Matt Yglesias point out that Rick Perry believes some astoundingly far-out things: for example, that all federal ban regulation and environmental protections are unconstitutional. Avik Roy responds that those are mainstream conservative positions. That tells you what you need to know about the viewpoint now falsely labeled “conservative.”
Matt Yglesias points out that Rick Perry holds some astoundingly extreme opinions. Perry thinks that Social Security, Medicare, federal labor laws, federal environmental laws, federal banking regulation, and federal aid to education are all unconstitutional, and that global warming is a fraud.
Avik Roy responds that all of these borderline-crazy views are mainstream conservative views. For example, opposition to the use of the Commerce Clause is “about as mainstream of a conservative position on constitutional law as there is.”
That’s supposed to disprove Matt’s claim that Perry is spouting lunacy. All it proves to me is that the viewpoint now falsely calling itself “conservative” is not to be taken seriously.
Update Ezra Klein has more: Perry wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, returning the power to choose U.S. Senators to state legislatures. I suppose we’re not moving back to the Gilded Age fast enough to please Gov. BigHair.
Second update Perry scores a trifecta: Paul Krugman explains why Texas’s success in luring jobs from other states with lower wages and weaker regulations can’t be duplicated nationally. Can you say “Fallacy of composition”? I was sure that you could.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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Reading “opposition to the use of the Commerce Clause” as “opposition to the EXPANSIVE use of the Commerce Clause” becomes… pretty much the mainstream direction the SC has been taking since Lopez. What’s the problem?
As well as what it was understood to mean for roughly 140 years.
If you view people who disagree with you as crazy, you spare yourself any obligation to confront them on an intellectual level, and risk possibly losing an argument. Diagnosing people instead of debating them is the lazy intellectual’s cop out.
If you can get them actually committed? That’s the intellectual’s equivalent of “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Anyway, to read comments at Yglesias’ site, is to be glad ‘liberals’ don’t have the power to commit their political foes.