For the Muslim it's take, take, take and if the West meekly expects something in return it's one giant * * * * you in return.
Cut out the honor killings, quit trying to impose shariah in the West, stop the female mutilation, get a job, pray inside the mosque?
Why, how absurd.
We burn cars, issue death threats, and set off bombs in retaliation. Accept our educational mortar attacks.
It is our way.
"My center is giving way, my right is retreating. Situation excellent; I attack." -- Marshal Ferdinand Foch, September, 1914
Before we can perform any useful analysis of "where to go from here," we must have a sense for what matters most: a priority list of items to be reviewed, assessed, and addressed. Not every battle in a war is critical. In really wide wars, some battles hardly matter at all, regardless of the attendant loss of life.
Therefore, our first task is to sort the critical battlefields -- the areas in which a victory or a defeat has really mattered -- from those that can be left for later consideration.
A very long time ago, I wrote:
[T]he three legs on which a free society must stand:
- The education of its citizens, particularly as regards the history of political forms and the thinking behind its own constitution;
- The ability to communicate freely, privately, and without interference;
- The possession of weaponry adequate to overthrow the government or to resist its usurpations, should the necessity arise.
Once all three legs have been sawn through, no obstacles remain to totalitarianism. But if even one remains sound, the people have a barrier to the State that the State cannot surmount.
Today in America, one of the legs -- communications -- is almost perfectly intact. There have been incursions, such as the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and a small number of enactments on such nebulous subjects as "pornography." However, due to the explosion of the Internet and the emergence of other modern forms of communication, in practical terms the citizens are almost completely in possession of the field.
One of the legs -- education -- has been sawn almost all the way through. Government control of education is all but complete. There has been some resistance, most notably by the resolute and vibrant homeschooling movement. However, the State has contrived to regulate even that escape hatch, and may be counted on to intensify those regulations as much as it may. Add to that the immense cost of school taxes, and the margin for resistance appears very thin.
The third leg -- armament -- is a battleground. The struggle is intense; the outcome cannot be predicted with confidence. Unfortunately, highly specious logic used to justify State supervision of private weaponry -- what Internet commentator Thornwell Simons once called "the mystical nuclear weapon exception to the RKBA" -- has been accepted even by the overwhelming majority of firearms enthusiasts. The result is a platform of justification for further incursions on the right to keep and bear arms that Americans will be hard pressed to resist.
The scales appear to be rather evenly balanced.
I continue to believe that these are the essential ingredients for the achievement and perpetuation of a free society. I no longer believe that "the scales" are "evenly balanced," nor that they were so at the time of the cited essay:
The schools, including colleges and universities, are conquered territories. The institutional news and entertainment media are similarly in the hands of the Left. The federal and state governments have pursued a brilliant strategy of slicing away firearms rights a bit at a time; the Heller and McDonald decisions and scandals such as "Fast and Furious" have done little to impede them.
It's no longer profitable even to "send a force" to the first two of those theaters. As for the third, the full consequences of the most recent developments have yet to manifest themselves.
Yet education, communications, and armament remain the critical battlefields. The side that prevails on them need not fear developments in any other sector.
Therefore, we must widen those battlefields. On the fields as they stand, our enemies' frontal positions are far stronger than ours, and they offer us no flank at which to strike. We must create a flank for them, and hit it as hard as our resources allow.
Today's focus will be education.
In education, there are two potential "flanks" to be considered:
Each of these avenues of attack faces limitations and countervailing forces:
The homeschooling movement has been impeded by the economics of the thing, and by the opposition of the "educrat elite." Reserving one parent to educate the kids implicitly sacrifices whatever income that parent could generate outside the home. These days, that's a considerable price to pay, especially given that such a family will be paying taxes to support the government's schools as well.
Alongside that, state departments of education have attempted to regulate homeschooling out of existence, by claiming the power to monitor and approve of setting, instructor, and curriculum: a clear violation of the homeschooling family's Fourth Amendment rights. Organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) have done what they can to ward off such intrusions, but with mixed success.
The online university is an "upstart" when it comes to accreditation; the established colleges and universities have labored mightily to prevent it from attaining the accreditation necessary to respectability. Also, it lacks a convenient way to embrace "practicum" elements -- for example, laboratory work -- that conventional colleges and universities can easily accommodate.
The freedom movement's offensive in the education theater should be channeled into these avenues:
Substantial success along either of these "flanks" would create a multiplier effect as persons as yet uninvolved with them take notice and decide to try them out. It would certainly create fear and tremors among our adversaries.
These are not magic formulae. (You'll read that here more than once.) Applying them will involve expense, effort, and perseverance. But they do constitute ways to circumvent the Ministries of Truth our governments and the Left have imposed upon us, such that the youngest Americans would have a chance of growing up unpropagandized, unherded, and properly aware of our heritage of freedom.
More anon.
In the aftermath of the disastrous 2012 election, many a conservative has "pulled in his horns," whether out of despair over the result or an inability to imagine how to continue. I can sympathize with the former reaction; I've often felt it myself as we've surrendered freedom slice by slice to the scalpels of the political elite. But the latter case yields easily to a simple technique.
What technique, you say? Good Lord! By now you should know I don't do short pieces.
It's been evident these past few years that the lovers of freedom have been fighting a rearguard action. We've been pressed backward by forces larger than ours, directed by tacticians who eclipse ours in ruthlessness. Several of the positions we've defended have fallen, while others have barely hung on. It's not a picture to inspire great confidence.
That's not completely bad. Confidence, as has often been said, is what you feel when you have no idea of the danger you're in. The routs we've suffered in recent years ought not to inspire us to think that "we've got 'em on the run." And there is indeed great danger perceptible in the shapes of current developments.
If a seasoned commander were to view such a theater objectively, he would make his tactical choices according to certain overall guidelines:
Much of warfare is determined by how well the commanders on opposite sides of a theater cleave to those rules. That applies to political combat as well.
In the political struggle of our time, the individual "battlefields" and "maneuvers" can be classified as:
The planners on each side make such assessments continuously. Sometimes they get them wrong...and sometimes they go wrong, because of developments no one foresaw. A historical example from the opening weeks of World War I is "Von Kluck's Turn." This maneuver by an aggressive general of the German forces on the Western Front was intended to add to the numbers poised to crush the French field armies from behind. It would have been unobjectionable had it not been for the energy of General Joseph Gallieni, commander of the military district of Paris, who had insisted upon preparing a force capable of defending the city.
Gallieni saw the defense of Paris as critical to the French war effort: were Paris allowed to fall, the French armies would have lost a great part of their morale, and possibly their cohesion as well. Yet the forces massed in Paris did not defend Paris as such; rather, they assaulted the German First Army in the flank it had exposed by turning away from Paris. The success of the Anglo-French forces at the First Battle of the Marne, though the achievement fell short of what it might have been, thwarted Germany's overall strategy (the "Schlieffen Plan") and gave the Allies time to marshal sufficient forces for an eventual victory.
