It is not uncommon to hear the right complaining about the “government controlling their lives”. Most are not talking about radio transmitters being planted in the their brains (yet ) but their proof invariably hinges on regulation. If you listen to them, regulation is controlling them from morning ’till night. We rarely hear what regulations are making them so miserable. If you cannot understand their dilemma in the simple recognition which comes with the word ‘regulation’ then you are not one of them. The assumption they have seems to be that regulation comes from the big, bad, bureaucratic, government man from above. This boogie man has the same position as Satan in Christianity. He is responsible for all ills in human society. He has nothing better to do than torture all the hapless creatures on earth. There actually is a medical condition for these folks caused by an overactive amygdale.¹

The truth is that regulation does not fall from heaven or ascend from hell. Regulation bubbles up from the electorate and corporations.

A plane crashes. People fly on planes. People want some assurance that their plane will not crash so we get the FAA.

Pollution starts giving people cancer in a highly industrial region. People do not want cancer. People do not trust the corporations telling them not to worry because it is not the corporation’s fault. People want assurance that someone else more objective is looking out for them so we get the EPA.

The banking industry starts making risky loans. The bank fails. People do not want to show up at the bank only to see that the doors are locked, the lights are off and there is no one to call to get their deposited money back. This is why we have banking regulation.

De-regulated financial markets start bundling up packages of people’s home mortgages into bonds. The whiz kids doing this figure out that they can get more money for these packages if their bond rating is higher. They come up with some fancy math no one understands to show that the risk for losing money on these packages is small, even though there are seemly larger and larger numbers of risky loans making up these packages. They also figure out that wining and dining these private rating agencies goes a long way towards getting them better bond ratings. Before long these seemingly fantastic, low risk, high yield packages are running out of mortgages needed to create them. The whiz kids get another idea, “let’s create a market that will make getting mortgages easier than getting candy out of a vending machines…folks can get mortgages to get money to do whatever they want to do…who can turn down free money?” When the market blows up and causes a deep recession people want someone to keep it from happening again, to do something about it, so we get financial regulation, again. The whiz kids get bonuses for their hard work crashing the economy and their last great idea is to blame the government for causing the recession in the first place.

Kids get a new toy. The put the toy in their mouth. They get lead poisoning. People do not want their kids to get lead poisoning so they demand a Consumer Product Safety Commission.

People get Ebola. People do not want to get Ebola. People demand that the CDC do something about it. They even demand that the government regulate the people coming from those Ebola countries by isolating them for weeks.

Regulation also comes from large and powerful companies that want to reduce competition, drive others out of their market, keep prices and margins high and also, at times, to keep substandard or dangerous products out of the market. The companies have deep pockets. They fund political campaigns. When their candidates get in office they expect payback. They get the regulations they want . This is called cronyism or corporatism.² Some economic whiz kids come along and tell us that the government is the one that made cronyism possible. If the government were not around to interfere with the workings of the ‘free’ market there would be no corporatism. Well, that is ostensibly true since corporatism is defined as,

a system of running a state using the power of organizations such as businesses and labor unions that act, or claim to act, for large numbers of people³

It does not take a whiz kid to know, no government – no corporatism. However, a couple problems arise after this: 1) It is not possible to have a government which in no way interacts with the market 2) If the market did not have a government it would have to create one. Of course, the whiz kids, with dubious motives, assure us that the closer we come to an ineffective, non-infringing government on the market, the more the market will take cares of us…sort of like evolution where, you know, the strong survive. What they are really telling us is that the new government, the laissez-faire (fancy French name for let the market decide) government will do a much better job at taking care of us. Trust the market to keep planes from crashing, pollution from killing us, bankers from stealing our hard earned money, financial whiz kids from wizzing all over us, kids from eating lead, people from getting Ebola or any of the nasty viruses and bacteria. Oh, and we all know corporations would have no capability to manipulate the market like in the Gilded Age, monopolies, etc. because the market would decide not to let them do that – right?

Well, now that we have established the fact the government is the big, bad, boogie man otherwise known as Satan and the ‘free’ market is the saint of evolution, I guess we can go vote for…you know who!

_________________

¹ See The Conservative and Liberal Brain

² See Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

³ Encarta Dictionary: English (North America)

According to a report just release entitled, “Credit Suisse : The wealth gap is starting to worry the arch-capitalists“¹, the wealth to income gap is the largest it has been since 1929. If 1929 rings a bell it is because it was the start of the Great Depression. Credit Suisse is by no means a left leaning group. They provide advisory services for private banking, wealth management and investment banking (ticker CSGN).

