Another Example in the “Paid for Breathing” Saga

That we should all get paid the same for doing less is something people say with a heavy “as if” inflection, and before they’ve given a bit of consideration to whether it would be feasible.  Professional legislators should know better.

Eric Holder: Legal Lightweight?

I noted before that Eric Holder didn’t seem to care much about the Constitution.  After his stuttering and stammering in response to Lindsey Graham’s pretty rudimentary questions, maybe he just isn’t a very good lawyer.

Shame on Joaquin Avila and Robert Rubin

Since going to law school and becoming an attorney, I understand lawyer jokes less and less.  Most lawyers I know are good advocates and, shall we say, “highlight” the facts that best support their position.  And as for the ones that just tell bald faced lies, it becomes part of my job to stick their noses in it before the court.  In short, in my line of legal work, liars don’t often get far before their lies get the better of them.

This is less so when lawyers get involved in politics.  There, the only ones to police them are other elected officials, who often don’t have the time, and reporters who often don’t know what they’re looking for.  In short, unlike in the relatively tight-knit world of civil litigation, no one’s very motivated to keep anyone else honest.

So although I’m glad these slimeballs got caught, it worries me that this is just the tip of of an iceberg.

Initial Thoughts on the Importance of Moral Philosophy

One more point about why we need a tenable underlying moral framework.  Start from the example of business transactions.  A businessman engages in several transactions every day, and rarely, if ever, concerns himself with whether the legality of the transaction can be enforced.  He simply assumes there is an underlying legal framework that, when called upon, will be available to translate his transaction into legal terms involving primary rights, primary duties, causes of action, justiciability, and so forth.  From time to time, the capability of that underlying legal framework must be demonstrated to the businessman, whether at such time when he needs resort to it, or when he learns of his colleagues’ and competitors interactions in it.  If the legal system fails to prove to men’s minds that his transactions may be enforced through clearly defined laws objectively and rationally applied, it will be no longer useful.

Something similar may be said about morality.  It is true that one will not often, perhaps ever, happen upon any person who doubts whether, because no transcendent moral order can be empirically established, such thing as a moral evil can ever exist.  But this has more to do with the fact that we happen to be the successors of a long train of adherents to a particular moral code.  However, moral quandaries do still  come up.  When they do, it becomes necessary to resort to more formal systems of moral philosophy that identify the origins of our moral beliefs, and whether they adhere to a rational, orderly, consistent structure.  And, in particular, whether they can end their regression in some non-arbitrary place, or whether it simply winds up positing a moral opinion not unlike the one they started with.

That Infinite Moral Regress Is an Unlikely Topic in Polite Company Is No Answer to It

Heather MacDonald gripes about the common objection to atheism that, without a transcendent moral order, no appeals to moral authority are possible and, ultimately, any atheistic moral system fails.  Heather’s rebuttal runs as follows:

Would someone please provide an actual example of such endless moral regress without the God trump card?  If I may borrow a phrase from my misspent youth, it seems to me that we are “always already” embedded in a moral environment far more complex and sophisticated than the blunt pronouncements of the Ten Commandments (i.e., those not commanding obsequiousness before God).   The question of some original source beyond human law and custom for our most basic principles, in my experience, never comes up.

. . . .

I have simply never witnessed the need to reference to God to establish the validity of our laws against extortion, say.  Real-world moral disputes are more complicated:  Is health care a right?  Who should pay for it and how much should one group pay for another’s health care?  Is economic regulation theft?  Is theft admissible to stave off starvation?  We answer these questions by drawing on our innate and developed moral intuitions and our society’s legal framework.

But this is to confuse public morality with formal morality. We do not subject our laws to the rigors of formal philosophy and morality and epistemology. We must accept certain fundamental truths as given in order to go on with political and legal life. But that is not to say that such formal inquiries are without value. Though we plod ahead from the place of our intellectual beginnings, from time to time it is important to have a look behind us. As Tocqueville put it:

Dogmatic beliefs are more or less numerous according to the times.  They are born in different manners and can change form and object; but one cannot make it so that there are no dogmatic beliefs, that is, opinions men receive on trust without discussing them.  If each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief.

