Handle Fire with Caution

Government is a tool similar to fire. It’s very useful when kept within careful limits. But if left to grow, it can do great harm.

Through most of history, in most parts of the world, government has leaped beyond a fire circle out into the forest, harming the very people who needed just a little of that power.

To some of us, the idea that the fire should be kept within safe boundaries makes natural sense. But there’s a substantial portion of the public who essentially say, “We need more fire. Go ahead and let it burn free. Sure, that’s been bad everywhere it’s been tried, but somehow we'll make it burn just right.”

We need to know the specific bounds to put upon government—and why. And then how.

Think of it as if you’ve just bought a new outdoor grill, one of those high temperature ones that can cook a steak perfectly seared outside without overcooking the inside. In other words, fire is involved. That means some danger. Really high heat. The possibility of getting burned. Fuel is involved.

When used correctly, you get delicious results, and the grill is a blessing to your life. When used casually or carelessly, it can cause burns. Maybe severe burns. Harm to people and environment. 

There’s a comic in the paper making fun of a guy, Crankshaft, who always has mishaps when he brings out the grill for the first time each summer. Some years all the neighbors require warnings. Some years the fire department is on call. Pretty much every year the grill explodes and shoots up into the sky. It’s a comic, so no lives our house are lost in the annual mishap. But you get the idea. What is supposed to be a useful management of fire turns out to be a danger.

Crankshaft comic from September 11, 2018

Often Crankshaft is found pouring lighter fluid on the grill. Too much. He doesn’t follow basic instructions or safety protocol.

If we’re looking at government as the grill—the way of using the fire for good—it would be a good idea to know enough to use it safely. We probably ought to carefully read the instruction book, and be experienced enough to understand basic safety rules such as using oven mitts and long-handled utensils to keep ourselves from getting burned.

We have an instruction book for our country. It’s the US Constitution. It’s short—about the length of a typical grill instruction manual. I keep a pocket version in my wallet.

But what did the Founding Fathers of America do before that was written—when there was “some assembly required” to come up with the right size government that would safely use the fiery power for good? They read a lot of the same things—as though they had all read the Boy Scout handbook on fire safety, plus related wilderness survival guides, and any other sources of wisdom.

The Founding Fathers were a diverse group, with a fairly wide range of educational sources, from somewhat random home tutoring and self-teaching, to a formal Harvard education. Yet, besides reading widely, they covered many of the same materials. You’d be hard pressed to find a founder who hadn’t read:

·         The Bible

·         Classic sources—in their original languages

o   Polybius

o   Cicero

o   Plutarch

o   Aristotle

·         Contemporary philosophers and historians

o   John Locke

o   Thomas Hobbes

o   Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, published 1776)

o   Montequieu

o   Blackstone

o   Gibbons (Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume I published 1776)

·         History

o   Greek and Roman

o   Anglo-Saxon

o   European

o   English

Books were still something of a luxury in the 18^th Century, and yet these men managed to find them in the frontier land of the American colonies—and find the best among many books. They shared them with one another. George Wythe suggested reading for Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson advised and shared books with James Madison. Benjamin Franklin had a study group of friends who studied a wide range of information. While they didn’t all know each other, living in various colonies in times when travel was a bigger challenge than today. But their reading choices were surprisingly uniform. As if a divine teacher had laid out a curriculum for them.

We can be grateful that these men understood both the dangers of too much government power (i.e., coercion, force = tyranny) and just the right amount. Harnessing just the right amount of government power was risky—but it has led to the best outcomes in human history.

In our day, at minimum we should be reading our founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. In addition, reading The Federalist Papers will give a fair amount of background to the thinking that went into the writing of the Constitution. These were newspaper editorials written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. They didn’t always agree, but they shared the idea that federalism, or distributed power, would work. Then, to see opposing views (those who were very concerned about too much government), you can try The Anti-Federalist Papers, also newspaper editorials attempting to express the dangers they thought the federalists were not fully addressing.

A more contemporary book that addresses the issues the founders faced is Skousen’s The 5000-Year Leap. And I’ve previously listed other suggestions. 

There are resources on government that I think are plain wrong, and harmful; these are about accumulating power over the masses—the opposite of what our Founding Fathers were looking for. They might be worth reading to understand the opposition, however. These include Machiavelli and, closer to our day but surprisingly relevant, Marx and Engels.

Enough time has passed that, along with a good understanding of history, we can see that the work of our founders is not simply theoretical. We can compare.

Just a decade or two ago, Venezuela was the most prosperous, modern country in South America.

screenshot from Stuart Varney report on Venezuela August 2018

Today it looks like a war zone. But without a war. The result is the burn of too much government.

If you want to see the result of too much government even here in our country, take a look at Detroit. I wrote about that here. Last night a friend shared with us a video from early in Steven Crowder’s career, a short documentary on Detroit. And, in the spirit of supporting free speech, after he’s been censored online, I believe unfairly, I’ll end today’s piece with that cautionary tale.

Devaluing Marriage: Part III--Decay of Civilization

Today is the third in a three-part series on the results of Devaluing Marriage. Last Thursday we talked about historical examples of devaluing marriage in Part I, and on Friday current worldwide examples in Part II. Today Part III of Devaluating the Family shows what can happen in our own country, what society looks like when family no longer functions as the civilizing influence it is meant to be. 

Let’s say we have a US city, formerly thriving, some 40 years ago. With a high minority population, it used to have the highest rate of home ownership of any black urban population in the country, with an unemployment rate for blacks of just 3.4%. 

