Politics & Economics

A Vote with Meaning in Massachusetts?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

It’s quite a night for politics in the Bay State tonight. The polls closed about half an hour ago on the first competitive race for a national office that I can remember in my lifetime. My sense is that, before this night is over,  Republican State Senator Scott Brown will have knocked off once heavily favored Mass Attorney General Democrat Martha Coakley for the open U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy since I was a two-year old. It has been a lot of fun over the past few weeks to feel the momentum building for Brown’s candidacy in this deep blue state, as it has provided some hope that the leftwing lunacy prevailing in Washington D.C. might be brought at least somewhat under control. Not that I think Scott Brown is going to exert some magical power – he’s a deeply flawed politician who just happens to have enough common sense to seem like a bright bulb in a dull array – but he will bring a sorely needed fiscal seriousness to the table, and the loss of the seat will at least force the Democrats to play ball in the Senate.

More importantly, the establishment elite have been served unambiguous notice that the American people are not buying the lies that have been served up as “healthcare reform,” nor do they approve of the bald shenanigans that have accompanied it. If Brown wins tonight, of course the rules in Washington change. It’s simply incredible to think that the Democrats needed a super-majority to get that pig passed, yet thought it was perfectly OK to proceed with it anyway. What arrogance to think they could makeover a major part of our culture through brute force, without having to convince others through reason! But even if Brown fails tonight, it has become abundantly clear for all to see that the current direction of the Obama administration is a political dead-end – even if they can’t see that it is also a moral dead-end. If even Massachusetts Democrats could so much as come close to losing “the Kennedy seat” to an anti-Obamacare movement, that is one dead movement. Stick a fork in it.

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Politics & Economics

Idealism Unencumbered by Reality: Obamacare, pt.2 (Universality & Reality)

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

obamagig_thumb21In the on-going debate over how to improve the American healthcare and healthcare delivery systems, the professed intent of most of the players has been to increase “access” or “coverage,” by extending benefits to people who currently do not have such access. Ostensibly, this is because “access” and/or “coverage” is priced out of reach for these folks, on account of some combination of raw poverty, and unavailability of employer-provided/subsidized health insurance, which is the vehicle through which most non-elderly Americans access the healthcare system. I spent almost a decade of my life numbered among those without medical insurance, and I’m familiar with the significant limitations of the current model, from the distortions introduced by the prevalence of employer-sourced benefits, to the reluctance – especially among the young – to view healthcare costs as a necessary out-of-pocket expense, similar to food, clothing, or shelter.

In any policy debate, a central component of the debate is the question: Who benefits? Apart from identifying precisely what the need is, and how it might be met, we need to have an understanding both of who should benefit, as well as who actually would benefit under any given proposal. Perceiving that adequate healthcare, whatever its precise definition (which must be defined in order to make rational policy decisions), is a universal necessity for living a fully flourishing life, many public voices have taken to calling for the recognition of a universal right to healthcare, and, not infrequently, of identifying the various “reform” packages proposed by Democratic leadership with such a universal mission.

But what does “universal” mean when used in the current political context? Does it truly mean universal, or does it merely say universal while meaning something else? And if it says one thing while meaning another, what are the implications typically associated with the term that cannot be legitimately claimed under these current circumstances, given the reality of what is actually meant when the term is being used? In short: How can this idea be invoked honestly, and – hence – profitably?

Consistent with decades of Catholic social thought, the Catholic Church, at least in the form of the USCCB, has thrown its moral weight behind the idea of a program of universal access to healthcare (whatever that particular term might mean), but there certainly has not been a single proposal put on the table during this debate that would come close to meeting a catholic understanding of the term “universal.” However, I’ve seen no evidence of anyone in the American hierarchy pointing out that disconnect, with the exception of the particular incongruity confronted in the abortion problem.

To a Catholic, it is a breathtakingly cruel mockery to invoke the character of universality on a healthcare plan that not only excludes a subset of the human race from the scope of said care, but positively persecutes them to a violent death at the hands of those they love the most. Yet, to the progressives behind the current program, abortion is part and parcel of the initiating agenda. It is quite beyond me how the bishops think they can lie down with the whore of misanthropic progressivism, in a foolish attempt to sire a bastard offspring that will manage to obsolete charity through benevolent state power, yet avoid the stink that naturally arises (the public funding of abortion) when they do. The bishops, I trust, will continue to refuse to support any program that is remotely pro-abortion – I would not suggest otherwise – but until the architecture of reform is rooted in a philosophical and political view of the world that is not wedded to the legalized murder of innocents, it strikes me as myopic to think that there could be room for a legitimate cooperation, devoid of complicity in evil. I don’t get their willingness to be strung along.

