During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese agreed amongst themselves to believe the fiction that man can be made altruistic, concerned only with the welfare of society, of the collective, in which he existed.  China fashioned a society mostly closely resembling in nature an ant hill, with the Chinese Communist Party its queen.  All were to zealously serve the Revolution.  The CCP would determine how an individual would serve, and decide upon whom served the Revolution felicitously, and who did not.  Those that the CCP determined were not good revolutionaries, or that stood in the way of the Glorious Revolution, paid dearly, often with their lives. 

But men are not ants.  Unlike worker ants in a colony, human beings have the individual capacity for reproduction, and are therefore innately and selfishly devoted to their own survival and propagation prospects.  The lie of human altruism that Chinese Communism embraced would ultimately force the unraveling of the society upon which it was founded.

Mao’s Little Red Book was the bible of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  Ordinary Chinese that wished to garner favor with the revolutionary authorities, or to just demonstrate their allegiances so that they weren’t harassed, carried it with them everywhere.  Knowing and understanding its tenets was required of every Party or Red Army aspirant.  But people who wished to achieve Party and Army membership did so for selfish reasons, in order to enhance their social status and enjoy the spoils that such membership afforded.  People were forced to lie about their altruistic nature, proving devotion to the Communist state by superficially internalizing Mao’s teachings, in order to selfishly acquire the meager benefits the state could bestow. 

It all ended when Mao died.  To its credit, after Mao’s death, the CCP realized that it could no longer restrain the selfish impulses of its people.  Madame Mao, the main enforcer of the Cultural Revolution lies, was banished, and China gradually unleashed the creative power of its people in order that they might enhance their survival and propagation prospects through efforts that did not necessarily include insincere concern for the Revolution.   The Chinese social experiment as a human ant colony was over. 

In the U.S., for at least the last three decades, American society, so far as its economic fortunes are concerned, has more or less depended on belief in the fiction, promulgated and encouraged by the Federal Reserve, a litany of other politicians and the economics fraternity, that money buys goods and services.  It doesn’t.  Goods and services buy goods and services.  Money is just a medium of exchange and a temporary store of value.  While there has lately grown a number of people who reject the fiction, not least Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has unfavorably compared the Fed to the Soviet politburo, the vast majority of the public have internalized and accepted the idea that monetary manipulations determine real economic outcomes.  Ironically, even the Fed admits that it has no such power. 

Underlying the fairly recent phenomenon of believing that money buys goods and services is the more durable assumption that economic growth is ever and always the end to which management of aggregate economic performance (belief in the possibility of which is another fiction) should strive.

As the Fed’s pronouncements on the economy and their planned monetary manipulations comprise something of a Little Red Book forming the foundations of the lies upon which American economic performance depends, it might be profitable to closely examine what the Fed has recently said to get an idea of what, exactly, is the fiction we are being asked to believe.  First, parsing the FOMC statement released yesterday (January 25, 2012):

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in December suggests that the economy has been expanding moderately, notwithstanding some slowing in global growth. While indicators point to some further improvement in overall labor market conditions, the unemployment rate remains elevated. Household spending has continued to advance, but growth in business fixed investment has slowed, and the housing sector remains depressed. Inflation has been subdued in recent months, and longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable.

The idea that economic growth is necessarily a social goal worth striving for, implied by the terms (“expanding moderately”, “further improvement”, “unemployment rate elevated”, “spending continues to advance, but”, etc.) used to describe it, is an unfounded premise upon which the idea of focused monetary manipulations depends.  What if economic stasis were the goal?  Does economic growth necessarily mean that the welfare of the individuals and households comprising the society is improving?  As America’s experience over the last three decades attests, economic growth can be robust according to measures evaluated by the Fed, while individual economic well-being improves very little.  All the “economic growth” of the last three decades, as measured in the dollars the Fed continually manipulates, hasn’t changed much of anything of the life of the average American since at least the 1970’s.  What if the measure were per capita income and its distribution?  If an economic system exists to serve the individuals and households comprising it, i.e., if an economic system is not imagined as a human ant hill, shouldn’t the metric used to judge its performance be how well it maximizes the welfare of the maximal number of its participants?

Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. The Committee expects economic growth over coming quarters to be modest and consequently anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually toward levels that the Committee judges to be consistent with its dual mandate. Strains in global financial markets continue to pose significant downside risks to the economic outlook. The Committee also anticipates that over coming quarters, inflation will run at levels at or below those consistent with the Committee’s dual mandate.

Employment and price stability are not correlated.  Employment can be low, while prices are rapidly increasing (the seventies); it can be high while the rate of price increases is declining (the eighties and nineties), or it can be low while prices are declining (the recent so-called Great Recession).  The two are not correlated, so can’t be causing each other, but it is a corollary of the fiction that money buys goods and services to believe that changes in monetary values determine employment levels. 

To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with the dual mandate, the Committee expects to maintain a highly accommodative stance for monetary policy.  In particular, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions–including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run–are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through late 2014.

“Accommodative” is code for devaluation of the currency in hopes that prices will increase, in hopes that aggregate economic growth will thereby obtain.  But if prices changes and employment levels are not correlated, as previously pointed out, and as anyone with just a bit of knowledge of economic history can easily discern, pursuing a strategy of accommodation is a chasing after the wind.  It is an attempt to appear as if something is being done while not doing anything. 

The Committee also decided to continue its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of securities as announced in September. The Committee is maintaining its existing policies of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. The Committee will regularly review the size and composition of its securities holdings and is prepared to adjust those holdings as appropriate to promote a stronger economic recovery in a context of price stability.

Continuing to “reinvest” in the housing market via mortgage-backed securities is an attempt to forestall further price declines in one particular sector of the economic system, which is only possible if it is believed that money buys goods and services.  If instead, it is acknowledged that money buys nothing, the strategy does nothing but change the overall price level.  If the price of a three bedroom, two bath house nominally increases, so too will the nominal prices of other goods and services, such that is worth roughly the same quantity of goods and services as before. 

But what of the long-term prognostications of these wizards of economics and finance?  What say their Little Red Book about the future?  From their “Longer-Run Goals and Policy Strategy”, also released on January 25, 2012:

Following careful deliberations at its recent meetings, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has reached broad agreement on the following principles regarding its longer-run goals and monetary policy strategy. The Committee intends to reaffirm these principles and to make adjustments as appropriate at its annual organizational meeting each January.

