You Can Never Leave

You Can Never Leave

You can always tell a socialist society by which direction they point the guns at the border.

The National Labor Relations Board has just asked an administrative judge to tell Boeing it must not begin production of new jets at its new facilities in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, because the relocation of this part of Boeing's business is an unlawful retaliation against its Seattle machinists union for past strikes.

The union has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989. Per the Wall Street Journal's take on this situation today, a 58-day strike in 2008 cost the company $1.8 billion. Talks with the union about leaving the work in Washington State bogged down over the union's demand for a seat on the board and a pledge that all future jets would be built in Puget Sound. Now Boeing has nearly completed construction of its $2 billion South Carolina plant; a thousand employees already have relocated there. Describing the motive for the relocation in an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, a Boeing executive said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.” From this, the union concluded that “Boeing’s decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights.” What's more, according to the complaint filed, the decision to move had the effect of “discouraging membership in a labor organization” and thus violates federal law.

It's obvious to me that Boeing workers will suffer financial harm and discouragement for exercising their collective bargaining rights in the way they have done historically. It's probably even fair to say that Boeing's proposed move to South Carolina will bring the nature of that financial harm into sharp focus for them, thus discouraging them further. I'd go so far as to guess that some of the squintier-eyed Boeing bigwigs are experiencing a certain amount of schadenfreude. So does it follow that Boeing's move is an unlawful retaliation for past strikes? Or is the union simply being mugged by the reality that an employer won't want to work in the union's state any more if the employer keeps losing money to work stoppages every few years? If union members are feeling discouraged about the benefits of union membership, why exactly is that? It's not as though Boeing were setting fire to the houses of the most troublesome unions reps. All Boeing is doing is removing its own hateful presence. Which is wrong. Come back here, dang it.

As the WSJ puts it: "Ultimately, the NLRB seems to be resting its complaint on the belief that Boeing spent nearly $2 billion out of spite, which sounds less like a matter of law than of campaign 2012 politics."

The most puzzling line in the NY Times report may be the statement of the NLRB's acting general counsel that "he was not seeking to close the South Carolina factory or prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there." So what is it he's after again, then? Maybe he'd like Boeing to go ahead and make money in South Carolina, then let the union in Puget Sound have a "taste" of the resulting profits?

I think Boeing has no choice but to file a counter-complaint alleging that the NLRB's action "discourages" state legislatures from passing right-to-work laws, and that therefore the administrative lawsuit must be enjoined on Constitutional grounds.

H/T Hot Air and The Daily Caller.

A better article

A Better Article on the Bible:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a perspective on the beauty to be found in plurality.

In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do.

Anyone who has ever attended a Catholic mass has encountered the readings from Scripture; after the first two readings, in the masses I have attended, the reader underlines that the scripture is the word of God. I suspect this is the cause of much of the confusion.

If the reading were of one of the visions of God -- say, Ezekiel's -- this 'word of God' is really the word of the prophet: no one is really contesting the point (except the 'debunkers,' who may contest that there was a prophet at all). The same Church has endorsed St. Thomas Aquinas' view, however, that God is simple: He has no parts. Thus, the vision of the prophet speaks of the hand of God, but God has no hand: God has no parts.

The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! 5 This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’”

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

What does the Church mean, to endorse both claims? Something other than what many have taken them to mean, I suspect: but something very serious, all the same.

Holy Week

Holy Week:

We are now well into Holy Week, and I have failed to make any decent note of it here. As penance I shall try to read yet another rendition of the tired, empty gripes against religion published this week by the Washington Post.

OK, I've tried three times. Lunacy... reactionary... abortion is a natural right!... Leviticus... religion lies, lies, lies!

Great. Did you ever see the point of the thing, though? Did you ever understand what was at the root of the mystery that religion tries to approach? Failing that, there's no point talking about it with you. You're missing some essential human element; a rant like this should occasion the deepest pity for the author.

Fish

Fish and Potatoes:

A song in Norsk.



Vikings! Fish and potatoes are fine, but wasn't it more fun when you were plundering monasteries? Just let me add that public sector unions are the ones with all the golden idols, these days.

H/t: BSBfB.

We're From the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

We're from the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

The FDIC released a report today with the amazing claim that, if the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act had been in place in 2008, the FDIC could have prevented the multi-hundred-billion-dollar international Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and saved creditors billions of dollars without costing taxpayers a red cent.

The Lehman bankruptcy was an amazing lawyer-fest, with a whopping $1.2 billion in fees approved by the bankruptcy court to be paid out of the bankruptcy estate's assets. It ending up paying creditors only 21 cents on the dollar. The FDIC claims it could have paid creditors 97 cents on the dollar. One way it would have accomplished this public service is to avoid all the legal fees. That much I probably buy; many of the legal battles would not have been fought at all absent the special bankruptcy context.

The FDIC says it also would have helped things by making its own loan to Lehman for operating funds, thus eliminating Lehman's need to negotiate for debtor-in-possession financing in bankruptcy. I'm not entirely convinced by the FDIC's claim that Lehman would and could have repaid this loan without burdening taxpayers, but OK, maybe.

I'm less convinced about this:

Under Dodd-Frank, the FDIC can require that systemically important investment banks, insurance companies and other companies with large financial services components deemed vital to the global financial system have resolution plans.

Such a “living will” would have required Lehman Brothers to develop early on a plan to dump or restructure some of its toxic real estate and private equity investments before being placed under FDIC receivership. The FDIC and other regulators both inside and outside the U.S. would also have had the ability to study Lehman's living will and work to improve it.

I don't like contemplating the image of FDIC regulators "studying" Lehman's "living will" in order to "work and improve it" -- either quickly, cheaply, or effectively. I doubt they could have been made to understand Lehman's business at all. Then there's this:

One of the key benefits to FDIC resolution authority is the potential speed of the transaction. Title II of Dodd-Frank allows the FDIC to review a financial institution's books, identify a potential buyer and any troubled assets that need to be split off, and quietly conduct bidding prior to taking over as a receiver.

The FDIC does have a track record of pulling off these emergency prebankruptcy sales at great speed, but as you might expect, when the pressure's on, the government regulators get their shirts handed to them. Invariably they find out in a year or two that they cut a horrible deal and some evil capitalist made a lot more money than they intended to allow, and they complain about it loudly -- often suing to renegotiate the deal.

