Two views of American religion: Eve Tushnet and Richard Posner

• “Europeans don’t believe in God, so they do whatever they want. Americans do whatever they want and call that Christianity.” So observes Eve Tushnet in this insightful reflection over at The American Conservative: "What does American "religiosity" mean in practice? Amid the superficial and in many ways frankly heretical aspects of American Christianity, there is still a deep and shared Christian vocabulary among the faithful and those raised around faith.  While this is not enough, it is a start, a vehicle that can help connect believers to the deeper truths about our lives and the meaning our lives have in light of the Gospel.

• Legal scholar, federal appellate judge and economist Richard Posner asks the question Why Are Americans More Religious Than Europeans?  Posner runs through a number of possible explanations, while overlooking two points that I think explain a large part of the differing levels of religiosity between the Old and New Worlds:  1) a large chunk of the very religiously devout population of Europe -- the part of the population for whom religion was more important than family, ethnicity or nationality -- left their homelands to come here to practice their religions in peace; and 2) a large chunk of the religiously devout peasantry who didn't escape to the New World were slaughtered during the European wars during the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Wesley J. Smith on the Obamacare decision

Strong words but words that need to be written.  You can read his analysis of the Court's ruling over at The Discovery Institute website: Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative.

No solace for conservatives and libertarians in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in the Obamacare case

For anyone who is interested in reading the Supreme Court's opinion, it can be found here at the official U.S. Supreme Court website.

My night-before-the-decision prediction wasn't too bad. I got the overall outcome right and I predicted that Chief Justice Roberts would write the controlling opinion. I completely missed that the statute would be upheld based on the Constitution's Tax Clause, but then again it appears that almost everybody else missed that too. I also missed that Anthony Kennedy would side with the conservatives on the Court, rather than with the liberals. This was completely unanticipated by most Court-watchers, and I didn't see it coming at all. I was sure that a vote to uphold the statute would be 6-3, with Roberts joining the majority in order to write the opinion. So, on big picture stuff, I was right, but on the details I was wrong. I will have to go back and work on my prognostication skills!

I don't really have much in the way to add to the already voluminous commentary on the internet about the decision, except to say that I think that conservatives and libertarians who are consoling themselves with the idea that Chief Justice Roberts has somehow crafted a judicial decision along the lines of Marbury v. Madison are deeply, deeply mistaken. I think that this decision should be seen as nothing more than a decisive repudiation of the conservative project on the Supreme Court. And I say this for four reasons.

First, the conservatives lost. Yes, yes, Chief Justice Roberts said many fine and dainty things about conservative legal doctrine in his opinion, but those fine and dainty things don't mean anything in this case. When push came to shove, the Obama administration won and won with the help of a justice -- the chief justice -- who has up to this point been seen as a conservative. While legal doctrine, supported by fine and dainty words, has a place in the long-term developing of a body of law, the simple fact of the matter is that there is no substitute for victory. This post over at Ann Althouse's blog makes that point quite well.

Second, even if the fine and dainty things written by the Chief Justice mattered in this case, they do not cover over the massive boost in government power that Roberts crafted for the administration through his construction of the Tax Clause. Whatever limitations his decision puts on the use of the Commerce Clause (and there is a significant debate over whether his decision actually limits the scope of Commerce Clause power at all, but that's a post for a different day), those limitations have been effectively rendered moot by Roberts' approach to the Tax Clause.  Not only is the tax power now seen as being virtually absolute, Congress doesn't even have to call what it is doing a tax in order for the Tax Clause to apply.  Congress and the executive can, in fact, vociferously deny that what they are doing is a tax at all, and the Tax Clause will still work to rescue the government's action.  This is a deeply, deeply disturbing aspect of Roberts' decision, one that has very serious implications for the idea of limited federal power under our constitutional order.

One of the primary limitations on the government's use of the tax power is the idea that it usually has to use that power in the daylight.  It has to call what it is doing a tax, or something relatively close enough to a tax for people to be able to figure out that a tax is a-coming.  Well, that's over now.  Now the government can deny, deny, deny that what it is doing is a tax or anything at all like a tax -- like the Obama administration did again today! -- and thanks to Chief Justice Roberts the Tax Clause will work its magic and provide the government with the authority to do what it wants to do.  This is a blow for transparency from our elected officials and it is bad, bad, bad news for proponents of accountable government.