The FOMC is firmly committed to fulfilling its statutory mandate from the Congress of promoting maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. The Committee seeks to explain its monetary policy decisions to the public as clearly as possible. Such clarity facilitates well-informed decisionmaking by households and businesses, reduces economic and financial uncertainty, increases the effectiveness of monetary policy, and enhances transparency and accountability, which are essential in a democratic society.

What they really mean is that we understand that some Americans have grown skeptical at their ability to create economic growth where none obtained before.  As such, they think it prudent to telegraph loudly and clearly which lies we will expect folks to henceforth believe, and for how long, as it is imperative that everyone steadfastly believes in the illusions they are trying to create, if they are to have any hope of creating them. 

Inflation, employment, and long-term interest rates fluctuate over time in response to economic and financial disturbances. Moreover, monetary policy actions tend to influence economic activity and prices with a lag. Therefore, the Committee’s policy decisions reflect its longer-run goals, its medium-term outlook, and its assessments of the balance of risks, including risks to the financial system that could impede the attainment of the Committee’s goals.

They’re actually saying, though they won’t directly admit as much, that they can’t control price levels for goods and services, or employment levels, or the price of money, except in the short-term, and even then, with a substantial lag. 

The inflation rate over the longer run is primarily determined by monetary policy, and hence the Committee has the ability to specify a longer-run goal for inflation. The Committee judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate. Communicating this inflation goal clearly to the public helps keep longer-term inflation expectations firmly anchored, thereby fostering price stability and moderate long-term interest rates and enhancing the Committee’s ability to promote maximum employment in the face of significant economic disturbances.

The inflation rate over the short, medium or long-run is ever and always a monetary phenomenon.  It is never caused by demand fluctuations, because if demand, for example, increases to cause price increases, that is not inflation.  That is simply markets adjusting according to supply and demand metrics. 

Incredibly, the Fed sees no irony or logical inconsistencies with declaring that inflation at a rate of 2% is reflective of “price stability”.  True price stability implies that except for changes in underlying market conditions (expanded supplies, improved technologies, etc., increased uses to which a good or service might be put, etc.), prices do not change. 

Until the Fed began actively manipulating the money supply to attain its goal of steady inflation, prices were more apt to decline overall than to increase.  Why?  Because technological innovations were continually bringing the costs of production down.  Yet the Fed constantly fights the goods and services markets, attempting to impose inflation upon them, like economic castor oil, whether they need it or not.

The maximum level of employment is largely determined by nonmonetary factors that affect the structure and dynamics of the labor market. These factors may change over time and may not be directly measurable. Consequently, it would not be appropriate to specify a fixed goal for employment; rather, the Committee’s policy decisions must be informed by assessments of the maximum level of employment, recognizing that such assessments are necessarily uncertain and subject to revision. The Committee considers a wide range of indicators in making these assessments. Information about Committee participants’ estimates of the longer-run normal rates of output growth and unemployment is published four times per year in the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections. For example, in the most recent projections, FOMC participants’ estimates of the longer-run normal rate of unemployment had a central tendency of 5.2 percent to 6.0 percent, roughly unchanged from last January but substantially higher than the corresponding interval several years earlier.

It is quite magnanimous of the Fed to admit it doesn’t control employment levels—they aren’t “largely determined by nonmonetary factors”—in the long-run, they are solely determined by nonmonetary factors.  Labor may be nominally paid in money, but it is factually paid in goods and services. 

In setting monetary policy, the Committee seeks to mitigate deviations of inflation from its longer-run goal and deviations of employment from the Committee’s assessments of its maximum level. These objectives are generally complementary.  However, under circumstances in which the Committee judges that the objectives are not complementary, it follows a balanced approach in promoting them, taking into account the magnitude of the deviations and the potentially different time horizons over which employment and inflation are projected to return to levels judged consistent with its mandate.

The Fed really, really, really wants everyone to believe it controls real economic outcomes.  Though it has admitted in previous paragraphs that it does not control employment levels (and implicitly thereby, aggregate economic output—the two are almost perfectly correlated), it still alleges it can balance all these economic factors on the head of a pin in order to achieve nirvana—aggregate economic growth—supposedly the result when its dual mandates are achieved.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Allow me to finish with some charts, ironically provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, on aggregate economic measures over time, revealing how little control over things, outside of nominal prices, the Fed really has.  The first is of the Consumer Price Index:

It’s pretty much a straight, uniformly-sloping upward line since the early seventies.  Indeed, inflation is ever and always a monetary phenomenon, thus it appears that the Fed, which controls the monetary levers, has done just as it desires, propelling prices ever higher.  The last little blip down is probably because the Fed used up its ability to jack up nominal prices of goods and services through interest rates (it hit the liquidity trap), and had to resort to simply printing new bills and pixels (to expand its balance sheet three-fold).  Thus, there was a longer-than-usual lag in effect than before, as it had previously refrained from creating new claims on taxpayers out of thin air, as printing money entails.

Now, the Fed Funds Rate over time.  Remember that the shaded areas indication recessions, i.e., contractions in output.

Did the Fed prevent any recessions with its monetary manipulations?  How strongly correlated are consumer prices (previous graph) and the Fed Funds Rate?  Indeed, hardly at all, begging the question, what is it that made prices consistently rise over the last forty or so years?  Just a steady diet of more money than was needed to keep them consistently rising, no matter the level of output?

Now, Employment:

And the correlation between the Fed Funds rate and Employment is?  Exactly, not much, if at all.

Thus the main vehicle through which the Fed seeks to influence real economic outcomes—the Fed Funds Rate—shows little to no correlation with the levels of either employment or consumer prices.  Though bouncing around a bit with recessionary declines (the latest of which hasn’t been surmounted), employment marches steadily upwards, and so too, do prices.  The Fed Funds rate, meanwhile, is all over the map.  To believe that it has been so expertly managed, up, down and sideways, to cause Consumer Prices and Employment to so reliably climb, requires belief beyond understanding.

Yet still, the Fed peddles it and we buy it:  Money buys goods and services and should therefore be carefully managed to promote growth in the level of goods and services being bought and sold.  That money buys goods and services is a lie.  That it should be managed to achieve the greatest possible growth in output is a false premise.  That money could be managed to promote growth is a lie founded on a lie, buttressed with a false premise.

