[porphyrogenitus]

While #1 is generally true, it’s not true in all cases, or at least depends upon how the parents in question define “pressing interest.” Parental child abuse is hardly unknown, and the sort of parents who are prone to abuse their children will not pay a protection agency to enforce the child’s claims against themselves (and children will lack the resources and, being minors, the ability to contract with a protection agency themselves).

Your #2 ignores the original premise – even if the grandparents learn of child abuse, they are not themselves the victims. As OP wrote, under Rothbardian anarchism “ only victims of a crime could take the respective criminal to court” – grandparents aren’t the victims of the abuse of minor children, neither are third parties who might witness it, school teachers who notice bruises or other signs of abuse, doctors who see signs of child rape, and the like.

Look, I’m certainly not going to hold up today’s child protection as a model of excellence (it misses much real abuse, and often persecutes people who have committed no real abuse). But here is something where IMO OP has a point – it’s not even an instance where “well, given how bad things are under the current system, we should at least give AnarchoCapitalism a try before saying it would be worse” – it is not even theoretically better in this instance.*

*I focused on parental abuse because I do think an AnarchoCapitalist society could devise a means of allowing the parents to be a child’s proxy – while rejecting those who sometimes write as if the parents hold their children as a sort of property or homestead them somehow. I’m in agreement with Stephan Kinsella that this is an odious doctrine. But it would seem there is no way, consistent with the Rothbardian doctrine mentioned above, that the AnarchoCapitalist society could protect children from abuse by their parents. I’ve seen it written – for example Mr. Kinsella expressed this to me – that while the general rule would be parents would be entrusted to be the proxies of their children, if they were found to be abusing or neglecting them sufficiently, that prerogative could be reassigned to another. However, the gap in this remains that such a third party would not have standing to bring a suit to have the custody over the children reassigned from the parents to themselves, because that third party would not be the victim. Thus they could not, consistent with the Rothbardian principle that only a victim (or, extended, only the victim’s existing legal proxy) can bring the victimizer to court – they would be bringing a case to court to gain the standing they do not have, and the case would have to be dismissed. Or the Rothbardian principle violated, but to violate it is to effectively reject it.

This is one of a couple reasons why I’m not an AnarchoCapitalist (though I do want to give a hat tip to Stephan Kinsella for giving me some very thoughtful and considered replies when I contacted him on this issue, which made my more sympathetic to at least his version of how children would be treated & protected in a Rothbarian society. But I still found it problematic).

[porphyrogenitus]

Thanks tons for sharing your knowledge with us!

Indeed, thanks to all the Professors here.

[porphyrogenitus]

At his personal website, Tom just posted this.

[porphyrogenitus]

I think that’s true, but I also think it is important to reject the false progressive narrative (is there a single example of progressive historiography that is not tendentious or mendacious?) when it comes to the true background and meaning of the second amendment, and the right it enshrines (again; it does not create that right, it enshrines it. So, for example, judicially reinterpreting it, or negating the 2nd amendment “democratically” or even constitutionally repealing it through the constitutional amendment process does not negate or change anything: it just means that this right joins many, many, many others that are not respected by the statists). A more polemical exposition here.

So the answer is that both the second and the tenth amendment protect them, but even if both amendments are repealled or ignored, it doesn’t matter: rights aren’t defined by what others or the state are willing to respect (thus the non-natural-rights/constructivist position fails); they can only either respect/protect pre-existing rights (and they cannot create new ones, such as a “right” to force others to pay for your birth control. Sorry, Sandy – that involves not “recognizing new rights,” but a rationale for violating real ones), or they can infringe and violate them by refusing to acknowledge and protect them.

Now, some legitimate libertarians are pacifists, who do not own guns and do not want “society” to be armed. But that is not the same thing as saying no one has a right to such arms, and it is certainly not the same thing as saying “the state should disarm the people, so that only the agents of government have weapons, because we know that’s the way to keep us all safe.”

Finally, it’s interesting that the very people (progressives) who think that every yahoo, even illiterate, disinterested, disengaged, uninformed ones (er “low-information voters” AKA “Obama’s New Base”) should be encouraged to have input into policy, into deciding how to run everyone else’s lives for them, cannot be trusted with weapons.

Well, they’re trusting these very same people with the most deadly force imaginable, by allowing them to determine whose finger will be on atomic buttons (or drone buttons, and the like).

