The New Clarion

Please don’t take this post too seriously. There are no crystal balls, and no one can really predict the future. If nothing else, the surprises of the primary season in 2008 should have taught us that. At best these “predictions” are educated guesses. Some of these are less serious than others.

At the end of the year we will look back on this post to see who got the most right. The winner gets bragging rights. If any reader wishes to make predictions, feel free to do so in the comments.

BILL BROWN

1. The credit card industry will “fail” and seek a bail out. There will be a general hue and cry as several banks “double dip” after the initial bail out.

2. President Barack Obama will propose a single-payer health insurance system that will be fiercely debated in Congress. Republicans will seize upon it as a defining issue and it will go down in defeat. But they still won’t get the reasoning right.

3. Antitrust enforcement will reach record levels under Obama’s Department of Justice. The corporate shakedown–in the form of fines– will generate substantial revenue.

4. Obama will pull troops out of Iraq and use them to invade Pakistan in an effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Pakistan will welcome Obama the Liberator.

5. Union membership and unionization will surge as the union-backed Obama administration puts some teeth in labor law. Strangely, it will not help forestall the recession.

Those are my predictions and I sincerely hope none of them come to pass.

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I enjoy many good blogs. However, I want to draw attention to a great new one I discovered, “Heroes of Capitalism.” Each day this blog features a businessman who improved our lives. Actually, the last part of that sentence is redundant because a successful businessman in a capitalist economy always improves our lives by creating goods that we value and purchase from him in trade.

The businessmen cited so far range from the well-known (Henry Ford and Steve Jobs) to the obscure (James Wright and Peter Hodgson, developers of “Silly Putty”), but all of them are benefactors to man. We can all thank them and have already done so, simply by purchasing and using their products, but this website goes further by publicly acknowledging their achievements.

Men like this need to be recognized. They are the “human face” of capitalism, the social system that frees them, and all of us, to produce. If I stop to think about it, nearly every second of my life I am using one of their products and my life has been made healthier, happier, longer, and full of great enjoyable things as a result.

Thank you, businessmen, and thank you to the producers of “Heroes of Capitalism” for bringing their good work to the attention of the world.

You have to feel sympathy for Richard A. Viguerie. He is a conservative who believes “The GOP Must Reject Big Government.” He notes a rising trend among conservatives to accept big government.

Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, complained in May to the Huffington Post that the greatest threat to the GOP is “this new brand of libertarianism” that says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government.” That, Huckabee said, is “not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people.”

And former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in a May column in the Washington Post, attacked small-government conservatives for believing that “no social priority is … more urgent than balancing the budget” or that “the state’s only valid purpose is to uphold markets and protect individual liberty.” He argued that small-government conservatism in that form cannot succeed politically or as policy; that it would be relegated to “the realm of rejected ideologies: untainted, uncomplicated and ignored.”

In the wake of the 2008 election debacle, the attack has continued.

In a column this month in the New York Times, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard — one of the nation’s top conservative publications — called on conservatives to come to grips with the reality of Big Government. Big Government is inevitable, Kristol suggested; we should accept it and move on. After all, he wrote, “talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it’s not to the public as a whole.”

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Myrhaf

I’m reading The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky and The Lower Depths and Other Plays by Maxim Gorky. Gorky was a communist in Russia and an avid supporter of the revolution. He was also a great writer—quite fascinating, though a naturalist who focused on “the lower depths” of society.

Gorky wrote, “For me, I have no other than ‘Man.’ Man and Man alone, I believe, is the creator of all things and all ideas; it is he who accomplishes miracles, and in in the future, will become master of all the forces of nature. That which is most beautiful in nature has been created by the labor of Man, and his intelligent hand. The history of art, of the sciences, of technology teaches us that all out thoughts, our ideas emanate from the process of Labor. I bow down to Man.”

Other than the Marxism in the “process of Labor” line, I admire this statement. It would be reviled today by both the environmentalist left and the religious right; that’s good enough for me!

