Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Does the 2nd Amendment apply to state laws would be the big one

I would say the answer is yes. The 14th Amendment is generally interpreted to mean that states are prohibited from denying their residents the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. If the 2nd Amendment affirms an individual right to bear arms (which it does -- although not the specific right the Court upheld) (except, of course, now it does), then no state can legally abridge that right, except in ways that the Court says are OK (e.g., certain unusual weapons can be banned, registration, waiting periods, and background checks are fine, regulations on concealed carry are acceptable, etc.).

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

I would say the answer is yes. The 14th Amendment is generally interpreted to mean that states are prohibited from denying their residents the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. If the 2nd Amendment affirms an individual right to bear arms (which it does -- although not the specific right the Court upheld) (except, of course, now it does), then no state can legally abridge that right, except in ways that the Court says are OK (e.g., certain unusual weapons can be banned, registration, waiting periods, and background checks are fine, regulations on concealed carry are acceptable, etc.).

The states could ban certain weapons or some classes of potential weapons-holders so long as the bans are not discriminatory. A criminal record would not be an un-Constitutional barrier to ownership of firearms. Requiring that someone take an inexpensive course on safe handling and storage of weapons and ammo (I am sure that the National Rifle Association would make such courses available cheaply, if not free) would not be un-Constitutional.

Requiring that someone speak English or be in possession of a certain level of education would be.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

I would say the answer is yes. The 14th Amendment is generally interpreted to mean that states are prohibited from denying their residents the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

Agreed, though this was not always true. The 14th was passed after the Civil War with the intent to give Bill of Rights protection to blacks. Alas, Jim Crow era precedents denied the federal government police powers, and declared that the Bill of Rights were a limit on the powers of Congress rather than being a bill of rights. Thus, state legislatures wrote laws inconsistent with the federal rights, and the federal government was blocked from interfering.

But the NAACP during the 20th Century slowly fought for and restored the interpretation you give above. Given the precedents covering the rest of the Bill of Rights, I would hope the states would be forced to abide by the 2nd.

Originally Posted by Odin

Somebody tell this to the ones on the left. There are plenty still concerned with "keeping guns away from evil redneck hicks" and whatever

And the ones on the right ... because I haven't noticed their obsession with gay marriage going away.

Originally Posted by mandelbrot5

Two, the economy isn't the only reason for our unease. There's more to it. People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don't talk about this much because it's too big, but I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep down, as "the designated mourner," from the title of the Wallace Shawn play.

I may be alone in feeling this way, but unlike Peggy Noonan, I feel deeply relieved.

I've always known that the "wealth" from the market and from house values was essentially funny money. And I've always known that the typical affluent lifestyle and its mores was somehow messed up, like trying to live on sugar. Everything overvalued, everything overpriced, and everything on credit ... it couldn't last, I knew it, and spent my entire adult life trying to keep things simple, despite the occasional ridicule for settling for a lower standard of living than most people would choose at my age.

Now everyone else knows what I know, and its such a breath of fresh air! Maybe its shocking, but its kind of nice. It's like waking up in Realitytown.

But then I always suspected the Crisis would include a large number of people suddenly realizing things that were always true, but not necessarily popular.

Originally Posted by angeli

And the ones on the right ... because I haven't noticed their obsession with gay marriage going away.

No, but nobody's listening any more.

For more encouragement, go rent "Milk" (excellent movie in its own right) and notice when the parades and marches change from the usual 60s fists in the air and chanting and placards, to floats and costumes and brass bands - which now happens in many, many cities and is greeted with delight by all but a handful of tired-looking, pitiful protesters - with placards, chanting, and fists in the air. (Cue up Bob Dylan on the mutable nature of time here.)

Originally Posted by angeli

I may be alone in feeling this way, but unlike Peggy Noonan, I feel deeply relieved.

I've always known that the "wealth" from the market and from house values was essentially funny money. And I've always known that the typical affluent lifestyle and its mores was somehow messed up, like trying to live on sugar. Everything overvalued, everything overpriced, and everything on credit ... it couldn't last, I knew it, and spent my entire adult life trying to keep things simple, despite the occasional ridicule for settling for a lower standard of living than most people would choose at my age.

Now everyone else knows what I know, and its such a breath of fresh air! Maybe its shocking, but its kind of nice. It's like waking up in Realitytown.

But then I always suspected the Crisis would include a large number of people suddenly realizing things that were always true, but not necessarily popular.

Agreed. You are speaking my lines......so to speak. I always thought it would be hard to keep from saying "I told you so" to those living the highlife, now forced to live by standards I chose from the outset, but, I cant bring myself to rub it in, even if it's deserved. Instead I mutter a "welcome aboard"

Originally Posted by Skabungus

Agreed. You are speaking my lines......so to speak. I always thought it would be hard to keep from saying "I told you so" to those living the highlife, now forced to live by standards I chose from the outset, but, I cant bring myself to rub it in, even if it's deserved. Instead I mutter a "welcome aboard"

Agreed. I find no joy in the sudden loss and wealth and/or status by those I know who thought that the fool's paradise would go on forever. If anything, I'm heartened to see that many are coming to grips with the reality that there is simply no way to finagle your way through life by stealth.

