Charity, Coercion, and Judaism

Some of the feedback from my piece on communal responsibility, plus some comments by my good friend Ezra, have got me thinking about charity. Generally, I do not prefer government-run charity operations for a few reasons. First, government in general is inefficient, rigid, and about as discriminating in its decisions as a wrecking ball through a crystal factory. Second, a large part of the charitable experience is the spiritual and moral effect it has on the giver, which is lost if we simply give our money to the government to act on our behalf. Third, it seems to run counter to the Jewish model of charity, which has a number of features to recommend it. But I am beginning to wonder whether the Jewish model can realistically be applied to a largely secular society.

[Disclaimer: I am not a rabbi, nor do I play one on TV. I believe that the statements about Jewish law below are accurate, but I have not made an exhaustive study of the subject.]

Jewish law mandates three different avenues for charity. First, if you own a field and grow food on it, you must set aside a corner of your field for the benefit of the poor (and this corner has no maximum size); furthermore, when you harvest your field, any stray produce must be left where it falls, to be gathered by the poor.

Second, three years out of seven, the “second tithe” of agricultural produce is set aside for the poor. This amounts to about 9% of the harvest, roughly every other year.

Third, all people are required to give at least 10% of their net income to the poor. (The rabbis imposed a maximum of 20%, after a number of prominent people were reduced to poverty themselves through their charity.) This is true even of the poor themselves; a beggar would have to give 10% of his alms to another beggar worse off than he.

A few points are worth noting. First, the punishment for not fulfilling your obligation was not judicial, but spiritual excision (i.e. a Divine punishment). One partial exception is that food which had not been properly tithed from could not be eaten; but even here, the punishment for eating untithed food was spiritual excision as well. So while there is a high degree of communal pressure to be properly charitable, it is primarily dependent not on civil authority but on belief in the Divine obligation for charity.

Second, only charity to those who actually need it counts; generally, this is defined as someone who does not have a year’s savings (excluding a home and furnishings), and without a steady income sufficient to live on. Giving to other causes, such as education, environmental conservation, etc., is commendable but must be over and above your initial obligation to give to the poor. That being the case, people have a mandate to determine whether recipients of charity are in genuine need.

Third, while there is an obligation to feed and clothe all of the poor, there is no blanket obligation beyond that; for a poor person to receive anything else requires that he cultivate the goodwill of charitable individuals. There is ideally a sort of “free market” for charity, where people decide individually who should benefit the most from their charity; those poor who are seen to deserve more support get it at the expense of those less deserving, who must be content with the minimum level of support, i.e. food and clothing.

Finally, the highest form of charity is to give someone employment. I do not know at what point salaries cease to be charity and become simply salaries, but the ideal is to get a poor person to be self-sustaining. On the other hand, the Torah warns us that “poverty will never cease from within Israel,” so our policies must not be predicated on any Utopian end to poverty.

So my prior thinking on the subject had basically been, “Instead of governments taking money by force and then spending it on lavish entitlements and subsidies, they should simply require that individuals give X% of charity on their own, or to private organizations who will do it for them.”

But.

How would such a thing be carried out? Would “properly poor” people have to register with a government agency, and keep receipts of their takings? Would charitable organizations be divided into “eligible” and “ineligible?” How can you prevent abuse of the system, and would such abuses be more or less preferable to the abuses taking place in the present system?

Communities are very different now than they were. It used to be that in a given location, there would be some rich people, some not-so-rich people, and some poor people. Poor people would always be available to the rich, and people always had the option of giving directly to the poor if they felt that working through intermediaries was not as effective, which has the effect of regulating the intermediaries’ behavior. Additionally, people generally knew each other, and could judge between possible recipients accordingly.

Nowadays, people largely live in communities grouped by level of affluence. The poor are very far away from the rich; if the rich wish to give charity, they are practically forced to use intermediaries. And that opens up all sorts of abuses. The larger an organization is, the less likely that it will do the job efficiently, or without some sort of corruption—especially if you involve government in the process.

I was at a dinner recently where one of the people, an economist, described a sort of Gresham’s Law of charity. (Gresham’s Law, remember, is that bad money drives out good. It can be easily generalized to all sorts of subjects.) As he said, a poor person in DC can decide to get meals from a local Catholic church, where they begin by asking your name and about your situation; over time, they will encourage you to take steps to improve your circumstances, and will eventually cut off people who are not working on self-improvement in some form. Or, the poor person can go to a government-funded soup kitchen, where they feed everyone without asking names, or demanding any sort of long-term development from the beneficiaries. Naturally, most poor go to the government kitchen.

I am very worried about charity, and about the communal obligation for the poor. At the same time, I think that the perceived obligation we have to the poor has been increased all out of proportion to what it should be; furthermore, the reciprocal obligations of the poor to the community have been completely forgotten. Charity is not a free lunch; beyond a certain minimum, it is an implicit statement that you, in particular, deserve this particular coin more than that other poor man down the road. And that means that you must justify your alms, through good morals and character if nothing else. (In Jewish communities, it is customary for the poor to bless their benefactors; those whose blessings are particularly potent receive much more charity in return.)

That is part of why I so distrust government charity programs as they are now constituted. There is no sense of reciprocal obligations; indeed, such programs are called “entitlements,” and there is a growing sense that people deserve such entitlements not by virtue of their worthiness, but their simple existence.

At the same time, I worry that we have few alternatives. Can the old model work if it must depend disproportionally on intermediaries, who are kept honest primarily through civil coercion, and not necessarily belief in a Supreme Being? Divine law has a major advantage over civil law, in that you cannot deceive God; but if you do not believe in God, all that limits your behavior is the fallible power of the state, and your own decency. And wherever large amounts of money go, there will be unscrupulous con-men mixed in with the truly noble—especially if part of the process is securing governmental endorsements for mandatory charity.

On the other hand, are government programs any better? At least if a private charity is dishonest, you can simply stop giving to them and find another. Competition can work in charity as well as in business. Government programs, on the other hand, have more or less guaranteed funding and arbitrary quotas to meet. They have historically given very little bang for the buck, and even encourage the growth of the very poverty they wish to alleviate. As the saying goes, “If you want more of something, subsidize it.”

On the whole I still think the Jewish model is superior in concept. But I don’t know if it could effectively supplant the present government infrastructure, if given the chance (though I am cautiously optimistic). I think, though, that we as a nation need to seriously consider whether giving the poor a free ride, with no strings attached, is truly to their benefit. There must be a reciprocal obligation, moral or communal or material, on the part of recipients of charity.

Privatization in China

I ran across a very interesting news report on Xinhua the other day. Highlights:

The widening income gap was the most serious social problem in China in 2004, according to a recent survey conducted by the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee. The survey also found that reform of the income distribution system in 2005 is the top concern of the respondents, including officials at the provincial level, Xinhua Telegraph Daily reported Friday.

So far it looks like something that could appear in the New York Times. But then we get this:

An Qiyuan, another CPPCC member, said that the income gap between different social sectors is also wide. Those working in some monopolized industries, such as power, water and gas supply units, telecommunications, air and railway transportation, enjoy much higher salaries than those working in other industries. The income gap between those poorly-paid and highly-paid industries increased by 4.25 times last year, against 3.98 times in 2003 and 2.62 times in 2000.

There is a cry for breaking the monopoly of these industries to narrow the income gap.

If they are printing it in the state news agencies, you can bet that some powerful people are in favor of breaking up the monopolies. It is rather ironic that Communist China seems more willing to embrace free markets (slowly and carefully, to be sure) than some Western countries I could name.

The other thing is that if you read the full article, you'll note that China is increasingly worried about the tensions between the urban and rural populations. This may well be the impetus for possible revolution; but it would not necessarily be a pro-capitalist revolution, as most rural areas have had many of the hardships of a free market, and few of the benefits.

But breaking the monopolies seems a promising move. It will help correct wage distortions and possibly ease the accompanying tensions; aside from that, I'd bet dollars to dimes that the monopolies in question are state-owned. Any reduction in state control over essential services is a good thing in my book.

China continues to be "a conundrum wrapped up in an enigma," as they say. Every time we get a troubling signal, like saber-rattling over Taiwan, we get a conciliatory signal soon after, like the NorKo's returning to negotiations. And behind everything is the increasingly developed, capitalist economy. Very confusing, all told; but not boring at least...

Thoughts on "High Fidelity"

I am about halfway through the novel "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby. (It was made into a movie a few years back.) I do not think I will read much farther, if at all. The book itself is exceptionally well crafted, is detailed and honest and unflinchingly realistic, et cetera. The only problem is that it makes me want to slit my wrists. I have had to force myself to read the last few chapters, and those who know me know that's saying something...

Meanwhile, the reviewers are enthusiastic. That's fine, but I want to comment on one aspect in particular of their reviews:

New Yorker: "hilarious"

Spin: "offhand humor"

London Sunday Times: "Hilariously accurate."

