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Here’s something I had not been previously aware of.

Kim du Toit informs me that, unless you have a net worth of one million dollars or more, or you run a bank, or you personally know the individuals running the start-ups you intend to fund, you are forbidden by law to be a venture captialist on any scale.

Yep. That’s right. The oligarchy is here. One law for the fat cats, another law for you. If you’re not a “qualified investor” (i.e., a wealthy one), your ability to invest in start-ups is severely limited.

Read it for yourself.

Supporters of the law, including many on the left that keep railing about the oligarchy that laissez-faire advocates are supposedly trying to establish, will insist that the law is necessary to prevent fat cats from ripping off poor, naive, misguided investors, and that funneling all investment from “ordinary people” through investment banks and other mechanisms that allow fat cats to take their cut is either an unrelated phenomenon resulting from not having enough economic regulation in place or perhaps an unfortunate side effect. But, yet again, laws that are sold as a means to protect ordinary consumers have the “unexpected side effect” of protecting incumbent vendors of all sorts (by making it harder to get a new start-up off the ground) and enriching other well-connected people (in this case, investment bankers). I’m sensing a pattern here.

Not a conspiracy theory, mind you. Different groups of wealthy and powerful people just find the same tool (dress up a law keeping ordinary people in their place as a way to “protect” them) useful for their purposes, and keep using it over and over, and will keep using it until a majority of the electorate finally decides that protecting fools from their own folly isn’t worth narrowing their opportunities or restricting their options for achieving their own ends. Or until enough wealthy and powerful people figure out that their private jets are as horsedrawn carts next to the wonders that “new blood” can come out of left field with if we stop trying to control them, and that letting someone come out of nowhere and become richer than you is worth it if you get richer than you are now in the process.

Maybe our friends on the left will one day figure out where oligarchies and class stratification actually comes from and sign on to economic as well as “personal” liberty, and point out the (all-too-frequent) times when their opponents on the right are pushing neither, and win elections on that basis. I’d join that party in a heartbeat, assuming that it didn’t oppose fighting as appropriate and defeating dangerous enemies of the United States and liberal society in general with a powerful all-volunteer military.

In Gonzales v. Raich, a bit of judicial activism would have been constitutionally correct and would have also increased our liberties, but the judges took a pass and went with the will of the majority.

For precedent, they relied on Wicard v. Filburn, or the “Every move you make affects interstate commerce” decision from the New Deal era.

Finding a right to abortion tucked away in a penumbra might be a stretch. Finding, nearly 150 years after the fact, that a single line in a list of enumerated powers grants Congress unlimited authority over the people and renders the entire rest of the list completely redundant and insignificant is… well, whatever it is, the abortion penumbra pales to insignificance, nay complete invisibility next to it.

Seriously, under any theory of Constitutional interpretation that doesn’t assume that the Founders were all higher than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide, can anyone possibly conclude that any rational interpretation of a list of enumerated powers could find this meaning:

Congress shall have power

– to do A
– to do B
– to do C
…
– to do R
– to pass any other laws concerning any activity whatsoever including growing vegetables in your backyard, given that anything you do might affect someone’s decision to buy or sell something across state lines.

All you folks screaming about Bush’s supposed efforts to destroy civil liberties should note that the Democrats are the ones employing every tool they can get their hands on to preserve this sort of jurisprudence, and Bush is the one trying to inject a few judges that see the New Deal reasoning as the thinly-veiled power grab it is. (Of course, in your world, it seems that “civil liberties” don’t apply to Americans buying stuff and selling stuff, but only to Muslims allegedly trying to blow up stuff. Which do you think is a greater threat to society?)

Why should the government stop people from hurting themselves?

The usual answers fall into three categories. There is the “no man is an island” rationale, the “we don’t want to have to look at you” rationale, and the “they’ll go on a rampage and destroy civilization” rationale.

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Well, not so much “points out” as “presents strong evidence in favor of it, but doesn’t exactly spell it out for some reason”.

In the first of a series on class in America, we see the ways in which “class is still a powerful force in American life”.

But they also point out the ways it is not:

“For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone. Federal deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls. Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer evidence that someone is middle class.

The economic changes making material goods cheaper have forced businesses to seek out new opportunities so that they now market to groups they once ignored. Cruise ships, years ago a symbol of the high life, have become the ocean-going equivalent of the Jersey Shore. BMW produces a cheaper model with the same insignia. Martha Stewart sells chenille jacquard drapery and scallop-embossed ceramic dinnerware at Kmart. ”

At the same time:

” At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening. ”

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What then?

To get a good picture, let’s indulge in a bit of alternate history. Suppose the Taliban government of Afghanistan had nukes in 2001. Let’s further suppose that they weren’t crazy enough to let any of them be used in terrorist attacks, but they had them and everyone knew it.

Fast forward to September 12. The Taliban government is knowingly sheltering the terrorist group responsible for knocking down two of our largest office buildings with thousands of people inside, and is not going to give them up. What do we do about it? How do we kill or capture the member of that group? More to the point, how do we stop them from striking us again and again? And then again? Still no nukes, but repeated conventional attacks on American civilians on American soil. How in the world would we stop them?

I don’t see how.

The Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, and they are run by a regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against the West in the past. They see us as “the Great Satan”. If they get nuclear weapons, what possible reason would they have for not sponsoring repeated, conventional attacks against the Great Satan itself? What could we do about it? Would we accept a nuclear exchange to retaliate for another 9/11-style attack? Would we wait until we’ve suffered five of them?

I don’t want to find out.

We should have been recruiting like crazy since 2001 to provide ourselves a reserve in case drastic preventative measures proved necessary. I think the necessity is now undeniable, that Iran must be prevented from getting nuclear weapons by any means necessary, and that time is not on our side.