All the Fed has managed to achieve in over a half-century of active management of the money supply is a steady decrease in the purchasing power of money, and that, apparently as a by-product of its activist interventions to  decrease the value of money any time it appeared that contracting output might render it more valuable.

Halfway down the front page of the document, something called “Amerigroup Mortgage Corporation, a VA Authorized Direct Lender” claims it “has saved veterans an average of $216.31**per month (often much more), which could be an extra $2,600 or more per year in your pocket!”

It promises that I can skip my next mortgage payment and keep the money for personal use.

It provides that the following benefits are available under this refinance program:

-Skip your next mortgage payment***

-Lower your monthly mortgage payments

-Get an escrow refund back from your current lender***

-No appraisal–equity not required

-No income qualification/verification

-Quick and easy Streamline process

-Average closing in 8-10 days

-Authorized direct VA lender

and notes that “Veterans with imperfect credit may be eligible to receive the same low interest rates as those with excellent credit.

It provides that loan specialists are available 7 days a week (including Sat. & Sun.), with extended phone hours from 9:00 am to 11:00 pm EST.

It offers, “P.S. This mortgage will be guaranteed by the Veterans Benefit Administration.”

“Double wide homes or manufactured housing eligible.”

In the fine print on the back, it explains how the ** and *** claims are calculated. 

I don’t have a mortgage on my house, so I’m not their target audience, but really, selling a refinance by allowing someone to skip a payment?  That is slum-lord, subprime nonsense.  No payments are ever skipped.  If the closing of the transaction means that no check has to be written that month, the “skipped” payment is simply paid in interest at the closing, either towards the payoff of the old loan, or the interest that accrues on the new one until the first payment. 

And getting an escrow refund as motivation for refinancing?  The mortgage company must have profound trust in the stupidity of their customers.  Indeed, the old loan’s escrow is refunded once it is paid off.  But the new loan establishes a new escrow account.  The new loan’s escrow will be rolled into the loan balance, and amortized over thirty years, so the couple of thousand dollars received as a refund for the old escrow account is really just extending and pretending. 

And the loan requires no appraisal, no equity, no income qualification and no verification of income?  My future tax liability is serving as guarantor for a loan to someone that might have no job, against a home in which they have zero or negative equity, secured by a residence that we aren’t even sure exists, and certainly can make no claims as to its value?  The cure for subprime madness that precipitated the Great Recession is more and greater subprime madness?

Aside from all the supposed benefits of the refinance, the flier comes plastered with connotations making it look like an official government document–as if Amerigroup Mortgage Corporation were in fact an arm of the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

This is naked exploitation of the ignorance of the average veteran concerning the mortgage industry in general and the benefits he is due in particular.  The sad thing is, this sort of sales job, which was not at all unusual before the crash, has apparently made its return (if in fact it ever ended).  Imagine how sleazy you have to be to exploit a fellow human’s ignorance like this–and though I generally loathe playing the “service to our country card”, this is specifically directed to veterans that have served in some capacity or another.  I had plenty of mortgage company clients, during the late nineties and early aughts especially, that were so sleazy (e.g., Ameriquest) that after conducting a closing for them, I wanted to go take a bath.  Though I had mainly fired them all or they had failed (Ameriquest, on both counts) by the time I quit, the sleaze was hard to wash away.  

Whatever it is I decide to do w/ my extra time now that my son is better, it won’t be representing an outfit like this.  It takes too long to get clean afterwards.

I noticed this book lying on the coffee table when I awoke this morning.  I think it was left there by my high school senior son, whose Sunday school class was using it as a worship/study guide.  It was a Saturday, the first of the off-season, when there’s no afternoon gridiron clash on television to make the morning’s chores and the week’s indignities worth enduring  (the three games left in the NFL season on championship weekend are just bittersweet sorrow for a season mostly gone).  The day started dark and grey and late, one of those days where thick overcast made it seem the sun had slept in.  The gloom matched my mood.  I really depend too much on watching football for tightening the play in the joints of my time. 

I would ordinarily never read a book like this.  To otherwise kill the three hours it took to read it, I would rather walk pointlessly around the neighborhood, doing like my dog-trotting neighbors, shuffling along behind the dog with a poop bag in hand.   Or maybe watch a Say Yes to the Dress marathon on cable with my teenage daughter.   Anything but subject myself to the torture of reading the ruminations of some California mega-church preacher about how Jesus can make me happy.  But shortly after I woke, the deluge presaged by the sleeping-in sun arrived, the latest of several already this January.  The torrent precluded a pointless walk, and as the cable is now a satellite dish, so too was the option of watching bad television (monsoon rains always knock out the dish).  The wife was reading on her Kindle and not in a playful mood.  Twenty plus years of monogamous matrimony always trends to celibacy.  The teenagers were in their beds asleep, where they would be for balance of the morning.  There were a couple of history books I had been reading in my spare time, but it was a Saturday morning, so most of my intellect had been washed away in a river of beer the night before.  I figured, what the hell.  It was either read the book or hang myself (an allusion to comedian Jim Gaffigan’s skit where he explains that bowling is what you do on a rainy day in lieu of killing yourself).  As reading the book seemed the option requiring less effort, I reached over and picked it up. 

The book was thin—only 175 pages—and paperback, which is to me still the easiest, most comfortable, most enjoyable way to engage a lengthy writing.  I doubt I’ll ever get past the notion of a great book as an intellectual delight made flesh, and I don’t care that it have a hard spine.  In fact, I rather prefer a paperback, because it is amenable to one-hand manipulation and control, which is important when relaxing on a couch or in bed.  I know Kindles can do that, too, but the words of a book aren’t particular to the sensory experience of a Kindle.  A Kindle seems so remote and unfeeling.  You can’t put a dog-eared Kindle book on the bookshelf after the reading is done, savoring its memory and insights a bit each time you walk past.

On the cover of the book, above its title, were two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one up and one down.  I think it was intended to mean that “crazy love” flowed down from God to mankind and back up to God from mankind.  I think.  I’m not quite sure because it was never explicitly discussed in the text of the book.  If the arrows mean something else, please forgive me, Mr. Chan, for not getting the point. 

I figured out even before the book began that I probably wasn’t its target audience.  There was a prayer page before the contents or dedication page that hinted right away that this wasn’t meant for me:

Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Grace.

