Archives for April 2014

April 30, 2014|Executive Compensation, inequality, innovation, Thomas Piketty

Promoting Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

In my last post, I discussed how the nature of innovation in our time raises questions for Thomas Piketty’s forecast of increasing inequality in his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In this post, I argue that his policy proposals also leave out consideration of innovation and thus risk great social harm.

Piketty does not recognize how crucial extraordinary individuals are to innovation and distribution. As Robert Solow notes in his review. Piketty seems skeptical that today’s highly paid “supermanagers” add much value for their very high salaries. Solow endorses this skepticism, agreeing that agency costs are responsible for these high salaries. On this theory, boards of public companies are cozy with these managers who often appoint them to their positions and the result is sky high compensation. But if agency costs were the cause, we should observe closely held companies paying supermanagers less, but as Greg Mankiw points out, they do not.

A much better explanation is that innovations in the structure of corporations– faster telecommunications and the availability of data that represent the details of companies’ operations—have enabled managers at the very top to make a huge difference throughout their organization. A business today is the shadow of one or a few individuals who can take the key decisions.

April 30, 2014|Justice Hugo Black, Rating Supreme Court Justices

Evaluating Justice Black

by Mike Rappaport|8 Comments

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

My last post argued that Justice Hugo Black was not the most overrated justice and in fact was a first rate justice. I thought I would comment here on attempts to rate Justice Black as a justice – a matter that was recently debated by Will Baude and David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy.

I always have a hard time with lists of great justices or great presidents, because it is always difficult for me to determine what are the appropriate criteria. As a libertarian, I have certainly been upset by the liberal or progressive historians or law professors selecting justices or presidents based on their own politics. Its fine if people want to rate officials based on their politics; the raters, however, should make clear that is what they are doing.

Attempts at nonpolitical criteria avoid the problems of political ratings, but introduce other challenges. One might judge presidents or justices based on how consequential they were, but unless one smuggles in political criteria, one can be an enormously bad president or justice and be very consequential.

Will defended Justice Black on grounds of “historical significance and legal ability.” Historical significance appears to be nonpolitical. Legal ability could be political or nonpolitical, depending on how one understands legal ability.

April 30, 2014|Her, Individualism, John Locke, Libertarianism, Personhood, Transhumanism

Deconstructing the Transhumanist Impulse

by Peter Augustine Lawler|9 Comments

Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. Cowen says “the light at end of the tunnel” is the coming of a world in which we will have plenty of everything, and all the time in the world to play enjoyable games. Lindsey writes that Karl Marx’s view of communism was wrong in only one respect: In order to live in a world of bohemian enjoyment, we’ll need to remain productive.

April 29, 2014|Church of England, David Cameron, Secularism, UKIP

Star Wars Trumps Culture Wars in Britain

by David Conway|7 Comments

During the run-up to Easter this year, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron had the temerity to assert publicly (and on more than one occasion) that Britain is a Christian country, suggesting also that it is no bad thing that it is. For having publicly espoused such politically incorrect sentiments, fifty-five prominent British humanists came down on him like a ton of bricks, excoriating him for false and divisive statements they claimed that he had made.

April 29, 2014|Cass Sunstein, Justice Hugo Black, Originalism, textualism

Was Justice Black the Most Overrated Justice? No way!

by Mike Rappaport|1 Comment

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

Cass Sunstein has a column arguing that Justice Hugo Black “who served from 1937 to 1971, is the court’s most overrated justice.” I strongly disagree with Sunstein (hardly the first time); I think Black is one of the best justices who served during the middle of the 20th century.

Sunstein likes Black’s generally liberal decisions, but he is critical of Black’s methodology of textualism and originalism. Sunstein begins with Black’s textualism, writing:

Too much of the time, Black claimed that the text of the Constitution required a particular result, when it did nothing of the kind. He famously defended his free speech absolutism by noting that the First Amendment “provides, in simple words, that ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ I read ‘no law … abridging’ to mean no law abridging.”

But Sunstein rightly points out that the key question is what “freedom of speech” means and many laws that interfere with speech may not interfere with freedom of speech.

