Posted on 05/09/2005 6:19:48 AM PDT by kjvail
The second anniversary of America's expedition into Iraq passed with relatively scant fanfare. Since hostilities in Mesopotamia commenced, thousands of American and Iraqi casualties have been tallied. Every month Washington spends billion of dollars on counterinsurgency and rebuilding efforts in Iraq and further afield, which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history[i].
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
...Democracy deconstructed
As Hans Hermann-Hoppe adeptly describes in Democracy: The God that failed, the democratic state is inherently a "public" monopoly. Unlike privately-owned monopolies, e.g., monarchies where the sovereign generally has an incentive to moderate expropriations of property to preserve the realm's present value for heirs, state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves from ownership or sale of government property.
Rather, a moral hazard and tragedy of the commons ensues as bureaucrats and politicians may merely exercise use of government property while on the state payroll, precipitating a strong inducement to maximize current use of government property, irrespective if such activities entail dire consequences for taxpayers and the economy at large.
As concerns government finance, officials conduct the borrowing and enjoy the resultant political plaudits from the constituencies that benefit from state largesse while other private citizens defray the expenditures and debts via taxation or government-stoked money creation. Indeed, Hoppe contends an elected president can run up public debts, instigate inflation, inaugurate long-running wars, and introduce other state projects footed by hapless taxpayers without being held personally liable for the consequences.
Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy methodically chronicles how the personnel of successive democratically-elected administrations manipulated American foreign policy to secure the narrow self-interests of connected business interests whilst justifying these massive, costly and incessant interventions on the pretext of combating communism or promoting democracy.
Politicians who have aggressively expanded the state in America and elsewhere are extolled as great. Verily, democratic governance provides an alluring career for aspiring politicians, their cronies and bureaucrats. Not only do officials have the resources accrued by the state at their disposal, they also exercise the authority and wherewithal to confiscate private property and participate in the process of spending and borrowing—absent individual culpability—all the while receiving a salary and pension funded by taxpayers. Furthermore, politicians and appointed administrators are only accountable during regular popularity contests, in which voters can reshuffle personnel but are not inclined to alter fundamentally the scheme of free-for-all theft.
Hoppe states democracy abolishes the distinction between rulers and ruled—the limited opportunity to become a member of the royal family that pervaded under monarchy—and assumes that any member of the political system may ascend to the upper echelons of governance. Given the state's indispensable need to steal for its subsistence and the nearly unfettered entry into the ranks of the ruling class, democracy renders it that much easier for politicians to accelerate exactions from the public, as the gates remain open for any individual or faction to gain access to governmental powers and impose the same taxes or regulations themselves. As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
The ability of elected politicians and entrenched bureaucrats to institutionalize and enforce systematic predation and redistribution of private property is an outcome of the democratic ethos itself. Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system—whether voluntarily or not—cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money. It follows that individual responsibility and private property ownership are seriously impaired and denigrated as the government-instituted "law of the jungle" taps innate human characteristics such as envy, self-preservation, and keenness for gratification.
As Frederic Bastiat explained in The Law, self-preservation and self-development are universal instincts among men as is the preference to do so with the minimum amount of pain and the maximum level of ease. Plunder then is favored over production, so long as the risks and inputs of confiscation are not as agonizing or as indomitable as the painstaking act of production and exchange. When given an opportunity to seize private property or stipulate regulations on owner's use thereof, as democratic rule is wont to do, participants in the political system vie for the chance to apply the state's coercive arm in service of their supporters' ends.
Motivated by envy and self-preservation, all classes of individuals demand, whether through forceful or pacific means, the franchise as its price for defraying the expenses of others running the government. Once empowered to help decide the course of public expenditures—Bastiat wrote—plundered classes opt to be as licentious as other enfranchised classes, rendering the systematic looting universal, even though such profligacy is undeniably detrimental to the economy's well-being.
