The LLC Connection

We have written several times herein about the political spectrum of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Indeed, we have gone so far as to say that libertarians are really just liberals who happen to be fiscal conservatives. This is an idea which was, it seemed, cemented at a recent time when we read that some some libertarians have come to like the term 'liberaltarians'(we must thank a friend of a friend who pointed this out). But sometimes other things come along which give us pause.

In a speech given at Hillsdale College here in Michigan and reprinted in their neat little pamphlet called Imprimis (the particular article can be found here: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp) William McGurn, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, makes the case that libertarians and conservatives are actually much closer. Why? Due to the libertarian emphasis on economics and economic justice.

It is a fascinating speech and we will not attempt to repeat it in detail. But the gist is that what conservatives and those who share the ideal of economic freedom have in common is the belief that it is freedom which drives the machine which improves the human condition. This is because freedom allows greater innovations and deeper thought in decision making than any type of state controls might allow. Freedom invented the wheel, the cam, and the steam engine. Freedom eradicated disease. Freedom improved agriculture, advanced science, and opened minds. And why does freedom work?

Because it offers a positive trust in the individual.

This is not to say that what individuals may or may not do is boundless. But it is to say that, where there is no moral affront involved, freedom works. To be sure, and Mr. McGurn points this out, there are differences between libertarians and conservatives, and the differences matter. Still, it is at least arguable that the right wing and the libertarian are closer than the latter may be to the liberal because the liberal ultimately believes in government control of people and things despite how he may protest otherwise. That's why they go to the bureaucrats and the courts when the don't get their way. They believe in force, not freedom.

We are closer, perhaps, to libertarians than liberals are because we share, even if from different starting points, the same essential belief in individual human beings. The full bodied libertarian and the blue blooded conservative are so much concerned about human relations that it makes differences more acute, precisely because we are seeking to do and support what's right. Liberals believe in a vague, amorphous humanity, defined ultimately by their whim. Conservatives and libertarians believe in real, flesh and blood people.

Mr. McGurn suggests that we are sides of a coin. It is an idea which deserves more discussion.

Science and Religion

No good Christian would have any issue with good science. Indeed Christianity and science go rather well together, as better thinkers than myself have said in better ways than I for years. Yet there is a breed of science which will have no quarter with any ideals save its own. It is the realm of pop science, and its followers are legion.

Pop science is most noticeable in the area of global warming, but exists in many other forms. Environmentalists who see the Earth as better off without human beings and those who insist on evolution as the only acceptable theory on the origin of people and things are two other examples. We should of course be concerned with meteorological cycles and I will admit that we have not always used our resources wisely; further, we must allow that evolution may well be fact. All of this is, to one degree or another, open to reasoned debate. But what is truly galling about pop science is how it so readily dismisses religious belief when it is so nearly a religion itself.

You don’t think so? If not, why the presumption (for that is all it is; who out there has observed a world without US in order to rationally make such a judgment?) the earth would be better without humans? Science is the area of fact and observation; value judgments are beyond its scope. Likewise the assumption that short term warming is bad, or that all the matter in the Universe was once compacted into an object the size of a basketball which just happened to be around (while the possibility of God just being around is deemed fantasy). What do these beliefs sound like? What do they appear based upon?

The answer is obvious: faith. The pop culture, of which pop science is a part, believes what it believes simply on the faith that it's true. They believe because it is what their conclusions lead them to think. Which is not to say that, on a case by case basis, there may be no reason for their faith. It purely illustrates that their ideas emanate from what the religious readily admit about theirs: knowledge is ultimately built upon axioms, starting points which are simply accepted as true. We believe in God because without an uncreated Creator nothing makes sense. They believe in the big bang basketball because, well, matter had to start from somewhere.

So you see, much of today’s science and religion share an approach to their creeds. It is not unfair to say, in a very real sense, that science is religion.

Let’s see if the evolutionists can handle the rebound.

