PWND

This video pretty much speaks for itself. I'll let the kid, his sister, and his dad do the talking.

Precedents are Stubborn Things

There has been much talk concerning the Supreme Court's decision to uphold "Obamacare" since the opinion was handed down by the high court a week ago today. In a landmark decision, the court decided to uphold the law by a vote of 5-4. Predictable glee on the one side and inflamed outrage on the other erupted moments after the decision was made known. The anchors of CNN's and MSNBC's ilk, attempting a kind of modesty in ideological victory, failed miserably to hide their joy. The conservative blogosphere and radio world made no attempt on the other hand to hide their disgust with Chief Justice John Roberts, calling his majority ruling everything from traitorous to the conservative cause, to an example of "twisted logic" and grasping at legal straws.

I have found it helpful to write this after the proverbial smoke of ideological battle has cleared, giving me time to digest not only all the coverage surrounding the law's success in court but also time to read the high court's ruling on the case. Going to the source is always good, but only if approached with honesty and integrity. I sincerely believed that I would probably find the same "twisted" and "tortuous" logic, the same legal convolutions, and the same pandering that everyone else has been reporting all this time.

Not only did I find that the reports surrounding Roberts' decision were overblown, but also that his argument made a surprising, even commendable amount of sense. I am no lawyer, Constitutional or otherwise, but it made sense to me. I never thought I would say this (I certainly never wanted to say this), but it would appear that the Obama healthcare law indeed stands up to Constitutional muster.

Justice Roberts argued the case from two different standpoints, as everyone should know by now. The first was from the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Roberts had no trouble in destroying the administration's Commerce Clause argument by pointing out that the Obamacare individual mandate cannot force someone into commerce who does not wish to engage in commerce. The case was pretty clear. However, the more interesting part of the chief justice's decision is reflected in the other standpoint presented by the lawyers for Obamacare. Those lawyers argued that the penalty for not buying health insurance was actually a tax, when Obama specifically said it was not a tax. In the end, Roberts ruled in essence that if the penalty walked like a tax, talked like a tax, was enforced like a tax, and was collected like a tax, then how could it be called anything other than a tax? He cites precedent after precedent to support his decision, especially his assertion that taxes have been called by other names before (including a penalty) and that the court ruled those things as taxes as well.

I will not recite the whole ruling here, but I found the essence of it to be very clear. The Commerce Clause arguments seem to be the part of his ruling that was more thoroughly hashed out and explained, whereas the taxing authority argument is by contrast a bit more brief, quotation dense, and yes, convoluted. And yet I don't necessarily find that last aspect troubling of itself, since the arguments in question are trying to tackle a highly convoluted and extremely long-winded healthcare law.

The Consequences

So what does it mean?

First of all, the ruling makes no attempt to call the healthcare law a good thing. Roberts makes that abundantly clear in the opening remarks of his statement, where he puts the blame for the monstrosity that is Obamacare on the people for electing the politicians that wrote it. If you want wise laws, elect wise men, he strongly suggests. We are here just to make sure that the parts all work as they should.

Second, it proves once again to the Congress and to the people that the judges on the court have the free will to rule however they see fit. The fact that Justice Kennedy (a man of a more liberal bent), and Roberts (a more conservative leaning man) both voted the opposite of their ideological leanings is proof of this. Both found compelling arguments to the contrary of their perceived camps and voted accordingly. That Justice Roberts was appointed by George W. Bush means nothing in this context. I am not saying that the court is pure of political heart, which it is most definitely not, but I believe that even the supposed conservative principles of the chief justice would not stand up to the scrutiny of case law, Constitutional gray areas, and historical precedent. 

Third, the ruling reinforces Congress's power to demand action of the citizenry, if only through negative means rather than through the positive command afforded by a Commerce Clause argument. The side effect of the ruling of course is a huge expansion of the power to tax by the Congress, by in essence ruling that economic inactivity can be taxed as well as activity. It is a wretched precedent created by (I think) a proper legal reading of the healthcare law, unfortunate as that might be.

Fourth and finally, Roberts' ruling labels the individual mandate for what Obama should have called it all along, a massive tax hike. Clarification of terms is helpful, and hopefully will assist in ejecting Obama from the office of president in November.

In the end, what is the Supreme Court for? To advance an agenda? Or to interpret law? In what way did Justice Roberts "betray" anybody by ruling on what he saw as the legal (not ideological) merit of the healthcare law? Both liberals and conservatives seemed so eager to push ideology that each side was set with statements to either blast the court's decision regardless of its merits or to praise it for seeing the light of reason. 

I think we could learn two things here: the first is that we should never again pass a law that is so enormously long and convoluted that it requires such nimble legal gymnastics to save it. The second is that if we are troubled by both Obamacare and the court's ruling, we have no farther to look for blame than ourselves. Justice Roberts is correct to shift the blame to 'we the people': if the power comes from the people, as our founders would like to think, then we need to elect a wiser governing body to represent us so that this whole fiasco never happens again.