Third, there is virtually no sustainable move on the Court to limit the power of the federal government.  Right now, the Court is posed at the edge of a knife over every kind of case that raises the issue of federal power.  The conservatives (Scalia, Thomas and Alito) don't make up a plurality of the Court, the liberals (Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan) do.  The balance of power is now held by the moderates (Roberts and Kennedy), and in order to win on ideologically-charged issues the conservatives have to get both of them on board.  That leaves the conservatives with no margin for error.  And this term, that problem has become more and more pronounced for the conservatives -- on everything from juvenile sentencing to immigration to the Obamacare decision. This simply is too fragile a coalition to produce consistent and strong results in favor of moving the Court to limit the every growing reach of the federal government.  Roberts has now demonstrated this term that he is not a reliable conservative vote -- he is now in play on the fundamental issue of the scope of federal power.

Fourth, Roberts' decision isn't even a model of judicial humility.  David Brooks today wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying that Roberts is an example of a humble public servant. As Brooks writes:

In his remarkable health care opinion Thursday, the chief justice of the United States restrained the power of his own institution. He decided not to use judicial power to overrule the democratic process. He decided not to provoke a potential institutional crisis. Granted, he had to imagine a law slightly different than the one that was passed in order to get the result he wanted, but Roberts’s decision still represents a moment of, if I can say so, Burkean minimalism and self-control.

Burkean minimalism??? Give me a break.  Brooks admits that Roberts engaged in outcome-oriented judging "in order to get the result he wanted[.]"  Well, that isn't judicial humility in deference to the political branches.  It is judicial arrogance, taking on the rightful authority of the legislature and the executive to craft the law at issue. And we're not talking about a little gap filling or a nip and tuck in order to make the overall statutory scheme work more efficiently or to clarify an ambiguity in the drafted language.  That kind of stuff, sadly, is not uncommon as the judiciary has to work with statutes that are, to put it mildly, badly written.  In order to get where he wanted to go, Roberts engaged in a wholesale re-writing of the statute, a re-writing that Brooks concedes was imaginative.  Roberts' opinion stands as one of the most audacious acts of judicial decision-writing in the last thirty years, matched only by the plurality decision by Souter, O'Connor and (yes) Anthony Kennedy in defense of abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Forget strict construction, what Roberts engaged in hardly qualifies as construction at all; it was an imaginative re-creation of the statute from the bench.  And whatever that is, it is not humble or deferential judicial decision-making.

So, for those four reasons, I think that conservatives and libertarians who are taking solace in the legal doctrine professed by Chief Justice Roberts are gravely mistaken. When looking at judicial decisions, it is critical to look not just at what the judges and justices say, one must look at what they do. And what Roberts has done is to drastically weaken the cause of limited government and sensible construction of the Constitution and the laws enacted pursuant to it.  For conservatives, Roberts' opinion is not good, and no amount of wishful thinking or clever hair-splitting will make it better.

Related item:  Smitty over at the Other McCain gives some good advice to conservatives and libertarians about their path forward now that Obamacare has received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court.  Well worth a read.

My explanation for Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in the Obamacare decision by the Supreme Court

Somebody got to his coffee:

Miller v. Alabama: an overlooked decision by the Supreme Court this week

In all the build-up for the Supreme Court's decision on Obamacare tomorrow, this fairly important criminal sentencing decision has gone relatively unnoticed. It shouldn't. It continues a line of Supreme Court cases where the liberals have been able to get Justice Kennedy to go along and craft increasingly significant restrictions on the sentencing of juvenile criminals.

A well-worth watching documentary on PG Wodehouse

From the BBC:

My predictions for tomorrow's Obamcare ruling

• If the Supreme Court votes to overturn all or part of the statute, the vote will be 5-4. The most likely result here would be to throw out the mandate but keep the rest of the statute. 

• If the Supreme Court votes to uphold all of the statute, the vote will be 6-3. Both Kennedy and Roberts are likely to vote with the majority under this scenario.  

• In either case, Chief Justice Roberts writes the opinion -- he will be in whatever majority decides the case, and as Chief Justice will get to assign who writes the opinion, which will be him (he hasn't written a major opinion this term, I think he has been waiting to write this one). 

