Love in Truth

This week Pope Benedict XVI’s much anticipated social encyclical Caritas in Veritate arrived.  Your blogger has started it but is nowhere near completing it so I’ll refrain from commenting on it specifically.  It’s not a quick read.

As would be expected there’s much commentary on it on the web this week, Google will give you the mainstream media, The Western Confucian has a nice compilation of Catholic media articles, the Acton Institute has a page devoted to it and The Distributist Review has some thoughts (I especially like the pdf format of the letter The DR created).

I thought today though that I’d offer an alternative to the print reviews.  What follows are archives from a daily show, Kresta in the Afternoon, hosted on a local Catholic radio station.   One of the attractive aspects of this show is the depth of conversation and the lack of sound bites.  The discussions are from the past week and feature men who are serious about their faith, committed to Truth and are seeking to understand and apply the lessons to be gleaned from an earnest study of the letter in the context of their Catholic faith.

On Tuesday, July 7, Kevin Schmeising and Harry Veryser were interviewed. Dr. Schmeising is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and Executive Director of CatholicHistory.net.  He discusses the human developement and progress aspects of the encylical.  Dr. Veryser is Professor of Economics and Director of the University of Detroit Mercy Graduate Program in Economics at Macomb University Center.  Dr. Veryser discussed the encyclical in a much different context from most and is well worth listening to.  You can hear Dr. Schmeising at 9:15 of the following link.  Dr. Veryser is at 25:45.

Kevin Schmeising of the Acton Institute and Dr. Harry Veryser of University of Detroit Mercy

On Wednesday, July 8, Kresta spoke with Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute.  Dr. Gregg is Acton’s Director of Research.  Kresta’s worthwhile commentary begins at 7:15 of the following link and Dr. Gregg’s discussion is at 18:10 where Kresta starts the conversation with the question, “Is this encyclical leftist?”.

Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute

And finally, Frank Hanna, CEO of Hanna Capital LLC points out that “…what [the pope is] really concerned about is our souls.”  Advance to 40:00 of this link to hear Kresta’s discussion with Hanna.

Frank Hanna on Caritas in Veritate

Filed under: Uncategorized , Catholic, Economics, Faith, Liberty, Life

Boys of Summer

There’s been little time for blogging lately.  Life’s been busy with a new job, graduation parties and my favorite – watching my boys play baseball.  Here’s a review by Charley Reese of one of my favorite baseball books and a little fun from the boys of summer.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Baseball, Books, Fun, Humor

July 4, 1776

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

---

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

Filed under: Uncategorized , Liberty, Life

Mises on the bust

I started reading Socialism by Ludwig von Mises this past spring and am almost finished.   Tonight I came across a passage that’s just too good not to share in its entirety.  Note how prescient Mises was.  Socialism was first published in 1922 so he’s writing sometime before then.  The current ill health of the US economy and how it came to be so gives testimony to the accuracy of his analysis.

First, this from the Introduction by F.A. Hayek, a veteran of WWI as Mises and Röpke were.

Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more just world.  And then came this book.  Our hopes were dashed.  “Socialism” told us that we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.

Now this from a section on inflation.  In the broader discussion Mises is discussing the methods of destructionism, the inevitable destruction of capital that occurs as socialist policies are pursued.  Inflation is but one of the policies.  As you read, think in terms of the decades since the end of WWII, not just the last couple of years.  Think not only of real estate bubbles but of the seventies, Greenspan, dot com bubbles and Y2K bubbles.  (All emphasis is added.)

Inflation is the last word in destructionism. The Bolshevists, with their inimitable gift for rationalizing their resentments and interpreting defeats as victories, have represented their financial policy as an effort to abolish Capitalism by destroying the institution of money. But although inflation does indeed destroy Capitalism, it does not do away with private property. It effects great changes of fortune and income, it destroys the whole finely organized mechanism of production based on division of labour, it can cause a relapse into an economy without trade if the use of metal money or at least of barter trade is not maintained. But it cannot create anything, not even a socialist order of society.

