There is a small British-style pub in a town about two hours South of where we live in Northern Idaho. I happened to be in the area so I decided to go into the pub and do some writing before returning home.
My impression that the pub seemed British was confirmed when I bumped into Peter Hitchens from The Mail on Sunday. Going up to him, I asked what he happened to be doing in America, and in a small town in North-West Idaho of all places.
Mr. Hitchens, author of The Abolition of Britain, a staunch defender of monarchy and one of the most insightful columnists in all of Britain, explained that he was covering the election from a small-town point of view. I was thankful that he decided to choose Moscow Idaho as his “small town”, because it gave me the privilege of picking his brain.
As we began talking about the differences between American and British politics and culture, Mr. Hitchens made the point that Americans are not electing a president; they are electing a king. Moreover, he said, sometimes it even sounds like some people think they are electing God, which is bound to lead to disappointment.
Electing God? There is more than a little truth to Hitchens’ observation. The misidentification of Barack Obama with the Almighty has been a recurring confusion throughout the junior senator’s campaign. Routinely Obama is treated as a Messiah figure who will lead America out of darkness into a utopia of prosperity and happiness.
The Messianic adoration has not been limited to visual art. Obama supporters have also been composing anthems to him (one of which even parodies the Christian worship chorus ‘Sanctuary’).
Obama has himself implicitly encouraged this perception by describing his mission in Messianic terms. In his acceptance speech in Chicago on November 5, Obama told the story of American history, from its inception to its growth into civic maturity, a process which climaxes in his own utopian announcement: “Our union can be perfected.”
Frequently, Obama takes Biblical phrases and categories and re-applies them to his own mission and promises.
In order to attain this eschatological climax, Obama must attribute to the state a God-like responsibility. Thus, instead of viewing the government as a mechanism for merely maintaining law and order, the state becomes a parent who is responsible to look out for its children. As Obama himself puts it,
“[government] should...protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.... Our government should work for us...
That’s the promise of America...the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.” (From Obama’s acceptance speech at the democratic national convention, Thursday, August 28th, 2008.)
According to the Genesis account, the devil deceived Eve by saying she could be like God knowing good from evil. Barack Obama takes the devil’s lie one step further: he apparently thinks he can be God, defining good and evil. In an interview in 2004, he defined sin as “Being out of alignment with my values.” What are the values Obama has chosen to adopt for himself? While Obama likes to think he has adopted the values of Christianity (as he puts it, “Jesus is the only way for me”), he also maintains that if someone else chooses to adopt an alternative worldview, that becomes true for them: “All people of faith – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Animists, everyone – knows the same God.... I believe that there are many paths to the same place.”
Given the redefinition of sin as “being out of alignment with my values”, and given the fact that all worldviews (and presumably the value systems which proceed from those worldviews) all hit the target in the end anyway, it follows logically that right and wrong become completely relative concepts, devoid of any objective meaning.
This subjective approach to ethics is reflected in Obama’s views on abortion. Not only does he support abortion, but he supports partial-birth abortion, a procedure so brutal that it is illegal in Britain.
In this brutal procedure, the entire baby is delivered except for the head. The back of the baby's head is then punctured with scissors, causing excruciating pain to the child. A catheter is then inserted and the baby's brains are sucked out with a vacuum.
On 4 occasions, Obama has voted against bills that would protect infants who are born alive after a botched abortion attempt. In justification of his decision, he said:
“whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a - child, a nine-month-old - child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it - it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional.”
