Help me with industry sign banking florida permission slip
my name is Justin Pearson and I have one of the greatest jobs in the world I wake up every day and I goes through the government it is awesome it's a lot of fun I highly recommend it I work for a group called in super justice and we are the nation's largest libertarian public interest law firm and what that means is we don't sue anyone for money and we don't sue people other than the government what we do is we provide free legal service to people whose rights have been violated and we help them to sue the government to get judges to throw out unconstitutional laws the Institute for justice is a national organization we have seven offices our headquarters is up in the DC area in Arlington Virginia we also have the IJ entrepreneurship clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and we have five state chapters as the Florida chapter where I'm the executive director and then we have chapters in Washington State Arizona Texas in Minnesota and I J has had quite a bit of success over the years if you include times when the government has changed the law legislatively after you filed a lawsuit we've won about 70% of our cases we've also been lead counsel in five US Supreme Court cases and we want more of those in fact even the one that we lost the infamous I'm a domain case keel over in London created such a backlash that I J was able to go around to 46 states and change those laws including right here in Florida so what happened is that kilo little pink house would not be able to happen here and one of the reasons why I J has been so successful over the years is because we focus on four key areas and we've really become experts in those areas and those areas are property rights economic Liberty school choice and free speech and of course I'm here today to talk to you about economic Liberty and specifically I'm here to talk about occupational licensing if there's one thing that would really like you all to understand when you leave here today is that our facial licensing laws usually have nothing to do with health and safety and I know that's counterintuitive I know a lot of times people are resistant to the idea of getting rid of occupational licensing because they think it'll make things more dangerous or they think these laws are there to serve some sort of public good and to create a safer environment and unfortunately in the vast majority of cases nothing could further from the truth what we have found is what normally happens is that large entrenched businesses have realized that the costs imposed by occupational licensing laws are something that they can bear rather easily but will keep new businesses from entering the market these are called barriers to competition and basically they will crush small businesses before they have a chance to grow and become competitive with the large entrenched businesses and because these occupational licenses have nothing to do with health and safety you lead to at least all sorts of ridiculous results like for example here in Florida it is much more difficult to become an interior designer than it is to become an emergency medical technician it's not even close it's so far apart and it's not that EMTs aren't receiving enough training they are they do a great job it's that the interior design lobby is ridiculously powerful and so they created this enormous barrier to competition Florida is one of only three states in the country that has an interior design line and those other 47 states there is not some outbreak of interior design catastrophes where someone trips over a misplaced pillow it doesn't happen but here in Florida not only is there a license but it is one of the most difficult licenses to get in the entire state and it's because of this perverse unholy alliance between big business and big government and unfortunately it's the little guy it's the entrepreneur it's a small business owner that's caught in middle and one of the great things about working for a large organization like IJ's it has a fantastic media team and so I'm going to show a few short videos today and one of my favorite videos is a video that I J put together kind of talking about these ridiculous laws that come about because they have no relationship to health and si and so I'm going to go ahead and play that right now just bail everyone knows that government at every level is requiring more and more Americans to get a government-issued license before they can earn an honest living in the 1950s we're only about one in 20 Americans needed the government's blessing to do their job today that number is more than one in three and government puts all kinds of requirements on would-be entrepreneurs making it harder for these entrepreneurs to start and grow small businesses are trip renews like Chuck here this is Chuck poor Chuck hates his job but Chuck has an idea I'm going to fix computers in my garage and sell them for low prices sure my business will create new jobs for my community Chuck oh boy and give more young people access to computers and then once my business really gets going I can expand into a commercial space and you live in Milwaukee so actually in Milwaukee starting a business in your home means you can't work in your garage can't have any employees can't have any signs and can't take deliveries what unless you come up with the money for a commercial lease right away you won't be starting your business at all well if Milwaukee won't have me I'm going to start my business somewhere else that's the spirit what Los Angeles needs is a good used bookstore actually believe it or not Los Angeles treats used book shops like they were strip clubs or gun shops you'll need a permit from the police to operate you'll have to be fingerprinted anyone who sells you books may need to be fingerprinted