Brilliant.

Perfect! This example may actually reach some people who until now do not understand that the “general welfare” clause is a true fatal flaw in the Constitution. There are other flaws as pointed out in a full critique of the
Preamble and Bill of Rights -
http://selfsip.org/critiques/billofrights.htmlGreat job, Mark! – http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/some-guy-ron-paul-doesnt-know-the-constitution/#comment-207868393

Spectacular!

Though I know the facts are on our side, I do wish the founders would have written the Constitution so that it would be even harder for these convenient re-interpretations to ever be considered credible.

Excellent! 

Beautiful!! 

General welfare = free drugs??

Mark – this is excellent.  I hope you don’t mind, I posted this on my facebook. I did acknowledge I got it from you as posted on tomwoods.com. 

I agree.  Some say written constitutions have failed, but I’m not ready to go that far yet.  What else do we have to secure liberty?  History has clearly shown that the drafters of written constitutions need to much more clear and explicit.  They need to spell it out so that even a middle-schooler can understand it, so that there’s little possibility of molding the text like a thing of clay.

Even on the rarely seen subject of “bills of attainder”—an old English common-law term—the court has screwed it up by diverging from the intended meaning. 

Raoul Berger, “Bills of Attainder: A Study of Amendment by the Court,” Cornell Law Rev. 1978  

O’Rourke has hustled and posted a response this afternoon (not counting his several comments on Tom’s previous article): http://open.salon.com/blog/paul_j_orourke/2011/05/20/some_guy_zips_up_ron_pauls_pants

His attitude comes across as a “normally I wouldn’t waste my time but…” sort of thing, but then proceeds to carefully go line-by-line through Tom’s rebuttal. He’s like a guy who is trying really hard to look like he doesn’t care and this doesn’t bother him.

If you take out all of the rhetorical flourishes and embellishments, his line-by-line response contains about a paragraph of actual rebuttal. He demonstrates his command of libertarianism by saying, “Jefferson feared corporate intrusions on liberty — libertarians embrace them.”

He reasserts his claim that no one understands the Constitution unless they embrace the “operative”, non-original, and distorted mess of what was originally presented to the States to ratify. He doesn’t argue why this is the correct position to take nor does he address the criticisms of it. You just need to understand that might makes right, apparently. Oh, he also lists lots of examples of past violations of the Constitution made by presidents and courts for us naive libertarians. I knew them all because I learned of them first from Tom Woods.

He’s very self-satisfied throughout this piece(?) and probably thought to himself, “Brilliant!” repeatedly as he crafted each line of response. He’s probably especially proud of the title. ‘Some Guy’, eh? You see what he did there? By the end, he’s so proud of his deconstruction, he sits back like a tourist in Vegas that’s used to winning all his local card games and says, “Are you sure you want to push all-in with that hand?”He has no idea who he’s playing with. He’s flashed his cards to half the table and he’s holding nothing.

Well, of course the guy’s proud. It’s easy to maintain a sense of pride when you lack the intellectual capacity necessary to comprehend the rules. Also, you can’t lose when you have nothing to offer.

In the arena of logical thought, his delusions and incapabilities form his impenetrable shield. For an idiot, such a thing is quite convenient.

Thomas Jefferson explained,
“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

James Madison, who said:
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

In February 1887, President Grover Cleveland, upon vetoing a bill appropriating money to aid drought-stricken farmers in Texas, said, “I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and the duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”

In 1854, after vetoing a popular appropriation to assist the mentally ill, President Franklin Pierce said, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity.” To approve such spending, argued Pierce, “would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

In 1796, Rep. William Giles of Virginia condemned a relief measure for fire victims, saying that Congress didn’t have a right to “attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require.”
A couple of years earlier, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
 

Madison in the Federalist Papers # 41 explains clearly the General Welfare Clause:
 
  Some who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on, the language in which it is defined.. It has been urged and echoed that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” amounts to an unlimited commission to  exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their- stooping to such a misconstruction.
Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. A power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury, or even to regulate the course of de­scents, or the forms of conveyances, must be very  singularly expressed by the terms “to raise money for the general welfare.”
 
But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon. If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same  sentence be excluded  altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing had not its origin with the latter.”
Madison also explain that “those terms where use in the Articles of Confederation and no one thought those terms to be anything more than a preamble of why the “To Powers” were given.”
 
 

 Billy gets hit by a car while driving to get groceries and suffers devastating injuries, breaks his leg, etc — would his parents really disallow him the use of their debit card to pay for hospital care/medications to restore his health?

In an ideal world, Billy would use his own piggy bank cash to finance his medical bills. In reality, where costs are so high that 62% of bankruptcies in the US are prompted by medical bills (and yes, over 3/4 of those with medical-related bankruptcies do have health insurance), promoting the “general welfare” and what is “necessary and proper” should ensure that all persons have a safety net such that those unlucky enough to suffer a medical calamity do not necessarily endure the second hit of financial devastation, or worse, the inability to pay for important medical treatments.  As a logical extension of this example, along with strictly enumerated items, universal health care is indeed necessary and proper to promote the general welfare.

 That is telling of your mindset that you flipped the analogy to make the federal government the part of the parents granting authority to the kid.  Is that how you view our system? 

A plausible story.  Plausible, but wrong.  Wrong because the ratifying conventions were assured of the specific limits on federal powers, and no asterisk was included to the effect that if a blogger in the 21st century thinks something is pretty important, the federal government’s powers may be enlarged without a constitutional amendment.

We might stop to consider why health costs are so high in the first place.  It turns out — you’ll never guess — our wise overlords are not merely innocent bystanders in the whole affair: http://mises.org/daily/4434

LOL. Except in the constitution’s case, it says you can have x, y, and z, and also (bold) any thing else you need!!! That’s what the necessary and proper clause was definitely meant to do.

A)  Mises is generally not a trustworthy source, being heavily biased.
B)  Note that other countries, around the world, have heavy governmental interference with this market, and somehow, they manage to get better results (per the OECD data) at a 40% discount, in terms of GDP, from our price.

I’m just saying.

“Mises is not a trustworthy source.” Translation: “I have no idea how to answer the arguments in that piece.”

The U.S. health care system is a horrendous mess, with heavy government involvement everywhere.  Surely you are not pretending this is the free market or anything like it.  As for these wonderful European examples, the finance ministers of these countries privately concede that the aging of their populations is obviously going to wipe these systems out.  They’re not blind.

I know a few homeless people that are completely content with their inequality and the way things work. What’s your point? Are you really going to judge the efficacy of something based on subjective anecdotes? I guess you have to when you have no objective proof.

I read it, and kind of sorry that I did so. If it had just been:
 ”Jefferson feared corporate intrusions on liberty — libertarians embrace them.” 

That would have been more intelligent… but of course still wrong. Simply stated, it conflates a desire for non-toxic entrepreneurial environment for Maoist Fascism.