The Solution to Everything

Well, almost. In memory of Charlie Munger, who passed away on November 28, 2023, this piece will point out that many, if not all, undesirable behaviors can be improved by carefully aligning incentives, particularly financial incentives, with desired outcomes. Let’s start with alleged “systemic racism” in police departments and a review of the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, a movie about the rapid decline of Minneapolis since the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. As Mr. Munger stated: “show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

A WORLD WHERE GEORGE FLOYD IS ALIVE AND DEREK CHAUVIN IS FREE

If you wish that the United States policing and public safety systems were such that George Floyd would still be alive, keep reading. If you wish that the United States justice system was such that Derek Chauvin would be free and not stabbed 22 times in a federal prison by a former FBI informant, keep reading. Both of these “better“ (in my view) outcomes would be possible in a system with properly aligned incentives. Financial sticks and carrots are powerful forces. When financial sticks are legally removed–for example, via personal legal immunity for state actors who commit negligent or reckless acts–this encourages reckless behavior and callouses the minds of bad and/or unconscious actors. Over time, systemically entrenched bad financial incentives can look like something else, for example “systemic racism.” Peanut Butter Powder M... Check Amazon for Pricing.

While I believe that it is possible for individuals—particularly individuals who identify with racist ideologies—to have racist views and act based on those racist views, non-ideological political systems are not and cannot be racist. Humans act, systems do not.

Before we move forward, please understand that I don’t expect that the current powers that be would ever adopt clear-eyed, sensible solutions to public problems. The reason for this is that the current system is built upon misaligned incentives. The current system is ”moral hazard” manifest. Sovereign, legal immunity for reckless state actors is just one pillar. Another is that, in the current fiat money, debt financed, central bank, and income-tax-as-a-political-weapon system, there is more money and opportunity in government if there are hate-based problems to solve. Lots of money + no liability for reckless conduct = lots of reckless conduct. Show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome. Team Red Republicans and Team Blue Democrats are each others’ greatest allies. The current system allows them to blame each other for societal ills and the system is purposefully designed to not hold either of them accountable for their errors. This is a system that entrenches division, foments societal friction, and all this improves political fundraising. If there were no hateful friction, that would mean less fear of the “other” and less fear would mean fewer reasons for political donations. So stoking friction and fear means more funds are raised and more people are elected into office into a system in which there is no mechanism to hold any of them accountable for their errors. So the cycle continues.

When you are done reading this, you can continue to hate Derek Chauvin or George Floyd or even “systemic racism” if you so choose. If you want to continue to be misled by hate and anger, that is up to you. You can even choose to continue to believe what you believe to be the root causes of problems in the “system.” As we review some history and some facts, however, I hope you will be able to see that George Floyd’s and Derek Chauvin’s unfortunate outcomes would have at least some probability of being better if they had been operating in a system without entrenched, misaligned financial incentives.

A LITTLE HISTORY

George Floyd Square is four blocks from where I grew up, in Minneapolis’ Eighth Ward. My father was the Minneapolis Eighth Ward Alderman from 1968 to 1972. Despite 13 stolen bikes, 2 break-in burglaries, a stolen motorcycle, and me being robbed of $1.75 in paper route collection money by a George Floyd doppleganger when I was 10 years old, my parents never locked our doors. And we never really felt unsafe. The neighborhood back then was probably 90 percent white and 10 percent black and was considered an “inner city” and “black” neighborhood. The Eighth Ward certainly had some race tension, but there was very little overt race hostility. There were several blacks on my dad’s campaign committee and “JD,” a 6 foot 5 inch black ex-convict from Gary, Indiana was our across-the-street neighbor and one of my father’s favorite people.

