David Boaz

Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett writes in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the latest court decision on medical marijuana. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the application of the Controlled Substances Act to personal medical use of marijuana did not exceed the federal government’s constitutional authority, Angel Raich went back to court to argue that the ban violated her fundamental right to preserve her life. Alas, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that claim, too.

But as Barnett notes, the court did seem unhappy with the decision it was forced to reach:

For now, federal law is blind to the wisdom of a future day when the right to use medical marijuana to alleviate excruciating pain may be deemed fundamental. Although that day has not yet dawned, considering that during the last 10 years 11 states have legalized the use of medical marijuana, that day may be upon us sooner than expected. Until that day arrives, federal law does not recognize a fundamental right to use medical marijuana prescribed by a licensed physician to alleviate excruciating pain and human suffering.

Pity a panel of judges forced to tell that to a suffering plaintiff.

It’s being overshadowed by the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, but there’s an important property rights case before the Supreme Court today. Timothy Sandefur, author of Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America, writes about the case in Legal Times today.

The case involves a dispute that arose when Harvey Frank Robbins bought some land in Wyoming. The Bureau of Land Management claimed to have an easement on the land, but that wasn’t recorded on the deed. The government demanded that Robbins agree to the easement, and he resisted. Government agents promised him “a hardball education,” and they delivered — harassment, citations for minor offenses, belligerent visits, and criminal charges for interfering with government agents, charges of which he was acquitted after 30 minutes of jury deliberation. Sandefur takes the story from there:

After enduring years of such treatment, Robbins sued, arguing, among other things, that the BLM agents had violated his Fifth Amendment right to exclude others from his property. The trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit agreed, but the government asked the Supreme Court to reverse in Wilkie v. Robbins. “No court,” said Solicitor General Paul Clement in his brief, has “ever recognized a constitutional right against retaliation . . . in the context of property rights.”

This astonishing argument is potentially far more dangerous to the rights of property owners than the notorious Kelo v. New London decision two years ago, which held that government can use eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another whenever politicians think doing so would be in the public interest.

If the Court rules against Robbins, home and business owners would find it much harder to resist when the government demands their property.

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe argued the case for Robbins, with the Justice Department defending the BLM. Watch for news stories later today.

Belmont College guard Andrew House complained that the NCAA assigned his team to this hotel, the historic Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem, N.C. He objected to the old, 19-inch television sets in the room and said that the hotel felt more like a log cabin.

Isn’t it great to live in a world so rich that a 20-year-old college student thinks a beautiful, historic four-story hotel is like a log cabin Next year, no doubt, players will complain about being assigned to hotels with old Ethernet connections that you actually have to plug your laptop computer into, like pioneer times.

It’s not often that you can point to a stirring article about American liberty by a Weekly Standard editor. But Chris Caldwell’s piece in the Financial Times on cock-fighting is a fine read. Yes, cock-fighting. Presidential candidate Bill Richardson doesn’t want the legality of cock-fighting in New Mexico to burden his candidacy as he travels the length and breadth of this great land. So rather than defend New Mexico as the last bastion of American freedom, he chose to sign a law banning it to help his campaign.

Caldwell notes sadly that even the defenders of the practice hardly mentioned liberty. Instead, they mentioned the economic benefits of tourism and the alleged anti-Hispanic bias of the drive to ban a sport popular with Hispanics. The better argument, he thought, would have been liberty: some people want to attend cock-fights, and Americans have been doing so for centuries, so why should “reformers” be able to take a small pleasure away from others Caldwell deplores the decline of the general presumption of liberty:

It used to be, under the US system, that one could do anything that was not expressly forbidden. Now one is forbidden to do anything one cannot make an explicit case for. The burden of proof has shifted.

It’s especially sad that Bill Richardson, who is not so bad on fiscal issues and is a supporter of medical marijuana, felt that he had to take people’s freedom away for his own political gain.

Great headline in the Washington Post today –

Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush’s Prized ‘No Child’ Act

The good news is that

More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate — including the House’s second-ranking Republican — will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

The bad news is that even

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said that advocates do not intend to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead, they want to give states more flexibility to meet the president’s goals of education achievement, he said.

So even a small-government federalist like Jim DeMint isn’t willing to say that education is a family, community, or state responsibility, but not a federal responsibility. Still, weakening the mandates would be a real victory for decentralization and competition.

