> The Supreme Court can increasingly make any election irrelevant, since no
> regulation will be able to be passed unless corporations are fully
> compensated for their foregone profits, making such regulation economically
> impossible. I frankly think the threat of the Supreme Court is understated,
> not overhyped, since people focus too much on the social issues like
> abortion - where the conservatives have not won a solid majority - as
> opposed to the core economic and federalism issues where there is an
> increasingly solid 5-4 majority for undoing large swathes of progressive
> legislation.
>
> -- Nathan Newman
*********
I'm starting to sympathize with Richard Grossman's idea that "the progressive era" is a totally misnamed era of US history.
Somebody needs to send the supremes and their clerks copies of John Commons "Legal Foundations of Capitalism" along with a copy or nine of Capital. Epstein and his fellow travelers write as if Commons never existed. The "takings" provisions in NAFTA and WTO are even more stupid than the clause in the USC. We need to redefine corps. not come up with "better" regulations.
"If the value of a parcel of land, for example, is determined in the first instance by an enormously complicated network of property, tort, and zoning laws that regulate permissible uses of that parcel and neighboring ones, along with numerous government policies that affect regional development and hence demand [highways, mass transit, tax-subsidized mortgage rates, government regulated insurance, macroeconomic policies that affect employment, and the like], what is the prepolitical 'baseline' property value against which we declare one additional environmental regulation or one additional tax to be a theft of private property?" [Barbara Fried]
Ian