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Individual, Community, and State: How to Think About Religious Freedom – Part II

In 13 History on 2012/10/19 at 4:03 AM

What is the cause of these pressures on freedom of religion and conscience? And how can we respond in the spirit of a renewed commitment to principles of religious liberty?

In truth and charity, we must give those responsible for the policies I’ve described the benefit of the doubt, as acting on some vision of the good. Those in charge of our universities, our state and local governments, our courts, and the Obama administration, seem to be animated by a desire to serve the goal of women’s health as they understand it, or to advance a certain view of freedom or equality. They think of electoral and legislative victories as vindicating the rightness of their views. And they often see the push-back that results as a failure to understand something obviously just. Hence the Obama administration’s rhetoric about a “war on women” expresses a real opinion on the part of the president and his supporters that the equal position and basic health of women in American society are served by a mandate that burdens all but the smallest employers and the most narrowly defined institutions of worship with the legal obligation to provide free contraceptives, abortifacient drugs, and sterilization services.

But while they may seek a certain good as they understand it, they fail to grasp the perspective of the religious dissent their policies generate. There is a blundering impatience on the part of the secular state, and the secular elites in charge of it, whenever countervailing claims are made in the name of religious conscience, the integrity of religious institutions, or the foundational character of religious communities as part of American civil society. And there is a characteristic failure to perceive the legitimate contribution of religion to public discourse.

Thus our predicament drives us back to first things—to the necessity of thinking through, from the beginning, the ground of religious freedom as an individual right; the relation of the individual believer to his fellows in a naturally formed community; and the way in which these individuals and their organic relationships of family, church, and other spontaneous expressions of civil society, are responsible for creating the state by their mutual consent.

I have twin touchstones for the reflections that follow: the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” which was addressed by James Madison to the Virginia General Assembly in 1785 and helped defeat a bill to spend tax dollars on the support of clergy; and Dignitatis Humanae, the “Declaration on Religious Freedom” of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. These two brief documents, written under such different circumstances 180 years apart, are not, of course, in perfect accord on every point. But they have something in common in the way they ground religious freedom in axiomatic reflections on the human condition, in the priority they place on religious obligations as making a higher claim on our attention than political obligations, and in the way they elaborate the limits of political authority.

Both Madison and the authors of Dignitatis Humanae begin with reflections on the individual human person and his relationship to God. Religious belief and devotion are not anthropological curiosities or historical relics, but are basic to the human experience—natural to us in the exercise of our most human faculties, those of the mind. And religious belief impresses itself directly on the mind in such a way that we can speak of it as not altogether voluntary—not a matter of willing choice, but of compulsion in light of the evidence that both reason and revelation place before us. Thus Madison speaks of religious conscience as an “unalienable right”—the same expression used for our most basic natural rights in the Declaration of Independence—“because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds[,] cannot follow the dictates of other men.” Likewise, Dignitatis Humanae, which grounds religious freedom in “the very dignity of the human person”: “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”

The right of conscience, then, is a right not to be compelled to speak or act as though what one knows to be true is actually false. For one has a duty to truth, and no higher duty than to the truth about the highest thing. As Madison goes on to say,

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. (emphasis added)
Similarly, Dignitatis describes religious freedom as something “men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God,” and this worship is the means by which we “may come to God, the end and purpose of life.” This puts before us as our end what Madison places before us as our beginning: Our freedom to fulfill our duty to God must be untrammeled because that duty is both first and last for us, the alpha and the omega. Fleshing out this common teaching, Dignitatiscontinues: “the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists above all else in those internal, voluntary, and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God. No merely human power can either command or prohibit acts of this kind.” As Madison puts it, “Religion is wholly exempt from [the] cognizance” of political authority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dignitatis had more than Madison to say about the fact that individuals do not practice their religion as a solitary act, but together with one another. Dignitatis refers to the “social nature of man,” and the natural consequence that “he should profess his religion in community.” It follows that the “immunity from coercion in matters religious” that men enjoy as individuals is “also to be recognized as their right when they act in community.” The vitality of faith comes in its communal character, in the individual’s fellowship with others whose views support, inform, and refine his own. Dignitatis treats at length the freedom of religious communities to meet and to organize, to teach and to witness to their faith, to control their own internal affairs, to undertake “educational, cultural, charitable and social” efforts as they see fit. This receives less attention from the more individualistic Madison, yet he implicitly agrees, assuming the existence of what he later called a “multiplicity of sects” and insisting on a politics of equal freedom for all religious communities, with the state “neither invading the equal rights of any Sect, nor suffering any Sect to invade those of another.”

