There is a certain kind of inside-the-beltway conservative (you know the type) who emerges from his cocoon from time to time with the good news that all is well in America. “We’re a center-right country,” he tells us. “It can’t happen here.” The guarantee of individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence, central to which is our tradition of religious liberty, is enshrined in the Constitution. We might debate the extent of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, but unlike the French we never had an anti-clerical party that bashes churches. In the guerres franco-françaises , from 1789 on, one took sides with either the Church or the Republic, but never both. Admirably, my conservative thinks well of his country—but he should get out more often. If “it” means a sharp turn to the left, that certainly has happened in the last three years. As for religion, the HHS mandates, which would force religious believers to violate their conscience by offering contraceptive and abortifacient drugs to their employees, are really about anti-clericalism. The Administration seeks to justify the mandates as a means of serving women’s health, but no one really believes that. Pregnancy isn’t an illness, and drugs that prevent or terminate a pregnancy don’t make people healthy. Even apart from that, the dollars in question are so trivial that no one is hard done by if she has to buy the pills herself. The cost of the “free” prescription is about $100 a year at Walmart, the price for a movie and dinner for two at Red Lobster. People on the left complain that, by opposing the contraception mandate, the Church is denying women contraceptives, but that’s only true if I am denied a dinner at Red Lobster because I have to pay for it out of my pocket. People who believe that also believe, with Big Brother, that Freedom equals Slavery. So all that is a subterfuge behind what is really going on, which is picking a fight with the Church. For the Administration, that’s a winner, for three reasons. First, anything that distracts attention from important issues is a godsend, and resurrecting the culture wars does just that. The economy is in the tank, Iran is about to get nuclear weapons, and what does the mainstream media want to talk about? A $100 a year prescription! Second, keeping the focus on religion gives Democrats an opportunity to beat up on Republicans. Democrats poll-tested the question last summer, and came away thinking that, by taking on the Church, they’d win more votes among women and the radical left than they’d lose among Catholics. That’s even more so if Santorum wins the Republican nomination, which explains the timing of the announcement. Here is noted philosopher Bill Press on Santorum and his religion: “It’s perfectly acceptable for Rick Santorum to hold and preach those beliefs about sexuality, no matter how medieval. But he’s running for president of the United States, not for pope.” With his finger on the pulse of American voters, Press goes on to predict a 50-state landslide for Obama over the issue. The Sisters for Life have protested that the new rule tramples on their right to practice their religion. Each of us will be required by law to obtain health insurance, or face fines. Since this HHS mandate will require every insurer to include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and artificial contraception, we will not be able to obtain any coverage that is free from those “services,” and we will be forced to pay for them directly. Since we are neither employers, nor employees, of any religious institution, we cannot even take advantage of the “religious exemption” contained in the new regulations or the “compromise.” The Sisters describe themselves as a “contemplative/active religious community,” which means that they’re almost as other-worldly as my inside-the-beltway conservative. What they haven’t realized is that limiting their religious freedom is the very point of the bill. Their mistake is the one James Bond made in Goldfinger . Agent 007 is strapped down on the table, unable to move, as the death ray creeps slowly toward him. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks. And Goldfinger smiles. “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Now, no one wants the good sisters to die. All the Administration wants is to convert them to the church of Saint Nancy Pelosi. They’ve been a great annoyance. They go on marches and the like. Of course the press never notices them, but still they’re an oppositionist movement. And for all their talk of “rights,” these are the same people who would deny the rights of loving homosexual partners to adopt children. After taking some flack on this, Obama came out with an “accommodation,” an accounting gimmick in which insurance companies are required to provide the drugs “for free,” a tactic that stripped away many of the rule’s critics, the Washington Post , left-wing Catholics, libertarians. If the prior rule was offensive, however, the “accommodation” is even more so because, without relaxing the requirement, it insults one’s intelligence. Only the deeply stupid and economically illiterate would believe that insurers will offer a costly service without passing on the cost to their insureds. The accommodation slaps the Sisters for Life in the face and then, compounding the humiliation, tells them to pretend that the slap never happened. It’s also amusing that an Administration which complains of the financial burden of having to pay for the prescription out of