Bhutan turns tourism into 'Gross National Happiness'

At the Takin Preserve: Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay
with me and visitors from the United Kingdom and United States.

Little more than a half century ago, the Kingdom of Bhutan was walled off to the world.

Today, tourists are welcome, but with strict controls that aim to leverage social and economic development.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Bhutan and had the privilege of meeting the prime minister, the Hon. Tshering Tobgay. The PM was visiting the Motithang Royal Takin Preserve in Bhutan, located just outside the capital, Thimphu.

Takin calf at the preserve.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The takin, by the way, is a large mammal native to the Himalayas, a genetic relative of sheep. One subspecies of takin is specific to Bhutan and is revered as the national animal. The preserve provides a sanctuary for the massive herbivores, thus also protecting the environment from their destructive appetite.

Tobgay was not at the preserve for a refresher on Bhutanese fauna; rather, the PM was escorting the 2025-appointed American ambassador to India and special envoy for south and central Asia, Sergio Gor, on a touristic and diplomatic visit. Gor was reciprocating a Tobgay visit to the United States in December.

Tobgay and Gor, at the PM's right, feed a takin.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

A longtime Bhutanese politician, Tobgay is American educated. He earned a bachelor's in mechanical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s and then a master's in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School in the 20-aughts. He published a book in English last year: Enlightened Leadership: Inside Bhutan's Inspiring Transition from Monarchy to Democracy (inset below).

Bhutan is a constitutional monarchy, though still leans heavily on the monarchy part of the description. The crown initiated a policy of democratization in 1952. A first national assembly was appointed the following year and given the power to impeach the monarch. Today, the king formally appoints the prime minister, though in practice the appointee is elected by the legislature. Similarly, final decisions of the Supreme Court formally are referred to the crown for approval.

Supreme Court of Bhutan, Thimphu.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In modern international law, Bhutan is renowned for its commitment to "Gross National Happiness" (GNH), a national policy priority introduced in the 1970s. A holistic measure inspired by Buddhism and informed by factors such as health, education, and living standards, GNH has been embraced conceptually by the international community—Bhutan joined the United Nations in 1971—as an alternative to economic productivity, the conventional measure of a country's success. One Bhutanese host explained to me that GNH does not mean every person is happy; rather, GNH describes the aims that should justify national policy-making.

Bhutan opened to foreign tourism only in 1974 and allowed television and the internet only in 1999. It still guards its borders jealously, allowing a limited number of tourists who must book through state-authorized agents and pay a US$100-per-day sustainable development fee. When I visited, my visa was arranged wholly by the tour service I used.

However restrictive Bhutan's social and political conservatism, I could not argue with the results I saw on the ground. People I met in Bhutan expressed affection for the king and queen, often noting that the royal family lives in a modest home and champions public education. Schoolchildren I happened upon in Thimphu were uniformed and polite, while also cheerful and playful, and they spoke English confidently.

Buddha Dordenma, visible from Thimphu center.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The sustainable development fee seems to be well reinvested in infrastructure, such as paved roads, and touristic sites, such as the 177-foot Buddha Dordenma statue, completed in 2015, that towers over Thimphu. A travel companion told me that the winding rural roads we traveled were unpaved when he visited a couple of decades ago. In literacy and life expectancy, Bhutan significantly outpaces its cohort in the "medium" range of the U.N. human development scale.

Thimphu, capital of Bhutan.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Insofar as I heard any gripe about government policy from the Bhutanese, it was that high-quality healthcare remains elusive, especially in the countryside. Nevertheless, when an American travel companion asked my guide about the cost of treatment after the guide mentioned a family member's cancer, the guide narrowed her brow in puzzlement. Then she shook her head, understanding the question, and said, "free, of course."

Rinpung Dzong, or "Paro Fort," a 15th-century monastery
and top tourist destination, in Paro, Bhutan's third-largest city.
Owned by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Thinking over what we had seen, some of my travel companions wondered aloud whether monarchy might not be so undemocratic after all. That struck me as curious after what I heard about some Nepali youth protestors speaking wistfully of monarchy there. Invariably upon such musings, an American, sometimes me, would say that the efficacy of monarchy might depend a bit too much on who is wearing the crown.

