On Che Guevara

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying "What goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here.

On Alton Brown

Well, I found out that Alton Brown, of "Good Eats" fame, is apparently a Baptist, apparently a Southern Baptist, at that.

Now, knowing how intimately being a Southern Baptist and cooking are related, I can't help but wonder how his membership at a Southern Baptist church has affected the dynamics there. I mean, who would want to compete against Alton Brown in the annual church chili cook-off (and if your church doesn't have an annual chili cook-off, I guess something's wrong with your church. Just my opinion, of course)?

Peter Heck on Christianity and Government "Charity"

More than a few Christians, especially young Christians, are confused on this point:

They tell us that obedience to Christ comes in the form of high taxes on the wealthy to fund social programs for the poor. Even if these programs weren't as miserably ineffective as what they are, look at what they foster: envy, greed, bitterness and resentment. Not exactly the motivations of love and altruism that Jesus said were to be at the heart of our goodwill.

In truth, there is not one recorded instance of Christ advocating government confiscation and redistribution of wealth in the name of charity.

Jesus did say: "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' (Matthew 25:40)

Jesus did not say: "The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you forcibly took from the masses through taxation in the name of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

Jesus did say: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21)

Jesus did not say: "If you want to be perfect, go, get elected to high office and then use the law to confiscate the property of those who have, and give to those you deem more worthy of it. Then claim you are following me."

You get the point. Barack Obama's social gospel of government sponsored theft is a flat contradiction to what Jesus taught.

In my experience, the way this argument usually unfolds involves blatant equivocation, although the person making the argument doesn't realize that that's what he's done. People say things like this: "But MOTW, don't you agree that we need to help the helpless?"

Well, sure. The questions, though, are, "Who are 'we?'" and "Exactly what is 'helpless?'" If you don't get those answers spelled out clearly and mighty dadgum quick, you will find that instead of talking about the church and people who legitimately cannot work or who have been diligently looking but cannot find it, you are talking about government and any body of people from whom votes can be bought for the price of some public "charity."

Food Stamp Perspective

Mr. Buchanan provides a little historical perspective on food stamps:

“The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

These searing words about Depression-era welfare are from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 State of the Union Address. FDR feared this self-reliant people might come to depend permanently upon government for the necessities of their daily lives. Like narcotics, such a dependency would destroy the fiber and spirit of the nation.

What brings his words to mind is news that 41.8 million Americans are on food stamps, and the White House estimates 43 million will soon be getting food stamps every month. A seventh of the nation cannot even feed itself.

...a Food Stamp Act was signed into law by LBJ appropriating $75 million for 350,000 individuals in 40 counties and three U.S. cities.

[snip]

Yet when Richard Nixon took office, 3 million Americans were receiving food stamps at a cost of $270 million.

[snip]

By the time he left office in 1974, the food stamp program was feeding 16 million Americans at an annual cost of $4 billion.

Fast forward to 2009. The cost to taxpayers of the U.S. food stamp program hit $56 billion. The number of recipients and cost of the program exploded again last year.

Among the reasons is family disintegration. Forty percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent. Among African-Americans, it is 71 percent.

Food stamps are feeding children abandoned by their own fathers. Taxpayers are taking up the slack for America’s deadbeat dads.

[snip]

Obesity rates have soared. Forty percent of all the kids in city public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade are overweight or obese.

Among poor kids, whose families depend on food stamps, the percentages are far higher. Mothers of poor kids use food stamps to buy them sugar-heavy soda pop, candy and junk food.

[snip]

The Department of Agriculture in 2004 denied a request by Minnesota that would have disallowed food stamp recipients from using them for junk food. To grant the request, said the department, would “perpetuate the myth” that food stamps users make poor shopping decisions.

But is that a myth or an inconvenient truth?

[snip]

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society — fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

We Americans are not only not the people our parents were, we are not the people we were. FDR was right about what would happen to the country if we did not get off the narcotic of welfare.

