America's New Caste System

A few posts back (“What’s Wrong with America”) I mentioned the remarkable new book by Charles Murray, “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.” Murray studies the disintegration of cultural values in the economic bottom third of the white population and shows that the breakdown has created a new caste system defined more by moral values than by race or wealth. The top 20% define a new upper-middle class that is racially diverse but monolithic in its continuing adherence to America’s founding virtues: marriage, industry, honesty and religiosity. These moral values that were part of the American DNA until the 1960’s have declined precipitously among the lower class. As Murray shows, this decline of moral character has been devastating to families and especially children.

Murray describes the plight of the new white lower class in his semi-fictional place called Fishtown. We will visit there in just a bit. First, I would like to give my own account of the new upper-middle class from personal observations of my home base in Palos Verdes, CA.

Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA: The “social x-rays” are emerging from spinning class, chatting excitedly and looking good in their spandex outfits. The women are from a diversity of races, with many Asians and a few blacks and South Americans. Missy is rushing off to meet her personal-trainer with her blond ponytail trailing behind. Her two rug rats are being well cared for in the Equinox Kids Club. After an hour’s training and quick lunch it is off to Chinese pre-school for the five year old and a trip to story time at the library for the two year old. Daddy is a busy executive with Honda but he somehow finds time to play with the kids, attend special events and read to them. Tom and Missy met at Stanford where he was pursuing an MBA, after three years as an investment banker, and Missy was the youngest student in her law school class. After graduation Tom joined Honda and Missy worked for five years as an assistant DA. She was offered a partner-track position with a prestigious LA law firm but turned it down in order to start a family and be a stay-at-home mom. Missy and Tom attend church regularly as do most of their friends. They do not know an unmarried mother.  They do not know anyone who has ever been to jail.

David Brooks (NY Times, 1/30/12) discussed the vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper “tribe” and the lower “tribe.” Members of the new upper-middle class have “returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They made themselves phenomenally productive, have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.” Unfortunately, the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in the lower tribe, and that is why people there are so very dysfunctional –- and unhappy.

The new lower class folks tend to live in places like Fishtown, in Philadelphia. In the late 1990s, a University of Pennsylvania grad student named Patricia Stern focused her PhD research on the sociology of that new lower class group. The following has been extracted from her field notes.

Fishtown, Pa: The woman with bags of groceries in both arms is walking home, children hanging onto the sides of her coat. Walking behind Diane is her live in, Eddy, playing his computer game. At least he is not (yet) a “runner” - constantly on the move to avoid debt and child support collectors, girlfriends, children or the police. After dropping from high school Eddy had a job in a fast food joint, but friends felt that the job was beneath his dignity. They coerced him into asking for a promotion, and he was fired soon after. Eddy has not held a steady job since, but does a bit of part time work, under the table, to pay for what he needs – a video game, some drugs, whatever. (He also did a short stint in jail for pedaling drugs.) Money is tight for things like food, rent and doctor’s visits.  Diane and Eddy are about to put their eldest child on Ritalin (for phantom ADD) in order to qualify for government disability support. If that goes OK, they will move all their kids onto disability over time. And there is another child on the way. Neither Diane nor Eddy grew up with their fathers around. Welfare has been a way of life for their families for two, going on three, generations. The family is white. Fishtown is white.

It is exceedingly rare that a single dry statistic can explain a disturbing socio-economic trend; even more rare when it explodes a rash of liberal myths. Last year, for the first time in American history, the number of babies born to unwed mothers under 30 exceeded 50%. In the Los Angeles Times Kay Hymowitz called this the “single-mom catastrophe.” The emergence of fatherless families has been an astounding phenomenon. “In 1965, only 7% of all babies were born to single mothers, while 93% of all American births were to women with marriage licenses.” In a little more than a generation the scale has swung to the bad side. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women and, for mothers under 30, the rate is 53%. (Race is still the major variable for children born out of wedlock: Black 73%, Hispanic 53% and White 29% -- 45% for Fishtown but only 7% for the upper 20%.) For airhead twenty-something’s, the reaction might be: “Yeah? What’s the biggie?” For the rest of us, this is indeed a catastrophe.

Look first at the social pathologies that ensue. Decades of research show that kids growing up with single mothers have much lower scholastic achievement from grade school through high school, at least twice the high school dropout rate, higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, behavior problems, depression and teen pregnancy. These unfortunate kids tend to pass all those maladies on to their offspring so that the condition becomes a multi-generational thing. Writing about black welfare moms, Star Parker called the environment “Uncle Sam’s Plantation” (the title of her book).

Poverty is another dire consequence. Of the families in the bottom economic quintile, 83% are headed by single mothers. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution calculates that “virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.” Indeed there is a magic formula for rising from poverty. “If young people do three things - graduate from high school, get a job and get married and wait until they're 21 before having a baby - they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class,” according to Ron Haskins of the Pew Economic Mobility Project. If they are also religious the success rate is even higher.

What happened? How did we get into this fix? “The 1960s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” Murray said. Abortion and welfare made fathers less essential in the eyes of many, and birthing out of wedlock children became normative in Fishtown.  Government dependency became a way of life. In 1965 only 6% of Americans received welfare. Today it is up to 35% (over 100 million people) receiving welfare payments of all sorts from other Americans. (This does not include Social Security and Medicare)  In a little more than a generation, dependency has metastasized in America.

So what is to be done? Transforming public education is the key. Fishtown kids have a difficult time at school because of dysfunctional homes, bad role models, lack of dedication, too much TV, drugs, etc, etc. Ask any teacher. Those issues will not be resolved by more welfare. Our leaders (politicians, teachers, cultural elites) need to drop being “non-judgmental” and begin to lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and non-dependence: to “preach what they practice,” as Murray puts it. Early childhood education needs to focus more on behavior and less on academics. Schools need to instill the values that the kids are not getting at home. What this country needs is a kind of civic Great Awakening--a return to our nation's original foundations of family, vocation, community, and faith. Schools need to be dealing in truth, not politically-correct indoctrination. As another great thinker recently put it, “American education is in the hands of liberal airheads. Take it away from them.” (David Gelernter, “America Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture.”)

James Madison, one of our most thoughtful founders, wrote: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness, without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” America is at risk of producing a lower tribe that is lacking in the virtue needed for liberty or happiness.

