NOT PARANOID ENOUGH

After sending forth the item under my name below, I was politely informed by a friendly one of the Conlawprofs that I'd not been paranoid enough. Having lived through the entire Cold War, assuming it has been completed, I don't think one can be paranoid enough, so I agree with my good correspondent, alas.  Here's the exchange:

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Bob, you are not paranoid enough. The system did not go hopelessly wrong in the 1930s. It went wrong when Taney's court failed to pull a bush v gore after the 1860 election. If only Douglas, Breckinridge, or whoever had sued, the court could have ruled that the vote was blatantly unconstitutional, because descendants of slaves had voted..... Then all this twisted "equality" jurisprudence would never have happened.  So it's still reversible now!  Courtesy of Scalia, Thomas, etc etc. Happy New Year!   --- On Sun, 1/1/12, Robert Sheridan <rs@robertsheridan.com> wrote:   From: Robert Sheridan <rs@robertsheridan.com> Subject: Right of Private Property To: "Con Law Prof list" <conlawprof@lists.ucla.edu> Date: Sunday, January 1, 2012, 4:55 PM   In an interview today of GOP Iowa primary candidate Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, by CNN's Candy Crowley, I was struck by his centeredness on the right of private property as he sees it.   Asked his position on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a product of the Civil Rights Movement to enfranchise blacks effectively denied the right to vote in the South throughout the era of Jim Crow, he said that the VRA was the wrong way to go about achieving this reform because it denied rights of private property and private decisionmaking (to those who enjoyed such rights, or power, other than black, that is), w/o saying what he would have preferred instead.  In other words, let them (the blacks) hang in the wind of the right of private property.   He cited the criminalization resulting from the anti-drug laws as an example of a regime that put a disproportional number of blacks and other minorities of color behind bars.  These laws limited individual choice, i.e. personal autonomy to make bad decisions as well as good.   With each subject put to him by Crowley, Paul returned to the right of private property, as though this notion underlies every issue in the country that he would seek to reform if elected.   It struck me that he so clearly seemed to have his views rooted not only in the Lochner Era, which exalted private property and the notion of 'freedom of contract' (from the management point of view in the labor-management conflict realm), but in the earlier laissez-faire capitalism era of the robber barons of the so-called Gilded Era of the late-19th C. post-Civil War era of unfettered industrialism.  His panacea for all problems seems to be a return to what he seems to view as a Camelot era in which the summum bonum is unrestricted rights to private property where landowners, for example, have unrestricted freedom to do what they wish with their land and the public be damned.   Part of what motivates him, as I see it, is the fear of socialism represented by a government that regulates private ownership and decisionmaking in order to achieve social, economic, and politial reforms; the New Deal would be the chief villain in this regard, as well as the liberties found and enunciated by 'activist judges' on the Court, with Wm. O. Douglas no doubt leading the charge down the wrong road starting with Griswold.  The right of private property and private decisionmaking is the shield, and sword, against creeping socialism, socialized medicine (Obamacare), and anything else represented by government seeking to protect minority groups that seem to need protection including men, women and children in the workplace, which brings us to Lochner itself, in 1905.   Where does this fear of the dreaded monster socialism originate?  As a Cold War product, I'm well-familiar with the power of that word, a dreaded thing to avoid at all costs to avoid being tagged red, or pink, or a Commie or fellow-traveler.  Yet the dreaded S-word seems to be thriving as a political bludgeon, despite the fact that we seem to have socialized government, socialized military power, and socialized banking and finance, if the bailout of 2008 and following can be included in the meaning of that word.   The odd thing is that laissez-faire capitalism was a product of Andrew Jackson's effort to get the government to stop supporting select private enterprise, particularly Biddle's 2nd Bank of the U.S.  T.J. Stiles, in The First Tycoon, The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, notes how strongly the Commodore felt against the power of government putting its thumb on the scale of competition by granting "franchises" (monopoly charters) to favored patricians such as Livingston with his right to monopolize commerce on the Hudson River, until Gibbon v. Ogden, the famous anti-monopoly (steamboat) case, that is.  To Vanderbilt, , a Jacksonian, laissez-faire capitalism meant getting rid of government favoritism in support of his competitors; he was anti-monopoly, at least the government supported variety (after this, it was every man for himself).  This seems to have grown into Ron Paul's view of the right of private property, as I see it.   Since attitudes such as these eventually become the subject of our study, I thought it would be interesting to lay it out here.   Perhaps this John Maynard Keynes quote applies to Ron Paul:   “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful    than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite   exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”    rs     -----Inline Attachment Follows-----   _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Conlawprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof   Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private.  Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.