Tag: politics

Mailvox: give to Caesar

JB wonders when it applies:

Not sure if you’ve run into this, but I’ve noticed a pattern when debating a liberal (Christian or not) about taxes and big government. When they get to the point where they have lost the argument, they throw a grenade with the statement, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.

Now, I’m not one to take the words of Christ lightly. It is true, Jesus did not go out of His way to incite rebellion against Rome, and seemed to endorse the concept of taxation with that statement. However, something doesn’t sit right with the liberal’s logic when they resort to that statement.

I wonder if you or the Ilk have a solid response to the Render Unto Caesar argument.

I usually run into this with regards to taxes. My response is always the same as the response that preceded the advice. “Show me the coin used for paying the tax. Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?” In other words, show me Caesar! So, while you can reasonably use this verse to justify writing a check to assorted dead men or the Federal Reserve, it is a poor argument in support of state or Federal taxation.

Now, it is important to note that it is not any wiser to refuse to pay the tax money demanded by the IRS than it is to refuse to pay the protection money demanded by the Mafia. But it does mean that the Biblical justification doesn’t apply.

As for government, the liberal Christian’s logic breaks down because what applies to a divine Emperor manifestly does not apply to a democracy, not even a constitutional republic in which the democracy is strictly limited. Whereas the imperial subject owes the Emperor nothing but obedience, the citizen of the republic has a duty to ensure that his duly elected government acts legitimately according to the bounds of the republic’s constitution.

Obama and the Gay Old Party

It would appear that Larry Craig is far from the only closeted Republican lawmaker. And if these reports have any substance to them, the Obama White House is about as straight as a male chorus line on Broadway:

Last month, Blagojevich’s trial judge, U.S. District Court judge James Zagel, a crony of former Illinois Republican Governor Jim Thompson, ruled that all 500 hours of phone calls intercepted and taped by Fitzgerald could not be played during Blagojevich’s trial as demanded by Blagojevich and his defense lawyers. Blagojevich demanded that Fitzgerald “show up in court and explain to everybody . . . why you don’t want those tapes that you made played in court.”

WMR has learned that the tapes may contain salty references Obama’s and Emanuel’s private lives…. Blagojevich’s trial is scheduled to begin on June 3 and Fitzgerald’s main interest is to keep the trial focused on Blagojevich, especially after he managed to “flip” Blagojevich’s former chief of staff John Harris to testify against the impeached and ousted governor. WMR learned from informed sources that one lawyer on Harris’s defense team is involved in a gay partner scandal that was discovered by the attorney’s wife.

Some of the wiretaps may reveal that it was not Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longtime friend and current White House policy adviser who was Obama’s top candidate to fill his U.S. Senate seat, but the young 32-year old “pick up basketball” friend of Obama, Giannoulias, then serving his second year as state Treasurer. However, Obama has avoided campaigning for Giannoulias in Illinois and there are indications that the president has “thrown Giannoulias under the bus,” according to some Democratic political circles in Chicago.

Mutiple Chicago sources report that Republicans who see Giannoulias’s Obama connections as providing an edge in his Senate race this year should not celebrate prematurely. Giannoulias’s GOP opponent, U.S. Representative Mark Kirk, a Naval Reserve intelligence officer, has also been identified as a closeted gay man. Kirk divorced his wife last year after an eight-year marriage. They had no children.

In addition, U.S. Representative Aaron Shock, who took over the House seat vacated by Obama’s Republican Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, is, according to Chicago Boy’s Town sources, a habitué of Minibar, a noted gay bar in Chicago’s gay district. For an extremely young first term member of the House, observers were surprised when GOP Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia named Shock as a Deputy Minority Whip.

As insane as it all sounds, there are three factors that suggest it might not be entirely fiction. First, where are Obama’s old girlfriends? Unlike every other president, they just don’t seem to exist and there’s hardly a woman alive who once had an even remotely notable lover that isn’t eager to let the world know that they were once an item. If a woman has ever dated a musician or an athlete, she’ll be sure to let you know about it… and there is no way that a woman who was involved with a president, let alone this particular president, would keep her mouth shut.

Second, the decision of the Blagojevich judge to prevent the defense from putting the recordings made by the prosecutor on the public record is deeply suspicious. If Blagojevich walks away with nothing more than a hand slap, it will be obvious that whatever he knows is too explosive to permit it to reach the public. And third, the invitation to Sen. Bill Frist’s Brokeback-style event is precisely the sort of idiotic “hidden” message that gay artists always love to try to sneak past the straights. Of course, it could have been nothing more than an immature gay staffer’s handiwork; I once pointed out to Spacebunny no less than seven penises, including one ejaculating, on an airline’s kiddy lunch package and I tend to doubt it said anything about the CEO’s recreational pursuits.

