this isn't a whole lot different from being a lobbyist for a foreign government and advisor to a presidential campaign at the same time.
Except, that's apparently legal.
I don't like roads, I'm going to sue the government to get rid of them.
I don't like the police, I'm going to sue the government to get rid of them
I don't like public schools, I'm going to sue the government to get rid of them.
I think black people should be slaves, I'm going to sue the government to get rid of the 13th Amendment.
Don't be a fool. If one can identify where his rights are being violated by the government, he has moral license to seek rectification. Back before the government became omnipotent and self-justifying through the religion of democracy, this was called a petition for redress. But that was back when we humans had a king, who was an easy-to-identify enemy.
These days, we tell ourselves falsely that our government is a democracy (rather than a gang of rulers, selected from those approved to appear on the government-issued ballot) and we are then fooled into believing that our only recourse to restore our rights is through voting for the lesser of two evils, again and again.
You can continue to deride these "bad people" for trying to get the government to leave them the hell alone. As for myself, I'll just leave a quote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Quit being deceptive. The Federal Reserve may report to Congress, but Congress has completely abdicated its role in regulating the value of money issued by the Treasury to the Fed. What good do hearings do?
Your international mining cartels could be a threat to the stability of the currency if it could actually be shown that their activity affects the price of gold. Do they inflate more than the economy grows? I have a hard time entertaining the claim that inflation through private labor is an equal threat to my savings as is inflation by government printing press.
By the way, the ability of banks to print money and create credit on demand is known as fractional-reserve banking. You will find, if you study instead of simply regurgitating, that bank panics and economic busts follow expansions in bank credit. (It is easy to see why; a bank that lends out what money it also has available on deposit for withdrawal is immediately insolvent according to simple accounting.) Expansions in bank credit are impossible if the money and credit issued by the bank are based on a scarce resource. Paper is not a scarce resource.
Unfortunately, the politicians in Washington took the legalized fraud that the bankers used to create various panics since the inception of the U.S., and nationalized this fraudulent system by establishing a central bank and a national banking cartel that only deals in the official currency, the fractional reserve dollar. Should it be any surprise, then, that the depressions are longer and more severe than ever before?
I am amazed that so many obviously intelligent people are so self-assured of their academic opinions that common sense is thrown entirely to the wind. It is very simple: Politicians can buy influence when they control the money machine. Printing money on behalf of special interests is a step on the road to central planning. The founders understood this. This wisdom is timeless.
That's Randian sophistry. If a corporation acquires a monopoly on food distribution in my town, then while it isn't rifling through my pockets and then dumping food into my bags, I may well have no practical option other than to shop there.
How does this company maintain its "monopoly" without the help of the government?
What's stopping you from starting your own competing food business, with your own supply chain all the way up from the growers?
What's stopping anyone from doing so, if the "monopoly" is indeed engaging in price gouging?
Why have we allowed ourselves to become dependent on having immediate access to the food we need to buy for that day, or else we starve? What happened to canned food, gardening, canning, hunting, and deep freezes? Isn't it better to save and plan ahead, so we don't actually need the monopoly's products, since it must then adjust prices downward to maximize profit at the lower level of demand?
Have you considered that without the "monopoly" providing you food at a price higher than you feel is fair, you'd starve just like your ancestors did in a famine?
Go ahead, vote in more bureaucrats, and price-fix their asses. That's what you want, right?
Wait, now they don't seem to have as good of a selection on the shelves, the food isn't as fresh, and the items you want are always in short supply.
Now you use your bureaucrats to mandate that they must have product on the shelves at your fixed price.
Wait, now they're packing up and going home because they have more profitable ventures to pursue? Outrage!
Here is where you can insert the favorite government program some politician promotes because, quote, "the free market has failed".
Not to mention that when you try and "limit the influence of money" you will run into First Amendment problems. I'll agree that money in DC is contributing to corruption. However, the answer is not to limit the money; it's to punish the corruption.
There is a way to "limit the influence of money" that doesn't involve restricting political speech: demand ratification of Article The First. Increasing the number of representatives and making districts smaller would cheapen campaigning, making it easier for a newcomer to break up the establishment hegemony, and to build face-to-face constituent relationships that will keep them in office without having to do favors for special interests.
Marbury v. Madison established that the judicial power the Court was granted was sufficient to establish that "an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void". It was the first decision to defer to a "founders' intent" argument to read non-textual power into the Constitution -- that of removing invalid laws from the books.
