Category Archives: South-Africa

Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution

Constitution, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Law, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

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Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution
By Ilana Mercer, February 17, 2012:

I would not look to the US constitution,” said US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an interview with Al-Hayat TV. “If I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, I might look at the constitution of South Africa, Canada … and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Al-Hayat’s correspondent had solicited Ginsburg’s advice on drafting the Egyptian constitution.

Go easy on Ginsburg. She shares a disdain for America’s founding document with millions, maybe even a majority, of her countrymen. The US Constitution is flouted daily by the people’s representatives, and has been amended and reinterpreted to the point of no return.

The governing documents that excite Bader Ginsburg’s admiration are documents of positive rights. The American Constitution is by-and-large a charter of negative liberties, as President Obama once described it derisively.

A positive right is state-manufactured, usually at the behest of political majorities. Rights to a job, water, clothes, food, education and medical care are examples. Some of the European covenants canvassed by Bader consider “freely chosen” desirable work as a human right. Ditto adequate “rest and leisure.” Once these needs are recognized as rights, they become state-enforceable, legal claims against other, less-valued members of society (“the rich”). Someone who hasn’t had a vacation, or has not reached his career apogee, gets to collect on such claims.

In the case of natural rights—the only founding truths the nation’s fathers could have conceived of, given their classical liberal philosophical framework—the duty is merely a mitts-off duty. My right to life means you must not murder me. My right to liberty means you dare not enslave me. My right to property means you can’t take what’s mine—not 35 percent of it, or 15 percent. Nada. And you have no right to stop me from taking the necessary acquisitive action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, respect the same restrictions.

As an instantiation of a constitutional democracy governed in accordance with state-minted rights, take the new South Africa, where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, in violation of natural law.

Not that you’d know it, but the poor South Africans enjoy a constitutional right to live free of all forms of violence, “public” or “private” in origin. Section 12 of their progressive constitution guarantees the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Clearly “progressive” doesn’t necessarily spell progress, as nowhere does this wordy but worthless document state whether South Africans may actually defend this most precious of rights. If anything, self-defense can be an offense in progressive South Africa. The law dictates that in the course of adjudicating cases of “private defense,” the right to life (the aggressor’s) and the right to property (the non-aggressor’s—whose life, by this “logic,” is not at stake) be properly balanced.

“Before you can act in self-defense,” remonstrates a representative of the indispensable South African Institute for Security Studies, “the attack against you should have commenced, or at least be imminent. For example, if the thief pulls out a firearm and aims in your direction, [only] then you would be justified in using lethal force to protect your life.”

Implicit in the right to life is the right to self-defense. A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. Alas, in constitutional South Africa, natural rights are merely nominal.

The same document allows a good deal of mischief for the ostensible greater good. It even has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights.” Since some citizens are more equal than others under the law of this tormented land, redistributive “justice” in South Africa is a constitutional article of faith. It sanctions the expropriation of land from one citizen in order to give to another, in the name of “social justice.”

Knowing what you now know about the South African Constitution—what is it do you suppose Bader-Ginsburg dislikes about one of the greatest documents of political philosophy?

From all accounts, it is that the US Constitution is principally a charter of negative liberties. Arrived at through reason (or revelation), natural (or negative) liberties are the only authentic rights to which man can lay claim. LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY: These are the sole rights of man. Congress doesn’t grant them; they exist irrespective of it.

One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not meant to be up for grabs by greedy majorities. Rights always give rise to binding obligations. There are no free contraceptives, Mr. Obama. If a woman has the right to contraceptives, someone has to work to supply her with this “right.” If one is constitutionally entitled to an education, somewhere, some poor sod will be roped into funding this manufactured entitlement.

More fundamentally, if in exercising a “right” one transgresses against another’s life, liberty and property—then the exercised right is no right, but a violation thereof. Because my right to acquire property doesn’t diminish your right to do the same, the right of private property constitutes a negative right. Negative rights are real (or natural) liberties, as they don’t conscript or enslave me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires, and vice versa.

Unless undertaken voluntarily, state-manufactured rights violate the individual’s real rights. Positive liberties—as trumpeted by Bader, Obama, and practically the whole DC Sodom and Gomorrah—are rejected outright in the natural law, followed by the Founders.

Now, the occupants of the Bench who compiled the South African, Canadian and European documents would argue that making some—”the rich” in the West, whites in a black-dominated democracy—supply others with work, water, clothes, contraceptives, food, education and medical care will increase overall liberty in society.

THAT WON’T WASH. Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all decent men, including those in power. That men band in a collective called “government” doesn’t give them license to violate individual rights.

Rights, as our Founding Fathers conceived of them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms to act in the procurement of these goods. From the fact that most Americans, Egyptians or Russians want others to fund or subsidize their lives, it does not follow that they have such a right.