Financial Times: "very funny"

And so on. It is true that the book is written with a particular sense of humor. Yet to my ear, this humor is very different from hilarity. It is cynical; it is sarcastic; it is vicious, even. The reader is invited not to laugh, but to smile knowingly. We are invited to enjoy the image of a man so incredibly shallow and self-centered that he damages the lives of others with his thoughtlessness and then complains that they have left him with sexual neuroses; a man who enjoys sex most of all because "I can lose myself in it entirely.... I could forget who I was, the time of day, who I was with."

I can understand why such fiction can appeal to some people; it is, after all, an examination of a very real type of modern person, in great detail. What I don't understand is how someone could find it not merely funny, but hilarious. Many of the reviewers spoke of recognizing themselves in passages of the book; sometimes I did the same, but that did not make the book funny for me, only honest.

If I can be permitted to speculate wildly for a time, I think much of the difference could be that I am judging the narrator, while other readers are not. I cannot get away from the narrator's ultimate cruelty and thoughtlessness, and reading the book from that angle makes it an unrelentingly depressing read. Others, perhaps, are simply luxuriating in the thrill of recognition, of confrontation with Self and the Absurd, without the discomfort of confronting the essentially flawed nature of the narrator, and by extension themselves.

Whether that is true or not, I am very much disturbed that the artsy set finds this book hilarious. Well-written, certainly. Important, possibly. Hilarious? My stomach churns at the thought.

[UPDATE July 12: Just finished the book. See my final thoughts (much more complimentary) here. I still don't think much of the reviewers, however.]

"The Beginnings"

This poem by Rudyard Kipling was posted in the comments at Wizbang:

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy—willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.

Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.

(1914)

Where Can We Respond?

Thus far, we have been perversely fortunate in our counterterrorism attempts. When 9/11 happened, we could point to a state that was openly allied with the terrorists responsible—Afghanistan—and a state that openly celebrated the attacks, was a longstanding enemy of the United States, and was neck-deep in general terrorist nastiness—Iraq. (And yes, paying Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 to murder Israelis counts as terrorism in my book; so don’t bother with all the obnoxious “no connection to terrorism” blather, it gets you no sympathy at all from me.) Moreover, both of these states were geopolitically vulnerable and relatively easy to conquer and pacify.

Aside from the value of the Iraqi and Afghani wars in and of themselves, they also gave politicians something to point to, to show that they were indeed “doing something” in response to the attacks. This lessened the need (in theory) for government to pull its usual idiocy on the home front, and (should have) allowed it to restrict its response to actions that actually have a practical purpose. (If this is true and they still managed to bungle the Homeland Security debate, imagine what would have happened without the war?)

The wars had an abstract value in geopolitics as well: an attack must be responded to, or else it will encourage further attacks. By invading Afghanistan, we demonstrated that we are willing to hit back, hard. By invading Iraq, we demonstrated that we will not limit our response to those directly responsible, but will clean up the whole fetid swamp of state-sponsored terrorism and totalitarianism if necessary.

But because we have already taken out the easy targets, Britain is left with a difficult situation. Prudence, pride and the long tradition of British defiance in the face of attack demand that the Brits respond with overwhelming force to the London bombings. The question is, where and against whom?

It is difficult to point to particular states that could have actively supported this specific attack; moreover, the remaining state sponsors of terrorism are all much trickier to deal with than was Iraq, for example. Iran, probably the most egregious example, already has the West tied up in knots over how to act. I doubt the mullahs are stupid enough to openly support actual terror operations right now, as opposed to general terrorist infrastructure, so a “case for war” would be difficult to sell.

Britain could conceivably step up its counterterror operations against the world terror networks, which it is probably going to do anyway. But such things are not in the public view, they are not sexy, and they do not produce immediate results. Any Pavlovian will tell you that the longer it takes for an action to get a reaction, the more tenuous the mental connection between action and reaction. As counterterrorism is as much an educational process as anything else, we need somehow to drive the message home.

One conclusion that has generated broad agreement is that Britain has been far too lenient with Muslim extremists and their supporters on British soil. Yet though the British must clean up house, they cannot afford to give the perception that their main response to the attack was to oppress their own Muslim community. This will tie their hands somewhat, unfortunately, and it also makes finding an external enemy all the more urgent.

So who?

It will be interesting indeed to see how Tony Blair chooses to respond. I have no persuasive ideas for where the response will be, but the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is an option, as well as Kosovo (a major transit-point for organized crime and terror groups, and practically a failed state after years of suffering the tender attentions of the UN), and Nigeria or other African countries with ties to al-Qa’ida. The next few weeks should be instructive.

We Are All Londoners Now

Everyone, please pray for the brave people of London, which has just suffered a series of coordinated bombings on their subways and a bus. Casualty reports are still coming in, but this looks like it will be a very bad one. The bus bombing was apparently carried out by a suicide bomber. Al-Qa'ida in Europe has apparently claimed responsibility.

The war continues. It may continue for decades more.

"May there be made known among the nations, before our eyes, vengeance for the spilled blood of Your servants."

UPDATE [9:30]: Wretchard, in his comments section:

The good thing about fighting Islamic terrorism is that it creates its own feedback loop. Anytime you are misguided enough to think they are normal human beings they will disabuse you. And the trajectory is corrected. The important thing is to stay the course, in Iraq and elsewhere, until this movement is utterly, utterly destroyed.

"Enlightened Self-Interest" vs. Communal Responsibility

About a month ago, I heard Dr. Walter Williams speak at the Heritage Foundation. He was giving a deliberately abrasive introduction to standard Libertarian ideas of government's role in the economy, with which I generally approve. At several points he was asked the inevitable question, "How can the poor/environment/elderly survive without the government to protect it against the ravages of capitalism?"

He answered, briefly, that if people were free to follow their selfish impulses, the problems would work themselves out. This is due to the idea of enlightened self-interest, i.e. that it is in the best interests of each individual to do things that benefit the group. (He gave the example of planting fruit trees on his property that he would never live to eat from, because doing so raises his property value.)

Now while this is often true, it is a problematic answer. I tend to be put off by the enthusiasm with which some defenders of the free market will trumpet selfishness as the cure for all our ills, for several reasons. First, this idea completely ignores the trouble of parasitism or free-riding, and the related problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. To wit, there are circumstances in which it is most advantageous for the individual to act to the detriment of society as a whole.

Second, people do not always follow their enlightened self-interest; often they prefer a short-term interest over a longer-term one, for more or less irrational reasons. To defend a system by saying that it works if everyone is rational is hardly a ringing endorsement.

Third, even aside from these issues, such a defense is worse than useless as a persuasive tool, which is ideally the point of the exercise in the first place. It runs counter to the everyday experience of most people, in which acts of selfishness cause hurt and acts of selflessness accomplish great good. Moreover, it reinforces the caricature of the greedy capitalist, and makes agnostics all the less likely to embrace capitalism; nobody wants to think of himself as a bad person, and you will usually get much farther by appealing to man's virtues than by excusing his vices (this is why advocates of abortion speak of "defending the rights of a woman's body" rather than granting permission to kill inconvenient babies, for example).

This all being the case, why then do so many people use this argument with so much glee?

I think we must look to the original question for our answer. "What will happen without government?" assumes that there is a large class of necessary civic functions that would simply be left as a gaping void, without the compulsion of government to ensure their performance. These functions now include such elementary things as feeding the poor and caring for the elderly, which would have been unthinkable not even a century ago.

Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the remarkable habit of Americans at the time to form more or less local associations to perform functions that Europeans would generally leave to the government. He gives the example of clearing a fallen tree from a road; while a European community of the 1830's would have called on the government to remove it, Americans would simply organize themselves and do the job on their own. (This sort of thing is so rare today as to be unheard-of in most of the country, sadly.)

One of the themes hammered on by the aforementioned Dr. Ryn in class is that Americans used to be motivated chiefly by a sense of virtue based on "Love your neighbor." That is, your first duty was to care for those closest to you, your family and your community. This led to a vibrant communal life, in which concerned citizens would care for each other and do what needed doing in the community, because that was what being a good person meant.

Now, on the other hand, we are encouraged to care for Humanity in the abstract (often to the detriment of individual humans right next to us). Since no individual could possibly care for all of humanity, we must delegate our responsibilities for humanity to an entity powerful enough to do so—namely, the government. Hence, we can pay our taxes, send off the government to do good on our behalf, and feel that we have discharged our obligation.

This is an exagerration, of course. But it is based on truth. It is often noted, for example, that Americans give much more charity per capita of GDP than do Europeans; this is explained most often by the tendency of Europeans to place social responsibility on the back of their governments, to which they pay so much in taxes. And this tendency is on the rise here as well. It is worth noting that the most generous states in the U.S. are not the richest—indeed, they tend to be the poorest—but tend to be least associated with expansive liberalism. The reverse is also true; those states most associated with liberalism and social welfare are disproportionally near the bottom of the rankings.

