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Stuart Taylor on how laws are strangling our economy and culture.
It’s no secret that America’s public schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — among other institutions — are broken. After decades of alarming reports and reform efforts, they still cost far more, and with worse results, than those of almost all other developed countries. And President-elect Obama’s hope of changing things dramatically for the better faces an uphill battle.
A big part of the reason, New York City lawyer-author-civic leader Philip Howard writes in a forthcoming book, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law, is that our institutions and their leaders are paralyzed by tangles of legal rules and diverted “from doing what we think is right” by fear of being unfairly hauled into court.
“We will never fix our schools, or make health care affordable, or re-energize democracy, or revive the can-do spirit that made America great,” Howard writes, “unless American law is rebuilt to protect freedom in our daily choices.” By this he means freeing ourselves from “the confusion of good judgment with legal proof.”
Reprising the themes of Howard’s best-selling Death of Common Sense in 1995, Life Without Lawyers also proposes some far-reaching remedies, designed in part to affirmatively define and protect the freedom of people in positions of authority to fulfill their responsibilities in their own way. To be published on January 12, its 191 pages are crammed with telling cases, anecdotes, and data. It brims with insights into how “rights” that were created to prevent “unfairness by those in authority” are now “guaranteeing unfairness to the common good.”
Howard, who is a senior partner in the New York City office of Covington & Burling and chairs Common Good, a legal reform organization that he founded in 2002, has convinced an ideologically eclectic array of leaders that he is on to something. Life Without Lawyers carries admiring blurbs by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Bill Bradley, former Harvard University President Derek Bok, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The book focuses especially on our schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — which itself plagues schools, as illustrated by the ban on running in playgrounds that one Florida county adopted after having to settle 189 playground lawsuits in five years, and health care, as demonstrated by the surge in childhood obesity caused in part by overcautious playground safety rules. …
Spengler takes a cold-blooded look at Bernie Madoff’s accomplishments and comes out of the closet too.
Now that the whole horrible truth has come to light, I have no more reason to conceal my true identity. I am Bernard Madoff.
Well, not really. But I wish I were. Few Americans have done more to punish stupidity, pretension and complacency than Madoff, whose apparent US$50 billion swindle calls to mind the caper by Mephistopheles in the second part of Goethe’s Faust. The fictional devil persuaded the emperor to issue paper money against buried treasured yet to be discovered. …
… Madoff, 70, a former Nasdaq chairman, was arrested by federal prosecutors last week in relation to what he reportedly told his sons was a long-running Ponzi scheme – that is one in which investors are paid high returns from money paid in by subsequent investors.
Most gratifying is the fleecing of the rich and famous – director Steven Spielberg, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and even actress Uma Thurman’s financier boyfriend Arpad Busson got stung, along with a list of supposedly savvy investment firms. The man deserves a medal. Deplorable, to be sure, is the ruin of hundreds of families who entrusted Madoff with their life savings, not to mention charities and school endowments. Call them collateral damage. I have never been squeamish about killing civilians when urgent military objectives are at stake. We give medals all the time to people who cause innocent death in war. Tough on them if they can’t take a joke, as the artillery likes to say about friendly-fire casualties.
The very rich believe what F Scott Fitzgerald said about them, that “the very rich are different from you and me”. Serried ranks of lawyers, accountants and financial advisors surround them and keep them from harm. Madoff proved otherwise, making a few of them into paupers and humiliating a very large number of them. Not because of what they do, but because of who they are, the very wealthy consider themselves above the fate of ordinary people. They know the right people, they join the right clubs, and they have access to the right advice. Sometimes it takes a national catastrophe to teach them otherwise. The slaughter of the subalterns in World War I destroyed the flower of the English gentry, and the Russian revolution left counts driving taxicabs in Paris. There was no recuperation from such punishment. …
Yesterday we had a few favorable looks at George W. Bush. Not so today as we have Mark Helprin from the WSJ. He says, “a pox on both their houses.”
… The counterpart to Republican incompetence has been a Democratic opposition warped by sentiment. The deaths of thousands of Americans in attacks upon our embassies, warships, military barracks, civil aviation, capital, and largest city were not a criminal matter but an act of war made possible by governments and legions of enablers in the Arab world. Nothing short of war — although not the war we have waged — could have been sufficient in response. The opposition is embarrassed by patriotism and American self-interest, but above all it is blind to the gravity of the matter. Though scattered terrorists allied with militarily insignificant states are not, as some conservatives assert, closely analogous to Nazi Germany, the accessibility of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons makes the destructive capacity of these antagonists unfortunately similar — a fact, especially in regard to Iran, that is persistently whistled away by the Left.
An existential threat of such magnitude cannot be averted by imagining that it is the work of one man and will disappear with his death; by mousefully pleasing the rest of the world; by hopefully excluding the tools of war; or by diplomacy without the potential of force, which is like a policeman without a gun, something that doesn’t work anymore even in Britain. The Right should have labored to exhaustion to forge a coalition, and the Left should have been willing to proceed without one. The Right should have been more respectful of constitutional protections, and the Left should have joined in making temporary and clearly defined exceptions. In short, the Right should have had the wit to fight, and the Left should have had the will to fight. …
Helprin warns about our vulnerability to China and Forbes warns of the same thing.
… This decade, for example, the Chinese have fired lasers to blind American satellites, actions that can be considered direct attacks on the U.S. In October 2006, a Chinese submarine for the first time surfaced in the middle of an American carrier group. This episode, which occurred in the Philippine Sea southeast of Okinawa, was an obvious warning to the U.S. Navy to stay away from Asian waters.
Then, in January 2007, the People’s Liberation Army, in what was an unmistakable display of military power, destroyed one of China’s old weather satellites with a ground-launched missile. During Hu’s tenure there has been a noticeable increase in cyber-intrusions and attacks on defense and civilian networks in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Why is Hu Jintao pushing his country down a path of high-profile force projection? There are two main reasons. First, there is the inevitable change in outlook when a nation goes from poor and weak to rich and strong. So it is natural that this rising power is thinking about how to exercise newfound strength. Although not everyone in Beijing believes the bloated claims aired in the West about China’s future, most Chinese officials nonetheless feel they will profoundly change geopolitics in the coming years. In any event, more and more of them see this moment as the time for China to reassert itself. …
Charles Krauthammer comments on Senate picks.
… In light of the pending dynastic disposition of the New York and Delaware Senate seats, the Illinois way is almost refreshing. At least Gov. Rod Blagojevich (allegedly) made Barack Obama‘s seat democratically open to all. Just register the highest bid, eBay-style.
Sadly, however, even this auction was not free of aristo-creep. On the evidence of the U.S. attorney’s criminal complaint, a full one-third of those under consideration were pedigreed: Candidate No. 2 turns out to be the daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House; Candidate No. 5, the first-born son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Caroline Kennedy, Beau Biden and Jesse Jackson Jr. could someday become great senators. But in a country where advantages of education, upbringing and wealth already make the playing field extraordinarily uneven, we should resist encouraging the one form of advantage the American Republic strove to abolish: title.
No lords or ladies here. If Princess Caroline wants a seat in the Senate, let her do it by election. There’s one in 2010. To do it now by appointment on the basis of bloodline is an offense to the most minimal republicanism. Every state in the union is entitled to representation in the Senate. Camelot is not a state.
Jennifer Rubin writes on the Senate maneuvering.
Borowitz reports Caroline asked to be Time’s Person of the Year.