Gandhi, Religion, and U.S. Politics

As I was doing some research for a project the other day, I came across this quote from M. K. Gandhi’s autobiography:

“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

While Gandhi and I come from different spiritual perspectives, I believe he made a profound statement. While religion has to do with the relationship between God and man, it also has to do with how men treat each other. And there are few greater fields where men interact than in the field of politics.

Gandhi’s statement caused me to think about several things, yet it also brought me back to our form of government. Many believe that we in the U.S. have a separation of Church and State. I believe this phrase gives us a false view of what we really have. Instead of a separation of Church and State, we have a disestablished relationship between Church and State. While there is no established church as England has, the moral guidance our religious tradition provides us can never be separated from the operation of our government. Our founders understood this. John Adams wrote:

“[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.”

Just like Gandhi, John Adams and our founders understood that our religious tradition is not something that can be relegated to just one day  of the week. Instead, it should be a guide that influences the actions of men and women daily….both in and outside the halls of governance.

Adnan Barqawi, Ronald Reagan, and America

Just this past Saturday, the Republican Party of Virginia held its State Convention to nominate its candidates for the 2009 Virginia Gubernatorial race. During the convention, the party delegates heard from all of its candidates, shinning among them their candidate for Governor, Bob McDonnell. There was even an appearance made by Sean Hannity. Later in the day with all of the heavy hitters having already gone, many former political figures filled stage time as the votes were being counted. Some delegates listened while others enjoyed conversation among themselves. That all changed when a young man named Adnan Barqawi walked out on the stage. A recent graduate and outgoing commander of the Corps of Cadets at Virginia Tech, Adnan’s cadet’s uniform was immaculate and his voice strong. With the audience still dividing its attention, he began to tell his story.

Almost four years ago, Adnan came to America from Kuwait. Adnan recalled how the Corps of Cadets enabled him to overcome the difference in culture and become a leader at his school. By the time he had begun to talk about the values of personal responsibility and leadership, he had the audience riveted to his every word. Telling the audience how he had just become an American citizen, he delivered this unforgettable line:

“I do not call myself an Arab-American, or a Middle Eastern-American, but an American. Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over. But when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight.”

He went on to affirm the values that made America great. The audience by this point was going crazy. I and other walked away amazed and inspired. A young man who had not even been an American citizen for four months, understood America better than most native born Americans. He in his own unique way, had been more like Reagan in 16 minutes than all of the Republican presidential candidates of 2008 combined.

Thankfully, his words were not lost to time and space. Below in two parts is his address to the audience. If you have time to only listen to one, start at part two. But please do yourself justice and listen to both, you will not regret it.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The Federal Nationalization of Personal Responsibility

I recently read an article that confirmed to me a dangerous trend in the United States. W. Bradford Wilcox in his Wall Street Journal article entitled God Will Provide — Unless the Government Gets There First, noted that there is a definite connection between a decline in a nation’s religiosity and the increase of welfare spending. He quoted political scientist Mr. Gill of the University of Washington as stating,

“For many centuries, average citizens and local communities have often relied upon the support of religious organizations to meet their various social needs, including assistance for the poor, counseling in times of crisis and education for the young…But as the welfare state has expanded, many people have found that they can get these same services from the government without having to give a time commitment to the local church.”

It would seem to indicate that as the government takes up responsibilities typically left to private organizations, government removes incentives otherwise motivating individuals to address the issues themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the more government “stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance.” So government has embarked on a self-perpetuating cycle. As they take up what private individuals use to handle, the more private individuals look to the government for help. This can only result in one thing, the concession of all private responsibility to government. And contrary to what some may say, as individual concede personal responsibility, they also concede personal freedom.

Government usurpation of private responsibility also threatens to destroy the community and family. As communities found they had needs, they bound together to solve them. Today though, government seeks to unsuccessful remove the needs that created communities. Gill writes that,

“A successful Obama revolution providing cradle-to-career education and cradle-to-grave health care would reduce the odds that Americans would turn to their local religious congregations and fellow believers for economic, social, emotional and spiritual aid. Fewer Americans would also be likely to feel obliged to help their fellow citizens through local churches and charities.”

