San Francisco Chronicle – February 25, 2006:
California residents who sell goods on eBay could have to pay a $295 fee and be regulated in the same way as pawnbrokers under legislation designed to crack down on the sale of stolen property.
The legislation being pushed by the state’s 700 pawnbrokers would replace a cumbersome paper-based system of reporting transactions of secondhand-property sales to local law enforcement with a statewide electronic database paid for by dealers.
Opponents say the bill would impose needless requirements on consignment stores, auctioneers, eBay trading assistants and the drop-off centers sprouting up to help consumers sell items on the Internet.
Ohio has already passed a law that could make Ohioan based eBay PowerSellers pay $200 for a license and post a $50,000 bond, plus…
the license requires a one-year apprenticeship to a licensed auctioneer, acting as a bid-caller in 12 auctions, attending an approved auction school, passing a written and oral exam. Failure to get a license could result in the seller being fined up to $1,000 and jailed for a maximum of 90 days.
Great posts Mr. Fusion.
How about providing a good reading list for further study?
Mr Fusion, now I know you are coasting on half a clue.
First of all, “legislated law” as you refer to it is really known as “statutory law” by everybody else.
Natural rights are those rights that your possess by virtue of being human. The right to your life, the right to defend your life, the right to the products of your labor – those are natural rights. The right to self government is also one of those pesky natural rights that good ol’ Thomas Jefferson rambled on about in the darn Declaration of Independence.
The Constitution serves only to set up a framework for a federal system of government and how the levels of government interact. And statutory law (to include ratified treaties) can only exist within the confines of the enumerated powers the people granted to the government when they created it.
Now to your other major mistake, which I will assume is out of ignorance — The Constitution does not grant a single right to anybody. The Bill of Rights serves to prevent the federal government from infringing upon the various rights that the people were already assumed to be in possession of. A hint you should have picked up on is that they were not a part of the original document, and were only added afterwards because of the paranoid objections of the anti-federalists (and others) during the debate on ratification. Pretty clairvoyant on their part in retrospect, since it’s pretty clear that government knows no end to its desire for power at the expense of freedom.
If that weren’t clear enough to you, maybe you should give a quick look-see at the 9th and 10th amendments before declaring again that we only have the rights that the government is kind enough to grant us. The people have the ultimate power, not the various levels governments.
Lastly, the “commerce clause” does not refer to the entire list of enumerated powers granted to the Congress (by the people) in Article I Section 8, but only to the specific clause dealing with, you guessed it, interstate and foreign commerce.
I am far beyond your high-school civics class.