Remaking the world, secular European style

In case you've not yet picked up on the messianic ambitions of the Junior Senator from Illinois, we have this passage from his speech today in Berlin. "With an eye towards the future, with resolve in our heart, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again." The highly-secular Germans ate it up, averaging more than one applause interruption each minute throughout the speech.

Barack Obama and western Europe: religiously immanentizing the Eschaton.

Add hypocrisy to the list

Barack Obama is currently on his world tour running for... it's not clear what. One would be forgiven for concluding that he is hoping to be elected Emperor of the Secular Western World. In any event, Obama made a campaign stop at the Western Wall in Jerusalem yesterday morning, complete with campaign posters written in Hebrew. Predictably, some in attendance heckled, others chanted their support.

Rather than accept responsibility for turning a holy site into the host of a political convention, Obama had this to say: "It was rowdier than the last time I was there, you know? I mean, people were sort of, like, holerin'. You know I was expecting more reverence."

Obama has demonstrated an increasing number of unattractive vices in the last several months. Add hypocrisy.

The case for basic goods -- civic evangelicalism part 5

This is part 5 of an ongoing series. See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

In a post last week I examined the unfortunate and immature, "progressive Christian" obsession with human conditions such as wealth and poverty, pleasure and pain. This obsession is borne largely out of an inability (or a refusal) to distinguish between basic goods, instrumental goods, and non-goods in the created universe.

By basic goods I mean things that are worth choosing for their own sake. These include knowledge, beauty, and human life.

By instrumental goods I mean things that are valuable only because they enable us to obtain more basic goods. Money, for example, is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Rather, it is to be pursued because it enables the pursuer to feed his family, stay healthy, and give charitably to those who are less fortunate.

By non-goods I mean things that are not to be pursued at all, but are mere by-products of choice. Pleasure is a good example. Neither pleasure nor pain is something to be chosen, though we often experience pleasure and pain as a consequence of our choices. We will experience pleasure as a result of our right choice to have a child, but that child will also bring us pain and suffering. We can also experience both pleasure (short-term) and suffering (long-term) as a result of the wrong choice to engage in sex acts outside of marriage.

Among the basic goods that Christians recognize are two of contemporary importance: human life and conjugal marriage (the union of one man and one woman in lifetime commitment). Many progressives deny that these are basic goods by first denying that basic goods exist in the first place. So, before we get to the cases for the intrinsic value of human life and of marriage (in later posts) we must first defend the notion of intrinsic value. Here we will respond with inductive reasoning, starting with particular cases and working our way out to general principles.

In my native New England, stone walls line the landscape. Historically, stone walls served two valuable purposes. The soil in New England is very rocky, and before it can be tilled and cultivated it must yield its rocks. The stone wall served as a place for farmers to store the rocks once they were removed from the soil. Once constructed, the wall also helped to mark boundary lines between farms or between fields in a single farm.

Today, farms in New England simply cannot compete with the agri-businesses in the West, and most New England farms have stopped operating commercially. In fact, many farmers have sold their land to vacationers who wish to escape the city and establish a second home in a quiet setting. These vacationers often restore stone walls that have decayed over the years. Often they find that the stones on their properties are insufficient to serve the particular aesthetic (the "look") they seek. So they buy stones and have them delivered onto their properties.

Now, the old farmer scratches his head in bewilderment at the sight of trucks bringing rocks onto the land. The farmer always had altogether too many rocks, so the notion that one would bring more rocks in seems like madness. In this respect, the vacationer's treatment of the stone wall is the opposite of the farmer's. But is the vacationer acting immorally?

Of course not. Why not? As the farmer reasonably chose to build a stone wall for the extrinsic benefits of tillable soil and boundary demarcation, the vacationer reasonably chose to re-build the stone wall for the extrinsic value of beauty. Both the farmer and the vacationer instrumentalize the wall, choose it because it is instrumentally valuable for the attainment of extrinsic ends. But there's nothing wrong with that because the wall has no intrinsic value, no value in itself, only instrumental value.

Now imagine a guy who wants to bed a girl who loves poetry. So before taking her to dinner, he memorizes some Keats. After his successful sexual conquest, he dumps her. The guy has acted immorally in at least two respects because he has instrumentalized beauty, knowledge, and another member of the human race. He has used poetry to get the girl and has used the girl to satisfy his desires. The first makes us uncomfortable, the second awakens our sense of injustice. Why?

