Justice, Fairness, And Respect For Every Human Being

For the next few weeks I'm going to look at examples of "social justice" in what is called the "faith community" with the intent to demonstrate how, while well intended those who preach social justice are being mislead, and thus ultimately distracted from what should be our true calling as Christians.

Week One:  We start with a big one, a quote from Pope Francis.

“A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.” – Pope Francis

I truly love the part about "respect for every human being".  He'll get no argument from me to suggest that isn't extremely important and clearly part of our calling as Christians.

But taking his statement in its entirety I see what should be an obvious problem except that this false concept called "social justice" is clouding so many minds and dare I say hearts.

His first six words pretty much strike right to my point.  "A way has to be found."  For the Pope to say about the world's sufferings, "a way has to be found", is like a doctor in the midst of a medical emergency saying, "if only someone here had some medical knowledge."  I'm pretty sure Pope Francis knows quite well that a way has been found and that way is Jesus Christ.  I'm also as confident as I can be in a fellow human being that he intends to reach as many people as possible with that message that Jesus Christ is the way.

To be fair to Pope Francis I will grant him that Christ works through people and we as Christians are not called to just be fans in the stands of God's mercy.  We are called to be the instruments of His mercy in this fallen world.

But here is where "social justice" separates us from Christ.  Christ uses us, His followers and by the fact the church universal is a set defined as all of His followers, He uses the church.  But no government is the church, no geographical community is the church, no group other than the church is the church.  The church is a set that intersects with but never encompasses any other group except for those specifically defined as such like congregations and Bible-study groups.  One can no more expect governments and communities to do something because it is what a good Christian would do than one can expect a car to be a train.  And to demand it through a political process is to make a joke of our calling.

Now to get down to some of the details in this quote.

"... to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table"

There are places in the world where the rich and powerful own everything and consciously work to keep the poor destitute.  This is clearly wrong.  Forbidding or working against economic mobility is something no Christian should participate in.  And in a secular context I believe Christians should favor governmental reforms that allow for greater mobility.  But such reforms should not be made at the expense of, as Pope Francis said, "respect for every human being."  Forced redistribution isn't Christian.  It is just one step away from unjust execution.  It demeans the individual to treat private property as something under the control of some larger community.  Voluntarily giving of one's surplus to assist those in need and potentially better their lives is Christian, but governmental policies of wealth redistribution are anti-Christian.

"...above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.”

As long as that word justice is not perverted to apply to groups instead of individuals I can say amen to this much.  Unfortunately "social justice" does just that.  Once we start to seek justice for groups not defined by having a common individual victimizer but instead another group we make victims of members of the other group who did nothing wrong in this case.

This false concept called "social justice" should rub all Christians the wrong way since it perverts and distorts so much.  Most distastefully it distorts our relationship with Jesus Christ.  I pray more of us will come to this realization.

And I Cannot Say It Enough Until It's Gone

I've written this before but it needs more effort from me.  The concept of "social justice" is a poison both to Christianity and to anyone who is truly interested in human compassion.

This is no easy subject.  The "social justice" throng will attempt to claim that anyone who doesn't accept their corporate goals is some how against individual justice and individual compassion.  Rather than be distracted by that faulty generalization I will start with a story.

One time before the dawn of cell phones there was a college student. He was making a fourteen hour drive from his parents house to his college when he saw something on the other side of the highway he couldn't believe. There was a car stopped on the far shoulder and a muscular young man walked up to it and opened the driver's side door. He then started to assail a woman inside the car with a rapid and fierce barrage of punches.

The scene was beyond belief for this young college student.  So much so that he was almost a full mile down the road when he finally convinced himself he actually saw it happen. In his fantasy life he had always thought of himself as a hero, and at that moment he was asking himself why he hadn't rescued the maiden in distress.  He could have veered his car across the median and over the opposing lane, right? The answer was reasonable enough, though not enough to keep him from feeling ashamed. The student was relatively scrawny, especially compared to the muscular attacker. It probably would have been foolish for him to have intervened, especially while trying to cross highway medians in a sedan poorly designed for any road hazard, let alone a full highway median, and highways medians in the state this took place in are especially treacherous.

