POLITICS and PUNDITRY

The Uncivilized U.S.

A long-time acquaintance of mine put a burr in my britches the other day, and it continues to chafe.  She’s a liberal who tries more than most I know to be fair when assessing political positions on issues.  I was therefore shocked all the more to hear her say she isn’t sure if the U.S. is a civilized society.

It all started when she recounted an Oprah show in which the first lady of talk went to Europe to compare their universal health-care-equipped societies to America’s.  My friend told me she found herself wanting to be Danish, because they rank among the happiest people, with a government that provides rather extensive services. 

The expense of such government care is a tax rate of 50 percent, according to the Danish woman who spoke to Oprah, and no one minds the high rate, because they get so much for it.  Oprah’s interviewee went on to say that they don’t consider themselves socialist; they simply consider themselves civilized. 

While the Danish woman may not have been comparing her country to the U.S., my friend unmistakably was.  I light-heartedly told her that I believe we’re civilized too.  To which she responded: “I don’t know.”

This is a person who’s been dismayed in the past when some conservatives called liberals unpatriotic!  You don’t think your country is civilized, I thought? Are you kidding me?

I immediately began dispensing United Nation’s statistics about how Americans give away a higher percentage of their earnings than any other people on earth.  She conceded that was civilized.  How gracious, I thought. 

Then it hit me: she must not know that as rich as we uncivilized capitalists are believed to be, there are still a fair number of countries richer than we are.  According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the per capita gross domestic product makes Americans the 12^th or 13^th richest country.  Denmark is fifth.  Call me crazy, but perhaps that has something to do with taking a 50 percent tax rate in stride.  The Danes can afford it.

While I was still reeling, she changed the subject from Oprah and the Danes to infant mortality rates.  I was informed that most western nations have a significantly lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. – further evidence, apparently, of how uncivilized we are. 

I asked for the facts behind the statistics, noting that so often when people discuss the need for health care reform in the U.S., they point out that our higher cost does not yield Americans greater longevity.  Of course, they neglect to factor in that we drive more than most Europeans and therefore have more car accidents; that we have more guns and people inclined to shoot them than most western countries, and therefore more shooting deaths.  Americans die more often for reasons that have nothing to do with a doctor’s care or lack thereof.  So I wanted a detailed evidentiary argument for how the U.S. infant mortality rate indicates that we are uncivilized.  I didn’t get one.

Having reached a point where I just wanted the whole maddening conversation to be over, I announced that the taxes and extensive services would be fine with me if it weren’t for a little old thing called the Constitution.  I’m a rules girl, I said.  If you don’t like the rules, change them – but you can’t just ignore them and go on your merry way, as I believe liberals do every time they want to pass a new government program without the constitutional authority to do so.

“Right,” she said taking the bait.  “We have to change the Constitution.”

Speak for yourself! I thought, waving goodbye.  The Constitution was written by a bunch of men who forced a king to leave them alone.  They painstakingly detailed the constraints of federal government power.  They wanted the government to be small and unobtrusive; they wanted the freedom to fail or succeed on their own.  They asked little of their government in exchange for the government asking little of them. They had the right idea; there was nothing uncivilized about it. 

Talking about altering those fundamental principles simply puts a burr in my britches.

Nobel Bombshell

“Are you kidding me??”  That was my exclamation upon hearing the news this morning that President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Talk about fodder for a return from a long blog break! I thought.  I could spew for a week straight on the insanity, insult and downright tragedy of the choice.

Now that I’ve calmed down, I must acknowledge that while embarrassing and ill-advised, the choice was not insane.  The Nobel Prize Committee may decide on anyone they choose, including those undeserving.  The prerogative is indisputably theirs.  But here’s the thing:

I was in Johannesburg and Soweto in April of 1994, reporting on the first all-race elections of South Africa.  I had the privilege of a front-row seat at a Mandela speech, given from a Soweto soccer field.  To say I was Impressed was then and remains an inadequate description.  For enduring 27 years in prison and embracing as friends the guards who kept him captive, for agreeing to a joint government with those who had kept him imprisoned, for renouncing the violence that had justified his capture and imprisonment to the apartheid regime, and for rallying a people to fight on for as many decades as it took to achieve legal equality, Nelson Mandela was a most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fact that a president who has yet to accomplish anything other than impeccable delivery of an eloquent speech is now in the same category of world achievers as Nelson Mandela is both baffling and enraging.  Those who drank the kool aid might argue that my conclusion is to be expected, given my frequently-recorded disdain of the current U.S. president and my stated admiration for the former South African one.  However, my outrage is just as deep-seeded when comparing Mr. Obama to those whose accomplishments are questionable to me. 