• My gut prediction on the outcome:  6-3 vote to uphold the entire statute. Nothing thrown out. Vigorous 3 justice dissent.  Roberts writes the opinion to apply only to health care in an effort to restrict future government mandates and take overs of the economy.  That's my call.  

Book Review: The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life

For those interested in religion, public affairs and the American Founding, here's an interesting book review that I thought I would share. It's written by a friend of mine, one of my former law professors. The review was originally published in the American Journal of Legal History, and is reprinted here with the permission of the author. Enjoy!

American Journal of Legal History

April, 2012

Book Review

DANIEL L. DREISBACH, MARK DAVID HALL, AND JEFFREY H. MORRISON (EDS.). THE FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS ON RELIGION AND PUBLIC LIFE. NOTRE DAME, IN: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, 2009. 352 PP. $28.00 (PAPER)

David K. DeWolf

Gonzaga University

Copyright © 2012 by Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law; David K. DeWolf

In The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison have set about to correct a truncated representation of what the Founders thought was the proper relationship between religion and public life--particularly the place of religion in politics. There is plenty of scholarship already available to challenge the claim that Jefferson's metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state was reflective of some sort of consensus among the Founders, and this volume offers additional reflection on the topic.

Before delving into the contribution that this volume offers, it would be helpful to answer the question, “Who cares?” Or perhaps more specifically, what purchase on contemporary issues is expected to be gained from an appeal to what the Founders believed? The short answer is that a common trope in contemporary politics is to accuse the “Religious Right” of betraying the vision of the Founders by failing to observe a distinction between the private dictates of religion and the public obligations of government. As pious as some of our Founders may have been, so goes the claim, they created a form of government that relegated religion to the realm of the personal and private, relying upon more universal principles to animate the structure of government. In fact, some claim that the Founding Fathers adopted a radically different conception from that of the “Planting Fathers,” rejecting their religious vision in favor of a form of government that prohibited any alliance between church and state.

To be sure, there is an equal and opposite claim on behalf of the so-called Religious Right: not only is the wall of separation metaphor misleading, but by attempting to exclude religion from the public square, “separationists” are ignoring the wisdom of the Founders. As even William 0. Douglas, an icon of the modern civil liberties movement, recognized in Zorach v. Clausen, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Critics of the separationist position argue that, leaving aside the prospect of divine retribution, failure to recognize the wisdom of the Founders will erode the foundation upon which the success of the American experiment has been built.

Thus, the reason that we are properly interested in the views of the Founders is to help resolve the dispute over who is more entitled to speak for the Founders on the question of how the spheres of religious belief and government are related. And in using the phrase “Forgotten Founders” in the title, the authors are suggesting that the subjects of the individual essays in the book have been relegated to undeserved obscurity in the usual presentation of the Founders. To be sure, most of the names are well known: Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Abigail Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Thomas Paine. These are names that most educated people could recognize as playing significant roles in the Revolution and its aftermath. The other names would be harder to pick out: Oliver Ellsworth, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and Mercy Otis Warren. These individuals are known to scholars of the era, and in some cases had a more decisive influence on the public understanding of religion's role in public life than those with greater name recognition.

Each essay is interesting in its own right, because in the life history of each subject there is a mixture of extraordinary opportunity combined with daunting personal hardship and challenge. For example, Alexander Hamilton's brilliance and public success combined with personal limitation and moral failure. Three years before his death he returned to the piety of his youth. As with many (perhaps most) people, the encounter of unexpected misfortune, or acknowledgement of serious personal failing, leads to a conversion of the heart. Even if the individual (in most cases) is already a Christian believer of a traditional variety, there is a renewed appreciation of how profoundly dependent each individual is upon the continued mercy of God.

It would be one thing if the essays merely documented the personal piety of the Founders. That would be consistent with the vision of the separationists-- religion as an uplifting and useful activity, but optional and private. Instead, each of the essay subjects assumed that a proper relationship to one's Creator was necessary not just for individuals, but for nations as well. In the same way that an individual, forgetful of his status as a creature, and inclined to assume that he is entitled to make his own rules, will soon discover how painfully inadequate he is to live without divine assistance, the nation that loses its sense of dependence upon a Divine Governor is likely to fall victim to the various ills that have plagued governments throughout history. Worse yet, unlike individuals, who may be rescued from a wayward path by concerned friends or acquaintances, nations tend to acknowledge their wrongdoing only after calamity has struck. Whereas King David took advantage of the Prophet Nathan's rebuke to mend his ways, the nation of Israel ignored the Prophet Jeremiah and wound up in the Babylonian Captivity.

