Saturday, September 12, 2009

Obama Czar: Cass Sunstein

Obama's regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein:

"Cass Sunstein supports outlawing hunting, phasing out meat eating, giving animals the right to file lawsuits"

"We ought to ban hunting"

- Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University

"Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives …"

- 2004 book Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily
in the interest of citizenship and
self-government."

-Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the
Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (page 137).

http://stopsunstein.com/

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Everyone knew that Cass R. Sunstein was an extreme “progressive,” a socialist, and an adversary of the US Constitution as actually written, but one particularly dangerous aspect of Sunstein’s personal political philosophy is not particularly well known.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has issued a press release reminding Americans that Cass Sunstein is additionally an Animal Rights activist and extremist.

How extreme?

Well, in The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer, 2002, later recycled into the introduction to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, an anthology he co-edited in 2004, he argues:

"Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf."

Sunstein, who is soon likely to be gifted with extensive powers as “regulatory Czar,” has argued in favor of bans on animal cosmetics testing, hunting, greyhound racing, and… meat eating!
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"...Sunstein's other writings are equally alarming. Big Brother government is not good enough for Sunstein. He prefers authoritarian father figures. Written with Richard H. Thaler, "Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron," holds that, "Often people's preferences are ill-formed" and "paternalism cannot be avoided," and "libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people's choices."

Their libertarian paternalism example involves a "cafeteria at some organization," where the director has noticed customers choosing more of the items presented earlier in the line. How to order the lineup?

The paper posits four possibilities, with #4 being the cafeteria director putting items earlier in the line she thinks consumers would choose on their own. The authors' dislike that. Option #1 is Sunstein and Thaler's choice.

The director should "make the choices that she thinks would make the customers best off ... to promote their welfare, all things considered." Even under market pressures, they maintain the director would have "a great deal of room to maneuver." In other words, they believe it is the director's job to change customers' tastes and preferences! Lovely philosophy for a federal regulator, that!
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Barack Obama's nominee for "regulatory czar" has advocated a "Fairness Doctrine" for the Internet that would require opposing opinions be linked and also has suggested angry e-mails should be prevented from being sent by technology that would require a 24-hour cooling off period.

[...]

Sunstein also has argued in his prolific literary works that the Internet is anti-democratic because of the way users can filter out information of their own choosing.

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government," he wrote. "Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom's name."

Sunstein first proposed the notion of imposing mandatory "electronic sidewalks" for the Net. These "sidewalks" would display links to opposing viewpoints. Adam Thierer, senior fellow and director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Center, has characterized the proposal as "The Fairness Doctrine for the Internet."

"Apparently in Sunstein's world, people have many rights, but one of them, it seems, is not the right to be left alone or seek out the opinions one desires," Thierer wrote.

Later, Sunstein rethought his proposal, explaining that it would be "too difficult to regulate [the Internet] in a way that would respond to those concerns." He also acknowledged that it was "almost certainly unconstitutional."

Perhaps Sunstein's most novel idea regarding the Internet was his proposal, in his book "Nudge," written with Richard Thaler, for a "Civility Check" for e-mails and other online communications.

"The modern world suffers from insufficient civility," they wrote. "Every hour of every day, people send angry e-mails they soon regret, cursing people they barely know (or even worse, their friends and loved ones). A few of us have learned a simple rule: don't send an angry e-mail in the heat of the moment. File it, and wait a day before you send it. (In fact, the next day you may have calmed down so much that you forget even to look at it. So much the better.) But many people either haven't learned the rule or don’t always follow it. Technology could easily help. In fact, we have no doubt that technologically savvy types could design a helpful program by next month."

That's where the "Civility Check" comes in.

"We propose a Civility Check that can accurately tell whether the e-mail you're about to send is angry and caution you, 'warning: this appears to be an uncivil e-mail. do you really and truly want to send it?'" they wrote. "(Software already exists to detect foul language. What we are proposing is more subtle, because it is easy to send a really awful e-mail message that does not contain any four-letter words.) A stronger version, which people could choose or which might be the default, would say, 'warning: this appears to be an uncivil e-mail. this will not be sent unless you ask to resend in 24 hours.' With the stronger version, you might be able to bypass the delay with some work (by inputting, say, your Social Security number and your grandfather’s birth date, or maybe by solving some irritating math problem!)."
source

GAG THE INTERNET!
AN OBAMA OFFICIAL'S FRIGHTENING BOOK ABOUT CURBING FREE SPEECH ONLINE

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ON END OF LIFE ISSUES and RATIONING HEALTH CARE:

"I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people."


