Freespace

New review of The Permission Society

Joshua Windham reviews by book, The Permission Society at Libertarianism.org. An excerpt:

This book demonstrates that freedom is good and the fight is worth it. It is of course true that a limited government dedicated to protecting rights with objective, fair laws will help to avoid some of the tragic stories sampled above. But at a deeper level, the Free Society is a flourishing society. It rewards trade over political scheming, self-reliance over appeals to authority, and innovativeness over rent-seeking. It promotes what Sandefur calls “the private values of responsible citizenship”: mutual respect, civic involvement, personal industry—and many others.It demands that individuals approach one another not as enemies to fell, but as partners in trade and fellows in achievement. If nothing else, Freedom matters because that is a society worth living in.

There is no doubt that we must regain this conception of ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our government if we are to curb the growth of Permission and make our way towards Freedom. But inspiration is not sufficient. We also need to take concrete steps towards our goal. And on that front, two additional recommendations come to mind.

Read the rest...

Talking Supreme Court with Armstrong and Getty

I was on the Armstrong and Getty program this morning to talk about the Supreme Court--Justice Gorsuch, the Blaine Amendment case, and the possibility of a big Second Amendment case. If you missed it, you can listen online here.

George Will on the conscience of the Constitution

George Will spoke at yesterday's "Freedom Day" event at the National Constitution Center, and I'm honored to say he quoted from my book The Conscience of the Constitution (at around 24 mins). You can watch here.

In defense of the equal rights of Native American kids

My latest article, "Escaping the ICWA Penalty Box: In Defense of Equal Protection for Indian Children" is in the latest issue of the Children's Legal Rights Journal. It takes an in-depth look at the way the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 deprives Native American children of the rights that are accorded to all other children in the United States. You can read it here.

From the Commonplace Book

Absolute power is the power to make oneself unpredictable and deny other people any reasonable anticipation, to place them in total uncertainty by offering no scope to their capacity to predict. This power, an extreme that is never reached except in the theological imagination, with the unjust omnipotence of a wicked God, frees its possessor from the experience of time as powerlessness. The all-powerful is he who does not wait but who makes others wait.

Waiting is one of the privileged ways of experiencing the effect of power, and the link between time and power—and one would need to catalogue, and analyze, all the behaviours associated with the exercise of power over other people’s time both on the side of the powerful (adjourning, deferring, delaying, raising false hopes, or conversely, rushing, taking by surprise) and on the side of the ‘patient’, as they say in the medical universe, one of the sites par excellence of anxious, powerless waiting. Waiting implies submission: the interested aiming at something greatly desired durably—that is to say, for the whole duration of the expectancy—modifies the behavior of the person who ‘hangs’, as we say, on the awaited decision. It follows that the art of ‘taking one’s time’, of ‘letting time take its time’, as Cervantes puts it, of making people wait, of delaying without destroying hope, of adjourning without totally disappointing, which would have the effect of killing the waiting itself, is an integral part of the exercise of power—especially in the case of powers which, like academic power, depend significantly on the belief of the ‘patient’ and which work on and through aspirations, on and through time, by controlling time and the rate of fulfillment of expectations (‘he has time’, ‘he’s young or ‘too young’, ‘he can wait’, is sometimes an academic verdict left to speak for itself): an art of ‘turning down’ without ‘turning off’, of keeping people ‘motivated’ without driving them to despair.

Pierre Bordieu, Pascalian Mediations (Richard Nice trans., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 228-29.