We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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How little coverage there is of this scandal, no?
When was the last time a felony fraud investigation into the campaign of a sitting Senator and presumptive Presidential nominee was almost totally ignored by the press?
This looks pretty open and shut to me, at least as far the fraud part goes. The only real question is whether the candidate knew, and that puts the candidate in the position they so frequently find themselves in – they either knew what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are guilty and unfit for office, or they didn’t know what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are incompetent and unfit for office.
“America’s militant agnostic minority has totally distorted the meaning of separation of church and state. It doesn’t mean banning religion and religious values from the public square. It doesn’t mean Howard Stern’s off-color (and frequently off-the-wall) ‘humor’ is protected speech, while the free _expression of religion is banned. It means the United States will establish no official religion, while remaining equally hospitable to all religions — and to those who practice none. Religious principle is not something to fear and loathe and banish from the public square; it is a code of conduct on which we can and should rely to guide our personal and civic behavior”
– singer Pat Boone, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
I know, I know – Pat Boone? But he seems to me he got this one about right (except for the implication that Howard Stern’s humor may not be protected speech).
Contrary to popular belief, “separation of church and state” is not found in the US Constitution. What is found in the Constitution is a prohibition on the establishment of a state church (which is why it is known as the Establishment Clause) reading thusly “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” The ‘separation’ meme comes from correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, but was never enacted in Constitutional language.
A nice, fairly even-handed intro can be found here.
Personally, I think that the issue of impending theocracy and separation of church and state evaporates, once you take seriously the US Constitution’s limited grant of power to the national government. If the national government is held to its enumerated powers, then it lacks the power to implement into civil law most behavioral controls that various religions might promote. Since the federal government restricted to its enumerated powers has no Constitutional basis to, for example, ban abortions, it simply cannot be used for that purpose by the purported theocrats among us.
The various left-wing ninnies who are running around bleating about theocracy are, in effect, hoist on their own petard. Having spent generations destroying the idea of limited government and creating an all-powerful national state, it ill becomes them to complain now that their tool is being turned to different ends. Even so, it is astonishing that virtually none of them realize that the uses to which the Republicans want to put federal power are inevitable, once you establish an all-powerful state in a country that is actually quite Christian and conservative, all told. It is sad but unsurprising that none of them are willing to attack the problem at its root by calling for limited government. No, the only solution the statists can imagine is seizing power again, themselves.
I am due for a fascinating teleconference in 10 minutes, but I thought this Glenn Reynold’s post nicely illustrated a real blind spot for libertarians. We tend to be market- and economics-oriented, and any concentration of attention in one area creates blind spots in others. One of those blind spots has to do with the economically irrational but irreducibly human craving for non-material benefits in the form of status, recognition, etc.
My historian-brother often says that one of the most interesting phenomena that he’s observed is the cross-cultural willingness of people to trade away economic benefits for status. I suspect that this is one example of that. So, in a surprisingly similar way, is being a politician. That’s an obviously poor economic move for most folks. But one of the drug dealers in Price’s book talks about how he likes the way he becomes the center of attention when he enters a room full of junkies. Politicians, I think, get the same thing, especially in the bubble-environments of Washington, or state capitals. I suspect, in fact, that people are, to varying degrees, hardwired to get an endorphin rush from that sort of attention, just as they’re hardwired in varying degrees to respond to drugs.
As I say, I don’t know if Levitt talks about that or not, but I think it’s one possible explanation for a lot of stuff that looks economically counterproductive.
I have a niggling sense that there is a lot more to be said on this subject, but duty calls. Go read the Instapundit post, and as always, be sure to click the concluding “Indeed.”
Selected research on bread:
More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoporosis.
Newborn babies can choke on bread.
Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
Providing all the scientific support any nanny-stater will need to implement controls.
One of the fables that socialists like to tell is how wonderful life is in their peoples’ paradises. From risible stories about how the Cuban people have world-class health care freely available to all and are 100% literate, to more plausible, but equally erroneous, tales about how our Scandinavian brethren manage to have a high standard of living, short work weeks, a benevolent welfare state, etc., these tales are inevitably spun by statists seeking to cast dust in the eyes of their more plebeian subjects the better to hide the failure of their grand schemes.
