On earth as it is in heaven

(Razing the Servile State III)

The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. ~ Genesis 49.10

In my previous posting on this subject, in which I sought to explain how a Christian's resistance to the state could be consistent with Romans 13, I made much of the notion of the consent of the governed. In other words, in contrast with the Roman Empire, in which not every subject of Rome's rule was a citizen, the Christian in the United Servile States of America has rights. In resisting the state, on the basis of the consent of the governed, the Christian acts in no way differently than Paul did when he objected to being whipped because as a citizen of Rome he had rights, one of which was the right not to be whipped or in any way punished without benefit of trial (see Acts 22.22-29). At the very end of that same posting I said I disagree with Christian Reconstructionist/Dominion theology. More specifically, what I said, in full context, was:

While I affirm the right of rebellion under Anglo-Saxon law tradition, as well as another tradition going back to Juan de Mariana, of regicide, I think we (i.e., Christians) should prefer another route. Bearing in mind, as I said above, that while Paul enjoined obedience to usurpatious, Roman governing authorities, he proclaimed a message which undermined the very state those authorities served. The best approach, it seems to me, is to agitate -- not call, not request, not even beg -- for surrender of illegitimately exercised powers.

Others, of course, would assert another approach. Christians, they would argue, should seek to hold public office, and hold those offices as ministers of God, as Paul calls governing authorities. In those offices, then, they should devolve these illegitimately exercised powers back to the states where they belong. Chief among these are, I think, Christian Reconstructionists or Dominionists, with whom I disagree.

For my purposes here, the Theonomist position will be described as follows. Simply put, despite the claims of dispensationalists and others, God's law has not been set aside; with the exception of the ceremonial laws, it still applies today. It must, because the Law is not arbitrary; it is a reflection of God's own character and cannot any more be set aside than God can deny Himself. Not only that, since the law was the standard applied by the Old Testament prophets against the nations, that law applies to believer and non-believer alike. God does not have one standard for believers and another for non-believers. Neither a Christian nor a non-Christian nation is ethically free to institute whatsoever laws may please it. Finally, despite popular understanding, theonomists do not propose to impose a theocratic dictatorship. Rather they intend changing the political order not by means of revolution (unlike some people we know), but by dependence upon regeneration, education and legal reform. (In my estimation, one of the best explanations of the position is Greg Bahnsen's "The Theonomic Reformed View", in Greg L. Bahnsen, et al, Five Views on Law and Gospel, Zondervan, 1996.)

I describe myself as a qualified theonomist. I agree with everything I just wrote as a description of the theonomic view that the law still applies today. But I take note of the fact that while the prophets do appraise the nations in terms of God's law, the nation of Israel (i.e., believers) are never tasked with applying that law against the nations themselves. Even if change should come by the above-mentioned means, there will still be those who dissent. The system theonomists propose, even if acceptable to a majority, must involve a certain amount of aggression against the property rights of the dissenters, specifically the right of self-ownership. The consent of the governed might be construed as the consent of self-owners to have their self-ownership aggressed against. (Technically, of course, if they consent, then there is no aggression involved. But let's not be technical just yet.) If, on the other hand, one does not consent to government, then government aggresses against self-ownership.

Self-ownership strikes the ear as a secular humanistic conception, and we (especially if we are Reformed) might therefore be inclined to dismiss it. But to my mind self-ownership (albeit a libertarian conception) is at the very least consistent with the fact that humans are responsible to God for their actions. In other words, humans must own their actions. If my actions are mine then so is the self which performs the actions. The non-believer is responsible for -- owns -- his unbelief and all the actions he performs in his unbelief. He owns the ends he selects as well as the means he selects for attaining those ends. Theonomists propose commanding the unbeliever to employ his property in a certain way, even, I'll grant, the right way. They propose aggressing against our neighbors' self-ownership, and this, despite theonomists, as a general rule, being very much free market oriented.

What theonomists, then, have in mind is a notion similar to what both the left and the right have of consent of the governed, which is really, the consent of the majority of the governed. This puts the minority in the position of having their self-ownership aggressed against, which, to them, amounts to government without the consent of the governed. And their property rights in themselves would be aggressed against under a right-leaning theonomic regime no more or less than their other property rights would be, or are, under a left-leaning anthroponomic regime. Why should anyone trade a left-leaning aggressor for a right-leaning aggressor? The only difference is the nature of the property rights being aggressed against. And that is why I believe it can truly be said that the difference between right wing theocrats like Theonomists and left wing theocrats (like those people at Theocracy Watch) is the nature of the regime to be imposed, as Mises explained:

In our time the most powerful theocratic parties are opposed to Christianity and to all other religions which evolved from Jewish monotheism. What characterizes them as theocratic is their craving to organize the earthly affairs of mankind according to the contents of a complex of ideas whose validity cannot be demonstrated by reasoning. They pretend that their leaders are blessed by a knowledge inaccessible to the rest of mankind and contrary to the ideas maintained by those to whom the charisma is denied. The charismatic leaders have been entrusted by a mystical higher power with the office of managing the affairs of erring mankind. They alone are enlightened; all other people are either blind and deaf or malefactors. ~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (4th Ed.), p. 156.

Anti-theonomist statists of non-theistic stripe will object to being described as theocrats on the grounds that they don't have a god. But their position is preposterous. It amounts to affirming that we should approve their dictatorship on the ridiculous grounds that their opponents' system posits, as given by a god, a complex of ideas whose validity cannot be demonstrated by reasoning while theirs posits, as given by some other source, a complex of ideas whose validity cannot be demonstrated by reasoning. Big deal. The choice they offer is still between two dictatorships. And to both of them, I say, "No me jodan."

So, in brief, in critiquing the dogmas of the servile state, I include a theonomist state because I don't think it can properly honor the concept of the consent of the governed, a concept which I think is consistent with the notion that, since God holds people responsible for (makes them own) their actions, people have to an extent some ownership of themselves. To govern a man without his consent, even for a theonomist, is to aggress against his property rights in himself. I object to the present non-theonomic, servile state without, at the same time, preferring a theonomic one. And that simply had to be explained because those who love our servile state will have it that all who oppose it (that is, the right wing) wish to impose upon us a theocracy. Thus do they hope to frighten us into their ever loving, protecting fold.

"Hide-and-Seek" versus "Seek-and-Destroy"

This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United [Servile] States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it. ~ David Kahane

During the campaign season, I was continually mystified by how ignorant McCain was about what precisely was going on. Given virtually any opportunity to hit back -- HARD!!! -- he refused, especially during the debates (see some of my reactions here, here and here). I don't know how many times McCain reassured us of his ability to reach across the aisle and blah, blah, blah. But it wasn't too long before I realized what was wrong with McCain: He was thinking in terms of politics, which is about governing a society, rather than revolution, which is about transforming it. There is a difference: In governing, that which is governed is left substantially unchanged by the act of governing; but in transforming, the whole idea is to alter society. Obama, no one seemed to notice (despite what he said, repeatedly), was not campaigning to govern; he was campaigning to transform, by which I mean not fix, repair, or correct, but rather, alter or even abolish. Destroy.

In governing, it makes total sense to reach across aisles, make friends, roast marshmallows and sing camp-fire songs and, when seeking office, to boast of one's abilities to do so as an important qualification. But one cannot resist revolution (i.e., transformation) in that way. It may be distasteful to say so, especially if one's hope is to govern, but the fact is transformation, and resistance to it, must be played by different rules than apply in politics. McCain either never figured that out, or he wanted transformation as well, but only to a lesser extent, or more slowly. McCain should have been resisting a revolutionary, but he never realized it. How else to explain his saying, “My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency.” Pardon me while I spew chunks. He would have been right, if Obama's presidency were going to be about governing. But why should McCain have thought so? Because he never understood what was going on. Through inattention he never understood his opponent's motives, or his goals. He really thought the campaign was about politics, how to govern. When one wants to govern (and is campaigning for office against one who wants to revolutionize) the campaign, though it preserve the outward appearance of government office-seeking, is really combat.

One cannot have failed to notice that the left have never cared to govern what they find. They seek to transform, and then only, to govern -- forever -- what remains after they have transformed -- altered or abolished. This, explains David Kahane, is why the left have never recognized a duty to -- how to put this -- play fair. There is no fair in a revolution. There is win or lose. Playing fair is how the other side loses. Thus saith the fourth rule for radicals: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." We should stop living up to the rule book:

If [we] had any sense, [we] would start using [their] tactics against [them]. After all, [we] have a few lawyers on [our] side. Sue [them]. File frivolous ethics complaints against all [their] elected officials until, like Sarah [Palin], they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO²’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip [our] own journalistic dogs of war, assuming [we] have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

[...]

What [we]...need...is a Rules for Radical Conservatives to explain what [we’re] up against and teach [us] how to compete before it’s too late.

Some people probably still think Republicans/Conservatives should be above all that type of activity, should play fair. Of course we should live up to our own book of rules, otherwise we become the enemy. But such rubbish overlooks what the "rule book" is for. If the rule book outlines how the game of campaigning for office is played and your opponent really isn't campaigning for office, but rather engaging in revolution (no matter how civil the appearance), then the game for which the rule book exists is no longer being played. The game has been changed from hide-and-seek to seek-and-destroy. You can keep playing hide-and-seek if you like, but your opponent is still going to be playing seek-and-destroy. Your chances, I think, are not so good, unless your opponent never finds you. Good luck with that.

Look at it this way, if you step into the boxing ring expecting a boxing match and your opponent discards his gloves and pulls a knife, or even a gun, you need a different rule book. If you insist on boxing, you're a dumb ass who deserves exactly what's about to happen to you, if only because you won't mount the appropriate type of defense. Moreover, you shouldn't even be playing defense in that situation anyway, moron.

Yes, people should play fair -- if we were still talking politics, if we were talking simply of governance. But we are not; that ship sailed long ago.

Skepticism, thy name is Treason

Think of any question regarding a matter of fact. Will it rain tomorrow? Does light really travel at 186,282.39705122 miles per second (in a vacuum)? Does caffeine stunt your growth?

Normally, even in vehement disagreements over these matters, vitriol is minimal. But for some types of people, there are orthodox answers to certain questions. Deny the orthodox answers and boy are you in trouble. The least bit of skepticism (and I do mean even the least bit) regarding the theory of evolution -- a single theory -- is never treated like simple skepticism, never treated as simple difference of opinion. No, this skepticism regarding a single theory (never mind the reason for the skepticism) is sufficient to earn the skeptic the accusation of being anti-science. One is an opponent of all science (I am ussually subjected to harsher treatment because I deny the possibility of a properly scientific theory of origins at all, on the grounds that theories of origins are necessarily highly speculative and strictly untestable. It's so much fun being me sometimes.)

When it comes to scientific orthodoxy, there is no such thing as free speech, no such thing as free inquiry, no such thing as honest, heart-felt objection. Disagreement with scientific orthodoxy is a crime. Take for example the crime of Holocaust Denying. The Holocaust is a simple fact condition: it happened; or, it did not happen -- like the questions, "What happened to the colonists at Roanoke?" or "What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?" Several theories abound regarding both those questions. (As of 2003 there were no less than 210 theories about the latter.) Rejecting any of those explanations is not a crime. You could, more relevantly, deny that there were any colonists at Roanoke in the first place or even that there was a fall of the Empire, without being guilty of a crime for doing so. But deny the Holocaust (which, by the way, I do not) -- have an honest, but contrary, opinion about a matter of historical fact -- and you are guilty of a crime.

Guilty of a crime for refusing to assent to a proposition about an event in history -- it hardly seems possible; but it's true. You say, if you dare, the Holocaust did not happen; and it's off to jail with you. Heretic.

When I was young, it was fashionable for us god-deniers to point to the Roman Catholic Church's treatment of heretics, those who disagreed with orthodoxy as defined by the Church. This treatment of heretics was one of many reasons for denying the truth of the Christian faith. Heretics, as we know, were subjected by the Church to unspeakable tortures and modes of execution, such as burning at the stake. We could not understand this mistreatment. The only thing these people did was to have an opinion on certain matters which were at variance with orthodoxy as defined by the Church. We, naturally, are much better. We do not have orthodox beliefs. We believe in freedom of inquiry and debate. No more persecutions of Galileo and his like.

It wasn't until after I, myself, (and sort of to my own surprise) became a Christian that I realized just how much orthodoxy there really is outside of "religious" orthodoxy. And, as P. K. Feyerabend, argued, there are ways short of the rack and the stake, of persecuting heretics.

