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Law: We the People
The Gettysburg Address was a work of genius.
The Gettysburg Address begins by telling Americans what they are devoted to and ends by saying what the People want is entirely up to the People.
You can’t have both.
But the Address is so poetic that I am the first person in the intervening century and a half to state this self-contradiction.
“Government FOR the people and BY the People” does not square with a republic “dedicated to the proposition.” If the people are dedicated to a proposition, their choice is already made.
The People are fathered. They ask, “What do we want?”
They then say, “We are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
So the question would be not what the people WANT, but how to make all men equal.
Which explains why the immigration problem is insoluble for Americans.
Government by the people would say that immigration would be limited to those who are good for the people, meaning the people already here.
But if you are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and that is your goal, what is good for the people already here doesn’t mean a damned thing.
There is nothing unusual about a person with two such beliefs. He is perfectly capable of welcoming a Mexican as a fellow human being and then killing him when this mind shifts to the “What I want” mode.
It is a condition called schizophrenia.
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