Government That Just Doesn't Care

In the last century the people of the European nations have conducted a great experiment. Upon the advice of experts they demolished the “little platoons” between the individual and government that provided support and aid when times were hard. Instead they bought into the idea that government programs could look after the poor and the unfortunate much better than private charity and mutual aid.

The driving force behind this great social experiment was an elite that assured the people that “we care.” In particular, we “care about people like you.”

There is one problem with this idea. Governments don’t care. People who work for government and who have lifetime employment tenure don’t care about you or anything else except their paycheck and the number of days till retirement.

The result of 100 years of caring is a government that just doesn’t care. Libby Purves in the London Times writes about how this works in detail.

Good Morning. Here is the news. Owing to a bank error, several thousand people have had their accounts emptied and credit barred, in some cases losing a job or university place. The bank refused to apologise, pointing out that it put the money back within three weeks — well, in 90 per cent of cases. It added that it is better to be on the safe side. In a separate incident, 2,700 blameless householders returned home to find bailiffs removing their furniture, owing to an IT error at a [finance] company that assumed the stuff belonged to them. The company expresses no regret, saying that errors must be kept “in context” because sometimes two houses look similar. It added that “customer satisfaction” with its activities is “at an all-time high”.

Imagine that! Imagine the outrage! But government does that all the time.

Here’s a horror story from Robert L. Woodson, Sr’s The Triumphs of Joseph. A woman in Philadelphia had her pregnant teenaged daughter give up her baby for adoption. Years later this woman had become commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Welfare. She found out that her grandson had just been “aged out” of the foster care system. In eighteen years the public welfare system had failed to arrange for an adoption for this child. The government just didn’t care. They allowed the child to bang around in the foster care system for eighteen years.

In the current sour political mood the American people are right to feel that, if the Republicans don’t have the competence to keep gas prices under control, what is the point of them?

But if the welfare state sponsored and defended by the Democratic Party just doesn’t care about kids, then what is the point of Democrats?

Irate Homeowners are Attacking Garbage Drivers Over Recycling

How long do you think it takes you each week to sort the garbage, toseparate the trash from the recyclables? An hour? Half an hour? Let’s say fifteen minutes.

So what is the cost to the nation, the compulsory unpaid labor, the corvée as the French called it before the Revolution, of separating out the garbage?

There’s a danger, you see. There’s a danger that the cost of separating the trash from the recyclables might be more than the savings.

That is what is going on in Britain. Tim Worstall ran the numbers, and this what he found.

By 2020 it will cost about £3.2bn a year to dispose of solid waste. Er, but that doesn’t include the 15 minutes per household in waste sepration. If you figure paying people an minimum wage, that means an additional cost of £1.6 billion.

Is anyone really suggesting that recycling can recapture the £1.6 billion cost in unpaid corvée labor by the citizenry?

There’s another cost, of course. The garbage collectors are getting attacked by irate citizens.

Binmen say recycling schemes have led to a surge in attacks by householders who find their rubbish uncollected when they fail to follow strict rules.

(Here in left-coast Seattle we are getting ready to fine people for improper recycling practices.)

Unions for refuse collectors are threatening to strike over what they say is a rising tide of violence that has seen one in five of Britain's 40,000 binmen injured in physical attacks at work and more than two thirds verbally abused.

Did you read that? One in five have suffered physical attacks at work and two thirds verbally abused.

Is recycling worth the life of a single garbage truck driver?

Education is Failing in Britain, Too

Back in the mid 1980s the experts decided, in “A Nation at Risk,” that the American school system was failing its children.

In Britain the school system is failing the children too.

Back in the 1960s the British replaced their ancient system of grammar schools with “comprehensives.” The idea was to eliminate the social evil of streaming, where intelligent students went to government grammar schools in their teens and the lesser lights went to “secondary modern” schools.

Well, thanks very much, says a graduate of the first crop that spent their teen years in comprehensives. Writes Robert Crampton in the London Times, about the kids who went to his school in Hull:

We arrived bright-eyed and keen, and we left, five or seven years later, well entertained, but not especially well educated. Yeah, we had a laugh, but we didn’t learn much. Enough to get by. Your status depended on your looks, your athleticism and your willingness to be disruptive. Academic ability was an irrelevance at best, a hindrance at worst.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

In Britain the great leaders of the nation since World War II on the left almost all went to a grammar school. Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers went to grammar schools.

But no longer. In 1965 the Labour government legislated a policy to push away the ladder on which many of their members had climbed from poverty to eminence. They replaced almost all the grammar schools with comprehensives. What was the result?

The people I was at school with have done OK. That’s what they always say about bright kids in comps, isn’t it? Oh, they’ll be OK. But we haven’t done as well as we could have done if we hadn’t been — there’s no polite way of putting this — shafted by Labour ideology for the past 40 years.

That’s about the long and the short of it. Government schools, coasting to a stop on more and more money, are shafting the children of Britain and the United States. In particular they are denying the bright children of the poor in the inner city of breaking free of the culture of helplessness and victimization.

How much longer will we allow this injustice to continue?

It's Easy for George McGovern to Praise Wal-Mart and Bash Unions

Good old liberal George McGovern can easily afford to praise Wal-Mart. He can praise if for its low prices. He san say that if you take the $27 million that Wal-Mart’s CEO took home and gave it to the hourly workers, that would only add up to $20.

The trouble is that “More” became “Too Much.” Look at parts marker Delphi. Delphi is in trouble, he writes.

