It is a gross simplification, but I’ll say it. The difference between liberalism and conservatism (as we use the terms in the US) is that liberals are fundamentally repulsed by some basic realities, while conservatives accept them. These basic realities include [1] economic inequality, [2] the human drive to be fruitful and multiply, [3] the human tendency to use the earth for our purposes, [4] the existence of economic growth, [5] the fact that some religions and cultures are morally superior to others in measurable ways, [6] the fact that there are economic laws that can only be scorned at a tremendous cost, and [7] the fact that the state always and everywhere messes up when it tries to positively direct society rather than serving as an avenger of evil. On each of these issues, liberals are ashamed and in denial, and on each of these issues conservatives embrace the reality enthusiastically.

John Fensel, naturally, took umbrage to each of my claims. And so, in this post, I will outline each of my seven claims, give a brief summary of John’s objections, and then, if necessary, respond.

Claim 1. Liberals Are in Denial About the Nature of Economic Inequality.

Conservatives realize that economic inequality is both necessary and good, with some exceptions. Liberals believe that economic inequality is a blight and an unnecessary product of an under-controlled economy, with some exceptions. A conservative knows that the best that government can do for economic inequality is to provide the basic framework of laws that make the world as fair a playing field as it can be, and to avoid contributing to unfair inequality. Other than that, economic inequality functions as an incentive to work, thrift, and planning for the future. Without it, incentives disappear and stagnation sets in. John accuses me of “subtly implying” that economic equality is the goal of liberalism. Instead, John argues, liberals simply want less inequality. John is right is all he is saying is that the majority of liberals are not forthrightly Marxist. But in his admission that liberals want less inequality, he essentially concedes my point. Liberals, without any sensible definition of how much inequality would be right, simply and universally declare that however much there is now, there ought to be less. This is, for all practical purposes, a blind drive to reduce inequality toward parity with reckless disregard for the important social functions that inequality serves. After mountains and mountains of research have proven that inequality is a constant and that people respond to incentives, liberals continue to a Quixotic war both on inequality and on the incentives it produces. This is the definition of revulsion for reality.

The good news is that because liberal societies rush head long toward the egalitarian welfare state and stagnation, conservative societies will rule the future because of the more robust incentives for creation of wealth that they produce.

Claim 2. Liberals are in denial about the human drive to be fruitful and multiply.

Human beings have a strong drive to reproduce. Fast reproduction fuels strong economic growth, as we’ve seen spectacularly over the past century, as the planet has been populated by more people than ever, living at higher standards of living than ever before. Liberals view the human desire to reproduce as somehow poisonous — this is, among other reasons, why they support population control, push birth control, support abortion, urge people to have less children, and generally freak out about an undefined phantom menace called “overpopulation” which they absurdly claim is impoverishing the world. This is denial and repulsion at the basics of human existence.

Thankfully, liberals seem to be taking their own advice and not reproducing. Conservatives reproduce at a much higher rate. And so those who fear population growth are committing collective ideological suicide by definition. Good-bye.

Claim 3. Liberals Are in Denial About Human Use of the Earth’s Resources

Humans exploit resources. This makes our lives better, allows us to live more efficiently, and has consistently lead to cleaner environments the more capitalistic a country is. John objects with all sorts of general talk about the need to be good stewards of nature. Whatever — I’ll grant that liberals certainly know how to talk in a way that makes them look like they don’t have a seething hatred of man’s desire to dominate and use nature. But here’s a simple test — find any major use of earth’s resources that liberals aren’t protesting. Have you thought of any? I thought not.

End result: countries which follow liberal ideas will continually be cutting back their use of every imaginable resource, strangling their economies with red tape. Conservative countries, on the other hand, will continue to win. Incidentally, this is true even if liberals are actually right on some issues. Imagine a world, for example, in which the hype over global warming were not a bunch of alarmist nonsense. In such a world, the liberal countries would start cutting back energy use drastically, crippling their economies. The conservative countries would take advantage of the cheaper energy prices caused by the liberal countries leaving the market, and would grow all the faster. We win. They lose.

