Tim Kowal

Pondering Positive Rights

by Tim Kowal on February 11, 2012

In light of some of the responses to the League’s constitutional convention, I’ve been doing some thinking on the subject of so-called positive rights and want to take the pulse of readers here.  To those of you who believe there is or ought to be a constitutional right to health care, do you believe this right exists outside the context of the state? That is, if we suddenly found ourselves stranded on a desert island with no government or formal laws, do I nonetheless have a right to receive medical services from you similar to your right against my stealing your possessions or causing you physical harm? What if you need my shirt to strain your drinking water–part of your "rights" to basic food, water, and health care? Can negative and positive rights co-exist?

You can see where I’m going with this: some kind of things are appropriately called basic, or constitutional, rights, and others are something else. But I genuinely want to understand the case for putting positive rights in a constitution, and how they might interact with or impact negative rights.

After initially posting this on Dutch Courage, I came up with an alternative formulation of the question, which I posed to @kylecupp and @eliasisquith in our ongoing Twitter discussion:

Are positive rights PERSONAL?  Can I AS AN INDIVIDUAL (or a group or even a government agency on my behalf) enforce a “right” AGAINST YOU to provide certain things (health care, food, retirement,  education, etc.) TO ME?

Keep in mind that, as a conservative and more importantly as a Christian, I accept I have certain moral obligations to my fellow man.  But it is my belief that if I shirk in those duties, I account to God, not to any man.  Political obligations, on the other hand, do require us to account to man.  Are the positive rights mentioned above, in the world constitutions mentioned in the study about our unlovable constitution, or in the South African constitution TVD referenced, the sort we account to other men if we fail to provide?  Are they personal, or are they for us each to work out for ourselves in fear and trembling in our respective moral and/or spiritual beliefs?

Kyle’s comments also got me thinking about something else.  (Kyle, you really have been my muse this week!)  Most of the “rights” in our Bill of Rights really are structured as natural rights.  The right to free speech is only guaranteed as against Congress making any laws abridging it.  It was later extended to mean any act of any arm of government, federal or state.  But notice that it never mentions that we have a personal right of speech, i.e., as against other private citizens or entities.  Yet obviously it exists.  If there was not an implicit, natural right to freely speak, I would be permitted to use reasonable force to prevent you from speaking ill of me—even if true.  But the uncodified common law has never permitted this, having always recognized a basic negative right to speech.  Similarly, the right to private property is protected by the Fifth Amendment against taking by the government unless for a public use, and even then requires just compensation.  But surely the Constitution’s silence as to common private theft does not suggest neutrality on the matter. 

Implicit in our Constitution, then, are natural rights to speak freely on true matters and to own private property.  So fundamental are these negative rights as against our fellow citizens that they have existed in the common law throughout our nation’s history. 

Here’s the point:  The intellectual and legal history underlying our Constitution reveals its adoption of a political philosophy of negative rights.  I don’t think there are any implicit positive rights in the Constitution, other than procedural rights (habeas corpus, jury trial, confrontation of witnesses, etc.), but I’m open to correction.  So if we were going to craft a new constitution, then:

(a) Do negative rights conflict with the positive rights we might want to include in that constitution? 

(b) If so, do we need to disavow our long common law history to the extent it champions those negative rights? 

(c) Do we need to identify a new political philosophy that provides the intellectual basis for a constitution of positive rights (like the Framers did by invoking Locke’s phraseology in adopting a constitution of negative rights)? 

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Our Unlovable Constitution

by Tim Kowal on February 6, 2012

A new study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg concludes that the world’s democracies are no longer emulating the U.S. Constitution, and are instead resorting to other templates that guarantee more “generic building blocks of global rights constitutionalism,” including “women’s rights,” “the right to social security, the right to health care, and the right to food.”  The study suggests that the U.S., “rooted in a libertarian constitutional tradition that is inherently antithetical to the notion of positive rights,” is in danger of becoming a “legal backwater.”

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to agree.  According to a recent interview, Justice Ginsburg said “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said.  She recommends the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights. (Via NY Times.)  Law and Versteeg similarly find that “the average constitution has increasingly grown to resemble the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Charter of Civil Society for the Caribbean Community.”

