What Public Employee Unions are Doing to Our Country

William McGurn's speech to the 2012 Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar is published in the March issue of Imprimis, Hillsdale's monthly contribution to public discourse.  If you don't receive it yet, it's worth reading, and you can subscribe for free by following the links at the appended issue.

McGurn's topic is public employees unions, specifically those at the state and local level.  His thesis is that "public sector unions have successfully redefined key relationships in our economic and civic life."

Reagan Was A Sure Loser Too

William McGurn is his usual magnificent self today.

Not since Herbert Hoover has a party out of power had such an opportunity to run against everything that troubles the American family—prices, interest rates, unemployment, taxes, or the fear for the future of their old age or the future of their children—than is now presented to the Republican Party. 

The Republicans, however, haven't figured this out. This is their basic problem. They have no strategy for defeating an Obama administration that is highly vulnerable on both domestic and foreign policy.

Those words were written by Scotty Reston in the New York Times on February 29, 1980 about President Jimmy Carter's good fortune, rather than President Obama's, to be facing such a pack of stumblebums.  We all know how Reston's prognostications turned out.

Nothing has changed.  To listen to the media, the Republicans are always stupid and confused, bumbling and inept, obtuse and alarming, extreme and unelectable.

Obama and the 'Bitter' Clingers--Round Two

William McGurn writes today about the President's latest assault on people of traditional faith: HHS's contraceptive mandate, which obliges Catholic institutions to pay for abortifacient and sterilization coverage in employees health plans, or else.  McGurn's discourse on the American founding is worth highlighting.

The Founders did not intend the federal government to be limited only by law. They also wanted it limited by a public square thick with private social institutions. The American Enterprise Institute's Arthur Brooks notes that more than half of all the civic institutions in American life have a religious purpose or affiliation—and that our liberty is linked to theirs. 

That's what Mr. Obama's own appointee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, meant in the recent Supreme Court case (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC) about religious liberty. There she wrote that "religious bodies have been the pre-eminent example" of what an earlier court called "critical buffers between the individual and the power of the State.'" 

That speaks to the real end game of the Obama project. In a recent Web post for National Review, Yuval Levin sums up what it means to drive religious life in America into Amish-like enclaves: "In this arena, as in a great many others, the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state, and to clear out civil society—clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state—when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president's agenda. The idea is to leave as few non-individual players as possible in the private sphere, and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government."

It was the dream of Rousseau and other bedrocks of collectivism to clear out the layers of institutions mediating between the individual and the state.  Their dream led directly to Madame Guillotine, and the Soviet Gulag.

Ironically, the actual fact is just the opposite of what the French revolutionaries thought.  The individual without institutions like family and church to nurture him becomes dependent upon an overweening state that dominates and devours him.

The final indignity is that the state, which presumes to supplant all institutions that care for the individual, ultimately determines whether-or-not that individual is to live, and, if so, for how long and under what conditions.  After all, if the state is going to pick up the tab for people (with other people's money including the money of the people being controlled), then of course they'll have the say about how much medical care may be expended on them, or how many children--if any--they may have.

Recent consequences of the Obama Presidency specifically and Democratic Party hegemony generally are noteworthy.

So the harsh winds of modern American liberalism blow through the civic landscape. The Boy Scouts are deemed a "religious organization" to evict them from a San Diego public park they had beautifully maintained for a half-century. Catholic welfare agencies are pushed out of the adoption business because they will not place babies with gay couples. And in their public pronouncements, senior administration officials, including the president and the secretary of state, tend to speak of "the freedom to worship" instead of a much broader "freedom of religion." 

At last week's National Prayer Breakfast, the president harkened back to his 2008 script, talking up how his own faith informs his public decisions. What people see these days, however, is the candidate who derided small-town Americans as "bitter" people clinging "to guns or religion." 

Turns out he was more correct than he knew. Except that what these Americans are clinging to might better be described as the Second and First Amendments.

The President forms part of that multitude, which over the past fifty years studied law not to learn anything about justice from it, but rather to instruct it in the higher ways of Leftist compassion.  They have deformed the law--made it anti-human and anti-life--among other ways by replacing the founders' document with a living, breathing constitution, which curiously only breathes with its Left lung.

President Obama's allegiance is not to America or its traditions.  It is to the dream of the French revolutionaries and their heirs: to level out any- and everything that stands in the way of the individual and the revolutionary's notion of what is best for him.

