Tag Archive for 'Nixon'

Understanding John Yoo and the Bush presidency

Published on 26 September 2009 in Justice/Law and USA. Tags: , , , , , . 0 Comments

Brad DeLong is continuing to maintain his stand against John Yoo.  To my mind, there is one clear way that John Yoo’s torture memos can be reconciled with his earlier writing on Clinton: He believes in the absolute primacy of the United States above all other nations.

Taking that as a postulate, placing US troops under foreign command becomes axiomatically unacceptable and was hence labelled unconstitutional [1], but allowing US agents to torture foreigners is acceptable, albeit unpleasant, because the victims are not American.

In practice, this becomes the application to the international stage of Richard Nixon’s famous 1977 quote, “when the President does it that means that it is not illegal.” Indeed, Condolezza Rice argued this exact point earlier this year (2009):

by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

This is simply the logical application (to the arena of military torture) of the belief that America should ignore all international agreements that constrain it in any way because to do otherwise would impugn the sovereignty of the greatest and purest nation in the history of mankind. You really have to admire their mental fortitude in failing to acknowledge the reductio ad absurdum that the Bush torture doctrine represented for that belief.

[1] To almost all Americans (including lawyers), the word “unconstitutional,” especially when applied in a political setting (and when is it not?), essentially means “against my ideology.”

Power proportional to knowledge

Published on 15 October 2008 in Economics, Epistemology, Justice/Law and Politics. Tags: , , , , , . 0 Comments

Arnold Kling, speaking of the credit crisis and the bailout plans in America, writes:

What I call the “suits vs. geeks divide” is the discrepancy between knowledge and power. Knowledge today is increasingly dispersed. Power was already too concentrated in the private sector, with CEO’s not understanding their own businesses.

But the knowledge-power discrepancy in the private sector is nothing compared to what exists in the public sector. What do Congressmen understand about the budgets and laws that they are voting on? What do the regulators understand about the consequences of their rulings?

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon’s bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

I often disagree with Arnold’s views, but I found myself nodding to this – it’s a fair concern.  I’ve wondered before about democracy versus hierarchy and optimal power structures.  I would note, however, that Arnold’s ideal of the distribution of power in proportion to knowledge seems both unlikely and, quite possibly, undesirable.  If the aggregation of output is highly non-linear thanks to overlapping externalities, then a hierarchy of power may be desirable, provided at least that the structure still allows the (partial) aggregation of information.