Creative Destruction

Finishing up my physics doctorate in late 1971, I was considering an offer to join the Xerox Corporate Research Labs in Rochester, NY. I did a summer internship in 1966 and had been working there part time for about a year while completing my thesis. Needing a full time job -- with two children and a stay-at-home wife -- I turned to my Xerox mentors for advice. Bob Gundlach was the top scientist and inventor at Xerox and a good friend. I was totally surprised when he advised against my joining Xerox. Bob said that the company had gotten fat and lazy and was no longer the innovative dynamo he joined two decades earlier. My part-time boss had similar reservations, and he graciously offered to continue my part-time employment while I worked full time as a college physics professor. After more than seventeen years of this arrangement, I did finally join Xerox as a full time research scientist and manager. What changed my mind?

During the 1970-80s Xerox suffered through some tough times, “fumbling the future” on personal computers (to Steve Jobs’ immense satisfaction) and losing copier market share to the Japanese. It took two decades for the management culture to change course, led first by the adoption of Japanese style “Leadership Through Quality” techniques. Product quality and efficiency became pillars of the corporate culture, and by the early 1990’s Xerox became the first American company to win back lost market share from the Japanese. Xerox re-branded itself “The Document Company” and transitioned to the next big things: color printing and software services.  Manufacturing became a much smaller part of its bottom line.

As David Brooks points out, this was a common storyline in corporate America. “Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and transformations. The process was brutal and involved streamlining and layoffs. But, at the end of it, American businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more efficient.” (“How Change Happens.” New York Times, 5/21/12) Companies as diverse as GE, IBM and Apple remade themselves.

The transition has been astounding. Economic output per person is now 20 to 25% higher in the U.S. than in Japan and the major European economies, and America's economy dominates the world in size and prestige. According to The Wall Street Journal, the revenue per employee at S&P 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011. And American exports are surging, due to smart machines, the shale oil and gas revolution, and the growth of the global middle class that is dramatically increasing demand for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, planes and entertainment, all important American products.


But not all is well. As Tyler Cowen reports in The American Interest (“What Export-Oriented America Means”), there are actually two American economies. On the one hand are the companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. With the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, these companies have become relentlessly dynamic and very efficient. On the other hand, there are large sectors of the economy that do not face this global competition — health care, education and government, and industries that depend too much on government (eg. autos). These segments cling to an economic model that no longer works because the pillars have eroded.


This was the issue discussed in my last piece (“America’s Economic Problem” 5/10/12). While America transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the productivity gains achieved by the multinational companies have displaced many low-medium skilled workers. Those workers will need to find employment in new enterprises, in fields some of which have not yet been imagined. After all, ten years ago who dreamed of Facebook or Myspace or Hootsuite? Who knew we needed personal trainers, personal shoppers or personal assistants of all types? Who would have imagined the growth of pet services (canine psychologists, for heaven’s sake)? New skills will be required.


The future can be very lucrative for America if only we strive for it. Sadly, there is a sizeable and growing segment of the population that has stopped striving. A bifurcation of American society is occurring before our eyes. Increasingly, our country is becoming segregated into high-income groups with a tendency to pre-1960s social mores, and low-income groups experiencing profound social breakdown. The double whammy of declining economic opportunity and growing dysfunction has created a new lower class in America like nothing we have seen before. That is the subject of my next piece.

America's Economic Problem

In my last article I briefly described the monumental economic and social problems that have been so brilliantly discussed, respectively, by Walter Russell Mead in a series of articles for “The American Interest, and by Charles Murray in his groundbreaking book “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.” 


Another seminal reference, that predates Mead and Murray by about a year, is the piece called “Keeping America's Edge” by Jim Manzi in “National Affairs” (Winter 2010). “The United States is in a tough spot. As we dig ourselves out from a serious financial crisis and a deep recession, our very efforts to recover are exacerbating much more fundamental problems that our country has let fester for too long.” And what are these festering fundamental problems? On the economic side, there is the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the ever-increasing international competition. And on the social side is “the growing disparity in behavioral norms and social conditions between the upper and lower income strata of American society.” As you see, Manzi raised the very issues that Mead and Murray expound upon.


In this article I will concentrate on the economic issues although, as we will see, these issues are inter-related. Many say that the economy will be fixed when the housing industry recovers from the bubble; or when consumer confidence returns; or when companies stop sitting on piles of cash and start hiring; or when the Federal government begins to seriously invest in the economy and green technology, as though the “stimulus” was way too small. I will not argue any of these points since, at best, such measures could bring a temporary reprieve. Our problems are structural and much more serious.


A few statistics will illustrate the problem. Consider, first, our country's transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Quoting from Manzi: In 1800, America was a nation of farmers: About three-quarters of the labor force worked in agriculture. Since then, this share has been in almost continuous decline. By the eve of the Civil War, it was a little over half; by 1900 it was about one-third. Today, agriculture employs less than 3% of the work force. This has been great for ¬consumers: Farming is now incredibly efficient, and food is cheaper and more plentiful in real terms than ever before in human history. American agriculture today is also a successful industry; in 2007, the U.S. exported more than $75 billion in agricultural products, However, the agriculture industry can no longer provide employment for very many people.


Just imagine the immense upheaval that occurred around the turn off the 20th century, when two thirds of the work force needed to be employed in something other than farming, and industry was not yet able to provide jobs for all the out of work farmers and new immigrants. Eventually American ingenuity prevailed, with Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, George Westinghouse, and many others finding myriad ways to employ millions of eager factory workers.


A lot of pain was endured along the way to this new economic model. “Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.” (The previous quote and much of what follows has been copied from the marvelous series of ten articles (77 pages) by Walter Russell Mead, that may be found at his blog site “Via Meadia,” 1/24/12 – present)


From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political institution in the country. Unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe most Americans owned and worked their own land. The individual family farm was prosperous and independent and the cornerstone of American democracy. Then the family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19th century made agriculture so much more productive, and brought so many of the world’s hitherto remote and inaccessible lands into productive contact with world centers of population, that old and outmoded methods of production could no longer be sustained.


The same thing is happening today: The 20th century model of the American dream faces the same kind of crisis the 19th century version experienced 100 years ago. International competition and technological advances mean that the American factory worker’s earnings and opportunities are depressed in the way farmers were going to the wall 100 years ago. Our successful manufacturing economy led us to push for free trade; that stimulated other countries to export to U.S. markets and generated the kind of financial flows that undermined the nation-based Keynesian economic model. Just look at the numbers. In 1974, one quarter of the US private sector labor force worked in manufacturing. Today, that share is down to about 11 percent. In parallel with that decline, real hourly wages for private non-supervisory workers have been stagnant for a generation. In 1974, the hourly wage was $4.22; in 2007, before the recession, it was at $4.18 (in 1974 dollars)


Jobs are disappearing in manufacturing and the learned professions for the same reason they disappeared from agriculture 100 years ago: productivity is rising. Fewer hands were needed back then to produce the food we ate; fewer hands are needed today to make all the cars and cell phones the planet’s consumers care to buy. Fewer humans in green eyeshades are needed to do the world’s accounting; fewer typists, stenographers, clerks and managers are needed to get the world’s clerical work done. Automation and outsourcing will combine to limit employment opportunities and income levels for most accountants, lawyers, architects and even some types of medical specialists. (X rays and CAT scans can be read as easily in India as at the local specialist’s office, and given the exponential improvements in software, many other medical processes will become susceptible to outsourcing and automation.)


