Happy new year!
A very good piece here: "The other ‘N- word’" by Jordan Susman. (I'd tip my hat to an article by John Zmirak, but I can't seem to find it.)
We definitely need to ratchet the rhetoric down and talk with open ears. At least Obama's rhetoric is moderate. (His actual opinions are far from moderate.)
Tonight we commemorate the final passing of a year that, like every other, has been expiring since it began, over 360 days ago.
We spend our days strutting around as if we govern ourselves, as if we control "our" lives. However tightly we cup our hands, this life drains away with each passing moment.
What foolish mortals we are to miss what is right before us: we are not our own masters.
"And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?
And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?..."Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day."
"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...
but please don't put a penny in the old man's hat,"
or at least that's what the classic carol would go if some intellectuals could re-write it according to their ideology.1
Lew Rockwell site still has posted Butler Shaffer's defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge from Dickens's A Christmas Carol. (I will not dwell on Shaffer's misspelling of Cratchit, but merely speculate that Shaffer was following the irregular spelling conventions of Dickens's time. For clarity of commenting, I have taken the liberty of replacing Shaffer's brackets with parentheses.)
Shaffer's defense of Scrooge centers around the claim that there is no just wage. In fact, he blames Bob Cratchit for being underpaid:
One of the offenses with which my client [Scrooge] has been charged was that he had not paid Bob Cratchett a large enough salary. Cratchett has worked for an allegedly substandard level of pay – whatever that may mean – for my client for many years. Why? Why did he not quit? Why didn’t he go to work for some other employer – perhaps one of the politically-correct businessmen who periodically show up at Scrooge’s office to solicit and browbeat charitable contributions from my client?
...
To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of [abstract] economics, two things should be clear: (1) if, as has been alleged, my client is a tight-fisted, selfish man, he surely would not have paid Bob Cratchett a shilling more than his marginal productivity was worth to Scrooge’s firm, and (2) if Bob Cratchett was being woefully underpaid by my client, there must have been [!] all kinds of alternative employment available to this man at higher salaries.
"Must have been"! What question begging! Shaffer fails to consider the possibility that if all of Crachit's possible employers are poorly formed wretches like Scrooge, then none of them will give him what he justly deserves. For comparison one might ask: how much is slave labor worth? Slavery was a social institution. A single family could not have held slaves without the consent of an overwhelming majority of fellow citizens. Else, the slaves could have sought refuge with a neighbor. Slaves were paid nothing, not because their labor was worth nothing (the basis of the antebellum economy!), but because society unjustly agreed to pay them nothing.2
Similarly, I claim that Cratchit was like a slave unable to better his lot with another employer by the broad consent of all possible employers, whose common misunderstanding and personal injustice permitted them to underpay employees.
Shaffer reveals the assumption behind his argument:
If Cratchett cannot find more remunerative work, and if my client is paying him the maximum that he is marginally worth to his business, then Cratchett must be worth precisely what my client is paying him! Economic values are subjective, with prices for goods or services rising or falling on the basis of the combined preferences of market participants.
What's being asserted here is far more than the truism that a thing's price is what you pay for it. The claim is that goods are only worth what people (arbitrarily) agree to be their price: they have no intrinsic worth. As much as I agree with the Austrian school of economics on many of its concrete prescriptions and proscriptions, its fundamental problem is its disbelief in intrinsic worth.
The ridiculousness of the Austrian school on this point is shown by examples of things that people pay for that are demonstrably valueless and even harmful, such as addictive drugs, pornography and the like.3 There are also borderline cases: how much are relatively injurious commodities, like cigarette's, worth?
Then there are inflated prices: How much does the latest celebrity news (Britney, Paris, et al.) add to our existence? Does anyone seriously think that tulips in seventeenth-century Holland contributed so much to human life that they were actually worth the enormous prices of the tulip bubble?
Another class of counterexamples transcends normal economic valuation: how much is motherhood worth? It is surely part of the myopia of modern economics (and their MBA minions) that mothers aren't figured into economic indicators like gross national product. If stay-at-home mothers don't "contribute" to the economy, no wonder women feel pressure to work outside the home!
The values of things come from their connection to real human goods, like health and education. For example, the food you buy in the grocery store has value to you because it provides nutrition that allows you to keep living. To deny intrinsic value is to deny intrinsic good. Shaffer and fellow travelers have become relativists through economic nominalism.
Nominalism is the denial that universals point to realities in the world. To a nominalist, "cat" is simply a useful label to group a bunch of particulars that have no real commonality, so that there is no way for the intellect to grasp4 the essences of things in order to form universals.
Similarly, in nominalist economics, there is no way for the intellect to grasp a commodity's connection to real human goods (e.g., nutrition, family, safety) in order to discover its intrinsic value.5 As Richard Weaver wrote, "The genius of value seems to have taken wings along with the other essences which nominalists would deny." If we cannot know what is good, we are moral agnostics—relativists, effectively: the good is just what each person says it is.
