Your Recurring Campaign Contribution

One issue that the current debate over pork projects has brought to the fore is how they essentially are used as campaign funds. It's a lot of money; CAGW noted about $16.5 billion in earmarks for 2010. Understandably, some folks don't like this; if Steve doesn't like his senator, he probably doesn't like that his senator can use the tax money taken from Steve to fund projects that are often unnecessary to keep key constituencies voting for that senator.

What many people don't fully realize, however, is how this injustice permeates our current system of taxation and appropriation. Let me give you a couple recent examples.

Let's start with Harry Reid's idea back in October to give every recipient of Social Security benefits (all 52 million of them) a $250 bonus That's $14.5 billion right there. Most of them could almost certainly use it; they haven't had a cost of living increase in years. I'm not a fan of social security, but that's not the problem; it's the strategy that disgusted me. It wasn't news to Reid that seniors wanted an increase. He'd just had two years of Democratic House and Senate majorities, along with a Democratic executive. If he'd wanted to pass this measure, he'd almost certainly have been able to do it anytime since 2008.

However, it wasn't until October of 2010 that he offered to vote on it, and then he wanted to vote on it AFTER the November elections. Now why the heck would he do that? It certainly doesn't make sense if his priority was to actually accomplish the payment; it is far more unlikely that it will pass now that Republicans have gained a majority in the House. If, on the other hand, his priority was to get himself and other Democrats re-elected, it makes perfect sense. Republicans were far more likely to oppose such a measure, so Reid dangled the $250 in front of seniors in order to get them to vote Democrat.

Here's another example in the news this morning. Al Gore, in a series of surprisingly frank statements, essentially admitted that the reason he supported subsidies (running about $6 billion a year) of corn ethanol wasn't entirely because he believed that it was in the best interests of the country.

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

Got that? Corn ethanol was a bad idea, but hey, folks, I was about to run for president so I needed votes in Iowa, why not throw a few billion in that direction?

Pork projects aren't the half of it. As long as your government can take your money without your consent, this will be a problem.

Anti-Civil Rights Act ≠ Anti-Civil Rights

This article has the Washpost trying to make a mountain out of a river. Rand Paul dared to suggest that the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 might not have been a good idea.

Never mind that, despite the headline saying his statement "confuses supporters," the author apparently couldn't find a single confused supporter to quote. This issue appears painfully simple to all of Paul's supporters, but the inability of the author to catch the point is telling.

Paul could oppose the 1964 Civil Rights act for one of three reasons.

1. He could be in favor of discrimination (no one is suggesting that this is the case)
2. He could be opposed to discrimination, but believe that it was not the place of the government to enact anti-discrimination laws
3. He could be opposed to discrimination, and in favor of some anti-discrimination laws, but opposed to a federal anti-discrimination law

What separates a politician like Rand Paul from your ordinary Republican or Democrat is his ability, when confronted with a social problem, to react with the knee-jerk response "Golly, there oughta be a law." This is reflected in his approach here, and that's precisely what his constituents like about him.

On Social Justice

I don't follow Glenn Beck. I did pick up, however, that he made some pretty harsh statements about churches that ascribe to the pursuit of "social justice."

First, of course, we need to define the term. Beck probably caught so much heat because he failed to properly do just that.

I've heard the term used quite a bit, and in some quite different ways. Generally, though, it's meant to encompass things that ordinary "justice" doesn't cover. If you ask Google to define social justice, you get three relevant results, the last of which I think best approximates the contemporary use of the term: "The fair distribution of advantages, assets, and benefits among all members of a society."

See what I mean? Most people wouldn't say that the fact that person A has more money or a better education than person B is inherently unjust; unfair, maybe. However, if a person ascribes to this definition of social justice, they'd do just that.


Roger Ebert, as quoted on Obama's Organizing for America website, blogged:

"What is social justice, anyway? I think it involves civil rights and liberties. It involves a trial in a fair legal system. It involves freedom of speech and the practice, or non-practice, of religion. It involves a living wage and decent working conditions. As my father often repeated, "A fair day's work for a fair day's pay."

See what he did there? Ebert took issues that actually involved justice (right to speak without encroachment, practice religion without encroachment, be free from imprisonment unless you've been found guilty in a fair trial) and lumped them together with an issue of fairness with regard to material possessions and comforts (a "living wage" and "decent" working conditions).

Now let me back up a little bit; when I talk about "justice", I'm talking about the kind of justice that scripture gives us the right to demand of others.

Think about it this way; God tells you to do all that you've agreed to do. He also makes provision for people and their leaders to enforce contracts. If you agree to pay your neighbor a sum of money for completing some work, and then fail to follow up, you've committed an injustice towards that neighbor and before God. Scripture provides for the other members of society to take action to correct the injustice towards the neighbor, but you still need to ask God's forgiveness for the sin you've committed to deal with your sin before God.