too for every book you buy you'll have to stamp it with an individualized number that corresponds to a bill of sale that identifies the book and who it came from police get to inspect those bills of sale and hold on you'll also have to hold books for at least 30 days before you sell them just in case the police have any questions but the First Amendment to the Constitution protects my the First Amendment well how quaint and hey you're not planning on selling that copy of the Constitution to anyone are you sure it's sake balloon advertising well that's an idea that's on the rise maybe you're onto something here Chuck but remember Chuck entrepreneurs aren't the only ones who have ideas bureaucrats have them too here in Houston you're only allowed to use balloons to sell cars or if you have a message that doesn't sell anything at all that's ridiculous hmm you're right all balloons now banned in Houston maybe Houston just ain't your kind of place Chuck how about DC Oh wanna be an interior designer huh not too bad not too bad at all but in Washington DC you'll need a license before you can tell people where to put those paintings pillars and planters but that doesn't make any sense actually that makes a ton of sense and dollars too you see existing interior designers lobbied the city to make all new interior designers but none of the current ones take a test and pay a bunch of money to go into the interior design business it's a win-win for the industry and the government interior designers get to keep out the competition and government gets to make money no go ruining a good thing by trying to lower prices for consumers now now you're talking Chuck Miami nice and sunny down there Valencia oranges and lots of tourists too you want to be a street vendor huh well you just need to get a little old permission slip from the city government ready Chuck let's go here's all you'll need an occupational license from the city of Miami an occupational license from miami-dade County a license from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation if you want to sell prepared food or if you want to sell prepackaged food a license from the Florida Department of Agriculture or if you want to sell gum another license from the city of Miami the city of Miami tax certificate the state of Florida tax certificate the certification from the Florida Department of Revenue that all your taxes have been paid a copy of the current Florida Department of Motor Vehicles registration for your cart a license plate for your cart a cart certification form signed by three different Eurocrats from three different departments and $500,000 in insurance coverage for any bodily injury or property damage caused by your vanity got all your paperwork together Chuck yes great now you're entitled to enter the street vendor lottery if you're lucky enough to win you'll be allowed to start your business and the winner is oh not you tough luck Chuck this is still Chuck he still hates his job any ideas left guy oh I'm just going to sell the leftover stuff from my computer business and go back to my old job actually what if you want to close a business in Milwaukee you'll need a government-issued license for that too and you'll have to give the government an itemized inventory every day of everything you're selling sorry guy that's just the cost of doing business or of going out of business oh I just give up X Lindt now if you'll excuse me I've got to go fix this unemployment problem wanna help people like Chuck visit w-w-w dot J to learn more and support AJ's work protecting economic liberty the last thing that should happen is to have the government get involved and keep small business owners from growing their businesses or starting their business to begin with and it hurts everyone at all different stages it hurts the customers who have to pay more and who also have less choices less variety when they go to buy something it hurts everyone who wants to go get a job because there are less jobs being created it hurts the small business owners who simply want to work for themselves and lose that option and all because politicians and certain entrenched interests have gotten together and created these barriers to competition and unfortunately I've seen them firsthand I love small business owners my parents are small business owners successful they've overcome the burdens but they've built a successful small business I went to law school to represent small business owners and I started my own business a law firm in order to do that it was because of what I saw representing small business owners with my own law firm over the course of seven years that I finally got so fed up that I did something really crazy I started working for free I started doing pro bono work on behalf of small business owners because a lot of my clients couldn't afford to pay me to file some big constitutional challenge all they could afford is for me to kind of help them deal with the problem as best they could so they could move on with their lives and so I started doing activism a lot of it with food truck owners and other small business owners and that's really what what caused me to cross paths with IJ which eventually led them to offer me the position to run their Florida office and frankly it was just too good of an opportunity to turn up I now get to file the types of cases that I always wanted to file on behalf of these small business owners and you know the things we see are really ridiculous I mean those are just a few examples but it's actually scary when you think about I mean at its essence government is force I know George Washington had the famous quote you know government is not a reason it is not eloquent it is force and those words are just as true now as they were when he spoke them it was only about by the way has anyone here