The received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state.
Not so fast. Even in the notoriously socialist-freindly confines of the New York Times, hard economic truths have a way of making themselves felt eventually. What the Times has belatedly discovered about its beloved third way socialist-lite economies is that they are falling behind, shackled to the dead weight of the welfare state, the enervation it breeds, and the taxes it imposes.
All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)
After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.
The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.
Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi.
While the private-consumption figure for the United States was $32,900 per person, the countries of Western Europe (again excepting Luxembourg, at $29,450) ranged between $13,850 and $23,500, with Norway at $18,350.
Faced with the undeniable economic reality that they have almost eaten their way through the economic seed corn laid up by their frugal ancestors, what do the current panjandrums of the welfare state do? Why, they lie, of course.
Meanwhile, the references to Norway as “the world’s richest country” keep on coming. An April 2 article in Dagsavisen, a major Oslo daily, asked: How is it that “in the world’s richest country we’re tearing down social services that were built up when Norway was much poorer?“
Mark Steyn with an extended meditation in the Spectator on globalization. Just go read it, already. Its worth the registration and annoying pop-ups.
From Instapundit, the excellent news that traffic cameras have been voted down in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Indiana.
A number of jurisdictions still have such cameras in place (or at least a place for them has been reserved, legal authority-wise), but fortunately there is a solution.
One can, I suppose, trace the end of the ideal of limited government in the United States from any number of events. I have heard the Civil War, Roosevelt’s court-packing schemes and the emasculation of Supreme Court jurisprudence on enumerated powers, even (half-jokingly) the extension of the franchise to women.
If these are all candidates for the beginning of the the end of limited government, I wonder if we aren’t witnessing the end of the end. Constitutional structure, jurisprudence, and the like were never more than temporary and imperfect restraints on the state, in the absence of real political backing and deep cultural roots for the ideal of limited government. There is precious little sign of either in the current landscape.
At this point, one looks around in despair for any sign that limited government has any political viability at all. The Republicans, whose commitment to limited government has been steadily waning for decades, appear to have abandoned it entirely now that they hold the reins of government.
While some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan’s deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture. Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan’s other famous lines, sans irony: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
This represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident. Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending, the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington, D.C. And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state’s rights, the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual family.
It scarcely need be said that the Democratic Party provides no hope whatsoever for limited government, outside of a few isolated issues. Of the Libertatian Party, well, the less said the better. Many small-l libertarians, pragmatic and incremental reformers such as myself, looked to the Republicans as the least worst alternative, with some hope that their authoritarian and statist instincts could be tempered by the political calculation that they couldn’t do without us.
It is apparent, however, that a new political calculation is afoot, one that relies not at all on believers in limited government, and thus consigns them to utter political irrelevance.
What if Karl Rove’s idea for a permanent majority actually worked? The GOP could convince soccer moms that it’s not so hard-hearted by implementing national health care piece by piece. It could pick up the votes of blue-collar union members by appealing to them on “values” issues that the Democrats can’t talk about without choking on their own bile. And the GOP could even pick up votes from socially conservative black and Hispanic voters who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage.
The electoral logic of Big Government Conservatism, in fact, is virtually inescapable.
At this point, I see no hope for limited government in the near or medium term. I don’t see any political home for us, anywhere that we can exert any meaningful influence. We can look forward only to the expansion of the state, until the entire political system is rendered chaotically fluid by some shock or upheaval. The most likely scenario I see for realignment and revival of limited government ideals would be the collapse of the Democratic Party, which would at least create an opening to reinvent the current, sterile Rep/Dem, Conservative/Liberal dichotomy as a new opposition between liberty and the total state.
Just to stir the pot in the peanut gallery:
Does anyone else find the use of the term “undocumented” to describe people who are in the US illegally to be more than a little disingenuous, misleading, and politically correct?
