A Snapshot of Men without Work

For decades we have been taught, nay ordered to believe that the unemployed were helpless victims, denied meaningful work by a cruel and heartless economic system.

Economists disagreed. Ludwig von Mises famously wrote that all unemployment in a free economy is voluntary. When we are out of work we do not take the first job that comes along. We wait, because we expect something better to come up. When we absolutely must get a job, we do.

When Booker T. Washington was traveling across the South after the Civil War on his way to get an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute he arrived in Richmond, Virginia late one night hungry and penniless.

[Next morning,] as soon as it was light... I noticed that I was near a large ship, and that this ship seemed to be unloading a cargo of pig iron. I went at once to the vessel and asked the captain to permit me to help unload the vessel in order to get money for food... I worked long enough to earn money for my breakfast, and it seems to me, as I remember it now, to have been about the best breakfast that I have ever eaten.

Unloading pig iron is probably one of the dirtiest, demeaning jobs you can imagine.

Today in America, according to Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, there are about 4 million men in the United States who have withdrawn from the workforce because they don’t want to work at the wages offered by the system—and frankly, they don’t need to.

Many of them are just taking out mortgages on their houses, or living off their wives. Or they are going on disability.

[T]he fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.



No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990.

The rolls of the federal disability program are doubling every decade.

The trouble with the disability program, like all the government programs to assist the unemployed, is that it encourages people to stay out of the workforce. Unfortunately, job skills deteriorate rapidly. The longer you stay out of work, the less employable you are.

According to The New York Times the men that have dropped out of the work force are likely to be:

• Less educated
  
• Living alone
  
• Released from prison
  

The Times invites us to observe the life of the Beggerows. He was laid off from Northwestern Wire and Steel in 2001 and since then has only worked occasionally as a community college instructor. His wife, Cathleen, is getting $12,000 a year from disability after suffering severe injuries in an auto accident. The marriage is the third one for both of them. Beggerow has an adult child from a former marriage; Cathleen has no children. Beggerow has no real plans to look for work.

This is the world that progressives and The New York Times have conjured into being in a century of political thinking and practical politics. And as the workforce participation of men goes down, the participation of women goes up.

Is this really the society that we want, with men dropping out into idleness and dependency? Shouldn’t we do something about it?

Because, as they say, when men go bad, released from work and responsibility, they go bad fast.

Chemerinsky Joins Plame Game

Politics ain’t beanbag, they say. When you go into politics, you had better expect rough treatment.

So when Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to discredit the Bush Administration over the assertion that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake in Chad, he can hardly have been surprised that the Bush Administration would try to discredit him.

But the media was shocked. The very idea! So we got a special prosecutor to determine whether there had been a violation of law in leaking the name of Joseph Wilson’s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Years later, the special prosecutor has decided not to prosecute any member of the Bush Administration for leaking Plame’s name.

The result: Valerie Plame is suing Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby in a civil-rights and civil conspiracy complaint.

Well, it’s a free country. And it is perfectly OK to hire the leading left-wing law professor in the land, Erwin Chemerinsky, to be your co-counsel and have him write a scathing article in Slate.

The top government officials who revealed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret operative for the Central Intelligence Agency egregiously abused their power and inflicted great harms on Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson.

The Man Bites Dog of this episode is the realization that the CIA, the agency that used to symbolize everything that was evil about the USA, is now, apparently, a part of the great liberal conspiracy.

Years ago, politically connected Democrats like Wilson and Plame would have run a mile to avoid having their names connected with the CIA. But now it appears that well-educated, well-connected folk actually work for, or get contract assignments from the Central Intelligence Agency. And when they want a spot of top-tier legal advice they go to Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s good to know that when an elite liberal needs a job she isn’t limited to the academy, local government, public law practice, social service administration, but now can also work for the intelligence community without ruining her bona fides.

The Bolton Kerfuffle Resumes

President Bush has nominated of John Bolton to be reappointed as UN Ambassador, and everyone is rehearsing their arguments of a year ago.

Bolton was appointed to the UN ambassadorship last August in the Congressional recess after Democrats filibustered his nomination. If he is not reappointed his recess appointment will expire at the end of the current session of Congress

Should Bolton be reappointed? As Colum Lynch makes clear, it all depends on what you think John Bolton should be doing at the UN. Democrats argue that Bolton is so combative that he is ineffective.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said, "Mr. Bolton's performance at the U.N. only confirms my conviction that he's the wrong person for this job."

