Joseph Sobran: Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has b...

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

Joseph Sobran

politics political organization

...[T]he Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain). Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population today - subtle logicians like you - can grasp such nuances. Too bad. The Constitution wasn't meant to be a brain-twister.

Joseph Sobran

population government brain

All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

Joseph Sobran

nervous president should

Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.

Joseph Sobran

permission littles mean

Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.

Joseph Sobran

democracy liberty people

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

Joseph Sobran

libertarian-party liberty government

If one person in America had starved over the last 20 years, you, reader, would know his name. The media would see to that. It would be the most thoroughly documented death since John Kennedy's.

Joseph Sobran

media names years

Some people don't mind a little constitutional sophistry in a good cause; and for liberals, centralizing all power in the federal government is always a good cause. Since most Americans don't know or care what the Constitution says, let alone what their ancestors thought it meant, the great liberal snow job has been very successful.

Joseph Sobran

government successful jobs

It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that.

Joseph Sobran

exercise morning men

Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked.

Joseph Sobran

judicial-review favors government

When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.

Joseph Sobran

clamor diversity mean

The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical.

Joseph Sobran

second-amendment government rights

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

Joseph Sobran

expansion support people

The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

Joseph Sobran

anarchism argument century

Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

Joseph Sobran

constitution has-beens evolve

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

Joseph Sobran

program libertarian liberty

The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated - and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him.

Joseph Sobran

hate heart jesus

Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state.

Joseph Sobran

states numbers men

It's a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war -- yet they insist that the war is for 'freedom'.

Joseph Sobran

patriotic war order

Liberalism's fatal flaw,... is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.

Joseph Sobran

enthusiasm hot ideas

Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.