Is it fair to criticize a system from which we benefit?

It is clear that those on the left say “no”. When I participated in Baptistlife.com the more “liberal” (read – left leaning) members often mocked the more “conservative (read – classical liberal) members saying “do you send back your Social Security check? your tax credit? your Medicare benefit? then how can you criticize a system from which you choose to benefit?”

It sounds like a good argument. But it isn’t. William Voegeli addresses some of the problems with this common “critics of the safety net depend on it” line in his article “Magic Accounting” at National Review Online.

An American who warns an elected official to keep the government’s hands off a social-insurance program doesn’t misunderstand our welfare state but has grasped its central argument exactly as it has been presented. Social insurance, we have been told (and told and told), is a mechanism through which we insure ourselves against financial vulnerabilities. The benefits are ours because we paid for them in advance.

Although as Voegeli points out, this isn’t entirely true – but it’s how these programs were sold to the American people. What troubles me more however is the cynicism – once again the goal is not to explain why these are good programs that should not be reformed but simply to silence those who would dare suggest reform.

The facts on the ground, as they have been arranged there and then interpreted by liberals, would place the welfare state in a politically unassailable position. First, make sure that every American stands to receive benefits from at least one and preferably several social-welfare programs. Second, stipulate that the only people with the moral standing to criticize the welfare state are those in line for no benefits whatsoever from it. These premises combine to reduce the ranks of opponents liberals deign to recognize to survivalists living off the grid.

Precisely. It is interesting how often arguments from the social-political left ultimately boil down to “shut up”.

Meanwhile George Will has something to say about the bipartisan consensus on federally subsidized college loans.

Taxpayers, most of whom are not college graduates (the unemployment rate for high school graduates with no college education: 7.9 percent), will pay $6 billion a year to make it slightly easier for some fortunate students to acquire college degrees (the unemployment rate for college graduates: 4 percent).

I hesitate to question George Will but some of his numbers don’t sound right. Nevertheless he makes good points about whether continuing to take from the less educated and give to the more educated is good policy.

"Finish her!"

Something interesting happened at The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Naomi Schaefer Riley posted something that upset enough people who protested strongly enough that she was fired.

Schaefer Riley commented on an article in The Chronicle about black studies departments that focused on a group of graduate students and their dissertations. In a nutshell Schaefer Riley thought the dissertations  ”a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap” and questioned the academic legitimacy(?) of black studies programs.

Ah the outrage. At first the editor of The Chronicle defended the piece by Schaefer Riley – its existence not its content – as an opportunity for debate. Several thousand academics signed a petition demanding Schaefer Riley be fired. The editor changed her tune and gave in to the mob. The four main charges were (1) her article was racist (2) she had not read – in their entirety – the dissertations in question (3) she does not have a PhD (4) how dare she pick on scholars too young to defend themselves.

To be frank – and I say this with all due respect – Schaefer Riley blew it. I do not know enough about the field to evaluate her points. But to me it seems she was trying to draw too much of a conclusion based on not enough evidence. Charges #3 and #4 have some merit. She does a great job reporting on higher education but until you’ve been through a doctoral program and had to produce a dissertation – let someone else take that on. But it is even more clear to me that the reaction was completely out of proportion to the perceived offense. I had to misfortune to read the response from three of the Northwestern graduate students whose dissertations were mentioned by Schaefer Riley. It is not a reasoned defense or dispassionate rebuttal. It is a vicious attack full of grotesque misrepresentations that only manages to leave the reader wondering if Schaefer Riley was right despite the flaws in her article.

The response plus many of the comments left by readers plus the capitulation by the editor of The Chronicle all illustrate that with regard to public discourse in this nation we are in a very bad place. Many of them boil down to “shut up white girl!”

• One can read the article by Schaefer Riley here.
• Here is the unfortunate response by the Northwestern graduate students.
• Here is the article explaining the decision to fire Schaefer Riley.
• Here is Schaefer Riley’s response to her critics.

Obviously there have been some reactions to all this in the blogosphere. Some are better than others.

