From left to right in the photo: Amy Vivian Coney Barrett, Neil McNeil Gorsuch, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, John Glover Roberts, Ketanji Oniyka Brown Jackson, Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., Elena Kagan, and Brett Michael Kavanaugh.
The conservative justices (Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh) are taller than the “liberals” (Sotomayor, Brown Jackson, and Kagan). That’s hardly a surprise, given that the “liberals” are women. But Barrett is much taller than all of the “liberal” women — and a lot better looking, too.
Roberts, who has moved to the center over the years, is shorter than all of the conservatives, with the possible exception of Thomas.
I write here of ways to combat crimes of violence and crimes against liberty, both of which are on the rise. Barring an electoral revolution (against the left) in the next few years, extraordinary measures will be required to halt the nation’s decline into an morass of anarchy mixed with oppression. I also believe, as I discuss below, that extraordinary measures are unlikely to be tried or to succeed if they are tried. Dystopia looms.
CRIMES OF VIOLENCE
A Case in Point
You may have read about the case of a juvenile who was driving a stolen car and struck a mother pushing her baby in a stroller:
That image is from a Fox Newsstory about the juvenile’s sudden death. Here’s the background:
The case made national headlines last year when Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon’s office sought a five- to seven-month sentence in juvenile probation camp, a punishment for young offenders described as less severe than military school but harsher than summer camp….
The teen was already on felony probation for poisoning a high school girl’s drink at the time of the hit-and-run, which surveillance cameras captured on Aug. 6, 2021.
The video shows a stolen vehicle speeding the wrong way down a one-way backstreet. It plowed into a woman walking her infant son in a stroller. Then he hit the gas, accelerating away from the scene, where a good Samaritan in a pickup truck rammed the suspect vehicle head-on.
Los Angeles police responded and found drugs in the driver’s system and marijuana in the car, according to an incident report obtained by Fox News.
The good news is in the lead paragraph:
A Los Angeles 17-year-old who ran over a mother walking her baby in a stroller in 2021 and received just a few months of diversionary camp as punishment was gunned down in Palmdale, California, this week.
It is my fervent hope that the juvenile, named in the story as Kevin Braca, was gunned down in act act of revenge for the young mother, and that the killer isn’t caught.
Generalizing from the Case
The news of Braca’s untimely death (i.e., several years too late) led me think about how to exact vengeance (i.e., justice) and combat crime despite prosecutors and judges who are unwilling to protect the citizenry from violent criminals.
Here’s an example of what I have in mind:
When a heinous crime occurs, a local police chief or sheriff with some guts and a strong sense of justice would be prepared to exact swift and certain justice.
The chief or sheriff would have a trusted team of officers capture the perp alive and hustle him away from the scene.
Well away from witnesses, the vehicle carrying the perp would be intercepted and the officers holding him would be “forced” to release him to the interceptors.
The perp would later be found hanging from a tree. There would be no useful leads from the rope used to hang him, from DNA, from shoe prints, from stray objects left behind, or even from satellite coverage.
The perpetrator would have been grabbed and hanged in the dark of night, and his executioners would have left the scene on foot under cover of darkness, wearing unidentifiable clothing and footwear. The vehicle they used, which would be left behind, would have been stolen hundreds of miles away by well-disguised persons and kept under cover until it was used in the capture and hanging of the perp. For that purpose, it would have appeared suddenly from a covered position unrelated to anyone involved in the hanging of the perp.
The success such an operation could inspire similar acts by other sheriffs and chiefs of police who are dedicated to justice and not bound by allegiance to a “justice system” that is becoming a haven for criminals. If enough sheriffs and chiefs of police take up the cause, there would be a noticeable reduction in violent crime (and, indeed, most types of crime) — at least in the regions where justice is swift and certain.
Assessment
It’s possible that some mass shooters who are said to have committed suicide were in fact executed by law-enforcement officers. But the circumstances have been murky enough to make suicide believable. An execution under such circumstances has no deterrent effect. An execution must stand out as one to have a deterrent effect.
But an obvious execution invites an intensive investigation — if not by local and State prosecutors, then by federal ones. That prospect alone would challenge the wits and guts of anyone who is thinking about staging an obvious execution. If there are any such executions, they will be few and far between, and therefore will not have a daunting effect on violent criminals.
CRIMES AGAINST LIBERTY
The State of Play
Paradoxically, the abettors of violence — leftist government executives, legislators, judges, and prosecutors — are also on the side of oppression against “ordinary” citizens: hard-working, law-abiding taxpayers. The oppression is justified by appealing to “the narrative”, which boils down to this: Humanity is beset by many threats and dysfunctions: public-health emergencies, climate change, white supremacy, racism, over-incarceration, sexism, arbitrary “assignment” of “gender” at birth, patriarchy, inequities, income and wealth inequality, market failures, transgression of “rights” of all kinds, disregard of “the science”, etc., etc., etc.
The oppressors argue that government must combat and rectify those phenomena, regardless of the consequences for liberty and prosperity. To that end, persons who question the existence or severity of the threats and dysfunctions, the necessity or efficacy of government programs that address them, or the power of government in general are guilty of spreading “misinformation” and must be silenced (at least).
As I (and many others) have amply documented, the road to serfdom is paved with (ostensibly) good intentions. Sir Ernest Benn put it this way:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
“Orwellian” is an over-used but accurate appellation for the present state of affairs in America and much of the Western world. If Americans were to find a way out of the nightmare, the rest of the West might follow suit.
The left is after everyone who opposes its agenda…. It would be disastrous (for the left) if its opponents could muster enough electoral support to overwhelm the combination of hard-left voters, squishy centrists, and stuffed ballot boxes (and their electronic equivalents).
The left thrives on control. The left therefore seeks every opportunity to transfer power from civil society and the States to the central government; disproportionately engages in electoral fraud; and seeks to undermine social norms and shape them to their own view of how the world should be. Anything that delays or thwarts the left’s march toward totalitarianism is called a threat to “democracy”. What leftists want is “democratic”; anything else is profoundly wrong or plain evil.
… The conspiracy includes not only most Democrat politicians but also vast portions of government bureaucracies throughout the land; most of the public education indoctrination industry; most institutions of higher learning advanced indoctrination; most media outlets; most “entertainers”; far too many corporate executives and administrator; and, of course, Big Tech (owners, managers, and employees alike).
As these various institutions slid to the left, they formed an informal but tight alliance that moves in lockstep to attain left-wing objectives. Their combined power enables them to advance the left’s agenda by shaping (distorting) perceptions of issues, and controlling the making and enforcement of laws and regulations. The whole thing is a classic Stalinist operation: scapegoat, shame, suppress and prosecute the opposition, and — above all keep — an iron grip on power. (The left loves to project its own feelings and methods onto its opponents.)
The broader conspiracy is an open one, but no less dangerous to liberty than subversion by agents of a foreign power.
Here, my recommended remedy isn’t to operate in secrecy until the enemy relents, but to operate openly in massive resistance to the regime.
A Possible Solution (for Some): A National Divorce
The form of resistance would be the simultaneous secession of several States, which I call a national divorce. The case for it is made in the introductory paragraphs of this post. The formal instrument of secession, which makes the case for the legality of secession, can be found by scrolling to section E.
There are twenty-two States whose governorships and legislatures are controlled by the Republican Party. If a dozen or more of those States simultaneously seceded and created a new nation, what could Washington do? A suit in the Supreme Court wouldn’t work because the States would no longer consider themselves subject to the decisions of the Court — or of any other component of the government that sits in Washington.
A threat of violence would be that government’s only recourse. The national guard units of seceding States would no longer be controlled by Washington, and most of them would either desert or rally to the cause of secession. It seem unlikely that they would turn on their native States.
That would leave it up to the president and Congress (what remained of it) to invoke existing laws (e.g., the Enforcement Acts) or make up new ones to justify the invasion and occupation of seceding States by U.S. armed forces. Such a move wouldn’t be universally popular in Congress; large numbers of U.S. senators and representatives who oppose the leftist regime would still be there. And there could even be some opposition from the few remaining leftists who are actually opposed to the oppression of ideological enemies.
At that point, the president would have to choose between (a) maintaining a façade of reasonableness by deferring to Congress or (b) ignoring Congress and proceeding with military action against the seceding States. Contrary to the secession that sparked the Civil War, this secession would be a peaceful one. An incumbent Democrat could be expected to invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln and order the use of force without first consulting Congress. (Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces on April 13, 1861. Lincoln waited until July 1, 1861, to ask Congress to approve and augment his actions against the Confederacy, which included calling up 75,000 troops and revoking habeas corpus.)
Assessment
The president and Congress would be well prepared for an act of secession. It couldn’t be kept a secret. It would dominate the news for weeks before its consummation. The president would issue stern warnings. The congressional delegations of non-seceding States would pass legislation authorizing the president to use force against seceding States. The effect would be to daunt all but a few determined governors and legislatures — and they must believe that force would be threatened but not used. The secession movement, thus reduced to a token showing, would fizzle.
(For assessments of other options, see sections A, B, C, D, and F of “A National Divorce”.)
The punctilious say that the century won’t end until midnight on the 31st of December 2000. Meanwhile, the other 99.99 percent of Earth’s denizens prepares to celebrate the end of the decade, century, and millennium on December 31, 1999. Contrary to our custom, we bow here to the popular will, but just long enough to offer this paean to the Twentieth Century. After boldly diagnosing the last 100 years in a few hundred words, we also thrown in a prognosis for the next 100 years.
The American Century?
The Twentieth Century, like any other complex phenomenon, cannot be judged one-dimensionally. Let us begin by comparing it with the other centuries of our nationhood.
Yes, the Twentieth Century has been called the American Century, but that soubriquet reflects one of the least of our achievements as a nation, namely, our dominant role in world affairs. In any event, the American Century was the Eighteenth Century, when the greatest heroes of American history gave us liberty and framed the Constitution to assure liberty’s blessings unto their posterity. (Well, that’s how they talked in those days — you can look it up.)
The Nineteenth Century was decidedly less stellar than the Eighteenth. The Nineteenth started well enough, with Mr. Jefferson in the White House, the purchase of Louisiana Territory, and the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Then the British burned the Executive Mansion, causing it to be painted white (whence the White House). That was one of the first — but far from the last — whitewashings in Washington.
If the history of the presidency counts for anything in rating centuries, the Nineteenth weighs in with one great (Lincoln) and a whole flock of losers and nonentities: Van Buren, Harrison I (he of the 30-day term of office), Tyler (the “too” in “Tippecanoe and…”), Polk, Taylor, Fillmore (later an avowed Know-Nothing as that party’s candidate for President), Pierce (a New Hampshire dipsomaniac), Buchanan, Johnson I (he of the first impeachment trial), Grant (the denizen of Grant’s Tomb), Hayes, Garfield, Arthur (call me Chet), Cleveland (who, unlike Billy-boy, fessed up to his sins before he was caught lying about them), Harrison II, and McKinley.
In the Twentieth Century, there have been three honorable Presidents — Coolidge, Truman, and Reagan — surrounded by a sea of fools and scoundrels: Roosevelt I (a Napoleonic nut-case); Taft (the answer to two trivia questions: heaviest and only one to become Chief Justice; Wilson (architect of the administrative state), Harding (sex-Clinton I); Hoover and Carter (two humorless engineers); Roosevelt II (first socialist president); Eisenhower (principle-Clinton I); Kennedy (sex-Clinton II); Johnson II (wager of disastrous wars on poverty and Vietnamese civilians); Nixon (truth-Clinton I); Ford (duh!); Bush I (principle-Clinton II); and Clinton (combining the worst of Harding, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush I — oversexed, unprincipled, and a congenital liar).
The Twentieth Century may have been the century of American power, but it has not been a century to be proud of if you still have any principles.
Major Themes of Century XX
The century’s dominant theme was established in its first decade: Capitalism became evil incarnate and — in the name of fighting evil — the federal government began to usurp the socializing roles of family, friends, neighborhood, and church. The second and third decades should have disillusioned the true believers in progress through government, as Wilson led us into the charnel-house called Europe and the sons and daughters of Carrie Nation led us into Prohibition. But prosperity casts a rosy glow on the sordid truth, as attests Clinton’s survival of l’affaire Lewinsky.
The fourth decade — specifically, the Great Depression — legitimated the federal government’s seizure of power in the name of “good”. The president and other elected officials became Santa Claus incarnate, doling largesse and special privileges to the masses in return for their votes, at the expense of the objects of the masses’ envy. Judges briefly and episodically resisted the power grab, then joined their executive and legislative brethren in the rape of the Constitution.
Succeeding decades saw more wars (perhaps only one of them was not a senseless exercise in presidential megalomania), more “social progress” (read aggrandizement of government), more “freedom” (read erosion of moral and ethical standards), more crime, and less civility. More crime and less civility being the direct result of moral and ethical erosion; moral and ethical erosion being a by-product of aggrandized government (the “nanny” state).
Other than that, it’s been a peachy 100 years. Somehow, our high standard of living (which would be even higher were it not for senseless wars and aggrandized government) doesn’t make up for all the rest. But perhaps the prospect of the “grand nanny” of them all — Ms. Rodham-Clinton — lecturing us from the well of the Senate is makes us just a bit peevish.
Inside and Outside
Each decade’s foreign adventures reflected the home front’s view of the world outside. In the first decade, government could do no wrong: it busted trusts, stole Panama, and sailed the Great White Fleet — all to great acclaim from the masses. A decade later it was time to assuage national guilt and get into a serious war, but only after much vacillation about what side to join. As if in atonement for trust-busting days of the first decade, the Marines were enlisted to the aid of capitalism in the “Banana Republic” skirmishes of the 1920s.
In the 1930s, the hangover from the Great War and the cancer of the Great Depression sapped our willingness to confront the most potent (but nevertheless distant) threat to national sovereignty since 1812. But Roosevelt II, with the unwitting help of the foolhardy Nipponese, managed to drag us into another foreign war. The feat of vanquishing not one but two legitimate powerhouses, awakened the will to power that lurks just below the skin of every politician and policy wonk.
The poobahs on the Potomac — who reap vicarious ego gratification (and perhaps sexual gratification) from the very thought of being at the center of world power — demanded that we stay in the arena so that we could shape the world in the American image. (Well, in the self-image of an all-wise, all-powerful effete stratum of the Eastern establishment and its acolytes, who come from all regions and walks of life to sniff at the seat of power.) Whence the misbegotten Korean War, the utterly tragic Vietnam War, and the various travesties, gunboat diplomacies, and chest-thumpings known as the invasion of Grenada, “peacekeeping” in Lebanon, the bombing of Tripoli, the confrontation with Iran, the Persian Gulf War, the feckless “humanitarian” excursion into Somalia, and the “humanitarian” bombing of Kosovar civilians so that the “good” thugs of the country formerly known as Yugoslavia can take their turn at savagery.
Thus has self-interested isolationism — like constitutional government — given way to the self-indulgent whims of the “wizards” behind the curtain of the omniscient, omnipotent state.
Historical Determinism Revisited
Moralists would say that the Great Depression was the price that we paid for the Roaring Twenties. If that is so, think what might lie beyond the turn of the millennium. In any event, there may be something to the theory that what we sow in one decade we reap in the next.
The “gay” 1890s gave way to the “uplifting” 1900s, when such moralists as Frank Norris, Ida Tarbell, and Roosevelt I strode the land. Their moral vigor gave way to the next decade’s Great War and the disillusionment it wrought. What could follow moral disillusionment but the amoral and “immoral” goings on the the materialistic 1920s? We paid for that holiday from reality with the plunge into the Great Depression and the rise of fascism.
Our indifference to fascism led to the next decade’s Greater War and thence to the Cold War. Fatigue set in, and the 1950s became the decade of “complacency”, featuring such entertainments as “Ozzie and Harriet”, “I Love Lucy”, and President Eisenhower’s studiedly incoherent ramblings at press conferences.
“Down with complacency”, said the children of the 1960s. “Up with the people (of all colors), down with imperialistic, paranoid foreign adventures, up with sex and drugs and rock and roll”, they chanted. And then they became power-hungry lawyers and politicians.
If the 1960s began in hope and ended in despair, the 1970s began in despair and ended in despondency. It was a decade of unremitting bad news, from the presidency and resignation of Nixon to the “oil shock” to double-digit inflation to the seizure of American hostages by Iran. There was nowhere to go but up, and up we went, through most of the 1980s and — with a breather for another foreign adventure and a brief recession — on into the 1990s: ever more prosperous, ever more hopeful of the future — materially if not spiritually.
And so here we are in what should be called — for more than one reason — the “gay” 1990s: where “rights” flourish and responsibilities diminish; where more and more parents neglect their children and blame the schools (if not society) for the tragic results of that neglect; where gratuitous sex and violence pass for entertainment; where reading, writing, coherent speech, and good manners are practiced more in the breach than in the observance; where those who believe in and practice personal responsibility are simply sick and tired of giving a free ride to the indolent and self-indulgent (of all colors, genders, and political persuasions across all socio-economic strata).
