The Demographics of Depression

The current issue of First Things (not yet available online) features a most interesting article by new associate editor David Goldman on the current economic crisis. While a lot of blame for our woes is rightly being placed on greedy Wall Streeters and corrupt and/or incompetent politicians Goldman casts his eye elsewhere. He makes a compelling case that our fundamental problem is demographic and that it's not going to be solved by the kinds of remedies Washington is prescribing.

The root of the problem, he notes, is the housing crisis. People borrow money to buy homes. This fuels the economy because the construction, purchase, and maintenance of houses create a multitude of jobs.

Two-parent families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. They buy bigger, more expensive homes and spend more on their maintenance. Single-parent families tend to be poorer and often live in apartments or smaller houses. Thus, buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children, but this cohort is in serious decline in the Western world, including the U.S.

Since 1970 our population has risen from 200 to 300 million, but the number of two-parent families is the same as it was in the early 70's - 25 million - while the number of one-parent families with children has tripled.

In 1960 dependent children made up half the population, but today they're only 30%. Meanwhile, the dependent elderly have gone from 15% of the population in 1960 to 30% today. As a result we are getting poorer. There are fewer couples with children to borrow and spend on housing and more and more elderly whose savings are being eaten up by the stock market slide.

According to Goldman, by 2025 households with children will decrease from half of all households to less than a quarter. There will be fewer people with children which means a lower demand for housing. Large lot single-family homes will slump from 56 million today to 34 million by 2025, a 40% reduction.

With a diminished demand for housing the boomers' savings will be sitting in the banks collecting very little interest because no one will be borrowing. The economy will turn to mush. Goldman says that we'll be poorer than we are now for at least a generation. Workers on the tail of the baby boom will work five to ten years longer before retiring and they'll retire with less income than they had planned. Young people will work for less money at duller jobs than did their parents and grandparents.

He argues that we must do what we can to encourage family growth and offers several recommendations toward this end:

• Cut taxes on families (Obama's Cap and Trade would be devastating since it would raise the cost of energy on families which is the equivalent of imposing a tax. His spending policies have already put future generations in debt to the tune of about $30,000 per person before they've even been born).
• Shift part of the Social Security burden to the childless by reducing payroll taxes (FICA) on those who have raised children (Those who have raised children have done their part to create the next generation. Those who haven't, haven't. Those, Goldman says, who have made the effort and paid the cost of raising children are seeing their savings erode because too many others have chosen not to. Those who avoid the effort and cost of children should be asked to pay more to fund social security than those who have raised them.)
• Make child-related expenses deductible.
• Change immigration laws to let in more highly skilled, productive individuals and fewer poor, uneducated immigrants. What we need right now are people who will generate wealth, not people who will demand services paid for by the already strapped public.

There's much else that Goldman offers in this essay that's worth reading. I would urge anyone, especially those between the ages of 18 and 40, to visit their local library, or any place that sells magazines, and read the entire article.

RLC

The UnChurchill

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's finest, most prescient moments:

Senator Reid hasn't had much to say about the war lately, for which we can be thankful. We can also be grateful that the people responsible for making the strategic decisions about the conflict in Iraq didn't pay any attention to him two years ago.

RLC

Romancing the Jihadis

Clifford May remarks on the odd yet fond attraction some Western Leftists have for Islamic jihadists:

Ask those on the Left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning Left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the Left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. The author Paul Berman, unambiguously and unashamedly a man of the Left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications such as The New Republic have not been apologists for radical jihadists.

But The Nation has been soft on Islamism for decades. Back in 1979, editorial-board member Richard Falk welcomed the Iranian revolution, saying it "may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country." Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, longtime Nation contributor Robert Fisk complained that "terrorism" is a "racist" term.

It is no exaggeration to call groups such as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with both Islamists and the Stalinist regime in North Korea - which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Ch�vez, the Bolivarian-socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran's ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy.

In a new book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror, Jamie Glazov takes a hard look at this unholy alliance. A historian by training, Glazov is the son of dissidents who fled the Soviet Union only to find that, on American campuses, they were not welcomed by the liberal/Left lumpen professoriate.

Glazov's book indicts artists and intellectuals of the Left - e.g. George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Susan Sontag - for having "venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming Americans and even the victims for their crimes."