• I especially appreciate what Nick Gillespie of Reason has to say.
• Wall Street Journal has an editorial plus commentary by James Taranto and now an opinion piece by Schaefer Riley.
• And finally – in order to demonstrate the hypocritical insincerity of those who were so distressed by Schaefer Riley’s article – some trenchant comments by Within the Black Community in “Black Progressive-Fundamentalist Academia – The Feeder System For The Black Racial Services Machine”. The title says it all.

H/T Legal Insurrection and Instapundit.

I also commend “America and the Value of ‘Earned Success’” by Arthur Brooks at Wall Street Journal Online.

Learned helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets, and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep unearned government benefits.

Meanwhile, their collective happiness—already relatively low—has withered. According to the nonprofit World Values Survey, 20% of Spaniards said they were “very happy” about their lives in 1981. This fell to 14% by 2007, even before the economic downturn.

That trajectory should be a cautionary tale to Americans who are watching the U.S. government careen toward a system that is every bit as socially democratic as Spain’s.

Government spending as a percentage of GDP in America is about 36%—roughly the same as in Spain. The Congressional Budget Office tells us it will reach 50% by 2038. The Tax Foundation reports that almost 70% of Americans take more out of the tax system than they pay into it. Meanwhile, politicians foment social division on the basis of income inequality, instead of attempting to improve mobility and opportunity through education reform, pro-growth policies, and an entrepreneur-friendly economy.

There may or may not be a connection between his description of “learned helplessness” and the first item in this post.

Let’s start with one of the sanest things you will read about how to handle a recession. “True Lessons of the Recovery” by Raghuram Rajan in Foreign Affairs.

H/T Greg Mankiw

Juxtapose some of Rajan’s comments about excessive(?) CEO compensation with a dose of reality again H/T Greg Mankiw:

I am torn between my support for free market economics – let people make what they can, earn what they can, keep as much as they can – with what I think is an appropriate concern about whether CEOs and other executives should be making so many more times what an average worker in their business makes. But when did that spike occur? Who was president? When did that spike drop? Who was president?

And when did CEO compensation start increasing again? Who was president?

Do not tell me Democrats “care” about the poor and middle class and that Republicans only “care” about the rich. That is a self-serving lie. Which granted many might sincerely believe. But match rhetoric and sentiment with actions and reality.

Regional bigotry.

I am a proud child of Massachusetts. Spent most of my life in the northeast. Grew up in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut – as well as Great Britain. Perhaps because of my background I have become increasingly aware of what I call regional bigotry. Which is the curious habit of (a) northerners especially (a2) northeasterners even more especially (a3) urban northeasterners to look down upon (b) southern states. There is a related and similar pattern of (c) southerners who live in urban settings to look down upon (d) other southerners who do not.

I find it quite offensive and have little patience for it.

Came across some great examples of it when following a link to an article about “Best/Worst States for Business”. According to this article which states are the best for business? Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Utah, and Arizona.

Notice a pattern? Most of them – most which is itself significant – are in the south/southeast.

Which states are worst for business? Hawaii, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, California.

Notice a pattern? Most of them – most – are in the north.

Obviously both ends of the political spectrum – which is nonsense because the spectrum has two if not three axes but you get the idea – try to use this list to make political points. The most obvious being states that have lower taxes, are “right to work”, and have lower costs of government (which includes the cost of state workers and their retirement benefits) are doing better right now economically. And “blue” states with high taxes, more regulation, and more expensive state governments (including high state retirement debt) are losing people and businesses.

A couple people try to offer what appear to be somewhat intelligent rejoinders. The primary one being that sure these ten states attract businesses, but these are lower wage jobs with less benefits because these states have less skilled and less educated citizens. Whether that is true is debatable. At the very least it seems to concede the larger point that states with lower taxes that don’t force people to join unions and pay union dues are doing better economically. You can complain about what kind of jobs with what kinds of benefits for what kinds of people all you like. But the fact remains that about half of all jobs created in the United States during the last few years have been not in California or New York but in Texas.

