axiomofchoice
1yr ago
On the other hand: in Scott's post he discusses how the PPP GDP is the metric which has suffered, as opposed to the market-exchange GDP. That is to say—the recent decline seems to be one of purchasing parity, where your money doesn't buy as much.
For easily-transportable goods, which could just as well be sold in any country, this doesn't apply much: you get pretty much the market exchange rate. It is the non-transportables, like services, which are cheaper in some countries than others, leading to a PPP adjustment.
That is: the complaint that PPP hasn't caught up is a complaint that labor is particularly expensive, that services are affected by Baumol's cost disease or the like. Developing countries typically have favorable PPP exchange rates, because they have plenty of cheap labor; people who don't have better things to do with their time than to work for cheap.
If we accept the difference between PPP GDP and market-exchange GDP as describing the issue, that seems to imply that the problem is that there is too much cost disease (or other reasons why labor is generally expensive), not too little.
In the American legal system, judges have traditionally held that certain domains are non-justiciable—outside judical power to review. Military operations and prosecutorial discretion were mentioned here because those are two such traditional domains. So no—the traditional judicial response to suits about a military operation is to say "sorry, my hands are tied, it's categorically outside my judicial authority to be involved" and dismiss the suit.
You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that judges shouldn't categorically exclude themselves from certain domains. There's a reasonable argument for that! But that shift, if it happens, would be a departure from traditional legal norms. And one judge doing so on his own can certainly be criticized as being at odds with the existing limits on judicial power as has been hitherto understood by the judiciary.
I'm not weighing in on the object level question of if the specific question in this particular suit should have been ruled as non-justiciable. It very plausibly is analogous to traditionally non-justiciable domains (like military operations.) But it's hardly cut and dried the way a suit about a military operation would be. There's precedent to be made here by higher courts in the future.
My point here is on the meta-level, that the US legal system recognizes some domains as categorically non-justiciable, and that this is why military operatorations and prosecutorial discretion were invoked as examples.
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