>This is further evidence that Nathan's position is based on phantasmic
>benefits offsetting real costs.
> Given the dismal history of economic development schemes in the U.S., it
> doesn't make much sense to argue from grand legal principle. It'd be not
> unlike the way the right uses civil rights language to argue against
> affirmative action.
Not really. As I've stated repeatedly, this is less an issue of economic development than opening the door for the courts to make substantive judgements on constitutional property rights.
However dismal the history of economic development and land use may be at times, the unfettered power of private property rights that the Institute for Justice is seeking through its property rights litigation is far more dismal.
The issue is not the economic benefits of economic development but whether we want the courts to allow property rights to trump democratic decisionmaking. Olver Wendall Holmes outlined in dissent in the 1905 Lochner decisions the position we largely won in the New Deal, which is that courts should not second-guess the elected branches on economic regulation:
"If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law. It is settled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we as legislators might think as injudicious, or if you like as tyrannical, as this, and which, equally with this, interfere with the liberty to contract."
It is the degeneration of liberalism and its associated radicalism that anyone on this list would cling to a rightwing Supreme Court as their check on democratic power, incredibly upholding court-supported property rights against that democratic decision-making.
Yes, politics is corrupt at times. That is the rightwing argument for oligarchy and always has been.
And at heart, many modern liberals and radicals are oligarchs at heart, benevolent ones with goals of egalitarian results, but fundamentally anti-democratic in their basic beliefs.
Nathan Newman