Is Free Enterprise Evil?
Kenneth W. Bickford
February 2012

Is free enterprise structurally evil? Does it guarantee goodness from its practitioners — or is it an impediment?

I ask because Occupy Wall Street, that movement of folks angrily bent on refashioning the American economy has suggested as much.

Here in New Orleans, a firestorm has erupted at Loyola University in response to a proposed Austrian economics master’s program. This program envisions an immersion in the political economic theories of the great 20th century libertarian thinkers of Austro-German descent, whose work is often neglected by students of political economy.

Critics see a manifest conflict with Loyola’s commitment to social justice. The objectors assert that some economic theories are structurally incompatible with goodness, and they strongly imply that this program of study is crippled by its engagement with just such theories. Since the Austrian school, almost alone among modern economics, embraces free enterprise as a nearly unalloyed good, the sharp criticism of this masters program implies a sharp criticism of free enterprise as such. And if an economic theory embracing free enterprise is at odds with Catholic teaching, it stands to reason that free enterprise may well be at odds with other Judeo-Christian moral systems.

So we come back to the striking question, Is free enterprise structurally evil?

As I put it in this earlier post:

Those golden-hearted souls who wish to take on the exhausting task of helping others--like Mr. and Mrs. Johns and Julea Ward--are the ones hit first by this requirement [to affirm homosexuality]. In those areas, the homosexual agenda now has such power that if you wish to help, they will define you instead as "harmful" if you do not promote their ideology. It is that stark. If you disagree with them, you are out. You may not help. You may not have the job. You may not do the work. It's the serious Christians or the homosexual activists. Both cannot win. Given the demands, no compromise is possible. We should not fool ourselves.

One of the more recent manifestations of the homosexual agenda is so-called "anti-bullying" legislation which seeks to enshrine homosexuality as defining a specially protected class throughout public schools and to make it a violation of all schools' policy, if not a crime, to criticize it. This is, in fact, the latest manifestation of the speech codes that some of us remember fighting on college campuses back in the 90's, but this time at the K-12 level.

The American Family Association of Michigan, in particular, has been pointing this out and has been fighting to make any "anti-bullying" legislation passed in Michigan include no special categories, no specially protected classes, in its language. The idea there is that in that case the legislation would not, at least on its face, give sanction to administrators and teachers to bully traditional students for their views.

The Komen Foundation, which is supposed to be a charitable foundation all about curing breast cancer, funded Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, for years. Pro-lifers were really bugged by this and suggested that Komen stop. Moreover, the funding was rather puzzling, because Planned Parenthood doesn't prevent or treat breast cancer. They don't even provide mammograms. Only, maybe, referrals for mammograms. So why would Komen send them money? It didn't have any clear connection at all to Komen's mission. It didn't make sense.

Recently Komen has made the sensible decision to stop funding them. The reason given is that PP is under congressional investigation, but it shouldn't have been necessary to give such a reason. Does Komen randomly fund doctors or clinics that are supposed to have something to do with "women's health"? I would think not; not if they aren't doing something obvious and specific about breast cancer. Komen could have just said they'd reviewed their funding policies and decided the money could be spent better for the breast cancer cause elsewhere. Since the statement would have been obviously true, that should have been the end of the discussion.

But the pro-aborts are absolutely livid. You must fund Planned Parenthood. You are not allowed not to fund Planned Parenthood. One Democrat lawmaker has said she no longer supports the Komen Foundation because they won't fund Planned Parenthood! And the clown Howard Dean says corporations should boycott Komen because they won't fund Planned Parenthood.

I mean, what? I sometimes truly believe that our nation has gotten to the point where it is impossible to have a substantive discussion in public about anything whatsoever. In debate team terms, shouldn't the advocates for PP's funding be bringing forward "need, plan, benefit" kinds of stuff? Shouldn't they be showing, clearly and in detail, how Planned Parenthood actually helps to save the lives of women or treat women in relation to breast cancer if they want to make an argument that they should be receiving funding from a breast cancer foundation? And in fact, since probably there are a lot of worthy organizations out there referring women for mammograms, shouldn't people who want Komen to fund PP have to provide evidence that PP is doing something especially noteworthy in this area? A private, focused charity has only so many dollars to go around, after all.

