Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Reading Kelo again and having lunch at the law school, I learned a few new things: (more…)

Clayton Cramer writes

I mentioned recently a case that seems to involve Allstate punishing an employee for writing an article that didn’t give the proper respect to homosexuality. Different River linked to it, and raised the ante, with an example of a Kodak employee fired for similar reasons, although because the Kodak employee dissented using company email, there is at least a plausible case that the employee was legally in the wrong.

Companies have every right to fire their employees for political reasons if the employment contract does not specify otherwise, but it is interesting how pro-homosexual these two companies are. Are companies allowed to fire employees for their religious views too? They should be. I see no principled reason for restricting the liberty of people to hire as they will, even though such liberty would hurt people of my politics and religion.

Rich Julie made a thought-provoking comment on Kelo at VC. (a) Why are conservatives so upset that federal judges are refusing to step in to stop a local government from doing something? (b) Isn’t it interesting that the 5th Amendment is the only one that provides a remedy for a wrong? (c) Doesn’t the literal reading of the Takings Clause allow takings for private use, which shows that adhering to the literal meaning of legal texts is absurd? (d) Why is a railroad or a grist mill, traditional “public uses” more of a public use than a factory? (more…)

Three good work traits are honesty, dependability, and skill. I wonder how the importance of these has varied across the decades. In a large organization, honesty and dependability become more important relative to skill in line positions, because the leaders and the staff can use their skill to set up bureaucratic procedures. What is the effect of computers? They make skill less important, but they can also be used to hold dishonesty in check.

This press release suggests taking Judge Souter’s house by force to make it into a hotel. I think the Kelo decision would actually allow this, as I’ll explain later. (more…)

The Washington Post exemplifies the anti-Christian attitude increasingly common in America in its article, “Intolerance Found at Air Force Academy”. The subheadline undercuts this already: “Military Report Criticizes Religious Climate but Does Not Cite Overt Bias”; that is, they couldn’t find any actual intolerance. This story has been little reported, but it is full of ironies. People purporting to support religious freedom actually are engaged in suppressing it– just look at what they say they are doing, which is to stop people from making religious statements. And I suspect what is really going on is a power struggle between the mainline denominations which have traditionally monopolized the armed forces chaplaincies and Christians who are actually believe the stuff rather than mouth pieties and act nice. I’ll quote two stories: one about the Air Force in which mainliners are complaining that evangelicals display their faith, and one about the Navy in which evangelicals complain that mainliners shut them out of chaplaincy jobs. (more…)

Scalia writes well, as usual. In today’s McCREARY COUNTY, KENTUCKY, et al. v. AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF KENTUCKY he writes about the rule of law, which is conspicuously absent from our Supreme Court’s decisionmaking:

What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle. That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that–thumbs up or thumbs down–as their personal preferences dictate. Today’s opinion forthrightly (or actually, somewhat less than forthrightly) admits that it does not rest upon consistently applied principle. In a revealing footnote, ante, at 11, n. 10, the Court acknowledges that the “Establishment Clause doctrine” it purports to be applying “lacks the comfort of categorical absolutes.” What the Court means by this lovely euphemism is that sometimes the Court chooses to decide cases on the principle that government cannot favor religion, and sometimes it does not. The footnote goes on to say that “[i]n special instances we have found good reason” to dispense with the principle, but “[n]o such reasons present themselves here.” Ibid. It does not identify all of those “special instances,” much less identify the “good reason” for their existence.

I suppose the real motivation of the liberal majority is to go step by step in outlawing religion, so as to avoid political backlash. If they ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance could not be said, or that “In God We Trust” had to deleted from coinage, they’d attract too much attention too soon.

At the Right Coast Maimon asks why anti-semitism and anti-Americanism are so often linked, and why people are so willing to insult Jews and America. I think all three are connected: the link is anti-bourgeoisieism, if I may create such a vowelish word. (more…)

VC has just started allowing comments. Here’s the comment I posted there on that:

I encourage you to edit (that is, delete– not revise) vigorously. Usually comments on popular blogs are a waste because such a large percentage are of low quality compared with the blog entries themselves. Tell commenters that half of them won’t make it, and readers will be much more likely to read the remaining half. That will encourage the high-quality commenters, and discourage the low-quality commenters, a good thing.