Ergo, many defenders of capitalism have apparently decided that they cannot appeal to any sense of communal obligation to explain why civilization will not collapse in the event of a free market; in some cases, they themselves are not keen on the idea of communal obligations either (this seems to be common in the troglodyte-wing of the libertarian or libertarian/conservative community). Instead, they are forced to appeal to pure selfishness, and give assurances that selfishness will bring about a new golden age.

This is a mistake, for the reasons I have already pointed out. Furthermore, selfishness as an ideal leads to a narrowing of the human spirit and is ultimately unsatisfying, perhaps immoral. If free-marketeers were smart, they would invest their energies in trying to reawaken the old spirit of communal responsibility in America. (I should really say, to spread the spirit of communal responsibility, for it is still alive and well in many communities.) It is this spirit that can make a free market work: the idea that the successful have a duty to care for the less fortunate, directly, without any reliance on governments to do the dirty work for us.

Indeed, statists of all types know that their greatest challengers are private benevolent organizations. Just look at the vitriol that is commonly poured upon the Boy Scouts...

Thoughts on Batman Begins

Last night I watched Batman Begins, which was absolutely rock-solid. Any movie with Michael Caine, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman has definite potential. Throw in Christian Bale as the lead, and we're rocking. I highly recommend the movie to anyone even remotely interested in Batman, martial-arts movies in general, or movies with awesome soundtracks.

***WARNING: Spoilers to follow. If you have not seen the movie yet, stop reading.










****I mean it!










Batman is one of the vast majority of superheroes (if you could call him that) who have an aversion to killing. This is a significant plot element this time around, as an act of mercy ends up costing him dearly later on, and the entire city of Gotham as well.

The Talmud has a saying, "He who is kind when he should be cruel, will eventually be cruel when he should be kind." The immediate context is a discussion of King Saul, who lost his divine mandate when he spared the life of Agag, king of Amalek. Later, while hunting for his rival David, King Saul massacred the priestly city of Nov, whose inhabitants were innocent of any crime.

But the general idea holds true in Batman as well. Bruce Wayne's teacher in the League of Shadows derided him as being too weak to do what is necessary in the pursuit of true justice, i.e. to kill people. Though the League has a perverted view of justice, the point remained true; when Bruce learns of the League's plans to destroy Gotham City and turns on them, he spares the life of his teacher. Yet his teacher simply continues his plans, and when next they meet, the League has sent a large portion of the city into hallucinogen-inspired anarchy. To save the rest of the city, Batman is forced to destroy the greatest legacy of his father's idealism.

Employing death as a tool of justice is repugnant to some, for many reasons. First is the possibility of error; killing an innocent man is perhaps the most horrible perversion of justice imaginable. Second is the thought that human life is infinitely precious, and therefore we have no right to kill anyone, no matter what his crime. Finally, death (by this reasoning) precludes the possibility of repentance, and whatever good the dead man might have done.

But sometimes the choice is not between death and incarceration; it is between death and freedom to continue doing evil. In that case, not killing an evil man may simply let him murder more innocents; to say that we have no right to kill him, therefore, is to say that his life is implicitly worth more than the lives of his victims. And that is truly repugnant, and a mockery of justice.

And as for repentance, it is not something that we mortals can dare to rely on. While some evil men do repent on their own, most do not. Can we be so heedless of the cost to others, to allow such a man to go free in the slim hope that he can find atonement?

The deeds of an evil man are ultimately his responsibility; but some small share of the blame must fall as well on those who could have stopped him, and did not. Bruce Wayne's moral code, which did not let him kill one who desperately needed killing, led to the murder of countless people. And even when he does finish it, Batman will not do so directly, keeping his code intact by the merest of technicalities. It is such moral codes that allow otherwise good men to confuse their passivity in the face of evil with principle.

Personal Accounts, FDR, and a Modest Proposal

In the course of some work I did yesterday, I stumbled across the following quote by President Roosevelt from the initial debates on Social Security:

"In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, non-contributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps thirty years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

I am not about to argue, as some rather foolishly did, that this proves that FDR somehow would support President Bush's Social Security proposal on personal accounts; annuities are a whole different animal from a typical investment account. But the quote sparked an idea on one way to make personal accounts more palatable to some who presently oppose the plan.

I have seen two credible objections (to say nothing of the absurd objections) to the personal accounts plan as it is now formulated. The first is that money invested in the stock market is always subject to losses, which rather defeats the point of Social Security. (You could always invest 100% in bonds, but your rate of return will suffer.) The second is that even if an individual's personal account has excellent returns, it does nothing for the solvency of the system; people receiving benefits at the moment will still be paid out of the General Fund, which would be getting even less revenue than before because of the personal accounts.

A year or two ago, I saw a prospectus for a new model of annuity that allows policy holders to capture some of the benefit of a rising stock market, while protecting their principle. It was sold, I think, by The Hartford, though I cannot find it now on their site; the terms seemed too generous to me at the time, and they probably ended up losing money. Regardless, the model was interesting, and could work if the initial terms were tweaked a bit.

[UPDATE 7/3: My source in the financial planning business tells me that not only is The Hartford still selling this type of annuity, but so are most of the other major players. It has proven very, very profitable, which only makes the argument to follow more compelling.]

So, I propose that we add another option to personal Social Security accounts. This option would work as follows: funds paid in will grow along with the broad market, up to a cap established by the government (let's say 10% per year, for example). Any additional returns will be transferred to the General Fund, and will be used to pay current beneficiaries. In return, the government will guarantee that whatever the market does, participants will at minimum receive back what they put in. The principle will be protected, eliminating risk.

Furthermore, at periodic intervals the level of protected principle will be ratcheted up to more closely match the present value of the account. So for example, say I paid $100 into this program for my individual account. Over the next five years, say the fund grows to $180. At a given time, my guaranteed benefit would be recalculated upward (the exact amount would have to be decided on by the actuaries), so that I can protect my gains.

If this option is added to the personal-accounts proposal, it will allow for greater returns than an all-bond fund, and at the same time provide security for people's money. Moreover, when the stock market does well, returns in excess of the cap will be transferred to the General Fund, helping to guard against insolvency. This deals with the two objections put forward so far against personal accounts, as noted above.

If this were added to the table, I think we would see a lot more support from moderate Democrats for the idea of personal accounts, which is all to the good. And in any event, more flexibility in your options is always a good thing. We need to broaden the debate to include this hybrid model of annuities, to give people options that tap into the power of the market, yet give them some protection as well.

Government and the Inequality Gapor The Mastiff Channels Marx!

Much has been made in recent years over the growing "inequality gap" or differences in wealth between the rich and the poor. Various means have been proposed to correct this gap, most of which involve (surprise!) redistributive taxation and government spending. This is yet another example of what Howard Jarvis meant when he said, "An election year is the time politicians promise to get us out of the trouble they got us into in the first place."

What? Do I mean to say that government, that great defender of the poor and oppressed against the rapacious capitalist exploiters, has caused this problem to begin with? Perhaps not entirely, but they certainly have a lot to do with it.

How is it that the rich make money? Either they invest in the stock market, or else they build or finance new businesses. "Yes," you say, "but can’t we do those things too?" Sure. But, thanks to government regulations found in the Securities Act of 1933 and the Investment Advisors Act of 1940, those of us not already rich are operating with a serious handicap.

When a new business seeks to raise money, it has a few options. It could theoretically sell registered securities on the broad market through an IPO or bond offering; but that is expensive, and government regulations require that the company already have significant assets before it can do so (something of a catch-22). Or, the business can make a private offering, the usual course of action. Private offerings are when the first real investors get on board, buying shares for less than a dollar per share in many cases. They are taking a large risk, as many companies fail before the investors can make back their stake.

At the same time, the potential for profit is huge. Once companies get established, they usually hold IPO’s. At that point, the easy money has already been made; the original private investors are making many times their original investment on the starting IPO price alone, to say nothing of what the stock can do later. Compared to them, buyers on the public exchanges are playing for pennies.

But here’s the catch: thanks to the aforementioned government regulation, only "accredited investors" can buy into private stock offerings. And accredited investors are defined as people who either are buying on behalf of a financial institution, or make $200,000 per year, or have a net worth of $1 million. In other words, only those who are already rich are allowed to make the most money.

(Comparatively, we are pretty well off today. Imagine what those numbers meant back in 1940!)

Now the government defended the regulations as necessary to protect unsophisticated investors with little to lose from the risk of private placements, which do after all have a high rate of failure. But investing in the broad market is not much safer for those who lack the discipline to invest properly. And purchasing options and futures are incredibly risky when not part of a comprehensive strategy—believe me, I know—yet there are no restrictions on them (nor should there be).