Surely we're not just expected to believe without any evidence that PP is a good outlet for Komen's dollars. If, in fact, PP's cheerleaders can't bring any evidence that PP actually prevents, detects, or treats breast cancer, then what possible excuse can they have for the outrage at Komen's cutting out the funding to PP?

For that matter, even if PP did do things relevant to breast cancer, it's not like the money is now going into a mattress somewhere. Presumably Komen will fund other groups that have something to do with detecting or curing breast cancer. And if liberals are so concerned about that goal, why would they try to hurt a charitable foundation that is trying to achieve that goal simply because the charitable foundation doesn't, inter alia, fund Planned Parenthood? Just who, again, is placing abortion politics above the good of women?

Right.

Update: See comments beginning here for the discussion of Komen's flip-flip decision, within days (during which their donations actually went up!) to begin funding PP yet again.

Wesley J. Smith adds information that I had not seen elsewhere and that should be more widely advertised: The HHS rules will place requirements even on those very few employers that do qualify for the narrowly defined religious exemption (because they employ and serve only members of their own religion). Even those employers will be required to volunteer information to employees about where they can obtain contraception. The very fact that employees could easily find such information for themselves merely underscores the fact that Secretary Sebelius is requiring it as a gesture, an act of power for its own sake.

In these various demands, Obama has shown himself such an extremist, so willing to sacrifice even political expediency and the appearance of moderation to ideology, so implacable in the desire to bring religious, especially Catholic, organizations to their knees, that he has roused opposition even among those who were not his foes previously. The arrogant recent announcement by "Catholic" Secretary Sebelius, endowed by Obamacare legislation with near-godlike powers over health plans throughout the country, that she would give Catholic organizations a year to "adapt" their consciences, has simply deepened the shock. Fr. Jenkins, the not-overwhelmingly-conservative president of Notre Dame, can't understand why the previous concept of religious exemptions can't still obtain. Why can't organizations like his own have a religious exemption, as one would have expected, from the demand that they provide contraception? Why has the Obama administration re-defined a "religious" organization so narrowly as to exclude those organizations that serve non-Catholics? Obama has broken a kind of unwritten rule: You lefty Catholics support me, and I'll leave you a little playground in which you can do your own thing. Nope. Now everyone has to pour a libation.

So here's a question: Will this outrage have any effect on the election in November? Will there actually be peace-n-justice Catholics who finally decide that Obama is not on their side and refuse to vote for him when they otherwise would have done so?

A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree…. That [Ward's] conflict arose from religious convictions is not a good answer; that her conflict arose from religious convictions for which the department at times showed little tolerance is a worse answer.

Ward was willing to work with all clients and to respect the school’s affirmation directives in doing so. That is why she asked to refer gay and lesbian clients (and some heterosexual clients) if the conversation required her to affirm their sexual practices. What more could the rule require? Surely, for example, the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion (1) does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct if the conversation takes a turn in that direction and (2) does not require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God if the client is wrestling with faith-based issues. Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.

The EMU case will not be the last case in which advocates of the homosexual rights agenda attempt to impose their views as orthodoxy. Eternal vigilance being the price of freedom, as it is, we can be thankful for the ADF, which is representing Ward. Now the case goes to trial, and it bears watching. (Question: Will Judge Sheeh be conducting the trial? How could one find out?)

The court ruled last September that telling a homeowner “let me in or I will take your kids away from you” can constitute an action against which there is no legal remedy, even though the person making the threat has no authority to enter the home and the homeowner is perfectly aware of it, and is (in real time) being affirmed in that by his lawyer. So, effectively, threatening kidnapping in order to be given an open door to home invasion, is OK.

