RedStateEclectic

What Might the Founders Make of It?

David Boaz writes:

Both President Obama and Sen. John McCain cited the Founders in their weekly radio addresses today, as they made the case for government actions that would have appalled those Founders. Obama invoked “the indomitable spirit of the first American citizens who made [independence] day possible” in arguing for a federal takeover of education, energy, and health care.

He might have trouble explaining how his policies reflect the spirit of the men who left us such words as these:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must be happy.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Meanwhile, McCain called for the American government to more vigorously support the protesters in Iran. What would the Founders say to him?

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible….Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. …Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

Maybe each week there should be three national radio broadcasts: one from the incumbent president, one from the other big-government party, and one reflecting the views of the Founders.

The source.

A Trust That Will Lead to Our Undoing as a Great Nation

...is a phrase, I borrow from Walter E. Williams' article Why a Bill of Rights?

Following up on The Ninths and Tenth Amendment, and The Battle of Our Lifetime, and Bootleggers and Baptists, and also The Idea of Rights,  you might want to consider this article, and the below clip:

The Ninth and the Tenth Amendment

Walter E. Williams reminds us

[...] the Ninth Amendment [...] reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In essence, the Ninth Amendment says it's impossible to list all of our God-given or natural rights. Just because a right is not listed doesn't mean it can be infringed upon or disparaged by the U.S. Congress. The Tenth Amendment is a reinforcement of the Ninth saying, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." That means if a power is not delegated to Congress, it belongs to the states of the people.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean absolutely nothing today as Americans have developed a level of naive trust for Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court that would have astonished the founders, a trust that will lead to our undoing as a great nation.

The source.

Incidentally, while Walter E. Williams does not deal with economics in the above article, his piece helps also explain why Williams' economics is so good.

Constitutional illiteracy is fraught with the greatest dangers, one of which is the inability to appreciate the working of a free economy, which is just a special case of men acting under the rule of law. A free economy is what happens when the rule of law is observed.

Walter E. Williams is one of the few economists who understand the legal preconditions of liberty, and thus of a free economy. If you do not understand liberty, you cannot understand economics, or rather, the proper subject-matter of economics: the nature of a self-generating order.

So, economic decline is one of the consequences of not thinking through the great Constitution of the United States and treating it effectively (though not necessarily rhetorically) with disrepect.

The Idea of Rights

Following up on Regretting the "Fix" and British Health Care Woes, and indeed many other excellent posts on health care and social welfare in general, let me draw attention to a fundamental philosophical difficulty that explains why health care as well as the debate about it are typically going astray.

If you want to have good health care or, say, a flourishing economy, what you need are good laws - and I am not talking about meddlesome, ephemeral legislation - I am talking about the laws of genuine justice. Genuine justice does not address health care or economic issues directly, it ensures that we approach the challenges in the best possible manner human society is capable of.

Let us think about rights:

I am not suggesting the terms cannot be employed sensibly and responsibly - "right" or "rights," used in the sense of a person being entitled to doing something. Having said that, I tend to avoid the terms, preferring to work with the concept of "rules of just conduct," which imply rights and non-rights.

In a free society, rights are virtually innumerable (for instance, the right to chew chewing gum, or to buy a Michael Jackson CD etc), and new, previously unanticipated rights come into existence all the time, simply by free individuals acting in any manner consistent with adhering to generally applicable "rules of just conduct."

The latter, to avoid detrimental meddling, are very general, abstract and negative - negative in as much as that they do not specify detailed, positive requirements, like "you have or have not a right to buy a foreign car that is not running on ethanol and has only three wheels," but provide merely additional information (like "you must not renege on contractually stipulated promises") for a free person to understand what action she is entitled to take without violating another person's equally delineated and protected liberty.

Using "rights" as a means of legitimising and enforcing concrete wants is incompatible with the original intent of the idea of a right, and indeed supersedes the original notion, which strictly referred to general principles or rules, by its opposite: specific commands, which are either directly expressed and enforced (i.e. "marrying a Jew is prohibited,") or in a round-about manner, by empowering certain agents to take concrete authoritative interventionist action legally protected by a supposed right (i.e. the right of Germans to be protected from Jews).

Rules of just conduct refer to individual human behaviour, equally applicable to all of us. Period.

By contrast, rights in the increasingly abusively expanded meaning of the term refer to desired states of affairs, and legitimise arbitrary and coercive action deemed requisite to bring about such states of affairs, rather than protecting justice conceived of as something more than a mindlessly regurgitate phrase, i.e. a consistently meaningful set of principles.

Bastardised rights of this kind, let us call them social rights (including many so-called human rights), are notable for at least two highly undesirable traits: first, they are not clearly defined - mostly because, in principle, they cannot be clearly and non-arbitrarily defined:

For instance, a just distribution of income: the distribution of income, a state of affairs, cannot be meaningfully captured by the terms "just" or "unjust," only human behaviour can.