Madison’s “Memorial”—again, not surprisingly—contains more of a political science than Dignitatis. It carries us back to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which move from our natural equality as created beings, to our possession of rights inextricably bound up with our nature and bestowed on us by the Creator, to the purpose and foundation of government, made by us to serve rather than frustrate our natural equality and liberty. Madison carefully employs the phrase “Civil Society” to identify the whole community—the community of communities, made up of families, churches, and all sorts of organic human relations—that is responsible for authorizing and limiting political authority. Civil society is the earthly sovereign, the supreme temporal power that delegates the powers of government. But even this is only the earthly sovereign. Over all there remains the “Universal Sovereign” to whom all must answer: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe.” For this reason, Madison says, religion is “exempt from the authority of the Society at large.” Much more so must it be exempt from the political authority of the government society creates.

The priority of individual rights and of the claims of organic communities also permeates Dignitatis, which describes the “common welfare of society” as consisting “chiefly . . . in the protection of the rights, and in the performance of the duties, of the human person.” Those duties are experienced and expressed in “religious communities,” so it is “imperative that the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice.”

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Individual, Community, and State: How to Think About Religious Freedom – Part III

In 13 History on 2012/10/19 at 4:01 AM

What are we to take away from these essential reflections on the nature and requirements of religious freedom?

First, human beings are by nature truth-seekers and truth-responders. If we are to live fully integrated lives, making our relationship to the truth a central part of our being and character, then we must respond to the truth as we understand it, and order our lives around it.

Second, thanks to the fallible character of our minds, we grasp the truth in common with some of our fellows and differently from others. But it does not follow from our conviction of the truth, shared with others, that we who agree acquire a right to compel others who disagree. Persuade yes, compel no.

Third, religious communities form an essential element in the civil societies formed by men. They are as natural and as organic as families. Their integrity and freedom come near to being as important as that of the individuals of which they are composed.

Fourth, the power of government, necessary as it is to maintaining a shared moral order, is the creature and not the creator of men’s rights, and the servant, not the master of our private relations in our families and religious communities. It has no jurisdiction over belief; it cannot properly legislate or adjudicate questions of religious duty or the validity of requirements of conscience. This is not to say that the government may never inquire into whether a claim of religious conviction is sincere. Nor must the state yield entirely to every sincerely presented claim. In the words of Dignitatis, the “objective moral order” that calls for “good order and . . . true justice” will trump claims that threaten the public peace or the rights of others.

But—fifth—short of such cases, the state should respect, honor, and even foster the role of religious communities and institutions as essential contributors to civil society. In crucial respects they are expressions of something still more basic to the flourishing of the human personality than is the political order itself.

The modern secular state errs in viewing religious communities as subordinate—whether as handmaidens of government, rivals for people’s allegiance, or as mere interest groups in elections and public policy debates. Subordination of the religious to the political tends to sever, in the minds of policymakers and judges, the link between individuals and the various expressions of religious community that enrich their understanding of the truth, animate their peaceful encounters with their fellow citizens who have different understandings, and inform the reasonable basis of our objective moral order.

We can see many of these problems in the HHS contraception mandate. In its administrative rulemaking, the Obama administration presumes to define what forms of religious community are religious enough to merit the state’s definition of “religious employer,” and thus to qualify as a genuine claimant of an institutional conscience. Even its promised “accommodation” would treat religious colleges, hospitals, and charitable ministries as second-class religious institutions. Genuine religion, it seems to say, is mere sabbath-keeping by individuals who attend the church of their choosing. And a family like the Newlands, insofar as it is engaged in a business, is utterly subject to the plenary power of the state. The creative gift of the Newland family—their business enterprise—does not fully belong to them, to be governed by their conscience. Their entrepreneurship must be severed from their faith, as though they can be Catholics only in church on Sunday. And the Obama Justice Department has the nerve to argue that the Newlands are “imposing their religion” on their employees!

Here we see one of the characteristic moves of the modern secular state: the effort to push the vital institutions of civil society aside—in this case, its religious communities and the unique role they play in the lives of citizens. Richard John Neuhaus understood this nearly 30 years ago in The Naked Public Square: “Once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it—the state and the individual.” And he added that “a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church.”

At one of this summer’s national political conventions, we heard the startling statement that “government is the only thing we all belong to.” In that understanding, the civil society and the communities to which government is responsible are left out. As a crotchety old Hollywood actor observed at the other convention, “We own this country . . . politicians are employees of ours.” He did not have religious freedom in mind, so far as I can tell. But his principle is sound for our purposes. Individuals of faith, joined in communities of faith, forming a civil society imbued with the many faiths of those many communities, own this country. The state’s authority comes from us, and its power—the power of our elected employees—cannot be greater than what we can rightfully give it. We cannot give the state power over the conscience of men and women, because we do not ourselves have any right to come between God and our fellow citizens. The sooner our elected employees remember these foundational truths, the sooner we may begin to recover a healthy notion of religious freedom.

