A "Living Constitution" Means Anything and Everything

Keith Burgess-Jackson (AnalPhilosopher) points out that the

editors of The New York Times, in their infinite wisdom, conclude that capital punishment violates the United States Constitution. See here. In this, they disagree with the framers of the Constitution, who wrote that “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” I go with the framers. You?

Me? I’m with the Framers. But then, I don’t believe in the “living Constitution,” wherein one may find anything one wants to find, not only deep in the penumbras but also in open contradiction with the Framers’ plain words.

E Pluribus Unum?

In the preceding post bemoaned the fact that the United States has become

a geographically defined collection of regionally, ethnically, politically, and culturally diverse identity groups. In that respect, what we ironically call the United States has become less coherent than at any time since the Civil War.

All of that splintering would be all right, if it weren’t for the fact that most of the splinter groups try to use the power of the state to bring the other splinter groups to heel. What’s so desperately needed is a return to federalism, in its original conception. As I wrote here,

[t]he constitutional contract charges the federal government with keeping peace among the States, ensuring uniformity in the rules of inter-State and international commerce, facing the world with a single foreign policy and a national armed force, and assuring the even-handed application of the Constitution and of constitutional laws. That is all.

With the federal government as a protective shield, citizens could “vote with their feet,” choose their associates, and argue among themselves about the role of government. I explore that topic in “Finding Liberty,” where I say that

[a]s long as there is meaningful exit there can be a race to the top. Exit serves liberty because it enables each person to find that place whose values come closest to his or her preferred way of life. Places deemed among the most attractive will grow in numbers and prosper; places deemed less attractive will wither, economically if not in terms of population. Under the right conditions . . . , the balance will tilt toward liberty, that is, toward a modus vivendi that seems, for most people, to offer happiness. That is the essence of federalism, as it was envisioned by the Framers.

That post is part of a series, “The Meaning of Liberty,” the several parts of which are consolidated here . The bottom line of the series:

Liberty suffers when a central government does more than make war, conduct foreign affairs, and regulate inter-State commerce for the sole purpose of ensuring against the erection of barriers to trade.

Liberty suffers when a central government imposes rules on all at the instigation of the majority or coalitions of minorities.

Liberty thrives when the rules that govern relations among the members of a group are agreed among the members of the group — even if those rules vary from group to group. One group’s liberty may be another group’s strait-jacket, and vice versa.

The motto of the United States — e pluribus unum (out of many, one) — will not be realized unless and until “Blue Staters” embrace true federalism.

P.S. Think of true federalism as being like a family in which all the children are grown. (No, I am not positing an all-wise, all-caring government as parent.) In most such families, the members get along best when each goes his or her own way, which is why Ma and Pa live in Michigan, Junior lives in Virginia, Sis lives in Iowa, and The Twins have split their act and gone to Oregon and Texas. They keep in touch, and they help each other through personal crises, but otherwise they stay out of each other’s hair (as the saying goes).

The State of the Union . . .

. . . is truly abysmal, when I think about it. And I was prompted to think about it by Mike Rappaport’s post, “The Decline of American Civilization,” at The Right Coast. Rappaport says that

the criticisms of Donald Rumsfeld by retired generals are another example of the violation of traditional norms that have served our country. Such criticisms both undermine civilian control of the military and can be exploited by our enemies. Norms of this sort are important and valuable but are increasingly ignored. Retired Presidents used to avoid strongly criticizing the current President, especially when the criticisms would be made on foreign soil and would be about foreign relations. But Presidents Clinton and Carter are happy to do it.

I suppose that the country will continue to exist, even though these norms are violated. But the nation will change for the worse. It will be harder to stay unified and to deal with one another in a civil way. And that, in the long run, is a big concern.

My reaction: The generals’ criticisms of Rumsfeld won’t make the nation worse off. Rather, they are symptoms of the already decrepit condition of the nation. In fact, as nationhood used to be understood, we no longer have a nation — as evidenced, to take but one example, by the Left’s resistance to the war on terror. What we have is a geographically defined collection of regionally, ethnically, politically, and culturally diverse identity groups. In that respect, what we ironically call the United States has become less coherent than at any time since the Civil War.

Liberalism vs. Leftism

Joe Miller has an excellent post on the subject at Bellum et Mores. I cannot resist quoting from my comment:

An excellent post. I [Tom] think the heart of the matter lies in this statement [from Joe’s post]:

Roughly, then, I [Joe] take liberalism to consist of three main theses:

Respect for individual autonomy.

A commitment to equality of opportunity.

State neutrality.

Liberalism (of the classical variety, which I [Tom] call libertarianism) differs from Leftism mainly in that libertarians favor process over outcome. . . . Leftists, on the other hand, do not respect individual autonomy, are not committed to equality of opportunity (they want to slant the playing field in a certain direction), and they definitely do not want a neutral state. What they want is for certain “classes” and ideas to triumph over others, and they will violate autonomy, equality, and neutrality to get their wishes.

Here’s what I didn’t think to say in my comment: The question remains whether there is such a thing as a middle ground, in which “liberalism” (of the modern variety) can be distinguished from Leftism. Joe seems to think that there is such a middle ground. I do not.

