Housing Boom and Bust
People continue to ask me, some two years since the economic downturn in this country began, "How did this happen?" But it's not just the friends and readers of rjmoeller.com who wonder aloud about the events surrounding the housing collapse and stock market drop. On national radio shows, cable-news television, and high-traffic websites one comes across similar queries on a daily basis.
If you really want to get a fuller picture of what all went on in 2008 (and the years leading up to it), you need to read Housing Boom and Bust by Dr. Thomas Sowell. For now, and to help clarify a few of the more pertinent facts of the case, check out Dr. Sowell discussing that book and this issue last year with Stanford University's Peter Robinson.
Tea Parties, Town halls, and Totalitarianism
By: R.J. Moeller
Election season is upon us once again and with it comes the renewed interest of millions of Americans who, for the intermediate time between ballot-casts, tune out Washington and tune in to whatever distractions in the world of entertainment happen to strike their fancy. 
Some have unsuccessfully attempted to keep up with the Kardashians, while others have (vicariously) danced with stars. We have Idols, Survivors, and Gossip Girls who are all, understandably, more interesting than anything to do with Minority Whips, Inspector Generals, and some guy named Filibuster in The Beltway.
And yet something feels different this time around. There is an unmistakable air of urgency and interest in regards to “politics” emanating from the previously-pacified masses. Friends, family members and acquaintances who I’ve never known to be “political” have in the last year become near-experts on the finer points of constitutional law, the intricacies of health care legislation, and my main man Dick Morris’ battle-plan to “take back America in 2010.”
When I’m receiving Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute policy research papers on supply-side economics in my email inbox from old college buddies who used to send me YouTube videos of burping toddlers and ferrets chasing a ball of yarn around a barn, I know something has changed in the culture. (Or at least in my cultural phylum.)
Maybe its temporary, like the waning patience eligible bachelorettes I take to dinner show for my mouth’s inability to stop talking about Milton Friedman and my forehead's inability to stop sweating profusely (regardless of room temperature), but I’d like to think that the sudden surge in social, cultural, and political engagement is a signal of a long-term trend.
The media would have us believe that the rise in support for conservative, libertarian, and constitutional principles is directly proportionate to the amount of bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, and arachnophobia (I do hate spiders) coursing through the wind-swept veins of Red-state, “middle” America. Whether pundits and politicians on the Left who espouse this grotesque “things like the Tea Party movement happen because anger and racism rule the hearts of Center-Right Americans” theory actually believe it, or simply regurgitate it out of reactionary disdain for their political opponents, is between them and their Maker.
I don’t know their hearts, but they certainly have no qualm with purporting to intimately know mine (and those of millions of Americans).
The truth is that the charges of racism levied against modern conservatism don’t hold up under the weight of experience, evidence or common sense.
The common themes one has heard at town hall meetings, Tea Party rallies, dinner-table discussions, Instant Message dialogues and water-cooler conversations include: limiting the rampant growth of government; reducing the astronomical debt and deficit our states and nation has accrued; protecting the border (and sovereignty of the United States); undoing the socialized medicine known as Obamacare; reigning in corruption and pork-barrel spending; and restoring integrity to our “great little experiment” in republican democracy.
Yep. I can just feel the scorching heat radiating off the flames of racism that surge throughout such provocative statements. If you’re flushing-red right now yourself, it’s likely not the result of Indian Summer weather this September. It’s probably because you saw right through these calls for fiscal responsibility, political accountability, and moral competency for the veiled KKK-like ruminations they truly are.
If racism is what gets Center-Right America out of bed in the morning, and not the need to work hard so that their church-going, law-abiding family can have food on the table and calories inside of them to burn at soccer practice, then why do we almost never hear racist sound-bites on television or radio, or read racist quotes in newspapers and magazines, from them? (We hear more about the "racism" than from the "racists" themselves.)