As Instapundit likes to dryly declare, “the country is in the very best of hands.” And there is no question that Republican commentators are scenting more than a little blood in the water these days, as the American Spectator’s Peter Ferrara is now thinking that Obama won’t even serve out his full term:

Months ago, I predicted in this column that President Obama would so discredit himself in office that he wouldn’t even be on the ballot in 2012, let alone have a prayer of being reelected. Like President Johnson in 1968, who had won a much bigger victory four years previously than Obama did in 2008, President Obama will be so politically defunct by 2012 that he won’t even try to run for reelection. I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it that far. I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall of 2012.

I think the possibility of a resignation is less remote than one would normally assume due to Obama’s personality. Like Sarah Palin, Obama is a narcissistic lightweight who craved the position, not the power. He’s already “made history”, he’s clearly not enjoying himself, and he has no sense of duty, so it’s basically all downhill from here for him at this point. So, if some sort of face-saving exit is offered to him, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him take it.

Mailvox: libertarian success

JY asks about the prospects for an applied libertarian society:

Do you believe that the success of applied Libertarianism is at all related to a society’s “collective morality”? The question I’m dealing with is whether a form of limited government, which some Libertarian’s advocate, is sustainable apart from a moral society (in this case, by “moral society” I mean one that closely aligns with the general Judeo-Christian ethic).

Not in the slightest. Libertarianism is a secular defense mechanism against evil; a moral Christian society can tolerate and survive big government much better than a purely secular one due to the limits built into Christian morality. Those limits will be violated from time to time, Man being fallen, but the centuries-long history of hundreds of Christian near-absolute rulers who never once engaged in the sort of routine butchery of their people that secular irreligious rulers regularly do shows that it is secular and immoral societies that are the most in need of libertarian government.

The problem is not that people are not Christian enough to pursue libertarian government, it is that they are not intelligent enough. Anyone who seeks special favors from a government empowered to grant them is a self-interested, shortsighted, gambling fool, because the government that can give can also take away and will do so whenever its own interest comes into conflict with the individuals.

Non-libertarians want cheap government health care, but they don’t want the government to deny them care or euthanize them when their health care threatens to become expensive. The problem is that most people are insufficiently intelligent to recognize that the former necessarily dictates the latter.

UPDATE – TZ points out an omission: I don’t think you answered the question that was asked: “whether a form of limited government, which some Libertarian’s advocate, is sustainable apart from a moral society”

Fair enough. Okay, my answer is this: no form of limited government is sustainable in the long term because no form of government is permanently sustainable. The most that can be said is that a moral society can be sustained longer than an immoral one, regardless of whether the form of government is limited or unlimited.

What books would you recommend for a young person (teen) just forming political ideas, leaning libertarian?

A lot of Robert Heinlein. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Tunnel in the Sky are probably the two best. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is the conventional work that has probably has the most influence on current libertarians. Orwell’s 1984 isn’t libertarian per se, but is well worth reading. And Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a must. Unfortunately, I haven’t read much in the way of explicitly libertarian philosophy or ideology that I find worth recommending.

Too much principle

Ross Douthat reveals the intrinsic and incoherent dislike for principle harbored by the pragmatic Republican:

Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.) And like many self-conscious iconoclasts, they tend to drift in ever-more extreme directions, reveling in political incorrectness even as they leave common sense and common decency behind.

It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting “paleo” writers of the last few decades, [Samuel] Francis and Joseph Sobran, ended their careers way out on the racist or anti-Semitic fringe. It isn’t a coincidence that the most successful “paleo” presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, opposes not only America’s interventions in Iraq, but the West’s involvement in World War II as well. It isn’t surprising that Ron Paul kept company in the 1990s with acolytes who attached his name to bigoted pamphleteering.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock that his son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Douthat is correct to say that Rand Paul could have and should have avoided a discussion of the merits of a 46 year-old law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn’t on any libertarian’s top 10 list of Federal actions that require overturning. In fact, it probably isn’t even on anyone’s top 25 list. But Douthat’s criticism of Paul’s principles naturally leads to the question of how much principle is too much? How much good is too good? And precisely how much principle should be, ideally, be cast aside in order to reach an optimum balance between principle and pragmatism? The illogic stems from ignorance; Douthat has clearly never stopped to think that the civil rights act, however justifiable, was in fact an expansion of central state power with all of the long-term danger that presents. He obviously has never thought about World War II in a critical manner, viewing it instead as a mystic and hallowed event that is beyond question. And he adroitly skips over the fact that the only reason Francis and Roberts ended up on what he calls a “fringe”, despite the fact that their views are far more popular in the mainstream public than those of their neo-conservative foes, is because they were exiled by the neocons after their successful conquest of the conservative media’s high ground.