I also bartended at and managed a downtown Minneapolis nightclub in the late 1980s. This was when there were some Minneapolis cops known inside and outside the force as “thumpers” who, the evidence suggests, enjoyed beating up on both ne’er-do-wells and relative innocents, both white and black. I have some experienced with them because we hired some of these officers as off-duty security to assist our also eager-to-thump-someone bouncers. There were some notorious police officers for whom the City paid out millions in lawsuit and settlement damages. One was Mike Sauro. White officer Sauro was the first officer to expose the City of Minneapolis to millions of dollars in damages when he severely beat a handcuffed white college kid named Craig Mische. Another was Dan May, a very young cop who killed a black youth named Tycel Nelson in 1990. Two white cops killed black Jamar Clark. There were a number of incidents like this in the 80s and 90s. On the other side, in 1992, officer Jerry Haaf was ambushed and killed by black members of the Vice Lords.

The last notorious act of negligent Minneapolis police violence before George Floyd was the case of black officer Mohammed Noor, who killed lily white housewife Justine Damond in her bathrobe when approaching his car unexpectedly. A litany of past incidents is detailed here. There is little objective evidence of racism in this history, although there is plenty of evidence of negligence and some recklessness. There have been so many acts of negligent and reckless Minneapolis police behavior that local attorney Bob Bennett has made a career off suing the City on behalf of people injured by Minneapolis cops. I don’t deny that racist motivation is possible in some cases, however, I believe the big picture reality is that a system that, by its nature, does not punish reckless and bullying behavior necessarily begets more and more reckless and bullying behavior. And the point of this essay is that it much easier and more effective to influence behavior with carrots and sticks than it is to change beliefs and ideologies.

And I am not picking on the police. The cold-blooded gangland murder of Jerry Haaf illustrates the extreme risk in being a cop. At the same time, everyone who participates in a system that encourages reckless behavior by failing to punish it will be more prone to engage in reckless behavior. Unchecked, those who tend toward violence and abuse will magnify this behavior in such an environment. This is Behavioral Economics 101. Police officers, including those with bully tendencies, who perform a very difficult job with no guardrails to restrain their sometimes reckless mistakes, literally know not what they do. What incentives are most effective at is making unconscious behavior conscious.

Since May 25, 2020 and the death of George Floyd, the already difficult job of a police officer has been made vastly more difficult. This is when it became clear that, instead of financial accountability for reckless behavior, Minneapolis police would now exposed to criminal punishment for doing their jobs well. Although Minneapolis enjoys very few allegations of police abuse today, this is because the police department as a whole, like police departments in many major Team Blue cities, has been in a “stand down” posture since May 25, 2020. As a result, Minneapolis today is unsafe in for many people in many areas. Crime is up. Carjackings and car thefts are way up. George Floyd‘s death and its aftermath have made parts of Minneapolis “no go” zones where the police do not respond to crimes and avoid situations that could end up with them sitting next to Derek Chauvin in a federal prison. The incentive pendulum, which for decades swung in favor of unlimited financial immunity for reckless behavior, has now swung in an equally unbalanced opposite direction—police are now exposed to crimes and jail for doing a difficult job well. This is a system that needs a fix, one that better aligns incentives. Augason Farms Cheesy B... Check Amazon for Pricing.

THE FALL OF MINNEAPOLIS

In that context, I recently watched the documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis. I highly recommend it. Be forewarned that it is difficult to stomach for both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are shaken by how well the movie illustrates the “thin blue line” between societal order and chaos and also by the realization that the Minnesota powers that be—namely Nebraska native Governor Tim Walz, New Jersey native Mayor Jacob Frey, and Michigan native Attorney General Keith Ellison–LIHOPed (let it happen on purpose) the surrender of the Minneapolis Third Precinct police station and also LIHOPed the following three days of rioting that caused $2 billion in property loss. In a system of well-aligned incentives, these men would not enjoy personal legal immunity for LIHOPing $2 billion in property damages that they had the power to prevent. They all would be bankrupted and maybe imprisoned.

