Musings Of An Indie WriterTuesday, November 30, 2004
A Gem From Jonah
National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg has his little ways, but he also has a rare gift of penetration into the psychological currents that underlie politics in these United States. His column of today
is a fine example of his insight. It deserves to be read widely and pondered hard. Have a quick nibble:
In 1996 Clinton ran on such issues as the V-Chip, seatbelts on school buses, school uniforms, “saving” Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the environment (who can forget that mantra?), food safety, and his boasts to have expanded the death penalty (he did but in ludicrously tiny ways). He was, critics charged, running for mayor of America. Other factors aided his victory — Dole’s candidacy, Clinton’s gift for making a victim out of himself, his signing of the welfare-reform law — but at the end of the day Clinton won because he was able to tap into small symbols of disorder and translate them into promises of a restored order.
Indeed, one of the reasons Gingrich was such a useful foil for Clinton is the inherent contradiction within the conservative movement. Conservatives are the chief defenders of a capitalist, free-market system, and the capitalist, free-market system is perhaps the most profoundly unconservative social force in human history. Markets topple established customs, they raze settled communities and erase whole ways of life. Conservatives defend this system not out of greed, but out of principle. Freedom without economic freedom is a farce. And economic security provided by government planners has, historically, been the security of guaranteed impoverishment. But that doesn’t negate the fact that as much as I like libertarian economic policies, they can be a real handicap at the polls. Nearly 80 years of bribing the public with entitlements has made the idea of yanking entitlements a politically risky proposition.
Please read the whole thing.
Moderation And Agendas
“I suppose there are two views about everything,” said Mark.
“Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”
[from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.]
In the midst of a typically excellent
David Limbaugh column,
we find the following:
Political analysts warn that overly aggressive efforts to push a conservative agenda could leave Bush and his allies vulnerable to charges of political overreaching, and ultimately cause a voter backlash. … Already Democrats are saying that Republicans are emphasizing an ideological rather than a middle-of-the-road approach to governing.
[...snip…]
In pressing for partial Social Security privatization and overhauling the tax system, Bush is taking a major risk. These are controversial matters that might drive some Republicans to become Democrats.
Limbaugh was quoting an un-linked article from the Chicago Tribune. His response is delightfully cutting:
Such brilliance. It’s like saying Republicans should forfeit their agenda now or else they might have to in the future. They should give up a bird in the hand for none in the bush. Either way, no conservative agenda. How convenient for liberals.
But the whole tempest is symptomatic of a larger and far more important matter: the false gods of moderation and compromise.
“Moderation in all things,” counseled Epictetus. When a student asked him if that advice applied to moderation itself, which would logically require us to be extreme about at least a few things, the philosopher was stunned. He’d fallen into the very trap that bedevils contemporary politics: the fallacy that moderation is a value.
“Moderation,” shorn of all context, is not only value-free but semantically empty as well. The same could be said for its linguistic opposite, “extremism.”
Name a political subject; that is, name a condition, process, or hazard that might conceivably be improved by State action. Conceive of a position on that subject. How does one judge it to be moderate or immoderate? By where it fits into the range of possible positions on the subject? Or by where it stands in opinion polls? Or by how dramatic its results are likely to be?
In recent years, the evaluation “moderate” has been used in a number of tendentious ways, none of which bear on the probable effectiveness of a policy, on its foreseeable costs, or on the likelihood of undesirable side effects and unintended consequences. In particular, the heavily left-leaning Old Media have used “moderate” as a way of encouraging Republican office-holders to be less conservative.
It’s all nonsense. A moment’s thought is all that’s required to dispel the moderation miasma…which only goes to show how few moments we take for thought.
Assuming that one has grasped some problem accurately—that is, he has all the relevant facts about it—what would he ask about a proposed solution to it?
- Would it really ameliorate the problem?
- How much would it cost?
- What other effects would it have?
- Would it violate any legal, moral, or ethical constraints?
None of those questions depends in any way upon anyone’s judgment of the proposal as “moderate” or “extreme.”
The enthronement of “moderation” as a value has led to another insubstantial yet unquestioned shibboleth: “compromise.” One must compromise between the “extremes,” don’t y’know; it’s the moderate thing to do. But why? Is it because the “extreme” positions don’t work, or are unaffordable, or would have undesirable side effects, or would violate the rights of some group of innocents?
