Free Republic

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has published an op-ed: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Sunstein located the source of Obama's inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution--though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa's ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt's proposals as their foundation. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights--not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals--was as follows: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak,...

NEW YORK – A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation. A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return. A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business. This is not a description of Cuba, communist China, or the USSR until 1991. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, as mandated by a radical new "bill of rights" drawn up and pushed by President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass...

You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the...