May 23, 2014
Friday Roundup, May 24th
- What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: Jonathan Last comes to Liberty Law Talk to talk babies, the extent of the market, welfare entitlements, and the pre-liberal foundations of a free society.
- And on that day the markets will freeze, businesses will shutter, homelessness will skyrocket, and we will plunge into a Great Depression 2.0. But what was the evidence relied upon by the government smart-set at the regulating agencies in those fateful days of September 2008? Answering this question is Vern McKinley’s Financing Failure which Todd Zywicki reviews this week @ Law and Liberty. McKinley’s book is the product of numerous litigated efforts to get the information used by the government to support its bailouts for the greater good. The verdict wasn’t actually supported by robust evidence, concludes McKinley.
- Arnold Kling recalls Hobbes dictum that a social order of maximum individual liberty requires a strong central state to guarantee it?
- Ilya Shapiro gets at the basic truth the Court overlooked in City of Arlington v. FCC: a government agency can never be a judge in its own cause. In this case, “six justices gave agencies discretion to decide when they have the power to regulate in a given area” expanding their already broad discretion where they have been accorded authority.
- Getting class action fees right: Ted Frank reports on his recent victory forcing class action attorney fees to be attributable to the actual settlement obtained for the class. The particular case in question, In re HP Inkjet Litigation (9th Cir. 2013), is especially appalling because the lawyers were to receive a $2.9 million payout in fees while securing for the aggrieved class members almost worthless coupons to use at Hewlett Packard’s website. Money for the lawyers, coupons for the plaintiffs, and profits? for HP. Really.
- Nicole Gelinas reports on the British Evasion since 2008 of its fiscal woes. Refraining from reforming massive entitlement spending means repeatedly drawing blood from the middle class in order to show cuts, which turns them against the case for cutting spending and size of government.
- Do you really want to live forever?
