SOTU: Our Mistakes

"On Tuesday, January 28 at 9pm ET, President Obama will deliver his fifth State of the Union Address."

I put that in quotes because it comes from the White House's official web site and even though it may seem way too generic a statement for someone to cry plagiarism, I know the history of the last two Democratic administrations too well not to be cautious.  After all the Clinton White House couldn't just change travel agencies.  They had to try and smear the one they were changing from.  And they couldn't just dismiss other employees whose services were no longer needed.  They had to make a major cases of misconduct against them even if they had to invent supporting facts.  And this current White House is not beyond acts of inexplicable pettiness either.

When the president very unwisely said, "you didn't build that" in front of TV cameras his White House claimed he was being quoted out of context.  That he wasn't belittling the work and sacrifices of private citizens but was just saying government provided the infrastructure and security needed for private efforts to flourish.  This was a petty and distorting response to a legitimate criticism, since even government and ultimately all the worthwhile things government can and does do is the product of private efforts. 

i.e. Yes, private American citizen, you did build that, and any president who can read a thoroughly prepared speech that says you didn't is highly unlikely to be a good one.  We the people of the United States of America did build our government for good or for bad.  And when our government stops being our servant and starts to become our "source of leadership" a.k.a master, we should reign it back in.

What To Look For At The State Of The Union

The press, both left and right like to make stories out of events and thus like to emphasize the personal.  The problem with this here is that we as a nation have a problem to address and President Obama's legacy isn't it.  Look for the talking heads to waste time wondering if Obama can restore the trust of the American people and avoid becoming a lame duck.

But keep in mind what really matters is what the American people do, not what the president does.  Whether Obama is big enough of a man to admit his mistakes tonight is nowhere near as important as whether Americans in general start to admit their mistakes.  Here are a few listed in case anyone is wondering what they are.

(1) We have looked for leadership in the wrong places, mainly in politicians.
(2) We have allowed politicians to be used as scapegoats for mistakes the we ourselves caused to happen through our over-reliance on government.
(3) We blame corruption of the political system for its failures as though we are innocent victims who are forced to vote for the wrong people.* 
(4) Many of us are already thinking if we can just elect the right person president in 2016 all will be well again.
(5) We think too quickly of government whenever we want a problem solved.

Those are just four of many but they all have one common theme.  We expect too much of government with no historical precedent to justify our expectations and then refuse to accept responsibility for setting it up to fail.

That's what I'll be looking for tonight; Any hint or indication that we the American people are finally beginning to see that Obama as president is not a mistake because he fooled us, but because we fooled ourselves.  My hope going forward is that we start to reject politicians who sell themselves as our leaders and start to gravitate more towards those who sell themselves as leaders of a well restricted government.


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* Mistake #3 should present a logical quandary to anyone who doesn't think it is a mistake.  If our votes can be so manipulated as not to count, what would we realistically propose as a solution?  No more democracy?  Shifting the power to influence the vote away from wealthy people to some other group of people, a select group like the press or certain government agencies?  

Certainly I'd hope few if any would see exchanging one type of elite influence for another as a real improvement.  At least the supposed excessive influence of corporations is done by citizens who have selected themselves by providing the public with a wanted product or service.  At least they are in turn subject to public influence.  The alternatives are not. 

My "solution" to excessive corporate influence on government is to make it more difficult or at the very least less potentially rewarding for corporations to petition government.  There are two ways to achieve this.  One is for judges to interpret the constitutional constraints on government more strictly so that it becomes more difficult for government to use general tax revenues in order to benefit a specific sub-group of people.  Two for the influence of government in general to be minimized.  e.g. If government regulations have minimal financial effect over an industry there will be little reason for the corporations involved to want to spend billions of dollars to influence those regulations.



Here's hoping the state of the union address will be old news come next Tuesday so I can feel free to write about something else.

MLK, Jonah, And God's Justice

As a teacher I've encountered a lot of attitudes I would never have realized existed if not for the experience.  One had to do with Martin Luther King junior.

The class had an assignment to write about someone they considered to be their hero and some students were stumped.  They asked me for help and the conversation went something like this.

"Mr. Fontaigne, who was your hero when you were our age?"

I replied with no hesitation.

"Martin Luther King junior."

A couple African American students looked at me like I had just made a rude gesture or told a particularly bad pun.

"But you're white", one of them said.

"And why does that matter?"

"You should have had another hero because he's ours."

Perhaps I was a bit naive at the time this took place but I didn't think most people of any ethnicity or race in the United States thought like that, until then.  Black, white, yellow, so what?  That was a big part of what King was all about, right?  Well guess again.

Living in that area of the United States commonly called "the south" even though it's really the south east I have seen other attitudes that concern me.  There seems to be a strong sense amongst some that the south should be forever punished for its past sins and I suspect that if King were alive today he would object to that.

I've been around long enough to already be familiar with the pat response to anyone suggesting what some great person of the past might have to say about today.  "You don't know and can't know because your not African American", or whatever the chosen arbitrary group definition may be.

