Not All Sheep

In “A Nation of Sheep,” I expressed my disappointment that the mail participation rate for Census 2010 is the same as it was for Census 2000. But not all residents of all States were equally compliant. The following table sorts the States by the changes in their participation rates between 2000 and 2010:

Change in Mail Participation Rate, by State (percentage)
	State	Census 2000	Census 2010	Change
	Wyoming	72	68	-4
	Colorado	73	70	-3
	Montana	70	67	-3
	Nebraska	79	76	-3
	North Dakota	76	73	-3
	Oklahoma	69	66	-3
	South Dakota	78	75	-3
	Alaska	64	62	-2
	California	73	71	-2
	New Mexico	65	63	-2
	South Carolina	65	63	-2
	West Virginia	66	64	-2
	Arizona	68	67	-1
	Arkansas	68	67	-1
	Connecticut	75	74	-1
	Idaho	75	74	-1
	Iowa	79	78	-1
	Louisiana	65	64	-1
	Massachusetts	74	73	-1
	Missouri	74	73	-1
	New Hampshire	71	70	-1
	New Jersey	73	72	-1
	Ohio	77	76	-1
	Wisconsin	82	81	-1
	Kansas	75	75	0
	Maryland	74	74	0
	Michigan	77	77	0
	Mississippi	67	67	0
	Nevada	69	69	0
	Oregon	74	74	0
	Pennsylvania	76	76	0
	Delaware	68	69	1
	Georgia	69	70	1
	Maine	65	66	1
	New York	66	67	1
	Rhode Island	70	71	1
	Texas	68	69	1
	Hawaii	64	66	2
	Illinois	73	75	2
	Indiana	76	78	2
	Minnesota	78	80	2
	Utah	72	74	2
	Vermont	65	67	2
	Washington	72	74	2
	Florida	69	72	3
	Virginia	73	76	3
	Alabama	66	70	4
	Kentucky	70	75	5
	Tennessee	69	74	5
	North Carolina	66	74	8

Source: Census.gov download.

I have highlighted the States in which participation rates changed significantly (i.e., by more than one standard deviation from the mean). Kudos to the residents of Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Honorable mention to the residents of the next seventeen States with negative numbers: Alaska through Wisconsin. Scorn for the lamb-like residents of the thirteen States from Delaware through Washington. And a hearty b-a-a-a to the sheep-like denizens of Florida, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Blasts from the Past

I have republished much of the pre-blog (“home page”) version of my old blog, Liberty Corner, in 29 posts at The Original Liberty Corner. (There’s a link to TOLC in the right sidebar, for permanent access.) Some of the material at TOLC is dated; most of it remains current; some of it is prescient.

The preceding post, “First Principles,” is based on one of my early contributions to the pre-blog version of Liberty Corner. From time to time, I will update other material and re-post it at this blog.

First Principles

The Constitution is for “we the people,” not “we the politicians” or “we the bureaucrats.”

A society is formed by the voluntary bonding of individuals into overlapping, ever-changing groups whose members strive to serve each others’ emotional and material needs. Government — regardless of its rhetoric — is an outside force that cannot possibly replicate societal bonding, or even foster it. At best, government can help preserve society — as it does when it deters aggression from abroad or administers justice. But in the main, government corrodes society by destroying bonds between individuals and dictating the terms of social and economic intercourse — as it does through countless laws, regulations, and programs, from Social Security to farm subsidies, from corporate welfare to the hapless “war” on drugs, from the minimum wage to affirmative action. On balance, the greatest threat to society is government itself.

America’s “social contract” is valid only within the United States, not across international borders. Even with the benefit of a common Constitution, we Americans find it harder every year to honor and respect each other’s lives, fortunes, and honor. Expecting other nations to behave as if they were bound by our social contract is like trusting Hitler in the 1930s — an exercise in false hope and self-delusion.

Free speech is a right. A free pass based on gender, race, religion, or any other incidental characteristic is extortion.

Liberty is not anarchy, nor is it the government dictating how we may live our lives and pursue happiness.

Liberty: the right to make mistakes, to pay for them, and to profit by learning from them.

The best government is that which walks the fine line between the tyranny of anarchy and the tyranny of special interests.