Nonetheless, other problems remain at the gate. For example, it would be politically impossible to include health care coverage for illegal aliens in our policy implementation, but Catholic social doctrine in no way distinguishes among persons on the basis of citizenry. The Church’s legitimate voice in the argument must speak to the implications of the dignity each human person possesses as a creature formed in the imago dei. Not only does such a perspective transcend the status of citizenry, it by definition also transcends national boundaries altogether.

The truth of the matter is that if the issue is to be framed as one of universal social justice from a Catholic perspective, every right to healthcare ascribed to a “poor” citizen of Anytown, USA, must also be ascribed to non-citizens within our borders, as well as “the least among us” in the far-flung corners of the earth. I’m not proposing this as an ad absurdum argument against healthcare reform. To the contrary, I believe it is in fact entirely true that local illegals and the remote destitute have the same claims as the rest of us to anything that can be construed as a human right, including healthcare. Political rights can be circumscribed by politics, but not human rights.

Nor am I trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good – suggesting that the Church cannot or should not support a plan that partially solves a problem without solving the whole thing. Provided that a plan does actually show promise of making progress toward a legitimate goal (in my opinion, a dubious assertion in this case), it would certainly be appropriate to propose its provisional value. But invoking the symbolism of absolute terms like “universal” upon what is at best contingent is misleading, a situation particularly deleterious when it involves spiritual leaders entrusted with the task of distinguishing the contingent from the absolute. It not only lulls the gullible into a false sense of sanctity, but as in this case of Obamacare, it obfuscates the absurdity inherent in the project of reducing human brotherhood to a political program.

Of course, if the American people had to consider the possibility of tax-payer funding of a system of healthcare (whatever that means) that would serve the whole word, it would be (rightly) laughed down as a cruel hoax that was utterly impossible to fund, staff, administer, or police. But even if we proscribe the vast majority of the world’s needy, and limit participation to Americans, these practical absurdities, so readily evident when we consider the prospect of a genuinely universal scope, are hardly resolved, and common folk know that – as is evident from the steadily growing disapproval of Obama’s project among the American citizenry.

Nevertheless, supposing we get beyond the Catholic bishops’ amalgamation of the Church’s social doctrine regarding the universal dignity of man onto what is (of necessity) a much less ambitious undertaking – that of the forcible redistribution of particular resources among a recognizable elite (e.g. U. S. citizens and documented aliens) – we’re still faced with the hard reality that the finite inputs available to any such system will be far exceeded by the output demands that are implied in the expectations of pro-“reform” arguments calling for the expansion of “coverage” to some many thousands of people who are presently not covered.

Not only does this program threaten to bankrupt the country by redirecting huge sums of money from other needs and uses into the already financially bloated healthcare market, it is counting on the availability of services that often do not exist, both of which influences will only serve to increase the cost of healthcare, defeating the very purpose that the program allegedly seeks to serve. This is pretty basic arithmetic. We do not presently have a meaningful surplus of “health care,” and it will not be possible, within a rational universe, to provide additional goods and services without either increasing their supply, or reducing their availability in some other quarter.

This is precisely the prospect being faced by the elderly dependent upon Medicare, which is expected to lose half a trillion dollars in funding in order to make subsidy dollars available elsewhere. This funding shift can only exacerbate the problems providers like the Mayo Clinic already face with Medicare, and will surely accelerate the current movement by these providers out of the Medicare system. This is a pending elderly healthcare disaster being facilitated by the Democrats, even while the President himself is singing the praises of the very providers finding themselves forced to get out from under the abysmal government system. Incredible.

A knave, at this point, might be tempted to accuse me of thinking that those presently going untreated “don’t deserve” treatment, or some such hogwash, but that is not the case at all. I am merely pointing out what should be an obvious fact: that health care, like all goods and services, operates in a complex economy in which price and availability are strongly influenced by the levers of supply and demand. This influence is not a capitalist invention imposed upon hapless society by mean-spirited businessmen; it is an explanation of how economies really work. You can’t reduce costs by imposing a tax structure that reduces supply, increases demand, and depresses cash flow in the general private sector. And price-controlling healthcare services would ultimately have the same effect on healthcare as rent controls invariably have on housing: it’s a disaster for the poor, and for society on the whole.

I have yet to hear a proponent of progressivist “solutions” admit that this economic reality might possibly pose a difficulty to the healthcare socialization project. In their determination to believe the rightness of their cause, they seem to have convinced themselves that there is no real cost to any of this, that the problem of inequitable distribution is simply one of “unfairness” in which scarcity plays no role, and that they can even achieve better than market-optimal results while actively sabotaging market incentives, such as lowering the payments made to doctors under Medicare. Sheer delusion.

I live in a populous area, just outside of Boston, which is also one of the world’s premier hotspots for health care technology. I suspect the supply-to-demand ratio for health care around here is about as high as it is anywhere, and it’s already not easy getting timely appointments, at least if you are not already a patient. Knowing what we know about the notoriously long waiting periods afflicting patients in Canada and other countries that have socialized their systems, how can we think we are seriously addressing any kind of lack-of-healthcare problem when we’re not attempting to find a way to increase the availability of healthcare itself? Trying to frame the healthcare access problem as one simply of inability-to-pay on the part of a victim class is both wrong-headed and counter-productive – unless your goal has less to do with caring for people than it does with establishing state control of healthcare. Clever slogans might be politically expedient, but they tend to be economic time-bombs.

The Democratic proposals put forth by each Congressional house would significantly raise healthcare costs across the board, fail to provide healthcare consumers with any needed new options outside of government controlled exchanges, destroy market incentives for both third-parties and healthcare providers, discourage providers from serving the elderly and other less affluent segments of society, discourage entry into the healthcare field at both institutional and personal levels, encourage artificial demand for unnecessary services by frontloading costs into taxes and premiums, create the typical government feeding trough and corruption that doling out tax dollars invariably creates, facilitate the continuation of enormous wastes of time, money, and resources as a consequence of medical malpractice law abuse, and, of course, exclude the most vulnerable members of the human race from even the most fundamental of protections. To call these plans “universal” in any sense at all – even provisionally – is an utter farce.

So who benefits? Beyond the advocates for unlimited state control of human society, I don’t see how anyone benefits. Sure, there will be rent seekers of various stripes who line their pockets – it’s impossible to spend $2.5 Trillion without making somebody rich – but the net result to the healthcare system- and the people it serves, will be a certain loss.

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Politics & Economics

Idealism Unencumbered by Reality: Obamacare, pt.1

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

obamagig George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” said: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” There is no more apt description of the political discourse that has defined the “healthcare” issue in this country over the past year. Now that we’ve seen what the Democratic leadership has proposed for legislation, would it be out of line to suggest that someone might owe Joe Wilson an apology?

Of course, it was almost impossible to know much of substance of what was being proposed until the 2,000+ page monstrosities were actually submitted as bills – documents our elected representatives wouldn’t even have read before voting on. For months, the public “debate” consisted of little more than partisan posturing from both major parties – save for some genuine disagreements over public funding of abortion, and the so-called “public option” insurance plan. Despite the constant “healthcare” rhetoric, the real target of political muscle-flexing is the medical insurance industry. Admittedly, questions around requirements for treatment rationing did arise while the public option was still on the table, so perhaps actual healthcare questions may come back into play at some point.

It is impossible to draft coherent policy without a sound understanding of the issues at stake, and it is impossible to understand the issues at stake without coherent definitions of the terms of the debate. The thing that bothers me most deeply about this obvious boondoggle is the almost total lack of interest – among politicians, journalists, or the general public – in making sure the issues are understood before taking a position or making a decision. As usual, we are, collectively, satisfied by an idealism unencumbered by facts, or by any kind of reasoning from ideas to consequences. I fear an economic train wreck coming, masquerading as yet more self-righteous do-goodism, and arrogating ever more power over people’s lives to the state. This is not reform, it’s simply the entrenchment of Big Brother.

The ideal at issue can be summed up as the universal right to healthcare. That sounds great, but what does it mean? In order to get from ideal to sound policy, all three terms (universal, right, and healthcare) need to be understood – not only insofar as their general implications through historical usage would suggest, but also precisely how they are being circumscribed by the current context. We are far from any useful common understanding of any of this. In discussion, this ideal is sometimes modified to propose that everyone has a right to adequate healthcare. The “adequate” modifier is a step in the right direction, recognizing at least that there is not a lately discovered unlimited right to whatever we call healthcare, but at the same time, it really just adds a fourth term to the question requiring resolution. If we don’t know what adequate healthcare is, how can we craft policy to achieve it?

The central term of the debate, healthcare, is so vague and ill-defined that it can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean at any given time, and it invariably does – and you can be sure that trend will continue. Not one of the main actors in this debacle would dare to publicly define exactly what constitutes “healthcare;” they’ll simply proclaim loudly that it must be reformed! It must therefore be noted that the central idea of President Obama’s primary domestic priority is a weasel word which nobody actually understands, or can articulate coherently! This is a textbook example of how a commitment to a vague concept can be abused for unrestricted leverage in policy determination. The point, after all, is not actually healthcare (whatever that means), but “shaping the future of America.”

I am reminded of a saying that I must confess I once accepted as axiomatic (as does virtually everyone on the progressive left): that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. No doubt the poor, like everyone else, sometimes do get poorer, and there are indeed scenarios where the above dynamic would hold true (e.g. with land grabs by the wealthy, or other usurpations of finite resources). But the saying is usually invoked as a denunciation of wealth growth in a capitalist context, where it makes absolutely no sense. As American wealth has grown, all but a tiny fraction of the populace has seen their standard of living rise to levels simply unimaginable to the vast majority of those whom history has called the poor. It turns out that a rising tide does indeed lift all boats, whether the progressives like it or not. The problem is that all boats don’t rise equally, and envy perceives this lack of uniformity in progress as an injustice, despite the fact that the process is actually working for everybody. Thus, it is an envy-occasioned blindness that gives rise to the mischaracterization of universal but uneven improvement as being a case of “the poor get poorer.”

Likewise, the actual problems in our healthcare system, and/or our healthcare delivery system, hardly seem to me to be of crisis proportion (after all, our healthcare system, by and large, is excellent, and the envy of the rest of the world). I agree that is prudent to be concerned about the rate of increase in healthcare costs proportional to the rest of the economy, but a large part of that cost increase is traceable to the technical revolution in the medical field, which is making more and more treatments available to people, yet which do not – and cannot – come free. Twenty or thirty years ago, we spent much less on medical costs, but we got much less in return. I don’t see anyone trying to turn back the clock on medical technology.

Because of the prevalence of third-party payers, whose role ends up encouraging the over-use of medical resources for non-critical and even frivolous problems, and who in turn have to bundle increased usage costs from both non-critical over-use and constantly emerging technological advances into their own pricing structure, consumers encounter premium increases that may not reflect their own usage of the healthcare system, eventually reaching levels that are economically disruptive, and even pricing them out of the market. We can talk about subsidizing these costs, but unless the causal issues are addressed, the costs are merely being shifted from one pocket to another.

The presence of these third-party payers has also distorted the pricing models of the healthcare providers themselves, inflating the pricing of direct payment markets to sometimes ridiculous levels, effectively eliminating the option of patients paying directly for as-needed a la carte care from providers, as had been the almost universal practice until very recently. This is part of what frosts so many young people who would prefer to stay out of the health insurance market (and who are likely to be forced now to take on these spiraling prices of the third-parties, both directly through premiums, and indirectly through taxation), that the costs for services for those without insurance plans are far and away higher than the insured indirectly pay through their third-party payer. Those who are uninsured not by choice are in an even worse situation. Simply requiring open accounting of provider pricing could go a long way in empowering cash customers (i.e. patients) in search of a fair deal.

The fact that the Democrats tried so hard to include a “public option” in the reform package demonstrates clearly that they do not understand the problems inherent in third-party payer systems, fail to see how sound risk management on the part of payers can limit those problems, and somehow still fail to grasp how much more distorted (not to mention corrupt) the market would be with an increased role for public agencies. It’s not that problems don’t exist in the delivery system; it’s that the Democrats seem bound and determined to make them worse in the name of making them better.

If the basic practical problem is that “healthcare” has become too expensive, there is absolutely nothing in the structure of the proposed reforms that will ameliorate that – in fact, all the guilty parties involved in this know full well that costs will increase. The Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has suggested that, with the Reid bill in place, healthcare spending, as a percentage of GDP, will increase from 17% to 21% over the next decade. Nice reform. I also have to assume that this estimate is not assuming overall economic damage, due to the irresponsible tax increases associated with this plan, shrinking the projected GDP, which would almost surely raise the percentage of that GDP spent on government regulated healthcare to an even higher percentage.

If, as it appears, the primary objective is to make “coverage” available to more people, the obvious first step should be to repeal the anti-competitive 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act, and the second step should be to set up supports for policy portability. What we get instead are Constitutionally dubious proposals to wreak havoc on the medical insurance industry, which appear so poorly thought out that it makes me wonder if this plan is really intended as a time bomb to get a nationalized program in place through the back door of private sector collapse. OK, that’s paranoid. Still…

And, of course, the one surefire way to realize immediate, significant healthcare cost reductions for everybody, tort reform, is, as always, nowhere on the Democrat’s radar as far as I know, despite the fact that, again, everyone involved knows what a real difference this would make. What a disgrace.

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Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch 9 Released: Initial Impressions

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

WORDsearch 9 was released Monday, roughly two years after the release of version 8. This is the third release of WORDsearch developed on the Bible Explorer platform for CROSS eBooks. Long-time WORDsearch users who have been waiting for a return of the search results management genius of the old Ref List will not find what they’re looking for, but some significant improvements have been made to version 8 nonetheless.

The biggest improvement, by far, was a complete reworking of the window syncing mechanism. In the two previous iterations of WS, as in Bible Explorer, each window (for books organized on a book-chapter-verse structure, such as Bibles, commentaries, outlines, etc) had a sync button, which could be turned on or off by the user – a general preference setting would determine which state the window originally opened in. Every book which was synced would cause all other synced books to follow along with it as it changed context.

In WS9, there are now four distinct sync groups to which any sync-capable window can be sg01 assigned, meaning that certain windows can be synced to each other, while other windows can be synced together in a different context. This multi sync-group functionality would be familiar to users of Logos. However, WORDsearch also introduced an optional driver/slave mode, similar to how Pradis managed its sync groups – but WS9 allows the user to manage the driver status directly from each window, instead of launching a dialog box. With a driver window defined in a sync group, only the driver window will cause the other windows synced to it to change context – the slave windows can be moved around in without affecting any other windows, and will then re-sync to the driver window when the driver window changes context.

Also new is the ability to designate a Bible window as an xref target window (again, familiar to Logos users). This is a major improvement over the unpredictability of WS8 when clicking links, and is made even more useful when the target window is joined to a sync group.

Another long-overdue improvement in WORDsearch is support for a NOT operator in search strings, which is entered as ANDNOT.

sdiag01 Searching, in general, has become a bit friendlier, because of several subtle changes to the Search dialog interface that make it easier to find and select books to search. The Search box finally supports the ability to type <> delimiters, which allows the user to use one or more Strong’s numbers in the main search string (as opposed to using the special "Strong’s #" search dialog, which will only accept a single number).

Also new are options to automatically include plurals of English nouns, and various forms of English verbs. A new Spelling Helper applet on the search dialog box can help eliminate bogus searches due to spelling errors, as well as generating lists of available words in the selected resources. These extra helps are not quite as robust as the similar features in QuickVerse, but they should prove to be useful.

WS9 introduces the concept of the Carousel, which allows the user to define a set of frequently-used books of particular types (Bibles, commentaries, and dictionaries, roughly speaking), which will always be available to "flip" to from a similar window type, with a single mouse-click or keystroke. As you flip from favorite to favorite using the Carousel, the contents of the books will attempt to sync to the preceding favorite, though it’s hard to do that consistently with dictionary-type books.

In prior versions of the WS Verse List, the entire text area was "hot" for triggering sync events, and any time you clicked on a verse or passage in a Verse List, every window with syncing turned on would move to the verse you’d selected in the VL. In WS9, only the reference itself is "hot" for syncing; you can select the text of a verse without triggering a window sync. Furthermore, VLs now have Sync buttons, meaning syncing can be turned off altogether, or a specific sync group can be chosen. Clicking a "hot" area (ref) in a VL that is un-synced will drive a "target Bible" window to display the verse in the context of the translation defined by the VL ref link, making it easy to find the range of the passage you may want to expand your verse result into.

The Cross Reference Explorer (XRE) has been markedly improved from it’s initial iteration in WS8. There is now a Cancel button to kill unintended searches. Multiple hits for a reference within a single page/section are now collapsed into a single entry in the search results, with a (#) indicating how many hits are available on the page. The tree control for results has also been improved to require less mouse-clicking to get to your results.

XRE search hits in books (not user docs, unfortunately) are now highlighted in the content pane WS9 Cross Reference Explorer(making the tool MUCH more useful), and the content pane now automatically scrolls so that the first hit is visible – usually.

Bible Notes are also now searchable by the XRE – functionality that was always selectable in WS8, but never worked. This is a great way to create your own inverse cross-reference resource.

