“Nothing in politics happens by accident”

This observation by Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind as various agencies of the federal government move in force against reported design defects in automobiles made by Toyota Motor Company. Focusing on problems of sudden acceleration, the proceedings of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a grand jury and today the House Energy and Commerce Committee have begun to exhibit something resembling a cross between swarming and piling on. Is it possible that last year’s federal intervention to "save" the Chrysler and General Motors corporations has as its follow up an attack on the chief foreign rival of these American companies? Just wondering. For years, the primary criticism of government efforts by liberals to encourage commerce has been that picking winners and losers is neither productive nor fair, these matters being best determined by competition in the marketplace. Are we now seeing that such "picking" involves not only giving political and financial advantages to favored firms but actually making attacks on unfavored ones? One is reminded of the purportedly non-xenophic President Obama's denunciation of foreign corporations in his State of the Union Address last month. I guess foreigners coming over the borders illegally is one thing but playing by the rules in the American market is something else. Kimberly Strassel wondered out loud about these possibilities last week in her weekly column at the Wall Street Journal. I think she might be on to something.

Political principles, slavery and abortion

When Abraham Lincoln, born 201 years ago today, delivered his immortal Gettysburg Address, he called for a "new birth of freedom." He had issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than a year before, which gave a wartime justification that he knew would ultimately be a peacetime bounty: the end of slavery in America. This "new birth" entailed shedding the remnants of old world conditions in the new by removing the massive contradiction between a free, republican constitution and the bondage of millions of human beings. No one understood more than Lincoln how revolutionary was this massive change in American life, but it took a man of his conservative thought and disposition to foresee its possibility long before and patiently await its consummation in the right circumstances. In his Lyceum speech given a quarter century before the enforcement of the Proclamation, Lincoln warned of a man of towering genius whose fame would eclipse the founders’ by either emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Men of the highest political ambition are not satisfied with serving in a regime of someone else’s making. But this was also an implicit warning that the nation’s unresolved dilemma could not forever be ignored.

Some of Lincoln’s critics, whether among the die-hard confederate sympathizers or liberal debunkers, saw in this early speech signs of a Caesarist temper. But Lincoln proved by his years in Whig politics that he was not an abolitionist and not thirsting for unmerited glory. Indeed, by constantly harking back to the founding fathers and their political principles, particularly in the crisis spawned by the Democratic party’s continual efforts to expand the territory of slavery, he reminded the nation that those principles are a rebuke to domestic slavery that are not to be forever ignored.

As to why the founders did not themselves abolish slavery, it had long been understood that its massive presence in half of the original states had rendered that eminently desirable object impossible. But Lincoln turned attention back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the future states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin; not to mention the Missouri Compromise of 1819, which prohibited slavery in most of the Louisiana Territory–at least until the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened it up to that evil in 1854.

It is also a fact that northern states all prohibited slavery by the time of the Constitution’s completion in 1787. Lincoln’s explanation was as simple as it was profound: the "central idea" of the Declaration of Independence was "the standard maxim for free society." While it did not result in the complete prohibition or elimination of slavery, it was "constantly labored for," however imperfectly, as "circumstances would well admit." Those principles of equality and liberty are eternally right, but require the consent of the governed for their full implementation.

The right circumstances came in the midst of the Civil War, a conflict in which Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, identified slavery as its cause. Not only the survival of the Union but the future of liberty was at stake in that war, which dragged on far longer than anyone had foreseen or desired, and had forced a choice on the commander-in-chief. Defeating the rebels required that they be deprived of a powerful asset, namely, the continued labor of their slaves while the masters and their sons fought the war’s battles. Sustaining support for the war in the North required that the sacrifices of thousands of its men not result in maintaining an institution that shamed the nation in the eyes of the world. Thus did the "ancient faith" of the American people impose their authority decades after its utterance in their founding documents.

