There’s a whole bunch of blog-argument going on about Bush’s recent judicial nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, her position on the Supreme Court’s Lochner vs. New York decision, and the merits of said decision and of other similar positions having to do with federal regulatory authority.

For the libertarian(ish) side, check out Volokh (several posts; scroll down) and Eric Muller and Will Baude. For the leftist side, try Nathan Newman or Allen Brill or Crooked Timber.

The discussion, as was perhaps sadly predictable, has become an opportunity for those on the left to haul out all of the usual warhorses. We have ad hominems about how only teenagers like Ayn Rand; dismissals of “Spencerian utopias” that do not address any of Spencer’s very non-utopian arguments; nonsense about how contracts, entered into consensually for mutual benefit, somehow become “exploitative” if one party is much poorer than the other; and so on. Most of all, we have a refusal even to consider the idea that you can oppose something bad (like, say, child labor or racial discrimination) and still believe that the government ought not be able to prohibit it. Sigh.

I’m awfully surprised, actually, that Bush would nominate someone like Brown. Her unfriendliness to federal power ought logically to be a bad fit with his administration– see especially Ashcroft’s awful record on federalism, denounced so ably by Radley in a string of posts here. It’s depressing to contemplate that she probably has very poor chances of confirmation compared to Bush’s other nominees, who are by and large much less pro-liberty.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2003 at 10:37 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.