The War Over Capitalism's Carcass

Capitalism has been dying a slow and painful death for as long as I have been aware of the issue. Today, the Democrats have declared their intention to control the remains and bury them in a pauper's grave.  So giddy are they that they don't even listen to the contradictions in their funeral oration.  Senators Harry Reid (NV) and Chris Dodd (CT) have just finished explaining the compromises that must be made in order to get the proposed "fix" delivered in time for the scheduled funeral in November.   One thing is quite clear: The Democrats will control the disbursement of the remains while crediting the Republicans with the kill.  Both of these declarations are evident in Reid's insistence that the Republicans compromise while the Democrats be given carte blanch to have their way with the old bird.  Reid insists that the appearance of the two presidential candidates was a grievous example of politics photo-opting that interfered with and made a circus of the proceedings. In the next sentence he blames the entire mess on Republicans.  This, of course, is not politics but the truth.

    Give me a break.

AF

Palin’ in Comparison

Well, the Republican Party finally looks like what it is – a kind of folksy, girl-next-door firecracker who talks about Big Government and standing up for American Values (you know – Apple Pie and Motherhood.  Sure can’t forget motherhood) and a tottering ex-war hero with dictatorial ambitions who wants to silence anyone who has enough money to make a difference , continue the hopeless and wrongheaded war in Iraq, and talks about a National Service Corps.  The emphasis here is on Folksy, with a capital F, which stands for what the, and rhymes with trick my truck.

By comparison, the Democrats look like champions of reason – a much-needed and long neglected characteristic of that elite bunch that are educated.   Forget what the Democrats actually support and what it will do to the country (the word starts with ‘d’),  if you’ve been educated in today’s schools in the basic subjects of socialization, multiculturalism and the environment, guess who you’ll vote for.   Yes, this election is Obama’s to lose.

I know I’ll be voting for him.   Call it my version of the Starnsville walkout.  

AF

P. S.  Have you ever wondered why Country Music has become the last bastion of values in the pop universe?  

Democratic Party Day, 2008

It's 7:45 AM PST, Monday, August 25^th, 2008. Do you know where your vote is?

Today is the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It's a convention only in the sense that supporters of the Democratic Party will convene to celebrate their vision of what this country should become. All the details of the platform may or may not have been hammered out already, but the candidates have been chosen and the general thrust of what that historic document will contain is already known. They call it "change," but as the details are revealed they look like more of the same in principle while the differences are like the different pizzas made at two different restaurants: a matter of taste. The principle involved is the use of force as an instrument of public welfare policy, and the only change is in the specific mix of policies to which force will be applied.

To contemplate the elimination of force as an instrument of public welfare policy is foolish at this point. Consider what would need to be done. You would need a principled citizenry that does not expect the government to provide for "emergencies" much less its every need, and you would need politicians that don't pander and an education establishment that isn't dependent on government money and a Supreme Court that bases its decisions on an objective understanding of the intent of the founders and. . .(fill in here with all the conditions that would have to be satisfied). That having been accomplished, we might get a change that would matter. (If you have access to a good academic library, I recommend Tara Smith's clarifying article on Originalism, published in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy, 2007, Vol. 2.) To achieve even part of such a principled change will require time and rational argument in an atmosphere that at least nominally accepts reason as the coin of the realm.

If making that change and making it stick for the long term seems difficult in such a relatively pre-disposed culture, consider the difficulty in an atmosphere which accepts faith as the coin of the realm.

Years ago Rand gave a speech, anthologized in Philosophy: Who Needs It, called "Faith and Force, the Destroyers of the Modern World." Faith and Force are the ac tion components of the psycho-epistemological archetypes that she discusses in the title essay of For the New Intellectual: The Witchdoctor and Attila. To put the current situation in the briefest form possible I would say this: Attila has been in control of domestic policy for years. As long as faith was regarded a background personal choice that did not explicitly support the Republican opposition to the use of government force, an ad hoc relationship could be maintained for the purpose of electing the loyal opposition. But that is the Republican Party of my youth.

That relationship can no longer be justified, in my view. Not only has the Republican Party embraced the use of force as an instrument of public welfare policy, there are important domestic issues that are explicitly religious in their support and in the rhetoric that surrounds them: "intelligent design" in the public schools and abortion. Both of these issues are argued now in terms of spiritual values that are clearly religious and that are explicitly viewed as God-ordained, faith-based values in a valueless world created by atheistic communists, socialists and relativists. Thus an explicit call for faith as a guiding principle for life has moved away from a background personal choice. This trend toward faith is now culturally supported to such an extent that it can be source of well-being in a commercial for financial services.

It is vitally important to eliminate faith as a justification for public welfare policy. The positive argument is that faith has wide epistemological reach. It has the power to obliterate the current relatively rational arena for discussion. The negative argument is that force is so entrenched in the public's view of politics that it is the more difficult of the two to abolish from political discourse.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats need to know that religious appeals are grounds for dismissal at the next election. The Republicans, so far, are the most vocal in their evocation of faith.

As it is, I will have to vote, if I vote at all, for a continuation of the status quo. That means, as far as I can see, voting Democratic.

I hope you will join me.

AF