One of the key capabilities lost in the transition from WS7 to WS8 two years ago was the ability to create links in documents to sections of books. This capability has returned in WS9, and it is extremely simple to do – unlike the multi-step process involving bookmarks in WS7. WS9 also provides a simple interface for creating links to Biblical passages within documents and Bible Notes using plain text for the link (as opposed to Biblical references, which continue to automatically generate links to Biblical passages).

Fans of Inductive Bible Study – among others – will appreciate the new ability to assign labels to any or all of the dozen highlighting colors available, though I believe highlighting would be far more useful for Bible study if it were supported within Verse Lists. Another nice touch in WS9 is that highlighting can be applied now as either traditional highlighting, or as colored underlining.

The Instant Verse Study tool can now be populated using a Collection, and the Copy button now makes it very clear that content is only being copied to the clipboard, requiring the user to paste it wherever he wants to use it. Collections are much easier to use in this version, and a Manage Collections window has been provided. A Library Manager tool allows the user to hide unwanted books, and the SmartLink scripture popups will no longer position themselves so low on screen they cut off text.

On the downside – and avoiding complaining about what the program doesn’t do – several significant problems either persist, or were introduced with this release.

[Update: the problem described in this paragraph has been fixed in a maintenance release.] Searching MyDocuments for text – one of the potential deal-makers that could set this program in a class by itself among its competitors in this respect – has gone from blowing up whenever it encounters a malformed HTML file, to blowing up whenever it encounters a PDF file that is not an HTML file. Needless to say, no PDF file is an HTML file, and if you’re like most people these days, and you have PDF files (which WS has supported since WS8 as library resources), then document searching is utterly broken for you. The original problem goes back at least to WS7 – probably to the earliest versions of Bible Explorer – and the function is rendered worse than useless at this point. Search will not even return results from CROSS books if there is a PDF file in the search path.

[Update: the problem described in this paragraph has been fixed in a maintenance release.] Similarly to the initial release of WS8, support for Personal Notes for non-Bible books has vanished from this release. When WS8 was released, even the icon for Notes was gone from the windows, but it is still there in WS9 – it just doesn’t do anything. It remains to be seen whether they will make a comeback in WS9, like they did in WS8, but there was a hue and cry two years ago when they disappeared, and I can’t imagine the user response will be any different this time around.

I’m finding changes to the Search Results display a bit hard to adapt to (I’ve been using WS9 in beta sr901 for several months). There’s more of a tree structure now, and there is a pronounced focus on how results are distributed among the books of the Bible. That’s all terrific in theory, but there is no way to segregate results from multiple translations – they are treated independently within the results for each book of the Bible, but I sorely miss being able to scroll through the full results of each queried translation independently. I also miss the hit numbering, which has disappeared from the left-hand column. I understand what they were trying to do, and I’d like to see them refine it, but this screen looks more like a rough draft than a finished piece of work.

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Politics & Economics

Eat the Rich?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

So, a majority of people in the country, at least according to this poll, want somebody else to pay for the looming health care program – you know, like those rich people,  who are most likely rich because they’re cheats, anyway. Why am I not surprised? Isn’t this just the perfect embodiment – and inevitable end-result – of modernism’s rejection of personal responsibility in favor of paternalistic political super-structures? I suppose I exaggerate though; the actual end-results of these left wing muggings of the rich have not infrequently climaxed with their murder, not their robbery – but we’re more moral than that in this country, right?

The welfare state may start out with the intention of protecting the weak from their inability to compete successfully, but without a solid and explicit grounding in virtue, it ends up inculcating widespread irresponsibility, and finding itself having to resort to thievery to survive. How is it that we haven’t learned this yet? To those who do not look too deeply at the means being employed, confiscatory tax policies might give the appearance of achieving social justice, but they are driven by a politics of envy, systematically breaking down the bonds of communal charity, through both the embittering of the few through the violation of their property rights, and even more so in the coarsening of the many, whose capacity for gratefulness, goodwill, and even civic responsibility, is undermined by an ethic of entitlement and usurpation. If the means you employ are criminal (like, stealing), your results will not be just, regardless of what you choose to call them.

Given the opportunity, and enough easy living to break down the backbone of self-discipline, the reality is that way too many people will not only sign up for a free lunch, but will order the filet if it’s on the menu. The problem is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and those who advertise it as such are either knaves or fools. Of course, once they’ve targeted whom they will coerce the payment from, there’s no longer a lot of question as to which they are.