Century XXI
Just when you think things can’t get worse, they do. It’s not hard to imagine a United States in which the following new “rights” have been legislated and/or adjudicated:
Animals may not be kept as pets without a license from the Department of Animal Rights & Welfare (DARW), whose inspectors may enter any home at any time in order to ensure that pets are being treated in accordance with the Animal Bill of Rights.
Animals and their produce (e.g., meat, eggs, feathers, manure) may be raised and processed only on “reservations” controlled by the DARW.
Guns may not be kept for any purpose — not for self-defense and (of course) not for hunting — by anyone other than law enforcement officers and members of the armed forces.
Because criminals are merely misguided or genetically defective products of society they may not be punished. Rather, society must be punished by turning criminals loose to exact their vengeance on it.
Because incessant media attention to every politician’s peccadilloes merely demoralizes the public — and because politicians are merely misguided or genetically defective products of society — the media may no longer report news about politics or politicians without a license from the Department of Happiness. Licenses are granted only to Hollywood producers who agree to produce uplifting “documentaries” of politicians in action (e.g., “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with James Stewart but without Claude Rains and his cronies).
Health care is socialized — no more ifs, ands, or buts; no more half-baked efforts to screw up the world’s best system of health care. It’s socialized and screwed up for good because Republicans — weary of being called “meanies” — give in on the last issue on which they differ from Democrats.
“How,” you ask, “could all of that happen?” Easily. Al Gore is elected President in 2000 and re-elected in 2004, with Ms. Rodham-Clinton as his running mate the second time. Ms. R-C shoots Gore at his second swearing in. She pardons herself (as a misguided product of society) and the Chief Justice swears her in — at gunpoint. In case you’re wondering, Ms. R-C was authorized to carry a gun because, following her unsuccessful Senate race in 2000, she became Gore’s Attorney General. (That’s called “first the good news, then the bad news.”)
And it goes downhill from there.
I believe that I correctly predicted the spirit of Century XXI, if not the precise details.
At my previous blog, Politics & Prosperity, I published 26 posts in a series that I called “Not-So-Random Thoughts”. The hook upon which the series hung was my discovery and quotation of pieces by other writers on subjects that I had addressed at my blog. The entries in the series, though they date back to 2011, seem to have retained their freshness, so I am republishing them here, with some light editing. I will leave the links as they are in the original posts, so some of them may be broken.
Atheism
Philip Kitcher reviews Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:
The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist’s Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.
The conclusions are premature. Although microphysics can help illuminate the chemical bond and the periodic table, very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles. Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts. Similarly, the neuroscientific discussions serenely extrapolate from what has been carefully demonstrated for the sea slug to conclusions about Homo sapiens.
And David Albert gets rough with Lawrence M. Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing:
Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”
Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?…
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff….
The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story….
[Krauss] has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff…. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
The gaps in scientific knowledge do not prove the existence of God, but they surely are not proof against God. To assert that there is no God because X, Y, and Z are known about the universe says nothing about the creation of the universe or the source of the “laws” that seem to govern much of its behavior.
(See also the many posts linked at the bottom of “The Atheism of the Gaps”.)
Caplan’s Perverse Rationalism
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have little use for the psuedo-libertarian blatherings of Bryan Caplan, one of the bloggers at EconLog. (See also this and this.) Caplan, in a recent post, tries to distinguish between “pseudo output” and “real output”:
1. Some “output” is actually destructive. At minimum, the national “defense” of the bad countries you think justifies the national defense of all the other countries.
3. Some “output” doesn’t really do what consumers think it does. At minimum, astrology.
Note: None of these flaws have any definitional libertarian component. Even if there’s no good reason for tax-supported roads, existing government roads really are quite useful. Still, coercive support is often a credible symptom of pseudo-output: If the product is really so great, why won’t people spend their own money on it?
Once you start passing output through these filters, the world seems full of pseudo-output. Lots of military, health, and education spending don’t pass muster. Neither does a lot of finance. Or legal services. In fact, it’s arguably easier to name the main categories of “output” that aren’t fake. Goods with clear physical properties quickly come to mind:
Food. People may be mistaken about food’s nutritional properties. But they’re not mistaken about its basic life-preserving and hunger-assuaging power – or how much they enjoy the process of eating it.
Structures. People may overlook a structure’s invisible dangers, like radon. But they’re not mistaken about its comfort-enhancing power – or how aesthetically pleasing it is.
Transportation. People may neglect a transport’s emissions. But they’re not mistaken about how quickly and comfortably it gets them from point A to point B.
Lest this seem horribly unsubjectivist, another big category of bona fide output is:
Entertainment. People may be misled by entertainment that falsely purports to be factual. But they’re not mistaken about how entertained they are.
Caplan is on to something when he says that “coerc[ed] support is often a credible symptom of pseudo-output”, but he gives away the game when he allows entertainment but dismisses astrology. In other words, if Caplan isn’t “entertained” (i.e., made to feel good) by something), it’s of no value to anyone. He is a pacifist, so he dismisses the value of defense. He (rightly) concludes that the subsidization of health care means that a lot of money is spent (at the margin) to little effect, but the real problem is not health care — it is subsidization.
Once again, I find Caplan to be a muddled thinker. Perhaps, like his colleague Robin Hanson, he is merely being provocative for the pleasure of it. Neither muddle-headedness nor provocation-for-its-own-sake is an admirable trait.
The Sociopaths Who Govern Us
I prefer “psychopath” to “sociopath”, but the words are interchangeable; thus:
(Psychiatry) a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts Also called sociopath
In “Utilitarianism and Psychopathy”, I observe that the psychopathy of law-makers is revealed “in their raw urge to control the lives of others”. I am not alone in that view.
This past Sunday, The Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page article on Obama’s machinations during the debt ceiling debate last summer. Rush Limbaugh spent a considerable amount of his on-air time Monday discussing one of the highlights of the piece: Barack Obama deliberately lied to the American people concerning the intransigence of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. The fact that a pillar of the sycophantic mainstream media would publish a story claiming that their hero lied is amazing….
What I say about Barack Obama I do not do lightly, but I say it anyway because I fear greatly for this country and can — not only from personal experience, but also in my dealing with others — recognize those failings in a person whose only interests are himself and his inbred radical ideology, which as its lynchpin desires to transform the country into a far more intrusive state by any means possible….
… Obama is extremely adept at exploiting the celebrity culture that has overwhelmed this society, as well as the erosion of the education system that has created a generation or more of citizens unaware of their history, culture, and the historical ethical standards based on Judeo-Christian teaching….
The reality is that to Barack Obama lying, aka “spin,” is normal behavior. There is not a speech or an off-the cuff comment since he entered the national stage that does not contain some falsehood or obfuscation. A speech on energy made last week and repeated on March 22 is reflective of this mindset. He is now attempting to portray himself as being in favor of drilling in order to increase oil production and approving pipeline construction, which stands in stark contrast to his stated and long-term position on energy and reiterated as recently as three weeks ago. This is a transparent and obvious ploy to once again fool the American people by essentially lying to them….
[T]here has been five years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call Mr. Obama what he is, in the bluntest of terms, a liar and a fraud. That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation, those who oppose his radical agenda only adds to his audacity. It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by the sycophants around him; thus, he is who he is and cannot change.
There should be no mystery about the “sudden” appearance of classified documents at various locations owned by or linked to Joe Biden.
Joe gave the documents to Hunter, for Hunter’s use in the family’s influence-peddling operation. Some of them were held, illegally, at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and International Engagement (i.e., take money from China in return for secrets and influence). They were being held in reserve for use by the family business or had already been used for that purpose.
Another batch, having been “loaned” to Hunter for use in the business, were left behind by him when he vacated his father’s home, which he was renting for almost $50,000 a month. That, of course, was a rather transparent way of funneling business proceeds to Joe.
Why did Joe’s personal lawyers find the documents? They must have been looking for incriminating evidence about the family business, at Joe’s behest or at the behest of someone who still has her marbles. Discretion being the better part of valor, the classified documents were turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
What wasn’t turned over to NARA? The truly incriminating evidence that Joe or his puppeteers have probably by now destroyed — notes and records of meetings, transactions, and payments that inculpate Joe.
With that out of the way (possibly), Joe may weather the storm. After all, he has most of the media, the Department of Justice, the FBI, a Democrat-controlled Senate, and scores of unrepentant NeverTrumpers on his side.
At my previous blog, Politics & Prosperity, I published 26 posts in a series that I called “Not-So-Random Thoughts”. The hook upon which the series hung was my discovery and quotation of pieces by other writers on subjects that I had addressed at my blog. The entries in the series, though they date back to 2011, seem to have retained their freshness, so I am republishing them here, with some light editing. I will leave the links as they are in the original posts, so some of them may be broken.
Secession
Ilya Somin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, on secession:
Of course, whether or not a secession is legal, it may be morally justified. Conversely, a legal secession may be morally unjustified, as was the case with the Southern secession. But the history of the Southern secession does not taint the legal and moral grounds for secession. As I say here,
The constitutional contract is a limited grant of power to the central government, for the following main purposes: 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.
It is clear that the constitutional contract has been breached. It is clear that the Constitution’s promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” has been blighted.
On the central issue of ObamaCare’s notorious mandate—i.e., whether it is constitutional for the federal government to compel a consumer purchase—everything hinges on the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. That element of the Constitution gives the federal government authority to regulate interstate commerce or activities affecting it. So far, so reasonable.
But the crux of the issue is whether forcing Americans to buy healthcare is regulation of commerce in the first place. Opponents note that non-purchase of healthcare should not be considered commerce or commerce-related activity. ObamaCare apologists, including some federal judges, make the remarkable claim that a decision not to purchase qualifies as interstate commerce or activity affecting interstate commerce, the same as a decision to purchase or a purchase itself. But even the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, in its 2009 assessment of likely PPACA constitutionality, acknowledged that Commerce Clause-based federal regulatory authority targets genuine activities that affect interstate commerce, not inactivity.
How to resolve this disagreement? The answer is staring us in the face, but has remained obscure to some lawyers and jurists who cannot quite see the forest for the trees. All you really need to know is what the word “commerce” means. To wit, commerce is “exchange of goods, products, or property . . . ; extended trade” (Britannica World Language Dictionary, 1959); “the buying and selling of goods . . .; trade” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1964); “the buying and selling of commodities; trade” (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1974); “interchange of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale . . . ; trade; business” (Dictionary.com, 2012). Uniformly, we see, the definition of commerce involves activity, not just a decision to act, and certainly not a decision to not act. The meaning of the concept of commerce presumes action, and always has. Moreover, even casual philology will confirm that the accepted meaning of “commerce” at the time of the Constitution’s drafting referenced activity, not inactivity, at least as much then as it does now (see C. H. Johnson, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, October 2004). In the same way, the Commerce Clause has long been construed to apply to action in or affecting commerce, from the 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden Supreme Court case onward.
[T]he real issue … comes down to this: Does Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce extend to “health care” generally, just because some aspects of it involve interstate commerce? In particular, can Congress constitutionally impose the individual mandate under the rubric of the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause?…
It is safe to say that a proper reading of the Constitution, as exemplified in the authoritative opinions excerpted above, yields no authority for Obamacare. That monstrosity — the official, Orwellian title of which is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) — attempts to reach an aggregation known as “health care,” without any differentiation between interstate commerce, intrastate commerce, and activities that are part of neither, namely, the choices of individuals with respect to health insurance.
It may be a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate actual interstate commerce that touches on the provision of health care. It is not a valid exercise to aggregate everything called “health care” and to regulate it as if it were all within the reach of Congress. When that happens, there is no room left — in “health care” nor, by extension, any other loose aggregation of activities — for State action or individual choice.
In sum, Obamacare is neither a valid regulation of interstate commerce nor necessary and proper to a valid regulation of interstate commerce. It is a governmental seizure of 1/9th of the economy. The individual mandate — which is a central feature of that seizure — is nothing more than coercion. It is no less peremptory than the military draft.
Freedom of Conscience
Yes, Virginia, there is freedom of conscience in Virginia:
A bill that ensures that faith-based adoption agencies in the state of Virginia won’t be forced to place children in households led by same-sex couples has passed both houses of the General Assembly and is heading to the desk of Gov. Robert McDonnell, a supporter of the legislation, who is expected to sign it soon.
Gov. McDonnell and the majorities in the Virginia legislature are standing up for freedom of conscience, which is among the negative rights that is trampled by grants of “positive rights” (i.e., privileges). These
are the products of presumption — judgments about who is “needy” and “deserving” — and they are bestowed on some by coercing others. These coercions extend not only to the seizure of income and wealth but also to denials of employment (e.g., affirmative action), free speech (e.g., campaign-finance “reform”), freedom of contract (e.g., mandatory recognition of unions), freedom of association (e.g., forced admission of certain groups to private organizations), freedom of conscience (e.g., forced participation in abortions), and on and on.
[As far as I can tell, the sensible act of the Virginia legislature was undone — by executive fiat — when the Governor’s Mansion was seized by Terry McAuliffe.)
Income Inequality
Thomas A. Garrett, a sensible economist, says good things about income inequality:
The apparent increase in U.S. income inequality has not escaped the attention of policymakers and social activists who support public policies aimed at reducing income inequality. However, the common measures of income inequality that are derived from the census statistics exaggerate the degree of income inequality in the United States for several reasons. Furthermore, although income inequality is seen as a social ill by many people, it is important to understand that income inequality has many economic benefits and is the result of, and not a detriment to, a well-functioning economy….
[O]ver time, a significant number of households move to higher positions along the income distribution and a significant number move to lower positions along the income distribution. Common reference to “classes” of people (e.g., the lowest 20 percent, the richest 10 percent) is very misleading because income classes do not contain the same households and people over time….
The unconstrained opportunity for individuals to create value for society, which is reflected by their income, encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Economic research has documented a positive correlation between entrepreneurship/innovation and overall economic growth.9 A wary eye should be cast on policies that aim to shrink the income distribution by redistributing income from the more productive to the less productive simply for the sake of “fairness.” 10 Redistribution of wealth would increase the costs of entrepreneurship and innovation, with the result being lower overall economic growth for everyone.
I am losing track of the posts in which I have made the same points. See this one and this one, and the posts linked in each of them.
The Left-Libertarian (“Liberal”) Personality vs. Morality
Will Wilkinson, a left-libertarian (i.e., modern “liberal”) if ever there was one, writes about his score on the Big-Five Personality Test:
I score very high in “openness to experience” and worryingly low in “conscientiousness”.
between various libertarian camps and between libertarians, Burkean conservatives, yahoo conservatives, “liberals”, and so on — are due as much to differences of temperament as they are to differences in knowledge and intelligence.
[T]he desirability or undesirability of state action has nothing to do with the views of “liberals”, “libertarians”, or any set of pundits, “intellectuals”, “activists”, and seekers of “social justice”. As such, they have no moral standing, which one acquires only by being — and acting as — a member of a cohesive social group with a socially evolved moral code that reflects the lessons of long coexistence. The influence of “intellectuals”, etc., derives not from the quality of their thought or their moral standing but from the influence of their ideas on powerful operatives of the state.
Presidential popularity, GDP, CPI, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
Presidential Popularity: Obama, Trump, Biden
I have followed the Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports* since 2008. The straightforward Approval Index (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) doesn’t quite capture the way that likely voters assess a president’s performance. So I concocted an “enthusiasm ratio” — the number of likely voters who strongly approve as a percentage of the number of likely voters who venture an opinion one way or the other (thus omitting the voters who are non-committal). Here’s a comparison of the enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden:
You might ask how Biden has caught up with Obama. I have no answer other than the fact that most voters have short memories and care little about the consequences of leftist governance. Some of those consequences are in evidence below.
GDP Trends
The exponential trend line indicates a constant-dollar (real) growth rate for the entire period of 0.77 percent quarterly, or 3.1 percent annually. The actual beginning-to-end annual growth rate is also 3.1 percent.
The red bands parallel to the trend line delineate the 95-percent (1.96 sigma) confidence interval around the trend. GDP has been below the confidence interval since the government-induced pandemic recession of 2020. Come to think of it, the back-to-back recessions of 1980-1982 and the Great Recession of 2008-2010 were also government-caused — the government in those cases being the Federal Reserve. The short recession of 2022, which may soon be followed by another one, can also be chalked up to the Fed.
In any event, the tailing off of real GDP growth since 2000 is the handiwork of government spending and regulatory policies. For much more about that plague, which has existed for more than a century, see this and this.
Unemployment
The government-reported unemployment rate of 3.3 percent for December 2022 is actually 10.5 percent. What the government doesn’t publicize is the labor-force participation rate, which has dropped from its January 2000 peak of 67.3 percent to 62.2 percent. See this post for details of the calculation. Here’s an up-to-date graph of nominal vs. actual unemployment rates:
Consumer Price Index
The index of prices for urban consumers (CPI-U) is the one that gets the headlines. There has been much ado in recent days about the drop in the rate of inflation, which only means that prices (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) aren’t rising quite as rapidly as they had been.
