"I'm offended!"

 Radio talk show host Dennis Prager, in referring to his days as a lecturer before his talk show career, mentions the first time someone said, during the Q&A period after his lecture, “I’m offended by what you said.” At this he was puzzled, never having heard someone say such a thing in that context. “I understand that you differ with the outlook of my lecture, but why would you be offended by it?”

In our present time it’s quite common to hear people say that they are offended by someone’s opinion about a given subject or governmental policy advocacy or their religious beliefs.  How did we get to this point where disagreeing with an opinion or advocacy for a political or economic position or religious/ethical view means also taking personal offense at the statements by their interlocutor? Certainly there are philosophical, political and ethical concepts which engender outrage, disdain and even contempt.  Communism, totalitarianism, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, the work of NAMBLA (the north American man/boy love association that advocates for the social and legal acceptance of pedophilia and pederasty) all fall under that category.  But that’s not offense. Offense is a personal affront, an insult, most often preceded by the words, “you” or “you are…” It is not, nor should it ever be simply a disagreement over issues or opinions.  It is caused by an ad hominem attack in its truest sense, which means “to the man”—not an idea or opinion, but an insult of his or her character or person.

As to how we got to this sorry state, where people so often take personal offense at the statements of other’s opinions on political/cultural/religious matters, and consequently seek to censor or ban their speech, there are several antecedents, ideas and cultural trends which not only contributed to it, but were perhaps necessary for its development.

The first would be what I have called the “new morality” of which I have written in me Christian thought blog: https://donmitchell.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-morality-part-1.html (and here) https://donmitchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-morality-part-2.html. What follows from an acceptance of this morality based entirely on feelings is philosophical hierarchy of feelings—and therefore of the good/bad distinctions of this moral structure. A simple statement of the structure of the morality of feelings goes like this: that which makes me or someone for whom I care about feel good is good=righteous; that which makes me or someone for whom I care about feel bad is bad=evil. From this proceeds the concept that the highest good is having good feelings, and the worst evil is making someone have bad feelings.  This has led people to attribute more moral weight to having the “right” feelings—in this equation substitute feelings for thoughts or ideas as demonstrated by the more often used phrase, “well, I feel,” rather than, “I think”—about any number of issues: same sex marriage, global climate, transgenderism, Socialism, etc.  This then leads them to morally condemn—not as mistaken but as evil—those who express different opinions on these issues.  This is why they almost universally attribute “hatred” as the motive for anyone holding opinions—or “feelings”—different from those on their end of the cultural/ideological spectrum. Because they deem hatred as one of the greatest of evils. Ironically they feel not only justified, but somehow ennobled and infused with moral superiority in “hating” those they have deemed as “haters.”  In taking personal offense at the opinions and statements of others who differ with their own they are psychologically rewarded with a sense of self-righteousness, a sense that they are an heroic figure standing up to the forces of evil. 

Tragically these ideas are being inculcated to our young, the idea that they should become, not just angry but personally offended, and rail against these perceived injustices.  And from this we get Greta Thunberg standing before the United Nations in 2019, a 16 year old girl, sneering at the assembled national representatives, all of whom were many decades older than her with an accumulated life experience orders of magnitude beyond hers, and intoning to them, “how dare you!”  She is merely a symbol now of the countless adherents to the new morality who take every opportunity to say “I’m offended!”

The added dimension to this—the danger of this phenomenon—is the reward obtained; this the sense of of self-righteousness and moral superiority sets up a feedback loop incentivizing more anger, more virtue signaling of offense and condemnation of the offender, more Greta Thunbergs pointing the finger of vilification and screeching, “How dare you!”

Star Trek Economics

 In a conversation with my sons last weekend the subject of Star Trek came up.  My oldest, Nigel, told me he had read that one of the writers became frustrated with Gene Roddenberry’s insistence that the Federation was a crime-free, money-free utopia.  Where would the conflict for drama come from?  I was suddenly struck by an idea, after a lifetime of being a Star Trek fan—starting with the original series that was my absolute favorite TV show when I was a child—that had never occurred to me before: the economic system described in the Star Trek canon was fundamentally Communist in nature.  And in one of the subsequent series of the Star Trek universe—Deep Space Nine—free market economics (aka Capitalism) is mocked and vilified in the form of the alien race the Ferengi.  Not only are the Ferengi portrayed as icons of greed, bigotry and exploitation, but physically ugly and repulsive to drive the point home on subconscious levels.

Later I got curious about this and looked it up on the web.  It turns out I’m not the first to whom this has occurred, at least not the broader subject of the economics of Star Trek. There’s quite a few YouTube videos on the subject and two economists have even written books about it, Trekonomics by Manu Saadia and The Economics of Star Trek by Rick Webb. It seems that both books deny that Star Trek society is Communist because it still allows the ownership of personal property and individual freedom, and instead they talk about it being a “post scarcity” society. Perhaps because, as Thomas Sowell has written, the definition of economics is “the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses.”  And that Maynard Keynes described the central problem of social order is scarcity—a problem he predicted would end in 100 years (well, *that* didn’t happen).

Before I go further let me make clear that this whole moneyless economic system of Star Trek has not been a consistent feature throughout the Star Trek universe.  There are references to Scotty “buying” a boat and Kirk “selling” his childhood home, as well as other, presumably, monetary transactions in the TV shows and films.  But in several places where the economics of the Star Trek Federation has been specifically addressed, the writers have made it clear that there is no money and people work “to better themselves and mankind.”

So now to my argument that Star Trek society is, if not entirely, at least fundamentally Communist.  Let me start with a definition of Communism.  Most of us, when we think of Communism, think of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. What most people don’t realize is that neither of these is Communist, and in fact there has never been, nor will there ever be a Communist state.  This is because, according to Marxist theory, Communism is the final condition of social evolution wherein there is NO state, a social utopia in which all countries and governments have faded away and everyone is simply sharing everything, “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”  With this in mind, calling a country Communist is an oxymoron.

The fact that the Star Trek Federation has a military and some sort of elected government (although that’s never been made clear) and that private ownership of property exists, would also preclude it from being strictly Communist.  But I would assert that it being a moneyless society in which work is motivated solely by personal improvement and the “betterment of mankind,” makes it much closer to the Communist ideal than any of the countries currently called Communist, all of which still have a monetary system and a hierarchy of work, the lower echelons of which are forced—nobody in “Communist” countries gets a complete free ride; everyone that can still has to work.

