Positive Liberty

I certainly have to agree with Kuznicki’s point that when the state gets into the business of policing our morals, it hands that power to mortal human beings who are themselves fallible, and who cannot resist exploiting their power at the expense of those to whom they dictate the standards of “goodness.” Ultimate power corrupts, especially when it is power over our moral choices. That was, after all, always one of the usual arguments of libertarians (before so many became swallowed up in moral relativism). That’s what John Milton, my favorite Christian libertarian, meant when he said

If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under Tyrants. Hence is it that Tyrants are not oft offended, nor stand much in doubt of bad men, as being all naturally servile; but in whom vertue and true worth most is eminent, them they feare in earnest, as by right thir Maisters, against them lies all thir hatred and suspicion. Consequentlie neither doe bad men hate Tyrants, but have been alwayes readiest with the falsifi’d names of Loyalty, and Obedience, to colour over thir base compliances.

(Emphasis added).

There’s a reason why the collectivist, paternalistic societies turn out to have the most morally corrupt and self-indulgent leadership.

But it’s somehow doubly tragic how so many conservatives think that policing our moral behavior will somehow avert tyranny by “teaching” us moral behavior! They don’t seem to realize that they have become the tyrants—like the guy in that Twilight Zone episode who goes back in time trying to undo a calamity, but discovers that he’s actually the causal agent of it. It is true that a people who will not govern themselves by reason and virtue are doomed ultimately to lose their freedom. But they are doomed to lose it precisely to those who would erect the paternalistic state—to the conservatives who promise to relieve us from our own moral responsibility. These conservatives, to again quote Milton,

are not skilfull considerers of human things, who imagin to remove sin by removing the matter of sin…. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewell left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousnesse. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis’d in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so…. Suppose we could expell sin by this means; look how much we thus expell of sin, so much we expell of vertue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike…. It would be better done to learn that the law must needs be frivolous which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good, and to evill. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferr’d before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evill-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more then the restraint of ten vitious.

I just finished watching (at Diana Hsieh’s suggestion) Something the Lord Made, and I want to second her recommendation. It’s a marvelous and powerful movie; the story of a black carpenter named Vivien Thomas who not only managed to become a pioneering medical researcher, but helped pioneer the field of heart surgery, all in the face of segregation and his own lack of formal schooling. Alan Rickman isn’t at his best doing a southern accent, but that’s really the only flaw in this outstanding movie.

Also, bit of a personal touch: the very first scene in the movie shows Thomas working on the floor of a green Victorian house in Nashville; that house is actually the Hale House at Heritage Square in Los Angeles. I and my parents lived in that house from 1981 to 1986. (The interior shots are not the interior of that house; they were filmed on a sound stage, apparently.) It’s pleasant to have a sort of personal connection to this excellent film.

A common charge against libertarians is that in our heart of hearts, we’re nothing more than libertines: Libertarians, the argument runs, want a drastic reduction in state power — but that’s only part of the story. What we also want, we are told, is a drastic reduction in moral suasion, social stricture, and even morality itself. The state is only a first step, say many conservatives, and what libertarians really want is moral degradation. This notion has contributed powerfully to mistrust between the two camps (notoriously through the writings of Russell Kirk).

The trouble with all of this, to my mind, is that the state enforcement of private moral conduct almost inevitably produces an even greater moral evil than the conduct we aim to repress. Far from leading to a more moral society, the use of force to police the private conduct of adults achieves just the opposite; in the name of opposing libertinism, the prohibitionists run squarely into something far worse. What follows is a horrifying example.

Continue Reading »

Commenter John left the following response to my post on Michael Novak’s response to me:

[Rowe:] They wanted our nation to be religious, and probably preferred the Christian religion dominate, but would have had no problem with the flourishing of exotic non-Judeo-Christian religions

I assume you are using “they” to refer to the “key founders”. If so this may be correct, but I doubt the validity of the “key founders” formulation. The Revoultion was fought and the Article’s and Constitution ratified by a much broader base of people than four or five people whom you select as key founders.

The State Constitutions adapted by many States explicitly singled out Christianity for protection, and made it a requirement for office in some cases.

