ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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I find it moderately ironic that much of the progressive thinking happens on private college campuses - themselves appearing, at least to me, to look like the Proprietary Communities of MacCallum and his modern heirs.
wintercow20 - nothing ironic about it - Harvard being the bellwether, the ostensibly Congregationalist/Puritan* clerical colleges that are the Ivies went from Puritan to Unitarian in the first decade of the 19th Century. And if you think about it, they're still in the mindset of fighting Puritans. That's what they think everyone who isn't one of them is.
*whatever Increase Mather was.
Isn't Progressivism ultimately the last bastion of Positivist and Social Darwinist thinking? Not to knock Spencer any more than need be, but the entire doctrine of Root Cause public ethics is straight out of Dickens. Spencer simply didn't know that Laplacian determinism wasn't true.
Peter A. Taylor''s website explores rather deeply the problems with *actual* Unitarians in the present day, and is good reading. He's posted on this blog before. I am a total fanboi ::))
http://home.earthlink.net/~flyingdragongoddess/indexa.html#peter
This might be true of progressive intellectuals generally, but it's not true of progressive lawyers, law professors, judges, etc. See, e.g., The American Constitution Society http://www.acslaw.org/about, and The Constitution in 2020 http://www.amazon.com/Constitution-2020-Jack-M-Balkin/dp/0195387961. But this is probably because conservative & libertarian legal interlocutors are much more familiar with the Constitution than the typical intellectual.
Perhaps one of the Progressives' strategies over time has been to stop talking about the Constitution, because many feel uncomfortable about clearly subverting it. It's impossible to ignore the Constitution in law/legal academia, so there the progressives have to make up clever rationales for ignoring the Constitution.
@GU wrote: "It's impossible to ignore the Constitution in law/legal academia, so there the progressives have to make up clever rationales for ignoring the Constitution."
Yes. Gray matter and the reaching of correct, or at least consistent, conclusions may often be orthogonal. Gray matter may, instead, be more like leverage. The more of it one has, the more clever and convincing the rationalizations one can think up to support whatever it is one wants to support.
If someone wants (or doesn't want) to believe (or do) something, they'll find their reasons. And the smarter one is, the more capable they may be in this regard. (Of course, I suppose it's possible that some may actually be true believers.)
Reminds me of Orwell: "There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."
Was there ever a time when agreement existed on what the Constitution restricted or allowed?
Was there ever a time when government wasn't influencing "markets" and "markets" influencing government?
Start with Jefferson and argue he didn't engage the Federal government in significant activity for those times to promote commerce by Federal government spending and institutions.
"Perhaps government by wise technocrats, unburdened by Constitutional limits, would be better."
That was exactly the argument of the founder of socialism, Henri Saint-Simon, about the laws of France and tradition. And they say progressives aren't socialists.
Arnold, you used the term "progressive thinking."
It strikes me that "progressive thinking" is an excellent example of an oxymoron.
On the topic of markets, governments and constitutional issues, I think Arnold is on the right track, in the right time, barking up one side of the wrong tree of “progressivism”. If he circled around to the other side there'd be as many intellectual conservative monkeys hanging about, as there are liberals on the other side of it. My cognitive bias sees intellectuals, left, right and center in a forest of neo-Hegelian revivalism.
Imo, most relevant to businesses and states visa-vie the Constitution that influenced rent-seeking in markets was the 1886 Supreme Court decision that granted corporations the same rights of people as “persons” under the 14th Amendment. Wanton interests of ever-bigger government and ever-bigger business were joined at the hip constitutionally and contractually with this cornerstone of corporate law.