Left, Right and Occupy Wall Street

People are comparing the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street. Okay. Let's do that.

Tea Party people have jobs and families.  The Occupy Wall Street crowd is peopled largely by scruffy college students and full-time radicals with no clue as to how things really work. No one gets arrested at Tea Party rallies. There is no public copulation or distribution of condoms. I don't recall a theme of anti-semitism at Tea Party rallies. Not like this woman at an L.A. Occupy Wall Street west coast spin-off. 



Tea Partiers have no record of issuing death threats to their opponents. 

Like this:

we are going to sow the kind of choas [sic] you are unequipped to deal with,” the email said. “And you’re going to find yourself in a country where you and your wealthy friends are gonig [sic] to be hunted.”

...and...

“Let me slit your throat you corporate whore ... I would slaughter your family as well if given the chance.”

Now where were we? Oh yes...No one in the Tea Party wants to destroy the foundations of the country. They want to strengthen and return to them. The Tea Party also has a coherent and focused message: stop the spending and reduce the debt. Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, is a movement without a message. If OWS has any clear message, it's "I'm silly, young, and passionate. Co-opt me!"

On that subject, on HuffingtonPost.com Lisa Sharon Harper and I have dueling columns for the next few weeks. This week I wrote, "Dreamers at Occupy Wall Street."

I begin with the humorous tag line, "If Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" was the anthem for the 60s protests, the anthem for Occupy Wall Street has to be Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain." [Follow the link to the original video of McClintock singing the song]"

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.

I end with this surely-to-be-unheeded warning to the Evangelical left who are frantic with over-realized eschatology.

What I see in the Evangelical political left is a dangerous, and I believe unbiblical, combination of Utopian expectations for government combined with an unjustifiably optimistic willingness to empower government for this breathtaking work. They want the Kingdom of God on earth; they want shalom fully realized now through political and economic reform. But if they came into the power they would need for this, they would quickly find their own movement co-opted by opportunists and their beautiful new day turned into a nightmare.

The in my Worldmag.com column today, "The Occupiers and the National Divide," I lament that Obama's embrace of OWS will just further deepen our national divide. "It will further radicalize the division in our country between the Friends of ’76 viewpoint of standing by our founding political tradition of limited government and the 20th century progressive vision of benevolent, centralized, technocratic oversight of all things."


Obama came to office promising "hope and change" in connection with being a "post-partisan president" who would take us beyond left and right, liberal and conservative, red state and blue state. But he meant that in the same way the the Soviet Union said they wanted world peace, by which they meant world communism. Obama wanted to make political debate irrelevant in an administrative state when everything was decided by liberal technocrats. Hence, Karl Rove today with truth, that Barack Obama is "the most rigidly ideological modern president." He doesn't actually believe in politics, the essence of which is self-government among equals.


By the way, in the Worldmag.com column, I cite a Douglas Schoen OWS survey that revealed “nearly one-third (31 percent) would support violence to advance their agenda.” One of my students saw immediately that in the event of violence, much more than that would get caught up in the frenzy. Another WSJ article goes into the details of the survey to reveal subtleties in the data.

Slaying ObamaCare for Liberty's Sake

In this column, "In with the Constitution, Out with ObamaCare," I explain what limited government is, i.e., our system of government, and how the Democrats violated all three principles of it when they passed ObamaCare.

Opponants of H.R.2, "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act," say it is meaninglessly symbolic because the Democratically controlled Senate won't take it up. I argue that it is meaningfully symbolic and a good use of House time.

Every elected representative takes a solemn oath to defend the Constitution. Yet, judging by what they do, not by what they say, Democrats these days don’t seem to believe in any of these features of limited government. If the purpose of government is not simply to praise what is good among the people (1 Peter 2:14) but to provide for the people’s good itself, then to limit the government in any way is an act of hostility toward the people.

Apparently, the people don’t see it that way. That’s why this week, in response to unambiguous popular demand, the Republican majority in Congress, perhaps along with some keen-eared Democrats, will send a message to the upper house and the president about limited government and liberty.

The bill to repeal passed the House "245-189 with three Democrats -- Reps. Mike Ross, Dan Boren and Mike McIntyre --joining the Republican effort," Fox News reports.

Extemism in the Defense of Security

In my Worldmag column today, "What We Lose When We Fly This Year," I close with this reductio ad absurdum extension of the TSA logic.

Perhaps we should hold our breath, grit our teeth, and just get through those dreadful pre-flight moments for the sake of safe skies. But why should we expect it will end with air travel? When it comes to terrorism, we can’t remain simply reactive. Shouldn’t we consider what terrorists might think of doing next? What about trains, and even commuter trains? Expect an increase in rush hour motor traffic. But an underwear bomber could target a bridge or a tunnel! We’ll need personally invasive pat-downs for everyone entering or leaving Manhattan, even carpoolers. And what about the possibility of an underwear bomber in a public school? Get ready for personal frisking of the kids before the school day begins. Oh, and principals and teachers, too. We have to be fair. By the way, is it possible for a terrorist to conceal explosives in his or her body cavities? Now there’s an interesting search.

Well, Christopher Hitchens went there already in Slate.

Consider: The decision to make us all take off our shoes was the official response to the scrofulous "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The ban on liquids and precisely specified quantities of gel was the best we could do by way of post-facto thwarting of a London-based scheme to mix liquids in-flight and cause a mid-air detonation. The decision to inquire more closely into our undergarments was the official response to the "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The more recent decision (this was a specifically British touch of genius) to forbid the shipping by air of any print toner weighing more than 500 grams was made after some tampered-with toner cartridges were intercepted on international cargo flights leaving Yemen a few weeks ago. (Fear not, by the way, you can't have these hard-to-find items in your carry-on bags or checked luggage, either.)

In the more recent instances, the explosive substance involved was a fairly simple one known as PETN. Now consider again: Late last August, the Saudi Arabian deputy minister of the interior, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, was injured in the city of Jeddah by a suicide bomber named Abdullah Hassan Al Aseery. The deceased assailant was the brother of Khalid Ibrahim Al Aseery, the suspected bomb-specialist of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the man sought in connection with the underpants and toner attempts. In the Jeddah case, the lethal charge of PETN was concealed in the would-be assassin's rectum.

Perhaps you can begin to see where, as they say, I am going with this. In order for us to take them even remotely seriously, our Homeland Security officials should by now have had no alternative but to announce a series of random body-cavity searches some months ago. At least that might have had a deterrent effect and broken the long tradition of waiting for the enemy to dictate all the terms, all the time. It is a certainty that this deadly back-passage tactic will be tried. It is equally a certainty that it will find us even more defenseless than before.