[porphyrogenitus]

Let me clarify something, too; it’s not possible to know a priori what the malinvestments will be (as in the example). One often gets a variant of this reasoning from non-Austrians (not JNJ1987), to the effect that “if you guys believe entrepreneurs are so great at forecasting, why can’t they just incorporate the artificial interest rate into their calculations and adjust for it?”

Well, 1) a belief that good entrepreneurs will generally make superior forecasts is not a belief in their infallibility (standard macro “rational actor/rational choice model” style). Absent the market price, there is no way for entrepreneurs to know what the true interest rate would be.

2) we’re all trapped in a “collective action problem” – knowing the interest rate/money supply is being interfered with, people could make no new investments, since they cannot predict which ones will go belly up during the bust. But not making new investments does not affect people or firms from being affected by the bust. Especially since in the meantime competitors are taking advantage of the seemingly cheap credit, which will have market-distorting affects in the short run as well (to their advantage, and your potential & actual disadvantage if you forego it – without much long-term advantage, since you’ll still be affected, in ways you cannot predict in advance, by the general bust that follows any artificial boom). So the only reasonable choice is to make whatever investments you can with an eye towards avoiding the pitfalls as much as you can and hoping to shield yourself as much as possible. but it’s imperfect, which is why everyone would be better off avoiding this whole mechanism to begin with.

[porphyrogenitus]

“If a central bank lowers interest rates by increasing the money supply, let’s say I own an oil company and now I invest in purchasing more drilling equipment (a capital good) in order to drill and produce more oil. Why is that a misallocation because the funds were not saved first? Isn’t that something that we needed/wanted in society, that would have been built lets say in two years anyway and we just built it in advance?”
(Emphasis added)

First it’s worth remembering that money is a medium exchange used to represent resources; it is not, actually, the other resources itself. Thus the problem with tinkering with the money supply – either by printing more, or artificially suppressing interest rates (which is usually done by the former means, but can be done by fiat), which leads people to think there is more of it than there really is. The point is that such artificial methods distort the usual price signals.

Note that ABCT does not claim to know which investments are malinvestments. Now people using ABCT can make a SWAG, informed by other data, as to what the malinvestments might be, but the theory in-and-of-itself doesn’t say “such and such an investment is going to be a malinvestment.”

So you cannot know for sure that the drilling equipment itself will have been a malinvestment. under normal market circumstances, you may have evaluated (as an entrepreneur) that it’s an investment you can’t afford to make at that time, or you may not have.

Note also that ABCT does not claim that only malinvestments will be affected by the market dislocations resulting from artificially low interest rates (or the cycle of fractional reserve banking itself).

The other thing your question implicitly forgets is that we live in a world of scarcity; under perfect circumstances, society as a whole may need/could use more of almost any good – energy, for example. (Note that this is important to remember: in public policy debates, people will often assert that there are “unmet needs” in, say, public education or public health, as if this is a trump in arguing for greater budgets. But scarce resources implies that there are always needs/wants that are unmet, that go unfulfilled. It’s a matter of prioritizing these under the resource constraints; and yes, this includes time-delays awaiting more resource availability).

So it’s not even a question of whether the additional drilling equipment would be, in some general sense, good to have. Just as in the master builder analogy it’s not a question of whether a bigger house would be nicer to have than a smaller house: it’s the fact that the resources implied by the market signal that artificially low interest rates do not actually exist (see also “money doesn’t grow on trees” – real investable resources do not expand simply because someone adds more numbers in a computer implying that they do).

So for example you’ll see a lot of nice buildings that, individually, may be very good buildings – but which aren’t filled because the demand for commercial buildings isn’t as high as people thought. Or you’ll see house construction (and price) simultaneously soar, but then crash, with housing developments going unfilled do to demand actually be insufficient (at a price that justified the initial investments made on the basis of artificially low interest rates), even though it is obvious that “society” “certainly needs” nice new homes. Or you’ll see investments in “green technology” be complete boondogles, even though in a perfect world – we shouldn’t be ideological about this – it would be nice if we had affordable low-emissions/efficient, low-polluting vehicles, energy, power plants, and the like. But the investments (whether made directly through fiscal subsidy or indirectly through low interest rates enticing people into thinking it is worthwhile to go into those fields) are failures on the market because their is insufficient demand for them at the price point that would justify the investment.

Artificually low interest rates imply greater demand than actually exists – both for present consumption (if interest rates are low, people will save less and consume more in the present) and investment (if interest rates are low, people will want to borrow more to invest in long-term projects) – than actually exists. Keynsians and other equilibrium-model/simplified-model economists take this implication of higher demand to mean (or create) actual higher demand. But ABCT, essentially, shows that this is an illusion.