Every time we have had a spike in this benchmark we have had a severe depression or recession. The folks at Credit Suisse are arch-capitalists. In the report they state:

Curiously, the Marxist view that the unequal distribution of capitalism’s rewards creates a potentially catastrophic drag on the economy has lately become conventional wisdom among such deeply capitalist institutions as the IMF and ratings agency Standard & Poor’s.

They go on to state that the reason for this is that rich people do not buy enough. Also, credit has tightened a lot for average folks in the last decade. They further state:

The problem of depressed demand is unlikely to be resolved at all by the workings of the market, which left to its own logic will continue to concentrate most wealth in the hands of a tiny few.

The movement towards flat income and incredible gains by the wealthy is called plutocracy. Plutocracy leaves the legitimate realm of a capitalist meritocracy and not only brings us closer to another economic depression but, as history has abundantly demonstrated, will eventually make a violent revolution more likely. As I stated in my recent post “Modernity and the Contradiction of Values Dilemma“, the lack of viable checks and balances in laissez-faire capitalism, intelligent regulation, is a contradiction of the values of modernity. Elitism has always been the direct outcome of plutocracy as the Gilded Age readily shows. It seems that there are trends in post-modernity that are again tugging at the reins of elitism. Anyone that advocates the principles that lead us back to plutocracy and elitism also must silence the bodies of modernity which advocated democracy, the common folk, and was embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

In this election season, each voter should ask themselves which political party would bring us closer to de-regulation, lower taxes for the wealthy and large corporations, and cutting and eliminating social programs that put money into the hands of the poor which get spent much more readily that in the hands of the wealthy. The Republicans have been slashing government funding and housing programs (NGOs) which benefit the poor and middle class. Now, they even have the nerve to bash the Democrats for the lack of affordable housing and blame the government for ignorantly turning Ebola away in the emergency rooms of their De facto health care plan².

Please ask yourself which party is more likely to support checks and balances in the market, find ways to get cash into the hands of those that will spend it, solve long term health care issues or at least make an attempt. It is also commonly known even among the most conservative economists that our economy has always done better under Democratic administrations than Republican administrations³. Also, when you think of political attempts at solutions versus road blocks and naysayers what political parties come to mind?

Look at where Austrian styled economics got us with radical financial de-regulation. Credit default swaps fueled the fires of a private mortgage wildfire. NGO’s loan failures were very small compared to private mortgage company failures. The bi-partisan FCIC report on the Housing Crisis of 2008 concludes:

The Commission also probed the performance of the loans purchased or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. While they generated substantial losses, delinquency rates for GSE loans were substantially lower than loans securitized by other financial firms. For example, data compiled by the Commission for a subset of borrowers with similar credit scores—scores below 660—show that by the end of 2008, GSE mortgages were far less likely to be seriously delinquent than were non-GSE securitized mortgages: 6.2% versus 28.3%.⁴

President Bush admitted the ‘mistake’ which put ‘boots on the ground” in Iraq and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars in foreign wars. Yet, the current political narrative has lost the perspective of the cost of those wars, in lives and capital, relative to the much lower cost of foreign involvements during the Obama administration.

Austrians take government austerity to an extreme. The difference between the U.S. recovery and European economic stagnation are commonly known to be the intervention of the Federal Reserve here and the tightening of fiscal policy by the German central bank. The Austrians would eliminate the Federal Reserve. They think the Federal Reserve “prints money”. The fact is the Fed sells government bonds through the Treasury department just as a private corporation sells bonds to raise money. “Printing money” would mean we would simply make the currency with no intention of paying it back. This type of narrative hides the basic function of a Treasury bond to manipulate the naive.

In keeping with their ‘selective’ austerity ideal, Republicans in Congress continually target government programs they oppose. They were not in favor of cutting the Medicare Advantage program they started which was a boondoggle for private insurance companies but cost the taxpayer 12% more for the same programs under traditional Medicare⁵ They would not cut the bloated defense budget without having too under budget sequestration in 2013. They refused to let the prescription drug plan, started under Bush 43, negotiate cost with insurance companies for bulk purchases as any private company would do. This has and will continue to cost the taxpayer billions of dollars. Due to this, the prescription drug program will cost as much as ObamaCare did over 10 years. No Republican has ever tried to repeal the prescription drug plan or change the law to save the taxpayer billions while providing the same services.

Republicans only favor cutting government programs they deem as wasteful such as education, environmental, food stamps which helps farmers as much as it helps the hungry. Republican cutting has hit many government department budgets including the CDC, embassy security, blocking infrastructure bills, cutting taxes on the wealthy while making sure that the poor masses would find it much harder to vote. In spite of their pet programs, under President Obama, the deficit has come down dramatically.