The documentary provides rubber-meets-the-road evidence that self-interested politicians—Antonio Gramsci-inspired cultural revolutionaries planted in Minnesota—used the George Floyd tragedy and crisis to seize political power and also as a cultural revolution beta test. The in-your-face venality of Minnesota leadership shown in the movie is frightening to conservatives because it vividly shows the ruthlessness of their political opponents. The movie did not mention it, but Walz is a 24-year veteran of the Minnesota National Guard and last held the position of Command Sargent Major. If he had the will to protect Minneapolis cops, citizens, and property, his background tells us that he could have done so with a phone call. He, together with Frey, purposely chose not to. The movie, through interviews with several disillusioned cops, shows that Minnesota’s Team Blue mafia saw George Floyd‘s unfortunate death as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to score political points and create a dishonest political narrative that not only derailed the lives of Derek Chauvin and three innocent cops, it irreparably damaged the morale of many Minneapolis police officers, several of whom in the documentary are black. The police in Team Blue cities are standing down in large part because Minnesota’s Team Blue political leadership ordered a stand down on May 25, 2020.

Liberals I know also had difficulty watching it. The cognitive dissonance it caused—showing many facts that did not fit the official narrative—was overwhelming for them. Some couldn’t watch the entire movie and stated that they couldn’t stomach the “propaganda.“ One I know did watch the entire movie and admitted to being disturbed about how the three other officers who were not Derek Chauvin—Tou Thao, J. Alexander Keung, and Thomas Lane–were obviously railroaded into prison. Overall, however, the liberals I interacted with still feel that a white male cop going to jail represents justice because the George Floyd incident finally captured on video what happens to blacks in America every day—abuse by white thug cops in a “system” that is inherently ”racist.” In their minds, someone needed to be held accountable for decades of racist abuse and that lot fell on Derek Chauvin. This take is understandable. Although there are many facts in The Fall of Minneapolis that clearly show that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and that Derek Chauvin was not afforded a fair trial, facts don’t change emotionally committed minds—liberal or conservative. The default human mindset requires blood and punishment for sin, real or imagined.

As an aside, I tend to see things a little differently, through the lenses of spiritual movement and behavioral economics. My spiritual observation is that Team Red conservatives who believe that George Floyd is a violent, lowlife drug addict who got what he deserved are driven by the same divisive spirit as the Team Blue liberals who believe that Derek Chauvin represents a violent, oppressive, irredeemable white male patriarchy and so similarly deserves his fate. Both views are, in my view, myopic and false and fail to seek to understand all the forces at play on May 25, 2020.

In my view, every human in their fallen, unconscious state would act precisely as George Floyd or Derek Chauvin did if they had had the exact same prior life experiences. I say this from the perspective of believing that Derek’s Chauvin‘s actions were, if wrong at all, probably negligent. If he did anything wrong, it was failing to recognize that something needed to be done after the (apparently actually negligent) ambulance driver had not arrived within 2 or 3 minutes after George Floyd was on the ground and no longer resisting. The other three junior officers clearly did nothing wrong. Similarly, if the owner of Cup Foods had not called the police on George Floyd and instead turned him away despite the federal crime of attempting to pass a counterfeit bill, it seems very unlikely that George Floyd would have died of an overdose. He more likely would not have ingested the fentanyl he was carrying and would have gone on his wayward way. This conclusion regarding Chauvin is supported by the actual jury deliberations, the jury flipped in favor of conviction only after one jury had an epiphany and decided, on her own, that Chauvin’s culpability was not his act of commission (purposefully strangling George Floyd) but an act of omission (failing to recognize that Floyd was in peril and doing something about it for the 9 minutes Chauvin had him on the ground). Incidentally, an act of omission was not a crime of murder before 2021, when every level of the Minnesota court system contorted itself into making it one just for Derek Chauvin. See here. The same “system“ that incentivizes cops to behave recklessly also fails to hold accountable judges who, sub rosa, abuse their positions of authority and contort the law through prevaricating “opinions” aimed at ensuring a political conviction. More misaligned incentives.