Here’s how things looked as of December 2022:
I don’t take any solace in the fact that the most recent year-over-year rate — 6.45 percent — means that prices double every 11 years. Back in the good old days when inflation was running in the neighborhood of 2 percent, prices would be expected to double every 36 years. An average Joe — not the idiot in the White House — could live with that. Now, he’s scrambling to pay his bills, probably with credit debt that is becoming more expensive to carry.
That’s enough for today. I’ll update this occasionally — and add to it.
* I follow Rasmussen Reports because of its good track record — here and here, for example. Though the Rasmussen polls are generally accurate, they are out of step with the majority of polls, which are biased toward Democrats. This has caused Rasmussen Reports to be labeled “Republican-leaning”, as if the other polls aren’t “Democrat-leaning”.
Donald Trump said recently that the U.S. is like a third-world country. I have been thinking along the same lines for the past few years. But I see America’s third-world-ness as a trend, not (yet) an actuality. In any event, the trend is real and it irks me.
I don’t care about air-travel snafus, which seem to have become more frequent and extensive in recent years. I last flew in September 2021, and it was the last time that I will fly anywhere. The last time that I flew and enjoyed the experience was in 1964, when my bride-to-be and I traveled from Dulles to Orly an a Pan American flight. (Our wedding was to be in Germany, where the parents of my fiancée then lived.) The stewardesses (as they were then called) were young to youngish, trim, smartly uniformed, and definitely female. The tasty meals were served on plates, and the flatware was the real thing — not plastic. And we were in the coach section (now called economy). Oh, well.
What I do care about are the many ways in which service has deteriorated in the past few years. Take my local Post Office — please! Word has it that there are ten unfilled positions for letter carriers, with the result that mail delivery is hit and miss. And to be sure that a mailpiece is picked up, I take it to the Post Office. (Yes, there are still some good reasons to use first-class mail.) How could there not be qualified applicants for those ten slots when the real unemployment rate is about three times the government-approved one? Hold that question; I’ll come back to it.
Shopping at a grocery store has become more of a challenge to my (admittedly) thin veneer of patience. Where are the carts? Scattered around the parking lot because there are too few persons willing to work for the wage that cart-corralling commands. Where is that or that item? Not in its assigned space on the shelves because the “supply chain” problem hasn’t gone away. Where are the cashiers who used to man (generic word) the many, now unused, scanners (formerly known as cash registers)? See “carts”, above. How are my groceries bagged when the semi-competent checker-outer has sent them past the scanner? Not very well. (I speak as an expert, whose first job was bagging groceries — a not-so-simple task for which I was actually trained many decades ago. I must also add that the cashiers for whom I bagged groceries were so fast at their jobs — without the benefit of scanners — that it was a challenge for me to keep up with them and bag groceries correctly. And I was a whiz at bagging.)
I would go on and on about the adventures of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, but almost all of my non-grocery shopping now consists of adding to the astronomical number of items that I have bought at Amazon (and other online retailers) in the past 25 years. Even there, however, there has been some deterioration in recent years: more frequent returns of shoddy items, more misdeliveries and failures to deliver on time. But online shopping still beats the other kind for ease of comparison-shopping, ease of finding the right item, the avoidance of incompetent clerks (if one of any description can be found), and the avoidance of driving to and from a shopping mall and milling around in it (usually to no good end). It usually costs less, too.
But automation has its limits. In addition to shopping for groceries of the kind that require first-hand inspection and the assurance of freshness, there are things like haircuts and dining out.
Dining out — even at upscale restaurants — has become a game of chance. Once again, the main problem (as with shopping) has become the availability and competence of the people who work directly with the public; in this case, the waiters (to use another appropriate but now verboten word). Are they attentive but not pushy? Usually, but they are too often not in sight when needed, which suggests that management is unable to hire enough competent waiters. (Again, see “carts”.) Do they know how to serve properly? It’s close call, even at what is arguably the best restaurant in the city where I live.
The bigger problem with dining out these days is noise. Except at very expensive restaurants, the level of noise has become so ear-shattering that it has become a challenge (for me, at least) to carry on a conversation while dining. And it’s a problem only in restaurants. Even grocery stores have succumbed to the trend of playing “background” music of a kind that is appropriate only among the set whose primary occupation seems to be rioting and looting.
There are many other indicators of social decline — mass shootings, rampant road-rage, red-light running as a habitual practice, F-bombs on broadcast TV, children shooting school teachers, rioting in the name of the “right” to kill unborn children, and on and on and on.
What’s behind it all? The “shortage” of workers that plagues retail outlets (and other kinds of establishments) can be attributed directly to the ever-growing number and munificence of government handouts. (For a partial tally, see the note at the end of “The Myth of the Red-Hot Labor Market”.) But the willingness to accept handouts instead of working is just a symptom of the broader decline in America. The same goes for the view that abortion should be a “right”.
It’s all part of the general decline of personal responsibility, which is concomitant with and a direct (if subtle) result of the rise in dependence on government. Beginning in the so-called Progressive Era of the late 1800s, there has been an unremitting and largely successful campaign to usurp and destroy the institutions of civil society that used to transmit, inculcate, and enforce civilizing norms. That campaign has been waged by the same “elites” who have conspired in recent years to destroy their most powerful opponent (Trump); to disrupt economic and social intercourse in a foolish, fruitless, counterproductive, and hysterical effort to defeat a pandemic; to suppress and censor persons and groups who challenge their destructive economic, political, and social nonsense; and to disarm America in the face of growing military challenges from Russia, China, and others, while wasting America’s treasure on an irrelevant sideshow war.
The Third Reich and Empire of the Rising Sun failed to dominate the world only because of (a) Hitler’s fatal invasion of Russia, (b) Japan’s wrong-headed attack on Pearl Harbor, and (c) the fact that the United States of 1941 had time and space on its side…
[The subsequent Cold War was a] necessary, long, and costly “war” of deterrence through preparedness [that] enabled the U.S. to protect Americans’ legitimate economic interests around the world by limiting the expansion of the Soviet empire.
I now suspect that the Cold War was unnecessary — and therefore a vast waste of lives and resources — because World War II took a wrong turn.
Bear in mind that the USSR, our Cold War enemy, survived World War II, went on to seize Eastern Europe, and became a power to be reckoned with largely because of
vast deliveries of American aid to the USSR during the war
the adoption of the policy of unconditional surrender, which probably prolonged the war in Europe, enabling the USSR to move its forces farther to the west
the Anglo-American invasion of Europe through northern France on D-Day, rather than through southern Europe earlier in the war, which also enabled Soviet forces to move farther to the west
FDR’s concessions to Stalin, late in the war at the Yalta Conference, which set the stage for the USSR’s seizure of Eastern Europe (the scope of which was ratified at the Potsdam Conference)
Soviet influence and espionage, exerted through and conducted by U.S. government officials, which abetted the foregoing and hastened the USSR’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
But there is more: several foregone opportunities to end the war early and turn the tide against the USSR.
[Rudolf] Hess’s journey to Britain by fighter aircraft to Scotland has traditionally been dismissed as the deranged solo mission of a madman.
But Peter Padfield, an historian, has uncovered evidence he says shows that, Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, brought with him from Hitler, a detailed peace treaty, under which the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over the imminent attack on Russia.
The existence of such a document was revealed to him by an informant who claims that he and other German speakers were called in by MI6 to translate the treaty for Churchill….
The informant said the first two pages of the treaty detailed Hitler’s precise aims in Russia, followed by sections detailing how Britain could keep its independence, Empire and armed services, and how the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe. The treaty proposed a state of “wohlwollende Neutralitat” – rendered as “well wishing neutrality”, between Britain and Germany, for the latter’s offensive against the USSR. The informant even said the date of the Hitler’s coming attack on the east was disclosed….
Mr Padfield, who has previously written a biography of Hess as well as ones of Karl Dönitz and Heinrich Himmler, believes the treaty was suppressed at the time, because it would have scuppered Churchill’s efforts to get the USA into the war, destroyed his coalition of exiled European governments, and weakened his position domestically, as it would have been seized on by what the author believes was a sizeable “negotiated peace” faction in Britain at that time. At the same time, since the mission had failed, it also suited Hitler to dismiss Hess as a rogue agent….
Mr Padfield added….
“This was a turning point of the war. Churchill could have accepted the offer, but he made a very moral choice. He was determined that Hitler, who could not be trusted, would not get away with it. He wanted the US in the war, and to defeat Hitler.”
Mr Padfield has also assembled other evidence to support the existence of the treaty and its contents – as well as the subsequent cover-up….
Hess’s aborted mission took place in 1941, and — purportedly — with Hitler’s blessing. After the failure of Hess’s mission, however, a lot happened without Hitler’s blessing. What follows are excerpts of Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press, 2013):
… When Louis Lochner, for many years the AP bureau chief in Berlin, attempted to file a story on the activities of anti-Nazi Germans operating out of France in October 1944, U.S. military censors blocked the story. Why? “The government official in charge of censorship was forthcoming enough to confide to Lochner that there was a personal directive from the president of the United States ‘in his capacity of commander in chief forbidding all mention of the German resistance,’” writes Klaus P. Fischer in his 2011 book, Hitler and America. Drawing from Lochner’s 1956 memoir Always the Unexpected, Fischer quotes Lochner’s explanation for this seemingly inexplicable and outrageous censorship: “Stories of the existence of a resistance movement did not fit into the concept of Unconditional Surrender!” …
Turns out, Lochner knew Roosevelt personally, and both men had a mutual friend in Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia. Lochner had been in contact with the anti-Hitler opposition in Germany since 1939. In November 1941, German anti-Nazis asked Lochner, heading home on leave, to contact the president on their behalf, to ask Roosevelt to speak out about what form of government he would like to see take shape in post-Hitler Germany, and to provide the president with secret radio codes so that Americans and German anti-Nazis could communicate directly with each other. So writes Peter Hoffman in The History of the German Resistance, 1933– 1945, which first appeared in Germany in 1969, drawing from the 1955 German edition of Lochner’s memoir, certain details of which Hoffman says are not in the English version.
Lochner was interned by the Nazi regime at the outbreak of the war in December 1941 and didn’t reach Washington until the summer of 1942. This would have been shortly after “unconditional surrender” was affirmed and reaffirmed by the president’s postwar advisory council subcommittee, and shortly after Roosevelt had promised a “second front” to Soviet minister Molotov. Lochner immediately informed the White House that he had personal and confidential messages for the president from the prince “and secret information on resistance groups in Germany that he might not confide to anyone else.”
No answer. No interest.
Lochner’s attempts at gaining an audience in June 1942 failed. Lochner followed up with a letter and received no reply. Finally, he was informed by the White House through the AP bureau in Washington, Hoffman writes, that “there was no desire to receive his information and he was requested to refrain from further efforts to transmit it.” …
… Hoffman reveals an important piece of the puzzle in a footnote. Lochner’s final attempt to reach Roosevelt on June 19, 1942, was in a letter addressed to a trusted presidential aide. That aide was [Soviet agent] Lauchlin Currie….
***
In his 1958 memoir, Wedemeyer Reports!, General [Albert C.] Wedemeyer picks up on George H. Earle’s series of secret negotiations with the German underground, which began with [Hitler’s chief spy Adm. Wilhelm] Canaris….
According to Earle’s account, he sent Canaris’s initial query regarding a negotiated peace to the White House via diplomatic pouch in early 1943….
… Just before Earle departed the United States to become FDR’s special emissary in Istanbul (officially, naval attaché), he wrote the following letter on December 19, 1942, from New York City on Ritz-Carlton stationery.
Dear Harry: If you don’t mind I’m going to report to you direct my activities. I like the way your mind works and I know you will sort out what you think of importance enough for the President.
[Canaris’s query went nowhere, of course, given Hopkins’s position as a pro-Soviet agent of influence — de facto if not de jure.]
***
The next approach to Earle, also in that spring of 1943, came from Baron Kurt von Lersner, a German aristocrat of Jewish extraction who lived in virtual exile in Turkey. He, too, had a proposal for the Allies. Earle wrote, “According to Lersner— and I could not doubt him; he had placed his life in my hands— some of the highest officials in Germany, [ambassador to Turkey Franz von] Papen included, loved their country but hated Hitler. They wanted to end the war before he bled Germany of all her youth, all her strength and resources. At the same time, they were deeply concerned about Russia’s growing might and power.” …
Earle sent off another dispatch to FDR at the White House marked “Urgent.” Again, Earle received no reply. “I pressed the matter with every ounce of my persuasion and judgment,” Earle wrote, “but I sensed the old trouble. Lersner’s call for an overt stand against Communist expansion distressed Roosevelt.” …
Earle wrote that his German contacts came back to him with another more specific plan, laying out the involvement of Field Marshal Ludwig Beck; Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, chief of police of Berlin; Prince Gottfried Bismarck, a Potsdam official and grandson of the “Iron Chancellor”; and a well-known cavalry officer, Freiherr von Boeselager. Again, the plan was to stage a coup, turn over Hitler and his top henchmen to the Allies, and bring about Germany’s “unconditional surrender, with one condition”: The Russians were not to be allowed into Central Europe, including Germany or territory at that time controlled by Germany.
Earle sent this dispatch off with high hopes, he wrote….
Earle doesn’t specify how much time went by, but finally an answer from the president came through. It was stiff and impersonal. “All such applications for a negotiated peace should be referred to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower,” Roosevelt wrote…. Earle explains, “In diplomatic language, this was the final runaround. Even if we did get to Eisenhower, the matter would be referred back to Roosevelt for a decision. The President’s answer was therefore a clear indication of his complete disinterest in this plan to end the war….
As for “unconditional surrender”:
Quite notably, … the very first use of the phrase “unconditional surrender” at Casablanca was by Harry Hopkins himself. In a January 23, 1943, meeting, one day ahead of the president’s sensational announcement, Hopkins told the grand vizier of Morocco, “The war will be pursued until Germany, Italy, and Japan agree to unconditional surrender.” …
… [U]nconditional surrender may well be the policy that ensured Soviet dominion over half of Europe. It was also, as Ian Colvin noted in the preface to a 1957 edition of his Canaris biography, a “pivotal point” in the tragedy of the German underground. “Unconditional surrender” would set the strategy of “total war” (Allied) as the only appropriate response to “total guilt” (German). Such a strategy presumed, indeed, drew inspiration from, a belief in the unwavering, monolithic German support for Nazism and Hitler, which the very existence of a significant anti-Nazi German resistance movement belied. For the sake of the policy then, the significant anti-Nazi German resistance movement had to be denied, shut out. Otherwise, “total war,” and the total destruction it required, wasn’t justified. Otherwise, I say, Stalin wouldn’t win.
General Wedemeyer devotes an entire chapter of his memoir to making the devastating strategic case against unconditional surrender. The general did not mince words: “We annulled the prospect of winning a real victory by the Casablanca call for unconditional surrender,” he wrote. 39 Why? “Our demand for unconditional surrender naturally increased the enemy’s will to resist and forced even Hitler’s worst enemies to continue fighting to save their country.” …
Wedemeyer elaborated, “We failed to realize that unconditional surrender and the annihilation of German power would result in a tremendous vacuum in Central Europe into which the Communist power and ideas would flow.”
About that vacuum in Central Europe: Is it the case that “we” simply “failed” to realize that a vacuum would emerge? Or had enough of us instead bought the Moscow line that Stalin wanted “nothing more than security for his country,” as Roosevelt, invoking Harry Hopkins, told William Bullitt at this same fateful moment? What about those among us in positions of power who had already decided that Stalin in Europe would be a good thing?
Remember Hanson Baldwin’s Numero Uno “great mistake of the war”: the belief “that the Politburo had abandoned … its policy of world Communist revolution and was honestly interested in the maintenance of friendly relations with capitalist governments.”
Where did that belief — propaganda — come from?
Wedemeyer explains, “We poisoned ourselves with our own propaganda and let the Communist serpent we took to our bosom envenom our minds and distort our ideals.” Baldwin is more matter-of-fact. “We became victims of our own propaganda,” he wrote. “Russian aims were good and noble. Communism had changed its spots.”
We were victims, all right, but not of “our own” propaganda; it was their propaganda. It was propaganda conceived in Moscow and disseminated by bona fide Kremlin agents, mouthpieces and organizers of Communist parties, fellow travelers, and many, many dupes (“ liberals,” “all the best people,” opinion makers, etc.). …
This puts a cap on it:
Now, the question: What if Lochner’s query had been received with natural interest and acted on in mid-1942? What if the U.S. government had initiated contact with the anti-Hitler opposition at that point and supported a successful coup against Hitler in Germany? Or, what if six months later, Canaris, Hitler’s secret opponent, had been encouraged to produce the defection of the German army and negotiate its surrender to the Allies? What if one of the subsequent, serious attempts that other opponents of Hitler made through various Anglo-American emissaries in 1942, 1943, and 1944 had been able to overthrow the Führer, close down the concentration camps, abort the Final Solution, thwart Soviet conquests in Europe and Asia, call off every battle from Monte Cassino to D-day to the Warsaw Uprising to the Battle of the Bulge, avoid the destruction of city centers from Hamburg to Dresden, and save the lives of millions and millions and millions of people in between? …
… [B]ut there it is: World War II could have ended years earlier had Communists working for Moscow not dominated Washington, quashing every anti-Nazi, anti-Communist attempt, beginning in late 1942, throughout 1943 and 1944, to make common cause with Anglo-American representatives….
