Prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service, [Sunstein] argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton -- or even the "slight appearance" of it.

Sunstein is a prodigious legal scholar, putting out books at a stunning clip. Usually what he does is package a set of ideas from another sector into a marketable and media digestable recipe, and Nudge is no different. The authors go through the standard litany of important concepts; anchoring, herding, biases, imperfect information, defaults, incentives, and feedback. Anchoring, for instance, is the concept that the first price you hear for an item is forever the price associated with that item. If someone tells you a diamond is worth $5000, it is a luxury item and getting one for $4000 is a deal. If someone tells you a piece of artificial condensed carbon is worth $50 for industrial uses, you'll feel ripped off if someone puts a price tag of $60 on the same stone that was a steal at $4000. The Tipping Point basically told this story, but better.

Still, these are important ideas, because they undermine the notion that free markets exist as neutral arbiters, showing markets as artificial constructs with important regulatory choices built into them. This is a newly emergent set of ideas, and who controls their interpretation will control the public policy choices they imply. As we move into an era where free market fundamentalism dies, it's important to keep our eyes on the framers of the new intellectual moment. Ideas can be used to prop up the corrupt system we have now, or to renew it. Sustein and Thaler are firmly on the side of propping it up. In chapter 6, for instance, Sunstein and Thaler go into a long discussion of savings rates and the importance of opt-in versus opt-out strategies for getting people to save more for their retirement. This, though, is how it's framed, on page 103.

As all politicians know but few are willing to admit, we will eventually have to bite the bullet in order to make Social Security solvent, through some combination of tax increases or benefit cuts.

That is exactly 100% out of the conventional wisdom from the 1960s conservative movement, which treats Social Security as a ponzi scheme. It is unsupported by evidence, as the 'insolvency' date for Social Security keeps being moved up every few years, but it is the way that Sunstein supports his theory of 'libertarian paternalism', which is an updated version of the DLC mantra that we must find a solution between a socialist regulatory state and a free market. Here's how Nudge explains this philosophy and its political viability.

Libertarian paternalism, we think, is a promising foundation for bipartisanship. In many domains, including environmental protection, family law, and school choice, we will be arguing that better government requires less in the way of government coercion and constraint, and more in the way of freedom to choose. If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest. So, to be clear, we are not for bigger government, just for better governance

The notion of 'nudges', or various things government and business can do to control human behavior without Stalinist regulation, is not new or particularly interesting. For instance, labor unions and business are locked in a multi-million death struggle about card check, which is simply a way of voting for or against labor representation. Labor wants to be able to use petitions or voting, business wants just voting. More examples include voter ID laws that help suppress the vote, ballot designs that privilege one candidate over another, and urban design and sidewalks that encourage or discourage driving. Yet more examples include economic assistance to low income women to reduce abortions, or the fight over abstinence-only education to lower the rates of STDs.

Thaler and Sunstein create new language to describe people who design the defaults in various systems, such as 'choice architect', but once again, this is not even close to a new idea. Bookshops have been charging money for retail placement for years; want your book at eye level, that'll be extra. No, the real point of this book is not to teach anyone about behavioral economics, but to enforce a Beltway orthodoxy that is anti-government to the core

Libertarian paternalism is a clever little slogan, but it's an oxymoron.

I have heard all this stuff about making government smaller and more responsive, offering more choice and less coercion using market forces before. It is the DLC's central argument, repackaged (yet again) as something hip and modern. Basically, it's conservative economics, Democrat style. I bought into it when Bill Clinton ran on it, thinking that it was worth a try. Now that I've seen what happens when Democrats act like second string Republicans, I'm not much impressed with such "new" ideas.

One of his former students, Kathy G, calls him the legal equivalent of Alan Colmes :

... the conservatives' favorite liberal, because he accepts their terms of the debate and has no compunction about kissing their asses with the utmost enthusiasm, the honor of liberalism, or his own self-respect, even, be damned. Either he has no clue how dangerous and destructive these right-wing extremists are, or he doesn't care. And I'm not sure which is worse.