At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, a Mrs. Powell anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the convention, she asked him directly: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  Franklin responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it”.

Well, after all these years, the jury is still out, but I submit that there has never been a point in time since the Civil War in which her question is more relevant, even as the words “democratic despotism”, as later contemplated by Tocqueville, would now be somewhat more appropriate than “monarchy” as an alternative to a republic.  For what we are witnessing is a crisis much more threatening to our constitutional order than any we have faced in over a century.

And the tipping point to which I refer is not just the reality of the consequences, both intended and unintended, of the health care bill, but rather the implications of the convergence of conditions in America that made such a travesty possible or even provided it with credible discussion space.  And I don’t want to hear that we as a people have been misled or duped by President Obama and his support base in the media and the leftist elite.  We made this possible because we abdicated our duties to self-government in a long train of seduction by the lure of entitlement, of the sacrifice of freedom for security, the pursuit of consumption out of all balance with production, and the expansion of “rights” without regard to responsibilities.

So, what now?  I have said before that we are at a point roughly equivalent to 1857 and the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case in the ramp up to the Civil War.  Tony Blankley recently put it at 1854 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  The ultimate point is that, as Lincoln wisely observed,  “A House divided against itself cannot stand……………it will become all one thing or the other.”  Neither of us have in mind another civil war, but we have a situation in which a large percentage, a majority in my estimation, of opinion leadership as well as the people at large remain committed to the principles as espoused in our founding documents, while a large percentage are convinced that these principles are outdated and should be replaced, overridden, or simply ignored.  This is a collision course that has been underway for at least a century, but never has the latter group had such a leader as Obama, the most ideologically progressive President since Woodrow Wilson, who profoundly disagrees with the foundational basis of the American experiment, not to mention the entire notion of American exceptionalism.

I am an eternal optimist, and, in spite of our sleepwalking, this remains a center-right country, so I am betting on the traditionalist strains and the exceptionalist nature of our culture to rise to the occasion, but the outcome is far from certain.

Every pundit, regardless of their qualifications, has an opinion on who is responsible for the worldwide financial  meltdown of 2008 and how to fix the problem.  The majority of these fixes involve two elements–more government regulation and the early detection and prevention of “systemic risk”.  Each of these assume that there exists a mechanism by which systemic risk can be evaluated by public agencies and that systemic imbalances and overloads can be detected in advance.  This is a dream world.

In the recent review of the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis, Brian Carney writes:  “Under proposals currently moving through Congress, our financial regulators are supposed to sit down together to identify and head off asset bubbles before they pose a risk to the system.  But a bubble becomes a systemic risk only because it is not recognized as such……..it is the rare few who grasp what is truly happening when it is still possible to do something about it…..”

This is the problem with economics as science, of which I have been skeptical since my first encounter with college freshman economics almost fifty years ago.  It’s about time we came full circle to this realization that was obvious to the “economists” of the 18th century.

Adam Smith told us that his economic theories were not science, but moral philosophy, and his foundational writing was manifest in The Theory of Moral Sentiments at least as much as in The Wealth of Nations.  Likewise other foundational economic theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek.  Even John Maynard Keynes recognized the moral implications of economic theory.  It was the progressives who were convinced that the laws of science could be easily applied to the social issues, beginning with Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, et al, and extending to the 1960′s intellectuals who espoused such notions as “if we can go to the moon, we can cure poverty”.

The same mentality applies to the static scoring of tax rate cuts and the related resistance to the human behavioral factors embedded in the more accurate dynamic scoring of incentives to investment and growth that result from these cuts.  When will we get an apology from the crowd that was so convinced of economic rationality that it could build sophisticated behavioral models with total disregard of the dynamics of human nature?  The short answer is never and, in fact, what we’ll get is more of the same.

The recent release of the book, Son of Hamas, by Mosab Hassan Yousef has caused quite a stir across the Middle East.  Yousef is the son of the founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and in his book he  discloses that he has served as one of the top spies for Israel’s internal security organization.  Needless to say, a shocking revelation for the hard core Islamic jihadists.

As I understand from reviews of the book, his basic premise is that Muslim fanatics are in need of liberation from their god.  In fact, he says in an interview that his father “is not a fanatic, he’s a very moderate, logical person.  What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God…………At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God……….The problem is not in Muslims.  The problem is with their God.  They need to be liberated from their God.”

Previously I have commented at length on the views of Pope Benedict XVI as they pertain to the dangerous ideas that the Muslim faith presents to civilization, the most dangerous of which is the idea that God approves violence in his name.  In his 2006 lecture at Regensburg, Germany, much maligned in the Muslim world for its alleged blasphemy, the Pope outlined how the choices made by Islamic theological and intellectual leadership over the centuries  have resulted in an inability to reconcile the truths of their religion with those of reason, a critical ingredient that has produced the dominance of the West in economic and scientific development.  And it’s not simply all about the radical swamps of Islam; even mainstream Islam has no real concept of tolerance, plurality, or true introspection.  Their God is pure will, and their mission is the rule of sharia law.   Obviously, these views resonate with young Yousef, and his courage should be a beacon for responsible Muslims.

