The Anguish of the Reactionary President

Back in the old days, rulers ruled.  They ruled over everything, from church, to military, to trade.



But then came the modern mechanical era.  God no longer kept the planets in their orbits, and an "invisible hand" seemed to guide merchants and consumers without the constant intervention of a wise ruler.



What is a ruler to do?  He worries about "inequality."  Not because he's caring and compassionate, or even because he's a brilliant technocrat, but because if you want to meddle with the workings of the "invisible hand" you have to start out by saying that the "invisible hand" isn't doing the job.  It's making some people too rich and leaving some people behind as too poor.



Thus Marx.  Thus the British Fabians.  Thus the American Progressives.  Thus the New Deal.  And thus our modern "progressives," university liberals, and President Obama.



It's not that the president is a socialist, but that socialism is just one phase in the serial attempts of the modern educated elite to justify its rule over the "commanding heights" of the economy, the culture, and politics.



In President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, we see the box that he and his educated elite friends are in. They want to rule.  They want new programs.  They want new regulations.  They want to be patrons, and they want us to be adoring and grateful clients.



But the science is in.  The "invisible hand" really works.  And it really works better if the government isn't endlessly manipulating the economy to get out of its latest jam with money printing, debt defaults, and endless subsidies.



And now the educated elite has run out of money.  But the band plays on.



In his speech the president has to walk a fine line.  He must invoke the great narrative of American exceptionalism, quoting Abraham Lincoln.  But he must twist it to fit his ruling-class agenda.  Thus he invokes "fairness" to justify increased taxes on the rich.  Here's the data from the IRS on this.  The rich pay a huge chunk of federal taxes, the rest of the top 50 percent pay almost all the rest and the bottom 50 percent pay almost nothing.  What the bottom 50 percent do pay goes towards payroll taxes, i.e., Social Security and Medicare.



I've been arguing with a left-wing friend recently about "inequality."  He has a chart that shows that median income went up with average income in the 1950s and 1960s.  But since 1980 the median income has lagged the average income, so the rich have been getting more of it.



Folks like Walter Russell Mead and Megan McArdle tell why this happened.  The post-World War II economy was corporatist.  The benefits were parceled out by an inside deal between the Big Units: big government, big unions, and big corporations.  But this crony capitalism ran out of money in the 1970s, as the rest of the world recovered from World War II and began to compete.  But then breathtaking new developments in technology and commerce poured gigantic fortunes into the laps of the entrepreneurs that took the opportunities and made them into consumer products, men like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Then there was Sam Walton who built Wal-Mart up from nothing to become the world's biggest retailer.  There's nothing fancy about Wal-Mart, just hard work to buy low and sell low, and provide an emergency operations center so Wal-Mart can flood assistance into disaster areas.



But what about the salvific progressive political leader?  Where does he fit in all this?  He really doesn't.  We really don't need him.  That is why the educated elite keeps coming up with new end-the-world scenarios.  That's what political leaders and religious leaders have always done to persuade us to follow them.



And that's the point.  Obama ran for office as a salvific leader under whose transformative leadership the "rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."  But really, global warming is a crock, and we've been working successfully on the environment for half a century, since about the time that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.



The great Montesquieu imagined the modern government with its separated powers: legislative, executive and judicial.  This was not an argument against tyrants, but an argument about the inevitable tyranny of a unified government.



Now we need to expand Montesquieu's ideas into a Greater Separation of Powers, between the political, the economic and moral-cultural sectors.  Obviously the scope and power of salvific political leaders will be much reduced.



President Obama and his ruling class will kick and scream all the way to their eventual irrelevance. Oh well.  I can handle that if you can.

Duck and Cover, Mr. President

I suppose that President Obama knows what he is doing with his class warfare strategy for reelection.  His State of the Union speech was complete with Warren Buffett's secretary, the one that pays more, percentage-wise, in tax that her boss.

But I'd like to warn you, Mr. President, that there is a ballistic missile en route that may well change the terms of trade in the current political argument.  The missile is Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.  It shows that it's not a question of the One Percent versus the 99 Percent, as our Occupy friends suggest.  It is not a question of millionaires and billionaires not paying enough in taxes. It is more a question of the top 20 percent of the upper-middle class doing fine in America while the bottom 30 percent does not.