The constitutional contract charges the federal government with keeping peace among the States, ensuring uniformity in the rules of inter-State and international commerce, facing the world with a single foreign policy and a national armed force, and assuring the even-handed application of the Constitution and of constitutional laws. That is all.

The business of government is to protect the lawful pursuit and enjoyment of income and wealth, not to redistribute them.

Each citizen is a unique minority of one who should enjoy the same rights as all other minorities.

The most precious right these days is the right to be left alone.

Presidential Chutzpah

Barack Obama — having pushed for and signed into law the thing known as Health Reform — which contains a phony promise to reduce the government’s budget deficit* — met yesterday with his self-created Bipartisan Fiscal Commission. The commission is to recommend ways of reducing future federal deficits. In the course of the meeting, Obama

spoke about the work he has done already towards trying to restore a stable fiscal path, from asking Congress to restore the “pay as you go” rule, to going line by line through the budget for more than $20 billion in savings, to challenging long-entrenched but outdated defense projects, to proposing a freeze in most of the discretionary budget for the next three years.

Wow! $20 billion in savings, as against a deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars — a deficit that would be exacerbated by the spending plans of our “parsimonious” president:

“An Analysis of the President’s Budgetary Proposals for Fiscal Year 2011,” March 2010, Figure 1-1.

There are only two ways to reduce future deficits significantly: raise taxes or cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The total bill for those programs (excluding the hidden costs of Obamacare) will rise from 10 percent of GDP to 23 percent of GDP when our grandchildren are in their “golden years”:

Source: Congressional Budget Office, “The Long-Term Budget Outlook,” June 2009, Box 1-2.

If the commissioners have any courage, they will recommend the gradual phase-out of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — along the lines of my proposed solution:

1. Abolish Social Security payroll taxes as of a date certain (Abolition Day).

2. Pay normal benefits (those implicitly promised under the present system) to persons who are then collecting Social Security and to all other qualifying persons who have then reached the age of 62.

3. Persons who are 55 to 61 years old would receive normal benefits, pro-rated according to their contributions as of Abolition Day.

4. The retirement age for full benefits would be raised for all persons who are younger than 55 as of Abolition Day. The full retirement age is now scheduled to rise to 67 in 2027; it should rise to 73 by, say, 2020. Moreover, partial benefits would no longer be available to persons between the age of 62 and full-retirement age.

4. Persons who are 45 to 54 years old also would receive pro-rata benefits based on their contributions as of Abolition Day. But their initial benefits would be reduced on a sliding scale, so that the benefits of those persons who are 45 as of Abolition Day would be linked entirely to the CPI rather than the wage index.

5. Persons who are younger than 45 would receive a lump-sum repayment of their contributions (plus accrued interest) at full retirement age, in lieu of future benefits. That payment would automatically go to a surviving spouse or next-of-kin if the recipient dies intestate. Otherwise, the recipient could bequeath, transfer, or sell his interest in the payment at any time before it comes due.

6. The residual obligations outlined in points 2-5 would be funded by a payroll tax, which would diminish as those obligations are paid off.

Repeat, with appropriate variations, for Medicare and Medicaid [and Obamacare].

The alternative is to burden the productive sectors of the economy, thus further reducing the rate of economic growth and making Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare even less affordable. Is that the future we want for our descendants?
__________
* The head of the Congressional Budget Office acknowledges that Obamacare

maintains and puts into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. For example, the legislation:

– Reduces the growth rate of Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusting for overall inflation) from about 4 percent per year for the past two decades to about 2 percent per year for the next two decades. It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved, and, if so, whether it would be through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or through reductions in access to care or the quality of care. . . .

- Establishes a tax on insurance plans with relatively high premiums in 2018 and (beginning in 2020) indexes the tax thresholds to general inflation.

Whither Inflation?

Who knows? My only observations: The recent up-tick is consistent with price behavior during an economic recovery. And, even with the up-tick, the current year-over-year rate of inflation is in line with the down-trend that began in 1980.

Derived from U.S. Department Of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index, All Urban Consumers – (CPI-U), U.S. city average, All items, 1982-84=100.