from the Orlando area just yeah yeah so you guys may not know this but you may about three years ago in Orlando SWAT teams full SWAT teams raided barber shops based on the suspicion of unlicensed barbering that that's what it's come down to and that wasn't an isolated incident we have a client right now in Texas you know just a hard-working person all she wants to do is earn an honest living she doesn't want to hand up it's the last thing she wants just wants to work for herself and she is engaged in in a big craft a trade called African hair braiding and this is a tradition that goes back centuries it's perfectly safe kids are allowed to do it it's not regulated adults are allowed to do it for free and that's not regulated but if you want to take your skills over a lifetime and do this all natural process of braiding someone's hair all of a sudden now it's regulated and she was arrested she was arrested for the crime of braiding hair and then she fought the law her name is Isis Brantley she fought the law and basically got the law change so that you could now become an African hair braider in Texas and she built her her her expertise to look to a level where she wanted to teach hair braiding now she's in trouble again because in Texas if you actually want to teach hair braiding you have to go and do it under the supervision of a licensed cosmetologist now cosmetology school doesn't teach hair braiding and she doesn't teach cosmetology but the cosmetology board in Texas is extremely powerful and so they've passed a rule that said if you want to teach hair braiding you have to work for one of their members and so let me show you a quick video on Isis and her story because I think it's very powerful seven cops came into my salon and they said I was under arrest and they took me to jail for braiding hair Isis Brantley is a professional African hair braider with decades of experience she opened the Institute of ancestral braiding in Dallas and works with everyone from Grammy award-winning artist Erykah Badu to the homeless a lot of these young ladies are found were homeless and jobless I took them in I trained them gave them skills and now they have become entrepreneurs in 1997 Isis was arrested because braiding was a crime in Texas unless you had a special license requiring years of schooling that had nothing to do with braiding Isis fought the licensing law for years and though she won the right to braid Texas didn't back down completely instead of passing braiding laws that make sense it simply wedged a 35-hour license for braiding into the existing barber statute now Isis is fighting for the right to teach the next generation of graders I've been teaching people to braid hair since 1984 and I want to be able to teach the course at the Institute of ancestral braiding but Isis can only teach the 35-hour braiding course at an existing barber school otherwise she has to build her own barber school and take expensive and pointless barber classes the bottom line is that Texas has no problem with Isis teaching it just has a problem with her working for herself to teach braiding for a living in her own school the government says Isis must turn it into a 2,000 square foot barber college and she has to install things that have nothing to do with braiding like adding ten barber chairs and five wash stations she'll never use Isis also needs useless things like short haired mannequins and barbering textbooks plus she has to go back to school for 750 hours of barber classes Raiders aren't barbers and braiding instructors should be forced to build barber schools or take classes from barbers that's why Isis is fighting for her rights once again she's teaming up with the Institute for justice to file a federal lawsuit against Texas this lawsuit means for me economic Liberty for my community and it's important that we change the laws so that everybody else can be treated fairly a victory for Isis will help braiders and entrepreneurs across Texas and Beyond economic Liberty is especially important for black women this is our new civil rights in the so you know it's messed up and so you see these stories over and over again if people oftentimes unfortunately though everyone's rights are important it's just it I'm always struck by how often these these victims are small just small businesses or low-income workers moderate income workers you know it's the middle class and the small business owners that the politicians are always talking about those are the ones getting harmed by these rules and unfortunately not too many people are sticking up for them and it's enough to sometimes make you wonder
if there even is a right to economic Liberty in this country but there is at least there was supposed to be you know when the Constitution was written it was written by people who believed in natural rights in fact if you read the Declaration of Independence it basically sounds like John Locke wrote it he was a famous natural rights philosopher and so whereas the Declaration of Independence laid out the philosophy for our new country it was a constitution that tried to implement that philosophy and they the people who wrote the Constitution weren't perfect and the Constitution will never be a perfect document but what they tried to do was they tried to create government to the extent that they thought it was necessary to protect the rights that already exist they believe that you have natural rights that exist regardless of the government and the government is inherently evil but is it but it is a necessary evil that should just exist on some small level in order to protect the natural rights you already have and so they created a government that was only supposed to be one of limited and enumerated powers that wouldn't have the ability to interfere with your natural rights and then on top of that you