Over at Instapundit, His Holiness Glenn is having a public think-in on the subject of, among many other subjects of course, to what degree if any the US government or bits of it is/are guilty of having failed to see 9-11 coming. Glenn Reynolds reckons that, although 9-11 was imaginable, it makes no sense to blame Bush, the FBI etc., or at any rate not that harshly. I agree, but go further.
The underlying assumption of the complaints about the pre-September 11th US security effort is that it is a good thing for governments to spend their time preventing particular bad things, rather than doing something about them afterwards, to go around, in other words, bolting stable doors while the horses are still in residence.
I dissent. I am of the worry-about-it-when-it-happens-and-not-before school of governmental decision-making. First, and rather trivially, it may never happen. And second, if your government takes precautions against this particular pending disaster, what about all the other equally pending disasters? Free individuals can choose which disasters they will worry about beforehand and which ones they’ll only bother with if and when. But governments being governments, if you tell them to worry about disasters they’ll regard that as a reason to worry about alldisasters. This would itself be disastrous, and to some extent it already is.
This tendency to expect governments to prevent bad things rather than to react to bad things afterwards is itself a hugely bad thing.
Central to the idea of the rule of law, at any rate as my bit of the world understands it, is that the authorities are not allowed to bang you up because of what they think you might be about to do. The rule is that they have to wait until you have already done something bad, and then they try and catch you and punish you. Law court proceedings are about what the accused has or has not done, not about what he might do in the future, on account of the sort of person he might or might not be, or on account of the types of actions he was indulging in which have a remote chance of causing bad things, like being black, taking drugs, using a rather dirty kitchen, owning scary weapons, being mentally unstable without having yet committed any actual mayhem, etc. etc.
Sadly, this principle is being severely undermined, at least here in Britain. Here, there is a plague of precautionary lawmaking going on. A centrally administered law-machine, which will supposedly end up making the world as safe as it can possibly be, is (a) running amok, and (b) making nobody any safer.
By the way, I don’t blame only our rulers for this, I also blame the general public. Whenever something bad happens, it is Joe Public himself who says: Why was this not prevented? (By the government, in other words.) Because, Mr Idiot Joe Public, that is not and cannot be their job. Refraining from serious badness before the government even knows about it is where you come in.
It always bothers me when people say that the government ought to be more “creative”. That’s not what governments are for. As a tentatively anarcho- brand of libertarian I’m strongly attracted by the notion that governments are for absolutely nothing, but if they are for anything, it is certainly not “creativity”. Creativity is unpredictable. Creativity is thinking “outside the box”, i.e. not following the usual procedures. Governments should follow the usual procedures.
The usual US government procedure for dealing with terrorist outrages is, and ought to be, that if you do something seriously bad to the US, the US will do something seriously bad to you. You can’t punish successful suicide bombers themselves, but you can go out and kill as many of their friends as you can find, and you do. Damn the expense. And you do this only after they’ve committed a huge horror. Result: this horror is not prevented, but funny how the general level of horror seems to remain agreeably low.
The usual procedure for stopping me murdering people is not for the government to spy on my every move. It is for the government to punish me, or failing that hunt me for ever – damn the expense – if I ever commit a murder. I know that. This is why I and my fellow countrymen, on the whole, refrain from murder. Again: murder stays comfortingly rare. Not by thousands of individual murders being governmentally prevented beforehand (we, the citizens do that), merely by being punished (very imperfectly and incompletely, by the way) when it occurs.
The law, and government generally, is a huge, mucky, blunt instrument. When terrible things happen and you’re the government, your job is to flail about with this blunt instrument in the general direction of the people you suspect of having done the bad things. You should not delude yourself into supposing that what you really have in your hand is a scalpel. Never, never promise that “such a thing will never be allowed to happen again.” Yes it will. Inevitably.
The US government is now being praised for hiring Hollywood scriptwriters to help it foresee future terrorism disasters. But how long before the relevant committees of “creative” people start cranking out a whole new deluge of attacks of the rights of Americans to do what they want, on account of what these creatives think it might lead to?
This is one of those bits of writing which, if I had had more time to devote to it, would have been shorter and better written. As it was, it took me almost as little time for me to write it as if has just taken you to read it. Bad luck, and all that. I hope, despite the longwinded incoherence factor, that you have found it worth your attention. Have a nice weekend.