If hatred of people with different colored skin is what is motivating millions of previously a-political voters to get involved in politics for the first time in their lives, wouldn’t such easily-influenced and thoughtless people likely be unable to control revealing their true intentions by blurting out racial epitaphs at every event, rally, and public gathering?
Is all of this excitement about the direction the country is headed in really attributable to the fact that a black man is president, like such erudite thinkers as Jeneanne Garafulo and Bill Maher propose? Someone better go and tell Ken Blackwell in Ohio, Marco Rubio in Florida, and Sarah Palin in the moose-hunting blind that their loyal, motivated supporters hate blacks, Latinos and women before it’s too late!
If there are overt racial slurs being bandied about at events carrying the banner of the conservative-libertarian values I ascribe to, I want to know about it. Enough with the inferences, and let's have some evidence, mainstream media.
Thus far, the evidence the media does have for the supposed racist backbone of the grass-roots, conservative-libertarian groundswell these past 12 months is little more than conjecture, hearsay, sour grapes, and tired, trite liberal talking points they likely learned in Sociology 101 freshmen year at whichever Leftist Seminary (aka “almost every college in America”) they happened to have been indoctrinated in.
What the Left in the media, academia, and congress are missing about the surge in enthusiasm and participation we’ve seen in this country is that it has very little to do political parties, and everything to do with principles, values, and ideas.
I typically vote Republican. I am a conservative.
Republicans were booted out of office in 2006 and 2008 because they weren’t acting like the conservatives they claimed to be. Democrats will be steam-rolled in 2010 and 2012 precisely because they did act, vote, and rule like the progressive liberals the most important and influential among them undeniably are.
People aren’t ecstatic about Republican Party patter trotted out by talking heads; but many of them are emphatically finished with big-government liberalism, and passionately believe in their traditional, conservative, convictions.
This is a war of ideas, not personalities. Liberals and Democrats love when a political fight is about the star-power or sex-appeal of candidates because they have the entire entertainment world at their disposal. If they can’t do a physical make-over on one of their candidates, they just leak it to John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, the ladies at The View and Rolling Stone Magazine that such-and-such a liberal candidate is cerebral, super-smart, and over-qualified compared to the GOP competition.
To an extent, however, the Left has begun to figure out that their go-to tactics aren’t going to work this time. This is why they’ve shifted their strategy from trying to out-cool the opposition to working tirelessly in hopes that they can paint the candidates of choice among the political newcomers I’ve been talking about in this column as radicals, extremists, and all-around nut-jobs.
Admittedly, as in the case of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, not every candidate Republican primary voters have chosen is an ideal one. But when you analyze why dark-horse, largely unknown candidates like O’Donnell beat out incumbent Republicans, it comes down to principles much more than personalities. The guy who held the seat in Delaware called himself a Republican and then voted for a laundry list of anti-conservative pieces of legislation. The voters in that state, as well as others around the nation, said “Enough is enough” and threw the bum out.
To paraphrase one Donald Rumsfeld: You don’t always go to the ballot box with the perfect candidate you want; you often have to go with the one you got.
It’s going to take a few election cycles to get better and better candidates in the position to run. It’s going to take a repeal of McCain-Feingold to open up financial doors for some of them to be able to run. It’s going to take constant vigilance from the citizenry for the next few terms to hold the people we put into power now accountable to the conservative principles they say they’re going to Washington to put in to effect later.
These, and other similar changes in behavior patterns from the electorate, will eventually lead to better candidates being willing to run and being able to win.
And for the time being, what liberal, progressive Democrats think of someone like Christine O’Donnell or Rand Paul is so utterly irrelevant to me that I’m not sure it can be expressed in mere words. Back in college, my friends and I had a system of blinks that we would use to communicate with one another when, among other things, we were in a boring conversation at a party. Negative commentary from Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, or Keith Olbermann on a Tea Party candidate registers with this blogger as a definite “two blink-er.” (Translation: “I’ve been rendered incapable of caring less about what this person in front of me is saying”)
Don’t get me wrong: the character and track-record of any person seeking to temporarily borrow some of our Creator-endowed rights while in elected office matters. It really does. But too many people, on both sides of the aisle, are missing the ideological forest for the petty, political trees that plague elections every 2, 4, and 6 years.