Gorky was poisoned by Stalin’s secret police in 1936.

I’m also reading Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey, an entertaining history of two drama queens. There was no internet or TV then, so Elizabeth and her court entertained themselves by creating drama in their lives. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, cut off her mother Anne Boleyn’s head when Elizabeth was three years old. “Daddy, where’s mommy?” That might explain why she never married—she knew what kings were capable of doing to a wife.

I read history always looking for play ideas. Elizabeth and Essex have been dramatized before, but the period might serve as a backdrop to a romantic drama.

Mike N

I just got 3 non-fiction books as gifts and am currently reading It’s the Sun, Not Your SUV By John Zyrkowski with subtitle “CO2 Won’t Destroy the Earth” with a forward by Peter Dietze who was an IPCC Reviewer. I’m finishing chapter one right now which looks at the so-called alternative, green energy sources, solar, wind, etc. The 2nd chapter asks “Why Buy This Book?” and intends to answer three questions:

1. What will I learn?
2. How will I learn it?
3. What does it mean?

I’m intrigued because these questions are both metaphysical and epistemological in nature, contexts that need to be addressed. I look forward to the rest of this short, essentialized book—98 pages of text followed by references and two appendixes.

Bill Brown

State of Fear by Michael Crichton: people have recommended this book to me for years but I just couldn’t imagine a decent plot around debunking global warming theory. It’s been much better (read much more compelling) than I expected and the graphs and refutations aren’t distracting. I can’t imagine anyone reading it and being convinced about the global warming hype machine, but it’s nice to think that a major author got this published.

The Art of Non-Fiction by Ayn Rand and On Writing Well by William Zinsser: these seemed due for a re-read now that I’m doing more serious (and rigorous) blogging.

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto: I just got back from Ethiopia two weeks ago—I was adopting a baby boy from there—and I couldn’t understand why the country was so poor. Everywhere I looked people were working hard, small businesses seemed to be flourishing, and my agency contacts there assured me that government wasn’t oppressive. I’ve mulled all of this over ever since and I think de Soto’s book (subtitled “Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else”) might hold the key to unraveling the mystery. We shall see.

Authentic Happiness by Martin E.P. Seligman: I’m re-reading this after seeing it cited by Jean Moroney in a newsletter. I’m just looking for other practical tips to bolster my level of happiness.

Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan: this is available free online and I’m looking for a good primer on Austrian economics before I take the plunge and read Ludwig von Mises’ seminal works. I’ve tried to read Human Action several times before but always failed for lack of motivation. Perhaps after reading Callahan’s breezy introduction, I will feel like I want to read the deeper tomes.

In a move typical of this body, the United Nations Security Council on Sunday roused itself to call for a halt to “all violence in the Gaza Strip” after Israel launched air strikes on several Hamas installations.  The preceding week of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel elicited nothing from the UN.  In their normal role of ally to thugs and aggressors the world over, the UN aids and abets Hamas’s hit and run attacks on Israel by allowing Hamas to attack with impunity, and then rushing in to defend them when Israel finally responds.  The institution is a disgrace to the world, and particularly to the US, which continues to host the evil organization on its own soil.

 http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-12-28-voa3.cfm

From the can-we-listen-to-him-this-time department:

By borrowing more than it can ever pay back, the government will guarantee higher inflation for years to come, thereby diminishing the value of all that Americans have saved and acquired. For now the inflationary tide is being held back by the countervailing pressures of bursting asset bubbles in real estate and stocks, forced liquidations in commodities, and troubled retailers slashing prices to unload excess inventory. But when the dust settles, trillions of new dollars will remain, chasing a diminished supply of goods. We will be left with 1970s-style stagflation, only with a much sharper contraction and significantly higher inflation.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal,  Michael S. Malone has an excellent column which provides an overview of some of  the disastrous wealth-killing regulations implemented over the past decade (all under the Bush Administration). These regulations, when combined with proposed increases in capital gains taxes,  will mean that, once the recession finally does bottom out, we will likely be in for a generation in which there will be very little wealth creation and non-governmental job growth.
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Regarding the Madoff scandal, Chuck writes:

“I can’t help thinking how similar it is to the characters who invested with the “playboy” version of Francisco D’Anconia, because he “knew how to make money.”  They did no research into the actual projects they were investing in. “

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting article by Mark Penn & E. Kinney Zalesne that attempted to explain this phenomenon.   While I am not familiar with and thus do not have an opinion about Penn & Zalesne’s theory of “micro-trends,”  I do think they make several astute observations.
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From Protein Wisdom:

Here’s how the Assoc. Press quotes Caroline Kennedy:

“I am an unconventional choice. I understand that. I haven’t pursued the traditional path. But I think that in our public life today, we’re starting to see there are many ways into public life and public service,” she said.

Here’s how the transcript really reads:

“And so, I, I’m an unconventional choice, I, er, understand that. I haven’t pursued the traditional path. But I think that, um, in our public life today, we, you know, are starting to see there are many ways into, to, public life and public service and it’s, uh, not as, um, all our institutions are … less, um, hierarchal then they used to be, and so, you know, I think that, you know, I bring, you know, my life experience to this and, you know, that includes, you know, um, being a mother, um I understand sort of those choices that women make that includes, uh, being a lawyer …”

In the 2 minute 16 second snippet of the grilled-cheese sandwich interview AP released, I counted 26 “you knows”.

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Just a quick note on this Madoff scandal.  I keep hearing that people and fund managers were investing with Madoff, in spite of misgivings, because he “showed results.”  I can’t help thinking how similar it is to the characters who invested with the “playboy” version of Francisco D’Anconia, because he “knew how to make money.”  They did no research into the actual projects they were investing in. 

Madoff no doubt made fraudulent claims, which somewhat mitigates the actions of his investors.  Still, when something seems too good to be true, extra care is called for.  Not lemming like behavior.

It struck me, the other day, just how much time I have to spend making a case that so-called “moderate” wings of the dreadful movements that America faces are effectively indistinguishable from the so-called “radical” or “extreme” wings. That it is not just, to give a few (by no means exhaustive) examples, “radical” Environmentalism, “radical” Marxism, or “radical” Islam which require steadfast opposition, but Environmentalism as such, Marxism as such, and Islam as such which must be opposed.

This shouldn’t be as hard as it is. The central ideas of all these movements are essentially disastrous and in complete opposition to the individual rights that formed the basis of what America was founded on. It isn’t just that respect for individual rights is fading from our culture in the face of the onslaught of the aforementioned movements and their kin. Granted, this is a factor, but it doesn’t account for the systematic dismissal I’ve observed of any attempt at opposition. People have been disarmed against judgment of any movement by its fundamental meaning. The unspoken yet widely pernicious cultural view I’ve seen is that differences of simple degree and consistency should be allowed to excuse things which are fundamentally alike.

I’ve come to understand that this failure represents a form of systematic denial – one that has far-reaching consequences to any effort to save our country from the disintegration of individual rights that these movements are foisting upon us.

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When people use the word “abolition” by itself, it generally calls to mind the movement to abolish slavery.  In modern America there are so many government institutions worthy of being abolished, that none of them generate the passion that a single goal can achieve.  We spread ourselves too thin.  By focusing on one goal at a time, more can be achieved.  The question then is in what order to attack the many wrongs of modern government?

My view is that public education is the most important factor in the spread of statism in America today.  Public education teaches the virtues of statism, altruism, multiculturalism/egalitarianism, environmentalism and mob-rule democracy, while denigrating Western Civilization, capitalism, individual rights and selfishness.  Those are just some of the practical objections to public education.  Morally, it is simply another form of the redistribution of wealth, i.e., theft on a grand scale. 

