Archive for the ‘Law and Civil Liberties’ Category
Conscientious Objectors
Can pharmacists have a conscience? Activists are demanding that Congress and state legislatures pass laws forcing pharmacists and other health workers to act against their own conscience in such matters as abortion, morning-after pills, and gay parenting.
Some doctors say it violates their conscience to perform abortions or provide artificial insemination for unmarried or gay people. Some pharmacists believe that the morning-after pill is a form of abortion, and their religious commitment forbids them to dispense it.
And now some patients and activists are demanding laws to force health professionals to dispense the care the patients want, no matter how it violates the health worker’s conscience. Activists who march for a woman’s right to choose want the government to overrule a pharmacist’s right to choose.
I was reminded of Arnold Kling’s question “Is Bioethics an Oxymoron?” when I read in the Washington Post the comments of official bioethicist R. Alta Charo: “As soon as you become a licensed professional, you take on certain obligations to act like a professional, which means your patients come first.” As I wrote in an online debate for Legal Affairs magazine,
this is an example of how one state intervention generates the demand for additional interventions. We say you can’t be a pharmacist unless you get a state license, and now you want to say that that license should empower the state to impose morally offensive obligations on those who were required to get the license.
Similarly, we require a prescription to get many drugs, including some forms of contraception. Why should a woman need a prescription for contraception? Why not just grant access to contraception by allowing it to be sold over the counter? Here we’ve created one intervention—the requirement that people get a prescription from a licensed doctor, which they must take to a licensed pharmacist—and it has led to a situation you don’t like, in which some tiny number of pharmacists are refusing to dispense a particular prescription. So you say we should have another rule, another regulation, another intervention.
As philosopher Loren Lomasky of the University of Virginia puts it in the Post article, “Freedom of conscience has been central to our political notions since even before the United States existed. People should not be forced into doing things that they find morally odious.”
Do the people who want doctors and pharmacists to be forced to provide abortions and morning-after pills want anesthesiologists to be forced to participate in executions? I’d bet not. These activists want their moral values enforced by law, they don’t want a neutral rule that all doctors must obey the laws of the state. If they did take such a consistent position, of course, I’d still disagree: anesthesiologists shouldn’t be forced to participate in what they may regard as murder, any more than gynecologists should.
This seems like such a clear issue to me. Yet most of the people in the Post‘s online chat about the issue were insistent that health workers must be forced to do as they’re told, regardless of their own conscience. Whatever happened to the liberal claims of individual autonomy, of the right of conscience, of the individual exercising his or her own mind? Gone with the wind, it seems, when liberals have the power to impose their values on other people’s consciences.
In a country of 290 million people and 14 million businesses, we should let these issues sort themselves out in the marketplace. Chances are that major drugstore chains like CVS and Walgreen’s are going to insist that their stores fill all prescriptions. If they have more than one pharmacist on duty at a time, then they may be willing to tolerate pharmacists who avoid filling certain prescriptions. If they do insist that all pharmacists be prepared to fill any prescription presented by a customer, then pharmacists who can’t accept such rules will have to look for jobs elsewhere. And if customers encounter a pharmacy that won’t give them what they want, then they will have to find another pharmacy.
A prime reason for freedom is pluralism. In the modern world we don’t all share the same moral and religious perspectives. The fact of moral diversity is a good reason for toleration and allowing people to sort themselves out in society according to their own moral choices. Freedom in a pluralistic society should mean that individuals get to make their own choices. Sometimes other people aren’t willing to do what we want them to do. But frankly, it’s involuntary servitude to force other people to work for us when they prefer not to. And it’s appalling that 141 years after the Thirteenth Amendment, some people still want to hold others to involuntary servitude.
Filed under: General; Health Care; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
U.K. Gambling CEO Arrested at U.S. Airport
Details are still sketchy, but it looks as if David Carruthers, a U.K. citizen and CEO of the U.K.-incorporated, U.K.-traded public company BetOnSports.com, has been detained at a Fort Worth airport while switching flights between the U.K. and Costa Rica. He will now apparently be charged in the U.S. for running a company that’s legal in just about every Western country except America. Reuters reports:
The U.S. Department of Justice said on Monday that BetOnSports was among 11 individuals and four corporations facing various charges of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud.
The founder of BetOnSports, Gary Kaplan, 47, was also charged with 20 felony violations, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest, the Department of Justice added.
“BetOnSports.com and other gambling Web sites operated by Gary Kaplan and his co-defendants offered gamblers in the United States illegal wagering on professional and college football and basketball,” said a copy of the indictment seen by Reuters.
It’s probably worth noting that Carruthers is an outspoken advocate for legalizing online gambling in the U.S. He recently debated Rep. Jim Leach on the issue in the Wall Street Journal. If Carruthers is being held solely because U.S. customers illegally do business with his legal, U.K.-based company, that’s disturbing enough.
