British law struggles to find the right balance between the right to speech and the right to privacy.
Friday Roundup, March 14th
- Comes now Joel Alicea opining in this month’s Forum on Richard Epstein’s essay “In Defense of the Classical Liberal Constitution.”
- Hank Clark of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson provides our feature Books essay this week on George Smith’s The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism.
- David Henderson @ Econ Lib catches noted inequality czar Thomas Piketty dodging a straight-forward question on inequality in America. In an interview with New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter Piketty was asked:
Might inequality in the United States be less damaging than it is in Europe because the very rich were not born into wealth, but earned their money by creating new products, services and technologies?
Piketty answers:
This is what the winners of the game like to claim. But for the losers this can be the worst of all worlds: They have a diminishing share of income and wealth, and at the same time they are depicted as undeserving.
Henderson notes that Piketty “. . . did not answer what I think was Porter’s implicit point–the large social value of the incentive to innovate–but also Piketty didn’t even answer the narrow question asked: is inequality less damaging because many very rich people earned their money by innovating?”
- R. Shep Melnick writes on “The Odd Evolution of the Civil Rights State” in the current volume of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
- Philip Hamburger’s upcoming book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? should greatly add to the conversation on how the administrative state violates rule under and through the law. In the meanwhile, Hamburger provides part of his thinking with this new paper “Equality and Exclusion: Religious Liberty and Political Process.” Don’t miss Hamburger’s short piece @ NRO earlier in the week “Underlying Hobby Lobby.”
- So we’ve had solid coverage on the intersection of federal control of education implicit in the Common Core Standards and the curricula that will likely be built around the standards.