Sunday, November 09, 2008
A good friend left the following comment on my previous post, Confusing Obama With God:
“Some good points about the tendency to deify human leaders, and the conflation of religious and political ideals. Though being your brother's keeper isn't the worst of them. If Obama wants to "perfect our union," recall that George Bush set out to defeat evil. Both projects are utopian and naive. Yet neither is to be despised. What's wrong with trying to realize religious values like equality or justice through politics? We evangelicals always tout the abolition movement for doing just that. Well, the awful admission - I voted for Obama, despite his wrongness on abortion. Why? I read his first, and better, book, Dreams from My Father. I sensed a world-class intelligence, a deep moral seriousness, an extraordinary feel for language, and a budding Christian spirit. I think his profession is true, but undeveloped (consider who discipled him for 20 years). I think that, as with Lincoln, the pressures of office my have a converting effect. The Civil War forced Lincoln to a deepened humility and humanity. I hope Obama faces nothing quite that horrific, but at some point he must confront the contradiction of his ideals. There is no basis for racial equality beyond the same one for the sanctity of life - the claim that we are all made in God's image. The Democrats, coming out of the secularist wilderness, can't evade that truth forever.”
I will begin by observing that I had a friend (my boss in fact) who fell out with a girl over Obama. I won’t fall out with you, Old Tom, even though you did vote for the man.
But I will address your concerns because others may have also wondered how I could equate Obama’s views on abortion with his desire to be his brother’s keeper. I did so intentionally, because it is precisely his zealousness to realize religious values through politics that makes him so dangerous. Don’t misunderstand me here: the problem is not that Obama has religious values to impose, for all law-making is an inescapably religious endeavour if ‘religion’ can be used broadly to include a person’s worldview. Rather, the problem is that Obama’s particular religious perspective orients him to view government as a vehicle to proactively transform society for the better, to bring equality, moral consciousness and values back to the American people. In short, Obama wants to make us good. That is what makes Obama and all utopian endeavours appealing, but it is also what makes them so perilous. As C.S. Lewis remarked,
“The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.” (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ‘Is Progress Possible?’ in The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1933), p. 514.)
For Barack Obama and his utopian aspirations, our whole lives become government’s business. Hence, his words which I have already quoted from his acceptance speech at the democratic national convention:
“[government] should...protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.... Our government should work for us...That’s the promise of America...the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
To many, this does not seem a very revolutionary comment to make and it pails into insignificance next to his views on abortions. After all, we already live in a society where the air we breathe, the water we drink, the size of our toilet tank, what medicines we may take, the water pressure in our shower, the words we can speak under oath and in private, how our physician treats our illnesses, what our children study in school, what risks we are permitted to run in our own businesses, how fast we can drive our car, what wealth we may retain are all regulated by federal law. We take it for granted that the government should be working, like a good parent, to direct out every move and meet our every need. Only when a law goes against one of our cherished freedoms do we sit up and cry “tyranny”, while never challenging the basic underlying paraidgm of government. We tend to focus on whether we agree with the actual policies, plans and goals in questions that someone like Obama may be proposing, rather than asking the prior and more fundamental question, "Is it government's job to even be legislating in these areas?"
The model of government that I am challenging is one which I call “the maternal state.” The maternal state is there it nurture us, to train us, to instruct us, to keep our toys safe, to be guardian of our possessions, to be our tutor in the way of virtue and, like a good mother, to make sure we share our belongings with our brothers and sisters.
The confusion between statecraft and motherhood is an ancient one. When Diocletian published his Edict of 301, mandating the persecution of Christians and destroying the few remaining liberties of the old Roman republic, he justified it by referring to himself and his associates as “the watchful parents of the whole human race.” Contemporary governments are increasingly following the pattern of Diocletian by acting, not simply as the guardians of law and order, but as mother to their citizens.
Part of a mother’s vocation involves educating her children in the path of virtue (Proverbs 1:8-9) and nourishing their bodies in growth. When government assumes the role of mother, the state begins to have a constant eye on our education, an eye on our virtue, an eye on our growth and an eye on the all-round development of the human personality. Our lives become their business because, like a good mother, they have assumed responsibility for our growth and training.
While no one would dispute the fact that virtue is necessary in a society, when government assumes responsibility for the cultivation of virtue, the result is more likely to be terror. (See Michael Ovey, ‘Beyond scrutiny? Minorities, majorities and post-modern tyranny’)
The French Revolution is one of the prime modern examples of a state assuming responsibility for the private lives of its citizens under the guise of promoting virtue. During the Revolution’s ‘Reign of Terror’, Robespierre justified the use of terror by appealing to the need for both private and public virtue. (See ‘Justification of the Use of Terror’, available online HERE).
