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.
My son and I like to watch “Life After People” on The History Channel. The show is a thought experiment that examines what would happen to man-made structures and nature if humans suddenly disappeared while leaving everything otherwise intact.
I like the show but one thing about watching it creeps me out.
Obama has nominated Cass Sunstein, who he knows from the University of Chicago, to be “regulatory czar.” Apparently, Sunstein has proposed that web sites be required to link to opposing opinions. He has argued that the Internet is anti-democratic because users can choose to view only those opinions that they want to see, and has gone so far as to say:
A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.
Via Ars Technica comes a link to a paper which seeks to explain with game theory why people continue to use unscientifically proven and usually useless medical treatments such as folk remedies or “alternative” medicine.
The researchers created a model to explain this behavior based on humans’ genetically programmed behavior to imitate. This surprisingly simple model shows that quack cures spread simply because their ineffectiveness means that people must use them more often and for longer times. This in turn means that more people see the use of quack cures than they see the use of effective cures, which creates more opportunities for imitation. In short, every person who uses a particular cure becomes an advertiser for that cure. The longer the cure takes and the more elaborate the cure, the more people accidentally advertise it.
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.