Claim 4. Liberals are in Denial About Economic Growth

This is almost a repetition of previous points. Conservatives like economic growth. They want as much of it as fast as they can. Liberals, on the other hand, are constantly working to destroy the inequality that stimulates economic growth, the economic freedoms that are its necessary foundation, the access to resources that is its necessary condition, and the international trade that stimulates it. Liberals will constantly and everywhere sabotage their own nations’ abilities for economic growth. Conservatives won’t. We win. They lose.

(John’s assertions about both liberals and conservatives equally wanting economic growth and just disagreeing on how to get there is barely worth refuting. His assertion that FDR is a role model for managing economic growth is an especially bizarre claim, and his claim that Clinton’s centrist policy of getting pushed around by Republicans is a model for liberal economic growth is equally bizarre. For those who want to know more about FDR’s miraculous ability to do the seemingly impossible task of keeping the US in a fifteen-year depression, read Murray Rothbard’s definitive work, fittingly titled America’s Great Depression. For more on the easy-credit policies by which Clinton/Greenspan helped destroy the foundations of American prosperity while technically experiencing economic growth, see Rothbard’s work on central banking, The Mystery of Banking and Jesus Huerta De Soto’s beautiful Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles. All of which I have read and enjoyed, but none of which, I would wager, John Fensel has read.)

Claim 5. Liberals are in Denial About Moral Religious and Cultural Superiority

Bottom line: some religions and cultures are significantly and observably superior to other religions cultures in certain measurable ways. This is obvious to anyone who has not pickling the liver of their soul with the intoxicating liquors of cultural relativism that we invented in the west. John’s response to my claim is typical:

Unbased and untrue. All religions have the same basic flaw: they require faith, not evidence, to support their claims. “Moral superiority” is a meaningless claim, especially to someone who studies ethics.

Let me a tell you a story. Once upon a time, a British imperialist Christian missionary named William Carey noticed that Hindus, practicing what John assures us is most certainly not a morally inferior religion in any meaningless sense, had the (to his Christian tastes) unpleasant habit of drowning babies in a river as an offering to a vicious goddess and forcibly burning widows for purposes of improved reincarnation. Being a fan of meaningless claims, and probably never having drunk from the fair font of ethical studies in his whole bigoted life, William Carey decided to be a real jerk and impose his vision of cultural superiority on them by getting the imperialist British government to outlaw their sincerely held religious practices. Now, I will admit that I am a bit of a hick, a knee-jerk conservative with a tendency to cling bitterly to my guns and religion. I tend to think my religious tradition’s emphasis on defending the defenseless and taking care of widows is morally superior to the Hindu religion’s emphasis on drowning and burning these individuals to placate the powers of the spirit world. But perhaps John is right. Perhaps Carey and the Hindus both had a worldview with the same basic flaws: both the need for protection of widows and the mandate for their burning are matters which are based on faith, and not evidence. My bone-headed claim to moral superiority is meaningless to someone with his level of ethical education.

Regardless of whether I or John are ultimately right on this, the fact is that I and those like me are statistically likely to make lots more little imperialists who will go about forcing their visions of culturally superior human rights on widow-burners everywhere. John and his ilk are likely to produce fewer and fewer liberal philosophy grads to tell us why all cultures are morally equivalent. And then, after awhile, our numerous progeny will take away the tax-funded subsidies to their universities, and, if they annoy us enough, take away their right to vote. We win. They lose.

Claim 6. Liberals Are in Denial About the Dire Consequences of Ignoring Economic Law.