[porphyrogenitus]

Here is an article on gun crime going up 89% in Britain following strict gun control.

I also recommend this article by Thomas Sowell.

There’s also this sort of argument (FACT: many if not most of the prominent people who argue for strict gun control have armed bodyguards at hand at their beck and call).

Then there is this.

And, I don’t often recommend Coulter articles, but she makes a good point here:

“Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.

None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on.

The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.”

This makes several good points, too, including: “And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.“

[porphyrogenitus]

Assertions of “propaganda” are not an argument – unless your friends believe that propaganda means “accepting what fashionable opinion tells us, that arguments against giving government more money and power are propaganda, while arguments in favor of giving government more power and money constitute ‘questioning authority.” Ask them precicely what is incorrect in the books they consider “propaganda.”

As for book recommendations, well there’s two categories there; “best” pro-statist books, and best books arguing against libertarianism (or do you mean arguing against Austrian economics? Or anarcho-libertarianisn?); if your friends think they read good arguments against libertarianism, ask them what they are. Let them point you to the books they think make a convincing case against libertarianis.

Anyhow, as for the former:
1) Rawls; anyone who is anyone over the last generation and a half has read Rawls, and even people who aren’t anyone have imbibed his view of “fairness.” Now, even as an undergraduate I found his reasoning to be particularly poor, especially the under argued assumption that “trust us, giving tons of power to central agencies to bureaucratically manage your affairs down to the most trivial details really does make you freer. Trust us, telling you what views you can openly express lest you hurt the feelings of other really is respecting your freedom of expression,” but lots of people lap this stuff up. Not explicitly explained in the book (because the audience was fellow academics) is that Rawls’ underlaying premises are based on standard (mainstream) economic premises, and the under-argued details of what he thinks follows from his two principles (essentially, the bureaucratic state & managerial, theraputic left-liberalism) also follow from what these people take to be standard macroeconomic premises (“welfare economics”). This makes Rawls useful in seeing how people derive the unlimited state from these premises, and believe that it protects freedom. Its underlaying premises are also a social-constructivist theory of social contract, and a claim that their system is “neutral” between ‘competing comprehensive conceptions of the good” (where, in fact, it constitutes a comprehensive system – if you read the whole book – and I mean read it closely, not skimming, but reflecting on the implications of each passage – you’ll see that absolutely every detail of people’s behavior is to be determined by the Rawlsian state; indeed, a sort of determinism follows naturally from the foundational economics. I blithered on about that because it’s important to understand these premises; if you want a good description of the differences, I highly recommend watching this by Bob Murphy and this and this by Israel Kirzner; both describe the differences/distinctions, and why they lead “standard” economics to statist conclusions (much of it has to do with their unit of analysis being equilibrium states, but other premises, including how they define rational action, are also important). (IMO those three videos are “must views”).

2) similarly in that vein I’d recommend Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” – which argues (I crap you not) that its libertarian to paternally manage everyone’s choices for them through “choice architecture.”

3) before he became the world’s greatest internets troll*, Krugman was a legitimate left-liberal economist. I recommend reading some of his old books. Also those of, say, Lester Thurow and/or Robert Kuttner are useful in this regard. Further regarding the interwebs, the site “Crooked Timber” is written by people who are apparently considered clever and insightful on the left; to that end you can make of this what you will. (Also keep in mind this true fact: by the standards of the left, libertarianism is racist). Note you’ll find that many of the reasons people oppose libertarianism is because they believe the progressive narrative of history: that governments aren’t violators of liberty; in every and all cases (except when a republican is in office and neglects things), government is our savior.

4) in the above I’ve basically assumed that those you’re arguing with are liberals, or accept liberal premises. However there are also conservative critiques, and even libertarian critiques. Much of the thoughtful of these have to do with the fact that classical liberalism contains within it the seeds of tendencies towards modern liberalism (some of these problems may not apply to anarcholibertarianism, but they definately apply to minarchical-libertarianism; which means I for one have a problem – see below); to that end I’d recommed the writings of Jim Kalb (some of which are in online articles, I recommend this, this and especially this, and some of the older ones here and he has a book “The Tyranny of Liberalism,” which is very good); Kalb attempts to explain why classical liberalism has tended to become modern statist-liberalism basically everywhere. I also recommend Ed Feser’s post – which will probably not convince an anarcho-libertarian but does explain. (I for one still have a lot of respect for Feser as a philosopher, but think he made an error/omisson – which I explained in another post – in his philosophy, which led him to reject even minarchy. Once that is corrected – and his fellow Aristotelian-Thomist, Oderberg, gets it right – then where he went wrong becomes clear, without tossing out the whole philosophy. But this just illustrates how even seemingly small errors can lead to great problems, when it comes to philosophy, as in logical proofs or mathmatical proofs).