⁶

The spike at the beginning of the Obama administration had nothing to do with ObamaCare which had not even hit the budget in those years. The spike was a result of the great recession started by the Bush administration which controlled both Houses of the Congress for six years and had a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. It reflects decades of congressional mandated spending under both parties and had absolutely nothing to do with anything the Obama Administration did. You would never know that by listening to popular rhetoric. The economic recovery since then and reduced deficit spending should have been a high credit to the Obama administration but the narrative has been turned upside down by big money political marketing in large part thanks to the Citizens United decision.⁷

Did we gain oil independence in the Bush administration? The International Energy Agency (EIA) predicts we will by 2015.⁸ If you listen to Republican rhetoric funded by the oil industry you would think that the EPA and President Obama has cripple energy oil production. The opposite is actually true.

Forbes recently published an article entitled “Obama Outperforms Reagan On Jobs, Growth And Investing”.⁹ The data shows that while Reagan was considered the best economic president in recent history he lags Obama in “all commonly watched categories”:

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories. Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.” Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

While job participation, what the Republicans call “real unemployment”, has remained relatively flat since 1994, there was a rise in job participation during the baby boom years under Reagan and a decrease under Obama as baby boomers retire. This chart shows the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment, including those no longer looking (called U6, it has been tracked since 1900). It has “remained pretty constant since 1994”.

Here is a comparison of unemployment under President Obama and Reagan:

It shows unemployment did not peak as high as it did for Reagan and recovered faster under Obama. Is this the message most folks are hearing? The current perceptions of President Obama are produced by those who could care less about the real facts.

When Republicans defend the wealth factor they often tell us that wealthy people create jobs. While only a small percentage of wealthy people actually finance start ups directly, their defenders suggest that stock investments indirectly finance companies that do create jobs. So who gains when jobs are created:

¹⁰

While rich folks may create some jobs they pale in job creation when it comes to a healthy middle class. It is really simple: the rich may create a job but the economy’s job creation engine is from the consumer who spends and thus creates multiple jobs. The rich will thrive whether the economy is good or not as the graph above shows. The referenced “Business Insider” article from the graph above goes on to state:

Now, again, entrepreneurs are an important part of the company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company’s customers’ ability and willingness to pay for the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that “rich entrepreneurs and investors” create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

Even more so, the great Reagan litmus test of “are you better off now than you were” at the end of the Republican’s great recession of 2008 has been completely ignored. Do we really want to go back there? Are the Republicans the ones that are going rally behind the middle class and their incomes? In spite of the doomsday sayers about Obama, where is the hard evidence that his administration will end worse than the previous Republican administration did? Are folks so gullible that they cannot remember recent history over the continual, highly financed squeals of rhetorical propaganda? I sincerely hope not. In any case, all I can say is that If the Republicans get back into office in 2014, we will all get what we deserve.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

_________________

¹ Here is a video about this shown on CNBC today.

² Ebola, Texas and ObamaCare

³ See The Great Lie: The Great Depression and Recessions of the United States

⁴ See THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY REPORT, page xxvi

⁵ See Extra Payments to Medicare Advantage Plans Totaled $5.2 Billion Over Fee-For-Service Costs in 2005, Also The Ryan Plan: Part 1

⁶ See CBO An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024, page 8.

⁷ See Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

⁸ See IEA Predicts the U.S. Will Be the World’s Largest Oil Producer by 2015

⁹ See Obama Outperforms Reagan On Jobs, Growth And Investing

¹⁰ See Sorry, Folks, Rich People Actually Don’t ‘Create The Jobs’ in Business Insider.

Governor Perry and many of the extreme right-wing Republicans in Texas including Ted Cruz are extremely proud of their efforts to repeal affordable health care in Texas. They have proven by their actions that they favor the old ’emergency room’ health care system.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has joined the ranks of other GOP governors eager to assert the sovereignty of their states by nullifying the ObamaCare law. Perry announced on Monday that the Lone Star State will not be expanding the Medicaid program or creating the necessary healthcare exchange to implement the president’s signature legislation. As noted by Reuters, “The announcement makes Texas the most populous state that has rejected the provisions.”¹

One thing that history has abundantly demonstrated to us about the ’emergency room’ plan is that low income folks and folks without health insurance are routinely turned away from hospitals as Mr. Duncan was recently or wait for hours in the waiting rooms while sharing any opportunist germs with each other. This is not the fault of the hospitals. It is the fault of reckless and opportunist politicians which are content to manipulate the public using highly funded and deep pockets, thanks to the Citizens United decision², into believing that they will not be directly affected by opposing ObamaCare. However, in the case of recent Ebola infections in Texas, it should be clear that the more folks of low income or no health insurance are ignored by the ’emergency room’ status quo, the more hospitals are forced to be lax with their admissions due to lack of adequate resources. See this chart below to see how Texas fares with the rest of the country. Note that these statistics even factor in the other conservative states which also refused the federal aid for Medicaid as “U.S. Uninsured”. The tragic difference is much more apparent in Texas when those conservative states are factored out from this data.

