Socialist Jurocracy

Former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour recently delivered a talk at the LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium titled, “Toward Freedom From Want.” (Nat Post - subscription required). It’s about as clear a call for the Court Party to hurry up the process of using the Supreme Court as a vanguard to usher in socialism. She calls for the Court to force government to insure economic equality. Sounds great? But she doesn’t provide much room for individual responsibility and freedom. Things like private property or any conception of human rights not wed to the protectorate of government gets labled “neoliberal, market-driven policy imperatives”. She concludes:

The possibility for people themselves to claim their human rights entitlements through legal processes is essential, so that human rights have meaning for those most at the margins, a vindication of their equal worth and human agency. There will always be a place for charity, but charitable responses are not an effective, principled or sustainable substitute for enforceable human rights guarantees.

By aligning rights with entitlements (by equating them!), she leaves little room for public life where government is not.

Louise Arbour became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2004. I suppose she prefers the tax-free regime of being a UN employee in New York City, where she wouldn’t have to suffer under the tax burden that she wants the rest of us to take on.