GrumpyCatFace wrote:One defines the other. All actions not prohibited by law are implicitly endorsed.Speaker to Animals wrote:GrumpyCatFace wrote:
It's not at all. Because, if I say 'good government does most good for most people', then we have the Tyranny of the Majority, and 49% of citizens can be oppressed.
If I say 'good government does most good for all people', then clowns jump all over me for being a Marxist.
It's a word game, that can't be answered in absolutes.
We are not talking about oppression, though. That would entail a violation of the minority's rights.
There exists a category of things a government should not do and a category of things that a government should do. We are speaking of the latter category. You are appealing to a violation of the former category, which was not even argued.
The Bill of Rights are not laws, though. They are constraints on laws themselves.
I would agree that the federal government, shit pile that it is, has done a great job of passing illegitimate laws to violate our rights, and the jackass Supreme Court just rubber stamps it. That doesn't make it right. What is says is that we don't have a good government.
Violating rights is what a government should not do.
We are discussing the realm of things that a government can legitimately do, and that maybe it should do. The argument is about whether the government should do something that we know it can do at some point in the future.