I will amend this post if Joe replies to my comment and/or this post.

Hillary’s Latest Brainstorm

Thirteen years ago Americans were saved from HillaryCare. Now the wannabe president-of-us-all wants to undermine one of the pillars of economic growth, which is capital investment. Larry Kudlow has the story; here’s his opening:

In a speech delivered in Chicago earlier this week, the New York Senator went on ad nauseam about all these alleged problems plaguing our booming American economy and how to fix them. She said “we cannot go on letting our basic infrastructure decay and failing to invest in new technologies if we expect America to maintain its economic leadership.”

Mrs. Clinton’s idea? She wants to see us put into place a “national investment authority.” This brilliant idea is based on a recent report by Felix Rohatyn and Senator Warren Rudman that would create some newfangled government institution to help “finance accelerated commitment to rebuilding our national infrastructure.” Read between the lines and all this means is just more intrusive meddling and spending from Washington. We know where that gets us.

Kudlow goes on to explain why Hillary’s latest brainstorm is yet another dangerous Clintonian fantasy. And yet, Ms. Rodham Clinton’s proposal will resonate with the intelligentsia, who like to believe that they are smarter than markets, and who certainly would like to tell us what to eat for breakfast (for starters).

One of the intelligentsia who probably applauds HillaryInvest is Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, who thinks he has proved the superiority of government over the private sector in the realm of R&D. I popped that thought balloon a while back, in this post, where I concluded that

[t]he true private rate of return to R&D is about 4 to 6 times that of the government rate of return. What else would one expect, knowing that the private sector responds to the signals sent by consumers while government just makes it up as it goes along?

But logic and facts will not daunt committed statists like Hillary Clinton and Joe Stiglitz.

Slippery Paternalists

Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia echoes my objections to “libertarian paternalism.” He says, for example, that

[t]he paternalists’ rhetorical purpose . . . is to get us to think of paternalism as all one thing, a nice continuous spectrum from policies that restrict choice slightly to those that restrict choice substantially. As they slide along this spectrum, they fail (I think deliberately) to draw attention to when they’ve crossed the line from libertarian (non-coercive) to unlibertarian (coercive). . . .

If paternalism can be coercive (as with a sin tax) or non-coercive (as with an employers pension plan rules), it is crucial to distinguish between these two types; acceptance of one form of paternalism does not imply acceptance of the other. Lest it seem I’m drawing a distinction without a difference, we should note that private non-coercive paternalism can be avoided much more easily than the public coercive variety. You can choose whether to take a job with a restrictive benefits package; you cannot choose whether to contribute to Social Security. You can choose whether to join AA or Weight Watchers; you cannot opt out of a sin tax.

Moreover, what “libertarian paternalists” really seem to want is for government to require such things as restrictive benefits packages (e.g., automatic opt-in to retirement plans).

UPDATE: I have just discovered an excellent article by Arnold Kling at TCS Daily. Some excerpts:

Roll over, Adam Smith. You said that we can trust the self-interested actions of individuals to benefit others. You said that an “invisible hand” guides markets, meaning that they did not require government control. But some of your economist descendants now claim that the self-interested actions of individuals do not even benefit themselves. Instead, government should intervene to make sure that individual choice serves to promote subjective well-being.

Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman hail the progress that has been made in measuring subjective well-being, or happiness. They say that researchers in this field, which is on the boundary between economics and psychology, have developed reliable methods to measure how well a person is feeling. This in turn enables them to make reliable assessments of how happiness is affected by income (both in absolute terms and relative to that of others), marital status, and how people allocate time among various activities, from socializing (good) to commuting alone (bad). . . .

[T]he reader may have surmised that I am not altogether sympathetic to Krueger and Kahneman. In fact, you may think that the totalitarian examples I have come up with are an unfair distortion of their work. They merely claimed to be “interested in maximizing society’s welfare.” Hasn’t that always been the goal of economists?

Indeed most economists, with the exception of the Austrian school, have seen the economist as an adviser to government. The advice of Adam Smith and David Ricardo was to promote free trade. To this day, I believe that the most reliable advice economists can give on topics such as trade, outsourcing, and immigration, is to point out the broad, long-term and often unappreciated benefits of these activities relative to their narrow, short-term and exaggerated adverse effects.

In the twentieth century, economists refined their analysis of the social benefits of markets. They proved that free markets lead to an optimal allocation of resources. This proof rests on a specific definition of “optimal allocation” and, more importantly, on perfectly competitive markets.

Because some important industries clearly are not perfectly competitive, economists conceded the desirability of regulation of such industries. Then, during and after the Great Depression, economists focused on the need for government to manage the business cycle and in particular to fight unemployment.* Finally, in the 1970’s and later, economists discovered many types of market imperfections, notably problems related to information, that could be used to justify government intervention — see my essay on Hayekians and Stiglitzians.

My point is that — with the exception of the Austrians — economists have been going down a slippery slope of interventionism for a long time. Krueger and Kahneman are simply further down that slope.

