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Photos of the Ayn Rand bust

I dispatched Chapman Law student Jennifer Fry to attend the dedication of the Ayn Rand bust this week, and she got some outstanding pictures! The bust is by sculptor Juan Rosillo, who has done a number of other busts for Chapman. I am once again very proud to be a Chapman alumnus.

Friday poetry

Supernatural Love
Gjertrud Schnackenberg

My father at the dictionary-stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand
His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word "Carnation." Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
"The obligation due to every thing
That's smaller than the universe." I bring

My sewing meedle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle's eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room
Shadowed and fathomed as this study's gloom
Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what's buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle's point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why
It is my habit to identify
Carnations as "Christ's flowers," knowing I

Can give no explanation but "Because."
Word-roots blossom in speechless messages
The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X I awkward move
My needle through the word whose root is love.
He reads, "A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh."
As if the bud's essential oils brush
Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstacy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me,

He turns the page to "Clove" and reads aloud:
"The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud."
Then twice, as if he hasn't understood,

He reads, "From the French, for clou, meaning a nail."
He gazes, motionless. "Meaning a nail."
The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth "Beloved," but my needle caught
Withing the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, "Daddy daddy"--
My father's hand touches the injury

As lightly as he toughed the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ's when I was four.

From the Commonplace Book

Let us not be afraid of unduly reducing the province of government. The social principle is always strong enough to prevent this, and the tendency of events is always in the contrary direction. It is too common, the wish to cure all social ills, and advance all social projects, by the power of government. It is too common the wish to place the industry, enterprize and morality of the people, under the care of the state: though all history proves that they sicken and decay under the influence of large governmental powers, and that, in Christian lands, they revive and flourish under the spirit of individualism, which is natural to man, and which can be properly developed only where the pragmatism of the state is excluded. The state is no proper leader in any such matters. It is delegated not to devise plans of acquiring wealth and securing happiness; but to protect individuals in the proper pursuit of their own lawful plans—not to guide enterprize into new channels and new undertakings; but to protect those already entered upon, and to keep open and improve their avenues. Man advances only by pursuing his own ideal of morality and enterprize; and this he pursues with an energy proportioned to the brightness of the rewards which his own eye discovers in it. When government interferes in such matters, it truly represents only those who suggest the plan; and they only will appreciate the ideal that it is intended to embody or realize; and they only, and not the people generally, can be relied on to give it effect. And so here, a small band of individual sockholders are likely to have the control of the millions of municipal subscriptions now proposed to be made in this and other cases, and the very proposition to make them, has prevented an incalculable amount of individual subscription, and set aside that much of the individual energy, forecast and watchfulness so necessary to the success of such enterprises. The laborer will not tax his own energies when Hercules undertakes his works, and he will be equally backward if Hercules attempt to control him. The vast majority of the people desire to be allowed to mind their own business in their own way, and it is this majority that ought to be regarded. And when the government undertakes to meddle with them, at the call of noisy speculators seeking public favors, no amount of official majorities can purge the deed of its tyrannical character.

—Sharpless v. Mayor of Philadelphia, 2 Am. L. Reg. 27, 41-42 (Pa. 1853) (Lowrie, J., dissenting) (Yes, there were dissents in Sharpless. I talked about that case some years ago.)

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

This morning I made a contribution to the Victims of Comunism Memorial Foundation in honor of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If, unlike the President, you consider this a moment worthy of remembrance, please consider making a donation for the upkeep of the monument and of the Global Museum of Communism.

Celebrations of the Fall

Cato's Chris Moody has collected some good links that commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Although I must wonder if Justin Logan won't complain that celebrating this is "antagonistic" to China....)

Wow...just...wow

This is astonishing. And Joanne Cuccia deserves congratulations for handling this outrageous incident with coolness, professionalism and appropriate indignation.

Property rights--or property permissions?

The cover story of October’s Liberty magazine, now online here, is my article about several of PLF’s lawsuits involving the problem of “exactions.” Exactions are demands that the government makes on you when you request a building permit. Local goverments routinely demand that property owners give up land, or money, or even in one case the right to vote, in exchange for such permits. Back in 1987, in a case called Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court explained that local officials cannot use their permit power as an opportunity to extort these rights from citizens, but local governments routinely ignore the Nollan limits, and the reason is pretty obvious: by forcing individual property owners to give up money or land to the government, bureaucrats are able to provide the public with public services without having to pay for them with tax money. They can shift those costs to politically powerless minorities instead.

But there’s also an important philosophical dispute involved. As I write in the article,

If private property is a basic human right, then it pre-exists the state, and government bears the burden of justifying the limits that it imposes on an owner’s freedom to use what belongs to him. But if property is created by government’s decision not to interfere, then the owner must obtain that permission by yielding other rights.... The central problem is the shift away from the Founders’ classical liberal view of natural, human rights and toward the Progressives’ view that rights are permissions based on political consensus. With that shift came a gradual change in the nature of land-use regulation; originally a mechanism for preventing nuisances, land-use planning morphed into a device for centralized social planning.

The Progressive era shift on political philosophy taught Americans to believe that they have a fundamental right to tell other people what to do with their property. Until we abandon that heresy, and return to our original creed, that every person has the right to freedom, so long as they respect the same right in others, private property rights will be at risk from exactions and other government schemes.

Cross-posted at PLF Liberty Blog

Ayn Rand Week at Chapman University

I just learned that this week is Ayn Rand Week at my alma mater, Chapman University. Events include the dedication of a bust of Rand to celebrate the establishment of the Rebecca and William Dunn Distinguished Chair in Honor of Vernon Smith (tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. in the plaza), as well as an exhibit of Rand memorabilia in the Leatherby Library and other events. Very cool! I'm pretty certain that will make Chapman the only college anywhere to display a bust of Ayn Rand!