It should be noted that the chief feedback mechanism of democratic government, voting, does occur in private enterprises and associations. Beyond this superficial similarity, however, there are acute distinctions. Shareholders exercise voting rights in a corporation proportionate to stock ownership whereas every eligible voter in a democratic election is entitled to one vote, irrespective if they are net tax-eaters or taxpayers.
Should shareholders grow disaffected by voting procedures, business strategies or dividends payouts they may opt out of owning a portion of an enterprise by selling stock, a prerogative denied to democratic voters who must acquiesce to government spending plans and policies—regardless of consent—lest they risk jail or emigration. The intrinsic tenuousness of property ownership in a democratic system and the inability to extricate oneself and possessions from possible confiscation accelerates the temptation to seize other people’s goods.
Bastiat argues that the onset of universal plunder undermines the purpose of law, in his view the collective organization of the individual right to defense of life, liberty and property. The moment law is perverted to engineer ends contrary to individual liberty, e.g., enshrining the notion individuals are entitled to a portion of each other’s property absent voluntary agreement, the conversion pits morality versus the adulterated law. Thus, moral chaos is the outcome of democratization, as one must either relinquish respect for the law or compromise moral sense.
The divergence between morality and democratic rule can be observed in legal positivism, the notion that right and wrong are absent prior to the introduction of legislation. Legislation attenuates predictability of law as the free entry into government and the intrinsic fluidity of political priorities ensure the governing process reflects the most urgent desires of policy-makers and the electorate, irrespective of the long-term ramifications of the enacted rules. Furthermore, the emergence of public or administrative law, which exempts government agents from individual culpability when exercising their sanctioned duties, enables the state's workforce to engage in behaviors that no other individual may commit licitly. Lew Rockwell cites a few euphemisms where the state excused itself from the laws it professes to uphold, such as kidnapping posing as selective service, counterfeiting masquerading as monetary policy and mass murder sold as foreign policy[v].
Consequently, law is not considered negative—inimical to injustice as Bastiat would have it—much less universal, eternally bestowed, discoverable by man and anterior to the institution of government. Bastiat asserts that the prior existence of life, liberty, and property is the impetus for enacting laws in the first place. Moreover, the demarcation between right and wrong and the very definition of crime is obfuscated and debased by the inexhaustible and transitory adoption and amendment of legislative diktat and the bifurcation of law codes applicable to the rulers and the ruled.
In sum, the unique characteristics of democratic government tend, according to Hoppe, Bastiat and others, to accelerate rising time preference, decivilization, and the incidence of crime to the detriment of private property, voluntary production and exchange, individual responsibility and even morality.
Why then do Messrs. Bush, Wolfowitz, and any other politicians, statesmen or bureaucrats get away with inaugurating recurring conflicts and administer an ever-expanding vehicle of coercion and plunder? The fundamental rules and ethos of democratic government impel man's innate inclination toward self-preservation and self-development to not only produce, trade and safeguard his own possessions but also employ legal theft to acquire more property from others.
Politicians and their deputies are merely the best at exploiting the system's impaired moral climate to organize the state's confiscatory arm to serve their backer's interests.
IMO, we can coexist with Muslims without much strain.
It is the extremist Wahabis, staunchly entrenched in Saudi Arabia, that are the root of the problem.
And, with our hand holding Pres in charge, we are left to hope GWB is the cleverest most subtle diplomat in history (yeah, sure).
Excuse me, I didn't know you were on the front line.
I've got 11 kids and step kids and 17 grandkids a-hole, so I think I've got as much concern for future generations as anybody on this forum.
Maybe you can settle back in your easy chair, and with our fearless leader say, "bring it on".
Well, you apparently don't give a shit if they get killed by jihadis, a-hole, so go stuff your crotchety old self.
