Loss of Freedom Archives - Page 11 of 33

Regulating Eating?

National Review Online: With passive smoking on the run, a new menace comes waddling into view (the Guardian reports — my emphasis added):

Governments around the world need to make immediate and dramatic policy changes to reverse a pandemic of obesity which could affect an extra 11 million people in the UK over the next 20 years, public health scientists have warned.The call to act…comes in a series of papers published on Friday in the Lancet medical journal. The journal begins with a strongly-worded editorial arguing that voluntary food industry codes are ineffective and ministers must intervene more directly…There was a particular need for leadership ahead of a UN summit in New York next month on preventing non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and cancer, said one of the authors, Boyd Swinburn, from the centre for obesity prevention at Melbourne’s Deakin University..Swinburn’s paper comes up with a clear primary culprit: a powerful global food industry “which is producing more processed, affordable, and effectively-marketed food than ever before”. He said an “increased supply of cheap, palatable, energy-dense foods”, coupled with better distribution and marketing, had led to “passive overconsumption”.

Legal Protection For Unattractive People?

ABA Journal: An economics professor is making the case for legal protections against looks-challenged people.

Writing an op-ed for the New York Times, University of Texas professor Daniel Hamermesh cites findings that good-looking people make more money, find higher-earning spouses, and get better mortgage deals. One study shows American workers assessed as being in the bottom seventh in terms of looks earn about $230,000 less in a lifetime than similar workers in the top third of looks.

Hamermesh offers a solution: Protect ugliness with small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could get help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly,” he suggests.

Federal Asset Seizures On The Rise

Estate of Denial:New York businessman James Lieto was an innocent bystander in a fraud investigation last year. Federal agents seized $392,000 of his cash anyway.

An armored-car firm hired by Mr. Lieto to carry money for his check-cashing company got ensnared in the FBI probe. Agents seized about $19 million—including Mr. Lieto’s money—from vaults belonging to the armored-car firm’s parent company.

He is one among thousands of Americans in recent decades who have had a jarring introduction to the federal system of asset seizure. Some 400 federal statutes—a near-doubling, by one count, since the 1990s—empower the government to take assets from convicted criminals as well as people never charged with a crime.

Last year, forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats and cash in more than 15,000 cases. The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than doubling in five years, Justice Department statistics show.

The expansion of forfeiture powers is part of a broader growth in recent decades of the federal justice system that has seen hundreds of new criminal laws passed. Some critics have dubbed the pattern as the overcriminalization of American life. The forfeiture system has opponents across the political
spectrum, including representatives of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union on the left and the Heritage Foundation on the right. They argue it represents a widening threat to innocent people.

Does the GOP Really Love The 10th Amendment?

Reason.com: The 10th Amendment to the Constitution is like the skinny teenage girl who blossoms over the summer and suddenly finds herself besieged by suitors. Once ignored, it has found a host of champions among Republican presidential candidates who are competing to show their devotion.

The amendment contains just one sentence: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

It is a bulwark of federalism, which allows states the freedom to adopt different policies reflecting their peculiar circumstances. It was meant as a check on those who would demand uniform practices from one end of America to the other.

“Facebook Law” Bans Student-Teacher Social Media Interaction

ABA Journal: A new Missouri law set to take effect later this month is aimed at more clearly defining teacher-student boundaries.

But critics say portions of Senate Bill 54, also known as the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, go too far in limiting social media contact between teachers and their students.

Even though it’s being referred to as the “Facebook law,” the law’s scope goes well beyond a single popular social network and instead covers any contact teachers would have with students via social media, according to reports in MSNBC’s Digital Life and KSPR ABC Channel 33.

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