Category Archives: Law

Mosaic Law Was Not Meant For A Pack Of Baboons Or Charlie Mansons

Judaism & Jews, Law, Morality, Private Property

Myron Pauli shares thoughts on the Torah portion “Mishpatim” (about common law in the Book of Exodus), on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of his late, beloved wife Linda Plotnick and the death of father Felix Pauli

The Torah can be divided into laws specifying the interaction between mankind and God such as prohibiting idol worship, and the interaction between mankind with mankind. Mishpatim contains much of the civil/common/secular laws. I will make some general observations rather than focus on specific laws:

FIRST: The laws should have a moral basis. Thus, laws should not be passed because the city council needs to refurbish the carpet or because a well-heeled businessman pays lawmakers to put his rivals out of business.

SECOND: The laws should be universal – hence they apply for all time and for all people. This is expressed in our own Declaration of Independence that all are equal in their God-given rights. It does not mean that I can slam-dunk equally with LeBron James – it is that we are equal under the law. This is the essence of the Rule of Law. The opposite is the “Law of Rule,” where the Czar or Pharaoh applies harsh laws to his enemies and no restrictions on his friends, or invents new laws or suspends old laws by his own whim.

THIRD: There are roughly 365 negative mitzvot and many of them deal with idolatry and the like. The number of civil-secular ones is smaller, perhaps around 200. Somehow, 200 prohibitions were enough for the ancient Israelites to function and thrive. This is distinct from America in 2015 which has over 80,000 pages in the Federal Register. Presumably some believe that 80,000 pages of laws make us more moral than the ancient Israelites, but I am skeptical.

FOURTH: I would like to consider 3 different philosophical views of property – those of Marx, Rosenbaum, and Moses. Karl Marx believed in communal property – hence, there could be no theft or coveting since everything was commonly owned. Individual property and individual responsibility were replaced by the commune and individual incentives to produce were replaced by communist coercion. Sadly, many people prefer to give up their individual responsibility to the communist whip although this concept of property has caused misery everywhere it has been tried.

Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand, considered property sacrosanct and even above life itself. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, and thou shalt not give thy property away – that is, compassion and altruism were dubious in her view. What you produced is yours and what I produced is mine. This was the perfect world for perfect people. Those who are too young to produce – children – were parasites with no place in her world. Nor did those who were too old, sick, stupid, or lazy. And without either compassion or children, it was a rather cold world with no means of sustainment.

Moses’ Torah recognizes the obligation to have and raise children and for children to love their parents and is thus self-sustaining. It also recognizes property rights and if one plants and cultivate an apple orchard, that orchard belongs to the producer. And those who are moral will be rewarded with rains and abundance. The owner owns all the apples on the trees, but if there is a surplus and apples fall on the ground, they belong to those in need. There is an incentive to own the trees rather than scavenge the leftovers, but there is also provision for the needy. So perhaps those 3000 year old ideas work better than the more modern proposed “improvements.”

FINALLY: I will temporary digress by departing from Mount Sinai for Philadelphia and quote Benjamin Franklin on the day the Constitution was adopted: “I agree to this Constitution … what may be a blessing to the people if well administered …. (however he noted that it) can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

John Adams said that our government was made only for a moral people. Thus it is true with any set of laws that they can only be as good as the people who abide by them. The Torah was not meant for a pack of baboons or Charlie Mansons. Throughout the Torah, Moses admonishes the people that good will happen to them when they follow the word of God and evil will happen when they disobey.

Thus, the needs of a civil society consist of a moral set of laws and a moral people to follow them.

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

No Salvation From The Gang of Nine

Constitution, Free Speech, Law, The Courts

By Myron Robert Pauli, Ph.D.

Every June is when the Supreme Court announces its decisions on the disputes on which it picks to rule. According to Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, “The Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Each year, they hand down very erudite but often nonsensical opinions citing previous erudite nonsensical opinions (known as “precedent”). If you trace back all the precedents, you might get a slight resemblance to the US Constitution, just as if you rotate 1 degrees each time for 180 times, you wind up pointing in the opposite direction.

From my view, the biggest nonsense of 2015 was Zivotofsky v. Kerry, a relatively inconsequential case over Congress instructing that passports for people born in Jerusalem list Israel as their birthplace. Now, the 4th clause of Article 1 Section 8 gives Congress authority over the rules of naturalization, which would seem to me, to cover citizenship status. Congress could declare Jerusalem births to be from Israel, Jerusalem, Palestine, Bolivia, or Mars. NO – said 6 Justices – that power is exclusively reserved for the president (Where is that stated in Article 2??).

