Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act. Democrats were for continued segregation
I mentioned neither Republicans nor Democrats. Progressivism, both big- and -small p versions, cuts across party lines: Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat.
However, you're simply wrong about the major parties and the Civil Rights Act. Democrat LBJ pushed the 1964 Civil Rights act through Congress, after Democrat JFK introduced it, and a majority of both Democratic and Republican Representatives and Senators voted for it. The split was strictly a North-South one. ("South", here, being states once under the control of the terrorist group that styled itself the "Confederate States of America".)
Both Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans were opposed to it, and Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans, in favor. (Though a slightly greater percentage of Southern Republicans opposed the bill, and a slightly smaller percentage of Northern Republicans supported it, than geographically comparable Democrats.)
I invite you to check your facts before you accuse someone of "Fail!" Because now you look like a total ass.
If you mean "progressive" (small "p") as in describing an individuals' attitude or outlook, then yes. If you mean Progressives, as in the movement that's been around since the '20s and counts Socialists and Communists as ideological brothers then you, sir, are incorrect.
You need to stop getting your history from Glen Beck, friend. The Progressive Era -- big P -- was from the 1890s to the 1920s, it didn't come into being in the '20s. And if you want to label Theodore Roosevelt a commie, well, good luck with that.
The rest of your post is a class-warfare mini-rant along with the "social justice" and "economic justice" buzzwords that Progressives use as cover for the fact that what they propose is socialist/communist/fascist-style redistribution of wealth by a powerful central government.
I just love the way that right-wing loons have started lumping communists and fascists together, despite the fact that one of the primary attributes of fascism was anti-communism -- fascism was the right's counter-move to the Russian Revolution. It's almost as much fun as the way they complain about people talking about class warfare, while promoting the actual practice of that warfare.
And if you think socialism necessarily implies a powerful central government, you need to read this. (And also have a look at this.) State socialism is not the only form of socialism.
It's capitalism that requires a strong government, to create and defend artificial property rights. Many socialists believe in a small government -- Marx himself, wrong as he was about so much, believed that under his philosophy the state would eventually wither away, unneeded.
How does A1S2 of the Constitution prohibit asking demographic information?
The relevant question, rather, is how does it permit it? It authorizes an enumeration. That's a counting. It does not authorize more than that.
I'm willing to grant the feds a lot of leeway to tax, spend, and regulate commerce, under their Constitutional authority. But I don't see Constitutional authority, or a need, to interrogate people about their family or their lives under color of an enumeration to apportion Congressional representation. (If the feds want more demographic information, it can be gathered via anonymous surveys.)
The difference in how governments' powers and citizens' rights are enumerated is to assure that citizens are not limited in their Freedoms, and that government *is* limited in its' powers & scope.
Although, more and more in recent decades, Progressives have attempted to reverse this so as to empower government and weaken individual rights.
Yes, damn those Progressives, weakening individual rights by pressing for civil rights, women's rights, and for the Feds to use their Constitutional powers to regulate interstate and international commerce and to impose taxes to provide for the common defense and general welfare in a way that protects American from exploitation.
Here's a hint for you: one can be a progressive and still believe that "citizens are not limited in their freedoms but that government is limited in its powers & scope".
Government is a vector quantity, it has both magnitude and direction; and while fans of unrestrained capitalism would like to see a government that pushes entirely in the direction of making the rich richer and better able to exploit the working classes, progressives want the government to use its power to promote social and economic justice.
That doesn't necessarily mean a bigger government, it means a government that pushes in a different direction.
I wonder how the Founding Father's interpreted that?
Irrelevant. As Madison said, "As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution, the debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative character...the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it recd. all the authority which it possesses."
The doctrine that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the "original intent" of the framers is nonsense, since the "original intent" of the framers was that their intent not be used to interpret the Constitution.
I suspect Thomas Jefferson may have had a better idea of what the Constitution meant than the libertarian fanatics who suggest breaking the law
Like the other Founders, Jefferson was a criminal, a terrorist insurgent who fought the lawful rule of the British crown. He was also a slave rapist, but that was legal at the time. Law ain't no guide to the right thing to do.