Maryland Constitution; “That, as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to him; all persons, professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty,”

Delaware: “Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat, or entering upon the execution of his office, shall take the following oath, or affirmation, if conscientiously scrupulous of taking an oath, to wit: ” I, A B. do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”

Pennsylvania: “And each member, before he takes his seat, shall make and subscribe the following declaration, viz: “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration. ”

I’ll stop there rather than fill this comment section. You can certainly pick out certain individuals from the era who felt differently, but it seems pretty clear that the mass of Americans at the time were quite religious, and that they were religious in an explicitly Christian sense, not in considering Christianity one good religion among many.

As I noted in my reply, I agree there was a difference between what the “key Founders” thought and the masses. However, I dispute that this formulation is not valid. Continue Reading »

His last anti-Mormon column provoked a slew of angry reactions from Mormon readers on Townhall. This one is even harsher.

Mormonism has almost nothing in common with Christianity. Mormonism is polytheistic, it denies original sin, it teaches that both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit have physical bodies, that Jesus was conceived through sexual intercourse between God the Father and Mary, that Jesus was the spirit-brother of Lucifer, that Jesus was a polygamist, that Jesus traveled to the Americas during His three days in the tomb, and that every Mormon male will one day become a God ruling over his own planet, accompanied by multiple wives, just as the God of this Earth, named Elohim – who was once a man – has done here. Continue Reading »

This is one of my favorite Bad Company tunes and wish it would get more airplay, as opposed to the half dozen other ones that are played to death. The following is not an official video, but one of those “YouTube” creations which features the recorded album version.

And this is a live version from Bad Company in 2002 which shows that Paul Rodgers has still got it.

It’s yet another question that brought a Googler to Positive Liberty. He ended up here, at a June 2006 post by Rowe disussing the mental health profession and homosexuality. Hopefully it’s reassuring to our newfound reader, since the post shows how mental health providers formerly, but erroneously, believed that masturbation causes insanity. They’ve since changed their minds.

So much for mental illness, but does masturbation cause simple anxiety? I’m guessing that at least for the questioner, the answer is yes. Why else would he be searching? Perhaps he’s only considering masturbation, and he’s wondering if doing it will make him more anxious than he already is.

Now for something that might really cause anxiety: The software logs your IP address, so I know where you live, you pervert.

I want to thank Michael Novak for devoting an entire post to my comments at the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog. To make sure that I am not misunderstood, I need to clarify some of my assertions. Novak begins:

In his intelligent replies to Ms. Allen and me, Mr. Jonathan Rowe raises many good points. But his vision of Christianity matches up neither with the Anglican nor the evangelical tradition. Rowe holds that “the primary ‘end’ of religion is morality itself,” and that the three distinctive tenets “which distinguish Christianity from all the other world religions” are “things like the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement.”

But the Evangelical tradition rejects the understanding of Christianity as mere morality. More important are repentance, and a personal relationship with Jesus as Lord. Meanwhile, most of the American Founding Fathers would have recited the Nicene Creed with some regularity at Anglican services. The tenets of that creed include many more items than Mr. Rowe’s three. Such abstract terms as “Trinity” and “Atonement” do not appear in it.

First, I argued that the key Founders (not me personally) believed “the primary ‘end’ of religion is morality itself,…” Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, in no uncertain terms, made it clear they believed this. And while there are ambiguities in exactly what Washington and Madison believed (requiring some detective work, putting the pieces of the puzzle together), I believe Madison and Washington were likewise agreed. Continue Reading »

I’ve lately been put in charge of the law clerks at the Pacific Legal Foundation, and this includes interviewing and hiring applicants. This is the first time I’ve looked at resumes, and of course a clerkship at a public interest law foundation isn’t going to be the same as a judicial clerkship or a clerkship at a private firm, but I have some thoughts that might be helpful to law students who are looking for such positions in the future.

Continue Reading »

Via Radley Balko, this movie review from the New York Times has me fascinated. Disturbed, but fascinated:

“Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

Mercifully, you don’t see this death on camera, though if you sit close enough to the screen, you will see a few fairly brief images of one sexual event, accompanied by graphic sounds. It isn’t pretty, which is why the images appear only on a small television monitor. Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it’s doubtful they want to look at a stallion’s erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom, at least in public. Certainly such an image would work directly counter to the self-conscious poeticism of Mr. Devor’s film, to its carefully confected narrative of misunderstood barnyard love and baleful testimonial. It is, after all, difficult to sing of the bodies electric and equine amid a chorus of “yucks.”