Your forgiveness is so good that I struggle with believing it at

Times.  Thank You for rescuing me from myself and giving me

Your Holy Spirit.  Your love is better than life.

Exactly what, I thought, might Mr. Chan have done that requires forgiveness?  Write this book?  Why did he need to be rescued from himself?  If Chan was alluding to the Christian doctrine of original sin, whereby men are considered sinners just by dint of their existence, then there was no doubt I was not his target audience.  It seems the most ridiculous and theologically illogical doctrine the Christian church has devised.  How can a God that is, as Judeo-Christian theology claims, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, infinite and perfect in every realm, not be the immanent cause of everything?  And if God is the cause of everything, then why would he create something, i.e., humanity, inherently wicked, needing his forgiveness by dint of having been created, by him?  The doctrine of original sin, of wickedness arising solely out of the fact of existence, stands in direct contradiction to the idea of a God that is the cause of everything, and that everything thus caused is good, unless it can be imagined that God contradicts his own nature in order to—do what?—keep himself entertained?  Such an idea implicitly operates to limit God’s infinite power, presence, knowledge and eternal perfection, and while mathematics may occasionally pretend that infinities can be limited to a particular domain, there is no place for a limited infinity in the logic of creation.  Either God is infinite in every realm and thereby responsible for all of creation, including human beings, or he isn’t. 

But then, Christian theology is rife with logical conundrums.  The existence of evil, particularly evil that accompanies the mere fact of human existence, nests at the core of its logical inconsistencies.  If any part of creation is evil, then God is not infinite, perfect and eternal.  If God is perfect and eternal and infinite in power, presence and knowledge, then evil, i.e., the contravention of his will, is not possible.  After reading the opening prayer, it occurred to me that if the following 175 pages are premised on Mr. Chan’s need for forgiveness for the fact of his existence, well, maybe I should have gone with the other option. 

I read the book anyway.  Remarkably, it wasn’t half-bad.  Chan mainly doesn’t bother with exploring Christianity’s logical conundrums, but instead focuses his efforts on identifying and explaining the ennui that besets individuals in a rich culture such as ours, speaking specifically as to how materialistic church-going Christians often lead a vain and shallow existence, only really ever “lukewarm” in their devotion to living as Christ taught.  He offers a closer walk, a “crazy love”, for Christ as the way to fill the void of meaning and purpose in a life where one’s innate material needs are more or less easily met.  The reward for doing so is a fulfilling life here on earth (with which I agree), and heaven afterwards (which seems superfluous).   Though employing the infrastructure of a Christian theology with which I mostly disagree (Trinitarian doctrine, for example, which to my mind is a needless bifurcation of the infinity of God), he still manages to capture the essence of the troubles afflicting modern man (Christian and otherwise) in the face of remarkable affluence and abundance.

Man, like all of God’s creatures, is necessarily designed for survival, the main impediments and limitations to which have historically been acquiring the resources (food, water, shelter) required to sustain existence.  Man was not designed to live in a world where the necessaries of life are so abundant that he must restrain, for example, his impulse to eat, but in affluent societies, such is precisely the challenge of existence he faces.  When food isn’t plentiful, it is clear that securing enough food to stay alive carries the immediate meaning and purpose for one’s life.   When food is so abundant that survival instead depends on refusing to eat more than is required, it is easy to see the psychological confusion and despair that might result. 

Chan advocates giving one’s life over to Christ as the answer.  But what, exactly, does it mean to give one’s life completely to Christ?  For Chan, like so many other theologians, serving Christ equates to serving others.  But how, exactly, is that accomplished?  Is it not enough to do as Christ taught, and “love thy neighbor as thy self”?  How far must one go to live in the service of Christ?  Should one be willing to abandon everything, including the means through which the necessaries of life are acquired, in order to follow Christ by serving man?  Wouldn’t that just impose upon others the obligation to provide for you what you are able, but refuse, to provide for yourself?  Is that how one loves thy neighbor as thyself?  

Chan relates that after a trip to Africa where he witnessed first-hand the immense and humbling poverty afflicting so many in that benighted continent, he came home and sold his house, moving into a smaller one, so that he could donate the savings to mission work.  He said that pretty much everybody he knew thought he was crazy.  He didn’t say whether he told them that he was indeed crazy, crazy in love with Christ, as his book admonishes.   Most people couldn’t believe that he would so recklessly impair his own family’s welfare (he has a wife and four children).  But his family was in no danger of starving just because the size of their living quarters had been reduced.  Their survival was as assured as anyone’s, and in fact, it can be argued that the extravagances routinely bestowed on American children impair, rather than improve, their survivability prospects.  The marriage pact legally and morally requires the spouses to support each other and any children they may have, meaning that each spouse is responsible for meeting their own survival needs, and the survival needs of the family.  The obligation does not extend to providing McMansions and fancy cars.  Chan was perfectly justified in doing what he did.  Crazy love should not be a suicide pact, but neither should confusing wants with needs impair the ability to do as Christ’s ethic moves one to act.

I was disappointed Chan did not more closely explore the meaning of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 22:39 that you should, “Love your neighbor as yourself”.  Though I am not Christian, in that I don’t believe in miracles or magic or specifically, the Resurrection, this little sentence forms the ethical foundation of my life.  But it is a bit more complicated than it at first glance seems. 

Most folks basically quit listening after they hear the part about “love your neighbor”, thinking that serving in the soup kitchen or donating old clothes and toys to the relief agency means they have shown their love for their neighbor.  It may be that doing such things reveals consideration for the welfare of others.  But the admonition is to love your neighbor as yourself.  It implies or assumes self-consideration, i.e., self-love, sufficient to guide one’s actions directed toward others.   But how can anyone love themselves, if the very basis of their existence is wickedness and evil?  Original sin and the Golden Rule don’t really jibe very well. 