This one, for me, is the real howler:

One of the problems Lehman faced as it skidded into bankruptcy was that potential buyers, including Barclays and Bank of America Corp., identified between $50 billion and $70 billion in assets they did not want to touch. Lehman was in no position to bargain, so the buyers walked, necessitating the bankruptcy filing, according to the report. . . . FDIC receivership would have prevented that, the report said.

As far as I can tell, this just means that the FDIC would have strong-armed some favor-currying insured bank into accepting the toxic assets, which would have ended up some day as a drain on the FDIC insurance system.

WE'RE DELIGHTED BY THE UNEXPECTED

Or at least I am delighted by finding synchronicity where I least expected it:

“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

[snip]

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

What the NYT article calls "those goose bump moments" - it describes the reaction I've always had to the Bard:

... how is poetic language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:

An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

As Davis's experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these "syntactic violations," the brain accepts them, and is excited by the "grammatical oddities" it is experiencing. While it has not been fully proven that we can localize which parts of the brain process nouns as opposed to verbs, Davis says his research suggests that "in the moment of hesitation" brought on by the stimulative effects of functional shift, the brain doesn't know "what part to assign the word to."

... we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

It even explains the magic of a baby's laughter.

Maybe it explains why I so often prefer the company of friends who have the grace to disagree with me. Who knows?

Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful.

My Brain Hurts

My Brain Hurts

You'll think me mad, but I've allowed myself once more to be drawn into an economic discussion with a "Modern Monetary Theory" enthusiast, because I was so startled to read that a solid bunch of progressives out there believe that the government deficit is not only a good but an essential thing for the welfare and happiness of Americans.

First of all, I've got to link to last year's Onion video on "The Money Hole" (h/t to today's Daily Caller for reposting it), which perfectly captures the lunacy of most political/economic discussions I've ever tried to listen to:

Now back to MMT: I take it the idea is that all private-sector financial transactions balance out to zero, which is Bad Thing, so the Government/Treasury/Central Bank injects new net financial transactions into the economy by spending more than the government taxes, which is a Good Thing. I asked why, in that case, the government shouldn't make the deficit even more fabulously beneficent by spending with greater abandon and collecting no taxes at all. The answer came back that that would cause inflation, a Bad Thing. What's more, without taxes, there would be no demand for the U.S. currency, because no one would believe it had value, just as my personal I.O.U. has no value if I have no visible means of future support. So why is a deficit a Good Thing, again?

And why is it not a Good Thing that all private-sector financial transactions net out to zero? Isn't that another way of saying that part of the private sector (say, older people who've amassed assets for retirement) is always lending to another part of the private sector (say, younger people who are starting businesses)? Why shouldn't it balance? And what, in the name of all that's comprehensible, would any of this have to do with the dream of full employment provided to us by a benevolent government?

I've never been schooled properly in economics. It was one of those things I never even considered studying in college. Now I'm completely at sea, trying to read up on this stuff. Can someone tell me whether MMT is complete lunacy, or is it worth trying to read more about it until I can make sense of some of the concepts? Because reading some of the links I've been sent to really makes me feel like I'm trying to understand the works of Joseph Smith, but without bringing sufficient faith to the task.

My husband recommended Thomas Sowell's excellent text, Basic Economics, to make up for my inadequate formal education, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly, because it's written in something I recognize as English. In the meantime, I see S&P has "revised its outlook" on the U.S. sovereign credit rating, perhaps preparatory to downgrading its AAA status:

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.

Preferences in Culture

Preferences in Culture

I have no idea how to explain the seeming decline in culture that Grim has posted about, except for my persistent suspicion that it has more to do than I would like with my tastes having been cemented in early adulthood. I become more of a curmudgeon with every passing decade. I do think it's interesting to look at differences in opinion between lay readers and "expert" readers in compiling a "100 Best Novels" list, in this case one compiled by the Modern Library.

The expert list places a higher value on craft and the sophistication of ideas, while the popular list rewards sheer entertainment value. It pains me to admit that I am familiar with many titles on the expert list only because I've seen movie versions (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Wings of a Dove, The Golden Bowl, Deliverance, The Maltese Falcon, A High Wind in Jamaica, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie's Choice, The Sheltering Sky, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ragtime). Others I've read only because they were assigned to me, but found that they'll never be for me: any James Joyce, for instance, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But there's a solid core of titles I agree with: Lolita, the Forster works, the Faulkner works.

The readers'-choice list is heavy on Ayn Rand and other speculative or ideological works such as science fiction. It includes some of my pulp favorites: books I actually like well enough to re-read, even if I would never try to defend my choice on purely literary grounds to a discriminating reader. Yes, I confess, I enjoyed both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" and I've at least read all of the several additional Rand entries. No, I won't try to defend the awful writing; I don't care. L. Ron Hubbard (three entries! Yikes!) and Frank Herbert and Lovecraft, not to mention Cormac McCarthy, will never be my cup of tea, but this list contains no fewer than six of my favorite Heinlein yarns, each of which I've re-read till the covers came apart. I was also happy to see some of my favorite Faulkner works on both this and the expert list. But who is this Charles de Lint guy, with eight winners? He's not even remotely familiar to me.

Reading lists like this always tempt me to go over to Amazon and order a bunch of stuff. Since I just did that last week with a pile of books about economics and social science that are still lying around in an accusing pile, I guess I'll have to defer my gratification. But I will put in a plug here for a recent fiction purchase, an early Patrick O'Brian coming-of-age romp called "The Road to Samarcand," the adventures of an orphaned young man traveling on the Silk Road in the 1930s with his adventurous, worldly-wise uncle and a scholarly dingbat of a cousin. (Hey, where's O'Brian on the popular list?)

In the meantime, I want to hear from all of you about all the books on these lists that I haven't read but should.

Chivalry & the French Revolution

Chivalry & the French Revolution:

One of the periodic articles about the alleged death of chivalry has garnered a strange reply from Stacy McCain. The reply is more interesting than the original post, which is well-traveled ground for us.

What Burke denounced as a “barbarous philosophy” was the spirit of modern radicalism — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — that rejects all tradition and custom as oppressive superstition. The mob that invaded Versailles in October 1789, insulting the Queen whose honor Burke thought should be avenged by “ten thousand swords,” was acting in accordance with this radical “scheme of things,” wherein “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman [and] a woman is but an animal.”