The student passed an exit and the thought occurred to him he could have stopped at a pay phone to report the attack to the police. Unfortunately he had passed the exit before he thought of it.

“Okay, the next exit then”, he said to himself, “I'll report it then”. 

The thought of what horrible things may have yet transpired back there on that highway shoulder made him wince. He didn't even want to think about the woman possibly being killed.

He had convinced himself of the urgency of informing the police as soon as possible, but then he thought what it might mean to his school work. He was in a different state, almost five hundred miles from his college, and his classes were way too intense for him to be able to take time out to assist a police investigation.

“How amazingly selfish of me”, he scolded himself for even considering putting his schoolwork ahead of protecting someone's life. He was definitely in his mind going to inform the police at the next exit, but then another thought came to him, one much more potent.

'The police patrol the highways. There will be one along sooner or later. Probably one has already gotten there considering all the time I've wasted struggling over the issue. Anyways, we have police precisely for that sort of thing. What do we pay them for right? College students returning to school on fourteen hour drives ought to be able to do just that.  College is all about the future after all. Let the police handle this.'

And so the young student returned to his college to attend his classes, making no report. The future was supposedly served and who knows what happened to the woman on the side of the highway, it wasn't his concern considering we have public servants to take care of such things.

As awful as it is, that's the end of that story.

Awful story and awful ending, right? Of course. This is the legacy of a culture that has decided to delegate individual responsibility to the employees of the collective, not to mention puts too much emphasis on the higher education and potential of its young people. While to be fair one could argue the young student in this story shirked even his corporate responsibilities to the collective, it was precisely the collective that enabled his ultimate excuse. If he had been centered in himself as an individual he would have had no one and no thing to hide behind. He would have either done something to help the poor woman or he would not have, and his own self-assessment would have no other two choices but that he was good or bad in it.

I used this story to encourage thought. Those who already agree with me may see new reasons why we're right, and those who don't agree with me are at this very moment thinking of ways they think this story doesn't support my point or that some other point is missed. Either way the pump on the well of thought has been primed. Now's a good time for some strait logic and reasoning.

The term “social justice” was coined by a Catholic priest named Luigi Taparelli in 1840. What he did was take the compassion of Thomism, a religious philosophy derived from the great saint Thomas Aquinas and try to apply it to groups of people as if these groups were individuals. e.g. The Bible teaches us to be compassionate to those less fortunate than ourselves, therefore, according to Taparelli, communities and societies as a whole should enact practices and policies to help the less fortunate. The persuasive power of this reasoning is apparent as we now see “social justice” preached, taught, and practiced throughout modern Catholic and Protestant churches, not to mention much of secular culture.

The problem with this, I argue is twofold. First off there is no such thing as social justice. Justice cannot be achieved by addressing people as groups instead of as individuals. Secondly, taking Biblical teachings and instructions meant to apply to individuals and applying them to collectives distorts the very message Jesus Christ tought. I will support this with reason, logic, and the some of the very scriptures the social justice believers try to justify their belief with below.

Point number one is that there is no such thing as social justice.

It is almost damning to academia that this flaw is so reflexively brushed aside even though the logic is unavoidable. Any attempt to achieve justice that demands something of one group of people in order to give it to another cannot in any way be just, since the individual members of the group effectively being punished are being punished for no fault of their own. They didn't decide to be born into a privileged ethnicity or gender, and in the case of those who are rich, all of them didn't get there by making morally bad decisions. While some may welcome the collective's efforts to help the less fortunate by taking things from them, some may not and for good reasons, demanding respect for individual human dignity not being the least. Put simply social justice policies of forcing people to share, especially through governmental actions, inevitably commit injustices on some individuals at least and since justice cannot be injustice, there is no such thing as “social justice”.

The common argument from academia against this clear logic is that people in privileged groups benefit from injustices and thus are in fact culpable. This is also the argument terrorists use to justify blowing up civilians. Most civil societies do not however consider the merchant who sold food to a criminal an accessory to whatever crimes he committed. They usually don't even consider the criminal's dependent children to be accessories. So how is the rich oriental man culpable for the poor black woman's misfortune? Simple, he's not, and to tax him more or to make it harder for his kids to get into a college is plainly the opposite of justice. There is no such thing as “social justice” since it is in fact inevitably unjust.

