Cafe HayekCafe Hayek RSS Feed New - Cafe Hayek - Article Feed

///////////////////////////////////////////
Courts Are Neither Legislatures Nor Constitutional Conventions

Posted: 26 Jun 2022 09:45 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to The Telegraph:

The usually wise Zoe Strimpel entirely misses the mark with her hostile
reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (“America
is headed for another civil war where one side has to vanquish the other,”
June 25.) It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the legal reasoning and
ruling in Dobbs, perhaps concluding that these are errors committed by a
court. But Ms Strimpel instead criticizes the ruling as if it’s the product
of a legislature or of a constitutional convention.

The ultimate question before the Court in both Roe and Dobbs was not the
normative one of whether or not American women should have legal access to
abortion. Instead, the question was one of fact, namely: Does the U.S.
Constitution protect the right to abortion? Roe found that it does; Dobbs
found that it doesn’t. Even if the majority of justices in Dobbs are
mistaken, no less mistaken are the many pundits – including Ms Strimpel –
who judge the Court according to how well or poorly it achieves particular
policy outcomes rather than according to how well or poorly it interprets
and applies the law of the Constitution. Not all that is desirable is
protected by the Constitution, and not all that is undesirable is
prohibited by it.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at
the Mercatus Center

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030

..

Nothing in the above letter implies anything about my personal views on the
morality of abortion, about appropriate abortion policy, or about the
merits or demerits of the reasoning and rulings in Roe and in Dobbs.




///////////////////////////////////////////
Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 26 Jun 2022 09:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from pages 12-13 of Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s important 2021
book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and
Spirit (footnotes deleted):

Why good-faith construction? Upon taking their Article VI oath to adhere to
the Constitution, all constitutional actors receive a great deal of
discretionary power. With this power comes a corresponding normative
obligation to implement the Constitution in good faith in a way that is
analogous to the duty that private law imposes on fiduciaries. Fiduciaries
are power-exercising parties who have been delegated control over resources
belonging to other (think attorneys, agents, and boards of directors).
Similarly, to fulfill their duty, judges and legislators must act
consistently with the letter of the instrument from which they draw their
power. They also must not abuse their delegated powers by using whatever
discretion that original meaning gives them to pursue their own extralegal
ends, goals, purposes, or objects, rather than serving the interests of
their principals. Where the letter of the Constitution is unclear, fidelity
to the Constitution’s design requires that judges, legislators, and other
constitutional decision-makers turn to the law’s original spirit.




///////////////////////////////////////////
Some Links

Posted: 26 Jun 2022 06:08 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Peter Calcagno and GMU Econ alum Edward Lopez encourage us to remember the
lessons of James Buchanans and Richard Wagners pioneering 1977 book,
Democracy in Deficit. A slice:

On the eve of the early 1980s high inflation rates, mainline economists
James Buchanan and Richard Wagner drew attention to the rising debt and
inflationary risks of the time. Their 1977 book carried the evocative
title, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. Buchanan
and Wagner’s prose minced few words, describing the Keynesian influence as
the culprit behind “continuing and increasing budget deficits, a rapidly
growing governmental sector, high unemployment, apparently permanent and
perhaps increasing inflation, and accompanying disenchantment with the
American sociopolitical order.”

Buchanan and Wagner argue that the post-Keynesian era suffers from the
“presuppositions of Harvey Road.” Harvey Road is a reference to the Keynes
family home in Cambridge. A biographer of Keynes, R. F. Harrod, coined this
“presuppositions” expression, and Buchanan and Wagner use it to argue that
Keynes’s economic theory operates in a political vacuum where the world of
monetary and fiscal policy is carried out by wise men in authority. This
intellectual aristocracy could ensure conditions of prosperity, freedom,
and even peace. In 2011, after President Obama’s stimulus package, many
remarked that “Keynes was back.” In reality, the Keynesian influence never
died, and modern macroeconomists and policymakers still suffer from the
presuppositions of Harvey Road.

Jim Dorn warns of the menace of fiscal inflation. A slice:

John Cochrane (2022), a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, makes a
convincing case that, although inflation generally can be understood as a
monetary phenomenon, its roots often can be traced to fiscal dominance—that
is, to political pressure to use the central bank to accommodate government
deficit spending. Both debt monetization and fiscal helicopter drops—or
what Cochrane calls “fiscal inflation”—need to be recognized.

Eric Boehm is correct: Biden ignores his own role in inflation.

Ryan Bourne reports that, thankfully, economists still believe in the price
mechanism. (DBx: Well, most economists still believe in the price
mechanism. Its distressing that not all do. Those economists who dont
believe in it those economists who agreed with the propositions in the
survey reported by Ryan are the equivalent of modern-day biologists who do
not believe in natural selection.)

