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The United States was founded with Common Law as a starting
point. Common law originated following the Norman Conquest of England as
an eclectic combination of local decisions. As the king consolidated
power, and courts and judges administered justice, for a price, a degree
of consistency between cases, enforced by precedent and a hierarchy,
came to be known as common law, all in the service of maintaining
domestic tranquility and income for the royal treasury. The power of the
judges came not from the sovereign, but from the acceptance by the
people of decisions that conformed to prior decisions and to other
similar decisions. Judges created "justice" by knowing cases and
deciding similarly, thus satisfying the people's conception of fairness.
Rulers only stay in power when they only do what the subjects tolerate,
and the same applies to judges and "the law". The structure,
procedures, paradigm, and rights were largely codified in the Magna
Carta and its subsequent implementation and consolidation. The treatment
of the Colonies by the King exceeded what the people would accept,
leading to our famous Declaration in which the right of the people was
asserted and the litany of
complaints were listed, complaints of violation of various equities and
rights inherent in the Common Law. In the Declaration, the
fundamental rights are delineated that gives the fundamental policies
required.
What is that fundamental founding policy? To answer
that we have to look at our fundamental founding documents. The
first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed — with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Our government was created by us, the people, and governs only with
our continued consent. We choose representatives to do our collective
bidding, and remove them when they become destructive to our inalienable rights.
What are these unalienable rights, and what does it mean for these
rights to be unalienable? There shall be no power that legitimately
can take these rights away from us. Moreover, every person is
entitled equally to these rights that can not be denied. These are the first two policies:
Three specific rights are enumerated in the Declaration.
For years the inherent policies implicit in the Declaration of Independence that these rights dictate have been
essentially ignored by politicians in a futile attempt to maximize them
all. If one argues that the Declaration of Independence does not have the authority to establish policy for our government, one is also arguing that that the Declaration of Independence did not have the authority to establish this country, which it clearly did.
Not only does the Declaration of Independence, have the authority, so does the Constitution itself.
The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America |
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The constitution, the supreme law of the land(Article VI), Places the rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence in the context of administration of the government, establishing the general order of importance of the goals for this government.
Equal, unalienable, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is in the nature of a right that it can not be denied, that it belongs to the holder. Unalienable rights belongs absolutely and exclusively to the people. Created equal with equal rights entails reciprocity. The priority order of these five dimensions are critical to the polices that must be followed to insure these rights can be enjoyed by all
Justice, tranquility, defense, welfare, liberty.
Justice requires equality, non-discrimination, on all the inherent
qualities of citizens. Not only must all laws and court cases provide
for equality under the law, so does it require that all citizens support
all other citizens by equal treatment with respect to all the inherent
qualities, Race, Gender, Sexual Preference, Age, Health, and any others
that are required to insure tranquility, defense, welfare, and
liberty. To meet these condition requires that reciprocity be a
factor in decisions regarding prohibited behavior. Anarchy, where
everyone can do what they want, even against others, cannot be allowed
nor permitted; anarchy is not liberty, anarchy destroys liberty.
The exercise of liberty can not allow acts which jeopardize "equal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
Domestic tranquility and general welfare. Domestic tranquility and general welfare require adequate means to minimize risk of loss of life, health, sustenance, and the safety of lodgings.
When we think of risk reduction, we tend to think of insurance.
What about risk and insurance? Let's say risk is the possibility
or probability of something undesirable or damaging happening that takes
more resources to recover from than you have or will have.
What is insurance? Let's say that insurance is a means to provide
for the cost of a risky event that you don't have the funds to recover
from.
Example: So suppose an event has a statistical probability of
happening to one person in a thousand per year in a particular community
of 1000 people and costs a thousand dollars to recover from. So the
community forms a pool to cover that cost, by all contributing $1 per
year. this shares the risk of loss and the risk to one unlucky
person who, as luck would have it, gets the $1000 to pay for his loss.