For example, you could call them traitors. That's what Paul Krugman does, accusing of treason -- against the planet, no less -- anyone who doesn't agree with his position on global warming. Do you suppose that, in their quest to save the planet, people like Herr Krugman will argue for the (summary?) execution of us traitors? We are, after all, talking about saving the planet...from traitors to the planet. And treason, as William Anderson points out, has traditionally been a crime punishable by death. Though I doubt they'll kill us. That would mean giving us an escape from their plantation -- I mean, planet.

These fundamentalists are just like the fundamentalists (of faiths other than their own) they despise. They never have to prove anything in order to compel belief. They want to control everything; and every crisis -- real, perceived or manufactured -- is an argument for their expanding purview. And when their prophets say it and they believe it, that settles it. The debate is over when they become convinced; and their opponents, not free to remain unconvinced, are transformed immediately from simple interlocutors into dangerous criminals.

H/T: William Anderson

Social Change: Necessary Conditions

A passage relevant to our times from Murray Rothbard, which I offer with a brief commentary:

Marxists have correctly perceived that two sets of conditions are necessary for the victory of any program of radical social change; what they call the “objective” and the subjective” conditions. The subjective conditions are the existence of a self-conscious movement dedicated to the triumph of the particular social ideal—conditions which we have been discussing above. The objective conditions are the objective fact of a “crisis situation” in the existing system, a crisis stark enough to be generally perceived, and to be perceived as the fault of the system itself. For people are so constituted that they are not interested in exploring the defects of an existing system so long as it seems to be working tolerably well. And even if a few become interested, they will tend to regard the entire problem as an abstract one irrelevant to their daily lives and therefore not an imperative for action—until the perceived crisis breakdown. It is such a breakdown that stimulates a sudden search for new social alternatives—and it is then that the cadres of the alternative movement (the “subjective conditions”) must be available to supply that alternative, to relate the crisis to the inherent defects of the system itself, and to point out how the alternative system would solve the existing crisis and prevent similar breakdowns in the future. Hopefully, the alternative cadre would have provided a track record of predicting and warning against the existing crisis.

Indeed, if we examine the revolutions in the modern world, we will find that every single one of them (a) was utilized by an existing cadre of seemingly prophetic ideologists of the alternative system, and (b) was precipitated by a breakdown of the system itself. ~ The Ethics of Liberty (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998), p. 267.

Or, with particular regard to that last clause, the supposed breakdown of the system, together with the assumption that only one alternative to the supposedly broken system exists. You know, the sort of alternative whose proponents claim for it that the only other course of action is to do nothing, which is, so they tell us, not an option. This is the sort of alternative whose proponents rest their case upon the strength of a false dilemma: "Not doing it our way" = "Doing nothing".

And that is why they believe themselves brilliant. In a way, they are brilliant: they can dress up a false dilemma with all the respectability of Einstein's Special Theory.

NOTE: The Ethics of Liberty is made available online by The Ludwig von Mises Institute, here (in pdf) and here.

FURTHER NOTE: If you don't have time to read the entire book, at least online, you should at least read Chapter 30.

More politicians should pull a Mark Sanford

And how I wish they would.


My wife and I had a slight, and friendly, disagreement over breakfast this morning about the revelations of Mark Sanford's mysterious disappearance over the weekend. Her position generally agreed with what seems to be the majority report on the issue: that the governor's absence would have been a grave liability in the event of some crisis, blah, blah, blah. I mean even the State Law Enforcement Division (responsible for his security) and his own staff couldn't reach him via mobile phone and text messages between Thursday and Tuesday. Why, one caller to the Limbaugh Show claimed that Sanford's absence left his state "in the lurch."

Heard somewhere in the state of South Carolina: Oh, my goodness. The governor's gone! What if there's a hurricane? What if the sky falls? What if the earth's temperature keeps rising?

Whatever.

My position is that no one (certainly no POLITICIAN!!!) can, or even should be so important that his mysterious absence would mean total disaster. An entire state in the lurch? Just because the governor is out of state, and out of touch with his staff? What are we saying here? That when the governor is away it's like a parent leaving the house for the weekend and the children unattended? Help! Social Services! (They're never around when you need them.)

Please. No one, certainly no politician, should be that important. And the fact that some are so should be a sign of something bad. An AWOL governor should be as frightening as missing a hole in one's head. Without condoning adultery, anyone should be able to just disappear for a bit if he wants to. Especially a politician. I wish more of them would.

Hey, whiners, listen up: If you don't need your parents anymore then you don't need your governor, either. And if you do need your governor, then you probably still need your parents, too. Grow up and start finding things more important to worry about than a missing politician.

My wife, incidentally, now agrees with me on this. Which she should. Because I'm right.

Now if I can just get her to surrender her position on the War on Drugs.

A Necessary Submission

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. ~ Declaration of Independence, emphasis added.

[I]t has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration. ~ LaBoetie, The Politics of Obedience, Part II.

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.... Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities.... ~ Romans 13.1, 5


Paradoxically, one of the dogmas underlying our own United Servile States of America, is that the state is owed virtually unquestioned obedience, and to some extent, even a modicum of adoration, by its subjects. I say paradoxically for two reasons. First, because these states owe their existence to the fact that the founders dared to question and then reject the obedience they owed the British Crown. Second, because some of the most state-adoring people in this country are conservative Christians, who rely upon texts like Romans 13 to urge this virtually unquestioning obedience, in contrast with some of their forebears who, in fact, urged rebellion on the grounds that government must obey the laws and when it does not it is no longer owed obedience. (During the period during which revolution was simmering, a "patriot" was one who favored liberty in the form of secession -- yes, secession -- from Great Britiain, as opposed to loyalists.) In the circles in which I move, I daresay most Christians, who look upon the Revolution favorably, would look upon a rebellion against the government in Washington, even an unarmed one, as a sin. I could be wrong. (But I'm not.)

Because I am a Christian, I must deal with this underlying dogma first because in expressing some antipathy for (servile!) statism I may seem to run afoul of specific Biblical passages such as the above-quoted from Romans 13. Especially is this the case when one considers the phenomenon of "Christian Patriotism", which, like men, women, teenagers, soldiers, college students, environmentalists, etc, etc, etc, even has it's very own niche Bible. How can I desire the razing of the (servile) state in the face of such passages? Moreoever, how could I possibly favor razing a state which my own faith played some part in founding. It comes to two things. First, nothing about a requirement to obey a governing authority implies that the governing authority is not in certain respects usurpatious. Second, this is no longer the state which Christianity played a role in founding. I'm not going to spend any time, here, arguing the second point. I shall devote attention to the first.

In questioning the authority of the state (by arguing that it should not have much of the authority it exercises) I am violating Paul's command. I am, in fact, going against God because Paul says that the state, as an authority, has been established by God. What the state, established by God, commands, I must obey. The voice of the state must be held to be the voice of God. In fact, however, unlike Rothbardian libertarians, I do not rebel against the state per se. I rebel against the state's usurpations. It is the state, not I, that is wrong.

Let's look first at what Paul says about the role of the state, or the "governing authorities". These authorities hold no terror for those who do right. One could argue that my antipathy to the state must indicate that I am one of those who do wrong. If I were keen to do right, I would not be bothered by the state. But I am bothered by the state; and I think I am justifed in being bothered. Paul does not say that the state first decides what is right and then punishes those who act contrary. He says the state simply punishes wrong-doers. The state is not the final word on what is right. The state, properly, is the enforcer of a law it has not created of itself, a law which pre-exists the state.

The situation in which we find ourselves is one in which the state acknowledges no law not posited by itself. The state shall first decide what is right and then punish those who do wrong. We live under the domination of a state which is the final word on what is "right" -- a divine state. We live under the domination of a state which forces us to live not by laws but by opinions. One can know this is true, by considering the fact that during the recent campaign season, the President asserted that, while government cannot and should not do everything for you, it should do for you what you cannot do for yourself. (He has not been alone in making that claim, of course. I mention it because it is recent history.) Perhaps it is a true proposition that government ought to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Frankly, I see no way to justify belief in its truth. That is an opinion. It is his opinion. And if one listens closely, one notes that we are never told why government must do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We are told this, hear this and obey this. (Well, some of us anyway. Others of us question.) So we are to be ruled by opinion, dogma really. Wrong-doers are those whose opinions are at variance with those of the state and act accordingly, in other words, heretics.

With respect, then, to the matter of usurpations, the question is not whether (and by whom) the state is empowered to do for some what they cannot do for themselves, but rather, from a Christian perspective, whether God empowers and authorizes, for a pertinent example, the governing authorities (Party A) to seize and employ the resources of one (Party B), not, as St. Paul says, to punish wrong-doers, but in order to do for another (Party C) what Party C cannot do for himself. If the state is not thus empowered, then it usurps this power and is, therefore, illegitimate.

So, I agree with Paul that the governing authorities have been established by God. That is not the question. The question is whether the governing authorities are authorized by their Establisher to do as they will, or to do as they were established to do. The question is whether the governing authorities still recognize themselves as having been established to punish wrong-doers, or whether they prefer to substitute their own notions of wrong-doing and punish in accordance with those notions, whether they prefer not so much to punish wrong-doers but to do for others what those others cannot do for themselves, and confiscating whatever properties needed, not to support their work of punishing wrong-doers but to do those things they prefer to do. And all this without the consent of those whose property is confiscated for these purposes.

Of course, those to whom Paul wrote also lived under the dominion of such a state. The governing authorities to which St. Paul enjoins obedience were also usurping powers not legitimately theirs. And yet, he says, "Obey them." Uncritical reading and recitation of this passage and others might lead us to continue a habit of submission to illegitimate authority. (Not very unlike some Christians who accepted the Nazi state on the grounds that "governing authorities" are established by God.) This is why it is important to take careful note of two very, very important facts. First, at the very moment in time at which Paul was urging obedience to the "governing authorities" he was proclaiming a message which would eventually turn that state on its very head. Second, on occasion St. Paul insisted on the prerogatives of his Roman citizenship. Roman citizenship was not something just everyone had back then. When the governing authority violated his rights as a Roman citizen, he asserted those rights, insisted upon them, in fact.

Like Paul, we have a citizenship which gives us rights against our own governing authorities. Not only that, ours is a citizenship in a country whose legal background (Anglo-Saxon law) includes the right of the governed not only to consent to being governed, but also the little known right of rebellion. So, in the same way St. Paul could appeal to Ceasar, which many of his readers could not, we can, even as Christians, legitimately insist upon our rights, including, should the need arise, the right of rebellion (as a consequence of the right of the governed to consent to their governments).

Speaking of Rome, it is interesting to pause and note that Rome, the capital city of an empire, was a republic before it degenerated into an empire. As a republic, it also was established in an act of rebellion against the Etruscan kings. So we have the ironical fact of a republic birthed in act of rebellion degenerating into an empire with a government rebellion against which was considered an act of treason. The Romans who founded the republic, claimed a right for themselves which they turned round and denied to others by expanding Rome's imperium through warfare. To be sure, beginning with Juilus Caesar, there was a pattern of granting Roman citizenship to provincials (i.e., wiping out the distinction between conquerors and conquered), but this was only to make the conquered easier to rule. Becoming a citizen of Rome did not come with a right to consent to the rule of Rome. In truth, granting citizenship to the conquered was nothing more than making their subjugation complete. But I digress.

While I affirm the right of rebellion under Anglo-Saxon law tradition, as well as another tradition going back to Juan de Mariana, of regicide, I think we (i.e., Christians) should prefer another route. Bearing in mind, as I said, above, that while Paul enjoined obedience to usurpatious, Roman governing authorities, he proclaimed a message which undermined the very state those authorities served. The best approach, it seems to me, is to agitate -- not call, not request, not even beg -- for surrender of illegitimately exercised powers.

Others, of course, would assert another approach. Christians, they would argue, should seek to hold public office, and hold those offices as ministers of God, as Paul calls governing authorities. In those offices, then, they should devolve these illegitimately exercised powers back to the states where they belong. Chief among these are, I think, Christian Reconstructionists or Dominionists, with whom I disagree.

I suppose, since the topic has come up, I should explain why. I'll have to do so another time.

To sum up my position, nothing about the requirement to give obedience to the governing authorities, means we are therefore prevented in insisting upon our rights under the laws of the nation in which we live. We can raze the servile state and at the same time acknowledge the excerise of legitimate powers. Razing the servile state is best done by attacking the dogmas upon which it rests, not the people in its employ. In other words, razing the servile state by attacking its underlying dogmas requires use of our first amendment rights, not our second amendment rights.

