Help educate a european

[Buzzcook]

Good neighbors make good fences.

I'd like to point out that over the last ten years, America and Americans have been giving up their rights wholesale.
Since 9/11/01 we have "traded freedom for a little security".

Western Europeans arguably have more freedoms now than do citizens of the United States.

Let me repeat what I said in an earlier posts, if a police officer asks for ID and the citizen either cannot or will not produce that ID, the police can detain and jail that citizen.

[animal]

But don't go quoting "Good fences make good neighbors" because he is saying quite the opposite.

Fences have their uses sometimes, but don’t see any need here. The tribute comment was in reference to protection money paid in taxes to the state … as in … US or European governments in general.

A "right to protection" is a collective right and different from the individual counterpart, a "freedom of protection", (better stated in English as "self defense").

The fences should be built to protect our individual rights from collective intrusion…. or "walls of separation", as Jefferson might say.

tell me not to , and I'm probably gonna do it

[BlueTrain]

Taxes are not protection money in no sense of the word. Think of it as a homeowner's association fee. If it's protection money, why do so many people here claim the government, in the form of the police, have no obligation to protect you. Tribute, on the other hand, would be money paid to another country because they demand it. Ever heard of the Dane geld, if I have the expression correct. Surely Husky has.

According to Frost, his neighbor apparently wanted a fence so his apple trees didn't go over and consort with his neighbor's apple trees.

All this talk about personal freedom and liberty (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité) becomes idiotic after a while. Another old man, not Frost, said if we don't all hang together, we'll hang separately. On the other hand, I never belonged to a fraternité. Sacrebleu!

[MTT TL]

Let me repeat what I said in an earlier posts, if a police officer asks for ID and the citizen either cannot or will not produce that ID, the police can detain and jail that citizen.

Maybe, most of the time they won't. Sure the police might arrest you for not showing ID. Then the citizen might then sue the police department for illegal arrest.

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/stude...s08jul05.shtml

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/201...r-false-arrest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...l-rights-bronx

http://gothamist.com/2011/11/02/stud...ours_by_ny.php

That is how America works. People make dumb mistakes and then the affected people sue them for it.

[Buzzcook]

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names.

The 5-4 decision frees the government to arrest and punish people who won't cooperate by revealing their identity.

MTT TL, the Supreme Court disagrees with you.

[brickeyee]

Giving your name is NOT the same as 'showing an ID.'

[animal]

Bluetrain, I thought the "opposite of fences" comment was in relation to Husqvarna’s exchange student experience, my bad. (still kinda snickering about the females being more stereotypical) As for Frost, sentimentalist mush can sometimes yield useful ideas, and not always in the way the author intended..
Police aren’t legally bound to protect us. I thought that one was settled years ago. It makes it all the more laudable when they take risks to protect us, imo.
When government is created as having rights it becomes an entity. It then acts according to its interests, and its interests are defined by those who control it. Those in control are paying "their guy" for a service. Those not in control are paying a entity that is foreign to their nature, for a service they don’t want to buy.
Danegeld is interesting, and complicated. Romans just about perfected collecting tribute except for the multi-tiered graft, that left only a trickle reaching Rome . Some guys in the old neighborhood did fairly well collecting it from local businessmen. The US paid it to the Barbary pirates until we built a navy, and "started" the war on terror. Demand for tribute always comes with the threat of losing what is already rightfully yours…
Socialize a right, and you’re paying the government to dispense that right. How is that not tribute?

To some a discussion of rights may look idiotic, to others it can look like simple mathematics. A question of vector forces within reference frames, yielding one solution as the government forbidden to exercise rights with respect to it’s citizens. The second solution, I don’t really care for.….Whether or not a government can act as if it had rights on the international scene, changes the reference frame.

Seriously though, liberty removes any requirement for fraternity. I guess "liberty, equality, free association" doesn’t have a good enough ring to it. Not every man is my brother; but those who are, became so by mutual choice.

