"What's the budget for the entire Catholic Church?"

Here are several answers to that question, all equally true:

• I don't know, and I doubt anyone could actually answer that question.
• Since the Church preexists creation (it has its roots in the Trinity) and is the Mystical Body of Christ, the family of the Son of the Living God, then by rights it has a claim to all things. Therefore, the created order--that's the budget of the Church.
• Since "the Church" means all of its members, the budget of the Catholic Church is equivalent to the amount of money passing into and out of the hands of all of its members at all times anywhere in the world.
• Speaking in worldly terms, I'm not sure anybody knows the amount of money passing into and out of the Church in a year for the very simple reason that we aren't Coca-Cola. There's no general headquarters with accountants tracking all the doings of all the branch offices and franchises and everything. The Pope never sees most of the money going into the collection basket every Sunday. That's simply not how it's done. It's sort of like trying to figure out what the actual budget for the "government of the United States" is for a given year, if by government we mean every single bit of those bodies which govern the United States (federal, state, county, local). Does anyone ever try to figure out that number?

For more of a sense of the way the thing works, see:

• The church's deep pockets, the butler did it, and myths about atheism
• Challenges to vision of a 'Poor Church for the Poor'
• Starving Africans, Gold, and the Catholic Church

Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate: Pope Benedict XVI's Social Teaching

Even though the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is awesome, it was released before Pope Benedict XVI's papal contributions to the Church's social teaching were published.  So, to round out the series, here's the USCCB's recounting of those contributions:

...Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) 2005, Pope Benedict XVI -- Benedict's first encyclical, that could have been an abstract or scholarly treatise, instead dug deep into the concept of love and cited the connections between love of God and love of neighbor. Pope Benedict said the Church could no more neglect charity than it could Scripture or the sacraments and even called charity a manifestation of Trinitarian love.

Caritas In Veritate (Charity in Truth) 2009, Pope Benedict XVI -- anticipated since 2007, this encyclical is believed to follow up on the themes of Populorum Progressio. Dealing with the ethics of contemporary economics, it's reasonable to think that the global economic crisis will weigh in heavily on what the pope has to say.

Their summary came before the release of Caritas in Veritate. Here's a more detailed summary.  Excerpts:

Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict's third encyclical, is a call to see the relationship between human and environmental ecologies and to link charity and truth in the pursuit of justice, the common good, and authentic human development. In doing so, the pope points out the responsibilities and limitations of government and the private market, challenges traditional ideologies of right and left, and calls all men and women to think and act anew...

The Trillion Dollar Coin

I'm sorry, but is there a universe in which this sounds like a good idea?  Excerpts:

...the law inadvertently gave the Treasury secretary the power to mint, say, a $1 trillion coin, or even a $5 trillion coin, or even a $1 quadrillion coin.

Rather than selling it, he might deposit it at the Federal Reserve. Presto! The shiny new asset would erase a trillion dollars in debt liabilities. Then, the Treasury could carry out its spending — including disbursing Social Security checks and Medicare payments — without hitting the ceiling, a cap on total debt issuance that currently stands at about $16.4 trillion.

When Congress raised the ceiling again, the administration could then take the platinum coin and destroy it. With a token the size of a penny, the White House could head off another round of Congressional brinkmanship and another run at a fiscal cliff...

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which mocked up a fake trillion-dollar coin with President Obama’s face on it, noted the absurdity of the idea by saying that the amount of platinum it would take to mint a trillion-dollar coin would sink the Titanic.

(A technical point, but a relevant one: such a coin would not need to contain a trillion dollars’ worth of platinum.)...

This is one of those times when having a fiat currency seems like a really, really bad idea.  The whole suggestion sounds awfully like this, only without the whole hoax aspect.

Debt Limit Hit...Before the End of 2012

Well, crud.  Excerpts:

The U.S. Treasury quietly warned at the end of a statement issued last Wednesday that it expects the federal government to hit its legal debt limit before the end of this year--which means before the new Congress is seated--and that "extraordinary measures" will be needed before then to keep the government fully funded into the early part of 2013...

Materialism Disproved

Because it cannot handle the existence of meaning. Excerpts:

...Greene writes that "a staunch reductionist would claim that...in principle absolutely everything, from the big bang to daydreams, can be described in terms of underlying microscopic physical processes involving the fundamental constituents of matter." Good stuff. I'm with him so far. But here's where he loses me: "If you understand everything about the ingredients, the reductionist argues, you understand everything."

If you understand the ingredients, you understand everything. I think this is a perfect summary of where modern atheism goes off the rails. A computer program could read and analyze the words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and even answer questions about its content. It could "understand" all the ingredients perfectly. But does that mean that it has grasped the essence of Sonnet 18? Scientists could attach a neuroimaging device to the head of a man who is reunited with the woman he loves after a long absence. The scientists could describe in great detail every part of his brain that was in use when she first walked in the room, and explain precisely how all the neurons were firing as he gazed at her. Would that data alone fully capture the moment?...

Gah! Atlas Shrugged Rises Again!

Behold!  Atlas Shrugged...2!  Excerpts:

The second installment of what will—Rand willing—become an epic trilogy based on the objectivist ur-text Atlas Shrugged is even more implausible than the first. By the conventional economics of the film industry “Atlas Shrugged Part II,” which opens to around 500 theaters this October, should never have been made.

Unless the movie in question involves simply tacking another numeral on to a field-tested franchise like “Scary Movie” or “Final Destination,” universal derision from critics and a box office loss are usually enough to count a sequel out. And yet here’s the next installment of “Atlas Shrugged” anyway, not limping straight to DVD but doubling the size of its theatrical release, having added $20 million to its budget, 20 minutes to its run-time, and a new cast...

The Economist, the Catholic Church, and Utter Confusion

A wonderful response to this recent article from The Economist.  Excerpts:

I am guessing The Economist does not have a copy of the Code of Canon Law. Even a glancing read of the Code would have revealed that the Church is quite clearly not run like a multinational corporation such as Walmart or General Electric and I for one am glad it’s not...

The "Bomb" in Obamacare

An interesting argument from Forbes.  Excerpts:

...[The Bomb is] the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.  Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

The Problem of State Solutions to Poverty

When we began our work there were thirteen million unemployed.  The greatest problem of our day was the problem of work and the machine.

The state entered in to solve these problems by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials...The problem of the modern state loomed up as never before in American life. The Communists, stealing our American thunder, clamored on the one hand for relief and on the other set up Jeffersonian schools of democracy.

Peter also quoted Jefferson--"He governs best who governs least." One of his criticisms of labor was that it was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 222

Sometimes The Better Christian Isn't Christian At All

Jim was a college graduate, had fallen away from his early faith but regained it by reading Claudel.  He was so painfully shy that he was no good at all in contacts with the rank and file.  He went to sea because he loved it; he loved the ship he served and the responsibility it entailed.  Perhaps there was much of romance and youth in his attitude.  He wrote to us of the clubs in the Russian port, and how the men were treated as men, capable of appreciating lectures, concerts, dances, and meetings with student groups.  In this country, he said, the seamen were treated as the scum of the earth; port towns and the port districts in these towns were slums and water-front streets made up of taverns and pawnshops and houses of prostitution.  He felt that the Russians treated their American comrades as though they were creatures of body and soul, made in the image and likeness of God (though atheism was an integral part of Marxism) and here in our professedly Christian country they were treated like beasts, and often became beasts because of this attitude.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 209

For All You Capitalists Out There

On the one hand: Atlas Shrugged the movie is on its way.

On the other hand: Fr. McCloskey is excited about the work of this economist.

A Climate of Wealth Redistribution

Interesting. I take no position on this, but--well, what do you think?

...The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole...

On Faith vs. Ideology

from Mark Shea:

The Faith is a mystery that has room for human traditions but is never to be identified with them.  It says, “We don’t know much, but we *do* know that we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, etc.”  ideology, in contrast, imagines it knows everything and has the universe mapped out to a niceity.

Step out of line just a little bit (by, say, suggesting that saluting the SS or speaking of “second amendment remedies” to the “Harry Reid problem” is irresponsible), and it’s far more important to excise the heretic than to ask whether or not there might indeed be something wrong with our tribe and its human traditions...

Catholic social teaching is what is right. And the great majority of alleged Catholic conservatives I run into on the web regard it with suspicion and contempt, preferring to get their gospel of democratic capitalism, laissez faire, and disregard for the weak from Talk Radio and not bother with learning the true gospel teaching from the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching. As long as this remains the case, the Church on the Right will continue to be as much a cafeteria as on the Left.  Indeed, it will be more immune to correction because it will have sealed itself off from any sense of a bad conscience by saying that, so long as it opposes abortion, all other forms of contempt for Church teaching are okay. At least the Left doesn’t kid itself that it is faithful. It openly and cheerfully treats Church teaching with scorn, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Americanism, democratic capitalism, militarism: these things can no more save us than the preferred Lefty heresies of hedonism and Pelvic Adventurism. The devil always sends lies into the world in pairs so that, fleeing one, we might embrace the other.

It’s all in Chesterton, all in Chesterton. Dear me, what *do* they teach in schools these days?

Third Way Economics

I've recently had occasion to explain that profit itself is morally neutral. It may be justly pursued as a means to receiving value for value--that is, just compensation for the value provided by your labors. A just wage, therefore, ought to include just compensation for value added as well as sufficient to cover the basic necessities of life. Provide more value, you desire more pay. Provide value at the rate of a Thomas Edison or Dagny Taggart, and you deserve a ton of wealth. However, in the course of providing this explanation, I think I may have neglected to emphasize that profit is not the proper end of economic activity. Indeed, homo economicus is an insufficient understanding of the nature of the human person. Therefore, the ultimate conflict of ideology cannot be that between capitalism and communism, since both have the same presumption at their root--that the whole of life is economic relations. Rather, the ultimate conflict of ideology shall always take place on the grand battlefield of disputes over human nature, metaphysics, the nature of truth, and teleology. So we have yet to find a truly human economics, though some have done great work along the way. A sampling:

Most of us have grown up taking for granted a dichotomy of two essential views of mankind: capitalism and communism. These two worldviews exist as the basic premises upon which any idea of society is based. You view man either as a prime mover in the action of his own life, individual par excellence, or as a very small piece of a much larger mechanism designed for the happiness and prosperity of all. The problem with these two views is that they both reduce man to a mere economic unit. Thus, one can rightly see them as two sides of the same coin -- which has not to this point been proven the only coin in the realm. Allan C. Carlson, working closely with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and aided by a grant from the Earhart Foundation in Ann Arbor, sets out to examine social ideas and ideologies of the 20th century that eschewed both capitalism and communism. The result, Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies -- and Why They Disappeared, is a fascinating examination of the will of citizens to self-govern... Carlson's essential idea in Third Ways consists of the primacy of the family and how the family has fallen under the boot heel of what Belloc termed the "servile state." With the majority of property, as well as the means of production, being held by a scarcer minority than ever before, the mass of people in Western society are forced to eke out a living as wage slaves. While Carlson paints a rather bleak portrait of modern life, he finds hope in the examples of the past, and offers this study as a relic of what might have been, and what very possibly might yet come to pass.

There needs to rise up a serious challenge to the existing left/right dichotomy, inherited from the Cold War and still skewing the entire economic debate. A third party with a family-centered, unusual economic stance would be a blessing right now. And in the same review, the source for Scott Hahn's discussion of the trustee family:

The well-known Irish proverb, "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live," has been cited for generations, but it was just decades ago that Carle C. Zimmerman put the shifting shelters of family, tribe, and government through rigorous research and analysis. His renowned study, Family and Civilization, was originally published in 1947. Zim­merman, a former Harvard sociologist, sorted families into three categories -- trustee families, domestic families, and atomistic families -- each with distinctive characteristics. His lavish sweep through history examined these family systems in ancient Greece and Rome; during the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and both World Wars... Zimmerman hoped that the identification of historic family trends through scholarship and teaching would protect and expand domestic families. But the book's new edition includes essays by Bryce Christensen and James Kurth that dim such hope. Christensen's comments recount the normalization and celebration of today's atomistic social ills by entertainers, academics, journalists, and politicians hostile to traditional families. He claims that "only new St. Pauls and St. Augustines can break the family-destroying spell of progressive utopianism and fortify intellectuals and the general populace with the integrity necessary to resist the gravitation of the burgeoning secular state." Kurth offers an unsettling discussion of postmodernism's denigration of religion and abandonment of Christianity in favor of an amoral multiculturalism: "The political, intellectual, and cultural elites of the West for the most part no longer believe in the values and principles that used to be ascribed to Western civilization, particularly those which were held by two of the traditions which shaped the West, the classical culture and the Christian religion." Kurth's final sentence offers little comfort: "The true answer to the question of what is to be done about reviving the Western family and Western civilization is that God only knows." This distinguished book is full of discouraging words about recurring historical trends that destroy domestic families -- no matter their country, class, or creed. Sunnier souls might discount the impact of increasing numbers of atomistic families around us, but optimists and pessimists alike will be shaken by the scholarly projections in this account.

If anyone can see their way towards forming a third party based around the insights drawn from these two books, it might be well worth all of our time to support it.

Gladio According to the NY Times

Before we dive in--I discovered the existence of Gladio through researching Propaganda Due after reading Malachi Martin's Vatican. Vatican was published in the mid-80s. The Gladio scandals appear to have broken in the early 90s. Martin had some interesting sources of information. An overview from the New York Times:

A Western cold-war conspiracy to fight what seemed imminent danger is coming to light in Europe. It is already rocking the Italian Government and will touch many others. There was, it is revealed, an organized underground, provided with hidden arms depots, prepared to launch guerrilla wars and resistance in the event of invasion from the East or overthrow of democratic governments from within.

There were different epic names for the operations -- "Gladio" in Italy (manned by secret gladiators), "Rose in the Wind" in France, "Red Fleece" in Belgium. They were sometimes directed, but generally coordinated, by NATO with participation of the C.I.A. and British secret service.

Former C.I.A. Director William Colby has confirmed some of this in recent interviews with Italian journalists. They also reported that meetings of the clandestine groups were held as recently as a few weeks ago in Brussels, though several governments claim it all ended by the 80's.

The Italian Government has said there were 139 caches of clandestine arms, explosives and communications equipment of which 127 were recovered years ago. They haven't accounted for the rest.

There's some astounding stuff in this article from 1990, when the Gladio scandal broke in Italy:

New "gladiators" are still recruited, and two members of Parliament say they visited a military base on the island of Sardinia where guerrilla training exercises were held last spring. But Admiral Martini told the investigating commission that nearly three-fourths of the 622 members were over the age of 50, or were dead.

Nevertheless, the network continues, and several officials reported that a supervisory committee of European secret services met in Brussels only a month ago. Nourishing conspiracy theories are assertions from key European leaders that they knew nothing about the operation until recently. Joseph Luns, who was NATO secretary general from 1971 to 1984, said he had never heard of it.

The network extended throughout Western Europe, even beyond the NATO countries though it was a NATO operation:

The Prime Minister said last week that Gladio later evolved into a branch of an extensive network, operated within NATO and abetted by a 1956 agreement between the United States and Italian secret services. Over the years, he says, 622 Italians belonged to the operation -- civilians who were trained by intelligence operatives and who had fought in World War II or served in the peacetime forces.

Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Luxembourg have all acknowledged that they maintained Gladio-style networks to prepare guerrilla fighters to leap into action in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Many worked under the code name Stay Behind. Greece called its operation Red Sheepskin.

News reports in recent days assert that similar programs have also existed in Britain, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Turkey and Denmark, and even in neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden.

The network also had supplies. Caches of arms were planted across Europe. Some caches of arms and supplies were never recovered. The chief of Italian military intelligence, Adm. Fulvio Martini, claimed that Gladio had no connection to any plots or neo-fascist organizations. That claim seems to lack support:

The Grey Wolves group, with which he [Mehmet Ali Agca, attempted assassin of Pope John Paul II] was associated at the time of the shooting, was linked to an underground network known as Gladio.

This was set up with CIA support in a number of European countries during the Cold War to prepare resistance to a possible Soviet invasion.

In both Italy and Turkey, Gladio networks are believed to have been behind numerous bombings and assassinations.

In Italy, the networks have been exposed and dismantled; in Turkey, they are still widely believed to exist as a so-called "deep state", with support from elements of the military.

There are ongoing trials of dozens of people accused of involvement in illegal, deep-state activities.

Agca was certainly helped to escape from prison in 1979 by his guards and some well-known underground right-wing figures. He was given false passports and enough funds to enable him to travel around Europe for several months before the attempted assassination.

The Turkish connection to Gladio is almost present-day news, as shown by this 2008 piece:

One of the most sensational public trials in Turkish history began Monday, as a court started hearing a case against 86 people — among them retired army generals, journalists and a former university rector — charged with assassinations, bomb attacks and trying to topple the government...

Turkey is a democracy with an elected government, but a powerful elite of military officers, judges and senior bureaucrats has helped steer the country since its inception in 1923, carrying out four coups. This trial is the first real attempt in Turkish history to prosecute the leaders of this country’s violent nationalist fringe, who prosecutors say have had links to the elite.

The case has riveted Turkish society because public criticism of the military, a vaunted institution in Turkey, is extremely rare. The military has denied any role in the plots; the officers identified in the indictment are all retired.

Prosecutors say the Ergenekon organization is the Turkish equivalent of the Italian Gladio network, a code name for operatives who infiltrated Italian society after World War II to counter Communism and who were responsible for a series of political assassinations and bombings in the 1970s. Turkey, according to the indictment, has allowed Ergenekon “to turn our country into a mafia and terror haven."

And more.

More on Avatar

Mark Shea has a small round up of recent reaction, along with this amazing analysis from Rod Bennet:

Like Pixar’s recent WALL*E, Avatar depicts a cautionary imagined universe which might almost have been dreamed up by Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day. These 20th century Catholic “Distributists” as they were called, prophesied a state of affairs wherein Capitalism and Communism would eventually agree to call off their long, destructive stand-off and allow a merger to take place, a cynical marriage of convenience between Big Business and Big Government for their own mutual benefit. In WALL*E it was the ubiquitous Buy N Large corporation, whose mile-long “Ultra-stores” sold “all you need and so much more” to an increasingly sheep-like population but whose W. Bush-like CEO also happened to be President of the World. Here in Avatar it’s the Resources Development Administration (or RDA), a “quasi-governmental administrative entity” which started as a mere globe-straddling monopoly but has ended up with the ability to use the nation’s armed forces the way Andrew Carnegie used Pinkerton guards, with an RDA officer on every battlefield giving direct orders to the generals. In both cases, nothing like “the free enterprise system” exists any longer: Big Business has come to rely on Big Government completely (just as Wal-Mart relies on Food Stamps, property-tax breaks, and other forms of massive corporate welfare to continue paying out its poverty-level wages) and Big Government (ever since the Soviet Union failed for lack of cash) has realized it can’t get along without Big Business. Belloc called this situation “The Servile State” but you don’t need quite his level of genius to see it coming these days, if, indeed, it hasn’t got here already. Not with Mr. Bush’s TARP program in the news, guaranteeing Federal control of the banks from now on, and Mr. Obama’s orgy of government buy-outs for former business enterprises such as General Motors all over the front pages (GM, which used to be, if you’ll recall, the largest corporation in the world—the Buy N Large of its day—and may yet be again, though under “entirely new management”). Even the redoubtable ex-Soviet mouthpiece Pravda observed these developments and pronounced them “the death of private enterprise” in America…and they were right. In truth, today’s political economy is something horribly new and different—the bastard love-child of its quarrelsome 19th century parents (Capitalism and Communism) with the many of the worst qualities of both. Avatar then, is no indictment of Capitalism, a system which, like Communism, is extinct in Cameron’s world…and in ours, too, IMHO. James Cameron may not have read the Catholic Distributists (nor have the makers of WALL*E in all likelihood, though director Andrew Stanton is, in fact, a Christian of some stripe) but for keen, observant eyes like theirs, so adept at “discerning the face of the sky,” all one has to do is “discern the signs of the times” (Mt 16:3). I, myself, wish more Christians could find a way to step out of the smothering hothouse of the left/right culture war and learn to do the same.

"Soft Tyranny" & "Straight Capitalism"

This piece has a number of fascinating points of great value, and a number of flaws. Among the excellent points:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. —C. S. Lewis, 1953 ...The late Irving Kristol, who died last year at 89, was exquisitely sensitive to the role of intellectuals in the metabolism of this debate, and I’d like to start by quoting from a speech he gave to the American Enterprise Institute in 1973. “For two centuries,” Mr. Kristol noted,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape...

Democratic despotism, Tocqueville points out, is unlike despotisms of old. It pre- fers the carrot to the stick. The goal of the operation is the same—the achievement of conformity and the consolidation of power—but the means of choice is not terror but dependence. Accordingly, Tocqueville writes, democratic despotism is despotic at one remove. It does not, unless stymied, terrorize. Rather, it “hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” ...One of the most rebarbative features of the Obama administration’s effort to bring government-control to a life near you is its combination of the antiseptic rhetoric of utilitarian social science with old-fashioned central planning. Consider Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is a top White House advisor on health care reform. Dr. Emanuel has famously argued that doctors “take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.” He wants to concentrate medical services not on those who need it most—the elderly, seriously impaired children, etc.—but on those who are likely to contribute to “the continuation of the polity,” “ensure healthy future generations,” and so on. Forget about “first do no harm.” “Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens,” quoth Dr. Emanuel, “are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” Got a loopy grandparent or a kid who is playing with half-a-deck? What can they contribute to “the continuation of the polity” or “healthy future generations”? The internet blogger Glenn Reynolds made the observation, amusing and scary in equal measure, that what we’re dealing with here bears an awful similarity to the troubled “cash for clunkers” program: “First Grandma’s Caprice then Grandma.”

We live in interesting times. The problem with the piece excerpted above is the inclination of the author to espouse a pure libertarian capitalist type vision of what a good future would be. He praises the glories of a "mercenary" mentality and hails the rule of the market as the path to freedom. Unfortunately, though, such a view inevitably mandates that the consumerist society will rise again. So long as the libertarian right mistakes license for liberty, they shall never understand the perils of the market unchained. Marx did not rise up in a vacuum--the industrialists did screw the workers. Profit does not necessarily reward virtue--it can be gained by vile practices and can reward shoddy quality products. A truly Darwinian economic environment would lead to the same serfdom and tyranny offered by the state. Neither government nor business writ large offers a human future unless captained by virtuous humanity, and even then we need the two ever dwelling in tension to ensure a human future for all.

The Oddities of Ayn Rand

I mean, aside from her atrocious understanding of human relationships, of course...

No, the odd thing about Ayn Rand is that she truly failed to understand or articulate what she was arguing for. It's there, in Atlas Shrugged, just not in the clearest, most philosophical passages. She's perhaps the best--at least, the most ferocious--enemy of charity broken away from truth.

The promise of Communism lies in man's natural rage against injustice and the suffering of his fellow man. When the workers were treated like animals, and worst than animals, the resulting back lash was inevitable from any conscience with a bit of life and spark left in it. You must feed a horse enough to keep it alive and plowing your fields. You must tend to your machinery and equipment at a bare minimum in order to keep it at work. When the horrors of the dawn of the industrial age, of Dickensian poverty and working conditions are defended and embraced by the titans of industry and those supposed to preserve the virtue of society, then one risks revolution.

But at the same time, such rage against ill treatment based in man's benevolence towards his fellow man overshot. In the name of the revolution, in the name of compassion, in the name of charity and concern for the oppressed laborers of the world, the revolutionaries believed they had to throw out all concern and charity for the oppressors of the world. Into that category they lumped the preservers of virtue in a society--the religions, the governments, the organizations and framework of the world from before the time of the Revolution, before the Year Zero of the Revolutionary Calendar--and decided it all had to go. Not only were they committed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but they wanted to chuck the tub with it. As well as the soap. And indeed anything and everything that reminded them they were ever involved in a bath to begin with.

Rand comes forth into the field with a clarion call for the nobility and necessity of truth, the importance of justice, the vital place of the producers--of the virtuous--who become the people of wealth and power in a society, and indeed, a call for the repudiation of anything, anything at all, that smacks of communism! And so, she pulls the baby and the tub back into the house, through the house, and right back out the other side of the house. She throws out charity.

Funnily enough, she tries to keep good will between people. She wants to retain a willingness to sacrifice everything for the welfare of people you love. She'd like to retain compassion. Even while she scorns it. It's an odd dynamic to watch at work. Her statement of her philosophy is so forceful, so compelling, so inviting in its heroic cadence and the strength of conviction behind it--and let's not forget the fact that an appeal to the existence of reason contra much of modernity is always refreshing--that many people get swept up in it and overlook the problems. She did, herself, I suspect, though it is unfair to judge her system merely from the novels and not from the explicitly philosophical work.

But her whole system depends upon the Communist vision of the world having some real attachment to what ordinary people mean when they speak of care for the little guy, and compassion for the oppressed, and the need to resolve problems of systemic injustice, and love, and altruism. Rather, she didn't understand Christianity. She who loved Aristotle, who ripped off some of his best lines for her chapter titles and section names, didn't seem to get the full force and effect of his description of the Prime Mover. Her adaptation to fit the main players of a capitalist worldview celebrating producers and men and women of achievement is an ingenious one, but it does not show that she got what he was saying. There must be a God. There must be some being at the back of all things, whether as the First Pusher who Itself is not Pushed or as the Ground of All Being or what have you, but there must be a God. There must be some first cause, or else we live in a universe of infinite cause, which is a universe of irrationality and unpredictability, without purpose or meaning. And this she abhorred.

Once that is understood, a great many other things are thrown into a different light. In an atheist's world, then history could truly have been a sequence of moochers and looters oppressing the men of production eternally, because in an atheist world, all religion would have been a sham and a lie, useful only for crowd control and the deception of the masses. But if religion is true, or the reflection of a higher reality expressed in better or worse ways by different systems, then there exists a being who may truly have a claim upon all men by right of creation, of production--a right over the creature that she would have understood and appreciated if she could only have seen. The creator's rights over the created are not like those sham rights of the master over the slave, or (in her novels) the sham rights of the looters and moochers over the producers and men of genius and achievement.

And then, of course, there's the complicating factor of the relationship God desires with his creations, which would elevate us far beyond anything Rand dreamed of in her neo-pagan fantasies. So Rand: both prophet of the diseases of modernity (specifically, of charity without the bindings of truth and justice, i.e., Communism) and a purveyor of false teaching herself (of justice without mercy, of Darwinian capitalism), while at the heart of it pulling out a key insight into money as the means of man's peaceful interaction, of trading value for value, of labor rewarded with pleasure rather than the slave's mere relief from pain, of the best of capitalism rewarding people of virtue with wealth according to their production and achievement aiding all of humanity.

I think frequently she is mistaken as a proponent of deregulated business, when she was rather arguing for the proper rewards for achievement and virtue. It is true, she wanted government cut to a minimum, enforcing contracts, handing down justice, and keeping the peace so that the producers could do what they did best. But she was not simply friendly to business--she was friendly to the achievers. She was not friendly to deregulation--she demanded just laws and good government, government based on truth and justice. She desired to see virtue rewarded and vice punished, according to her own scheme. And that was the problem, in the end. According to her own scheme--except her scheme was wrong.