Adam Cohen Quotes

A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

People’s genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s.

The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.

Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation’s corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, ‘Mad Men’ offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy – and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.

Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.

Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ delivers both.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

Defending Congressional authority should not be a partisan issue.

Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right – and the national government should protect it.

When the gun lobby fights gun-control legislation, its logic is clear: it does not like laws that prevent people from owning or using guns.

The Supreme Court’s most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of ‘judicial activism’ – of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.

The press should not get special privileges – if they drive recklessly or put people in danger, they should be subject to every reckless driving and endangerment law on the books – but they should also not be singled out for special punishment.

Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up ‘locational privacy.’

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.

The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.

Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.

It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern – such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the major achievement of President Obama’s first term.

Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.

State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.

It’s tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.

After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

Supporters of tough voter ID laws are not afraid of vote fraud – they are afraid of democracy.

Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like ‘the right to bear arms.’

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

Being unemployed – or working at minimum wage – is rough in the best of circumstances.

Patents have a place in medical science – for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.

DMs are a lot like email – and should have the same privacy protections as a mailed letter.

As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form.

Gun violence in the U.S. is an epidemic.

To be rejected on account of old age may or may not feel the same as being rejected on the basis of race or sex. But it is clearly unjust and dehumanizing, and the law should take it more seriously than it does.

Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.

If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.

‘Hard Times’ does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel’s subjects managed to find silver linings.

Too often, animal-rights supporters seem to care about animals to the exclusion of people.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like ‘free speech’ or ‘due process’ – or potato chip.

It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.

When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.

Even a single Justice can have a profound impact on the country.

There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.

Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic – including blacks, hispanics and students.