y the moral and correct thing to do.

Here’s another example. There’s a terrorist that says I’m going to kill somebody unless you do X, but you can lie. Let’s say you lie and say yeah we did X. Let the not a terrorist, let’s say a kidnapper, let the victim go. Well in that case you’re lying to somebody bad and you’ve got a better result.

Now I know what you’re going to say. It goes like this: “Are you saying that the ends justify the means? Are you saying that the ends justify the means?” Yes, yes I am. The ends do justify the means whenever you’ve done a cost-benefit analysis. When should you do cost-benefit analysis? Every time you make a decision. A hundred percent of the time you should weigh all of the costs against all of the benefits and then you should pick, and I know this is tricky, you should pick the one that’s bigger. If the costs are higher than the benefits you don’t do it. If the benefits are really big but the costs are small then you do it.

Here’s what you don’t do. Go get yourself a bumper sticker and put it on your Prius and say the ends don’t justify the means. The ends don’t justify the means. If the extent of your analysis is a bumper sticker that really doesn’t even mean anything because the costs and the benefits are always compared in all decisions all the time. It’s sort of like being against air. I am against air. I like breathing but I don’t like air. I don’t like oxygen. All right, it doesn’t make any sense to rail against the end justifying the means when every decision is that. You’re always comparing the costs and the benefits.

So should a president lie to the public about how credible the system is if he sincerely believes that that’s what’s best for the country, best for everything? Absolutely. Absolutely he should lie about that. I would be very disappointed if the president came out and said anything like this: “You know I’m not so sure I was legitimately elected.” Oh my God, the biggest mistake any politician could ever make.

Yes, so before my critics pile in and say some version of “Scott, you are ignoring the ethical and moral dimension again. You are a bad person who ignores the ethical and moral dimensions.” No, I’m explicitly saying those are part of the costs and/or benefits. They’re not the only ones. Sometimes avoiding nuclear holocaust is also in the equation, in which case telling a lie to avoid a nuclear holocaust, maybe that’s a case where the ends justify the means.

All right, there’s something I call the IBM effect happening with the pundits who are watching this situation with Putin etc. And the IBM effect goes like this. Back when I was working in the corporate world, so this is a million years ago, if you had a choice of getting an IBM system or computer versus some other vendor, the common saying at the time was nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. Because IBM service etc. was so good that if something went wrong IBM would just fix it. I remember the first time I did a deal with IBM and I was in charge of negotiating contracts for that section of the bank and I said, “Okay, now let’s negotiate your contract” after we had decided to pick them. And the IBM rep said, “Oh we don’t do that.” And I said, “Come on, everybody negotiates contracts. That’s how the world works. You don’t just give me a contract.” And IBM said, “Yeah we do.” And I would look at the contract. I’d say there’s all these things we would worry about that are not mentioned. You know, what happens if you put it in a system and it doesn’t work? What happens if we need some kind of an adjustment? What happens if we chose wrong, we need an upgrade? There’s nothing in your contract that would protect us in those cases. And do you know what IBM says? They say we’re IBM. If something’s wrong we’ll fix it, period. That’s our business model. If something’s wrong we will stay up all night, we’ll pay money, we’ll do everything. That’s on us. And so I ended up signing a non-contract if you will with IBM that didn’t really say much except we’re going to buy your stuff. And when trouble happened, because it always does, right, nothing goes smoothly, what did IBM do? They fixed it. Was it in the contract? Nope. Did they argue about it? Nope. Because that was their business model. We’ll fix it, period.

Now here’s my point. That was the reason that people would say nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. Because something always goes wrong after you choose the system you’ve chosen. It’s like, “Oh I wish I’d done this right, should have done this, or it doesn’t work.” But if you choose the other vendor something goes wrong and you might not be able to fix it so easily. So even if it was the right choice you could still get fired for it. If something goes wrong you’re seeing the same thing here with the Russia situation.

If you are a Russia pundit, let’s say you’re an American pundit talking about Russia or you are a news person, what is the thing you can say about Putin and Russia that will never get you fired? And by that I mean you will never be wrong if you say this. And I’ll put this as a question. What’s the one thing you can always say about Russia that will make you look like a legitimate pundit and observer that will never be wrong? You should be tough with Russia. You need to be tough. That’s it, right? The IBM opinion on Russia is you have to be tough because whoever says that is never going to get fired. If it turned out that the answer was not being tough and let’s say the president’s approach gets us to a good place, would that pundit get fired for saying we should have been tough with Russia? Not really, because that’s sort of the picking IBM choice. It’s such a bland normal routine thing to say we need to be tough with Russia. You’re not going to get fired for that even if it turns out that the other plan worked better.

So saying you’ve got to be tough with Russia is everybody keeping their job and saying the safe thing because it’s just so obvious. What Trump is doing is why he always does. He shook the box so frickin’ hard that, and this is the hilarious part, Trump has made his critics compare Putin to Brennan and Clapper and argue about which one is less reliable. Think about that. President