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  1. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Writing for the Boston Globe, conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby makes what passes today as a strong argument against the brain-dead anti-immigration faction of the conservative movement: A couple from Brazil, seeking a better life for themselves and their 2-month-old daughter, enter the United States unlawfully. They settle in Massachusetts, where 18 years later the girl graduates from a public high school, as assimilated and acculturated an American as her classmates in every respect - except that they are US citizens, and she, by virtue of a decision made when she was a baby, is not. Her classmates can attend the University of Massachusetts, paying $9,704 a year in tuition, the price tag for Massachusetts residents. She can attend only if she pays the out-of-state rate of $22,157; if that's more than she can afford, she's out of luck. How is that a rational public policy? How is Massachusetts improved by making it impossible for an accomplished high-school graduate, a lifelong resident of the state, to gain a university degree? Who benefits when her education - along with the higher earning potential it would lead to - is cut short? She doesn't. You don't. Massachusetts taxpayers certainly don't. [links dropped, other minor format edits] Jacoby notes that current Governor Deval Patrick's recent proposal to allow illegal immigrants residing in Massachusetts to pay in-state college tuition is driving conservative voters into the arms of Charlie "If you're illegally here, you're illegally here." Barker. He correctly notes that this xenophobia contradicts the idea that "what matters most about any of us ... is personal character and achievement." Right he is, but his level of analysis is wrong, and that causes him not to raise the question he should. What, exactly should "improving" Massachusetts entail in the context of the proper function of the government? Put another way, since a proper government protects individual rights, "How is Massachusetts improved by forcing anyone to pay for anything that anybody else needs?" I agree with Jacoby that our current immigration laws are largely preventing from coming here, "just the sort of newcomers Americans should embrace," but these aren't the only laws in need of reform. As I have argued before, the real problem is not that immigrants are sucking up social services like education, but that the government is providing these services in the first place rather than private enterprise. As I put it before in a slightly different context, "I doubt anyone would complain if these [kids] were paying customers of American schools." I would also doubt that anyone would complain, if they needed help to attend, about them being recipients of voluntary charity, winners of academic scholarships, or participants in industrial work-study programs. That fact that Massachusetts is running schools that it should not, and that those schools charge out-of-state tuition for some students to attend is not "making it impossible" for anyone to receive an education, but it is making it impossible for many people to benefit from the fruits of their own labor. It is probably also harming the economy of Massachusetts in myriad other unseen ways. Finally, Massachusetts, in the proper sense of its being a state founded to protect the rights of individuals, is inarguably placed in great peril by the fact that such systematic violations of our rights are happening at all, and all the more so that such violations are business as usual. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  2. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Israeli Oath-Fakers Pursuant to a recent post of mine on the so-called "Oath Keepers," who advocate mutiny by the military and the police as a means of "protecting" the Constitution, it is noteworthy that Israel is already suffering from the consequences of a similar direct assault on rule of law: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced concern on Tuesday over a mutiny by pro-settler soldiers that raised fears of more rebellion in the ranks in any future land-for-peace moves with the Palestinians. The solution to bad laws and foolish policies is to promote better laws and pro-freedom policies, not eroding rule of law. Paul Hsieh in RCP I'm late to this party, but still very glad to see that a good, pro-freedom op-ed on the physician slavery debate was linked by RealClear Politics. Republican Dark Horses The good news, such as it is, is that there seem to be multiple viable alternatives to Sarah Palin in the GOP. The bad news is that none is terribly exciting, and David Brooks likes John Thune, the first listed. He doesn't have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down. He doesn't have ambitions to restructure the tax code. He just wants to lift burdens on small business. Or: He just wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Sigh. Happy Birthday, Motown! According to a blogger at Mental Floss, Motown Records recently turned fifty. The post has several embedded YouTube videos of its author's favorite Motown classics. Real gentlemen don't scream, "Bitch!" Nor do they feel the need to self-apply the label, "gentleman." This magazine piece and this blog post can be thought of as snaggletoothed, inbred descendants at the end of the line of Whitaker Chambers' non-review of Atlas Shrugged at National Review. Even some of the sympathetic commenters at the blog post could see that these weren't really about Rand or the intellectual movement she started. The high point of the blog posting comes when Barry Ritholtz easily gets backed into a corner by a commenter who hasn't even read Rand. Ritholtz does all he can do: dare him to call his bluff. "You should definitely read Atlas shrugged [sic] and than make up your own mind." Yes. Please do that, Kimble. It's getting to where anyone who writes such tripe might as well spare himself some effort by appending a "Kick me!" sign to his posterior at the beginning of the day. (HT: Brad Harper) Objectivist Roundups Some time while I was under the knife or loopy from painkillers, Rational Jenn hosted last week's Objectivist Roundup. I believe C. August will host this week's edition. As an interesting aside, this morning I googled "Polian Godboy" and saw that Rational Jenn had hit the 75,000 site vist mark. Congratulations to her! Submarining is scary. Hehhh-yep! To Serve Man Insert your favorite altruism-as-cannibalism joke here, tie it in to Barack Obama's desire to control the Census Bureau and his newfound concern with public debt, and then fill in your new census long-form questionnaire here. I scored seven. Memo to Barack Obama: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was a satire. This, my short version, is also a satire. I only mean the take home message, "Eat me!" figuratively. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  3. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Stephen Bourque makes some incisive commentary about a recent change in the government's recommendations on the timing and frequency of breast cancer screening. His post deserves a full read, but one paragraph in particular caught my eye: It has always amazed me how much trust the general public puts in government recommendations of this sort. The group in this case, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is characterized as an "independent panel of experts in prevention and private care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services." But what exactly is this group independent of? The implication is that they are independent of individuals and corporations that have a vested interest in the guidelines. However, what the panel is entirely dependent upon for its existence is the federal government, an institution that has absolutely no incentive to meet consumer demands. The panel is independent of responsibility and accountability. [minor format edits] I suspect that the amazement may be at least partially rhetorical, but it is worth noting where such blind trust originated and considering its full ramifications. The above paragraph reminded me of the following warning from an essay by Alan Greenspan in his better, younger days: To paraphrase Gresham's Law: bad "protection" drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter. It declares, in effect, that all are equally suspect... Second it grants an automatic (though, in fact, unachievable) guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards. The value of a reputation rested on the fact that it was necessary for the consumers to exercise judgment in the choice of the goods and services they purchased. ... [bold added] ("The Assault on Integrity" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 119-120) In other words, over the past few decades, people have become less and less accustomed to acting as their own "consumer watchdogs" even as the government slowly gobbled up larger and larger swaths of the medical and scientific sectors, slowly making the independent advice of scientists to the government less so. Consider this the informational equivalent of the illusory "access" to medical care the Democrats are promising us. This affects everyone and even confounds the efforts of those of us who are inclined to distrust the government to establish our own opinions on medical matters. For example, at the site Quack Watch is a list of "Twenty-Five Ways to Spot Quacks and Vitamin Pushers." Reading through the list, I noticed that ten of the items on the list (1, 2, 9, 10, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, and 25) included reliance on the government in some way: e.g., mentioning government nutritional guidelines, alluding to the role of the government in regulating the practice of medicine, or linking to a government web site. Of course, since the government funds so much research and "educates" so many people about science, the truth is that every single item on the list is affected in some way by government interference in the economy: Both the information under consideration as well as the ability of an average person to evaluate it have often been undermined from the start. The immediately possible debacle of a government takeover of the medical sector would be a bad enough pit for America to have to have to climb out of, but the truth is that we need only turn around for a moment to see that we are already in another. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  4. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Glenn Reynolds is a Jennifer Rubin piece that asks the question, "f [barack Obama's] so smart and well-educated, should't he have come up with something better than the stimulus boondoggle?" She gets frustratingly close to the right answer, but ends up whiffing: [F]inally, as Ronald Reagan said, "The trouble with our liberal friends isn't that they are ignorant; it is that they know so much that isn't so." In other words, they have a set of views at odds with the way the world operates (meekness will endear us to our enemies, terrorists will be impressed with American legal procedures), the American political scene (the public wanted a lurch to the Left), and basic economic realities (you can load mandates and taxes on employers without impacting employment). These views are a great impediment to a successful presidency. True enough, but Rubin ends on the following note: "[H]e has time. Maybe with experience, he'll wise up." I'm not so sure about this, because Rubin overlooks the fact among the ideas one holds are the standards for what constitutes "success." On the one hand, I applaud Rubin for seeing the importance of ideas in shaping the actions of the President, but on the other, I'm still unsatisfied with the level of analysis. What if Barack Obama's fundamental ideas are telling him that what he's doing is the best way to realize "equality" not only among all Americans, but among all people in the world? No pain, no gain -- and we haven't even gotten around to asking whether Obama sees suffering as a good thing, as many Christians do. Maybe he thinks the pain is the gain. Conservatives who happen by here should not dismiss me for nit-picking. One need only open the digital pages of City Journal to see altruism/collectivism infecting even their own ranks. Luigi Zingales, attempting to argue for small government, seems to think that our government should be in the business of addressing income disparities, of all things! Though American GDP has doubled in real terms over the last 25 years, median real income has grown by only 17 percent. While the richest 1 percent of the population has almost tripled its real income and the richest 0.01 percent has more than quintupled it, the bottom 10 percent has increased its income by only 12 percent. So what? If the government didn't meddle with my personal choices and have its hands in my pockets all the time, I'd be thrilled to have any kind of income increase. Bill Gates hasn't picked my pocket or broken my leg if he is a trillionaire instead of a billionaire -- assuming, of course, he earned it rather than having been handed loot by the government. Zingales goes on to praise "Republican" Theodore Roosevelt for creating the FDA and trust-busting. This he does on the way to counseling that, rather than, "give these poorer citizens entitlements disguised as rights," like the Democrats, the Republicans "should focus on providing" welfare state programs of their own disguised as "opportunities." What's going on here? Rubin naively assumes that Obama has the same pro-prosperity goals she has, and Zingales seems to think that his goal of small government is compatible with egalitarianism. Why? Because neither sees morality as having anything to do with life. Rubin's tack is that Obama will eventually see the "impracticality" of his idealism and back off on his destructive agenda. She underestimates the power of Obama's ideas to guide his actions. Zingales, on the other hand, fails to see the power of his own altruism (an apparently "compassionate" conservatism) to turn his enthusiasm for small government on its head and, in the process, transmogrify him into a "Democrat lite." I strongly suspect that both hold an altruistic moral code and see morality as a matter of duty. On such a score, Ayn Rand made the following profound observation: In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept "duty" has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality--specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it. ("Causality Versus Duty," in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 98) Conversely, a means causally incompatible with an end will fail to lead to that end. Altruism does not inform political choices (i.e., the selection of means) that lead to the protection of individual rights, whose purpose is to enable men to live for their own sake. Thus, to the extent that one's goal is altruism or egalitarianism, that end (and not individual rights) will guide his actions and his thoughts, meaning it will obliterate his ability to make use of his intelligence for the means of furthering his own life. And further, to the extent that one's goal is freedom, that end will be frustrated by the means of achieving altruistic or collectivist goals. In the political sphere, this means that one will regard individual freedom (and the economic prosperity that follows from it) only as means to that end (if that), and not as the proper end of government. The result will be that one will fail to see the danger of those more consistent than oneself, and that freedom will fall by the wayside when it frustrates egalitarianism. This is why Jennifer Rubin underestimates Barack Obama's effective stupidity and Luigi Zingales fails to offer a real alternative to same. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  5. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog A friend from Houston emailed me a link to an article titled, "Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw," at Forbes. Its author, Sramana Mitra, grew up in pre-liberalization India, and once: ... embraced Ayn Rand as the one who best articulated a philosophy that rang true to my naturally entrepreneurial mind. Capitalism, meritocracy, individualism, self-correcting market economics, innovation, excellence, integrity, fairness, work-ethic, justice--many of the values that I worship are also those that Rand celebrates in her fiction through her unforgettable characters. Fair enough: Ms. Mitra no longer "embraces" Ayn Rand. At least she admits what many libertarians and a self-proclaimed "Objectivist" here and there will not. I'll give her that much. But I have an interesting question to ask. Did Mitra ever embrace Rand in the sense of fully grasping her philosophy on the inductive level? Based on her description of that philosophy and her reasons for rejecting it, I think the answer is: No. In her next paragraph, Mitra complains that the "flaws" she now sees with her "deeper understanding of how capitalism works today" are unlikely to "correct themselves." Already, there are several flags. While it is true that capitalism is self-correcting (more on this shortly), this is an economic description of what happens under capitalism, and is neither fundamental to grasping the nature of capitalism nor even for making a case for it. (It is also worth noting here that there is no capitalist economy in the world today: Mixtures of free market elements and state controls are properly called, "mixed economies.") Capitalism, as Ayn Rand herself put it, is, "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights..." Its justification lies in the fact that for man, the rational animal, to survive and prosper, he needs to be able to profit from the use of his own mind and trade with others. The only system that gives him the opportunity to do so is capitalism. All other systems involve the forcible transfer of wealth, and so are ultimately not conducive to man's survival. Implicit in the recognition that one must be free from threats and harm from others is the acknowledgment that nobody else owes one a living. It is this last fact that Mitra loses sight of as she builds her case for rejecting the philosophy of Ayn Rand and, with it, capitalism. She starts out talking about self-correction in the field of venture capital and even gives a succinct outline of how that market self-corrects: "Investors and limited partners come to realize that funds are not performing, and they pull the plug on them. Non-performing funds die, those that do well survive, new funds crop up..." Mitra gets the problems with the auto industry partially right, although she should have mentioned the government's role in setting up GM's failure, from putting its muscle behind the labor unions to distorting the automobile market via such measures as fuel efficiency regulations. Nevertheless, she does at least refuse to stand behind the government bailout of GM. Whether GM fully "deserved" to go bankrupt (or would have even gotten to such a brink under actual capitalism) is an interesting question that Mitra leaves unasked. It is when she discusses banks, however, that a fundamental flaw in Mitra's grasp of Objectivism becomes readily apparent. Mitra complains that the behavior of "looters" and the government's response to same has resulted in, shall we call it, a "cycle of economic violence." The government has intervened to save many of them, and now, these bailed out banks want to hand out billions in bonuses to their non-performing employees. Capitalism gave way to welfare economics, and now the government has to intervene further to limit these looters from behaving badly by imposing taxes and regulations. A whole messy cycle that brings me to the core "bug" in the system that Rand once sold me on... Mitra neglects the government's role in setting up the current economic mess, but that is actually not the fundamental point at which she goes wrong. Here is where she goes wrong: [T]here is another less obvious bug in capitalism that I don't believe regulation can quite handle. It is the fundamental flaw that our celebrated system rewards speculators much more than creators. A relatively junior hedge-fund manager or a bond trader on Wall Street makes a great deal more money in his career than Charles Kao, who invented the basic physics making optical communication a reality. Dr. Kao, now 73, won the Nobel Prize this year, but his net worth would not compare favorably with that of George Soros. Yet, who added the real value? Soros or Kao? Mitra answers (, apparently failing to notice that "© both" is an option, which blows my mind coming as it does from a , and one who has studied Ayn Rand to boot. Implicit in the question of value, as Mitra may recall, is the question of a value-er. Kao identified facts of reality in physics, but these facts were and would remain value-less to large numbers of people were they left undiscovered, unpublicized, and unapplied. True, Kao discovered some things, many beyond the abilities or determination of most people to grasp. But how would any inventor or scientist offer anything of value to the general public? He'd have to build a prototype, manufacture a product, and sell it. For all of these steps, the inventor has to convince others that his idea has enough merit that the man on the street will eventually be receptive enough to pay for it out of his own pocket. This is no trivial proposition! (I'm sure Orville and Wilbur Wright endured plenty of ridicule for tinkering around with airplanes in their time...) All of the steps from discovering a theory to implementing it in marketable ways require information about things such as business, intellectual property law, and markets that few scientists are likely to have, and sums of money, which few scientists will have had time away from their studies to earn. The errors in his political thinking aside (and assuming, arguendo, that Soros's fortune comes only from sources actually possible under laissez-faire), individuals like George Soros are rare indeed: They combine financial resources with business knowledge (or the ability to locate needed business knowledge) and make it available where it might not otherwise be. Nobody owes anyone else a living. That includes John Galt when he needs a means to market his famous motor and Midas Mulligan when he needs a productive way to invest capital he has sitting around doing nothing. The fact that Soros is richer than Kao or (to use a better example) a Mulligan is usually richer than a Galt -- under capitalism -- is not a flaw, but a consequence of a virtue of capitalism: Division of labor, which is what allows someone good at finance to work in finance and someone good at theoretical physics to work at theoretical physics. The reason a financier will generally be wealthier than a great physicist is because, generally, a financier is better able to offer more value to more people at any given moment than a physicist. (For example, he can offer the same kind of help to a chemist, a biologist, and a tinkerer in a garage, while the physicist either has a marketable idea or he does not.) Mitra's former idol, Ayn Rand, was famous for invoking the phrase, "Check your premises." It sounds like Mitra would do well to consider that advice before condemning her apparently unexamined purchase as defective. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  6. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Switching planes at Washington National Airport yesterday, I was surprised to find printed copies of Politico in a waiting area. Until then, I had thought it was strictly a web publication. Needless to say, I took a copy and thumbed through it during takeoff. Within was an installment of a feature called "Arena Digest" titled, "Should GOP worry about tea parties?" I found the following comment by law professor Sherrilyn Ifill interesting: Tea party conservatism is a help to the image of the Republican Party as an opposition party in a time of Democratic control of the White House and Congress. That's great for TV appearances. But tea party conservatism is a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power because the kind of anger, vitriol and take-no-prisoners tactics of tea partyism is not a recipe for electoral success or for governing. A majority of Americans still want leaders who want to, and can, actually govern -- that means talking to people across the aisle, compromise, counting votes and advancing policies that bring positive results in the lives of constituents. Tea partyism is not a set of governing ideas. It's a nonstop protest against whatever is the status quo. Unless tea partyism can lose its fringe sensibilities and have as a central animating principle the idea of governance and not just protest, it will never return Republicans to power. To the contrary, it will continue to function as a barrier to "governance" Republican , who are the only hope and future of a party that has lost its way."Governance Republicans," eh? I've never heard big government Republicans called that before, but Ifill's comment did remind me that I have seen the term "governance" used by certain big-government conservatives here and there. (See David Brooks for a particularly sickening example.) Furthermore, I recall the usage always being in ways that seemed to mildly suggest that the government ought to be running our lives, while at the same time, not putting it quite so bluntlyl. The dictionary gives an ambiguous pair of definitions, and Wikipedia suggests I could be right to be suspicious of the term. In any event, Ifill is half-right, half-wrong. She corrrectly identifies the Tea Party Movement as a somewhat blind rebellion in need of intellectual leadership, but speaks as if she is oblivious to the idea that laissez faire could be a viable political philosophy. Indeed, she even seems to equate it with anarchism up to and including imagining the same angry type of spirit that animates the anarchist running amok within that movement. If I am correct that the term "governance" is (or is being used as) an anti-concept, then it would appear to serve mainly to obliterate the proper concept of a government that solely protects individual rights and replace it with statism. As the Tea Party movement evolves, so are its opponents, who are smearing capitalism even before the tea partiers themselves fully realize that that is their natural goal. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  7. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Over at Fresh Bilge, Alan Sullivan points to a rather lengthy story about one David Rubin, whose occupation in government finance has landed him in hot water for "conspiracy, wire fraud and obstructing federal tax authorities." Sullivan remarks, "The more money that government hands out, the more opportunities for corruption multiply." True enough, but this fire rates more than one alarm, and this shouldn't have been the first: The time to complain about corruption is whenever central planning of any kind is proposed or implemented. I haven't finished the story and am not sure I will, but two things strike me as worth bringing up. First, the story is as long as it is in part because of the byzantine financial regulations it has to explain, and that make the David Rubins of the world possible -- both in terms of creating a need for people willing to navigate said regulations and in terms of these regulations representing a space at the public trough. I note further that many measures are already in place to prevent earning "too much" profit in these transactions, while at the same time it is absurd to expect municipal investments to grow without compensating the investors. Second, I am unimpressed by the $6 billion estimate of the annual cost to taxpayers reported to be due to "public corruption, officials' mistakes and lack of disclosure." Every billion is only about three dollars per head in America. This is chump change compared to the enormous existing price tag for central planning at the federal, state, and local levels -- more commonly and variously known as "entitlement programs," "regulations," and "infrastructure." This "non-corrupt" tab is set to expand by trillions on Barack Obama's watch -- after George W. Bush got the ball rolling in 2008 with his financial "bailouts." Certainly, I do not condone corruption, which would exist (albeit on a much more limited scale) even under capitalism. However, for the same reason I oppose the focus on reducing "earmarks" at the Congressional level, I find that concerns about corruption too frequently and easily distract from the real problem, which is that too many Americans regard theft as legitimate when performed by government officials in the name of central planning. The reason for this is the widespread acceptance of altruism, which excuses such theft on moral grounds. Unsurprisingly, altruism -- being impossible to practice consistently by anyone interested in remaining alive -- demands its own version of corruption on the moral level: hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, too, is wrong, but too many people for too long have allowed that breach between words and deeds to distract them from asking whether altruism itself is a moral problem. That would kill two birds with one stone. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  8. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog The "off-off-year" elections went about as well as one could expect: The American people essentially rejected both of last year's presidential candidates. Glenn Reynolds offers what I think is a pretty good overall integration of how voters probably weighed local concerns and discontent with a far-left Congress and Obama Administration: All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday's off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman. Reynolds rightly notes later that, "f [Obama] were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn't have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic." Reynolds sees Obama's problem as part-agenda and part-competence. Maybe so, but I find myself both dubious and ambivalent about the latter. First, Obama's agenda, being demonstrably bad for America, will masquerade somewhat as incompetence to the extent that he can enact it. This will both magnify the problem he has with inexperience (that Reynolds notes) and make it too easy to excuse his actual policy failures: I shudder to imagine a future Democrat President reintroducing the Obama agenda and, thanks to this perception of ineptitude, getting away with an assertion like, "Obama was incompetent. Socialism will work this time." Second, to the extent that Obama really is incompetent, I find this mostly a relief since he spends much more time trying to re-shape America than doing his actual job, anyway. Reynolds' short-term prognosis is that there isn't any longer any steam behind the locomotive of that train Obama keeps trying to herd us all onto: "It'll be politics as usual from now on, and we can thank Obama, at least, for making politics-as-usual seem not so bad after all ..." I hope he's right in the short term, but wrong in the long term. Politics-as-usual hasn't looked so good in a long time, but since "politics-as-usual" means a mixed economy, and mixed economies trend towards dictatorship, America is going to have to reject "politics-as-usual" sooner or later. Fortunately, NY-23, where Bill Owens became the first Democrat to win in over a century yesterday, offers some hope that Americans are waking up to this idea. Recall that Newt Gingrich lost his argument that the Republicans should run as "Democrats Lite," to Sarah Palin when many Republicans started backing the Conservative Party candidate in that election. It would appear, though, based on the huge Republican margin in that district reflected in the seven previous elections, that Sarah Palin also lost her (Reaganesque) argument -- that a little bit of theocracy is okay with the American voter -- last night. Doug Hoffman mixes a small government economic outlook -- which should have been a sure winner -- with a very socially-conservative one that I, for one, find completely unacceptable. Eric Scheie expresses similar "misgivings" on Hoffman and adds: Perhaps the voters had had it with all the national hype, and finally decided they'd rather just vote for a Democrat who said he was a Democrat rather than be dragged against their will into a much-hyped "referendum" on a "bloody Republican civil war" they never asked to fight. That kind of exhaustion, too, should tell the Republicans something: Just because Americans don't want the government's hands in their wallets doesn't mean they do want to let the government back into their bedrooms. Or, as one blogger memorably put it, "Your rights end where my pockets begin." I think Scheie is premature to ask whether this was, as his post title put it, a possible "victory for laissez-faire," but that (or at least progress towards it) is what was missing from the ballot. It will be a long time before Americans have that option, but the time for "moral suasion" as our nation's first anti-slavery movement called it, does appear to be ripe for advocates of individual rights. (Ayn Rand called this "intellectual activism.") Yes, it is good news that this election possibly represents a big loss of momentum for the Democrats, but that last is even better news. In terms of the ballot choices, there was no way for Americans to win politically last night. So we did the next best thing: we stalled for time instead. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  9. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog During college, I had an elderly professor from Hungary who, it was rumored, still had fragments of a bullet in his back because he had the temerity to vote against Communist rule with his feet. That bullet came to mind yesterday when I ran across a pair of news stories about people avoiding confiscatory tax rates in America and what governments are starting to do about it. First, New York is hemorrhaging productive citizens: More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country. The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out. "The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource -- people," the report said. Except for the story's emphasis on how much loot these people are taking with them, I agree with that last line. Were I a New Yorker, I'd be concerned that there were fewer opportunities to trade with those who left. Forget my taxes or the replacement of those who left with the less productive and parasites: These new people would mostly not be a problem but for the fact that the welfare state turns many of them into problems by chaining them to anyone who hasn't left yet. Fortunately, New York can't prevent people from fleeing, but if you haven't left yet, your state might take a cue from Chicago and do what it can along these lines: Chicago and Cook County residents aren't the only ones about to get shocking tax news ; the city is debuting a "tax whistle-blower" plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago's business community. [minor format edits] The bullets haven't started flying yet, but on a national level, the gun is already cocked. Recall that there is already an emigration charge for people who renounce their American citizenship for tax purposes and that both parties collaborated on the law, which Bush signed. Interestingly, the bill includes a measure to confer benefits to soldiers, giving it a pro-American veneer that will mollify the unobservant. That bone tossed towards the patriotic and the fact that a Republican President signed the exit tax into law remind me of something else: Glenn Reynolds points to a Libertarian's blog posting on a Robert Samuelson piece about the physician slavery debate in Congress. Specifically, Samuelson notes that Democrats are now using terms associated with the free market to re-brand socialized medicine. Samuelson calls that "genius," and the Libertarians seem pretty impressed with that observation, but this is nothing new or rare at all. As another example look no further than the Chicago story above, where a tax official quoted about the new tax snitch program refers to the bounties as an "incentive." More to the point, I've been on this scent for a very long time. Has anyone ever heard of "cap-and-trade?" That government fuel rationing scheme sounds enough like capitalism for Arnold Schwarzenegger (who once fled socialism himself) to back it and tout it as a "free market" solution to global warming. Or "privatization" of infrastructure that merely replaces a socialist arrangement with a fascist one? Republicans have been branding statism as capitalism for a very long time. There's no "genius" in the Democrats applying new labels to their various schemes. That's just monkey see, monkey do -- and by a monkey very slow on the uptake at that. If you want to call a deception that will make America less free if people fall for it "genius," you will have to dig a little deeper. Anyone can see the veneer peeling from the wetted, dripping particle board in the above examples. Think of a freshly-varnished chair made of fine, but rotting wood and you'll get the idea of what "genius" is really like. For "genius" of this kind, consider a group that makes lots of hay out of the similarity between our two big government political parties and the fact that their policies will lead to tyranny. Consider further that in the process of doing so, this group is constantly plagiarizing the conclusions of a brilliant political philosopher, even to the point of glomming on to the popularity of one of her most famous works -- while at the same time smearing its author as "intolerant" and "dogmatic" as a means of belittling the principles she used to reach the conclusions they're plagiarizing. Such a group will pose as an "alternative" to the main two parties, while selling the exact same product not just in a different bottle, but with different flavoring. That group is the Libertarian Party. To start to comprehend this deception, one must ask: "What is the essential thing wrong with tyranny?" To appreciate the answer, "It violates individual rights," one must know what rights are, which means knowing what man is and why rights are important. (This is just where one has to begin.) One must also understand the nature of physical force and the moral difference between initiating it against another man and using it in retaliation in self-defense. Only after one has done this can he see why this question is important, consider how best to protect himself from others who will seek to harm him through physical force, and consider whether and how to delegate his retaliatory force to others in order to form a proper government. The Libertarians pretend that no such careful thought is necessary, and that one can simply destroy all government to achieve freedom. They take the moral principle that Ayn Rand discovered that man should not initiate force against others out of context and misapply it to politics in order to pass off anarchism as capitalism. (The ones who do not actually advocate anarchy help those who do by pretending that this is a minor quibble.) To them, government as such is a bad thing. This is not true. A hint of the rot comes when one tests the chair: Since Libertarians reject thinking in terms of principles, they frequently react to the fair question of how an individual will be protected from the initiation of force under anarchy any better than under a dictatorship with smears like that the one noted above and with insults. As Nick Provenzo once put it so well, "Want to enrage a Libertarian? It's easy. Just have standards." (Obviously, this is no refutation of Libertarianism, but it should cause one to wonder what exactly is going on.) Caveat emptor. Just because someone can correctly point out the deficiencies in the products currently on the market does not mean that what he is selling is any good. Just because someone says that freedom is cheap doesn't mean it is. The struggle for freedom is difficult and will be lost without careful, principled thought on the part of pro-freedom intellectuals about fundamental issues, of which non-initiation of force is neither fundamental enough to serve as a starting point nor even meaningful outside such a context. If a slave market is not capitalism, neither is anarchy freedom. Capitalism does not exist when rights are violated and rights are not protected without a proper government. And I don't care how good that might sound: Do not take my word for it. Do not take Ayn Rand's word for it, either. She can make your thinking easier, but obviously, she can't do it for you. Your agreement will mean nothing unless you understand what all of that means for yourself. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  10. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Pat Buchanan writes a sympathetic column about a rather disturbing phenomenon emergent in what he calls "the age of Obama." In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia." Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey. [minor format edits] Except for the truthers, the groups Buchanan lists here are all examples of rebellion , some more blind than others, to Barack Obama's nakedly collectivist, anti-American agenda of expansion of the role of the federal government into every area of our lives. (Buchanan is wrong to speak of an "Age of Obama:" The inappropriate use and explosive growth of government was going on thanks to both parties long before Obama showed up to cash in on it.) I sympathize with the last three groups, but emphatically disagree with the way the birthers and the so-called oath keepers are trying to save America from dictatorship. Only the tea partiers are acting in a manner appropriate to the situation we face, although many of them are low on intellectual ammunition. The birthers, who believe that there is a massive conspiracy to cover up the "fact" that Barack Obama is not actually an American citizen are clearly the blindest of the lot. At best, they're fishing around for a bombshell revelation that will serve as a real-life deus ex machina to deliver our country from this (particular) menace. In the meantime, they waste their effort deluding themselves to the effect that such a huge conspiracy is even possible, as well as time they could spend learning what they can do to slow or stop him (and other dangerous politicians) now. But at least the birthers, universally dismissed as nuts and impotently spinning their own wheels, aren't really hurting the cause of liberty. The oath takers are another matter entirely. These people are preparing to take action, and their timing indicates that they do not really know what they are doing. First, consider what they plan to do: They -- members of the executive branch of the government -- plan to disobey orders based on their own interpretation of the law and the Constitution. That is, they are planning to usurp the function of the judiciary branch on a case-by-case basis as they work, and to bypass the legislative branch as well as the electorate, rather than to persuade lawmakers and other voters of the proper course of action for their country. (Part of this work consists of learning for oneself the principles behind proper government.) And, oh yeah, they're setting a very, very dangerous precedent in doing so: They are weakening one of the few good things left in this country: rule of law. It is not immoral for someone to disobey an order -- in a dictatorship or during an open rebellion against a tyrannical regime. But, as horrendous as Obama is, we do not live under a dictatorship. We still have freedom of speech, and many of our rights are protected enough that we can act to turn the tide of public opinion back towards the direction of increasing government protection of individual rights. The so-called oath keepers clearly fail to understand this because they are acting as if this is not an option -- as if we are already in a dictatorship. In addition to their failure to appreciate the importance of rule of law, they -- unlike the Founding Fathers -- clearly fail to understand the value of rational persuasion and this is due to a failure to grasp the role of rational principles in guiding man's actions. To see this, let's do a thought experiment. Sergeant Arnold, a born-again Christian who thinks gambling is sinful and an "oath-keeper," is a member of his state's national guard. Suppose further that his state has passed a law banning gambling, which had just been legalized in the United States. The bill was very controversial, and because the governor knows that a large number of casino owners are planning to defy this law, he has called up the National Guard to keep them closed. Conveniently for the governor, some religious fanatics have threatened to bomb any casinos that remain open, so the governor claims to be "protecting" them from terrorism. The President federalizes the guard and orders them instead to stand watch over any casino that wishes to remain open. Hoping to provoke a test case, James McGillicuddy, a casino owner, weighs his risks and does just this. Someone calls a bomb threat in to him as soon as he gets wind of it. Unfortunately for him, his business is being guarded by Arnold's unit, which has been briefed about the threat and given instructions on how to head it off. That night, Arnold, a sniper, relieves watch in a building behind the casino. Just as he was briefed might happen, a bearded man in camouflage carries something out of the woods behind the business. Because he thinks that states' rights (a part of the Constitution) override federal power (another part) in this circumstance, though, Sergeant Arnold has decided he will not guard the casino. He's entertaining himself with an iPhone instead. So he never sees the man, never calls on anyone to stop him and see what he's doing, and never has him in his sights. Instead, he has decided that not guarding the casino is the best way to protect America from Barack Obama and "secular humanists" like McGillicuddy. Since he happened to be the only person who could have seen the bomber, the casino bursts into flames while he's surfing the Internet on his iPhone. McGillicuddy and twelve of his employees die in the blast. All he had wanted to do was make a living, and to have his day in court. If that scenario seems contrived, replace the casino with an abortion clinic, and recall the use of the Arkansas National Guard during Little Rock's desegregation crisis. Consider further the fourth item on the list of orders the "oath keepers" will not obey. We are a lot closer to personal harm than we might care to imagine with self-appointed constitutional "experts" like this in charge of enforcing the law. At least the tea partiers understand that America remains free enough that moral and political debate can preserve the freedom we have left and bring the government back around to its proper purpose of protecting individual rights. Many of them are wrong about particulars, but they at least appreciate the proper approach to political change in a nation founded on the principle -- apparently forgotten by the "oath-keepers" -- of consent of the governed, and in a nation of laws, and not men. The tea partiers offer their views for the consideration of others, and, from what I have heard, many are actively seeking the intellectual ammunition they need to better understand what went wrong with America and what they need to know to appeal to the best within their countrymen before the next election. Someone who does not understand an oath can only mouth its words: He cannot be trusted to uphold such an "oath." These are not oath keepers, or even oath takers. They are oath fakers. You cannot protect the Constitution in any meaningful way by subverting individual rights, consent of the governed, rule of law, or any other principle which must be generally accepted in order for it to be anything but words on paper. Mutiny on the part of the armed forces or law enforcement is not the way to protect the Constitution, but -- at best -- a concession that it is no longer in force. To anyone who has mistakenly joined this movement, I ask that you reconsider: It might help to imagine someone patriotic that you completely disagree with on one issue as an "oath taker" -- and that person being in charge of protecting someone you care about, where that issue plays a role. -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected some typos. Cross-posted from Metablog
  11. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Social Networking Bleg Apparently, my last post both impressed and disappointed. On the one hand, I got backlinks (that I know about) from Rob and Trey. On the other, I was asked by commenters why I didn't make it easier to alert readers to the post with Twitter, FaceBook, or NetworkedBlogs. Blog template editing time is nigh. If you see your favorite social network missing, let me know. Thanks in advance. Precautionary Principle and Pascal's Wager Via HBL I learned of a whose creator regards it as an unassailable argument in favor of global warming legislation. Binswanger called it an application of Pascal's Wager to environmentalism and notes its more common name: the precautionary principle, which Wikipedia describes as: ... a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. [links omitted] I find several things interesting about the precautionary principle. First, it basically means that one has to have (or beg for) approval of anything he wants to do from government officials. Second, as it is being used by global warming alarmists, it is clear what the pecking order is between "the public or the environment" whenever there is a conflict. (Just see how little attention the clown in this video pays to the depression he admits these taxes and laws would bring, and note that he makes zero mention of political freedom at all.) Third, this principle is basically a way for people who take Pascal's Wager to force the rest of us to do the same by smuggling in arbitrary criteria of harm to excuse government action in situations where it is not warranted. Objectivist Roundup Head on over to 3 Ring Binder! "GoodThing in Life" Carnival and Chat Inspired in part by a recent post of mine on cooking as a hobby, Martin Lindeskog is attempting to bring back something along the lines of the old Carnival of the Recipes, but not limited to cooking. He's targeting Thanksgiving weekend as a start date. Like a Kazoo at a Funeral The glomming-on-with-cum-backstabbing-of Ayn Rand by Libertarians continues as Reason TV (of all hosts) plans to "celebrate" the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand by interviewing two of her most famous detractors, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Maybe it was something she said... Actually, it wasn't that, but her insistence that the fight for freedom begins with intellectual rigor that earned exposed their enmity. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  12. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Last year, I was unable to pay my respects to those who were murdered today in 2001 in the way that I had wanted because I was fleeing from a storm that eventually hit where I was living at the time. This year, I find that my country faces a different storm no less threatening and from which physical avoidance will not deliver us. Fortunately, it is humanly possible to blunt the effects of this man-made storm in other ways. The Enemy-in-Chief may, for example, be doubling down on his attempts to impose servitude on our physicians and their patients en route to "taking care" of the rest of us, but America has successfully resisted tyranny before, and we can do it again. The issue over which these battles are being fought -- the individual's inalienable moral and political right to lead his own life free from threats and coercion from others -- is the same. Only the methods of fighting differ. But as we fight to survive, we stop for a moment to mourn those who were murdered that day, and take a moment to consider how precious being alive and free really is. It is from that perspective that I write today. After a living thing is injured, it begins to heal. I am no less angry about what the Islamic savages did then on the way to squandering their own lives, and no less resolved that we must eventually wage a merciless war against the countries that made what they did possible. However, time has made me better able to enjoy again the simple pleasure of a blue sky like the one I saw that morning just before I heard the news. I have noticed that I no longer am immediately reminded of those attacks whenever I see one. Those obscene events, still celebrated by Moslems the world over as "holy," violated all of us, and it is from that violation I think I noticed myself recovering this morning. I realized on a deeper level that while it may be necessary to fight back to continue living, that my cause is holy and untouched. It is my life, it is my spirit, and it is my blue sky. The last three sentences are almost word for word what I thought upon waking today. Knowing what anniversary loomed, I'd spent some time yesterday evening reading about the events and their perpetrators, but that is what I woke up thinking about instead. The feeling was all mine, but something about the formulation seemed eerily familiar. As it turns out, some digging shows that the words echo the following passage near the end of Ayn Rand's novella, Anthem, after its protagonist rediscovers the word that America's enemies would like to abolish forever. I AM. I THINK. I WILL. My hands... My spirit... My sky... My forest... This earth of mine .... What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer. I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect. Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!" Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the load-stone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before! (111) And that is the answer. I will never forget that day or forgive anyone who lent those atrocities aid or comfort in any way, but they have not vanquished my soul. And yes, we Americans are in great danger from many fronts. We must fight the scourge of tyranny, whatever its source, vigilantly and without compromise. That is vitally important, but on one level, doing so is as significant as swatting flies: You just do it and you get on with your life, because life is precious. I can enjoy my blue sky again. Thank you once again, Ayn Rand! -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  13. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Through Progressive Revival, a religious left blog hosted at Beliefnet, comes an amusing and instructive article accusing America's Roman Catholic bishops of being "cafeteria Catholics." To set the context for the following explanation of what a "cafeteria Catholic" is, the article notes that, generally, America's Catholic bishops tend to take theocratic stands on the so-called "social issues," and yet sound (at least to its author) more like fiscal conservatives at other times (e.g., They do not get behind major expansons of the welfare state, like physician slavery.): "Cafeteria Catholics" is a term often used by conservatives to describe members of the church who are not in alignment with Church teaching on every issue. Using this term, conservatives claim that liberals are too willing to pick and choose which teachings they will follow. Fair enough, and author Paul Gorrell has a point here, too. But conservatives overlook the reality that the Catholic Church has a very liberal social teaching that places the dignity of the person at its core. This influences the way the Church teaches about aid to the poor, economic justice within taxation systems, and universal health care. Since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the Church has formally taught that a social approach to health care was necessary to ensure equal access for all. The burden of providing health care to everyone belonged to the society at large. Catholic Social Ethics has further developed this notion since the Council and consistently articulated support for universal health care within society. A recent papal encyclical should remove any doubts about the accuracy of the above, although it hasn't in some quarters. Where the article gets amusing for a moment is where Gorrell, clearly on the moral offensive, decides to go in for the kill. [For some possible amusement at the expense of yours truly, see the Note below.] It's important to realize that the official teaching on marriage in the Catholic Church has been written by men who have never been married. These men also teach that birth control can never be used by a married couple. Aside from the fact that much of the official teaching of the Church contradicts the understanding of healthy sexuality within the field of modern psychology, it is stunning that those whom the Church authorizes to speak on these topics have often defended, hidden, or participated in a system of sexual abuse that highlights their own deeply disordered relationship with human sexuality. [bold added] The implied call for his church to adopt a more reasoned approach to sexuality would be laudable were it not made ridiculous at the outset by the fact that not half a minute ago, Gorrell was chiding these very bishops for failing to adhere to the Church's economic teachings. Add to this difficulty the fact that these economic teachings suffer a defect similar to that of the sexual mores he skipped over during his own pass at the buffet: They were also originated by men who did not make a completely rational study of man and his nature before formulating them, much less ever got around to proving the existence of God. But that's just a quick laugh. Note several things here: (1) Gorrell is the more consistent altruist, and as such, is more in tune with the moral principles of his faith on economic matters. His side will eventually win any debate (such as there can be) on "economic justice" within his religion because... (2) Such debates are circumscribed by certain arbitrary premises that all its members will never examine because they accept them on faith. (3) Any follower of his religion, whose ethical code demands that man act against the requirements of his own nature, must necessarily be of the "cafeteria" variety. (4) This fact makes the inevitable guilt a valuable psychological weapon for anyone participating in that sordid debate. Read on. With Barack Obama's reinvigoration of his opposition, there are and will be calls for the "next Reagan" and other such attempts to revive the "alliance" between theocrats and individualists. Now the article becomes instructive, because such an alliance would concern us with debates like this and their likely outcome. Catholic Bishops in the United States, however, have opposed universal health care out of fear that abortion will be included in whatever bill that Congress might pass. Instead of proudly stating the Catholic tradition on universal health care and then demanding that abortion be excluded from public option benefits, the Catholic bishops have started from a place of opposition and, in so doing, failed to uphold a core social teaching of the Church. This is not the only reason to avoid making such a mistake again, but one look at the basis for some of Obama's "opposition" should show that such calls are ill-advised. --CAV Note: Paul Gorrell, or someone claiming to be him, informs me that he is actually no longer a Catholic. This sounds plausible to me, but I cannot presently confirm it one way or the other. Updates Today Added a Note. Cross-posted from Metablog
