May 5, 2011, 10:25 am
From my column today at Forbes.com, this week on Donald Trump and campaign finance reform. An excerpt:
Have you heard the news? Apparently Donald Trump is running for President. Of course you would have to be living in a hole not to know that. Over the last couple of weeks, based just on media stories tracked by Google News, there have been over a thousand news stories a day mentioning Trump’s potential run for the White House. In fact, there are more than double the number of articles on Trump’s potential run than their are on the actual candidacies of Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, and Tim Pawlenty combined.
Do you like candidacies by crazy populist billionaire reality TV stars? If so, then by all means, let’s have campaign spending limits.
December 15, 2006, 3:56 pm
Sean Lynch of Catallarchy is dead on with this:
The headline showing on Google News reads: "NJ's Move Toward Same-Sex Unions Called Undemocratic." My first thought upon reading that was, "Duh!"
It seems to me that civil rights are undemocratic by their very
definition, since they are rights that cannot be taken away, even by
the will of the majority, at least in theory. The whole reason our
Constitution even contains anything other than voting procedures is
that it was clear to the framers that if they left everything to the
will of the majority, they'd end up with an even worse tyranny than the
one they just threw off.
As much as some libertarians may complain, the fact that civil
rights today are in as good of a state as they are is a testament to
what a great job the framers did at making the USA an
"undemocratic" country. Heck, even the Second Amendment survives mostly
intact in most states. And the rate at which technology seems to be
empowering individuals seems to be outstripping the rate at which
democracy is attempting to take away our rights, even using that same
technology.
Terrific! I shared similar thoughts but from a different angle when I wrote that "the right to vote" is the least of our freedoms.