If you firmly believe that economic freedom is inherently intertwined with religious and political freedom, you know which direction the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-run government is heading and you know that it is the wrong one.
If you are convinced that the Founders were infinitely wise, and not short-sighted, in limiting and de-centralizing the powers of each branch of the federal government, you know that at the current rate of annexation and intrusion we will soon be living in an un-recognizable, European-style state.
If you’re sick of czars, summits (beer, or otherwise), and buck-passing, you know that Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, and Carly Fiorina (in California) aren’t who your ire ought to be aimed at.
This is a Center-Right country. We have a decidedly Left-of-Center group running it.
You do the math.
The reason for the success of Tea Party rallies and town hall meetings and conservative media outlets and “fringe” political candidates is difficult to figure out like the success of family-friendly, positive message-filled movies like Chronicles of Narnia and The Incredibles is difficult to figure out.
People are willing to support something that is representative of their beliefs, convictions, and general worldview.
See you at the polls (on November 2nd).
G.K. Day: Tremendous Trifles
It's Friday, and you've wisely typed "rjmoeller.com" into your address bar, so that means you're in for an enormous treat: insight about the world from my boy Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
Based on a recommendation from my good friend Adam C, today's selection comes from a collection of Chesterton essays titled Tremendous Trifles. The specific piece I want to share with you, "What I Found In My Pocket", is a humorous, witty account of a train ride GKC had, at the time, recently taken. Finding himself aboard a locomotive with no book to read or pen-and-paper with which to write, the perpetually dis-organized Chesterton decided to examine the contents of his pockets.
An excerpt:
The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Battersea tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided me with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library.
Should my railway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro and con upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the cross of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant all that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope of England.
The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife, I need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditations all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those practical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our human civilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man. I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war. For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened it and looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade; and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man.
The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches.
Then I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing, the thing we all love, but dare not touch.The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world. The next was a coin of a very modest value; and I saw in it not only the image and superscription of our own Caesar, but all government and order since the world began.
But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket.
I allude to my railway ticket.
Read the entire essay here, and keep in mind as you read that this was published in a major British newspaper. One week Chesterton would dissect the social ramifications of adopting socialism, and the next he was using the contents of his pockets as the material for poetic commentary on Western civilization. His was a rare talent.
The Left Doesn’t Care For Capitalism
Since being elected the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama has been the catalyst for a national discussion about such commonly used, however misunderstood, terms such as "socialism" and "capitalism." When Americans on the Center-Right of the political spectrum point out the more-than-passing similarities President Obama's agenda has to socialism they are lambasted, lampooned and derided for being mis-informed extremists (who are probably racist as well).
Here, in their own words, are the public statements of the Obama administration (and other top liberal Democrats) in regards to their attitudes toward both socialism and capitalism.
I rest my case.
How Fair Was My Doctrine
As I have been writing columns lately on the totalitarian instinct inherent to Leftist ideology, I thought this video appropriate to post. In recent years there has been much talk about something called the "Fairness Doctrine." In fact, I wrote something myself about it a few years back. Essentially, this was a government agency that made sure there was "fair" and "equal" representation of all political views on public airwaves. No, I didn't make this up, and it isn't some allusion to Orwellian literature. It was going on here, in the United States of America up until the administration of Ronald Reagan.
The reason the Fairness Doctrine has re-emerged as a discussion topic in political circles is because liberal Democrats (like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York) want it back. Another former senator who wants it back?
If what you just heard from your now-president sits well with you...you're a liberal. Easy as that.
