The Good Life

Obama Too Focused on Expanding Government

2010-02-22T16:55:00.001-08:00

At the dawn of the Obama administration, there were some optimistic conservatives who refused to buy the media-peddled scenario of the new age of liberal dominance. But few could have known just how thoroughly President Obama's agenda would be rejected this year - not just by Americans but by the world. Whether it's health care "reform", climate change, the war on terror, "engagement" with Iran, or the Middle East peace process, so far, President Obama has come out a loser. Most of his domestic agenda has succeeded not just in energizing his opposition, but also in enraging many of the independents who voted for him.

As one of the least experienced men ever to occupy the Oval Office, perhaps it's not too surprising that President Obama has had multiple political and policy setbacks. After all, besides a relatively short stint in politics, his only other jobs have been as a professor, a young lawyer, and a community organizer.

But although there should be reason to hope that he's capable of learning on the job, it's far from clear that he can. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect to the president's background is its ideological narrowness. Obama's previous life and career has presented him neither with any reason for seriously considering views opposed to his own, nor any suggestion that there is any purpose in doing so.

The president has spent his entire adult life in academic enclaves, where certain left-wing "truths" about the nature of the United States (and its role in the world) have gone entirely unchallenged - from California, to Manhattan, to Cambridge, to Chicago - and where holding those views is deemed to be something akin to a moral imperative for any "good" person. What's more, for most of his adult life, President Obama has been treated as "special," one of the "best and brightest" - enjoying the kind of early prominence and media adulation that can lead a young man to the conclusion that his views are "right," not primarily because they are true, but simply because they are his.

Marinated in left-wing academic environments, seeking election only in what had been a safely "blue" state, and ascending easily to the presidency despite compiling the most liberal voting record in the Senate, President Obama has never before been forced to confront the possibility that his most cherished assumptions about America and the world might not always be correct - and, what's more, that they might turn out to be profoundly unpopular. Coupled with the already-steep learning curve of the presidency, that's a lot for anyone to process in one year.

Despite having been billed as a deep and introspective thinker, the question is whether the President will display any capacity for the kind of hard-headed, pragmatic analysis that could prompt him to attempt a mid-course correction when it comes to his policies on Iran, mirandizing terrorists, and imposing a domestic agenda that elevates spending and government expansion above fiscal prudence and job creation. Does he possess the kind of flexibility, for example, that will allow him to revisit his obvious and long-standing aversion to "tax cuts for the wealthy" - in order to adopt policies that will spur job growth and economic recovery?

The next few weeks should be telling. If the president honestly and openly recommits himself to the transparency, bipartisanship and pragmatism that he extolled in his campaign, there's time for recovery. But if he doubles down on his extant agenda - beginning with an effort to impose health care "reform" on a hostile electorate through the reconciliation process - Americans will be forced to conclude that the President's regard for his own agenda is exceeded only by his contempt for their views.

-Carol Platt Liebau is an attorney, political commentator and guest radio talk show host based near Los Angeles.

Don't hurt me

2010-02-18T16:10:00.001-08:00

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

2010-02-13T09:46:00.001-08:00

Society & the Fallacy of "Fairness"

Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well. But this concept of fairness is not only different from prevailing ideas of fairness among many of the intelligentsia, it contradicts their idea of fairness.

People like philosopher John Rawls call treating everyone alike merely "formal" fairness. Professor Rawls advocated "a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstances." He called for a society which "arranges" end-results, rather than simply treating everyone the same and letting the chips fall where they may.

This more hands-on concept of fairness gives third parties a much bigger role to play. But whether any human being has ever had the omniscience to determine and undo the many differences among people born into different families and cultures-- with different priorities, attitudes and behavior-- is a very big question. And to concentrate the vast amount of power needed to carry out that sweeping agenda is a dangerous gamble, whose actual consequences have too often been written on the pages of history in blood.

There is no question that the accident of birth is a huge factor in the fate of people. What is a very serious question is how much anyone can do about that without creating other, and often worse, problems. Providing free public education, scholarships to colleges and other opportunities for achievement are fine as far as they go, but there should be no illusion that they can undo all the differences in priorities, attitudes and efforts among different individuals and groups.

Trying to change whole cultures and subcultures in which different individuals are raised would be a staggering task. But the ideology of multiculturalism, which pronounces all cultures to be equally valid, puts that task off limits. This paints people into whatever corner the accident of birth has put them.

Under these severe constraints, all that is left is to blame others when the outcomes are different for different individuals and groups. Apparently those who are lagging are to continue to think and act as they have in the past-- and yet somehow have better outcomes in the future. And, if they don't get the same outcomes as others, then according to this way of seeing the world, it is society's fault!

Society may lavish thousands of dollars per year on schooling for a youngster who does not bother to study, and yet when he or she emerges as a semi-literate adult, it is considered to be society's fault if such youngsters cannot get the same kinds of jobs and incomes as other youngsters who studied conscientiously during their years in school.

It is certainly a great misfortune to be born into families or communities whose values make educational or economic success less likely. But to have intellectuals and others come along and misstate the problem does not help to produce better results, even if it produces a better image.

Political correctness may make it hard for anyone to challenge the image of helpless victims of an evil society. But those who are lagging do not need a better public relations image. They need the ability to produce better results for themselves-- and a romantic image is an obstacle to directing their efforts toward developing that ability.

Tests and other criteria which convey the realities of their existing capabilities, compared to that of others, can have what is called a "disparate impact," and are condemned not only in editorial offices but also in courts of law.

But criteria exist precisely to have a disparate impact on those who do not have what these criteria exist to measure. Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate against students who did not study.

Disregarding criteria in the interest of "fairness"-- in the sense of outcomes independent of inputs-- adds to the handicaps of those who already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and the things they need to do to make their situation better.

By Thomas Sowell

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

2010-02-13T09:46:00.000-08:00

Enough to Let Me Go

2010-01-25T15:30:00.000-08:00

"I was thinking about how love (not just lust or codependency that commonly flood the tunes on the airways) actually involves quite a bit of faith. There's a lot of letting go involved. Two souls in love is an intricate dance of give and take. I can be a fairly solitary person from time to time. Sure, I love being with people, but I also need time alone. I guess I thrive on the poles. So this song is about the dance involved in a relationship the coming together and letting go. The song equates love with breathing- pulling in and releasing. Or a seed, for the seed to grow it has to be dropped and buried.

In our barcode media, love is often portrayed as consumption. As consumers in a commercial driven culture we can begin to view other souls as objects, or potential cures for our deepest fears and insecurities. "Perhaps if I found the right lover I would no longer feel this deep existential despair." But of course no human soul could be the Constant Other, the face that will never go away. Only the infinite can fill that role. But the silence can be deafening. It's a fearful thing to be alone. Do you love me enough to let me go? "I can't live without you"- "I would die if you ever left me"- These are not the songs of love, these are the songs of consumption."

-Jon Foreman about his song "Enough to Let Me Go"

Oh, I'm a wandering soul
I'm still walking the line that leads me home
Alone
All I know
I still got mountain to climb
On my own
On my own

Do you love me enough to let me go?
Do you love me enough to let me go?
To let me follow through
To let me fall for you, my love
Do you love me enough to let me go?

Back from the dead of winter
Back from the dead and all our leaves are dry
You're so beautiful tonight
(Do you love me enough to let me go?)

Back from the dead we went through
Back from the dead and both our tongues are tied
You look beautiful tonight
(Do you love me enough to let me go?)

But every seed dies before it grows

Do you love me enough to let me go?
Do you love me enough to let me go?
To let me follow through
To let me fall for you, my love
Do you love me enough to let me go?

Breathe it in
And let it go
Every breath you take is not yours to own
It's not yours to hold
Do you love me enough to let me go?

Do you love me enough to let me go?
Do you love me enough to let me go?
To let me follow through
To let me fall for you, my love
Do you love me enough to let me go?

The folly of a "right to health care"

2009-12-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that his chamber’s health care bill “demands for the first time in American history that good health will not depend on great wealth.” Reid said the legislation “acknowledges, finally, that health care is a fundamental right—a human right—and not just a privilege for the most fortunate.”

Since more than four-fifths of Americans already have medical insurance, and even those without “great wealth” have been known to enjoy “good health,” Reid was laying it on a little thick. But his premise, which is shared by President Obama, explains the moral urgency felt by supporters of the health care overhaul that is making its way through Congress. It also reveals a radical assault on the traditional American understanding of rights.

The Framers believed the Constitution recognized pre-existing rights, protecting them from violation by the government. The common law likewise developed as a way of protecting people from wrongful interference by their neighbors. If people have rights simply by virtue of being human, those rights can be violated (by theft or murder, for example) even in the absence of government.

By contrast, notwithstanding Reid’s claim that government-subsidized health care is a fundamental human right, it does not make much sense to say that it exists in a country too poor to afford such subsidies or at a time before modern medicine, let alone in the state of nature. Did Paleolithic hunter-gatherers have a right to the “affordable, comprehensive and high-quality medical care” that the Congressional Progressive Caucus says is a right of “every person”? If so, who was violating that right?

During his second presidential debate with Republican nominee John McCain, Obama said health care “should be a right for every American.” Why? “There's something fundamentally wrong,” he said, “in a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills.”

According to the president, people have a right to health care because it is wrong to charge them for medical services they can’t afford. Which is another way of saying they have a right to health care.

While liberty rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of contract require others to refrain from acting in certain ways, “welfare rights” such as the purported entitlement to health care (or to food, clothing, or shelter) require others to perform certain actions. They represent a legally enforceable claim on other people’s resources. Taxpayers must cover the cost of subsidies; insurers and medical professionals must provide their services on terms dictated by the government.

A right to health care thus requires the government to infringe on people’s liberty rights by commandeering their talents, labor, and earnings. And since new subsidies will only exacerbate the disconnect between payment and consumption that drives health care inflation, such interference is bound to increase as the government struggles to control ever-escalating spending. Rising costs will also encourage the government to repeatedly redefine the right to health care, deciding exactly which treatments it includes.

If health care is a fundamental right, equality under the law would seem to require that everyone have the same level of care, regardless of their resources. That principle was illustrated by the case of Debbie Hirst, a British woman with metastasized breast cancer who in 2007 was denied access to a commonly used drug on the grounds that it was too expensive.

When Hirst decided to raise money to pay for the drug on her own, she was told that doing so would make her ineligible for further treatment by the National Health Service. According to The New York Times, “Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones.” The right to health care is so important, it seems, that it can nullify itself.

- Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Noonan goes yard...

2009-12-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

Not sure if she called her shot, but this home run is Ruthian...

The Adam Lambert Problem
"Wrong track" poll numbers aren't just about the economy.

"The news came in numbers and the numbers were fairly grim, all the grimmer for being unsurprising. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported this week that more than half of Americans, 55%, think America is on the wrong track, with only 33% saying it is going in the right direction. A stunning 66% say they're not confident that their children's lives will be better than their own (27% are).

It is another in a long trail of polls that show a clear if occasionally broken decline in American optimism. The poll was discussed on TV the other day, and everyone said those things everyone says: "People are afraid they'll lose their jobs or their houses." "It's health care. Every uninsured person feels they're one illness away from bankruptcy."

All too true. The economy has always had an impact on the general American mood, and the poll offered data to buttress the reader's assumption that economic concerns are driving pessimism. Fifty-one percent of those interviewed said they disapproved of the president's handling of the economy, versus 42% approving.

But something tells me this isn't all about money. It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.

Sure, Americans are worried about long-term debt and endless deficits. We're worried about taxes and the burden we're bequeathing to our children, and their children.

But we are concerned about other things, too, and there are often signs in various polls that those things may dwarf economic concerns. Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.

It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don't care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don't care about us control our culture. In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in the Adam Lambert Problem. More on that in a moment.

America is good at making practical compromises, and one of the compromises we've made in the area of arts and entertainment is captured in the words "We don't care what you do in New York." That was said to me years ago by a social conservative who was explaining that he and his friends don't wish to impose their cultural sensibilities on a city that is uninterested in them, and that the city, in turn, shouldn't impose its cultural sensibilities on them. He was speaking metaphorically; "New York" meant "wherever the cultural left happily lives."

For years now, without anyone declaring it or even noticing it, we've had a compromise on television. Do you want, or will you allow into your home, dramas and comedies that, however good or bad, are graphically violent, highly sexualized, or reflective of cultural messages that you believe may be destructive? Fine, get cable. Pay for it. Buy your premium package, it's your money, spend it as you like.

But the big broadcast networks are for everyone. They are free, they are available on every television set in the nation, and we watch them with our children. The whole family's watching. Higher, stricter standards must maintain.

This was behind the resentment at the Adam Lambert incident on ABC in November. The compromise was breached. It was a broadcast network, it was prime time, it was the American Music Awards featuring singers your 11-year-old wants to see, and your 8-year-old. And Mr. Lambert came on and—again, in front of your children, in the living room, in the middle of your peaceful evening—uncorked an act in which he, in the words of various news reports the next day, performed "faux oral sex" featuring "S&M play," "bondage gear," "same-sex makeouts" and "walking a man and woman around the stage on a leash."

People were offended, and they complained. Mr. Lambert seemed surprised and puzzled. With an idiot's logic that was nonetheless logic, he suggested he was the focus of bigotry: They let women act perverse on TV all the time, so why can't a gay man do it? Fifteen hundred callers didn't see it as he did and complained to ABC, which was negligent but in the end responsive: They changed the West Coast feed and apparently kept Mr. Lambert off "Good Morning America."

Mr. Lambert's act left viewers feeling not just offended but assaulted. Again, "we don't care what you do in New York," but don't include us in it, don't bring it into our homes. Our children are here.

I don't mean to make too much of it. In the great scheme of things a creepy musical act doesn't matter much. But increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.

It's things like this, every bit as much as taxes and spending, that leave people feeling jarred and dismayed, and worried about the future of their country.

Truly, 2009 was a bad year for public behavior.

There were this year the party-crashing Salahis and their amoral assumption that their needs—fame and fortune, which are the same as Adam Lambert's—trump everyone else's. You want public order and security? We want a reality show. And there was their honest and very modern shock that people were criticizing them. "It's ruined our lives," Michaele Salahi told the Today show in a bid for sympathy. She and her husband in turn were reminiscent of the single woman who likes to have babies, and this year had eight, through in vitro fertilization, and apparently expected to win public praise.

All these things—plus Wall Street and Washington and the general sense that most of our great institutions have forgotten their essential mission—add up and produce a fear that the biggest deterioration in America isn't economic but something else, something more characterological.

I'd like to see a poll on this. Yes or no: Have we become a more vulgar country? Are we coarser than, say, 50 years ago? Do we talk more about sensitivity and treat others less sensitively? Do you think standards of public behavior are rising or falling? Is there something called the American Character, and do you think it has, the past half-century, improved or degenerated? If the latter, what are the implications of this? Do you sense, as you look around you, that each year we have less or more of the glue that holds a great nation together? Is there less courtesy in America now than when you were a child, or more? Bonus question: Is "Excuse me" a request or a command?

So much always roils us in America, and so much always will. But maybe as 2010 begins and the 00s recede, we should think more about the noneconomic issues that leave us uneasy, and that need our attention. Not everything in America comes down to money. Not everything ever did."

-Peggy Noonan

Moral Rights, Moral Responsibility and the Contemporary Failure of Moral Knowledge... (and other light reading)

2009-11-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

Dallas Willard paper/talk... it's a long one, and certainly not a quick read, but it's a delight. Enjoy!

Moral Rights, Moral Responsibility and the Contemporary Failure of Moral Knowledge This talk was given at the first annual Human Rights conference hosted by the IPFW Institute for Human Rights at Purdue University, December 10, 2004.

THESIS: The prospects for human rights observance in real life rise and fall with the prospects of moral knowledge, at present quite dim.