Now why is that?

Walter Russell Mead has written several essays over the past year examining the collapse of the “blue” social model. Even Rhode Island is beginning to acknowledge reality. The “blue” social model is simply not sustainable. What cannot continue forever won’t. It’s all very well for critics of the “Best/Worst States for Business” list to complain about which approach is best. But theory has a bad habit of losing to reality. It sure would be nice for everyone to have PhDs, super high paying jobs, with complete health care coverage, and retire after 20-30 years in the state government with pensions that each year are worth more than what I have had to save on my own so far.

Oh yes – regional bigotry.

We can debate those who appear to offer cogent arguments. Why – or rather whether – “red” states tend to receive and use more federal funds than “blue” states. But what is more revealing is those who articulate sneering condescension toward states that are “best” for business. Some examples:

“The top 10 is not surprising – States where it’s easy to exploit workers and avoid paying taxes to schools and healthcare. Eight of the ten are former slave states; ironic.”

Got that?

“What’s odd is that the jobs are mostly minimum-wage, lacking benefits and focused on illegal aliens. Where should these people go for healthcare if their employers won’t provide it? And should their children become home-schooled evangelical zombies? Your Hee-Haw utopia frightens me.”

So much regional bigotry in one comment.

So if a state is doing well economically, seeing job growth, people and businesses moving here – it’s because most jobs are minimum-wage, with no benefits, given to illegal aliens {wth?!? I thought “illegal aliens” was now a verboten expression} no healthcare, the people are less skilled, less educated, home-schooled, evangelical zombies, living in a Hee-Haw utopia?

Glad you feel so good about yourself up there in wherever – California, Illinois, New York? How’s business by the way? Too bad arrogant pride doesn’t pay the bills or balance the budget.

Such comments – “yeah but you inbred redneck morons in your filthy backwards southern former slave state” – are revealing. I am convinced that a lot of “red-blue, liberal-conservative, Republican-Democrat” discussions are really about the desperate need to feel good about oneself. How? By establishing your superiority over others. We care! We are better educated! We aren’t a former slave state! {Given how difficult it is to change history one wonders what a former slave state is supposed to do about that and whether it makes the slightest bit of difference in the present.} We are better people!

“We are better than you.”

I am convinced that attitude is what drives more than half of all social-political debates and decision making. The need to believe “I am good!” by proving we are better than others. And I rather doubt that only the social-political left suffers from this.

News item = Baton Rouge and Baker pass the CATS (Capital Area Transit System) tax.

Baton Rouge has a public bus system. It is not very good – according to many who use it or try to. One of the main complaints is that it is not very convenient or reliable. You can waste a lot of time waiting for the bus to arrive to take you there. And then again to take you back. Because there are not enough buses or routes and those routes are not always very convenient and the buses do not always arrive when you expect.

I have lived here for 13 years and I have no idea how to use a bus to get somewhere.

I have parishioners who do not have cars. This is so for different reasons. Visiting scholars who are here for less than 6 months cannot get a driver’s license. Many students and scholars don’t make enough to afford a car. Some of my parishioners are basically refugee families with a single adult trying to support several people on a minimum wage job. If you want to take a bus to get to the Mall of Louisiana or your job at the hospital you almost have to add an hour before and after.

So CATS asked for more money to improve the system. I admit not being keen on having to cough up another $120 per year just to improve the public bus system. I haven’t had a pay increase in a few years and like nearly all Americans my expenses go up every year. The anti-CATS tax crowd in Baton Rouge had some legitimate concerns. Is it worth it? And we can continue to ask good questions about whether the money is being spent and managed effectively. Just because public expense is for a “good cause” doesn’t mean we have to support it uncritically right? And governments have a bad habit of spending other people’s money very badly.

(I have been trying to get certain members of my family to drop certain unnamed $10/expenses to save money. This is like adding another Netflix like service or data plan to our annual budget. Argh.)

