B) The right to drink is not defined as in inalienable right in any legal
> or philosophical text that I'm aware of. Not in the Constitution, not in
> Locke, not in Plato, not in anything. Even the 21st Amendment allows great
> latitude for the individual states to regulate alcohol. It's enshrined in
> the Constitution.
You know, Steve, this is where I part company with you and Phil; not that I'm joining up with Senor Loonbag. This whole "X is not a right, it's a privilege" argument makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. I always hear that driving is a privilege; I disagree. Driving on public roads MIGHT be, but driving on private logging roads (for example) does not seem like it should be. And if you're driving on public roads...why is using a public road a privilege?
Away from that argument and back to the other: no philosopher or political thinker I know of and respect says that a person has a right to food. Work or starve sounds good to me, except in cases of handicap or illness, where the state or the individual is morally obligated to provide for the person who cannot gather their own food. However, given that a person HAS food, "the right to eat [it] is not defined as in [sic] inalienable right in any legal or philosophical text that I'm aware of. Not in the Constitution, not in Locke, not in Plato, not in anything."
Of course it isn't. The very idea of a "right to eat" sounds crazy, don't it? None of those folks would have even considered that a "right" to drink needed to be enumerated. The very thought would have been alien to them. I would argue that there IS an implicit right to drink, and that the government has ringed that right round with regulation. But it is still a right, not a privilege. The government can regulate it, but they cannot take it away, once the age requirements are met. The age requirements simply recognize that there are legal and medical concerns involved, just as there are in a number of other situations. I don't agree with the 21 vs. 18 judgment, but that's a thing to decide in the courts and the voting booth.
People have a right to that which they need to survive. No one needs alcohol to survive; no one needs to drive to survive; they do, however, need food. That's the difference.
Phil =====visit the New York City Homebrewers Guild website:
"Lew Bryson" wrote in news:4qN4f.56$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com:
Because access can be revoked for bad behaviour[1]. And, yeah, the same is seemingly not true for alcohol. I suppose because access is essentially unenforceable.
The privacy thing, though, while not explicitly called out in the Constitution, seems like it should be a Right. So you finally gave in and twanged the wire to pictures of dairy cows? Should you lose your privacy priviledge for throwing down a tarp and Tivo'ing (and looping) Christi Paul?
The 18th Amendment of the Constitution was repealed to make the badness go away. That seems to me to imply that booze is a right.
Terri Schiavo. She should have been kept alive at all costs. She should have died two days after I do because that would make me feel better.
Yeah, the Proposition thing works sooooooooooooo well here in CA. eg, selling horse for human consumption or knowingly exporting horse for human consumption is illegal. (Dunno about pet food.) What's next? Abalone?
I get a kick out of the cliche "Our 18-to-20-year-old soldiers can marry, buy a home, and/or kill. But they can't buy a beer."
If you think that, you've never been On Base. EAFB Stripes for starters...
Scott Kaczorowski Long Beach, CA
"Here kitty kitty kitty kitty."
"NCO! NCO! NCO! NCO!"
[1] And then there's the "commit a felony, lose the right to vote" thing.
People have a right to that which they need to survive? Power/gas companies turn off peoples' heat in the winter all the time, or at least, they did until very recently when lawyers discovered a right to heat. "No one needs to drive to survive," there's one that's spoken like a city dweller. The only rights we need to survive are water, air, space to live, and food...if we don't have the money to pay for them, are our rights then taken away, or must the gov't provide them? Is it a right, or an entitlement?
Is it only that which we need to survive that is a right? Are movies a privilege too, then? We don't need them to survive, but all we have to do is lay down the money and buy them. We have a right to privacy: do we need privacy to survive?
The whole "privilege, not a right" argument smacks of paternalism, smells like something Tom Paine would have ripped and burned.
By the right to have it, I mean that the government cannot stop you from getting it. It's the utilities who control it and you must pay for it if you want it.
If driving wasn't a right, we wouldn't have to wait a certain age to get that driver's license. If driving was a right, the government wouldn't be able to take it away from us because some people are bad drivers. And then there that driver's license fee. How much does the state charge you for your license in PA, Lew?
Again, the government can't say, "You can't have food!" It's the supermarkets who say that when you have no money to buy it. Unlike alcohol, food (unless it's prepared and/or served to us) is tax free.
