Two Old Germans Drinking Coffee

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Is the title of this piece in The American Interest.  Generally I read TAI in connection with Walter Russell Meade’s blog, but the link in a side-bar caught my eye and — thanks to the wonders of the internet — hey presto! I was there.

A couple of quick thoughts:  I’d known that Angela Merkel was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor in the Soviet Occupation Zone East Germany but hadn’t understood that the new Bundespräsident is himself a former pastor, likewise from the old zone.  This might well be a coincidence.  On the other hand maybe not.  Among my favorite reads of the last several years is rather thick book titled The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson, which is an intellectual and cultural history of the area known now as Germany from 1750 to just recently.  The author (British) starts his foreward with the observation, backed up by survey data, that at least in Britain the twelve years of the Nazi era have pretty much eradicated awareness that long before the Austrian corporal emerged from the grit and slime there was German thought, philosophy, literature, science, music, industry, and innovation.  Up through 1933 Germans had won more Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry than all other nations put together.  The modern university, especially the research university, is a more or less Prussian institution.  In short, there are way more moving parts to Germany, what it was and what it is, and how it got both ways, than you can comfortably fit inside a gas oven.  Watson’s book, like Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, is a tremendous source of for-further-reading inspiration.  In any book of that scope there won’t be space enough fully to submerge oneself in the details of what might interest, but its scope will (i) plow up enough subjects that the reader will find multiple topics to explore in greater detail elsewhere, and (ii) if the endnotes are consulted, provide some good hints at where to start looking for those greater details.

In any event, one of the interesting factoids to which Watson calls attention, more than once, is the frequency with which the drivers and visionaries of Germany thought and progress all have, somewhere in their biographies, the data point that they were children of Protestant pastors.

The other interesting point made in the linked article is the difference between the ages of the principals: Benedict was born in 1927; Gauck only in 1940.  While at their respective ages one might think 13 years not too significant, its true importance becomes apparent when you consider how old each was in 1944-45, as Everything Went to Pieces in the Reich.  Joseph Ratzinger was 18 in 1945, nearly a full-grown adult, and while not possessing an adult’s full measure of adaptive capacity, at least sufficiently aware of the world to make some kind of sense of it.  Gauck, however, was among the very youngest Kriegskinder, those children who — especially in the east — were exposed to the horrors of industrialized warfare without emotional defenses of any kind.  I’ve already posted on what has been called the “forgotten generation,” and the damage those children took with them into later life.  What is the likelihood that Gauck’s approach to politics is not to some degree colored by his partially-processed, overwhelming recollections of the war’s end, and his father’s arrest and enslavement by the communists?

Is it, in other words, wholly surprising that two “old Germans” of their respective generations and backgrounds would both perceive the de-Christianization of Europe to be among the more important issues facing Western Civilization?

Jauchzet, frohlocket! Auf, preiset die Tage!

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This video is pretty old.  The conductor, Nikolaur Harnoncourt, has quite a few more miles on him these days, but he’s still The Goods.  He’s made it his specialty to re-create music using original instruments wherever possible, so what we get to hear is as close as we’re likely to get to what the composer would have had in mind.

This is the first movement of the first cantata of the Christmas Oratorio.  The final movement of the sixth and last is here (I just shoved it in because the trumpet is Ludwig Güttler, who absolutely rocks; the video shots are in Transylvania):

I may have pasted either or both of the above videos here before, but if I have, so what?  It’s my blog, after all.

Now and Then, There’s a Fool

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Such as I am, over you.  You taught me how to love and now you say that we are through.

I first heard this Hank Snow song in July, 1987.  It was in (by gentle irony) Snow’s native Canada, as I was driving from Michigan to Newport, Rhode Island.  On June 13, 1987, Garrison Keillor broadcast what he represented to be the last show of A Prairie Home Companion, which has to rank as one of the most magnificent experiments in American popular entertainment, ever.  I’d been at sea, and my mother had recorded it off the radio for me.

For reasons unnecessary to explain fully here, this song really sank in, all the way up the shaft to the feathers.  It still does, although for not quite the same reasons.

Hank Snow died on December 20, 1999.  May he live on, in his songs and music.

Let’s Pull Things Apart, Before We Decide

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As Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

What I like about this piece on guns, gun crime, and gun criminals is what it does not pretend to know.  It does not offer a panacea, or (pun intended) a magic bullet.  It does not focus on what people think, but rather what they do.  Which is all we can respond to, when you get right down to it.  How do people actually act?

This is Why I Get Antsy

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When I hear people talking about “reasonable restrictions” on the right guaranteed (not established, by the way) by the Second Amendment.

We are assured that no right is absolute.  We in fact can look about us and confirm that much for a fact.  We have all heard that my rights stop at the tip of your nose; which is likewise correct.  We are told that, in order to make a society of 310 million-odd people rub along in some sort of fashion, you’ve got to be willing to take some jack-planing to things you’d rather hold dear.  Also correct.

On the other hand, we are told that all portions of the Constitution are of equal dignity.  We are told that with the exception of express provision, such as the 21st repealing the 18th Amendment, or the 17th Amendment explicitly changing how senators are chosen, no provision of the Constitution trumps any other provision.  Most importantly, the same canons of construction apply across all portions of the document; we don’t — or at least we hold ourselves out as not doing so — craft certain rules of interpretation for certain provisions and then read others in a diametrically opposed fashion.