The answer is to reject the doctrine of original sin.  The doctrine is a creation of latter-day theologians and arises out of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden, when they refused to heed God’s warning to not eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Since Adam and Eve disobeyed God, all of their progeny, i.e., all of humanity, was condemned, according to the doctrine, as innately evil.  Adam and Eve were living in eternal bliss prior to disobeying God, after which God afflicted them with mortality and expelled them from the Garden of Eden.   While nothing about the biblical story condemns all of mankind as evil, it has been twisted and contorted by both Christian and Jewish theologians, many of whom were undoubtedly more interested in glorifying and magnifying their own power and prestige than in interpreting the allegorical truths of the story, to prove the innate wickedness of man that can only be absolved through God’s redemptive grace.  It benefits the priesthood greatly (see Medieval Catholicism) to instill in the laity fear, anxiety and loathing at having disobeying God , whose will they are charged with interpreting and revealing, and whose redemption they dispense, often for a fee.   

In my view, the story of Adam and Eve is simply an allegorical tale of the dawn of man’s sentience; of his ability to grasp that his existence is finite in time and space.  Man’s mind had gradually evolved to become ever more powerful until finally he was able to grasp that he existed, and therefore one day would not, yoking his heart and mind to the terrible burden of understanding his own mortality.  Besides, the story can’t be about disobeying God without doing great violence to the idea of God’s infinity.  So long as God remains all-powerful, all-knowing and all-present, nothing happens, including his betrayal, without him. 

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Biblical tale provides that God lamented that man was now “like one of us” (Genesis 3:22—as an aside, “us” seems a curious way for God to have described himself—a matter for another day).  Knowledge allowed man to understand, like God, which actions were good, i.e., which actions enhanced his own survivability, and also which were evil, i.e., which actions impaired survivability.  Before the awakening of his mind, man was like the rest of the animals, instinctively responding to external stimuli, unaware of why or how a particular response might be good or bad.  Animals are incapable of intentionally doing bad.  Evolution theory tells us that living creatures can’t intentionally impair their prospects for survival, else their species would not long exist.  Dogs do not commit suicide.  Yet man alone can act in ways, which from his perspective (not God’s), are evil.  There are, in fact, suicidal men.  Man’s powerful intellect that provides him sentience and the knowledge of good and evil also allows him to overcome his instinctive impulses in the service of destroying himself.   Only man can commit suicide, and the ability to do so is directly derived from his intellect having grown so powerful that it can override his instinct.   

After the mental awakening, man was able to determine which stimuli response tended to be good, i.e., tended to enhance survivability prospects, and which were bad, i.e., impairing survival, and he was able to look past the immediate decision moment to see what the long-term impacts on survivability might be.  Knowledge provided him the power to choose the best response to environmental stimuli.  Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is not a tale about what happens when God is disobeyed.  It is an allegorical tale about the evolutionary awakening of man’s mind.

With mankind’s original sin thus cleansed in a bath of objective interpretation of the allegorical tale from which it arose, it is easy to see how man might love himself so that he can love his neighbor.  Man’s love for himself arises out of Jesus’ first and greatest commandment –to love God with all one’s heart and soul and mind.  From the 284 muscles in a caterpillar’s head (an example that Chan uses), to the billions upon billions of stars in the galaxies, to every last Homo sapiens ever born, God created them all, sustained them all, and was constituted in every last speck of every last one of them.  Mankind is just a ripple in the fabric of God, and individual men, just threads in the ripple.  Or, as Baruch Spinoza, my favorite seventeenth century heretic Jew philosopher, might say, men are space- and time-limited modes of God.  It would be impossible to love God and not also love one’s self.  To me, “crazy love” means knowing and understanding and loving God, as manifest in the towering majesty of his creation, including the little slice of it that comprises me.   It is simultaneously exalting and humbling to imagine that God did not believe his universe complete without fashioning out of the fabric of his being the unique creature that is me.  Everyone should feel similarly awed and humbled about their creation and existence, a feeling that depends not in the least upon their standing among the hierarchy of humanity.     

In this view, meaning and purpose is derived from existence.   One needs not look outside themselves to find the purpose for which they have been created.  Solely by dint of their existence, each is necessarily a part of God’s infinite and perfect plan; a plan which finite beings can only ever view dimly, as through a looking glass.  It doesn’t take imagining the reward of heaven that awaits after devoting one’s life to serving Christ to give life meaning and purpose.  Existence, i.e., survival and propagation through space and time for so long as is possible, is enough.  Existence is the only meaning and purpose for which God’s will in our lives is conclusively revealed.  If the God of infinite power did not mean for us to exist, then how could we?  It is impudent to question, like the Talmudic scholars (See Everyman’s Talmud, Abraham Cohen, 1949, p. 95), whether or not God should even have created man.  Man exists because God, in all his majesty, deigned to create him.  That should be enough.

But all this leaves us right back where Chan started, physically comfortable, but psychically yearning for something meaningful to fill the empty hours between the minimal exertions required to ensure, so far as is possible, the continuation of our existence.  We were created to engage life as an existential struggle.  Trying to figure out what to do once the battle is won can be utterly maddening.

Chan says that we can resolve the dilemma through dedication (or for his Christian audience, rededication) of our lives to Christ.  But living a Christian ethic is also relatively easy—just treat your fellows as you would wish to be treated and you’ve pretty much got it licked.  It has little to do with whether one cusses, or drinks beer, or goes to church, or serves on a charity board, as Chan correctly observes. 

Chan provides some examples of people he thinks have “crazy love” for Christ, i.e., a dedication do more than just live the Christian ethic, offering this a way out of the ennui that always results when life is otherwise comfortable and secure.  There was the ex-prostitute that kept her home in the hard end of town open to anyone from the streets that needed help.  There was the doctor in Africa that had all his teeth pulled just so he wouldn’t suffer any dental problems impeding his work against a deadly disease.  There were the Christian music songwriters that never took a penny of royalties for their tunes.  These are fine examples of meaningful ways to live when survival is more or less assured.  They offer a better way, when, as inevitably happens, one fails at finding meaning and purpose in the cultural impulse for relentless accumulation of money and power and prestige far beyond one’s needs.  There is nothing more banal than the cult of American materialism.  Trying to make the acquisition of the next cool technological gadget, or car, or house, or clothes the meaning and purpose of one’s life is attempting to fashion meaning and purpose from a false god, and false gods always ultimately consume the ones that worship them.