The feds are authorized to conduct an enumeration, not an interrogation. I will be filling in the number of people who live here, and crossing out all other questions; I'd like to see everyone else do the same. If the feds want other data, they can get it by anonymous surveys that give much more privacy protection than their assurances to "trust us."
When government or big business wants your info, it's always best to ask what's it's being collected for, and give only that which is needed to accomplish the legitimate goal. The checkout clerk at the market doesn't need my zipcode to complete our "I give you cash, you give me stuff" transaction, and so he doesn't get it. The feds don't need my family information or home ownership status to do the headcount to divy up Congresscritters, and so they don't get it.
Sorry Stephen, but: Thessalonians 3:10 (New International Version)..."If a man will not work, he shall not eat."
...which, not being attributed to Jesus but rather to the nutcase known as Saul or Paul, who didn't even know the guy, 1) does not contradict my statement, and 2) if genuine (some scholars doubt the attribution of this letter), is a fine example of how J's teachings were being perverted within a few decades of his death.
In Buddhism, I know of no concept of a "messiah". None. Maybe those of you who have perhaps studied more of the Sutras than I could offer another point of view.
Maitreya is a future Buddha who's supposed to show up some day and show us all the True Dharma. What we have here is the Theosophical Maitreya, which is a variation on the Buddhist one.
(A bizarre variation, but Theosophy is pretty wacky. It's also historically important, playing a big role in uniting Buddhism and bringing it to the attention of the West in the late nineteenth century, and also in kicking off what developed into Neopaganism.)
There's a saying in Buddhism, "If you see the Buddha on the side of the road; kill him!"
That's Zen, which -- despite its strong impact on the Western view of Buddhism -- is really a small part of Buddhism. Many, if not most, Buddhists follow some sort of devotional path where they believe that some Buddha or Bodhisattva will come down and give good little boys and girls a ride to Candyland.
Even if a police officer opens fire on you, your legal options are still to comply and then fight it out in court later.
Actually there is legal precedent that you have the right to defend yourself against unlawful arrest. Read up on John Bad Elk v. United States, which upheld the common law idea that "If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest."
Given our contemporary police state (mostly-benign, at least to the middle class, as it might be). I wouldn't necessarily expect this right to be recognized today -- some states have legislated against it, but whether such legislation would stand a Constitutional test, I dunno, IANAL, etc.
Of course, if some crazed cop has opened fire on me, I suppose my choices would be to wait around until he hits me, run away, or shoot back. If running away were not possible or safe, I'd have to say shooting back and hoping I survive to argue about it in court would probably be a better choice than waiting to take a bullet.
Police authority is pretty awesome
Police have power, what with guns and clubs and radios for calling other people with guns and clubs. But no person has any more authority over you than you choose to grant them.
Of course they're irrelevant to a discussion about browser share.
Of course the context is irrelevant to "John Hasler"'s point, up-thread, that confusing the Net with the Web is wrong.
Let me try to make this as clear as I can for you: 90% of the Web is not the same thing as 90% of the Net. This is because the Net includes, in addition to the Web, such things as e-mail, VoIP, BitTorrent (and other p2p), games, non-web video, and VPNs, as well as infrastructure like DNS, DHCP, and BGP (which I didn't mention before but deserve a nod). The browsers that account for 90% of Web traffic, only account for (90% * Web traffic / Net traffic) of Net traffic. Thanks largely to p2p, the Web traffic / Net traffic ratio may be well less than 50%; which would make 90% of the Web be something less than 45% of the Net. So confusing them is not even approximately correct.
Stuff traffic volumes, think about users. To Joe Sixpack and Aunt Mary, that blue e thing is the internet.
And we should allow the same sort of ignorance in tech journalism? I can forgive Joe Sixpack the confusion; I don't think we should forgive CNet so easily.
There's no need for the (n?). The word starts with a consonant, and just because Americans seemingly can't pronounce the letter H, doesn't mean you have to lower yourself also.