[And here a short rant:  What made the U.S. Constitution so radical was not its concept of separation of powers; was not the suggestion that there are some things which government may not do; it was not the practice of lodging sovereignty in an elected assembly rather than in the will of a crowned head.  What made the Constitution so radical was precisely that it was written.  It had substance and form, and the latter determined the former, not the other way around.  We hear continuous blather from the bench about respecting “substance over form,” which is nothing more than an ipse dixit declaration of a desire not to follow the letter of the law in order to achieve a particular result in a specific case (what the late Maurice Rosenberg correctly described as “judicial ad-hockery”).  Statutes are written for the purpose of establishing that certain forms of behavior are legal and certain other forms of behavior are not legal; that certain forms of actions will produce Result X and other forms will produce Result Y or at least Result Not-X.  When a judge announces that the case will be decided on a “substance-over-form” basis what he’s announcing is that he does not believe himself bound to his oath of office.  But I digress, slightly.  The reason that written constitutions were so abhorred by the would-be absolute monarchs is precisely because, until the U.S. Supreme Court decided that texts are “living documents,” pretty much everyone acknowledged that a written text means the same thing today that it did yesterday, and that “evolving standards of decency” (one of the most fat-headed expressions ever to ooze from the judicial pen) cannot change what the document says, and therefore cannot change what it means.  It was precisely this insight, which the American judiciary has now found so quaintly outdated, that drove the revolutions of 1848 across Europe.  The tyrants and would-be tyrants from Prussia to Vienna to St. Petersburg were terrified of written constitutions for precisely one reason:  They, like the modern American judiciary, did not care to be bound by what some bunch of dead guys wrote years ago.  The “living document” crew which holds that the text means what they say it means is the moral and intellectual twin of the absolute tyrant, and both are entitled to the same deference from a free people, which is to say zero.  Here endeth the screed.]

What happened last Friday was that a lunatic, exercising a constitutionally protected right, then used those otherwise protected actions to commit a number of actions which are already criminal offenses in every jurisdiction of the country.  In consequence of his actions, it is now proposed that the constitutionally protected rights of everyone else, none of whom is the person who shot up that school, be permanently and in blanket form diminished, ex ante. 

Oh don’t worry, we are told; these will be only “reasonable” restrictions on what isn’t an absolute right.  We must do this because we have to make sure that your ability to exercise your rights does not facilitate the commission of what is already a criminal offense by someone to whom you have no connection, and whose criminal actions will be neither assisted nor hindered by your exercise, or not, of any right you possess.  The rights of all must be diminished because a few, some of whom are identifiable in advance and others of whom are not so identifiable, might use those rights to commit a crime.  Not that they will do so, but they might.  Other actions which would result in the diminishment of the otherwise constitutionally protected rights of a much smaller number of people — specifically that subset of Americans consisting of those mentally disturbed individuals whose potential for violence has either already been demonstrated or who are sufficiently objectively diagnosable that you can point to them and say this guy is a ticking bomb — must be avoided because, well, to commit them to an institution would be in derogation of their constitutional right to personal liberty.  Well, yes, it would do so.

I am going to suggest that such reasoning is dangerous.  We also have a constitutionally protected right to practice our religion of choice.  That right is neither more nor less protected than our Second Amendment rights.  Some people — above all some adherents of the Religion of Peace — use their freedom of exercise to promote and even engage in criminal acts.  Like encouraging specific individuals to become active members of terroristic organizations.  Like using affiliated organizations to launder money in support of terroristic organizations.  Like acting as meeting places for members and active supporters of terroristic organizations.  All those actions are already criminal offenses, no matter by whom committed, or how committed.  Just like killing 26 people in a single rampage is a crime whether done with a firearm, a machete, a bomb (Timothy McVeigh, anyone?), a motor vehicle, a cigarette lighter, or an airplane. 

Now, it just so happens that of all the bewildering tapestry of religious practices in the U.S., there is one and only one in the organizations of which such terroristic activities are actively and systematically pursued (not even the nut-jobs at the Westboro Baptist Church launder money in support of, for example, Aryan Nation).  Of course, I am perfectly willing to assume that the overwhelming majority of the adherents of that Religion of Peace are not knowingly engaged in those activities . . . even if they might personally know some who are.  But the same logic which tells me that it is merely a “reasonable restriction” on my right to defend my family and myself that I get only seven shots to do so, rather than fourteen, or that I may not use a particular caliber bullet or a particular load to do so, would also support liquidating every congregation of the Religion of Peace, or restricting them to congregations of no more than, say, five, because well, you know, we can say for a fact that some of them have, and some of them are, and therefore that some of them inevitably will actively use their otherwise protected right to congregate and worship as they please to commit criminal acts.  We know that.

