Sunday, May 23, 2010

Robin Longstride

"Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions."

Thursday, May 20, 2010

What Do You Do When Profits Go Down?

If you're a socialist like Marx, you call it excess production capacity when profits decline. Power to the working class!

If you're a more traditional Keynesian, you say we have a problem with demand, nothing that a little stimulus won't cure.

If you're a libertarian like Friedman, you say get the hell out of the economy and let the business fail if it's producing things people don't want!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Sarah Palin: American Law Should Be 'Based On The God Of The Bible And The Ten Commandments'

Hi Leslie and Rob,

Here’s support for your argument that Palin doesn’t know what she needs to know. In this instance, she doesn’t know enough about our constitutional roots:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/sarah-palin-american-law_n_569922.html

The founders differed a great deal among themselves, but they reached broad agreement about matters of church and state. First, discussing God in the public square was just fine. They invoked God and his blessings on the new nation all the time. Lincoln in the nineteenth century and Wilson in the twentieth were two presidents who extended this tradition.

Second, a government that favors a particular church, sect, tradition or faith was not fine. The inter-faith wars in Europe were a recent memory for the founders. They wanted no part of those conflicts in America. Thus the establishment of religion clause in the Constitution. I should know where that phrase appears, but I don’t remember.

So in this country we have two extremes. One group wants to exclude all discussion of God from public discourse, no matter where it comes from. Most recently we saw opposition to a national day of prayer. Another group – led by Palin – wants not only God, but a Christian God central to our public discourse. We had a vision from the founders of a civil society that welcomes publicly expressed religious beliefs, but doesn’t favor a particular church. Current arguments about God’s place in the public square no longer point toward that vision.

Love,

Steve

P. S. In the last campaign, reporters asked Obama why he didn’t wear a flag pin in his lapel. He started wearing one. What would happen if a candidate wore a cross or a star of David in the same location? How about a cross next to the flag? In a healthier political environment, a candidate could wear anything and no one would remark about it. At least, no one would say anything directly to the candidate about the symbol.

It’d be great if a candidate wore a different symbol every day! One problem: Muslims eschew symbols like that, so they’d be left out of the rotation. Plus a male candidate wouldn’t want to wear a head scarf.

/sfg

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Political Leaders and Intelligence

Hi Leslie and Rob,
 
I just saw in Huffington Post that Bill Maher’s nickname for Sarah Palin is Mrs. Moron. That made me smile.
 
It’s a reminder though of something that Garry Wills wrote a long time ago. He observed that political leaders do much better when they are of middling intelligence – mediocre is the word he used. So why do we want our leaders to be so smart? We don’t want them to be too wealthy, too randy, too pushy, too fussy, or too anything, really. Why do we want them to be so brainy?
 
Anyway, no one would mistake Palin for a brainiac.
 
Love,
 
Steve
 
 
P. S. You could say that leaders with extra brains are better problem solvers, or that they’re more entertaining, or that we trust them more, but each one of those reasons sounds pretty doubtful to me.
 
Nixon was smart, but no one would call him entertaining or trustworthy.
 
Here’s an interesting case: Kennedy was blessed with high intelligence, and many voters loved him for his leadership qualities. But many individuals, including people in his government who were quite powerful, thought he was not a good leader. As with Julius Caesar, they did not trust him, and his extraordinary intelligence may have been a factor in that.
 
/S. G.