The decision of HHS Secretary Sebelius’ to narrow the conscience exception should come as no surprise. Under her interpretation, employers must provide contraception as “preventive health service” under Obamacare. That includes abortifacients, like the morning-after pill. Religious institutions, like hospitals and schools, are not exempt.

In 2007, Jonah Goldberg authored a book with the provocative title of Liberal Fascism. Goldberg’s thesis is that there is an affinity between modern American liberalism and fascism.  He defined liberalism as the “ideology of good intentions” that can end up in “the totalitarian temptation.” The Sebelius decision was a classic example of what Goldberg meant.

He defined Fascism as “the religion of the state.” Mussolini was clear about that. “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” The current conflict between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church (and other religions) has an historical precursor.

Mussolini waged jihad against Catholic social organizations, notably Catholic Action. Their social activities, including with youth, were viewed as operations “outside the State” and hence a threat to it. The activities were treated as political actions adverse to the state. In the fascist mindset, all mediating institutions threaten the state. In this instance, the Obama Administration is dangerously close to adopting that mindset.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an Encyclical defending Catholic Action and the Church (Non Abbiamao Bisogno). He noted that “liberty and right are the heritage of souls.” In strong language, reminiscent of the strong language of U.S. Bishops today, Pius XI said the fascist ideology “clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State – the ‘Statolatry’ which is no less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction with the supernatural rights of the Church.”

In its pursuit of the good intentions of promoting women’s health, the Obama administration has succumbed to the totalitarian temptation. It has trampled the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion. Instead of permitting Americans to practice the faith of their choosing, it endeavors to make us all worship in the pagan religion of the State.

Jerry O’Driscoll

The suppressive equality argument that a desperate president is trying to sell to distract attention from his miserable performance in office is falling flat on its face. Why, you ask? Because it is against the very core of human nature. Man by nature wants to grow, to improve, to succeed. That nature demands the hope that this core need can be met by individual effort. Essential to that hope is the freedom enshrined in law to pursue dreams, to succeed and yes to fail. Obama’s equality argument dims that hope, puts a lid on that freedom, turns success into something to be condemned. He has traveled the country railing against the successful.

Ryan Streeter posits a kinder opinion for the OWS misfits’ protests in his Indystar post, How to succeed by merit. He suggests that what the protestors really oppose is unearned wealth: “America isn’t a land divided by the 99 percent and the 1 percent. It’s a land divided by those who earn their success day after day and those who don’t. This class distinction has nothing to do with how rich or poor you are. It has everything to do with what kind of person you are.”

Streeter contrasts Steve Jobs with Bernie Madoff then gives examples of unearned success: lottery winners, Fannie and Freddie executives, unionized public employees, ineffective tenured teachers, spoiled rich kids, and too-big-to fail corporations. Trying to put a good face on and ascribe good intentions to “the bearded misfit sitting in a festering tent on public property” Streeter suggests that what he really objects to is this “unearned success.”

In a hopeful conclusion he argues: “It’s time to stop protesting a false premise and focus instead on promoting earned success. Do we need to end too-big-too-fail policies? Yes. Do we need to end harmful welfare programs? Yes. But most of all, we need to encourage earned success in our own homes. That’s where the real change begins.”

Now I would submit that income inequality is good. It sets the ever changing level to which to aspire. The lower views the higher status as something to be strived for and eventually attained. Even if not in his current generation so long as his children will be in positions to continue to improve. Challenge to improve is key to success; the lower the position on the income scale the greater the challenge.

The beauty of inequality is that it exists all up and down the income scale. It causes challenge, effort and either success or failure up and down the ladder. Those close to the top want to leapfrog into the number one position. And once that is attained someone below will always be striving to leapfrog again.This in turn promotes an aggregate rise in the standard of living for the whole of society. It’s Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” at work.

So we should reject Obama’s socialistic, big-government equality hogwash and promote freedom to succeed with fewer limits and less government.

Cohn points out that “As a practical matter, few of us are prepared to allow a somebody die when life-saving treatment is available, just because that person isn’t prepared to pay the bills.” He goes on to point out that hospitals cannot legally refuse emergency medical treatment and that doctors are obliged to render aid under their professional oath.

