Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with

Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with

Part 20 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

With three posts remaining in this series on how 'Economic Thinking' has transformed our common sense into a bitter-fruitful chaos of conflicting ideological positions, this post sees many of the consequences of what we've covered in the preceding posts, taking shape through this, the 3rd of three key methods by which 'Economic Thinking' severs our thinking from reality, and uses our cooperation with it to transform the Rule of Law, into a Rule of Rules for our rulers to rule over society with.

Recapping what we mean by the Rule of Law, it begins with that understanding of Law which Aristotle described as being "... law is reason unaffected by desire...", and developing an orderly system of such laws that are capable of upholding justice, first has to begin with the metaphysical understanding that it is possible to know what is real and true, followed by the epistemological acknowledgement that while any party to a dispute, including the state, can be in error, an understanding of what actually occurred is best arrived at through the reasonable consideration of testimony, evidence, and arguments which exclude the arbitrary, and which supports the ethical imperative of pursuing the best understanding of events possible, so as to provide reasonable consequences and redress for any actions that are determined to have taken place.

All three aspects of that - the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical - comprise what Cicero expressed as the law being "...right reason in agreement with nature...", and all are required to be able to derive and implement a clear system of laws which are what first led men away from taking matters into their own hands to exact bloody retribution, and gave rise to the popular expectation that Justice can and should be sought through a court of law (see Aeschylus's The Furies (Eumenides)).

Such a system of justice requires popular support. The fundamental legal truism of Edward Coke that "A man's home is his castle", can only be meaningful when the members of a society commit to serve as the virtual battlements of each other's property, through the Rule of Law. Anything less than that system and the broad understanding of it, will induce both man and society to regress back to the savage's rule of force where 'might makes right' under a tyranny in which no man is or can expect to be free to live in liberty.

Into those fundamentals of the Rule of Law, the Classical American Liberal understanding added the assurance that all who came before the law were to have equal standing before the court in which Lady Justice is blindfolded to any conditions and social status that might encourage favoritism, because their government - the popular sovereignty of We The People - was established for the purpose of upholding and defending the individual rights of all, so that liberty is possible to be enjoyed by all.

It is worth noting that while the pro-regressive 'Woke Right' attack individual rights as being empty claims of 'muh rights!' that are mysteriously discovered with each new grievance - which coincidentally (not) is how the pro-regressive 'Woke Left' approaches fabricating 'new rights' to serve each new grievance - the Classical American Liberal understanding of individual rights holds that they are innumerable (see the 9th & 10th amendments), and that their origins are neither mysterious nor arbitrary, but the self-evident consequence of human nature, which follows from the common sense understanding that men have to use their minds in accordance with what is real and true, in order to take those actions they judge to be best for living lives worth living. They saw that as being the basis for obtaining knowledge, and the basis for developing virtue, as well as the basis for determining what, how, and whether, you worship and give thanks to God; it is the basis for obtaining food, clothing and shelter, it is the basis for developing and maintaining worthwhile relationships, for exchanging your goods & services with others, and for defending all of the above against predators (four legged & two), and all other adverse conditions.

What that understanding also made clear, was that the forcible violation of an individual's judgement in such matters, is the basis for what we identify as being criminal acts. And of course it was still fresh in our Founders' living memory, how the many violations of that understanding were the basis for the drumbeat of "He has..."'s that were submitted against King George III's government, to a candid world, in our Declaration of Independence.

With that understanding at the time of America's founding (what Jefferson called "...the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...""), We The People understood that the need to take such actions was a self-evident truth of human nature which came from "nature and nature's god", and they understood that it would be fundamentally wrong for those laws which a people governed themselves with, to infringe upon their ability to take those actions that they judged best, and therefore they demanded that our Constitution be amended with a Bill of Rights to identify those most fundamental individual rights that are common to all, and to forbid their government - that understanding of Popular Sovereignty' which animates the first three words of our Constitution: "We The People..." - from infringing upon their individual rights and liberty. The Preamble to the proposed Bill of Rights put that as:

"...The conventions of a number of the states having, at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added; and as extending the ground of public confidence in the government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;..."

You don't need to be a scholar to understand our Declaration of Independence, or a constitutional scholar to understand what it is that our Constitution was written and ratified to do, or to have more than familiarity with human nature to grasp why We The People felt it necessary to amend the constitution they had so recently ratified, but that general understanding is what forms a minimum baseline of understanding that a person must have, IMHO, in order to credibly identify yourself as being an American, and anyone - Left, Right, or ambiWokestrous - who minimizes, dismisses, or ridicules that understanding and the need for it, has identified themselves as being both un- and anti-American.

• TLDR: A reasonable attention to what is real and true is necessary for establishing those laws & consequences that make justice and liberty possible for all.
• Warning:A reasonable understanding is fractured by the admission of the arbitrary - what seems to have no more cause than crude desires, pretentions, or spite - which is the common entry point of falsehood & chaos that feeds the urge to power for power's sake.

It was with good reason that John Adams, and most others of our Founders' era, who had a common sense understanding of what one is real and true and how one should conduct themselves in relation to that, repeated maxims such as this one, that cautioned against the arbitrary:

"'Obsta principiis', nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards..."

, which is as true for the individual, as it is for the society they live within.

Thought in action that's conformed to what is real and true and right to do, forms the roots of both individual rights and of private property. It is the basis for establishing those reasonable rules & consequences that justice requires, and which make living in liberty, in society together, possible. When we arbitrarily justify discarding an integrated regard for reality, to get an 'economic benefit' which supposedly serves the 'common good', we not only engage in denying the fundamental requirement of justice, we begin severing our own minds from what is real and true, and begin participating in the spread of injustice by transforming the Rule of Law into a Rule of Rules for Rulers to rule over We The People with.

TURD's (The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse) spin honeyed falsehoods to ease their popular consumption.

To the extent that our TURD's justify using the force of law and regulation to impose their utilitarian ideas upon us for the 'common good' - which is what "The Ends justify the Means" means - your own property, and indeed your own active presence in your own life, has in principle been taken from you. The extent to which that has occurred in your society, is the extent to which your society and those living within it, have been made into tools of 'Economic Thinking', in the hands of those who claim the power to speak for your society. For instance: when you see the likes of Bill Gates and the WEF pushing measures to suppress car emissions & cow farts, which your federal, state, and local governments use their alphabet agencies to cite as cause for adjusting their regulatory controls over your society, at your expense, for 'the common good' - that is the fruit of 'Economic Thinking' in action.

That is a critical problem.

The Common Economic Problem
Karl Marx's 'Economic Interpretation of History' is what has been the most visible means of elevating 'Economics' into having a central position in our lives, and critical to how he justified his thinking, was the single line which he said the whole of his philosophy could be distilled down into: 'the abolition of private property'. Marx believed that it was foolish for earlier philosophers to have only tried to understand the world, when he believed that "... the point, however, is to change it.", and perhaps with Archimedes' statement of "Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world" in mind, Marx set about using 'Economic Thinking' as his lever, along with his Idea that 'Private Property alienates us from ourselves' (a notion that he largely lifted from Rousseau) as his fulcrum, he intended to unleash its dialectical power upon the world, to move it into a global state of revolutionary change.

Phill Magness: Marx is less than zero.

On that account at least, and precious little else, he was proven right. Beware, however, attempting to engage with his 'reasoning' as if he had 'some good ideas', as doing so without having a firm grounding in an understanding of what is real and true, is to take a potentially fatal step into the dialectic which Marx had purposefully designed for mystifying his readers with.