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left spent several years wandering in the wilderness. Many of them, Glazov suggests, looked upon the terrorist attacks of 9/11 less as an atrocity than as an opportunity to revive a moribund revolutionary movement.

Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Lynne Stewart, and Stanley Cohen are among the luminaries of the Left Glazov accuses of having found common ground with Islamists.

Glazov concludes that the Left's "romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America's foes. . . . The Left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow it - and must be supported." On that basis, militant Islamism is regarded as a "valiant form of 'resistance' against American imperialism and oppression."

If such values as equality, tolerance, and human rights are crushed in the process, that's a price many on the Left are willing to pay. Those on the Left who disagree should perhaps speak up more loudly and more often.

There's more to May's essay at the link, but I might mention that another value of the Left that makes their alliance with Islamists even more bizarre is religious freedom. The Left is predominately secular and atheistic and they prize the freedom to remain that way. Surely they must realize, though, that if the Islamists were ever successful in toppling a Western country, the atheists would be the first to be relieved of their heads. Or, being hard Leftists, maybe they don't realize it.

RLC

Ambush

C. J. Chivers describes in the New York Times an army ambush of some 26 Taliban in Afghanistan:

Only the lead insurgents were disciplined as they walked along the ridge. They moved carefully, with weapons ready and at least five yards between each man, the soldiers who surprised them said.

Behind them, a knot of Taliban fighters walked in a denser group, some with rifles slung on their shoulders - "pretty much exactly the way we tell soldiers not to do it," said Specialist Robert Soto, the radio operator for the American patrol.

If these insurgents came close enough, the soldiers knew, the patrol could kill them in a batch.

Fight by fight, the infantryman's war in Afghanistan is often waged on the Taliban's terms. Insurgents ambush convoys and patrols from high ridges or long ranges and slip away as the Americans, weighed down by equipment, return fire and call for air and artillery support. Last week a patrol from the First Infantry Division reversed the routine.

Go to the article to read Chivers' description of the fight. The quick summary is that it was a bad night for the Taliban.

RLC

More 'Redistribution'

Here's a piece by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner in economics, Ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank, Professor of Columbia University, etc., etc. Among other things, Stiglitz says:

The people who designed the [bailout] plans are "either in the pocket of the banks or they're incompetent."

Perhaps what I find most alarming is that the bad news is no longer coming from only those once considered to be "fringe". Now the news is coming from notable scholars and well-known experts in economics and finance. And it's coming rather frequently.

Dr. Doom

Whenever I see something from Nouriel Roubini, I check it out for several reasons; he's rather brilliant, he's a professor of economics at the Stern Business School at New York University and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, and his background is extremely impressive.

But, perhaps most of all, his ability to foresee the likely outcome of all things economic has been uncanny for at least the last couple of years. Given that he was warning of the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today several years ago, it's no wonder he has earned the nick-name "Dr. Doom", and rightly so.

Having said that, I don't agree with all of what he says regarding his prescription to fix our economic problems because I gather he's of the Keynesian School of Economics but if not, then perhaps he's simply speaking from a perspective that our government will be able to understand. In other words, I believe the Keynesian philosophy of economics is flawed but it's the current economic philosophy our government embraces*. And Roubini speaks in terms they understand.

At any rate, Roubini is refreshing because he tells it like he sees it and he doesn't seem to care if anyone's offended. Here is a recent article from Roubini that shows he doesn't have favorites and, perhaps what I find most encouraging is, he puts much of the responsibility for the present dilemma squarely where it belongs. Advocating that those who are responsible take responsibility is certainly not politically correct these days but I never said Roubini cared about such silliness.

Check out some of his other articles here.

* Note that Keynes's idea's became less influential in the 1970s, after attacks from Milton Friedman and other economists who were less optimistic than Keynes about the potential for interventionist government policy to complement the free market. But in 2008, high level policy makers in the world's modern economies have shown a renewed interest in implementing economic solutions in accordance with the recommendations of Keynesian economics - such as the fiscal stimulus and far-reaching government intervention behind the plans of President Barack Obama and other global leaders to rescue the economy.

Editor's note: So we would solve our current economic crisis that has been caused by excessive borrowing and spending by more borrowing and spending??? If they are wrong, all of this printing of money and spending will end very, very badly.

Murray Rothbard considered Keynes an intellectual lightweight, fixated on simple short-term solutions to complex long-term problems, obsessed with his own ego and influence, and one of the most destructive statist intellectuals of the 20th century.