know when it came time for the Constitution be ratified many of the people who wanted to vote for it require that they add a bill of rights and that was pretty confusing to some of the founders because they said wait a second we created this this constitution for this government of limited and enumerated powers you don't need a redundant Bill of Rights you know the government we're setting up is just it's just something that's gonna consist of small islands of regulation in a sea of Liberty you cannot list all the rights it's impossible you have infinite rights but in order to get the constitution around they had to agree to come up with a bill of rights and at no point did it even cross their mind that this constitution would create a government that could interfere with economic livery I mean during the debates over the Constitution you'd hear people or you can read even in the transcript people say things like well should we list a right to put on a hat how about you know waking up when we want are going to bed when you want because you have these infinite rights and so the way they fix that problem was the ninth amendment which says listen we're gonna lift some of these rights but don't let that mean that we don't have other rights you know you have rights even if they weren't listed here and then of course you can't talk about economic Liberty without perhaps my favorite Amendment which is the Fourteenth Amendment because that one really directly arose out of economically be concerns as hopefully many of you know the 13th amendment abolished slavery but in the aftermath of the 13th amendment people started to realize that just abolishing slavery wasn't enough that you don't have freedom unless you have the freedom to control your own destiny and just removing the label of slave isn't enough and so you you would see all these issues in the south and the former confederate states where former slaves were basically forced to go back and work for their former slave owners because they did not have economic Liberty because the entrenched interests had created different laws and different occupational licenses that were directly and intentionally designed to keep the former slaves from being able to earn earn an honest living for themselves and so what the 14th amendment did is hopefully you know some of you know has it applied the rights in the Constitution to the states said it wouldn't just apply to the federal government and it made clear that those rights included economic Liberty and for many years the United States Supreme Court really did a good job of protecting economic Liberty but obviously they don't anymore and so it makes you wonder well what happened and I think it goes back to a discussion that the founders had early on you know early on a Thomas Jefferson warned us that it was the nature of government to expand it was the nature of things for liberty to give away and so the the framers had to think well wait we need some some type of government that helps us protect our natural rights but we need to keep it constrained we need to keep it as small as possible and I think James Madison said it best when he when he explained how to do that and of course you've all heard of the checks and balances but what James Madison really thought would stop the government from growing would be the judicial branch and James Madison said that federal courts would be and I love this quote an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive and so you had this government on one hand that was supposed to be small but just inherently wants to always grow now on the other hand you had these federal courts that were supposed to use the Constitution to keep the government from growing because the framers understood that the purpose of this new republic that they were creating was not democracy democracy is great but it has flaws the end result was supposed to be individual liberty and the framers recognized that when when your rights are being violated the fact that the majority of people may have voted for that does not make it any better in fact it makes it worse which is why federal courts and federal judges aren't elected it's because we need them to stand up for those people's rights are being violated even when it's unpopular to do so in fact that's the most important time to do so but unfortunately judges are not impenetrable works they're people they make mistakes you know sometimes the government slips one by the goalie and government grows and other times they just don't do their job intentionally and that's really what happened during the New Deal I don't know I'm just curious for my own education how many of you have heard of the switching time that saved 9 whew a few of you it's it's something so basically up until the new deer deal there was an era of Supreme Court jurisprudence called the Lochner era it's named after a famous or infamous depending on your view a Supreme Court case that upheld economic Liberty and there were actually a whole series of those cases but during the New Deal FDR you know was passing quite a bit of New Deal legislation and some of it was getting struck down by the US Supreme Court and so FDR did a great job of really villainizing the Supreme Court in the press the media was was just ripping them to shreds the public hated them FDR was very was very very popular as you know and so finally FDR said listen if you don't start passing if you don't start upholding my laws and saying they're unconstitutional I'm going to pack the court because the Constitution doesn't say how many Supreme Court justices there would be and so he would say listen my party controls Congress if you keep ruling my these laws that we pass unconstitutional we're gonna increase the number of justices which then obviously will have to fill those vacancies and we'll