Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
F.H. Buckley
The old liberal-conservative ideological axis appears increasingly irrelevant as a corruption-virtue axis bids to take its place.
What they didn’t understand was why Hillary Clinton’s supporters didn’t seem to care about her lapses. She had left a trail of public corruption in her wake, and the Trump supporters wondered why that didn’t seem to matter.
Taken at face value, the Clinton Global Initiative provides public goods on a worldwide basis. There’s
The historian René Girard called it mimetic rivalry, with good paid back for good, and ill for ill.
Buckley understands human nature and is accordingly pessimistic about eliminating corruption altogether, like the Founders.
Pascal wrote that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they believe they are following their conscience.17 They can then enjoy that most delicious of sensations, the feeling of justified hatred toward enemies.
That’s what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wondered when he complained of the hypocrisy of the anticommunist liberal who objected to Stalinist violence: “He forgets that communism does not invent violence but finds it already established, that for the moment the question is not to know whether one accepts or rejects violence, but whether the violence with which one is allied is ‘progressive’ and tends towards its own suppression or towards self-perpetuation.
Even the burdens of regulation can turn out to be an anticompetitive blessing for the major firms that enjoy economies of scale in coping with them. For a large firm, with its battery of lawyers and compliance experts, it’s simply a cost of doing business.
Corruption is a silent killer of the U.S. economy, and it’s possible to put a number on this.
For America as a whole, that would amount to an 18 percent or $3.2 trillion increase in the country’s wealth. Think of that missing wealth as the tax that corrupt politicians, regulators and judges impose on all
The Framers of our Constitution were hard-nosed realists about the manners of mankind, and they weren’t about to launch a moral rearmament crusade when they set out to design a corruption-free government in the summer of 1787. The notes of their deliberations at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were kept secret and not published until all the delegates had died, which allowed them to state their opinions of their fellow citizens with remarkable candor. “Take mankind in general,” said Alexander Hamilton, “they are vicious—their passions may be operated upon.”5 That was a little
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Parliamentary governments have far more effective ways to discipline a misbehaving chief executive. It’s a great deal easier to remove an inconvenient prime minister through a simple no-confidence motion or party vote than it is to impeach a sitting president. Not merely are the requirements of a trial in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate virtually impossible to achieve, but a president may cover up his tracks through his control of information and his ability to delay the proceedings. The separation of powers in the American Constitution was designed to
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those other countries we have a presidential form of government with a separation of powers, and those features of our Constitution have, over time, made the United States more corrupt.
If spending in American elections were capped, the result might well be less competition in politics and more corruption in government, given the particular dynamics at work here.
When countries already have a certain amount of corruption, there’s a tipping point where stronger anticorruption laws produce more corruption,
Here are three proposals for election law reform that would curb corruption rather than aggravate it: • Unless they are lobbyists, donors should have an unimpeded ability to contribute anonymously to campaign committees and political parties without fear of intimidation or harassment. But when the money is paid into the official’s pockets, that changes things, and a bribery charge properly applies if pay-for-play is promised or given. • While they can give useful information about proposed rules to overworked congressional staffers, lobbyists should be barred from
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And that’s it. The existing set of contribution limits and disclosure requirements should be repealed. As we’ll see, they haven’t done anything except make our government more corrupt.
If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction. —Gouverneur Morris
There was also a rising moneyed aristocracy, based in New York and Philadelphia, composed of urban merchants whom the agrarian Democratic-Republicans saw as their natural enemy.
The crucial moment in American history was not the Revolutionary War but the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, when fifty-five delegates from twelve states assembled to frame a new constitution for the country.
When Mason spoke of the middle-state “office hunters,” he likely let his eye fall upon Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. At the age of eighty-one, Franklin was the oldest person at the convention, and next to Washington he was the most famous, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac and a member of the Royal Academy. As a politician and a diplomat he had first asked the British to expel the French from North America and then persuaded the French to kick the British out of the United States, a triumph unmatched in U.S. diplomatic history. He was the indispensable American as much as Washington
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“Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” There, Hume proposed a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, and each of these into one hundred parishes, and then built up from there with county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators.
Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who in turn would elect a higher level of representatives, and so on up the ladder. At each rising level, the electors would presumably have better judgment than those who elected them, resulting in a superior set of representatives at the highest levels. The cream would rise to the top.
Still to be decided was how the president would be chosen. “This subject has greatly divided the House,” said James Wilson, “and will also divide people out of doors. It is in truth the most difficult of all on which we have had to decide.”
was also the most consequential, for today we have a government that is dominated by the presidency.
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, with its presidential system and separation of powers, was sold as an anticorruption covenant, and that is how the convention delegates understood it.
Republican Virtue In the eighteenth century there was a special understanding of disinterested republican virtue, the virtue of patriots who scorned corruption and championed the general good. In Britain it was represented by a “Country party,” whose members detested Walpole and were avid readers of Cato’s Letters and of Bolingbroke, and who stood in opposition to a “Court party” that was more comfortable with corruption. In France, republican virtue found its most striking expression in the paintings of Jefferson’s friend Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), where it reached repellant heights.
