Unintended Consequences

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 1996, the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted the requirement that every lawyer licensed in Minnesota periodically attend Continuing Legal Education classes on Elimination of Bias. It’s been 15 years. Has any progress been made? What measurement is used to determine the extent to which bias has been eliminated from the legal profession? Donald Rumsfeld, pondering the problem of Middle East terrorists, famously asked: “Are we killing them faster than we’re creating them?” What metric is the Supreme Court using to measure reduction in bias in the legal profession?

In other words, how will we know when we’ve won? And if, as I strongly suspect, the answer is “it never will be possible to eliminate bias in the legal profession,” then aren’t we wasting a lot of time and money chasing unicorn dreams? The practice of law is tough enough these days, and the cost of days off to sit in class plus the fees for the classes themselves are passed along to the customers along with rent, taxes and all other overhead. And if it turns out the insulting, humiliating and degrading classes are making lawyers MORE biased rather than less . . . .

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Given the record of most government programs – a war on poverty that made us poorer, urban renewal that made cities crappier, education spending hikes that are followed by stupider students – it doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Posted

April 26, 2013

Culture War, Liberty, Pork Patrol

Mitch Berg

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3 responses to “Unintended Consequences”

TheFedSucks

April 26, 2013

The government and the Fed have forced so much misallocated capital and waste upon us that the system will implode. It’s inevitable.

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr13/Keynesian-lackeys4-13.html

…there is a difference between productive investment and squandering money. A productive investment generates a multiplier effect: most importantly, it increases productivity which then creates value, surplus and wealth.

“…apologists/neofeudal apparatchiks attempt to mystify this consumption by labeling it “investment.” The misdirection may fool craven politicos seeking to buy votes, but the real world is not fooled.”

“Value, surplus and wealth can only be created by increasing productivity. If an investment doesn’t increase productivity, it is either malinvestment, misallocation of scarce capital or consumption.”
LearnedFoot

April 26, 2013

Joe obviously has to report this June, like me. And, like me, still needs to find 2 credits of EOB courses that won’t make him want to chew his own arm off.
bubbasan

April 26, 2013

Given that all the diversity training I’ve experienced attempts to replace traditional biases with liberal biases, it is only a biased test that would demonstrate any progress in this regard, even versus the results you’d expect from the old Jim Crow days in the deep South.

Which is, as “TheFedSucks” notes, exactly as designed. It’s not like anyone really wants to look at the statistics for Pell Grants, student loans, solar energy grants, AFDC/TANF, and the like. At least not honestly.