Pluralism, the dominant mode of social organization1 in the modern West, dictates that all social groups — religions, ethnicities, languages — are necessarily equal, or at least of indeterminable value, and therefore ought to be equally tolerated and even fostered by the state. It is founded in the denial of the Church's claim to universal and unique veracity, and as such must be considered as antithetical to the Catholic faith. However, most Catholics today accept pluralism as a given, or even support it as a positive good. Often this support is predicated upon the mistaken notion that any denial of pluralism requires forced conversions and public burnings — a notion which even a brief perusal of Catholic teaching will rapidly dispel. Pluralism, however, is not an antidote to pseudo-Gothic fits of violent prosyletism, but an effective remedy for any public presence of religion in the state at all, and any serious analysis of the theory will reveal that it cannot be reconciled with Catholic social or even dogmatic teaching.
That most language and ethnic groups deserve to be tolerated and fostered would not be challenged by any authentically Catholic thinker. Each culture has its own unique ways of embodying the Incarnation and glorifying its Creator in addition to those which the Church, in her wisdom, prescribes for all men and all places. The modern tendency to recognize the richness inherent in many variant cultures should be welcomed by traditional Catholics as an effective antidote against the centralizing nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unless taken to extremes,2 Catholics find no difficulty in acknowledging this aspect of pluralism, which perhaps accounts for their guardlessness concerning the other, more problematic, prong of the theory.
Pluralism's difficulty (and contradiction of Catholic teaching) comes when it insists on the uniform equality of all religions, in common with cultures and ethnicities. This claim necessarily conflicts with the Church's claim to unique truth, that she and she alone possesses and passes on the whole truth given to man by his Creator. In a state which contains a multiplicity of religions, the pluralist argument goes, a single religion cannot be acknowledged as true for fear of alienating those of other religions and thus fomenting civil discord. Instead, all religions should be acknowledged as equal, and the matter of religion should be completely avoided by the state.3 This statement of pluralism's tenets clearly reveals its roots in another position which has been condemned by the Church. Indifferentism, the idea that all religions are equally capable of saving man (in other words, that God is indifferent to the way in which He is worshipped and, indeed, to whether or not the truth about Him is believed), bears a striking similarity to pluralist doctrine.
Pluralism is simply indifferentism extended to the public square. The two are morally equivalent; indeed, they are simply two sides of the same coin. Just as indifferentism claims that religion is an indifferent matter for the soul of the individual, pluralism claims that religion is an indifferent matter for the proper constitution of the state. The two work hand-in-hand, and often invoke one another's precepts to defend themselves. The standard pluralist argument, for example, runs that the state should recognize no one religion because doing so will alienate the believers of the other religions—and who is the state to say that those other religions will not bring their followers to salvation just as well as ours will us? Their principles are so intertwined that one cannot help but affirm that pluralism and indifferentism are simply two aspects of the same idea, one which is fundamentally antithetical to the Church's claims of sole salvific power.
Pluralism also shares with indifferentism the tendency to destroy all real religion within their spheres. As the popes have declared, indifferentism results in the abandonment of all substantive religion4; after all, if the particular religion by which one worships God is irrelevant, then will not God be just as well pleased by an individual worship which is minimal to the point of non-existence? Indifferentism thereby leads its followers into a religion which requires neither morals nor worship, a religion devoid of any substantive content. Pluralism extends this tendency of indifferentism into the public sphere. The state, immediately or gradually, reaches the point where the only religious tenets it supports or even acknowledges are completely banal, or at least deprived of all significant content.5
Thus, pluralism falls under the same condemnations as indifferentism,6 in addition to the many which have been levied against it in its own right.7 The Church has always reacted very strongly to these theories, which presume to sever the state from its true philosophical, and therefore necessarily religious, underpinnings. That is because indifferentism and pluralism necessarily involve yet another heresy, a sort of liberal quietism, by which faith is a personal and private matter which must never enter into one's public dealings.