The other “generic building blocks” Law and Versteeg conclude are missing from the U.S. Constitution include “Right to work,” “Right to unionize and/or strike,” “Physical needs rights,” “Right to education,” and “Limits on property rights” (e.g., “property may be limited by its social function”).  Other popular “rights” include “Citizen duties,” “Right to a healthy environment,” “Other worker’s rights,” and “Artistic freedom.”

Two observations:

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No, Americans are not “operationally liberal”

by Tim Kowal on January 14, 2012

Responding to my demurrer to “the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal,” Yeggmen sticks up for the saw: 

what researchers have (repeatedly) done is get a bunch of people together and have them fill out a long and comprehensive political questionnaire. They ask them to choose an ideological label, vague questions about principles (e.g., whether the government should do more or less), and ask them thousands of questions on specific policies in order to ascertain the ideological character of their policy preferences.

Here’s what they found:

In the aggregate, Americans are always operationally liberal on average.
They prefer policies through which the government does and spends more to solve social
problems. And they are always symbolically conservative on average: they consistently prefer the
conservative label to the liberal one.

With respect, to explain the saw is not to defend it.  My argument is not that Americans do act consistently with their conservative self-identification.  My argument is that if Americans are “operationally liberal,” it’s because they’ve been painted into a corner. 

[Continue reading at Dutch Courage]

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Under Siege: How Government Centralization and Expansion Puts Democracy in the Service of Special Interests

by Tim Kowal on December 19, 2011

In its first full year of business in 1998, the 99 Cents Only store in the north Los Angeles city of Lancaster did over $5 million in sales. This was welcome news to the city, given the space had been vacant ever since the new “Power Center” shopping development, where 99 Cents was located, opened ten years earlier. Almost immediately, however, 99 Cents’ next door neighbor, Costco, told the city it needed to expand. The owner of the center offered Costco optimal space behind 99 Cents, but Costco insisted that the city use its power of eminent domain to condemn 99 Cents’ business. If the city refused, Costco threatened to relocate to neighboring Palmdale, who surely would use ever tool at its disposal to attract the lucrative big box store’s business. To seal the deal, Costco issued an additional threat: not only would it relocate to Palmdale—it would leave its existing store shuttered and vacant as an economic deadweight on the city’s key commercial center. Backed against the wall, the terrified city relented. It condemned 99 Cents’ store, paid the shopping center owner $3.8 million, and give the parcel to Costco for one dollar.

This story typifies what drives all rent-seeking: Motive and opportunity. Businesses seek economic advantage wherever they can find it, and they frequently find it in the coercive power of the state. Ill-defined limits on government powers—of which eminent domain is just one example—give businesses easy access to this power. When the economy grows, the motive to capture the government intensifies. When government is centralized, the opportunities to capture it get cheaper and more convenient. When the limits on government recede, these opportunities get still cheaper and more abundant. Motive explains why rational private interests engage in rent-seeking: to gain a competitive edge. Opportunity—that is, the opportunity for access to government power through ill-defined limits on that power—explains why rational government officials yield to special interests: they face a “race to the bottom.” If the Lancasters of the world refuse to use their coercive government power for the benefit of special interests, some other government official or agency will. Denying access to special interests just means they will look elsewhere. And they will surely find it, so long as giving in to special interests is a matter of legislative “discretion.”

[Continue reading at Dutch Courage...]

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Can the Occupy Movement Tackle Crony Capitalism?

by Tim Kowal on October 30, 2011

In a comment on Shawn Gude’s previous post on the main page about the Occupy movement, I asked who the “1%” is and whether Occupy protesters were primarily aggrieved about “Wall Street,” or whether they were aggrieved about “wealth inequality” more generally.  Commenter Michael Drew referred me to this post at Rortybomb entitled “Who are the 1%, and what do they do for a living?” purporting to get right to the point.  Here’s the operative chart:

These numbers show that the wealth share of CEOs and other private sector executives has actually decreased almost 14% since 1979.  In contrast, the share of financiers increased more than 80%.  Yet the rest of the Rortybomb piece lumps business leaders into the same category as financiers.  Why? 