Alternatively, we know that at least some people who are accused of criminal offenses are in fact guilty.  Guilty as sin.  We know that at least some of them refuse to testify for no other purpose than to increase their likelihood of escaping the consequences of past criminal action and facilitating future criminal action.  Now, some of the folks who refuse to testify actually did not do the act for which they are charged.  We know that at least some of them refuse to testify for any number of reasons (including, by the way, the fact that they are guilty of other crimes for which they have not been caught or charged, but for which they can reasonably expect to get fingered if they ever expose themselves to cross-examination).  Now, I am assured that my having to make application to some government drone who will examine me to make sure that I’m not one of the — say, thirty or so — crazy mothers who during any given year will shoot up a school, movie theater, or mall (in a population of 310 million people, that thirty makes up 0.000001% of the population), before permitting me to exercise my constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, is nothing but a “reasonable restriction” on that right.  OK.  So let’s have a government office to which a criminal accused must apply before being permitted not to testify against himself.  He will need to convince them that, more likely than not, he did not actually do the deed for which he is charged in that proceeding, and that he does not intend to use his silence to cloak illegal activity of any other sort.  This office would of course be hermetically sealed off from the prosecutor’s office, but without that certificate he would not be permitted to exercise his right not to testify against himself.  But it’s only reasonable, right?  And don’t get me wrong, some of the people making that application would be some truly evil people.  Like Adam Lanza, had he survived.  I mean, why should we, the taxpayers and the public in general, have to spend all that money to pot the guy who actually did it, and take the risk that he walks to do it again?  I mean, I don’t have a constitutional right to get away with a crime; if I did have a right to get away with it, it wouldn’t be a crime because I’d have the right to do it without molestation by the state.  So the only constitutional right that’s being affected here is the right not to assist the prosecution in coming after me.  And seriously, if I actually did the deed, then how much truly important constitutional injury can be said to have occurred?

[Another short rant:  I will also note that the same logic which says that the U.S. government may tax me for my failure to do an act which it does not have the constitutional power to compel me to do (such as, for example, buy a specific kind of health insurance) also lends itself to other instances in which someone’s exercise of a constitutional right (such as the right not to buy health insurance) carries serious externalities.  Like the guilty criminal’s refusal to testify against himself, or the insistence on gumming up the works with some damned lawyer’s penny-ante objections about reasonable searches and seizures.  In fact, the right to be free in one’s person, property, and papers from unreasonable searches and seizures is a pretty onerous burden on the public.  So why don’t we just say that we’re not compelling you to testify against yourself; we’re just going to tax you for your failure to do so, on a sliding scale by the seriousness of the crime?  Of if you really want us to figure out where you’ve hidden the gun, instead of just producing it on demand, we’ll impose a tax on you for the cost of the search.  Oh, don’t worry; it will be a reasonable cost.  There will even be a panel of “experts” to figure what that cost is.  They’ll update it periodically.  You really have to be a judge to accept that sort of thinking without laughing so hard you blow snot out your nose.]

Or how about the freedom to form a political party and solicit votes from one’s fellow citizens?  There are places in this world, in Wonderful Enlightened Gun-Grabbing Europe, where certain political positions may not be publicly espoused, no matter the number who may agree with them in secret.  Try setting up a fascist party in Germany these days (hell, for that matter, try to get away in Germany or Austria with saying the Holocaust didn’t happen; that’s a criminal offense, and it’s not criminal stupidity, either, that you’ll be charged with).  Now, no one’s going to argue that Europe isn’t civilized (we don’t talk about how many Frenchmen, and Dutch, and Italians, and Greeks, and Poles, and Czechs, etc. joyfully collaborated in the extermination of the Jews, do we?), are they?  So if we can point to their gun prohibitions as being reasonable, then surely their restrictions on ass-hat political movements must also be reasonable, no?  And it’s not as though the American Nazis stand any chance of actually electing anyone (in marked contrast to the Europeans, but we don’t talk about the fascists’ electoral successes either), so why not just go ahead and ban them?  Won’t be any skin off my nose (oddly enough one of the few people whom such a ban would really hit would be ol’ Morris Dees; he might have to dip into his outfit’s quarter-billion dollar nest egg, almost all of which is held in private equity, by the way).  C’mon; it’s reasonable.  And we’re all about reasonable restrictions on constitutional rights these days, aren’t we?

Oh . . . where was I?  Yes.  Once you begin accepting the assertion that my exercise of my own constitutional rights must, in advance and without reference to any action or failure to act of my own, be restricted because someone unknown to me might, just hypothetically might, incorporate into his commission of a crime the same behavior that I in my fuddy-duddy law-abidingness am constitutionally protected to indulge, then you might as well hang it up.  You are not living in a system of limited government.  You are living in a system of government in which the only limitation placed on what the governing class does to you is your willingness to stand there and take it.  And that is why I get antsy when I see the likes of Dear Leader, Dianne Feinstein (a concealed carry permit holder), and their ilk begin to drool and pant at the thought of restricting the rights of Americans as guaranteed by one but only one (as yet) of the first ten amendments to our constitution.

No Weapons, No Massacres

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Or at least that’s what Franz Joseph Freisleder, a head-shrink for juveniles in Munich, allows.  “The main thing,” he says, is “the availability of weapons.  With a weapon that I don’t have I can’t cause a massacre.”

I’ll bet the Isrealis, and the Iraqis, and the Russians, and the folks in Oklahoma City, and the employees of the firms who worked in the World Trade Center will all be very glad to know that without easy acess to firearms you can’t cause a massacre.

