On 07/13/2017 11:35 AM, \0xDynamite wrote:
Well yeah... "Liberty" meant rich people thumbing their noses at the Crown that made them rich by setting them up in business with land grants, slaves, legal institutions and some amount of military protection.
For the peasant class, "Liberty" was a false promise of equal rights before the law and the belief that everybody would get rich quick once the Crown stopped taxing the Colonies.
This is a pretty cynical view of the founders, who while they may have been aristocratic in some mundane sense (having money), they were also simply knowledgeable enough and enlightened that they wanted to defend their rights as equals rather than suck dick for some imagined divine rights given to kings.
Any time I talk about politics or political history in a crowded room, someone is certain to dismiss what I say by calling it "cynical." Don't feel bad - one of the smartest people I ever knew called me that just yesterday. For reals. As for "the founders," they did indeed want to defend their rights as equals - within their own class as wealthy individuals, vs. those closer to the center of power in England. They also "wanted to" defend their right to abuse and exploit their social inferiors, as shown by the fact that they did so: First by employing slave labor including transportees from England, and chattel property imported from Africa; then by refusing to pay the wages due Revolutionary War soldiers they contracted with to fight their battle against the Crown. The Colonial ruling class did not organize a Revolution to obtain freedom from anything but their contractual obligations to the Crown. Our current crop of Constitutional scholars seem to largely agree that the Convention was called for the primary purpose of creating a Federal authority capable of putting down armed uprisings against major land holders who refused to pay their debts to foolish peasants.
Today, "Liberty" can have as many meanings as their are market segments under the Right Wing umbrella, but all these meaning have one thing in common: Direct rule by our billionaires.
No, while a fashionable position of those who smoke dope. There is only indirect rule by billionaires and lazy ass liberals who aren't willing to take their disagreements with the police state to court.
The sole function of the State is to support economic activity, and absent organized resistance leveraging the massive numerical superiority of penniless peasants, that means facilitating the interests of billionaires at everyone else's expense. In Libertarian Fantasy Land, incorruptible Courts can exist, and tort litigation takes place on a level playing field not matter how many orders of magnitude separate the income and assets of the contending parties, i.e. the resources they can bring to bear to manipulate both fact and process. The eagerness of idealists of all stripes to self-mutililate for the benefit of their social betters, once cleverly enough lied to, will never cease to amaze me. I have come to think of it as a defining feature of "civilization," possibly THE defining feature. But then, I'm an anarchist and everyone knows that means lunatick. Better not to look too closely at the ideas articulated above, lest they draw one into a delusional frame of reference from which there can be no escape. :o)