UPDATED 05/27/10: See this post for an alternative estimate of the rate of inflation.

Tocqueville’s Prescience

I have added Joseph Epstein’s new book, Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide, to my Amazon.com wish list. My urge to own the book arises from a review in The American Spectator. The reviewer (Larry Thornberry) observes that

Tocqueville understood the constant conflict in democracies between liberty and equality, and the threat too much emphasis on the latter poses to the former. He recognized the emotion of envy behind much of the high-minded talk about equality, which he once described as “generally the wish that no one should be better off than oneself.”

Tocqueville saw the soft tyranny of the smothering paternalism that democracies can impose, and the bureaucracies they can build. He understood that too much centralization of government is a one-way street to despotism.

So true. So prescient.

With respect to “soft tyranny” or “soft despotism,” as it is generally called, I can only repeat myself:

Soft despotism is “soft” only in that citizens aren’t dragged from their houses at night and executed for imaginary crimes against the state — though they are hauled into court for not wearing seatbelts, for smoking in bars, and for various other niggling offenses to the sensibilities of nanny-staters.

Despite the absence of arbitrary physical punishment, soft despotism is despotism, period. It can be nothing but despotism when the state holds sway over your paycheck, your retirement plan, your medical care, your choice of associates, and thousands of other details of your life — from the drugs you may not buy to the kind of car you can’t drive, from where you can build a house to the features that your house must include.

“Soft despotism,” in other words, is too soft a term for the regime under which we live. I therefore agree with Tom Smith: “Fascism” is a good descriptor of our present condition, so I’ll continue to use it.

The Once and Future Ration Book

Our children and grandchildren will need ration books for medical services if Obamacare isn’t repealed. How else will medical services be acquired when providers exit in the face of arbitrary fee caps, when demand soars because of universal access to “cheap” or “free” medical services, and when private insurance companies have been squeezed out of business by government?

In anticipation of that bleak future, I dug out one of my World War II ration books and updated it. Here’s the revised cover (“health” replaces “war”), followed by a page of ration coupons:

The howitzer motif is appropriate, given that Obamcare is a war on medicine and liberty. Other coupon pages feature equally appropriate symbols: tanks, aircraft carriers, and dive bombers.

Abortion and Crime

In several posts at my old blog, I examined the causes of crime and ways to combat it. Among other things, I debunked the proposition that more abortion means less crime. (See this post and follow the links therein.) Abortion, if it does anything, leads to more crime by women because it “frees” them from child-rearing:

Derived from Statistical Abstracts of the United States: Table HS-24. Federal and State Prisoners by Jurisdiction and Sex: 1925 to 2001; and Table 338. Prisoners Under Federal or State Jurisdiction by Sex.

It’s women’s lib at work!

How’s “He” Doing?

“He” is Barack Obama (BO), who presides over the left half of the nation and dictates to the right half. In an early post about BO’s popularity — or lack thereof — I observed that his “approval rating may have dropped for the wrong reasons; that is, voters expect him to “do something” about jobs, health care, etc.”

And, sure enough, when BO used his first state of the union address to reiterate his allegiance to the New Deal, his unpopularity dwindled a bit. And when he and his co-conspirators — Reid and Pelosi — rammed their health-care bill through Congress, his unpopularity again dwindled.

The good news is that BO remains generally unpopular:

Net approval rating: percentage of likely voters strongly approving of BO, minus percentage of likely voters strongly disapproving of BO. Derived from Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. I use Rasmussen’s polling results because Rasmussen has a good track record with respect to presidential-election polling.

In polls there is hope.

A Nation of Sheep

The mail participation rate for Census 2010 has reached 72 percent, matching the Census 2000 rate. By the time the census-takers are done with their canvassing and re-canvassing in July, the vast majority of American households will succumb to the Census Bureau’s unconstitutional prying by divulging information that is none of the government’s business.

Bah! Or, I should say, b-a-a-a!

Clinton the Conspirator

Bill Clinton is back on the job. Thanks to a large assist from CNN, Clinton is once again painting those who oppose oppressive government as potentially violent extremists in the mold of Timothy McVeigh. Byron York has this take on Clinton’s latest foray into fear-mongering:

With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing Monday, former President Bill Clinton is playing a starring role in the liberal effort to draw what the New York Times calls “parallels between the antigovernment tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today.” The short version of the narrative is: Today’s Tea Partiers are tomorrow’s right-wing bombers. . . .