But things could get even more interesting.
Downside of Disclosure
The Washington Post reports today about the emergence of the Democratic Alliance, a group vetting organizations for wealthy, liberal contributors. The group has an interesting rule:
The alliance has required organizations that receive its endorsement to sign agreements shielding the identity of donors…The group requires nondisclosure agreements because many donors prefer anonymity…Some donors expressed concern about being attacked on the Web or elsewhere for their political stance; others did not want to be targeted by fundraisers.
Of course, the United States has a long tradition of anonymous speech and political activity, including The Federalist Papers. The donors to the Democratic Alliance continue in that tradition. Their desire for anonymity proves that mandatory disclosure of money in politics imposes costs on participation.
Those same costs affect donors to political campaigns who do not have a right to anonymous speech. In fact, a donor who gives to a challenger threatening an incumbent member of Congress faces a greater risk than that confronted by the donors to the Democracy Alliance.
Given their experience with the downside of disclosure, perhaps the donors to the Democratic Alliance (or the organizations they fund) will lead the way toward liberalizing or eliminating mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions.
Overkill
Today, my paper on SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics is finally released. It’s been the thrust of my research for nearly a year, now. It offers a history of SWAT teams, legal background, analysis and criticism of their increasingly frequent use and abuse, and an appendix of case studies that documents more than 150 botched raids.
You can download it for free [pdf]. If you want a slick, bound copy, you can order one for $10, and you’ll also get a copy of Gene Healy and Tim Lynch’s paper on the constitutional record of George W. Bush.
We’re also launching an interactive map to accompany the paper. The map plots every botched raid I’ve found in my research, with a description of what happened and a list of sources. You can sort the map by type of incident. So, for example, if you want to see only those raids where an innocent person was killed, it would look like this. If you want to see raids where a nonviolent offender was killed (a recreational gambler or potsmoker, for example), it would look like this. If you want to see all of the “wrong door” raids where no one was killed, it would look like this.
The map is also searchable by year, state, and type of incident.
Cato’s news release on the paper is here.
Why 527s May Survive for the Long Term
The drive to eliminate 527 groups appears to have failed for this year. That is good news for free speech. But maybe the story is even better. Maybe Congress won’t eliminate 527s next year or the year after. Let me explain.
First, a little history. 527s rose to prominence in the 2004 presidential campaign. The Democrats used 527s to raise several hundred million dollars to help the Kerry campaign. The Republicans by and large did not use 527s. Party leaders wanted to keep control of the GOP campaign. For reasons of partisanship and control, Republican leaders wanted Congress to “close the 527 loophole.”
They have failed to do that. Democrats were willing to filibuster to block the legislation, and seven Republican senators were unwilling to support the effort to end 527s.
However, things could change. To succeed in the Senate, the 527 ban will need more unified Republican support plus a few stray Democrats (say, about 10 of them) voting contrary to the wishes of their party’s leaders. The latter could happen. An endangered incumbent of either party values his re-election more than party discipline. Twenty percent of the GOP in the House voted for McCain-Feingold, the wishes of their leaders notwithstanding.
There’s No Fixing the FBI’s Computers
While Congress and the Department of Justice consider mandating that ISPs retain data about all of our communications, the FBI, it seems, can’t keep its own IT systems up to date. Putting aside the irony to focus on practical matters, what will bring the FBI up to snuff? I told the reporter in the article linked just above that nothing will.
The problem is institutional; when an organization’s membership doesn’t enjoy feast or famine based on the success of the organization, very little can bring it into focus and create success. . . . Congressional and public oversight is a weak, weak substitute for competitive pressure.
But the FBI’s computer systems have to be fixed, don’t they? They do. And to get there, you might have to shrink the FBI and law enforcement generally — especially federal law enforcement.
Because of the nature of bureaucracies, I don’t think there is an effective management solution to the FBI’s problems with IT. The better answer occurs at a higher level of abstraction:
Charged with Second-Degree Innovating
They’ve been described as Minnesota’s Tupperware parties for wine tasters.
For the past two years, a consultant with the Traveling Vineyard, a Massachusetts company operating in nearly 30 states, would come to your home. Along with friends, you’d sample a pinot or chardonnay, and then fill out a form if you wanted to buy some.
And here’s how the regulators are going to kill it:
On Tuesday, state authorities raided a landmark Minneapolis liquor store, Surdyk’s, seizing about 40 cases of wine in an effort to shut down the Traveling Vineyard. Surdyk’s ships prepackaged and prepaid orders from the company to its customers.
Have We Learned Nothing from “SchoolHouse Rock”?
