Quote of the Week
Ralph Raico, in the opening lecture for this year’s Mises University:
That Robert Higgs is quite a radical. He makes Bob [Murphy] look like a neocon.
Another One Bites the Dust
Bulgaria is about to join the ranks of the League of Countries With A Tax Code Better Than the United States. In January they’ll implement a 10% flat tax and cause me to finally utter the phrase, “if only our tax code was advanced as Bulgaria’s.”
Law Headlines of the Day - July 31, 2007
New at Wal-Mart: jury service! (N.Y. Times)
The frightening possibilities of hate crimes. (Volokh)
Maybe this is what Michael Jackson could do in prison. (Above the Law)
Finally, consistency: ladies’ nights are sexist. (New Yorker)
The Turtle Zombie Boy and Internet Privacy. (Concurring Opinions)
FAMILY GOUGES STORE! The FTC acts quickly to restore fairness!
The last time you got a great deal at the store, or low balled someone on EBay and came away with HUGE amounts of consumer surplus, did you stop to think about how “fair” the exchange was? Typically, people reason that if the seller is willing to let it go at a certain price, that is a “fair price”. Sadly, that reasoning breaks down when applied in the reverse direction.
Mark Steckbeck wrote up a very entertaining opening paragraph introducing a piece on consumer protection laws. Please read it.
The piece itself was written by Skip Oliva and is an excellent read. Here’s the first part of the post:
It’s difficult to reconcile the American concept of “equal justice under law” with the Federal Trade Commission’s motto, “Protecting America’s Consumers.” The implication is that there is one set of laws for consumers and another set—affording lesser protection—for producers and sellers. This conflict presents itself in all “consumer protection” laws, and it stems from an awkward premise: That in any given economic exchange, the party trading cash holds the legal and moral high ground over the party trading a good or service.
An Inefficient Energy Policy
Pete du Pont in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. has substantial supplies of oil and gas that could be accessed if lawmakers would allow it, but they frequently don’t. A National Petroleum Council study released last week reports that 40 billion barrels of America’s “recoverable oil reserves are off limits or are subject to significant lease restrictions”–half inshore and half offshore–and similar restrictions apply to more than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (We consume about 22 trillion cubic feet a year.)
Access to the 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been prohibited for decades. Some 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, but a month ago the House again, as it did last year, voted down an amendment that would have allowed the expansion of coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. All of which leaves the U.S. as the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.
Law Headlines of the Day - July 30, 2007
It could be a campaign slogan. “Originalism: Not Just for Liberals Anymore.” (TNR)
There can be only one Second Amendment. (Law.com, opinion at L.A. Times)
Fifteen judicial positions, but five openings–anyone interested? (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
“Asylum” isn’t a dirty word in Chinese (unlike, apparently, in Spanish). (N.Y. Sun)
Law Headlines of the Day - July 27, 2007
Justice Breyer “inspires” Senator Specter to examine Chief Justice Roberts’s and Justice Alito’s nomination hearing testimony for inconsistencies. (Politico)
Shark eats lawyer. (Above the Law)
Medical costs cause bankruptcy… if you cook the numbers correctly. (Washington Times)
Formula for success: let the FBI falsely imprison you for about 30 years, collect $100 million. (CNN)
When “best interests of the child” means martial arts classes. (Volokh)
“Actively engaged” is such a relative term
Yesterday the GAO issued a report on the Department of Agriculture’s farm subsidy program. Amongst the findings:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report.
In a selection of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time.
The report cited a 1,900-acre soybean and corn farm in Illinois that collected $400,000 on behalf of an owner who lived in Florida before his death in 1995. The company did not notify the government of the death but certified each year that the dead shareholder, who owned 40 percent of the company, was “actively engaged” in managing the farm.
Naturally this report acted as a wake up call to the members of congress currently debating a new farm bill right? Not exactly:
Instead, the House Agriculture Committee has produced a bill that essentially maintains current subsidy programs, with some minor tweaks billed as “reforms.” Among them is a provision that would disqualify a farmer with an annual adjusted gross income of $1 million — yes, $1 million — from receiving subsidies. That’s a pathetic five times the $200,000 cap President Bush proposed earlier this year. […]
So what is the speaker’s take on this rotten bill? It “represents a critical first step toward reform,” Ms. Pelosi said last week. That’s the wrong answer.
If that’s the first step, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us.
The Lowest-Rated Jerry Springer Show Ever
Crowd: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!Jerry: Today’s guests are here because they can’t agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I’d like to welcome Todd to the show.
Todd enters from backstage.
Jerry: Hello, Todd.
Todd: Hi, Jerry.
Jerry: (reading from card) So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?
Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it’s been nothing but fighting ever since.
Jerry: Why is that?
Todd: You see, Jerry, I’m a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the “I” or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.
Crowd: Ooooohhhh!
Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?
Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we’re through. I just can’t go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn’t believe I exist.
Jerry: Well, you’re going to get your chance. Here’s Ursula!
Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.
You’ll have to read the rest of it from here.
Glen Whitman’s Cal State, Northridge page is pretty interesting.
Some interesting ideas to think about…
It seems like most of the time someone tells you it’s “dangerous” to think about something or “harmful” to talk about something — you should immediately drop what you’re doing and go for it. I’m exaggerating, of course, but the suppression of unpopular opinions is becoming more and more of an issue.
It gets even more sticky when government funding is involved (as just about everything does).
The folks over at Reason did a writeup of this piece by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s an interesting read in which he concludes:
Though I am more sympathetic to the argument that important ideas be aired than to the argument that they should sometimes be suppressed, I think it is a debate we need to have. Whether we like it or not, science has a habit of turning up discomfiting thoughts, and the Internet has a habit of blowing their cover.
Tragically, there are few signs that the debates will happen in the place where we might most expect it: academia. Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women’s underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause.
Academia has transformed from a breeding ground of new ideas into a disseminator of political correctness. The good people over at the Moving Picture Institute have picked up on this and have put out a documentary entitled Indoctrinate U. The trailer looks great, I’m looking forward to seeing it.