So either could be ok here, but I have a strong urge to punch people who say "an historic occasion" or "an hallucination". These are just wrong, unless you are a Cockney aitch-dropper. Such bad grammar does not leave me an happy camper.
It's a simple rule: "an" before vowel sounds, "a" before consonants. The "n" in "an" is exactly there to hold vowels apart; if you don't have adjacent vowels (sounds, not symbols) in your phrase, it's redundant.
I always wondered how short order cooks could keep track of all the various foods they were cooking with different start times and different cooking times. Now I know they were "serious professionals".
Yes. A good cook is a serious professional. Why not?
The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth.
If your editor does not already let you do this, why haven't you upgraded to Emacs yet?
As long as we're OT, I recently read Omnilingual on Project Gutenberg and I recommend it as a nice sci-fi short about learning the language of ancient Martians without any common translation to start from. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19445
I'll certain check it out -- H. Beam Piper hasn't disappointed me yet. Thanks for the link.
The invisible man is blind. If light passes through a body without being affected, then it cannot be properly refracted
Wells was too smart for you: "I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist."
Why exactly is there a congressional case going on about this?
Because Congress (under its Constitutional authority to regulate interstate and international commerce) makes laws that regulate the auto industry.
It becomes even more worrying when you realize that the US government has a controlling interest in most of Toyota's competitors in the USA.
Toyota is directly or indirectly responsible for 170,000 U.S. jobs -- jobs held by voters. Congress has plenty of interest in Toyota's well being.
In short, why do I care about this?
If you do not care that people are dying because of defective products, please seek psychiatric attention.
File a class action lawsuit and let the courts settle it.
A class action lawsuit would compensate those injured, and the families of those killed. It will not stop the killing, whereas revised regulations might.
Destroying private property is illegal, while Refusing to service someone is not.
There are in fact many instances where refusing service to someone is illegal, thank goodness. A bank cannot refuse to open an account for you because of the color of your skin, et cetera.
It's about getting the job done and most people would rather pay for it if it came down to it than choose an inferior free solution.
You've confused "Free-as-in-freedom" with "Free-as-in-cost", and missed the point that, in the long run, freedom is needed to get any significant job done. It's not just an ethical choice to use free software, it's a practical one: if you don't have the freedom to change and share the software you use, your system is by nature unreliable.
Buying a car that can only be serviced at the dealer may not be immoral, but it sure would be stupid -- not just expensive due to the monopoly, but you'd be left high and dry if that dealer closed. The same applies to software.
A lot of todays "young people" somehow find classical music boring. This, I do not understand.
Many years back I took a class in the physics of music. One interesting tidbit I learned was the the perception of dissonance has changed over time, that intervals once considered to be dissonant are perceived less so today. If we associate dissonance with "tension" and consonance with release of that tension (an overly-simplistic model, sure), perhaps music that's several hundred years old lacks the emotional dynamic it had to its original listeners.
Who cares about what chavs enjoy? Repel them and be done with it. Such folks don't change, at least for the better.
And here, ladies and gentleman, we see the classist attitude that allows Britain to be such a haven for despotic and anti-democratic behavior. When it's known that lower class people "don't change, at least for the better", all that's to be done is to "[r]epel them and be done with it". Never mind what they as individual human beings have done, or could be capable of accomplishing; it's quite sufficient to judge them by their class.
No, laws should be followed. Bad laws should be enforced because it quickly shows how stupid they are.
It's 1860 and you're in the U.S. A runaway slave shows up at your door.
If you believe that all laws should always be followed, you turn him in, in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act. So, do you believe that all laws should always be followed?
Let's assume that you find that your humanity is more import than abstract devotion to the law and decide to help the fleeing slave. Then, a cop comes along and catches you. Should he enforce the law, throw you in jail and drag that slave back to his "owner" to be beaten? Or do you believe that maybe bad laws like the Fugitive Slave Act should not be enforced?
I've not found anything that says it better than this: "Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool." -- John J. Miller
By the very nature of the law it should be applied all of the time indiscriminately, anything else is corruption.