He treats individual responsibility, “whether it’s the responsibility to stay healthy, the responsibility to seek timely medical care, or the responsibility to make the right choices about health insurance.” And he points out that luck, misfortune plays a significant role in medical problems and their outcomes.

Cohn concludes: “My definition of a decent society is one that protects people not only from bad luck, but also, in some circumstances, from their own bad judgment.”

It’s hard to fault his good will but not his argument. His problem is the fallacy of equating “society” to “government.” Society is composed of individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities, synagogues, churches, mosques, social service organizations, and charitable organizations. Society has moral obligations and norms. Society enforces social obligations with association and ostracization.

Government is the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, and societies. Government creates legal obligations and regulations. Its laws and regulations are frequently broad and of the “one size fits all” variety. Government enforces these obligations with civil and criminal penalties. What it extracts, it extracts at the point of a gun.

What is a social obligation is not necessarily a government obligation. Cohn misses the principle of subsidiarity, that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent social unit closest to the particular issue. Families, charities, social groups, hospitals can handle the case of the 30 year old with cancer who can’t afford treatment. Those groups close to the problem can make case-by-case judgments on the cancer patient’s misfortune or bad judgment. In short, they, better than the government can handle Cohn’s “in some circumstances” hedge. Likewise those groups can better handle the obese patient or alcoholic that refuses a life style change, which is the side of universal health care or health insurance that Cohn doesn’t mention.

The money that government doesn’t extract by legislating and enforcing universal health care or health insurance is money that subsidiary social groups will have to provide the necessary care in appropriate cases.

The principle of subsidiarity, the basis of America’s founding, is completely reversed in Europe. That organizing principle has two sides of the same coin: 1. That matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority or unit of society. 2. And, that the central authority should perform only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. Thus our thirteen colonies joined to form a federal union with a government of limited powers, reserving most general power to the states or the people. States, counties, social groups, churches, families and individuals had responsibilities were important were “the people” from wince the central government derived its legitimacy.

In Europe the opposite is true.  ”The critical difference between the American and European unions has to do with the location of power. The U.S. was founded on what we might loosely call the Jeffersonian ideal: the notion that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect. The European Union was based on precisely the opposite ideal. Article One of its foundational treaty commits its nations to establish “an ever-closer union.”

“The EU places supreme power in the hands of 27 unelected Commissioners invulnerable to public opinion.”

“The will of the people is generally seen by Eurocrats as an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction. When France, the Netherlands and Ireland voted against the European Constitution, the referendum results were swatted aside and the document adopted regardless. For, in Brussels, the ruling doctrine—that the nation-state must be transcended—is seen as more important than freedom, democracy or the rule of law.”

Hannan warns because he doesn’t want to see America, which he considers the repository of traditional freedoms embodied in common law, go the way of his country and become more European. As a Briton he considers America the last bastion of British freedom which lives on in America. He points to the perils of greater regulation, higher taxes and centralized power both in an economic sense and in a human sense.

So our current president, is acting like the Brussels technocrats in growing the federal government, multiplying welfare systems, disarming, and passing the buck to supernational organizations. He is not a leader but a follower of a model destine to fail. Be warned.

To my way of thinking, this states the essence of American Exceptionalism, the individual’s desire to live freely and succeed. People still struggle and take great risks to come here just to have the opportunity to succeed.

Sorry, President Obama, your mealy mouth put downs of American Exceptionalism just don’t cut it.

• the underground economy is the nations biggest employer, employing 43% of the country’s workers.
• 92% of Egyptians hold real property without legal title.
• the value of the underground businesses is 30 times the value of those companies listed on the Cairo exchange.

Understand the underground economy operates outside the normal economy and the benefits of the law. Entrepreneurs have no access to normal business structures, normal business credit and normal legal protections. In short, it is held back. Its growth is stunted. De Soto characterizes the business value of these underground enterprises as “dead capital,” incapable of growth in any traditional sense.

