Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, July 29, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant It is often said in philosophy-of-science discussions that “if it explains everything, it explains nothing.” This reminds us of the most-used word to explain everything economic: “greed.” As British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne described allegations of interest-rate index manipulation, “Through 2005, 2006 and early 2007 we see evidence of systematic greed at the expense of financial integrity and stability.” We note in passing that the dates mentioned are conveniently before the current chancellor assumed office in 2010, but we are still waiting for any solid evidence that whatever actions the bankers took to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) had more than a microscopic effect on the markets. This is not to say that LIBOR could not be manipulated: if anything, we should be amazed that  ... keep reading Richard J. Grant is a Professo...

Published in   The Tennessean , Sunday, July 22, 2012   and   Forbes   with   archives .    by Richard J. Grant Just as one drop of blood (real or imagined) made Elizabeth Warren a Cherokee for a while, she also believes that receiving $1 of benefit from government spending makes each of us a child of government forever. Last fall, at the beginning of her senatorial campaign (challenging Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts), she pooh-poohed charges of “class warfare” by assuring a group of supporters: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.” Sound familiar? President Barack Obama seemed at the time to be sharing the same scriptwriter and, in case we forgot, last weekend he reminded us: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” An unduly charitable interpretation of these words would take it that the president and Ms. Warren have noticed that most of life, including commerce, c...

Published in   The Tennessean , Sunday, July 15, 2012   and   Forbes   with   archives . by Richard J. Grant     The key to understanding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is not whether the provision formerly known as the “individual mandate” is now a penalty or a tax but what burden it imposes. The act’s remaining political support depends on a failure to recognize the incidence and magnitude of the total burden imposed on people by the whole act. From the beginning, support for federal government intrusion into medical care depended on the belief that we could get something for nothing. The reigning mythology is that “health care is different” and that a government bureaucracy can and must protect us from that multitude of professionals and “evil corporations” that offer medical-related products and services. Not understood is that the same freedom to trade and enter into contracts that has yielded fine service and rap...

Published in The Tennessean, Sunday, July 8, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant Although the Affordable Care Act contains many new taxes that will soon come into effect, most recent attention has been focused on whether or not the individual mandate provision within the act constitutes a tax. The Supreme Court has recently ruled, in NFIB v. Sebelius, that what the legislation calls a “penalty” can be construed for constitutional purposes to be a tax. This leaves open the question of what kind of tax it is. The closest that the court came to a clear statement was that it was a tax on “not obtaining health insurance.” But this appears to tax inactivity, which suggests that it contains the same defect as the use of Commerce Clause powers to regulate inactivity. To overcome this objection, the court insists that “the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity.” But the first and only example it gives is that o...

Published in   The Tennessean , Sunday, July 1, 2012   and   Forbes   with   archives . by Richard J. Grant The good thing about reading bad judicial decisions is that they get better toward the end. The bad thing is that the ending, the dissent, doesn’t count — though it might be used by future judges to help them think more clearly about how the law really should be understood. Such describes last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which served to uphold the 2010 health-care reform with the Orwellian name, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. On the eve of the decision, most observers thought it obvious that part or the entirety of the act would be found incompatible with the Constitution. As it turned out, four of the justices concluded that the act “exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying nonconsenting States a...