Improving the Constitution

 I've been mulling over the apparent shortcomings of our federal government, and a couple possible constitutional amendments have come to mind.

One of the issues is that of gerrymandering.  The re-election rate for incumbent members of Congress is over 90%.  State legislatures draw districts in very partisan ways.  I recall a Reader's Digest article on gerrymandering that described a district that stretched in six long narrow psuedopods across half the state, and another that was two residential districts connected by several miles of interstate highway.  Somebody tried to get a district that was actually two areas completely separated from each other, but courts shot that down.

My proposed correction:  "1.  Congressional districts shall be drawn so that each can be enclosed within a rectangle with an area no more than 120% of the area of the district.  2.  If the geography and population distribution of a state make doing so impossible, then congressional districts of that state shall be drawn to minimize the total area of rectangles enclosing all congressional districts.  3.  States with only one district shall be exempt.  4.  A rectangle shall be a geometric figure with four sides and four equal vertices."

A second issue is that the states have been rendered subservient to the federal government, which was never the intention of the Founders who wrote the Constitution.  That was the original function of the Senate, to give the States a voice in the legislative process.  A third is that getting rid of bad laws is far more difficult than it ought to be.  As James Madison warned us, ""It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow."  To correct these, I propose the following amendment:

"1.  The House of Relief is hereby established.  2.  Members of the House of Relief shall be called Relievers.  3.  The legislatures of each State shall appoint three Relievers, who shall serve at the pleasure of their respective state legislatures, which may recall or replace them at any time, and for any reason, or for no reason at all.  4.  The House of Relief shall only  have the power to pass bills that repeal federal laws and regulations of the United States, and to terminate federal departments and offices not established by the Constitution of the United States.  5.  Any such bill which receives votes of one-third of Relievers currently in office shall be passed to the President of the United States without review by the other houses of Congress, and will become law upon his signature, or fail if the President should veto the bill.  6.  Any bill which receives votes of one-half of all Relievers currently in office shall become law immediately, overriding any Presidential veto, without review by any other branch of government."

While I think these are more-or-less good ideas, I'm sure they could use some polish.  Any ideas anyone may have for their refinement would be most welcome.

The Carrot and the Stick

It is a truism of political science that there are two ways to get a mule to do what you want:  to use the carrot, or the stick.  These approaches are also applied to people, as broad terms to denote various enticements or threats.  Dale Carnegie pointed out that for the carrot to work, you must also be able to "arouse within another an eager want," that is, engage in salesmanship, and also that sticks are generally ineffective in the long term.

Bill Clinton was regarded as a master of offering carrots.  Better observers of political science than I have said so.  They also mention his reluctance to use the stick.  It really is no wonder that he got elected, as American electioneering is largely a matter of offering various carrots to people. 

The carrots that Donald Trump offered the electorate were largely tax cuts, deregulation, improved border security, and returning patriotism to a socially acceptable stance (something the Common Core standards for history largely make untenable).  The only sticks he really had to wave during the election were the policies of Barack Obama, and the history and character of Hillary Clinton, who was promising to expand them.

What I've observed about Donald Trump, especially when it comes to his foreign policy, is that he makes ready use of not only the carrot and the stick, but also salesmanship and showmanship, in order to get what he wants (e.g., an end to Chinese protectionism, which I support, as well as an end to Chinese dumping, which I do not), and often in rapid succession or even simultaneously.  He's done so in the contexts of NAFTA renegotiations, the China trade deal, and his attempts to get North Korea to denuclearize.  I don't care for all of his foreign policy goals, but I have to admire how straightforward and how effective he is in pursuing them.  And I think that part of that is due to his salesmanship and showmanship.


It hasn't always worked.  Many people were aghast when President Trump lavished praise and offered status to Kim Jong Un, but I saw it as an offer of some carrots (and fairly cheap carrots at that), combined with salesmanship and the possible offering of more carrots in the future. 