Point number two is that social justice distorts the Christian message of compassion it claims to be part of.

For this point I will lean heavily on the Christian message itself, as I should, and I'll begin with what I call the key to it all. Our Lord referred to it as the greatest two commandments.

Mark 12:30-31 ~Jesus
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

These two commandments are about three things, God, ourselves, and others. They pretty effectively show the emphasis of Christ's message and ministry. First we are told to love God with our all, and what is entailed and detailed out as that tells us something, "your heart", "your soul", "your mind", "your strength". None of those things are properties or responsibilities of any collective. Of the four, three are only aspects of individuals. Only strength could also be something beyond our immediate self. The other three are so clearly individual that they are often seen as synonymous with singularity.

The second commandment then ties our love for others inseparably with our love for ourselves. The absence of the collective in this becomes almost obvious if one asks one of the most obvious questions. That is, 'how do I love myself?'. Do I give control of my resources to someone else so they can look after me when I'm fully capable of doing it myself? No. I want my dignity. Therefore if I am to love others as myself I must do it whenever possible with the utmost respect for them and myself. I should whenever possible and/or practical do it personally, directly, as one individual to another. And when I can't do it directly and instead make use of some in-between service, I should do it of my own volition, not through force of law or even in response to some community born sense of oughtness. It should always be my choice, a moral obligation perhaps, but never a legal or in any way a coerced one.

Now the implications I draw here from just two verses, as important and key as they may be to the entirety of the Christian message, may be countered by the throngs of Christian leaders and teachers who insist that “social justice” can be found all over the scriptures. So much so that some have claimed if we cut out all support for “social justice” from the Bible we wouldn't have very much left. But not to worry. I can brush this throng aside, not with a premature reflex but with reason. I don't even have to use the trump card I established earlier, that there logically is no such thing as “social justice”. I can use the very scriptures they claim support it.

One of the favorites of these areas of scriptures they claim support “social justice” is the Beatitudes, found in Matthew 5:3-10. They are as follows (NIV translation). There are eight of them so I numbered them accordingly.

(1) “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(2) Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
(3) Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
(4) Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
(5) Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.
(6) Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.
(7) Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
(8) Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

There is little if any serious scholarly claim that “the poor in spirit”mentioned in the first beatitude are anything other than the humble. Humility, I should add, is an extremely important goal set in Christian teaching and should always be pursued by Christians, as difficult as that may be. “Humility, like a rose, once grasped ...” I was taught while getting my masters. So in my humble yet educated opinion (oops there goes the rose) the only beatitude here that could have anything directly to do with what the throng would call “social justice” is the third one.

This however is very problematic for them because that part about “they shall inherit the earth” seems a bit more grand than receiving unemployment compensation. I suppose they could argue I'm just being difficult in interpreting it as quite so grand, but look at it in the context of the first and second beatitudes. " The kingdom of heaven"? And those who mourn "will be comforted"? What will comfort those who mourn short of God fixing the problem of death itself? All of the remedies seem pretty clearly to be of a divine source, not a human one and certainly not a collective or social source.  So why would a task for the human collective be thrown into the middle of list of things only the divine can achieve?

As for the other verses the throng may point to, I have read them and I could fill a book explaining each away, but I would just be wasting space and time re-hashing the same few effective refutations of their interpretations. They all come down to this.

All of these verses that they say refer to groups and communities either refer to God, as in the beatitudes, or to individual moral obligations to other individuals as they encounter them, not the actions or policies of communities or governments.  The strongest support the “social justice” throng has is from the prophets where God chastises Israel for its treatment of the poor and needy, but if one reads on in each case God blesses individuals who made the right choices. If the principle of “social justice” were applied, no one would have been spared His wrath. Instead in each case it is individual responsibility and God's power and intent to bless that comes out as the true theme, not something called “social justice”.