So an increasing welfare state not only perpetuates the need for itself, it does so at the expense of personal liberty and our need for a neighbor just down the street. No longer do we need to be involved in our communities for an all-caring Washington will coach our children’s baseball team and help our elderly neighbor cut her grass.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: The Human Inequality of Equality

So the other day I was reading Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws ( 1748 ) and found myself struck by the relevance of his assessment of democracies. I was especially taken by a story he told from Xenphon’s Symposium. Montesquieu’s writes:

Each guest in turn gives his reason for being pleased with himself. “I am pleased with myself,” says Charmides, “because of my poverty. When I was rich I was obliged to pay court to Slanders, well aware that I was more likely to receive ill from them than to cause them any; the republic constantly asked for a new payment; I could not travel. Since becoming poor, I have acquired authority; no one threatens me, I threaten the others; I can go or stay. The rich now rise from their seats and make way for me. Now I am a king, I was a slave; today the republic feeds me; I no longer fear loss, I expect to acquire.”

Montesquieu went on to write, “Therefore, democracy has to avoid two excesses: the spirit of inequality, which leads it to aristocracy or to the government of one alone, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to the despotism or one alone, as the despotism of one alone ends by conquest.”

Essentially Montesquieu concluded that either extreme of inequality or equality lead to tyranny. What is interesting is that both extremes lead to despotism by one or a small group of people. The first is simply explained. The second is interesting because essentially the spirit of extreme equality weaknesses a people so much through the corruptions that follow that one individual is able to use force to conquer the democracy.

True equality he noted was not equality of social standing but standing under law. He stated that, “Men are born in equality, but they cannot remain so. Society makes them lose their equality.” Equality of social standing can only be achieved by perpetrating inequality onto certain individual. If one man worker harder than another, wouldn’t it be unjust for government to subjugate them to the same level of standing? Conversely, equality under law can be given to all without trampling upon anyone.

When everyone must be equal with everyone else, virtue is lost and corruption is bread. As the story above indicates, it is not justice to favor the poor over the rich. Justice is considered blind to state in life, but attentive to right and wrong. Yet as in the story, those in authority become the target of corrupted individuals pushing extreme equality. Through this eventually leaders become corrupted and to hide it, they corrupt others. They take from the people in order to give it back. Today leaders tax the productive in order to redistribute it to the unproductive…and they do it in the spirit of “equality.”

This extreme spirit of equality not only robs a people economically, but morally and spiritually. Rather than building up society to its highest level, we constantly tear down people. Just the other day, the news headlined a story about a girl’s basketball coach who was fired for allowing his team to win 100-0. No longer are there to be winner or losers. We speak about wanting to have the best school in America, yet we reprimand any sign of excellence. While we give lip service to wanting to produce tomorrow’s leaders, we fire anyone who stands out of the crowd.

This can only go on for so long. As the people demand more, the leaders take more. Eventually, society must collapse under the strain of its own corruption because of its loss of economical and moral strength. In the telling and provocative words of Montesquieu, “The more the people appear to take advantage of their liberty, the nearer they approach the moment they are to lost it.” 

Robbing the Cradle

Recently Nancy Pelosi attempted to insert contraceptives as part of the $825 billion dollar so called “stimulus package.” She stated that family planning, (a.k.a, reduction of births in the lower income brackets) would “ reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

Thankfully this measure was struck from the package, yet as James Pethokoukis wrote in his blog, the proposal was unacceptable for many reasons. First it reduces children to an economical consideration. No longer is life priceless. Rather, the government can and does put an economical price on the children; the money that will be saved from them never being born. Not only does this seem wrong for government to be making such a consideration, it even flies in the face of sound economical theory.

Mr. Pethokoukis went on to cite Phil Longman’s work Empty Cradle:

“Population aging also depresses the growth of government revenues. Population growth is a major source of economic growth: more people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amid a shrinking population, but in the real world, it has never happened. A nation’s GDP is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per worker. Thus a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an economy’s growth potential. When the size of the work force falls, economic growth can occur only if productivity increases enough to compensate.”

So if for nothing else, the federal government should want increased population for future potential growth of the economy. Yet I believe that there is a much greater moral argument to be made. And probably one of those arguments would be for government to stop perpetuating a welfare system that provides economic incentives for lower income mothers to have children out of wedlock.