Admittedly, Iran has thus far mostly gotten the stick from President Trump.  The closest he's come to offering a carrot is to announce that he's ready to negotiate for peace, but only on his terms, particularly verification of their denuclearization.  But given the pallets of cash that the previous US President lavished upon the Iranian government, while getting very little for his constituents, Trump may have quite reasonably concluded that they were feeling too entitled to getting carrots from us while fomenting (at gunpoint, when necessary) demonstrations demanding "Death to America!"

Minimum Wage Hikes Are Not Pro-Life

May God bless Mark Shea, who thinks he is helping.

Mark is calling for a $15/hr minimum wage.  He has done so many times before, and he's likely to do so many times again, no matter what havoc it wreaks upon the poor, or how much it entrenches us in our poverty.  He still believes it will help.

And a higher minimum wage does help, but not who he thinks, and probably not as much as it harms even them.  As I explained in an earlier post, it helps union workers, especially among unionized government employees, members of unions like the SEIU and AFSCME.  Their contracts specify wages not as $X/hr, but as $(minimum wage)+Y/hr.  Increasing the minimum wage to $15 will give all such employees a $7.75/hr raise that they don't have to negotiate for, and that all other government budgets must be built around.

The first victims of minimum wage hikes are people who have a hard time making money for their employers even when paid only minimum wage.  Redpanels has illustrated this:

What happens to those jobs?  Typically, they are either automated or turned over to the customer.  Why do you have to pay to use the air compressor to fill your tires?  Why do you think nobody pumps your gas, washes your windshield, and checks your oil for you, like Gomer Pyle did in 1962?  Why do fast-food restaurants, 7-Eleven, and convenience stores and gas stations, one and all, have self-serve beverage fountains?  Where are all the soda jerks?

I live is a small town, with a population under 1000.  It's rural; the closest shopping outside town limits not counting gas stations is at least eight miles away.  Why do you think the McDonald's in the small town where I live bought a robot to fill sodas for the drive through?

What happened is that the minimum wage has made it unprofitable to hire people to do these jobs.  My guess is that the total cost of hiring a minimum wage employee, including minimum wage plus the employer's Social Security and Medicare taxes on wages paid plus the workman's comp and unemployment insurance premiums employers are required to pay plus the cost of keeping track of hours and computing all these things and sending the various payments where they have to go plus all other labor costs, adds up to quite a bit more than $7.25/hr, probably at least $10/hr and could be as high $12/hr.  Anyone whose labor doesn't make his employer a profit after paying all these costs does not get hired.

In fact, my own job would go underwater should the minimum wage rise to $15/hr.  And that's why I got really mad at Mr. Shea.

I work as a certified nurse aide (CNA) in a skilled nursing facility (nursing home).  My job is to help the residents with activities of daily living (ADLs) such as dressing, getting into and out of their beds and wheelchairs, moving to and from the toilet, eating, bathing, shaving, brushing their teeth and hair, taking their vital signs, helping them with other things as they need me to, and observing them for potential health issues, particularly pressure ulcers (bedsores) and other skin issues.  Almost nobody in this job gets paid $15/hr.  It's very rewarding in other ways, but it is hard work that doesn't pay well.  When I took the class to qualify for the Nurse Aide Certification Exam, the instructor told us that anyone able to read and write at a 10th grade level should be able to pass the class and the NACE.  And so it was.

The thing is, it takes about 1 CNA per nine residents to get everything done right and done well for all these residents during the daytime, and probably around 1 CNA per 15 residents at night.  You might get by with ratios of 1:12 during the day and 1:18 at night if you're willing to forgo things like oral hygiene (important for adequate eating, and preventing pneumonia and heart disease), proactive toileting, frequent bathing, incontinence rounds every two hours, and resident dignity, privacy, preferences, and safety.

When the minimum wage rises, every employer who pays less than the new minimum has to do one of three things:  increase revenue, increase productivity, or cut hours. Otherwise, they go under.  What this means for the nursing home administrator with about 90 residents is that if he's going to keep the same staffing level, he very likely will also have to come up with an extra $3900/yr in revenue for each resident, JUST for the increase in minimum wage, JUST for CNAs -- we aren't adding in rest of the labor costs for keeping those CNAs yet, let alone the suddenly-increased costs for staffing the dietary, housekeeping, maintenance, and laundry departments yet.

