“Right” On

I was recently moved to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments while listening to a radio advertisement. (These are, by the way, not recommended activities while driving a 5000 lb vehicle – it, um, interferes with safe driving.)

The ad in question was for a firm that “freed” deeply indebted people from the “burden” of their debts. The money quote that induced said poor driving practices was something along the lines of, “You have a right to be debt- and worry-free.”

Oh really? So, I guess by extension, I have a “right” to own a home, car, flatscreen TV, boat, vacation villa, all of which I cannot afford? After all, if I have a “right” to be debt-free, then it follows easily that I need not be overly concerned about incurring the debt in the first place.

Absurd? Of course. What is most troubling here, though, is that the people peddling this “service” are doing so knowing full well that there is an audience for their sophistry. In a sane, ethical, and thoughtful society, such claims could never get traction. An advertisement like this would be jeered for the moral corruption that it represents. But a good part of “modern society” is so fundamentally ethically debauched, that this sort of thing passes almost without comment.

So how, exactly, did we become so morally numb? What is it about free people that causes us to buy into utter nonsense when we really do know better? I’d suggest three root causes:

• As Western society developed, there was a shifting emphasis on just what living was supposed to accomplish. In the early days, living was defined primarily by survival activities like reproducing, fishing, farming, and building. As the blessings of Liberty began to produce wealth – in some cases, great wealth – we looked at ourselves and began to think about living our lives to “do good”. A poor man doesn’t have time for charity. Charity is a rich man’s hobby. Andrew Carnegie had the time and wealth to do this on a scale that Thomas Jefferson, for example, could not have contemplated. But in the 2oth century especially, we’ve come to see life as a quest for pleasure, contentment, meaning, and even just wealth itself. Notions like honor, truth, and goodness have become almost entirely overshadowed by “how I feel about things“. Crushing debt makes me feel bad. I can’t possibly allow that to happen – feeling bad is the only “sin” left in our narcissistic culture. Clearly, anything that remediates my feeling bad is a “good” thing and thus ought to be pursued with all haste and vigor.

• Most people are personally pretty honest. If you drop your wallet on the street, most folks will happily return it to you. But the same honest citizen manages to have moral amnesia when the victim is anonymous. The same wallet-returning saint will often have no problem commiting a minor act of larceny when the target is a faceless corporation, for example. The claimed “right to be debt-free” works precisely because it is some “evil” bank or lending institution that will suffer the consequences. In actual fact, of course, we all pick up the tab for bad debt in the form of higher prices. But “we all” is just as anonymous as “the eeevil banker” and thus similarly fair game to be defrauded.

• For the better part of 300 years, we’ve been busy enjoying the blessings of Liberty bestowed upon us by Locke, Jefferson, Smith, and all the rest of the Dead White European thinkers. In so doing, we’ve mostly stopped thinking about just why this all works. In particular, we have a deeply polluted notion of “rights”. In today’s vernacular, a “right” is anything I desire highly. According to the culture-at-large, I have a “right” not only to not pay my debts, but also to a “quality” education, “decent” living conditions, and “good” healthcare. At this rate, I shortly expect to be granted the “right” to a Ferrari and a mansion.

Meanwhile, back in Reality, we really have only one real “right” – We have the right to that which we have earned or what someone will voluntarily donate to us. Anything else is simply fraud. Worse still, the getting of something other than what we have earned pretty much always involves the use of threat or force. Here again, we see the convenient distinction between personal and anonymous morality. A good many “decent” citizens – who would never contemplate violating their neighbors’ property or stealing from them directly – think nothing about voting in laws that have essentially the same effect. Do you want a better school for your children you cannot possibly afford? Vote in higher property taxes. ‘Don’t like what you pay for prescriptions? Pass a law that has “government” (aka “All the rest of us”) pick up the tab. Does your neighbor’s choice of vice offend you? Well, get together with the rest of the mob and make those activities illegal. The list is endless and grows daily. Until and unless we reclaim the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment and once again declare ourselves to be both free and honest, we will continue to drown in the moral abyss that is our culture.

