Lux Lucet

Newt Gingrich went and did it. After several months of bluster, boasting and nonsense – he’s a historian, by golly, and don’t you forget it – he finally managed to say something interesting. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the former speaker admitted that if he had to choose between Ron Paul and Barak Obama in the general election, he’d go with Obama. For what it’s worth, Gingrich later hedged his language, but the cat’s out of the bag.

This should surprise no one given the fact that when it comes right down to it, Gingrich and Obama have far more in common with each other than either one does with Ron Paul. Both love welfare at home, warfare abroad and neither cares a whit about the Constitution.

Now that one hypocritical, statist Republican has shown his true colors, perhaps more will have the courage to follow. Rush Limbaugh. Paging Rush Limbaugh. Has anyone seen Rush Limbaugh…

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In a recent piece, I commented on an article in Time by Joe Klein. For a mainstream media writer, I thought Klein was reasonably fair to Ron Paul, and was in fact more open to Paul’s free market ideas than many leading conservatives. I also mentioned that the article had a number of errors in it as well. I dealt with one of those already: Klein’s conflation of popularity and constitutionality. For Klein, it seems, if legislation is passed by Congress and is popular with the people, it must be constitutional. It was on this basis that he defended Social Security. This, of course, is fallacious. A law is constitutional if it is in agreement with the Constitution; it is unconstitutional if it is not. This has nothing to do with popularity.

There is another common, mistaken idea in Klein’s article based on the unstated assumption that complexity is good and simplicity is bad. Klein wrote, “This is a complicated society, undergoing an ever more rapid transformation in the midst of a potentially long economic slump…It’s these sorts of times that raise up people with simple answers: ideologues and demagogues. Paul is an ideologue and – we’re lucky – an entirely honorable one.” Klein, like many people, assumes complexity is good and normal, simplicity is not.
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In a article in Time, political writer Joe Klein spotlights Ron Paul in a not too negative fashion. In all honesty, I Klein’s piece was much better than I would have expected out of the MSM. It’s funny, but in some ways the MSM is less hostile to Paul’s ideas than many prominent voices in the conservative media. Limbaugh regularly bashes Paul as do the fine folks in the flagship conservative political magazines. Not that Klein quite gets it. I doubt he’d ever count himself as a Paul supporter, but stranger things have happened.

One area where Klein could improve is in his view of Social Security. Klein writes, “On an even more basic level, it would be nice to believe that people could take care of themselves without government help, but it just hasn’t proved true: programs like Social Security and Medicare – with run directly against the Jeffersonian-libertarian tradition – were necessary because people couldn’t take care of themselves. The elderly, especially, had trouble paying medical bills after their working days ended. The American people, through their government, decided to make a rudimentary deal, to make sure their parents didn’t starve or sleep in the streets and were able to get medical care.”

Of course, this raises the question, how did people take care of themselves before Social Security? They or their families did. If that wasn’t adequate, there were many charities that assisted people. When the Republicans won the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich put out a list of books supporting limited government. On that list was a publication titled The Tragedy of America Compassion. In it, author Marvin Olasky effectively refuted the notion that before the modern welfare state – including the advent of sacred programs like Social Security – people were starving in the streets. Socialists would have you believe that were it not for government “charity,” there would be none. That idea is simply false.

Klein continues, “There was nothing unconstitutional about that – just as there’s nothing unconstitutional about requiring people to have medical insurance now. The deal was made with the consent of the governed. In the real world, these are the most popular programs the government offers – about 80% of the American people are happy with them.”

Here, Klein shows he himself to be well off base. He seems to confuse popularity with constitutionality. And while I won’t deny that many government programs have popular support, this is very different from saying they are constitutional. The logical rule is that if it is not granted in the Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from that activity. The Constitution does not authorize Social Security, therefore it is unconstitutional for the federal government to provide Social Security benefits. The logic is simple to understand, but hard to face.