And the UN diplomats agree.

"He sometimes makes it very difficult to build bridges because he is a very honest and blunt person," said South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo.

But Republicans like him, and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) has decided to support his nomination this time around.

Republicans feel that since most nations regard the UN as an institution for “constraining U.S. power,” that Bolton’s job is not to make the UN work, but to bring the work of the UN to a halt.

Democrats, who have more faith in the power of diplomacy, want someone to work with the other nations at the UN.

So, do we want to reform an institution that sees its job as constraining US power? Or do we want to keep it discredited and ineffective?

What the US would like out of the UN right now is to enforce Resolution 1559 demanding the disbanding of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Ain’t gonna happen, however nicey nicey the US UN Ambassador is to his fellow diplomats.

The only way that Hezbollah will get disarmed is if it is defeated in battle.

Because international relations are not about diplomacy but about power.

Children are Boring. Discuss

Half a century ago, in her Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir called woman “the victim of the species.” Actually, she included in her chapter on “The Data of Biology” the idea that all female mammals were thus disadvantaged. For instance:

The fish and the bird, which expel the egg from the body before the embryo develops, are less enslaved to their offspring than is the female mammal.

The name of the game, you see, is “autonomy.”

So when journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor exclaims in print “Sorry, but my children bore me to death!” you can see where the idea came from when
“she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children.”

The thrust of Beauvoir’s life and work is that the data of biology should not get in the way of more important things, like autonomy, creative work, writing painting, sexuality, and all that sort of thing. In fact the central evil of the existentialism that she and J-P Sartre gave the world is “bad faith.”

That doesn’t mean lying, by the way. Writes Austin Cline:

According to Sartre, bad faith occurs when someone tries to rationalize our existence or actions through religion, science, or some other belief system which imposes meaning or coherence on human existence.

Translated, that means that it is wrong to use knowledge to explain the world, because almost all our knowledge of the world comes from other people.

The point of life is to be an autonomous creative, self-inventing individual, not a slavish follower of other peoples’ ideas. “In the absence of any fixed human nature or absolute, external standards, we must all become responsible for whatever choices we make.”

Obvious, the data of biology have a way of severely restricting this kind of freedom. In fact, we could say that the data of biology, which have exploded in the last half-century, tend to raise more and more questions about “the absence of any fixed human nature.” When it comes to nature vs. nurture, nature has been putting points on the board consistently for decades.

You can understand, again, why the feminists had to destroy Harvard President Larry Summers. If women are indeed different from men, and are indeed programmed by a fixed human nature to be child bearers and child nurturers, then the dream of perfect autonomy and equality and an end to underrepresentation in the professions and competitive occupations is a fantasy.

But Helen Kirwan-Taylor has a point. Children are boring, or rather, they are work, and they will suck everything out of you and then ask for more. It is much more fun to work with interesting intelligent adults in fashion journalism as she seems to do. Rich women since the dawn of time have opted to pay other people to look after their children.

It is just the bourgeoisie that has made a cult out of child-raising. The question is: Why? Why has the middle class made such a big thing out of childhood and parenting?

Washington State Supreme Court Upholds DOMA

With the 5-4 decision of the Washington State Supreme Court upholding the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, it looks like the gay marriage issue will move to an accommodation of gay partnerships and not the redefinition of marriage that the high court in Massachusetts mandated back in 2003.

The court’s majority decision (here and here) was split between three justices (Barbara A. Madsen, writing for Chief Justice Gerry L. Alexander and Charles W. Johnson) who said, hey, it is up to the legislature to redefine marriage and two more conservative justices (James M. Johnson and Richard B. Sanders) who argued a more forceful defense of heterosexual marriage, arguing that there is “a compelling governmental interest in preserving the institution of marriage.” On the other hand,

"I would hold that there is no rational basis for denying same-sex couples the right to marry," wrote Justice Mary E. Fairhurst, who was joined by Justices Tom Chambers, Susan Owens and Bobbe J. Bridge [in dissent].