If the distribution has been achieved by people observing rules of just conduct, any outcome of the distribution is "just", derivatively, i.e. "just" in the sense of not involving unjust conduct on the part of anyone. More we cannot and should not ask of justice: to see to it that a person, any person, does not act unjustly.

In fact, the better we get at maintaining a consistent notion of justice, the richer we tend to be.

Also, a rich society will always be a society of differential income.

What matters is that the differentiation of income in such a society is a precondition of its growing wealth benefiting all, whereas in a, say, communist country, differential income persists, without serving as a precondition for increasing wealth benefiting everyone - which feature of a command society, in turn, is the always detrimental result of the absence of consistently practiced justice.

Secondly, to the disadvantage of a consistent use of the concept of justice, social rights give precedence to any coercive, arbitrary (as opposed to rule-heeding) concrete measures that happen to be considered conducive to attaining the indistinctly defined, desired states of affairs.

Social rights are the dream of big government - they create (a) the illusory impression of clearly defined, worthwhile "social" goals, and (b) the reality that some agent is empowered to enforce its interpretation of the mandate by such means as it considers expedient for the purpose.

That is to say: some airy-fairy mandate exempts certain parts of society, especially the government of the day, from adhering to rules of just conduct and gives them the power to impose their arbitrary schemes of realisation on all of society.

The result is an instance of what I try to summarise in my motto "freedom or irrationality."

A small, biased, privileged and disproportionately powerful segment of societal actors is entrusted with the solution of a problem that is actually best approached by incorporating the maximum number of players interacting under conditions of sensibly delineated freedom.

For, all big social problems are problems of adjusting successfully to unknown circumstances, so as to be able to ferret out unknown solutions. If we restrict free interplay, by privileging a minor section of the population to act the more powerfully and conceitfully, we make society a lot less intelligent than it needs to be to solve the problems that the anti-libertarian status quo pretends to be concerned about.

If justice is treated as a residual, at best, rather than the most important precondition of our civilisation, the logic of power takes over - and the logic of power is always the enemy of the common weal, which can only be achieved under conditions of freedom.

Here are two very useful articles on rights offered by the Adam Smith Institute - I take an even more radical stance, but the articles are nevertheless good and commendable, in my opinion:

The War on Capitalism - Human Rights, Political Bias, by Jacob Mchangama, and

A Short History of the Social Rights Myth, by Rachel Patterson

SCOTUS Gives Chrysler Deal The Go-Ahead

Just heard it on the news:  The Supreme Court has ruled that the Chrysler deal with Fiat can progress.

What a shame they didn't bother to actually hear the case.  This is horribly, horribly wrong, and I hope that the law blog I read will explain how such an important case was not even considered worth hearing.

But hey - Obama said he was going to redistribute wealth.  I suppose the only thing that really surprises me about this is that  I didn't expect him to shaft a teachers' union to glean favor with the auto workers union.

Update:   Suits &  Sentences has more.

GM Symbol of USA - Obama's Vulture Socialism

Obama is the figurehead of the accelerating takeover of the United States by vulture socialists. His popularity is a measure of America's advanced state of decay.

Writes George Reisman:

What has happened to General Motors is symbolic of what is happening to the United States. The United States is being destroyed economically and culturally by irrational theories and policies. The standard of living of its people is falling. Government officials are preparing to accelerate the fall by means of the imposition of insane policies designed to curtail energy consumption and roll back the production of wealth. The American people have elected a President who has expressed regret that the Supreme Court "never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth" because it "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution."

If a company as great and as economically powerful as General Motors once was can collapse into a shadow of its former self, so too can every other company in the United States. So too can the United States itself.

The Source.

Hans Bader has more on some of the specifics:

The federal government is giving another $30 billion in taxpayer money to General Motors to allow it to operate without having to cut excessive union wages. The Obama Administration is “gambling” on its ability to turn around the company under government control.

The Obama Administration has said it will now interfere not just with the “selection of the company’s board of directors,” but also in “fundamental corporate decisions,” and “major corporate events and transactions.” For example, Obama recently pressured GM to keep its headquarters in crime-ridden, economically-collapsing Detroit.

The $30 billion is excessive even if the Administration’s wildest hopes come true. Even if federal money were the only way to keep GM afloat (which it isn’t — GM could be made competitive simply by cutting its excessively high employee wages to lower levels that still exceed average American wages), and even if the bailout saved not only GM jobs but also the jobs of “related suppliers and dealers,” “the price of the U.S. government bailout comes to about $125,000 per employee, including those working for related suppliers and dealers,” according to the Washington Post.