one’s pocket tells us, out of the other side of its mouth, that the cost is so trivial that the insurer will do it at no charge. If that were the case, why was Nancy Pelosi, barking madness apart, so worked up about this? There’s a third reason why the issue is a winning one for liberals. The Church is one of those inconvenient institutions interposed between the president and the people. When one has direct knowledge of the good, as the liberal does, and a president with whom one agrees, intermediary institutions simply get in the way. If they articulate a different political or moral vision, they’re Bill Press’s medieval church. If they provide social services, schools, hospitals, adoption agencies, they are doing what government should be doing, and often with a dangerously illiberal agenda. And it’s not just the Church. There’s also the Supreme Court, whose Citizens United decision Obama regularly takes on, remarkably to their faces in his 2010 State of the Union speech. Then too there’s Congress, which sadly has been given the power, under the Constitution, to oppose the will of the president. “What’s frustrating people,” Obama said, “is that I haven’t been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.” (Those darn Founders! Maybe I’ll recess appoint my entire cabinet next time around.) Then there are charitable organizations, which Obama wants to shrink by limiting charitable deductions. Who needs them, when government should be doing it all? There also are families, who shockingly send their children to school with turkey sandwiches and not the Chicken McNuggets approved by the Department of Education. Finally, there are the states and American federalism. Libertarians have properly complained that a government which can force people to buy health insurance (without invoking the taxing power) can require people to eat broccoli. Or possibly arugula, were it up to Michelle Obama. What seems not to have been noticed is that Obamacare is also an issue about federalism, or would have been so but for the expansive view courts take of the Commerce Clause (“the feds always win”). For libertarians, it’s always about Man vs. the State. For statists too, it’s the same line-up, only this time the state always wins. Conservatives view it differently, as we see a need for intermediary institutions between man and the state. They give people the meaningful diversity that comes with a range of choices, and the information about how to live and how we should be governed that Washington cannot alone provide. That is why anti-clericalism is so dangerous. It does more than trample on individual rights. It also attacks an institution which permits its members to flourish in solidarity with each other, and which, merely by existing, defends their freedom. When every other barrier to oppression is removed, in a Poland or a China, what remains are churches faithful to their mission. Our modern liberal is an imperialist, you see. He would treat everyone equally, and to ensure equality would refuse to recognize any intermediary institution. “To the Jews as Frenchmen, everything,” said Napoleon. “To the Jews as Jews, nothing.” For what are the Sisters for Life, after all, except a number of female citizens, and a small number at that? To them as Catholics, nothing; to them as citoyennes , the state offers Ortho Tri-Cyclen!
Read the original here:
Liberal Imperialism
Still waiting to hear President Obama’s plans for the new “green” economy? Well, it arrived yesterday in the form of the ” National Bioeconomy Blueprint ,” released with great fanfare by the White House. It’s all there — the Age of Fossil Fuels is on its way out, the Age of Biofuels has begun. Now to be fair, there’s a lot of good stuff in this 84-page report, in terms of medical advances, agricultural innovation, and new industrial technologies. Since the decoding of the DNA molecule in 1953, the biological sciences have made extraordinary progress and continue to do so today. Whereas the 17th and 18th century could be called the Age of Physics and the 19th and early 20th centuries the Age of Chemistry, we are now living in an era when biological research is the cutting edge. To be fair again, all this happened long before Barack Obama arrived in the White House. In declaring government support for the Bioeconomy, the President and his Administration are essentially running to the head of a parade. True, there’s going to be lots of government funding to hand out and true, to this point the biologists have felt somewhat neglected. “Some people in the biotechnology industry have grumbled that the White House’s idea of innovation focused on electronic devices, social media and solar energy,” reports the New York Times . Yet ever since the Egyptians, priests and politicians have been claiming credit for every natural occurrence, from the rising of the sun to the blooming of crops, so there’s nothing new in this Administration claiming to make it all happen, either. What is unique about the new Bioeconomy is that the Administration has taken this opportunity to trumpet the idea that in addition to medical, agricultural and industrial advances, the Era of Biology will be a time when we “grow our own fuel” and begin substituting “biomass” for the conventional fossil fuels that have powered the Industrial Era since the 17th century. Says the report: The current backbone of our energy and chemical industries is carbon-based fossil fuels. Today we rely primarily on oil, coal and natural gas to run our cars, heat our homes, and provide the raw material for a wide range of products from drugs to plastics to fertilizers.