- During my professional lifetime, liberals and the left-wing
have focused on failures and misdeeds of the private sector, while libertarians
and conservatives have focused on the failures and misdeeds of the public
sector or government. It turns out that both sides are right.
-
- The Enron case and the other accounting scandals of this
new century are testimony to misdeeds driven by private sector greed, just
as the unjustifiable war in Iraq is testimony to the abusive behavior of
government.
-
- Justice demands that we be always on guard against a
prosecutor's case. However, the devastation wrought by fraud committed
by a few at the top of Enron seems real. Thousands of employees lost jobs
and pensions, and shareholders took a large hit.
-
-
- We now know that fraud on the part of the Bush administration
launched the ill-fated Iraqi war. The war's financial and human cost dwarf
the Enron catastrophe. The out-of-pocket cost of the war to date is $337
billion, with steep future costs for veterans' care and replacement of
military equipment. Approximately 3,000 US troops have been killed, and
Department of Veterans Affairs documents show that 100,000 veterans of
Iraq and Afghanistan have been granted disability compensation. Estimates
of Iraqi civilian "collateral damage" range from 30,000 to 655,000
deaths. America's reputation has been shattered, and the prospects for
terrorist "blow-back" are higher.
-
- The most important difference between these two fraud
cases, however, is in accountability. The Enron executives have been brought
to justice with prison sentences, multi-million dollar fines, and, in one
case, by death from a heart attack brought on, perhaps, by the stress of
prosecution.
-
- Even if the Bush administration and the rubber-stamp
Congress are held accountable in next month's election, the ringleaders
of the war are unlikely to be brought to justice. Polls indicate that the
November election--if votes are honestly counted, an uncertainty with the
electronic voting machines--will hold Bush and the Republicans accountable
by ending one-party rule.
-
- A number of commentators have noted that with the Democrats
as complicit in the war as the Republicans, a change in party control over
one or both houses of Congress is not exactly accountability.
-
- But the problem is larger than that.
-
- When government officials are held accountable, they
are merely voted out of office and not generally prosecuted. They do not
suffer the same severe punishments as their counterparts in the private
sector.
-
- Enron destroyed jobs, not people's lives, and the financial
cost was inconsequential compared to Iraq. The disparities in accountability
and punishment for misdeeds in government and private sectors are striking.
-
- So far in history no private sector interest has been
able to achieve power over a population comparable to the power wielded
by Stalin or Hitler, and no private sector power has been able to set aside
civil liberties as Bush has done. The liberal-left notion that government
is our protector from the private sector is as naive as the libertarian-right
view that all wrong resides in the government. The common denominator of
wrong is the fallibility of man.
-
- The Founding Fathers gave us a government infused with
sufficient power to deliver justice to a people who believe in justice,
but structured to be incapable of enslaving the people. The government's
powers were separated, dispersed, and tied down with the Constitution and
Bill of Rights. Law was made a shield of the innocent rather than a weapon
in the hands of government.
-
- This Blackstonian concept of law was gradually eroded
by the Benthamite conception. In a nutshell, Jeremy Bentham's argument
is that once democracy had triumphed over monarchy, people no longer had
reason to fear government which was now the product of self-rule. Bentham
argued that Blackstonian concepts constrained government from using its
power to do good, and that the restraints should be removed in the interests
of the greatest good for the greatest number.
-
- Over time Benthamite law gained in strength as various
ideologies or interests in power chaffed at restraints on their agendas
and as wars and the Great Depression, and now "terrorism," created
crises which accumulated power in government, as Robert Higgs has demonstrated.
-
- A government that has set aside habeas corpus and the
rule against self-incrimination is the last place one should look for protection.
-
- A Future of Freedom Foundation conference will echo this
theme next June. The underlying theme of the conference, as the organizer,
Jacob Hornberger, explained to me, is that "blow-back" to US
Middle East policy "resulted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which
then led to the post-9/11 assaults on civil liberties."
-
- I agree with Hornberger that the way to deal with terrorism
is to change the policies that provoke it. What the Bush administration
has done is to institutionalize elements of a police state as protections
against terrorists so that it doesn't have to change its policy in the
Middle East. There is no gain in being made more secure from terrorism
by being made less protected against the police power of government. One
threat simply replaces another, or is added to another.
-
- However, if Hornberger believes that the assault on our
civil liberties began with 9/11, he hasn't a clue as to how serious the
problem is. The year before 9/11 Lawrence M. Stratton and I published a
book, which we titled "How The Law Was Lost" and which the publisher
titled "The Tyranny of Good Intentions." By law, we meant the
Blackstonian concept of law as a shield of the people, which is enshrined
in the Bill of Rights. We show in our book that our civil liberties have
been so eroded that many are "dead-letter" rights.
-
- The Bush administration's recent detainee and torture
legislation merely took some of these dead-letter rights off the books.
Even if the Supreme Court puts the rights back on the books, they have
been eroded by legal precedent and neglect.
-
- Both left and right have fallen into Benthamite thinking
in order to better chase after the particular devils in their agendas.
"Law and order conservatives," for example, are inclined to regard
certain civil liberties as "coddling criminals" and thoughtlessly
take the side of police and prosecutors against civil liberties. Both left
and right are prepared to deny First Amendment rights to the other side,
and political correctness makes it impossible to debate many issues or
to acknowledge many problems. The left has long campaigned against the
Second Amendment, an essential civil liberty. When a problem is pointed
out, people demand a program of action as a solution. However, not every
problem has a policy solution. When people no longer understand that civil
liberties are more important than political agendas, they have lost sight
of the belief system that protects them. Beliefs are more important than
institutions.
-
- As Michael Polanyi noted many years ago, if people believed
in Stalinism, democracy would uphold Stalinism. If people believe in Bentham
over Blackstone, there will be no civil liberties regardless of political
accountability.
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- Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate
Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor
of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including
The Supply-Side Revolutin (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political
Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University
and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He
has contributed to numerous scholar journals and testified before Congress
on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service
Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal
of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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