Strangely (or maybe it’s not so strange) missing in response to Yousef’s revelation and conspicuously absent from any of the speeches by President Obama in Cairo or other venues where Middle Eastern leadership is focused is any reference to the need for a recognition of this obvious disconnect by responsible Muslim leaders.  The Pope could use a little help here, and it would be nice if it came from the political leader of the free world.

I am reminded of the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel lecture of 40 years ago:  “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of bare-faced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles…….a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well being as the chief goal of earthly existence.”

Recently a fairly obscure court decision caught my attention.  A Federal judge in Manhattan struck down some of a company’s patents on genes linked to breast and ovarian cancers.  This decision will no doubt revive the debate as to whether human genes, or any living thing for that matter, should be subject to patent protection.

The guiding precedent in these matters is the 1980 Supreme Court decision in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, wherein the Court ruled 5-4 that engineer Chakrabarty’s patent of a bacterium capable of breaking down crude oil be upheld.  The decision was very narrowly structured, however, and the Court emphasized that it is the responsibility of Congress to decide the limitations of patent law as they pertain to living things.

The recent New York decision will be appealed and this is a rare instance in which I agree with the American Civil Liberties Union–it should be upheld.  Further, the Court should have no role in determining whether such patents ought to be approved, only whether or not they are permitted by law.  Congress should do its job and definitively outline what constitutes “patentable matter” under the law.

Significantly at issue here is language used by the Patent Office in granting the Chakrabarty patent:  “…..the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of patent law”  And, as Leon Kass has made clear, the principle used here seems to be that there is nothing in the nature of a being that makes him immune to being patented.

This is erroneous thinking.  There is potentially considerably more to a living organism than a  “composition of matter”, a term coined by the Court as synonymous with a “manufacture”.  Human consciousness cannot be separated from its embodiment.  Congress needs to make this clear before we get much farther down this trail.

A few odds and ends on the education front:

**As difficult as it might sometimes be to come to the defense of the Texas State Board of Education, I must do so in the case of the recent revision of the social studies standards, particularly as it pertains to the history textbooks.  Yes, some of it was over the top prescriptive, such as lists of people who died at the Alamo, etc., but the accusations that were highlighted in newspaper op/eds, such as “the elimination of Thomas Jefferson from the history books” were totally without foundation.  Basically, rather than “revisionism”, much of what resulted was a rebalancing of historical perspective that has skewed far to the left over the past several decades under the influence of multiculturalism, postmodernism,  and related biases.  And, incidentally, the most vocal critic of the process and its result was the Texas Freedom Network, possibly the most misleading name I can imagine to describe an organization so far out of the mainstream that any objective observer should not want them within 100 miles of a school history textbook.

**The recent death of Jaime Escalante reminds us of the extraordinary courage of one man who took on the entire education “blob” and won some huge battles until he was finally crushed by the Los Angeles teacher union because his success in advancing the achievement of at-risk children exposed the vested interests of too many adults in the system whose interests trump those of the kids.  In his memory, we should retrieve the 1988 movie,  “Stand and Deliver”, based on his story, which is essentially about how he completely destroyed the myth of low educational expectations for poor inner-city children.  The battle still rages.  RIP

**I was initially in favor of Texas participation in the competition for the Obama adminstration’s Race to the Top grant funds, and even joined in signing an editorial piece to that effect.  The principle sticking point for Texas, which ultimately did not file an application, was the weighting of the criteria for joining the national Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Now that I have seen the first draft of these standards for math and reading, and reviewed a critique of them by people in whom I have high regard, I am more inclined to agree that Texas was correct in not participating.  So far, the draft reflects lower rigor and expectations than we already have in our Texas standards and don’t meet the college/career standards that we recently achieved in House Bill 3 in the last session of the Texas Legislature.

**It was just announced that Texas is to receive over $330 million under the federal School Improvement Grants program to turn around its persistently lowest achieving schools.  Of course, there are the usual federal guidelines for compliance and I haven’t seen these;  I can only imagine.  But if there is not wide-ranging authority for innovation, deregulation, competition, and, most importantly, complete control over human resources, including contract set asides for all personnel, substantially all of this money will be wasted, as has many millions spent on turnaround projects before these.  Of all the “reform” efforts of the past twenty or so years, the one major area in which progress has lagged most prominently is failing school turnaround, particularly with the high schools, primarily because we have not allowed these practices to be fully implemented throughout the feeder pipeline.

Meanwhile, our organization, the Texas Institute for Education Reform, and its allies continue to plow ahead.  For updates, go to our web site, www.texaseducationreform.org, and please keep us in mind when budgeting your tax-deductible  contributions.