The Abortion Debate

    For some reason, people have gotten the idea the debate about abortion has two salient features. 1: It began with Roe V Wade in January of, 1973  and 2:  It's exclusive to the United States.  Those two assumptions are features of the intellectual chauvinism of the American Right. Those two assumptions are incorrect and not at all what I've been thinking about.  That's why I mention them?

    Although, it is worth noting there was no government concern about abortion in the United States until people became concerned about the safety and the qualifications of the various providers in the 1880's. Attempts to outlaw the practice didn't come until even later.
    I was thinking about who pays for the continuance of the debate.  Abortion on demand is settled law and practice in the United States and it keeps showing up in the courts at great public expense as the result of the actions of various state legislatures.  The defense of the settled law and practice falls on the shoulders of private individuals and organizations at great expense. But the attack on settled law and practice is financed by state treasuries. Why?  How did we get to a point where all taxpayers are required to pay for attacks on settled law and practice?  In addition, when Roe challenged Wade , Wade and  the state of Texas defended themselves at taxpayer expense and Roe was privately financed.  You could certainly say the Texas law was settled and accepted practice.  What sense does this reversal of who pays the bill make?   Why do the taxpayers get stuck with the tab no matter what side they're defending, insurgency or settled law and practice?  Without partisan accusation I don't really have an answer for that.  I can't think of another example of that circumstance.  The anti-choice people have hijacked the various state treasuries.  When you think about it it's kinda odd no matter what side you're on.
     Sides. The debate has gone on for thousands of years.  The ancient Greeks talked about it.  Was it a violation of the Hippocratic Oath?  They didn't discuss it as a matter of law .  It just was and they wondered about the morality.  It pretty much stayed that way until the Christian Church came along.  That's when they started talking about penalties.  Even those penalties were ecclesiastical rather than civil although they carried a great deal more weight than they do now.  Morality was a separate realm from secular authority.  That's an interesting concept we might better follow today.  Render unto Caesar etc.  The medieval authorities seemed to think morality was separate from secular consideration.  It is worthy of note the Church did have a power to administer punishments including corporal punishments.  Think Spanish Inquisition.  If you really wanna go deep you can think about Sharia Law.
    So, as I followed the reading on the subject, this struck me.  It seems to me, as the concept of individual rights of man began to develop so did the concept of secular, governmental limitation of those rights.  It doesn't seem reasonable to me secular authority has a legitimate role in questions of morality but where do you draw that line?
    So, in actuality, it's an ancient debate and there is a serious question if it's a subject for government at all.  Interesting, but why do we keep getting billed for it?

Waco Etc

    There were mistakes made at Ruby Ridge and Waco that eventually resulted in hundreds of deaths.  Those mistakes have never been discussed.  Those mistakes center on basic principles of the establishment of any governed community and we're dealing with the debris 20 years later.
    First: And this is very important:  Society has a right and a duty to defend itself.  Secondly: All governments are ceded a monopoly on the employment of violence.  All arguments concerning the Constitution and civil redress do eventually meet the reality of first principles as well they should.  There is a reason why violating first principles is recognized as dangerous.  It is the first step on a "slippery slope".  This particular slope ended at Oklahoma City a few years later but that's not really the end of it.
    In both instances, Ruby Ridge and Mt Carmel,  society was confronted with overt violence by violent malefactors.  These malefactors had been brought to the attention of duly organized authority via their own anti-social activities centering on the advocacy of violence against society.  Their petit motivations are completely unimportant. They rendered their own message irrelevant by confronting first principles and no one in authority caught it.
    Randy Weaver et al were  given 11 days to surrender after they shot a federal official.  To be sure his wife was killed and well she should have been.  Oh, she was holding her infant child!  Isn't that just too affecting an image?  Who was holding the children at the day care center in Oklahoma City when they were murdered?  The idea we ever paid Randy Weaver anything but a bullet in the brain is an insult to common sense.  Had those people been treated as the violent, anti-social thugs they aspired to be and in fact were,  immediately,  the rest would not have happened.
    The Branch Davidians  were gun dealers. They lawfully dealt in mail order guns. They appealed directly to others with the same anti-government, end- times philosophies.  When confronted by lawful authority about suspect transactions they responded by murdering 4 federal agents.
    Here's an interesting aside.  If anyone who cares to could open their own government-funded school what kind of school do you suppose these people would have used your tax dollars to operate?  Someone should ask Betsy DeVos that question.
    What did happen was David Koresh, who was clearly irrational, was given 51 days to negotiate an end to the siege set off by the Davidian's murder of law enforcement officers.
    The negotiations failed for two reasons.  There never should have been a negotiation of any type.  That in and of itself was irrational.  The amount of force necessary to apprehend the murderers of our agents should have been immediately assembled and employed.  No lives were saved for the second reason.  Koresh was irrational and failing the duty to order and society did nothing but embolden other irrational people.  That should have been foreseen.  Just because circumstances have been imposed that make people loath to do their duty does not mean they shouldn't do their duty or make it less of a duty and this is a glaring example of why.  That needs to be recognized going forward.
    Two years later, to the day and in commemoration of the date,  the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by malefactors encouraged by the mistakes at Ruby Ridge and Waco.  The ATF agents involved in the Waco siege were based at that building.  The bizarre ethos created by treating Weaver and Koresh as something other than common criminals killed 168 totally innocent people including 19 children.  That's a totally unacceptable outcome caused by a failure to understand the basic ideas behind government itself.  In this case those ignored ideas are: Society has the right and the duty to protect itself and government thru duly constituted authority has the sole license to employ violence.  If the protection of those basic concepts isn't immediate and zealous it will uniformly lead to trouble as we have seen.

