Foundations: Faith and Governance

Faith and Politics, like two foundations of a colossus, are much more stable when there is space between them!   

Bomb Agrabah!

According to a December poll by Public Policy Polling, 30% of Republican primary voters—and 41% of Donald Trump supporters—are in favor of bombing Agrabah, the fictional country in Disney’s Aladdin. 

These folks are looking for a forward-thinking leader, who will take the fight to the enemy, instead of waiting for a ‘smoking gun’ … a smoking gun that could come in the form of American skies blackened by a massive airborne invasion of parachute-pants-wearing boys, aboard magic carpets. 

In case any of my fellow Democrats are feeling all smug about this, there was an unrelated poll in which  44% of Democrats favor accepting refugees from Agrabah.  

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/12/trump-leads-grows-nationally-41-of-his-voters-want-to-bomb-country-from-aladdin-clinton-maintains-bi.html  

Trump and the Carnival Mirror

If we watch for them, many things occur in our lives and in popular culture that offer an chance for discovery and self-reflection.  The popularity of Donald Trump, I believe is one of these. 

He is, in a way, like one of those weird carnival mirrors.  You look into it, but the image that is reflected back is distorted in a comical, perhaps grotesque way. The proportions are all wrong – the face too fat, the neck to long for a stubby body, or the other way around.  

The carnival mirror has been used as a vehicle in movies and television for the dramatic effect that viewing the distorted image has on the character staring at it.  The character knows it's distorted, but it reveals something disturbing to them about themselves that ends up being pivotal to the plot.  

The comforting thing about a real-life carnival mirror, is that when you walk away from it, you have the assurance that it was indeed a distortion – that it’s not really you.  What decent people, who happen to be Republican, have to face with Donald Trump is that as grotesque, distorted, and mean-spirited as is the caricature represented by his views and his behavior, a decisive component of their party's coalition—a coalition they absolutely need to hold together in order to win—looks at this hideous image … and likes what they see.  

Herd Immunity

In the 1960s, nearly everybody was vaccinated.  Our parents grew up before many of the vaccines we got were even available, and saw the devastation wrought by polio, diphtheria, rubella, mumps, etc.  The people who developed the vaccines that made these diseases and others rare were heroes. 

For a number of reasons in the time since then, people have opted to not be vaccinated against many of these devastating diseases – and in some cases to not vaccinate their children.  They’ve been able to do this with relative impunity because they were protected by ‘herd immunity’; enough of us were vaccinated that, even when the rare person contracted one of these diseases, there wasn’t the reliable chain of contagion required to sustain an epidemic. 

Well, those chickens have come home to roost.  Complacency—combined with traditional beliefs and skepticism for scientific data—have led to increasing numbers of people opting out of immunizations.  Now there are enough gaps in herd immunity that a chain of disease vectors are passing on some of these diseases.  

Curiosity and Wisdom

Curiosity is to knowledge and wisdom what hunger is to good nutrition and physical fitness.  We are driven to satisfy these appetites, but how we do so makes a huge difference.  

When we make sound choices—taking in balanced insights from a variety of healthy sources; slowly savoring each concept, combining this with vigorous, thought-provoking exercise—we build a healthy, strong, mentally fit mind. 

But in our world of the internet, and 24/7 cable news, these healthy choices are hidden within a vast smorgasbord of junk ideas – easily digested, and superficially satisfying, but with little or no real value.  Like junk food, these offer instant gratification – which makes them highly addictive.  But like junk food, they are a poor substitute for a balanced diet of healthy options. 

Once acclimated to a junk diet and mentally sedentary lifestyle, the effort of integrating a healthy diet of more challenging ideas loses its appeal.  Over time, minds develop an intolerance, and lose the ability to digest anything that requires the slightest complex thought or rumination.  

Sunk languidly in their overstuffed easy chairs—wireless remote always within reach, ready to feed the addiction—inertia rules.  The addict becomes lazy, and mentally doughy, easy prey for even the most ludicrous of junk.  

Cap and Dem 2

Regarding capitalism and democracy, here’s a perspective to consider.  
Sometimes they go well together, since they share the premise of individual choice, unencumbered by government mandates – with the outcome determined by the aggregate choices of the participants.  

The key difference in premise is that democracy is founded on ‘one person, one vote’, while capitalism is founded on ‘one-dollar, one vote’.  In Democracy it’s the aggregate votes of people that decide; in capitalism, the aggregate dollars.  

Capitalism and democracy play best together when the endowment of dollars-per-person has some modicum of parity.  Because of the intimate linkage between governance and economy, a radical skewing of wealth distribution inevitably bleeds over into a skewing of political power in the same direction. 

This skewing can be particularly severe in a mass-media environment where sharing ones message to an electorate requires significant economic resources.  

Beyond a certain degree of wealth distribution skewing, any remaining semblance of democracy is just an illusion.  

Cap and Dem

Here are three statements that are taken as axioms by many in our society: 

1.       Democracy is the best form of government

2.       Capitalism is the best economic system

3.       Democracy and capitalism always, or generally, work hand in glove together to improve the lot of participants. 

I generally agree with these statements in principle, but consider any concepts this foundational to be worth testing periodically.  As with many ideas taken as self-evident, they may suffer from lack of close examination, and uncritical acceptance.     

At their best, democracy and capitalism are environments within which individual aspirations can be pursued freely, unencumbered by government-imposed political or economic tyranny.  Individual actors may vote as they please, and direct their investments however they choose.  In aggregate, the person, or proposal that gains the most favor is elected or becomes law; and the investment that appears most promising to the most people is successful in attracting funding – often bidding up its price in the process.  At their best, no system better translates attractiveness into success – at the expense of less attractive candidates, policies, and investment opportunities. 

In order to attract investment and increase profits, enterprises are driven to the lowest-cost source for identical factors of production and distribution.  This, in turn, encourages efficiency on the providers of these factors, and generally throughout the entire value chain – and drives inefficient, high-cost providers out of business, and lowers the cost of goods and services to consumers.   

MAKE MORE COMPACT - One person, one vote, vs. One dollar, one vote

Je Suis Charlie

Je suis un parisien. 
Je suis français. 
Je suis juif. 
Je suis musulman. 
Je suis chrétien. 
Je suis un citoyen du monde.

Je suis Charlie.  

F-35 and Military Spending

We are experiencing the same effect that killed the Soviet Union, as military spending crowded out domestic.  In our case, though, it is not a technologically superior foreign enemy driving the excess, but simply the need for quarter-over-quarter increases in profit for the military-industrial complex. 

The advantages provided by the F-35 could have been gained with a much lower investment, but for a number of factors.  The arcane rules that require different specifications for the various service branches added incredible complexity and cost to place on a single platform.  Obviously the revolving door between the senior ranks of the military and the executive ranks of the contractors who serve them provide a powerful disincentive to those who would do anything to risk profitability.  Combine these with the Keynesian benefits to a local economy of the engine provided by a sealed military contract—and the strategic way in which savvy military contractors target the Congressional districts in which they locate development and production—and you have an irresistible recipe for an intentionally expensive military budget.  

Once built, these weapons can’t just sit in warehouses and hangars, so—as with the boy and his new hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail—we seem to find ourselves irresistibly drawn into a steady stream of conflicts.