Actually no one can know for sure since no one is him but him, but I believe I can be pretty sure because of something he and I have in common that's a bit more than arbitrary.  We're both seminary trained Christians who have studied the same Bible.  And while there is a lot of areas of the Bible some have found more meaning in than others, there is one story in the Bible I can be pretty sure we have both studied a lot, Jonah.

The parallels between the story of Jonah and the civil rights movement in the south are plenty and obvious if one just begins to think about it.  And I am confident that Martin Luther King junior was a man of thought.

Jonah was asked by God to go tell the people of Nineveh to repent and turn their hearts toward Him, and Jonah didn't want to go.  Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire and the Assyrians were the most notorious people of their time.  They ethnically cleansed all the lands they conquered by torturing the men to death.  They didn't just kill them, they impaled them; a gruesome and slow way to die.  The impaled bodies would be left on display for the women to see so they could not forget that they were now Assyrian property and less than human.  The Assyrians caused so much hate toward themselves that even thousands of years later their descendants -- the Kurds -- are hated by their neighbors. 

Now Jonah knew God was prepared to forgive the Assyrians if they would just repent and Jonah's sense of justice was not the same as God's.  Thus Jonah tried to run away from God's calling.  But as the story states Jonah was ultimately brought to follow God's instructions and the Assyrians did repent and God forgave them.

Jonah was fit to be tied, so to speak and there was no happy ending for him in the book.

The American south's experience with civil rights has great parallels to the story of Jonah, ones I doubt would have been missed by King if he were alive today.  Like the Assyrians the American south had been exceptionally cruel and disrespectful to certain groups of people.  Though they were not as cruel and disrespectful as the Assyrians it was still a form of the same crime against humanity.  And like the Assyrians of Nineveh as described in the Book of Jonah, the people of the south repented.  Whatever racism that remains in the south must now hide for the most part because the people of the south have collectively condemned racism.

And it is perhaps no mere coincidence that the south has prospered since the time of its repentance.  For over one-hundred years since the end of the civil war the south had largely wallowed in more than an average share of poverty, but starting around the conclusion of the civil rights movement it has been amongst the nation's most rapidly growing economic regions.

God seems to have forgiven the south of its past sins (as such that He deals with groups and regions), but we seem to be infested with modern day Jonahs.  They're concept of justice is not the same as God's.  He forgives while they still feel the wrongs committed.  For them justice will not be achieved until the people wronged are lifted up and others are punished.  That's social justice though it's not God's justice and they refuse to accept that they can be different, that their human understanding of justice could possibly not be the same as that of the transcendent God.

Looking back at the Book of Jonah it's interesting and enlightening to note not only what did happen but what didn't happen.  When the people of Nineveh repented they didn't do a thing to repay the people they had wronged, and yet God considered this repentance.  Like when the corrupt tax collector Zachaeus became a follower of Jesus, it was Zachaeus who volunteered to repay those he had cheated, but Jesus seems to have never asked this of him.  God was interested in the individual heart in relation to Him.  What each individual did toward others was and is an individual matter.  One that flows from a right heart but none the less an individual choice.

Once again the ugliness of social justice reveals itself in attitudes that insist that certain groups of people be punished and never given credit for progress.  And that great men like Martin Luther King junior be reserved for a group of people he just happened to be in.

Here's hoping that as we remember Martin Luther King junior that young people of all ethnicities and races will feel free to look up to him, and that part of his legacy can include the eventual death of this evil farce that divides us called "social justice".

Brandon Smith's The Collectivist War Against Cultural Heritage

In an article entitled The Collectivist War Against Cultural Heritage  July of 2012, Brandon Smith wrote what I consider to be a phenomenal set of thoughts regarding collectivism.  I cannot do enough to encourage my readers to read it themselves.

In fact this is the second time I've gone out of my way to refer you to it.  The last time was about one year ago.

 To Smith's thoughts I will only add what I've found to be an excellent rule of thumb when evaluating movements and their ideas.  A good movement will bring along all things. Those are past, present, and future; tradition, reason, and emotions.  A bad movement must defy reason by trying to exclude some major part of the human experience.  If the preachers of a movement must teach disdain for tradition, shame of the past, and invalidation of strong feelings there is something very very wrong with it.

We are not a species, and indeed no species capable of anything even remotely resembling the cognitive is one that can thrive independently of whole segments of our being.  We cannot live entirely in a realm of total newness, divorced of the past.

We can all try to push against our feelings and act contrary to them, but ultimately we can only emotionally destroy ourselves if we persist.  Sure, there are cases where people have developed irrational fears they must overcome, but they are overcome through experiences that reveal those fears for what they are, baseless.  Most things however that we react to emotionally, we do so for good reason.  If that wasn't true we'd be a dysfunctional species that never should have survived as long as we have.

Read Brandon Smith's article and you will see how extremely important it is for us to cling to our heritage, not abandon it, and also how dangerous those lines of thought that tell us otherwise are.

"But They Are Not Entitled To Defy Reason Without Consequence"

Last year on this same date I wrote some words I believe hold quite well a full year hence.

