more on the bishops I don't want to come across as anti-Catholic especially since some of my favorite bloggers are Catholics, so I think it's worthwhile to mention that my complaints here are specifically about the bishops and not about Catholics in general. Many Catholics are wonderful allies in the fight against the anti-Christian Leviathan state, but that shouldn't prevent us from criticizing their leadership when necessary.

My concern is that by letting the bishops lead a movement against Obamacare when they have only the most minimal imaginable disagreement with it and otherwise support it enthusiastically, the right is in danger of getting suckered and making it look like there was a compromise when there wasn’t.

Conservatives and libertarians need to make it emphatically clear that the bishops’s concerns with Obamacare are not the full set of concerns and make sure that everyone knows that the bishops actually support most of the parts of Obamacare which the right finds odious, so although we support them in this intramural squabble, they do not speak for us and can’t make deals for us.

I see that Ann Coulter is leading the way on this. Good for her. Conservatives need to forcefully articulate that this is not about birth control. That may be what the bishops are worried about, but those of us who are supporting them are doing so because we care about freedom, not just religious freedom, and certainly not just freedom from paying for birth control.

Unfortunately, some on the right seem to have been suckered on this and have fallen into the trap of making this a social-conservative issue, as noted by Michael D. Tanner (link from Instapundit). It's not even a good social conservative issue since the majority of social conservatives probably don't have an issue with contraception.

Don't let them sucker you into a losing position again, Republicans.  ¶ 11:29 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  a catholic who agrees that the bishops had it coming Paul A. Rahe is a Catholic who had thoughts similar to mine on this issue. And since he is a lot more knowledgeable, I thought I'd link to him (link from Powerline, who also had similar thoughts ... I don't feel so lonely any more ...).

Here are some quotes from his post:

At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder. But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same. The freedom of the church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doctrines decry as morally wrong is considered sacrosanct. The liberty of its members – not to mention the liberty belonging to the adherents of other Christian sects, to Jews, Muslims, and non-believers – to do the same they are perfectly willing to sacrifice.

This is a good point. I think if I were a Catholic, I'd be writing to some of these bishops to ask why they aren't protecting my freedom of conscience, only their own.

More from Rahe:

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal.

People today forget that the evil foe of the Democrat party used to be WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Before Roe v. Wade and the Reagan Revolution, Catholics were as closely identified with the Democrats and their socialist enterprise as blacks are today.

And more:

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

  ¶ 11:48 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  the bishops get theirs I've been reading all over the blogosphere about Catholic bishops being upset at a mandate in Obamacare that would force almost all employers, including Catholic hospitals and schools to provide contraception as part of their health insurance. I would be more sympathetic, but, ... weren't these the same bishops that gave cover to Obamacare as long as they were getting their special exception? Aren't these the same bishops that have always supported the welfare state?

I seem to recall discussions of the welfare state as an extension of Christian charity. As though the bishops had mixed up "love thy neighbor" with "render unto Cesar" and ended up with "Render under Cesar so that Cesar can love thy neighbor for you."

Catholics (not all Catholics, but probably the majority) have supported expansion of government services under the theory that since Christians have a responsibility to help those in need, they should support a government that helps those "in need".

There are two serious problems with this theory. First, God didn't command us to help the poor just because God wanted the poor to be helped. If that were the purpose then God is perfectly capable of giving the poor whatever help they need. God commands us to help the poor because he wants us to have the spiritual exercise of voluntarily giving up something that is ours in order to help others. Sacrifice is good for the soul.

This side of the giving is completely lost when taxes are taken from us at gunpoint to give to the poor, and since the poor are getting far more help from the government than they need, people who want to exercise their souls have fewer opportunities to do so.

The second problem is that when the government is doing the charity for you then the government decides what charity work needs to be done with your money --not you and not your church. Not only does this mean that your "charity" money goes disproportionately to the politically connected (because that's where all government spending goes) but in addition, politically powerful special interests will piggyback on this spending to push their interests.