Usually not. Usually it’s just a reflexive demand, no more rationally grounded than the worship of “moderation.”
Worse is possible, of course. At one point, the Soviets enunciated and acted on an idea that came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrine: that “fraternal countries” had an enforceable right—enforceable by the Soviet Union, of course—to “preserve the gains of socialism,” regardless of any change of heart among their citizens. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and engineered a coup in Poland in service to this idea.
American liberals’ domestic version of this doctrine differs only in that, rather than appeal to some foreign power to invade and avert the horrors of competitive capitalism from our shores, they declaim ominously about “backlash” and “reaction.” They “advise” their opponents to “compromise” on their agenda, for “the sake of amity.” This is one of the central currents of left-liberal rhetoric these past fifty years.
Britain’s Labourites took a similar stance toward the reforms of Margaret Thatcher’s Administration. Prominent Labourites responded to each privatization initiative by calling it retrogressive. Their candidates vowed to restore the Labour-engineered status quo ante at each campaign…despite the wild popularity that each Thatcher initiative enjoyed.
Ultimately, the Labour Party did come around a bit. One cannot swim against the tide of popular sentiment forever if one wants to retain some influence over political discourse. But the similarity of their attitude and rhetoric to that of American left-liberals, in the face of the wave of popularity enjoyed by their ideological and electoral opponents, must be grasped in its full significance.
It’s not a thrust at the effectiveness, affordability, controllability, or morality of conservative proposals. Indeed, it has no rational aspects at all. It’s a loser’s demand that the losers get their way at the expense of the victors—a demand that would be laughed out of court if the positions were reversed.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Should It Or Shouldn’t It: Rights, Consent, And The State
[This essay and its predecessor are intimately linked to the previous series on “Consensus And Constitutional Order.”]
this essay,Connie Du Toit propounded the following questions [Enumeration added by FWP]:
- Do you believe a group of people have the Right to form countries (with all the associated limitations such as borders, citizenship, immigration and visitation rules), with a system of government determined by the group?
- If so, what happens when a new majority is created that wishes to change the ground rules established by the earlier, now minority, group? Can they do that? Do they have a right to do that?
- How is a country different from any private club, such as a country club or homeowners’ association?
Questions 1 and 2 are best answered by a brace of counter-questions:
- What do you mean by “a group of people”? What other characteristics besides being human do they possess?
- What do you mean by “a right”? If it’s a moral warrant for the use of coercive force, shouldn’t the domain of applicability be spelled out rather precisely and exhaustively?
- What sort of government, with what sort of powers, has this group proposed? Shouldn’t the specific powers and privileges claimed be a part of the question?
Question 3 is rather easier. A government possesses a privilege that no other sort of organization possesses: its agents may use coercion—physical force and the threat thereof—to impose their wills on the government’s subjects. Some governments are unconstrained; others are required, by law and tradition, to remain within certain bounds that limit their coercive privileges. For example, in the United States a man may not commit murder and then use his private property rights to thwart arrest; however, he may use his private property rights to block an “investigation” of his involvement in unspecified crimes, or crimes that might not really have been committed.
With that having been established, we can return to the counter-questions to Connie’s 1 and 2:
- Have the persons who will be subject to this government given their consent to your machinations? Was it express or implied? If implied, what is the foundation for your assumption of government-making authority?
- Do you propose to limit this government in any way? If so, what will the limits be, and how will they be enforced? If not, how would it differ from any other criminal organization?
What Connie has plumbed is what the late Murray Rothbard, in his book For A New Liberty, called “the argument for the State de novo.” Professor Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist, could find no legitimate foundation for government. If confronted with express, unanimous consent, he would have argued that the descendants of the government-formers could not rightfully be bound by their progenitors’ grants of consent. If confronted with implied consent, he would have argued that no inference is strong enough to justify the abridgement of an individual’s rights to his life, liberty and property.
But Professor Rothbard was far more concerned with the abuses of power than with its potential proper uses. He did not concern himself overly with the “middle case,” in which the proposed government is allowed only to act as an agent, protecting its subjects’ rights and doing nothing else.
The heart of the problem of legitimacy in government is the question of agency: whence it derives and how far it extends.