A century ago, agriculture was in crisis because fewer people were needed to produce the world’s food supply. Today, the middle class is endangered because fewer people are needed to do the world’s routine factory work and information management. In both cases, the economic dislocation and painful change were the side effects of progress rather than the signs of dissolution. The reality last time around was that with fewer hands needed at grow food, more human energy, talent and skill were available to do other things: to produce the goods and services that a more sophisticated and much richer modern industrial society would want and need. This time the emerging economic model will revolve less around “stuff” and more with arrangement, delivery, intelligence, capability and design. And a lot of our economy won’t be about making things at all; it will be about enjoying the freedom that comes when less and less of life revolves around getting the necessities.


Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim.


The real political division in American today is between those who think the old days can come back if only government does the right things (tax rich people; pump enough money into state and local government, health care and the higher education industry; raise tariffs high enough and sprinkle enough subsidies on enough industries to protect and rebuild the manufacturing sector) and those who realize that the past is gone and we must now create a new future. In a very real sense, liberals have become reactionary traditionalists while conservatives have become the new progressives.


But America is good at change. We absorb immigrants better than most. We like new things and like to try them out. We have an optimistic streak in our nature; we believe that change is basically good and that being open to new things will make us happier and better off. Our religious sensibility is future-oriented and believes that God is working through the chaos and uncertainties of life.


Roland Bainton, church historian (1894-1984), used to speak beautifully about the way people learned to open themselves to the changes God had in mind for them, and about the special kind of courage they needed to do that. He would encourage his students to think about something Martin Luther once said: “Christ is my bee. He comes not to sting me; he comes to bring me honey.”

What is wrong with America?

Everyone seems to have an opinion, but one thing is agreed: America is in a bad way. The economy is in the dumper. Over 15% of the work force is either unemployed or working part time while searching for a full time job. Housing prices are depressed and home foreclosures continue at historic rates. Strong majorities say that the country is heading in the wrong direction. The approval rating of congress is in the single digits. And, from our political leaders, all we receive is cognitive dissonance. The president says jobs are “job one,” yet he stops construction of the Keystone oil pipeline, thereby killing thousands of good new jobs.

Yet, the expensive restaurants are busy. The stock market is flirting with 13,000. Gold is at an all time high. At the movie theater last week, we saw a woman with three kids at the candy counter; her bill was $65! What’s up with that?

Social issues are becoming more serious. Have you checked out the sorry state of public education? Hint: underfunding is not the cause. Last week the Federal Departments of Education (Arne Duncan) and Justice (Eric Holder) released a report showing that black males at ghetto schools are disciplined at a higher rate than other children. Duncan and Holder use this “fact” of discrimination to explain the poorer performance of blacks at those schools. Is this just ignorance or more cognitive dissonance? Thomas Sowell (a black man) has the answer: “Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life. Make no mistake about it - the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.”

On the family front, for the first time ever, the number of children born out-of-wedlock to women of all races in their prime childbearing years exceeds 50%. Think about that – over half of these children have no father in the house. Most will struggle to avoid lives of poverty and ignorance. Yet on the morning TV talk shows (like The View) women make excuses, some even holding up the unwed mothers as positive examples of sexual freedom.

When asked what’s wrong, my conservative friends generally say it’s obvious: the controlling political Party wants to make Americans more dependent on government -- and less free. I think they get it about half right – recall prescription drug coverage and NCLB. It seems to be just a matter of degree. Furthermore, I believe that these economic and political problems are merely symptoms of more serious underlying issues that threaten the American way of life.

I think that there are two existential problems for the American experiment, one generally economic and the other social and moral. These problems are sometimes interrelated and sometimes cause and effect. Marxists, Social Darwinists, hard-core secularists -- materialists of every stripe -- would have us think that economics determines everything. If people steal, it is because they are poor. Poverty, to their way of thinking, is the primary cause of social decay. Religious believers, on the other hand, hold that the poor can be just as righteous as the rich; it depends on your beliefs and how well you follow them. Whatever the cause and effect may be, these economic and social issues, taken together, are causing a crisis of confidence in American institutions.

It is our good fortune that these issues have been studied by two eminent scholars who have recently published their observations. In a penetrating series of articles for “The American Interest,” Walter Russell Mead addresses the economic crisis. Mead believes that the crisis is the natural consequence of the liberal and progressive economic system we enjoy. The root cause of the crisis is a paradigm shift in employment, from factory work to whatever will take its place.

Just over a century ago, there was a similar crisis caused by the decline of the family farm. The second agricultural revolution – the boom in productivity due to new farming technologies – meant that far fewer farm workers were needed. But industry was not yet ready to employ the millions of former farmers who were then unemployed. After some hard years, the factory system grew to employ all of the surplus farmers, and more, including millions of immigrants. The new economic model based on industrialization provided a much better living for ever more Americans.

That so called “Fordist” economy fostered American prosperity for most of the twentieth century. But American innovation in factory automation, computers and “killer apps” grew productivity to the point where far fewer workers were required to produce the goods we needed and sold. Manufacturing jobs slumped, even while manufacturing output grew. Foreign competition from low wage countries exacerbated the job loss here in the US. Most of those jobs are gone forever. What will we do next?

The social/moral crisis has been investigated in a remarkable new book by Charles Murray. In “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010”, Murray addresses the disintegration of the family in the economic bottom third of the white population. Murray chronicles the inexorable breakdown since the 1960s of America’s founding virtues – marriage, industry, honesty and religiosity – within the blue-collar class, and the personal and communal wreckage that has ensued. We’re seeing the “collapse of the central cultural institution in one particular part of America” – meaning the collapse of marriage among the working class.

It is hard to tie this cultural breakdown to economic conditions. During the Great Depression, the poor were more numerous and far poorer than today, yet economic stress did not undermine the family in those terribly hard times. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. So what went wrong?

One cause was the radicalism of the feminist movement. While demanding equal rights for women, radicals also concluded that the nuclear family was antiquated -- a man in the home was superfluous. Feminine studies programs grew up in the universities preaching the virtues of single motherhood. The Federal government Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying. Sexual liberation was a great thing, especially for single men.