Nonsense. Separation of powers has a purpose. If the legislature passes an odious law, the executive has a duty to not enforce it, and the judiciary has a duty to not convict under it. "I was only following orders" is not excuse, even if that order comes from the legislature in the form of a law.
I keep thinking how cool it would be if a law were passed to the effect of "For every new bill signed into law, two laws must be repealed."
Disregarding the fact that many, if not most, bills signed into law are changes to existing bodies of law (patches, if you will, rather than whole new programs) what you'd get repealed under such an arrangement would probably be things like the First Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, privacy laws...
The number of laws is not a particularly good measurement of how free a society is. It only takes one law to implement a dictatorship -- "Whatever the dictator doesn't like, shall be subject to whatever penalty the dictator feels like handing out."
That's not to say that there aren't a bunch of stupid laws out there that ought to be repealed or replaced, only that it's not a simple situation with a "fewer laws are better!" solution. People are a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I mentioned neither Republicans nor Democrats. Progressivism, both big- and -small p versions, cuts across party lines: Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat.
However, you're simply wrong about the major parties and the Civil Rights Act. Democrat LBJ pushed the 1964 Civil Rights act through Congress, after Democrat JFK introduced it, and a majority of both Democratic and Republican Representatives and Senators voted for it. The split was strictly a North-South one. ("South", here, being states once under the control of the terrorist group that styled itself the "Confederate States of America".)
Both Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans were opposed to it, and Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans, in favor. (Though a slightly greater percentage of Southern Republicans opposed the bill, and a slightly smaller percentage of Northern Republicans supported it, than geographically comparable Democrats.)
I invite you to check your facts before you accuse someone of "Fail!" Because now you look like a total ass.
You need to stop getting your history from Glen Beck, friend. The Progressive Era -- big P -- was from the 1890s to the 1920s, it didn't come into being in the '20s. And if you want to label Theodore Roosevelt a commie, well, good luck with that.
I just love the way that right-wing loons have started lumping communists and fascists together, despite the fact that one of the primary attributes of fascism was anti-communism -- fascism was the right's counter-move to the Russian Revolution. It's almost as much fun as the way they complain about people talking about class warfare, while promoting the actual practice of that warfare.
And if you think socialism necessarily implies a powerful central government, you need to read this. (And also have a look at this.) State socialism is not the only form of socialism.
It's capitalism that requires a strong government, to create and defend artificial property rights. Many socialists believe in a small government -- Marx himself, wrong as he was about so much, believed that under his philosophy the state would eventually wither away, unneeded.
The relevant question, rather, is how does it permit it? It authorizes an enumeration. That's a counting. It does not authorize more than that.
I'm willing to grant the feds a lot of leeway to tax, spend, and regulate commerce, under their Constitutional authority. But I don't see Constitutional authority, or a need, to interrogate people about their family or their lives under color of an enumeration to apportion Congressional representation. (If the feds want more demographic information, it can be gathered via anonymous surveys.)
Yes, damn those Progressives, weakening individual rights by pressing for civil rights, women's rights, and for the Feds to use their Constitutional powers to regulate interstate and international commerce and to impose taxes to provide for the common defense and general welfare in a way that protects American from exploitation.
Here's a hint for you: one can be a progressive and still believe that "citizens are not limited in their freedoms but that government is limited in its powers & scope".
Government is a vector quantity, it has both magnitude and direction; and while fans of unrestrained capitalism would like to see a government that pushes entirely in the direction of making the rich richer and better able to exploit the working classes, progressives want the government to use its power to promote social and economic justice.
That doesn't necessarily mean a bigger government, it means a government that pushes in a different direction.
Irrelevant. As Madison said, "As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution, the debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative character...the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it recd. all the authority which it possesses."
The doctrine that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the "original intent" of the framers is nonsense, since the "original intent" of the framers was that their intent not be used to interpret the Constitution.
Like the other Founders, Jefferson was a criminal, a terrorist insurgent who fought the lawful rule of the British crown. He was also a slave rapist, but that was legal at the time. Law ain't no guide to the right thing to do.