If you want to know how to restore chivalry, you must forget the idea that chivalry is about manners. It is about sacrifice. The problem with this analysis is that it neglects the degree to which Marie Antoinette was always treated like an animal: a sacrificial animal. Let me quote here from Robert Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch, page 70-2.

Marie Antoinette... entered Strasbourg as a fourteen-year-old fiancee in a crystal coach.... On an island in the middle of the Rhine, the masters of ceremony had chosen the place where the archduchess was to be handed over, naked, to her husband's envoys. A special pavilion, in rooms decorated with tributes to the future queen, had been built to receive her.

...

On an island washed by the currents of the Rhine, a wooden pavilion had been erected: "the house of the consignment." There, Maria Antonietta, as she had been called in childhood, became forever Marie Antoinette. The consignment took place on an international border, which ran down the middle of the pavilion and through the great table in the center of the main hall. Marie Antoinette entered the pavilion from the Austrian side. In the last room before the border she was slowly undressed before the escort that had accompanied her from Vienna. Not even a ribbon or a hairpin was to remain in contact with her body. She was thus offered, naked, to fabrics woven in the new French land -- to the silk shift, the stockings from Lyon, the little slippers fashioned by the Court's shoemaker....

[T]he passage through ritual death was noted by the many eyes that were observing her and that would continue to observe her until her biological death. This act of sacrificial stripping effected her complete transfer to the land that was clothing her with destiny. Protocol is the last power for protecting abandoned symbols. It ensures that symbols, even when they are not perceived as such, can continue to act[.]

The French Revolution meant to tear down old symbols, but -- this seems to be Calasso's key thesis -- all it achieved by abandoning the rituals was to restore the blood to what long ago had become symbolic sacrifices. The ancient order raises its head once the rituals that placated it have been abandoned.

The archaeologist P.V. Glob believed that these were "offerings to the gods of fertility and good fortune"...

Many bog bodies show signs of being stabbed, bludgeoned, hanged or strangled, or a combination of these methods. In some cases the individual had been beheaded, and in the case of the Osterby Head found at Kohlmoor, near to Osterby, Germany in 1948, the head had been deposited in the bog without its body.

Usually the corpses were naked, sometimes with some items of clothing with them, particularly headgear. In a number of cases, twigs, sticks or stones were placed on top of the body, sometimes in a cross formation, and at other times forked sticks had been driven into the peat to hold the corpse down. According to the archaeologist P.V. Glob, "this probably indicates the wish to pin the dead man firmly into the bog." Some bodies show signs of torture, such as Old Croghan Man, who had deep cuts beneath his nipples.

Some bog bodies, such as Tollund Man from Denmark, have been found with the rope used to strangle them still around their necks. Some, such as the Yde Girl in the Netherlands and bog bodies in Ireland, had the hair on one side of their heads closely cropped, although this could be due to one side of their head being exposed to oxygen for a longer period of time than the other. The bog bodies seem consistently to have been members of the upper class: their fingernails are manicured, and tests on hair protein routinely record good nutrition.

The Catholic churches burned in the French Revolution had been the halls of sacrifice, where now only one victim was sacrificed: and when they drank his blood and ate his flesh, he was satisfied. Yet in the ancient order, the old order and the new one, there was always sacrifice.

All honor comes from sacrifice. Honor is sacrifice: and therefore the greatest honor is for the one who stands up and offers to be the sacrifice. This is why we honor those who put on the uniform of our military, which is nothing less than an offer to go forward into the ritual of sacrifice so that the rest of us do not have to do so. In this they are doing just as Jesus is said to have done for all mankind; as Beowulf did for Hrothgar.

It is important to realize exactly why the queen was not just a woman, and not just an animal. It is important to realize why the queen, above all, deserved ten thousand swords. She was the sacrifice. She was the royal child sacrificed by Austria to France after the Seven Years War, given over in ritual death so that other children would not have to be given over to war.

It is not for no reason that the words "sacrifice" and "sacred" are so closely linked. This was the order that the Revolution broke, and the reason the streets of Paris ran red with blood.

Infants Behind the Wheel

Infants Behind the Wheel

H/t Zero Hedge

An angry rant about taxes. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

via Instapundit

How to Meet Nice Guys

How to Meet Nice Guys

It's an old problem: where to go, what to do, to meet nice fellows you might want to date and even, some day, marry. For gently raised young women of prior centuries, the task might have been entirely handled by her family. Modern young women demanded the right to do their own screening and picking. Sometimes that meant choosing from among lifelong acquaintances from the neighborhood. Sometimes it meant meeting young men at church, or school, or (eventually) at work. These days, who has time? Who goes to church? Who stays in touch with the old neighborhood, or listens to what one's family thinks about a prospective date?

But anonymous hookups are so dispiriting, not to mention how many of them peter out after a one-night stand, or become outright dangerous. Along came Match.com, where you could be introduced to a guy who had filled out a form, and you could trust him enough to be alone with him after only a few hours, without knowing anything about his family, his history, or his character! Except, of course, that Match.com is a lot better at fostering introductions than about vetting your prospective paramour. The company has now been sued by a woman who is shocked to discover that a stranger is still a stranger. A guy she met through Match.com followed her home after the second date and assaulted her. Now she wants a judge to shut the company down until it institutes an effective mechanism for screening out sexual predators.

Maybe Match.com will have to start attending church with its male members and getting to know their families and friends. And it can have a special division that roughs the guy up if he doesn't live up to his reputation as a gentleman.

The Joys of Urbanism

The Joys of Urbanism

Here's how big a city containing the entire world population of 6.9 billion would have to be if it were the same density as some of the world's cities:

Paris:

New York:

Singapore:

San Francisco:

London:

Houston:

Most of you are idiots

Most of You are Idiots with Nothing to Say:

Present company excepted, of course. However, that is the conclusion of two separate articles treating the bounty of literature being published today.

Why read?

If we take the argument a step further, we face the possibility that the humanities are actually countereconomic; the notion of alterity and sympathy, taken seriously, would undo the profit motive and put a fair amount of grit into the workings of economic activity. It would undermine the individualism upon which exchange, in its current forms, is based.