As Union soldiers overran rebel strongholds and ultimately forced their surrender, slavery was doomed. The ratification of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited domestic slavery or involuntary servitude was at war’s end a foregone conclusion, thereby fulfilling Lincoln’s lifelong but long-delayed hope. But the imperatives of equality and liberty did not cease with the end of fighting. There were civil rights and voting rights to be guaranteed, in order that the gift of freedom for millions of Americans not be devoid of promise. But in fact that promise was long delayed, until agitation for equal protection of the laws a century later culminated in the passage of comprehensive civil rights laws.

Given the oppression that slavery and racial segregation uniquely imposed on persons of African descent, it is not surprising that lovers of liberty should continue, for good or for ill, to dedicate themselves to improving the lot of the race so afflicted. Yet it is well to remember that America’s crisis developed precisely because a growing number of its leaders–primarily but not entirely in the South–came to believe that freedom was for white people only. The "domestic" character of slavery, as well as its confinement south of the Mason-Dixon line, tended to place it out of sight and out of mind, enabling Americans outside the South to ignore it. Such, dear readers of this piece, is the plight of unborn children, who are not only primarily a "domestic" matter but completely invisible in their mother’s wombs–however visible their impact on their mother’s bodies.

That the issues of the Civil War should be revisited in our time will surprise–or disturb–only those who believe that they concerned only the place of blacks in American society. But the principles are universal and only incidentally concern race, which is, after all, only an accidental and not an essential attribute of our human nature. It can hardly be doubted that everyone generated by the union of a male and female human being is a human being from the moment of conception. And while the founders (or Lincoln) could not be said to have had the unborn specifically in mind when they dedicated their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to winning independence from a despotic regime, their principles are no respecter of persons. No member or class of the human race can claim a monopoly on liberty and equal rights.

The language of the Declaration of Independence is clear: "All men are created equal." Children are not created at the moment of their birth, but rather nine months prior. However unequipped to exercise or understand their rights (and what child is before his or her majority?) , unborn children are at the very least entitled to equal treatment and freedom from oppression or death at the hands of those nurturing them. With ultrasound technology, we no longer have the excuse of not knowing that children are developing before birth and we see bodily features and movements which settle the question of their humanity.

From the moment the United States Supreme Court issued its infamous decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973, the nation has not been wanting in conscientious citizens who argued for the humanity of unborn children, and thus their entitlement to the law’s protection; and in due course the parallel they saw with the plight of blacks held in slavery. More to the point, an earlier Court, in an equally infamous decision in 1857, Dred Scott v. Sanford, declared that black men had no rights which white men were bound to respect. It galls today’s cast of sensible and not-so-sensible civil rights leaders for anyone to make the comparison between Negroes and unborn children, partly because they fear that it distracts attention from a more compelling issue and partly because they have adopted the feminists’ claim that women’s rights entail the right to an abortion at any time during the entire nine months of pregnancy.

But the founders’ principles and Lincoln’s recurrence to them continue to work out their consequences in the hearts and minds of Americans. Just as the premises "All men are created equal" and "all blacks are men," lead to the conclusion that "all blacks are created equal," so too do the premises, "All men are created equal," and "all unborn children are men," lead to the conclusion that "all unborn children are created equal." We must not be tempted, as the nation was tempted in the mid-nineteenth century, to abandon the faith of our founding fathers. And perhaps we will be spared from paying the heavy price it paid for that apostasy.

Old movies and unwelcome history

The moment the Japanese Empire bombed Pearl Harbor, the vast majority of Americans were committed heart and soul to winning the world war that the sneak attack abruptly brought our nation into. But as welcome as the ultimate victory was, World War II’s conclusion was, like most wars, a mixed blessing. For while the Nazis, fascists and warlords were thoroughly defeated, one of our principal allies, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (deceased, 1991) was in command of central Europe and portions of the Far East. No less pleased at the outcome as the western allies–the United States, Great Britain and France–the USSR nevertheless was a regime no less hateful than the ones defeated in war. In Europe, a divided continent entailed further divisions within defeated countries, specifically, Germany and Austria. In both countries, four zones of occupation were established at the Potsdam Conference, not only for these countries but for their capital cities, Berlin and Vienna. The division of Germany epitomized the tragic results of the "good war," as it came to be called, with crises in 1948 and 1961 that threatened another world war, and the remarkably peaceful outcome of 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961. Austria was more fortunate, as the four-power occupation of the country and its capital ended with its official neutrality, agreed to at a summit conference in 1955.