Most nursing home resident care is paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.  They are not going to kick out the extra $5000+ per resident per year.  Remember, hiring and keeping employees just got a LOT more expensive, perhaps nearly twice as much.  When prices go up, it puts downward pressure on purchases, so hiring and employment will go down.  Because Medicare's single largest source of revenue is payroll taxes, the giant jump in unemployment is likely to prevent Medicare from getting any sort of increase in revenue; rather, revenue will likely decrease.  So too will reimbursement.  And that means fewer CNAs to help residents live healthy lives.  Rather, we can expect that one result of an increase of the minimum wage to $15/hr is that nursing home residents will face a lot more neglect, and for many, homelessness as their facilities are driven under by a misplaced desire to be generous with other peoples' money.

May the Infinitely Merciful protect my residents from that.

Is the Media Unfair to Mr. Trump?

So I'm watching this speech by Donald Trump.  John C. Wright has been going on about how the media is carefully and deliberately trying to hide anything about Trump that might appeal to voters, and only present those things which they will find frightening or repugnant.  I figured it behooved me to let the man speak for himself.



He opens with some solid statements that men like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have been making for years, to wit, that crime hurts Black communities most, and that riotous protests especially are hardest on the people who are already hurting most.  He points out that the results of Democrat party fiscal and domestic policy has been the opposite of progress.  All well and good, but it's been ridiculously difficult to convince the victims that they are in fact in an abusive relationship with the Democrat Party.

He also wants to reverse NAFTA and some other free trade agreements because one result has been that production of easy to manufacture goods (eg, textiles), has gone overseas, and the Americans who used to do those jobs no longer have them. 

If you only look at the jobs and production that has gone to foreign countries, it's easy to suppose that free trade is a bad thing.  What gets ignored is how free trade helps us be richer by lowering the prices we pay for easy-to-make goods, and makes those desperately poor people who have started making those goods richer, by becoming more productive.  The upshot/counter argument is that ending free trade is our way of saying that poor people in Third World nations don't deserve to have an industrial revolution, or wealth.

And then he makes the second half about how the election is his Personal Struggle against corruption, and attacks on his opposition (for results and policy, as well as for their personal characters).  Admittedly, our system of campaign and election laws is designed (or, as he says, rigged) to make sure that only the Demicans and Republicrats can win elections. 

He calls for an end to the crony capitalism which has made him rich.

Uh huh.

He says he's going to protect every American job.  For each job protected, we've found that eight others wither before they can be created.  He's going to cut taxes for all workers and small businesses.  Good for him.  He says he'll make it very expensive for a company to pull up stakes and go elsewhere.  Bad populism, there.  He plans to reform the regulatory regime to make it more business friendly.  I hope so, but good luck with that.  He continues to take a hard line on immigration.  The idea that we should have immigrants who want to be Americans, who hold American values of justice, hard work, self-reliance, and tolerance dear, appeals to me.  The idea that we ought to tighten immigration otherwise doesn't.  It is absurdly difficult to become an American citizen.  Unless you're already a millionaire, you'd be lucky to make it in even a decade.

He wants educational reform -- school choice, charter schools, merit pay, tenure reform.  Jeb Bush did do some of that at one point in FL.  Perhaps he can be Mr. Trump's Secretary of Education.  He wants more police, more enforcement, and better judges and prosecutors.  He's out to take down cartels and gangs like was attempted with the Mafia in a previous generation.  But at what price for the innocent?  Will he bear in mind Blackstone's Formulation that it is better for many guilty to go free than that one innocent be punished?

In healthcare, he's out to repeal the PPACA, better known as Obamacare.  While not every clause of that law is bad, it's not worth it to try to save what was beneficial.  He intends to improve consumers' ability to choose the healthcare they want.  Well and good.  