The incessant eagerness of the law-maker to act as parent to citizens is expressed in Abraham Lincoln’s words that “the legitimate object of government" is only "to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves...." The presupposition behind this idea is that the State, like a good mother, must offer a helping hand wherever the citizens are incapable or in need. Otto von Bismarck, the great German Chancellor of the 19th century, suggested similarly when he asserted that government must act “in fulfilment of the workers' right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”
A good mother will determine what objects her children are allowed to possess and how they are allowed to use them. If a brother is using a stick to hurt his little sister, the mother has the right – indeed the duty - to step in and remove the instrument. This only makes sense because there is a prior understanding that a child’s ownership is provisional and can be overruled at any given time by parental interference. This not only protects the child from potentially harmful objects, but helps them learn to be responsible with their possessions and to share them with other siblings when appropriate. All ownership proceeds from the parent in so far as the child owns nothing that the parent has not given or allowed.
In following the maternal paradigm, the modern state has no scruples exercising ownership over all the land and the fullness thereof. One of the ways the “public welfare” does this is by redistributing wealth and dictating how citizens can utilize their property. A.P. Lerner was typical when he defended governmental interference with the economy on the grounds that it was “a form of guardianship…to prevent foolish spending.” (Abba P. Lerner, The Economics of Control) In following the maternal paradigm, Obama has advocated such redistribution on numerous occasions, not least in his comments on the Warren Court:
"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted....I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way."
See my friend Russell Mann's comments on this quote here.
Not only does Mother State believe she has a right to plunder the profits of individuals (effectively forcing us to share our toys with our siblings), but she also views herself as possessing ownership of money in the collective. This can be seen in the pervasive assumption that it is government’s job to control and manipulate the economy, interest rates, cash flow, etc, (which I commented on in my article on the financial crises). At the risk of over simplification, that is the whole point of the American Federal Reserve: to regulate the economy through manipulation of interest rates.
Unconsciously, many in the West are oriented to think that everything belongs to the state by default and what is ours is only that which government has graciously allowed us to keep. However, a citizen population presupposes citizen ownership, seeing that a citizen who cannot engage in free trade and ownership is not properly a citizen at all but bears the same relation to the state that a slave bears to its master or a dependent child to its mother.
Karl Marx was wiser than most when he recognized this relationship between property and family. Marx claimed that because the family is based on capital and private property, a successfully attack on private property would necessarily also involve an attack on the family. The family, he and Engels wrote, “will vanish with the vanishing of capital.” One of the methods communism used to ensure the vanishing of the family was state control of education. (See chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto) Marx knew that destroying the family was central to destroying private property, and destroying private property was essential to destroying the family. When the family was destroyed it would be replaced by the family of the state. Communism was as much about a new form of motherhood as it was about economic theory.
Marx ideas about private property were hardly novel. According to many of his Enlightenment predecessors, the advent of private property represented a kind of fall of man. As J.L. Talmon observed,
"Not only avowed Communists…but also Rousseau, Diderot and Helvetius were agreed that ‘all these evils are the first effect of property and of the array of evils inseparable from the inequality to which it gave birth’. Diderot contrasted the ‘esprit de propriété’ with the ‘esprit de communauté’. He admonished the Legislator to combat the former and to foster the latter, if his aim were to make man’s personal will identical with the general will. Rousseau’s eloquent passage on the first man who enclosed a plot of land with a fence, deceived his neighbors into the belief in the legality of his act, and thus became the author of all the wars, rivalries, social evils and demoralization in the world, is not more radical than Morelly’s and Mably’s obsessive insistence that property is the root cause of all that has gone wrong in history." (J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy)
A good parent assumes responsibility for fixing problems that exist in the home and the family. Consequently, a child’s problem is never just the child’s problem: it is also the mother’s problem. The similarity between this aspect of motherhood and the contemporary state hardly needs pointing out. We live in an age where the prevailing assumption is that all problems in society are the government’s responsibility to fix. William Buckley described this tendency well.
