Chickens come home to roost...

The use of innovative new ways of using government to Punish the Evildoers Among Us (without going to the trouble of actually passing any laws) started with attacks against everyone's favorite bad guy: the tobacco industry. Recently the focus has expanded to include firearms manufacturers. The tactic seems to combine the best of several worlds: it feeds the seemingly insatiable human need to punish someone for real or perceived wrongs, it avoids entaglements with people who may shoot back (e.g., organized criminals), and it appeals to plain old avarice and greed, as in, "We'll make 'em pay!"

Well it hasn't taken long for an enterprising bureaucrat in Philadelphia to wonder if suing businesses for redress of various "injustices" might not become a standard tactic for implementing policy and, naturally, filling the city's coffers.

City solicitor Ken Trujillo has 145 lawyers (as well as private attorneys) researching cases to file. "This is not any kind of attempt to go out and make a business of suing businesses willy-nilly," says Trujillo. "We want to bring cases that have a good chance of success and where the payoff both in terms of policy and financially is high for the city." He declined to name any specific industries that may be targeted in future action.

Doesn't that just send a chill down your spine?

The time was, if you wanted someone to stop doing something, you convinced a bunch of legislators to make it illegal. Afterwards, if anyone got caught doing it, they went to jail. (Yeah, I know, that's a simplification, but bear with me...)

Now, it seems, by using the courts "creatively," law can "keep up with the times" and the government can go after people - sometimes years after some activity - and sue them in front of juries who, in the back of their minds, may well imagine their taxes going down if they can see their way to dipping into the deep pockets of defendants for redress of any and every kind of grievance, real or imagined.

This might sound good as long as the Bad Guys are among the usual slimeballs (as determined by some elite group of lawmakers), such as the tobacco and firearms industries. But now imagine some two-bit town solicitor in Podunk gets enough juice to sue, say, Planned Parenthood in a civil case for, say, having abetted numerous abortions? Impossible, you say? Not on my watch, you say?

Never underestimate the power of a litigator, especially one who believes himself (or herself) to be among the annointed.

Unless this trend is stopped soon, the legal system will settle down into a mode that looks only for victims who will not be found guilty of any crime, but of thwarting that fickle thing called "public policy," and from whom governments can squeeze money. I'm not at all sure that's the way things ought to go.

Cheers...

Top 10 Books

Some time ago, I bid on and answered a query at InfoRocket.com, a site that allows people to receive payment for answering questions. Most of the questions are silly ("What's the name of the CD in my computer right now?") and some have been thinly disguised marketing pitches ("Who wants to make a lot of money on the Internet?"), but the site survives. I digress...

The question I answered was something along the lines of: "What were the ten most important books you've ever read?" I answered the question, earned my "fee" ($10), and went on about my life. At any rate, I just ran across the answer - which I thought I had lost - in a lonely, out-of-the-way subdirectory on my vastly underused Windows box. Reviewing the list, I note I still feel the same way about it, so I figure maybe it belongs as part of my LiveJournal, before the file disappears again, like a bone sinking back into a stew.

In answering the question, I took the question literally. The books on the list are not necessarily among my favorite books; in some cases I may not ever read them again. In each case, however, I felt that I was a significantly different person after finishing the book. Things were clearer, seemed sharper, were more in focus. I was surer of myself. I'd grown.

The list also follows no particular order. The only conscious ground rule I observed in selecting the books on this list was that the texts are available in English.

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
More than any other work by any other writer, the writings of Ayn Rand -- and her Atlas Shrugged in particular -- helped me crystallize what turn out to be a fairly libertarian set of views and philosophy of life. What I found important about Atlas Shrugged was its reaching beyond the often dry and current-events bound content of Rand's Objectivist periodicals in its characterization of her philosophy, showing archetypes that made deep impressions in my mind.

