Today’s must read is a post on Gregg Easterbrook’s new TNR blog, attacking the avarice of pending 9/11 lawsuits.
Now some 9/11 families are saying $1.6 million isn’t enough. Set aside whether they should be receiving anything from taxpayers, given the myriad other circumstances in which Americans die in various horrible events every bit as traumatic and devastating to their families, who receive nothing at all. Assume for the sake of argument that something about 9/11 justifies offering victims’ estates a very large special payment. Yet some 9/11 families are saying very large is not large enough. This is greed; it is employing the memory of lost loved ones for gold-digging.
In so many areas, tort law actually skews the moral calculus that it supposedly is in charge of furthering. (E.g. application of environmental law to public transit systems can result in less environmentally sound policy). But the disguise of avarice as national public good here is astounding. Why does it take a somewhat contrarian blog writer to say the thing that must be on a lot of people’s mind?
Meanwhile, I should take issue with a bizarre claim of Easterbrooks’:
Why does the crackpot judge get 24-7 coverage when the noble governor gets almost none? Because the snarling judge and his intolerant followers show Christianity in a bad light; by granting them attention, the media make Christianity look bad. Gov. Riley’s crusade to help the poor shows Christianity at its luminous best. Therefore the media ignore Riley.
Calpundit makes the simple point that this is disengunuous, that “the media covered the Ten Commandments story because there was a lot of action, a lot of fast changing news, and lots of photo opportunites.” There’s another layer: the media latched onto this as a good story because it simultaneously dramatized questions of the role of religion in public life (an issue of particular interest to the blue states) and reenacted the incursion of federal power into Southern jurisprudence. In other words, regional politics and attendant class difference sublimated since the Civil Rights era came bubbling right up.
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