Human rights are in desperate straits around the world. They are widely proclaimed, but brutally violated on a mind-numbing scale. The basic outlook which I wish to represent in this talk is that moral rights depend, for their effective implementation, upon a certain condition in human community. If the community is not one of a high level of moral substance (that is, not predominantly one of morally good people, both in official positions and throughout the population), then moral rights will, at best, degenerate into mere legal rights; and even then they will be continually subject to failure in the context of need, because the individuals involved in such contexts do not act to support them. Those legal rights—where they exist—will also be, at most, honored in the letter, and not in the spirit of human dignity, as Kant and those of similar moral outlook would understand human dignity.

When this is the case, those who have legal rights (blacks, women, prisoners of war, homosexuals) may be able to bring governmental processes and forces to bear to secure themselves in certain (obviously important) respects, and that is no small thing. But even that is not a given, and in any case they will not achieve the type of acceptance and endorsement that persons of genuinely good moral will and character extend to others in a moral community. This will be even more true of people outside of ethnic and national groups, and especially when hostilities prevail between such groups.

Professor Clark Butler has written:

In large impersonal societies, individuals steeped in duty consciousness often lack a sufficient knowledge of others and their claims to guarantee protection of their rights even when they would wish to do so. However conscientious individuals are, they are often unconscious of the secondary consequences of actions. Even continuous duty consciousness is thus compatible with periodic justified eruptions of rights consciousness. Yet a significant difference exists between the rights consciousness of individuals who must arouse a non-existence sense of duty and that of individuals who can call on a pre-established sense of duty in others.¹

This is a very penetrating observation about the unfortunate human condition. The lack of "a pre-established sense of duty in others" does indeed make "periodic justified eruptions of rights consciousness" inevitable. But I would add that more than such a sense of duty in others is required for a proper functioning of rights in human society. Conscious dutifulness to rights is never enough, and not just for the reasons Professor Butler points out. Rather, such a dutifulness can succeed only as a part of a moral character of pro-active concern for human goods. Beyond such a sense of duty lies the sense of moral identity that each person carries as a marginal presence in all their acts and activities. That is, the sense of what makes me a good person, a person worthy of approval, inclusion and support from normal human beings around me. This sense of moral worth contains a presumption of the reality of moral worth, and a presumption of shared knowledge of that reality. When the sense of moral reality and knowledge is lacking or mistaken—e.g., takes there to be no such thing as moral reality, or takes moral worth to consist in ethnic identity, or in success at pursuing one's own interest above all, etc.—then the sense of moral identity of the individual (and the group) will lead to the denial or suppression of the human goods which it is the primary function of morality to protect and advance.

Among human goods, of course, rights themselves stand very high. In fact, they are, if you wish, a kind of meta-good, for their point is always to assure the accessibility of other goods. Their point is never just themselves, never just having rights, but a kind of life in which respect and active support for human dignity and well-being is paramount.

Now, what I have called "the sense of moral identity," which each person carries in all their acts and activities, rests upon a presumption of a shared knowledge of life and of what makes one morally acceptable or praiseworthy or not. However fragmentary or misguided the presumed knowledge may be, it is, I think, impossible for a normal human being (I leave out of account sociopathic and extremely traumatized individuals) to conduct their life except upon the assumption that there is shared or sharable knowledge of who is a morally good person and who is not—and, by extension, of what is right and wrong, of what is morally obligatory or praiseworthy or not, and so forth. Thus, the normal human being accepts the necessity and the possibility of moral guidance and of learning about such matters, and the possibility of being wrong with regard to them. That is, of holding false views regarding them.

Throughout the history of ethical theorizing in the Western world, well up into the 20th Century, every important thinker has agreed with that. What most strikingly characterizes 20th Century ethical theorizing is the emergence of Non-Cognitivism as a serious contender in the field of moral understanding. Far from being a passing phase, as often seems assumed currently, Non-Cognitivism (now usually in the guise of one "Constructionism" or another) has entered the life-blood of Western culture. As a result, there is now no recognized, systematic body of moral teaching that can be presented as moral knowledge by the institutions of Western society: chiefly, by the universities, and only slightly less so by the churches or religious institutions—and certainly not by law and government. This fact is the result of what I refer to as "the disappearance of moral knowledge in the 20th Century." If one wishes to see the process through which this came about from the viewpoint of the universities, Julie Reuben's book, The Making of the Modern University gives the institutional history.² It was only during the mid- and late 20th Century that the University became the center of cultural authority and set the societal standard of what counts as knowledge and what does not. Currently, by the standard it sets, moral understanding and judgment do not count as knowledge. This is simply the case, though very few people seem to recognize it.

But the university in the 20th Century was in this respect informed and controlled by long-range developments in ethical thought—not by these alone, of course, but essentially by them. Those developments laid the foundation for the emergence and continuing dominance of Non-Cognitivism in our academic culture: indeed, of a Non-Cognitivist culture generally. I want to briefly survey those developments to show how we got where, I take it, we stand today. I am not going to try to convince you here that there has been no recovery from Non-Cognitivism. But I believe that a thesis to that effect can be sustained by a careful examination of the work of writers from Hare to Rawls, Williams, MacIntyre and Gibbard.

For purposes of this discussion I shall use the work of G. E. Moore as a dividing line. Although there is an increasing interest today in the immediate predecessors of Moore, such as T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, it is still true, as it has been for many decades, that discussions of the history of ethics, proceeding backward, stop at Moore, and only resume with more distant figures such as Mill and Kant. This, I think, is because there really was a profound transformation that occurred with Moore, but it was one which had little to do with his famous Intuitionism or the other usual topics of ethical theory in the 20th Century. Rather, it had to do with what is to be regarded as the primary subject matter of ethical theorizing.

In the 1880's and 1890's, in the United States and Great Britain at least, a broad consensus about the moral conduct of life prevailed, and was regarded as a systematic body of knowledge. It was a consensus that was thought to be rationally grounded in moral theorizing of the sort commonly done in the universities at that time. This consensus was incorporated in a number of widely used textbooks in ethics, prominent among which were John Dewey's Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics³ (and, later on, Dewey and Tuft's Ethics⁴), J. H. Muirhead's The Elements of Ethics⁵, and J. S. Mackenzie's A Manual of Ethics⁶, to mention only three of several textbooks that went through repeated revisions and editions in widespread use.

The main source, by far, for this consensus was the personality and lectures of T. H. Green, forcefully expressed in his short teaching career at Oxford and in his posthumously published Prolegomena to Ethics. I shall refer to this body of university teaching simply as "the pre-Moore synthesis," because on the theoretical side, it was primarily Moore's work that resulted in that consensus evaporating, with nothing explicitly replacing it in the academic (and later the cultural) context.

Looking back at the pre-Moore synthesis in ethical theorizing, the first point that stands out is what it took to be the central subject matter of ethical inquiry. The favorite term for that subject matter among these writers was "conduct," by which voluntary action, or action with an end in view, was meant. (Sometimes—and especially later on in this period—conduct was approached by way of the moral judgment. On this approach, one first identified and examined the characteristically moral judgments, and then moved on to an examination of what those judgments are about—which was found to be primarily conduct, or action with an end in view. Then the analysis was turned upon conduct to see what it is and how it divides into "good" and "bad" conduct, and what that means. In other cases one might speak, not of the judgment, but of the "idea" of obligation, etc.)

As for conduct itself, it was regarded as a type of complex and 'organic' whole.⁷ John Dewey, for example, said: "Conduct implies more than something taking place; it implies purpose, motive, intention; that the agent knows what he is about, that he has something which he is aiming at." (Outlines, p. 242) And, on this broad understanding, conduct is not separable from character. Conduct arises out of the whole person. "Character and conduct are, morally, the same thing, looked at first inwardly and then outwardly." (p. 246) Thus, "To say that a man's conduct is good, unless it is the manifestation of a good character, is to pass a judgment that is self-contradictory." (p. 246)

This view of ethical reality was widely assumed among pre-Moore teachers and writers. They were, generally, people who believed life to be an organic whole, where the components of conduct were not atomistic units, but thoroughly inter-penetrated one another, making the "meaning" or nature of each component dependent upon that of all the others. So the motive and intention, feelings or sentiments, the consequences and the personal character, that go into an action which is conduct are not things that can be separately considered in ethical analysis. Considered together, however, they allow us to understand and know—indeed, to teach—what human beings ought to be and to do.

Nevertheless, it is the will that stands out in this literature as primary for moral goodness or badness. MacKenzie remarks that "the good will ...supremely good and ...the ultimate object approved by the moral judgment." (Manual, p. 129) But, of course, "A good will cannot be there without good action," he says, "and there can be no good action without a good will." (p. 129)

T. H. Green had earlier held that the distinction between the good and bad will "must lie at the root of every system of ethics." On his view, "The statement that the distinction between good and bad will must lie at the basis of any system of ethics, and the further statement that this distinction itself must depend on the nature of the objects willed, would in some sense or other be accepted by all recognized 'schools' of moralists, but they would be accepted in very different senses."⁸ The good will certainly will be thought of in these writers as a will that is a settled, coherent body of dispositions to act in ways that promote the goods influenced by the action. As James Seth, another luminary in the pre-Moore consensus remarked, "Conduct, therefore, points to character, or settled habit of will. But will is here no mere faculty, it is a man's 'proper self'. The will is the self in action; and in order to act, the self must also feel and know."⁹

The second point that stands out in the pre-Moore synthesis is that it assumed the substance of the moral life, centered on conduct, will and character, to be an object (subject) of knowledge. (Here, let us say that one has knowledge of a certain subject matter if he is capable of—or, in the occurrent sense of "know," if he actually is—representing that subject matter as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.) Thus, all of the authors concerned, without exception, speak of "the Science of Ethics," as the field of inquiry in which they are engaged, and on the basis of which they naturally give fairly specific directions concerning what people ought to do and to be. That is a language and a practice which you can hardly imagine anyone in the field of ethical theory using today. But they used it quite confidently—even without a thought. This followed from what they took the subject matter of ethical theorizing to be, plus the assumption that that subject matter is open to examination by observation, abstraction and theorization. It is the failure of this assumption about the accessibility of will, character, etc. to knowledge that, more than any other single thing, accounts for the current situation with regard to moral knowledge and authority, described above as "the disappearance of moral knowledge."

The third point about the pre-Moore synthesis that must be noted here is that normative, first level moral judgments were regarded as a natural part of moral theory. That is, given the appropriate inquiry into and understanding of the good person or character, and of the good or right action ("conduct"), it was thought that normative judgments of specific application to persons and actions were not only appropriate, but were required as a natural part of the work of the ethical theorist. Ethical theorists thought it to be a natural part of their work to say, to teach, that certain lines of action were right or wrong, and that certain (types of) people were of good or bad—even "evil"—character. They thought that "moral guidance" through instruction and personal influence was a proper part of their work, for which they were responsible, and that it should be expressed "in class," when appropriate and appropriately. The division between what later came to be known as "meta-ethics" and practical or normative ethics, as that distinction comes into play post-Moore, would have been something inconceivable to them. Contrary to Professors of ethics nowadays, they all would have thought that they had moral knowledge that their students did not have, and had a 'moral authority' based thereon.

The effect of this was that they expected their teaching to strongly effect the actions of their students, and by many reports it did. R. G. Collingwood said, in his Autobiography, that "The School of Green sent out into public life a stream of ex-pupils who carried with them the conviction that philosophy and particularly the philosophy they had learned at Oxford was an important thing and that their vocation was to put it into practice.... Through this effect on the minds of its pupils, the philosophy of Green's school might be found, from about 1880 to about 1910, penetrating and fertilizing every part of the national life."¹⁰

In America, much of the moral drive back of the "Progressive Movement," of the 1890's on to the 1930's and later, came from the teachings of John Dewey (and like-minded university and professional people) about moral reality, moral knowledge, and the moral life. This was the last time there existed in America a generally shared understanding of moral worth that could publicly serve as the basis of a public program of legal and social reform. (Note how far the work of John Rawls, for example, falls short of any such real effect.)

Dewey at mid-career had this to say about moral worth: "We have reached the conclusion that disposition as manifest in endeavor is the seat of moral worth, and that this worth itself consists in a readiness to regard the general happiness—even against contrary promptings of personal comfort and gain." (Ethics, p. 364) The words are Dewey's, but he would have been first to tell you that they fairly accurately express the outcome of a remarkably rich period of ethical reflection, running from T. H. Green to Dewey's middle years. They mark the end of that period, however, and the influence of G. E. Moore and "the analysis of ethical concepts" was to change the subject matter of ethical theory away from the moral life itself, and would institute the period of ethical nihilism—"Non-Cognitivism" or, at least, agnosticism—that continues up to today.

In After Virtue Alaster MacIntyre, who has long been deeply concerned with the state of affairs I call the disappearance of moral knowledge, perceptively comments: "We have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.... Since Moore the dominant narrow conception of moral philosophy has ensured that the moral philosophers could ignore this task."¹¹ If that is true, we have not yet fully understood the claims of the post-Moore moral philosophers.

Now the pre-Moore attitude toward the relevance of moral theory and teaching to responsible moral instruction and guidance, and to the formation of character and society, was the received view from Socrates through the pre-Moore thinkers. It is hard to find any serious exceptions. I know of none. I doubt anyone will seriously question this with respect to Classical and Medieval thinkers. But the assumed connection between moral theory and moral guidance is strong and vital right up through the pre-Moore period. David Hume in the late 1700's remarks that "The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and the beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.... What is honourable, what is fair, what is becoming, what is noble, what is generous, takes possession of the heart, and animates us to embrace it and maintain it."¹² For all the professed admiration of Hume currently, who today would follow him in this? One wants to keep in mind, however, that it was precisely such a conviction about moral reality and life that animated earlier discussions of rights.

Henry Sidgwick, toward the end of the 1800's said: "The moralist has a practical aim: We desire knowledge of right conduct in order to act on it."¹³

An older contemporary of Sidgwick, Matthew Arnold, in the opening paragraph of his essay "Marcus Aurelius," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. I, expressed the view that was the common cultural outlook at the time: "The object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue; and this object they seek to attain by presenting to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor or gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making way toward its goal."¹⁴

The obvious if not pressing question is: What happened? In particular, was it actually discovered that there is no possible body of knowledge about moral distinctions and relations upon the basis of which one person might give moral instruction or guidance to another, and moral institutions of right and law be maintained? I cannot believe it was. Of course that whole group of mid-20th Century theorists known as Non-Cognitivists ("Emotivists") claimed to discover just that. They had a powerful impact upon ethical theory as professionally practiced, and one from which it has not yet recovered to any significant degree. But I suspect that they and the situation they created are more a symptom of deeper-lying causes than a primary cause in their own right.

Certainly they (the Non-Cognitivists) did not discover there was no moral knowledge. Even if there is none, they didn't discover it. Rather, they were engaged in a project (now long-recognized as failing) of redefining knowledge, and redefining knowledge in such a way that moral distinctions could not be "known" in their new sense. A thin triumph at best, from a rational point of view. But they claimed to have discovered that knowledge was not what it had long been taken to be, and that, among other astonishing results, there could, in the nature of the case, be no knowledge of the domain which pre-Moore ethical theory had taken as its subject matter. What had passed as moral knowledge (for them, now, "moral language"—a not insignificant change of subject) would have to be re-interpreted as something else altogether. In the shadow to the "Linguistic Turn" in philosophy, such a re-interpretation is exactly what the Non-Cognitivists (Ayer, Stevenson, etc.—and later R. M. Hare and the "multifunctionalists") offered. It is important to notice that that effort at re-interpretation has continued unabated up to the present, still with nothing in the way of an established or promising result on the horizon. But this failure has not led people to question the fundamental change—the turn to "concepts" and the "logic of moral discourse"—which was instituted at Moore. Rather, they just work all the harder in the direction that took its rise from Moore. Surely something deep is driving them.

To understand what actually happened to bring about the shift from a pre- to a post-Moore understanding of moral knowledge and of the practice of moral theory and guidance, one must look, more broadly, to the universities of the late 1800's and early 1900's. The attempt by the Non-Cognitivists to redefine knowledge was part of a much larger social process that can be aptly called "The Secularization of the Academy." This process marked a shift that certainly was historically necessary, but it also was one that had many inessential and unforeseen consequences.