A man’s delegated agent may do, on his behalf and with his authority, things he would otherwise do for himself. When an agent is retained by explicit contract, the scope of his agency is usually set out in the contract in explicit terms. When an agent arises by implication, the “contract” must arise from another source. In the case of governments and their latitude, the source must be the rights of Man.
The proof is by reductio ad absurdum. Imagine the reverse: that a government recognizes no rights, yet claims absolute agency over its subjects, to do whatever it deems in the best interests of the whole. That would license it to murder, to enslave, and to seize whatever it liked, for any purpose or none. Without a delimiting concept of rights, there is no way to argue against any of this, regardless of whether the government is monarchic, oligarchic, majoritarian, colonial, or provincial.
The foundation concepts of rights and justice, as much argument as there is about their margins, underlie every concept of government and its legitimate powers. There’s simply no getting away from them. If government is restricted to the chores of maintaining justice and protecting the rights of its subjects, but is allowed to do nothing else, then consent to it is implied by the very claims of rights that would be used to decry any other extension of its powers. If it steps across that line, it loses its claim to legitimacy.
Had the Framers proposed a government of unlimited powers to replace the colonial administration ejected by the American Revolution, their work would have been unfounded, recognized as such by the state legislatures, and rejected. But the understanding of rights was much better and more widespread then.
Because there is argument—and probably always will be—about the nature and extent of individual rights, there cannot be unanimous agreement about the extent of government’s agency-derived powers. Though some matters are settled definitively, for example whether an individual has the right to enslave other individuals, others are matters of controversy, for example whether a sick man has a right to medical care that he cannot pay for (or make a credible promise to pay for by some agreed-upon future date). Because of the existing controversies, and because other controversies might arise in the future, the bounds drawn around government’s actions must be capable of adjustment.
This gives rise to the principle that processes alone determine legitimacy. For if the bounds on the State’s privilege of coercion are subject to adjustment, then there must be a process by which a proposed adjustment is legitimized. It is that process, or family of processes, that defines the de facto rights of individuals subject to the State’s decrees, just as the processes by which a group of men gathers to plan a government, and by which their proposal is approved or rejected, determine whether they’ll be venerated as Founding Fathers or dismissed as cranks.
Connie might well say that this is not a complete answer to her questions. But her questions required more context than she gave them, as your Curmudgeon tried to illustrate with his counter-questions. Even once the necessary context has been provided, margins will remain, including the explicit denial of consent to governmental agency explored by Lysander Spooner in his tract No Treason: The Constitution Of No Authority.
Perfection is unattainable in this world. There will always be those, such as Lysander Spooner, to whom no claim of implied consent to governmental agency is satisfactory. We must do the best we can. In pursuing questions of governmental legitimacy, the proper scope of its activities, and the best means by which to redress its shortcomings, “the best we can” is the application of a well-understood concept of rights and its concomitant, justice. Ironically, Spoonerite objectors to the concept of implied consent are least likely to be the persons who trouble the public peace—and most likely to be in the front lines when the State oversteps the bounds of rights and justice.
Spooner himself was a Constitutional lawyer. Indeed, he was one of the foremost of his day. Imagine that.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Some Thoughts On “Free Ice Cream”
Ghost Of A Flea has vented his irritations with the trolling / whining / nitpicking subset of his readers. They sound an awful lot like those that terminally irritated Steven Den Beste,
to whom he refers.
Your Curmudgeon gives thanks that his readers and commenters are of a better breed than the above. Then again, Eternity Road, as was the Palace of Reason before it, is aimed at persons of a high intelligence level: say IQ 130 and above. (Although that didn’t protect Den Beste, did it? Must think about this some more.) The few cretins who are moved to spread feces in the comments section are quickly banned. E-mail that offends is deleted, and the address of the sender is added to the delete-on-reception list.
But guess what? The blogger who does these things has sharply limited his audience. Most readers are much closer to the axis of the Big Bad Bell Curve. Sadly, the prevailing level of courtesy and civility among ordinary folks has dropped pretty low. The quality of discourse on radio call-in shows provides a good picture of the status quo.