Worst of all, governments are quite willing to use state lotteries to pad their own balance sheets. If you want a risky activity, you can’t get much worse than this. People, often relatively poor people, pay hundreds of dollars per year to the state, and get back nearly nothing. And government has the audacity to tell us that private stock placements are restricted for our own good?

Plain and simple, this is a government policy to enrich those already on top at the expense of everyone else. Investing should be on a level playing field, not rigged to favor Washington's bankrollers. The American tradition is one of limitless opportunity for those with audacity and vision; how can we deny opportunities to the poor in the name of risk-aversion?

And it is not only investors who are hurt. Business owners, to get the funding they need, must kowtow to wealthy investors, often signing away large portions of their businesses. And such wealthy investors have demands on their time, and are relatively few in number; who can say how many fledgling businesses collapsed due to lack of funding, simply because there was no good way to let the millions of small investors in America buy in?

Indeed, this is the true function of the stock market: to enable companies to raise funds. But for most of us, unless we buy into an IPO (when the easy money has already been made), our purchases do practically nothing for the companies we trade; we are essentially trading expensive baseball cards. (Ask shareholders of WorldCom how much of the company they “owned,” and how much benefit they got when it was bought out by MCI. I’ll tell you: none. The stock shares themselves were devalued and replaced by a new issue, none of which went to the original owners.)

If we are serious about reversing the trend towards concentration of wealth, we need to work for the good of the small investor, and the small business owner. It is unconscionable that only the wealthy may participate in the best way to make money in America, the true engine of our growth. The accredited-investor caste must be abolished.

Freedom, Not Democracy

One of my professors for the summer is Dr. Claes Ryn, faculty member of Catholic University and author of “America the Virtuous” (which we are using as a textbook). His major thesis is that American society, previously characterized by distrust of human reason, and humility in the face of man’s fallen state, has been transformed by Rousseau-style Enlightenment thinking; it is now possible to imagine a central blueprint for the “perfect” society, and then to attempt to implement it, both here and across the globe. This tendency first arose as a major force with the Progressives, strengthened with the Socialists, and is now continuing with the Neoconservative (in the strict sense) movement.

Dr. Ryn calls all such utopians, who have a global agenda built on the perfectibility of human reason, “Neo-Jacobins” after the French revolutionaries. His book focuses mostly on the strain of Neo-Jacobinism to be found within the Neoconservative movement, simply because they are in power right now. His presentation was unfortunate, as I found myself struggling to avoid writing off the book as simply one more rant about the eeeevil neocons. But Dr. Ryn has even more disdain for the Socialists, and does not hesitate to identify their new base of support as the Democratic Party, so he has that much going for him.

But I think that in his analysis of what elements of American foreign policy are motivated by “Neo-Jacobinism” or utopianism, Dr. Ryn misses a fine distinction that is nevertheless crucial for explaining why President Bush, no ideologue, is seemingly falling into step with the Neoconservative program. In Chapter 15 of his book, Dr. Ryn mentions that while many Neoconservatives speak of fighting to spread democracy, the President nearly exclusively speaks of fighting to extend freedom. Dr. Ryn simply sees the one term as substituted for the other; but if that were so, why does the President use “freedom” and not “democracy” most of the time?

President Bush has said that Natan Sharansky’s book, “The Case for Democracy,” lays out his own foreign policy reasonably well. When I asked Dr. Ryn if he would consider Sharansky a Neo-Jacobin, he said yes. This misses a key distinction between Sharansky’s views and the “democratism” that is Dr. Ryn’s main complaint with the Neoconservatives.

A “democratist” believes that democracy is the best form of government for all peoples, and that therefore it should be American policy to spread it across the world.

Sharansky, on the other hand, is not primarily concerned with democracy per se. Rather, his argument is that regimes that fail the “town square test” of tolerating dissent are driven to create outside enemies for domestic consumption. Therefore, to promote general peace and tranquility, we need to promote governments that tolerate dissent, or more broadly that respect the rights of their people. Thus far, democracy seems to be the government most likely to do that.

The key difference is that one view is ideological, the other practical. If some new form of government were to arise that more consistently protected the right of dissent, a Sharanskyite such as myself would have no problem advocating it instead of democracy. (The merits and demerits of democracy will have to wait for another post, sadly.) But a Neo-Jacobin democratist would be just as fiercely attached to democracy as Marxists are to communism today.

What Dr. Ryn does not consider is that many people support the spread of democracy for practical reasons, and are therefore guided by practical considerations. While the concrete differences between a true Neo-Jacobin and a Sharanskyite are miniscule today, they may not be tomorrow. So while I am willing to grant that utopianism in any form is troubling, we are hardly being brainwashed by the new Marxists. “America the Virtuous” is a valuable book, if shrill at times, but this is a point worth keeping in mind should you decide to read it.

Legislated Morality

In a previous piece (The Free Market and Morality), I argued in favor of legislated morality, in the abstract. Fortunately, my sloppiness could not survive for long, and I was asked in the comments section to specify what laws in particular I would prefer, which did not involve people actually injuring each other.

(For my purposes, I am going to restrict myself to activities that are entirely voluntary for all parties involved, and do no direct harm to anybody.)

Having thought about it for a few days, I keep coming back to the entertainment industry. Take music, for example. The Greeks knew the degree to which a person’s moral instincts were shaped by the very music they listened to; Aristotle even went so far as to advocate banning certain musical modes entirely from the city, as being too discordant and not instilling the proper love of harmony in the listener. The Phrygian mode especially (which is today called Dorian mode) was seen as promoting vice. Much to be preferred were the morally edifying Lydian and Dorian modes (Dorian is today called Phrygian mode, ironically enough).

Does this seem farfetched? It is widely known today that hooligans generally do not like classical music, and public malls have taken to playing such music on loudspeakers to drive away criminals. How can such people dislike classical music so much that they will actually leave places where it is playing?

I remember when I first began listening to Metallica. I really liked the music, which was unusual for me; generally I consider most rock to be terrible. But at the same time, as I listened I could feel myself becoming coarsened in some subtle manner. Perhaps it was the aggressive electric guitar, or the pounding precussion. It was worse when I would work out in the campus weight room. Someone would usually put on some sort of rap or hip-hop, which makes for excrable listening. Aside from the lyrics, the effect of the music itself was like a jackhammer to the brain, with a relelntlessly pounding beat that obliterated all thought before it.

Music is a language, and communicates information just as surely as words do. That the information is emotional and not logical does not make it any less real. And its effect on the human spirit is profound. Aristotle wrote that good music teaches the listener to recognize and even to seek out true virtue. The opposite is true as well. Are we then to simply allow people to make whatever music they want, and then to inflict it on the public sphere?

The Beatles were seen in their day as shocking, even dangerous. Compare them to the cesspool that is modern music. Can anyone doubt that there has been a real moral decline? Or that its effects are felt throughout society?

Similar arguments can be made for television or movies, or computer games for that matter, and much more easily than for music. Now I am not arguing that "immoral" music should be banned entirely, if such a thing would even work. But it should be banned from the public sphere. If children want to listen to such things in the home, that is their parents' concern. But the public sphere is our concern, and we should not permit it to become the dumping ground for everything that people don't want in their homes, as it has become.

So much for entertainment. The other thing that comes to mind is body piercing.

I am continually astonished by the miracle of the human body. That nerves and sinews and muscle work together so flawlessly (in general), that the endocrine system can maintain such a complex and delicate balance of chemicals, is staggering. And people are so cavalier about poking holes in themsleves?

Earrings and nose piercings have a long tradition, and I have no quarrel with them. But the more exotic manifestations denote a certain disregard of the human body, or even in some cases actual self-loathing. It cheapens the value of human life; it is perhaps suicide writ small. A bit overstated, but not by much. So I would ban all piercings besides ear and nose; teenagers can keep their melancholic angst to themselves, and should not be allowed to damage their bodies on a whim.

Both degraded public entertainment and body mutilation hurt no one directly, or even indirectly except at several removes. They are purely voluntary for those directly involved. And yet to allow both free license, as has been done, undermines the morality of entire societies. It is here where the Non-Agression Principle fails, I think, and where strict libertarians come up short. Morality best grows in an environment suited to morality. It is the task of societies to provide that environment.

Rafsanjani's Doubletalk

I am right now staring with some amazement at the front page of the Investor's Business Daily, which is graced with a photo of former (and would-be future) Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The caption quotes this worthy as saying, "I am going for a policy of relaxation of tension and deténte." Rafsanjani is apparently running on a platform of specifically not developing a nuclear weapon.

This is of course the same Rafsanjani who said on December 13, 2001:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world…. Jews shall expect to be once again scattered and wandering around the globe the day when this appendix [i.e. Israel] is extracted from the region and the Muslim world.