Here’s my take on “libertarian paternalism” and related matters:

Libertarian Paternalism
A Libertarian Paternalist’s Dream World
The Short Answer to Libertarian Paternalism
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice
Another Thought about Libertarian Paternalism
The Economics of Corporate Fitness Programs
Another Voice Against the New Paternalism

Where’s Substantive Due Process When You Need It?

McQ at QandO asks “Massachusetts ‘health care’ prelude to government takeover?” — and answers in the affirmative. When it happens, I am sure that the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to step in. The Court ought to invalidate any such takeover as a violation of liberty of contract, which is guaranteed in Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution. The Court used to invoke the doctrine of substantive due process to uphold liberty of contract. As I pointed out here:

The Framers understood very well that obligation of contracts (or liberty or freedom of contract) is both a matter of liberty and a matter of property. For to interfere legislatively with liberty of contract amounts to a deprivation of due process because such interference prevents willing parties from employing their labor or property in the pursuit of otherwise lawful ends. That is, the legislature finds them “guilty” of otherwise lawful actions by forbidding and penalizing those actions.

State-run health insurance would deprive health-care providers and their patients of the freedom to decide the terms under which they will do business with one another.

This post at The Volokh Conspiracy suggests that the concept of substantive due process, which came to maturity in Lochner v. New York (1905), only to be cast aside during the New Deal, may be regaining respectability. If that’s true — and I hope it is — it will be just in time to save the citizens of Massachusetts from the Commonwealth’s version of socialized medicine.

It’s Mostly a Matter of Attitude

Leftism/anarcho-capitalism vs. conservativism/neolibertarianism:

Libertarian-Conservatives Are from the Earth, Liberals Are from the Moon
The Worriers
More about the Worrying Classes
A Dissonant Vision

Hanging Separately

Norman F. Hapke Jr. has an insightful post at The American Thinker. In “The Antiwar Crowd Forgets We’re All in This Together,” he writes:

Wellington is reputed to have said, “A great nation cannot fight a small war.” His country’s success in the 19th century belied that idea for Great Britain, but our experience in Viet Nam and Iraq lends some credence to the phrase. In neither place were we ever in any danger of losing militarily, but in each our adversaries have focused on the real center of gravity, our self-confidence and will-to-win.

Our enemies are vile and heartless but they are not stupid. There is a direct bright line from the Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Saigon in 1963 through Somalia in 1998 to Abu Ghraib and every suicide bomber driving the streets of Baghdad today. They know we are susceptible to what the media, by its institutional imperative, wants to show us, and they exploit our openness. That fact of our society is a given.

What is not a given is how our elites have reacted. . . .

Our elites and politicians have failed to realize that the best chance we have of winning this war quickly and with minimum losses is if our adversary sees a united, resolute America putting its disagreements aside so that it can bring maximum power and ingenuity to bear on achieving its objectives. If we foreclose the only avenue they have of ever coming close to defeating us, the war will soon be resolved. We can argue the origins of the war, the faulty intel, and all those presently irrelevant issues when our boot is on the bloody neck of the last terrorist. Until then we should concentrate on winning. No one on this planet can defeat us. We can only defeat ourselves.

Precisely. I concluded “Shall We All Hang Separately?” with these thoughts:

The Left has, by its words and deeds over the decades, seceded from the mutual-defense pact of the Constitution. The Left has served notice that it will do everything in its power to weaken the ability of those Americans who aren’t post-patriotic to prepare for and execute an effective mutual defense.

Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And Lincoln was right, but he was able to reunite the “house” by force. That is not an option now. The Left has more effectively seceded from the Union than did the Confederacy, but the Left’s secession cannot be rectified by force.

And so, those Americans who wish “to provide for the common defence” are forced to share a foxhole with those post-patriots who wish to undermine “the common defence.”

If the Left’s agenda prevails, we shall indeed all hang separately.

Two Heroes and a Blackguard

Laurels to

[t]wo Ukraininan doctors, Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ishchenko, [who] have been seeking asylum in Ireland since 2004, after they were forced to flee their country for exposing appalling human rights abuses of women and unborn children in the Ukraine.

The doctors were part of a group working to uncover a macabre system of medical trafficking in the bodies of unborn babies, European Life Network reported today. Doctors were deceiving women into aborting their babies for false “medical” reasons, and then selling the bodies of the children. The children would be aborted live, and their bodies cut into separate organs. In some cases live dissection took place.

Most of the body parts were apparently sold to the burgeoning cosmetic industry of “foetal tissue” youth-enhancing treatments, as well as quack “medical therapies.”

In many cases, women were paid to get pregnant and to deliver the baby at a given gestation. They were paid a higher price for carrying the child closer to term, since abortion is illegal in the Ukraine after 12 weeks gestation.

Dr. Eric Pianka, on the other hand, probably roots for the dark side:

[A] few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka . . . , the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. . . .

. . . Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. . . .

Pianka . . . began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it’s too late.

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world’s population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved. . . .

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third’s of the world’s population. . . .

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn’t merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause. . . .

