Jacob Sullum: Maybe the Obama Administration Should Look in the Mirror

Jacob Sullum (who is a columnist for Reason Magazine article and is the editor for the article that Kerwyn and I have written on the Tonya Craft case), has a great column today pointing out just how much buck-passing goes on in government in general and the Obama administration in particular.

Jacob writes:

Two weeks ago, writing in The Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius argued that Americans must be forced to buy government-approved medical coverage to prevent "unfair cost-shifting" by uninsured patients. They neglected to mention that the federal government mandates such cost shifting by requiring hospitals to treat all comers, regardless of their ability to pay.

Holder and Sebelius also misleadingly implied that the individual insurance mandate is aimed at addressing uncompensated care, which according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation represents less than 3 percent of health care spending. The main reason ObamaCare compels people to buy insurance is not so they can pay their own bills but so they can pay other people's bills. Since the new system requires insurers to cover everyone while forbidding them to charge sicker policyholders more, it needs to conscript people who hardly use health care so they can subsidize the expenses of people who use it a lot.

The Obama administration's refusal to acknowledge that coercion begets coercion when the government meddles in the health care market was one of the year's most memorable examples of blame shifting.

From there he goes to the latest McDonald's lawsuit (McDonald's does not help us enough in saying "no" to our children) to the TSA's excuse that they have to abuse us at airports because last year a Nigerian hid a bomb in his underwear (that did not go off, but did ensure that he would produce no future offspring).

Lest we think that our "betters" in Washington are going to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, perhaps the litany of excuses from Jake Blues as to why he jilted his fiance (played by Carrie Fisher) will better describe the Washington blame-shifting culture:

"Reason" Blogs on the Tonya Craft Case

Jacob Sullum of Reason (a publication for which I have written five articles), has blogged the on Wednesday's events, and I hope he will blog more often.

While he does use my blogs, he also uses other material and explains why he believes this case is a sham:

Anderson believes Craft, like the defendants in the McMartin Preschool case and other child molestation panics of the 1980s and '90s, faces false charges based on testimony from child witnesses who have been coached by therapists, police, and prosecutors to "remember" things that never happened. Today's testimony by one of Craft's alleged victims reinforces that impression (Emphasis mine).

He further points out:

Obviously, none of this (the trial events of the day) is conclusive one way or the other, but if this is the general quality of the testimony against Craft (and presumably the prosecutors led with their strongest witness), reasonable doubt will be inescapable. Anderson notes that the usual line from accusers in cases like this is that we must "believe the children," but it's clear from overturned convictions and academic research (not to mention everyday experience) that little kids frequently will insist that something happened when it did not, especially if they are repeatedly coached by adult authority figures (who themselves may sincerely believe that abuse occurred). Here we have a 9-year-old recalling what allegedly happened when she was 5, with who knows how many intervening conversations aimed at eliciting descriptions of abuse. Furthermore, Anderson reports, several children who were at Craft's house when some of the abuse allegedly occurred insist that nothing untoward happened. If so, "believe the children" does not bring us any closer to the truth.

Judge Napolitano on "Positivism" in the law

For the past seven years, I have written a number of columns and papers on law and especially federal criminal law. (Candice E. Jackson, an attorney on the West Coast, often has been a co-author, and a great writing partner she is!) I wrote more than 60 articles on the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case in which the prosecutor, Michael B. Nifong, pushed on with charges that he had to have known were false.

Unfortunately, there are numerous "Nifongs" in the federal system, and I am currently working on an article that outlines some of the more egregious things happening in the federal system. The larger problem here is what Judge Napolitano calls "positivism," which he defines in the following way:

Positivism teaches that the law is whatever the lawgiver says it is, providing the rule is written down. Under positivism, so long as the legislature in a democracy was validly elected and followed its own rules in enacting a law, the law is valid and enforceable no matter what it says.

This is as opposed to "natural law," which Vice-President Joe Biden condemned during the 1991 hearings for the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Napolitano writes this about "natural law":

Natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity. Since we are created by God in His image and likeness, and since He is perfectly free—or, if you prefer, since we are creatures of nature born biologically dependent but morally free—freedom is our birthright. Liberty comes from our humanity, not from an outside source such as the government.

This is an article worth reading, for it outlines why the law has moved in the way that it has over the last hundred years or so, and especially since the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.