By: Brian Krause On January 6th, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his historic eighth State of the Union address and inspired the American people with his famous Four Freedoms. The freedoms of speech and worship, with the right to live without fear and want, were spoken to be as inalienable as the rights laid … Continue reading “Necessitous Men Are Not Free Men”: The Case for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights Today
Category: Rethinking Communities
One of the most common maxims of the United States is: “everyone hates taxes.” The collective consciousness of taxes is that they are a heavy social burden and an irreconcilable nuisance. Even those who support raising taxes feel the need to vilify it by complaining about the percentage of their paychecks removed by the federal … Continue reading Burning Bridges: How Michigan’s Tax System has Eroded its Infrastructure
One of the perils of our increasingly-connected lives is the extent to which many of the constitutional protections we rely on in our non-digital lives either do not apply or work differently when applied to our electronic devices. Perhaps the most important example of this lies in fifth amendment jurisprudence, or what is more commonly … Continue reading What’s Testimonial?: The Fifth Amendment in the Digital Age
The state of Michigan is home to Motown, a world-class baseball team, America’s largest ski jump - and thousands of extremely dangerous abandoned mine shafts. As the mining industry began leaving Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the mid-twentieth century, few steps were taken to ensure the safety of existing structures. Today, there are over 700 abandoned … Continue reading Shuttered for Years, Mines in the Upper Peninsula Remain Hazardous
Being young people who are interested in public policy is weird. There’s a persistent assumption that we don’t know what we’re talking about, or that we somehow don’t understand enough about the world to have an informed opinion. Further, though, there is a belief that our basic assumptions of how the world should work—that people working full-time should not live in poverty, that people deserve available and affordable health care—are a product of the naivety of youth. This is, needless to say, deeply condescending.
Roosevelt @ Michigan State University 