The most obvious explanation is that the Occupy movement is primarily organized around a moral commitment to a particular definition of “fairness” oriented around results rather than process.  I previously outlined the problems with drawing a necessary connection between wealth inequality and “unfairness” or “injustice.”  But I have also discussed the real problem of power inequality:

There is nothing unjust about economic inequality.  What does become unjust, however, is when those who benefit from an organized system of laws to amass wealth[ ] then use that wealth to abuse that system of laws.  What results, then, is not just wealth inequality (which I contend is no sin by itself), but power inequality.  Where power inequality exists in great enough measure, a political system can no longer sufficiently guarantee procedural fairness.  And where there is no guarantee of procedural fairness, wealth inequality suddenly becomes a real injustice—inequality of wealth is only just to the extent it is the result of free choices, and free choice cannot be presumed where there exists an inequality of power.

Pointing generally to wealth inequality fails to take into account the threshold-earner phenomenon and the clarion call of cultural critics to work less and eschew building financial fortune and to spend more time in non-economic activities. It also fails to account for the fact that, in real terms, the poor have experienced significant economic improvement in the past 30 years. The rest of us, too, get the benefit of the new technology and other cheap consumer goods that corporations invent, develop, manufacture, and distribute, many of which undeniably improve our lives. I previously made and developed these and other points on these pages in my review of Paul Krugman’s book.

If power inequality—e.g., “crony capitalism”—is the problem, does the Occupy movement have a solution?  Simply more regulation and more central control won’t get us there.  In fact, that road may wind up making matters worse.  Cronyism is a two way street.  True, the bigger an industry gets, the more resources it can devote to rent-seeking.  But that has nothing to do with the incentive to rent-seek.  A powerful interest has little reason to buy influence in a weak government.  The problem of faction and “crony capitalism” thus gets worse as government becomes more powerful and centralized. 

The controversial 2005 Supreme Court opinion in Kelo v. New London provides a worthwhile illustration.  The Supreme Court’s failure to enforce the “public use” clause of the Fifth Amendment, a structural check against the influence of factions, has led directly to more crony capitalism.  For example, corporations’ and developers’ wealth had little to do with the crony capitalism that befell Suzette Kelo when her home was taken by the city council of New London, Connecticut at the behest of the Pfizer Corporation—who later scrapped their plans and abandoned her bulldozed neighborhood as a blighted vacant lot.  Had the Court faithfully applied the Constitution according to its plain language—so as not to give near-unfettered discretion to local governments—Pfizer would have had no reason to rent-seek in the first place.  Had the law of the land clearly prohibited the taking of property from one private party to hand over to a more politically favored private party, Pfizer would not have bothered asking the town council to exercise a power it clearly didn’t have.

Fixing the damage done by Kelo is relatively straightforward because we know where the system failed.  Constitutional checks were already in place but the Supreme Court ignored them.  The Court can and at some point will reverse Kelo. 

The rest of our problems concerning economic and regulatory policy are more difficult because we’ve been operating off book.  Who do we blame for our financial crisis?  “Fat cats”?  “Crony capitalists”?  “Corrupt politicians”?  These are not new phenomenon.  They were baked in the cake as we evolved our federal government by way of court decisions and “Constitutional Moments.”  We got the progress and economic growth hoped for, but we failed to install structural checks against the downsides.  No wonder “class warfare” is brewing:  populist forces are rushing to fill the vacuum created by having altered the balance of governmental power that has given factions  more access to the levers. 

Somewhere under the din of bongos, the Occupy movement has some legitimate grievances.  However, a generalized grievance of against wealth disparity will not get us the structural checks we’ve been lacking.  The movement could take up a more intellectually cohesive position by rallying against centralized economic and financial planning and restoring America to a more constitutional model.  Unless it does that, I predict we’ll see some legislative reforms pandering to the vague demands of the movement, but little in the way of serious reform. 

[Cross-posted at Dutch Courage]

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Affirmative Action and Equality, Cont’d

by Tim Kowal on September 28, 2011

I would be remiss to leave the recent discussions on affirmative action and equality without citing Frederick Douglass’s moral argument against affirmative action made in 1865 to a group of abolitionists:

“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us…. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”

As it turned out, this nation’s racial minorities achieved their most dramatic years of social and economic progress in the years prior to affirmative action.

