The humorous part is your wholehearted gushing embrace of substantive due process invention for, say, gay rights, but not for right to contract, right to property, etc. embodied in the 5th, 14th, and 9th Amendments.
Glad you got a kick out of it. The language was a reply to Bill's mistake. He meant to say progressives don't seem to care about property rights, but instead said they don't care about rights. Since we now have at least one supreme court decision in favor of gay rights, I think it's fair to say some sort of step has been taken.
However, the more serious issue is the contract, property, et all language. As I read the Rosen article, the Constitution in Exile people wished to reverse almost all regulation of business activities. That is precisely the wrong direction to go right now. For the last thirty years, the regulatory process has been undercut by the wrong appointments to regulatory bodies. But, until this Bush administration, the various administrations tried to act as if it wasn't happening. Now, with GWB we have a clear agenda to undermine all regulatory actions from water, to air, to medicines, to the security exchanges. Etc.
I've just finished the latest book on Enron, A Conspiracy of Fools. If there was ever a single lesson to take home about Enron, it's the failure of the regulatory process, at all levels. |