Rand Paul is hardly “undone”, no matter how much Douthat and the other faux conservatives in the Republican Party would like to believe he is a political dead letter. The America of 2010 simply doesn’t view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the same manner that the America of 1980 did. The liberal white guilt that fueled the civil rights of the 1960s and diversity of the 1990s is all but dead, having been slain by the Vibrant Society, and besides, what does a Mexican or Somali immigrant care about 18th, 19th, or even 20th century American history anyhow.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Americans have ideologically devolved to the point that they are simply too unprincipled to elect principled politicians, in which case it doesn’t matter whether men like Rand Paul are elected or not. Because an unprincipled electorate will fully merit the fate that appears to be in store for them.

Contra the bricklayers

In which I respond to an erroneous assumption made by a commenter on John Scalzi’s blog:

I think Libertarians are the most idealistic people in the world. They really do believe that left to their own devices people will do the right thing. Look at Alan Greenspan and his shock that large corporations didn’t act in their investors’ best interests.

This is a wildly incorrect notion of libertarianism and is almost precisely backwards. It is because libertarians understand that people are capable of committing great acts of evil, especially the sort of people who desire power over others, that they wish to prevent government from interfering in people’s lives to the greatest extent possible. We libertarians most certainly do NOT believe that people will do the right thing if left to their own devices, rather, we believe that since most people will do the wrong thing if given power over others, it is in the interests of everyone to make sure that the force multiplier offered by government to those people is as small as possible.

As for Alan Greenspan, it is important to understand the difference between the supposedly innnocent, self-servingly revisionist Greenspan and the coldly calculating servant of Wall Street. There was absolutely nothing libertarian about Greenspan’s actions; it wasn’t as if he eliminated all of the many government regulations that create and govern corporations as well as forcing them to sell their stock on certain specific private exchanges rather than freely on the Internet.

As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was positive in that it overturned government enforcement of segregation, which was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free association. And it was a negative in that it also violated the individual’s Constitutional right to free association.

It is profoundly stupid to claim that a private individual does not have the right to refuse to serve someone on the basis of race, sex, or any other criteria he happens to choose, given the right of free association. (Yes, I am aware that the Supreme Court has declared otherwise, that still doesn’t change the perfectly clear text of the Constitution.) Once you eliminate that right, you have transformed the individual into a legal serf with no control over his own services as there is no bright line on further directives from the government except the momentary whims of the responsible agents.

Libertarians are those few who understand that the problem with the brick is not the brick itself, but that it is another brick in the wall.

I should note that it is also profoundly stupid, in many cases, for business owners to exercise their right to free association on the basis of superficial factors. If I manufacture computers and refuse to sell to Asians, I am voluntarily abandoning a huge international market. If I own a bar in Detroit and refuse to serve blacks, I am not likely to remain in business very long. These things tend to sort themselves out over time courtesy of the inexorable market forces. On the other hand, in some cases, it is necessary for other businesses owners to exercise their free association right on a superficial basis if they are to remain in business. The successful fitness franchise, Curves, is built upon little more than anti-male discrimination whereas the traditional men’s social clubs are all but extinct because their customers were not interested in patronizing the government-dictated mixed-sex format.

Everyone discriminates/exercises their right to free association, the only question is where one happens to draw the line. The primary problem with permitting the government to draw the line for everyone is that the government is a dynamic entity. Those who cheer government involvement in telling business owners they cannot discriminate against homosexuals are unlikely to be happy about a government telling business owners they must discriminate against them. But once you have permitted the camel’s nose into the tent, you have very little control over which part of the tent it will eventually choose to defecate.

Best to keep the damn camel outside where it belongs!

Rookie mistake

Rand Paul hasn’t quite figured out the art of dealing with critics looking for gotchas:

Rand Paul is coming under attack for things he said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race discrimination in privately owned restaurants and hotels.

First of all, I would absolutely voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is an egregious violation against property rights as well as the Constitutional Right of Free Association. That being said, it is remarkably stupid for any politician, of any party, to comment upon what he would or would not have done had he been voting on a bill 46 years ago.

The correct response would have been to say: “Rachel, I have no more intention of speculating about how I would have voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than I have of speculating how I would have voted on the Declaration of War against Spain of 1898 or the Proclamation of Imperial Divinity of 14 AD. I was not a Senator in either Washington DC or Rome at the time of those previous votes, and while hypothetical speculation is always interesting, it’s simply not relevant to a Kentucky Senate campaign in 2010.”