Economically, George Floyd or something like it was inevitable because of a system with entrenched, personal legal immunity for state actors. Before May 25, 2020, if a cop recklessly killed or injured someone, the cop generally received a paid vacation called “administrative leave” and few other consequences. This unfortunately is still true for a governor who causes $2 billion in property damage or a judge who tortures the law and rules of evidence to imprison three completely innocent officers. Indeed, because of the other perverse incentive pillar—politicians who create more societal friction get rewarded—a governor who materially abets $2 billion in property damage may find himself getting promoted to head of the class of governors. But for police officers, after May 25, 2020, doing their jobs by the book now can mean life in a federal prison and getting shivved in the library by an incarcerated federal government agent. In the unconscious swinging of the incentives pendulum, a bad incentive system with no personal financial accountability has now been made worse by going in the opposite direction and exposing cops who simply do their jobs non-negligently to draconian criminal consequences. Witness Tou Thao, J. Alexander Keung, and Thomas Lane.

Police officers are now in the most difficult of positions for public employees. While they still are not financially responsible for their mistakes, they now can lose their liberty even when they don’t make a mistake. Furthermore, the misaligned financial incentives still provide that if a reckless cop is determined to be at fault in causing injury or death, then there is only one financial bagholder–the city or municipality that hired and retained him. The city has no rights of subrogation (to get reimbursed by) from even the most egregiously offending cop. In the Mike Sauro 1980s example above, the city tried to fire Sauro after the Mische incident but failed because the police union forced arbitration of his termination and an administrative judge decided in Sauro’s favor.

In a world of perfectly aligned incentives, if a union exposes a municipality to extreme liability by forcing that municipality to retain an employee who is a known financial liability, the municipality should have the right to demand payment/reimbursement from the union pension fund for that employee’s reckless acts. This is a “third party payor” problem. You will not improve A’s behavior if the “system” always compels B (the city) to pick up the tab for A’s (bad public actor) reckless behavior. This is not a slam against cops, or even Mike Sauro, this is true of all public officials and anyone unconsciously acting in a system void of consequences for reckless behavior. As detailed more fully below, it is also true of Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill, who guaranteed a Chauvin conviction by refusing to allow the jury to see evidence that would have exonerated Chauvin. Some of the worst crimes, and the least detectable, are committed by judges who also are not exposed to any financial sticks when, for example, they deny one man a fair trial and send three innocent men to prison. Ditto for mayors, governors and attorney generals.

The best thing any organization, public or private, can do to improve its performance is to tightly align financial carrots and sticks to the actors producing positive results or causing harm. This goes not only for the police, but all government actors.

When “liberal” people see the photo below and see it for an agonizing 9 minutes, many conclude that it illustrates Derek’s Chauvin’s callous disregard for George Floyd in particular and black life in general. They also conclude that the callous disregard that they see is a symptom of systemic racism. When “conservative” people see the photo below they see a by-the-book cop using a department-authorized restraint technique to subdue a very large and very strong overdosing, foaming-at-the-mouth drug addict who had just been arrested for trying to pass counterfeit money—a federal felony and only one of two crimes listed in the U.S. Constitution.

What I see is the predictable outcome of a system with misaligned incentives. In a system with properly aligned incentives, the incident probably would never have happened or, after about two minutes and a crowd instinctively sensing that a man was dying before their eyes, Officer Chauvin, now with skin in the game and potential financial liability including loss of a lifetime pension and healthcare, would have woken up from his unconscious slumber within two minutes after officer Keung called in a “Code 3” medical emergency and ordered an ambulance. A financially interested Chauvin would have said: “Where the f@*k is the ambulance??? Go to my car and get the Narcan!!!” Similarly, the other three officers would have sensed the reason–being financially exposed–for their senior officer’s stress and immediately contacted the ambulance paramedic and informed him: “if you are not here within 30 seconds with Narcan and oxygen ready to go, there are four cops here who will testify that you are on the hook for killing this guy!!!” Financial skin in the game has a way of focusing the mind and altering behavior. In such a system, George Floyd would likely still be alive.