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Learning

Modern Scholar series (part IV)

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Being “between courses” has afforded me the opportunity to dip back into Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series of lectures on audio CD. I started listening to these a couple years ago, finding the entries by Thomas Madden to be especially worthwhile listening. Aside from Madden’s, I have to admit that I’ve found the rest of the series hit or miss, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Professor Fred E. Baumann for his entry, Visions of Utopia: Philosophy and the Perfect Society.

This might come across as a backhanded compliment, but I was impressed by the seriousness with which Baumann treated religion in this set of lectures. Not that the lectures focused on religion – religion played a small role – but he understands the importance of religion in the fabric of both intellectual and common history, and did not just simply dismiss it as irrelevant, or regard it derisively, as most modern intellectuals seem to. Not only was that refreshing, but it added a layer of realism and intellectual heft to the discussion that seems sorely lacking so often.

The lectures cover Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Jacobin implementation of Rousseau’s thought, Marx’s programmatic update of Rousseau, and Skinner’s Walden Two, concluding with some reflections on the continuing relevance of utopian thought, particularly in the bizarre but socially intoxicating supra-eugenicism of the movement at the edge of “progressivism” that calls itself transhumanism.

Baumann is not a strictly conventional thinker on these matters, and I take issue with some of his opinions – especially in the way he reads Rousseau, which seems to me to unjustifiably take him off the hook for the monster he created – but I highly recommend this set of lectures as a thoughtful and engaging exposition on what only a fool would still consider a fringe aspect of political science.

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Politics & Economics

“Tear Down this Wall!”

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Very interesting short piece linked here from the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section yesterday by Ronald Reagan’s former chief speech writer, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what a dreadful threat Soviet communism posed to human freedom on many levels – not to mention world peace – and how remarkable it was that the whole odious scheme came crashing down with such a whimper.

The power of words, the power of conviction, the power of resoluteness, the power of truth… credit should be given where it is due, and along with Pope John Paul the Great, it is hard to think of anyone more responsible for the peaceful outcome of that tense conflict than the flinty Reagan. Truth be told, I’m ashamed of  how I thought of him at the time, in my youthful naivety.

Anthony R. Dolan: The Power of Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech – WSJ.com

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Misc

A Quiet Note of Thanks

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

One of those days when the realization slaps me that we just don’t get do-overs in life…

I heard during the prayers of the faithful this morning that Tony Melchiorri had died, and was buried last week. Tony was a Natick cop for many years, and a man I came to know, after a certain fashion, during my teenage years in town. He was always a good guy.

I think it’s fair to say that Tony spent a good deal of his life trying to protect the local kids from their own stupidity – with admittedly mixed results. But thanks for trying, Tony. Rest in peace.

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Media & Culture

Jonathan Sperry and the Messaging of Faith

Posted on by John W Gillis / 4 Comments

sperry I took the family to see The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry last weekend. This is an independent “family” movie by Christian director Rich Christiano, with an explicitly Christian message and worldview. The movie had been vigorously promoted locally by some good friends of mine, who were obviously excited to see something in the theater that was not only not antithetical to Christianity, but which explicitly promotes Christian faith.

I understand the urge to try to gain a foothold for decency in all kinds of public arenas, but I had a hard time getting excited about the potential for this movie, in part because of my previous experience with Christian movies and other forms of Christian popular art, in part because of the doubt-confirming sappiness I detected in the movie trailers I saw, and in part because I think any attempt to sprinkle the local movie house with holy water is likely to be about as effective as baptizing a brothel these days, as these venues have truly become houses of sin, peddling fare that seems more and more debased each year, promoting grotesque visions of both humanity and God, blatantly contemptuous of virtues and virtuousness – especially marriage – and generally just being corrosive of character in every conceivable manner. It’s hard to see how spitting into that foul wind can truly be to our advantage.

Nonetheless, I packed up the family for the field trip, hoping that at least my youngest would like the movie (she did). The Christian sub-texts were easily identifiable: the need for knowledge of Christ in order to know eternal salvation; the power of personal forgiveness – including praying for others – to effect spiritual transformation in others; the power of personal evangelization to effect conversion in others; and the centrality of the Bible as the means of properly knowing God. This seemed like pretty standard evangelical fare – not without theological weaknesses, but certainly a worthy and important message to share with the world. But it is one thing to have a message worth proclaiming; it is another to proclaim that message worthily.

