Maggie's Farm

Roger Kimball - Hillary Clinton and Friedrich Hayek.

I have no time today to discuss it, but Kimball discusses one of our previous links today on Hillary, and radical communitarian thinking.

Read it!

(Do any of our readers still have one of those scythes? I do, but using a big noisy gas machine is more fun, and a work-out in itself. Wendell Berry on Scythes.)

Dalrymple, in New English Review. It begins:

Quite often one reads that such-and-such a country - the Congo, for example - is impoverished in spite of its abundant natural resources. The tone is usually pained and a little surprised; the writer seems to think that natural resources ought to develop themselves and benefit populations without human intervention, by jumping out of the ground and distributing themselves equitably, for example.

Read the whole thing.

h/t, Mr. Free Market

Quoted from Crime, Drugs, Welfare - and other good news by Wehner and Levin in Commentary:

As for the social reality underlying this general feeling of decline, a number of conservative commentators, concentrating especially on the areas of crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy, undertook the task of quantifying and analyzing the available evidence. The most notable such effort was by William J. Bennett, who in March 1993 released a report entitled The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.

Over the course of the preceding three decades, Bennett wrote, the United States had indeed experienced “substantial social regression.” About this, the data were unequivocal. Since 1960, there had been a more than 500-percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400-percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. To Bennett, the conclusion was inescapable: “the forces of social decomposition [in America] are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”

Just when cultural decay seemed hopeless, these things began to change. They conclude:

Culture itself, finally, exhibits an ebb and flow as surely as economies pass through cycles of ups and downs. In The Great Disruption (1999), Francis Fukuyama cited historical examples of societies undergoing periods of moral decline followed by periods of moral recovery. In our case, too, he argued, the aftermath of the cultural breakdown of the 1960’s had already triggered and was now giving way to a reassessment and recovery of social and moral norms. Such “re-norming” will not occur in every social class all at once; in some instances it may take hold in one stratum but not in another. That is partial progress, but progress nevertheless.

Despite persistent anomalies and backslidings, some species of cultural re-norming certainly seems to have been occurring in this country over the past decade-and-a-half, and it is fascinating to observe in whose hearts its effects have registered most strongly. In attitudes toward education, drugs, abortion, religion, marriage, and divorce, the current generation of teenagers and young adults appears in many respects to be more culturally conservative than its immediate predecessors. To any who may have written off American society as incorrigibly corrupt and adrift, these young people offer a powerful reminder of the boundless inner resources still at our disposal, and of our constantly surprising national resilience.

From a series of clips of Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher interviewing Friedman in 2005. More of the clips here.  h/t, MouseNaround

The government as Santa the Thief (who and what is "Santa the Thief"? We will tell you later.)

The Trouble with Limited Government, by Voegli at Claremont. One quote:

Reagan was elected president 25 years after the first issue of National Review declared its intention to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This was an amazing ascent for a political movement that started out, in the words of NR's first editorial, "superfluous" and "out of place." In the 25 years since Reagan's election, however, conservatives determined to scale back the welfare state might as well have been standing a respectful distance behind history, whispering "please slow down."

If conservatism has a future, those who want to fashion it need to acknowledge and understand this stunning defeat. In National Review last year Ramesh Ponnuru said the "real crisis" is that, while a conservatism whose "central mission" does not emphasize the fight against Big Government is inconceivable, a "political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority" for that mission is unimaginable. Conservatism, in other words, can have a purpose or it can have a prospect. It cannot, apparently, have both.

This political problem will only become more acute as the challenges of governance become more severe. One yardstick may help conservatives feel a little better about themselves. In 1981 federal spending was 22.2% of GDP; last year it was 20.3%. This measure hovered in a very narrow band for the whole era, never exceeding 23.5% or falling below 18.4%. Adding expenditures by states and localities confirms the picture of a rugby match between liberals and conservatives that is one interminable scrum in the middle of the field. Spending by all levels of government in America amounted to 31.6% of GDP in 1981, and 31.8% in 2006.