Recycling Simply Isn't That Important

Today is the day that we take our recyclables to the recycling center. As I've mentioned before I'm not particularly a fan of recycling. That does not, however, mean I am diametrically opposed to it.

Unless I miss my guess, I think the conservative position on recycling is akin to the conservative position on almost everything else: if it's necessary, truly useful, advances the safety of human beings or, quite frankly, if it pays without violating any moral norms, we are open to it. This list by no means exhausts the questions we might have about recycling or any other issue. It merely sets the table for discussion.

We are not, no matter what liberals may say about us, obstinately opposed to change. We only ask that the change is genuinely worthwhile or serves a greater purpose than what we were doing before. There's no point being fools about it: if recycling is what we have to do to keep planet Earth habitable for us, then we should do it. I am not convinced that it saves the planet all that much wear and tear. I am merely stating that if it can be reliably demonstrated that without recycling we, or our heirs, will die out due to our lack of proper stewardship, then we ought to recycle heavily.

The trouble is that I don't see that being the case, and the burden of proof must lie on the shoulders of those who think it is rather than on those of us don't. It is fair to ask: why must I change my habits because you think it good? Give me something concrete and we'll talk. Otherwise, I am well within my rights to wonder whether anything projected over a large scale is actually predictable. Telling me that without recycling we'll be piled with trash or run over with landfills within a couple hundred years is nonsense on its own face. Scare tactics merely scare. How about a little rationality, a little perspective? If you're right, the sanity of your cause will come through.

Why shouldn't I ask whether the process will pay me? It strikes me that we give away paper, plastic, glass jars and so on, solely for someone else to benefit from it. If it pays, why can't I get paid for it? The answer, essentially, is that these products don't really pay anyone unless given to them. They must be had in large quantities or they aren't worth handling; the true value of those products are virtually nil. Yet I can and have gotten cold hard cash out of my scrap iron, aluminum, and copper. Why? Because they hold a decent value even after their initial use. Even now I am willing to concede that if there is a greater necessity, something beyond monetary value which I ought to consider, then I should consider it. If we will die out by about 2025, or especially by next Tuesday, without recycling, then let's do it and forget about who gets paid what. Otherwise, it's just scare tactics again.

Is recycling truly useful? Certainly for a few, but for the general society? You're asking that a lot of people go to a significant effort to turn in garbage; again, where is the empirical proof or practical reason for it? I'm not all that interested in how recyclables are used outside of that context. So there are playgrounds where shredded old tires can soften a kid's fall: would there be no other ways of doing this, ways perhaps better, with new materials? I don't know the answer. I'm only asking. But I am within my rights to expect a good answer.

As it stands now, my attitude is live and let live. If you want to recycle, then recycle. Only don't force your preferences upon me without just cause. Your say so, no matter how heartfelt, is not good enough.

The President seeks Re-election

President Barack Obama has announced that he will seek re-election for the office of President of the United States. No surprise there, of course, and he has a couple big advantages over his Republican fellows which with he may make hay. He will face no primary opposition, a situation few incumbents face anyway, and incumbency itself means so very much. It's pretty easy to have your face in the news every day when you're already in the Oval Office.

That does not mean that his road will not be bumpy. His party and his political creed are relatively unpopular these days. Further, the President will need the twenty months or so which he's got in order to shore up a base which has itself soured on him. Elected largely on an anti-war platform (despite any pledge to ramp up the actions in Afghanistan) he has actually spread war. Libya is not going to go away soon, and that's something he cannot blame on his GOP counterparts. The gyrations he will be forced into in defending that course shall indeed be fascinating. It's always different when it's your army rather than the other guy's eh?

He said in announcing his candidacy that change takes time. This certainly true, especially when considering we have an American constitutional system which basically forces slow alterations to our structures and policies and an American people who resist drastic shifts to their thoughts and acts. Say what you will, Mr. Obama has definitely shown a willingness to push his views by any means necessary. If that's the definition of a leader, he qualifies.