Terri Schiavo died this morning.
I hope that her husband and family can find some peace, if not with each other, than at least within themselves.
Now that the emotional flash point of the debate is gone, I hope that we can have a more considered policy discussion over who should make medical decisions for non-decisional patients, and under what restrictions.
Nobody is willing to take the position (at least in public) that a person should not be able to refuse medical care in person, on their own behalf. However, many of those now engaged in the struggle over end-of-life health care are, wittingly or not, arguing that some health care decisions should be removed from private hands and made by the state.
The current baseline rule is that your personal autonomy with respect to consenting to or refusing to consent to medical care is pretty much absolute (I am discussing medical care, not mental health care, which operates in a parallel universe on these issues). I note that there are some second-order restrictions on what kind of care is actually available to you, arising from various licensing and regulatory regimes, but leave those aside for now. You can refuse any and all kinds of care, ranging from the most extreme life support to the most mundane blood transfusion, and people do all the time, even when the refusal puts their life at risk.
Things get more complicated when you are unable to decide for yourself (or, what amounts to the same thing, unable to communicate your decision). Someone has to decide what care you will be given. Your ability to make such decisions in advance will, sooner or later, be outrun by the unforeseeable complexities and irreducible detail of your medical care. If nothing else, someone will have to interpret your written instructions and apply them to the messy clinical realities. At the end of the day, if you are not “decisional” you will have a surrogate decision-maker. That decision-maker will either be a private individual or the state.
The current system very rarely results in the state directly taking custody of a medical patient who is not decisional, and is very heavily biased toward leaving health care decisions in private hands, with a fairly limited “reserved” power in the state to hear disputes about who the private decision-maker should be. So far, so good.
Although reasonable people can disagree on whether, for example, Michael Schiavo should be Terri Schiavo’s surrogate or one of her parents should be, this dispute is over the proper issue of which private party should make decisions. It is very difficult, I think, to argue that this issue hasn’t been fairly and adequately processed by the courts.
However, we are seeing increasing pressure to restrict the decisions that the surrogate can make. This is where it gets tricky, because legal restrictions on the decisions that a private decision-maker can make mean that the state is making that decision. If there is a law on the books that prohibits your surrogate from consenting to experimental treatments, then the state is making the decision that you will not receive that treatment. If there is a law on the books that prohibits your surrogate from withdrawing a feeding tube, then the state is making the decision that you will be fed through a feeding tube.
The current mantra that “if there is any doubt, err on the side of life” is a TV-friendly sound-bite in the service of expanding the control that the state has over your medical care, because this “principle” removes from your surrogate the ability to make health care decisions, and is functionally equivalent to the state ordering that medical care be provided regardless of your wishes. For your own good, of course.
Similarly, the endless agitation for more appeals amounts to agitation for more state review and oversight of a nominally private decision. For your own good, naturally.
In short, to the extent any coherent public policy is being advanced by the people who want the feeding tube re-inserted into Ms. Schiavo, it is a public policy that shrinks the decision-making powers of private decision-makers, and necessarily transfers those decisions from private hands to those of the state.
The over-riding principle that is cited in favor of this transfer of power to the state is the protection of life. However, the protection of life is not an absolute trump card; indeed, when it comes to medical care, personal autonomy overrides protection of life; otherwise, the law would require that life-saving health care be provided to you over your objections.
Nobody is willing to take that step, so advocates for the transfer of power to the state are left in the position of arguing that some decisions that you can make for yourself should never be made by your surrogate, but should be made by the state instead. Those are the only two choices on offer – either the state makes decisions about your end-of-life medical care by prohibiting your surrogate from deciding, or your surrogate decision-maker does.
I think you know where my instincts are when faced with a choice between preserving the private sphere and expanding state control.
Bill Quick puts up 11 excellent reasons for limited-government types to be pissed off at the current administration. I found little to quibble with.
Generally, I have found George W. Bush to be good, very good, on foreign affairs, and mediocre to bad on domestic issues.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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