Cass Sunstein, the "left" wing of the U of Chicagolaw school, has been hammering on the baseline issue with great clarity and effectiveness in a series of book, including The Partial Constitution and Social Justice and Free Markets. I recommend these spare, lucid, and powerful writings to anyone interested in the issues. I don't agree with everything he says, but he is excellent on property and baselines. Sunstein tends to understate their radical implications; he may have had judicial ambitions that are now largely scotched, alas; he would have been great on the 7th Circuit. --jks
>*********
>
>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
>
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