“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”

Copyright © 2011 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used:  “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”

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Sacrament of Confirmation Administered to Younger Children

In 13 History on 2012/09/14 at 9:11 AM

Rome, Italy, Mar 8, 2012 / 03:58 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo said he is delighted to have first-hand papal approval for changing the order by which children in his diocese receive the sacraments.

“I was very surprised in what the Pope said to me, in terms of how happy he was that the sacraments of initiation have been restored to their proper order of baptism, confirmation then first Eucharist,” said Bishop Aquila, after meeting Pope Benedict on March 8.

Bishop Aquila was one of five bishops from North and South Dakota to meet with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican as part of their March 5-10 “ad limina” visit to the Rome.

Over the past seven years the Diocese of Fargo has changed the typical order of the sacraments of initiation. Instead of confirmation coming third and at an older age, it is now conferred on children at a younger age and prior to First Communion.

Bishop Aquila said he made the changes because “it really puts the emphasis on the Eucharist as being what completes the sacraments of initiation” and on confirmation as “sealing and completing baptism.”

When the sacraments are conferred in this order, he said, it becomes more obvious that “both baptism and confirmation lead to the Eucharist.” This sacramental assistance helps Catholics live “that intimate relationship of being the beloved sons and daughters of the Father in our daily lives,” he added.

The Bishop of Fargo said the changes have also distanced the Sacrament of Confirmation from “some false theologies that see it as being a sacrament of maturity or as a sacrament for ‘me choosing God.’”

Instead, young people in Fargo now have “the fullness of the spirit and the completion of the gifts of the spirit” to assist them in “living their lives within the world,” especially “in the trials they face in junior high and high school.”

Bishop Aquila explained his theological thinking to Pope Benedict during today’s meeting.

In response, he said, the Pope asked if he had “begun to speak to other bishops about this.” He told the pontiff that he had and that “certainly bishops within the Dakotas are now really looking towards the implementation in the restoration in the ordering of the sacraments.”


Lessons From American History: Governments Are Terrible Investors. Part I

In 13 History on 2012/08/31 at 11:11 AM

John Steele Gordon

John Steele Gordon
Author, An Empire of Wealth:
The Epic History of American Economic Power

 

Economic Lessons from American History

JOHN STEELE GORDON was educated at Millbrook School and Vanderbilt University. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Forbes, Worth, National Review, Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a contributing editor atAmerican Heritage, where he wrote the “Business of America” column for many years, and currently writes “The Long View” column forBarron’s. He is the author of several books, including Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, and An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on February 27, 2012, aboard the Crystal Symphony during a Hillsdale College cruise from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires.

AMERICA is still a young country. Only 405 years separate us from our ultimate origins at Jamestown, Virginia, while France and Britain are 1,000 years old, China 3,000, and Egypt 5,000. But what a 400 years it has been in the economic history of humankind!

When the Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed dropped anchor in the James River in the spring of 1607, most human beings made their livings in agriculture and with the power of their own muscles. Life expectancy at birth was perhaps 30 years. Epidemics routinely swept through cities, carrying off old and young alike by the thousands. History tends to dwell on a small percent of the population at the top of the heap, but the vast mass of humanity lived lives that were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Today we live in a world far beyond the imagination of those who were alive in 1607. The poorest family in America today enjoys a standard of living that would have been considered opulent 400 years ago. And for most of this time it was the United States that was leading the world into the future, politically and economically.

This astonishing economic transformation provides rich lessons in examples of what to do and not do. Let me suggest five.

1. Governments Are Terrible Investors

When the Solyndra Corporation filed for bankruptcy last summer, it left the taxpayers on the hook for a loan of $535 million that the government had guaranteed. In a half-billion-dollar example of how governments often throw good money after bad, the government had even agreed to subordinate the loan as the company’s troubles worsened, putting taxpayers at the back of the line. In retrospect, it is clear that the motive behind the loan guarantee was political: to foster green energy, an obsession of the left. And that’s the problem with government investment: Politicians make political decisions, not economic ones. They’re playing with other people’s money, after all.