Now it is easy to see that there is no society that can prosper without such beliefs, or rather there is none that could survive this way; for without common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not.  Thus in order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought and held together by some principal ideas; and that cannot happen unless each of them sometimes comes to draw his opinions from one and the same source unless each consents to receive a certain number of ready-made beliefs.

If I now consider man separately, I find that dogmatic beliefs are no less indispensable to him for living alone than foracting in common with those like him.

If man were forced to prove to himself all the truths he makes use of every day, he would never finish; he would exhaust himself in preliminary demonstrations without advancing; as he does not have the time because of the short span of life, nor the ability because of the limits of his mind, to act that way, he is reduced to accepting as given a host of facts and opinions that he has neither the leisure nor the power to examine and verify by himself, but that the more able have found or the crowd adopts. It is on this first foundation that he himself builds the edifice of his own thoughts. It is not his will that brings him to proceed in this manner; the inflexible law of his condition constrains him to do it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Univ. Chicago Press, 2002  (Mansfield and Winthrop, eds.) at 407-08 (emphasis added).

Being Muslim in America Is No Picnic

A good friend of mine shared this YouTube video of 20 year old nightly news piece on his elementary school alma mater, Orange Crescent School in Garden Grove, California (“OCS”).  OCS is an Islamic school, part of the Islamic Society of Orange County, and shares a campus with the local mosque.  My friend Hassan, who appears in the piece as an adolescent, has always stressed to me that the Muslim community is very American, sharing in our values of self-reliance, hard work, virtue, and personal responsibility, and that they have long desired to become more accepted into the American culture.  Sadly for them, in the 20 years or so since this piece aired, Americans seem more wary of Muslims than ever.

The likes of Andy McCarthy and Geert Wilders characterize Islam as not a religion, but a political ideology, and that there is no such thing as “radical Islam,” but instead the atrocities we see people committing in the name of Allah are simply dutiful Muslims following the letter of the Koran.  The Fort Hood tragedy was not a freak accident—it was an inevitability given our irrational toleration of Islamic ideology.  Islam, McCarthy and Wilders would have the Western world understand, is anathema to free society.

Interestingly, Edward Gibbons, author of the seminal The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, concluded something similar about Christianity.  According to Gibbons, Christianity poisoned the pluralistic, secular fabric of the Roman empire, and instead made claims to a singular, universal Truth.  They stressed the temporal quality of the physical world, and focused on the otherworldly.  Rather than committing themselves to the protection of the Roman empire from the barbarians and swearing fealty to the emperor, Christians were committed to personal salvation and swore fealty to the God.

Edward Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Today, by contrast, it is the view of many Americans that America is founded upon Christianity. What changed?  Not the core tenets of Christianity.  It is not Christianity’s message that determines its cultural impact. Religion and political regimes have a symbiotic relationship.  The Roman empire was pagan.  America was deistic and at least loosely Christian at its founding.  Religion—whether Christianity or Islam or just about anything else—is inherently dangerous to political systems if not suitably integrated in the respective society’s cultural fabric.

Most religions can be used to either support or tear down political society.  The culprit is not religion qua religion. We should not be so naive as to explain terrorism and anti-Americanism as the inexorable conclusion of a religious view.  And until we more fully understand the deep sociological and historiographical reasons that actually underlie modern ethnic and religious tensions, we ought to refrain from alienating that segment of our society that shares so many of our most important values and that wants to become part of our society.  Terrorism is a great evil.  We do a disservice to the cause of eradicating it by including so many false positives.

Lest We Forget, Men Are Ruled by Laws, Not by Things Bestowed by Laws

This has been weighing heavy on my mind lately: how could any red-blooded, thinking person—any American—honesty and sincerely believe that one ought to have a right to accept a living from his fellows without having earned it?  I might console myself with the thought this this is an extreme fringe view.  But as Half Sigma admits, “Government-provided healthcare for all citizens would be a form of th[is] inheritance dividend . . . .”  If our legislators—even despite us—push ahead with this huge entitlement program that will almost certainly be impossible to rescind, is there any logical stopping point before we vote ourselves an “inheritance dividend“?