So the next question is how does this Star Trek economy actually *work*?  All this talk about working to improve one’s self and better mankind sounds great…if you’re a doctor or a teacher or a starship captain.  But who’s going to want to work cleaning toilets or slopping hogs, or any number of other jobs that are boring or dirty or just downright unpleasant?  Because I don’t see a bunch of robots toiling away at this kind of thing in any Star Trek TV shows or movies.  The presumption of the Star Trek economy is that it’s “post scarcity”, that due to scientific advances and replicator technology all disease, hunger, shelter—all the basic needs of life—are met and no one needs to work for money to supply those necessities.  This is wish fulfillment of the most fanciful nature; you might as well say that there’s an infinite number of genies who are magically producing everything we want.  But, for the sake of argument let’s say that future technology could actually accomplish this: would that inevitably lead to peace, the end of crime and the kind of utopian social order depicted in Star Trek?  No, because this denies basic realities of human nature.  But of course that conceit has been at the heart of Marxism and the Communist ideal—that man is perfectible under the right social conditions, that crime, antisocial pathology and human misery are all results of unmet needs and inequality of results, or as Rousseau said, man in his natural state *is* perfect but is enslaved by corrupt governments.

The problem with the vision of Star Trek economics and Federation utopianism is two-fold: the first being a complete misunderstanding of human nature, the second being a complete misunderstanding of free market enterprise (Capitalism).  I think I can deal with both of these at the same time.

Thomas Sowell has written about the two main concepts of human nature which he calls the “constrained” or “tragic” view of human nature and the “unconstrained” view of human nature.  The “unconstrained” view is that held by Marx and other social utopians, the view that human nature is perfectible if only the right social conditions are met—conditions which *they* know how to implement.  The “constrained” or “tragic” view might also be called the biblical view, that man is fallen and irredeemably flawed—this side of heaven—and can never be perfected, only ameliorated. Free market enterprise understands human nature in the constrained view and realistically incorporates that reality in its system of incentives and disincentives.  As Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” In other words, benign self-interest (but *not* greed—more on this later.)

Why do people work at boring, dirty and generally unpleasant jobs now?  The Marxist says it’s because they are oppressed and exploited by the bourgeoisie and I can presume that would be something like the answer given by Kirk or Picard.  But watch a few episodes of Mike Row’s Dirty Jobs and you come away with a much different picture.  People take pride in their work, even when it consists of unpleasant, dirty conditions and even drudgery; and not just in the work itself but in the fact that they are making their own way in the world, providing for themselves and their loved ones.  This is what economist and social scientist Arthur Brooks has called “happiness due to earned success.”  The data is voluminous and very clear on this: people are happy when they feel they have *earned* their success, not when it’s just given to them; and this is regardless of how much money that success has afforded them.  It’s essentially tied to the dignity and feeling of accomplishment of making their way in the world, of earning their living. (Brooks has written a number of books on this, by the way.)  An essential part of this equation is *earning*—the very fact that a market transaction occurs, you work and you get *paid* for your work. A feeling of “improving yourself and bettering all mankind” could never begin to substitute for that, or motivate anyone to work a “dirty job.”

At the core of all misconceptions of free market enterprise (Capitalism) is the zero sum myth.  This is the idea that all wealth, all money, all resources, are a “fixed pie” and for one to get a larger slice means that someone else gets a smaller slice.  In other words, wealth is accumulated at the expense of others: for one to become rich, someone else must become poor.  This faulty thinking has a long history and can be heard in old axioms such as the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” and to other myths such as that Capitalism is “driven by greed.”  Remember the movie Wall Street and the Gordon Gekko character’s speech, “greed is good?”  The fact is that free market enterprise is driven by altruism, by serving the customer the absolute best that you can, because only in that way can you hope to have a successful business.  Rip off your customers and see how long you stay in business.  And yet listen to anyone with the anti-Capitalist viewpoint—and it’s hard to find anything *but* an anti-Capitalist viewpoint in the press or any form of popular media and entertainment—and you’ll come away with the idea that Capitalists do nothing but rip off their customers.  As for the “fixed pie” myth, in man’s natural state, the pie is not only not fixed in size, the pie doesn’t even exist.  First somebody—let’s call her entrepreneur—had to *think* of a pie.  Then she had to gather the ingredients.  Then she had to *make* the pie. That’s how it went with every single thing that makes up what we call an economy: every product, every service, every building, every car…everything.  It had to be conceived and then built, one at a time. And each one of those things built *added* to the size of pie.  

In one of the videos I watched the presenter made a big deal about how something like the 26 richest people on earth own as much as the poorest 3.8 billion people.  My question is, did they acquire their wealth by stealing it from those poor people?  If not, if what they actually did was *create* that wealth that didn’t exist before, what’s your problem?  A more interesting statistic to me is that in about 12 years world poverty was cut in half.  It wasn’t foreign aid that did that, it wasn’t non-governmental organizations that did that—it was free market capitalism that did that. No economic system in the history of mankind has enriched humanity and improved living conditions all over the globe as has free market capitalism.  Economist Deirdre McClosky has written extensively on this.  She calls it “The Great Enrichment.”  According to the data, since the 1800s the developed world experienced an increase in wealth of 3,000%! 

So after all that I can say that I still like Star Trek, at least its science fiction elements, but their economic system is pure fantasy nonsense.

Wordsmithing, part 10

Subsidy

1. a direct pecuniary aid furnished by a government to a private industrial undertaking, a charity organization, or the like.

2. a sum paid, often in accordance with a treaty, by one government to another to secure some service in return.

3. a grant or contribution of money.

4. money formerly granted by the English Parliament to the crown for special needs.

Recently I got into a bit of an online tussle with someone over a quote by TV jester John Stewart of the Daily Show.  The quote was as follows: 

Hypocrisy: bitching that paying for birth control “goes against your religious beliefs” while expecting non-Christian taxpayers to pay for your churches.

The caption by the poster of the meme read: It’s time to tax the churches. 

I don’t much care for being unfairly called a hypocrite, so I posed the following question on the comments section: 

Please explain to me how non-Christian taxpayers are paying for churches.

To which I was given a link to blog post that referenced this blog post by the Washington Post.  If you click on the link you can read the whole post, but here’s a table with the break-down that is the heart of the piece. 

