Watch closely over the next two months, for it will probably be the most critical period for the future of the country in the past sixty years.  Not since the power grab of the New Deal have we seen such a well-orchestrated attempt at such a massive power shift and wealth transfer as is represented in the domestic legislative priorities of the current administration.  And these proposals are not transitory in nature.  Initiatives such as “cap and trade” and the health care overhaul are transformative, designed by their authors to produce major irreversible change in American culture.  Whatever your “soapbox”, pulpit, or sphere of influence, turn up the volume and get serious now, because it may be too late by Thanksgiving.   Meanwhile, some relevant thoughts of which I have been reminded recently by a couple of subscribers:

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.  You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.  You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.  You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.  You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.  You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”–Abraham Lincoln.

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism.  But, under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened……..I no longer need to run as a Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party; the Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”–Norman Thomas, former Socialist Party candidate for President, in a 1944 speech.

After all that has been written and said about health care reform over the past six months, it is virtually impossible to offer much that is original.  Much of the editorial commentary in favor of the various concepts floated by the left reflect such an ignorance of the realities of economics, human nature, incentives, and markets that it is not worth the time and space to refute them.  I’ll just throw out one question involving their organizing principle that, to any rational analyst, should undermine the entire basis:  How can we adopt a new system of financing health care that supposedly will add 47 million new insured people while reducing the cost of the system on a budget-neutral basis without rationing of care and disastrous increases in taxes?  It violates the law of non-contradiction on its face, and if the American people ultimately buy into anything close, they will have fooled me (again).

There has been one unique take on the debate that is the best I have seen, coming from the school of thought that I had  believed to have been totally silenced, which is the one that asks: Is equality of health care a fundamental right?.  I have previously attempted to make the case that it isn’t, and I continue to believe that there is a strong case there, but I am no doubt in the minority, and certainly so since at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s enunciation of his “Second Bill of Rights” in the early 1940′s.

In this vein, I was struck by the commentary of Dr. Thomas Szasz, author and emeritus professor of psychiatry at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.  Rather than paraphrase his premise, I will simply quote the critical passages from his recent essay in the Wall Street Journal:

“The idea that every life is infinitely precious and therefore everyone deserves the same kind of optimal medical care is a fine religious sentiment and moral ideal.  As political and economic policy, it is vainglorious delusion.  Rich and educated people not only receive better goods and services in all areas of life than do poor and uneducated people, they also tend to take better care of themselves and their possessions, which in turn leads to better health.  The first requirement for better health care for all is not equal health care for everyone but educational and economic advancement for everyone.

We must stop talking about health care as if it was some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it.

If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price.  We will become the voluntary slaves of a ‘compassionate’ government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.”

A final thought.  I have previously written about “public choice theory” (May 2003), a concept which is applicable in the current debate.  This theory was originally formulated by Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan and in simplest terms is nothing more complicated than the espousal of market-based principles and systems for the delivery of public services.  Critics of this theory seem to believe that rational people, when acting on certain desires or needs normally delivered publicly, do not behave as they do in markets, that somehow they set aside human nature and become immune to the dynamics and incentives of market forces.  The sooner we rid ourselves of this nonsensical policy thinking, the sooner we can come to grips with the realities of the market and incentive systems that will be necessary to rationalize our health care finance system.

A brief and belated tribute to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who died last January and who whose legacy in the journal First Things, which he founded, published, and edited, is one regular publication which I do not miss.  Thankfully it is being carried on in similar style by his successors.  Of course, his breakthrough to public awareness was his 1984 masterpiece, The Naked Public Square, which probably did more than any other work to restore the debate on the notion of the vitality of religious faith in informing the deliberation of public policy in America.  In this and other pursuits, notably including his ecumenical work involving Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, he was totally dedicated to the proposition that religious faith and practice and their intersection with philosophical reason were critical to the sustenance of the American strain of the Enlightenment and, in fact, American exceptionalism.  RIP.

The recent death of Robert McNamara brought back many memories, mostly of frustration for those of my age who strained to make sense out of the Vietnam War.  In many ways he embodied the essential liberal premise–that smart people from the best schools, armed with efficient systems, can apply rationality to deal with organic human problems, under the broad assumption that, as George Will characterized it, “if it can be counted, it can be controlled”.  McNamara exhibited this tendency both in his conduct of the war and his stewardship of the World Bank.

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson thought that if he could get enough bright people in the room he could manage the war from Washington.  He also at least once said that if he could get Ho Chi Minh in a room one-on-one he could successfully make a deal to end the war.  In this thinking he was the perfect leader of and complement to the “best and the brightest” of the Great Society.  All of which is the epitome of Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of the elites–the Achilles Heel of liberalism in policy at home and abroad.  In this particular case, the unfortunate result for America has been that the honorable purposes of the war in Southeast Asia have been discredited along with its failed execution.  RIP

As I write, the news is that Sonia Sotomayor was finally confirmed by the Senate by a 68-31 vote, with nine Republicans joining all Democrats in confirming.  This is a reasonable outcome and I believe that the conduct of the hearings exhibited about the right balance of rigor, respect, and expository aspects of judicial philosophy, i.e. a “teaching moment”, expected of the loyal opposition.  Hopefully, as a result, the ground is prepared for the next confirmation fight, which figures to be a bloodbath.  We almost never know how these things will work out for several years, but on observation so far, it seems that this appointment could have been much worse for strict constructionists, and I sense that she will not be a strong philosophical leader on the Court.  We’ll see.

The story line for her, of course, was and will be, until she otherwise distinguishes herself on the Court, her personal “narrative” and identity politics as practiced by the man who appointed her and who vowed to rise above those factors.   The two major substantive issues will be her application of natural law (which can be read as “empathy”) in judicial review and her application of positive vs. negative rights interpretation of the Constitution.  If she becomes a leader on the Court for her and Obama’s expansive point of view in these areas, she could be a problem beyond her vote.  Souter was a disaster; if she is no worse, consider us fortunate.

A few odds and ends on the culture trail:

*  How many of you read this quote in the New York Times Magazine from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or heard any coverage of it:  “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe v. Wade was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”  No mention of whether or not she approves of eugenics or condones abortion as a primary means of controlling “undesirables”.  Of course, eugenics has a long history in the U. S.,  having been supported by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a famous case before the Supreme Court, and it was a major factor in Margaret Sanger’s rationale for founding Planned Parenthood as well as those who supported approval for RU-486, the abortion pill, in the early 1990′s.  The abortion on demand for any reason crowd doesn’t like to be reminded of this inconvenient history.  Incidentally, Hillary Clinton was in Houston recently to receive Planned Parenthood’s highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award.

*  Last month I mentioned that Houston Mayor Bill White has been dealing with the police officers’ union over the implementation of the new “287g program” that calls for specialized data and training in screening for illegal immigrants among persons held in detention by municipal authorities.  This will no doubt be a significant issue in Houston’s upcoming city election.  Meanwhile, The Houston Chronicle takes issue with the use of this program “in a city with hundreds of thousands of undocumented residents, most of them law-abiding………..whose only crime is to be here illegally”.  Am I missing something here?  Thankfully, Congressman Lamar Smith, co-sponsor of the bill creating 287g, has written the Chronicle to make clear that legislative intent is definitely not to be selective in enforcement.

*  I was very disappointed to see the announcement that David Boies and Ted Olson have taken the case to challenge California Proposition 8, the law approved by the voters to ban same sex marriage, particularly in the case of Ted Olson, for whom I had the utmost respect as a rule of law traditionalist until now.  In their explanation, it seems that these two high-profile attorneys can offer no reason other than bigotry or fundamentalist religious doctrine for opposition to same sex marriage, a tactic that would define all traditional morality under natural law as mere prejudice.  More on this later; I will only suggest that if Messrs. Boies and Olson believe that the right to marry is as fundamental as they allow, what is to prevent more than two individuals to form a marriage union?  And from there the imagination proceeds unchecked.

*  Finally, I was struck by a recent letter to the editor from a Houston woman protesting the reference to abortion in a previous letter as “immoral”.  She suggests that it is not up to the writer to define morality, and that “a choice that a woman makes about terminating her own pregnancy is not a matter for society to judge.  It is her own personal decision and morality doesn’t enter into it.”  If this isn’t very close to the ultimate in nihilism and moral relativism, I hope I don’t encounter what is.