History is littered with government investment disasters. The Clinch River Breeder Reactor, for instance, authorized in 1971, was estimated to cost $400 million to build. The project ran through $8 billion before it was canceled, unbuilt, in 1983. A half century earlier, the Woodrow Wilson administration thought it could produce armor plate for battleships cheaper than the steel companies. The plant the government built, millions over budget when completed, could not produce armor plate for less than twice what the steel companies charged. In the end it produced one batch—later sold for scrap—and shut down.

Going back even farther, to the dawn of the industrial age, consider the Erie Railway. In order to get political support for building the Erie Canal, Governor DeWitt Clinton promised the New York counties that bordered Pennsylvania (known as the “Southern Tier”) an “avenue” of their own once the canal was completed. The canal was an enormous success, but as such it affected the state’s politics. A group of politicians from along its pathway, the so-called Canal Ring, soon dominated state government. They were not keen on helping to build what would necessarily be competition.

A canal through the mountainous terrain of the Southern Tier was impossible, and by the 1830s, railroads were the hot new transportation technology. But only with the utmost effort did Southern Tier politicians induce the Legislature to grant a charter for a railroad to run from the Hudson River to Lake Erie through their counties. And the charter almost guaranteed economic failure: It required the railroad to run wholly within New York State. As a result, it could not have its eastern terminus in New Jersey, opposite New York City, but had to end instead in the town of Piermont, 20 miles to the north. It was also forbidden to run to Buffalo, where the Erie Canal entered Lake Erie, terminating instead in Dunkirk, a town 20 miles south. Thus it would run 483 miles between two towns of no importance and through sparsely settled lands in between—not unlike the current proposed California high-speed rail project, the first segment of which would run between Fresno and Bakersfield and cost $9 billion.

The Erie Railway was initially estimated to cost $4,726,260 and to take five years to build. In fact, it would take $23.5 million and 17 years. With the depression that began in 1837, it soon became clear that only massive state aid would see the project through. So New York State agreed to put up $200,000 for every $100,000 raised through stock sales. Even that was not enough, however, and the railroad issued a blizzard of first mortgage bonds, second mortgage bonds, convertible bonds, and subordinated debentures to raise the needed money. This mountain of debt got the Erie completed in 1851, but it would haunt the railroad throughout its existence. Indeed, the Erie Railway would pass through bankruptcy no fewer than six times before it disappeared as a corporate entity in the early 1970s.

Why was the Erie Canal a huge success—it even came in under budget and ahead of schedule—that made huge profits from the very beginning, while the Erie Railway was a monumental failure? One reason was that canal technology was well-established and well-understood by the early 19th century. More important, the route of the Erie Canal was the only place a canal could be built through the Appalachian Mountains. Thus it would have no competition. And the reason the canal was built by government was that the project was simply too big for a private company to handle.

A very similar situation arose in the 1950s. Three decades before, a young U.S. Army captain had joined an expedition in which the Army had sent a large convoy of trucks from Washington to San Francisco, to learn the difficulties of doing so. They were very considerable because the nation’s road network hardly deserved the term. By the 1950s, that young captain had become president of the United States and road-building technology was well understood. Dwight Eisenhower pushed a national network of limited-access roads through Congress, and the country has hugely benefitted from the Interstate Highway System ever since.

Both the Erie Canal and the Interstate Highway System are passive carriers of commerce. Anyone can use them for a fee, although many Interstates are paid for through the Highway Trust Fund. But a railroad is a business that can only be profitable with careful attention to the bottom line forced by competition. And governments are notoriously bad at running businesses because government businesses are always monopolies. Just remember your last customer-friendly visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In addition to building infrastructure such as the Erie Canal and the Interstate Highway System, government can be good at doing basic research, such as in space technology, where the costs were far beyond the reach of any private organization. Only government resources could have put men on the moon. Nevertheless, I’m encouraged to see that the next generation of rockets is being developed by private companies, not NASA. That’s a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, we are headed the other way with the American medical industry.


Lessons From American History: Politicians Have Self-Interests. Part II

In 13 History on 2012/08/31 at 11:09 AM

2. Politicians Have Self-Interest Too

In 1992, New York State found itself $200 million short of having a balanced budget, which the state constitution requires. The total state budget was about $40 billion, so it could have been balanced by cutting one half of one percent—the equivalent of a family with an after-tax income of $100,000 finding ways to save less than 50 dollars a month.

So did New York cut its budget? Don’t be silly. Instead, it had a state agency issue $200 million in bonds and use the money to buy Attica State Prison from the state. The state took the $200 million its own agency had borrowed, called it income, and declared the budget balanced. New York now rents the prison from its own agency at a price sufficient to service the bonds.