Let me be perfectly clear: Karl Marx had no good ideas. He had ideas that were effective in mystifying people, but none that reflected what was, should, or ever could be, real and true.

And of course Marx's ideas about Property don't just conflict with the Classical American Liberal's common sense understanding that private property is what enables an individual to become more secure and confident in their life and pursuits, it is a full blown attack upon the entire understanding of how our lives and individual rights are morally and legally secured to each of us, through our respecting what each other has property in (see James Madison's essay on "Property").

In an irony that I doubt was lost upon Marx - you'll recall that those who knew him best often cited his passion for repeating the line of the demon Mephistopheles: "Everything that exists deserves to perish!" - when a person believes that there is nothing that we can expect to have property in, including our own life, then the commitment that each person has to each other through their society's institutions of Law, and Justice, and civil customs, will vanish along with their property. The irony here is that the consequence of denying the validity and justice of private property and of property owners, is that all persons and their possessions, are then at one and the same time effectively nationalized into becoming faceless chattel possessed by the state - if you don't have power over what is yours, then it is not your property, and your life is not yours to live - and what could be more alienating than a system such as that?

And then there's the ideology of Fascism, which was developed by Italian socialists under the heavy influence of American Pragmatism (especially from the father of American psychology, William James, as Mussolini said: "Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, it’s will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value"), to produce a more 'practical' means of producing the same results of personal alienation by transforming 'property' into mere possessions that were to be authorized by, overseen by, and managed as needed by, the approval of 'expert' govt administrators, who would have ultimate control over who would be permitted to possess what (the alienating of people from their property, creates: "...The resulting sense of powerlessness increased the lure of cynicism and demagoguery...", which is the necessary fuel for those pursuing revolutionary power, whether Marxist/Leninist, Fascist, or via a 'third way'). And though fascism permits a favored few to possess 'things' and collect 'money' as if it were 'theirs' - and even to force others to patronize 'their' products & services - those are surface appearances that continue for only so long as those government administrators continued to permit them - which typically is not for long, as what such a system excels most at producing, is a demand for new scapegoats to blame for the wealth which such transactions produce ever less of. And again, if someone else controls what you possess, then what you possess isn't yours, and neither is your life.

But before you shake your head too quickly at the Marxists & Fascists, it may come as a surprise (sadly) that the very same essentials of 'Economic Thinking' that drove the Marxists & Fascists, is what lies behind the pragmatic regulatory laws that have been practiced by the alphabet bureaucracies of our Administrative State. Those regulatory agencies were *ironically* first implemented here by our first 'Progressive' presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, so as to provide a 'third way' alternative to the extremes of communism/socialism/marxism, and Fascism, and it is that ideology that has constrained our 'judicial system', for well over a century.

The sad fact is that whether such actions against private property and individual rights are taken in the revolutionary manner that Marx proposed, or in the bombastic 'everything in the state, nothing outside of the state' style of Mussolini, or through the more 'pragmatic' means of progressive regulatory powers & takings used by our Administrative State, they all use the State's power to make decisions in your own life, for you, in everything from how much water you flush your toilet with, to the food you eat, and what your children will be taught to believe for twelve years of their lives within their state approved schools. The distasteful truth is that each of those approaches fully embody an opposition to private property as being central to their ideologies, and enacting them alienates the people from their property, from their individual rights, and from their own lives.

see Phillip K. Howard's classic: "The Death of Common Sense - How Law is Suffocating America"

Whether Private Property is abridged in the name of the 'common good' by way of 'Progressivism', or Leftism (the pro-regressive Left's corruption of Liberalism), or 'Conservativism' (which is too often the pro-regressive Right's corruption of Liberalism), or 'Socialism', or 'Fascism', or 'Communism', is ultimately a matter of making ideological distinctions without any meaningful differences, so as to mask what they all have in common: that they are all variations of 'Economic Thinking', and peeling back the surface layers of these collectivist ideologies reveals that each utilizes The State to permit some - whether few or many - people to have official title to the appearances of property, while The State has the ultimate power to limit and permit what actions those people - few or many - are to be allowed to 'decide' what they can use it for, in an economy - which they understand to mean everything that anyone does within it - that is ultimately to be controlled and managed by the State. In each and every one of their ideologies, it is The State whose laws are not bound to upholding and defending the individual rights and property rights of its people, that has the power to withdraw what had once been recognized as 'property' from the possession of its people - any and all - at the whim of whichever bureaucrat is involved in overseeing it.

What developing the habit of looking beneath the surface positions and their given answers reveals, is that the apparent differences that exist between, are but the shallow and mostly cosmetic differences of clever ideological marketing campaigns. But no matter how cleverly the differing ideologies of 'Economic Thinking' are marketed to you, those ideas can only lead to what is objectively bad and always markedly worse, which is what the history of the 20th Century has attested to in the oceans of blood that have flowed out from a hundred of million+ dead around the world:

That nothing good has, can, or ever will, come from ideas that are derived from an opposition to private property.

What just a little foresight from principled thinking (which recognizes what is, what must follow, and what should be) reveals, is that if 'Economic Thinkers' are ever permitted to fully achieve their central goal of abolishing Private Property, it would force society to regress back 2,500 years into that B.C. era when the ideal of 'justice' was at best that of the Sophist Thrasymachus', who held that 'justice' was nothing more than a tool of power for serving the interests of the stronger. That is the nature of their ideals, which is the reason why I describe them all, no matter whether they purport to be on the Left, or the Right, as being Pro-Regressives.

By the fruits of these very different Founding Fathers, you should know them:

"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."
John Adams, 'Discourses on Davila', following his 'A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States of America'

"...Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own...."
James Madison, 'Property', 29 Mar. 1792

"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.

"This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own."
Ben Franklin, one of his 'Silence Dogood' essays,1772

Fruits: An unprecedented growth in freedom & prosperity

"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'

Fruits: Over 100 million dead over just the 20th century alone

I know of no goals of the latter 'Classical Liberals' of the period following the close of our Founders' era, from J.S. Mill, to Comte, and on down to John Maynard Keynes, that did not seek to serve just a set of pro-regressive goals as those, under the banner of 'Economic Thinking'. It was through the treason of The West's philosophers, academics, and not a few of its clerics, who knowingly subverted their institutions to form new 'norms' of Education, Law, and Economics around them, that they advanced those pro-regressive goals through means such as semantic deception and propaganda, to progressively insinuate their altered meanings, into popular understanding, and although few dared to state their meaning openly, let alone attempt to carry them out without the cover of false pretenses, their private letters and writings reveal that their intentions were to undo ( which they say is to *improve*) the real historic progress that had been achieved through the Classical American Liberalism of our Founders.

It's important to remember that despite 'Economics' getting most of the headlines, 'Economic Thinkers' do not work alone or exclusively with financial considerations, they rely heavily upon their key allies in Education and Law, as all three were reformed through their shared roots in the new 'Social Sciences', which stretched out into America as the 'Progressives', and across the United Kingdom as the Fabian Socialists. And though the most far reaching and dramatic changes in Western society were brought about through education - which I'll remind you of in just a moment - the most immediate and practical effects came about through the new theories of Positivist Law, which, like it's American cousins, the Pragmatists, contemptuously disregarded reality and principled reasoning, in favor of whatever its TURD's arbitrarily asserted 'will work' in their place, for the 'Common Good'. Those aims were aided and abetted by the latter 'Classical Liberals', which made it easy for the new 'Economic Thinkers' to utilize the power of government policies as law, while openly contradicting the established practices and wisdom of those Classical American Liberals ("'Obsta principiis', nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud..." held no sway amongst the 'New Economics'), who had preceded them.