Facts of the case :

If you are a social conservative (please note the man and woman getting married and the beautiful child in the womb) and don't have an allergy to American patriotism, I think you will like it too.

Social conservatives, those of us on the unabashed American right, are tired of being told to go to the back of the bus by our supposed "own" party. When was the last time we had a presidential candidate who appealed this directly and unashamedly to our values, including our social values, to what we stand for? I can't remember the last time.

I argued then, and would argue now, that we conservatives need a line in the sand on particular issues, particularly issues of social conservatism. My biggest grief at that time was that my fellow conservatives seemed to have no such line. It was, "I'll vote for the lesser evil no matter who he is." I wrote pieces on the nature of a vote arguing that one should at least be willing in some sense to endorse a candidate if one is going to vote for him. None of this, "I'm going to vote for Hitler if the other guy is worse" stuff. Remember: You'd be horrified (I hope you would) to find a campaign sign for Hitler on your front lawn.

Okay. I stand by all of that. But by that same token, I think I need to be willing to take some flak from the exceedingly purist right for the following statement: I'm going to vote for Rick Santorum in the upcoming Republican primary. In fact, I'm not even remotely ashamed to be doing so. That's why I'm blogging it. In fact, I'd put a yard sign for him on my front lawn.

Don't bug me with whether he's electable or not, because frankly, I don't give a darn. Especially not in the primary. Primaries used to be about voting for the candidate who most closely represented your views. If and when he loses the primary, I'll make up my mind about whether I can in good conscience vote for whoever wins. That'll be then. This is now.

The purist case against Santorum is based on on several of his past actions. One is that he allowed his arm to be twisted by the party machinery into campaigning for the odious Arlen Specter against Toomey, a conservative primary challenger. Another is his voting for funding Planned Parenthood in Title X omnibus legislation. A third is his voting for the FACE bill.

Of these, the last is in my opinion the worst, and I would like to see him say that it was unconstitutional and wrong. On the other hand, it's a) water under the bridge, not the kind of thing that has much connection to future action and b) something he was probably bamboozled into thinking blocked only "violent" protestors and the like. So it was billed at the time. Not a good vote, but the fact of it in the past of a Congressman who is enthusiastically, not to say pushily, pro-life right now does not cross my bright line.

The funding for Planned Parenthood is not good, and he has defended voting for the bill in debates. What I would like to see is for him to be on-board with defunding Planned Parenthood in the future. Now that the campaign among pro-lifers has gotten going for that purpose, my guess is he will get on-board with it, despite his defensiveness about past votes. These omnibus bills are the very devil. They're a kind of cancer on our legislative life and no doubt have tripped up many otherwise good Congressmen. The horse trading that goes on is incredible, and they include a grab bag of stuff. He should reconsider his defensiveness, but his having voted in the past for one of these monster bills that, inter alia, includes funding for PP does not cross a line for me. Moreover, the existence of the Hyde amendments which allegedly block funding for abortions per se has probably been used by party whips as a successful argument to many a pro-life congressman to vote for such omnibus bills. It is only recently that pro-lifers have seen it as realistically within their sights to block the allegedly "non-abortion" funding that still goes to PP from government coffers.

The campaigning for Specter was to my mind, even at the time, a tragedy for Santorum. Yes, it meant that he didn't have the courage to say no. Not everybody does have that courage all the time. The pressure he was under was intense, and no doubt the action was portrayed to him as a necessary and virtuous thing, to keep a Republican majority in the Senate. I took a certain grim and probably wrong satisfaction against the Republican leadership from the fact that that didn't work out for them. At all. As strategy, it stunk. Plus it was unprincipled. But I felt sorry for Santorum. And he's paid. The voters punished him.

This is a candidate who speaks up loudly and clearly, right now, about both abortion and opposition to the homosexual rights agenda and who I believe will and would take action in those areas if elected to office. And he takes flak for it (and downright nastiness) from the liberal media all the time. He even gets barbs about it from at least one fellow Republican campaigning against him who has said that he "Can't stop talking about gay people." To my mind, that's a kind of recommendation. That is the kind of thing that pro-lifers and social conservatives have been wanting for a long time.

I'm going to vote for him. It would be just as cowardly of me not to say so because I've made my stand on the Internet with conservative purists and don't like the thought of what they might say or think about me as it would have been in 2008 for me to hide my refusal to vote for McCain.

Well, would that it were so. But let's not get too excited too fast. After all, our pro-death opponents are not satisfied unless every woman everywhere has easy access to an abortion for whatever reason, and they'll howl that we're abrogating women's "constitutional rights" if we rein in a quodlibetal abortion license.

Several of the items Slate brings up, though examples of good legislation which will, God willing, save lives, are not direct challenges to Roe and its infamous companion, Doe v. Bolton. These include waiting periods and informed consent laws, some apparently even requiring women to be offered an opportunity to view an ultrasound of the unborn child. (Slate makes it sound like the woman must actually be shown the ultrasound, which appears to be incorrect. This summary by Guttmacher just describes offering the woman the opportunity to view an ultrasound.)

However, the prohibitions on abortion after fetal pain (which the statutes list as twenty weeks) are more plausibly challenges to Doe. This is because, at least if they are all like Idaho's, they apparently contain only a very narrow health exception which could not plausibly be applied to "mental health" or financial situation. Slate frets about the failure to file suit against such bills, but in August, a couple of months after the Slate article came out, such a suit was indeed filed, apparently focusing on the absence of the desired sweeping health exception. I don't have an update on the status of that suit; if a reader does, please post that in comments.

Is a terrible secret
Which, baffling the modern mind,
Lies concealed inveterate.

The surface truth, plainly enough,
Admits not of gainsay or dissent,
Seems to well conclude the stuff.

Yet gradually does it appear,
To focused reason, to rooted thinking,
That few errors indeed are more dear

Than this: supposing little children,
Like sad small adults, sunken and downtrodden;
Oppressed by the burden —

The burden of approaching expiration:
The old serpent with his death,
And his gospel of acquisition.

For with the laughter in falsetto
That filters down the hall
To our tired ears comes also:

News that falsifies the old cliché
By reminding the dull adults,
That slow-witted cretinous company —

Recalling to their minds
What bad theory took away
And cliché unjustly confined —

That we’re all getting younger
Indeed every last one,
Whose destiny is bound up with the young’uns.

For a newborn babe,
In becoming a three-year-old,
His awakened mind lacks naught but age;

Or a cute little girl
On the verge of being well and truly
A young woman, for all men a flag unfurled.

‘Tis simply true that a child youth gains
Brains and body age
But hardly become decrepit or tamed:

O the child in growing youth gains
In him society procreates
In his flowering the cliché faints.

Every parent, no matter how aged
Or oppressed and dragged down
Need only think to his child as a babe

To say to himself in all truth
That “younger indeed I’m getting:
The babe in my arms was proof.”

As you get older, your productivity will, eventually, decline. If you live long enough, you will reach a point when you can no longer provide for yourself.

You cannot bake bread when you are young, bury it in the ground, and then dig it up and consume it when you are old. In your golden years, you must rely on someone younger and fitter to bake bread for you.

In every society, the old have some claim on the resources of the young. Only the nature of the claim varies.

From this, in syllogistic fashion, the author unpacks some implications for modern political economies.

However, what has come out recently is sufficiently important that I think the donation issue should be set aside when discussing it. For one thing, live donation from a relative is what the parents are proposing and hope will be possible, and that is the most defensible form of vital organ donation. For another thing, the ramifications of what they have run into, especially just now in our national life, are much wider than organ donation.