Why write?

A loud, swarming noise of hundreds of thousands of books published each year, one almost indistinguishable from the next. Here are three new biographies of Coco Chanel, published almost simultaneously. A giant stack of memoirs about being sexually abused as a child. A dozen or so fantasy trilogies that begin with a poor girl who, upon the death of her mother, discovers she’s actually heir to the throne and must fight off usurpers.

Surely, though, the best ideas float to the top?

Does one dare to raise one’s voice above the commotion, try to draw some attention away from those taking up the spotlight? Who gets in that rarefied space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.

That's from a female author, by the way.

We've occasionally discussed the problem -- usually in the context of music -- of "Where are our Wagners?" Eric reminds us that we are in a time of extraordinary richness of sharing: we can hear forms of music that most of the greats never heard while they were composing; and those great composers; and many other forms as well.

This should be producing some magnificent synthesis, Beethoven with punk rock: but what we're getting instead is... well, it's garbage. Literature and academic thought is likewise drowning in sewage.

What is to be done about this? Also, what does it mean that more variety -- even more access to the greatest that history has ever produced -- does not reliably produce greats, but seems instead to drown them? I have heard that happiness is often imperiled by having too many choices; this seems like another problem of that type.

It is a problem not often considered in philosophy, which often follows Aristotle's formula that 'the good' is what things desire, and they desire those things because they lack them in some sense. Here is a case where we lack nothing -- not the best. Yet, lacking nothing, we are unable to make good things ourselves. It is as if the magic has broken, and the spell receded: all that is left are the old things, the works we cannot make alone.

A Solution to Global Warming

A Solution to Global Warming

According to the San Francisco Business Times, marijuana grown indoors is responsible for 1% of U.S. electrical production and contributes 17 million metric tons of carbon per year, not counting exhalations.

A couple of years ago, I spent a little over a year representing the bankrupt owners of a large redwood timber company in Humboldt County, California. The few local towns are tiny. They used to depend almost entirely on the timber industry, before it was ripped to shreds. More recently, the local economy has given the superficial impression of depending on tourism (it's an extremely beautiful, remote area), but it's widely believed that the actual source of income buoying the place up is grow-houses. Locals believe that most of the rental house stock is in use as indoor pot farms. A very small town supports two fully-stocked hydroponics-supply stores.

The S.F. Business Times asserts that, after medical marijuana was legalized in 1996, residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50% in comparison with other parts of California. One of the issues complicating my bankruptcy case was the presence of squatters in the redwood forests, who grew pot in the clearings and had a distressing tendency to start small brush wars in response to intruders. Paradise, man! Global warming probably will make the pot crop even more vigorous.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON MARGINAL TAX RATES



Discuss amongst your ownselves.

While I mostly agree that raising taxes on the rich isn't the answer to erasing the federal deficit, I can't help observing that there's precious little evidential support for the view that allowing marginal tax rates for the highest income bracket to climb to 40% is either unprecedented or gol-durned unAmerican.

The fact is that for the past century, the top marginal tax rate was nearly ALWAYS been higher than 35%. Not that "it's always/usually been that way" is a particularly solid normative argument for taxing the living daylights out of the Chinese toy-loving minions of the richest one percent.

On the otter heiny, "it's always/usually been that way" makes a pretty good argument against the notion that Armaggedon will result if we raise taxes on Teh Evil Rich (among whom the blog princess is mildly disturbed to find herself) :p

UPDATE: the argument conservatives *should* be making:

I find this simply fascinating.

In a blog post that I thought was about Congress, a self described progressive suddenly takes a hard left turn into fatty-hate:

We are a nation of sacred cows. I'm talking about two aspects of America. One is our personal tonnage and the other is our indignation when anyone looks askance at someone who is obese. If feeling disgust and annoyance around people who are seriously obese is unfair, well, count me as one of the unfair. One reason has to do with feeling uncomfortable and frustrated in the company of people who are both self-destructive and heedless. The other has to do with those whose addictions add to everyone's difficulties. They cost us all a lot. The losses are measurable exactly as war's costs are measurable -- in young lives and a nation's treasure.

I wonder if this is going to be the new meme, now that hating on Republicans seems to be becoming passe', especially since the supposedly progressive President is starting to sound like one. And since obesity knows no color line, there are all sorts of entertaining implications to this line of thinking.

I suspect that this particular blogger is a retired baby-boomer, since he (the voice sounds like a he to me) has the time to post dozens of posts a day. I notice this blog showing up on memorandum much too often for a blog that appears to have no readers. Or at least no one who comments.

That gives me a thought.

Ymar, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to show this person error of their ways in your winning style. See how long it takes for him to start deleting your comments. (Anyone else who wishes to, can join in as well.) There is certainly enough to comment on over there.

Budget Spectacles

Eat the Rich

Obviously last week's budget drama -- the impending doom of a shut-down of non-essential federal government activity -- was just a warm-up for the festivities surrounding the impending doom of a failure to raise the debt ceiling. (I'll add here my apologies to households expecting a military paycheck, as I would have considered freezing those funds a cause for a general public uprising, almost alone among the proposed effects of a shut-down. Cutting off paychecks to Congress would have been more my speed.)

Most of the excitement is generated by two sides shouting "Spend less!" and "Tax more!" at each other. So now might be a good time to consider Iowahawk's no-nonsense approach to finding the additional tax money to fund the nation's $10 billion-a-day spending habit:

12:01 AM, January 1

Let's start the year out right by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us through...

9:52 AM January 4 . . .

Iowahawk manages to make it through the end of 2011 with a series of confiscations, then finds himself at the beginning of 2012 needing to do it again. Anyone know, he wonders, where we can get more plutocrats?

MORON WATCH

The United Nations, an organization that never met a pressing human rights issue it wasn't willing to pretend to care about bloviate into submission, has decided to deploy its unique brand of Multisyllabic Might against Gaia-raping capitalist running pig-dogs everywhere:

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving "Mother Earth" the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to "dominate and exploit" — to the point that the "well-being and existence of many beings" is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia's Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country's natural resources as "blessings," and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature's complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

Because Goddess knows, there is nothing your average Gaia-raper fears more than those four little words: "We need to talk." Look for this latest humyn rights initiative to be just as wildly successful as their last effort:

A month after the United Nations last summer announced the creation of a new, $500 million-a-year organization to promote equality for women in global affairs, the U.N.’s own investigators revealed that 15 years of “gender mainstreaming” efforts within the UN Secretariat have been a sweeping and costly failure.

