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Now
If Enron's Skilling Gets 24 Years in Prison,
How Many Should Bush and Cheney Get?
The
Crimes of Greed vs. the Crimes of Government
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
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.
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
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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