INCENTIVES ARE COLOR BLIND

For those who see systemic racism as the motive for every act of police violence against blacks, I ask: “what about 5 black cops beating to death the unarmed black man, Tyre Nichols? What about the sad case of Tony Timpa, the white mentally disabled man who was killed when a white cop used the authorized MRT technique to subdue him? Or the sad case of Archer Amorosi, the 16 year old white lacrosse player who his mother was concerned might commit suicide, called 911, and two white deputies helped Archer by killing him. I know, facts, particularly facts that don’t fit the narrative, don’t persuade emotionally committed minds. They are nevertheless facts and they are not irrelevant.

And these aren’t isolated incidents. Reference also the high profile cases of Freddie Gray, Sean Bell, and Minnesota native Philando Castile. Is there something about “the system” that is causing black and other minority cops to kill other blacks and white cops to kill white kids? Or is some else going on? Something else is going on. What is going on is a system that has forever provided personal legal immunity for state actors and thereby incentivized those actors to switch off their better judgment in stressful situations.

If everyone, liberal and conservative, simply took a deep breath and closed their eyes and attempted to take race out of the equation in all of the instances above and in its place insert an incentive for the officer to raise the level of their behavior, they would see their error. For example, imagine that Derek Chauvin (or any of the other officers detailed above) were called to scene to arrest their own son or brother (even an adopted opposite-race son) who was overdosing or was suicidal or was otherwise behaving dangerously. Would the father/officer summarily kill the son/brother/suspect who was in distress or would he do everything in his power to identify a more creative and less lethal solution? To ask the question is to answer it.

Although I hope that The Fall of Minneapolis will be Exhibit A in the case against the LIHOP officials who surrendered the once-great city of Minneapolis, I doubt that it will change many minds.

THE MIDDLE WAY SOLUTION—HOLD PUBLIC EMPLOYEES AND OFFICIALS TO ACCOUNT FINANCIALLY

Imagine for a moment that, if a police officer killed someone and there was some question about whether the use of force was legitimate—with a strong bias in favor of the cop because no one would ever choose to be a cop if the financial risk was too high—that the cop did not get an automatic paid vacation. Imagine further that, depending on the level of the officer’s culpability—eg reckless or willful conduct, simple negligence would be too low of a standard—the officer could be exposed to a personal judgment and his union pension fund could be compelled to reimburse his employer’s losses. Finally, imagine that the only immunity that a police officer enjoyed was absolute, complete criminal immunity for non-intentional, non-premeditated conduct; that is, no police officer will ever go to jail for performing his job aggressively. He may go to jail if he uses his position to intentionally murder someone who is sleeping with his exwife—see the Tyre Nichols case—but outside of those circumstances the only risk he would be exposed to would be financial. If this is too heavy of a “stick” and is not enough incentive to supply enough cops, you could increase the carrot incentive by making cops’ income tax exempt. As night follows day, I can assure you that if you adopted a system like this it would optimize police behavior and would be much better than the current stand-down that exists in Team Blue cities. Furthermore, by exposing pension funds to liability, within a decade the pension would ensure that every cop was a black belt in jiu jitsu and/or some other means of incapacitating violent people without leaving a mark. Incentives are superpowers.

In such a system, even an unconscious Derek Chauvin would not be in jail. He may be exposed to some financial liability for failing to act in those fateful 9 minutes, but he would be free.

THE DETAILS OF MAY 25, 2020 WITH A PROPERLY ALIGNED INCENTIVE SYSTEM

So, imagine May 25, 2020 in my old neighborhood at “Cup” Foods with very limited personal financial immunity. By the way, I always loved that name Cup Foods because I thought it may have been a clever inner-city attempt to copy/associate with the very large and successful local grocery chain ”Cub” Foods–an attempt that fooled exactly no one.

