Author: Tony

Sen. Clinton is Rod Tidwell.

Sen. Clinton and her populist buddies are opportunists, nothing more. Consider:

“Our tax code should be valuing hard work and helping middle-class and working families get ahead,” [Senator Hillary Clinton] said in Keene, N.H., as she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It offends our values as a nation when an investment manager making $50 million can pay a lower tax rate on her earned income than a teacher making $50,000 pays on her income.”

It should equally offend our values when a teacher making $50,000 pays a lower rate on her earned income than an investment manager making $50 million pays on her income. Having a tax code that is used as a tool to push agendas, pick winners and losers, demonize success, and generate fleeting economic “equality” offends our values. Set a base exemption and tax everything – and everyone – else equally, at a rate as low as possible, regardless of an individual’s economic results.

Let me ask a question or two. If there is unfair treatment here, and it seems there is, why is the explanation always that the rich aren’t paying enough? Why is the problem never that the poor are paying too much?

“Human being” ranks higher than gender.

Somali-born model Waris Dirie, a victim of childhood FGM, uses her celebrity status to campaign against FGM through the Waris Dirie Foundation. She’s doing noble work, but I’m struck by the over-simplification of the debate by this sentence on the main page of her foundation’s website.

If genital mutilation were a problem affecting men, the matter would long be settled.

Of course it affects men, and I mean only FGM. The statement is too simplistic to be anything more than a biased piece of feel-good cheerleading. It’s a sound bite without substance. Saying it dismisses the fact that FGM affects men. Many men see this as positive. They are wrong, but we will not convince them by isolating FGM’s harm as exclusive to the women who’ve been mutilated.

Still, there is an argument to be made using that statement in reference to male genital cutting. To get there, consider this quote from Ms. Dirie:

“Every day I still struggle to understand why this has happened to me – this cruel and terrible thing for which there is no reason or explanation – whatever they tell you about religion or purity. I can’t tell you how angry I feel, how furious it makes me.”

I could’ve said that. I will say that. Every day I still struggle to understand why this has happened to me – this cruel and terrible thing for which there is no reason or explanation – whatever they tell you about religion or purity. I can’t tell you how angry I feel, how furious it makes me.

I am not minimizing what happened to Ms. Dirie or any other victim of FGM, although I know some will read it that way. I do not care. Forced genital cutting without medical indication is barbaric and unacceptable. The violation and horrific injustice is not unique to females just because the damage is more significant.

Male genital mutilation is a problem affecting men (and women). The matter is not long settled, except that it continues without restriction. Most men are fine with that. Many women, too. They are all mistaken, whether or not the genitals being cut belong to a girl or a boy. I will never consider a societally-dependent gender bias before I consider the act of genital mutilation itself. The latter is wrong, so the former is irrelevant.

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In a related story, read this quote by a nurse from Nigeria, a victim of female genital mutilation. She disapproves of FGM, but her quote is useful (from this article):

You see, there are times that I want to agree with the people that are advocating for female circumcision. By virtue of my profession, I have been opportuned to see the vagina of a lot of women, and I must confess that some of them can be very ugly. Some of them are so big and long, as if competing with the men’s penises. Sometimes it is the labia that looks funny. Some even come with colours different from that of their body part. For some women, there is nothing that can be done to it, it cannot close up. Once she unfolds her legs, that is it. The thing will just be open like that. Like a big sore between the thighs. But just as you have the ugly ones, so you have the beautiful ones. Someone once told me that a beautiful woman will definitely have a beautiful vagina. So, once you see a beautiful woman, be sure that her vagina will look beautiful too. Maybe it is because of this ugliness that they actually started circumcising women. One can never tell.

It is not because of that ugliness, but the thought process is informative. In greater detail, this analysis mirrors a common theme found in deciding to circumcise male infants. The natural genitals are ugly, so it is society’s duty to eradicate this problem, to “fix” them. Presumably the child will not do so if given the choice, even though it allegedly means he’ll be resigned to a sex life that does not involve another person. So we must do it for him or her. Of all the possible opinions, only the child’s opinion is irrelevant.

That is no way to make a medical decision for any child.

Who told him how atheists think?

When I commented that Michael Gerson is full of wrong ideas, I didn’t expect him to so quickly be the gift that keeps giving, this time with a ramble about questions unanswerable by atheists. I am not an atheist, so Mr. Gerson’s nonsense isn’t directed at people like me. Many of his assumptions are, because the questions answered by belief in Mr. Gerson’s god rely on irrationality. For example:

But there is a problem. Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits.

So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

How do we choose? This is a trick question, right? How about we use our subjective reasoning to decide what we value most. I could be cruel to someone weaker than me. The opportunity presents itself and it’s in human nature to act on that. Why not act on it?

Mr. Gerson knows the answers, of course, although he only offers one option for the atheist (and non-religious).

