As a Yalie, my views on Harold Koh are clearly influenced by the admiration and respect that he commands on campus.  I think there is a good case that Harold Koh’s stated views on foreign jurisprudence are significantly outside the mainstream so as to be concerning to conservatives.  I also think it really doesn’t matter.  He’s going to be a judicial activist, and to be honest, I’d prefer my judicial activists to base their decision upon concrete international laws and treaties than to vague penumbras and multipronged tests.

Koh is, right now, merely the symbol of the brewing fight between strict constructionists and liberal activist judges (here, I use “liberal activist” not as an epithet but merely to distinguish from the less common conservative activism – which is not implausible)

Today I took part in the Yale Adam’s Cup – I helped JE take first place last year and this year I broke to the semis and dropped there.  The resolution I ended up losing on was “Resolved: Even if effective, this house would never use torture“.  I was given the affirmative (“government”) position of supporting a complete ban on torture, even if it was guaranteed to be effective.

It was a bit strange to  me.  I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the tension between torture’s efficacy and the moral implications of it.  I think it’s much clearer to me after this debate that the torture question really comes down to a core question – is there room in government for extraordinaryism.  That is, can we say, “we won’t torture except in a ticking time bomb scenario?” or does that inevitably 1) corrupt the moral fabric of our nation and 2) lead to a slippery slope.

I was very happy from an intellectual standpoint – although a bit disappointed for the ground I had to cover on the resolution – that the resolution explicitly removed the question about the efficacy of torture.  In my opinion, it’s too often a trick of politics to argue the nonexistence of complicated ethical questions.

For instance, Obama announced at his inauguration that “We reject as false the choice between our safety and ideals”.  Mark Steyn calls the declaration of “false choice” as “one of [Obama's] favorite rhetorical tics”

There is genuine conflict between ideals when one must choose between a safe population and a free population.  Anarchy (a state of nature) not safe enough in the same way that trapping everyone safely in little glass bubbles is not free enough.  There is clearly a balancing point between freedom and safety, which indicates that there is naturally a real choice to be made between the two.

The ticking time-bomb scenario leads a serious thinker to a similar conclusion.  There is obviously something lost to society in the torture of anyone, even a terrorist.  But at the same time, torture CAN work.  There are some that claim torture has no utility to society; like Obama they seek to dismiss a legitimate debate as a “false choice”. After all, if torture doesn’t work, it should not be used.  But if it DOES work, there’s a much more complex debate to be had.  (On tax revenue, it’s the Republican Party’s turn to claim they can have and eat their cake.  With little evidence, they hold up the hypothetical Laffer Curve and proclaim there will be more revenue with lower rates.)

My ultimate conclusion, despite arguing to the contrary for a total of 12 minutes, was that although we can say that torture should never be allowed, in reality given the ticking-time bomb scenario, it is human instinct to save thousands or millions of lives at the expense of a bit of human dignity.  My feeling is that any government presented with the ticking time bomb scenario – even one led by Andrew Sullivan – would torture first and apologize later.

Ross Douthat has an post up on the problems that conservatives in America face when courting the so-called Black Vote.  Douthat argues that although conservatives should not compromise their core vision nor their criticism of liberalism’s stranglehold on the minority vote (as, he alleges, George W Bush did), conservatives should try to find innovative pragmatic policy solutions that can make a big difference to those on the ground while not compromising on conservatism itself.

I agree with this point on a policy level insofar that making people happier is generally a good thing.  But more broadly speaking, I think Douthat misses the meat of the political problem.  The rift between the black vote and conservatism cannot be solved by innovative conservative policy solutions, because conservatives wouldn’t get the credit for any progress on race issues.  That’s a bad thing from a strictly policy perspective, but it’s unfortunate from a political perspective.