In conversation today a friend of mine noted what ought to be an obvious point but which I haven’t heard mentioned thus far:  The only distinction between lunatics like Adam Lanza and lunatics like the Al Qaeda suicide squad lies in the method of delivery.  It is sad but true that if someone is so whacked out, either by his Religion of Peace, or his obsession with a particular person (like Rep. Gifford’s shooter), or blood lust, or whatever that he’s willing to include himself in his own casualty list, then you’re not going to stop him.  Period.

Another interesting aspect of this head-shrink’s logic, by which he concludes that it’s all traceable back to the easy availability of weapons, is his statement that there’s been a marked increase in crimes of violence within the last 15 years.  From that increase he looks to the increase in availability of firearms and concludes — hey, presto! — that correlation is causation.  But he’s got a problem:  In the United States, at least, violent crime in general and weapons crime in particular has been on a 20-year decrease, at the same time that firearm sales have been skyrocketing, and also at the same time that the legal environment within which law-abiding citizens carry them has appreciably loosened.  In fact, the downward trend has continued even during the Great Recession, precisely when all the hand-wringers’ models would predict an upsurge as poverty, long-term unemployment, home foreclosure, evaporation of entire industries, and stagnating or declining personal wealth have darkened the land to a degree not seen since the 1930s (this article at the National Review Online cites (unforuntately without links) a Minnesota criminologist who allows that the high point of mass killing was . . . 1929).  According to the same Minnesota criminologist, the incidents of mass shootings dropped from 42 during the 1990s to 26 during the first decade of this century, a 38% drop.

Oh, and another thing:  Until this past Friday morning, according to this same criminologist, the three deadliest school shootings in history had occurred in . . . Texas?  Nope.  Arizona?  No.  Mississippi?  Wrong.  Alabama?  Try again.  New Jersey?  Not close.  The answer?  Great Britain and Germany.

So let’s see:  We’ve got a juvenile head-shrink who observes violence in his own country increasing (he sure as hell isn’t observing it increasing in the U.S; even fact-challenged outfits like the NYT have glommed to that pattern; the commentary on the Washington Post “fact check” points out that even the WaPo admits there is no evidence to support a positive correlation between concealed-carry laws and gun violence).  And from that he weighs in with a postulated causal relationship that is 180 degrees out from the measurable data.  Fool.  Hack.  Referral troll.

Cobbler, stick to thy last.

Department of Self-Innocence

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If the diametric opposite of self-knowledge is self-innocence, then Howard Kurtz must be pure as the driven snow.

He wants the media to keep the issue of “the gun issue” front and center.  He wants a “media agenda.”  Not to take sides, of course, but in earnest agreement with those famously unbiased gas-bags Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch (both surrounded by armed security details 24/7, and both of whom have refused to state the caliber, make, or magazine capacities of the weapons their protectors carry), he thinks the MSM needs to keep harping on it lead a national conversation.  Until when?  What do they propose to change with this “conversation”?  What do they propose to stop by talking (if talking could stop violence, then the Japanese, with whom we were talking literally until the planes were in the air, would never have bombed Pearl Harbor)?  I’ve yet to hear Li’l Mike B. talk about changing the laws relating to the incurably lunatic (this is a guy for whom “change” means he’s going to take away your jumbo soft drink, by the way).  I can’t recall hearing any of the people Howie quotes wanting to change the laws so that more people, in more circumstances, have a greater ability to defend themselves.

No:  Kurtz doesn’t say as much, because he doesn’t have to, but the stopping point in his proposed “conversation” is that the rights of law-abiding Americans, who have never shot up a school, a movie theater, a church, or a mall — and who have no desire to do so — are to be diminished.  As Glenn Reynolds allows over at Instapundit, “The problem, Howard is that we don’t trust you guys.”

What I especially like is how Kurtz, piously staring off into the clouds, declaims that his proposed “media agenda” is not supposed to take sides.  You really have to admire how precious are statements like:  “But since when does the press have to wait for a president’s cue to cover a story?”  He said that; he really did.  This is from an industry that gave us Journolist, and which repeatedly has been caught coordinating and parrotting Dear Leader’s administration’s talking points, has been documented as suppressing news stories which might be damaging to their favored candidates’ chances.  What, you say?  It’s just a pure coincidence that magically every major media outlet (except Fox News) just happens to start talking about a specific “issue” within hours after some administration drone just happens to mention it?  It’s got nothing to do with “taking sides” that bad economic news, which for eight years was so obviously foreseeable as to be nearly self-evidently the result of a specific White House’s policy preferences (even though only for four of those years did that White House have a cooperative Congress), suddenly, on January 20, 2009, becomes universally “unexpected”?  Go on believing that, if you please.

“And the press should be fair to all sides.”  He says this as if it would be a novelty.  Which it would be.  He says this in an article in which he quotes Dear Leader’s call for “meaningful action”; quotes Bloomberg’s calls to de-arm everyone except billionaires who can afford their own private security details; quotes Rupert Murdoch’s ignorant rhetorical question about when we will finally ban “automatic weapons” (answer: 1934).  He does not quote any actual statistics for violent crimes in general or gun crimes in particular or even more especially mass shootings over the past quarter-century (they’ve been declining and are still declining, four years into the Great Recession).  He does not quote John Lott, whose ground-breaking studies actually attempted to ask and answer the question whether there is any statistically demonstrable correlation between rates of violent crime in a specific state and changes in that state’s gun laws. He does not quote anyone from the NRA, in any capacity, or even refer to that organization other than to make ominous reference to its “legendary clout on Capitol Hill.”  [cue everyone to duck and cover]  He does not quote any statistics on where the 70+ mass shootings of the last 20 or so years have occurred, relative to those locations’ status as a “gun-free zone.”  This is the man who is proposing to be fair to all sides.