The Age of Kardashian

The ubiquitous Kim Kardishian is in the news for apparently no longer being newsworthy.

Everything the reality family touches turns absolutely toxic — with party promoters, magazine editors and television execs all scrambling to blacklist them, insiders told The Post. 

Ratings for the family’s reality show have plummeted, sales of magazines with Kim Kardashian’s mug go unsold, and her products are unmarketable, insiders say.

The writer opines that her fall from grace stems from her publicity-stunt marriage to New Jersey Net's forward Kris Humphries, which afforded those who consume celebrity objects only 72 days of vicarious thrills.  The disappointment was simply too much to bear for a public expecting years of virtual wedded bliss in Kim's nuptial bed.  

In consequence, her stock price is cratering.  Noman wonders, however, if there isn't another explanation for this newsless piece of information.  

Last month, William McGurn penned a routinely masterful opinion piece entitled "Taxing Kim Kardashian."

It's not her split from Mr. Humphries only 72 days after their wedding, which raised questions about whether the marriage was simply one big publicity stunt. Nor was it the earlier sex tape that earned her celebrity and riches. Only a prude would object to that. 

No, Ms. Kardashian's sin is this: She pays what she owes in state taxes under California law, instead of the much larger amount that some self-appointed advocacy group thinks she ought to be paying.

The organization is called Courage Campaign and its website reveals it to be a California mélange of activist groups and labor unions. In a video that presents Ms. Kardashian in some of her more conspicuously consumptive moments, Courage Campaign claims that while Ms. Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, she paid only one percentage point more in taxes (10.3%) than a middle-class Californian (9.3%). 

"That's not OK," says Campaign Courage. And in their video, they get right to the point, calling on viewers to "Ask Kim to support the millionaires tax of 2012." 

Ms. Kardashian has become wealthier than a Pharaoh by encouraging the public to lust for her.  And while the public is only too willing to engage in this contemporary form of everyday idolatry, the Left sees depravity only in her greed manifest by her not paying more in taxes.

It doesn't see enough.  Greed is of a piece; it is the glue sealing the bargain between consumers who shower human objects with loot in return for absorbing every last detail of their fleshy lives, and the commodified celebrities who court the bargain to their own detriment.  (Ask Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.)  

If more people read Aquinas, they would know of the intimate connection between lust and greed, both of which are capital vices.  Both inflame human passions and overwhelm practical reason--deliberation, judgment and choice.  

Prudence flees, conscience is occluded, where lust and/or greed take root.  Consequently, neither lust nor greed are sins that a rational culture encourages to fester, let alone nurtures, in its bosom.

Where you find glossy magazine covers and video screens filled with images of relatively talentless women strutting about as lusty confections to be consumed--like bon-bons on high heels--you necessarily find lust.  

Conversely, you won't necessarily find greed wherever you find wealth--a condition that need not automatically lead to conspicuous consumption.

Ironically, the Left decries wealth, while it forces pornography and sexual corruption onto the culture, and thus onto everyone, under the guise of a right.  The fact that people like Kim Karadashian dominate the public's notice has everything to do with the Left's appropriation of media and legal culture.

With respect to tax lust:  

It's tempting to dismiss this campaign as the work of a bunch of California crazies. The problem is that its assumptions about wealth and taxes extend far beyond the Golden State. Indeed, they have calcified into an orthodoxy that defines the Democratic Party.  

[Believers] will not be swayed because they are not being driven by their economics. They are being driven by their conception of immorality: the idea that millionaires have more than they should—and that any wealth they have is not something they have earned but something the state has allowed them to keep. 

It says much about the progressive Puritanism of our age that what these folks really find most sleazy about Ms. Kardashian is not her sex tape or her marriage, but that she's unembarrassed about making money. 

Many years ago in these pages, Irving Kristol famously wrote that the liberal paradigm "has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie—but only if she is paid the minimum wage." Today, women like Ms. Kardashian make much more money exercising that right. The only question progressives ask is about the size of the government's cut.

A Journal reader in Massachusetts retorts:

If every American had ready access to the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter and health care—no one would justly begrudge a millionaire as rich as Croesus. 

But in reality, thousands of sick, poor and disabled Americans lack such basic sustenance, while a tiny fraction of the population possesses most of the nation's wealth. That, Mr. McGurn, is what is morally repugnant to the liberal conscience.