5) for a Libertarian, and essentially Austro-Libertarian, critique of anarcho-libertarianism, and a critique I essentially agree with, I recommend Randal Holcomb’s article government unnecessary but inevitable (note the title is even wrong; Holcomb suggests in the article that government is necessary, for the two standard minarchist reasons).But see also Walter Block’s reply and note what I said in point #4, above – Kalb’s argument that classical liberal minarchy inevitably collapses into modern, comprehensive-statist managerial-theraputic liberalism, a point i also agree with (the problem? The problem is basing things on classical liberal theory. To that end, Rothbard was probably correct in seeking an Aristotelian foundation, and Mises, Nozick, & Hayek wrong in using Kantianism as a foundation. While, yes, accepting that Aristotle was a statist. The basic problem there though is Aristotle’s “polis” is usually translated to mean he believes “man is a political animal” – which, to a degree he always is – even in a non-state, there will be politics & governance. But man is a social animal is a more apt description, and then one insists upon the distinction – which social contract theory inevitably confuses – between state and society. One is also then free to argue that anything that would go into a “social contract” reflect pre-political commonalities and understandings, and thus cannot themselves be based on a social contract ‘we all agreed to/would agree to in a state of nature/behind the veil of ignorance” – these sorts of arguments, which lead to social-constructivist theories of, I.E., rights: that rights come from a political agreement, that is, from a state, and thus are subject to redefinition, modification, and even elimination at the discretion of “The Big We” – the state, the Hobbsean absolutism of “unlimited democracy.”

*Given how legitimately brilliant Krugman is – and anarcho-libs like to mock him, but if you read any of his old stuff – the writing isn’t very readable, it’s dry and academic, and there will be much to disagree with; – but the man is legitimately intelligent. Therefore, as I started to say; given how legitimately brilliant Krugman is, I’ve been forced to conclude that his “Conscience of a Liberal” polemics constitutes the greatest, decade-long troll of liberalism, ever, a subtle joke to the effect that liberals have no conscience. Well played, Krugman, well played. He belongs in the /b/ hall of fame.

[porphyrogenitus]

I know it hasn’t worked in Great Britain (though it’s often claimed that it has). I’d be curious if this was really the case in Australia, but I suspect it might be – but note the underlaying draconian ambition, here: Australia didn’t just outlaw sale of new weapons, or of certain weapons. It essentially confiscated them all. Also, as alluded to in the article, as part of their ban Australia effectively outlawed self defense (which Britain, as a practical matter, has also done – in many cases, you’re more likely to be charged for a crime in Britain defending yourself from an assailant – with the assailant called to testify against you – than you are if you initiate a crime).

Plus, it is obvious that gun control is not a necessary feature of reducing or eliminating crime: as Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s anti-war brother) has pointed out, Britain in the 1920s had gun laws (or rather, almost no gun laws) that make today’s gun laws in Texas look strict. But Britain then had hardly any gun crime. Ten years ago Britain introduced strict gun control laws – and gun related crime has gone up 89%. See also: Switzerland. A country that does the exact opposite of disarming law-abiding citizens. Instead it hands them automatic (not just semi-automatic) weapons. Switzerland has very little gun violence.

The reason for higher crime isn’t the presence of guns. But this is what they want to go after, because they have always wanted to go after guns, and episodes like the recent one give them an excuse/rationale. But they don’t want to address other (and the real) factors behind such events, so…they don’t. (Note some of those include things that I think Libertarians would have a problem with: such as “deinstitutionalization,” the increased difficulty in any attempt at involuntarily institutionalizing someone who is dangerously psychotic).

OtoH, I saw a facebook post to the effect that mass killings stopped by the police average over 18 deaths, while attempts at mass killings which are stopped by armed civilians on the scene (meaning: concealed carry) average only 2.2 deaths per incident. But while people writing, say, Slate articles, want to bandy about a lot of statistics – they do so tendentiously. They never want to mention the statistics on crimes prevented by armed private individuals. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

[porphyrogenitus]

“When we say that X Bill or X Proposal violates First/Second/Fourth amendment rights, are we accepting the government as the source of those rights?”