In this context the controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind. Whereas no one has made a claim that it is unconstitutional to invite schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the United States, there is a well-known challenge to saying the Pledge with the words “under God” inserted after the words “one nation.” With the essays of this book in hand, one can appreciate why it might be seen as a mistake to pledge allegiance to a country before there was some assurance that the country was properly restrained by an acknowledgement of higher duties.

The Founders could certainly have been wrong in their understanding; but this volume is an important contribution to an accurate representation of what they actually believed, and it may help strengthen the judgment that they were correct.

Ronald Reagan: cold warrior for freedom & cold warrior for peace

A great article by Fred Barnes has been posted over at The Weekly Standard:  The Real Reagan.  Barnes does a very good job in a short space debunking many of the myths about Reagan that have grown up since his tragic affliction with Alzheimers disease and his passing.  Well worth a read.

One point about Reagan that is often overlooked by his modern admirers is his moral opposition to nuclear weapons.  Reagan was a staunch defender of the West who rightly understood that the Soviet empire was evil to its core.  But he also was opposed to the strategy of mutual assured destruction and he very much wanted to help create a world free of nuclear weapons.  As Barnes writes:

[T]he big ideas of the Reagan era came from Reagan himself. The biggest was his obsession with eliminating nuclear weapons entirely, a goal he pursued despite the opposition of many of his advisers and his closest foreign ally, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It was Reagan, not his aides, who came to the conclusion that mutual assured destruction, the theory that fear of massive nuclear retaliation would deter a first strike by the United States or the Soviet Union, was immoral. “What’s so good about a peace kept by the threat of destroying each other?” Reagan asked “many times,” according to Secretary of State George P. Shultz. “The public was hesitant to embrace” Reagan’s idea, Shultz writes in the foreword to Reagan’s Secret War, and “advisers Reagan trusted and who were experts in this area didn’t support it. But none of that diminished Reagan’s conviction.”

And it was Reagan who thought it possible to win the cooperation of the Soviets. All they needed was assurance of America’s good intentions. Shultz agreed and became his closest adviser. Reagan rebuffed efforts by hardliners in his administration to have Shultz fired, explaining in his diary on November 14, 1984, “George is carrying out my policy.”

His most ambitious -- and most mocked -- strategic plan to accomplish these goals was SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was ridiculed by Reagan's opponents as "Star Wars."  Far from being something out of science fiction, SDI was a forward thinking effort to use technology to create a defensive system that would render nuclear weapons obsolete. Here's Reagan's speech announcing the SDI program:



Reagan showed himself to be no reactionary, but rather a visionary with his proposal. And he was willing to reach out to the leaders of the Evil Empire to do it. Even if that meant rejecting the direction his hardline advisors wanted to take.

Ronald Reagan: cold warrior for freedom & cold warrior for peace.

Eastern Washington is full of fantastic places

Like the Chelan County museum in Cashmere, Washington -- right off the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains.  James Stripes went and visiting the museum and wrote up a blog post about it over at his well-worth reading blog Patriots and Peoples.  Head on over to his blog and read about this amazing museum and its treasures of natural history, native American history and 19th century pioneer history. There's even a collection of political campaign memorabilia. I'm planning a visit the next time I'm in that neck of the woods!

When machines replace lawyers...

Sounds like some creepy science fiction movie, doesn't it?  Well here's one serious exploration of that topic, posted over at The Atlantic's website. Personally, I agree with Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit -- this is already happening. It will only get worse (or maybe better depending on your perspective!) as time goes on. Of course, for the foreseeable future there will be a role for human counsel and human advocacy, but the role of computers is only going to become more prevalent as time goes on.

Who is the most underrated Founding Father?

American historian extraordinaire Forrest McDonald and his wife Ellen Shapo McDonald have a very solid answer to that question:  John Dickinson. Read their whole answer over at The Imaginative Conservative. I don't think there is much question that Dickinson is massively overlooked by most modern historians. Along with Samuel Adams, John Jay and Patrick Henry, Dickinson is out of fashion with the modern age. Part of this has to do with the fact that none of those men every ascended to the presidency.  But part of it has to do with the intellectual fads and obsessions of our time. Thus, they are not the subject of serious study for the most part. Yet our Revolution and our constitutional order would have been impossible without those men. The fact that they are overlooked says far more about us than it does about them.