Since six states, Connecticut, Georgia, Nebraska, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee, recently upheld traditional marriage, it appears that a consensus is developing to require gay activists to go through the legislature for relief rather than the courts. That’s probably a good idea because there are, in fact, a host of issues around marriage, including government benefits, safety, fertility, adoption, that really should not be decided under duress after an activist court decision.

Three of the Washington State justices are up for reelection in the fall. They are Justices Alexander (voting in the majority) and Justices Chambers and Owens (dissenting).

Is Religion vs. Science a Red Herring?

While we battle in the public square about whether religious belief can coexist with faith in scientific method, some scientists just go ahead and believe in God anyway.
In The New York Times Cornelia Dean looks at the books of three scientists who came to faith. For instance,

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician.

Of course, Dean also gives us the latest from the religion-and-science-don’t-mix crowd, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens.

And, as Dean writes, these authors advance their ideas with something like “religious fervor.”

Of course, ever since Kant, we have been in the position where we can’t prove the existence, or non-existence of God. In fact, we can’t even prove the existence of reality. Anyway, they are two different problems.

The problem of reality is the problem of the “is.” How can we know reality, and how reliable is our knowledge? Since Kant we have gradually come to grasp that all we can have is a view of reality that is good until updated.

The problem of God is the problem of the “ought.” What is our purpose; what should we do; what is the meaning of the universe?

To understand the problem of the “ought” we should go to the man who was both a Catholic priest and a top twentieth century physicist: Georges Lemaître. He was the guy who invented the Big Bang Theory of Creation. It is worth reading what John Farrell writes about him.

Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel Laureate Paul Michael Dirac had a chance to discuss the expanding universe with Lemaître. Dirac was an atheist, and yet later he recalled, "When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion."

Now this is a very disturbing idea, and it cuts across the grain of the usual science vs. religion controversy represented by the books discussed by Cornelia Dean.

What is Lemaître saying? I would argue that he is saying that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, what it means to be a human. Science and creation are really secondary issues. The big issue is: how should I live my life? That applies both at the immanent level of how to treat the other people in your life, and at the transcendent level of what’s it all about?

In other words, forget arguing about the “is.” Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is a blind alley. The big questions are about the “ought.” And whether God exists or not, each one of us acts and lives our life based upon some faith, conscious or unconscious, in the meaning and the purpose of life.

Very often we act against our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. But that is another story.

Humiliation After Humiliation

Are we in a war with the Islamists? Andrew C. McCarthy is worried that we don’t really take the Islamists seriously. But they are very serious about us. There is no doubt about what Sheikh Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, thinks. It’s war, war to the death.

“We consider [the United States] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources.... This American administration is our enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’”

No doubt there are thousands of Levantine antiquities in American museums that ought, in the fullness of time, to be returned to their lands of origin. But plundering oil and resources. Please! When paying $75 per barrel?

The real beef, of course, is the humiliation, the way it all went wrong and Islam became not the glorious expanding fist of God but a collapsed cultural backwater sustained only by the heroin of oil revenues.

The refusal of the United States to take the Islamists seriously, and to brand them as an enemy—the complaint of McCarthy—is not necessarily negligence: it is yet another humiliation for the Arabs of the Middle East.

As the Israelis uncover the surprising extent of the military infrastructure in southern Lebanon we can understand the meaning of all those reports from Iran about workers not getting paid for months at a time. Now we know where the payroll money went. It was sent to Lebanon to build up Hezbollah. And now a lot of it is being blown to blazes. Another humiliation.

If we review all the brave revolutions of the last century that promised death to America and death to capitalism we can observe a common problem. After all the fighting words there came the problem of delivering. And in every case the revolutionaries never had the power to carry out their boasts. The Bolsheviks wasted the fruitful land of Russia. The Nazis didn’t have the economic and military power to conquer Russia. Mao nearly starved China to death trying to become a world power by selling the seed corn of China’s peasants.

You have to wonder. How close is Iran to economic ruin? All these foreign adventures don’t come cheap.

It is relatively easy to find soft spots in the world and entice teenage thugs into the streets. But you have to create a power base if you really want to strut in the world.

The record of the last century is that if you want to lead a powerful nation then you need to create a powerful, capitalist economy, featuring a free people. It is a lesson that the Chinese seem to have learned in the last generation.

It seems to be the one thing that the Islamists cannot bring themselves to do. It is the final humiliation that the Islamists cannot even begin to face.