Harry covered this pretty well but let me just add; the constitution as originally conceived recognized rights – government didn’t create the rights, it acknowledged them and was supposed to protect them. See also the Declaration of Independence, which mentions several rights, then says that government is instituted to protect (not create) them, and when in the course of human events a government transgresses them systematically, people have a right to separate from that government and institute a new one (or, if you’re an anarchocap, none at all).

The idea that rights come from government is a later perversion, first initiated in continental europe, then spread to the U.S. by progressives influenced by Rousseau & Hegel. But the big counter-argument is that “if ‘rights’ come from government, then there are no ‘human rights’ at all, since they are subject to redefinition and elimination at the whim of those in power. Government-granted ‘rights’ leave one defenseless in arguing that National Socialist Germany or Lenin, Stalin, or Mao violated human rights, since they, too, believed that government told its subjects what the subjects rights were – or weren’t.”

[porphyrogenitus]

See also a book Tom has referenced from time to time; vollentary fraternal mutual aid associations at one time did exist – even though all the current “market failure/collective action problem” models say they couldn’t have.

If these organizations did an imperfect job, 1) society as a whole was a lot poorer then; we could do much better now and 2) it is not as if the welfare state model, either here or in the U.S., is actually more effective at getting people out of poverty (quite the contrary in fact. Indeed there have been a recent flurry of statistics showing how it entraps people). The welfare state model is also, necessarily, “one-size-fits all” policy, while private mutual aid & charitable organizations can tailor things to the recipient. A still-existing example is: what’s the most effective and prominent institution that helps addicts in need of help? It’s not a government program, it’s AA.

This is an old problem; Bastiat once wrote that “every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all” – a problem that extends beyond self-described socialists to…well, practically everyone, nowdays. Partly because people have confused ‘society’ with “state” – they’ll ask “don’t you want to live in a society where X?” (X being: the poor are helped, or health care is available to those who need it, and so on), and but then they either imply or directly assert that means the state does it.

(I’ve concluded that, as an intellectual/philosophical problem, the origin of this failure to distinguish between society and state lays with social contract theory. Thus it is necessary for libertarians to make sure people understand the distinction between the two and keep it in mind at all times, because it’s all too easy in a society founded on the basis of classical liberal social contract theory to lose sight of this distinction).

There are a couple other sources like the Beito book that Tom has mentioned, but they slip my mind now, which address how people were helped, and how they helped themselves, in the time before the welfare state crowded most of these institutions – the institutions of true civil society – out.* Hopefully he’ll post and mention some of them. A lot of these arguments for private provision of aid are in his book Rollback, which I recommend highly.

*Not all of them disappeared, but some were utterly transformed; for example, the Bank of America was originally founded to help Italian immigrants. It still exist, of course, but now it’s just another member of the banking system.

[porphyrogenitus]

“A” bank can’t buy assets prior to its collapse, unless you mean “buy assets to prevent collapse” in which case it is not in a pre-collapse situation, anyhow (since its flush with liquidity)

If “A” bank buys assets then declares “whoops, we’ve collapsed,” those assets would be liquidated in bankruptcy and go to creditors. In normal times. Admittedly, we do not live in normal times, but even now most banksters won’t take that level of risk. (They’d have to find a way to shift the assets). If one, even major, bank steps out of line in this way, odds are they just get their throat slit for not playing well with the others (though the executives will parachute away quite rich, still, even as all the customers get screwed, MF Global-style, baby!); so “a” bank won’t do it until they credibly believe others are about to do it, too; then each will rush to be first lest they get left holding the bag.

If all the major banks jump together they could do what you describe but they would then, as I described, be precipitating the very crisis their jumping would be responding to (“it’s impending, so we jump now”); they could then hope to get away with it because it’s “systemic” and they would hope to be bailed out again, and probably would be, but it’s not an obvious winning move for them because they would also be destroying most of their current banking assets (such as those are), which are various dollar-based accounts & derivatives.

Of course, if and when they decide those assets are already essentially worthless anyhow, they could say “screw it, lets do it.” I guess that’s what to watch for. But probably it won’t be a coordinated plan but a near-simultaneous response in the face of a panic precipitated by some external event (like a major bank in China or Dubai, or sovereign wealth fund, deciding the dollar has had it and dumping tons onto the market at one time, causing others to do the same). I dk what the odds of that happening is, but Professor Herbener’s replies suggest that it’s very low in the near term.

Each year the current policy path goes on, though, the odds go up. Something I’m not sure Professor Herbener would disagree with.