The report, issued in August 2010, evaluates how gender mainstreaming -- the term that the U.N. uses to describe achieving equality between the sexes in all walks of life -- is being incorporated in all U.N. work to “ensure that the different needs and circumstances of women and men are identified and taken into account when policies and projects are developed and implemented.”

Is there anything the sternly wagging finger of international consensus can't do?

We think not.

Eek - a Republican

Eek -- a Republican

Another Maggie's Farm find: this essay in Slate by a woman who's struggling to understand how her best friend can be a Republican. She seems like an honest, caring friend whose opinions are based on carefully educated thought -- and yet she opposes Obamacare and the federal funding of Planned Parenthood! How can the author reconcile her revulsion with her love?

Nowhere in this amazing piece do I find even a glimmer of recognition that the Republican friend might also have to struggle to deal with her progressive friend's beliefs, or with her circle's casual assumption of superiority.

O wad some Pow'r the Giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us

Republican Virtues vs. Servile Institutions

Republican Virtues vs. Servile Institutions

I recommend these two video lectures from the American Enterprise Institute website, recommended to me over at Maggie's Farm. The first is Charles Murray, summarizing a book he's nearly completed on changing patterns of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religious involvement in the lower and upper thirds of the American population in terms of education and income. His main observation is that, while the upper third always has had stronger showings in these areas than the lower third, the divergence between the two groups has grown over the last 50 years even as both groups have dropped off in their "scores." A favorite snippet: he believes that the upper group is afraid to "preach what it practices," perhaps out of some diffidence about the propriety of pushing on others the practices that have worked so well for them and their families.

The other lecture is Bill Kristol, speaking about a collection of the neo-conservative essays of his father, Irving Kristol. A favorite snippet: a neo-liberal is someone who's been mugged by reality, but refuses to press charges.

Western Waters

Western Waters:

I imagine some of you are getting curious about my continued absence. A few weeks ago I got a call from BLACKFIVE's Mr. Wolf, who asked me to come down and help him out with something. I'm still down here, and I'm not sure how long I'll be. As I settle in, though, it'll be easier to find time for the Hall.

If you were curious about whether Mr. Wolf lives up to his nickname -- "Winston Wolf. I solve problems." -- here's the view off the back porch of the quarters he arranged for us.



So, when we're not working, it's not a bad place to be. Still, all this sun and wind can get you a bit dehydrated after a while. There was some good news about that today, though.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad. Here are some of the things my daughters, Muffin and Poppet, and my son, Buster, were never allowed to do:

• go to Mass naked

• attend a sleepover at Charlie Sheen’s house

• mix Daddy a martini using sweet vermouth

• play the violin within earshot of me

Have you ever heard a kid learning to play the violin? A cat in the microwave is nothing to it. And let me add an addendum to the things my children were never allowed to do​—​put a cat in the microwave. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying they weren’t allowed to do it.

Whose children are going to succeed in life, Amy Chua’s or mine? Her Lulu has that violin going for her​—​there’s hardly a Silicon Valley billionaire, Wall Street plutocrat, senator, four-star general, or pope who isn’t a violin virtuoso. And Sophia, who tickles the ivories, can always say, “Don’t tell Mom I work for Goldman Sachs, she thinks I play piano in a house of ill repute.” But my kids practice too, hour after hour every day. They practice being jerks. And since almost every boss I’ve ever had was a jerk, this gives them a leg up. Plus there’s the cat in the microwave. That shows an inquisitive, experimental turn of mind. You can see how electronic cat-zapping could lead directly to the invention of something like Facebook.

Heh... :)

Still Gone:

I'm beginning to doubt I will ever be back.



Carry on.

WHY DOES LINDSEY GRAHAM HATE OUR FREEDOMS? MILLER TIME EDITION

In the last post I threw out a few Inflammatory Debate Questions:

1. Is it really a threat to democracy for Lindsey Graham to say that there's ample precedent in American history for wartime limitations on "speech"?

2. Does expressing an opinion that differs from your own make a politician "unfit for office"?

3. Is America really so fragile that we can't discuss the trade offs between liberty and security without imperiling the Republic?

The Intrepid MikeD was kind enough to put himself in the line of fire respond to my anguished cri de coeur:

I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war,” Graham told CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday.

How do we hold people accountable in this country? A civil suit, perhaps. Criminal law? Occasionally. The fact that he's a lawmaker makes this a monumentally stupid thing for him to say.

As it turns out, Graham later explained the comment (which was by no means clear):

NRO: How do you do that?
GRAHAM: Push back. Let the world know that we don’t condone this, that this is not America. Let people see that this is not who the American people are. To be a Christian, you don’t have to prove you’re a Christian by burning the Koran. We are nation where we tolerate religious differences and that’s what makes us great. We want to push the Muslim world to tolerate Christianity better. It’s pretty hard for us to stand up for freedom of religion in Islamic counties when you can’t stand up for it here.

NRO: If Koran burning puts troops at risk, should the New York Times be banned from publishing classified memos, since that is a form of First Amendment expression that potentially puts our troops at risk?

GRAHAM: Yes. I was very consistent. I wanted to investigate the WikiLeaks case to see if it compromised our national security. See, I believe that we are at war. I am not talking about Koran burning in isolation. I am talking about it in response to what General Petraeus said. If this is important enough to him to issue a statement, then it ought to be important enough for us in government to listen to what he has to say.

This is not some theoretical case of free speech; this is a case that is impacting the security of our forces, according to our general on the ground. WikiLeaks was the release of classified information, and I don’t believe that the private in question has a free-speech defense. Those who release classified information, even for those in the media, they are not above the law. The First Amendment doesn’t allow people to publish state secrets.

NRO: But don’t you fear that if we let Islamic extremists determine the speech debate in the United States, then we’ve lost something?