John Fensel says he’s “not sure what liberal view” I’m “taking a shot at” here. Where to start? How about with John’s own ludicrous suggestion that the only thing keeping us from utopia is the use of money. Hold that little piece of ill-informed speculation up next to another book John has surely never read, Ludwig Von Mises’ magnum opus Human Action, and you’ll see all you need to know about the contrast between right-wing deference to economic law and liberal scorn for it.

Claim 7. Liberals are in Denial About Government’s Tendency to Mess Up Whenever it Tries to Positively Direct Society

In my original post, I stated that when government abandons its role as “avenger of evil” and seeks to “positively direct society” it will inevitably destroy whatever it touches. John immediately misdirected the argument by asking me whether firefighters mess everything up. Clever, John. It is true that firefighters don’t fit in the “avenger” category, but if we’re honest with ourselves they’re also not an attempt to “positively direct society.” They are nothing more than a diversion. I have previously made it clear to John that I have no objection to government rushing life-saving aid to those in immediate danger (see here). So ignore the firefighters bit.

John then moves on to something more to the point, asking me how it is that food stamps make a mess of society. Whenever I hear someone asking rhetorical questions on the assumption that the various forms of welfare aid our state hands out as a reward for failure do not have a destructive impact on our country, I can only assume that the person asking such a question has never lived in the ghetto. I have, and I’ve seen lives wrecked by the disrespect for hard work and organization that comes with welfare aid.

I can only assume such a person has never lived in the slums of South America. I have, and I’ve seen the human wreckage socialism produced wherever it goes. I’ve seen both of my parents terrorized at gunpoint by South Americans living in the chaos and poverty that statism creates.

I can only assume such a person does not volunteer his time helping tutor poor children and tear out his hair in frustration at the difficulty of instilling the love of learning into a child whose parents have taught him to play dumb as a way to earn government “special needs” aid. I go to church among people who have given their lives to helping poor neighborhoods, and they all agree that the welfare state isn’t working.

I can only assume that a person who has asked such a question has never had the heart-rending experience of running a church in a broken part of Price Hill. I’ve known such a man and I can assure you that he has seen first hand and knows the insanity that Fensel’s dreams of entitlement lead to. Here’s his report from the inside of deep recesses of the welfare state.

John, people like you are exactly why I believe more strongly every day that liberalism is doomed by its complete disconnect from reality.

The reason that Hayek is popular is because he talks at great length in vague ways about how awful ill-defined concepts of “socialism” and “fascism” are. He extols what he vaguely calls “liberalism,” which is apparently like laissez-faire except that it’s, well, not laissez-faire at all. If you peel back the rhetoric and actually look at the specific policies Hayek calls for, you can see that he is advocating a progressively more and more interventionist welfare state. The fact that he calls this “liberalism” instead of “socialism” is partially a rhetorical trick.

Hayek is not a bitter pill to swallow. Any right-winger who wishes to wrap himself in the mantle of libertarianism, without any need to do the actual hard work of being consistent about it, can turn to Hayek for justification. Hayek, for all his free-market mystique, advocated extensive government interference in healthcare, insurance, guaranteed minimum income, city planning, and zoning laws. He thought tax rates were not all that important — what was important was not whether there are free markets in the sense of markets unfettered by government interference, but whether markets are free in some sort of highly subjective “quality” sense.

For more, see here, in which Hoppe explains the same problem of Hayek’s.

And so they all go out in big unorganized crowds, without any defined program or set of demands. They are simply hundreds of angry, defiant people determined to force the government to make things right. How will they know when the government has taken appropriate action? They’ve got no coherent theory of what’s wrong or how to fix it, so the only way government can appease them it to lash out at suitable targets of rage or commit financial suicide.

Occupy Wall Street is probably too small a movement to plunge our country into chaos. I think we’ve got a bit further down to go economically before anything like that happens. But no matter how small they are, they are a frightening picture of a souring mood: disorganized people, angry and frightened, taking to the streets and demanding that someone, somewhere, do something. It all sounds good, if perhaps a bit idealistic, until we think about what it would take to make them go home if the movement grew to much.

