Government Mandate Quotes

Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

I’m not in favor of the government mandating a prayer in school because our country was founded on the fact that no particular religious faith would have ascendance over or preferential treatment over any other.

He laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.

King Arthur: I am your king. Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you. King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then? [Angelic music plays... ] King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

He(Prophet Muhammad) laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.

Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Marriage today is the outcome government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all mandate for how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives.

Free-loading at emergency rooms—mandated by government—makes being uninsured a viable option.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.

Church controls what government doesn’t,” Mark elaborated. “And government controls churches through the 501(3)(C) tax exemption. Any church that fails to follow government mandate dictating what they can say and who to support loses their tax- exempt status. The churches have become the ‘great whore’ as the Bible6 predicted.

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. [Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968.]

It is estimated that nearly half a billion people tune in for China Central Television’s seven p.m. news hour. The fact that all local stations in China are ordered by government mandate to carry the program likely has much to do with this high number, but frequent announcements that the president would be making an important national address this evening ensured even higher ratings than normal.

Before OkCupid profiles became mandated by the Galactic Government, the only way to find a mate was to self-induce brain-damage and beg strangers for sex in public. The fact that anyone ever achieved sexual congress during these dark times is a remarkable testament to man's will to survive.

To emphasize how truly backward our society is...let's finish with a little quiz. Let's do it like Jeopardy. In 1990, this government required companies to give a new mother a year's leave at 90% pay. Answer: What was Sweden? This country provided nurseries for most children over eighteen months. Answer: What was Sweden? Nearly half of the children under three in this country were in publicly financed nurseries, and nearly 95% of children three to six were (and are). Answer: What is Denmark? In this country, 95% of children aged three to five are in preschool. Answer: What is France? This country provides care for one quarter of children under three in wholly or partially subsidized nurseries. Answer: What is France? In 1984, this country gave workers twelve weeks of maternity leave with pay. Answer: What is Brazil? (Yes, Brazil!) This country mandated eight weeks of maternity leave WITH PAY. Answer: What is Kenya? (You heard us, Kenya!) This country provided none of these things; instead, to help mothers and small children, its magazines featured profiles of rich celebrity moms who could show women how to do it all. Answer: What was the United States?

A nation could choose to observe socialist tenets. Communism meant rigid government control—people had no choice other than to comply, and government mandate rather than personal accomplishment determined the course of their lives. Peoples Temple socialism was intended to change hearts through example, not coercion.

Redemption is not just about being saved *from* the consequences of sin, it is also about being saved *to* something- to resume the task for which we were originally created. And what was that task? In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." "Be fruitful and multiply", means to develop the social world: build families, churches, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, "subdue the earth" means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the "cultural mandate" because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures and build civilizations- nothing less.

A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.

Government is the human attempt to mandate goodness and ensure fairness. Yet there is only one place where goodness is born, and that is in the human heart. There is only one place where fairness can be conceptualized, and that is in the human mind. There is only one place where love can be experienced truly, and that is in the human soul.

Laws continue to be enacted, and the regulatory environment has become more complex due to unacceptable conduct remediation. Consequently, entities continue to be compelled to demonstrate compliance with legal mandates through documented assurance assessments.

In the world God wills work, marriage, government, and church, and God wills all these, each in its own way, through Christ, toward Christ, and in Christ. God has placed human beings under all these mandates, not only each individual under one or the other, but all people under all four. There can be no retreat, therefore, from a “worldly” into a “spiritual” “realm.” The practice of the Christian life can be learned only under these four mandates of God.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.

Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.

Remember again the principle: We will never be over those things that God has set under us until we learn to be under those things that God has placed over us. There is strength through surrender. Are you under the Word of God? Is the Bible your mandate for life? Are you loving it, reading it, obeying it, and living it? Are you consciously filled with the Holy Spirit? Have you yielded every part of the temple of your body to him? Are you grieving him in any way? Are you graciously submitting to those human authorities that God has set over you: in the home, in the church, in civil government, and in the workplace? Have you made Jesus Christ the absolute Lord over everything in your life?

-The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then I would rather be wrong then to be numbered among the majority of the so-called righteous people whose only mandate seems to be controlling people. If a government is against its people expressing themselves, then that government is obviously hiding something criminal from its people and the world, and it is therefore afraid of being exposed and losing whatever power it has.

Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.

