When market failure is outlawed

It was the institution of government that unleashed those vices of greed and avarice encouraging people to build on sand. It did so by first placing a policy priority on the good idea of home ownership but pursued it with a fanaticism that neglected other goods such as prudence and rational risk assessment.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute:

In a very familiar parable, Jesus tells the story of two home builders. One built a house on sand, the other on rock. The house on the rock withstood the weather. The one built on sand did not fare so well: "The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall thereof" (Matthew 7:24-29).

If the parable were retold today, it might include an episode in which treasury officials and members of Congress cobbled together a bailout program for the owner and lender of the house on the sand. No matter how much money they spent, however, the ending would be the same.

Six weeks ago, when the $700 billion bailout of failing financial firms was being considered, the country was swept up in the debate. The bill, which created the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), passed with thin public support. Washington claimed that the bill was necessary to keep the world from an economic Armageddon. Many people suspected that it amounted to little more than welfare for Wall Street.

Who was right? Consider the dramatic change made to the way the program works, as announced last week by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. He said that the government would no longer purchase toxic assets from failing institutions. It would now start giving the money directly to lenders. In other words, the entire rationale of the bailout changed overnight.

Why the change? The problem with the original idea is that it violated every common-sense rule of business. The government would pay far more than the market would bear and then, no doubt, we would watch as the market price slid to the bottom. Every time a supporter claimed that this was a good deal for taxpayers, you could almost sense the rise in deep skepticism. If you believed them, I've got a house built on sand to sell you.

The rest.

ACLU defends "Joe the Plumber"

Hell must be freezing over...

Quote of the day

A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.

- Rupert Murdoch

Change Dispenser

Dispenser comes pre-loaded with Pez-flavored soma*

(However, just wearing the t-shirt seems to induce the same state of bliss)

* By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Island veterans of the Devil's Brigade awarded U.S. Bronze Star Medal

Raymond and Lawrence Durant, August 8, 2006, Naufrage, P.E.I.

Jim Day, The Guardian:

Two Island veterans of the Second World War who served with the fearsome Devil’s Brigade have been awarded the prestigious U.S. Bronze Star Medal.

Lawrence (Junior) Durant of Charlottetown and his cousin Ray Durant, who now lives in Ottawa, can add the bronze star to their impressive list of military accolades.

The medal is awarded to those who distinguished themselves while serving with the U.S. Army by “heroic or meritorious achievement or service . . . in connection with military operations against an armed enemy.’’

Both of the Durants volunteered at the same time with the First Special Service Force (FSSF) — the joint Canadian-American commando unit better known as the Devil’s Brigade.

The one-of-a-kind military unit was perhaps most noted for conducting silent night raids on the German lines, their faces smeared with black boot paste, leaving casualties in their wake and a special calling card that read, in German: “The worst is yet to come.’’

The FSSF was known for special training that included parachuting, skiing and mountain climbing, as well as conducting extreme marches with immensely heavy packs on their backs.
But for the reinforcements who volunteered later, like Ray and Junior Durant, this commando skills list was considerably shorter.

Junior Durant, in an interview with The Guardian last year, noted he wished he had special training when he saw battle at Anzio beachhead in Italy, where he came under heavy shelling.
Every night, he and others in the Devil’s Brigade were behind enemy lines, taking part in covert operations.
“All our work in Anzio was behind German lines, every night we were in behind German lines, every night,’’ said Junior.

“It was scary, I tell ya.’’

The U.S. Bronze Star Medal has arrived in time for Junior to add to his uniform for Remembrance Day ceremonies along with his 1939-45 Star, Italy Star, France/Germany Star, Canadian Volunteer Service Medal and the Defence Medal.

“I feel great about getting it,’’ Junior told The Guardian Friday.

Ray Durant, 86, a native of Summerside who now lives in Ottawa, said he was very proud and very honoured to receive the Bronze Star Medal.

He called the distinction one of the high points of his life.

Junior, who turns 85 in December, was a 19-year-old farm labourer in Wilmot Valley when he signed up as an infantryman in May 1943.

He was in a holding camp in Avellino, Italy, in 1944 when he volunteered for the FSSF.