Had any private company sold, say, its corporate headquarters to a wholly-owned subsidiary and called the money received income, its management would be in Club Fed. So why wasn’t Governor Mario Cuomo or the state comptroller thrown in jail for what was a patent act of accounting fraud? Because government, unlike corporations, can keep their books as they please. And why must corporations obey accounting rules? In a beautiful example of Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work, it was the self-interest of Wall Street bankers and brokers that produced one of the great ideas in American economic history.

In the 1880s the great Wall Street banks that were emerging at that time, such as J. P. Morgan & Co. and Kuhn Loeb, as well as the New York Stock Exchange, began demanding two new ways of doing business: First, listed firms, and those hoping to raise capital through the banks, were required to keep their books according to what became known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. There are many ways to keep honest books—and, of course, an infinite number of ways to keep dishonest ones—so it’s important that all companies keep them the same way, so that they can be compared and a company’s true financial picture seen. Second, these firms were required to have their books certified as honest and complete by independent accountants. It was at this time that accountancy became an independent, self-governing profession, like law and medicine.

But while J. P. Morgan was probably the most powerful banker who has ever lived, not even he had the power to force governments to adhere to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and submit their books to independent certification. And because it is in the self-interest of politicians to cook the books—just as corporate managers did until Wall Street forced them to change their ways—they continue to commit accounting fraud on a massive scale. This is no small part of the reason that the federal government and many state governments are in financial crisis today.

In 1976 New York City went broke, thanks to spending borrowed money and hiding the fact by means of fraudulent accounting. The state refused to help until the city agreed to do two things: adhere to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and have its books certified by independent accountants. What a concept! Needless to say, the state imposed no such discipline on itself. So here we are, 36 years later, and the city is in pretty good financial shape while the State of New York is a financial basket case, almost as badly off as California. Maybe New York City should offer to help the state—once, of course, it agrees to keep honest books.

3. Immigration is a Good Thing

Everyone living today in the United States either has ancestors who said goodbye to everyone and everything they had ever known, traveling to a strange land in search of a better life, or did so himself. That takes a lot of guts and a lot of gumption. Both are inheritable qualities.

The French and Spanish governments, far more authoritarian than the British, were very careful about who they permitted to emigrate to their colonies. They wanted no troublemakers, no dissidents, and especially no religious heretics. The British government, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less who went to its colonies. The result was a remarkably feisty mix of people. Many just marched to the beat of a distant drummer. More than a few arrived one jump ahead of the sheriff—and others one jump behind him, having been transported as criminals. But the bulk came of their own free will, and have been coming ever since, in hopes of finding a better and richer life. Even those who arrived as slaves, and thus had no choice about it, survived an ordeal that is utterly beyond modern imagination and passed that incredible strength down to their descendants.

But while immigration made this country, there has been a long history of anti-immigration in America, beginning as early as the 1840s when the Irish, fleeing the famine, began to pour into our burgeoning eastern cities. Western states later pressured the federal government to limit and even exclude immigration from China and Japan. In the 1920s we limited all immigration, trying to make the ethnic mix that was then in place permanent.

To be sure, we need to secure our borders. All sovereign governments have a right and a duty to decide who gets to come in. But it is entirely in our interest to allow in those who want to work hard and succeed, for that makes us all richer. And in a time when by far the most precious economic asset is human capital (a phrase not coined until the mid-18th century), turning away those who possess it makes no sense. In particular, current regulations regarding H-1B visas and visas issued to foreign postgraduate students at American universities often force the holders to return to their native countries after they finish their studies or the particular job for which they were admitted. Many of these highly educated and highly skilled people wish to stay. Instead of letting them, we send them back to work in economies that compete with us. That’s nuts.


Lessons From American History: Good Ideas Spread, Bad Ones Don’t. Part III

In 13 History on 2012/08/31 at 9:11 AM

4. Good Ideas Spread, Bad Ones Don’t

In colonial times we had a chaotic money supply. Britain forbade the export of British coins, so while American colonists kept their accounts in pounds, shillings, and pence, what circulated in day-to-day transactions was a hodgepodge of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and some British coins, warehouse certificates for tobacco and other products, paper money printed by the colonies—until the British government forbade that too—and even wampum, the form of money used by the Indians.

After the Revolution, the need to create a national money supply was an urgent task of the new nation. The question of what unit of account to adopt was a complex one because the colonists were accustomed to so many different, and often incommensurate, units. Robert Morris, who had done so much to keep the Revolution financially afloat, tried to bridge the differences by finding the lowest common divisor of the monetary units encountered in each state, calculating this to be 1/1,440th of a Spanish dollar. He proposed that this unit be multiplied by 1000, making the new American monetary unit equal to 25/36ths of a Spanish dollar. Thomas Jefferson—whose role in this process amounted to his one and only positive contribution to the financial system of the United States—argued instead for simply using the dollar.

