At 1:48 PM -0700 8/23/97, Lucky Green wrote:

At 01:58 PM 8/23/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:

...

This I agree with completely. At no point in the Constitution does it give the federal government the job of welfare. It also does not provide for any mechanism for law enforcement (ie DEA, NSA, FBI, etc.) outside of taxes and inter-state commerce.

So we are all in agreement: when I mentioned Norplant briefly being a precondition for receiving welfare benefits, I was talking about a example that I recall to have occurred in a single state. [I can't remember the state. Anyone?] It appears you agree that States are allowed by the US Constitution to impose such requirements, subject to the state's own constitutions.

There's a landmine here, of course. Namely, the issue of whether states may impose restrictions which are "unconstitutional." To some states rights folks, as I assume Jim Choate may be, the answer is often "of course." To some libertarians, the answer is often "of course not." A good example to consider is "free speech." The First Amendment talks about Congress shall make no law...does this mean California may ban certain books, restrict certain religions, or impose censorship on the press? (Most folks would say "Of course not." But on what basis can individual states and municipalities override the Second Amendment?) Anyway, this is not the subject I plan to discuss. Getting back to Norplant and the putative reproductive rights of welfare mothers, consider a series of laws or rules: * Case 1: Recipients of public assistance must agree to be sterilized or have Norplant implants. * Case 2: Residents of public accomodations may not own or possess guns of any type. * Case 3: Recipients of public assistance may not practice Islam. * Case 4: Residents of public accomodations or recipients of public assistance must not co-habit with other adults, especially of the opposite sex. How do these differ? Case 1 is the situation being discussed by Lucky and Jim, modulo the issue of whether it was the Federal government or some local state which passed the law. This case is complicated by the oft-discussed issue of "reproductive rights." The Founders chose to say nothing about reproduction, and the issue has raged for much of this century (Sanger, birth control legality, abortion issues, etc.). Case 2 is also a real one, involving a law in Chicago forcing residents of Cabrini Green and other such "projects" to turn in their guns, with random inspections to ensure compliance. This has been controversial, and I don't know what the current status is. Again, whether this was a local or federal rule is not really the point, as the next case will show. Case 3 is fictional, and would of course be immediately subject to an injunction against enforcement, with rapid overturning by the various courts which heard it. Why? Because regardless of whether the law were passed by the state of Illinois, or California, or by the federal government, it would be seen by nearly all as a slam dunk violation of the rights of religious freedom. But why is it really any different from Case 2? Probably because of the totemic role freedom of speech and freedom of religion play in American society. The First Amendment is apparently "more equal" than the Second Amendment. (Shown also in the treatment of ex-convicts: we ban them from owning guns and from voting, but would not think of imposing speech or religion rules on them. Why? It can't just be the "danger" issue, as that would not explain the ban on voting. And certainly some religions are "more dangerous" for an ex-con to fall into than owning a gun would be. Many issues. As an aside, what if the ex-con joined a church consisting of "known felons"? As many parole rules (and parole is now essentially a part of the incarceration process and cannot be avoided, except by doing the full sentence) ban association with known felons, what does this mean for the freedom to practice one's religion? How about Case 4. A woman receiving welfare is told she may not sleep with a guy, or at least he had better be gone by the time the welfare monitor--sort of like the floor monitors Soviet apartment buildings used to have!--checks up on the welfare mothers. Doesn't this violate basic constitutional rights to associate freely with whom one wishes? The rationale for Case 4, of course, is that the goal of welfare (cough cough) is to give _single mothers_ (or single fathers, in a much smaller percentage of cases) assistance, not to encourage people to shack up but avoid becoming formally married. But it still rankles, of course. As all of the cases do. And the same logic for Case 4 really carries back to Case 1: the purpose of welfare is not to subsidize the production of more children. (Even the liberals are getting worried about this one. A local rag, "The Metro," reported on a series of unemployed, unemployable, welfare moms and the like. One 23-year-old woman has 3 children, is unmarried, and is working on having 3 more, because, as she explained to the exasperated interviewer: "I always like the idea of having three girls and three boys.") To me, as a libertarian of long standing, what these cases all indicate is that when the State has the power to give, it acquires the power to take away, and that such paradoxes such as described above are essentially unavoidable. The only real solution is the natural one: people should not have children unless they have prepared themselves for the process of having children, through savings, good jobs, a stable family situation, a supportive family, etc. "But what about the children?" is no longer compelling to most of us, which is why welfare is being cut out, even by Comrade Clinton. There is nothing right about having some people scrimp and save until they can afford to have children while 23-year-old dingbats already have 3 children on welfare and are planning for more. And everybody here should read Charles Murray's "Losing Ground." Murray studied the statistics from the early days of "general relief" throught "Great Society" to the present, and concluded, convincingly, that the tremendous rise in black illegitimacy is correlated to the rise of welfare. Hardly surprising that when a 15-year old black girl can leap from being low status in black society to high status, with her own apartment and with a check every month, merely by getting pregnant, that a whole lot of black teen girls will do just that. And that the rules against married people getting welfare will ensure that few marriages occur. (As the Cato Institute showed a couple of years ago, the average package of benefits for a single mother of two averages out to the equivalent of about $13-15 an hour, or about $27,000 to $30,000 a year that she would have to earn in the outside world to equal her welfare/AFDC/WIC package.) This is why things are the way they are. It's gonna change. And I for one will watch the starving children and place their deaths at the doorstep of the U.S. government for having adopted a seemingly kindly but actually genocidal policy. (By the way, one can imagine a fifth case, to connect more close to crypto: * Case 5: Residents of public accomodations must agree to escrow their crypto keys with the government. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."