Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Why's & Wherefore's of the Supermajority

Here is another nominee from the best comment contest that really stands out. kudos to JMH.

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/08/27/5g/#comment-95

PS. TWANLOC = Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen... in case you were wondering. ;)

Congress VS. The Fed

Here is a link to a coment By L3 over at BC. it was nominated in the "best comment" contest thread and when i went back to read it I remembered the insights it provided and wanted to blog it so as not to lose it.

enjoy

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/05/18/the-death-of-kings/#comment-34

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist

http://mises.org/story/3769

Unbelievable! I learned a ton from this piece. For one I had always assumed that communism started with marx, but here the earlier roots of communism are explained.

Also this details and explains the spiritual world-view that underlies communism. its a world-view where individualism simply does not exist. This is the satanic plan from the war in heaven. Under it the highest and ultimate destiny of man kind is to surrender individual will to a cosmic collective governed by a single, infinite, self. But its not really even a collective as that would imply a collection of individuals. In this plan there is only one infinite will and it stands alone and there is nothing beyond it, it is the universe. In short Satan's will would have become the only operative will in the universe overriding, consuming, even the Father ("give me your glory"), whereas the Father's plan created/allowed individual agency.

There is irony and hypocracy here in that Satan had an individual will given to him by the Father and was thus permited to hatch and offer his scheme, which he then tried to use to take away every one elses will including the Father who had granted him his will in the first place. It's like Zeus and the Titans.

The eerie part is that the satanic world-view uses certain words - like "freedom" or "diversity"- but the meanings are inverted. It reminds me of Orwell: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. I'm only about a 1/3 of the way through this, but I had to blog the link so make sure that i dont lose it.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

On War and Apocalypse

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/07/apocalypse-now#

I mind altering piece if you can get into it, though not all of it holds water unless you take a fairly broad view of things (nit pickers will find plenty to disagree with). Though I'm not a radical pacifist upon first reading I felt this piece made a decent arguement for the position.

Its written from a catholic perspective so a little "decoding" may be necessary ( ie. "the passion" roughly equates to "the atonement" in LDS terms).

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Religious Freedom

Full text of an address By Dallin H. Oaks on the subject of religious freedom.

Update 10-21-09: Originally I had the full text posted here, but it really is too long for that. enjoy the link.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Ungoverned

A story where the Second Amendment is writ large.

http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416520724/1416520724___4.htm

Monday, October 12, 2009

Nature & Distribution of Work & Wealth and the coming Political & Spiritual Realignment

Here is a gem of a comment from Leo. It's monstrously long but it hits so many nails so squarely on the head that I just have to quote it in its entirety. Enjoy:


Leo Linbeck III:

It does seem as if we are entering a period of political realignment. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but many of them link back to this undeniable fact: in the developed world (aka the West), life is not really that tough.

The West has been able to sustain, through bubbles and busts, a productive capacity that is unmatched in human history. Never before have so many gotten so much with so little effort.

But this fact – which is a largely good news – has a dark side. Human beings are dynamic entities, and so must strive, must exert, must drive, must keep moving to be complete persons: in short, we must work.

Even shorter: stasis = death.

However, the wealth created by the productive capacity mentioned above has resulted in significant numbers of our citizenry who do not have to work. Interestingly, the “non-productives” are concentrated at the ends of the income spectrum.

The very rich do not have to produce because we have created a system in which they have so much accumulated wealth that it is almost impossible for them to spend it all. They can safely stop working, and never need worry about not having life’s necessities. In fact, many of them never need worry about not having life’s luxuries. Additionally, many of the very rich have never produced, because their wealth is inherited.

The very poor do not have to produce because we have created a system which has redistributed wealth to them through the government, at little or no cost. They can safely avoid working, and never need worry about not having life’s necessities. In fact, the latest trends are to see to it that they have enough money to enjoy life’s luxuries (at least by global standards) – TV’s, cars, drugs, stylish clothes, high-quality, on-demand healthcare, etc. – goods that only the rich can afford outside the US. Additionally, many of the very poor have never produced, since they inherited their access to state largess through a system of cyclical illegitimacy.

The Left has become the voice of these groups, the representative of the non-producer. They use parlor tricks – accolades heaped upon “generous” donors who give money to “good” (aka left-wing) causes, heart-rending stories of poor children who don’t have enough to eat, feel-good reports of government programs that helped Ms. Doe to get back on her feet – to convince us that their side is the side of virtue.

But the policies promoted by the Left are not virtuous. They attempt to further increase the number of non-productives. They promote policies that bias the system against the entrepreneur; they promote regulatory frameworks that benefit big business (businesses which are, because of their scale, filled with non-productives); they promote nationalized healthcare, so that you don’t have to work to get coverage; they promote expanding entitlements, so that you can retire (i.e. stop working) early; they promote unionization, so that workers can have someone “on their side” trying to get the maximum amount of economic rents for the minimal amount of work; and so on.

Work is a path to virtue by enabling and rewarding good actions. Policies that seek to minimize work, then, can hardly claim to be virtuous, regardless of their intentions.

The current difficulty in the US (and, it seems, in the UK) is that the Right has all but abandoned its role as the voice of the producer. Largely, this is because the behavior of the Republican Party (the supposed representative of the Right) has been utterly hypocritical. Republicans said they were for limited government, low taxation, scaled-back entitlements, less government spending and regulation, etc. But when in power, they didn’t walk the talk.

