Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For May 13, 2015

May 10

To R. Scott Clark and his 1987 blogpost quote about how, because of a lack of honesty and basic literacy, our nation is in the dark. This appeared in Heidelblog.


With nation's history of how it has treated nonwhites, haven't we always been in the dark regardless of our literacy abilities?

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To Joseph Sunde and his blogpost on John Witherspoon's recommendations for how to contribute to society. This appeared in the Acton blog.

Whitherspoon shows a good path for Christians, but is this what we should expect nonChristians in our society to do as well? And if so, where is our freedom of religion? For if this is the only hope we Christians hold out to society, especially with our own history of mistreating others and our love of money and prosperity, we will rightfully be seen as seeking privilege and rank over others.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on the need for an international police force to help persecuted Christians and others. This appeared in the Acton blog.

We need to ask a couple of questions here. First, will a police force be sufficient in protecting persecuted Christians or do need a paramilitary force? Second, will we support the police when they are called on to protect Palestinians and Bedouins from Israel's constant grabbing for more land and resources? Third, when we will we reflect on how our foreign policies contribute to the persecution of any group that could be associated with the West? After all, not only have we blindly supported Israel's occupation, we have supported coups and tyrants serving as proxies heads of state. And in Africa, our main concern regards how many natural resources we can extract while maximizing our own profits.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on liberal morality with its emphasis on property rights. This appeared in the Acton blog.

I found the article cited to be extremely disingenuous and deliberately lacking in self-reflection. These characteristics could be boiled down to following line about why some oppose capitalism:

Stop us before we make everyone richer, healthier and safer, they seem to be pleading.

Of course statistics will be quoted on how many more people can now live on more than a $1/day than before. Those statistics fail to distinguish where those greatest gains have been made. China, which is hardly a capitalist country has shown the largest gains. And the selected statistics are silent about the costs that such gains have incurred in a number countries such as the increased use of sweatshop and trafficked labor and further destruction of the environment found in either the extraction or use of fossil fuels, And another set of statistics that are ignored are the growing number of people in nations like the US who are approaching a poverty level income while the vast  percentage of wealth gained in the recovery since 2008 have gone to the upper 1%. And now we are getting close to another trade agreement that robs nations, including ours, of their national sovereignty--the TPP.

And what is important about the blind acceptance of Capitalism here is that it carries with it its own treacherous form of materialism--that is according to Martin Luther King Jr.  And this leads our society to being 'thing-oriented' society. And, according to King, for as long as this thing-oriented society with its emphasis on gadgets, profits, and property rights are more important than people, then evils such as racism will forever remain. And here is the unreported King. For as long as we can consider racism as a separate entity from our values economy, we will be more than happy to address. But which conservative will follow King in associating our drive for profits and emphasis on property rights with racism? Which one?

While Carter is singing 'The Sunny Side of The Street,' invisible stakeholders, invisible to those who benefit most from the status quo, are trying to tell us something their personal experience about our Capitalism. And we have a choice here. Either we can look at our own circumstances and deduce that everybody benefits from today's neoliberal capitalism, or we can listen and even visit these people they live and do an inductive study on how Capitalism is helping/hurting others.

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For April 22, 2015

April 15

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on how much scientific evidence is required to accept what is said about global warming. This appeared in his Heidelblog.

And those who resist accepting as even a possibility what much of the evidence points to do so because they know that doing so calls on them to change. And that change would be drastic and would involve one of their most sacred cows: their prosperity and way of life. To be a responsible member of society and to accept as being probable the evidence regarding man induced climate change means some cutting back on both consumption and some producing along with doing more sharing of what we already have.  And they don't want to make those changes. Well, none of us do.

And lest anyone look down on them for not wanting to risk their prosperity for what they accept about man induced climate change, we all have key issues on which we must make tough decisions. And sometimes we are responsible and sometimes we aren't. We're equals here.

BTW, there is a difference in comparing Einstein's theory of relativity and man induced climate change. The former carried with it no sense of urgency because nothing was risked. The latter involves a limited window in which to act in order to avoid serious, if not catastrophic, future losses.

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April 21

To Joe Carter and his blogpost video on the importance of property rights. This appeared on the Acton blog

There seems to be a false dichotomy here between having property rights or not having them at all. Also, It isn't just having property rights that is the issue, it is the priority they are given in society. And considering that the presenter described property rights as the path to peace, he seems to put a very high priority on those rights. Finally, the hypothesis of property rights providing the path to peace needs to be test in reality.

So there are property rights. The issue is how important are such rights--realizing that property here involves more than just land. Martin Luther King Jr. said the following:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

To King, property rights existed in a larger context. How these rights are used depends on the orientation of society. When the use of property rights hurt people but gain a profit, we learn whether we are 'thing-oriented' or 'person-oriented.' If we are thing-oriented, then we will use property rights to get more stuff regardless of how that affects the property of others. We should note that property rights were used to foreclose on homes during the bubble. And we should note that laws that explain property rights are written by people some of whom have a self-serving agenda. We should note here that the name 'property rights' is empty in terms of revealing what those rights should be. These rights are based on man-made laws.

Finally, we need to ask if property rights provide the path to peace. Here we should note that the U.S. can be viewed as a champion for property rights. In fact, much of The Constitution was written to protect property rights. And here we should note how many of its writers owned large quantities of land. Yet, with all of those property rights, as a nation, we lead the world in the ratio of lawyers to people. And we see a large number of lawsuits regarding property.

But not only do we have the highest percentage of lawyers, we've been in wars for over 200 years of our nearly 239 years of existence, we have been involved in armed conflicts or wars. The wars started here with one of the reasons why we fought the Revolutionary War: westward expansion. And in expanding westward, we took property from America's Indigenous people. So does the theory that property rights lead to peace match the practice? That might be a hard sale to make.

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To Elise Hilton and her blogpost on the upcoming Encyclical on the Environment. This appeared in the Acton blog.

The issue with 'demonizing Captialism' has nothing to do with creating a partisan document. Rather, the issue would revolve around the accuracy of such an analysis of Capitalism. 

In addition, acknowledging that climate change exists but doing nothing gains nothing. And who is giving an exact formula for confronting climate change? No one that I know of. 

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To Joe Carter's criticisms of liberal Christians' support for the Iran nuclear agreement. This appeared in the Acton blog.

I am not sure of the reasons why Conservatives oppose the framework. If they think that they can forever prevent Iran from creating nuclear weapons, they are foolish. We should note that Iran has a right to use centrifuges to enrich uranium and enriching uranium does not imply that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

IMO, the real objection to Iran's developing nuclear technology is that it challenges Israel's adaptation of the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East. Applying that doctrine makes Israel leery of any substantial technological development in the region.

The Achilles Heel of Conservative Economics Is Interdependencies

I believe that it was the last presidential election when the Republican answer to an alleged faux-pas made by Obama when he claimed that the government deserves credit for the internet and other American accomplishments: 'We built that.' The 'that' in the statement referred to the businesses and accomplishments made by many business owners such as the internet. And the issue raised by the statement is this: What right does the government have in interfering with a business owner's private property? This interfering with private property involves government's taxes and regulations on private property. We should note here that property refers to more than just land, it refers to all of the wealth a business owner has accumulated through his/her business or other endeavors.

Note that America's Constitution was written because of a then perceived threat on private property--that is the private property of the wealthy only. The threat then was being posed by other individuals, not the government. Note the following from Henry Knox's letter to George Washington (click here):

Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government, unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed coo high and collected coo rigidly…The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes—But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is "That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice, and ought to be swept off the face of the earth." In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws which are easily effected by the means of unfunded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever.

We can also read the immediate concern expressed in Federalist 10 (click here):

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.

Similar concerns were also expressed in the Constitutional Debates (click here). We should first note Charles Pinckney's words:

We cannot pretend to rival the European nations in their grandeur or power; nor is the situation of any two nations so exactly alike as that the one can adopt the regulations or government of the other. If we have any distinctions thay may be divided into three classes. 

      1. Professional men.

                2. Commercial men.
 
               3. The landed interest.

The latter is the governing power of America, and the other two must ever be dependent on them-Will a national government suit them? No. The three orders have necessarily a mixed interest, and in that view, I repeat it again, the United States of America compose in fact but one order. The clergy and nobility of Great Britain can never be adopted by us. Our government must be made suitable to the people, and we are perhaps the only people in the world who ever had sense enough to appoint delegates to establish a general government. I believe that the propositions from Virginia, with some amendments, will satisfy the people. But a general government must not be made dependent on the State governments.

Note how Pinckney, who had a plantation and owned slaves, wanted both an enduring general government and a ruling class--the landed interest. Here, the distinction between what Europe had and what Pinckney wanted was that divisions in Europe were based on birth while in America, divisions would be based on economic class. BTW, the people whom Pinckney was referring to when he said 'government must be made suitable to the people' will be identified a little later.

Now it is time to read James Madison's concerns expressed on a different days during the debates:

The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be jsut, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered.

Now we should note that the last two quotes were part of a debate so that other opinions were expressed. But the intended result of the Constitution was to strengthen the federal government by giving it a power of enforcement. And the purpose for strengthening the federal government was so that it could better respond to dissent and actions like Shays Rebellion. 

As for Madison's statements, note his fear of opening England's elections to 'all classes of people.'  Agrarian law was one of then current issues being advanced by those Americans who were resisting or rebelling against the status quo. Also note that Madison adds an additional layer of protection for Senators from public opinion. That layer consisted of the length of the term each senator should serve. The longer the term, the more immune the Senator would be from public opinion.

We should know a couple of other things about the Constitution. First, of the 55 delegates, 18 were land speculators or either owned or presided over slave plantations. Thirteen delegates obtained their wealth from business, merchant or shipping ventures. Eleven delegates dealt with securities. A large portion of the delegates possessed at least a significant amount of wealth. And there were only a few who were small farmers (click here).

We should note one other thing about the Constitution and those times: only white, male landowners could vote. These were the people to whom government had to be 'suitable' as Pinckney referred to them. It wasn't until 1850 that all could vote regardless of land ownership. But the all then refered to white males only (click here).

In addition, we have Shays Rebellion and the dissent that was expressed in most of the nation at that time. People were losing their farms due to the combination of hard economic times and taxation (click here). In addition there was the sentiment that the land should belong to all who participated in the Revolution. 

What is the point of all of this? The point is that our government was originally constructed to protect the property of the wealthy. But some fair-minded people would ask: Don't the rich have rights? They certainly do, but not at the expense of the rights of others. We might ask the Constitutional delegates who owned slaves this question: How much of their personal wealth morally belonged to them? We can find out how much of their wealth legally belonged to them. But that isn't the question. 

We should also ask the same question to those other delegates whose wealth might have been due in part to the exploitation of others. In fact, this is the question we must ask of all of ourselves. After all, how much of our own wealth morally belongs to us if when the money we save from paying "low" prices is because workers are being exploited. The plight of migrant farm workers immediately comes to mind here. If migrant farm workers are not being paid a fair wage, then how much of the money we saved in paying low prices morally belongs to us? And migrant workers are not the only ones being abused here. Many people working in the cities and suburbs are being paid such poverty wages that they must apply to government assistance programs in order to survive. And none of this includes the sweatshop and trafficked labor who produce many of the goods we consume.

But it isn't just those who are exploited by our financial transactions who might have a legitimate claim on our wealth. Doesn't the government provide a certain number of services, such as the police, judicial services, and the military, that protects us and our wealth? And don't those services cost money? So when corporations work so hard to avoid paying taxes for those services, aren't those same corporations vying for a free lunch at everybody else's  expense? So how much of each corporation's wealth morally belongs to that corporation?

In addition, when we think about the costs to society when some are able to hoard so much wealth, doesn't part of the wealth actually belong to other people as well? Here, we could consider how expensive it is to maintain a civil society. Doesn't such expenses have a claim on our wealth as well?

Finally, for us religious folks, doesn't God provide us with everything we have. And thus, when we see those in need, aren't we called to imitate what God has done for us by sharing with them? 

The combination of the Ayn Rand-libertarian thinking with being, as Martin Luther King Jr. called it, 'thing-oriented' is causing our society to implode--to King, being thing-oriented meant that we we care more for profits, gadgets, and property rights than for people. And perhaps some of those who have the most wealth would prefer that society implodes in order to, perhaps, lessen the outside demand made on their riches. And yet, all that was stated above confronts us with the fact that we have what we have because of interdependencies. We have what we have because of the contributions made by others. So the question becomes, will we moral-up to the legitimate claims which others have on our wealth? Or, are we too thing-oriented to share what we should?