“The key question to be asked is why most Egyptians choose to remain outside the legal economy? The answer is that, as in most developing countries, Egypt’s legal institutions fail the majority of the people. Due to burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws, it is impossible for most people to legalize their property and businesses, no matter how well intentioned they might be.”

“The examples are legion. To open a small bakery, our investigators found, would take more than 500 days. To get legal title to a vacant piece of land would take more than 10 years of dealing with red tape. To do business in Egypt, an aspiring poor entrepreneur would have to deal with 56 government agencies and repetitive government inspections.”

So we have a nation that was once the center of intellectual firmament and religious tolerance. The center of culture for the Arab world. It now wallows in a bureaucracy that over regulates and thus restricts the rule of law to the wealthy small minority of the population. No wonder there is unrest and turmoil.

What does this say for the world envisioned by our progressive leftists now in control? What is the endgame for the overregulation of HHS, the EPA, the FCC or the myriad of commissions, agencies and tzars in the Obama administration?

It is difficult to envision an underground economy of any appreciable size. It is difficult to see a black market except in illegal substances. But it is realistic to envision an economy in decline, and losses to freer more productive economies. And it is realistic to envision entrepreneurs voting with their feet.

Hopefully the recent November election and the upcoming 2012 election will reverse the economic course the nation is now taking.

He reviews the traditional notions of socialism as “a system of social organization that advocates the vesting of ownership and control of the means of production and distribution in the community as a whole.” But he argues that “ownership and control” in the modern era should be “ownership or control.” In essence “control” makes “ownership” unnecessary. He uses Fannie and Freddie so called private corporations as current and deadly example; despite the ostensible private ownership, there was no doubt that control was vested in Congress.

Williamson argues for two further criteria in the definition of socialism: “the public provision of non-public goods” and the use of “central planning” to implement that provisioning. Public goods for economists are “non-rivalrous in their consumption and non-excludable in their distribution.” Private goods are the opposite, rivalrous and excludable; my cell phone is mine and I can stop you from using it. By the way cell phones are provided to welfare recipients!

The “central planning” criterion he adds is the one Friedrich Hayek railed against. This is what distinguishes the garden variety welfare state from one that can be called socialist. In effect, “socialism is not redistribution…socialism is central planning.” The plan is everything. Its presence “and the empowerment of the planners is to socialism what the Eucharists is to Christians and what Mosaic Law is to Jews.” If the plan conflicts with its purported goal, say redistribution of wealth to the poor, the plan will prevail. In effect, the plan exists for the sake of the planners.

“Socialism’s main defect is the inability of political decision-makers to make rational decisions without the information provided by prices generated by marketplace transactions. The repression associated with socialist regimes is in most cases a reaction to the failure of The Plan. As Mises’s colleague F. A. Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, central planners frustrated by their inability to mold the economic world to their will inevitably are tempted to run roughshod over the rights and interests of the individuals they purport to serve. Sometimes this takes the relatively innocuous form of high-handed officials in the Canadian public-health service denying a procedure or timely access to care; sometimes it takes one of the diverse forms explored with such horrific vigor by Kim Jong Il. Hayek’s diagnosis, which is widely misunderstood and exaggerated, is not perfect, but he was correct that there is a path that connects the many stops on the road to serfdom. But we need not travel to exotic lands to experience socialism firsthand. Any American public school will do.”

He argues that the aim of public education is and has always been to standardize students so as to better fit into the plan; conformity is the order of the day. Examples of political speeches to students to this effect abound, urging them to take up the nation’s challenges like health care. No political party has a monopoly on this approach. Obama is merely the current national advocate just as Bush was in his term.

“The public schools constitute one of the most popular instantiations of socialism in American life, though Social Security and government-funded transportation systems no doubt rank nearly as high. But popular with whom? Certainly the educators and administrators who run the system are largely pleased with it, as they should be; the noncompetitive nature of government-run education provides them with salaries and benefits far exceeding what they plausibly could earn in the private sector.”….”Public schools fail for the same reason that all socialist enterprises fail: lack of information. In marketplace transactions, prices communicate critical information about who is producing what, who is consuming what, and what it is that producers and consumers want and need.”

