Catholic Insistince on Altruism to 'Spread the Wealth'

The 'Common Good' is Coerced Altruism

I have a list of twenty two blogs I try to scan daily, but the demands of writing my own blog, of trying to get a distance-based academy organized, working a daily job, and attending AA meetings and doing AA service work does not give me much time for the other blogs. I have to pick and choose. Some days I find nothing worthwhile; other days, like today, I found something I like--the blog that teaches me something.

It was on the Acton Institute Power Blog, named after Lord Acton who "made the history of liberty his life's work; indeed, he considered political liberty the essential condition and guardian of religious liberty."

http://www.acton.org/research/acton/index.php

What was it I learned? That Catholics have used the common good "as an excuse for more government involvement in peoples’ lives and the installing of socialistic, 'spread the wealth' programs." Dr. William Luckey

I dashed off a comment at the end of his blog. In the "Academy Blogger" I have debated the issue of "altruism" as being (originally) the Catholic version of the "eradication of self-centered desire, and a life devoted to the good of others; more particularly, selfless love and devotion to Society. In brief, it involved the self-abnegating love of Catholic Christianity redirected towards Humanity conceived as an ideal unity." [emphasis added] see "altruism" http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html

The common good is therefor altruistic, requiring a lowest common denominator of the ego, common from one man to the next, a place where one must relegate his/her ego in order to eradicate self-interest, rational though it may be, or not; and where the common good is attained by devoting one's self selflessly--as if that is not an incomprehensible contradiction--in an act of totally "eradicating" the self.

This is most certainly not the same as what our Founders meant by the "general Welfare," when they wrote that phrase in the Constitution; it is the opposite. The "general Welfare" is the protection of the sovereignty of the individual, sovereignty composed of all the powers not delegated to nor prohibited to the Federal government or the governments of the "several States." Whatever is left over, (and almost everything was "left over" until the administration of FDR's "New Deal",) is necessary for the operation of a free individual.

We no longer retain the right to our individual sovereignty. But I have covered that a dozen times in this Blogger. The Choir Sings the Hymn "Individual Sovereignty" Power Reserved to the People, Respectively Laissez-Fairre: the Economics of Individual Sovere... Tocqueville and Individualism et al.

The "general Welfare" is justice in the political arena, which includes economics. The "common good" has become the language used to hide the injustice of imposed altruism.

Anything imposed against what is just, is coercion; anything imposed to insure justice, is not coerced. Each of these ideas is what it is by definition. You could turn each statement around and make the same arguments: Coercion is that which is unjustly imposed; coercion is not that which is justly imposed.

What is justly imposed must, by the same definition, take only as little from an individual's sovereignty as is needed for the "common sovereignty," i.e., government instituted of, by, and for the governed themselves.

It is true that there must be coerced "common good" among people who are not willing to abnegate their egos to society. The best of the recent examples of an uncoerced person was Mother Theresa, who we now know abnegated her ego to the will of a God who she thought, for twelve years, had deserted her. That, aside from the willingness of Jesus to be crucified for all others in the human race, is as altruistic as one can be and not be coerced.

But going that distance is much more than Dr. Luckey is talking about. "This [coerced] version of the common good is the foundation for some people’s idea of distributive justice, but actually it is based on the 'Robin Hood fallacy' of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor." [emphasis added]

What is distributive justice? "[T]he first relatively simple principle of distributive justice examined is strict egalitarianism, which advocates the allocation of equal material goods to all members of society." [emphasis added] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [see also No Justice in "Luck Egalitarianism" ]

How does Dr. Luckey know it is the Robin Hood syndrome? Merely "by reading Aristotle and St. Thomas. Both of those great thinkers say that government must rule for the common good, but both of them oppose 'common good' to the 'particular' or 'private' good. . . nowhere in Aristotle or St. Thomas does it say that the common good is the exclusive or even main province of the government. They merely give a negative prohibition that the state cannot make laws which are good for only one segment of society." [emphasis added]

One segment of society is exactly what distributive justice is about: the use of coercion to force altruism on those who have, for the benefit of those who have not.

