Archive for the 'Politics' Category

The Politician Gnomes

Allen October 2nd, 2008

Laura Hollis writes about Thomas Sowell’s eternal question: “And then what?” Thomas asks this question over and over in his book, Applied Economics

Laura stresses that many of the same people who got us into this mess with sub-prime mortgage crisis never asked the question “And then what?”.

Quoting from Laura’s essay:

As Thomas Sowell points out so elegantly, politicians tend to think only of the short term – what will get them through the next election. But the rest of us MUST think about the long term, because we’re the ones who are going to be stuck with it. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by yesterday’s problem and deluded by today’s promises, we will be blindsided by tomorrow’s crisis. And tomorrow’s crisis will be catastrophic.

With all due respect to the Underpants Gnomes, perhaps we need to formalize the Politician Gnomes’ plan for everything:

  1. Propose a program that will get us elected.
  2. Get Elected.
  3. ???

We Just Lighting Up Their Lucky

Allen October 2nd, 2008

BatesLine has a great extended quote from probably one of the best Senators in Congress today, Tom Coburn:

As a practicing physician, I compare where we are today to a physician who commits malpractice. We have a patient with cancer. They have a secondary pneumonia because of the cancer. We are going to treat the pneumonia. We are going to give the antibiotics, we are going to give something to lower the temperature, we are going to give something to suppress the cough, we are going to give something to thin the mucous, but we are not going to fix the cancer. We are going to ignore the cancer.

Let me tell you what the cancer is. The cancer is Congresses that, for years upon years, have totally ignored the Constitution of the United States and taken us to areas where we have no business being. There is no way you can justify, in the U.S. Constitution, that the country ought to be the source of mortgages for homeowners in this country. Yet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control 70 percent of the mortgages in this country.

I plan on voting for this bill. I support that we have to do something now. But how we got here is very important if we are going to fix things in the future….

If anybody in America is mad about this situation, there is only one place they need to direct their anger and it is right in the Congress of the United States.

I’m slightly in favor of the bail-out. However, I could also see this becoming a political boondoggle that will haunt our nation for a long, long time. That ’sense of needing to do something’ can quickly lead to poor legislation. Witness the ‘Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act’, socialized medicine schemes and other intrusions of government into areas where it doesn’t belong.

Perhaps we are giving the nation something to ‘thin the mucous’.

Or perhaps…

Authenticity and Forced Volunteerism

Allen September 8th, 2008

As I may have alluded to earlier, I work with the Boy Scouts of America. Most of my activities lately has been constrained to mentoring Eagle candidates for our Troop, but the Anchoress highlights in a recent post what has troubled me with some of the rank requirements that the young men need to achieve in order to advance.

The Anchoress here is talking about Bill Whittle (another of my favorite authors), “required volunteer service” and the authenticity of political candidates. A worthy read for both the Anchoress’s words and Bill Whittle’s original essay.

I used to volunteer at a local hospital, working with patients recovering from brain accidents, and also at a local Alzheimer’s facility. I did that because I wanted to, I was not compelled to do it (except, perhaps by the Holy Spirit). Because it was truly voluntary, it was real, authentic service.

…

Think of monasticism. A monastic gives up everything, moves into a community, share all his goods and even lets go of individuality; if superficial individuality is subsumed in the cause of something greater, it is because the monks and nuns have individually determined that it must be so. Because everyone there is of a like mind, and voluntarily giving themselves up – voluntarily practicing self-abnegation – it works. It is an authentic life of service and sacrifice because it is voluntary.

If you were to try to force monasticism, to compel people to work at something in which they do not believe, to give themselves up for something that does not speak to their individual hearts and spirits, it would not work. It would be completely inauthentic, and it would die.

Ellipses are mine.

The problem is that Boy Scouts require so many hours of “volunteer work” in order to advance in rank. While I understand what they are driving for, this has bothered me for quite some time. How can this be in any way, shape or form volunteer work? This is work required in order to obtain a goal. Worthy work and a worthy goal. But not volunteerism.

Mind you, I don’t have a solution to this problem. I’m not sure how big of a problem this is as the Boy Scouts are a volunteer organization — Adult volunteers (by and large) and young men who volunteer to join.

The Fallacy of ‘None of the Above’

Allen January 23rd, 2008

For a long time, I’ve said that I would like for all elections to have a ‘None of the Above’ choice. That way, if ‘None of the Above’ won, all of the candidates would be barred from running for office for 3 or 5 years. They would be told that perhaps they need to get a bit more ‘real world experience’ and to try again in a few years.

While that sounds like a nice way of letting those gas-bloated wind-bags what we really feel about them, a recent essay by the Anchoress has changed by mind.

If Ronald Reagan were alive right now, watching the GOP split into these tantrum-throwing factions (whereby “perfection” is duly defined as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-free-market, pro-worship, pro-Bush-doctrine, pro-tax-cut, pro-ship-back-all-illegals” and then, as each less-than-perfect candidate’s failure on one or more issues is noted, each are thus deemed unworthy of the support of the pristine and uncompromising “base”) I think he’d be disgusted with the lot of you.

Perhaps that ‘None of the Above’ would be come ‘None of the Perfect’ and we never finish this interminable campaign.

As a note, the Anchoress is ready to leave the Republican party to become an independent again. I’m arriving at the same conclusion from the other side of the mirror. I’ve about decided that the Democratic party is no longer the party for me.