“Private vs. Public” Battles in the Classroom
By: R.J. Moeller
"I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education's power to reverse generational poverty. But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett [the billionaire investor] framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today's problems in urban education. 'Make private schools illegal,' he said, 'and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.' "
-Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of Public Schools (District of Columbia)
It is never difficult to find relevant, timely examples of people in positions of political power attempting (or at the very least, desiring) to impose their vision of how things “ought to be” on the rest of us. To some extent, this is appropriate. I would hope that every person seeking public office has some convictions of their own. Nihilism is not the belief system I want my mayor, senator, governor or president to hold. And, for better or worse, none that I know of, do.
Thus, the aptly dubbed “Culture Wars” are alive and well in every corner of this nation. We argue and debate because we care; because we know the issues of our time matter.
Few issues strike a nerve quite like education, and for good reason. The impressionable mind of a child is a precious thing. Education of that mind typically leads to a richer, fuller life. The agnostic and religious parent alike agrees on such points. The “education debate” today isn’t over whether or not education is a good thing: fundamentally, the debate centers on who will do the educating.
Americans have always quarreled over their respective visions for the nation they love. But there are some arguments that are made that would end the freedom to argue over them. There are, as G.K. Chesterton put it, “thoughts that stop thought…and those are the only thoughts that ought to be stopped.”
And it is here, at the very heart of the education debate in America, where questions involving the appropriate role of government, individual liberty vs. collective “salvation,” economics, sociology, and history so clearly converge. It is here where the dissection and discussion of the visions of those in power over us can (and must) begin.
Michelle Rhee is the Chancellor of the public school system in Washington D.C. She was not elected, but appointed to her post in 2008 by Mayor Adrian Fenty, himself a liberal Democrat. In a February 8th commentary written earlier this year, Chancellor Rhee-Palpatine penned the words of the quote I opened my column with today. Rhee was recounting the advice mega-billionaire (and Obama economic adviser) Warren Buffett had given to her concerning the difficulties in effecting “real” change:
He said it would be easy to solve today's problems in urban education. 'Make private schools illegal,' he said, 'and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.' "
That does sound easy.
And dreadful.
The implication of Buffett’s suggestion is that if rich kids were forced to go to bad schools, the rich parents of those rich kids would make sure that their kid’s new school wasn’t so bad.
Ms. Rhee specifically references this exchange with Mr. Buffett in order to drive her guilt-ridden point home: This super successful guy agrees with my vision of social engineering at the hands of Ivy League experts, but he and I both know you selfish knuckle-draggers, those clinging to your guns, religion, and money, would never go for it. And that’s what is really wrong with education.
For the purposes of this piece, my primary concern is with the cozy comfort level American liberals, progressives, Leftists and Democrats have with totalitarian ideas – like the one Mr. Buffett put forward and Chancellor Rhee pines for. But let me get back to that thought in a moment.
It absolutely must be pointed out that the United States of America spends more per public student than any other country, save Switzerland, so all of this “It’s all about the Benjamin’s” talk is garbage. Switzerland, as well as many other countries that spend less than the U.S., actually gets what it pays for and is ranked higher in overall “Math, Science and Reading” scoring systems than we are. An 8th grader today in the United States knows less than an 8th grader 100 years ago. School administrators make six-figure salaries while insisting their districts don’t have money for books; bad teachers are protected by mafia-like unions; and good teachers are limited in what they could potentially earn by the bad teachers and suffocating unions. Parents drop their kids off at school, treating all teachers as if they were babysitters who can only make the parents happy by giving their kids an “A” (earned or otherwise).
But the answer to highly unsatisfactory results in public education is to shut down the schools that actually work? The answer to a problem caused by a complex blend of sociological, economic, bureaucratic, and moral problems will be best solved by handing the reigns solely over to the bureaucracy – the sector of society least equipped and most detached from the individual students and families whose education we’re supposedly concerned with?
The types of schools (i.e. private, parochial, etc.) that purposely avoid making the mistakes that have tanked the American public education system are understandably the targets of those responsible for running that public education system into the proverbial ground. The same private citizens who are forced to pay both their regular taxes and the tuition for their child’s private education are vilified for wanting something better than what people like Ms. Rhee can provide.