The recoognition of a right to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure the rights are too tepid for a morally viable society.

The government had a reverse mandate not to do the very things they tried to do,’ cross-bench senator Nick Xenophon told us. ‘He put an albatross around his neck from the very beginning.

No government, no multinational corporation, no agency at all could counter the mandates of a unified world community. And that is why so much energy and resources are invested in division and separation.

Come and take it” used to be an edgy patriotic dare referring to the Second Amendment. Now it’s lamely and effeminately tweeted out by those who don’t want government to ever end their futile mask mandates.

Overt bigotry, Jim Crow laws and policies, government-mandated discrimination, and the belief in black inferiority have virtually disappeared. Laissez-faire racism, instead, involves persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks for their own conditions, appeals to meritocracy, and resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate America’s racist social conditions and institutions. Government is formally race neutral and committed to antidiscrimination, and most white Americans prefer a more volitional and cultural, as opposed to inherent and biological, interpretation of blacks’ disadvantage status.

As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.

To take another example, with regard to healthcare, the left suggests that their entire goal is to make healthcare available to everyone. But they don’t mandate that a certain percentage of the population go to medical school. That’s because in order for government to guarantee a product’s availability, the government must either hire workers or force workers to get into a given industry. The government hiring workers would require paying money for doctors – and the left argues that doctors already make too much money. And the left won’t argue openly for what they would prefer: forcing people to practice medicine for patients deemed worthy by the government. Unless you are willing to force people using the law to go to medical school, you cannot have a successful universal healthcare system. That’s what they’re finding out in Britain, Canada, and Israel – all countries in which private medicine is on the rise, legally or illegally, outside government auspices.

They want to keep the government ‘out of our bedrooms.’ What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar.

Though taken for granted today, making milk safe and cleaning up water supplies were herculean efforts, involving massive investments of public dollars and new laws mandating that farmers, milk distributors, and other private actors change their behavior. No city required milk pasteurization at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the early 1920s, virtually all the largest cities did, and many offered “milk stations” where poorer residents could buy clean milk. Infant mortality plummeted.25

It is possible. It just doesn’t happen enough. Private industry—with its incredible ability to move fast and efficiently—in partnership with government, with its broad mandate, is perhaps the most powerful force we have for positive change in society.

Politicians are busy changing positions of people who are stealing or people who are corrupt, but are not changing the behavior of stealing or behavior of corruption. It seems like stealing from the poor people to enrich themselves or to be corrupt is their core mandate.

Article 2 of the Mandate provided for self-governing institutions; however, the context makes clear that this applied only to the yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine was called, while the Palestinian majority was consistently denied access to such institutions.

Consider some basic economic truths. If the government mandates that workers who are earning $7.25 must, overnight, be paid $10.10 an hour (or even $15.00 per hour) those new dollars must originate from some source. For example, if a fast-food restaurant that employs twenty individuals is required to pay some or all of them close to 30 percent more per hour, it must account for those dollars somewhere. The restaurant can try to sell more food, it can increase the cost of food, it can cut the hours of its employees, it can hire fewer workers, or it can lay off those currently employed.

The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. Remember this when you hear people blame the free market for the excesses of the sub-prime bubble.

The Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet’s revelation, peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary...Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.

If the Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.19

As the Model S neared completion, he got in the car one day and pulled down the passenger-side visor. “What the fuck is this?” he asked, pointing to the government-mandated warning label about air bags and how to disable them when a child is in the passenger seat. Dave Morris explained that the government required them. “Get rid of them,” Musk ordered. “People aren’t stupid. These stickers are stupid.

Are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments slaughtered an estimated ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE in the 20th century? The commies beat Hitler 20-1. Their unbounded love for ‘humanity’ didn’t seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism.

Power is certainly important, particularly in dictatorships, in places where constitutions, laws, unwritten rules, traditions and understandings don’t count. But in a healthy democracy, power is a surprisingly limited element. And the unwritten conventions, understandings, forms of respect for how things are done, for how citizens relate to government and to each other, are surprisingly important. Why? Because if democracy is only power, then what we are left with is a system of deep distrust. Why? Because if only power matters – even if it is the result of an election – then the government feels that it has a mandate to do whatever it wants; that the law is there principally to serve power. If democracy is only about winning power and using it, then it has been deformed into a denial of society and of the idea of responsible citizenship.