Source: Kaiser State Health Facts, 2012

– See more at: http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=5519#sthash.HL3MzX1Q.dpuf

What is lost in the right’s rhetoric is the vested interest that we all have in making sure that the U.S. has adequate health care. When the poor and uninsured are no longer the ‘they that can be conveniently ignored’ but the ‘they’ that can spread Ebola to the wealthy and insured, the political landscape changes. If hospitals are underfunded and under staffed thanks to the law signed by Ronal Reagan requiring hospitals to take care of the indigent³ they will not be able to adequately screen for conditions like Ebola. This is no longer a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ problem but a problem that threatens even the most red states. I have always maintained that you can be a very selfish, ‘me only’ voter and still have valid reasons, your own interest, for providing a “safety net” as Reagan called it for the less fortunate. It is unfortunate the even Democrats are running away from these principles in their local elections after the brutal beating from the right on ObamaCare. If we as Americans do not learn from the Ebola incident, we fully deserve everything that will come from our convenient ignorance.

_________________

¹ See Texas Refuses to Implement ObamaCare

² See Money is Free Speech?

³ See Simpson-Bowles Revisited

Also, see this column by Duncan’s nephew:

Exclusive: Ebola didn’t have to kill Thomas Eric Duncan, nephew says

With regard to this post…

I just read this post and am in the process of reading some others with a few preliminary comments. I think you may be giving short shrift to Levinas from a more traditional Christian apologist point of view. Speaking as one with many years experience in traditional Christian denominations and un-denominational Churches I have seen an abuse of the ‘salvation’ motif as a kind of license for abuse of the other. I see this abuse in a similar light as Levinas’ critique of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity (see my latest post here for a little more on this). If salvation empowers, endows one with a special knowledge, this elevated and founded origin (arche) can make Ethics in Levinas’ sense secondary just as Heidegger’s authenticity gives short shrift to ethics.

Did Jesus ever promise that salvation eliminated personal guilt? Sure, there is the notion of substitution, Jesus taking on the sins of the world, paying the price, etc. but isn’t the promise of salvation concomitant with following in his footsteps, becoming the servant not the master, the first being last and the last being first? Wouldn’t this mean the believer should accept the free gift not as merited or earned but as an interruption of the other, the other being Jesus, while we were “yet enemies”. Why would Christians use salvation as an excuse to bash the other, condemn the other, totalize the other in Levinas’ sense. Did Jesus totalize the other or did he meet each one as unique, as personal, as worthy of unconditional love even as sinners. This type of ethos puts the other in the place of a radical alterity, an interruption of mine-ness whether it be authenticity or salvation. As long as the other is known and understood in some prior understanding, disposition, metaphysics of ontology, there can be no place for a Jesus-like attitude or an Ethics in Levinas’ sense. The violent history of Christianity, while not reducible to it, does show another option for Christians that is more akin to the heretical disposition of the Pharisees and Scribes that Jesus decried. It might also be more along the lines of Levinas’ critique of ontology, totalizing the other.

Additionally you state in protest, “for Levinas, salvation comes by stopping the flight, turning, and with open arms embracing that which pursues and condemns me”. I believe that here is where Jesus has a noble but radical philosophy, in short, yes. Remember turn the other check? Remember, walk a mile for the other that forces you to do so, give your coat to the other that takes it? Remember while we were yet enemies Jesus gave himself, sacrificed himself to the enemies? Did he protest to Pontius Pilate? Did he claim that he was God and therefore innocent? He freely gave himself to be counted as a common criminal, guilty of sin even to the point that “God made him that had no sin to be sin “. Are you suppose to turn yourself over to the persecutor? If you want to follow the radical lead of Jesus, the answer is yes. The doe turning to the hunter is not so different than the sheep being led to the slaughter, is it?

I do not want to imply an across the board equivocation to Levinas and Christianity nor do want to imply that I am a Christian but I do see some deeper confluences in Levinas and Christianity (and Kierkegaard) than the conclusions I read in this post.