Why do so many people support the welfare state?  It’s all they’ve ever heard of, in their public education.  Capitalism is, indeed, an “unknown ideal” to graduates of public schools.  In short, if we are to start a political trend toward a more capitalist society, I think public education is the first institution that has to go.  It should be the focus of a new abolitionist movement. 

While the main focus of the attack should be on the injustice of the redistribution of wealth inherent in public education, the practical aspects also have to be addressed.  In that regard, someone on the ObjectivismOnline Forum linked to an article from a few years ago, which described in practical terms the advantages of private education over public education, specifically for the less well to do, who are normally considered the principal beneficiaries of public education.  This article demonstrates the contrary.

5. It’s COLD! Cold weather has hit North America and much of the world. Here in Southern California it got down to the 30′s at night. Environmentalists claim that weather extremes are the result of global warming, but I don’t think people are buying it. I believe doubt is starting to spread. There is a lot of talk among scientists that we’re heading for a new Ice Age now. All of this is important because if global warming hysteria fails, environmentalism will suffer a huge blow to its credibility.

4. The Never-Ending War. It’s been seven years now since September 11, 2001, and American troops are still dying in the Middle East. We have settled for a state of permanent war and altruistic nation building because all-out war would be an assertion of our national self-interest that would anger the rest of the world. Every American death in the Middle East now is a sacrifice to the gods of altruism and world opinion.

And how much of our never-ending war is a function of welfare state pressure-group politics? The libertarians and paleo-conservatives, though wrong on many things, have a good point with the link between the welfare state and the warfare state. Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the state.” I predict that at the end of President Obama’s four years we will still be have troops in the Middle East. Do you think that a statist like Obama would want to give up that power?

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In the comments to a recent post, there was some discussion of profanity. Is it necessarily bad? Not important? What?

By profanity, I mean George Carlin’s seven words, more or less. Damn, hell, and goddamn are just salty language, although with the rise of religion, goddamn has become something you don’t say in polite company. In the mid-20th century saying goddamn was, like cigarette smoking, just normal adult behavior.

Ayn Rand, as usual, gets to the essence of profanity with her philosophic way of thinking. In the section on “Obscenities” in The Art of Fiction, she writes,

Obscenities are language which  implies a value judgment of condemnation or contempt, usually in regard to certain parts of the body and sex. Four-letter words all have non-obscene synonyms; they are obscene not by content, but by their intention — the intention being to convey that what is referred to is improper or evil.

Obscene language is based on the metaphysics and morality of the anti-body school of thought. Observe that the more religious a nation is, the more varied and violently obscene is its four-letter-word repertoire….

Obscene language is not an objective language which you can use to express your own value judgments. It is a language of prefabricated value judgments consisting of the denunciation of sex and this earth and conveying that these are low or damnable. You do not want to subscribe to this premise.

So, like the preacher who is attracted to prostitutes, the religious person will see dirty words as a metaphysical validation of the sordidness of sex and the body in this earthly realm.

It’s interesting that the modern, moral relativist type finds nothing wrong with obscenities. Have you ever had a conversation with a very modern woman who talks casually about “f**king”? It’s a little shocking to hear someone talk about it as if it were no more important than grocery shopping or parking the car.

Both the mystic and the subjectivist devalue sex with obscenities. The mystic condemns the body and sex as filthy and low; the subjectivist accepts that we’re all filthy and low without value judgment, as if to say, “Yes, that’s life — it’s no big deal.”

Sex and the body and life on earth are good. Unlike the religious view, it is perfectly moral to pursue sexual happiness on earth. But also, unlike the modern view, sex is a deep, important value that a person of self-esteem would not take casually. When you understand the full value and importance of sex and the body, you understand Ayn Rand’s point: obscenities reflect nonobjective value judgments that a rational person should not hold.