Most certainly there is a subjective element in prices, but that does not deny each good's intrinsic value. Valuation is something that only a conscious subject can engage in, so we would expect the subject to enter into it and to bring a knowledge of hard-to-quantify realities and relations. It is difficult to consider all factors that give a commodity a particular value to a particular person. Essences and goods are more closely allied with qualities than quantities, and it takes a person to evaluate qualities.6
Plus, valuation is subjective in that it is different for each person relative to his situation. A starving man would justly part with gold for a meal, while a well-fed man rightly values food more moderately. Nevertheless, the human ends at stake are the same and can be objectively evaluated—which is not to say that some sort of rigid mathematical formalism can be applied universally.
So there are real values for things, and there is a just wage a man should be paid for his labor. Of course, the existence of a just wage doesn't guarantee that we will always know it in any particular case. Even less does it mean that a legislature can know it well enough to mandate it for an entire country, as many proponents of the minimum wage assume.
The whole point of Dickens's melodramatic portrayal of the Crachit family is to remove any doubt that Scrooge is underpaying its patriarch. How can Shaffer ignore this?
It takes a recalcitrant blindness to deny an author's manifest meaning. As we'll see, for Shaffer, this blindness doesn't stop at Dickens's creation.
Human happiness comes from enjoying human goods, and unhappiness comes from lacking these goods. Shaffer himself admits that Scrooge is profoundly unhappy:
Taking my client as the miserable fellow Dickens has presented him, let me be the first to admit that if Ebeneezer’s obsession with materialistic pursuits rendered him an unhappy person, and were it the purposes of his detractors to help extricate him from his self-imposed miseries and to restore him to that state of happiness and innocence so common to most of us in our childhood years, no one would be happier than I. But it is not my client’s happiness that the prosecution endeavors to obtain, but his money.
I claim that Scrooge's unhappiness comes from the fact that he knows in his heart of hearts that his miserliness is wrong. Shaffer casts these "detracts" as if they simply wanted Scrooge's money, instead of wanting his money as a means to a greater end. It's been a while since I've looked at Dickens, but might it be possible that Scrooge's "detractors" want him to part with his cash as a means of growing out of his miserliness and finding happiness?
Is it not enough that Scrooge's own conscience condemns him? The supernatural also condemns him in the form of the three spirits of Christmas. But Shaffer has a rejoinder to this as well:
Keep in mind, these specters are possessed with the powers to suspend ordinary rules that operate throughout the rest of nature. They can successfully defy gravity, move backwards and forwards in time, cause matter to become invisible, raise the dead, and foresee the future. Having all of these amazing powers, why did these spirits not intervene to cure Tiny Tim of his ailment?
But take this argument further: if there is a God in heaven, why doesn't he cure all the Tiny Tim's of the world? Perhaps because exercising a spiritual good like generosity is more important than physical health. Perhaps because, just as a parent knows it is good for the child to clean his own room, the Supernatural knows that good actions are overall better for the actors.
It is significant that atheists use these same sorts of arguments: maintained consistently, the same relativism that denies intrinsic goods and intrinsic value eventually leads to a denial of the Author of All Good.
If it weren't for the divorce between abstract economics and the reality of human goods, there wouldn't be the philosophical rift between economic and cultural conservatives that we suffer from today. But then again, the divorce of economics from integral goods is emblematic of the rupture in the constitution of fallen man.
Even in tough economic times like these, charity is still in order, so please do put a penny (or a pound) in the old man's hat.
1. That it is an ideology is somewhat evident in the rhetoric of this more recent Lew Rockwell piece in which he absolutizes economic actions as "good" or "evil": "Don't Cave!." While I agree with his conclusion that these interventions are wrong, to call them "evil" is to conflate prudential economic decisions with moral absolutes like the right to life.
2. When I say slaves were the basis of the economy, I am of course not saying that they were the only ones who contributed value to that economy.
3. I understand Murray Rothbard admitted these sorts of cases, but didn't let them cloud his belief in Austrian-school principles.
4. Notice I didn't say "comprehend": we needn't have comprehensive knowledge to grasp a thing's essence.
5. The irony is that such economic relativism would seem to be more characteristic of supporters of "fiat currencies" and less of Austrian-School economists, most of whom advocate return to the gold standard.
6. That our current economic system (read: the souls of its participants) is overly obsessed with quantities is evident from the fact the recent uproar over lead-paint on toys from China. Why should it take a violation as serious as this to wake us up to the crisis of quality in goods not only from that country, but from everywhere we buy to cut the bottom line?
Butler Shaffer, "The Case for Ebeneezer," LewRockwell.com (December 13, 2004).
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1948), 142.