The Apostle Paul stated the Christian position on charity when he wrote, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim.5:8). Christians are to provide for their own households – including aged parents – out of their own resources, not use the government gun to do so. Charity starts at home. Ron Paul’s voting test – he will not vote for a bill unless it is authorized in the Constitution – is logical, constitutional, and in accord with Christian ethics. Would that there were many more like him in Congress.     

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This morning I was driving to work on the interstate, minding my own business, and sipping a nice, hot, oversize mug of coffee. It was a pretty typical morning commute. Nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting. At least not until a Volkswagen Jetta passed me on the left. The Jetta itself wasn’t remarkable. It was like hundreds of others I’d seen before. But something about it caught my eye and caused me to do a double take. Much to my surprise, the car had a gas pump nozzle still inserted in the gas tank sticking out the side of the car. Even better, the six feet of hose still attached to the nozzle was dragging on the road surface well behind the rear tire. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Clueless!,” I thought to myself, “How could anyone be that oblivious to what’s going on around him?”

Of course, we can all be clueless at times. When I was in grade school, I used to fill up the lost and found with gloves and hats and coats. I could have outfitted half the third grade with all the stuff I misplaced.

And to tell you the truth, I’m still that way. Those who know me are well aware of my bad habit of putting things in odd places and completely forgetting about them. I recently lost my eyeglasses for a week and had no idea what I might have done with them. I finally figured out they were in the pocket of my new hoodie, but not after overturning the house and making special trips to two restaurants, thinking that I had left my glasses at the table.

Some people think that my writing is clueless too. I hope that’s not the case, but maybe they have a point. No doubt I have several cords worth of wood in my eye. A man should never judge his own case. Whatever.
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Why were we flying a drone over Iran? – Rep. Ron Paul

Much has been made of the lost American surveillance drone recently captured by the Iranians. The Pentagon has lied about it, John Stewart has made fun of it, and Obama has asked for it. But what is important in all this is the question, what was it doing there in the first place? As usual it took the temerity of Ron Paul to ask this important and – as far as our masters of the universe in the government and media are concerned – impertinent question.

Many Americans take it for granted that the US has the right and the duty to bomb, occupy and spy on the rest of the world. They take it as a matter of course that the US ought to engage in these activities and become angry should anyone suggest otherwise.

But God never commanded Israel to spy on its neighbors as a regular practice. Yes, spies were sued on occasion, but this occurred only during times of war. John Robbins made this point quite well in his essay The Sine Qua Non of Enduring Freedom. He wrote,

A related foreign policy question is the matter of spies, for perhaps the predominant function of embassies today (and perhaps whenever they have been used) is espionage. Ancient Israel used spies, but only during war and for short periods of time. Just as there was no standing army, so there were no standing armies of spies and diplomats. God commanded Moses to ‘Send men to spy out the land of Canaan,’ one from each tribe…

Some of this spying was commended by God, and perhaps all of it was, but we are not told that all of it was done at God’s express command. But spying was used exclusively during wartime. Spying on other nations was not a normal, peacetime practice of either the Hebrew republic or the monarchy. It seems clear that spying on one’s neighboring governments during peacetime, even more than maintaining embassies that harbor spies, is a form of prohibited foreign intervention. It can hardly be argued that God’s command to Moses justifies the regular use of spies, for the command was very specific: Spy out the land of Canaan. Espionage, except during wartime, is not a proper function of government..

The absence of both resident ambassadors and spies is the norm.”

The Bible commands individuals and governments to mind their own business (1 Thess. 4:11), but peacetime spying is anything but that. If anyone objects that droning Iran is not an example of peacetime espionage because we are at war with Iran, I would ask him to show me where the Congress has declared it.

And if anyone supposes that regular espionage is fine because it is done only to bad men from bad nations who deserve it but has no implications for the civil rights of American citizens, I would point out that the airport porno scanners, warrantless wiretaps and vanishing financial privacy we have come to enjoy in the post 911 world all suggest that what the feds do over there doesn’t stay over there, but rather that both the foreign and domestic surveillance apparatuses are in reality two sides of the same lawless federal coin.

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