The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management - Hyrum Smith
Other self-improvement books I've read merely emphasize the importance of setting goals as a means of accomplishment, and then go on to explain how to set and achieve those goals. This book made me rethink my priorities, so that my goal-setting activities reflect the results I want to achieve. As a result, I no longer feel obligated to get 16 hours of work done in 8 hours; I will be satisfied to work in a manner that addresses what is most important to me in life, be it in an 8, 10, 12, or 2 hour period.

How To Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Today cited as a handbook on manipulating others, this book nonetheless was valuable to me because it forced me to focus on how I interact with others and to realize that people are generally more interested in their wants and needs than in mine. It certainly made dealing with people in my first job (travel representative) much easier, and the lessons learned from reading this book have lasted until today.

Selected Essays on Political Economy - Frederic Bastiat
Bastiat wrote in a libertarian vein, and this book -- particularly his collection of essays on "What is seen and what is not seen" -- affected me on two levels. First, it presented very cogent arguments in favor of free markets, which I found useful in discussions with others. Second, and perhaps more important, it taught me the value of not jumping to conclusions based on first impressions; that it was entirely possible to dig into a set of facts and find an alternative explanation that better fits the facts than to settle for a knee-jerk reaction based on a first impression.

The Memory Book - Harry Lorayne & Jerry Lucas
What surprised me most about this book was how it completely upended everything I thought I knew (and everything my friends and acquaintances knew) about memory. It is not hard to learn and apply the techniques presented in this book, and while I have never felt it necessary to do anything such as memorize all of the ticker symbols on the stock exchange, I have found the "tricks" shown in this book (which some of my more cynical friends called "crutches"), to be useful to me again and again over the years.

Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
This book rearranged my whole view of the world at a time when I was starting my career and feeling pretty smug about myself. I started reading the book at the recommendation of a friend who was studying artificial intelligence. I'd heard of Bach, but not of Goedel, a mathematician, nor of Escher, an artist. Hofstadter kept showing how the three themes of math, music, and art kept wrapping around each other (hence the "braid" in the subtitle), and he kept throwing me off-balance with concepts I had never dealt with, yet which I found fascinating at the time and useful later in my career (e.g., recursive structures, self-reference, propositional calculus, number theory).

Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor & Middle Class Do Not! - Robert Kiyosaki
Scott Fitzgerald noted that the rich are different, Kiyosaki told me why. Published relatively recently, Kiyosaki seems to validate a lot of things I had concluded on my own, such as how the idea of "go to school, get good grades, get a good job" may not be as valid today as it was in my parents' day. By comparing and contrasting the attitudes of his biological father, an accomplished, yet financially poor academician, with those of the rich, yet only eighth-grade-educated father of a close friend, he provided insight into the thinking processes and financial literacy of people who are, or become, affluent.

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
This book was recommended to me, and on the basis of the "ambitious" nature of the title and its having been written by a concentration camp survivor, I picked it up. The book was not an easy read; I kept asking myself if I would have found what it took to survive under similar circumstances, and did not like the vagueness of my answers. On the other hand, I was encouraged by the basic message of the book, which was that finding meaning in one's life is an important factor in survival; and if it's true for concentration camps, then what wonders can we accomplish in environments so far removed from them?

Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
The author would appear to have been a very interesting person: writer, translator, lepidopterist, chess player, and more. And this biography was the first piece of real "literature" that I really moved me (my recollection is that all else I'd read to that time -- college -- had been either popular fiction, technical, or forced down my throat in school). There were passages in this book that I would read, and then read again because the words and their associated pictures were just so *right*.

The Collected Poems of Robert W. Service
These are poems that I readily understand. I've been out "in the great Alone, when the moon was awful clear," and those are pleasant memories. So in tune with me is Service's work that I managed to memorize The Shooting of Dan McGrew by osmosis (no apparent effort...no memorization techniques...I read it out loud a few times and it "stuck"). Service led me to Kipling, whose work I'd originally bypassed as too dense, and to other poets, such as Burns, whom I have learned to enjoy immensely.

What books changed your life?

Cheers...