Eternity Road has a rather small audience. On a typical day, only a few hundred souls wander in here. That’s all right. Those are the readers your Curmudgeon wants. They’re his kindred spirits, who read with attention, think seriously about what they read, and express themselves clearly and politely. They’re near the pinnacle of the “intellectual structure of production,” where new ideas are born and tested for soundness.
Your Curmudgeon writes for those readers, and for the pleasure of expressing himself, and for no other reason. Other bloggers, who write for reasons connected to a desire for a larger audience, have to put up with a lot more nuisances and offenses as part of the price. You can’t have a mass audience without having to deal with the qualities of the mass.
As for the “free ice cream” effect, Den Beste wrote in his farewell post (linked above):
I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.
This is true. Some—many—will do that. It’s well established over the great sweep of human history that:
- Gratitude and appreciation are far rarer and more evanescent than ingratitude and resentment;
- That which has been routinely available for a sufficiently long period comes to be seen as a right.
There’s simply no help for it. That’s why Web punditry should be viewed as a personal indulgence performed entirely for its own sake. If the ingratitude and demands of others are too much to bear, the Web pundit should do what Den Beste did and shut up shop. Steven was simply getting more irritations and offenses than his pleasure at expressing himself could counterbalance. He behaved “economically”; he did the rational thing according to his own preferences and standards. Anyone who’s enjoyed his work these past few years would have expected nothing else from him.
The alternative is to do as your Curmudgeon has done: deliberately limit your audience by pitching your work at a thoughtful and courteous minority. Albert Jay Nock would have recognized this group. He called it “the remnant.”
If you’re going to give out free ice cream, doesn’t it make sense to limit the recipient group to those who’ll behave gratefully and graciously in response? Doesn’t it make sense to keep firmly in mind that, now and then, a cad will slip past the gates and have to be dealt with—and that his behavior is no reflection on the worthiness of yours?
Bloggers, keep faith with yourselves. Look out for Number One first. No one else can do it as thoroughly and accurately as you can.
WHEREAS
The inimitable Andrea Harris
has titled a post on things that annoy her:
...which immediately got your Curmudgeon thinking about—what else?—legislation.
Every bill emitted by Congress begins with an explanatory preamble, the first word of which is “Whereas.” The preamble then goes into the reasons for the bill. Much of the time, there’s no connection between those reasons and the real world. But how your Curmudgeon would love it if, just once, in response to hectoring by some strident interest group, Congress were to pass a bill that read about like this:
WHEREAS, the Congress finds that the State of the Nation is more or less satisfactory at this time; and:
WHEREAS, the Members of both Houses have had enough of the whinings and cajolings of self-nominated victims and petty-minded would-be tyrants over their fellow citizens; and:
WHEREAS, there are far more important matters to deal with at this time, or perhaps at any time, than the puerile obsession of [insert interest group here] with [insert interest group’s fetish issue here];
IT IS THE SENSE OF THE CONGRESS that the Nation must and shall tell [insert interest group here] to GO TO HELL and CEASE TO PRATTLE about how the sky will surely fall unless it gets its way on [insert interest group’s fetish issue here].
Wouldn’t that be good clean political fun?
And They Say Blogs Aren’t A Source Of News!
Michelle Malkin
has used set theory to predict the sales of an item she spotted yesterday in Borders Books. (Your Curmudgeon, who once prided himself on his eagle’s eyes, failed to spot it on his sojourn there yesterday. Possibly his psychic self-defense circuits kicked in to obliterate the memory.)
This could be big, folks. If her technique works, business schools ‘round the world will be battering down Miss Malkin’s doors.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Should It Or Shouldn’t It: An Approach To The Analysis Of A Constitutional Order
Once one accepts, for whatever reason, that governments will not cease to exist in the foreseeable future, one is committed to working out a set of principles that will govern their behavior. Probably the most important aspect of this is the analysis of how a government should be structured and what it should be allowed to do—the analysis that must precede the writing of a constitution.
These past two years, the freshly liberated Iraqis have had to stumble through that process with little to no guidance. That wasn’t their fault. Not many people anywhere have given much thought to meta-constitutional analysis. Besides, if the United States had taken too obvious a guiding hand in the matter, the accusations of “imperialism” would have been too strident to bear…though whether that ought to have stopped us is a question that deserves its own session of hard thought.