Some argue that a careful determination of our long-term interests — a fear of bad consequences — will constrain our selfishness. But this is particularly absurd. Some people are very good at the self-centered exploitation of others. Many get away with it their whole lives. By exercising the will to power, they are maximizing one element of their human nature. In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them? Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

It’s not particularly absurd to claim that a fear of bad consequences influences our behavior. If a person has a marginal appreciation for what we consider ethics and morals, however and from wherever they derive, the fear of bad consequences will matter. If that person values something, but is unconcerned with taking from another to acquire it, the threat of prison looms. (Except for politicians, of course.) So he makes a choice. Society responds accordingly, if he chooses what it prohibits.

But that’s not all there is, of course. Mr. Gerson seems compelled to believe that God put in many wonderful features in human nature, yet he implicitly dismisses any concept that atheists might value these features more than the opportunity to cruelly exploit, rage uncontrollably, and so on. If atheists understand that such negatives exist, even if they believe them to be a result of evolution, surely they are capable of understanding and acting on the positives. Such evaluations are subjective. Without God, the evaluation is not doomed to embrace Lord of the Flies.

All of this leads Mr. Gerson to conclude that atheists and theists alike agree that humans “have an innate desire for morality and purpose”. Right, because it’s human nature. This is complicated? But theists are somehow acting rationally because they believe that God is in control of this. Atheists?

In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

Do atheists never find love? Purpose? Meaning? The evidence doesn’t hold up, of course, because there are more than enough atheists to disprove Mr. Gerson’s ridiculous assumption. But it’s pleasant to know that believing in a loving god who has us all “destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire” because we cave to the negative temptations of human nature he presumably gave us is the only reasonable and justifiable position.

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Mr. Gerson makes this statement as parenthetical aside in his column, so I didn’t include it in my primary focus. Still, it’s worth mentioning because Mr. Gerson has made this error before.

… An irreverent trinity — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn’t approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny.

Forced genital cutting without medical indication is genital mutilation. Forget spiritual tyranny. It is physical tyranny. Mr. Gerson can advocate for the circumcision of male children as often as he likes, and dress it up with as many biblical references as he pleases to justify such mutilation. He will be wrong every time. The medical facts do not support him, but what he implicitly argues here, that circumcision is acceptable because people attach religious meaning to perpetuating it upon male infants, is irrelevant. We live in a civil society of guaranteed, inherent rights. The right to remain free of medically-unnecessary surgery without explicit consent is among those rights.

I will repeat myself as often as necessary. Any god who would demand such an abomination is not a god who deserves respect or allegiance.

House Backs Meddling in Different Ways

When writing legislation to tinker with an already broken system, it’s best to understand which assumptions are flawed. First, the set up:

House Democrats pushed through legislation yesterday that would boost government-subsidized student loans and other college financial aid by $18 billion over the next five years, despite strong opposition from Republican lawmakers and a White House veto threat.

The legislation, passed in a 273 to 149 vote, would cut interest rates on federally backed student loans in half and increase Pell grants for low-income students. It would pay for the measures by slashing subsidies to lending companies by about $19 billion over five years and use about $1 billion of remaining savings to reduce the federal deficit.

Cutting subsidies is always good, but to divert the savings to grants and interest-rate cuts, as if Congress can legitimately and arbitrarily cut them to a desired rate and have the outcome be economic efficiency is folly of the highest order. This plan will no more help students go to college affordably than anything else Congress has tried since it began subsidizing higher education.

But that’s not the fun part. Consider this:

House Republicans also offered a plan yesterday to substitute increased Pell grant funding for the interest rate cuts. They said they favor that approach because more of the money would be targeted to lower-income students, whereas interest rate cuts benefit middle-income borrowers as well.

The most fundamental flaw in higher education is the silly notion that government policy should establish parents as best suited to pay for college. Nonsense. College students are adults, and should be expected to bear the burden. If their parents want to pay, fine. That’s a decision within the individual family. Government should not step in the way.

But undergraduates are almost exclusively lower-income students. They would be lower-income borrowers. If the student’s parents are middle- or high-income, but choose not to pay for college, how is that student any different than the student whose parents would pay for college if they could afford it? The outcome is exactly the same, except the student whose parents are lower-income will get free money from the government. Once again, the government is picking winners and losers based on criteria other than facts.

I wonder why?

[Rep. George] Miller said the changes were necessary to make college affordable to all Americans. “We have an obligation to make sure that students have the maximum opportunity to take advantage of a college education,” he said.

Congress does not have any such obligation. It only has a Constitutional obligation to stay out of the market for college and student loans. If having a college degree is so wonderful, and my two degrees suggest I think it is, supply and demand will sync without help from Congress.