The post that has kicked off a firestorm on the pro-life internet, which you may have already seen, is here. Here is the AP story. Briefly, parents of a mentally disabled child being treated a CHOP claim that, after the child's regular doctor gave them the impression that their child was eligible for transplant, they were expressly told in an interview with a doctor and a social worker that their child could not receive a kidney transplant because she is "mentally retarded" and because of her "quality of life." The social worker also cited the concern that in thirty years (if the parents themselves are dead by that time) the child would not take anti-rejection medications. Here are some quotations:

In the middle of both papers, he highlighted in pink two phrases. Paper number one has the words, “Mentally Retarded” in cotton candy pink right under Hepatitis C. Paper number two has the phrase, “Brain Damage” in the same pink right under HIV.

[snip]

I put my hand up. “Stop talking for a minute. Did you just say that Amelia shouldn’t have the transplant done because she is mentally retarded. I am confused. Did you really just say that?”

[snip]

I point to the paper and he lets me rant a minute. I can’t stop pointing to the paper. “This phrase. This word. This is why she can’t have the transplant done.”

“Yes.”

I begin to shake. My whole body trembles and he begins to tell me how she will never be able to get on the waiting list because she is mentally retarded.

A bit of hope. I sit up and get excited.

“Oh, that’s ok! We plan on donating. If we aren’t a match, we come from a large family and someone will donate. We don’t want to be on the list. We will find our own donor.”

“Noooo. She—is—not—eligible –because—of—her—quality– of –life—Because—of—her—mental—delays” He says each word very slowly as if I am hard of hearing.

[snip]

[The social worker] smirks a little. “Well, what happens when she is thirty and neither of you are around to take care of her. What happens to her then? Who will make sure she takes her medications then?”

One of the questions that arose in the course of Mearsheimer's and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer's blurb was whether or not Atzmon, the author of the bizarre book that Mearsheimer blurbed, is either a Holocaust denier or Holocaust revisionist. Mearsheimer, in the course of doubling down and refusing to budge, stated unequivocally:

I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that indicate he 'traffics in Holocaust denial.

Notice that this concerns other things Atzmon has written, not just the book Mearsheimer blurbed. Like Leiter, who blandly declared Atzmon (on the basis of extremely brief research) a "cosmopolitan" rather than an anti-semite, Mearsheimer declares him no Holocaust denier at all.

In the very first comment on Mearsheimer's post defending himself (and Atzmon), a reader attempted to provide more data. The reader provided a partial quotation and a link. I am here providing a longer quotation with a different link to the same post. Here is Atzmon on the Holocaust (emphasis added).

It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little anecdote to elaborate on:

If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple question for more than a while.

[snip]

I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?

I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.

If this is not "trafficking" in Holocaust denial, I'm not sure what would count. In my earlier post I pointed out that Atzmon plays the post-modernist and says that he "neither affirms nor denies" the Holocaust. That's bad enough. Oddly, the postmodern mask seems to have slipped here. He's talking about "historical sense" and saying in so many words that such Holocaust details as the desire of the Nazis to eradicate the Jews from the Reich and the existence of a death camp at Auschwitz do not make historical sense. Yet I have no evidence that Mearsheimer and Leiter have revised their opinion on the subject or on Mearsheimer's endorsement of Atzmon, despite the fact that this information was made available to Mearsheimer. If readers have evidence that either Mearsheimer or Leiter has done a 180 and repudiated Atzmon, do post that evidence in comments at Extra Thoughts.

One of the stories mentions an attempt to "promote meetings of reconciliation" between Christians and Muslims. Um, sure: Group A beats, kidnaps, and tortures the children of Group B and destroys its places of worship; Group B does nothing of the kind to Group A. So what we really need is a meeting of reconciliation between these opposed groups. I don't think so. The situation calls for official keepers of the peace, official posses, and official hangmen to protect, rescue, and avenge the innocent. But in Muslim Pakistan, that's not likely to happen.

Meanwhile, let us pray for our brethren under persecution from merciless Islam.