社会制度 – 落园

以前来美国都是出差，反正公司管吃管住，大部分东西都不怎么操心，其实还是挺不一样的。这次是真的搬过来了，就要跟各个政府部分打交道，此时才算是真正和这个社会制度开始打交道。

我是一种对美国既不喜欢也不讨厌的状态。这次搬过来也只是想换个环境增加一点人生阅历，并非抱着一种特别崇敬的心情来看的（也可能是在欧洲待过之后已经明白了“外国的月亮也不总是圆圆的”那样的道理）。

税收制度。我现在接触到的还只是个税。美国的个税是真正意义上的“所得税”，允许有很多项目的抵扣，而不像中国的个税基本就是一个“流转税”，按工资流水交完了就完了。以前觉得欧洲税高，现在看美国税率也不低，乱七八糟扣完了手里真没什么钱了（加州有州税）。说到州税也就是美国特色的联邦－州政府制度。中国虽然是有国税和地税之分，但至少在个人所得税这里我们只需要交一次就好了。美国就要两层盘剥（取决于每个州的税制），包括法律也是，每个州都有自己的法律。而且对个人来讲最崩溃的就是要全球交税——比如我在中国有房租收入，按税法那也要交美国的税（中国已经交过的可以抵扣）。

社保。社保某种意义上就是交税，这个全球各个国家都类似，我还真没看到哪里是真正的“现收后付”，基本都是“现收现付”吧。美国乱七八糟的社保交了一堆然后发现医保还是额外买的，我至今也没太搞明白扣的一堆都是什么钱，就当交税了吧。反正在上海也是扣8%社保2%医保什么的。我刚来没几天就跑到社会安全局那里去办理ssn了，美国好像没有身份证号一说，反正ssn大概是最好的个人识别的方式了，办银行卡啊什么都靠这个。但是这东西又不象国内的身份证那样可以当证件用，这个号码居然是要保密的，这张卡也就是薄薄一张纸片，需要藏起来....

投票权。反正这个是建立在交税基础上的，刚来不久就收到呼吁停止扩建milpitas垃圾场的传单。民主有民主的玩法。

信用制度。这是除了民主之外大家羡慕美国最多的？反正我还没觉得这东西有啥特殊...

驾照。DMV应该是我到了加州之后跑的次数最多的地儿了。有意思的是，DMV除了处理跟车和驾照有关的东西，还可以申请一张id，非驾照的id。还有就是出门就要开车，这个挺讨厌的。

地址。美国好像办什么东西都特别看重地址。开银行账户需要提供带有地址的文件，办理驾照什么也都靠地址，信用卡网上购物还要验证billing address（以前用国内信用卡海淘的时候这个都是随便过的）。搬家了要通知劳工局，要通知银行，要通知dmv等等，然后美国寄东西也是奇慢无比的，习惯了国内的“江浙沪包邮次日到”只能默默的去搞个amazon prime来实现two day free shipping了。哎。还我顺丰...

房租。湾区房租贵的离谱，哎。2k刀都不一定找得到一室一厅住起来还算放心的房子。至于日常物价什么的，倒是和出差没什么两样，最多就是去超市买东西的次数多了一些。

社交。开车就没得喝酒，好像湾区人民都是过的家庭生活，下班也没见谁去喝酒，除非是生日趴什么的。倒是大大小小的各种meetup一堆堆的，可见大家晚上还是挺无聊的，需要一些活动来打发时间。

好像也没啥了，一个整天上班下班的人应该有啥可以说的呢？美国又不是欧洲，随处走走都是艺术建筑什么...

这门课真的是超级耗精力，video很长，还有很多资料要查，还得写很长的assignment...勉强跟着，多少有点力不从心了...好在结束了。

笔记零零散散的，更多是边写作业边查资料所得。这门课后半部分，professor Akhil Reed Amar 主要是在讲unwritten Constitution，就是说那些历史啊典故啊什么的，虽然没有具体写在宪法的8000字里面，但是还是彰显着宪法的精神和光辉的。大致的框架和可以从Amar的这本书里面看出来：

America’s Unwritten Constitution : The Precedents and Principles We Live By.

书可以在amazon上搜到，不过我看到一篇书评还蛮好的，很提纲挈领的总结了一番。抄一下：

The Enacted Constitution: Amar undermines the constitutional text by trying to demonstrate that we don’t actually know what the “official” version says anyway. And he goes on about “the Year of our Lord” about five times longer than one might have thought possible, debating with himself about whether that reference in the Constitution collides with the First Amendment.