Though pluralism, because it is simply a public manifestation of indifferentism, necessarily promotes a lack of any substantial religion in those living under its regime, there will always be those who resist this tide and maintain a faith which contains actual tenets requiring real, active fulfilment. Whenever such fulfilment, however, requires the conversion of others, it is violating the sacred doctrine of pluralism and indifferentism that all religions are equal, at least as far as salvation is concerned, because it presumes that the beliefs of the converted were less worthy of salvation than those of the converter. Such substantive faiths must be kept out of the public square as much as possible, even if the government of the pluralist state still insists on permitting the free exercise of all religions within its borders. Thus great social pressure arises encouraging the subsumation of such active faiths into simple, internal affairs, the active elements completed removed. Even arguing on behalf of a position from the standpoint of religious faith is considered bad form and insulting to the beliefs of others.8 Thus arises the great compartmentalization of life which effectively banishes religion not only from any official role in the state, but also from any unofficial role which it might play through the beliefs of individuals who participate in the pluralist society. Irreligion has been enshrined as the official state "church," and the protestations of those few who continue to insist on an active, public faith are of no avail in the sea of pluralistic practical atheism.
Faith, however, must be lived out in action, as Our Lord Himself9 and St. James10 have told us. This means that faith must be lived out both by individual Catholics, by Catholic families, and by the state.11 Just as indifferentism paralyzes Catholic action in the individual sphere, pluralism paralyzes it in the public. While nearly all modern states have laws which either mandate pluralism explicitly or have been interpreted to so mandate, Catholics cannot succumb to the doctrines of a theory so antithetical to authentic Christian teaching. Laws must, of course, be obeyed12; however, love of country as well as loyalty to the apostolic faith require Catholics to pray and work for the removal of the evil effects of pluralism and indifferentism in their respective states. Catholics must shun pluralism just as they would any other heresy as harmful to the soul and contrary to the social teachings of the Church.
If pluralism, for the state, were limited to the above, then I would be a pluralist. If I were catholic, I'd be a pluralist catholic. Since my views are not represented in the parts of the quote I left out, I am not sure if I qualify as a pluralist.. But as as my position is not based upon "denial of the Church's claim to universal and unique veracity," but only upon ignorance of such when weighed against others claims, I guess I do not qualify as a Pluralist.
The pluralist argument that "...a single religion cannot be acknowledged as true for fear of alienating those of other religions and thus fomenting civil discord," I would disagree with as much as you do. Nor do I agree that "...all religions should be acknowledged as equal..." But I completely agree with the idea that "...the matter of religion should be completely avoided by the state." Now if this qualifies me as a follower of "indifferentism," then so be it.
Indifferentism, the idea that all religions are equally capable of saving man (in other words, that God is indifferent to the way in which He is worshipped and, indeed, to whether or not the truth about Him is believed).
Ah... I guess I do not agree with indfferentism either, as I do not agree that "all religions are equally capable..," nor "that God is indifferent..." Since "pluralism is simply indifferentism extended to the public square," I am obviously not a pluralist. On the other hand, I agree with them that "religion is an indifferent matter for the proper constitution of the state," except of course to extend to its believers, practitioners and promoters the same rights of expression and assembly that are given to all other people on all other matters of opinion. Thus while I agree with the pluralists on one single very critical issue, I find my self laughing at their silly notion that "the state should recognize no one religion because doing so will alienate the believers of the other religions." If that were one of the main reason that the state should not recognize one single religion, then even I would find it hard pressed to defend the state's independence from religion and vise versa.
I agree that where "the state, immediately or gradually, reaches the point where the only religious tenets it supports or even acknowledges are completely banal, or at least deprived of all significant content," is quite damaging to religion as a whole. For this, among other reasons, "religious tenets" should not be something that the state "supports or even acknowledges."
...all modern states have laws which either mandate pluralism explicitly or have been interpreted to so mandate...
This appears to be true in Europe and Canada, but not much so here in the USA. For the most part we have a pretty good separation of church and state. Now mind you, it could be stronger, and often slips with increases of religious recognition, but for the most part the American people have seen to it that at least the line has been held.
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