With all possible good faith for Kurtz and his colleagues, this savors more than slightly of Richard II’s willingness to meet with Wat Tyler and his rebels.  How’d that work out, again?  “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.”  Whereupon the executions began.

In fairness to Kurtz, he does make one throw-away reference to the crux of the matter:  “Sometimes the possession of guns enables those under fire to defend themselves.”  Left unspoken is the MSM’s revulsion at that statement.  That’s the whole point:  People, ordinary people, the “little people,” should not be able to defend themselves while actually under fire.  People who can defend themselves are that much less beholden to people like Dear Leader and Mayor Mike.  They are that much more difficult to bugger around.  Dear Leader and Mayor Mike have that much less to threaten to withdraw for politically disagreeable behavior.  Your precinct didn’t vote the right way last time; guess y’all don’t need all those police officers hanging around, do you now?  Don’t think that’s something that would happen?  Take a look at the spending patterns of the 2009 Porkulus Bill on a per capita basis in states that voted Democrat in 2008 relative to those that did not.  Ask the victims in the 2008 Philadelphia voter intimidation case, which was dismissed after the government had already won it.  Listen to Dear Leader encourage his ethnic voter bases to vote for revenge.  Look at the political giving patterns of those Chrysler and GM dealers whose franchises got pulled versus those whose weren’t.  And tell me that police protection of a defenseless population is something that would not be scaled up or down depending upon the political reliability of that population.

In Mayor Nanny’s Bloomberg’s world individuals have no right to defend themselves with the same sorts of resources as his own personal security detail.  Security from personal, physical violence is a beneficence bestowed by an enlightened government (run by the right sorts of people, of course) upon people who ought to be grateful (dammit!) to their benefactors.  When under attack, they should wait upon the police to arrive; the police — the governmental power — will swoop down to safeguard them.

Just like the police stopped Adam Lanza in time.

What’s the Matter with Michigan?

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So asks Adam Garfinkle over at The American Interest.  That’s the title of his piece on Michigan’s recently-enacted right-to-work (or as he terms them, “so- called right-to-work”) laws.  You can’t tell from reading it whether he chose his title in admiring emulation of the similarly titled book about Kansas from a few years ago, or in ironic allusion to it, or in gentle mockery of it.  That doesn’t really matter, in truth, even though to ask what is the “matter” with someone or something necessarily supposes that he or it has gone off the rails in some respect.  And that assumption is abundantly clear from the article.

Garfinkle brings an interesting background to the debate; he allows, “I am the son of a rare Jewish member of the Teamsters union.”  That’s OK; Sandy Koufax is a Hall of Famer not because he was Jewish but because he was one of the all-time great pitchers.  Where Garfinkle provides some helpful cross-fixing (the navy navigator in me always like to have at least a three-point fix if I can get it) does in fact come from the Judeo part of the Judeo-Christian heritage, and specifically the ancient Israelite usages of what we would describe as unfree labor.  Garfinkle laments (and I’m sure he’s right) that inartful translation of the Torah has resulted in these unfree relationships being tagged as “slavery,” and the texts therefore as implicitly endorsing the unequal relationship between the worker and the one employing the worker.  [Aside:  Garfinkle thinks he is ameliorating the ancient worker’s condition to describe him as being more in the nature of an indentured servant. He needs to familiarize himself a bit more closely with what indentured servitude actually looked like on the ground, for example in colonial Virginia.  Ex:  Maiming, the chopping off of digits, was considered a not-inappropriate disciplinary device to deploy with an indentured servant.] 

Where the Torah passages referenced become relevant is in Garfinkle’s statement that, “But the idea that one Israelite would literally enslave another is quite foreign to the sense of the text.”  It is relevant because, while Garfinkle expressly rejects the marxist description of showing up to work with nothing in your hands but their palms and getting paid to use them as “wage slavery,” he still puts an enormous amount of weight on what he describes as the “inherently unequal relationships between those who have capital and those who work for those who have capital.”  It is the “inherently unequal” aspect of it that seems to trouble Garfinkle as being foreign to America’s Judeo-Christian heritage.

Here’s Garfinkle’s tie-in paragraph:

“Barring some very improbable mass return to a more egalitarian and self-sufficient pastoral life, or a leap forward to a comparable situation where people in much greater numbers work for themselves, there is nothing to be done about this. It just is what it is. (Attempts to eradicate the problem by having the state play the role of capitalists, whether in “soft” Left socialist or “hard” Left communist terms, haven’t worked out so well, and indeed they didn’t even solve the basic problem.) A work contract within any for-profit enterprise, even in America today, is still essentially a form of indentured servitude, though for the vast majority of us it is so very mild a form that the term doesn’t feel right: We can quit and seek work elsewhere on pretty short notice or no notice, we can get severance pay, we have certain rights of redress, we can get government unemployment benefits if one party or the other breaks the contract, and so on and so forth. All the same, no one who does not work for himself or within an integral family unit is truly free and “at liberty” the same way that someone who does work for himself is.”

With all respect for Brer Garfinkle’s thoughtful approach (and it is thoughtful, in contrast to the usual suspects’ blather about “workers’ rights” and so forth), in this paragraph we see the nub of why I think he’s mistaken, even on a theoretical level.  The key part of indentured servitude was the indenture.  It was the contract which the master could terminate, but not the servant.  It was the contract which forbade the one (the servant) to seek that application of his talents and efforts which would best serve his desires — all of his desires, and not just the how-much-do-I-get-paid-for-how-much-work issue — but imposed no such restriction on the master.  It was the contract which gave direct, physical, corporeal dominance to the one over the other. Garfinkle in fact refutes his own argument:  In a mass economy of millions upon millions of people, and thousands upon thousands of different ways to make a living, and with at-will employment on both sides, outside of the limited context of the nearly-extinct company town (see, e.g., Coalfield, West Va., as depicted in Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys; I worked a summer in Welch, that county seat), the employer simply does not have anything like the power that master of even non-indentured servants had 200 years ago.

There are these days precious few skills which a man or woman may not learn and carry with him from one employer to the next, or out on his own.  One of our little town’s largest employers got his start selling office furniture out of the back of a station wagon.  One of my more successful clients is a commercial contractor who’s been in the business for 30 years (and has never been sued, which is nothing short of miraculous), and who once remarked to me, “Not bad for a country boy who started out with a pick-up truck and a Skil saw.”  Whether you’re a machinist, or work on hydraulic lines, or do custom welding, or whatever; this country is swarming with people who started out with nothing more than the silk loom operators of Paterson, New Jersey and who now work for themselves or with equal partners.  Even that four-loom system which was the downfall of the Paterson silk workers needed someone who could install it; someone who could fix it; someone who could fabricate replacement parts for it.

Garfinkle also doesn’t seem to realize just how many people out there are wholly or partially self-employed.  About ten or fifteen years ago I saw a number from the BLS that was in the 35% range for both.  That’s a third of the workforce, guys.  According to this BLS publication, as of 2009 just over ten percent of the total workforce was self-employed (I didn’t see where they captured the partially self-employed, that is, people who work for someone else and also for their own business).  Garfinkle characterizes the self-employed as enjoying some sort of “radical liberty,” which is true if by “liberty” you mean a Hobbesian state of nature.  Rousseau, a goober of the first water, allowed that man is born naturally free, and is “everywhere in chains.”  Errmmm . . . Jean Jacques (and Adam Garfinkle), those cast on their own resources are not hyper-free.  There is no such thing as paid time off; there is no such thing as employer-provided benefits; there is no one to whom you may storm in and demand a raise.  If you are not personally attending to your business you are losing money, either because your business is suffering or because you’re having to pay someone else to do what you would otherwise.  As one’s own boss, there is no room to specialize on what you do best.  You must be your own marketer, your own bookkeeper (even if you hire someone for that function, if you take your eye off that ball you’re screwed), your own accounts receivables manager, your own collection agent, your own HR department, your own regulatory compliance department . . . and oh by the way you actually have to, you know, do the underlying work as well.

Garfinkle makes some entirely valid points about what any employer with more than walking-around sense already knows.  If you employ anyone other than drudges, you’d better see to it that your employees have a safe, clean (or at least as clean as your business can make it), productive atmosphere in which to work.  You’d better pay attention, close attention, to what they think about how you’re doing your job.  You’d better pay attention to morale sumps in the workplace, whether they are of operational, physical, or personal origin.  You have to be a good butcher.

Where Garfinkle doesn’t quite seem to Get It is that he assumes that an organized workplace fosters any of the above, either in theory or in practice.  There is not one single thing about collective bargaining, against the background of a closed shop, which necessarily trends towards any of the productive organic relationships which Garfinkle extols.  The essence of the closed shop is the establishment of a legal system in which no one may be hired unless he is a member of Group X, and no one from Group X may be fired, or his job altered, or the manner in which he does his job altered, or his pay changed, except upon agreement by the representatives of Group X.  What is inherent in the nature of a closed shop is that it is manifestly in the interest of each member of Group X to increase his own rights and privileges as a member of Group X rather than to increase the number of members of Group X, or even to prevent the decrease in the number of Group X.  What is also inherent in the closed shop is that the person hiring Group X is provided a disincentive, which increases with each incremental advantage gained by Group X, not to increase the number of Group X.

From everything I’ve read, and from all my circle of acquaintance who have experience in organized workplaces (both as management and as unionized workers) the most pernicious effect of organization is not so much the inflated wages of the job-holders, but the restrictive work-place rules.  I don’t have to do X because I’m in Group Y is the perennial cry of the union worker.  Doesn’t matter than X desperately needs to be done and you’re the only one available to do it; I’m in Group Y and The Collective Bargaining Agreement says I don’t have to do X.  This attitude is not peculiar to the manual laborer, either.  Once Louis XVIII fell off his horse at a parade.  He lay there on the ground, the King of By-God-France, until the “correct” official came to help him up (he was too fat to manage the trick himself).  Earlier on an exalted person (can’t recall if it was king, emperor, or pope) died of heat stroke sitting in front of a raging fire (to ward off the plague) because the correct official could not be timely located to remove him or the fire.  When Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha married Victoria of Britain, one of the banes of his existence was the fractured nature of the Royal Household.  It took months to repair a broken pane of glass in a window, because there was no single person to whom he could say, “Fix that damned window by close of business tomorrow”; no, it had to go through the steward of this-that-and-the-other, the lord-warden-of-thus-and-such, and the clerk-of-keeping-Her-Majesty’s-ass-freezing.