****

President Obama’s New "Regulatory Czar" a Believer in "Quality of Life" Health Care

This could be bad. Cass R. Sunstein, just appointed by President Obama to be “regulatory czar,” is a big “quality of life” guy in determining the cost/benefit ratio of government regulations. This is the executive summary of a paper he wrote back in 2003 for the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, entitled “Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay.” From the paper:

In protecting safety, health, and the environment, government has increasingly relied on cost-benefit analysis. In undertaking cost-benefit analysis, the government has monetized risks of death through the idea of “value of a statistical life” (VSL), currently assessed at about $6.1 million. Many analysts, however, have suggested that the government should rely instead on the “value of a statistical life year” (VSLY), in a way that would likely result in significantly lower benefits calculations for elderly people, and significantly higher benefits calculations for children. I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people. The hard question involves not whether to undertake this shift, but how to monetize life-years, and here willingness to pay (WTP) [what one would pay to obtain a good] is generally the place to begin…In fact, a focus on statistical lives is more plausibly a form of illicit discrimination than a focus on life years, because the idea of statistical lives treats the years of older people as worth far more than the years of younger people.


The paper dealt broadly with how to measure the cost/benefit aspect of government regulations generally, and illustrates how bureaucrats and their enablers are the real kings now. But that aside, its applicability to regulations in a regime of national health care law are obvious and frightening: If regulatory policy is to be based on granting the lives of elderly people a lesser value, it begs for health care rationing that would be supported by terms such as “value of statistical life year,” “willingness to pay”–and other such euphemisms that will no doubt be coined–as bureaucrateze cover for blatant medical discrimination.

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“Sunstein is an advocate of something called libertarian paternalism, which means give people the choice to make their own decisions, but instead of just laying out the facts, control the number of choices, then use knowledge of behavioral sciences (like psychology) to guide them to do what you want.”


*****

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (released in paperback last month), Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler explain how enlightened “choice architecture” can close the gap between hedonism and wisdom though “libertarian paternalism”: a kind of minimalist interventionism designed to remedy some of the America’s greatest collective action problems.
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** Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent

** Nudging toward Bethlehem: Organ donation without consent

** "Nudging" America to Give Up Meat

** Nudging Us to Better Food Choices?

** Libertarian Paternalism

** Obama chief: Embryos are 'just a handful of cells'
Argues cloning ban 'silly,' scoffed as those who find it morally repugnant


**Sunstein: Obama, not courts, should interpret law
'Beliefs and commitments' of nation's leader should supersede judges


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From the December 13, 2004, issue of National Review
You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.

A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the radical notion that all rights — including rights usually held to be "against" the state, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured — are grants from the state. In a book co-authored with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights, he argued that "all legal rights are, or aspire to be, welfare rights," that is, positive grants from the state. There is no difference in kind between the right not to be tortured and the right to taxpayer-subsidized dental care.

In his new book, The Second Bill of Rights, Sunstein seeks to give constitutional status to welfare rights. The title comes from Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, in which he proclaimed that "necessitous men are not free men" and proposed a "second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all." Among the rights FDR proposed were the rights to "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," "adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education."

The mere assertion of those rights isn't enough for Sunstein; he wants to endow them with constitutional status, like the rights that are actually mentioned in the Constitution. He admits that "the founding document does not refer to them, and it is not seriously argued that they are encompassed by anything in the Constitution" — yet on the next page he states that "if the nation becomes committed to certain rights, they may migrate into the Constitution itself" (emphasis added). Later on, he asserts that "at a minimum, the second bill should be seen as part and parcel of America's constitutive commitments. Roosevelt's speech proposing the second bill deserves a place among the great documents in the nation's history. Indeed, it can be seen as occupying a place akin to the Declaration of Independence, or perhaps somewhere between the Declaration and the Constitution."

Article V of the Constitution, which specifies how it may be amended, doesn't include "migration," but perhaps "migration of amendments" has itself migrated into the Constitution. As a theory of constitutional law, that is remarkably thin. But let's pass on to other problems with Sunstein's approach.

First, Sunstein's fundamental insistence — that all rights are grants from power — is incoherent. In The Cost of Rights, Sunstein and Holmes argued against the idea of "moral rights," or rights that are valid by virtue of something other than force: "When they are not backed by legal force . . . moral rights are toothless by definition. Unenforced moral rights are aspirations binding on conscience, not powers binding on officials." Thus, "the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards" is simply another welfare right, a right that the state hire monitors to monitor the police and guards, for "duties are taken seriously only when dereliction is punished by the public power drawing on the public purse." This theory generates an absurdity, for it rests on an infinite regress. For me to have a right not to be tortured, the police would have to fear punishment by monitors above them. But for me to have a right not to be tortured, I would have to have a right that the monitors punish the police if they torture me. Do I have that right? I would have it only if the state hired monitors above the monitors, to punish the monitors if they failed to punish the police if the police tortured me. Do I have a right that the monitors of the monitors punish the monitors? Only if there were monitors to monitor the monitors who monitor the monitors who monitor the police, and so on, ad infinitum. The flaw is entirely internal and completely fatal to the theory: If we were to accept the theory, all it would show is that no one has any rights, for the demands of the theory could never be satisfied.

