Levels… With Steps… Like Ancient Egypt

As follows from the previous note, not using man-made contraceptives entails a “pro-life” attitude, a state of mind that affirms humanity. It’s a healthy philosophy of life or ideology, as wholesome as libertarianism is compared to evil conservatism and stupid left-liberalism.

When John Paul II mentioned the culture of death with respect to contraceptives, he is to be understood in a sense different from such a culture with respect to abortion. This is because for birth control, children are never conceived in the first place and therefore, cannot die. The Pope was referring to the death of the human race.

Perpetuation of the species is a different thing altogether from individual search for happiness. Sometimes the two are in conflict, and when such is the case, the conflict must be wisely resolved.

It is certainly true that any single person’s decisions regarding his own procreation cannot be held responsible for the fate of the human race. If we are to go extinct, this particular Smith was not the cause of it. Therefore, again, using NFP in married life is a matter of piety, of something given to God according to justice, in God’s capacity as an authority over His most valuable creation, the human race. Smith will not bring about the continuation of our species, but he will at least practice what he preaches.

The Catholic Church sanctions a form of family planning in which the couple has sex only in those times of the month when the woman is naturally infertile. Why?

This reason is that a woman who uses contraceptives does not fully give herself to her husband. She is saying: “You can possess me, but I won’t let you beget a child in me.” She can conceive but refuses to do so.

With the “natural” planning, this technically does not occur. There is either no love and no children, as in when the woman is fertile, or love and children, except it so happens that nature prevents conception.

The problem here is that praxeologically, this may seem to be a distinction without a difference. Does it matter whether conception is checked by the woman’s body alone or body plus a contraceptive pill? In both cases, there is the same intention on the part of the husband and wife, namely, to enjoy sex without the possibility of making a child.

Now God made the woman’s body in a certain way. She is fertile on the 4th and infertile on the 24th. When the couple has sex on the 24th, God is preventing conception, as per His own design. When the woman takes a pill on the 4th, she takes matters into her own hands.

But what’s wrong with that? God has designed humans such that their hair grows. Is it wrong to have a haircut? Life is naturally solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; what’s wrong with building a civilization? The difference is that getting haircuts is due to an individual’s regard for himself, while sex is bound with individual regard for the species. People are naturally eager to seek their own happiness. Maintaining the human species is something quite different from that. It requires distinct sacrifices of purely individualistic pleasures. Children are “flowers on our graves.” Too much egoistic self-regard, and there may not be a next generation at all. Hence, it seems that procreation cannot be fully under exclusive human control but is something that is in part managed by God.

Hence, humans are not entirely free and autonomous in pursuit of sex and love. They must give their due to God. Using contraceptives entails taking an excessive share of control over procreation.

But what if God had designed humans in such a way that the woman was fertile always? Would not that have spelled the end of natural family planning? Isn’t NFP, therefore, based on an accident, a kind of loophole in the divine laws? And what if our couple wanted to have sex on the 4th not on the 24th? Why should it have to wait, just because of this accidental obstacle? God’s design seems arbitrary and flawed.

Again, the answer lies in a certain conflict between the interest of individuals and the species as a whole; or if you like, between the presently living and those yet unconceived. Sometimes the former should yield to the latter.

We may, if we like, make this more concrete. For example, suppose there is pre-existence of the soul. There is a long line of souls in heaven waiting to be called to incarnate as humans and live this life. Without procreation, their interests, which include our own, if there is such thing as re-incarnation, will be hurt. We should be mindful of the interests not only of this world but of the universe as a whole. The yet unborn have a claim on us.

Even if the unconceived cannot be said to exist, we the living may desire a large communion of saints. Not 10 people but 10 billion people. But in that case it pays Smith not to have children but benefit for free from Jones’ children. But everybody thinks this way. This is a case of positive externalities unrealized. Children are underproduced. One possibility is to have the state subsidize large families. But we live, or want to, in a free society. It is immoral to tax childless people for the sake of those with children. Further, under such conditions, children will be viewed as a means to government hand-outs rather than loved for their own sakes. Hence, the Church’s moral suasion seems like the best possible solution.

In short, going no further then NFP is a concession to God’s will regarding the well-being of the species. And that is the point of the Catholic Church’s injunctions.

