The other day, I posted an extraordinary story of abusive political power.
ZipDialog Post: Your property? Yeah, right, pal. I got friends who want it
First, the story in a nutshell. Then, the larger meaning.
Alderman Bullies Property Owner to Help a Friend
Chicago Alderman Proco Joe Moreno wanted to help a business [Double Door Music Hall] that had contributed to his campaign coffers. So he told Brian Strauss, a firefighter and property owner, to rent his building to the business or suffer the consequences. When Strauss refused to comply, Moreno made good on his threats, downzoning Strauss’s building and scuttling multiple attempts to sell the property.
Strauss is now suing, arguing that Moreno’s abuses of his aldermanic powers violate Strauss’ rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. –Reason blog (Link here)
Fortunately, some of the strong-arm tactics were caught on cellphone video.
It has also been investigated and reported by CBS2 Chicago, but largely missed by the local media.
Chicago politicians acting badly is a “dog bites man” story in Chicago, just as it is in New Orleans or New Jersey–but not Minneapolis. Some jurisdictions are actually pretty honest; the voters demand it and toss out the miscreants.
The Larger Meaning, Beyond the Usual Chicago Political Stench
- Extract donations from Chick-Fil-A or Walmart
- Extract donations from their potential competitors or others who don’t like them, such as grocery owners and their unionized workers in Walmart’s case.
Those political uses of weak property rights illustrates something significant–well beyond Chicago.
When most people think of strong property rights, they think (correctly) that they are essential for economic growth. Why invest if the state can come and steal your profits?
What they miss is a second implication: strong property- and contractual-rights constrain overreach by the state.
That’s why FDR had to knock them down in 1937. They were blocking his New Deal programs, which had been ruled unconstitutional because they violated citizens’ economic rights.
FDR told the Supreme Court Justices that, if they didn’t rule his way in the future, he would pack the court with more judges who favored him. This threat went beyond traditional appointments; there were no Constitutional limits on how many judges sit on the Supreme Courts, just as, at the time, there was only a norm (not a law) saying Presidents could not run for a third term. Faced with FDR’s threat, the judges caved in and began ruling New Deal programs were just fine with them.
Aldermen use the same logic in a slightly different way: they say, I already have the power to crush you. So, give to me or I will.
Bottom Line
Whether the rights are free speech, free association, property, or contract, the message is the same. The state will overreach unless its limits are well-specified and institutionalized.
That’s a Core Western Value. It ought to extend even to Chicago aldermen.
The story certainly appears to be false. Gen. Mattis has backed up the President on that point. Mattis’ word is good enough for me.
The protesters were not mollified by the fraternity members’ claims that they had no intention of “offending or hurting anyone,” arguing that the theme of the party contributes to white supremacy.
It was held at a fraternity, which is (by definition) an abomination. These kinds of private social organizations should be stamped out if we don’t like them, just as Harvard’s President Faust tried to do.
Among activists’ sticking points, especially for a group of students called Reedies Against Racism, was Hum 110. The course, which faces a curricular and pedagogical review every 10 years but has maintained a fundamentally Western orientation, is simply too white, too male and too Eurocentric, critics charged, especially for a course required of all students. Moreover, the student activists said, Hum 110 largely ignores how these works may have been used over time to perpetuate violence against people of color. –Inside Higher Ed
Court Order: Former University of California, Santa Barbara Administrator Hid Exculpatory Evidence in Title IX Investigation
Hat Tip to Tom Elia 
Yes, there will be a lot of attention to the missed signals from the US to Spanish and Catalan authorities, as there should be.
The unregulated flow of North Africans and Middle Easterners into Europe
Based on the leaked documents, The Washington Post reported new details Thursday about Trump’s tense phone calls in late January with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. In the former, Trump reportedly told the Mexican leader to stop publicly saying his government would not pay for a border wall.
They already had one in Virginia, so this is really not new, just a more convenient location for Mueller’s office, which now has 16 full-time prosecutors.
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Hat Tip
If the Municipal Council had offered an attractive alternative site, that would be a reasonable compromise.
The growing tension between the party’s ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain, was on vivid, split-screen display over the weekend. In Chicago, Senator Bernie Sanders led a revival-style meeting of his progressive devotees, while in Atlanta, Democrats made a final push to seize a traditionally Republican congressional district. –New York Times
Raza’s verdict comes at a time when officials are increasingly pounding down on blasphemy claims across the country. At least 15 Pakistanis are said to have been arrested by the counterterrorism department under the umbrella of blasphemy, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Four other people were sentenced to death for the crime in 2016 alone. . . .
Some attack her publicly; others hide behind anonymity, proving the know what zip code they live in.
Meaningless words, all of them. But Angela Merkel takes the cake: “People in the UK can rest assured that Germany stands shoulder to shoulder with them.” Well, isn’t that . . . reassuring. In what way do such words help anybody to “rest assured” of anything? In any case, how dare she? This, after all, is the woman who opened the floodgates—the woman who, out of some twisted sense of German historical guilt, put European children in danger by inviting into the continent masses of unvetted people from the very part of the world where this monstrous evil has its roots. –Bruce Bawer in City Journal
The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.
My own theory about today’s stagnation focuses on growing angst about rapid advances in technologies that could eventually replace many or most of our jobs, possibly fueling massive economic inequality. People might be increasingly reluctant to spend today because they have vague fears about their long-term employability – fears that may not be uppermost in their minds when they answer consumer-confidence surveys. If that is the case, they might increasingly need stimulus in the form of low interest rates to keep them spending.
President Trump’s efforts to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table are taking place against the background of a broader effort to recast US policy in the region. The memory of Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s failed effort, back in 1981, to put together a regional “strategic consensus” against the Soviets may have faded, but the idea behind it is making a comeback. Facing the Iranian revolutionary regime and its proxies on the one hand and radical Sunni versions of Islamist totalitarianism on the other, key regional players are now more open than ever to an informal US-led alliance against their common enemies. The semblance, perhaps even the substance, of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front can facilitate this; but even more important would be a firm policy on Iran.
The one-notch downgrade in long-term local and foreign currency issuer ratings, to A1 from Aa3, comes as the Chinese government grapples with the challenges of rising financial risks stemming from years of credit-fueled stimulus.
Scruton’s insight is a deep one, I think, and builds directly on Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution (done only a year after the Bastille fell, long before the Terror, which he anticipated).
That is Hayek’s goal, as well, and the core of his crucial distinction between top-down statutes and regulations and the laws that emerge from countless decentralized transactions.
The college is doing what all schools do: a full review of the course.
Columbia does still have a common-core for freshmen, but I don’t know whether they have watered it down, as Chicago has, or how they defend it if it actually does emphasize those old dead folks like Plato.
Thanks to Ed Vida