The founders didn't write in the Constitution that illegal laws were to be voided by the judiciary, relying instead on inferior courts being bound by the Supreme Court precedent if the matter again reached their desk at a later point.
And the founders certainly didn't write that interpretation should be based on their perceived intent, rather than on the text of the Constitution they painstakingly crafted. Even in the case that they had, most certainly no intent other than unanimous intent would be an acceptable basis for further argument, considering their wildly differing opinions on many aspects of the Constitution.
Wouldn't you think they carefully considered the impact of each word when crafting the text? Why do we allow our partisan modern judiciary to second-guess them, second-guess our reading skills, and tell us what they think the Constitution 'really means'?
Well, we know why. Supreme Court justices can only be removed from office pursuant to a conviction for violating their oath of office, and yet they have convinced us that they can tell us what the very document that binds their oath of office 'really means'. And we are to respect that utterance as the highest decree in the land. Talk about job security!
Marbury started us down a long, painful road of judicial tyranny. It's not that the judiciary grabs power for itself, as you point out. They already have what they sought, because they are in the position of being the most Godlike political figures on earth.
The tyranny comes when the judiciary, over the past 150 years, has utterly failed to constrain the enumerated powers of the federal government in any meaningful way, has utterly failed to protect the natural rights of the individual to his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and has even had the audacity to roll back Constitutionally enumerated rights in the name of the Drug War, in the name of the Global War On Terror, in the name of Progressivism, in the name of Public Safety, and in general whatever any federal social-engineering effort or boogeyman required. And because of its stature, its passive endorsement of the growth of government is taken as the highest endorsement.
It's long past time we held justices accountable to their oath of office, and stopped allowing them to rewrite their own terms of employment through "interpretation".
The real goal of a gold standard is to combat uncontrolled money expansion. There are a number of ways to accomplish that without arbitrarily pivoting on some random and irrelevant metal.
If gold is random and irrelevant, then why does it become the default monetary unit in the absence of a fiat currency?
Why has gold been the exchange medium of choice throughout history, predating government bankers?
Why does the government need legal tender laws to prop up its fiat currency?
If it is intrinsically worthless, why does it need to be confiscated and outlawed? If it's so worthless, wouldn't it just vanish and be discarded in the absence of government control?
Please stop thinking like a politician. Gold is the most universal store and exchange of value that we have, it has been so throughout history, and even today remains so -- despite the efforts of many powerful people to shove a "good as gold" national debt note down our throats.
The exchange medium of choice should be left up to the market. Then your hypothesis that gold is intrinsically worthless can be proved true or false by simply observing the course of events. Is gold taken as payment for valuable goods and services? If so, then gold is valuable.
As you acknowledge, tying the dollar to gold is the best way to control inflationary deficit spending. Of course, there are a "number of ways" to control inflation, but as long as they involve trusting politicians with a national credit card like we do with the paper money, none of them is a good way because they ignore human nature and the nature of politicians.
Tying the dollar to gold is not only a good idea, it is a moral imperative if the fiat money is to remain the sole legal tender.
That's not the reason the US dollar is crapping out.
The case for new money creation causing depreciation of the existing money has been thoroughly made. It is up to you to offer an equally plausible alternative for why prices are going up and why the dollar is at a historical weak point in international trading.
NAFTA has not brought about free trade. NAFTA has brought about the export of our industries and jobs because of our regulatory environment. It makes no sense to manufacture here anymore because other countries aren't subject to the same worker protection laws and business regulations. That is why the NAFTA/CAFTA approach is wrong. It results in an export of capital and labor from the U.S. because the agreements do not force the players to play by the same rules on an even field.
I don't understand this usage of the word "libertarian." In a truly libertarian system, the webhost would simply sell your personal info to the highest bidder. If everybody is free to do whatever they want, what right do you have to prevent them?
In a libertarian system, the government does not have the power to compel the webhost to turn over your personal info without a warrant. And the webhost risks a market backlash if they sell services predicated on a privacy policy that they do not abide by.
The only problem with capitalism is that monopolies (hi, Bill!) distort Adam Smith's free market.
Monopolies are worse when they are propped up by government. In this case, it is eternal copyrights, with a recently criminal copyright law that socializes the cost of enforcing those copyrights.
Of course, it is ironic that BillG complains about the rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer, and blames this on greedy corporations, when it is our government's monetary policy, trade policy, and commercial regulations that actually accomplish exactly that. It's no coincidence that the only way to avoid confiscation of your wealth is to do business with Wall Street.