Second, Sunstein insists that without government protection no one would enjoy anything of value, and therefore that all value must be attributed to the action of the state: "Government is 'implicated' in everything people own. . . . If rich people have a great deal of money, it is because the government furnishes a system in which they are entitled to have and keep that money."
The problem here is that Sunstein's economic theory of value is stuck in the period of the classical economists, who tried to attribute all value to one necessary factor of production; for them, that was labor. Sunstein merely substitutes what he has decided is the one necessary factor: the state. But after the "marginal revolution" in economics (circa 1871), no serious thinker should make such a mistake. It is now recognized that we make choices across a great many margins, and that value is not created by a single necessary factor. If that were not so, we could say that farmers produce all value, since without food none of the rest of us would produce anything else; likewise, for other groups and factors of production. The theory of value on which Sunstein rests his case for the welfare state is remarkably naive and primitive.

Third, the ethical implications Sunstein draws from his theory of value do not withstand scrutiny. He says that "to believe that people have a right to their current holdings, so that any diminution of those holdings amounts to a violation of their rights . . . is an utterly implausible position. Those who possess a great deal do so because laws and institutions, including public institutions, make their holdings possible. . . . In the state of nature — freed from the protection of law and government — how well would wealthy people fare?" Let's see what else this theory would entail: If a doctor were to save my life, then, since the doctor would be responsible for my existence, and therefore for all of the liberty and wealth that I might enjoy or create henceforth, the doctor would have the right to decide what should happen with that liberty and that wealth, since without the doctor neither I, nor the liberty, nor the wealth would exist. In short, Sunstein's ethical theory is just silly.

The Second Bill of Rights may rest on a logical fallacy, a primitive economic theory, and a silly ethical claim, but it is instructive nonetheless. Sunstein's treatment of the problem of how to use the judiciary to enforce welfare rights shows what a radical departure they are from the rule of law, how they introduce arbitrariness into government policy, and how, ultimately, the contradictions and incompatibilities generated by welfare rights undermine the very idea of rights itself — for when "rights" conflict, the state must decide whose "rights" are to be respected, but, since it has been stipulated that both of the conflicting parties are in the right, the state's decisions must be on the basis of something other than right.

Sunstein's work represents a return to the governmental theories of absolutism — of power, rather than of right. Welfare rights are incompatible, not only with property rights, but with law and with the very concept of rights. Professor Sunstein, meet Louis XIV.

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'Death panel' is not in the bill... it already exists

"...The AP is technically correct in stating that end-of-life counseling is not the same as a death panel. The New York Times is also correct to point out that the health care bill contains no provision setting up such a panel.

What both outlets fail to point out is that the panel already exists.

H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of former Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle. Before the Porkulus Bill passed, Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in detail about the Council's purpose.

Daschle's stated purpose (and therefore President Obama's purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption. Daschle argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept "hopeless diagnoses."

McCaughey goes on to explain:

"Daschle says health-care reform "will not be pain free." Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them."

Who is on the Council? One of its most prominent members is none other than Dr. Death himself Ezekiel Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel's views on care of the elderly should frighten anyone who is or ever plans on being old. He explains the logic behind his discriminatory views on elderly care as follows:

"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."

On average 25-year-olds require very few medical services. If they are to get the lion's share of the treatment, then those 65 and over can expect very little care. Dr. Emanuel's views on saving money on medical care are simple: don't provide any medical care. The loosely worded provisions in H.R 1 give him and his Council increasing power to push such recommendations.

Similarly hazy language will no doubt be used in the health care bill. What may pass as a 1,000 page health care law will explode into perhaps many thousands of pages of regulatory codes. The deliberate vagueness will give regulators tremendous leverage to interpret its provisions. Thus Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein will play a major role in defining the government's role in controlling medical care.

How does Sunstein approach end of life care? In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value. Specifically he champions statistical methods that give preference to what the government rates as "quality-adjusted life years." Meaning, the government decides whether a person's life is worth living. If the government decides the life is not worth living, it is the individual's duty to die to free up welfare payments for the young and productive.

Ultimately it was Obama himself, in answer to a question on his ABC News infomercial, who said that payment determination cannot be influenced by a person's spirit and "that at least we (the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research) can let doctors know and your mom know that...this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

Maybe we should ask the Associated Press and New York Times if they still think we shouldn't be concerned about a federal "death panel."

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