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THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, April 29, 2010
THE LIMITS OF POWER
by Thomas Sowell
Syndicated Columnist
When I first began to study the history of slav- ery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places. In both places, slave
owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in nei- ther place was whipping a slave literally to death
likely to bring any seri- ous consequences. There could hardly be a greater power of one hu- man being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accom- plished by power. Most slaves perform-
ing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punish- ment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plan- tation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient. Tasks involving judg-
ment or talents were dif- ferent because no one can know how much judgment or talent some-
one else has. In short, knowledge is an inher- ent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it. Payment can vary in
amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incen- tive to betray the existing rulers and try to estab- lish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically im- possible for them. At more mundane lev-
els, such tasks as diving operations in the Caro- lina swamps required a level of discretion and
skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sug- ar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incen- tives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s to- bacco factories. The point of all this is
that when even slaves had to be paid to get cer- tain kinds of work done, this shows the l imits of what can be accom- plished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accom- plished that way. Even the totalitar-
ian governments of the 20th century eventually
learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese gov- ernment began to loos- en its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the eco- nomic benefits of freer markets. As those benefits be-
came clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market prin- ciples were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country’s life, where
See SOWELL on 38
UN CAMBODIAN COURT WRESTLES WITH ERA OF GENOCIDE
by John J. Metzler
Syndicated Columnist
UNITED NATIONS—Thirty-
five years ago this week, the guns fell silent in Cambodia. The capital city Phnom Penh was captured by the Khmer Rouge communists and the war was finally over. Then an unfathomable reign of terror commenced taking Cambodia into yet lower levels of the Indo- chinese inferno. Now a generation later, an UN- backed tribunal is trying key Khmer Rouge leaders “accused of mass killings and other crimes during the country’s genocide.” During the rule of the Beijing-backed Pol Pot
regime between 1975- 1979, nearly two million Cambodians were killed by their own people in the name of communist utopianism. The Year Zero as it was called, was to forcibly transform Cambodia into a socialist utopia, which rivaled the radicalism even of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. Neighboring Vietnam’s
invasion of its old ethnic rival, Cambodia and the instillation of a puppet regime in 1979, inter- rupted the sanguinary rule of Democratic Kam- puchea. Despite the ille- gality of the invasion and the dubious legitimacy of the rulers, (many of them former Khmer Rouge de- fectors), from a human rights perspective, for the average Cambodian, the situation improved.
Yet Democratic Kam- puchea was still the UN- recognized representative holding the seat of Cam- bodia. An annual po- litical General Assembly debate brought together representatives of the Pol Pot regime, genuine na- tionalists, and the mer- curial if bizarre Prince Sihanouk. The People’s Republic of China backed the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. Administration of Jimmy Carter had just recognized Beijing and thus was playing the China Card, and most developing countries op- posed Hanoi’s invasion too. Thus there existed the political clout to produce resounding ma- jorities contemning Viet- nam’s illegal occupation of Cambodia. In light of the condem- nations of Vietnam, it
almost became an after- thought that the Khmer Rouge presided over the infamous Killing Fields, an indisputable geno- cide which tore the once gentle heart from this Indochina land, making the very name Cambodia synonymous with forced starvation, torture and death. Given massive interna-
tional political pressures, Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia and allowed a UN peacekeeping and subsequently political process with led to free and fair elections in the early 1990’s. Not surpris- ingly the old Kingdom of Cambodia was reestab- lished. By 2003 the UN and Cambodia agreed to a joint judicial Tribunal, tasked with trying lead- ing Khmer Rouge figures. The Tribunal is com-
posed of both Cambodian and foreign judges. Recently the UN’s Chief Legal Counsel, Patri- cia O’Brien, visited the Phnom Penh-based Tri- bunal, officially called the Extraordinary Cham- bers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). After holding discussions with Cambodian officials, she stressed the continuing importance of the Tri- bunal, but called on do- nor countries to provide funding to support the ongoing judicial process. The ECCC budget for
2010 stands at $45 mil- lion and is paid by both the Cambodian govern- ment and foreign donors. The Tribunal provides a full and proper legal frame- work with Trial and Appeal Chambers. A trial of the notorious
See METZLER on 38
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