The concept of Private Property is not an economic concept, it's a concept of philosophy, law, and human relations. Whether it is respected or violated produces economic consequences, but the the concept itself reaches back in time even to the Bible ( 'Thou shalt not steal', has little meaning without some concept of private property).

'Economics', Law, and Education, work together best by mystifying popular opinion through the Semantic Deception of terms (see especially Post #5 in this series) that people are too familiar with to question (until too late), such as how 'Economic Thinkers' use the concept of 'Good', when speaking of a common or greater 'good'.

Unfortunately, what most people presume 'Good' to mean, then and even now, as the sense of:

"conforming to a high standard of moral virtues; admirable or favorable"

, is, and was, not what the 'Social Sciences' intended towards the individuals within 'their' economy, or even in any meaningful way for the economy itself. Their use of the term 'Good', follows from how it has developed through a long line of thinkers from Descartes to Bentham to Hume, and of course J.S. Mill, who explicitly did not value that sense of what is Good, but seek only what would be of utility to their plans for *their* economy, and that requires that they evade what is meant by the quality of good, by misrepresenting it as some greater quantity of utility (some degree of pleasure, pain, or power), which puts them in fundamental opposition to what is good.

That misrepresentation - Semantic Deception - is how so many of us are lured into thoughtlessly giving our assent to violating (usually by ignoring) the principle of individual rights & property in regards to both ourselves and our fellows (do you actively object to your children's mandatory attendance in public schools? Do you object to the Income Tax in principle, or just hope for a better percentage rate? See what I mean?), under the excuse that we would be serving the greater good of the 'Common Good'.

The lure to us to ignore/violate the principle of private property, is the dialectical two-step of cause & effect, that is at the center of 'Economic Thinking', and it is the key means by which we participate in demoralizing ourselves.

"A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. … he will refuse to believe it… That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."

pic.twitter.com/u7GYyDUS93

— Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost (@Ne_pas_couvrir) September 14, 2024

If you're not yet seeing the link between 'Economic Thinking' and our becoming demoralized, you may be mistaking being 'demoralized', for meaning something like feeling 'down in the dumps', but that's not the case, as Demoralized means:

1: to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : to corrupt the morals of

, so that being demoralized means that you are no longer in the habit of thinking about what is real and true as being a moral concern. If you pay close attention, you'll see that the condition of being demoralized is what the utilitarian/pragmatic/progressive/'Economic Thinker's promote as being one of their highest ideals, and it's a mistake to look for how that happens by focusing too closely on economic factors of supply & demand, or laws spun to support them, while forgetting about their 'Social Science's partner in 'progressive education' which is what has taught us their ideal that how we think, and what we think of as being real and true, have little or no connection to each other, and it is that ideal that has been the chief means of teaching us to play an active role in demoralizing ourselves, through our own beliefs, passions, and decisions.

One of the clearest examples of that being their ideal, and that it has been, and still is being taught to us, in this phrase from "Bloom's Taxonomy", which has guided the teaching of our teachers since the 1950s (Note: the inset pic is one I found in 2021 on a school district site in Santa Clara county, CA), that:

"...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong..."

The purpose of that ideal is to dismantle a student's moral capacity and habit of caring about right & wrong - for both the new teachers, and the youths they'll soon be teaching - and to think instead in terms of material costs & benefits - AKA: 'higher order thinking'.

The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, said that Western society was protected from the lure of Marxism by what he called the West's 'Cultural Hegemony' - the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture and the liberal tradition of self-governance, as was exemplified by the Classical American Liberalism of our Founders' era. They understood that to break that protection, the people had to be demoralized, and coincidentally (not) that ideal from "Bloom's Taxonomy" - which is incorporated into everything from 'self-management' to 'conflict resolution theory', to 'critical thinking' - has been a lesson they're taught to proudly employ in everything they (you) would think and do, in all aspects of life.

We should not forget, not even for a moment, that 'Economic Thinking', implicitly & explicitly, considers an 'economy' to include (and control) everything that happens within *their* economy, and what that means is that the dirty little secret of modernity is that 'Economic Thinking', is totalitarian in nature. As such, whether that is used to transform a western society outright through Marxist or Fascist revolutions, or more slowly by means of either Fabian socialism or 'Progressive' Regulatory Law, to do so without the use of overwhelming military force, they only need the people of that society to break themselves from the western understanding of morality and philosophical realism - 'Western Cultural Hegemony" - that was protecting them. As it turns out, putting 'Economic Thinking' into the thinking that people habitually think with, in economics, law, and education, has proven indispensable to 'peacefully' transforming that society's Rule of Law, into a Rule of Rules, which those in power can then rule over that society with.

How to get a good and moral people to demoralize themselves
A good people won't knowingly do that to themselves, of course, but by injecting 'Economic Thinking' into education, law, and commerce, and by having greased the skids with a false idea of 'Good', that people will progressively sail down the slippery slope of self-corruption, with very little friction.

Education - The people's understanding of education has to be 'reformed' first. In America, the understanding of education that we began with in our Founders' era, was focused upon educating for the wisdom, knowledge, and virtue which their understanding of Classical American Liberalism rested upon. That view is what was reflected in this letter from Samuel Adams to his cousin John Adams, in 1790,

"...a gratefull remembrance of our pious and benevolent Ancestors, who early laid plans of Education; by which means Wisdom, Knowledge, and Virtue have been generally diffused among the body of the people, and they have been enabled to form and establish a civil constitution calculated for the preservation of their rights, and liberties..."

, and our downward slide from that solid moral high ground, began with our willingly 'adding' economic goals of "improving the workforce" to the nature and purpose of what education was for, such as was urged by Noah Webster, who gave us his thoughts on the purpose and faults of that education which had made his era possible:

"...it appears to me that what is now called a liberal Education, disqualifies a man for business. ... An academic Education, which should furnish the youth with some ideas of men and things, and leave time for an apprenticeship..."

, and with the telos of education thus confused, what soon followed from the Adams' appreciation for the wisdom & courage that their liberal education had brought them, was a descent into the popular expectation that kids should "pay attention in school to get good grades and get a good job", and we've progressively fallen from there in barely a century's time, to dispensing the economically driven advice that Woodrow Wilson gave to high school teachers in 1909,

"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."

, and in the blink of an eye we plummeted down from the heights of our Founders' era, to the full on anti-American educational ideals of Blooms taxonomy, and further down to ESSA, SEL & CRT.

Law - Likewise, injecting 'Economic Thinking' into the purpose of the law, soon turns the telos of the law from its purpose and duty of upholding and defending individual rights as was understood in our Founders' era, to manipulating rights for 'the common good' as first began to be seen here in the SCOTUS case of the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge, by 1837,

"While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and wellbeing of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation."

Soon afterwards, that same judge, then Chief justice Roger B. Taney, authored the Supreme Court's shameful Dred Scott decision that justified slavery 'for the common good' as well, and it was a free fall from there to SCOTUS justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wishing that "every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether", and the growth of regulatory agencies and favorable opinions on eugenics by 1927.