Razing The Servile State

[T]rends of evolution can change, and hitherto they almost always have changed. But they changed only because they met firm opposition. The prevailing trend toward...the servile state will certainly not be reversed if nobody has the courage to attack its underlying dogmas. ~ Ludwig von Mises

Mises was correct to identify courage as a necessary component in beating back the "servile state". (He'd be gratified, I'm sure, to know I agree with him!) Fortunately, I don't think lack of courage is our problem at present, here in the United Servile States of America. As I listen to critiques of His Beatitude and his policies, it strikes me that the courage is there. What is missing is much greater precision in identifying the "underlying dogmas" which Mises writes of. So far, the criticism is limited to explaining that, and how, the policies are socialist and in the long term unaffordable. Call the policies socialist, then show how they are socialist. (As, for example, here, where Karl Rove argues that we will become a European style welfare state. That is not a problem if you accept, as many now clearly do, the dogmas which underlay the welfare state.) Follow up with demonstration that the policies won't work somehow. Also, with respect to the in-fighting in the Republican Party, one must show that the so-called moderates lack the fortitude necessary to confront the left.

What is really missing, among conservatives, is awareness that the problem with moderates is not lack of courage, as Rush Limbaugh, for example, is wont to assert. Rather, moderates share belief with the President in some, if not all, of those underlying dogmas. Perhaps, as General Powell suggests, "the people" want higher taxes and more government, but the question is, Should they want these things? or, more importantly, Should they have them? You don't always get what you want. And sometimes you simply don't have a right to what you want.

Now, the General may be right about the trend, but that tells us nothing about the desirability of the trend. That's the problem with following a trend: the trend itself cannot tell you whether you should be following it. This is an important point. I'll come back to it in a moment, however.

There is another failure among conservatives. They keep talking as if we do not already live in, what Ludwig von Mises (following Hilaire Belloc) called The Servile State. To hear them talk, if we don't stop His Beatitude, we shall wake up one day in a police state. The sad fact is, we are already there. And the fact that conservatives do not see this may be testimony to just how many of our servile state's underlying dogmas they themselves have already accepted.

I can only put forth the briefest argument that we live in a servile state. Let me begin with the premise that socialist and communist states are servile states. Now consider some of the goals expressed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital. and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.

Granted, not all of those goals have been reached here. But anyone paying attention, I think, clearly understands that these are not vastly different from Leftist goals today, at least not in spirit.

We live in a servile state. The task, then, is not to prevent a servile state from arising in our midst. The task is to raze the one we have (and have had for quite some time) straight to the ground, and then grind it to dust.

I tabled above the topic of historical trends. Let me now return to it ever so briefly. One of His Beatitude's most cherished dogmas seems to be that the direction of societal evolution will continue into the future, and that it must do so. Attempts to reverse these obvious trends are doomed to failure. We must submit to the path of history; we don't want to be on "the wrong side of history," a phrase used by His Beatitude during his inauguration speech:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

No assertion that "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent" are unethical, or immoral in doing so. They are simply on the wrong side of history. There was a time when these tactics were on the right side of history, but not any longer. I suppose one could argue that it is unethical or immoral to be on the wrong side of history. But let us note the larger claim: His Beatitude, the god-like one (if Evan Thomas is anyone to listen to), knows where history (like Hegel and then Marx before him) is going, and is therefore fit to lecture leaders around the world on where history is going and how they will best be on its right side. They, apparently, must simply take his word for it.

The Blessed One re-iterated this idea during his speech at Langley, when he told attendees that new interrogation policies will put us on the better side of history. Well, thank goodness. I have been fearful that our so-called torture tactics were wrong, in the sense of being unethical or immoral. Now we can take solace in the fact that they are not wrong. They just fly in the face of what His Lordship tells us is the right side of history. Torture? That is so bell-bottoms and tie-dyed t-shirts.

The notion of historical inevitability shows up in El Jefe's approach to economics. In short, there will be no "going back" to whatever conception of capitalism He thinks has existed here. Even in this he affirms the inevitability of historical trends, Mises summarizes it:

In the last decades there [has] prevailed a trend toward more and more government interference with business. The sphere of the private citizen's initiative [has been] narrowed down. Laws and administrative decrees [have] restricted the field in which entrepreneurs and capitalists [are] free to conduct their activities in compliance with the wishes of the consumers as manifested in the structure of the market. From year to year an ever-increasing portion of profits and interest on capital invested [has been] confiscated by taxation of corporation earnings and individual incomes and estates.

Bush's mistake -- deregulation -- was the attempt to reverse an obvious trend. That is to say, Bush's policies were simply on the wrong side of history. History is going in the direction of more, not less, regulation -- more, not less, government intervention in the free (HA!) market. His Lordship is clearly on the right side of history: less, not more, private activity; more, not less, government activity. There is, of course, a problem with calling it a mistake: nothing tells us, even assuming historical inevitability (as unscientific a doctrine as ever there was), that we should be on the so-called right side of history.

Mises rather nicely disposes of the idea of the inevitability of historical trends in the article to which I've linked. But that is only one of the dogmas acceptance of which underlay servile states, especially ours. And, like Mises says, they need to be critiqued.

Can Sotomayor be borked? -- a follow-up

Sotomayor, the story goes, should be called to account for this quote, making her, Rush Limbaugh's words, a reverse racist:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life....

That, apparently, is what passes as an attempt at borking. The quote is much less offensive (though no less objectionable, on different grounds) when left in its larger context:

In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. I recall that Justice Thurgood Marshall, Judge Connie Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, and others of the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, Justice Ginsburg, with other women attorneys, was instrumental in advocating and convincing the Court that equality of work required equality in terms and conditions of employment.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. ~ See here (emphasis added).

Frankly, the immediate context makes the comment less offensive because it follows an assertion about the lack of a universal definition of "wise". It's less offensive only because it's a bit nonsensical: having recognized the absence of a universal definition of "wise", it's a bit silly to go on and say anything at all about a "wise" latina. Judge Sotomayor could not even hope to distinguish between a "wise" latina and one who is not "wise". We must go on to ask how, in the absence of a universal definition of "wise", we can possilbly know that a "better" decision was reached, much less how we can know that this somehow-better decision was reached by a "wise" as opposed to an "unwise" latina.

On the subject of context there was this posting at Daily Kos, which attempts to show that Justice Alito said something similar to Sotomayor's sentiments:

And that's why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position...

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

See? That proves it. Republicans are hypocrites.

The context, Alito's confirmation hearings, raises some doubts, however:

[SENATOR] COBURN: You know, I think at times during these hearings you have been unfairly criticized or characterized as that you don't care about the less fortunate, you don't care about the little guy, you don't care about the weak or the innocent.

Can you comment just about Sam Alito, and what he cares about, and let us see a little bit of your heart and what's important to you in life?

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point. I don't come from an affluent background or a privileged background. My parents were both quite poor when they were growing up.

And I know about their experiences and I didn't experience those things. I don't take credit for anything that they did or anything that they overcame.

But I think that children learn a lot from their parents and they learn from what the parents say. But I think they learn a lot more from what the parents do and from what they take from the stories of their parents lives.

And that's why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position.

And so it's my job to apply the law. It's not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result.

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country."

When I have cases involving children, I can't help but think of my own children and think about my children being treated in the way that children may be treated in the case that's before me.

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who's been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I've known and admire very greatly who've had disabilities, and I've watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn't think of what it's doing -- the barriers that it puts up to them.

So those are some of the experiences that have shaped me as a person.

To be accurate, Alito was not asked about jurisprudence. He was asked about what type of man he is. He was responding to assertion that he doesn't care about people.

There were several elucidating comments such as that Alito lied when he gave this testimony of his background, his feelings about it and the fact that he thinks about it when he attempts to apply the law (here, here, here), examples of making up facts needed to support a pre-determined conclusion. There is another, though not strictly related, example of that in this comment, in which we learn that if there is any racism in Puerto Rico it was brought there by tourists.

Bear in mind that Alito didn't say his background influenced his decisions, that wasn't the question. He certainly doesn't say anything such as that a "wise" italiano can reach a better decision than some white guy who didn't have the italiano experience. In fact he stipulated that "[I]t's my job to apply the law. It's not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result." Keep that in mind when reading this comment. Then there's the one who claims Alito is so assimilated that he isn't really Italian anymore, here. Strawman comment in which Alito is criticized for saying that because of his ethnicity he could understand things better other who did not share his ethnicity, something he didn't say.

This is why I said leftists are so much better at borking than rightists. To successfully bork someone your audience must buy your pathetic, logical-fallacy ridden arguments. And the most potent logical tools leftists have are the persuasive definition, equivocation, strawman and the ad hominem. To regain the upper hand, Republicans, win, lose or draw, must reject borking as an appropriate strategy precisely because the tactics involved are at odds with the sort of appointees they claim to want, as well as with the sort of jurisprudence they claim to want these appointees to exercise. As Michael Polanyi says in his book, Personal Knowledge, often, in order to persuade one must teach one's interlocutor how to think. That is a very time-consuming process, and it means a few defeats before any successes. And if Republicans object to having to take the time for this, they might consider they have only themselves -- not Democrats -- to blame for the necessity.

H/T: Ethel C. Fenig, at American Thinker, here.

P.S.

As a bonus consider this pathetic refutation-by-mocking of originalism:

Judges like Antonin Scalia can throw out two centuries of precedent because they don't agree with it. Why? Because they've held private seances with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers, who revealed what they really meant when they wrote the Constitution.

How's that for a legal philosophy?

Originalists, whether their jurisprudence is right or wrong, possible or impossible, have not claimed private seances with the ghosts of the founding fathers. So what we've got here is a strawman, an argument against a proposition which hasn't been put forth. (And, as the highest court in the land, the SCOTUS is not bound by stare decisis. For, if it were, the Supreme Court could not possibly have reached the holding in Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483 [1954]) which overturned a half century of precedent going back at least to Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 [1896]). Besides, I don't know if we have two centuries of precedent on any legal matter, except perhaps for the notion of judicial review.)

He pretends to defeat, by simple mocking, the idea of being able to determine the meaning of a text through analysis of the text itself. Shall we apply this same skepticism to his comment at Daily Kos? Is it possible, after all these days, to determine what this silly individual really meant when he wrote that comment? If he would agree that it is still possible, these many days later, to discern the meaning of his posted comment, then what is the expiration period? For how long a time must a document be extant before only a seance with the writers of the document can reveal the meaning of the text? It is people like this who make borking successful. Is this the kind of sad, intellectual cripple Republicans want to persuade by such tactics?

Can Sotomayor be borked?

As the in-fighting among Republicans continues, the moderates think conservatives should capitulate and permit the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor without a fight. This, because it will harm the party to be seen objecting to the appointment of a hispanic woman to the Supreme Court.

Conservatives seem to think she should be borked for these offending remarks (among others):



H/T: Althouse

Much more informative, however, is the fuller clip:



A lot has been made of the fact that she says courts of appeals are where policy is made. There is really a much, much more important, much more revelatory comment here. It is the part (about 1:25 minutes in) where she outlines the role of the court of appeals in determining the next step in the development of the law. In other words, we are talking legal trendline analysis, probably not too different, as a conception, of Justice Holmes' notion that law is simply a prediction of what courts will decide. I'm going to post on the subject of historical trends, in the near future. (In fact, I've been working on that post for over a week now.) But for now let us note that the whole business of Obama's desire for justices with empathy and the importance -- to some -- that she is both hispanic and female is not quite as important as this statement of the nature of jurisprudence. At the court of appeals, the law is not being applied; it's "percolating". At that level of adjudication, the law has no being (if you will); the law is becoming. Indeed, it is always becoming. The question is, as Sotomayor says, what is the law becoming.

It is important to understand this, because, as Ann Alhouse says, conservatives should use this time to teach conservative interpretive principles, which means setting forth clearly what liberal interpretive principles are:

Here's what I think conservatives should do: Accept that she will be confirmed, but use the occasion to sharpen the definition of conservative judicial values and to argue to the American people that these are the better values. ~ Here, emphasis mine.

In a subsequent posting, responding to something Rush Limbaugh said on his show, she says:

If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.

It will be difficult for conservatives to follow Althouse's advice (which they should do) without understanding the crucial conception of historical trends. It might also help if conservatives better understood the difference in conceptions of rights (and therefore of justice) between left and right. They both use the words "rights" and "justice"; but they really do not mean the same thing by these words. And that's why I really can't fully agree with Althouse that confirmation should not be about ideology. (She'd be so disappointed to know that, I'm sure.)

