The last two years have seen a vigorous national debate about the role of government in the management of the economy. With certain sectors of the economy almost collapsing under the weight of imprudence and greed and resultant bailouts and stimulus packages, the very concept of unfettered markets has been challenged in the minds of many, while accusations of ‘socialism’ have been bandied about by others.

By its very nature, a robust free market with minimal regulatory interference cannot survive in an amoral secular environment. The liberty to profit from production of goods and services can never be unlimited in a stable society. Unchecked greed, not an uncommon human instinct, easily leads to chaos, anarchy, and ultimately a dissolution of functioning societies. The limits on such human instincts can come from within, in the form of individual conscience and social sanctions . Or they can come from without, in the shape of legislation and regulation.  While a sharp conscience is hardly an exclusive preserve for those who go to church, organized religion is the most widespread and time tested platform for an ethical rulebook for the masses. Dismissing the church, synagogue, mosque and temple as irrelevant to the concept of markets is reflective of dogma rather than introspection.

 

One of the most prominent social sanctions to check capitalism is unionization which, in its extreme form, can encompass compulsory membership, frequent strikes, and intimidation. An observer needs only look at Europe to see the correlation of faith and economic freedom. The most highly regulated economies are those of Scandinavia and  the most unionized one is that of France, all countries that are home to the most secularized Western populations. Conversely, largely observant Ireland and Poland host economies least constrained by the state and far less troubled by organized labor disputes. By the same measure, we can contrast the freer economy of the more church-going United States with that of Canada where the population is far more secular.

If men were angels, opined Thomas Jefferson, governments would not be necessary. Taking a practical step backwards form that flourishing dictum, we can perhaps argue that if people have well developed consciences, big governments may be unnecessary in the marketplace.

The president is trying his best to balance our global image, our constitutional heritage, and our security needs realizing that paranoia and xenophobia are not only unproductive but counter-productive to the mission at hand.

Part of the CIA’s problem is that since the Stansfield Turner era under Carter, we have progressively hamstrung the agency’s manpower with encumbering it with affirmative action programs. This is not just another government agency. It worked best when bright, patriotic, stoic, and well educated young men of good families quietly worked there to assure our national security.

Errol Southers nomination as TSA chief should be stopped dead in its tracks. A man who has repeatedly abused his authority to run background checks on individuals to grind a personal axe (in his case, on his former wife’s lovers) should be prosecuted and jailed, not put in charge of a vital component of national security. On top of that. Mr. Southers wants to unionize TSA, something unheard of in front line agencies. Frankly, public employees being unionized is wrong in principle and potentially dangerous in practice.

 The fear expressed by conservatives in the 1990s that, thanks to Bill Clinton’s social engineering policies our warships will become ‘floating maternity wards’ is coming to pass very well, as this story shows.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_iraq_military_pregnancy

That liberal Democrat senators have chosen, once again, to interfere on behalf of their radical feminist patrons says quite a bit about their disregard for military ethics. That my fellow Kansan Bob Gates has stood silent instead of supporting General Cucolo is disappointing.

The military is in the business of fighting wars, not crafting a social experiment at the behest of the those who seek to dangerously remake the building blocks of society. Please, take your experiments to Berkley or some other place where they won’t endanger the national security of the Republic. Let generals and soldiers do their job. It is bad enough that we have to send a battalion of lawyers before soldiers are sent into war zones; it is a mockery that now we will have to send therapists, counselors, and obstetricians as well.

In case the liberals didn’t get the memo: America is at war.

Some of the earliest organized English settlements in the New World were called commonwealths, rather than states or colonies. Even today, four of the states of our Union-Massachussetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky-officially designate themselves as commonwealths rather than states, unlike the other forty six states. The difference in nomenclature is one of pure semantics today. It wasn’t so always. The founding fathers of those entities purposely chose the commonwealth moniker to emphasize the nature of their respective governments’ public trust in looking after the common weal.

