Saturday, October 14, 2017

Loopholes and Border Call-ees

Muhammad Atta believed in a World Without Borders, too.

Some vintage Steyn:


"I love borders, the more the merrier – town lines, county, state, and, of course, national. Borders symbolize one of the few remaining constraints on government: You don’t like the grade school here in town? Move ten miles up the road. You don’t want to pay Vermont sales tax? Drive over the river and shop in New Hampshire. Arianna Huffington huffs against “tax loopholes for fat cats”, but I’d say the ability to rent a post office box in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands is a “loophole” in one of the original 16th century senses – an aperture to let in light and fresh air. The fact that there’s somewhere else to go to is the ultimate limitation on government. Borders give people choices – and, to put it in a bumper sticker, “I’m Pro-Choice And I Vote With My Feet”. When starry-eyed utopians speak of a “world without borders”, you can pretty much guess what kind of a place the one-world one-party state would be, with tax rates starting at 60%, about where they are in Sweden right now.


That’s why Justice O’Connor’s indifference to jurisdictional integrity and partiality to foreigners is not just a kinky fetish but something philosophically incompatible with the job she’s meant to be doing. If you wanted to construct the precise opposite of the US constitution, it would look an awful lot like “international law”. The former is a document that limits the state’s grip on the people, the latter is designed to ensure they can never wiggle free, no matter where they go. “International law” is the new colonialism, the imposition on the world’s peoples of the moral certainties of a remote, unaccountable western elite – indeed, one far less tolerant of local customs and culture than the old-school imperialists. The Europeans haven’t had much luck imposing their laws on Saudi Arabia and Sudan but, thanks to Justice O’Connor, other backward jurisdictions like Texas and Alabama are about to be whipped into line.".......

I'd say Texas and Alabama have declined the invitation.



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