He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, “Smarter people have fewer kids.” He said those who don’t have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, “. . . because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn’t care made more babies.” He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and “I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too.”

With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered.

Pianka and his sychophants, I am sure, believe that they are among the chosen 10 percent who should be spared. Pianka clearly belongs to that breed of doom-sayers which wants a society that operates according to its strictures. But society refuses to cooperate, and so the doom-sayers conjure historically and scientifically invalid explanations for the behavior of man and nature. By doing so they are able to convince themselves — and gullible others — that their vision is the correct one. Because they cannot satisfy their power-lust in the real world, they retaliate by conjuring a theoretical world of doom. It is as if they walk around under a thought balloon which reads “Take that!”

I would trade a million Piankas for Drs. Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ishchenko.

(Thanks to my daughter-in-law and son for pointing me to the linked stories.)

More Communitarians

Occam of the Carbuncle improves on my analysis of communitarianism:

. . . Liberty Corner offers a convenient compass for navigating the political jungle.

“The communitarian state is simply too seductive. It co-opts its citizens through progressive corruption: higher spending to curry favor with voting blocs, higher taxes to fund higher spending and to perpetuate the mechanisms of the state, still higher spending, and so on. Each voting bloc insists on sustaining its benefits — and increasing them at every opportunity — for one of two reasons. Many voters actually believe that largesse of the communitarian state is free to them, and some of them are right. Other voters know better, but they grab what they can get because others will grab it if they don’t.” . . .

I would add a third type of communitarian voter to Tom’s list – the one who knows the state’s largesse is not free, but sincerely believes that the strictly enforced “compassion” of collectivist initiatives is the best way. This voter is typically driven by a belief in the inevitability of poverty and a sort of noblesse oblige toward the less “fortunate”. Typically, the paying of taxes is viewed by this sort of voter as a sacred duty and even a privilege. The state is seen as a massive charitable organization.

Spot on.

Today’s Recommended Web Reading

At LegalAffairs Debate Club, John Robertson and Barbara Katz Rodman debate “Choosing Your Child’s Sex?” The question for debate: Should it be unlawful for parents to select an infant’s sex through abortion or in vitro techniques and, if so, under what circumstances should it be legal? Robertson offers the usual liberal cant (“we prize individual autonomy and reproductive choice”) and tries to cajole fellow liberal Katz Rodman into going along with him. She won’t:

In this “more choice is better” argument, the children that are never created (whether as fetuses aborted or embryos unselected or sperm washed away) can hardly be said to be harmed by the fact of their non-being. So then there are the children who are “chosen,” the selected ones, chosen for their sex. I think there really is the potential for harm there—any time we give parents reason to think they can control the kind of people their children are, I think we are doing damage to the child, the parent, the relationship. . . .

A woman with one or two daughters will face more, not less pressure to produce a son if sex selection becomes part of ordinary practice. The new “choice” will probably pretty quickly become an obligation.

And as to whether “family balance” will inevitably lead to sex selection in the first place: you know the “slippery slope” argument? Think greased chute.

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek explains once more (this time in “Mental Experiment“) why international trade isn’t a zero-sum game or a threat to the well-being of Americans:

A lot of people are worried about China as an economic threat to the United States. I’m not. China’s economic success is good for Americans. When Americans buy toys and clothes and iPods made in China it means that we have more people and capital available to make other things.

A variation on the Chinese threat is that someday, if they keep growing, they’ll pass us. This is the view that economics is like the Olympics. If you don’t finish first, you’re stuck with the bronze or silver medal or worse, you don’t even get to the medal stand. But economic success is not like the Olympics. It’s not a zero sum game. . . .

What if you woke up one more morning and discovered . . . . [that the] Chinese had mismeasured their national income information and it turned out that the Chinese, in fact, had a per capita income many times that of the United States. . . . . How would it change your well-being? Would it make any difference whatsoever?

Maxwell Goss at Right Reason points to a story about

Dutch MP Sharon Dijksma [who] proposes fining women with college degrees who choose to stay at home instead of entering the paid workforce. Dijksma explains: “A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work — that is destruction of capital. If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

The first mistake, of course, is the subsidization of education, which encourages persons who will not use it (or use it well) to partake of it at taxpayers’ expense. The second mistake is to assume that it is a “waste” to educate women who choose not work outside the home. Mothers are the main civilizing influence in society — or they were before they went “to work” in droves. It makes a lot more sense to have college-educated mothers than it does to have college-educated pharmaceutical salesmen (to take but one of many examples of “wasted” education).

The Federal Election Commission has decided — more or less — to go along with the First Amendment. Tongue Tied reports:

The very idea of rules for the internet is anathema to me but America’s FEC does not seem to think so. The rules they have just handed down have no terrors for bloggers at the moment but as sure as night follows day, more and more regulations will follow.

The Tongue Tied post then links to a story that includes a recap of some of the main points of interest to bloggers:

Feds’ Internet rules

The FEC’s final Internet regulations adopted on Monday are less onerous than an earlier version. Here’s what they say:

• Paid political advertising appearing on someone else’s Web site would have to be reported, regardless of how little or how much it costs. But that responsibility would lie with the candidate, political party or committee backing the ad–not a Web site accepting the ads.