Read more in "Don't Be an Ass About Airport Security."

An Unwelcome Hand from the Government

It is ironic that just a few days before what is arguably the Tea Party election in which country rebelled against government overreach, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) instituted a new practice of "patting-down" air travellers in their private places to make sure they are not concealing any explosives.

Government’s chief function is to secure us in our persons and property against murder, molestation, and theft. We expressed this understanding in the fourth amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In my Worldmag.com column, "Government Overreach at the Airport," I argue that Congressman John Boehner, who reportedly bypasses these screening methods, should take up this cause in a defense of our liberty.
Tomorrow, I will chime in again on the subject, and then perhaps I will have got everything out of my system.

It's OK. I Work for the Government.

I don't know what these people are saying about airport body scans, but it looks funny, and some of the gags are visual. Here is the link.



Anthony Bradley has a good column on the subject in WORLDmag.com, "Saying ‘no’ to airport body scans."

When I recently flew out of Charlotte, N.C., I opted out and found myself being touched in ways that had me wondering if I had somehow accidentally wandered into my doctor’s office for a complete physical exam.

He reports this:

[T]hese new measures have no proven success in increasing airport security, according to Rafi Sela, an Israeli security expert. Sela recently testified before the Canadian government that these full-body X-rays are “useless.” “I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” he said. As such, the Israeli government does not use body scans in the Tel Aviv airport. Maybe our government could learn a lesson from the Israelis?

This is all an excellent argument for two things. (1) The federal government screws up everything it touches. (2) High speed rail.

I will not be flying until this stops.

The Road Less Often Taken

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson


I reproduce this from http://patriotpost.us/edition/2010/09/20/brief/, a worthwhile site which culls the best American thought from all decades:


The path of liberty or the road to tyranny


"We are faced today with two different roads, one of which follows the path of liberty set by our Founders in the Constitution, and one of which diverges from that path and leads us down the road to tyranny. There are two different warring camps within our society, and the ongoing battle between those camps has been graphically illustrated in recent primary elections and by the vicious fight over the nationalization of our healthcare system. On one side are those of us, including the members of the Tea Party movement, who work hard to support their families, who love their country, and who understand and revere a document that has stood firm for 223 years to guide us. These ordinary, everyday Americans rightly fear the unprecedented growth in the size and power of the federal government. They are angry over the unsustainable and uncontrollable growth of federal spending and the federal deficit that will inevitably lead to financial ruin. They are appalled over the contempt shown by so many in the other camp for our governing document, the Constitution. ... That other camp is made up of politicians who recognize no limits on their power, their liberal activist allies in the judiciary, and members of the media, Hollywood, and academia, who have been stretching, bending, and chipping away at the Constitution for decades. They welcome a tyranny of elites who can govern however they see fit without being checked and limited by what they view as an 'anachronistic' document and the parochial views of the American people. After all, they know what is best for all of us. They should control our lives and our economy. ... There is a growing movement throughout America to reinvigorate the tree of liberty, a tree whose trunk is the Constitution, whose limbs are the Bill of Rights, and whose leaves are the new sons and daughters of liberty who embody the same spirit that infused our Founders. On Constitution Day, let Americans rededicate themselves to securing 'the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity' by actively working to preserve the Constitution of the United States." --former Attorney General Edwin Meese

Jihad and Western Liberty

Whatever you may say about him personally (and I do), Newt Gingrich is brilliant, and is as politically insightful as the best among us.

At a recent address to the American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich argued that we need to reframe our understanding of the so-called War in Terror. That name distorts the nature of our present international conflict involving radical Islam.

It began not in 2001, but in 1979 with the Iranian revolution.

It has nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, America's image in the world, or the presence of American troops in the Middle East. The essence of the conflict is the struggle on the part of radical Islamists to impose Sharia law universally. It is what their religion requires (as they understand it), and technology as well as culotural and political circumstances have opened the opportunity to make great strides toward that end.

It takes two forms: militant and stealth, i.e., the former using violence, and the latter using cultural, intellectual, and political means to achieve the same goal. Framing the conflict as a war on terror takes into account only the former. Iran is the locus of the militant effort. Saudi Arabia pushes the stealth agenda.



Watch the entire speech, "America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan."

Andrew McCarthy has an eloquent summary of the speech and the issue it addresses at NRO, "It's About Sharia: Newt Gingrich Resets Our National Security Debate."

He explains,

• "The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia."
• "Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system."
• "...the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example."
• "It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam."
• "Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated."
• "By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich...gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender."

The Political Economy of Shopping

Excerpted from my WORLDmag.com column, "Liberty, Justice, and Shopping."

...This summer, I have been researching a project. As I have not been at the college much, the library has not been at hand. So I went to Amazon.com to see what the market was charging for the titles I needed. Then the fun began! For the last month I have been delighting myself buying a steady trickle of books for prices that thrill a Scotsman's heart. For just $4, I bought George Gilder's 1980 classic, Wealth and Poverty...in hardcover...with a dust jacket...not a mark in it...delivered to my door. ...

What has this to do with liberty? In this commonplace experience, I notice three examples of the justice and goodness that ordered liberty allows, in this case, through a free market.

First, the market provides broadly for people's needs. ...

Second, the market is not a respecter of persons. ...

Finally, the market provides a kind of distributive justice. ...

Liberty as exercised in an ordered but free marketplace is part of God's good design for human well-being. It's just a part. It's not sufficient on its own. But no discussion of its shortcomings can proceed in fairness without first recognizing these great goods.

Someone has recommended Bookfinder.com in place of Amazon. I'm always happy to introduce competition into the marketplace, especially when someone starts looking like a monopoly.

Fashion, Faith, and the Turkish Future

The King's College in New York City sends students each year on international ventures of various sorts to engage students and political leaders on the truth and importance of liberty--spiritual, political, and economic. We have sent teams to Albania, Bulgaria, and Uganda. This May, Jane Clark joined the Turkey Venture. She published this report yesterday on the politics of headscarves there in National Review Online.

Many Turkish college students oppose repealing the ban because they believe that their fellow students want to wear the headscarf as a political statement, rather than from religious conviction. A female student from Bogazici University in Istanbul recently told me she believes the government shouldn’t cater to the scarf wearers: “For some of them the headscarf is just a trend. You can tell by the way they tie the scarves. It doesn’t represent religious conviction for many of them.”

Erol Aslan Cebeci, an AK member of parliament, concurs with those who believe religion should not be a factor in politics. Though personally a devout Muslim, Cebeci says that his religious beliefs should not affect his work. However, he does not see the repeal of the headscarf ban as a religious statement by the government. Instead, he sees it as expanding freedom of religious expression in society.

