Most educated people of the eighteenth century, such as the Founding Fathers, subscribed to Natural Rights Theory, the idea that every human being has a considerable number of innate rights, simply by virtue of being a human person. When the US Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, many at that time felt that the federal government outlined by the Constitution would be too strong, and that rights of individual citizens against the government had to be clarified. This led to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, which were ratified at the same time as the Constitution. The first eight of these amendments list specific rights of citizens. Some leaders feared that listing some rights could be interpreted to mean that citizens didn't have other, unlisted rights. Toward this end, James Madison and others produced the Ninth Amendment, which states: the fact that certain rights are listed in the Constitution shall not be construed to imply that other rights of the people are denied.
Constitutional traditionalists interpret the Ninth Amendment as a rule for reading the rest of the constitution. They would argue that "Ninth Amendment rights" are a misconceived notion: the amendment does not, by itself, create federally enforceable rights. In particular, this strict reasoning would be opposed to the creation of any new rights based on the amendment. Rather, according to this view, the amendment merely protects those rights that citizens already have, whether they are explicitly listed in the Constitution or simply implicit in people's lives and in American tradition.
More liberal interpreters of the US Constitution have a much more expansive view of the Ninth Amendment. In their view, the Ninth Amendment guarantees to American citizens a vast universe of potential rights, some of which we have enjoyed for two centuries, and others of which the Founding Fathers could not possibly have conceived. These scholars point out that some rights, such as voting rights of women or minorities, were not necessarily viewed as rights by the majority of citizens in late eighteenth century America, but are taken as fundamental and unquestionable in modern America. While those rights cited are protected specifically by other amendments and laws, the argument asserts that other unlisted right also could evolve from unthinkable to perfectly acceptable, and the Ninth Amendment would protect these as-yet-undefined rights.
Most educated people of the eighteenth century, such as the Founding Fathers, subscribed to Natural Rights Theory, the idea that every human being has a considerable number of innate rights, simply by virtue of being a human person. When the US Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, many at that time felt that the federal government outlined by the Constitution would be too strong, and that rights of individual citizens against the government had to be clarified. This led to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, which were ratified at the same time as the Constitution. The first eight of these amendments list specific rights of citizens. Some leaders feared that listing some rights could be interpreted to mean that citizens didn't have other, unlisted rights. Toward this end, James Madison and others produced the Ninth Amendment, which states: the fact that certain rights are listed in the Constitution shall not be construed to imply that other rights of the people are denied.
Constitutional traditionalists interpret the Ninth Amendment as a rule for reading the rest of the constitution. They would argue that "Ninth Amendment rights" are a misconceived notion: the amendment does not, by itself, create federally enforceable rights. In particular, this strict reasoning would be opposed to the creation of any new rights based on the amendment. Rather, according to this view, the amendment merely protects those rights that citizens already have, whether they are explicitly listed in the Constitution or simply implicit in people's lives and in American tradition.
More liberal interpreters of the US Constitution have a much more expansive view of the Ninth Amendment. In their view, the Ninth Amendment guarantees to American citizens a vast universe of potential rights, some of which we have enjoyed for two centuries, and others of which the Founding Fathers could not possibly have conceived. These scholars point out that some rights, such as voting rights of women or minorities, were not necessarily viewed as rights by the majority of citizens in late eighteenth century America, but are taken as fundamental and unquestionable in modern America. While those rights cited are protected specifically by other amendments and laws, the argument asserts that other unlisted right also could evolve from unthinkable to perfectly acceptable, and the Ninth Amendment would protect these as-yet-undefined rights.
Most educated people of the eighteenth century, such as the Founding Fathers, subscribed to Natural Rights Theory, the idea that every human being has a considerable number of innate rights, simply by virtue of being a human person. When the US Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, many at that time felt that the federal government outlined by the Constitution would be too strong, and that rights of individual citizens against the government had to be clarified. This led to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, which were ratified at the same time as the Constitution. The first eight of these amendments list specific rights of citizens. Some leaders feared that listing some rights could be interpreted to mean that citizens didn't have other, unlisted rights. Toward this end, James Madison and others produced the Ninth Amendment, which states: the fact that certain rights are listed in the Constitution shall not be construed to imply that other rights of the people are denied.
Constitutional traditionalists interpret the Ninth Amendment as a rule for reading the rest of the constitution. They would argue that "Ninth Amendment rights" are a misconceived notion: the amendment does not, by itself, create federally enforceable rights. In particular, this strict reasoning would be opposed to the creation of any new rights based on the amendment. Rather, according to this view, the amendment merely protects those rights that citizens already have, whether they are explicitly listed in the Constitution or simply implicit in people's lives and in American tradition.
More liberal interpreters of the US Constitution have a much more expansive view of the Ninth Amendment. In their view, the Ninth Amendment guarantees to American citizens a vast universe of potential rights, some of which we have enjoyed for two centuries, and others of which the Founding Fathers could not possibly have conceived. These scholars point out that some rights, such as voting rights of women or minorities, were not necessarily viewed as rights by the majority of citizens in late eighteenth century America, but are taken as fundamental and unquestionable in modern America. While those rights cited are protected specifically by other amendments and laws, the argument asserts that other unlisted right also could evolve from unthinkable to perfectly acceptable, and the Ninth Amendment would protect these as-yet-undefined rights.
For much of the twentieth century, Saving and Loans (S&L) banks made mortgage loans to individual middle class families, allowing many to buy houses. In the 1970s, the combination of inflation and falling oil prices created economic conditions to place S&L banks at risk. In the early 1980s, Congress deregulated the S&L banks, allowing them to expand the kinds of investments from which they drew profits.
