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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4788)	1/5/2017 2:18:47 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362327

You have given me nothing to persuade me otherwise. For the beard, you haven't given me any reason to be persuaded that it is more important. To be fair its not really about beards, that was just an example you put out. Even if I find the example weak it doesn't necessarily mean the idea is weak. Food is pretty intimate, most people eat every day, and all people need to eat. Beards are for most of far lesser importance. To the extent they do have some special importance due to some religious belief or other idea, well people can hold special religious or philosophical beliefs about food that can be just as sacred to them. If a beard is special for someone is probably not an issue of being so close to them but rather most likely an issue of religious practice. Perhaps I used one of the strongest examples for property (food) and you one of the weakest ones for bodily integrity (facial hair). If it was outlawing Playstations vs taking Kidney's by force from those who have two healthy ones, obviously the later would be a much more severe violation. OTOH I still don't think I'd frame the difference in the same way you would. "The essence of himself" etc. But rather mostly that there would be a lot more pain, discomfort, risk, and at least temporary incompetency from the later then the former. If somehow none of those were the case, and the things were talking about were of equal importance (neither food vs. facial hair nor kidneys vs playstations, its hard to think of a really good combination that would work here) I'm not sure I'd say that attacks against or attempts to control your body where not at all worse or more out of bounds than an equivalently dangerous and difficult attempt to control or destroy property, but I don't see a good reason for that to be a central lens to look at such issues. A less direct point is that control of property becomes a way to control what you do with your body, how you interact with even your relatives and close friends, what you say or express, etc. Totalitarian regimes, can't really afford to send most of their population in to prison camps, or the firing squad (not if they want to avoid total collapse, and even brutal totalitarian dictators usually aren't Pol Pot), but if you don't at least appear to go along with whatever they want (which can include things like growing a beard, or in theory not growing one) you don't get as much in terms of property, you can't get an apartment or whatever (although that's more the case with communist regimes, who mostly didn't care about beards) You do realize, don't you, that I am not disagreeing with you re the wheat grower? I, too, consider that to be overreach. The decision was an important overreach, not just because the case itself, but because it marked the point were the interstate commerce clause became the "anything that can be claimed to affect interstate commerce clause". A key protection of both individual rights and of subsidiarity/federalism/states rights was the federal government was supposed to be limited to its expressly granted powers (even if it might be very powerful within those limits). This wasn't the beginning, or the end, of the federal government slipping those reigns, but it was an important step along the way.