GRAHAM: No. Here’s what I fear: I fear that politicians don’t have any problem pushing against laws in the Middle East that are outrageous. It’s perfectly acceptable for me to push back against prosecutions by Islamic countries against people of my faith. And it is perfectly appropriate for me to condemn Koran burning when the general who is in charge of our troops believes that such action would help. I’m not letting Islamists determine what free speech in America is, but I am, as a political leader, trying to respond to the needs of our commander. You’ve got to remember, General Petraeus decided that this was important enough to get on the record as being inappropriate. And I want to be on the record with General Petraeus.

NRO: Instead of being an advocate for Petraeus, should you not first and foremost be an advocate for the First Amendment?

GRAHAM: You know what? Let me tell you, the First Amendment means nothing without people like General Petraeus. I don’t believe that the First Amendment allows you to burn the flag or picket the funeral of a slain service member. I am going to continue to speak out and say that’s wrong. The First Amendment does allow you to express yourself and burn a Koran. I’m sure that’s the law, but I don’t think it’s a responsible use of our First Amendment right.

Where does this end? How many more things are going to happen in the world that is going to incite violence against our service members overseas? I am just asking Americans, don’t do that, please. For God’s sake, no matter how you feel about religion, please keep it within the confines of realizing that we have thousands of people serving our nation, fighting for those First Amendment rights. They’ve got enough problems.

Just be responsible, that’s all I’m trying to say. Burning the Bible would not justify murder, burning the Koran doesn’t justify violence. The people who are committing this violence, I condemn them. That’s what I said Sunday. I don’t think I said anything Sunday that was inconsistent with what General Petraeus said.

Maybe I hate America too, but I don't have any problem with any of this. Repeat after me: Lindsey Graham does not have the ability to single handedly pass laws against Koran burning. Nor did he advocate doing so (hand waving and hyperbolic mischaractizations notwithstanding).

I'm fine with people disagreeing with Senator Graham. But I get off the bus when I see people arguing that it's "dangerous" to limit free speech... and then go ballistic when a U.S. citizen says something they disagree with. I thought the whole point was that robust debate was a *good* thing?

As for the second part of Mike's commment, I'm going to take exception to that, too (what is this? Pick on MikeD day? :)

But what is really the icing on my cake is "Free speech is a great idea..." No, the HELL it's NOT Senator, it's the CONSTITUTION. It superceeds the law. As far as your oath of office is concerned, it is your primary focus in your JOB. And what war are we in? ... Unless that moron pastor in Florida is inciting riots, committing treason, or aiding and abetting the enemy (which pissing them off hardly seems like abetting them), I see no need for the United States Government to "hold him accountable."

First of all, it's not at all clear to me that Graham is advocating that the U.S. government hold Koran burners accountable:

NRO: The question about your comments is about imposing any kind of legal pushback during a time of war.

GRAHAM: If I could, I would make it a crime to burn the flag, but the only way you could do that is through a constitutional amendment.

NRO: What I don’t understand is, if would you support an amendment to ban flag burning, why do you not support one to ban Koran burning?

GRAHAM: In my view, the flag represents who we are as a nation. It is a symbol of who we are. If you start talking about individual acts of religious intolerance, the amendment doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense, to me, to focus on the symbol of the country, the flag. I’m not proposing that we propose a ban on religious disagreement. I am saying that you can disagree with America; you can disagree with me, but don’t burn the one symbol that holds us together. That’s not an act of speech. They say that is symbolic speech, but I think that is a destructive act. It’s the one thing that unites us.

Yet when it comes to regulating what individual churches may do, or what individual citizens may do under the guise under religion, you are not going to be able to write a constitutional amendment to ban those practices. There is no way to do that. I wish we could hold people accountable for their actions, but under free speech, you can’t.

Secondly, if you stop to realize that one of the major goals of the Taliban/Al Qaeda is to turn Abdul SixPack against us, then it's hard to imagine a better propaganda tool than some moron burning a Koran. Let's not forget that Afghanistan ain't Manhattan. It's a foreign culture that views honor in a way that is... well, foreign to us. And it's not too hard to whip up a mob in a country with where law and order are both fragile and precarious. I would argue that if you make it easy for our enemies to turn the general public against us, you ARE aiding and abetting the enemy (leaving aside the question of appropriate response).

A few years ago when the anti-war Left were hysterically accusing Der BusHitler of violating the Constitution, I read an interesting book. The man who wrote it - Richard Posner - is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. His thesis was that war is different from peacetime and the Constitution was never intended to be a suicide pact:

Posner, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, inaugurates a new series on inalienable rights. The series is intended to stimulate debate, and Posner's work will do exactly that, drilling energetically into a set of issues raised by what he sees as an unprecedented emergency. In the fact of terrorism and the threat of WMDs, he argues, the scope of constitutional rights must be adjusted—i.e., narrowed—in a pragmatic but rational manner. Saying we must balance the harm new security measures inflict on personal liberty against the increased security those measures provide, Posner comes down, in most but not quite all respects, on the side of increased government power. He advocates that coercive and even brutal forms of interrogation should be allowed in proper circumstances, that all communications within the United States should be subject to interception, and that government should have authority to enjoin publication of classified information. Posner (An Affair of State) would impose limits and qualifications on these assertions of government power, but even so, his views will provoke Category 5 protest from civil libertarians. You may agree with or be appalled by Posner's cost-benefit analyses, but the author's premises are explicit, his writing is economical and precise, and he ably makes the case for his side in the national debate.

I agree with Mike that we should view any infringement on our civil rights (whether it be during war or peacetime) with a suspicious eye. But I also see the wisdom in Justice Jackson's famous maxim in his dissent to Terminiello v. Chicago. It's an interesting case.
If a lifetime of reading history has given me an appreciation for anything, it has strengthened my faith in the natural ebb and flow of liberty in this country and the robustness of our system of government. Certainly there have been abuses and the majority of those abuses have occurred during time of war. From the vantage point of hindsight, it's easy to look back at our forebears and blithely say, "They overreacted", or conversely, "Gee... all those abuses and yet somehow the Republic endured!"

To me, the latter view makes more sense. To pretend that wartime (and we ARE fighting two wars and our servicemen and women ARE just as important as their civilian counterparts) restrictions of liberty are unprecedented, unAmerican, or the last gasp of a dying democracy on the otter slide to jackbooted repression and the Rise of the 4th Reich seems (at least when viewed from the perspective of history) a tad overwrought.