Now notice that in every case but one (the faith-based initiatives) every line item describes a tax exemption which they then title a “subsidy”.  Here is my online response:

This entire piece relies on a deceptive misuse of a word: "subsidy". This is a rhetorical propaganda tactic that the left uses all the time, and it's based on the concept that all money belongs to the government, and to whatever degree they allow us to keep that money is from their benevolence. Proceeding from that premise, anyone or any group of people who are allowed to keep more of their money than anyone or any other group, is deemed as taking that money from the later. These funds are then viewed as a "subsidy" to the former. This whole premise is not an American idea, it comes from Marxism. The American idea is that our rights come from God, not from the government, and that government only gets its authority from the consent of the people. That authority wields terrible power, though, the power of a monopoly on violence. In other words the government has the power, by threat of violence to confiscate a portion of the money you make. We call these taxes. A subsidy is actually when the government takes money that they have confiscated from one group of people and gives that money to another group of people. These are sometimes called transfer payments. So, for instance, farmers who grow certain crops of which the government wish to see more, in an effort to manipulate commodities markets, are given subsidies from your tax dollars. They are actually given money to grow those crops. But a tax break, such as the mortgage interest deduction you are allowed to claim on your taxes, is not a subsidy, it is merely the government allowing you to keep more of the money you made. Even if I conceded that tax exemption were a "type" of subsidy (which I don't, but let's pretend that I do), it would still be a "type" in which no funds are transferred to the church, only in which funds are not transferred from the church to the government. So the question remains unanswered, and actually unanswerable. The only way to come to the conclusion that tax payers are "paying" for churches is to think that the money that churches would have paid to the government in taxes, if they were not tax exempt, actually belongs to the taxpayers—which is absurd. There are no subsidies—no transfer payments—to churches. There is a tax exempt status to them, just as to many other non-profit organizations in this country. That tax exempt status has existed from the very beginning of this nation. If you wish to tax churches, what other non-profit organizations do you wish to tax? Non-profit hospitals? Charities for the poor? Drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities?

As I mentioned before, the one line item in the table above that actually is a subsidy is for faith-based initiatives.  Understand, these government funds do not go for buildings or any other assets for churches, but rather to fund programs that are faith-based, such as alcohol and drug treatment, support for young, unwed mothers, programs that work with prisoners to teach life skills and reduce criminal recidivism.

The misuse of the word “subsidy” by the left to create the misperception that any tax break is actually a theft of taxpayer money is another example of the leftist lexicon, the intentional manipulation and distortion of language, of redefining words to control the popular debate about the size and scope of government.  To the leftist and the statist, government is the means by which utopia can be created; therefore all that is not government—the free market, private business, private charities, non-governmental agencies that compete with what they believe are the provinces of government welfare entitlements— must be marginalized, discredited, or better yet, vilified. 

"Free" College and the Minimum Wage

I got into an online discussion with a friend of a friend about the minimum wage. The discussion started with my friend’s friend saying that we should offer free college education to everyone, to which I said,

Free college education. That's an interesting idea. How do you propose this? Should we enslave all higher education professionals...and compel them to work for nothing? But they must eat and wear clothing...who will pay for that? And what of their task masters...you know, the guys with whips...who will pay them? And will the quality of education suffer under these conditions? Or did you really mean to say that the government should take over all higher education schools, confiscate even more money from us, and provide college education at no cost (other than taxes) to the students? But then that's not really "free" is it?

Then he proposed raising the minimum wage, to which I said,

If there is anything that should be mine--mine to do with as I please, mine to take anywhere I wish in this country, mine to decide without any interference from bureaucracy--it should be my labor, i.e. selling the labor of my hands. I should be able to sell it at whatever price I deem. Minimum wage is government tyranny in its most pure and undiluted form, though, as illustrated on the cover of Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism, offered with a smiley face with the best of intentions, for "our own good", but tyranny nonetheless. It is leviathan government descending from on high to tell me, "no, you may not sell your labor for that price." And if there is no one willing to buy my labor at the price they deem fit, too bad for me. Here are some crumbs we will give you from our noble largesse from funds we have confiscated from your fellow citizens who are more "privileged" than you.

Then he said, So therefore, if all I can sell my labor for, (assuming that I can find a job), is lower than the cost of living, that's a good thing?

And I said,

Please enlighten me on the "cost of living". What is it? Usually when that term is used today it is in reference to an index arbitrarily set by the same set of bureaucratic tyrants that tell us what the "minimum wage" should be.

And he said, My personal definition of the cost of living is food, shelter, clothing, transportation and costs associated with employment.

And I ended with this,

Food, shelter, clothing, transportation--and how do you measure that? These days I eat quite well (too well, judging by my waistline) but when I was first married and making minimum wage, my wife fixed a whole lot of hamburger helper dishes. We also rented a furnished and utilities-paid one bedroom apartment. We had a second hand TV and a crappy little record player with tiny built in speakers, the kind you would see in children's bedrooms. We had one car. My wife would drop me off at work, then drive herself to work, or I would carpool with a friend at work. We agonized about any clothing purchase and found the best price we could before buying. We didn't have a dishwasher or cable TV or air-conditioning in our car or a smart phone with a data package (they didn't exist in 1975), but we got by and actually saved money. Not because the minimum wage was so much better then, but because we lived as frugally as we knew how.

In times before mine it was common for people with large houses to take in boarders to supplement their income, or to actually run boarding houses as a business. These were very common for single men or women, and quite reasonable since one was only renting a room and sharing a common bathroom. It was also common for men who never earned enough to support a family--for whatever reason--to remain single and live in such boarding houses their entire lives. Today both the boarding house scenario and the conditions in which my wife and lived when newly married seem unthinkable today. Things like personal computers, wifi, central air conditioning, dishwashers, cable TV (and multiple TV sets), smart phones with large data packages, multiple cars per family, $200 or $300 basketball shoes, are all considered necessities and indexed as "the cost of living".

As to the worth of the individual,  [he had indicated that paying someone a small wage meant that employer, or society or something, valued them less as human beings dm] you seem to be conflating a person's worth as a human being with their worth as a wage earner. One has virtually nothing to do with the other. As Jesus told us, we are all of great worth to God by virtue of the fact that we are created in God's image.