When people start harassing wealthy people; when wealthy people start to fear for their lives, then you are definitely not in a 3T.

In T4T, it is stated to no matter what your institutional advantage is (back in the 3T), if your business is perceived as predatory or your influence as corrupting, then you will be at risk.

Scorn Trails A.I.G. Executives, Even in Their Driveways

March 20, 2009

By JAMES BARRON and RUSS BUETTNER

The A.I.G. executive who was nicknamed “Jackpot Jimmy” by a New York tabloid walked up the driveway toward his bay-windowed house in Fairfield, Conn., on Thursday afternoon. "How do I feel?” said the executive, James Haas, repeating the question he had just been asked. “I feel horrible. This has been a complete invasion of privacy."

Mr. Haas walked on, his pink shirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon. The words came haltingly. "You have to understand,” he said, “there are kids involved, there have been death threats. ..." His voice trailed off. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.

"I didn’t have anything to do with those credit problems,” said Mr. Haas, 47. “I told Mr. Liddy” — Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., the insurance giant — “I would rescind my retention contract.”

He ended the conversation with a request: “Leave my neighbors alone.”

Too late. Jean Wieson, who has lived down the block for 24 years, had stopped her car in front of Mr. Haas’s house before he arrived home. She was angry about the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to its executives, the credit-default swaps that brought American International Group to its knees, the $170 billion the federal government has spent to prop it up. "It makes me absolutely sick," she said. "It’s despicable. It’s disgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give every cent back."

Those bonuses in years past helped make A.I.G. executives into prominent local citizens. They own big houses like Mr. Haas’s, with its three chimneys and its views of Southport Harbor and Long Island Sound in the distance. Some are well-known contributors to arts groups and private schools in Connecticut communities not far from the office park in Wilton that is the workplace of many of the employees in A.I.G.’s Financial Products division, which is at the center of the storm over bonus payments.

Now these executives are toxic, and those communities are rattled and divided. Private security guards have been stationed outside their houses, and sometimes the local police drive by. A.I.G. employees at the company’s office tower in Lower Manhattan were told to avoid leaving the building while a demonstration was going on outside. The memo also advised them to avoid displaying company-issued ID cards when they left the office and to abandon tote bags or other items with the A.I.G. logo.

One A.I.G. executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared the consequences of identifying himself, said many workers felt demonized and betrayed. “It is as bad if not worse than McCarthyism,” he said. Everyone has sacrificed the employees of A.I.G.’s financial products division, he said, “for their own political agenda.”

The public’s anger, he said, “is coming from bad facts as a result of someone else’s agenda — or just bad facts period.” Instead, he said, the so-called bonuses were in fact just payments that had been promised long ago to workers, including technical and administrative assistants.

A.I.G. employees are not the only ones seeking protection: An executive at Merrill Lynch, where bonuses have also come under fire, said that some employees had asked whether the firm would cover the cost of private security for them.

Scott Silvestri, a spokesman for Bank of America, which bought Merrill in December, would not respond to that claim, but said in a statement, “The safety and security of our associates is paramount, and we will always take the appropriate steps.”

And there may be more protests. The Connecticut Working Families party, which has support from organized labor, is planning a bus tour of A.I.G. executives’ homes on Saturday, with a stop at the company’s Wilton office.

“We’re going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do,” said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. “I know there’s a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what’s happened. We’re not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy.”

A.I.G. paid the $165 million in bonuses to 463 of its executives, but in the uproar that erupted when the payments were made public, Mr. Liddy asked the employees to return much of that money. He said that many of them have agreed to do so.

The New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, said on Thursday that A.I.G. had handed over a list with the names of the bonus recipients. But he did not release the list. “We are aware of the security concerns of A.I.G. employees,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement, “and we will be sensitive to those issues by doing a risk assessment before releasing any individual’s name.”

It was unclear exactly what measures the officials at A.I.G. have taken in the name of protecting the company’s executives. Officials at several police departments in Connecticut towns where A.I.G. executives live said they did not know about possible threats against the bonus recipients. “We haven’t heard of it,” said Sgt. Carol Ogrinc of the New Canaan police. “There have been no complaints made to our department.”

But several security companies in New York credited the financial crisis with a noticeable increase in some areas of their business, from protecting executives to dispatching bomb-sniffing dogs to check for trouble. “There is certainly anger among people about the economy and fear among corporate executives themselves,” said Patrick Timlin, the president of Michael Stapleton Associates, which provides bomb-dog teams.