Once the dollar was chosen, it would have been natural to adopt the British system of dividing the basic unit into twenty smaller units, and those into twelve still smaller units, the way American merchants kept their accounts. The Spanish system in use in the colonies—cutting dollars into halves, quarters, and eighths, called bits—would have been a natural idea as well. But Jefferson advocated making smaller units decimal fractions of the dollar, arguing that “in all cases where we are free to choose between easy and difficult modes of operation, it is most rational to choose the easy.”

That made Jefferson the first person in history to advocate a system of decimal coinage, and the United States the first country to adopt one. This was a very good idea, and, as good ideas always do, it quickly spread. Today every country on earth has a decimal currency system.

But if Jefferson’s decimal coinage concept was a good idea that quickly spread around the world, another idea that developed here at that time was lousy: the so-called American Rule, whereby each side in a civil legal case pays its own court costs regardless of outcome. This was different from the English system where the loser has to pay the court costs of both sides.

The American Rule came about as what might be called a deadbeat’s relief act. The Treaty of Paris (which ended the American Revolution) stipulated that British creditors could sue in American courts in order to collect debts owed them by people who were now American citizens. To make it less likely that they would do so, state legislatures passed the American Rule. With the British merchant stuck paying his own court costs, he had little incentive to go to court unless the debt was considerable.

The American Rule was a relatively minor anomaly in our legal system until the mid-20th century. But since then, as lawyers’ ethics changed and they became much more active in seeking cases, the American Rule has proved an engine of litigation. For every malpractice case filed in 1960, for instance, 300 are filed today. In practice, the American Rule has become an open invitation, frequently accepted, to legal extortion: “Pay us $25,000 to go away or spend $250,000 to defend yourself successfully in court. Your choice.”

Trial lawyers defend the American Rule fiercely. They also make more political contributions, mostly to Democrats, than any other set of donors except labor unions. One of their main arguments for the status quo is that the vast number of lawsuits from which they profit so handsomely force doctors, manufacturers, and others to be more careful than they otherwise might be. Private lawsuits, these lawyers maintain, police the public marketplace by going after bad guys so the government doesn’t have to—a curious assertion, given that policing the marketplace has long been considered a quintessential function of government.

The reason for this is that when policing has been in private hands, self-interest and the public interest inevitably conflicted. The private armies of the Middle Ages all too often turned into bands of brigands or rebels. The naval privateers who flourished in the 16th to 18th centuries were also private citizens pursuing private gain while performing a public service by raiding an enemy’s commerce during wartime. In the War of 1812, for instance, American privateers pushed British insurance rates up to 30 percent of the value of ship and cargo. But when a war ended, privateers had a bad habit of turning into pirates or, after the War of 1812, into slavers.

Predictably, the American Rule has spread exactly nowhere since its inception at the same time as the decimal coinage system. There is not another country in the common-law world that uses it. Indeed, the only other country on the planet that has a version of the American Rule is Japan, where a very different legal system makes it extremely difficult to get into court at all.

The United States has more lawyers and more lawsuits, per capita, than any other country. But lawsuits don’t create wealth, they only transfer it from one party to another, with lawyers taking a big cut along the way. Few things would help the American economy more than ending the American Rule. Texas reformed its tort law system a few years ago and the results have been dramatic. Doctors have been moving into the state, not out of it, and malpractice insurance costs have fallen 25 percent. And remember, good ideas always spread.

5. Markets Hate Uncertainty

The Great Depression that started in the fall of 1929 ended, at least technically, in early March 1933. The stock market, almost always a leading indicator, had bottomed out the previous June, down 90 percent from its high in September 1929. 1933 would be the second best year for the Dow Jones average in the entire 20th century, coming off, of course, a very low base.

But recovery was very slow in coming. Unemployment, over 25 percent in 1933, was still at 17 percent as late as 1939. Indeed, in 1937, when the economy suddenly turned south again, there was a problem: what to call the new downturn. Most people thought the country was still in a depression, so that word wouldn’t do. But economists, delighted to have a problem that they could actually solve, came up with the word “recession,” and that’s what we have been using ever since.