This is why we want to avoid profanity on this blog. I left Blagojevich’s f-bombs intact because it’s interesting how he talks like a gangster. This is something of a rare exception. I use obscenities occasionally in life because I don’t keep their full meaning in my mind. They provide easy emphasis, as in “Politicians are f**king idiots.” But I don’t want to take the easy road in writing. How much better it is to find an original thought that carries the same punch as profanity.

UPDATE: Slight revision of one sentence.

For people today it is hard to imagine what our government used to be like, before FDR changed everything.  We are awash in regulations.  In Garet Garrett’s fascinating collection of essays, called The People’s Pottage, he discusses (among other things) the advent of a slew of government agencies under Franklin Roosevelt, among them the NLRB, FDIC, and the SEC.  These agencies were Roosevelt’s method of adding to his executive powers the power of legislation, a power not given to the President in the Constitution.  Laws are to be enacted by the Legislative Branch of government alone: 

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . . [Article 1, Section 1, US Constitution] 

The President’s role is merely to execute that legislation.  In Garret’s words:

[Congress] did not write the New Deal laws.  It received them from the White House, went through the motions of passing them, engrossed them, and sent them back to the President.  That was called the rubber stamp congress . . .

In that special session the Congress had surrendered to the President its one absolute power, namely, control of the public purse; also in creating for the New Deal those new instruments of power demanded by the President it delegated to him a vast amount of law-making power—so much in fact that from then on the President and the agencies that were responsible to him made more law than the Congress.  The law they made was called administrative law.  Each new agency had the authority to issue rules and regulations having the force of law.  ["The Revolution Was," p. 60-61, in The People's Pottage.]

So Roosevelt arrogated to the Executive Branch powers denied it by the Constitution.  On top of that,  the laws his agencies promulgated were all of the regulatory nature that Mike N. correctly identified as initiating force against American citizens. 

It is often argued that the modern world is too complex for Congress to understand in all its minutia, let alone legislate for.  Therefore, the argument goes, agencies are necessary.  Even if one were to grant this premise – which I do not – it still does not justify any law-making agencies being created by or answerable to the Executive Branch.  If they exist at all, they should be created by and answerable to the Legislative Branch alone.    

But this argument is a red herring, in any case.  The principles of law and government are not one iota more complex today than they were in 1787.  It is only when a government becomes engaged in micromanaging the economy that it runs into this complexity.  The solution is not to create a multitude of regulatory agencies, but to remove the government from the economy altogether.

Reading the GM bailout term sheet, I am struck by the political nature of the loan. Most lenders would care about payment schedules, interest rates, and profit and loss statements. The Treasury Department focuses on more nugatory matters:

• Eliminating golden parachutes
• Canceling executive bonuses
• Allowing federal clawbacks
• Selling off any private aircraft
• Restricting holiday party and other event spending
• Limiting spending on outside consultants
• Pegging prevailing wages to Toyota, Nissan, and Honda’s prevailing wages
• Matching work rules to Toyota, Nissan, and Honda’s work rules

Each of these is like a response to a news article or exposé from the past several months, designed to prevent future embarrassment. The executives at GM and Chrysler should be embarrassed to have consented to this. And officials at Treasury should be embarrassed at this overreach of their authority, this precedent-setting expansion of government interference into the economy. Sadly, none of them will be made to feel ashamed by the media, by Congress, or by the public even.

Somebody has put up a Leftists’ fantasy edition of The New York Times dated July 4, 2009.   Some of the parody articles are so well done that they are not even funny – they are all too chillingly realistic.    But one of them, “Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge” had me in stitches.   I have no idea whether the person who wrote it intended it or not – but this perfectly captures the soul of George W. Bush, an altruist who will always “turn the other cheek” and, in the process, sell out and betray anything and everything, including himself:

Although the treason indictment came as no surprise to most observers, what was completely unexpected was the party who brought it.

“The case is highly unusual in a number of ways,” said Bugliosi, “not the least of which is that the defendant is actually accusing himself.”

