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.

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