DavidOdden

I'll play along: Rahi Digar.

There is not even evidence of no evidence of forced labor in Canada or the US. Is there evidence of evidence of US companies subcontracting labor in China? The existing law prohibits import of goods produced via forced labor or labor by minors, regardless of who owns the company. I am always trying to figure out your position, it now seems that you want to change to a system of tariffs rather than prohibitions, but also apply the tariffs at a nation-wide basis (i.e. anything from China, presumably also Vietnam, the Philippines, Burma, Bolivia, Chad, India, Kenya, Russia, Belarus and so on.
Of course, high-enough universal tariffs could liberate us from income taxes, as Trump has promised.

Applied consistently, prohibition of imports from less-free nations would effectively prevent all imports to the US, which may be Trump’s plan. The distinction between “prohibited” and “prohibitive” is spurious. There have been flippant proposals to legalize all drugs or other vices and then “tax the hell out of it” – like Norwegian alcohol taxes. Gasoline taxes in the US (and Norway only way more so) are generally punitive, being a method to “prohibit” driving without actually outlawing internal combustion engines. Raising taxes on imported goods is one way to make sure that no other country has an “advantage” over the US, thus protecting the US from outsiders.
Existing US and EU law already incorporates a restriction on “un-free trade”, where goods imported to the US or the EU at an actually unfair price owing to government subsidy are subject to a tariff, and this is one of the few legitimate uses of import tariffs. The reason why we don’t trade with Cuba is mainly political inertia and the fact that Cuba used to be an existential threat to US security (you remember the Cuban missile crisis, I assume). The majority of US trade sanctions are directed at specific evil persons and not the entire nation, for example there is a list of individuals in Somalia who have aided terrorist organization or who have engaged in acts of violence against civilians; restrictions on imports from Sudan are aimed now at the military overthrow of the government, again not “any trade with Sudan”. Sure, France is less free that the US because it represses “hate speech”, but penalizing Americans for the sake of the speech interests of the French is quite literally self-sacrificial.

Kagan is wrong about elevating the power of SCOTUS over other branches, what the court did was deflate the improperly expanded power of POTUS, to rewrite law without congressional approval. The Constitution grants the power to write laws to Congress, and only to Congress. Yet under Chevron, if POTUS comes up with an interpretation of a law that is not blatantly inconsistent with what Congress said, he has the power to effectively rewrite the law, without Congressional approval. The Constitution does not give POTUS the power to perform the interpretive job assigned to the courts. The Constitution grants the three branches equal and balanced power, but not identical subject matter powers – where under Chevron, the courts allowed POTUS to usurp the role of Congress, to write laws, and the courts, to interpret the laws enacted by Congress.

I do not understand this statement. Nobody in this thread has shown anti-Objectivist views, so I surmise that you must be talking about the authors at Cato or Scotusblog. Out of argumentative generosity I will assume that one of those authors harbors and promulgates anti-Objectivist views. So what? It is never necessary to “be cautious” about reading material that you disagree with, or a person who you disagree with. At worst it is a waste of your time, and at best it may give you material to sharpen your own views, in case they are wrong. Avoidance of knowledge is not a virtue.
As should be well-known in these circles, Chevron is one of the worst judicial doctrines of the past century, up there with Filburn v. Wickard. The linked blog entries are fairly neutral and accurate, though the Cato entry is more supportive of the predicted outcome. In my opinion, the blogs are correct.

I believe this is the essential difference in our positions. My concern is whether a government operates according to the proper nature of government (placing the use of force under the control of objective law). Your concern is only whether a government is a threat to the people living under it.

I believe this is the essential difference in our positions. My concern is whether a government operates according to the proper nature of government (placing the use of force under the control of objective law). Your concern is only whether a government is a threat to the people living under it.

I understand that Putin will also demand that Alaska be returned to Russia. King Felipe plans to demand the return of California, but they have less enforcement power.

There is a Latin expression that covers this well: reductio ad absurdum. I can't ascertain whether you do or do not assume what you seem to say you assume, but as a policy, I find it likely that you are making that assumption, also that you are sufficiently self-aware that you know whether you are making that assumption.

There is a Latin expression that covers this well: reductio ad absurdum. I can't ascertain whether you do or do not assume what you seem to say you assume, but as a policy, I find it likely that you are making that assumption, also that you are sufficiently self-aware that you know whether you are making that assumption.

