Saturday, August 27, 2005

Less than Fein

It's worse than it first appeared with Fein, the man for whom property is, apparently, a nuisance:

Insipid minds incline toward major constitutional blunders. Justice Henry Brown pronounced the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Justice Rufus Peckham embraced free enterprise and Herbert Spencer's Social Statics as constitutional mandates in Lochner v. New York (1905);

Yikes. The entire free enterprise system is a matter of congressional grace. How about that. They could socialize everything tomorrow and adopt communism the day after; Fein doubtless would think it an unwise policy choice (I'm giving him an unearned benefit of the doubt), but he'd see courts as powerless to do a thing about it. At least, it would make Takings law much easier to adjudicate.

And as Anonymous predicted, conservatives like Fein see property rights to be as unjustifiable, constitutionally, anyway, as privacy (which of course means only some favored people's privacy, but that's not a fight with Fein, so save it for another time.)

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