With a purely "social justice" issue, however, things are different. If your needy neighbor asks you for a gift of your property, God has commanded you to oblige him and give him what he needs. If you fail to give him your property, you've disobeyed God just a surely as in the first scenario. However, God didn't give the members of society the right to enforce this mandate. Christ told us to give of our property lots of times; never once did he give us a general mandate to compel others to give of their property. He told his followers to give of their own to feed widows and orphans; he didn't tell them to demand that Rome tax the wealthy and use that money to feed widows and orphans.

The pursuit of "social justice" isn't a problem at all if it merely involves the conviction that you should give of your own to help those less materially blessed than you. That's an absolutely correct philosophy, albeit a misapplication of the word "justice" in view of its generally accepted meaning. Where it deviates from both scripture and classical liberalism, though, is when it is applied politically through the use of force. Forced charity isn't charity at all, and it isn't obedience to God's commands.

Here's a question you should ask anyone who ascribes to the political philosophy of social justice: Why do we need to stick the word "social" justice in there at all? Why can't we simply pursue justice?

The real answer is that "social justice" and "justice" are completely different concepts. If person A has more money or a better education than person B it may be because person A stole the money, or inherited it from someone who oppressed person B's parents, or it could simply be because he worked harder or is smarter than person B, or because he just got lucky in a stock market pick. The first two possibilities are issues of actual justice; the latter are simply issues of material inequity, not justice at all.

I used to place this clip of Harry Reid at the top of my list of dumb statements made by politicians. It may have to yield that place, however, to this doozy.

Religion in Textbooks

Here's a video you may or may not want to watch. It's essentially a bunch of moms talking about their feelings in light of an ongoing controversy over wether or not some conservative and Christian elements should or shouldn't be required in history textbooks used in Texas public schools. I'll give you a short synopsis; some of them kinda support it, and some kind of oppose it. One mom points to the fact that many events and historical decisions were influenced by religion, so that should certainly be included. Another mom says that actual studies of world religion, and any possible religios controversy or offensive content, should at least be optional.

A Texas college student from another article took a somewhat more confrontational position:

"We're concerned that the far right members on the state board are trying to force their personal and political agendas on the children of Texas"

Here's the real answer, though; they're all wrong. Or they're all right, depending how you look it it. What is certain is that they all fail to identify the problem.

Think about it this way; there are thousands of overtly religious private schools throughout the nation; Christian schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, etc. In lots of these schools, every student must learn one religion, and that religion will be presented as absolutely true. Yet, no one suggests that this is an injustice. What's the difference?

If you don't like what a private school teaches, you can leave, just like you can leave a public school if you don't like what they teach. So that's not the difference.

If you are a student attending a private school and you disagree with some religious material presented, you have less ability to contest that material in that private school than you do in a public school. If anything, there's more freedom in a public school environment, so that sure isn't the issue.

If you don't like what a private school teaches, you can complain to the school board and they can change it. That can also be done, to a certain degree, in a public school.

Here's where the injustice lies.
If you don't like a private school for some reason, such as the curriculum content, their bullying policy, their religious practices, or the quality of their service and you decide to leave, you can quit paying them tuition. Not so with a public school. Unlike private, non-coercive companies, public schools get your money whether they deliver a satisfactory product or not, heck, whether they even serve you directly or not.

That's the injustice, and as long as it continues, taxpayers will rightfully feel wronged when they are forced to pay for an educational service that doesn't deliver what they want, whether it's quality education, a safe environment, more or less sex ed, or whatever.

What we all need to realize, though, is that the problem isn't on the service end at all. If someone set up a school that guaranteed sub-par results, explicit and controversial sex ed and a strictly evolutionary and humanistic perspective in all their textbooks, you wouldn't feel wronged at all so long as you weren't compelled to pay that school tuition.

The injustice happened when we were taxed, but no one seems to have noticed.

Libertarianism IS Ineffective

Or, at least it can be. Here's one argument I've heard several times in opposition to a libertarian philosophy. If the libertarian suggests that government must respect the same individual rights that the common citizen must respect by not taxing, not enslaving, not takning property by force without contract or some voluntary surrender of right, the recipient of this suggestion will often reply something like the following:

"That's a very nice dream, but it's horribly naive. You need to have national defense, local security, courts, education...the list goes on, and you'll never accomplish these things without taxes. We live in a fallen world, and an effective, successful government simply has to use some level of coercion to do good things."

This argument can be right, and it can be wrong. This depends, of course, on two things. First, it assumes that there are things that can only be done through coercion, or can be done best through coercion. This flies in the face of what we see demonstrated every day; almost all of the great successes you see in the business world were accomplished without the use of coercion. However, let's assume for a moment that this first assumption is true; that you can't, for instance, have good medical care without coercive government involvement.

