Category: ideological culture

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

My Enemy’s Money

American democracy is uglier than necessary. We don’t have to talk so nasty about our opponents. Or their money.

The usual snipe about this process is that funders of “our side” (whichever side that happens to be) are Good and True and Selfless, while funders of the other side are Evil and Dishonest and Selfish.

So, Democrats decry — and often seek to regulate — the spending of wealthy conservatives and “major corporate lobbyists”; Republicans decry — and, perhaps less often, seek to limit — the spending of unions and billionaires such as George Soros.

Because organizations like MoveOn have been funded by Soros, they are said to be somehow less “legitimate.”

When it was discovered that the Koch brothers of Koch Industries had funded various “Tea Party” organizations to the tune of (it is said) many millions, Obama-hurrahing pundits and activists decried this, charging that it proved that there was no “grassroots” element to the movement. “Astroturf!” they cried.

All nonsense.

Now, Democrats from Obama on down claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign money for ads. But Democrats haven’t produced a shred of evidence. It’s simply a wild accusation.

Look: It’s not tainted money when the other side gets it and you don’t. Or vice versa. Besides, rich people should be as free as less rich folks to give to their causes.

And perhaps we’d see less money pouring into politics from billionaires were campaign contributions for the rest of us less limited.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

A Literary Giant, a Giant of Liberty

Had we but world enough, and time . . . we’d read all the books on our reading lists.

Last week I contemplated the classics of political liberty and a book I hadn’t read. After that, the days of the week clicked off, as they do, and a writer I was familiar with (but had never read) won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I wonder: Will I ever make time to read his books?

They don’t exactly look like my cup of tea. But, perusing the list of novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, there seems to be something for nearly everyone.

What I knew Vargas for, mostly, was his notorious move away from trendy communism and towards an appreciation of freedom. Individual freedom. Liberty. He even ran for the presidency of his country on a limited-government platform, and raised quite a lot of interest, only to be beaten by a sly, dark horse of a candidate who went on to stay in the news for quite some time.

Success or no, by standing up for constitutional limitations and private property and civil liberties as one coherent package, Vargas made an important contribution to world culture that almost deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Too often, literary types feel (like his friend-enemy-frenemy Gabriel Garcia Márquez obviously feels) destined to ally themselves with “the Left.”

Mario Vargas Llosa broke that tradition.

So, congratulations to an eminent man of letters . . . and liberties.

Too bad he lacks a North American counterpart.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture

Should I Read This?

Yesterday I talked about a New York Times piece on the Tea Party reading list. I mentioned several authors, including Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, and even Saul Alinsky. As an astute reader mentioned, I did not bring up W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap, which Ms. Zernike’s article treats at some length.

I also did not deign to mention a few books merely cited, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Why?

Well, of the books I didn’t mention, I’d only read one. And it wasn’t The 5000 Year Leap. More importantly, the title of the Times piece, what interested me about it, were the classics. The 5000 Year Leap isn’t a classic yet.

But perhaps I should ask you: Have you read it? Does it deserve to be a classic?

The New York Times didn’t exactly entice me into the book’s pages. According to the paper, Skousen thought Jefferson urged teaching Christianity in state public schools. This seems to fly in the face not only of Jefferson’s humanistic “Epicureanism” but also of the disestablishmentarianism of the Baptists for whom Jefferson supportively coined the expression “wall of separation between church and state.” (It’s often forgotten, these days, that, during our nation’s founding period, Baptists were ardent supporters of keeping religion and politics separate.)

But I’ve learned long ago, you can’t always trust the Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
ideological culture

Tea Readers

According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.

Tea Partiers are reading classics . . . but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:

  • Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
  • F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  • Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-funded gimme-gimme state.

The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.

That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something.

Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.

Wow. What a revolutionary thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Demolition Time!

The socialist party of Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, expects to lose seats in the next election. El Presidente pled with voters to not forsake the “revolution.” He dubbed the opposition — which last time around boycotted the elections — “Operation Demolition.”

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

Surely what we hope for in an opposition party, in South America or El Norte, is, in everything but the incendiary, literal sense, demolition.

Of expansive, intrusive, know-it-all government.

“Big” and “intrusive” are just two words that characterize what the GOP brought to America during its heyday. Others? Massive spending, a new medical “entitlement,” growing public debt, and — as a sort of crackpot coda — bailouts for rich people.

Same for united government under the Democrats: More uncontrolled spending, an even more massively expensive medical “entitlement,” ballooning public debt — and, as a variation on a theme — more bailouts yet.

Massive government with no limits. But we’re told we can’t call it socialism!

Reports from Venezuela say the opposition has shifted from hatred of Hugo to issues such as rising crime and cost of living. In America, Tea Party folks have gained most ground when they attack spendthrift and socialistic policies rather than demonizing President Obama.

In both cases, ordinary people’s everyday concerns — taxes, debt, inflation, thuggery, and all the other things that go along with socialist-leaning policies — trump the cult/anti-cult of personality as well as political theory, expressed by this ism or that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture too much government

Sir Terry Confesses to Forge-ry

Recently, two dreams came true for comic fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Yet, the final result was comic reality . . . Great Britain-style.

First dream? He was knighted by the Queen.

Second? He forged a magic sword.

Well, he mined ore off his estate, and, with the help of a friend, smelted it using a hand-made kiln heated with sheep dung. Pratchett even added in meteoric iron to make his sword. The heavens-sent ore is called “thunderbolt iron.” Yes, that’s the “magic part.”

