Category Archives: ethics

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

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Yesterday I wrote about government intervention and personal responsibility.  Now we have corporate America looking for government protection from themselves and from their responsibilities.  Here’s the money quote, from Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, who was speaking at a recent cyber security panel discussion (a link is in the above The Daily Caller article):

We’re going to be making crazy products in 10 years and you guys [the government] are going to have the responsibility for protecting people using those products.

Meanwhile, financial leaders of the G-20 (read: leading politicians of the G-20) are still trying to find ways to bail out bankrupt countries and to inure private investors against the outcomes of their decisions to continue investing in these countries’ junk sovereign debt.

If we still believe in the truths identified in our American social compact’s principles statement

  • all men are created equal
  • they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
  • among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
  • to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men
  • whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People—it is their duty—to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government

then we cannot accept either of these sets of behaviors.  Government can help, but it’s Facebook’s responsibility (to take the particular case) to build in capability to use their products safely, and it’s our—us individual users’—responsibility to use Facebook’s products safely and securely.  Government can certainly help in this—as a follow-up to corporate efforts and our own, or as a last resort.  However, government has no obligation, can have no obligation, under our social compact to come in a priori to protect us from ourselves.  Or to regulate their product or our use of it.

If the birth place of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, early articulators of the concepts of rights inherent in the existence of individuals and of those rights’ associated individual responsibilities, at all accepts those principles, then Europe cannot continue its efforts to bail out failure and thereby relieve those who’ve failed of their responsibility for the results of their actions.

To relieve investors—or consumers—of our responsibility for our own decisions and shift that responsibility onto government is to destroy all sense of our personal responsibility.  Greece is exactly the result we get when government takes responsibility away from its citizens.  Greece is what we get when there is no (short term—i.e., within a single generation) result accruing to the individual for his own poor decision—indeed, when poor decisions are not even possible because government will fill in any shortfall from that decision.

Bobby Seale shouted “Power to the People!”  But he was a piker.  Thomas Paine had been shouting “Power to the People!  Responsibility to the People!” 200 years prior.  Mr. Zuckerberg seems to have forgotten that whole second half of our civic duty (Europe may never have learned it).  The Reverend Jesse Jackson used to challenge people to chant, “I am somebody!”  Apparently, today’s chant is “Government, make me somebody!”

Duty and Market Intervention

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I want to describe a few of instances of government intervention into our free market, then I want to describe a couple of cases of civic duty avoidance.  Then I’ll tie these two together.

Scott Gottlieb, an ex-deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal a case of FDA intervention in our market.  The salient parts of the intervention, for our purposes, are these: a superior means of repairing an aging (and so failing) valve that allows blood to flow from the heart into the aorta, a means in use in Europe for four years, is finally becoming available in the US.  The FDA insisted on increasingly extensive, slow, and costly animal and clinical studies—all for our own good.  One result of this sort of delay is that more and more American medical device makers are moving their businesses overseas, at the expense reduced availability of medical innovations to Americans.

John Carreyrou, in another The Wall Street Journal article, describes a different case of medical industry market intervention.   What’s relevant here is this: in response to the method by which Medicare measures the efficiency with which services are delivered to patients receiving home-health care, the nation’s three largest home-health care companies altered their delivery methods to maximize their reimbursements under those measurements.  Of course, this may have affected the efficiency of the care actually delivered.

In the third instance, Bob Greifeld, CEO of Nasdaq OMX, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal article, problems with Sarbanes-Oxley’s market intervention.  Here, Greifeld notes that small business’ portion of job creation in the US has fallen from 64% of the new jobs in the period from 1993 through 2008 to 51% in 2010.  Further, initial public offerings—a primary means by which companies raise capital besides borrowing—by small companies (IPOs of $50 million or less) fell from 300 per year, on average, in the ’90s (before Sarbox’ enactment in 2002) to 30 in 2010.  These reductions, while also depressed by the current economic Panic, are due largely to the cost of Sarbox compliance, which hits small companies far harder than it does the large corporations, and this in turn inhibits their growth and hiring.  Sarbox’ efforts to protect investors from their own decisions is hurting small business growth and employment.