• All ads that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate or solicit donations would have to carry disclaimers.

• Bloggers and other individual commentators wouldn’t have to disclose payments received from candidates, political parties or campaign committees–but those groups would have to report payments to bloggers.

• No one except registered political committees would be required to put disclaimers on political e-mailings or Web sites. The e-mail requirement would kick in only if the committee sent out more than 500 substantially similar unsolicited messages at a time.

• The media exemption enjoyed by traditional news outlets would be extended to “any Internet or electronic publication,” which could include everything from online presences of major media companies to individual bloggers.

Thanks to the FEC — for nothing.

A Political Compass

From a post that is almost two years old, but still on-target:

The left-right, liberal-conservative taxonomies of the political spectrum fail because they are linear and lacking in subtlety. My alternative is a . . . taxonomy with these four major points arrayed on a circular continuum:

• Anarchy — “might makes right” without an effective state to referee the fight

• Libertarianism — the minimal state for the protection of life, property, and liberty

• Communitiarianism — the regulation of private institutions to produce “desirable” outcomes in such realms as income distribution, health, safety, education, and the environment

• Statism — outright state control of most institutions, reached either as an extension of communitarianism or via post-statist anarchy or near-anarchy, as in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China.

Think of anarchy, libertarianism, communitarianism, and statism as the North, East, South, and West of a compass. The needle swings mostly from anarchy to statism to communitarianism, and occasionally from communitarianism toward libertarianism, but never very far in that direction. . . .

The communitarian state is simply too seductive. It co-opts its citizens through progressive corruption: higher spending to curry favor with voting blocs, higher taxes to fund higher spending and to perpetuate the mechanisms of the state, still higher spending, and so on. Each voting bloc insists on sustaining its benefits — and increasing them at every opportunity — for one of two reasons. Many voters actually believe that largesse of the communitarian state is free to them, and some of them are right. Other voters know better, but they grab what they can get because others will grab it if they don’t.

I remembered that post as I ruminated on the naïveté of anarchism, which is only a way-station to statism. Anarchy is an inherently unstable régime, favored by naïfs who probably wouldn’t last more than a few days in it. As for modern “liberalism,” it has become nothing more than statism.

Whiny Kids

There’s a dubious study which claims to show (according to a journalist) that

the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints . . . grew up to be a conservative.

There’s no need to rely on an ill-designed study to identify the ideological leanings of whiners. Just watch the news and surf the web and you will find them in abundance — mainly on the Left. For more, read this, and follow the links therein.

P.S. Republicans Happier than Democrats, Independents

P.P.S. One of Michelle Malkin’s readers adds this thought:

It would seem that there is a limited amount of whiny childishness that each person expends in a lifetime. Conservatives use theirs up as children while liberals get older and then become whiny children.

P.P.P.S. Malkin has more.

A Black Bigot Speaks

If anything exemplifies Leftists’ condescenscion to blacks it’s this op-ed piece* in the L.A. Times by Erin Aubry Kaplan (right). The op-ed is about former White House staffer (and black Republican) Claude Allen, who recently was charged with theft. The most telling bits:

I don’t support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less . . . .

Here is a man who, like most black conservatives, has had to do an awful lot of personal and political rationalizing to pay dues . . . .

In so many words, Allen and other black conservatives are too “dumb” to know that conservatism is bad for them. And/or they’re just power-seeking Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas who suck up to powerful whites in return for access to power and the perks of high office. Kaplan (like her compatriots on the Left) is unwilling to credit Allen and other black conservatives with having a principled attachment to conservatism.

Kaplan’s own blackness doesn’t excuse her profound bigotry. It merely underscores her status as a “house black” at the Left-wing L.A. Times, where she spouts the party line in the hope of keeping blacks “in line” — that is, voting for Democrats in order to perpetuate the regulatory-welfare state that has done so much, for so long, to undermine black families and stifle the initiative of young blacks.
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* Free registration required. Try latimes@fastchevy.com as a username and password as a password.

Sprawl

A few days ago I left a comment on a post whose author bemoaned sprawl in the Atlanta area. I wrote:

How awful. Tasteless people want to live in the exurbs of Atlanta in houses that may be faux mansions but are probably good value, compared with the prices they’d pay for the same space and features in or near Atlanta. The developers have the county commissioners in their pockets, eh? How awful that owners of land are “allowed” to build houses on that land to meet the needs of consumers. If you and the crunchy cons don’t want to live amongst the “unwashed” don’t. I wouldn’t want to live amongst them either, but I don’t begrudge their their right to live where it suits them. I certainly don’t begrudge them the right to flee the big city, even if it’s for a McMansion. What’s your alternative? Force people to live cheek-to-jowl in the “friendly confines” of Atlanta — just so you drive through the countryside without being offended by their abysmal taste in architecture? Or perhaps you’d like to make birth control and abortion mandatory so the population stops growing. There’s lots of countryside out there. If you don’t like what you see in one spot, go to another spot. Better yet, buy some for yourself and set up covenants that will preserve it in its natural state, for your enjoyment and that of your heirs. Nothing wrong with that, either.