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California Legislature Proposes Racial Discrimination in University Admissions Policy

by Tim Kowal on September 27, 2011

Via Pacific Legal Foundation, the California Legislature recently passed a bill, SB 185, that would require the state’s public universities to discriminate on the basis of race and gender in their admissions policies.  Here’s the relevant text of SB 185:

This bill would authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, to the maximum extent permitted by the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 31 of Article I of the California Constitution, and relevant case law.

And here’s the relevant provisions of article 1, section 31 of the California Constitution, as amended by Prop 209, which runs expressly counter to SB 185:

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California Governor Jerry Brown vetoes ski helmet mandate, language bill, and higher cell phone fines: “Not every human problem deserves a law”

by Tim Kowal on September 10, 2011

In the comments to my recent piece on the new babysitter legislation on its way to becoming law in California, co-blogger Tom Van Dyke mentioned that Gov. Jerry Brown “has a righteous spark.”  The very next day, Gov. Brown proved him right by vetoing a ridiculous bill (yes, it made it through both houses of this state’s dysfunctional legislature) that would have criminalized child skiing and snowboarding without state-approved headgear.  In his veto message, Gov. Brown reminded his fellow Democrats in the state legislature the limits of lawmaking:

To the Members of the California State Senate:

I am returning Senate Bill 105 without my signature.

This measure would impose criminal penalties on a child under the age of 18 and his or her parents if the child skis or snowboards without a helmet.

While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state.  Not every human problem deserves a law. 

I believe parents have the ability and responsibility to make good choices for their children.  [Emphasis added.]

The bill had been introduced by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, the lawmaker who earlier this year proposed making it illegal for businesses in the state to require its employees to speak any specific language.  I wrote about that proposal here.  Gov. Brown vetoed that bill, too.

Cleaning up the inning, Gov. Brown also vetoed a measure to increase base fines for using a cell phone while driving by $50 on the first offense and $100 on subsequent offenses.  The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the measure “would have brought the total penalty to $328 for the first offense and $528 for subsequent offenses. It also would have applied to bicyclists, but with lower penalties.”

As participants in our previous discussion recall, I noted the same wrongheaded yet pervasive approach to lawmaking that Gov. Brown criticizes in his veto message.  Specifically, while we can agree that most proposed laws have in mind the enforcement of some nice-sounding objective, the law is not an appropriate instrument to achieve every such objective.  To the (surprising) number of you who defended the babysitting bill, then, I want to know your response to Gov. Brown here.  Do you agree with his vetoes of these bills?  If you agree, how does the basis for that agreement square with your support for the babysitter law?

[Cross-posted at Notes From Babel]

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Aging boomer trends

by Tim Kowal on September 7, 2011

Here are a couple of interesting (and troubling) posts about what aging boomers are up to.  First, the LA Times reports that, as predicted, the nation’s 77 million boomers are beginning to dump their stocks as they prepare for long retirements.  Just as the economy rose during the boomers’ productive years, experts are predicting a long slump as they begin to cash out:

The report’s basic premise is that stock prices “have been closely related to demographic trends in the past half century" — in other words, that baby boomers pushed up stock prices in earlier years as they hit their prime earning and saving years.

. . . .Indeed, aside from being a longer-term depressant, selling by baby boomers -– the post-War contingent born between 1946 and 1964 –- could forestall any current-day recovery in the market from the global financial crisis.

And cashing out they are, according to this article from a Fox affiliate, reporting that many retiring boomers are also retiring the idea of leaving an inheritance:

"My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero," Willison said. "I’m going to spoil myself now."
Upending the conventional notion of parents carefully tending their financial estates to be passed down at the reading of their wills, many baby boomers say they instead plan to spend the money on themselves while they’re alive.

In a survey of millionaire boomers by investment firm U.S. Trust, only 49% said it was important to leave money to their children when they die. The low rate was a big surprise for a company that for decades has advised wealthy people how to leave money to their heirs.

The article reports that many boomers feel they have pre-paid their children’s inheritance by helping them pay for college or a house.  Says one boomer:  "I’ve helped launch them with their education and their careers. If they can’t make it on their own now, they can never make it. I’ve done my job. Now I’m going to enjoy life." 

