Morality, Religion & Philosophy: March 2008 Archives

It seems that leftists are only with taxpayer money, not their own personal wealth.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 through 2004 to charities, or less than 1 percent, according to tax returns for those years released today by his campaign.

The Obamas increased the amount they gave to charity when their income rose in 2005 and 2006 after the Illinois senator published a bestselling book. The $137,622 they gave over those two years amounted to more than 5 percent of their $2.6 million income.

Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman, said the Obamas gave as much as they could afford. He also said the Obamas gave $240,000 to charity in 2007, though they have yet to make last year's tax returns public.

My wife and I make a lot less money than the Obamas, so I'm surprised to learn that we give away a lot more. I guess it's just a difference in priorities. Leftists prefer to tax others to fund their generosity, while conservatives are willing to give their own wealth away. It sure makes Barack Obama's lectures on "hope" a little less palatable, doesn't it? Put your money -- not mine -- where your mouth is, Senator.

The fact that he decided to give more away when his candidacy for the presidency became serious makes him look worse, not better.

(HT: Political Punch.)

Here's an article that really made me think over the past month, which is why I didn't post it sooner. "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors". I'm not good at this, and I've really been debating the merits of the idea internally.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.” ...

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

I don't tend to bite off more than I can chew, but I do like to stay extremely busy. Am I too busy? I don't know. I know I get bored if I don't have something productive to do.

Anyway, I still don't know what to think of the article, but I figured it was time to share it so I can close at least one thing: a lingering browser window.

I feel like I've written about UCLA students versus Planned Parenthood before, but I can't find a post of mine that mentions that earlier incident in which a PP employee told a supposedly-15-year-old girl to lie about her age so she could get an abortion.

Anyway, lately students from my alma mater have been calling Planned Parenthood and getting the employees to admit to explicit racism.

The call to Idaho came in July to Autumn Kersey, vice president of development and marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho.

On the recording provided by The Advocate, an actor portraying a donor said he wanted his money used to eliminate black unborn children because "the less black kids out there the better."

Kersey laughed nervously and said: "Understandable, understandable. ... Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I've had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I'm excited and want to make sure I don't leave anything out." ...

The student editor-in-chief of The Advocate said she's not surprised by Planned Parenthood's response and that the unedited recordings speak for themselves. The activist students think Planned Parenthood targets minorities and minority neighborhoods.

Well there's certainly statistical evidence that Planned Parenthood targets minorities, but I'll admit that I'm surprised it's due to racism rather than greed. I guess they're returning to their roots: Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, advocated the abortion of black babies "by force if necessary".

Barack Obama's crazy racist spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., is finally getting some attention from the mainstream media, but you may remember that I was all over this story almost a year ago. (Which is why I believed, asserted, and still believe, that Barack Obama cannot win the general election.)

It's not like "Pastor" Wright is an strange estranged family member associated with Obama by random chance... Obama and his family have been under his spiritual guidance for 20 years by their own volition. There's no way for Obama to disassociate himself from this nutcase at this point... and frankly, there's no reason to believe that Obama doesn't share Wright's view of the world.

Writer and ironically self-described "brain-dead liberal" David Mamet has written a compelling account of his transition from "liberalism" to realism.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. If you're a leftist you might find some new ideas to consider, and if you're not you'll at least get some insight into the "liberal" mind.

The disconnect between reality and the prevailing leftist view of a world gone horribly wrong that must be fixed immediately, by government, at any cost, is why I often have a hard time respecting even the most intelligent leftists I encounter. This cornerstone of leftist dogma just does not compute.

I hung out with my brother and Bernardo tonight and realized that Bernardo and I have fundamentally different views of liberty. To paraphrase him, he thinks that our rights as humans derive from a Rousseau-ian "social contract" that depends solely on whatever agreements a majority makes within itself. I, on the other hand, believe that we each individually have inalienable rights that supersede any the desires of any majority, even if it's everyone else in the world against me alone.

I think this ode to tax havens will serve as a concrete example of our differing perspectives. I agree with the writer, Johnathan Pearce, and I expect Bernardo will take the communitarian position.

The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians - if there are many - have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their 'responsibilities'.

At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.

Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may - may - be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers.

The "classic liberal" ideas expressed in that second paragraph are utterly foreign to modern "liberals" -- leftists -- who rarely hesitate to advocate the use of coercive power for the accomplishment of their desired ends.