Obama: too busy to remember communism's crimes

Of all Obama’s symbolic snubs, his refusal to attend ceremonies celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall is the most shameful. The events of 1989 (both of June and of November) make up the greatest symbolic moment in the post-War world, and the Wall the most horrific symbol of the communist tyranny that murdered more than 60 million people, and tortured, enslaved, censored and brutalized many millions more. Against the horrors of communism, the United States stood as a witness on the side of humanity—flawed, aspiring, just humanity—the humanity that spoke in the words of Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, when he called the Nazi leadership “symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.  Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.” The same is true of the legacy of the USSR.

Whatever our imperfections, the United States has tried to stand on the side of democracy against dictatorship. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter sent a delegate to a memorial ceremony commemorating the USSR’s massacre of Poles at Katyn Forest.  In 1971, when the United Nations threw the democratic Republic of China out of the United Nations at the demand of the totalitarian People’s Republic of China, American ambassador George Bush walked out arm-in-arm with the Taiwan delegation. When he visited Berlin in 1963, John Kennedy was not afraid to speak for the victims of communist despotism: “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” When Ronald Reagan went to the Wall, he insisted against the wishes of his state department on inserting into his speech the words “tear down this wall.” These men did not fall for the facile “realism” that proclaims itself too sophisticated and clever for moral issues; they knew that nothing is more realistic than to call things by their right names—to celebrate and cherish and proclaim the goodness of freedom, and to attack the tyrant and the slavemaster with whatever tools one has.

And today, twenty years after the wall came down, and communism’s awful horrors were splattered to the ground for all to see the bloody mess, what does Barack Obama have to say?

The Berlin Wall

Hard as it is to believe, this month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wonder if I will ever see something so glorious ever again.

Please take a moment to check out the Victims of Communism Memorial and contribute to its upkeep.

"May [July 4th] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."--Thomas Jefferson

Oral arguments in Jones v. Harris Associates

The Washington Post has an article here on Jones v. Harris Associates, the case on executive compensation argued today in the U.S. Supreme Court. I wrote the Cato Institute's amicus brief.

SCOTUS Blog has a recap on the oral argument. This is certainly disappointing (if unsurprising): "When it came time for the Solicitor General to argue, Assistant Curtis Gannon, embraced [the anti-free market approach] articulated by the Second Circuit in a case called Gartenberg. As did John Donovan, counsel for Defendants, who also embraced the Gartenberg test and expressly declined to defend [the pro-freedom approach] adopted by the Seventh Circuit."

It is precisely the cowardice of businesses who refuse to stand up for their right to the money they fairly earn that hands the default victory to enemies of economic freedom.

My favorite bookstore

This is my favorite bookstore, Hein & Co. bookstore in Jackson, California. Of course, there's Powell's in Portland, but I rarely get there. Hein & Co. Is the best browsing bookstore I've been to. Great selection, great prices, great cats.

Friday poetry

Don Marquis is, alas, little rembered today. He was a newspaper columnist and humorist who wrote a series of poems supposedly authored by a cockroach named Archy, who banged out his work on a typewriter by leaping head first on the keys.

the lesson of the moth (1927)

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the
wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of
it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before theybecame
too civilized to enjoy
themselves

and before i
could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the
same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry
himself

archy

Conservative tea

Here's my question: is conserative tea made with Goldwater?

Beautiful libraries of the world

My friend Pagona passes along this great blog post of beautiful libraries in the world. Unbelievable. How could you everactually get any reading done in any of these? (I've tried reading in the Library of Congress Reading Room and found it virtually impossible.)

This is how grownups govern...?

I certainly sympathize with Schwarzenegger's side. But is this really necessary?

Democrat admits Democrats cannot resolve the pension problem

HT: A&G

Friday poem

"Lying" by Richard Wilbur

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
Later, however, talking with toxic zest
Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it
Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,
You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing
Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.
Not that the world is tiresome in itself:
We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.
So too with strangeness not to be ignored,
Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,
And so with that more rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?
It is the water of a dried-up well
Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.
There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung
From Hell to probe with intellectual sight
The cells and heavens of a given world
Which he could take but as another prison:
Small wonder that, pretending not to be,
He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden
In a black mist low creeping, dragging down
And darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.
Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:
The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,
The river glazes toward the dam and spills
To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,
And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile
Some great thing is tormented. Either it is
A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind
Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast
Which tries again, and once again, to rise.
What, though for pain there is no other word,
Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?
It is something in us like the catbird’s song
From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning
That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,
Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant
Of the first springs, and it is tributary
To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut
That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron
Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof
Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,
Or of the garden where we first mislaid
Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting
Out of what cognate splendor all things came
To take their scattering names; and nonetheless
That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees—
Which having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dovetailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

(c/o Carol Peters)

Hey, whadda ya know?

This is unintentionally hilarious:

How can we most effectively weaken property rights…?  [F]raming property as bundles of rights and forewarning of limitations weakens perceptions of ownership and decreases resistance to subsequent restrictions….  The potential applications of this research to property theory are numerous. Legislators, judges, and regulatory agencies craft legal measures that respond to, or even capitalize on, strong, pre-existing frames of citizen-owners.

Yep, I’d say that’s about right!

(HT: RSR)

My Chapman talk on Lochner

I recently spoke to the Federalist Society at Chapman University School of Law (my alma mater) on the subject of Lochner and of constitutional protections for economic liberty in general. I recorded the talk and you can listen to it here. (It's a big file and takes a while to download.)