But Christ needn’t necessarily be implicated in the dedication of one’s life to serving others.  Once survival is more or less assured, meaning and purpose can be found by Christian and non-Christian alike in assisting others with their survival struggle.  The impulse to do so can arise from the love of God and self-love, as I’ve described as the idea animating the Golden Rule.  It can be motivated, like Chan recommends, by the thought of taking up one’s cross in crazy love for Christ.  It can be motivated by the promise of heavenly rewards.  Or it can just be the humanitarian instinct that understands, though our intellect often refuses to acknowledge, that our welfare is intricately and eternally bound to the welfare of all others.  It doesn’t matter how it is that one rejects the false gods of wealth, power and honor for something more significant and real like helping others in their existential struggle.  Banishing the ennui of living in a land of plenty—a “rich country”, as Chan puts it—requires rejecting its false gods by whatever means one can. 

Chan wisely refrains from explicitly exhorting people to abandon everything when they fall crazy in love with Christ.  He acknowledges that even among those filled with this crazy love, determining the appropriate action in the premises is a profoundly subjective affair. 

Thus it took one dreary Saturday morning to compel me to read Chan’s book.  I’m glad I did.  It took even more–a Sunday morning church service (during which time I pondered Chan, not the preacher), two NFL conference championship games, and yet another round of central Alabama tornadoes before I was able to sort through the problems posed by Chan, and reduce my observations to writing.   While I can never believe in the divinity of Christ (except in as much as all men are divine little ripples in the fabric of God), I still believe that Christ’s teachings offer a profoundly satisfying and useful ethic for life.  Chan gets a lot right—the awesomeness of God, as an absolute matter, and relative to man’s puniness; the impossibility of man ever fully understanding God; the fragility and finitude of life; the hollowness of materialism; the emptiness of wearing one’s religion as an accouterment in social battle; the importance of living moment to moment in an unpredictable world; the existence of purpose and meaning, no matter how difficult it might be to see or understand.   

Chan pinpoints the source of ennui and despair that comes with living in a rich country as the failure of so many lukewarm Christians to really devote their lives to Christ. 

I would agree in principle, but would explain it differently.  The source of our ennui and despair is that life is too easy; we are survival machines that lack meaning and purpose when we have successfully ensured, so far as is possible, the continuation of our existence.  Once survival is assured, spending our superfluous time and resources on winning the acquisition, power and honor game always proves meaningless.   (Watching too much football such as I do can be a similarly meaningless chasing after a false god, but mainly only if the game is treated as something more substantial than just a game).  The trick is to realize that it is not just our survival with which we are instinctively concerned, but also the survival, in varying degrees and magnitude, of every single member of our species.  When a baby in Somalia starves, we all feel a bit of its pain—not as much, from the comfort of our well-fed lives a half world away, as its mother, but a measure of pain nonetheless.  If survival is so easy in the place we are that ennui and existential angst sets in, so long as survival is difficult and doubtful elsewhere, the psyche can be salved by aiding others in their struggles.  After all, not only am I a little slice of God, so too is everyone else.

I owe most of my theology/philosophy of existence to Judeo-Christian doctrines, mainly as expostulated by Baruch Spinoza, previously mentioned as my favorite seventeenth century heretic Jew philosopher.  Spinoza was variously described as an atheist, or “that God-intoxicated philosopher”.  My understanding of God and what His omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence logically and objectively means is directly derived from and grounded in Part One, “Concerning God”, of his masterpiece, Ethics.  His view of God is very similar, and has been compared, to Buddhism, and so too is my philosophy of existence, so far as I understand the religion. 

Roughly two of my last two and a half years have been spent more or less solely focused on caring for my son as he struggled to survive his second bout with leukemia.  There is no existential angst when engaged in a struggle like that.  There are no lukewarm Christians in foxholes.  I knew that the meaning and purpose of my life at that time was to aid and comfort my son in his existential struggle, whatever its outcome might be.  But now, things have settled down, he’s doing well, and I’m faced with focusing my efforts elsewhere.  I’m not rich, but I have enough money that I don’t need much anymore.  Setting my sights on making more money when more money isn’t really needed seems a perfect prescription for ennui and despair of the type I felt about four or five years ago in the midst of the real estate boom.  It seems I am presently faced with something of the same problem explored by Chan, which is perhaps a part of why the book resonated with me.

It is not an option not considered by Chan that business people, i.e., capitalists, can serve God by serving others simply through the conduct of their business.  It may be time for me to start a new business as the way to meaningful life.  Capitalists serve others and themselves (as Adam Smith ably pointed out so many years ago) by providing a service or good which others desire.  But there’s no requirement that capitalists plow all of their profits into the making of more profit.  They could, for example, dole them out to the employees upon whom their success depends.  Imagine how many millionaires Sam Walton might have made of rank and file Walmart employees had he vested them with an ownership interest in the profits the firm generated.  Walmart served its customers by exploiting its efficiencies to sell its wares at the lowest possible cost.  It could have done more, and enhanced its employee’s lives and fortunes, most of whom were paid the lowest market-clearing wage possible, by sharing the bounty of their efforts with them.  But then, Walmart employees would have eventually discovered themselves suffering the angst that accompanies riches.  The cycle never ends, as the Buddhists teach.

Crazy Love is reasonably well-written, and a good starting point if existence is beginning to lose its edge in meaning and purpose for you.  You may agree with Chan that the problem is best resolved through devoting one’s life to Christ.  If like me, you can’t quite even grasp what devoting one’s life to Christ means, the book should still help you begin to realize something of the source of your despair so that you can dig a little deeper for answers.  If falling in the latter category, I highly recommend eventually reading Spinoza.  He certainly illuminated my path.

Let’s just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.

It doesn’t matter that Mr. Obama can’t get the economy out of second gear. It doesn’t matter that he cynically betrayed his core promise as a candidate to be a unifying president. It doesn’t matter that he keeps blaming Bush. It doesn’t matter that he thinks ATMs are weapons of employment destruction. It doesn’t matter that Tim Geithner remains secretary of Treasury. It doesn’t matter that the result of his “reset” with Russia is Moscow selling fighter jets to Damascus. It doesn’t matter that the Obama name is synonymous with the most unpopular law in memory. It doesn’t matter that his wife thinks America doesn’t deserve him. It doesn’t matter that the Evel Knievel theory of fiscal stimulus isn’t going to make it over the Snake River Canyon of debt.

Above all, it doesn’t matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing. All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won’t be another fiasco. But they can’t be reasonably sure, so it’s going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know.