Cebeci’s argument is counterintuitive for many European secularists: He believes that loosening religious restrictions leads to stronger political secularism. But he points out that there is more than one kind of secularism: “There is American/Anglo-Saxon secularism and French secularism.” American secularism is religiously neutral. French secularism (laïcité) allows the government to control how civilians practice their religion. Since 2004, students in French public schools have been forbidden to wear “ostentatious” religious symbols — including headscarves, but also yarmulkes and oversized crosses.

Cebeci believes that American secularism is the desired model. The question before the Turkish court system is much more than whether women can cover their heads. It is whether to follow the pattern of French liberalism or American liberalism.

Read the whole thing: "Turkey, the Headscarf, and Secularism."

We are Engaged in a Great Civil War

The depth of our political divide in America constitutes a civil war, the one side preserving the regime and the other side working to overthrow it. But thankfully it's a cold war, not a shooting war. All that we need for preserving the republic against it's progressivist overthrowers is to re-school the American public in their heritage of liberty.

I have been writing recently about the movement of American government in dangerous directions toward a subtle, seductive, but very real form of despotism. Most recently I published "The Temptation to Dictatorship" at WORLDmag.com, a further reflection on what I wrote here in "The Dictatorship of Hope and Change." We hear Tom Friedman and Andrea Mitchell musing openly on Meet The Press about the public benefits that would result from allowing Barack Obama and his soul-mates in Congress to suspend the Constitution for a day and really put things right. This was not a careless thought. Friedman was just following up on what he stated in one his recent books. But only Paul Gigot expressed shock and incredulity. When he did, the political cognoscenti around him just blinked and went on.

This dangerous indifference to the institutions of liberty is not limited to a few reckless talking heads on a Sunday news show. It pervades the liberal establishment. And if it were only indifference, we would be in better shape than we are. George Will has drawn national attention to the principled hostility toward our very form of government that has characterized the Democratic Party for almost a hundred years, and which Barack Obama has raised to the level of mortal struggle.

Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of "progressivism," was the first president critical of the nation's founding. Barack Obama's Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake's rejection of limited government.

In my WORLDmag.com column today, "Our Present Civil Cold War," I continue Will's train of thought to what I think is its implied but unstated conclusion. (Michael Lind at Salon.com responds to Will's thesis here.)

*****************

What Wilson began, the Great Depression interrupted, but Franklin Roosevelt took it up again with great energy in the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson carried it forward with the Great Society, and now Barack Obama has raised this war against limited, constitutional government to the level of mortal struggle.


Now we are engaged in a great civil cold war. It is a political war between the advocates of limited and unlimited government, between those who support the Founding and the Constitution as amended and the self-described progressives who, by definition, reject what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us in favor of what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Will takes his prompt from a new book by William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. In the progressive view of politics, there is no limiting principle for government. Writes Voegeli, “Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is.” We can see this in President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” speech, in which he declared the commitment of his government to, among other things,

...the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.

Thus rights become government entitlements that don’t limit government, but instead empower and expand it.

For progressives, the purpose of government is not to protect certain natural rights that in turn limit the government itself. This is the political theory of the Founding and the Constitution. Rather, government’s job is to discover new rights that come to light as we morally evolve, i.e., as we progress.

Our choice is between two very different forms of government. Limited government stands opposite progressive government of unlimited reach. Individual liberty stands opposite federally guaranteed personal security. Our system of checks and balances stands opposite the popularly unaccountable and trans-political bureaucracy. In the Great Civil War, we fought—as Lincoln put it—for “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This new struggle is a domestic cold war for that same understanding of freedom. We need to be clear that there is a fundamental difference between these politically divergent ways of life, and that the choice is now clearly before us. Otherwise we will simply slip peacefully into what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” the way a freezing man welcomes the embrace of death like a comforting lover.

*****************

Reading List:

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, The Federalist Papers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America.

Walter McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History (HarperCollins, 2004).

R.J. Pestritto. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007).

Matthew Spalding, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future (ISI, 2009).

William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter, 2010).

James Caeser, Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard UP, 2008).

Also, anything by Martin Diamond, Charles Kesler, Forrest McDonald, or Herbert Storing.

You should also explore through these websites and catalogues the considerable labors that thoughtful patriots have undertaken over that past two generations or so in the re-schooling of America in its education for liberty.

Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
The Constitution Society
The Federalist Society
The Founders' Constitution
The Heritage Foundation
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Jack Miller Center
Lehrman American Studies Center
Liberty Fund

The Dictatorship of Hope and Change

Roger Simon at Pajamas Media calls it nostalgie du fascisme ("The Culture Wars are Turning," May 24, 2010). Woody Allen tells a Spanish magazine that Barack Obama needs to be given dictatorial power for just a "few years" to get us out of what he sees as our various messes.


Sentiments such as Woody has expressed indicate a liberal impatience with messiness of free government, which is in part the necessity of persuading your neighbors in sufficient numbers to bring your views into law. It also indicates a liberal arrogance that precludes democratic compromise.

I would be tempted to dismiss these as the ridiculous babbling of a Hollywood comedian, except that liberal columnist Thomas Friedman, the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes (1983, 1988, 2002), recently said the same thing on Meet the Press, and veteran journalist Andrea Mitchell agreed with him.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MR. GREGORY: I want to follow up on one point, though, Tom Friedman, which is when you have such activism on the left and the right, what does that do to the political center and how do you govern in that respect? Bob Bennett, the senator who was defeated in a nominated convention in Utah, wrote this in The Washington Post this morning, "The tea party movement's ... two strongest slogans," he writes, "are `Send a message to Washington,' `Take back America.' I know both very well because they were the main tools used to defeat me ... two weeks ago. ... Yet when the new members of Congress whom these slogans elect in November take office ... will they stand firmly on partisan sidelines continuing to shout slogans? Or will they reach across the aisle in the interest of the country? ... If they want their movement to be more than a wave that crashes on the beach and then recedes back into the ocean, leaving nothing behind but empty sand, they should stop the `gloom talk.' These are not the worst of times we have ever faced, nor is the Constitution under serious threat." Where is the center that actually does something, that actually achieves things in Washington if this is what we're creating?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it's been decimated. It's been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control--really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that's really what, what it's come down to. So I don't--I, I--I'm worried about this, it's why I have fantasized--don't get me wrong--but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

MS. MITCHELL: And, in fact, Tom, you're absolutely right. One case in point, the Financial Regulation Bill, which we can get to...

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. MITCHELL: ...but Chris Dodd realized that Bob Bennett, with whom he wanted to work, the ranking member on the Banking Committee, was so swept away by his fight back home in Utah that he could not work across party lines, and that there is so much punishment for anyone who works across party lines to try to come up the best solutions so they end up with things that are not optimal.

