Law professor Todd Zywicki has an excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal on the way the Obama administration has been strangling the rule of law to secure benefits for political favorites (the UAW).
If memory serves me right, it was Sir Henry Sumner Maine who said that the history of progress is the history of the advance of contract over status. That is, the progress of civilization depends on relinquishing the antiquated idea that people should be entitled to things just because of who they are, and embracing the idea that you’re entitled to what you can get through peaceful relations with other people, that is, contract.
The US has been slowly retreating from its historical commitment to the rule of law over time, but now it’s turning into a rout like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Obama is happy to demolish the legal structures that gave the US economic progress just so he can give short-term benefits to his political allies.
What next?