The Church has worried about sex for 3 reasons. First, there is a matter of health and moderation. People should enjoy sex but within right reason, in order not to get STDs or not to exhaust themselves or not to demean themselves by centering their lives on obtaining sex. Second, the sensual pleasure of sex is a stepping stone to the intellectual joy of love, and unless sex produces love, it is positively harmful to the soul. Third, in order to foster family planning and avoid unwanted and bastard children.

For (1), the Church is concerned with basic virtue. For (2), with union of human beings through love. For (3), with making sure that children — who, too, have an eternal life and are important — are loved and cared for. I think it is both proper and laudable for the Church to seek to influence human behavior regarding these things.

Suppose you are told: Love God more than anything. Now you love your family. But you are not sure what this thing called God is. If you hear this admonition, you can interpret it in two ways: one, you need to figure out God and learn to love Him even more than wife and children; two, you ought to start hating your wife and children, because only thusly will the commandment be fulfilled when you do not love God at all.

That is, if you are indifferent to God, then you will love him more than anything, only if you hate everything. Of course, this interpretation is crazy, but this is one sense in which love for God is measured by love for people: the former must exceed the latter. This is how we must understand Lk 14:26: as a striking metaphor.

There is another sense: no one can truly love God if he fails to love his fellow men sufficiently.

When we put the two together, we arrive at Mt 22:34-40.

On one’s deathbed, a man should be prepared to give up everything he has in this world. The moment his heart stops, he loses everything, including his very body. If, at this moment, he does not have God, then it seems that he ends up with nothing.

So, here is a basic life pattern according to this understanding. A person acquires temporal goods in the first half of his life, and disburses them in the second. He should, indeed, die broke, but not by spending everything on himself but helping young people grow up. The middle to old age is the age in which one ought to busy himself with making the world a better place for his own and everyone else’s children.

Belief in some form of life after death is prior to any religion. It is almost innate in humans. Moreover, it is necessary for religion. Of what use is friendship with God or service to God or being loved by God in this life, if these things terminate in a most pitiful manner upon death?

Homeschooling on the one hand is a bit odd, because it is a conscious act to avoid taking advantage of division of labor. The parents are rarely experts in those subjects that evoke the interest of the child. It seems more reasonable to send a kid to a school or at least hire tutors. There are also social gains, insofar as one teacher can handle a large group, whereas there is one parent-teacher per only a few kids at home.

The phenomenon of homeschooling is, in fact, a desperate reaction against the awfulness of government schools. Public schools are so bad to both the intellect and morals that people, not being rich enough to afford private schools or tutoring, resort to withholding kids from those hellholes.

Homeschooling, precisely for reasons of its inefficiency, is a vigorous condemnation of the present compulsive state schooling regime.

The power of good ideas is weak, indeed; the power of bad ideas is far stronger; but fortunately, the power of no-ideas-whatsoever (especially from the conservatives) is practically omnipotent.

Consider a system, such as a painting or a car engine. A painting consists of a large number of colored lines and points. If you look at it very closely, all you’ll see are these things. But look at it from afar, and you’ll see the painting as a whole and may be struck by its beauty. You will no longer notice the individual components of the painting. The variety of component parts is complemented by a unity of the whole. Just as the unity can be of form, so it can be of function. A car engine is also built out of numerous parts. Each part alone is non-functional, but put them together, and again look at it from afar, and you see something that works marvelously by moving the car.

An electron is simple as an elementary point particle. Its inner complexity and unity are zero. God is both infinitely complex and perfectly unified. When beholding God, one cannot comprehend him due to this complexity and infinity of “parts” (possible worlds?) but the parts fit together so seamlessly as to produce one thing, in which it is impossible to detect any distinctions.

Whether you look at God from near or afar, you see both the infinite complexity and simple unity.

Remember that Rationals excel at making masterful plans and need autonomy; Artisans excel at masterful execution of actions and need freedom. Now Artisans live in the moment and enjoy life to the fullest. But enjoyment of an action requires its mastery. And achieving mastery takes a large amount of practice. The end is pleasure in action; the means is practice. For any temperament, there is motion from what is, such as incompetence, to what ought to be, such as mastery. But here, the means, practice, is simply performance of action when it is not yet fully mastered. Thus, at the beginning, practice is painful, because the Artisan often fails. He is clumsy, unartistic, awkward. But as he progresses, even practice becomes pleasurable, insofar as it comes to resemble fully perfected skill.