I can’t help wonder, though, how much the boomer generation—particularly, the leaders they helped elect—contributed to the high entry costs that make it so expensive for their children today to begin new careers, or contributed to the land use regulations that make it so expensive for their children to afford the kind of housing their parents had 30 or 40 years ago. 

I wish those boomers well who have earned and saved enough to enjoy a comfortable retirement.  Those they leave behind have no claim on them, and the boomers have every right to enjoy their rewards.  We might have liked, however, to have enjoyed more of the economic freedoms they had so that we might have a better chance at our own. 

[Cross-posted at Notes From Babel]

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Prop 13 Is for Lovers…of Property Taxes!

by Tim Kowal on September 6, 2011

Last week’s “OC Watchdog” piece by Teri Sforza in the OC Register pokes the Prop 13 bear, suggesting it is time Californians withdraw their opposition to higher property taxes, by focusing on the familiar scenario of the new homeowner paying scads more in property taxes than his long-time homeowner neighbor.  For those unfamiliar with this watershed issue of California tax and public finance policy, Prop 13 is the wildly popular constitutional amendment passed in 1978 by a margin of nearly two-to-one, cutting rates on all property taxes to a maximum of 1% of 1975 property values.  Cal. Const. art. XIII A, §§ 1-2.  Prop 13 allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year, and revaluation may occur only when property is sold.  After its passage, Prop 13 cut statewide property tax revenues by a staggering 57%.  It is commonly blamed by politicians and the media as one of the chief causes of the decline in the funding and, more debatably, the quality, of California’s sub-par school system.

Like many Prop 13 opponents, Ms. Sforza points to Prop 13’s loopholes, such as 1031 like-kind exchanges available to commercial and investment property owners, suggesting homeowners are getting the short end of an already wrongheaded deal.  Similarly, LA Mayor Villaraigosa attacks Prop 13 as “a corporate tax give-away.”  Says Villaraigosa, “[w]e all know the history” of Prop 13:

With the state experiencing rapid growth and high inflation, we had people literally forced out of their homes by skyrocketing assessments. And we all know what’s happened since. Not only have we suffered the long?term consequences of disinvestment in public education and public infrastructure ?? Prop 13 has had the unintended effect of favoring commercial property owners at the expense of homeowners.”

However, a closer study shows Villaraigosa’s “history” is not only incomplete, it is wrong.  In fact, just six years prior to decisively enacting Prop 13, Californians even more decisively (65.9% voting against) to defeat Prop 14 (a/k/a the “Watson II” initiative), a similar proposed constitutional amendment to limit property taxes.  Four years before that, Californians rejected still more resoundingly (68% voting against) the same idea in Prop 9 (a/k/a the “Watson I” initiative).  Moreover, state law at the time placed ceilings on the tax rate that school districts could assess without the approval of a “tax override” by a majority of district residents.  As of 1971, nearly every district had approved such an override. [click to continue…]

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California’s Nanny State Nanny Law

by Tim Kowal September 4, 2011

The California Assembly, faced with such difficult tasks as prison overcrowding, the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, one of the worst business climates in the nation, and a broken education financing policy (article forthcoming), apparently has prioritized the issue of overworked babysitters, courtesy of a bill introduced by Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).  From the [...]

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The Constitutional Conservatism Newspeak

by Tim Kowal August 28, 2011

“Liberals are the true conservatives of this generation,” a growingly popular line of argument goes, “because liberals are the guardians of the new American tradition—the New Deal tradition—against the reactionary onslaught of the fake, revanchist ‘conservatives.’ True constitutional conservatism,” the argument continues, “would defend Supreme Court decisions of the past 70 years that approved centralized [...]

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“If you seek our monument, look in the hole”

by Tim Kowal August 25, 2011

I devoured Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon within a few days of its release.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit of a declinist, so I tend to nod right along with Steyn’s narrative.  An impressive autodidact though he is, Steyn is not an economist, so no doubt the facts and figures [...]