I have not done justice to the quality of Williamson’s work in this brief outline summary and therefore urge a reading of the complete article, his book and indeed a subscription to the National Review. I do think that we need to revive the federal structure this country was founded upon. In other words make the “central planning” dramatically less central! This and an emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity, pushing the satisfaction of social needs to the lowest competent level, will more than justify the term American Exceptionalism.

The EPA has decided that the regulatory authority that gives it the charge to guard against oil spills gives it the power to regulate any oil spills. The most recent example of this is the regulation of milk production!

Yes, milk, it turns out has oil in in, not the kind that powers diesel motors, but the kind that adds inches to your waist. Since “protection” is the EPA’s middle name, it has set out to protect you from milk spills. As of now, these are not the kind of spill you aren’t supposed to cry over, but the kind of spills that may cause serious flooding to mass population centers and, yes, farms!

It will now force farmers to comply with new regulations to file “emergency management” plans to deal with spilled milk! Seriously, farmers must “train “first responders” and build “containment facilities” if there is a flood of spilled milk.”

“Since there is no free lunch, all of this is going to cost the farmers both money and time that could be going into farming– and is likely to end up costing consumers higher prices for farm products.”

“It is going to cost the taxpayers money as well, since the EPA is going to have to hire people to inspect farms, inspect farmers’ reports and prosecute farmers who don’t jump through all the right hoops in the right order. All of this will be “creating jobs,” even if the tax money removed from the private sector correspondingly reduces the jobs that can be created there.”

The regulatory bureaucracy has no incentive to be efficient, no competition and no check on its operations or expansion. It has every incentive to expand and no incentive to contract. It seeks power and stretches the power it has.

Obama has appointed leftists that will regulate the CO2 you exhale and the free speech you profess to exercise over the internet. He is thus less honest than his rhetoric and a dangerous statist indeed.

For the un-Irish, if you Google “Irish begrudgery,” you will find several interesting and entertaining, as only the Irish can be, hits. Here one from everything2.com, begrudgery:

“Begrudgery is an attitude which has often been identified as “the Irish disease”. In essence, it describes a predilection to begrudge other people their success and wealth. Irish people are supposedly very keen to drag everybody down to their level, with phrases such as, “It’s far from that he was reared”, i.e. “He may be successful/wealthy/powerful now, but I knew him when he was just a guttersnipe/corner boy/snot-nosed pup”. This attitude is summed up nicely by Bono: ”An American will look up at somebody living in a big house on a hill and say, “Someday, I’m going to be like him”. An Irishman will look up at the big house and say, “Someday, I’m going to get that fecker!”"

My point is that Americans have long ago learned the lesson, my Dad taught me, don’t begrudge. Applaude success! Michael Barone’s RCP post, Personal Well-Being Overshadows Income Inequality, well illustrates the point. In it he points out the left’s conundrum, income inequality has been increasing yet most Americans are not perturbed.

Why don’t Americans want the wealth re-distribution that Obama was trying to promote to Joe the Plumber?  Because they see the opportunity, the mobility, the freedom that America provides. Income inequality from bootstraps to the top only reinforces that belief, that hope for themselves or their children or grandchildren.

“But there’s little evidence that most Americans begrudge the exceedingly high earnings of the likes of Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg or J.K. Rowling. We believe they have earned their success and don’t see how taking money away from them will make the rest of us better off.”

“We already take quite a bit. Current tax rates mean that the top 1 percent of earners account for 40 percent of federal income tax revenue — a higher percentage than in many Western European countries. Higher tax rates would probably produce more tax avoidance — rich people can adjust their affairs — and lower revenues than forecast by static economic models.”

So, who hasn’t learned my Dad’s lesson not to begrudge? Obama, Pelosi, Reid and others who support welfare subjugation and class warfare. And Barone counts Gary Trudeau!  ”One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.”

Turns out that most of us applaude earned success, reject envy, and appreciate the mobility and the opportunity that this country provides for those willing to work for it. That’s why we are successful. Pray it continue!

Hopefully only a bad dream from which we shall awake!