But, of course, this was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the war, as painfully the true nature of our Soviet allies became clear. It was bad enough that Soviet troops remained from the Baltic republics to Bulgaria. But even those persons in Russia and its satellites who managed to flee ahead of those troops to the western democracies were relentlessly pursued by Soviet authorities.

Operation Keelhaul was the wrenching obligation of Western powers to deal with the Soviet refugee "problem." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the heroic Russian writer who took on the Communist colossus and ultimately won, denounced even the estimable Winston Churchill for consenting to this massive human tragedy. Because the operation mocked everything the victorious allies fought (and prosecuted German and Japanese leaders) for, it was given little publicity.

But movie makers in those days took note. "The Red Danube," an MGM production of 1949, (shown on TCM) zeroed in on the grisly work of Soviet repatriation with telling effect. Despite the British occupation forces’ determination to carry out their orders to deliver thousands of unhappy and unwilling refugees from Soviet tyranny to their horrible and undeserved fate, the truth obtrudes itself.

Here is a useful plot summary from IMDb (Internet Movie Database):

"Shortly after the end of World War II, British Colonel Michael 'Hooky' Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon) is assigned to a unit in the British Zone of Vienna. His duty is to aid the Soviet authorities to repatriate citizens of the Soviet Union, many of whom prefer not to return to their home country. Billeted in the convent run by Mother Auxilia (Ethel Barrymore), Nicobar, and his military aides Major John 'Twingo' McPhimister (Peter Lawford) and Audrey Quail (Angela Lansbury), become involved in the plight of a young ballerina (Janet Leigh) who is trying to avoid being returned to Moscow. Nicobar's sense of duty is tested as he sees first hand the plight of the people he is helping return to the Soviet Union; his lack of religious faith is also shaken by his contact with the Mother Superior."

I read several of these plot summaries, all of which equivocated in some way on the momentous issues involved. To say that "many" of the Soviet citizens "prefer[red] not to return to their home country" is a huge understatement. All were actively hostile to the idea, for it does not take a genius to figure out that a regime that deprives you of your liberty is to be avoided at all costs. Other summaries called the movie "propaganda" and "heavy handed." That’s how things appear to those who are either ignorant of political realities or wilfully blind for the sake of avoiding conflict.

But the summaries indicate that there are several threads in this movie. Front and center is the painful dilemma of the officers of a good regime being ordered to deliver unwilling people to an evil one. The film "humanizes" this weighty issue with a young officer’s passion for a beautiful victim of the massive roundup. (The officer’s aide is also in love with him.) So our hearts tug for the young couple’s fight to avoid her repatriation and hurt badly when events conspire against them.

Col. Nicobar’s sense of duty, reinforced at all levels of the British command, is not hard to admire, but our awareness of the evils it brings about forces us to stop and think. As determined as he is to carry out his orders, a combination of the true facts of the repatriation and his being prodded by the mother superior, produce a far different outcome. Looking back at the event, today’s reviewers reflect the influence of postwar revisionism that refuses to acknowledge that the Cold War was rooted in Soviet tyranny, and of "political correctness" that all too incorrectly seeks to banish religious issues from public discussion.

The good-hearted and honest colonel has difficulty reconciling the existence of massive evil in the world with the promise of love and peace that is the Christian message. He is not one to change his mind easily for, as John Adams long ago observed, "facts are stubborn things." Not only Nazi atrocities but, as he is painfully learning, Soviet atrocities shake the world, leaving men like him with the unending duty of opposing them by force. Religious sentiment, he believes, is no better than rank superstition in the face of these great evils.