The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolized the top offices in the Mandate government and excluded qualified Arabs;46 they censored the newspapers, banned political activity when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments.

At the same time, I began to question the efficacy of government for improving human lives. I came to suspect that taxation, restrictions, mandates, subsidies, licenses, tariffs, bailouts, prohibitions and all the rest, even if well-intended, usually protect monopoly, cause recession, burden the poor, enforce racial discrimination (as I learned from Jennifer Roback, the Jim Crow laws were legislation), obstruct education, and so on.

The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.

For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future. As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.

Peacekeeping is a soldier-intensive business in which the quality of troops matters as much as the quantity. It is not just soldiering under a different color helmet; it differs in kind from anything else soldiers do. The are medals and rewards (mainly, the satisfaction of saving lives), but there are also casualties. And no victories. It is not a risk -free enterprise. In Bosnia, mines, snipers, mountainous terrain, extreme weather conditions, and possible civil disturbances were major threats that had to be dealt with from the outset of the operation. Dag Hammarskjold once remarked, "Peacekeeping is a job not suited to soldiers, but a job only soldiers can do." Humanitarianism conflicts with peacekeeping and still more with peace enforcement. The threat of force, if it is to be effective, will sooner or later involve the use of force. For example, the same UN soldiers in Bosnia under a different command and mandate essentially turned belligerence into compliance over night, demonstrating that a credible threat of force can yield results. Unlike, UNPROFOR, the NATO-led Implementation Force was a military success and helped bring stability to the region and to provide an "environment of hope" in which a nation can be reborn. It is now up to a complex array of international civil agencies to assist in putting in place lasting structures for democratic government and the will of the international community to ensure a lasting peace.

The Problem” always resulted in suicide. Fox News had reported the word so often that they were now using synonyms. “Self-destruction.” “Self-immolation.” “Hari-kari.” One anchorman described it as “personal erasing,” a phrase that did not catch on. Instructions from the government were reprinted on the screen. A national curfew was mandated. People were advised to lock their doors, cover their windows, and, above all, not to look outside. On the radio, music was replaced entirely with discussions. A blackout, Malorie thinks. The world, the outdoors, is being shut down. Nobody has answers. Nobody knows what is going on. People are seeing something that drives them to hurt others. To hurt themselves. People are dying. But why?

When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead. This is true in corporations, nonprofits, universities, governments, faith communities, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major scandal fueled by cover-ups, you’ll see this same pattern. And the restitution and resolution of cover-ups almost always happens in the wilderness—when one person steps outside their bunker and speaks their truth.

Would the fate of China have been different if Stilwell had been allowed to reform the army and create an effective combat force of 90 divisions? ... This assumption might have been true if Asia were clay in the hands of the West. But the"regenerative idea," stilwell's or another's, could not be imposed from the outside. The Kuomintang military structure could not be reformed without reform of the system from which it sprang and, as Stillwell himself recognized, to reform such a system "it must be torn to pieces." In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have tried. Stilwell's mission was America's supreme try in China. He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less: he never slackened and he never gave up. Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought. Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later. China was a problem for which there was no American solution. The American effort to sustain the status quo could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular support. It could not hold up a husk nor long delay the cyclical passing of the mandate of heaven. In the end, China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.

Power is certainly important, particularly in dictatorships, in places where constitutions, laws, unwritten rules, traditions and understandings don’t count. But in a healthy democracy, power is a surprisingly limited element. And the unwritten conventions, understandings, forms of respect for how things are done, for how citizens relate to government and to each other, are surprisingly important. Why? Because if democracy is only power, then what we are left with is a system of deep distrust. Why? Because if only power matters – even if it is the result of an election – then the government feels that it has a mandate to do whatever it wants; that the law is there principally to serve power. If democracy is only about winning power and using it, then it has been deformed into a denial of society and of the idea of responsible citizenship. And that is the increasingly common characteristic of government, even in democracies. Only power matters. This is partly the outcome of government being de-intellectualized.