And to be fair, it isn’t Ms. Rhee’s, or any particular public school teacher or administrator’s fault: it is an inherently flawed system, built on inherently flawed ideology.
I happen to follow the podcast of a D.C.-area radio talk show that is frequented by a rotating group of Washington Post columnists and journalists, and to a man (and woman), every single media pundit on Tuesday’s show were in full support of the Buffett-Rhee proposal to silence free assembly, speech, and private education. Of course each of them were quick to add that they “weren’t sure” that they would want their own kids to be the first test-subjects of such a plan should it be tried in selected areas of the country some day.
These Washington Post pundits are all progressive liberals. So is Michelle Rhee. So is Warren Buffett. So are President Barack Obama and his wife.
So are more than 80% of public school teachers and administrators.
Please understand that what I’m trying to do here is clarify, first and foremost. I don’t believe that the Left is evil; just wrong. I firmly believe that Warren Buffett and Michelle Rhee have nothing but the best intentions when they suggest that making private education illegal will make education better for the collective, just as I believe that President Obama meant well when he annexed 1/6th of the economy under the control of the federal government via the stealth health care bill. And just as I believe that Nancy Pelosi means well when she pushed for unprecedented levels of centralized power and control over the U.S. economy with Cap-and-Trade legislation.
But whether you intended to be wrong, or you are mistakenly wrong – you’re still wrong. Whether you meant to propose something that is contrary to the very heart of American republican democracy, or you accidentally proposed such a load of rubbish – it’s still rubbish.
What we need in this country is more school choice, not less. We need more parental involvement, not increased decision-making responsibility in the hands of Department of Education officials. We need for principals to be able to more easily fire rotten teachers and more frequently reward outstanding ones. We need more financial accountability and transparency in our education system, not less.
None – and I mean none – of those (and many other) things are possible in a centrally-planned, socially-engineered bureaucratic quagmire like the one we currently have.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote extensively and spoke passionately on the subject of school choice and school vouchers.
Dr. Friedman was concerned about the practical, logistical components of the education system and its flaws, and he offered many tangible solutions for improving it, but he also was aptly able to take a step back and see the underlying conflict this issue embodies: the tension between centralized control and individual choice.
I could, with the best of intentions, put an end to all automobile accidents tomorrow by outlawing cars. But are we willing to sacrifice the freedom, comfort, and time-saving miracle of an automobile so that I and my good intentions can sleep easier at night? What about all the lives that are saved because ambulances and first-responders can get to the scene of an accident or house-fire so much quicker than the horse-and-buggies of yore?
The United States of America is different precisely because we chose liberty over forced equality or pie-in-the-sky Utopian schemes. Our freedom to choose is one of our great strengths, not crippling weaknesses.
There are ways to cut down on the number of automobile deaths each year without banning cars. There are ways to improve education without putting an end to private education.
Sadly, for all of us, progressive liberals tend to pursue the choices that put an end to choice. They support the alternatives that leave the rest of us without any.
“Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.” -Thomas Sowell
I Thought We Hated Bush?
Historian and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson has an interesting new column on the apparent about-face many people have done in their spite-filled hatred of President George W. Bush.
Former president George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. So, for nearly two years, Pres. Barack Obama won easy applause by prefacing almost every speech on his economic policies with a “Bush did it” put-down.
But suddenly Bush seems okay. Last week, the president did the unthinkable: He praised Bush for his past efforts to reach out to Muslims. Vice President Joe Biden went further and blurted out, “Mr. Bush deserves a lot of credit.” Biden topped that off with, “Mr. President, thank you.”
Even liberal pundits have now called on Bush to help Obama defuse rising tensions over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and Arizona’s illegal-immigration law.
What’s going on?
