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Title: The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice by Paul Craig Roberts, Lawrence M. Stratton ISBN: 0-7615-2553-X Publisher: Prima Lifestyles Pub. Date: 01 May, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.64 (14 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Seriously flawed, but very useful
Comment: I'm giving this book three stars because it is very good at one thing, even though it is bad at most everything else. Intended as a primer for a civil libertarian view of certain troubling legal trends, The Tyranny of Good Intentions fails on that level because it wears its bias on its sleeve in some staggeringly conclusory statements (for instance, blaming publicity-hungry feds for genocidal butchery against David Koresh) while failing to back them up. No one who reads it and is not already convinced of the book's thesis could be converted by this supposed entry-level book.

And for those already committed to the cause espoused by the authors, this book contains little in the way of useful reasoning. Its avowed purpose is to contrast Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian version of law, which it states is in force today, with Blackstone's absolutist version of civil liberties -- but instead of defeating Bentham's arguments, the authors call him names and say Blackstone's version of law is more traditional (i.e., older). There are good arguments to be made against weighing peoples' civil rights against a general societal benefit. For instance, whenever it's done and individual rights are made to yield to the public good, it seems that the public doesn't benefit. But the authors do not discuss the contrast they claim they are making between absolute rights and utilitarianism; they just say utilitarianism loses, make fun of it, and move on.

Considering the two levels on which The Tyranny of Good Intentions is supposed to work are two on which it fails utterly, I find myself surprised to be giving in three stars. But there is a level on which it is extremely useful. The authors' research for emotional arguments to replace the logical ones they do not make has revealed a large number of concrete examples of injustice done to real, named people under the present system of proescutorial overenthusiasm. While these are reported in the conclusory style I so deplore, they are useful beginnings to my own researches, and they make for splendid talking points.

There are people out there to whom the potential for abuse of governmental power is purely theoretical because they have never heard of anyone who actually suffered. Properly used, the examples in this book can raise awareness that not only can government get out of hand, but it has. No one who learns of the Depression-scarred doctor who kept cash in his shoeboxes, and had it seized when he tried to give it to charity, will look at drug forfeiture the same way again. No one who hears of the pizza restaurant forced to clean toxic waste out of a landfill because some of its boxes were found in it will be an unequivocal supporter of the Superfund.

For all its many faults, The Tyranny of Good Intentions will raise the level of skepticism about government power, and for this alone it is worth the three stars I give it. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and this book is an inspiration to pay this price.

Rating: 4
Summary: You Think Prosecutors Are After Criminals. Think Again!
Comment: This rather unassuming book is one of great import. When the same book is endorsed by Milton Friedman and Alan Dershowitz on the same page, it is one not to be taken lightly.

The book started off with the cornerstone pieces of the Anglo-Saxon law - mens rea (criminal intent), non-retroactiveness of new laws, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, sanctity of attorney-client privilege, property rights, and went on to cite laws and legal cases, some of the very high-profile, that helped chip away the these cornerstone pieces and made the law no longer a guarantor of constitutional rights. This dangerous practice of eroding the "Right of the Englishman" is, according to the authors, a result of well-intended, but poorly thought-out legislation and over zealous government prosecutors, who were driven by political ambition, pressure of revenue and even personal enrichment.

It is frightening development. It is hard to believe that this country has allowed its cherished legal system to deteriorate to one that, in essence, is no different than that of a police state - one that prosecutors could at will use the full force of the government to break any individual, sometimes by threats, lies and confiscations. Most people will dismiss this notion as alarmist, until they read what this book has explained and chronicled. After 9/11, the Ashcroft regime seeks to greatly enlarge federal powers to fight terrorism, but that inevitably be at the expense of our cherished civil liberty. We should all be vigilant about what is being done. History has taught us that some really bad things that are done with good intentions are very, very hard to undo.

Reading this book forces me to revise my opinion on those who had been vilified by the prosecutors and the media, like Charles Keating, Jr. Leona Hemsley and Michael Milken; as well it dims the much-heralded Rudolph Giuliani legacy. It also reconfirms that damages done by FDR's New Deal - the emergence of the administrative state, and his Court-packing initiative, not to speak of the unleashing of the welfare state.