Once again, Tocqueville warns us that economic feasibility is not the only test for doling out entitlements:

One might say that sovereigns in our time seek only to make great things with men.  I should want them to think a little more of making great men; to attach less value to the work and more to the worker, and to remember constantly that a nation cannot long remain strong when each man in it is individually weak, and that neither social forms nor political schemes have yet been found that can make a people energetic by composing it of pusillanimous and soft citizens.

. . . .

Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions within them are not equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Univ. Chicago Press, 2002  (Mansfield and Winthrop, eds.) at 672, 676.

President Not Sure About…Much of Anything Lately

Rasmussen reported Wednesday:

Sixty percent (60%) of likely voters nationwide say last week’s shootings at Fort Hood should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 27% want the incident investigated by civilian authorities as a criminal act. Another 13% are not sure.

Those following the story Very Closely are even more likely to want the shooting investigated as an act of terrorism.

Sixty-five percent (65%) of all voters say Major Nidal Malik Hasan should receive the death penalty if convicted. Nineteen percent (19%) disagree, and 16% aren’t sure.

Idiocracy's President Not Sure

Still occupied with being not sure whether to send support to our troops in Afghanistan, Obama responded to the Fort Hood tragedy by joining ranks with the “not sure” camp—going one better, in fact, by asking Congress to put off its investigation.  The AP reports:

Lawmakers, however, already have announced they want their own investigations and were frustrated with what they view as a less-than-forthcoming administration.

. . . .

Obama said he was not opposed to hearings — eventually. But he strongly pressed lawmakers to hold off until the probes now under way are completed.

“There is an ongoing investigation into this terrible tragedy,” Obama said. “That investigation will look at the motives of the alleged gunman, including his views and contacts.”

“We must compile every piece of information that was known about the gunman, and we must learn what was done with that information. Once we have those facts, we must act upon them.”

Will Government Health Care Be the Dinner Guest Who Never Leaves? One Liberal Thinks So

This right left(!)-wing nut thinks there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy behind the public option.

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

Kind, caring, benevolent big-government politicians?  You don’t say.

Letting the Sick Die on the Street

Jeffrey Miron defends his view, as recapitulated by Matt Yglesias, that government health care is not even justified in order to provide health care to those “with no money through bad luck or poor decision-making” who then “get sick [and would otherwise] just die on the street for lack of money.”

I agree with the general premise of Mr. Miron’s view.  There is really no reason to treat health care from any other industry.  That is, of course, unless for some reason we want to starve health care of the productive and intellectual energies of market actors and instead serve it a diet of whatever level of useful efforts a farm of government employees finds its way to part with.  The trouble is that, in order to overcome the moral wrinkle that comes with the question of health care, we need to make sure that everyone is able to take responsibility for his own interests if he so chooses.  That is, if someone can’t afford fire insurance on his home, those are the breaks—he probably bought too much house.  But if someone can’t afford health insurance, most good folks won’t be able to assuage their guilt at the thought of him dying on the street because he happened to get sick.  At the very least, we need to be able to say, “sorry to hear that, but you should have done x.”

This has mostly to do with the pre-existing conditions issue.  In some instances, we can waive off this problem by arguing that so-and-so should have gotten health insurance before he got sick, or his condition was probably caused by his own behavior.  This is perhaps true.  But the fact remains that there are many folks who get terrible illnesses through no fault of their own.  And even if they have health insurance, even one short lapse—which might occur due to a missed form, of which there are many—could forever banish them from the possibility of ever again being insured.

That is why, in my view, certain unknowns should probably be diffused across large numbers of Americans, as a matter of public policy.  By this I assume that, while it just won’t wind up sitting right to make each individual take on the entirety of the risk of the calamities that nature might throw at him, it is also not right to make insurance companies take on unreasonable risk.  Instead, because the health care system is one that we all want to be available to everyone who wants it—i.e., it is not like the Faberge egg industry—we might all need to shoulder slightly higher premiums so that certain pre-existing conditions do not unduly price individuals out of the market.

In this way, so long as everyone who wants insurance is able to obtain it at a relatively reasonable price, there is no reason—as a matter of social justice—to lament anyone “dying on the street” because they chose not to purchase it.  As a matter of personal justice, of course, many folks will still be unable to stand idly by.  But this is what charity is for.  The government’s duty is fulfilled simply by making choices available.  It is neither required, nor constitutionally empowered, to right every wrong doled out by fate and nature.