A consequence of both ideological beliefs and partisan allegiance is that people are likely to read their own biases into their interpretation of causality.  In my more libertarian mind, the current economic crisis was based in large part on the government encouraging bad lending practices through legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act and the government encouraging bad spending practices through the social programs jump-started under Johnson’s Great Society.  In other words, there was too much government.  This crisis has strengthened my faith in conservatism.  In the minds of  my more paternalistic acquaintances, the current economic crisis was caused by a lack of government intervention and greedy bankers running amok.  This crisis has strengthened their faith in liberalism.

As long as Republicans are seen as “tough on crime”, liberals will perceive any police brutality, any perceived injustice in law enforcement, and any racial disparities in sentencing to be just the overzealous reach of  conservatism gone wrong.

I had a guest column appear in the Yale Daily News this morning.

The latest viral video making the rounds on the internet belongs to a British MEP named Daniel Hannan.  He puts American political rhetoric to shame.

In the New York Times yesterday, with the tagline “The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.”, perhaps the most powerful piece to come out of this entire recession.

One has to wonder how Barack Obama’s pledge to conduct direct diplomacy with leaders of Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea is going.

Today, Hugo Chavez called him an “ignoramus”.

Yesterday, Iran “brushed aside” his youtube video.

And North Korea has decided to test Obama’s mettle.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.
-Barack Obama

Barack Obama has lost his mind.  It seems, unfortunately, that he’s leading a large portion of the country with him.  The reason that conservatives care about the size of government is because a small government will not overreach and do colossally stupid things.  It will not infringe on the liberty of individuals.  A small government has never been an oppressive or fascist government.  A small government can always grow if the people demand it.

On the other hand, a big government will think it’s working – until it’s too late.  A big government will not shrink at the whim of the people.  The beast will not voluntarily give up its power – it must be starved.  By its very nature, it will subsume dissent.  In a crisis, it will run the risk of moving too fast and doing too much.  History has shown us that the worst types of governments are the big ones, not the small ones.

President Obama has done this country a terrible disservice.  He, along with the crazed regulators in the House, have pushed forth a 90% tax on bonuses for all employees making over $250,000/year at firms that received bailout checks.  These strings-attached are retroactive.  When JP Morgan and Bank of America received funds, they did not know that their bonuses would have been taxed.  Some are considering returning the funds in order to break free of federal regulation – but why bother?  Matt Drudge reports that Obama’s preparing to push legislation to regulate all bonuses, regardless of whether the company received bailout funds or not.

Obama has framed this as a way to curb greed.  But he is not curbing greed – he is fundamentally changing the incentives and realigning the national landscape.  Obama is not content to merely regulate the practices of the financial industry; he wants to push a salary cap on the I-Bankers and Traders who’ve contributed greatly to the financial innovation and success of American in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Why not first cap the salaries of professional athletes?  It seems ludicrous that Alex Rodriguez can make $27.5 million a year playing baseball but that a star fund manager who generates great returns for the pensions and 401ks of working class Americans will be limited to 1/100th of that.  Michelle Obama made $300,000 while working for a hospital – if she’d worked for a fraction of that, the hospital could have bought more life-saving treatment for patients.  Barack Obama makes $400,000 a year – if he worked for a fraction of that, he could put that money towards programs that work rather than his own pocket (or better yet, he could return it to the taxpayers).   President Obama also signed a $500,000 book deal right before his inauguration – if he’d signed for less, he’d have left more money in the pockets of publishing companies – which desperately need it – and a new aspiring author could have also signed on.

I don’t begrudge President Obama or his wife any of their success – but they seem to believe, like many of the super-rich who backed them, that their success had nothing to do with the system of incentives that have been cultivated by the marketplace of opportunity that America affords.  It’s a dangerous belief.

In America, people should not live in fear of angry mobs because they made money.

Paul Krugman laments the AIG bill:

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

Obama was elected on the promise of Change.  But for some odd reason, Krugman thought that Obama wouldn’t do what he promised to do.  Obama attacked NAFTA.  Obama scapegoated profit-making enterprises (don’t you wish more companies were making a profit today, Mr. President?).  Obama made economic populism the central theme of his campaign.

Obama was the ultimate Rorschach test.  But there’s no use in crying over spilled ink.