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Between 2009 and 2020, Josh published more than 10,000 blog posts. Here, you can access his blog archives.

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Watching the Spelling Bee at the Gym with the Sound Off Just Doesn’t Work

June 2nd, 2012

When the judge pronounces the word, the captions just say “[word].”

I can’t spell for crap. I was never good at spelling. I came to age in the era of spell check.

I wonder if the spelling bee will remain relevant in the future?

Anyway, congratulations to the winner! May she never make a typo.

Once “lowering health care costs” is a legitimate governmental purposes, every regulation on individuals can be justified

June 2nd, 2012

Nothing else is off limits. Everything people do to themselves may at some point increase the cost of their health care. And if the state has a legitimate interest in lower such a cost, there is a legitimate justification for regulations that infringe on individual autonomy–subject only to the restraints in the BIll of Rights.

Say the Court upholds the mandate, and this rational becomes embedded in the norm–this frightens me much, much more than abuses of commerce or necessary and proper clause power.

Congress will always boundaries, but with such a rationale, any law would go.

Update: I think this blog post may have been subconsciously inspired by this WSJ op-ed I glanced at (but did not read) yesterday.

Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone’s health care.

Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight. New York itself, with private money, some of it from Mr. Bloomberg’s own pocket, has also tried the carrot approach, dangling direct payments to encourage beneficiary families to adopt healthier habits.

So perhaps the famous “broccoli” hypothetical during the Supreme Court ObamaCare debate was not so fanciful after all. It flows naturally from the state’s fiscal responsibility for your health that it will try to regulate your behavior, even mandating vegetable consumption.

In any event, I have been batting this idea around for some time.

“They will grow up in a world where physical storage of information is as outdated as rotary-dial telephones and mimeograph machines are now.”

June 2nd, 2012

And good riddance. I’m glad the next generation will not have to suffer through physical media (or paper, probably).

Perhaps in my children’s lifetime, all these products will be reduced to their most elemental forms: a simple glass display to see things, with some small speakers to hear things. The future of media and tech devices is not how many things can be packed into a given size, but how much can be left out.

Ilya Somin on Asian-Americans and Affirmative Action

June 2nd, 2012

The glaring inconsistencies in Texas’ affirmative action policy and others like it suggest that many universities are either operating an ethnic spoils system, trying to run a compensatory justice program under the guise of promoting diversity (while ignoring Chinese and Japanese-Americans’ powerful claims for compensation) in order to avoid running afoul of Supreme Court precedent, or some of both.

To avoid misunderstanding, I should reiterate that I have some sympathy for the compensatory justice rationale for affirmative action, and do not believe that such policies are categorically unconstitutional. I also have significant reservations about the Fisher case in particular. My general position is the exact opposite of current Supreme Court precedent, which holds that racial preferences can be used to promote “diversity” but not compensatory justice for minority groups that have been the victims of massive “societal” discrimination.

Ilya discusses a CHE piece.

Constitutional Faces: The Schecter Brothers

June 2nd, 2012

The “Four Jewish Butchers” that “brought down the first New Deal.”

The Schechters were kosher butchers operating in the 1930s who stood fast to their commitment to the dietary laws of kashrut in the face of ferocious pressure and prosecution by a powerful government. They eventually took their case to the highest court in the land—and won—defeating one of the most popular and powerful administrations in American history.

One would think this story of Jewish heroism and commitment to Jewish values would be inspirational for generations of young American Jews. But the Schechter brothers were up against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was the Roosevelt administration’s prosecution of the Schechters for violating the National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the pillars of the New Deal, that led the Supreme Court to declare the act unconstitutional in 1935. FDR was, and remains, so beloved by American Jews that the heroism of the Schechters has been lost as a story of Jewish moral commitment in the face of power. In her history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes begins the process of rescuing the Schechter brothers from obscurity by spending an entire chapter on their challenge to the New Deal. In this article I build on Shlaes’s account to provide some broader context for their story and draw some implications for Jewish Americans.

Little known fact- the Schechter Brothers voted for FDR in 1936 after their Supreme Court case!