The Constitution Ginsburg, Obama and the DC Sodom and Gomorrah trash each and every day was designed to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth.

Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution
©2012 ILANA MERCER
WND & RT
February 17

NEW COLUMN: ‘Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?

Affirmative Action, America, Argument, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism, South-Africa

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THE NEW COLUMN is “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” It was featured first on Townhall.com. It is also on WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Renaissance.

On Sunday, you can read it on the great American Greatness.

The column is first in a series of three. Excerpt:

The “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction.

Operationalize the nebulous abstraction that is “systemic racism,” or get out of my face!

To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms–the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable (to use statistical nomenclature).

Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called “racism”—systemic or other—it remains nothing but thought crime:

Impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. (By logical extension, America is not a free society.)

The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally under its protection. The law, then, is not the problem, logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward.

“Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

Systemic racism is most certainly not “the only plausible explanation” for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.

This logical error is the central tenet of preferential treatment—affirmative action, and assorted quotas and set-aside edicts and policies.

According to diversity doxology, justice is achieved only when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. On indices of economic well-being, the same egalitarian outcomes are expected.

Equalizing individual and inter-group outcomes, however, is an impossibility, considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that such differences have existed since the dawn of time. …

… THE REST: “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?“, on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Renaissance.

On Sunday, you can read it on the great American Greatness.

American Greatness, where I do verbal swordplay for civilization, is the best, cutting edge, paleoconservative webzine. Julie Ponzi, its skilled, bold editor, harnesses and enhances the best talent our side has for the battle of ideas ahead.

Busiest Comments Section is on American Renaissance.

UPDATED (8/7/020):

Readers reached are worth everything.

UPDATED (2/10): NEW COLUMN: What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa

Africa, Democracy, Federalism, History, Iraq, Racism, Secession, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN IS “What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa.” It’s on American Greatness NOW. The column also appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

In what should serve as a lesson for Americans today, recall that 30 years ago, on February 2, 1990, F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, turned the screws on his constituents, betraying the confidence we had placed in him.

I say “we,” because, prior to becoming president in 1989, Mr. de Klerk was my representative, in the greater Vereeniging region of Southern Transvaal, where I resided. (Our family subsequently moved to Cape Town.)

A constellation of circumstances had aligned to catapult de Klerk to a position of great power. A severe stroke forced the “The Crocodile,” President P. W. Botha, from power in 1989. Nothing in the background of his successor, President, F. W. de Klerk, indicated the revolutionary policies he would pursue.

To a 1992 referendum asking white voters if they favored de Klerk’s proposed reforms, we returned a resounding “yes.” Sixty-eight percent of respondents said “yes” to the proposed reforms of a man who sold his constituents out for a chance to frolic on the world stage with Nelson Mandela.

For it was in surrendering South Africa to the ANC that de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

Why was de Klerk trusted to negotiate on behalf of a vulnerable racial minority? For good reason: De Klerk had made his views abundantly clear to constituents. “Negotiations would only be about power-sharing,” he promised. At the time, referendum respondents generally trusted de Klerk, who had specifically condemned crude majority rule. Such elections, in Africa, have traditionally amounted to one man, one vote, one time. Typically, elections across Africa have followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements take power everywhere, then elections cease. Or, if they take place, they’re rigged.

Among much else, de Klerk’s loyal constituents agreed to his scrapping of the ban on the Communist-sympathizing ANC. Freeing Nelson Mandela from incarceration was also viewed as long overdue as was acceding to Namibia’s independence, and junking nuclear weapons. Botha, before de Klerk, had, by and large, already dismantled the most egregious aspects of apartheid.

What de Klerk’s constituents were not prepared for was to be legislated into a permanent position of political subordination. President de Klerk, the man entrusted to stand up for crucial structural liberties, went along with the great centralizers. He caved to ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities.

By the time the average “yes” voter discerned the fact that de Klerk had no intention of maintaining this opposition when push came to shove, it was too late.

… READ THE REST. “What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa” is on American Greatness NOW. The column also appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Image is of President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela (Photo by © Louise Gubb/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

UPDATE (2/10):  Nevertheless, we are honored to have a response from Jeffrey Sachs. It generated quite the thread.

My book is not “an attack on the end of apartheid,” @JeffDSachs. That’s a distortion. A principled critique of dominant-party rule in South Africa doesn’t amount to an approval of apartheid, of which the book offers a detailed critique, too.

Heck, I came out FOR Quebec’s secession (2000), @GerardHarbison & @JeffreyASachs . That’s the libertarian position. Political divorce is completely kosher, so long as individual rights are preserved.

 

 

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