When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights. The people can act only by their agents and, within the powers conferred upon them, their acts must be considered as the acts of the people.
The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.
Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.
Most of the people around me have a vested interest in how much money I make. You know, so a celebrity could find themselves in a position where people could have meetings about their life without them involved. And when I say 'their life' I mean not their professional life either. They could talk about their personal life.
Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
Why should I tell you where I am going to get funds from? If I were to do that then all the vested interests would get alerted. You must be aware that railways are full of such elements and my fight is against them.
'Fight Master' is a show that Spike came up with. Obviously, Spike has a vested interest in Bellator, which is filling a void that was created when the UFC and 'The Ultimate Fighter' left and went to Fox. I think this fills a huge piece of the puzzle for the folks at Spike, in terms of demographics and what programming they like to do.
Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.
Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.
There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.