Speaking of Limbaugh, and, more importantly, of conceptions of "rights", he has a transcript of 2001 radio interview in which Obama, discussing redistribution of wealth and how the Supreme Court's never gotten into it, complains of the Constitution's "negative" liberties.

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I'd be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

[...]

As radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution at least as its been interpreted and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted, and one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

Most conservatives, Limbaugh among them, will likely focus on His Beatitude's talk of "redistributive change". But that is really not the most important thing; it's not the element needing attention. What needs attention is the notion of "positive" rights, because there is little point in arguing for "redistributive change" unless one first presupposes that there are "positive" rights.

Also important is Obama's clear indication, in 2001, that he had no interest in presiding over the government created by the Constitution -- the government created by the States. Note his assertion that "the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, [which] says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but...doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf." That's true, because the Constitution didn't create a government which had duties to do anything, or at least much of anything, on our behalf. He wanted, and wants, a government other than the one created by the Constitution he affirmed to protect and defend. The nomination of Sotomayor is less about her being a woman, even less about her being hispanic, than it is about His Beatitude's desire to preside over a government with a constitution which protects "positive" rights.

But her being a woman, and her being hispanic, is useful. It is useful because in objecting to her appointment on ideological grounds it will still also be true that Republicans, though not technically, object to the appointment of a hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. It just won't be true that they object to her appointment because she's a hispanic woman. Despite the Democrats' borking, on ideological grounds, of Miguel Estrada.

Dems bork. Republicans capitulate. What a joke.

Can she be successfully borked? No. Republicans, especially the conservative kind, just are not as good at it as Democrats; and they shouldn't try to be, either. They should press her -- hard -- on those ideological matters. She should be grilled on the task of the appellate judge, anticipating the next step in the development of the (judge-made) law. She should be asked questions the answers to which will elucidate the nature of "positive" rights, especially that fact that "positive" rights mean involuntary servitude. She should be asked a lot of questions, questions about the law and its application, jurisprudential questions. But I hope we don't have any of that "In-Sonia-Sotomayor's-America" crap that Ted "Splash" Kennedy dumped on Judge Bork. Please, ye gods and goddesses, not that. (Well, not on the floor of the Senate anyway.)

Don't applaud California just yet

Well, you can applaud the voters, but in the end they will be ignored.

So, California voters have said "No" to new taxes. (According to the LA Times, this vote was an improper exercise of voter power.) On hearing the news yesterday morning, I was tempted to celebrate. I was listening to two bankers who have a brief (ten minutes) radio show talk about the California vote. One of the two is from California and called it a fiscally conservative, though socially liberal, state.

Is it a fiscally conservative state? I don't know. Whether it is, it is definitely a bankrupt state. And the vote may have more to do with that, than with any fiscal conservatism. One supposes that even a liberal knows when he's run out of money -- even other people's money.

The idea of bankruptcy should give us a clue. While they may be out of money, I doubt a sufficient number of Californians want to give up all those government programs supported by those taxes. Heck they've just about asked for them. And what do we now do when it comes to bankruptcy? Ask someone for a bailout, of course.

California will no doubt be bailed out by states that are not bankrupt. Actually, it will be a bail-out of California unions, like the auto company bail-outs were. That's how His Beatitude will become, in addition to Government Motors, Governor of California.

It's only the latest unfederal regulatory whip

In the bad old days of private slavery, the overseers used whips to keep those slaves in line. Now in the good old days of public slavery the overseer uses fiat regulation to keep us in line. In the bad old days, if the overseer had wanted a slave to drive less, he'd give the slave a whippin'. Now, when they want us to drive less they give us a regulation.

There is a bit of common ground. In both cases, the overseers know it's all for the slaves' own good. After all, no one (no one in his right mind) can object to a clean energy economy, or saving the planet, or whatever they think is best for us all.

Yes, it will be good for us. Of course it will. Never mind that immigrants -- legal and otherwise -- seem not to share that conviction:

[E]conomic opportunities are universal. If you feel them and sense them, so do others outside the border — and they want to be part of it. If they don't feel them and sense them, maybe it is time to wake up and realize that they don't exist as they used to.

Time was when shelters just across the border, where people lived until they saw an opportunity for safe passage, were filled and overflowing. Now they are empty. Time was when the border-patrol vans and buses hauled people here and there, whereas now they just drive around on day trips, looking for some sign of life.

To have an "immigration problem" is enormously flattering for a country. For that problem to go away is a dark cloud, a bad omen, a sign that something is going terribly wrong. The absence of an immigration problem can quickly turn into an emigration problem.

[...]

Emigration out of the United States has been growing every year since 1991, from 252,000 in 1991 to 311,000 in 2005. I couldn't find data past that point, but can there be any doubt where we are heading with this? Low-skilled employees want nothing to do with us. High-skilled employees are not allowed in. Enterprise is being killed at every turn. It won't be long now before larger and larger numbers of people vote with their feet.

A final insult is how US tax law treats its emigrants from this country. It continues to tax them as if they were lifetime slaves. Wherever you go, the force is with you.

The heck of it is that all of this could be turned around today. A social consensus against tyranny can form and strengthen. It only takes political will to let freedom reign. ~ Lew Rockwell, here.

I wonder if that "jmwtex" guy (whom I mentioned just below) would favor abolishing the expatriation tax law on the grounds that it, like a woman being forced to carry a baby to term, is a form of slavery? I'll have to ask him.

Slavery is Freedom

There are some comments on His Beatitude's Notre Dame speech, posted here.

To His Beatitude's certainty that there is some common ground shared by "pro-life" and "pro-choice" position, one "Lou Dignazio" offers this retort:

The trouble with slavery was the idea that Blacks were not "human".
The trouble with abortion is the idea that an unborn baby is not "human"

There is no common ground here...

Slavery is wrong, killing an unborn baby is wrong. The arguments for their acceptance all come from selfish interests. (Here.)

To which a "jmwtex" responds:

Sorry, wrong there. There are seriously valid arguements that unborn babies are not humans. Slaves could breath on their own and survive without a surrogate. Unborn babies do not. Slaves are one single, self sustaining life, unborn babies are not. Slaves do not require the giving of part of another's life to keep them alive.

I do grant that abortion many times is selfish. But there are lots of things in this world that are selfish. The law does not require us to be good and not be selfish. This is the only area were we are arguing that people should not be selfish and make it illegal to be selfish. (Here.)

One "PrincipalDad" also retorts to Gidnazio:

Telling a woman that she is not allowed control of her own body and must carry a baby to term (even if that may kiII her or that pregnancy was not her choice) is a form of slavery. (Here .)

You see a common theme here: slavery, being made to do something against your will.

Bear that in mind as you ponder own of the most amusing of the comments coming from "amiri", here:

One good result of the Obama appearing at the 2009 graduating class of Notre Dame's commencement ceremony protest was the President's opportunity to share his beliefs on the need for us all to assist in ensuring a better quality of life for all Americans from the embryo to the grave.

He so eloquently brings out the hypocrisy of the overemphasis of protecting life in its gestation phase but the failure of society to sustain a protective involvement in every phase of each others lives.

If we could sustain that fervent devotion of ensuring the survival of the seed of life throught all phases of life we would create a just society founded on the value of true brotherly love. Help you neighbor from the infancy of your relationship until it is time for him to lay down his head. Love is sustainable if we allow it to be.

We must all "assist in ensuring a better quality of life for all Americans from the embryo to the grave." We must all help our neighbor from infancy "until it is time for him to lay down his head." Let us note that we shall be made to do this whether we want to or not. We shall also be made to create a "just society" whether we want one or not (or, at the very least, whether we want someone else's conception of a "just" society). That strikes me as very like a woman being made to carry a baby to term whether she wants to or not, which, as "PrincipalDad" informs us, is a form of slavery.

"jmwtex" is actually wrong. It must be illegal to be selfish. That must be why the government takes one's money from him and gives it to another. What was it he said about giving part of another's life to keep someone alive?

My favorite of all comments was this one by "Annieke":

What surprises me in this debate is the fact that the people that are pro-life, are also pro-gun and pro-death penalty. (Here .)

In case you don't know: When the question is, Where do you stand on the abortion issue? "pro-life" means you oppose abortion. It means one has chosen to side with the life in the womb, nothing more. "Pro-life" is the position on abortion, not the reason for the position.

After all, I note that many people who are supposedly "pro-choice" are actually anti-choice. They oppose school vouchers, which would give the poor a real choice about the education of their children. They oppose letting business owners choose whether to permit smoking in their establishments. They oppose letting broadcast station owners decide how much or little conservative and/or liberal content there shall be. They oppose letting gun owners choose whether to own assault weapons. They oppose letting the people paying the wages decide how much to pay in wages. They oppose letting the people who pay the bonuses decide how much to pay in bonuses. They oppose letting people choose for themselves how much of their income they distribute to others, and who, precisely, those others will be.

You know, when it comes to things other than abortion, they're not very "pro-choice". They are "pro-choice" only when they do not care about the choices others may make.

And, of course, they can't be, because, like "pro-life", "pro-choice" isn't a position on everything. It's a position on the abortion question.

So also to your wife -- Wisdom Sunday

"Wives, be in subjection unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the Church: being Himself the Savior of the body. But as the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everything." ~ Ephesians 5.22-24.

It is a well known fact that the Scriptures teach submission of wives to husbands, an overwhelming number of husbands seem to know it; and it seems to be their favorite teaching. Women, especially after the rise of feminism, don't like it very well. That's understandable, especially since "submission" is also used to describe the master-servant relationship.

But context is everything when it comes to the meaning of words. As James Barr taught, the basic unit of meaning is not the word, but the sentence. But I digress.

St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, says to husbands:

Wouldest thou have thy wife obedient unto thee, as the Church is to Christ? Take then thyself the same provident care for her, as Christ takes for the Church. Yea, even if it shall be needful for thee to give thy life for her, yea, and to be cut into pieces ten thousand times, yea, and to endure and undergo any suffering whatever,—refuse it not. Though thou shouldest undergo all this, yet wilt thou not, no, not even then, have done anything like Christ. For thou indeed art doing it for one to whom thou art already knit; but He for one who turned her back on Him and hated Him. In the same way then as He laid at His feet her who turned her back on Him, who hated, and spurned, and disdained Him, not by menaces, nor by violence, nor by terror, nor by anything else of the kind, but by his unwearied affection; so also do thou behave thyself toward thy wife. Yea, though thou see her looking down upon thee, and disdaining, and scorning thee, yet by thy great thoughtfulness for her, by affection, by kindness, thou wilt be able to lay her at thy feet. For there is nothing more powerful to sway than these bonds, and especially for husband and wife. A servant, indeed, one will be able, perhaps, to bind down by fear; nay not even him, for he will soon start away and be gone. But the partner of one’s life, the mother of one’s children, the foundation of one’s every joy, one ought never to chain down by fear and menaces, but with love and good temper. For what sort of union is that, where the wife trembles at her husband? And what sort of pleasure will the husband himself enjoy, if he dwells with his wife as with a slave, and not as with a free-woman? Yea, though thou shouldest suffer anything on her account, do not upbraid her; for neither did Christ do this.

[...]

So then she was unclean! So then she had blemishes, so then she was unsightly, so then she was worthless! Whatsoever kind of wife thou shalt take, yet shalt thou never take such a bride as the Church, when Christ took her, nor one so far removed from thee as the Church was from Christ. And yet for all that, He did not abhor her, nor loathe her for her surpassing deformity. Wouldest thou hear her deformity described? Hear what Paul saith, “For ye were once darkness.” [Eph. v. 8.] Didst thou see the blackness of her hue? What blacker than darkness? But look again at her boldness, “living,” saith he, “in malice and envy.” [Tit. iii. 3.] Look again at her impurity; “disobedient, foolish.” But what am I saying? She was both foolish, and of an evil tongue; and yet notwithstanding, though so many were her blemishes, yet did He give Himself up for her in her deformity, as for one in the bloom of youth, as for one dearly be loved, as for one of wonderful beauty. And it was in admiration of this that Paul said, “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die [Rom. v. 7.]; and again, “in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” [Rom. v. 8.] And though such as this, He took her, He arrayed her in beauty, and washed her, and refused not even this, to give Himself for her. (Emphasis mine.)~ On The Epistle to the Ephesians, Homily 20.