Ray was coincidentally there at the same time and also joined up. Junior was posted with 4th company, 2nd regiment and his cousin, Ray, with 3rd company, 3rd regiment.

Related: The Devil's Brigade

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken

They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

Geriatric cyberpunk

Gizmodo:

Honda's first foray into robotizing old peoples' haunches looked pretty tame, but this new one, on which geriatrics are supposed to mount like some sort of meat trophy, feels like a glimpse into a horrible, dystopian future where up is down, right is wrong and grandmas and grandpas amble through Sears on mechanized rectal steeds instead of walkers. The machine, which I'm 90% sure is just the missing half of this Battle Droid from Attack of the Clones, is more a passive support device than it is a set of active robot limbs, though it does have a small electric motor.

Obamanation

Click.

Lemmings as a projection of existential angst**

When one narrative fails, simply substitute another one.

**

Oprah has her first porta-potty experience!

"Spreading the wealth" has begun.

Bricks - no, not brickbats - for Obama

[The Lego artist]

“What people are not dealing with is the fact that we’re going up against a culture that finds it acceptable to do the things the rest of the world left behind with the barbarians in the 6th Century. I’m a little tired of people worrying about being polite.”
– Frank Miller, the creator of 300, in the L.A. Times

300 is the movie to watch. Also, I guess the DVD will sell like hotcakes.

Indeed, this is the most controversial war film since Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and young men are flocking to cinemas, in spite of denunciations from mad Iranian ayatollahs, or because of them, one would hope.

Narrated by Australia’s David Wenham, 300 tracks a small band of Spartan warriors through the Battle of Thermopylae, a battle in which democracy-loving Greeks take on the all-powerful dictator-worshipping Persians.

For the most part it “is excessively, cheerfully violent – and it is gorgeous to behold,” observes Richard Roeper, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist. “It looks like the world’s most sophisticated and expensive video game, and I mean that in a good way.”

Sophisticated, indeed.

The cutting edge visuals (from lifelike computer-generated battles to the hypertechnical digital back lots) are, no doubt, enchanting Australian audiences too. This is a smash, bash, clash of civilizations, and our nation’s top grossing film.

Director Zack Snyder, 40, focuses on the fog of appeasement, as opposed to the fog of war. This is critical. In 300, one doesn’t have to watch smiley-face, happy clappy, kids flying red kites in King Xerxes’s land, or hear a fat guy telling us what to think.

When you enter 300, you’re opening the door to harsh realism. In 300 democracy is the imperfect good guy, where one is exposed to a “make no apologies” culture. The enemy, of course, is Persia (Ancient Iran), where real evil resides, and “reason” is a dirty word.

300’s Spartan ground-pounders are sword-happy patriots, hawks driven by testosterone-fuelled dreams of battle. Moreover, Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his fellow troops reject “diplomatic” gabfests in favour of chummy in-jokes, spellbinding military stratagems, and verbal attacks on pro-appeasement elitists.

The rest.

Only 77 days left till we find out the meaning of "Hope" and "Change"

God bless America. And may God bless President-elect Barack Obama with true wisdom, faith, and courage for the responsibilities he has been entrusted with.

God of power and might, wisdom and justice,
through You authority is rightly administered,
laws are enacted, and judgment is decreed.
Assist with your spirit of counsel and fortitude
the President and other government leaders of the United States.

May they always seek the ways of righteousness, justice and mercy.
Grant that they may be enabled by your powerful protection
to lead their country with honesty and integrity.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Mark Steyn:

I congratulate Senator Obama on a remarkable and decisive victory. It was in many ways the final battle in a war the Republican Party didn’t even bother fighting — the “long march through the institutions.” While the Senator certainly enjoyed the patronage of the Chicago machine, he is not primarily a political figure: Whether “educators” like William Ayers or therapeutic pop-culture types like Oprah, his closest associations are beyond the world of electoral politics. He emerged rather from all the cultural turf the GOP largely abandoned during its 30-year winning streak at the ballot box, and his victory demonstrates the folly of assuming that folks will continue to pull the lever for guys with an R after their name every other November even as all the other institutions in society become de facto liberal one-party states.