“If there is crime in the street, it is because government does not provide enough day care. If there is unemployment in the steel mills, it is because the government is using too much steel making submarines. If there is a growing number of broken homes, it is because government has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment.”
A state that assumes maternity feels compelled to keep a careful watch over the education, money, speech and even thoughts of its citizens. Political scientist Andrew Hacker defended government’s role in taking responsibility over all the activities of its citizens on the grounds that
"If government is to govern it must be able to tell people they must stop doing things they are now doing; it must be able to curtail private activities and privileges so that society will be more orderly. Leadership is meaningless unless citizens are prepared to follow: to sacrifice individual pleasures and agree to redistributions in which they may be losers. To be a nation, in short, a society must have a citizenry willing to surrender a substantial portion of its freedom to public authority."
As a good mother shows compassion to her children, especially when they are ailing, so the maternal state offers its own compassion to the masses. As President George Bush once revealingly remarked: “when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”
When Mussolini first coined the word “Totalitarianism”, it was not a pejorative slur, nor was it something connoting tyranny. Rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its grasp. Because this is not the job of the government, compassion from the state is usually a prelude to tyranny. The beneficent state naturally morphs into a malignant state.
Just as the impulse to be a faithful dog is ennobling in a dog but demeaning when exhibited by a man, so the mothering instinct is nurturing in a mother but tyrannical when assumed by the state.
And that is why I did not vote for Obama. I see in him someone who is honestly, sincerely and wholeheartedly acting from altruistic motives, and that is why I consider him so dangerous. As C.S. Lewis again put it,
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." C.S. Lewis, ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ in God in the Dock (op. cit., p. 499). See also R. Andrew Newman, ‘Stay Out of Our Wardrobe! The libertarian Narnia state’
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
The Hidden Tax
"When the value of Americans' savings is deliberately eroded through inflation, that is a tax, albeit a hidden one. I call it the inflation tax, a tax that is all the more insidious for being so underhanded: most Americans have no idea what causes it or why their standard of living is going down. Meanwhile, government and its favored constiuencies receive their ill-gotten loot. The raket is safe as long as no one figures out what is going on." Ron Paul, from The Revolution, pp. 143-144.
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. – As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
"To steal from the shoemaker the fruit of his labor, one can take his product or the money he has received for it. Or else one can so tamper with the monetary system that the money will not serve to purchase economic goods equivalent to the product the shoemaker provides. Outright stealing is widely recognized for what it is, but the economic crime that accomplishes the same thing through debasing the money is not. Yet the motive and the effect are the same." (Herbert Schloassberg, Idols of Destruction, p. 90.)
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Control Through Crisis, by Robin Phillips
http://robinphillips.blogtownhall.com/2009/01/28/control_through_crisis,_by_robin_phillips.thtml
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
Classical Greece and Rome had a tradition of appointing a dictator during times of crisis. After the crisis finished, the dictator stepped down and government returned to normal, usually to some form republic or oligarchy.
Following this tradition, modern leaders frequently appeal to times of real or alleged 'crisis' to persuade the populace to entrust them with powers that would normally be distributed. Obama and his team is no exception.
The economic crisis facing the country is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before." So said Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff under Barack Obama. The comment was made to business leaders assembled by the Wall Street Journal in November of last year. In the conversation, which is available on Youtube, Emanuel went on to say, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Control Through Crises
Though Emanuel did not specify what “things” he was referring to, it is not hard to guess. It has been a hallmark of American liberalism to use disasters (whether economic, military, environmental or domestic) as a means for increased government control. Knowing that most citizens value security over freedom, and are only too happy to sacrifice the latter if it can increase the former, lawmakers with totalitarian aspirations have never hesitated to greet crises as wonderful opportunities.
In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg chronicles the most significant liberal administrations in modern American history, showing that it was through national calamities – real or imagined – that Americans were persuaded piecemeal to surrender their liberties. In this monument of historical research, Goldberg relates how a long line of Presidents progressively scared the American public into accepting the bloated power of the executive branch as the only alternative to various crises. Barack Obama is well versed in these scare same tactics. On the first of the month, the (then)President-elect warned an audience at George Mason University of the dire consequences that would occur if Congress failed to adopt his stimulus package. Like his statist forefathers, Obama waves the magic wand of government as the only solution. As he put it, “only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.” Ignoring other credible solutions to the economic downturn - such as returning to the gold standard or abolishing the federal reserve system that caused the recession in the first place - Obama wants Americans to believe that the only answer is to trust officialdom with control of our finances.
Following a Keynesian approach to economics, in which governments are encouraged to spend their way out of financial difficulties, Obama’s “stimulus package” entails the largest US budget deficit since World War II and could add nearly US$1 trillion to the $10.64 trillion national debt over the next two years. But more worringly, it would introduce unprecedented levels of government control by greatly nationalizing the economy and bringing America one step closer toward socialism. For Americans who value security over liberty, this is a small price to pray.
Obama: America's Bismarck?
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “If we don’t know our own history then we simply have to endure all of the same mistakes and all of the same sacrifices and all of the same absurdities over again times ten.” History shows that the beneficent state which increases its power in order to offer “security” to its citizens, morphs naturally into a malignant state which preys on the rights of its citizens. For example, when Hitler came to power in Germany, it was in the wake of Otto von Bismarck having first oriented the German people to “gradually...value security over political freedom and cause[ing] them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.” (William Lawrence Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
Between 1883 and 1889 Bismarck put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included a compulsory insurance for workers to help them in old age, sickness, accident and incapacity. This was organized by the State but financed by employers and employees, who were thereby forced to surrender a significant portion of their economic liberty. Had Bismarck never oriented the Germans to value security over freedom, it is doubtful that Hitler would ever have gained such widespread acceptance. Hitler himself remarked in Mein Kampf: “I studied Bismarck's socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.” The principle behind Bismarck legislation was simple: remove people’s freedoms under the guise of being cared for. I am not suggesting that Obama is a Hitler. However, he may be the American version of Heir Bismarck, creating the infrastructure for a totalitarian state by elevating security above liberty in his “care” of the American people. (Interestingly, when Mussolini first coined the word “Totalitarianism,” it was not a pejorative slur but a positive term to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state. Naturally, such a state had to encompass all of life within its grasp.) For Obama, care is also the primary vocation of government. As he put it in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention,
“Government should...protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.... Our government should work for us... That’s the promise of America...the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
The utopian fervour with which Obama views the state was reaffirmed in his speech in Chicago on November 5, 2008. He told the story of American history, from its inception to its growth into civic maturity in a “new dawn of American leadership” – a process that climaxes in his own utopian announcement: “Our union can be perfected.”
Given his utopian aspirations, the economic crisis is indeed a wonderful opportunity that the Obama’s administration would hate to see go to waste. It is only at such times that people are willing to surrender substantive portions of liberty – in this case economic liberty – in exchange for the promise of security. Richard Weaver warned of this in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favours, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”
Friday, April 03, 2009
G20 Madness
I’m very tired after a long week of work, but I just can’t go to bed without posting something about yesterday’s nefarious G20 conference.
President Obama proudly announced that the agreements reached at the G20 summit in London had marked ‘a turning point’ in the pursuit of global economic recovery. I agree that the conference on Financial Markets and the World Economy did indeed mark a turning point. They marked a turning point in the fundamental role and responsibility of government. The G20 summit put into sharp relief the emerging set of assumptions which have been slowly overthrowing the formulations of sovereignty and liberty articulated in the historic American and British traditions.
The first of these emerging assumptions is that times of crisis require restriction of liberties. In terms of world history as a whole, this isn’t a new idea. The classical Greek city states as well as pre-imperial Rome had a tradition of appointing a dictator during times of crisis. After the crisis finished, the dictator was expected to step down and government would return to normal, usually in some form of republic or oligarchy.
