[adrr]

Greater good of society out weighs people's individual rights. These are basic constitutional tenets. Why you can't yell fire in a crowded theater even though you have the right to free speech. Why the SCOTUS has ruled vaccine mandates are constitutional.

[coredog64]

Schenk was overturned because it was a bad decision. In general, “fire in a crowded theater” is my heuristic for “this person doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.

This is the top Google result for “fire in a crowded theater”: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

[adrr]

Use the more modern version it and yell “I have a bomb”.

[beerandt]

You got the premise wrong, not the phrasing.

With firecodes what they are today, a bomb is a more comparable danger to what a fire was 100 yrs ago, anyway.

[refurb]

You actually can yell fire in a crowded theatre and no, the the US doesn’t automatically weigh the “greater good” over individual rights.

[tastyfreeze]

Society is a cultural framework and does not in any way supercede individual rights. There is no greater good. The SCOTUS has ruled that states have the authority to mandate vaccination not the federal government. The federal government is extremely limitited in its authority by the Constitution.

[claytongulick]

"Greater good" has been the justification for the worst atrocities committed in history.

Be careful about so willingly giving up your right to self-ownership.

You may not ever get it back.

[adrr]

Greater good is what it makes it possible to have individual rights. Imagine if you had an absolute right to free speech. You could write or speak anything without legal recourse. Trademark law and copyright law wouldn’t work. Fraud wouldn’t be prosecutable.

Apply that to other rights like the right to bear arms. If government couldn’t set standards and people could procure any weapon, how does society function? How does air travel even exist with people owning anti aircraft missiles.

That’s why our founders made our constitution a living document with courts interpreting the constitution and balancing individual rights with our collective rights.

[claytongulick]

I see the "living document" argument made a lot, and I don't think it means what some people think it means.

The founders were purposefully vague in several areas of the constitution because they absolutely did want circumstances to determine interpretation, however they were not vague at all about delegated and reserved powers. These things are not "living" in a sense of judicial review.

By "living" document, it was intended that the constitution could be modified by an amendment process. There was never a provision for judicial review.

In fact, then entire concept of judicial review arose from Marbury vs Madison [1] where the court claimed this power.

The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, and one of the things that makes it unique in history, is to limit the powers of the government. The founders believed that individual rights were innate (granted by God), not granted by government and certainly not granted by the federal government.

All powers other than those specifically Delegated to the federal government are reserved for the States - the 10th Amendment makes this clear.

It is not the role of the federal government to decide on "greater good" mandates, those powers are very specifically reserved for the states, who are constrained on what they may do by the Constitution and its amendments.

We, as a country, have allowed the federal government to overstep this in many areas. The DEA, for example, only exists because of a very bad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, which arose from a bad Supreme Court decision (Wikard vs Filburn)[2] about whether or not you were allowed to grow your own wheat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

[odessacubbage]

you can indeed yell fire in a crowded theater.