The WSJ quotes Silent Cal in its Notable & Quotable today:

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people.

The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Calvin Coolidge’s whole speech is worth reading, so here it is.  A sample:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

So please, read it all.

Hubbard posted this at 8:21 AM EDT on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 as Philosophy, Amer-I-Can!, The Right Words

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There are many criticisms one can make of Dick Cheney: his indifference to public opinion is counterproductive and his obsession with enhancing executive power has probably done more to encourage Congress and the Supreme Court to restrain Bush than anything the ACLU has done. Rod Dreher’s criticisms of him, however, are not conservative.
Dick Cheney made some relatively uncontroversial points in a speech: that our economy depends on hydrocarbons in general and oil in particular; that despite massive subsidies, alternative fuel sources aren’t going to replace oil and gas any time soon; and that drilling for more oil would lower the fuel costs that are clobbering anybody who has to drive regularly. All of these are attempts to see what reality is and to deal with it.

A correspondent of Rod Dreher’s writes:

What plans do he and others have to reduce our consumption of this oil? Never in his speech, from what I have read, does he say that we need to reduce consumption. Could one argue that this borders on moral blindness?

And Dreher comments:

One could, if one wanted to be generous to the VP. What, exactly, is conservative about Cheney’s attitude?

Dreher seems to be conflating two issues: first, consumers and oil consumption; second, Dick Cheney and his take on the economy.

Let’s tackle that first issue of consumers and oil consumption. What’s conservative is letting the market work. Dreher’s correspondent might have noticed that, according to the Financial Times:

Petrol demand in the US has been falling since October as the financial storm from the housing sector crimps demand and Americans trade in their SUVs for more modest vehicles. Last month US petrol consumption fell by 130,000 barrels per day.

In short, people are driving less and consuming less oil—exactly as the correspondent presumably wishes—without the heavy hand of government forcing people to drive Priuses or bike to work. Perhaps Dreher would like Dick Cheney to impose restrictions on fuel use as FDR did during WWII and Carter did during his “moral equivalent of war,” but that can hardly be considered conservative.

Interestingly, proven world oil reserves rose from 645.8 billion barrels in 1978 to 1,052.9 billion barrels in 1998; as of January 2007, we’re at 1,317.4 billion barrels. As oil extraction technology improves, it seems likely that we’ll expand the reserves still further. Letting the market work will mean that investors are going to rush in and start pumping more oil since the prices are currently high.  Since people are also driving less, the increase in supply and decrease in demand will push oil prices down—assuming government doesn’t meddle.  A windfall profits tax on oil companies will get passed on to consumers (sort of like how taxes on tobacco companies have increased the cost of cigarettes).  Barring government intervention, I agree with Steve Chapman that gas prices will come down eventually.

Now, the issue of Cheney and our hydrocarbon economy. Dreher might not like it, but that’s how the economy works. The clothes we wear and the food we eat have usually been shipped some distance. The computers on which we type our blog posts are probably powered by coal (a majority of America’s electricity comes from coal burning power plants). I suppose it would be possible for families to take inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi and make all their own clothes and food—but nothing about primitivism is necessarily liberal or conservative.  Hydrocarbon technology has made living in suburbs and growing enormous quantities of food cheaper.  A revealing idea that Dreher once wrote is that “Cheap chicken is not worth a compromised conscience.” That attitude is a luxury only the moderately affluent can afford.  It is acceptable for an ordinary consumer or pundit to have this particular attitude and to spend his money on more expensive chicken and rice, but for a government official with Cheney’s power, deliberately making food more costly—as restrictions on oil would do—would make the current food riots seem like a Sunday School picnic.

If Dreher wants people to use less oil, the high prices that hurt their pocketbooks is almost certainly the most effective way to do it. Dreher has been theorizing that peak oil will encourage people to live how he wants them to live and that they’ll be happier once they get used to organic co-ops and bicycles, never mind the financial struggles they’re in now. Dick Cheney disagrees that socking it to people who need to drive a lot is worth it, and is intellectually honest enough to argue that more drilling, though it offends the granola crowd, will help the ordinary folks.  It seems rather weaselly for Dreher to hope high oil prices will push people who’d rather live in suburbs and big homes to living the way he wants them to; if he can’t convince them that crunchy conservativism is the way to go, maybe high oil prices will do it.

Both Jonah Goldberg and Florence King observed some unconservative tendencies in Rod Dreher’s thought. He may be socially conservative—but on economics, he has more in common with Al Gore and Ralph Nader than Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman.

Hubbard posted this at 9:20 PM EDT on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 as Philosophy, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet, It's Economics - Stupid!

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Via TJIC, New York’s Nassau county is posting pictures of people arrested for driving while intoxicated.  I don’t have a problem with humiliating drunk drivers—unlike the guy at Pajamas media—but shouldn’t these people have the trial first? 

A troubling potential abuse of this: a grumpy cop just pulls someone over, the driver gets his picture posted on the wall of shame, and he could well lose his job—even if he wasn’t driving while intoxicated.  Without the trial, I think this is a bad idea.  Nassau county supervisor Thomas Suozzi (whom I once hoped would upset Eliot Spitzer in the NY gubernatorial primary) should be run out of office.