The classic British and American traditions, on the other hand, have prized liberty just as highly as safety, as encapsulated in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Similarly, the great constitutional charters of the British tradition, such as the Magna Charta and the 1689 Declaration of Rights, took it for granted that the crown was just as responsible to safe-guard liberty as to preserve national security.
It is beyond the scope of this post to chart how, piece by piece, liberty has been sacrificed on the altar of security, in both American and the British contexts. Suffice to say that this process reached fruition in the decisions and ominous rhetoric of the G20 summit this week.
Taking it for granted that the way out of the crisis is more regulation and Government control of everything from banks to hedge funds, Obama boasted to the G-20 leaders that America has been pursuing “the strongest regulatory reforms any nation has contemplated...” Appealing to the international financial crisis as the justification for unprecedented global controls, Obama praised the G20 countries who were following America’s example of Government “partnering” with the private sector. Those who followed the news this week will know what this “partnering” meant in practice. After Obama rejected Chrysler and General Motors' restructuring plans, virtually fired the chairman of General Motors and gave Chrysler 30 days to merge with Italian automaker Fiat, the line between Government and the private sector has grown very transparent. “Partnering”, it turns out, is a code-word for nationalizing.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that Mr. Obama, like the other G-20 leaders, means well. Totalitarians always do. I have pointed out before that when Mussolini first coined the word “totalitarianism”, it was not a pejorative slur, nor was it something connoting tyranny; rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its grasp. The oppressive totalitarian state always begins by being the compassionate totalitarian state.
Richard Weaver warned of this tendency in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favours, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”
That then, is the first assumption that underpinned the G-20 conference: times of crisis require restriction of liberties.
The other assumption underpinning the G-20 conference is that national sovereignty is the enemy of peace. In the post-national climate of contemporary politics, it is routinely assumed that any nation that has too much autonomy is in a position to hold the rest of the world to ransom. Gordon Brown said, "I think the new world order is emerging, and with it the foundations of a new and progressive era of international co-operation." That may be fine words for countries like Britain who sold its sovereignty to Europe long ago, but what about those nations who don’t want to co-operate with this new G20 oligarchy? The long and the short is that they get penalized. For example, the G2o leaders announced that those nations that are tax havens will be put on a trade blacklist. Instead of letting each nation create its own banking and transparency laws, nations will effectively be bribed into complying with international regulations.
I grant that preserving the autonomy of independent states makes for a messy world. It makes for war. But consider the alternative? Immanuel Kant hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “The idea of the law of nations presupposes the distinction between independent states. Although this is a state of war...it is still, according to reason, better than the fusion of those states by means of a hierarchy of power culminating in a universal monarchy. Laws which are passed for a large area lose their vigour, and such a soulless despotism, after it has hollowed out the kernel of goodness, ultimately collapses into anarchy.”
It is getting late and I must be wrapping up. The final assumption that permeated the G20 conference is that governments are justified in plundering their citizens.
Jose Luis Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain was jubilant when he said, “We have set in motion the greatest concerted plan of fiscal expansion in history. It is unprecedented. It reaches five trillion ... This amount will contribute in a decisive way to facilitate a recovery of the world economy and to preserve millions of jobs." Oh joy, but did it occur to anyone to ask how the G20 countries are going to finance this huge injection of cash? As with Obama's stimulus package, the answer is that it will be paid by the tax payer. In a Keynesian circle that is so well articulated in THIS video, governments will be plundering the market in order to inject money into the market. Like the movie villain Dr. Evil, who demands a vast sum to avert world catastrophe, the world leaders are effectively telling us that unless we fork up, the world’s economy will end in ruin. (Even money that is borrowed is eventually paid for by plundering the citizens, as is money that is arbitrarily printed, as THESE quotations show.)
I suppose here I ought to wrap things up with a nice little conclusion. But I'm going to go to bed instead.