Here, now, are the civic duty items; both involving jury duty.  In Hillsborough County, FL, a judge there was confronted with no less than 387 individuals who had ignored their jury summons on a single day (it took him 3 hours to gather 22 good citizens for a single jury pool).  His response was to issue summons to those “absentees” to explain their absence; unsatisfactory excuses could earn their offerors a fine or 6 months in jail.  In Midland County, TX, the judges faced a similar situation, with 294 no-shows on a single day.  Similar summons for show-cause hearings were issued, with unsastisfactory excuses similarly earning fines or jail for their offerors.  These two examples are all too typical, both for the two counties and for the nation.  Such skips not only are individually wrong; in their aggregate they degrade the defendant’s right to a fair and prompt trial.  And they degrade the government’s ability to obtain justice for the victims of the miscreancy in question.

Thus, on the one hand, we have government interfering with individuals’ free choice and assuming outright the responsibility for those choices, and on the other hand we have free individuals shirking their duty to their neighbors and to their community (and ultimately to their country).  Here’s how they’re related, as if you haven’t figured that out by now.  When we allow government to interfere with our choices, when we allow government to protect us from ourselves, when we allow government to assume responsibility for the outcomes of our choices, we become habituated to government handling our responsibilities for us.  And we lose our sense of responsibility.  And we shirk our responsibilities, assuming always that someone else will take care of the matter for us.

The outcome of this is not just that we grow lazy and amoral.  We lose our freedom: the only way government can take care of us, can satisfy our responsibilities for us, is by managing our outcomes for us, by managing our choices for us.  By controlling our behavior.

Government and the People

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Our social compact, as in the nature of such compacts, is an agreement entered into, voluntarily, by each of us with all of the rest of us.  It is an agreement between and among us; it involves no one else and no thing else.

A result of this compact of ours is a government which we have created to serve our needs (chief among these being the protection of our Creator-endowed natural rights in this secular world and the protection of each of us and all of us from each other—not from ourselves—and from others who are outside of our compact).  This is an important point, which many miss: our compact is not at all an agreement between us and our government.

Our government is nothing more, or less, than our creation, and as such, it is subordinate to us in every respect.  In order to enable our government to prosecute those protections, to do the job for which we created it, we do, indeed, transfer from us to it a measure of authorities and powers so that it has necessary tools.  However, these powers and authorities, originating in us, can be withdrawn by us at any time.  Thus, the relationship we have with our government is not at all one of equals, nor is it in any way a democratic relationship.  Our government is bound to do our bidding, not the other way around.

One of the things we acknowledged about ourselves in this relationship, those 230 or so years ago when we agreed to our social compact, was a duty inherent in us to replace our government when it became so oppressive, so counter to our purposes, as to no longer have our consent to govern.  This acknowledgment is sufficiently important that our Declaration of Independence says it twice:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

and again:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

When our Founders wrote these passages, they were working in a world devoid of democracy, a world containing no government that operated with the consent of the governed (however much a people may have loved its monarch).  Thus, they were envisioning the only means of abolishment as being the course on which they had embarked: violent revolution.  But the government they invented (and which followed on the example of various ancient Greek ideas, among others) made routine another means of abolishment and institution of new: periodic and frequent elections, through which we might recast our government peacefully and, simultaneously, renew our consent.  Of course this new invention did not eliminate recourse to violent overthrow, but it made resort to that, necessarily rare (“mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing”) option, extremely unlikely.

But there is another side to this asymmetric relationship between us and our government.  Of necessity, our government is subordinate to us—and so it is not independent of us.  We cannot just wind it up, set it loose, and walk away.  Nor can we divorce ourselves from the individual responsibilities and obligations that are part of that endowment in us mentioned earlier.  As our government is bound to obey our instruction, so are we bound to provide that instruction, as often as necessary.  We have a duty to ourselves, to each other, and to our subordinate government, to stay actively engaged in the politics of our time, and specifically in the activities of our government.

We must maintain active oversight of our government, working to keep it on the straight and narrow, its behavior satisfactory to our ends and not to its own.   Over the flow of history, conditions will evolve, and it may be necessary for us, as the polity of our compact, to alter our government’s path to a new course better suited to the new conditions.  We cannot do this, we cannot maintain course or alter it, if we do not remain actively engaged: positively schooled in the politics and economics and activities of our time, and positively interacting with our government to ensure it is serving our needs alone.

Pericles once said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”  Or as Plato put it more bluntly, “Those who think they are too smart for politics are doomed to be governed by those who are dumber.”

