Archives for January 2016

January 31, 2016|Economist, Entitlements, the elderly, they young, Veronique de Rugy, Welfare State

The Unnatural State

Charging Bull, the famous Wall Street sculpture at Bowling Green in the Financial District, New York, New York (photo.ua/shutterstock.com).

The Economist reports that in five nations net transfers (private plus public) go from the young to the old rather than the other way around. Some of these nations are deeply social democratic (Germany, Austria, Slovenia). Some are thought to be conservative (Hungary, Japan). But all have in common large social entitlements.

This trend shows show how welfare states can reverse the natural order of things, where the old give more to the young than the young can ever repay. Families exemplify this principle. Socially too, the intergenerational flow of resources is what creates civilization as each generation receives benefits from the previous one.

Now to be sure, not everything that is natural is good. But few people criticize the special solicitude parents feel for their children or the old feel for the young generally. And entitlements to the elderly cannot easily be justified by abstract appeal to the justice of redistribution. It is simply not the case that the elderly as class are poorer than the young.

The social consequences of this unnatural flow are deeply unfortunate.

January 29, 2016|David O. Russell, Jennifer Lawrence, Joy Mangano, The Fighter, The Insider

No Joy in Mudville

by Victor Morton|Leave a Comment

Remember that Saturday Night Live commercial for “Shimmer” and how Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin quarreled about whether it was a floor wax or a dessert topping? They could quarrel just as much about Joy, the latest film by director/screen writer David O. Russell starring Jennifer Lawrence.

January 29, 2016|Amy D. Ronner, Dostoevsky and the Law, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

Lawyers Should Read Dostoevsky

by Steven Grosby|3 Comments

Moments of disorienting despair, or of painful honesty, can strip away our comforting self-conceit and force us to recognize what a disquietingly thin barrier it is that separates the decency of civilized life from the brutality of barbarism. If the barrier is thin—and there is too much evidence to deny it—do we have the strength, character, and means to maintain, and thereby meet the challenge of defending, that decency?

January 28, 2016|NLRB v. Noel Canning, Originalism, Town of Greece v. Galloway

Comparing Traditionalism and Originalism

by Marc DeGirolami|9 Comments

Charging Bull, the famous Wall Street sculpture at Bowling Green in the Financial District, New York, New York (photo.ua/shutterstock.com).

In my first post of this series on law and tradition, I said that though a judicial opinion might exhibit both originalist and traditionalist features, these are nevertheless distinct interpretive categories. In this post and the next, I will briefly explore the similarities and differences in two opinions decided by the Supreme Court in 2014—Town of Greece v. Galloway and NLRB v. Noel Canning—both of which are traditionalist but not (necessarily) originalist in method (though Town of Greece is complicated). My claim is not that these decisions are correct; only that each exhibits a distinctive interpretive approach that is intentional about maintaining coherence and continuity with very long-standing patterns of legal and cultural practices and that each determines constitutional meaning primarily on the basis of practices rather than principles.

January 28, 2016|Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren, Victims' Fund

Other People’s Money

by Michael S. Greve|4 Comments

Charging Bull, the famous Wall Street sculpture at Bowling Green in the Financial District, New York, New York (photo.ua/shutterstock.com).

In a very fine investigative article in the Washington Examiner, Sean Higgins reports on “Obama’s Big Bank Slush Fund.” As part of their “settlements” with the feds over alleged misdeeds, big banks routinely agree to make donations to various “fair housing” outfits, to the tune of several hundred millions of dollars.

January 28, 2016|Calvinism, Democracy, Gilead, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marilynne Robinson, Scientism

Marilynne Robinson and the Mystery of Progressive Democracy

by Ralph Hancock|2 Comments

My favorite novelist is also Barack Obama’s. That shouldn’t be a problem, you might say—two people of widely different political opinions can love the same beautiful things. As Paul Seaton has observed on this site, studying Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction, marked as it is by her very conventional academic-liberal political opinions, is not very conducive to appreciating the exquisite subtlety of her fiction.[1]

The New York Review of Books late last year published an extensive conversation between the President and the novelist (which Joe Knippenberg commented on here). Obama and the author of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008) come to an immediate meeting of minds, or rather hearts, on their faith in “democracy,” which, the ostensibly Calvinist Robinson posits, is based on “the willingness to assume well about other people.”

Asked by the President to explain the convergence between her Christianity and her “concerns about democracy,” Robinson offers the simplest possible explanation: she believes “people are images of God” and that “democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level.” To the President’s and the novelist’s joint chagrin, though, the “loudest voices” for Christianity in American politics don’t really take their Christianity seriously; supposedly they fail to follow Christ’s injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Robinson has gone so far as to describe Christian America as “associating the precious Lord with ignorance, intolerance, and belligerent nationalism.”

January 27, 2016|Adrian Vermeule, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Executive Action, Legislation, Median voter, polarization

Obama’s Responsibility for Political Polarization

by John O. McGinnis|26 Comments

Charging Bull, the famous Wall Street sculpture at Bowling Green in the Financial District, New York, New York (photo.ua/shutterstock.com).

In his state of the union and again in his recent interview with Politico, President Obama expressed sorrow that he has not been able to end political animosities. As he put it in the interview, “a singular regret for me is the fact that our body politic has become more polarized, the language, the spirit has become meaner than when I came in.”

Obama blames different factors from the media to gerrymandering for our angry divisions. But Obama himself is in no small measure responsible for polarization. His reliance on executive action, most egregiously his order on immigration, is a primary cause. Unsupported by any express delegation from Congress, this extraordinary act is enormously controversial. It seeks to permit five million people who have come to this country illegally not only to stay but to work.

Legislation on divisive issues is much less likely to lead to polarization than executive fiat.

January 27, 2016|Charles Evans Hughes, the conscientious citizen, Voting

Stoner vs. Munger: Citizen or Consumer? How Do You Choose When You Vote?

by James Stoner|1 Comment

There is a marvelous ambiguity in the question that Mike and I are debating.[1] Idiomatically, a question that begins “How do you . . . ” might be asking how one should do something; or it might be asking how, typically, it is done. As with any ambiguity, the interpretation depends upon the context.

For example, if an older person who looks a bit baffled asks, “How do you use an iPhone?,” you would show him how to enter a code to unlock it, how to swipe a finger across the screen to make various icons appear and disappear, perhaps even how to dial a call. If, by contrast, a 20-something carrying an iPad asks “How do you use an iPhone?” you would assume he or she was taking a survey, and you might answer by mentioning your favorite apps and showing him or her some favorite photos or videos.

So, if someone asks our question, “How do you choose when you vote?,” one would consider the questioner. If a neighbor or a stranger asks, one might answer “Democrat” or “Republican,” or “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” or even say “None of your business!” But if a student asks, or someone young enough not to be fixed in his or her opinions and habits, then perhaps the questioner means, how should one think about voting, how should one go about making a political choice?

January 27, 2016|Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, John Rawls, Public Choice, Social Contract, Thomas Hobbes, Voting

Citizen or Consumer? Michael Munger Responds

by Michael C. Munger|4 Comments

When it comes to voting by citizens in a democracy, there are four essential questions, as I see it, in marrying up the “should” and the “is.”

January 26, 2016|Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass, Hillsdale College, photography, Picturing Frederick Douglass

The Camera of Liberty

by Diana Schaub|5 Comments

The abolitionist newspaper founded by Frederick Douglass was called the North Star, after the direction of travel taken by runaway slaves. As his fame and influence grew, Douglass became a living version of that guiding light (and the newspaper was eventually renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper). Like Polaris, he was the brightest star in the constellation of the 19th century.