Fraternité

WHY did I name my blog “Fraternité”? Because the usual American prescription, “liberty and justice,” is necessary but not sufficient: it does not tell us HOW liberty and justice are to be safeguarded. Possibly, every citizen is a Minuteman, sleeping with his weapon by his side; but he still needs a Paul Revere to stay awake all night. Who is it who keeps the vigil? The watchman cannot be the Big Man, because all men are equal; however, he can be the servant of all the others, if one is willing to accept that status.

Obviously, Persons In Government Service will always dislike being mere servants and aspire to be equal to their employers; we can see that they will start by “assisting” the weakest (the babies and the aged) and gradually, gradually adopt a pretence of knowing what to do without being told. Gradually, gradually it will come to pass that the rather few P.I.G.S., who regularly work together and know one another, will come to believe that they together know better than the more numerous, but less organized, citizens. “P.I.G.S. are more equal!”

How, then, can they be kept in their rightful place? Only if the citizens practice fraternité, solidarity, “collective security.” Only if an attack on any one citizen is resisted by all the citizens!

Is this hopelessly idealistic, wholly beyond achievement? It is not ¬– this is the explanation of the common-law principle that it is a crime not to pay a tax; the tax is, supposedly, devoted to defending the lives, the liberty and the property of the citizens. The legislature gives the money to the executive for just such purposes; everyone prefers to know that no-one else is engaged in piracy, in counterfeiting the current coin, or in assisting a foreign enemy.

Only last year, a philosopher at Oxford (you must know Oxford University, it is where Bill Clinton studied?) named Richard Dawkins wrote a book, “The God Delusion,” asserting, among other things, that the queen of England had no right to compel him to take part in the defense of the realm because he – being, unlike the queen, an atheist – did not believe in defending her realm. But one does not have to believe in the divine right of queens, or of kings, to know what is right and what is wrong. It is not religion, but simple logic, that if A and B are fighting, the one who does not want you to assist him is the aggressor, the one who does is the victim: the draft board is entitled to say to Dawkins, “you are taking the side of the enemy, you will be interned.” If, instead, it allows him to remain at liberty as a conscientious objector, it is doing him a favor.

The common law developed, of course, in the days before firearms, when only those who could make good use of a sword or a bow or a lance were equal, and thus women were normally not persons legally. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the common law is, therefore, valueless in a time of semi-automatic pistols and fully-automatic carbines. There is good evidence to the contrary. Three common-law nations, these United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, are always head and shoulders above all other countries in highway safety – despite the facts that we drive heavy vehicles from one STOP sign to the next on straight roads with hard shoulders, and the Brits drive small vehicles from one circle to the next on winding roads with high, sharp curbs.

Fraternité in America

Where do we find fraternité in the Constitution? What IS the Union for, why was it constituted? “Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion;”
It is amusing to notice that the Convention recognized that the first threat to liberty would be, not foreign nations, but unelected P.I.G.S! Seemingly, no State has called upon the U.S. for such protection.

Nowadays self-styled “conservatives” claim that individuals are “invading” the States; but we know that is not the meaning of the word, because the Constitution uses words distinctly and precisely different: “Art. I, Sec. 9: The Migration or Importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress . . . .” The power that Congress in fact has is the power to naturalize the immigrants, after one or another State has admitted them.

Noteworthy is it also that, while the Congress has the sole power to coin money – a meaningful word, COIN! – the States reserved the power to choose, from gold and silver coin, their own legal tenders: if the “staple” States, which traded with Britain, had chosen gold, and the “navigating” States, which traded with the Far East, had chosen silver, there would have been very little risk of inflation occurring – as a result of gold or silver being discovered in great quantities – but not being discerned. (In fact, just three States, Colorado. Missouri, and Nevada, have chosen coins, but all of them allow the citizens to use whichever metal they like!)

Scrutiny will show that the Constitution is also strictly democratic, in the sense that the many (State) officers always have the first word, if not the last word also. State officers “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper . . .”: treaties and appointments are made “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate” (which cannot mean “subject to the approbation or rejection of the Senate,” because that wording was proposed, in only the lesser matter of appointments, by the avowed aristocrat Hamilton, and rejected.)

Today, it appears that the United States is “democratic” in the very most deplorable manner, in that the several States treat as precedents the decisions of a court that acts by mere majority. True it is that Nevada, for one, has commanded its judges to follow U.S. precedents: but the Constitution meant where the U.S. has jurisdiction: by the time Nevada was constituted, the Eleventh Amendment had deprived the U.S. of jurisdiction of a case brought by a citizen against a State.

There are two other defects in the present understanding. One is, that the judges of the U.S. have never been authorized to decide a case by majority; there are only three instances where the Constitution does not specify the majority needed to proceed, i.e. for the jury in the trial of “all crimes,” for the States in convention, and for the judges – but we all know how the criminal jury proceeds, and we know that the Convention acted “by the Unanimous Consent of the States present.” The other glaring defect is, that the entire concept of separation of powers is founded on the understanding that the courts proceed by the common-law method of reconciling the precedents – the U.S. judges are merely to follow the CORPUS JURIS of the several States – rather than snatching the "law" out of empty space.