February « 2007 « The Irate Nation

More Regarding Speaker Gingrich: Tax and Economic Policy

Note: I should mention that the reason why I'm critiquing Speaker Gingrich is because I think he's potentially the most thoughtful of any candidate in the race, Republican or Democrat. There are disagreements I have, and I think if I keep writing people will see that we can maturely disagree in the Republican party and still support each other. I definitely endorse his candidacy, and hope he runs, so I can have someone I actually want to vote for.

There's nothing in this list of policies and goals that will surprise those of us immersed in conservative ideas. Lower taxes help business grow, as we are allowed to do more with our own money. The increased tax revenue that comes from lower taxes in turn enriches the government and allows us to maintain our position as the world power. Such a climate exists right now (in all this talk about the war, people have forgotten the Bush tax cut worked, and that our economic growth is tremendous,) but there are ways in which we are discriminating against industry - i.e. unions being too powerful, other countries having less regulations in terms of business - that could take the competitive edge we get through tax cuts and throw it away.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that our Leftist friends are exactly right about something, and Speaker Gingrich must address that point if we are to thrive. The Marxist critique of work in The Communist Manifesto has one point that really cannot be refuted - the modern worker is reduced to being part of a machine, his work is less "craft" and his ability is tied directly to the money. If drug-dealing were legal, people who bought and sold drugs would be some of the richest people in this country. They wouldn't need any education or skill to do that, and yet capitalism would embrace them, and then the refining of their "trade" would start, and specialized jobs within the drug dealing industry would crop up that did require education and some talent.

That's the insidious part of capitalism - the truth is, it's based on a conception of freedom that is pure desire. The idea that one is "free" in that one acts lovingly, or one acts with grace and skill, the Christian and classical conceptions of freedom, roughly, are all gone. And we see this in the job market to some degree. People would be prouder of me if I ran accounts for a company that dealt in pornography because that's a job, and it makes money. To be a graduate student and read Lincoln and rant on the Internet - none of that is "work," and writing is something anyone can do, given pen and paper and a 3rd grade education, and it couldn't possibly get the things I or those I love need to survive, and it certainly can't get me any respect or, because of teacher's unions and the Education field that has arisen from that movement, students of any sort.

The alienation of the intellectual from any genuine sense of labor is the tip of the iceberg. I think it's pretty clear that modern capitalism rewards vice over mores: the incentive is to keep creating stuff, no matter what its use. The abortion debate was unthinkable until the technology came about and was mass-produced; pretty soon, we'll be cloning humans to harvest their organs. A few friends of mine the other day were telling me with a straight face that cloning a person and tearing him limb from limb for our satisfaction is indeed scientific progress.

I said it in the last post, and I'll say it again. Our values have to be loud and clear before any debate starts. You want to invest in math and science? Then be clear about what their purpose is, and what their limits are. Math and science aren't America alone; they're a tool and a realm in which we are free, protecting ourselves and discovering the universe. But again, they're no substitute for love, or appreciating our past. Similarly, with saying "we need to competitive in industry," we need to be clear not just about job creation, but about what kind of jobs we want, and how we want workers to live. We can easily be the world's economic superpower if we pay everyone a penny an hour. Whether we should want that or not is the question.

Speaker Gingrich On Math and Science Education

Aside: In case you're interested, a friend has some musings about Putin and the Left. The shock for me is that anyone could side with Putin. Also, see my blog for some thoughts about what "The Daily Show" represents.

Newt Gingrich has a really interesting line of thought, which I disagree with somewhat, on math and science and our schools. What I love about his thought can be summed up in his statement here:

Scientific research spending must be considered part of the national security budget.

Gingrich's words there aren't a simple assertion about a budget. When taken together with his other statements, it looks like he's giving science and technology a role: such things must help us defend our nation, otherwise our values and virtues could count for nothing. Liberals and libertarians assume, of course, that this will magically happen, but the truth is that where we invest is dependent on what we think is most important. Right now, we think erectile dysfunction medication is critical. Technology is not oriented towards keeping us safe unless something bad happens.

The area of disagreement I have with him is that while he's conscious of a problem - i.e. that since science oriented towards our security, just like when it is oriented towards our creature comforts, is the attempt to exercise pure power, and therefore must be a technological edge against other nations in order to have that power, otherwise all previous scientific efforts are a waste - he's not seeing that we probably spend too much on math and science education as is. Our heritage is going to pieces, and we're not able to articulate why this nation is good. At best, we can only articulate why other nations are bad.

The thing about an education is that except for math and science, it cannot be subject to popular decision-making. If this nation could throw out Shakespeare in order to get another shiny new type of cell phone, it would - every one of us, including myself, does so every day: every time I'm playing video games and not reading Plato, I'm saying that something is more important than trying to understand the past and trying to see where mankind has come. Our attitude is "make money and live comfortably," and that's not the attitude one can approach education policy with: one doesn't need to know anything, strictly speaking, to do either. It does help that math and science add to mastery of the physical world, but the ancient and medieval worlds, for religious and philosophical reasons, wouldn't consider what we do in those areas knowledge, as we make grand claims through them without any awareness of how empty and stupid we will sound later.