   

How Much Ya Got?

    In a society that's so affluent, surrounded by so much wealth,  it's no surprise we study the poor. We study what makes them poor and how they might deserve and employ our generosity and how they can quit being poor.  Generosity.  Aren't we just wonderful?  Their poverty concerns us and we want them to quit it.  So do they.
    Eventually, someone got around to wondering exactly how generous various classes of people actually were.  What they confirmed is interesting.  I say 'confirmed" because John Steinbeck told us decades ago when he said, " If you're in trouble, hurt or need - go to the poor people.  They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones."
    I don't know where that quote came from in Steinbeck's works but it's the kind of "out of plot" throwaway observation that typifies good literature.  Not every word has to advance a narrative but just about every word should inform.
    At any rate, it turns out the poor, by any metric we know, are the most generous among us. They apparently have more free time to read the Bible.  My dad used to say you can never grasp anything with a clenched fist.  He was certainly never wealthy but in his way, he was never poor.
    Abraham Lincoln said, " God must surely love poor people.  He created so many of them."  Perhaps God was trying to teach us about fraternal love and charity.
    I guess it's a personal familiarity with the very concept of need that enables the poor to be free with generosity within their limits.  Maybe half of essentially nothing is better than nothing at all.
    Familiarity with the very concept of need.  There's a thought.  We've built a society that can and does isolate many individuals from a moment's need.  Maybe that good thing becomes a flaw.  I don't suppose we can teach poverty to make its attendant lessons more available. Although, sometimes life itself takes care of that detail.  I've been poor.  I don't recommend it.  Some things are better learned from a book even if imperfectly learned.
    Bill Gates is credited as one of the most generous people in the world.  I doubt if he had just one, he would give you half his blanket.  On the other hand, Warren Buffet seems to be a guy who just might give you half his blanket.  It's said that as Gates' fortune grew he came under criticism for not being more active in philanthropy.  Now,  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partners with Warren Buffet around the world.  You do have to wonder how that came as an afterthought to one of the richest people in the world.
    If you want to understand simple generosity wait for the large lottery payouts to reach into the hundreds of millions,  then go to an employee's lunchroom or a neighborhood tavern and listen to the music and magic of idle daydreams.

You Can't Be Serious.

    There is a philosophy at work here.  There is and has been for some long time a philosophy that says the Federal Government should only be involved in a very few things.  National Defense, international relations, fostering trade and internal commerce and actually not much else.
     Laissez Faire.  That's why people who believe various agencies should just disappear have been put in charge of those agencies.  It's a philosophy that no one has taken seriously for over a century.  However, it had to be shot as dead as McKinley to get them to stop and it literally was.  It was TR that opened that door to progressive government when McKinley was shot dead.  The grandparents of some of today's republicans were horrified by progressivism.  Remember, Wilbur Ross is 82. Trump, himself is in his mid-'70s.  Yep their grandparents and in some cases their parents.  Institutional memory dies hard.  We've created a different world and there are people who just don't like it much and definitely have the resources to fight back.
    Some of these people are just outright idiots but some of them are just wrong.  Geez, I hope you don't have to be an outright idiot to just be wrong.  Some of the smartest people I know have been wrong.  Some of them I know personally, quite well.
    For some reason, you can't convince these people the pittance we spend in the overall scheme of things to help and advance our fellow citizens isn't some sort of affront. They have not grasped the great lesson of the last century that by helping, in some small measure, the least among us we elevate us all despite the evidence all around them.
    Let's talk about government cheese.  Where do you think that came from?  It was purchased by the government to support prices to farmers who had flooded the market with dairy products.  The same is true with rice, canned hams and various fruit juices.  But it's worse than that on a growing share of our extremely productive economy.  The SNAP program streamlined delivery but in the end, it's a way of subsidizing agricultural production.  A growing portion of that production is concentrated in corporate concerns who shortly will instruct their republican friends to just shut the hell up. That's not where it stops.
    Let's look at energy production for home electrification and heating.  If it weren't for nationwide subsidies of these commodities 20% of their market would be gone.  We'd be looking at 20% of American households with some form of alternative electric production even if it was candles and home heating production even if it was scrap wood.. Telephones?  Without subsidies, the ubiquitous phone booth would be back PDQ.  Even Reagan got that.
    How about medical care?  Without Medicaid and Medicare, about 50% of hospitals would close and you'd likely die at 50.  Not because you can't afford to provide for yourself but the facilities you rely on couldn't be run without the provided subsidies and they wouldn't exist.  This provision benefits us all and has elevated us all. Can we economize? Of course. Can we abandon a century of progress?  Of course not.
    They are following a philosophy but it's a failed philosophy we all should know will not work.