Fortunately for them, the upper class generally recognized how destructive this behavior was and gradually returned to their more conservative ways. The lower class whites never made the right turn and the statistics tell a sad story. For example, only 48 percent of working class whites aged 30-49 were married in 2010 compared to 83 percent in the white upper class.

These foundational problems, one economic and one social, have solutions. You may be surprised to find that one is progressive while the other is conservative. I’ll describe these problems and solutions in more detail in the following two posts.

The Passion of Miss Sandra Fluke

Just who is Sandra Fluke and why does she matter? The third year law student at Georgetown, a Jesuit university, testified last week before Nancy Pelosi’s House committee in support of the Obamacare mandate to provide free contraceptive products to one and all. The 30 yr old Miss Fluke was no neophyte to this cause. At Georgetown, she has served as president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, as vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, and as editor of the Journal of Gender and the Law. Today she is the re-born Joan of Arc, having testified, in essence, that “Congress should gut the First Amendment because it economically inconveniences the nation’s elite law students.” (Ben Johnson, Lifesitenews.com)

The fact that Georgetown Law does not cover contraception for students, Fluke testified, created “untenable burdens that impede our academic success” and proved Georgetown does not “live up to the Jesuit creed.” Contraception, she said, “can cost a woman over $3,000 a year during law school…that’s practically an entire summer’s salary.” She neglects to mention that $3,000 is enough to buy condoms for “protected sex” eight times a day. How’s that for sexual freedom?

As part of a Democrat effort to change the discussion from defending religious liberty against ObamaCare to one about the “subjugation of women,” Dems will attempt to make Fluke a feminist martyr. She and others who believe that institutions ought to be compelled to fund free birth control are, in effect, demanding a subsidy for having sex. No one is trying to prevent Sandra Fluke or anyone else from doing whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms. “But what Fluke and President Obama are trying to do is to force religious institutions to pay for conduct their faith opposes.” The sovereign “assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary’s IUD.” (Mark Steyn, National Review, 3/5/12)

Those who care about life – including the life of a baby in the womb or out – within the benevolent embrace of Obamacare, need to remember how abortion became a Constitutional protected “right.” It started with a totally manufactured fight over contraceptives chosen to be a precursor to the abortion rights campaign. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found a right to contraceptives in the Constitution under the heading of “privacy” which Justice Douglas discovered in the Bill of Rights (that) have “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” In other words, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution so Bill Douglas invented one. Step one in the abortion campaign accomplished. Roe v. Wade completed the fraud, when Justice Blackmun found that the right to privacy, wherever it comes from, includes the right to abortion.

Now we’ve “progressed” to partial birth abortion and even post birth abortion. Then–State Senator Obama opposed -- in 2001, 2002, and 2003 -- successive versions of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, an Illinois bill that was meant to provide protection for babies born alive after attempted abortions. The bill gave the infants protection as legal persons and required physicians to provide them with care. Infanticide was fine with Sen. Obama, as long as NARAL and NOW approved.

President Obama and his court want us to be more like the enlightened Europeans. An article recently published in the Oxford Journal of Medical Ethics says that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life.” The article entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” argued that “To bring up such (Downs) children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

Welcome to Obamacare, and the brave new world of sexual freedom.

His Majesty, the King

“…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

How very far we have come since that day long ago when the English king Canute had a throne placed on the seashore, sat in it, ordered the tide to go back, and duly got his feet wet. Canute, being a down-to-earth man, was annoyed by fawning courtiers who tried to tell him that he was all-powerful, and the tide stunt was to demonstrate that he was not.

When Barack Obama was crowned (I mean inaugurated), there was a widespread sense that the messiah had arrived. One news anchor said he "felt this thrill going up my leg” while Evan Thomas, the Newsweek editor, noted:"In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He's sort of GOD.” President Obama was called the “Son of promise, child of hope, our American prayer” and even the “Platonic philosopher king we’ve been awaiting for the past 2,400 years.” Michelle Obama said she was proud of America for the first time in her life.

Is there any wonder that the new president felt he had a mandate to remake America to his liking? Indeed, he cheerfully proclaimed that he intended to “fundamentally change America.”

Now progressives had been fundamentally changing American culture for several decades, and the European culture wars (the “Kulturkampf) go back to the time of von Bismark. The origin traces to the anti-Catholic “May laws” that intended to “suppress it (the Church), to destroy it, to crush it with violence,” since it was seen as standing in the way of German nationalism and progress. With the Nazis the anti-Catholic sentiment morphed into opposition to all religion. In 1935 school prayer was abolished and by 1938 Christmas carols and Nativity plays were banned. A Hitler youth song rang out:

We are the happy Hitler Youth, We have no need for Christian virtues ,….

Meanwhile, Hitler purchased popularity with lavish social welfare programs, national healthcare, environmentalism, and a fixation on organic foods and obesity (“Food is not a private matter.”)

The American Kulturkampf began with the 1960’s effort to eliminate prayer in public schools and state aid to parochial schools. Abortion was legalized on the basis that religiously informed morality had no place in public affairs. Roe v Wade merely extended the “right to privacy” found in an “emanation to the penumbra to the Constitution” that had been used to legalize contraception. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of a school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. How far we have come!

Now we have Obamacare. Charles Krauthammer enumerated its constitutional wreckage. (Daily Breeze 2/19/12)

Obamacare forces religious institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients, supposedly free of charge through the generosity of the religious institution's insurance company. On what authority can the president unilaterally order a private company to provide a service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries? This is government by presidential fiat. In Venezuela, that's done all the time.

Obamacare is an assault on the free exercise of religion since church schools, hospitals and charities will be forced into doctrinal violations commanded by the state. It is an assault on free enterprise since the state treats private insurers the way it does government-regulated utilities, determining everything of importance including risk ratios (for age, gender, smoking, etc.) and what is to be included in the basic policy (abortions will be next). It is an assault on individual autonomy since every citizen without insurance is ordered to buy it, again under penalty of law.

Many thought it was merely political hyperbole when Obama promised to stop the seas from rising. Others saw him as “the product of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence” and “not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh.” I think Obama meant it when he said he would fundamentally change America. The Platonic philosopher king has spoken.

Chadwick Boy Comes Home

He walked into the room to the chorus of 300 kazoos playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Michael Reagan is truly loved in these parts. The Republican Women luncheon was sold out, and we were not disappointed. Michael shared some of his childhood experiences here on the Hill. -- He attended Chadwick School because Ron and Jane did not want their adopted son to be exposed to the temptations of Beverly Hills High (and they wanted him out of the house).

He told heartwarming stories about his dad, who was a bit of a cheap skate.

Michael walked into his father’s hospital room --

Michael: How are you doing dad?

Ronald: Well, you know son, I was shot yesterday. (in that soft, slow Reagan tone)

Michael: I know that dad; I just wanted to know how you are feeling.

Ronald: Well, Michael, I’m feeling OK. But I have some advice for you.

Michael: What’s that dad?

Ronald: If you’re going to get shot, don’t wear your new suit.

Michael: I see it dad, the blue suit all cut up lying in the corner.

Ronald: Yes, they had to cut it off me. I was hoping they would try to save the suit. After all, I am the President.

Michael: I know dad.

Ronald: Michael, the boy who shot me; his name is Hinkley. Do you think his parents have money?

Michael: They are oil people, dad.

Ronald: Well, do you think they’d buy me a new suit?

And so it went, one endearing story after another, for over an hour, without a single note.

But there were serious moments as well. Like when he spoke about how we just have to beat Obama before he destroys our country. Michael would vote for any of the Republican candidates (even Ron Paul) and he wishes they would stop taking pot shots at each other and concentrate on Obama. Republicans are sometimes their own worst enemies.

Democrats, being ideologically pure, have no problem with any Democrat candidate (even Barbara Boxer), while Republicans are a more diverse bunch. I thought about what I believe, as a conservative Republican, and contrasted it to mainline Democrat ideology.

Republican vs. Democrat

Rights bestowed by God vs. Rights granted by the State
Individual liberty vs. Government control of our lives
The Constitution vs. A living constitution
Individual responsibility vs. Cradle-to-grave welfare
Life vs. “Choice” (ie a woman’s right to kill)
American is exceptional vs. Just like Greece is exceptional, or China, or..
Right to bear arms vs. Gun control
Legal immigration vs. Open borders
Right to work vs. Unions

Democrats are congenitally wedded to their beliefs, in some cases with a religious fervor (eg. the sacred right of a woman to reproductive freedom). By contrast, Republicans are renegades: Goldwater was pro choice, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens, Bush gave us prescription drugs at government expense, and, did you know, William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot.

Michael told the story about his dad appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in order to keep a promise to his daughter, Maureen, who in return gave up campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Several times Michael reminded us to be more like Democrats – to get into the game. Write letters to the editor, knock on doors, don’t just send money like we always do.

Now we need to nominate a ticket and get behind it. For my money the best would be Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for VP. It’s a WASP-free ticket -- a Mormon and a Roman Catholic -- How diverse is that!!

Car Wars

Imagine your teenage son and his cheerleader girlfriend hopping into his brand new jazzy sports scar for its maiden spin. OK, I know this merely reinforces the Palos Verdes stereotype of indulgent parents and spoiled kids. But, hey, the kid is an honor student who will be attending Stanford U. in the fall. Anyway, the car enters the 405 freeway and carefully moves across toward the HOV speed lane. Suddenly the unimaginable happens: the throttle opens wide, the engine revs into the red zone, the brakes cease to function and the steering wheel locks tight. A disaster is imminent.

This is merely the opening scene of Chris Malburg’s new techno-thriller, “Car Wars: A Novel of Industrial Terrorism.” (Get it at http://www.carwarsebook.com/ or at Amazon.com). My friend and PVE neighbor, Chris is a noted business writer who is trying his hand at fiction. And his new book is a fun read, especially on a Kindle at RAT Beach. Without giving away the plot, let me just say that there are plenty of villains in the book, among them Yonggan Zhanshi, ruthless industrialist in control of a devastating weapon of mass destruction, the head of the Chinese National Bank and the honorable President of the PRC.

In a memorable scene the Chinese President reads the riot act to the American president. Here is an excerpt:

...The Chinese President frowned at his American counterpart. “America is bankrupt,” he began. “Morally as well as economically. I can do nothing about the former, but I can do something about your economics. I am your banker. I am now calling in the money I have lent to you. From this moment on, you work for me.” The Chinese President paused for a few seconds to let the shock of what he had just said fully sink in.

“America’s Social Security, its Medicare and Medicaid and its unfunded pension liabilities created by the powerful labor unions now comes to 93 percent of your gross domestic product. There is no more money left to pay for anything else. And so you rely on China, Japan and the UK to buy your Treasury debt to fund your cash needs. No more!
“Your baby-boom generation is now retired. This large portion of your former workforce no longer pays taxes, but they do suck down your government’s benefits like hogs on a teet. Had you raised taxes to pay for all this years ago and reduced spending, things might have been different--”

“I have been in consultation with my fellow holders of US debt. The IMF is calling the temporary line of credit it granted the United States. You have 30 days to repay the $100 billion you borrowed. Additionally, China demands that the US immediately repay $500 billion in Treasury securities coming due in the next 60 days. Not only will China not lend you the $300 billion you have come here to borrow, but my country will no longer be in attendance at your Treasury auctions.”

The Chinese President stopped his pacing in front of his counterpart, turned and looked him in the eye. “This financial hiatus China is taking from America does not have to be permanent. If the US puts its financial house in order and affords China one other courtesy, I may elect to resume doing business on a limited scale.”

The American President sat very still in his chair. He rejoiced that there might yet be a way out of this financial morass. “Yes, Mr. President? What kinds of house cleaning tasks do you have in mind?”

The Chinese President’s knife-edged hand slashed the air, making his first point. “America will limit the coverage of Medicare and Medicaid--no more expensive treatments. Either your people will pay for them on their own or they will do without.” The hand slashed the air a second time, “Next, no health insurance subsidies. You will explain to your greedy, unemployed nation of welfare recipients that healthcare is not a right of citizenship but instead, a personal responsibility.”

“Next,” continued the Chinese President, “You will eliminate all nonessential governmental expenses. You will begin with farming subsidies, ethanol production, public broadcasting, energy conservation and trade promotion.” The knife-edged hand slashed the air yet a third time, “You will go to a flat tax system where everyone--every single American citizen--pays taxes equivalent to 18 percent on the income they earn. You will eliminate all deductions and tax credits. You will also increase the gasoline tax to $2 a gallon. You will balance your federal budget.”

The US President raised his hand for permission to speak. “That’s a lot to take in. Are you finished, Mr. President?”

“I will tell you when I am finished...

Good stuff that. I had no idea that the PRC President was a Republican. In fact some of his action items could be taken straight from Newt Gingrich’s new 21st Century Contract with America.

Faster than Light

"We don't serve faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

The cognoscenti were abuzz -- Einstein was wrong! Relativity was debunked! European scientists at CERN in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy had shown that the speed of light is not really the limit. Physicists, on the other hand, were mildly amused, one, even, who promised to eat his shorts if the experimental result was correct. The great majority of physicists, a clear consensus, were skeptical of the results, thinking that there must be an experimental error.

Interestingly, no one in the physics establishment mentioned the consensus. No one accused the experimenters of being Relativity-deniers. No one tried to stop publication of the seminal paper in a prestigious journal. And no one claimed that the CERN-Sasso scientists were bigots – after all, Einstein was a Jew. In short, the physics community reacted not at all like the global warming community when confronted with contrary evidence.

So what was all the excitement about? The experiment, code named OPERA, was built to detect neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles, which are produced at CERN and aimed towards Gran Sasso, 700kms away. There are several types of neutrinos and two of the species are called mu neutrinos (mu-nu) and tau neutrinos (tau-nu). The primary purpose of the experiment was to determine if any of the mu-nus from CERN had converted into tau-nus along the way. If so, this would help establish the idea that neutrinos have a finite (really tiny) mass that might account for the much-sought-after “Dark Matter” hidden in the universe. A sidelight was to measure the time of flight of the neutrinos and compare it to the time light would take to travel the same distance. Surprise! The neutrinos took less time, 60 nanoseconds less.

OPERA chief scientist Antonio Ereditato explained that “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy. And of course the consequences can be very serious.” Indeed, much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light (in vacuum).

Faster-than-light particles, so-called tachyons, have long been contemplated by theoretical physicists. If they did exist they could be used to send signals into one's own past, a clear paradox of causality -- and an explanation of the backwards joke at the beginning of this note. In fact, the most famous quip about “faster than light” has by now attained a venerable age (Reginald Buller in Punch, 12/19/23):

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

The upheaval of known physics resulting from the discovery of tachyons would be momentous. A few astounding effects are discussed briefly in the Appendix.

In a related development, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics has been granted for an experimental error! It was 1997 and Adam Riess was sure he'd spotted a blatant error in his results -- measurements of exploding stars implied that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, instead of slowing down, as everyone expected. Indeed, astrophysicists believed that the rate of expansion of the universe -- set in motion by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago -- would be slowing down due to the influence of gravity. The goal was to figure out how rapid the deceleration was. What the scientists found, instead, was that the expansion of the universe was accelerating -- an observation that could be explained by the existence of a mysterious “Dark Energy” that acts like anti-gravity. Further experiments supported this finding and, even though no one knows what the Dark Energy is, the experimenters were awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize.

In breaking news (10/5/11): The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, for his discovery of quasi-crystals, a form of matter that was not thought to exist. Shechtman faced skepticism, even expulsion from his research team, before his discovery won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough. “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman, 70, told a news conference in Haifa, Israel.

These cases illustrate the way real science should work. It is not politically motivated, and is not right just because it is believed, no matter the consensus.

Appendix

In classical physics, mass is independent of speed. In Relativity, however, Einstein showed that the mass of a particle is related to its velocity, v:

M = M0/sqrt(1- v2/c2)

where M0 is the particle’s rest mass (mass at zero speed), c is the light speed and sqrt(…..) signifies the square root of the quantity in brackets. As one tries to accelerate a particle, and its velocity increases, so does its mass because of the v in the denominator of the equation. That makes it harder to speed up the particle. The result is that for all normal particles (we might call the tardyons) the speed has an upper limit of c, the speed of light.

Note that for tachyons, if they exist, the term v/c exceeds one, and the term in the brackets is negative. Since the square root of a negative number is imaginary, the mass of a tachyon is a strange thing indeed.

Another curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, energy approaches zero when v approaches infinity. Therefore, just as tardyons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.

Some Scary Numbers

You may recall the catchphrase “Billions and Billions” (of stars) that was associated with astronomer Carl Sagan’s popular TV show Cosmos.(1) It seemed like an enormous number, commensurate with the vastness of the universe. Now, however, Billion is passe’, Trillion has become the new Billion –- such as in the US Federal budget deficit for 2011 is more than a Trillion dollars – and we need to recalibrate our mental calculators. So much has changed.

I remember making $1.80 an hour hauling beef for Wilson & Co, the meat packers. That was 1961 and I was not making much more than the black maids in that new movie “The Help.” And I was paying income tax and FICA.

Today the Government Motors unionized workers make $28 an hour (plus another equal amount in benefits) and yet complain. They just got a signing bonus of $5,000 plus inflation protection to ink their latest contract. Now that $28/hr is a scary number because it is unsustainable. We cannot compete in the global marketplace when nut-turners make $28 an hour. And thus far we have been somewhat lucky since the countries that make good cars –- Germany, Japan, South Korea –- are all expensive places to manufacture them. When the $5 per hour Chinese learns how to make a good car – say in 5 years – it will be all over except the shouting.

But I digress. What I really want to talk about are the scary large numbers. Take $1 Trillion (that is a million x $million) for example. $1 Trillion is the amount the US Federal Government collects in income taxes from those of us lucky enough to pay income taxes. It is also equal to the amount we claim on our deductions; thus the tax code saves us an equal amount, ie $1 Trillion. For the average Joe the deductions come from mortgage interest, charitable contributions, supporting your mother-in-law, and the like. Note that only about 10% of the $1 Trillion tax savings goes to those evil corporations (which happen to employ our neighbors). So when Obama talks about generating a few hundred billion dollars by closing tax loopholes, it is largely our loopholes he wants to close. And remember, also, that nearly half of US households pay no Federal income tax at all. When the President talks about paying our fair share, I wonder if it is those folks he wants to do more.

An even scarier number is $14 Trillion. That is roughly the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in a year. But $14Trillion is also roughly the value of the Federal government debt, and also the total US household debt. Let’s do some arithmetic. If we divide the GDP by the US population, some 310 million, then the GDP per person is about $45,000, so is the Federal debt per person, and so is the personal debt of each person. For a family of four, that sums up to $180,000 in all three categories. Thus the average family owes $180,000 in government debt (not including State debt) and another $180,000 in family debt. Those are some scary numbers. Could it get much worse?

Oh, yes it can. Have you heard about the UNFUNDED LIABILITIES? Projecting into the future, the revenues from all Federal taxes will not be able to fund the required expenditures. The numbers are actually quite staggering: Social Security - $17T, Medicare - $88T, adding up to more than $100 Trillion dollars. Since the private net worth of all Americans together is estimated at just over $50 Trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve, you can see the problem.