For a better treatment on John Maynard Keynes, see this link.

Before the Cock Crows Thrice

By now you've probably heard that our President spoke recently at Georgetown - a Catholic university, need I remind you - but not before insisting that the Latin letters IHS on the pediment behind the podium be covered up. The President evidently wished not to give offense to any viewers of the speech who might suffer an attack of the vapors at the sight of the Latin symbol of Christ, which makes me wonder whether the next time he visits a mosque if he'll insist that any symbols of Islam be concealed.

James Schall at The Catholic Thing has similar musings:

What interests me here is this: If this president speaks at a Jewish Synagogue, or a Baptist church, or the Crystal Cathedral, or the Muslim Mosque on Massachusetts Avenue, the Ravens Stadium, the George Washington University, the headquarters of Planned Parenthood, or the hall of the local Atheist Society, will the same policy be followed? Will all signs of what the place actually is and stands for be covered over? If so, it represents equitable treatment, but is it wise? Is the president never to appear in any venue with obvious particular commitments, and why choose religious and not secular signs? Should, say, a university seal be exempted, but a crucifix not?

Will presidents be able to appear anywhere outside government buildings if the rules are really equally applied to both religious and secular? And this raises a real question: Is it American? George Washington once talked before our New North Hall, so did President Clinton. I guess a porch does not need much cover-up. But is the American understanding of state and religion designed to hide any religious or cultural sign whatsoever? If a president is buried at a local church, as President Woodrow Wilson is, must the funeral be covered over so that no signs of a church are seen?

This country does not hide its religious presence. If a president does not want to speak in a given place, fine. Don't ask. But if he does, it should not be on condition of the place's ceasing to present what it historically is.

I don't know which is more disgraceful, that the White House insisted that the Christian symbol be covered up or that a putatively Catholic university acquiesced to the demand. Georgetown's willingness to go along with this repudiation of their identity recalls to mind the story of Peter who, when challenged by the crowd to own up to his friendship with Jesus, chose instead to deny that friendship. It's a story of shame, betrayal and cowardice not unlike the events at Georgetown.

The cock is crowing for Georgetown just as it did for Peter.

At the above link Mary Eberstadt follows Schall's post with an amusing letter to the Vatican from the White house expressing its concerns about Mr. Obama's upcoming visit. It's a hoot.

RLC

Financial Oligarchs

Bill caught this outstanding article in The Atlantic, authored by former IMF bigwig Simon Johnson, and passed it on to ruin our day.

Here's The Atlantic's lede:

The [economic] crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

The difficulty is that the people who control the financial empire are so inextricably intertwined with our political class that it's almost impossible to separate them.

The article's a little lengthy, but it's very enlightening. Unfortunately, by the time you're finished reading it you'll probably have become a Marxist.

RLC

Courageous Heart

In 2007 we wrote about Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who risked her life to save Jewish children from the Nazis and who was nominated that year for the Nobel Peace Prize. In an unforgiveable spasm of political correctness she was denied the award because the judges thought it should go to Al Gore for his global warming slide show.

Now the rest of the country will soon be marvelling at the sheer boneheadedness of the Nobel committee's decision. CBS is showing a made-for-television movie that tells the story of Sendler's heroism during WWII. The movie will air this Sunday the 19th.

This post at First Things blog explains why this woman was such a great human being - not as great as Al Gore, apparently, but great nonetheless. The movie is titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. Don't miss it.

RLC

The End of Philosophy

David Brooks assays the field of ethics in a New York Times column titled The End of Philosophy and quickly finds himself raising questions he doesn't realize he's raising:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, "Human," is that "it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found."

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

This is interesting. I haven't read Gazzaniga's book, but I suspect that the reason no link has been found between reason and morality is that the kind of behaviors most people think of as moral have no basis in human reason. Reason leads us to the conclusion that we should look out for #1. The only reason we should care about the welfare of others is if we'll somehow benefit from doing so. If we won't benefit or if we don't care about the benefit, then there's no reason to have any consideration for the interests of others at all.