As an initial matter, in a system with properly aligned incentives, Derek Chauvin might not even be there. If any of the 17 prior complaints against officer Chauvin were legitimate and he was proven to have acted recklessly or willfully in those instances, he may have already been bankrupted or run out of the union for exposing the pension fund to too much liability. But let’s imagine there were 17 prior complaints and Mr. Chauvin had never been found to have acted recklessly in the past. That is, in fair adjudications not one of the 17 prior claims had any merit. So the record suggests that he is rule-following, by-the-book cop and the fact is that good, veteran cops doing a difficult job receive bogus complaints.

Even with no sovereign immunity, I doubt that Chauvin and/or any of the officers would have behaved any differently until 36 seconds after George Floyd was on the ground. It was 36 seconds after George Floyd was on the ground that officer Keung ordered “Code 3” (high level and urgent) medical assistance. That assistance, stationed a half mile away, did not arrive for 8 long minutes. After 36 seconds, I believe things would have transpired much differently because, if Chauvin and the other officers had not been conditioned for decades to understand that they would never be held financially responsible for any mistakes they made and instead understood that recklessly irresponsible conduct could trigger their financial liability, they would have been much more conscious of the imminent need to get George Floyd immediate and effective treatment for what they knew or suspected to be a fentanyl overdose in progress.

As indicated above, after two or three minutes and George Floyd going limp, Chauvin or one of the other cops would have said ”where the f#@( is the paramedic?!” And again, because in our system of skin in the game liability, the ambulance personnel would also have potential liability for reckless or grossly negligent conduct—for example parking the ambulance blocks away for an unexplained reason and not being prepared to provide Mr. Floyd with Narcan and oxygen immediately after loading him into the ambulance. Incidentally, this is the actual evidence which Judge Peter Cahill refused to allow Chauvin to present to the jury in his defense. But even if the ambulance failed to show up for 8 minutes for legitimate reasons, would the other three officers have behaved the same in our better system? No way. After a couple of minutes, they too would have been motivated to tune out the taunts of the angry mob and would have been able to focus on saving their own financial interests and thereby focus more quickly on keeping alive a vulnerable person experiencing an overdose. If Chauvin remained unconscious, they would have pulled him off of Floyd to save themselves. They would have gotten out their own Narcan and one of them would have figured out a way to communicate to the ambulance driver that he would be on the hook, not them, if George Floyd died on their watch.

So in a system with well-aligned incentives, George Floyd would likely be alive and Derek Chauvin would not be locked up, although there may remain an issue as to his financial culpability if he did nothing in those 9 minutes.

Another illustration of how a properly aligned incentive system would work is the unfortunate case of Officer Kimberly Potter and Daunte Wright. This is another local police fatal shooting that happened in the midst of the state’s prosecution of Derek Chauvin. Officer Potter, like officers Thao, Keung, and Lang, was a victim of the political zeitgeist, was wrongly convicted of a crime and spent 16 months in jail. In that case, in a traffic violation pullover executed by a black trainee officer, a wanted-on-warrant Daunte Wright attempted to flee in his car with an open door. To prevent Wright’s escape, officer Potter mistakenly pulled out her gun instead of her taser and killed Wright. It is clear from video of the incident that Potter’s behavior was not reckless. She made an innocent mistake that could not even be attributed to negligence. The dangerous situation, and Potter‘s admitted mistake, was caused by Wright attempting to flee and endangering Potter and other cops. Under a system with well aligned incentives, there would be no criminal liability for non-intentional conduct and no financial responsibility for non-reckless conduct. As such, Kim Potter does not go to jail and is not exposed to any personal financial liability for an innocent mistake that would not have happened if Daunte Wright himself had not himself acted recklessly. If the city of Brooklyn Park paid anything to Wright’s family, the union pension fund should not be required to contribute without an adjudication that Potter committed a wrong. Better outcome.

WHAT ABOUT DEREK CHAUVIN’S CLAIMS AGAINST OTHER STATE ACTORS?