Had Gallieni not bucked the political and military hierarchy to conserve three army corps for Paris's defense, "Von Kluck's Turn" might well have allowed Germany's forces to compel an overall French surrender. Alexander von Kluck, the German First Army commander who had unilaterally decided to swerve away from Paris, would have been hailed as a commander of genius and a great hero. As matters eventuated, Von Kluck is regarded as one of the "goats" of the war for pressing too hard against a tempting target while a critical new threat coalesced to his rear.
If conservative political strategists fifty years ago had looked upon the cultural trends of the United States and said to themselves, "We have no need to involve ourselves in such things," we of today would have been able to criticize their judgment with a degree of justice. However, we don't know whether such an assessment was even made; all we can say is "If only we had known," and resolve to be more alert to such threats in the future.
But another question of importance arises at this point: As events progress and trends develop, how can we measure the correctness or dubiousness of such decisions after they've been made -- possibly in time to correct our worst mistakes?
Charles Murray, in writing about social pathologies and the political measures applied to them, has emphasized the importance of watching the right metrics. For example, with regard to "public" education, the right metric was most definitely not the amounts being spent on the schools; nor was it the self-esteem of the students. We allowed state and local governments to escalate school spending with wild abandon. We allowed the federal government to stick its nose into primary and secondary education, most unConstitutionally. Yet our children kept failing to meet the norms of previous generations. Indeed, they slid further and further behind those norms while they became ever more unruly, ill-mannered, and prone to physical and social disaster, as we emptied our pockets of valuta and our hearts of hope for their futures.
If the car won't start, pumping more air into the tires won't fix the problem. But you have to know something about how cars work to reach that conclusion. Similarly, you have to know something about how children learn -- what the preconditions are; what specific preparations are required for learning specific subjects; and what can go wrong in the process -- to fix a failing school...or a nationful of them. You have to study the history of classroom education. You have to be willing to start small "pilot" programs and observe them in operation. You have to resolve to disregard supposed "experts" who can't even point to an example of their nostrums in practice, much less successfully so. (Publicly hanging a few such pour encourager les autres should be reserved for extreme cases.) Then you have to watch the right variables to be at all confident that your new fixes are getting the job done:
And of course, there's always the Point of Diminishing Returns to beware of: God's little way of keeping our heads from exploding from mushrooming self-congratulation. Just because tactic X has been effective, doing X twice as hard, or twice as long, or twice as expensively is not guaranteed to be twice as effective. Indeed, it might not be effective at all.
You might have already deduced that this is the start of a new series of essays. They'll be pitched at a highly intelligent reader, and held at a fairly abstract level, for two reasons:
For those not familiar with the Pyramid of Political Production:
This is a special case of how all new ideas are born, developed, conveyed to large numbers of people, and eventually become dominant (i.e., "conventional wisdom"). If it troubles you to think of freedom, the free market, and a sharply limited government as "new ideas," be not afraid: "new" can often mean "forgotten." That's the case before us.
I'll return over and over to the three central guidelines of successful combat enunciated above. Perhaps you might give them a few of your spare moments, as well.
In any contest beyond the trivial, there comes a time of defeat: a time to take stock of ourselves.
There comes a time to employ wisdom garnered from other venues.
There comes a time to show that we're unbroken and formidable.
There comes a time to make our ancestors proud of us.
There comes a time to stand our ground.
The time is now.
More anon.
Quite a lot of opprobrium is being heaped on the head of General David Petraeus -- yes, it's still proper to call him "General;" the rank stays with the man -- for his affair with biographer Paula Broadwell. Officially, Petraeus's resignation was mandatory; marital fidelity is actually part of the agreement to serve in the Cabinet. But the amount of vitriol being showered on him for his dalliance is mind-boggling; it amounts to something like a public flogging.
General Petraeus has just celebrated his 60th birthday: November 7 of this year. Apparently he's been married to his wife Holly for about 38 years. By contemporary standards, he married young and has stayed married to the same woman for a very long time.
Those among us who think little of the sin of adultery, or who dismiss the potential for blackmail to which it exposes the adulterer, might count General Petraeus lucky. Most sixty-year-old men, whatever their marital status, inclinations, or potency, could only dream of an affair with a younger woman as attractive as Paula Broadwell. But General Petraeus is handsome, dynamic, and until his resignation was one of the most powerful men in the country. That's a heady combination in many women's eyes. It also tends to undermine the judgment of the man so blessed...especially under certain unfortunate circumstances to which even less handsome, dynamic, well-placed men are prone.
I can't condone the violation of the marriage vow, regardless of the temptation. But I'd like to remind my Gentle Readers that there are things we do not know: among them might just be the sort of things that would have impelled many among us to do what General Petraeus has done.
Imagine that you're a sixty-year-old career soldier of high rank. Your duties and responsibilities have weighed ever more heavily on you as time has passed. They've kept you away from home, family, and friends, to such an extent that some ten or fifteen years ago, your wife, weary of always being alone, declared that "I don't know you any more," and announced a sub rosa end to the marriage. That is: the two of you would continue as husband and wife in the eyes of the world, but in private, you would have no further connection except for the roof under which you sleep.
Military wives have reacted that way in the past. It's not infrequent, especially for careerists who've ascended to a colonel's or brigadier general's rank and hope yet to enter the military's uppermost elite.
You're in a pickle now. Your sex drive is still strong, but the woman you've loved all those years is no longer interested. Indeed, her coldness toward you is more than merely physical. The solidity and reassurance your marriage once afforded you has been ripped away. You're a man alone, without the foundation a reliable home life and the support of a loving spouse once provided.
You struggle to dampen the ache with work, with the sense of absorption your high position offers, and with the sense of accomplishment arising from your talents and your dedication.
An admirer has approached you: a beautiful younger woman. For whatever initially non-romantic reasons, the time you spend with her is considerable. Over that time, she makes it plain that she would happily become more than merely a friend. That yearning ache breaks containment and surges back into your heart.
A fork lies before you. Which branch will you choose?
Perhaps you would prove stronger than the temptation. Perhaps you would resolve, despite your spouse's disavowal of her marital obligation to love, honor, and cherish you, to remain faithful to your vows. Perhaps you would even find the strength to turn the importuning young admirer away gently, with soft words of appreciation and regret that it could not be otherwise.
And perhaps you would break.
No, I don't know that that's the sort of home situation David Petraeus faced or faces. I have absolutely no inside information about the matter. I'm merely spinning a tale -- one grounded in the unpleasant reality many a career military man has faced in the past. I doubt that, even if that were a close approximation to General Petraeus's situation, we would ever be allowed to learn of it.
The flesh is weak. Temptation gets the better of many of us, especially those whom fate or questionable decisions have "softened up." In a case such as this, the Christian thing to do is to remind oneself that "but for one or two turns of fortune, that could have been me" -- to deplore the sin and pray that the sinner seek forgiveness, but refrain from condemning the man.
Judge not, for as you judge others, you also shall be judged.
I've encountered the following Heinlein quote more than once these past few days:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” [From Time Enough For Love]
This has been offered as a slap at the many thousands who've found themselves severely impeded by the effects of Superstorm Sandy: without power, low on gasoline, possibly without a home.