Unless beauty, knowledge, and human persons have instrinsic value, using beauty, knowledge, and human persons instrumentally to achieve extrinsic ends would not strike us as troublesome. We conclude from this observation that some objects of choice, such as poetry and women, are valuable in and of themselves and are reasonably chosen for their own intrinsic value. Those objects of choice we call basic goods, goods that are chosen not for any more fundamental reason but as reasons themselves.

Single-payer health insurance as a moral obligation

Two of my "progressive Christian" acquaintances have recently made the claim that Americans have a moral obligation to ensure that all persons have health insurance. To them I have posed the following questions, but they have either declined or proven unable to answer.

(1) Whence this moral obligation? How does one come to such a conclusion?

(2) How extensive is the obligation? Must everyone have full coverage for all medical, dental, and pharmaceutical needs, or will lesser levels of coverage satisfy our putative moral obligation? If the latter, are not free market solutions the most efficacious? I wholeheartedly agree with you that this is a complex problem requiring a complex solution. History teaches that markets produce better solutions to complex problems than governments.

(3) What principled limitation exists on our putative moral obligation? Moral obligations are universal. For example, my moral obligation not to take innocent human life extends both to Americans and to non-Americans. On your reasoning, why are we not also morally obligated to provide health care to the billions of uninsured and impoverished in nations other than our own?

(4) How are we to discharge our moral obligation without infringing upon personal autonomy? Some people simply don't want to spend the money for health insurance, and others (particularly the young and healthy) don't need to.

I am trying to avoid the conclusion that these questions have no intelligible answers and that my acquaintances are trying to foreclose debate by calling names. The conclusion becomes more difficult to resist the longer they fail to answer these simple questions.

Dangerous because so very naive

Barack Obama pledges to rid the world of nuclear weapons during his tenure as President. As if the goal were not sufficiently naive, his means are laughably so. "Obama said adhering to nonproliferation treaties would put pressure on nations such as North Korea and Iran."

The notion that Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be so shamed by our voluntary disarmament that they will give up their nuclear ambitions can only be maintained in a very small, very weak, or very immature mind. The Candidate of the Past must be defeated. We cannot afford to capitulate to thugs and terrorists.

Wealth and poverty, two sides, same coin

The most recent edition of Harvard Magazine (Mrs. Discipulus is an alumna) contains a silly screed inveighing against income disparity. That's predictable enough. Contemporary liberals adhere to the ridiculous notion that your financial success is a net loss to someone who is less successful, even if that person is better off as a result. So the corporate shareholders who succeed in business and create jobs for working-class families are, in the twisted lib worldview, harming those very same working-class families for whom they are creating jobs and, therefore, wealth.

The HM author introduces a new term to summarize this concept: "relative deprivation." I quote directly: "The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more."

To articulate such nonsense is to refute it. However, liberal fascination with inequality (and attendant, maleable concepts such as "poverty") flows out of a much deeper metaphysical misunderstanding about the world in which we live. For whatever reason, contemporary liberals have it stuck in their heads that human conditions like poverty and wealth, sickness and health, pleasure and pain, are the really important things in life. This is a narrow, dogmatic view of life.

Mature, reasoning people recognize that the really important things in life are basic human goods, such as knowledge and beauty, and the great virtues, such as love and charity. The human conditions are merely the occasions -- opportunities, if you will -- to practice the great virtues and to enjoy the basic goods.

For this reason, mature, reasoning persons have the capacity to be truly joyful in wealth or poverty, sickness or health, pain or ecstatic pleasure. Liberals lack this capacity. Instead, they look around at the greatest, most just nation in the history of the world and complain that biology has left the genders unequal. They live in the most prosperous time in history, in the most prosperous nation on earth, but they are obsessed with the psychological harm that a middle-class college professor ostensibly suffers by watching his CEO neighbor drive to work every day in his Benz.

These are useful observations to bear in mind as we listen to "progressive Christians" in the coming months drone on and on about inequality in America. Having grown up the oldest of six children in a ten-foot wide trailer and having worked my way into the upper middle class, I look at inequality in the most prosperous nation in history as an amazing opportunity. So who is narrow-minded? The Harvard Magazine-Sojourners crowd, or me?

The Next Bailout

Bloomberg has an article today speculating that Fannie and Freddie, the mortgage giants with tacit government backing, need more capital. The question becomes where will they get the capital? It is likely that the U.S. government will foot the bill. Unfortunately, I have to say that a bailout by the USG is probably necessary given the liquidity these two institutions provide for our mortgage markets. Also, if Fannie and Freddie lost tacit backing, the cost of funds for mortgages would likely sky rocket. The worst part is that Fannie, Freddie, and Congress all had a hand in creating the broken system and now because of their mistakes, we'll be footing the bill. Thanks guys.