Noman's conservative conscience also recoils at the specter of thousands of Americans, and millions of people around the world, lacking ready access to the basic necessities of life.  He scoffs, however, at the risible suggestion that increasing taxes in order to pay off Democratic constituencies for their fealty will do one whit to resolve this problem.

If providing succor to the poor, and not Statism, were the true motive of Liberal belief and action, then they would join with Conservatives in cause to strengthen families (procreative ones) and churches.  These institutions protect and fortify the person with love, care and material sustenance necessary to develop habits of self-sufficiency, become sensitized in a practical manner to the needs of others, avoid poverty in the first place, and recover should they fall into it.  

Yet, Liberals routinely attack family and church, arrogate their roles, and enlarge the State's dominion through programs to address the problems created by their intentional diminution.

Liberals would join with conservatives to deter, rather than foment, addictions to sex, drugs and rock & roll--addictions that reduce far too many to a feeble crust, a pathetic semblance of a person.

This genuine solicitude for the poor, for human dignity, would promptly end the political conflicts that roil the nation and prevent its unified advance towards the common good.  Liberals don't want to end the cultural degradation, however, which results in the very poverty they brandish as exhibit A in their hall of self-justification.  

If there were no poor, beholding or dependent, what excuse would Liberals have for raising taxes and creating a massive state that operates according to the rules of patronage rather than the inhospitable ones of performance?  Who would vote for them?  

There is a reason people quip that Liberals love the poor so much that they strive to create more of them.

Finally, Liberals would join cause with Conservatives to strengthen the capitalist system (as opposed to ideology), which produces wealth and provides opportunity for more people to achieve higher standards of living than have ever before been deemed possible.  

They would acknowledge that for the sake of combatting poverty-inducing addictions, not everything should be marketable, e.g., pornography, sex, drugs.  They would desist in proposing high-tax, low-freedom solutions that perpetuate the problems that ostensibly motivate Liberal compassion.

Noman is weary of figments like Kim Kardashian who are thrust onto his consciousness to separate him from his conscience, wits and money.  The endless parade of celebrity vixens served up for public consumption sadly reminds him that consumers and consumed alike are fallen.  

OK, the woman looks good.  Beyond that, is there any other reason to notice her, let alone incessantly?

If McGurn is right, then her toxicity problem can easily be solved.  All she needs is to be photographed and make appearances with Warren Buffet on behalf of higher taxes.  

She can praise the virtues of government compassion, and perhaps adopt a PC cause, like Mark Zuckerberg did with the paradigmatic government boondoggle: Newark's notoriously troubled public schools.  That was sufficient to deflect concerns over Facebook's systemic disregard of privacy concerns.

NGO activists would stop conspiring with media activists and the nasty articles would stop.  If today's goddess of gloss genuflected obeisantly enough to the political correctness that makes and breaks her, she might even get glowing coverage for her humanitarianism.

Aside from her temporary problems, however, people and society should be concerned about the never ending media barrage clutching at the human soul from the grocery store line to one's living room.  

“I’m bored with them,” said Manhattan publicist R. Couri Hay, who organized paid Kardashian visits to clubs in 2008 and 2010. Now, he said, he wouldn’t dream of promoting “Kim Kardashian and her little clunky sisters.”

Noman is bored with them, too.  And, he's never even seen their (or any) TV reality show.  He knows too much about the observer effect, and seen to many women strut their stuff for a spontaneous audience, to think that such a thing is possible. 

And Baby Makes Seven Billion

William McGurn has flagged a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) news item, "The State of World Population 2011."  His comment: "Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby."

At Columbia University's Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN "the consequences for humanity could be grim." Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared "the earth is full," suggesting that a growing population means "we are eating into our future." And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a "human swarm" that is "overbreeding" in a way that "prosperous, well-educated families" from the developed world do not.

Advance praise for Sach's 2008 book, "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet," was provided by no less a personage than Nobel Laureate Al Gore:

"Common Wealth explains the most basic economic reckoning that the world faces.  We can address poverty, climate change, and environmental destruction at a very modest cost today with huge benefits for shared and sustainable prosperity and peace in the future, or we can duck the issue today and risk a potentially costly reckoning in later years.  Despite the rearguard opposition of some vested interests, policies to help the world's poor and the global environment are in fact the very best economics bargains on the planet.

Noman could read these alarums all day.  He loves their invariant structure.

(1) things are definitely going to be perilous (2) for all of us (3) because of the hairy unwashed (4) if we don't fix it right away (5) by doing what I say (and am heavily invested in), (6) and crushing the obscurantists (7) who are just selfish people (8) that don't deserve a fair hearing (or funding for their research);

 
(9) Conversely, things will be utopian (10) especially for the poor (11) and the sacred environment (12) if government forces people to be free, (13) according to my lights (14) which all affected can scarcely mind, (15) given my infallibility, (16) especially when everyone sees the eventual benefits (you'll thank me later) (17) and which is in everyone's best interests regardless.

Neither does the bottom line vary; it's been the same since the 19th century.  The enlightened must shackle the economy and procreation.  They must break the family's and church's hold on people.

Then heaven on earth and perpetual peace will ensue.  You can take it on their authority.  The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, if and only if government disregards the traditionally vested interests.

Many policy experts believe that governments and NGOs have the tools to limit and control the world's population. The key effort, many say, is simply making sure that effective family planning spreads throughout the developing world. "What's really critical is the political commitment of governments. Family planning is not actually that expensive," said John Bongaarts, vice-president of the New York-based Population Council. 

However, campaigners on family planning issues often come across cultural and religious factors that make educating women and reducing the size of families difficult.  Some governments make a point of trying to increase their populations, while many religious groups preach against the use of contraceptives. 

The Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based group linked to anti-abortion organisations in America, last week welcomed the news that the world's population was set to hit 7 billion this month. "Humanity's long-term problem is not going to be too many children, but too few," said the institute's president, Steven Mosher.

McGurn cuts deftly through the faulty anthropology underlying the UN's vision of the person.

The truth is that the main flaw in Malthus is precisely his premise. Malthusian fears about population follow from the Malthusian view that human beings are primarily mouths to be fed rather than minds to be unlocked. In this reasoning, when a pig is born in China, the national wealth is thought to go up, but when a Chinese baby is born the national wealth goes down. 

Behind this divide between those who worry about limits put on human exchange and those who worry about limits to growth are two very different views of the human person. The former believe that so long as people are free to trade and use their talents, the more the merrier. The latter treat people as a great mass of more or less interchangeable cogs, hence the worries about "sustainability" and "carrying capacity" and the like...

In short, it all comes down to your conception of the human person. Another way of putting it is this: Instead of looking for ways to reduce the number of people at the banquet of life, we would do better to look for ways to lay a better and more bounteous table.

Note how Malthusian Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi identifies people as a cost best obviated in order to help states avert fiscal crisis:

McGurn points to a necessary but oft-missed relation: free market economics are wed to population growth and procreative freedom (and vice-versa).  They stress the creative, innovative aspects of the person, whom Julian Simon designated the ultimate resource.

For those who view people as being resourceful, capable and contributory, there is no need to place limits on their number or productive activity.  They'll figure out what is needed in order to sustain life and procreation.

Significantly, the transmission of life normally results from love--real, self-gifving, donative love--something there can never be too much of in the world.  Children, incidentally, evoke the response of sacrificial, donative love better than anyone or -thing.

Statist economics are inevitably linked to population control and coercive measures to limit procreation (and vice-versa).  They stress the dependent, needy aspects of the person, whom editorialists at the Charlotte Gazette referred to collectively as the human swarm.

For those who view people as a resource drain, there is always an urgent need in a world of scarcity to place limits on, and control, nearly every aspect of human life, especially procreation and the free election of productive activity.

The exception to this command-and-control rule, for the time being, is any activity that leads to dependence.  Statists champion these as the absolute rights of autonomous individuals.

With sufficient exercise of such rights, especially but not exclusively in adolescence--e.g., to sexual activity, sexual identity, pornography, divorce, abortion, drug use, media of choice--people become docile, dependent and controllable.

Once self-control and character break down, once the person severs connections from others who nurture and sustain him, he will turn to the State in need.  Like any addict, he will do anything for a fix.

Apparently, the only thing capable of riling him up is the threat that those paying for it might stop.

McGurn is right as far as he goes.  Noman concurs and would simply like to add the following.  

Ultimately, both conceptions address an aspect of truth.  Not every person is a burden, not by a long shot.  Neither is every person productive, talented or resourceful.