What is going on, indeed! Bush was held in contempt by anyone with a pulse in the media for nearly 8 years. (He got a break for the few months following 9/11.) Democrats portrayed him in 2004 and again in 2008 as the single, solitary reason there was human suffering, Islamic terrorism, and global warming. We had to shut down Gitmo, immediately pull out of Iraq, and apologize to every country whose feelings we offended under Bush's reign of terror.
And yet Gitmo remains open. We stayed in Iraq another two years (and were only able to pull more troops out because the Petraeus-planned, Bush-backed "surge"). And now Democrats are even going so far as to thank the old boy for his work.
"You did a heckuva job, Bushie."
In comparison with Obama and his gaffes, Bush no longer seems the singular clod whom his opponents endlessly ridiculed. The supposedly mellifluent Obama relies on the teleprompter as if it were his umbilical cord. His occasional word-mangling (he pronounced “corpsman” as “corpse-man”) and weird outbursts (he recently complained that opponents “talk about me like a dog”) remind us that the pressures of the presidency can make a leader sometimes seem silly.
Bush now seems cool because he has played it cool. The more Obama and Biden have trashed him, the more silent and thus magnanimous he appears. Bush’s post-presidency is not like that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton — both of whom criticized their successors and hit the campaign trail — but similar to that of his father, who worked with, rather than harped about, Bill Clinton. That graciousness not only has helped George W. Bush in the polls but seems finally to be have mellowed out Obama as well.
Criticism of Bush got out of hand in the last few years of his term. Writing novels or making documentaries about killing the president, or libeling him as a Nazi, is not the sort of politics that we want continued during the Obama years. So it makes sense before the general election to halt the endless blame-gaming, before what goes around comes around.
The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush of Ground Zero who had a megaphone in his hand and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.
America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised.
Bush wasn't as good as some remember him, but he absolutely wasn't as terrible as far too many do. And what is more, we need to start seeing our leaders as extensions of ourselves. We put these people into power.
Wicked Pelosi of the West (Coast)
John Dennis is a Republican candidate for Congress in California with a fairly creative, if not over-the-top, way of communicating the problems with the Democrats currently running things in Washington.
A little tacky if you ask me, but I won't loose much sleep over Nancy Pelosi melting.
The Debate Remains The Same
By: R.J. Moeller
As I sat down to write this column, what would be my first since early August, I had an idea to pen a witty commentary on the differences in the types of August Recess vacations that presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush took while Commander-in-Chief as opposed to the ones The One (President Obama) has taken since entering the Oval Office. 
I was going to do a bit of psychological analysis on what hanging out with Manhattan and Washington elites on Martha’s Vineyard, as opposed to riding horses and clearing timber with a chainsaw on a ranch, says about a man; about a leader. But as much fun as that might have been for yours truly, I was unable to shake the feeling that I was supposed to address something else today.
Something bigger.
Something foundational to the way I see the world. Something that the world is currently debating and fighting over, but also something that the world has been debating and fighting over since time began.
That something is the question of political (and by extension, economic) power and control, and whether it is best centralized or de-centralized.
The most casual and infrequent readers of this website will themselves be able to testify that this is by no means the first time I have written on the subject, but for some reason, taking a brief bit of time off from my weekly column has left me more resolute than ever to communicate to anyone who will listen the inherent dangers and fundamental flaws of centralized power.
This vocational clarity, this “calling,” if you will, has come to me from the realization that upon the point of “Who will rule?” the entirety of American social, cultural, political, and economic interactions rests.
Not only “Who will?”, but “Who ought?” and “Who can?” as well.
During my summer hiatus, I purposely went back to the original sources of my initial inspirations to write: the Bible, and the written works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and G.K. Chesterton. I spent time reading in the Old Testament, specifically the books of Genesis and I and II Samuel. I re-read Crime and Punishment, Notes From The Underground and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. My foray into Chesterton included his novels The Ball and The Cross and The Man Who Was Thursday, as well as Essential Writings, a compilation that included both selections from some of his more philosophical writings and extended excerpts from the transcripts of some of his legendary debates with renowned socialist, atheist and play-write, George Bernard Shaw.