Thus, for Artisans, the distinction between means and ends does not exist; means morph ends smoothly and imperceptibly.

If tax-supported law enforcement (though not at all arbitration and not fully law-making), may be a workable solution for some communities (and as always, when I speak of a community I imagine local self-government), then we must ask what the most just way of financing the police would be. It is obvious to all that when a person buys something at the store, he almost never experiences significant price discrimination: a lamp costs the same whether the buyer is rich or poor. The question is, Why should there be price discrimination in the form of a progressive or even flat tax for the services of the police?

Now the function of the police should be two-fold. First, to enforce judicial verdicts, those that are actually issued and delivered to the police, and those that the police assume will be made, such as when they ticket people for speeding. It is not at all obvious that rich people sue others more than poor people do, requiring more attention from the police in securing their rights.

Secondly, the police deter crime in general, on the margin, of course. It is true that a rich person has more property to protect and is a bigger target for thieves and similar miscreants. But police are not to provide actual security guarding. Their deterrence power permeates the entire community; so our rich guy is likely to invest more into personal security, all the way to hiring bodyguards and bullet-proofing his car. Again, it is not self-evident that the police will expend more resources on deterring those who would without such deterrence prey on the rich rather than the poor. People have been known to kill for $5.

Given the reasoning above, the answer is apparent: the tax most in accord with justice is a head tax, wherein everyone pays the same amount regardless of his income or wealth. It also has the advantage of being easily enforced, non-intrusive, and perhaps even neutral (empirical economists correct me if I am wrong). I fully agree with Rothbard that the ability to pay principle of the progressive / flat tax is the procedure of a highwayman who robs his victims as much as they “are able to pay.” But still the head tax may be a genuine hardship for some to comply with. What to do? Let’s combine the benefits of the head tax with those of the flat tax as follows: Everyone pays 2% of his income to the city government until his total tax reaches, say, $1,000. Then he pays no more. As I pondered this scheme, I remembered that economist Steven Landsburg suggested something similar in his book Fair Play. In his stirring words, “My own gut preference is that nobody should ever be required to pay more than five times the average tax bill. … [This] criterion proclaims the virtue of liberty… It embodies the principle that there is some limit to our social responsibilities. Whatever duties we may owe our fellow citizens, we should be able to fulfill those duties and then move on.” (107) Amen, brother.

Note also how this arrangement permits taxpayers to keep their privacy. If the law orders them to pay 2% of income or $1,000, whichever is less, then one can simply pay $1,000 and not file any tax return at all. The city government will not have any access to his financial data, because he is paying the maximum tax, anyway. On the other hand, those unwilling to buy privacy in this manner can submit their information to justify paying the 2%.

Isolationism means desiring to stop communication, travel, immigration, and trade between citizens of nations. Ron Paul wants to increase those. It means blockading countries and imposing sanctions. Ron Paul will not do either. The two paradigmatic isolationist countries were the Soviet Union and North Korea. In the USSR, for example, isolationism was called the Iron Curtain. They even tried to dampen radio broadcasts from abroad, in an effort to prevent people from being influenced by “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

What Ron Paul is, in fact, is a man of peace. He does not want to start wars and kill people. If Smith bullies Jones, does Smith by that very fact show himself to be “open” to others and not at all isolationist? Does internationalism, i.e., the opposite of isolationism, mean beating people up? How come the only non-isolationist relationship that is respected by conservatives is something like “America rapes Iraq”?

1. Abolish legal tender laws. This will quickly convert fiat money into commodity-based money.
2. Enforce 100%-reserve banking for all demand deposits. This will eliminate credit money.

That is it! There is no need specifically to monetize gold and silver; or for the government to do anything other than (1) enable the market’s good money (whatever it will turn out to be) to drive out the government’s bad and (2) protect property rights of banks’ own customers.

Either Ron gets nominated, or you deserve to lose. Lose to the buffoon and embarrassment Obama. Lose big. If you don’t nominate him, then you need to eat crow. You will show yourselves to be worthless. I swear, I’ll vote for Obama myself, in a tiny effort to humiliate you for failing to produce out of the mass of “conservatives” anybody of any value.