A part of what was involved comes out in a statement by Professor John Lyons, made in 1998, on how he understands his role as a teacher in the university to exclude moral instruction: "I do not claim to be morally superior to my students, to have a source of moral knowledge that they do not have, or to convince them of my authority as a teacher of ethics."¹⁵ Now this statement raises a number of questions. Why would one think that to give moral guidance is to presume one is morally superior? And why think that to have moral knowledge would require that one have a "special source" that others (who don't have the knowledge) do not have, making you something special—and then, perhaps, morally superior? And why think giving moral guidance involves trying to get people to believe and act on my authority?

A part of the irony here is that Lyons, a Professor of French, is clearly teaching that it would be morally odious for him or others to do such things as he mentions. There is no doubt that he is prepared to say and to teach this in class, and that it is part of the moral guidance he was given by his teachers and cohorts in his socialization as an academic. He is giving moral guidance to one and all in this very statement in which he is explaining why he does not give moral guidance to students. No doubt the things which Lyons here morally reproaches have been done in the past, and in ways deserving of his reproach. Inappropriate and even immoral moralizing by teachers has been done and is now being done (as Lyons acknowledges, p. 155); and no doubt there is a special danger of this occurring around social institutions, such as universities. But to avoid these dangers it is not necessary (Is it even possible?) to deny the existence or possession of moral knowledge, or to deny that it is possible or morally permissible—or even morally required—to pass such knowledge on in appropriate ways when that is suited to the academic situation. Clearly, in making his remarks Lyons presupposes moral knowledge (He knows, no doubt, that it is morally wrong to claim to be morally superior to students, etc.), and that it is right to pass this knowledge on. And I venture he would feel free, or even obliged, to make his statements here quoted in the classroom, expecting his students to believe them. But what he is doing is all a part of what was involved in the secularization of the academy. The professor had to get out of the business of moral guidance, which had been so closely involved with religion and religious authority. That will be easy if there is no moral knowledge.

Now secularization, with its essential as well as inessential accompaniments, went hand-in-hand with the professionalization of the academic areas. This might be viewed as the positive side of the divorce from religious institutions. The maintenance of standards in a social enterprise such as the university requires appropriate social organizations. Such maintenance is one mark of a profession, and, in the past, it has been necessary for the purposes of guaranteeing the expertise of the individual practitioner and the responsibility of the profession to society at large.

But professionalization requires careful identification of a subject matter so that its boundaries may be respected. Philosophy, and especially Ethical Theory, had long been concerned with the understanding and guidance of life as a whole. But Philosophy after 1900 resolutely turns away from that, as one part of secularization, and increasingly does so as its professionalization develops. This required the identification of a different and unique subject matter for Philosophy. That subject matter turned out to be 'concepts', and Philosophy dutifully turns out to be 'logic'. A new subject matter and a new method are then in hand—if we can only find out what they are. Verbally at least, "Logic, Language and Meaning" are the center of focus in what was promised to be a "Revolution in Philosophy."

Now it should be noted that, in fairly close correspondence with all this, Psychology was trying to become scientific. (Actually, becoming scientific was high on the agenda for Philosophy as well, and was the main reason it 'became' logic.) In Psychology one must forget about the "soul." (See Edward Reed's marvelous book, From Soul to Mind.¹⁶) Becoming scientific meant experimental psychology: laboratories and only what could be studied in them. Then Behaviorism (Watson), or Deep Theory (Freud and others), and most recently brain theory mixed in with computers. What must be noted here for our concerns is that none of these directions of Psychology dealt with, or allowed one to deal with, the traditional subject matter of ethical theory, though many efforts were made to include that subject matter: "conduct," will and character.¹⁷

But it needs to be said once again with emphasis that, in all of these developments in Philosophy and Psychology, and in the fields of professionalized learning in general, no one discovered that we cannot know, in the ways routinely practiced by pre-Moore ethical theorists, the nature of rational deliberation and choice, of "conduct," will and character, and of the primary moral distinctions embedded therein. But, regardless of that, choice, will and character disappear from the field of acceptable knowledge—and especially as they were thought to be known by observation (of oneself and others), conceptualization or abstraction, and theoretical organization—the practice of the pre-Moore consensus.

What is the effect of all this on the status of rights and right claims in guiding human behavior, collectively and individually?

Rights claims were always the most resilient segment of moral discourse in the face of Non-cognitivism. Even in the heyday of Emotivism, many never surrendered the view that such claims stand in logical relations to other statements. They simply could not accept the view that rights claims were inherently non-rational. "I have a right to X" was thought of as logically entailing "You have an obligation not to interfere." And as logical relations were slowly pried loose from truth, in the progression of ethical theorizing in the mid 1900's, rights claims became even more acceptably "cognitive." Overall, however, the reason why rights talk survived the Emotivist onslaught, to the extent it did, was not because of some insight into their objective, truth-bearing status, but because the social and political situation would not tolerate the idea that opposition to the draft, racial segregation and economic deprivation were simply matters of taste or feeling. In these matters the objective reality of right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil, and the assurance of knowledge thereof, were just undeniable to most citizens including academics. Rights and justice were too vital to life to dismiss to the realm of the Non-Cognitive.

Unfortunately, however, that did not dispel the cloud over moral reality and knowledge which was cast by their exclusion from the domains of science and by the associated Non-Cognitivist offensive, and which could not but effect the force of claims to moral rights. Legal rights are, of course, another matter—though with problems of their own—except, of course, insofar as they are thought to depend upon a moral foundation. Legal rights are the result of political processes and are sanctioned by government action. They may be either moral or immoral. As important as they are, the moral quality of the society in which they exist is what concerns most people.

The legalities of the treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo¹⁸ may be endlessly discussed, and no doubt will be. But the two sides are really concerned about whether or not the government of the United States should be permitted to treat those prisoners in ways which are regarded by many as immoral. Classifying them as "Non-Combatants" to get around provisions of the Geneva Convention is a typical maneuver to permit treating people in ways not morally acceptable. One side argues legalities to prevent what they regard as immoral—not just illegal—treatment. The other side argues legalities to permit treatment that they themselves would recognize as immoral under most circumstances. Here as in many other scenes of contemporary life, the moral has no effective standing, and is replaced with the political and the legal, which then fail to address the deeper issue of "is it right?"

But if there is no moral reality, or no knowledge of it, then the legal and the political are as far as one can go. What more is there to be concerned about? Persons who would respond to "moral" issues beyond that would be foolish, "unrealistic." They would be worrying themselves, perhaps risking their careers or even their lives for nothing, or at least for something which no one has knowledge of—perhaps for no more that a personal quirk on their part. That is pretty much where the "knowledge" now acceptable as such to the University leaves us. And this explains why sporadic efforts to teach "professional ethics" have no significant impact upon professional behavior and life. They can find no cognitive foundation for the formation of moral character and for becoming a morally responsible person in all the connections of life. And since the University is the arbiter of what counts as knowledge, it rules out any such foundation from other sources, and leaves only ethnic identity (cultural relativism) or non-rational personal commitments to go on. These do not provide a satisfactory basis upon which to confront the widespread abuses of human rights that characterize our contemporary world.

I have spoken repeatedly of the reality of moral goodness and of knowledge of moral goodness. Now I would like to briefly state my view of them, and point out how that view positions human rights in the broader context of morally acceptable human existence. Here I cannot argue for my view, but only state it and offer a few essential clarifications.

The morally good person, I would say, is a person who is effectively intent upon advancing the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, in a manner that respects their relative degrees of importance and the extent to which the actions of the person in question can actually promote the existence and maintenance of those goods. Thus, moral goodness (as well as badness) is a matter of the organization of human dispositions and will into a system called "character."

"Character" refers to the settled dispositions to act in certain interrelated ways, given relevant circumstances. Character is expressed in what one does without thinking, as well as to what one does after acting without thinking. The actions which come from character will usually persist when the individual is unobserved, as well as when the consequences of the action are not what the agent would prefer. A person of good moral character is one who, from the deeper and more pervasive dimensions of the self, is intent upon advancing the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact (etc.).

The person who is morally bad or evil is one who is intent upon the destruction of the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, or who is indifferent to the existence and maintenance of those goods.

This orientation of the will toward promotion of human goods is the fundamental moral distinction: the one which is of primary human interest, and from which all the others, moving toward the periphery of the moral life and ethical theory, can be clarified. For example: the moral value of acts (positive and negative); the nature of moral obligation and responsibility; virtues and vices; the nature and limitations of rights, punishment, rewards, justice and related issues; the morality of laws and institutions; and what is to be made of moral progress and moral education.

A comprehensive and coherent theory of these matters can, I suggest, be developed only if we start from the distinction between the good and bad will or person—which, admittedly, almost no one is currently prepared to discuss. That is one of the outcomes of ethical theorizing through the 20th Century. It is directly opposite to the consensus of the late decades of the 19th Century, for which, as we have noted, the fundamental subject of ethical theorizing was the will and its character. (See Green, Bradley, Sidgwick, Dewey)

I believe that the orientation of the will provides the fundamental moral distinction because it is what ordinary human beings, not confused or misled by theories of various kind, naturally and constantly employ in the ordinary contexts of life, both with reference to themselves (a touchstone for moral theory) and with reference to others (where it is employed with much less clarity and assurance). And I also believe that this is the fundamental moral distinction because it seems to me the one most consistently present at the heart of the tradition of moral thought that runs from Socrates to Sidgwick—all of the twists and turns of that tradition notwithstanding.

Just consider the role of "the good" in Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, for example, stripped, if possible, of all the intellectual campaigns and skirmishes surrounding it. Consider Aquinas' statement that "this is the first precept of law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this; so that all the things which the practical reason naturally apprehends as man's good belong to the precepts of the natural law under the form of things to be done or avoided."¹⁹ Or consider how Sidgwick arrives at his "maxim of Benevolence"—"that each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him."²⁰ Sidgwick of course tried hard to incorporate his intuitions of justice and of prudence into this crowning maxim, but with little obvious success.

A few further clarifications must be made:

1. I have spoken of the goods of human life in the plural, and have spoken of goods with which we are in effective contact, i.e. can do something about. The good will is manifested in its active caring for particular goods that we can do something about, not primarily in dreaming of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" or even of my own 'happiness' or of "duty for duty's sake." Generally speaking, thinking in high level abstractions will always defeat moral will in practice. As Bradley and others before him clearly saw, "my station and its duties" is nearly, but not quite, the whole moral scene, and it can never be simply bypassed on the way to "larger" and presumably more important things.

One of the major miscues of ethical theory since the sixties has been, in my opinion, its almost total absorption in social and political issues. This for reasons already indicated, and of course these issues do also concern vital human goods. They are important, and we should always do what we can for them. But moral theory simply will not coherently and comprehensively come together from their point of view. They do not essentially involve the center of moral reality, the will and character.

2. Among human goods—things that are good for human beings and enable them to flourish—are human beings and certain relationships to them, and, especially, good human beings. That is, human beings that fit the above description. One's own well-being is a human good, to one's self and to others, as is what Kant called the moral "perfection" of oneself. Of course non-toxic water and food, a clean and safe environment, opportunities to learn and to work, stable family and community relations, and so forth, all fall on the list of particular human goods. (Most of the stuff for sale in our society probably does not.) Rights are primary human goods, and therefore the good person, on my view, will be deeply committed to their recognition and full deployment.

There seems to me no necessity of having a complete list of human goods, or a tight definition of what something must be like to be on the list. Marginal issues, "Lifeboat" cases, and the finer points of conceptual distinction are interesting exercises and have a point for philosophical training; but it is not empirically confirmable, to say the least, that the chances of having a good will or being a good person improve with philosophical training in ethical theory as that has been recently understood. It is necessary for the purposes of being a good or bad person that one have a good general understanding of proximate human goods and of how they are effected by action. And that is also what we need for the understanding of the good will and the goodness of the individual. We do not have to know what the person would do in a lifeboat situation to know whether or not they have good will, though what they do in such situations may throw light on who they are, or on how good (or bad) they are. The appropriate response to actions in extreme situations may not be a moral judgment at all, but one of pity or admiration, of the tragic sense of life, or of amazement at what humans are capable of, etc. etc.

3. The will to advance the goods of human life with which one comes into contact is inseparable from the will to find out how to do it and do it appropriately. If one truly wills the end one wills the means, and coming to understand the goods which we effect, and their conditions and interconnections, is inseparable from the objectives of the good person and the good will. Thus, knowledge, understanding and rationality are themselves human goods, to be appropriately pursued for their own sakes, but also because they are absolutely necessary for moral self-realization as here described. Formal rationality, defined without reference to particular ends or values, is fundamental to the good will, but is not sufficient to it.

4. Clearly, knowledge of moral distinctions depends upon knowledge of the human self, the subject of those distinctions. What E. Anscombe said decades ago about the need to quit doing moral theory until we have an adequate "moral psychology"²¹ seems very sensible in the light of how knowledge is now understood in the institutions of knowledge. Of course we can't stop theorizing. We have to continue thinking about moral distinctions, because we have to act, and have to find out how to act. But we can never regain the self (will, character) as a subject of knowledge so long as we insist in forcing the self into a scientistic ("naturalistic") mold. Moral knowledge disappears with authentic self-knowledge, which disappears with the ascendancy of "naturalism" (scientism). Moral character is not a matter of the physical body at any level of refinement, or of its "natural" relations to world and society. As long as the physical realm is regarded as the only subject of knowledge, there will be no moral knowledge and no cognitive foundation of the moral life. This is exactly where we stand today in Western culture and in the University system that presides over it on its epistemic side.

Moral rights have as their primary role resistance against the attitudes and actions of people and arrangements of evil intent. But in order for them to be effective in that role they must be urged and supported by multitudes of people of good will: people of established benevolence, wisdom, prudence, courage and temperance. Such people can only support their lives upon their experience of the reality of moral distinctions and values and upon a clear knowledge of their reality and nature. Upon that foundation, when widely shared, moral and then legal rights can frame societies and governments that are not just just as defined by rights, but are contexts of human flourishing. Pull that foundation away, and justice and rights themselves will not flourish—though we must have them and must always struggle to do the best we can by them. The point is not that we should wait for people to be highly developed or morally perfect to push for the upholding and expansion of rights. We should always do what we can to that end. It is an essential part of individual and corporate moral enculturation and progress. But what we can accomplish thereby depends upon the moral character of multitudes of people nourished and directed by knowledge of the reality and nature of moral values and distinctions. Ironically, the very institutions of knowledge today are turned against that upon which a high level of moral goodness in individuals and society depends.

NOTES

¹Quoted from Chapter One, section 9, of Clark Butler's unpublished book on Human Rights Ethics. Return to text.

²(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Return to text.

³Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (First edition, Ann Arbor, MI.: Register Publishing Company, 1891). References here are to John Dewey, The Early Works 1882-1898: Essays and Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Carbondale, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) Return to text.

⁴John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1908). Return to text.

⁵John H. Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics, third edition (London: John Murray, 1928). Return to text.

⁶John S. Mackenzie, A Manual of Ethics, fourth edition (London: W. B. Clive, University Tutorial Press, 1900). Return to text.

⁷The metaphysics of "Internal Relations" dominates the thought of Green and of most of his followers, and certainly that of Dewey. Return to text.

⁸T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ''154 & 155. Second edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1884), pp. 160-161. New edition, ed. David O. Brink (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 174-175. Return to text.

⁹James Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, twelfth edition (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), p. 5. Return to text.

¹⁰R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 17. Return to text.

¹¹Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 23. Return to text.

¹²David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, second edition (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1902), Section 1, p. 173. Return to text.

¹³Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, seventh edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 5. See also Henry Sidgwick, Practical Ethics: A Collections of Addresses and Essays (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) for many clear statements on the point here at issue. Return to text.

¹⁴Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism: First Series (New York: Macmillan, 1930). Return to text.

¹⁵John D. Lyons, "Upon What Authority Might We Teach Morality?" Philosophy and Literature, 22:155-160 (1998), p. 160. This is one contribution to a "Symposium: Is Morality a Non-Aim of Education?" pp. 136-199 of this volume. Return to text.

¹⁶(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Return to text.