I am a classical liberal – as opposed to a modern statist liberal – and believe in maximum liberty which usually means minimum government. However I make an exception for public transportation. The reason is very simple. Do we want people to be dependent on the government? or work and support themselves and their families? Surely the latter. Okay. But what if a family in very poor circumstances can’t afford a reliable car? How can they get and keep that job so they can support themselves? I have seen people – members of this church – who have gone from “barely making it” to “not making it” (once even homeless – although that situation was a little more complicated) because of car issues. One major repair bill and it’s adios mi auto! Even “conservatives” that is classical liberals should be supportive – not uncritically – of robust public transportation systems.

Good public transportation can improve quality of life in a city for everyone – not just the lower socio-economic class. The family in which I grew up was upper-middle class – and yet when we lived in England we jolly well used the trains all the time.

So as much as I’d rather not see another annual expense added to the family budget – and to cover a single item – overall I am glad for CATS.

When enough media outlets pound us enough with the message that someone is odious or venal or stupid one starts to believe the propaganda. “Oh man sure hope Michele Bachmann does not become the Republican presidential candidate because she’s crazy and dumb too”. Enter Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online who boils it down for us in “Bachmann Smart, Media Dumb”:

Seems like only yesterday when Michele Bachmann was supposed to be dumb… [L]ate last year, when I heard her speak at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend. I was sitting at a table full of professor types. We kept turning to each other and saying, “This woman is sharp, not at all the dunce she’s been portrayed as.”

Liberalism nowadays may be the last great holdout of old-fashioned prejudice. By telling themselves they’re against group hatreds of all kinds, and dismissing their opponents’ arguments as nothing but bigotry in disguise, liberals grant themselves license to despise. They swear, mock, and hate with a clean conscience, never guessing they’re turning liberalism itself into an outpost of bigotry in reverse. The flip side of liberal guilt is this hidden license to hate.

Same thing applies to Sarah Palin. Came across an article about the recent efforts to go through thousands of her emails. Some people leave comments along the lines of “she is still stupid” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Just naked prejudicial assertion. I frankly am increasingly tired of being told whom we should like.

Walter Russell Mead has made significant contributions to our national social-political conversation with “The Death of the American Dream I” and “The Death of the American Dream II”.

The one thing I do know is that change is on its way — more fundamental, more challenging, and also perhaps more exhilarating than many of us are ready for. The health of the American economy is going to require us to move away from the credit card economics of the consumer republic.  The health of American society and democracy require that we move beyond the life of the last eighty years.  We should be looking at new ideals in which domestic partners are enterprise partners, the home is more frequently a place of business, and education moves away from big box buildings and toward forms of community schooling somewhere between home schooling and charter academies.

One way to summarize the kind of change we need.  During the farm era the focus of American domestic policy was to create the most favorable possible environment for millions of ordinary Americans to launch flourishing small businesses.  Rather that focusing on home ownership, American social policy should probably be looking at small business formation as the key to mass middle class prosperity in the next fifty years.

The American Dream is not in the last analysis a farm or a home and a good job.  It is the dream that through hard work and good choices the average American can be prosperous and independent, and that ordinary people with these life experiences can govern themselves wisely and well without the ‘guidance’ of their ‘betters’.

Even many so-called/self-proclaimed conservatives might not get this. That they confuse “progressivism Lite” with true classical liberalism and the American Dream before the vision of Thomas Jefferson lost out to that of Alexander Hamilton. Mead’s important articles remind me strongly of an important and interesting podcast by Clark Carlton on “My Two Cents on Capitalism”:

Capitalism is a modernist economic system and progressivism is a modernist palliative—not an alternative.

The only real alternative to capitalism is something along the lines of what Jefferson envisioned. This is similar to the vision of the Catholic distributivists, such as Belloc and Chesterton, and to the third way of the Protestant economist Wilhelm Röpke. The foundation of such a system is widespread property ownership and decentralized government.

I should point out here that the Greek word economia means household management.

