Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
A truly sad story about conditions in Zimbabwe. There is something particularly sad about people forced to eat their own protected wildlife. Of course, no one can blame them. No one could blame them if they ate all the elephants.
Remember when Mugabe was the darling of the Left? Remember how they all supported his redistribution of land as post-colonial justice?
I think I’ll go find a random leftist and punch him.
There is a bizarre idea in leftist circles that U.S. judges should apply the standards of “International Law.” To U.S. cases. From Jonathan Adler via Instapundit:
For example, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School, mentioned as a possible Kerry Supreme Court nominee, has supported the idea that U.S. courts should expansively apply international legal precedents without the authorization of the president and Congress.
There is one simple reason why this is contrary to everything America stands for. American political theory rest on the idea that all just law arises from the formally expressed will of the people. If at some stage of its development, the people did not vote on a law, the law has no validity. Even the Constitution itself was originally voted on and by design we can vote to amend it as we wish. How, then, can a U.S. judge legitimately use a foreign concept for which the American voters have never cast ballots? By what legal theory are free people bound by the decisions of others in which they have no say? Arguing that judges can impose foreign standards against the will of America voters simply tosses overboard the founding justification for American justice that people should only be governed by law to which they consent.
Sadly, this is just another symptom of the American Left’s progressive (pun intended) abandonment of the American concept of governance in favor of the more authoritarian European model. Incapable of conceiving of their own capacity for error and utterly convinced of their own moral rectitude, they have no intellectual or moral issues with using any means necessary to impose their will upon their fellow citizens. They decide what they want and then manufacture a means of getting it. Invoking some vague “international standard” lets them find the legal justification they want in the entrails of whatever monster of foreign law they want to slit open on that particular day. It’s not “international law” they wish to adopt but rather the sole authority to choose to decided what “international law” means on any particular day or in any particular circumstance.
The American Left is on a long, dark road.
While linking to a Megan McArdle comment on a childish Matthew Yglesias post on bankers, Instapundit asks a question that reveals a void in our language and world-models:
“DOES GREED MAKE YOU A BAD PERSON? What about greed for power, a trait exhibited by many of those who denounce greed for money? Which is worse?”
Why does Instapundit have to use the cumbersome phrase “greed for power” to describe a very common human behavior? Why do we have to describe the lust for power in terms of the lust for money?
Language can tell you a great deal about the world models held by those who speak the language. Specifically, if a language lacks a specific, neat word for a particular concept, it tells you that the people who speak the language don’t use the concept very often.
What does it tell us that English and every other Western language have a single word to describe the destructive lust for money but that they lack a single word to describe the destructive lust for political power?
Significant piracy has been so long gone from the world that the very word “pirate” evokes only images of 17th-century sailing ships armed with blackpowder weapons. Now pirates have returned to the choke points of the world’s oceans. What has changed? Why could we deal with pirates 150, 100 or 50 years ago but we can’t deal with them today?
I think that, as with terrorism, the return of piracy indicates the collapse of international law and the liberal order it establishes. It tells us how dysfunctional international law has become.