¹⁷See how Owen Flanagen tries to accomplish this in his entertaining book, The Problem of the Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2002). The title misleads. The problem dealt with is the problem of saving all that matters in human life once it is decided that there is no soul. This book is the current exemplar of a genre that arises in the 17th Century and runs through works like Ludwig Büchner's Force and Matter, the writings of Ernst Haeckel, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos. The effort to 'save' moral reality and knowledge strictly within the framework of physical reality is noble, perhaps, but hardly successful. Return to text.

¹⁸The conference for which this paper was prepared was on "Guantanamo Bay and the Judicial Treatment of Aliens." The concern was with the violation of the human rights of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners interned in the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay. Return to text.

¹⁹Treatise on Law, Question XCIV, Second Article. Many editions. Return to text.

²⁰Methods of Ethics, p. 382. Return to text.

²¹See the opening paragraph of her "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy, 33:1-19 (1958), and reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 26-42.

Health Reform's Moral Hazard

2009-11-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

Health Reform's Moral Hazard

By Steven Malanga

For years Dr. Linda Halderman operated a general surgery practice in California's San Joaquin Valley, where she treated patients ranging from those with serious, life-threatening conditions to those seeking elective, cosmetic treatments. In a recent piece in Investors Business Daily, Halderman recounted the story of a woman patient who had not had a mammogram in several years even though her family had a long history of breast cancer. "But I don't have insurance," the woman told Halderman when the doctor asked why she had neglected to get a test that costs $90. Yet the woman was in Halderman's office for $400 Botox treatments that she was paying for.

In her piece Halderman recounted stories of patients who were enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state subsidized health plan for the poor in California, but paid upwards of $1,000 in cash out of their own pockets for laser hair removal procedures, and patients who sat in her waiting room entertaining themselves with expensive IPods and mini- DVD players yet balked at $5 insurance co-pays. She described patients who "considered health care a lower budget priority than decorated skin and expensive toys." Other doctors who commented on her piece online told similar stories.

It has now been some 70 years since the federal government shifted the landscape in health care by bestowing on employers tax subsidies for providing workers with health insurance. And it has been 45 years since the federal government got directly into the act by creating two vast public health plans, Medicare and Medicaid. Both moves have helped to transfer health care bills from the individual to third-party payers, so that many of us are now used to not paying individual bills from doctors or hospitals.

Over time, healthcare has come to seem less like a service we purchase than like an entitlement or worse, a right bestowed on us by government or by our workplace. After all, the government designed Medicare, the public health plan for seniors, to cover hospital care for seniors but eventually under pressure expanded it to pay for virtually all non-elective doctor and hospital visits as well as drugs for every senior.

And private enterprises like the Detroit auto companies negotiated their health benefits for employees with unions because it was cheap to do so using government tax subsidies. The companies rarely asked whether the additional services and coverage they were providing were essential to their employees' health. These services were perks that were affordable in the post-World War II era, and employees came to expect them until the auto companies could no longer afford them.

Now, nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed by a Quinnipiac poll say it is government's responsibility to ensure that everyone has "adequate health-care." But does providing $90 mammograms to an uninsured person who would rather spend $400 on Botox treatments amount to a responsibility of government?

The question is ever more important as the health reform debate rages. The New York Times reports that a battle has broken out in the White House between those who want reform legislation to have more cost-saving initiatives and those like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a master of realpolitik, who think it's not politically possible to pass a bill that Americans will see as limiting their health care choices.

What both sides in this White House debate don't understand is that they are at loggerheads because the legislation being considered in Washington will attempt to reform the system from the top down, by fiat from the government. As a result, any cost savings will be those dictated from Washington after decades when individual Americans and health providers have grown resistant to such mandates. To take just one recent example out of dozens: some White House advisers want more savings in the legislation from hospitals, but the administration has already promised hospitals that it won't demand more of them in exchange for their support of health reform. This is the way our health system is being revamped, one political favor at a time.

This is why the only truly effective way to reform our health system, including slowing the growth of costs, is not from the top down, as mandated by Washington, but from the bottom up, by putting health care dollars and choices back into the hands of individuals. We can do that by eliminating the business deduction for health insurance and transferring tax credits to individuals who can use them to purchase their own insurance. We can establish health savings accounts where people can accumulate the money they save on health insurance to pay big bills. If we feel we need a safety net, we can establish government pools that protect people against the most catastrophic costs.

In these ways we would slow the growth of health costs not by gigantic, unpopular mandates from Washington but through millions of individual decisions by people acting with their own money and in their own best interests. Under such a system there should be no need for the White House to cut Machiavellian deals with hospitals or doctors or AARP for their support in exchange for political favors that undermine the greater goal of reform.

Or we can continue down the path we are on, which is what the current legislation would do. What will that get us? More incidents like this one in Boston, where a doctor, writing in the Boston Globe, recently described going to a CVS pharmacy where he found people lined up waiting for a flu shot. Some patients, when they discovered that their health insurance did not cover the shots, declined to get them and simply left, though CVS charges just $30 for a shot. As one letter writer, commenting on the doctor's observations, put it: "People unwilling to cover the costs of a shot that may prevent them from getting sick shows that the only health care reform that some people want is one in which someone else pays for it."

We need less of this sort of system, not more.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Global Warming scenario of the day

2009-10-27T13:32:00.001-07:00

'Global Warming' fun scenario of the day:

Coal currently accounts for 83% of China's energy production. It is estimated that by 2030, the population of PRC will grow from 1.3 to 1.5 billion. This (along with continued urbanization of rural China) will result in an extra 8,600 terawatts of needed electricity - 3 times more than the usage in 2006. If China reduced Coal to 70% of energy production by 2030, even with "clean coal technology" equipped, China's CO2 emissions would increase by 80% by 2030.

Since China already produces more green house gases than the U.S. that would mean that in 2030, the US could emit 0 green house gases (read: not exist anymore) and everything would be pretty much the same as it is right now.

Doesn't that Cap-and-Trade sound amazing right now? It's going to save the planet!!!

Stimulus Spending Doesn't Work

2009-10-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

He's only a professor at Harvard... no biggy...

The global recession and financial crisis have refocused attention on government stimulus packages. These packages typically emphasize spending, predicated on the view that the expenditure "multipliers" are greater than one—so that gross domestic product expands by more than government spending itself. Stimulus packages typically also feature tax reductions, designed partly to boost consumer demand (by raising disposable income) and partly to stimulate work effort, production and investment (by lowering rates).

World War II defense spending offers a good measure of stimulus effects.

The existing empirical evidence on the response of real gross domestic product to added government spending and tax changes is thin. In ongoing research, we use long-term U.S. macroeconomic data to contribute to the evidence. The results mostly favor tax rate reductions over increases in government spending as a means to increase GDP.

For defense spending, the principal long-run variations reflect the buildups and aftermaths of major wars—World War I, World War II, the Korean War and, to a much lesser extent, the Vietnam War. World War II tends to dominate, with the ratio of added defense spending to GDP reaching 26% in 1942 and 17% in 1943, and then falling to -26% in 1946.

Wartime spending is helpful for estimating spending multipliers for three key reasons. First, the variations in spending are large and include positive and negative values. Second, since the main changes in military spending are independent of economic developments, it is straightforward to isolate the direction of causation between government spending and GDP. Third, unlike many other countries during the world wars, the U.S. suffered only moderate loss of life and did not experience massive destruction of physical capital. In addition, because the unemployment rate in 1940 exceeded 9% but then fell to 1% in 1944, there is some information on how the multiplier depends on the strength of the economy.

For annual data that start in 1939 or earlier (and, thereby, include World War II), the defense-spending multiplier that applies at the average unemployment rate of 5.6% is in a range of 0.6-0.7. A multiplier less than one means that, overall, other components of GDP fell when defense spending rose. Empirically, our research shows that most of the fall was in private investment, with personal consumer expenditure changing little.

Our research also shows that greater weakness in the economy raises the estimated multiplier: It increases by around 0.1 for each two percentage points by which the unemployment rate exceeds its long-run median of 5.6%. Thus the estimated multiplier reaches 1.0 when the unemployment rate gets to about 12%.

To evaluate typical fiscal-stimulus packages, however, nondefense government spending multipliers are more important. Estimating these multipliers convincingly from U.S. time series is problematical, however, because the movements in nondefense government purchases (dominated since the 1960s by state and local outlays) are closely intertwined with the business cycle. Thus the explanation for much of the positive association between nondefense spending and GDP is that government spending increased in response to growing GDP, rather than the reverse.

The effects of tax rates on GDP growth can be analyzed from a time series we've constructed on average marginal income-tax rates from federal and state income taxes and the Social Security payroll tax. Since 1950, the largest declines in the average marginal rate from the federal individual income tax occurred under Ronald Reagan (to 21.8% in 1988 from 25.9% in 1986 and to 25.6% in 1983 from 29.4% in 1981), George W. Bush (to 21.1% in 2003 from 24.7% in 2000), and Kennedy-Johnson (to 21.2% in 1965 from 24.7% in 1963). Tax rates rose particularly during the Korean War, the 1970s and the 1990s. The average marginal tax rate from Social Security (including payments from employees, employers and the self-employed) expanded to 10.8% in 1991 from 2.2% in 1971 and then remained reasonably stable.

For data that start in 1950, we estimate that a one-percentage-point cut in the average marginal tax rate raises the following year's GDP growth rate by around 0.6% per year. However, this effect is harder to pin down over longer periods that include the world wars and the Great Depression.

It would be useful to apply our U.S. analysis to long-term macroeconomic time series for other countries, but many of them experienced massive contractions of real GDP during the world wars, driven by the destruction of capital stocks and institutions and large losses of life. It is also unclear whether other countries have the necessary underlying information to construct measures of average marginal income-tax rates—the key variable for our analysis of tax effects in the U.S. data.

The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP.

Mr. Barro is a professor of economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Mr. Redlick is a recent Harvard graduate. This op-ed is based on a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September.

Saving a Million Jobs at $787,000 Per Job

2009-09-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

Saving A Million Jobs at $787,000 Per Job

By Bill Frezza

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said Thursday the $787 billion stimulus plan kept one million people working who would otherwise not have had jobs.

You wouldn't let me stand up and make the simplistic claim that these million jobs were saved at a cost of $787,000 per job without challenging the details of my accounting, would you? Surely, reality is more complex.

But when the White House Council of Economic Advisers calculated the number of jobs saved by our government's massive stimulus spending, how is it that they entirely neglected to account for the impact on employment of removing $787 billion dollars from the balance sheet of the private economy?

What kind of single-entry bookkeeping is this? Who are these experts so willing to make glib claims with a straight face? How is it that the press, politicians, and pundits credulously report these claims as facts? And why are those who question whether the emperor is wearing any clothes treated like obstructionist members of some lunatic fringe?

There are those who passionately promote the theory that the government can, on net, create jobs by taking money from one set of citizens and handing it to another. Does this make sense to you? Are these promoters easily fooled, willfully blind, or cunningly smart? Let's take a look under the covers and examine the source of this week's claim.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers is lead by three presidential appointees. Currently, these are Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and Cecilia Rouse.

According to their biographies on the Council web site, these people have never held jobs outside of academia. Their positions at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago were protected by lifetime tenure. Unemployment, to them, is a theory that cannot become a personal reality. What in their backgrounds makes them experts on the subject of job creation?

They never had to meet a payroll. They never had to raise money to fund their businesses from skeptical investors. They never bet their life savings on their own business judgment. They never had to scramble to pay off a banker who called in a loan. They never had to decide whether to take a calculated risk to expand their workforce hoping to take market share from a fierce competitor. They never had to make a judgment call on whether or not to launch an unproven new product. They never had to manage a reduction in force, explaining to employees that their jobs have been eliminated because the tax and regulatory burdens imposed by some new law forced them to cut costs. They never lost business to a government-subsidized competitor whose cost of capital was vastly lower than theirs. They never had to grease the palms of politicians offering constituent services to resolve a bureaucratic hangup caused by the labyrinthine government approvals these selfsame politicians inflict on many businesses. They never had to deal with a missed sales forecast caused by an economy so roiled by capricious and uncertain fiscal policy that frightened customers were holding back orders. They never had to deal with a key supplier that unexpectedly went bankrupt because their source of credit dried up as dollars got sucked out of the commercial economy into government debt. They never had to negotiate with angry landlords after being forced to shut down a business destroyed by spurious mass-manufactured class action lawsuits. They never had to stand up in front of disappointed investors to explain why they lost money that had been entrusted to them. And you can be sure that none of them ever fell on their face and had to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and decide whether it was worth going through all of the joys described above to take another shot at building a business from scratch.

Go read their biographies. Do Christina, Austan, and Cecilia appear to you to be contributing members of the productive economy? Do you see any evidence that they've spent even a fraction of their careers creating jobs? What do you think qualifies these people to work as high level apparatchiks of a governing class determined to manage the businesses of others?

All three have Ph.D.'s from fancy universities. They are prize winning experts in macroeconomics. To have come this far you can bet that they are ambitious, articulate, well connected, and brilliant. Yet when the Council of Economic Advisers did its calculations to determine the number of jobs saved by the stimulus, they shamelessly counted assets and totally ignored liabilities.

People this smart cannot be easily fooled. People so visibly in the public eye cannot remain willfully blind.

No, these people and those that appointed them are cunningly smart. It's we who are the fools for listening to them. Long after these experts return to their sinecures in academia to train another generation of economists on the wisdom of central planning and Keynesian pump priming, it's we and our children and our grandchildren who will be paying the price.

Bill Frezza is a partner at Adams Capital Management, an early-stage venture capital firm. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com. If you would like to subscribe to his weekly column, drop a note to publisher@vereverus.com.

End to Two Grim Fairy Tales

2009-08-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

This sums up exactly how I feel about these two men...

Well done, Mr. Breitbart, well done.

(emphasis is mine)

End to Two Grim Fairy Tales

By Andrew Breitbart

With the deaths of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Michael Jackson, the summer of '09 marked the merciful ends to Camelot and Neverland, iconic American fairy tales whose story lines should have come to merciful ends long ago when their charismatic protagonists took dark and irredeemable turns.

Our country was not built to support blood dynasties or to elevate the rich and famous to a higher ethical or constitutional plain. But through the power of celebrity, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jackson worked the media to twist truths. They manipulated their constituencies and fans to obscure their misdeeds. They played the faithful to confer this manufactured innocence on the rest of us. And, in the end, they placed themselves above the law.

My condolences go to the Kennedy and Jackson families, who should not be stained by the sins of their kin. But there is no time like the present to ensure that those masterfully produced, over-the-top, all-star televised funerals don't serve to canonize talented and charismatic men who failed to own up to their public wrongs and who continued to flaunt the behaviors that got them into trouble.

Given that President Obama's flailing medical care reform movement is in the process of being given new life under the fallen senator's name, our national health now depends on talking honestly. As Mr. Kennedy's political defenders would put it, it's time to speak truth to power.

Forty years have passed since Chappaquiddick. Immediately after the accident, Mr. Kennedy scrambled to organize the best and brightest to save his career, rather than to save the life of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.

Before the facts were gathered, as her family was being prepped for a cash payoff, the Massachusetts voter - in "shock" and "denial," the beginning phases of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's grief cycle - was asked by the senator in a carefully constructed televised speech to look away from his misdeed in the name of his family's recent tragedies.

In a time of grief, the young senator framed his future as a referendum on Camelot. And the media didn't call him on it. The fix was in.

The result was Mr. Kennedy needn't do more than show up for work to atone for his calculated selfishness. Without apology or contrition, Mr. Kennedy crafted a public career in which he spent taxpayers' money - certainly not his own - to make up for his unspeakable behavior.

As long as he toed the liberal line, this trust-fund Robin Hood was protected by the liberal masses and the mainstream media. Hollywood did its job by not putting his story on the big screen.

Doing to the reputations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork what he did to Miss Kopechne only reinforced his value to the Democrat Media Complex as the memory of his brothers' more authentic Camelot began to fade.

A blogger at the Huffington Post went so far as to argue the liberal Miss Kopechne herself would have accepted her death on utilitarian grounds. "Who knows - maybe she'd feel it was worth it," Melissa Lafsky wrote.

