Hagedorn's Loophole

What if the Constitution of the United States had a relatively easy way to enslave nearly all its citizens and to take away nearly all their rights. It does.

Godel’s Loophole unveiled the relatively easy way that Congress could use Article V of the Constitution to perpetually amend itself, Article V of the Constitution, to make it easier and easier to amend this constitution until — poof — a dictatorship can arise quickly and easily. Silly Godel predicted exactly what has been happening in the illiberal transformations in Hungary, Belarus, Turkey, and Russia.

Hagedorn’s Loophole is similar. This same constitution can be used to enslave nearly the whole population and to restrict their natural rights by using the Thirteenth Amendment. It did not end slavery in America, it just changed it and made slavery a permanent public institution. Yes, now private individuals cannot own slaves, and no one is considered 3/5ths human, but the state can own as many slaves as it can criminalize and convict. It can set the laws of criminality, set the terms of conviction, restrict the rights of these citizens as it sees fit, and execute them and their ‘justice’ at its whim. As can be seen in New York City’s House of Detention, imprisonment can be for willy-nilly reasons. Of course, southern slavery was continued in the south by using a patchwork of idiotic laws (Jim Crow Laws and many others) in order to imprison disproportionately Black people for rentable chain gain slave labor — and the profit of southern governments.

This systematized state slavery has been and still is used to keep Black people from voting. It is just one of a dozen ways that whites in the south have disenfranchised voting Black people in the south even today in 2022. Of course, all of whites’s high-and-mighty and haughty self-righteous arguments were made with ‘rational and logical’ underpinnings for their own self-disillusionment; but whether they were made by racist Democrats in the 19th and 20th centuries or racist Republicans in the 20th and 21st centuries, they followed the illiberal ideas so emboldened by modern Republican and seminal racist Lee Atwater in his Southern Strategy. Even the Southern Baptist Convention has agreed that they have roots drenched in deep racism.

After centuries of well-educated adults using rational logic to lead us down all of these human capital wasting, illiberal, and anti-natural rights paths, how can we assume that our collective intellectual, cultural, political, and constitutional capability will protect us from perpetuating these civic crimes further into our futures? Yes, we can only save ourselves. But the Hagedorn Loophole gives us an easy way to enslave ourselves.

Be OPEN — any country that does not use its full capacity to equip and empower all of its citizens to their max capacity both civically and commercially is not fulfilling its constitutional mission to liberally stand “…of..., by…, and for the people.” It may have some liberties and some justice, but it certainly does not have all of either and nor does it have equality. Qualis - “what kind of” …government is it? Not OPEN and not FREE. It is illiberal.