Berkeley City Council Doing Its Anti-Democracy Bit

[Radar]

Any time the government takes money from those who have earned it by force or coercion (fear of going to jail) and gives it to those who have not earned it .... it's a textbook example of socialism.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Really, UT? Then why the weird quality of radar's posts? Why his absence of a global libertarian vision? Why his reluctance for us to help remove political obstacles (almost the only kind that seem to have effect) to engendering prosperity worldwide? He ought to remember that prosperity is good for business, and that the business of America is business. His noncomprehension of the value of liberation from the oppressions of too much government, whenever foreign peoples are concerned, strikes me as, well, thoroughly bad. Too much government equals not enough business and not enough wealth or wellbeing. It is hardly unlibertarian to liberate those ground under tyranny's heel, and thus I consider it our responsibility as human beings. Radar definitely won't take this responsibility, leaving him vulnerable to accusations of inhumanity. I don't get hit with these any too often. Which of us, then, is the friendlier to the global body politic?

It does not follow that because he married foreign he's thought foreign policy through. He seems to me not merely uninterested, but actively against thinking about it -- have you noticed his insistence that America retreat within its own borders, becoming this continental cloister? It's all over his writing -- any excuse whatsoever to withdraw from the world, he makes it. There must be a reason for such consistency, and I don't think we can lay this one directly at narcissism's door.

That's never been how these United States have functioned, not long-term, and especially so once we became a world power around the turn of the twentieth century. Sure, many other nations put together don't spend but a fraction on the military we do -- they can afford to do that precisely because of what we spend on it, and what we get for that expenditure is power projection like nobody else can manage. What's more, a century of experience with us has shown us trustworthy; the good actors among nations don't need to arm up against the United States, and this fact is reflected in the size of their military establishments, particularly in their navies, which by comparison with the US Navy look more like the Coast Guard, and have similarly coastal missions and areas of operation.

American interests I believe are not separable from America in general, nor separable from the economy, for the reason that we're too interconnected with the rest of the world.

You will have to show proof, proof mind you, that the "common defense" clauses are limiting clauses. So far, you've only repeated your assertions, not proven them. I do not recall a "common or territorial defense only" anywhere in there, and I say you couldn't find one. I read them as: this is one purpose. It is tacit about others, but does not forbid them. The Constitution doesn't set forth how foreign policy will be conducted, it merely apportions who does what parts of the whole. Except in matters of funding, that is the Executive Branch. It takes the Legislative to ratify foreign aid.

I think, radar, that you're more interested in being radical than in getting it right, or practicing "the art of the possible." You look to an eccentric reading of the Constitution in an effort to pare down the size and scope of the Federal level of government, but I don't think the Constitution supports you in the endeavor -- you're trying to have trade without security, and that is unwise. Better, I think, to concentrate on paring down the Federal welfare-state departments.

I've been around the world with the Navy; I've crossed the longitude of Diego Garcia going both east and west. I've been close to war. I speak four languages myself, English, Spanish, French, and Russian, and can still order lunch in Turkish, and am looking into taking some German. Don't try getting haughty with me.