No reading of Mr. Jackson's relationship with young boys seems kosher. Perhaps he didn't molest Jordie Chandler, but paying him eight figures to go away certainly should have put an end to the Peter Pan routine. Mr. Jackson was a singer and a dancer but his best instrument was playing the media. As long as he kept up the "We Are the World" routine - noblesse oblige to a beat - the media looked the other way.

In the language of the Democrat Media Complex, speaking ill of Mr. Jackson was racist. Speaking ill of Mr. Kennedy was ideological. Both were protected. Their foes were ignored or castigated.

By playing the media's institutional biases, both Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jackson rose above the law.

While Mr. Jackson spent most of his time self-medicating and collecting children and expensive stuff, the untouchable Mr. Kennedy continued his destructive habits while giving his Massachusetts constituency and American liberalism a bounty of legislative accomplishments.

The supporters of Mr. Kennedy, and to a lesser degree Mr. Jackson, elevate and promote "social justice" and "economic justice" as the highest human goals. Upon the deaths of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Kennedy, the media continue to erase their ugly backgrounds hoping their eternal celebrity can serve these collective ideals.

But the rubes - those of us skeptical of moral relativism, media manipulation and the cult of celebrity - prefer "justice justice."

Only when the "elite" among us begin to see things like us - and not in the unrealistic fairy tales crafted by our liberal betters - will Americans begin to live happily ever after.

Andrew Breitbart is the founder of the news Web site breitbart.com and is co-author of "Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon - the Case Against Celebrity."

Seriously Unserious

2009-08-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation's elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy League Huey Long is not oxymoronic.

Barack Obama in August became a Huey for today, a rabble rouser with a better tailor, an unrumpled and modulated tribune of downtrodden Americans, telling them that opponents of his reform plan—which actually does not yet exist—are fearmongers employing scare tactics. He also told Americans to be afraid, very afraid of health-insurance providers because they are dishonest (and will remain so until there is a "public option" to make them "honest"). And to be afraid, very afraid of pediatricians who unnecessarily extract children's tonsils for monetary rather than medical reasons. And to be afraid, very afraid of doctors generally because so many of them are so rapacious that they prefer lopping off limbs of diabetes patients rather than engaging in lifestyle counseling that for "a pittance" could prevent diabetes.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican whom Democrats hope will lend a patina of bipartisanship to their health legislation whenever it gets written, says that one thing we learned from the cacophonous town halls of August is "that there are many people who are satisfied with their health insurance." Actually, long before this debate began we knew that a large majority of Americans have insurance, and a large majority of that majority are content with their care. That is why the president has become shrill: There is no underlying discontent commensurate with the scale of the changes he is trying to propel.

Another reason that reasonable people are wary of any government plan for a grandiose rearrangement of the health-care sector's 17 percent of the economy is that, regarding grandiosity, the president, after less than eight months in office, is a recidivist. His health-care crusade comes after a $787 billion stimulus (which has effectively made the Energy Department into the nation's largest venture-capital firm, scattering scores of billions of dollars to speculative energy investments) and the semi-nationalization of two car companies. August ended with the unembarrassable administration uttering a $2 trillion "Oops!" by estimating that the 10-year budget-deficit projection is about $9 trillion rather than $7.1 trillion. The supposed means of paying for the president's $1 trillion health-care plan include substantial Medicare cuts that will never happen, and the auction of carbon-emission permits that, instead, would be given away by the Waxman--Markey cap-and-trade legislation the House has sent to the Senate.

That legislation is a particularly lurid illustration of why no serious person nowadays takes seriously Washington's increasingly infantile bandying of numbers. The point of cap-and-trade is to impose a ceiling on the nation's greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions—primarily carbon dioxide. The legislation endorses the goal of holding the global carbon--dioxide level to a maximum of 450 parts per million by 2050. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute do the math. The 450 level is less than the 2030 projected level for all countries other than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 30 developed nations. Which means the global goal would be unreachable even if in 2030 those 30 disappear—if they have zero emissions. Waxman--Markey endorses the goal of reducing all of this nation's GHG emissions 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. In 2005, the United States' carbon-dioxide emissions were 6 billion tons, so an 83 percent -reduction would permit about 1 billion tons—what America's emissions were in 1910, when the population was 92 million and the economy was one twenty-fifth of today's. But by 2050, the population probably will be about 420 million, so per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be 2.4 tons—one quarter of 1910's per capita emissions.

Hayward and Green say that historical data indicate that the last time emissions were that low was 1875. And even before that, before widespread use of fossil fuels, wood burning by Americans may have produced more than 2.4 tons per capita. Today France, which generates approximately 80 percent of its electricity by nuclear power, and Switzerland, which generates most of its electricity by nuclear or hydropower, have per capita emissions of 6.59 and 6.13 tons, respectively.

Obviously Hayward and Green are correct that meeting the 2.4-ton goal "is not going to be seriously attempted." So why do the same politicians who want to radically expand government's control of health care pretend otherwise? Because they are not serious people. Which is why so many Americans are seriously alarmed.

- Newsweek, George Will

The Myth of Free-Market Health Care in America

2009-08-04T16:55:00.001-07:00

Why other Western countries offer no panacea for American woes

Shikha Dalmia | July 30, 2009

ObamaCare is in retreat. That much was clear the moment the president started springing B-grade Hollywood references to "blue pills and red pills" in its defense during his news conference last week. But before ObamaCare can be beaten back decisively, its critics need to answer this question: How did his plan for a government takeover of roughly a fifth of the U.S. economy get this far in the first place?

The answer is not that Democrats have a lock on Washington right now—although they do. Nor that Republicans are intellectually bereft—although they are. The answer is that both ObamaCare's supporters and opponents believe that—unlike Europe—America has something called a free market health care system. So long as this myth holds sway, it will be exceedingly difficult to prescribe free market fixes to America's health care woes—or, conversely, end the lure of big government remedies.

The fact of the matter is that America's health care system is like a free market in the same way that Madonna is like a virgin—i.e. in fiction only. If anything, the U.S. system has many more similarities than differences with France and Germany. The only big outlier among European nations is England, which, even in a post-communist world, has managed the impressive feat of hanging on to a socialized, single-payer model. This means that the U.K. government doesn't just pay for medical services but actually owns and operates the hospitals that provide them. English doctors are government employees!

But apart from England, most European countries have a public-private blend, not unlike what we have in the U.S.

The major difference between America and Europe of course is that America does not guarantee universal health insurance whereas Europe does. But this is not as big a deal as it might seem. Uncle Sam, along with state governments, still picks up nearly half of the country's $2.5 trillion annual health care tab.

More importantly, contrary to popular mythology, America does offer public care of sorts. It directly covers about a third of all Americans through Medicare (the public program for the elderly) and Medicaid (the public program for the poor). But it also indirectly covers the uninsured by—at least in part—paying for their emergency care. In effect, anyone in America who does not have private insurance is on the government dole in one way or another.

This is not radically different from France, where the government offers everyone basic public coverage, of course—but a whopping 90% of the French also buy supplemental private insurance to help pay for the 20% to 40% of their tab that the public plan doesn't cover.

Meanwhile, in Germany, about 12.5% of Germans who are civil employees or above a certain income opt out of the public system altogether and rely solely on private coverage—even though they know it is well nigh impossible to return to the public system once they switch. And more Germans likely would go private if they were not legally banned from doing so.

The most striking similarity between America, France and Germany, however, is the model of "insurance" upon which their health care systems are based. In other insurance markets, the more coverage you want, the more you have to pay for it. Consider auto insurance, for instance. If you want everything—from oil changes to collision protection—you'd have to pay more than someone who wants just basic collision protection. That's not how it works in health care.

For the same flat fee—regardless of whether it is paid for primarily through taxes as in France and Germany or through lost wages as in America—patients in all three countries effectively get an ATM card on which they can expense everything (barring co-pays) regardless of what the final tab adds up to. (Catastrophic coverage plans are available in America, but the market is extremely limited for a number of reasons, including the fact that most states have issued Patients Bill of Rights mandating all kinds of fancy benefits even in basic plans.)

Thus, in neither country do patients have much incentive to restrain consumption or shop for cheaper providers. In America and Germany, patients don't even know how much most medical services cost. In France, patients know the prices because they have to pay up front and get reimbursed by their insurer later—a lame attempt to ensure some price consciousness. But since there is no cap on the reimbursed amount, the French sometimes shop for doctors based on such things as office decor rather than prices, according to a study by David Green and Benedict Irvine, researchers at Civitas, a London-based think tank. (Green and Irvine reported this as a good thing.)

So what are the consequences of this "insurance" model and how are the three countries coping with it? America, as Obama continuously reminds us, spends 16% of its gross domestic product on health care—the highest percentage in the world. If current trends persist, in 75 years health care will consume about 50% of the GDP—and all of the federal budget. But France is not doing a whole lot better. Its health care system is the third most expensive in the world with over 11% of its GDP going toward health care—nearly three times more than the amount in 1960. The French fork over more than 20% of their income in taxes for public coverage (and another 2.5% to purchase supplemental private coverage)—yet their public program suffers from chronic deficits. Germany, similarly, spends about 11% of its GDP on health care with Germans contributing more than 15% of their income toward buying health care.

If France and Germany are not spending even more on health care, one big reason is rationing. Universal health care advocates pretend that there is no rationing in France and Germany because these countries don't have long waiting lines for MRIs, surgical procedures and other medical services as in England and Canada. And patients have more or less unrestricted access to specialists.

But it is unclear how long this will last. Struggling with exploding costs, the French government has tried several times—only to back off in the face of a public outcry—to prod doctors into using only standardized treatments. In 1994, it started imposing fines of up to roughly $4,000 on doctors who deviated from "mandatory practice guidelines." It switched from this "sticks" to a "carrots" approach four years later, and tried handing bonuses to doctors who adhered to the guidelines.

Meanwhile, in Germany, "sickness funds"—the equivalent of insurance companies—have imposed strict budgets on doctors for prescription drugs. Doctors who exceed their cap are simply denied reimbursement, something that forces them to prescribe less effective invasive procedures for problems that would have been better treated with drugs. But the most potent form of rationing in France and Germany—and indeed much of Europe—is not overt but covert: delayed access to cutting-edge drugs and therapies that become available to American patients years in advance.

The point is that there is no health care model, whether privately or publicly financed, that can offer unlimited access to medical services while containing costs. Ultimately, such a model arrives at a crossroads where it has to either limit access in an arbitrary way or face uncontrolled cost increases. France and Germany, which are mostly publicly funded, are increasingly marching down the first road. America, which is half publicly and half privately funded, has so far taken the second path. Should America offer even more people such unlimited access through universal coverage, it too will end up rationing care or facing national bankruptcy.

The only sustainable system that avoids this Hobson's choice is one that is based on a genuine free market in which there is some connection between what patients pay for coverage and the services they receive. That is emphatically not what America or any Western country has today. Looking to these countries for solutions, as Obama and other advocates of universal health coverage are doing, will lead to false diagnoses and false cures.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation and a columnist at Forbes. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

Gay Marriage, Democracy, and the Courts

2009-08-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

The culture war will never end if judges invalidate the choices of voters.

By ROBERT P. GEORGE

We are in the midst of a showdown over the legal definition of marriage. Though some state courts have interfered, the battle is mainly being fought in referenda around the country, where “same-sex marriage” has uniformly been rejected, and in legislatures, where some states have adopted it. It’s a raucous battle, but democracy is working.

Now the fight may head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Following California’s Proposition 8, which restored the historic definition of marriage in that state as the union of husband and wife, a federal lawsuit has been filed to invalidate traditional marriage laws.

It would be disastrous for the justices to do so. They would repeat the error in Roe v. Wade: namely, trying to remove a morally charged policy issue from the forums of democratic deliberation and resolve it according to their personal lights.

Even many supporters of legal abortion now consider Roe a mistake. Lacking any basis in the text, logic or original understanding of the Constitution, the decision became a symbol of the judicial usurpation of authority vested in the people and their representatives. It sent the message that judges need not be impartial umpires—as both John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor say they should be—but that judges can impose their policy preferences under the pretext of enforcing constitutional guarantees.

By short-circuiting the democratic process, Roe inflamed the culture war that has divided our nation and polarized our politics. Abortion, which the Court purported to settle in 1973, remains the most unsettled issue in American politics—and the most unsettling. Another Roe would deepen the culture war and prolong it indefinitely.

Some insist that the Supreme Court must invalidate traditional marriage laws because “rights” are at stake. But as in Roe, they are forced to peddle a strained and contentious reading of the Constitution—one whose dubiousness would undermine any ruling’s legitimacy.

Lawyers challenging traditional marriage laws liken their cause to Loving v. Virginia (which invalidated laws against interracial marriages), insinuating that conjugal-marriage supporters are bigots. This is ludicrous and offensive, and no one should hesitate to say so.

The definition of marriage was not at stake in Loving. Everyone agreed that interracial marriages were marriages. Racists just wanted to ban them as part of the evil regime of white supremacy that the equal protection clause was designed to destroy.

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

Of course, marital intercourse often does produce babies, and marriage is the form of relationship that is uniquely apt for childrearing (which is why, unlike baptisms and bar mitzvahs, it is a matter of vital public concern). But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation. This explains why our law has historically permitted annulment of marriage for non-consummation, but not for infertility; and why acts of sodomy, even between legally wed spouses, have never been recognized as consummating marriages.

Only this understanding makes sense of all the norms—annulability for non-consummation, the pledge of permanence, monogamy, sexual exclusivity—that shape marriage as we know it and that our law reflects. And only this view can explain why the state should regulate marriage (as opposed to ordinary friendships) at all—to make it more likely that, wherever possible, children are reared in the context of the bond between the parents whose sexual union gave them life.

If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.

A veneer of sentiment may prevent these norms from collapsing—but only temporarily. The marriage culture, already wounded by widespread divorce, nonmarital cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing will fare no better than it has in those European societies that were in the vanguard of sexual “enlightenment.” And the primary victims of a weakened marriage culture are always children and those in the poorest, most vulnerable sectors of society.

Candid and clear-thinking advocates of redefining marriage recognize that doing so entails abandoning norms such as monogamy. In a 2006 statement entitled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” over 300 lesbian, gay, and allied activists, educators, lawyers, and community organizers—including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and prominent Yale, Columbia and Georgetown professors—call for legally recognizing multiple sex partner (“polyamorous”) relationships. Their logic is unassailable once the historic definition of marriage is overthrown.

Is this a red herring? This week’s Newsweek reports more than 500,000 polyamorous households in the U.S.

So, before judging whether traditional marriage laws should be junked, we must decide what marriage is. It is this crucial and logically prior question that some want to shuffle off stage.

Because marriage has already been deeply wounded, some say that redefining it will do no additional harm. I disagree. We should strengthen, not redefine, marriage. But whatever one’s view, surely it is the people, not the courts, who should debate and decide. For reasons of both principle and prudence, the issue should be settled by democratic means, not by what Justice Byron White, in his dissent in Roe, called an “act of raw judicial power.”

Mr. George is professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and founder of the American Principles Project (www.americanprinciplesproject.org).

Why Taxing the Rich makes no Sense

2009-07-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

...For the record, this guy wrote a book titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy"... this goes beyond simple "conservative vs. liberal" rhetoric.

A Surtax On The Top 1%

Bruce Bartlett, 07.31.09, 12:00 AM EDT

This is a very bad way to pay for health care reform.

It seems almost certain at this point that whatever health reform legislation is ultimately enacted by Congress, its principal funding will come from a surtax on the top 1% or so of taxpayers. This is a very bad idea for reasons that have little to do with the economic effects of taxation.

It's wrong in principle to enact a government program with broad benefits that is so narrowly funded. It ensures that the financing of health reform will be precarious and its political support will rest on a weak foundation. This will make it easier for a future conservative government to gut the program or abolish it altogether as was done with welfare in 1996.

For more than 200 years, economists have generally accepted Adam Smith's basic principles of taxation. The first and most important is this: "The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government ... in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state."