There are any number of conservatives who regard Heinlein as a genius's genius: the fount of all wisdom and never to be gainsaid. Well, sorry, lads and ladies, but he's not. He was a science fiction writer of considerable ability, a fair degree of insight, and a conservative bent. He was brighter than average, beyond all doubt. But like most of us, he was often wrong -- and his advice, particularly the crop culled from the abovementioned tome, is a mixed bag at best.
The operative word in the quote above is should. That makes it a matter of evaluation and opinion.
I've called should "my favorite word" for quite some time. In my position, I used to get a lot of "shoulds," as for example:
In response to which I posted the following over my desk, in very large type:
WARNING: In the Land of Should:
- All programs work on the first try;
- All programs do everything and take no time to develop;
- Even the most complex programs take up no memory or disk space, and require no operator familiarization!
YOU HAVE ENTERED THE LAND OF IS. Welcome. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Here in the Land of Is, we endure some rather unforgiving constraints. They're called the Laws of Nature. One of those laws is that men will languish in poverty unless they specialize. In response, we learned a little trick called the division of labor. It's the foundation of modern life.
Because of the division of labor, not all of us have to be farmers. Not all of us have to be butchers. Not all of us have to be mechanics. And thank God, not all of us have to pitch manure or write sonnets -- and there are most definitely persons who should be forcibly restrained from attempting either. By dividing the necessities and desiderata of life into specialties and allowing individuals to trade the fruits of their respective gifts, we have developed an economy of unexampled power, and produced a degree of prosperity many of us simply don't appreciate.
That sort of prosperity is not available under any other scheme of economic organization.
But hark! Specialization in response to the division of labor produces...specialists: Persons who are highly competent at one particular undertaking, and mediocre or worse at most others. A division-of-labor economy assumes that specialists of the many sorts we occasionally need are: 1) out there somewhere, and 2) available at need. Inasmuch as each of us is a specialist of some sort, no other assumption is plausible or workable.
What made Sandy so devastating wasn't that the relevant specialties -- construction; electrical work; heating; etc. -- all ceased to exist. Clearly that didn't happen. But because of the intensity of the storm, because of our geographical dispersion, and because the storm interfered seriously with transportation and fueling, a sufficiency of specialists of the most important sorts were unable to rush to the aid of those worst affected.
(I could go on about how government has worsened such matters by inserting its snout into disaster relief, but I'll spare you...for now.)
It will always remain possible that a natural disaster of Sandy's magnitude or worse will disrupt our normally smoothly functioning division-of-labor economy. To set aside reserves with which to cope with reasonably foreseeable developments is prudent, and to be encouraged. But ask yourself this:
The Gentleman Adventurer who sets out to explore Proxima Centauri would probably need all the skills Heinlein tabulated...well, except for that business about manure and sonnets; some perversions should be kept secret in perpetuity. The rest of us can get by fairly well with our individual specialties even in troublesome conditions, as long as transit and communication remain reasonably practical. When those requirements fail, I suppose we can all revert to hunter-gatherers and move into riverbank caves.
Good morning, fellow grumps, cynics, misanthropes, and aspirants to those hallowed estates. He's back by popular demand: your Curmudgeon Emeritus! It took a while -- you know how stubborn that Fran person can be -- but the election returns seem to have nailed it: the Web simply cannot do without the degree of supremely skeptical, salubriously supercilious snark of which your Curmudgeon is the Milky Way’s premier vendor.
And on we go.
A long time ago, your Curmudgeon wrote the following:
The overwhelming majority of Americans are good and decent people, whose desires, both for themselves and for one another, are close to uniform. Liberals don't want to see large-scale degeneracy in the streets; conservatives don't want to see the poor locked into inescapable ghettoes and left to starve. Both communities of thought would love to see everyone live as well and happily as kings. If you disbelieve this, we have no chance of conversing agreeably.We have many differences about means -- about those policies which would best redress our social and economic ills in an enduring way, and without unpleasant side effects. We have few differences about ends; that's the nature of consensus.
The dominant means of the century past has been politics. The failure of political solutions to most social problems should be beyond argument. In a few cases, there's a good case to be made that our ends -- the rights we strove to instantiate or defend -- were misconceived. In most, it's far more likely that we can more reliably get to where we want to go by changing trains: by getting clear of political techniques, with their inherent centralism, inflexibility, and invitations to corruption, and by adopting the methods of freedom. Let individuals and voluntary associations work to make their parts of the world more what they want it to be, while respecting the equal freedom of others with divergent priorities and abilities to do the same.
Frankly, your Curmudgeon can't imagine what he must have been thinking that day. The majority of Americans "good and decent people?" Please! Perhaps at one time, but no longer. For a minimum of a century, the political elite has striven to corrupt the entire nation -- to bludgeon into us all the conviction that only politics could possibly attain the ends we hold highest -- and if it hasn't yet bagged the last few holdouts, surely it won't take much longer.
Well, it was a long time ago.
It's been true for some time that the preponderance of voters decide to whom to give their support on the basis of a single consideration. For about 70% of the electorate, the consideration is party affiliation. For many of the rest, it's one issue of overriding importance to that particular voter.
When George Pataki first ran for Governor of New York, a number of voters elected to support him on the basis of his support for the death penalty, while some others were drawn to him for his promise to reduce state spending. Moreover, those persons were largely willing to say as much, thus defining themselves, for that election at least, as one-issue voters. Given the number of areas into which a state government inserts itself, such an orientation might seem myopic, even perverse. Yet many an election is decided by exactly such persons. Pataki's thin margin over Mario Cuomo could not have endured the loss of their votes.
If it's myopic and perverse on the state level, how much worse is it on the national level? Yet your Curmudgeon could easily make the case that if not for millions of Americans to each of whom one end rises above all others in priority, Barack Hussein Obama would not have been allowed a second term as president. Consider:
Believe it or not -- your Curmudgeon has gone to some lengths to verify this -- every one of those five issues determined some tens of thousands of votes, all by itself. Such voters blithely dismissed piddling little matters such as the cronyizication of the national economy and the reduction of our military to impotence. Their pet issue was their entire concern, and be damned to the candidate who paid it no obeisance.
It's not always myopic or perverse to throw one's support to a candidate for a single issue of importance. Consider this scenario: The U.S. is at war with an enemy roughly its own size, whose declared war aim is the conquest and subjugation of the world. One presidential candidate argues for a vigorous prosecution of the war effort; the other calls for preemptive surrender. Which would you back -- and would you be at all embarrassed to say so?
But the minor issues mentioned above hardly rise to that level. Four of the five need not be political; private action could remove them entirely from the sphere of State action. The fifth is merely absurd, a recrudescence of collectivism unworthy of a supposedly free society.
Yet these are the sort of issues that can swing an election -- and did.
For quite a while, your Curmudgeon was unwilling to believe that the majority of Americans could be venal enough, or stupid enough, to elect a Marxist autocrat, who for four years had unabashedly demonstrated those qualities, to a second term in the highest office in the land. He'd allowed himself to forget everything he'd learned about the great mass of men. In particular, he'd forgotten that the sort of stunted mind that locks in on a single end is equally capable of deciding that only one means can achieve it.
