The Ghost of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes Gets a Second Chance

The Ghost of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes Gets a Second Chance

By James V. DeLong 

The parallels between these New Deal laws, particularly the National Industrial Recovery Act, and ObamaCare practically write themselves.

Few commenters on the Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare accept that a legal thinker as sophisticated as Chief Justice John Roberts could really believe that the law should be upheld under Congress’s taxing power. In any case, if the Court was going to go baying off down the taxing power track, the issues needed much more analysis than the throw-away treatment they got in the course of the litigation.
So the question is, what was Roberts up to?

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Scalia’s Wise Dissent

By Lee Harris 

Critics of Justice Scalia’s dissent have lambasted him for his reference to Obama and have mocked his admission that his mind was ‘boggled’ by the government’s arguments. Yet none has addressed the heart of his quite powerful argument.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s immigration law, I came across several liberal commentators who treated Justice Scalia’s dissent as if it were the ravings of an unhinged lunatic. Naturally, I expected a bit of bias on their part, and decided to look over Scalia’s dissent for myself. As I glanced over it, I was struck by the names of two long-dead European thinkers whom Justice Scalia cited, Samuel von Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel. This grabbed my attention. Why Vattel and Pufendorf, I wondered. Was Justice Scalia simply showing off his erudition or had his hatred of Obama driven him to find solace in musty old volumes of antiquated philosophical musings? At any rate, I was intrigued, and promptly began to examine Scalia’s argument, along with Justice Kennedy’s opinions and the dissents of Justice Thomas and Justice Alito. Eventually, after some reflection, I began to see what Justice Scalia was up to.

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Dodd-Frank: The Economic Case for Repeal

By Peter J. Wallison 

As the second anniversary of the act approaches, its role in slowing our economic recovery is coming into focus. GDP growth shrunk immediately after the law passed and has never recovered, while key terms in the law remain undefined.

It is rare that a single law can have a significant adverse effect on the enormous U.S. economy. But there has never been anything like the Dodd-Frank Act. Signed into law by President Obama on July 21, 2010, its extraordinary effect in slowing the economy is coming into focus as its second anniversary approaches.
As shown in the chart below, the U.S. economy had a few reasonably good quarters of recovery after the crisis, particularly the third and fourth quarters of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. These were not of Reagan quality, of course, but they suggested that the economy was beginning to heal.

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And the Regulatory State Drones On

By Blake Hurst 

Forget the kerfuffle over EPA drone flights; nobody pays attention to the things that the EPA is doing that are truly frightening.

Bovines of Nebraska, take cover; Big Brother is watching! The Environmental Protection Agency has been doing aerial reconnaissance flights looking for cows disrespecting U.S. waters—cows not being known for their personal hygiene, and Nebraskans often raising cows in large groups (of cows, not Nebraskans).
This has kicked off the type of political firestorm that makes our politics so predictable, not to mention frustrating. Farmers, understandably, were not happy when “flyover country” included Big Brother flying over their homes and farms with cameras. Politicians expressed shock and dismay, but the EPA has had little to say. The EPA has admitted to the flights, but point out that they didn’t do very many and that it is much more efficient to fly than to drive over a place as big as Nebraska. Budgets are tight; it is very expensive for government agents to drive around Nebraska looking for errant cow pies.

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To Clinton, and Beyond!

By Alan Viard 

The president’s statement that ‘these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth’ has no validity unless ‘growth’ is defined as short-run business cycle improvement.

In his remarks on Monday, President Obama reignited the debate about the fate of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The president reiterated his support for letting the high-income rate reductions included in the tax cuts expire at the end of this year, ignoring the economic damage that higher marginal tax rates will do to saving and investment. The president touted raising high-income tax rates as a way to reduce the deficit, even as he reaffirmed his support for more costly middle-class tax cuts and ignored the even more costly growth of entitlement spending.

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‘It’s Not About Crime, It’s About Values’

‘It’s Not About Crime, It’s About Values’

By Lee Harris 

On the moral pussyfooting of contemporary liberalism.

On the night of June 27, 2012, a seven-year old-girl, Heaven Sutton, was shot down in front of her home by two members of a Chicago gang. It is said that she was killed by a stray bullet, but this simply means that her murderers did not intentionally aim at her. It certainly does not mean that her murderers didn’t see her—it only means that they didn’t care. After all, when gangs set out to murder members of rival gangs, they can hardly be expected to take the time and trouble to worry about who might be in their line of fire.

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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

25 Signs The Collapse Of America Is Speeding Up As Society Rots From The Inside Out

The problems that America is experiencing right now are not just confined to the field of economics.  The truth is that there are signs of deep decay wherever we look, and without question the United States is rotting from the inside out in thousands of different ways.  For a long time our debt-fueled prosperity has masked much of the social decay that has been festering underneath the surface, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is beginning to disappear.  For many Americans, it is easy to point a finger at a particular group or political party and blame them for all of our problems, but the reality of the matter is that our societal decay cuts across all income levels, all political affiliations and all regions of the country.  We are being destroyed from within, and this decay can be seen on the streets of the most dilapidated sections of major U.S. cities and it can also be seen in the halls of power in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street.  It is undeniable that something has fundamentally changed.  The American people do not seem to possess the same level of character that they once had.  So where do we go from here?

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The Corn Is Dying All Over America

All over America the corn is dying.  If drought conditions persist in the middle part of the country, wheat and soybeans will be next.  Weeks of intense heat combined with extraordinarily dry conditions have brought many U.S. corn farmers to the brink of total disaster.  If there is not significant rainfall soon, many farmers will be financially ruined.  This period of time is particularly important for corn because this is when pollination is supposed to happen.  But the unprecedented heat and the extremely dry conditions are playing havoc with that process.  With each passing day things get even worse.  We have seen the price of a bushel of corn soar 41 percent since June 14th.  That is an astounding rise.  You may not eat much corn directly, but it is important to realize that corn or corn syrup is just about in everything these days.  Just look at your food labels.  In the United States today, approximately 75 percent of all processed foods contain corn.  So a huge rise in the price of corn is going to be felt all over the supermarket.  Corn is also widely used to feed livestock, and if this crisis continues we are going to see a significant rise in meat and dairy prices as well.  Food prices in America have already been rising at a steady pace, and so this is definitely not welcome news.

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A Face for the Faceless

By Nathan Smith 

Jose Antonio Vargas and others who have made their illegal status public are giving a face to millions, and turning undocumented immigration into a mass civil disobedience movement. Their movement has just seen its first victories.

A year and a half ago, I published a book, Principles of a Free Society, in which I defined civil disobedience as open, non-violent, principled defiance of a law which one wishes to see changed; argued that most illegal immigration does not qualify as civil disobedience because it is not open; and added that: “If illegal immigration in the United States does not yet constitute a mass civil disobedience movement, it is not far from it… A satyagraha approach [satyagraha, meaning 'clinging to the truth,' is Gandhi’s term for civil disobedience] might involve illegal immigrants openly advertising their status in order to court arrest and deportation.” (Principles of a Free Society, p. 129)

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