In light of the current debate on Capitol Hill, the quotation of the day comes from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in D.C. v. Heller: Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional [...]

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” “A Republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 I do not want to say much about the election today, but I do want to share a few thoughts. I will begin by referring the reader to [...]

I have been quiet about this year’s election, but not for lack of caring.  The last few months have been extremely busy for me; to my shame, my busy schedule has meant that I have been silent about what is likely the most important presidential election in more than 30 years, not to mention extremely [...]

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. ~ Dick, in Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2 I am always amused when I get campaign literature from various folks attempting to smear some candidate or another as “a trial lawyer.” Being a trial lawyer myself, I tend to have a [...]

On the heels of my post on upward mobility comes an insightful post by Cato’s Michael Tanner. Two key quotations: In the end, however, one has to ask a more basic question. Why do we care about inequality at all? Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. But is inequality? After all, if we doubled [...]

Say what you want about Ron Paul—and there is a lot to say—this is perhaps the best one-sentence commentary on his candidacy to date: It is quite remarkable that a man who renounced his membership in the Republican Party because he so despised the Ronald Reagan administration could now be running for the GOP nomination [...]

I read an interesting article on economic mobility in National Review Online, which got me thinking. The article is good in that it points out some of the statistical challenges in measuring upward mobility. For example, who counts as poor? Who counts as middle class? Are we measuring intergenerational or intragenerational mobility? In acknowledging these [...]

HistoryNet has an article on the topic of cultural property and who owns it. The article, The War Over Plunder: Who Owns Art Stolen in War?, addresses some of the same topics I addressed in my comment for the Chicago Journal of International Law at the Law School of the University of Chicago, Keeping the [...]

All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. ~ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution [...]

A number of people have asked me lately what I’m reading on economics and the financial markets right now.  Truth is, I’m always reading such things, and no short list can even come close to covering the variety of material I try to read, from the scholarly and serious (e.g., Posner, Becker, Mankiw, etc.) to [...]