Any reasonable person should see the parallels between this and our current situation with federal regulatory agencies, the ATF, and national, state, and local efforts in the drug war.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is consulting members on whether to seek the authority to punish people without going to court.

It has heard plans from one police chief for powers to ban teenagers from city centres and gangs from meeting up.

Civil rights group Liberty said that the suggestion was “a recipe for arbitrary justice”.

“When you do decide that someone’s been so criminal and behaved so badly and harmed other people that you need to punish them, that really is something that in a democracy belongs with the courts,” director Shami Chakrabati told BBC News.

The reason we have a State is to provide a predictable, reliable system for the administration of justice as opposed to the lynch mob. The reason we separate the three functions of the State (the creation of law, the enforcement of law, and clearing things up when the law is in question) is so that the executive power - the power most feared by the Founders and the only power present in authoritarian states - cannot just do whatever it pleases, using its force to enhance and protect its own power and the privilege of those who make up the state. A court is involved in virtually every aspect of enforcing the law (the provision of warrants for search and arrest, arraignment, indictment, determination of guilt, sentencing) is to ensure that the executive is justified - is within the law and operating in a prescribed manner - in its actions. (more…)

Out of my modesty and humility, I’d like to announce that I have received an appointment to the United States Military Academy (West Point). Unless Vanderbilt offers me a National Merit Scholarship Finalist package that competes with West Point, I’ll be a cadet come June.

 Editor’s note: John Maynard Keynes was an early 20th Century liberal economist.

 If Keynes was correct in his economic assessments and massive amounts of government spending can increase consumer demand, investment, and total spending in an economy, why, then, did New Deal price floors on agricultural products create massive amounts of surplus? Wouldn’t the increased consumer spending among the hungered create a demand for the fruit that, in reality, had to be destroyed?

Or is it correct to assert that Keynesian economics is merely an experiment in the ineffectiveness of government allocation of resources, specifically in this instance financial capital?

Note: this is also the somewhat unorthodox “personal statement” that I sent to Vanderbilt in my application for admission. Until spring break, I will be rehashing previously written but pertinent and rarely read material.

An open letter to the Congress of the United States of America
From Chase Bradstreet

Dear Congressmen and Congresswomen, Representatives and Senators,

Thank you for reading my opinion; thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to listen to a humble citizen.

Years, hopefully many from now, when our progeny have lost their last freedom, they will, as it is human nature to do, ask “who? why? how?”. Again, as it is human nature, they will not like the answers.

For most of your respective congressional careers, and especially after the not so far past events in New Orleans, you have heard countless individuals and organizations - both your constituents and the constituents of your honorable fellow representatives and senators - make demands of the federal government in general and Congress in particular.

This should hardly surprise you, but I write to you today to do, with one glaring difference, that same thing:

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To enact a socialist program, a state necessarily needs to replace the profit motive. As it is human to follow self interest, a government must either rely from the onset purely on force or it must undertake regulation of every corner of society. Since most socialists are well meaning idealists, they balk at the use of force, and thus the latter - soceital regulation - almost always precedes the former by some time. A government that attempts to replace the profit motive or self interest must attempt to fundamentally alter human nature (an action which seems out of human hands). The thoughts of individuals about their own person and society and the conscious or instinctual evolutionary reactions to a society or environment by an individual must be changed fundamentally.

To change human nature, the government must be present and influential in every phase of life, for one learns in every phase of life. It must tailor the information an individual has access to, form and reform an individual’s reactions to that information, and mold or fabricate a social and legal environment that promotes in every way the desires and preferred behaviors of the government. A state must regulate the actions between individuals, ensuring that they do not exchange thought dangerous to the progressive aims of the state. A state thus cannot limit its purview to a single generation nor can it consider a particular generation to be of a separate sphere in regards to posterity. The government must, to prevent ideological regression, influence and exert control over the relations between the generations, assuming the role of the parent to ensure that the old human nature remains a relic.

A state of socialist tendencies must change human nature to survive and to propagate its preferred means to stated desired ends; to change that nature, a state must be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, absolute and unrestrained, involved in any and ever aspect of society - it must be a totalitarian state. Well meaning idealist liberals need remember this truth.