The (Flexible) Rule of Law Professors
George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki writes in today's Wall Street Journal that the "Obama administration's behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy" is an affront to the "rule of law" that simply can't be tolerated:
By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing businesses. That is, businesses that might have received financing before but that now will not, since lenders face the potential of future government confiscation. In other words, Mr. Obama may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election. But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?
The value of the rule of law is not merely a matter of economic efficiency. It also provides a bulwark against arbitrary governmental action taken at the behest of politically influential interests at the expense of the politically unpopular. The government's threats and bare-knuckle tactics set an ominous precedent for the treatment of those considered insufficiently responsive to its desires. Certainly, holdout Chrysler creditors report that they felt little confidence that the White House would stop at informal strong-arming.
That's some nice rhetoric. Too bad Mr. Zywicki wasn't saying this when he was director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that violates thousands of private contracts a year under the pretext of antitrust enforcement. Indeed, everything Mr. Zywicki describes above goes on at the FTC every single day. So why exactly was he working for them in a senior management position? And why is George Mason so eager to embrace a man whose intellectual integrity comes with its own revolving door?
Comments (25)
Matt R.
Olivia clearly has some beef with GMU, which I wish he'd air privately, as his ad hominem attacks don't add anything to the discussion.
Published: May 13, 2009 12:47 PM
J. Kelly
I concur with Matt. We risk the same type of senseless division that is endemic to all forms of radical politics (recall the Monty Python sketch on the matter). It is fruitless and counter-productive.
Published: May 13, 2009 1:16 PM
Paul
Attacking someone when he is correct is not an effective tool for liberty.
Published: May 13, 2009 1:22 PM
Michael A. Clem
Would you other commentors want to use Zywicki as a source, only to have someone else shoot him down for his apparent hypocrisy? Unless he now regrets the work he did on the FTC. There are far too many people who say one thing but do another.
Published: May 13, 2009 1:54 PM
Lucas M. Engelhardt
I concur with the commenters.
It seems that Oliva has some grudge against GMU... to my knowledge, the University never claimed to be "ideologically pure" (though I might be wrong).
And it seems pointless to attack a man when he is right because there was a time when he was either wrong or hypocritical.
For example, if JM Keynes had abandoned his theories in favor of ABCT, I think the appropriate response would not be to condemn him for being so very wrong all those years. Rather, we should say something like "Good, now make up for the mistakes you made." A statement like this sounds like "making up for mistakes" to me.
Published: May 13, 2009 1:57 PM
Alex
I've got to go with Oliva on this one. If you look up "Austrian School of Economics" on Wikipedia, and hit the "organizations" tab on the side, the first name on the list is George Mason University. GMU probably has the strongest "free market" reputation out of any university in the country (except for possibly UChicago). George W. Bush also has one of the strongest "free market" reputations among US presidents, but that doesn't make it so. If one were to look at most of Bush's rhetoric, one would probably agree this reputation is deserved, but a look at his policies tells a different story. This is a similar situation. I'm sure most of you guys are furious that Bush has a free market reputation and insist on the truth at every oppurtunity; Oliva feels the same way about GMU. If Keynes had converted to Austrian thought, that would have been great; if he had spewed Austrian rhetoric publicly while privately advising Keynsian policy to the State, not so much.
Published: May 13, 2009 2:29 PM
fundamentalist
FEE has a good article on its web site about "conservative Keynesians" which explains why Bush was the way he was. A "conservative Keynesian" is an oxymoron like iron butterfly, or jumbo shrimp, but it explains Bush's weird behavior.
Published: May 13, 2009 2:49 PM
BillySixString
What happened to Oliva's post titled "Tyler Cowen, Resign!" (http://blog.mises.org/archives/009935.asp)? Was it lost down the memory hole?
Here it is:
Tyler Cowen: "I do not agree with Obama on all points but he understands economic policy better than do most professional economists, whether Democrats, Republicans, etc."
Today's Wall Street Journal, quoting an Obama administration official: "You don't need banks and bondholders to make cars."
Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney: "The recent developments in the marketplace should make it clear that we can no longer rely upon the marketplace alone to ensure that competition and consumers will be protected."
Varney added that the Antitrust Division doesn't need to abide by due process or economic constraints because "there is no such thing as a false positive" in antitrust. In other words, the Justice Department is infallible on matters of economic policy.
I've had enough of hearing about George Mason University's reputation as a free-market "Austrian" economics department. It's just another Beltway s**t-hole littered with mediocre talent and ex-government officials. And as a Virginia resident, money confiscated from my wallet is going to subsidize these hacks.