Bill Bennett asked me on the air the other day why voters were so hot for this hope’n’change mush, and I suggested that it’s the dominant vernacular of the age. Go into almost any American grade-school and stroll the corridors: you’ll find the walls lined with Sharpie-bright supersized touchy-feely abstractions: “RESPECT,” “DREAM,” “TOGETHER,” “DIVERSITY.” By contrast, Mister Maverick talked of “reaching across the aisle” and ending “earmarks,” which may sound heroic in Washington but ring shriveled and reductive to anyone who’s not obsessed with legislative process. This dead language embodied the narrow sliver of turf on which he was fighting, while Obama was bestriding the broader cultural space. Republicans need to start their own long march back through all the institutions they ceded. Otherwise, the default mode of this society will be liberal, and what’s left of the Republican party will be reduced (as in other parts of the west) to begging the electorate for the occasional opportunity to prove it can run the liberal state just as well as liberals can.

Thankfully, the conservative (not to be mistaken for the Republican) "long march - back - through the institutions" has already begun. Rev. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute spoke recently on "The Way Forward":

Today we find institution after institution “in the tank” for unrestrained government intervention. One is reminded of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s call for the left to begin a long march through the institutions of Western Civilization. The left, it seems, got the memo. How will we respond to this disheartening situation? Now is no time to retreat in disarray. Now is no time to stumble. There remains a remnant … a potent remnant who has not bowed the knee to big government. My call to you tonight is a transparent one: strengthen the soldiers of that remnant. In particular—strengthen that band of brothers gathered with you tonight, the Acton Institute.

Never in Acton’s nearly 20 year history has our message been more essential than right now. As an institution that cherishes the free and virtuous society, we are living through this thing with all of you, and we need your help to continue. Our history of integrity; the quality of our products and programs; the responsible tone with which we approach the questions at hand, all speak to the fact that this work is worthy of your investment. I humbly ask for it with the promise that we will use it well and prudently.

The fact of the matter is that too many of us have become much too comfortable and yielded to a perennial temptation, the temptation to take our liberty for granted. Those of you who have invested in the work of the Acton Institute over the years know—and especially those of you who have had a chance to see our latest media effort “The Birth of Freedom” know—we believe the time has come for a renewal of those principles that form the very foundation of civilization, the same principles that make prosperity possible and accessible to those on the margins.

Liberty is indeed, as Lord Acton said, “the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” As such it is in need of a nutritious soil in which to flourish. In this sense you and I are tillers of the soil, if you will.

Liberty is a delicate fruit. It is also an uncommon one. When one surveys human history it becomes evident how unusual, how precious is authentic liberty, as is the economic progress that is its result. These past few weeks are a vivid and sad testimony to this fact. As a delicate fruit, human liberty as well as economic stability must be tended to, lest it disintegrate. It requires constant attention, new appreciation and understanding, renewal, moral defense and integration into the whole fabric of society.

In a trenchant analysis of the free society, Friedrich Hayek once offered a sobering speculation:

“It may be that as free a society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, and that once freedom is achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued…” and then he goes on to ask, “Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew?”

He answers, “It may be so, but I hope it need not be.”

Read the rest here.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself?"

The great Binks cuts to the chase:

Duh. Sounds like someone who never met a bear or had appendicitis.

Any sensible non-Utopian should rightly and deeply fear the Obama Scam winning the Presidency. Fear partisan politics as enforced national policy. Fear Blue Shirt truthsquad tactics and messianic government. Fear playing communist games with the engine of the world economy. Fear what all the bad people will do when the world cop goes AWOL with social engineering, redistribution, and other communistical experiments on people.

Fear is not the worst thing. Bad people with bad ideas and power to do bad things?– much, much worse than a little fear.

Today and tomorrow the world holds its breath. Heaven itself seems watchful.

If Mr. McCain wins, it will be a very near thing, and all the Utopians will not be happy, and the new president will have to sort out a nation more divided and more entrenched in a state of political cold war than ever before. The increasingly extremist Democrats bear the burden of blame, but so do slack Big-Gov Republicans, and conservatives who’ve been dropping the ball in the culture wars.

