Category Archives: morality

A Thought from the Border Crisis and Immigration Generally

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…it’s not limited to those topics, but it was triggered by a quote by Dr Manny Alvarez in his piece about the bias of the Latino press in its coverage of the current children border crisis. What Alvarez said was this:

The crisis reminds me of that old saying: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Alvarez offered this aphorism in the context of needing to address the root cause of the crisis, not merely treat the symptom that is what the crisis is.

Let me modify the aphorism slightly; it’ll illustrate another part of the root cause.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime and deny the donor man the opportunity to maintain the dependency of the recipient on him.

UN Involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian Authority War

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a UN organization “providing humanitarian relief” in Gaza, said they found rockets hidden by PA terrorists inside a “vacant” school earlier in the week. This is the second time the UNRWA has been found to have PA’s rockets stored in UNRWA facilities.

This time the rockets were found in an “unused” UNRWA building situated

between two other UNRWA schools that are being used to host 1,500 displaced people.

Also this time, instead of returning the rockets to the PA, as the UNRWA did with that prior cache,

UNRWA staff withdrew from the area.

And abandoned those 1,500 refugees the UN was pretending to shelter.

More Moral Equivalence Nonsense

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President Obama and John Kerry have adopted this ostensibly even-handed trope [that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must agree to a cease fire], and on Tuesday the European Union went further and deplored Israel and Hamas as if they were equal perpetrators. Hamas should stop its “criminal and unjustifiable acts,” the EU said, but it added that it was “particularly appalled” at the human cost of the Israel ground offensive.

No. There is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens from terrorist assault and an entity that only rains rockets on that nation for the purpose of killing as many civilians, including children, as it can; there is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens and an entity that shoots rockets at a nuclear power plant in that nation for the purpose of destroying the plant and scattering as much radioactivity as widely as possible; there is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens and an entity that uses its own civilians, including its own children, as shields for the purpose of running up the Palestinian body count for PR purposes.

The US and the EU each must put aside this despicable assumption of an equivalence of morality between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (“particularly appalled!?” Maybe the EU isn’t assuming so much equivalence…) and exert such pressure as they have left on the PA to stop its assault and to forswear terrorism.

If there is to be a legitimate cease fire, it can come about in one of only two ways. The PA must stop its attacks on Israel and allow verification of that cessation. Alternatively, Israel must continue in Gaza until the PA’s ability to continue its attacks is destroyed completely and the PA terrorists are dead or captured. Given the integrity of the PA, though, the former alternative is likely only to provide a brief respite before the PA resumes its terrorism.

The Kerfuffle in the Middle East

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Regarding the current Israeli/Palestinian Authority war over the latter’s terrorist attacks on Israeli cities and nuclear facilities, Secretary of State John Kerry is in Cairo to work with his Egyptian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri, to try to bring about an end to the war, or at least a lull in the current outbreak of the larger, on-going war.

To Kerry’s credit, he also says he wants to find “a way to deal with the underlying issues.” Success here would, indeed, go a long way toward reducing the likelihood of further hostilities.

Unfortunately, he continues to lack any understanding of the situation. He also thinks the underlying issues are “very complicated.”

No, they’re really quite simple. Israel wants the terrorist attacks to stop; the PA refuses. Israel wants its right to exist explicitly recognized and that recognition acted on; the PA refuses on both counts. Israel wants a peaceful relationship within a two-state outcome that contains Israel and a Palestinian state; the PA refuses.

A Thought on Government and Enterprise

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This is from The Washington Times.

[T]he Obama administration first received clear notice more than five years ago about the need for an overhaul to reduce patient wait times.

“Excessive wait times are addressed by moving to a resource-based management system,” Veterans Affairs technology officials told the Obama-Biden transition team in a briefing report that included mention of VA’s “schedule replacement” project.

And this [emphasis added]:

“VA has been trying—and failing—to replace its outpatient scheduling system since 2000, wasting nearly $130 million in the process,” Rep. Jeff Miller, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told The Times when asked about the delays.

“Because VA acquisition officials have proven time and again they are simply too inept to guide the development of a new proprietary appointment-scheduling system in an expedient and cost-effective manner, department leaders need to look at adopting commercial technologies that are being used in the private sector….”

It’s easy enough to knock President Barack Obama and his administration over this, and President George Bush’s administration had a hand in this, too. It’s also easy to hammer the Veterans Affairs Department. However, the problem isn’t about any particular President’s failure to deal with a problem, nor is it about the broad failure of the VA to perform.

No, this is an illustration of the general inability of government to do as well as private enterprise anything that private enterprise can do in a competitive market: if private enterprise can do a thing at all, it can within very broad limits do it better than government (national defense and foreign policy come to mind as things better left to the Federal government, but not much else). The Federal government cannot compete with private enterprise on efficiency at all.

In sum, such things should be left to the private sector of our economy, and the government should just stay out. In the particular case, this means that the VA should be disbanded and the VA’s annual budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can find their own doctors, their own medical facilities, their own health plans.