Also, in response to this post:

“The Other is totally absolved of my guilt. The Other cannot be made guilty for the guilt he or she places on me. This is a form of slavery, of imperialism. If the Other were to share in my guilt, even in a relational sense, than the self knows the guilt of the Other, and this is the Same.”

In Levinas this is not a reciprocal relationship. It is not what the other places on me, it is how I efface the other. This non-reciprocity cannot be brought into to ‘light’ of mediation. It is not synchronous with my time, my worldhood. The rupture happens diachronous to me. I do not share a origin with the other. The other is anarchical. Slavery and imperialism imply a relationship. This is not what Levinas has in mind. A logic of this sort would totalize the other in Levinas.

“Levinas argues strongly that when we were first created that we already had this guilt upon us. There is a choice in the guilt, but it is not ours. The choice of guilt lies in the choice of the Other. If I could assent to the choice of guilt, that would be an acquiring, a taking over. And this, again, is to acquire the Other.”

For Levinas, it is not a matter of choice or “acquiring”. It is before your choice. Is original sin your choice? That choice is not given to you either. Likewise, in Levinas your guilt is not up to whether you accept Levinas’ philosophy or not. Even more so, when the other is mediated into an object of my choice, the other is no longer other but a moment of my reflection, a facsimile of the other that Levinas would call totalization or murder.

Levinas does not say that “that we humans are free” but that freedom is a result of effacing the other. Freedom, whether it be in the first moment of Hegel’s Logic or in some vague notion, denies the absolute alterity of the other which gives me no choice except to cover it over (e.g. history), to declare my freedom from the interruption of the other which, in Levinas, implicates me before I can answer. I am responsible to the other before my choice. I owe a debt which does not originate in me but ruptures all my originations in the face to face encounter with the other. I would also call your attention to the famous Anaximander fragment which could also be thought from this context:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

If infinity looks back at us in the face of the other we would expect that my attempt to retreat and cover over such absolute otherness would require my destruction, the destruction of the plastic cast I make of the face of the other as infinity breaks through in the encounter with the other, by necessity. What is required is my guilt, my original sin (the sin of arche if you will), for effacing the call of the other, the rupture of infinity. In my time, my imposed temporal synchronicity to all things, to the other, I am implicated, founded as injust, as murderous in my obliviousness to the call. This is what Levinas calls guilt.

Concerning a couple posts entitled “The Conservative Road to Serfdom” and “Why Is Distributionism So Intolerable?“…

While I am not a Hegelian, it seems to me that much of the direction of these essay’s thinking is captured and re-entangled in a Hegelian dialecticism. The notion of internal and external in Hegel directs us to the problem of limit and liberty, control and choice. In this question, we hear the faint echo of Aristotle’s potentia in Latin and dunamis in Ancient Greek and actualitas from Latin and energeia from Ancient Greek. These relations are inscribed from origin (arche) within the prism and reduction of power relations. The nagging question in Distributionism is “who decides, I or other?” For Marx, the question framed by Marx is forced communism or the natural evolution and unfolding of communism from the impossibility of capitalism. Both of these ideologies want to claim legitimacy in and from the freedom of the individual, the enlightenment of the masses, one at a time. Those who emotionally react to the prospect of external, dominating power want to force these dialectics into an externalizing mode. Those who seek legitimacy, lay claim to the individualizing, progressing, choice of critical thinking and self-determination…’I willed it thus’. Where is the origin of external and internal in Hegel?

It is in the beginning, the Logic. It is in nothingness and freedom. Pure, abstract being is the horror, the Dread (in my hybrid use of terms). It can mean nothing, be nothing, do nothing. Nothing neither opposes or confirms, hopes or despairs, moves or un-moves. It is antithetical to life. Pure being imprisons in absolute hermetic emptiness. Freedom finds its ‘infinite’ domain or realm not as a movement to something but as a movement from nothing. Freedom is escape from nothingness, from pure Being. Freedom has no choice but to escape, mediate, and discriminate. Differance [sic, Derrida’s fault] can only perpetually recapture itself, mesmerize, fantasize, phantasma-size, symbolize in order to escape the Real (Lacan).

Morality and religion may be thought antithetical to the highly secularized concept of ‘secular’. However, morality and religion also find their origin in freedom…freedom from sin, freedom from ethical anarchy, freedom from externally imposed, ‘secular’ norms. Morality and religion are surrogates of freedom while claiming and decrying their native heritage in freedom. Only God knows, only God is absolute. Freedom reserves the space for pure being, absolute otherness to be as Holy, as the safeguard which cannot be questioned. Freedom is from foreboding dread, anxiety, torture and age-abiding hāidēs. The ingenious synthesis in universal catholicism (not as noun) is in protecting and nurturing individualism while at the same time delimiting boundaries, immovable boundaries.

