Suchergebnisse

Abstract. The United States Constitution is still shrouded in myths, clothed in broad terms and garbed with ambiguities. These require constant reinterpretation. If a continuing constitutional convention is thus endemic to the American political system, then is it, as Jefferson said, "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary"? Justice Jackson wrote that "we are infallible only because we are final," but it is a maxim of American politics that the Court follows the election returns. In the last analysis, there is a higher court in a republican democracy, the Court of Public Opinion (of which scholars and publicists are the officers) which achieves revision by periodic reinterpretation and re‐examination.

Abstract. The geostationary arc is an orbit in space in which a satellite, 22,300 miles up, moving at the speed at which the earth revolves, can continue to hover over a continent on earth, monitoring weather and military activities, rebroadcasting entertainment and information programs, newspaper and magazine printing plates and particularly communications. In the latter use it replaces surface microwave relay transmitters every 30 miles (which replaced the much more expensive long landlines), at an estimated savings of more than half a billion dollars annually for this use alone. Because the orbit cannot accommodate all the applicants for slots within it, the Federal Government should grant, for an adequate fee, three year licenses, raising the fee on renewal to absorb the annual economic rent.

Abstract. The attack upon the judicial rule that evidence seized in contravention of a person's constitutional rights shall be excluded from his trial, regardless how damaging to the prosecution's case—an attack advocated by Chief Justice Burger and President Reagan—rests upon a misunderstanding. This rule, the exclusionary rule, has not resulted in acquittals that would not otherwise have occurred. And it does, and has, protected the innocent as well as the guilty. The rule was fashioned by the Supreme Court of the United States to safeguard constitutional rights. These rights cannot be abridged constitutionally by the executive or the legislature; they can, but should not, be modified by their creators, the Justices, for they exist to check unconstitutional and illegal acts by agents of the State.

Abstract. Henry George intended that his last work. The Science of Political Economy, (which his untimely death left unfinished), should recast economics in a new mold. He argued that if economics is the science of the nature of wealth and the laws of its production and distribution and if in present society there is some deep and widespread wrong in its distribution, if not in its producton, it is the office of an honest science to disclose that. He therefore sought a philosophical basis for an investigation into the nature of wealth which led him into an investigation of the idea of value. These investigations were preceded by an attempt to set out a philosophy of science with respect to one of the sciences, economics.

Abstract. Henry George derived his economic theory from his personal experience. He had the good fortune to be living in California during his formative years; there the economic events which transpired during the settlement of the North American continent—the passing of the frontier and its consequences—occurred within a time span of a few years and the telescoping of history gave him the framework for an original economic system, as well as a utopian vision of a free society. Much attention has properly been paid to George's economic ideas but he was also a moralist, one accepted by some philosophers as among the greatest. This aspect of his work, and particularly his value theory, have been neglected.