Gape-mawed shock notwithstanding, that really is the crux of libertarian public policy: There is more importance to those with money keeping it than there is importance to not killing thousands of your less rich citizens and millions of foreigners.

Her opening paragraph is beautifully terse. It lists the worse features of libertarian policy and… asks you to not notice them. Her focus on process, which sounds a lot more “conservative” to me than “libertarian”, is best summed up by Antonin Scalia’s comment:

[...] the doctrine of “Substantive Due Process.” Only lawyers can walk around talking about substantive process, in as much as it’s a contradiction in terms. If you referred to substantive process or procedural substance at a cocktail party, people would look at you funny. But, lawyers talk this way all the time.

Setting aside the class-myoptic couching of this in terms of a cocktail party, this perfectly captures a core aspect of conservatism and libertarianism, as well as boiling Scalia’s whole judicial career down to a sound bite: “Process matters, substance is orthogonal to process, so there must never be substantive due process.”

Now, at this point a bored five year old might ask, “What’s ‘due’ mean?”

Scalia, and analogously McCardle here, are, like our beloved resident troll, equivocating. Substantive due process is not due application of substantive process, but substantive application of due process, and any arguments about “substantive process” without a discussion what right that process is due to provide are irrelevant or meaningless.

And at least in the case of Scalia, it’s nothing but bald dishonestly that they dodge the principle of due process.

I want the 2 minutes of my life I spent skimming McMegan’s linked post back. I should have known better than to bother.