Economy - It might be expected that 'Economic Thinking' would be good for commerce, but with its opposition to Private Property (if you don't control your property, it's not your property and your life is not yours either), it instead has the effect of removing morality and virtue from exchanges, which reduces commerce to seeking after any amoral gain at the cost of everything that is of real value, and set a trajectory towards government getting into bed with corporations in regulatory law, and their corrupting of free markets. As the American people were being hit with the new 'Economic Thinking' from all sides by those they'd looked to for guidance in Education, Law, and Commerce, they were progressively demoralized and distracted into trivialities, and increasingly lost the ability to care about, or even to recognize what is right and wrong, or why it mattered.

Being taught to doubt or even to just ignore whatever value that *the truth* 'might' have for them, leads the demoralized person away from thinking about how to do what is right, and into simply caving in to 'Why don't we just be pragmatic about this?' instead, which enables and encourages the most predatory of ideologues ('they're not 'bad'(!), they're just effective!') to elevate themselves into power by appealing to the growing enviousness of 'the people' ("More of this! and more of that! None of them or those!"), to willingly assent to a Rule of Rules, that'll 'take action!' for the 'Common Good'.

'Economic Thinking' obscures our understanding of what is real and true by means of a pragmatic and utilitarian attack upon the unity of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and it's in that role that 'Economic Thinking' is and always has been, the 'respectable' establishment face of 'Social Justice', which is and always has entailed the actual sacrifice of what the Good is, to what seems useful (AKA: Evil).

To stop ourselves from participating in doing mental, moral, and spiritual damage to ourselves, we need to recognize that the 'Economic Thinker's offers of dialectical 'Change!', are but the surface level changes of an Affordance Trap which ensures that their power to control what matters most to '*their* economy', will be unopposed, and so remain unchanged.

In the end, the best way to resist 'Economic Thinker's efforts to separate us from reality, is to take the time to notice what it is that you're seeing, and to not resist knowing what you see, so as to be able to do what the Cold War dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, advised: 'live not by lies'. If we can realize that 'THEY' rely upon our being too demoralized to recognize what they are doing, then when they're utilizing the three key methods of 'Economic Thinking', we can take the cheese from their Affordance Traps and leave them unsprung, so that when they mention one, we can bat their definitions aside, and reaffirm what it really and truly is, and why they fear it enough to reframe reality through the three key methods of 'Economic Thinking':

1. Value - To those involved in an exchange, Value is what results from their judgement of what is of value to their own interests, which is what the LTV (Labor Theory of Value) seeks to obscure behind calculations of various external material forces, in order to disrupt your metaphysical understanding of what is real and true.
2. Markets - "Say's Law of Markets" describes the reality that in order to exchange anything, something must first be produced, and it is people's judgement (AKA: Markets) which 'Economic Thinking' undermines and attacks through strawman refutations and ridicule, to disrupt those consequences that logically follow from actual causes, to disrupt an Epistemology of causality & logic
3. Law - The Rule of Law enables the individuals in a society to live in liberty together by upholding & defending individual rights and property rights, which 'Economic Thinking' must replace with a Rule of Rules, so as to force people to live by the *expert* decisions of others - disrupting what should follow from our actions, through Ethics & Justice, is priority #1 for the 'Economic Thinker'

It doesn't require any grand demonstrations on your part to do that, it only requires that we, ourselves, simply pay attention to what is real and true, and to stop participating in the lies that surround us.

"... the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me..."

Live not by lies. Make the effort to recognize what is (Metaphysics ), how you know it (through an epistemology of Causality and Logic), and so be able to clarify what we should do in response to that (Ethics), to get yourself firmly back on the side of what is real and true, which is what Classical American Liberalism is founded upon.

The reality is that a common good must be common to all.

The reality is that a common good must be common to all.

Part 13 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

So in this metaphysical whirlwind of a tour of how a respect for what is real and true can lead to well ordered and prudent thinking, we've also glimpsed how easily it can be undone. Those who do manage a sound philosophical framework, are better equipped to imagine living in a civil society, and begin conceiving of what would be required for such a society to sustain and maintain itself across time, without it at the same time becoming a powerful threat to them.

Man is a political animal. We naturally want to live in society with others, while at the same time we also want reasonable boundaries of separation between us and them; those who do care about what's real and true and about each other as well, are a people whose thoughts will bring them around to the idea of Individual Rights.

By focusing on the essentials, we can thumbnail how the reality of what is real and true, reveals and defines the concept of Individual Rights. Because it's rooted in the nature of being human (an expanded version of this here, and here), growing out of those actions which the reality of living as a human being requires a person to choose to perform. We must be able to engage in:

• thought,
• speech,
• association,
• action,
• the developing of convictions and abilities needed to identify what you value,
• the need to defend what you value against those adverse conditions and predators that may arise

, no one could be expected to live a fully human life without the ability to take such actions.

That is not only an undeniable truth, it's one that is true here, there, and everywhere there are human beings, and everywhen across time, and it is so because they are human beings first. It's true in the same way, for everyone, regardless of their environment or circumstances.

IOW: The need to take these actions is a central fact of Human Nature, that is expressed through an uncorrupted Common Sense.

What does vary by place and circumstance, is how well people recognize and respect these realities, , and whether we differentiate a sound we all hear as being only noise, or have developed the ability to identify that sound as C or C# Minor, both are done so with respect to what is real and true for all. Yet however that might be reflected in a society, the fact remains that human nature requires people to be able to take those actions that the nature of being human demands of them. To deny and/or deprive someone of the ability to do so, is at the very least, immoral, and it will foolishly deprive them of the 'Wealth of Nations'.

Shorter version: Individual Rights are what results from recognizing the logical consequences of creatures employing their Free Will in a rational respect for reality and the value of each person which was the gift of Judeo-Christian religion, truth and understanding will be recognized as the most vital tools of survival.

As that becomes understood, the reciprocal nature of individual rights becomes self-evident, and for that to be followed, we must apply it as a principle:

Individual Rights must be recognized and respected for every member of a society, or else no one can have a reasonable expectation of enjoying them.

Far from being the random whims of popular fancies or the privileges of a powerful few, each person has a responsibility to recognize that their own individual rights depend upon their respecting the same of everyone else in their society. Valuing the ability to live your own life, requires abiding by the principle of not treading upon another in exercising their rights, and also not advocating for or tolerating those of your fellows - friends or not - doing so to others you don't like. Unless those who constitute your community are committed to respecting and upholding the principle of individual rights for every individual in that community, then everyone will soon find themselves back to being only as free as their own muscles 'tooth & claw' can manage by force to keep the predators - animals or human - at bay - which is the norm that those who seek power, truly crave - across time.

That understanding is and must be a common understanding and highest value in a society - an actual Common Good - if that society is expected to be of value to its people.

To repudiate human nature, turns your own nature against yourself and humanity.

To effectively practice that principle requires two other features, because simply understanding that cannot provide the means of sustaining that sentiment in the face of the disagreements - honest and otherwise - that are sure to arise amongst people. Communities first need to establish a reasonable system for justly resolving the disputes and deliberate violations of those rights that may arise between individuals. Doing so requires a clear set of rules of engagement between people, that will be recognized and enforced by the people as a whole, and that is the basis of a Rule of Law, within a system for formulating and implementing them, which is the role of a Judicial System.

To go beyond an authoritarian sense of 'maintaining order', that system needs to have a deserved reputation for ensuring that all parties to a dispute will have the opportunity to make their best case, and have it honestly considered, according to written rules that are clear, reasonable, and applied equally to all without prejudice or preference, so that each party can agree that a judgement was fairly made, even when it goes against them.

