The Constitution Rewrite,
March 10, 2016
This review is from: The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Paperback)
The Frozen Republic - which I enthusiastically picked up because I thought it was a Star Wars novel about an ice-bound planet - turned out to be an exhaustingly detailed report on the various utterances, opinions, statements, thoughts, desires, wishes, actions and consequences thereof of damn near every bureaucrat who ever cashed an American paycheck.
The justification of all this is to drive home the notion that the Constitution doesnt work.
Any writer who signs his name to such a premise has my admiration for courage.
My admiration, and my stamina, flagged, however, as I went from page to mind-numbing page in a long winding journey through American history. A history, in the view of the historian, created by bureaucrats. Not by normal people who are stuck with obeying bureaucrats. History is, after all, the history of the collective and the governments ordering each collective around.
My experience has been that when dealing with the premises of a collectivist - which everyone seems to be - you are never going to get to a solution to whatever particular problem the collectivist is having a problem with.
Moving along here, the solution offered to solve the problem of the failed Constitution is to change the Constitution. Not get rid of it, but rewrite it; probably by bureaucrats now living rather than the original bureaucrats who wrote the one we have now, since they are dead. Even so, despite being deceased, they could not write a worse one now - the Founding Fathers - than they did originally when they were alive. In my opinion. Perhaps the author himself has created a rough draft of a new Constitution, I suspect he is certainly up to it, and maybe that would be the one to get the job done, whatever the job is that needs to be done, which, apparently, is create a different Constitution. Every nation now seems to have one, thanks to us, and I think all would agree they are all doing very very well and they are all tons of fun to visit. Maybe we could use one of theirs.
If the book accomplishes anything, it presents a strong, lengthy, ongoing, relentless, almost enthusiastically infinite litany of times when the original words of the Constitution were interpreted or ignored to get resolved some particular political collectivist "problem." Which, as I mentioned earlier, cannot be solved by collectivism. So, therefore, if you are one of those people - a Conservative - who thinks the Constitution is Holy Writ rather than the badly-written juggernaut of edicts and commands and directives and proclamations that it actually is...you might have your faith shaken. However if you are a Conservative you will have thrown this book into the fire long long long before you finish reading it. Because to you the Constitution - which you likely have never read - and with good reason! - is a magical deity of ink on parchment written by experts in good standing in the creation of nations with tons of experience at it before they created the United States of America out of thin air.
What the author fails to realize - I'm guessing - is that the Constitution was not written for you. It was written for the bureaucrats it was creating. They deal with it, they operate under it, they were created by it...it's for them. Not you. the "We the people" mentioned in the opening edict are the three dozen or so bureaucrats who signed it. You are not one of them. Hold on, let me check, I could be lying. Nope, you're not there. Since it is written for people whose jobs were created by it...they all seem to be doing rather well by the Constitution, and very few of them have experienced a lack of job security, no matter how the Constitution gets interpreted by the interpreters and judged by the judges. Why change it?
Well, unless I misread the author it needs to be changed so that there can be more "democracy. "Democracy," like "constitution" is a sacred word that does not have a bad connotation within it. Democracy, like constitutions, are inherently good by definition. To a collectivist, collectivism works best when the entire collective is somehow involved down to a man. In other words, we are put here on earth to be political beings in a swarm. Not individuals trying to live life as comfortably as possible with stuff. Stuff never created by bureaucrats but by "stuff makers." Needless to say Capitalism is not discussed. Capitalists are not elected. Nor are they mentioned in the Constitution. Only bureaucrats are mentioned in the Constitution.
If you love government and think it should be magically run by The Entire Population Directly rather than by "representatives," this is the book for you. It will guide you on your way to a better and more effective magical Constitution than the Magical Constitution created oh so long ago. You see, we're better at constitution-writing than we were. Constitution writing has advanced over the centuries. We could create a really good one now. And lord knows you can't live without one. The sky would fall and you?....you would turn into a rampaging looter and murderer without one. Assuming you lived through the falling sky incident
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