As a Christian I believe God deserves our all and we are instructed to give Him that. In all that He has done and tells us through the scriptures He will do, He is ultimately and primarily concerned with individual relationships with him and others. Yes, He did work out part of His plan through a nation, Israel, but Israel failed because of the inability of humanity to obey the law even through a national effort and ultimately, both as evidenced in the prophets and in the New Testament, God holds individuals responsible for their decisions. In all of His punishments towards Israel He always either spared certain individuals or spared larger groups for the sake of individuals, and it was because of the choices they made, not the groups they were a member of.

Jesus came to make it possible for individuals to have personal relationships with God and this good god commands us to love others as we love ourselves. We are therefore called to empower others as individuals to be able to choose what the nature of their relationships with God will be. There can be no coercion of any kind, no legal or social pressure in this. Only persuasion in an atmosphere of respect for individual dignity and free will. If at any point we drop the element of individual choice from this we become disobedient to His commandment to love others as ourselves and in turn to love God with our entire being.

This is not just true in bringing people to Christ. The Church universal is not one thing on the outside and the opposite on the inside. Christian character continues to be a matter of individual and not corporate decisions. It is individual Christians' relationships with God and other individuals that are most important, not their commitments to communities.

For the Christian community social justice is worse than heresy, for unlike heresies that distort our perception of the nature of God, social justice diminishes our roles as individuals both in helping and receiving help, and worst of all causes us to be disobedient to God's commandments, most notably the two Jesus told us were the greatest. Our brothers and sisters in Christ who teach social justice need interventions where we take them aside in a loving manner and show them the errors of their ways. If they reject our correction and insist on continuing to teach social justice we should send them on their way without us. Tough medicine, I know, but in these critical days where the church universal is so infected, it's high time we took it.

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.


<***>

* 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.

My New Year's Wish For 2014 (and on into 2017)

2013 seems to be a year I shouldn't miss.  Though life's experience thus far has taught me there always seems to be some memories to cherish even in hard times.

I met a 1st cousin of my mother's who has an amazingly sharp mind in spite of frequently forgetting what was said just a minute or two ago.  The contrast between her short term and long term memories was amazing and I felt just as amazingly fortunate to have met her.  I know, how many times could I use the word 'amazing' there, but it seems quite fitting in spite of whatever literary critique it may attract.

I saw lightning bugs which I hadn't seen since my childhood, and for the first time I saw the attic bedrooms that my father and his siblings used when they were growing up.  I've decided I want an attic like that myself some day.  Nothing like having three or four bedrooms right there in case company comes over.

And oh yes, the public's perception of the president has finally begun to come down.  We in the United States in general seem to have an entirely unjustified reverence for whoever we elect president.  It's as if somehow by electing a president the nation bestows the dignity and honor of the collective populace upon that person.  

It's collectivist nonsense at its finest.  By essentially worshiping a president we worship ourselves, and even worse than worshiping ourselves as individuals, we worship ourselves as a collective we call the "American people".  As fine a country as the United States may be and as unusually common is nobility amongst its people, worship is inappropriate.  Especially when it is of any collective.

Too many of us read way to much meaning into the fact that the president is the only nationally elected public office.  Instead of seeing democracy as a lesser of evils that only represents at best a momentary glimmer of a generally vague public sentiment, too many of us see the president as the people's avatar.

This I suspect explains why approval polls consistently put any congress below the same ratings of their contemporary president.  It's because many people see the president as the human embodiment of the nation as a whole and to assign the president blame for things would be like accepting the blame themselves.  And it is human nature to want to blame others first.

Though I would hope the current president's drop in the polls would actually translate into Americans accepting responsibility for our problems, I suspect that rather they are finding ways to transform Barack Obama from their avatar into a scapegoat.

In other words I look on this good news from 2013 with a scant eye.  If he continues to slide in the polls right onto 2016 I fear the same group of foolish avatar-makers will just find themselves a new one.

What we really need is someone like George Washington who will step in and announce to the American people that no one person can or should be as important as we keep trying to make our presidents.  And that it is not that an individual can ever be so important, but that the individual always is even more so.

Can we hope for that much wisdom in such a high office?  That is my new years wish.

I wish you a happy new year.