While living in society naturally provides us with neighbors, it is only from orderly thinking that is centered around a respect for what is real and true, that the idea that 'good walls build good neighbors' will emerge, which is what the idea of the Rule of Law is meant to embody. The Law enables society's individuals to unite into one body politic, while upholding and defending the Individual Rights of all its members, provides the separation which preserves them as Individuals within that society, and as with 'Good walls make good neighbors', a healthy sense of individualism simultaneously recognizes the separation that individual rights affords them, and at the same time embraces the community which makes that possible.

It should be equally self-evident that for such a system to be practical, the people of the community must have the manners, morals, understanding, respect and reverence for what is real and true, that is necessary for sustaining it, which is what's behind John Adams comment that:

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Our inalienable rights have and can only have real substance, by forming a community of people who have the manners, morals, and knowledge that equips them to understand their importance. Only in such a society that values each person, individually and in society together, can the concept of Liberty begin to arise, or long remain.

The 'lone wolf' image of liberty, is not only hogwash, it is a dialectical attack upon both Individuality and Liberty as such.

The third item required (in addition to law and morality), is one additional component - or rather recognizing its presence in the first two - that's needed in order to tie those abstractions of morality and law into the reality of day-to-day life, and that's the concept of Property, as understood in James Madison's brief essay on it.

The ability to respect another person's property - what they have property in - is what results from the people of a moral and lawful society recognizing and upholding the individual rights of its people. That tripartite awareness strengthens the bonds of trust between them, both protecting and encouraging their ability to make individual decisions within society, which enables them to enjoy living lives worth living.

Those are the blessing of liberty, and that is what enables happiness to become a normal aspiration in society, and a sound respect for law, morality, and property, are indispensable to that.

Liberty is a result of all of its working parts. That is the understanding that formed the bedrock of anglo-American law, which Lord Coke had expressed as :

"Everyman's home is his castle!"

, it's what enables it to have meaning, and it does so because the manners and morals of the people and their respect for the inseparability of individual rights/property rights, enables their laws to form the walls & battlements of each person's castle - but those battlements can only be as sound and sturdy as their understanding of the principles they rest upon.

It's at that level that those actions necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are understood to be inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence, and why our Bill of Rights forbid our government from making any laws - no matter their intent to aid or protect - that would infringe upon our individual ability to take those actions or to be secure in the property and relations that are the fruits of them (see the bullet points above... or James Madison's veto message).

For that reason I do not agree with a recently popular notion, especially popular amongst libertarians, that our Declaration of Independence would have been improved if Thomas Jefferson had used the phrase 'life, liberty, and property', instead of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Indeed, if our society, or any other, attempted to begin with (or revert us back to) the denuded notion of 'property' as an empirical factoid denoting physical possession alone (as utilitarians and 'classical liberals' like J.S. Mill would have it), rather than its being that crucial point which integrates the intersection of thought, action, and consequence, without which that society would be unlikely to lead to anything more than a crude and glittery form of barbarism which might blaze brightly, and briefly, but would surely burn itself out soon enough.

Liberty is not simply 'Individualism' (which in its narrow sense views human nature as being just as malleable as collectivism does, but on a smaller scale), and it's damn sure not 'Collectivism', it is what results from recognizing how individuals are able to live together in liberty, as a society which they all share in. Healthy individualism, simultaneously involves recognizing how people being able to act on their judgement, contributes to their community ('The Wealth of Nations'), and recognizes how the individual depends upon the community protecting their ability to do so - just as 'good walls make good neighbors', walls and neighbors give meaning and definition to each other - and in that sense, Liberty, is what results from a philosophical, societal, and religious union, of the proper relationship between individual and community - the one in the many.

The thoughtless savage - whether a Rousseauian savage, or J.S. Mill's savage 'individualist' - due to the paucity of their own conceptual development, never has and never will be able to engage in liberty, for as Edmund Burke said, 'their passions form their fetters'. They can know nothing more than the sparsest freedom of the moment, a moment that's always in peril, for if like Hume, they too cast their abstractions into the fire, then fire and strife becomes their sole destination.

That, all of that, is the basis for that real Good which a legitimate government should exist to uphold and preserve a judicial framework for. That sense of good is what is and should be common to all, and intentionally depriving some people of any part of it, diminishes the good - weakens the fortifications of everyone's castle - and cannot be 'for' a common good, or any 'good' at all.

Nothing can be said to be for the 'common good' or for the 'Greater Good', which begins by undermining, denying, ignoring or eliminating, the fundamental principles which make it possible for what is good, to become the common baseline which that society exists to preserve.

From that realization, should come a redoubled respect for what is real and true, and recognizing how central Truth must be to the enjoyment of liberty, comes additional reverence for it, which puts down sturdy roots for morality and conforming 'the pursuit of happiness' to them. There should also come a redoubled anger towards those who'd push the passive aggressive assault upon what is real and true that is relativism - 'your truth isn't my truth' - you should recognize the violent attack upon all you hold dear, which such sentiments as that undoubtedly are.

...notations from The Palmer Worm

That Common Sense view is not only the worldview that our Founders founded America upon, it is the worldview that enabled our Founders to found it. That worldview is what we need to fight to restore our understanding of, so that our society, laws, and governance, can endure - as Franklin said: 'A Republic, madam, if you can keep it!'.

Judge Ketanji Brown, lest you be judged

The law is a subject that I find fascinating, how it developed, and developed into principles that could uphold justice, and particularly how its philosophical concepts are best applied to the often messy realities of life. Whatever your opinion of my opinions on the subject might be, I've put in a great deal of time and effort over the years into writing numerous posts on law, justice, and diving into the history of how it has developed from its origins in ancient times, down to today, and where it's gone right and wrong along the way. I've dug into the records and opinions of early figures from Cicero to Edward Coke and  John Locke through our Founders, and down to the present day. I've looked into the often opposing opinions of judges nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States of America, from Thomas, Breyer, Garland, and how disturbing it is that legal pundits of 'the right', reflect the left turn taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. But with Judge Ketanji Brown... I can't muster the interest to dig much deeper than a couple of the remarks she gave at her confirmation hearings.

Her relation to Critical Race Theory shows why. Not because she supports its ideas, but because she embodies its meaning. She has repeatedly written and remarked about her admiration for the founders of Critical Race Theory, Derek Bell, and Kimberle Crenshaw, and on at least one occasion she's lectured to students about its relevance to guidelines in federal prison sentencing, citing CRT as one of the interesting factors that should be considered when considering sentencing:

"...I also try to convince my students that sentencing is just plain interesting on an intellectual level, in part because it melds together myriad types of law – criminal law, of course, but also administrative law, constitutional law, critical race theory, negotiations, and to some extent, even contracts. And if that’s not enough to prove to them that sentencing is [sic] a subject is worth studying, I point out that sentencing policy implicates and intersects with various other intellectual disciplines as well, including philosophy, psychology, history, statistics, economics, and politics..."

, and with the likes of that in her easily searchable record, this is what she had to say about CRT in her confirmation hearings, in one of her exchanges on the topic with Senator Cruz,

“In your understanding, what does critical race theory mean?” Cruz asked the judge.

“Senator, my understanding is that critical race theory is, it is an academic theory, that is about the ways in which race interacts with various institutions,’ Jackson responded. “It doesn’t come up in my work as a judge. It’s never something that I’ve studied or relied on, and it wouldn’t be something that I would rely on if I was on the Supreme Court.”

