Law and virtue

Ann Althouse recently said, "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer." The inimitable Andrew Cusack gives us further light in a single simple sentence: "...the government is attempting to solve a problem with a law, when really the only solution is a virtue."

The General Theory of NPR

I had the local NPR station on the radio Sunday afternoon as I worked in the kitchen. As I half-listened to one liberal interviewing another, I formulated a General Theory of NPR: NPR's default position is that every human problem can and should be solved by the federal government. I noted that for some future blog post and then within moments, at 4:04 in the mp3 file, I heard confirmation of it, as one liberal asked the other about making websites more accessible to the handicapped, "I'm confused on this point. Now, I know the government has a fairly wide berth in mandating physical improvements in public space, that have pretty much become standard not just in government buildings but in all public places. Is the internet deemed, for the purposes of government mandate, a public space that the government can say to a retailer or some other website that you're simply not in compliance and you'd best start to comply?"

The General Theory is a corollary of Althouse's Maxim: "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer." Indeed.

Scalia on amending the Constitution

Antonin Scalia, from United States v. Virginia et al. (94-1941), 518 U.S. 515 (1996), via Althouse:

The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court's criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter majoritarian preferences of the society's law trained elite) into our Basic Law.

Change! Yes We Can!

Fun hopenchange comes to Japan.