This seems unacceptable to many people because even though our society is becoming increasingly secular we're still living off the moral capital of an earlier, more religious age. Our grandparents believed we should care about others because that was what God desires of us. Several generations of Americans have since been raised without God, but they've still been taught the precept. They no longer can explain why it's right to care about others, they just know intuitively that it is. Of course, as time goes on, more people are going to recognize that their intuitions are hanging in mid-air, like the cartoon character who has run off a cliff but hasn't yet started to fall, and they're going to abandon them as groundless and yield instead to their egoistic impulses.

Brooks continues:

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don't have to decide if it's disgusting. You just know. You don't have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can't explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

Indeed. Brooks here is as much as acknowledging that right and wrong are completely subjective, like our taste in food or art. What's right in a world without God is whatever one feels is right.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, "The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest."

Or, put differently, reason is simply a tool we use to try to justify our feelings to our intellect. As such its role in ethics is pretty much secondary.

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there's an increasing appreciation that evolution isn't just about competition. It's also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don't just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

But if our moral sense is simply an artifact of evolution, what obligates me to pay any attention to it? The answer, of course, is nothing. If human morality is just the result of a process that shaped us for survival in the stone age what need do we have for it today? It's no more necessary or important than is the hair on our arms.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures - at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

Brooks is here begging the question. He assumes that altruism and the rest are moral desiderata and then enthuses about the fortuitous path evolution has taken to produce these very traits. But what makes altruism better or more "moral" than egoism? If Brooks just assumes that it is then he's assuming what he really should be trying to demonstrate.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They're good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people's moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

But what is goodness? Is it caring for others? Why not think it consists in dominating others? Brooks and the people he's talking about seem to have a whole host of assumptions about what is good, but if the only reason these things are good is because we've evolved the desire for them then we have to say that selfishness, greed, lust, power, violence, etc. are also good because we've certainly evolved the desire for them as well. Why elevate some of the results of evolution to the staus of virtues and not others?

For more on Brooks' essay you can go here and here.

RLC

Civil Discourse Among the Lefties

This video of last night's Countdown with Keith Olbermann has to be seen to be believed (and savored). Tens of thousands (at least) of ordinary Americans turn out to protest the reckless spending that is almost sure to bury our children under a mountain of debt and Janeane Garofalo and Keith Olbermann slander them with almost every libel they can think of and then wind up concluding that these concerned citizens are all opposed to Obama's policies because he's black.

For Garofalo and Olbermann anyone who opposes spending our country into oblivion is a stupid, racist, latent mass murderer who's easily manipulated by the evil Fox News. Maybe Ms Garofalo is angling for a job in Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security, or, more likely, this video is simply a glimpse into the fevered fantasy world in which the left lives and moves and has its being. I don't recall either of these luminaries saying anything at all bad about the G-20 protestors, or the anti-war protestors back in Bush's first term - people who have actually destroyed property and harmed, or threatened to harm, other human beings during their protests - but let ordinary folks gather peaceably to display their frustration and displeasure with their political leadership and that's prima facie proof to such as Garofalo and Olbermann that the protestors are a bunch of bigoted Neanderthals a single incendiary word away from reenacting the Holocaust.

Garofalo avers that opponents of the President's policies are suffering from a neurological disorder - perhaps she has a degree in psychiatry, I don't know - but what name should we assign the delusions under which she and Mr. Olbermann labor? These demonstrations weren't funded by the GOP nor were they organized by Fox News. Perhaps when one is consumed with hate and a sense of one's own intellectual superiority, paranoia comes naturally and any who dare dissent from their own point of view is little more than a contemptible "redneck."

Anyway, the good stuff starts about three minutes in:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Don't you wish you were as smart as Ms Garofalo? She knows so much it must be sheer joy to be her. On the other hand, we might pity the woman who, gifted with such a towering intellect - a virtue exceeded in its vastness only by her vanity - finds that nevertheless the only people who care to listen to her are a few members of Keith Olbermann's tiny audience, people who perchance are as hate-filled as is Ms Garofalo.

RLC

Freedom Is Slavery

Janet Napolitano, the Director of Homeland Security and the lady who informed us that we are no longer fighting a global war on terrorism but rather a war on "man-caused disasterism," has released a report to law enforcement agencies that warns of a growing danger in the U.S. from "right-wing extremists." The report has caused quite a stir since it apparently offers no substantiation for its claims and because it defines right-wing extremists in a manner that would include most of the Founding Fathers. The Washington Times column on the DHS report opens with these words:

The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in "rightwing extremist activity," saying the economic recession, the election of America's first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

Has no one at the DHS ever read The Federalist Papers? A preference for state and local authority is a principle upon which this country was founded. It is the basis for the much ignored 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Apparently the Obama administration considers people who still harbor the hope that we will one day return to the Constitution to be dangerous rogues who need to be watched.

"It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration," the warning says.

According to Ms Napolitano the gentle nuns who pray daily for the repeal of Roe v. Wade and those who are perplexed at our government's failure to secure our borders are also members of this nefarious class of extremists.

There's something peculiar about the fact that Barack Obama's associations with known left-wing extremists who planted bombs and terrorized innocent families was pooh-poohed during the campaign, but now his administration is planning to place opponents of abortion on demand and illegal immigration under the watchful eye of the police.

The report, which was first disclosed to the public by nationally syndicated radio host Roger Hedgecock, makes clear that the Homeland Security Department does not have "specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence."It warns that fringe organizations are gaining recruits, but it provides no numbers.

The report says extremist groups have used President Obama as a recruiting tool.

"Most statements by rightwing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action," the report says. "In two instances in the run-up to the election, extremists appeared to be in the early planning stages of some threatening activity targeting the Democratic nominee, but law enforcement interceded."

It would be interesting to see exactly what data the DHS has to support any of these claims. No data appeared in the report. In fact, the report reads like a summary of liberal stereotypes of anybody who disagrees with them on the issues facing the country. Of course, a lot of Americans were concerned about the election results, but who, precisely, was concerned about them because Obama was an African-American? The report doesn't tell us. You just have to take their word for it and accept that you are possibly guilty of thought crime if you express concerns about being led by the most radically left administration in the history of this country.

The Homeland Security assessment goes on to say specifically that "rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat."

But in fact:

The FBI report said that from October 2001 through May 2008 "a minuscule" number of veterans, 203 out of 23,000, had joined groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, the Creativity Movement, the National Alliance and some skinhead groups.

Here's an odd nut: Why are the National Socialists considered a right-wing group? National Socialists (neo-Nazis) are socialists; socialism is a phenomenon of the left; ergo neo-Nazis are leftist extremists, they're not "right-wingers."

The DHS report is filled with meaningless claims (meaningless because there's no way to determine their significance). For example:

DHS/I&A notes that prominent civil rights organizations have observed an increase in anti-Hispanic crimes over the past five years.

But who's perpetrating these crimes? Other Hispanics? Hostile blacks? White racists? The report doesn't say. We're just left to ponder why this fact is to be construed as evidence of the rise of right-wing extremism.

Those of you who consider yourselves pro-life, or are returning vets, or have serious qualms about allowing everyone into this country who wants to come in should be on notice that Big Sister Janet is watching you. Perhaps we can expect the Obama administration to soon be placing telescreens in every home and public space.

RLC

Dealing with Pirates

Strategy Page offers an interesting explanation as to why the world seems slow to do anything about the Somali pirates:

While ten percent of world shipping traffic goes through the Gulf of Aden each year, most of it is in ships too fast for the pirates to catch, and too large for them to easily get aboard. These ships pay higher fuel costs (for the high speed transit), higher insurance premiums, and two days of "danger pay" for their unionized crews, and that's it. This increases the annual operating costs of these ships by a fraction of one percent. But for smaller, and slower, freighters, mostly serving local customers, the pirates remain a problem. These ships tend to be owned by African and Arab companies, and manned by African and Arab crews.

In other words, in financial terms piracy is just not much of a problem. The article goes on to lay out the pros and cons of the various options for ending it:

In dealing with a piracy problem like this, you have three main choices. You can do what is currently being done, which is patrolling the Gulf of Aden and shooting only when you see speedboats full of gunmen threatening a merchant ship. The rule appears to be that you fire lots of warning shots, and rarely fire at the pirates themselves. This approach has saved a few ships from capture, and the more warships you get into the Gulf, the more pirate attacks you can foil. But it won't stop the pirates from capturing ships. Establishing a similar anti-piracy patrol off the east coast of Africa would cost over half a billion dollars a year, at least.

A second approach is to be more aggressive. That is, your ships and helicopters shoot (pirates) on sight and shoot to kill. Naturally, the pirates will hide their weapons (until they are in the act of taking a ship), but it will still be obvious what a speedboat full of "unarmed" men are up to. You could take a chance (of dead civilians and bad publicity) and shoot up any suspicious speedboat. Some of the pirates would probably resort to taking some women and children with them. Using human shields is an old custom, and usually works against Westerners. More pirate attacks will be thwarted with this approach, but the attacks will continue, and NATO will be painted as murderous bullies in the media.