, for her now to claim that 'CRT doesn't apply', is not just a lie, but it is an application of Critical Race Theory in action, especially in regards to its disdain for what is objectively true, that we know something to be true because it conforms to reality. The CRT'r requires the use of scare quotes to refer to 'objective truth', and usually will no nearer to the subject than Epistemology, and then only to deride its degraded modern expression of 'epistemic adequacy', on their way to touting the root of Critical Race Theory's, in 'Social Epistemology', and CRT's foundational roots in Charles Mills, where 'truth' is socially constructed through 'narratives' that best serve the interests of the 'authentic' group.

Why does that matter? Because it means that there is truly no reason to give her reasoning any consideration, her words purposely have no relation to reality beyond how they might move her narrative 'forward'. The only 'truth' she values, is what pragmatically 'works' to manipulate the listener to advance her ideological narrative. Such a point of view is not compatible with our Constitution, or with Individual Rights under the Rule of Law, such a person as 'Judge' Brown, has no business being involved in the law, let alone having a seat on the Supreme Court.

I don't need her to tell me that she puts 'objective truth' in scare quotes, when she's demonstrated so well that she believes just that. And given that, I find it hard to imagine why anyone would bother asking her for the 'reasoning' behind her sentencing of this criminal or that. It advanced her narrative and undermined our society and the rule of law. End of story. That's CRT's purpose and interest, and that is exactly what Delgado & Stefancic meant when they wrote an explanation of it for High School level audience with ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001)':

"... critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law..."

IOW: There is no reason for you to think that her words bear some intentional relation to reality. Why would anyone give her the credit of thinking that they might?

The frosting on the cake, of course, was her meme worthy reply to Sen. Blackburn asking her if she could provide a definition of a woman.

"No. I can't. Not in this context, I'm not a biologist."

, what she meant of course, was 'Sorry, no, that wouldn't benefit the narrative of lies that I am advancing, and intend to continue advancing while on the SCOTUS'.

I'm sorry, but 'Liar' is a far too respectful term for such a person as that, but if you're willing to have the likes of that 'darken counsel with words that have no knowledge', go for it, but know that if you judge her acceptable, or choose to judge not at all, you will be judged for that, and not just by me.

If the first concern that you, like Joe Biden, have about 'Judge' Brown, is about what her race is and that she is a woman (whatever that is), then you are a racist and a sexist. If your main concern about her nomination, is which political party she aligns with and furthers, rather than being deeply concerned with how the implementation of her ideas through our courts will affect the Rule of Law in our nation, then you are an ally of lies and are serving the advancement of hatred, death, and destruction.

For me, as she has shown herself to be, at best, an unjust person, she has no business sitting on any court of law in the land, let alone the Supreme Court of the United States of America. If Brown is confirmed to the Supreme Court, as it seems likely she will be, the prospects of our children's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, will be that much the worse for it.

Political Crime & Punishment with Balking Heads

A friend & I who most often come to similar conclusions, differ on whether the Senate's trial against Donald Trump...is constitutional, or not. Though Morgan thinks that what the Leftists' are doing is "...stupid and dishonest...", he does think it is constitutional, and I most definitely do not think the Senate trial is constitutional - does he have a point? Well... let's have a look at the Impeachment Clauses themselves:

"Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7 The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried the Chief Justice shall preside; And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgement in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law."

So where does the disagreement come from? I think it has to do with where he and many others are beginning from - the Impeachment Clauses themselves. Why? Because, IMHO, they aren't the proper place to start such reasoning from, they're the last part of the process, and with a false start, you're as likely to make a false conclusion as a 'correct' one. Keep in mind here, that I'm looking only at how people can have an honest disagreement over the matter, as distinct from the dishonest and corrupt efforts of the Pro-Regressives (Left & Right) in the media and Democrat & Republican parties (if you can square their words & actions with law and justice... please, show me how), and they have no relation to those who, like Morgan, are honestly looking at the matter, and trying to determine what is, and is not, constitutional (and BTW, Morgan's got some questions that I'd love to see being taken up in the 'trial' this week).

So with that in mind, and attempting to use the impeachment clauses as our starting point, lets see if we can see what the veritable parser of clauses might see.

If you start with the impeachment clauses themselves, what do you have to go on? Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5, is pretty straight forward, and though historically every other congress has had the good sense of responsibility to at least pretend to intend to have honest hearings, and to bring reasonable charges, the Constitution doesn't say a word about their having to do that. Pelosi got the House of Representatives to impeach the then currently sitting president, again, and that's that. We can argue over whether it was wise to do so, but there's no real argument over whether it was constitutional of the House to do so. It was. It was also stupid and corrupt... but... that doesn't make it unconstitutional, it only shows what kind of thinking is representative of all too sizable a segment of the people living in America, today.

So then what? Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6, says that only the Senate has the power of trying impeachments, and that 'when the President of the United States is tried the Chief Justice shall preside' - do you think that that presents a problem to the earnest clause parser? No, I think, not really, as that too could easily go either way. For instance, if Parser #1 thought that such a line did actually settle matters, then Parser #2 could easily point out that that which refers to the current President, is just as simple a matter of pointing out that since the former president is no longer the current president, then the Chief Justice needn't preside. Sure, Parser #2 would then call out 'next!' and move on, as his fellow Parser's head explodes on the spot. If Parser #1 balks at that, Parser #2 might point to the last portion of the clause which says, that: "...no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.", and point out that it says 'person', and not President, right?! Balk & balk, and on they go. We'll leave them there, for now, and move on.

And so what about Clause 7? Here especially, from what I've seen of people honestly trying to parse this out, there seems to be an almost even-odds chance of them coming out one way, or the other. Clause Parser #1 will point out that "Judgement in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, AND disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States", and conclude that 'You can't remove someone who's not in office, amiright?' Right you are, Parser #1... but... then... Parser #2 will point out that 'disqualifications' from holding office, is still on the table. "No it's not!" Parser #1 will reply, 'didn't you see the 'AND'? They can only be disqualified after being removed from office!'. But, as Parser #2 will then point out, that 'and' is preceded by a comma, which makes it less a logically binding of 'This AND that', than an optional listing of 'You can choose from this, and this, and this, and this', indicating that those are options are all available, but optional.' and so forth, and so on the balking heads go.

See what I mean? Beginning from the Impeachment Clauses themselves, will lead honest people into balking heads, balking at this point, and that, and they can go no further - seriously, how could either hope to go any further than endlessly 'Yes!/No!'ing each another from there?

Now, as I said, I do not think that the senate can properly put former president Trump on trial before the senate, but I also do not think that that point can be made and understood, simply on the basis of a common sense reading and parsing of the clauses alone, because 'answers', one way or the other, are only too easy to find, and only too easy to feel satisfied with. And that's pretty much where my back & forth with Morgan was stuck at, as he was looking at the clauses themselves, and found no way to look beyond them when any of the above points were pointed out, such as the point that Trump was no longer in office, Morgan simply replied:

"... But, Trump *was* in office when he was impeached.
The question thereby becomes relevant: Is he so unsuitable for that office that he should never enter it again? I maintain this question is predicated on premises that are not only false, but laughable. But that doesn't make it unconstitutional. The Senate has a valid impeachment article. As I said in my blog post, if they vote to acquit and the House says "Hold up, we just thought of something else we're going to impeach him again"...that's a different conversation. That's a bill of attainder. Congress authorizes the House to act upon the office, not the person; and it authorizes the Senate to act upon the *article*. Both are expressly prohibited from acting upon the person.
And neither one is. The President Pro Tem is presiding over the trial, just as he would preside over the trial of any article impeaching someone other than the sitting President of the US..."