That last thing is what the bishops have suddenly come up against, but I don't see any sign that this was a learning experience for them. All they seem to want is their special exception over religious objections. If people have pragmatic, philosophical, or financial objections, well, screw them. They can just knuckle under and do what Mr. government charity tells them to do. It really strikes me as a sort of un-Christian, I've-got-mine-so-I-don't-care-about-your-problems approach to the issue.

It would be nice to see some indication that Catholics have learned a lesson about the dangers of the Leviathon government, but I'm not seeing it in any of the reading I've been doing. I expect that the bishops will eventually win this one and that they will then go back to supporting the very policies that led to the problem to begin with.  ¶ 11:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  wealth Marxists base a lot of their demands for social justice on the idea that there is just a limited pool of wealth that everyone fights over. But this idea is wrong. Wealth expands as people expend effort and create organization and goods.

After a factory makes a car, there is a new bit of wealth in the world: the car. The car is something that people want. Similarly, after someone makes a bar of soap or a pizza or a washing machine, there is new wealth in the world. The same is true when someone delivers the pizza to your house. He took a pizza that was of little value to you because it was far away, and he brought it to your door and handed it to you, greatly increasing the value of that pizza to you and thereby slightly increasing the total wealth of the economy. That’s why he gets paid: he takes low-value pizzas and turns them into high-value pizzas. The money that he gets is extracted from the difference in the low and the high value.

Manufacturers are similar to pizza-delivery guys. They take raw materials and create something that people value more than they valued the raw materials. Soap makers take low-value chemicals and perfumes and mix them together to make a product that will leave you feeling fresh as an Irish spring. That soap product is more valuable to people than the raw chemicals were, so new wealth has been created. The soap makers, like the pizza-delivery guy, get their profit from that difference between the value of the raw materials and the value of the finished product. They create new wealth and then take out a slice of it for their trouble.

But notice that everyone is better off: the guys who owned the chemicals are better off because they valued the money that was paid for the chemicals more than they valued the chemicals. The customer is better off because she values smelling Irish more than she valued the money that she paid for the soap. The manufacturer is better off because he valued the profit that he made more than he valued the time that he had to put in to make the profit. And the employees of the manufacturer are better off because they value their wages more than they value the time that they had to put in to make the wages.

This is the key of free-market trading, the reason that free economies always outstrip planned economies and the factor that Marxist economic theories miss: every free trade increases the wealth of both parties to the trade! The very fact that the trade was freely made shows that both parties to the trade value what they got more than what they gave up. Since both parties to a free trade are wealthier and no one became less wealthy, every free trade increases the overall wealth of society.

The same is not true in planned economies. In a planned economy, you go to work because you have been assigned a job by the Central Planning Committee. You don't do the job because you freely decide that the time you spend is of less value to you than the money you receive; you do the job to avoid punishment. This is genuine coercion (as opposed the the fake coercion and “exploitation” that Marxists are always talking about, which involves people just not having the choices that they would like to have). In a Central Planning economy, many of the transactions do not increase the overall wealth of society because the transactions are coerced, and so one or both of the people involved in the transaction is not better off and the wealth of society may actually decline as a result of the transaction.

Wealth is just “what people want”. It is nothing else. The only way to ensure that the wealth of a society increases is to let the members of the society chose their own transactions based on what they want. There is no other way known to ensure that the transactions actually give people what they want.  ¶ 1:38 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I went to see a movie for Superbowl Sunday The game is probably in the last minutes and I have no idea what the score is. I only know who's playing because someone mentioned it today. I used to go to Superbowl parties with friends, but since I moved to the San Francisco, none of my new friends watch sports and I find that I really don't care that much except as a social thing.

Skipping the Superbowl still seems a bit like skipping Christmas or Thanksgiving or New Years. Oh, wait... I skipped Thankgiving and New Years this year too. Hmm. I wonder if I'm getting too isolated. I only ended up celebrating Christmas because my mom made me.