What about Derek Chauvin? Although there are many state actors who acted in grossly negligent and reckless ways toward him—his own police chief Medaria Arradondo hung Chauvin out to dry when he disingenuously testified that he did “not recognize” the MRT technique in the photo above. All Minneapolis cops are trained in MRT. The Fall of Minneapolis shows two MRT images from Minneapolis training manuals that look identical to the photo above. In a system where all state actors were exposed to liability, in addition to Arradondo, Chauvin would likely also have viable malicious prosecution/false imprisonment claims against the Minnesota Attorney General and Minnesota Supreme Court for conspiring to invent a crime that could be shoehorned into Mr. Chauvin’s conduct.

But the person who did the most harm to Derek Chauvin was Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill. Judge Cahill did this through three simple decisions all of which were upheld by the higher Minnesota Courts and all of which illustrate the everyday banality of unconscious evil that goes on in United States courtrooms. This is not because the judges themselves are evil, they aren’t. They are lulled into unconsciousness by a system that does not punish them for their worst mistakes, just like bully cops. These mistaken decisions permanently and negatively alter the course of real lives. See Thao, Keung, and Lang., Judge Cahill, knowing he would be personally immune from any errors, tied Chauvin’s hands behind his back and refused to allow Chauvin to show the jury that: (1) the ambulance was 6-8 minutes late in arriving and was unprepared for a “Code 3” overdose, no Narcan, no oxygen; (2) the Minneapolis police trained and certified all of its officers in MRT and the iconic photo of Chauvin with what appears to be his knee on George Floyd’s neck looks exactly like a photo of the MRT technique in the Minneapolis police training manual; and (3) the autopsy and the physical evidence of George Floyd’s neck shows that Chauvin’s knee on his back did not cause his death–Floyd did not die of asphyxiation/an inability to breathe.

If you want to witness what judicial unconsciousness looks like in real time, here is Judge Cahill upbraiding officer Tou Thao for not being properly humble and contrite for what Judge Cahill had ordained—that officer Thao was at fault for George Floyd’s death. This is Exhibit A in what truly excellent, old-school judges would call “Black Robe Disease,” an otherwise normal human who is possessed with a spirit of moral arrogance and superiority–the product of years of making mistakes without ever being held accountable.

If you doubt this, all you have to do is look to the unfortunate death of Amir Locke, another innocent black youth who was killed by Minneapolis police when, under the auspices of a no-knock warrant, they broke into the apartment where Mr. Locke was sleeping on the couch. Mr. Locke was not the subject of the warrant. Ten seconds after the police knocked in the door Mr. Locke was dead because he reached for a gun.

The relevance? Judge Cahill signed the no-knock warrant.

Again, Judge Cahill unconsciousness is not his fault. The blindness and callousness he exhibits above is the predictable consequence of a system that has never punished any judge for any mistake, including signing a piece of paper that caused the death of an innocent man or lying and misrepresenting the law for political purposes.

THE $2 BILLION IN PROPERTY LOSS

And what about all those business owners on Lake Street? What about their insurers? In a political system with well-aligned incentives, Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, and Attorney General Ellison would have to carry something like malpractice insurance in order to even get on a ballot. Further, for potential excess liability beyond the limits of their policies, their governments would also have to “bond“ them and insure them. Lloyds of London and its affiliates have an entire category of insurance—Excess and Surplus Lines—designed for such purposes.

Thus, in order to even qualify for public office, a candidate would have to have adequate malpractice insurance and would also have to show that he was bondable—insurable for excess coverage.

In a better world, one with well-aligned incentives, the business owners on Lake Street would therefore be able to sue the negligent and reckless officials who caused them harm and would collect on their personal malpractice policies and also against the excess and surplus lines insurers. The excess and surplus lines insurers would also have a right, under certain circumstances, to subrogation (get paid back) by the likes of Walz, Frey, and Ellison. These insurers would also have the right to deny any future bonds/excess coverage for any individuals who had exposed any governmental entity to significant liability. Thus, any official who breached the public trust and ordered a “stand down” of law enforcement for three days of looting and rioting would be bankrupted and financially handcuffed from ever holding a bonded position. No insurer would insure him. This would mean no more promotions for causing societal friction and billions in property loss.

Sounds perfect.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.