Gently, but firmly, the mother superior reminds him, by her persistence in fighting for Maria’s release and even publicizing the whole repatriation issue with the Pope, as well as by her pointed observation that God did not do these wicked deeds but man, Nicobar sees a new and more compelling duty to risk his position and his sustenance by refusing to carry out any further cooperation with the Soviets’ nefarious project. The denouement will bring delight to every lover of liberty and freedom of conscience.

Momentous issues at mid century gave many people a sense of moral clarity than has seldom been seen since. We can be grateful to old Hollywood (and Turner Classic Movies) that it made films worthy of the best characters that humanity has put forth. May it plague the consciences of those who will not see the truth that is right in front of them.

Health care and justice: Reply to Sasseen

Your understanding of the health care debate is truly comprehensive and thoughtful. We must always be concerned with both individual rights and the common good. You have shown the way to deal with the present crisis in a way that is consistent with the Constitution and distributive justice. I do wish to make a few points. First, whatever the requirements of the common good, the constitutional question is crucial. That is, we are a people in virtue of the Constitution, which has formed our habits and shaped our character. These have contributed mightily to a market economy which not only distributes goods and services more efficiently and more abundantly than any other society, but has aroused expectations and even enriched and thereby empowered government agencies. We now desire universal health care because we have gotten closer to it than would have been possible in the market economy's absence. We are enduring the crisis, if not the revolution, of rising expectations.

Socialists can only dream of redistributing the wealth in the presence of the hated capitalistic system that generates massive wealth to redistribute. The socialists' quarrel with capitalism is not over its productive capacity, which even Marx more than acknowledges in the Communist Manifesto, but over its alleged failure to distribute the profits fairly. We need to be sure that, in dealing with the present difficulties, we do not "kill the goose that laid the golden eggs." That may sound trite, but we are talking about preserving our constitutional system that has brought us so many economic as well as political and social benefits.

The fact that private health insurance covers so much more than homeowners' or automobile insurance indicates just how much our expectations have been aroused. Home and auto insurance covers calamities beyond the normal or "daily recurrent needs of the household." Health insurance seeks to cover practically everything related to health, including routine office visits. More than this, the government, through Medicare and Medicaid, does much the same. The result is that most of us make health care decisions on the expectation that someone else will pay--at least directly--for them (even if we pay in the end through premiums or taxes).

We are acting less like self governing citizens of a free republic than like wards of the corporate and bureaucratic state, however benevolent. Proposals to micromanage this already socially generous system or even to replace it with a government bureaucracy threaten the constitutional order which made this generous health care financing possible. This restraint takes the form of many citizens' manifest preference for practically anything but what Democrats are now proposing, which is to scrap the free market in health altogether. Our regime made us what we are, including our generous and advanced health care.

My second point concerns the dynamics of democracy. Our constitution was established to temper and moderate the demos as much as possible, consistent with the equality and liberty sought by our people, and the authority of the majority to make public policy. While it is certainly true that democracy, in some sense, always threatens our delicate constitutional order, it is also true that in the public mind (perhaps not in the "theoretic politician's" mind) our country is not merely a democracy.  Citizens cherish constitutional restraints and protections no less. I think it remains rhetorically effective, as well as true, to appeal to the Constitution as the source of our political prosperity and not merely to defer to majority rule or to acquiese in its ultimate triumph over constitutional restraints.

The Republican party is the institutional vehicle for keeping us true to our national heritage, and it is currently doing as good a job of defending us as can be expected under the circumstances. The Democratic party, or what its founders called the Democracy, is the enemy of constitutionalism. To the extent that we Republicans make that case, we make the case against unrestrained democracy. The rule of law includes a healthy and free marketplace and not just the formal laws that govern it (not to mention the infinitude of bureaucratic rules that burden it).  That is the meaning, I believe, of your distinction between regulating commerce and managing it.