MR. GIGOT: We'd all be in jail if we were China for a second.

MR. FRIEDMAN: No, I--it's--I understand. I don't want to be China, I want our system to work, though.

We all know what's right, apparently. It's just our hopelessly broken democratic process that's getting in the way. They speak as though we're the Weimar Republic. And what do you think of someone who laments the disappearance of the political center while at the same time longing for dictatorial powers? Notice that it took the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot to step in with the obvious: The cameras are rolling, and you're talking like crazy people.

Friedman, the prophet of the broadsheet, expressed the same fascinating political proposal to Tom Brokaw in 2008, again on Meet The Press.

MR. BROKAW: You have an intriguing proposition in this book. You'd like to be China for a day, just one day.

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, it comes from actually a dialogue I had with Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, and Jeff was making the point that, you know, really almost out of exasperation of a company that's been trying to be an energy innovative leader, saying, "Look, Tom, we need is"--what Jeff said is we need a president who's going to set the right price for carbon. Set the right standard, set the right regulation. Shape the market so it will be innovative. Everyone will kind of whine and moan for a month and then the whole ecosystem will take off. And I thought about that afterwards and I said to him, "You know, Jeff, what you're really saying is, `If only we could be China for a day. Just one day.'" So I wrote a chapter called "China for a day, but not for two." Really, about what we would do if for one day we could impose, cut through all the lobbyists, all the amendments, all the earmarks, and actually impose the right conditions to get our market to take off.

As he indicates in the interview, he was summarizing the point he makes at the beginning of chapter 16 of his book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, "China for a Day (But Not for Two)."

As far as I am concerned, China's system of government is inferior to ours in every respect--except one. That is the ability of China's current generation of leaders--if they want to--to cut through all their legacy industries, all the pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of a voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping change in prices, regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that reflect China's strategic long-term national interests, changes that would normally take Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement (pp. 372-373).

In other words, China's system of government is inferior to ours in every way except for the totalitarian power the rulers have at their disposal. It's like saying you deplore apartheid except for the way it treats the races.

But the source of their annoyance is not really those nasty Republicans. At bottom, it is the dumb sheep they represent--chief among whom are country people and Evangelical Christians. Elizabeth Scalia reports more fully on this at First Things, including this nice observation:

The leftist party that these people support is currently in control of both houses of congress and the White House (and they are well-represented within the federal judiciary) and yet, it is not enough. The power is not pure enough, it is not invincible enough; their power is diluted because, dammit, those little people crowing about the constitution all over the internets are mucking things up!

Republican government, that is, self-government by a free people, unlike mere democracy, requires a people who has the collective capacity for self-government. They need a minimal level of education generally, an understanding of their system of government and of the value of their liberties, and a moral restraint that in most cases comes by devotion to a religion that is compatible with republican government. People who long for these sorts of emergency powers--or perhaps only the power to "deem" major health care reform bills into law--think of most Americans as comparable to the poor, tribal, historically tyrannized, and culturally slavish people in "developing" countries who are not quite ready for democratically accountable government. This is one reason there is a Tea Party movement storming its way across the American political landscape, heading for November and beyond.


Click on the blog's "fascism" label for posts during the 2008 election season observing fascist tendencies on the left in general and among Obama supporters in particular.

Also, have a look at Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

Take It From a Better Man Than I

 Recently, I argued that what is fueling Tea Party anger is fear of tyranny and, thus, a vigilant defense of liberty. ("Political Evil This Way Comes," April 16, 2010.) Well, perhaps it's obvious, but it's not obvious to many who are reporting on the protests.

Michael Barone makes his own argument ("Tea Partiers Fight Culture of Dependence," April 19, 2010), much better of course, that the Tea Partiers are not fundamentally concerned about taxes. They are defending a culture of independence against a culture of dependence that has been rushing in on us with great force this past year.

The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the culture of dependence.

The tea partiers see things differently. They're not looking for lower taxes -- half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure -- half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives.

But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens' dependence on it. And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence which has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous -- and the most charitably generous -- nation in the world.

This fire doesn't die over night.

Political Evil This Way Comes

The so-called Tea Party continues to make the news, recently as object of the mainstream media's vilification as just so many white, upper-income racists. Others focus on the vast government spending and corresponding public debt that provoked these ordinary people into active political involvement. I argue today on WORLDmag.com ("Tyrants Among Us") that while runaway government spending is a big part of what is driving Tea Partiers to revolt, underlying that is a more fundamental fear in the face of runaway government size and power and lawless intrusion. They see tyranny hatching out of Washington like a scaly thing, bigger and more sure footed than ever seen before, and they are fighting for the survival of liberty.

Here is the little more rambling, less politically restrained version of the published article:

***  **  *  **  ***

What angers Americans in the Tea Party movement is tyranny. And well it should. It is spreading in Washington even more than usual.

Our Declaration of Independence still speaks for us where it says:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Lawless government is an unmistakable sign of tyranny, i.e., government that exercises power not under law or according to the authority given to it by consent of the governed, but on an authority it claims to have in itself.
The Democratic Party's health care reform legislation is an example of governing tyrannically. The law requires people to purchase health insurance who, perhaps because they are young and healthy, presently do not carry it. This is not a tax. It is the government just telling you to do something because they believe it to be good for the country. It is not conditional upon any other behavior. It says, "You will do this or we will punish you with a fine."

I have not heard a credible argument from any elected officeholder justifying this provision constitutionally. Even the president, who has taught constitutional law, made only a vague reference to the state requirement that people buy car insurance, which of course is different in that it is a condition of owning a car for use on public roads. If people take the bus or walk, they can decline the purchase. But this is government exercising authority beyond what the Constitution allows, authority the people did not entrust to it. This is power exercised tyrannically, and on a grand scale.

At a constituent meeting, Rep. Phil Hare, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, stated with unguarded candor (as though it were no big deal) his disregard for the constitutional limits of congressional power when it comes to providing for what he thinks is the public good.



When asked to locate in the Constitution where Congress gets the authority to require everyone to buy health insurance, his response was, "I don't worry about the Constitution on this...I care more about the people dying every day who don't have health care." In a half-hearted attempt to find a constitutional hook on which to hang the law after the fact, he cited the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, thinking that he was quoting the Constitution. When someone pointed out that these words are found in the Declaration of Independence, he expressed indifference to the distinction. "Doesn't matter to me. Either one."

