From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Book for the Ages
Date: 31 Dec 92 05:21:19 GMT
Organization: HTE

I am posting this for the benefit of any Russian or other CIS citizens who might
be reading.

I have to imagine that a lot of thought is going on in the CIS at present as to
how countries need to be run, and I know that it is terribly difficult to
understand a country like the U.S. from such a distance.  I have to imagine
that the questions being asked about the United States are sort of like "Gee,
there certainly is a lot which we'd like to copy from the Americans, but what
exactly is it that we DON'T wish to copy, that is, what has goofed the
Americans up so badly over the last thirty years or so?"

There is a book which has come out recently which will almost answer that
question at one sitting:  "ABANDONED, The Betrayal of the Amrican Middle 
Class Since World War II", by William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell, Madison
Books, 1992.  The authors are law professors at the University of South 
Carolina.

The book covers the subject of democracy and debt, from the discussions on the
topic amongst the founding fathers to the demise of New York City under
Rockafeller/Mitchell, i.e. the infamous notion of "moral obligation" bonds,
culminating with such abominations as the sale of Attica prison to Donald
Trump's UDC.

The authors proceed on the assumption that governments (at least in this 
country) end up with debt problems when they abandon democracy and develope
agendas which the people do not support;  this would include things such as
the VietNam war as well as such things as school bussing to achieve racial
balances, farm subsidies etc.  If fairly asked to pay taxes for such programs,
the people (rightly) would rebel;  governments therefore develope increasingly
convoluted schemes to pay for such dealings.

The authors attribute our banking problems, on which they have much to say, on
a growing political abandonment.  

The authors have a great deal to say about our legal and academic systems, and
the book itself might be viewed as a $22 education in Amrican constitutional
law.

They very clearly point out the 180 degree difference between the world-view
of American jurisprudence of 100 years ago and what we have today, particularly
with respect to the famous Swift/Tyson decision of Joseph Story in the mid
1800's.  Our system, as you've read, is three-part, consisting of supposedly
equal branches of legislature, administration (president), and judicial.

Everybody in this system from the president of the U.S. to the dog-catcher of
El-Paso County (Graftstvo), Colorado, is accountable to the people via
regular elections, with the single exception of judges.

Judges are appointed for life and are utterly unaccountable to the political
system, other than that they may not commit crimes.  What protects the people
from judges?

Joseph Story said, and for 80 years everybody believed, that what protected
the people from judges was that judges did not write law;  they interpreted
the laws, they enforced the laws, but they did not write them.  Laws arose
from the constitution, from acts of legislatures, and from long standing
customs which acquired the weight of law via the precepts of the English and
American common law.  The entire concept of case-book legal education and
judicial precedent which we now (wrongly) accept were abhorrent to them.

These precepts were abandoned in this century, with increasingly disasterous
results.  Two years ago, a federal judge ordered the region including Kansas
City, Missouri to spend (and raise their own taxes to pay for) 88 million
dollars to build "magnet schools" to be used in a forced school bussing 
program in which children from outlying districts were to be bussed into the
city, which their parents had moved to escape from.  The people's own laws 
forbade them to tax beyond one dollar per 100 dollars of assessed property
values;  the judge ordered them to raise taxes above four per hundred.

To ordinary American people, that is more or less equivalent to the following:
you are leading a virtuous and frugal life, you work hard every day, go to
church on Sunday, save money rather than spending it...  suddenly the 
government orders you to begin using intravenous drugs, to drink at least
two quarts of Vodka a day, and to have sexual relations with at least two
total strangers every week.  Sort of hard to picture...

The book I mentioned offers stunning examinations of all of these problems
and more.  I highly recommend it to Americans, and even more so to anybody
setting about to set up institutions for the future.


-- 
Ted Holden
HTE

Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet