oh, and this



Maybe you just need to budget your money better. You know, like poor people with their doctors.

I'd be able to budget my money better if I didn't have to support so many poor people and their doctors. Your artificial support schemes disarm me of my pursuit of happiness. And by federalizing everything and telling me I must leave the country if I don't like it, you also impose a huge additional cost for me to live. Imposing a double-whammy on me.

Just think though, had tomorrow never happened today we would all be canada.

Wouldn't you be voluntarily donating all that money to poor people via charity instead of being forced to do so via a coercive government?

voluntarily puts the Free in Freedom.

As stip's been saying, "founders" is a broad, heterogeneous group. If you include Jefferson, he thought Constitutions and laws should expire every 19 years and opposed debts extending past 19: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders ... h2s23.html

Actually, it could finance both. Why is that charity only involves money to progressives? Bizarre.

true.

I'd also say that the founders failed to account for the existence of political parties, which basically blow up the whole system of checks and balances that they set up in the first place, didn't solve the problem of slavery, created a political system that overly privileges smaller, rural states, and that a number of them were a little too suspicious of the idea of democracy and were primarily concerned about preserving their own privileged status as a new national elite replacing the old colonial elite. So I'd conclude by saying that while what they thought is certainly of historical interest, and helpful for figuring out why our institutions function the way they do, their opinions should not end a conversation either way.The overall value of the system they set up is perhaps a bit overrated when narrowly and or literally interpreted. it's value and its endurance are derived precisely from the way in which it is ill defined in crucial places, and the fact that it is governing a fantastically wealthy country that can afford to ignore many of the problems within its government.

This was a politically impressive and philosophically sophisticated generation of men we had involved in politics (many of them, anyway). A lot of their work was excellent. They weren't gods, however, or even saints, and we revere them primarily because we need someone to worship in order to tie together a nation of several distinct regional cultures that probably wouldn't otherwise hang together.

Happy 4th of July

John Hanson agrees with this post, but...



...the Rolling Stones like this one better.


Now, really...who would you rather be?

This is a point you return to a lot w/r/t the healthcare debate and I get where you're coming from on it, but what it always makes me wonder is what you think the solution is in the real world.

The alternative to a healthcare mandate is that people without health insurance will still get hurt and require care and the way that works is that we all end up paying for those "free loaders" in the form of higher health care costs across the board. How do you fix that problem?

Is it simply that it's more acceptable to you to have corporations charging you to account for others as opposed to the government?

wait, i just noticed this, are you (LW) on the one side saying "the founders" wrote a literal and precise document that was not fluid and cite Jefferson as an example of the document's intentions/protections/limits. And then follow that up by saying the Louisiana Purchase was an act of tyranny forced on the people by an illegitimate interpretation of the original document and this illegitimate interpretation was acted out by non-other than Jefferson himself?

talk about saying one thing and doing another, Jefferson, like most others, changed his tune when given the chance.

This paper is something like a scorecard on the crisis: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/1/ ... _15892.pdf

(Neither Krugman nor Reich mentioned)

You're really managed to scratch my confirmation bias' itch with that one, d*ckfan. Looks interesting, I'll have to read it later. Abstract:


In other words, concrete factual analysis enabled more precise and accurate projections, while academic and intellectual wankery did not. Also, the majority of my scorn for the modern economics profession is directed at macroeconomics. Absolute rubbish.

I see they list Dean Baker on their list of people who predicted it. He's another economist I like. Those other guys I hadn't really heard of. In fairness, I can't name many by name.

Basically the article says that economic theories that separate financial speculation out from the real economy were more accurate, which makes sense. It also seems to focus largely on people who predicted the housing bubble would burst. I'm shocked there were so few.

articles like this are really useful.

So I have a feeling that probably no one will be interested in this, but one of my favorite law bloggers, Josh Blackman, has made his blog public again after a one year hiatus while he was clerking for a circuit judge. He's also the guy who founded FantasySCOTUS, which is pretty much what the name suggests. Amazingly, he privately published over 200 pages of posts during his clerkship, and made them public only a few days ago. I'll have some reading catchup to do.

It's amazing how many law blogs I read these days, and how more fulfilled I feel about current events by hearing about them through this lens. Someone once asked me (SS, maybe?) asked me what good resources there were on SCOTUS, and I never gave it a complete answer, so I might as well now:

Nonpartisan:
SCOTUSblog

Libertarian:
The Volokh Conspiracy
The aforementioned Josh Blackman

Left wing:
Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon, both on Slate
Scott Lemieux, who also blogs on Lawyers, Guns & Money

I have yet to find a good right-wing law blog to follow regularly, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I couldn't find a campaign finance reform thread on my first go and the search feature is waaaay too slow for me to try again, so here goes it: http://news.yahoo.com/brazil-judge-orders-arrest-google-president-164309455--finance.html

So anyhoo, if Citizen's United had been decided differently something similar could be happening here. Is this desireable? Any input from the local Brazilians?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/your-right-to-resell-your-own-stuff-is-in-peril-2012-10-04#

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril


CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4.

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.

A Supreme Court case could limit the resale of goods made overseas but sold in America.

Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.

Put simply, though Apple Inc. AAPL -2.05% has the copyright on the iPhone and Mark Owen has it on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution.

That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad, and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling, it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.”

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale.

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed and bound overseas, or an Italian painter’s artwork.

There are implications for a variety of wide-ranging U.S. entities, including libraries, musicians, museums and even resale juggernauts eBay Inc. EBAY -1.76% and Craigslist. U.S. libraries, for example, carry some 200 million books from foreign publishers.

“It would be absurd to say anything manufactured abroad can’t be bought or sold here,” said Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer and Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation who specializes in technology issues.

The case stems from Supap Kirtsaeng’s college experience. A native of Thailand, Kirtsaeng came to America in 1997 to study at Cornell University. When he discovered that his textbooks, produced by Wiley, were substantially cheaper to buy in Thailand than they were in Ithaca, N.Y., he rallied his Thai relatives to buy the books and ship them to him in the United States.

He then sold them on eBay, making upward of $1.2 million, according to court documents.

Wiley, which admitted that it charged less for books sold abroad than it did in the United States, sued him for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered with the first-sale doctrine

In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that anything that was manufactured overseas is not subject to the first-sale principle. Only American-made products or “copies manufactured domestically” were.

“That’s a non-free-market capitalistic idea for something that’s pretty fundamental to our modern economy,” Ammori commented.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the case on Oct. 29.

Both Ammori and Band worry that a decision in favor of the lower court would lead to some strange, even absurd consequences. For example, it could become an incentive for manufacturers to have everything produced overseas because they would be able to control every resale.

It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins and resales, considering about 40% of most U.S.-made cars carry technology and parts that were made overseas.

This is a particularly important decision for the likes of eBay and Craigslist, whose very business platform relies on the secondary marketplace. If sellers had to get permission to peddle their wares on the sites, they likely wouldn’t do it.

Moreover, a major manufacturer would likely go to eBay to get it to pull a for-sale item off the site than to the individual seller, Ammori added.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, eBay noted that the Second Circuit’s rule “affords copyright owners the ability to control the downstream sales of goods for which they have already been paid.” What’s more, it “allows for significant adverse consequences for trade, e-commerce, secondary markets, small businesses, consumers and jobs in the United States.”

Ammori, for one, wonders what the impact would be to individual Supreme Court justices who may buy and sell things of their own. He himself once bought an antique desk from a Supreme Court justice. “Sometimes it’s impossible to tell where things have been manufactured,” he said. “Who doesn’t buy and sell things? Millions of Americans would be affected by this.”

If the Supreme Court does rule with the appellate court, it’s likely that the matter would be brought to Congress to force a change in law. Until then, however, consumers would be stuck between a rock and a hard place when trying to resell their stuff.


*********************

I don't even know where to begin on this one....

I guess I better my yard sale together while I can.

goddamnit

So after some further reading on this, I am not sure the article I posted got it's facts right. The case seems to be revolving around 'gray market' goods, not foreign made goods that are legally imported and sold in the US (like the iPhone). Do we still have any lawyers on the board or have they all abandoned the PJ-verse?