fill in them with people who will say that our laws are constitutional and we'll pack the court and now I should point out that we don't know if the court packing scheme was really the reason why the Supreme Court switched the the main justice who switched his viewpoint and started voting in favor of the new laws was the Justice named Owen Roberts and unlike most other Supreme Court justices who have their their memoranda and notes let them be published at some point so people can learn from him justice Owen Robin Roberts Burke everything he had said no would ever find out why he changed his mind and then when he left the bench there was this problem where they you know that Chief Justice said wait a second we have this problem everyone's saying that you changed your vote because you were bullied by FDR you know you need to fix this and so justice Owen Roberts wrote a brief memo saying it wasn't because of FDR we had already kind of decided even before he threatened us now maybe that's true maybe it's not I know other people suppose that what really happened was during the landslide election of 1936 Justice Owen Roberts became frustrated with just being so unpopular and that's why he gave in either way whether it was because of FDR whether it was because of the 1936 election either way it was a totally legitimate reason to change his mind and that's why it's referred to as the constitutional revolution of 1937 and at that point the floodgates were opened and we've created this this giant bureaucratic monster in the government at all levels of government I know in the video that I showed to start it talked about how at one point not that long ago shortly after the New Deal only 1 in 20 people had to obtain a license to work now that number is 1 in 3 and it's because basically the US Supreme Court has stopped enforcing economic Liberty if in fact it got so bad that people thought you know you shouldn't even waste your time bringing an economic liberty case the Supreme Court recognized that there was a right to economic Liberty but you were never going to win so why waste your time and the reason is because in the aftermath of the 1937 constitutional revolution after the Supreme Court had shredded large parts of the Constitution they realized that there were parts of the Constitution that cared about like free speech and so they came up with the bifurcated standard of review where basically rights like free speech still get reviewed under strict scrutiny which is real judging and other rights like economic Liberty get reviewed under something called the rational basis test which basically means fake judging where the government always wins and so you know before IJ came along people had kind of given up on economic Liberty as a constitutional right they knew that it technically existed but no one would ever win and so IJ said wait a second you know we know there's this right there have there has to be cases out there that are so extreme that a judge will ignore this whole idea of rubber-stamping government action and will actually rule in favor of the small business owners and so they went and found them and just like all the other cases the government would walk into court and argue hey judge economic Liberty rational basis test you know dust off the old rubber stamp we went automatically and oftentimes that's what happened but IG was able to find such outrageous cases that were happening all over the country that I J started to win at least some of them and then once that happened now when the government argues that they weren't automatically IG I can say no no sometimes we win there's some level of judging involved here and as soon as that happens we have a fighting chance because the examples are so extreme I mean the victims are so sympathetic and the government bullies are so out of control and so it's a slow and steady progress to get rid and slow and steady fight to get rid of these occupant occupational licensing laws but it's it's what we do and I have a lot of fun doing it I know it's a serious subject but we actually have a lot of fun because we just run into these absurd situations and I think one of the best illustrations of it um has to do with three cases that we filed on behalf of people who build caskets it turns out that the funeral industry has a lot of power around this country and so they've created some pretty ridiculous barriers of competition you know fuel directors are not casket manufacturers casket builders are not fueling directors but in many states funeral directors have passed laws or I've been able to convince you know their representatives to pass laws saying that you can only sell a casket if you go and become a licensed funeral director and now in these states you know there's no law saying you have to be buried when you die and if you want to be buried when you die there's no law that says you have to be bearing in the casket if you want to be buried in the casket there's no law that says what that casket needs to be made out of if you want to buy it you know from someone out of state you can buy from whomever you want but if you want to buy a casket from a human being in the state where you live they have to be a licensed funeral director it makes no sense and so the Institute for justice filed a case in Tennessee and it went up to the Fifth Circuit Court assuming the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals I mean just so you all know there are basically the way that Court of Appeals work in the federal courts the country is divided into 11 regions there are other courts as well like the DC server but for all intensive purposes there are 11 regions and so in the Sixth Circuit which covers Tennessee and some other states IJ was able to convince the court to throw out this bear to competition and that was the first time since