George Will rightly gives special applause to the concurring opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Timbs decision. Here’s his conclusion:
[Justice Clarence] Thomas, who correctly regards stare decisis — the principle of deciding cases by adhering to precedents — as less than sacramental, has for many years been 20 percent of a potential court majority for resuscitating the privileges or immunities clause. With Gorsuch, who last week suggested that the privileges or immunities of U.S. citizens “include at minimum, the individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights” (emphasis added), there would be 40 percent of such a majority. America might be moving closer to a more robust role for an engaged judiciary in protecting a more spacious conception of the rights attached to national citizenship.
Kevin Williamson makes clear that to speak of health care as a right is complete nonsense.
George Leef points us to a former university president’s analysis of higher education. A slice:
Tenure is another of our academic traditions that [Daniel] Johnson sees as accomplishing little except to increase the cost of college education. He understands the reasons why tenure was adopted long ago—to protect the academic freedom of professors—but believes that it now inflicts costs far in excess of its benefits. Tenure imposes very high personnel costs on colleges (salaries and benefits that must be paid even though the individual is producing little or no value for the school) and also prevents more efficient use of scarce resources.
According to Art Carden, lobbying is akin to robbing a record store.
Here’s Nick Gillespie on the current state of CPAC.
And here’s the latest from Eric Boehm on Trump’s trade war with China.
Pierre Lemieux explains that protectionist arguments belong in the toilet.
