In older times, blithering crackpots were a lot easier to tolerate, and ignore.

Now, when a Constitution intended to bind the government in iron chains lies largely ignored, the crackpots are now threats, and harder to tolerate.

Looney opinions can now easily become the law of the land, and there is no limit anymore to what the government can do to you if enough people back it. This "pure democracy" is precisely what the Constitution was designed to prevent, and it doesn't work any more.

There are real, live people who would love to make it illegal to eat meat. They have not succeeded in this, not because our system of government prevents such a massive annihilation of individual rights, but only because--so far--there are enough people who like meat and enough farmers who grow it to deflect the looney pressure group. So far.

This example applies to thousands of ways in which certain people would love to run your life.

So I point out the crackpots. They ALL have guns now.

* * *

Ayn Rand wrote a great article thirty years ago describing this situation. Extensive excerpt below:

A Nation's Unity, Part 1 (From the "Ayn Rand Letter," Vol. II, No. 1, October 9, 1972



...The fact that in case of disagreement men can resort to physical force, i.e., to human destruction, is the reason why every human association is based on some sort of agreement, which is implemented by certain rules of conduct. An agreement, in this context, does not necessarily mean a common purpose: you may make an agreement with a neighbor that you will not attack-him so long as he does not attack you - and if both of you abide by it, you are free to go your own ways and, perhaps, never see each other again. The fundamental agreement which is required of a nation is an agreement on the rules of peaceful coexistence. A territory inhabited by men engaged in perpetual conflicts, chronic fighting, physical violence, and general hatred of all for all, is not a nation nor a country, but a bloody mess. Internal peace and some sort of harmony are the precondition of the existence of a nation.

The big questions, however, are: Peace - at what price? Harmony - on what terms? Agreement - about what? And more: Can such terms and agreements be chosen arbitrarily? Can men choose any terms and make them work simply by wishing them to do so? Or are there objective factors which necessitate certain principles of human association, and defeat all others? In sum, the fundamental social question is: What principles should men agree upon in order to live and deal with one another?

The best way to answer questions of this kind is to start not with an enormous, floating abstraction, such as "society as a whole," but with one member of society, the one you know best: yourself. Ask yourself: What rules of conduct would you be able and willing to accept in order to deal with your neighbors?

Let us say you are a young man who knows that he must work in order to support his life. You have a good job, a small family, and a home in the suburbs. Since you do not intend to stagnate, you maintain a certain financial and intellectual balance between the present and the future; you budget your money and your time: your money, to provide for your present needs and to improve your standard of living, e.g., to pay off the mortgage on your home - your time, to do your present job well and to study in order to qualify for a better one. You like some of your neighbors, and you dislike others, but you are not afraid of any of them: they are not a threat to you, nor you to them.

This is the normal pattern of your life and you take it for granted, as if it were a fact of nature. But it is not. It took thousands and thousands of years to achieve it. Let us see what it depends on.

Suppose this country's political system was changed: it was decided that the affairs of each community are to be determined at a monthly meeting of all its citizens, by a general, democratic vote, and that the rule of the majority is absolute, without limits or appeal. It would mean that you could be thrown out of your home and out of the community - if the majority so voted. It would mean that you could be sentenced to die - if, not liking your manners or your ideas, the majority so voted. This is not fantasy. This was the social system of many Greek city-states: pure democracy, unlimited majority rule. Would you agree to accept it in the name of communal unity?

No? Then would you agree to accept it on a much larger scale and by remote control?

Suppose it was decided (but never announced openly and explicitly) that the nation holds the absolute power of a Greek city-state. But since one cannot convene an entire nation to a monthly meeting, the people are compressed into groups representing various interests - and the government acts as arbiter and ruler, who listens to their clashing demands and enforces the will of those it deems to be representative of the public interest. These groups are not elected, they are formed informally, "spontaneously," "democratically," anyone is free to form them - and to clamor demands for anything.

How will you adjust to it? First, there is a business lobby, but you don't mind it, it helps your boss. Then, there is a labor lobby, but you don't mind it, it helps you. Then, there is a farm lobby, but you don't notice it, it's too remote from your activities. Then, a neighbor on the next block forms a group demanding better roads and two blocks further, a woman forms a group demanding better schools. Another group demands free lunches for all schoolchildren - and a rival group demands free textbooks. Your windows are smashed, one night, by the group of the local juvenile delinquent, or "problem-adolescent": they shout "nonnegotiable demands," which you cannot quite untangle, but you gather it has something to do with "Youth Power." The residents of the local Old Folks' Home form a group, demanding "Senior-Citizen Power." The oldmaid file-clerk at the office, whom you can't stand because she can't keep the files straight, is given a promotion - with the help of a group that demands the "Liberation of Women." You have no time to keep track of it all, you notice only that your taxes keep rising and rising - and your money keeps buying less and less.

You are late getting to the office, one morning, because the local welfare-recipients' group lies stretched out across the highway, demanding a yearly income greater than half of yours; you slam on the brakes just in time to avoid running over the group's leader, a lady known as "Fatso," who has twelve children and no visible husband. You had planned to have three children, but you decide to wait a little for that third one--you cannot afford him. A long-haired young man forms a group to forbid anyone to have more than two children - and a short-haired young woman forms a group to forbid abortions and the use of contraceptives. There's a group that demands the display of sexual intercourse on the screen, and another group that demands censorship of all movies above the intellectual level of a six-year-old - so you give up going to the movies.

You fall behind in your mortgage payments, but your property taxes keep rising and rising. You consider giving up your house and renting one in a new development, five miles away. But the local bird-watcher's group is suing the developer, demanding that the land he cleared be turned into a public park. Your boss has promised you a promotion, the job of managing the new branch factory he is planning to build in your district. But he does not build it: the lady who used to head the local poetry club, now has a group that demands the preservation of the beautiful swamp he was going to fill.

Then an educational group decrees that you cannot send your children to the local school, which so much of your property taxes has gone to pay for, so your children are bused to a distant town - a daily trip of two hours going there and another two hours coming back. This, you are told, will achieve racial integration. You had never thought of it before, but you become race conscious and try to untangle your own ancestry. You find it so mixed that you cannot qualify for any of the groups into which your community is splitting: the Afro-Americans, the Chicano-Americans, the Italo-Americans, the Jewish-Americans, the Irish-Americans, etc. And you - you are just a mongrel American, a title of which you would have been proud at one time, but which is becoming dangerous. If you lose your job, there will be no preferential quota to help you get another one, and no way of knowing how many "ethnic" applicants will be pushed ahead of you; there will be no preferential quota for your son's admission to a college, when the time comes. You are alone, unprotected, defenseless - and the only reason you know that you are living in a human society and not on a desert island is the fact that your taxes keep rising and rising.

How do you adjust, to whom, and to what? The first thing to go is your future.

You can barely keep up with your current expenses. You have no way to plan ahead: if you try to save, you do not know which demands of which groups will eat up your savings in the form of new taxes and higher prices. Why study to develop your skills? You do not know whether you will ever get a better job, or what new obstacles will spring up overnight, or whether there will be anyone left to hire you. You used to plan your course in terms of years; the range of your concern shrinks to one year, then to one month, and then to next payday: you can see- nothing beyond but a black void.

Strange things happen to a man without a future. You begin to act like the type of man you had once despised: you become sloppy at your job, you can barely summon the effort just to get by; you get drunk too often; you buy a luxurious lawn mower, which you have no time to use - and you quarrel with your wife over the expensive cut of lamb chops she bought for dinner. And when you hear a seedy lecturer, at a group meeting, declare that the Horatio Alger stories are a myth, that a man cannot rise by individual effort and ability, you applaud defiantly and belligerently.

Oh yes, you have joined a group; you have joined several groups. You do not know exactly what they stand for, but they talk of community action and mutual protection, and they denounce other groups, you do not know clearly which ones or why. You had tried to get it clear, but gave up. Every time you read a newspaper or listen to the snarling voices on television, things grow murkier.

You do not know by what steps your attitude toward your neighbors has changed. You have begun to watch them suspiciously. Whenever you see two of them in a heated discussion, or observe several cars parked in front of a house, you feel a touch of anxiety: you do not know what they might be up to, what new group might be formed, and what it will do to you. You learn to feel fear. You are afraid of your neighbors - of any human being. You are afraid to speak. You smile, and you agree with everyone you meet. You are afraid to think. One day, you discover that what you feel for men is hatred.

In rare moments, you wonder what has happened to your neighbors. They were decent people once - you remember vaguely - they did not act like wild packs scrambling to get at one another's throats (and pockets). You do not know how many of them are wondering the same thing about you. You know only that there was a time when the local bird watcher and the "problem-adolescent" and the poetry-club ladies and Ms. Fatso were of no danger to anyone, but now they are. Why were they better in the past? If someone answered: "Because they did not have a gun" - you would not understand it.

You have come to believe that people are no good and that force is the only practical way to deal with them, since reason - they all tell you - has failed. You cannot cope with the enormous complexity of an entire nation's problems; you have no way of knowing, you conclude, who is right or wrong - so let some groups force others and reestablish order. No one has explained to you that the Golden Rule applies to politics: if certain conditions of social existence are unacceptable and unbearable to you, you cannot expect others to accept them and make them work - and what these conditions do to you, they do to "society as a whole."

Do you agree to accept a social system of this kind?

It is, of course, the system under which we are living today, but which we have never chosen. It is important to consider it now because, in the coming Presidential election, one of the candidates is asking us to agree and - in the name of national unity - explicitly to accept the principle that our lives belong to the State.