Movie-going is no intellectual exercise. Movies need to make their point through effective dramatization that leads viewers to understand the message the movie intends to convey. I think it’s fair to say that, as drama, this movie fails to compel, and so can hardly be considered an effective vehicle for the message it seeks to share, regardless of how worthy the message is. The plotline is feeble, corny, pat, predictable, and far from believable in the simplistic way its events conveniently converge, with nary a trace of struggle arising from either temptation or circumstance. In sum, it completely lacks what is these days called authenticity. The characters are paper thin, and weakly acted. The only sympathetic character in the movie, in my view, is the young friend who doesn’t know how to shut his mouth. Otherwise, this is a wooden story about cardboard characters. More proof, perhaps, that the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.

This kind of naively idyllic portrayal of the Christian experience could easily lead to disillusionment among the young or newly converted, as people don’t very often turn their lives around on a dime when you start praying for them. Nor does one’s own conversion experience very often reflect an unambiguous conquest of personal sin; rather, periodic backsliding, of a greater or lesser degree, is an all-too-common aspect of the spiritual journey. I appreciate that the story was not attempting to convey such a journey per se, being rather narrowly focused over a short time period, yet even great moments of repentance are normally marked by a gradual comprehension of the of the depth and scope of one’s transgressions, as well as a developing apprehension of the redemptive grace at work. Any such complexity was conspicuously absent from this story, and when the bully is wholly cured of his bullying ways after an emotional “calling out” to a hitherto unknown God, you sense the film has conjured up the fantastic conceit of cheap grace.

The only even remote resemblance to Christian community in the film were the Bible Studies the Jonathan Sperry character led the boys in at his house – which frankly came off more as Sunday School games with trite moral lessons than anything resembling immersion in the Word of God. Rather, everyone went off on their own to read their Bibles. Is that kind of mutual isolation for “devotions” supposed to somehow reflect the ecclesial unity for which Christ prayed? Yet the reading of the Bible was presented as something at lest pretty close to the pinnacle of Christian life. But reading the Bible – especially alone – not infrequently produces heresy as well as holiness, and we’re talking here about a group of thoroughly wet-behind-the-ears pre-teenage boys, with no apparent Christian community to provide them wisdom, temperance, and mature direction. Whatever role “church” played in the film’s home-town community, it was unrelated to the thematically crucial issues at the center of the movie, and peripheral to the lives of those characters who were meant to reflect Christianity. And that is a thoroughly impoverished view of Christianity.

Never mind community, these young boys didn’t even have families to speak of – they either didn’t exist, or they served as minor props. The plot’s most important parental character was the deceased father of the bully! In what was perhaps the most bizarre example of the disconnectedness of the film’s Jesus movement from the realities of human community, the wife of that man, whom were are told had thoroughly despised and rejected her deceased (ex-?) husband’s turn to Christianity, never even makes an appearance in the story as her son adopts of the same faith under the tutelage of the elderly Mr. Sperry. Are we to suppose that she would not have had some kind of reaction, which might somehow have complicated the story – at least for the boy? This is just clueless story writing.

It might be objected that I am criticizing the movie for not being what it did not set out to be. Fair enough. But if the point of the movie was to convincingly show how one person’s faith can influence others for the good, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to insist that the faith in question – and its alleged effects – be presented at a level of authentic personal engagement which exceeds that of a typical Care Bears episode, which is pretty close to where this film engages its audience. With better character development, it could have been a Hallmark Special with a Jesus message – not that I’d ever expect to find a Jesus message in a Hallmark Special, seeing how offensive such blatant religiosity is to the gatekeepers of cultural standards. But as a piece of evangelism, I have to say that I think the film fails for lack of believability and, hence, credibility.

molokai Ironically, the day after I viewed the movie, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Damien of Molokai, about whom a feature film had been made roughly ten years ago. The film, Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, portrays the life of Damien as he ministers to leprous outcasts exiled to to an island colony in 19th century Hawaii, becoming one of them, and eventually dying of their shared affliction. Rich Christiano could learn much about authentic presentation of the Christian faith, and its power to transform communities through the faithfulness of individuals, by watching this moving, and truly evangelistic, film.

Given the blank slate of pure fiction, Christiano created a bunch of cardboard characters engaged in a series of events that together make Christianity look unbelievable and childish, if not downright cartoonish. Director Paul Cox, by contrast – not even a Christian filmmaker, mind you – working with the actual life events and legacy of a real saint, painted a picture of Christian love that continues to inspire, and that reveals many of the finer aspects of a practical Christian faith. One hero is today known as the patron saint of HIV/AIDS sufferers, and their caretakers. The other will soon pass the way of a plastic Happy Meal toy. If evangelization is worthwhile, we need more of the former, and less of the latter; more message, less messaging.

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