The political forces arrayed on the side of capital have always wanted to treat labor as a commodity, driving down costs and demanding the freedom to move production to countries with the lowest wages. They have tried to prevent workers from forming unions and look for opportunities to break unions once they are formed. They have also tried to prevent governments from regulating working hours and conditions, imposing minimum wages or mandating family leave. On the other side, the workers have organized into unions, braving numerous bloody confrontations, in order to be able to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions, and over the years have won a number of important concessions, such as laws that prohibit child labor and provide for a regulated work week, safer working conditions and so on. The heyday of this era was in the 1950s, when an assembly-line autoworker in Detroit was able to earn enough to afford a house and a car, raise a family and then retire comfortably. That era is now over.

Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

Until recently, three unspoken principles have guided the arena of genetic diagnosis and intervention. First, diagnostic tests have largely been restricted to gene variants that are singularly powerful determinants of illness—i.e., highly penetrant mutations, where the likelihood of developing the disease is close to 100 percent (Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease). Second, the diseases caused by these mutations have generally involved extraordinary suffering or fundamental incompatibilities with “normal” life. Third, justifiable interventions—the decision to abort a child with Down syndrome, say, or intervene surgically on a woman with a BRCA1 mutation—have been defined through social and medical consensus, and all interventions have been governed by complete freedom of choice. The three sides of the triangle can be envisioned as moral lines that most cultures have been unwilling to transgress. The abortion of an embryo carrying a gene with, say, only a ten percent chance of developing cancer in the future violates the injunction against intervening on low-penetrance mutations. Similarly, a state-mandated medical procedure on a genetically ill person without the subject’s consent (or parental consent in the case of a fetus) crosses the boundaries of freedom and noncoercion. Yet it can hardly escape our attention that these parameters are inherently susceptible to the logic of self-reinforcement. We determine the definition of “extraordinary suffering.” We demarcate the boundaries of “normalcy” versus “abnormalcy.” We make the medical choices to intervene. We determine the nature of “justifiable interventions.” Humans endowed with certain genomes are responsible for defining the criteria to define, intervene on, or even eliminate other humans endowed with other genomes. “Choice,” in short, seems like an illusion devised by genes to propagate the selection of similar genes.

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

The point is simple: The feds can mandate a higher wage, but some jobs don’t produce enough economic value to bear the increase. If government could transform unskilled entry-level positions into middle-income jobs, the Soviet Union would be today’s dominant world economy. Spain and Greece would be thriving.

The modern left proves how prescient the Framers were. The left’s class warfare strategies mean that election campaigns are actually conducted against the Constitution’s safeguards of freedom. Supporters of the Constitution’s federalist framework of limited central government and its protection of liberty and property rights are demagogued as enemies of social justice. Statist candidates construe electoral victories as a mandate to undo constitutional constraints that impede their authority to do “the right thing,” as Obama puts it. Winning office becomes a license for lawlessness.

each is inherently expansive and evangelistic.” The abortion mandate firestorm isn’t dying down – and it shouldn’t. This is government overreach at its worst – and is a direct assault on the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom and conscience.

for the threat embodied in the HHS Mandate. “If the federal government can force not only Catholic institutions, but those of many other faith communities, and small businesses, and family-owned firms to

Because salmon have both united and divided a people, they present us with an opportunity to think ethically about this place, Seattle. The challenge, though, is to move beyond the habit of trying to dominate nature to the more feasible goal of governing ourselves, and to tame our reflexive impulse to put ideas into neat categories. An evolving ethic of place, like any ethic, is neither a divine commandment nor doctrinaire mandate. It is a product of history and thus it is ever changing. It must be, in other worse, a deliberate and enduring dialogue between humans and their environments.

Two of the most basic roles of government are to create a realm of safety and a realm of prosperity. When governmental leaders use their position for personal gain, it amounts to prostituting their charisma for themselves. Excellence is found in doing our best for the sake of others.

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.

In the postwar period, democratic politics was transformed not only by the switch to oil, but by the development of two new methods of governing democracies, both made possible by the growing use of energy from oil. One of these was an arrangement for managing the value of money and limiting the power of financial speculation, which was said to have destroyed interwar democracy – a system built with the pipelines, oil agreements and oligarchies that organised the supply and pricing of oil. It was accompanied by the construction of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the policing of the postwar Middle East that replaced the need for mandates, trusteeships, development programmes and other scaffoldings for imperial power. The other new mode of governing democracies was the manufacture of ‘the economy’ – an object whose experts began to displace democratic debate and whose mechanisms set limits to egalitarian demands.