The United States does not have formal diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of Bhutan, thus Ambassador Gor's visit as special regional envoy. Gor has some personal connection to, well, at least the Asian continent. He was born in Uzbekistan—"Gor" is a chosen truncation of Gorokhovsky—and migrated with his family to the United States, via Malta. He graduated from secondary school in Los Angeles.

Amb. Gor

How did an L.A. immigrant wind up with an ambassadorship in the Trump administration? Gor has been involved in Republican politics since his post-secondary days at George Washington University. His recent ambassadorial qualifications include fundraising for President Trump and starting a Trump-reverent book publishing company with Donald Trump, Jr.

After the 2024 election, the President appointed Gor to head personnel appointments. President Trump later credited his "great friend" Gor with "nearly 4,000" party-loyal hires in the new administration. Presumably Gor himself included.

Let's open up those tax returns. All of them.

Had Donald Trump never entered politics, never become President, his billion-dollar-plus tax-return losses reported by The New York Times would still have happened.  And no one is so naïve as to think that Trump is alone in exploiting the tax system, if not mocking it.  The alternative minimum tax, in place long before the Trump-Times study decade, is supposed to curtail claimed-loss shenanigans by the 1%ers.  But they don’t pay it and hardly ever have.  Working people pay it.  (I paid it at least once.)  Sure, we should go after tax fraud.  But I’d like to see our congressional leaders talking about unfairness in the tax system as it exists in law.  That’s Congress’s wheelhouse, after all.

Let me issue the perennial reminder that personal income taxes are fully transparent, public, and online—for everyone—in Norway, and they always have been public, if only more recently online.  Yet the sun still shines there—most places, most of the year—and people get on just fine.  It turns out that knowing what other people earn in income does not undermine or destroy society.  In fact, transparency might generate overwhelming positive consequences, such as a better informed therefore better functioning free market for labor, and, lo and behold, public confidence in government and tax equity.

America has a weird ethic about salary secrecy.  My pay is online; you can look it up at Mass Live.  Look for my wife there, too, so you know what our household income is.  And then explain to me why we owed thousands of dollars in taxes this year even after we reduced our 2018 W-4 deductions to zero and supposedly got a rate cut.  (Spoiler alert: Pretty sure the IRS over-cut withholding to create short-term economic stimulus at later public expense.)  I’d tell you what we make right here, but I learned the hard way that people at my workplace hate when I talk openly about salary.  There’s some social taboo, I guess, that I never learned.  Anyway, 🤙.

Here’s my modest proposal.  We don’t have to be Norway.  But how about, when you’re elected to federal office, executive or legislative, your tax returns, back some number of years and going forward some number of years, are entered into a public database.  We see politicians herald the release of their returns; that’s the norm we hold up as desirable.  So let’s formalize it.  Simple and nonpartisan.  These are people holding public jobs, paid from the public fisc.  So we know their earned incomes.  What’s left to hide?

Maybe if we saw everyone’s taxes in Congress, as well as the President and Veep, we’d finally get meaningful and bipartisan tax reform.

Roundup and other stories: Monsanto, Sandy Hook, Aaron Hernandez, Monica Lewinsky, Summer Zervos, and One Montana Statute

A number of stories have broken in the last couple weeks that, ordinarily, I would like to write about on this blog.  I've been traveling a good deal and unable to keep up, so here's a short, uh, roundup.  Hat tip to my Torts II class, which is ever vigilant.

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Strict product liability—Roundup.  In phase one of a bifurcated trial proceeding, plaintiff Edward Hardeman succeeded in causally tracing his cancer to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide.  (NYT, Mar. 19.)  Bayer, which purchased Roundup maker Monsanto, saw its stock price tumble on the German exchange, Fortune reported.  This finding follows the notorious $289m award (later reduced to $78m) entered in favor of Dewayne Johnson against Monsanto in California state court in August 2018 (Phys.org), now on appeal (Justice Pesticides).  Recap is tracking Hardeman v. Monsanto, 3:16-cv-00525, in federal court in the Northern District of California.