As does much of the rhetoric I've seen aimed at Senator Graham. Disagree with him on the merits if you wish. I would add, though, that not only is he an attorney (which leads me to suspect he might just understand the First Amendment and 1A jurisprudence better than does your average pundit) but he is one of the few Congresscritters who has actually deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "gutless coward".

SINCE I'M FEELING FEISTY TODAY...

...here's Yet Another Potentially Inflammatory Set of Debate Questions:

1. Is it really a threat to democracy for Lindsey Graham to say that there's ample precedent in American history for wartime limitations on "speech"?

2. Does expressing an opinion that differs from your own make a politician "unfit for office"?

Wow. Really?

3. Is America really so fragile that we can't discuss the trade offs between liberty and security without imperiling the Republic?

HOW POLITICALLY INCORRECT OF HIM...

Apparently, Charles Murray is just a big, mean spirited misandrist:

Note the discrepancy between what I just said and our common perceptions of what's going on with marriage. The very common impression is that it's the upper class that's had problems with marriage...

...For the upper middle class, marriage is alive and well. It has collapsed in the working class.

Why is it a big deal that fewer than half of working class whites ages 30-49 are married? Well, there are several reasons.

One is that marriage civilizes men. Married men... their incomes go up. Their productivity goes up. In a more general sense, adult males who are single are kind of a kind of disheveled population....disheveled in a variety of ways culturally and socially and they clean up their acts when they get married with fairly good regularity.

Another reason is that single people are not good producers of social capital. They seldom coach Little League teams and chair civic fund drives, or take the lead in getting a 4 way stop sign at an intersection where children play.

A third, more fundamental reason is the one that de Tocqueville saw. It's worth quoting directly:

"I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans [domestic virtue referring to married life in America] as the principal source of all their other qualities.

He then goes on to enumerate those qualities and concludes:

"In short, domestic virtue does more for the preservation of peace and good order than all the laws enacted for that purpose, and is a better guarantee for the permanency of the American government than any written instrument - the Constitution not excepted.

Debate questions:

1. How does what Murray just said differ from Kay Hymowitz's latest effort, which has produced the most amusing (if deafening) howls of outrage - along with cries of "Misandry!!!1!!!!111!!!!" - from quite a few righty bloggers?

2. Is Murray's message "misandry"?

3. If so, is John Hawkins a misandrist, too?

Is it controversial to note that people in their twenties are a lot less grown up and responsible than they used to be? Yes, it’s nice that so many Americans can waste their twenties clubbing and playing Madden — and I mean that. The fact that so many young Americans even have the option to do that shows we have an extremely prosperous society.

Of course, there’s also a price to be paid for that prosperity: Percentage wise, we have a lot of “adults” in this country who think like children because they’ve never been forced to grow up and deal with the real world the way Americans did in past generations.

Pointing this out apparently infuriates liberals, who in their ignorance, tend to confuse hedonism with happiness.

From what I've seen, liberals have plenty of company on the right side of the blogosphere. Just sayin'.

Criminal Faces

Criminal Faces

See how proficient you are at identifying a criminal, relying only on his face when set in a "neutral" expression. I got them 75% right, which is too good to be accounted for by chance. It turns out I'm reliable at identifying assaulters (something about the deadness of the eyes and the set of the mouth), so-so at identifying arsonists and drug dealers, and terrible at identifying rapists. The key can be found here, if you'll scroll down all the way to the last page of the article. (H/t Assistant Village Idiot.)

Heh.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.

I've seen this before. I've spent some time around the battle field at Monmouth, NJ, and several years ago the park started an initiative to 'restore' parts of the battle field to its condition at the time of the battle in 1778. This pretty much involved cutting down a whole lot of vegetation that had grown up since end of intensive cultivation in central NJ. (by that I mean people who were doing tings like gathering firewood in addition to working the land) Grim knows what I mean.

It's hubris to think we really can damage nature on any long-term scale.

via American Digest

AND THEY SAY *WOMEN* TALK A LOT...



I love the hand gestures.

Traveling

Traveling:

I'm traveling again, this time on business, so I can't promise to be around much for a bit.

POLITICS: APPARENTLY IT REALLY *IS* A BLOOD SPORT...

Yikes:



In case you can't read the text in the screen snap, it says "Lawmaker Wants Grilling Of Libya Minister on Lockerbie"

These Congress Wallahs are just a bunch of big brutes.

BWAHAHAHA

Bwhahaahaha!

I'm sorry, I should come up with something more significant to say about hahahahahaha:

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process....

Mr. Schumer told them to portray John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.

Then the conference call began in earnest, with the Democrats right on message.

“We are urging Mr. Boehner to abandon the extreme right wing,” said Ms. Boxer[.]

You do have to give them some credit here. It took a certain amount of guts to go ahead and hold the call. The guts it took to go ahead and repeat the spin with a straight face?

My hat's off to you, ma'am.

DON'T YOU JUST HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS?

Some days it seems as though nothing goes right:

An eagle ray weighing as much as 300 pounds landed on top of a woman on a boat in the Florida Keys last week, throwing her to the deck and pinning her underneath it -- the "scariest thing" that's ever happened to her, she said.

The woman, Jenny Hausch, was on the chartered boat Friday with her husband and three children, taking pictures of a group of eagle rays as they flew out of the water.

.... the ray kept "slamming and slamming on top of (Hausch), trying to swim away."

...Klein said the animal measured 8-feet across, and probably weighed a good 300 pounds.

"It's just massive, it has a 10-foot tail," she added.

I know just how she feels.

Against the Law

Against the Law:

One of the points of unity among you in our recent debate about Dr. Cronon was the importance of the concept of "the rule of law." I want to set aside the particulars of that case entirely, and discuss the idea of "the rule of law" independently. This is an idea that has always struck me something other than an unalloyed good (to use Cassandra's phrase). I want to offer some objections to the idea of adopting it as a principle for ourselves.

Before I do, I want to recognize that I understand why so many people have adopted "the rule of law" as a principle. The principle is laid out so beautifully in A Man for All Seasons:



The principle as Sir Thomas More lays it out is exactly correct, and I don't dispute it at all.