It’s not as if the true nature and intentions of the Soviet regime were unknown. As West points out, the peace feelers from Canaris et al.
began … at about the same time former U.S. ambassador to the USSR William C. Bullitt presented FDR with his prophetic blueprint of what the postwar world would look like if Anglo-American appeasement of Stalin didn’t stop….
Specifically:
Bullitt’s first memo to FDR was written on January 29, 1943. He began by acknowledging that many observers in the United States believed that Stalin shared the president’s post-war vision expressed in the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. Bullitt countered that no “factual evidence” existed to support the view that Stalin was a changed man. “We find no evidence,” he wrote, “but we find in all democratic countries an intense wish to believe that Stalin has changed….” This view of a changed Stalin, therefore, was “a product of the fatal vice in foreign affairs—the vice of wishful thinking.” U.S. and British admiration for the valor demonstrated by the Russian people in the defense of their homeland was causing policymakers to overlook “both basic Russian Nationalist policy and Soviet Communist policy.”
“The reality,” Bullitt explained,
is that the Soviet Union, up to the present time, has been a totalitarian dictatorship in which there has been no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, and a travesty of freedom of religion; in which there has been universal fear of the O.G.P.U. [secret police] and Freedom from Want has been subordinated always to the policy of guns instead of butter.
Stalin controls “in each country of the world,” Bullit further explained, “a 5th column” composed of “public or underground Communist Parties.” Stalin uses this Fifth Column for “espionage, propaganda, character assassination of opponents, and political influence….”
“[T]here is no evidence,” Bullitt emphasized, “that [Stalin] has abandoned either the policy of extending communism or the policy of controlling all foreign communist parties.” The Soviet Union “moves where opposition is weak, [but] stops where opposition is strong.” The United States must, advised Bullitt,
demonstrate to Stalin—and mean it—that while we genuinely want to cooperate with the Soviet Union, we will not permit our war to prevent Nazi domination of Europe to be turned into a war to establish Soviet domination of Europe. We have to back democracy in Europe to the limit, and prove to Stalin that, while we have intense admiration for the Russian people and will collaborate fully with a pacific Soviet State, we will resist a predatory Soviet State just as fiercely as we are now resisting a predatory Nazi State.
Bullitt provided FDR with a brief history lesson to show that Russia had always been an expansionist power…. Therefore, Bullitt opined, “[e]ven if Stalin had become a mere Russian nationalist—which he has not—that would be no guarantee of pacific behavior; indeed, it would be a guarantee of aggressive imperialism.”
Bullitt then listed Stalin’s “avowed” aims, which included the annexation of Bukovina, eastern Poland, Besserabia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and parts of Finland, and his secret goals, which included establishing communist governments in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland and northern Iran, and expanding the influence communist parties in France and Germany. Bullitt feared that a Soviet Union victorious in Europe would try to take geopolitical advantage of the fact that the United States and Great Britain still had to contend with Japan in the Far East. In such circumstances, Bullitt wrote, “[t]here will be no single power or coalition in Europe to counterbalance the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will be in a position to devote all its strength to overrunning Europe….” He sketched the following scenario:
While the United States and Great Britain are engaged in defeating Japan, the Red Army … will sweep through Europe from east to west, being welcomed by the Soviet 5th columns already organized in every European country. Then will follow the familiar comedy. There will be no talk of “annexation by the Soviet Union.” There will be a “freely chosen form of government” (Soviet); “free expression of the people’s will” (under occupation by the Red Army); and out will be trotted again all the obscene lies that accompanied the “freely expressed desire of the Baltic Republics, to be received into the Soviet Union.”
To prevent Soviet domination of Europe after the war, Bullitt counseled, the United States must establish in “occupied or liberated countries in Europe democratic administrations which, working together, will be strong enough to provide the requisite defense against invasion by the Soviet Union.” … ” The United States, he advised Roosevelt, must “lay the ground work for a combination of democratic governments in Europe strong enough to preserve democracy in Europe and keep the Bolsheviks from replacing the Nazis as masters of Europe.”
The United States, argued Bullitt, should not rely on agreements with the Soviet Union to preserve peace and the balance of power in Europe and the world. “The onward flow of the Soviet Union,” he explained, “has never been impeded by any written agreement…. Soviet invasion finds barriers in armed strength, not in Soviet promises.” That armed strength, according to Bullitt, should consist of an integrated, democratic and armed Europe backed by Great Britain and the United States….
Four months later, on May 12, 1943, Bullitt wrote a short follow-up memo to the president. He urged FDR to get commitments from the Soviet Union and Britain to help us in our war against Japan, and repeated his call for a military invasion of the Balkans to liberate Eastern and Central Europe before Soviet forces occupied the region. U.S. power was at its zenith, according to Bullitt, so it was essential that we translate that power to achieve our political goals.
On August 10, 1943, Bullitt wrote a final letter to the president on this subject. Echoing the great theorist of war, Karl von Clausewitz, Bullitt emphasized to Roosevelt that “[w]ar is an attempt to achieve political objectives by fighting; and political objectives must be kept in mind in planning operations.” The political objectives of the United States, he explained, “require the establishment of British and American forces in the Balkans and eastern and central Europe. Their first objective should be the defeat of Germany, their second, the barring to the Red Army of the way into Europe….”
A Soviet dominated Europe would be as great a threat to the United States and Britain as a German dominated Europe, wrote Bullitt. The dilemma of U.S. policy was to find a way to “prevent the domination of Europe by the Moscow dictatorship without losing the participation of the Red Army in the war against the Nazi dictatorship.” The most important elements of such a policy were, he wrote, the “creation of a British-American line in Eastern Europe,” and the establishment of “democratic governments behind” that line. [From the entry for William C. Bullitt at the University of North Carolina’s site, American Diplomacy: Foreign Service Dispatches and Periodic Reports on U.S. Foreign Policy; links no longer available.]
Roosevelt ignored Bullitt, and the rest is history. The war in Europe was prolonged, unnecessarily and at great cost in lives and treasure. (Bear in mind that if the war in Europe had ended sooner, the Allies could then have focused their efforts on the war in the Pacific — with the resultant saving of many more lives and much more treasure.)
Perhaps the failure to seize an early victory can be chalked up to stubbornness and near-sightedness. I would believe that if there had been only one failure, or even two of them. But several failures look like a pattern to me: a pattern of preference for the survival of the Communist regime in Russia, and a willingness to abide Communist expansion in Europe. The best that can be said is that FDR’s outlook was blinkered by his commitment to Germany’s unconditional surrender, and that his views about the long run were (a) unduly optimistic, (b) insouciant, or (c) actively pro-Soviet. Given the degree of influence wielded by Harry Hopkins with respect to unconditional surrender and Soviet success, I opt for (c). Dupe or not, FDR sat in the Oval Office and made the decisions that turned the world upside down.
The prolongation of World War II is perhaps the biggest government failure in the history of the United States. There is one other that might rival it, though its proximate cause was inadvertent.
Once upon a time, Bryan Caplan — a professor of economics — trod (unwittingly) on Jonathan Swift‘s literary territory: satire. I have in mind Caplan’s post “Murder Equivalents”:
Economists’ [sic] have long struggled to get non-economists to put a dollar value on human life. We’ve almost completely failed. No matter how high the dollar value you use, non-economists hear callous minimization of human suffering. Is there any way to quantify the magnitude of Awful without seeming awful yourself?
I say there is. From now on, let us measure each horror in “Murder Equivalents.” The Murder Equivalent of X, by definition, is the number of ordinary murders that would be just as bad as X. The concept allows for the reasonable possibility that some deaths are less bad than a normal murder. The Murder Equivalent of an accidental death, for example, might only be .5 The concept also allows for the reasonable possibility than some deaths are worse than a normal murder. The Murder Equivalent for a death by terrorism, for example, might be 2. A terrible war that lays a country waste might be twice the number of deaths from war crimes, plus the number of civilian deaths, plus .5 times the number of soldier deaths, plus one per $10 M in property damage.
Logically, this re-scaling is no better than a sophisticated Value of Life calculation. Psychologically, however, it’s far better. Comparing something to murder doesn’t sound callous. Nor does it minimize the badness. It only puts the world in perspective. Many salacious front-page horror headlines are clearly less bad than one murder. Thinking in terms of Murder Equivalents would help diffuse such distractions, reducing the risk of costly crusades against relatively minor problems.
Yes, I know that many people will angrily reject any metric that potentially implies their gut emotional reactions are unreasonable. As usual, I’m working at the margin. How can we get more people to think numerately about the horrors of the world? Murder Equivalents is the best idea I’ve got.
Caplan’s modest proposal is Swiftian, even if it’s not meant to be. I refer, of course, to Dean Swift’s A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, wherein the author (an Anglo-Irishman) suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies.
Death by old age is death by old age. Death by accident is death by accident. Death by murder or terrorism is neither of those things, and can’t be equilibrated with them by an arbitrarily assigned coefficient. Caplan’s proposal is scientism on steroids.
Murder is an intentional act that can be deterred and avenged. The best way yet devised of deterring murder is by executing murderers swiftly — no pun intended — and surely. Not only does execution send a “message” to would-be murderers, many of whom will heed it, but it prevents murderers from murdering again.
Similarly, terrorism is an intentional act that can be prevented, deterred, and avenged. It’s not just another “risk” — like being struck by lightning — as some fatuous economists would have it.
In any event, how would the coefficient (relative value) of death by murder or terrorism be assigned? By a know-it-all professor of economics like Bryan Caplan? Even a first-year student of economics should be able to tell you that the only meaningful relative value is the one that results from a market exchange between willing sellers (prospective murderers and terrorists) and willing buyers (prospective victims of murder and terror). In a word: price.
The problem (for Caplan) is that every murder would have a different price, and most murders would have a price of infinity, because the prospective victims would be unwilling to be murdered at any price.
… they are made to conform to power there is human suffering.
Human beings have ends (objectives) that they pursue by applying resources (means) through various social arrangements (ways). The ends, means, and ways vary greatly across social units (including political ones), both in time and across time.
Here’s a simplified sketch of the major components of means, ways, and ends and of the influences on them:
The ends can be characterized broadly as survival (e.g., the acquisition of food, clothing, shelter and health care) and the attainment of emotional fulfillment. The latter may include such things as sex, a loving marriage, children, wealth, social prominence, and political power — none of which necessarily precludes the pursuit of some or all of the rest (and other desiderata).
The means include availability of resources (their existence and affordability), innate ability (including intelligence and particular skills), knowledge, temperament and psychological fitness (e.g., ambition, social skills), and knowledge and belief (e.g., learning from various sources, ability to sort fact from fiction).
The ways are the the social norms that may constrain and direct action (e.g., an ethic of sharing vs. an ethic of entitlement); the social connections that enable (or hinder) cooperation between persons and social units in the pursuit of ends; and the political (or power) arrangements that shape norms and inhibit or foster social connections (e.g., laissez-faire vs. a plethora of restrictive and prescriptive regulations).
All of those things vary in and across time, both in the scope and scale of their applicability. Many of the changes are the result of experience (feedback and learning), including but far from limited to the experience of failures incurred in the pursuit of ends. Inventions and innovations lead to changes in resources, in methods of production (through economic units, which are social connections), and in the particular ends that are pursued.
Forces outside a particular social unit or polity will affect relations and accomplishments within the unit or polity. Such forces include natural disasters and war, for example. More broadly, there is chance or randomness. Things don’t go according to plan because of lack of knowledge or foresight, an accident, a foreseen disaster that does more damage than expected, etc. Life is full of such events and they have effects that don’t lend themselves to learning or prudent planning. Life sometimes (or often) just happens.
Given all of the many possibilities — in time and across time — that are contained in each of the broad concepts and relationships outlined above, it should be evident that there is no “social science” (a risible term) that can validly explain or predict the course and outcome of human affairs, except perhaps in small, narrowly defined ways. Even then, if immediate effects can be anticipated with some certainty (a bloodied nose as a result of a punch), possible ramifications may be many and unpredictable (e.g., a retaliatory punch, a retaliatory murder, a feud of many years’ duration).
Most “social scientists” would demur. Economists, for example, would say that the “law” of supply and demand is reliable. It may be, but it is reliable only in a general way (and not infallibly): The higher the price of a product or service, the less of it will be demanded by consumers, for example. Something that should be easy to predict, but isn’t, is the change in GDP during the next calendar quarter (e.g., see this). In general, and with respect to climate in particular, modeling of almost any kind that ventures beyond well defined physical phenomena is a fool’s game.
There is however, a way to force human events to follow a certain course, which is the desideratum of those who place deadening certainty against thriving liberty. That way is to gain control of the apparatus of the state, to coerce the subjects of the state to act according to its dictates (through force, censorship, and and to say that whatever follows is “good” and just what the regime intended.
That, in effect, is the direction in which the United States seems to be headed. Regardless of dire outcomes (e.g., general inflation, soaring energy and food prices, the suppression of science that gets the “wrong” answers), the regime presses on with heavy handed regulation, the weaponization of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the empowerment of private actors (e.g., Big Tech) to suppress the regime’s enemies, and much more.
There is no learning from experience in this regime. Belief — uninformed and ends-driven — rules all. Every failure is met not with an honest reappraisal of policy failures but with the reassertion and expansion of failed policies.
It is the Sovietization of America: the exercise of power for its own sake, justified by the betterment of the people (or some of them), with the effect of impoverishing the people and setting them against one another. Its only “virtue” is the predictability of its results.
Certainty (or something like it) in human affairs is possible only by paying an extremely high price in liberty and prosperity.
Related reading: Glenn Ellmers, “Federal Foes”, The New Criterion, January 2023
I dined this evening in an elegant restaurant in an elegant hotel. The meal, excellent as it was, was marred by occasional raucous outbursts from a nearby table. You’d think that the surroundings and the price tag would deter riff-raff. But you’d be wrong in this age of vulgarity and noise.
I reached the hotel and restaurant by driving along what was once one of America’s most beautiful boulevards. The boulevard — like the restaurant — has been degraded by riff-raff who believe that the desecration of elegance and beauty raises them up. It simply reveals them for the savages that they are.
For your visual pleasure, here are a few photos of the hotel, the restaurant, and the boulevard (before its desecration):
That’s the statue of Robert E. Lee, which with several of its kind used to grace the traffic circles along the boulevard. The boulevard was and is called Monument Avenue, but the name now rings hollow.
The hotel (The Jefferson Hotel), the restaurant (Lemaire), and Monument Avenue are in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond has gone a long haul in the wrong direction.
Here we are — whoever “we” are — at the end of another year. But what’s another year, anyway? Earth has made another circuit (more or less) around the Sun, and has revolved on its axis about 365.25 times.
Then there are many types of recurring event on Earth:
birth
childhood
adolescence
schooling
work
marriage
child-bearing
child-rearing
aging
death
And much more that is the common lot of too many humans: political discord, hate, crime, and war, for example.
At the end of 2022, I must add to those lists an encroaching fact of life: political repression, which has spread from East to West at the speed of an unchecked wildfire. It operates in different ways and for ostensibly different reasons in various nations and reasons, but the end is the some: strong (if not always absolute) control of the expression of ideas and the outcomes of political processes. I have called it, elsewhere, the Sovietization of America (not to mention Canada and most of Europe).
I have been saying for years that the United States is only an election away from total domination by the left. That remains true, unfortunately, because large swaths of the populace seem indifferent to what is happening to their liberty and prosperity.
If (or when) America falls fully into the grip of the left, there is one thing that Americans will no longer have to fear: war. Despite the anti-Russian posturing that is fashionable (and foolish), the future path of a leftist-controlled America is clear: accommodation with its enemies. That this can only lead to more oppression and economic deprivation is of no consequence to the left in America, just as it was of no consequence to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
William Vallicella praises solitude of the kind enjoyed by introverts. (Introversion is at least one trait that we share.*) Vallicella ends by quoting Albert Einstein:
The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune in old age, as Albert Einstein attests in “Self-Portrait” in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5: “. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever. I live in that solitude [emphasis added by LV] which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Solitude doesn’t just mean being alone. An introvert can be alone, mentally, in a crowd. But being alone, physically (away from the madding crowd), makes it easier to marshal one’s mental resources and thus to cope with the world, and even to improve it.
Anthony Storr captures this state of mind in Solitude: A Return to the Self. Storr, in the book’s final paragraphs, summarizes his themes and conclusions:
This book began with the observation that many highly creative people were predominantly solitary, but that it was nonsense to suppose that, because of this, they were necessarily unhapppy or neurotic. Although man is a social being, who certainly needs interaction with others, there is considerable variation in the depth of the relationships which individuals form with each other. All human beings need interests as well as relationships; all are geared toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal….
