The original constitutional structure has, [law professor Elizabeth Price Foley] says, been inverted: Citizens are required to convince the courts that laws restricting liberty are “irrational”; government should be required to articulate justifications for limiting liberty. The Founders’ goal — in John Adams’s formulation, a nation of “laws, and not of men” — has, Foley believes, “been taken much too far.”
The courts, Will concludes, “incit[e] governmental arrogance by deferring to it. So judicial deference often is dereliction of judicial duty.”
While Will describes a case at the local level, this trend is particularly worrisome at the federal level, where judges have assented to the growth of an extra-constitutional administrative state. Administrative agencies, Gary Lawson ably explains, justify their broad, unchecked powers using a dubious “rationality” argument. And “constitutional law buffs know that ‘rationality’–so-called rational basis review–is code for ‘the government wins.’”
Lawson sums it up colorfully: “When the basic institutions of modern administrative governance are at stake, the Court closes ranks and hurls the constitutional text into the Potomac River.”
This isn’t to say that we need “conservative activist judges” to undo the damage. Instead, we need judges who recognize the importance of the Constitution and America’s first principles. In their decisions, former attorney general Ed Meese insists, jurists should recognize “the importance of grounding their decisions on the bedrock of original understanding instead of the shifting sands of public or personal opinion.”
At a time when Congress is trying to cut federal spending, political reporters often confuse two homophones and write “reign in spending” instead of “rein in spending.”
Here’s a visual guide to help writers distinguish the two.
Like many urban problems, the decline of walkable, livable urban centers can be traced to government intervention. In *Triumph of the City, *Ed Glaeser argues that restrictive zoning regulations served only to distort markets, artificially limit density and make dense areas unaffordable.
In a new article for Cato Ubound, Donald Shoup argues that minimum parking requirements—which require developers to build a certain number of off-street parking spaces—have promoted auto-oriented urban design over denser, more walkable forms:
First, parking requirements prevent infill redevelopment on small lots, where fitting both a new building and the required parking is difficult and expensive. Second, parking requirements prevent new uses for many older buildings that lack the parking spaces required for the new uses…
Removing a parking requirement is not the same, however, as restricting parking or putting the city on a parking diet. Rather, parking requirements force-feed the city with parking spaces, and removing a parking requirement simply stops the force-feeding. Ceasing to require off-street parking gives businesses the freedom to provide as much or as little parking as they like. Cities can remove minimum requirements without imposing maximum limits, and opposition to parking limits should not be confused with support for minimum requirements. Minimum parking requirements may be our most disastrous experiment ever in social engineering, and ceasing to require off-street parking is not social engineering.
Over at Market Urbanism, Stephen Smith points to a study on how parking minimums distort builders’ decisions. The study, Smith says, finds “that at least half of all non-commercial properties have more parking than they would otherwise choose, and that the excess can oftentimes be quite large.”
Megan McArdle explains that the complexity of accounting practices means it’s perhaps futile to try to design a corporate tax without “loopholes” of any sort. “A corporate income tax,” she writes, “needs to start by calculating income, and as anyone who has ever looked at a corporate financial statement knows, that’s really complicated.”
Last but not least, Trent Hamm makes the case that your leisure time should not be spent idly. Leisure time, he writes, “can provide all the space you need to take on personal goals and get involved in things you might not otherwise enjoy.”