This has come to be called "the benefit principle"--that there should be a linkage between the taxes one pays and the benefits one receives from government. Of course, some taxes will necessarily fund programs for which no direct benefit exists--national defense being the classic example--and some spending will aid those who lack the ability to pay. But that still leaves a lot of government programs that can be financed largely by their beneficiaries.

The best examples of the benefit principle in action are Social Security and Medicare, which are financed by payroll taxes dedicated solely to financing those programs. This linkage has enormous virtues, both political and economic. Economically, the burden of the payroll tax is significantly reduced because the vast majority of workers know they will get back every penny they pay plus a significant return. Thus they tend to view the payroll tax less as a tax and more like the deductions from their pay for a 401(k) or health insurance. Rather than discourage work effort, the payroll tax actually reinforces it.

Politically, the payroll tax has made Social Security virtually invulnerable to attack, as we saw just recently when George W. Bush was completely unsuccessful in generating support for privatizing a portion of Social Security. This is precisely why Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted on such a conservative financing mechanism even though many of his advisers argued strenuously in favor of general revenue financing, which would have been much more progressive.

As Roosevelt told one of those advisors, Luther Gulick, "I guess you're right on the economics. ... We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren't a matter of economics, they're straight politics."

Another good example of the benefit principle at work is the gasoline tax. Since the roads are primarily used by drivers, it's appropriate that they pay the bulk of the cost of construction and maintenance. At the state and local level many taxes are largely paid by those who benefit from them. According to a National Conference of State Legislatures study, about a fourth of all state taxes are earmarked for particular programs. At the local level, property taxes are the principal funding source for education, police and fire protection--services that largely accrue to homeowners.

There are other problems as well in financing health reform with a surtax on the rich. One is that health spending is likely to rise much faster than revenue from the surtax. The Congressional Budget Office has warned about this problem, noting that its own estimate of the health legislation significantly understates the long-run cost.

That is because CBO doesn't estimate program costs out more than 10 years due to unreliability past that point. Unfortunately, Congress is able to use this constraint to game the system. It often phases in new programs very slowly so that their cost is low in the early years, with the true cost only reflected in the out-year estimates.

In the case of the House bill, the 10-year cost is a little more than $1 trillion, implying a cost of $100 billion per year. In fact, spending in the first three years is virtually zero. By the 10th year spending will be more than $200 billion and rising at 8% per year. This suggests that the cost of health reform will be more than three times greater in the second decade after enactment than the first.

However, CBO notes that revenue from the surtax is not likely to rise faster than the economy as a whole or about 5% per year. As a consequence, relative to current law, "the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window."

This problem will be worse if the wealthy are more aggressive in their use of tax planning than CBO thinks. As I noted in a previous column, self-incorporation alone would reduce a wealthy person's marginal tax rate to 35% from a proposed 45%. Economist Robert Carroll of the Tax Foundation thinks revenue from the surtax will probably be 40% less than CBO is estimating.

Former Clinton Treasury economist Len Burman notes a basic unfairness in the way the surtax is calculated. Normally, taxes are assessed on net income, but the surtax will be assessed on adjusted gross income, thus depriving rich people of perfectly legitimate business deductions. In addition, the use of AGI as a tax base will raise the maximum tax on capital gains and dividends above the 20% rate proposed by Barack Obama in his budget.

Burman, who has no ideological qualms about raising taxes on the rich, thinks this is a "stupid" way of raising new revenue since we have the Alternative Minimum Tax that already takes away many deductions from the rich, such as that for state and local taxes. The result, Burman says, will be to make the income tax system "even less coherent than it is now."

Economist Bill Gale of the liberal Brookings Institution also objects to using a surtax to pay for health reform. If we are to raise income taxes, he thinks it should be for deficit reduction, not to finance additional spending. Like most economists, Gale thinks it is insane for Congress to do health reform without touching the vast tax subsidy for health insurance that has created many of the problems it is trying to fix.

Finally, as a political matter, Democrats need to ask themselves whether they really want to become known once again as the party of class warfare. Mark Penn, who was Bill Clinton's pollster, has warned that this could drive wealthy voters, who shifted heavily toward the Democrats between 2004 and 2008, back into the arms of the Republicans. (According to exit polls, only 36% of voters making more than $200,000 voted for John Kerry in 2004; 52% voted for Obama in 2008.

Penn says that Clinton's 1993 increase in the top tax rate was "a major factor" in the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994. In 1995, Clinton himself admitted publicly that he raised taxes "too much" when he boosted the top rate to 39.6% from 31%.

I continue to believe that if we are to expand health insurance for the uninsured, it should be with a dedicated funding source that is largely financed by the beneficiaries. I think a value added tax would be the best way to do this, but there are certainly other alternatives that can be considered, such as raising the payroll tax. The worst option would be a surtax on just 1% of taxpayers.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author ofReaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.

Translating Obamacare into Plain English

2009-07-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

By Bill Frezza

Forget for a moment whether you believe healthcare is an inalienable right like freedom of speech or a service one purchases like auto repair. Do you prefer honestly debating the issue or hiding behind Orwellian doublespeak?

Do you support open and transparent deliberation or do you believe that "change" justifies the use of misinformation, intimidation, and obfuscation?

Are you thinking through the likely consequences of the detailed healthcare "reforms" being proposed or are you more invested in making sure that your tribe - be it Red or Blue - "wins" this particular legislative fight?

Do the questions above matter or is your remedy for one screwed up presidency piling on another one?
How happy were you when our last President bamboozled the country into a hasty war in search of non-existent "weapons of mass destruction?" Were you shocked that he had no plan to secure the peace after achieving military victory? Once entangled, were you surprised that it took years of blood and treasure to set things right?

Then why are you comfortable watching this President stampede the country into the remodeling of 18% of our economy in search of non-existent "savings" that cannot possibly come from expanding the menu of government entitlements? Will you feign surprise when it becomes undeniable that Congress has no idea how to pay for the new benefits being proposed?

Don't get me wrong. Maybe a majority of Americans really do want every citizen to be taken care of according to his needs while "the rich" are forced to pick up the tab according to their ability. Many other countries work that way, although the definition of "rich" has a way of expanding as quickly as the entitlements. And maybe we do want wise central planners telling our doctors how to treat us. But before we enshrine this into law, doesn't it make sense to have an honest debate?

Here is how my dictionary defines "insurance."

Insurance - coverage by a contract binding a party to indemnify another against specified loss in return for premiums paid.

Compare this to the definition of the word "welfare."

Welfare - financial or other assistance to an individual or family from a city, state, or national government.

As Congress attempts to remake the healthcare industry, which are we talking about - insurance or welfare?

Health insurance - like fire insurance and life insurance - is a financial product sold by underwriters who offer a menu of services with prices based on an actuarial analysis of risk. The average premium paid for coverage has to be higher than the average payout for covered services or else the underwriter goes broke. Health insurance does not magically deliver "free benefits." Even if coverage comes through your employer, the premiums paid could have otherwise gone into your paycheck. Plans vary from high deductible coverage of only the most severe catastrophes to gold plated reimbursement for every sneeze and sniffle. Medical services are not "rationed" by insurance companies, they are contractually provided as specified in the product you or your employer buys. Some employers buy fancy plans and others cheap out depending on what kind of employees they need to attract.

Welfare is the ultimate in "free benefits." It is run on a pay-as-you-go basis. Plans are structured by community activists, not actuaries. Payouts are usually based on need, although middle class welfare programs are often the most expensive. Of course welfare has to be rationed because there is no price mechanism to balance supply and demand, no need to generate profits, and the provider can't go out of business - although California is testing that proposition. Rationing has nothing to do with what recipients "deserve," it comes from the fact that government treasuries are not infinite.

Once we agree to speak plain English, is it so disastrous to take the time to carefully consider what we're getting into? Do we really want Congress to pass a 1,000 page trillion dollar medical welfare bill that guarantees every American free healthcare regardless of their ability to pay? Are we willing to let recession-battered Federal and State governments go deeper into debt to support this? Are we ready to turn most doctors into civil servants so we can set their salaries? And are we prepared to raise everyone's taxes a little bit today and a lot tomorrow to pay for it all?

If you are a current recipient of medical welfare - namely Medicare or Medicaid - are you willing to share your benefits by having a fixed amount of services spread over an additional 45 million people? Please don't pretend that Medicare is not welfare, we agreed to speak English. If Medicare were really "insurance" with premiums set by actuaries, then why do both tribes agree it is destined for bankruptcy? You say it's because the nation is aging? Insurance companies don't go broke when their customer base grows, they make more money. And if national aging is the cause of Medicare's ultimate bankruptcy, how are things going to be improved by adding another 45 million people to the rolls who can't even afford bare-bones insurance?

Telling the truth is fundamental to running a democracy. Calling things what they are is integral to telling the truth. We'd better get started if we hope to pass policies that don't themselves need to be "reformed" before the ink is dry.

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

2009-05-20T09:43:00.001-07:00

By ARTHUR LAFFER and STEPHEN MOORE

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Chad Crowe

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-authored a famous study in 1998 called "Can State Taxes Redistribute Income?" This should be required reading for today's state legislators. It concludes: "Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will cause gross wages to adjust. . . . A more progressive tax thus induces firms to hire fewer high skilled employees and to hire more low skilled employees."

More recently, Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado last year examined many factors that explain why some states grew richer than others from 1964 to 2004 and found "a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on state economic growth." In other words, soaking the rich doesn't work. To the contrary, middle-class workers end up taking the hit.

Finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates. Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

This result was all the more remarkable given that these were years when the stock market boomed and Wall Street gains were in the trillions of dollars. Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect. New Jersey now has one of the largest budget deficits in the nation.

We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Or consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves.

One last point: States aren't simply competing with each other. As Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently told us, "Our state is competing with Germany, France, Japan and China for business. We'd better have a pro-growth tax system or those American jobs will be out-sourced." Gov. Perry and Texas have the jobs and prosperity model exactly right. Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and we hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota and New York realize this before it's too late.

Mr. Laffer is president of Laffer Associates. Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. They are co-authors of "Rich States, Poor States" (American Legislative Exchange Council, 2009).

Lady Justice is Blind, not "Empathetic"

2009-05-04T15:58:00.001-07:00

Lady Justice is Blind, Not 'Empathetic'

By Carol Platt Liebau

Preparing to fill the Supreme Court seat soon to be vacated by David Souter, President Obama has announced that he wants a judge with "empathy." According to the President, his nominee must understand "justice" to be "about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation."

As a former constitutional law professor, surely the President understands that possessing "empathy" in the abstract is an absolutely meaningless criterion for a judge. When a President emphasizes the importance of "empathy," the more proper question becomes not whether a particular judge has empathy, but rather, for whom? After all, empathizing with a woman who wants a late-term abortion necessitates a certain lack of empathy for her unborn baby. Empathy for accused criminals can feel like something very different to their victims.

In fact, by invoking a comfortably-undefined "empathy" as the indispensable quality in a justice, President Obama is deftly deploying warm, fuzzy rhetoric to signal that he intends to select a justice with a very specific left-wing policy agenda. Looking for a nominee who is concerned about whether people "can make a living and care for their families" means he is seeking a judge who will side with unions or plaintiffs against businesses. Nominating a jurist who worries about whether people "feel safe in their homes" means finding a person who will greet with skepticism the claims of law enforcement in search and seizure (or national security) cases. And selecting a judge pledged to make people feel "welcome in their own nation" means naming a justice with the politically correct views on hot button social issues ranging from gay marriage to affirmative action to immigration to removing faith from the public square.

Barack Obama won the election fair and square, so there would be no grounds for objection if he were listing the criteria for a nominee to a policy-making position. But he isn't. He is selecting a jurist, and therefore is supposed to be seeking someone who will uphold the rule of law by deciding cases impartially, based only on the law and the facts before him - and nothing else.

Instead, Obama wants a policymaker sitting on the Supreme Court - in fact, a super-lawmaker on steroids. He's looking for a judge willing to engage in an enterprise that has nothing to do with the actual process of adjudication - that is, interpreting the laws that have been passed by a legislature and signed by an executive. Rather, Obama's ideal nominee will eagerly seek to participate in the inherently political enterprise of deciding cases based - not on the Constitution and laws - but on whether s/he personally feels one particular outcome would be preferable to another. That's known as results-oriented jurisprudence. And it's dangerous.

The kind of judging the President approves is completely subjective. Justices pluck a phrase from the Constitution and imbue it with a new, hitherto- unimagined meaning in order to reach a liberal result consistent with their own personal political or social sympathies. By such formulations, the concept of "liberty" can be expanded at a Justice's own whim to authorize constitutional protection for everything from assorted abortion rights to gay sex (as, ironically, Reagan nominee Anthony Kennedy has done over the years). And in the future, if President Obama's justice has anything to say about it, "liberty" will be extended even farther to serve as a rationale for imposing gay marriage, eliminating restrictions on partial birth abortion, and validating any other trend du jour that the left embraces.

Eventually, should a Republican president start nominating justices based primarily on their "empathy," surely even liberals will realize that it is dangerous to install a judiciary that relies on feeling, rather than reason, as the indispensable guide to judicial decision making. After all, a judge's empathy extends most predictably to parties to whom s/he relates or with whom s/he sympathizes personally or politically. As such, relying on "empathy" undermines citizens' confidence that all will be equal before the bar of justice - and that adjudication itself will be impartial. That assurance is essential for a free people to remain free.

There is a reason that Lady Justice wears a blindfold. Justice is supposed to be blind to the race, gender, finances, politics - and every other "empathy"-eliciting - characteristic of those who seek it in good faith. Apparently, it's too much to hope that figuratively, at least, President Obama's justice will be, too.

Andrew Breitbart is a Great American

2009-05-01T14:32:00.001-07:00

Why the pass fellas?

Hypocrisy rears its ugly head. To reiterate Breitbart's essential question, "Why are gay-activists giving Obama, Biden, Hispanics, and Blacks a free pass when it comes to gay-marriage, but crucifying the religious right?"

I'll give you a hint... there is no good reason. Read on and make your own decision.

"Greetings, from a poolside cabana at a trendy boutique hotel in Santa Monica. Oh, how I love these overpriced overnight stays. The sleek designs. The ambient music. The uniformly attractive and stylishly dressed young staffs. The plush beds with sheets of an absurdly high thread count. Weird faucets and weirder sinks. I bask in the attention to detail. W is my favorite letter. Philippe Starck is a personal hero.

As a realist, I've built into my mindset that the majority heterosexual population is less than exclusively responsible for creating this and countless other high-end consumer and artistic experiences. Plus, I have a ton of wonderful gay friends - even ones "married" and with children. If gay activists created "A Day Without a Gay" (as they promoted Dec. 10 of last year), I'd be the first to cry "uncle" - even before Cher. So, accordingly, I make philosophical and political accommodations. I'm - as the MTV generation says - "gay-friendly."

But lately, color me "gay perturbed." "Gay-friendly," a term once manifestly redundant, now seems a glaring contradiction.

The gay political-activist community - in my view, a small minority of left-wing agitators acting on behalf of the whole - has been on a binge of bad public behavior, and I'm not referring to the bare-buttocked-chaps look and inappropriately placed sparklers during "pride" parades.

The Mormon community was recently targeted for its support of Proposition 8, the pro-traditional-marriage initiative in California. Donors to the cause were isolated and even exposed on online maps. Businesses were targeted. People lost their jobs.

The latest high-profile act on behalf of the "community" came from the Miss USA pageant. Perez Hilton, the wildly popular Internet gossip and celebrity hit man, somehow got himself placed as a judge of female beauty at the Donald Trump-sponsored event. Not to be judgmental, but the apprentice behind that hire should be fired. But I digress.

At the point in the pageant when the young lovelies are asked questions by those who pick the winners, the flamboyantly gay man (who by day pries into the private lives of stars and scrawls human DNA-spewing phalli under the faces of those he doesn't like) asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, whether she approved of gay marriage.

It was a setup.

Miss Prejean is a student at San Diego Christian College - the kind of place activist gay leftists are at war with, where Christians preach what they practice.