The capacity to be alone was adumbrated as a valuable resource, which facilitated learning, thinking, innovation, coming to terms with change, and the maintenance of contact with the inner world of the imagination. We saw that, even in those whose capacity for making intimate relationships has been damaged, the development of creative imagination could exercise a healing function…. Man’s adaptation to the world is largely governed by the development of the imagination and hence of an inner world of the psyche which is necessarily at variance with the external world…. Throughout the book, it was noted that some of the most profound and healing psychological experiences which individuals encounter take place internally, and are only distantly related, if at all, to interaction with other human beings….
The epigraph of this chapter is taken from The Prelude. It is fitting that Wordsworth should also provide its end.
When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
These are especially trying times for those who thrive on solitude. Aldous Huxley says this in The Perennial Philosophy:
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions – news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire.
Mr. Huxley would hate the twenty-first century. The noise is beyond deafening. And it’s everywhere: beeping cell phones; loud one-sided conversations into cell phones; talking automobiles; ear-shattering “music” blasting from nearby automobiles, stadium loudspeakers, computers, TVs, and (yes) radios; screeching MoTown (or whatever it’s now called) blasting away in grocery stores (at the request of employees, I suspect); movie soundtracks worthy of the Siege of Stalingrad; and on and on.
Sound has become a substitute for the absorption and processing of information, that is, for thought. The decades-long crescendo in the West’s sound track lends support to the hypothesis that intelligence is on the decline.
And the decline is evident in more than noise. That so much time is wasted on dreck — often whole lifetimes — is a greater tragedy than the inevitable death of any particular artist, writer, or thinker. Equally tragic is the rejection of civilizing traditions, which are also sublime products of the human mind. Thus:
I hate modern art that swaps form for dead sharks; and modern music that exchanges harmony for noise…. I hate religious leaders who think that God is found “in the spaces” and that worship is therapy. I hate our pornographic culture, our tasteless battery foods, and our TV that treats adults like children and children like adults. I hate our obsession with irony, as if a shrug of the shoulders is cleverer than serious inquiry. I hate the death of chivalry, manners and the doffed hats. I hate our promotion of sex over romance – today’s Brief Encounters are very different things. I hate the eradication of guilt and shame, very useful concepts that hold us back from indulgence. [Tim Stanley, “Conservatives: Don’t Despair of Our Corrupt, Decadent Age. Write about It”, The Telegraph, August 2, 2013]
Life needn’t be like that. When all else fails, one can take refuge in one’s own mind, where beauty dwells — if one has cultivated a mind that is immune to the slings and arrows of this outrageous world.
* I am an INTJ, and especially strong in the I, T, and J dimensions. Here are my scores on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) (as of 02/16/17), which is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The descriptive excerpts are from David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates’s Please Understand Me.
EXTRAVERSION 0 – INTROVERSION 10
The person who chooses people as a source of energy probably prefers extraversion, while the person who prefers solitude to recover energy may tend toward introversion.
SENSATION 8 – INTUITION 12
The person who has a natural preference for sensation probably describes himself first as practical, while the person who has a natural preference for intuition probably chooses to describe himself as innovative.
THINKING 20 – FEELING 0
Persons who choose the impersonal basis of choice are called the thinking types by Jung. Persons who choose the personal basis are called the feeling types…. The more extreme feeling types are a bit put off by rule-governed choice, regarding the act of being impersonal as almost inhuman. The more dedicated thinking types, on the other hand, sometimes look upon the emotion-laden decisions and choices as muddle-headed.
JUDGING 19 – PERCEIVING 1
Persons who choose closure over open options are likely to be the judging types. Persons preferring to keep things open and fluid are probably the perceiving types. The J is apt to report a sense of urgency until he has made a pending decision, and then he can be at rest once the decision has been made. The F person, in contrast, is more apt to experience resistance to making a decision, wishing that more data could be accumulated as the basis for the decision. As a result, when a P person makes a decision, he may have a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness, while the J person, in the same situation, may have a feeling of ease and satisfaction.
Js tend to establish deadlines and take them seriously, expecting others to do the same. Ps may tend more to look upon deadlines as mere alarm clocks which buzz at a given time, easily turned off or ignored while one catch an extra forty winks, almost as if the deadline were used more as a signal to start than to complete a project.
It is said that INTJs are type-proud. The reasons for that are evident in the foregoing passages.
It’s time to revisit Bryan Caplan, a first-rate economist whose ventures into other fields usually discredit him.
In this episode, I reach back to 2010, when Caplan restated his version of the Golden Rule, which is that “we” ought to be treated just as “we” would treat others. (My take on Caplan’s earlier post is here.) Much as I like the Golden Rule, for its civilizing influence on humans, I am not a simple-minded moralist like Caplan and other libertarian purists.
Caplan objects to the “double standard” by which Americans, for example, would praise the killing of enemy civilians, were it a necessary act of war, but condemn the killing of 3,000 Americans by an enemy who proclaims his act necessary in the service of some objective. I wonder if Caplan would object to the “double standard” when faced with the prospect of his children being among the 3,000 Americans killed.
The Golden Rule also is known as the ethic of reciprocity, and for a good reason. For the Golden Rule to operate effectively, it must be accompanied by a reasonable expectation that your mundane acts of self-restraint and helpfulness will be returned in kind by persons whose lives touch yours, or with whom you share a bond of kinship or culture.
The Golden Rule simply doesn’t operate very well across the boundaries of family, friendship, and culture, Caplan’s wishful thinking to the contrary nothwithstanding. (Consider, for example, the rudeness that often prevails in anonymous encounters over the internet and on the highway.) And there is no inherent reason that the Golden Rule should operate well across those boundaries, just because Caplan (or any other intellectual) asserts that it should. Who died and left him (and his ilk) in charge?
There are other moral considerations at work, aside from reciprocity. One of them, which I discuss here, is the ethic of mutual defense:
[W]ho better to help you defend yourself than the people with whom you share space, be it a neighborhood, a city-state, a principality, or even a vast nation? As a member of one or the other, you may be targeted for harm by outsiders who wish to seize your land and control your wealth, or who simply dislike your way of life, even if it does them no harm.
If, like Caplan, you’re willing to allow an enemy to obliterate some of your fellow citizens because you have obliterated some enemy citizens, you are not to be trusted. You might as well be an enemy.
More generally, Caplan’s moral blindness betrays his Rationalism. As Michael Oakeshott explains,
the Rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason … to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration….
… And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. (“Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5-7, as republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays)
Thomas Sowell puts it this way:
One of the things intellectuals [his Rationalists] have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society [or a nation] together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia….
Under the influence of the intelligentsia, we have become a society that rewards people with admiration for violating its own norms and for fragmenting that society into jarring segments. In addition to explicit denigrations of their own society for its history or current shortcomings, intellectuals often set up standards for their society which no society has ever met or is likely to meet.
Calling those standards “social justice” enables intellectuals to engage in endless complaints about the particular ways in which society fails to meet their arbitrary criteria, along with a parade of groups entitled to a sense of grievance, exemplified in the “race, class and gender” formula…. (Intellectuals and Society, pp. 303, 305)
Sowell’s attack is aimed at left-wing intellectuals, but it could just as well be aimed at libertarian purists like Caplan and his ilk.
Arnold Kling is somewhat dismissive of Christopher DeMuth’s (paywalled) proclamation in The Wall Street Journal:
The essential purpose of modern American conservatism is to conserve the American nation. My program for doing so would be in part antiprogressive. It would re-establish national borders, reduce our million annual illegal entries to zero, and calibrate lawful immigration to the needs of cultural assimilation, social harmony and economic growth. It would abolish all official racial and other group preferences, quotas and gerrymanders. It would liberate the energy sector.
My program would also address causes of national disorder in which conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defense and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting stable currency—not 5% inflation, not today’s official goal of 2% that quintuples prices in a lifetime, but zero.
And it would include not only the historical tried-and-true but also modern innovations. These include universal school choice and initiatives to mobilize science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communication and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.
Kling says,
DeMuth’s ideas seem to me to fall somewhere between Trumpism and the establishment. He used to head up the American Enterprise Institute.
The first and second paragraphs in the quotation from DeMuth strike me as old-fashioned Republicanism of the Goldwater-Reagan variety. There’s nothing “establishment” (i.e., “bipartisan”) about any of it. To the extent it’s “Trumpist”, that means “Trumpism” isn’t just baloney.
I’d want to think harder about the implications of the third paragraph. If DeMuth means that government should throw money at certain outcomes, I’d demur. But if he means that government should back off in certain areas and let market outcomes dictate, I’d approve. But I will say that I’m entirely sympathetic to the repatriation of the production of national essentials — including but not limited to the production of fossil fuels and steel.
This is an old (2009) but still-relevant post about the still-irrelevant Leonard Pitts Jr., a syndicated columnist whose offerings I used to read (occasionally) in The Washington Post. This masochistic practice served two purposes. First, it exercised my cardiovascular system (i.e., raised my heart rate and blood pressure). Second, it helped me to keep up with what passes for wisdom among the race-card-playing set.
Mr. Pitts, who is a syndicated columnist operating out of The Miami Herald, comes by his race-card-playing naturally, as a black and — given his age (b. 1957) — a likely beneficiary of reverse discrimination (a.k.a. affirmative action). I should note that Pitts plays the race-card game clumsily, probably because his mental warehouse is stocked with gross generalizations and logical fallacies.
I was provoked to write this post by a Pitts column, to which I will come, where (in passing) he defended the socialization of medicine because other things also have been socialized. By that logic, Pitts would excuse the murder of his wife because millions of murders already have been committed.
* * *
I begin my sampling of Pitts’s pathetic prose with “We’ll go forward from this moment”, of September 12, 2001 (a reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001):
Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless.
No, “we” (the citizens of the United States) are most decidedly not a family, not even a feuding one. If there ever was anything like an American “family,” it existed in the years just after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces. The degree of unity and resolve in the America of 1942-45 makes a mockery of the years following September 2001, during which disunity and irresolution became the standard pose of the media, academia, the Democrat Party, more than a few Republican “moderates,” many isolationist paleo-conservatives, and most libertarians.
Americans, now more than ever, are members of millions of separate families, churches, clubs, neighborhoods, work groups, etc. If there is anything shared by a majority of Americans, it is a taste for food in large quantities, vulgar entertainment, and a chance to feed at the public trough at the expense of other Americans.
The most notable schism in American life is one that has arisen since the onset of the Great Depression. It has come to this: Americans are deeply divided (though not evenly divided) about the rightful power of government in foreign and domestic affairs. There are three main camps. The largest favors surrender abroad and statism at home; the smallest favors surrender abroad and anarchy at home; the one to which I belong favors the full exercise of American might in defense of Americans’ legitimate overseas interest, together with a limited government devoted mainly to the protection of Americans from domestic predators and parasite.
It is obvious in what I have just said that Americans today do not even share a tradition of liberty, which has long vanished from the land. Because of this loss of liberty, Americans have become something less than citizens with a common birthright and something more like hostages in their own land, with little voice and almost no opportunity for exit. Many (perhaps most) Americans like it that way, many others don’t understand what has been lost to them, and some (too few) understand it all too painfully. Pitts and his ilk like it that way because they are in thrall to special-interest politics and cannot see how those politics have abetted our downward spiral into political bondage, social license, and weakness in the face of our foreign and domestic enemies.
People are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when it allows them to stand in judgment of someone else, licenses them to feel superior to someone else, tells them they are more righteous than someone else.
They are less enthusiastic when religiosity demands that they be compassionate to someone else. That they show charity, service and mercy to everyone else.
Consider that last month thousands of people wept on the steps of an Alabama courthouse in support of a rock bearing the Ten Commandments. And watching, you wondered: What hungry person gets fed because of this? What naked person is clothed, what homeless one housed?
It seemed a fresh reminder that religious people are often the poorest advertisement for religious life.
How much more convincing an advertisement, how much more compelling a testimony, if people of faith were more often caught by news cameras demonstrating against healthcare cuts that fill our streets with the homeless mentally ill. Or confronting the slumlord about the vermin-infested holes he offers as places for families to live. Or crusading to make the sweatshop owner pay a living wage to workers who are treated little better than slaves.
From what well of knowledge does Pitts draw his assertions that people are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when they can stand in judgment of others, but are less enthusiastic when compassion is in order? Does Pitts even know, let alone care, that residents of “Red” States — where religious fundamentalism is more prevalent — are much more generous in their charitable giving than residents of “Blue” States — where secular Europeanism is the norm?
And what about those persons who “wept on the steps of an Alabama courthouse in support of a rock bearing the Ten Commandments”? What is wrong with protesting the further distancing of government from morality? I suspect that Pitts doesn’t want public officials to be reminded of the Ten Commandments because one of them says “You shall not steal” — and that is precisely what government does when it taxes and regulates Americans toward poverty, often in the name of “compassion”.
And why would it be a compelling testimony for religion if “people of faith” were more often seen demonstrating against budget cuts that fill our streets with the homeless mentally ill, or confronting slumlords about vermin-infested holes, or crusading to make sweatshop owners pay a “living wage to workers”? Pitts can offer such advice only because he doesn’t understand or care about the implications of such actions: Higher taxes for hard-working families; more homeless persons as landlords raise rents to defray the costs of improving their properties; more starving poor, as “sweatshop” owners find new locales in which to recruit willing workers who have less exalted ideas than Pitts about what constitutes a “living wage”.
Pitts reveals himself as an ignoramus or a hypocrite — probably both — who is simply pleased to indulge his moral outrage when it allows him to stand in judgment of others.
As a reader who chose to remain nameless put it, many people wonder if a given black professional “is there because of his/her skills and abilities, or because of affirmative action. Unfortunately, affirmative action policies leave many unanswered questions about a black person’s education and training, as well as skills and abilities. . . . How do we answer these questions?”
I will try my best to answer them with a straight face. It’s going to be difficult.
Because there’s an elephant in this room, isn’t there? It’s huge and noisy and rather smelly, yet none of these good people sees it. The elephant is this simple fact:
White men are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action this country has ever seen.
That’s not rhetoric or metaphor. It’s only truth.
THE NATION’S CUSTOM
If affirmative action is defined as giving someone an extra boost based on race, it’s hard to see how anyone can argue the point. Slots for academic admission, for employment and promotion, for bank loans and for public office have routinely been set aside for white men. This has always been the nation’s custom. Until the 1960s, it was also the nation’s law. . . .
My correspondents feel they should not be asked to respect the skill or abilities of a black professional who may or may not have benefited from affirmative action. They think such a person should expect to be looked down upon. But black people have spent generations watching white men who were no more talented, and many times downright incompetent, vault to the head of the line based on racial preference.
So, here’s my question:
Would African Americans be justified in looking down on white professionals? In wondering whether they are really smart enough to do the job? In questioning their competence before they had done a thing?
Pitts deploys three shifty debating techniques: He changes the subject; subtly (and inappropriately) redefines a key term; falsely generalizes about a class of persons (white men); and then draws an unsupported conclusion from flawed premises.
The change of subject is obvious. Pitts, instead of addressing the question whether affirmative action leads to the advancement of under-qualified blacks, attacks whites for having been unqualified.
Why were whites unqualified? Because they, too, benefited from something Pitts chooses to call affirmative action, namely, “giving someone an extra boost based on race”. There is a basic problem with Pitts’s shifty redefinition of affirmative action: discrimination against blacks produces different results than discrimination against whites. The real elephant in the room, the one that it is impolite to mention, is that blacks and whites often have different skills. And for most jobs where intelligence matters there are many more qualified whites than blacks.
It is therefore wrong to paint whites with the same “affirmative action” brush. Despite Pitts’s implication to the contrary, blacks would not have been justified in looking down on white professionals, as a group. But theconverseisnottrue. Certainly, there are and have been superb black doctors and miserably incompetent white ones, but faced with a choice between, say, a white doctor of unknown skill and a black doctor of unknown skill, a person (black or white) would prudently choose the white doctor.
No one becomes a teacher to get rich. You become a teacher because you want to give back, you want to shape future generations, you want to change the world.
Oh spare me! You become a teacher because
you enjoy teaching, in general
you enjoy teaching a particular subject because you know it well
you enjoy the power of being in charge of a classroom (to the extent that you’re mentally and physically capable of being in charge)
it’s the best job you can get, given your intelligence and particular skills
some or all of the preceding statements apply to you.
Teaching is a job, not a mystical calling.
Pitts is right to say that
much of what ails American schools can be traced to a bureaucracy that: a) doesn’t pay enough; b) does too little to encourage and reward creativity; c) doesn’t give principals authority over who works in their schools; d) makes it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.
The key word is “bureaucracy”. American schools will not improve until they are privatized, allowed to compete with one another, and allowed to hire teachers who know their subjects as opposed to NEA-approved hacks with “education” degrees. Some schools will be better than others, of course, but that’s true now. What isn’t true — or possible — now is that most schools will improve, or go out of business. (Public schools sometimes are “closed” for conspicuous failure, only to re-open in the same place, and with most of the same students and teachers.)
The problem, for Pitts and other “liberals”, is that it just isn’t “fair” for some children to have access to better schools than others, even though that also is true now, and even though bright children of less-affluent parents undoubtedly would have access to scholarships funded by affluent graduates of better schools. No, in the name of “fairness”, Pitts and his fellow “liberals” would rather hope for a transformation of public schools that will never happen, precisely because public schools are beholden to the NEA, which is nothing more than a union designed to guarantee work for incompetents who cannot master real subjects.
