ignores the POV of the individuals of the day, who generally do not have grand strategic plans, but are, rather, attempting to maximise short term gains.  There's an interesting school of thought that claims uber-grand strategist Metternich's scheming in Europe was the result of whom he was trying to sleep with at the time.  

a terrible precedent. To say that the court had a good day because it followed (its own) precedent is to avoid the question entirely.

The decision considers corporations "associations of individuals," when they are plainly not associations in the sense of a freely-governed society of like-minded people. Corporations are not democracies...they are not "one shareholder one vote," rather, the few individuals with the most money invested are the ones who call the shots. Thinking of corporations as associations of people is a fallacy, "utter nonsense" according to the Montana Supreme Court. I don't believe there's precedent, either: a wholesale fabrication by the "originalists" on the court.

The court also overturns Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, holding that massive spending on behalf of (but not in collusion with) an electoral candidate creates neither "corruption nor the appearance of corruption." Basically, the court refused to entertain the idea that the political process could be compromised by money, unless that money is formally transferred into the accounts or otherwise under the direct control of election committees. This is a ludicrous, fingers-in-the-ears position for the court to take.

Just ask Montana. That state's long, factual record of political corruption stemming from the "Copper Baron" days makes an absolute joke of the Court's contention that independent spending cannot be counted as corruption.

In response to the legal conflicts with Heinze, in 1903 Anaconda/Standard closed down all its industrial and mining operations (but not the many newspapers it controlled), throwing 4/5 of the labor force of Montana out of work. Toole, Montana, An Uncommon Land, 206. Its price for sending its employees back to work was that the Governor call a special session of the Legislature to enact a measure that would allow Anaconda to avoid having to litigate in front of the Butte judges. The Governor and Legislature capitulated and the statute survives.

Yes, the court was legally correct to follow precedent. But it is a terrible precedent based on reasoning that is utter nonsense.

This ban on me from buying a fleet of MC-130's and as many MOABs as I can is surely an assault on my fundamental right to bear arms.

More like punted. They want to see how that part of the law works in practice.

Should an Arizona sheriff get in the habit of using lengthy status checks as a kind of de facto detention, the majority opinion suggests the Court would likely strike it down on some other, non-supremacy grounds. 

Detaining individuals solely to verify their immigration status would raise constitutional concerns. And it would disrupt the federal framework to put state officers in the position of holding aliens in custody for possible unlawful presence without federal direction and supervision. The program put in place by Congress does not allow state or local officers to adopt this enforcement mechanism.

 

So why not decide that question, which was raised at oral argument? The court points to the enormous uncertainties in how the law might actually be applied – a law enjoined on July 28, 2010, days before it was scheduled to first take effect:

 

However the law is interpreted, if §2(B) only requires state officers to conduct a status check during the course of an authorized, lawful detention or after a detainee has been released, the provision likely would survive pre-emption—at least absent some showing that it has other consequences that are adverse to federal law and its objectives. There is no need in this case to address whether reasonable suspicion of illegal entry or another immigration crime would be a legitimate basis for prolonging a detention, or whether this too would be preempted by federal law.

 

The nature and timing of this case counsel caution in evaluating the validity of §2(B). The Federal Government has brought suit against a sovereign State to challenge the provision even before the law has gone into effect. There is a basic uncertainty about what the law means and how it will be enforced. At this stage, without the benefit of a definitive interpretation from the state courts, it would be inappropriate to assume §2(B) will be construed in a way that creates a conflict with federal law.

but said it was open to "as applied" challenges. So not a full endorsement by any means. I'm pretty sure Joe Arpaio will be back in court at some point in the near future.

I'd accept that reasoning, but not from Mr. "partying with naked twenty year olds on a rooftop pool at 2 AM". The question is why do you vote, you seem to have more than enough going on.

especially the young, have.  And then you worry about income inequalities and mandates and what not.

I can't help it if the study of philosophy has rendered you incapable of quickly explicating a simple idea.

But they're a small % of the elderly is my pt.

inflation is built on bitter experience. It destroys the social compact that makes countries successful - 1. save (ie invest) now, so that you can enjoy the  fruits of your labours at a time when you can no longer labour.  2. Moderate your wage demands to your productivity increases, not your cost of living increases as the latter are insignificant. 

Sadly, loose credit (a form of stimulous) has meant we face the hard choice of either inflating or defaulting unpayable debts away. Default is a theft from the lenders. Many of them should have known better. Inflation, along with its other attendant corrupting influences, is a theft from lenders and from the savers and those on fixed incomes. For the poor in those circumstances it will be a disaster. People in eastern europe and Russia well remember.

History doesn't bode well for future of the Eurozone

Maintaining monetary union without real fiscal or political union eventually imposes unsustainable costs on someone.

Michael Hiltzik

Dear Catchy, I'd like to argue old people and inflation with you...but you've been positive on the Euro...what do you think of this analysis that has a certain resonance in me.

June 27, 2012

Any traveler among the former French colonies of West Africa in the early 1990s could have foretold the future of the euro. The prospects weren't pretty.

Most countries of Francophone West Africa were then, as they are still, members of a single currency zone very much like the Eurozone. Legal tender for the 13 countries was a pair of essentially identical currencies known collectively as the CFA franc — named from the French acronym for "African Financial Community."

France, which kept the CFA fixed at an exchange rate of 50 CFA to one French franc, had created the zone partially to maintain political ties for its former colonies, but mostly to maintain its mercantile dominance. The CFA kept Francophone Africa economically dependent on France and gave the mother country a convenient market for its products and a source of cheap raw materials. A mandate that CFA countries keep large financial reserves in France fattened its treasury.