The greater of the two evils will be enabling conservatives to persist in standing only for the status quo and to hate every new idea, good or bad, that comes their way.

In Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet the criminal, Jefferson Hope, is an avenger of his wife’s death who offers his victims, under threat of death, a choice between two pills: one is poisonous, the other’s nothing. After the guy takes one pill, Hope takes the other. (This works for the first man; the second one refuses and is killed.) As he explains, he trusts God’s providence to protect him and destroy the offender.

Now consider the movie No Country for Old Men, where the criminal does the same, except that he is a psychopath and serial killer, who flips a coin which decides his victim’s fate, according to whether that victim calls it correctly or not. Now suppose the call is wrong. What if the serial killer asks before committing his crime, mocking the guy and adding insult to injury by enjoying the favor of his demonic providence, “Where is your God? How come He did not protect you?” What’s the right response?

Of course, this situation is familiar to us: “The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.’ The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.’ There was a written notice above him, which read: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!’” (Lk 23:35-39)

I would say therefore, “God did not help me, so that you may be condemned more easily, and I, glorified as a martyr. You can’t win. If you strike me down, you will seal your doom, and I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

The Enlightenment was a shift of emphasis from virtue to happiness, an empowerment of the Artisan and Rational temperaments, as opposed to the Guardian and Idealist ones.

1. “The fruits of one’s labor should belong to the laborer.” 2. “The worker deserves his wages.” 3. “It is unjust to aggress or initiate violence against another person or justly acquired property.” These are arrived at by intuition. Libertarians claim that these are naturally attrictive to the vast majority of people. They “feel right” and are “self-evident from (the virtue of) justice.” The system of natural liberty seems lovely to all people; and those few to whom it does not so seem are spiritually sick.

Libertarianism then in one sense is faith seeking understanding. If we agree that the axioms are plausible, then we can enter into a conversation regarding their implications and complications that are vast in number. Can you kill a guy to save the world? Can you and should you shoot a mugger dead? Is taxation theft? At the same time, is local government praxeologically necessary and ought to be financed by taxes? Etc. But we must agree on these general principles before discussing anything.

In active life, qualities of character are split into 3 kinds: those for the sake of (1) acts, (2) themselves, and (3) relations. Thus, “being a doctor” is for the sake of curing illnesses. It is better to cure an illness than to be a doctor. Being a doctor (a state) has no value apart from the curing (an act).

On the other hand, it is better “not to be a glutton” than “on many occasions to have eaten in moderation.” A routine, such as not overeating, is for the sake of a state, not being a glutton. This virtue is contributes to the loveliness of the soul and is for its own sake.

Finally, some virtues are for the sake of relations between different individuals. “Not stealing” (act) is for the sake of and inferior to “hating theft” (state) which in its own turn is for the sake of and inferior to a “just society” in which people respect each other’s property rights and are related to each other according to justice.

It is interesting that in the speculative life, these distinctions are not present. To “know” something (an act) is to be able to recall it from memory and contemplate it. Which is exactly identical to “being knowledgeable” about something (a quality). Which again is identical to having a true belief, truth being defined as a correspondence relation between thought and reality.

It’s Easter. When I think about His birth, I feel dread. God the Father wanted to try His Son, try His claim that He loved us. The Father predicted what would happen to the Son. A perfect being born into the world, and what do we do with it? Brutalize and destroy it. The Father had a pretty good idea of what kind of beasts we were. He made us, after all. And He said to the Son: if you find yourself still loving the world after this, well, it’s yours. Salvage from it what you may. But I will not bequeath you even this pitiful world unless you see for yourself, through personal experience, what it is you claim to be so in love with.

That Jesus would accept the world even after being murdered was never certain. Not to us, not to Him, not to the Father. The fate of the world truly hanged in the balance. Our salvation was a contingent event, rooted fully in God’s 3rd-level goodness. He did not have to bless us after what we did to Him. Yet He did, and Easter celebrates this fact.

Christmas is just the beginning of the trial of Christ. The stakes were — are — infinite. And all good Christian men should tremble at this event.

Defenders of free markets do their cause no favor by claiming that the present status quo is a paragon of laissez-faire. Without fully private money and banking, capitalism is always in a precarious spot ideologically.

De-socializing both is by far the most important reform of our times one can fight for. Everything else is peanuts. Do this, and freedom will suddenly make sense.