When the government says you have the right to something, it says that it won't prohibit you from having it. It never said it will give it to you.
Phil =====visit the New York City Homebrewers Guild website:
Even in the communist Soviet Union they called it "driving rights". I would agree to make it a privilege only if the government provided all the means necessary to survive without having to drive, which is not the case in most parts of this country.
I do not support drinking and driving or any violations on the road. But how in the world anyone is supposed to earn money for a living, plus fines, court expenses etc., if he or she has no right to drive, because her license has been suspended? Therefore the punishment of taking away the driving privilege pushes the offender into a corner with no way out, other than new violations of driving with a suspended license, or becoming a homeless, or going to jail. No civilized government should be placing its citizens into such a dead-end situation. And don't tell me they deserve it. Most of them don't.
Our system of criminal "justice" is designed to produce serious criminals out of some minor offenders by placing them in a "no way out" situation more often than not.
Okay. The government cannot stop me from getting booze. I can go out and buy it any time I want, if the store's open. Medicine is more a privilege than booze, by your standards: I can only get prescription medicine if a doctor says it's okay.
Can the government change the laws and make it harder for me to get booze? Yes, they did: 18th Amendment. And that was overturned, and it went away:
21st Amendment. Slavery was legal: didn't mean it was right. And that was overturned.
"People have a right to that which they need to survive." You do not need free speech to survive. You need free speech to live free, with dignity. But not to survive. The whole idea that there are rights and privileges that the government grants...is abhorrent. Seriously, Phil, do yourself a favor and re-read Common Sense. Belonging to a country club, that's a privilege. Publishing a screed on how that country club's admission policies are backwards and racist, that's a right.
You have to wait to a certain age to vote. You have to pay taxes to fund the whole voting system, including the party primaries. Is voting a privilege? Do we have a "right" to public education, or is that a privilege? In my state, education is pretty much required: the cops came next door and took a kid away because he refused to go to school. I pay damn near $4,000 a year for that "right." Charging a "fee" vs. levying a "tax" is simply two words for the same thing: coercive demands for money.
So if you don't have a kitchen, you don't have a right to food? Unless you want to subsist on raw fruits and vegetables, that is...
And I suppose Pennsylvanians have a right not to go naked, while New Yorkers don't, since you're taxed on clothing and we're not? Thank God for that clothing privilege on a windy January morning, eh?
The government cannot take away my right to see movies. That's free speech and free press. So seeing "Dumb & Dumber" is an ironclad, government-protected right, but having a beer while I watch it is a privilege that the government grants to me out of the goodness of it's heart? That's ridiculous.
Well, at least in this context, when I use "privilege" (if I did; I try to avoid it), I don't mean "here's something nnice we're going to let you do because we're just that swell." It just means legally permitted bheavior that does not rise to the level of explicit constitutional protection. The writers found it important enough to call out rights like free speech and assembly, trial by jury, due process, something to do with guns (although poorly written), but they didn't find it necessary to call out a lot of other things. Which does not mean exclusion, as the 10th amendment states, but they don't enjoy the same level of inalienability as the enumerated rights.
Not really. For instance, IIRC, it's one of the things called out in the UN Charter on Human Rights. People do have a right to basic things like food, shelter, etc. Deliberately starving a popuplation would get one a paid trip to The Hague. There's nothing silly about it at all.
I would argue that there are lots of implicit rights as well. I, for example, favor legalization and regulation of drugs. I feel that people have a right to do what they wish, as long as that right does not infringe on anothers.
There are, of course, many people who reject the notion of inferred rights out of hand, demanding that the Constitution be read with the same literal-mindedness that they read their Bibles. I am not one of those people. I just bring it up to point out that there is far from universal belief in the idea of inferred rights.
Where I part company with the OP and the likes of many fringe libertarians (mainstream libertarians, I have more than a little in common with) is the idea that there should be no regulation. Regulation is permitted by the Constitution, actually preserves freedom (read up on some of the recent Nobel-prize winning economic research about how a degree of regulation leads to freer markets than purely unregulated markets), and is necessary to prevent anarchy.