Government may be dealing with the problems of a situation they created a long time ago. So rather than simply trying to prevent births, maybe government should begin to take the steps to reform welfare so as to limit the economical incentives that encourage births out of wedlock. Consequently, maybe government could prevent itself from trying to reduce the value of a child to a lump sum.

The Lincoln Standard – Looking Upon His Like Again

Stephen Samuel Wise in 1914 was asked to give a speech commemorating Lincoln’s birthday. The speech turned out to be one of lasting importance due to Wise’s incredible oratory abilities. Reading over his speech, I was struck not only by Wise’s rhetorical abilities, but by his observations of human tendency.

He stated, “Instead of following Lincoln, we too often strive to make it appear that he is following us. Instead of emulating him, we too often venture to appropriate him. Instead of sitting at his feet as his disciples, and humbly heeding the echoes of his lips, we attribute to him our own petty slogans.”

We can easily see this being done today. And with the 44th Presidential Inaugural today, we are seeing this more than usual. But what I want to focus on is our tendency to take the standards of history and degrade them to suit our own needs. This is especially prominent in the conservative movement with Ronald Reagan. Over the course of the last presidential elect, conservatives grasped various candidates and proclaimed, “He’s a true Reagan Conservative!” “He’s the next Ronald Reagan.” They often did this despite the fact that the candidates really did not fully represent all Reagan embodied. Rather than judging our candidates according the standard left by Reagan, we reduced the standard of Reagan down to the candidates.

Wise went on to state, “He did not solve all the problems of the future, but he did solve the problem of his own age. Ours is not to claim his name for our standards, but his aim as our standard.” If we truly do value the standard left by Reagan, we will begin to strive toward becoming like him rather than making him look like us.

One other thing conservatives constantly remark is that we will never see another like him. Wise even noticed this problem concerning Lincoln in his own time. “There could be no poorer way of honoring the memory of Lincoln than to assume, as we sometimes do, that the race of Lincolns has perished from the earth, and the we shall never look upon his like again. One way to ensure the passing of the Lincolns is to assume that another Lincoln can nevermore arise. Would we find Lincoln today, we must not seek him in the guise of a rail-splitter, nor as a wielder of the backwoodsman’s ax, but as a mighty smiter of wrong in high places and low.”

If we use Wise’s standard, I believe that the world did indeed look upon Lincoln’s like again. It was Ronald Reagan. And if we were to look before Lincoln, we would find that he was the same likeness as George Washington. They come under different names each time they appear and never in the same form, yet they all were “a mighty smiter of wrong in high places and low.” I believe we will see the like of Reagan, Lincoln, and Washington again. In the meanwhile, lets use the brightness of their legacy to light the pathway of our future.

Removing the Splinter before it Grows into a Tree of a Problem

While the media is no longer focusing on the Big Three’s problems, their problems have not disappeared and until the CEOs of those companies probably handles them, they will continue to reappear as assuredly as the Clintons do in politics. So what should be done once it does recapture the media spotlight?

Rather than temporarily enabling the Big Three to continue perpetuating bad business practices through giving them government funds, they should be allowed to fail. By allowing them to reach the failing point, the Big Three would likely each declare chapter 11 bankruptcy. Heritage Foundation Expert Andrew Grossman explains that such a move would not result in their disappearance in the auto market. Rather the move would force the companies to seriously evaluate their business plans. This process would definitely not be easy, as it would require them cut some serious inefficiencies from their system and face some long ignored operational issues, such as the UAW.

Bankruptcy would give the Big Three a structured way to streamline their functions and deal with a current corporate structure that is unsustainable and unprofitable. It would break the UAW’s death grip on the auto companies. While union members would ultimately be receiving less in benefits than before, more workers would be assured long-term security at a fair market wage rather than the whole workforce eventually meeting unemployment when the Big Three collapse from the UAW unsustainable drain.Just like when someone gets a splinter in their finger, people typically have two options. They can confront the sharp pain and pull out the splinter. Or they can baby it, just hoping the pain will go away. In the former situation, the wound will heal and the pain is quickly alleviated. In the latter, the wound is allowed to feaster and ultimately, there is more pain endured. Bankruptcy is the first option. A government bailout is the second.