I particularly liked the comment from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), author of the proposed House bill: (more…)

For the past six years Democrats have railed against President Bush’s gimmicky, deceptive, wildly unbalanced budgets. Now that they control Congress, they have the power to write their own budgets. And what have they come up with As the Washington Post explains,

Senate Democrats unveiled a spending blueprint yesterday that envisions a massive expansion of the nation’s health-insurance program for children, as well as billions of additional dollars for other domestic priorities such as public education, veterans’ health care and local police.

Despite the additional spending, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the proposal would virtually erase the federal deficit within four years without raising taxes and produce a surplus of $132 billion by 2012.

It’s not true that politicians never learn anything. Conrad and his colleagues have learned a great deal from Bush and his budget spinners.

The Washington Post reports,

“Three of the last five years, there’s been no budget for this country,” [Sen. Kent] Conrad said in an interview.

Actually, for the past 218 years, there’s been no budget for this country. The country is a vast, sprawling nation of 300 million people, millions of businesses, and more than 100 million households. The country is not a corporate entity, and it has no budget.

On the other hand, there is supposed to be a budget for the federal government, and Congress is indeed derelict in failing to pass one. But politicians should not forget the distinction between the country and the government.

Russell Roberts of George Mason University writes about Japan, China, and the trade deficit scare in the Wall Street Journal. Along the way he notes:

The story of the baseball off-season is the Red Sox spending $100 million to bring Daisuke Matsuzaka from Japan to the United States. Dice-K, as he’s known, is the ultimate import. He takes away a job from an American pitcher.

Russ is mocking the protectionist argument, of course. But he could have drilled in on this point more than he did. We often hear that immigrants “take American jobs.” But really, when America welcomes software engineers from India or magazine editors from England or the laborers who built my house from El Salvador, they don’t necessarily take anybody’s job. An expanding economy–expanding partly because of the immigrants–may well need more engineers, editors, or laborers than it would have needed in the absence of immigration.

But Dice-K actually is taking someone’s job. He’s going to pitch in the major leagues. There’s a fixed number of major league teams, and pretty much a fixed number of pitchers on each team. If the Red Sox hire Dice-K, they’re going to fire or not hire some other pitcher. Probably some good ol’ boy from the American South, whose next best alternative is, yes, being a greeter at Wal-mart. Maybe even one of my Kentucky relatives. Hey, maybe Pat Buchanan’s onto something here…

Bloomberg’s Singapore-based columnist Andy Mukherjee writes about the private-education boom in China:

At the end of 2005, some 15 million students were enrolled in 77,000 non-state schools. That’s 8 percent of the 197 million Chinese children aged 5 to 14 years. Privately funded schools in India have twice as large a share of the total market.

Expect the gap to close quickly.

Nine years ago, Ma Lei of Fudan University wrote about the growth of private schools in China for Cato Policy Report:

In Wenzhou, more than half of the 600 million RMB spent on education comes from the private sector. That’s a claim that few, if any, communities in the United States can make. …There are more than 2,300 privately run kindergarten classes in Wenzhou, in which more than 90 percent of all children of kindergarten age are enrolled. In addition, there are 21 private high schools, which educate about a quarter of the total high school student population.

James Tooley has also written at length about private education for the poor in Africa and India. His work, and its exciting new directions, are discussed in this Atlantic article.

Los Angeles Times reporter Nancy Vogel has a roundup of nanny-state bills pending in the California legislature:

Enjoy fast food? Like to light up while you watch the waves? Forget to sock away money for your kids’ education?

Some California lawmakers want to change your ways. They’ve planted a crop of proposals this year — “nanny” bills, as they’re called — that would:

•  Restrict the use of artery-clogging trans fat, common in fried and baked foods and linked to heart disease, in restaurants and school cafeterias.

•  Bar smoking at state parks and beaches, and in cars carrying children.

•  Open a savings account, seeded with $500, for every newborn Californian to use at 18 for college, a first home purchase or an investment for retirement.

•  Fine dog and cat owners who don’t spay or neuter their pets by 4 months of age.

•  Require chain restaurants to list calorie, saturated fat and sodium content on menus.

•  Phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs, which are less energy-efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs.

Read more…