When one decides that one particular end stands infinitely above all others, and that only one means is available for reaching it, he has gone from single-issue politics to microvision politics. Like a newborn bird in the nest, which will only take sustenance from the gullets of his parents, he is determined to have his way on his pet issue but will not be satisfied with anything but its political imposition -- that all shall be compelled to accept his priority by the forces of the State, regardless of any other consideration.
Microvision politics is the province of the Left, which has practiced it for some decades with steadily increasing success. The Right cannot contest it without ceasing to be a conservative, principle-centered movement. Promises of free contraception and free cell phones? Of state recognition of same-sex marriages? To bail out the mortgages of unwise and profligate purchasers? How could an ideal of limited government in a regime of freedom square itself with such things?
Yet these are among the most important tactics by which the Left has captured the political machinery of the country. While ends have narrowed, voter by voter, to a single all-important aim, means have been winnowed down to State action and nothing else.
This is the Right's challenge for the Twenty-First Century: to replace microvision politics with the sort of broad, principled appreciation of freedom that prevailed a century ago. We must somehow re-educate millions of functional idiots away from the notion that whatever is most important to them simply must come from the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent State. Failing that, we must contrive to exclude such imbeciles from political decision-making.
It will not be the work of a moment. Your Curmudgeon wonders if it's possible at all. Meanwhile, his bunker in the mountainside is coming along quite nicely, thank you. Never fear, your mail will be forwarded.
It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months."Obama Win Means U.S. Will Remain Brokest Nation In History." By Mark Steyn, Investor's Business Daily, 11/10/12.
Greece, which many people think is a "no big deal" sort of sideshow, is anything but. The fact of the matter is that Greece runs out of money in about a week."And Now, The Consequences." By Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker, 11/10/12.
All right, all right. You can stop asking.
First, Barack Hussein Obama has retained the Oval Office for a single reason: More votes were tallied for him than against him. Why that's so, we might never know.
However, we can know where he'll try to take the nation:
This should be obvious. The consequences of those thrusts demand deeper thought.
Today, the federal government spends about 25% of our annual Gross Domestic Product. As many other commentators and analysts have noted elsewhere, that's about 6-7% above the historical peacetime average. Since tax revenues fall well short of the amount required, Washington must borrow the difference: more than $1 trillion per year, these past four years.
Private-sector growth has been anemic where it hasn't failed completely, resulting in an expanding pool of unemployed and underemployed Americans. Thus, we may expect the above pattern not merely to continue but to worsen: federal spending will be driven further upward by "compassionate needs," including bailouts for the most profligate state governments. This is an arc of a vicious circle, which will cause federal revenues to decline and borrowing to increase.
Trouble is, the pool of persons and institutions willing to lend to Washington has shrunk considerably. So the Federal Reserve Bank, the "lender of last resort," has been tapped to purchase the greater part of the Treasury bills issued to cover the debt: about 61% of all new T-bills issued when last I checked. It makes those purchases with newly created money, thus reducing the purchasing power of every previous dollar in existence.
This mechanism is simple enough for a child to understand. The purchasing power of the dollar -- i.e., its exchange-value in terms of real goods or services -- is inversely proportional to how many dollars exist. When a flood of newly created dollars reaches people's bank accounts, those who produce real goods or services find that the demand for them has increased. People with more dollars in their pockets tend to spend more; thus, under the prevailing rates of production of the things they want to buy, there's a "shortage." Despite the great flood of new dollars into the market, not everyone can purchase what he wants...or needs.
However, as any rational economist will tell you, there's no such thing as a "shortage" in absolute terms. A "shortage" of a good or service is a consequence of its price in dollars being set too low. So prices rise until the supply of goods and the demand for them, expressed in dollars, are once again in equilibrium.
Though to some Gentle Readers this reminder of how inflation really works will be unnecessary, not everyone is aware of the insidiousness of the mechanism by which Washington steals, not merely from our incomes, but from our savings as well.
That's not the only consequence of the Fed's purchase of T-bills with new money. Another -- quite an important one -- is a burgeoning climate of envy.
Psychology, said Robert A. Heinlein, is not a science for a simple reason: it's too difficult. Powerful minds gravitate toward fields where order is more easily found and exploited. In the obscure and variable reaches of the human psyche, order is maddeningly elusive. Thus, though we can see many patterns in human behavior, a degree of comprehension sufficient to make predictions about them -- falsifiable predictions that have measurements and time limits attached -- eludes us, and likely will continue to elude us into the indefinite future.
One of the patterns is the rapid growth of resentment of others' success, even though it has no connection to or bearing on our own. That surge of envy is the power behind all redistributive movements. It's irrational; the degree to which we respect and encourage one another to prosper is the best measure of our own success. Yet it pervades virtually every society on Earth.
The flow of the Fed's newly created dollars will not be uniform across all industries or demographics. Those that don't get quite as large a share of the swag as others will tend to focus enviously on the others, rather than on their own practices and how they might be improved. In truth, this can also be observed in pure capitalist economies with absolutely stable monies. However, inflationary economies display it to a far greater degree, because of the disconnect between the accumulation of dollar balances and the ability to satisfy one's wants with them.
As envy intensifies, so also do political pitches aimed at exploiting it.
Unless the GOP contingent in the House of Representatives succeeds in restraining federal spending -- a bet against heavy odds, given its past performance -- we can expect both an acceleration of dollar-deterioration via inflation and a corresponding surge in redistributive demands and political pandering to them.
Redistributive demands aren't all for direct government handouts. Some of them are for clamps on this or that segment of the economy: regulations to favor or inhibit certain businesses or practices; wage and price controls; imposition of monopolies or monopsonies by federal decree.
We've been hearing more about the cost of regulation as the years have slipped past. Many a conservative voice has been raised in support of cost/benefit rules to constrain regulatory activity. Though those voices diverge in many ways, they agree on the central point: Every regulation of production and commerce comes at a cost. Government cannot intrude into the market without incurring a price someone must pay.
Trouble is, Gentle Reader, the "someone" is usually you.
It could be an increment in taxes. After all, bureaucrats must be paid, or so they claim. So taxes might increase to cover the expansion of the federal payroll.
It could be an increase in the price of some good whose makers have been freshly regulated. Most regulations on production impose increased costs on the producer, after which he might well decide to pass that increment along to you the purchaser. Though for any good there is a price level at which it becomes unmarketable, the producer can only know when that level has been reached by reaching or exceeding it.
Or it could be a "shortage." This is the most common consequence of a price control: the imposition of a maximum retail price for a good or service. If the controlled price of item X is $5 per unit but its would-be purchasers are willing to pay $10, more persons will line up for item X than the supply of X will satisfy. They have the money, but they can't get the item. Nor will the supply of X increase to satisfy the excess demand, for the amount of X being produced resulted from an intersection of demand at $5 with the costs and difficulties of X production. New producers will not rush into the X market until the price is allowed to rise -- the very thing the price control prevents.
Wage controls, being merely price controls on labor, can be treated similarly.
