Ya gotta watch out for them "nice guys"

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 1928

I came across this quote in Frederich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. This warning starts off the seventeenth chapter titled, "The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State" and is an appropriate reminder to us today as government massively expands on the justification of helping some segment of society. The quote prompted me to search for its source, curious about the the context which inspired Justice Brandeis to issue this advice.

The quote is part of Brandeis' dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States. The opinion is worth reading in its entirety as an excellent example of a principled interpretation of the Constitution. The issue at stake was whether or not wiretapping was a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The 1914 supreme Court case Weeks v. United States had previously established that illegally obtained evidence could not be used in a criminal trial because it violated standards for search and seizure. Brandeis argues that although telephones did not exist at the time of writing of the Constitution, the principle involved is protection of the private citizen's security from government invasion--no matter the form. Here's another taste of his principled reasoning in Olmstead:

'The principles laid down in this opinion affect the very essence of constitutional liberty and security. They reach farther than the concrete form of the case there before the court, with its adventitious circumstances; they apply to all invasions on the part of the government and its employe of the sanctities of a man's home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty and private property, where that right has never been forfeited by his conviction of some public offense-it is the invasion of this sacred right which underlies and constitutes the essence of Lord Camden's judgment...There is, in essence, no difference between the sealed letter and the private telephone message. As Judge Rudkin said below:
'True, the one is visible, the other invisible; the one is tangible, the other intangible; the one is sealed, and the other unsealed; but these are distinctions without a difference.'

Let us hope that the judges who will review the constitutionality of ObamaCare think as clearly and in such a principled manner. It's time to reverse this country's tend toward greater and greater indentured servitude of one citizen for the sake of another and get back to a principled application of individual rights, equally applied to all.

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A Case in Point

I don't want an equal share of loot. I want freedom.

--CAV

Read the rest.

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Poverty and Capitalism

I love this man's impish benevolence--and his economics aren't bad either.

America's Biggest Oil Spill

We will still have to see what the long term effects are--but so far, the damage of the BP oil spill appears to be more economic than ecologic.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig...But so far...it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana...

So far, the teams have collected nearly 3,000 dead birds, but...the Valdez may have killed as many as 435,000 birds..."We can't speak to the long-term impacts, but Ivor is just saying what all of us are seeing," says Amy Holman, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) director for Alaska who is working on van Heerden's assessment team in the Gulf...

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor, says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it..."

"There are a lot of alarmists in the bird world," Kemp says. "People see oiled pelicans and they go crazy. But this has been a disaster for people, not biota."

From Time Magazine, 7/29/2010 "The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?"

The photo essay of 100 Days of the Oil Spill is worth checking out, though notable for its absence is any mention of the US delay in accepting international offers of assistance.

HT The Rational Capitalist. (And be sure to check out the political cartoon he links to.)

Take a Test on Economics

1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures a country's total economic activity. T or F?
2. Consumer spending represents around two-thirds of the economy. T or F?
3. If prices are stable, that means there is no inflation. T or F?
4. Money is a creation of government. T or F?
5. A period of gently falling prices is a bad thing. T or F?
6. Before the Reserve Bank/Fed/Bank of England was created, the world was wracked with inflations, booms and busts. T or F?
7. Economics is a "value-free" science. T or F?
8. Saving takes money out of the economy. T or F?
9. Interest rates are set by the Central Bank. T or F?
10. A good war is good for the economy. T or F
11. Government spending pumps up an economy in depression. T or F?
12. Banks are inherently bankrupt. T or F?

Answers here.

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