From MeganMcCardle at Bloomberg, Those Pesky Principles:

This is the nature of principles-based systems. They are cold and impersonal, and ostensibly neutral machinery often produces results that look grossly unfair by any common-sense moral standard: rich people getting better treatment from the legal system than poor ones, bankers who gambled on mortgage bonds getting a safer retirement than truck drivers who gambled on an overpriced house. If the “fairness” of following principle departs too widely from the “fairness” of following our intuitions, then people are going to start asking what’s so great about those principles.

In truth, there are great things about those principles. Countries unbound by such principles, where the leaders run around browbeating and cajoling and subsidizing companies into doing what they want, are not great places to live or work. They stagnate, harming consumers and the majority of workers who are not lucky enough to have jobs at the favored companies.

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