Even if we disagree with an idea – even find it repellent – we must try to understand it on its own terms. In other words understand it as the person who holds that idea understands it. Otherwise we are engaging in not much more than a kind of solipsism. Reality is not much more than a projection of our own minds.

There is a lot of solipsism going on right now.

Victory Davis Hanson offers his usual perceptive and insightful brilliance in his recent article “The American Soviet”.

We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises.

…

In the American Soviet, only two questions remain. Do these double lives of ours make a sort of sense: Is it that the official utopian rhetoric about love among the masses offers psychological compensation for our private self-interested skepticism about the nature of man? Or is the daily lie a modern Western rather than an enduring human phenomenon — our 21st-century leisure and affluence infecting us with intellectual and moral boredom, in which we long ago outsourced our collective morality to our bureaucratic overseers as we busied ourselves with far more enjoyable private indulgences?

Much is being made lately of high gas prices. And we need to keep in mind that while the Obama administration is not (solely) responsible for this it has done nothing to improve the situation. And this administration and its defenders are engaging in rank demagoguery.

*(For the record the price of gas began to drop from a high of about $4.00 in mid-2008 during the Bush administration and continued to drop after Barack Obama was elected president. It began to climb again pretty much right at the beginning of 2009. It remained steady in the $2.40-2.80 range for a while. And then began to spike in early 2011. Take a look.)

Check out “Are Sky-High Gas Prices Good?” again by Victor Davis Hanson.

And “The Media Don’t Get Economics” by Conrad Black:

The Treasury and Federal Reserve are playing with dynamite, running unheard-of deficits like this. All decent people hope it works, but anyone who has proceeded determinedly and with sure step from Grade 2 to Grade 3 arithmetic can see the risk. Even the existing measurements, which assume that these trillions of dollars of new debt will somehow be retired, confirm a 20 percent rise in the money supply — but the media, which are rarely slow to unload on public personalities in tight corners, have given this wild monetary rise a relatively free pass, to the enhanced peril of almost everyone in the world.

And “Why Isn’t Obama Celebrating High Oil Prices?” by David Harsanyi:

The administration, of course, isn’t at fault when oil prices spike; it just seems to make matters worse. Or better, if you happen to be an environmentalist. So why isn’t it celebrating? Though the left may be wary of the political consequences, it has been pining for high fuel costs for decades. So here they are. Let’s see how the economy responds.

And when some would demonize petroleum companies Larry Kudlow brings the noise in “The Left Hates Oil Companies”:

I read somewhere that either Exxon or the whole oil industry pays more in taxes than the bottom 50 percent of the whole income-tax system. So while president Obama is out there ragging on oil companies to remove so-called tax subsidies, it’s odd that he doesn’t mention how much in taxes the energy firms actually pay to Uncle Sam.

And so on. Dear readers will recall my views on energy and the environment. I support wholeheartedly(?) efforts to find alternative renewable sources of energy. But (a) we need to be honest and realistic about some of these alternatives currently being promoted and (b) a ruined economy – which is where we are heading – is unlikely to develop any of these.

Oh and speaking of solipsism and understanding the motivation for something repellent I decided not to go there in this post. Too dangerous.

Aw shucks let’s go there. But others will do the talking for me.

H/T Ace of Spades HQ

I was impressed by the astute observations Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times makes in his recent article “The increasingly odd political optics of Barack Obama”.

The former state senator may, in fact, be slaving away on 18-hour policy days. But much of that is closed out of sight. So the public is left to focus on Obama’s frequent vacations, golf outings, celebrity gatherings and proclivity to give a speech at the first whiff of trouble.

With no real opposition, Chicago’s Democrat pols care little about how insensitive things look.

Any one of these apparent missteps is inconsequential. However, accumulated over his 118 weeks in office, they create the impression of carelessness at best or, worse, arrogance.

Read the whole thing especially the series of “it’s one thing… it’s another” paragraphs.

Although Malcolm appears to be criticizing President Obama in a small way he is defending him. In that his observations could be interpreted to mean “Look actually President Obama is working hard and doing a great job. But for some bizarre reason whoever is in charge of managing his public image is making him look like a lazy self-centered arrogant twit”.