In other words, when it comes to doing good, constitutional restraints are irrelevant. They don't apply. The legal constraints of the Constitution are, in the eyes of Democrats like Phil Hare and, apparently, the president, only for bad people. The goodness of the obviously good things that good hearted people do with government power is the ultimate foundation of public authority, transcending even the Constitution. Another way of stating this view is that moral progress is the fundamental law of the land. It is the unwritten constitution behind the written constitution. That is to say, the politically progressive use of power is self-authorizing. Every other exercise of civil authority must be subject to constitutional limitations because that is what a constitution is for.

This lawlessly self-flattering attitude seems to draw, but unfaithfully, from Cicero's maxim in De Legibus (3.3.8) that has echoed loudly through the centuries, Salus populi suprema lex esto, "the welfare of the people is the highest law." By salus, or welfare, he meant the well-being or safety of the people. The sense of the statement is that because the individual depends on the community for the enjoyment of his private goods, and even for his very life, his individual good must yield to the public good in general when the two come into conflict. No law needs to state this. It is in the nature of the political relationship. In that sense it is the supreme law that transcends even the most fundamental written laws.

Francis Bacon reiterated the thought in #56 of the Essays, "Of Judicature." Uttered by Cicero, the words are taken in their natural law context. But Bacon's view of justice is more conventional and mundane. He explicitly cautions his readers against laws that claim divine origin, saying, "laws, except they be in order to that end, are but things captious [misleading], and oracles not well inspired." In other words, judges should pay no attention to divine law and philosophic consideration of natural law. These only distract from civil business. John Locke used it as the epigraph for his Two Treatises of Government. Both of these men used a surface piety and respect for traditional views to direct people to a radically popular foundation of political justice. But they both advocated the rule of law, even of a fundamental law in a liberal, constitutional republic. What we see in Congressman Hare's words, and in the aggressive expansion of government by his party without regard to the enumerated powers of the Constitution is something that is neither Ciceronian nor Lockean, but rather Jacobin. Yes, Jacobin.

Cicero's maxim is one for emergencies. The Democrats in Congress, along with the president, are governing as though it were the ordinary basis for legislative activity, or, to speak more cautiously, as though the fullest and immediate expansion of the welfare state were a matter of national emergency.

But in the face of such tyrannical usurpation of authority, such an obvious design to reduce us under the absolute despotism of benevolent technocracy does not justify violence. It does, however, justify vigilance. Every patriot should exercise that vigilance at the ballot box in November, asking him or herself the question, "Does this candidate govern or promise to govern under the laws, or regardless of the laws as a law himself?" Will this candidate govern as a benevolent despot, or as a public servant under law?

Let me hasten to add in conclusion that Christians are substantially to blame for this state of affairs. The constitution for the Kingdom of God is the Bible. In the late nineteenth century, Christians started debunking and dismissing its authority, and substituting enlightened progressive morality and the latest developments of scientific thinking in its place. Today, even Protestant Evangelicals, who supposedly have a high view of Scripture, treat the details of its teachings with careless disregard, following instead all too often the fashions of Evangelical subculture.

Christians can be salt and light by conforming their convictions more conscientiously to the Word of God, and voting their convictions more faithfully on election days.

Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?

Each year in April, The King's College takes a break from regular classes and focuses as an academic community on some fertile topic for exploration and reflection through a common reading, student debates, dramatized great speeches, an art exhibit, student lectures, and a formal address by a prominent academic. This year the theme (in keeping with the times) is "avarice." We had two readings: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Our honored speaker will be Stanley Hauerwas from Duke Divinity School tomorrow night.


I most appreciate the student lectures, however. (Forgive me my weaknesses.) One student from each of the nine "houses" by which we organize the student community at King's delivers a ten minute lecture on a commonly assigned question. Following the avarice theme, and wishing to challenge our liberty oriented Christian community, the student lead Interregnum Committee posed the question, "Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character." I was only able to hear six of the addresses, and, while they were all impressive, sophomore Tim Wainwright's stood out, in my opinion. He graciously consented to allow me to reproduce it here at Principalities and Powers.

"Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?"

Tim Wainwright

House of C.S. Lewis, The King's College, class of 2013

The question I address today, “Does the free market corrode moral character?”, is not a new one, but it is a complex one, and because of this I feel I should start by defining my terms and my interpretation of the questions. First of all, I define “free market” not as a lawless Wild-West kind of gold nugget anarchy, but as an economic system of capitalism with minimal interference, with rule of law and clear rights of private property, and a system where people can freely exchange goods and services. Secondly, the way I interpret this question posed is “how does the free market impact people’s morality?”, as in, does the free market on average cause individual people to behave in an immoral way? Therefore, I will not be trying to persuade you of the various material benefits of free market policy and economics. Also, minimum wage laws, regulation, dead weight loss and the harm caused by nationalization of industry and other nuances will be left for another discussion. I will be trying to leave out these topics unless they pertain directly to people’s moral character.

I lay this out to you because it’s important. It means that this lecture will be more of a subjective approach than an objective one. And because I have to focus on morality rather than math, and because this is such a deep question and I only have ten minutes with which to talk about it, I will not be able to go into as much detail as I would like. Keeping those challenges in mind, I’ll now talk about some way how best to serve others by providing a superior product or making a process more efficient and seeking to market that. This creativity cannot be mandated by central economic planning. Also, do not let it seem like free-markets use a reductive definition of creativity, as simply a means to turn something of worth into cash. From a Judeo-Christian vantage point, the capacity to create is something, in the words of Austin Hill, “distinctly human, something God-given, and something indicative of the unique nature of the human person, having been “made in the image of God”. Creativity is a gift that separates man from the beasts. Birds and other animals create, but with repetition, not ingenuity. Capitalism is the economic system which allows creativity to thrive most because it provides incentives, more so than any earthly alternative.

Speaking of incentives, that brings me into my third ethical point in favor of free-market capitalism. It is the only economic system that relies upon persuasion rather than coercion. Communism, fascism, and socialism rely upon coercion: trying to get people to do what you want by threatening to reduce their options. And by “reducing options”, I mean state-sponsored murders. 65 million in China, 20 million in the USSR, the list goes on. Free-market capitalism, presupposing the freedom of exchange, that the rule of law prevents anyone from being physically forced to make a purchase, means that no trade will occur without the blessing of all parties involved, which means that by definition it is a win-win situation. That means that in order to get others to do what you want, you have to use persuasion rather than coercion. It is an environment where people have an incentive to serve others in order to serve themselves, thus actually tempering the human desire to conquer and domineer. It takes those in the economy whose motives are pure greed (and they do exist) and forces them to channel that greed into doing something useful for their fellow men, for that is the only way they can sate it. So not only does free-market capitalism sponsor certain virtues, it also channels certain vices and, while not eliminating that vice, at least preventing it, when the rule of law is upheld, from becoming something that harms the rest of society as it would under another system.