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Gun liability—Sandy Hook.  The Connecticut Supreme Court issued its long awaited ruling in the Sandy Hook families' case against gun maker Remington, allowing the case to go forward on one theory of Connecticut consumer protection law.  (NYT, Mar. 14.)  The court delivered 4-3 upon the dubious conclusion that the U.S. Congress, in immunizing gun makers from liability upon a host of tort theories, did not mean to preempt remedies under state consumer protection statutes such as the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act.  The dissent was unpersuaded.  Meanwhile many a pundit had commented on the gun regulatory response pending in New Zealand since the Christchurch attack, marking the contrast with U.S. legislative paralysis amid shootings here.  The case is Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International, LLC, No. SC-19832.

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Wrongful death, collateral estoppel—Aaron Hernandez.  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the conviction of former NFL player Aaron Hernandez in the June 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.  Lower courts had thrown out the conviction after Hernandez hanged himself in prison in 2017.  Massachusetts law appeared to require that the conviction be vacated upon the common law doctrine of "abatement ab initio," because the defense appeal was not resolved when the defendant died.  Instead the Massachusetts high court held that the doctrine is antiquated, and the record should read "neither affirmed nor reversed."  In the case of Lloyd, the victim's mother had settled her civil claim.  But the Court recognized 

the potential impact abatement ab initio can have on collateral matters, including undermining the potential application of issue preclusion....  There are a host of potential other interests than can be affected by the outcome of that prosecution and, although we must be mindful not to let any one of those other interests override a defendant's rights, they are worthy of recognition when considering the best approach to follow when a defendant dies during the pendency of a direct appeal.

The case is Commonwealth v. Hernandez, No. SJC-12501 (Mass. Mar. 13, 2019).

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Invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress—Monica Lewinsky.  John Oliver did a brilliant segment on, and interview with, Monica Lewinsky on his Last Week Tonight.  Looking back at comedians' crass jokes in the 1990s—Oliver includes himself, but it's Jay Leno who is cringeworthy—makes one uncomfortably aware of how far #MeToo has evolved our perception of power dynamics in the workplace.  The sum of the experience is newfound empathy and more than a little angst over online bullying. I now follow Lewinsky on Twitter, as she's a more effective anti-bullying spokesperson than Melania Trump.

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Defamation, Supremacy Clause—Summer Zervos. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court ruled that Summer Zervos's defamation suit against President Trump may go forward despite the President's constitutional objections.  Zervos alleges that Trump defamed her through his spiteful attacks on her credibility over claims of his sexual misconduct after she was a contestant on The Apprentice.  In Clinton v. Jones style, the President sought to have a stay in the action until his White House service concludes.  The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that claim in Clinton, ruling that the lower court could manage the case with deference to the demands of the presidency—a conclusion, incidentally, that might have been proved erroneous in light of subsequent events.  Anyway President Trump tweaked the tack, arguing that because this case arises in state law in state court, vertical federalism, as expressed in the Supremacy Clause, should not permit the arguably untenable subservience of a sitting President to the supervisory authority of the state court.  The Appellate Division concluded 3-2 that the problem can be managed; as in the past, for example, a President might testify via video.  Some court orders might violate supremacy, the court explained, such as a contempt ruling, but that mere possibility does not warrant stay of the action in its entirety.  The Appellate Division also ruled that the charge essentially of "liar" is not mere rhetorical hyperbole, but is capable of defamatory meaning.  The case is Zervos v. Trump, No. 150522/2017 (N.Y. App. Div. Mar. 14, 2019).

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Criminal libel, First Amendment—Montana statute.  The U.S. District Court for the District of Montana struck down the state's criminal libel statute for want of an actual-malice-as-to-falsity standard of fault.  The case arose from an ugly dispute in election of a county district judge.  The statute came close to the actual malice standard, requiring knowledge of a statement's defamatory character, but making no mention of recklessness.  The federal court acknowledged that the state high court had read First Amendment standards into other state statutes.  But the criminal libel law had been applied without modification.  Moreover, although the law originated from 1962, before New York Times v. Sullivan and Garrison v. Louisiana in 1964, the legislature had amended the statute more than once, in fact once amending it to ensure truth as a defense, so had passed up chances to bring the statute into full constitutional conformity.  Recap is tracking Myers v. Fulbright, No. 9:17-cv-00059-DWM-JCL (D. Mont. Mar. 18, 2019).  Professor Eugene Volokh wrote about the case for Reason.