Matt Kibbe is joined by Robert Alt, CEO of The Buckeye Institute, and Eric Flannery, owner of The Big Board, to celebrate the filing of their constitutional challenge against the District of Columbia. After Eric announced that his restaurant would not discriminate against the unvaccinated, the city pulled his liquor license and ultimately shut him down completely. Nine months later, after Eric was forced to burn through his life savings, The Big Board is open and the outstanding fines have been dismissed. But Eric and Robert are fighting on in defense of the fundamentally American principles at stake. Their new legal challenge argues that the DC government did not have the authority to issue a string of emergency orders that resulted in The Big Board’s shutdown, and that these actions, by seeking to evade congressional review and judicial scrutiny, violated the U.S. Constitution and the Home Rule Act of 1973.
Watch Free the People’s documentary coverage of this story:
Shut Down Indefinitely | Part 1
Shut Down Indefinitely | Part 2
Subscribe to Kibbe on Liberty on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Robert and Eric…if you ever make it to Rapid City SD, I’ll buy you a beer as I’m not as courageous as either of you and I doubt I’ll ever set foot in the District of Columbia. Thank you for standing up for what is simply RIGHT. The ideal that man is ruled by laws not other men is so easy to say, so thanks for working so hard to remind our superiors in government of this simple truth. I don’t understand why they have no shame. Why are they not skeptical, given centuries of history to prove the point, of their own power to do good and not bad? This battle reminds me of some of the writings of Etienne de La Boetie in The Politics of Obedience, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. If I may quote him:
Place on one side fifty thousand armed men, and on the other the same number: let them join in battle, one side fighting to retain its liberty, the other to take it away; to which would you, at a guess, promise victory? Which men do you think would march more gallantly to combat – those who anticipate as a reward for their suffering the maintenance of their freedom, or those who cannot expect any other prize for the blows exchanged than the enslavement of others? One side will have before its eyes the blessings of the past and the hope of similar joy in the future; their thoughts will dwell less on the comparatively brief pain of battle than on what they may have to endure forever they, their children, and all their posterity.
In this case it was two (okay, a team back there somewhere) against fifty thousand.
Or:
Thus the despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if thy were decent men, he would have to guard himself; just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of wood itself. Such are his archers, his guards his halberdiers; not that they themselves do not suffer occasionally at his hands, but this riff-raff, abandoned alike by God and man, can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit, but are helpless…
Matt, it would be great to have someone on to talk about Etienne de La Boetie! and/or, Frederic Bastiat