One of the most significant aspects of the Constitution of the United States is also one of the least discussed: its provision for amendment. This facility has been but lightly used since the ratification of Bill of Rights: seventeen exercises in 214 years. But that it exists at all implies some very strong statements about the significance of the Constitution itself, and what its Framers had in mind when they wrote it. First, that amending the Constitution is possible at all testifies to an essential wisdom of the Framers: wisdom enough not to assume that their work was perfect and complete per omnia saecula saeculorum. They knew America to be a society in flux, that it would swell from its original thirteen states to cover a much larger region with a much larger population, and that any legal arrangement without the capacity to change when necessary would bind their creation unacceptably. Foresight and humility impelled them to leave a means by which their revolutionary conception could continue to develop, to correct for their omissions, if any, and to meet needs they could not imagine. Second, the difficulty of the amendment procedure, in particular the requirement that a proposed amendment command two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and then receive the approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures, makes it plain that they didn’t want their carefully argued-out work uprooted “for light and transient Causes.” They foreclosed radical redesign of the United States by subsequent generations by the expedient of requiring so great a consensus that an amendment would perforce be in harmony with the original plan. Herein lies the essential conservatism of the Constitutional plan. Third, that the Constitution is amendable, albeit at such great difficulty, gives the whole thing significance. One doesn’t trouble oneself about mending that which has no value, or which one expects soon to discard. The Constitution’s amendability adds emphasis to its other key provision:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State notwithstanding. [Article VI, second paragraph.]By the above clause and the amendment provision, the Framers were saying, “You have a problem with our work? Fine. Amend it. But don’t think we didn’t mean what we wrote, in all its particulars.” The Constitution’s other provisions are of the following kinds:
- Structural: It defines the branches of the federal government and their roles within the federal system.
- Authoritative: It makes explicit grants of authority to the three branches.
- Restrictive: It expressly forbids both the federal government and the state governments to act in certain ways.
All of these provisions are amendable; therefore, all have binding force. To be released from their bonds, Congress and the state legislatures must amend them.
In discussing the force and overall significance of the Constitution, it’s unavoidable that one address the flaws in it as it was first drafted:
- It sanctioned slavery.
- It permitted federal borrowing in peacetime.
- It failed to specify what would qualify as “advice and consent” from the Senate.
- It relied too greatly on tradition in the use of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
- It incorporated the disastrously over-interpretable word “regulate” and the equally disastrous phrase “the general welfare” in Article I, Section 8.
However, the hazards these things incurred were not immediately apparent, and in any event, in the creation of a wholly new system of government, some mistakes are unavoidable. The amendment provision ought to have been adequate to deal with these flaws. In one case, the abolition of slavery, it worked as intended.
The reason amendment failed to cope adequately with the other flaws in the document is that, when the severity of those errors became apparent, the nation had already discarded the binding nature of the text. The regnant ideology had become that of a “living Constitution,” whose provisions could be reinterpreted as creatively as any federal jurist might like. If judicial interpretation of the Constitution could serve the same ends as amendment, and with equal legitimacy, then why bother with the far more cumbersome and protracted amendment procedure?
Of course, Constitutional interpretation quickly exploded from a delimited group of problematic cases—Did “to coin money” mean that all money had to be coin? Must a “republican form of government” have a constitution? How about a bicameral legislature?—to the assertion of authority over the meaning of the entire document.
The audacity of this hijacking can hardly be overstated. It’s as if jurists had announced that henceforward and forever, the meanings of English words were to be determined solely by the courts, and that those meanings could be whatever a preponderance of the judges on the court of interest deemed them to be, regardless of any and all precedent on the subject.
If this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, then hard thought must go into how it is supposed to work, and how to enforce it. But before that, we must settle what grand principles lie at the base of both those sets of questions. Your Curmudgeon believes: in hard, narrow constraints upon government at all levels; that words have an exact meaning; and that the people in arms are the enforcement authority for all fundamental law. If a majority of Americans believed the same things, there would be no dangers from a new Constitutional Convention…but unfortunately, there’s no consensus on any of those three points. So the first effort must go toward establishing, or re-establishing, the postulates that underlie constitutionalism. This might be easier than anyone thinks. Most thought about constitutionalism goes toward interpretation of the existing federal document, a seductive and destructive trail. Very little thought goes into the point of writing a constitution in the first place: what it logically implies for the locus of sovereignty, the nature of government, and the guarantees that must be allowed to individuals. Why write a constitution? What does the enterprise imply? What purpose can it serve? If the point of a constitution is not to limit government’s action and protect the rights of private parties, what else could it be? What private rights, if any, are logically inseparable from a constitutional order? More anon.
