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Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man
"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
New York's former and disgraced governor, Eliot Spitzer, is today a columnist at Slate.com, the webzine founded by Michael Kinsley and funded by Microsoft. In an era where the concept of personal shame has evaporated Spitzer is trying to rehabilitate his shredded reputation. A few months back in April, we apologize for not spotting this sooner, Spitzer co-authored an editorial entitled "Gun Control Without Gun Laws: How Obama can use government procurement regulations to limit gun violence" available here. It's worth a read if only to ponder that Eliot Spitzer is an object lesson: sometimes the universe does give people the justice they deserve. Why anyone still listens to this fool of unbridled chutzpah, arrogance and self aggrandizement is beyond us? Here he is on how the government can blithely still accomplish gun control without those pesky little things called "laws." We've yet to see a more telling example of raw unbridled power than his statement below that: "more fundamentally, companies could be told to stop selling certain types of weapons to the general public... * * * If government cannot legislate the conduct it wants, then it can use market power to buy it. For the money we are spending, we should buy not only guns but some peace from gun violence."Oh? For the children, right? Under what actual legitimate authority, you know "derived from the consent of the governed", are you talking about here Mr. Spitzer? Or do mean the same type of authority that you exercised to get your hooker to take the train down to DC for you? Here's the thing, Spitzer: If govt cannot legitimately legislate in an area it is overreaching its rightful confines if it works consciously to reach the same result through other means. (Which is why so many lawyers and constitutional scholars, like me, have very very deep seated problems with the constitutionality of federal tax and spending coercion on the states - thank you oh soooo much Supreme Court for South Dakota v. Dole (which was also a case "for the children"). ) Spitzer is also wrong on the facts. Drug dealers didn't "pioneer[] the use of 9-mm guns" the government did as part of switching from the long standard .45 over to 9mm pistols in order to use the same ammo as Nato forces. And Spitzer calls for magazine safety disconnects... maybe he should talk to those self-same police and military folks whose buying power he wants to harness... none of the guns they buy have them (for good reason too long to go into here). And witness first hand the oft derided but very real slippery slope in action: "If we can use a capital infusion to a bank as an opportunity to control executive compensation and to limit use of private planes, why can't the government use its weight as the largest purchaser of guns from major manufacturers to reward companies that work to keep their products out of criminals' hands?"Why not indeed? Government. Weight. Largest. Behold the truism in action: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have. Finally, let's flip one of Spitzer's final sentences around and apply it to the govt in the way he applies it to private gun manufacturers. Spitzer quips: "This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?"To which our retort simple question is: "Why do we trust any government that permits its officials to constantly lie to citizens, confiscate ever increasing amounts of hard earned wealth, bankrupt them, their children and their grandchildren yet is allowed to continue to peddle old discredited ideas as if they were bound to work this time around?" Labels: gun control, Spitzer, Supreme Court
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