"One of the few great benefits of this last election is that we are now free to identify nonsense where it is.  We no longer need to guard our words so as not to offend potential swing voters.  Stupidity won this last election and is now in charge.  Such a circumstance means that now is the time to point it out and not mince words while doing it.  The left can have their victory and the power that goes with it, but they are not entitled to defy reason without consequence.  They will drive this nation further and further towards ruin and they should have their stupidity pointed out as we go along.  To do anything less would make us even more stupid than they are.  I for one will use the intellect God gave me."

The stupidity I was pointing out at the time was the claim that failure to raise the federal government's debt limit was the same as the government failing to pay its debts.

I didn't mention the phrase "the full faith and credit of the United States" at the time but it would have been appropriate.  That poor phrase has been used and abused out of any appropriate context so much over the past few years that the District of Columbia's child protected services should raid the White House and the DNC and take it away from them to protect it from any further harm.

The "we" I was referring to is not Republicans or even conservatives, but anyone with a good rational combination of libertarianism and a sound knowledge of macro-economics.  Right-leaning libertarians, libertarian-leaning Republicans, and the Tea Party jump to mind.  I suspect there may be some libertarian-leaning Independents and Democrats in that fold as well.  Basically anyone who cares about individuals as individuals and not primarily as part of some collective somehow defined to suit some purpose.

So today's entry is an opinion piece and I of course respect my own opinion a great deal.  But perhaps not enough to simply keep it to myself.

Here are a couple things I think are stupid but can't necessarily beat in to total submission with logic, not quite anyway, but close.

Libertarians who refuse to vote.
-- Like it or not, no matter where you go in the world, you live under the "protection" of some government or group of thugs.  To live your life as though they don't exist or to defy the reality of their power over you is just that, denial.  And that's both unhealthy and unproductive.  You help no one including yourself by living this way, and worst of all you ignore the plight of others who are being oppressed.

People who describe capitalism as a failed social system or structure.
-- First of all capitalism is a straw man created to turn natural laws into an ism so that it can be challenged by other isms.  I understand why pro free-market people use the term in a positive way but even that irritates me because capitalism doesn't actually exist and using the term just plays into the "capitalism has failed us" loonies attempts at reason.  It's like saying, "let me start by granting you that the Earth is flat and the Moon is made of green cheese".
-- Secondly the idea that we can command supply and demand by government edict or that we can indefinitely supply everyone's needs by reducing private property rights (i.e. government driven wealth redistribution) is nothing short of a demonstration of willful ignorance of fundamental economics.  Once you reduce the individual's ability to accumulate wealth you cannot help but reduce their motivation to accumulate more and thus you reduce the amount of wealth there is to distribute.
-- Thirdly the idea that we can just re-educate people or educate future generations to think more collectively about the creation of wealth is about as close to whistling past the graveyard as I've seen in years.  Sure, studies seem to show that the accumulation of wealth has diminishing returns in terms of motivation.  But that just points to the merits of free-market principles, not the failures.  People who accumulate more and more wealth eventually become more and more secure financially which puts them in a better position to help others.  Different people reach this philanthropic phase sooner or later.  No doubt this variance is due to many complex factors including past experiences with adversity, personal character, plans to leave resources for future progeny, and the extent to which they feel the government is already forcing them to "give back".  The "current" system already has a mechanism where those with more give to those in need.  The difference between the "current system" and the proposed alternatives is the degree to which the individual is respected.  And oh yes, the degree to which reality is being respected -- as in the "current" system" -- or being defied -- as in the so called alternative.  Can there be a legitimate alternative to reality?

Conservatives that think any hand-out to the poor is worse than doing nothing.
-- Ebeneezer Scrooge lives amongst us.  If these people would take the time to read the great conservative economists they would discover something they obviously weren't aware of, or perhaps were just ignoring as inconvenient.  Free-markets do not perfectly and justly reward hard work or even well-planned and thought out hard work.  Sure hard work does in the long run benefit people more than laziness, but only in the long run.  And more than that, it only benefits more than laziness in the aggregate.  It's well possible for someone who works hard all their life to always be poor, even in the middle of a wealthy community with minimal government interference.  It's also possible for someone to be lazy all their lives and become wealthy and stay that way.  As Jesus said, "the poor you will have with you always".
-- The "long run" may not come in time for some in immediate need and the "aggregate" may not ever come around for some.
-- This "system" of ours only prevents disaster for some through the generosity of those who can afford to help and are willing to.  To turn the popular phrase, it's easier to teach a well fed man to fish than a starving one.
-- There is no such thing as "compassionate conservatism" because the term is redundant, but unfortunately there is such a thing as "heartless conservatism".  And this is not true conservatism by any means.  Any so-called conservative who doesn't care about an individual in need enough to actually meet their need where they are is a collectivist, and thus they are just a slow moving liberal-progressive-socialist.  Instead of having government pick who dies they let arbitrary market forces do it.  Allowing this in any way is anti-conservative.
-- The conservative alternative to liberalism is less government charity and more private charity, not the end of charity.