Despite the perverse consequence of the deadly trio:
...all three will increase over time. Politicians love power and hate responsibility; thus, they tend to move in whatever direction maximizes the former and minimizes or eliminates the latter. Here you have explanation for why elected officials secretly love the profusion of unelected, faceless Civil-Service bureaucrats, despite all rhetoric to the contrary: The political class can blame an ever-greater fraction of the nation's woes on persons immune to popular displeasure, while taking credit for any gains, which the bureaucrat class cannot contest.
And so:
I counsel anyone concerned with the near and intermediate future to "brace for impact."
What, then, must we do?
On we go. Hopefully, not to Mark Butterworth's vision of a divided continent, but given America's demographics and the distribution of opinion, we cannot be sure. So be prepared -- and don't let your hopes cloud your perceptions or your reason.
"Stupidity is always a capital crime." -- Author unknown.
"So is privileging your fantasies over reality." -- Me.
I did promise one, didn't I? Trouble is, I'm not sure I have any idea.
Turnout for the election fell short of the 2008 figures, though it appears to have equaled the 20th and 21st Century norms. As turnout was expected to be a predictive element – specifically, predictive of a Romney victory -- we must wonder whether any of the analysts on the Right fully grasped its import.
The whole question of what moves American citizens to vote hasn't been studied nearly as deeply as it should. Why is that? Perhaps because those in a position to analyze it are afraid of the conclusions they'll be forced to draw.
This was Mitt Romney's sixth campaign and his fifth defeat. It's exceedingly unlikely that he'll ever again stand for election to a public office. It's virtually guaranteed that he won't be a contender for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2016; neither party has much interest in renominating a loser. The nominations of Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1968 were deviations from that tendency, and highly unlikely to be repeated.
Who does that leave? Romney's competitors in the primaries were uninspiring, mostly by lack of staying power. In addition, their ages would seem to preclude further prominence in national politics. If the Republicans wish to remain a major party, they'd better be looking to their "farm teams" -- the state governors and U.S. Senators -- for figures to be groomed for national postures.
Inasmuch as the GOP now holds 30 governorships, you might think the crop should yield some likely prospects for the "big club." However, only one of those governors, New Jersey's Chris Christie, has made much of a blip on the national radar. Even Wisconsin's Scott Walker, despite his undeniable success in curbing union power and defeating an impassioned recall attempt, is too obscure to "go national" at this time. Christie was generally regarded as unsuitable for the national spotlight even before his embarrassing tango with Barack Obama after Superstorm Sandy. So the next Republican presidential candidate might have to come from the Senate.
That is, if there are elections in 2016.
Vote fraud and vote suppression were both attempted in a large number of districts. The consequences are things we cannot know with perfect certainty, because the very mechanisms we must call upon to determine them have far too often proved corrupt.
Of one thing we can be certain: a huge fraction of our military was denied its franchise. Ballots simply never reached those soldiers, sailors, and airmen. As those voters overwhelmingly favor Republican candidates, there might well have been a race-changing impact from that alone.
This denial of the franchise to tens of thousands of American servicemen could not have occurred without the passive connivance of the Obama Administration. The Pentagon underfunded the effort; it admitted to having done so. It claimed that its hand was forced. By whom? There was a law in place intended to guarantee precisely the opposite. However, that law went unenforced.
Young Americans thinking about a hitch will know this. It cannot have a positive effect on enlistment rates. Whether that was a consequence the Administration desired, we cannot know.
This matter of a "mandate to lead" will now be front and center among the Punditocracy. Those on the Left will insist that merely by having won a second term, Obama's program of steadily advancing social-fascism, redolent of European socialism as practiced in France, Germany, and Italy, has been confirmed as "what the people want." Those on the Right will point to the thinness of Obama's popular vote margin and demand to know how a difference in the tallies of less than 2% could be interpreted that way. With appropriate exchanges of party alignment, this is the way they've dueled ever since the election of Richard Nixon.
Obama himself has never been terribly concerned with "what the people want." His repeated flagrant dismissals of Constitutional constraints, Congressional prerogatives, and his ex officio duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" make it clear that he regards himself as above the law, including the Supreme Law of the Land. He will be at least as determined to have his way these next four years as he's been up to now.
When a Caesar of the Roman Empire began to behave in an erratic or willful fashion, someone -- the Senate, the Praetorian Guard, the Army, his family, or some civic-minded citizen -- usually assassinated him and installed a replacement. The system worked tolerably well until welfare measures and Imperial intrusion into the agriculture market -- panem et circenses -- created a dependent class too large for the remaining productive citizenry to support.
We might just have such a dependent class today. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News argued as much to Bret Baier yesterday evening. If so, restoring the Republic might prove as difficult for us as it was for the Romans -- and remember, they "lost the finals" to the Visigoths and the Vandals.
A final thought before I get back to working on Freedom's Scion.
I concur in substance with the gloomier evaluations of this outcome: the country will now accelerate its slide into division and moral degradation. Those of us who "have a little something" will increasingly be the targets of those who want what we have but aren't willing to work and save as we've done. They believe that theft by State agency is their "right," and the State, which always takes the lion's share of its kills, will happily assist them in their efforts.
Several persons have argued that this makes it plain that the time has come to "go Galt." There's an impassioned bit of reader email about that at Instapundit. But that must remain a completely personal choice.
You don't owe anyone the power to direct your course through life. No, not even to "restore the Republic," no matter what it might have done for you in years past. (Let's not get into what it's done to you.) Whatever your station, whatever your prospects, whatever your outlook and your fears, you must choose according to your best judgment and the dictates of your conscience. Rest assured that those around you will be doing much the same.
For my part, I intend to go on as I've done up to now: working in my trade a few years longer; writing fiction in my spare time, which I hope will become more copious when I've retired; and looking after my loved ones, my animals, my home, my parish, and my community to the best of my ability. I would regard any willed deviation from those patterns as a betrayal of self: an implicit declaration that the things I've done with my life and my powers weren't really what I wanted to do, or what I felt I ought to do. Inasmuch as that's the opposite of the case, I feel no temptation to change course.
And so I exhort you, Gentle Reader, to ask yourself: Have you been doing what you really want to do and ought to do? If so, why would you change it to suit someone else's notions of civic engagement? If not, I'd suggest that you get cracking while you still can, but that's a much more complex discussion.
Be not afraid.
UPDATE: Duyen has just emailed me:
Flashy, if I find out you've been drinking this early, I'm going to have to come out there!
Never fear, dear: I ran out of booze before midnight.
William Bradford's courage, and that of the 102 souls who gave birth with such terrible effort to the country and the freedoms we celebrate this week [Thanksgiving 2009], is surely worth taking a moment to remember. It is also perhaps a moment to remember the inscription on Bradford's grave, the English translation from the Latin as follows:"The Answerable Courage of William Bradford." By Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator, 11/24/09."What our forefathers with so much difficulty secured, do not basely relinquish."
With the election around the corner, you can’t miss the escalating sense of urgency from many voices, bordering on panic, that this is the most important election ever – ever. Such hyperbole exposes the truth of our supposed two-party system.
The rhetoric states that Party A wants it hot while Party B wants it cold. But if that is true, why is the result always lukewarm mush, election after election?