One would think it is all about him and not the United States of America. To which I respond ding ding ding.

What I struggle to understand is how some people continue to defend this president. Are we looking at the same reality here?

H/T Ace of Spades HQ

And once again Veronica De Rugy of both George Mason University and Reason magazine lays down some reality for those more inclined to believe demagogy in her recent piece “The truth about taxes and redistribution: Do the rich pay their fair share?”

The four myths she tackles with truth are:

Myth 1: The wealthy aren’t paying their fair share.
Fact 1: The wealthy disproportionately fund the United States federal government.

Myth 2:  Top earners in the United States are millionaires.
Fact 2: Only 2% of the top 10% of earners are millionaires.

Myth 3:  All Americans pay income taxes.
Fact 3:  An estimated 45% of Americans will pay no federal income taxes this year.

Myth 4: The key to our deficit problems rests in our ability to increasing the top marginal tax rates leads to increased tax revenues
Fact 4: From 1930 to 2010, tax revenue collection in the United States has never topped 20.9 percent, averaging 16.5 percent of GDP over these 80 years – despite drastic fluctuations in the rate of taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

With all respect to Professor de Rugy I wonder if anyone is attempting to claim “all Americans pay income taxes”. But the point is still well taken.

By the way that last Myth/Fact is important. When protesters in Wisconsin shout “tax the rich!” and when President Obama says the wealthy need to “pay their fair share” (fair?!?!? I do not think that word means what you think it means) they speak from a space-time continuum in which Hauser’s Law does not apply.

“Left alone [Melkor/Morgoth] could only have gone raging on till all was levelled again into a formless chaos” – J. R. R. Tolkien (Morgoth’s Ring, 396)

“The spirit in revolt consequently acquires a hatred of being, a frenzy to destroy, a thirst for an impossible nothingness” -Vladimir Lossky (Orthodox Theology, 82)

“Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” – Romans 5:12 (Revised Standard Version)

The apostle Paul says it simply and clearly. How did death enter the world? Through sin. And how did sin enter the world? Through Adam.

(Not Eve. Which is interesting. And sheds some light on how Paul uses the Old Testament.)

So is death punishment from God for sin? In my opinion no. Although death puts a limit on human rebellion. It is one thing to have a free personal being in revolt against God. It is entirely another if that free personal being in revolt against God is immortal and/or indestructible. Consider Balor from the Space:1999 episode “End of Eternity”.

Rather the first human beings in Genesis 2-3 were not immortal. At least not yet. Perhaps if Adam and Eve had chosen for God and not against they would have been permitted to eat of the tree of life.

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” — 23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. (RSV)

It is only after the man knows good and evil – has arrogated unto himself the authority to decide what is good and evil? – that God decides it is necessary to send the human beings out of the garden so that they cannot eat from the tree of life and live for ever. Death is a response/consequence of the revolt.

There is another way to look at this. Consider the psychology of evil. If God is the source of life and we choose against God there is a sense in which we have chosen death. Sin is inherently a movement toward death. Again not so much in terms of punishment. But (a) result/consequence and (b) direction away from God who is the source of life.

Why is this important? Because lately I have begun to notice more clearly the relationship between sin and death. By which I mean how much of what we recognize as sin somehow a movement toward death? How much of what we recognize as sin is destructive or self-destructive or even both? I am beginning to wonder if we can discern a pattern.

Now here is where I might step on some toes. Including my own. Because I would rather not discuss Christian theology and politics together in the same post.

I have been struggling to understand why generally speaking certain social-political-cultural views and practices seem to cluster. For example why people who reject the Christian faith – notice how I phrased that not merely faithful members of other religions – are so obsessed with sex. By which I mean it seems to terribly important that people not constrain or restrain themselves in any way. Do it when you want with whom you want. And while they are at it who needs that oppressive institution known as marriage?