But perhaps more magical, really, is Pratchett’s personal hankering for a sword. Swords are out of fashion these days. But if you dream up Discworld, Pratchett’s comic magic domain, it makes some sense.

There is a sad tag to this story. Pratchett suffers from Alzheimer’s. That little tidbit, a terrible disease, lends a sort of strange discord that takes over the tale, if you let it.

Of course, there’s the ever-present political element. One is not allowed to carry around large knives, daggers and swords in England.

Pratchett says that it it annoys him that “knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords. That would be a knife crime.”

Normally, I’d agree with him. Knights should be able to carry around large blades. So should regular folk. It’s the criminals, who keep them hidden, who are the problem. Not the citizenry. And certainly not knights.

Still, should dementia hit him full, perhaps it’s just as well he’s hid his sword.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

The Bad Lesson

If you favor hiding evidence and quashing open inquiry with regard to public questions of the most urgent interest, what does that say about your philosophy of education?

Teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles have been in a tizzy because the Los Angeles Times, a liberal bastion, published a detailed series casting controversial light on the quality of public school education in the city. The articles include a database of scores assessing — gasp! — the effectiveness of teachers.

This is a disturbing development for union reps demanding ever greater pay and job security for even lackluster instructors. To be sure, it’s not the negative evaluations that most intensely disturb them, nor even any debatable aspect of the methodologies used to assess effectiveness. It’s that the data has been publicized and discussed at all. The Times should not have published the database, complained one union official, Randi Weingarten. Another union honcho, A.J. Duffy, even called for a boycott of the paper, as if it were morally turpitudinous to give parents even an inkling of teacher performance.

Slate.com contributor Jack Shafer concludes that the Times has “done its readers a great service” by exposing Duffy and his cronies as “enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable — essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools.”

Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Academically Free to Leave

One goal of academic freedom is to protect inquiry from the guardians of orthodoxy, the machinations of those who resent any articulation of an alternate view.

Administrators at UCLA don’t seem to be fans of this goal.

James Enstrom has been at UCLA for 36 years. He lacks tenure, and his contract is not being renewed because, according to the school, his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department.

The professor was booted soon after coauthoring a piece at Forbes.com, disputing the relationship between diesel soot and deaths in California. According to Enstrom, in 1998 regulators “declared diesel exhaust a toxic substance based on studying truckers and railroaders from back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when emissions were much higher. They never factored in . . . that a very high percentage of truckers are also smokers . . . yet they were using this research to declare that all diesel exhaust is a toxic substance.”

Even colleagues who disagree with Enstrom worry about the implications for academic freedom. Michael Siegel at Boston University notes that the mission of Enstrom’s department is “to study the impacts of the environment on human health, and that’s exactly what Enstrom does. . . .”

The department apparently objects not to “the nature of his research but the nature of his findings.”

UCLA says chucking Enstrom has nothing to do with his conclusions, but won’t comment further. If there’s nothing to hide, why are they hiding it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture incumbents political challengers

Establishment Out

Another one bites the dust: Nine-term Congressman Mike Castle was defeated in Delaware’s primary by Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell.

Weeks ago, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski was bested in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, also Tea Party-supported. Before that Utah Senator Robert Bennett lost his re-nomination bid.

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, who has actively assisted the insurgent Republicans, clarifies: “The GOP establishment is out.”

Media folks love talking about the angry mood throughout the land. The bad economic times have made people upset, they say — the supposition being that this rage is irrational, aimed indiscriminately at those in government, no matter how well they may have performed.

But the mainstream media hypothesis is wrong on both counts. First, the anger at career politicians isn’t new. Four years ago, long before the recession, Alaska GOP voters tossed out their incumbent governor, one Frank Murkowski, in favor of Sarah Palin. Voters have long disapproved of the way career politicians have wrecked our country. At some point, “enough” has morphed to “too much,” hence the current large-scale revolt.

Further, voters are clearly discriminating, not taking their ire out on all incumbents, just those they feel have not represented their interests.

That’s why we have elections: to hold elected officials accountable.

We ought not bemoan that citizens are boiling mad, but that it takes so much bad behavior by politicians to raise this righteous fury.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

King’s Dream, Tea Party-Style

In the Washington Post’s Book World segment, surprise was noted how quickly Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Tea Party manifesto, Give Us Liberty, fell off in sales. Why? Perhaps “Tea Party folks . . . already knew who they were and what they believed?”

Good guess.

But what do they believe?

Alveda King is the niece of Martin Luther King, whom she refers to as “Uncle Martin.” Fielding questions from CNN’s Larry King after she had participated in Glenn Beck’s recent Washington rally, Ms. King insisted that “It’s not so much about the man as the message.” The “issues” she emphasized were the ones that Beck, to the surprise of many, had also emphasized: Faith, hope, charity, and honor.

“My uncle said we have to live together as brothers — and I add, as sisters — or ‘perish as fools.’” If Ms. King is not out of place in Beck’s wing of the Tea Party, then what of all the noise about racism? Could widespread opposition to Obama be mainly about policy?

When Rev. Sharpton talked about “going all the way in civil rights,” Ms. King clarified something that might be useful in helping left-leaning folks understand Tea Party folks’ attitude towards policy: “My uncle was not teaching that we needed the government to take care of us.”

His main message had something to do with liberty. And respect for all.

Tea Party people appear to be in the main stream of modern American culture in claiming such ideas as theirs, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.