Ayn Rand made an unwitting error in her Playboy interview of 1964. But her error was in not being able to see the future, and the rise of a popular Marxist like Barak Obama.

"Collectivism," she said, "as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead."

But in the very next breath she was absolutely correct, and she is still correct to this day; "But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism," she continued, "have not yet been discovered."

Forty-eight years later, her second statement is still correct, and that is why collectivism was allowed to remain alive: the world has still not "discovered" the nature and the source of capital.

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© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Originalism and Obama

Ontology distinguishes between entities, draws distinctions in their qualities that set them apart from other entities, and qualifies the relationships of those qualities to the qualities of other entities. Entities are defined by their qualities, e.g., the primary distinquishing characteristic of "man" is not his opposable thumb, nor his linquistic ability, since chimps have rudimentary language, and elepephant, whales and other species may also have rudimentary language. The distinguishing characteristic of "man" is "rational animal."

So when I read the November 8 edition of American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/americas_third_republic.html I knew the subject was drawing the lines of distinction between the Constitution before and after the administration of FDR, and comparing it to the coming administration of Barak Obama:

"Theodore Lowi, a political science eminence at Cornell University, years ago drew a bead on what was wrong with the American polity. In his The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, he claimed that the Founder's constitution of 1787 had been surreptitiously replaced with a new one by the FDR administration, and no one had actually noticed it for seventy-plus years."

The idea that no one had noticed it is so badly wrong I am surprised Lowi's editors didn't stop him from saying it.

In the blog "No Exit," Fitz Brundage wrote in Opposition to the New Deal that, "the policies of [FDR's] administration inevitably aroused opposition. The evolution of Roosevelt’s New Deal cannot be understood apart from the opposition that it aroused. [A] coalition of conservative opponents emerged and systematically curtailed the most ambitious plans of the New Deal. [ ] By early 1935, the New Deal legislation of the previous two years had aroused growing voices of criticism on the left and right of the political spectrum, and by several important Supreme Court rulings." http://david-sullivan.blogspot.com/2007/09/opposition-to-fdr-and-new-deal.html

"Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, argued against a 'Bill of Rights,' asserting that ratification of the Constitution did not mean the American people were surrendering their rights..." http://david-sullivan.blogspot.com/2008/09/wwagd-what-would-andy-griffith-do.htm

Yet it seems as if we have done just that. Harold Kildow argues in the American Thinker about the differences between post-FDR, and the incoming administration of Barak Obama. Kildow says the Constitution post FDR was "Constitution 2.0" and now we may be in for "Constitution 3.0" without anyone ever voting to change the Constitution.

As a matter of fact, it has been an accepted fact of American politics since the publication of Emmerich de Vattel's text, "The Law of Nations" that the legislature does not have the power to change a constitution:

"American writers quoted {The Law of Nations} on constitutional law, almost immediately after the book's publication. [ ] Boston revolutionary leader Samuel Adams wrote in 1772, 'Vattel tells us plainly and without hesitation, that "the supreme legislative cannot change the constitution," that "their authority does not extend so far," and "that they ought to consider the fundamental laws as sacred, if the nation has not, in very express terms, given them power to change them." " http://east_west_dialogue.tripod.com/vattel/id4.html

This is the reason that Originalism, or original intent reading, of the Constitution is necessary. It is the only objective means of determining the qualities of the written law and the relationships between those qualities and what the Framers intented.