At a White House meeting four days [after the bombing], [Dick] Morris presented Clinton with a comeback strategy based on his polling.  Morris prepared an extensive agenda for the session, a copy of which he would include in the paperback version of his 1999 memoir, Behind the Oval Office.  This is how the April 27 agenda began:

AFTERMATH OF OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

A. Temporary gain: boost in ratings — here today, gone tomorrow

B. More permanent gain: Improvements in character/personality attributes — remedies weakness, incompetence, ineffectiveness found in recent poll

C. Permanent possible gain: sets up Extremist Issue vs. Republicans . . .

It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City.  And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted.  In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack.  The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election.  None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City.  And that is the story you’re not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.

And here is Debra J. Saunders:

Clinton wrote that while criticism is “part of the lifeblood of democracy … we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedom and public servants who enforce our laws.”

What I want to know is: Other than the twisted McVeigh and company, who is not clear on this difference? Does Clinton think his all his critics are stupid, or is he playing stupid?

But wait, there’s more. Clinton continued, “We must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.”

Think about that for a minute: If anyone were to cast blame for the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 dead, or any other attacks within American military bases, on the antiwar movement, then that assertion would be followed by howls of outrage, and deservedly so. It would be absurd to suggest that opposition to the war be misconstrued as promoting violence against U.S. troops.

Yet somehow arguing against President Obama’s health care plan can be construed as practically an incitement to violence.

It all boils down to this: Clinton spearheads a left-wing conspiracy to discredit Americans who legitimately protest the unconstitutional and fiscally destructive acts of the federal government. One of the conspiracy’s tactics is to charge that Tea-Partiers and other critics of Barack Obama’s policies are “racist” — as if Obama’s policies weren’t, in and of themselves, deserving of opprobrium. (See, for example, the decidedly non-racist “Contract from America,” which reflects the true concerns of the Tea-Partiers and millions of silent Americans who are with them in spirit.)

Clinton’s moral standing is on a par with Teddy Kennedy’s. That is to say, Clinton has no moral standing. (A small, non-sexual sample of Clinton’s morality can be found in the use of CS gas against the 25 children who were present in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco.)  To call Clinton a snake would be an insult to snakes.

The Mega-Depression

In the preceding post, I offered my definition of recession and asked whether the current one has ended. (The answer: not yet, but I may know soon — or sooner than the official score-keepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research.) It since occurred that to focus on the current recession — or any recession — is to ignore America’s mega-depression, which is now more than a century old.

As I explain here, the mega-depression began in the early 1900s, when the economy began to sag under the weight of “progressivism” (e.g., trust-busting, regulation, the income tax, the Fed). Then came the New Deal, whose interventions provoked and prolonged the Great Depression (see, for example, this, and this). From the New Deal and the Great Society arose the massive anti-market/initiative-draining/dependency-promoting schemes known as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The extension and expansion of those and other intrusive government programs has continued unto the present day (e.g., Obamacare), with the result that our lives and livelihoods are hemmed in by mountains of regulatory restrictions.

The mega-depression is an example of  “that which is not seen,” a coinage of Frédéric Bastiat. In “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen,” Bastiat writes:

Have you ever chanced to hear it said “There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts on industry; it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself.” . . .

The advantages which officials advocate are those which are seen. The benefit which accrues to the providers is still that which is seen. This blinds all eyes.

But the disadvantages which the tax-payers have to get rid of are those which are not seen. And the injury which results from it to the providers, is still that which is not seen, although this ought to be self-evident.

When an official spends for his own profit an extra hundred sous, it implies that a tax-payer spends for his profit a hundred sous less. But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it.

In the case of aggregate economic activity, what we see is what has been left to us by government. What we do not see is the extent to which the money taken from us by government and the restrictions placed upon us by government have deprived the economy of entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and productive capacity. The cumulative effect of those deprivations — that which we do not see — dwarfs the Great Depression in depth and extent. The cumulative effect is our mega-depression:

Is the Recession Over?