Published: May 13, 2009 3:24 PM
Raul
Lucas,
I agree with you that if someone renounces earlier beliefs and comes to believe something else, there is nothing wrong with that. However, has Zywicki ever renounced anything he did at the FTC? (This is not rhetorical, I don't know if he ever has.)
Published: May 13, 2009 3:53 PM
DNA
Speaking of GMU, here's something truly embarrassing from an Austrian economist in need of a crowbar to remove his lips from Tyler Cowen's posterior:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/05/reasonable-radicalism.html#comments
Published: May 13, 2009 3:57 PM
filc
Doesn't seem like an attack. Seemed more like a question worth pondering.
Published: May 13, 2009 4:28 PM
Arend
What Lucas M. Engelhardt said.
@ filc: That some commenters see this blogpost solely as an attack at GMU has to do with an earlier out of line blogpost by Oliva that got deleted of the site. This deleted blogpost should according to the reasoning Oliva uses in this blogpost follow him till the end of days. But I suspect most commenters will not be that slow forgiving.
Published: May 13, 2009 6:30 PM
S.M. Oliva
"And it seems pointless to attack a man when he is right because there was a time when he was either wrong or hypocritical."
Hmm. It seems some of you are caught up on this "what he said" point. Look, I thought Mr. Zywicki's article was excellent. I'm happy to recommend it. And I'm certainly not seeking some mea culpa from him over his prior FTC employment.
But before some of you jump on me for being divisive or attacking people, please try to bear this in mind. There are very real victims of FTC violence. I've spent years speaking with these people and trying to tell their stories as best I can. For some of this time, Mr. Zywicki was on the other side of the fence. He was helping the FTC hurt these people -- many of whom are still suffering from the effects of FTC judgments. They're not allowed to forget about it. So I'm certainly not going to lay off Mr. Zywicki -- or anyone else who was responsible for these crimes -- out of some false sense of promoting libertarian unity.
I hope this clarifies my position.
Published: May 13, 2009 6:39 PM
anon
Hayek alluded to this, actually:
" By moving around the world I have avoided that corruption which government service regularly involves.
And more sadly, I have seen in some of my closest friends and sympathizers—I won't mention any names—who completely agreed with me, how a few years in government corrupted them intellectually and made them unable to think straight."
Note that Hayek doesn't express disdain for them - despite their faults - in some morally patronizing tone.
If we're serious about spreading the message of liberty and sound economics, and about winning hearts and minds - ad-hominem attacks and moral-posturing of this variety has to stop. Otherwise it's just preaching to the choir - any "moderate" or socialist (which is the default position for most people) would instantly be turned off.
But it's more cozy being an armchair critic, and deride others what they should have done. Always an ego-stroking, self-validating exercise.
Published: May 14, 2009 3:08 AM
anon
btw it's good to be reminded that Mises himself eventually couldn't stand Rothbard - Rothbard's views (anti-Americanism, pro-Vietcong left-wing political agitation) were so extreme, and vituperation so intolerable, to Mises, that he stopped talking and communicating with Rothbard for the last 15 years or so of his life.
My point is that being right is one thing, how you communicate your views is quite another. Be careful not to alienate those whom you're trying to persuade from the truth.
Published: May 14, 2009 3:15 AM
steven
anon
re: Rothbard/Mises... what are you referring to?
Published: May 14, 2009 7:20 AM
Jeffrey Tucker
Anon. is making stuff up.
Published: May 14, 2009 7:49 AM
Jeremy H.
[I posted this before. It seems to have been removed.]
What evidence do we have the Zywicki was engaging in anti-liberty behavior at FTC?
I realize that for some libertarians, simply accepting government money is a sin. And furthermore, many readers and bloggers on this site are opposed to "libertarian centralism" (as am I, in general). But outside of these two complaints, it appears that part of Zywicki's time at FTC was spent trying to reduce interstate barriers to trade, e.g.:
http://archives.energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/10302003hearing1119/Zywicki1767.htm
As I said, libertarian centralism, i.e., using the power of the federal government to fight state regulations, may be a bad idea for both pragmatic and philosophic reasons. But Mr. Oliva's charges that Zywicki was helping "FTC violence," "was helping the FTC hurt these people," and labeling his actions as "crimes" are quite serious charges.
If being employed by the government is enough to convict a man in libertarian court, then no need to bring up FTC -- Zywicki works for a state university. But what other evidence does Mr. Oliva or others have that to back up these charges?