If GM had rejected a federal bailout and takeover, and simply filed for bankruptcy in December, it would be recovering on its own right now, since it could have used bankruptcy proceedings to tear up the collective bargaining agreements with the United Auto Workers that saddle it with excessive wage and benefits and rigid work rules, and it would also be benefiting from the recent collapse of oil prices. It was record-high gas prices that forced consumers to buy smaller cars last year, battering GM’s finances, which were based around selling big cars. But gas prices have fallen from over $4 a gallon last year to $2.50 now. So the bailout is saving no jobs, it’s just allowing GM to keep union wages high at taxpayer expense, while keeping it from becoming competitive in the long run. (The recent drop in gas prices will also mask the effects of incompetent management of GM by the Obama Administration. On the other hand, the Administration’s CAFE and global warming regulations, which GM opposed before it was taken over by the Administration, will destroy tens of thousands of autoworker jobs).

The bailout is neither necessary nor likely to be successful in the long run. In its failed auto bailout in the 1970s, Britain did the same things that Obama is doing, like propping up high union wages and promoting the production of little “green” cars consumers may not want. Its bailout failed miserably, destroying the British auto industry’s chance of survival.

“‘Countries . . . protect ailing auto companies on the theory that they need to protect jobs,’ said Maryann N. Keller, an independent auto analyst. ‘But it’s not clear that protecting companies leads to the revival of those companies.’ As for the jobs, Keller said ‘a lot of that is bunk’ because Americans would buy the same number of cars no matter who the maker is. ‘Somebody would still make the parts,’ she said. ‘They would just be made for a different customer.’”

Why is the Obama Administration doing something so wasteful? Politics. The UAW is one of the biggest sources of money and manpower for the Democratic Party and Obama, and the UAW is now calling the shots. (The UAW spent millions electing Obama).

While taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars bailing out the Detroit automakers, the UAW has made little in the way of sacrifices, refusing to accept cuts in pay that could keep the automakers able to compete with lower-cost competitors. As even the liberal Washington Post lamented, “the union can boast that it has been promised no loss in ‘base hourly pay, no reduction in . . . health care, and no reduction in pensions,’” even though excessive union wages and benefits helped sink the company. Meanwhile, the government has ripped off pension funds and bondholders who loaned the car companies money.

The bailouts aren’t the only outrageous waste of taxpayer money taking place right now. Even bigger is the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, which is harming the economy, both by triggering foolish trade wars that have backfired and cost at least 40,000 jobs, and by driving up interest rates for businesses that need to borrow money to expand or create jobs. (The government is keeping down interest rates on its own debt by printing vast sums of money to buy its own bonds, in order to finance the exploding national debt, which will result in massively higher taxes).

The source.

Can You Detect Obama's Snoring?

Someone told me he saw Obama in the lecture hall, where Walter E. Williams is giving his below presentation.

According to the source, Obama was sleeping through the lecture, head buried in his folded arms.

I could not make out Obama in the clip.

Nor could I hear his snoring.

Please watch the clip carefully.

Can you detect Obama's snoring?

True enough: when Obama woke up, he became president of the United States, acting as if all his messianic vigour was gathered by taking a rest while Williams was making his points:

Government Intervention and Individual Freedom from FEE on Vimeo.

Comrade President Obama and His Bully's-Buddies-Philosophy

Espousing empathy politics (and imposing it on the legal system) is not only a sign of a primitive mindset utterly incapable of appreciating the indispensable preconditions of the public weal - in the case of Comrade President (Obama), it is part of a vicious routine to encourage and instrumentalise those seeking privileges (by virtue of political preponderance) and to turn this practice into a "moral" ideal systematically replacing the rule of law.

Related posts: "The Barbaric Fraud of 'Social Justice',"The Super Bowl and the Rule of Law," "Obama's Devastating Chrysler Politics," and "Taking Ourselves Hostage."

Clearly, a good judge must have "an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live." Judicial decision-making involves the application of abstract rules to concrete facts; it is impossible to render a proper judicial decision without understanding its practical effect on both the litigants and the wider community.

But what about compassion and empathy? Compassion is defined as a feeling of deep sympathy for those stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering; empathy is the ability to share in another's emotions, thoughts and feelings. Hence, a compassionate judge would tend to base his or her decisions on sympathy for the unfortunate; an empathetic judge on how the people directly affected by the decision would think and feel. What could be wrong with that?

Frederic Bastiat answered that question in his famous 1850 essay, "What is Seen and What is Not Seen." There the economist and member of the French parliament pointed out that law "produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them." Bastiat further noted that "[t]here is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."

This observation is just as true for judges as it is for economists. As important as compassion and empathy are, one can have these feelings only for people that exist and that one knows about -- that is, for those who are "seen."