"Out of all the topics I studied up on, I dreaded that one: I prayed I would not be asked about gay marriage. If I had any other question, I know I would have won," she told Fox News.

Perez Hilton, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., affirmed Miss California's fear: "She lost it because of that question. She was definitely the front-runner before that." Miss Prejean received zero points from Perez Hilton, who put her on the spot defending her faith. She finished in second place.

On display at the Miss USA event was the activist left's pageant of selective bullying, a concerted strategy to go after low-hanging fruit like Mormons. But the left leaves off its hit list members in good standing of its normal coalition - its "rainbow" coalition. In California, one of the gayest places on the map, blacks and Hispanics - who disproportionately disapprove of same-sex marriage - get a stunning pass from outraged proponents of gay marriage.

Since 9/11, the highly organized gay left has also been deafeningly silent on Islam's anti-modern approach to homosexuality - let alone same-sex unions. The mullahs in Iran somehow get a major pass while the director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento is targeted for ruin. This contradiction is not subtle. Indeed, it's obvious and pathetic.

In fact, in the beauty contest that was the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama - the left's hand-tailored candidate and an icon of "hope" in the gay community - like his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., shares Miss California's stance on gay marriage.

"I'm a Christian," Mr. Obama told the Chicago Tribune. "And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

Why the pass, fellas?

I fear the vicious and hypocritical path that the activist gay left is headed on will eventually be met with a backlash. If it already hasn't. Activism goes both ways and somehow the majority has a way of having its say. Unless the gay community polices itself better and registers its displeasure against these pitiful and selective acts of political retribution, many tolerant Americans who hold the same beliefs on marriage as Mr. Obama and the Dalai Lama are going to begin to register their displeasure at the voting booth and through consumer boycotts against those who employ or support the thuggish tactics of Perez Hilton and his ilk.

"A Day Without a Gay" may become a prolonged and mostly unspoken reality. Trust me, I don't want to throw out all my John Waters DVDs. But if push comes to shove, and if the bullying continues, I'm more than willing to stay at a Ramada."

-Andrew Breitbart

Word up to my brother Vaclav

2009-05-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus

PRAGUE -- I am surprised at how so many people nowadays in Europe, the United States and elsewhere have come to support policies underpinned by hysteria over global warming, particularly cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for "green" energy sources.

I am convinced that this is a misguided strategy -- not only because of the uncertainty about the dangers that global warming might pose, but also because of the certainty of the damage that these proposed policies aimed at mitigation will impose.

I was invited to address this issue at a recent conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. My audience included business leaders who hoped to profit from cap-and-trade policies, subsidies for renewable energy and "green" jobs. My advice to them was to not get caught up in the hysteria.

Europe is several years ahead of the US in implementing policies intended to mitigate global warming. All of the European Union's member countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and adopted a wide range of policies to lower their emissions and meet their Kyoto targets.

These policies include a cap-and-trade initiative known as the Emissions Trading Scheme, steep fuel taxes and ambitious programs to build windmills and other renewable energy projects. These policies were undertaken at a time when the EU economy was doing well and -- one hopes -- with full knowledge that they would have significant costs.

With the global financial crisis and the sudden economic downturn, two things are becoming clear. First, it will be difficult to afford these expensive new sources of energy. Second, energy rationing policies, like cap-and-trade, will be a permanent drag on economic activity. Ironically, emissions have not decreased as a result of these policies, but are doing so now as the world economy moves into recession.

This is not a surprise to someone like me, having been actively involved in my country's transition from communism to a free society and market economy. The old, outmoded heavy industries that were the pride of our Communist regime were shut down -- practically overnight -- because they could not survive the opening of the economy. The result was a dramatic decline in CO2 emissions.

The secret behind the cut in emissions was economic decline. As the economies of the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries were rebuilt and began to grow again, emissions have naturally started to increase. It should be clear to everyone that there is a very strong correlation between economic growth and energy use.

So I am amazed to see people going along with the currently fashionable political argument that policies like cap-and-trade, government mandates and subsidies for renewable energy can actually benefit an economy. It is claimed that the government, working together with business, will create "a new energy economy," that the businesses involved will profit and that everyone will be better off.

This is a fantasy. Cap-and-trade can only work by raising energy prices. Consumers who are forced to pay higher prices for energy will have less money to spend on other things. While the individual companies that provide the higher-priced "green" energy may do well, the net economic effect will be negative.

It is necessary to look at the bigger picture. Profits can be made when energy is rationed or subsidized, but only within an economy operating at lower, or even negative, growth rates. This means that over the longer term, everyone will be competing for a piece of a pie that is smaller than it would have been without energy rationing.

This does not auger well either for growth or for working our way out of today's crisis.

Václav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic, which holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers of the European Union until June 2009. He is the author of "Blue Planet in Green Shackles -- What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?"

Morality and Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

2009-04-28T10:08:00.001-07:00

Absolutely fabulous article.

Well written, well reasoned.

As Mr. Wehner points out, coercive interrogation techniques are not inherently morally abhorrent. It's not self-evident that waterboarding (or other interrogation technique) is wrong for the very simple fact that anyone would struggle to decide whether or not to perform it if lives (tens, hundreds, maybe thousands) hung in the balance. "Self-evident" means that it would need no argument. It would be perfectly clear on its own. You would be hard-pressed to compare waterboarding with, say, rape, on the morality heirarchy.

Enough of me. Read the article

"The issue of the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques involve several inter-related questions.

There is, first of all, the matter of morality. Critics of enhanced interrogation techniques have taken to saying that Americans don’t torture, period – meaning in this instance that we do not engage in coercive interrogation techniques ranging from sleep deprivation to prolonged loud noise and/or bright lights to waterboarding. Anyone who holds the opposite view is a moral cretin and guilty of “arrant inhumanity.” Or so the argument goes.

But this posture begins to come apart under examination. For one thing, the issue of “torture” itself needs to be put in a moral context and on a moral continuum. Waterboarding is a very nasty technique for sure – but it is considerably different (particularly in the manner administered by the CIA) than, say, mutilation with electric drills, rape, splitting knees, or forcing a terrorist to watch his children suffer and die in order to try to elicit information from him. Waterboarding is a technique that has been routinely used in the training of some U.S. military personnel – and which the journalist Christopher Hitchens endured. I certainly wouldn’t want to undergo waterboarding – but while a very harsh technique, it is one that was applied in part because it would do far less damage to a person than other techniques. It is also surely relevant that waterboarding was not used randomly and promiscuously, but rather on three known terrorists. And of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program, according to Michael Hayden, President Bush’s last CIA director, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey – and of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in the memos on enhanced interrogation.

Morality also involves balancing ends and means. It is therefore relevant to take into account the possible benefits from the act of coercive interrogation techniques. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, during a 2004 hearing on the subject of torture, put it this way. “There are times when we all get into high dudgeon” on this matter, Schumer said, but that we “ought to be reasonable about this.” He then added this:

I think there are probably very few people in this [Congressional hearing] room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. Take the hypothetical: if we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believe that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most Senators, maybe all, would do what you have to do. So it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the fox hole, it’s a very different deal. And I respect, I think we all respect the fact that the President’s in the fox-hole every day. So he can hardly be blamed for asking you, or his White House counsel or the Department of Defense, to figure out when it comes to torture, what the law allows and when the law allows it, and what there is permission to do.

Senator Schumer noted, “We certainly don’t want torture to be used willy-nilly… But we also don’t want the situation like I mentioned in Chicago to preclude it.”

Apropos of Schumer’s comments, critics of enhanced interrogation techniques need to wrestle with a set of questions they like to avoid: if you knew using waterboarding against a known terrorist may well elicit information that would stop a massive attack on an American city, would you still insist it never be used? Do you oppose the use of waterboarding if it would save a thousand innocent lives? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? What exactly is the point, if any, at which you believe waterboarding might be justified? I simply don’t accept that those who answer “never” are taking a morally superior stand to those who answer “sometimes, in extremely rare circumstances and in very limited cases.”

Let’s consider the more common cases that don’t involve a “ticking time bomb scenario.” How might you react if you found yourself in government in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, in which you knew al Qaeda was responsible for the strike and knew it was intent on doing far more damage to America. You captured a high-value terrorist who, if you elicit information from him, might well provide you with details that are essential to preventing a future attack and mass death. You are told enhanced interrogation techniques, if employed properly and under guidance, will work; and will probably save many thousands of innocent lives. In that case many people would, I think, (reluctantly) give the green light to coercive techniques – which is exactly what Congress, including Democratic Members of Congress, did.

On the substantive level, there is the question of the efficacy of enhanced interrogation techniques. There is an intense debate surrounding this matter, but we can certainly say that respected members of the intelligence world insist that innocent Americans are today alive because we employed a set of coercive interrogation techniques. According to Hayden and Mukasey, “As late as 2006, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of Al Qaeda came from those interrogations.” Former CIA Director George Tenet said, “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than [what] the FBI, the [CIA], and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.” And former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has said, “We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.”

Stuart Taylor, the politically moderate and intellectually honest columnist for National Journal, put it this way:

The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary. The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. . . . But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives — and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more.

It seems unlikely that asking a jihadist his surname, first name and rank, date of birth, army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information – which is what the Geneva Conventions say ought to apply to prisoners of war but not, historically, to unlawful enemy combatants – would elicit as much information as coercive interrogation techniques. Dennis Blair, Obama's national intelligence director, admitted to his staff that “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding” of al Qaeda. (Once Blair’s memo was revealed, he added this caveat: “There is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.") And thanks to Taylor, we know that in 2002 the current Attorney General, Eric Holder, said that terrorists are not "entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention" and that we need to "find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located."

I am not one who believes that there is no cost to pursuing enhanced interrogation techniques. In debating policies, especially those that reach the president, there are costs and benefits to consider. So it’s certainly possible that our employment of enhanced interrogation techniques was used as a recruitment tool for militant jihadists; if so, that needs to be weighed against the plots you break up and the innocent lives you save. Also, many members of the military oppose waterboarding because they feel it stains the reputation of America and endangers our own servicemen and women (though it’s hard to accept the argument that al Qaeda would be less sadistic if we had not used coercive interrogation techniques; after all, they were beheading innocent people even before it was known the U.S. used water-boarding). These are not silly objections. Beyond that, most of us instinctively pull back from using harsh interrogation techniques and certainly torture. Given the double-obligation of morality and law, we should begin with the presumption that waterboarding shouldn’t be utilized and then set a very high bar for anyone who would argue that it might be acceptable in very limited instances.

But that is, in fact, what seems to have occurred. And so I do not accept for a moment that the last eight years constitute a “dark chapter” in our history. Quite the opposite. Michael Gerson points out that our history is replete with actions – the firebombing of Dresden, dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and (I would add) Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in World War II – which certainly raise more morally problematic issues than what the Bush Administration pursued.

There are of course serious-minded critics of enhanced interrogation techniques. But to pretend, as some critics do, that the morality of this issue is self-evident and that waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques are obviously unacceptable and something for which our nation should be ashamed is, in my judgment, not only wrong but irresponsible. When a nation is engaged in war, you hope to find in government sober people who are able to weigh competing moral goods and who take seriously their obligation to protect our nation. They may not get everything right at the time – hardly anyone does in the heat of the moment – but they should not have to face a lynch mob years after the fact (especially those in the lynch mob who blessed the activities at the time they were being used). The American public, one hopes, can see through all this. And as Nancy Pelosi might well discover, playing a role in inciting a mob can come at a cost."

-Peter Wehner

-T

Stem cells go beyond science

2009-04-24T14:51:00.000-07:00

Not many of us would want the federal government to leave military procurement to defense contractors, Medicare reimbursement to doctors or banking regulation to Citigroup. But President Obama says when it comes to allocating federal funds for scientific studies, we should defer to scientists.

That assertion came in reference to research on the use of embryonic stem cells to find treatments for various diseases. Obama announced that he was junking President Bush's rules, which limited federal funding to research using embryonic stem cell lines that existed before August 2001.

"This order," said the president, "is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America" and "protecting free and open inquiry." Harold Varmus, co-chairman of the president's scientific advisory council, said it showed the president would rely on "sound scientific practice... instead of dogma in developing federal policy."

But one person's dogma is another one's ethical imperative or moral principle. Science can tell us how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can't tell us whether we should use it.

Research on embryonic stem cells is controversial because it requires the destruction of live human embryos. Supporters find it easy to minimize the significance of this fact because the embryos are only a few days old - nothing more than "blastocysts."

You don't have to be part of the pro-life movement to have qualms about this kind of scientific inquiry. James Thomson, the Universit of Wisconsin biologist who pioneered the field, has said, "If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough."

In 2001, supporters of embryonic stem cell research called on Bush to allow experiments using "surplus" frozen embryos in fertility clinics, arguing that they would be disposed of anyway. But Obama didn't limit his new policy to these fertilized eggs.

On the contrary, he left open the possiblity of funding studies using embryos created specifically so their cells can be harvested - which Congress has barred, but which some advocated would like to allow. The president took no position on whether scientists should be permitted to create embryos for the sole purpose of dismembering them for their stem cells.

He did, however, reject another option. "We will ensure," he said, "that our government never opens the door to use the cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong and has no place in our society, or any society."

Is that a scientific judgment?

No, it's a philosophical one, reflecting Obama's moral values. Apparently, the folks in white lab coats can't be relied on to answer all questions.

What this mandate means is simple: it may be permissible for scientists to create cloned embryos and kill them. It's not permissible to create cloned embryos and let them live. Their cells may be used for our benefit, but not for their own.

There lies the reality of embryonic stem cell research: It turns incipient human beings into commodities to be exploited for the sake of people who are safely past that defenseless stage of their lives.

It's a change that poses risks not just to days-old human embryos. The rest of us may one day reap important medical benefits from this research. But we may lose something more vital.

-WSJ

That which we call a rose...

2009-04-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

By any other name would smell as sweet

The Gay Marriage Fantasy

Also, as has been previously discussed about the implications regarding religious liberties, this is also good.

Future of Religious Liberty

To quote UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh

"It seems to me plausible that judicial decisions banning opposite-sex-only marriage rules would likewise come to be extended -- by legislatures or by courts -- to go beyond their literal boundaries and instead to justify bans on private discrimination,"

"It seems quite likely that they will spill over into diminishing any constitutional claims to engage in such discrimination by private entities, including Boy-Scout-like organizations, churches, religious universities and other institutions."

He also said these claims are not "scaremongering".

Eventually churches will not be allowed to say that something like homosexuality is wrong... thus destroying the very thing gay-marriage proponents are attempting to protect - the separation of church and state.

Funny how that works...

Talk amongst yourselves.

-T

Dear Mr. President

2009-03-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

As an entrepreneur and manager of a small business - like the small businesses that comprise some 99% of our nations employer businesses - I am concerned, first and foremost, with the bottom line financial implications of the decisions I am confronted with.

When salesmen contact me with products and services, the first question I generally ask is what is my ROI. Now, I'm sure you have some good explanation for your endorsement of the solar panels in Denver that wouldn't pay for themselves for 110 years, even though their estimated usage life is only 25 years (article here). That, however, is a very small issue compared to what you are proposing for our failed auto industry.

So Mr. President, I just have one question for you - what is our return on investment with these latest bailouts? Is there one? As far as I can tell, this just seems to be a donation for the sake of being able to say that we make cars in America. If my company fails, can I request bailout funds? If we fail there won't be any manufacturers of electric skateboards in America. That would be an absolute travesty to me and my 6 employees.

Sincerely,

Really pissed off about paying taxes to support crappy cars made by companies who allowed their executives run them into the ground.

-T

Let's cut the crap...

2009-03-23T11:18:00.001-07:00

Ok, I have to rant about something...

I fly a lot. I went to China 5 times last year. I flew to Thailand, Dallas, San Fran a couple of times and to Portland.

This past weekend I went to Salt Lake City with the boys to get some late season skiing in.

I've finally had it. I am sick and tired of the "please shut off all portable electronic devices as they may interfere with our navigation equipment". I was listening to my iPod during the safety spiel and was politely told by the rather burly male flight attendant, "Please turn it off until we are at a safe altitude. You don't want us to land in the lake like those people in New York."