Last time Charles Murray had a blockbuster it was Losing Ground in the 1980s. That book was an analysis of the effect of the welfare state and its welfare programs.  It led to the reform of welfare in the 1990s.

The point that Charles Murray tries to make, over and over again, is that "inequality" is not a problem of millionaires and billionaires making too much money.  It is a problem of the government spending too much money on the welfare state.

It sounds very caring and compassionate for the government to spend money on the poor.  If only it were true.  Instead government spending leads to the breakup of families and the idleness of men.

Government spending doesn't lead to idleness in the upper-middle class because, oddly enough, the government designed by the upper-middle class helps the upper-middle class do what it wants to do anyway: go to school, get a degree, get a job, start a family.  But the welfare state has the opposite effect on anyone below the upper-middle class.  It encourages women to choose the government over marriage, and it encourages men to abandon the mothers of their children.  Unmarried men tend to work less than married men--a lot less.  Also, of course, a bums-on-seats education system may work very well for the sons and daughters of the middle class, but not so well for the sons and daughters of the working class, where people learn more by doing that by listening to teachers.

I just have this feeling, Mr. President, that when we look back on 2012, we will remember not your 2012 State of the Union Speech, but the publication day of Coming Apart: January 31, 2012.

Obama is not a Friend of Catholics

You can understand that the liberal Catholics would want to find a way to support Barack Obama.  After all, he believes in a lot of the same stuff they do: social justice, and solidarity.  So it's not surprising that they would support Obama in 2008.



But now they are finding out that Obama isn't returning the compliment.  William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal:

Now, suddenly, we have headlines about the president's "war on the Catholic Church." Mostly they stem from a Health and Human Services mandate that forces every employer to provide employees with health coverage that not only covers birth control and sterilization, but makes them free. Predictably, the move has drawn fire from the Catholic bishops.



Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover. In a post for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winter minces few words. Under the headline "J'ACCUSE," he rightly takes the president to the woodshed for the politics of the decision, for the substance, and for how "shamefully" it treats "those Catholics who went out on a limb" for him.

The problem is that under ObamaCare Catholic charities will have to provide health insurance with birth control and sterilization.  No exemption.  No opt out.  Which rather signals that Obama and his crew aren't interested in helping their liberal friends in the Catholic Church.



McGurn says that this is a shame.

Conservatives may enjoy the problems this creates for Mr. Obama this election year. Still, for those who care about issues such as life and marriage and religious liberty that so roil our body politic, we ought to wish Catholic progressives well in their intra-liberal fight. For we shall never arrive at the consensus we hope for if we allow our politics to be divided between a party of faith and a party of animosity to faith.

 Of course, this rather misunderstands the problem.  Our politics is not divided "between a party of faith and a party of animosity to faith."  Our politics is divided between a party of transcendental faith and a party of secular faith.  On this view the liberal Catholics are fools to be supporting the party of secular faith.  Unless, of course, their real faith is the secular faith of big government and the subordination of civil society to the political sector.  Either way, liberals don't like any civil society organizations that are not subordinate to the liberal establishment, and they work, every day, to marginalize them and subordinate them to political power.



It's my view that the election this year is going to be a lot bigger than we think.  Because our mainstream media is so liberal, the discomfort with Barack Obama is still inchoate.  As the Republicans begin to campaign more vigorously against the president and get more bandwidth, I think we will see the needle start to move against the president.  When it does, our liberal friends will be shocked.  They will go into denial. They will not be able to deal with it.

Educrats Chase Teenaged Sailor Round World

How about that 16-year-old Laura Dekker from Holland, who just finished a round-the-world solo cruise in her 38 foot ketch Guppy?

How about those child-welfare authorities that were hounding her and her parents?

Miss Dekker fled abroad in 2010 when Dutch child welfare authorities took legal action to try to stop her making the voyage. She later won a 10-month court battle, promising judges she would buy a bigger boat with advanced navigation equipment, take courses in first aid and coping with sleep deprivation, and enrol in a special correspondence school.