Disguising this edifying process in the United States are the handi-capitalists in nominally “private” institutions – from Wall Street money-shufflers and government-guaranteed mortgage hustlers to corn-state ethanol farmers and Silicon Valley solar shills – that are dependent on public handouts and mandates for their success.

Distrust of executive agencies leads to demands for more legal checks on administration, which reduces the quality and effectiveness of government. At the same time, demand for government services induces Congress to impose new ========== America in Decay (Unknown) - Your Highlight at location 159-160 | Added on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 20:39:14 mandates on the executive, which often prove difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. Both processes lead to a reduction of bureaucratic autonomy, which in turn leads to rigid, rulebound, uncreative, and incoherent government.

The UN Security Council is the only body empowered to authorise the international use of military force. Australia commonly sends troops abroad under UN mandates, in recent years to East Timor and Afghanistan. So why would Australia not want its voice heard at the table that shapes the mandates? Or are we only good enough to risk our troops’ lives to carry out missions designed by others? This is an intolerable idea, and Abbott’s response was a remarkable act of oppositionism. The choice was between seeing the government fail and the nation succeed. The Abbott opposition preferred to see the government fail.

All told, three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus bill—were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future.

Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel their supposedly democratic government no longer truly reflects their interests but is under the control of a variety of shadowy elites. What is ironic and peculiar is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic.

The United States is trapped in a bad equilibrium. Because Americans historically distrust the government, they typically aren’t willing to delegate to the government authority to make decisions in the manner of other democratic societies. Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which confirms people’s original distrust. Under these circumstances, they are reluctant to pay higher taxes, which they feel the government will waste. But while resources are not the only, or even the main, source of government inefficiency, without them the government won’t function properly. Hence distrust of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He might have remained a Judicial were it not for a growing schism that began to eat away at the department’s long-held and nonpartisan mandate to keep the galaxy free of conflict. On the one side stood Tarkin and others who were committed to enforcing the law and safeguarding the Republic; on the other, a growing number of dissidents who had come to view the Republic as a galactic disease. They detested the influence peddling, the complacency of the Senate, and the proliferation of corporate criminality. They saw the Jedi Order as antiquated and ineffectual, and they yearned for a more equitable system of government—or none at all. As the clashes between Republic and Separatist interests escalated in frequency and intensity, Tarkin would find himself pitted against many of the Judicials with whom he had previously served. The galaxy was fast becoming an arena for ideologues and industrialists, with the Judicials being used to settle trade disputes or to further corporate agendas.

And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece’s shadow economy—unreported income hidden from the tax authorities—constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP.24 A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve.

Luntz used polls, focus groups, and “instant response dial sessions” to perfect the language of health-care attacks and then tested the lines on average Americans in St. Louis, Missouri. Out of these sessions, Luntz compiled a seminal twenty-eight-page confidential memo in April warning that there was no groundswell of public opposition to Obama’s health-care plan at that point; in fact, there was a groundswell of public support. By far the most effective approach to turning the public against the program, Luntz advised, was to label it a “government takeover.” He wrote, “Takeovers are like coups. They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.” “I did create the phrase ‘government takeover’ of health care. And I believe it,” Luntz maintained, noting too that “it gave the Republicans the weapon they needed to defeat Obama in 2010.” But most experts found the pitch patently misleading because the Obama administration was proposing that Americans buy private health insurance from for-profit companies, not the government. In fact, progressives were incensed that rather than backing a “public option” for those who preferred a government insurance program, the Obama plan included a government mandate that individuals purchase health-care coverage, a conservative idea hatched by the Heritage Foundation to stave off nationalized health care. Luntz’s phrase was so false that it was chosen as “the Lie of the Year” by the nonpartisan fact-checking group PolitiFact. Yet while a rear guard of administration officials tried lamely to correct the record, Luntz’s deceptive message stuck, agitating increasingly fearful and angry voters, many of whom flocked to Tea Party protests.

Scripture tells us to submit to governing authorities. That’s a valid command—most of the time. However, when we fear God, there comes a time when we must resist human government and yield to a higher authority. Government is given to protect the good and to punish the bad (see Romans 13:3). When government protects the bad and punishes the good, then our submission to legal authority may have to end. This becomes the source of persecution for righteousness’ sake.