David Warren says:

The United States is on the verge of electing a man whose sweet promises include an end to rising sea levels, and the change you can believe in. Should he win, and should his party form the supermajority in the U.S. Congress that is currently predicted in the polls, we can be assured of at least four years of American self-destruction — probably on a scale beyond that of the Carter presidency — with consequences to the entire free world.

Look at all the souls who gather in the mass rallies for this eloquent demagogue! We have seen this kind of thing so many times before in history. People believe because they want to believe. But when their faith is transferred from God, to politicians; and when their rational judgment is suspended, from the illusion of hope — well. My own earthly prayer is a simple one, that Truman will somehow defeat Dewey, in this instance, letting us return to our real problems, with whatever our wallets still contain.

Hear us, O Lord, in heaven thy dwelling place.

And let all the people say ‘Amen!’.

Binks

And Fr. John Corapi, preacher extraordinaire with a doctorate in Catholic dogmatic theology, concisely confutes convoluted Catholic 'conscience' claptrap. The money quote is in the second clip: "Now read my lips: any Catholic who votes for a pro-abortion candidate is cooperating in gross moral evil."








h/t Linda Keefe-Trainor, The Explainor

UPDATE: The Sheepcat states it perfectly: "I tell you, some people will say, à la Matthew 25, "Lord, Lord, when did we see you dying abandoned in a hospital utility closet?"

Choose wisely.

The furnace kicked in an hour early again this morning, as we'd forgotten to reset the programmable thermostat along with all the clocks on Saturday night, so I found myself wide awake just after 5 a.m. from the sudden blast of heat. (As my proud ownership of two vintage Snoopy "I'm allergic to mornings" mugs attest, early awakenings by yours truly rank as unusual events of historic proportions.) And seemingly out of nowhere, the words, "I have set before you life and death" started rattling around in my head. Now, as much as I would like to claim that I often wake up with Bible verses upon my lips, this is, alas, an altogether too infrequent occurrence. And not being blessed with a good memory for particulars, like chapter and verse, I got a cup of coffee going, and googled. Right - Deuteronomy - I knew that... (ahem).

"For this command which I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you.

It is not up in the sky, that you should say, 'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'

Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'

No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.

"Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom.

If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,

I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." (Deuteronomy 30:11-20, New American Bible)

Tomorrow, the United States will have to choose, and for Catholics, as George Weigel explains, it "is not too mysterious and remote... it is not up in the sky... nor is is across the sea." In fact, there can be no equivocating:

As Cardinal George's letter indicated, the Catholic Church's teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion involves a first principle of justice that can be known by reason, that's one of the building blocks of a just society, and that ought never be compromised—which is why, for example, Catholic legislators were morally obliged to oppose legal segregation (another practice once upheld by a Supreme Court decision that denied human beings the full protection of the laws). Questions of war and peace, social-welfare policy, environmental policy and economic policy, on the other hand, are matters of prudential judgment on which people who affirm the same principles of Catholic social doctrine can reasonably differ. The pro-life, pro-Obama Catholics are thus putting the full weigh of their moral argument on contingent prudential judgments that, by definition, cannot bear that weight.

This is an election about life and death. Here in Canada, we didn't really have a choice - or a voice for that matter - beyond considering the views of individual candidates. Americans do. Canadian musician and evangelist Mark Mallett has recorded a video for American Catholics that I'd like to share. (Yes, he knows he flubbed the U.S. election date - a minor point - as he notes in the post related to the video. Now, contrary to the polls, media onslaught, and general hysteria, I don't agree that Obama's necessarily got a lock on this election. It ain't over till it's over. And I know that Mark would agree that our cooperation with God's grace and mercy may yet turn the tide. However, I concur with him on the rest: "This is not about another round of debates on women’s rights or the right to choose. This is an illumination of conscience on perhaps the most pivotal social issue in the modern world."

The Hour of Decision from Mark Mallett on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Two excellent related articles:

"An open letter to our fellow Catholics on Election Eve" by Edward Morrissey and Elizabeth “The Anchoress” Scalia

and

"The Pro-Life Case Against Barack Obama . . . and Doug Kmiec" by Ryan T. Anderson & Sherif Girgis