When you’re the King of France, or the emperor, or By the Grace of God Queen of Great Britain Etc. it doesn’t matter, really, that you require that sort of crap to attend to even the most dinky little workplace tasks.  When your net profit at the bottom of the page is about ten percent of gross revenue from operations, and from that you have to pay all the shit that the tax laws require you to capitalize, even though you’ve had to pay cash for them, it matters.  It really does matter.  If you don’t fund  your depreciation reserves in cash, then you know what happens when that Jumbo-Mega-Thingummy-Jig that is the core of Plant No. 3’s operations wears out?  You have no cash to buy a new one.  You either shut Plant No. 3 entirely, or you find something else to do with Plant No. 3, like turn it into a warehouse that employs 25 people instead of 172 (if you can; and maybe you can’t), or you borrow the money to replace it.  And if the latter, you’ve just cranked up your fixed expenses by the note payments, even though you can’t write off the principal portion of the payment.  All of means that when The Next Big Thing hits your industry, you’ll have that much less maneuvering room to respond to it.

The results of work-place organization are thus entirely predictable:  They result in a steady bleeding of the host organism until it hits the point of non-viability, at which point it implodes and suddenly no one has a job, on any terms.  In the meanwhile there are hosts of people who didn’t get a job.

Garfinkle’s central mistake is to mythologize the employer-employee relationship.  Both enter into solely for their own good.  Both desire to remain in the relationship only so long as it suits their own ends.  The definition of “fair market value” is that price (or other terms) upon which two persons would agree upon, acting at arm’s length and adequately informed of all material information, and neither being compelled to deal with the other.  Collective bargaining in the closed shop destroys that last element.  Without it, no one can answer the question, “What is my X worth?”  Without a reasonably accurate answer to that question, no one can make an informed decision as to whether and how he ought to continue to provide that X, whether that X is a job position, or a set of job skills, or the product of the conjunction between the two.  It results in the systematic misapplication of the world’s finite resources. 

In a perhaps unintended irony, Garfinkle pointed out that the attempts of the state to supplant the role of the independent employer-employee relationship have universally failed.  He does not ask why they have universally failed.  At its root, Garfinkle’s misapprehension arises because of a failure to give due consideration to the fact that, outside the bounds of family relationships (which he in fact cites in the context of ancient Israel) and explicitly charitable undertakings, no one will act in another person’s self-interest except to the extent that prospective action is also in his own self-interest.  Collective bargaining introduces a formalized adversarial element to the workplace relationship; it in fact overlays the entire relationship in an adversarial framework.  This is seldom helpful to either side.  I am a lawyer; it is how I feed my children.  And yet, as I have observed to numerous prospective clients, introducing a lawyer to a situation is not a universally-applicable method to improve it.

Michigan’s right-to-work laws do not destroy anything sacred.  What they do is require a union to demonstrate to its consituents that what it is doing is in the workers’ interests.  And I will state that there is nothing, nowhere, in any context in which requiring someone to prove his value to his fellow humans is any other than a Step Forward in Progress.  I mean, think about the contrary position:  You must fade money and resources, foregone opportunity, to a group of persons without their needing to demonstrate any benefit to the person from whom the money or resources are demanded.  You must, in other words, give something for nothing.

With appreciation to Mr. Garfinkle for his thoughts and input, I just don’t think that Michigan’s taking a step away from a world the viability of which rests of the thesis that you can take something for nothing repeatedly and over time in a world in which barriers to free movement of people, finances, and goods are coming down about our shoulders is any but a Very Good Thing.

I Guess for the Moment They’ve Won

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Word on the street has it that Dear Leader is going to nominate John Kerry to be the new secretary of state.

John Kerry.  This would be the same John Kerry who, while his erstwhile comrades were still in combat, went before Congress and numerous other public venues to accuse them of all manner of atrocities, the vast majority of which were manufactured from thin air by Kerry and his new comrades.  And I do use comrades intentionally.  This would be the same John Kerry who has, according to the sundry groups on both sides which attempt to put a score on specific politicians’ actions, as they relate to issues X, Y, or Z, has consistently ranked as among the two or three most far-left members of the Senate.  This would be the same John Kerry who during his unsuccessful presidential run tried to wrap himself in the flag and claim the status of war hero.  This would be the same John Kerry who — in front of the cameras, natch — threw his military decorations away . . . except it came out some time later they weren’t actually his.  He threw someone else’s away.

Isn’t that just like a lefty?  You take what someone else has got his ass shot at to earn, and you throw them away, first making sure the camera angle is right.  You take the economic wealth and resources that others create and you strip them away to reward your voting blocs.  You take what hundreds of thousands of Americans have bled and died to build, and you hand it over to our sworn enemies, because those who neither bled nor died to build it will shout hosannas and strew your path with lucrative “consultancies” and NGO offices palm fronds if you do.