I could go on. I could say how capitalism creates responsibility, civility, cooperation, and responsibility. That it furthers knowledge, and that it helped give us modern theology in that it allowed people to take a break from farming and spend some time thinking about God. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to really unpack those topics. Instead, I will use the time I have left to answer common arguments from those who disagree with my view of the market.

I’ll begin with the most common complaint against free-market capitalism: that it is a system that rewards and fundamentally relies upon greed and selfishness. Critics who make this point are foolishly confusing selfish behavior with self interested behavior. A market system does run on self-interested behavior, but that is not necessarily greedy. What I'm doing right now, giving this lecture, is engaging in self-interested behavior. I accepted the chance to speak in front of you because I am interested in the subject matter and how it gets communicated. But it's not selfish. Selfishness can be defined as “exclusively concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others”. I’m certainly not exclusively focused on my own pleasure being here. If I were, I wouldn’t be here; I would be asleep!

And that is why it is important for us to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest. Self-interest, as defined by Paul Heyne, is “individuals in control of property using that property to pursue projects that interest them”. There is nothing inherently wrong with self-interest. Not all desire to better oneself is greed. Indeed, the Book of Proverbs says, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth”. There is clear biblical support for a pursuit of self-interest through hard work, and it is on this that the free market runs, not greed.

And this is where critics of capitalism get it all wrong! They make glaring assumptions about the true motives of people in the business world. What is it that business execs are thinking about in their work? When they devise a campaign or have meetings, are they only thinking about getting more money? Sometimes, but a whole lot less than we are given to think. And I would stress that the greed that does exist is a matter resulting from the human heart, not from the way the economic system is set up.

This point about the human heart is closely related to the second common argument I will refute, so I will expand it in relation to this: that the free market creates a materialistic and spiritually bankrupt consumer culture. You all know the common caricatures: of obese Americans who love nothing more than a McDonald’s and a Starbucks on every corner, who only care about getting the latest Steve Jobs toy. Or, as a Preacher named Jim Wallis put it, “The tree of the American economy is rooted in the toxic soil of unbridled materialism”. Unfortunately, this dramatic stance distorts consumption into gluttony. Gluttony involves our hearts, it is something created by human nature and not from circumstances created by private property.

St. Augustine talks about this problem of material goods, the “beautiful form of material things”. He says that “Sin can gain entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law. These lowest goods hold delights for us indeed, but no such delights as does my God, who made all things; for in him the just man finds delight, and for upright souls he himself is joy”. Isn’t that beautiful? If we unpack what Augustine says here, we learn that materialism comes from putting earthly desires before God. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, its that thing humanity has been struggling with for the last few thousand years, way before The Wealth of Nations was written. Materialism can be found in any culture, and it is something that stems from the imperfection of human hearts, not from any imperfection of the free-market. I'll summarize this point by using the words of economist and author Jay Richards, “don’t confuse the free market with the bad choices free people make”.

To sum up, far from being a system that actively corrodes people's moral character, the free-market enterprise system actually encourages virtues. Remember charity and creativity and all the rest? It also uses persuasion over coercion. And as I have shown, most of the moral arguments against capitalism come from misguided people. And this is where we get to the root of the matter, what I think is the one single most harmful false presupposition in this debate. Underpinning anti-capitalist views are, I believe, a Utopian view that society can somehow be perfected. People who criticize capitalism compare it with a perfect universe, a Nirvana. Against a perfect world, against the Kingdom of God, of course free market capitalism looks bad. So does anything else you care to name. But when you hold capitalism up against any other earthly alternative, then it stops looking so bad. As Martin Wolf said, “Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed--and never will”. Remember that the free market is only one of several imperfect, earthly ways to run an economy….but hold no doubts that it is by far the most moral, the most humane, and the most efficient of all the imperfect options available to us.



Bibliography

Scott Rae and Austin Hill, The Virtues of Capitalism: The Moral Case for Free Markets (Northfield Publishing, 2010).

Paul Heyne, "Are Economists Basically Immoral?" and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Liberty Fund, 2008).

Paul Heyne, The Student's Guide to Economics (ISI, 2000).

Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010).

Susan B. Varenne, ed. Late Have I Loved Thee: Selected Writings of St. Augustine on Love (Knopf Doubleday, 2006).

Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (HarperOne, 2009).

The Weight of Other People in Politics

 

Scott Rasmussen will be speaking at The King's College here in New York City on March 3. As surely you know, he is a prominent American political pollster.

He is also the author of a newly released book, In Search of Self-Governance.

“Self-governance is about far more than politics and government,” says Rasmussen. “It requires a lot of the American people, and it has nothing to do with the petty partisan games played by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, even after more than 200 years of success, there is an urgent need to defend this most basic of American values.” 

This is a principle to which President Obama sometimes pays lip service, indicating that he understands that many Americans believe in this understanding of liberty. He just doesn't share that belief. Neither does most of his party. In their view, good government is government that relieves you of the burden of self-governance. In fact, they appear to believe that "self-governance" and "liberty" are just arrangements by which the rich and powerful exploit the poor and helpless. That's why we need big government.

In his recent analysis of the President's State of the Union address, George Will ("Faux Contrition: Obama Blames the Public") points out how the president looked down on the poor gammas and deltas who make up most of the American people (whom he regards also with an aspect of pity on account of our heart rending stories).

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not "explaining it more clearly." But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation's substance but the presentation of it to slow learners. He urged them to take "another look at the plan we've proposed."

In his infinite mercy, the president will draw on his truly unprecedented logical and rhetorical abilities and make another attempt to explain the self-evident virtues of his health care reform plan (which he called a plan, even though there are two very different plans, as Will points out).

Not only is President Obama frustrated by our increasingly irksome insistence on retaining a role for ourselves in the government of our personal affairs (everything from choice of doctors to choice of light bulbs), he is also annoyed by having to share power not only with another political party, but also with two other branches of government. Will sees this attitude encapsulated in a phrase Obama used last night: the "weight of our politics."

Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of...everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state.

Yet despite this annoyance with how the gears of Washington slow the advance of progress and defer our hopes, Washington (not even state government) is always the answer.

Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. 

What is false is ultimately incoherent. The truth is always consistent with itself.

Addendum:

Peter Wehner's analysis is along the same lines as Will's, but much more thorough in exposing what he calls "A Self-Referential State of the Union Address."