Yes. A large group in the US has decided to block his rise to power, since his policies would grievously threaten their interests. Little is known about this shadowy organisation beyond its name - 'The Voting Public'.
Yeah, except if you actually go knock on doors or make phone calls, maybe 1 out of 10 people has even heard of him, and all they know is the televised smear campaign (which, thankfully, most average people are skeptical of from the start). It seems to me if there is something that stands in the way of his campaign for restoring lost freedom and a sound economy, it is not the voting public. If not the media, it's the non-voting public that don't value freedom, don't value the Republic, and settle for whatever they get, as long as they don't have to bother to go vote.
I don't think so. There's a difference between code actively contributed to a large collaborative project and an independent work.
Not in law there isn't, so I would have to assume you're just banking on the notion that a judge might buy this argument if one of the dormant copyright holders suddenly showed up to "submarine" anyone distributing the GPLv3 kernel. What commercial interest is going to want to get entangled in that possibility regarding their Linux-based product?
If their work is sub-par, but uses the Starcraft name and artwork, it can contribute to consumer confusion in the marketplace, and affect Blizzard's own reputation negatively for no good reason.
You have jumbled trademark and copyright law. No one is suggesting that someone be able to legally pass off something under Blizzard's brand. (However, the idea that Blizzard can claim a trademark on the entire *Craft name space is equally absurd.)
Building on top of the work of others is creating your *OWN* RTS, but taking the mechanics that make Starcraft so much fun and making them your own. It is *NOT* stealing artwork, music, and storyline that somebody else has spent the time crafting.
Who is "stealing" anything, when it's a game engine that simply REUSES the game data from your purchased version of Starcraft? Totally absurd.
I would have to assume, based on this misunderstanding, that you considered it "stealing" for the bnetd project to provide a non-Blizzard server for playing presumably legally-purchased Blizzard games over the Internet in private.
Going with the MIT X11 or BSD licenses in the future is unfortunately going to limit my ability to build on top of other libraries
How so? Hardly any license is more permissive than either of these.
But more to the point, it means that other free software developers are able to use my code without license incompatibility frustrations.
It seems that when licenses are mutually exclusive, as the GPL and 4-clause BSD are, you cannot blame either license in particular. Many other free software licenses are incompatible with both the GPL and the 4-clause BSD.
I believe blame should be placed on the person who chose the wrong tool for the job, in this case using the GPL for a library which was intended to be linked with non-GPL programs, and especially those which use licenses incompatible with the GPL. Clear permission to link with non-GPL programs is the whole reason the relaxed LGPL exists... and is even the advice of the FSF in that situation.
I've no knowledge of this specific DVD drive, but thinking about the motivations of the operating system vendor vs the motivations of the DVD burner vendor, it wouldn't be surprising if the DVD burner vendor was the one who took the shortcut because they didn't care about security and just wanted to get it working as quickly and easily as possible.
That's right. Anyone who objects to the change has the absolute right to tell you not to make such a change to their code. And then you take their code out.
What I contend, however, is that the majority of active copyright holders of a collective work have the right to indicate a desire to change the license and to ask the remaining copyright holders to decline or not. If the others don't respond, they can be considered to have gone along with the change. The overall work's license choice does not have to be cast in concrete.
There are many pieces of software out there with a 4-clause BSD license where the author cannot be contacted. Would I be legally correct in relicensing the work myself to 3-clause BSD, as long as I publish a public notice of intent for 90 days before doing so? Can this preemptive relicensing scheme be applied to any abandonware, like old MS-DOS programs?
This may be true, but I do not think that it is all the politician's fault. I think it is partly the fact that the population of the USA was probably a fraction (~120 million) of what it is today. It is simply not reasonable to have any contact with any meaningful fraction of your electorate.
Copyright power was established to "promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts". Building on top of the work of others is essential to that progress. If copyright laws are used to stifle people building on top of the work of others, then those laws are not serving the intended ends of copyright and thus should be abolished.