[porphyrogenitus]

Anthony wrote: “I bet they have just enough in reserve to prevent a collapse in the event of hyperinflation, or will use the reserves to buy commodities right before the crash does happen (assuming they know exactly what’s going on at the Fed).”

Recall the dynamics of fractional reserve banking; with X amount of reserves, they can generate (approximately) 10X in “money.” Basically if/when they do what you say, they will not just be buying things up right before the crash does happen, but precipitating the inflation that until now has been held in check.

Also we have to define “crash” – a normal crash tends to produce falling prices; so they won’t be buying just before that kind of crash, if they know it is coming (a big if; possibly a lot of these guys think they know, but their past performance in predicting isn’t anything to write home about. This includes having “inside information” from the Fed on any pending crash; the predictive powers of the Fed when it comes to crashes is….); anyhow, if they wait for everything to tank, then buy things up “on the cheap” using their excess reserves, they’ll then be precipitating the inflation.

OtoH, if by ‘crash’ here you mean “they try to buy things right before teh inflation,” well that’s practically self-fulfilling because as soon as they do so, they’ll be unleashing a torrent of currency into the economy.

[Caviates are probably in order with respect to the degree to which financial institutions can directly transform their excess reserves into 10X monies that they themselves can directly use to buy up teh stuffs. But most of these large financial institutions have enough “partners” that they could basically swing it. However, – and this is a big however – it is not really in the interest of U.S. banks to destroy the currency that all their banking transactions are denominated in. Which may explain why they’re sitting on vast amounts of excess reserves right now and are not willing to unleash cash into the economy to reduce this to the usual level of reserves – which is, practically zero “excess” reserves. I mean, basically that will only happen in the Gotterdamerung of the U.S. Banking System. Which we may not have to wait more than a few years for, anyhow. I certainly don’t expect it to take longer than another decade.]

[porphyrogenitus]

“Well I suppose it doesn’t hurt for people to continue pointing out they have no legitimate authority to do the things they do under the commerce clause or the taxing power. As a side note, I would guess that Nullification might see some push if they try to pass a lot of Federal restrictions on guns.”

Oh I totally agree with you on that. I also believe it’s useful to point out what “our actual constitution” is, and how (and when, and where) it became at variance with the written one everyone (including, I admit, I) still fetishize. Then hit them with the argument of what is actually legitimate (not much that the current federal government does). Then people start to see that the movement they believe “protects our constitutional rights the most” is actually the opposite (progressivism is actually the opposite of what most people think of when they hear the phrase “progressive” – I say this as someone raised in Wisconsin, who still has some respect for Robert Lafollette; but, of course, in many ways “Fighting Bob” was one of the few people who truly believed the rhetoric. Still, the program was wrongheaded – but my respect is for his sincerity).

“Does anyone know the historical context of how this power expanded?”

Tom mentions this in either the lecture on the Spanish American War or the Progressive Era (or both, I truly forget now); anyhow as with much else it started with Theodore Roosevelt, then got progressively worse over time.

Apparently now you can do practically anything you want with an executive order – witness how the current occupant rewrote welfare law with one, used one to compel people to violate their consciences, and rewrote immigration law with another; rule by decree is de rigur and limited only by how bold you’re willing to be (if you go to far you might alienate enough people in congress that it’ll take all of six months for them to get over it). The only practical limit on executive orders is the amount of public outrage, which gets less and less as people get accustomed to their abuse (aka “enlargement”).

The courts may or (almost always) may not reverse them, but in practice this is as likely as with any regular piece of federal legislation & regulation – that is, executive orders are treated, as a practical matter, identically to constitutionally-passed legislation (and regulatory codes enacted by agencies are, if anything, given even more latitude – see recent environmental regulations. Of course these are usually tied to some open-ended legislation passed through congress – or to an executive order – worded such that the agency is given the power to determine what the law on such and such will be, or, if the legislation is old enough, retroactively interpreted as to give agencies the power to determine the substantive content on the law regarding such and such. As a legislative body, Congress’ main role now is to enact bills that delegate legislative responsibility to other agencies – delegating the responsibility delegates the blame, so when a Congresscritter goes home and gets questioned by constituents, even if they voted for a bill, they can say “oh, that’s really bad how the agency is treating you. When I get back to Washington, I’ll be sure to look into that for you.”)

[porphyrogenitus]

Weights and measures, that’s a good one. I’ll have to write that one down so I don’t forget it next time I write something like this.

I actually like that one. “Weighs and measures;” – I prefer lulzy arguments because at least then I get some lulz while they’re buggering me.

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