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The Affluent (and Downgraded, Debt-Laden) Society

by Tim Kowal August 8, 2011

The late preeminent liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once complained in The Affluent Society that where Democrats once stood for an issue of great importance in emphasizing production, they lost that issue by misunderstanding why production was important.  For Galbraith, production was central to the modern American economy not to sustain impressive arrays of consumer [...]

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Conservatism: Defender of the Modern Welfare State?

by Tim Kowal July 18, 2011

I am grateful for the incentive Jason’s rebuttal provides to study conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott.  However, I respectfully disagree with Jason’s conclusion that “esteem[ of] the present … on account of its familiarity” suffices to establish conservatism.  Thus, I stand on my assertion that there is something more to the idea of conservatism than unthinkingly [...]

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“Carmageddon,” Car-Culture, and Conservatism

by Tim Kowal July 15, 2011

The LA region is preparing for the weekend closure of the 405 freeway, one of the area’s main thoroughfares, for the planned demolition of the Mulholland Bridge to add carpool lanes to a 10-mile stretch connecting the west side to the San Fernando Valley.  LA officials have been working with “celebrities with large Twitter followings” [...]

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The Conscience of a Liberal

by Tim Kowal July 6, 2011

Despite modern liberalism’s sweeping scope, no one seems to know quite what it is. Liberalism appeared somewhere in the sixteenth century—“St. George, in the guise of Rationality,” as Kenneth Minogue puts it—to slay the dragons of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. Centuries later, liberalism slew the dragons of slavery, poverty, and later “the inert scaliness [...]

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Painting Conservatism Out of the Corner: A Review of William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State

by Tim Kowal June 21, 2011

Andrew Sullivan’s recent apologia—or, perhaps, obituary—of conservatism makes at least one very good point:  Modern conservatism has painted itself into a corner.  Concerning the poor and uninsured, for example, Mr. Sullivan rightly observes that “in a society that won’t let people die on the street, these are real and tough problems we cannot just wish [...]

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The Role of the Prison Guards Union in California’s Troubled Prison System

by Tim Kowal June 5, 2011

Jailing is big business.  California spends approximately $9 billion a year on its correctional system, and hosts one in seven of the nation’s prisoners.  It has the largest prison population of any state.  The number of correctional facilities, the amount of compensation for their unionized staffs, and the total cost of incarcerating a prisoner in [...]

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Due credit to Dearborn Muslims for sending the right message on Terry Jones

by Tim Kowal April 25, 2011

Pointing out the recent stories concerning Terry Jones’s plans to protest outside Dearborn, Michigan’s largest mosque—and noting that a local CAIR leader, Dawud Walid, among others, rightly and admirably criticized the legal attempts to shut down Jones’s speech—commenter BSK invites me to defend my argument that American Muslims have a “messaging” problem.  As readers will [...]

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Why wealth inequality is not unjust, but power inequality is

by Tim Kowal April 18, 2011

In a previous post, I explained that one of the underlying sources of disagreement about basic economic policy is that first world economies are both theoretically and practically complex, and thus may be quite difficult to reconcile with one’s particular theory of justice—e.g., a theory that seeks to ensure some baseline fairness in the distribution [...]

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Muslims and PR: A response to comments

by Tim Kowal April 13, 2011

Because of the large number of comments to my last post, I hope it is acceptable that I respond to them en masse below. First, perhaps I didn’t clearly set out the nature of my argument and observations.  I did not prescribe how any Muslim should think about his faith.  I did not purport to impose [...]

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Muslims and the need for reform or, at least, better PR

by Tim Kowal April 12, 2011

Two weeks ago, the Orange County Federalist Society, of which I am honored to serve as vice-president, hosted Andrew McCarthy to talk about the King Hearings on the question of radical Islam.  A few months ago, we hosted a panel discussion on the Park 51 mosque (a/k/a the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and the Oklahoma anti-Sharia [...]

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Why We Disagree About Taxes, Entitlements, and Economic Theory in General

by Tim Kowal April 6, 2011

In a previous post drawing the distinction between procedural and substantive justice, I noted my objection to the idea that procedural fairness ought to be subverted in order to guarantee predetermined outcomes.  However—and although I predicted that most Americans would probably agree with me—I did not touch on the difficulty in refuting the intrinsic appeal [...]

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