Welfare and the ConstitutionPrinceton University Press, 2009 M01 10 - 192 páginas Welfare and the Constitution defends a largely forgotten understanding of the U.S. Constitution: the positive or "welfarist" view of Abraham Lincoln and the Federalist Papers. Sotirios Barber challenges conventional scholarship by arguing that the government has a constitutional duty to pursue the well-being of all the people. He shows that James Madison was right in saying that the "real welfare" of the people must be the "supreme object" of constitutional government. With conceptual rigor set in fluid prose, Barber opposes the shared view of America's Right and Left: that the federal constitutional duties of public officials are limited to respecting negative liberties and maintaining processes of democratic choice. |
Dentro del libro
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... people have at least a moral obligation to try to keep the promises they make to the electorate, and people typically vote and pay taxes voluntarily only for benefits promised or received. Informed readers will connect this moral ...
... people in any way, though alarming and false, is not beneath the effort to refute. The doctrine can be explained not as chilling indifference to the people's welfare but as thoughtful opposition to the so-called welfare state. The ...
... people into conforming to, or paying for, arbitrary conceptions of the good life; and arguments that the “general welfare” is nothing more than an aggregate of the subjective preferences of individuals and thus whatever allocation of ...
... people. • False assumptions about the nature of governmental action: that there are relevant distinctions between state action and inaction (widely held in the polity despite wide rejection in the academy) and especially between ...
... people. I can say whether the Constitution is adequate to the people's welfare—but only as a formal matter of legal competence or power, not as a matter of empirical constitutional culture, though I do offer an opinion about the latter ...
Contenido
1 | |
Charter of Negative Liberties Arguments from Text and History | 23 |
Negative Constitutionalism and Unwanted Consequences | 42 |
Moral Philosophy and the NegativeLiberties Model | 65 |
The Instrumental Constitution | 92 |
Is the Constitution Adequate to Its Ends? | 118 |
Index | 157 |