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has not yet declared an end to the recession. But no matter . . . according to the NBER, a recession ends when the economy has stopped contracting and begun expanding. In other words, the NBER could (and has) declared the end of a recession when the rate of aggregate economic activity (as measured by constant-dollar GDP) remains below its level at the beginning of the recession. That anomaly leads me to the following definition:

• two or more consecutive quarters in which real GDP (annualized) is below real GDP (annualized) for an earlier quarter, during which

• the annual (year-over-year) change in real GDP is negative, in at least one quarter.

That is to say, a recession lasts as long as there is a real and sustained dip in economic activity.

Here is my take on postwar recessions, which are marked by the vertical bars (click image to enlarge it):

Contrary to the NBER, there were no recessions in 1969-1970 or 2001. The Reagan-Volcker boom — which began in 1983 and was interrupted by the very mild recession of 1990-1991 — lasted until 2008.

To answer the title question: I don’t know if the recession is over, but I will know as soon as the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its GDP estimate for the first quarter of 2010. Or, you can wait until the NBER makes its call in 2011.

The Shape of the Supreme Court

UPDATED 08/09/10

With the replacement of Justice John Paul Stevens by Elena Kagan, the Court’s presidential provenance looks like this*:

Reagan — Antonin Scalia (1986), Anthony Kennedy (1988)

Bush I — Clarence Thomas (1991)

Clinton — Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993), Stephen Breyer (1994)

Bush II — John Roberts (2005), Samuel Alito (2006)

Obama — Sonia Sotomayor (2009), Elena Kagan (2010)

In terms of age, the Court looks like this:

Ginsburg, 77

Scalia, 74

Kennedy, 73

Breyer, 71

Thomas, 61

Alito, 60

Sotomayor, 55

Roberts, 55

Kagan, 50

Barring an unexpected death or retirement, Ginsburg will be the next to go. Like Souter and Stevens, she is likely to retire on Obama’s watch, in an effort to maintan the Court’s present ideological balance. Obama’s picks have not, and likely will not, alter the Court’s ideological balance, but they will create a core of youngish “liberal” justices, who will serve for decades.

The best that we devoted adherents of the Constitution can hope for is a one-term Obama-cy and a Republican successor who will do a better job of selecting justices than Ford (Stevens), Reagan (O’Connor and Kennedy), and G.H.W. Bush (Souter). In fact, the election of a Republican is critical because the person who sits in the White House from 2013 to 2017 or 2021 may well have to replace three justices — most likely Scalia, Kennedy, and Breyer.

Imagine the future of the Court if those three justices — an eccentric originalist, a wavering centrist, and a semi-hard leftist — could be replaced with sober, collegial originalists. They would outnumber Kagan, Sotomayor, and the next Ginsburg by 6-3, setting the stage for an era of constitutional resurgence.

__________

* For those of you who are interested in the Court’s genealogy, the following lines of succession have led to the present Court (* = elevated from associate justice to chief justice):

Chief Justice
John Jay (1789-1795)
John Rutledge* (1795-1795)
Oliver Ellsworth (1796-1800)
John Marshall (1801-1835)
Roger Brooke Taney (1836-1864)
Salmon Portland Chase (1864-1873)
Morrison Remick Waite (1874-1888)
Melville Weston Fuller (1888-1910)
Edward Douglass White* (1910-1921)
William Howard Taft (1921-1930)
Charles Evans Hughes* (1930-1941)
Harlan Fiske Stone* (1941-1946)
Fred Moore Vinson (1946-1953)
Earl Warren (1954-1969)
Warren Earl Burger (1969-1986)
William Hubbs Rehnquist* (1986-2005)
John Glover Roberts Jr. (2005-)

Associate-1
James Wilson (1789-1798)
Bushrod Washington (1799-1829)
Henry Baldwin (1830-1844)
Robert Cooper Grier (1846-1870)
William Strong (1870-1880)
William Burnham Woods (1881-1887)
Lucius Quintus C. Lamar (1888-1893)
Howell Edmunds Jackson (1893-1895)
Rufus Wheeler Peckham (1895-1899)
Horace Harmon Lurton (1910-1914)
James Clark McReynolds (1914-1941)
James Francis Byrnes (1941-1942)
Wiley Blount Rutledge (1943-1949)
Sherman Minton (1949-1956)
William Joseph Brennan Jr. (1957-1990)
David Hackett Souter (1990-2009)
Sonia Maria Sotomayor (2009-)