And They Haven’t Done Anything About Black Tuesday Yet!
Americans Hit Stores as Holiday Shopping Season Officially Opens
NEW YORK — Americans stormed the nation's shops on Friday after Thanksgiving Day and marked the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, lured by cut-price toys and discounted consumer electronics.
Now I'm confused. Which is it, Fox: official or traditional? They hardly mean the same thing.
All the same, the C.S.O. and I participated a bit, and were surprised at the relative moderation of the crowds in such places as Home Depot, Best Buy, and Borders Books. (No crowd at all in La-Z-Boy Furniture, but then Christmas isn't a furniture-buying holiday.) Also, all the salespeople we approached were polite and relaxed, rather than harried and brusque as one might expect on "Black Friday."
Speaking of which, just what retail outlets did Becker and Fagen have in mind here?
When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door,
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor.
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed,
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road.
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be
Don't let it fall on me.
When Black Friday comes
I'll fly down to Muswellbrook.
Gonna strike all the big red words
From my little black book.
Gonna do just what I please,
Gonna wear no socks and shoes,
With nothing to do but feed
All the kangaroos.
When Black Friday comes I'll be on that hill
You know I will
When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it 'til
I satisfy my soul.
Gonna let the world pass by me,
The Archbishop's gonna sanctify me,
And if he don't come across
I'm gonna let it roll.
When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna stake my claim
I'll guess I'll change my name.
[from Steely Dan's "Black Friday."]
Friday, November 26, 2004
Is This “New” Hostility, Or Is It Just Out In The Open Now?
Ought this to change anything at all?
WASHINGTON — The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have created a shared anti-American cause among otherwise-divided Muslim extremists and raised the stature of the radicals in the eyes of ordinary Muslims, a Pentagon advisory panel says.
The report by the Defense Science Board (search) concludes that the government must urgently change its approach to understanding and communicating with the Muslim world. It says U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis, and neither the White House nor Congress has done enough to fix it.
At the root of the problem, the report says, is a fundamental misunderstanding of why many Muslims are hostile toward the United States. They “hate our policies,” not our freedom, it said.
The report cites a “pervasive atmosphere of hostility” toward the American government that has intensified since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the U.S. responses to them.
Your Curmudgeon can’t see the difference between “hating our policies” and “hating our freedom.” The policies are merely what America must do to defend herself and her citizens’ rights to their lives, liberties and properties. Anyone who doesn’t care for them is cordially invited to pick up a weapon and try to do something about it. Wait, that’s what the Muslim world has been doing for quite a few years now, isn’t it?
The following passage from Ann Coulter’s recent book How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) is particularly relevant:
In the spirit of specifically targeting only the worrisome Muslims, I note that the media have inadvertently identified several of them with blinding clarity. In case you missed these stories, I bring them to your attention so you will be forewarned: Do not fly with any of these kids. Soon after the terrorist attack, the New York Times chatted with students at the Al Noor School, a private Islamic academy in Brooklyn—evidently the Arab equivalent of the Horace Mann High School (Anthony Lewis, ‘44). None of the students said they had experienced any harassment since September 11. To the contrary, their school had been deluged with support from local Catholic schools, hospitals, state education officials, and political leaders.
But the love was entirely one-sided. The students stated point-blank that they would not fight for America against a fellow Muslim. They denied that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. The criticized the United States for its cruel treatment of Muslims. “Isn’t it ironic,” one Islamic student sneered, “that the interests of America are always against what the Muslims want?” That’s why the last several major American interventions—in Kuwait, Somalia, and the Balkans—were all in defense of Muslims. Of course, there was the attack on Osama bin Laden, but according to them, he wasn’t practicing “true Islam.” I wish they’d get their stories straight: Do most Muslims support bin Laden or not? Though uniformly refusing to believe bin Laden was behind the terrorist attack, the students showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about who was behind it.