Usually, when there has been a steep decline in economic activity, recovery is equally steep. The valley is V-shaped. That is what happened in 1920, when there had been a severe post-war depression and then a strong recovery. So why was the recovery so slow in the 1930s? One reason, according to an increasing number of economic historians, is that Franklin Roosevelt had a bad habit of changing his mind. While highly intelligent, he was no student of economics and seldom read books as an adult. So much of his program was, essentially, seat-of-his-pants policy. First there was the National Recovery Administration, which amounted to a vast cartelization of the American economy. When the Supreme Court threw it out—by a unanimous vote—FDR moved on to other remedies, including big tax increases on the rich.

But markets, which can function even in disaster with ruthless efficiency, hate uncertainty. When uncertainty regarding the future is high, they tend to tread water. As a result, there was what is known as a “strike of capital.” While corporations often had large cash balances—General Motors made a profit in every year of the Great Depression—and banks had money to lend, there was little investment and few loans made. Both the banks and the corporations were too uncertain about what the government was going to do next.

That is precisely what is happening today. Banks and corporations have plenty of money. Apple alone is sitting on about $100 billion worth of corporate cash. And yet the recovery from the crash of 2008 has been tepid at best. The valley is U-shaped. Undoubtedly a big reason for that is the enormous uncertainty that has plagued the country since 2008. Will health care—one-sixth of the American economy—be taken over by the folks who run the post office? Will the Bush tax cuts be ended or continued? Will the corporate income tax go up or down? Will manufacturing get a special tax deal? Will so-called millionaires—who, when you listen carefully to what liberal politicians are saying, can earn as little as $200,000 a year—be forced suddenly to pay “their fair share”?

Who knows? So firms and banks are postponing investment decisions until the future is clearer. Perhaps the clearing will happen on November 6.

Copyright © 2012 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.” SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST. ISSN 0277-8432. Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #1563325.

Reprinted by permission of Hillsdale College

About Imprimis

Imprimis is the free monthly speech digest of Hillsdale College and is dedicated to educating citizens and promoting civil and religious liberty by covering cultural, economic, political and educational issues of enduring significance.  The content of Imprimis is drawn from speeches delivered to Hillsdale College-hosted events, both on-campus and off-campus.  First published in 1972, Imprimis is one of the most widely circulated opinion publications in the nation with over 2.5 million subscribers.


Seeing Is Believing

In 13 History on 2012/08/24 at 11:09 AM

A few years ago a retired  nurse confided in me that she was tormented by the reality of what she had callously done.  She had disposed daily of babies who were victims of what is termed partial-birth abortion: as the baby is being born, surgical scissor execute it.   This nurse disposed of the babies in plastic bags which she dumped in the hospital trash bin.

Although she sort of describe the procedure to me, it was when I saw a demonstration by Dr. Lile on YouTube, that I grasped the horror ot it.  Dr. Lile has granted his permission to post this video on the Pause and Ponder blog.  Look and realize for one cannot see this and not believe that this is the taking of an innocent human life.

Thus saith the Lord: A voice was heard on high of lamentation, of mourning, and weeping, of Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted for them, because they are not.  Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:18.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g46hlT_2804

 

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New particle may unlock new discoveries, says Vatican astronomer

In 13 History on 2012/08/03 at 11:11 AM

By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The discovery of a new sub-atomic particle — the so-called Higgs boson — may help scientists discover how the hidden structure of all matter in the universe works, a Vatican astronomer said.

“It indicates that reality is deeper and more rich and strange than our everyday life,” U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno told Catholic News Service.

When people go about their everyday business working or relaxing, they don’t think about the tiniest building blocks of physical matter, but “without these underlying little things, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.

Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, announced July 4 that they were 99.999 percent certain they found evidence of a new particle that might be key to the structure of the universe and to understanding nature.

British physicist Peter Higgs first hypothesized the existence of the particle in the 1960s as the final missing element in a framework called the Standard Model, which explains how sub-atomic particles and forces interact.

Over the decades, with the help of increasingly powerful and sophisticated high-energy particle accelerators, scientists have been searching for what atoms are made up of, what the smaller components of atoms are made up of, what the nature of those smaller components is, and so on, Brother Consolmagno said.

But it wasn’t clear why some materials, such as protons and electrons, have mass and therefore are attracted to each other by gravity, while other materials, such as photons, have no mass, he said.

“Higgs, 50 years ago, worked out a model called the Standard Model, that would provide reasons for attraction and why there is mass,” the Jesuit said.

Higgs predicted that if a particle that produced the effect of mass existed, it should be “visible” after two atoms were smashed together at high enough speeds.

Experiments at CERN have revealed that “there is something that looks something like the Higgs-boson,” Brother Consolmagno said. The new data “will be used to test the Standard Model and how sub-atomic particles work,” he said.

