My wife and I just attended a tour at the National Archives of the exhibit of Iraqi-Jewish documents that were rescued and preserved from the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in 2003. My Iraqi-Jewish wife, along with many others, is very upset that these documents, having been stolen from the Jewish community, are […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
Pew Study: 27% of Jewish Children Live in Orthodox Homes
By comparison, only 11% of Jews ages 18-29 are Orthodox. Two caveats. First, only 80% of those 18-29 who were raised Orthodox call themselves Orthodox, so if trends hold the 27% will be more like 21.5%. Second, there is a confidence interval, unknown to me, and the numbers may not be quite so dramatic. But […]
Question about Corporate Social Responsibility Policies and Obamacare
Just wondering…. If (a) you are running a business that has a commitment as part of ingrained policy to obey the law; (b) President Obama announces that his administration will for the time being not be enforcing the law with regard, e.g., to existing insurance policies, or for that matter, the employer mandate; (c) is […]
Expanded the Range of Respectable Opinion in Constitutional Discourse
As Ilya noted yesterday, all the authors wrote postscripts for the book, some long, some short. Here’s my short one, focusing on the importance of blogs like the VC to expanding the range of “respectable opinion” in constitutional discourse: In 2011, a law professor at Yale, defending Obamacare from constitutional challenge, claimed that only one […]
Venezuela Goes from a Seeming Parody of Third World Socialist Populism to
such heights of absurdity that if you came across it in an Ayn Rand novel, you would say to yourself, “Oh come on Ayn, even Socialist despots have to try to govern with a straight face” and “the public wouldn’t be dumb enough to fall for such things.” Yet, as one of my Facebook friends […]
The Elite Defense Bar and Expert Evidence
I was recently discussing with someone the record of the elite defense bar with regard to the law of expert testimony, and it’s not a happy history. Elite defense lawyers have often steered their clients in the wrong direction, to wit: (1) In the early 1980s, when toxic tort cases were just beginning, defense lawyers […]
Posner on Lochner (UPDATED: Posner versus Posner?)
By David Bernstein on November 6, 2013 8:25 am in Constitutional History, Constitutional Theory, Rehabilitating Lochner
While I greatly admire Judge Richard Posner’s amazing corpus of work, I’ve noticed in recent pieces that he has a tendency to state propositions as indisputable, absolute truths when they are at least disputable, and sometimes flat wrong. Here is an example. Posner writes in the California Law Review: The majority opinion in Lochner is […]
Australia Anti-Discrimination Law and BDS at the University of Sydney Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (UPDATED)
[I’ve rewritten this post to eliminate unwieldy updates and improve it–I relied too much on an incomplete account from Ha’aretz–but I’ve preserved the original at the end for anyone who’s interested.] An Israeli NGO, Shurat Ha’din, is suing an Australian academic, Jake Lynch, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University […]
How Murray Rothbard Became a Libertarian
Via Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Hearts Libertarians, here is a video of the late Murray Rothbard, who is as responsible as anyone for the existence of the modern libertarian movement, describing his libertarian history. I have my issues with Rothbard, including what I think of as his inane views on foreign policy adapted from bad […]
Question for Supporters of the Boycott of Ender’s Game
If you think people should boycott the movie Ender’s Game (discussed by co-blogger Dale here) because of Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay marriage remarks, do you also think that people back in the 1940s and 50s were justified in threatening to boycott movies if Hollywood employed Communists as screenwriters? Do you the studios were justified in […]
More on African Americans Voting with Their Feet
By David Bernstein on October 28, 2013 1:45 pm in Constitutional History, Unions, Voting With Your Feet
Below, Ilya discusses the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the 1940s and 50s as an example of poor people “voting with their feet.” It’s that, though it’s a bit more complicated than that, too, because federal New Deal policies set out to limit acreage farmed in the South […]
Who is to Blame for the Plight of Christians in the Middle East who are Being Attacked and Driven out by Muslims?
Multiple choice question: (a) Jews (i.e., Israel); (b) Christians who support the Jews; (c) Muslims You would think the answer would be “c”, but then you’re clearly not as sophisticated a thinker as Diarmaid MacCulloch, who, writing in the Daily Beast, thinks that the answer is (a) and (b) with only “an extremist militant minority […]
Question for Ilya
Is rational ignorance really the problem, or is it almost entirely “rational irrationality?” I ask because the vast majority of people are not only rationally ignorant about politics, but also about the products they purchase. How much do I really know about my Ford Flex and Honda Odyssey? Compared to how much I could know, […]
The American Voter as “Flounder” (Warning: Profanity in Video)
LA Times: “All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it,” said Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester. “I’m infuriated because I was lied to.” I think this one may go down in history with “Read my lips… No New Taxes.”
British Author Howard Jacobson on Left-Wing Anti-Semitism
Regular readers will recognize some themes from my blogging on related matters. Jacobson: If we are to talk of tactics, then routinely accusing your critics of employing illegitimate tactics is a common, illegitimate tactic in itself. This particular one — that, as every criticism of anti-Zionism is motivated by bad faith, there can be no […]