the New Deal that a federal appellate court had ruled in favor of an economic Liberty plaintiff but the supreme court didn't take the case we want at the appellate level the government appealed to the US Supreme your streams weren't interested they're not usually interested in economic Liberty so it wasn't a big surprise so then we filed another case we filed a case in Oklahoma basically the exact same case exact same fact pattern I just mentioned to you have to do with you know the slicing licensing requirement that you be a licensed funeral director with all that entails all the education cost that entails just to sell caskets that you make and that went up to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said something pretty outlandish they recognized that what the what the the funeral director lobby was doing was just for their own self-interest that it wasn't tied to any legitimate health and safety concern at all but they still ruled in favor of the funeral board and what they said was that basically things are so bad things are so corrupt the self dealing is so widespread that they're not gonna open up that can of worms that they're not going to rule those laws unconstitutional that basically helping out a special interest for no other reason than the benefit that special interest is enough to meet the rational basis test in federal court and and the quote it just boggles my mind so I want to show it to you so I don't miss a tit while baseball maybe the national pastime of the citizens citizenry dishing out special economic benefits to certain in-state industries remains the favorite pastime of state and local governments that was a court upholding the law that was a court saying that it was constitutional that's how bad things have gotten so we filed a third case we were angry you know and by the way we appealed to the US Supreme Court there was a circuit split in that situation that's supposed to increase the chances of the your Supreme Court taking the case but like I said your screams don't care about I can have Liberty so they shot it down so we pulled out all the stops we filed a case in Louisiana does anyone know who were representing in Louisiana nobody first rule of public interest law whenever possible represent monks and so that's who we found in Louisiana we found these monks they live on a monastery in Louisiana I'm not making this up I'll show you the video in a second and they have and basically you know a part of their mission in their monastery is they need to be self-sufficient they have to pay for health care and all there are things that they have as human beings and so what they do there is you know they take their trees and they and they use the wood to build these very noble simple basic caskets and they sell them and in Louisiana it's got the same laws that I talked about before you know you're not required to be buried in a casket it's not required to be made out of wood you can buy it from whoever you want out of state but if you want to buy it from a a person in the state of Louisiana it needed to be a licensed funeral director the monks had no interest in becoming a licensed female director they didn't want to direct funerals they didn't want to install an embalming room on to the monastery they just wanted to sell these basic caskets that they build
in their little wood shop on their monastery to people who didn't want to get ripped off by the fuel directors and of course the funeral directors fought back and they fought back hard because one of the ways they make a lot of money is by jacking up the prices on caskets to rip off customers so let me show you this video so you believe me that we actually did represent monks amongst us st. Joseph's Abbey feel very strongly that we have a right to an honest living through the the building and sale of our Abbey caskets but Louisiana doesn't respect that right so the monks have taken the Pelican state to federal court as monks have done for centuries the brothers of st. Joseph Abbey in Covington Louisiana put food on their table through the labor of their own hands the monks of st. Joseph's a V have been making caskets for over a hundred years people who who asked for them want to share in that noble simplicity that our coffins express my husband really wanted to have a simple burial he lived life simply and he wanted to have just a simple wooden coffin and so the monks were able to provide that service for us but it's a crime in Louisiana to sell a casket unless you're a state licensed funeral director and the government has launched proceedings to punish abbot Justin Brown and Deacon mark coud rain for the sin of selling a casket which is really just a box the monks face crippling fines and even jail and they've also lost an important way of supporting themselves we're not a wealthy monastery and we need the income that st. Joseph Wood Werks could generate for the health care and the education of our own monks the state is going after the monks because licensed funeral directors want the casket market to themselves there's an unholy alliance in Louisiana between government and the powerful funeral industry lobby the monks have teamed up with the Institute for justice and a major federal lawsuit to protect their right and the right of every American to earn an honest living free from economic protectionism and other outrageous government interference bureaucrats and special interests are so out of control in this country then not even monks are safe the brothers of st. Joseph Abbey are ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court if that's what it takes to restore economic Liberty to grassroots entrepreneurs everywhere you but that's the type of thing we see when we sue the government in its own court we won that case of the trial court level so the government appealed