The Higgs-boson had been nicknamed “the God particle” as “a joke” in an attempt to depict the particle as “almost like a gift from God to help explain how reality works in the sub-atomic world,” he said. Because the particle is believed to be what gives mass to matter, it was assigned the godlike status of being able to create something out of nothing.

But such “God of the gaps” conjectures are not only bad reasons to believe in God, they are also bad science, Brother Consolmagno said.

“You’ll look foolish, in say 2050, when they discover the real reason” for a phenomenon that was explained away earlier by the hand of God, he said.

However, another kind of faith and hope do exist in the scientific community, he said.

“No one would have built this enormous experiment,” tapping the time and talents of thousands of scientists around the world, “without faith they would find something,” he said.

“My belief in God gives me the courage to look at the physical universe and to expect to find order and beauty,” he said. “It’s my faith that inspires me to do science.”

Copyright (c) 2012 Catholic News Service www.CatholicNews.com Reprinted with permission of CNS.

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Major source of historical manuscripts to be put on line

In 13 History on 2012/05/25 at 9:11 AM

VATICAN APOSTOLIC LIBRARY TO DIGITISE A MILLION PAGES OF MANUSCRIPTS AND INCUNABULA

Vatican City, 13 April 2012 (VIS) – Msgr. Cesare Pasini, prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, announced in yesterday’s “Osservatore Romano” that over the next five years 1.5 million pages of manuscripts and incunabula held in the Vatican and in the Bodleian Library in Oxford will be be transferred into digital format. This is the largest such initiative yet carried out by the Vatican Library and is being put into effect with the assistance of the Polonsky Foundation.

Two thirds of the works to be digitised – around one million pages or 2,500 books – will be chosen from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and incunabula in the Vatican Apostolic Library. The institution possesses 8,900 incunabula, making it the fourth largest collection in the world. A catalogue of the incunabula has recently been published on the internet and, thanks to this latest project, it is hoped to make more than 800 complete works available online. They include the famous “De Europa” by Pope Pius II, printed by Albrecht Kunne in Memmingen before 1491, and the 42-Line Latin Bible of Johann Gutenberg, the first book printed using moveable type, between 1454 and 1455.

Certain particularly important Hebrew manuscripts are also due to be digitised, including the “Sifra”, written some time between the end of the ninth and the middle of the tenth century and perhaps the oldest surviving Jewish codex; a Bible written in Italy around the year 1100; commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud; Halakhah and Kabbalah, as well as writings on philosophy, medicine and astronomy.

Among the Greek manuscripts to be transferred into digital format are works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Hypocrites, as well as New Testament codices and works by Church Fathers, many decorated with Byzantine miniatures.

As well as its 8,900 incunabula, the Vatican Apostolic Library also possesses more than 80,000 manuscripts. Msgr. Pasini explains that transferring them to digital format is a way of “better conserving cultural heritage, facilitating consultation and ensuring a high-quality reproduction before any eventual degradation of the original. It also means making those works immediately accessible to many more people online”.

The Vatican Apostolic Library’s digitisation project began two years ago, since when the number of manuscripts available in digital format has been gradually increasing thanks to the efforts of the library’s own reproduction laboratory. There are also a number of initiatives under way in collaboration with other cultural institutions, such as the ongoing digitisation of the Latin Palatine manuscripts being carried out with the University of Heidelberg.

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Rite for Blessing of a Child in the Womb

In 13 History on 2012/05/18 at 11:11 AM

Vatican City, 3 April 2012 (VIS) – Beginning in the second week of May when many countries around the world celebrate Mother’s Day, the text of the “Rite for the Blessing of a Child in the Womb”, having received the approval of the Holy See, will be made available in parishes throughout the United States. The announcement was made recently in a note issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops informing the faithful that the the text – printed in both English and Spanish – has received the “recognitio” of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston and chairman of the episcopal conference’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, has explained that the blessing was prepared to “support parents awaiting the birth of their child, to encourage parish prayers for and recognition of the precious gift of the child in the womb, and to foster respect for human life within society”. The blessing may be imparted either during the liturgy or outside of Mass and the text will eventually be included in the Book of Blessings, after it has been revised.

The blessing of unborn children was promoted by Archbishop Joseph Edward Kurtz of Louisville. When bishop of Knoxville he had asked the Committee on Pro-Life Activities to see whether a blessing existed for a child in the womb. When none was found, the committee began preparing a text which was presented to the Divine Worship Committee in March 2008. In November of the same year the full body of bishops approved the prayer and it was sent to the Holy See for the “recognitio”.

Copyright © Vatican Information Service Vatican City