But a wage earner's worth is based on the value his or her labor brings to the employer. The entrepreneur creates a product or service which is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. When the entrepreneur needs additional labor other than his own to make that product or provide that service, a job is created, but only at a wage commensurate with what the customer is willing to pay. When wages are arbitrarily driven up--by government fiat, let's say--the entrepreneur often finds that the job is simply unnecessary, as in the case of theater ushers for instance, or can be replaced by mechanization, as in the case of berry pickers or the young bag boys at grocery markets who would take your deposit pop cans here in Oregon, both jobs of which have now been replaced forever by machines. Entrepreneurs don't create jobs so people can have jobs--only the government does that, which they do solely by confiscating money from producers.

Entrepreneurs create jobs because they need work done which they can sell as a product or service at a profitable level. If they cannot do that at a profitable level, they fail and go out of business, and all the jobs from that business end. This is the cold equation. It's not about how anybody "feels" about you, or whether they like you, or whether you "deserve" to earn more (whatever that's supposed to mean). It's just this: can you bring a profitable value to your employer with the work you do? And the other part of this cold equation is that minimum wage laws, apart from being tyrannical and immoral, don't make jobs, or sustain jobs, they end them. Some of them, some whole classifications of jobs, forever. And who is hurt most by this? The low skilled, young worker trying to get a start in the job market. And who among that cohort does this hurt the most? Without question teenage black males.

My economic hero (and hero of other intellectual sorts as well), Thomas Sowell, was a Marxist in his economic ideology, all the way through his academic studies, even as he studied under free market sage Milton Friedman. But what turned Sowell from a Marxists to one of our most eloquent defenders of free market enterprise was his experience working for the Federal Labor Commission as an economist and seeing for himself the raw data. The disastrous effects, especially on his fellow American blacks were clear and irrefutable. When he began to make noise at the Commission about this, they basically told him to shut up about it. So he quit, went back to teaching economics and began his writing career, no longer a Marxist but an ardent apologist for classical economics and free market enterprise. When I read his text, Basic Economics, the scales fell from my eyes. I have since read everything I can find by this giant of clear thinking, and I urge everyone else to do the same. Or at least read Basic Economics.

Why I Am a Republican

After some recent engagements online, I thought it would be useful to clarify my political affiliation. This seems urgently needed since the question of party identity in the United States seems completely obscured by slogans, myth, and perceptions of branding designed by the spin-doctors of professional campaign managers and public relation mercenaries.

 Before I get into why I am a Republican, let me give you the problem I have with the Republican party. It's perhaps best illustrated by an oft-stated axiom by my cultural hero, Dennis Prager: "There are two parties in the Untied States--the destructive party, and the stupid party. I belong to the stupid party." I'm not a Republican because I think they're brilliant. They're not, they are indeed, stupid--at least in one very import aspect: messaging. I am often appalled and discouraged by how incompetent the Republican party is at defining itself and the principles upon which it is based, to the electorate, and more importantly, to the popular culture at large. There are many sagacious thinkers expert at defining and explaining conservative ideals, but the Republican leadership and political class seem immune to their instruction. It's disheartening to watch Republican politicians bumble their way through press conferences, sound-bites, and talk-show interviews; to see the disjointed, contradictory statements, the back-biting, the self-inflicted wounds, the complete ignorance of utilizing popular media.

 Conversely, the Democrat party is a grand master of messaging and media, from a remarkable discipline in message (a phrase or slogan, repeated verbatim by every single Democrat legislator, party official, commentator and apparatchik day after day in every single media appearance), to its complete command of iconography and image. Just look at a website, for instance, of two campaigning legislators, one Democrat, one Republican. It's a safe bet that the website of the Republican will look dull and amateurish in comparison to that of the Democrat. The Republican party just doesn't seem to understand the importance and power of popular media, image, and the arts.

 So, why am I a Republican? The short answer is because of the ideas and principles that define the party and its platform, and most importantly because those ideas and principles coincide with my faith, my worldview, and my own political/philosophical beliefs. Space does not allow me to address all the details--I think that would be book length--but let me hit the high points.

 Of greatest importance is the core defining difference between the two parties; as I see it, this is their divergent views on the role and scope of government. My thinking about this is heavily influenced by Thomas Sowell's masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. In it Sowell describes two different visions of how the world works and of human nature itself--what in Christian philosophical terms is often called worldview (from the German philosophical term, weltanschauung)--which he names the constrained vision, and the unconstrained vision. The constrained vision --what he otherwise calls the classic or tragic view of human nature--he asserts is in essence the biblical view, that man is fallen and all his effort are therefore constrained by the limitations of his sinful nature; his condition may be ameliorated, but never perfected except by God in the next life. The unconstrained vision sees no limitations on the condition of man, believing that perfection and utopia are possible through human effort.

 The out-working of these contrary visions in the two parties are exemplified by their defining views on the role and scope of government: the Republican party believes in limited government, confined to those narrowly-defined tasks enumerated in the Constitution (establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty); the Democrat party believes in inexorably and infinitely expanding government, and with projects such as the New Deal, the Great Society, and most recently, the Affordable Care Act has massively magnified not only the size, but scope of government. Regarding this last point, this scope has not merely been enlarged in application, but in the very ideas that define government in much of popular culture. See, for instance, the Four Freedoms speech given by FDR on January 6, 1941 in which he enumerate two freedoms never mentioned in our founding documents--freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These philosophically departed from the Constitutional concept of government's role as being the securer of conditions under which its citizens might pursue their own happiness, to one in which the government should be the provider of that happiness. Or see the Politics of Meaning speech given by then First Lady Hillary Clinton at the University of Texas, in Austin on April 7, 1993 in which she said,

We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

Here she defines politics (and by extension government) as an essential domain of realizing personal meaning and fulfillment, in effect advocating an encroachment of government into areas formerly inhabited only by religion, ethics, and philosophy. Or watch the online cartoon, The Life of Julia, produced by Barak Obama's campaign during the last election, in which the fictional Julia is cared for, from birth to death, by a Democrat party-controlled state (headed, of course, by President Barak Obama the compassionate), which serves at once as surrogate parent, spouse, and all around benefactor. 

