David Bottomley's Blog

People will always do what are in their own best interests.  Free market capitalism has been successful largely because it takes advantage of this fact of human nature to serve the needs of others through the profit motive.  However, when this is done artificially through government edict, history is replete with  government policies creating disastrous outcomes.   For example, colonial Delhi, India wanted to eradicate cobras in the city, so they offered a bounty to people to hunt the cobras, which worked at first, but then people started breeding cobras to continue receiving the bounty after the wild cobras were gone.  The government then removed the bounty, and people set their cobras free, resulting in an even larger cobra problem.  This is called the Cobra Effect.  There are myriad examples of the unintended consequences of government policies, from seat belt and airbag laws making it more dangerous for pedestrians, to payday lending laws dri...

Should felons be allowed to vote?  Should non-violent felons be allowed to own firearms?  Are red flag gun laws unconstitutional?  Who defines mental illness?   I'm going to answer all of those questions and more in this video from a Constitutional perspective.  If you haven't watched my previous video "Who Decides What is Constitutional" I would recommend watching it as well.  I'll put a link to that video in the description. A quick history lesson - the Constitution, in Article 1 Section 8, provides a very specific list of what the federal government is allowed to do.  The Bill of Rights was added later at the insistence of the anti-federalists to specifically prohibit the federal government from acting in certain areas, just in case the federal government went off the rails and started operating illegally - outside of Article 1 Section 8, which it unquestionably has.  In the Bill of Rights, all citizens are granted certain protect...