To understand how I can dispute the principle and not Sir Thomas More, it is necessary to recognize the distinction between the People and the state; and that Sir Thomas More was speaking as an agent of the state. The argument that an officer of the state should 'give the Devil the benefit of the law' is an argument about the state recognizing legal limits to its power. Just as the play says, if we accept the state setting aside the lawful limits of its power to deal with evildoers, we will soon find it accepts no limits when it deals with anyone else.

The "we" who are accepting or rejecting the state's powers here are "We, the People." The distinction between the People and the State is that the People are those who retain the power described in the Declaration of Independence:

[T]hey are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

"The rule of law" is therefore not a principle for the People to accept as a first principle. They are the judges of whether "the rule of law" has become destructive to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Their first principles must be these three things.

The rule of law is a means to that end; when it becomes destructive to those ends, the law must be set aside in spite of itself.

If the law is unjust, "the rule of law" means the rule of injustice. Before we the People speak of 'giving the Devil the benefit of the law,' we must not forget that the Devil often has the best lobbyists. We should not commit to a moral principle that commits us to pursuing injustice on those occasions when the wicked have captured the law.

----------------------------------------

There is a second argument that applies even when the law is not unjust; even when it may be perfectly just.

The law is an exercise of the power of the state, and the power of the state is coercive -- it is based on violence, that is, even when an individual instance is not violent. Every act of "law enforcement" is an act of coercion.

Many times in life we find ourselves in disputes with others, and we could rely on rules and force to push people to accept our way. We might also be able to sit down, talk things through, and achieve a compromise position that everyone can live with. The second approach means that we do not get exactly what we wanted, but we do get a society that is more pleasant to live in. Very often, this second approach is the foundation of friendships and good relations with neighbors.

This is why we respect the old breed of "peace officers" more than the sort who consider themselves "law enforcement officers." A peace officer is preserving the order of society, but this often means letting certain things slide if an agreement can be reached between the parties in dispute. The law here is a tool, certainly, but he does not stand on 'the rule of law.' He mentions the law, and then talks people into sorting out their problems so that no one has to go to jail. The "law enforcement officer" is a tool of state coercion with his every act; the "peace officer" often is able to preserve the peace and common order through agreement.

The fact that the law permits us to do something is almost irrelevant to the moral question of whether or not we should do it. If the law forbids something, that fact is relevant to our moral calculations because breaking the law is a serious act, to be done only in cases of the type discussed in the first section. There are some laws we must morally break; the rest we must not break.

Once we have determined that the law permits something, however, the law is finished informing our moral decision. We have to make the choice of whether to do what the law permits us to do, or to refrain from doing it, on other grounds.

Like the peace officer, we often have powers we choose not to use. We often don't use our legal freedom to spend all our money on booze and gambling. We often have disputes with neighbors that we settle out of court. We often don't arrange protests just-this-side of our neighbor's property.

We often treat people better than we must, and that is a very good thing. The more a society relies upon the law to settle its disputes, the less stable that society is. That is to say that the more the People turn to the state to resolve their disputes, the more of their power they are ceding to the state.

A society that resolves its disputes according to the law instead of socially has given all its power to the state, and is at the mercy of the state. Do you wish to be at the mercy of ours? Do you trust our politicians to 'give the Devil the benefit of the law', or would you rather have the hedge of your neighbors just in case? You will have it only if you extend it to them as well.

It may be the case that our society has grown so unstable that we are running out of options. While last chances exist, to extend hands and rebuild some of the social power that guards us against exposure to state power, I think we ought to try. Certainly when we are dealing with thugs on the other side, or on our own, we should do nothing for them; but when we are dealing with ordinary and decent people, it is in all of our interests to try.

Dissidents and Migration

Dissidents and Migration

Mark mentioned migration in a comment thread below about one of the possible responses to a dissatisfaction with government. By coincidence, I just received an email today from my sister about her genealogical studies of our family. It turns out that our family tree is stuffed full of folks who fled Europe to escape religious persecution:

We have Elder John White, Puritan, who came to Massachusetts in the 1630s; Alexander Kilpatrick, Presbyterian, who left Northern Ireland and the boot of the Church of England (this is the story of the "Scots-Irish") in 1730; Jacob Hermann Arndt (later the name was changed to Arrant) who came to Philadelphia in the 1730s, when virtually all German immigrants to Pennsylvania were German Pietists (a religion with much in common with Quakerism) who were being persecuted or burned at the stake in Germany; and the Huguenots forbears who had to escape the massacres in France. . . . Then there is the story of all the folks after they got here. As far as I can tell, no matter which line you trace back, no family stayed in one place more than a generation or so. This may seem more normal to you, but there are many, many people I know in Philadelphia whose families have been here for centuries . . . .

I suppose the family trees in Texas are more likely to include the wandering branches than those on the East Coast. By moving to Philadelphia as an adult, my sister was making a retrograde movement that placed her among people with a much stronger tendency to put down roots generation after generation.

It seems that my ancestors had a higher-than-average problem with authority. For myself, if I have a problem with authority, it has scarcely revealed itself in geographical movement. I've barely moved from the location of my birth, and that only at a time in my life when I was not starting either a business or a family. On the other hand, I'm in a part of the U.S. that has been settled by Europeans only for what amounts to the blink of an eye, and therefore retains something of the tradition of exiles or malcontents. Our home is built on property that, as far as I know, had never been occupied by Europeans at all before us. At most, some had run a few cattle here, more than a century ago, before most of the present woods grew up. There was a bit of commerce here before the Civil War, and even a salt works not too far away, but the Union forces put an end to all that. Things mostly grew wild again until about the middle of the 20th century, when a slow trickle of people began to move back in. These were not, to put it mildly, the sort of people who would be living in New York if only they could figure out how to get there.

Would my fugitive ancestors be horrified that I joined the Episcopal Church, barely distinguishable from the historically oppressive Church of England? Perhaps not, since the Episcopal Church today would probably strike my most dissident ancestors as a hotbed of heretical license.

Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers

And now, for the same kind of ingenuity, but in a sillier vein (but I definitely want one):

Actually, we saw a car with front doors that opened in this peculiar fashion just last week, obviously on its way to South Padre Island beach for spring break. I don't know if the owners of that car could make the doors rotate and flap, too, but if so, I'm sure they picked up all the chicks they could handle, especially since the car was painted in a fetching metallic blue with a faux-alligator roof and all kinds of Barbarella-style chrome ornaments.