The solution is to enforce the laws we have, not feign powerlessness every time some crackerjack claims to have identified a profitable loophole.
See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits.
However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...
1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.
It's also a work culture. (What can you generally expect from an employer?)
I've never worked in the US.
But it sounds like workers are not protected.
The American Dream is a story of entrepreneurship, not of employment.
This is bad for the employees, bad for society and bad for competitor companies who are playing by the rules.
The solution is fairly obvious. Invest in bodies to proactively enforce the laws we already have.
With that framing, I honestly don't like "as long as we tightly control where it is spent" arguments. They all beg the question that we know where money should be spent. Where history is a great guide that, no, we didn't. We have examples to look to, to be sure. Some decent guidelines, as it were. But they are often last year's guidelines, and that year came and went.
So, I'm game to "keep our eyes open" as we increase allocation. But, by and large, I think insisting on winning bets is a fools errand that will likely cause more problems than it solves.
Earmarking everything is almost impossible to do right. Tax revenue streams go up or down from forces outside the legislature’s control. If there’s a bumper crop of corporate receipts, the right move might be to save them in a rainy day general fund for disasters, or when times are lean, etc.
Put another way, if we can’t seem to spend money well doing it in an annual budgeting process, I don’t know how we will do any better trying to do the same thing years in advance when the tax is passed.
correct. They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends." If the legislators really wanted it to say something else, they should have written it that way.
The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs.
"Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today.
That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.
Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.
Maybe you need to do some research. Patents are construed in exactly the same way as any other law.
I highly recommend you educate yourself about the distinction between common law and statutory law, since you seem confused:
> A clarification of the term "common law" is in order at this point. While common law may have originally referred to a body of law thought to exist in common across jurisdictions under generally accepted standards of legal reasoning, I use the term here to distinguish statutory law made by legislators from case law made by courts. It is well understood that each state has its own common law, crafted by its courts under the supervision of the state supreme court, subject only to the supremacy of federal statutory and constitutional law.
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Corporations' relationship to their contractors is most definitely not "common law." At most, it's administrative law, and if we come to questions of interpretation, it's statutory law.
Before, you were "not trying to be rude" about "common law," and I just demonstrated that common law has nothing to do with labor laws. Common law is judge-written law developed over centuries, as those references I gave you lay out.
Labor laws are statutory law, sometimes modified by administrative rulings. As I said at the start of this, laws are construed by judges, much like patent claims are. Whether Amazon's indirect contractors are "employees" or not comes down to judges' constructions of the relevant laws, which in turn is influenced by the briefs submitted by each side. That's why California has had voter initiatives to change the laws.
So what is the dispute, again?
Within the bounds of the viable interpretations of the words actually written into the law, courts are, in fact, often guided by their reading of legislative intent in choosing which of the superficially viable interpretations is correct.
The idea that interpreting what the laws say precludes interpreting what legislators mean seems to implicitly invoke the idea that any given set of words has only one tenable interpetation to start with, so you never need to look to external context to resolve meaning.
This is a not-too-unpopular conceit, but its quite wrong.
"legislative intent" is in fact deeply controversial among judges. What counts as "intent"? Something a bill sponsor said, but other sponsors disagreed with?
the only certain thing is what the bill says, and the fact that it passed.
Do you really disagree with that claim?
If legal words only had one tenable intepretation we could resolve contract disputes so quickly...
why don't you say what language is being misinterpreted, and we'll go from there?
If even a small fraction of laws have multiple tenable interpretations then that comment is correct.
If you don't think that's the case for some laws, then I'm shocked.
And this is before introducing the concept of "legislative intent", this is just at the base level of looking at the text of laws.
The claim was that some laws have multiple tenable interpretations. So for those laws you can have multiple distinct options, none of which are wrong ways to read the text.
The thing called "wrong" was the idea that laws never do this.
GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.
I don't really want to get into the importance of it here. But I do think it's true, so I replied when you called that specific point wrong.
> GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.
Which comment? I don't see it.
Reply stupidly to this and you can have it again.
Because that was the opposite of the claim made that you disagreed with? Unless, you mean, “what language in a post you responded to in this thread was being misinterpreted by you”…
Not even sure how you would go about making it illegal. What, paying money to another company is illegal? You can't contract out work? It doesn't make any sense.