Comments on: ACLU is to the Constitution as ________ is to Economics?

Question: ACLU is to the Constitution as ________ is to Economics?

doppleradar — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:36:06 -0800

ACLU is to the Constitution as ________ is to Economics?

What organizations can I join/volunteer/devote my career to that work for the rights of consumers/taxpayers/investors against the consequences of bad market and government choices?

By: jtfowl0

jtfowl0 — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:49:11 -0800

Libertarians?

By: Inspector.Gadget

Inspector.Gadget — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:52:11 -0800

Essentially any organization that interprets economics according to policy preferences will fit this analogy. The ACLU isn't a one-stop individual liberty protector; they read some provisions of the constitution more closely and others more expansively in order to create a favorable constitutional backing to their policy ideas that aren't textually present either way.

By: troy

troy — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:06:29 -0800

Heritage Foundation
American Enterprise Institute
Manhattan Institute

etc. if you bat right.

Brookings if you bat what is thought of as left in this country.

By: lee

lee — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:19:45 -0800

SEC

By: Bigfoot Mandala

Bigfoot Mandala — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:34:16 -0800

The Longview Institute? (About)

By: lunasol

lunasol — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:40:13 -0800

Brookings if you bat what is thought of as left in this country.

Actually, Brookings is pretty much considered to be a bipartisan, moderate think tank.

Anyway, you don't really say what your particular leanings are. Troy has a good list of rightwing think tanks. Some center-left think tanks are:

Center for American Progress
Economic Policy Insitute
Progressive States

There aren't really a lot of activist groups on either side of the spectrum when it comes to these issues, probably because they are someone wonky and, until this month at least, not "sexy" to most people. However, there is the libertarian Taxpayers' League and the left-leaning USAction, which both have state chapters.

By: mendel

mendel — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:41:04 -0800

Trade unions.

By: ALongDecember

ALongDecember — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:11:28 -0800

Consumer Reports.

By: grouse

grouse — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:13:47 -0800

Consumers Union (and you can support them by subscribing to Consumer Reports)
Public Interest Research Group

By: Confess, Fletch

Confess, Fletch — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:34:39 -0800

Chicago School

By: spork

spork — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:37:08 -0800

You're going about it in a funny way. See, the American Civil Liberties Union seeks to protect rights guaranteed by the constitution and laws. Economics is a social science in that it studies how goods and money are used.

You want to work to make sure this can't happen again, yes? Okay, first you need to understand what happened. Then, decide why it happened so you can try to prevent it from reoccurring. I learned a bunch watching the News Hour on PBS. That show makes one hour feel like two. The last This American Life was great too. And, you don't need a gold medal from fuckin' Sweden to know that the Republicans have their head up their ass.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:09:37 -0800

The Center for American Progress would not be a bad place to start. You can't join it per se but you can donate, and they have blogs, publications, and events like Rethinking Mortgage Finance after the Meltdown. There are a few orgs there that may merit your interest.

My family is Consumers Union going back half a century, and while they do macro stuff relating to regulatory policy, it's mostly about physical or at least retail products (e.g. debit cards). They probably will support a number of mortgage-related rule changes in the coming months, but again at a pretty basic level relating to consumer rights and not so much about (monetary) policy implications.

If you really want to be a ground-level ACLU type, NACA and some other groups that help real individual people with their mortgages would be worth looking at.

By: yclipse

yclipse — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:19:04 -0800

Cato Institute

By: history is a weapon

history is a weapon — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:19:31 -0800

URPE, trade unions, and Doug Henwood.

By: decathecting

decathecting — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:53:35 -0800

If you're interested in both the constitution and economic liberty, check out the Institute for Justice. They're a law firm that sues the government to protect the rights of the people in areas including commercial and political speech, the right to practice one's profession without undue interference, freedom from eminent domain abuse, and school choice.

By: footnote

footnote — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:14:13 -0800

In terms of lobbying, policy and research, the Center for Responsible Lending spent years and years talking about the subprime mortgage crisis, but alas, nobody listened until too late. There are also other consumer organizations such as NACA, which somebody already mentioned, and the National Consumer Law Center.

In terms of "impact" litigation (meaning, big cases that affect policy rather than individual consumer cases), Public Citizen's Litigation Group and Public Justice have lead the legal battle against preemption of state laws, including state lending laws. By abusing the doctrine of preemption, which replaces state law with weaker federal laws, mortgage lenders were able to continue to make their abusive loans until everything fell apart.

On a smaller scale of litigation, every city and region has some kind of civil legal services program for low-income individual's day-to-day problems, which will often include some kind of consumer protection program that extends to mortgage issues. One example is South Brooklyn Legal Service's Foreclosure Prevention Project.

Finally, there are many private plaintiffs' consumer law firms that litigate all sorts of consumer class actions. One of the most successful is called Lieff Cabraser, but there are smaller, three - four lawyer shops in every city.