"In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a family of theories central to all of which is the proposition that the Constitution has a fixed and knowable meaning, which was established at the time of its drafting. [It is] a formalist theory of law and a corollary of textualism. Today, it is [ ] most prominently associated with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. However, some liberals, such as Justice Hugo Black and Akhil Amar have also subscribed to the theory." Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

The coming administration of Obama will do nothing toward Originalism, and may reverse the the idea, depending on whom Obama is able to nominate to the Supreme Court and get approved in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Modern liberals and many conservatives believe the contrary of Originalsm. It is called the Living Constitution, and is a concept which proposes the Constitution should be interpreted to evolve with the society that implements it.

The very fact that Originalism is disavowed by American liberals, democrats and others, as the proper method of interpreting the Constitution, and their reasons for that disavowal, is proof positive that we are indeed headed for Constitution 3.0, and the only people taking note of it are Originalists. The rest of the nation sees nothing wrong in impressing our own ideas "between the lines," as it were, of a document meant to be taken literally: Change it if you don't like it. The Founders never said ignore it and do what you will by pretending we meant something we didn't mean at all and wouldn't approve of if we were asked.

But "Originalism does not in any way prevent it from being applied to American law in any decade or any century. The original intent can--and ought--to be applied because that was the intent of those who wrote it. They provided us with the means to change their intentions, and that means was not to ignore their intentions. That means was not to place any meaning on their words that fit our purposes. That means which they provided was to either nullify by Amendment where necessary, or alter by legislation where allowed, the intention of their words." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/free-assemblage-of-metaphysical.html

If Obama is as Marxist as he appears to be when he speaks and has his positions published, e.g., when he talks of "windfall profits," and "redistributing" profits from the capitalists to the consumers, he has no intention of Originalism in his political philosophy (except perhaps where it may serve his own policies; we shall have to wait to see.)

Neither Obama nor the Democrats are liberals in the originalist meaning of the word. The drafters and signers of the Declaration were such liberals, formed from Renaisssaince thinking, because the original meaning if not definition of "liberal" was "secular liberation of reason."

Liberating reason from the constrictions of secular law as written, in order to corrupt and destroy it, rather than changing it by the methods built in to it in order not to destroy it, is not liberalism; it is at time collectivist, at times fascist, and at times anti-reason.

But ontologically it is not Originalism, the integrity of changing the Constitution by the means provided within that document. Any other means is sabotage. It is the breaking of the oath taken by every public servant to uphold the Constitution, and it should be punishable by law. The fact that liberals scoffed--even laughed, as Joe Biden did--at the idea of the Marxism of Obama's rhetoric tells us that we are indeed getting ready for the Constitution 3.0, through subterfuge, through reading it as "living", and through previous abuses of it that were gotten away with.

The fact that Obama is an accomplished Constitutional law professor only makes the outcome of his administration darker for the liberty given us by the Minutemen and others who gave their lives in the war for freedom, the war they afterward declared was to "secure the Blessings of Liberty upon ourselves and our Posterity."

Their posterity have let them down.

Congress Shall Make No Law...Prohibiting the Free Exercise of Religion: First Amendment

"The
proposition that Muslims have special privileges in American society, to which
others are not privy, is now enshrined in precedent."

But it also may make no law establishing a religion, and giving to Muslims what is not given to Christians, Jews, and the faithful of other religions --including to Atheists who are protected under precedents set in courts http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/atheism-is-protected-by-law-austin.html --is the establishment of the rites of religion. Click on the blue sentence for more.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Musings and Quotes for Saturday

Condensed from About.Com
"John McCain did the right thing and tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate.
".Palin showed a commitment to her pro-life conservative principles by not bowing to the pressure to abort her mentally-challenged child.
".Palin will be keenly aware of how her military decisions and the decisions she influences as vice-president will affect the men and women serving in the armed forces. Her oldest son, Trig, (sic) is headed to Iraq next month.
".At 44, Palin nullifies any advantage Barack Obama might have with his youth...brings a refreshing female voice to the debates and the campaign... has a likeable style and toughness .
"...earned a staggering 90-percent approval rating from her Alaskan constituents, not the easiest people to please. Her commitment to her principles and her willingness to follow through on promises makes her the toast of Alaska, the darling of the GOP and, now, the apple of the nation's eye."
Justin Quinn http://usconservatives.about.com/b/2008/08/29/alaska-gov-sarah-palin-the-right-partner-the-right-running-mate.htm