One big reason is that the company's unionized workers earn $64 an hour in wages and benefits — more than twice what some of its competitors pay.

Of course, it’s easy for him to talk. He’s a Democrat-emeritus. He’s not running for anything. But still. Somebody has to say this sort of thing, and it might as well be George McGovern, the founder of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. But here’s the money graf.

Universal healthcare provided by the federal government is one way to supplement income. It is also a way of relieving hard-pressed businesses of one of their highest cost burdens.

You can see where this is going. Bail out the auto companies with national health insurance. But let us get back to the high ground.

“Liberals,” he writes, “must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality.”

We can all agree on that. And how about starting with the unjust and inegalitarian fact that liberal Democrat union members working for state and local governments earn about 40-50 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector?

Where’s the justice in that?

Opus Dei: "It is Gruesome"

Should Christians emulate the Muslims? Should they tear the place up and burn a few multiplexes when Hollywood produces a blasphemous movie like The Da Vinci Code?

Mary Wakefield went to see the movie and found herself cringing after about fifteen minutes.

Five minutes into the film, I began to squint with embarrassment, and after 15 I slid down in my seat so as not to catch a Christian eye. The flick itself is daft... but the attack on Christianity is breathtaking.

After the movie she exchanged a couple of words with Jack Valero, PR man for Opus Dei, “for once without his trademark grin.”

"It is gruesome to see my brothers and sisters represented in this awful way, it bears no relation to reality," he said.

Hollywood is, after all, just a bunch of artists. They get their anti-religious bigotry because it is in the air. Anti-religious bigotry is in the air because believers in our modern secular religions higher up the food chain, the MSM and the universities, fill the public square with their secular culture and their secular religion. Hollywood types pick it up and turn it into movies.

How can you blame them? They experience their anti-religious art as an enlightened and creative challenge to a backward superstition. They want to enlighten the world and convert it to their secular religion of government-run compassion and sensitivity and individual creativity, and they are completely right to understand Christianity as a stake poised above their beautiful prostrate bodies, about to be driven into their enlightened secular hearts.

(Yes, of course history is witness to countless religious wars conducted in the name of God. But what do you think the great wars of the twentieth century were all about? They were wars provoked by militant secular religions.)

The culture war is a religious war. It is a war between a God-based religion and a secular religion. It probably won’t come to an end until one side wins.

Nobody can know who will come out on top. But there is this to think about. The secular world view may be helpful and beneficial to an educated, creative elite. It is, after all, their religion. But the record shows that it is utter ruin to the folk trying to make it in the city. That is why the welfare state has made the inner city into a war zone of joblessness, helplessness, and hopelessness—and brutal violence. The people who have just arrived in the city need not so much material as spiritual aid.

That is something that our secular elite just cannot understand.

Put a Stake Through Freud's Heart

What should we do about Freud to celebrate his 150th birthday? Dig him up and “put a stake through his heart,” writes Spengler in Asia Times.

No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body.

That’s why there’s an epidemic of eating disorders and “self-harming,” the practice of cutting yourself with razor blades.

But why? “Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido.” This seems to be harmless enough on the face of it. But today

Women enter adolescence with the expectation that they will be used but not loved. Men no longer need to feign affection to receive sexual favors; they merely need ask. It is no surprise that young women have come to despise their bodies, some to the point of destroying them.

So the old system whereby women gave sex to receive love is broken. And not just that.

All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper's nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father.

On top of that, the mother gave sexual pleasure to the infant through the breast, the father repressed the son’s interest in his mother, and the daughter bemoaned the lack of a penis. Ever seem a family like that? No? Really.

The indesdructible fact that we moderns have rebeled against is that marriage is society’s clever little dodge to keep men attached to the mother of their children way after the collapse of their physical beauty.

The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty.

We’ve thrown all that away, and none more completely and more emphatically than secular, liberal women. And then we wonder why girls are cutting themselves up.

Read the whole thing.

Opus Dei Finds Coded Message in Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown must be laughing all the way to the bank. His Da Vinci Code has got everyone talking, and that is what you need to sell books and movies.

To all those out there outraged by the eruption of the Arian heresy, Fr. John Wauck (of Opus Dei!) says to cool it. Writer Dan Brown obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, so neither should we. On the contrary, a coded look at DVC shows that Brown is having a grand old time with his book, even laughing at himself as a hack writer.

He sits his hero Robert Langdon down to a power lunch with his editor Faukman (an anagram of Brown’s own editor Kaufman) who is worried about whether Langdon’s book about the divinity of Christ is real scholarship. The editor,

worried by the manuscript’s daring conjectures about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and the Holy Grail, wants to make sure that Langdon has scholarly support for his theory, so he reminds him: “You’re a Harvard historian, for God’s sake, not a pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck.”

Ahem. No professional writer of thrillers could doubt what business he was in. And it does not take a genius to figure out that secular educated women, the major buyers of fiction, would could easily warm to a novel about the sacred feminine that interprets 2,000 years of history as a male patriarchal conspiracy. So Fr. Wauck advises us all to lighten up:

Brown is clearly a good sport who knows perfectly well what he’s up to, and he can’t resist tipping his hand to let us in on the joke. So hats off to an author who’s not ashamed of coming across as a “pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck” — and, as we now know, finding it with a vengeance — literally.

But the big question is really, will the movie sell tickets? The schlockmeister made his quick buck, and good luck to him. But can Hollywood make its buck too?