Branching out from these core views are the individual policies informed by them. The Republican party, since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, has stood for a strong and even interventionist national defense with robust funding of our military and intelligence gathering capabilities. That this is an essential role of government--perhaps even the central role of federal government--as enumerated in the Constitution is, I believe, unassailable as it is implied in three of the six purposes of government listed in the preamble: insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, and secure the Blessings of Liberty. Where once the Democrat party shared this goal--the doctrine of Cold War containment of Communism and maintaining a military capability of fighting two major wars simultaneously in different parts of the earth started under Truman--it began to advocate a reduction in military budget, force, capability, and deployment in favor of redirecting revenues and human assets to social welfare programs and transfer payments. This began in earnest under the Reagan years with their relentless resistance to his military build-up, his deployment of midrange nuclear missiles in Europe, and his plans for the ICBM Strategic Defense Initiative, then solidified as party dogma in the Clinton administration. It has now intensified in both scope and degree in the Obama administration with its withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, its "leading from behind" in the action in Libya, its incomprehensible forfeiture of advantage in the recent negotiations with Iran, and the deep budget cuts weighted most heavily on the military in the sequester cuts.

 As the Democrat party has invested itself more deeply in the unconstrained vision it has made uniform its positions on social issues in which, in prior times, its members had held diverse views. This has had the effect of strictly polarizing these issues along party lines. None of these issues is more clearly polarized than that of abortion. One by one, Democrat legislators who had spent most of their political careers as "pro-life" (anti-abortion), some of whom had wielded great power within the party, "saw the light" and changed their position to "pro-choice" (pro-abortion on demand and in some cases funded by the state) such that this position now serves as a litmus test for any position in the party. I have an acquaintance who had for many years been an elected precinct committee person in a county Democrat party. Precinct committee person is the very bottom elected position one can hold. Yet he lost that seat because, as a serious practicing Catholic, he refused to capitulate on this issue. The newest polarized social issue is the definition of marriage. Apparently the unconstrained vision impels its adherents to advocate for the eradication of distinctions--such as male and female--that have guided human civilization from its beginnings. This overturning of social and moral conventions driven by the unconstrained vision has seemingly engendered an antipathy to the source of that morality: biblical ethical truth. In the last presidential election at the Democrat convention when the committees were convening to write the platform, one leader saw that no mention of God had yet been included, and proposed an inclusion of some such statement as had always been made in the platform. This suggestion was roundly booed by the delegates. The boos were ignored by the leadership and the statement included, but it's indicative of an attitude prevalent now in the Democrat party.

Economic policy is another area of party line polarization that I would assert proceeds from the differing worldviews with which most of their members align themselves. In grid form it would look like this:

Party              Worldview           Economic theory      Government policy
Republican    Constrained          Hayek                       Non-interventionist
Democrat       Unconstrained      Keynes                     Interventionist

Soon after the stock market crash of 1929 under moderate Republican president Herbert Hoover, federal governmental interventionist policy began. One of the first such policies was the Smoot/Hawley tariff, signed into law by Hoover (despite his objections) in 1930. The tariff, created in an effort to help American farmers, started a cascade of reciprocal tariffs all over the world that stifled world trade and possibly precipitated a global depression and most assuredly deepened it. FDR actually campaigned against the tariff while running against Hoover, but soon after taking office, began a massive project of federal economic interventionist policies that included a complete overhauling of the Federal Reserve, The Banking Act of 1933 that instituted the FDIC, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (which told farmers what and how much of a crop they could grow, as well as set price controls on commodities), a deep restriction of the money supply, The Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the formation of the National Recovery Administration that was so far reaching and draconian in its imposition of hundreds of "codes" on American business, that it was finally struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. Throughout his 12 years as President of the United States, FDR relentlessly lived up to the call he had made in a college commencement speech in 1932 that,

This country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

So he kept experimenting with one government interventionist policy after another, sometimes abandoning them, but more often just adding a new one to the mix. This seemed to serve as a turning point in the Democrat party; since then such attitudes toward economic policy have become uniform and hardened in the party.

It's important to note, however, that the homogenization of Republican party attitudes to economic policy did not begin to occur until the Reagan administration. Both Senator Smoot and Representative Hawley, for instance, were Republicans, as were Senator Davis and Representative Bacon of the Davis/Bacon act. And in 1971 President Nixon imposed sweeping price and wage controls on virtually every industry and commodity in the country. Even since Reagan there have been departures from Hayekian non-interventionist theory by Republicans such as the steel tariff imposed by George W. Bush in 2002, or the 152 billion dollar economic stimulus package he pushed through in 2008.

The final issue I'd like to address is that of entitlements and social welfare programs. But first let me establish some historical grounding.

The origins of the modern welfare state begin with Otto von Bismarck in late 19th century Germany who introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance. Its development was underpinned by a wholesale acceptance of the unconstrained vision which led to a definition and focus on equality in contradiction to that held by the American founders.

Under the American system the focus of equality is in process, equality under the law. In other words, the law and its processes shall treat all its citizens equally, ignoring their real-world differences (skin color, natural abilities, economic status, etc.). Thus our symbol of justice, the statue of Lady Justice, a sword in one hand, and a set of balance scales in the other, is blindfolded, acknowledging that differences do exists, but barring herself from seeing those differences so she cannot take them into account in her judgement. But beginning with the French Revolution and progressing through the development of the modern welfare state to its apex in the European socialist democracies, most of the countries of Europe defined and focused on a concept of equality of outcome. The ultimate good in this view is a leveling of economic class whereby the poor are brought up while the rich are brought down, and this is accomplished through the power of the state which redistributes income by confiscatory taxation of the rich and transferring that wealth to the poor via social welfare programs.

In her brilliant history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes begins by describing a tour of the Soviet Union taken by a group of FDR advisors, some of whom later became part of what was called FDR's "brain trust" who helped formulate the policies he called the "New Deal". Welfare entitlements in the US started in the New Deal, expanded in the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, and now further enlarging in the Obama administration, have their origins in a combination of ideas borrowed from the European socialist democracies as well as the Soviet Union. They all proceed from the unconstrained vision, and have led to a gradual abandonment of the American view of equality (equality of process) and the adoption of the European view of equality (equality of outcome). To be sure, there has been substantial participation by the Republican party in this paradigm shift. The passage of Medicare, for instance, had massive bipartisan support. But with the polarizing of the two parties that has occurred over the last few decades--which has entailed many conservative Democrats changing parties, as well as a few liberal Republicans switching to Democrat--differing approaches to welfare and entitlements has clearly emerged.