and we went up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and we won there too and so the government tried to appeal to the US Supreme Court just from court wasn't interested so now there are three cases on this issue out there three cases on whether it is okay for the government to pass a law for no other reason than to help a special interest that's what decided those three cases that one issue so those wins although they were great they're really modest wins it's not like we totally opened up economic Liberty for everyone but it's a step in the right direction and so that's what we have to do we have to just keep chipping at it you know over and over again over the course of many years and keep moving forward you know trying to make things a little bit more free for everyone and get rid of these ridiculous occupational licensing requirements that don't help anyone and just jack up prices and hurt small business owners thank you the Fourth Amendment and its effect on economic delivery how do you feel about the expansionary nature of the and through a corporation and the process has basically right it that's a great question thank you um for those of you who have not studied the 14th amendment basically it has three parts you have the subs yeah well first you have the privileges or immunities clause which is actually my favorite part of the Fourteenth Amendment and was intentionally written to mirror the language of the privileges and immunities clause which has to talk about you know your rights and that's what those words meant purges and immunities meant right and the problems of the time and then you have the substantive due process clause and the Equal Protection Clause and it was really the privileges or immunities clause that was designed to protect your economic Liberty but through a ridiculously erroneous decision called the slaughterhouse cases that that part was read right out of the Constitution because the Supreme Court felt that if they applied it that would change the Constitution apparently the Supreme Court never looked up the word amendment in the dictionary because that's what an amendment does but they they decided that the privileges or immunities Clause just wasn't going to be followed but then what happened is after that point you have this situation where they still recognized it was long before the New Deal so they still recognized that there was a threat to economic Liberty and to what they would do is they would take other parts of the 14th amendment usually the due process clause and they would apply it to cases where really the privileges or immunities clause should have been used and that led to problems I mean I agree with you it's problematic that the best thing to do would be to go back it's not gonna happen to the Supreme Court hates to reverse itself it hates reversed prior generations one reason being that the Supreme Court doesn't want it its own opinions getting reverse when they all retire another reason is that you actually have to have some sort of predictability with the law in order for the law to be enforceable it needs to be predictable and so I don't think or I mean I would love her to happen but it's unlikely that the course is gonna come out and reverse the slaughterhouse cases but that would make the most sense would be to actually go back and treat the 14th amendment the way it was supposed to be treated then you have clear situations where the privileges or immunities clause should apply the due process clause should apply or the Equal Protection Clause apply instead what you have is a there's a Supreme Court judge using whatever whatever they have available and kind of jerry-rigging it to fit whatever the situation may be and it definitely leads to problems however I would tell you this I am much less concerned about the Supreme Court striking down too many laws than striking down too few regardless of what part of the Constitution they use I mean and part of it's just my own preferences for liberty you know I think the way I'm gonna pair FRA paraphrase Thomas Jefferson here but I'd rather deal with the problems with too much Liberty than not enough and so that's really what the what the Supreme Court does is they strike down laws sometimes they rewrite laws unfortunately not supposed to and people complain about activism and it's a that's a legitimate concern but when I think of the cases that really infuriate me the most I think a case is with Supreme Court bid its tongue I think a case is like buck V Bell where they allowed the state for sterilization programs to go on where approximately seventy thousand women were sterilized against their will because the Supreme Court ruled against Carrie buck whose only crime was that she was raped by a friend of her family I think about cases like the karamatsu cases you know where where agent Americans during World War two were in prison for no other crime than where their ancestors were born and these are cases where the Supreme Court looked at the issue and then looked the other way that bothers me much more I think causes much bigger problems than cases where the Supreme Court maybe strikes down a law that they shouldn't but I know that was a very long-winded answer did I even approach where you were going with that question well I mean that's a great point too because obviously that was a concern that they had with the 14th amendment that now now there's actually a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment that gives Congress the power to pass laws to implement the Fourteenth Amendment so basically what you're doing is you're affecting the balance of power between the federal government and the state government and that is a concern even as a libertarian that's a concern on some level because in my view if you are gonna have power you need it as you know