Daily Archives: 23 August 2012

Retirement Security—For Whom?

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The Obama Campaign now seems to be coming out in favor of the status quo regarding the financial security of our American senior citizens.  They continue to state their adamant opposition to reforming Social Security (and Medicare, which is part of the Social Security system) at all.  Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden made that refusal explicit a few days ago during a Virginia campaign stop:

I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security.  I flat guarantee you.

The opposition summarized by Biden has been so long-lasting and, of late, so shrill, that it seems the Progressives are afraid of freeing up the programs, of freeing up us American citizens to take care of ourselves away from the watchful eye and controlling hand of government.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D, FL) expresses Progressive fear this way:

The very last thing we ought to be doing is putting at risk the retirement security of millions of America’s seniors.

And yet, she chooses not to address the plain and simple fact that, with our retirement security in the hands of government, with government making funding and disbursement decisions for millions of us, we have no retirement security: Social Security will be bankrupt in just a few short years (it’s already paying out far more than it’s taking in, and the Social Security trustees say the funds will be exhausted by 2033), and Medicare is in worse shape.

Wasserman’s plaint is especially cynical in light of the fact that, for the last three-plus years, Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama—and his fellow Progressives in Congress—have chosen to offer no solution to this at all, save taking $700 billion dollars from America’s seniors’ Medicare in order to give it to his precious Obamacare, and otherwise, as Biden has assured us all, to refuse any change.

Wasserman, et al., also are objecting to a reform that would put more freedom and responsibility in the hands of us citizens: the specific proposal to which Wasserman was objecting (and which, sadly, has been absent from the last two (Republican) House-passed Federal budgets) would have allowed us to take a significant portion of our Social Security taxes and invest those funds in our own retirement accounts, managed by us without government interference.

Why are the Progressives so afraid of letting American citizens make our own choices, be responsible for our own lives?  Do they think we’re just too stupid to manage our own futures, that we’re dumber than government?  Or are they simply afraid of losing the power that comes from the dependency of others on them, and so their own retirement security?

Foreign Law in US Courts

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog recently ran a piece about the legitimacy of using of foreign law in American courts.  The piece drew heavily from an article on the Volokh Conspiracy, but I want to talk about the concept, rather than the particular case (which Eugene Volokh also used for a concept discussion).

The particular case began with a man and woman who married in Pakistan.  Later, still in Pakistan, the man divorced the woman in a religious ceremony, but neither followed through with a secular divorce.  The woman then remarried while still in Pakistan, and after that, the new couple moved to the US, where they had another marriage ceremony.  This marriage, though, also failed, and the two separated.  The woman had never told her second husband about her first marriage, but in the course of his own divorce preparation investigation, he discovered that first marriage, the religious divorce, and the lack of a secular divorce.  He filed for annulment, rather than divorce, arguing that the woman from whom he was seeking an end to marriage had committed bigamy.  The woman filed for divorce, rather than annulment, insisting that the religious divorce was sufficient to have ended that first marriage.

A trial court, after consulting Pakistani law—which controlled both the secular and the religious marriage and divorce concerning that first marriage—granted the annulment, and a state appellate court affirmed.  Volokh and the Law Blog both say that this use of foreign law in a domestic court was legitimate.  I agree for the narrow kind of case this represents.

The acts in this case, which created the status of each person on which the other relied, were wholly completed within that foreign jurisdiction.  Whether each person could rely on that status, then, needs to consider the law under which that status originated.

But this is a narrow situation.  It cannot apply, for instance, where acts are completed in the US.  This must rule out, for instance, the use of Sharia law to determine whether allegations of spousal abuse in a household in the US are accurate.  This must rule out any legitimacy of any defense of the form “That’s the way we do it in the Old Country.”  Actors in the US are not in the Old Country.

It must also rule out some areas where the actors in the US are acknowledged by all relevant parties to have broken the Old Country’s laws and then come here.  This is what political asylum is for.  A divorce vs annulment question has nothing to do with asylum.  Breaking an Old Country law in defense of the inalienable rights—and associated individual freedoms—that we acknowledge as possessed by all human beings is an area where the foreign law must be held irrelevant.