A man may swagger around, treating his wife as if it is her role in life to serve his needs, sexual and otherwise. And he may behave as if he has done her a favor by marrying her. (As if!) But he's going to be judged by how well his love for her compares with Christ's love for His church.

As Mr T. used to say, I pity the fool.

The Case Against Carrie Prejean

There are two elements of the Carrie Prejean matter that I found fascinating, from an ethical perspective. First, because she said she believed, on biblical grounds, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, she has received attention because of some photos taken while modeling. It is fascinating because her position is based on an explicit prohibition in Scripture. She is vilified, on the other hand, in the absence -- arguably -- of an explicit prohibition. (There is some debate about what the Bible's requirements for modesty really entail, not so much about the prohibition of same sex relations.) In other words, the Scripture explicitly states that a man shall not lie with another man as he might do with a woman, which, at the very least, is a prohibition of homosexual pair-bonding, or, at most, a prohibition of any and all sexual encounters between members of the same sex. Her position is based upon that explicit prohibition.

It is amusing to note that the controversy about the photos proceeds upon the notion that, in saying that she believes, on biblical grounds, that marriage is to be between a man and a woman, she was also saying that she, Carrie Prejean is a paragon of Christian virtue, or, as they put it at TMZ, "biblically correct." This is the behavior of people who have no arguments for their positions, as if gay marriage really is okay because someone who says it isn't is, arguably, guilty of some moral turpitude in some area of his life. In other words, if you're not morally perfect then you have no business making any assertions regarding moral issues, even if you are asked. Given this, I wonder if Perez Hilton perfectly obeys traffic laws. If he doesn't I wonder if he would assert that stealing is wrong. I mean, if perfect obedience is the qualification for making assertions about correct behavior then I hope, if he has any beliefs about correct behavior -- and we know he does (for example: don't say you disagree with same-sex marriage) -- that he perfectly obeys the law. Otherwise, he wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on if he were ever robbed.

For all that, however, there may be something to their ire. Look at the reasoning she employs in defending the photos:

"I am a Christian, and I am a model.... Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos." ~ Here.

There you have it. Her appearing in the photos is justified by her job description. The job description of a model includes posing for lingerie and swimwear photos. I am a model. Therefore I pose for lingerie and swimwear photos. (Models also pose for topless and nude photos, but never mind that just now.)

It's ethical because in my profession it's an accepted practice. Carrie Prejean is not the only Christian who reasons through ethical issues in this slip-shod, fast food fashion. I suspect many of her critics are angry with her not just because of her stance on same-sex marriage but because of her elementary school level justifications for the photos. They probably think a job description is not the place to go to answer questions about whether certain elements of your work are ethical.

Look at it from their perspective. When it comes to the ethics of same-sex marriage, she relies upon the Bible. Fine. But then when it comes to the ethics of certain photos for which she posed, she relies upon her job description. Gee, I wonder why they're upset.

I suspect her critics also, speaking of the Bible to which she alluded in her reply, understand that the Bible calls Christians to eschew sensuality. And I think they understand all too well the amount of sensuality involved in beauty pageants, lingerie and swim-wear.

Self-examination and ethical thinking is hard for some Christians. They've been fighting the culture war for so long that, while they are well practiced at comparing the culture to the Scriptures, they don't have much experience comparing themselves to it with the same microscopic attention to detail. And if we slow down and really think it through, perhaps we can see that, while not entirely correct, Carrie Prejean's critics do have something of a case against her. Yes, she is a bit of a hypocrite; but that's not all. When confronted with questionable photos she shrugs her shoulders and says, "I never claimed to be perfect".

Great. She's not perfect. But she still gets to do her job. Gays still don't get to marry. She seems, to her critics anyway, to be more bothered by the imperfections of gays -- and gay marriage -- than by her own imperfections. I'm sure they believe that she can spell out, with great eloquence, the harms to society created by gays and their marriages, but not as eloquently on the harms to society of her own, surely less important imperfections. No, she doesn't want to redefine marriage. But, one could argue, her profession, among others, has been in the business of redefining several other things (like modesty) for the last several decades.

Not that I really care, but I am glad she gets to keep her crown.

Released Documents can be a study in contrasts

I'm not on the His-Beatitude-is-not-a-natural-born-American bandwagon, but it is interesting to note something about his response to "quo warranto" requests that he prove his citizenship and, thus, his fitness for office.

While he will release "torture" memos, and contemplate releasing "torture" photos, he won't take the simple measure of releasing his birth certificate:

As Jerome Corsi, WND senior staff writer, explained, "The main reason doubts persist regarding Obama's birth certificate is this question: If an original Hawaii-doctor-generated and Hawaii-hospital-released Obama birth certificate exists, why wouldn't the senator and his campaign simply order the document released and end the controversy.

"That Obama has not ordered Hawaii officials to release the document," Corsi writes, "leaves doubts as to whether an authentic Hawaii birth certificate exists for Obama." (Here.)

I wonder why.

H/T: Seaspook

I wonder if any of these people voted

Ten thousand dead people have received stimulus checks.

I bet a lot of them voted, too.

Obama's Economic Plan Will Cost Nothing, Really

There is a way of looking at the Messiah's economic plan, which should allay all our fears about the costs. It is an explicitly Marxist way of looking at it: Money isn't real.

That's what someone should tell Rush Limbaugh. Maybe then, he'll stop worrying about the $1.8 trillion budget deficit and the $9 trillion dollar national debt. As the saying goes, "Freedom isn't free." And the best kind of freedom -- freedom from necessity and fear -- is going to cost a lot.

[T]he realm of freedom...begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.... Freedom...can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this...under conditions most favourable to... their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond [the realm of necessity] begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.... ~ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III (emphases mine).

In the furor over His Beatitude's stimulus organ, many of the complaints have stemmed not merely from the unconstitutional nature of many of the measures (e.g., government virtual take-over of banks, actual take-over of car companies, incremental dismantling of Wall Street, sending lynch mobs to executives' homes) but from the increase in the national debt, as well as the deficit spending entailed. The cost will, they assert, be staggering.

Actually it isn't going to cost anything. Nothing at all. You see, the reason stuff costs anything at all is because the parasitic exploiters among us attach a price to their wares. And, in fact, this price is exploitative precisely because it is higher than the cost of production. When His Beatitude and his genuflecting courtiers have finished redesigning the economy, exploitation, costs and prices will be things of the past.

When you have a right to what you need, you should receive what you require at no cost. Some object because this means that others will bear the costs. But one day this will not be the case: nothing to which we have a right should have any cost at all. Price, a blind force of nature to which we must no longer be enslaved, will be abolished. Besides, money is a legal fiction anyway. And even if it isn't, gold and silver certainly are not monies, any more than the means of production transformed into capital is really capital (see Capital, Ch. 48, I, here). Capital isn't a thing; it's a relation. And money isn't a thing either. In reality, then, none of this is really going to cost anyone anything! Complaints about the costs of all this are part of the economy which His Beatitude is redesigning for us, an economy which "does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations" (Capital, Ch. 48, III). When he, has finished his great labors there will be no costs associated with anything, and, therefore, no deficit and no national debt.

Pardon me while I break spontaneously into doxology:

O, happy day, happy day.
He'll wash our debts away.
O, happy day, happy day.
We'll never be in need.
Forever we'll be free.

Ah. I feel so much better.

More important than the costs associated with His Beatitude's organ, however, is the assault on freedom which some of believe is entailed. The actual fact of the matter is this (and it makes sense when you understand the leftists' conception of rights). The left simply have a completely different view of freedom. This explains why right and left often sound like they are talking past each other. It also explains how leftists, with their speech codes and all, can assert their love of freedom with a straight face. Ultimately the left's conception of freedom is a whole lot like Marx's conception, oddly enough.

The most important freedoms must be from want and fear. It entails man's control over his environment and so controlling it -- centrally, of course -- that man shall have every need supplied with the least amount of labor. Labor will continue, of course, but for reasons other than bleeding and sweating for the basic necessities of life; and it shall also be distributed equally to all. We'll be living like they do in Star Trek, where things cost "credits" not "dollars" -- to the extent that anything has a cost in that silly universe.

You see, right now, the work involved in living is performed by the many. The many are poor. Those who do the least labor are the few, the wealthy. You see the unfairness. The many work the most, and have the least. The few work the least (if you can even call it work), and have the most.

To experience true freedom, man must be free from having his work determined for him by "necessity and mundane considerations." This includes even those necessities and "mundane considerations" caused by recessions, which have to be done away as well, by doing away with the boom in the first place, which, as Timothy Geithner told Charlie Rose on 6 May (from about 21:25 to 25:00, specifically at 24:02) is what the Obama administration is trying to do. No other freedom really matters. And the desire for such freedoms is really, when you think about it from the Marxist perspective, a desire to commit crimes against humanity.

So, one simply has to disagree with Michael Maiello's argument that Obama is simply an oligarch, not a socialist. It's not as if the two are mutually exclusive. Better informed is Zac Bissonette, who argues that Obama is a Russian-style oligarch. That's a little more like it.

I think Maiello doesn't understand how socialism works during that period of time before it is fully realized. If he did, he'd know why I still favor the Obama-as-socialist thesis. In the long run -- which is the more relevant perspective, when dealing with socialists -- I think it true that he is a socialist, regardless who benefits immediately from his largesse. But these "benefits" will only continue while money is treated as if it is something real, which it isn't. (I could be wrong. Maiello may understand. But, at this point, I'm disinclined to believe he does.)

Actually, since the choice is not really between Obama the Oligarch and Obama the Socialist, I'm still inclined to stay with my assertion that, like his predecessor, he is a Keynesian.

Note: I think the Charlie Rose interview with Timothy Geithner makes clearer than almost anything else could, that one of the other purposes of His Beatitude's policies is to increase confidence not to the market (as if!), but to increase confidence in government. Moreover, it will be interesting to watch them prevent the next boom. After all, how do they know where in the market it will take place? Clearly, they don't. Not only that, they can't tell the difference between a legitimate boom, led by entrepreneurs in response to real, unmolested interest rates (and less devastating than the typical, artificial booms created by money supply inflateion and credit expansion) and fed-created, artificial booms. I guess Geithner means they want to prevent the next fed-created boom. Yeah. Right.

One man's justice is another man's torture

Hip-hop is not torture, but that's something completely different.

John Demjanjuk is supposed to be extradited to Germany. He objects to the extradition on the grounds that he is going to be tortured. German authorities say no, he's not going to be tortured.

Now, the "torture" in this case is, according to Demjanjuk, the simple act of being transported to Germany at all, because his health is so bad, including pre-leukemia, kidney problems, spinal problems and gout (see here and here).

One can only believe that, for some people, justice sometimes requires a little torture:

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center found irony in Broadley's argument for his client.

"He wants to plead the sense of fairness that he regularly denied all of the victims at Sobibor," Hier said.

He called Demjanjuk's comparison of his planned deportation to torture "preposterous coming from a person that served the S.S. in a death camp. It is a preposterous argument and insulting to the survivors of the Holocaust."

Hier said that 250,000 Jews were killed at the camp and that none of the guards who worked there was blameless.

"You were there for one job: kill the Jews," he said. "And that's what they did full-time."

He called the evidence against Demjanjuk "overwhelming" (here).

Demjanjuk says it's torture. Hier says it isn't. Golly gee, Wally. What should we do?

Oh! I know! Let's ask His Beatitude -- may he live forever. He'll tell us what torture is.

Torture should be legal, safe, but rare

Miguel Guanipa, here, describes "a federally sanctioned procedure that is performed on a daily basis in one of the most vibrant democracies on earth, and which has been in place for almost forty years." The procedure he describes is, in fact, part of the required curriculum at medical schools and executed by highly skilled, and highly compensated, professionals. It is also executed solely upon human beings who have committed no crime, a procedure liberals positively love and demand conservatives to embrace:

[I]magine for a moment that you have been assigned a couple of prisoners whom you have been given complete freedom to torture. Neither prisoner is aware of the fate that awaits them. You enter the room of the first prisoner and begin by tearing off one of his limbs. The prisoner -- who is not privy to the reasons why you have committed such a dastardly act against his person -- writhes in agony. You then proceed to systematically sever other vital organs. The prisoner tries to flee in desperation, but you have blocked the only exit through which he may entertain any hopes of escaping his torturer. What the prisoner doesn't know is that prior to the moment you entered the scene you had already planned for him to die before being eventually removed from this chamber.

