PRESENT ISSUES: TRUMP CANDIDACY AND THE CHEVRON DEFENSE
There’s a lot of current legal commentary by a lot of well meaning legal practitioners, but given that there is a dispute over the foundation of the law (the logical basis) and a dispute over the faith in the institutions of government, there is a great deal of difference between opinions offered. And they vary from really bad, to missing the point, to making excuses, to reasonably cogent.
Back when it was clear the economics profession was going to crash pre-2008, I considered devoting my time to correcting economic thought.
But I understood the problem with economic thought was predicated on a problem of legal thought that would limit the use and abuse of economic thought.
And that the only way to solve the problem was the truth, meaning, continuing my work universally commensurable language of ethics and politics and extending it to that of law and as a consequence economics.
Because, with the displacement of traditional agrarian morals of the church with industrial age economics as justification for all political decisions, the weaknesses in law due to supernatural nonsense were amplified by scale of polity and economy using pseudoscientific and sophomoric nonsense.
At this point the economics profession has all but suicided in its attempt to drive policy, and the culture wars have replaced both economic science and religion’s agrarian morality in some desperate search for foundations of decision making in economics, politics, and law.
And the legal profession is lacking it’s logical foundation as seriously as was the economic and the theological.
Yet this is an unnecessary failure. The founders and their english precursors were very close to a science of ethics and politics. For reasons I’ve elaborated elsewhere they did solve the problem of incentives but they left about a half dozen holes in the constitution despite being elaborated by Blackstone – who was the legal sage of the age they were all familiar with – and those holes consisted of a few presumptions of the obvious that today are not (natural, common, and concurrent voting legislation and law are simply scientific), and a few problems they simply didn’t know how to solve (truthful speech) without undermining the church’s ability to teach christian dogma myth and mysticism which they considered necessary for the ‘common people’ meaning those who were not educated lesser aristocracy.
So this is another time in my life when I see an opening for a career devoted to explaining to the public these matters in terms that they can understand -precisely because at this point we know how to fill those holes in the constitution whether presumptions or limitations of knowledge at the time.
Truth is I would find it more rewarding than the rather solitary and tedious process of producing the reforms that would fix those holes in that constitution, and fully complete the grounding of our american- anglo – germanic – early european law in a science and formal operational logic. The reason it’s more rewarding is that it’s socially and politically participatory.
Yet one cannot be done without the other. And I am one individual where my work would allow more to mater it and increase the numbers of those of us who seek to educate the people so that in their ignorance and optimism they are easily led to the serfdom and authoritarianism that will result from their natural dispositions without such knowledge, and without such defense by those few of us capable of defense of others by gift of tradition, loyalty, will, or talent or all four.
Cheers
-CD