Today, at The Weekly Standard, I find a review by Vincent J. Cannato of Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. Toward the end of the review, Cannato says this:

While suburban sprawl might not be everyone’s cup of tea, (including mine) sprawl-like communities seem to afford a large number of people the kinds of lives they wish to lead. Sprawl critics have yet to convince large numbers of Americans that their solutions for engineering private choices about how and where to live and work will result in greater social benefits or happiness.

Sprawl is messy, chaotic, and sometimes annoying. In short, it is everything one expects from a free and democratic society. Leave the neat and clean societies for totalitarian regimes. Sprawl creates problems, just like every other social trend; but to damn it for its problems is akin to outlawing the sun for causing skin cancer.

Robert Bruegmann reminds us that much of the anti-sprawl crusade is a result of a rising level of prosperity, and the complexity of millions of individual decisions made on a daily basis by millions of citizens. Better to have to deal with long commutes and strained infrastructure than malaria, cholera, or declining life expectancy.

In terms of problems, I’d take sprawl any day.

Me, too.

A Test of Morality

Anyone who opposes the death penalty for terrorist scum and favors euthanizing innocent life is depraved.

The Heart of the Matter

From Mark Steyn’s appreciation of the late Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005):

Forty years after McCarthy’s swift brutal destruction of the most powerful Democrat in the second half of the 20th century [LBJ], it remains unclear whether his party will ever again support a political figure committed to waging serious war, any war: Carter confined himself to a disastrous helicopter rescue mission in Iran; Clinton bombed more countries in a little over six months than the supposed warmonger Bush has hit in six years, but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory or Belgrade embassy, it was always desultory and uncommitted. Even though the first Gulf War was everything they now claim to support – UN-sanctioned, massive French contribution, etc – John Kerry and most of his colleagues voted against it. Joe Lieberman is the lonesomest gal in town as an unashamedly pro-war Democrat, and even Hillary Clinton’s finding there are parts of the Democratic body politic which are immune to the restorative marvels of triangulation. Gene McCarthy’s brief moment in the spotlight redefined the party’s relationship with the projection of military force. That’s quite an accomplishment. Whether it was in the long-term strategic interests of either the party or American liberalism is another question. Yet those few months in the snows of New Hampshire linger over the Democratic landscape like an eternal winter.

As I once put it, the

Democrat Party began its veer to the hard left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war candidacy. McCarthy didn’t win the party’s nomination that year, but his strong showing made reflexive anti-war rhetoric a respectable staple of Democrat discourse.

The Democrats proceeded in 1972 to nominate George McGovern, who seems moderate only by contrast with Ramsey Clark and Michael Moore. Since McGovern’s ascendancy, the left-wing nuts generally have dominated the party — in voice if not in numbers. Nominees since McGovern: Carter (a latter-day Tokyo Rose), Mondale (Carter’s one-term accomplice), Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — all well to the left of the mainstream (to borrow some Democrat rhetoric). Bill Clinton (of the failed plan to socialize health care) became a moderate only because he faced Republican majorities in Congress. Clinton lately [in his comments about the war in Iraq] has been showing his true colors.

(Thanks to Ed Driscoll for the pointer to Steyn’s piece.)

Calling a Nazi a Nazi

UPDATED, 03/18/06

Steven Pinker (quoted by AnalPhilosopher) says:

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. . . . It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.

So say I:

Hitler was “conservative.” The canard that will not die. Hitler was a statist Leftist who would have been at home in today’s Democrat Party.

Do I exaggerate about Nazism’s affinity with the Democrat Party? The common ground between Nazism and Democrats spans eugenics (Democrats: abortion and euthanasia), class/race warfare (Dems: reverse racism, “soak the rich”), state control of business (Dems: if it moves, regulate it; if it doesn’t move, tax it), the suppression of opposing views (Dems: campus speech codes, disruption of conservative speakers, efforts to muzzle the blogosphere). Those strike me as rather fundamental similarities.

Consider this quotation about the founder of the modern Democrat Party and today’s regulatory-welfare state:

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932. Faced with the Great Depression — a depression which had been caused by government itself — Roosevelt’s “solution” was to implement the socialist-fascist economic system under which Americans now suffer. Under the banner of “saving America’s free-enterprise system,” FDR was directly responsible for the abandonment of America’s 150-year history of free enterprise.

Arguing that the American people could no longer be trusted to be charitable to others, FDR claimed that government — the organized means of coercion and compulsion — was needed to help those in need. And to effect this claim, he secured the passage of his New Deal for Americans. Roosevelt used the disastrous results of one governmental intervention — political manipulation of money — to justify another — the socialist ideal of using government to steal from those who have in order to give the loot to those who need. . . .

[I]t was through the income tax and the power to expand money and credit that Roosevelt was able to accomplish effectively his political plundering and looting, not only from the rich but from everyone in all walks of life.