In a press conference held close to midnight yesterday at his Crawford, Texas ranch, former President Bush cited his renewed Christian faith as the catalyst for this unprecedented action. “Last month, I had a conversation with Jesus Christ. A new conversation. And I’ve been very blessed to have been born again, again. This time, for real,” Mr. Bush read in a prepared statement to half a dozen stunned reporters.

“It’s taken a lot of soul searching, or more like deep-soul diving, I think is the term. But now I see that it was wrong to lead our nation to war under false pretenses. Millions have suffered for my sins, and I see now that it is only fitting that I should suffer as well.”

Mr. Bush’s self-accusation seems largely to have been plagiarized from years of accusations made against him in the press. It refers to his “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” and describes how he and his team attempted to make the “W.M.D. threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear certain, whereas in fact we knew there wasn’t one at all.”

“The death and economic collapse that resulted has been completely devastating to our nation and, most of all, to me,” read Mr. Bush’s indictment. “I want to make amends, and it is for this reason that I am requesting that I be indicted for high treason. I thank the court for allowing me to right my grave wrongs. Bring it on!”

….Mr. Bush maintained his characteristically jovial manner throughout the proceedings. “I could be executed, but what good would that do anybody? Especially me. I think the nation would rather I spend a good long while considering what happened — not only the tragic end of hundreds of thousands of lives, but the end of American capitalism, that I liked, I sincerely liked,” Mr. Bush said. 

As for the real New York Times –  well, considering the extremely dire situation the entire newspaper industry is in and New York Time’s own financial problems,  the “Old Gray Lady” and venerable home of Walter Duranty, the spiritual father of today’s dominant media,  may not be around for very many more 4th of Julys even if the Leftist fantasy world is shoved down our throats.    But we still have a few more weeks left of Bush and Paulson – perhaps they will give the Times a nice bucket full of bailout money.

Lately I’ve seen these arguments on several blogs and have even been discussing them with a relative who shares these views: “We have to have some government regulations or everyone will get ripped off” and, “What would replace the FDA, USDA, FTC etc?”

A lot of confusion revolves around the failure to properly understand the concepts ‘initiatory force’ (regulations) and ‘retaliatory force’ (laws). According to the principle that all men have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the laws of this land are supposed to be designed to protect those individual rights. And since rights can only be violated by the use of force whether direct or indirect (as in fraud), our laws thus need to be based on the principle that the government must have a monopoly on the retaliatory use of force and can legally employ that force only against those who initiate its use. Our Constitution says in part: “To secure these rights governments are instituted amongst men.”

But so new was the concept of rights that even many thinkers in our founder’s time did not grasp its implications regarding the use of force. As soon as the ink dried on the Constitution, state governments began writing laws that employed the initiatory use of force against citizens. Whereas proper laws are based on the principle of protecting people’s rights with the retaliatory use of force, regulations are based on the principle of employing initiatory force to compel a desired behavior in the absence of a threat to anyone’s rights. Laws ask how do we best exercise our rights in the context of retaliatory force? Regulations ask how do we best violate rights with initiatory force? This last is never admitted by the regulators and their legislative creators but it is true nonetheless.

This confusion between starting the use of force and retaliating with it has long since led academia to believe that one can mix politics and economics and still have a just and prosperous society. It can’t be done any more than one can fix a flat tire on one’s car by changing a light bulb in one’s house. The car and house are two different creatures each with its own nature and purpose. One wouldn’t change the car’s oil in the living room or take a shower in the garage. If the nature of each is respected then both the car and house can efficiently coexist in the same life context of any individual.

And so it is with politics and economics. Economics is the science that studies the nature of voluntary interactions between people in a given society. Politics is the science that studies the nature of physical force in that same society, the application of which is called law. To interject force in an economy is to nullify free choice. Societies may stumble along with such a mixture for awhile but will reach a tipping point where they will have to repudiate their controlled economy or face collapse. And what they have to repudiate is the initiatory use of force, not its retaliatory use.

