Killing children is naturally a topic people have strong feelings about. At large in our culture, this debate plays out between two diametric opposites. On the one side, those who advocate killing children in order to preserve a more pleasurable
So, you just got effective control of a nation’s government, by means we’ll not go into here (very inconvenient, the superpowers stopping as soon as you got this far). Your goal, naturally, is to extend your power, but no longer
‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse.’ So say the legal textbooks, the judge’s rulings, and all the cavalcade of legal orthodoxy. Yet on the face of it, this seems unjust. How can I be accountable to a law I
A people has a right to retain its land. Private property is an important part of any just and healthy society. Private property should not be vulnerable to eminent domain (i.e. the government going ‘Mine now’, al a Naboth’s vineyard)
This is part of a mixed series between my Substack and this website, complete with a jumbled posting order. Go here for the first in the series (I, II). The next article in Islander #5 is an intriguing argument by
God is our legislator. The fundament of American government’s institution is the legislature. Congress makes the law; the executive enforces the law; the judiciary arbitrates the law’s enforcement. In theory, that is the American structure, repeated across fifty one constitutions.
Men always want more power. Separation of powers, as Montesquieu laid it out, is a means of playing this cupidity against itself. The American implementation is not so focused on the balancing of classes as Montesquieu was (albeit some element
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause must compete with another famous definition of the American government’s proper relationship with the church: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he wrote of a “wall of separation between church and state” (Dreisbach).
Moral issues can break pragmatic policy. You may have caught on by now that while this is a ‘review’ in the sense that it does often summarize and recommend, in design this is more of a ‘response’ to the various