The winner of this year’s Bastiat Prize has been announced: John Hasnas, a business ethics professor at Georgetown. He won for his essay, “The ‘Unseen’ Deserve Empathy, Too”:

One can feel for unfortunate homeowners
about to lose their homes through foreclosure.
One cannot feel for unknown individuals who
may not be able to afford a home in the future
if the compassionate and empathetic
protection of current homeowners increases
the cost of a mortgage. . . .

The law consists of abstract rules because we
know that, as human beings, judges are
unable to foresee all of the long-term
consequences of their decisions and may be
unduly influenced by the immediate, visible
effects of these decisions. The rules of law are
designed in part to strike the proper balance
between the interests of those who are seen
and those who are not seen. The purpose of
the rules is to enable judges to resist the
emotionally engaging temptation to relieve
the plight of those they can see and
empathize with, even when doing so would be
unfair to those they cannot see.
Calling on judges to be compassionate or
empathetic is in effect to ask them to undo
this balance and favor the seen over the
unseen.

You can read the whole thing here.

Oh Bobby, we do love the people. We have voluntarily paid their mortgages, provided downpayments, given 8K tax credit, forced meanie banks to “cram-down” their mortgages. And to prove our love of the people, my representative and yours are forcing mortgage companies to lend to the same people who created the defaults in the first place. But I don’t care since I love the seen and unseen whether they can pay their mortgages or not. Love’em all. They create the quality of life for which America is known.

I like the part about IPN being an independent think tank From left to right, all think tanks are independent and not biased in the least.
  Besides, the premise that current compassion towards homeowners will result in future mortgage increases is not empirically proven in this post. For that matter, it is not proven anywhere.
  Sounds like Bart is just doing some Judge bashing based on his ideological biases and abstractions.
  Typical conservatives. Wonkish abstraction over real people. love the country, love capitalism, love the flag,screw the people.

Post Your Comments: