Futures and Options

Haven’t had a chance to read through the full ruling yet, but so far this one looks like a win for rationality.  If you’re not familiar with the case, George Will provided an excellent summary about two months ago.

I started keeping track of the raw numerical data for my travels and so far this year in numbers is either impressive or depressing depending on how one looks at it.  Numbers are slightly projected through the end of this month to capture the entire first 6 months of 2009:

• Days in year to date:  181
• Days on the road:  97 (53.59%)
• Airline Miles Earned:  76,932
• Expenses (incl. hotel/airfare):  $20,488.83
• Projects worked on:  3

H/T to Consultant Ninja for giving me the idea to track this.

The New Criterion has a lively review by Mark Steyn of Paul Rahe’s book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift. The central idea of the article (and presumably the book, although I haven’t read it) is summed up by this two-hundred-year-old passage from Tocqueville, who was musing on ways in which a free republic could, on its own, collapse into a despotic state, quite apart from the coercion of a nineteenth-century-style despotic monarch:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Sound familiar? The problem is that the transformation to “soft despotism” occurs stealthily, perhaps imperceptibly. The key to retarding its creep, according to Steyn and Rahe, is the vitality of the institutions that traditionally served as intermediaries between the individuals and the sovereign state: family, church, school board, township, county, and the like. These are the institutions that are on the ground, that are actually capable of observing and responding to the problems of individuals and communities, and in which individuals can feel genuinely invested. But that ideal is increasingly forgotten as the federal government assumes greater and greater responsibility for our everyday lives.

Steyn offers this current anecdote in support of Rahe’s thesis:

Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money: A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina, Miss Bethea wrote to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress. Imagine if Miss Bethea gets her way, and the national bureaucracy in Washington becomes responsible for grade- school paint jobs from Maine to Hawaii. What size of government would be required for such a project? And is it compatible with a constitutional republic?

Can you imagine a schoolgirl in 1793 sending a letter to George Washington asking the federal government to please do something about the leaky roof on her local schoolhouse? And can you imagine President Washington actually inviting said schoolgirl to come to Philadelphia and sit behind him as he read her letter during an address to Congress in an attempt to shame them into sending a check to Dillon, South Carolina (as Obama did with Ms. Bethea)? We have been sliding down this slope for a long time; perhaps the slippage has accelerated enough during this new administration that people will finally notice.

Couldn’t resist passing along this nicely put bit of exasperation:

I keep hearing about how smart Obama is because he has the wisdom and judgment to implement policies that contradict his campaign positions now that he is in office and has all the facts before him. I agree — that is evidence of his intelligence. It makes him almost as smart as the people who believed what he now believes back when he believed the opposite.

You know, I actually have more respect for those folks who complain that Obama isn’t liberal enough than those who celebrate the wisdom of his fickleness. The former at least have some consistent political opinions; the latter (including a distressing portion of the press) are apparently just mesmerized by the sound of our good President’s voice.

…”liberalism” used here in the modern-day sense. Please watch this fascinating discussion between Peter Robinson and Charles Kesler. All five parts of the interview are worth viewing, but I found this segment particularly enlightening. Kesler’s thesis is that the progressive notion of economic rights that came alive under Wilson and especially FDR had the effect of liberating citizens from what were formerly considered core virtues — what we today call “family values” — which were largely indispensable in exercising one’s economic freedoms (providing for yourself and your family). Indispensable, that is, until the government took it upon itself to provide those basic economic necessities to everyone. With old-fashioned individual virtue no longer a prerequisite for economic survival, individuals were free to explore beyond the bounds of traditional morality. In short, the New Deal made the Sexual Revolution possible.

As Kesler acknowledges, some of the evolution of traditional “family values” is attributable to changes in the overall economy that made it more conducive for women to earn a living.  But the Sixties, he argues, went far beyond mere recognition and acceptance of changing economic realities; the progressive movement at its core was an outright repudiation of traditional morality, made possible by the creation of the welfare state.  Much to think about there.

I suspect that libertarian-minded readers might disagree with this analysis, as it posits a definite link between traditional morality and economic freedom.  But I would note that Kesler’s worldview does not require a government-imposed morality (which libertarians find repugnant).  Rather, traditional morality was and is a tool to cope with economic realities when those realities are not taken care of by the government.  So government need not impose moral virtue; it need only keep its nose out of individuals’ economic business, and individuals will turn to virtue of their own accord.  The perversion of progressivism is that it removes the need to deal with economic reality, and so we find traditional virtues cast aside as no longer necessary to survival.

Incidentally, I find the Uncommon Knowledge series to be one of the best things on the web. Robinson doesn’t try to hide his conservatism, but he nevertheless elicits some challenging and enlightening commentary from his always impressive guests. Never a waste of time to watch his interviews.

At the beginning of this month when the US Government effectively bought a controlling interest in General Motors, Obama had this to say:

What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM.  They, and not the government, will call the shots and make the decisions about how to turn this company around.

Unless, of course, calling those shots and making those decisions means they need to close a plant within a prominent Democrat’s district.  It seems that Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has “convinced” General Motors to delay the closure of GM’s plant in Norton, Mass.  Nevermind that this is precisely the sort of thing that Obama promised us would never happen.

Overall though, I really don’t see how this can possibly go wrong.  I mean, it’s not as though this sets a precedent for using GM as a means of administering pork-barrel projects to a congressman’s home district at the detriment of the remainder of the country.  And it’s certainly not as though a politician would ever ignore the larger picture if doing so could enlarge his own piece of the pie.

Oh…  This is the real world, isn’t it.  Yeah, we’re screwed.

H/T to Discriminations for bringing this to my attention.

I already explored some reasons for criticizing Sotomayor in a previous post, but it looks like we have a couple more gems from from someone who is nominated for one of the most mentally-demanding positions in the world.  In describing her experiences in college, Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton:

When my first mid-term paper came back to me my first semester, I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish, we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition, a cotton shirt in Spanish is a shirt of cotton, una camisa de agodon [sic], no agondon [sic] camisa.

Now, I’ll admit to not knowing enough Spanish to even ask where the bathroom is, but I still know enough to understand that even when the construction is, “a shirt of cotton”, the word “cotton” remains an adjective, whether in English or in Spanish.  To be sure, the point which Sotomayor is attempting to make, that differences in standard grammatical construction between two languages represent additional challenges beyond mere vocabulary for people who learn a second language, remains reasonably valid.  However, Sotomayor’s method of expressing this point can only be described, charitably, as “inartful”.

In a delightful case of sabotaging her own point, Sotomayor had earlier said:

Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Personally, I bristle when someone mangles a common idiom.  Furthermore, style guides frequently caution against being excessively prescriptive with regard to split infinitives as there are often cases where a split infinitive is superior, both in clarity and grace, to it’s ostensibly grammatical counterpart.  As if that weren’t enough, her distaste for the passive voice is likewise misplaced; in legal or technical writing it is often desirable, if not strictly “necessary”, to omit reference to an agent that is performing the described action.

As before, the point which Sotomayor was attempting to make stands reasonably valid.  Clear and concise writing (which is generally achieved through mindful consideration of proper grammatical style) is vitally important to effective communication.  However, we once again see an example of how Sotomayor’s own writing falls short of being clear and effective.

I recognize that grammatical errors are part and parcel to the human condition and I do not expect that anyone will always be completely without error in his or her speech; however, the examples above are such as should have been well proofed and I do not believe it to be at all unreasonable to expect that Sotomayor would understand that Spanish does indeed have adjectives and that the proper English idiom is “bristle”, not “blister”.  A person who is being considered for a seat on the US Supreme Court simply should not produce writing that suffers from such elemental flaws.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!

Jolted by cost estimates as high as $1.6 trillion, Senate Democrats agreed Tuesday to scale back planned subsidies for the uninsured and sought concessions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars from private industry to defray the cost of sweeping health care legislation.

Apparently Senate Democrats have forgotten that goods and services actually have to be paid for.  They must have also missed the fact that the country is already bleeding money with record deficits.

Then again, given the ratio of what is paid for to what is going to be financed through deficit spending, maybe they’ve simply decided to exercise the same level of fiscal restraint as their constituents did before this whole mess started.

Several officials said the Congressional Budget Office had issued a cost estimate of $1.6 trillion, with only about $560 billion paid for.

Just put that $1.1 trillion on the credit card and worry about it later.  What’s the worst that could happen?

Seen the new “GM reinvention” commercials? Leaner, greener, faster, smarter? Struck me as a bit creepy how closely that mantra matched the Left’s monolithic vision of the automobile industry. Almost seems as if the commercial could have been paid for by the Democrats in Washington.

Waaaaitttt a second….

Those who would seek to mandate anything for another person’s “own good” would do well to remember the following quote from C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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.