But Roosevelt did more than just enshrine into the American political and economic system the ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin (the mass murderer FDR affectionately referred to as “Uncle Joe”). Greatly admiring Benito Mussolini’s fascist system in Italy, Roosevelt proceeded to implement the same type of economic system in the U.S. For example, his National Recovery Act gave him virtually unlimited dictatorial powers over American business and industry. And any American citizen who did not do his “patriotic” duty by supporting the NRA and its “Blue Eagle” soon found himself at the receiving end of FDR’s vengeance and retaliation.

And it was during this period of time that such alien schemes as the Social Security Act, the FDIC, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Emergency Banking Relief Act the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Securities Act, and the National Labor Relations Act came into existence — all with the aim of taking control of people’s lives as well as absolving them from responsibility for errors and foolhardiness by giving them the political loot that had been stolen from others. . . .

And what was the reaction of the American people to the evil, immoral, and tyrannical acts of FDR? Like people in other parts of the world who were suffering under dictatorial rule — Russians, Germans, and Italians — most of them reacted like sheep — meekly going along with their own slaughter and, in many instances, ardently supporting it. . . .

For several years, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by four justices — Sutherland, Butter, Van Devanter, and McReynolds — declared FDR’s socialist and fascist New Deal policies in violation of the United States Constitution — in violation of every principle of individual liberty and limited government on which this nation was founded.

But the end came in 1937. In what many judicial scholars say was a result of Roosevelt’s disgraceful and pathetic attempt to pack the court with some of his cronies, a fifth justice — Owen J. Roberts, whose vote had helped to invalidate much of the New Deal — shifted his vote in favor of Roosevelt’s policies. And with Roosevelt thereafter being able to replace dying and retiring justices with ones who would do his bidding, the era of American economic liberty came to a sad and tragic end.

More than economic liberty came to a sad and tragic end under FDR:

[E]conomic and personal liberty are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve our personal values, and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. When the state restricts economic liberty, it necessarily restricts personal liberty, and vice versa. The state simply cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving socio-economic network.

FDR didn’t believe that. Neither did Hitler or Stalin. Neither do a lot of Democrats.

I am sick and tired of hearing Leftists (i.e., a lot of Democrats) call conservatives and libertarians “fascists” and “Nazis.” It’s time to call Democrats what they (or a lot of them) are: Hitler’s (and Stalin’s) brothers and sisters under the skin. Fascist, Socialist, Communist, Nazi, Leftist — they’re all pretty much the same thing as far as I’m concerned. Different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind.

UPDATE: David N. Mayer says that

those people on the left-side of the traditional left-right political spectrum who call themselves and their policies “progressive” are abusing the word. Progressive, according to most dictionaries, means “favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are,” “making progress toward better conditions, employing or advocating more enlightened ideas,” or “going forward or onward.” Rather than being truly “progressive,” those who label themselves by that word are, in fact, reactionaries: they adhere to, and they advocate a continuation and expansion, of the failed policies of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.

There’s nothing “progressive” about the socialist, paternalistic policies that American leftists advocate. The 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state they want to expand was itself based on the 19^th-century statist policies of Germany’s Otto von Bismarck; and Bismarck’s statism was the old European wine – the paternalism that for centuries had been the dominant public policy of the feudal monarchies of Europe – rebottled in 19^th-century packaging. Like the conservatives (those on the right side of the traditional left-right political spectrum) whom they claim to oppose, left-liberal “progressives” are really advocates of paternalism and collectivism. Left-liberals and conservatives differ only in the type of 19^th-century paternalism they want to continue or expand. Conservatives (paternalists/collectivists of the right) seek generally to use the coercive power of government to impose Victorian-era morals, while their brethren on the left seek generally to use the coercive power of the government to redistribute wealth. Both sides would willingly sacrifice individual freedom and self-responsibility in order to advance their collectivist agenda, their notion of the so-called “common good” of society.

That’s just the beginning. There’s a long bill of particulars. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s mostly on target. Go read it.

The Adolescent Rebellion Syndrome

AnalPhilosopher makes a good point in “Childishness on Campus“:

Academics are in a state of arrested emotional development. They have no real-world responsibilities, so they can—and do—revert to childishness. Their students, who are in adolescent rebellion against their parents and other authority figures, are all too happy to emulate them. They absorb the jargon, the modes of thought and feeling, and the attitudes of disrespectfulness and incivility. These students are in for a rude awakening when they enter the working world, where seriousness, respectfulness, discipline, and civility are not just encouraged but required.

In fact, he echoes my thoughts about adolescent rebellion and other forms of intellectual immaturity, which are to be found mainly — but not exclusively — among “artists,” academicians, and the Left generally:

The truth is that in art — as in “serious” music — the best work that could be done had been done by about 1900. That left Picasso, Braque, and their ilk — like Schoenberg, Berg, and their ilk — with two options: Create new works using the tools that had been perfected by the masters who came before them, or disown the tools in a fit of adolescent rebellion. The artists and “serious” composers of the 20th century, in the main, took the second option. (07/24/04)

* * *

If you can’t defend Clinton on his own merits, make up an absolutely silly reason to discredit his opponents [as Paul Fussell does:]

“Conservatives know that I cannot be trusted… I hate them in general, I grew up in that atmosphere, my father was a corporate lawyer and always voted Republican — that’s one reason I decided not to. It’s a standard boy’s reaction. If your father’s a dentist you either become a dentist or you ridicule dentists for the rest of your life.”