Condensed from CATO Institute for Media
"She has been a crusader against pork-barrel spending and has taken on the corrupt Alaska Republican establishment. Certainly this pick carries a great deal of risk, but it has a high upside as well." Michael D. Tanner
"Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate is a political masterstroke. Always an electorally attractive choice, Palin is an even stronger selection following Barack Obama's political punt on Joe Biden. Palin checks a lot of boxes for the McCain campaign: a maverick, anti-establishment profile; a youthful, telegenic, professional woman and devoted mother; and a non-Beltway politician popular among grassroots conservatives." Patrick Basham
http://www.cato.org/pressroom.php?display=ncomments&id=137
"Palin supported and signed into law a $1.5 billion tax increase on oil companies in the form of higher severance taxes. One rule of thumb is that higher taxes cause less investment. Sure enough, State Tax Notes reported (January 7): “After ACES was passed, ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s most active oil exploration company and one of the top three producers, announced it was canceling plans to build a diesel fuel refinery at the Kuparuk oil field. ConocoPhillips blamed the cancellation on passage of ACES [the new tax]. The refinery would have allowed the company to produce low-sulfur diesel fuel onsite for its vehicles and other uses on the North Slope, rather than haul the fuel there from existing refineries.” "Chris Edwards http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/08/29/palin-uninspiring-tax-policy-record/

Condensed from Fox News.Com
" Women are not fungible.
"I don’t know if anyone sitting around with John McCain in the last few days has explained that to him; frankly, I don’t know if there even were any women sitting around with John McCain in the last few days. But, I think I understand a few things about Hillary’s base in the Democratic party, and why so many women have been so loyal to her, and if John McCain thinks that simply picking another person with similar anatomy is going to win their votes, he’s about to learn a very important lesson in gender politics." Susan Estrich http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,413525,00.html

"I appointed both Democrats and independents to serve in my administration. And I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress — I told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on that bridge to nowhere.
If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves. Well, it’s always, though, safer in politics to avoid risk, to just kind of go along with the status quo. But I didn’t get into government to do the safe and easy things. A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why the ship is built.
Politics isn’t just a game of competing interests and clashing parties. The people of America expect us to seek public office and to serve for the right reasons.
And the right reason is to challenge the status quo and to serve the common good. Now, no one expects us to agree on everything, whether in Juneau or in Washington. But we are expected to govern with integrity, and goodwill, and clear convictions, and a servant’s heart."
Sarah Palin http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/08/29/raw-data-sarah-palins-remarks-after-being-named-gop-vice-presidential-candidate/

Now, my own opinions are these:
I hate Obama's far left politics, and if elected he will cost this nation a lot, in terms of money, in terms of irreversible social policies such as came from the FDR's New Deal (like Social Security,) to LBJ's Great Society, whose "War on Poverty" still has young people asking by what means can we eliminate poverty, as if that is ever going to happen. You can't legislate equal pay to all persons; you can't take from the rich to give to the poor; and if you give a college education to everyone, there are still those who will make so much more than others, percentage-wise, that they will cause those who among the college educated will fail at life, to fall under the "poverty line."

But Obama is the person America needs to heal us from decades of wounds done to the self-esteem of black Americans, and to the esteem of white American's who were ashamed of what their neighbors had perpetrated on blacks. His election would give MLK's "Dream" a reality that others before Obama could never have brought. He acts like a politician, not like a black politician, such as Jesse Jackson. Oh, I admire Jackson for many things, including the teaching of
blacks in the 60's to stand up and shout, "Say it loud--I'm black and I'm proud!"