That common weal was hardly looked after in the trillion dollar health care bill that has been rammed through the Senate this week, with support from the six senators from the Commonwealths of VA, MA, and PA. It was a naked display of parochial bribery rather than the public trust as hesitant and vulnerable senators were purchased with taxpayer money. The most expensive were Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana who were each bought for almost five hundred million; less expensive were Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota who each had price tags of over a hundred million. Looking at the auction market that has been the United States Senate this Christmas, it is hard to argue with President Reagan’s observation that politics is an undertaking very similar to humanity’s oldest profession.

A trillion dollars is money beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Yet, it is the ordinary people’s money.  Much of the amount will be, in the short- and medium term, financed by public debt and increased revenue generation. This is liquidity that could have been otherwise available to the private sector for job growth and trade expansion. Granted, some of it will arguably go towards delivering actual healthcare; but a large proportion will be overhead geared towards bureaucrats with fancy titles and lawyers with kinship to politicians.

This bill is not an example of taking care of the common weal. Rather, it a study in the plundering thereof.

Almost a two hundred years ago, one of our greatest statesmen, Daniel Webster, made a passionate plea to the Supreme Court to let small Dartmouth College survive the onslaught of bureaucratic zeal “Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But if you do so you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it”

Well, the heavy hands of the Obama administration are now on the tiny Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. A small liberal arts institution run by the gentle Benedictine monks, Belmont Abbey is on the receiving end of federal investigation and possible prosecution by three arms of this administration: the Civil Rights Commission, the EEOC, and the Justice Department.

The crime of Belmont Abbey is its faith: it is college that follows the Roman Catholic teachings in letter and spirit. And few trait are more worthy prosecution and persecution in these times than authentic, counter-cultural, traditional Roman Catholic living.

You all know that KsReaganite is neither Roman Catholic nor subscribes to every tenet of Catholic teaching. But I urge you to support the cause of Belmont Abbey College because if is the cause of individual liberty and conscience. So, please help the college out as it fights against a bureaucracy that has no limits on zeal or funding. You can make a contribution here to the Belmont Abbey Chancellor’s Fund.

https://secure2.convio.net/bac/site/Donation2?idb=396605211&2480.donation=form1&df_id=2480&JServSessionIdr004=d7e5dejl25.app9a

Apart from the fact that he belongs to the same fraternal organization that I do, there is little to like politically about Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. It was all the more refreshing, thus, to find him bravely sponsoring an amendment to allow the re-importation of prescription drugs from abroad. Apart from the obviously cost cutting element inherent in the proposal, it embodies the very essence of free markets. With drug prices at all time highs, the only two ways to control them would be to either slap price controls or allow for more competition.

The fact is that drugs of a similar or even better quality are significantly cheaper abroad due to regulations, competition, and production costs. Notwithstanding the incessant propaganda, not only are drugs made in many countries at least as safe as ours, but our bureaucracy has the tools and staff to check for quality at the point of importation. Heck, even today the number one source of chemicals that go into our drugs is India; and to think that somehow Canadian drugs are unsafe!

The drug companies, as Senator Dorgan rightly points out, want the American people to subsidize their profits but fighting against trade and competition. Sadly, otherwise pro-free trade Republican senators are buying into the drug companies’ argument hook, line, and sinker.  By failing to pass the Dorgan amendment, the Senate has shown that it has a strong bi-partisan caucus that abjures the principles of free trade and swallows the nonsense of xenophobia for the sake of contributions from the drug lords..er…the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies.

There is understandable anger at big banks raking in loads of money when the average American is mired in economic uncertainty. The instinctive reaction, perhaps tinged with a liberal dose of vengefulness, is to impose more regulations to keep banks honest. Most of these regulations fall into one of three categories:

1. unnecessary, i.e. requiring checking account statements to have square sized grids on the bottom of the last page to display overdraft fees
2. counterproductive, i.e., making overdraft privilege very difficult for debit card transactions which will result in two (from bank and merchant) overdraft fees to customers, not to mention the embarrassment
3. designed to create more jobs for bureaucrats, i.e., the proposed legislation to create a fourth financial regulatory agency, notwithstanding the three we already pay for

A better solution would have been helping banks police themselves for standards of service and ethical conduct. Why not a White House conference pulling in all the major banking CEOs who can set up an industry-wide authority (like a banker’s Better Business Bureau) which sets standards, grades service, sanctions bad behavior, and publishes all this so that the public can make more informed decisions? Those banks that score well on these measurements could be rewarded with more access to government contracts while those who come up short will have an incentive to do better to compete for the same largesse, without costing an additional cent in public money.  Together as partners, rather than as adversaries, can the government and banks be better stewards of the consumers’ shaken confidence.

