Jed S. Rakoff Quotes
I've never been impressed with bureaucratic tradition. I don't like it when the parties come to me and say, 'This is the way that it's always done, judge.' I never found anything in the oath I took or the statutes I was asked to look at that said, 'Judge, stop thinking, because this is the way it was done before.'
Rakoff, Jed S. Interview by Martin Smith. The Untouchables, Frontline, PBS, 22 Jan. 2013.
This was an observation and statement that made many conservatives unhappy with a figure who was usually their hero. However, Mises observed correctly, that any reactionary is supporting and defending what he/she perceives is the best of the past. But by definition the ideas are of the past and are the intellectual product of others. Therefore the ideas she espouses are never hers. The reactionary is intellectual dependent on the past. In contrast, liberals, progressives and radicals MIGHT be intellectually independent. A few are, but most echo their ideas. But the reactionary can never be intellectually independent.
The loyalty and sometimes hypocrisy that is often called for by political parties tends to be offensive to people of serious thought and intellect. However, America has developed two major political parties which while from time to time tend to lock-step obedience, over time tolerate wide diversity and there are few areas in which there can be a party loyalty test. In nations where there are many parties each can be very well-defined and narrow, while if essentially only two, they must have broad tents in order to win. Thinkers are more comfortable in that kind of party.
Alvarez was one of the key physicists who developed the atom bomb and was the scientist selected to accompany the plane bombing Hiroshima. There was considerable friction in the Manhattan Project development of the bomb between the scientists and the military.
Jed Saul Rakoff is a Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