…Not that he labels man-horse sex deviant or comic or icky or anything much at all. Instead of taking on the serious moral and political objections to bestiality, including those in Leviticus (thou shalt so not) and by animal-rights proponents who reject the instrumental use of animals, he offers haters shrieking on the radio and other opportunists. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.

That’s too bad. After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

This last paragraph points to inconsistencies all over the place in the way that people relate to animals. Some animals are food, and these may be done with almost however we please. Others are virtually adopted into our families: Pets are not to be eaten or ever treated with cruelty; we note their life passages with joy and grief almost as we would for human family members. Yet almost no one finds it acceptable to have sex with animals, even if these sex acts are not nearly as cruel as what we do to our food animals. This taboo holds whether or not the animal has been symbolically adopted into the family; here, the pet/non-pet distinction seems not to matter.

Conservatives can accept all of these strictures as the distilled wisdom of the ages, and it does not bother them if no pattern can be found: Being a conservative is not about finding logical patterns of thought, but about accepting the wisdom of the past with faith and humility, making changes only when dire necessities intervene, and then only gradually and as little as possible.

I’m not a conservative, and I’m wondering what general ethical principles, if any, govern our currently accepted relations to animals. We don’t systematically avoid animal pain; industrial farming clearly demonstrates otherwise. We likewise don’t use animals indiscriminately for human purposes; the bestiality taboo disproves this. Some animals are more anthropomorphized than others; some are more “food” than others. Some are simply disgusting — neither imagined as food nor as diminutive echoes of ourselves. To all of this there seems no reason at all — that, I think, is why a film like Zoo is so fascinating.

Okay, since I’m sure it’s on all of your minds, even if you don’t want to ask: No, I don’t think about animals sexually. I feel a strong personal revulsion against the idea. I also mistrust personal revulsion as a legitimate source of law or policy, and I can’t even convince myself that animal cruelty laws — let alone anti-bestiality laws — are coherent expressions of any principle at all, not when I can eat meat without feeling the least bit of guilt. Yet just as revulsion is not a proper source of law, lack of revulsion is not a reason for the law to stand aside.

So what do we do?

Here’s some applause for Glen Whitman’s response to Dinesh D’Souza’s most recent idiotic drivel.

What an awesome testament to the power of the human mind–on so many levels. The device that allows Prof. Hawking to communicate; the wheelchair that gives him movement; the technological and medical advances that have kept him alive much longer than the usual victim of ALS (half of whom die within three years of diagnosis); the airplane that can take him into the sky and give him the feeling of weightlessness…. And what more fitting than to allow a man who has overcome so much and accomplished so much? Very inspiring indeed.

Via BoingBoing, here is the complete list of “Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers.” There are 41, and all of them are fairly simple. The Wiccans fought for years to get their pentacle onto the list.

Meanwhile, here is the portfolio of Woodlawn Memorials, Inc. Woodlawn offers fully customized etchings, many of which are in color. There are palm trees, shamrocks, roses, the Virgin Mary, and by my count no fewer than three… lighthouses. If you don’t see something you like, ask them: As the site helpfully points out, Woodlawn’s products “can be customized with any image of your choice.”

I’m betting they’ve done quite a few pentacles. Less government, more individuality.

Brayton (at his other blog) discusses the ACLU of Indiana’s lawsuit against license plates reading “In God We Trust.”

Now I am well aware that people who object to “In God We Trust” are thought to be pedants. I am well aware that religious people find the phrase inoffensive. I know that these same religious people insist that if it’s inoffensive for them, then it must be inoffensive for all others, too. I know, finally, that many who insist strongly on the separation of church and state find other battles more pressing.

Yet I wonder… How much state-sanctioned godliness should we tolerate? If this phrase is innocuous, then where are the limits?

Continue Reading »

So there’s this toll collector in New Jersey named Jason Glassey. And one day, when he gets off duty, he’s feeling a little stressed. So he gets in his car, still wearing his uniform, and drives along the Turnpike until he gets stuck in traffic behind a van. Like many folks, he scoots over to the right lane and passes the van. And like any good, sensible public employee, as he’s passing the van, he reaches over for his paintball gun and shoots at the van that has caused the backup.