So now we’ve got a twice-elected president, born to and raised by avowed communists, steeped in marxist, racialist separatism, who got his political start literally in the living room of an unrepentant domestic terrorist who to this day still takes pride in having “declared war” on the U.S., appointing as secretary of state a man who did everything he could to provide hope and comfort (we just have to assume that he did nothing more concrete to assist those killing Americans in Vietnam) to an armed enemy during wartime.

It took them 50 years, but the 1960s lunatic fringe has more or less completed its Long March.  Those to whom the United States is a failed experiment, an illegitimate blight on the face of a Brave New World (ruled by the Enlightened), have now taken the place over.

Some years ago I read an article in The Economist, I think it was, about the goings-on in some South American country.  I can’t recall the specifics any more, but, quoting someone else and applying the tag to the country in question, the article allowed that, “[Brazil, I think it was] is not a serious country.”

The United States is no longer a serious country.

A Discordant Note

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[N.b.  I’m not going to blog the school shooting in Connecticut.  Not today.  Not until I push back and sort out my own thoughts.  Not with my kindergarten boy at home tonight.]

P. G. Wodehouse wrote roughly 89 novels, or at least that’s the number I seem to recall coming across some years ago.  I once found a web site that purported to list all of them (including the novels which were published under different names in the U.S. and Britain).  I printed the list off and checked it against my bookshelves.  I’m proud to report that I have well over 70 of the titles.  Which made the surprise all the more gratifying when my mother managed to locate and buy for me not one but two which I did not have.  One was an Uncle Fred novel, Cocktail Time, and was about what you’d expect from the Earl.  It was published post World War II, and like the rest of his post-war opus it just isn’t quite as uproariously funny as his earlier efforts.  I mean, there’s a reference in there to Uncle Fred watching television.  Television?  In Wodehouse?  That would be like stumbling across a reference to an off-track betting parlor in the early passages of Genesis. 

The second was The Adventures of Sally, and is I understand one of several books involving the same lead character.  The edition that my mother found noted only that it was first published in Britain in 1922.  It must have been written a bit earlier than that, because there are several references in it to the Spanish flu, which started in 1918 and had pretty much run its course by 1920.  That sort of a mentioning-something-that-wasn’t-very-funny was enough of a jar.  I mean, even Roderick Spode, he of the Black Shorts, was only an allusion to the S.A., and he shows up in the role of swanking buffoon.

What really made my head rotate on its vertical axis, though, was a scene towards the end of the book.  In it a main character appears in a falling-down-drunk, belligerent, wantonly destructive condition.  In fact, the way the scene unfolds I would have expected, had it not been Wodehouse I was reading, that I was about to read a depiction of a rape.  I mean, the staging, dialogue, and mood are that black.

At the risk of understatement, I’ve never come across anything in Wodehouse even remotely that — threatening is the only word I can think of.  Even when he allows that he is sure his critics will be eaten by wild animals, after the fashion of the Old Testament, he does so in a voice which you can hear laughing as your eyes run across the words.  His other depictions of characters who are staggeringly drunk are pretty much all humorous.  One thinks of Gussie Fink-Nottle dispensing the prizes at the Market Snodsbury grammar school.  That’s got to be one of his most famous scenes and it’s priceless humor.  In fact, Wodehouse only very rarely actually depicts a fully drunk character.  Mostly what you see is the aftermath, as when Tipton Plimsoll and (I forget who the other chap was) wake up in a New York jail after a night on the tiles, with every hoof in the Light Brigade dancing on their respective skulls.  Or when Augustus Sipperly and Bertie Wooster appear in court the morning after making an attempt on a bobby’s helmet on Boat Race Night (one of my all-time fave Wodehouse lines is when the magistrate turns to address Bertie and begins, “As for the prisoner Leon Trotzky . . . .”). 

[Update: 15 Dec 12]:  In mentioning Wodehouse’s depiction of the elevated, how could I forget Percy Frobisher Pilbeam, who gets thoroughly into the sauce at Blandings?  The conversation between Percy and Lady Constance is every bit as classic as Gussie at the prize-giving.

Most of the time Wodehouse doesn’t even go that far, only having someone give an indirect reference (usually without any details thrown in) to some past indiscretion, like Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and the story of the prawns, which Galahad Threepwood writes down in his memoirs, or Galahad continually referring to the time in ’95 when he and Puffy Benger put Old Wivenhoe’s pig in Plug Basham’s bedroom to cheer him up (or maybe it was he and Plug who put it in Puffy’s bedroom? I haven’t re-read the stories recently).  Or even, to recur to Uncle Fred, when he keeps making reference to his day at the dog races with Pongo Twistleton-Twistleton, invariably mentioning that a wiser magistrate would have contented himself with a warning.

So that was my background frame of reference for Wodehouse and then bang! there’s a violent drunk front and center in the action.  Disconcerting.  In fact, that whole book is something of an outlier among those of Wodehouse’s that I’ve read.  Sally and her beau are really the only ones who end up truly happy.  Most out of character.  I wonder what was going on in his life when he wrote that book that would have soured him so on life in general.  I do have his recent biography, but I don’t recall anything of that nature being covered.  And of course in 1920 he had nearly two decades of Class A stuff left in him, so it isn’t as if his muse deserted him.

Curious, in other words.