After the job is finished, you enter the next room in which your next hapless victim waits. He is also unaware that you are about to inflict intolerable pain upon him. But this time you decide to employ a more effective method. You bind this prisoner, and then dip him in a tank full of a corrosive solution that will gradually eat at his flesh, obstruct his breathing, and bring about a slow but certain demise. Within minutes of being submerged in this tank the prisoner expires. You could argue that his death was somewhat more merciful than that of the first prisoner. Now imagine that you had been asked to torture these men, not because they were withholding actionable intelligence that could potentially save the lives of thousands of innocents threatened with imminent peril. It was not because they were active members of an itinerant terrorist organization responsible for wreaking havoc around the world. In fact, both these men were innocent human beings, physically incapable of defending themselves, who had been placed in these rooms through no choice of their own. To make matters worse, their painful deaths were commissioned by and discharged at the full behest of their closest family member.

Happens every day. Liberal Democrats and Moderate Republicans love it.

Say good-bye to the university

Mark C. Taylor, of Columbia University, argues that we should End the University as We Know It.

David Koyzis, of Redeemer University College, has this to say of it:

While he may be guilty of a certain degree of rhetorical overkill, I heartily approve of his emphasis on what might be called interdisciplinary renewal within the university

And quotes this passage from Taylor's article:

There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises. It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

Taylor describes, in significant bullet points, what's wrong with graduate education. For example, our conception of the university is rooted in Kant's notion "that universities should 'handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.' "

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.... And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

How Duns Scotus used citations. Interesting, perhaps. The subject of a Time Magazine article maybe. But important enough to show up someday in a peer-reviewed journal article?

Of course, as a libertarian, I can't agree with some of his solutions, especially as they entail bringing about the sort of university he wants by (more) government fiat decisions. But that's another matter. I'd prefer to see interdisciplinary studies universities popping up like.... I was going to say, "Like McDonald's". But the fast food connotation is thoroughly objectionable.

In another interesting article, Stanley Fish writes on God Talk.

Obama's likely SCOTUS picks: Gird Your Loins

Michelle Malkin's legal sources have compiled sketches of Obama’s top three likely picks and their records. She advises: "Gird your loins."

Good advice. Wait til you get a load of them.

Or, as Jim Carey said in "Mask": "Hold on to your lug nuts! It's time for an over-haul!"

Here's a clip. The line I quoted is about 2 minutes and 30 seconds in.

Could Specter's defection make it harder to confirm His Beatitude's judicial nominees?

Michael Dorf thinks it is at least possible, citing a more detailed explanation, here. Fuller, subsequent discussion, here.

Secession in our future?

Clifford Thies thinks so and argues on three grounds: the inalienable right of secession, the international law of secession, and the US law of secession.

Interesting article. And no, he isn't arguing that any state should secede, at least not yet. But I think it clear he believes the day will come, though not, perhaps in our life-time. I hope not. I don't mind belonging to a federal republic; but living in a unitary one is sure getting on my nerves.

This is sure to be added to my dossier at DHS.

Now that UAW owns GM and Chrysler, what's next?

The government and unions have got themselves some car companies, but no one has to buy those cars. But there's no guarantee it will be a profitable venture, like Amtrak. This ownership isn't going to work very well if Americans decide, in one of those great paradoxes that adds sweetness to life, that buying American, when it comes to some automobiles, may be, well, un-American.

Not to worry. A government subsidy here, a tax increase on "foreign" and imports there, a promise to make your car payment for you for nine months if you lose your job and it just might work. In other words: artificially decrease the cost (and, thus, the price) of the union-owned product, and artificially increase the cost (and, thus, the price) of the private-owned product. Why, I bet the taxes on your purchase of a GM or Chrysler product will be just about zero, but not the taxes on your foreign auto (say, for example, a Volkswagen Group product, like your Lamborghini, Bentley; or your Porsche, whatever). The taxes on those products will likely increase. But that might start a trade war.

Is this how government really works?

Cruising YouTube a few nights ago and caught this.



That's right. Go after a group no one likes and is small enough to be too weak to protect itself. They should call the made-for-TV-movie The Gangs of Chicago.

It might be funny, if it weren't true.

My kind of strip show!

Field stripping, that is.




A little FYI, here. Yes, you can try this at home. Make certain first that you clear the weapon. And you will know you've re-assembled it properly if the weapon racks and cycles. Pull the slide back then pull the trigger.

Illegitimate Tea Parties -- Postscript

Listening to a caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show, hosted today by fellow Texan, Mark Davis, I'm reminded of a rather insidious line of reasoning which, supposedly, shows the illegitimacy of the tea parties. It goes like this, according to the aforementioned: The Tea Parties were not organized at the "grass-roots" level.

Let's assume that is the case. Therefore what, precisely? Well, ostensibly, therefore, they are illegitimate protests; and we can justly, and safely, ignore them.

Here's why I call it insidious. What we have here is an assertion about the organizers of, and the participants in, tea parties. We do not have a refutation of the proposition in support of which the tea parties were held. The tea parties were organized in support of the proposition that, as they put it, we are Taxed Enough Already. I've already mentioned Marie Cocco's attempt, in all fairness to her, one of the few attempts to deal with the proposition. But this line of reasoning is really a line of reasoning which would justify ignoring the protesters, a line of reasoning which would justify minimizing protesters' concerns without even having to refute the proposition.

Joe Schmo asserts P. In the course of discussing P, Joe says he is a grass-roots type of person. Someone antagonistic to Joe, someone who denies P, asserts that Joe is not a grass-roots type.

Here is the logic we're taking about:

1. Protesters assert P (i.e., P is true).
2. Joe is not a grass-roots type.
3. Therefore not-P (i.e., P is false).

Whether the organizing of the tea parties was grass-roots, is irrelevant to the question of whether anyone is taxed enough already.

There is another insidious line of reasoning in some criticisms of the tea parties. It goes like this. A recent Gallup poll found that only 46 percent of Americans say their taxes are too high. Fifty-two percent of those earning between $30,000 and $75,000 said their taxes were about right. This was reported on my evening news, right after their coverage of the tea parties, almost as if to say, "Since a majority of Americans believe that their taxes are about right, that must mean the protesters are wrong." Only a journalist could reason that way, I guess.

The insidious reasoning is that since a large number of Americans are relatively satisfied with their level of taxation, either (1) any protests of taxation are illegitimate and protesters should go along with, and share, the majority opinion, or (2) Americans are not being over-taxed, as tea partiers assert. (Vox populi vox dei. The voice of the majority is gospel.) The insidiousness is precisely this: it denies individuality. It denies to the individual the right to assign his own value to his own property.

It's also specious and tendentious reasoning. Let's take a group G, and examine its members' belief in a proposition P. Let's say a majority of those polled in group G believe P, and that a minority believe that not-P. The majority's belief that P means absolutely nothing to the truth value of P. Nothing whatsoever. Nada. Null. Not only that, but the majority's belief that P has no bearing on the minority's belief that not-P. It means nothing whatever to the minority that the majority believe that P. And for the minority's belief that not-P, the assertion that the majority believe that P is not a refutation: the majority's belief that P, tells us nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about the truth value of P.

So it is irrelevant to the question that 52 percent of Americans earning between $30,000 and $75,000 believe their taxes are about right. And this is important because this poll is reported as if it means that the tea partiers are not being over-taxed. Not only that, but 52 percent of Americans, each one of whom is free to value his tax dollars as he pleases cannot tell me how to value my tax dollars.

Anyone who thinks he's being over-taxed is absolutely correct. Yes, you read that correctly. And I wrote it correctly. If you think you are being over-taxed, then you are being over-taxed. For no one can dictate value to another, except for liberals who, as marxists (by and large), reject the subjective theory of value in favor of the labor theory of value (or some other intrinsic value theory) and do not mind dictating anything to anyone. But note, that assigning the value of a good to the labor involved in production is no less subjective than the subjectivity involved in the subjective theory of value. All we're really talking about in the labor theory of value is the subjective valuation by marxists, of labor over some other standard of valuation. And we are also talking about their imposition of that value upon others.

And that's the problem with Marie Cocco and her type. They believe there is some intrinsic, universally applicable value to all goods. Namely, their own; and, usually, the labor theory. They're sort of dictatorial like that. (It's for own our good.) But there isn't any intrinsic, universally applicable value to any good. If you believe you are over-taxed, then if liberty means anything (including the liberty to assign value to your own goods, including your own dollars), it means you are over-taxed. It's your money. You earned it. And you're free, or should be anyway, to value it as it suits you to do.

And this brings me to one thing with which I definitely agree with Rush Limbaugh about. Leftism is an assault on the individual. Nothing proves that better than when a leftist thoroughly denies an individual the right to determine the value of his own property, especially his money. Maybe I will get a tax cut this year. We'll see. But I'm not going to deny to my wealthy neighbor a right I fully claim for myself: the right to decide for himself the value of his money and whether he thinks too much of it is going into government coffers.

Having blogged twice on the tea parties, I do have this criticism of them. They focused too much on taxes. While I agree with the proposition that, on the whole, Americans pay too much in taxes (and I mean all taxes, at all levels), the real problem is spending. If more focus could have been devoted to spending, them some attention could have been given to inflation (i.e., increase in money supply). And inflation is important because, in addition to being a form of theft, that is where the federal government is going to get the money it doesn't get from taxes or borrowing. And the reason that fact is important is that inflation affects even those people who pay no federal income tax, especially those who live on fixed income, those who live on welfare, those who work for low wages. An increase in the money supply decreases the value, the purchasing power, of those dollars already in circulation (or deposit) at the time of the money supply increase.

But, given that there is still a relation between taxes and government spending, a "party" protesting taxes isn't a complete waste of time.

On the torture memos

Straight to the point: The release of the memos is part of the left's continued denial that the confrontation with terrorists is a war in any sense. It is a law enforcement matter, not a military one. And in law enforcement situations, suspects are not subjected to "harsh" treatment. You give them coffee, cigarettes -- you know, make them comfortable. Then you ask them, kindly and gently, whatever is on your mind.

It strikes me also, that this is part of the incremental stripping away of national sovereignty. In a world in which a "nation" is simply a formality, those things which used to be justifications for wars are now causes of legal action. Just as citizens of a city, county, or state don't carry on private wars with each other but go to court instead; just as citizens who are harmed do not take the law into their own hands and get justice for themselves -- nations shall not carry on private wars, or act so as to get justice for themselves by military means. As the nation-state must go the way of the dodo bird in favor of world citizenship, so must the freedom of a nation to see to its own security. It's a denial, if you will, of nations' rights. If there is to be world citizenship (Obama obviously thinks so), then there is, or must be (eventually) a world state. Since a state must have a monopoly on the use of physical force, it stands to reason that the world state must have this monopoly. For that to happen, the monopoly enjoyed by the nation-state must be dismantled. So, no private security ops for the nation-state and, hence, no prosecution of wars by nation-states. Well, that's what I think, anyway.

From what we've been told, one would think the legal advice given to the Bush administration amounted to, "Hey, torture is okay, and it's okay to use torture when interrogating suspected or known terrorists." In actual point of fact them memos examined each technique in punctilious detail. Indeed, use of the term memo has been somewhat misleading. Most people's experience with memos is with document of two or three pages in length. These memos are larger than that. The briefest of the memos is 18 pages.

The so-called torture memos can be accessed here. Enjoy. With the release of these memos, outlining in great detail how we go about "torturing" people (including the very tight controls employed), we are probably out of reliable interrogation techniques. Now terrorists, if there really are any (clearly His Beatitude is doubtful), will be able to provide more intelligent SERE training for their "high level" operatives. There is nothing like knowing what to expect to help get you through potentially stressful situations. The worst part of almost anything is not knowing what to expect, and about how long it will last. Knowing exactly how you are going to be "tortured", and for how long, should be of inestimable benefit to terrorists -- if there were any, which there aren't. There can't possibly be: the President wouldn't make useful information available to an enemy.

Apparently, any technique which involves anything more aggressive than asking, "Do you have any plans to commit terrorist acts, specifically, to kill or otherwise harm anyone, anywhere, at any time; and, if so, what, specifically, are these plans?" is torture. Oh, I forgot to add, "Pretty please, with baklava smothered in syrup."

Hugh Hewitt makes a relevant point about the most heinous of these torturous acts:

As the commentators show their feathers to each other, see if any of them cite a single vote by the Senate or the House to define waterboarding as torture throughout the years when the Congress was fully aware of the practice. The DOJ legal analysis was the best effort of front-line lawyers in the aftermath of a massive attack on the United States. Their Congressional critics of today who did not demand a defining vote on what constituted torture are the worst sort of hypocrites. They are the lawmakers, and chose --even when House and Senate were controlled by Democrats from January 2007 to the present-- to avoid passing a law bringing clarity to the very gray areas of the law of interrogation.