Naturally, such absolutely inappropriate behavior would get him fired. Shooting at cars, even with a paintball gun, is not what any rational person would consider appropriate conduct, even if it’s off shift, for a person who is a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike!

But if you thought that, you would have forgotten about public employee unions, which insisted that Mr. Glassey should keep his job. An arbitrator agreed, and the employer appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that reinstating him after such conduct would contravene public policy. As in, well, duh! Nevertheless, on Monday, the state Supreme Court upheld the reinstatement order. A decision to reinstate a fired public employee, the Court said, could only be voided if it violated “public policy…embodied in legislative enactments, administrative regulations, or legal precedents, rather than…amorphous considerations of the common weal.” New Jersey Turnpike Authority v. Local 196, 2007 WL 1174206, *5 (N.J. 2007). To quote Tim Allen, “urrh?!”

“To be sure, the State has a public policy against aggressive driving,” said the Court. “Although Glassey’s conduct violated that public policy, his reinstatement to his position as a Parkway toll collector is not contrary to any embodiment of public policy…. [W]e find that the award reinstating Glassey to his position as a toll collector did not implicate any statutory, regulatory, or precedential embodiment of public policy.” Id. at *9.

Even more mind-blowing are some of the precedents the Court relied on:

[D]eference to an arbitrator’s award reinstating an employee to his former position following admittedly serious misconduct is consistent with arbitration jurisprudence across the nation. See, e.g., Boston Med. Ctr., supra, 260 F.3d 16 (ordering reinstatement of nurse charged with substandard conduct following infant’s death); Westvaco Corp., supra, 171 F.3d 971 (upholding award reinstating employee who sexually harassed coworker); Saint Mary Home, Inc. v. Serv. Employees Int’l Union, Dist. 1199, 116 F.3d 41 (2d Cir.1997) (upholding reinstatement of employee who assaulted co-worker and was found in possession of less than ounce of marijuana); United Food & Commercial Workers Int’l Union, Local 588 v. Foster Poultry Farms, 74 F.3d 169 (9th Cir.1995) (ordering reinstatement of employees who failed drug test); Chrysler Motors Corp. v. Int’l Union, Allied Indus. Workers of Am., 959 F.2d 685 (7th Cir.) (reinstating employee who sexually harassed colleague), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 908, 113 S.Ct. 304, 121 L. Ed.2d 227 (1992); Local 453, Int’l Union of Elec., Radio & Mach. Workers, supra, 314 F.2d 25 (upholding reinstatement of employee convicted of gambling in workplace). Specifically, deference to a reinstatement award comports with the comparable result in United States Postal Service v. National Ass’n of Letter Carriers, 839 F.2d 146 (3d Cir.1988). There, a postal employee confessed to firing “gun shots at his [p]ostmaster’s empty parked car, damaging the windshield, dashboard and front seat.” Id. at 147. And there, as here, the employee was discharged for his off-duty conduct and the arbitrator reinstated the grievant. Ibid. Although the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declined to address the breadth of the public policy exception, id. at 150, Chief Judge Gibbons, writing for the court, remanded the matter for entry of an order enforcing the arbitrator’s award, id. at 150-51.

Id. at *10.

My flabber is gasted. I suppose it should have been long ago.

Geoffrey Stone, a very prominent legal scholar with the University of Chicago, has written what really should be an embarrassing bit of pseudo-scholarship about this week’s Supreme Court ruling on partial birth abortion. That decision may be right or wrong and I’m more than willing to entertain arguments on both sides, but arguments like this are the kind of tripe that we would expect from a hack radio talk show host, not a serious legal scholar:

What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling, to ignore.

Continue Reading »

This story should surprise no one who knows a little about economics:

It’s a perk of federal employment: a free monthly subsidy that pays for commutes on public transportation. But scores of workers have been taking the government for a ride, selling their benefits on the Internet and pocketing millions in cash each year.

The program, which covers 300,000 federal employees nationwide, has been abused by workers across a variety of agencies, the Government Accountability Office will report to Congress today. Workers in the Washington region alone have defrauded the government of at least $17 million a year, with the actual figure probably several million dollars higher, according to the GAO.

