Chris Navin

Richard Epstein at The Hoover Institution on the Browning Ferris NLRB issue:

‘On that question, the new joint employer rules will likely batter today’s already grim labor market, as they will not only disrupt the traditional workplace but will completely wreck the well established franchise model for restaurants and hotels. As the majority conceded, the so-called joint employer does not even know so much as the social security number of its ostensible employees. It has no direct control over the way in which the current employer treats its workers, and yet could be hauled into court for its alleged unfair labor practices.’

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As previously posted:

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As I’m neither a lawyer nor an economist, feel free to chime in. Epstein is intense.

Once you convince yourself that the business of government is to ‘worry about the elimination of wealth differentials,” as he states, then you will almost always end up shrinking the pie. Epstein advocates keeping the pie growing, and removing barriers for people to enter into voluntary exchanges where both parties can benefit.

The income inequality folks often end up making more inequality through good intentions, cinching off the economy at its top through crony capitalism (favoring a few business winners and creating barriers to market entry along with enormous, inefficient bureaucracies). They can also increase the politicians’ control over the money supply, eroding capital and tying outcomes to short-term political cycles. Aiming for more equality often leads to less equality, much as the equality of outcome folks want more one-man, one-vote democracy, which is pretty much impossible in practice.

The whole thing stalls and people fight more over less.

***Say you’re more conservative, or religious, a Burkean, a la Kirk, or very interested in what keeps families together and the restraints necessary upon individuals and their own passions, helping to pursue life, liberty and some happiness. As a libertarian law/economics thinker, Epstein makes the case that conservatism is great for genetic relations and family units, but not always scalable beyond these smaller circles necessary to maintain greater freedoms in civil society: Our families, churches and civic organizations. He advocates a broader system of voluntarily entered into agreements and contracts, through Chicago School economic theory, which keeps the pie growing below in a large republic like ours.

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******One concern from the conservative perspective is that libertarian theory can introduce an individualism into people’s lives that is destructive as much as constructive, one that encourages anarchic, anti-traditional, anti-authority impulses. Maybe that individualism is already here, as a friend points out, and there is both a classically liberal and a deeply anarchic libertarianism, and Epstein usually identifies as classically liberal.

Originalism vs. The living constitution: George Will Via The Jewish World Review: ‘True Self-Government’.

Repost-Eugene Volokh At The National Review: ‘Multiculturalism: For or Against?’…Repost-’Kenneth Anderson At Volokh: ‘The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, Or, Downward Mobility’

Charles Fried and Randy Barnett among others, testified as to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Nearly 3 hrs, but likely worth your time. The New Deal is part of the problem: You can skip to the parts you’d like)……Randy Barnett At Volokh: ‘My Answers to Questions Posed by Senators Durbin and Sessions’…