Published: May 14, 2009 8:25 AM
anon
Cut and paste:
"It was common knowledge back in the sixties that Mises, who was on board of directors of the John Birch Society, was so incensed at Rothbard’s anti-Americanism and pro-Vietcong left-wing political agitation that he stopped talking or communicating with Rothbard. Unless the Rothbardians have engaged in major historical revisionism, this shouldn’t be too difficult to confirm. As for Mises’s extremism, his name appeared each month on the Birch magazine (American Opinion?), which you can probably still find in the collections of some libraries (perhaps even on-line.) And in Human Action, he wrote (sorry, don’t have the page reference, but you can probably look it up under “conscription” in the index) that, in the face of the Soviet threat, anyone who opposed military conscription was guilty of aiding and abetting the Soviets in their quest for world domination (or something along those lines)."
Published: May 14, 2009 8:45 AM
DNA
anon:
Source, please?
Published: May 14, 2009 8:50 AM
Chuck
What Zywicki is doing is promoting a false dichotomy between a corrupt right and a corrupt left. It's the old good cop - bad cop routine. He wants you to think he is against Obama and the left when they are actually working together.
Published: May 14, 2009 4:36 PM
College Parasite
"Moderation" will always lead us a bit further down the path of statism. Even if your argument is not twisted by the statist you're arguing with, who might go out spouting that "even libertarians" agree with his version of big government, it's very rare that someone as intellectually stiff or dishonest as to refuse to consider a radical opposite point will stick to defending liberty consistently, rather than being quickly reverted to full statism as soon as an event happens (or is portrayed by the media so) that "proves" too much liberty leads to bad things.
I think the problem with "moderates" is that they don't realize, or don't believe, that our current model of society orbiting around State permits and handouts is not salvageable. It feels that libertarians fighting bitterly for every inch of lost ground are doing nothing more than (if they are successful) postponing the inevitable breakdown of the current order. If there is to be a future for liberty, it won't be thanks to thoroughly, hopelessly indoctrinated "normal people", who are, to be honest, too busy trying to make do with whatever scraps their overlords throw at them to question whether something's fundamentally wrong with it.
That is not to say that we should just wait for the "wheel of history" to magically bring liberalism to the top. But Pyrrhic victories in arguments here and there aren't going to win the ideological war; don't compromise your consistency and your credibility for the sake of fitting in a Sunday barbecue talk.
Writing a principled and praiseworthy article fighting back government power grabs doesn't redeem previous cooperation with such power grabs. If anything, this article *should* make libertarians push for a honest mea culpa from Zywicki - working for the FTC is such a huge contrast from writing an article such as this that the two of them just can't go together. Failing to acknowledge this can only mean intellectual short sightedness or plain dishonesty.
Published: May 14, 2009 6:08 PM
Sean
The subject matter of this post and the related comments is very relevant to the overall structure of the battle libertarians face. Are we battling individuals and groups or the ideas they espouse and the paradigm that results? It seems like the fulfillment personal vendettas held against people for their prior opinions and actions can be supported only by personal justifications, such as what Oliva mentioned in his response. Such justificaitons are only warrented when they are needed to outweigh what would otherwise, shall we say, less-than-beneficial effect. The current paradigm is able to exist, in large part, because society is flooded with such attacks. They serve no purpose other than to cloud the underlying substantive arguments and block methodologically unscrupulous individuals from accurately perceiving otherwise objective truth.
Instead of trying to purify the libertarian movement, perhaps we would be better off purifying the intellectual battleground, by separating the logic of liberty from the arguments and opinions that convolute public debate.
Published: May 15, 2009 3:04 AM
greentea
There are far too many people who say one thing but do another.
Published: May 15, 2009 7:09 AM
Harry Felker
"That's some nice rhetoric. Too bad Mr. Zywicki wasn't saying this when he was director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that violates thousands of private contracts a year under the pretext of antitrust enforcement. Indeed, everything Mr. Zywicki describes above goes on at the FTC every single day. So why exactly was he working for them in a senior management position? And why is George Mason so eager to embrace a man whose intellectual integrity comes with its own revolving door?"
As we can find prevalent in most people surrounding this financial nightmare, say/do one thing when you have the influence, say/do the right thing when it does not matter anymore...
The unconscionable immorality and amorality of the recognized persons is so apparent it defies logic that they are or were ever given responsibility in the first place...
Harry Felker
http://constitutionalrevolution2009.com/blog/?p=55
Published: May 16, 2009 11:16 AM