The Wealth Of Numbskulls

Adam Smith published The Wealth Of Nations in 1776, thereby laying the foundation for all modern economics. It stands as co-equal with the American Revolution in defining the modern free state because political and economic liberty are two faces of the same coin.

And … these two forces were phenomenally successful. In less than 300 years, the US experiment produced a global tidal wave of change (for the better) that the previous 9700 or-so years of recorded history could not accomplish. Today pretty much everyone on the planet benefits directly or indirectly from Smith’s foundational ideas about how wealth is produced. Even the most remote and “primitive” cultures benefit from Western wealth, whether via medicine, transportation, communications, or commerce.

But, perhaps this economic success was just a wee bit too successful. The Western beneficiaries of Smith, who enjoy historically unprecedented wealth, seem to have utterly forgotten his lessons. Today, you see, wealth is actually under attack. Attacking wealth is the luxury reserved only for the (relatively) wealthy. It’s no accident that some of the loudest anti-Capitalist voices emminate from the children of wealth. A good part of the 1960s counterculture, for instance, were rich kids going to tony elite schools on daddy’s credit card. This model persists today among the ultra wealthy population of actors, musicians, and drunken scions of political families.

And they’ve had their desired effect. Today, a good part of the general population has been taught to resent the wealth of others and is sure that wealth=dishonesty. They are fully immersed in the intellectual sewage spewed forth by the academy, the “entertainment” community, and even the politicians at large (almost all of whom depend on wealthy donors, but can never admit it out loud).

Nowhere is this more apparent than the incessant drumbeat of hatred directed toward “Big Eeeeeeevil Corporations”. Look Left, look Right – you’ll find some “thought leader” peddling the usual “Corporations Are Bad And Harm The Little Guy” line of toxic waste. But even a slight examination of Reality lays this notion to waste. Consider, for a moment, the richest members of society. Bill Gates has an approximate wealth of $50 Billion – a nice tidy sum. Let’s suppose there are a  hundred like him (there aren’t).  For those of you that suffered at the hands of New Math, that’s a total of $5 Trillion.  Now, suppose our mythic hundred Eeevil Rich Guys pooled their money in order to oppress us Little Guys. Oh wait, the US economy alone cranks out about $13 Trillion every year. At most, our evil cabal can buy up less than a half year’s annual wealth – and that’s just the US, nevermind the Anglosphere, Europe, Asia, India … So, Big Eeeevil Rich People do not, in actual fact, own the bulk of large business.

So… who exactly owns Big Eeeevil Corporations?  We do! We do so via our retirement plans, our investments in mutual funds, our teachers’ pensions, our union pensions, and so forth. In effect, attacking large business interests is an attack on ourselves (aka “The Little Guy”).

In a related vein, we often hear about “overpaid” CEOs. Apparently, we, the owners of their companies don’t think so, because we keep investing in them. BTW, most corporate executives own a vanishingly small percentage of the companies  they run. It would be better if they owned more, because they’d have a greater interest in their company’s performance.  But the Wealth Haters have seen to it that the aforementioned executives don’t get too large a piece of the action by means of foul laws that make stock options harder and harder to grant.

There are dozens of similar examples, but they all boil down to one thing: The failure to understand basic economics coupled with personal greed and class envy has turned our “Wealth Of Nations” into the “Wealth Of Numbskulls”. The Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs can only be plucked so often. Sooner or later, we’re going to get the devastating effects of attacking wealth, the people who produce it, and those who possess it.

Jefferson had it right in his first draft of The Declaration Of Independence. It should say “life, liberty, and property”. Without a respect for wealth, there can never be liberty.

The Absurdity Of Global Warming Politics

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22069080-5001031,00.html

The beauty of the current Global Warming Religion is that it can be used as the basis for local cooling, warming, more rain, less rain, more storms, fewer storms, … pretty much anything your lil’ heart desires. Since the GW pantheists have pretty much dispense with scientific rigor, peer review, experimental duplication, validation of input data, and all the rest, anything is possible.

This ought not to surprise anyone. When an issue divides itself almost perfectly along lines of political ideology, you can pretty much bet there isn’t much science or reason involved – it’s all about agenda.