A free country will not have any government regulations. The alphabet soup bureaucracies like FDA, USDA, CDC etc would not exist except as private testing and inspection companies.

This does not mean that there won’t be any regulations. Banks, insurance companies and others conduct client inspections now. That will multiply in a laissez-faire economy. There won’t be any unself-interested bureaucracy to rely on. The more people have to rely on their own judgement the better at it they will get. The best regulator of the market is the dynamism of the market itself. That dynamism is the freedom of all the people to pursue their happiness according to their own best judgement. It’s called capitalism. It means freedom by right instead of by permission. Regulations = permission.

Robert Tracinski makes this point in a post about the massive and surprising return of statism this year in TIA Daily:

…this crisis is a clear refutation of the claim, made in some Objectivist circles, that the intrusion of religion into government is the central political issue of our time. If religion were really the central issue, politically or culturally, we would expect large numbers of people to turn to God—and to religious politics—in a crisis. Instead, when the crisis came, people turned to the state.

This is a boldly stated refutation of Leonard Peikoff’s 2006 statement:

How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.

Socialism—a fad of the last few centuries—has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades. Leftists are no longer the passionate collectivists of the 30s, but usually avowed anti-ideologists, who bewail the futility of all systems. Religion, by contrast—the destroyer of man since time immemorial—is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.

Is it, as Tracinski says, either/or — God or state? Could it be, rather, that Republicans turned so readily to the state because they had already turned to God? After all, Bush’s entire presidency, with his compassionate conservatism, has been big government brought on by the altruistic ethics of Bush’s religion.

In an economic crisis, one would expect the state — even a religious state — to look for economic solutions. People might react to bankruptcies on Wall Street by turning to God, although it’s more likely after a major terrorist attack or natural disaster. Church attendance might rise in addition to the bailouts and increasing state intervention in the economy. It’s not either/or.

There is a larger point to be made. I suspect that both Peikoff and Tracinski have been misled by the propaganda of the two major political parties. Yes, the Democrats are the home of the socialist/nihilist left and the Republicans are the home of the religious right, but they’re both big government parties. The welfare state has turned them into two gangs fighting for power so they can distribute the loot stolen from producers to their favorite pressure groups.

The rise of religion could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to socialism in America. Religious ethics are socialist ethics. In the Sermon On the Mount, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Monks who take a vow of poverty follow the logic of that statement. On this premise, socialism, which redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor, is moral; capitalism, in which individuals selfishly pursue wealth, is immoral. American Christians twist themselves into pretzels to rationalize the pursuit of wealth, but if you take Jesus’s words seriously and cut the crap, you have to side with socialism.

We’re lucky Marx was an atheist and that he created, under the influence of Hegel, a bizarre fantasy about history going from feudalism through capitalism to culminate in communism — a kind of heaven on earth. Were it not for all this, religion would have allied itself with socialism to fight capitalism long ago.

The New Left has shifted the emphasis from economics to culture — multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, animal rights, etc. No longer saddled by Marx’s fantasies, it will be easier for the left to integrate with religion.

I wait in dread for what I call the Grand Rapprochement, in which the left and right come together to form one big statist party. I imagine the deal being something like: the right gets to enslave man’s spirit and the left gets to control the economy. The two sides will mutually reinforce one another as the religious right gives them morality and the left gives them a veneer of practicality in this world.

The biggest sticking point to the Grand Rapprochement would be abortion, and here someone will have to lose. I think it would be the feminists because their arguments are weak. Religionists argue against abortion with righteous moral fervor. Abortion is murdering babies! The moral high ground always wins. Women will get screwed again. So to speak.

What is the greatest threat to America, the socialist left or the religious right? The answer is both. And the big loser will be freedom.

Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!

“Rule Shields Health Workers Who Withhold Care Based on Beliefs”