On the Democrat side the sense seems to be that an ever-increasing progressive tax system coupled with an unending proliferation of transfer payments, social programs, subsidies, and entitlements are the only hope for the poor and the method by which a truly egalitarian utopia can be achieved, the "fundamental transformation of America" that Barak Obama spoke of five days before his election into office. And any suggestion of scaling back this project, reducing the progressive ratio of taxation, or tightening the requirements for access to the programs, is characterized at best as indifference, and more usually as outright heartless cruelty to the poor and vulnerable. So, under the Obama administration we have seen the eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as Food Stamps, greatly relaxed, first as part of the 2009 Stimulus Act, then further by administrative fiat when he changed elements within the Clinton Welfare Reform Law in 2010. This resulted in the number of recipients of Food Stamps soaring from 28 million in 2008 to 47 million five years later; perhaps an outworking of an axiom bandied by Democrat policy-makers: "a policy only for the poor is a poor policy"?

Conversely the Republican approach to entitlements and assistance programs is to view them as a safety net to help the poorest, the most disadvantaged, the most vulnerable in our society, but always with an eye to avoid the moral hazard of engendering permanent dependance in all save those who are incapable of ever providing for themselves. As Paul Ryan said during the last presidential campaign, "we want these programs to be a safety net, not a hammock." Of course this is invariably characterized by Democrats as the desire to do away with these programs all together.

In conclusion, there are a great number of other issues in which the Republican party stands in agreement with my worldview, biblical moral truth, and political views, among them: private gun ownership, school choice, the death penalty, states rights, energy policy, environmental policy, voter ID, support for Israel, reform (with the possibility of privatizing portions) of the "big three" entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to keep them solvent, and the appointment of federal and appellate judges who adhere to an originalist view of the Constitution rather than a "living document" malleable view. For further clarity I have included this link to a website that is a synopsis side by side comparison of the Democrat and Republican party platforms of 2012 using excerpts copied directly from their written platform documents. These are the Democrat and Republican statements on these issues written in their own words.

I have written this blog post in the effort to clarify my own thoughts as well as to cut through the fog of disparaging bromides and smears. As always, I welcome comments, questions, debate, even spirited argument. But if all you have to offer is unsupported accusations, ad hominem attack, or name calling, be warned that I will not respond.

Is Health Care A Right?

In a recent discussion on FaceBook I was having with a friend who works in health care, another of her friends posted the following:

From my perspective, the key question is whether healthcare is a right or a privilege.
If it is a right, then there must be a way to provide an appropriate level of basic health care for all and an opportunity for the market to offer extended benefits (think Medicare-for-all with Medicare Advantage-like extended benefits).

Here is my answer to this question:

With respect to health care being a right under the US system of law, I would say it most certainly is...in the same sense that all the rights guaranteed under the Constitution are negative rights; in other words our bill of rights are all constraints on government action and conversely acknowledging the freedom of the individual citizen to act. We are thus told, not that we have a right to happiness, but the right to pursue happiness unimpeded by government. So health care is a right, by this American system of thought, in that the government can never deny a citizen health care. This may seem axiomatic, but it's actually an important distinction born out by the way in which interpreting rights from this negative approach (the US way) as opposed to interpreting them from the positive approach (to a great extent the European way) plays out in practical terms. Let me lay some ground work.

The US value of equality is an approach to the concept as process, i.e. all citizens shall be viewed under the law as equal. All shall be treated the same without regard to age, sex, economic class, religion, etc. This is what is known as a legal fiction, because in reality no one, not even identical twins are equal. We all have differences in height, weight, strength, natural abilities--but the legal fiction is that we are all viewed by the law as though we were the same; no one shall be given preference or be discriminated against because of his differences from another. Thus lady justice is depicted as blindfolded so that she may not see the differences between those who stand before her. As an aside, this idea of legal fiction is the principle at work in the recent SCOTUS decision that classified corporations as persons. This is nothing new; it goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. The word "corporation" is derived from the Latin corpus meaning "body". The Romans invented the idea of treating a "body" of people, (a club, a church congregation, an association of business partners), as a single person to make it easier for legal transactions such as taxation or law suits. So this already has a long established precedent in US law and indeed can be traced back to English common law. In much of the European social democracies, however, equality is rather interpreted in the positive sense of result, i.e. the government shall be responsible to achieve equality of outcome for its citizens.

The first thing to understand is that these two views of equality are mutually exclusive; they necessitate two completely different and indeed opposing actions from government. The US (negative) view of equality demands that the government in no way takes into account the advantages or disadvantages of its citizens in its behavior toward them. The European (positive) view of equality necessitates that citizens are categorized by their advantages and disadvantages, and then treated in vastly different ways so as to level out the results. It should be obvious by now that we in the US are, bit by bit, losing our historic understanding of equality and replacing it with the European ideal of equality of result.

If we look at the positive and negative views of health care as a right, the same sort of contradictions arise. In the negative view the single incumbency on the government is to leave the citizen alone to pursue her own health care from those whose livelihood it is to provide it. But from the positive view the incumbency on government is to either be the provider of health care, or to be the agency of the provision of health care; in both cases this leads to tyranny of government. At first blush this seems counterintuitive--how can so altruistic a goal as universal government-supplied health care lead to tyranny? Quite easily, it turns out.

First, let's consider: what is a "right"? I propose this as a working definition: a right is a moral and just claim on the part of an individual. In all US style negative rights, that claim can be stated something like this: "I have the right to say what I want, to worship the God I please, to associate with whom I wish, to not be searched or have my property seized without due process of law, to own and carry a gun with which to defend myself, to not be taxed or governed without my consent." Notice the defining principle is the action of the individual and the restriction of action on government. But the positive right claim might be expressed this way: "I have a right to be provided with health care (or a job, or a place to live)". The initiating action has switched from the individual to…? Well, some one other than the individual, someone else who will provide this thing or service being demanded. And of course that means the government. But what the government provides it must first take from at least some of its citizens. To illustrate this in its most stark terms, let's, in the words of Einstein, do a thought experiment. Let us suppose that one day all the doctors, and all the nurses, and all X-ray technicians, and all the other health care professionals in the United States got fed up with medicine as a career and quit. And let us further suppose that the United States had at this point fully adopted the European notion of health care as a positive right. What would the government do? It seems obvious that faced with the legal obligation to provide health care to its citizens--to satisfy their right to it--they would have to force those health care professionals back into service. Now this is an obviously absurd proposition, but it illustrates an idea already at work in the US health care system. Our legislature has made it illegal for a hospital to turn away a patient--any patient--from emergency care for failure to pay, and so, at least to a small degree, health care professionals are already being forced into service. The professionals are not forced to work without pay, so it is the hospitals which must bear the cost, which they in turn pass on to other, paying patients and mostly to their insurance providers.