This city has a population of around 3/4 of a million people, about half of what it was during its thriving years; those who could get out have gotten out. Housing is surprisingly cheap. Many of those who left the decayed city were unable to sell their property, so they abandoned it. Houses average a mere $7,000 (let’s say as of March 2010, down from $98,000 in 2003) and continue to drop.  

In its previous thriving years, the city had a lot of industry. Much of it was concentrated in one market sector, but that is a sector that continues to grow worldwide, yet edges on bankruptcy in our study city.

Education in our city is disastrously poor. The high school graduation rate is a rock bottom 22%.  Public schools are known to be so bad that, even though the cost per student is nearly double the national average, and 27% of families live below the poverty line, only 38% are willing to subject their children to the public school district. The rest resort to charter schools (17%) or private schools (45%), no matter the cost. Only 11% of the population has a college degree. Combining this data with the brain drain of capable workers escaping to find work elsewhere, this means that in an increasingly technological world, this population is woefully inadequate to fill job needs.  

Without workers worth employing, it is unlikely that businesses will risk opening new facilities that could help remedy the high unemployment. Unemployment hovers about 11.6%, 2.5% higher than the national average, 1.3% higher than the state it is located in. 

Crime is rampant. With an annual rate of 20 violent crimes per 1000 people, and 366 murders a year, this is nearly double other high crime cities. Compared to cities twice its size, our city of decay has nearly 200 more cases of arson per year and 4,000 more stolen vehicles. 

The previous mayor finally resigned under pressure after 10 felony indictments on numerous corruption charges, bribery, obstruction of justice, political favors in government contracts, and prostitution among them. (He was recently paroled following a plea deal.) The current mayor ran on a more honest, transparent government platform, and may be an improvement. Following his appointment, he then had to face election, in an election where only 15% of registered voters turned out. 

Taxes are high. Per capita spending on social programs is astronomical. No amount of social spending seems capable of bringing about a recovery. For those who have work, their prosperity is moderated by the high taxes and crime.

What is the family makeup of our decaying city? It takes some looking to measure the data. There are 269,445 households, but many of these are single people, in other words not families. There are 162,924 family households; that’s 60% of the total. But these include many empty nest or so far childless couples—which also contribute to society by being married. But what we really want to know is the makeup of households currently raising children. There are 74,251 such households. Of these, 22,871 are headed by two married parents. That is 30.8%. The remaining 51,380 families raising children are headed by single mothers, single fathers, single parents cohabiting with a nonrelated person, or some other scenario that is less than ideal for the children. 

We know that there is a critical mass of intact families necessary to stabilize and civilize a population. We don’t know the exact point of critical mass, but it is probably around 75%. During the Great Depression, FDR had the luxury of depending on a high level of around 90% intact families to mitigate the damage caused by governmental economic interference. Our study city simply creates social problems, rather than solving them. There is no room for social engineering failures. 

If only I were making up this hypothetical city of decay! This is in fact a description of Detroit, Michigan. There are many causes for the decay in this city; the rules for political freedom, free-market economics, and civilization are intertwined, which this city exemplifies in the negative. We could blame labor unions, who have limited hiring and limited new business. We could blame corrupt politics that offer giveaways in exchange for votes. But we could also blame liberal social policies, which have promised to solve problems better solved by strong families: food, clothing, and shelter for children; education; passing along a strong work ethic and other civilizing teachings.  

You get more of what you subsidize. When you subsidize mistakes like bearing children outside of wedlock and raising them in mainly fatherless homes (also subsidizing the dissolving of marriages through no-fault divorce), you get more of that. Nationally, single motherhood is the common factor for 70% of juvenile murderers, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, dropouts, runaways, and suicides.

So the separation of parenting from marriage contributes to the decay in a way that will make recovery nigh unto impossible regardless of economic and political reforms. I don’t see recovery happening for Detroit, unless something huge changes the situation—something as huge as whole population religious conversion. (It happened in Nineveh, back in Jonah’s day, so let’s not assume it’s impossible, just unlikely.) 

After last week’s Part I and Part II, you may have been expecting an example of disaster hitting a city because of the imposition of “same-sex marriage.” We haven’t yet had an example of such a city or region in our country. But we do indeed have a number of areas where marriage has been devalued to something less than what it has meant for millennia. Instead of a permanent, exclusive commitment to society to establish a family, it becomes merely a vehicle to give benefits to two people in a current sexual relationship—something which has no innate benefit for society. 

Let’s imagine for a moment what is likely to happen in a marriage-devalued community. Children are raised without the benefit of their two parents—which results in more social problems: poverty, crime—which discourages business from locating there and increases unemployment. In other words, it could deteriorate into the very picture of Detroit. Areas within a number of US inner cities, where out-of-wedlock birth is the rule, indeed have social ills and economic failures to rival Detroit. Mostly these are pockets and not entire cities. 

If we’re looking for a remedy, it cannot be imposing a definition of marriage that prevents family from doing its civilizing duty; specifically, imposing “same-sex marriage” can only cause further harm. Such a social experiment is guaranteed to cause decay. Any remedy has to include strengthening families—encouraging marriage where children will be raised by their own parents, encouraging adoption as the expected result of out-of-wedlock births (instead of the current mere 1%), encouraging counseling for marriages in crisis so that no-fault divorce ceases to be an easy escape that then costs society as a whole.  

There is an additional sad result wherever “same-sex marriage” has been imposed: loss of religious freedom and freedom of expression for those who value marriage and family. That is a subject for an entire post another day.