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I’ve posted some “Questions and Answers on Law and Economics” elsewhere.

I was unhappy to discover that Billy Graham is unwilling to say that homosexuality is sinful or that Mormons, Jews, and Muslims are sinning by not accepting Christ. All he has is a gospel of niceness. Here, from Sharper Iron: (more…)

I was just reading a book about Hitler and WW 2 which pointed out mistakes the Allies made, and was wondering whether our leadership at the theatre-strategy level in Europe– i.e., Eisenhower– really was any good. Examples:

1. Why invade the Riviera in 1944? The Germans were going to retreat there anyway rather than get cut off, and it used up lots of landing craft.
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The Kelo case confirms what has been the courts’ interpretation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The clause says, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” A plain reading would be that the government can seize private property, but only for a public use, and only if the owner is compensated. The courts say, in effect, that any motivation is public use unless it can be shown that the true motivation is actually just to help some private party. That’s pretty much impossible to show, of course, since they also make clear that it’s okay if a private party gets rich off the property seizure, so long as there is *also* and *primarily* a public purpose. (more…)

I realized an implication of agency law yesteday: if your agent negligently injures *you*, then vicarious liability protects him from liability. Or am I wrong?

What happened was that I came home from Arlington and found that the college student who mows our lawn and does this and that with gardening had carefully uprooted and killed 19 of 20 of our morning glories, thinking they were weeds. He works very slowly and is not all that bright, and we knew that. Indeed, that is true of many of our students here. I got rid of our bottle of Roundup after a previous student gardener managed to blast brown holes in our lawn using it to kill dandelions.

At any rate, I will not charge my agent for the damage he did to the garden, and I should not be able to do so. If he had killed the neighbor’s flowers, I, his principal, would be liable. If he kills my flowers, I still, as principal, should be liable. This removes the risk from the agent, which is usually efficient. If we wanted, we could contract around this, however, a big difference from the case in which the neighbor is damaged. I could contract with my agent that he pays liquidated damages if he kills my flowers, or even simply change from the default rule of no liability to make him liable.

Dennis Mueller is quite stimulating. Now he is talking about redistribution. Scott Yenor asked about the motive of, say, giving food stamps to the poor because the rich feel bad seeing poor people starve.

Professor Mueller responded by saying, among other things, that if that is the motive, then only the donors– the rich– ought to vote on it. This is a neat idea. We might want the taxes and food stamps to be compulsory, government-organized, but to overcome the free-rider problem we might want to say that a majority of a class– say, rich donors– can vote to compel the entire class to be taxed and to thereby donate. But of course you do not want the recipients to vote on this.

The class might be narrowly defined– and should be, an interesting question. Hollywood millionaires would like to be taxed more for charity to the poor, but Idaho potato farmer millionaires would not. The Hollywooders, being more numerous, would like to define the class broadly, so as to make the farmers subsidize their charitable desires.

Mueller says he has a paper on this. No doubt his Public Choice III cites it.

Not Tom, but Time. I’m listening to Dennis Mueller talk about unanimity rules in government. They have 3 defects, he says: 1. Take too long to decide, 2. Encourage strategic behavior (you hold out for a bribe) (but is the threat credible?–bargaining problem, anyway). 3. It protects the status quo too much. It is the TIME aspect which interests me now. (more…)

I’ve had trouble connecting this past couple of days, but I plan to be back in business late tonight.

Suppose we catch somebody dealing drugs. Does that tell us that that person has probably committed other, non-drug crimes that are harder to detect? (drug dealing is relatively easy to catch because [a] the seller is at risk from the buyer, and [b] the seller at risk from his supplier, and [c] the seller has to find customers). If so, then even if we didn’t care anything about drug dealing directly, it might be a good idea to lock up drug dealers.

This could be looked at with numbers. It would be a good research topic.

From National Review we learn that the DeLay prosecutor dropped charges against several corporations and proclaimed their good reputation in exchange for cash for charities he favors: (more…)

I couldn’t resist taking the Theological Worldview Quiz, even though the questions are rather poorly worded. The biggest problem was that so many questions are actually two questions in one. Avoid that if you’re designing a diagnostic test. (more…)