“I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill, and I’m sittin’ here on Capitol Hill…”
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and cartoons were confined to Saturday morning broadcast programming, kids learned about the separation of powers (among other things) from the ”SchoolHouse Rock” toons.
Apparently some future New Jersey lawyers weren’t tuned in.
The recent lawsuit about which Cato’s Neal McCluskey has been writing asks the court to create a school voucher program in New Jersey as a remedy to the state’s deficient public school system. Right ends, wrong means. Courts are for legal interpretation; legislation is for legislatures.
There’s little doubt that New Jersey is failing to live up to its constitutional promise to provide a “thorough and efficient” education. Should the court so rule, it will be up to the legislature to fix the problem, and introducing a universally accessible free education marketplace is certainly the best solution they could implement.
But it’s their job to implement it, not the court’s.
Fraudulent Identity Fraud Statistics
Slate has a great piece up on the use and misuse of statistics by reporters.
The magic number for journalists covering the identity theft beat has been $48 billion—the estimated annual losses suffered by identity theft victims—which carries the Federal Trade Commission’s imprimatur. . . . Fred H. Cate, a law professor and director of Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, notes that if the estimate were accurate, it would wipe out up to half of the banking industry’s $103 billion profits in 2005. “If those numbers were true, we’d have a banking crisis on our hands,” he says.
When I worked on the Hill, I came to recognize a similar dynamic at play: There were things everyone believed and no one questioned. I called them “political facts” because the source of the fact was consensus rather than any measurement or observation. Repetition of political facts in Members’ speeches and floor statements just made them all the more true.
A political fact relating to identity fraud is that it is a stranger crime, often a product of data breaches, that is conducted mainly over the Internet. It sometimes is, but in my book, Identity Crisis, I point out the results of an actual study showing that:
[M]ore than a third of individuals who had been impersonated in a true identity fraud knew . . . who the perpetrator was. And in more than half of those cases, the perpetrator was a family member or other relative. Other prominent perpetrators of identity frauds are people in companies or financial institutions with access to personal information, as well as friends, neighbors, or in-home employees of impersonation victims. So much for the Internet being the cause of identity fraud, though it certainly plays a role in some cases.
Alas, . . . my source was a Federal Trade Commission study.
“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.”
That quote, commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, comes to mind when contemplating yesterday’s vote in Congress to ban Internet gambling.
It passed, 317-93. What’s interesting is that Rep. John Conyers introduced an amendment that would have removed the exemption the bill grants to allow states to put their lotteries online. That amendment overwhelmingly failed.
Which means that a good number of Congressmen, most of them Republican, voted to ban Internet gambling sites operated by private citizens, but voted to allow them when operated by the government.
Fake IDs Save Lives in Iraq
A fascinating AP report says that Iraqis are using fake IDs in light of the recent growth in sectarian killings. The major groups in Iraq are not distinguishable by physical traits, but they are by name. To avoid being killed, people are getting false identification cards:
Surnames refer to tribe and clan, while first names are often chosen to honor historical figures revered by one sect but sometimes despised by the other.
For about $35, someone with a common Sunni name like Omar could become Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite name that might provide safe passage through dangerous areas.
This illustrates very well how genuinely complex security can be. At any time, the relevant authorities in Iraq could have decreed that all people get (as near as possible) forgery-proof biometric ID cards and carry them at all times – a great way to batten down a country, right?
Doing so would have fed directly into the strategy being used by the enemies of peace and security in Iraq today: setting up fake checkpoints and killing people who arrive there members of the wrong sect. Identity cards had a role in the Rwandan genocide just over 10 years ago, as well.
Those who believe that identity cards are a simple route to good security, well, they suffer what is so rightly known as the fatal conceit. Central planning that deprives people of control over their lives can be deadly–literally–in surprising and unpredictable ways.
Thank goodness for the fake ID outlets in Iraq today, and thank goodness the promoters of ”secure ID“ in the United States didn’t take their message to Iraq.
The tradeoffs involved in identification are discussed in my book, Identity Crisis.
Geneva and Guantanamo
The news wires are saying there has been a major policy development concerning Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration is now changing its stance with regard to the Geneva Convention, reports say.
The White House says today’s announcement does not reflect a change in policy. That is probably right. That is, the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan established some new law with respect to the application of Geneva to detainees and the Pentagon is now simply tinkering with some policies to comply with that ruling.
Because Clintonian word games still pervade the capital, however, one must scrutinize these policy announcements very closely. For example, whatever the Pentagon is saying about Guantanamo today may be limited to the Pentagon and to the men held at Guantanamo Bay. I say that because in 2002, President Bush issued a directive that pledged humane treatment to all prisoners in U.S. custody. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later admitted in 2005 that that directive did not apply to officers of the CIA and other nonmilitary personnel.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