Apologies

On behalf of the entire Cloakroom gang, I apologize for the scant content these last few weeks. For several of us, summer is a time to focus on things other than politics, legal developments, and current events. (That's not a good reason for our delinquence, just an excuse.) Posting will continue to be light throughout the remainder of the summer, but when Congress and the federal courts get back up to speed in a few weeks, we will no doubt find ourselves compelled to provide analysis. In the interim you will hear from us from time to time.

Thanks for checking in.

Live by the judicial decision, die by the judicial decision

Largely unable to persuade in the court of public opinion, progressives have spent the last five decades imposing their eschaton-immanentizing worldview on the rest of us through activist courts of the third-branch, impervious-to-democratic-impulse type. The problem with that strategy of legal subjugation is that the courts do not always cooperate.

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided (rightly, in my view) that the Second Amendment secures to individual, private citizens the right to bear arms. (See Ed Whelan's helpful summary, here.) And a million liberal lawyers groaned audibly.

Kennedy's disregard for the meaning of words

Justice Kennedy is at it again. Writing for a 5-4 majority Kennedy today announced that the death penalty may not be imposed upon those who rape children. The natural repugnance decent people feel for child rapists is borne not out of any defect of reason but rather out of an intuitive understanding that child rape is a horrible, awful, indefensible, inexplicably depraved act. Justice Kennedy regards that intuition with contempt.

Kennedy is equally contemptuous of the rule of law and the meaning of words. According to the AP report (I have not yet read the decision), Kennedy reasoned, "The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child." However, the U.S. Constitution contains no requirement that punishment be proportional. Instead, it prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. If execution is not cruel and unusual for a murderer, nothing in logic suggests that it would be cruel or unusual for a child rapist. But in Justice Kennedy's world, in which we are all voiceless subjects, words have no meaning.

Import Tariff on Oil?

Today, during my usual morning intake of Morning Joe, I watched as Pat Buchanan and Tom Friedman agreed that our addiction to oil can only be broken with an import tariff. This discussion was based on Friedman's new book and articles he has written in the past. So, why does this matter?

I believe it marks a unique point in our current events since protectionist conservatives (yes, they exist and Buchanan has always been one. See the Nixon Administration for evidence of this.) and liberal Greenies see the same solution to different problems. In Buchanan's case, protection of "Made in USA" label and in Friedman's case, the reduction of greenhouse gases. The trouble is that if this coalition gains traction we will start down the slippery slope of protectionism and add substantial recessionary pressure to the US economy.

The argument for import tariffs is that the tariff will further increase the price of gasoline, shrinking demand. Additionally, the tariff would generate revenue for the US treasury which could be used for the various and sundry purposes the Federal Government finds to spend our money. The argument goes that instead of feeding foreign government coffers we will feed our government coffers.

Well let's look at some of the inherent problems with a tariff:
-First, the world price for oil will not change. The only place where the price will change is where the tariff is in place (the US).
-If you could up with an argument that the price for oil would drop then the US would be subsidizing world economic growth at our expense. The reason is that while the world would be paying a new low price, the US would still pay a high price. This price differential would give world industry a competitive advantage over US industry.
-There would be a fine balance between government receipts created from the tariff and economic activity lost for the same reason. Could government get it right? Likely not. It would probably require a good bit of tinkering.
-Tangentially, RECESSION and INFLATION. Adding a fixed tariff would drive up prices for energy intensive goods (everything is energy intensive) this would likely drive up prices and would likely stifle growth and cause recession. I defy policymakers to come up with a way that this could be avoided. The only scenario under which it can be is to have an alternative source. Currently, this alternative does not exist. Oh, and please don't say corn based ethanol.
-Finally, increasing the price of oil would disproportionally effect those without discretionary income i.e. the suburban, rural poor, who rely exclusively on automobile transportation.

Hopefully policymakers will see the myriad issues related to tariff increases. Even more importantly, let's hope Pat Buchanan and Tom Friedman drop the subject.

Typical...

It is so predictable. The minute a Republican actually becomes vocal and decides to fight for Republican principles a legion of status quo me-first GOP'ers begin to criticize the action. And again in predictable fashion, the criticism never comes on the record because they are too cowardly to associate their name in public with their bitter sour grapes. Rather, they use the oldest trick in the Washington playbook, the anonymous quote.

