Stranger than anything Rand ever imagined

[Petro]

At 10:54 AM -0700 8/5/01, Tim May wrote:
>On Sunday, August 5, 2001, at 09:29 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>> At 09:15 AM 8/5/01 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>>> So, they ARE asking Congress to try and circumvent that nasty 'ol 
>>> Commerce Clause.  It should be interesting to see what Congress thinks 
>>> it can fashion th will pass SC muster.
>> Actually, this may be one of the few areas -- actual interstate trade 
>> and taxes -- that come close to the meaning of the Commerce Clause. I 
>> suspect a challenge will have to be made on public policy grounds 
>> rather than constitutional ones.

>California's energy crisis (cough) could be solved overnight if dynamos 
>could be attached to the Founders spinning in their graves.

	Nah, they're mostly buried on the East Coast, so the electricity would have to come across lines owned by "those greedy out of state power companies". Never mind that those greedy out of state power companies were charging less per MW than in-state producers. 

>Item: California is seeking to collect taxes on a transaction which did 
>not occur in California. Sounds like a tariff on goods entering 
>California. Sounds like what the commerce clause was designed explicitly 
>to stop.

	If you are talking about the same thing that Declan is, then at least
1/2 of the transaction *did* occur in California. 


(I'm not in disagreement with the rest). 
-- 
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html
It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so
afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such 
knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.