Boundaries reckoned by and through time in Anaximander ground justice and truth while simultaneously exacting a cost for their transgression. Heidegger would have thought ground (grund) and un-ground (ab-grund) in a typical Greek sense as origin and lack of origin (an-arche). Hegel seems to me to be fascinated and captured by this dialectic as were the Greeks. The excess to this dialectic can only be forever and infinitely recaptured by the dialectics all consuming lust for totality. It certainly merits an authenticity and easily brings one back to its bog. Hegel evens treats us to his profound psychological insight into the ever/never ending story in the master slave dialectic. The reciprocity and inextricable bounded-ness of the master and the slave find their freedom and their nemeses in each other. The freedom of the master is limited by the ever increasing dependence on the slave for livelihood, survival, definition and grounding meaning. The infinite freedom of the master, of necessity, requires the master’s servitude and indebtedness to the slave’s grounded-ness and existence. On the other hand, the slave, chained to existence, work and production requires the promise of absolute freedom. Freedom and nothingness, infinite and finite, determination and in-determinate dance violently in the bowels of religion.

In conclusion, let me simply draw upon the riddle posed at the origin by Hesiod and the Greek muses:

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean,¹

The Greeks know the dilemma and riddle posed by infinite freedom and absolute indeterminateness and all the subsequent permutations in historical dialectic and spirituality. Their answer, for the purpose of this short essay; revere, create, think, dramatize, poeticize, sculpt but never be lulled into sleep and demise by the spirit of gravity not for ‘will to power’ as Nietzsche’s oracle requires but for Desire to love, to renew, to believe, to breath in again our debt to alterity, to open once again the epoch of civilization wherein we live and move and have our being.

_________________

¹ See my Philosophy Series 4 discussion

I agree with the old line Republicans¹, why should we pay for the indulgences and abuses of others? Now that “corporations are people too” according to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision² they should be treated like people.

Regular people are charged more and more for garbage collection according to rising disposal costs.

Regular people pay for higher food costs because of destructive climate changes³.

Regular people pay taxes on gas to maintain roads and bridges.

Regular people pay the price for the housing crises and speculative banking practices.

Regular people pay the increasing health care costs for emergency room health care.

Almost everywhere you look regular people are considered responsible for increasing costs no matter who caused the increase.

If corporations are destroying the environment with climate change and increasing disasters, why shouldn’t they pay for it? Why should we pay for it? I suggest that we let oil companies make all the oil they want in whatever way they want too. I think we should have a national budget cost for typical historical, environmental damage including the cost of living and inflation. If the cost of environmental disasters exceed that budget, the oil companies, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. should be taxed to pay the additional recovery costs from these disasters. If the disasters are cyclical as these folks claim, when the costs go down they should be rebated the additional taxes proportional to what they paid in. Why should the burden get put solely on those that use gasoline with higher gasoline taxes? The “corporations that are people too” need to pay for the costs they incur. This logic used to be en vogue in Republican circles with Mitt and friends in something called “cap and trade” but became illogical when certain high positioned Democrats took up the cause.

If corporations too big to fail go under they need to pay the cost for economic recovery not charge it to the national debt. They should probably have insurance policies, just like regular folks do, to cover their costs in case they go under and can’t pay for their economic damages. Why should the Federal Reserve bail out the big guys and let regular folks go belly up on their houses⁴?

Banks and insurance companies need to be able to pay for risky investments and policy holder damages in case their bets don’t pay off. Why should regular folks pay for their maladies? Why should they get to charge it off to the national debt⁵? As recent history has shown, we get “cherry picked” with effectively “catastrophic” homeowners, health insurance and car insurance that we cannot use unless we want to get dropped or pay higher premiums.

Health care companies make great profits. The reason they do is because they are partly subsidized by the taxpayer for emergency room health care, Medicare and Medicaid⁶. Why are their profit margins covered while our health care costs go up? Why should taxpayers pick up the cost for corporations that do not pay their employees a livable wage? Why should we pay for food stamps and health care while these corporations pad their pockets with profits at our expense? Again, Mitt and friends found a logical alternative to this only later to be loudly decried on the right as “Obama-care”.

War hawks should sign up to pay for their wars from their political parties contributions and wealthy donors if they are hell bent on stating wars⁷. Why should I pay for a war I never wanted and have to live with the consequences of my lost family members. I think good ‘ol Republican boys that are gun-ho ought to be the first ones on the front line.