Although I was seeking general intellectual refreshment and inspiration from these readings, what I found was very specific and concrete. And as much as modern people enjoy telling themselves that the ideas and social movements we “invent” and fight over are all so novel and unique, I could not help but be struck by the timelessness of the most important debates.
Mankind has been wrestling with the notion and nature of power since time began. Man (and woman) has disagreed over who is in charge with God, with himself, and certainly with other men (and women).
In the book of Genesis we read about the Tower of Babel. Power and creative energy has been centralized after God has explicitly told the planet’s inhabitants to disperse, to “be fruitful and multiply,” and to “fill and subdue” the earth. These stubborn individuals feel they know better and in order to show how great (they think) they are, construction of a giant tower “that will reach the heavens” is commenced. Mankind is debating with God in a very literal way here, and God responds to their point with a counter-point of His own: you now all speak different languages, so go “get busy,” start your own people-groups, and stop thinking that the answer to life’s challenges is passing off your personal responsibilities to the collective.
A little later in the Good Book, in I Samuel, we find the nation of Israel demanding from God that they be given a king; one like all their pagan neighbors have. Prior to this, God had appointed judges and local leaders to oversee the social, political, and legal interactions of all 12 tribes. The prophet Samuel urges the people of Israel to reconsider handing over their freedoms for the inevitable tyranny that comes from centralized power.
"This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [b] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day."
The people tell Samuel (and God) to “Get Bent!” and they, in turn, get a crummy, petty, selfish king named Saul. They also get a Russian Roulette of crummy kings for the proceeding 10 centuries or so.
But as Chicago Cubs fans know only too well: anyone can have a bad millennium, right?
Nearly 20 centuries later, in Czarist Russia, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of many engaged in a philosophical (and theological) battle with the European and Russian proponents of secular socialism. Russia in the 1850’s and 1860’s was not a horrible place to live, but it certainly had its flaws. The country was largely religious, but increasingly disillusioned with the Church and the monarchy in Petersburg. The leading intellectuals were disseminating collectivist, nihilistic ideas in print and in the universities, and many under-educated and confused people were beginning to buy into the notion that the problems they felt were caused by the Church and the Czars would be best addressed by exchanging one tyranny for another in the form of a socialist state running by “elites” and “supermen.”
The debate here, again, centered on the question “Who will rule?” Dostoevsky believed in the inherent dignity of every human being, and that God alone was capable of handling the power both the Czars and the collectivist State craved. He prophetically predicated through his stories, such as his novel The Possessed that the course his country was on at that time would ultimately lead to revolution persecution of religious Russians, the breakdown of the family, and the totalitarianism that typified his beloved homeland throughout the 20th century. He did all of this without the luxury of being able to observe one failed socialist state after another, as we in the West are so fortunate to be able to do today.
Not long after Dostoevsky, some 2,000 miles away in London, a writer, thinker, journalist and “defender of the faith” named Gilbert Keith Chesterton emerged. In a time when progressives in Western Europe and America were pronouncing the death of God and the birth of the modern, centrally-planned, socially-engineered era, Chesterton emerged as one of the foremost and formidable proponents of such “trifling” things as democracy, religious orthodoxy, and common sense. One of the hottest tickets in all of London-town in the first three decades of the 1900’s was to one of the frequent debates G.K. would participate in with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
Shaw and Wells wanted centralization of power and re-distribution of wealth. They wanted religion eradicated, but only to be replaced with the State-worship all true socialists desire (whether they acknowledge it or not). They saw the chaotic nature of life, economics, and war and decided that things were best left up to “the experts.” Chesterton saw things differently, and was only too happy to share his thoughts with loyal readers and boisterous, crowded lecture halls.
In the fall of 1927, in a public debate with Mr. Shaw on the topic of “Should private property be abolished in favor of collectivism?”, Chesterton had this to say in response to Shaw’s initial claim that “the Commons” (i.e. “the collective will of the people”) ought to make all economic decisions:
“When you have vast systems, whether political or economic in nature, however just and however reasonably controlled, indirectly, by elaborate machinery of officials and other things, you do in fact find that those who rule are the few. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it is not true that all the people directly control. Collectivism has put all their eggs in one basket. I do not think that Mr. Shaw believes, or that anybody believes, that 12 million men, say, carry the basket, or look after the basket, or have any real distributed control over the eggs in the basket. I believe that it is controlled from the center by a few people.
They may be quite right or quite necessary. A certain limit to that sort of control any same man will recognize as necessary: it is not the same as the Commons controlling the means of production. It is a few oligarchs or a few officials who do in fact control the means of production.”
I couldn’t have blogged it better myself.
As someone who openly admits his bias in favor of Judeo-Christian values, free market economics and American conservatism, I realize that this entire discussion regarding the pitfalls and dangers of centralized power, a concept championed much more frequently by the secular-Left, can come off as self-satisfying and convenient. I also realize that one must be careful about how far they take the tying of their own beliefs around the necks of thinkers, philosophies, and dogmas that have come well before his time. Dostoevsky wasn’t the literary version of Milton Friedman. Chesterton wouldn’t necessarily agree with every position conservative writers like Thomas Sowell and Charles Krauthammer take today. The nation of Israel wouldn’t have righted every socio-political wrong by electing Ronald Reagan as their leader.
But only someone equally (or increasingly) biased in favor of centralized power and the policies (such as forced re-distribution of wealth and the dissolution of property rights) that it entails could look at history, even recent history (if the Bible or 19th century Russia or 20th century England is too far removed from the world of iPods and Jersey Shore for your liking), and not see some major and significant problems with the consolidation of power into the hands of a few. The forest of individual liberty, free enterprise, and republican democracy does have some rotten trees in it, but sometimes it takes a helicopter’s birds-eye-view to see how plush this forest truly is.
Especially when compared to the Chernobyl-like wasteland that is socialism.
There are debates that we must continue to have as a nation. There are questions we must continue to ask of ourselves and of each other. Primary among them are these: Who should rule? Who is best equipped to make the most important decisions in your life? What are the benefits/costs of freedom? Of central planning and social engineering?
Is America really willing to trade our liberties, our honor, and our sacred duties for the flimsy promises of security and “free stuff” that well-intentioned, however misguided, politicians, professors and pundits of the Leftist persuasion make every 2, 4, and 6 years? Are you?
I’m not.
Ode to Labor (Day)
Chuck Colson's latest Break Point commentary is a unique perspective on work, labor, and the history of Christian thought regarding both.
With an election on the way, candidates are attending picnics and rallies accross the nation in celebreation of Labor Day. Too many will denounce the rich and pander to the dissatisfaction and fears many workers feel. Work to many, you see, is a necessary evil. The goal in life is to put in enough time to retire and relax.
But that attitude and that goal is contrary to a Christian worldview perspective on work.
Christians, you see, have a special reason to celebrate Labor Day, which honors the fundamental dignity of workers, for we worship a God Who labored to make the world—and Who created human beings in His image to be His workers. When God made Adam and Eve, He gave them work to do: cultivating and caring for the earth.
In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans looked upon manual work as a curse, something for lower classes and slaves. But Christianity changed all of that. Christians viewed work as a high calling—a calling to be co-workers with God in unfolding the rich potential of His creation.
He continues:
Much of our culture has a distinctly Greek view of work: We work out of necessity. But, you see, we are made in the image of God and as such we are made to work—to create, to shape, to bring order out of disorder.
So this Labor Day, remember all labor derives its true dignity as a reflection of the Creator. And that whatever we do, in word or deed, we should do all to the glory of God.
I really appreciated this important reminder from Mr. Colson, and I hope you do too! Happy Labor Day!
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Oh, and I couldn't resist, but here is the first part of a multi-clip video of Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail on Labor Day 1980:
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