The feds are authorized to conduct an enumeration, not an interrogation. I will be filling in the number of people who live here, and crossing out all other questions; I'd like to see everyone else do the same. If the feds want other data, they can get it by anonymous surveys that give much more privacy protection than their assurances to "trust us."
When government or big business wants your info, it's always best to ask what's it's being collected for, and give only that which is needed to accomplish the legitimate goal. The checkout clerk at the market doesn't need my zipcode to complete our "I give you cash, you give me stuff" transaction, and so he doesn't get it. The feds don't need my family information or home ownership status to do the headcount to divy up Congresscritters, and so they don't get it.
...which, not being attributed to Jesus but rather to the nutcase known as Saul or Paul, who didn't even know the guy, 1) does not contradict my statement, and 2) if genuine (some scholars doubt the attribution of this letter), is a fine example of how J's teachings were being perverted within a few decades of his death.
Maitreya is a future Buddha who's supposed to show up some day and show us all the True Dharma. What we have here is the Theosophical Maitreya, which is a variation on the Buddhist one.
(A bizarre variation, but Theosophy is pretty wacky. It's also historically important, playing a big role in uniting Buddhism and bringing it to the attention of the West in the late nineteenth century, and also in kicking off what developed into Neopaganism.)
That's Zen, which -- despite its strong impact on the Western view of Buddhism -- is really a small part of Buddhism. Many, if not most, Buddhists follow some sort of devotional path where they believe that some Buddha or Bodhisattva will come down and give good little boys and girls a ride to Candyland.
Sure, that's in contradiction to what (we think) the Buddha actually taught...but then, Jesus didn't say "if you don't work you don't eat", and Mohammad explicitly forbid the killing of women and children, so it's not like the Buddha is the only one whose legacy has been twisted.
Actually there is legal precedent that you have the right to defend yourself against unlawful arrest. Read up on John Bad Elk v. United States, which upheld the common law idea that "If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest."
Given our contemporary police state (mostly-benign, at least to the middle class, as it might be). I wouldn't necessarily expect this right to be recognized today -- some states have legislated against it, but whether such legislation would stand a Constitutional test, I dunno, IANAL, etc.
Of course, if some crazed cop has opened fire on me, I suppose my choices would be to wait around until he hits me, run away, or shoot back. If running away were not possible or safe, I'd have to say shooting back and hoping I survive to argue about it in court would probably be a better choice than waiting to take a bullet.
Police have power, what with guns and clubs and radios for calling other people with guns and clubs. But no person has any more authority over you than you choose to grant them.
Of course the context is irrelevant to "John Hasler"'s point, up-thread, that confusing the Net with the Web is wrong.
Let me try to make this as clear as I can for you: 90% of the Web is not the same thing as 90% of the Net. This is because the Net includes, in addition to the Web, such things as e-mail, VoIP, BitTorrent (and other p2p), games, non-web video, and VPNs, as well as infrastructure like DNS, DHCP, and BGP (which I didn't mention before but deserve a nod). The browsers that account for 90% of Web traffic, only account for (90% * Web traffic / Net traffic) of Net traffic. Thanks largely to p2p, the Web traffic / Net traffic ratio may be well less than 50%; which would make 90% of the Web be something less than 45% of the Net. So confusing them is not even approximately correct.
And we should allow the same sort of ignorance in tech journalism? I can forgive Joe Sixpack the confusion; I don't think we should forgive CNet so easily.
The "h" in "homage" is silent in the preferred pronunciation. So if you're using the preferred pronunciation it's "an homage", just like "an hour"; but if you're using some dialect where the h is pronounced, "a homage" would be correct.
So either could be ok here, but I have a strong urge to punch people who say "an historic occasion" or "an hallucination". These are just wrong, unless you are a Cockney aitch-dropper. Such bad grammar does not leave me an happy camper.
It's a simple rule: "an" before vowel sounds, "a" before consonants. The "n" in "an" is exactly there to hold vowels apart; if you don't have adjacent vowels (sounds, not symbols) in your phrase, it's redundant.