If and when a large enough and angry enough group of people demanding vague but drastic change are clogging our nation’s streets, the authorities will have two primary options. First, they can clamp down. This could easily spawn a counter-reaction of public outrage, at which points all bets are off. If the economy is bad and the public mood ugly, police overreaction could easily be all it takes for widespread rioting to occur.

Second, our government can appease them. The options for appeasement are few. Demands have been heard among the protesters for fully nationalized healthcare, a guaranteed minimum income even for the unemployed, free college for all, massive infrastructure spending, and so on. The problem with all these is that our government is not just low on cash, but approximately fifteen trillion dollars in the red. When interest rates finally rise, and they will, massive cuts in government spending will be necessary. Far from increasing spending, we will have massive austerity whether we like it or not.

Once conventional financial options are exhausted, peaceful appeasement can only occur through “social justice” measures of the kind that don’t directly cost money: government decrees. The sorts of things that fit in these categories more or less boil down to either mandated wage increases or price controls. If the government attempts targeted wage increases in specific sectors, those sectors gain at the expense of everyone else. Targeted wage increases can work just fine if you’ve got to appease a relatively focused interest group, say, orange-pickers or something like that. Little groups like this get special legislation written for them all the time. But the sort of protesting we’re seeing with Occupy is a sort of broad-based general complaint that will not be satisfied without across-the-board action, such as a steep hike in, say, the federal minimum wage. If that occurs, we’re in real deep trouble. First, the rising minimum wage will unemploy even more people. Second, it will cause rising prices, which along with the larger burden of a higher unemployed population, will wipe out all economic gains brought about by the measure. At that point, we run the risk of Brazil-style inflation, with massive public works to try to keep the unemployed calm, a constantly rising minimum wage trying to keep ahead of price increases, and ever-greater amounts of money flying off the governemnt’s printing presses in an attempt to pay for all this.

The available options I’ve listed so far are not exhaustive, but they are illustrative of a greater problem. Any attempt to make the problem go away by means of the sorts of policy changes the Occupiers favor nwill only make the problems worse, quite possibly leading to a vicious circle of increasing economic misery and increasing anger in a vicious circle that could tear our country apart.

The other option, a much financially cheaper option, is to take rapid and drastic action against the sorts of people that the protesters resent. You can use your imagination as to how this might go.

The problem is this: our country has massive systematic problems, democracy is showing itself to be fatally unstable but nobody is willing to do the hard things it would to keep representative democracy from tearing itself apart.

Meanwhile, we have a confused bunch of folks with pre-totalitarian atitudes, unsure of anything except for a rabid hatred of the three million Americans who form the top 1%. The best we can hope for is that the whole thing washes out. I don’t know where things go from here, but one thing I can tell you for sure: the appearance of the Occupy Wall Street people is an ominous sign. And the widespread expressions of sympathies with Occupy are an even worse sign.

. . . it may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—-as what you get by default when organization isn’t possible.

Maybe he’s right. It would be swell if we could arrange for everyone to get an optimum quantities of peaches and farmland and grapefruits and vacations and jobs and math lessons and peanut butter and button-down shirts and keys and bus rides and joysticks and chairs through one organized, top-down plan. Or, at least, that’s what the Soviets aspired to do. It certainly sounds good.

But we quickly find that if we even try to centrally control a single product like gasoline, let alone a sector like healthcare or even an entire economy, we run into terrible problems, because there’s no way that a central authority can figure out all the optimum quantities of stuff, and even if it could, there’s no way it can handle all the coordination required to make all that stuff and get it where it needs to be when it needs to be there. This is what is known in economics as the calculation problem.

And so, with occasional and partial exceptions, mankind has settled on using markets for such things. Because markets scatter the factors of production far and wide in a chaotic interplay that Marx called “anarchy of production,” there are some definite problems with a market system. And, when measured against the imagined paradise of the would-be central planner, the market is indeed a “degenerate caste,” “what you get by default when [centrally managed] organization isn’t possible.”