This past February, Deirdre McCloskey gave an address on liberty on the
Occasion of the 800th Anniversary of the University of Padova. A slice:

But the second pair of Roosevelt’s four freedoms, “freedom from fear” and
“freedom from want,” are positive ones, and dangerous. They are freedoms to
have, like Amartya’s “capabilities.” In the short run, obviously, if the
state taxes Giovanni and is enabled thereby to give a positive liberty of
free goods and services to Dario, Dario is mightily pleased—at any rate if
he does not have ethical worries about the negative liberty not granted to
Giovanni. Giovanni in turn views the transfer as an act of goberno ladro,
and feels justified to turn to the Italian indoor sport of evading the
taxes.

Ray Domanico says that Betsy DeVos has much to teach. A slice:

The true threat DeVos posed to the Washington education “blob” was her
commitment to localism, pluralism, and federalism in educational matters
and her belief that parents should be the ultimate arbiters of how and
where their children are educated. These values are anathema to
Washington’s self-appointed mandarins and the self-serving national
teachers’ unions, which are more interested in pressing their influence in
Washington than in fighting for better schools state by state.

Heather Mac Donald rightly criticizes Bidens green hypocrisy. A slice:

Mocking climate-change warriors for their private jets and yachts,
far-flung vacation homes, and chauffeured SUVs has become routine among
jaundiced observers of the world’s increasingly numerous environmental
conferences. Such mockery hasn’t had the slightest effect on the conferees’
conspicuous consumption of the miraculous products of Western innovation
and capitalism. The celebrities and climate ministers continue to enjoy
their fabulous lifestyles in plain view, confident in the cardinal rule of
all environmentalism: one’s own activities are always important enough to
be exempt from any environmental limits. Only the other person should have
to sacrifice.

Matt Ridley calls for an independent inquiry into covids origins.

Matt Ridley and Alina Chan ask: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

Blake Stone-Banks reports on life in lockdowned Shanghai. Two slices:

Raising two-year-old twins, my wife and I faced the real prospect of having
our children taken from us into quarantine facilities with no way to
contact them. We deliberately began sharing cups and utensils with our kids
with the hope that if one of us contracted Covid, we would all test
positive and avoid family separation. We made plans to bar our door if we
tested positive and kept a list of emergency numbers, including that of the
U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, which would soon order non-emergency employees
to depart China.

We also began hearing reports of more compounds in both Pudong and Puxi
where residents were unable to receive food deliveries. I began calling
colleagues and friends to check in on them, and I discovered, to my horror,
how lucky our family was to live in a large, centrally located compound.
Several of them who lived in smaller compounds were struggling to get food.
The logistical nightmare of a 25-million-person lockdown was already coming
into focus.

..

Nothing made much sense about how the lockdown was implemented, and we had
nowhere to turn for answers. In the first month of lockdown, almost no one
could leave their apartment for access to healthcare. Of the three times I
am aware someone in our compound called an ambulance, each time the
ambulance was denied. There is no official toll of those who died due to
Covid hospital restrictions, but many stories were shared on WeChat,
including that of a nurse who died from asthma after being refused access
to her own hospital. Every time one of our kids bumped his head or choked
on his food, we immediately entered triage mode because the ambulances
weren’t getting through.




///////////////////////////////////////////
So True

Posted: 26 Jun 2022 04:07 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
el gato malo posted the image just below at his blog, bad cattitude. If you
doubt its veracity, behold, when youre next in a modern supermarket, the
entire or, in some cases, almost entire aisle devoted to pets. Pet food
(available for animals of different ages and body weights). Pet snacks. Pet
toys. Pet accoutrements. Pet grooming equipment. Its no exaggeration to say
that pet dogs and cats and perhaps even pet parakeets in America and
other rich countries today live better than did most of humanity prior to
the industrial, capitalist age and that, were these countries to make a
serious move toward socialism, many of these pets would become human food.






///////////////////////////////////////////
Quotation of the Day

Posted: 26 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 226 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2017 paper “Rebuilding
the Liberal Project,” as this paper appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The
Struggle for a Better World:

True liberals must be vociferous critics of the intellectual errors
committed by the progressive elite, and the empirical consequences that
such errors have brought in their wake.

DBx: Pictured here is FTC chairwoman Lina Khan a progressive elite who
fancies that she knows better than markets what are the details of
competitive processes and outcomes and when, and by how much, market
competition should be suppressed in order to attempt to promote other goals
and fancies.




--
You are subscribed to email updates from "Cafe HayekCafe Hayek RSS Feed New
- Cafe Hayek - Article Feed."
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now:
[link removed]

Email delivery powered by Google.
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States