By 1990, however, the relationship turned into a subsidy from France to its faltering former colonies of as much $3 billion a year. As the individual African economies diverged, the CFA benefited rich countries, such as cocoa-producing Ivory Coast, and helped impoverish others, such as Senegal, whose major exports included peanuts.

Two schools of thought developed regarding the future of the CFA. One was that devaluation was inevitable. The other was that it was impossible — partially because of the difficulty of keeping the momentous change secret so insiders, including government leaders, couldn't profit from advance knowledge, and partially because the resulting fall in working-class living standards would foster unrest across the zone.

Inevitability finally prevailed. France instituted a devaluation in 1994, cutting the exchange rate of the CFA versus the franc to 100 to 1, with predictable consequences: Workers whose real income had been cut in half went on strike to double their wages. Inflation soared and unemployment spread throughout the zone. Governments tottered. And Africa's overall economic prospects barely budged.

Sound familiar?

The lesson of the CFA for the Eurozone is that maintaining monetary union without real fiscal or political union eventually imposes unsustainable costs on someone — in the CFA case it was France, in the Eurozone it's Germany. The bill payer eventually insists on changes to lower the bill, and those changes typically fall hardest on the workers stuck at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Bondholders and other investors who reaped profits in the good years will generally manage to protect their investments when things turn down, often by liquidating labor costs through the imposition of wage freezes and layoffs. You can think of Greece as the Senegal of the euro.

None of this really comes as a shock to professionals in international finance. Indeed, you could fill Dodger Stadium — or more appropriately, Paris' soccer venue, the 81,000-seat Stade de France — with the experts who claim today to have foreseen the flaws in the euro at the time of its launch in 1999. But these were papered over for more than a decade, or until the flaws turned into cracks and, ultimately, crevices.

The fundamental flaw is that the countries of the Eurozone, which comprises 17 members of the European Union and a handful of non-EU states, are simply too diverse, economically and politically. As David O. Beim, an expert in international finance at Columbia University, put it last October, "Germany and Greece should not share the same currency." The former is a highly efficient, low-inflation, export-oriented economy, the latter an inefficient, inflation-beset importer of goods.

Beim notes that in the 15 years before these two countries were yoked together in a single currency, the Greek drachma depreciated 82% against the German mark. What made the euro's architects think that this powerful trend would evaporate with the creation of the Eurozone? Wishful thinking, perhaps, but this is one way in which the euro appears to represent the triumph of hope over experience.

Economic diversity isn't in itself a recipe for currency failure. Some regions of the U.S. bear the same resemblance to one another as Greece and Germany. (Think of the Rust Belt versus Silicon Valley.) But they're united by a nationwide fiscal policy and a single monetary authority (the Federal Reserve). Not so the Eurozone, where unified policy decisions must yield to the sovereignty of its individual members and where, contrary to the hopes and wishes of the euro's creators, nationalism has been rising, not waning.

The traditional way to resolve imbalances in economic outcomes among countries has been changes in exchange rates. Greece's currency should be worth a lot less than Germany's. If it had continued to fall relative to Germany and other exporters, as it had before 1999, then Greek goods would be cheaper for German consumers to buy, and Greek consumers and industries might wean themselves off ever more expensive foreign imports. The law of supply and demand would be in full force.

But the Greek and German currencies are worth exactly the same. Without recourse to devaluation and revaluation as economic tools, the only way to establish economic equilibrium for Greece and other importing countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal is by pushing down wages and slashing their workforces: This is done through the "austerity" regimes causing widespread popular unrest in those countries.

Displaced Greek laborers are free to seek work in richer countries across the border, but the lifestyle of guest workers in strange lands doesn't have to be spelled out for them, and the prospects for growth at home recede even more.

The lesson of the Eurozone crisis is that when a mistaken policy goes bad, an increasingly narrow class calls the shots, spreading misfortune far and wide. Just as the future of the Eurozone could be read in the history of the CFA zone, the future of both could be read in an earlier attempt to yoke disparate economies together in a rigid arrangement. That was the gold standard era that led to, and ended with, the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover memorably recalled the anti-recessionary policies of his plutocratic Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, as "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate.... High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life." (There's some doubt that Mellon uttered those exact words, but they surely described his thinking.) An understandable reaction, among people who can witness the consequences at a safe and secure remove.

Recovery from the Depression began only when every country freed itself to make its own monetary and fiscal choices by shedding the gold standard. This was understood by both Franklin D. Roosevelt, who started the process, and Richard Nixon, who finished the job.

The record suggests that the fundamental question for Europe is not "Can the euro be saved?" but "Should it be saved?" Its purported virtues, such as the elimination of currency transaction costs among the member nations, have been far outweighed by the costs it imposes. It is also plain that half-measures to save the euro won't work — the wholesale devaluation of the CFA franc reduced its burden on the French government, but preserved economic imbalances among CFA countries and has done almost nothing to improve the West African economy overall.

Bankers and bondholders in Europe and the U.S. are fixated today on the financial ripples that might be created in international markets by the exit from the Eurozone of Greece, followed perhaps by Spain, Portugal and Italy. But no one has yet outlined how a currency that manacles together so many mismatched economics reaches a stable future, save through an endless sequence of bailouts. Sooner or later, the impossible will give way to the inevitable, and those countries will be left again to make their own way in the world rather than having their path dictated from afar.