He says he'll restore honor and reduce corruption.  That requires giving more teeth to the federal government's equivalent to internal affairs.  Didn't Mr. Obama also promise us the most transparent administration ever?  A particular policy, though:  no speaking fees paid to spouses of high-powered administration officials and bureaucrats.

He finishes with more populism, promising to fight for average American people.  There's a fair bunch of conservative virtue-signaling in his speech.  I find myself agreeing more and more that conservatism is just the liberalism of the previous two generations.

So far, I'd say the media probably aren't trying to be fair to him.  There are a few more recent speeches posted by the same Youtube account I can watch to see.  And I probably ought to revisit Mr. Trump's campaign site to see what his particular policy recommendations are.

Good Times in Linux-Land

I'm going to suggest you start using a Linux-based operating system on your computers, rather than Mac OSX or Windows. One reason for switching is because Microsoft is dropping support for Windows XP next April, and you will only be able to get Windows 8 (and then only after a hardware upgrade). If you don't want to buy a new computer, switching to Linux could easily save you from that.

Many Linux variants (called distros) are easy to install, use, and maintain. They do really well what most people do on their computers: surf the web, email, chat on instant messaging clients, manage photos, and word processing. Few of these things are done exactly how they're done in Windows. But that's a feature, not a bug. In a lot of cases, the ways that Windows does these things are kind of lousy, but you're used to the problems. In the meantime, the new way of doing things will seem unnatural and awkward, but it was every bit as awkward and unnatural when you were first learning how to do it in Windows.

Before you consider installing a Linux distro, I urge you to

1. BACK UP YOUR DATA
2. Read their documentation
3. Test that you can restore your data from backup
4. Read their documentation
5. Defragment your hard drive
6. Read their documentation
7. Proceed with download, testing, and installation of your chosen distro

The easiest way for most people to start with Linux is to use Linux Mint 13 (Maya) KDE Edition. The desktop is pretty, quite a bit like Windows 7, and Linux Mint 13 will be supported util April 2017, which means you won't have to reinstall until then. The next version of Linux Mint to have support past that date will be released no sooner than April 2014. Try the live version before installing.

There are other distros that are well-suited for beginners. These include openSUSE, Ubuntu (which has a novel interface called Unity that should also work for smartphones and tablets -- I recommend the LTS version), Kubuntu (again, I recommend LTS), Mageia, PCLinuxOS, and Lubuntu Extra Life Extention. They vary in how often they release new versions, what sort of desktop environment to provide, how long they support old versions, which software they think it is most important to support and update, and how devoted they are to software freedom.

Fedora is quite a bit trickier to make desktop-ready than any of these that I've mentioned. It is heavily supported by Red Hat, which is strongly devoted to free software principles. As a result, Fedora doesn't have a push-button easy way to enable Adobe Flash, many popular (captive) multimedia formats (such as DVDs and MP3s, as well as Adobe Flash), or the nVidia or Radeon proprietary graphics drivers. If installing FlashBlock in your web browser doesn't change anything for you, and you don't play any games with 3-D acceleration, this might not matter. Fedora is also devoted to cutting edge software and rapid release cycles.

Software freedom is one of the major reasons I prefer free software to captive software, like Microsoft Windows and Office, iTunes, Adobe Flash, Kindle, and Nook. They all mean to prevent you from actually controlling copyrighted content, but rather putting control of such content in the hands of others. And if they have to be able to hijack your computer without your say-so to keep that control, then they can. And really, do you deserves that kind of aggravation? Should you have to live with other people controlling your computer, because of so-called "intellectual property rights"? Is it right and just for (say) MGM or Sony Entertainment to delete your legitimate, legal, digital download of a movie or song, because somebody else posted a copy of it on Pirate Bay or MegaUpload or a similar site?

On Newtown, CT, and Policy

I ran across Larry Correia's statements on mass shootings and what makes people safe in Mark Shea's commentariat.

