Musings Of An Indie WriterThursday, September 20, 2007
Trend Lines And Outlines
"Wise men see outlines and therefore draw them." -- William Blake.
"Mad men see outlines and therefore draw them." -- William Blake.
The desire, near to a compulsion, to put definite shapes to the amorphia of existence is the essence of both genius and lunacy. The two species are distinguished solely in this: the lunatic elevates his outlines to articles of faith, while the genius remains open to counter-argument and counter-evidence.
Though every genius is eventually proved wrong -- no human conception can embrace the full sweep of reality with perfect accuracy -- nevertheless they contribute mightily to the advance of human understanding, by hewing close to single indefeasible epistemological rule: facts trump theory.
In the world of politics and public policy, that maxim becomes practice trumps theory. A policy proposed to remedy some social ill, but which fails to remedy it or makes matters unacceptably worse, must be admitted to be a failure and repealed. That having been done, it should be installed in the Museum of Historical Mistakes, where future students of government and political economy can ponder its shortcomings and learn how not to repeat its errors.
Of course, politicians and governments being what they are, the above, common-sense approach to political misfires is seldom observed. Only two politicians in recent history have said "I was wrong" where anyone else could hear them: Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, and Julius Nyerere, dictator of Communist Tanzania. Nyerere's admission got him forced out of politics; Sadat's admission got him assassinated.
Of one thing we may be sure: politicians love power. Any man who runs for high office believes he deserves power: the power to compel, prohibit, and expropriate others with the law as his weapon. If he didn't think himself trustworthy enough to have it, why would he seek it?
Shall we talk about health care for a while?
Hillary Clinton, America's ineradicable reminder of the most corrupt executive administration of the Twentieth Century, seeks to return us to those halcyon days of yore. That is, she wants to be president. Apparently, eight years prowling the White House corridors snarling at Secret Servicemen for trying to do their jobs wasn't enough for her. You may recall, Gentle Reader, her first thrust at governance and the foofaurauw into which it precipitated the newborn Clinton Administration.
Well, she's back to playing that same tune on her banjo. It might well be the only one she knows. Or perhaps she thinks "children's rights" aren't punchy enough to propel a socialist into the Oval Office.
Health insurance made mandatory for all Americans. Employers compelled to offer health care insurance to all their employees, or pay a punitive tax. Government subsidies for those who can't afford a government-approved policy from their own wallets. Insurers placed under price controls and forbidden to refuse coverage to any applicant. Expansions of Medicare and Medicaid to cover any bald spots. Tax increases to cover the inevitable costs of the inevitable supervisory bureaucracies.
(Your Curmudgeon seldom writes in sentence fragments, yet above is a whole paragraph of nothing but. Let that be a measure of how serious this is.)
Some wag once wrote that the one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. That your Curmudgeon has forgotten his name is confirmation of his thesis. If Americans permit Mrs. Clinton into the White House again, that will be another.
In brief, every scheme of nationalized health care ever tried has imposed health care rationing on its victims and has ruined the medical industries that serve them. The sole beneficiaries of such schemes are the bureaucrats who administer them, who would otherwise have to find meaningful work in the private sector. But any reader of Eternity Road is likely to know that already, so why dwell on it? In any event, Peter Ferrara has an excellent dissection of the matter at National Review Online.
Mrs. Clinton, notably, claims to have learned from her failed 1993-1994 attempt to nationalize American health care. What did she learn? Well, she's a little vague on that; "not to be radical" is the only intelligible phrase that's passed her lips on the subject. But clearly, she didn't unlearn her desire to take control -- coercive control, for in government there's no other kind -- of one-seventh of our economy and the lives and fortunes of all the Americans it serves.
Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect that. Desire can be frustrated, and sometimes defeated, but it can't be destroyed except by fulfillment. Ambition once thwarted often flares up twice as bright. More to your Curmudgeon's point of today, the long, strong, unambiguous trend line in Mrs. Clinton's pursuit of power is a very useful thing. It permits us to outline her, to know her to an extent a shallower or less consistent history would not.
There's value in knowing a politician's history in detail. In most cases, it's not to their credit, which is one reason modern Americans have been seeking "Washington outsiders" for high office.
But it's not just politicians whose trend lines we should scrutinize. In this age of coalition engineering and political pandering, long-lasting, coherent special-interest groups are at least as important. Which brings your Curmudgeon to the subject of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007(ENDA).
Before you read it, try Googling the title of this bill. You'll quickly learn what it's about, who's behind it, and why. If you're at all conscious of recent legislative and regulatory history, you'll ask yourself "why does anyone think this bill is necessary?" Note also that state and federal governments are not exempted from its provisions, a rare departure from their traditions.
It's not necessary to analyze the bill in detail, if you're aware of the history of homosexual political activism. The entire thrust of "gay" politics has been a drive to compel Americans to accept them as just like everyone else. That's the sole objective explanation for the ludicrous notion of same-sex marriage. Marriage is the quintessential normalizing institution, by which adults establish themselves as adults, demonstrate respect for the future and responsibility toward it, and thus gain stature in their communities. But the reason it works that way is marriage's focus on children, which a same-sex couple is biologically incapable of producing.
The spearpoint term in homosexual political activism is, of course, "discrimination." Unfortunately, this camel's nose was shoved into America's tent long ago: 1964, the Civil Rights Act. As the saying runs, if you tolerate the camel's nose, eventually you find the whole camel in there with you.
Only one sort of institution should be subject to non-discrimination law of any sort: a government. Private persons and their voluntarily formed organizations are Constitutionally exempt from any legal demand that we not discriminate.
You say you don't believe it? Look it up. Bill of Rights, First Amendment. It's called freedom of assembly. One cannot have a right to do a thing unless one also has a right to refrain from doing it, in both cases without fear of legal jeopardy. But with regard to "non-discrimination law," that aspect of Constitutional law is completely ignored.
In the debates over the 1964 CRA, Hubert Humphrey famously said that if the CRA were ever to be used to impose quotas on American employers, he'd eat the bill on the Senate floor, in open session. Senator Humphrey is no longer with us, but if he were, one must ask whether he'd follow through on his pledge. Most Democrats and liberals have "convenient memories."
But your Curmudgeon's central point here is the trend line of "gay" political activism. In championing the ENDA, homosexuals are demanding a right nowhere mentioned in any of our founding documents: the right to offend others, by word and deed, without being excluded from association -- economic association, at least -- with those whom they've offended. Its "exemption" for religious institutions is fraudulent. Matt Barber makes a trenchant case against ENDA at TownHall.com.
All of that to one side, if homosexuals and "transgenderists" can compel normal Americans to accept them in the workplace regardless of their dress, speech, or conduct, the encirclement and destruction of individual rights by "non-discrimination law" and special-interest politicking will be nearly complete. There will no longer be freedom of economic association in a practical sense. Indeed, the logical progression would be toward a regime of government pre-approval of all hiring and firing decisions. At least, that would limit the number of lawsuits over such things.
Two trend lines, and two outlines drawn from them. Is the artist Wise, or Mad? Your Curmudgeon fulminates; you decide.