When it comes to statutory provisions, the more specific the law the better; and the easier it is to prosecute violators. As it is, there is too much subjectivity in the law against torture. Heck, teenagers think, and act like, they're tortured if you take away their iPods, cell phones, or (God forbid) ground them.

We are, as many have observed, witnessing an attempt to criminalize dissent, specifically: dissent from leftist interpretations of the laws, or even just leftism itself. And to think, they accused the Bush administration of doing so. What's bad for the goose is good for the gander, I suppose.

P.S.

The relevant statutory provisions (which are cited in the memos) are as follows:

As used in this chapter—

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—

(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;

(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;

(C) the threat of imminent death; or

(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States. 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2340.

(a) Offense.— Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

(b) Jurisdiction.— There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—

(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or

(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.

(c) Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy. 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2340A.

Illegitimate Tea Parties

Marie Cocco wants taxpayers to know that they are not being over-taxed. This, despite the fact that it's their money being taxed and therefore up to them to decide how they feel about the value of the money coming out of their paychecks. In other words, despite their own subjective valuation of their money, and their own subjective valuation of the use of those tax dollars, the protesters are not being over-taxed. Marie Cocco knows better. She is smart. She knows the protesters really don't have the proper valuation of the money coming out of their pockets. What's more, the money isn't coming out of their pockets. They don't know the facts; she is going to set them straight, because they actually have it quite good. After all, 95% of them are getting their taxes cut. They'd know that if they wouldn't let themselves be led astray by right wing party hacks.

Her argument is two-fold. First, the tax rates are actually quite low. So tea partiers shouldn't be complaining. Second, the money is going to good causes and, although she doesn't come out and say it, one can easily believe she would add that only the selfish and heartless would deny their hard-earned funds to these worthy causes. This takes us back to her underlying assumption, that the real masterminds behind the tea parties are partisan activists, not "real" people, working people, middle-class people. Working and middle-class people were not at the tea parties: they were working. Those people are warm, and kind, and compassionate; and they would never object to having money sucked out of their pockets to pay for worthy causes or -- even better -- to receiving tax cuts while the "wealthy" receive tax increases, unless their minds have been twisted by partisan activists who are "locked out of power and floundering with low public approval". Those partisan bastards. If only they weren't so partisan; if only they were more high-minded; if only they weren't so ideology-driven -- like Marie Cocco.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office...released an updated analysis of the effective federal tax rate -- that is, what individuals and businesses pay after they take exemptions, deductions, credits and so forth. And it turns out that the effective federal tax rate that households across the income spectrum pay is lower now than it was 30 years ago, with an average rate of 20.7 percent. That encompasses all federal taxes, including excise and payroll taxes.

Cocco wants us to feel good because the effective federal tax rate is, on average, 20.7%. Frankly, I'm shocked she didn't say only 20.7%. (As if federal taxes are the only sort anyone is bothered about.) "Look," she says, in effect, "in addition to the fact that you real taxpayers -- by virtue of being working and middle-class types -- aren't paying any income taxes, even if you were, you're being allowed to keep almost 80% of your money, so shut up. Stop being deceived by partisan activists who are locked out of power and floundering with low public approval." Let me stipulate to all that she says, only because nothing I have to say depends upon her being wrong, which she isn't, as far as she goes. The simple fact of the matter is that it is really for people whose money is taken from them to put a value on the money taken from them. It is for the people whose money is being taken to decide whether an effective federal tax rate of 20.7% is too high. What if I prefer an effective rate of 2.07%, rather than 20.7%? Who is she to tell anyone that they should gladly accept 20.7%, rather than 2.07%, as the effective tax rate? It isn't her money she's talking about. (And, as far as her money is concerned, she can pay as much in taxes as she wants. More power to her.) It long ago ceased to amaze me that people like her can be so glib about assigning value to other people's money.

Not only does she purport to tell people how to value the money coming out of their pockets, she also has the temerity to tell them how to value the things these tax dollars pay for:

So what do we really spend all this tax money on? About two-thirds of it goes toward defense programs and health expenditures, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

[...]

Social Security accounts for another 21 percent of spending and big health programs -- Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program -- another 20 percent.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance -- perhaps these are things we should value. Perhaps the people who benefit from these programs are helped by our money and should receive our money. But it is our money. Everyone else who wants our money either must give us something in exchange, or, for worthy, charitable causes like provision for the poor and elderly, the children, even university education, has to call my house, talk to me, and ask for it. And they have to ask nicely. And, should I say no, they have to live with it. They don't get to suck it out of my paycheck and tell me to shut up when I complain, on the grounds that these are worthy causes and I should be grateful to be left with whatever they don't decide to take. But, for people like Marie Cocco, my compassion for my fellow man is not properly demonstrated by what I freely do for him with my money, but what is done with money forcibly taken from me, or from my wealthy neighbor.

The message of the Tea Parties was quite simple: It's our money, whatever class we belong to. And I'm not going to be lectured by sanctimonious journalists. I'm not going to accept my middle-class tax cut on the grounds that my wealthy neighbors' taxes are being raised, any more than I'd accept it if Cocco put a gun to man's head and stole $100 from him and wanted to give a portion of it to me. As Mona Charen observes, some of us won't be bribed.

What angers me about the left is really quite simple. They are all pretense about how the right wants to impose their values on everyone. You know: anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-porn, anti-drug, anti-Smurf, anti-Barney, anti-Tickle-Me-Elmo, anti-Teletubby, whatever. Now comes Marie Cocco and her ilk, as they have done for generations now, to impose their own values on us and draft the money for their values out of the pockets of whichever class has the bad luck to have earned Least Favored Taxpayer status. Today it's the wealthy. In other times and places it was the Jews. "Wealthy" is the new "Jew". You know, if these people reasoned about the wealthy the way they reasoned about other groups, we could justly call them anti-semites: Jews are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the wealthy; going after the wealthy means going after Jews.

Cocco is right about one thing. None of this is new:

[W]e must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era). The cycle works as follows: Democrats engineer a leap forward of activist government, accompanied by "progressive," "moving America forward again" rhetoric. Then, after a decade or so, the Republicans come in armed with conservative, free-market rhetoric, but in reality only slow down the rate of statist advance. After another decade or so, people become tired of the rhetoric (though not the reality) of the free market, and the time has come for another Leap Forward. The names of the players change, but the reality and the phoniness of the game remains the same, and no one seems to wake up to the shell game that is going on.

[...]

Much propaganda is made about the horrors of the deficit, of the necessity of "sacrificing" for the future, for our children, in order to help close the deficit. That is the excuse for the vanishing of [one] tax cut, to be replaced by [another]...tax increase..... And yet, at the very same time, there is supposed to be a massive spending increase. Why? For two reasons to "jump start the economy," which is [in]... a recession...; and second, to provide "investment" for an economy that has been stagnating...and needs more...investment.

Always with these people it is the same. No matter what the state of the economy, it is always been bad enough to warrant ever more statism. When one thinks about it, the tea parties were really about statism, which is nothing without taxes, regardless the effective rate.

Incidentally, the two quoted passages above are by Murray Rothbard, written, not during the last 92 days but in 1993. The first was written in January 1993, the second in May 1993. Admit it: You wouldn't have guessed.

God cannot destroy the world

Someone else beat Him to it.

Punished as wicked or scourged as a son?

They may look the same, superficially; but they are not the same.

"It is for chastening that ye endure" [Hebrews 12.7] not for punishment, nor for vengeance, nor for suffering. See, from that from which they supposed they had been deserted [of God], from these he says they may be confident, that they have not been deserted. It is as if he had said, Because ye have suffered so many evils, do you suppose that God has left you and hates you? If ye did not suffer, then it were right to suppose this. For if “He scourgeth every son whom He receiveth,” he who is not scourged, perhaps is not a son. What then, you say, do not bad men suffer distress? They suffer indeed; how then? He did not say, Every one who is scourged is a son, but every son is scourged. For in all cases He scourges His son: what is wanted then is to show, whether any son is not scourged. But thou wouldest not be able to say: there are many wicked men also who are scourged, such as murderers, robbers, sorcerers, plunderers of tombs. These however are paying the penalty of their own wickedness, and are not scourged as sons, but punished as wicked: but ye as sons. ~ John Chrysostom, Homily on the Epistle to the Hebrews, 29.

Liberty and the "Super-power"

[P]retenses that they have "Saved the Country," and "Preserved our Glorious Union," are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated...an unwilling people. This they call "Saving the Country"; as if...any people kept in subjection by the sword (as it is intended that all of us shall be hereafter)...could be said to have any country. This, too, they call "Preserving our Glorious Union"; as if there could be said to be any Union, glorious or inglorious, that was not voluntary. Or as if there could be said to be any union between masters and slaves; between those who conquer, and those who are subjugated. All these cries of having...[established] "a government of consent"... are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats...when uttered as justifications... for now compelling...anybody to support a government that he does not want. ~ Lysander Spooner, "No Treason", No. 6, XIX. (Emphases mine.)

As anyone who listens knows, Rush Limbaugh is quite at ease with the U.S. being a super-power. Consequently he was unhappy with what he called Obama's "World Apology Tour", and with this op-ed piece published in several central and south american papers, because he's helping the rest of the world in take us down a notch, which they desire to do because they object to our being the world's lone super-power. I make no secret of being no great fan of the current occupant of the Oval Office. And I made no secret that I wouldn't be a fan of his opponent's administration. So, in general, I share Limbaugh's antipathy for the present adminstration. But there is an element of Limbaugh's thinking, on the subject of super-powers, that concerns me.

Conservatives' inability (especially -- no surprise -- neo-conservatives) to see the relation between our super-power status and the loss of freedoms they (rightly!) complain of has bothered me for some time; but it has really come to a point in the last several years. I was never a big fan of our "superpower" status, specifically, being one of only two super-powers. I liked NATO because I thought it could be an alliance of super-powers, an alliance of free nations against the communist barbarians; but that was short-lived. What can I say? When you are young and hopeful, you tend to act young and hopeful. I hadn't realized, until I was part of NATO, how comfortable Europeans are with socialism. And once you're comfortable with socialism, buying communism isn't much of a stretch.

But never mind European style, democratic, socialism.

The simple fact is this: a super-power, no matter how benevolent, no matter how "democratic", simply cannot be ruled with a republican form of government, though it will maintain the facade of republicanism -- for a while, anyway. And you cannot believe in the consent of the governed without having the view of states' rights which I have and, as a consequence, you cannot be a fan of your nation's super-power status. Indeed, a confederacy (which is what we confederates believe the Constitution created, consistent with the notion of the consent of the governed) could never have become a super-power. How can that possibly have happened with constituent members (whose taxes will fund the super-power) free to leave the so-called union with impunity?

Put simply, it could not have happened. A super-power, member-states of which can freely leave, is a super-power which is always on the brink of extinction. That is why Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father of "Crony Capitalism", and his ideological descendants (proponents of the American System), who sincerely desired a mercantilist empire of their own, don't like confederacies. They would be so proud of what this country has become, even including the recent bailouts.

Conservatives like to believe they favor states' rights, just shy of talking secession. And when I converse with them and they discover my heresy, they give the nod to states' rights and invoke "federalism" but quickly point out that the United States would never have become the power we are today had the war for southern independence been successful. Being a super-power is, apparently, an unqualified good, such a good, in fact, as to require a limitation on the right of a state to give its consent to the central government. Anything which would upset that status is an unqualified evil. (Or, they point out, that the United States would be two countries, instead of one, as if unification is, again, an unqualified good. Well, it is for a mercantilist, anyway. Not so hot for freedom lovers, though.) So, for the sake of being a super-power, the rights of states must be limited.

One of my first responses is, "What United States? There are no united states. The word united connotes freedom: the states are freely united. But they are not freely united, not anymore. They are dominated. A little freer, perhaps, but they are united in the same sense as the members of the former Union of Soviet Swallowed Republics were united. They aren't united; they are unified, sort of like a team of horses. A team of horses, hitched to the same wagon, are not united; they are unified. They do not pull together; they are harnessed and then driven together. They are driven by a master, a central, controlling master, who drives the team in pursuit of his own goals, his own vision. The master may graciously, from time to time, inquire of the team as to their own preferences, goals, visions, whatever; but, in the end, if theirs do not cohere with his own, then his own shall prevail. The vision of the master makes the liberties of the horses a relatively minor consideration. The horses must all go in the same direction; some curtailment of freedom is to expected -- for the great good of the whole team. (As if the horses, who didn't ask to be on any team in the first place, should care about the needs of the team, which are not really the needs of the team but the desire and vision of the wagon-master.)