Yes, religious liberty is under threat in America

CUA president John Garvey set out the case that it is, as this article from the Cardinal Newman Society website reports:  Six Proofs That Our Religious Liberty Is Threatened.  (Hat tip to Creative Minority Report.)  A necessary read for all people of good will who believe not just in freedom to worship, but also in freedom of conscience.

Update:  here's proof number 7.

Catholic idea of government: substance over form

Some worthwhile perspective from Pope Leo XIII:

There is no question here respecting forms of government, for there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage.  Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors. 

But as regards political power, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God, for it finds this clearly testified in the Sacred Scriptures and in the monuments of antiquity; besides, no other doctrine can be conceived which is more agreeable to reason or more in accord with the safety of both princes and peoples. 

- Diuturnum (On Civil Government), paragraphs 7 & 8 (1881).

Living la dolche vita in bella Italia -- Capuchin style

Fr. Charles over at A Minor Friar has a great post on his introduction to Capuchin Franciscan life in Italy.  Glad to hear that his new assignment in his order is going so well!

Three posts from The Pittsford Perennialist

• KORFUS FTA:  Providing a quick overview of the destructive effect of free trade on the US economy, with a link to Pat Buchanan's latest op-ed on that disastrous policy. 

• What's Wrong with Jefferson?:  A short exploration of one of the many fundamental inconsistencies in Thomas Jefferson's ideology.  

• Post-War Allied Atrocities:  Disturbing news on the forced ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe after World War II.  The victims?  German civilians -- old men, women and children -- most of whom had lived in settled German communities that were generations if not centuries old. A shameful blight on the Allied record.

On the enduring influence of Alexander Hamilton

James Pinkerton discusses that topic in a book review posted over at The American Conservative.  Hamilton's wisdom is needed now, on both the Left and Right of our political spectrum.  His approach to political economy and ordered liberty are precisely the tonic needed for the times.  The best answer comes not  from the statism of the Left, or from the increasingly unhinged anti-statism on the Right, but from the balance of freedom and government outlined by Hamilton.  

George Will on commonsense conservatism

There's a video of Will's presentation on that topic posted over at The Imaginative Conservative.  Well worth watching.

The lessons of Detroit

The cautionary tale that is the modern Motor City is explained by Kevin Williamson over at National Review Online.  Here's just one good point out of many that Williamson makes:

Even the best tax regimes are cannibalistic: Every tax is an incentive for the taxpayer to relocate to a more friendly jurisdiction. But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions). The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.

For Greater Glory

If you haven't already, go see this movie!

¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Que viva!

Pope Leo XIII on man as a social animal

"And indeed nature, or rather God Who is the author of nature, wills that man should live in a civil society; and this clearly shown both by the faculty of language, the greatest medium of intercourse, and by numerous innate desires of the mind, and the many necessary things, and things of great importance, which men isolated cannot procure, but which they can procure when joined and associated with others."

- Pope Leo XIII, Diuturnum (On Civil Government) (1881).

The glory of male communication

Expressed with perfection in this Verizon commercial:



Update: Creative Minority Report has kindly linked to this post. Thanks so much for the link! And welcome any Creative Minority Report readers who are visiting my blog for the first time. Feel free to take a look around!

Catholic social teaching and immigration reform

That's the subject of this blog post over at U.S. Catholic by Fr. Tom Joyce:  Pope Benedict on immigration reform. As Joyce points out, the pope has emphasized two key points. First, that each nation has a legitimate right to control its borders. Second, that immigrants need to be treated with dignity and respect in light of their fundamental human rights.

The history of the Catholic Church in the United States, as Joyce summarizes, revolves around immigration and the incorporation of new arrivals into both Church and society here.  In a society that often devolved into spasms of anti-immigrant hysteria, the Church stood up for the religious, civil and human rights of those who came to America to build the future.  I would note that the Church in the 19th century also took upon itself the duty of helping Catholic immigrants lawfully assimilate into American society, emphasizing the teaching of English, the inculcation of civic virtue and American identity in the new people thronging to our nation.  If we are to properly address the immigration situation in this country, we need to recover that kind of balanced approach to immigration reform. Law & order, religious liberty, civil & human rights, as well as assimilation all need to be kept at the forefront as the discussion moves forward.  The Church as an institution, and individual Catholics in the public square, need to do more to restore this balanced approach to immigration policy.  