Periodic outbursts of industrial genius keep the world advancing materially, and enable laggards and leaders alike to live in greater dignity by participating in greater bounty.

The resource-driven debates of our time concern the preferable political economy to accommodate the full range of personal capacities found in the populace, from competence to incompetence.

Noman and McGurn believe that the liberal, free-market system is preferable for reasons including that it encourages material self-sufficiency--it obliges personal effort and growth--thereby making that outcome more likely throughout society via character formation.

That is not to maintain that anybody is a self-sufficient being, an autonomous individual, which would be an anthropological error, an ontological misidentification of the fact.

It is merely to say that people will more likely develop and expend creativity, ingenuity and energy to sustain themselves and their loved ones if they are educated to consider self sufficiency an indispensable condition of responsibility, maturity, human dignity and the common good.

It is also meant to underscore the fact that people are capable of achieving, and quite often do achieve, more than they think they can, but only if they are encouraged to strive.

Conversely, Noman considers the Statist, public-sector-driven system anathema for reasons including that it encourages material dependence, thereby making that outcome more likely via character deformation.

In either case, the pedagogical function of the respective control system tends to create the reality that it views the human person to be.  The system, like any and every control system, is formative.

Ironically, those who protest for free markets, character formation, self-donation and procreation are considered mean and heartless.  Statists who encourage dependence are considered compassionate. 

Noman believes that is due to freedom advocates' incomplete articulation of principles, explanation of reasons and perhaps consideration of responsibilities to others on the one hand.  It is due to Statists' success in shaping the terms of the debate on the other.

It is undeniable that some people will fall through the cracks, whether freedom or tyranny reigns.  It is incumbent upon all of us to help them recover, and ameliorate suffering wherever possible.

It is not sufficient to champion liberal, free-market political economy and wash one's hands of responsibility to others who use freedom poorly.

The question is under what auspice is it incumbent that we help, ameliorate suffering, and exercise responsibility for others?

Here another dimension comes into play: civil society and its pluralistic moral order.

Liberal, free-market political economy depends upon the moral and cultural resources generated by robust intermediate associations, e.g., family, Church, schools, various groups of choice.  Pope John Paul II designated this aspect of social order the "subjectivity of society."

People who fall through the cracks, who cannot compete, who are not especially productive due to limitations need to be picked up, but not necessarily by the State.  Rather, they need the support of family, Church, community association, etc.

In the first place, those groups have a closer connection to the person.  In the second, the person is more bound to those groups.  He is not anonymous; neither are they.  Each is more accountable to the other.

Statist, public-sector-driven political economy considers the State responsible for the individual.  Accordingly, Statists feel entitled to control the minutest aspects of his life-- down to what light bulbs he may use, and what insurance he must carry--as well as the weightiest, such as whether or not he may procreate or open a business.

This model considers highly subjective society a threat.  As the State expands and assumes responsibility for ever larger swaths of human need, the subjectivity of society recedes.

Conservative silence on the matter, and discomfort articulating a vision of highly subjective civil society, leaves a population trained to depend on government largesse subject to demagoguery on the issue.

Thus, President Obama warned attendees at a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser yesterday that if Democrats lose the 2012 election, government will tell the American people, "You are on your own."

State assistance and isolated ruin are hardly the only two alternatives.  The suddenness with which this has become the mentally defined set of outcomes in crisis America, however, and the ease with which the President exploits it, is breathtaking.

Family, church and traditional groups have been redefined and relegated to the margins as the State has assumed control over matters formerly pertaining to their domains.

This has exposed economic activity to the ever encroaching impositions of a nanny state in need of resources, and consequently in predator mode.

The free market strain of conservatism will have to embrace the traditional sources of cultural-moral strength in order to survive.

The family-procreative-religious strain of conservatism will need to embrace free-market, low-tax, light-regulation economics in order to create conditions in which it can flourish.

The choice, simply put, is one between a culture of life and a culture of death.

In sum: (1) the Statist model is unsustainable, as eventually the dependent will overwhelm the capacity of the productive to provide; and (2) the social issues relating to individual rights and the generation of life are inextricably linked to economic issues of government spending, taxation, deficits, regulation and the like.

The UNFPA has done us a service by revealing its premises, encouraging fellow travelers to reveal their hands, and highlighting the various relations and connections on both sides of the debate.

Noman would like to thank them by encouraging readers to procreate often for the good of the economy, mankind, and especially of the human heart.