Party A and its supporters cry that Candidate B will undo all the good Candidate A has done during the last four years. In turn, Party B and its supporters cry that, if elected, Candidate B will rollback everything foisted on the country during Candidate A’s soon-to-conclude term. From this, one would assume the structure of government is akin to a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing between the separate and distinct agendas and platforms of the two parties. However, as history has shown, that conclusion is false.
Not only is it false, but even the most ardent supports of the parties know it is. And that is why they are in a panic.
For sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment the assumption is true – politics is a Ping-Pong ball. Another four years of Obama would mean the continuation of his current agenda, plus some new programs of liberal nonsense. At some point, the marginal voter would switch allegiance, or simply grow board [sic] with the current state of affairs, and a Republican candidate would be elected president.
With a Republican in the White House, all the so-called left-leaning changes initiated since the last Republican was in power would be wiped from the books. Shelves of regulations would be cast into dumpsters and the country would once again be conservative and free (or so the rhetoric goes).
Then, after some time, the marginal voter would once again switch sides and the Democrats would have a go at their four-year or eight-year socialist paradise.
As parties moved in and out of the Oval Office, one group of citizens would be inconvenienced for some multiple of four years, only to see the country returned to its previous course. Things would be tough at times, depending on whether the party in power conformed to your political views. But knowing that, in the near term, political life reversed would limit the “most important election” rhetoric to just a few on the far wings of the parties.
You object: What about the legislative elections?
The office of the president is becoming more imperial with every election. The “most important election” rhetoric is around the president because of the obvious supremacy of the executive branch. So the president is our immediate concern.
However, the only things Ping-Ponging are the issues each party champions. Those issues switch in a subtle, Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish way. Today’s conservative issues were last year’s liberal issues.
Bush’s wars are now Obama’s wars, justified by the Democrats as proper intrusions in the business of other countries. Bush’s assault on our freedoms is now a centerpiece of left ideology. Hegel (er, Fichte) would be proud of both parties.
This coalescing of agendas is obvious. Most conservatives have already embraced the policies of Obama – with a few exceptions, of course – and cannot even imagine a world without, among other things, socialized healthcare.
Again you object. However, socialized healthcare is a conservative issue – not Obamacare, of course.
But the Republicans declare that a system run by government regulations and programs is efficient and a right for all – and their so-called conservative base cheers.
It’s tough to keep things straight at times, since we are never certain which party favors which program.
Look, Ryan proclaims that if it wasn’t for the government his mother could not have gone back to college, and he would not be a candidate for vice president. Ryan says that he has no intent of reducing such liberal programs of wealth redistribution, and conservatives rang a loud applause.
With Romney, the country will not return to what is now considered the halcyon days of the Bush or Reagan. Voters on both sides know the claims of undoing the policies of the previous administration are false. They know Romney’s claims about repealing Obamacare are hallow [sic], just as they know Obama insinuation regarding less wars are as equally without merit.
In fact, both candidates previously gave what appeared to be heartfelt arguments against the agendas they now support. But no hypocrisy was committed. Each candidate simply seeks power, and changing agendas based on the latest poll reveals no hypocrisy relative to that end.
Romney will not lead the repeal of anything. He may modify the edges, but the core will remain. And no one should expect him to change the core – the Obama core is his core. Just as Obama’s core is Bush’s core. On and on.
Voting for president is a delusion. Both parties and their candidates champion the ever-growing state. Neither has any intent on reducing government. And they all share the same core platform and agenda – the end is the same, just the order of initiatives is different. And this will continue until the majority in this country finally says, “Enough!” and withdraws support from the current political system.
If this is the most important election ever, it is because it is the most important election to skip.
During just the last four years, America’s national debt has skyrocketed from roughly $10 trillion to about $15 trillion. That’s not power, Dear Reader, that’s epic weaknessSo, the sensible thing is to re-elect the man who sees nothing wrong with having that massive debt. A position apparently embraced by a huge number of Americans. America. The only country in the history of the world exempt from the consequences of its actions. Eric Fry, The Daily Reckoning email newsletter, 11/6/12.
Election Day is almost upon us. Thank God and all the saints and angels.
The most recent polls indicate a narrow lead for Mitt Romney over Barack Hussein Obama in the most populous contested states. That would appear to be good news. But those states share a characteristic that might yet undo the trend in popular sentiment: the unions are strong there.
There have already been reports of union members massed at the polls, taking note of cars with Romney / Ryan stickers, and blocking those persons' access to the polls. There's no chance that anyone could explain this away; it's pure New-Black-Panthers-style thuggery aimed at stealing the election. So far, when the police have been called on to dissolve such a blockade, the union thugs have moved aside without protest...but the police don't hang around long afterward. Whether the blockades reassemble once the police have departed has not yet been reported.
Keep your cell phone fully charged, and keep it with you. Use its camera to record such incidents. Whether such evidence could prove valuable after the election, I cannot say, but it's far better to have it.
By now, all Gentle Readers have undoubtedly read about the "mischievous machines" found in six of the contested states: electronic voting machines that transform a voter's choice of Romney / Ryan into a vote for Obama / Biden. There's been some talk about "calibration errors" in such machines, which I, a computer professional, find disingenuous -- especially since no voter has yet complained that his vote for Obama / Biden has been transformed into one for Romney / Ryan.
These are digital devices. "Calibration" is no more applicable a concept to a digital voting machine than it would be to an abacus. Buried in those machines' software is an algorithm that deliberately steals one out of every N Romney / Ryan votes, where N was chosen to maximize the gain for Obama / Biden while minimizing the probability of discovery. That the fraud was discovered is the most remarkable part; had the implementer been really clever, he'd have done a more thorough job of concealing the theft.
We cannot blindly trust the electoral system. Use whatever means you have to confirm that your vote goes where you intend it to go.
Romney has exhorted us to vote "for love of country." It's a good round phrase, and one whose implied sentiments will draw little dissent. But "love of country" deserves a few moments' more thought than we usually give it.
What is our "country," and what does it mean to "love" it?
There are as many interpretations of each of those words as there are voters. Virtually anyone minded to do so could justify his vote as "for love of country," no matter for whom or what he'd cast it. In a sense, that's at the heart of the problem we face today.
I'm a freedom-minded voter. I see freedom -- the right to do as you damned well please with what's rightfully yours, without having to ask anyone's permission or fear any variety of punishment -- as the essence of America. I contend that if we are truly an exceptional nation, it's because over the centuries, Americans and would-be Americans have overwhelmingly accepted the burden of freedom, and its reverse face, responsibility, and have carried them to unprecedented success.
Not all voters are freedom-minded. Some vote for subsidies or subventions for their particular interests. Some vote for racial, ethnic, or religious advantage. Some vote for "compassion." Some vote for the more glamorous candidate, or the one more heavily touted by glamorous celebrities. No doubt others have other reasons.
It does no good to ask such voters how they could possibly see their aim as "love of country." Yet if I could ask every such voter a single question, it would be this one:
I have no idea what answers I'd get, but I'd lay a pretty penny that few of them would be "freedom." Even the dullest voter should be aware that "freedom" and "the vote" are far from synonymous. But if they sincerely believe that they love this country, what do they love about it and how would they articulate it?
