Tag Archives: morality

Some Thoughts on Poverty and Obligation

Posted on by
Reply

Anthony Davies and Kristina Antolin had these thoughts in a Saturday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church’s mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community’s tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it’s where Mr. Ryan’s religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution.

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. Coercing people to feed the poor simply substitutes moral poverty for material poverty.

What they said.

Look! Shiny!

Posted on by
Reply

Anything to distract attention and to change the subject from the topics at hand.  Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is so reluctant to talk about his performance with the economy these last three-plus years, to talk about his performance with job creation, to talk about foreign policy, or to propose concrete solutions to these problems that he’s back to dragging this red herring.

He’s had his campaign manager, Jim Messina, resurrect Reid-esque nonsense by sending a letter to Matt Rhoades, of the Romney campaign, asking pretty please for just five years’ worth of Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns, against a legal requirement of two years’ worth of such records.  And if Governor Romney will only do that much, Messina promises that Obama will make no more demands or comments on the matter.  Real decent of him to make such an offer.  And real evasive.

Which Party is the More Worthy?

Posted on by
Reply

One party trusts Americans to make our own decisions, to see to our own prosperity, to honor our own obligations.  This party wants to see a smaller government that is less intrusive into our business’ and our private affairs, wants to reform, and so to preserve the principles underlying, Social Security and Medicare—including privatizing significant portions of them, trusting us to make our own decisions wisely—wants to foster an economic environment that restores our equality of opportunity so that, in the Theodore Roosevelt’s words, each American can “show the best that there is in him.”

The other party says we Americans are not able to make the right decisions; we need government to see to our prosperity for us, to assume responsibility in our place.  This is the party of affirmative action, insisting that some of us must be carefully sheltered and nurtured (and based on the color of our skin and not on the content of our character) because the best that there is in us just isn’t good enough.  This is the party of wealth redistribution because some Americans are inherently incapable of working toward our own, in John Adams’ terms, “safety and happiness;” we cannot make wise decisions on our own accord.  This is the party that says government must take our wealth and redistribute it in particular ways to particular groups of us because the party does not believe we can—or will—honor our own duty to take care of those around us who are less fortunate.

Paul Ryan Bad for Women?

Posted on by
Reply

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell says so.  Ryan’s “not a pick for women” she pronounces.   Follow the link inside the link to the Fox News article to hear her remarks.

Then refresh yourselves regarding her political acumen, and her integrity, with the two clips here, which show her airing her cynically and dishonestly edited video of a Romney speech.

Now decide for yourselves whether this woman is qualified to speak for women—or for any other adults.

Government Keynesian Waste

Posted on by
Reply

As if there’s any more need to demonstrate the fallacy of Keynesian stimulus pseudo-theory after its failure in the ’30s, some empirical evidence from today’s economic dislocation and failed “recovery” is neatly summarized in the following graph from Business Insider:

Most are already familiar with those projection curves, from the 2009 hype associated with ramming the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Stimulus Act) through the Democratic and then-economically timorous Congress.  Government standing aside and letting the economy recover on its own was going to let unemployment peak at around 9% and not move below 7% until Dec 2011 or reach “full” employment until Dec 2013.  On the other hand, the Obama Stimulus would cause an almost immediate peak (in August 2009 after a February enactment) at 8% and lead to recovery below 7% unemployment by fall 2010, a year sooner than under non-interference.

Instead, the Obama Stimulus has actively suppressed employment—and so economic recovery.  Unemployment, at roughly 8.5% at the time of stimulus enactment, continued rising unabated to above 10%, and it has remained above the worse-case no-government projection ever since.  Notice further, that actual unemployment has generally followed the shape of the no-government projection curve: the only effect of Obamanomics in this milieu has been to make government involvement worse than no involvement—it hasn’t altered anything else.

Do we have empirical data for the contrary position, that government noninvolvement is actively beneficial?  You betcha.  The Depression of 1920-1921 ran from the start of 1920 through the middle of 1921, and President Warren G Harding’s administration sat it out, with no significant government intervention attempted.  The graph below is constructed from data taken from Table 9 in a paper by none other than Christina Romer.

There are a couple of takeaways here.  One is the sharp, high peak to unemployment and the rapidity with which both the peak and the recovery occurred.  Another is the rapidity with which our economy actually worked its way through this Depression compared to the projected recovery rates in the first graph above.  The projections for our current failing recovery are, compared to hard data, cynically pessimistic.  This pessimism, though, cannot be laid at Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama’s feet; a broad range of economists assumed that slow pace.

In general, to repeat earlier posts and statements made by others: money spent by government is money not available to the private sector or to individuals to spend on their own goals and needs.  Money spent by the government is money that first must be taken from those private enterprises and citizens in the form of taxes today to pay for that spending or greater taxes tomorrow to pay both for that spending and for the interest on the debt incurred by that spending.  And here we’ve seen empirical evidence that government spending, above a minimal level for funding government itself and national defense, isn’t just useless, it’s actively counterproductive—destructive.