So, the first level of tyranny is the imposition by government of the costs of mandated health care on those who provide it, and citizens who have not benefited from the care (patients who pay the hidden costs of care provided for others). The second level of tyranny is the realization of that which the negative view of health care as right guarantees against--the denial of care.

The question was posed as to whether health care should be viewed as a right or a privilege. I would say that viewed from the negative rights position, it never runs the risk of being a privilege (in the sense of being either granted or denied at the discretion of government), but under the positive view it by necessity becomes a matter of privilege in that it is subject to the discretion of government and the exigencies of its resources. That which the government grants it can deny. Let's look at two ways in which this happens; one is bad, the other is much, much worse.

Under the English public health system, those that have the resources can purchase private health care, but under the Canadian system even that possibility is closed from the citizen. The Canadian government has become the sole provider of health care, and they deny all other providers. This is why, when wealthy Canadians, or members of the Canadian Parliament, get serious heart trouble or cancer, they come to the United States for surgery or treatment. Even middle-class Canadians, as they become more and more desperate languishing on interminable waiting lists for care, will sell their homes or cash in their retirement funds to come to the United States for treatment. But even the more benign English public health system is fraught with enormous cost problems. Consider that the public health care system of tiny little England is the 4th largest employer in the world. And consider the irony of the fact that England, where the MRI machine was invented, performs MRI tests at a minuscule per capita rate in comparison to that which is done in the US.

And now for the worst form of government tyranny in health care. Do you remember the older pastor and his wife from Bulgaria who are supported by Meadow Springs Community Church? [This is the church I and my friend both attend] If you recall, she has heart trouble. Bulgaria, while no longer a Communist country, still has a public health system, but being an economically depressed nation, their resources are quite limited. When the couple visited a few years ago, the story they told us was that when a citizen of Bulgaria reaches the age of 65 they are cut off from all health care. All health care! By government mandate, no more resources will be "wasted" on them. That is truly a denial of health care.

Socialism is no longer an either/or proposition, but rather a spectrum. I subscribe to the redefinition of socialism put forth by Kevin Williamson that Socialism is government control of the means of production, supplanting the former definition that it's government ownership of the means of production. I would further assert that the United States has already progressed quite a way across that spectrum, with the trend directed further still. I believe this is a grave error and an abandonment of the values and principles upon which this country was founded: liberty, limited government, the personal morality and religiosity of its citizenry. As for health care in this country, I believe many of the solutions to the present "mess" and catastrophic costs are to be found in free market solutions, indeed by actually allowing a free market in medicine--something which, for all the lamentation by the press and social utopianists about the "greed" of the profit motive and the "immorality" of profit in medicine, does not really exist under our present tax and medical insurance structure. For further reading on this matter I would point you to a book by a Canadian doctor who has worked under both the Canadian and the American health care systems, Dr. David Gratzer, called "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care."

Why Civilizations Die

How Civilizations Die is perhaps the most important book I've read this year. It changed my mind about an important issue in American national security on which I thought I would never be moved. More about this later.

Mr. Goldman writes under the nom de plume "Spengler" after Oswald Spengler, the German author of the 1917 book The Decline of the West, an influential foundation for the social cycle theory. The book is structured around his italicized "Spengler's Universal Laws" sprinkled throughout the text which serve as something like thematic headings, as for instance:

Spengler's Universal Law #1--a man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a 'rational self-interest.'

It's also broken into three parts, one, The Decline of the East, two, Theopolitics, and three, Why it won't be a post-American World.

In part one, The Decline of the East, he makes the startling assertion (well documented by UN demographic data and other sources) that many predominantly Muslim countries, among them Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iran, are experiencing a decline in birthrate with a rapidity never seen before in human history such that they are heading, perhaps within our lifetimes, for economic collapse and eventually their extinction as nations. Consider this astonishing and counter-intuitive claim: Iran has become one of the least religious countries in the world. His supporting data is that on any given Friday in Iran only a little over 1% of the Iranian population attend a Mosque for prayer, less than church attendance in the most secularized post-Christian nation in Europe. I had read about the death-spiral decline in birthrate in Europe and Japan in Mark Steyn's America Alone and the demographic time bomb in China with the massive imbalance between men and women created as a product of their "one child" policy, but everything I had read or seen about the Middle East seemed to indicate their birthrates were high and that Muslim births were such in European countries that they threatened to "take over" many of those countries in a few decades. So it was a shock to read Mr. Goldman's case for the "closing of the Muslim womb" as he put it.

In part two, Theopolitics, he makes the case that these birthrate declines are nothing new, but have in fact been repeated many times in history. Indeed in the second chapter of part two he chronicles 3 great extinctions in history: 1, the Mycenae (prehistoric Greek), the Hittite, and the Egyptian empires; 2, the Hellenistic empire (historical Greece); and 3, the Roman empire. But more importantly he gives reasons why such die-offs occur. Consider this short example, an account by Aristotle of the defeat of Sparta by a second-rate Greek power:

Sparta once had 10,000 citizens, but by the middle of the 4th century B.C., Aristotle reports, the number had shrunk to only 1,000. …It is the first report in history of depopulation due to a reluctance to raise children. They concentrated wealth in the hands of an ever-narrower oligarchy, which raised fewer children the better to concentrate wealth in family hands.

Earlier in the book he explains that when a society or culture realizes it is doomed it responds in one of 3 ways: 1, it commits suicide, 2, it quits having children (historically by abortion or infanticide) and whiles away the remaining time in hedonism, and 3, it fights to the death to take as many as it can to the grave with them. The suicide response can be seen contemporarily in pre-industrial tribal cultures who are exposed to Western culture, such as New Guinea and Amazonian tribes whose youth, after seeing the wealth and opulence of the West and realizing they will never obtain this, commit suicide at an appalling rate. The childless hedonism we see in the post-Christian European countries and in Japan. But the 3rd alternative is the threat of Muslim Jihadism.