There are hundreds of thousands of victims of gun violence, innumerable victims of drunk driving, thousands of victims of hate crimes, uncountable numbers of people murdered or maimed by distracted driving, and so on. Obviously the government is not doing its job to Keep America Safe. It is not enough to just make it a crime to drive drunk, shoot people, commit various crimes because of a person’s sex, race of religion, not to fine people for using their phones while driving. We need to get to the root of the problem, which is that people are allowed to have guns, consume alcohol, associate with bigots or possess cell phones in the first place. A national ban on guns, alcohol, social media and cell phones would greatly alleviate these atrocities. Those who support the First, Second and Twenty First Amendments have their heads up their asses (individually and severally). “Rights” are meaningless without assurances of safety.

 

Evasion of fundamentals renders this discussion pointless. The most important fundamental which has been evaded here is the difference between US immigration law, and the floating abstraction of “security”. Let us take a non-immigration issue, the fact that any person in the US can easily transport 25 gallons of gasoline in glass jugs in the trunk of their car, on public roads. And doing so poses a real threat to the safety and security of those who happen to be in that vicinity. This lies at the extreme edges of the concept of “initiation of force”, because this act is dangerous but not per se deliberate use of force to override the will of others. It is a reckless act. For the sake of public safety, we could outlaw such an act as having a significant danger potential. Similar reasoning is commonly used to prevent potential dangerous actions by businesses (the restriction can selectively apply to businesses because of the Commerce Clause whereby the federal government gets to crack down on businesses in a way that it cannot crack down on individuals, you may well reason that individuals should be subject to the same kinds of restrictions that are imposed on  businesses – we’re moving in that direction, anyhow).
In order to protect the public against the threat of individuals acting dangerously, and following the premise that security needs can override individual rights (freedom of action), police should then be authorized to arrest and inspect any person or vehicle for the presence of such dangers. Under a strict police state, the detainee can be detained indefinitely until, for example, the police are convinced that the person is not transporting dangerous materials in contravention of the law, or in a more “libertarian” police state the police are convinced that they have no intent to use the goods in a force-initiating manner. The thing that nobody argues for is that the police should have the power to halt all movements, simply because it is imaginable that someone intends to initiate force via their movements.
The immigration bottleneck has not one thing to do with real issues of security, it is not like passing through the TSA inspection to get on an airplane. The purpose of the immigration choke-point is to limit the number of non-citizen individuals coming into the country. The rationale is not that Mexicans or Indians are inherently dangerous and highly likely to violate the rights of individuals, it is simply that allowing Mexicans and Indians into the US dilutes the labor pool, making available an expanded labor market which thus makes it possible to reduce labor costs. Exclusion of foreigners thus protects the “right” of citizen workers to demand a higher wage, because the government regulates the supply of cheap labor.
Questions of “security” play virtually no role in determining who gets to enter the US. The quota system is the primary determinant of that question.

By way of context, the cat meows that
I think you are missing a golden opportunity here. Observe that the cat arrogates for himself the right to speak for all women, as well as the right to declare who is a woman. Since the criteria for womanhood or manhood are entirely subjective and since self-declaring to be in a particular demographic allows you to speak on behalf of that demographic, you can declare yourself to be some kind of woman, and assert “having no problem” with any arbitrary sub-group of things invading the prerogatives supposedly set aside for that demographic. We can use the labels on the doors as an indication of the demographic that has a right to that space (no idea how to handle the spaces labeled “family”). You can set your own standards of welcoming, and your own demographic labeling standards. This applies to sex, age, race, religion, really anything that you can imagine. The power of arbitrary declaration, reality-be-damned, is quite awesome, and is available to everyone.

He missed an important but subtle detail about the $4 wage problem. Hiking pay rate from $1 a day to $4 has unexpected consequences. It’s only a possible benefit for the few people with skills desired by western manufacturers. It is a great boon for the few who are employed in such positions, but it is terrible for the other 95% of the population who have incomes in the $1 range. The money supply expands, local prices skyrocket to balance the money supply and increased demand for goods, now a pint of milk becomes unaffordable for the 95%.
In a free market, wages slowly increase a bit, as labor becomes more valuable and employees can reasonably demand greater compensation. Using force to short-circuit the natural process of increasing worker skill (value, ergo wage) will disable most workers in the economy who are not lucky enough to work for a rich American manufacturer (of the few who decide to continue operating in that country). Even wages are really low, prices are also really low.

An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.

I see, so you take dishonesty to be a virtue. You don't have the decency to admit who you really are, when encroaching on the public domain. What makes you think you have to right to utter your rants in public? If we IP-tracked you and published your real name and address, would you then be morally bound to cease addressing philosophical questions?

You are not a philosopher, so why are you even commenting on the works of a philosopher?  You see where this is going, I hope.