And there is concern in places like Wilton that the scandal is tarring their town. “They’re blaming us,” said Konstantinos Papanikolaou, a manager at Orem’s Diner in Wilton, about a mile from the A.I.G. office.

Jay Fiedler of Trumbull, Conn., said his town was also a “victim,” initially of a brutal economic downturn that had been fueled by problems at companies like A.I.G., and then of the outrage that has coalesced around the bonuses that A.I.G. paid.

“It just so happened that it happened here,” Mr. Fiedler said. “The community is the victim of the fact that it takes place here.”

Others in A.I.G.’s neighborhood were clearly angry. Tamara King, an immigration specialist at a health care company whose office is adjacent to the A.I.G. quarters, said she feels disgust each time she walks past it.

"You don’t want to associate with them because it’s not a reflection on the state, it’s not a reflection on us," she said. But she added, “You have so many people out of a job, and these people think they can take the money and run."

The largest single bonus check, for $6.4 million, went to Douglas L. Poling, an executive vice president for energy and infrastructure investments. Mark Herr, an A.I.G. spokesman, said Mr. Poling had told him he was returning the bonus “because he thought it was the correct thing to do.”

Gerry Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who was brought in by Mr. Liddy in November to wind down the financial products unit, said Mr. Poling had sold off roughly 80 percent of the unit’s assets. Mr. Pasciucco said the money from the sales would go to the government, which has handed more than $170 billion in bailout money to A.I.G. in the last six months.

“He’s done an outstanding job in winding down his investment books,” Mr. Pasciucco said. "He did it at the right time, and we’ve made money. We would be losing money today if we waited to sell some of these assets."

Mr. Poling’s father, Harold A. Poling, retired as the chief executive of Ford Motor Company in 1994. On Thursday, Cheryle Campbell answered the phone at Harold Poling’s house in Bloomfield, Mich., where she said she had worked as a housekeeper for 20 years. She said she was not surprised to hear that Douglas Poling had decided to give back his bonus. “You’d think, being in the kind of job he is, that he’d be one of those sharks,” she said. “But he’s not at all.”

Douglas Poling has lived in the same house on a dead-end street in Fairfield for 11 years. The local papers say that he and his wife have given generously to a homeless shelter, to the Westport Country Playhouse and the Fairfield Country Day School, a boys’ prep school where tuition runs as high as $29,300 a year.

But on Thursday, his house, like Mr. Haas’s, was being watched by private security guards.

Cool! My backyard! I hang out with friends at Orem's diner!

Solid advice to anyone who has a fortune: make sure that if it is recently earned that it was earned honorably -- or prepare to give it up.

Boo-effing-hoo.

When the rich piss people off they shouldn't be surprised when people start dangling nooses in front of them.

Give. Me. A. Break.

Is it not totally transparent that these people are just trying to grab for themselves the role of victim? I hardly think a single one of them has actually lost a single second of sleep over the thought of maybe ending up getting what they deserve. This whole thing is just the elites trying to distract attention from who they really are -- they can't possibly be the ruling class if they're afraid, now can they?

Once word gets around of the first even attempted lynching... then I might start to think that the Masters of the Universe might actually be getting the tiniest bit nervous at their future prospects. Until then, they're just smokescreening; it's a tactic that has served their interests well for many, many decades.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Give. Me. A. Break.

Is it not totally transparent that these people are just trying to grab for themselves the role of victim? I hardly think a single one of them has actually lost a single second of sleep over the thought of maybe ending up getting what they deserve. This whole thing is just the elites trying to distract attention from who they really are -- they can't possibly be the ruling class if they're afraid, now can they?

Once word gets around of the first even attempted lynching... then I might start to think that the Masters of the Universe might actually be getting the tiniest bit nervous at their future prospects. Until then, they're just smokescreening; it's a tactic that has served their interests well for many, many decades.

"The rabble are just lazy and jealous and just want to off us and take our money" reaction the economically powerful have had throughout history to people wanting social justice doesn't help them, either.

There's a Mises quote:

Originally Posted by Ludwig von Mises

The corruption of the regulatory bodies does not shake his blind confidence in the infallibility and perfection of the state; it merely fills him with moral aversion to entrepreneurs and capitalists.

"Infallibility and perfection of the state" is, of course, a straw man. Typical for von Mises.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

"Infallibility and perfection of the state" is, of course, a straw man.

FWIW, Mises was no anarchist, but he could have improved his wording..

Originally Posted by Matt1989

FWIW, Mises was no anarchist, but he could have improved his wording..

No, he wasn't an anarchist, he was a free-market purist and one of the founders of the Austrian school of economics. But it's not just his wording that needs improvement here, it's his logic. The implied conditional is that "if the state is not perfect, infallible, and immune to corruption, then regulation of the economy is useless." Put that way, the conditional is absurd, no? Yet that is the only honest way to put it.