At least he admits that his liberalism arose from adolescent rebelliousness, which I have contended is a primary source of liberalism. (08/04/04)

* * *

There’s surprisingly little chatter in the libertarian-conservative segment of the blogosphere about this:

About 70% of voters agreed to add this sentence to the Missouri Constitution: “To be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman.”

. . . Stanley Kurtz at The Corner adds this:

Apparently, …Democrats outnumbered Republicans at the polls. That makes the already dramatic 71 percent vote in favor of the Missouri marriage amendment all the more impressive. The Post-Dispatch also notes that gay marriage advocates outspent opponents, and launched a major television ad campaign to boot….

In a post that predates the Missouri vote, the usually sensible Virginia Postrel opines that:

People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love.

A lot of “people” support abortion rights and gay marriage simply because it’s the politically correct thing to do — a litmus test of one’s open-mindedness and liberality — and a form of delayed adolescent rebellion against moldy reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. (08/04/04)

* * *

It’s obvious that Osama favors a Kerry victory. Why else would he go to such lengths to try to discredit Bush and remind American voters that the “choice” is ours?

Does that equate Osama and the American left? It would by the left’s vilely strident, anti-war, anti-Bush rhetoric. But I won’t stoop to the left’s level of illogic. I’ll say only that some on the left sympathize with Osama’s ends and means because they’re essentially acting out a form of adolescent rebellion. (10/30/04)

* * *

[A]lthough Ward Churchill and his ilk are despicable human beings, I don’t care what they say as much as I care that they represent what seems to pass for “thought” in large segments of the academic community. Clearly, universities are failing in their responsibility to uphold academic standards. Left-wing blather isn’t knowledge, it’s prejudice and hate and adolescent rebellion, all wrapped up in a slimy package of academic pretentiousness. (02/28/05)

* * *

The Left will bitterly oppose any nominee for the Supreme Court if the Left finds in that nominee a scintilla of opposition to legal abortion.

What I want to know is why that issue is of such great importance to the Left. What is it about abortion (or the “right” to have one) that seizes the passions of the Left? Is it the notion of self-ownership, that is, the “right” to do with “one’s body” as one will? If the Left were consistent about self-ownership it wouldn’t also encourage government to take money from others in order to provide “free” programs, ranging from health care to bike trails.

The Left’s selective embrace of self-ownership indicates that its elevation of abortion to sacramental status has deeper, more psychological roots. The Left is in an arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “Daddy” doesn’t want me to smoke, so I’m going to smoke; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to drink, so I’m going to drink; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to have sex, so I’m going to have sex. But, regardless of my behavior, I expect “Daddy” to give me an allowance, and birthday presents, and cell phones, and so on.

“Daddy,” in the case of abortion, is government, which had banned abortion in many places. If it’s banned, the Left wants it. But the Left — like an adolescent — also expects government to cough up money (others’ money, of course) to quench its material desires.

Persons of the Left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want, regardless of the consequences for others. The Left’s stance on abortion should be viewed as just one more adolescent tantrum in a vast repertoire of tantrums. (07/21/05)

* * *

The effort to portray conservativism as an aberrant psychological disorder goes back to the publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality, about which I was instructed by Prof. Milton Rokeach, author of The Open and Closed Mind (related links). Here is how Alan Wolfe, who is sympathetic to the thesis of The Authoritarian Personality, describes its principal author:

Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of “critical theory,” a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism.

Hmm. . . . Very interesting. . . .

How does Rokeach’s work relate to Adorno’s? Here’s Rokeach, in his own words:

The Open and Closed Mind grew out of my need to better understand and thus to better resist continuing pressures during my earlier years on my intellectual independence, on the one side from orthodox religion and on the other side from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Research as a continuation of adolescent rebellion? Hmm. . . . I wonder what Dr. Freud would make of that? (02/01/06)

* * *

The point is that liberty and happiness cannot be found in the abstract; they must be found in the real world, among real people (or totally apart from them, if you’re inclined to reclusiveness). Finding an acceptable degree of liberty and happiness in the real world means contending with many subsets of humankind, each with different sets of social norms. It is unlikely that any of those sets of social norms affords perfect liberty for any one person. So, in the end, one picks the place that suits one best, imperfect as it may be, and makes the most of it. . . .

[But t]here is a kind of pseudo-anarcho-libertarian who asserts that he can pick and choose his associates, so that his interactions with others need consist only of voluntary transactions. Very few people can do that, and to the extent they can do it, they are able to do it because they live in a polity that is made orderly by the existence of the state (like it or not). In other words, anarcho-libertarian attitudes are bought on the cheap, at the expense of one’s fellow citizens. (03/02/06)

Yes, radical libertarians tend to be just as jejune as their counterparts on the Left.

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