It was one of the worst State of the Union addresses in modern times – a stunning thing for a man who won the presidency in large measure based on the power and uplift of his rhetoric. ... The speech was defensive and petulant, backward-looking and condescending, petty and graceless. He didn't persuade people; he lectured them. What was on display last night was a man of unsurpassed self-righteousness engaged in constant self-justification. His first year in office has been, by almost every measure, a failure – and it is perceived as a failure by much of the public. Mr. Obama cannot stand this fact; it is clearly eating away at him.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into her expressions, but Michelle seemed to reflect the same attitude up in the balcony. This is the woman who was proud of her country for the first time in her life only when it was fawning over her husband in large numbers. Now that it's turning against his policies (though not necessarily against him personally), she's bitter again.

He also echoed the irony that Will highlighted: "And even as he castigated Washington for being "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems," he continued to champion an agenda that would concentrate unprecedented power there."

Addressing the State of Liberty

As we anticipate President Obama's State of the Union address, we should also cast an eye to Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report. Freedom House began publishing these global assessments in 1973. In 1984, five years before the collapse of the Soviet empire, Samuel P. Huntington published his essay, "Will More Countries become Democratic?" (Political Science Quarterly, 99:2), and in 1993, The Third Wave: Democritization in the Late Twentieth Century. When the Berlin Wall was finally breached in 1989, and it was clear that the West had won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published his provocative essay, "The End of History?," in The National Interest. Twenty years later, things do not look as hopeful for liberty around the globe.

The Economist, in "Democracy's Decline: Crying for Freedom," tells us this about the Freedom House report:

Freedom House classifies countries as “free”, “partly free” or “not free” by a range of indicators that reflect its belief that political liberty and human rights are interlinked. As well as the fairness of their electoral systems, countries are assessed for things like the integrity of judges and the independence of trade unions. Among the latest findings are that authoritarian regimes are not just more numerous; they are more confident and influential.

This map gives stark expression to the advance of tyranny (yes, that is the opposite of freedom) over the last decade.

It is good that the people who prepared this report call themselves Freedom House, not Democracy House. It is a disgrace, given all that political theorists have to teach, that there has been such enthusiasm for "democracy" and multi-party elections, in isolation of the other pre-requisites for liberty, among state department policy makers, journalists, the Bush White House, and now the Obama administration. Ronald Reagan spoke about freedom, a more substantive and less ambiguous good.

With the rise of dictators (Chavez), kleptocrats (Putin), and Islamocrats by the ballot box, democracy has been earning a justifiably bad reputation.

Semi-free countries, uncertain which direction to take, seem less convinced that the liberal path is the way of the future. And in the West, opinion-makers are quicker to acknowledge democracy’s drawbacks—and the apparent fact that contested elections do more harm than good when other preconditions for a well-functioning system are absent. It is a sign of the times that a British reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, has written a book with the title: “Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote?”.

A good start in correcting the misunderstandings that lead to these tragically false hopes for democracy would be for American college and university political science departments to clear out their Marxists and nihilists, and establish core courses that teach the religious and philosophical roots of modern liberty, as well as the founding and classic texts of American liberty, such as The Federalist Papers and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Big Government and Self-Government

Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1851, 

speaking against the Stamp Act

One of my students in her final exam essay wrote, "Why should I trust my government if my government doesn't trust me?" She wrote these words in the context of reflecting on the political problem, viz., "How do you enable to government to restrain the governed while at the same time obliging it to restrain itself?"

Her question is at the heart of the liberal-conservative debate in America today, and the line of that very practical philosophical dispute is showing up in some surprising places of late. On January 19, 2010, the citizens of Massachusetts have the opportunity not only to fill the Senate seat recently vacated by Ted Kennedy, but also to pass a judgment on the political vision our present government is aggressively pursuing, often in opposition to the clear consensus of the American people. People's attention is focused on the current plans for health care reform, for combating what is supposed to be global warming, and for reviving the economy. Behind these plans, however, are fundamental questions concerning big government and self-government.


Liberals see people as fundamentally needy on the one hand and unworthy of being trusted to provide for one another and themselves on the other. Thus, privatizing Social Security would be a disaster. People would lose all their money in the stock market. Only the government can be trusted to steward people's retirement funds wisely. (Of course, they don't steward these funds at all. They spend them, and trust that they can pay us out of the contributions from our children and grandchildren, a formula for bankruptcy when the baby boomers move fully into retirement.)

And people certainly cannot be trusted to provide for their aged parents, so all the elderly must become wards of the state. This, of course, schools people in the view that their parents are, in the end, none of their concern. Liberals take the same view of children. Get them as early as possible into the public school system. If you want to homeschool your children, (a) you must be crazy and thus incompetent, and (b) the education you provide must be strictly regulated by the local public school authorities, regardless of how bad a job they themselves are doing educating children.

By contrast, conservatives trust people to manage their own affairs according to their own lights and preferences. This may not be wise for every people in the world, but it is certainly fitting for a free people such as we.

Aristotle says that a citizen in the proper sense of the word rules and is ruled in turn, as opposed to one who is a slave by nature who, by definition, requires direction from another. A true citizen, therefore, is not simply someone who enjoys a particular legal status, but is someone who by his character is capable of self-government. This is someone who has the intelligence, moral character, and practical judgment to make life decisions of sufficient wisdom for living a life of human flourishing along with others of similar character.

In short, a free citizen must be virtuous. For this reason, Aristotle identifies aristocracy (rule by the  virtuous few, i.e. the genuinely virtuous) as the best regime. The citizens under that regime rule and are ruled in turn with a view to the common good, or at least the common interest, not seeking their selfish advantage. In other words, the more self-government there is, the more good government there will be. The more virtue there is among a people, the more they will be governed by what Thomas Jefferson called the natural aristoi.

Thomas Jefferson also said, "That government governs best which governs least." He wrote those words in the context of a fairly virtuous people. He might well have added, "...having the least need to govern." The more virtue in a people, the less need for government over a people. The more virtuous a people is, the less they are in need of the restraining power of government. They are largely governed from within. As another of my students put it in her senior thesis, "Since justice by definition entails a just observance of law, law enforcers are less needed for a just people." The internal policemen of their character renders the need for outside policing to that extent unnecessary.

Thus, conservatives are concerned for public morality because they are concerned about people's capacity for liberty, i.e. self-government, both individually and corporately. Liberals, on the other hand, understand liberty as self-indulgence and post-modern autonomy, the freedom to construct one's own moral universe and live accordingly, provided that one does not "harm" anyone else (that provision being a completely groundless restriction within a post-modern frame of reference).

Conservatives are concerned to support personal virtue among the people (yes, it requires support, largely from religion, especially Christianity), so that they can live with the dignity of free people in a free republic. Liberals are happy to see people indulging themselves in any way they please while the government manages and provides for them in as many spheres of life as possible. Thus, American conservatism tends toward republican liberty, while progressive liberalism tends toward, well, benevolent totalitarianism, which in the end, because human nature is what it is, becomes simply totalitarianism.

