What I’ve Learned From Paul Craig Roberts

Dr. Roberts writes: “The successful columnist is the one who understands that the job is one of entertainer. He finds an audience to which to play and gives up on educating anyone on any issue.” I thought it might be worthwhile to mention something my conservative family has learned from his work. Due to ministry involvement with inner city youth for a couple decades, we have become aware of particular situations in which plea bargaining and other aspects of the modern U.S. justice system have been used to railroad some of the folks we know. But though we have been personally involved, this still was merely anecdotal evidence of problems with the U.S. justice system. Our strong conservative tendencies to trust the cops and the authorities prevented us from drawing larger conclusions.

Dr. Roberts, in his work on the systemic injustices getting progressively worse in the U.S. system, has opened our eyes that these are not isolated cases but indicative of a long-run trend away from traditional standards of justice. Thank you Dr. Roberts for speaking out about these things in a way that my conservative parents (and myself) could understand and appreciate. If a left-winger had said all these things we might have dismissed them. But now we understand what we are really up against. I hope many other “law and order” conservatives are exposed to Paul Craig Roberts’ important work in this area so that we can understand that our current system is less and less about law and order and more and more about arbitrary injustice.

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11:56 am on February 2, 2004