Ron Paul is also the only one advocating returning to the gold standard (even though there's not enough gold on the planet to support the US economy and it's an outmoded system that can't be sustained)
First of all, your comment demonstrates you know nothing about monetary policy. Second, while he favors the gold standard and advocates abolishing the Federal Reserve, he advocates two different policy steps in the direction of sound money. One is to legalize competing currencies, in order to force the Federal Reserve to be responsible with monetary policy, since poor monetary policies would result in people storing their wealth in non-dollars. Another is to force the Federal Reserve to back the dollar with a commodity by tying the dollar's value to a price range of that commodity -- not necessarily gold -- to restrain politicians from endlessly printing money to finance their overseas adventures and welfarism at home.
Just what is it about either of these two schemes that isn't plain old common sense?
abolishing income tax (and introducing nothing to replace the source of well over half the country's budget)
First of all, the obvious policy step is to abolish the IRS and return to a flat tax, the fairest tax of all. (Switzerland has one of the biggest welfare systems in the world, and somehow manages to balance the books with a flat 11% income tax.)
Second, we spend more on the illegal wars and illegal foreign aid every year than the income tax brings in. Doesn't it make sense to end all of it at once?
abolishing the FDA (radium water and colloidal silver for everyone!)
If you want radium water and collodial silver, what business is it of the government's to prevent you from having it? Is it the same business that prevents you from importing prescription drugs and using herbal remedies that are legal everywhere besides the US, driving up health care costs by handing the pharmaceutical companies a monopoly? The same business that prevents alternative low-calorie sweeteners used around the world from being used in food products in the US?
Actually, reducing the FDA to a labeling and testing organization sounds like a damn good idea. And without the monopoly power handed to the FDA, private labeling and testing organizations could coexist and eventually render it unnecessary.
abolishing birthright citizenship (he's all for the Constitution except when he's not)
Advocating a Constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship is not in conflict with the Constitution in any way.
breaking off all trade with other nations (can't be too careful when you're avoiding the Zionist conspiracy to form the North American Union, I suppose)
You've gone off the rails, considering he is the only one advocating that we have a free trade policy with all nations with a uniform tariff, as opposed to selectively embargoing nations like Cuba and NK, or employing "managed trade" policies like CAFTA and NAFTA that favor certain industries and countries. It doesn't need to be said that any form of trade is better than sanctions or bombing.
and his "state's rights" stance is basically just asking for a reintroduction to segregation and institutionalised discrimination at best - and Crimson Skies at worst.
States cannot violate the Constitution. As for your concerns, read Article IV and the 14th Amendment.
"The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states."
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
That's not true, first of all he has never come out against the core essence of antitrust law in preventing private or public anti-competitive coercion. Antitrust prosecution is unjust when it is used as a political weapon and applied based on appearance or symptoms that seem abusive, rather than punishing an actual anti-competitive coercion that took place. Second of all the federal government has very little Constitutional authority to regulate corporations, it only has that power when acts of commerce cross state boundaries. Antitrust cases should very rarely see a federal court when they are in the process of trial, but these days they go to federal court first thing, and that is a distorted picture if you start from the Constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, about those air marshals? More air marshals arrested since 9/11 than arrests made by marshals
What is the purpose of giving a foreign government classified information? How is this purpose different from the purpose of a lobbyist?
this isn't a whole lot different from being a lobbyist for a foreign government and advisor to a presidential campaign at the same time. Except, that's apparently legal.
Don't be a fool. If one can identify where his rights are being violated by the government, he has moral license to seek rectification. Back before the government became omnipotent and self-justifying through the religion of democracy, this was called a petition for redress. But that was back when we humans had a king, who was an easy-to-identify enemy.
These days, we tell ourselves falsely that our government is a democracy (rather than a gang of rulers, selected from those approved to appear on the government-issued ballot) and we are then fooled into believing that our only recourse to restore our rights is through voting for the lesser of two evils, again and again.
You can continue to deride these "bad people" for trying to get the government to leave them the hell alone. As for myself, I'll just leave a quote:
Your international mining cartels could be a threat to the stability of the currency if it could actually be shown that their activity affects the price of gold. Do they inflate more than the economy grows? I have a hard time entertaining the claim that inflation through private labor is an equal threat to my savings as is inflation by government printing press.
By the way, the ability of banks to print money and create credit on demand is known as fractional-reserve banking. You will find, if you study instead of simply regurgitating, that bank panics and economic busts follow expansions in bank credit. (It is easy to see why; a bank that lends out what money it also has available on deposit for withdrawal is immediately insolvent according to simple accounting.) Expansions in bank credit are impossible if the money and credit issued by the bank are based on a scarce resource. Paper is not a scarce resource.