I am willing to imagine that he may have changed his mind. After all, the nuclear program is wildly unpopular within Iran; Iranians have no desire to get into a shooting war over some mullah's homicidal fantasies. But I think this is just one more sign of how rigged the elections really are. Rafsanjani is hardly an outsider candidate, promising to reform the system. He is an old friend of the ayatollas, and everybody knows it. If there were real reform candidates on the ballot, our dear friend Rafsanjani wouldn't stand a chance. He may be moderating his talk now in hopes of avoiding Western ire, but I don't think we should let him get off that easily.

The Free Market and Morality

For a long time I've been nagged by a sense of inconsistency in my beliefs. I am as absolute a defender of free-market capitalism as you will find, under the assumption that people can generally be trusted to sensibly pursue their own interests. At the same time, I believe that morality can only be assured through a system of law, and that leaving morality to the individual is a recipe for disaster.

When thinking about the distinction between them, the best I could come up with is that individual freedom seems to work better in economics than in morality. That answer is unsatisfying, since it says nothing about why this should be so. Yesterday, I finally put my finger on what I think the essential difference is.

In economics, you can keep score. In morality, you can't.

In economics, your success or failure can be clearly quantified at any time, by counting up your assets. By watching your score, you have immediate feedback on whether the choices you make are beneficial. With that information, each individual can analyze his options and decide which are best, at least when taken generally over the whole system.

But in morality, the very standards you use to measure yourself are based on a moral decision. There is no single standard. What I would consider a debauched disintegration of society, others might call the free expression of individual potentialities or other such nonsense. We cannt agree on how to score ourselves, and therefore groups of people cannot effectively regulate their own behavior without the intervention of an outside standard. People cannot be trusted to do the right thing, because they cannot agree on what the right thing is.

Libertarianism, when applied to morality, leads to anarchy.

Draining the Swamp

The program I'm on seems to have a very clear theme: government has gotten out of everyone's control. As one example, it has become so musclebound because of its huge network of subsidies and preferential laws, and the growing mass of lobbyist groups that have arisen to defend them, that it can get nothing done. That's the basic premise of Jonathan Rauch's book "Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working." He takes great pains to avoid demonizing the lobbyists; after all, they are only acting rationally, given the high costs for a single group not to lobby Washington when everyone else is. If you don't get in on the action, you're left screwed.

The major problem is that lots of people say they want small government, but nobody wants to personally suffer from government's retrenchment. So every time a particular program or subsidy goes under the ax, hordes of concerned citizens shriek like the Furies and send lobbyists to save "their" piece of the pie. This is absurd, of course. We need to realize that if we want to clear away the deadwood of government, and free up the small businessman from the morass of laws that favor the big boys, we will need to suffer some pain first.

I think one good place to start would be in housing.

Everyone is worrying about a "bubble" in housing. People are overstretching their means, and buying houses they clearly cannot afford, using such risky and shortsighted methods as interest-only adjustable loans. Why, you ask, would so many people put themselves at such risk of going upside-down on their mortgage?

Simple. Because paying interest on mortgages is government-subsidized. To wit, you get to write it off on your taxes.

How many times have you heard that buying a bigger house is the best tax-shelter available (assuming you aren't extremely wealthy)? How many people do you know who have actually bought massive houses for just that reason?

This cannot go on. If sanity is not restored to the housing industry soon, we are going to end up with a meltdown that will make the S&L crisis look like small fry. We have to remove the tax-free status of interest payments. It can be done in increments, naturally, to make it easier to adjust to, but it must be done.

"But," you ask, "how can we possibly do that? Think of how much money we will be paying. We can't afford that!" So along with making interest payments taxable, we should lower the tax rate to compensate. No more subsidizing interest-only foolishness; just fair taxes across the board. (Plus, it would be "progresssive"! After all, most poor people do not make mortgage payments.)

Best of all, by doing this we will demonstrate our fundamental willingness to accept a little pain in the short term in order to correct a fundamental distortion for the long term. That is, if we are indeed willing to do so. Philosohpically, ending mortgage subsidies should be something liberals and conservatives can agree needs to happen; the only thing standing in the way is our questionble tolerance for pain. That is why we need to start spreading the word now, to get the idea out into the open.

We need to face the facts. The only way to really fix government is to suck it up and do without many of the entitlements we have ourselves demanded, and benefit from. Housing subsidies is as good a place as any to start.

Update: Georgetown Live!

Yesterday I arrived at Georgetown University, where I will be having classes for the next two months. Tomorrow I begin my internship (I am not blogging about it unless and until I get my boss's approval).

The university is large and very beautiful (aside from the disconcerting presence of crucifixes in most of the major buildings). The other students on the program look like a really good bunch, and my roommates are good guys. So far it's been a lot of fun.

I haven't had a lot of time to think about what I'm going through, but rest assured that my cogitations wil be cogitating as always, so there should be some fun reading here before long. So far, the biggest issue has been dealing with kosher food, given that all the good shopping is outside of walking distance from the university. Once I start using the Metro more, that should be taken care of.

Now I have a lot of news to catch up on. I'll be back...

Trouble Brewing in Uzbekistan?

After the massacre of several hundred (perhaps thousand?) civilians by the Uzbek military, the US became rather uneasy about its support for President Karimov. After Karimov and China publicly aligned with each other, the US started moving.

Via Instapundit comes word that the State Department is evaucating the families of its personnel from Uzbekistan. Apparently the Peace Corps and other NGO's are about to pull their people as well. This comes just after a delegation of Senators visited the capital to express their displeasure over the massacre and subsequent crackdown by Karimov's thugs. It seems that practically overnight, Uzbekistan has become hostile territory, or at least unfriendly.

If Karimov is seeking closer relations with China, there is probably some sort of Russian involvement. Russia and China both want to limit American power in Central Asia, and Russia has been nervous over American bases in Uzbekistan in particular. The massacre and its reprecussions gave China a chance to extend its own reach, and Russia is probably happier this way because the American presence is being undermined.

Was this the impetus behind our new pressure on the regime? Or is it simply that we have finally decided that we can no longer tolerate "our SOB's" in order for the spread of democracy to become a true geopolitical weapon against extremism? I don't know, and frankly the practical difference is slight. It seems like the recent tide of democratic feeling in tyrannies is going to stick, and is being supported by the United States. If we should hope to preserve isolated outposts of tyranny because the State Department feels it to be in our immediate interest, it would be foolish and ultimately futile. The Mubaraks of the world are doomed, whether Foggy Bottom likes it or not.

At any rate, what next for Karimov? The presence of American troops in Uzbekistan has to be a constraining factor, but what if he should demand that they leave? I don't think he's ready to do that yet, but the possibility has to be worrying President Bush. I suppose it depends on whether China is willing to make it worth Karimov's while. It will be interesting to watch, at least.

Grrr!!

As I was moving out of my room, a student I know was going with a security guard to get into his room, which was locked at the time (He had forgotten a few things that he needed to get out of the room). While I was locking up my room, I overhear the security guard say, "You going to leave all the lights on like that?" (Bear in mind, this is over summer vacation.)

The student answered, "Sure, why should I worry about it? I don't pay the electrical bill, do I?"

GAAAAAAAAAHHH!

What kind of ignorant $#!+ is that!? I knew he was a bit of a jerk before now, but what could possibly be going through the guy's mind to make him waste a ton of electricity (which the school is paying for) because he can't be bothered to turn off a lightswitch, while he can be bothered to make a smart-alecky remark about how much of a jerk he's being?

/rant_OFF

Anyhoo, time to get out of here. Shabbat shalom!

"You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive..."

Over the next few days, I'll be in transit to the greater Washington D.C. area, where I have a summer school/internship program lined up. It's based from the Georgetown campus, and I'm really looking forward to it. All kidding aside (see title), I hope to be placed in some sort of government agency; but I'll know for sure once I get there (I hope).

Depending on where I do get placed, this blog could potentially get a LOT more interesting. Blogging will be light until I get settled in, but after that we'll see what happens. Cheers!


POSTSCRIPT [1:45 AM]: If you should happen to be standing outside of Penn Station on Sunday, and you see a giant U-Haul pull up and start unloading—that'll be me.

It really is amazing how much stuff can acumulate over a year, and I've already sent a huge box home by mail!

Gender in English

I have always been annoyed by those who dislike the word "man" in English, by which I mean those individuals who would rather have a "chairperson," a "congressperson," "all persons are created equal," et cetera, et cetera. Such constructions have no poetry, are incredibly flabby and grating on the ear, and disregard the weight of centuries of English rhetoric.

"Men" is a vigorous word, marching forward with the stride of a legionnaire. "Persons" is high-pitched and whining, has two syllables instead of one, and ends nearly inaudibly. Similar contrasts exist between "Man" and "Person." Compare the following (you might try reading aloud):

"Fight like a man." "Fight like a person."

"You ain't no kind of man." "You ain't no kind of person."

"Declaration of the Rights of Man." "Declaration of the Rights of Persons."

On the other hand, I can easily imagine that women would take offense at the proliferation of male language, given that English is largely neuter. One could compare it to a Jew listening to public declarations praising America's Christian charity, for example. So there is a problem to be dealt with.