So my criticism of Speaker Gingrich is that in saying "more math and science," he's opening the way for populism to wreck our schools even more, by setting a very practical standard for where we need to go. The question of education is whether we want to survive as a people appreciative of our heritage and as many heritages as possible, or whether we want to survive simply, through common defense. It's a tough call, and I respectfully disagree with the Speaker, because we have been surviving simply far too long, and now cannot even say "terrorism is bad" or "families are worth having."

GTB Blogburst: Dirty Johnny Sutton

By Heidi Thiess We are still closely watching the Border Patrol case, especially after last week's explosive news that the DHS had lied to Congressmen who were looking into the case. Close on the heels of that shocking revelation, we noted that US Attorney Johnny Sutton, the prosecutor in this case, has lied openly and repeatedly about this case to the media. In an effort to counter Sutton's lies, here is one of his favorite public statements about Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean deconstructed:

"These guys did very serious crimes and once anybody who knows all the facts of this case — the fact that they shot at an unarmed guy 15 times, lied about it, covered it up, destroyed the evidence ... it's hard for me to imagine a prosecutor would look the other way," he said.

1. It has not been proven that the drug smuggler was unarmed. Sutton has been unable to prove it, yet he states it like it's a fact. Furthermore, two of the drug smuggler's own family members have made statements that he has been running drugs since he was 13 or 14 and has never smuggled drugs without being armed. 2. Compean and Ramos DID NOT LIE about shooting the drug smuggler. They didn't know that they had until almost a month later! And it's still not proven that Ramos is the one who shot the drug smuggler. 3. The DID NOT try to "cover it up". They verbally reported to their superiors that they fired their weapons. 4. They DID NOT destroy evidence. Sutton has been harping on this because he claims that the site of the shooting was a "crime scene" and that the BP agents knowingly altered the scene of the crime by picking up their shell casings. That is FALSE. The agents, including the agents that were with them at the time of the shooting, did NOT designate the area a crime scene, since they did NOT know that the drug smuggler had been shot. 5. In fact, far from lying about the incident or "covering it up", Ramos and Compean followed procedures exactly:

U.S. Border Patrol firearms policy specifically states that agents are

Links: Obama's Church, GOP Mom on Obama, GOP Straw Poll

Just some links for your perusal:

1. Barack Obama's Church, via PTN.

2. GOP Mom articulates her case against Obama. (This is definitely not my case for or against him.)

3. The GOP Bloggers straw poll is actually a lot of fun, if you haven't done it yet.

Tagged as: barack obama, Bloggers, Gop, Gop Straw Poll, Mom, Perusal, Ptn No Comments

"Dog bites Man," or "Guest Blogger Introduces Self"

I suppose I should have introduced myself before I wrote the last entry I put here, which was this.

I'm Ashok, I'm a graduate student in political science, and I love to blog. Highlights of my writings over the last year can be sampled here, and my newest blog is here. I have a tendency to be really obnoxious and long-winded, as you can see from my writings, and I do have an opinion on everything, which is probably not the wisest thing. Still, I'm here blogging because I know how hard it is to update frequently enough to keep the conversation a blog starts going. And the conversation "irate nation" has started is a good one: those of us who want America to preserve itself have to be angry at the way things are going.

I'm lucky, I live around Philly, and today I spent the time walking with my really long ugly hair and beat up clothes looking like a homeless person around Independence Mall. It's tough for me to relate nowadays to what happened there - no less than Lincoln, in Lyceum, calls this a challenge. There, he says that all is well and good when things are happening in the Founding generation, because everyone is into what they're doing. But future generations want to feel like they're founding too, because only with that feeling does one feel truly free. Jefferson recommended that a revolution happen every 19 years, in order that people would reattach to the law more fully.

I'm after something a little bit different than feeling free. I am free, I know that. The real problem is that being free doesn't seem to go anywhere nowadays. Yeah, the economy is good. But who really wants 99% of the jobs out there? Yeah, we have all these giant schools that give out prestigious awards and are discovering amazing things. So why isn't the world better? And yeah, we're all religious, even the Left - the fervor certain atheist groups bring to their denial of belief is nothing less than that which would attend those eagerly awaiting the Apocalypse. So it doesn't seem like pure religious fervor, even, can save us.

Freedom has to mean something. The generations before us were Founding generations: each has different things to teach us, and I feel that Hemingway and Faulkner and Emily Dickinson and Lincoln and FDR and Nixon and a host of others have a lot to do with who we are and can show us how we might want to conceive and deal with problems. They had a sense of purpose we just don't have. I would put up with all the libertarian nonsense that people spout if they were willing to settle down and have kids, or at least say that fighting for one's country and having a foreign policy were good things, or base tolerance not on "live and let live" but on "we stand for doing something with your life, and we're happy to help you if you're willing to help others."

As it is, we have all the "freedom" we could want in this libertine age, and no clue whatsoever what to do with it.

So that's where I'm coming from, and I think it's a moral conservatism that is more arrogant than anything you've ever seen, and I'll stand by my guns, and hopefully bring you posts that may not be the shortest, or even the best reading, but will certainly make you think.