Godfrey Daniels, I hear you say.  Mother of Pearl.  Here we have millions of kids in the global underclass getting totally screwed by the family breakdown of the welfare state and the lousy schools, and the bureaucrats still have time to hound a rich-bitch kid and her parents over a teenage adventure.

Of course, there's nothing new here.   When Laura was 12 she made a solo trip from Holland to England, just like Arthur Ransome's Swallows in We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea.  Only in the Brit novel, it's Brit kids sailing to Holland instead of the other way around.  But really, the Dutch version is more realistic.  The Dutch are famous sailors.  Only they were sailing to the Spice Islands with the Dutch East India Company before the Brits got cracking with their own East India Company and the empire in "Injah."  The Brits learned about everything they know from the Dutch.

You can understand those child-welfare authorities.  Why, the very idea that some kid could escape the mandatory 12-year sentence to confinement in a government-approved child custodial facility!  Not to be endured!  What could be more important for a 15-year-old that sitting bored to tears in her government child custodial facility?

On the contrary.  Here we have a young woman, in her mid-teens, that has sailed around the world solo!  What matters whether she's done her math or her social studies or her sex education.  The education she just get in life is worth about five years of confinement in the government's child custodial facility.  This idea that government officials would have anything helpful to say to a girl and her parents about sailing, survival, navigation--and "sleep deprivation."  It is madness!

Yeah, you are saying.  What about "sleep deprivation" training for Italian cruise-ship captains?

In fact, scrub the "sleep deprivation" training.  What is needed, for survival in high adventure, is the training to act effectively when you are tired, panicked, and scared out of your tree in the middle of the night in the southern ocean.  I'm sure the bureaucrats have tons of experience with that.

But there's a bigger issue. (There always is.)  What in the Sam Hill are we doing allowing the government to bully us around with the raising of our children?  When are we going to rise up and tell the politicians and the bureaucrats to get lost and come back when they have their deficits, their debt, and their utterly failed programs under control?

What About That Mean?

Every virtue, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition.  Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."

Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better?  Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes.  It is "an intermediate between excess and defect."   Thus the great Aristotelian notion of the mean.

But the mean is not a rigid thing, half way between the extremes of excess and defect.  If "ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds."  The mean is an individual thing for each person.

Thus, the mean for Milo the excellent wrestler in the eating department would not the the same as for "the beginner in athletic exercises".  Obviously, Milo would need to eat a lot more than you or me. He's a wrestler in training. Therefore the appropriate mean for him is a lot more than for the beginner.  Today, we would say that it is one thing for a Tour de France competitor to consume 5,000 calories per day, but quite another thing for a couch potato.

The point is that "the master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate," the mean between the extremes. But the mean for each virtue is not the same for everyone; the mean is the intermediate that leads to virtue in each of us.  It is a "mean relative to us" according to a rational principle as a "man of practical wisdom" would determine.

Vice, of course, is different. There is no mean there for Aristotle. It is just bad. There is no such thing as "adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way". Of course that says nothing about adultery with a slave.

With the virtue of honor, according to Aristotle, the mean is "proper pride"; the excess being "empty vanity" and the defect "undue humility."  Aristotle understands honor here as aristocratic pride.  But in Honor: A History, the modern James Bowman defines honor rather differently.  It is the reputation that a hoplite infantryman would have for staying in line, or a GI for supporting the buddies in his unit.  It has nothing to do with aristocratic pride, but is rather the reputation for courage under fire.

Indeed aristocratic pride, so ubiquitous in The Iliad, is a corruption of honor.  It is the insistence that an aristocrat be treated as though he were courageous and unflinching in combat, whether or not he is.

You could call aristocratic honor a vice.

The Green "Fight Against Big Oil"

When actor Robert Redford writes that the Keystone XL decision is an historic victory against Big Oil.  He writes:

President Obama has just rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a project that promised riches for the oil giants and an environmental disaster for the rest of us.



His decision represents a victory of historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline path and all across America who have waged an uphill, years-long fight against one of the most nightmarish fossil fuel projects of our time.

Oh please, gag me with a spoon.  What about the 600,000 miles of pipeline in the US, mostly not as carefully designed as the Keystone XL?  And don't you realize, Mr. Redford, that the president is almost certainly planning to allow the pipeline to proceed, once he has got your money and your vote for opposing it?