We went back & forth through several feet worth of comments, and not surprisingly, we got no further, as most of the honest arguments that I've seen over the matter, end up in irresolvable 'Yes!/No!'s, and no one can decisively say otherwise. Even Wapo (who I in no way consider to be an honest actor in this) admits: Can a former president be subject to an impeachment trial? The Constitution is murky. The experts (establishment) are split (Libertarianish), and not surprisingly, as more legal experts - the vast majority of whom have learned the law through only the modern positivist parsing of it - side with the Pro-Regressive (Left & Right)'s point of view.

IMHO, the honest differences involved stem from a different approach being taken to not just the law, but to thinking itself, which might be summed up as a tendency to go straight to analysis, in order to arrive at their interested ends, vs performing analysis only after having engaged in synthesis. Think... the modernist 'Critical Thinking' (which Morgan has a favorable view of) approach of looking at what's presented and immediately performing a logical analysis of it, vs the more traditionally reasoned approach, which I favor, of first seeking to understand what it is that's being discussed, checking and verifying the premises of the argument being presented, it's then and only then, if they check out, moving on to perform those logical comparisons needed to test the validity of the argument being presented.

So if we want to get beyond the endless 'Yes!/No!' of balking heads, we've got to begin by starting where we should have focused upon, at the beginning, rather than the end. And the first step of entering deeper into that argument, begins with the immediate surface level definition of the word, Impeachment, which is defined as:

'1.(especially in the US) a charge of misconduct made against the holder of a public office.'

, where the 'holder' is '2. a person who holds something'. That alone will get us no further and deeper in the matter than it did above... unless we begin looking beyond the text of the clauses themselves and into their meaning, do that, and, then we might begin to take notice of what's in the parenthesis at the start of #1:

"(especially in the US)..."

The alert reader will notice that that is an indication that a different approach to impeachment may exist elsewhere. Does that matter to us in the US? Well, No, and Yes, meaning that it doesn't matter what Canada, or Mexico may or may not define or use the word for today, but it does matter how it was elsewhere defined in what formed the basis of our Founder's understanding of Law, even and especially where they disagreed with that. To that end, I'd urge you to read through the links at the bottom of the page that I linked those clauses from, and especially to the last two, both of which came from early and distinguished commentators on our Constitution, the first from from William Rawls, which gives a fine overview of the thinking prevalent in our Founder's time, and the second and far more extensive and comprehensive link, is to former Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, whose commentaries on the Constitution formed the basis for Constitutional Law for nearly a century, until that point where our Law schools began to actively distance themselves from the thinking of our Founding Fathers, in the 1930's.

Why those apply especially to this part, 'especially in the US', is that they give more than a little history on how and why impeachment developed under the English Crown, and how they deliberately differed from that, and how, and more significantly, why, our Founders defined the process as differently from the English as they did, strictly confining charges of impeachment to 'civil officers' of the United States, including the president and vice-president, who could then be put on 'Political Trial' for, and have judgement rendered against them for 'Political Crimes'. And yes, there's an important reason for why I'm italicizing and underlining those terms, as they indicate an important and very clear distinction between private and civil life, and between both political and criminal charges.

First, there's the difference between Civil & Private life, that needs to be taken into account, as Justice Story puts it,

"... we speak of civil life, civil society, civil government, and civil liberty; in which it is nearly equivalent in meaning to political. It is sometimes used in contradistinction to criminal, to indicate the private rights and remedies of men, as members of the community, in contrast to those, which are public, and relate to the government...."

That distinction was an issue, under that English law which our Founders were deliberately seeking to improve upon. There, impeachment could be applied to a wide variety of person's, and our Founders had that very much in mind when writing the impeachment clauses as they did, as Joseph Story further notes,

"...In this respect, it differs materially from the law and practice of Great-Britain. In that kingdom, all the king's subjects, whether peers or commoners, are impeachable in parliament; though it is asserted, that commoners cannot now be impeached for capital offences, but for misdemeanours only. Such kind of misdeeds, however, as peculiarly injure the commonwealth by the abuse of high offices of trust, are the most proper, and have been the most usual grounds for this kind of prosecution in parliament. There seems a peculiar propriety, in a republican government at least, in confining the impeaching power to persons holding office. In such a government all the citizens are equal, and ought to have the same security of a trial by jury for all crimes and offences laid to their charge, when not holding any official character. To subject them to impeachment would not only be extremely oppressive and expensive, but would endanger their lives and liberties, by exposing them against their wills to persecution for their conduct in exercising their political rights and privileges. ..."[emphasis mine]

, and from that understanding of confining the impeaching power to persons holding office, goes to what the nature of Impeachment was understood by our Founders to mean, and to what they intended it to be used for, and to why it is that Impeachment is defined as: '1.(especially in the US) a charge of misconduct made against the holder of a public office'. Which is why I emphasize, that the impeachment clauses referred to some one person, who presently holds office.

Whatever we might say about the shoddy and rushed nature of the charges of impeachment that the House brought against President Trump, his term in office had not yet expired, and as the Constitution doesn't define the process any further, the charges of impeachment brought by the House are constitutional. But that's only the first step, and the second step comes as those charges are then taken up in a trial in the Senate (and what kind of trial is... and can... that be?), which is what we're going to be subjected to this week, which is occurring weeks after the expiration of the then president's term in office - which means that our Senate, in the name of We The People, will be subjecting a private person to a political trial, on charges of political crimes, and that, IMHO, is not at all acceptable, and is more in line with the practices of the British Crown, which is what our Founders were clearly seeking to distance us from, and for very good reasons, which we should respect and demand be upheld.

Some of the reasons for that,:

"...§ 783. As the offences, to which the remedy of impeachment has been, and will continue to be principally applied, are of a political nature, it is natural to suppose, that they will be often exaggerated by party spirit, and the prosecutions be sometimes dictated by party resentments, as well as by a sense of the public good. There is danger, therefore, that in cases of conviction the punishment may be wholly out of proportion to the offence, and pressed as much by popular odium, as by aggravated crime. ..."

, and,

"...§ 784. There is wisdom, and sound policy, and intrinsic justice in this separation of the offence, at least so far, as the jurisdiction and trial are concerned, into its proper elements, bringing the political part under the power of the political department of the government, and retaining the civil part for presentment and trial in the ordinary forum..."

The President of the United States - and not a private citizen who at one time may have held the office of the President of the United States, but the current office holder of that office - may be subjected to a political trial for political crimes, but a private citizen may not be subjected to political charges, over political crimes, in a political trial.

This is not and should not be, about Donald J. Trump - who is no longer our president and so cannot be removed from office - but about the dangerous notion of using the Constitution's Impeachment Clauses, to subject a private citizen to political crimes and punishments - not only do those charges no longer apply to him, but more importantly they do not under any circumstances, apply to any private citizens, and so the senate should not, must not, and cannot, constitutionally, try a private citizen on charges of impeachment. Those charges were constitutionally brought by the House, upon the public official who was then serving in office at that time, but who no longer is the President of the United States of America. Those are not charges that are suitable for being brought against American citizens, on charges which 'shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor'.

This does not mean that if a former president were suspected of having committed criminal acts while in office, that he would somehow be free from the long arm of the law. Take note of the last line of Clause 7, that "... the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law.", IOW if the person in question is believed to have committed criminal acts, they most definitely can still be charged with them after leaving public office, just as any private citizen might be, and if those charges are found to have merit, then that person can be tried, and if found guilty, they can be convicted, and can be sentenced for those crimes - but that can happen only because they are criminal crimes, in criminal court, and not political crimes, being tried in a political court.