By destroying the basis of reckoning values—the possibility of calculating with a general denominator of prices which, for short periods at least, does not fluctuate too wildly—inflation shakes the system of calculations in terms of money, the most important aid to economic action which thought has evolved. As long as it is kept within certain limits, inflation is an excellent psychological support of an economic policy which lives on the consumption of capital. In the usual, and indeed the only possible, kind of capitalist book-keeping, inflation creates an illusion of profit where in reality there are only losses. As people start off from the nominal sum of the erstwhile cost price, they allow too little for depreciation on fixed capital, and since they take into account the apparent increases in the value of circulating capital as if these increases were real increases of value, they show profits where accounts in a stable currency would reveal losses.[19] This is certainly not a means of abolishing the effects of an evil etatistic policy, of war and revolution; it merely hides them from the eye of the multitude. People talk of profits, they think they are living in a period of economic progress, and finally they even applaud the wise policy which apparently makes everyone richer.

But the moment inflation passes a certain point the picture changes. It begins to promote destructionism, not merely indirectly by disguising the effects of destructionist policy; it becomes in itself one of the most important tools of destructionism. It leads everyone to consume his fortune; it discourages saving, and thereby prevents the formation of fresh capital. It encourages the confiscatory policy of taxation. The depreciation of money raises the monetary expression of commodity values and this, reacting on the book values of changes in capital—which the tax administration regards as increases in income and capital—becomes a new legal justification for confiscation of part of the owners’ fortune. References to the apparently high profits which entrepreneurs can be shown to be making, on a calculation assuming that the value of money remains stable, offers an excellent means of stimulating popular frenzy. In this way, one can easily represent all entrepreneurial activity as profiteering, swindling, and parasitism. And the chaos which follows, the money system collapsing under the avalanche of continuous issues of additional notes, gives a favourable opportunity for completing the work of destruction.

The destructionist policy of interventionism and Socialism has plunged the world into great misery. Politicians are helpless in the face of the crisis they have conjured up. They cannot recommend any way out except more inflation or, as they call it now, reflation. Economic life is to be “cranked up again” by new bank credits (that is, by additional “circulation” credit) as the moderates demand, or by the issue of fresh government paper money, which is the more radical programme.

But increases in the quantity of money and fiduciary media will not enrich the world or build up what destructionism has torn down. Expansion of credit does lead to a boom at first, it is true, but sooner or later this boom is bound to crash and bring about a new depression. Only apparent and temporary relief can be won by tricks of banking and currency. In the long run they must land the nation in profounder catastrophe. For the damage such methods inflict on national well-being is all the heavier, the longer people have managed to deceive themselves with the illusion of prosperity which the continuous creation of credit has conjured up.

Remember, this was Mises published in 1922, not Paul from the 2008 primary season.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Austrian Economics, Economics, Inflation, Leviathan, Liberty

Summer School

I’ll be participating in Vox Day’s Voxiversity III at his blog this summer – a study of Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg.  Due to my own formal studies last year I missed Voxiversity I and Voxiversity II.  Since  Vox U I the participation has grown exponentially.  If you’re looking for something to read this summer get a copy of Liberal Fascism and take part in Vox U III.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Books, Leviathan, Liberty

Standing for Liberty

Twenty years ago the world watched as Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square and protested oppression in the name of Liberty.  Below is one of the most famous, if not the most famous, shots from that week.  In USAToday, Jeff Widener gives his account of how he got the shot.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Leviathan, Liberty

“Mentality of war”

I’m nearly finished reading The March of Freedom which has better acquainted me with some people I already knew of (Friedman, Mises, Röpke) and introduced me to people I’ve never heard of before (Robert Nisbet, Frank Meyer, Midge Decter).  The editor has compiled a list of 15 “conservatives” (in quotes because some of the subjects are not usually considered conservative) and written a short biography of each.  Along with the bio the editor has included an essay authored by the featured individual.  Which brings me to one of those names I had not heard of before: Richard M. Weaver.

