11 Comments

Frankly, Mark, I think a lot of us would be more interested in your take on why Noem hasn't managed to replace you yet. Also, I would love to get hear about your history with Corey Lewandowski and your impressions of why he was so quickly let back into the fold after Vegas. Finally, you might have some insight into when, how and why Noem changed course on Trump being endorsable. After all, you were around when she told the NYTimes last November he was not the best option. I would love to read another guest piece from you on any/all of these issues.

Expand full comment

But what if my 'property rights' infringe on the health, safety, and well-being of my neighbor? What if they cause improper drainage or major odor issues or flooding or damage to the ecosystem or damage to the environment or cause health issues or deplete my water supply or the aquifer?

Expand full comment

While some professional licenses are completely useless (hair-braiding for example), other licenses (medicine, lawyer, engineer) are not useless. If we allow "the market" to weed out the bad "brain surgeons", we will have other problems.

Expand full comment

I disagree with the facile notion that property rights and personal rights are the same thing. Property rights might be incorporated as a subset of personal rights, but they are far from coextensive.

Expand full comment

It was a quote of Coolidge. Take it up with him?

Expand full comment

You wrote: "First, the former president respected property rights and understood that, as he put it, 'property rights and personal rights are the same thing.'" You were clearly offering this as a concept in which you believed. So I took it up with you.

Expand full comment

Ok well if you put it that way... The Founding Fathers saw it the way Coolidge did. I don't see it as a facile notion at all; to the contrary just about nothing Coolidge believed was facile. He got some things wrong, to be sure. But as for his take on personal rights and property rights, here's James Madison saying the same thing:

It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. *These rights cannot well be separated.* The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.

Expand full comment

I do not consider personal rights to be limited to the acquisition of property or the protection of property. Many important personal rights have nothing whatsoever to do with property. So, yes, Mark, it is a facile notion. And in this case, facile is a euphemism for dumb.

Expand full comment

How much of this Extreme Right Wing Drivel do we have to have? This is PR Red State Fascism.

Expand full comment

Archie and Edith sang about Herbert Hoover, not Calvin Coolidge.

Expand full comment

Yes, good catch! That was an intentional revision. Notice I said "to improve a line" from the theme song.

Expand full comment