In this regard, there's much to be done...and absolutely no clear way to do it.
That's all for now. No doubt I'll be back on Wednesday with a what-it-all-means piece, but for the next two days I'll be concentrating on other things, prayer most conspicuous among them. In closing:
May God forever guide and guard these United States of America.
More exactly, to conform more precisely to Western experience, the passengers become unwilling a few seconds after free fall is effected, but not before. As the front bumper clears the edge of the precipice, they are still happy and complacent, much like the voters in the U.S. election of Tuesday next who give every indication of still being indifferent to the facts (1) that the putative current "president" of the country has at all times been constitutionally unqualified to occupy that office and (2) that he began his political career in the living room of two communist terrorists. But two of the oddities that come to mind when this man's history is examined. Any one of these two oddities bothers the Colonel ad astra and all of them taken together make him the unbalanced individual that he is today.
Another T&L moment is unfolding in Denmark, which seems an unlikely place given its prosperity and its distance from the areas to the south like Greece, Italy, and Spain which have received so much attention in the recent past for their fiscal profligacy and consequent threat to the stability of the Eurozone. Isn't Scandinavia immune from problems created by the cousins of Zorba and Don Corleone?
Like those countries, however, the tension in Denmark between mentally healthy politicians vicious right wingers wanting to reduce social welfare spending and saintly left wingers wanting to pour taxes down a rat hole respond to every whim, impulse, quirk, and delusion of the voters resolved predictably, in 2011, in the election of a center-left government promising to do what center-left governments do, namely, spend like there's no tomorrow.
This the new government has found it is impossible to do and, as the author of the passages quoted below, Mr. Hedegaard, observes, this has made the government very unpopular. More specifically, Danish politics, he says, are now "in deep crisis [and if] elections were held today, the current government would be swept away."[1]
But a mere change of leadership won't resolve the crisis that has developed because it is deeper than merely encountering certain inconvenient budget numbers. The crisis also manifests itself in the public schools which are "Danish society's most essential institution."
Here it is that the deluded Westerners' mindless embrace of multiculturalism has come face to face with the predictable and commonplace problems that arise after people from incompatible cultures are transplanted in the West. In response to the discipline problems created by Muslim immigrant children in the schools many Danes have put their children in private schools where there are fewer immigrant children.
In one Copenhagen neighborhood fully half of the families are choosing the private school option, a quite astounding fact. What makes this an instance of probable divine justice is that this neighborhood
is one of the reddest areas in the country, where voters routinely cast massive votes for left and far-left parties, i.e. the very parties that are particularly keen on more immigration and on upholding the public school system.[2]These Danes' choice of private schools is thus a stellar instance of what Lawrence Auster refers to as the "unprincipled exception" that liberals make when reality is dangerous or expensive and in stark opposition to sacred liberal "values." The liberal chooses to avoid the danger or expense without acknowledging the wise deviation or abandoning a firm commitment to liberalism.
The Danish response to one teacher's exasperation suggests that reality is beginning to register in certain quarters, particularly the reality of the danger posed by Muslim immigration:
This [the teacher's apology for making an accurate observation about Muslim behavior] would normally have re-established an idyllic political correctness, but something quite surprising happened: The Chairman of the Ejerslykke School Board, Peter Julius Jørgensen, wrote an op-ed for the newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende, in which he called attention to the kind of problems with "double-linguistic" pupils [i.e., students speaking both Arabic and Danish] that the school had to contend with. They didn't shy away from calling their teachers "fucking whores" and showed so little respect that it made teaching impossible.The United States inexplicably has also imported large numbers of Muslims and the lessons the Danes are learning are ones that will, as surely as night follows day, be taught here as well. Little indication, however, that substantial numbers of the beautiful people grasp the suicidal stupidity of multiculturalism.* * * *
“The problem,” [the newspaper] Jyllands-Posten continued, “is not the principal but the ill-mannered children, who are not properly brought up by their parents but rather supported in their destructive behavior."
And why, asked the paper's editorial writer, may we not "call Muslims Muslims when they themselves put so much emphasis on this identity"?
The day before, the editorial writer for the daily Kristeligt Dagblad called for unqualified support for Principal Sonsby. To be sure, the paper thought it too "simplistic" to blame the pupils' bad behavior on their religion. Even so, the editorial writer admitted that there was a "real problem", which had not been openly discussed: "The fact that some double-linguistic pupils ruin the education for others and that their lack of respect has something to do with their religious and cultural background."
Despite some reservations, these statements amount to a revolution in a country where the only accepted explanation for the bad manners of the "double-linguistic" has so far been poor social conditions. In other words: If extra billions were pumped into the public schools and parents of naughty boys were given more money, the problems would disappear.
If, on the other hand, the public school system's collapse is entirely or in part caused by religion and culture and the fact that Muslim parents cannot or will [not] bring up their children to become integrated into Danish society, what could possibly be accomplished with more money?
Can Muslims be bribed to integrate into a Western society? So far it hasn't happened anywhere.
This sheds a new political light on the entire problem: By what right do Danish politicians allow further immigration of Muslims, knowing that the public school system – the institution that more than any other has made Denmark a caring and cohesive society – cannot integrate them?
So far nobody has asked that question. [3]
At some point in the past, Westerners mostly abandoned a belief in witchcraft but it's not clear that the beliefs they adopted afterwards proved to be qualitatively different. Look to Denmark for instruction on how insistent and unpleasant realities play out in the minds of people who can't count, can't learn anything from 1,200 years of Muslim pathology, and do believe in Tinkerbell.
Notes
[1] "Danish public schools facing collapse." By Lars Hedegaard, Dispatch International, 11/1/12.
[2] Id.
[3] Id. (Emphasis added.)
My reader must understand that Andrew had never been a man of resolution. He had been willful and headstrong; and these qualities, in children especially, are often mistaken for resolution, and generally go under the name of strength of will. There never was a greater mistake. The mistake, indeed, is only excusable from the fact that extremes meet, and that this disposition is so opposite to the other, that it looks to the careless eye most like it. He never resisted his own impulses, orThis is a simply brilliant observation about children. Actually, I suppose it is an observation about adults observing children. Children who are 'strong-willed' are not strong at all; in fact they have no 'will' of their own to speak of, only impulses which they cannot control because they are actually weak. They do not need to be 'weakened' in any way, what they need is strengthening. True strength of will is not a vice, in whatever proportion (though, obviously, imprudence and ignorance certainly are, whether or not they are married to a strong will.)
the enticements of evil companions.
No one knows what Liriope and Cephisus did [to leave Narcissus vulnerable to the curse by trying to satisfy a prophecy which they thought would give him a long life], but whatever they did, it worked: he didn't even recognize his own reflection. That's a man who doesn't know himself. That's a man who never had to look at himself from the outside.
How do you make a child know himself? You surround him with mirrors. "This is what everyone else sees when you do what you do. This is who everyone thinks you are."
You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that. These are the limits by which you are defined. Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger, glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents. He was never allowed to ask, "am I a coward? Am I a fool?" To ensure his boring longevity his parents wouldn't have wanted a definite answer in either direction.
