Posted on 03/26/2011 3:55:39 AM PDT by Scanian
Even if it could be proved that judges who are making rulings that go counter to the written law produce better results in those particular cases than following the letter of the law would have, that does not make society better off. When laws become unreliable and judges unpredictable, lawsuits become a bonanza for charlatans, who can force honest people to settle out of court, for fear of what some judge might do.
* The mainstream media never expressed half the outrage about Mao Zedong as they did about Ronald Reagan. Yet, when it came to killing millions of innocent civilians, even Hitler was an amateur compared to Mao.
* The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called "the Detroit pattern"-- increasing taxes, harassing businesses and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.
* Safety advocates who say that we shouldn't take chances, but should ban things that might be unsafe, don't seem to understand that if we banned every food to which somebody had an allergy we could all starve to death.
* Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival. An intolerant Islamic world may outlast the Western world that seems ready to tolerate anything, including the undermining of its own fundamental values and threats to its continued existence.
* The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be "materialistic" and "greedy" to want to keep what you have earned. But it is "idealistic" to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Mr. Sowell is describing a Byzantine Dicatorship - capricious laws, arbitrarily applied, at the behest of, and for the benefit of, a small, favored, inner-circle, at the expense of the populace at large....
To carry a popular metaphor to its logical extreme, we are now “Frog Soup”......
Sowell has a unique gift for saying what should be obvious but isn’t in the most clear and concise manner.
“Sowell has a unique gift for saying what should be obvious but isn’t in the most clear and concise manner.”
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Very true and I don’t see him being attacked daily by the left wing fruitcakes. If Jim Demint says essentially the same things he is called a wild eyed right wing extremist even by some so-called conservatives.
This is a great man. I hope he lives for a very long time, with a healthy mind and body. God bless him.
He’s working on, what? His 75th book or something like that?
Walter Williams asked Sowell if he writes with both hands, two books at a time.
> Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival.
Wow, those are the exact words that I used 9 or 10 years ago in a discussion about profiling as an inborn survival method that we are born with.
Years ago (MANY years ago), students in law school studied the Constitution; now they study “case law”. And what is the result? What do we have? A mess.
You make a distinction that is no distinction. The lawyers who wrote the constitution were students of the English Common Law in the best sense, and English Common Law is case law. To understand almost anything in the constitution you need to understand the common law defintion of the terms at the time it was written.
The problem is when judges feel that they are empowered to abandon law, case law, constitution and statutes altogether and fashion out of thin air a remedy that the law never envisioned for a wrong that many of us do not think is a wrong at all or at least one that some defendant or society as a whole should pay out daamges for.
That is what Sowell is decrying. For instance, contracts are supposed to be interpreted according to the intent of the contracting parties as expressed in its written terms at the time of writing. There are several centuries of case law that forms a body of precedent for what terms mean, how they are to be construed, and how to establish meaning when ambiguities or conflicts arise.
But in too many places - and Michigan recently became one of those places - judges have taken upon themselves to toss out contracts altogether and create something else they believe to be fair. Too often it is not fair, but becomes a crap shoot as to who wins. It is one of the main reasons that businesses are fleeing the state of Michigan. Rule of law no longer applies there.
It already has. 10 People go into 10 different courts for the exact same thing with the exact same evidence. There will be 19 different judgements.
And that’s just the way the lawyers like it.
About the same many years ago, students of business studied business subjects, such as management, accounting, marketing, finance, economics, information systems, business law, etc. Businesses hired these students, who then worked their way up in the various departments, and contributed to the long-term survival and prosperity of the enterprise.
Now MBA frauds, with undergrad degrees in EDU, sociology, poli-sci, etc., study "case studies" of previous MBA screw-ups, then proceed to create screw-ups of their own which will subsequently become "case study" material for the next crop of MBA frauds. A five-year plan, on a two-year contract, with bonuses based on meaningless quarterly "metrics", with a golden parachute of gazillions, regardless of the company's prospects for survival.
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