re: #707 MandyManners

Let us leave aside for the moments the merits of “redistribution” as policy and returning to my original point, which seems to have been lost.

You posted:

H’s into positive freedoms and positive liberty, the ones whereby the government is free to do things for you, as opposed to the philosophy of negative liberty upon which our Constitution was founded.

Oops. The Constitution. That flawed thing.

Never mind.

I then posted the segment of the interview wherein Obama called the original Constitution “flawed”, saying that he was referring to the specific issue of slavery and how it was handled. My main point in doing so was to try to convey that Obama’s statement about the Constitution is not as condemnable as I believe you think it is.

You then said that Obama talked about “social justice” elsewhere in the interview, a fact which I do not dispute. I do disagree, however (and so do the courts), with the contention that any form of government assistance runs counter to Constitutional principles. What is true, and what Barack Obama was talking about in the interview, is that programs of government assistance cannot be created by the courts under the theory that the Constitution endows positive liberties and requires the legislature to enact them. However, it is just as true that if the legislature does enact such a program, it will (rarely) be struck down by the courts.