Saturday, July 16, 2016

The liberty agenda

Will Wilkinson has a great piece up at Vox that is a nice summary of the need for reforms and the unifying and important message of classic liberalism regarding today's problems.

The nut of the issue:

The problem is that, as the law stands today, economic liberties are not considered "fundamental" enough to merit special legal protection. And that means regulations of the economic sphere are subject to the least demanding level of legal scrutiny — "rational basis." They are considered justified, more or less, simply by virtue of the fact that they have made it through a legislature or city council.
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And that, in a nutshell, is how the economy got rigged — from bottom to top, from occupational licensing for hair braiders to ironclad intellectual property protections for tech billionaires. American law does not consider economic liberties to be "fundamental" in the way that, say, the right to have an abortion or the right to get a same-sex marriage are fundamental, and so regulations of economic life aren’t required, as matter of law, to have any practical relationship to the goals they are supposed to achieve.

And that means there has been very little to keep interest groups, large and small, from slowly rigging our economy with self-serving regulations under the guise of the public interest. 

You rig an economy or a society by taking away the presumption of rights.  This is obvious to everyone in contexts outside of commerce.  The loss of that presumption in commerce is the key to so many of our social dilemmas.

6 comments:

  1. Okay broken-record time: in 1926 the Supreme Court ruled property zoning was legal. Every property owner in American was stripped of rights thereafter. And or course, markets flummoxed.

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    1. The commerce clause, in general, sort of took a beating at that time, didn't it? It seems like the Supreme Court saved us by overturning the NIRA, but it seems like Roosevelt's threats led to a lot of poor decisions regarding economic rights after that.

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    2. The idea that government can be used to create artificial economic privilege was democratized in the Great Depression--WWII era. Various interest groups, left and right, have been refining the concept ever since....

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  2. It would be nice if courts would protect people's economic rights against the legislatures and, usually, against the will of the people. But how much responsibility do we want to load onto the courts thus to thwart the General Will? The courts cannot afford to stray too far from what the government and the people want, since they have no power of enforcement of their own.

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    1. I hear you. That's what constitutional limits can do, by tying the court's hands. It's too bad there wasn't something more specific about commerce in the Bill of Rights.

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    2. One of the main reasons that the constitutional convention was held in the first place was because Rhode Island was abusing her position geographiccally speaking to impose costs on adjoining states. The commerce clause was written to end those abuses. Perhaps not enough consideration was given to the fact that a more centralized federal government could do mischief with it.

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