* * *
I come now to the column that touched off this post: “No ability to explain us to us”. Though the thread of Pitts’s “logic” is tangled, he his main concern seems to be national unity, or the lack thereof.
He rests his point on the fact that not everyone is happy with the election of Barack Obama or his policies, which he traces to racism or out-and-out nuttiness:
Last year, Barack Obama was elected president, the first American of African heritage ever to reach that office. If this was regarded as a new beginning by most Americans, it was regarded apocalyptically by others who promptly proceeded to lose both their minds and any pretense of enlightenment.
These are the people who immediately declared it their fervent hope that the new presidency fail, the ones who cheered when the governor of Texas raised the specter of secession, the ones who went online to rechristen the executive mansion the “Black” House, and to picture it with a watermelon patch out front.
On tax day they were the ones who, having apparently just discovered the grim tidings April 15 brings us all each year, launched angry, unruly protests. In the debate over health-care reform, they are the ones who have disrupted town hall meetings, shouting about the president’s supposed plan for “death panels” to euthanize the elderly.
Now, they are the ones bringing firearms to places the president is speaking.
The Washington Post tells us at least a dozen individuals have arrived openly — and, yes, legally — strapped at events in Arizona and New Hampshire, including at least one who carried a semiautomatic assault rifle. In case the implied threat is not clear, one of them also brought a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s quote about the need to water the tree of liberty with “the blood of … tyrants.”
Is Pitts suggesting that most of the 60,000,000 Americans who voted against Barack Obama (46 percent of those casting a vote in the election of 2008) immediately hailed Obama’s election as a “new beginning”? To be sure, there was a honeymoon period around inauguration day, when about two-thirds of voters hopefully approved of Obama and his net approval rating hovered between 25 and 30 percent. But the honeymoon was over almost as soon as it had begun, as Americans began to grasp the bankruptcy (pun intended) of Obama’s policies.
But rather than acknowledge the awakening of most Americans to Obama’s threats to liberty and prosperity, Pitts stoops to barely veiled charges of racism and irrationality. To hope that Obama fails is not to wish ill for the nation; to the contrary, it is to hope that Obama’s policies fail of realization because they are seen (rightly) as inimical to liberty and prosperity. To find racism in talk of secession is a ploy by a columnist who is willing to sell his liberty cheap (or give it away), as long as the president’s skin is of the right color.
Then we have the concatenation of
the ones who went online to rechristen the executive mansion the “Black” House, and to picture it with a watermelon patch out front.
On tax day they were the ones who, having apparently just discovered the grim tidings April 15 brings us all each year, launched angry, unruly protests.
In other words, some racists oppose Obama and his policies; therefore, opposition to Obama and his policies is racist. Pitts evidently failed Logic 101, for he could just as well suggest that some racists (i.e., reverse racists) support Obama and his policies; therefore, support of Obama and his policies is racist.
A relative handful of those publicly protesting Obamacare — themselves a relative handful of the millions who oppose or question it — happen to have carried guns (legally) to the forums at which they (or others) voiced protests. Pitts verges on a Soviet-style declaration that those who oppose the regime are, by definition, mentally ill and must be locked up, for their own safety.
As noted earlier, Pitts is unfazed by the fact “that our libraries, schools, police and fire departments are all ‘socialized’”. If one more thing — namely medical care — is socialized, so what? And, given the number of murders committed every year, if one more person is murdered, so what?
All of that aside, Pitts’s real point has do with the kind of country America will become:
These are strange times. They call to mind what historian Henry Adams said in the mid-1800s: “There are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”
Adams spoke in geographical terms of a nation rapidly expanding toward the Pacific. Our challenge is less geographical than spiritual, less a question of the distance between Honolulu and New York than between you and the person right next to you. . . .
We frame the differences in terms of “conservative” and “liberal,” but these are tired old markers that with overuse and misuse have largely lost whatever meaning they used to have and with it, any ability to explain us to us. This isn’t liberal vs. conservative, it is yesterday vs. tomorrow, the stress of profound cultural and demographic changes that will leave none of us as we were. . . .
Round and round we go and where we stop, nobody knows. And it is an open question, as it was for Henry Adams, what kind of country we’ll have when it’s done.
“Can” one government comprehend the whole? It may be harder to answer now than it was then.
The distances that divide us cannot be measured in miles.
Pitts is right about the distances that divide Americans, but those distances have divided Americans for generations. (I repeat: “We” are not a family.) The only way to reconcile those differences is to restore the basic scheme of of the Constitution, which is to
establish one nation united in common defense,
with open internal borders, and
free movement of goods across those borders, for prosperity’s sake, and
free movement of people between and within the several sovereign States, so that individuals may associate with those whom they find most congenial.
Such a wise scheme will not do for collectivists like Pitts, who cannot abide the thought of a world other than one made to their specifications. If the Pittses persist in their collectivist zeal, America will proceed from a (cold) civil war to secession, a military coup, or even revolution. And the fault will lie with the Pittses, because they are the true enemies of liberty.
* * *
Having reacquainted myself with Mr. Pitts, and having thereby exercised my cardiovascular system, I bade him adieu — not fondly but forever.
I started blogging in the late 1990s with a home page that I dubbed Liberty Corner (reconstructed here). I maintained the home page until 2000. When the urge to resume blogging became irresistible in 2004, I created the Blogspot version of Liberty Corner, where I blogged until May 2008.
My weariness with “serious” blogging led to the creation of Americana, Etc., “A blog about baseball, history, humor, language, literature, movies, music, nature, nostalgia, philosophy, psychology, and other (mostly) apolitical subjects”. I posted there sporadically from July 2008 until September 2013.
But I couldn’t resist commenting on political, economic, and social issues, so I established Politics & Prosperityin February 2009. My substantive outpourings ebbed and flowed until March 2019, when I hit a wall.
I then started blogging at Realities, in an attempt to focus on short, punchy posts, and to substitute quantity for length. That’s the way I started, but it’s not in my nature to say a little bit when there’s a lot to be said. So I resumed blogging at Politics & Prosperity, and brought back with me all of the posts that I had published at Realities from April to August 2019.
My blogging stint at Politics & Prosperity finally ended in June 2022. In July 2022 I decided to republish old P&P posts at Substack, using the moniker Loquitur’s Letter. (My nom de guerre, Loquitur Veritatem is Latin for truth-teller.) I have since begun to mix new posts with the old ones.
I have published about 4,000 posts at my various blogs. There’s a page at Politics & Prosperity — “Favorite Posts” — which provides links to what I consider to be the best of the posts I published at P&P and the other blogs mentioned above.
What follows is a complete index of the posts I’ve published at Loquitur’s Letter. Some posts are assigned to more than one category. The series “Not-So-Random Thoughts” defies categorization, so I will link to entries here: I, II, III.
Examining several facets of a moral, legal, and scientific issue.
Using a Q&A format, this page summarizes my writings on abortion in the 18 years, since I first voiced my opposition to it
WHY DO I OPPOSE ABORTION?
My objections to abortion are moral and prudential. Morally, I cannot condone a brutal, life-taking practice for which the main justification is convenience. (See, for example, tables 2 through 5 of “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Qualitative and Quantitative Perspectives”, a publication of the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization.) Prudentially, I do not want to live in a country where blameless life can be taken easily, with the encouragement of the state or at the state’s insistence. Abortion is a step down a slippery slope.
There have been serious proposals to allow post-natal abortion — infanticide. The next step, which has been taken in some “civilized” countries (not to mention the Third Reich and Soviet Russia) is involuntary euthanasia to “rid the populace” of those deemed unfit.
Ah, but who does the “deeming”? That is always the question. Given the rate at which power is being centralized in this country, it is not unthinkable that decisions about life and death will be placed in the hands of agencies of the federal government.
If anyone thinks it cannot happen here, think again. No nation or class of persons is immune from the disease of power-lust. The only way to prevent it from spreading and becoming ever more malevolent is to resist it at every turn.
I address the slippery slope toward state-imposed eugenics at several points below.
WHY DO I CALL ABORTION MURDER?
First, there’s the obvious fact that abortion results in the death of a living being. But that’s a mild way of putting it. The methods used in abortion would be termed “brutal” by opponents of capital punishment, who usually are pro-abortion. Consider this (from Wikipedia as of April 7, 2018):
From the 15th week of gestation until approximately the 26th, other techniques must be used. Dilation and evacuation (D&E) consists of opening the cervix of the uterus and emptying it using surgical instruments and suction. After the 16th week of gestation, abortions can also be induced by intact dilation and extraction (IDX) (also called intrauterine cranial decompression), which requires surgical decompression of the fetus’s head before evacuation. IDX is sometimes called “partial-birth abortion“, which has been federally banned in the United States. [Ed. note: One small step for humanity.]
In the third trimester of pregnancy, induced abortion may be performed surgically by intact dilation and extraction or by hysterotomy. Hysterotomy abortion is a procedure similar to a caesarean section and is performed under general anesthesia. It requires a smaller incision than a caesarean section and is used during later stages of pregnancy.
What happens in an intact dilation and extraction? This (according to Wikipedia as of April 7, 2018):
Feticidal injection of digoxin or potassium chloride may be administered at the beginning of the procedure to allow for softening of the fetal bones or to comply with relevant laws in the physician’s jurisdiction. During the surgery, the fetus is removed from the uterus in the breech position, with mechanical collapse of the fetal skull if it is too large to fit through the cervical canal. Decompression of the skull can be accomplished by incision and suction of the contents, or by using forceps.
Almost enough said. For more, go here for an excerpt of an interview of philosopher Don Marquis.
WHY DID THE “RIGHT” TO AN ABORTION BECOME A POLITICAL CAUSE?
Daniel J. Flynn makes this astute observation in a piece at The American Spectator:
Students did not end the Vietnam War. They ended the draft. And once the draft ended, their protests, at least on a mass scale, ended, too.
Wikipedia, not normally my go-to source for history, lists more than 100 major events on its page documenting protests against the Vietnam War. The very last one occurred one week before Richard Nixon ended the draft. Small, scattered protests, of the like that do not appear Wikipedia’s radar—one in Central Park in 1975 involving Joan Baez and others comes to mind—continued. But even as the killing continued the big protests did not because the draft did not.
And it is true that U.S. combat operations continued after the end of the draft. So I must agree with Flynn’s observation.
What does it have to do with abortion? It’s mostly about the “Me” generation — the Baby Boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Look at this graph from this article in Wikipedia:
This source addresses some of the causes of the decline in the abortion rate since 1980. There are others, such as easier access to contraceptives and the growing awareness (and fear of) HIV/AIDS.
But the most obvious cause of the decline is the aging of Boomers. A large fraction of the women who were born during the peak baby-boom years (1946-1960) would have been “past it” by the mid-1990s*. And that’s when the abortion rate ended a period of relatively steep decline (see above graph). The abortion rate continued to decline at more gradual rate through the early 2000s, when it leveled off, then began to decline at a faster rate after 2008. (The most likely cause of the steeper decline since 2008 is the enactment by several States of stricter controls on abortion.)
This isn’t to absolve later generations of their sins. Most college graduates and college-goers** of the X, Millennial, and Z generations have drunk the Kool-Aid of “wokeness”. But the Boomers — notable for their self-centered depravity — were and are especially dangerous because so many of them became prominent in politics, the law, and the internet-media-academic complex.
The Boomers (or too many of them) epitomize the left’s 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.
As amply demonstrated by the reaction to the leaked decision on Dobbs (2022) — and the later announcement of that decision — too many persons of the left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want: period. The left’s stance on abortion should be viewed as just one more adolescent tantrum in a vast repertoire of tantrums. __________ * The late Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) epitomized the Boomers. She was born in 1947 and began her eventually successful suit to legalize abortion when she was 21.
** College-goers, as distinct from students who are striving to acquire knowledge rather than left-wing propaganda, and to exercise their critical faculties instead of parroting left-wing slogans.
WAS THE “RIGHT” TO AN ABORTION REALLY THE “LAW OF THE LAND”?
No, not really. The U.S. Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning.
All branches of government are equally bound by the Constitution. No branch of the federal government— not the Congress, not the President, not even the Supreme Court— can legitimately act in ways contrary to the words of the Constitution. Indeed, Article VI requires that all government officials— legislative, executive, and judicial, state and federal—“ shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” Thus, the idea of a written constitution is closely tied to the idea of constitutional supremacy: In America, no branch of government is supreme. The government as a whole is not supreme. The Constitution is supreme. It is the written Constitution that prevails over every other source of authority in the United States.
Further, as sovereign entities and parties to the constitutional contract, the States can (and should) refuse to implement unconstitutional decrees emanating from the central government.
IS ABORTION A NATURAL RIGHT?
The road to natural rights is through natural law. Natural law is about morality, that is, right and wrong. Natural rights are about the duties and obligations that human beings owe to each other, given natural law.
Believers in natural law claim to start with the nature of human beings, then derive from that nature the “laws” of morality. Believers in natural rights claim to start with the nature of human beings, then derive from that nature the inalienable “rights” of human beings.
A natural law would be something like this: It is in the nature of human beings to seek life and to avoid death. A natural right would be something like this: Given that it is natural for human beings to seek life and avoid death, every human being has the right to life.
Natural law is “discovered” in the sense that it consists of norms that arise from human nature. An example would be the Golden Rule, or ethic of reciprocity. It seems most likely to have arisen from experience and normalized through tacit agreement before it was enunciated by various “wise men” over the ages.
The main alternative to the idea of natural law as arising from human nature is that it preexists in divine ordinance. But the two ideas can be reconciled by saying that human nature, by design, manifests divine intent.
In any event, if the Golden Rule is natural law, it seems not to offer room for a natural right to an abortion, that is, abortion on demand for any reason whatsoever. Doing unto others as one would be done unto would seem to prohibit the arbitrary taking of a life. (This raises the question whether a fetus is a “person” or a “human being”, to which I will come.)
Moreover, if there is a fundamental natural right, one that underlies all others, it is the right to life. There are rare instances in which persons willingly and voluntarily succumb to death, but they are notable exceptions that underscore the basic human urge (natural law) to go on living. This, too, argues against the killing of a fetus.
So, as a general matter (which admits limited and specific exceptions), there isn’t a natural right to an abortion.
WAS THERE REALLY A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO AN ABORTION?
There was, but only in the sense that the U.S. Supreme Court fabricated such a right in Roe v. Wade (1973). As the majority in Dobbs explained at length, the right to abortion was not and is not rooted in the nation’s history.
Abortion was considered murder long before States began to legislate against it in the 19th century. The long-standing condemnation of abortion — even before quickening — is treated thoroughly in Marvin Olasky’s Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America. (excerpt here). Olasky corrects the slanted version of American history upon which the U.S. Supreme Court relied in Roe v. Wade. The criminalization of abortion by most States in the 1800s did not mean that it was generally approved of or thought of as a right at the time of the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It was certainly not thought of as a right at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.
The majority in Roe v. Wade found for abortion by invoking a general privacy right, which had been invented in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). But the Court could not decide whether the right is located in the Ninth Amendment (reserving unenumerated rights to the people) or the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing due process of law). Neither amendment, of course, is the locus of a general privacy right because none is conferred by the Constitution, nor could the Constitution ever confer such a right, for it would interfere with such truly compelling state interests as the pursuit of justice. By the logic of the majority’s reasoning, infanticide in the confines of one’s home would be permissible if the States hadn’t legislated against it before 1787.
The spuriousness of the majority’s conclusion is evident in its flinching from the logical end of its reasoning: abortion anywhere at anytime. Instead, the majority delivered this:
The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. . . . We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.
That is, the majority simply drew an arbitrary line between life and death — but in the wrong place. It is as if the majority understood, but wished not to acknowledge, the full implications of an absolute privacy right. Such a right could be deployed by unprincipled judges to decriminalize a variety of heinous acts.
In sum, the constitutional “right” to an abortion was a fabricated judicial whim. A later Court went part of the way (but, sadly, not all the way) in exposing the Roe Court’s fabrication. I refer to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). As blogger Patterico noted, Casey
1) upheld the central holding of Roe on stare decisis grounds; 2) stripped the abortion right of its status as a “fundamental right” under the Constitution; and 3) replaced Roe‘s trimester framework with a rule tied to viability.
Stare decisis is a vile legal doctrine that has enabled the long and costly accretion of powers by the federal government. The majority in Dobbs (excluding the pusillanimous chief justice) rightly rejected stare decisis.
I address viability below.
IS A FETUS A “PERSON”?
This question is related to the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade that a fetus isn’t a “person” — and therefore entitled to constitutional protection — until it becomes “viable” in the third trimester of pregnancy.
The “personhood” issue is legalistic rather than scientific. Personhood is an abstraction, not a physical fact. A human being is created at the moment of conception. It may be a rudimentary human being, but it is one nevertheless. And it has the potential to become a fully formed human being.
