Torture & Rule of Law

It's too easy for liberals to dismiss torture as ineffective as well as despicable. There are strong arguments for believing that torture can force people to reveal knowledge they might not otherwise disclose. Let us suppose, then, for the sake of argument, that torture can be an effective tool in dealing with terrorists. Given that premise, what is the morality of using torture?

In my view, torture can only be justified when (1) there is an immediate danger, (2) there is reason to doubt the effectiveness of nonviolent interrogation methods, (3) the decision to proceed is made through a procedure that provides for the unanimous agreement of a dispassionate fact-finder and those who would inflict the torture, and (4) the torture would be carefully monitored to prevent sadism or excess. In such a procedure, the people making the decisions would suffer no liability for deciding against torture, but could suffer liability for deciding in favor of it or proceeding with it if they knowingly used false information or personal malice.

In both the first and second conditions, there must be independent evidence. That is, the premises must be established by some evidentiary indication, not simply the captor's fear or speculation. Torture, then, should be available in extreme situations as a last resort.

Getting Analysis of NJ Budget Dispute

Today, hoping to find some discussion of the rights and wrongs of the NJ budget dispute between Gov. Corzine and the State Assembly's Democrats, I searched Google for articles, even blogs, on the subject. All I could find were news reports about the existence of the dispute, and the effect of the shutdown. Not a word anywhere that I could find about the merits of the positions. This is the pathetic state of the press in America today.

Jobs

Rob Shapiro of NDN's Globalization Project recently commented that low job creation in the US is the result of higher energy and healthcare costs in the US than elsewhere. I question both premises. First, US energy costs are, if anything, lower than in our competitors because we have low energy taxes, subsidize our energy business, possess abundant fuel resources, and have an infrastructure that allows industry to switch between fuels fairly easily. In addition, since we have been worse than other countries in conserving energy since the Reagan administration, we have more ability to reduce our consumption if necessary.

As to healthcare costs, we know that we pay about twice as much as other industrialized countries, and in return receive a lower quality of care. But that doesn't mean industry pays more than elsewhere. Companies receive tax deductions for their expenditures, while other countries charge higher taxes. In addition, US companies have fewer retirees compared to Japan and Europe. I don't know the costs after factoring in these considerations, and perhaps they are still higher, but until someone does the study, the claim that we suffer from higher healthcare expenses is just conventional wisdom.

Neoconservative idealism

Francis Fukuyama's wonderful article in a recent NY Times Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html, gives a succint overview of the intellectual roots of neoconservatism and discusses their idealistic thinking in advocating the Iraq War.

I have some difficulty with terming the neoconservative agenda "idealistic, as Fukuyama does. Idealism is generally thought to be benign, a posture of directly seeking the good because that's the right thing to do. The friendly critique of idealism is that it ignores reality, and in doing so leads to bad results; the unfriendly is that conceptualizing and pursuing the good is not worth doing, either because there is no such thing as the good, or the pursuit inevitable ends badly.

The so-called idealism of the neocons, though, is not exactly a pursuit of the good for its own sake. Whether to preserve access to oil, or safeguard Israel, or foreclose a base for terrorism, or revenge Bush's father, there were more dominant motivations for invading Iraq than an abstract idea that getting rid of the evil dictator would be a good thing to do. It isn't very pure, that is, and it serves more as a fig leaf for baser motives than as anything important in itself. Since the neocons are themselves far from naive people, I assume they know this as well as anyone else. In other words, the use of the term "idealism" to characterize their argument is an unwarranted rhetorical cleansing of what they were actually doing.

That said, I was delighted with Fukuyama's intellectual history, and especially with this gem:
""The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support."

Howell's Washington Post piece

I've been following the dust-up over Deborah Howell's biased reporting in the Washington Post. She wrote that Abramoff contributed to both Dem and Repub representatives, as if the wrongs were equal, and when the Post blog got tons of angry comments, she give an insipid and misleading "correction." Recently there was a discussion by bloggers and the Post's editor, Jim Brady, about the Post's shutting down its blog to get rid of obscenity. In all this discussion, the whole point of the brouhaha has been lost: namely, Howell's biased reporting! Amazing to me. If her reporting had been on the Fox network or in some other overtly partisan place, nobody would have objected. But when, like Judith Miller's, it comes as a factual piece in a liberal medium, her falsifications and misleading statements have a lot of malign impact.

Moral Majority

The WSJ this morning has an article about how China, the Islamic world, and other parts of the world are developing new internets. The reason these are gaining some traction, rather than being technological toys, is the world's distrust of American control over the internet through ICANN, a distrust based on its hatred of Bush. In other words, out of a world population of, say, 5 billion people, 150 million support Bush, and the other 97% hate and fear him.