The Implicit Constitution: Amar relies mostly on the predicate-act canon and the whole-text canon. The duty to do X includes the authority to do Y if Y is necessary to carry out X. On the whole, he stands on pretty firm ground here.

The Lived Constitution: You have a constitutional right “to have a pet dog, to play the fiddle, to relax at home, to enjoy family life with your loved ones, to raise your children, to wear a hat.” You get the idea. So how do you enforce your warm and cuddly constitutional right to “enjoy family life with your loved ones”? Amar doesn’t say.

The Warrented Constitution (that’s not a misspelling but a lame pun in homage to Chief Justice Earl Warren): The Warren Court (1953-1969) honored the “spirit” of the Constitution (and the letter, too, Amar argues unconvincingly). The Warren Court, of course, represented the official unmooring of constitutional law from the words of the document that the Court was supposed to be “interpreting.”

The Doctrinal Constitution: Amar asserts that Roe v. Wade was correct because it was “rights-expanding”: he argues that “a case that construes a textual constitutional right too narrowly is different from one that construes the right too broadly. Even if both cases come to be widely embraced by the citizenry, only the rights-expanding case interacts with the text of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments so as to specially immunize it from subsequent reversal.”

The Symbolic Constitution: “The most important thing to understand about America’s symbolic Constitution is simply that it exists, Amar writes:

Americans of all stripes can easily name certain texts that stand outside the confines of the written Constitution yet operate in American constitutional discourse as privileged sources of meaning, inspiration, and guidance. True, once we move beyond this core set of texts, the outer boundaries of the canon are fuzzy.

Amar’s examples: the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Feminist Constitution: In Amar’s view, all law relating to women was undermined by women’s suffrage: “under an entirely plausible vision of America’s unwritten feminist Constitution, judges soon after 1920 could have held that laws such as these [relating to contraception and abortion] were valid only if reenacted by a legislature elected by women voting equally alongside men. As for these laws, perhaps judges should have wiped the legal slate clean in 1920, by striking down the old laws and thereby obliging states to put the matter to a fresh vote.” To quote this is to refute it.

The Georgian Constitution (the name is based on that of George Washington): This chapter is mostly padding based on George Washington’s presidential (and precedential) actions. Perhaps it was intended to relieve traditionalists after the unreality of the preceding chapter.

The Institutional Constitution: Again, this is padding for traditionalists. “[P]ost-1789 institutional practice thus furnishes a powerful lens through which to read the 1789 blueprint.”

The Partisan Constitution: “Most of the rules and roles textually delineated in the original Constitution — for House members, senators, department heads, vice presidents, members of the electoral college, and so on — must today be reread through the prism of America’s two-party system.” But why?

The Conscientious Constitution: Here we get to the personal preferences of judges: “[T]here is a proper place for conscience — a concept that forms part of the necessary, albeit unwritten, substratum of American constitutionalism.” If you’re a judge, follow your bliss.

The Unfinished Constitution: This is the great morphing Constitution that is “still to be written, the hoped?for Constitution of 2020 — and of 2121 and 2222.” This constitutional morphing is our “constitutional donation.” Amar’s doubt about it is confirmed in his use of surely: “Though this [donation] does not reside on the clear surface of any explicit constitutional text, surely it forms an integral part of America’s unwritten Constitution.”

实在是每一节都很长...各种历史背景事件来龙去脉这样，读起来蛮累的。我个人印象比较深的是乔治华盛顿，比如他的言行举止言传身教确立了很多传统；然后就是一些彰显人文精神和时代光辉的文字演讲，比如大家耳熟能详的I have a dream；最后就是美国法院习惯的 stare decisis 即“遵循先例”，各种案例比如为什么现在是一人一票这样。宪法修正案也有很多故事什么的，学法律的过程除了看条文本身还要熟知很多cases，好累。我的理解是，法律是一个社会的规范条文，所以这东西不是证实或者证伪这么简单，理解法律除了需要抽丝剥茧之外，还考验人的综合和联想能力。一句话，费时的熟练工种...

虽然我是三天打鱼两天晒网，deadline之前奋力突击类型的，但是真的从这门课学到了很多东西。理解一个社会制度远远比理解一个数理模型难的多...所以宪法学起来其实比税法之类的经济法难很多，就像以前常说的一句话，经济学家考虑的更多是效率而非公平(efficiency > fairness)，而法学家考虑的是社会整体的诉求和运转规则。出发点完全是不一样的。利益分析简单，而情理分析就好难。