The presentation of the book, unfortunately, seems to lack clarity and force, and the organization is somewhat loose. There are anecdotes abound, but they are not backed by statistics, and the reader has no idea if the outrageous prosecutorial excesses are 10% of the cases, 1%, or less. The book is otherwise very readable. I will recommend this book if only for the seriousness of the subject matter.

Rating: 2
Summary: Why do the non-heathens rage?
Comment: [.... The Tyranny of Good Intentions discusses, or at least alludes to, some of the most important issues about democracy. . Public policy, evolutionary biology, economics, and management theorists, as well as ethicists, are all coming to appreciate that one of the most critical factors in a community is the degree of trust among its members. Altruism turns out to be common in many facets of life. ... I agree with the authors' nominal thesis that denying groups civil liberties and a meaningful franchise leads to tyranny. Paternalism has nearly always failed to prevent tyranny.

So, I found myself reading a book I thought was raising many of the most important questions, written by authors who seemed to be well placed to make a dramatic fusion of old-style public choice theory with the modern findings about trust, and sounding a clarion call for liberty, which is my favorite overture. ... The first problem was the title; the authors aren't serious about the phrase "good intentions." Their opponents are villains, "evil incarnate."

The second problem also involves the title; there is little or nothing worthy of the label "tyranny" discussed here. Overwhelmingly, the book protests white-collar crime cases against super elite Americans, environmental regulations, and the civil rights laws.

The third problem is that the book ignores all of the difficult issues because it assumes away all the tensions and tradeoffs in public policy. ... Because they argue that denying these rights leads to tyranny, I waited for them to describe any of the four classic proofs from English history of this thesis. ...An explosive mixture of hate, bigotry, and fear led to periodic savagery and pervasive malign neglect and exploitation. Millions of people died and hundreds of millions of people lost their liberties due to these acts of tyranny. The authors say not a word about them.

.. Why the same failure to use these terrible acts by America, which show that a denial of individual rights leads to tyranny? Their inclusion would falsify the authors' real views, that our super elites (who are exemplary) are tyrannized while "the other" is the problem. ..The irony is that this book teaches us almost nothing about tyranny through what it says, but much about tyranny through what it omits. England and the U.S. prove that nations can value freedom while enslaving others. It was not an accident that the word "slave" was not in our Constitution. The exclusion of the victim from the document made it easier to continue to tyrannize blacks. Similarly, English law simply ignored slavery in the colonies.5 Roberts and Stratton have unintentionally illustrated how real tyrannies are maintained. The victims disappear from the tyrants' histories.

The fifth problem is that the book does not show that tyranny, in Professor Dershowitz's phrase, "is not a left-right issue." The authors' villains are on the left, their heroes on the right. The heroic protector of civil liberties was - J. Edgar Hoover. Franklin Roosevelt and Chief Justice Warren are villains. The book is wholly one-sided in other ways. For example, prosecutors are evil. Conclusory statements by defense counsel are treated not as advocacy, but as ultimate fact (requiring neither supporting analysis nor citation). There are no complex human beings in this book, only cartoon caricatures drawn with chunky crayons.6 [end page 227]

So, how well do they deal with the important questions their book at least implicitly raises? As I will show, very poorly by any standard of scholarship. They aren't clear in their analysis, or rigorous, and they are relentlessly one-sided. Many of their facts are wrong and they rarely provide citations. They rely on ad hominem attacks on their foes and rhetoric replaces reason. Government workers do not have good intentions; the authors repeatedly liken them to Nazis.

Thus, the book implicitly raises another question. Why, at their very moment of triumph, is the raging right becoming overtly hostile to our nation's government? Why do the non-heathens rage? Ironically, Mr. Roberts used to claim that the central problem in America was such pessimism and hostility towards America on the part of leftist elites (a "denunciatory ethic"7).

The claim that the government is filled with Nazis is important. Attitudes like this lead to disturbed persons deciding that it would be a good thing to murder a couple hundred strangers, including their children in a day care center, because they work for the federal government in Oklahoma City. Instead of wanting to build trust between the public and government workers, the authors believe that the only hope for escape from our tyrannical government is the complete destruction of such trust. As the saying goes, if we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities.<..I use the word in its conventional senses as involving either (or both) .. The authors' love of liberty doesn't extend to gays. Though they quote with approval the common law's enshrinement of a man's home as his castle (Id., 12), they think it a good thing to arrest gay adults engaging in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes..

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