Added to the blogroll: Institute for Justice
Reason magazine has an interview with Scott Bullock, senior IJ attorney, who represented the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court in Kelo vs. City of New London.
I’ve watched IJ’s advertising in Reason for some time and have supported all their efforts to challenge Statist interpretations of US law.
I hadn’t supported them with a contribution, however, and I’ve just changed that.
They were at the front of the campaign to prevent the state sanctioned theft of those houses in New London.
In defending civil rights, these guys provide a legitimate alternative to the ACLU. Check them out.
Worth considering a donation. We need them now more than ever.
While I’m on the topic of the Court’s recent repeal of the 5th Amendment, I’d like to add these observations:
There has been a great deal of attention paid to the fact that this particular decision favors developers over less wealthy homeowners. True in this case, but philosophically irrelevant.
Consider that the neediness of Liberals for being seen to protect the less powerful is built on two premises
1- Liberals have good intentions.
2- Whatever the results of Liberal policies, the less powerful should be grateful. They are, after all, helpless without Liberal saviors..
With our current Supreme Court doing what it can to whack the “little people”, this mantra is confirmed, aligning perfectly with Liberal doctrine – “You are helpless without us.”
They alway forget to add “…and because of us.”
Some have charged that such an obvious violation of the plain language of the 5th Amendment, especially in favor of business interests, is extreme hyprocisy for a Liberal, activist Court.. This is incorrect. SCOTUS has not acted against its tendencies.
SCOTUS is not constructively liberal. It is actively Statist. It consistently votes to increase the power of government on substantive issues.
From the standpoint of freedom and the rule of law, it makes no difference whose ox is Gored (listen up Al). Stealing is stealing.
The Kelo ruling supports seizing a luxury hotel and turning it into subsidized housing equally as it does the reverse. While the former may be less likely to happen, it is no less threatening to freedom. Poor and rich alike are entitled to protection of their property rights.
Or used to be. The Court has handed decisions regarding “your” property to the whim of government. That is outrageous. It means you no longer have property if your city council decides otherwise.
“Property” has become a one word oxymoron.
Lee Harris at Tech Central Station has some interesting thoughts on this: Can a People Have Too Much Respect for the Law?
He begins:
Can a people have too much respect for the law?
This might appear to be a strange question to ask. Americans, after all, seem to believe that it is impossible to have too much respect for the law. Yet a visitor to our shores in 1867 — and an English barrister at that — disagreed with this proposition.
The visitor was William Hepworth Dixon, whose book, New America, is a delight to read. By and large, he found us as a people quite likable, unlike some of the earlier travelers from England, such as Charles Dickens and Francis Trollope, both of whom agreed that we were simply deplorable barbarians. Not so Dixon. Yet there was one aspect of our national character that disagreed with him. Our “deference to the Law, and to every one who wears the semblance of lawful authority, is so complete…as to occasion a traveler some annoyance and more surprise,” Dixon wrote. “Every dog in office is obeyed with such unquestioning meekness, that every dog in office is tempted to become a cur.”
Dixon singled out the Justices of the Supreme Court, noting with apparent dismay that they are “treated with a degree of respect akin to that which is paid to an archbishop in Madrid and to a cardinal in Rome.” Then he concludes with an admonition:
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