Associate-2
William Cushing (1790-1810)
Joseph Story (1812-1845)
Levi Woodbury (1846-1851)
Benjamin Robbins Curtis (1851-1857)
Nathan Clifford (1858-1881)
Horace Gray (1882-1902)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1902-1932)
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1932-1938)
Felix Frankfurter (1939-1962)
Arthur Joseph Goldberg (1962-1965)
Abraham Fortas (1965-1969)
Harry Andrew Blackmun (1970-1994)
Stephen Gerald Breyer (1994-)

Associate-3
John Blair (1790-1795)
Samuel Chase (1796-1811)
Gabriel Duvall (1811-1835)
Philip Pendleton Barbour (1836-1841)
Peter Vivian Daniel (1842-1860)
Samuel Freeman Miller (1862-1890)
Henry Billings Brown (1891-1906)
William Henry Moody (1906-1910)
Willis Van Devanter (1911-1937)
Hugo Lafayette Black (1937-1971)
Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. (1972-1987)
Anthony McLeod Kennedy (1988-)

Associate-4
John Rutledge* (1790-1791)
Thomas Johnson (1792-1793)
William Patterson (1793-1806)
Brockholst Livingston (1807-1823)
Smith Thompson (1824-1843)
Samuel Nelson (1845-1872)
Ward Hunt (1873-1882)
Samuel Blatchford (1882-1893)
Edward Douglass White* (1894-1910)
Joseph Rucker Lamar (1911-1916)
Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1916-1939)
William Orville Douglas (1939-1975)
John Paul Stevens (1975-2010)
Elena Kagan (2010-)

Associate-5
James Iredell (1790-1799)
Alfred Moore (1800-1804)
William Johnson (1804-1834
James Moore Wayne (1835-1867)

Associate-6
Thomas Todd (1807-1826)
Robert Trimble (1826-1828)
John McLane (1830-1861)
Noah Hayes Swayne (1862-1881)
Stanely Matthews (1881-1889)
David Josiah Brewer (1890-1910)
Charles Evans Hughes* (1910-1916)
John Hessin Clarke (1916-1922)
George Sutherland (1922-1938)
Stanley Forman Reed (1938-1957)
Charles Evans Whitaker (1952-1962)
Byron Raymond White (1962-1993)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993-)

Associate-7
John Carlton (1837-1865)

Associate-8
John McKinley (1838-1852)
John Archibald Campbell (1853-1861)
David Davis (1862-1877)
John Marshall Harlan (1877-1911)
Mahlon Pitney (1912-1922)
Edward Terry Sanford (1923-1930)
Owen Josephus Robert (1930-1945)
Harold Hitz Burton (1945-1958)
Potter Stewart (1959-1981)
Sandra Day O’Connor (1981-2006)
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. (2006-)

Associate-9
Stephen Johnson Field (1863-1897)
Joseph McKenna (1898-1925)
Harlan Fiske Stone* (1925-1941)
Robert Houghwout Jackson (1941-1954)
John Marshall Harlan II (1955-1971)
William Hubbs Rehnquist* (1972-1986)
Antonin Gregory Scalia (1986-)

Associate-10
Joseph P. Bradley (1870-1892)
George Shiras Jr. (1892-1903)
William Rufus Day (1903-1922)
Pierce Butler (1923-1939)
William Francis Murphy (1940-1949)
Thomas Campbell Clark (1949-1967)
Thurgood Marshall (1967-1991)
Clarence Thomas (1991-)

Sources: Appendix Two, “Nominations and Successions of the Justices,” The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions, edited by Kermit L. Hall, Oxford University Press, 1999; “Members of the Supreme Court of the United States,” from the website of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Declaration of Independence, Updated

If you haven’t read “A Declaration of Independence,” or haven’t read it since I revised it, I recommend a first or second look.