You might be a liberal if…
Michael Kinsley has a piece that mentions Richard Nixon’s policy of price controls in the early seventies. Eugene Volokh says
Of course, the notion of economic liberty—the right not to have the government dictate your wages and prices, the right to enter and run your business on your own terms, the right to hire, be hired, fire, or quit with little government supervision, and so on—has not been terribly popular with liberals for many decades. … Unfortunately, as the Nixon Administration shows, it has been unpopular with some ostensible conservatives, too, though this just shows that Nixon wasn’t that conservative on economic matters.
That last sentence reminds me of the following exchange between two philosophers (mentioned by David Lewis somewhere, I think).
A: Here is a counterexample to your view.
B: You’re misinterpreting me. This can’t be a counterexample, because I intended my argument to have no counterexamples.
Jacob Levy follows up with a sketch of the conservative landscape of that time. It’s a very interesting period. The Republican Party’s attitudes to the welfare state were very different from today. One of my former grad-school office mates is writing a book about it.
While we’re over at the Volokhs and talking about the Nixon era, the psuedonymous Juan Non-Volokh demands to know whether Jack Balkin can call for Richard Posner’s nomination to the Supreme Court without being forced to condemn those who denied Robert Bork a seat when he was nominated. Both Posner and Bork are high-caliber legal scholars, Juan argues, so you can’t support the former without supporting the latter, except on illegitimate partisan grounds.
Funny, I’d always thought that Bork’s nomination got canned because—not to put too fine a point on it—he believed that saving Richard Nixon’s ass was more important than upholding the rule of law.
Update: Jack Balkin has a few things to say about Bork’s comparative merits as a scholar, too.
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