Unfortunately, the politicians in Washington took the legalized fraud that the bankers used to create various panics since the inception of the U.S., and nationalized this fraudulent system by establishing a central bank and a national banking cartel that only deals in the official currency, the fractional reserve dollar. Should it be any surprise, then, that the depressions are longer and more severe than ever before?
I am amazed that so many obviously intelligent people are so self-assured of their academic opinions that common sense is thrown entirely to the wind. It is very simple: Politicians can buy influence when they control the money machine. Printing money on behalf of special interests is a step on the road to central planning. The founders understood this. This wisdom is timeless.
There is a way to "limit the influence of money" that doesn't involve restricting political speech: demand ratification of Article The First. Increasing the number of representatives and making districts smaller would cheapen campaigning, making it easier for a newcomer to break up the establishment hegemony, and to build face-to-face constituent relationships that will keep them in office without having to do favors for special interests.
Marbury v. Madison established that the judicial power the Court was granted was sufficient to establish that "an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void". It was the first decision to defer to a "founders' intent" argument to read non-textual power into the Constitution -- that of removing invalid laws from the books.
The founders didn't write in the Constitution that illegal laws were to be voided by the judiciary, relying instead on inferior courts being bound by the Supreme Court precedent if the matter again reached their desk at a later point.
And the founders certainly didn't write that interpretation should be based on their perceived intent, rather than on the text of the Constitution they painstakingly crafted. Even in the case that they had, most certainly no intent other than unanimous intent would be an acceptable basis for further argument, considering their wildly differing opinions on many aspects of the Constitution.
Wouldn't you think they carefully considered the impact of each word when crafting the text? Why do we allow our partisan modern judiciary to second-guess them, second-guess our reading skills, and tell us what they think the Constitution 'really means'?
Well, we know why. Supreme Court justices can only be removed from office pursuant to a conviction for violating their oath of office, and yet they have convinced us that they can tell us what the very document that binds their oath of office 'really means'. And we are to respect that utterance as the highest decree in the land. Talk about job security!
Marbury started us down a long, painful road of judicial tyranny. It's not that the judiciary grabs power for itself, as you point out. They already have what they sought, because they are in the position of being the most Godlike political figures on earth.
The tyranny comes when the judiciary, over the past 150 years, has utterly failed to constrain the enumerated powers of the federal government in any meaningful way, has utterly failed to protect the natural rights of the individual to his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and has even had the audacity to roll back Constitutionally enumerated rights in the name of the Drug War, in the name of the Global War On Terror, in the name of Progressivism, in the name of Public Safety, and in general whatever any federal social-engineering effort or boogeyman required. And because of its stature, its passive endorsement of the growth of government is taken as the highest endorsement.
It's long past time we held justices accountable to their oath of office, and stopped allowing them to rewrite their own terms of employment through "interpretation".
If gold is random and irrelevant, then why does it become the default monetary unit in the absence of a fiat currency?
Why has gold been the exchange medium of choice throughout history, predating government bankers?
Why does the government need legal tender laws to prop up its fiat currency?
Surely, if gold has no intrinsic value as you claim, people wouldn't irrationally flock to it as an alternative to paper money whenever possible, right? And yet they do. That's why we have to have laws in place enabling bureaucrats to harass and steal from people who dare to do business in anything other than the national paper money.
If it is intrinsically worthless, why does it need to be confiscated and outlawed? If it's so worthless, wouldn't it just vanish and be discarded in the absence of government control?
Please stop thinking like a politician. Gold is the most universal store and exchange of value that we have, it has been so throughout history, and even today remains so -- despite the efforts of many powerful people to shove a "good as gold" national debt note down our throats.
The exchange medium of choice should be left up to the market. Then your hypothesis that gold is intrinsically worthless can be proved true or false by simply observing the course of events. Is gold taken as payment for valuable goods and services? If so, then gold is valuable.
As you acknowledge, tying the dollar to gold is the best way to control inflationary deficit spending. Of course, there are a "number of ways" to control inflation, but as long as they involve trusting politicians with a national credit card like we do with the paper money, none of them is a good way because they ignore human nature and the nature of politicians.
Tying the dollar to gold is not only a good idea, it is a moral imperative if the fiat money is to remain the sole legal tender.
And the people who hold onto those currencies continue to suffer for it.
The case for new money creation causing depreciation of the existing money has been thoroughly made. It is up to you to offer an equally plausible alternative for why prices are going up and why the dollar is at a historical weak point in international trading.