As Joel Kotkin points out, the Keystone XL decision forced the president to side with "urbanista" America against the rest of America.



There is a word for this sort of issue.  It is called a "wedge" issue.  The idea is to unite your side while splitting the other chaps.  That's why the House Republicans put language in the two-month payroll tax cut that forced the president to make a decision on Keystone XL.  Considering that the Democrats had already planned to give up on the white working class this year, it's no surprise that they went with the bigger chunk of their base: the urbanista greens rather than the suburbanista working class.



I've been saying all along: Bring it on.  I'm a naturally conflict-averse chap, but I recognize that the great issues facing America have to be fought over.  The reason is that, in normal times, the "urbanista" agenda of the liberal educated class gets no pushback.  Mainstream media types run around boosting lefty issues, from wind and solar to "diversity" to "gay marriage," and attack anyone that disagrees with them and bigots or deniers, according to taste.



But a great election is a time when conservatives can contest in these ideological wars.  Thus the perfect storm of government debt, Great Recession, climate change,  ObamaCare, and energy prices create a crisis that will force the American people to confront the issues and make a choice.  In normal times, when there is not a crisis, it is very difficult to push back against the liberal agenda.



In normal times, liberals present their statist agenda as caring and compassion, pretending that they are conducting a national conversation in accordance with Habermas's discourse ethic.  In fact, of course, they are always playing political hardball and finding ways to silence their critics and turn the "discourse" into domination.  But in normal times they manage to persuade moderates that liberals are on the side of the angels.



In crisis times, like right now, conservatives get a chance to fight back against the liberal power plays.  We can argue that the "stimulus" spending and regulatory blizzard hurts ordinary Americans.  We can show that ObamaCare is a lie that will ration health care to America's grandmas.  And during an election conservatives can use paid media to balance the free media that supports liberal ideas.



What is really needed, of course, is for conservatives to make a Long March through the institutions so that the normal times discourse is balanced between liberal agenda and conservative agenda.  That is a huge challenge because it means, for a start, neutralizing the government education complex.  Then there is the liberal culture complex, the liberal foundation complex, and the liberal mainstream media.



At any rate, there's a good chance that an historic victory can be won in 2012 if President Obama is defeated and the US Senate goes Republican.  The mad statist government of 2009-2010 will have educated a whole new generation of Americans to mistrust government.



Meanwhile the liberal "victory" in the fight against Big Oil should remind Americans who is in favor of reducing the cost of filling their gas tanks.

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

Stalin famously inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had.  Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven”.

Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13. OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously discrete elements as "the parts of the body."

Never mind about the vegetative aspect of the irrational soul, he says, that operates even in nurslings and embryos, not to mention "full-grown creatures."  This irrational element seems to operate in a world of its own and is uninfluenced by reason.

However, there is another irrational element that seems partially connected with the rational element, and indeed can be influenced by it.  This element is an "appetitive" and "desiring element."  It might move a man "aright and towards the best objects".  But there seems to be another principle that "fights and resists" the rational principle.  Thus the appetitive element shares in the rational element only "in so far as it listens to and obeys it".

Now here is where things get tricky.  The appetitive irrational element seems to be subdivided into two parts, the one that does the right thing on its own, and the other capable of obeying the the rational principle as articulated, e.g., by one's father.

But what about the rational principle?  What about that?  Well, that seems to be divided into two sub-elements too.  For "some of the virtues are intellectual and other moral".  The man of good character we praise for being "good-tempered or temperate"; the wise man for "his state of mind".

So there we are.  For the Aristotelian soul we have a rational element and an irrational element.  We divide the rational element into the intellectual and moral, and the irrational into vegetative and appetitive.  But the appetitive we subdivide into a rational part, insofar as it is persuaded by or obeys the rational principle, and the irrational part, which just does what it does, in opposition to the rational principle.

How many divisions has the soul?  Counting only "leaf" elements, we have five.  Counting all nodes from the complete soul on down, we have a total of nine.  Who knows how many divisions there will be in heaven?

Remember, the point of all this is to understand that "activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue" which is happiness or eudaimonia.