They Have To Get This Right For America To Have A Real Chance

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black)  December 5, 2024  

On November 20, 1945, an international tribunal first convened in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg to prosecute key leaders of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials were a key aspect of holding individuals accountable for the brutal acts and genocide committed under Nazi rule.

High-ranking officials, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess, faced charges, and they tended to grab most of the headlines. But plenty of lower ranking officers, and even doctors, faced trial as well. Naturally they tried to defend themselves by claiming they were “only following orders”.

But the Nuremberg Trials established a clear precedent that moral responsibility falls on the individual who committed the crime. “Only following orders” is simply not a valid justification for blatant wrongdoing.

It’s always dangerous territory to bring up the Nazis in any intellectual argument because it’s just so sensational. But in this case the analogy is an important one because we’re ultimately talking about accountability.

Bureaucrats and politicians in the US government commit outrageous, egregious acts of wasteful mismanagement on a daily basis. A lot of it is even deliberate.

And yet no one is ever held accountable. The conservative writer Thomas Sowell once argued that “it is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

People in the private sector pay for their mistakes all the time. Businesses who don’t deliver value soon find themselves without customers. Employees who don’t do good work find themselves out of a job.

But government officials have squandered trillions of dollars. They locked down businesses, forced experimental vaccines on children, censored free speech, and violated just about every right imaginable.

How many have been truly held accountable?

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