PART VIII: THE THIRD AND LAST WISEMAN OF YALE AND YALE’S PARTING GIFT.
Chapter 8.2: The Third and Last Wiseman of Yale: meet Robert H. Bork
I met the third Wiseman at Yale during this semester, a genius amongst geniuses. An economist, lawyer, scholar and social scientist, I had sat in his class and saw his mind was brilliant. His name was Robert H. Bork.
One spring afternoon, I wandered up to his office and we began to discuss the Austrian Economist, Joseph Schumpeter’s theories. We just talked about Schumpeter’s treatise on the Crisis of the Tax State, its trajectory to self-destruction, and analogy of the Tax State “Tree”, a simple comparison to a fruit bearing tree (the productive sector-the goods producing sector) with a parasitic vine attached, (the non-producing sector-the taxation authority) that feeds off the fruit bearing tree and eventually kills it. This is what government does with taxes, regulation, etc., it produces nothing but smothers growth and eventually the fruit bearing host dies along with the parasitic vine. Self-Destruction. Then hopefully, a Phoenix is born from the bitter ashes.
We discussed what I had been taught earlier, that a government can only exist to reallocate resources produced by the private sector. It reallocates what it does not produce by taking it from the producers and allocating the “take” to others for votes or power, by taxes, borrowing, or monetary inflation (devaluation of debt). And the government’s appetite is endless, the more it takes and reallocates, the more powerful it becomes. That is the end game, until the parasite kills the host.
Nobody at Yale would understand Schumpeter’s brilliant works except for Bork. I soon became his disciple, and enrolled in my third year to his “Antitrust” class. He was the third and last Wiseman at Yale, he was a giant, maybe a Teddy Bear giant, but nonetheless, a Jedi Master. I was his aspiring Jedi apprentice, a disciple.
He would go on to the government sector, and hopefully become a Supreme Court Judge, to save our country, which needed his intellect desperately. But this tale turned out to be the most horrible of the horrors that pervaded the American Legal System.
After I left Yale, Bork became an Appellate Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit between 1982 and 1988. He was nominated by President Reagan on December 7, 1981, was confirmed with a unanimous consent voice vote by the Senate on February 8, 1982, and received his commission on February 9, 1982. President Reagan then nominated Bork for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on July 1, 1987, to replace retiring Associate Justice Lewis Powell.
A hotly contested United States Senate debate ensued over Bork’s nomination. Television advertisements produced by People For the American Way and narrated by Gregory Peck attacked Bork as an extremist. Accordingly, a large number of groups were mobilized to press for Bork’s rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely a partisan battle. On October 23, 1987, the Senate denied Bork’s confirmation, with 42 Senators voting in favor and 58 voting against.
According to columnist William Safire, the first published use of “bork” as a verb was possibly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of August 20, 1987. Safire defined “to bork” by reference “to the way Democrats savaged Ronald Reagan’s nominee, the Appeals Court judge Robert H. Bork, the year before”. Clarence Thomas was subsequently confirmed after one of the most divisive confirmation hearings in Supreme Court history. As a fellow Yalie, I had nothing against Clarence Thomas until 2008, when the entire Supreme Court failed its vow to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and thus deeply betrayed their country. More on this later.
The Country’s highest Court, however, in losing Robert Bork, had been denied one of the most brilliant legal minds of the century, to the detriment of and severe prejudice to the United States.
Bork went on to write a best seller “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline”, in which he argued that the rise of the New Left and entitlements in the 1960s in the U.S. undermined the moral standards necessary for civil society, and spawned a generation of intellectuals who oppose the Calvinistic hard-work values of Western civilization.
But to a careful reader, he questioned the cancerous metastasis of the entitlement society, occurring before our very eyes.
Furthermore, Bork raised the ultimate religious question on abortion: Are you killing a potential life or potentially killing a life? Bork, in his genius, saw propagation of the species as the prime directive; it was the reason why the human race had grown from six figures to nearly 8 billion humans, in spite of a history of senseless murder, senseless wars, and senseless mass death. Children were thus a precious gift from God, a miracle. Was abortion a murder of a miraculous legal-medical concept simply called a “fetus”, or was it the murder of a human life? When does the clock ticking begin? When do you have the right to murder your offspring? At the first heart beat? Or do you have the right to kill your offspring when they constantly sass you back at age 13, when you really want to kill them? Logic would indicate that real “choice” comes only once, when a woman can choose to cross her legs at follicular or ovulation phase of their menstrual cycle, which starts sometime after their period begins and ends a week later with ovulation. But this is a religious coin-toss, one that can only be answered by the Almighty Holy One.
But we as humans had to address this delicate question, this dilemma, and thus we dumped it on the Justices of the United States Supreme Court. In their landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade. Cited as 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the Court took a semi-cowardly way out and, with the wisdom of Solomon, split the baby in half, or rather thirds or trimesters. Failing to decide decisively, they created a trimester framework to allegedly balance the fundamental right to abortion with the government’s two legitimate interests: protecting the mother’s health and protecting the “potentiality of human life”.
Again, only the Almighty Holy One can pass on this, and may not really care. But you will find out, if so, when you pass on to the afterlife and be judged whether or not you murdered your offspring. I do not want to be there. It won’t be pretty. Trust me.
At Yale Law, I took this Bork genius’s antitrust class. He was best known for writing “The Antitrust Paradox”. He posited that the primary focus of antitrust laws should be on consumer welfare rather than ensuring competition, as fostering competition of companies within an industry has a natural built-in tendency to allow, and even help, many poorly run companies with methodologies and practices that are both inefficient and expensive to continue in business simply for the sake of competition, to the detriment of both consumers and society. Bork’s writings on antitrust law were influential in causing a shift in the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to antitrust laws since the 1970s.
Now, however, we might want to go backwards, dust off, and to test the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 against the privacy violating and data-gathering behemoths, Amazon, Google and Facebook, et alia. Break them up? Muzzle their ferocious power? De-fang them? Why not? Let us do it. Hoorah!
Unfortunately, I would leave Yale and never see this Giant Icon, Bork, again. I had so wished to collaborate with him on a sequel to his best seller: “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline”. It would be titled “Bobsledding Past Gomorrah”. Such had the cancer of the entitlement society metastasized throughout this country.