The heart of the book for me is found in the final part where he explains Augustine's rejection of Cicero's definition of society as a community of interests--a definition with economics at its core--to a people bound together by a common agreement as the the objects of their love. So, in short, civilizations die because they love the wrong things. In Theopolitical terms, this means they love a god who fails:

Pagans worship their own image in the person of gods who are like them, only better. Pagan faith is everywhere and always fragile, according to Spengler's Universal Law #15: When we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed. The function of pagan gods in not to redeem us from death, but to bring us success. Pagan gods do not love men and women, although they may occasionally lust after them. Absent success, pagan societies lose their faith; the religion of the ancient world is a carnival-parade of new gods introduced by winners to replace the failed gods of the losers, as defeated tribes were absorbed into their conquerors. …Athens could not be assimilated; it could only perish of disappointment and disgust. Loss of faith sooner or later sapped them of the will to live. As Sophocles wrote, under such conditions it is better to die, and better yet never to have been born.

In the last half of part 2 he makes the case that Europe actually abandoned Christianity in the 17th century:

Two rival versions of Christianity fought to the death in the Thirty Years' War: the Catholic concept of universal empire, and the obsession of the French that they, among all the nations of Christendom, were chosen by god as his proxy on earth. Both of these were religious passions, and thus the Thirty Years' Was was a religious war. But it was not the Catholic-Protestant war about which he have all been taught. It was a war between Christianity and neo-pagan national idolatry, and Christianity lost.

He credits Cardinal Richelieu as the master manipulator of the war, prolonging the horror, slaughter, and death by starvation for the express purpose of weakening all the European nations involved--including fellow Catholic Spain and Austria--so that France could rise to ascendancy over all of Europe and rein as God's proxy on earth. This is proven by the fact that he maneuvered to support the Protestant resisters after they had been defeated:

By 1635, Austria--at terrible cost--had crushed the Protestant resistance once again. But then Richelieu sent two hundred thousand troops into Germany to fight on the Protestant side. Spain responded with it own forces, and the second half of the Thirty Years' War turned into a war of attrition between Catholic Spain and France, fought mainly on German soil.

In the final section of the book Goldman makes the case that America will not go the way of Europe, Japan, and the Muslim Middle East because she loved the right right things, central among those is God. The first colonists were Christians who selected themselves from out of the paganized nationalism that had come to be called Christianity in the European nations in an effort to create a new society based on Biblical Christianity, the election of the individual through personal conversion, and adoption into God's spiritual commonwealth, Israel.

The Protestant radicals could flourish only by creating for themselves a new kind of country, on whose citizens would select themselves out of the world's nations. The European tribes, whom the Church had nurtured into nationhood, wanted to become the New Israel in their own tribal skin; the Protestant radicals sought rather to adopt individuals into a new chosen people in a new promised land. ...The Europeans were not content with adoption into Israel; they wanted to replace Israel. And they themselves became the god that failed. The Americans chose to build a City on the Hill that would select--in parallel to the Christian idea of conversion--individuals who wished to become part of it.

Europe, in loving their idolatry of nation descended into a kind of paganism, and that paganism, as all pagan gods do, failed. They have lost faith in their vision, and indeed in themselves, and they are dying--through indifference, concentration on frivolousness, and unwillingness to raise children.

This brings me to the crucial issue for which Goldman, through his brilliant arguments, has changed my mind: that of the nation-building efforts on the part of the United States and our battle against Islamic terrorism and its patronage states. Since the beginning, I've always rejected the argument that Iraq and Afghanistan were incapable of democracy. During the post World War II project in which the United States engaged in democratizing Germany and Japan, opponents had argued that they too were incapable of democracy, but men whose work and opinion I respected, such as Natan Sharansky and Fouad Ajami, pointed out that those projects had succeeded and there was no reason these would not succeed as well. Yet, the real question, from Goldman's perspective, is not whether they can become democracies, but whether they can adopt the American model of democracy, for as he says:

It seems pointless to argue whether the American political model is better or worse than any other. It's the world's only successful model.

Germany and Japan may have adopted a form of democracy and become peaceful allies, but they rejected the core of the American model:

America destroyed the German and Japanese delusions of racial superiority and their hopes of empire, and offered them instead a modest position in the world under the wing of American power. It appears that Germans and Japanese don't breed in captivity. Having lost their Christianity to nationalism, and lost their nationalism to losing, the Europeans do not appear to want to be much of anything…humiliated cultures turn sterile and pass out of memory.

The point is, they may have taken on democracy, but they are nevertheless doomed to self-extinction. And the same fate awaits the Islamic nations to which we have committed so much of American treasure.

Where Germany and Japan had worshiped a "god who failed" in the form nationalism and dreams of empire predicated on racial superiority, it is the character of the Islamic god which presents an insurmountable barrier to the American model:

In the American founding, the biblical concept of Covenant undergirds individual rights, for these are granted irrevocably to every member of society by a God who limits his own power as an act of grace…Muslim theology leads to a radically different concept, for an absolutely transcendent God leaves no room at all for the individual.

So what does Goldman advocate we do in dealing with these doomed states and the non-state jihadist entities, and our foreign policy overall? He starts off this way:

America should seek alliances with states that in some way approximate its own exceptional character--in other words, that love what we love--employing our good offices to help them succeed after our fashion. And we should isolate and contain the maleficent influences of states that, repudiating our principles, love other things.

He goes on to clarify this strategy in 6 ways: 1, cut our losses and remove the bulk of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan with the exception of deterring Iran's encroachment on Iraqi oil fields and special forces to assist friendly local forces. 2, prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons--at all costs. 3, deploy our ground forces to neutralize threats to our security--destroy our enemies, not build the societies of other countries. 4, abandon balance-of-power politics in south Asia in favor of building strong alliances with our natural allies, such as India (not Pakistan). 5, engage China in rivalry without hostility. 6, Russia, he sees as a particularly difficult case with its move to once again obtain control over its former Soviet rein of influence. America's attempts at supporting freedom movements within Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine have failed, but it's essential that we make clear to Russia that "Poland is a Western nation that must remain secure under the wing of American friendship, and that no form of intimidation will be tolerated."

What do I take away from this? I believe our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were absolutely necessary for the punishment and containment of these terrorist-supporting states in the wake of the 9-11 attack, but I now see the folly of our nation-building enterprise--in the long view it is doomed and a tragic waste of blood and treasure. So in this respect I have moved a long way toward the view held by John Derbyshire and, toward the end of his life, William Buckley Jr.

To those who are intrigued by these arguments, as well as those who remain skeptical, I urge you to read this important book and evaluate Mr. Goldman's full case as I'm sure my synopsis of them are sadly inadequate in doing them justice.