Two thoughts, if you're willing to put up with them long enough to read them:

1) FDR was indeed right. Personally, I don't think he really gave a rat's rear end; I am pretty sure that like most leftists, he thought that no price would be too high to pay for the expansion of government. But look at what's happened via the so-called "Great Society" programs, through our so-called "War on Poverty": bluntly, poverty won. The number of "poor" people has not diminished, it has increased. Part of this is because government keeps defining poverty in such a way as to continually guarantee that a lot of people will qualify for these government handouts. It's a good way to keep the serfs dependent, you know. Part of this is because, just as FDR and many others have noted, the availability of handouts is destructive to the work ethic. In economics, this is known as a "moral hazard." It is a real thing, not some chimera dreamed up by right-wing fanatics who want to see babies starve.

The upshot is that anti-poverty programs do little to alleviate or reduce poverty; instead, they escalate and exacerbate it.

2) Money is fungible. If you're not familiar with this concept, I will briefly explain: one dollar substitutes for any other dollar. A dollar you receive in food stamps is a dollar that you can now spend on gasoline, on internet service, on cigarettes, on beer, etc. It is because money is fungible that those of us who are not on food stamps--and I am not trying to be overly judgmental here, I am well aware that in this economy, people who never expected to be on food stamps are getting them--are constantly gobsmacked to see those who are talking on their cell phones in the Wal-Mart checkout line. "How the dickens can they be on food stamps and afford a cell phone?" people ask?

The answer is obvious: it is because they are on food stamps that they can still afford a cell phone, or cable tv, or soda pop, or beer, or cigarrettes.

One of the most indelible impressions I have received in my adult life forever reinforced the concept that money is fungible. At one church, I used to go out on visitation quite regularly. We went in teams, and one night, one of the members of my team was an elderly lady who happened to be in charge of the church's benevolence ministry. That night, she wanted to go visit a family who'd come to the pantry for food assistance, and to whom we'd given, of course, some food.

Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the home and found, to the best of my recollection, four men, all drunk out of their minds on beer. "How," you might ask, "did they afford beer when they were in such desperate straights as to go begging for food?" The answer is, again, obvious: it was not so much that they were desperate for food. They were desperate for beer, and did not want to spend their beer money on food for the family. So they went to the church, and the church, in essence, via the fungibility of money, bought their beer for them. Let me hammer that home for those who aren't getting it: one dollar substitutes for any other dollar. The dollars that household received in food became dollars spent on beer. We bought their beer, we just didn't know it.

Now, let me carry this into a wider context: because money is fungible, in a very real sense, when we give people food stamps, we are often not buying them food. We are buying them all the things that they would like to have but otherwise would not be able to afford. Because they have been freed from the burden of a realistic food budget, they can now buy other things.

How does it feel to be taxed for the sake of paying for other people's cell phones? Because that is exactly what's being done to you. And ironically, all that government taxing and spending is part of what's killing the job market!

God Love Pat Buchanan...

Again, it should be noted that I don't agree with Mr. Buchanan on everything. Perhaps most notably, I think he substantially underrates the threat militant Islam poses to the world (ourselves included) and overrates how quiet Dar al Islam would be if we just completely dropped everything in the Middle East and cleared on out of there.

My principle objection to how we have been fighting the War on Terror is that we keep operating on what I believe to be a very bad assumption: that we can, for lack of a better word, "democratize" societies grounded on beliefs that simply do not, and never have, esteemed democratic values or republican government. Foreign policy based on bad assumptions is ultimately doomed to failure.

But on the following, yes, I do believe Mr. Buchanan has a point...

Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.

Why should Americans, 65 years after World War II, be defending rich Europeans from a Soviet Union that has been dead for 20 years, so those same Europeans can cut their defense budgets to protect their social safety nets?

President Eisenhower told JFK to bring the troops home from Europe, or the Europeans would wind up as permanent wards.

Was Ike a closet isolationist?

Almost $14 trillion in debt today, we borrow from Europe to defend Europe, borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from the Gulf Arabs to defend the Gulf Arabs. And we borrow from Beijing to send foreign aid to African regimes whose U.N. delegations laughed and applauded as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. Have we lost all sense of self-respect?

In his 1969 “Silent Majority” address, Richard Nixon said that, after Vietnam, America would provide Asian allies with weapons and assistance in defending their freedom. But Americans would no longer do the fighting.

Why are U.S. soldiers still on the DMZ, 57 years after the Korean War? Why are Marines still on Okinawa, 65 years after Gen. MacArthur took the surrender? Cannot Korea and Japan, prosperous and populous, conscript the soldiers for their own defense?