Employees have taken the benefit vouchers, known locally as Metrocheks, and turned them into a kind of black-market currency, selling them — often at a discount off the face value — to buyers who can use them to ride Metro, regional buses or commuter railroads.

Evidently the federal employees in this story don’t value the transit subsidies as much as they would value a cash raise. In even a relatively free economy, this is hardly surprising: Cash buys stuff, including perhaps rides on the Metro. Metrocheks only buy one thing, and the recipients don’t necessarily value that thing. Instead, they value other things. And surprise — a market emerges.

So the next time some wild-eyed libertarian tells you that subsidies often don’t go to the people who want or need them, now you have a handy illustration of the phenomenon. We’re not crazy after all. As market economists have argued for years, an in-kind subsidy is the worst sort of all, because it presumes that the subsidizer can, through the magic of the gift in kind, transform the recipient’s preferences. This is only very rarely the case. Usually, and almost always with repeated but unwanted gifts, the recipients set up a market to obtain the resources they would rather have.

Look closely at that $17 million figure. Those are your dollars being transferred — inefficiently. It’s an attempt on the part of subsidy recipients to recoup the deadweight loss of the system, by re-allocating resources to those who actually desire them. Some kinds of government waste are obvious, and we remember them easily. Even decades after the fact, everyone knows about the $600 toilet seat. Other kinds of government waste are insidious, and the value of all of these gray- or black-market Metrochek trades gives us some idea of where the most serious kinds of government waste can be found. It’s not in the $600 toilet seat. It’s in the systematic misallocation of huge amounts of money, all in the name of doing good.

Indeed, that $17 million represents only the amount of deadweight loss that employees have been able to recoup and that government accountants have been able to document — in the Washington, DC area. There remains the recouped but undocumented deadweight loss, which I suspect is enormous, as informal networks of friends probably distribute the cards far more than they are sold on the Internet. And there remains the rest of the country, which the GAO didn’t even consider.

And finally there’s the deadweight loss that isn’t recouped at all. This last — the Metrocheks that sit unused in the national underwear drawer — are really just a subsidy to the ailing public transit systems, which have generally never been solvent in the first place. The money is paid to the systems in advance, in a handy lump sum. But the service is never provided (is it any wonder why public transit authorities love the Metrochek system?). It’s a check written to a service provider whose service is not sufficiently wanted in the first place. It’s a reward for inefficiency, because Metro gets to pocket the difference. And if we prosecute individuals for selling their Metrochek disbursements, we will be prosecuting them… for making government more efficient.

Michael Novak has replied to Brooke Allen’s latest on the Founders and Religion. He writes:

Ms. Allen tells us that she had grown up being taught (even at the University of Virginia, “Mr. Jefferson’s University”) that the United States was founded as “a Christian nation.” Much to her surprise, she later encountered many passages in biographies about the Founders that testified to their trust in reason, not revelation, and to their roots in “the Enlightenment,” not in Judaism or Christianity. Her passion now is to tell the world of her discovery. America, she writes, is an Enlightenment nation, not a Christian nation. The “moral minority,” she holds, saw this from the beginning.

My own experience, interestingly enough, was almost precisely the opposite. I grew up as a Roman Catholic — that is, neither mainline Protestant nor evangelical Protestant. When I began to read more widely in the records of the founding I was quite surprised with how saturated with Christian concepts the American “philosophy” is. My Catholic teachers (several key ones educated in Europe) tended to dismiss the American founding as excessively individualistic, materialistic, Masonic, and deist. They did not consider it worthy of holding a significant place in serious Christian reflection.

I have to agree with Novak here. I think the academy heavily weighs on the side of the secular left’s view of history. However, millions of folks in religious conservative circles have their own sources outside of the academy which challenge the academy’s narrative. Continue Reading »

I was deeply moved this morning by the following lines from the blog Inside Iraq:

Good, the road is open today.

It has been closed for nearly a month, since the terrific bombing of the police station.

It saves a lot of time going to work – only for the ladies, of course. Men from other areas would think twice before going down that road.

We are stopped. We wait for fifteen minutes. We move forward slowly; bumper to bumper till we reach the towering blast walls.

