A legal argument for less regulation in the U.S.

I'm interning for a month in Aix-en-Provence, France with a French law firm.  As I have a few minutes of free time, I thought I'd throw out some of the perspective my time working at a French law firm has given me on the costs and benefits of the American and French legal systems.  A lot of what I write below might seem like obvious things to many readers, especially those who have studied history or law at all, but I just want to lay out all of the important facts so that even those readers with a very elementary knowledge of law can follow along.

Note: This is a long article, and I don't expect everyone to read it.  Therefore, these two paragraphs in italics sum up my point:

Common law countries traditionally have less regulation but more litigation, while civil law countries have the inverse setup.  With more litigation and less regulation, we only have the courts deciding disputes when actual wrongs have occurred, contrary to an over-regulated system where companies are punished by the government for things they have not even done yet.  

I think that the United States' traditional model of allowing a huge amount of litigation while having relatively small regulation has served us well, as it has allowed our economy to grow while punishing companies in court if and when they actually do something wrong.  However, now that we are maintaining our massive amount of litigation AND adding on a suffocating amount of regulation, we threaten to suffocate our economy and stifle any growth by businesses attempting to be honest who fear they will be punished at every term by both litigation and regulation.

Now, if you want to know the historical background and rationale for why I wrote the above paragraphs, keep on reading:

Drone attacks in Pakistan kill few high ranking militants

Newly published research indicates that US drone attacks are killing very few valuable targets in Pakistan.  Considering the amount of blowback against the United States caused by these very attacks, this data should seriously call into question whether these attacks should be continued.

The Washington Post reports:

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.

Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.

In the report, the argument is made that civilian casualties in such attacks are down to six percent.  However, based on my research, this claim by the CIA has absolutely no backing, and is based more on CIA guesswork than anything else.  We should remember the words of Baitullah Mehsud, founder of the Pakistani Taliban, who said, "I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10-15 persons. One U.S. [drone] attack and I got 150 volunteers!" (cited article on p. 14)

Along with the cost in human lives of these drone attacks, we also must never forget their economic cost.  The amount of money it takes to build, fuel, and maintain an attack drone and its armaments certainly could be put to better use, ideally in the free market, but even in other areas of government as well.

What we can learn from the Wikileaks situation

“The people at Wikileaks could have blood on their hands,” Senator Lindsey Graham said Nov. 28 in response to the whistleblower organization’s most recent publications of previously classified State Department documents. “I don’t know what the cables may say, but we’re at war. The world is getting dangerous by the day. People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I’m concerned. If you can prosecute them, let’s try.”

I was amused, though not surprised, to see these words coming from a person who does have blood on his hands. However, Sen. Graham’s response to the most recent actions of Wikileaks sum up the United States government’s general demeanor towards whistle blowing in general – “How dare you reveal the things we have done.” Americans can learn a lot about our government simply from observing its response to an organization like Wikileaks. Let’s consider just three of the dozens of such lessons.

There is no anti-war political party in Washington

The entire point of Wikileaks’ revelations about American foreign policy has been to demonstrate that there is a massive divide between what the United States government claims to be doing around the world and what it actually does. And, despite the thousands upon thousands of documents that have revealed substantial war crimes, abuses of power, and despicable acts that establish a pattern going far beyond a few isolated incidents, not a single major politician in Washington has stated that the incidents being revealed need to be investigated. Instead, Wikileaks is attacked for daring to reveal what the United States government deemed that its people did not need to know.

Realism, taken to its logical end, is non-interventionist.

I have a new piece up over at the Daily Caller about why I believe a realist foreign policy is in fact heavily non-interventionist, despite what many advocates of our current wars in the Middle East might say.

...when followed to its logical end, the realist school of internationalist relations which so many use to justify the American presence all over the world is in fact one of the greatest arguments against our current foreign policy.  I do not argue against America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan because I think that we would all just get along if these wars ceased to happen.  I argue against these wars because I come from a perspective that sees the people we are fighting as human beings with the same base motivations as myself, and when these people see their livelihood threatened, they take the best course of action that they can find, which unfortunately often involves siding with whatever group holds the most regional power.