NAFTA has not brought about free trade. NAFTA has brought about the export of our industries and jobs because of our regulatory environment. It makes no sense to manufacture here anymore because other countries aren't subject to the same worker protection laws and business regulations. That is why the NAFTA/CAFTA approach is wrong. It results in an export of capital and labor from the U.S. because the agreements do not force the players to play by the same rules on an even field.
In a libertarian system, the government does not have the power to compel the webhost to turn over your personal info without a warrant. And the webhost risks a market backlash if they sell services predicated on a privacy policy that they do not abide by.
Monopolies are worse when they are propped up by government. In this case, it is eternal copyrights, with a recently criminal copyright law that socializes the cost of enforcing those copyrights.
Of course, it is ironic that BillG complains about the rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer, and blames this on greedy corporations, when it is our government's monetary policy, trade policy, and commercial regulations that actually accomplish exactly that. It's no coincidence that the only way to avoid confiscation of your wealth is to do business with Wall Street.
You have jumbled trademark and copyright law. No one is suggesting that someone be able to legally pass off something under Blizzard's brand. (However, the idea that Blizzard can claim a trademark on the entire *Craft name space is equally absurd.)
Who is "stealing" anything, when it's a game engine that simply REUSES the game data from your purchased version of Starcraft? Totally absurd.
I would have to assume, based on this misunderstanding, that you considered it "stealing" for the bnetd project to provide a non-Blizzard server for playing presumably legally-purchased Blizzard games over the Internet in private.
How so? Hardly any license is more permissive than either of these.
It seems that when licenses are mutually exclusive, as the GPL and 4-clause BSD are, you cannot blame either license in particular. Many other free software licenses are incompatible with both the GPL and the 4-clause BSD.
I believe blame should be placed on the person who chose the wrong tool for the job, in this case using the GPL for a library which was intended to be linked with non-GPL programs, and especially those which use licenses incompatible with the GPL. Clear permission to link with non-GPL programs is the whole reason the relaxed LGPL exists... and is even the advice of the FSF in that situation.
LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2
Try ten percent
The very first proposed amendment to the Constitution was designed to address this inevitable problem.
The wisdom and foresight of those who came hundreds of years before us never ceases to amaze me.
Copyright power was established to "promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts". Building on top of the work of others is essential to that progress. If copyright laws are used to stifle people building on top of the work of others, then those laws are not serving the intended ends of copyright and thus should be abolished.
First of all, your comment demonstrates you know nothing about monetary policy. Second, while he favors the gold standard and advocates abolishing the Federal Reserve, he advocates two different policy steps in the direction of sound money. One is to legalize competing currencies, in order to force the Federal Reserve to be responsible with monetary policy, since poor monetary policies would result in people storing their wealth in non-dollars. Another is to force the Federal Reserve to back the dollar with a commodity by tying the dollar's value to a price range of that commodity -- not necessarily gold -- to restrain politicians from endlessly printing money to finance their overseas adventures and welfarism at home.
Just what is it about either of these two schemes that isn't plain old common sense?
First of all, the obvious policy step is to abolish the IRS and return to a flat tax, the fairest tax of all. (Switzerland has one of the biggest welfare systems in the world, and somehow manages to balance the books with a flat 11% income tax.)
Second, we spend more on the illegal wars and illegal foreign aid every year than the income tax brings in. Doesn't it make sense to end all of it at once?
If you want radium water and collodial silver, what business is it of the government's to prevent you from having it? Is it the same business that prevents you from importing prescription drugs and using herbal remedies that are legal everywhere besides the US, driving up health care costs by handing the pharmaceutical companies a monopoly? The same business that prevents alternative low-calorie sweeteners used around the world from being used in food products in the US?
Actually, reducing the FDA to a labeling and testing organization sounds like a damn good idea. And without the monopoly power handed to the FDA, private labeling and testing organizations could coexist and eventually render it unnecessary.
Advocating a Constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship is not in conflict with the Constitution in any way.
You've gone off the rails, considering he is the only one advocating that we have a free trade policy with all nations with a uniform tariff, as opposed to selectively embargoing nations like Cuba and NK, or employing "managed trade" policies like CAFTA and NAFTA that favor certain industries and countries. It doesn't need to be said that any form of trade is better than sanctions or bombing.
States cannot violate the Constitution. As for your concerns, read Article IV and the 14th Amendment.