The Injustice of Handouts

The second negative that would result from a government auto bailout would be the injustice it would be to the American workers as a whole. A bailout would enable the Big Three to avoid dealing with the UAW issue, thus helping to preserve the UAW hold on the industry. Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to Choose state that, “the gains that strong unions win for their members are primarily at the expense of other workers.”  Milton and Rose went on to write that:

On the average about 10 to 15 percent of the workers in this country had been able through unions or their equivalent, such as the American Medical Association, to raise their wages 10 to 15 percent above what they otherwise would have been, at the cost of reducing the wages earned by the other 85-90 percent by some 4 percent below what they otherwise would have been.

In an opinion piece, Bruce Raynor , President of United Here, cites union’s ability to raise wages as key to helping revive the economy. He states, “What the economy needs now is rising wages so the country can get on the path of wage-driven consumption growth.” But even this line of reasoning seems quickly debunked. In a UCLA research project focused on the Great Depression, one researcher states that:

High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns….As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.

So unions in many instances could hurt both the workers and the economy as a whole. Therefore, a bailout would constitute the use of taxpayer funds to rescue a system that discriminates economically against a majority of workers in favor of a unionized few.

While I believe that people should most definitely have the freedom to unionize, it would be unjust to use taxpayer funds to help institute discrimination against the majority of workers. In my last post concerning the auto bailout, I will address what I believe is the best course of action.

Government Subsidized Failures, Interest-free #TCOT

So if there is no responsibility for government to act in this area, is it even prudent for government to act in this area? From the outset, a taxpayer-subsidized bailout would do two negative things.

First, it would set a precedent that government will act as a corporate parachute if lobbied hard enough. This encourages irresponsibility in business decision-making. One only needs to look as far as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to see how government involvement in private organizations changes the dynamics of wise risk/profit analysis. While being privately run, they were government owned and thus felt secure to dabble in the risky subprime market knowing that the government wouldn’t allow them to fold. Commenting on the Fannie and Freddie situation, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas stated that, “The expectation of a bailout is an incentive for other private financial institutions to ignore risk in the future.” The Economist equated the situation to “a hard-living student who relies on his parent to cover his debts.”

George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty wrote:

Government can displace risk—by insuring against its effects on some citizens—but cannot finally escape it. If the insurer state attempts to absorb all risks of individuals and businesses—of unemployment, inflation, foreign competition, waning demand, accident, and disability—it will find itself overloaded with larger perils and responsibilities than it can well manage.

A government bailout would displace the risk of not addressing serious inefficiencies and bad business practices, the biggest being its unwilling to reign in the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Currently the UAW demands exorbitant worker compensation far beyond what the industry can profitably sustain, yet the Big Three continue to avoid standing up to the union. Therefore, intervention of this type only seems to result in government subsidized failures, interest-free.

I will address the second negative result of a government bailout in my next post.

The Congressional Assembly Line of Handouts

At the end of the fall semester, I wrote a paper concerning the bailout of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler that Congress had been considering. Since then, President Bush stepped in with a temporary fix consisting of a 13 billion dollar plus loan in the absence of any Congressional activity. So while the issue no long dominates the airwaves, it is likely to reappear sometime after Obama is sworn in. When addressing whether the government should bailout private companies, the first question that must be answered is whether the government possesses responsibility in this area?

John Locke believed individuals form civil government to preserve life, liberty, and property. This concept served as the foundation for Declaration of Independence’s phrase, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Locke concluded that the great end of civil government is the preservation of its citizens’ property. Judeo-Christian heritage provides that civil government’s responsibility is to preserve justice. This is essential to preserving property. Thus the preservation of property and justice seems essential to any government action.

Without developing any deeper correlation, the auto bailout is not a matter of preserving property or justice. While a failure in the auto industry would have adverse effects on the citizenry and the economy, it would not result in a lost of property or justice.

If anything, government intervention in this situation would be the matter of property creation and not property preservation. These are two very distinct things, one which is clearly within the responsibility of government and the other which is questionable. So if it is not the clear responsibility of government to be involved in the bailout, is it prudent for government to be involved? Does it make good business sense for government to increase the efficiency of their congressional assembly line of handouts? I will address this in my next post.