A recent attempt to further strip the Danish people of their freedom of individual choice can be seen with the Danish socialist government mandates in 2012 that proposed a law enforcing Danish parents to read bedtime stories to their children.

government, and ceremonial activities. They must also prepare themselves for the bigger decisions, greater risks and uncertainties, and longer time spans that are inherent to this leadership level. They must always be cognizant of what Wall Street wants them to achieve in terms of the financial scorecard. Group managers can’t take a specialist mentality into a realm that mandates holistic thinking. They need to evolve their perspective to the point that they see issues in the broadest possible terms. We should also point out that some smaller companies don’t have a group manager passage. In these companies, CEOs usually undertake a group manager’s responsibilities.

The church will really change society for the better only when individual believers make their chief concern their own spiritual maturity, which means living in a way that honors God’s commands and glorifies His name. Such a concern inherently includes a firm grasp on Scripture and an understanding that its primary mandate to us is to know Christ and proclaim His gospel. A godly attitude coupled with godly living makes the saving message of the gospel credible to the unsaved.

One expert has pointed out a connection between drop in home cooking and the United States’ soaring obesity rate. This is why in the United Kingdom, where obesity rates are closing in on those of Americans’, the British government recently passed a law mandating secondary-school students to attend cooking classes5.

abortion will continue. Many opponents claim to be taking the moral high ground. However, by depriving them of their civil rights, opposition to abortion hurts women and is thus unethical. It condemns women to mandatory motherhood. This attitude is not new. The systematic maltreatment of women has been institutionalized by governments and religions for several millennia.56 57 58 The clarity and cogency of the argument against abortion should be sufficient to sway public opinion. However, over the past four decades, this has not been the case. Opponents of abortion have resorted to eight murders,59,60 arson, firebombing,61 intimidation of women and clinicians,62 governmental intrusion into the physician-patient relationship,63 imposition of obstacles that deter and delay abortion, and increased costs.64,65 A broad campaign of deception and chicanery, including crisis pregnancy centers and disinformation sites on the Internet,66 has influenced decisions about abortion and its safety. Without the smokescreen about abortion safety, the ongoing attack on women and health care providers might be recognized for what it is: misogyny directed against our wives, sisters, and daughters. Ironically, the same political conservatives who oppose “big government” and its interference in our daily lives are sponsoring anti-abortion legislation mandating more intrusion of government into the private lives—and bodies—of American women. While the ethical dimensions of abortion will continue to be debated, the medical science is incontrovertible: legal abortion has been a resounding public-health success.18,19 The development of antibiotics, immunization, modern contraception, and legalized abortion all stand out as landmark public-health achievements of the Twentieth Century.

So the great democratic experiment that was the Janata government began with a lack of democracy. JP and Acharya Kripalani said they would choose the next prime minister. They ruled out anybody from the Jan Sangh because it had the Right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS antecedents. They ruled out Charan Singh who was regarded as a difficult customer. But more significantly, they ruled out Jagjivan Ram, the leader of India’s Harijans, the man whose defection had swung the election for the Janata Party. Jagjivan Ram announced that this was part of the traditional prejudice against Harijans. And who knows? Perhaps he was right. In

Among those Athenian values and principles are: • Self-understanding is the basis for authentic living. • We must question “conventional wisdom” to verify the truth for ourselves, rather than rely on tradition. • The individual has moral and spiritual authority over his or her own “soul.” • Free speech, open dissent, and questioning of authority are essential to a healthy society. • To be most productive, thinking should be disciplined by logic and personal experience. • Our human dignity mandates that we rule ourselves through participation in constitutional government. • A sound economy should have due respect for private property, markets that work, and individual enterprise. • The state’s military powers should be under civilian control. • We should value and appreciate the body, physical fitness, and the enjoyment of our sexuality.

Time Magazine believed that due to public opinion the President had been given a “mandate” which he could “translate into foreign policy.” Shockingly, nothing changed in foreign policy. No move was made to liberalize the quota system. Nor did the President instigate an intervention-based coalition of nations. And so, without any serious international interference, Hitler’s government continued along its chosen path.

Like the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, the Patriot Act and related federal legislation enacted in the wake of 9/11 have provided a legal framework for the war on terror. Secret trials were mandated for foreign nationals whom the federal authorities sought to deport—the real targets, of course, were men and women from Muslim countries—and the evidence on which the government relied could be withheld from their attorneys. Of the 13,740 foreigners who were prosecuted under these new laws, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “not a single one of these individuals was ever publicly charged with terrorism.