The deregulation was designed to open beneficial options which would allow the flagging S&L banks to save themselves. Instead, many S&L banks pursued investments in sectors they did not understand well, such as commercial real estate: they entered these sectors with large amounts of cash although they were not fully apprised of the risks. The collapse of the housing market in the mid 1980's, following an unprecedented building boom over the previous ten years, led to the failure of numerous S&L banks. As these banks were protected by federal insurance, this collapse cost the American taxpayers over $100 billion. In some of the S&L banks that failed, the bank leaders were found guilty of embezzlement and other kinds of fraud. In some cases, the burden of fraud caused otherwise viable banks to fail, and in other cases, a bank that was going to fail anyway had its life prolonged by fraud, creating additional expenses for the federal bank bailout.
Former bank regulator William Black has argued that the US government has not adequately learned important lessons from the S&L crisis. While stronger regulations for all banks are in place now, little has been done to strengthen the fraud procedures. Black has pointed out that bank fraud has the opportunity to thrive whenever regulation or oversight is loosened, and systemic occurrences of bank fraud pose a major risk to the well-being of the economy. While individuals may resist fraud because of their own ethics, this is not sufficient to protect the economy as a whole. Congressmen, responding to Black's charges, argue that the SEC has in place strict guidelines for what constitutes bank fraud, and that both SEC investigators and congressmen themselves are well-poised to detect even individual instances of fraud, to say nothing of widespread fraud. Black points out that SEC investigators do not have criminologist training: while they understand the rules well, they are not familiar with all the methods used to subvert or violate them. Furthermore, congressmen, under certain conditions, can turn a blind eye to bank fraud. For example, in the 1980s, the so-called "Keating five" senators accepted cash contributions from Charles Keating, the head of a S&L bank, and in return gave Mr. Keating undue protection which allowed him to continue his fraud.
The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven's last and vibrant word on the big style he had cultivated in the previous decade. In the Eighth Symphony (1814) he does something new by seeming to return to something old. He writes, that is, a symphony shorter than any since his First. It is almost as though he wanted to call his entire development throughout that decade into question. Indeed, over the remaining years of his life he would confidently explore in opposite directions, writing bigger pieces than before and ones more compressed, his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public and his most esoteric, compositions that plumb the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and those that propose utterly new ways of organizing material, music reaching extremes of the centered and the bizarre.
If, however, we think of the Eighth as a nostalgic return to the good old days, we misunderstand it. To say it is 1795 revisited from the vantage point of 1812 is not right either. What interests Beethoven is not so much brevity for its own sake—and certainly not something called “classicism”—as concentration. It is as though he were picking up where he had left off in the densely saturated first movement of the Fifth Symphony to produce another tour de force of tight packing. He had already done something like this two years earlier in one of his most uncompromising works, the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95. But a symphony is not a “private” connoisseur's music like a string quartet; by comparison, the Eighth Symphony is Opus 95's friendly, open-featured cousin, even though its first and last movements bring us some of the most violent moments in Beethoven.
The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven's last and vibrant word on the big style he had cultivated in the previous decade. In the Eighth Symphony (1814) he does something new by seeming to return to something old. He writes, that is, a symphony shorter than any since his First. It is almost as though he wanted to call his entire development throughout that decade into question. Indeed, over the remaining years of his life he would confidently explore in opposite directions, writing bigger pieces than before and ones more compressed, his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public and his most esoteric, compositions that plumb the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and those that propose utterly new ways of organizing material, music reaching extremes of the centered and the bizarre.
If, however, we think of the Eighth as a nostalgic return to the good old days, we misunderstand it. To say it is 1795 revisited from the vantage point of 1812 is not right either. What interests Beethoven is not so much brevity for its own sake—and certainly not something called “classicism”—as concentration. It is as though he were picking up where he had left off in the densely saturated first movement of the Fifth Symphony to produce another tour de force of tight packing. He had already done something like this two years earlier in one of his most uncompromising works, the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95. But a symphony is not a “private” connoisseur's music like a string quartet; by comparison, the Eighth Symphony is Opus 95's friendly, open-featured cousin, even though its first and last movements bring us some of the most violent moments in Beethoven.
The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven's last and vibrant word on the big style he had cultivated in the previous decade. In the Eighth Symphony (1814) he does something new by seeming to return to something old. He writes, that is, a symphony shorter than any since his First. It is almost as though he wanted to call his entire development throughout that decade into question. Indeed, over the remaining years of his life he would confidently explore in opposite directions, writing bigger pieces than before and ones more compressed, his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public and his most esoteric, compositions that plumb the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and those that propose utterly new ways of organizing material, music reaching extremes of the centered and the bizarre.
If, however, we think of the Eighth as a nostalgic return to the good old days, we misunderstand it. To say it is 1795 revisited from the vantage point of 1812 is not right either. What interests Beethoven is not so much brevity for its own sake—and certainly not something called “classicism”—as concentration. It is as though he were picking up where he had left off in the densely saturated first movement of the Fifth Symphony to produce another tour de force of tight packing. He had already done something like this two years earlier in one of his most uncompromising works, the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95. But a symphony is not a “private” connoisseur's music like a string quartet; by comparison, the Eighth Symphony is Opus 95's friendly, open-featured cousin, even though its first and last movements bring us some of the most violent moments in Beethoven.