limited and decentralized as possible and obviously that goes against that a little bit but it goes against that in a way to increase your individual liberty to increase your rights to give you extra tools to stand up for yourself against whatever level of government you're dealing with and so that's why I'm a big fan of the 14th amendment any other questions are you all scared now after that answer yes yeah that's interesting it's a situation that does lead to some different opposing value judgments I mean on the one hand you're right as I mentioned before and it's is true the law needs to be predictable you know if people are gonna follow it it's going to be enforced and I'm not an anarchist I may seem like one because I'm so opposed to everything that's happening these days but but I I agree with with some of the things that some people who wrote the Constitution said which is that you need some level of government to protect your rights on the other hand you know you have this issue when you're a victim and I did commercial litigation primarily behalf of small business owners but still I did it for many years before I joined I J and you have this issue sometimes with people who have victimized and don't know right away they honestly just don't find out right away and so you have you know the interests of just people knowing being able to know and move on with their lives and know that there's not some lawsuit lurking on the one hand with the interests of a of a true victim on the other hand who found out about something five years later for whatever reason because it was cover-up er it's just the type of problem that doesn't appear right away as a constitutional issue I don't know if I can answer that it's a very interesting question I could I could be okay with it going either way and I could be upset with it going either way didn't know depending on my mood at the moment you know I I always passionately believe in what I'm saying but I reserve the right to change my mind and it's a great question I appreciate you bringing to my attention I'll look those cases up I understand the dilemma I don't know which way I would have gone if I were on the court I will tell you this one thing since you brought up the SEC we know when I first got out of law school I went to work for a securities litigation firm for a few years before I I started my own practice you know law school doesn't teach you how to practice law and so you really need to go work somewhere after law school to kind of get the proper training and so I went there and I was an attorney in cases in state court or federal court we did a lot of work going up against the ICC on behalf of not even not big companies just small companies but you know publicly traded companies on a small scale and its really disturbing the way they do things I mean our whole justice system is disturbing in many ways yeah I don't know if you guys know this but on a per capita basis we have a higher percentage of our population in jail than any other country on the planet and I don't think it's because our people are evil I think we have too many laws and so you always have to question kind of the way the justice system goes about doing things Radley Balko has a great book out if you're interested that called the rise of the warrior cop which talks about kind of how police have implemented military techniques and it's just the stories are incredible but anyway going back to what I was saying and dealing with the sec you know a lot of times whether you agree with what the police are doing generally speaking what they what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to cut deals with the small fish in order to get them to catch the big fish the ICC does the opposite because the big fish have money and so you'll see when the SEC settles with these giant investment banks what'll happen is you'll see that you know the bank pays some some giant amount of money to the SEC and then if you actually look at the fine print someone will go to jail cuz someone has to go to jail but instead of it being like the head guy it's some like junior vice president of something that was just tangentially involved because that's what the FCC does they cut a deal with the big fish and throw the small fish in jail because the big fish pays the money so I'm not a fan of the SEC but I know that was not even really related to what you asked there you go I'm happy you know as you can probably tell I'm happy to answer any questions you have so there anymore yeah I was disappointed when that happened you know I'm not a fan of either major party but one of the things that helps me sleep at night is knowing that they're both so unconfident that I can't get a lot done and so you know just think about how scared the world would be if the government were more efficient you know so when that rule went away I was disappointed and I think you're right it's gonna it's gonna lead you know the as you pointed out the issue that really brought about was the whole issue of judicial appointments and we're gonna we're gonna get a whole bunch of appointments push through and and they're gonna be on the bench for a long time and when you're dealing with the federal court that's a lifetime appointment and in case I ever appeared from those judges I'm sure they're all well-qualified but you know I just want to say this since this is going out on YouTube but uh yeah that was a sad day for me and I think there will be ramifications for a long time anything else all right well listen I have some materials there at the back you guys are welcome to pick up also our website is phenomenal I J orga has these videos as well as many others as well as my email address so if you think of a question send me an email give me a call I'm happy to talk to young people like yourselves thanks again