(Most of my undergraduate and graduate studies focused on ancient West Asian aka Near/Middle Eastern civilizations such as the Sumerians Akkadians Egyptians Hebrews and so on. I have read and/or collated dozens of ancient marriage contracts. My point being that for thousands of years people who were not Christian or Jewish have thought the legal-cultural institution known as marriage is a great thing.)

And on top of that sex without producing children. So everybody needs to use contraception. And when contraception fails – or was never used – legal elective abortion.

Now do not misunderstand me. I acknowledge that some Christians support and some atheists oppose legal elective abortion. And many Christians have no problems with birth control. And I am not saying anything for or against either of these – neither am I judging anyone who supports or has done either of these. But the hard cold biological fact is that the primary function of sexual intercourse is reproduction – or if you will the creation of new life.

So one the one hand we have people who adamantly oppose any – or at least most surely they would draw the line somewhere – restraints on sexual behavior. On an activity whose original primary function is (a) to create new life and/or (b) to overcome death. (On the latter aspect see Orthodox Theology by Vladimir Lossky p ???.)

And on the other hand they want to make sure that this activity never – or rarely – results in the creation of new life. Either by prevention the creation of new life – contraception. Or by destroying the preborn life that this activity creates – elective abortion.

(For the record there is a reason my wife and I have two children. Without going into detail yes we have used different methods of birth control.)

What prompted me to make this mental connection(?) is something Tony Rossi wrote recently about the movie and more importantly the novel Children of Men by P D James:

Recalling the evolution of the infertility problem, Theo says, “We thought that we knew the reasons — that the fall was deliberate, a result of more liberal attitudes to birth control and abortion, the postponement of pregnancy by professional women, the wish of families for a higher standard of living . . . Most of us thought the fall was desirable, even necessary. We were polluting the planet with our numbers . . . When Omega came it came with dramatic suddenness and was received with incredulity.”

Described in these terms, the story seems like an all too plausible scenario. In a society that has largely divorced sex from procreation, no one ever followed that attitude about reproductive choice to its logical if unlikely conclusion. Now, Omega has arrived and the despair is overwhelming.

There is a marked increase in suicides by middle-aged people who would “bear the brunt of an ageing and decaying society’s humiliating but insistent needs.” Also, every reminder of children (schools, toys, playgrounds) has been removed from the public landscape “except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children.”

People’s attitudes toward sex have also changed in an unexpected way. Theo says, “Sex has become among the least important of man’s sensory pleasures. One might have imagined that with the fear of pregnancy permanently removed, and the unerotic paraphernalia of pills, rubber and ovulation arithmetic no longer necessary, sex would be freed for new and imaginative delights. The opposite has happened. Even those men and women who would normally have no wish to breed apparently need the assurance that they could have a child if they wished. Sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic.” (emphasis added)

According to P D James in The Children of Men what is the logical conclusion of unrestrained sex without procreation? Death. And despair.

Drugs and other addictions. Consider the misery and destruction caused by people who grow/make and sell drugs. Consider the self-destructive nature of drug use and alcohol addiction. Is that significant aspect of modern life largely an attempt to achieve non-existence?

Violence and oppression. What is Moammar Gadaffi doing right now if not attempting to destroy those he cannot control? Communism – in the Soviet Union in China in Cambodia and elsewhere – has killed more human beings that any religion.

And this is where I might really cross a line or two.

Why does the political-cultural left seem to ally itself with radical Islam? Could it be the movement toward death is something they share in common?

The recent turmoil in Wisconsin. Which of course is only an opening skirmish in the period of soft civil war which the United States may be entering. I understand not wanting to lose money and benefits. Been there done that myself and members of my family. But what we have is an entirely unsustainable trend. Spending/committing more and more money we simply do not and will not have. So why not tax the rich? Well first of all if we appropriate every dollar made by the rich – defined how exactly? – we still would not have enough for the obligations facing us. Second many of the rich would change their behavior and make it more difficult to take their money. Third of all eventually we would run out of money period. Total economic collapse. Anarchy. Chaos. Greece anyone?