Really guy? REALLY?!?!?!?

Are you that dumb? Do you think that I am?

We landed on the damn moon 41 years ago! Since then we have come up with some insane technology, yet you would have me believe that playing my 1.5 volt iPod during takeoff could result in catastrophe.

Shut up already. There is no shot in hell that using my cell phone during takeoff could interfere with the avionics on the aircraft.

Now some might ask, "How do you know? It's POSSIBLE, isn't it?"

To which I say, "No, it's not."

How many people do you think have left their phones on in their pockets or left their iPods on during takeoff? Approximatel 1 BILLION people flew last year. If .5% of people that fly do that, every year there are 5 million chances for devices to interfere with the plane every year. 5 million. I'm pretty sure that at least that many people have done that and I think that's a big enough sample size to know that nothing is going to happen if I want to listen to my iPod instead of your ridiculous safety speech and the loud jet engines.

So I ask you, airlines, what the hell is the deal? Is this some ridiculous power trip? Do you really want us to be uncomfortable and annoyed on the flight? Sometimes it sure seems that way.

So let's cut the crap and shoot it straight... either tell us why you really don't want us using "personal electronic devices" during takeoff and landing, or shut up and let us listen to our music in peace because I'm not buying the "interference with navigation equipment" garbage anymore.

Also, to the Delta employee checking baggage in Salt Lake, when I have kids of my own I am going to tell them your story as a cautionary tale of what happens if you decide to be a complete and total idiot.

I'm out.

-T

Veganism and Abortion

2009-03-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

I was driving home on Sunday when I was flipping through AM radio stations. Came across GoVeganRadio. For 20 minutes, I listened to some guy rant about the "horrors" of animal testing and slaughterhouses. I got home and did a little research on all the claims he made. Researched Veganism and vegetarianism and looked up the mission statements of PETA and some other fringe animal rights lobbyist groups. I was pretty fascinated. One question continually came up in my head, "Can you be adamant about animal rights and also coherently support abortion?"

I contend you cannot and here is why:

Tom Regan, Philosophy PhD and teacher at NC State, wrote a book called The Case for Animal Rights. I browsed the book and it can be briefly summarized here Vegan Ethics

The basic premise of Veganism (and vegetarians who don't eat animal products because they disagree with the methods of killing animals) is that animals have inherent moral worth and deserve the same treatment that humans do. "Any being with a complex mental life, including perception, desire, belief, memory, intention, and a sense of the future --among other attributes -- is a subject of a life. Considerable evidence leads to an understanding that most animals indeed are subjects of a life, as opposed to biological beings without such subjective worlds."

Fair enough. I think you would be hard-pressed to call someone crazy for believing something like that. You may not agree, but you should be able to see that it's a fairly rational way of thinking.

This brings me to abortion...

I am making one assumption in my argument and it is this: Vegans and vegetarians would have a major problem with people killing cow (or other animal) fetuses.

If this is untrue, then my argument fails.

Can you see where I'm going with this? Vegans and vegetarians (and PETA members) would have a serious problem with killing calf fetuses, but don't necessarily have a problem with human abortion. There is no mention of human abortion is Veganism or PETA doctrine.

The only way to reconcile this would be if Vegans argued that humans and human fetuses have LESS inherent value than animals and animal fetuses.

This is clearly not rational and would be virtually impossible to make a valid and sound argument in support.

What does this mean? Not a whole lot unless you're a Vegan or PETA supporter. But it is yet more proof that people don't spend nearly enough time understanding their own beliefs and the logical and practical consequences of those beliefs.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

-T

Bravo Charles Krauthammer, Bravo!!!

2009-03-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

'Yet, unlike President Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

Dr. James Thomson, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells, said "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Obama clearly has not."

This could not have been written more perfectly.

Every one of you should read this article. Pay particular attention to the last paragraph.

Morally Unserious in the Extreme

Viva la Moustache

-T

Salutary Interference...

2009-03-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

...We need some.

DC Examiner Article

Also, can someone please tell Nancy Pelosi to shut up already? Seriously...

-T

Noble intent, terrible outcome

2009-03-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

"Unfortunately, our history suggests new government programs, however noble the intent, more often wind up delivering less, more slowly, at far higher cost than projected, with potentially damaging unintended consequences. The most recent case, of course, was the government's meddling in the housing market to bring home ownership to low-income families, which became a prime cause of the current economic and financial disaster."

I am officially terrified

Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow

-T

Compassion for the poor and needy?

2009-03-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

You be the judge

Assault on Authentic Compassion

Oh and this one too...

Transferring the Wealth?

-T

Why I love the WSJ

2009-02-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

Op-ed pieces like this one...

Put away childish things

"Mr. Obama came to office without a conspicuous vision other than "bipartisanship" and a belief in the beneficent influence on America and the world of seeing a black man exercising the powers of the presidency. He wields his party's shibboleths like one who sees them mainly as levers for delivering the goods. His ideas about the exercise of politics, in fact, may be accurately reflected in the recent stimulus bill -- in office you supply the wish lists of those who put you there."

Piercing indictment...

-T

Word of the day: Schadenfreude

2009-02-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

Schadenfreude - noun -satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.

This is an excellently reasoned and written article

Obama's Schadenfreude

Anyone else excited about Bobby Jindals first real exposure to the American public with his response to President Obama's address to Congress?

I can't wait.

Been working on a long post of, about, and/or relating to the decline of American responsibility... stay tuned...

-T

Obey?

2009-02-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

President Obama is certainly more eloquent that Fmr. President Bush. He is certainly more polished and smooth when it comes to his public appearance. He seems to be more calm and controlled and his intelligence is apparently top-notch.

None of this, as is becoming increasingly clearer, automatically translates to successful Presidential policies.

Stocks hate Obeynomics

Pres. Obama campaigned on "Change we can believe in". It doesn't seem as though his appointees got that memo...

7,000 - here we come...

-T

For the record...

2009-02-15T22:24:00.000-08:00

President Obama, you already won the presidency. Stop campaigning.

Here's a dose of some numbers. Stop with the doom & gloom rhetoric and start with the leading of our country.

Stop with the rhetoric

-T

Incompetency Defined

2009-02-13T12:31:00.000-08:00

The House of Representatives passed the 'Stimulus' Plan today. I will not say 1 word about what is actually in the Plan because that is not even necessary to illustrate the pure, unadulterated incompetency displayed by those who voted "Yes" on the bill today.

This bill was just over 1,000 pages long. It was submitted late Thursday night by the House Appropriations committee.

How many people do you know can read 1,000 pages in 12 hours?

We voted for these representatives to represent us (imagine that). I'd honestly like to know who feels properly represented by their representative who voted "yes" on a bill before they had time to read it.

How is this even legal? Shouldn't there be some mandated period of time based on the length of the bill that must pass before it can be voted on? (Like, say, more than 12 hours for a 1,000 page bill)

Didn't we get into this financial crisis because of haste, irresponsibility and lack of understanding of the things at work in our economy?

Dosen't hastily voting on a bill of this magnitude have an inordinately high probability of exacerbating the problem?

Don't extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures? Why couldn't Congress postpone their precious recess to sit down and READ AND DISCUSS this bill instead of rushing to vote just because there's an arbitrary deadline. Is that too much to ask of our elected government?

Am I crazy?

Please tell me someone else out there has a problem with this.

-T

Down with Fairness

2009-02-11T16:53:00.000-08:00

"Speaking of talk radio (which I listen to constantly), I remain incredulous that any Democrat who professes liberal values would give a moment's thought to supporting a return of the Fairness Doctrine to muzzle conservative shows. (My latest manifesto on this subject appeared in my last column.) The failure of liberals to master the vibrant medium of talk radio remains puzzling. To reach the radio audience (whether the topic is sports, politics or car repair), a host must have populist instincts and use the robust common voice. Too many Democrats have become arrogant elitists, speaking down in snide, condescending tones toward tradition-minded middle Americans whom they stereotype as rubes and buffoons. But the bottom line is that government surveillance of the ideological content of talk radio is a shocking first step toward totalitarianism."

- Camille Paglia

Decent article on a hodgepodge of issues. Excellent paragraph on the Fairness Doctrine, which as she rightly says, is a "shocking" proposal.

Paglia article

-T

The Intolerance of Truth

2009-02-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

Over the past few years I have been stunned at the increasing unwillingness of our leaders and media to make black-and-white statements regarding their stances on certain issues.

Whatever the subject may be - whether it's Terry Schiavo and the decision to "pull-the-plug", capital punishment, abortion, gay-marriage or any other hot-button social issue - it is now extremely rare to hear anyone give an honest statement regarding their beliefs.

Political correctness has now completely replaced the search for truth and honesty. Yes, that is a general and broad reaching statement, but take it as that and see if it fits. I trust you will find it to be true.

President Obama gave the perfect example of what I am talking about last year at the debate at Saddleback Church. When asked about his thoughts on abortion he answered, "...That's above my pay grade."

That's all-time cop-out. This is an issue that nearly EVERY American has strong feelings about - and nearly EVERY American will answer that question truthfully and honestly when asked - but our new President (a Senator at the time) can't discuss his belief and stance on the issue?

This is not meant to pick on President Obama, but rather to show that even the "leader of the free world" has regressed to the point of absurd political correctness.

Honestly, what would have happened if President Obama had responded with a very articulate, well-thought out and sensitive answer to that question? There are absolutely logical and rational reasons to support abortion. Would he have been branded intolerant? Certainly not. Obviously a very large number of people would disagree with him, but to dodge that question in that manner was disingenuous at the very least. President Obama has demonstrated he has uncanny speaking skills, so one must conclude that he chose to dodge the question in the name of political correctness rather than for a lack of a legitimate answer.

This is troubling.

Really the only reason I can come up with is that people are now afraid to be branded as "Intolerant."

When there's a news story about racism, no one has any problem condemning racism. Why? Because the vast majority of people condemn racism so it is 'safe' to do the same.

If you were to voice the opinion that racism is OK, you would most certainly be branded intolerant. Rightly so.

However, the question becomes, is the person intolerant because they don't agree with the vast majority or because all races of people OUGHT to be 'tolerated' (by tolerated I mean afforded the same rights and respect as all human beings)

That seems like an obvious answer... it's the latter.

It is the "OUGHT" that really changes the discussion.

This answer becomes less clear when the question is about capital punishment, assisted suicide, or abortion and the majority is not as clear cut.

What ought we to do?

Is it good to be tolerant of a bad thing? Clearly not.

The reluctance to say something like "I support abortion" can be construed to be the realization that you might be wrong about the worthiness of the tolerance of abortion.

We need truth to guide us and teach us the things which we should tolerate.

Dodging these questions in the name of tolerance and political correctness is tantamount to saying that you aren't firm in your beliefs.

I'll finish by quoting my favorite pianist, Sergey Rachmaninov

"The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt—they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt."

We meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculatea and brood... but we have stopped exalting...

-T

Here are some links...

In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry

Superman don't need no airplane...

All economists agree?

Obama a Novice?

The Normalization of Evil

2009-02-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

"Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil."

Mr. Pearl - you could not have said it any better.

When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?

Fantastic article in the WSJ by Daniel Pearl's father. Daniel Pearl was the WSJ journalist who was kidnapped and beheaded. The video of the gruesome murder was aired. His parents watched the video of Islamic terrorists cutting the head off of their son. He was then cut into 10 pieces and the pieces were placed in a shallow grave.

Hate George W. Bush all you want, but he was right - evil does exist in this world. What happened to Daniel Pearl was pure evil.

The most disturbing part of this article is Jimmy Carter's quote. Read closely.

"It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel."

See anything wrong? No?

I'll give you a hint - it has something to do with the conditional clause "when international laws and ultimate goals..."

Namely, the clause shouldn't be there. The sentence should end on the word 'terrorism'.

Decide for yourself

-T

Theism, Atheism, and Rationality...

2009-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

I've begun reading Alvin Plantinga's book "The Nature of Necessity"... it's a doozy and it makes me want to be in Philosophy classes again...

Anyhow, got side-tracked with some bibliography tangents and came across this paper by Plantinga

Theism, Atheism, and Rationality

I'll warn you now that it's not the easiest read, but it's a fantastic short paper on a topic that has become highly relevant in the past year or so with the troubling desire to disregard Christians as fools or lunatics.

And please, for your own sake, don't comment unless you read the paper.

Plantinga is an incredible mind (PhD from Yale among other achievements), so don't think you are going to refute or offer up a counter argument with a 3 paragraph comment before you read and understand the article in its entirety.

-T

Look at the Time

2009-01-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

Very interesting and extremely well-written article on perspective and self-awareness in times of crisis...

Noonan is awesome

Look at the Time

I'm in SLO for the weekend, catch you all next week.

-T

Logical inconsistencies

2009-01-29T11:28:00.000-08:00

Below are 11 true statements...

1. Existing fetal homicide laws make a man guilty of manslaughter if he kills the baby in a mother's womb (except in the case of abortion).

2. Fetal surgery is performed on babies in the womb to save them while another child the same age is being legally destroyed.

3. Babies can sometimes survive on their own at 23 or 24 weeks, but abortion is legal beyond this limit.

4. Living on its own is not the criterion of human personhood, as we know from the use of respirators and dialysis.

5. Size is irrelevant to human personhood, as we know from the difference between a one-week-old and a six-year-old.

6. Developed reasoning powers are not the criterion of personhood, as we know from the capacities of three-month-old babies.

7. Infants in the womb are human beings scientifically by virtue of their genetic make up.

8. Ultrasound has given a stunning window on the womb that shows the unborn at eight weeks sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All the organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. Virtually all abortions happen later than this date.

9. Justice dictates that when two legitimate rights conflict, the limitation of rights that does the least harm is the most just.

10. Justice dictates that when either of two people must be inconvenienced or hurt to alleviate their united predicament, the one who bore the greater responsibility for the predicament should bear more of the inconvenience or hurt to alleviate it.

11. Justice dictates that a person may not coerce harm on another person by threatening voluntary harm on themselves.

Many people incorrectly believe that the arguments against abortion are based solely on the Bible and religion.

Clearly not the case. None of these statements says anything about religion or the Bible.

Yet, if you add these up, there is a striking logical inconsistency.

The issue of abortion comes down to the issue of personhood - that is, what is it about us that makes us a 'person' and confers the rights and liberties afforded to all 'people'?
Afterall, if a fetus isn't a person, then there is no issue.

The ways we define (derived from some of the statements above) "person" will result in a logical contradiction if you allow abortion. If you say personhood is conferred at birth, then fetal homicide/manslaughter laws don't make sense.

If you say you are only a person when you can live on your own then you take away the personhood of those on life support.

If you say that you are person when you have the ability to reason, then you take personhood away from the severely mentally handicapped as well as infants.

On top of that, abortion also violates principles of justice (see numbers 9-11)

Now let me say this. I am not opposed to all abortion. I think in cases of rape or when the life of the mother is in serious danger, it should be allowed. These, however, are very rare occurrences and make up a tiny fraction of the number of abortions performed in the US - they also do not contradict personhood issues because they are extreme cases that allow for exceptions.

What I do think is important (especially from the standpoint of knowing what we believe and why we believe it) is that we have a coherent and logical understanding of personhood - as this definition applies to very many issues and topics in our society.

-T

So it begins

2009-01-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to start one of these for a long time. Not sure why I haven't gotten around to it...

Anyhow, I'm starting my blog.

I'll warn you now - It's going to be all over the place.

Before I begin and enter the blogosphere, I feel as though I should have a 'mission statement' for my blog.

I want this to be blog that explores the important issues in our lives and does so in a good faith effort to seek the truth.

I'll start by telling you that you will probably disagree with me at some point. Great. You may also take offense at something I say or perhaps at the way I say it. Also great. That means you're at least doing some thinking about things that matter to you.

Too many people go through life without knowing what they believe or why they believe it. It's absolutely tragic.

If I can spur debate which leads to honest introspection, then I will have achieved my goal.

Here we go...