…you see, the Catholic Church is faulty. It is so entrenched in the doctrine of 'faith above all else' that should God himself come to us, and tell us that a certain belief or practice the Church had mandated was incorrect, he would be unable to persuade those who govern the faithful of his veracity. If he sat across from you in this very chair and said 'I am the one and only true God', the average Catholic would reply 'Get thee behind me Satan'. Everyone seems so very sure God has no desire to talk directly to them. The very tenet binding us to the Church, denies us true contact and understanding of God. People had forgotten, myself included, that God speaks through the Church, and that the Church is not God—that is a distinction which must be remembered at all cost.

An important piece of evidence against him was his possession of a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique Portatif, an anthology including many articles attacking the Catholic Church.* The young nobleman was sentenced to the customary punishment—being burned—after having his right hand cut off and his tongue cut out; Voltaire’s book was burned along with him. The defendant refused to confess or name any other young men who had participated—even after being tortured for the final hour before his execution (again, as mandated by law), and the sentence was then carried out. The clerics and government magistrates, after cutting off the hand as specified in the sentence, showed unexpected mercy by not cutting out the young nobleman’s tongue before the auto da fé.†

But the inspired writers, early in Old Testament history, recognized there is one exception or limitation to our divinely mandated obligation of civil obedience: whenever an ordinance or official command would require that we disobey God’s will or His Word. The

It was the beginning of his personal crusade to make life easier for the more than forty million disabled Americans. By 1990 he had moved Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that mandated changes in public buildings, accommodations, and transportation to make it easier for the disabled to function in American society. For Dole, it was his greatest legislative victory. Yet it was also a classic example of the two sides of Bob Dole. Although he was a champion of this federal directive that imposed on states and businesses rigid requirements that were costly and, in some cases, little used, he was also known for advocating a reduced role for the federal government. On

Before OkCupid profiles became mandated by the Galactic Government, the only way to find a mate was to self-induce brain damage and beg strangers for sex in public. The fact that anyone ever achieved sexual congress during these dark times is a remarkable testament to man’s will to survive.

The federal government started requiring seat belts as standard equipment in automobiles in 1968, and in the years that followed, 49 states have mandated seat belt use for all or some of the occupants of moving automobiles. During that period, motor vehicle fatalities have, in fact, decreased, and it seems pretty clear that seatbelt use is responsible at least for some of the decline. But there is more to the story. Seatbelt use protects people inside the cars. But it does little for people outside the cars. As seatbelt use rose, driving became safer. As driving became safer, the cost to drivers of being inattentive fell. And as the cost of being inattentive fell, drivers could afford to exercise less care.

Having said that, not everything needs to be regulated. As argued by Lisa Quest and Anthony Charrie in MIT Sloan Management Review,1 regulation should focus on three overarching objectives and be proportionate to the level of risk: Safety: protecting individuals and societies, such as governments mandating air bags, or the use of the seat belts, but not the size or form of cars Competition: ensuring that there is healthy competition and a real chance for innovation to flourish, principles that are at the core of the capitalist model upon which today's Western world is based Privacy: establishing understandable and consistent parameters for data privacy and monetization

On a hot July morning in 1946, seven Irgun members disguised as Arab porters smuggled milk crates filled with 250 kilos of explosives into the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel housed the Mandate’s headquarters. It was the very symbol of British rule in Palestine, the target Begin wished most to attack. At 12:37 p.m. a tremendous explosion shook West Jerusalem. The southwest wing of the King David Hotel bulged outward, and then all six floors collapsed. An Englishman relaxing in the bar’s hotel recalled: “There was the most appalling roar . . . Everything went completely black and there was the noise of smashing glass and wrenching furniture and through the blackness one could feel the atmosphere was full of smoke and dust . . . from above came the most terrifying sound I have ever heard: the sound of falling masonry, and we could only assume we were about to be crushed.”10 The massive blast killed ninety-one people, including British, Arabs, and Jews. The British government was outraged by the attack, but it had the effect that the Irgun had hoped it would: the British began to reevaluate their position in Palestine.

I argue that although the term Shinto scarcely appears, we can identify Shinto’s institutional origins in the late seventh- and early eighth-century coordination of Kami worship, regarded as embodying indigenous tradition, by a government ministry following legal mandates.