He only paid $1, so his loss only cost him $1. His loss also costs
everybody else $1 too. The risk was shared. In truth,
there's going to be an administrative cost per person, say another $1,
so the insurance costs $2 per year, but pays the full cost of $1000
loss. And, if this is a for-profit business, there's going to be
an additional cost to cover the profit. But if it's a non-profit
company, the cost of risk reduction is cheaper to the subscriber than in
for-profit insurance companies. The point of insurance is that you buy
risk reduction at a much lower cost than if you have no insurance. You
also lower significantly your anxiety that something you don't have the
resources to recover from might happen. Lower anxiety equates to
domestic tranquility and welfare, so insurance is a good thing.
Another way of doing the same thing, is to give the job of risk
reduction to the government. Then the premium is not voluntary, and it's
called a tax. As a home-owner in my home town, part of the real estate
tax package is a separately listed fire department share. There is
administrative cost and risk cost figured in, but no profit, so we get
our fire risk at a lower cost than buying insurance from a for-profit
company. It doesn't pay for repairs, but it pays for getting somebody to
come put out the fire as fast as possible, in many cases saving much of
the building and or contents.
What are important things to provide domestic tranquility and general
welfare? How about just about everything needed to survive and get a
job, such as education and healthcare. These dictate that we have a
policy to provide education and healthcare. the lack of which denies
our fundamental rights dictated by the preamble to the
constitution. That's what we have a constitution for, to specify
what is to be provided to the citizens and how to do it.
If we are to be able to pursue happiness, we're going need a job with education to do it together with sufficient pay to cover our food, housing, and health care, all of which cost coins. So we require policies to provide education sufficient to get a job that pays enough to cover our costs of living, lodgings, and healthcare. Healthcare is made up of prevention and correction, both of which cost coins.
There are lots of risks for health. Millions of Americans have no
health insurance, so sickness and injury jeopardize life and welfare.
Yet we do not provide risk reduction for all our citizens. Universal
health care would provide for both.
Medicare is paid for by a tax on wages and by the premiums for seniors
starting at age 65, that go into trust funds. Benefits are paid out of
the trust funds, but it only covers 80% of allowed charges, not
including prescription drugs nor dental nor vision care. The trust funds
have billions of dollars in surplus which will keep the funds solvent
well into the 2030's, but the 20% medical risk and the 100% dental,
vision, and prescription drugs risk will be born by us unless we buy
private commercial insurance programs.
None of these program meet the criteria of the Declaration of
Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, which specifies that
we have unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. In order to meet those criteria vis-a-vis health and
welfare, we need universal health care like the majority of other
developed countries. It should be our undisputed policy that there
be no charge for the delivery of any and all necessary health care
simply by walking in and getting an appointment at any health care
facility. The funding for these services must be paid by a single payer,
the government, or a trust fund managed by the government. The funds
must be financed by a combination of income and wealth taxes, must be
progressive, so that the lowest income people pay none of these taxes.
On the right to pursue happiness. Necessarily we need all the
aforementioned rights managed with reciprocity in priority order to
enable the pursuit of happiness. Not withstanding the ambiguity of
happiness, we can assume that, at a minimum, it requires adequate means
to enable freedom from the business of surviving, freedom to pursue more
and extras. But one thing it does not allow is the freedom to pursue
such means at the expense of others losing that same right. We can not
have a policy that allows some to perform actions that prevent others
from obtaining the means to survive, to afford health, and to pursue
sufficient means to achieve more than mere survival, nor acts that
deprive others of such means. In a word, the pursuit of profit to
the extreme that it prevents others from getting good enough paying jobs
to have a living wage. The excessive pursuit of wealth that
denies others a reasonable and adequate pursuit of wealth, such that the
wealthy is extremely richer than the poorer, so much so that the poorer
can not enjoy a reasonable happiness, becomes a violation of
reciprocity in freedom by denying choice to the poorer. Such extreme
income and wealth disparity as have been engineered over the last
hundred years is in violation of the unalienable civil rights dictated
by the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the
Constitution. It recreates the conditions of the serfdoms of
England, of the abuses by the king of the colonial days, of the slaves,
of the Jim Crow, and now of the plutocrats and oligarchs.
The resistance is forming. Will we revolt? or will the Plutocrats and
Oligarchs succeed in transforming The United States into a capitalistic
dictatorship with the ultra conservative court, ultra conservative
congress, and injustice department all cow-towing to the ultra rich? After years, what are we on the brink of?