The third option is to go ashore and kill or capture all the pirates, or at least as many as you can identify. Destroy pirate boats and weapons. This is very dangerous, because innocent civilians will be killed or injured, and the property of non-pirates will be damaged. The anti-piracy forces will be condemned in some quarters for committing atrocities. There might even be indictments for war crimes. There will be bad publicity. NATO will most likely avoid this option too. The bottom line is that the pirate attacks, even if they took two or three times as many ships as last year, would not have a meaningful economic impact on world shipping. For example, the international anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden costs $300 million a year, a fraction of a percent of the defense budgets of the nations involved. Politicians and bureaucrats can stand that kind of pain, and will likely do so and refrain from doing anything bold in Somalia.

It seems to me that the best option is to amend the Law of the Sea treaty to allow shipping companies to employ trained private security contractors, such as we used in Iraq, to fend off attacks. Once word gets out that ships are manned by security teams and that a lot of pirates are going to get killed if they try to hijack a ship, a lot of them would see their enthusiasm for piracy evaporate rather quickly.

Ron Paul offers a somewhat similar plan. He thinks the U.S. should employ bounty hunters.

RLC

Three Months In

Today protesters across the country are having "Tea Parties" to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the economic policies of the current administration. The fear is that the enormous spending undertaken by the Obama administration is going to strap us with debt that will only be paid by inflating the currency or raising taxes, both of which will suffocate the hopes we have for our childrens' future.

But it's not just the government's economic nostrums that have people alarmed.

Just before the election last November we noted that most conservatives and many libertarians opposed Barack Obama because they foresaw an Obama administration, supported and abetted by a Democratic congress, eager to implement a number of measures that would erode our freedoms and be detrimental to our national health. Here's the listwe posted back then:

1. Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
   
2. Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
   
3. Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
   
4. Redistribute wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
   
5. Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
   
6. Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs. (Cap and Trade, minimum wage, capital gains tax, health insurance)
   
7. Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
   
8. Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare.
   
9. Nationalize health care.
   
10. Deny to parents any choice in where they send their children to school.
    
11. Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
    
12. Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it's conservative and/or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine or "Localism."
    
13. Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
    
14. Take away the right to own or buy most types of firearms or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
    
15. Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections by implementing card check.
    

We're now three months into the new administration and it's clear that the list above failed to do justice to Democrat ambitions. Already the President, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their minions in Congress have taken steps toward implementing most, if not all, of the above goals. The Democrats are anxious to fundamentally reshape the contours of our society, and there's very little that can be done to dissuade them until the elections of 2010.

To be sure, there's much about our society that's in need of reshaping, but none of the changes listed above are among them. In my opinion, at least, achieving any of the items on the list would be at best harmful and at worst calamitous.

RLC

Change We Could Believe in

When people don't pay income taxes they have little stake in the economic health of the nation and a lot of incentive to vote for whatever politicians will keep their tax at zero. In the U.S. approximately half of wage-earners pay no income tax at all, while ten percent of wage-earners account for 70% of tax revenue.

Students of government going all the way back to Plato have pointed out that no polity can sustain itself when people who don't pay taxes are able to vote to tax the wealthier citizens in order to provide them with the amenities of life. When the less wealthy have access to the public purse it won't be long until they clean it out, which is what we've done in this country.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer compares the tax burden in the U.S. to an inverted pyramid with the narrow top 10% supporting the rest of the structure. Such a pyramid poised on the point is inherently unstable and so is our tax structure.

Fleischer argues that everyone who earns anything should be required to pay something and he's right. I have not yet come across a cogent objection to the Flat Tax plan that would assess everyone who has an income a particular percentage (say, 20%) with no deductions and few exceptions.

Another intriguing proposal is the Fair Tax.

Whatever plan is adopted it's clear that the current system is unworkable. If a sizable portion of the president's cabinet selections, including the secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner), plus much of Congress, including the chairman of the committee that writes the tax code (Charley Rangel), can't figure out what they owe then the code needs to be overhauled.

That would be the sort of meaningful change that we could actually believe in.

