Something Up There Wants to Keep Me Highly Amused: Right-Wing Cato Institute Control Dispute Department
I must say, a week ago I would have said that I would have been willing to pay serious money to hear Ed Crane and his posse at the Cato Institute say something like:
Shorter Ed Crane: Our collective societal well-being is advanced when restrictions are put on the ability of property owners to do what they wish with their property. The Cato Institute itself, for example, is in a legal sense the private property of its shareholders. But its shareholders do not have the moral right to do what they wish with it. For the Cato Institute is not a mere legal instrumentality that three shareholders control and direct. Instead, what the Cato Institute is is a social trust, a Great Compact, a contract that makes a great chain between all libertarians dead, living, and yet unborn, in which all those committed to the collective intellectual project of libertarianism are stakeholders who have moral rights over the Cato Institute that completely trump the property rights that so-called "owners" of The Cato Institute may claim to have.
For such an argument would seem to have the potential for wider applicability...
And now, taking all of the reactions from upholders of those currently seized of Cato against Cato's shareholders, Ed Crane and company have in effect fulfilled my dreams…
Thus I have more proof that there is indeed a God, a God with a profound sense of irony, a God whose job it is to keep me amused...