Back to the OP: If a cop comes up out of the blue and asks my name, I’m gonna tell him and probably hand him my ID at the same time.. If he asks to use my bathroom, I’ll invite him inside, and show him where it’s at.
If he demands to know my name, I’ll tell him, but won’t be happy about it.. If he demands an ID for no apparent reason … I’ll want to know why. (If he demands to use my bathroom, then I'll really be amused.)
It’s all about force, and how it’s directed, imo.
The freedom to exercise a right is not a demand to do so, otherwise it would not be a right, but a duty. Our freedoms with respect to the government, are still subject to the governance of the individual.

[BlueTrain]

I think some of what you say is nonsense, pardon the expression. Governments are entities and moreover, we live under layers of governments, presumably because we want it that way. Least ways, that's the way it turned out. But apparently some of the honorable members of this forum have a basic problem with any government. We'll get to Sweden in a moment.

At the very lowest level, government is the community. There are some formalities but the way it work here, it's all pretty much local. In some places if it's worth it, there may be a lot of outside interest and influence and it's been that way for the last 150 years, too, like it or not. That's where you are correct in mentioning money. That isn't socialism by any means, which is a word that sometimes gets tacked on to anything they don't like. But what it is, this outside money, as we might call it, is a form of corruption. You knew that already.

Now, we're going to have to leave out a lot here because the reality is that things are way more complicated than can be covered in a place like that, although I realize there's always the temptation to simplify things. You just have to realize things in real life aren't like that.

What governments have that individuals do not have is power. Probably the one most important in the context of this thready is police power. They usually but not always have the power to tax. Mostly the controversies in the last two hundred years has not been between the people (that's you and me) and government but rather between the different levels of government. But you probably already knew that, too.

I have no idea what you mean when you say socialize a right. Nice turn of words, though.

In Sweden, if we can get a, uh, foreign viewpoint, what is the relationship between the different levels of government that you have there and also the relationship between the police and the people? Here I'm not looking for the Wikipedia version but the way that chainsaw guy sees it.

[animal]

Maybe nonsense, lunacy, or a different language. Each decides for himself. "Entities as foreign" stems from the idea that the individual is sovereign.
Not just money, we pay in different ways. By "socialize a right", I meant a form of payment there too, converting the ownership of a right to the state. (Payments aren't necessarily voluntary.) That which controls it, owns it. When it comes to power, rights justify the use of power. A government with rights has it’s own justification, one without rights can only justify its use of power through the rights of the individuals involved.

I actually like government, but only when it acts as a referee between its citizens internally and provides services usable in common by all of its citizens. Actually, the former is part of the latter in that statement. Other than that, I don’t have any use for it. The perils of being an early-classical liberal, I suppose.?


What do you guys think about the following ?

Our government is layered, but should government be layered, or should it’s departments be separated according to their functions? (I could gripe for days about the interstate commerce clause here, but the question is for you.)

Back to police power, do you want a referee to enforce a rule of law, or someone to exercise control by a right of the government?

Which is preferable:
Having the right and ability to protect yourself, which also comes with the responsibility to do so correctly and the liability connected to your mistakes…. OR
Having the right to protection wherein the state has the responsibility to protect you, and if forced to protect yourself, the state decides if you acted correctly as it’s agent.
Some see no difference.

[pgdion]

Western Europeans arguably have more freedoms now than do citizens of the United States.

I wonder if this view varies depending on who you are and where you live?

From almost every measure in my life this is not true except maybe on speed limits. But hey, I can 70 - 75mph most places in my state now and I guess I'm ok with that (my Firebird may still disagree however ).

When it come to the topic of primary concern here (guns & stuff) ... I'd have to say this is not close to true even based on my limited collection. I'd have to believe there are few if any places in Western Europe where I could have what I currently have, and the only thing stopping me from having more is more money. With the exception of property taxes and what I can do with the lowland/sometimes wetland on my property up north ... I feel pretty darn free. But then again, I don't live in NJ, the cops in MN are overwhelmingly a bunch of good guys, and I don't fly at all.

[BlueTrain]

Let me clarify a point about what I meant by layered government, in case someone is misunderstanding me. I mean only that we live under, for most of us, a city or county government (and sometimes both), a state and finally the federal government. Some other countries have federal systems, other countries do not. Some countries had no local government in the sense we think of it under communist governments, though some did. It probably depended a lot on the size of the country. But mainly I want to remind you that when one says government, there's more than the federal government. You may wish there was no federal government, which is fine, and at one time there wasn't, but there will always be some government.