One can have compassion for workers who lose their jobs when a plant closes. They can be seen. One cannot have compassion for unknown persons in other industries who do not receive job offers when a compassionate government subsidizes an unprofitable plant. The potential employees not hired are unseen.

One can empathize with innocent children born with birth defects. Such children and the adversity they face can be seen. One cannot empathize with as-yet-unborn children in rural communities who may not have access to pediatricians if a judicial decision based on compassion raises the cost of medical malpractice insurance. These children are unseen.

One can feel for unfortunate homeowners about to lose their homes through foreclosure. One cannot feel for unknown individuals who may not be able to afford a home in the future if the compassionate and empathetic protection of current homeowners increases the cost of a mortgage.

In general, one can feel compassion for and empathize with individual plaintiffs in a lawsuit who are facing hardship. They are visible. One cannot feel compassion for or empathize with impersonal corporate defendants, who, should they incur liability, will pass the costs on to consumers, reduce their output, or cut employment. Those who must pay more for products, or are unable to obtain needed goods or services, or cannot find a job are invisible.

The law consists of abstract rules because we know that, as human beings, judges are unable to foresee all of the long-term consequences of their decisions and may be unduly influenced by the immediate, visible effects of these decisions. The rules of law are designed in part to strike the proper balance between the interests of those who are seen and those who are not seen. The purpose of the rules is to enable judges to resist the emotionally engaging temptation to relieve the plight of those they can see and empathize with, even when doing so would be unfair to those they cannot see.

Calling on judges to be compassionate or empathetic is in effect to ask them to undo this balance and favor the seen over the unseen.

The entire article.

For those of our readers who can spare an hour over the weekend to watch a lecture given by Walter E-Williams on "How Much Can Discrimination Explain?," I recommend the below clip:

How much can discrimination explain? from FEE on Vimeo.

The Barbaric Fraud of "Social Justice"

Only human action can be "just" or "unjust." Namely, action that complies with or deviates from general rules of just conduct, equally applicable to all. Outcomes of human action conducted without violating these rules, are not unjust - no matter how disagreeable such outcomes may appear to this or that person or group.

The concept of "social justice" is a ruse employed to undermine a meaningful approach to justice and to translate politically contrived predominance into "privi-leges," a Latin concept that requires no translating, and to subvert "leges," the Latin term denoting genuine laws. 

Below find two incisive articles on the barbaric fraud of "social justice:"

Thomas Sowell writes about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States:

Nothing demonstrates the fatal dangers from judicial "empathy" more than Judge Sotomayor's decision in a 2008 case involving firemen who took an exam for promotion. After the racial mix of those who passed that test turned out to be predominantly white, with only a few blacks and Hispanics, the results were thrown out.

Make sure to read the short article in full.

The housing boom and bust is another gigantic fraud committed in the name of "social justice."

In fact, it is more accurate to state that fraud is not "committed in the name of 'social justice'" - rather, fraud is the purpose and essence of so-called "social justice."

From Walter E. Williams' brief review of Thomas Sowell's most recent book "The Housing Boom and Bust:"

Sowell provides numerous examples of government actions at both the federal and state levels that created the housing boom and bust and its devastating impact on domestic and foreign financial markets...

[...]

What can be said about the intelligence of the news media and the American people who buy into to congressionally created lies that our problems were caused by Wall Street greed and Bush administration deregulation? In the words of Barney Frank, "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation" and "mortgages made and sold in the unregulated sector led to the crisis." The fact of the matter is our financial sector is the most heavily regulated sector in our economy. In the banking and finance industries, regulatory spending between 1980 and 2007 almost tripled, rising from $725 million to $2.07 billion. I challenge anyone to come up with one thing banks can do that's not covered by a regulation.

For the Washington politicians to get away with spinning the financial crisis the way they have suggests that American people are either stupid or ignorant. I hope it's ignorance because "The Housing Boom and Bust" is the cure.

Single Parenting in the Wild that Government Throws Humans Back into

As a complementing contrast to Laura's wonderful posts on "Single Parenting in the Wild" and "The Perfect Rain," I offer the below link. However, not without noting that the libertarian is a gardener, a true ecologist, a lover of nature, someone, who understands that man is part of nature, never outside of it, thriving or perishing, like any plant or animal, depending on whether he finds a way to adjust - and thereby enrich - his needs, perspectives and narrow concerns to a grander order.

Today's governments (re)create a (regressive and in considerable measure surmounted) wilderness that overgrows a vista of civilisation which emerged spontaneously throughout human history, an attainment that can only be captured, preserved and benignly furthered by understanding and heeding the principles of liberty.

Man loves and supports government for its ability to humour and humiliate him by the ambivalent prospects of dependency.

We have not learned yet to cut the umbilical cord of the individual living and maturing under the conditions of a society that has outgrown the purview of a mastermind.

Read Hans Bader's Memorial Day piece.