Full disclosure: I received Pell grants all four years as an undergraduate. I also had to repay a significant portion of my student loans early because it was in my mother’s name. Government requirements wouldn’t let me borrow everything in my name, even though I received zero financial support. I repaid the loan early because it was restricting my mother’s access to credit for her needs.

There is a comparison to be made.

I hadn’t planned to offer any discussion of male circumcision from the story in yesterday’s entry about FGM. However, it’s important to highlight this description from the article.

The term female circumcision [sic] covers a range of procedures from minor symbolic cuts to the genitals to attacks that involve the complete amputation of external body parts.

That matches what the WHO says about FGM. The question is obvious, but almost everyone wants to ignore it. Why is even a minor symbolic cut on the genitals of a female minor always unacceptable [ed. note: it is], but undeniably more destructive cutting on males is okay?

Because we can look into the future and find potential benefits? Because we pretty up the surgery with religious or cultural significance? Those can be valid reasons for an adult choosing it for himself (or herself), but when applied to children (of either gender), they are nonsense.

Before anyone gets upset, yes, this matters when comparing female to male genital cutting:

Police said instruments such as rusty tin can lids, razor blades and broken glass have been used to cut them, and thorns used to stitch up the wounds.

I’ve always acknowledged that the difference in degree between female and male genital cutting is significant. FGM is also often done to repress or eliminate female sexual pleasure. I readily concede both points.

But neither point is always the case when a female’s genitals are cut. The justifications can be similar. When those non-medical reasons are applied to females, we dismiss them, often labeling them misogynistic. We see through the irrationality.

With males, we are blind. As I’ve said before, it takes more than a clean operating room and good intentions to justify genital surgery on children. Gender should be irrelevant. This is an issue of cutting the genitals of a child without medical indication.

Fighting FGM in Western Countries

Regardless how many laws we make against an activity, that doesn’t mean the activity will cease. The Female Genital Mutilation Act prohibits all medically unnecessary genital cutting on female minors in the United States. Such a law is appropriate and should’ve arisen the first time lawmakers became aware of such barbarism. That it took until the middle of the 1990s is absurd. Still, I am not naive enough to think FGM doesn’t occur either in America or to American girls taken outside the country.

Britain is no different, so London police are making a direct effort to bring attention to FGM:

A £20,000 reward has been offered to bring the first person in the UK to justice for performing female circumcision.
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A clinic in London is treating up to 500 women every year for health problems linked to female circumcision.
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[Metropolitan Police’s child abuse unit] warned that many children are taken overseas during the summer holiday to undergo the procedure.

I’m saddened that we live in a world where police have to offer a reward for people to bring such criminals to justice. If that’s what it takes, though, so be it. I don’t imagine we’d find much resistance in the U.S. to such a tactic by police.

Partisanship vs. the People

Michael Gerson, who’s too regularly full of wrong ideas, discusses child health insurance in today’s Washington Post.

The column is useful enough, since it discusses how to get children covered by health insurance, as well as a glossed-over failure within the existing government structure of providing insurance for children. There’s room for disagreement, despite his opening suggestion, but his conclusion is better than creating a new bureaucracy to do what the government already does. (The government shouldn’t be doing this, and his solution for adults is lacking.)

One sentence is worth excerpting. The story is lost a bit when reading this in isolation, but the context remains.

Fulfilling the most basic parental responsibilities can’t be legislated.

Why not? Politicians (and pundits) seem convinced that many such actions can and should be legislated. At least in Virginia, the laws for restraining children minors under the age of 16 while riding in motor vehicles suggests that basic parental responsibilities are legislated.

I happen to agree with his original statement. (We legislate feeding children sufficiently, for example, but that’s not what Mr. Gerson means by most basic.) As he mentions in his column, almost 6 million children eligible for Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program aren’t signed up because their parents haven’t filled out the paperwork. That makes no sense. I’m sure most of those 6 million children aren’t signed up because their parents don’t know they’re eligible, but I don’t see how a free society can force people to sign up for public insurance, just because they’re eligible. Providing health care to their children, yes. Accepting public assistance, no.

When we hear that 47 million Americans don’t have health insurance, that means 250 million do. We should learn from the majority more than we decipher problems from the minority. I’m left wondering why, with programs already available, we should create new programs for children and adults in the hopes that we’ll eventually get to everyone. Shouldn’t we investigate why parents aren’t signing up for something that already exists rather than create a new boondoggle that will fall short of politicians’ plans? Our current crop of presidential candidates don’t think so, so the real lesson is that big government conservatism and big government liberalism are more interested in big government than political philosophy. Surprise. Won’t single-payer health care be fun?!?

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A little Michael Gerson bonus, extending from his statement. As he concluded in his Independence Day column:

In America we respect, defend and obey the Constitution — but we change it when it is inconsistent with our ideals. Those ideals are defined by the Declaration of Independence. We have not always lived up to them. But we would not change them for anything on Earth.