Just ran across this excellent quotation in Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences:
It may indeed appear before the struggle is over that the attack upon private property is but a further expression of the distrust of reason with which our age seems fatally stricken. When it is no longer believe that there is a restraining reason in accordance with which men may act, it follows that the state cannot permit individual centers of control. The repudiation of transcendentalism compels the state to believe that individual centers of control will be governed by pure egotism, as indeed they largely are at present. At the same time, this repudiation pushes aside the concept of inviolability. The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason. Once you credit man with the power of reason and with inviolable rights, you set bounds beyond which the will of majorities may not go. Therefore it is highly probable that subconsciously or not, the current determination to diminish the area of inviolable freedom masks an attempt to treat man as a mere biological unit. For liberty and right reason go hand in hand, and it is impossible to impugn one without casting reflection on the other.
In other words, since according to popular, liberal conception, reason has no power over men, all interest boils down to arbitrary exercise of egoism, which knows no bounds. In this conception, the only force restraining this chaos is the state.
One aspect of silliness here is that the state is somehow exempt from being an exercise of any egoism, despite it being just another human institution, and subject to all human foibles of anything created by these (supposed) biological units. I'm pretty sure this is another reflection of the being implicit divinization of the ego, or at least certain egos, that occurred with Cartesian dualism. When Descartes split the spirit from the body (making the person not a whole, but two wholes), he effectively made an element of the individual transcendent in a way that only God truly is.
Somehow the collective Ego has gained a property (infallibility) not present in the constituent individual egos. This sort of implied emergentism is enough to make one suspect that what's true of the state, might be true of an individual: maybe we humans aren't just agglomerations of molecules in motion driven by selfish desire, but wholes capable of rational self-determination! Naaaw!
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1948), 137-138. (I clipped the actual text from this ISI page.)
John Zmirak's latest on InsideCatholic is a well crafted picture of the nightmare we can expect from the Democratic takeover. He's predicting much of the same thing I am, albeit more skillfully.
Nevertheless there are some interesting dissenting responses to his post about how serious the threat of FoCA is. Here are some excerpts:
The problem with being my age is that you remember too much. For example, I remember the same kind of talk in 1992, which was also supposed to be The End of Civilization as We Know It. Yet, we seemed to survive the next eight years. Some even think we did better in the 90's than in the ought's. In politics, the end of the world seems to be a quadrennial event.
—John Médaille
No doubt we've been used cynically by the Republicans, as Bush has most manifestly shown by disregarding the unilateral actions he could have taken to promote pro-life.
For instance, why are we hearing about FOCA from Catholic sources, but not from McCain or Palin themselves? Their opponent has made this a priority, why haven't they pressed him on that?
For one thing, McCain's friend Joe Lieberman is a FOCA co-sponsor.
For another, perhaps they too realize it has no chance of passing.
From Catholic News Agency, see Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life on FOCA:
“Moreover, it’s so extreme, I really don’t think it would ever reach his desk, even if the Democrats increased their numbers in Congress,” Fr. Pavone said."
—Kevin J Jones
... Obama is no progressive messiah; he's a standard politician like any other. As such, his primary mission in life is not to pass FOCA, but to ensure his own re-election. If passing the law helps, he'll try to do it; if not, he won't.
With that in mind, if the Congress were to pass -- and Obama sign -- the FOCA, there would be such an explosion among voters (the great majority of whom do NOT support FOCA) that all the gains Democrats made with moderates this year would be for naught. The FOCA is great for rallying the Democratic primary base, but like Obama's other promises to the fringe of his party (like filibustering FISA), it will disappear once he takes office... Only to reappear as a 2012 campaign promise.
FOCA is a boon for direct mail fundraising (on both sides), but it isn't going anywhere as legislation.
—Brian Saint-Paul
I'm not so sanguine that they won't pass the bill. The problem is that unlike the Republican elite, who cynically use social issues to promote themselves, the Dems are true believers. "Science" after all sanctions their worldview. Obama's record and public statements show that abortion is important to him.
A couple years ago the legislature of my state had passed a pro-abortion1 bill and a same-sex "civil union" bill. I took mail-in cards to churches to help people tell our Democratic governor not to sign them into law. One pastor let me put the anti-abortion cards in the church, but not the anti-civil-union cards; he told me that our governor would sign the former but not the latter: he is a compromiser, the pastor assured me. Wrong: the governor signed both bills into law.
The problem is: compromise with what? These people live in like-minded coteries and never hear any opinion but their own reflected back at them. For them to compromise means to do what they hear "everyone else" say should be done: exactly what they want to do (like Bush, but without the advantage of a disagreeing media).
I can only hope they are right that the Dems aren't serious about passing FoCA. Unfortunately they'll probably restrict themselves to their typical anti-democratic (ironic, isn't it?) stealth routine of legislating through liberal Supreme Court justices—we'll incrementally get the full effect of FoCA for two to three decades at least.