Conservatives, though, can't take much solace from fighting Big Government to a draw.

Read the whole thing. Readers know my view: the only vision which can compete with the vision of childlike dependency on an omnipotent State is the old Yankee vision of the individual freedom and dignity of sturdy, honest, self-reliant family people who proudly forge their way through life, take their lumps, ask for nothin' from nobody, and want a government which only protects freedom and which "governs least." That noble vision was an easy sell in 1789, but not so easy today. From the board-room to agri-business to greedy geezers, everybody now seems to want a government Santa, and to feed at the trough of the income tax and the federal debt - and even invents ways to morally justify it. Heck, if I live to Medicare, I will probably take it too - but I will hate myself for doing so.

There is a soul-degrading vicious cycle at work: the more you tax people, the less money they have to take care of their families - so the more they will want, or even need, "freebies."

Am I old-fashioned to distrust and fear government power and control? Are we really just government-intoxicated decadent Europeans, on a different continent with different accents or a different language, instead of the stalwart, rugged, independent Americans of history? Was it just a dream?

For many more old, not very PC ads, including "Is it always illegal to kill a woman?", here at Daily Mail

Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, seems like a book that somebody needed to write.

Sounds like the right book at the right time.

Many readers of this site are well-aware of the totalitarian impulse of the Left, but I am not sure how much the general public thinks about it. However, I am not sure how much of the general public reads anything.

Race, IQ, and Education, a quote:

One year ago, I wrote about the attempt to send more children to college, instead of dealing with students as individuals. I will not repeat that rant here. But this is another example of how the education establishment wants more money in reward for its failures.

Overall, I think that to do education properly, we need to take into account individual differences of ability. I do not think we should pay attention to race. Too much of our education policy seems to be driven by the opposite--we focus on outcomes in terms of race and leave the individual children behind.

And from his 2006 piece he links, Education and Entrepreneurship in which he refers to Wizard of Oz diplomas, a quote:

I fear that many of the students who pass will go on to earn Wizard-of-Oz diplomas, which signify nothing. Students will claim to be educated, but employers will know otherwise. The phenomenon of the Wizard-of-Oz diploma has discredited the college degree.

My oldest daughter discovered that her degree qualified her for secretarial positions. She soon decided to try law school instead. As her experience illustrates, although the average salary differential between college graduates and non-graduates remains high, the marginal college graduate is earning little or no premium.

With Iowa coming up soon, it's been a tough month for Hillary Clinton with a whirlwind of uncomplimentary stories.

The Hu contribution scandal, the radical law firm story, her strange reversal on illegal driving licenses, her unwillingness to take a firm stand on anything, new polls that reinforce the idea that she might not be electable, the Vin Gupta story, news articles reporting that people do not trust her honesty - and now the lesbian theme comes out of the closet today, a theme which has been whispered around Washington for many years. That's enough to short-circuit any rapid-response team.

The Dems do have two excellent candidates who are substantial, savvy, accomplished, and ready for prime time: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd - Dodd being perhaps the more impressive of the two. If primary voters take a look beyond the two celeb candidates (Clinton and Obama) they might find something to like.

When candidates were chosen by wise men in smoke-filled rooms, Biden and Dodd would have been on the top of the list and Clinton and Obama would have been viewed as arrogant, presumptuous lightweights and laughed out of the room and instructed to return when they have accomplished something.

Are voters so celeb-intoxicated these days that solid guys ("solid" as politicians go - even though I would not be voting for any of these) don't have a chance?

When Social Security was initiated by FDR as an effort to remove workers from the workforce to reduce politically-dangerous unemployment while virtuously cloaking it as "caring" for the old folks, politicians never publicly considered the long-term effect of that incentive.

Or did they?

Adding money to lower-, middle- and upper-class folks' retirement calculations helps incentivize them to quit being productive and to retire earlier while they are still able-bodied, paid for, as parasites, by a shrinking number of hard-working youngsters.

Politicians never think long-term (but, in the defence of those in the 1940s, folks in their 60s now are in far better shape that folks in their 60s then). Politicians think election, job, power, importance, ego, etc. But we know better: The Law of Incentive and the Law of Unintended Consequences are always in force. The Feds need an "Office of Consequences and Incentive" along with the "Office of the Budget."

Mankind is powerfully motivated by money, and that will never change. Money offers choices. Many have commented on Megan McArdle's fine piece on Social Security, but I will link this piece on her piece.

I believe Social Security should be income- and asset- balanced, but it will never happen. It's an entitlement now: another freebie on the backs of others.

Photo: Ida May Fuller, supposedly the first Social Security check recipient

Prof. Bainbridge reports that spanking has been criminalized in New Zealand. This is unfortunate, because sometimes we all require an administration of tough love. I know I did, and it probably kept me out of jail. Our Dr. Bliss wrote a defence of corporal punishment here, a while ago. I agree that a good spanking is more to the point, more direct, and less painful than mental punishments - although I agree with a proper administration of shame when appropriate. Still, spare the rod...

Many - not all - kids require a stern Dad and a disapproving Mom from time to time, if not more often. If a person doesn't internalize the guidelines of decent citizenship in the family, the cops will be stuck with the results. And that annoys the cops and makes them act rough because they'd much prefer to be eating jelly donuts in peace in their patrol cars.

The subject makes me wonder about how some in Western culture seems to want to define harshness downwards, to the point of considering waterboarding of terrorists who might plan to kill you and your brethren as "going too far," or the death penalty by injection "cruel and unusual." Are we becoming so namby-pamby that any exertion of force is viewed as barbaric? It's an epidemic of "niceness" and a terror of anything which might have anything in common with "violence."

If so, it's a dangerously decadent road. I blame Rousseau.

Comment by the Editor: How come the first to yelp about spanking and waterboarding tend to be the first people to excuse terrorists and inner city violence? And often the first to propose greater government coercive power over the individual? Authoritarian families produce free, self-regulating citizens who don't need or desire authoritarian or nanny governments. It's all a mystery to me.

While checking out the link to the Mediocracy site, I found a piece which echoes much of the sort of thing we write about here, about the attempts to re-define Liberty in the UK.

Dr. Tassano notes:

The transformation from old-liberty (= right not to be interfered with) to new liberty (= right to be interfered with) takes place, as Dr Brown showed us, in 13 easy steps.

Read the whole thing. We'll add him to our regular reads.

Re-posted from Feb, 2007

If you believe in a man-made global warming crisis, you:

1. Will not fly on airplanes
2. Will live close enough to work to walk or bike
3. Will turn off your electric power - and no oil lamps. No computers - they are energy sponges.
4. Will cease to mow your lawn
5. Will heat your home with solar power, or, better yet, not at all. It takes a lot of energy to create those solar panels
7. Will give up eating beef
8. Will junk your cars, tractors, lawn-mowers, boats, chain saws, etc.
9. Will wear no synthetics, or clothing requiring electric power to produce
10. Will grow all of your own food so it doesn't have to be trucked to your supermarket

If you do not do those things, then I won't believe that you are genuinely concerned, and will not take you seriously. Show me what to do - don't tell me what to do. Government and the UN first, please. Greenies second.

Just don't tell me that you are going to continue to enjoy these luxuries until the government forces you not to. Show leadership and individual responsibility. No pseudo-virtuous tokenism, please. Carbon credits? Gimme a break.

(Personally, I agree with Stephen Harper that the climate hysteria is no more than a socialist/luddite scheme.)

Update. An Al Gore True Believer said this to me yesterday: "I'm not the problem. Society is the problem." This person sells real estate and drives a big Mercedes all day long in his job in our Connecticut exurbia. "Society"? Who dat bad man? And what is his phone number?

Image: Non-hypocritical global warming fans in Vermont wear no factory clothing, inhabit caves, and hunt for food in the woods, which they eat raw so as not to create CO2 and other pollution with campfires. Vermont environmentalists complain that they are depleting the forests of roots and tubers, scaring the deer, and eating all of the skunks and raccoons. And crapping all over the place.

Jack Daniel's at  Synthstuff. Don't do it - it's perfect for a fine Christmas eggnog. They should consider the poor, who can't afford a bottle of Jack for their eggnog.

Maybe this CNN story has legs, after all. Another Rathergate? Media people are scared of Hill and Bill: if you give them a hard time, they will never grant you another interview. Not just collusion - ratings. Still, I suspect CNN could be violating McCain-Feingold. And so will I, if given half a chance to do so on Maggie's Farm. Sue me: I have 200 smart lawyer friends here in Hartford, CT., and we will tie you up in court for a lifetime and cost you a bundle.

Doing what?  We are making our venison mincemeat pies tongiht, for Thanksgiving, and for our friends. Aged for four weeks. The smell from the kitchen is amazing. Lucky friends. Ten to give, and two for Thanksgiving here for the beloved relatives. And we are not making pumpkin pies - we are going to make Butternut squash pies from winter squash from the garden. The challenge is to get the moisture out of the cooked squash so it's not to watery and bland.

Jarhead Red. Made by Marines, with profits to the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation. Nothing fancy, but it tastes fine. (I checked, to make sure.) Each Thanksgiving we give thanks to God, to our ancestors, to our friends and family, and to our armed forces. Not to our politicians - never.

Myron Magnet tours Monticello, and reflects on the mind of Jefferson. A quote:

It’s true that Jefferson had his moments of wanting to withdraw into “intellectual pleasures” that “ride serene and sublime above the concerns of this mortal world,” as he told Maria Cosway: his taste for unworldly abstraction is nowhere clearer than inside Monticello’s empty dome, a stupendous and costly exercise in pure geometry, breathtakingly beautiful with its giant, Michelangelesque baseboard and the light pouring in from its round windows and central oculus, but virtually unusable because its echoes make conversation impossible, it’s unheated, and its access is steep and narrow. Even the sumptuous mahogany double doors built for symmetry opposite the dome’s entrance open only onto a jumble of rafters and attics.

But usually Jefferson’s intellectual pleasures fully engage the world: for him, the increase of knowledge is meant to improve man’s condition. When Buffon “affected to consider chemistry but cookery,” for instance, and to equate the laboratory with the kitchen, Jefferson took sharp issue; chemistry, he lectured the count, is “big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.” Did not people justly esteem “Dr. Franklin’s science because he always endeavored to direct it to something useful in private life”? Were not phosphorous matches, for example, a boon to mankind, and would not interchangeable musket parts, which he saw in France long before the Colt factory used them for mass production in America, change history?

Whole thing at City Journal

Pontius Pilate's sarcastic, ruthless yet also sympathetic and challenging question to Christ (for which he did not wait for an answer) will echo in my mind as long as I live.

"Substituting science for religion is like swapping a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear."

It has always seemed to me that non-scientists, and non-students of the hard sciences and math, put more faith in "science" than do students of science.

Non-students of science seem quick to find truth in the results of the scientific method than scientists themselves, who, like the great Polanyi, tend to be humble about knowledge, and are always questioning their methods and their findings. Science is about "theory" and a search for facts, not about Truth. Scientists never talk about Truth.

It was good to see Polanyi referenced in a piece by John Polinghorne in the UK's Times Online, titled The Truth in Religion. He uses Dawkins and Hitchins, et al, as starting points for a serious discussion of the relationship between faith and reason. One quote:

No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Dawkins invokes Bertrand Russell’s parable of the teapot irrationally claimed to be in unobserved orbit in the solar system. Of course there are no grounds for belief in this piece of celestial crockery, but there are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently. Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science. In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for rational commitment. In his book on the philosophy of science, Personal Knowlege (1964), Michael Polanyi stated that he was writing in order to explain how (scientifically) he could commit himself to what he believed to be true, while knowing it might be false. That is the human epistemic condition. Recognizing this should encourage caution, but not induce intellectual paralysis. It is in this spirit that the dialogue between science and religion needs to be conducted.

Polinghorne's whole essay/book review here.

Image: Tintoretto's Christ before Pilate

The MSM is famously poor with science reporting. A new member of our blogroll, The Frontal Cortex, says we need Science Critics - with a good example of junk "science." 

Indeed we do need journalists who understand the mysteries of statistics, science, and math. Otherwise, they just take whatever they're fed at face value - assuming that if it's "scientific", it must be true.

More on this general subject to come...

If Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes, nobody is stopping him from sending in a check. The Feds welcome donations, but get none from the mega-wealthy - including offshore Soros and offshore Kennedy.

If you do not feel you are sufficiently taxed, don't complain - just ACT. Send it in, and give your conscience some relief.

Taxes are not progressive enough. h/t, Dr.X. (By the way, if it needs to be said, I disagree with this link, entirely. I am in favor of a flat tax of 13% on everyone, with no deductions and no increase above 13% except in wartime.)

From Prof Deneen, Giving a Damn. A quote:

Can it be any coincidence that within a decade of the supposed renewal of political philosophy in America - the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, perhaps the most intricate theoretical justification of the welfare state ever penned - that the welfare state in America, and increasingly throughout the world, was being dismantled? The American welfare state increases in scale especially during those decades when our thicker communities are being dismantled or abandoned ("The Great Society" - in the singular). As Tocqueville predicted, it would be the ascent of individualism itself that would give rise to the felt need for a "tutelary State" to compensate for what had once been provided - albeit unevenly, informally, unequally - within the thicker webs of familial and local life. The dismantling of the welfare state is seen as a victory by the Right, but they are often uncognizant of the corresponding dismantling of communal forms that their valorization of individualism - especially the individualism of the marketplace - effectively undermines. The Left believes that the battle can be won by getting the correct philosophical articulation of Rawls's thesis, and are fundamentally oblivious to the wholesale dismantling of any real commitment to civic concern that has been a consequence of their wholesale efforts at achieving individual liberation and autonomy. Contemporary liberalism and conservatism (so-called) alike are fundamentally incoherent.

This echoes some of Dr. Bliss' comments a week or so ago on The Problem with Women. Link is above to the whole essay.

From a review of Ted Dalrymple's new book, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, by Rebecca Bynum in New English Review, a quote:

The influence of Mill and others is such that today social mores and traditions are thought to be evils in themselves, since they are considered to be impediments to progress, enlightenment and individual freedom. Therefore, there is nothing left to act as a brake on human behavior except legality and therein lies the rub. As says Dalrymple:

The lack of any intervening authority between the individual on the one hand, and the sovereign political power on the other, enables the latter to insinuate itself into the smallest crevices of daily life.

Over the last century we have witnessed such a powerful ideological attack on tradition, that tradition has not held, then on religion, and religion holds only in pockets, and then upon the foundational unit of civilization, the family, so that finally in many places, especially at the lower rungs of our social scale, the family has effectively been destroyed, so that nothing stands between the individual and the power of the state. Often in these areas many adult individuals are dependants of the state by virtue of welfare. They are provided with their physical needs, food, clothing, shelter and medical care, often dispensed in the form of anti-depressant drugs, all through the benevolence of the state. It is inevitable that these solicitations should take the form of greater and greater totalitarian control. So what starts out as a drive toward absolute freedom ends up in absolute totalitarianism.

Read the whole thing, which reads very much like a (better-written) Maggie's Farm post.

12th Century Londoners put it away, from breakfast onwards. But what about the dread afternoon hangover in the pre-Tylenol era?

Speaking of which, apparently even social boozing damages the brain. That's a damn shame, because it is difficult for anyone to go through life cold sober 24 hrs/day, 7 days a week. We all need some forms of relief from reality, sometimes. But, on the other hand, "No brain, no pain:" a bit of brain damage might be a good thing.

Photo: One of my dutiful wives, bringing me my daily allotment.

Photo on continuation page: A fun pub, NSFW.

Heard on the radio yesterday:

"Hard work won't kill you, but why take the chance?"

"America is not a country for the faint-hearted."