The next assumption that this argument makes is that we should use a material standard to determine what constitutes effective, successful government. This is currently a very popular assumption, so I don't blame anyone for holding it. Should we, though? Which is your top priority; material comfort, or the protection of individual rights?

Jeremy Bentham advocated a material standard of evaluation in Principles of Morals and Legislation. According to Bentham, an action is "right"

when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community (utility) is greater than any it has to diminish it.

As a result, according to Bentham, government should follow whatever course of action maximizes utility.

Jefferson, on the other hand, used the word "right" differently in the Declaration of Independence. He said that a right is inalienable and endowed by God. He held that, instead of finding right in the greatest material good, governments exist to secure these pre-existing rights.

Bentham would consider a government successful if it made decisions that resulted in the greatest happiness, even if it that meant trespassing upon what Jefferson would have considered an individual's God-given rights. Since Jefferson said a government exists to secure rights, I assume he would consider a government successful if it did just that.

Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that taxation violates the right to property. Let's also keep assuming that there are some situations where the greater happiness (utility) is served by taxation.

In this case, application of a "Benthamite" standard would mean that a taxing government was successful; it had resulted in more happiness. Application of a "Jeffersonian" standard would mean that the same government was unsuccessful; it had violated individual rights.

So if you're looking for a government that provides all sorts of material benefits, like education, health care, etc. even at the expense of individual rights, or if you don't believe individual rights exist at all, then sure, libertarianism is impractical.

If, however, you believe in the existence of rights endowed by a creator, and that those rights should subsequently be held sacred by even a government, then it's one of the most practical systems in existence.

I'm pretty sure this is what Franklin was talking about when he said "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Rights being what they are...

There's a misconception that I want to address. You can see the evidence of it in legislative approaches to social problems all the time. It is the idea that "rights" are, or can be, in conflict.

A right constitutes proper authority, the power to make decisions and do as one pleases. It invokes higher law; it's something that is ordained by God or nature, not other people. Rights are, by definition, exclusive. Two individuals cannot claim a divine right to the same power or authority over the same property; if they do, one is right, the other is wrong. It's easier to understand when you consider a "right" as "the right," or the right thing to do. If course of action (A) is settled on as the right thing to do, then this is the same as saying all other courses of action are not the right thing to do. To bring this back to a more common application of the word, if an individual has the right to make decisions regarding a certain peice of property, then no other individual can claim the same right, unless the first person chooses to share it.

(Keep in mind, married folks, that wives and husbands only count as one individual).

The confusion arises when folks think of general rights as unlimited. They aren't. It isn't really accurate, for example, to say that you have a right to property. You have a right to some property unless you've been slacking, but of course you don't have a right to all property. You can't say that you have a right to free speech, because you don't have a right to stand in your neighbors house and scream shrilly after he's told you to be quiet. You have a right to some speech, some of the time, in some places.

Rights are limited like the borders of states; one ends where another starts. This lends itself quite well to one of my favorite phrases explaining the limitation of rights: "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" (Richard Maybury).

There are a couple places where I've heard this erroneous argument used, and they are usually made in the context of justifying government intervention that encroaches upon actual individual rights.

For instance, you'll see immunization statutes that make a provision for exemption in situations where an individual has a bona fide religious conviction against immunization. However, many of these statutes specifically state that, in the case of an epidemic, this exemption will not be upheld.

This isn't, as some would suggest, a matter of competing or overlapping rights where the state has an right that is simply more important than the individual's. It would be silly to suggest that the parent has a right to not immunize in a given situation and that the state has a right to compel immunization in the same situation. Remember, you're appealing to a higher authority when you claim a right; God (or nature) isn't going to stand behind both opposing parties simultaneously proclaiming both to be properly excercising his authority.

It is a question of whether or not the individual does, in fact, have a right to adhere to their religious convictions in this situation at all. If they do, it can't be argued that a simple state interest outbalances a right. Rights, by definition, also trump interests. Take the scriptural example of the starving thief in Proverbs 6:30; his interest is acute and reasonable, but it doesn't negate the rights of the person he steals from.

To say that a right exists, but that it must be suspended or forfeited or encroached upon to serve even a pressing interest is a contradiction in terms. If I say this, then although I'm using the term "right," I'm actually assigning to the word the actual meaning "privilege."

"So what" you may say at this point. "What's the difference between saying that I don't actually have a right to do x and saying that I do have a right to do x but the government has a stronger right? Isn't the outcome the same?

Maybe, in some situations. The danger, though, rests in the assumption that arises when one incorrectly identifies the limitation of a right as an acceptable instance where a right is encroached upon. It is never proper, from a logical perspective or from a philosophical perspective, to say that it is ethically acceptable to encroach upon a right. That is exactly equivalent to saying that it is ethically acceptable to stop something from doing that God (or nature) has given them rightful authority to do. Instead, it is appropriate to identify the border of the dominion that God (or nature) established, and stop someone cold when they cross it.