Then again, perhaps it would be best for them to pass it. At least then we'd have an honest fight out in the open.
A demagogue takes the highest office in the land. We are witnessing the decline of the republic, not unlike the passing of the Weimar Republic that preceded Germany's fall to National Socialist rule.
But is Obama comparable to everyone's favorite dictator? In his own words to his supporters, "You did it [voted me power] because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead." Does he know what "enormity" means? The first definition according to Miriam-Webster is "an outrageous, improper, vicious, or immoral act." Obama says more than he knows. But honestly I don't think the voters understand the enormities he seems intent on enacting (but neither do his supporters seem to care all that much).
He has pledged that the first thing he will do is pass the Freedom of Choice Act (FoCA). With a solid Democratic majority backing him in Congress, the only thing that would prevent him from carrying out that promise is if he exercised a "politician's prerogative" to change his mind. From his (other?) waffling and equivocations during the campaign, it appears he is well practiced in this art. I wouldn't count on that though: from his voting record, there seems to be no dearer cause to the man than abortion and ensuring that a child slated to die under an abortionist will not see the light of day.
FoCA will sweep away any state restrictions or limitations on abortion, such as parental consent, waiting periods, and mandate federal funding of abortions. Further, in enshrining abortion as a fundamental right, it will eliminate the ability of health-care workers to opt out of participating in abortions for reasons of conscience. It will likewise force religious hospitals to perform abortions or shut down.
The silver lining to these radical actions is that it might wake people up. It's one thing when children are killed invisibly in some minority corner of a city1, but it's quite another when federal troops are closing down, say, Catholic hospitals. (Don't underestimate Obama's slickness and ability to seduce people into swallowing poison.) The shame of this sight will be the just dessert of those of his supporters with some moral quality; the shameless may know no punishment in this life.
Speaking of the Catholic Church, the bishops were much better in speaking up this election cycle. Perhaps that was because statements by Pelosi and Biden treaded on their proper territory (doctrine). But one gets the feeling that it was too little, too late. We're soon be paying for two generations of subtle dissent (since Humanae Vitae), malforming of consciences, and skullduggery (e.g., Cardinal McCarrick's twisting of then-Cardinal Ratzinger's statement on the excommunication of pro-abortion politicians). I'd like to ask those bishops who haven't taken a decisive stand how what they think history will look on them. In the last few decades the left has been spouting the canard that the Church didn't do enough to prevent the Holocaust. It seems to me that the future will look back with deep disapproval on bishops who refrained from speaking up strongly against the killing of over 40 million innocents in our day. May God help them when they face judgment on the last day!
As far as the coming tyranny is concerned, we can thank the current occupant of the White House for setting us up quite nicely. In expanding beyond bounds the power of the imperial Presidency, Bush (along with Cheney) has handed unprecedented power to his successor. "Conservatives" have only themselves to blame. Perhaps they thought someone as "good" as Bush (read: on "their side"—supposedly) would always hold the Presidency? But just as only Nixon could go to China, only a "conservative" could curtail civil liberties without complaints from "conservatives." Years ago I warned my Bush-boosting parents that whatever powers Bush accumulated to the Presidency would be passed on to whoever, say Hillary Clinton... and now we have a President-elect who's far to the left of Hillary!
Bush and Co. certainly accelerated the centralization of power, but it was a road we've been heading down for quite a while. The whole system is broken. The stakes are so high that both major parties have dispatched hundreds of lawyers2 to dispute contested votes. The problem is that the stakes shouldn't be so high: no single man should have so much power. (This, along with the large effort required to campaign, is why we can't get decent, sane men to run for President nowadays.)
Robert Royal has some apt words:
Republicans have also been pandering, to a smaller but large enough swath of the population. What both parties have been doing used to be known as demagoguery and was recognized by the Founding Fathers as one of the reasons that democracy historically has been a very unstable form of government. Once popular passions are loosed from the bounds of law, the people usually demand everything from their rulers. This runs counter to the deepest sources of our civilization. Aristotle once remarked that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science. But that wise pagan pointed to heavenly beings and other things above us as normative, i.e., politics is limited and subordinate to higher truths.
But our government reflects its people. The fundamental problem is our impatience: we want it all and we want it now. We don't want to wait to be rescued from the suffering that threatens us, so we hand our self-dominion to a man, or to an institution, we think will save us.
What we really need is Hope. Not the worldly sort that Mr. Obama claims to fulfill, but the theological virtue that points only to God. Were Obama's claims true, he would leave us nothing to hope for. Given that they are hollow, we have all the more reason to put our trust in our Creator.
Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no help.3
1. Planned Parenthood situates its clinics primarily in minority neighborhoods.
2. If only we could dispatch them in the other sense!
3. Ps 146:3.
Please consider forwarding the link to this spot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0__ctD48nfQ.