I’m having a hard time thinking of what government agencies should not be on that list of “first to go”. State, Justice, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security and GSA I suppose. Most federal agencies occupy a position in the executive hierarchy rooted in a cabinet department, e.g. the Army is under the DoD, Secret Service is under Treasury, but EPA is the product of executive ukaze not act of Congress, though with Congress acquiescing by requiring environmental impact statements which gives the EPA its power to eviscerate businesses. Along with the Commission on Civil Rights, EEOC, Office of Government Ethics, FTC, Consumer Product Safety Commission, FCC, FEC, PBS, NPR, VOA, NEH, NEH, NASA, NRC, TVA, Federal Reserve, USPS, SSA, Amtrak, Peace Corps and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (seriously), the EPA is one of myriad untethered agencies not under a clear chain of legal authority. Usually, a cabinet department is created by act of Congress and includes a provision for an head. The EPA was created by Nixon fiat declaration, and an attempt to elevate it to actual cabinet status failed under Carter. Nevertheless POTUS has “treated” the administrator of the EPA as “cabinet rank”. The only limit on the administrator of the EPA is that as a “cabinet rank official”, he is subject to Senate approval.
So that means, the EPA can be demoted by executive order, not requiring any act of Congress.
In this case, the real problem is the National Environmental Policy Act, which is the cudgel that grants dictatorial powers to an unsupervised extremist.
 

No, remember that one of the founding members was a dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and one became a dictatorship when the UN illegally expelled China. So I mean the one where Russia dominates with its veto power. The old UN is dead.
Yes and no. We do have an appalling tendency to support dictatorships, but not all of them, for example not Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela, Red China, Syria, Belarus, Laos etc. We have variable "support" (tolerance) of dictatorships in Russia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, actually lots of Africa. Maybe you could propose a concrete metric of "support" (I mean, do we "support" Canada or Germany?).
Sometimes, the realistic choices are so horrid that it doesn't make a difference. At least presently, there is no decent alternative support-choice for the fake nation "Palestine", nor Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan or even Mexico. Most nations in the UN are appalling dictatorships, which is sufficient reason for civilized nations to leave in favor of a freedom-defending organization.
 
 

An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.

An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.

I want to remind you that transgenderism exists, and can be understood objectively or subjectively. Same with any other existent. Gender is an extremely mushy construct, so are race and ethnicity. Gender has the special status of not even having a finite collection of conventional values, whereas race is limited to fewer that a dozen values (after which it degenerates into ethnicity, which has about 10,000 values). Transsexuality is a subcase of generic transgenderism, which can be limited to the annoying political habit of rejecting the English pronouns “he” and “she”.
Communism, fascism and Objectivism are choices made by people. Transgenderism is another choice, with the proviso that some people largely reject the concept of “choice” when it comes to anything vaguely sexual, and want to reduce their choices to some kind of external compulsion (either “society” compels something, or their body compels it). The foundation of “transgenderism” is that most people are – by law – assigned a sex at birth, either “male” or “female” (or equivalent words in the local language). This itself is an objective fact, though not universal. Somebody does an inspection of the newborn and announces “It’s a boy/girl!”, without consulting with the child (for obvious reasons). Later in life, the child may reject that initial determination: if they do, they are relabeled “trans”, if they do not, they are labeled “cis”. There is no conventional deadline for making that determination (at least in the US), therefore a 6 year old can declare him- or herself to be trans, so can a 90 year old. The subjective aspect of transgenderism is that each person individually chooses their "gender", perhaps by acquiescence.
The question of special trans “rights” comes down to two issues. The first is about actual enforceable rights such as the right to enter into contracts. This audience does not need to be reminded that a right is not the same as a privilege. Bathroom laws are the classic cause of confusion over so-called trans rights. Put simply, no person has a right to another person’s property. Put more pointedly, though, there is also “public property”, property owned by the government (and necessary so that the government can carry out its proper function). It is inevitable that there will be government-owned military barracks. Such barracks will necessarily have some kind of latrine facility, and inevitably there will be rules regarding such facilities. What should those rules be? Do females have the right to exclude men from the latrine / shower designated for “females”? Do whites have the right to exclude black from said facilities? This is the one question of “rights” worthy of discussion.
The other “rights” issue is “demands on the conduct of others”, which can be summarized by the template “I do not consent to you doing X”, with X ranging over “referring to me with the pronoun ‘he’”, “thinking that I am a female”, “uttering sentences which could be construed as support of conservative politics” or “denying my claim to be a victim”. I’d say that the thought-crime aspect of this notion of trans rights is highly offensive and I do not consent to being victimized by those thought police. OTOH one might have a friend (a.k.a. “person of value”) who does not want to be confronted with questions about whether they are gay, queer, bi, curious, or in some sense in need of corrective surgery. We can even include people who are utterly straight male but who feel annoyed that English has the pronouns “he” and “she”, and wish to be referred to with the word “ta”, “huyu”, “it” or “they”, depending on personal quirk. In that case, and as is always the case of values, you have to compare two values and decide which is the greater value to you.
The thing that I find so tragic is the very existence of “manipulation methods lie in authority figures in academia and (downstream to) media”. We are talking about Child Rearing 101, a course that way too many parents abdicate on, leaving it to the authorities. Which has resulted in fundamental questions of proper behavior being decided by an elite central committee which then mandates what correct political thought will be.