For all the Obama haters, there is some consolation in a second term for the President:  The US will be done with him after 2016.  He can’t run again.  He can become a ”statesman” like Hillary’s husband.  Of course, he could put up Michelle as a candidate, sort of like Bill did with Hillary, first in the Senate, and then for President.  We’re looking more and more like Argentina every day.

Much has been argued over the benefits and demerits of the practices of private equity firms.  Private equity has been accused of being vulture capitalism (Rick Perry), swooping in to feed on the carrion of dying companies and the employees that depend on them for survival.  Alternatively, it has been hailed as performing a necessary capitalist function, seeking out firms that are either poorly managed or ill-positioned competitively, and creatively destroying the firm’s impediments to success, returning it to competitiveness in the marketplace, or in the circumstance that it can’t be saved, reaping whatever gains can be had by liquidation and moving on. 

Capitalism recently had a brush with death, or at least did its financial, housing and automobile manufacturing sectors in the US and elsewhere.  What might a former private equity capitalist have done in the face of such a calamity?  Had a private equity capitalist been in charge of the White House (or perhaps better, the Federal Reserve), would they have allowed markets to determine the fates of firms who had irresponsibly and ineffectively managed risk?  Risk management, after all, is the sine qua non of firm management.  To put the point succinctly, would there have been TARPs I and II, the bailout of AIG, the bailouts of Chrysler and GM, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie and the housing market in general, the bailout of GMAC (now Ally), etc, ad nauseum?  After all, the foundational premise of the argument for private equity is that market-based capitalism requires the continual restructuring of firms, or even their occasional elimination, in order to ensure economic vitality such that the great and glorious growth upon which capitalism depends may proceed.   It’s hard to see how these bailouts in the Great Recession helped that process along. 

In fact, weren’t all these bailouts the diametric opposite of what a creatively destructive private equity manager might believe was appropriate?  Wouldn’t a private equity capitalist have celebrated the failures as the necessary antecedent to growth? 

Marx (generally regarded as the first to point out capitalism’s creative destruction tendencies, even if he never explicitly used the term) observed that capitalism is inherently unstable because it trends to the concentration of wealth, i.e., capital accumulation, that then trends to overproduction (if new markets can’t be imperialistically pried open), ultimately yielding collapse.  From the collapse arises a new economic order, leaner and more efficient than the bloated one it replaced, in a process that continues incessantly, at least until the proletariat (the 99% in Occupy Wall Street vernacular) finally realizes the only ones benefiting from all this wealth creation and destruction are the bourgeois capitalists, and revolt to creatively destroy the social and cultural infrastructure allowing their exploitation.  It’s not hard to imagine that Marx would have considered private equity fund managers nothing more than particularly unsavory and pretentious bourgeois capitalists that believed themselves indispensable to a process of creation and destruction that would have carried on with or without them anyway.  

But how strongly does Mitt Romney believe in his past?  Does he really believe the narrative that Henninger asserts, that private equity firms like his saved America’s economy from stagnation and decline in the eighties by imposing market discipline on its takeover targets?  (Neverminding the recent and immense stagnation and decline, even in the face of a free and unfettered field for private equity capitalists).  

Stephen Schwarzman is a giant in the private equity field.  He manages Blackstone Group, LP.  According to an article on Bloomberg.com, he recently opened his Park Avenue apartment to a fund-raising gala on Romney’s behalf.   He apparently is of the camp that believes private equity performs a necessary capitalist function, his firm having purchased interest in an ailing Florida bank (BankUnited) after the Great Recession hit.  But when it came time to reveal his personal finances to the Federal Reserve, as is required of bank principals, according to the Wall Street Journal, he balked, restructuring his firm’s investment such that it wasn’t required.  

Commercial, deposit-taking banks are only quasi-private entities.  Their loans are either explicitly (deposit insurance), or now implicitly (TARPs, etc) backed by the government.  Is a firm that swoops in to feed on the carrion of a commercial bank really involved in a free-market endeavor?  Is this the sort of thing that a President Romney would support?  Why would Schwarzman refuse to disclose his financials had he nothing to hide?  Would he have gotten a free pass from a Romney Adminstration?  Is this payback for not supporting Obama?

Nothing of what happened or why in the eighties is very pertinent right now.  What is pertinent is knowing how the candidates might navigate the ongoing capitalist collapse.  That things seem quiescent right now does not mean they are.  Nothing real has changed, only the accounts have been shuffled around.  Marx was more or less right when he observed that capitalism’s inherent instability means that eventually all the factors of production would be socialised, he just didn’t get right whom would be clamoring for socialisation.  Capitalists, believing themselves to be powerful enough to manipulate the political system to do their bidding (justifiably it seems) have led the revolution to communal ownership, at least as regards risk.   What, I wonder, would a private equity, free-market zealot, think of that?

The last movie I saw in a theater was “No Country for Old Men”.  I consider the Cohen brothers artistic geniuses; anytime they come out with a new movie that looks interesting, I at least consider traipsing off to the theater to sit in the company of people whom I don’t know nor care to know, in a setting that is loud, uncomfortable and expensive, to see it.  But even with the Cohen brothers, I sometimes just wait for the DVD.  Though coming late in his life, Clint Eastwood has also proved his directorial chops with me.  Outside of No Country, “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino” were the best movies I’ve seen in the last decade. 

I won’t argue with the cinematic brilliance of Red Tails executive producer George Lucas.  I saw his original Star Wars as a kid, but lost interest in the franchise as an adult.  I’ve never seen any of the five sequels.

But there are a few reasons I want to explicitly point out that I won’t be seeing Red Tails. 

First is that I think most historical fiction, movie or literary, is just bunk.  Either do the history or do the fiction, but don’t try to simultaneously do both.  I understand that history, even in documentary or academic form, is often something of a tapestry of half-truths and lies woven to make some sort of claim that animates our understanding of the present and future.  But historical fiction seems to be just a lazy way to get around coming up with a plot.  At its best, fiction is an art form exploring the nature of reality and humanity in a way that teaches while it entertains.  Historical fiction, depending for its plot on well-known historical narratives, doesn’t teach, and only rarely entertains.  For example, what is educational or entertaining about a fictionalized account of the attack on Pearl Harbor?  Fictionalized history, such as ”Pearl Harbor” depicted, depends on the audience knowing the history as taught in school (which was likely itself more dogma than fact), carrying with it the necessity of hewing to the textbook history, which limits character development to not much more than caricature.