Larry Correia may truly be one of the most qualified of people to discuss the issue of how gun ownership and use affect criminal behavior, including mass shootings like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary. I have seen nothing I think you would do better to read if you wish to be informed on the relevant issues, especially not anything I've written.

Occupy Wall Street

It turns out OWS has a real list of real demands. Naturally, domestic press either hasn't a clue or refuses to cover it, but (according to Naomi Wolf in the Guardian whose article you should read) the top three demands are (I quote):

1. [G]et the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
2. [R]eform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
3. [D]raft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

These are none of them entirely bad ideas. I can deal with some sort of blunting of the Citizens United ruling, even though I think the good guys won. It certainly allows the richest people or groups to give the greatest exposure to their message, but without it, many worthwhile messages were completely stifled. I would far rather we had real freedom to campaign on whatever message we wanted, as long as we were telling the truth, but for as long as honesty is entirely optional and slander and libel are completely acceptable in campaign speech, we have to have something.

Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a buyout of Republicans by Citigroup; John Dingell (D-MI) said that it would result in banks "too big to fail" that would have to be bailed out. But then the anti-redlining regulations were added, to help Clinton in his dream of subsidizing the housing of people who were unlikely to pay for their own homes with the Community Reinvesting Act, by transferring all the risk from the banks to the federal government. That has ALSO helped to set us on our current train-wreck financial crisis. I would like to see a return of at least the conflict-of-interest regulation that the Glass-Steagall Act act imposed.

That third item? It has my FULL SUPPORT. What they are talking about there is plain, simple, pure plunder by law, also known as corruption.

Ms. Wolf also makes a pretty good case that the crackdowns were coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security (which department is a reason to spit upon the memory of the 2d Bush presidency if ever there was one). And as she has said, it's no wonder these people are having the $#!t kicked out of them at the behest of the federal government.

David Warren

David Warren is quite possibly my favorite journalist alive today. He has been writing, lately, on "What is to be done?"This column is the one where he hits it way, way out of the park. Go and read it.

NOW.

A Clarion Call for Subsidiarity

There's a reason that David Warren's column is in my bookmark and my blogroll. He is an excellent writer who defends the moral, the true, the just, and the beautiful.

Here is a case in point. You should go read it.

And since Mr. Warren doesn't have commentary on his site, come back here and comment.

Pressure your senators!

Leahy and Hatch, two longstanding proponents of nearly any legislation that restricts freedom, have come up with a real doozy: S. 3804, the the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (THOMAS link). There is an online opposition group, Demand Progress. Their front page links to stories from nearly a dozen sources.

I urge you to call and write your senators, and tell them to oppose the bill. No need for details, just tell them "OPPOSE S. 3804, the the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act." No point in getting verbose, all your senator will get is a report telling how many have written, called, and emailed in on each side of the issue.

Still More Blogrollin'

Deo gratias, Dr. Sanity has returned to the Blogosphere. In my typically inattentive manner, I failed to notice for nearly a month.

The whole content of her first post since April is this YouTube Video, deftly showing the contrast between President Obama, and one of his predecessors in the Oval Office, to whom his followers are fond of comparing him.

Twitter can't hold everything

At least, I imagine it can't ... like embedded videos. Salute to this post by the Western Confucian. Like him, I stand with Hayek.

The Ruling Class in America

This very long article describes the real political divide in America as well as anything I've read in quite a while. I urge you to check it out.

And I decided to post the link and suggest you read it before I got anywhere on this post on Mark Shea's blog, where I first found it.

How To Have An Austrian School Economy

Salute to the Western Confucian. Full article at A Conservative Blog for Peace. Actual text by Bishop Williamson of the SSPX.

Excerpted are the seven commandments of Austrian School Economics:

1. Thou Must Earn.
2. Thou shalt not spend more than thou earnest.
3. No state may make too many rules.
4. No state may tax too much.
5. No state may spend its way out of a recession.
6. No state may print its way out of a recession.
7. No state may employ its way out of a recession.

Seem like very solid rules to me. I wish we had a government that would follow them.