Of course, if she pressed further, I would answer the question as if she had asked about the Augustan godhood. “Well, Rachel, there’s no question that Octavian accomplished great things and reunified the empire after it was riven by a series of failed triumvirates and the subsequent civil wars, but I’m not sure it actually required the mind of a deity to outthink Marc Antony.” If your interlocutor is being silly, the idea is to respond in a way that highlights the inherent silliness of his approach, not be dragged down into the mire of the ridiculous.

Republican spin

Charles Krauthammer suggests that Kentucky Republicans chose for Rand Paul over the establishment candidate, Grayson, because they don’t like Obama:

Well, I think that‘s the most amazing phenomenon of this day. He came literally out of nowhere. And when you compare him — politically he’s not exactly like his father, Ron Paul, but Ron Paul when he ran for the presidency in ‘08 was a bit of a joke. He was way out there.

It tells you how much our country has changed in two years that that kind of libertarianism was considered kind of kooky at the time, and now his son who is less libertarian, he’s more sort of centrist, but still – he’s really challenging the Republican establishment . . .

This has been I think the amazing story of the last year. Look, the tea party, which is behind Paul, barely existed a year ago. . . .

This is I think a tribute to how radical is the Obama agenda — the spontaneous reaction to overreach, a trillion-dollar stimulus, a health-care takeover, and cap-and-trade, all of that at the beginning of a term. This is an amazing, spontaneous phenomenon, and we‘re going to see a lot of its effects tonight.

Right, it can’t possibly be because Bush and his establishment Republican White House rammed the bank bailout down the throats of an unwilling America. What a pathetic attempt at co-option. It’s not hard to see that the Republican leadership absolutely hates what is happening and is getting concerned that their plans to send another Dole/McCain sacrificial goat up against Obama in 2012 may be falling apart. Ron Paul wasn’t a joke in 2008, but Charles Krauthammer is most certainly a joke in 2010.

Striking a chord

I’m not a big fan of politicians, to say the least. And even the best of them are usually capable of turning around and selling out both their principles and their constituencies. But, I have to admit, I kind of like what I’ve seen of this guy. Anyone who can summon up such instinctive and dismissive sarcasm in refusing to suffer journalistic fools will tend to strike a positive chord with me:

Gov Christie calls S-L columnist thin-skinned for inquiring about his 'confrontational tone'

The Supremes and the equality myth

I’m not particularly concerned about presidential Supreme Court nominees since most appointees by both parties have zero respect for the Constitution as written. I find Obama’s present stealth nominee to be more amusing than anything, considering how she wishes to throw out literal centuries of tradition, jurisprudence, and free speech rights in favor of a nonexistent concept:

President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, argued certain forms of speech that promote “racial or gender inequality” could be “disappeared.” In her few academic papers, Kagan evidences strong beliefs for court intervention in speech, going so far as to posit First Amendment speech should be weighed against “societal costs.”

In her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan writes:

“I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

All societies are “marred” by racial and gender inequality because there has never been any equality of any kind in any society. And there never will be. It would be as reasonable, and as meaningful, to write that society is marred by the absence of flying pink unicorns and that the magical appearance of those wonderful creatures would be cause for great elation.

As a bonus, Kagan’s blathering also demolishes the idea that the Left is as vehement in its defense of the First Amendment as the Right is in its defense of the Second.

The United States Yankee Corps

I was raised to revere the Marine Corps my entire life. I have always harbored the greatest respect for the many Marines I have met through the years. But I have absolutely no doubt that my grandfather, who fought in WWII and Korea and was declared a Marine’s Marine by the Commandant of the Corps himself, would be bewildered by the rejection of the American South by what should apparently be renamed the United States Yankee Corps:

Straight out of high school, one 18-year-old Tennessee man was determined to serve his country as a Marine. His friend said he passed the pre-enlistment tests and physical exams and looked forward with excitement to the day he would ship out to boot camp. But there would be no shouting drill instructors, no rigorous physical training and no action-packed stories for the aspiring Marine to share with his family. Shortly before he was scheduled to leave Nashville for boot camp, the Marine Corps rejected him…. When the young recruit didn’t go to boot camp, Andrews learned of his rejection based on his tattoo of the Confederate battle flag on his shoulder.

It would be educational to see what would happen if Southerners refused to enlist and re-enlist until ludicrous ban on Southern heritage and Southron pride is rescinded. Without the South, the Marine Corps would find itself transformed into a mercenary force largely populated by gangsters looking to acquire combat training and Mexicans seeking citizenship. Of course, if that’s the ultimate objective of the policy, then we can expect that the ban on the Confederate Battle flag will only be the first step and it won’t be long before other patriotic symbols such as the Gadsden Flag and the Betsy Ross Flag are banned as well. Does anyone believe a UN or Mexican flag would be cause for similar rejection?

Speaking of Mexico, it is already on the verge of civil war violent revolt in the north. This makes me wonder, how long will it be until Round Two?