Fortunately, there is a solution that does not involve watered-down language and weak, limp-wristed rhetoric. In Old English, the term "man" actually was gender-neutral. It had precisely the same meaning as "person" today, and it also included a collective sense lacking in the modern equivalent. The word for man was "wer" or "wére," surviving today in "werewolf." The word for woman was "wyf," which became "wife."

So here's a thought, which is shared by the author of the site I linked: what if we readopted "wére" in place of modern "man," freeing up "man" to return to its previous place of glory as a neutral word representing all of humanity? In one stroke, we would save the masterpieces of English rhetoric from the enervating influence of the Uberfeminist Censorship Committee, while at the same time solving the underlying problem once and for all.

There are a few practical problems, but nothing insurmountable. if "Negro" could be banished from the language in favor of "black" or "African American," I see no reason why "wére" cannot catch on. It's not as if English doesn't have any other homonyms or homophones, anyway.

I'm tempted to adopt the term on my blog for a few posts, and see what happens.

Declarations of War, Revised

As long as democracies have gone to war, there have always been those who argued that wars were prosecuted for selfish reasons, and were therefore illegitimate or evil. Anyone not living in a cave for the past few years knows exactly what I mean. In the Iraq example, many people have gone so far as to belittle the tangible good that the United States has done for Iraq and focus entirely on the perceived selfish goals of the Bush Administration, believing that our humanitarian work has been incidental and only to disguise our supposed exploitation of Iraq.

This is to be expected. The world has a long history of wars fought only for the benefit of the rulers and their hangers-on. War being such a terrible evil (though often the lesser evil), it is repugnant to the moral mind to allow wars to be fought without a clear idea of why they are necessary; yet the government has many tools at its disposal to influence the public to give its assent, in a case where they might not have done so otherwise. For this reason among others, many people have an instinctive distrust of government intentions in war. As our soldiers in Iraq know, this causes significant problems.

I think that one way to lessen the chronic mistrust of a wartime democratic government would be to rework the concept of a declaration of war. Presently, declarations of war serve only to put the opposing state on notice; they are practically redundant, and have not been used by the United States since World War II. Note that this does not mean that the legislature is no longer consulted; often bills are passed instructing the executive to use “any means necessary” to deal with the conflict at hand. (This absurd change of labels probably owes much to the U.N. Charter, which declares “war” illegal.) But there is no longer a routine, formal invocation of the world community as spectators. This should change.

I propose a new formula of declaration to be passed by the legislature, necessary in any case where one state sends an occupying force to another (not necessarily in war), consisting of three parts: first, laying out the reasons for sending troops, casus belli or otherwise; second, laying out the immediate goal of the troops; third, laying out in general terms the long-term program of the declaring state in the state to be occupied. This declaration must carry the force of law, both national and international.

This would make into a criminal act the prosecution of war for stated reasons known to the aggressor to be false. Note that incompleteness in stating reasons would not be inherently criminal, but lying in the declaration would be. The purpose would be to force a government to state an “official” reason or reasons for the war, which could then be judged on their own merits by the citizens or by the international world, independent of conjecture. Even if the true reason for war was different, the official reason must be able to stand on its own in the eyes of the public.

It would also clearly delineate the boundaries of military action at the outset, and make going beyond them illegal, unless another such declaration is passed. No more could the people say they did not know what they were getting into.

Perhaps most importantly, the long-term phase would be forced to conform to what had been openly agreed to by the legislature. This would calm those who fear naked exploitation or any other underhandedness, since such activities would now be devoid of any legitimacy.

Such a formula, if adopted, could help keep states honest. Any opposition party would salivate at the chance of arresting government officials for unauthorized war activity. If such an arrest were prevented, the invocation of international law would at least make the government into official pariahs, if nothing else. (I am skeptical, but there must be a fallback in case of abuse of power.) The declaration would also clear up much of the anxiety surrounding government motives in wartime, which can only be to the good. In any event, it would ensure that all major aspects of the war are consented to by the legislature, which would be a marked improvement over what we have now.

Quote of the Day

Leo Strauss responds to Marxist philosopher Alexandré Kojéve (previously Kochevnikoff, before he moved to Paris), who identifies the ideal world state as a homogeneous tyranny in which all citizens agree with each other, and with the tyrant, of their own free will:

[T]he Universal and Final Tyrant will [by definition] be an unwise man… To retain his power, he will be forced to suppress every activity which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the universal and homogeneous state: he must suppress philosophy as an attempt to corrupt the young. In particular he must in the interest of the homogeneity of his universal state forbid every teaching, every suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific technology…. [T]his time, the cause of philosophy is lost from the start. For the Final Tyrant presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy. He claims therefore that he persecutes not philosophy but false philosophers…. Kojéve would seem to be right although for the wrong reason: the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.

Leo Strauss, "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero" in On Tyranny, pg. 210

Does this sound at all familiar? It should.

80/20

Last night I was privileged to attend a Tai Chi class given by my professor's teacher, Dr. Harvey Sober, a grand master. It was a very good class, and I learned a great deal. One of the members of the class had written a Tai Chi handbook that we used at the college, and the master was throwing him around casually during his demonstrations. It was something worth seeing.

At one point in the evening, Dr. Sober spoke about the importance of developing and maintaining your health. He teaches classes at my college, and said that if you ever wanted to see people in terrible health, you just had to come into the Beit Midrash (House of Study, with the connotation of studying Jewish law), or as he called it, "the Ward." There, you can see "eighty-year-old twenty-year-olds, and ninety-year-old twenty-five-year-olds."

My fellow college students and I knew exactly what he meant, of course. At the college, there are several different types of students. You can identify the hard-core Beit Midrash learners easily enough. They usually spend several hours a day in the Beit Midrash hunched over large books with very small type (aside from their regular university classes). Many of them do not exercise at all and eat poorly, and all of them get perhaps five or six hours of sleep a night—and it shows.

This type of student usually has very pale skin, and his head and shoulders are hunched forward exactly as if they were ninety-year-old women with osteoporosis. Often they have glasses of varying thickness, and most of them already have visibly receding hairlines. Their bodies are usually thin and flabby, and the skin of their fingers, arms and necks looks like it belongs to a senior citizen. Seeing these students for the first time, you would imagine them to be perhaps in their late thirties and in poor health.

That these students were ever allowed to think that they could destroy their bodies for the sake of their learning is a disgrace for the observant Jewish education system. According to the Rambam, we are obligated to guard our health and fitness, so as to better serve God with our bodies. Yet for some reason, this obligation is given short shrift even as more trivial minutia of the law are obsessed over. The result is that those students most knowledgable in Torah are in all likelihood the ones who will die soonest.

Something has gone very wrong with the Jewish concept of the ideal person, and I think we can identify the problem as far back as Talmudic times at least. In Biblical times, the leaders were not only teachers of the Law and prophets, they were also physically powerful. Jacob lifted a boulder that usually took many men to roll; his sons were powerful enough that two of them anihilated the city of Shechem. The prophets of Israel often led armies in battle, for example Gideon and Devorah.

More than that, the leaders were often musicians and poets. King David, the "sweet singer of Israel," is the best example. It seems clear that in those days, the leaders were expected to hold to a standard very much like that of the "whole man" of Greece, combining physical prowess, cultural refinement, mental development, and spiritual perfection.

By the time of the Talmud, something had changed. With the loss of sovereignty, martial prowess was no longer worthwhile. Indeed, the consesus now was that the study of Torah itself made one weaker, and that this was simply the price of being a scholar. Music was discouraged as lightheadedness, and poetry seemed to die out entirely until we had contact with Muslim culture centuries later. Study of the Torah and the law was seen as the only worthwhile pursuit for the leadership, though commercial activities were seen as practically beneficial and "secular" study was deemed necessary to properly interact with outside powers.

One vivid example of the new mindset: at one point, a major rabbi had been kidnapped by bandits. R' Yochanan, a leader of that generation, gave up hope and said that the women should begin weaving the funeral shroud. His associate, Reish Lakish (who before turning to Torah had been a bandit and gladiator), immediately got out his old weapons and said, "They may kill me or I may kill them, but regardless I will try to save the rabbi." He succeeded; but the tragedy of the situation was that it was even necessary for him to go alone. In a previous era, every other rabbi would have been standing beside him from the first moment.

We need to rediscover the ideal of the complete person, fully developed in all aspects, body, mind, and soul. To cripple the body through neglect as you seek to refine the soul is absurdity. Not only that, it is damaging to the nation as a whole. We are not not under the Roman occupation; we have our sovereignty back, and we need to act like it. We can no longer neglect the physical for the sake of the spiritual—if we ever could to begin with.

Bill Whittle Returns

Bill Whittle, the brilliant internet essayist, had taken a long hiatus from blogging. He's back now.