Government Intervention and High Prices

I found this article, by Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson at Grove City College. He discusses the history of meddling with prices, and how it raises costs. It's worth a read. But in the first comment, along comes this, from Joe DeVet:

[T]here’s a moral dimension to messing with markets which is often overlooked in Catholic discourse about “social justice.” We Catholics proclaim a “preferential option for the poor”, but as the discussion goes on, many other competing “social-justice” goals tend to get in the way. We see a problem like the loss of the family farm, and we figure we’ll subsidize plowing crops under and killing piglets for the sake of the farm. We see a minority who don’t have health insurance, and are tempted to think remaking the whole health system will help those few.

At the end of the day, we may have helped SOME poor in the short term, but have harmed all the poor in the longer term. Prices are higher and goods and services more limited as a result of the interventions. The rich (includes you and me) are inconvenienced; the poor actually suffer. They don’t just “feel” poorer, as the author states, but ARE poorer.

So much for the “preferential option.” Bearing this in mind, we need to recognize that it is not only a bad idea to intervene in markets the way the current administration is trying to do, it is actually sinful.

Supply, Demand, and Price

As a schoolboy, I was taught that demand has a direct relationship to price, and that supply has an inverse relationship to price. Chances are very good that you were taught the same. And it's important to know how supply and demand affect price, but that is very far from being the whole story. Price affects supply and demand, as well.

The Laws of Supply, Demand, and Price

• Increases in supply cause downward pressure on price.
• Decreases in supply cause upward pressure on price.
• Increases in demand cause upward pressure on price.
• Decreases in demand cause downward pressure on price.
• Increases in price tend to attract more resources to production.
• Decreases in price tend to divert resources away from production.
• Increases in price tend to reduce demand.
• Decreases in price tend to stimulate demand.

When supply, demand, production, and price are all allowed to affect each other naturally, there is a constant trend towards equilibrium in all of them. Then, the things we want most are taken care of first, and as inexpensively as possible. Almost everything that is produced is bought and used.

This is the core of the free market system. Prices are allowed to move freely, so people know what use of their resources will bring them the most money. And, all other things being equal, that is what they do. It all works really well until somebody (that is, the government) starts meddling with prices.

EDIT: this really was too much to do at once. I have decided to break the giant wall of text into several posts.

In this series:
Supply, Demand, and Price | Price Caps | Price Supports | Restricting Supply | Excises | Subsidies

Health Care Reform

I believe that the health care reforms being suggested are very, very bad. I have formed a deep and powerful mistrust of any government-run institution. For starters, there's Papa Ben's blanket statement that a bureaucracy cannot provide what is most needed, which is love. Further:

"Bureaucratic Rule of Two: Removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit cost of production." -- Thomas Borcherding, BUDGETS AND BUREAUCRATS: THE SOURCES OF GOVERNMENT GROWTH

I found this article thanks to a combox post over on Father Longenecker's blog. The author, David Goldhill, does an excellent job of explaining why our health care system is so dysfunctional.

A synopsis, if you think it's too long to read, boils down to the King of Id's Golden Rule: Who has the gold, makes the rules. We are not the ones who provide the gold, so we do not make the rules. Medicare, Medicaid, your HMO, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and other insurers are the ones who make the rules. And they make those rules, whether they mean to or not, to benefit themselves. Any benefit we receive is almost an accidental by-product.

I may not agree completely with Goldhill's proposed solutions; I have not yet given them enough thought. But I think he has his pinpointed the systemic root of the problems that most strongly draw our attention.

Tax Day

Today is the deadline for filing US income tax forms.

One of the most telling scenes from the Tom Clancy novel where he had Jack Ryan as the new President was where Ryan's Secretary of the Treasury had the ENTIRE FEDERAL TAX CODE brought before the Congressional committees that oversee such things. The pile of books and documents was so massive that it destroyed the table, before they even got it all on there. Given Clancy's penchant for exhaustive research, I have no doubt that this is an accurate representation of the sheer verbiage regarding taxation and revenue to be found in the Federal Register.