  14. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog I'll open this post with a cute and amazingly on-point email joke my Mom sent me this week: Subject: AMISH VIRUS You have just received the Amish Virus. Since we do not have electricity nor computers, you are on the honor system. Please delete all of your files. Thank thee. Now, on with the show... This post is not about blog policy (which I keep mainly to myself), but it does start off from one of my policies, namely that I moderate comments in part to keep the discussion civil. Happily, I find that I rarely actually have to consider rejecting a comment. On top of that, I have also noticed that even the rudest comments can often serve as examples of something I am talking about or as fodder for charity refutations, sometimes even doing half the work for me if the commenter is sufficiently sloppy or unglued. Rarely does a comment (aside from spam) offer nothing of value to a discussion, but last night, I rejected two (by the same person), to yesterday's post, for that very reason. That said, the comments do accidentally offer grist for the mental mill. The first I rejected because the commenter mocked another of my commenters. I include it here mainly for context. Here is the first comment: Your caricature of Catholicism is ludicrous -- I'd despise it too, if it was as you claim. The finest, most intelligent gentlemen teachers I ever had were both Catholic priests -- one, a tecaher [ sic] of philosophy, the other, a physicist. "Tortured, prisoner souls" -- gzeesh, spare me the melodrama. If one is religious, then praying before sex doesn't strike me as off the charts. Nor is it the Catholic Church per se publishing this prayer book, but a Catholic group. And no, Gus, the Church does not view sex as obscene. This comment is sort of a mashed-up version of a flame sandwich, in the sense that it actually does bring up some legitimate issues of general interest. One of these, the fact that there are decent people who profess religion, I have touched on before (probably in answer to the same person). There are other such points. (One is this: Many apologists for evil philosophies evade the practical implications of those philosophies by appealing to the fact that those very philosophies do not explicitly state those implications.) But this post isn't about those points, for the same fundamental reason I refused to post the comment in the first place: The blog is my property and I use it as I see fit. Today, I do not care to address those issues. And yesterday, unfortunately, this person couldn't help but drop an insult in with his comment. But wait! There's more! If you pay close attention to the above passage, you will see that our firecracker tosser is moving the goal posts behind that puff of smoke. And by "moving the goal posts," I am understating things. He is, in fact, trying to play a completely different game on a completely different field. Consider the following: "If one is religious, then praying before sex doesn't strike me as off the charts." That is true, but it is also completely beside the point, which is that the whole premise of taking things on faith leads to objectively ridiculous practices. If I believed in ghosts, I might spend Friday evenings conducting seances, too. Seances, like praying before sex, are ridiculous. The question is this: Why bring this obvious point up at all? The next comment will make that more clear. Gotta love how you handle contrary ideas -- hey, just don't show them at all! Cool.... Let's talk about that "mindless" set -- oh yes, those people of faith. They can't think for themselves, unlike those brave Randroids who amazingly all think that Frank Lloyd Wright is the best -- the best! architecture of all time. And did I mention fiction? All Randroids must agree that Hugo's "Les Miserables" is the best fiction!! Amazing how many of you can't think beyond your puny box........but don't worry, somewhere out there some Cathoic is praying for your soul. Gus, have the guts to engage a Catholic (an ex-atheist, ex-Ayn Rand fan)who wishes do disagree with your caricature of the faith. What are you afraid of? If you can't do that, you're pathetic. Massive offenses against truth and etiquette aside this person is trying to feel good about himself by placing me -- the proprietor of this blog -- in what he sees as an inescapable bind: Publish a direct insult or "admit" that it is true. (See also, "I dare you to publish this.") The real problem is this: Even if I wanted to engage this person, I really can not. He admits to being a person "of faith," which is to say that he holds premises in the absence of evidence or proof. I could waste hours talking to this guy, and ultimately see him just shrug, pick up his Bible, thump on it, and say, "I have faith." (I actually watched a creationist do just this back in college once he was backed into a corner.) If I am "afraid" of anything here, it's wasting my time effectively talking to a wall -- one just sentient enough to be able to insult me. Obviously, that does not make me pathetic. (See also: "Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World.") But back to the game-changing. Notice what that last line is meant to do. There is no way to come out ahead by adding this to a discussion thread: If I publish it and don't say anything about the insults, I'm helping him pretend that his conduct is acceptable. If I publish and do address the insults, it looks like I give a rat's behind about his opinion of me, which is clearly irrational and irrelevant. That, by the way, is on top of wasting time and mental energy. (On re-reading, I realize that, setting aside the rudeness, I probably could have gotten away with just pointing this out.) Worse still, I would be allowing him to set the terms of the discussion on my blog. The conversation would have ceased being about the catastrophic consequences of allowing the arbitrary to infect one's thinking, and instead been about what a great idea it is to pray before sex, assuming you believe in God -- as if history doesn't already provide plenty of examples of what people have done on that premise, some of it well beyond the merely ridiculous. And this brings me to one final point, which is that this bile is actually an excellent example of a point I made in a comment: [T]hey have been trained all their lives NOT to trust their minds. They have had their confidence ruined. What are most flames designed to do? Evoke a poorly-controlled expression of a negative emotional response. And what is an emotion? It is, as Ayn Rand once pointed out, "an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises." It causes me to wonder about a person when he deliberately sets out to insult a total stranger in a one-to-one email communication. (Which is what the second "comment" really is.) I wonder whether this is: (1) a plea for attention from a total stranger who has no reason to care, (2) an admission on one's own part that one has nothing better to do than attack the values of another person, and (3) an admission that one lives in a personal hell. The last is a serious admission, but in any event the desired payoff is that the other person will respond in kind. The only remaining question that needs answering is this: Why would I respond at all? (Or, in the present context, why would I post this as a comment, vice dissecting it in a post.) Because I cared on some level about the insult. The hope is that deep down, I feel this person is right, and that I, too, lack self-confidence and therefore exist second-handedly enough to feel on some level that if I don't do as he says, I really am a coward. This is a seedy attempt to get me to not just take an insult, but to help him dish it out. It drives this person batty that I disagree with him. But, if he's right, why do I bother him? And if he's wrong, why is he wasting time on me? He admits that he won't check his own premises, but yet he feels a need to browbeat me into carelessly accepting them so he can "win" an argument with me. My speculation about why some people try to provoke flame wars is that seeing other people throwing fits of impotent rage is a form of validation. Verbalized, it might be something like, "See! I'm not so bad. Everyone else is irrational, too." Whatever the reason, this is not a confident or productive activity. Well, this led to some interesting speculation, but the purpose of philosophy is not to gaze at one's navel, or to argue pointlessly, or to have fights. It is to live one's own life, and I have some living to do. And that -- not that I owe anyone an explanation -- is why I summarily rejected the above comments. -- CAV Updates Today: Some minor edits and clarifications. 9-7-09: Deleted extra line after first paragraph. Cross-posted from Metablog
  15. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Prima facie -- that's the Latin equivalent for "at first glance" -- it might sound both well-timed and encouraging that the administration of President Barack Obama, who hails from Hawaii, has decided that the Justice Department will step up enforcement of Civil Rights law. Eric Holder's push would seem well-timed on the face of it because Hawaii's longstanding racial problems seem to have worsened lately. Glenn Reynolds quotes the Southern Poverty Law Center: Celia Padron went on a Hawaiian vacation last year, lured by the prospect of beautiful beaches and friendly people. She, her husband and two teenage daughters enjoyed the black sand beach at Makena State Park on Maui. But a Hawaiian girl accosted her two teenage daughters, saying, "Go back to the mainland" and "Take your white ass off our beaches," says Padron, a pediatric gastroenterologist in New Jersey. When her husband, 68 at the time, stepped between the girls, three young Hawaiian men slammed him against a vehicle, cutting his ear, and choked and punched him, Padron says. Police officers persuaded the Padrons not to press charges, saying it would be expensive for them to return for court appearances and a Hawaiian judge would side with the Hawaiian assailants, the doctor contends. This cultural rot includes sympathy for the idea of legally forbidding whites to vote in Hawaii. And Holder's push would seem -- again, on the surface -- to be encouraging. From the New York Times: To bolster a unit that has been battered by heavy turnover and a scandal over politically tinged hiring under the Bush administration, the Obama White House has also proposed a hiring spree that would swell the ranks of several hundred civil rights lawyers with more than 50 additional lawyers, a significant increase for a relatively small but powerful division of the government. The division is "getting back to doing what it has traditionally done," Mr. Holder said in an interview. "But it's really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal." Unfortunately, as anyone who has experienced the annoyance of interacting with a bigot or suffered the real harm of discriminatory law will know, surface appearances aren't everything. The first passage quoted above unfortunately veers off into a discussion of "hate crime," which is actually fortuitous because it leads nicely into what is wrong with Holder's initiative. As I have stated in the past regarding hate crime legislation: The proper response to hate crime legislation is simple. First, abolish it. Second, throw the book at criminals for their actual crimes rather than for what they think. Our government exists to protect us from the initiation of force on the part of others (i.e., from fraud, theft, and murder). But holding a belief, however repugnant, does not, as Thomas Jefferson might put it, "pick someone’s pocket or break his leg." The only valid reason to consider someone's beliefs in a criminal case is to establish intent. This is already part of criminal law. The crime should be punished the same regardless of the belief system of its perpetrator. In other words, the proper function of the government is to protect individual rights, and hate crimes legislation actually does nothing towards this end. Rather, by attacking freedom of speech, it violates individual rights. So what has this to do with Holder's announcement? Everything. For Holder is not getting ready to make sure that Hawaiians -- and all Americans -- are protected equally under the law, but to intensify enforcement of laws that, in fact, violate individual rights. As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush's appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination. It is bad enough that there are laws on the books which violate the property rights of individuals by preventing them from deciding with whom they will do business, but at least under the old regime, Justice was focusing on whether someone actually discriminated against someone else. But now, apparently, one will not be judged as an individual any more when it comes to these laws, but according to which racial category one belongs and whether what he has done in the daily course of his affairs looks, statistically, like he might have engaged in racial discrimination. (Which is not necessarily wrong, as Walter Williams recently pointed out.) The timing of Holder's announcement turns out to be simply -- and ironically -- coincidental. So, despite superficial appearances, Barack Obama is not stepping up to the plate to protect individual citizens equally under the law. He is not taking steps to ameliorate a problem that should, arguably, be familiar to him. He is not taking up the legitimate mantle of the struggle for racial equality that saw an end to Jim Crow. Instead, he is running with the pack of wolves that subverted that struggle and turned it into an effort to establish new discriminatory laws that simply injure different classes of the citizens he has sworn to protect. I am extremely disappointed in Barack Obama, but when we look deeper, we see that his political opposition is far from blameless: That Bush and the GOP lacked the intestinal fortitude to repeal such laws is not only damning for them, it is coming home to roost for all of us now. At the rate Barack Obama is going, the next election cycle promises to be a slaughter for his party. The time to demand that the GOP start repealing laws that violate individual rights is now. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  16. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Pursuant to a recent post, reader Dismuke emails me about an activity you may be interested in, which is an outgrowth of the Tea Party demonstrations: The national leadership team of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition this morning announced a series of Tea Party Buycott events designed to support John Mackey and the Whole Foods grocery chain. Mackey is the CEO whose op-ed in The Wall Street Journal opposing Obamacare and supporting free market health care reform has sparked unprecedented and unwarranted attacks from left wing propagandists. The first two events are scheduled for Tuesday evening, September 1, 2009 in St. Louis, Missouri and Dallas, Texas, with additional events in other cities and locales to come. The St. Louis event will be held at the Whole Foods store located in Town and Country, Missouri off Clayton Road and will begin at 6 pm. The Dallas kickoff event will be held at the Whole Foods Market located at 11700 Preston Rd., Dallas, Texas and will begin at 7 pm. Details of these Tea Party Buycotts and future buycotts can be found online at http://www.teapartybuycott.com. If you are participating in either of these or know more, feel free to leave a comment. Two more things I more or less randomly thought of upon hurriedly posting this... (1) I am glad to see that the Tea Party folks are characterizing themselves as "fiscally conservative." (2) Were I -- as someone pretty unfamiliar with the stores -- to participate in such an event, I might consider showing up a day or so before to become familiar with the layout of the store. One drawback I can see to one of these events is having a huge mass of people who don't know where anything is in the store at once attempting to do their weekly shopping! -- CAV Updates Today: Added last paragraph. Cross-posted from Metablog
  17. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Recently, Paul Hsieh noted the good news that debate over physician slavery has shifted to a more fundamental level than politics, and become a moral debate. In addition to that encouraging development, there is also the matter of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey taking this debate to the home soil of the pro-slavery side. As with all battles, each side fires shots, and forces join each side. According to the Huffington Post, two labor unions have decided to come to the aid of the pro-slavery side: As the NY Times write-up of "the most unexpected" sideshow to the 2009 Health Care Debate put it: "Reaction from pro-reform [ sic] Whole Foods shoppers was swift and vociferous." Now the Change To Win Investment Group and United Food And Commercial Workers Union -- both a part of the Change To Win federation of unions representing six million workers -- have put out statements criticizing Mackey and encouraging a boycott of the store. CtW called for Mackey's removal as chairman of the board and CEO. "Mr. Mackey attempted to capitalize on the brand reputation of Whole Foods to champion his personal political views, but has instead deeply offended a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base," the group's executive director Bill Patterson said in a statement. UFCW has begun handing out pamphlets to Whole Food shoppers. The group said Mackey's op-ed was an "attempt to undermine Obama's health-care reform." (Whole Foods is not unionized.) [bold added] So a bunch of dumb thugs who can scarcely read are going to pass out paper with stuff printed on it? That's potentially very good news: Let's hope this accelerates the process of "a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base" actually reading Mackey's editorial. Many of these shoppers now reflexively support "healthcare reform," but perhaps after they read the editorial and think about it, they will instead come to reflectively oppose physician slavery, as Ann Althouse recently suggested they might. (She posts an update of her own here, and points to a BBC story on the boycott as well.) Perhaps, if a few of them think about the issue enough, they will come not just to oppose physician slavery, but support freedom for all individuals. Dumb opponents can be a godsend, so to speak. This Southerner recently made his first post-transplant visit to Whole Foods here in Boston when he discovered that his usual grocery store, despite having a "Southern and Southwestern Cuisine" aisle, does not stock Tabasco sauce. (He also enjoyed confounding the checkout girl with a "third" (nearly-extinct) word beginning with the letter "P" when asked whether he wanted a bag for his purchase.) On that trip, I remember thinking that it's nice to have a place for occasional purchases of the more "exotic" items in my diet, but now, I will make it a point to go there each week in support of its CEO. As Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post put it, "Now is the time for all good capitalists to shop at Whole Foods." I don't have a car. I am on a budget. My usual store is ten blocks closer and I'm mostly happy with it. I couldn't do all of my shopping at Whole Foods even if I wanted to, but I am sure I can find an excuse to make the trip once a week. The excuse will be the food, but the reason will be to thank Mr. Mackey for standing up when it counts. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  18. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Three sources I check on a near-daily basis --RealClear Politics , The Drudge Report, and Fresh Bilge -- all point me to a William McGurn editorial in the Wall Street Journal about what Barack Obama ought to do to "save" his presidency. Let's set aside for the moment the whole question of whether it might be a little premature to gloat over the failure of Obama's push for physician slavery. The article draws some interesting parallels with how Bill Clinton responded to the resounding defeat of his attempt to impose government control over your health (and with it, the Democrats) during his first term. It is these parallels and how conservatives might react to them that I want to consider. McGurn writes from a pragmatist's (read: unprincipled) perspective and the assumption that political office is an end in itself. This causes him to misjudge the Obama situation in several ways. The root of his difficulty lies in the fact that this speculation about how Obama might "save" his Presidency ignores the fact that, as Clinton might have put it, "That depends on what the meaning of the word, 'save' is." I think that McGurn (and Clinton) have a vastly different idea from Obama of what "saving" his Presidency would entail. McGurn sees the presumed defeat of central planning in medicine as an opportunity for Obama to become free of the farthest left reaches of his party because its agenda is unpopular. He cites another political writer on this score. In his book The Pact, historian Steven M. Gillon puts it this way: "Ironically, Gingrich's revolution may have saved the Clinton presidency by freeing him from the control of his party's more liberal base in Congress, giving him the opportunity to return to the moderate message that helped him win election in the first place. [minor edits] Alan Sullivan of Fresh Bilge gives what I think is at the same time a perceptive and tin-eared response: "[T]here's no way stiff Obama will suddenly morph into flexible Bill Clinton..." The good and the bad of this observation both come from the same notion, which McGurn shares, that holding the presidency is somehow worth it to Obama in and of itself. But yes, Obama could well turn out to be inflexible. Why? Notice that I said "holding the presidency," rather than "holding power." That's an important distinction, and which side of this distinction Obama lands on will determine how he might react to a major setback. Bill Clinton learned from his defeat that he did not have the power -- perhaps a better term would be "political capital" -- necessary to enact his entire agenda. But for Bill Clinton, holding office made him feel like a big shot. In this way, I think that Obama is fundamentally different: It's all about imposing his vision on America. Bill Clinton was all about the office and Barack Obama is all about power. This means -- contrary to the blindness of pragmatism -- using power for a specific goal. I doubt that just hanging on will do anything for Barack Obama. Clinton could have reacted to his discovery in a variety of ways: (1) He could have evaded the lesson and kept working full bore, but fruitlessly, for the same agenda; (2) He could work to get parts of his agenda enacted with what power he had; or (3) He could pretend to favor a different agenda and bask in popularity for helping to enact it. Clinton mainly chose the third of these, as McGurn indicates: Though he continues to deny GOP contributions to his success, after his 1994 health-care defeat, Mr. Clinton did what all smart pols do: He appropriated the most appealing parts of his opponents' agenda. The result was a new Bill Clinton, embracing everything from deregulation and welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act. In his 1996 State of the Union, he even struck a Reaganite chord by announcing that "the era of Big Government is over." From this newly held center, Mr. Clinton advanced his presidency and pushed, both successfully and unfairly, to demonize Mr. Gingrich. Mostly he got away with it. One might be tempted to scoff about Obama taking this option, given how far to the left he seems to be. In fact, one might also say, "What agenda is there for him to appropriate, this time?" The rotten parts. The ones that, perhaps, already exist in his agenda, but are on the backburner for now. Most of the better parts of the Republican agenda have withered away, but I think that this Clinton-like turn is a more dangerous possibility than Sullivan apparently does. Recall whom Obama chose to deliver his inaugural invocation, and with whom he sojourns, so to speak. If Obama chose such a path, we might get our first taste of a religious left presidency. (Obama might also try this if he is sufficiently pragmatic.) And if he does, watch for some evangelicals to help him throw capitalism under the bus. But what if Obama is more principled than Bill Clinton or less religious than he appears? He and the Democrats could well decide to enact physician slavery on moral grounds and take the electoral losses. (The word "repeal" wasn't in the Republican lexicon even in 1994...) On Friday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said his boss was 'quite comfortable' with the idea that sticking to his agenda may well mean 'he only lives in this house' for one term. We could get both option (1) and option (3). This could give us the worst of both worlds if the Democrats actually took over the medical sector. We have to hope Obama is too secular to want to enact a religious agenda, and willing to take what he can get from a less friendly Congress, or that he continues going full bore, but sees little success in enacting his agenda. In the sense of his Presidency offering anything of immediate political good to America, the Obama Presidency is beyond saving. I doubt we'll get a Clinton II, but not just on grounds that Obama is probably too inflexible to "pull a Clinton." Because the Republicans have learned nothing from their loss of power, they are ill-equipped to make Obama be a decent -- or at least harmless -- President. (That said, pro-capitalists will profit from not having to rebut the silly idea that the President is "pro-capitalist." This is an enormous long-range good that many conservatives fail to appreciate for a variety of reasons.) And if you don't believe me, just look at what a couple of Republicans -- including the last presidential nominee -- recently said (via HBL) about health insurance "reform:" Though one of the Senate's most liberal members, Kennedy -- and his ability to work out bipartisan deals -- was on the minds of a couple of key Republican senators in the health care debate Sunday. "No person in that institution is indispensable, but Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I've ever known in the Senate, because he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, speaking on ABC's "This Week." "So it's huge that he's absent, not only because of my personal affection for him, but because I think that health care reform might be in a very different place today." Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch echoed the sentiment on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Well, Sen. Kennedy would, first thing he would have done, would have been call me and say, 'Let's work this out.' And we would have worked it out so that the best of both worlds would work." [bold in original] With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats? I don't think Barack Obama could turn out to be another Bill Clinton even if he secretly wanted to. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  19. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Instapundit, I have encountered an interesting analysis, from an Alinsky-ish perspective of Barack Obama's current political difficulties. This occurs in the first item of a Best of the Web feature at Wall Street Journal Online. As is so often the case with conservative analysis, its strength is generally better on the less abstract levels, but get far enough away from the concrete level and it falls flat on its face: Which brings us to a word of caution for those who don't want to see Obama re-elected: Inasmuch as the condition of being leaderless gives Republicans significant tactical advantages now, they will not enjoy those advantages in three years. Even if Obama's performance as president leaves much to be desired, he could win a second term if the Republicans nominate an opponent who makes an easy target for ridicule. Just ask John Kerry. [bold added] Or the Republicans could win, and find themselves eaten alive as their leader, now suffering the same tactical disadvantages Obama currently possesses, flounders about. Non-ridiculousness will get you only so far. Why is James Taranto so blind to this? I oppose Obama's agenda and find myself wondering whether, at the rate things are going, we might want him for eight years. The lesson Taranto draws in the first section of this Best of the Web is something like, "It's easier to erode someone else's power than to wield it for oneself." That's true enough, particularly when that power is held at the pleasure of a voting public. Part of the answer, to which I suspect Taranto is oblivious, lies in the very next section of his entry. Here, he discusses a fascinating aspect of the predictable calls for a boycott of Whole Foods by its predominantly left wing clientele in response to a recent editorial by its CEO, John Mackey. Taranto quotes Ann Althouse, a regular customer of Whole Foods: The place was packed as usual --here in lefty Madison. It occurred to me that the boycott will not only fail, it will backfire. Whole Foods shoppers won't give up their pleasure easily. If they are pushed to boycott, they will want to read the Mackey op-ed, and if they do that, they will see it is a brilliant and specific analysis that is stunningly better thought-out than what we are hearing from Obama and the Democrats. Moreover, once they do that, they should be outraged--or at least annoyed--by those who called for a boycott, who sought to enforce such strict obedience to the particular of legislation [sic] that the Democrats in Congress have been trying to ram through. Maybe some of the people who want to support Obama and the Democrats will stop and think for themselves about what health care reform should be. [bold added] Besides the fact that possessing power carries with it the tactical liabilities of having to maintain it, there is also the simple fact that if the truth is on your side, you have a huge advantage. Perhaps, in addition to being gutsy, Mr. Mackey is amazingly shrewd. If this pans out, I promise to go easy on the patchouli jokes when mentioning Whole Foods in the future. Taranto appreciates how this battle is shaking out, but does he see how it applies to the war for America's political future? I suspect not, for the Republicans, insofar as they have become a party of big government and theocracy, also do not have the truth on their side. Taranto has repeatedly made it clear that, while he is useful as an opponent of Obama having power, his positive agenda would be little better. The truth is not on his side, so he does not appreciate its tactical value and arguably even fears it. In some respects, the fact that neither side is aligned with reality bodes well for those of us who understand that the key to a good future for America is to fight against both theocracy and leftist collectivism, its secularized twin. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  20. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Left-wing radio commentator Ed Schultze -- whose voice and delivery, at least in the linked clip, bear a bizarre resemblance to Rush Limbaugh's -- claims he "sometimes think" that conservative pundits "would love to see Obama taken out," because they "fear socialism [and] Marxism." Another link at RealClear Politics claims that Schultze himself had once "Wishe[d] Death On Dick Cheney." For this post, I will leave aside the lowness of this insult on Schultze's part. He is basically attempting to dehumanize his opponents by claiming that we have no regard for human life, and cannot see our political opponents as human beings. I am sorry, but this is still a civilized country. I want Obama to go down in flames, politically, but I have no desire to see him murdered. That said, I will address a few other aspects of Schultze's remarks... Although I am no conservative, I share with the likes of Rush Limbaugh a fear Obama's agenda of government control of the economy. If fact, I would say I fear it even more than many conservatives do because I understand it better than they do. In fact, I understand it so much better than they do that I am very ambivalent about the prospect of the Republicans returning to power in Congress in 2010, only perhaps to save Obama's healthcare agenda, among other things. The GOP, still a party of intrusive government and, as such, no friend of individual rights or capitalism, only opposes Obama controlling the reigns of improper government power, and not, as it ought, anyone having such power on principle. Nevertheless, I doubt many conservatives want "Obama Clause" shot for this very reason. He is saving the GOP from having to do what it cannot do at present: make a positive appeal to the American voter. One would need command of a set of principles consistent with freedom to do that. (Sadly, too many conservative pundits do not appreciate how ineffective the GOP may turn out to be in putting the brakes on Obama's anti-American agenda.) That said, Schultze's charge is still ludicrous on its face. This is the first peep I have heard of such an idea, and I am more familiar with conservatives by far than with leftists. Speaking for myself, as one whom Schultze has inexcusably smeared, I have to say that the murderous impulse he projects onto people like me -- people who abhor tyranny -- is not only unjust, but objectively incompatible with our goals and the current political context. We still have freedom of speech here in America, and Barack Obama has done wonders for making certain issues so clear that Americans can finally discuss them intelligently. I, for one, am thrilled that I now no longer have to start almost any discussion with something like, "Bush's policies are not really capitalist because, ..." Not only that, but Obama has opened up the debate on ethics! The two parties are both against individual rights anyway -- just like all the major political parties of an earlier time once supported slavery. What the United States must have, as history shows, is an intellectual debate, and the resulting rise of a pro-individual rights group of voters that the parties ignore only at their own peril. Obama has unintentionally accelerated progress in this crucial debate, rather than allowing the United States to continue sleepwalking towards the same fascist measures under a "pro-capitalist" Republican President. In addition to the above, the event Schultze claims Obama's opponents want could end public debate even more effectively than Obama's threats or the Democrats' "enact first, read later" approach to government. Obama would become a martyr, and the timid Republicans, altruists to begin with, would be more likely to cave to an agenda subsequently cast as a way to honor the legacy of our First Black President. Ed Schultze's comment indicates that all he can see in politics is a king-of-the-mountain struggle for momentary power over others. Perhaps that is what he would do were he an opponent of Obama's. But for those of us sincerely interested in freedom, the better part of power -- as with valor -- lies in discretion. -- CAV Updates Today: Added third and fourth paragraphs shortly after initial posting. Cross-posted from Metablog
  21. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Barack Obama could have passed -- to many Republicans, anyway -- as an advocate of capitalism recently when he noted that, "UPS and FedEx are doing fine," as they "compete" against the US Postal Service. This he said while addressing a crowd friendly to his plan for health insurance "reform," but at a time when his congressional henchmen are being surprised across the country to learn that real Americans do not want said plan. His remark is clearly intended to assuage the public, and to make his plan seem harmless to us. But other video, of earlier remarks by him and by Democratic members of Congress plainly indicates that he does not really believe his own words and that his plan is, in fact, a "Trojan horse," (as he once put it) for a goal he has repeatedly endorsed over the years: single-payer health care (i.e., government control of the medical sector of the economy). It is nevertheless worth stopping for a moment -- before we report him for it -- to consider the full meaning of Obama's comparison of the plan he wants to foist on us with the Post Office. If it's going to be such feeble competition for the insurance industry, why implement it at all? And why would we want it? And why would Obama leave himself wide open to such a glaring policy failure? To really understand any utterance, one must always step back and consider its full context. In this case, it might be worthwhile to consider the nature of the "competition" Barack Obama claims the Post Office is participating in. An old column by Edwin Feulner over at Capitalism Magazine will do us nicely: We know we can count on private services such as FedEx and United Parcel Service to deliver on time. If they didn't, they'd go out of business. And we also know--many of us from bitter experience--that we always can't count on the post office. That's because the post office is a government-protected monopoly; 19th century laws make it illegal for anyone else to deliver letters. It's also exempt from state and federal taxes and free from most government regulations. That combination is a recipe for disaster. If you read the whole thing, it will become plain as day that the only reason there even exists a Post Office to "compete" is federal protection. It would be for similar reasons, as John Lewis recently indicated, that Obama's plan could exist. Here's just one example: By setting a minimum 70% actuarial value of benefits, the bill makes health plans in which individuals pay for routine services, but carry insurance only for catastrophic events, (such as Health Savings Accounts) illegal. For a similar reason you can't just post a letter for, say, a quarter, at FedEx (or even a Post Office that really had to compete), you won't be permitted to find more affordable health insurance than Obama's even if a free market could provide it. When the government disallows consumers the choice of less-expensive options, inferior enterprises like the Post Office become "viable." And, as Lewis indicates further down the line for this plan, enough government aid to such an enterprise will artificially make it not just viable, but the cheapest "option" we will have. This is why, when you hear Obama say he wants single-payer coverage by the end of his term and when you hear him talk about his plan like it's a Post-Office-like "loveable loser," he seems to mean it both ways. It is because, to him anyway, it is both ways: The Obama Plan is a sort of Medical Post Office -- but on steroids. Government protection will make it ineffective by shielding it from real competition, and put better options out of reach of the public. Too bad he underestimates the intellect of the American people. I don't want, "The doctor can see you now," to have the same level of reassurance as, "The check is in the mail." That is why I don't want Barack Obama's plan, and I thank the President for making it clear from which direction that fishy odor is coming. Barack Obama implies that his plan is "self-sustaining." If that is the case, why doesn't he just resign, slightly increase his "premiums," and make millions selling it on the open market? I'll even help his cause by demanding that the government stop strangling the insurance industry with regulations. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  22. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Trial Balloon LB informed me the other day of a story in the Nashua Telegraph concerning someone turned in to the White House snitch line for posting "fishy" comments. On Thursday morning, NashuaDan found himself on the phone with a Secret Service agent explaining that his remarks were only philosophical and not intended to threaten Obama, he said. While NashuaDan's comments did not strike me as implying a threat to the President, it is the job of the Secret Service to protect the person holding that office, and I have no problems with them erring on the side of caution. However, ... NashuaDan's subsequent phone conversation seems so innocuous that one just about can't help wondering whether the call itself was orchestrated, right along the lines of NashuaDan's comments. Let me explain... Yes, the Secret Service ought to investigate threats made against the President, but don't forget about how they learned of this "threat." And don't forget that it isn't as if informant SLRNashuan could not have found another way to tip off the Secret Service to a legitimate threat against the President. But the lack of a media ruckus indicates to me that this is exactly what is being forgotten or ignored. As a result, now that the snitch line has been used for an arguably legitimate purpose, it has an undeserved air of legitimacy. If President Obama is not called on this one, watch for his snitch line to gradually be used for its intended purpose, which is to end all public debate that hurts Barry's feelings. The Secret Service exists to protect the President, not to monitor political debate. President Obama's snitch line is blurring the distinction between the former and the latter. Whether that is intentional is immaterial. That is the effect. The Janitor-in-Chief Our President seems to be a little bit confused about his job description ... " /> " type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="425" height="344"> I don't know what I find most annoying about this silly pronouncement. First, it is not his job to be "cleaning up" the financial catastrophes caused by the economic interventions of past administrations -- but to get out of the way himself so that the free market can function properly. Second, his metaphor of people just shutting up and getting to work does not apply to a situation in which the first order of business is to have a frank discussion about what we ought to be doing. Third, his condescendingly common (if affected) air of doing us all a favor by cleaning up for us clearly distracts his most vocal fans in the audience from the fact that his idea of "cleaning up" is no different from the "solutions" his predecessors have had. Having Barack Obama for President is like we hired an un-paper-trained puppy to do a janitor's work when we should have hired a security guard. Don't "Do a Lot of Talking" ... ... if you have a disabled son and are worried about one of the "cleaning" methods -- i.e., rationing -- the Janitor-in-Chief wants to employ with the medical mess. I am unfamiliar with Mike Sola's overall position in the medical care debate, but his inexcusable treatment at the hands of "Representative" John Dingell and the late-night harassment he has received at home are worth noting. (HT: Dismuke) The Democrats plainly have abandoned the ideal of representative government: Who in his right mind would want to put his medical decisions in the hands of the kind of people who would insult him (at best) over a difference of opinion and show up at his home to threaten him at night? And if those hints aren't enough, Sola asks why Congress won't use the plan themselves and Mike N reports that the plan won't go into effect until the Democrats have gotten to run another election first. But if all that isn't enough to make you not want this clunker of a plan, then I suggest reading it. John Lewis did, and he has posted a fine executive summary over at Principles in Practice. Mike Dingell and President Obama would do well to consider the above political cartoon, but they will not. Will their bosses, the American people, have the sense to fire them? And Speaking of Cleaning up... The American electorate need look no further than about ninety miles south of Florida to see where socialism can take us if Obama gets his way: Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said on Friday. To use a metaphor of my own, central planning has made Cuba unable to wipe its own behind. Vendor Lock-in Hell Glenn Reynolds notes that an Apple netbook has the potential to introduce the iPhone commercial model to computing in general. I'm not happy to hear that, but no, I don't want Obama to step in to "save" personal computing. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  23. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Senator John Cornyn of Texas has rightfully asked President -- and I mean no disrespect to the office here -- Obama what he intends to do with the list of political opponents he has begun compiling. Naturally, the reactions from those quarters -- the quarters where I live -- has ranged from indignant to concerned, and those reactions are entirely appropriate. Indeed, there is no exaggerating the seriousness of the threat that Barack Obama poses to our freedom. His actions, thanks to modern database technology, are not just petty: They are actually dangerous, as Byron York of the Washington Examiner indicates (via John Hinderaker) when he examines the legal ramifications of that despicable move. The White House request that members of the public report anyone who is spreading "disinformation" about the proposed national health care makeover could lead to a White House database of political opponents that will be both secret and permanent, according to Republican lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are examining the plan's possible implementation. Hinderaker reacts: A secret and more or less permanent dissident database--in America! That's quite an accomplishment for an administration still in its seventh month. It seems longer, somehow. This is chilling, but if this is something to keep in mind at all, it is only in a tactical sense. A few people have tasted the possible short-term consequences of opposing Obama at various town hall "meetings" across the country, as reported yesterday: One man was attacked for bearing what Nancy Pelosi might call a "swastika," (above, HT: Alan Sullivan) and another was pushed or slapped in the face (Click through images 9-16.) simply for defending the same health care system that Ted Kennedy used when diagnosed with brain cancer. Now imagine what the man in charge of the executive branch could do, were he so inclined, and bear in mind the violent metaphor he used last night while speaking to his constituency of union thugs and ne'er-do-wells. This is what he wants you to imagine -- while forgetting that the consequences of failing to stand up to him will be far worse in the long run. (Here is one example.) Myrhaf is right: The left is statist, and therefore more authoritarian. It is the party for "control freaks." The pro-freedom right (as opposed to the pragmatist welfare staters and the religionists) is a leaderless phenomenon of America's tattered tradition of individual liberty. The left is the party of totalitarian cynicism and lies. The opposition -- call it the Tea Party movement if you will -- is an honest reaction by millions of good people to the shocking loss of freedom in America. All the left can do is hope to "define" their opponents with smears that are actually a self-portrait. The slaps and punches are just the start, regardless of what we do. Now is hardly the time to back down. We will survive Obama only by successfully fighting him. Do not be deterred by his pathetic scare tactics or the public confession that is his "enemies list." This is a roll of honor: Be sure to join it today. Is anyone out there selling Gadsden Flag armbands? I'd happily buy one. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog
  24. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Last week, the scientific news magazine Chemical and Engineering News, received a large number of letters to the editor (HT: Alan Sullivan) in response to an editorial it previously carried in which Rudy Baum, its editor-in-chief, proclaimed that the scientific debate over climate change (aka global warming) is over -- and implicitly compared scientists who disagree with him to Holocaust deniers. Many were scathing rebuttals from scientists, and at least one called for "find[ing] a new editor." Among the rebuttals was one by a scientist who identified himself as a "progressive" and dismissed a conservative think tank as, "free-market fanatics." I'll quote from a few of my favorites below. (Note that not all of these are necessarily by scientists.) First, Edward H. Gleason of Ooltewah, Tennessee, reminds Baum of the uncomfortably close and inappropriate relationship often existing between government and science today. I can't accept as facts the reports of federal agencies, because they have become political and are more likely to support the regime in power than not. Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS [American Chemical Society] is certainly alarming to me. Second, a couple of writers weigh in on hysterical claims to the effect that complex scientific issues have been "settled," and on the nature of actual scientific debate. The first of these is by Howard Hayden of Pueblo West, Colorado. I am always intrigued by claims that science is settled, especially when it comes to something as complex as climate. Rudy Baum's remarks are particularly disquieting because of his hostility toward skepticism, which is part of every scientist's soul. Let's cut to the chase with some questions for Baum: Which of the 20-odd major climate models has settled the science, such that all of the rest are now discarded? [my emphasis] Heinrich Brinks of Monterey, California, adds the following coupe de grace: I'm sure you would have espoused the merits of phlogiston theory as it was a matter of "scientific consensus" at the time and took a great deal of skepticism, experimentation, and thought to overturn it. [link added] And, lest we forget who is calling whom Nazis in this debate, here's a letter in support of Baum from one Roger Shamel of Lexington, Massachusetts: Your comments about the climate-change deniers are right on target. In fact, your closing paragraph, "Sow doubt; make up statistics," etc., was one of the best summaries I've seen of the deceitful practices that the deniers are allowed to get away with. We humans seem to learn from experience, and thus our modern systems of justice are not well geared for dealing effectively with climate-change deniers. This is a shame, because every month's delay in taking meaningful action likely will lead to more climate-related death and destruction in the future. There should be a law. [my emphasis] That one makes me think of a certain Inconvenient Amendment. And that reminds me of the one thing I wish had been mentioned, but wasn't: individual rights. I was happy to see that some respondents appear to see on some level that see the scientific debate over global warming and its causes is a distinct issue from the debate over what to do about it if it is occurring due to human causes. This is unfortunate, because it requires a firm grasp of the concept of individual rights (as well as of the proper purpose of government) to see that the real political question is: "Should the government do anything at all about global warming if, for the sake of argument, it is occurring and is due to human activity?" -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected characterization of Chemical and Engineering News from "journal" to "scientific news magazine." Cross-posted from Metablog
  25. By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Barack Obama, whose friend and advisor, Cass Sunstein, wants to "regulate" freedom of speech, seems both in a hurry to get started with and eager to broaden the scope of that "regulation." Specifically, he wants to "encourage" the debate over socialized medicine in much the same way that socialized medicine will "encourage" our good health and continued existence. Jeff Emanuel quotes from the White House web site: There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected]. [his emphasis] This is interesting, since many "members" of Congress (to use John Conyers's unintentionally apt self-description) and the President seem so eager to make such "health insurance reform" law without even reading the bill. How the hell would they even know what "disinformation" was? Does Obama regard the bill itself as "disinformation?" After all, it does address government control of end of life care: ( The level of treatment indicated under subparagraph (A)(ii) [i.e., "life sustaining treatment" --ed] may range from an indication for full treatment to an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions. (430) This paragraph clarifies what Conyers and Obama hope will go on during "advance care planning consultations" which will become more frequent once you are admitted to "a skilled nursing facility [or] a long-term care facility" according to the previous page. Enough of a "limit" in such a case will make this an "end of life" issue. And so we see that one needn't look very hard nor must one exactly make one's head hurt while connecting the dots in order to find examples showing that this bill is exactly what the White House is afraid you might realize it is -- if you value your life and do not regard it as government property. Emanuel rightly adds: [A]s we've seen in the health care debate to date, the term "disinformation" is used by the Obama White House as a catchall to describe any opposition to the President's push for single-payer, government-run health care... When I first heard that Obama is hoping to enlist the aid of free-lance informants, I saw this as a symptom of his pragmatism. He obviously thinks he can get away with claiming that arguments against his "reforms" like the one I posted yesterday are not "factual" because they rely on abstractions and are thus, in such a view, not concrete enough to be factual. I still think that this is true, but there's more going on here than a pragmatist's disdain for principles. This move is also an implicit admission on the President's part of the basest emotion there is, envy, or, as Ayn Rand famously described it, "hatred of the good for being the good." Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one's own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable. If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good. (from "The Age of Envy," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 152.) To exaggerate only slightly, if you just read the bill, you can see that if it is passed, your life can be forfeit at the government's convenience. There is nothing to "disinform" about. This move is all about and only about you selfishly valuing your own life. Obama claims to regard selfishness as immoral, but another quote from Ayn Rand should illustrate why I think he does envy the spirit of the nation he hopes to rule: Isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison .... They're second-handers .... They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. (605, and more here) [bold added] Does that last paragraph not sound familiar? And does it not almost perfectly characterize the form which Obama hopes political "debate" will take? Obama does not really have a self, and he hates those of us who do. Obama, as this bill clearly shows, could care less about the quality or length of your physical life. It's your spirit that he's really after. And he expects to break it by making you afraid to speak your mind. -- CAV Updates Today: There is more on the subject of Obama's recruitment of informants over at Titanic Deck Chairs. Cross-posted from Metablog
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