I do not think the hatred of the world, the nearly universal view of the Bush people as villains, derives from their policies per se. Of much greater importance, and danger to human well-being, is their systematic distortion of humanity's core moral values. That they often do so in the name of Christianity is simply hypocritical icing on their stinking cake. The distortions I am talking about consist of a publicly asserted and defended moral relativism that turns values like truth, charity, and justice into propaganda tools, to be used or betrayed as necessary to advance the user's personal agenda. They speak contemptuously of the "reality-based community," proclaim actions compassionate that injure the people they affect, and assert the right of the President to ignore the laws and Constitution when it suits him. These statements openly trivialize and debase the values they purport to use.

Even Richard Nixon, the last truly villainous Republican President, did not go so far. He tried to conceal or deny doing the wrong and immoral things that were eventually proven, but he never tried to deny that those things were in fact wrong or immoral. In other words, when he abused the powers of the Presidency his defense was that he didn't do it. Bush, by contrast, admits that he did it, and claims that it was right and proper for him to do so.

It cannot be truthfully said that terrible people like Bush et al reliably meet their comeuppance. More often than not they prosper from their behavior (except to the extent that they must live with themselves and their ilk), and when such people run political units, they create hell on earth for everyone caught in their web. Often these hells then last for decades or centuries. The good news is that we are still a democracy, with the power to stop and reverse the horrible policies these people are imposing on us and the world at large. The bad news is that every new day makes their impact more indelible.

Health care reform

Yesterday's WSJ contained discussions of health care reform that I found simultaneously interesting and obscure. It was interesting because of intelligent reader comments and some good comments about the limited value of making consumers pay for their medical care. But it was obscure because the writers were throwing around supposed facts that were not placed in context, and were used as debating props, rather than aids to reasoned discussion. In general, advocates don't seem to work from a common database, and many of the supposed "facts" people cite are either falsehoods or distortions. For example, wingnuts claim that malpractice law is a major culprit, but all available data suggests that malpractice cases are rare, hard to win, and barely touch the hundreds of thousands of actual malpractice.

Nobody seems to mention, any more, the carefully crafted approach worked out by Hilary Clinton and Ira Messenger in 1993, yet as far as I can tell it was the closest thing to a comprehensive and intelligent solution that we have ever had. It was defeated by partisan politics, special interest activity, and clumsy advocacy, not on its merits. I find it hard to take health care reform proposals seriously if they don't build on that proposal, or explain convincingly why not.

Alito

I am sorry to see so many ill-informed comments on Judge Alito's decisions. The fundamental distinction between good judges and bad ones is whether they proceed by choosing the result they desire first and then chopping logic to get there (Scalia, Rehnquist), or by following careful legal reasoning to either the result required or the discretion that the law allows (Harlan, Frankfurter). In my reading of Alito's controversial decisions, he has consistently followed the latter approach. Even where the discretion he exercises is not what I might have chosen, I respect how he got there. Whether Alito now holds the personal views he held in the Reagan years is another matter. But even if he does, I do not see him as an idealogue. Many Supreme Court justices have changed over the years, and given Alito's temperament it seems likely that he comes from the "reality-based" community, and will grow more liberal over time as he considers the consequences of his decisions.

Who I am

I'm a lawyer by training and inclination, have been a business entrepreneur most of my life, and consider myself to be fairly conservative on economic policy, while favoring social policies based on fairness, kindness, and community. I have lived in three cities: Boston, San Francisco, and for some time now, NY. I divide my time between managing investments, arbitrating and mediating legal disputes, working for improved legal systems, serving as chairman of the board of a cosmetic company, and writing a history of the origins of business. I have published articles about antitrust problems in the newspaper industry, Harvard's investment policies, the cost-benefit evaluation of water development in California, and energy policies from an environmental point of view.

Casino corruption is a sideshow

Casino corruption is a sideshow. The main event is far more serious: a full-scale attack on the structures and values that have made America the closest nation to paradise on earth for the last two centuries. This is corruption of a grand order, and responses that merely criticize this or that practice or policy are inadequate. Kerry laid out very well and very clearly what was wrong with Bush's policies in a host of areas, and most Americans consistently agreed with him, but he still lost because he failed to nail the rot from which those policies spring. The basic problem is that the Bush people are fundamentally un-American and immoral. It is not just that they engage in torture, murder, lying, deception, and unlawful conduct. Even worse, I think, is that they openly argue in favor of such behaviors, which were formerly regarded as so shameful that even inveterate crooks like Nixon felt it necessary to deny engaging in such conduct.