For example, I question the accuracy of global warming statistics and the methods used to arrive at them.  We live in a world where, ever since the creation of the broadcast news creature called the weatherman, there are constant jokes about what a waste of space weather people are.  Their predictions are simply unreliable.  If the forces of nature are such that no matter how much scientific knowledge we have, weather predictions are wrong (and often so), then how can anyone in their right mind trust the accuracy of predictions about the state of our atmosphere several decades from now?

When I was a child in the 1970s, the big fear was that another ice age was coming; the planet was allegedly cooling at a rapid pace.  By the 1990s, global warming was the threat, and the predictions at that time were that we’d be dealing with significantly higher oceans by now.  Instead, the earth’s temperature has declined in the last decade, leading a growing number of scientists (almost all outside of the United States) reevaluating those computer models upon which carbon footprint controls are based.  Yet, none of these rather large and valid questions about the accuracy of climate change data detracts in any way from the time, effort, passion, and  bona fide work that Al Gore put into informing the masses about an issue he believes detrimentally affects all of humanity.  I don’t think his conclusions of gloom and doom are right, but I had no issue with him receiving the Nobel Prize for his lifelong work.  That’s the key that’s missing from any sentence describing why the Nobel was awarded to Barack Obama.

“Need to Look Out for One Another”

In his blitz of interviews this Sunday, President Obama disagreed unequivocally with President Carter’s assertion that racism is the true source of conservative discontent with the administration’s domestic agenda.  Mr. Obama acknowledged that the “spirited” health care debate is about more than changing the health care system: it’s about the role – and size – of government.  But in making this acknowledgment, the president made another comment that inadvertently indicated why there will be no peace on this issue with folks who are right of the Left.  He said the question at the heart of the current debate is: “How do we balance freedom with the need to look after one another.”

But who says there’s a need to look out for one another?  The U.S. Constitution contains no such need.  But it does say plenty about freedom.

Many on the left would say morality and compassion require that we “look after one another,” but those justifications are completely unrelated to the law and therefore to government.  Government must actually choose to legislate on the basis of morality; it is not required to do so.  And chosen it has, more than once, to pass laws based on allegedly shared values.

Laws against prostitution and drugs are prime examples of the government legislating morality.  Examples of government-legislated compassion are social security and Medicare, into which all taxpayers pay and the benefits of which all taxpayers are supposed to reap.  In this way, entitlement programs differ dramatically from all proposed forms of health care reform thus far, as well as government programs that are designed to have individual citizens look after one another, whether they want to or not, using the federal government as the intermediary social worker. 

Americans aren’t happy having government choose to contribute their hard-earned dollars to a charity that’s not of their choice, which is what “looking after one another” amounts to.  The brilliance of FDR and LBJ in setting up the social security and Medicare funds, respectively, was that they knew getting something back for the dollars put in made it more palatable to the public. 

President Obama believes in charity for charity’s sake, without taxpayers getting anything on the other end but the satisfaction of having helped their fellow man.  Good for him.  That’s an honorable ethos and one easy to agree with in a personal sense - but not a governmental one. 

Charity for charity’s sake is, in fact, a valuable thing that people should try to give if they can.  But when they can and do, it should be to the charity or persons of their choice, in the manner of their choice and not to the federal government, for the government to decide who’s deserving and why.  President Obama, as an individual, is free to give as much to as many people as he can personally afford, purely for the satisfaction of having helped his fellow man; but he shouldn’t be allowed to foist that ethos onto the rest of the population.

Unfortunately, most liberals seem to believe that government should do what individuals aren’t willing to do, while being the very individuals who aren’t willing to do more for their fellow citizens.  Various polls and studies repeatedly show that conservatives, the ones arguing for freedom, those citizens who know that the Constitution establishes a small central government, and that the document literally enumerates the freedoms the government is supposed to protect, do a much better job of looking out for one another without order of the feds.  They give more time and money to both secular and religious organizations than those who self identify as liberal Democrats, for nothing more than the satisfaction of helping their fellow citizens.  No wonder they don’t want the government telling them they have no choice but to give more.

Those who believe taking care of the less fortunate is a moral obligation should be required to live their belief, not simply fill out their tax return.  Liberals want to just pass a program to help the less fortunate and tax the public for it.  Their way is lazy; it requires no thought, no effort, and no genuine gift of anything.  What’s moral about that? 

In any political battle in the U.S. between freedom and the need to look out for one another, freedom should win.  It should win for constitutional reasons and for moral ones.