National security, yes. Empire security we can no longer afford.

What? You Haven't Seen Food, Inc?

That's what I wanted to ask the folks over at the-blog-that-shall-not-be-named when they excoriated Senator Coburn for holding up an alleged "food safety" bill. If they'd take the trouble to watch Food, Inc, they might learn a couple of things, like that some of our biggest food safety problems are exacerbated by government involvement (quick example: we have a few too many scares with e coli, right? E Coli grows well in the digestive systems of cows that are
fed corn. We, of course, finish off, or fatten up, our cows on corn. Not that corn's their natural diet or anything [That would be grass, for you non-rural folk]. We fatten them up on corn in large part because corn is cheap. Corn is cheap because the government subsidizes it. The government subsidizes it because of lobbying from certain giant corporations...) and that large corporations have a nasty habit of squeezing out competition by means of government muscle (Just google "monsanto + soybeans." Just google it. That's all I'm sayin'.)

I didn't have time to go into detail, though, and just left them to wallow in what they incorrectly perceived to be the moral high ground. However, what Stanislav, a Russian blogger, posted today reminded me of the whole thing. I haven't looked in detail at the bill, and don't know whether Stanislav is correct in the details, but...well, go ahead and read this:

In America, the House has already passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act S.510 bill and only the Senate is left to pass their version and commingle them into a unified monstrosity. The bill is designed to destroy the small farmer in America, the very caste of people who is the most likely opposition to the control of the moneyed elites.

Though the American small farmer is a dieing breed, with hundreds of thousands of families throwing in the towel over the past decade, he is not dieing out fast enough.

[snip]

The paperwork restrictions on farmers, the amount of effort to put in perfectly filled out copies or to face $500,000 fines on the first infraction, will guarantee that only the large agro giants are left standing in rather short order. On top of this the FDA will have full authority to dictate each and every detail of how food should be grown and under what conditions to the American farmer.

This is one of the ways it's done, folks, that is, this is one of the ways large corporations get rid of the small fry. For more details on this sort of thing, you can read Crunchy Cons; Mr. Dreher has a fairly lengthy discussion of this stuff.

Used to be, people in this country had enough sense to laugh when someone said that the most frightening sentence in the English language was, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

---

You haven't seen Food, Inc, have you? You went out and spent your movie money on something with explosions, or to see Bella snog that dimwit vampire, didn't you?

---

Just What I Been Talkin' 'Bout for Years!

One of the objections I've long had to free trade--again, let me reiterate for those who don't know, free trade and free markets are not the same thing, I oppose the one and support the other--is that if you lose some of your industries to foreign competition in the name of free trade, you might just find your tuchus in a sling if you have to, like, go to war. Or something.

Pat Buchanan says, illustrating this very point:

A fortnight ago, a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese patrol boat in the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Tokyo released the ship and crew, but held the captain.

His immediate return was demanded by Beijing.

Japan refused. China instantly escalated the minor incident into a major confrontation, threatening a cut off of Japan’s supply of “rare-earth” materials, essential to the production of missiles, batteries and computers. Through predatory trading, China had killed its U.S. competitor in rare-earth materials, establishing almost a global monopoly.

[snip]

The Chinese tiger is all grown up, and it’s not cuddly anymore.

And with Beijing’s threat to use its monopoly of rare-earth materials to bend nations to its will, how does the Milton Friedmanite free-trade ideology of the Republican Party, which fed Beijing $2 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over two decades, look now?

How do all those lockstep Republican votes for Most Favored Nation status for Beijing, ushering her into the World Trade Organization and looking the other way as China dumped into our markets, thieved our technology and carted off our factories look today?

The self-sufficient republic that could stand alone in the world is more dependent than Japan on China for rare-earth elements vital to our industries, for the necessities of our daily life, and for the loans to finance our massive trade and budget deficits.

How does the interdependence of nations in a global economy look now, compared to the independence American patriots from Alexander Hamilton to Calvin Coolidge guaranteed to us, that enabled us to win World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years?

That is only part of what's going on. Don't get me started about machine tools, and machinists, and tool-and-die makers. You don't wanna know.