Political Correctness and Jim Crow

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I was taking my daily exercise walk through the neighborhood this morning and had an interesting conversation with a passing motorist.  Since it’s a residential area, I was moseying along in the street, and the motorist stopped and asked why I didn’t like the sidewalk (no snark; he was just curious).  The salient part of the conversation went like this:

Me: “Just habit.  Usually my wife and I walk together, and when we talk, there’s much hand-waving and elbow-flying.  The sidewalk isn’t wide enough for us.”

He: “Oh, you’re Italian.”

Me: “Nah.  We’re American.”  (OK, some leg pulling here.)

He: “No, I meant your heritage is Italian.”

Me: “Nope.  American.”

He: “I get that.  I was asking about your ethnicity.  All that hand stuff, and all.”

Me: “Yeah—like I said, American.”

This completely innocent conversation—the motorist really was just curiously asking about something that seemed entirely natural for him to ask about—illustrates how far we’ve slipped into the mess that is the Politically Correct.  We no longer think of ourselves as Americans.  We think of ourselves, instead, as part of this or that group first, and we just happen to be American, second.  We’re African-Americans. We’re Asian-Americans.  We’re Hispanic-Americans.  We’re XYZ-Americans.  We insist on these group break outs of our American-ness, as though all there is to being an American is the legal citizenship of the country to which we belong, and every difference, however minor, needs anxiously to be preserved.

But we don’t just separate ourselves on ethnicity or skin color.  We segregate along other equally useless lines.  We’re Catholics, first, and Americans second.  Or Protestant.  Or Baptist.  Or Muslim.  Or Jewish.  Or Atheist.  We’re rich, or poor, and American second; union or non-union, and American second.  In a sort of reverse artificial segregation, we can’t hold back a student who isn’t progressing in his studies because keeping him back might “stigmatize” him.  So he’s passed forward, anyway, in a reverse segregation.

This is nothing more than the preservation of the Jim Crow era’s segregation and separate but equal…claptrap.  Today’s segregation, though, is far more insidious than that era’s openly separate water fountains, restrooms, schools for which those Jim Crow Democrats of 50 years ago fought so desperately.  Today, we have “affirmative action” that seeks to give preferential treatment to government-selected groups, not on the basis of merit, but solely on the basis of belonging to the right group.  We have outright quotas, where selection is based solely on belonging to the right group: the process doesn’t even pay lip service to merit.

In the end, this PC-driven segregation accomplishes nothing but the soft bigotry of low expectations about which Bush the Younger spoke some years ago.  Although he was referring specifically to education, this low expectations nonsense is far broader than that.  This soft bigotry justifies government welfare for those “special” groups: government believes the members of these groups cannot—ever—help themselves, an individual in one of these groups cannot—ever—make the right choices, without government handouts and “guidance”  In the end, this PC-segregation serves no other purpose—intended or not—than to keep these government “favored” groups trapped in the Liberal company town, paying for their government welfare with their votes—there being no other product in the company store than dependency, and no other currency for that store’s white goods than the scrip of those votes.

We aren’t Americans who have differing beliefs—which diversity contributes to our greatness as a nation and makes our culture what people of other nations want to immigrate to join.  We aren’t Americans with differing skin tones—which differences gives us a breathtaking range of beauty.   Instead, we are those differences, first and foremost.  That’s the argument, anyway, for Political Correctness.

On second thought, PC is far worse than Jim Crow.

Update: For an additional take on the racist nature of Affirmative Action, see this article from The Wall Street Journal by Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Coalition and author of “Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of our Character” (Encounter Books, 2008).

Another Reason to Privatize Social Security

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You can’t have your disability benefits whenever it’s inconvenient to the Federal bureaucrats who control SSA in your name to act promptly.

Social Security bureaucrats—and this includes the Social Security judges who must rule on the legitimacy of a disability application—in at least seven states are slow-walking social security disability applications.  The reason offered is that, in the Federal calendar, which is used for promotion and bonus assessment, the last week of September of this year is a 53rd week due to leap year effects.  Work done in the 53rd week doesn’t count toward meeting the numbers necessary for promotion or “thousands of dollars” of bonuses: they’ve been instructed to hold off on the work for a week so the work will count toward those numbers.  Of course it’s a simple programming task to include 53rd weeks….

Apparently, the Federal bureaucrats’ perks are more important than the disability payments for thousands of Americans.  Of course the SSA spokesman “regrets this occurrence.”  No word on whether Ms Jo Anne B Barnhart herself, the head of the Social Security Administration, “regrets this occurrence.”

Read the whole thing.