• What Would Harding and Coolidge Do? How the Harding-Coolidge administration cut taxes and spending and allowed the economy to recover.
• Why Transit Matters. Transit allows density.
• Another Silly Attack on the Constitutional Structure. This time, the Senate is vilified as “the chamber designed to thwart popular will”–which is perhaps a good thing.

• John Quincy Adams Starts Tweeting. Very clever.
• Is American Health Care Really Worse Than Europe’s?
• A Curious Task for the Homeless. Homeless men in Poland are building a ship. Might their energy be better directed at securing employment or a permanent residence?

• Tax Burden of Top One Percent Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95 Percent. It’s not bad per se that top earners pay more in taxes, but it’s something we should keep in mind as we consider still more tax increases to ensure “the rich” pay their “fair share.”
• In Defense of Profits. Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter argues that “high profits are excellent news. When corporate earnings reach record levels, we should be celebrating. The only way a firm can make money is to sell people what they want at a price they are willing to pay. If a firm makes lots of money, lots of people are getting what they want.”
• Overdoing the Security Details. Might anonymity more effectively protect our leaders than attention-grabbing security arrangements?
• National Review’s Editors Take on Birth Certificate Conspiracy Theorists.

• Mark Steyn on the Birthers. “A true conspiracy theorist would surely believe that Obama deliberately started the birth-certificate business in order to make it easier to dismiss his opponents as deranged.”
• A Time for Choosing, Redux. “For centrists in both parties the moment has come to decide which side of the public-private divide they want the U.S. and its future workers to be on.”
• Can the Fed Prevent Bubbles? The new president of the New York Federal Reserve, Donald Luskin writes, “thinks the Fed should be responsible for identifying and preventing asset-price bubbles. Considering that the Fed’s track record reveals more skill at causing bubbles than preventing them, this is a very dangerous idea.”

In his analysis of the ongoing Henry Louis Gates embroglio, Christopher Hitchens makes a startling assertion (which Jason Kottke approvingly quotes). In defense of Prof. Gates, he writes (emphasis added) that

It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right.

Superficially, this is quite correct. The Constitution does protect an individual’s right to free speech and the sanctity of his home.

But the Constitution is not, as Hitchens suggests, the origin of these rights. Even were they not mentioned in the Constitution, these rights would still exist: an individual would remain “the sovereign of his own home and privacy.” These “unalienable Rights” derive not from a simple document written by fallible men, but, as Thomas Jefferson put it, from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” And it is “we the people” that grant the Constitution its powers, not the other way around.

Hitchens is right to revere the Constitution and the rights it protects, but he must remember that the Founders crafted the document to protect the existing natural rights of individuals. To argue that the Constitution is what “makes a citizen…sovereign” is in fact to diminish these rights and make man not sovereign at all but just another subject.