Let everyone that wants a gun get one but if the gun gets used to kill someone the gun owner and the company that made the guns ought to pay all costs and damages associated with their destruction. They should also pay for higher law enforcement costs. We should have VERY stiff fines and prison sentences for those that do not lock up their guns and keep them out of the hands of unlicensed gun owners.⁸

These folks need to pull their own weight and quit relying on the corporate welfare, nanny state to keep bailing them out. Many of these additional costs fall on the backs of regular folks. Why can’t these predominately Republican folks live up to their own professed ideology? They complain about the nanny state when it comes to others while sponging off the nanny state in understated or re-stated ways when it comes to them.

It seems to me that folks are all too happy to profess a Republican ideology⁹ when it comes to other folks but when it comes to them they become, shall we say, covert Democrats. Of course, they do not process it that way. They have all kinds of ways to rationalize their hypocrisy¹⁰. They call it ‘free market’, environmental liberal lie of climate change, Democratic nannies, politician Social Security robbers, “I get the Medicare I already paid for”, Medicaid bleeding heart liberals, etc¹¹. They have many ways to rationalize their implicit Democratic concerns about themselves in terms of good ‘ol Republican values.

If the free market really is the best way to distribute goods and reward risk-takers¹², the burden should rest on the risk takers not on folks that never took the risk. Why can’t we have a free market that really works as it is professed to work. Reward and punishment need to fall on the backs of the ones that take the risks and reap the rewards. If it does not then we have the dreaded nanny state albeit under the guise of blaming others for their failures.

As I have previously pointed out¹³, many conservative have enlarged amygdales. The evolutionary ancient amygdale is the fear center of the brain. It is highly functional for fight or flight. Unfortunately, it cares little about consistency and contradiction. That part has to do with the anterior cingulated cortex, a more recent evolutionary innovation. Our future will not rest on fear, deception, and brute power to uphold insane, contradictory and hypocritical ideologies but on compromise, error correction, and critical thinking. We need to hold ourselves and others to the same standard, whatever it may be, and not find ways to propagate our advantage at the cost of those that had nothing to do with us, our failures and our risks. Isn’t this a ‘conservative’ value?

_________________

¹ See Conservatism and Liberalism: A Historical Perspective

See The Question of Conservatism

² See Money is Free Speech?

³ See The Ryan Plan: Part 3

⁴ See Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis

⁵ See Myths Exposed: President Obama is Responsible for Historic U.S. Federal Debt and Spending Levels

See Down the Rabbit Hole

⁶ See FAQs on Health Care Reform

See Health Care in Louisiana and Massachusetts-Bobby Jindal and Bill Cassidy

See Mitt and Friends

⁷ See Wars Started by Republicans Including Vietnam

See A Case for Bashing the Democrats

See Why We Still Sacrifice Our Young

See War on Terrorism

See Nearly Every Member of Congress Voted for Intervention in Iraq?

See Freedom Handout

⁸ See How to make gun control work…

⁹ See The Great Lie: The Great Depression and Recessions of the United States

See Poor Rich Folks

See A vote against Big Government is a vote for Big Business

¹⁰ See The Fox and the Hen House

¹¹ See Problems with Medicare and Medicaid

¹² See Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

¹³ See The Conservative and Liberal Brain

I have somewhat loosely followed a translator in recent years who actually helped me on one occasion find an ancient quote. Anyway, from time to time he has complained of ‘Christian persecution’ in England and I assume by extension, the world at large. He also seems to have some issue with homosexuals as well which appears to have something to do with his religious beliefs. I think he may believe that homosexuals are great examples of ‘Christian persecution’. In any case, the majority of his work is not along this polemic but rather translating ancient texts. Recently, I read one of his posts here which I could not resist adding my own contrary two-cents to…

Roger,

After reading your post I think it is very close to, “This shall not have been a polemic!”. I would even go so far as to suggest it could be an apology in wolf’s clothing. First, I admire your work and dedication to scholarly pursuits. I understand the lack of time for such indulgences in whatever your post wasn’t. In any case, I must say that as an ‘other side of the pond’ observer, I do not see this Christian persecution that you rail about. It is hard for me to believe that the originators of the Magna Carta would imprison folks because of their religious beliefs. I think you may be over the top on these claims. On one hand, if you did convey the whole story in your slightly more than emotive quips on the arrest, I think most rational folks, whether Christian or not, would agree it was a travesty of justice. On the other hand, some of this alleged ‘persecution’ may actually result from a kind of natural law, reaping what you sow.