Thus, the government of a free people can trust the people to govern their own affairs while it attends largely to what in principle they cannot do on their own. This is not to be confused with libertarianism, because it recognizes the need for virtue in the citizenry, and also that public virtue requires appropriate (not oppressive) public support and protection. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy that Christians should pray for their governments so that those governments would fulfill their divine calling as government--no less and no more--"that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way" (I Tim. 2:2). What Paul means by a peaceful and quiet life is the liberty to govern one's own affairs, and to take a hand in the affairs of one's community, including taking care of the poor. This requires godliness, and is a life of human dignity. Good government provides for this liberty.

When government does not trust the people it governs, the people they distrust are either a slavish people or a free people. If they are slavish, the government indeed should not trust them, but should nonetheless take steps to cultivate better character in them so that they can live more as free people. This is statesmanship. Government that simply continues in that distrust and uses it as an opportunity to grow itself is just a form of mastery, and, as such, is not a government at all.

If the people it distrusts is a free people, then, as my student said, that people has no reason at all to trust their government. That government views them as slavish and will attempt by a thousand measures to reduce them to servile dependence. The Declaration of Independence describes this as "a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism."

Some people are called to die for liberty. Some are called only to vote.

First Epistle to Tim

Dear Tim,

There are some who call you...Tim, right? Well, I can see you're a busy man, but I do want to respond to your comments on the post below, "Is It Incompetence or Sabotage?".

As the inspiration so to speak, of the post--in a personal email I directed David's attention to the Muir cartoon and the Politico piece he combined in his post--I must consider that your comments are directed at me as much as at David, since I consider his brief handling of the material very much in keeping with his usual high achievement. Hence the charge of unChristian writing and thinking--are these thought crimes in your estimation?--, and the unmannerly and unChristian error of mixing politics and faith that forms the central thrust of your plaint is pointed at me as well.

So you consider it "ironic" that the Titus 3 quote on being subject to principalities and powers hovers hard by the "very unchristian" criticism pouring forth from this blog. I notice in the same sentence the irony has turned to evil (assuming for the sake of the argument that what we are saying is evil)--someone who speaks evil of the president in the name of Christ or of Christianity is doing evil itself, or have I missed your meaning? You equate criticism with evil speaking, and evil speaking with political insurrection, and consider it antithetical to the teachings of our Lord and Savior, who called Herod--a political leader--a fox, and over turned the tables in the temple. You also implicitly equate the despotism known in antiquity with the self governance of post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment democracy, at least some of the values to which I assume you at least partly subscribe--equality before laws equally applied, the worth of individuals as individuals, natural law as the ground of natural right, the sovereignty of the people over their government servants--oh wait--that last one is the rub isn't it?

In your confusion, you have forgotten--or never knew--that in the Lockean liberal theory of politics, which Francis Fukuyama ably argued to be the basis and the high point of Western political achievement, individuals form governments for their own purposes. Governments exist for the sake of the people, not the other way around, as was the default assumption across the ancient world. The apostle Paul, from which the bulk of the political citations concerning "principalities and powers" flow, was concerned to shepherd the early churches past the suspicious and brutal idolaters of the Roman emperor and his minions. Paul's advice and teaching to the churches of the first century, under Roman dominion, makes sense to a culture based in slavery; indeed, not a few of the early adherents were slaves. What would your advice be to black slaves in say, the 1760's America; should they submit without complaint to their "masters"? In centuries in which the full implications of the intrinsic worth of every individual inherent in Christ's teachings unfolded, the understanding of the relation to the political order necessarily changed from that of those steeped in a society that accepted as matters of fact slavery and despotic rule. Would you bring back slavery, or do you long for an enlightened despotism headed by such as a Barack Hussein Obama? David and I certainly agree that despotism is the trajectory with this bunch in the White House. But respect for authority by citizens looks different in a small L liberal political culture than it does in an ancient despotism.

If you conflate Caesar and Obama in your mind--a philosophical tic you share with the One--you will miss the, for some, obvious differences between free government and despotism, and hence the range of thought, speech, and action open to free citizens of a free society. You seem to suggest that the ambit of political speech, thought, and action available to Christians in the present day should be circumscribed by that of the ancient world, as if the revelation of Christ through the writings of ancient authors also lock us into the political, social, and cultural understandings of the writers themselves. I don't think so, and neither did the writers of our Declaration and Constitution.

And thus, David and I will continue to be critical, ironic, insubordinate, and as large a pain to figures in positions of authority as we have been up to now, and we will not consider it evil-speaking or "insipient trash" (sic.), your Sojourner-inspired jeremiad to the contrary notwithstanding. I will have more to say in a further epistle. Until then Tim, take some wine for your sour stomach.

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David adds:

Thank you for your comments, Tim. The comments feature is there for discussion. Thank you also for identifying yourself, and please don't take Harold's bit 'o fun with the Monty Python connection the wrong way. It's healthier to join in the laughter, and carry on from there. (Here's the video for anyone who skipped the link.)



I guess it helps to put a face with a name, even if it is a randomly chosen one. Tim the Sorcerer at least is an impressive Scotsman.

I offer a partial justification for the Christian integrity of the blog and for vocal Christian opposition to the present government's policies in the post that follows above.

Harold I am eager to read these other epistles you have in mind. Let me say, friend, you're like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top. That is, I... I mean that, uh, like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure and your departure merely makes us hungry for more. (Oh, where have I heard that?)

Harold: LOL...is that one of yours Innes?

Abe Lincoln Weighs In On Health Care Debate

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) speaks homespun common sense in good midwest American fashion here in his opening statement on the currently proposed health care reform legislation. Let the Congressman have the floor.



He's eloquent. He's sincere. He quotes Lincoln ("You can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak.")

Of course, I was curious as to the source of this Lincoln quote, so I went searching. It does not appear that Honest Abe wrote these words, although they have been attributed to him for many years. Snopes traces it to a Presbyterian minister named William John Henry Boetcker who was the director of the Citizens' Industrial Alliance when he penned these truisms in 1916. The theory goes that they were later published on the back of a leaflet of genuine Lincoln quotes and the confusion was inevitable. Nonetheless, the ideas are Lincolnian.

Ronald Reagan quoted these pearls of wisdom at the 1992 Republican National Convention, and attributed them to Lincoln.

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed.

This clip does not include the spuriously attributed Lincoln line (it follows just after), but it is well worth the five minute investment to watch it.



You can read the full text of the speech here.