He was allowed to live in a world of speculation, of fantasy, of "someday" and "what if". He never had to hear "too bad", "too little" and "too late."
When you want a child to become something-- you first teach him how to master his impulses, how to live with frustration. But when a temptation arose Narcissus's parents either let him have it or hid it from him so he wouldn't be tempted, so they wouldn't have to tell him no. They didn't teach him how to resist temptation, how to deal with lack. And they most certainly didn't teach him how NOT to want what he couldn't have. They didn't teach him how to want.
The result was that he stopped having desires and instead desired the feeling of desire.
Nemesis had an easy job, she only had to work backwards: show him something that didn't return his love, and he'd be hooked.
Narcissus's parents were demi-gods-- didn't they know how to raise a good son, what a proper parent needs to do? Yet they listened to a charlatan anyway. They were given meaningless information by a supposed expert and abandoned all common sense, and so created a monster who brought death to at least one person and misery to all.
(emphasis mine)
[I]f virtue can be 'taught,' or in some way 'conferred,' it is not likely to be accomplished in the same way as knowledge is through education. Rather, virtue is probably more a capacity to be trained in -- or disciplined to -- through practice. And as self-control is the common root of virtue, then it stands to reason that the clearest method of 'teaching virtue,' at least at its earliest stages, is through simple discipline. 'Spare the rod and spoil the child,' as they say. In a way, what discipline does is to provide a sort of strength -- the strength to assert will over impulse -- and it is the developing of this strength which is the beginnings of virtue.Emphasis...uh....mine?
Re: Shawn Macomber's Funding Terror:Anonymous letter to the editor, Reader Mail. The American Spectator, 3/22/04.I am from Metro Detroit which has a very large Arab population, reputedly the largest outside of the middle east. I know many and about 80% of them are virulently supportive and sympathetic to Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda type goals. If the Koran says it must be so, etc.
Much of their money has been from cash businesses and unreported for decades. I heard of the cigarette scam years ago and that is just the tip of the iceberg. An enormous mosque has been built on Ford Road in Dearborn Michigan. My guess is that Saudi/Wahabi funds contributed to the mosque and influence the curriculum. More disturbingly, I'm told that the Iraq war is out of bounds for discussion in 5th grade suburban classrooms because of fear of Arab outrage.
First, the words of The Won:
Mitt Romney, whatever his flaws as a policy wonk, is so thoroughly decent, so thoroughly an American patriot, that supercilious, deceitful, dictator-kowtowing Barack Hussein Obama should be ashamed to run against him:
Spread it around.
An interesting exchange occurred this morning while I was dressing to go to work. I mentioned to the C.S.O. that, contrary to expectations founded on past behavior, my employer was "picking up the tab" for the two days of Sandy's immediate wrath. That is, since the company had formally closed its campus, employees would not be required to cover those two days out of their accrued vacation or personal time.
Beth's response was immediate: "It's the right thing to do."
I demurred. There's no defensible argument that a corporation is morally required to pay its employees for not working. At least, there's none founded on any notion of rights with which I'm familiar. So we quibbled over the "right thing" notion for a while. Finally we agreed that, while no moral nor legal obligation to do so rests on a private concern, it was nevertheless the best thing to do:
What's that you say? A public-service ethic isn't something one should expect to find in a private firm? Well, that's as may be, but go back fifty years or so and any and every company whose employees had suffered a disaster such as Sandy would have behaved exactly this way. No one would have expected or predicted anything else; everyone would have been stern in condemning a company that did otherwise.
Why?
Give that a few moments' thought while I refill my mug.
In Albert Jay Nock's landmark 1935 work Our Enemy, The State, he describes the burgeoning change in attitudes among private citizens as regards the importunings of the less fortunate:
When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them. We can get some kind of rough measure of this atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the State's relief-agency. The State has said to society, You are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power and exercise it to suit myself. Hence, when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
The effect Nock describes in the above was not limited to individuals; private firms that had demonstrated a legendary degree of paternal care for their employees were similarly affected. They steadily lost all inclination to see to any interest but that of their stockholders and managements. The sorts of corporate relief activities for which companies such as IBM had been world-famous slowly dropped off, in many cases to nothing.
One of the salutary effects of American participation in World War II was the partial revival of the public-service ethic among American corporations. This was in part due to the rebirth of the sense of shared danger -- quite a lot of Americans were in the line of fire at that time -- and in part due to federal "encouragement." (Washington controlled the commerce of the nation through war contracts and necessities rationing; it could dictate terms to virtually every employer in the country with little fear of being refused.) Thus, the nation came out of the war with a somewhat restored public-service ethic, from individuals to the largest commercial firms.
Fast-forward to 1960. Though much of the New Deal was firmly cemented in place, the huge public-works, make-work, and federal relief programs that had persisted through the Great Depression had been wound down, such that persons in need were once again dependent on their neighbors, local eleemosynary institutions, and the public-service ethic felt by American employers. At that time, what natural disasters occurred were met by the sort of "social power" Nock describes above; given the resurgent commercial vitality of the nation, there was no shortage of it. But the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations unwisely undermined the ethic once more with new federal social-service interventions, particularly Johnson's "Great Society" programs. Massive new federal intrusions into charitable action restarted the deterioration in public-service attitudes that had been reanimated during the war and the succeeding years of reconstruction.
Today, except for the very largest corporations, which are massively dependent upon the good will of federal customers and regulators, the idea that a private firm should display any sense of public service or beneficence toward its employees has all but vanished. Political considerations are paramount in all corporate decisions about acts of "charity;" far more often than not, the motive is to purchase the good will of legislators and regulators.
We no longer expect private firms to act as if "we're all in this together." For that matter, cultivating that sense among one's neighbors is harder than it once was: many who will pay it lip service in good times will, when crisis is upon the neighborhood, pull into their shells without apology. The attitude that prevails today is more or less "every man for himself."
I can't condemn that attitude from any sort of principled basis. Americans live with far more fear today than since the Great Depression / New Deal years. Fear tends to encourage self-protective behavior above all other impulses. He who has never felt fear for his own physical or financial survival cannot grasp its smothering intensity.
But we fear, largely, because our overweening governments have undercut our means of defense: of ourselves, and of our neighbors. This is as true of private companies as of any individual. When the State seizes half the earnings of the nation year after year, and then puts a good part of them toward making it progressively harder to earn, what else are we to feel? When the State dilutes the national currency with progressively larger issuances of debt obligations that must be purchased with freshly printed money by the Federal Reserve Bank, how are we to look forward with confidence?
If we are turning inward, willfully building defenses against calamity that would exclude all but ourselves, yet despise ourselves for our loss of fellow-feeling with what remains of our consciences, should all the blame fall on our own shoulders? Should we not look to the governmental tapeworms that suck away the resources that once bolstered our confidence -- that once made it thinkable to include others in our circle of care, just as they once included us?
The men who steer our corporate employers respond to the same influences. They're drained by the same tapeworms, in many cases more voraciously than what we suffer as individuals. Don't think too harshly of them.