Peter Hitchens on Philip Larkin

A somewhat melancholy but nonetheless delightful review of a new collection of Larkin's poetry has been posted by Hitchens over at his blog.  The late Christopher Hitchens' younger & wiser brother provides some good insights into both the failures and triumphs of Larkin's work.  I have to confess that I am largely ignorant of Larkin -- most of my knowledge of the English poets ends with Coleridge & Wordsworth.  What I found most interesting in Hitchen's discussion of Larkin is the notion that Larkin is an unintentionally religious poet, and that his meditations on death bring us to the point of asking if the religious intuition is not simply a way to get us from embracing the reality of death, but rather is a intuition of something that is true.  Hitchens' is well-worth a read here.

Ordered liberty and the political rhetoric of Alexander Hamilton

A lengthy essay on that topic by one of the master historians of the American founding may be found here:  The Rhetoric of Alexander Hamilton.  The author, Forest McDonald, does a very good job dispatching some of the gross distortions of Hamilton that have persisted since the radical Jeffersonians took it upon themselves to poison the record regarding this most uniquely American founding father.  Far from seeking to create a centralized government based on greed and corruption, Hamilton sought to ensure that balanced government would be motivated by virtue, natural law and the principle of proper and precise debate over public policy issues.

While the Jeffersonians were wallowing in the mud of crass politics, Hamilton sought to elevate discourse and speak clearly on the pressing issues of the day. As McDonald notes, Hamilton was unsure that the American experiment in constitutional government would succeed, but he was adamant in his commitment to fight for its viability in a world growing increasingly swamped by the fervor of ideology.  And the key to viability was and is to shift the discussion from rights to duties, from benefits to obligations:

More than most of his countrymen, he doubted that the experiment could succeed; more than any of them, he was dedicated to making the effort. He perceived clearly that political rhetoric of the highest order was necessary to the attempt, for such is essential to statecraft in a republic. Now, we hear a great deal these days about the public’s “right to know.” That is a perversion of the truth, even as modern public relations, propaganda, and political blather are perversions of classical rhetoric. If the republic is to survive, the emphasis must be shifted from rights back to obligations. It is the obligation, not the right, of the citizen of a republic to be informed; it is the obligation of the public servant to inform him and simultaneously to raise his standards of judgment. In adapting his style to his audience, Hamilton was fulfilling his part of the obligation.

Ordered liberty was the goal of Hamilton's work.  And ordered liberty requires not just a right ordering of the affairs of government, it requires a citizenry oriented to liberty and civic virtue.  McDonald's essay does a fantastic job of showing Hamilton's commitment to defending ordered liberty against its enemies, using clear and energetic language grounded in the belief in morality, duty and prudential principle.

The proper role of government in encouraging prosperity

That's the background topic of this essay by James Pinkerton posted over at The American Conservative:  Why Do We Have USDA? While often the source of much justified criticism, the USDA has played a critical role in securing the overwhelming success of the American agricultural system.  And its roots go back to the Lincoln administration's efforts to ensure that the frontier farmers settling in the West would have the infrastructure and knowledge-base necessary to turn the prairie into the breadbasket not only of America but of the world as well.  The key to Lincoln's approach, typified by the USDA in the 19th century, was to boost productivity as a way to lift the economic condition of the average American worker.  As Pinkerton writes:

If USDA is now a joke in the minds of many, a Lincoln living in the White House today would not find it funny at all. To him, helping develop and defend the middle class was always serious business, and so today, in any updated Lincolnian strategy, revitalizing USDA for new missions on behalf of working families in rural America would be a crucial element.  Indeed, a President Lincoln today would also undoubtedly get to work on a broad range of pro-productivity measures, aimed at raising wages, prices, profits, and outputs.

Both Republicans and Democrats could use a significant infusion of Honest Abe's wisdom.

Quote of the day: American or English?

"America has a right to a language of its own, and to the largest share in forming that pigeon-English which is to be the 'world-language' of the future."

- George Santayana, America's Young Radicals (1922).