I don't agree with the 21-year drinking age. We've discussed that before, and while some of our reasons differ - I don't agree that changing it is going to have any appreciable effect on changing Americans' perceptions and usage patterns regarding alcohol, while I believe you have made that case - we are in accord that the proper age is 18. However, the law is 21. It's a fact that therefore has to be dealt with. There are legitimate reasons for regulating ages upon which people can do things, and in many ways, 18 is no more or less arbitrary than 21. The main problem is that all other rights and responsibilities are thrown at a person at 18 (and age that is arguably too young, IMO) but not this one. But I don't dispute at all the validity of setting an age where one gets the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. That age is inevitably going to be arbitrary. The drinking age is striking only in its incongruity.
And, regardless, disapproval of it does not lead to justification of killing people enforcing the law on the books.
The OP likes to positively associate himself with abolitionists. The fact is, abolition was eventually brought about through entirely legal means, using the systems set up in the Constitution and enforced by laws and judicial review. Sure, many people did things through extra-legal means. They tended not to resort to violence to achieve their aims, however (isolated counter-examples exist, of course, but just as the civil rights movement of the 60s was largely non-violent, so were the abolitionists).
The process may be slow-moving, but it ultimately works more often than not. And just because it doesn't provide the results you like (you generic, not you, Lew) doesn't mean it's acceptable and proper to react violently.
Bingo. And to get to your original point, and points elsewhere in the thread, the idea that something is not a specifically enumerated right does not mean it's a thing the governemnt bestows out of kindness. There's no specific callout of freedom of movement in the Constitution that I recall, but it's easily inferred from other rights that are enumerated. Same with a lot of other things. But the fact is, the coursts tend to tread much more cautiously around enumerated rights (unless we're talking the 4th amendment under the Rhenquist court...), recognizing the fact that if the writers called out those issues explicitly means they regarded those things as especially important. Yes, those rights can have regulation, but it's notable that things like religion, speech, gun ownership (in terms of federal law; states differ, and there's a dearth of federal case law that speaks on the subject) have very minimal federal regulation compared to other "obvious" but non-enumerated rights such as the right to move freely or the right to privacy.
That would put the right to free speech higher than your 'right to eat,' but if you're okay with that... Otherwise, I'm okay with what you're saying except for the use of the word 'privilege.' Most people, I'm afraid, and particularly those in government and law enforcement, DO see these as just that: "privileges" that they permit us to have on sufferance. Leastways, that's how they act.
Ah, in my context, it did. In terms of genocidal imposed famine, of course it doesn't. Starving someone deliberately is simply murder, and that is definitely out. After all, everyone has a very basic right to life.
No argument here. You wouldn't have to argue with me at all.
I think you'll find that a lot of the people you are tarring here read quite a bit into the unenumerated rights of the Constitution. There's conservatism, and then there's conservatism. Not all conservatives are social conservatives.
No argument here on this, either; see my post to Scott K. Regulation of a right does not make it a privilege.
We'd obviously argue on the first bit, true, but the rest of it? Yeah, okay. You gotta draw the line somewhere; we just drew it in the wrong place. College screws things up.
Absolutely not. Not THAT law, anyway. Got to get a lot more serious.
We're pretty much in line on the rest of what you said, too.
Why does college screw things up? If no college, young adults would be out in the workforce at 18, and still be deserving of all the rights and responsibilities of legal adulthood. College is a time to learn, so why not learn responsible social drinking rather than learning to sneak around to bypass illogical laws? Millions of USians survived an 18-y.o. drinking age pre-Reagan. And I have yet to see believable statistics that indicate *anything* is somehow better now that we've had, what, twenty years of federal interference in the states' rights to regulate alcohol laws.
Semantics. College for some, work for others. Colege students are still in a somewhat coddled, authoritarian environment, which leads some older adults to continue to treat them as if they were little kiddies. It complicates the situation, I should have said.
Indeed.
USians? You been talking to Canadians?
The 21 drinking age saved thousands of lives, just ask MADD. No one other than anti-alcohol researchers has done any research, so that's all you'll find. And if you want to read something interesting, track down Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent on that decision (and then read her dissent on Kelo v. City of New London, the recent property rights decision). Bad law, bad decision.
MADD is one prohibitionist group and two a sneaky drinkers club. What a combination. Moms like it because, sure their daughter dragged some guy out to get drunk with and then dies in a car wreck. Then the Mom has a lifetime of grief to enjoy. They also blame the driver for a failed marriage no sex life hell you name it. The money is not bad if you look into being a MADD reprehensive. Lot of MADD Moms are sneaky alcoholics. Hey ! They got good reason right ?
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