As Justice Story pointed out, there is a clear distinction between private affairs and civil duties, and there is also a distinction between what the private citizen can count on when charged in a court of law, and what they might be made to face up to in a political process. A private citizen in a criminal trial enjoys the 'due process of law' and conviction by 'unanimous agreement' of a jury of their peers who believe them to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt - that's not the case in an impeachment trial before the Senate, where it requires only that a 2/3 majority of sitting senators, who can hardly be seen as 'the peers', of that private citizen. The United States Senate, although constrained by laws, is not a court of law, and an impeachment trial is a political process applied only to members (present tense) of our government. The Senate has no power to try private individuals, and what they are now pursuing has far more in common with a British form of impeachment, or bill of attainder, or with a legislature singling out individuals for 'trial' and conviction... than it does our Founders political form of impeachment, and which would be a major constitutional no-no.

For those reasons, what the nature of Impeachment is (as applies to an office holder), for 'political' and not criminal charges, there is a distinction between an Office Holder, and what all office holders immediately revert to on leaving office, the resuming of their fully private status as private citizens, who are due the “privileges” and “immunities” as were later re-asserted in the 14th Amendment. The former 45th president is now a private citizen, and we should not, for any reason, be seeking to bring that private citizen, or any other, up on political charges. Period. If you have reason to believe that he's guilty of a crime, then charge him, try him, and even convict him, but that must be done as with a private citizen being brought up on criminal charges. In no way, shape or form, should a private citizen, be brought up on political charges, and tried in a political court. Ever.

NO.

A thought might have occurred to you here, as it did to Rawls, and to Story, and most others, which are longstanding questions which have not been resolved, such as:

'What happens if the president resigns as the trial begins, what happens? Can the impeachment trial continue?'

Would that be an escape? My answer to that, is no; if the person that is serving the political office of president, is in office when a trial is begun, then his resignation would amount to an evasion of lawful charges, and should be brushed aside - if President Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon after he resigned, he could have been tried in the senate on the charges that the House was presumably about to bring against him, as the prerequisites for the trial were met in that he was in office, and his term would've been active at the time of a Senate trial, and his resignation would have amounted to an attempt to evade trial, and so would have been in that context, invalid. But if the person proposed to be tried for 'political crimes', is not in political office at the start of the trial, because his elected term of office had concluded, then the conditions for a political trial are not met, and that trial is not appropriate.

Yes, the points that Morgan and others are making, do have a point - but only if you go on nothing more than the text of the Constitution alone. Yes, anyone who is capable of reading and using logic, can make the point that the constitution doesn't explicitly say that the President has to be in office, but such a 'logical' and legalistic parsing as that is, IMHO, an extraordinarily dangerous road to stroll down. In issues of power, if the rules defining it are unclear, then the ability to wield that power should default to the usage that is more restrictive towards governmental powers, than to those of private citizens. If you're not sure why, maybe you should think about the differing interpretations of the Commerce Clause, and of all of the enumerated powers of our Constitution's Article 1, Section 8, where similar Clause Parsers of the past and still in the painfully ever present moment, have enabled our government to insert itself into every aspect of our lives. Think of that same murkiness of interpretation being applied when it comes to the action of trying private citizens for political crimes, and by political rules.

For these 'clausal parsing's' and for many other reasons, I am most definitely not a 'Textualist', or of a 'Original Intent' school of thought, because by their similar natures, they also soon stray into equally stunted views of the law, leaving and exposing easy loopholes, which soon lead to evading the deeper meaning that the Constitution was written to express, and to secure; and while it is true that logic is a necessary component of constitutional thought, it is not a sufficient one. Logical comparisons are not a valid starting point, IMHO, as was widely understood up until the last century; instead, the proper starting point had been understood to begin with first asking whether the premises which those logical comparisons are to be performed upon, are true, or not. If not, there are no parsings to apply or logical comparisons to perform, and so no logical conclusion to be pretended to be arrived at, as the journey was cancelled when its premises were found to be untrue. Only after a successful step is completed, should we proceed on to the next step, and properly analyzing the issue requires beginning by looking at what the matter itself is, and then at what the processes, plural, involved are, and only after the matter is found to apply, and each successive step is properly completed, should we come to the part where judgements might be rendered, if found guilty.

Our Constitution was developed not out of ideological schools of 'law', but as the concept and purpose of Law naturally developed into (pre-American) constitutional structures through the concepts of natural law that it was later derived from, and major decisions cannot be made upon the basis of particular clauses without reference to the whole, but only with the full meaning of the law in mind which that clause expresses a portion of. In this particular case of impeachment, that process begins with the concept and history of impeachment itself, whose purpose is to remove an unfit person from political office, and as it was developed in America, to apply to political actors in political office. To accept that it is ok to impeach a private citizen, to try them, and to assign judgement upon them, for the purpose of preventing them from seeking political office in the future, is not only a case of the ends justifying the means, but is a matter of our government using our political processes to limit the available political actions and thoughts of American citizens. Such an action is not, and must not, be tolerated to be, in any sense, justified. 

If the term of the person serving in the political office of president, has not expired when a trial is begun, then the prerequisites for the trial are met, and any political penalties are appropriate to be applied to them, if they are found guilty. But if the political term of a person proposed to be tried for 'political crimes', has expired, and they are not in political office at the time of the start of the trial, then the conditions for holding a political trial are not met, and that trial is not, in any way, appropriate, allowable, justifiable, or constitutional.

The 45th president was impeached twice, and was tried in the senate for it once, and as his term in office has expired, he can no longer be constitutionally be tried for impeachment as an office holder. If someone wants to bring criminal charges, and can produce just cause for them, they may do so, but in no way do any aspects of impeachment apply to the former President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.

I'll leave you with Joseph Story's summary, his opinion, and his realization that the Constitution itself doesn't settle the matter conclusively, that, sadly, is up to us... and judging from our current state of affairs, I think that We The People are the very last ones who should be trusted with the matter.

§ 801. As it is declared in one clause of the constitution, that "judgment, in cases of impeachment, shall not extend further, than a removal from office, and disqualification to hold any office of honour, trust, or profit, under the United States;" and in another clause, that "the president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanours;" it would seem to follow, that the senate, on the conviction, were bound, in all cases, to enter a judgment of removal from office, though it has a discretion, as to inflicting the punishment of disqualification. If, then, there must be a judgment of removal from office, it would seem to follow, that the constitution contemplated, that the party was still in office at the time of the impeachment. If he was not, his offence was still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice. And it might be argued with some force, that it would be a vain exercise of authority to try a delinquent for an impeachable offence, when the most important object, for which the remedy was given, was no longer necessary, or attainable. And although a judgment of disqualification might still be pronounced, the language of the constitution may create some doubt, whether it can be pronounced without being coupled with a removal from office. There is also much force in the remark, that an impeachment is a proceeding purely of a political nature. It is not so much designed to punish an offender, as to secure the state against gross official misdemeanors. It touches neither his person, nor his property; but simply divests him of his political capacity.

...§ 803. It is not intended to express any opinion in these commentaries, as to which is the true exposition of the constitution on the points above stated. They are brought before the learned reader, as matters still sub judice, the final decision of which may be reasonably left to the high tribunal, constituting the court of impeachment, when the occasion shall arise....

The situation of 'when the occasion shall arise', has indeed arisen, and I'm very skeptical about whether We The People are going to rise to the occasion of it. We'll see.