cozcommunio

The following is a letter that Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University and Cafe Hayek (link on blogroll), sent to the President of the World Wildlife Fund on their earth hour Saturday night.

letter to Carter Roberts, President of the WWF:

Dear Mr. Roberts:

You and members of your organization worry that industrialization and economic growth are harming the earth’s environment. I worry that the intensifying hysteria about the state of the environment - and that the resulting hostility to economic growth - might harm humankind’s prospects for comfortable, healthy, enjoyable, and long lives.

So I commend you on your “Earth Hour” effort. Persuading people across the globe to turn off lights for one hour supplies the perfect symbol for modern environmentalism: a collective effort to return humankind to the dark ages.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

By the way, of course, the WWF should award some special prize to the North Korean government, for that government keeps North Koreans not in any meager “Earth Hour,” or even “Earth Day,” but in what WWFers might call “Earth Decades” — very little light ever. This picture of the Korean peninsula speaks volumes — the Dark Ages today; a society keeping its carbon footprint tiny. Of course, in doing so it keeps itself also desperately poor, often even to the point of starvation.

The following are remarks made by John Paul II on December 16, 1997 on the importance of the great American experiment:

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain “self-evident” truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by “nature’s God.” Thus they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory, but a great experiment in what George Washington called “ordered liberty”: an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good. Reading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities toward the family and toward the common good of the community. Their authors clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability, and no happiness without respect and support for the natural units or groupings through which people exist, develop, and seek the higher purposes of life in concert with others.

The American democratic experiment has been successful in many ways. Millions of people around the world look to the United States as a model in their search for freedom, dignity, and prosperity. But the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native-born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic. Their commitment to build a free society with liberty and justice for all must be constantly renewed if the United States is to fulfill the destiny to which the Founders pledged their “lives . . . fortunes . . . and sacred honor.”

John Dickinson, Chairman of the Committee for the Declaration of Independence, said in 1776: “Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of preexisting rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals; but come from the King of Kings and the Lord of all the earth.” Indeed it may be asked whether the American democratic experiment would have been possible, or how well it will succeed in the future, without a deeply rooted vision of divine providence over the individual and over the fate of nations.

Whoppers She Won’t Confess To

• She didn’t know about the FALN pardons.

• She didn’t know that her brothers were being paid to get pardons that Clinton granted.

• Taking the White House gifts was a clerical error.

• She didn’t know that her staff would fire the travel office staff after she told them to do so.

• She didn’t know that the Peter Paul fundraiser in Hollywood in 2000 cost $700,000 more than she reported it had.

• She opposed NAFTA at the time.

• She was instrumental in the Irish peace process.

• She urged Bill to intervene in Rwanda.

• She played a role in the ’90s economic recovery.

• The billing records showed up on their own.

• She thought Bill was innocent when the Monica scandal broke.

• She was always a Yankees fan.

• She had nothing to do with the New Square Hasidic pardons (after they voted for her 1,400-12 and she attended a meeting at the White House about the pardons).

• She negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia (who were released the day before she got there).

The Goldwater Institute says no and so does the Constitution of the state of Arizona. A private organization, Goldwater Institute, is fighting to end government money to help private businesses. Does the Gift prohibition in the Arizona Constitution have any meaning. Read George Will’s column today.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/will031608.php3

The Principle of Subsidiarity is a concept that the Catholic church teaches that many of my freedom loving friends would appreciate. It is also a concept that quit a number of the American Catholic Bishops don’t understand.

The following comments are from a piece David Bosnich for the Acton Institute.

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

As our founding fathers made clear in The Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution was designed to leave many issues of great importance in the hands of the states. The federal government was to do only those things which the individual states could not effectively do for themselves. The subsidiarity principle was at work in the foundation of our nation. But from the New Deal era onwards, there has been a steady growth in federal power at the expense of the states. This has sparked a renewed interest in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves all powers not delegated to the federal government to the states or to the people.

John Paul II wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility.

Link to full essay:

http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_article_200.php

When the markets are de-leveraging like they are currently, some rich are getting poorer. The Carlyle Group (a firm that runs money for the super rich and politically connected)is a powerful Washington-based private-equity firm which currently is in the process of collapsing. The companies shares are down over 80% since problems were disclosed last week. The Carlyle Capital Corp. is heavily leveraged, in some accounts over 30 times. What this means is if they liked a position they borrow from investment banking firms with say only 3.34% money down (this gives them a 30 times leverage). If the position goes up in value they would score monster returns on their investment. The problem today is their investments are going down in value do the sub-prime and credit market problems. So they are experiencing monster loses and their bankers are demanding they put up more money. These capital calls are forcing them to liquidation positions into weak market. The firm is well known for the dozens of world political figures and luminaries it has employed and has as investors in the fund include George H. W. Bush and James A. Baker III. Carlyle’s current chairman is Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM and Nabisco. The Carlyle Capital Corp. is just one of the funds that the Carlyle Group runs. It is a mortgage investment fund. A year ago it was valued over $22.7 billion in the last year it has lost over 97% of its value. Here is a link to today’s Wall Street Journal a story:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120537974320632835.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news

The moral to the story is leverage can make you rich in rising market and it can make you poor in weak markets. Leverage is a double edge sword.

David Mamet in an article in The Village Voice “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” lays out how he understands that people in a free society can solve their problems better with limited government intervention. Mamet is probably one of the most prominent American Play writers in the last 20 years. Here is the link to the piece:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,374064,374064,1.html

In the article he calls Thomas Sowell our greatest contemporary philosopher. After looking and writing about the drama of life for the last 30 years Mamet gets it. He understands that we need freedom to plan and determine our own lives. Government needs to have a limited and defined role in the process of ordering everyday life.

Warren Buffet was answering questions on CNBC this morning. There were a number of email questions regarding his advocacy of higher taxes for the rich and why he doesn’t voluntarily give more money to the government. His answer was that his charitable foundation probably does a better job of allocating resources then the government would do. This comment begs the question of why we should have higher tax rates to give more money to an entity that will not do a good job of allocation resources. I agree with Warren here that the people who work and produce the resources should decide how to allocate the resources. I wish Warren always agreed with Warren and let people decide how to spend the fruit of their labor. Or does Buffet only want certain people to be able to make these decision?.