 It is only fitting that the first state dinner of the Obama presidency was for the Prime Minister of India. I will venture out a loud prediction that in thirty odd years, the only ‘other’ super power will be India. For all the talk of a united Europe, resurgent Russia, and gigantic China becoming peers to the greatness of the United States, frankly it hasn’t happened and is not likely to. Sure, Europe or Russia or China are great powers with even greater potential in some areas of achievement. But none of them have the ‘package’ of India’s strengths, a package that mirrors that of a rising America of the 1920s and predicates sustainable success across the board.

Supporting the infrastructure of a multi-party federal democracy is a market that is growing by the thousands every day as more and more Indians leap into the middle class and hundreds join the elite of information technology professionals. Undergirding a very diverse multi-ethnic society in India is the extended family unit, not unlike our own during the frontier days of the late nineteenth century, which is largely untouched by the meltdown of the family structure that rages through much of old Europe. Old fashioned in many ways but equipped with cell phones and speaking English in the spheres of commerce and technology, Indians are a bunch on the move with strength.

Not surprisingly that strength is also visible in India’s military. Producing much of the hi-tech hardware itself, manned by regiments whose warrior traditions have been proven from the fields of the Flanders to the peaks of the Himalayas, India’s million strong armed forces are easily a match for China and Russia today (interestingly, today India has more aircraft carriers than Russia and China put together).

India has potential for the long term, a potential built on a sustaining blend of participatory politics, strong family structure, and an economy fuelled by a mass market and professionals of tomorrow’s technology. This will be our adversary, hopefully, without being our enemy.

We have put a considerable distance, I’d like to think, from the times and climes which strictly dictated what a woman should wear or shouldn’t. Granted that many women, just like many men, do take the concept of sartorial autonomy to the edge, as any HR manager will tell you.  The wardrobe or makeup of female anchors and reporters on FOX News is anything but outside the bounds of business decorum. Nonetheless, there has been a consistent whine all around liberal blogosphere about this silly matter, culminating in it being brought up this week on CNN’s Joy Behar show.  Unhappy and outraged over FOX’s stratospheric ratings success, its leftwing enemies are desperate; hence the targeting of the ladies at FOX. The trigger was provided, unfortunately, by FOX’s own Megyn Kelley who, in answer to a joke, affirmed that women at the network preferred wearing skirts because such attire was more feminine than pants. A matter of opinion that is neither here nor there but perhaps one that finds nods across much of FOX’s audience demographic.

Of course, an innocuous remark like that set off the cholesterol levels of the liberals and feminists. They took umbrage, they were outraged, and their avante garde research concluded that FOX was the most sexist network because..get this…its female anchors were all blonde, attractive, and wore nice skirts. You’d think those are the criteria that feminists would be outraged to judge any woman by! But then, what do I know about the most recent advances in contemporary feminist thought.

If the wardrobe of FOX anchors was an issue at all, a normal person would have concluded this: the anchors wear what they prefer in their professional wisdom. Were there space for even more spin, we could add that indeed the slightly center right fan base of FOX probably associates pantsuits with Hillary Clinton anyway. Then there is the simple business fact that most of FOX’s most ardent viewers are men between thirty and fifty years of age. How many such men do you know who do not like an articulate blonde in a fitted skirt and heels?  

Take it from an MBA: it makes business sense.

That justice has to be seen to be done is a maxim as old as the basic architecture of the laws of the English speaking peoples. It is just and proper to try the accused masterminds of 9/11 at the vey place where this cowardly massacre took place. Our very constitution makes it crystal clear in the Sixth Amendment. Not only will our faith in the supremacy of our constitution be vindicated thus, but also our declaration to the world that our cause is so just that it needs not hiding behind barbed wire off the shores of a little island. American justice must be seen and done, in open, with boldness, and with the faith of our Founding Fathers guiding us and the trust of the generations to come held in sanctity. Yes. KSM and his cronies must be tried at the American bar of justice next door to the sanctified ground where we shall one day build the Freedom Tower.