No advocate for state regulation of the economy, or even for socialism, has ever, to the best of my knowledge, argued for the state's perfection, infallibility, or immunity from corruption, nor do any such people consider that state of affairs a prerequisite for the utility of economic regulation. In other areas, Mises himself would not reason this way, since as you note he was not an anarchist. The criminal justice system is similarly not perfect or infallible, yet Mises did not advocate the abolition of laws. The military is not perfect or infallible, yet Mises did not advocate total disarmament.

In many areas of life, we recognize the imperfection of government, but most of us also recognize that it serves purposes for which it is irreplaceable, and so we employ it, doing our best to minimize the dangers of corruption and error. Mises himself advocated this course -- just not w/r/t economic activity.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Give. Me. A. Break.

Is it not totally transparent that these people are just trying to grab for themselves the role of victim? I hardly think a single one of them has actually lost a single second of sleep over the thought of maybe ending up getting what they deserve. This whole thing is just the elites trying to distract attention from who they really are -- they can't possibly be the ruling class if they're afraid, now can they?

Once word gets around of the first even attempted lynching... then I might start to think that the Masters of the Universe might actually be getting the tiniest bit nervous at their future prospects. Until then, they're just smokescreening; it's a tactic that has served their interests well for many, many decades.

Narcissistic and selfish people are the last to recognize their own unpopularity because they are so convinced of their excellence as people. They surround themselves, if at all possible, with adoring flunkies, insulating themselves from knowledge of the harsh judgment that results from their destructive failures. Executive suites started filling with them around 1980, reflecting the worst Boomer traits: selfishness, rapaciousness, and ruthlessness with some un-Boom lack of reflectiveness. To be sure, Civic generations can lack reflectiveness, but for a different reason: they expect others to do the reflecting on their behalf. Narcissists and sociopaths fail to reflect because reflection would show the emptiness of their personalities.

Narcissists and sociopaths can of course cast themselves as undeserving victims of unjustifiable rage. The absolute worst, and crudest -- often criminals -- often pose as the most innocent people who ever lived when confronted with their crimes. Discredited executives who find themselves facing hostile news media (even FoX News has turned on these people) and public opinion, having been surrounded by people who think them wonderful (flunkies, groupies, peers, and family dependents) exaggerate the dangers to themselves.

Or do they?

This time if we have a revolution -- let's leave the small business owners alone.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

No, he wasn't an anarchist, he was a free-market purist and one of the founders of the Austrian school of economics. But it's not just his wording that needs improvement here, it's his logic. The implied conditional is that "if the state is not perfect, infallible, and immune to corruption, then regulation of the economy is useless." Put that way, the conditional is absurd, no? Yet that is the only honest way to put it.

Disagree. IMO, that conditional does not correspond to the line. (I actually didn't expect a response; I was merely showing that it resembles today's conditions, so I didn't provide full context).

Well, I scrolled through the article trying to find the context of the line and couldn't, and I refuse to wade through an entire lengthy article written by Mises, whose writing is not only turgid but an exercise in sophistry and rationalistic unscientific claptrap of the most self-consistent sort, so I shall have to concede the point of intended meaning by default.

In isolation, the phrase's apparent meaning is however subject to the criticism offered.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Well, I scrolled through the article trying to find the context of the line and couldn't, and I refuse to wade through an entire lengthy article written by Mises, whose writing is not only turgid but an exercise in sophistry and rationalistic unscientific claptrap of the most self-consistent sort, so I shall have to concede the point of intended meaning by default.

In isolation, the phrase's apparent meaning is however subject to the criticism offered.

Well, it's a silly argument anyway. But 'CTRL + F' is your friend.

Originally Posted by Matt1989

Well, it's a silly argument anyway. But 'CTRL + F' is your friend.

Now that's a Millie-to-Boomer line if there ever was one.

Originally Posted by Mr. Reed

Now that's a Millie-to-Boomer line if there ever was one.

LOL got that right.

Originally Posted by Mises

The history of the last decades can be understood only with a comprehension of the consequences of such inter*vention in the economic operations of the private property order. Since the demise of classical liberalism, intervention*ism has been the gist of politics in all countries in Europe and America.

The economic layman only observes that “interested par*ties” succeed again and again in escaping the strictures of law. The fact that the system functions poorly is blamed ex*clusively on the law that does not go far enough, and on cor*ruption that prevents its application. The very failure of interventionism reinforces the layman’s conviction that pri*vate property must be controlled severely. The corruption of the regulatory bodies does not shake his blind confidence in the infallibility and perfection of the state; it merely fills him with moral aversion to entrepreneurs and capitalists.

It appears that Matt was right. I mis-identified the fallacy in question. It's NOT a straw man, it's an assertion contrary to fact.