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The Framers thought these problems came from the mercenary new men who now inhabited the state houses in America, a second string of ill-educated populists who were deaf to the national interest and all too ready to advance wasteful local interests.21 Not long before, the Patriots had fought against corruption by shifting power closer to the people. Now, in an ironic twist, the remedy for corruption would be to concentrate power in the central government. To remedy state corruption, Madison proposed a federal veto power over state laws—the same power that the British Board of Trade in
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they agreed that the public virtue needed for good government required private virtue in the citizenry.
Mason proposed that Congress be given the power to enact sumptuary laws against luxury goods.
The bourgeois virtues of honesty, trustworthiness and industry would temper the competition for political positions that Montesquieu saw as the seedbed of corruption.
But then Morris was no prude, and might privately have agreed with Danton’s retort to Robespierre that “virtue is what I do every night with my wife.”
Many Americans saw Catholicism not as a source of moral teaching but as a glaring example of man’s natural depravity.
Catholics were widely identified with corruption, and not entirely without reason, since Irish immigrants used their voting clout to gain elective office and then proceeded to staff city halls and police stations with other Irish Catholics.
As for his own aims, Madison really didn’t want a lifetime appointment for the president; the proposal was a strategic one, he wrote, with the real goal being term limits. Supporting a lifetime appointment was his way of telling the delegates what would be needed without term limits and with a president appointed by Congress, because the president could then make corrupt bargains with Congress in order to keep getting reappointed.
regime, with a president selected by the House of Representatives or by electors exercising their own discretion. Within a few decades, however, the revolution in transportation and communication had begun to transform the government into our modern presidential system, with voters across the country electing the president. Few of the Framers would have expected this. They
The delegates to the Philadelphia Convention must have returned home thinking they’d given the country a congressional form of government, in which Congress would generally pick the president.
The rise of democracy and a popular election of the president first made the executive branch coequal to the legislature, and then allowed it to emerge as the modern presidency—commanding, decisive, and possessing all the authority of the only person elected by the nation at large. It is remarkable how little the fetters designed by the Framers have constrained the executive branch, and how readily it has mimicked the monarchy they found so objectionable.
If the constitution of separated powers was designed to prevent the accumulation of power in a single person, as Madison argued it would, it’s been a complete failure. On the contrary, it has served to increase executive powers.
When Goethe met Napoleon in 1808, the emperor told the poet that the idea of destiny belonged in the Dark Ages. “There is no destiny,” said Napoleon, “only politics.”
It all added up to states exploiting each other, failing in their responsibilities to each other and to the national government, and this was a form of corruption. This is why Madison thought a federal veto over state laws was “absolutely necessary to a perfect system.”
Exit rights promote honest and good government, as Frederick Jackson Turner recognized in his Frontier Thesis. In nineteenth-century America, states competed for residents by liberalizing their laws, and eastern states that were losing people to the West through migration had to liberalize in order to keep up.12 If newer states extended the franchise to all white male voters, Virginia was compelled to follow suit. Similarly, the impetus to gender equality came from the frontier.
The state’s justice system still favored local residents against out-of-state parties, and redress was still to be found only in federal courts.
What’s needed is a judicial system that makes it harder for them to display their bias or incompetence. And that is what the Framers sought when they created the federal judiciary. Before 1787 there had been state courts in each of the thirteen former colonies, but now there would be a federal government, and federal courts would be needed to resolve issues that arose under federal law.
three basic questions. First, how should judges be chosen? Second, how might a corrupt judge be removed? Third, when should a party sue in a state court and when in one of the new federal courts? On each of these questions, a central concern was avoiding corruption.
A rule of natural justice is that no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause.7 Extended to states, the principle explains the rest of Article III, § 2. The [federal] judicial Power shall extend . . . to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State,—between Citizens of different States,—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. Purely private disputes “between Citizens of different states” would be removed to federal
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In Federalist 81, Hamilton noted that cases where “the state tribunals cannot be supposed to be impartial” would be decided in federal court. By dividing things up in this way, the Framers offered Americans the best of both worlds. Purely federal matters would belong in federal courts, and we wouldn’t have Texas treaties that conflict with New York treaties. And since diversity cases would belong in federal courts, we’d also be saved from state courts sticking it to out-of-state defendants. At the same time, letting state courts decide on purely in-state disputes would give states the
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When states compete in this way, there’s a “race to the
top,” won by the state with the best set of laws. We’ve seen this in corporate law, where Delaware won the race and became the “home of corporations.”12 It also seems to happen in contract law, with bargainers choosing to opt out of California law in favor of more efficient New York law.13 On the other hand, jurisdictional competition can also be a race to the bottom. Mississippi’s legal rules may be wasteful, but other states might seek to copy them in order to stick it to their out-of-state defendants...
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The genius of the Framers’ solution was to give America the prospect of a race to the top while preventing a race to the bottom, and the key was se...
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When Strawbridge was decided, no one worried that a complete diversity requirement would work a hardship. That was too far up the road. Subsequently, however, complete diversity became a tool of oppression in the hands of a Dickie Scruggs.
