X-Message-Number: 23126 Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:50:54 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: regulation If the antilibertarians on this list would take the trouble to do a little reading on the topic before expressing their opinions, they might find they are arguing against their own rights as cryonicists. The US Constitution, which can be viewed as a mostly libertarian document, is a good place to start. It clearly says that all powers not explicitly assigned to government are reserved by the people. Regulatory power has been seized by the federal government mostly under the excuse of the Commerce Clause (look it up). This was never the intention of the framers of the Constitution. The states were united as a republic (look it up), not as a democracy, as was stated explicitly by Ben Franklin in his famous response to being asked about the nature of the Constitution. Democracies are liable to satisfy the majority at the expense of a minority. Thus there are good reasons for regarding the Constitution as a rigid, inflexible document, especially since it contains its own provision for being revised where necessary. All of this is highly relevant to cryonics, since an argument legitimizing the practice of cryonics in California (the only state where cryonics is recognized as an option on every death certificate) was that all rights not explicitly assigned to government are reserved by the people--including the right to cryopreserve human beings. Cryonicists who argue in favor of regulation are trying to have it both ways. Like any small special-interest group, they want to regulate the things they don't like (guns, perhaps, or workplace hazards) while retaining their right to enjoy the freedoms they do like (such as the right to be cryopreserved). This is naive and ultimately self-destructive. A couple of references: http://www.constitution.org/lrev/bork-troy.htm (enumeration of rights lost via the Commerce Clause) http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2000/11-06-2000/vo16no23_republic.htm (the modern history of the word "democracy" displacing the concept of a republic in the United States) And lastly some applicable quotes: "It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." (Alexander Hamilton, 1788, speech in New York urging ratification of the newly written Constitution.) "...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths." (James Madison, in The Federalist, No. 10.) It is of course somewhat ironic that a former British citizen such as myself should be addressing this message to native-botn citizens of the United States who presumably learned all this stuff in high school. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23126