This hypocrisy has left the Republican Party in tatters. From 2000-2008, according to Gallup polls, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating has not changed: it was 53% in 2000, and 53% in 2008. During that same period, Republican favorables went from 54% to 40% – a massive, 14-point drop. The basic reason is hypocrisy. I respect someone I disagree with if they really act in accordance with what they say. I don’t respect someone I agree with if their actions don’t match their professed beliefs.

So conservatives have abandoned the Republican Party in droves, further weakening the Left’s unrelenting attempts to move the US toward “democratic centralism.”

At the same time, the Left has vilified the productive sector, accusing it of being greedy, narcissistic, over-consuming, racists, sexist, etc.

Greedier than Charlie Rangel? More narcissistic than Barack Obama? More over-consuming than Al Gore? More racist than Jesse Jackson? More sexist than NOW? Really?

No, not really. In the real world, the productives realize that a business can’t succeed if they don’t share the wealth and credit, can thrive if it doesn’t conserve, and can’t retain talent if it allows its biases to prevent the recruitment and retention of talent.

And so, we are left with a situation where a huge chunk of the citizenry has no effective representation. This is the reason there will be a re-alignment. In a republic, citizens will not long tolerate being unrepresented. Something has to happen.

So who will speak for the productive sector? The political entrepreneur who steps forward to bear this standard will tap into an enormous and increasingly energetic base of support. It will take a while for these leaders to emerge, but when they do the re-alignment will happen fast. The good news is that our basic legal framework – from the Constitution on down – supports the emergence of such a leader. Revolution is not necessary.

The bad news is that such a leader has not yet appeared, and the number of non-productives is growing fast, so time is short. Perhaps David Cameron is such a leader in the UK (I have my doubts, but keep hope alive), but there is no one like that who has yet emerged in the US.

But I remain confident a new group of leaders will emerge. And, somehow, I feel like the internet will play a leading role in this drama. As will blogs like Belmont Club, and the thoughtful and engaging members herein.

The times, they are a changin’.

L3

Oct 11, 2009 - 5:36 pm


Here is a follow up from Leo.

Leo Linbeck III:


WSL,

Thanks for the kind words.

I would like to see him expand his ideas to consider what becomes of our society when more people inhabit the idle sector than the productive. What mechanism exists to keep the country functioning when all signs point to the profitability of living off the work of others? Or does a society, reaching such a point, simply collapse into anarchy?

Well, I don’t know if I’m the best guy to expand on that, but here’s my best shot.

I think the thing to watch is the spiritual dimension. My unscientific, anecdotal observation is that a lot of people never stop producing. I have also observed that those folks are disproportionately believers in God. My hunch is that they see that all of their actions have meaning, so they never stop acting, never stop working.

These people – regardless of which creed they profess – are always looking for a plow to push. I’m sure you know people like this. If their employer goes out of business, they find another job. If they get fired by their employer, they start a business. If their business fails, they find another to start. If they sell their business, they either start another, or they turn their attention to needy causes.

In addition, there was a time when these folks were held up as exemplars of citizenship in our communities. They were treated with respect, and felt proud of their role as producers. Organized religion played an important, perhaps central role in this esteeming process. This community admiration, in turn, induced young people (especially young boys) to strive to emulate their behavior.

Where there is a breakdown in faith, there is a breakdown in hope. And when hope evaporates, so does the willingness to defer gratification that is at the heart of production. After all, at its very core, to produce is to defer gratification. I invest my time making widgets, with the expectation that I can sell the widget for more than it cost me. That requires hope.

Hopelessness is a barrier, then, to production. But the solution to hopelessness is not hope. The solution to hopelessness is faith. And it better be faith in God, cause faith in human beings – who are, after all, flawed – can’t sustain hope, but faith in God can.

Sorry for the digression, but to summarize, my view is that so long as there is a strong religious underpinning to a society, these temptations to idleness can be resisted. That is why I remain optimistic about the US. Depending upon the poll, the percentage of Americans who believe in God ranges from 73-94%. That’s a big reservoir of faith.

Conversely, things are not quite so promising in Europe. There, belief in God is ranges from OK (Poland at 77%) to worrisome (Ireland at 58%) to troubling (UK at 29%) to scary (Sweden at 17% [insert link to Nobel Peace Prize here]). The reservoir is almost drained; still, it will get refilled. It’s just going to be refilled by a different creed.

So, my optimism for the US basically rests on our faith. Which is why, I believe, the liberal project for America will fail – Americans won’t change their beliefs fast enough for the process to progress to the point of irreversibility.

Finally, an interesting test of whether I’m right to be optimistic is probably healthcare reform and abortion. It is clear that the President wants to have public funding of abortion. But regardless whether abortions are eventually paid for by the Federal Government, I’m almost certain that the President will not be able to get abortion passed “through the front door.” He’ll have to sneak it in the back door through some kind of administrative ruling. Why? Opposition, primarily, of the Catholic Church.

Faith still really does matter in the US. It is our true hope, as long as we don’t change.

Cheers,
L3


Oct
11, 2009 - 7:33 pm

Monday, October 5, 2009