Tag Archives: ethics

Demand for Admiration

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I wrote, below, about Progressives’ need for personal acclaim in their community “organizing” efforts.

Here’s an example of that desperation for recognition in another milieu.  It’s now a legal requirement to give credit to a Progressive for the “good deed” a business might do.

As background, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,

insurers that don’t spend a specified amount of revenue on actual medical care—as opposed to administrative costs—must refund the difference to customers.

Now the requirement for hosannas:

Health-insurance companies must tell customers who get a premium rebate this summer that the check is the result of the Obama administration’s health-care law, according to federal guidelines released Friday [11 May].”

Rules…instruct insurers to notify recipients of rebates in the first paragraph of the mailing by writing: “This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums.  This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act—the health reform law.”

Moreover,

Insurers will also have to send a generalized letter to all other customers explaining that if they aren’t receiving a rebate, it is because the company has met the targets under the law.

Finally, Obama, as part of his Progressive Education Movement, is using his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to push doctors “to educate people” about the benefits of the law.

Update: Just how desperate can these guys get?

Some Thoughts on Community Organizing

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There’s the conservative way, and there’s the Progressive way.  Below are examples of each, beginning with the conservative version.

One Saturday, Grant Bennett got up on a ladder outside his two-story [house] intent on dislodging a hornets’ nest, which had formed between an air-conditioning unit and a second floor window….  The hornets went right at him, and he fell off the ladder, breaking his foot….  Romney learned what had happened and went over that afternoon to see if there was anything he could do….

About nine thirty that Sunday night, Romney reappeared…carrying a bucket, a piece of hose, and a couple of screwdrivers.  “He said, ‘I noticed you hadn’t gotten rid of the hornets,'” Bennett recalled.  “I said, ‘Mitt you don’t need to do that.’  He said, I’m here, and I’m going to do it….  You demonstrated that doing it on a ladder is not a good idea.'”  Romney went at it from inside the house, opening a window enough to dislodge it.  Soon the hornets were gone.

Hmm….  Problem solving on the fly, too.

Romney’s acts of charity extended beyond just the church community.  After his friend and neighbor Joseph O’Donnell lost a son, Joey, to cystic fibrosis…Romney helped lead a community effort to build Joey’s park, a playground…in Belmont.  “There he was with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” O’Donnell said.

Romney didn’t stop there.  About a year later, it became apparent that the park would need regular maintenance and repairs.  “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and kids and they’re working on the park,'” said O’Donnell….

Hmm….  Staying in it for the long term.  And the kicker:

[Romney] did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, “We’re doing this,” without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.

On the other hand, Saul Alinsky pointed out the essential ego involved in Progressive community organizing:

The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose.

Layered on top of this, his community organizer operated from a fundamental mindset of manufactured conflict:

Here our concern is with that tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

Never mind that, just as in any economic, or other social, endeavor, it’s not a zero-sum game.  Power sharing (getting to the sharing is, indeed, often a source of conflict in) is power growth for all.  The difference is the difference between consent of the governed and top-down government control.

Progressive community organizing—protesting, threatening disruption or charges of racism, if accession to demandsagreement wasn’t achieved—was used to force 14 major banks to agree to turn a $55 million, 11-city lending program over to ACORN to manage.

Then-community organizer Barack Obama led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (co-founded by that “guy who lived in his neighborhood,” Bill Ayers) that fed over $100 million to community organizers and radical education activists.

So, why am I only providing Romney examples on the conservative side, but providing a range of Progressives and their activities?  Full disclosure: I support Mitt Romney for President.  That’s not the reason for the focus, though.  Romney is famous, so descriptions of this sort of thing get out, regardless of modesty.  Conservatives, generally, just do it, without seeking credit.  Ordinary Americans’ acts of kindness, of organizing actions for the benefit of their communities, don’t get publicized, because that’s not the goal of the acts.  If it were, they wouldn’t be acts of kindness or benefits for their community, but acts of self-aggrandizement, of glory-hounding.  Of personal political gain.

h/t to Power Line for the Romney anecdotes.

Some Thoughts on Affirmative Action

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Do affirmative action programs accomplish anything in the direction of “fairness?”  No, these programs are, by their nature, racist and sexist.  Such programs do no more than perpetuate the myths that some groups are more equal than others, and that other groups are less equal than some.  How very Wilsonian:

segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.

What are affirmative action programs but a holding apart of some groups from others—segregation?  This holding apart is founded on the gravest of bigoted insults: some groups simply are unable to do for themselves, and so they must have special treatment from Big Government.  This is baser than the simple, honest hatred of most bigotry: it’s the insidiously velvet-gloved slur of low expectations.

Moreover, these programs deny their victims a fundamental aspect of their Americanism, much less of their humanity: their individuality and their individual responsibility.  Those who are the targets of affirmative action are lumped into groups assumed to be so inferior that they must have handouts; such targets are denied their opportunity to succeed or fail on their own merits, they are denied their opportunity to show the best that is in them.

Worse, such targets are denied such capacity in perpetuity: they are made dependent on government as surely and as thoroughly as the administrators of such programs and the politicians who create them are made dependent on these dependencies.

The failures go on.  The targets of affirmative action, even in those cases where they’re allowed to leave behind the preferences, are denied the full pleasure of their efforts.  Anyone who has ever received a scholarship, or a job, or any other success as a result of affirmative action cannot fully enjoy that success: did he earn it, or was he the right color, the right ethnicity, the right gender; did he merely satisfy the right affirmative action criterion?  Our own president is reduced to bragging about having benefitted from affirmative action programs, including possibly having gotten his position on the Harvard Law Review as a result of affirmative action.

In the end, how can we achieve a full integration of all comers into our society, into what it is that is an American, when we continue to hold significant portions of our fellows apart through deliberate special treatment based, not on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin or the chromosomes of their gender?  Where is the morality of such segregation, of this denial of another’s right and obligation to see to his own responsibilities and to make his own way in our common world?  How is this fair by any stretch of that term?

Julia, Revisited

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Here’s another take on the life of Ward Julia, via Power Line.

The captions are, unfortunately, hard to read.  Here they are:

Under President Obama: Julia is enrolled in a Great Leap program where she will learn critical community organizing and obedience skills from qualified union staff screened for felony convictions, readying her for success in the kindergarten phase of her customized 65-year life plan.

Under Mitt Romney little Julia will be marched to a Mormon polygamy camp in Utah where Paul Ryan will torture her with boring Republican math mumbo-jumbo.

Hmm….

The Federalist and Thinking

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I wrote earlier about the willful imposition of ignorance by our pseudo-elites on their unfortunate students concerning the essays gathered up into The Federalist.  In this campaign season and President Obama’s repeated demands to raise taxes, I thought I’d just quote from the opening of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 31.

To the People of the State of New York:

IN DISQUISITIONS of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind. Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry, that “the whole is greater than its part; things equal to the same are equal to one another; two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and all right angles are equal to each other.” Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation. And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common-sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible.

The objects of geometrical inquiry are so entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart, that mankind, without difficulty, adopt not only the more simple theorems of the science, but even those abstruse paradoxes which, however they may appear susceptible of demonstration, are at variance with the natural conceptions which the mind, without the aid of philosophy, would be led to entertain upon the subject. The INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing, extending even to the minutest atom, is a point agreed among geometricians, though not less incomprehensible to common-sense than any of those mysteries in religion, against which the batteries of infidelity have been so industriously leveled.

But in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable. To a certain degree, it is right and useful that this should be the case. Caution and investigation are a necessary armor against error and imposition. But this untractableness may be carried too far, and may degenerate into obstinacy, perverseness, or disingenuity. Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general, the same degree of certainty with those of the mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than, to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations, we should be disposed to allow them. The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject. Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties.

It’s no wonder the Progressives run from these essays.  If they knew of them, Progressives might actually have to think about their policies’ effects.