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dcnovice -> RE: Grade the Debate (10/6/2012 6:16:17 PM)
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quote:
So, the better idea is to grow a massive government to meet an entitlement society so we don't have to have a small program to verify need.
This seems a bit of a straw man. Don't applicants for public assistance already have to prove that they need it? The big exceptions, of course, being Social Security and Medicare, which were based, rightly or wrongly, on age.
quote:
Actually, you were 2/3 of a person. That was a deplorable, but not out of the norm back then. That was also a compromise on the part of our Founders. That was also changed via Amendment. Thus, it is in the Constitution.
That doesn't quite hit the mark. Slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person in terms of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives, but they emphatically were not legal persons or citizens. Slaves were property that could be sold, beaten, raped, and forced to work without pay. I don't know what the law was regarding killing a slave. The Supreme Court was painfully clear about this in Scott v. Sanford (better known as the Dred Scott decision):
But there are two clauses in the Constitution which point directly and specifically to the negro race as a separate class of persons, and show clearly that they were not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government then formed.
One of these clauses reserves to each of the thirteen States the right to import slaves until the year 1808 if it thinks proper. And the importation which it thus sanctions was unquestionably of persons of the race of which we are speaking, as the traffic in slaves in the United States had always been confined to them. And by the other provision the States pledge themselves to each other to maintain the right of property of the master by delivering up to him any slave who may have escaped from his service, and be found within their respective territories. By the first above-mentioned clause, therefore, the right to purchase and hold this property is directly sanctioned and authorized for twenty years by the people who framed the Constitution. And by the second, they pledge themselves to maintain and uphold the right of the master in the manner specified, as long as the Government they then formed should endure. And these two provisions show conclusively that neither the description of persons therein referred to nor their descendants were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution, for certainly these two clauses were not intended to confer on them or their posterity the blessings of liberty, or any of the personal rights so carefully provided for the citizen.
Emphasis mine.
It's funny: When I saw the black-and-white graphic earlier in the thread about libertarian viewpoints, I actually did wonder if it would be fair to add "Against slavery? Don't own one" to the list.
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