Libertarian Party of Montgomery County
Promoting liberty throughout the Greater Dayton area and the Miami Valley
The widening gap between grades and actual academic performance shows the perils of letting concern for “equity” drive educational policy. In a quest to pass more disadvantaged students, Los Angeles public schools may in fact be failing them.
Price controls have been thoroughly debunked by history and economic theory. In fact, one of the first lessons in a standard freshman introductory microeconomics class is explaining how controls on prices (and wages, hereinafter, just “price controls”) cause shortages and surpluses.
In 1987… just 29% of people charged with federal crimes were jailed before trial; the rest were released back to their families. But today, pretrial jailing has become the norm, and we conclude that “the culture of detention” is to blame:
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R‒Ky.) saw it, Garland’s memo usurped congressional authority by shielding crack defendants from mandatory minimum sentences. So instead of asserting that authority by rectifying a blatantly unjust penalty scheme, Congress has once again kicked the can down the road.
What economists call the “tax wedge” is the gap between what an employer pays for an employee’s services and what the employee receives after taxes. It causes some jobs to disappear entirely, as employees and employers may not be able to agree on a wage once taxes are taken out of the paycheck. It causes some employees to flee to lower‐tax countries, states, or cities.
I mean, maybe it should be okay for people to arrange and sell flowers to willing buyers without anyone being branded a criminal in the process, but how far can we take that lesson? Anytime you take an option away, for some people, it will have been the best option they had available to them. Take that choice away, and they don’t substitute it with whatever you thought was better for them. It just leaves them with nothing.
These billion dollar walls are easily cut through with conventional power saws that cost as little as $100. Of course, these are just the breaches that have been discovered.
https://www.cato.org/blog/border-wall-was-breached-11-times-day-2022-2
“Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claims under the Free Exercise Clause….” That seems correct to me, given the facially discriminatory treatment of religious institutions. The court also concluded that the prohibition likely independently violated the Second Amendment, for reasons similar to those given in Judge Sinatra’s earlier decision in Hardaway v. Nigrelli; and the court also concluded that the law violates the Establishment Clause…
The court here correctly, I believe, worked from the assumption that a government school was constitutionally required to be institutionally neutral about political values. The school as such could not prefer Black Lives Matter posters to MAGA hats, and could not base employment decisions on such preferences. It is evident that many university professors, administrators and leaders, at both public and private institutions, would not work from that same assumption.
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/12/29/doing-pickering-balancing-right/