E-mail. VoIP. BitTorrent. Games. Non-web video (e.g., Netflix streaming). VPNs.
There is substantially more to the Net (IP traffic) than just the Web (data linked from HTML pages).
Yes. A good cook is a serious professional. Why not?
If your editor does not already let you do this, why haven't you upgraded to Emacs yet?
I'll certain check it out -- H. Beam Piper hasn't disappointed me yet. Thanks for the link.
No, it's not. A Social Security card is one of several documents that can be presented to prove work eligibility. A passport, a birth certificate, or several other documents can used with the I-9 form.
Wells was too smart for you: "I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist."
Because Congress (under its Constitutional authority to regulate interstate and international commerce) makes laws that regulate the auto industry.
Toyota is directly or indirectly responsible for 170,000 U.S. jobs -- jobs held by voters. Congress has plenty of interest in Toyota's well being.
If you do not care that people are dying because of defective products, please seek psychiatric attention.
A class action lawsuit would compensate those injured, and the families of those killed. It will not stop the killing, whereas revised regulations might.
There are in fact many instances where refusing service to someone is illegal, thank goodness. A bank cannot refuse to open an account for you because of the color of your skin, et cetera.
You've confused "Free-as-in-freedom" with "Free-as-in-cost", and missed the point that, in the long run, freedom is needed to get any significant job done. It's not just an ethical choice to use free software, it's a practical one: if you don't have the freedom to change and share the software you use, your system is by nature unreliable.
Buying a car that can only be serviced at the dealer may not be immoral, but it sure would be stupid -- not just expensive due to the monopoly, but you'd be left high and dry if that dealer closed. The same applies to software.
Many years back I took a class in the physics of music. One interesting tidbit I learned was the the perception of dissonance has changed over time, that intervals once considered to be dissonant are perceived less so today. If we associate dissonance with "tension" and consonance with release of that tension (an overly-simplistic model, sure), perhaps music that's several hundred years old lacks the emotional dynamic it had to its original listeners.
And here, ladies and gentleman, we see the classist attitude that allows Britain to be such a haven for despotic and anti-democratic behavior. When it's known that lower class people "don't change, at least for the better", all that's to be done is to "[r]epel them and be done with it". Never mind what they as individual human beings have done, or could be capable of accomplishing; it's quite sufficient to judge them by their class.
Given the number of iatrogenic fatalities and the recent revelations about tritium leaks at Vermont Yankee, it's clear that neither medicine nor nuclear power plants are being effectively regulated. Nor are banks.
It's 1860 and you're in the U.S. A runaway slave shows up at your door.
If you believe that all laws should always be followed, you turn him in, in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act. So, do you believe that all laws should always be followed?
Let's assume that you find that your humanity is more import than abstract devotion to the law and decide to help the fleeing slave. Then, a cop comes along and catches you. Should he enforce the law, throw you in jail and drag that slave back to his "owner" to be beaten? Or do you believe that maybe bad laws like the Fugitive Slave Act should not be enforced?
I've not found anything that says it better than this: "Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool." -- John J. Miller
Nonsense. Separation of powers has a purpose. If the legislature passes an odious law, the executive has a duty to not enforce it, and the judiciary has a duty to not convict under it. "I was only following orders" is not excuse, even if that order comes from the legislature in the form of a law.
Disregarding the fact that many, if not most, bills signed into law are changes to existing bodies of law (patches, if you will, rather than whole new programs) what you'd get repealed under such an arrangement would probably be things like the First Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, privacy laws...
The number of laws is not a particularly good measurement of how free a society is. It only takes one law to implement a dictatorship -- "Whatever the dictator doesn't like, shall be subject to whatever penalty the dictator feels like handing out."
That's not to say that there aren't a bunch of stupid laws out there that ought to be repealed or replaced, only that it's not a simple situation with a "fewer laws are better!" solution. People are a problem.
When has Greenpeace ever blown up a factory??? Citation seriously, seriously needed.