It is not often that I write to sing praises of a liberal Democrat who supports public employee unions and votes for tax increases. Tonight is one of those rare exceptions because the courage showed by Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) during the weekend’s healthcare debate is even rarer. On behalf of a constituency that has no rights, no voice, and no vote, and against the wishes of the entire machinery of his own party and President, the former lawman showed why once upon a time cops were universally respected.  I do hope fervently that the healthcare bill is packed off into history to bother us no more. In the very unfortunate even that it does become law, however, I would be somewhat relieved if the Stupak Amendment is part of that law. Nothing is more politically offensive than being asked to pay my tax dollars to support, even indirectly, those hedonistic people who kill their own children for convenience. The Stupak Amendment assures that those tax dollars will not go to support infanticide, but rather help poor children with needed pre-natal, post-natal, and immunization regimes.

Last week Pope Benedict moved to welcome traditional Anglicans/Episcopalians into the Roman Catholic Church with their liturgies and episcopates largely intact. Whether the pontiff’s initiative is a genuine reflection of his concern for greater Christian unity or cynical ploy for ‘expanding market share’  when the ‘competition’ is in disarray, it does serve to put in glaring light the abyss, spiritual and temporal, that is the American Episcopal Church (ECUSA). Some would argue that calling New York based ECUSA a ‘church’ is stretching the definition of the word too much.

Indeed, today’s rapidly declining ECUSA is better known for liberal activism on behalf of any number of colorful causes like global poverty, climate change, hate speech legislation, and gay marriage rather than for sublime spirituality or substantive theology.  Leading ECUSA bishops openly question the most basic Christian precepts and creeds. The result has been a heaemmoraghe of members from an organization which, a mere generation ago, was considered the premier church of America counting amongst its congregants any number of Presidents, CEO, chancellors, cabinet members, and theologians. The marriage of the ECUSA with the equally theologically irrelevant ELCA Lutherans some years ago has done nothing to stanch the flow of orthodox Episcopalians and Lutherans to the more substantive branches of their own heritage (or to the various evangelical denominations).

The Pope’s gambit, as one East Coast journalist called it, should serve as another impetus in the continuing task of consolidating the several strands of non-ECUSA Anglicanism in North America which began this summer with the launch of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Seeking ultimately to become a full fledged province of the global Anglican Communion, ACNA is ambitiously bringing together and diligently organizing disparate elements of disaffected ECUSA parishes, Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Evangelical congregations, and small outposts of reformed Anglicans across Canada and the United States.  It is a gigantic task but a noble one with the ultimate aim of bringing under one umbrella the millions of Christians who devoutly hold to both Biblical precepts and their Anglican heritage as enshrined in the 39 Articles of Faith that have served as the anchor of Anglican Christianity since the sixteenth century.

 I have said this before and I will say it again: victims of crimes are victims of crimes, glaring reminders of a law enforcement system that failed them and utterly deserving of swift justice that a free society can and must provide them. The race, religion, gender, sexual habits, or disability of the victim should be of no concern to the justice system whose task remains the identification, prosecution, and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  We cheapen the horror of a crime and violate the principle of equal justice under the law when we decide that some victims of the same crime are less worthy than others.

By signing the so called ‘hate’ crimes legislation today, President Obama and his radical liberal allies have gone down that very path of creating two sets of victims: the preferred ones and the ordinary ones. On top of that, they have expanded the heavy hand of the federal government both into state jurisdiction and into free speech and free thought. Another proof that liberals are not really friends of, well, liberty.

Liberals and their middle class educated ‘moderate’ cohorts will rejoice today at the so-called Matthew Shepard Act. But no mistake about it, not too far in time from today the basis of that very law will be used to expand federal power to control the actions of groups and individuals with whom liberals sympathize; it will be perhaps a war time Republican president who will find it easy to expand his powers to consider anti-war speech to be a ‘hate’ crime. Moderates and liberals who cheer today will be shedding tears that day; tears that they will very richly deserve.

This despicable law is another effort to raise money from San Francisco donors, muzzle religious speech, and provide federal employment graduates of second class law schools and third class gender studies programs.