RLC

Salient Details

Every report I've seen or heard about the horrible abduction and murder of 8 year-old Sandra Cantu has mentioned that her killer, Melissa Huckaby, was a Sunday School teacher and pastor's daughter. I'm not sure why the media feels this is a salient detail that the public should be aware of unless they just can't resist an opportunity to stick a thumb in the eye of Christians. After all, how many times are the religious associations, or lack thereof, of any of the mass murderers who've befouled our society from the Columbine killers to the most recent shooting in the immigration office at Binghamton, NY featured on the evening news? Are we ever told how many of these killers are, say, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or atheists?

Let a putative Christian do something horrific, however, and the person's faith is almost certain to be made an explicit part of the story, as if to impress upon us that Christians are just as bad as everyone else and that Christianity makes no difference in one's moral life.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the media's motives. Perhaps they reported Ms Huckaby's religious background because they thought it an anomaly that someone of her persuasion would do something so terrible. It's possible. It's possible that the media don't report the religious stance of those who commit similar horrors because, well, because most of them have no religious stance and their crimes are really not so surprising given that fact.

Even so, I propose that from now forward every murderer's religious beliefs be made an integral part of the news accounts of his or her atrocities. It'll be interesting to see the results in print, although anyone who thinks about it can predict what they'll be.

RLC

Condescending Contempt

Anyone who has spent much time browsing YouTube, or listening to people like Bill Maher, will recognize the sort of condescending contempt A.N. Wilson describes in an essay in the Mail Online about the attitude of the British secular elite toward people of faith.

During the course of his column Wilson tells us something of his own story:

For much of my life, I, too, have been one of those who did not believe. It was in my young manhood that I began to wonder how much of the Easter story I accepted, and in my 30s I lost any religious belief whatsoever.

Like many people who lost faith, I felt anger with myself for having been 'conned' by such a story. I began to rail against Christianity, and wrote a book, entitled Jesus, which endeavoured to establish that he had been no more than a messianic prophet who had well and truly failed, and died.

Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion.

Wilson then concludes by pointing out that the confidence adherents to atheistic materialism have in the rationality of their belief is quite unjustified:

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.

All in all it's not a bad essay with which to conclude the Easter season.

RLC

The Year of Astronomy

New Scientist celebrates the Year of Astronomy by releasing a series of eight of the best astronomical photographs of the year. They're dazzling.

Jupiter's Ghost

RLC

Irena Opdyke

Dennis Prager tells a story of a woman in Nazi-occupied Poland that raises some serious moral questions. The story has been made into a play that's currently on Broadway entitled Irena's Vow:

Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, "Irena's Vow." The Irena of the title is Irena Gut Opdyke, who, at the time of the play's World War II's setting, was a pretty 19-year-old blond Polish Roman Catholic to whom fate (she would say God) gave the opportunity to save 12 Jews in, of all places, the home of the highest-ranking German officer in a Polish city. Ultimately discovered by the Nazi officer, she was offered the choice of becoming the elderly Nazi's mistress or the Jews all being sent to death camps.

As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a "Nazi whore" but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.

What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.

Here's the question this story compels us to ponder: Is what Irena did wrong or right? Do you, like Prager, see her adultery as heroic and deeply good or do you see it as deeply wrong and sinful? Or neither? Is your answer one you could explain to someone else or is it just an intuition?

RLC

Easter Poll

I find this a bit hard to believe, but since it's Easter I thought I'd put it up on Viewpoint anyway:

As Christians gather to celebrate Easter this Sunday, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 88% of adults nationwide think the person known to history as Jesus Christ actually walked the earth 2,000 years ago. That's up five points from a year ago. Today, 5% disagree and 7% are not sure.

Eighty-two percent (82%) also believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God who came to Earth and died for our sins. Another 10% think otherwise and 8% aren't sure.

Nearly as many, 79% believe the central claim of the Christian faith--that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Only 10% say they do not believe the first Easter resurrection really happened, while 11% are not sure.

Almost 80% of Americans believe in the historical resurrection of Jesus? Eighty two percent believe in the deity of Christ and substitutionary atonement? I wonder what the response would have been had folks been asked what difference these beliefs make in the way they live their life. I also wonder what the response would've been had these questions been posed to, say, a thousand college students surveyed on a range of campuses. Alas, Rasmussen apparently wasn't curious about the same things I am.

There's more on this poll at the link.

RLC