I promised Mom I would go home for Christmas so I ran that TSA gauntlet twice. I used to like to fly, but now I avoid it like the plague. I wonder how much better off the airlines would be if the TSA weren't making the process of getting on a plane so miserable.

Where was I? Oh, yes: Superbowl commercials. I am sooo sick and tired of hearing about the new Superbowl commercials. It was mildly interesting for the first couple of years after some marketing genius discovered that they could sell Superbowl time at, like, a trillion dollars a minute, and then give the advertisers lots of extra publicity by getting people to talk about the commercial. It was slightly interesting to see what the companies would do to make their commercial worth talking about.

Now it's old. Really old. And when I see a blogger blogging about a Superbowl commercial all I think is "sucker". If they aren't paying you for that exposure, you are just being strung along. Either the commercial is interesting enough to talk about on its own or it isn't. If it is, then why bother to mention the Superbowl? And if it isn't, then don't waste people's time with it.

Now you may be thinking, "Gee, Doc, why don't you follow your own advice? There's nothing in this blog post that is interesting enough to waste people's time with." And normally you would be right, except that this post relates to the Superbowl so it's time-waste worthy.  ¶ 7:51 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  fact checking Politifact Politifact has given a "mostly false" rating to this statement:

New energy standards will take away "our freedom of choice and selection in the light bulbs we have in our homes."

Yet the statement is 100% true as Politifact notes:

the standards will ultimately bring about the end of traditional incandescent bulbs

Which means that we will not have the freedom to chose traditional incandescent bulbs. How is that not a taking away our freedom of choice? Apparently, Politifact doesn't consider it "taking away our freedom of choice" if no one is taking away the choices that they (the people at Politifact) prefer.

I've got to score this statement by Politifact as "pants on fire".  ¶ 11:08 AM 1 Comments Links to this post

  parables Marcel comments on my previous post that he thinks the birds in the mustard tree are gentiles. This suggested to me a thought on the interpretation of the parables (take this for what it is, I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be an expert on parables).

My thought was that I try to think of a justification for viewing the birds as gentiles, and it goes something like this: "well, the tree represents the kingom of God and there are only good things in the Church so the birds must be something good that are sort of added after the main church --hey, the gentiles were the latecomers, so..."

But that seems rather a backwards way to interpret a parable. Recall that Jesus had a specific purpose in speaking in parables --he wanted to confuse people. He want people to hear without hearing. If you can figure out the whole meaning of a parable just by logic, it seems that Jesus wasn't doing a very good job of hiding things.

It seems that to understand what Jesus was saying, you have to have access to the secret key. Part of the key is his surely the private explanation that he gave to his disciples of how to interpret the parable of the sower. That parable also had seeds which grew into plants, which represented the kingdom of God. In that parable, the birds represented Satan which ate the seed, snatching the word of God away before it can bear fruit. What do you think birds do in mustard trees? I'll bet they are eating the new mustard seeds.

Bearing fruit is another thing. In other parables, plants that represent the kingdom of God or believers show that they are in God's will by bearing fruit. There is nothing in this parable that says the mustard tree is bearing fruit, just that it is sheltering these mysterious birds.

Is there any other parable where sheltering birds represents something good? Well, there's the metaphor of a chicken sheltering her chicks under her wings, but that's not a parable, the meaning is manifest, and it's really exploiting the relationship of motherhood, not the mere fact of sheltering.

Finally, there is the fact that in a number of other parables, Jesus clearly is talking about bad influences in the Church, such as the parable of the wheat and the tares and the parable of drawing in the net. This seems to have been a point that he wanted to stress: just because someone is among the believers does not mean that he is a believer.

The parable of the wheat and the tares seems to teach that it is not our responsibility to sift out the unbelievers --that is a task for God. I propose that the point of the mustard seed was slightly different --that the entire Church as a body would grow into something unnaturally large that sheltered evil.  ¶ 3:07 PM 8 Comments Links to this post