The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too theory on government extended to a new emphasis on "voluntary regulations", which are a lot like ordinary regulations except no one actually follows them.
Here we have a tool – the municipal ordinance – devised as an extraordinary and emergency measure (and consequently issued through mayoral fiat without passing through the customary municipal decision-making procedures) being used instead as a means to establish ordinary regulations.
The Germans, prodded by Chancellor Angela Merkel's new coalition partners, the Social Democrats, have refused to accept a deal that includes special rights for investors and corporations that seek to block ordinary regulations in special arbitration tribunals.
The purpose of the moratorium his clients faced was "to prohibit use," while the purpose of ordinary zoning regulation is "to enable use," he explained.
By applying strict First Amendment scrutiny to this ordinary economic regulation, he warns, the court threatens to substitute "judicial for democratic decision-making".
And referring to Lochner v. New York, the 1905 Supreme Court decision that summoned a constitutionally protected "right of contract" to block government regulation, he added: "At worst, it reawakens Lochner's pre-New Deal threat of substituting judicial for democratic decision making where ordinary economic regulation is at issue".
Such ordinary and sensible regulations rely on, among other things, our belief that in a sane and democratic nation regulation may become excessive, but need not, because reasonable people are watchful and can be relied on to do sensible things.
The idea is to make it clear to errant officials that, no matter what they may think of ordinary laws and regulations, there is a big one they cannot ignore.
"The function of government is not to create hardships for its citizens, but to provide relief," Mr. Molinaro wrote in the letter, in which he contends that these districts impose onerous regulations on ordinary homeowners.
But throughout his career he has exhibited a willingness to push things as far as he can on an opportunistic basis, running roughshod over competitors, business partners, ordinary people, rules, and regulations.
But while they have had trouble engaging the public's imagination in many cases -- it is hard to explain abstruse European regulations to ordinary Britons and expect them to remain alert -- they have had no such problem with the metric issue.