If it is permissible to kill a human being who is still in the formative stage, it should be permissible to kill anyone who hasn’t yet reached his full height. Perhaps that should be the cut-off point for “personhood”.
WHAT ABOUT THE VIABILITY ARGUMENT?
There is a phony pro-abortion argument that a fetus is fair game (so to speak) until it is viable. That is, until it could survive (as a newborn child) outside the mother’s womb. But that is a circular argument because a fetus that is aborted before it could have survived outside the mother’s womb would have attained viability had it not been aborted.
The viability argument comes down to this: It is all right to kill a fetus before it becomes viable so that it cannot become viable.
Moreover, when does a human being become “viable’, that is, capable of living without assistance? Certainly not at birth, and certainly not during early childhood. Possibly at puberty, but not in the United States or most Western countries, with their cossetted hordes of adolescents. And not even at graduation from high school for those who take it as their birthright to extend adolescence to age 22 and, sometimes, well beyond it.
WHY SHOULDN’T A WOMAN CONTROL HER OWN BODY?
That question is a dodgy way of trying to get around the fact that a fetus has a life of its own — literally. The fetus may be dependent on the woman who is carrying it, but it is not her body. The fetus is a separate human being, no matter how dependent on its mother. Further, as discussed above, dependency doesn’t end with birth. In fact, these days it often continues until a child is a twenty-something. There are some advocates of post-natal infanticide, but only enthusiasts of euthanasia would extend murder beyond that stage.
There is a similarly slippery argument for abortion. It is the self-defense argument, which is sometimes billed as a property rights argument. A leading example is found in Judith Jarvis Thomson‘s article, “A Defense of Abortion” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1 (1971): 47-66), which is available online here. It goes like this: A fetus is an “uninvited guest” in or “invader” of its mother’s body, which is the mother’s property. The mother may therefore do with the fetus as she will.
But a fetus is neither an uninvited guest nor an invader. Rather, it is a life, and that life — by biological necessity — is (almost always) its mother’s responsibility:
Conception, in almost all cases, is the result of a consensual act of sexual intercourse.
Conception is a known consequence of the act of sexual intercourse.
Life indisputably begins at conception.
A woman who conceives a child by an act of consensual sex has therefore incurred an implicit obligation to care for the life that flows from her act.
Given that the existence of a fetus cannot cause harm to anyone but its mother, the only valid route for terminating the life of a fetus would be a legal proceeding that culminates in a judicial determination that the continuation of the life of the fetus would cause grave physical harm or death to the mother.
A person who argues otherwise can do so only by regarding the fetus a sub-human implantation for which the mother bears no responsibility. Such a person might as well argue for a right to dispose of surly teenage children through involuntary euthanasia. The principle is the same: Kill the life you brought into the world because its presence is inconvenient or irritating. (For brilliant demolitions of arguments similar to Thomson’s, see this by Matt Walsh and this by Glen Whitman.)
IF ABORTION WERE ILLEGAL, SHOULD A WOMAN WHO ABORTS A CHILD FACE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES?
Kevin Williamson infamously said that women who have an abortion are guilty of murder and should be executed. That view, which he stated more than once — before he was hired by The Atlantic — led to his firing by The Atlantic when its spineless editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, bowed to a (figurative) lynch mob.
Where does that leave me? I will answer by repeating (with light editing) something that I wrote almost 15 years ago.
How much jail time? Anna Quindlen asked that question in a Newsweek article she wrote in 2007 about the punishment for abortion. Quindlen observed that
[i]f the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal.
The aim of Quindlen’s column was to scorn the idea of jail time as punishment for a woman who procures an illegal abortion. It reminds me of the classic definition of chutzpah, given by Leo Rosten: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”. The chutzpah, in this case, belongs to Quindlen (and others of her ilk) who believe that a woman should not face punishment for an abortion because she has just “lost” a baby.
Balderdash! If a woman illegally aborts her child, why shouldn’t she be punished by a jail term (at least)? She would be punished by jail (or confinement in a psychiatric prison) if she were to kill her new-born infant, her toddler, her ten-year old, and so on. What’s the difference between an abortion and murder? None (see above), except where the life or health (beyond mere anxiety) of the mother is at stake.
Quindlen, who predictably opposes capital punishment, is consistent in her (typical) leftist opposition to justice. The Quindlens of this world somehow manage to make victims out of criminals.
IS ABORTION A STEP DOWN A SLIPPERY SLOPE?
Every time the state fails to defend innocent life it sets a new precedent for the taking of innocent life. Thus we come to the slippery slope.
Ross Douthat uses the Williamson case as a springboard to highlight “liberal” extremism in the defense of abortion:
[M]y pro-choice friends endorsing Williamson’s sacking can’t see that his extremism is mirrored in their own, in a system of supposedly “moderate” thought that is often blind to the public’s actual opinions on these issues, that lionizes advocates for abortion at any stage of pregnancy, that hands philosophers who favor forms of euthanasia and infanticide prestigious chairs at major universities, that is at best mildly troubled by the quietus of the depressed and disabled in Belgium or the near-eradication of Down syndrome in Iceland or the gendercide that abortion brought to Asia, that increasingly accepts unblinking a world where human beings can be commodified and vivisected so long as they’re in embryonic form.
Abortion is of a piece with selective breeding and involuntary euthanasia, wherein the state fosters eugenic practices that aren’t far removed from those of the Third Reich. And when those practices become the norm, what and who will be next? Instead of reflexively embracing “choice”, leftists — who these days seem especially wary of fascism (though they locate it in the wrong place) — should be asking whether “choice” will end with fetuses.
In sum, abortion is of a piece with Hitlerian eugenics. If you consider that to be an exaggeration, consider this piece by Patricia E. Bauer (a former reporter and bureau chief for The Washington Post), whose child has Down’s syndrome:
Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had “the test.” I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I’m a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I’m a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren’t relevant to their lives….
The irony is that we live in a time when medical advances are profoundly changing what it means to live with disabilities. Years ago, people with Down syndrome often were housed in institutions. Many were in poor health, had limited self-care and social skills, couldn’t read, and died young. It was thought that all their problems were unavoidable, caused by their genetic anomaly.
Now it seems clear that these people were limited at least as much by institutionalization, low expectations, lack of education and poor health care as by their DNA. Today people with Down syndrome are living much longer and healthier lives than they did even 20 years ago. Buoyed by the educational reforms of the past quarter-century, they are increasingly finishing high school, living more independently and holding jobs.
That’s the rational pitch; here’s the emotional one. Margaret is a person and a member of our family. She has my husband’s eyes, my hair and my mother-in-law’s sense of humor. We love and admire her because of who she is — feisty and zesty and full of life — not in spite of it. She enriches our lives. If we might not have chosen to welcome her into our family, given the choice, then that is a statement more about our ignorance than about her inherent worth.
What I don’t understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no value….
And here’s one more piece of un-discussable baggage: This question is a small but nonetheless significant part of what’s driving the abortion discussion in this country. I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families. The abortion debate is not just about a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby; it’s also about a woman’s right to choose which baby she wants to have.
This is not about “having” or “not having” babies with disabilities – the common way of discussing such things, when they are discussed at all. It is about “killing” or “not killing” babies with disabilities. Period.
I myself recall having a conversation with a Down’s syndrome adult who noted the disparity between Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s well-publicized support for the Special Olympics, and his equally well-known insistence that no woman should have to bear the indignity of a “defective” or unwanted child. “I may be slow,” this man observed, “but I am not stupid. Does he think that people like me can’t understand what he really thinks of us? That we are not really wanted? That it would be a better world if we didn’t exist?”
This from a speech given by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1978:
If people are only considered to be economic entities whose value is measured by the quality and/or quantity of their productivity, then what conceivable justification is there for maintaining, at great expense and difficulty, mentally and physically handicapped people and elderly? I know, that as sure as I can possibly persuade you to believe: governments will find it impossible to resist the temptation … to deliver themselves from this burden of looking after the sick and the handicapped by the simple expedient of killing them off. Now this, in fact, is what the Nazis did … not always through slaughter camps, but by a perfectly coherent decree with perfectly clear conditions. In fact, delay in creating public pressure for euthanasia has been due to the fact that it was one of the war crimes cited at Nuremberg. So for the Guinness Book of Records you can submit this: That it takes just about 30 years in our humane society to transform a war crime into an act of compassion. That is exactly what happened.
Not only can it happen in America, it is happening in America. In addition to abortion as a means of selecting “superior” specimens, there is genetic engineering, a more overt and frightening project of super-Frankensteinian scale.
There is the long-standing and partly successful push for voluntary euthanasia (a.k.a, assisted suicide). When and where it becomes legal, it provides cover for involuntary euthanasia. It is better to keep it illegal and let those who are truly desperate find reluctant help than to authorize it and invite all-too-willing help. (See Theodore Dalrymple.)
Another initiative, fortunately sidetracked for now, is forced mental screening of school-age children. Though this endeavor was pilloried as a plot by Big Pharma, it carried the seeds of thought- and behavior-control cloaked in a health-care guise. Something like it will be resurrected when the masters of practical thought-control — the Facebook, Google, YouTube generation — come to full political power.
The place to stop Hitlerian schemes is at the outset, before they gain a foothold and provide an excuse for other schemes that wear superficially benign masks. Every Supreme Court decision that enables interference in the lives, liberty, and property of Americans becomes an invitation to — and excuse for — further interference.
(Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland warned strongly against the evil side of eugenics in “The Death of Hippocrates” (The New Republic, September 12, 2004). The article is now hidden behind a paywall, but I excerpted much of it when it appeared. The excerpts are at the bottom of this post.
In answer, I turn to philosopher Jamie Whyte‘s Bad Thoughts – A Guide to Clear Thinking. Specifically, to one of Whyte’s logical errors, which is found under “Shut Up — You Sound Like Hitler” (pp. 46-9). Here’s the passage to which I object:
Anyone who advocates using recent advances in genetic engineering to avoid congenital defects in humans will pretty soon be accused of adopting Nazi ideas. Never mind the fact that the Nazi goals (such as racial purity) and genetic engineering techniques (such as genocide) were quite different from those now suggested.
Whyte seems to believe that policies should be judged by their intentions, not their consequences. Genetic engineering — which Whyte defines broadly — is acceptable to Whyte (and millions of others) — because its practitioners mean well. By that standard:
Obamacare, which caused health-insurance premiums and medical costs to rise ever higher, was a success because it was meant to cut premiums and costs.
Measures to combat CO2 emissions have been successful, even though they have resulted in higher energy costs and there is no demonstrably significant relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature (whatever that is), and no well- understood relationship between global temperature and human flourishing. (Though people tend to migrate from cold climates to warm ones, and warming produces higher crop yields.)
I cannot find a moral distinction between such “benevolence” and Hitler’s goal of racial purity.
Whyte, in his eagerness to slay many dragons of illogic, sometimes stumbles on his own illogic. Whyte to the contrary notwithstanding, not all invocations of Hitler are inapt. Genetic engineering, Whyte’s primary example, can be Hitlerian in its consequences, regardless of its proponents’ intentions.
I say “can be Hitlerian” because genetic engineering can also be beneficial. There is, for example, negative genetic engineering to cure and treat particular disorders.
I will continue to invoke Hitler where the invocation is apt, as it is in the cases of abortion, involuntary euthanasia, and the breeding of “superior” humans.
(Speaking of philosophers, see this for a demolition of a pro-abortion philosopher’s casuistry.)
IS THERE A UTILITARIAN OR ETHICAL ARGUMENT FOR ABORTION?
It’s patently absurd to think of measuring individual degrees of happiness, let alone summing those measurements. Suppose the government takes from A (making him miserable) and gives to B (making him joyous). Does B’s joyousness cancel A’s misery? Only if you’re B or a politician who has earned B’s support by joining in the raid on A’s bank account. (For more, see this and this.)
Nevertheless, the world is burdened by “ethicists” like Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Some years ago, Singer sought to exploit the tragic, state-ordered murder of Terry Schiavo, This is from WorldNetDaily:
During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments, says controversial bio-ethics professor Peter Singer.
“By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct,” says Princeton University’s defender of infanticide. “In retrospect, 2005 may be seen as the year in which that position (of the sanctity of life) became untenable,” he writes in the fall issue of Foreign Policy.
Singer sees 2005’s battle over the life of Terri Schiavo as a key to this changing ethic.
The year 2005 is also significant, at least in the United States, for ratcheting up the debate about the care of patients in a persistent vegetative state,” says Singer. “The long legal battle over the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube led President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress to intervene, both seeking to keep her alive. Yet the American public surprised many pundits by refusing to support this intervention, and the case produced a surge in the number of people declaring they did not wish to be kept alive in a situation such as Schiavo’s.”…
Yes, people say that they don’t want to share Terri Schiavo’s fate. What many of them mean, of course, is that they don’t want their fate decided by a judge who is willing to take the word of a relative for whom one’s accelerated death would be convenient. Singer dishonestly seizes on reactions to the Schiavo fiasco as evidence that euthanasia will become acceptable in the United States.
Certainly, there are many persons who would prefer voluntary euthanasia to a fate like Terri Schiavo’s. But the line between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia is too easily crossed, especially by persons who, like Singer, wish to play God. If there is a case to be made for voluntary euthanasia, Peter Singer is not the person to make it.
Singer gives away his Hitlerian game plan when he advocates killing the disabled up to 28 days after birth. Why not 28 years? Why not 98 years? Who decides — Peter Singer or an acolyte of Peter Singer? Would you trust your fate to the “moral” dictates of a person who thinks animals are as valuable as babies?
Would you trust your fate to the dictates of a person who so blithely dismisses religious morality? One does not have to be a believer to understand the intimate connection between religion and liberty, about which I have written here and here. Strident atheists of Singer’s ilk like to blame religion for the world’s woes. But the worst abuses of humanity in the 20th century arose from the irreligious and anti-religious regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
In a question and answer article published in the UK’s Independent today, controversial Princeton University Professor Peter Singer repeats his notorious stand on the killing of disabled newborns. Asked, “Would you kill a disabled baby?”, Singer responded, “Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.”…
“Many people find this shocking,” continued Singer, “yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion.” Concluding his point, Singer said, “One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.”
Let us be clear: Singer admits that it is the people who don’t support a woman’s “right” to have an abortion who insist that there is no distinction between the fetus and the newborn — or the fetus and an old person whose death might be convenient to others. Given Singer’s endorsement of involuntary infanticide — abortion and the killing of “disabled” newborns (“disabled” as determined how and by whom?) — Singer accepts, by implication, the rightness of involuntary euthanasia.
(There is much more about Singer’s “ethics” here, including his obvious support for “death panels”.)
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, DOESN’T ABORTION LEAD TO A LOWER RATE OF CRIME?
This question lends itself to rigorous statistical analysis. I begin with Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt (with Stephen J. Dubner). Here’s how The Washington Postreported Levitt’s findings about the drop in crime:
Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt’s notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt’s [sic] clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe.
Well, Steve Sailer (among others) has attacked Levitt’s findings:
First, Levitt’s theory is predicated — at least publicly — on abortion reducing the proportion of “unwanted” babies, who are presumed to be more likely to grow up to be criminals. The empirical problem with this is that legalization (which occurred in California, New York, and three other states in 1970 and nationally in 1973), didn’t put the slightest dent in the illegitimacy rate, which is, by far, the most obvious objective sign of not being wanted by the mother and father, and has been linked repeatedly with crime…
… [But] the growth in the illegitimacy rate didn’t start to slow down until the mid-1990s when the abortion rate finally went down a considerable amount.
My article [in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative] offers a simple explanation, drawn from Levitt’s own research, of why legal abortion tends to increase illegitimacy. [Ed. note: Read the whole thing.]
Second, the acid test of Levitt’s theory is that it predicts that the first cohort to survive being culled by legal abortion should have been particularly law-abiding. Instead, they went on the worst teen murder rampage in American history….
For example, the 14-17 year olds in the not particularly murderous year of 1976 were, on average, born about 1960 (i.e., 1976 – 16 years of age = 1960), so they didn’t “benefit” from being culled by legalized abortion the way that the 14-17 years olds during the peak murder years of 1993 and 1994 should have benefited, according to Levitt.
In contrast, the homicide rate for the 25 and over cohort (none of whom enjoyed the benefits of legalized abortion) was lower in 1993 than in 1983.
If the legalization of abortion did result in less crime it’s only because abortion became more prevalent among that segment of society that is most prone to commit crime. (I dare not speak its name.) What policy does Levitt want us to infer from that bit of causality? Would he favor a program of euthanasia for the most crime-prone segment of society? Now there’s a fine kettle of fish for leftists, who favor abortion and oppose “oppression” of the the segment of society that is the most crime-prone.
In any event, if abortion does anything, it leads to more crime by women because it “frees” them from child-rearing. In the following graph, the blue and orange lines denote pre- and post-Roe years (with a one-year lag for Roe to take effect).