It is not possible for the tax code to be so vast without those corrupt politicians who are drawn to the power that legislators wield inserting laws and regulations that favor themselves and those who contribute to their coffers.

It really needs to be scrapped, and completely. I doubt very much that the people in Congress will let the power cravings which drew them into that job be thwarted in that manner. I understand more and more why Claire Wolfe believes that it is too late to save our current system, though I must agree when she says it is too early to start shooting the bastards.

I also understand why the Catholic Church has never regarded democracy as much of a friend to the people. Democracy led to anti-Catholic purges in The Vendee. Democracy isn't much of a friend to the Catholic Church now, except perhaps in Poland, Malta, and to some degree in Ireland.

There is no reliable guarantor of liberty in an amoral society.

Liberator Online

From Ask Dr. Ruwart in the Liberator Online

QUESTION: In a libertarian society where everything from housing, to health care, to education, to adoption is privatized, how would the minority population -- namely anyone not white, male, straight, and Christian -- be guaranteed equal rights?

For example, being a lesbian, I am afraid that a Catholic hospital (the only one for miles in my small town) will be allowed to deny me treatment, even for a broken bone, just because I'm gay. Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you can't be a doctor to everyone, maybe you should have chosen a different line of work.

MY SHORT ANSWER: Majority rule, which is more or less what we have now, ultimately translates into legalized minority persecution. For example, prior to the success of the civil rights movement, blacks in the U.S. were forbidden, by law, to marry whites, share facilities, patronize the same businesses, etc.

These laws were passed after the Civil War, precisely because blacks were beginning to marry with whites, share facilities, and patronize the same businesses. A few enlightened whites were demonstrating how all could live together peacefully.

Their example frightened the majority who quickly passed laws mandating discrimination. In a libertarian society, these laws could not have been passed because they forced people -- at gunpoint, if necessary -- to stop voluntarily associating. The only legitimate use of force in a libertarian society is self-defense.

Today, same-sex couples find themselves facing the same laws against intermarriage as blacks and whites once did. In a libertarian society, such laws wouldn't be possible. Marriage would be a private contract between two willing individuals who could set the terms to suit themselves.

Your concern, a legitimate one, is that some service providers -- for example, doctors or hospitals affiliated with some religious denominations -- might refuse to treat gay people in a libertarian society. Sadly, they might, even though Christ regularly healed those who did not live by society's norms and were therefore called "sinners."

However, in a libertarian society, we wouldn't have today's morass of medical regulations which limit the number of health care practitioners and facilities. Instead of a single hospital in your neighborhood, you'd likely have more and better facilities to choose from. Most would probably do their best to help anyone who walked through their doors.

Prejudice doesn't end by legal decree. Indeed, people become more resentful towards groups that they are forced to tolerate, associate with, or treat. Consequently, laws which seem to protect minorities often harm them instead.

You suggest that perhaps a doctor who won't treat everyone shouldn't be a doctor. But legalizing that opinion opens the door to legalizing others -- such as "if you aren't marrying to procreate, you shouldn't be allowed to wed." Where would that leave the gay community?

We want freedom of choice, but we don't want others to have it. We can only have freedom if we are willing to give it to others. Ironically, when we honor our neighbors' choices, they are much more likely to honor ours.

Dr. Ruwart, prudently, declines to suggest which religious denominations would require the hospitals affiliated with them to refuse treatment on the basis of same-sex attraction. Not me. I would expect this from Wahhabi Muslims.

Catholic hospitals exist to care for the sick. This is an act of corporal mercy which the Church expects all believers to extend to all who might obtain salvation -- which certainly includes the entire GLBT community. How could we expect to bring this woman to the light of Christ if we do not exemplify His love?

Now, if she wanted a Catholic hospital in a libertarian society to hire her, or provide her with any sort of reproductive therapy outside of a natural marriage, then she would should expect be disappointed. In a libertarian society, nobody would be trying to prevent Catholics from being Catholic.