Socialists have their way by making us remember that a market is a “degenerate case” while making us forget the reason the impossibility of effective central controls. We are told that our current problems need to be solved by people who feel no need to demonstrate that their “solutions” won’t cause even worse problems. This is what Bastiat was talking about in his brilliant essay “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.” If we could get just one tenth of the population of the United States to get to know this concept, we would see victories far beyond the wildest dreams of tea partyers.

So far, we’ve been using the word ‘market’ in a narrow, specific sense. We’ve been using it to refer to the process by which people exchange things from one person to another, things calculating in terms of monetary value. In a broader sense, all of life is one giant market. Everything we do is a trade-off.

Marriage, for example, is a market activity. In marrying someone, we not only trade all other possible mates for them, but we also trade a great deal of time and effort. When we do something as simple and seemingly innocent as hitting the snooze button is a trade-off, a sale, if you will, of five or ten waking productivity for slumber. You may well be losing more than just the five or ten minutes, by the way. A recent study of over a million people indicated that people who sleep five to seven hours have lower mortality rates than people who sleep eight or more hours. Sleeping nine or ten is associated with very sharp spikes in mortality rates.

The writer of Proverbs would be thrilled to see his views on sleep vindicated against the insistence of modern culture on at least eight hours. Watchman Nee, in which of his books I cannot remember, recommended that Christians sleep more like six hours then eight. He expressed some hesitation over “bypassing the physicians” but did it anyhow. He may have saved the lives of some folks who read his advice and ignored the best scientific findings. [Evil anti-scientific religious conservative laughter.]

Where was I? Oh, yes, that’s right — everything is a market. If calculation is difficult for markets in the narrow sense, it’s impossible for markets in the wider, non-monetary sense.

If we apply the idea of a “degenerate case”, then, the fact that people are allowed to choose their own mates is a “degenerate case” which has only arisen due to the sad fact that governments haven’t come up with a satisfactory way of organizing the pairing off produce. Yet. [Ominous music.] A man suddenly deciding to go for a brisk walk is a “degenerate case” as well. He only has the freedom to do so because the apparatchiks of the Politburo haven’t yet figured out how regulate everyone’s exercise.

We see, then, the problem with the phrase “degenerate case.” It implies that the ultimate form of social organization is formal central control, and that market’s are only tolerated as stop-gap solutions in situations for which central control is currently impractical. Pushed far enough, we can extract from Graham’s statement a totalitarian ethic totally at odds with what Paul Graham usually stands for. It would be unfair of me to call Graham a totalitarian, because he’s not. But pushing words until they break does make for some interesting thought experiments. It can serve as a forewarning of what might happen if we don’t think carefully.

So far as I can tell, God has created the world that man lives in as a giant market, in the broader sense of the term. We are given choices, and our decisions, corporately and individually, have made us degenerate cases indeed. Is the market of life a degenerate case that occurred because organization was impossible with God? Heaven forbid. With God all things are possible. God could have, if he had chosen, decided to centrally organize all things. We could all live in harmony in a delightful orchard eating fruit all day.

But God decided that it was preferable for humankind to have choice, even at the cost of losing Eden. It is the central folly of the modern state that people view God-granted freedom as a “degenerate case.” It is also, unless I am horribly mistaken, the central error of Calvinism, which, in every intelligible presentation of it that I have ever heard, argues that the choices God gives are not really choices, or, at least, not at all “choices” in the normal sense of the word. To the Calvinist, Scripture does not say, “I set before you this day life and death” and “choose this day whom you will serve.” No, instead Scripture is made, “I set before you life or death, one or the other, but not both” and “I have chosen whom you will serve.”

I either do not understand Calvinism, or I understand that it is ridiculous. Given the thoughtfulness and intelligence of a number of Calvinist writers, I can’t rule out the former.

Perhaps, especially if you consider yourself a Calvinist, you might consider this entire post a massive misadventure caused by pushing the concept of “market” too far. Perhaps this is a misadventure. But I might at least plead this — people have been using the market as a metaphor for the arrangement between God and man for over two millennia.

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist to-day will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

– Churchill, June 4, 1945

Here’s a snapshot of how this works. The US finances everything with debt. Our military might generally seems to reinforce our invincibility, and people continue to pour their hard-earned money into our coffers. It becomes clearer and clearer that we cannot continue the present path, but everyone keeps the charade going, and agencies responsible for accurately estimating the future keep saying how wonderful the emporer’s clothes. Then one agency, Standard & Poor’s, downgrades our debt rating from AAA to AA+, which is the equivalent of them saying that the emperor is indeed decked out in the finest of clothings, but that perhaps his fine clothing is just getting a bit worn.

On hearing this, investors suddenly begin to freak out. The sleeping are rudely awakened, and begin to flee our stock market and buy up gold, driving prices to a record $1775.

It becomes clear that this game is not sustainable through mere economic games. People now have access to the hard figures which reveal the government for the unworthy borrower it is. American socialism is collapsing upon itself, unable to stand up to simple expressions of financial dissent. Socialism, as it always must, is losing the war of information. And so Michael Moore, a leftist who thinks a bit faster than most, suggested a course which, in one variant or another, is the only way our current moderate socialism can continue to last:

Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again

– Michael ‘Gestapo’ Moore, August 8, 2011

Surely you have noticed the increasing war on words. Some pastor plans to burn Qur’ans, and ironically, an officer in the US military is paraded about claiming that such a pastor will be responsible for the death of US soldiers. Oddly enough, everyone looks away from the tens of thousands of Muslims killed by US soldiers, and we are somehow talked into believing that Muslims are most of all a bunch of airheads more worried about some hick with some lighter fluid and a Qur’an than the deaths of family members and the occupation of their countries. Somebody shoots Gabrielle Giffords, and immediately everyone starts sobbing and moaning about overheated rhetoric and the use of the term ‘target’ in campaign adds — rather than on the shooting itself. Signs plastered throughout all the dorms here at OSU are up to remind us of the official positive attitude that we must have toward bisexuality. Everyone is on the watch for ‘hate speech’. Public schools are the first line of defense against unapproved ideas, and workplaces are similarly targeted if they provide a ‘hostile environment’ to approved victim groups.

Free speech, in the mind of the modern left, is nothing more than the right of people to say things they agree with. The question at hand in the current unfolding debt crisis is this: will we give up our failed socialistic experiment as a nation, or will we begin to give up the freedoms, including speech, that we have enjoyed for so long?

anarchism: the advocacy of the elimination of the state.  Generally the sort of anarchism I will discuss, on those odd occasions that anarchism comes up, is free market anarchism, which does believe in the rule of law, but does not believe in monopolistic rule of law.  I suggest For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard, as a primer in this sort of thinking.  Rothbardian anarchism is not anarchism in the sense of chaos (though some would argue it would eventually lead to it), nor is it anarchism in the sense of lack of law.  Though I’m not a Rothbardian anarchist myself, I respect Rothbardian anarchist theory and treat it as a theory worthy of examination.  The important thing to remember is that Rothbard-style anarchism, also called free market anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, is a call for an alternative sort of government, not a call for looting, rape, and pillage.

argument: The word “argument” is typically used in a negative sense, sometimes to point out to quarreling people that they’re taking their differences too much to heart, and sometimes just to make people shut up about their disagreements.  On this blog, however, the word “argue” is used in a conceptual sense.  Argument is nothing more than making an assertion and backing it up with reasons.  Argument is vital and desperately needed.

capitalism: In this blog, unless noted otherwise, I use capitalism to represent a system under which all are free to buy, sell, and give away their own labor, land, goods, and services at whatever prices they choose, to whomever they choose, whenever they choose, and in whatever quantity or state they chose.  When I call myself a capitalist, I am not giving any sort of blanket approval to big business, for example.  Capitalism does mean that I support Walmart’s right to sell cheap stuff.  It does not mean that I support zoning laws that crowd out smaller competitors, eminent domain that is used to seize private property and give it to Walmart, labor controls which give many people no options except working at Walmart, a welfare system which allows the public to bear part of the cost of Walmart’s labor, etc.  Indeed, all of those things are highly anti-capitalist, by this definition, despite the fact that they are done by a stereotypically capitalist organization.  Slavery is also anti-capitalist, by this definition, because it involves the selling of what is not one’s own.

child labor is nothing more than children working for money.  I’m generally okay with child labor, especially when no other alternatives exist for the families practicing it.  (Critics of the industrial revolution often conveniently ignore the fact that most rural children before the industrial age died before the age of 8).  However, I am against abusive child labor.  Yes, I know that can be a difficult line to draw.

libertarianism: a system of thought which opposes the use of government for solving problems.  Almost nobody is 100% libertarian.  I, for example, am okay with government punishing people who have sex with children.  Strictly speaking, that’s not very libertarian of me.  Some non-libertarian ideas reside in the brain of just about any libertarian, so I don’t use the term only to describe purists like Rothbard.  However, if someone supports our current welfare state or our current policy of continual warfare, it would be ridiculous to call them libertarian.  A libertarian, to deserve the title, must have a consistent opposition to statism.

welfare: I use the term broadly to describe a variety of wealth transfers done for social reasons.  Welfare includes food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public schooling, government loans and grants to college students, etc.

slavery: forcing one person to work for another.  Though private slavery has been outlawed throughout the world, it still continues illegally.  Government slavery also exists legally, but is called the draft.  I am opposed to legal private slavery, illegal private slavery, sex slavery, and the draft.

socialism: This is a term that’s almost impossible to pin down, but generally refers to a belief that government must manage the economy for the greater social good.

statism: irrational trust in the moral goodness or practical usefulness of government, and a corresponding irrational disregard for the problems caused by it.  I do not use statism as an opposite to anarchism.

sweatshops: places where people voluntarily work longer hours than Americans would, in conditions that Americans would refuse to work in, for far lower wages than Americans would accept.  The only reason people work in sweatshops is that the sweatshop is the best available work.  In Nike sweatshops, for example, workers earn double the wages of their fellow countrymen.  I am unabashedly pro-sweatshop.  I do not, however, support slavery or abusive child labor, which is another issue altogether.

Chávez went on, jovially stating that, were Obama to pay him a visit, both leaders would “sit down to talk, to eat socialist arepas,” a corn-based pancake popular in the country.

Chavez went on, jovially stating that, were Obama to pay him a visit, both leaders would “sit down to talk, to eat socialist arepas.”

The friends of truth, therefore, on whichever side of the question it may be found, are now more indebted to Mr. Campbell than any other Christian minister of the present day. [page 438]

Hurray, the United States government just declared the Church is officially off the hook in regards to the care of the sick and infirm. Now all we need is some social action to clear out that pesky widows and orphans problem and we can get back to the real job of speculative theology and anathamatizing each other.

Of course, he was speaking in jest but I will say this plainly–regardless of what effect the bill has on medical bills, the Church worldwide needs to know that we are most definitely not off the hook on the matter of helping the poor.  It is and always has been a mission of the church and the growth of the welfare state gives us no excuse to turn away from those in need.

Many extreme things are being said on both sides of the aisle, so I thought I would try to, if not persuade any of you, at least give you a glimpse of what’s happening in the minds of folks like myself regarding this bill.  Many on the right have hurled about accusations of fascism, Nazism, and communism against the supporters of this bill.  Naturally, those supporters who support the bill out of a love for the poor and hurting see such accusations as ridiculous.  On the other hand, there are those on the left who are shocked that the Republicans and libertarians of this country are almost unanimously against this bill.  Do they hate the poor?  Do they deliberately wish to prolong suffering?

And so, as someone against this bill, I will explain what I think.  The goal is not so much to persuade any of you but to show that opposition to this bill is not simply grounded in hatred for the poor and opposition to the principles of Christianity.  Because there are a number of points I want to bring up, I’ll only address each one briefly.  If you want more information on any of them, feel free to ask.  So here are some of my objections to the bill:

1)  Abortion.  As someone who believes that human life exists in the womb, I am against abortion.  Let’s leave aside for a moment the difficult problem of pregnancies which threaten to an unusual extent the life of the mother, which I won’t argue one way or the other at present.  As opposed as I am to even the toleration of elective abortion, it is even worse in my mind if the federal government were to pass a health bill granting my forcibly taken tax dollars to pay for elective abortions.  There has been debate over whether this bill includes such funding, but what is most telling for me is that the bill was forced through without Stupak’s amendment to forbid abortion coverage.  Instead, the bill was sent through with the promise of an “executive order” by President Obama to stop money from being used on abortions.  However, the President does not have the power to use an executive order to stop funding, so the order is not worth the paper it’s printed on.  See here and here.

2)  Personal choice.  There are, in my mind, two general tendencies any government can follow.  It can provide a minimum framework of law and order, and then allow individials to make choices about their own personal lives.  Or it can set about with the goal of planning out people’s lives for them, with the government given the power to make people make choices that the government thinks is right.  This bill, which severely limits the choice of the individual as to whether to get insurance and what kind to get, is a clearly coercive action by a government which thinks it can decide what is best for people–an action which is contrary to the principle of liberty which is the foundation for all prosperous societies.

3)  Socialism.  This bill is socialist in that it gives the central government the power to the healthcare industry–to regulate prices, what sort of health products are sold, who gets healthcare, how much healthcare they get, what treatments they get, etc.  It forces doctors and insurance companies to form policies not by competing to provide the best value to paying customers, but instead to try to keep up with a myriad of regulations imposed by the existing overgrown bureaucracy and 159 new agencies created by this bill.  To my mind it is about as sensible to say that this will result in better healthcare as it would be to say that North Korea’s Kim Jung Il has hatched a communist utopia in his nation.

4) Spending.  The United States government spending is currently equal to just under 50% of the nation’s total domestic product.  Amazingly, this massive spending by government, including incredible amounts of wealth redistribution, has not removed poverty from the U.S.  And yet rather than say that government spending is creating problems, our nation repeatedly resorts to simply spending and borrowing more each year to try even larger projects.  This new healthcare bill already requires a tax hike of 400 billion over the next decade to help pay for it, and that’s just the beginning, even according to our federal government’s ridiculously optimistic estimates.

5)  The national debt.  This point is of course closely related to the previous one.  We have a national debt greater than $12,600,000,000,000.00, (12.6 trillion dollars), we are borrowing about $1.5 trillion ($1,500,000,000,000.00) annually at our present rate of spending, and we spend 18.2% of our national income just keeping up with our interest payments.  Our interest payments will grab more and more of our federal revenues as we continue to increase our debt and as interest rates on our debt go up as the world begins to distrust our ability to pay back money.  If you doubt that the world would mistrust our ability to pay the debt, know that it is no coincidence that on the same day our already-broke government passed this massive socialist bill, it was announced that the market now finds more security in loaning to an individual (Warren Buffet) than to the U.S. Federal Government, and that we are in the process of losing our stellar national credit score.

So there it is, my friends.  Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I’ve made clear that the reason me and others like me oppose the stimilus bill is because of our concern for our nation’s stability and well-being, and not because we want the poor to suffer.