United Liberty

With the impending decision on ObamaCare, the Left is already trying to knock the Supreme Court. For example, Juan Williams, a frequent contributor on Fox News, explained yesterday in The Hill that, if they do strike down ObamaCare, the Court will be betraying the trust of voters:

Every political strategist working the fall elections sees a game changer coming by the end of the month.

That’s when the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.

The Democrats have a nuclear option in this political game if the high court throws out the healthcare law as unconstitutional.
[…]
the heart of any attack on the Supreme Court for derailing healthcare reform will come from Obama.

After oral arguments at the Supreme Court, he signaled his willingness to target the court’s conservative majority during the presidential campaign. Obama told reporters that if the court overturns “a duly constituted and passed law,” the justices will be guilty of “judicial activism.” With words that sounded like a threat he added: “I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

The hardball political fact is that attacking the court will help the president’s campaign and it will damage the court for years to come.

A CBS News/New York Times poll released last week shows most Americans already believe the ruling on healthcare reform will be based on justices’ personal and political views. According to the survey, 55 percent of Americans believe the justices’ political ties will play a role in the healthcare decision.

ABC News reported this morning that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a popular figure in the conservative movement, is not being vetted to serve as Mitt Romney’s running mate:

Even before the Republicans chose a presidential nominee it was widely assumed that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., would be at the top of anybody’s list of vice presidential candidates. The reasons are obvious: Not only is he young, charismatic and wildly popular with conservatives, but he could also help Republicans win a key state (Florida) and make inroads with Hispanics.

But knowledgeable Republican sources tell me that Rubio is not being vetted by Mitt Romney’s vice presidential search team. He has not been asked to complete any questionnaires or been asked to turn over any financial documents typically required of potential vice presidential candidates.

Although it is possible that Rubio may yet be asked to go through the vetting process, it has been nearly two months since Romney named his long-time aide Beth Myers to run his vice presidential search. The fact that Rubio has not been asked to turn over any documents by now is a strong indication that he is not on Romney’s short list of potential running mates.

This is sure to disappoint many conservatives and Tea Party-minded activists and sure to add to the skepticism of Romney, much of which is reasonable. Many feel that the former Massachusetts Governor needs to add a dynamic figure to his ticket, one that can appeal to conservatives and establishment Republicans alike. Rubio seems to fit that bill the best out of potential running mates that have been floated.

Those pushing Rubio are surprised, according to Zeke Miller:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned back in May that failing to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would, in these very tough economic times, lead to yet another recession. Higher taxes would, according to the CBO, “discourage people from working and saving, further reducing output and income.” That would seem to most like a basic understanding of economics. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama is unconcerned and is leaving no one to believe that he is willing to make a deal to keep this from happening.

But another study shows that if taxes aren’t kept at current rates, that it will slow economic growth, taking the economy down a tumultuous path:

A new study released Friday shows that letting any of the Bush-era tax cuts expire will weigh heavily on economic growth and lead to millions of job losses, likely plunging the economy back into recession.

The report by the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) 

shows that if Congress fails to take any action and to address the so-called fiscal cliff, a combination of expiring tax provisions and automatic spending cuts, the economy will lose $855 billion from gross domestic product, more than 1 million jobs next year and up to 3 million in 2014 along with an average of $1 trillion in lost consumer spending.

Economic growth would drop by 2.6, 3.3 and 0.5 percentage points from 2013 through 2015.

Though no one thought a ruling on ObamaCare would come yesterday, there was quite a turnout of reporters at the Supreme Court as decision were announced in several pending cases. We don’t yet know how the nation’s High Court will go in this specific case, but some hints may have been recently dropped by two justices, as Avik Roy explains:

On Friday, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at the annual Court review of the American Constitution Society, a group “dedicated to…countering the activist conservative legal movement.” Ginsburg said that she was quite aware of the controversy surrounding the Obamacare case. “Some have described the controversy as unprecedented and they may be right if they mean the number of press conferences, prayer circles, protests, counter protests, going on outside the court while oral argument was under way inside.”

In her ACS remarks, Ginsburg suggested that she might be on the dissenting side of the case. “I have spoken on more than one occasion about the utility of dissenting opinions, noting in particular that they can reach audiences outside the court and can propel legislative or executive change,” said Ginsburg, in the context of a 2007 pay discrimination case.

Most tellingly, she touched upon the key question that I believe the Court is still working through: what to do with the law if the individual mandate is indeed found to be unconstitutional.

For a group of people who follow the veritable patron saint of Austrian economics on Capitol Hill, the fans of Ron Paul don’t seem to understand the Austrian concept of “malinvestment” very well. Malinvestment, as described by the Mises Wiki, is:

Malinvestment is an investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the reallocation of resources to more productive uses. “Wrong” in this sense means “incorrect” or “mistaken” from the point of view of the real long-term needs and demands of the economy, if those needs and demands were expressed with the correct price signals in the free market.

Of course, the concept applies more to commercial dealings than with efforts in the political sphere, but I think it works here too, especially when you regard recent messages from the Ron Paul faithful:

Ok so the Rand endorsement let us all down a lot along with all of the discouraging emails and videos directly from the campaign. I think for the most part we are over the hump if you know what im saying.

Now think… before all of these shenanigans how much did you believe Ron Paul could win! And remember when we realized all the delegates are unbound?! That was amazing and at that point it was the cream of the crop. We were gonna win hands down, romney has no chance in hell.

You remember all those fuzzy feelings right?

Last year, many libertarians and conservatives criticized President Barack Obama for involving the United States in air campaigns in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi, the country’s dictator, without congressional approval. The Obama Administration claimed the authority to bomb Libya through an alarming interpretation of executive power that they said derived the War Powers Resolution and, thus, did not need approval from Congress. Interestingly enough, two of Obama’s top advisers warned that involving the United States in Libya would require congressional approval. Their advice was ignored.

It appears now that Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, has taken a page out of Obama’s book by claiming in an interview on Face the Nation that he could go to war with Iran, a frequent target of neo-conservatives, without congressional approval. Here is the revelant quote (emphasis mine):

On June 16, 1723, Adam Smith, whose book, The Wealth of Nations, became the foundation for capitalism, was born in Scotland. Smith’s book and philosophy brought us the basics for the free market and free trade and also laid the first moral case for these ideas.

Via a couple of videos from Learn Liberty, Prof. James Otteson briefly explains what Smith believed and how he viewed his economic theories as the best way to help lift the poor out of poverty:

And a brief explanation of the “invisible hand”: