When Pippi Långstrump took up residence at Villa Villekulla with her monkey (Mister Nilsson) and her horse (Lilla Gubben — "Little Buddy," "Old Man" in some translations), she also brought with her a modicum of financial security in the form of a suitcase full of gold coins. Despite her sometimes lavish spending habits and attempts by the unscrupulous and thieving to deprive Pippi of her wealth, the suitcase always seemed full.
Not too many of us have bottomless suitcases of gold — and even if we did, gold would cease to be worth much. (Sorry, Ron, there's nothing magical about a gold standard . . . or silver, either.) Gold isn't automatically money, any more than money has to be gold. Before the flood of silver that lowered the price of that metal throughout the world in the latter half of the 19th century, most of the world was on a silver standard, not gold. There simply wasn't — and isn't — enough gold to meet the needs of commerce.
With the spread of commercial and central banking, however, the amount of gold (or silver) became, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The only time the precious metals became important for monetary purposes was when a country insisted on pegging its currency to a specific weight of metal and permitted "convertibility" to give the public confidence in the currency.
The ability to convert a paper currency into gold or silver does not, however, mean that the paper currency is backed by gold or silver. Convertibility simply gives the public confidence that those pieces of paper are worth what it says on the face. What backs the currency are the bills and notes "accepted" by the issuing bank or State treasury. If the bills and notes represent the present value of existing or future marketable goods and services, the currency is asset-backed. If the bills and notes represent the present value of future tax collections by the State, the currency is debt-backed.
The problem that faces us today is, how do we shift from an ubiquitous and wildly fluctuating debt-backed currency, to a stable and uniform asset-backed currency?
Reform of the Banking System. As we noted yesterday, the Federal Reserve was established in part to provide the private sector — not government — with adequate liquidity to finance capital formation whenever existing accumulations of savings or other private resources failed or were inadequate. As Dr. Harold Moulton pointed out in The Formation of Capital (1935), using existing savings to finance new capital formation actually militates against economic growth as it decreases effective demand, making new capital investment less feasible. It is far better to monetize existing and future marketable goods and services by discounting qualified paper at commercial banks and rediscounting the paper at the Federal Reserve. This would ensure an adequate supply of loanable funds by tying the money supply directly to production, and back the currency with the present value of hard assets to which it would be bound by the institution of private property.
Current projections published recently in the Wall Street Journal reveal that by the end of the current fiscal year (09/30/12), the U.S. national debt will be 72-1/2% of GDP. This means that the money supply will consist mostly of instruments backed by government debt, and less than a third in the form of instruments backed by private sector hard assets. In 1913, government debt accounted for less than 20% of GDP. (We don't have time to do the actual calculation, and most sources today hide figures by giving past data in adjusted 1990 "international dollars," so we're using the statement found in Moulton's in Principles of Money and Banking, 1916, that private sector bills of exchange at that time accounted for 80% or more of all transactions.)
One of the goals of the Federal Reserve was to replace the National Bank Notes of 1863-1913 and the Treasury Notes of 1890 — all backed by government debt — with Federal Reserve Bank Notes backed by government debt purchased from the National Banks. The Federal Reserve Bank Notes would be replaced in turn with indistinguishable Federal Reserve Notes backed by the present value of private sector hard assets as private sector asset paper replaced government debt paper as the backing of the currency.
Ignoring the confusing distinction between the identical Federal Reserve Bank Notes and Federal Reserve Notes, a similar program could be carried out today simply by prohibiting the Federal Reserve from either discounting or rediscounting of primary or secondary government securities, or engaging in open market operations in secondary government securities. The only Federal Reserve transactions permitted with respect to government securities would be to sell — not buy — its holdings.
To restore confidence in the currency and the economy, it might be advisable to retire debt held outside the United States first, followed by government debt held by commercial banks, then the Federal Reserve. Any domestic holdings by institutions and individual investors could be left outstanding for a time, as these were purchased with existing savings, and were therefore not inflationary. This, of course, requires that all efforts be focused on increasing production of actual marketable goods and services, not pumping more inflationary government debt into the system.
According to the "National Debt Clock" (accessed today, 03/29/12), more than $5 trillion in U.S. debt is held outside the United States. Assuming all exports are purchased with U.S. dollars, that means that the U.S. has to export $5 trillion more than it imports to transfer the debt "in house." Note, however, that doesn't retire the debt. It simply shifts the holders of the debt from foreign companies and countries, to U.S. producers of exported goods.
Looking again at the National Debt Clock, we see that the total national debt is a little short of $16 trillion. (Half a trillion dollars or so is an immense amount of money, but it can get spent very quickly with little or no result, as we have seen, so we'll use $16 trillion.) We remember reading somewhere or other that no government can exact more than 20% of GDP as taxes without triggering a financial meltdown. That 20% is not the tax rate. It's the percentage of GDP that can be diverted into taxation, a different thing.
Assuming that's true, the United States is going to have to produce $80 trillion in marketable goods and services to generate the $16 trillion in tax revenues necessary to retire the debt — and that's on top of the $5 trillion trade surplus required to shift the foreign debt to domestic debt. That's $85 trillion of production that we're already on the hook for . . . plus whatever is needed to keep the government running in the meantime.
Assuming that government spending gets reduced and the total government budget is maintained at around $4 trillion for all government, local, state, and federal, annual GDP must increase — without inflationary distortion — to $25 trillion every year (a 66.67% rate of growth) in order to retire the debt at a rate of $1 trillion each year, or sixteen years. Reducing the debt at a rate of $500 billion a year gives us a target GDP of $22.5 trillion (50% growth rate) and a 32-year timetable. Debt reduction at the rate of $250 billion per year would give us a target GDP of $20.625 trillion (37.5% growth) and a 64-year timetable . . . but why go on? — and we're not even counting all the promises that have been made for Social Security and Medicare and (if the administration has its druthers) Obamacare.
At current rates of growth of around 1%, these targets for growth are more than unrealistic. They're in Fantasyland. If, however, we maintain the current rate of (non) growth, but reduce the entitlements that currently take up two-thirds of the federal budget by half, or approximately $1 trillion, we can apply those savings to debt reduction, and come up with the same 16- to 32-year timetable — you know a target of $1 trillion each year simply couldn't be met without a revolt, so cut it in half and double the time needed to pay down the debt.
Plus, you can't just cut people off. By phasing out entitlements instead of going cold turkey, however, replacing Social Security, Medicare and welfare gradually with Capital Homestead Accounts, we can get a reasonable 64-year timetable (call it 65, to tie in to a lifetime's capital accumulation under Capital Homesteading), reducing the debt by $250 billion each year, starting with zero debt reduction the first year and assuming that CHA income replaces entitlements dollar-for-dollar at an even rate as people start building toward capital self-sufficiency until entitlements are eliminated and the annual savings reach the full $2 trillion annually in year 65.
That's still painful, of course, but it can be done — if we get a Capital Homestead Act . . . and control spending and eliminate all monetization of government deficits that would add to existing debt. First, all credit extended for speculation, consumption and government expenditures would have to come out of existing accumulations of savings. The market should set the interest rate. This would at one and the same time be a boon to pension plans, retirees who invested in government bonds, and others, and discourage speculation, unnecessary consumption and government spending as the true cost became evident.
The primary business of the commercial banking system and the Federal Reserve, however, would be to provide the private sector with sufficient money and credit to finance capital formation. This would mean reinstituting measures similar to Glass-Steagall to separate financial institutions by function, such as all forms of issue banking from all forms of deposit banking (e.g., commercial banking from investment banking, and both from insurance). There should also be specialization within both issue and deposit banking to avoid conflicts of interest and getting outside the institution's area of competence.
Reform of the "Income System." Most people today are trapped within the wage and welfare system as their sole source of income. Only a few are able to take advantage of the "ownership system," in which all or most of their income comes from capital ownership.
To institute a viable and sustainable economy that works for everyone, it is essential that every child, woman and man be able to participate in the economy to the best of their individual abilities and capacity. Most people would agree that anyone who is willing and able to contribute his or her labor should have the opportunity. That is not the problem. Lack of capital ownership is the problem. Most production today comes from capital, not labor — yet only those who currently own existing capital have, in general, both the opportunity and the means of owning future capital.
As capital replaces labor in the production process, the situation becomes critical. Because the rich and the State currently control the means of acquiring and possessing private property in capital, people remain dependent on wages and welfare for their subsistence. More and more people must own capital if the economy is to survive and thrive, but fewer and fewer people are able to.
Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler advocated that the money creation powers of commercial banks backed up by the Federal Reserve be used to extend credit so that people who currently own little or no capital be able to purchase it in the form of new equity issues of corporations. The shares could be paid for using dividends paid on the shares themselves. Traditional collateral would be replaced with capital credit insurance and reinsurance, the premiums being paid with the risk premium charged on all private sector loans.
In this way people without savings could purchase capital and pay for the capital with the profits generated by the capital, just as the rich have done for centuries. The price of labor could fall (or, more likely, rise as prospective employers had to compete with ownership income to hire enough workers) to its true market value. Government manipulation of the currency to stimulate demand would become unnecessary as people met their own wants and needs through their own efforts. This would also decrease government expenditures for welfare, and shrink the federal and state budgets.
The wage and welfare system would be abolished (but obviously not wages and welfare!). Workers with ownership income would have the option of turning down a wage they did not consider adequate, thereby making wages rise naturally. If wages became too high, of course, human labor would be replaced with technology — but since the workers themselves would own the technology, it would increase income rather than eliminate it. As the tax base was rebuilt, those unfortunates unable to find work and whose investments were either failures or insufficient to meet their needs could receive welfare if private charity was unable to assist — and there would be a much larger funding pool.
These are some of the critical features of Capital Homesteading, which should be examined seriously by the current crop of political contenders. After all, few of us are able to dip into a suitcase full of gold coins to meet our needs as Pippi could.
#30#
THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.
Showing posts with label Welfare Blackmail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Welfare Blackmail. Show all posts
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Welfare Blackmail, Part V: Capital Homesteading
As we have seen in this series, the main issue in the HHS contraception mandate controversy is who is in charge of what, and who is the ultimate sovereign. It is a fundamental principle of natural law that the State was made for man, not man for the State. The State's proper role is to help people help themselves, not to provide for every conceivable want and need. The State's job is care of the common good, not every individual good. This is so that the individual may exercise his or her natural rights, thereby acquiring and developing virtue.
The normal means by which citizens acquire and develop virtue is ownership of capital. This not only empowers them economically, removing all justification for State control of the economy, it empowers them with the political power to resist growing State intrusion into their daily lives, whether domestic, through State bureaucrats dictating to parents, or religious, through dictating to organized religion. As one commentator opined,
"No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, no undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them." (Tom Bethel, "Freedom and Its Enemies," American Spectator, June, 1999, p. 19.)
The issue boils down to whether the State is the guarantor of all individual goods. If so — and the American Bishops seem to have conceded this point — then what constitutes an individual good is a matter of opinion to be decided by whoever has the power to force others to comply. In order to secure the other benefits the State presumably guarantees, the good must be taken with the bad if the majority so decides.
The bishops need to regain the high ground, demanding that the State confine itself to its proper role as guardian of the common good. Unfortunately, they are in a very weak position because, having accepted the idea that the State should provide all individual goods in theory, they can't complain when the State does so in practice.
Nevertheless, the State, because it has a monopoly over the instruments of coercion — the police power — must necessarily be limited to maintaining the institutions of the common good and correcting abuses, regulating but not controlling individuals and institutions. Care for the common good does not, except in cases of extreme need, mean supplying individual wants and needs.
The problem with making it possible for every child, woman and man to have the opportunity to become a capital owner, however, is that liberals typically recognize barriers to ownership, but assume nothing can be done to remove them. Conservatives do not generally recognize barriers to ownership, but assume that restoring the free market will by itself reestablish a just social order.
The single most important barrier to widespread ownership is the fixed belief that it is essential to reduce consumption and accumulate savings before new capital can be financed. Advancing technology, however, both replaces human labor in the production process and, by its high cost, shuts out most people from ownership of capital instruments. This is because only the rich or the State have the capacity to save or create enough money to finance new capital.
Fortunately, the belief that new capital can only be financed out of existing accumulations is utterly false, as Dr. Harold Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution from 1916 to 1952, proved in The Formation of Capital, published in 1935 as the third volume in a four-part series presenting an alternative to the Keynesian New Deal. The vast bulk of new capital is not financed out of past reductions in consumption, but by future increases in production. The present value of future marketable goods and services is monetized and used to finance new capital that pays for itself out of future profits.
Because this method of finance does not rely on the ability to reduce consumption, but on the capacity to own capital, anyone can become an owner of capital without first reducing consumption and accumulating savings. One proposal that embodies this method of finance is "Capital Homesteading."
Capital Homesteading is a national economic policy based on the growth model of binary economics. It is designed to lift barriers to capital ownership in the present financial and economic system and universalize access to the means of acquiring and possessing capital assets. A Capital Homestead Act would allow every child, woman and man to accumulate capital in a tax-sheltered Capital Homestead Account. There would be a target level of assets sufficient to generate an adequate and secure income for that person without requiring the use of existing pools of savings or reductions in current levels of consumption.
Under "Capital Homesteading," a citizen would have a tax-sheltered capital asset accumulation account, similar to an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). Each capital homesteader's account would be the "vehicle" to accumulate annual allocations of interest-free, productive credit and new asset-backed money issued by the central bank and administered by local commercial banks. This new money and credit would then be invested in feasible private sector capital formation and expansion projects of businesses that would issue new shares to be purchased and sheltered in the citizen's Capital Homestead Account. After the "future savings" (future profits) generated by the productive assets paid off each year's Capital Homestead investment (loan), the citizen would continue to receive in the form of dividends the incomes generated by those capital assets.
By vesting each citizen with power over his or her own life through ownership of capital, both the means by which the State controls people's lives and the justification for such control in the first place would be removed. Issues such as the HHS mandate — the whole of the health care bill, in fact — would be moot.
By insisting that the State provide for people's individual goods instead of caring for the common good, the Catholic bishops are simply going to have to accept whatever the State chooses to dish out. By demanding empowerment of people with direct ownership of capital, however, the bishops can achieve the desired end — a decent material life for everyone — but without giving in to State coercion or control.
#30#
The normal means by which citizens acquire and develop virtue is ownership of capital. This not only empowers them economically, removing all justification for State control of the economy, it empowers them with the political power to resist growing State intrusion into their daily lives, whether domestic, through State bureaucrats dictating to parents, or religious, through dictating to organized religion. As one commentator opined,
"No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, no undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them." (Tom Bethel, "Freedom and Its Enemies," American Spectator, June, 1999, p. 19.)
The issue boils down to whether the State is the guarantor of all individual goods. If so — and the American Bishops seem to have conceded this point — then what constitutes an individual good is a matter of opinion to be decided by whoever has the power to force others to comply. In order to secure the other benefits the State presumably guarantees, the good must be taken with the bad if the majority so decides.
The bishops need to regain the high ground, demanding that the State confine itself to its proper role as guardian of the common good. Unfortunately, they are in a very weak position because, having accepted the idea that the State should provide all individual goods in theory, they can't complain when the State does so in practice.
Nevertheless, the State, because it has a monopoly over the instruments of coercion — the police power — must necessarily be limited to maintaining the institutions of the common good and correcting abuses, regulating but not controlling individuals and institutions. Care for the common good does not, except in cases of extreme need, mean supplying individual wants and needs.
The problem with making it possible for every child, woman and man to have the opportunity to become a capital owner, however, is that liberals typically recognize barriers to ownership, but assume nothing can be done to remove them. Conservatives do not generally recognize barriers to ownership, but assume that restoring the free market will by itself reestablish a just social order.
The single most important barrier to widespread ownership is the fixed belief that it is essential to reduce consumption and accumulate savings before new capital can be financed. Advancing technology, however, both replaces human labor in the production process and, by its high cost, shuts out most people from ownership of capital instruments. This is because only the rich or the State have the capacity to save or create enough money to finance new capital.
Fortunately, the belief that new capital can only be financed out of existing accumulations is utterly false, as Dr. Harold Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution from 1916 to 1952, proved in The Formation of Capital, published in 1935 as the third volume in a four-part series presenting an alternative to the Keynesian New Deal. The vast bulk of new capital is not financed out of past reductions in consumption, but by future increases in production. The present value of future marketable goods and services is monetized and used to finance new capital that pays for itself out of future profits.
Because this method of finance does not rely on the ability to reduce consumption, but on the capacity to own capital, anyone can become an owner of capital without first reducing consumption and accumulating savings. One proposal that embodies this method of finance is "Capital Homesteading."
Capital Homesteading is a national economic policy based on the growth model of binary economics. It is designed to lift barriers to capital ownership in the present financial and economic system and universalize access to the means of acquiring and possessing capital assets. A Capital Homestead Act would allow every child, woman and man to accumulate capital in a tax-sheltered Capital Homestead Account. There would be a target level of assets sufficient to generate an adequate and secure income for that person without requiring the use of existing pools of savings or reductions in current levels of consumption.
Under "Capital Homesteading," a citizen would have a tax-sheltered capital asset accumulation account, similar to an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). Each capital homesteader's account would be the "vehicle" to accumulate annual allocations of interest-free, productive credit and new asset-backed money issued by the central bank and administered by local commercial banks. This new money and credit would then be invested in feasible private sector capital formation and expansion projects of businesses that would issue new shares to be purchased and sheltered in the citizen's Capital Homestead Account. After the "future savings" (future profits) generated by the productive assets paid off each year's Capital Homestead investment (loan), the citizen would continue to receive in the form of dividends the incomes generated by those capital assets.
By vesting each citizen with power over his or her own life through ownership of capital, both the means by which the State controls people's lives and the justification for such control in the first place would be removed. Issues such as the HHS mandate — the whole of the health care bill, in fact — would be moot.
By insisting that the State provide for people's individual goods instead of caring for the common good, the Catholic bishops are simply going to have to accept whatever the State chooses to dish out. By demanding empowerment of people with direct ownership of capital, however, the bishops can achieve the desired end — a decent material life for everyone — but without giving in to State coercion or control.
#30#
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Welfare Blackmail, Part IV: A Social Glass-Steagall
Every couple of years or so there is a flurry of letters to the editor of the Mensa Bulletin — the national journal of American Mensa, the organization for those who test in the upper 2% of the population in a standardized IQ test — between those who believe in God, and those who don't. Inevitably, those who believe in God are labeled knaves or fools for that belief, while the other side earns for itself the opprobrium of being fools and knaves for the lack thereof.
Surprisingly for a society that prides itself on the intelligence of its members — or perhaps not, considering that a high IQ is the only common denominator — no one bothers to ask the obvious question and settle the primary issue. It is, in fact, an exercise in futility to discuss whether God does or does not exist until you have settled the issue whether God can exist.
You see the problem? If one side in the debate accepts as a given even before the debate begins that God cannot exist, and the other side accepts without question that God does exist, there can never be any real debate or argument, merely name-calling and sneering.
We've seen the same thing with respect to "debates" about binary economics and the Just Third Way. The three mainstream schools of economics, the Keynesian, the Monetarist/Chicago, and the Austrian, are firmly established on the assumption that it is impossible to finance new capital formation unless you first cut consumption and accumulate money savings.
This necessarily results in concentrated ownership or control of capital, either in the hands of a private elite (capitalism), or the State (socialism), with fundamental natural rights continually redefined in order to try and force the system to work. Anybody who says anything different is automatically a knave or a fool, usually both — which seems to present no logical problem, as the accusation comes from people who have built careers on both eating and retaining their cake.
Binary economics, on the other hand, takes as a given that new capital not only can be financed without first cutting consumption and accumulating money savings, given that the purpose of production is consumption and not reinvestment, new capital must be financed in that way if the economy is to be in equilibrium. Using "future savings" is the only feasible and just means of financing widespread capital ownership and eliminating the business cycle without using the dishonest expedient of redefining natural rights, especially freedom of association/contract (liberty) and private property. Keynes redefined both in both his Treatise on Money (1930) and his General Theory (1936) to try and make his system work. Academics have, in fact, become so accustomed to "re-editing the dictionary" (as Keynes put it), that they truly can no longer conceive of absolute standards of anything.
It becomes clear, then, that the real issue is not being addressed in the debate about the contraception mandate, or in the larger debate between those who are concerned with which individual goods the State should provide and in what manner, and those who want to limit the role of the State. Nor is it a simple "all or nothing" situation as many attempt to frame it, as there is really no "pure" position, except for those who believe that whatever the State does is necessarily right without question, and such ideologues are very rare.
Even, e.g., supporters of Roe v. Wade, who chant the mantra that the Supreme Court established abortion on demand as the law of the land and therefore all resistance or protest is [pick your pejorative], in almost the same breath declare that if abortion were to be outlawed, the law would not be obeyed! Thus, on the one hand they insist that abortion be supported with all the resources of the State and any and all protest silenced for the simple reason that it is the law, and your opinion is irrelevant. On the other, they declare that if abortion were to be outlawed, the law would be disobeyed because our opinion, not a presumably unjust law, determines what is right. At one and the same time they reject the idea of an authority higher than the State to dismiss their opponents' argument, and rely on it to clinch theirs.
So, what is the real issue here? As we have seen, it's whether the State is guardian of the common good, or guarantor of all individual goods. This is the question that confronts the American Catholic bishops, the Catholic laity, as well as Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others of faith or ethical philosophy who oppose the growing intrusion of the State into matters of personal conscience.
Many of these groups and individuals are on the horns of a dilemma they created for themselves by insisting that the State's responsibility to care for the common good means guaranteeing every individual good. By accepting gradually increasing State-funded social programs, they have been forced to accept the price: a growing dependence on the State that provides the funding and that necessarily dictates how the funds are to be used.
Nevertheless, the common good is not the aggregate of individual goods, but the network of institutions within which each individual exercises his or her natural rights and thereby acquires and develops virtue, becoming more fully human. The State is not to try and provide or guarantee individual goods, except in extreme need.
That being the case, the State (civil society) does not have the authority (at least legitimately) to set standards of morality. This provides a check against the State deciding for its own advantage or those of favored supporters or clients to change or "improve" moral standards . . . for everyone's good, of course. The State cannot, therefore, redefine natural rights such as life, liberty or property, however much it is charged with defining their legitimate exercise within the bounds of the natural law. (We won't discuss today the widespread modern confusion over the difference between having a right and exercising a right.)
Nor can the State redefine basic institutions outside its own sphere of competence, e.g., changing "marriage" (an institution in domestic society) to mean something other than what it is. The State's proper role is to regulate the social order through enforcement of moral standards, not control the social order through redefinition of those standards, despite what John Maynard Keynes said about the power of the absolutist State to "re-edit the dictionary."
Similarly, religious society, which discerns and defines virtue, and domestic society, which transmits those definitions to children, have no power outside their own purview to enforce moral standards. Parents may not punish other people's children for violating rules they have set for their own children within their own family, nor may a Presbyterian minister sue a Methodist neighbor for not contributing to the Presbyterian Church or have the State impose a fine, any more than a Rabbi can impose a penance on a Muslim for not going to Temple on Saturday or send the sheriff to arrest him and force him to attend. All of them, however, can legitimately discern the truth of the natural law and teach that murder, theft, adultery, and so on, are wrong, and demand that the State enforce these moral standards within reason and as appropriate.
We can therefore understand that the traditional separation of Church, State and Family — properly understood — operates as a kind of "social Glass-Steagall." With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the financial services industry was able very effectively to eliminate all systemic checks and balances in pursuit of financial power. In addition, the industry itself as experts set the standards of ethical behavior and, by and large, enforced them . . . so to speak. It was, in effect, like asking a thief to define burglary and then relying on him to make certain nothing was stolen, only holding him accountable if he was dumb enough to violate his own rules and get caught. No, allowing the State both to define and enforce virtuous behavior is a very bad idea. It's just as bad as allowing a religious body to impose civil penalties and enforce them for violations of faith-based teachings.
That's not to say that authorities in all three societies — domestic, religious and civil — don't often try to extend their power far beyond their legitimate spheres. These days, of course, when the authoritarian State has managed to take over large areas formerly recognized as the purview of religious and domestic society, people have been whipped into a frenzy of fear over the dangers of too much power in the hands of parents or clergy.
This should probably make people more suspicious than it does — there is a natural tendency to condemn anything that opposes what you happen to want to do, especially if it's particularly harmful. We see, for example, chain smokers chanting about the dangers of quitting cold turkey, libertines about the unhealthiness of chastity, while alcoholics can recite at great length the benefits of a wee nip now and then — the list is endless.
All of this, of course, leads directly into the dilemma in which Catholics and members of other churches and faiths find themselves when confronted with the contraception mandate. For over a century Catholics and others have demanded and, since at least the 1930s, have received increasing levels of State intrusion into and control over the lives of individual citizens in an at best marginal — and extremely expensive — effort to guarantee everyone's individual good.
This includes even — or especially — such groups as the distributists, who (as we might expect) want to have their cake and eat it, too. They have no problem with State control — although some, admittedly, claim with Karl Marx that the State will wither away . . . and be replaced by something that is the State in all but name. One distributist enthusiast claimed that the State would largely be replaced by groups of people in free association, which, while membership would not, strictly speaking, be voluntary . . . that's when we stopped reading. "Involuntary free association" is a concept far beyond our intellectual capacity.
No, State control of every aspect of life is not the problem as far as the cake-eaters-and-keepers are concerned. The problem occurs when those in power order us to do things with which we disagree. That shows that they just aren't the right people, and they're probably evil, kicking puppies, and pinching babies in their spare time. To the guillotine! (With love, of course.) Then we can replace The Evil Ones with people who will Do The Right Thing All The Time . . . like us. Aw, what the heck. Us.
We're afraid we have to disagree on that one. The reason that people in power can get away with such things is that the system allows it. No, we're not saying that the system forces anybody to do wrong. A badly structured system just makes it easier and more advantageous to do wrong, especially if you're one of the lucky few who have figured out how to manipulate it. What is needed is not more and more regulations to try and control every act within the system, or an unending debate over which individual goods a State should guarantee — thereby making those receiving them into permanent dependents (slaves) of the State — but a restructuring of the system to allow it to operate for the advantage of everyone.
Any such restructuring must take into account the need to implement proper internal controls. This is so that the system normally runs properly without relying on every act being dictated, or on a key person who will try to coerce virtuous behavior.
Separation of function is a primary component of proper internal control. Separation of Church, State and Family builds internal controls into the system, as does separating the common good — the vast network of institutions within which we acquire and develop virtue — from individual goods: the actual development and acquisition of virtue through the exercise of our natural rights. Some of the elements of a "social Glass-Steagall" would be:
• The State limited to its proper role as guardian of the common good, not the guarantor of all individual goods. Except in cases of extreme need, and even then as the final, not first recourse, after individual and group efforts have been exhausted and private charity cannot handle it the State should not intrude into domestic or religious society, unless required to do so to protect the civil rights of individuals. This necessarily requires:
• The individual citizen as a member of society recognized as having primary responsibility for the structuring of the common good. Ordinarily this responsibility is delegated to duly constituted political authority, but when that authority becomes flawed or corrupt, or institutions no longer serve their primary function of assisting individuals to acquire and develop virtue, citizens must organize and restructure the social order through acts of social justice.
• Church (religious society), Family (domestic society) and State (civil society) recognized as discrete societies within the social order, each with its special role to play. This does not address the primary meaning or purpose of religious or domestic society, just their relations to civil society:
One of the most serious problems today, however (and what ties the hands of the American bishops and others of good will), is the belief that, worthy, even necessary as these elements of social internal control may be, people do not see any way that they can be implemented. This seems to justify the silence over these issues and the continuing debate not over whether Welfare Blackmail is in any degree acceptable, but how much slavery we can tolerate before the pot boils over or the country goes bankrupt.
In the next posting in this series we hope to show that there is, in point of fact, a way out — and one that can be implemented without disrupting the social order, or taking anything away from anyone except a monopoly over opportunity.
#30#
Surprisingly for a society that prides itself on the intelligence of its members — or perhaps not, considering that a high IQ is the only common denominator — no one bothers to ask the obvious question and settle the primary issue. It is, in fact, an exercise in futility to discuss whether God does or does not exist until you have settled the issue whether God can exist.
You see the problem? If one side in the debate accepts as a given even before the debate begins that God cannot exist, and the other side accepts without question that God does exist, there can never be any real debate or argument, merely name-calling and sneering.
We've seen the same thing with respect to "debates" about binary economics and the Just Third Way. The three mainstream schools of economics, the Keynesian, the Monetarist/Chicago, and the Austrian, are firmly established on the assumption that it is impossible to finance new capital formation unless you first cut consumption and accumulate money savings.
This necessarily results in concentrated ownership or control of capital, either in the hands of a private elite (capitalism), or the State (socialism), with fundamental natural rights continually redefined in order to try and force the system to work. Anybody who says anything different is automatically a knave or a fool, usually both — which seems to present no logical problem, as the accusation comes from people who have built careers on both eating and retaining their cake.
Binary economics, on the other hand, takes as a given that new capital not only can be financed without first cutting consumption and accumulating money savings, given that the purpose of production is consumption and not reinvestment, new capital must be financed in that way if the economy is to be in equilibrium. Using "future savings" is the only feasible and just means of financing widespread capital ownership and eliminating the business cycle without using the dishonest expedient of redefining natural rights, especially freedom of association/contract (liberty) and private property. Keynes redefined both in both his Treatise on Money (1930) and his General Theory (1936) to try and make his system work. Academics have, in fact, become so accustomed to "re-editing the dictionary" (as Keynes put it), that they truly can no longer conceive of absolute standards of anything.
It becomes clear, then, that the real issue is not being addressed in the debate about the contraception mandate, or in the larger debate between those who are concerned with which individual goods the State should provide and in what manner, and those who want to limit the role of the State. Nor is it a simple "all or nothing" situation as many attempt to frame it, as there is really no "pure" position, except for those who believe that whatever the State does is necessarily right without question, and such ideologues are very rare.
Even, e.g., supporters of Roe v. Wade, who chant the mantra that the Supreme Court established abortion on demand as the law of the land and therefore all resistance or protest is [pick your pejorative], in almost the same breath declare that if abortion were to be outlawed, the law would not be obeyed! Thus, on the one hand they insist that abortion be supported with all the resources of the State and any and all protest silenced for the simple reason that it is the law, and your opinion is irrelevant. On the other, they declare that if abortion were to be outlawed, the law would be disobeyed because our opinion, not a presumably unjust law, determines what is right. At one and the same time they reject the idea of an authority higher than the State to dismiss their opponents' argument, and rely on it to clinch theirs.
So, what is the real issue here? As we have seen, it's whether the State is guardian of the common good, or guarantor of all individual goods. This is the question that confronts the American Catholic bishops, the Catholic laity, as well as Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others of faith or ethical philosophy who oppose the growing intrusion of the State into matters of personal conscience.
Many of these groups and individuals are on the horns of a dilemma they created for themselves by insisting that the State's responsibility to care for the common good means guaranteeing every individual good. By accepting gradually increasing State-funded social programs, they have been forced to accept the price: a growing dependence on the State that provides the funding and that necessarily dictates how the funds are to be used.
Nevertheless, the common good is not the aggregate of individual goods, but the network of institutions within which each individual exercises his or her natural rights and thereby acquires and develops virtue, becoming more fully human. The State is not to try and provide or guarantee individual goods, except in extreme need.
That being the case, the State (civil society) does not have the authority (at least legitimately) to set standards of morality. This provides a check against the State deciding for its own advantage or those of favored supporters or clients to change or "improve" moral standards . . . for everyone's good, of course. The State cannot, therefore, redefine natural rights such as life, liberty or property, however much it is charged with defining their legitimate exercise within the bounds of the natural law. (We won't discuss today the widespread modern confusion over the difference between having a right and exercising a right.)
Nor can the State redefine basic institutions outside its own sphere of competence, e.g., changing "marriage" (an institution in domestic society) to mean something other than what it is. The State's proper role is to regulate the social order through enforcement of moral standards, not control the social order through redefinition of those standards, despite what John Maynard Keynes said about the power of the absolutist State to "re-edit the dictionary."
Similarly, religious society, which discerns and defines virtue, and domestic society, which transmits those definitions to children, have no power outside their own purview to enforce moral standards. Parents may not punish other people's children for violating rules they have set for their own children within their own family, nor may a Presbyterian minister sue a Methodist neighbor for not contributing to the Presbyterian Church or have the State impose a fine, any more than a Rabbi can impose a penance on a Muslim for not going to Temple on Saturday or send the sheriff to arrest him and force him to attend. All of them, however, can legitimately discern the truth of the natural law and teach that murder, theft, adultery, and so on, are wrong, and demand that the State enforce these moral standards within reason and as appropriate.
We can therefore understand that the traditional separation of Church, State and Family — properly understood — operates as a kind of "social Glass-Steagall." With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the financial services industry was able very effectively to eliminate all systemic checks and balances in pursuit of financial power. In addition, the industry itself as experts set the standards of ethical behavior and, by and large, enforced them . . . so to speak. It was, in effect, like asking a thief to define burglary and then relying on him to make certain nothing was stolen, only holding him accountable if he was dumb enough to violate his own rules and get caught. No, allowing the State both to define and enforce virtuous behavior is a very bad idea. It's just as bad as allowing a religious body to impose civil penalties and enforce them for violations of faith-based teachings.
That's not to say that authorities in all three societies — domestic, religious and civil — don't often try to extend their power far beyond their legitimate spheres. These days, of course, when the authoritarian State has managed to take over large areas formerly recognized as the purview of religious and domestic society, people have been whipped into a frenzy of fear over the dangers of too much power in the hands of parents or clergy.
This should probably make people more suspicious than it does — there is a natural tendency to condemn anything that opposes what you happen to want to do, especially if it's particularly harmful. We see, for example, chain smokers chanting about the dangers of quitting cold turkey, libertines about the unhealthiness of chastity, while alcoholics can recite at great length the benefits of a wee nip now and then — the list is endless.
All of this, of course, leads directly into the dilemma in which Catholics and members of other churches and faiths find themselves when confronted with the contraception mandate. For over a century Catholics and others have demanded and, since at least the 1930s, have received increasing levels of State intrusion into and control over the lives of individual citizens in an at best marginal — and extremely expensive — effort to guarantee everyone's individual good.
This includes even — or especially — such groups as the distributists, who (as we might expect) want to have their cake and eat it, too. They have no problem with State control — although some, admittedly, claim with Karl Marx that the State will wither away . . . and be replaced by something that is the State in all but name. One distributist enthusiast claimed that the State would largely be replaced by groups of people in free association, which, while membership would not, strictly speaking, be voluntary . . . that's when we stopped reading. "Involuntary free association" is a concept far beyond our intellectual capacity.
No, State control of every aspect of life is not the problem as far as the cake-eaters-and-keepers are concerned. The problem occurs when those in power order us to do things with which we disagree. That shows that they just aren't the right people, and they're probably evil, kicking puppies, and pinching babies in their spare time. To the guillotine! (With love, of course.) Then we can replace The Evil Ones with people who will Do The Right Thing All The Time . . . like us. Aw, what the heck. Us.
We're afraid we have to disagree on that one. The reason that people in power can get away with such things is that the system allows it. No, we're not saying that the system forces anybody to do wrong. A badly structured system just makes it easier and more advantageous to do wrong, especially if you're one of the lucky few who have figured out how to manipulate it. What is needed is not more and more regulations to try and control every act within the system, or an unending debate over which individual goods a State should guarantee — thereby making those receiving them into permanent dependents (slaves) of the State — but a restructuring of the system to allow it to operate for the advantage of everyone.
Any such restructuring must take into account the need to implement proper internal controls. This is so that the system normally runs properly without relying on every act being dictated, or on a key person who will try to coerce virtuous behavior.
Separation of function is a primary component of proper internal control. Separation of Church, State and Family builds internal controls into the system, as does separating the common good — the vast network of institutions within which we acquire and develop virtue — from individual goods: the actual development and acquisition of virtue through the exercise of our natural rights. Some of the elements of a "social Glass-Steagall" would be:
• The State limited to its proper role as guardian of the common good, not the guarantor of all individual goods. Except in cases of extreme need, and even then as the final, not first recourse, after individual and group efforts have been exhausted and private charity cannot handle it the State should not intrude into domestic or religious society, unless required to do so to protect the civil rights of individuals. This necessarily requires:
- A limited economic role for the State, especially a prohibition against money creation by emitting bills of credit,
- Free and open markets within an understandable and just legal system as the best means of determining just wages, just prices and just profits,
- Restoration of the rights of private property, especially in corporate equity and other forms of business organization, and
- Widespread direct ownership of capital, individually or in free association with others.
• The individual citizen as a member of society recognized as having primary responsibility for the structuring of the common good. Ordinarily this responsibility is delegated to duly constituted political authority, but when that authority becomes flawed or corrupt, or institutions no longer serve their primary function of assisting individuals to acquire and develop virtue, citizens must organize and restructure the social order through acts of social justice.
• Church (religious society), Family (domestic society) and State (civil society) recognized as discrete societies within the social order, each with its special role to play. This does not address the primary meaning or purpose of religious or domestic society, just their relations to civil society:
- The role of organized religion with respect to the social order is to discern the precepts of the natural law and guide both domestic society and civil society in applying them.
- The family's job with respect to the social order is to "rear children," that is, teach them to be fully functioning adults — non-dependents — in both religious and civil society.
- The job of the State is to maintain institutions so that the social order operates in accordance with the precepts of the natural law within acceptable parameters.
One of the most serious problems today, however (and what ties the hands of the American bishops and others of good will), is the belief that, worthy, even necessary as these elements of social internal control may be, people do not see any way that they can be implemented. This seems to justify the silence over these issues and the continuing debate not over whether Welfare Blackmail is in any degree acceptable, but how much slavery we can tolerate before the pot boils over or the country goes bankrupt.
In the next posting in this series we hope to show that there is, in point of fact, a way out — and one that can be implemented without disrupting the social order, or taking anything away from anyone except a monopoly over opportunity.
#30#
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Welfare Blackmail, Part III: The Secret of Life
In yesterday's posting we raised the possibility that the common good over which the State exercises guardianship might — at least for the sake of argument — not be the aggregate of individual goods, but something less . . . and, in a very real sense, much more. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be the case. We don't know if Aristotle was the first person to talk about the common good, but that's not important enough to look up right now. What is important is that Aristotle knew what the common good is: that at which all things aim.
That sounds perhaps a little flip, but stop and think for a moment. Does anybody (or anything) aim at or strive for something that he knows is bad for the sake of its badness? Hardly. Even striving for something we know to be bad is done for some gain or good that we believe will accrue to us, or to avoid a greater evil. The warped and totally depraved man who does great evil for the sake of what we believe to be evil believes it to be good. A glance into Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf reveals that he regarded himself as a benefactor of humanity.
Aristotle went on to say what this good is at which all things aim: virtue. While the word "virtue" has its roots in a Latin word, virtus, meaning "manliness," let's not let that bother us. Virtue today signifies human-ness, and is defined as "the habit of doing good." That being the case, the job of each human being on earth — the "secret of life" if you will — is to spend his or her life acquiring and developing habits of doing good, in the process becoming more fully human.
So what is the good common to the entire human race, the "common good"? Simply the capacity that each human being has to acquire and develop virtue, thereby becoming more fully human. That is, by acquiring the habit of doing good, we bring ourselves into closer conformity with our own nature.
That's important, because we acquire the habit of doing good by exercising rights. Not all rights, of course. There are a great many rights that exist only to make life easier or more livable. Since, as Aristotle said, "man is by nature a political animal" (which seems to be a unique combination of individual and social — think of it as a social being with individual identity and rights) we gather into groups to live, but without neglecting the fact that we remain individuals at the same time we are members of a group. The art of politics is to balance the needs of the individual with the demands of the group.
Those rights that help us become virtuous by their exercise are called "natural rights." This is because they help us to become more fully human, that is, conform to our own nature. Among the most important of these natural rights are life, liberty (freedom of association/contract) and private property. The common good can thus be understood as the vast network of institutions — especially natural rights — within which humanity, as political animals, acquire and develop virtue (build habits of doing good), thereby becoming more fully human.
We mentioned "Catch-22" in yesterday's posting, and now we bring it up again. It seems that there is a catch to all this. That is, if we do not do the work ourselves of building habits of doing good by exercising our rights, then we do not truly become virtuous. If we are handed or guaranteed everything we need or could reasonably want, we are no more virtuous than a student who copies all the right answers from the back of the book is learned.
We are given rights so that by their exercise we can meet our own needs and those of our dependents, and in the process develop our potential as human beings. If the State or our parents continue to take care of us when we should have learned how to "do" for ourselves, we remain children — or slaves.
Everyone, of course, needs a hand once in a while. To turn people into permanent dependents (another word for slave) as a usual thing, however, is profoundly wrong because it defeats the whole purpose of life — which is to become more fully human by acquiring and developing virtue. As should be obvious, there is no virtue developed when everything is guaranteed.
There is also the problem that distributing material goods on the basis of need, except in an emergency, comes under charity, not justice, and thus not under the purview of the State. As Leo XIII explained,
"No one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for his own needs and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly his condition in life, 'for no one ought to live other than becomingly.' But, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one's standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over. 'Of that which remaineth, give alms.'' It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity — a duty not enforced by human law." (Rerum Novarum, § 22)
Thus, a State that attempts to supply every material need or (worse) coercively enforce what it has, on its own authority and without reference to objective moral values decided is "good," has already admitted that, as a State, it is a failure. Trying to provide for every material need or even a bare subsistence is only justified by a permanent state of emergency — or perhaps we should say, a State of Emergency that supports those in power for the sake of continuing their power.
Having failed in their job of maintaining the common, mediate good in operating condition, those in power attempt to retain power by attempting to provide for what they have decided in Procrustean fashion is immediately good for everybody. In this, too, they necessarily fail, if only because the more you attempt to provide for every individual want and need, the greater those needs and wants get, and the less incentive there is for people to go out and get it for themselves — and the faster the government goes bankrupt trying to provide for everyone without producing anything.
This is where "Obama's Choice" demonstrates its wrongness. If (as we have seen) the common good is the capacity every human being has to acquire and develop virtue, and the State has the job of caring for the common good (which must not be construed as the aggregation of individual material goods), then the State must never — except in cases of extreme need — undertake to provide for the material wants and needs of its citizens. Even more — the State cannot invent a virtue or change the definition of virtue to suit anyone, whether the individual or group in power, an oppressing majority, an oppressed minority, or a cute girl in a short skirt.
The teaching and definition of virtue must in general be left respectively to the teachers of morality, that is, to parents (domestic society) and ministers of religion (religious society). If you stop to think about it, this makes a lot of sense in systems terms. Parents have no authority over their adult children, and can be held accountable for teaching them vice instead of virtue when young, while membership in a religion is a matter of individual choice and cannot be coerced. Neither organized religion nor parents, for all they can define and teach virtue, have any power to enforce rules that punish vice outside a very narrow and limited range. Balancing this is the fact that the State, that can compel obedience to virtuous norms and punish vice within a very broad range, lacks the legitimate power to teach and define what those norms are.
In accounting we call this "internal control" or "separation of function." It provides automatic checks and balances, and protects against mistakes. In politics it's called "democracy," and prevents the concentration of power in any single society, whether civil, domestic, or religious. In daily life we call it "common sense."
#30#
That sounds perhaps a little flip, but stop and think for a moment. Does anybody (or anything) aim at or strive for something that he knows is bad for the sake of its badness? Hardly. Even striving for something we know to be bad is done for some gain or good that we believe will accrue to us, or to avoid a greater evil. The warped and totally depraved man who does great evil for the sake of what we believe to be evil believes it to be good. A glance into Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf reveals that he regarded himself as a benefactor of humanity.
Aristotle went on to say what this good is at which all things aim: virtue. While the word "virtue" has its roots in a Latin word, virtus, meaning "manliness," let's not let that bother us. Virtue today signifies human-ness, and is defined as "the habit of doing good." That being the case, the job of each human being on earth — the "secret of life" if you will — is to spend his or her life acquiring and developing habits of doing good, in the process becoming more fully human.
So what is the good common to the entire human race, the "common good"? Simply the capacity that each human being has to acquire and develop virtue, thereby becoming more fully human. That is, by acquiring the habit of doing good, we bring ourselves into closer conformity with our own nature.
That's important, because we acquire the habit of doing good by exercising rights. Not all rights, of course. There are a great many rights that exist only to make life easier or more livable. Since, as Aristotle said, "man is by nature a political animal" (which seems to be a unique combination of individual and social — think of it as a social being with individual identity and rights) we gather into groups to live, but without neglecting the fact that we remain individuals at the same time we are members of a group. The art of politics is to balance the needs of the individual with the demands of the group.
Those rights that help us become virtuous by their exercise are called "natural rights." This is because they help us to become more fully human, that is, conform to our own nature. Among the most important of these natural rights are life, liberty (freedom of association/contract) and private property. The common good can thus be understood as the vast network of institutions — especially natural rights — within which humanity, as political animals, acquire and develop virtue (build habits of doing good), thereby becoming more fully human.
We mentioned "Catch-22" in yesterday's posting, and now we bring it up again. It seems that there is a catch to all this. That is, if we do not do the work ourselves of building habits of doing good by exercising our rights, then we do not truly become virtuous. If we are handed or guaranteed everything we need or could reasonably want, we are no more virtuous than a student who copies all the right answers from the back of the book is learned.
We are given rights so that by their exercise we can meet our own needs and those of our dependents, and in the process develop our potential as human beings. If the State or our parents continue to take care of us when we should have learned how to "do" for ourselves, we remain children — or slaves.
Everyone, of course, needs a hand once in a while. To turn people into permanent dependents (another word for slave) as a usual thing, however, is profoundly wrong because it defeats the whole purpose of life — which is to become more fully human by acquiring and developing virtue. As should be obvious, there is no virtue developed when everything is guaranteed.
There is also the problem that distributing material goods on the basis of need, except in an emergency, comes under charity, not justice, and thus not under the purview of the State. As Leo XIII explained,
"No one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for his own needs and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly his condition in life, 'for no one ought to live other than becomingly.' But, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one's standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over. 'Of that which remaineth, give alms.'' It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity — a duty not enforced by human law." (Rerum Novarum, § 22)
Thus, a State that attempts to supply every material need or (worse) coercively enforce what it has, on its own authority and without reference to objective moral values decided is "good," has already admitted that, as a State, it is a failure. Trying to provide for every material need or even a bare subsistence is only justified by a permanent state of emergency — or perhaps we should say, a State of Emergency that supports those in power for the sake of continuing their power.
Having failed in their job of maintaining the common, mediate good in operating condition, those in power attempt to retain power by attempting to provide for what they have decided in Procrustean fashion is immediately good for everybody. In this, too, they necessarily fail, if only because the more you attempt to provide for every individual want and need, the greater those needs and wants get, and the less incentive there is for people to go out and get it for themselves — and the faster the government goes bankrupt trying to provide for everyone without producing anything.
This is where "Obama's Choice" demonstrates its wrongness. If (as we have seen) the common good is the capacity every human being has to acquire and develop virtue, and the State has the job of caring for the common good (which must not be construed as the aggregation of individual material goods), then the State must never — except in cases of extreme need — undertake to provide for the material wants and needs of its citizens. Even more — the State cannot invent a virtue or change the definition of virtue to suit anyone, whether the individual or group in power, an oppressing majority, an oppressed minority, or a cute girl in a short skirt.
The teaching and definition of virtue must in general be left respectively to the teachers of morality, that is, to parents (domestic society) and ministers of religion (religious society). If you stop to think about it, this makes a lot of sense in systems terms. Parents have no authority over their adult children, and can be held accountable for teaching them vice instead of virtue when young, while membership in a religion is a matter of individual choice and cannot be coerced. Neither organized religion nor parents, for all they can define and teach virtue, have any power to enforce rules that punish vice outside a very narrow and limited range. Balancing this is the fact that the State, that can compel obedience to virtuous norms and punish vice within a very broad range, lacks the legitimate power to teach and define what those norms are.
In accounting we call this "internal control" or "separation of function." It provides automatic checks and balances, and protects against mistakes. In politics it's called "democracy," and prevents the concentration of power in any single society, whether civil, domestic, or religious. In daily life we call it "common sense."
#30#
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Welfare Blackmail, Part II: "Obama's Choice"
Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) was a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who gave customers the "choice" of any horse in the stable as long as it was the one in the stall nearest the door. A way of preventing the best horses from being overused, the actual choice was "take it or leave it" — a genuine choice, but not very attractive to the customers if they happened to draw plugs.
There are other types of disagreeable choices, most of them dating from the modern age in which choice itself has been raised to a virtue, regardless of the objective quality or morality of the options. At the top of the list is Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," described in the Wikipedia as being "a logical paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that can only be acquired by not being in that very situation."
Then there's the "double bind" in which there are two or more conflicting situations, all presumably equally valid but which contradict each other, so that a positive response or reaction to any one negates all the others, with disastrous consequences — as it is often put, "You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't."
We now have "Obama's Choice." The Pro-Choice president has delivered a mandate that under the mantra of "choice" forces people to take the only option given, willy-nilly. As we saw in yesterday's posting, President Obama believes his position to be solid — politically, economically, and legally.
Politically, the American bishops have a history of giving ground, as demonstrated by the ineffectiveness of the Pro-Life movement and the fact that many Catholics voted for Obama in the last election. Economically, individual Catholics and the Catholic Church as a whole are dependent on the government for funding the social programs they have demanded for over a century. Legally, Congress passed a law, and the law is always right . . . except when the Supreme Court says it isn't, and the Supreme Court isn't about to do anything to undermine the power it has managed to gather to itself.
Fortunately for the American people and the Constitution, "Obama's Choice" isn't really what the president thinks it is. Obama is obviously relying on there being no alternatives to what he proposes, and the proven ineffectiveness of the American bishops — and religious leaders of other faiths — when faced with the power of the State.
The fact is, however, that there are alternatives to the current system that glorifies State power over everything else. "Obama's Choice" is actually what is called in logic a "false dilemma": only two choices are presented (obey the law or suffer the consequences) when, in fact, there are others.
Obama assumes as a given that he has Catholics and the Catholic Church in his back pocket. He clearly believes that neither individual Catholics nor the institutional Church will vote him out of office and risk losing the benefits that presumably only the State can provide and which the various Republican candidates want to cut. Obama, so he believes, has the Catholic Church over a barrel.
Therein lies Obama's first miscalculation. While the Catholic Church is the most visible and vocal target of the contraception mandate, the contraception mandate is not a "Catholic issue." There are people of other faiths, even none at all, who recognize the danger of the State dictating religious beliefs and practices, and thereby attempting to establish religion in contravention of the First Amendment.
Obama, however, has made an even more serious miscalculation. That is to accept without question the assumption that the proper role of the State is to be the sole guarantor of all individual material goods. The "common good" or general welfare over which the State exercises authority is, in this understanding, the aggregation of all individual material goods. That being the case, the State has not only the right, but the duty to guarantee a minimally acceptable standard of living for everyone, and to decide what, exactly, constitutes "acceptable."
If it is, in fact, the case that the State is the sole guarantor of all individual material goods, then the determination of those goods is a purely civil (that is, non-religious or domestic) matter. The Catholic Church or any other religious body can give its opinion as to the objective goodness (or badness) of anything the State has deemed a good, but that opinion is just that — an opinion, and has no validity unless the State as an exercise of prudence or expedience chooses to accept that opinion, and in its generosity allow that opinion to be applied to members of that religious body. If, however, allowing the exception would create an unacceptable precedent (e.g., prevent people from being guaranteed what the State has determined to be a desired result), then the religious body or bodies must give way.
Suppose, however, that the common good — the general welfare — is not, in fact, the aggregate of individual material goods enjoyed by the citizens of a State? Suppose (for the sake of argument) that this "common good" is something less material and a bit more spiritual. If that is the case, then the State would not only be overstepping its bounds to deny religious bodies and institutions exemptions based on conscience, it would be a tyranny for trying to guarantee results by usurping rights that belong to individual citizens and their free associations — rights that are vested in those same citizens to empower them to meet their own needs by their own efforts, thereby growing and developing their potential as human beings.
#30#
There are other types of disagreeable choices, most of them dating from the modern age in which choice itself has been raised to a virtue, regardless of the objective quality or morality of the options. At the top of the list is Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," described in the Wikipedia as being "a logical paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that can only be acquired by not being in that very situation."
Then there's the "double bind" in which there are two or more conflicting situations, all presumably equally valid but which contradict each other, so that a positive response or reaction to any one negates all the others, with disastrous consequences — as it is often put, "You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't."
We now have "Obama's Choice." The Pro-Choice president has delivered a mandate that under the mantra of "choice" forces people to take the only option given, willy-nilly. As we saw in yesterday's posting, President Obama believes his position to be solid — politically, economically, and legally.
Politically, the American bishops have a history of giving ground, as demonstrated by the ineffectiveness of the Pro-Life movement and the fact that many Catholics voted for Obama in the last election. Economically, individual Catholics and the Catholic Church as a whole are dependent on the government for funding the social programs they have demanded for over a century. Legally, Congress passed a law, and the law is always right . . . except when the Supreme Court says it isn't, and the Supreme Court isn't about to do anything to undermine the power it has managed to gather to itself.
Fortunately for the American people and the Constitution, "Obama's Choice" isn't really what the president thinks it is. Obama is obviously relying on there being no alternatives to what he proposes, and the proven ineffectiveness of the American bishops — and religious leaders of other faiths — when faced with the power of the State.
The fact is, however, that there are alternatives to the current system that glorifies State power over everything else. "Obama's Choice" is actually what is called in logic a "false dilemma": only two choices are presented (obey the law or suffer the consequences) when, in fact, there are others.
Obama assumes as a given that he has Catholics and the Catholic Church in his back pocket. He clearly believes that neither individual Catholics nor the institutional Church will vote him out of office and risk losing the benefits that presumably only the State can provide and which the various Republican candidates want to cut. Obama, so he believes, has the Catholic Church over a barrel.
Therein lies Obama's first miscalculation. While the Catholic Church is the most visible and vocal target of the contraception mandate, the contraception mandate is not a "Catholic issue." There are people of other faiths, even none at all, who recognize the danger of the State dictating religious beliefs and practices, and thereby attempting to establish religion in contravention of the First Amendment.
Obama, however, has made an even more serious miscalculation. That is to accept without question the assumption that the proper role of the State is to be the sole guarantor of all individual material goods. The "common good" or general welfare over which the State exercises authority is, in this understanding, the aggregation of all individual material goods. That being the case, the State has not only the right, but the duty to guarantee a minimally acceptable standard of living for everyone, and to decide what, exactly, constitutes "acceptable."
If it is, in fact, the case that the State is the sole guarantor of all individual material goods, then the determination of those goods is a purely civil (that is, non-religious or domestic) matter. The Catholic Church or any other religious body can give its opinion as to the objective goodness (or badness) of anything the State has deemed a good, but that opinion is just that — an opinion, and has no validity unless the State as an exercise of prudence or expedience chooses to accept that opinion, and in its generosity allow that opinion to be applied to members of that religious body. If, however, allowing the exception would create an unacceptable precedent (e.g., prevent people from being guaranteed what the State has determined to be a desired result), then the religious body or bodies must give way.
Suppose, however, that the common good — the general welfare — is not, in fact, the aggregate of individual material goods enjoyed by the citizens of a State? Suppose (for the sake of argument) that this "common good" is something less material and a bit more spiritual. If that is the case, then the State would not only be overstepping its bounds to deny religious bodies and institutions exemptions based on conscience, it would be a tyranny for trying to guarantee results by usurping rights that belong to individual citizens and their free associations — rights that are vested in those same citizens to empower them to meet their own needs by their own efforts, thereby growing and developing their potential as human beings.
#30#
Monday, March 12, 2012
Welfare Blackmail, Part I: Obama's Case
The American Catholic bishops are in a bind, as are all Catholic Americans. Having as a body effectively endorsed the Welfare State and accepted that the State is the guarantor of all individual goods (see Economic Justice for All, the 1986 American Bishops' "Pastoral Letter" on the U.S. economy), they have acquiesced in legalized abortion and are now faced with being forced to participate materially in providing artificial contraception and sterilization. That is, having accepted the benefits the State presumably confers, they now balk at the price.
The liberal media have been quick to exploit the situation, presenting the Catholic Church's position — as they and, unfortunately, many Catholics understand it — as hypocritical. The Church has, after all, despite decades of protests and demonstrations, permitted abortion to continue, even conceding the use of tax dollars to support the abortion industry. Requiring that religious institutions pay for contraception and sterilization doesn't seem as bad as abortion, so why all the fuss? Besides, most Catholics use contraception and some have sterilizations, so why not just recognize reality and come into the 21st century?
The general public — and the media that tell the public what to think — clearly doesn't understand the difference between allowing even a monstrously unjust law to continue for a time if you are not personally forced to do wrong, and a law that forces you to do wrong. In moral philosophy (which means simple common sense), we can — in some cases must — allow an injustice to continue if trying to end the injustice under current conditions would reasonably be expected to materially disrupt society.
This does not mean that we are permitted to let things stay as they are. There are two caveats to allowing unjust laws to continue that many people, even Catholics, overlook. The first is that we are not forced in any way to participate in the evil. Legalized abortion does not require that anyone have an abortion; to that extent the mealy-mouthed equivocation of the Pro-Choice position is correct: if you're against abortion, don't have one. (The issue of tax monies used to support abortion, directly or indirectly, confuses many people because they don't understand the principles of taxation, and our unnecessarily complex tax system obscures how tax monies are spent.)
The second caveat is that we must not allow matters to stay as they are. In social justice we are obligated to organize with others and work to reform our institutions, preparing the way to remove the unjust law in a way that reasonably ensures that people accept not having what they formerly regarded as a right.
Allowing an unjust law that does not force you to do wrong to continue — for a time — however, is substantially different from going along with a law that forces you personally to do wrong. When chattel slavery was legal, no one was legally required to own a slave, nor did the government provide subsidies, tax credits, or other benefits to slave owners.
When the government did support slavery, as with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the law was widely disobeyed, in some cases openly flouted. The Fugitive Slave Act was, until the Volstead Act (Prohibition), the most widely disobeyed law in U.S. history.
The political and economic forces behind the Fugitive Slave Act and the subsequent Dred Scott decision that overturned the Missouri Compromise eventually led to the Civil War. Prohibition led to the almost complete breakdown of civil authority in some areas, such as Chicago, and to the entrenchment of organized crime.
It is thus a supreme irony that America's first black president (who was also a senator from Illinois), who should be more sensitive than anyone else to the consequences of laws that force people to act contrary to conscience, has announced that he will not negotiate or give ground in any way on the issue of forcing religious institutions to violate religious principles. President Obama seems determined to overturn the "compromise" of Roe v. Wade and impose a modern day Dred Scott decision.
From his perspective, Obama's actions are eminently reasonable, and he has what appears to be solid support for his move, legally, politically and economically. Justice Roger Brooke Taney, of course, in 1857 believed he had equally firm support for the Dred Scott decision, which according to William Crosskey was a blatant attack on the Constitution of the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act, despite its futility, demonstrated the support of the federal government for slavery, as would the use of government troops to put down John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. David Christy's Cotton is King in 1855 argued that the economic survival of the United States and the British Empire depended absolutely on chattel slavery.
Obama has every reason to believe that the American bishops — and, of course, the laity of the Catholic Church whose votes ensured his election in 2008 — will (after a suitable display of bravado and bluster) cave in. The bishops' protests over Obama being granted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame, bestowed by University President Father John Jenkins in open defiance of the bishops' authority, were clearly nothing for anyone to worry about, a tempest in a teapot. The bishops obviously lacked the power to keep even a single Catholic institution, and that one a virtual icon of American Catholicism, in line. The controversy (such as it was) blew over. Father Jenkins was not called to book for his act, and was even regarded as a Pro-Choice hero by many for what was characterized as a courageous stand in going with public opinion.
To clinch the matter from Obama's perspective, by allowing the State to become (as one enthusiast put it) "the sole intercessor available to the poor" (i.e., the source of every material good), the bishops have necessarily abrogated their moral authority. The bishops, now dependent on the State for funding the social programs they believe to be essential, are going to be forced to obey, despite anything they say. They have always given ground before, and the contraception mandate is no different from previous confrontations in which the bishops demonstrated their complete lack of power.
#30#
The liberal media have been quick to exploit the situation, presenting the Catholic Church's position — as they and, unfortunately, many Catholics understand it — as hypocritical. The Church has, after all, despite decades of protests and demonstrations, permitted abortion to continue, even conceding the use of tax dollars to support the abortion industry. Requiring that religious institutions pay for contraception and sterilization doesn't seem as bad as abortion, so why all the fuss? Besides, most Catholics use contraception and some have sterilizations, so why not just recognize reality and come into the 21st century?
The general public — and the media that tell the public what to think — clearly doesn't understand the difference between allowing even a monstrously unjust law to continue for a time if you are not personally forced to do wrong, and a law that forces you to do wrong. In moral philosophy (which means simple common sense), we can — in some cases must — allow an injustice to continue if trying to end the injustice under current conditions would reasonably be expected to materially disrupt society.
This does not mean that we are permitted to let things stay as they are. There are two caveats to allowing unjust laws to continue that many people, even Catholics, overlook. The first is that we are not forced in any way to participate in the evil. Legalized abortion does not require that anyone have an abortion; to that extent the mealy-mouthed equivocation of the Pro-Choice position is correct: if you're against abortion, don't have one. (The issue of tax monies used to support abortion, directly or indirectly, confuses many people because they don't understand the principles of taxation, and our unnecessarily complex tax system obscures how tax monies are spent.)
The second caveat is that we must not allow matters to stay as they are. In social justice we are obligated to organize with others and work to reform our institutions, preparing the way to remove the unjust law in a way that reasonably ensures that people accept not having what they formerly regarded as a right.
Allowing an unjust law that does not force you to do wrong to continue — for a time — however, is substantially different from going along with a law that forces you personally to do wrong. When chattel slavery was legal, no one was legally required to own a slave, nor did the government provide subsidies, tax credits, or other benefits to slave owners.
When the government did support slavery, as with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the law was widely disobeyed, in some cases openly flouted. The Fugitive Slave Act was, until the Volstead Act (Prohibition), the most widely disobeyed law in U.S. history.
The political and economic forces behind the Fugitive Slave Act and the subsequent Dred Scott decision that overturned the Missouri Compromise eventually led to the Civil War. Prohibition led to the almost complete breakdown of civil authority in some areas, such as Chicago, and to the entrenchment of organized crime.
It is thus a supreme irony that America's first black president (who was also a senator from Illinois), who should be more sensitive than anyone else to the consequences of laws that force people to act contrary to conscience, has announced that he will not negotiate or give ground in any way on the issue of forcing religious institutions to violate religious principles. President Obama seems determined to overturn the "compromise" of Roe v. Wade and impose a modern day Dred Scott decision.
From his perspective, Obama's actions are eminently reasonable, and he has what appears to be solid support for his move, legally, politically and economically. Justice Roger Brooke Taney, of course, in 1857 believed he had equally firm support for the Dred Scott decision, which according to William Crosskey was a blatant attack on the Constitution of the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act, despite its futility, demonstrated the support of the federal government for slavery, as would the use of government troops to put down John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. David Christy's Cotton is King in 1855 argued that the economic survival of the United States and the British Empire depended absolutely on chattel slavery.
Obama has every reason to believe that the American bishops — and, of course, the laity of the Catholic Church whose votes ensured his election in 2008 — will (after a suitable display of bravado and bluster) cave in. The bishops' protests over Obama being granted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame, bestowed by University President Father John Jenkins in open defiance of the bishops' authority, were clearly nothing for anyone to worry about, a tempest in a teapot. The bishops obviously lacked the power to keep even a single Catholic institution, and that one a virtual icon of American Catholicism, in line. The controversy (such as it was) blew over. Father Jenkins was not called to book for his act, and was even regarded as a Pro-Choice hero by many for what was characterized as a courageous stand in going with public opinion.
To clinch the matter from Obama's perspective, by allowing the State to become (as one enthusiast put it) "the sole intercessor available to the poor" (i.e., the source of every material good), the bishops have necessarily abrogated their moral authority. The bishops, now dependent on the State for funding the social programs they believe to be essential, are going to be forced to obey, despite anything they say. They have always given ground before, and the contraception mandate is no different from previous confrontations in which the bishops demonstrated their complete lack of power.
#30#
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