Students from the Al Noor School were interviewed again a few weeks later, this time by CBS’s 60 Minutes. The students instantly and enthusiastically agreed with the proposition that a “Muslim who becomes a suicide bomber goes to Paradise for that action.” One student answered “Definitely” and called a female suicide bomber “very brave.” Others said they earnestly hoped the suicide bombers went to Paradise. “I mean, they’re doing it for a good cause,” one boy explained. “I pray they go to Paradise,” another said. Most comforting, one student said, “I think we’d probably all do the same.”
It is impossible to inculcate such an attitude in children unless it’s continuously reinforced by the society that envelops them. Even in America, Muslim enclaves are almost perfectly closed to “infidels”; the children imprisoned within them receive a continuous diet of this sort of poison.
Yes, the interests of the United States are opposed to the interests of Islam, and rightly so. When America sets forth, it does so to free men from their chains, regardless of the quality of the rationale under which they were shackled. Islam is a shackler par excellence; always and everywhere, it demands utter and unquestioning submission enforced by the power of the State. Even to express doubt of its tenets is considered intolerable blasphemy, punishable by death. This would render it antithetical to liberty and American principles even if it owned to no other barbarities,
which we know is not the case.
The “Religion of Peace” is so hostile to any competing belief system that it seizes on
any excuse to slaughter and enslave “infidels,”
wherever the opportunity might present itself. Persons unfamiliar with Islamic doctrines can easily evaluate its deeds. Polls and studies that purport to demonstrate Muslims’ “new” hostility toward America only reveal what was always there, what could not help but be there, and what will be there until this vicious totalitarian ideology is effaced from the Earth.
Synthetic Sympathy Dept.
This was certainly to be expected:
WASHINGTON — Some lawmakers have pledged to continue fighting to protect federal workers’ jobs from what they say is unfair competitive bidding, after such protections were quietly cut at the last minute from the weekend’s omnibus budget bill (search).
The House and Senate had earlier agreed to an amendment to deny funds to implement outsourcing regulations known as Circular A-76 (search). But that language — and a compromise version offered by its supporters — was removed from the more-than-3,000-page budget bill after a White House veto threat.
Sponsoring lawmakers said they only learned of the change after the massive bill reached their offices late Friday night.
By using the veto threat to kill the amendment, “the Bush administration has once again shown its disdain and disrespect” for federal workers, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, in a joint statement Saturday with Sen. Barbara Mikulski. The two Maryland Democrats sponsored the outsourcing amendment earlier this year.
As many have already noted, the Democratic Party has become explicitly the Party of Government—of More and More Government, of Government Uber Alles. Government workers are the most natural of all its constituencies. Any barrier that might countervail its program for the relentless expansion of the State simply cannot be allowed to stand.
C. Northcote Parkinson was thought to have had his tongue in his cheek when he observed that the natural dynamic of bureaucracies was to do ever less with ever more personnel and resources, but events have proved him correct. There is not one case in the history of the world where a bureaucracy has actually solved the problem it was formed to solve and then shut up shop. There are damned few cases of bureaucracies making even temporary inroads on their charter problems.
This is a natural consequence of the incentives that attach to labor of any kind. We all want to do less of it, and for increased compensation and prestige. But unionized government employees, in sharp contrast with the rest of us, can make that dream come true much more often than not:
- Civil Service labor rules protect them against dismissal and against significant disciplinary actions.
- Their wages come from a trough filled by a third party, the taxpaying public, so their employers don’t feel the cost of their upkeep.
- A Civil Service supervisor’s prestige is measured almost exclusively by how many employees report to him (and to supervisors subordinate to him, of course), so he has a natural incentive to expand his workforce regardless of need.
- On those rare occasions when the White House or Congress finds enough backbone to cut back some bureaucracy’s budget, its Iron Triangle of defenders—private-sector beneficiaries, private-sector suppliers, and its own personnel—can usually outmaneuver its attackers, or at least make the campaign too painful to continue.
- In the near term, the Washington Monument Defense almost always stings the ultimate “consumer”—the ordinary American—more than the cost of maintaining the bureaucracy. This undermines political will for the contest.
- Taxpayers can’t demand a refund.
Ours is a competitive, capitalist society…except within the government itself. Fancy that.