Jackson even has international foreign policy credentials which I admire: "In addition to Slobodan Milosevic, Jackson has also persuaded Hafez al-Assad, Fidel Castro, and Saddam Hussein to set American captives free." http://www.slate.com/id/1002723/

But Jackson's personality often appears to polarize America. It is an historic fact that most black American politicians are polarizing. After all, they came of age in the violent era of the Civil Rights Movement. Obama is not polarizing and doesn't come from that generation. He does not even have any American ancestors who were slaves. That has caused some of those polarizing black leaders to question Obama's "blackness."

I like Obama. I really think he thinks that left-wing policies are moral, and good for people. But how he can square up those socialistic policies with the Constitution he has taught at the college level, can only be explained by the socialistic policies that our left wing courts have allowed to pass unchecked. He comes from a generation that believes because legislation and policies within the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society were not struck down as unConstitutional, that more of the same will be more than "ok," it will be cathartic for the younger generations who have demanded "social justice" and not gotten it.

With Obama they will get it, but they will push this nation further than it has ever gone, in the direction of Marx's proclamation that "From each [we shal steal] according to his ability [to be stolen from;] to each [we will give the stolen money] according to his needs [and according to how much we can afford to steal from those with ability.]"

That is not the kind of social justice that comes from the Constitutional dream of individual sovereignty. "Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." Joseph J. Ellis http://www.friesian.com/ellis.htm

On the other hand, the Republicans have gone along with much of it, and when they protested against leftist socialistic legislation, they protested too quietly and rarely about the socialism that such legislation represented. It was usually about the costs, or a side issue, or it was just partisan bickering.

For the cathartic effects, and because it would, in a John-Galt fashion, hasten the failures of socialistic leaders and thinkers in this country, I seriously considered voting for Obama. As I said, he's likable, and the fact that we would have elected a likable black man, rather than having this nation ripped apart more by seeing a contentious black man in the Oval Office, would heal many wounds.

But John McCain's pick of a young female who is as likable as Obama and who has the credentials of political integrity, if not of political background, changed the race. (She is a Republican who fought against corrupt Republicans in Alaskan government--and won.)

McCain will not be "four more years of Bush" because McCain pushed Bush to change much of the policy Bush was hell-bent on following. Those two have been political enemies far longer than they have appeared to be friendly. So he voted 90% with Bush? Well, sometimes voting against a bill is worse than voting for it. I suspect that if voting against Bush would not have given ammunition to the leftists in America, McCain would have voted far less than 90% with Bush.

And now, in one brilliant stroke, he has given us the same power of catharsis, for women if not for blacks; and since Obama is not a woman, we are forced to take "catharsis" one step at a time--either in the step toward black, or toward female.

See what I mean about voting against something? In this case voting against a likable woman V.P. along with a maverick Republican Presidential candidate would be worse than voting for a likable socialistic black male candidate with a contentious white male V.P.

Have a happy and safe Labor Day Weekend.

Quotes to Get You Through the Weekend

"Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem." Bill Vaughan.

"If you want to be happy, be." Leo Tolstoy

"I am at two with nature." Woody Allen.

"Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up." Chinese Proverb

"The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place." Jim Rohn

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." Mark Twain

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence." Daniel Hudson Burnham

"Operator! Give me the number for 911!" Homer J Simpson.

"First there are those who are winners, and know they are winners. Then there are the losers who know they are losers. Then there are those who are not winners, but don't know it. They're the ones for me. They never quit trying. They're the soul of our game." Paul William "Bear" Bryant

"When we got into office, the one thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were." John F. Kennedy

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt

"One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.” – God in the Dock; C.S. Lewis

"Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken." Yogi Berra

"Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women." Groucho Marx

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

"I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."Benjamin Franklin

"The price of greatness is responsibility." Winston Churchill

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream." Mark Twain

"For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked." Bill Cosby

"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." Anatole France

"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."Kathleen Norris

"We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength." Bill W. from the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous

"I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan

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This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®