Hubbard posted this at 5:03 PM EDT on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 as Philosophy, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Liberty and/or Security

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Michael Barone here makes a powerful philosophical point about how extraordinarily condescending Obama’s comments really were:

…he is parroting the argument of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but the problem is that Frank, like Obama in these comments at the Gettys’ multimillion-dollar house, is hugely condescending to voters. Frank’s argument is that low earners are too stupid to realize that their real interests are in voting Democratic and that they are hugely stupid for voting Republican because of their religious beliefs or their views on trade (which are presumably similar to Obama’s truckling-to-the-AFL-CIO views—or Hillary Clinton’s) or their views on gun control or their anti-immigrant sentiments.

Obama is saying this to an audience that is willing to subordinate its own short-term interest on economic issues (i.e., lower tax rates) to its belief in reproductive rights (which equals killing babies, in the views of some fellow citizens) or in welcoming immigrants (a lot easier to get household help; anybody check the green cards on the 2800 block of Broadway?) or whatever. The implication is that low earners are not to be counted as rational unless they vote on their short-term economic interest while high earners should be counted as not only rational but enlightened if they are willing to vote (and max out contributions to candidates) despite their short-term economic interest. (I am leaving aside the possibility that voters on each side might decide that their short-term economic interests are not in the long-term economic interests of either themselves or the nation in whose interests both sides try to serve.) Bribe those poor dummies to vote for our side, and we can get them to back reproductive rights and civil unions and defeat in Iraq and all the rest of the “progressive” agenda.

But why should we assume that low earners in Pennsylvania towns are any less idealistically motivated than the rich people who thronged to the billionaires’ 2800 block of Broadway in San Francisco?

Obama’s sentiment doesn’t merely denigrate the beliefs of small town Americans, it robs them of their status as moral beings capable of projecting a positive vision of the future beyond themselves. Like so many big government liberals for decades now, he reduces them to nothing more than hungry mouths to be fed. But Americans, rich and poor alike, cannot be reduced like that. We remain as we always have been, the most ideological people on earth, voting, above all else, for what we think is right.

Apollo posted this at 8:14 PM EDT on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 as Philosophy, Politics, Amer-I-Can!

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Yuval Levin has a fascinating — and lengthy — article about the sibling relationship between the political left and the scientific revolution of the 19th Century.  It has its problems.  Levin acknowledges, but does not truly discuss, the benefits that have come through this shared heritage and presumes the Right has been right to apply the civilizational brakes in every situation (Levin avoids conversation about teaching evolution).  Those are worthy arguments, but they’re presented without serious refutation.

But even with these problems, it’s a fascinating read and interesting intellectual history.  By far, the best part is its discussion of the contradictions of inherent in Environmentalism:

Modern science is grounded in a particular view of nature, both material and moral. The natural world, thought the fathers of science, is matter in motion; it is best understood by being pulled apart into its constituent forces and pieces, and experimented upon under duress. “The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom,” Bacon argued, because nature is not a whole but a sum of parts, and is not moved by a purpose, but driven by discrete causes alone. Nature, moreover, is the chief constraint on human power and human comfort, and the extension of the empire of man over nature is a noble and necessary goal. For too long, they thought, human beings had been subject to the whims of nature and chance, but by coming to know the workings of nature, we could master it, both removing natural obstacles and constructing artificial advantages for ourselves. “Nature, to be commanded,” Bacon wrote, “must be obeyed,” so the purpose of the new natural science was to learn nature’s ways so as to overcome them. This desire for knowledge of and power over nature was not power-hunger, it was humanitarianism. Nature, cold and cruel, oppresses man at every turn, and bold human action is needed in response. Science arose to meet that need.

If you had to devise a complete opposite to this scientific view of nature, a mirror image in essentially every respect, you would probably end up with roughly the notion of nature that gives shape to the modern environmentalist ethic. Nature in this view is, to begin with, a complete and ordered system, to be understood in whole and not in part. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir, a founder of modern environmentalism. Far from conquering and manipulating nature for his benefit, moreover, man must be careful and humble enough to tread gently upon it, and respect the integrity (and even the beauty) of its wholeness. We are to stand in awe before nature, and never to overestimate our ability to overcome it or underestimate our ability to harm it (and with it ourselves). “We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do,” wrote the great British environmentalist Barbara Ward in her 1972 book Only One Earth.

Taken to the extreme, this approach turns the scientific view of nature on its head, and looks at man as an oppressor of the natural world instead of the other way around.

I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot more to Environmentalism than just Climatology.

Tom posted this at 11:50 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 as Science & Evolution, Kulturkampf, Philosophy

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Professor Bainbridge has a worthwhile excerpt regarding Lincoln’s willingness to treat Confederate prisoners harshly in order to protect Union soldiers from mistreatment.

I’ve yet to read anything from or about Lincoln that contradicts his blunt speech to Captain Kirk.

Apollo posted this at 10:33 PM EDT on Monday, April 14th, 2008 as Philosophy

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A rainout on opening day.

Apollo posted this at 2:13 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 as Philosophy

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