James Madison foresaw the problem with government excess in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

It is pretty clear that the government, at least since FDR, and at all levels, has failed to live up to its obligation of restraint. Then Obama goosed it, but good!

(1) The title of Sagan’s last book was “Billions and Billions.” As a humorous tribute to him, a sagan was defined as a unit of measurement equal to at least four billion, since the lower bound of a number conforming to the constraint of billions and billions must be two billion plus two billion. What is the US deficit measured in sagans? Or should we call it an obama?

Imagine God and Country

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try…

It was the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and we were at church. The service was moving and memorable. Then the minister announced that the next song would be John Lennon’s Imagine, and added that he was very glad it was chosen. I wondered why?

In the book Lennon in America, by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon himself explained that Imagine was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted.” Imagine is commonly referred to as the “atheist’s anthem.” So why sing such a song in church? Why, especially, on a day of national sorrow? Have we somehow misplaced our moral compasses?

The next day I read about a research study by eminent Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith. The study asked about the moral lives of young people 18 - 23 years of age, and the results are depressing. (“If it Feels Right,” David Brooks, New York Times, 9/12/11)

When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. The study revealed an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism -- of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism.

Imagine all the people
Living for today

When there is no God or Heaven, living for today seems like a reasonable ethics.

For decades, thinkers in many disciplines have warned about the erosion of a shared moral framework. Alaisdair MacIntyre argues that the disintegration began during the Enlightenment with the rejection of Aristotle’s teleological idea -- that human life had a proper end, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Throughout history, society has served to provide this preparation through the family, the church, school and the state. The group was seen to be the essential moral unit. Religion defined rules and practices, families imposed moral discipline and schools supported the families. Now, however, we are told that it does not matter what we believe as long as we follow our hearts -- the individual as the essential moral unit.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

The founders of our great country firmly believed that God was the foundation of virtue and that “respect for His authority, mediated by the authority of parents, was the foundation of godly character.” The public schools were established with the goal of reinforcing this parental obligation to mold moral citizens.

Somehow, through machinations known only to the intellectual soul, the “Men in Black” decided that religion needed to be banished from the public square. Thus teachers were left toothless in their battle with the child’s instinctive willfulness. Now there are movements afoot to banish the Pledge of Allegiance from the schools as well. Heaven help us if the courts get to decide.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Imagine, indeed! Every time the sharing all the world crowd has taken control of a society or nation the result has been violence and widespread destitution. The forces that are trying to transform this country into a Lennonesque utopia must be resisted, or we will inherit the culture we deserve, and it won’t be pretty.

References

Barzun, Jacques, The Culture We Deserve
Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind
Bork, Robert, Slouching Toward Gomorrah
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society
Hunter, James, The Death of Character
Levin, Mark, Men in Black
MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue

PolyMath or Pretender

I like to read the New York Times articles by Paul Krugman: though pretentious, they are usually good for a few laughs. You see, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics who yet adheres to Keynesianism, an outmoded and generally discredited economic theory. Although it has been clearly shown that Keynesian government “investment” actually prolonged the Great Depression, and that his theory utterly failed to explain Jimmy Carter’s stagflation, Krugman still clings to his childish belief that yet another “stimulus” is just what we need to cure the Obama recession.

Occasionally Krugman goes off the reservation and tries to display his scientific acumen. He is, after all, the guy who wrote an essay on the computation of interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light. I kid you not. (See “Sixty-seven, and Smarter than Paul Krugman,” palosverdesblog, 5/5/09.) In his recent Times piece, “Republicans Against Science” (8/28/11), Krugman criticized Rick Perry for this “vile” statement: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” Yep, Krugman called that “vile.” Let us see if Mr. Krugman knows what he is talking about, or is he just a pretender.

What makes a scientific theory? Let me use an example to illustrate the concept. If I say that things fall down, that is true, but is not a scientific theory. If I add that things fall down because the Earth attracts them that is a hypothesis, still not a theory. If say that all the planets move in orbits because the Sun attracts them, that generalization is still less than a theory. When, however, I say that the force of attraction between the planets and the sun is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them, then I am able to calculate the motion of the planets for comparison (and prediction). Now I have a scientific theory.

Thus a scientific theory is more than an idea. It must be descriptive, quantitative, predictive and testable. Thus, it must also be falsifiable. Newton’s gravity meets all these criteria. As an exercise for the reader, ask yourself if evolution does the same. Treat microevolution (Lamarck, c1800, which predates Darwin) and macroevolution (Darwin’s big idea) separately. Here I’ll put global warming “science” to the test.

The central premise of global warming theory is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have been trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere and warming the earth. Since the beginning of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing inexorably, from about 280 ppm in 1800 to 390 ppm today, an increase of 39%. Yet during that time the average global temperature has gone up and down. And during the Medieval Warming (900 -1300AD), before the advent of the industrial age, the global temperature was comparable to today.
Even overlooking the obvious fact that to base your science on one variable – actually a small proportion of one variable – is not science, the evidence does not even support the idea. Indeed, the global warming “science” - based on computer models - fails the criteria of a scientific theory. In the memorable words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is “not even wrong.”

As for pseudo-polymath Paul Krugman, his theme song should be
“Yes, I’m the great pretender…”

The Logical Dead End of the Nanny State

The Western world, as I recently noted (“The Abolition of America,” 7/4/11) is in the process of rejecting the natural tradition of objective right and wrong. One of the sad consequences has been a cultural and moral decay that has infected the greater part of old Europe. Now, only a month or so later, we have witnessed riots in the streets of London and throughout England. Many observers of the British scene have commented on the root causes of the senseless destruction. Three of my favorites - Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Ann Coulter - plus Prime Minister David Cameron -- contributed their wisdom to the following analysis.
Lord, please forgive my plagiarizing.

There are many lessons for us from London in flames, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. There is a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – they call it “shitting on your own doorstep.” And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.

The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in stimulus their entire lives. One-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and if it does not receive that high standard, that is a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived, even though each one has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor, quite likely, any member of his family made much of a contribution. Indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude.

And consigning the violence to rage over reduced job opportunities and welfare doesn’t quite wash. A large number of the vandals and looters are teenagers on their school vacations rather than desperate twenty- or thirty-year olds recently out of a job and with a family to support. As written in the Daily Telegraph, the rioters hardly represented a beleaguered minority neglected by the state:
So far, those arrested and charged include an 11-year-old girl, a 31-year-old primary school teacher and the 19-year-old daughter of a company director who is currently at Exeter University. The participation of those from relatively affluent backgrounds, either in full-time education or full-time employment, makes nonsense of the knee-jerk response of blaming cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, among other things.

