The other day on Richard Steele’s Barber Shop program on WBEZ I heard a discussion of Mayor Emanuel’s announced support for the victims of John Burge. If you’re not up on your Chicago atrocities, it is apparently the case that under John Burge Chicago police routinely tortured criminal suspects.
I couldn’t agree less with the participants in the discussion, all clearly adherents to the belief in the “roomful of money” hypothesis of government, that somewhere there’s a roomful of money that the city can just draw from whenever it cares to. The city would need to borrow to pay these reparations and at present interest rates that means the city would pay these reparations forever, many times the originally promised sum. Indeed, the city would be better off paying a modest stipend to each of the torture victims for life if it could do so from actual operating revenue than it would to promise lump sum payments it would be forced to borrow to pay.
My view of this is that such cases should not be heard by the courts under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, that the mayor should not have the power to make such promises, and the the mayor and the City Council together should not have the power to pay reparations. It is rife for abuse. Additionally, it punishes the innocent and allows the guilty to go scot free, the opposite of what you might wish. If the mayor wishes to pay reparations from his own pocket it would be magnanimous of him, otherwise no.
My view is that the city should not even defend city employees accused of breaking state law or city policy. That would at least provide some small incentive for city employees to do the right thing.
When it comes to government’s critical assessment of monetary expenditures there is no disciplined or reasonable brake pedal. It’s more about political expediency than real moral or fiscal efficacy. Time and time again money is spent imprudently when it flows through the hands of bureaucrats, rather than coming from the fruits of someone else’s labor.