Checkpoint personnel check my car documents and let me pass.

Slowly, slowly I enter a world almost apart from its surroundings – Al-Mehdiya / Al-Dora.

It is said to be totally devoid of Shiites now. Is that true??

Are all these people I see walking on the pavements, Sunni??

A strange feeling comes over me – I should feel some sort of kinship.

Let me have a closer look.

A woman in an Aba, a simple woman walking the streets wearing a flip-flop.

Another in elegant suit and hijab.

Two young men, college students, in white and gray.

One very dark skinned man carrying a briefcase.

Two young ladies dressed in very modern – but suitably modest jeans and top, one very fair and the other a refreshingly beautiful brunette.

Many, many men and women going about their business, stopping taxis, waving for public mini buses, on their way to work, school or market.

I try to force a reaction from myself, that these are my kin, Sunnis, like myself.

I strive to find a sign; some mark to distinguish them; to endear them to me.

But there is none.

Ethnic fighting is as a rule never due to historical ethnic hatreds. If it were, then the Germans and the Poles would still be at war; the English and the French would detest one another; and whole swaths of the American South would lie in ruins.

Westerners tend to put a lot of faith in the explanatory power of historical ethic hatreds because, patronizingly, we tend to belive that Others are far more in thrall to their pasts than we are to ours. We believe all too readily that they are incapable of treating with respect or civility those people whom their great-grandparents treated with contempt.

I don’t want to deny the power of one generation over another, but I do think that that power is smaller than we assume. I think what’s really happening in Iraq looks something like this:

1. An evil, murderous thug reigned over a country with brutality and terror. His chief weapon? A state omnipotent in principle. He dispensed favors and money to all those of his clan, hometown, and ethnic/religious group.

2. A well-meaning outside country evicted the murderous thug. In itself this can only be a good thing. (But things aren’t ever “in themselves.” They’re always situated “in” a whole bunch of other things!)

3. The well-meaning outside country promised that the government will, from this point forward, be in the hands of the people as a whole. No effort was made to limit the powers of government; on the contrary, it was always insisted that the Iraqis may do whatever they like, so long as it’s ratified by a democratic vote. This includes establishing a state religion, nationalizing the oil industry, and mandating economic equality, complete with all necessary measures to achieve it. Conservatives, this is what you are fighting for. When you condemn the patriotism — the Americanism — of the skeptics, you are damning us because we are skeptical of this. And you are proclaiming yourselves more patriotic — because you support this. Power must go to the people, the government will be the people’s instrument, and it will know no limits.

4. Immediately, the question becomes: Who are the people? All Iraqis begin reconsidering their neighbors, not as individuals, but as components of a potentially hostile voting bloc, one that if placed in power will surely be able to harm them. This galls. From the standpoint of the individual, the only check on governmental power, the only guarantee that I will not be a target, is to take control of the political process and so arrange things that the members of my own faction will benefit, rather than any others. The various subcultural divisions of a society, relatively harmless under limited government, become under an unlimited government the fault lines of a civil war.

5. Ironically, this guarantees that the unlimited government cannot be established at all. Yet its substitute, widespread ethnic and religious killing, is hardly better.

Would that we had insisted upon a limited government for Iraq, not one in which democracy can do anything. No, I don’t think the country would instantly have turned into Iowa. The process of social disintegration laid out above may not arise from the letter of constitutional law — but rather from what the people believe that the government can or should do. Of course, it does say something that the current Iraqi constitution is the product of that society’s deliberations in this regard. Could we have averted this? I don’t know. It hardly seems worth speculating about anymore.

Some elitists scoff at the notion that any serious poetry can be found in rock lyrics. Well, some, arguably most rock lyrics are bad. But given the quantity of rock music, even if say 5% is good, there are a lot of “diamonds” in the “dunghill,” as Jefferson would put it.

That doesn’t mean that the average listener appreciates the message (or even knows the right lyrics!).

Especially with songs about America, American listeners are probably likely to assume an “up with America” message when a typical rock artist who may be cut from bohemian cloth, is likely not to impart that message. Most notably, Ronald Reagan misunderstood Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” which is not an “up with America” song. Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World folks may wrongly assume has pro-America lyrics but does not. Continue Reading »