Some Republicans say the Republican Study Committee’s ongoing push to define the House GOP’s election-year message is a thinly veiled attempt by the group’s chairman, Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, and other members to put their political ambitions ahead of party needs.

“We should be really focused on the majority party,” said one senior GOP aide. “This is all about giving [Hensarling] the stature, given [presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen.] John McCain’s anti-earmark position, to get him nominated to a senior position in that administration. It is so obvious and he is doing it at the worst time for the Conference. None of this is helpful for anyone other than him.”

Hensarling is not known to be particularly close to McCain, but he was mentored by former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, a McCain ally who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Hensarling was executive director.

The messaging push has led to speculation about Hensarling’s ambitions should McCain win the presidency or if party losses in the House open positions in the GOP leadership. The ambitions of other top members of the RSC, including Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and House Chief Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, have also been the subject of discussion.

This is what status quo power-hungry leadership types have been saying about reformers for years. When Mike Pence was chairman of the conservative Republican Study Group, the nasty leadership aide quotes were everywhere then too. Hensarling should look at these pathetic snipes as a badge of honor. If leadership aides weren't fabricating stories about the chairman of the RSC it would be clear that said chairman was not doing his job. Hensarling is being effective and relevant, and that pisses some people off.

They should get over it. For the good fo the Party and more importantly a nation that desperately needs some real leadership.

The September 10 Candidate

We have here called Barack Obama the Candidate of the Past because of his extraordinary resemblence to Jimmy Carter. Obama is mired in the failed policy proposals of the 1970's.

As Andrew McCarthy today points out, Obama is also mired in the failed national security mindset of another moment of the past, September 10, 2001. McCarthy drives the point home:

When an elitist lawyer like Obama claims the criminal-justice system works against terrorists, he means it satisfies his top concern: due process. And on that score, he’s quite right: We’ve shown we can conduct trials that are fair to the terrorists. After all, we give them lawyers paid for by the taxpayers whom they are trying to kill, mounds of our intelligence in discovery, and years upon years of pretrial proceedings, trials, appeals, and habeas corpus.

As a national-security strategy, however, and as a means of carrying our government’s first responsibility to protect the American people, heavy reliance on criminal justice is an abysmal failure.

A successful counterterrorism strategy makes criminal prosecution a subordinate part of a much broader governmental response. Most of what is needed never happens in a courtroom. It happens in military operations against terrorist strongholds; intelligence operations in which jihadists get assassinated — without trial; intelligence collections in which we cozy up to despicable informants since only they can tell us what we need to know; and aggressive treasury actions to trace terror funds.

Barack Obama lacks the will to oversee these necessary operations, and he is far too enthralled with his own moral and intellectual superiority to deal honestly with the problem of terrorism. For the preservation of all that is good about Western civilization and this great nation, the Candidate of the Past must be defeated.

Supreme Court Roundup

Having been on vacation for two weeks, I missed entirely an annual June tradition. Each year about this time the justices of the United States Supreme Court hand down from on high tablets of stone containing enlightened pronouncements on the state of American law. Some of these pronouncements are sensible, coherent, and foundational to ordered liberty. These tend to be written by Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Scalia, Thomas, or Alito.

Other pronouncements are written by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, or Souter. These tend to be destructive of the rule of law, inconsistent, breathtakingly dismissive of common sense and the meaning of words, and coherent only to mainstream media commentators and liberal law professors.

Into the latter categorty falls last week's Boumediene decision. NRO has an excellent summary of that disastrous judicial event.

I have not yet read today's Dada decision. And Matthew Franck's handy Kennedy Rule, useful for determining whether a SCOTUS case was wrongly decided, does not pertain because the court did not in Dada declare anything unconstitutional. However, it is worth noting that Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Dada on behalf of Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, and Souter. Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito dissent.

I repeat that I have not yet read the decision. It is possible that the majority correctly decided Dada. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Another twisted New York Times columnist

I missed this column last week while on vacation, but Rick Garnett directed attention to it at Mirror of Justice. According to NYT columnist Judith Warner, dads who encourage their daughters to wait for sex until marriage are distinguishable only by slight degree from dads who imprison their daughters in dungeons and rape them repeatedly. Warner expresses "horror" at the commitment of evangelical fathers to protect their daughters' purity, a protection she labels "emotional violence." And, in Warner's twisted worldview, fathers who affirm the beauty of their daughters commit emotional incest.

And liberals wonder why we call it a culture war.