There is a sense in which one group that lives off another group – fairly or unfairly or both – may eventually kill its host. Even our current political and economic policies are – when you scratch beneath the surface – taking us inevitably toward death.

I am greatly distressed by the apparent movement toward mob rule in Wisconsin. Do these protesters stop and wonder what would happen if everyone behaved the way they do and took that behavior and rhetoric to their logical conclusions? Can you imagine? Can they imagine?

Well we should care about the poor right? Yes indeed. And keep transferring money to them right? Perhaps it matters how we do that. Because consider the circumstances in which millions of poor African-Americans – and others – live in many of our cities. Are they not surrounded by the threat the fear the reality of death?

Let me conclude with a few qualifying remarks.

First this is a work in progress. I could be wrong. I could be very wrong about some or much or all of the above. But I am attempting to figure out the pattern that unites things I observe that otherwise do not seem to make sense.

Wright’s First Rule of Epistemology.

In any given set of data the anomalous elements are the key to understanding the whole.

Second I want to be careful about how this applies to the conscious motivations of real people. I am sure most people are not consciously trying to destroy themselves or other people. What I suggest is that even when we do not consciously realize it sinful behavior might at some level be an attempt to embrace death/deny life.

Which leads to third I am sure many people who (a) are not Christians and/or (b) are atheists are consciously(?) trying to embrace and nurture life. I am sure many people who are doctors who research new medicines who develop new technologies – or who just plain work to pay the bills and take care of their families you know? – as far as they are aware are trying to live and preserve life.

H/T The Anchoress for the Children of Men article

My wife is a teacher and former state worker. Many relatives on my mother’s side of the family are teachers and public/state workers. For some reason almost no one on my father’s side is a teacher or public/state/government worker. And when University Baptist Church two years ago began to offer/provide medical insurance for ministerial staff – read that again – our family declined. Would it save some money each year? Yes. But (1) the insurance my wife is able to provide is much better and (2) if we stay with her insurance then the state of Louisiana will provide medical insurance when we retire. If we go with insurance through the church we save a little now and lose a lot later.

By the way my wife (a) contributes to her retirement and (b) pays part of the cost of our medical insurance. Because she provides nearly all insurance for our family she takes home about 2/3 of her salary. No fooling.

So on the one hand we are a family that is counting on the type of pension and insurance coverage after retirement that is bankrupting states. On the other hand we contribute now to that pension and insurance coverage later.

There is a great deal one can say about the political battles taking place in states such as Wisconsin Ohio Indiana and New Jersey. What frosts my mug is summarized well by James Taranto:

It’s quite striking the way almost every lie the left ever told about the Tea Party has turned out to be true of the government unionists in Wisconsin and their supporters.

The Mainstream Media is doing everything it can to mislead and misinform/underinform the American people. I commend to you “Wisconsin Myths and Facts” by Matthew Shaffer that refutes about 90% of the propaganda we are being asked to believe about the situation in Wisconsin.

Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote an excellent piece comparing teachers to other workers. What I appreciate is he does not run down or denigrate teachers. No nonsense about how teachers have cushy jobs or only work ten months a year and so on. Only that they have it better than they used to. And better than most of the American workers whose taxes pay for teacher salaries and benefits:

So, yes, teaching is a noble profession upon which the future of our youth rests. It is not easy, and it is not as lucrative as the law or medicine. No doubt day-traders and the architects of hedge funds can make more in an hour than a sixth-grade social-studies teacher earns in a year, without either the caring or the commensurate work. Yet in comparison to most workers in the private sector, teachers are, in terms of working conditions and compensation, blessed — which is why we are told of Wisconsin that the problem is not really one of renegotiating wages, benefits, and pensions.

In these lean times, amid the furor and name-calling, we forget that teachers are not the wretched of the earth. They are often noble sorts, and that is reflected by what they make, how long they work, and the conditions under which they toil. If you doubt that, ask the almond farmer, roofer, or welder whose taxes pay their salaries.

Nicely put.