… Now technologies are advancing to better harness the potential of microorganisms and plants to produce fuels, intermediate chemicals (e.g., the precursors for plastics), and other biomaterials. This is an idea that does not appeal to a lot of people — including biologists, agronomists, ecologists, industrialists and some scientists. Instead, the enthusiasm is limited to a peculiar breed of semi-literate people known as “environmentalists.” Without giving it much thought, environmentalists have declared that the dirty, nasty world of “hard” energy is about to be replaced by a soft, green world of biotechnology. In truth, if this ever happens, it will be the biggest requisitioning of nature for human purposes in the history of the planet. The idea that we could do away with fossil fuels by substituting crops and other biologically based sources has been around since the 1970s when we seriously thought we were running out of oil and gas. In his 1976 book, Soft Energy Paths, Amory Lovins first suggested we could replace one-third of our oil consumption by building a biofuels industry only ten times the size of the beer and wine distilleries. Unfortunately, he never bothered to calculate the amount of land that would be required. That was easy enough. From Lovins’ own figures, it was clear that growing crops to replace one-third of our oil consumption would mean cultivating an area three times the size of the continental United States. Nevertheless, Jimmy Carter, who had read Soft Energy Paths, became an enthusiast and persuaded Congress to adopt a 4 cents-per-gallon tax credit for ethanol after the second “gas shortage” of 1979. The 4 cents a gallon eventually grew to 46 cents-per-gallon and as a result, 40 percent of our corn crop now goes into the nation’s gas tanks. Ethanol just passed cattle silage as the principal use of corn and each year we devote 100,000 square miles — the equivalent of Iowa — to its cultivation. Still, the dimensions of the problem have barely improved. In 2006, James Jordon and James Powell, two research professors at Polytechnic University in New York, wrote in the Washington Post : It’s difficult to understand how advocates of biofuels can believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addition.… [T]he entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15 percent of demand.… And the effects on land and agriculture would be devastating. What keeps the advocates of biofuels going is the expectation that some miraculous breakthrough will change all this. For decades the Holy Grail has been “cellulosic ethanol,” a process that would use the stems, leaves, and other non-edible portions of the plant instead just the sugars and starches that are easily converted to alcohol. Breaking down cellulose is tough, however, and can only be accomplished in two ways: 1) heating the material in a way that consumes more energy than it produces, or 2) employing enzymes produced by bacteria that live in the guts of cows and termites. But duplicating the environment of a cow’s or termite’s stomach is very difficult. Although it’s been accomplished occasionally in the laboratory, every attempt to ramp up to an industrial scale has been a failure. In 2007, a company named Range Fuels claimed to have finally mastered the process. For this it won the 2008 North American Fuels Technology Innovation Green Excellence of the Year Award before it had ever produced a gallon of fuel. Backed by $156 million in grants and loan guarantees from the federal government, Range Fuels opened its first plant in Georgia in 2009, promising to deliver a significant portion of the 100 million gallons per year of ethanol mandated by President George W. Bush. By 2010 the mandate had been scaled back to 6 million and Range was discovering it couldn’t deliver that. In 2011, after making one test run, the company closed its doors and declared bankruptcy. (The test run allowed it to fill requirements of the loan guarantee so that investors were reimbursed while taxpayers were left holding the bag.) Advocates of “biodiesel” often talk about using other existing sources of organic material such as restaurant wastes and cooking grease as raw materials, so let’s look at that. The U.S. consumes 18 million barrels of oil per day, enough to cover 220 football fields to a height of ten feet. The EPA estimates that the nation’s restaurants produce 300 million gallons of waste oil per year . That’s one gallon for every American. There are 15,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 80 countries on six continents. If we made the wild assumption that each one of them produced five barrels of waste cooking oil a day, that would mean 75,000 barrels, which would be enough to replace 0.4 percent of our daily oil consumption. Every other scheme to harvest supposedly useless organic materials such as forest or crop wastes quickly runs up against the same obstacle. There simply isn’t enough of it around. Moreover, biofuels have very low energy density and are widely scattered. Just harvesting and transporting them would consume massive amounts of energy. Economically, it would never make sense — which is why it is not already being done. That’s why President Obama has now set his sights on yet another miracle — algae. It’s the only one left. ***** ETC is a non-profit in Montreal dedicated to protecting the rights of peasants and tenant farmers in the developing world. Originally founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, the initials stand for “erosion, technology and concentration” — the last being the concentration of economic power in the hands of international corporations. “Our mission is to monitor the impact of new technologies on the lives of indigenous peoples around the world,” says Jim Thomas, ETC’s project research manager. “We’re hardly the tool of the oil companies.” Nonetheless, ETC has emerged as one of the leading critics of algae and other biofuels, mainly because of the anticipated impact on Third World agriculture. “The problem with biomass is that it has very little energy density,” says Thomas, who works out of Montreal. “It doesn’t even compare well with solar, which is very dilute. Photosynthesis is only 1 percent efficient at turning sunlight into useful energy while a solar thermal plant can manage about 20 percent. The big problem with algae is that you can’t grow it more than one or two inches deep or else you lose the sunlight. So it’s going to require ridiculously large quantities of land. In order to match the output of a single oil refinery, you’d need to cover an area the size of San Francisco.” With this kind of land requirements, the only place where biofuels are going to make any kind of sense is in the developing world. “The cheapest biomass will inevitably be grown in the forests of Brazil and Central Africa,” said Thomas. “It’s already happening. Right now the search for biofuels by investors is the largest land grab of the last 300 years. Peasants are being pushed off their land. There are conflicts and battles going on and people are even being killed over this issue. Any technological advances are only going to make it worse. Switching from fossil fuels to biofuels is essentially an appropriation of the biological resources of the developing world by the developed world.” So there you have it, Obama’s brave new world of soft, green energy. In truth, the current era will probably be looked back upon as a brief episode when crackpot ideas gained the upper hand — when we ruined whole landscapes by littering them with useless windmills and solar collectors and took the preliminary steps toward dragooning the entire world’s biological resources in trying to replace the more dense and useful resources of oil, gas and the atom that nature has offered us. Hopefully, it won’t last long.
Follow this link:
Hold the Oil, Pass the Algae
America is in danger “of becoming something of a legal backwater,” a justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, is quoted as telling the New York Times . His comment is in a scoop that ran under the headline “?’We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.” The story follows up on an interview Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave to Al-Hayat TV in Egypt. In the interview she said that were she drafting a constitution in the year 2012, “I would not look to the United States Constitution.” Instead she commended to her viewers the constitution of South Africa, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada. Justice Ginsburg’s remarks went viral on the web among those who thought they were inappropriate for a justice bound by oath—as every American official must be*—to support the Constitution. The New York Sun commented on them in an editorial, “Lost in Egypt,” suggesting she had missed an opportunity to take the discussion of law-giving all the way back to Sinai. But the New York Times’ dispatch opens up the question of how popular an example our Constitution is these days. The Times reporter, Adam Liptak, gained an advance look at a new study on precisely that topic. He quotes its authors, two law professors, as reporting that our Constitution “appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.” Mr. Liptak, in my view, is onto an important story here. One of the key features of these newfangled constitutions with which everyone is so smitten is that they are much longer than America’s parchment. In Canada’s constitution, which our friendly neighbor got around to writing only in 1982, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, at more than 1,000 words, twice as long as our Bill of Rights, which has 482 words. The curious thing is that with all that verbiage, the Canadians failed to find space to provide for the right that one of our greatest constitutional commentators, St. George Tucker, called the “true palladium** of our liberty”—namely, the right to keep and bear arms. “Why, that’s impossible!” you might exclaim. “No constitution writer could forget such a right.” But feature this. The South African bill of rights is more than ten times the length of ours. And in that vast verbiage there’s not one syllable protecting the right to keep and bear arms. The document covers equality, dignity, life, security of person, slavery, privacy, religion, expression, picketing, association, politics, citizenship, movement, occupation, labor relations, the environment, property, housing, health care, education, language, culture, and arrest, among other rights. But not so much as a peep about the palladium of our liberty. Oh, and South Africa’s constitution states that the whole list of rights can be thrown into a cocked hat if there’s a state of emergency. But never mind, the European Convention on Human Rights appears to be even longer than South Africa’s—running to more than 5,000 words. Yet the Europeans couldn’t find room for the palladium of liberty, either. Mr. Liptak of the Times reports that only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions feature this one of the most basic rights. I cite this right only as an example of the problem with these hyper-long and detailed constitutions. When something is left out of a long list of rights, it tends to look less like an accident—given that they thought to list so much else. If the American constitution is a rich painting done in simple, elegant strokes, the new constitutions à la mode are something out of Breugel, crowded with so many little, crabbed figures one has to hunt for any particular one of them. Finding a right becomes a constitutional version of “Where’s Waldo?” Yet the great attraction to the left in these long constitutions is that they are built less around one of our Founders’ most famous modi operandi , the idea of negative rights or restrictions on the government. These new constitutions are riddled with positive rights, meaning things the government must provide. Our negative rights are worded like this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” etc., etc. Positive rights are worded like this from the South African Constitution: “Everyone has the right to have access to a) health care services, including reproductive health care; b) sufficient food and water; and c) social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.” No wonder a member of President Obama’s brain trust, Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, has called South Africa’s foundational law “the most admirable constitution in the world.” It’s just what the left is looking for these days, a system under which the government is not only permitted to do what the left wants but, at least in principle, required to do it. This is a feature of the so-called communitarian movement, in which the community outranks the individual. It is just breathtaking to see a paean to it coming from a justice of our own Supreme Court on the airwaves of another country. THIS IS NOT TO SUGGEST that Justice Ginsburg lacks for patriotism. I would not want to do that, even for a nanosecond. Some of the clips of her remarks that are rocketing around the web exclude a number of profound observations by her that are contained in the full interview. One is an essential point about constitutions generally, which is that, as she put it, “a constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom. If the people don’t care, then the best constitution in the world won’t make any difference.” She also spoke about the Constitution’s preamble and the intention to form “a more perfect union.” She stressed the enduring nature of that quest. No one suggests that America’s Constitution could not be improved. The Bill of Rights, after all, was itself a series of amendments. All the more admirable our Constitution has become. Editorializing on Justice Ginsburg’s interview, the Sun said it has nothing against South Africa, Canada, Europe, and Australia. America may turn out to be a legal backwater, the Sun said in respect of Justice Kirby of Australia, “but if you want to take away our Constitution, you’ll have to pry it out of our cold, dead hands.”
Originally posted here:
‘A Legal Backwater’
On Tuesday, several
Former Attorney General Ed Meese saw this coming. President Obama is now operating in tandem with the New York Times and other sympathetic media outlets to delegitimize not just the Supreme Court, but the Constitution itself. This effort can be traced back to a front page NYT hit piece authored by Adam Liptak that ran on July 24, 2010. The article is built around a database created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that gauges the ideological complexion of court rulings and the leanings of individual members. “In the database, votes favoring criminal defendants, unions, people claiming discrimination or violation of their civil rights are, for instance, said to be liberal,” the report explains. “Decisions striking down economic regulations and favoring prosecutors, employers and the government are said to be conservative.” In a subsequent piece that ran in February, Liptak targets the Constitution itself. “The Constitution has seen better days,” the article begins. From here, Liptak goes on to describe how the Constitution is no longer a compelling model for other countries. He even quotes sitting U.S. Supreme Court Association Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to drive the point home. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. As an alternative, Ginsburg recommends looking to South Africa’s constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the European Convention on Human Rights. General Meese suspects the NYT reports are deliberately timed with White House actions. “What he [Obama] is really doing is leading an effort to undermine the Constitution as the primary document which forms the basic principles of our government and the structure that should be followed by the executive branches as well as the other two branches,” Meese explained during a talk at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Mark Wohlschlegel, a staff attorney with Americans for Limited Government (ALG), challenged Justice Ginsburg’s view of the Constitution in a recent report . The Constitution “is not a document designed to empower the government to protect its people, but rather one that was designed to protects its people from their government,” he wrote. It is now apparent that Team Obama views not just the Supreme Court, but the Constitution itself as an obstacle.
