Posts tagged: James Madison

Are Angels Watching, or Is the NSA?

By , November 6, 2013 11:51 am

Madison said it best,

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Alex Tabarrok rifs on that theme at Marginal Revolution when he asks Did Obama Spy on Romney? He answers his own question:

No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, facebook metadata and other data are being collected.

Who knows? As Tabrrok reminds us, the NSA listened in on Angela Merkel’s phone calls. What if Romney called her during his 2012 campaign? In any case, he’s certainly right when he says that “Men are not angels.” Nevertheless, Tabarrok doesn’t think the NSA forwarded any tapes on to the Obama campaign. Still, “Men are not angels,” right?

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.

The Nixon administration plumbers broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to gather information to discredit him. They busted into a single file cabinet (pictured). What a bunch of amateurs.
The NSA has broken into millions of file cabinets around the world.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Who will pay for the NSA break-ins? (Emphasis added)

Limited Government Via Incremental Politics

By , October 21, 2013 10:09 am

George Will (who, by the way, is speaking at BYU tomorrow) nails it in his October 18, 2013, column:

[Barack Obama] and some of his tea party adversaries share an impatience with Madisonian politics, which requires patience. The tea party’s reaffirmation of Madison’s limited-government project is valuable. Now, it must decide if it wants to practice politics.

Rauch hopes there will be “an intellectual effort to advance a principled, positive, patriotic case for compromise, especially on the right.” He warns that Republicans, by their obsessions with ideological purity and fiscal policy, “have veered in the direction of becoming a conservative interest group, when what the country needs is a conservative party .”

A party is concerned with power , understood as the ability to achieve intended effects. A bull in a china shop has consequences, but not power, because the bull cannot translate intelligent intentions into achievements. The tea party has a choice to make. It can patiently try to become the beating heart of a durable party, which understands this: In Madisonian politics, all progress is incremental. Or it can be a raging bull, and soon a mere memory, remembered only for having broken a lot of china. Conservatives who prefer politics over the futility of intransigence gestures in Madison’s compromise-forcing system will regret the promise the tea party forfeited, but will not regret that, after the forfeiture, it faded away. (Emphasis supplied)

(Wills’s visit reminds me of a couple of other media luminaries who stopped by to chat when I was at BYU, including to David Halberstam, in the Marriott Center, and Bob Woodward, in the Wilkinson Center Ballroom. I read Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest as a consequence of his visit.)


Panorama Theme by Themocracy