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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (5266)	11/16/2005 9:50:50 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543106

"An Economist's View on Torture In thinking about torture, I had come to a dead end of what felt like a very unsatisfactory conclusion: that we had to keep torture illegal and rely on our agents charged with security to break the rules when extraordinary circumstances warranted it. I don't feel as bad about this after reading Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution: Here is where economics can make a contribution. By making torture illegal we are raising the price of torture but we are not raising the price to infinity. If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution. Only if the price of torture is very high can we expect that it will be used only in the most absolutely urgent of circumstances. The torture victim faces incredible pain and perhaps death at the hands of his torturer. If these costs are to be born by the victim then we had better make damn sure that the benefits are also high and the only way we can do that is to make the torturer also bear some of the costs. Torture must not be cheap. Be sure to read the whole thing, it's not much longer. My impulse was to run all 4 paragraphs of his post, but that's not really fair-use excerpting, IMO. Posted by Brian Keegan at November 15, 2005 01:00 PM" centristcoalition.com