If the rights of states must be limited for the sake of being a super-power, it stands to reason that individual rights must also be limited, again, for the good of the whole. Your neighbors may believe that your use of your property must be limited so as not to adversely affect your property values. It just goes on and on.

I know: it sounds like confederate sour grapes. But if you're still with me, consider this. The language employed to discuss our super-power status is instructive. Consider the phrases "a super-power" or "the lone super-power", and note the singulars. How does a fifty state union become a or the super-power? They don't, but a fifty member dominion can do so. These are not united states: they are unified states. And there is a difference.

And so long as Rush Limbaugh and his fellow travelers are enamored of the super-power, the simple fact of the matter is that the encroachments upon freedom will continue. They may be halted occasionally, or slowed down, but only temporarily. The reason is quite simple: secession, even if only a last resort, was the only true check upon unlimited federal power. As Woodrow Wilson once wrote, the outcome of the War for Southern Independence established the principle that the federal government is the judge of the limitations of its power. Thank you, Yanks.

Lord Acton understood the relation between state rights and totalitarianism, as he wrote to General Lee (4 November 1866):

Without presuming to decide the purely legal question...I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

General Lee definitely understood it, as he responded to Lord Acton (15 December 1866):

I yet believe that the maintenanceof the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. I need not refer one so well acquainted as you are with American history, to the State papers of Washington and Jefferson, the representatives of the federal and democratic parties, denouncing consolidation and centralization of power, as tending to the subversion of State Governments, and to despotism.

There is no such thing as a super-power with a republican form of government, at least not for long. When the Romans acquired super-power status (albeit by means somewhat different from our own) they lost their republic. To be truly consistent with their profession, freedom lovers should stop being so devoted to the Unified States as a, or the, super-power, in preference of a union, a real union of free and united states.

The long and short of it is this. You can't have a free country and be a super-power, any more than you can have a free country and be a socialist power. My problem with His Beatitude is not that he's harming our super-power status. My problem is that he's not really big on freedom.

I was so glad to hear my Governor not shy away from the possibility of secession, when asked about it by a reporter at the "Tea Party" in Austin, Texas. That Perry -- not too shabby...for an Aggie.

Musing on evangelicalism's coming collapse -- Part Five

(Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

At the end of this posting I raised the matter of educational philosophy. I don't want to take up the subject at length, but it occurs to me, as I continue to reflect upon evangelicalism's coming collapse, that before a Christian can do educational philosophy he needs to have done his philosophy. And I think that's a large part of evangelicalism's problem: too many of them haven't really done their evangelical philosophy. That is, many of the Christians who do philosophy take up questions being worked on by non-Christians, not entirely out of line, one could say, but perhaps not the best use of limited time and resources. Alvin Plantinga noted over two decades ago that philosophy is a social enterprise; and this fact has implications:

Christian philosophers...are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community. But the Christian community has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda and its own research program. Christian philosophers ought not merely take their inspiration from what's going on at Princeton or Berkeley or Harvard, attractive and scintillating as that may be; for perhaps those questions and topics are not the ones, or not the only ones, they should be thinking about as the philosophers of the Christian community. There are other philosophical topics the Christian community must work at, and other topics the Christian community must work at philosophically. And obviously, Christian philosophers are the ones who must do the philosophical work involved. If they devote their best efforts to the topics fashionable to the non-Christian philosophical world, they will neglect a crucial and central part of their task as Christian philosophers. What is needed here is more independence, more autonomy with respect to the projects and concerns of the non-theistic philosophical world.

Plantinga extended his remarks to all Christian scholars.

One might say evangelicalism has been poorly served by its scholars, who seem by and large to have been concerned to stake out claims in topics of interest to Princeton or Berkeley or Harvard. That is, after all, how one earns respectability. Perhaps. But neither has evangelicalism been very willing to be served by her scholars. Reducing the Christian life in the world, for the most part, to evangelism, evangelicals have asked their scholars, in varying ways, "How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls? How can you be so wasteful of your time as to think of anything but evangelism and missions?" So, as Spencer observes, evangelical educational institutions have done little but staff their own needs. I know this: I have been the recipient of this attitude. Invariably, in talking to some evangelicals about my university studies as an undergraduate, I was asked how I, as a Christian, could justly study philosophy. One person, but only one, flat out told me there was no way I could be a Christian if I was studying philosophy. Hadn't I read Colossians 2.8? (In fact I had, which is why I felt comfortable studying philosophy and telling this gentleman he, not I, was the one who did not understand St. Paul.) For a time I was involved in the Christian Education at an evangelical church. Time out of mind I was chastised by parents for attempting to turn their children into philosophers, rather than Christians. (On a proper conception of philosophy, there isn't a difference.)

Incidentally, in those times I found encouragement in a passage from C.S. Lewis's, 22 October 1939 sermon, "Learning in Wartime":

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground -- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age. ~ In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

It is important to note, given that my topic has been Christian education, that Lewis preached that sermon to answer the question, "When the world is advancing to heaven or hell, when liberties hang in the balance, how can students and faculty spend time on what seem to be trivialities in comparison?"

In the previous posting, I asked, "What is the student when he finishes the course of instruction at a Christian school -- other than qualified to go on to college or get a good job, be a good citizen of the U.S.?" Presently, I think the question is being answered better by the Orthodox, than by evangelicals. I think we should say that the student will be a knower of God when he completes the curriculum at his Christian educational institution. Does this mean that I think Christian schools should teach only Bible, theology, and so forth? Not at all. That would be to focus only on that form of God's revelation theologians call Special Revelation. There is also God's General Revelation -- his creation. As a revelation of God, the creation is also a means of union and communion with God. This is why Gentiles do instinctively the things contained in the law, why St. Paul could affirm that all men know God (even though they refuse to acknowledge and glorify him as God [Romans 1.18ff]).

The relation between Christian education and the coming anti-Christian spirit Spencer writes of is not forced. In this posting I asked what makes an education Christian other than the fact that it goes on in Christian schools, is provided by Christian teachers to Christian students (or the children of Christian parents) and includes chapel services once a week and a handful of Bible, theology, or Christian worldview classes. Someone who was opposed to "Christian" education could be made quite happy if a school would simply do away with its chapel services and its Bible, theology and Christian worldview classes. So when one thinks of this anti-Christian spirit one has to wonder: What is it that will make the object of this opposition Christian? It's one thing for Spencer to write of "intolerance of Christianity", but it is important to know whether the "Christianity" for which there will be this intolerance is characterized by careful devotion to Christ or by careful devotion to other things (such as "reclaiming" America for Christ). I suppose there are some who might argue that careful devotion to Christ has to mean, on some level, claiming (or reclaiming) America for Christ. In a sense that is true, if by "claiming" we mean something synonymous with evangelizing, which, by the way, is what I would mean. But, what with the "Dominionist" scare and all, I think people can be forgiven if they understand "claiming America for Christ" to mean getting legitimate control of the apparatus of the state and using that apparatus for Christian purposes (whatever "Christian" means, in that context) -- in other words Christian statism. (And I don't care if the personification of this Christian statism is Jim Wallis or Jim Dobson.)

If the intolerance of Christianity is, in fact, an intolerance of Christian statism (and I don't mean only Dominionist or Reconstruction varieties) I find myself being all for it, frankly. For me, Christian statism seems to have the same vision of an unfederal central government, promoting a utopian vision of "unity" over "disunity", engaging in just as much centralized control over public education as the current crowd, imposing its morality (however much I happen to agree with it) with same verve and gusto as liberals have done for decades. We'll probably be just as over-taxed to pay for the Christian state as we are to pay for the secular state. In other words, the Christian statism seems to me to be different from the secular statism in that it is Christian statism rather than secular statism. (But remember my question: What makes Christian education Christian?) Let me put it this way: I've always been bothered by the fact that the Roman Empire continued to be an empire after the Christians took it over. An empire is still an empire; and I don't like empires, no matter how benevolent. So if intolerance of Christianity is really, as I presently suspect, intolerance of Christian statism, then all we have here is one group of statists not tolerating another, rival, group of statists. Help me, Jack Bauer!

Of course, Christianity as careful devotion to Christ can be just as intolerable to statists as the other variety of Christianity. In the end, a statist is one who, as I mentioned here, worships man through the state. The Christian whose Christianity is careful devotion to Christ is perhaps even more intolerable to a statist (especially, perhaps, the secular statist) than the Christian whose Christianity is marked by careful devotion to "reclaiming" America for Christ. Statists cannot permit much in the way of loyalty to something higher than the state, so there is that possibility.

But I just don't think that our devotion to Christ is what's causing the problem right now. Yes, Jesus did say that those who hate him will hate his followers. But it is logically fallacious to believe that everyone who hates us does so because of him. When you see sad stuff like this (and we know that's just a sampling), in addition to acknowledging that evangelicalism seems to have difficulty giving its adherents resources to fight indwelling sin, you have to think, "It could be us." St. Peter said: "Let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evil-doer, or as a busybody in other people's matters. Yet, if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter" (1 Peter 4.13). It is possible for Christians to suffer persecution for reasons other than devotion to Christ. When evangelicals appear to care more about whether unbelieving Heather has two unbelieving mommies than about whether believing Juan Alberto Ovalle is trying to hook up with underage girls, one has to understand how devotion to Christ seems to be a bit lower on the order of business than it should be. It would be well for evangelicals to take that to heart.

I suspect, however, that when the difficult times Spencer discusses come, the vast majority of evangelicals will take comfort that the rapture is upon us. So persecution prone are they that they will take comfort in the fact that "so persecuted they the prophets" (Matthew 5.12), and so forth. (Some of the comments here bear this out, I think.) Their disdain for the spiritual disciplines as well as the charismatic thirst for spiritual gifts like tongues, prophecies, miracles, healings, pre-occupation with eschatology, etc, have left most of them (it appears to me) without the tools or the patience, for the introspection, the self-examination, the soul-searching necessary to revive themselves. Indeed, most seem likely to blow all that off as wasteful navel-gazing, or, worse, legalism.

I also suspect that those of us who would suggest that the coming suffering may not be, or may not entirely be, suffering for simply being a Christian, will be treated like those who suggested that perhaps some elements of U.S. foreign policy played a role in the 911 attacks. (I was not one of those, for whatever that's worth.)

Good Friday

Perfect security and full peace
cannot exist in this world.
~ Thomas a Kempis
If we have hope in this life only
If in this life only
We have hope
It is not even that of the conquered,
Deceived by a Greek horse or
Defrauded by a crafty snake and
Since neither tears nor cries can rescue the perishing
I no longer endeavor to persevere
Under the weight of futile existence
Having tested myself and
Sought for meaning
In wine
In women
And philosophies

What we saw and heard and touched

Why should anyone take bricks for stone
And tar for mortar? Why not rather be scattered, nameless?
One toils
And another plunders
One produces
And another loots
Ancient cities, vigor spent, foundations shaken,
Recline and raze themselves to powder
The end of it all is vapor.

“I thirst.”

Adoration is recompensed with indifference
And love with infidelity
Blessed unions
Broken by premature death or
Thieving infirmity
Leave love cherished alone
In its given child

“This day you shall be with me…”

Mouths open and lies flee their hive
The passionate, desperate, clutching heat
Of flesh on flesh
(Consuming, ceaseless, desire)
Bears no fruit
No glazed donut monsters begging kisses
See the nursery, unused, converted
Into a spare bedroom
And useless seeds discarded

Arms nailed down…

I try to remember something
I’m supposed to remember
If only I could remember
Something
About a light in a window extinguished
By a silver chord
To a grinding halt
For poverty in numbers
An act of fidelity
For one of betrayal
At about the sixth hour
If only I could remember
If only I could have seen a little something

Just a little spattering
Of an omnipresent brain
A little something now
A little something here
In this life
In this world

“Into your hands…”

A little something more
Than this sisyphean life
In a crust of bread from cursed dust
After the sweaty, pyrrhic victory over thistle and thorn
What goes in is eliminated
All that is filled eventually empties
That’s where he was, I think,
When his heart broke: under the thorns

Then blood and water flowed




~ James Frank Solís
Good Friday, 2009