So what’s in the Declaration of Independence that Mr. Gerson cherishes?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

How is same-sex marriage, which Mr. Gerson opposes, not the pursuit of happiness? Is he going to get ignorantly stuck on the reference to the individual’s Creator, read that as a euphemism for his God, and call government intervention okay? He clearly believes he can legislate happiness. If he believes we can’t legislate the most basic parental responsibilities, why not? Legislating signing up for insurance is easier and likely to be more effective than legislating happiness.

One more, just because it’s worth pointing out.

From the same Sen. Obama speech:

If you’re willing to teach in a high-need subject like math or science or special education, we’ll pay you even more.

The central planner always knows best which area is a “high-need”. Should Sen. Obama become president and get this change through Congress, welcome the coming glut of math, science, and special education teachers. And they’ll all be making more money, without concern for supply and demand. Really, who needs to worry about such bothersome economic laws. Sen. Obama knows, and he’ll direct government to benevolently provide.

Who believes that government can never be the core problem?

Looking at the speech where Sen. Barack Obama discussed the idea of merit pay (from yesterday), it’s not hard to figure out that, while he may truly be interested in fighting for merit pay in schools, he’s not interested in reform if it doesn’t conform to rhetoric.

The ideal of a public education has always been at the heart of the American promise. It’s why we are committed to fixing and improving our public schools instead of abandoning them and passing out vouchers. Because in America, it’s the promise of a good education for all that makes it possible for any child to transcend the barriers of race or class or background and achieve their God-given potential.

Everything wrong with Sen. Obama’s candidacy is wrapped up in one paragraph. Vouchers – public financing without public provision – equates to nothing more than “abandoning” our schools, and presumably our children. I’ll try to contain my enthusiasm.

Exhibit A:

There’s no better example of this neglect than the law that has become one of the emptiest slogans in the history of politics – No Child Left Behind.
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But don’t come up with this law called No Child Left Behind and then leave the money behind. …

He’s right that No Child Left Behind is a flaming turd. Worse, it’s a federal flaming turd, when the federal government has no legitimate authority to insert itself into public education. But if he thinks that it’s a flaming turd only because it doesn’t have enough money backing it, even if the extra money goes to better pay¹ for quality teachers, he’s either an opportunist or a moron.

Let’s assume he becomes president and fixes the unfixable No Child Left behind by throwing more money at it, even if it’s only to offer merit pay to teachers. Is it a cheap shot, or merely pointing out the obvious, to suggest that if those children “transcend the barriers of race or class or background and achieve their God-given potential”, Sen. Obama will be more than happy to have government take a considerable portion of the fruits of that achievement? You know, to level the playing field.

When liberals progressives talk about equality, they never mean equality of opportunity. Never. It’s always equality of outcome. Sen. Obama wouldn’t be advocating single-payer health care with huge tax increases if he didn’t advocate equality of outcome.

To be fair, I’m sure he’s being honest when he says he wants children to reach their potential. (Why the need to include “God-given”, if not to appear religious?) But that leaves him, at best, as inconsistent and unprincipled. I want consistent principles in a president.

Link to Sen. Obama’s speech courtesy of Ruth Marcus’ column in today’s Washington Post.

¹ I guess the assumption isn’t that bad teachers shouldn’t make less than they currently make. They’re paid correctly. We need more money to pay the good teachers. Wouldn’t a voucher system or other privatizing plan achieve the same thing, if that’s the right problem with teacher pay? What if it’s not the right problem with teacher pay?

The wheels of injustice turn quickly in China.

Kip has a running series titled “China is Still a Dictatorship”. See if you think this news fits that:

Moving to address mounting concerns about the safety of its exports, China announced Tuesday that it had executed the former head of its food and drug safety agency for accepting bribes in exchange for approving substandard medicines.

At a news conference, State Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Yan Jianyang said officials like Zheng Xiaoyu — who was sentenced to death in May after he was found guilty of accepting cash and gifts worth more than $800,000 — had brought “shame” to the agency and caused serious problems.

There are arguments here about the death penalty, as well as whether or not bribery should result in a death sentence. (The substandard medicines Zheng approved caused deaths, if I’m not mistaken, but I understand the charges to be bribery rather than something related to those deaths.) But Zheng was sentenced in May. Roughly two months from conviction to execution. I have a hard time believing that China is capable of quality appeals in two months.

I’m not confident China is capable – or interested – in quality appeals, which is ultimately the larger issue. Commenting on reforms to food safety standards, this:

The reforms show that “the Chinese government is a responsible government and has placed a great deal of importance on the quality and safety of its exports,” said Lin Wei, the deputy director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau.

The Chinese government is not responsible. It is a dictatorship and it behaves like all dictatorships. Forgive me if I fail to admire it for its economic “miracle” and foray into what can not even loosely be defined as capitalism.