"ON LIBERTY"

John Stuart Mill in his ON LIBERTY raises some interesting points about what is freedom and what is society's role in protecting freedom as well as protecting the individual from being hurt by others. Is it morally relevant to limit an action that only affects others? Where do you draw that line for when a society can intervene? Is it the responsibility of society to prevent harm from being done to others? Should people be allowed to hurt themselves as long as it isn't hurting others? Who decides where the line is drawn for appropriate societal behavior? Is it the Church or Government? Should people just be left alone and should we let the world sort itself out? These are all questions that I am pondering at the moment and anyone who wants to join the discussion please feel free.

Supreme Court as a centralizer?

Today in class we talked about the role of the Supreme Court in centralizing the power of the Federal Government. It was an interesting discussion the main point of the lecture being that over the years pretty much regardless of the political makeup of the court. They tended to move to rule on cases in such a way to give legitimacy to Congress and the office of the President. They most often showed this when they would rule on cases where states made attempts to limit federal power with most of this involving Constitutional state law. An example the Professor gave was Brown vs the Board of Education. He contended that really what the Supreme Court is doing is to rule in such a way that it often drags more reluctant states along so that their laws become more consistent with the rest of the Nations laws and the laws of other states. As always I am open to anyone thoughts?

Heating up!

Well thanks to my little debacle with Van I have noticed more people visiting but no one is saying hello. I will try to post more of my political thoughts just for the sake of dialog if nothing else. But that is a two way street so I hope some people join in to the discussion. Lets see what to bring up? Today in Federalism we talked about the power of the Presidency as a unifying force for nationalism. One of the interesting things was that even when a President has campaigned on a platform of smaller government. They still have enlarged the system by giving either their enemies or friends a stake in the system. Sometimes the stake comes in trying to work within the system to fight a President often when people try to amend the Constitution. I just found this to be an interesting process.