I cannot believe any magistrate would uphold such a shabby arrest as apparently he did not. Justice is not perfect every time. There are reasons why justice is required and not some kind of natural law which needs no socially sanctioned enforcers. Injustice occurs regularly not just by criminals but also by sanctioned enforcers and by regular ‘ol mean-well folks. I am not surprised at all when sanctioned authorities commit injustice. I am aggravated when they appear to get away with it carte blanche. I hope democracy can ultimately address such atrocities but I am not even sure about that. In any case Roger, it does seem as if this Christian persecution thing is a bit of a stretch. I can tell you get a lot of emotional mileage out of it but I think most folks are not convinced by such claims. Of course, I know that you write that off as more of what you claim, Christian persecution. It comes across as an unfalsifiable belief if you know what I mean. On this side of the pond there are panhandlers and/or street philosophy peddlers regardless of theological persuasion which do get arrested for harassment and aggressive behavior so ‘forced free speech’ is not a right that is typically defended here.

I think you ‘doth protest too much’. I am not a Christian but I have no need to persecute Christians. ‘Persecution’ seems to me to imply a kind of on-going plot, a concerted endeavor. As you suggest, who has time for such shenanigans. Certainly, there may be some folks Christian or not which engage in such pathologies but I would not think this takes place in the majority of the sociological bell-shaped curve. However, paranoia does seem prevalent these days as it affords a certain kind of passive response to the ‘devils’ of existence. It seems to me that paranoia elevates ones false sense of uniqueness and importance as keepers of the Truth which requires social critique and upheaval. It may be fun for some but actual persecution requires way too much time and effort for most. Folks are creatures of necessity not ideology. My take is that we may have disagreements which some, more or less, would like to sanction socially, politically and legally but personally, I prefer the philosophical path of polemos, not in the sense of overt war but in the sense of strife and conflict, which gets worked out cathartically rather than violently. I see no problem with challenging philosophical or theological positions. I found my many years of undergraduate and graduate work intensely challenged my belief systems and forced me to change my ideas many times over the years. I think if the Greeks had simply been ‘polite’ the Occident would be a very different place today. Additionally, I think if one were God and would weigh historical, religious persecution in the balance, Christianity, at least as self-acclaimed, would not find itself weightless.

Why would you complain and emote some sort of sacrosanct indignation over Christian persecution anyway? Didn’t Jesus tell you that is what you signed up for as a Christian. Did you see him rail against the unbelievers? Isn’t he the one that said, turn the other check; give a stranger your coat and walk with him if he asks; lay down your life as he did for the sinful world, the enemies of the cross. It seems to me that if Jesus had indignation it was for the Pharisees and scribes of his day and even more for the money changers in the temple.

If there is a God, the world was created with a huge amount of sow what you reap in it. If Christians are persecuted it may not be heathen indignation but it may be that they are sowing what they have reaped. As Kierkegaard tells us if everyone is a Christian no one is a Christian. Doesn’t the Revelator tell us of an apostate Church, false messianic claims and ask if there would be faith on earth? Could it be that what you deem aggressive resistance to Christianity could rather be ‘chickens coming home to roost’ for Christians? Here across the pond, we have no lack of Christians which are brash and have none of the famed English politeness in such matters. We are regularly accosted by faith warriors both at shopping malls and in our politics. We have those that would legislate their morality in the name of ‘religious freedom’. There seems to be no end to what ‘religious freedom’ means over here. Of course, not any religion but the Christian religion is what most clearly rises to the top in these jurisprudent befunkles. Did Christ try to establish a kingdom on earth? Didn’t he say to the contrary and those that defended an earthly kingdom misunderstood him? Isn’t the Christian kingdom not of this world. Isn’t the mystic vision of Christianity to have the Holy Spirit reveal the pettiness of this sinful world in light of the glories of Heaven? Epiphany allows Christian suffering without whining of persecution, without hostility and even more so – laying down one’s life for the persecutor, dying for the sins of others. What happened to that Christ?

As a natural law, it may be that aggression requires aggression, enmity requires enmity, persecution requires persecution. Who would break this cycle? I think from ancient texts we may surmise that, for one, Jesus would not answer hatred with hatred but love. Did he strike out on the cross or pardon criminals? Even Socrates asked another to pay his debt with his dying words. Jesus and his disciples went to prison multiple times. Do you see any writings from those folks complaining of the ‘injustice’ or the persecution? They accepted it as par for the course and ministered to their fellow prisoners. They healed the sick, championed the poor, comforted the poor in spirit. I do not detect modern animosity and religious fervor in their approach to the world. They were long suffering. I think the thin skin approach to one’s faith and theology betrays a kind of insecurity in the coherence of one’s beliefs. If someone tries to convince you that you are wrong make them reason, explicate and clarify while you attempt to do the same; the worst case is you both walk away thinking more clearly, the best case is both may learn something.