A couple of weeks back I wrote about Ray Madoff's new book, Immortality and the Law. Now I see that the Financial Times has a nice review of it. From the FT:
Two rough principles have governed the way we think about our duties to dead people. The first is summed up in G.K. Chesterton’s aphorism: “Tradition is the democracy of the dead.” The second is: “You can’t take it with you.” To put it crudely, while society has let dead people “vote” (in that it respects their traditions), it has not let them own property (since there would be no point to it). Things are changing, though, in the US. To judge from Immortality and the Law, a sparkling polemic by the Boston College law professor Ray Madoff, US courts and lawmakers have recently made a number of bad decisions that have turned this arrangement upside down. We hold the wisdom of previous generations in ever lower esteem. But, Madoff convincingly argues, we are granting the dead ever more elaborate property rights, which are crowding out the rights of the living.
And the conclusion--which would be funnier if it weren't so true:
In the Clinton era, the political consultant James Carville quipped that, if there were such a thing as reincarnation, he’d like to come back as the bond market, since “you can intimidate everybody”. After reading Madoff’s assessment of the tightening grip of the dead on our resources, Mr Carville might not feel the need to come back at all.One of my hopes is that Madoff will spur a new scrutiny of the ways that vested rights are protected -- and perhaps over-protected. The FT's review emphasizes that theme. No matter where you are in this debate, I think you'll really enjoy Madoff's sparkling prose. It's an easy read, which will cause you to think deeply -- that's a tough combination for an author to pull off.
Gerry Beyer wrote about the review yesterday.
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