Photo by Jeff Kubina, via Wikipedia.

Three Long Days



The nine current Supreme Court Justices -
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

 We are now moving into the third day of oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of the Obama health care law. It has been quite an historic week for the Court, involving probably the most significant case to be heard in that body in my lifetime. Read a breakdown of the arguments here.

Also, read about the administration's botched defense of its law here.

The Catch Me Net

Apple, Inc. has been getting more than its fair share of attention lately, possibly due to the fact that they may not (quite) have told the truth when they were supposed to. They boasted on their web site of rigorous standards that all of their suppliers were required to meet in order to work with the famed creators of the iPhone and iPad. Alas, either Apple, Inc. knew and lied to the public about the records of its suppliers, or else they were simply unaware of the horrid conditions that some of these suppliers work under. American journalism did its job right in uncovering the story, finding evidence suggesting that Apple did in fact know about the abuses for a long time and chose not to do anything about them.

In one case, which borders on the absurd and tragically comic, a Foxconn employee ended up on the roof of the facility, threatening to commit suicide by jumping because he had been treated so badly. Management was finally able to get the man down and they took steps to ensure that the suicide rate by jumping decreased. What steps, you ask? Not by improving work conditions. No, their solution was to install nets on the outside of the building in order to catch suicide jumpers.

It sounds (and is) ridiculous. But it is true. The catch-me net is their solution. Because apparently that was the only problem they were actually trying to solve, that people trying to kill themselves by jumping tended to hit the ground violently and die from blunt force trauma. If the blunt force trauma could be averted, everything would be all right. Right?

The Foxconn case is not much different than so many other cases of Chinese companies manufacturing goods for American consumers. The theme is the same: exploitation. Low pay, very very long hours, long weeks, no rest, lousy living conditions, promises of benefits that never materialize. There is no dignity in this work.

Where am I going with this? I am driving towards defining a word, and defining it correctly so that all the world knows exactly what I mean when I say it and that there is no misunderstanding. The word is capitalism. In defining the word, I shall follow the same path as author Thomas Storck does when he quotes Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno: "[T]hat economic system, wherein, generally, some provide capital while others provide labor for a joint economic activity." So one party provides the financing, the other party does the gruntwork for a wage.

What is so wrong with this arrangement? It seems normal enough on the surface. But there is hidden problem here: to paraphrase Mr. Storck, the problem here is precisely the separation of work and property (or capital.) As he says so eloquently, "the separation between work and the ownership of productive property ... tends to liberate the appetite for amassing wealth from the natural limits attached to it when that wealth is acquired by an individual with his own labor applied to his own productive property."* It is a situation ripe for the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. The minority party, the rich, can enjoy the almost limitless increase to their stockpile of wealth (which can never be properly utilized by so few people), whilst the majority party, the labor providers, only gain a tiny share in the wealth they help to create.

Radio talk show personality Neal Boortz likes to describe the poor in this country as basically the ones who will not work hard enough to make a good living; the lazy, lousy, stupid, uneducated poor. He claims it is mostly a mindset of entitlement that keeps the poor in their poverty. Former governor Mitt Romney speaks as if he agreed with those sentiments. Both men suggest that we don't need to cut the economic pie into smaller pieces to go farther, rather, we need a larger pie for everyone to have a bigger piece. In other words, we need more people to become wealthy so that they may spread their own wealth around. I think the two of them have missed the point, though, kind of like Foxconn and its catch-me nets.

They in effect suggest that we just need more capital providers in this country, more rich people to finance the projects. Except that this seems to be precisely the problem. As people become more financially wealthy, they are generally less inclined to do their own manual labor, or simply do not have the time to do it anymore. Therefore, they hire out the work since they have the money. But what they are paying for is labor, something which in effect Boortz and Romney are both saying that we should work our way away from towards greater ownership of wealth.

Boortz and Romney (and many a capitalist) would essentially have us devalue the proper place of labor and concentrate instead on acquiring capital. This concentration leads us, I imagine, to despise labor.

If there is uncertainty about the conclusions I have drawn here, I submit for your consideration the very Foxconn of which I spoke earlier. It is a monstrously huge company that provides dirt cheap labor to build Apple's iPhone. Apple makes most of the profit from the sale of said phone, the Apple company gets rich, American consumers (in a way the capital providers) get their iPhone cheap and everyone is happy except for the Foxconn employees who make next to nothing for their labor.

Unions in the United States and elsewhere have attempted to correct this monumental injustice by demanding higher pay for their members' work. But again, capitalism rears its ugly head by continuing to separate labor and capital. Take the United Auto Workers as an example. They demand unreasonably high pensions and benefits and pay because they need not worry about troublesome things like cash flow and profits. They just build the cars, not balance the company books. They work, they do not own. So the union and the auto manufacturer end up at odds because neither is in a position to really care enough about the others' true needs.