Finally, however much Hobbes and Locke have in common on the state of nature and the state of civil society, their starting and ending points differ. Because the state of nature for Hobbes is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," he opts for a monarchy over a democracy to govern it. He does leave the door open in theory to a democracy, but few readers of Hobbes believe that he has high hopes for it. On the other hand, for Locke the state of nature is "inconvenient," with all sorts of unresolvable disputes that require a settled, known law to adjudicate them. His preference for democracy is not only not theoretical but explicit, and the king is reduced to a mere executive with some but not all of the monarchical powers. In short, warlike mankind needs a monarch, according to Hobbes, whereas squabbling mankind requires a large element of self government through democratic institutions, according to Locke.

Locke, if he does not prescribe duties at least makes it far more likely that men will freely assume them because they are free to accumulate goods and therefore more able to provide for themselves and others, and even to support a government without being excessively burdened. This is another way of saying that the limited government and market economy that Locke did so much to foster satisfies the demands of the common good very well indeed.

We run the risk of "throwing out the baby with the bath water." Preserving our constitutional system is the key to maintaining our public health.

Offering and obtaining loans is not charity

In our easy-money world of low-interest loans, many draw the conclusion that we should be able to borrow money just because we want it. Whether it is conventional loans for the purchase of homes or automobiles, or credit cards for buying practically everything else, terms are easy and cheap–or so it appears. This reflects the larger commercial picture as the Federal Reserve System has been keeping its interest rates low for member banks. This is designed to avoid the monetary disaster which is the likely consequence of the government’s fiscal irresponsibility. Annual budgets of more than a trillion dollars were bad enough; now the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress have given us trillion dollar deficits!

The national debt now is more than $12 trillion (12,000,000,000,000), which is unfathomable in human terms. But what is clear is that it will never be paid off. In the meantime, the Fed is keeping interest rates low to avoid looming national bankruptcy.

But this is not sustainable. In a commercial recession that shows no significant signs of abating, our currency faces repudiation in world markets and, in due course, our own national market. No policy can keep the dollar sound when in fact it has lost its purchasing power.

If it’s any comfort to anyone, our national policy makers are as inclined to believe in fantasies about loans as all those Americans who moved into homes that they could not afford or avoided credit card fees for unpaid charges. Of course, that is no comfort at all.

Money, like any good in the marketplace, has its price. In a primitive barter system, we would be trading objects which for the most part are incommensurable. Money allows us to value the objects we want or need. But money itself does not, to state the obvious, grow on trees.

If one wants a house or a car, one has to pay for it. (At least, that’s what we all thought until the sub-prime market in real estate was cranked up by a combination of federal laws, ACORN law suits, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack credit terms.) If one wants money that one hasn’t got, one must likewise be willing to pay for it. This is plain justice for several reasons.

First, it belongs to someone else. However much one may long for someone else’s money, it is mere covetousness to imagine that one has a right to it. Just as one has no right to expect automobile dealers or owners to give one a car, or homeowners or mortgage companies to give one a house, no one is entitled to money from a bank or other lending institution.

Second, money is typically not lying around uselessly. It is invested in properties, securities or businesses that will yield a profit or dividend. The popular mythology of bankers sitting on hoards of money which they are selfishly denying to needy people needs to be discredited. No one in his right mind recklessly gives away money.

Third, money must be lent at a cost because there is no sense in taking it from a profitable venue and putting it into an unprofitable one. Money is not "free." There is a net loss for people who get back only the principal without the interest.

Fourth, loans must be repaid with interest to insure that the money lenders have a continual supply of money to lend to future borrowers. If debts are not repaid or the return falls short of where the money could have been invested more profitably, the capacity of the lenders is in question. Indeed, the capacity of borrowers to get money is seriously impaired.

In fact, the current artificially low interest rates have already pinched the market for loans. Lenders who do not wish to go out of business have found ways to protect themselves against a run on their funds by asking for more collateral or better credit.

Similarly, credit card companies try to protect their reliable customers by imposing more fees on the less reliable. Credit card users who pay off their monthly bills faithfully have been rewarded with no interest charges. Again, money must be flowing back to keep these firms in business. Where is the justice in the careful spenders subsidizing the careless ones?

The sooner we free ourselves from our addiction to easy money, the sooner our commerce will be healthy again. But that means facing facts about loans.