The trivial answer is to only spend money for proper purposes, and we know what those purposes are. However, money is also spent to cover prior obligations, for example the government borrows money from citizens with the promise to pay interest on that loan (savings bonds for example). The government also steals money under the promise to return a portion of it in the future (social security). The government has numerous contracts with individuals and businesses, which create an obligation to pay in return for goods and services. Sure, you can declare that the government has no right to make such promises and no person has the right to rely on such promises, because anyone should know that these are improper functions of government. The underlying premise of that thinking would be that a contract is automatically void if a party should know that it is morally suspicious.
Oh, also, we do not know for sure whether it is morally proper for the government to spend money enforcing contracts. That is because there is no existing pre-payment for litigation plan (i.e. the option of “buying enforceability” for property rights). We know that you have the right to have your contracts enforced, it is not determined whether you have to pay for exercising that right.
Clearly, the first step, which is strictly political, is to not authorize future improper expenditures. Dealing with past expenditures and the liquidation of existing booty to satisfy debts is a second and later step. Repudiation of debt is highly immoral, and is not under discussion. Evil acts have severe consequences. Youi, youj and youk all advocated the existing regime of “infinite government-supplied free stuff”, and thus bear moral responsibility for the severe consequences of government expenditure.

The trivial answer is to only spend money for proper purposes, and we know what those purposes are. However, money is also spent to cover prior obligations, for example the government borrows money from citizens with the promise to pay interest on that loan (savings bonds for example). The government also steals money under the promise to return a portion of it in the future (social security). The government has numerous contracts with individuals and businesses, which create an obligation to pay in return for goods and services. Sure, you can declare that the government has no right to make such promises and no person has the right to rely on such promises, because anyone should know that these are improper functions of government. The underlying premise of that thinking would be that a contract is automatically void if a party should know that it is morally suspicious.
Oh, also, we do not know for sure whether it is morally proper for the government to spend money enforcing contracts. That is because there is no existing pre-payment for litigation plan (i.e. the option of “buying enforceability” for property rights). We know that you have the right to have your contracts enforced, it is not determined whether you have to pay for exercising that right.
Clearly, the first step, which is strictly political, is to not authorize future improper expenditures. Dealing with past expenditures and the liquidation of existing booty to satisfy debts is a second and later step. Repudiation of debt is highly immoral, and is not under discussion. Evil acts have severe consequences. Youi, youj and youk all advocated the existing regime of “infinite government-supplied free stuff”, and thus bear moral responsibility for the severe consequences of government expenditure.

This is, of course, the essence is the “equality” (of outcome) doctrine, well-addressed in Brook & Watkins Equal is Unfair – the driving goal of a just society is that everyone has the same wealth, to be accomplished by decapitating from the top. I’m not inclined to waste time on the claim that Sotomayor has “established that nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial diversity of admits in higher education”, certainly nothing in the Constitution addresses the question whatsoever unless one deems that college education is a fundamental right protected by the Equal Protection clauses. Equally well, they should surmise that nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure racial purity.
As an actual certifiably colorblind-American I am offended at Jackson’s disparaging racist reference to My People in saying that “our country has never been colorblind”. Speaking on behalf of all colorblind-Americans, I demand an apology and the immediate resignation of Jackson and all color-vision supremicists like her. She is wrong that her response is simple: it is simple-minded. When it comes to acknowledging things, there is a common practice of putting an Acknowledgment Statement in your email sig-file so that you can “acknowledge the history of injustice to whoever” (of course filling in specific classes). The interesting thing, to me, is the bizarre twisting of Title VI that leads to the conclusion that the woke goal of suppression of incorrect political thought is so important that it is proper for a government educational institution to violate the law in order to overcome “intergenerational transmission of inequality”, by giving presumptively racist white students an equal opportunity to be admitted on their merits. The sins of the great-grandfather are inherited by all of their children, and all who look like them. Slavery is such a clear wrong that anything that is in any way tainted by the scent of slavery is morally equivalent, Tippu Tip notwithstanding.
The moral stain can never be eradicated.