April 28, 2014|Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Presidential Power, presidential vetoes, Signing Statements

Are Signing Statements a Bad Thing?

by Keith Whittington|5 Comments

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

I’ve always thought that the brouhaha over signing statements was much ado about nothing. During the presidency of George W. Bush, liberals discovered signing statements and decided they were bad and connected to a “lawless” executive enthralled by an idiosyncratic and dangerous theory of a unitary presidency. Except that signing statements as such had nothing to do with theories of the unitary executive, signing statements had long been issued by presidents across the ideological spectrum, and it was less that evident why signing statements in and of themselves were supposed to be dangerous. Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has gone back to business as usual on many facets of executive power that were denounced by liberals just a few years ago, signing statements included.

But my esteemed colleague Mike Rappaport raises a more interesting question about signing statements.

April 28, 2014|Christianity, Cold War, Edmund Burke, Historicism, John Locke, Leo Strauss, Progressivism, War

Critiquing Leo Strauss from the Right

by Grant Havers|1 Comment

This next episode of Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with author and professor Grant Havers on his conservative critique of Leo Strauss. Many conservatives hold Strauss in high regard as a thinker who shaped their intellectual commitments. Havers discusses the question: what's so conservative about Strauss' philosophy? Havers' recent book Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique contends that Strauss was a liberal Cold War warrior who most wanted to defend the foundational principles of British and American democracy. Going to the heart of Strauss' philosophical principles and his grounding of modern constitutional liberty in classical Greek political thought,…

April 28, 2014|inequality, innovation, Matt Ridley, Paul Ehrlich, Thomas Piketty

Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

by John O. McGinnis|15 Comments

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has gotten a better reception from left-liberals than any book since Limits to Growth. The books have important similarities. Both posit societies in the grip of a doomsday pincer. Limits foresaw a future of poverty and hunger, as inevitably declining resources outrun inevitably increasing population. Piketty sees a future of increasing inequality, as capitalists enjoy an ever-greater share of global income than workers. Both books are also used to justify government intervention. Limits to Growth was the basis of attempts to slow down population growth and require conservation of resources. Capital in the Twenty-First Century expressly calls for a global wealth tax.

Most importantly, both books share a similar, fundamental flaw, although Piketty’s book is far more interesting and sophisticated. They do not take sufficient account of innovation– of the manner in which human ingenuity again and again benefits us all. The mistake in Limits of Growth has already become clear, as Matt Ridley reminded us in the Wall Street Journal last week. We are not running out of energy, for instance. We have more usable oil than ever as we have learned to exploit shale. Innovators are creating wide variety of energy sources that were either not well understood or even imagined in 1972, when Limits to Growth was first published.

Piketty’s book has the same flaw. In his lucid and favorable review, Robert Solow shows that Piketty’s claim of increasing inequality is based partly on his belief that the rate of return on capital will stay constant, even as economic growth slows. In Piketty’s view, a sluggish economy means that people who own capital will gain a greater share of income than people who earn wages. This projection depends on a technological slowdown . But with the relentless increase in computational power, there are more reasons to believe in technological acceleration than stasis.

April 28, 2014|Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan

The Lady Turned Britain Upright

by Nile Gardiner|2 Comments

California Franchise Tax Board (Image: Flint Builders).

British commentator Theodore Dalrymple asked recently on Law and Liberty: “Was Margaret Thatcher’s legacy one of free markets, of laissez faire?” He professed himself “not so sure.”

The former British prime minister, argued Dalrymple, did little to roll back the frontiers of the State during her 11-and-a-half years in office:

Mrs. Thatcher was loved and hated not so much because she changed things, but because she said she wanted to. . . . My impression is that her effect, where it was long-lasting, was predominantly negative.

I have long admired Mr. Dalrymple’s punchy, prescient and always entertaining articles, frequently to be found in the pages of The Spectator, but I beg to differ with his assessment of Thatcher’s legacy.

April 27, 2014|Foreign Policy, Obama, Russia, Ukraine

Obama’s Pretense Empowers Putin

by Angelo M. Codevilla|6 Comments

By bold paramilitary action, Vladimir Putin is seizing full power over eastern Ukraine. At the same time his empty threat of outright invasion is leading the Ukrainian government—supported by Barack Obama as a rope supports a hanging man—to agree to a “federative structure” for the country.

Józef Czapski: A Soldier and Artist Fights for Liberty

by Priscilla M. Jensen

Held as a POW by the Soviets in 1940, Czapski later worked to bring to light their murder of 22,000 of his fellow Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.

The Fracturing of France

by Guillaume de Thieulloy

Conflicts between the “metropolitan winners” and the “peripheral losers” are not the only social or political faultline in France.

Archives for April 2014

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