In fact, Levitt’s findings are built on statistical quicksand. This is from the abstract of a paper by Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz of the Boston Fed:
[A] fascinating paper by Donohue and Levitt (2001, henceforth DL) . . . purports to show that hypothetical individuals resulting from aborted fetuses, had they been born and developed into youths, would have been more likely to commit crimes than youths resulting from fetuses carried to term. We revisit that paper, showing that the actual implementation of DL’s statistical test in their paper differed from what was described. . . .We show that when DL’s key test is run as described and augmented with state‐level population data, evidence for higher per capita criminal propensities among the youths who would have developed, had they not been aborted as fetuses, vanishes.
Whatever abortion is, it most certainly is not a crime-fighting tool.
BUT IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, ISN’T ABORTION CONSISTENT WITH LIBERTY?
Unsophisticated, self-styled libertarian defenders of abortion hold an “anything goes” view of liberty that is in fact antithetical to liberty. They may call themselves libertarians, but they might as well be anti-war protesters who block traffic or “greens” who burn down ski lodges and sabotage power facilities.
Liberty requires each of us to pursue happiness without causing harm to others, except in self-defense. Those libertarian defenders of abortion who bother to give the issue a bit of thought try to build a case for abortion around self-defense, arguing that a woman who aborts is defending herself, and that no one should question her act of self-defense. But that is a ridiculous argument, as I show above.
Where, then, lies a valid libertarian defense of abortion? In privacy? Not at all. Privacy, to the extent that it exists as right, cannot be a general right, as I have also argued above. If privacy were a general right, a murderer could claim immunity from prosecution as long as he commits murder in his own home, or better yet (for the murderer), as long as he murders his own children in his own home.
A “practical libertarian” might argue that legalizing abortion makes it “safer” (less dangerous to the mother), presumably because legalization ensures a greater supply of abortionists who can do the job without endangering the mother’s life, and at a lower price than a safe abortion would command without legalization. I’m willing to grant all of that, but I must observe that the same case can be made for legalizing murder. That is, a person with murderous intent could more readily afford to hire a professional who to do the job successfully and, at the same time, avoid putting himself at risk by trying to do the job himself. “Safety” is a rationalization for abortion that blinks at the nature of the act.
I am unable to avoid the conclusion that abortion is an anti-libertarian act of unjustified aggression against an innocent human being, an act that is usually undertaken for convenience and almost never for the sake of defending a mother’s life. Murder, too, is an act of convenience that is seldom justified by self-defense. Abortion, therefore, cannot be validated by mistaken appeals to self-defense, privacy, viability, and safety. Nor can abortion be validated (except legalistically) by a series of wrongly decided Supreme Court cases.
A hard-core “libertarian” will take refuge in the dogma that governmental interference in matters of personal choice is simply wrong. By that “logic,” it is wrong for government to interfere in or prosecute robbery, assault, rape, murder and other overtly harmful acts, which — after all — are merely the consequences of personal choices made by their perpetrators.
If the state has any legitimate function, it is to defend the lives, liberty, and property of those subject to its jurisdiction. State sponsorship of abortion is antithetical to that legitimate function. It suborns the killing of innocent human beings whose lives the state ought to protect.
“Liberal” support for abortion is just one more piece of evidence that “liberalism” is the enemy of liberty.
“Libertarian” support for abortion is one more piece of evidence that libertarianism — the dogma — is corrupt and anti-libertarian. (See what happened to Nat Hentoff when he demurred from “libertarian” orthodoxy in the matter of abortion.)
(It would make an already very long article excruciatingly long if I were to elaborate on the preceding point. If you are interested in understanding the anti-libertarian origins of libertarian dogma, go here.)
EXCERPTS OF SHERWIN B. NULAND’S “THE DEATH OF HIPPOCRATES” (THE NEW REPUBLIC, SEPTEMBER 12, 2004)
The exhibition [on eugenics at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington] details the influence of eugenics on determining Nazi policy from the time of the party’s assumption of power in 1933 until the end of World War II….Though some have thought of it as an applied science, eugenics is in fact more a philosophy than a science. Its proponents based their notions on genetics, having as their purpose the improvement of the breed. The word was defined exactly that way in 1911 in a book by the eminent American biometrician and zoologist Charles Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York (elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the following year), who called it “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”
Eugenicists believed that it is possible, and even a good idea, to attempt to enhance the quality of our species by regulating the reproduction of traits considered to be inheritable….
When Gregor Mendel’s forgotten experiments on inheritable characteristics were rediscovered in 1900, a certain biological legitimacy was conferred on these notions, as unknown factors (later shown to be genes) were identified as the source of traits immutably passed on to offspring, and it was perceived that some are dominant and others recessive….
Once the Mendelian laws of heredity were widely known, eugenics movements were founded in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, several of the nations of Europe, and even Latin America and Asia. Eugenics research institutes were established in more than a few of these countries, most prominently the United States, England, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden….
Not unexpectedly, eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity. Liberals–or progressives, as they were then usually called–were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities of society to be due to circumstantial factors amenable to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group. Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.
It is hardly surprising that National Socialism in Germany would embrace the concept of eugenics. But from the beginning, there was more to Nazi support than the movement’s political appeal or the promise of its social consequences. As is clear from the exquisitely structured and thoroughly reliable accounting of “Deadly Medicine,” the stage was set for the emergence of a drive toward a uniquely German form of eugenics long before the average citizen had ever heard of Adolf Hitler….
The earliest hint of the coming storm had appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, when the German biologist August Weismann definitively showed that changes acquired by an organism during its lifetime cannot be inherited. Weismann’s findings overthrew a theory promulgated a hundred years earlier by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, holding that such adaptations could be passed down to succeeding generations. So-called Lamarckianism had incited controversy since its inception, and its debunking added fuel to the fire of those who believed that human beings inherit not only fixed physical characteristics but also mental and moral ones….
[M]any [eugenics researchers] were serious scientists whose aim was to discover ways in which the very best of the inherited characteristics might be encouraged and the very worst eliminated, with the ultimate goal of curing the ills of society….”By the early 1900s, proponents of eugenics everywhere began to offer biological solutions to social problems common to urbanizing and industrial societies.”…
To large numbers of its host of well-meaning adherents, eugenics was a scientifically and even mathematically based discipline, and many of them actually thought of it as a measurable, verifiable branch of biology that held the promise of becoming an enormous force for good.
Though it must be admitted that the United States, Britain, and Germany became centers for eugenics in part because of each nation’s certainty of its own superiority over all peoples of the world, the fact is that these countries were hardly more chauvinistic than most others. The primary reason they led in eugenic studies is traceable to a far more significant factor: their leadership in science….
The German-speaking institutions were so far ahead of those of every other nation that leading clinicians, researchers, and educators in Europe, Asia, and the Americas considered their training incomplete unless they had spent a period of study at such centers of learning and innovation as Berlin, Würzburg, Vienna, and Bern, or one of the small academic gems among the many outstanding universities in Germany, such as Göttingen, Heidelberg, or Tübingen….
The Germanic medical establishment was heir to a grand tradition of accomplishment and international respect; when it took on eugenics as a worthy goal, it was convinced of the righteousness of its intent. Even when some of its own members began to voice concerns about the direction in which the research and its application were going, many authoritative voices drowned out the relatively few protests.
The process rolled on within a worldwide cultural milieu conditioned by the universally accepted belief that the earth’s population was divided into races, and further subdivided into ethnic groups within them….
The rising power of the international eugenics movement manifested itself in predictable ways, from anti-immigration laws to compulsory sterilization for those deemed unfit, enacted in such “progressive” countries as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and parts of Canada and Switzerland — as well as the United States, where some two dozen states had enacted sterilization laws by the late 1920s. The most dramatic moment for Americans came on May 2, 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state of Virginia’s intention to carry out tubal ligation on a “feebleminded” young woman named Carrie Buck, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter also judged to be retarded, as was Carrie’s mother. Writing the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
To a twenty-first-century sensibility, the equation with vaccination is at the very least questionable, but at the height of eugenic thinking, the eight-to-one majority among the justices reflected the general mood of a nation fifteen of whose states (the only ones of the twenty-seven reporting) would by 1933 have sterilized 6,246 of the insane, 2,938 of the feebleminded, fifty-five epileptics, sixteen criminals, and five persons with “nervous disorders.” More than half of these procedures were carried out in four state mental hospitals in California. In almost every state, the law applied only to residents of public facilities, which meant that lower-income groups were affected far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Some sixteen thousand Americans would eventually be sterilized.
At this time Germany had not yet enacted any sterilization laws, in spite of strong advocacy and much expression of admiration for the American system by the so-called racial hygienicists. All of this foot-dragging ended when Hitler came to power in 1933, and it ended with a vengeance….Between 1934 and 1945, some four hundred thousand people would be forcibly sterilized, most before the war began in 1939. These included, in 1937, about five hundred racially mixed children of German mothers and black colonial soldiers in the French army occupying the Rhineland.
The basis for sterilizing these children was the outgrowth of the notion that a hereditarily gifted nation can retain its greatness only if the heredity remains pure, a thesis that had been widely accepted in Germany (and by many citizens of other countries as well, including our own) for generations….By 1937, the principle of pure blood had manifested itself in many ways, most particularly in the persecution of Jews and the passage of the Nuremberg laws of 1935, officially called “the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” by which marriage and sexual relations were prohibited between Jews and people of “pure” German blood. Shortly thereafter the Reich Citizenship Law went into effect, declaring that only “Aryan” Germans were citizens and Jews were to be considered “subjects.” This law defined who was a Jew and who was a so-called Mischling, an individual of mixed parentage. From these beginnings as an outgrowth of eugenics — itself a misconceived attempt toward utopia — Nazi racial policy would culminate in the murder of millions and the near-annihilation of European Jewry….
The theorists and the scientists who had until 1933 been able, and sincerely so, to claim detached objectivity for their research, could no longer delude themselves about the purposes for which it was being used. With the ascent to power of the Nazis, they had become, willy-nilly, active participants in the beginnings of genocide….
The murder of children was only the beginning. In October, 1939, Hitler authorized euthanasia for adults housed in German asylums….Between January, 1940 and August, 1941, some seventy thousand adult patients were gassed, their only crime being that they were unproductive members of the Nazi state….
But far worse was to follow….On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference established the policy that would lead to the Holocaust, and from then on the real question became not whether but how….
Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems so clear that eugenics had always been a dangerous notion, and that its adherents were either deluded or racist. But the fact is that such a realization was slow in coming, and appeared only after matters had gotten completely out of hand and the stage set on which horrendous events would take place. Among the several reasons that medically trained students of eugenics allowed matters to turn so ugly was their failure to recognize a basic fact about the scientific enterprise, which is well known to historians and philosophers of the subject but continues to elude even some of the most sophisticated men and women who actually do the work. Though this fact characterizes science in general, it is even more applicable to the art that uses science to guide it, namely medicine, which was, after all, the underlying source of the momentum that drove the application of eugenic principles.
The basic fact to which I refer is that neither medicine nor science itself derives its “truths” in the thoroughly detached atmosphere in which its practitioners would like to believe they work. Especially in medicine and medical research, the atmosphere not only is not detached, but it is in fact largely the product of the very influences from which its participants seek to free themselves in order to isolate observations and conclusions from external sources and subjectivity. For an early explication of this, we may with profit turn to the father of Justice Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who was for some years the dean of Harvard Medical School and bid fair to be called the dean of American medicine in the mid-nineteenth century. Here is what the elder Holmes said in an oration delivered to the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1860, titled “Currents and Countercurrents in Medical Science”:
The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density. But look a moment while I clash a few facts together, and see if some sparks do not reveal by their light a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of society and the general thought of the time, than would, at first, be suspected.
The medical theory of any era–and to a somewhat lesser extent the science on which it is based–arises in a setting that is political and social. Not only that, but its directions and even its conclusions are influenced by the personal motivations, needs, and strivings of those who practice it, some of which may not be apparent to these men and women themselves. Though we would have it otherwise, there is no such thing as a thoroughly detached scientific undertaking. The danger in this lies not so much in its truth, but in the inability of society and the community of scientists to recognize the pervading influence of such an unpalatable reality, which flies in the face of the claims that form the groundwork for our worship of the scientific enterprise….
By itself, each of the small steps taken by the eugenics movement in the early part of the twentieth century seemed not just innocuous but actually of real interest as a subject for consideration. Attached to the names of highly regarded scientific thinkers, the theories intended to improve the general level and functioning of a nation had a certain appeal to men and women concerned about social issues….
At what point would I have realized the direction in which all of this was hurtling? Perhaps not until it was too late. Looking back with unbridled condemnation on the beginnings of racial hygiene does not enlighten today’s thoughtful man or woman in regard to how he or she might have responded at the time….
This is not to say that there had not from the beginning been enough evil men lurking at the ready to push the notion of racial hygiene down the slope whose slipperiness they recognized long before men of goodwill awoke to the reality of what they had wrought. Nor is it to say that — even when the worst was becoming evident — many others did not continue to allow the slide to take place and to accelerate because, after all, those being sterilized and euthanized were so unlike themselves. But it is most certainly to say that there is good reason for so many wags and wise men down the centuries to have repeatedly observed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes “anarchy is loosed upon the world” not because “the best lack all conviction,” but because they firmly and honestly believe they are doing the right thing.
Doing the right thing: there has never been a period in the modern era when our species has relaxed its fascination with the idea of improving itself….A century ago the buzzword was eugenics. Today it is enhancement. Eugenics is meant to improve the breed and enhancement is meant to improve the individual, but they are too similar in concept to allow us to rest easy with either one.
Today’s molecular biologists and geneticists have dipped a very powerful oar into the ongoing stream of debate about heredity versus environment. Every year — every month — we read about newly discovered genetic factors determining not only physical characteristics but those of morals and mind as well. Sometimes we are even told their precise locations on the DNA molecule. No one knows how much of this will hold up in the coming decades, but we can be sure that a significant proportion of it will be confirmed. Some authoritative scientific voices are telling us that we should take advantage of the new knowledge to fulfill our fantasies of improving ourselves and indeed our species.
These new findings — and the enthusiasm of some of our scientists — take us huge steps beyond the ultimately shaky theoretical platform on which the eugenics movement stood. The debate has for several years been raging between those who look to the lessons of the past and shout warnings and those who see only the utopia of an enhanced future and shout encouragement. In a powerful discourse against reproductive cloning — only one manifestation of the brave new world being foreseen — Leon R. Kass wrote in these pages of “a profound defilement of our given nature … and of the social relations built on this natural ground.” At the far other end of the spectrum is Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA and one of the new breed called “futurists,” whose enthusiasm for bio-psychoengineering (Kass’s cautionary term for such feats of creativity) and a post-human future is so unbounded that he has gone so far as to title his most recent book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Inevitable! Even more frightening than the confidence of Stock’s vision for his fellow men and women is the title of the book’s first chapter, in which he outlines his image of how the laboratory will come to control evolution: he calls it “The Last Human,” meaning those few of us remaining whose bodies and minds have been formed by nature alone.
This is genuinely terrifying stuff. Not since the first half of the twentieth century have prominent thinkers been so starry-eyed at the thought of controlling the future of our species, or at least that privileged portion of it that will have the financial, cultural, and other wherewithal to take advantage of the offer being presented to us…. Though I admire Stock for his sincerity and the magnitude of his intellect, I am sure that I would have admired more than a few of the early German eugenicists for the very same reasons had I known them as well as I know him. What concerns me is not the progression of the technology, but the inherent creeping hazards in its philosophical underpinning, which is ultimately to improve the breed.
It all sounds very familiar. Looking backward, we can now see the danger in state-enforced policies of improvement, but too many of us have yet to awaken to the equally dangerous reality of improvement that is self-determined. We are once again standing on the slope, from the top of which the future we may be wreaking is already visible. Now is the time to recognize the nature of human motivation — and the permanence of human frailty.
I have a habit of speech — acquired long ago and hard to shake — which is the unnecessary use of prepositions in phrases like “hurry up” and “stand up”. I don’t write that way, but I still (too often) speak that way.
I hadn’t been conscious of the habit, probably acquired from my Midwestern parents, until about 30 years ago when a young computer whiz corrected me when I said “open up”. She said that “open” would suffice, and my eyes were (figuratively) opened; that is, for the first time in my life I understood that I had long been been guilty of preposition proliferation.
In addition to “open up”, “hurry up”, and “stand up”, there are “fill up”, “lift up”, and possibly dozens of others that feature unnecessary prepositions. I leave it to you to list your favorites.
There are also phrases involving prepositions that aren’t quite wrong, but which are unnecessarily long. Consider, for example, one that is used often: “come in”. It’s really a shorthand way of saying “come into the room/office/house to which you are seeking entry”. So the “in” isn’t superfluous, but it is unnecessary.
“Come” will suffice, as will “enter”. Why aren’t those expressions used as commonly as “come in”? I suspect that it’s because “come in” sounds less abrupt and more cordial than the peremptory “come” and “enter”. That is to say, “come in” is more welcoming.
Which brings me back to “hurry up”, “stand up”, and similar phrases. Perhaps the prepositions were added long ago to suggest that the speaker was making a request, not issuing a command. That is, they were added out of politeness.
Perhaps it is politeness that prevents me from giving up abandoning the practice of preposition proliferation.
Politics and Prosperity 