Yet a true leader is more than that. A true leader knows the necessary from the optional, the constitutional from the illegal, the right from the wrong. The 2010 elections hold something of a lesson in how the American voters view such things. That in itself will likely be that biggest hurdle the President faces. Can he make them believe that he really knows what's best, what's right, for all of us?

Afghan deaths are not Terry Jones' Fault

Three United Nations workers and four Nepalese guards were killed in Afghanistan recently during the route of a protest aimed at revenge for a Florida pastor's having burned copies of the Quran. Revenge, mind you, being the very operative term here. Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the pastor. "The demonstration was meant to protest against the insane and totally despicable gesture by one person who burned the holy Quran," he said.

Granting that this is true, and there is little reason to doubt that in the direct and immediate sense it is, it still seems as though a further, and worse, quite frankly, 'insane and totally despicable gesture' has occurred. That gesture is precisely what was perpetrated by the protesters in Afghanistan.

We are told, almost incessantly, that Islam is the 'religion of peace'. Yet the actions of those purporting to practice the Muslim faith appear to say exactly the opposite: mock us and we will kill you. With any provocation, we will not turn the other cheek, but, rather, hunt you down and extract vengeance for your crimes. Even if those we choose to exact our revenge upon are not particularly close to the source.

What the Reverend Terry Jones did is indeed reprehensible and indefensible. There is no case in its favor. Yet in the same manner, what he did cannot ever be seen as a defense of what that Afghan crowd did either. Blaming him for the deaths of those UN workers and guards, even tangentally, lets the mob off the hook. They murdered seven innocents. That is not and never will be fully on the soul of Terry Jones. It will be primarily on the hands of the murderers themselves, and nothing less.

To say it any other way is to ignore the real cause of this most heinous act. The real sin lay with those who committed willful murder. The blood of the victims is not on the hands of a peripheral American minister. It stains only the religion it claims to believe in and live.

The FDA's New Food Regulations

In what can only be seen as another shallow attempt by the government to do something which feels good rather than what is substantial, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed that restaurants include calorie counts on their menus by 2012. After all, you already get that information, courtesy of the FDA, on prepackaged foods you prepare or eat at home. Why not have the restaurants do it too?

Oh, let's see: maybe because your health is your job? Could it be that what you eat is your responsibility? Yes, yes, we know the obvious and vacuous reply to that: because those bad old food companies won't offer the information without being forced. Heaven forbid that the American people force it themselves by demanding it on their own, if that's so important to them.

But, you must understand, the government can't have citizens going around looking out for themselves now, can it? Because, of course, they might begin to see something which Washington, and even Lansing and Detroit and Wayne County (albeit to lesser degrees) don't want you to see. You might begin to realize that you're a big boy, you're a big girl, and you can make your own choices in these and other personal areas. You may begin to think that, horror of horrors, you simply do not need government to the depth and degree which government says we need it.

Yet the longer we accept such pandering, the less chance of our becoming truly independent human beings. What really can be said is good for us when we are not able to see it for ourselves?

It's Not All About What Folks Will Buy

I am a free market enthusiast through and through, but I do believe that the capitalists (particularly the more libertarian ones) do need to keep one thing in mind: something is not moral merely because there is a market for it.

Nothing wrong with making money, of course. As a rule. Yet there are ways of making money which are morally abhorrent. The whole sex trade, to be sure, or products which are seriously and significantly offensive. No one ought to see Calvin urinating on a Ford symbol, for example. That people will buy this sort of thing is not the point; nor is the point that human freedom may call for grudging toleration of such things. The ultimate point must be that the act or product must be moral in and of itself in order to be moral in the marketplace.

I am not saying that the government should become involved in regulating what are admittedly often only juvenile paraphernalia. Still, it would nice if the markets would be a bit more self regulating and eschew such garbage.

To rephrase an old saw, I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other economic systems. It is a sobering thought.