Go. Read. Send to all your friends. (Be warned, the essay is rather long.)

Discordance

Today's print Wall Street Journal has a piece on its Arts and Culture page about the decline of opera. This is true both in the sense that fewer people are going to the opera in general, and that the operas they are going to are predominantly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Modern opera is characterized by lavish productions that generally appear for one season and then vanish into the mist.

The author of the piece (I cannot remember his name, but he is the former director of a New York Opera company I think) blamed the music world's infatuation with atonal music. He noted that while the critics applaud atonality because it produces "challenging" music, everybody else just hears bad music. While other art media have had similar styles enjoy great popularity (abstract paintings, for example), music is diffferent. Most people want to hear something that sounds good, i.e. melodic music.

Phillip Glass, the piece notes, was the last modern opera writer to enjoy any prominence whatsoever. His work was unusual, but it was also unusually melodic; though you never knew quite where he was going, you always knew that Glass was going somewhere and that it would be a relatively continuous journey. And for the sin of not writing atonal music, the opera world has buried his works. They would rather put on "challenging" operas to empty houses than abandon their precious atonality. The customer is wrong here, the artist's vision is paramount.

I dislike atonality in general. A few years ago, as part of a college assignment, I went to a performance of works by students of Stefan Wolpe, an atonal composer. I think it was the first musical performance I attended where much of the audience wore tie-dye, faux-Third-World peasantwear, and Che Guevara shirts. (The overwhelming majority of them were over forty.) The other interesting thing was the contrast between the music of Wolpe himself, and the composers of the present generation. I wrote at the time:

I found it intriguing that Wolpe’s music was associated with that of the other composers, for although all of it was aggressively avant-garde and abrupt, I heard in Wolpe’s compositions a subtle structure and framework which seemed absent from most of the later composers’ works…. [M]uch of the later music seemed designed to induce suicidal depression or gastric ulcers in the listener, while Wolpe’s music was whimsical, vibrant and often quite humorous.

Later on, I wrote:

The music did not seem to be building up a progression to an event, but rather setting an evocative tone, a tone which in almost every piece seemed aimed at unease, instability, disquiet, and stomach-acid. The night struck me as a sort of group-flagellation; this impression was bolstered by the members of the audience, who for the most part spoke about the rallies they were attending or international politics and who read “The Voice of the Village.” The music seemed to be narrowly aimed at just this sort of people, antinomian, iconoclast[ic] and restless.

I think this is the problem. The musical establishment is producing pieces by and for people who do not see art as pleasurable pastime, or as cultured refinement, but as an expression of their all-consuming dislike for structure and tradition. Small wonder that modern opera is finding few takers; most people go out to have a good time, and expect to hear music and singing that they can enjoy. For much the same reason, modern "highbrow" classical music is dying off. It is populated almost entirely by the atonalists; composers who want to write melodically have instead been writing sound scores for movies, and increasingly video games.

It is no surprise that when most people listen to classical-style music, they listen either to the old masters or to movie soundtracks. Game soundtracks too are losing their stigma, and are becoming more and more popular. I cannot name a single modern "classical" composer after about the 50's; yet the names of John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hanz Zimmer and Jerry Goldsmith (to name a few) are known and loved by millions.

So the musical establishment is running itself into the ground. All right; wouldn't they eventually get the message? Not when their music has become an expression of cultural angst, rather than an end in itself. Plato complained that the musicians and poets of his day desired so much to please the audience with their music that they broke out of the musical conventions of their day and invented new forms (which to Plato's ear were inferior to the old—though he opposed most innovation on general principle). Modern-day "serious" artists, on the other hand, believe that breaking established conventions is their entire purpose, their raison d'etre. They are unlikely to change just because the unwashed masses think their work is terrible.

As an audience member, I am very displeased. These so-called "artists" have lost their way. Other forms of art can be enjoyable even if they are unconventional or abstract. But music depends on harmony, on the beautiful mathematics of ratios and intervals, on melodic lines building to glorious release. Music is also uniquely connected to the emotions. Harmony is pleasing; disharmony is nervewracking. I know what I prefer to listen to.

Kofi Annan on Iran

In response to the Iranian parliament voting to resume uranium enrichment, Kofi Annan has issued a warning—to the United States:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned the Bush administration that the Security Council might deadlock if asked to punish Iran for its nuclear program… China and Russia, which have strong economic ties to Iran, might veto any push to sanction Iran, Annan suggested in interviews with USA TODAY. "Action or inaction will have a great impact on future cases and on our efforts to promote nuclear non-proliferation," Annan said. A deadlock on Iran, he said, could embolden North Korea and future North Koreas.

So instead of having a deadlock in the Security Council, which would encourage proliferation, Kofi wants us to avoid the issue entirely, which will impress would-be proliferators with our steely resolve and steadfast commitment. Huh?

Granted that the Security Council will veto any attempt to get tough on Iran. Given that, Kofi would rather preserve the tenuous illusion of international solidarity rather than display for all the world to see that major powers are willing to cover for rogue states. Unfortunately, everybody knows what is really going down, and the absence of an official diplomatic headcount will change nothing. Indeed, if it becomes clear that Russia and China intend to oppose the West over Iran, then we could drop the polite fictions we have been hamstrung by and get down to business.

That is certainly the result I would prefer. But it is more dangerous in the short-term than the Kofi approach; it is probable that Kofi and those of like mind hope that Russia and China will shift their positions over time, and realign with the West on nuclear proliferation and other issues. If we have an open confrontation, this scenario becomes much less likely; but so long as there is no need to draw lines in the sand, Russia and China retain the option of changing their stances without losing face.

There are two key flaws in this approach. First, it assumes that we have time to wait for Russia and China. Given the advanced stage of the Iranian weapons program, that assumption is questionable. Second, it assumes that Russia and China have compelling reasons to align with the West against Iran. If anything, the reverse is true. A nuclear Iran would create a huge impediment to the growth of American power, and also supplies oil to China and buys weapons from both. On the other hand, if the theocroligarchy were to fall, America would almost certainly become the new power broker; hence, American influence would blanket the entire Middle East.

Neither China nor Russia want that. China especially seems to be gearing up for a fight in the near future, and Russia is quickly moving past its Weimar phase and into its Fascist phase. I believe it better for us to confront them now than to let things continue to simmer, while Iran moves closer and closer to a functioning arsenal.

The Power of a Dying Man

An Iranian mullah on his deathbed writes a letter to former President Rafsanjani, he who publicly called for Iran to aquire nukes and explode them in Tel Aviv. What is in the letter is absolutely astounding. I have nothing to say, other than that I hope Rafsanjani and all of his ilk spend eternity in horrific torment for what they have done.

Read a summary here. The original letter, in Farsi (I think), is here in case anyone can read it.

Wow... Just Wow...

Robert Byrd compares the ending of judicial filibusters to Haman's plot to kill the Jews!

Radioblogger has the audio, along with some remarks on the context. After listening to it, I can understand why everyone in the Senate looks permanently bored out of their minds. Sen. Byrd hasn't a single coherent thought in the whole rambling bloviation. But listening to Sen. Byrd say "Ahaas-yu-ei-rus" is worth the time. There is nothing I can possibly say that will do justice to the clip.

As an aside, I think that elected officials should be tested for aging-related neurological disorders. I'm not sure Sen. Byrd is playing with a full deck.

This Could Get Interesting...

British MP and tyrannophile George Galloway has been rather cross lately, after Senator Norm Coleman's committee investingating the Oil-for-Food mess accused him of accepting vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil from Iraq. After Galloway claimed that he had demanded to testify to the committee, Coleman responded by publicly inviting him to the hearing scheduled for May 17. Now, Galloway is taking him up on it.

Galloway had been a member of the Labour Party, but was thrown out after he accused Tony Blair of dishonestly prosecuting the war on Iraq, among other things. He then formed his own Respect Party, and won reelection against the black Jewish woman Oona King (a Labourite who supported the war) in a campaign that saw some really nasty racist politics in a district with a large Arab bloc. In at least one incident, Ms. King was assaulted by an Arab gang. Mark Steyn commented on election night that "I think there's no doubt that, under cover of "anti-Zionism", there's now an explicit anti-Jewish component to the political scene."

Galloway has a long history of kissing up to murderers and dictators, especially if they are anti-British, anti-American, or especially anti-Israel. George Orwell would have had a field day eviscerating him in print, I'm sure.

Galloway vs. Coleman. I hope somebody gets a good video feed, because things are going to be very nasty.

"Epic"

Some time ago, I first was directed to this "documentary" set in 2014 predicting how news would end up being produced in the Internet age. The main focus is on Google's automated news aggregator; but I'll let you see the rest for yourself.

The piece is becoming more and more pertinent, given that Google has occasionally used as source material websites promoting neo-Nazism, communism, and various extremisms, while at the same time refusing to include material from more conservative sites such as Little Green Footballs for alleged racism. Now Powerline reports that they're at it again. Apparently, someone is upset that Jews are holding Holocaust memorials in Germany. That someone also seems to approve of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Google's service appears not to mind.