A more plausible “root cause” is the parlous state of British inner-city state education, which has turned out a generation of unemployable youth, who are understandably angry at their dim prospects and their miserable state-provided living environments. This introduces a different, and altogether more damning, diagnosis: the failure of the policies of post-war social democratic orthodoxy, and the cumulative growth of the welfare state, to address the problems of urban poverty and the integration of marginalized classes into wider society – indeed, the state’s role in destroying the integrity of families, in discouraging bourgeois aspiration, and in uprooting traditional community values which historically served to harmonize and reconcile society to itself.

Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to address the “moral collapse” that led to the widespread looting and violence. He has pledged to “review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society: schools, welfare, families, parenting, addiction,… to the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility.

“These riots were not about race,” Cameron said. “These riots were not about government cuts ... And these riots were not about poverty.”

“No, this was about behavior ... people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint.”

He listed irresponsibility, selfishness, fatherless children, reward without effort, crime without punishment and behaving as if one’s choices have no consequences as some of the problems contributing to a “slow-motion moral collapse.”

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore,” he stressed.

And the “social fightback” starts with families. “If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.”

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Today want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. Here is America, the Democrats' real achievement has been in destroying the family, thereby creating an endless supply of potential rioters. When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them!

It is barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began and the rate of black illegitimacy has tripled to 72 percent. Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded from 4 percent to 29 percent. Instead of a “War on Poverty,” it should have been called a “War on the Family.”

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their “benefits” flowing.

It's the Democrat Party “heroin dealer” model of government.

The Abolition of America July 4. 2011

As Americans celebrate our Independence, it behooves us to heed the warning of a man who did not live in freedom. “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots,” said Alexander Solzhenitzyn. You sever a people’s roots by destroying the memory of their historical past. Today, too many Americans, particularly young people, are ignorant of our past, or believe a distorted version of it.

Jesus said “I am the Truth,” and without truth there can be no freedom. In the past century, British author C.S. Lewis wrote eloquently on the subjects of truth and identity. Clive Staples Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) wrote everything from children’s fiction to philosophy and theology, from The Chronicles of Narnia to Mere Christianity. The Abolition of Man was his classic defense of truth (the natural law) and his goal was nothing short of an attempt to salvage Western civilization. Lewis believed that the Western world was in the process of rejecting the tradition of objective right and wrong, and he saw this rejection of truth being taught in the school systems of his day. Fifty years later, with the advent of post-modernity, the question of “Truth” is, indeed, the question of our time.

Lewis would be appalled to find that the “debunking” program he described in The Abolition of Man has done so much damage to the Britain he knew. As Lewis feared, the cultural demolition was deliberate. The self-anointed reformers admitted as much: “We recognize that the British people love the old ways, and that there is no popular clamour for change. Nevertheless, change we must.” Sadly, this change has led to a cultural and moral decline that has infected the greater part of old Europe. The last two Roman Catholic popes have written with passion on the dangers of a “dictatorship of relativism” in Europe. But how did this cultural sea change come about? Was the root cause intellectual or material? And to what degree has America been infected?

The radical idea that truth is a state constructed by the mind is at the root of a cultural infection. With reason as the sole guide, each reasoning person could (should) construct his own private version of truth (subjectivism). What inevitably follows is relativism -- that each individual’s conception of truth is as valid as any other individual’s. When applied to society, there are no objective truths, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. When applied to virtue, moral relativism is the result. Each society creates its own ethics. The ideology of relativism holds that all cultures, ethnic groups, sexual preference or special interest group are equally valid, deserve communal support and mandated representation. This is “multiculturalism” today.

Radical thought in America has a long history but it entered the mainstream in the 1930’s and marinated through the 60’s. Intellectuals in fields such as education and psychology had been infected by Radical Enlightenment philosophy and Marxism. Scholars taught the tactics of “Critical Theory:” destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, morality, the family, sexual restraint, capitalism, patriotism and conservatism. Their strategy was psychological conditioning: “America’s children could be conditioned at school to reject their parent’s social and moral beliefs as racist, sexist and homophobic, and conditioned to embrace a new morality.”

Now the radicals of the 1960’s have become professors of philosophy, sociology, literature, black studies, feminine studies, GLBT studies,… and, most ominously, professors at the education schools of nearly all colleges and universities in America. In the Ed. schools they are able to indoctrinate the future teachers of America in all manner of radical thought including relativism, multiculturalism, gender equality and hateful criticism of Western culture, America in particular.
Their first step is the deconstruction and reinvention of history. Lying about our history has now become commonplace. Take, for example, the National History Standards published by UCLA in 1994. This curriculum promoted multiculturalism by minimizing the achievements of Europeans and their descendents in America in order to focus attention on blacks and American Indians. Students were told they need to “Analyze the Declaration of Independence (mentioned only once) from the perspective of men and women, and people of Native American, European, and African descent.” The US Senate denounced the UCLA farce by a vote of 99-1.
But that did not stop the revisionists.

In 2005 the California State Board of Education approved the eighth-grade history text, Creating America. Produced by Houghton Mifflin, Creating America identifies ten representative American heroes: Abigail Adams, Crispus Attucks, Andrew Jackson, Queen Liluokalanai, Abraham Lincoln, Juan Sequin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Washington, Ida B. Wells and Zitkala-Sa. In fact, this highly unrepresentative American history rather vaguely resembles a “Soviet-style history” cobbled together from representative national heroes that conforms to multicultural ideology.

One of the most popular American history texts at the high school level is Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Reflecting postmodern revisionist ideology, Zinn declares that “there is no such thing as pure fact.” The theory of history offered by Marx --“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”-- is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history, which is portrayed as a continuous chain of immoral colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of minorities and the laboring underclass. Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. Yet nowhere in his book will the student learn about Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

More recently, the state of CA passed a bill that would require teaching the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. The textbooks will need to be modified accordingly. Is it actually a fact that GLBT contributions have been systematically excluded from the texts? Of course, facts mean nothing when you are pursuing an agenda, in this case the abolition of the centuries old tradition of heterosexual marriage.

So what is left of our culture? Was the redefinition of the words “is” and “sex” by President Clinton an aberration? In one of the founding texts of sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim wrote that by defining what is “deviant,” we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. In 1993, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a now-famous essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.” In it, he argued that social scientists, the courts, politicians, and some in the general public had been busy redefining deviancy down, so much so “as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, (while) also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”

How far have we regressed since then? “This is the Brave New World that mindless tolerance, diversity and lawsuits on their behalf have wrought. The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one's breath away,” said my friend Dennis Prager. As Dostoyevsky prophesized many years ago, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

I’m confident that Jack would agree.