Not all of these questions brought up here necessarily have either-or answers. For instance, you have the right to defend youself, you have the right to secure your house against illegal entry, neither of which necessarily mean you have the right to shoot people. You may not even have the right to own a gun for several reasons. The question of whether or not you acted correctly in defending yourself is generally up to a jury. Good luck.

A larger problem as I see it and one that seems to be invisible to a lot of people is the way we as a people are allowing government to cede its powers to corporations. Dwell on that for a while.

[MLeake]

Corporations on the one hand, unions on the other hand, and community organizations on the gripping hand...

[BlueTrain]

What do you mean by community organizations? Something like home owner's associations? Corporations, absolutely, unions, maybe.

A sympton of what I'm getting at is the way community spirt has seeming evaporated over the last sixty years, or so it would seem. Remember Main Street? What does your main street look like now. My home town still has a main street but the business that used to be there moved out to the mall, an entirely private place. However, in all honesty, I can't credit that to any subversive element bent on destroying American life. People like shopping malls. The oldest indoor shopping mall, which coincidentally is in Russia, is over a hundred years old. But at my local mall, Tyson's Corner, there are armed guards hanging around, not policemen. I'm really not sure what to make of it.

Sort of stretching the theme of the thread, isn't it?

[MLeake]

HOA's are actually a good example, BlueTrain.

Some of their rules can be absolutely dumbfounding; in some areas, it's virtually impossible to find a decent house that doesn't belong to such a HOA. In many cases, this is because a small circle of developers have the bulk of the political influence with regard to zoning and construction.

I live in a rural county area, in large part so I can be away from the types of neighborhoods that think they should dictate how people use their own property. I may get fewer government services, as a result, but that is quite fine with me.

The neighbors out here don't have rules and bylaws; we do, however, help each other out with repairs and such on occasion.

My wife's uncle, on the other hand, would not live anyplace that doesn't have a HOA. He doesn't want somebody's unsightly 4x4 or RV reducing his potential property value. He is subsequently quite alright with a HOA telling him how he can set up his yard, paint his house, etc.

My wife and I maintain the type of place that the neighbors would not complain about, anyway, but that's because we like it that way - not because some external force has issued decrees.

Edit: To tie back into the idea of the OP, many Americans see things the way I do. We don't need everything to be provided by a nanny state, and we are quite happy to provide many of those "services" for ourselves; we also prefer to not be bothered by government, to the maximum practical extent. Ergo, we are not willing to cede powers to government that it has not been expressly given. In your example, if there is no legal requirement to provide a photo ID, then we are opposed to the idea of providing one because that makes some representative of the state happy in that moment.

[BlueTrain]

Although a home owner's association is outside the scope of the discussion, they do sometimes take on the appearance of government. But no one is required to live where there is one. Everything else you say about them is true. If there are few people, government has little to do. But once people start living in towns and cities, it has a real job to do. It is not in the nature of government to run every little thing in people's lives but it is in the nature of some people to want to be in a position to tell people what to do. Some of them end up in government. It would be a rare elected office holder who did not want to be there. I cannot say that liberals are more likely to want to tell people how to live than so-called conservaties. Maybe it's only people in the middle (moderates) who'd rather leave people alone.

But people won't leave each other alone. At some point the welfare of everyone becomes more important than the freedom of the individual. If I lived in a crowded old town like Georgetown, DC., or Alexandria, VA, I sure wouldn't want everyone burning coal in their fireplace.

[animal]

At some point the welfare of everyone becomes more important than the freedom of the individual

Nope …
Only if you look to government to build a society.

If you look to government to ensure the liberty of it’s citizens, so that THEY are free to build a society, then ---

The welfare of everyone depends on the freedom of the individual.

[tayronachan]

Husqvarna, one poster said it well when he said that "You must understand that here it's a cultural thing! Here, generally speaking, government is NOT viewed as a helpful, big brotherish entity. For those that are enamored of the originalist, constitutional concept of American Govt., Govt. is a necessary evil, to be minimalized at best, and preferably, mostly avoided." Today some see an erosion of our civil liberties and our Constitutional Rights, so naturally you will see people pushing back against percivied in-roads against our Constitutional Rights and Liberties.