Dr. Ruwart also declines to comment on the public-good aspect of natural marriage. There is significant public good in children growing up in a natural family, all of them with the same mother and father (and only one of each), all living together. Because this IS a public good, it ought to be encouraged, even by the State. The same cannot be said of any other family structure.

Spiritual malaise

One of the most powerful things about the Internet and hypertext markup language is how easy it becomes to connect things.

Like many and perhaps most libertarians, I loathe the War on Drugs (one of several Wars On Rights our government is waging). I find it impossible to credit the idea that making marijuana, opiates, and cocaine illegal has done more good than harm. Criminalizing has had a neglible impact on demand, but has made satisfying that demand so profitable (by driving up the price) that the market can bear even the expenses associated with the businesses all being run by criminals, many of them drug-addled.

Ann Landers once asked a very perceptive question regarding the War on Drugs: "The real question is why are millions of people so unhappy, so bored, so unfulfilled, that they are willing to drink, snort, inject or inhale any substance that might blot out reality and give them a bit of temporary relief." And people do this regardless of the facts that the risks are just about unreal, and the primary result of indulging in recreational pharmacology is to make you stupid. I've been sort of asking myself this question for years, long before my reversion to mere Christianity or to the Catholic Church. As a libertarian, I tended to blame the lack of liberty.

I ought to have known better. The minimal and anecdotal evidence I have doesn't much support that; the US and Europe have unusually high levels of liberty, compared to much of the world, but as far as I know, they are also where people most often seek obliviation through drugs.

And then I ran across this post, by Jennifer F. Here's the pertinent bit, where she describes the feelings brought on by victory and triumph back when she was an atheist:

I'd forgotten about this until now, but up until a few years ago, almost every time something exciting or good happened I would feel a tinge of depression. No matter how great or exciting the situation, for some reason I could never quite feel fully happy about it. Just as my happiness would be about to reach a crescendo, something would make it fall flat, like when a singer just barely misses the high note. I didn't generally struggle with depression in this time in my life; it was just that for some odd reason whenever something particularly good occurred, it would trigger a vague sensation of despair somewhere deep down inside. I didn't understand why this happened, but my best guess was that maybe I had some problem with not feeling like I deserved good things, or that I had some issue with depression that I wasn't acknowledging.

Though those two things may have been factors, I don't think they were at the root of the problem. Thinking back on it today, it's clear that something else, a very real, inconvenient truth was there in the back of my mind when I got that promotion, deposited the big paycheck, bought the cool car, moved into the downtown loft, got that amazing Christmas present, traveled to the interesting places, went to the hip parties, landed a big client: this is as good as it gets...but it's not quite good enough.

The fun wasn't fun enough, the luxuries weren't luxurious enough, the excitement wasn't exciting enough to completely smother out that part of my soul that begged for something more. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful -- to the contrary, I regularly felt overwhelmed with gratitude for all the wonderful things in my life -- it's that there was a subtle but present sense of despair that these things weren't doing what they were supposed to do. I was kind of happy. But why wasn't I fully happy, why wasn't I completely at peace, why was I still a little bit restless, even when I technically had it all?

That's when it hit me square between the eyes: that Godless life she described lined up with Thoreau's description of lives lived in quiet desperation. People are turning to drugs because turning to themselves and their things, as our culture advocates, cannot satisfy. Western culture has turned to drugs in proportion to how far it has turned from God, in an ultimately fruitless attempt to fill the enormous God-shaped holes left in our lives by our unbelief.

So I am left with this conclusion: Rampant drug abuse is a scourge, to be sure. The War on Drugs is an even worse one. Because it's always best to fight evil as early and often as possible, the thing to do about them now is to evangelize.

To repeat the concluding paragraph of my first post on this blog:

One of the themes you will see me revisit, time and again, is the sincere belief that great evils are only rarely defeated by force and laws. Force and laws can resist evil, and that is the proper use of them. But evils, be they terrorism, violence, abortion, pornography, drugs, or what have you, are only suppressed by force and laws. They are defeated only when evil hearts are transformed by love.