We as Americans either disdain labor, value it by its monetary value too highly, or subconsciously realize that our work is still valuable but that our capitalist system disallows it to have value. Thus much of our work becomes outsourced to those people who will actually still do the work. That is the reason we see Made in China printed on everything, and also the reason there are so many Mexicans doing the menial labor as janitors, dishwashers, lawn care specialists, etc. Capitalism gravitates towards the cheapest labor in order to produce the greatest profit, regardless of the conditions necessary to make the labor cheap in the first place.

This is a systemic problem, and will only become worse the greater the separation between capital and the labor which creates it becomes. More capitalism (or more capitalists) is not the answer. Reintegrating man's labor and productive property is the answer. There is more pride, accomplishment, and justice in being rewarded for the work you truly own than for making a profit off another person's labor.

This is the essence of Distributism.

*Thomas Storck, Capitalism and Distributism: Two Systems at War

Out For Blood

I remember back when Osama Bin Laden was killed in his compound during the now-famous SEAL Team Six raid, I was sitting at work doing whatever I was doing, with my headphones on listening to the local news and talk station on the radio. I believe it was Sean Hannity's show I had been listening to (which I shall do no more except to get the gist of the conservative mood on a certain subject, as Hannity's particularly rabid version of conservative arm flailing grates most obnoxiously on my nerves.) But putting his irritating and ADHD tendencies aside for a moment, I wish to draw out a particularly egregious statement he made that week concerning the government's release of pictures of the raid.

Now, normally, if the government is going to make an extraordinary claim like the fact that they have killed World Terrorist Number One, I would be the first to say "prove it." The government makes very little attempt these days to prove anything, especially its own capacity to govern, so maybe this cynicism is justified. And in this vein, or so I thought at first, Hannity demanded that the pictures of the raid be shown to the public. But he did not really desire proof of anything. On the contrary, he was highly praiseworthy of the SEAL team's efforts and applauded their actions even without the proof. I will try to quote his exact words as to why the pictures should be shown, because the American people "deserved to see that bastard with a bullet in his brain."

Wow. The man was literally bouncing in his recording booth seat with glee at the fact that another human being had been shot to death through the head. And this same man claims to be a Catholic.

This scenario basically repeated itself in the conservative talk show world this past weekend with the death of Kim Jong Il, although without the same driving intensity of the Bin Laden raid. The lack of charity shown was astounding, from talk show hosts and callers. These are people that are supposed to be middle of the road Americans, working class Christians, middle class Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and atheists who show some kind of moral character. And I can't say that they were all out for blood, but many of them were.

One of the most fundamental things I learned from good Catholic parents when I was a child was that no matter the cost, embarassment, ridicule, or hatred I received, I was required to love my enemies. That does not mean I am not allowed to fight enemies (the Church has the best developed theory on the conduct of a just war than any other institution on earth), but I am still called upon to love the enemies I may be called upon by my country to destroy. One of the greatest parts of this love is to pray for the salvation of the souls of all men, especially publicly evil men. At the death of Osama Bin Laden I did not joke about him finally meeting his seventy-seven virgins, I prayed for God's abundant mercy on his soul. At the death of Kim Jong Il I prayed that his soul might rest in peace because that is what a Catholic does.

A Catholic, a Christian, never revels in another man's death. Vengeance is God's and He shall repay. What we should pray for is that God's merciful will be done in that dead man's case. God does not consider a sinner in hell a triumph; rather, a soul in hell has rejected his Maker and must suffer the consequences. On the other hand, a soul that turns to God at the last moment is a victory more momentous than any other in heaven and on earth, and God rejoices in that soul even more than that soul rejoices in God's grace. In either case, however, God stands as eternal and all-knowing judge, and only He is to say who is in hell and who is not (not you, Senator John McCain.) It is not only not our job, it is entirely outside our realm of knowledge and experience. For us to rejoice that the bastard is finally gone and that God may send him to live with the likes of Hitler and Stalin is to act like a freshman at college, a state of life in which we are ignorant of how little we know and therefore revel in how stupid we are.

It is only fallen human nature to desire vengeance instead of justice, and only logical to desire justice without mercy. And yet God astoundingly does neither; maybe that is part of His unfathomability. He never does what we would do and that frustrates us. And yet when we do His will, we are mysteriously more at peace with ourselves. Far be it from usas His followers, then, to be less magnanimous than God.

I write this with some anger and frustration, not at Kim Jong Il or any publicly evil person in general, but directed at a single comment of a friend of mine. I had made the comment that I wished Kim Jong Il to rest in peace, and that God might have mercy on his soul. This friend (a Catholic) could not agree to my desire that Kim Jong Il should rest in peace, and to this day I do not know why. If it is because of listening to people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, turn them off. Now. They have been less than Christian numerous times before, and they deserve to lose listenership every time they spout uncharity and untruth. If that is where the vindictiveness comes from, cut them off for the safety of your own soul. Please.

Mahatma Gandhi famously said once: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ." A "Christian" nation that is out for the blood of tyrants is no Christian nation at all. Be aware of revenge and hatred and root them out. They do nobody any good.