There is too much data out there for any person to read alone. It must be organized; but organization implies evaluation. The gatekeepers of information will always be the true powers of the world.

Operation Matador

Belmont Club summarizes information about the ongoing battle in and around Qaim on the Iraq/Syria border, in which the Marines are crushing a large contingent of insurgents. More information at Fourth Rail; a second post is here.

It seems that having reduced most of the insurgent bases in Iraq proper, the US is finally starting to close down the supply lines from the border. A commenter on Fourth Rail speculates that all the diplomatic pressure on Syria in the past weeks has been in preparation for Operation Matador, to prevent the insurgents from escaping across the border. The Army has said that the mission was planned for some time, so this is very likely the case.

Actually, stop reading this post and go to The Adventures of Chester. He's been liveblogging the mission for some time. I'm headed there as soon as I post.

Hmm...

Sen. Clinton Finance Director Goes to Trial

I can't say I'm terribly shocked. I'm sure this sort of money laundering goes on all the time, in campaigns on all sides of the political spectrum. It really is absurd to try to categorize political donations; money is fungible, after all, and numbers in a ledger can easily be tweaked.

The rewards for cheating are high. Money is the lifeblood of political campaigns, and there is no way to change that. Even if all campaign donations were banned tomorrow, and were replaced by public debates and free airtime, "independent activists" would spring up to do the dirty work that campaigns need. Plato would say that a law that is being broken more often than not should be repealed, since it is ineffective and is only leading to contempt of the legal system.

That said, what David Rosen did was illegal. And I'm sure that this will complicate Ms. Hillary's ambitions for the presidency. The thing I find most alarming is that so many of the principal actors are also involved in securities fraud, defrauding charities, prostitution, and money laundering. Bad enough that the last President Clinton was connected to this sort of scum; do we really need a second one?

Quote of the Day

[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children's emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

—Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pg. 73 (softcover)

British General Elections

First line from Fox News's reporting:

Tony Blair won a historic third term as prime minister Thursday but his Labour Party suffered a sharply reduced parliamentary majority in apparent punishment for going to war in Iraq, according to projections based on exit polls.

Like hell it's punishment over Iraq. If it was, then most people would have defected to the Liberal Democrats, and not to the Conservatives, who were the biggest winners and who supported the war (albiet in lukewarm terms). According to accounts I've seen by Britons, the big issue is whether or not Britain will drop the pound, embrace the Euro, and join the political side of the EU. Blair has aggressively pushed the Euro, and most of Britain despises him for it.

Especially given the horrible economic performance by the big Eurozone countries, and given the horrible regulations they have to work under, Blair's chances of getting Britain to fully join the EU are smaller than Yossi Beilin's to win the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The next few years are going to be interesting for the Liberal Party, methinks. Especially since most of the party is actually anti-war, and cannot stand Tony Blair. I must say, his domestic policies are rather disgusting, but when the chips are down he was willing to go all the way in Iraq over the objections of his own party, and I and a lot of people respect him for it. I'm glad he was reelected at least, so that nobody could crow that he was punished over Iraq—um, never mind. (Stupid journalists...)

Sharansky is Done

A few days ago, Natan Sharansky, the conscience of Israel, resigned from Ariel Sharon's cabinet. I haven't been thinking a lot about it until today, partly because I didn't want to consider what it meant. But the truth will not go away.

So long as Sharansky remained in the government, there was hope. You could say that things are not so bad, that Sharon may yet see reason, that Sharansky thought that the situation was worth being involved in. But now that he has quit, there is no other conclusion than that the disengagement is a colossal blunder, and a betrayal of our people, our principles, and not least of the Palestinians who are being condemned to life under terrorists indefinitely.

I hope to God that Sharon is brought to his senses. I don't know what kind of stature Sharansky still has in Israel after over a decade in politics, but for many of us on the outside he represents Israel as it should be, unflinching in its principles and dedicated to serving God by spreading justice on Earth. Now he has finally given up on Ariel Sharon. What are we to think?

Perhaps this move will resonate more strongly in Washington. President Bush famously claimed to base his foreign policy on Sharansky's ideas; now let him show whether his principles will trump momentary convenience. I am sure that the disengagement could serve some short-term interests of America, and perhaps even Israel, but in the long run it is a terrible mistake and a mockery of justice to let Gaza sink deeper into the rule of the gun.

How can it be that we continue to put ourselves in such an absurd position? Yes, ourselves! Arafat is dead, Saddam is imprisoned, Lebanon is shaking free of Syria, Syria itself is desperately trying to avoid being next on the American hit-list… yet we make concession after concession to appease a band of murderers who survive now largely with our own money! What madness is this?

All we can do now is trust in God. We certainly cannot trust the government of Israel.

US Military Stretched Thin?

Apparently the Pentagon has described in general terms a classified report to Congress which states that our deployment to Iraq is straining our resources and may impede efforts to, ahem, respond to new threats (for example, Iran?).

My question is why such a report was issued now, and why, if it is classified, was a description given to the press? My only conclusion is that this must be part of a diplomatic game of some sort. We are signaling that we have no intention of expanding military operations any time soon, certainly not in the next year.

What is the purpose of doing so? Either we are trying to get certain countries to calm down, or else we might be trying to get them to overextend themselves in the mistaken belief of our weakness. I have no idea which is the case, nor do I know who the target is. But the timing of this strikes me as very fishy. We'll probably get a clearer picture of what's going on in a few months.

To What Purpose?

On several occasions now, I have written about the troubling tendency of American society to neglect the spiritual and focus on the material. Over the end of Passover I began reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," and I am even more troubled. Bloom traces this mindset to the very philosophical underpinnings of our democracy, starting from Locke; worse, all we have to look forward to (according to prevailing philosophy) is the nihilism of the Nietzschian abyss, as the contradictions within Locke become more apparent.

At present, we are most concerned with creating material wealth and political peace and stability for the entire world, that being the way to achieve universal happiness (in theory). Very well; imagine this scenario. In perhaps twenty years, but certainly within the next century, we will possess the technology and manufacturing capacity to feed, clothe, house, educate, and entertain everybody on the planet in a manner scarcely dreamed of by the kings of old. Judging from current trends, by that time the greater part of the world will be ruled by democracies, and interstate war will become almost nonexistent.

So we will have achieved universal peace and prosperity. Then what?

How will we spend our lives? To what will we dedicate ourselves? What will animate our faculties, inspire our imaginations?

For the part of humanity that has banished the spiritual from their lives, we will begin to see a world out of "Fahrenheit 451," in which constant amusement is the order of the day. People will be frantically diverting themselves to avoid confronting their own meaninglessness and purposelessness. Indeed, we are beginning to see such a world today in America. Have we ever spent as much time and money on our own amusements as we do today?

What truly amazes me is that all of these existential crises that supposedly overthrow our very natures are predicated on philosophies that assume, as their first axiom, that God does not exist and that religion is mere superstition. Let us set aside for the moment the thought that such an assumption is incredibly arrogant, and amounts to a deification of the human intellect as final judge over reality. What these philosophers are saying, is that it is better to unflinchingly believe that there is no God, no meaning, no purpose in life, and then to accept the inevitable destruction of human society that must ensue, rather than to continue believing in God, virtue, and the good.

Yet if one simply believes in God, suddenly all of the angst and emptiness of modern life is swept away and replaced with the shining certainty of truth and virtue. Moreover, the prospect of universal prosperity presents no terrors to the spiritual mind; indeed, such a world is best suited for the cultivation of the soul, as individuals are at last freed from the necessity of endless daily labor.

And on what basis was it declared that "God is dead"? Because we cannot perceive a God? What absurdity. Indeed, as science continues to roll back the mysteries of the universe, it becomes harder and harder to believe that the universe, Earth, or humanity came about by chance. The sheer infinitude of factors that had to converge for humanity to exist awes the mind (to say nothing of the events of the Big Bang, which even the devout atheist Stephen Hawking admits were outside the bounds of physics).

(It is perhaps easier for Jews to believe in God because our own history is so wildly improbable. That we survive, and prosper, in circumstances in which every other people in history have simply evaporated, forces the conclusion that an unnatural factor is intervening. But regardless.)

Yet if the Western mind does not rediscover spirituality, if not actual divinity, we are doomed to the slow disintegration predicted by Tocqueville nearly two centuries ago. In a world of individualistic nihilism, why participate in society? Why have children? Why deprive yourself of instant gratification in search of moral refinement?

Much has been said about the imploding birthrate of Western Europe, and the explosion of the Muslim birthrate. Aside from the geopolitical implications, I believe that this shows clearly that in a Darwinian sense, atheism is a poor survival trait. Over time, atheistic societies will be swallowed up by theistic societies.

Which shall America be?