Weaver’s “Up From Liberalism“, his featured essay in the book, is his own account of his journey from socialism to conservativism.  Near the end of his chronicle he discusses some of the dangers of technology and offers these prescient remarks:

The deadly trap into which the pride of the modern world in technology and invention has led us is not often described in its real nature. It has produced a world condition of unheard-of instability. The only way in which this instability can be overcome even temporarily is through rigid, centralized control of the national life. And the only way that a rigid, centralized control can be maintained is to keep the people living in a mentality of war. One can do this by filling them with desire of conquest, or one can do it by keeping them fearful of a real or imaginary enemy. Then one has a trump card to play on every occasion. If there is any relaxing or any resentment of controls, one has only to invoke “the national security” to silence opposition and even render it disreputable. We in the United States are living under the second of these policies now. The choice appears to lie between chaos and perpetual preparation for war, and the trouble with preparation for war is that it always issues in war.

Penned in 1965, Weaver was not advocating this rigid control but was concerned with the prospects of nuclear conflict.  Even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain almost twenty years ago we still seem to be living in an era of perpetual war for perpetual peace, whether it be in “fighting them over there” or preventing others from developing the types of weapons we have.  The Western Confucian provides a recent example of this mentality in Neocons More Dangerous Than Nork Nukes.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Leviathan, Liberty, Politics, War

Declining property rights

Property rights and property owners are under assault once again.  And the assault weapon is the law.  The Michigan House this week voted 73 – 31 to prohibit business owners (with some regulated exceptions) from allowing smokers in their establishments.  Restaurants and bars are not included in the exceptions.  Seventeen of the 73 were Republicans, the limited government [sic] party.  Included in the seventeen was my own representative, Marty Knollenberg, who on his website tells voters, “If you know of a regulation that interferes with your life or your business, my office will investigate it and look at logical ways to reform it.“

Maybe the first step to reform would be to refrain from adding more laws that restrict an owner’s right to make his own decisions about his property and business.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Economics, Leviathan, Politics

Big Brother is watching you

The BBC reports of the implementation of a national network of cameras and computers being used to log and track automobile license plate numbers. Authorities insist that “innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it.”

One innocent man disagrees however:

John Catt found himself on the wrong side of the ANPR system. He regularly attends anti-war demonstrations outside a factory in Brighton, his home town.

It was at one of these protests that Sussex police put a “marker” on his car. That meant he was added to a “hotlist”.

This is a system meant for criminals but John Catt has not been convicted of anything and on a trip to London, the pensioner found himself pulled over by an anti-terror unit.

“I was threatened under the Terrorist Act. I had to answer every question they put to me, and if there were any questions I would refuse to answer, I would be arrested. I thought to myself, what kind of world are we living in?”

Big Brother is active in the states too.  Recently the Chicago Tribune reported of a Wisconsin court ruling allowing Wisconsin police to attach GPS devices to anyone’s vehicle without a warrant.

And locally, Michigan is in the midst of its “Click it or Ticket” and “Buckle Up or Pay Up” campaign.  Extra patrols are out patrolling “enforcement zones” to ensure compliance with seat belt laws.  Make no mistake, they’ll be watching you.  “One officer will serve as a spotter who will radio unbelted motorist information to nearby marked patrol cars or motorcycles that will pull over offending motorists.”  The effort is financed by the federal government.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Leviathan, Politics

Christian libertarian blog carnival

The Holy Cause has recruited bloggers from around the globe to contribute to the first Christian libertarian blog carnival.  Perfect timing for the unofficial first weekend of summer (in the US).  Take some time this weekend to acquaint yourself with some bloggers who cherish both their faith and their freedom.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Economics, Faith, Liberty, Life