When you look to the Right, you see people flatly denying the anthropogenic model of warming because … well, “God gave us dominion over the planet” or “it’s bad for business” or (worse still) “it won’t be a problem in my lifetime”.

The Left has wildly embraced the anthropogenic warming mode. It has done so because of a slightly more complex set of intellectual defects than the Right and these come in several parts:

1. The Left was deeply influenced by “theory”in the mid 20th Century. I don’t mean a real theory like scientists might propose. I’m talking about the -isms: Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and such. These schools of “thought” varied in detail, but shared one essential character: Reason was not seen as the sole or even primary way by which humans acquired knowledge that could be made normative upon other humans. It was all about reading meaning into the object under consideration, even if that meaning was entirely an artifice of the reader. When you abandon Reason entirely – which the various theory schools did, more-or-less – you can make anything “true” as you see fit.N.B. That even the most devoutly religious members of the Right never abandoned Reason. They merely claim that it is only one of several ways we acquire knowlege. A considerable portion of Judeo-Christian theological history was dedicated to the development and use of Reason in service to the Creator.
2. The Left was also early to the game of abandoning religion and any notion of transcendent meaning outside human definition. If there is no Creator and no meaning to the physical universe – it is just a random set of physics equations – then it follows pretty quickly that the only possible source of either “good” or “bad” things happening to our world must either be one of those random equations OR we humans are to blame. In effect, elevating humanity to being the single highest source of transcendence in the known universe, opened the door to blaming humans for the “bad” things that might happen. In short, anthropogenic warming serves a kind of Humanist ego agenda that with the help of 1) above doesn’t need any real rational basis.***
3. Even as traditional religious observation was abandoned, nothing could stop the inherent nature of humans to seek meaning in their lives. Here the Left stepped up with a variety of offerings from Eastern Mysticism to the various gobbledygook New Age practices. One popular form of replacement religion was Earth-worshiping – shrouded in the form of “Environmentalism”. In effect, the adherents of these ideas became closet pantheists with the Earth as their (non-personal) deity and the Environmental dogma as their theology.
4. The Left has been losing political traction since the late 1970s. Witness the recent Democrat “mandate” in the mid-term US elections wherein the Left Democrats have been essentially powerless in actual fact. In the face of losing the hearts and minds of the voters (“You mean those people in the Mid-West and South actually vote????!”), one sure way to try and win them back is to scare the “dummies” into believing that: a) There is imminent danger ahead and b) Your side has the answer.

Taken together, 1-4 explain the Left obsession with anthopogenic warming causes. Now, it may well be that we are in fact causing some acceleration of warming. But the science still isn’t complete and cannot make that case in any compelling way just yet. But that doesn’t stop the ideologues on both sides from making declarations with solemn certainty.

*** A closely related expression of this intellectual defect (the Humanist insistence that there is no transcendent meaning to life outside of mankind itself) can be seen in the current healthcare debates. At the bottom of the noise, there is, I am convinced, an essential bitterness on the part of the Humanists. It just annoys them to no end that we humans inevitably die. Especially so since, in the absence of any transcendent meaning, life alone has meaning. Death ends all meaning. Thus, it is all the more important that the center of the universe of meaning – the human being – be preserved for as long as possible and at any cost, even the use of government force. What is particularly revolting about this view, beyond its necessary use of force to be achieved, is that the same people who hold this view get convenient amnesia when the subject of abortion is introduced. Apparently, only some human lives’ meaning are worth preserving.

Irony On July 4th

Locke, Jefferson, Rousseau: All argued that the basis for oppression and inequality was overweening government. More particularly, they argued that only a free people could overcome the natural tendency of government to be despotic.

Isn’t it ironic that the very beneficiaries of these ideas today – Western Citizens – have with one enormous breath in the last hundred years announced that government is the instrument to remediate inequality and oppression? Listen to contemporary political “debate”. On all sides the “role of government” is assumed. The factions merely are arguing about who shall be fed and who shall be eaten.

Writing about the impending World War in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote words that apply even moreso today:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

(http://www.esrnational.org/september1_1939annotated.htm)