Monthly Archives: December 2012
Book Review of “Water For Sale” by Fredrik Segerfeldt
For my complete collection of my book reviews, please visit my Youtube Channel or RomansBookReport.com
Supreme Court rules cops can be filmed!
Good news, for a change. :)
Smile for the camera, coppers — the US Supreme Court has decided to let stand a lesser ruling that allows citizens in the state of Illinois to record police officers performing their official duties.
Up until just last year, an anti-eavesdropping legislation on the books across Illinois meant any person within the state could be imprisoned for as much as 15 years for recording a police officer without expressed consent. In August 2011, a federal appeals court struck down the law, but an Illinois prosecutor has asked the Supreme Court — unsuccessfully — to challenge that ruling.
On Monday, the top justices in the US said that they would not hear the case and will instead rely on last year’s ruling where a federal appeals court in Chicago agreed that the eavesdropping law, as written, “likely violates” the First Amendment.
“The Illinois eavesdropping statue restricts a medium of expression commonly used for the preservation and communication of information and ideas, thus triggering First Amendment scrutiny” and that the “statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests,” the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opined previously.
Under that ruling and thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh in this week, last year’s decision to not allow the enforcement of that law will stand, essentially making it for once-and-for-all perfectly legal at the highest level to tape record cops on the job.
Harvey Grossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, says in a statement that the ACLU was “pleased that the Supreme Court has refused to take this appeal.”
(Read more)
Great ‘Fiscal Cliff’ discussion
I love Stefan Molyneux’s passion and ability to communicate.
The Size Of Nations By Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore
I’m skeptical of social “modeling” but I love their politically incorrect conclusion:
The authors of this timely and provocative book use the tools of economic analysis to examine the formation and change of political borders. They argue that while these issues have always been at the core of historical analysis, international economists have tended to regard the size of a country as “exogenous,” or no more subject to explanation than the location of a mountain range or the course of a river. Alesina and Spolaore consider a country’s borders to be subject to the same analysis as any other man-made institution. In The Size of Nations, they argue that the optimal size of a country is determined by a cost-benefit trade-off between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity. In a large country, per capita costs may be low, but the heterogeneous preferences of a large population make it hard to deliver services and formulate policy. Smaller countries may find it easier to respond to citizen preferences in a democratic way.
Alesina and Spolaore substantiate their analysis with simple analytical models that show how the patterns of globalization, international conflict, and democratization of the last two hundred years can explain patterns of state formation. Their aim is not only “normative” but also “positive” — that is, not only to compute the optimal size of a state in theory but also to explain the phenomenon of country size in reality. They argue that the complexity of real world conditions does not preclude a systematic analysis, and that such an analysis, synthesizing economics, political science, and history, can help us understand real world events. [Emphasis added]
(Side note: I’ve begun using the word “nation” to refer to a race of people, and distinguish it from “country” and certainly from “government.”)