Many were annoyed by the Obamacare decision – but there should be little surprise. In 1937, the Supreme Court had decided: (1) The 10th Amendment has no meaning. (2) Congress can hand out welfare, retirement, etc. “benefits” to individuals at will. (3) Congress can delegate legislative powers in the form of “regulations” which can be drafted by unelected bureaucrats and where citizens can be fined and imprisoned for violating. So, Gomer Pyle, where is the “surprise surprise surprise”? Congress surely didn’t read the 2900 page Affordable Care Act. I somewhat doubt that Obama read the 2900 pages and, in any case, has changed it at will every month. Why should a “wise Latina” like Sotomayor decipher 2900 pages of hieroglyphics? Besides, only one person in the galaxy understands what is in that glop and that is Professor Gruber. If hyperregulation is good on Mondays, why is it wrong on Tuesdays? Basically, the Supremes did not want to touch that greased pig of a bill.

The Court often rules for freedom of speech. This angers “conservatives” when the speech is smutty and angers “liberals” when it is plutocratic oligarchs funding 30 second political spots. Admittedly, the smut is on a higher intellectual and more honest than the 30 second ads. But is the Supreme Court responsible because more people watch smut than read the Bible? Is the Supreme Court responsible because people believe those silly spots where Hillary uses her billion buck fundraising booty from sucking up to the oligarchs and special interests to accuse Jeb of being a corrupt tool of the oligarchs and special interests and Jeb uses his billions to accuse Hillary of being the corrupt tool?

And, of course, we have gay marriage? Personally, I am not going to change because someone marries the same sex or a consenting bear or their toaster (but don’t fool around with the vacuum cleaner!). If millions are going to descend into Sodom because of a few people’s preferences, those millions cannot have very strong moral convictions. But again, did the Supreme Court cause “indecency” or are they just “following the election returns” (and popular trends)?

And the granddaddy of all brouhahas: abortion. Theoretically, the right to abortion follows the right of a person to “do what she wants with her body.” Hence, a person can chop off her leg, cook it in the over, and eat it. But America has not had 55 million cases of cannibalistic self-mutilation. America has had 55 million abortions since 1973. Is there not some responsibility for that among the tens of millions who decided to terminate the lives of those developing children?

When Stevens in Gonzales v. Raich said that a woman smoking dope in her basement interferes with interstate commerce, he also pointed out that if the law is idiotic, Congress and the president should repeal the law. Yes folk, don’t look at Ginsburg, Scalia, Roberts, and Rehnquist as the Blessed Mother and the Holy Trinity! If this nation is authoritarian, corrupt, bloated, idiotic, or immoral – time to gaze into the mirror. You will not receive Salvation from the Gang of Nine.

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Why The National, Disproportionate Preoccupation With Two Perps?

Crime, IMMIGRATION, Justice, Law

It took hundreds of law-enforcement officers, aided by border patrol agents, to corner and catch two outlaws, on the lam in northern New York for three weeks. The manhunt for notorious killers Richard Matt and David Sweat is over (read the tedious details for yourself). As the law spares no effort in … praising itself, we can ponder the disproportionate obsession with these two criminals.

In particular, criminals of the Matt and Sweat caliber (or potential) cross the country’s Southwest, wide-open borders almost every day. They go on to integrate into drug cartels (yes, I’m pro-legalization; always have been), as drunk drivers and petty or not-so-petty criminals. No one stops them. No one is allowed to ask them for their pedigree.

So why the out-of-whack preoccupation with these two perps?

Justice John Roberts Cements Position … On The DC Party Circuit

Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Law, The Courts

Did you expect anything different from Justice John G. Roberts Jr.? Why? This is the chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, who had previously rewritten Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power.

What did this “conservative” jurist do NOW? Reports Lyle Denniston of the SCOTUS Blog:

… a divided Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that subsidies to help lower-income Americans buy health insurance will remain available in all fifty states.

That, the Court concluded by a six-to-three vote, was what Congress intended when it passed the sweeping overhaul of the health insurance market five years ago. If the subsidies are not available across the nation, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., wrote for the majority, that would bring about “the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid.”

Had the ruling in King v. Burwell gone the other way, to eliminate subsidies in thirty-four states, at least 6.4 million Americans likely would have almost immediately lost the insurance coverage that many of them have for the first time. And, given the way Congress wrote an interlocking law, the cascading effect of the loss of subsidies for so many probably would have collapsed the whole arrangement — a point that Roberts embraced in foreseeing the potential for a “death spiral” for the ACA.

The Chief Justice’s twenty-one-page opinion was an often technical interpretation of many arcane provisions of the ACA, but it was clear that the outcome had been driven in considerable part because the majority had accepted the centrality of the subsidy scheme to the law as a whole, and had found persuasive the dire predictions of the impact of sharply paring down that scheme.

The decision closely tracked most of the arguments that the Obama administration had made in defending the nationwide availability of subsidies, in the form of tax credits. …

MORE.

“A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” will show that Roberts has always been about the moves. With his affirmation of the right of the state to compel the individual into a purchase, Justice Roberts moved into the DC party circuit. Roberts’ smooth moves, today, on behalf of The Powers will cement his position on this circuit.