Second, the mythologized history of the Tuskegee Airmen depends on latent racism to make the story compelling.  There is nothing at all remarkable today about black men capably flying airplanes in combat, unless one carries in the heart a hint of the idea that perhaps it really is true that blacks are inferior in some amorphous way to the every other race that can.  Of course blacks can capably fly airplanes.  Not all blacks can capably fly airplanes, but then, neither can all whites, though the proportion of each that could be taught to fly is probably much higher than most people imagine.  As a former Army helicopter pilot with a bit of experience in the premises, I feel confident in saying that pretty much anyone–black, white, yellow, etc.– that can drive an automobile ought to be able to learn to fly.   

Was it pigheaded of the US government to bar blacks from jobs as pilots during the first couple of decades of powered flight, just as it was learning how to use aviation as a force-multiplier on the battlefield?  Of course, but it must be remembered that it was not even a decade prior to mankind taking to the air (Kitty Hawk in 1903) that the US government’s supreme judicial authority had implicitly supported the view (in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) that blacks were innately inferior to whites by upholding segregationist laws founded on that view.

Because blacks wanting to serve as pilots had been treated so poorly, once they were allowed to serve in black-only squadrons, it then became necessary to exaggerate and mythologize their capabilities and contributions to the war effort, as the movie, necessarily required to follow the widely-accepted historical script, undoubtedly does.  But just as blacks are no less capable as pilots as are whites, neither are they any more capable.  Black aviators did heroic things in World War Two.  So too did white, Hispanic and Asian (on both sides of the conflict) aviators do heroic things on the battlefield.  Their race had nothing to do with it. 

It is mainly the education establishment, with the support of the federal government, that tries to ascertain, on a group level, the innate capabilities of the various races, so far as one’s race is even ascertainable.  As a group, blacks and Hispanics fare poorly on academic measures relative to whites, who in turn fare poorly relative to Jews and Asians.  But group measures say nothing of individuals, and individual measures, in a society to which individual rights and responsibilities apply, should be paramount.  To imagine a black man can’t do math because of his race is the essence of stupidity and laziness.  Even when humans are categorized along racial lines, there are always superlatives at either end of the distribution.  There are Jews with a lower IQ than the average black, and there are whites that really can jump extraordinarily high.  A person’s race says absolutely nothing about that individual’s particular attributes. 

I don’t wish for my identity to be limited by what appears to be my white European ancestry (I don’t really know much of my own genealogy) .  The only race to which I wish to belong is the human race.  I try to treat others the same, but movies such as Red Tails, and the mythologized historical narratives upon which they depend, demand considerations of race, or the narrative fails.

Finally, the trailer to the movie, repeatedly aired during commercial segments of television shows I happen to watch (mainly football games), depicts a scene that is utter nonsense, nevermind the silly voice over where the narrator talks about “returning one husband to his wife; one father to his children”.  In the scene, a pilot and leader in the squadron has his group huddled around him before a mission, kind of how Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens huddles his defensive teammates together to give a pep talk for the television cameras before a game, or how Drew Brees does the same for the Saints, or how college basketball teams gather in a circle crouched low, with arms draped on each others shoulders, while some player stands in the middle and leads cheers to the swaying of the team. 

In the trailer, the squadron leader begins a chant with “to the last man, to the last plane, to the last bullet….we fight”, to which his teammates respond “we fight”, which is then repeated a couple of times.   This depicts a scene that I can almost guarantee never took place, but plays well to a crowd that believes Ray Lewis and Drew Brees and the college basketball team are doing something more than just putting on a show for the fans.  Fighting a war is not analogous to playing a football or basketball game (and the cheer-huddles of each sport are for the fans–it can never be forgotten that sport is entertainment).  War is about killing people.  It is a somber affair for all except the most pathological.  It humbles even the most arrogant.  Even in victory, there is great loss; the battlefield inevitably claims some husbands and fathers and friends.   To implicitly reduce war to something akin to a sporting contest in order that addled entertainment consumers can somehow relate is contemptible and ahistorical.  The Tuskegee airmen that fought were better than this; they were like everyone else that has faced the prospect of killing or being killed in battle.  It is the essence of racism to believe or depict them otherwise.

All that, and the sticky floors and exhorbitantly priced snacks and the crowd of people I don’t know nor care to know with whom I’ll be scrunched together in the theater audience, means Red Tails is yet another movie I won’t be seeing.

Read through S&P’s justification for last week’s downgrades of nine European countries. Along with the expected dumping on those countries’ fiscal profligacy, one finds as well a blunt recognition of Europe’s moribund “fundamentals,” meaning their ability to produce “strong and consistent” economic growth.

If not for Bain Capital and the other, bigger players who commenced a decade of leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers in the 1980s, the odds are that the U.S.’s “fundamentals” would be similarly weak. Instead, the U.S. corporate sector remade itself during the Bain years.

Private equity was an effect, not a cause of the eighties boom.  There were several causes that coalesced at approximately the right time to make for rising economic fortunes. 

First and foremost, as is almost always the case with periods of rapid economic expansion, the eighties witnessed a revolution in productive efficiency.  The eighties ushered in the first mainstream application of the ongoing information technology revolution–the personal computer.  Productivity soared.

Next, Presidents Carter and Reagan led the charge at the turn of the decade to deregulation of a number of industries, particularly in the transportation sector (trucking, airlines, railways) and banking and finance.  Costs declined, consumption expanded, economic growth obtained.

Next, the baby-boomer hippies of the sixties and seventies finally reached their productive, consumptive years, fueling booms in the housing and automobile markets, along with a compelling democratization of the investment class.  Everyone bought houses, Beamers and stocks. 

Last, Fed Chairman Tall Paul Volcker restored the dollar’s usefulness as a medium of exchange and temporary store of value by his draconian tight money policies, taming the dollar’s hangover from the excesses of the late sixties, Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, and two oil shocks during the mid and latter seventies. 

Henninger claims that firms like Bain Capital in the eighties, and the creatively destructive capitalism they represent, explain the difference with America’s still more or less vibrant economy and Europe’s gathering irrelevance.  There’s an alternative explanation for Europe’s stagnation relative to the US that has nothing to do with private equity capitalism.  Try this–the median age of the European Union is over forty, with the population of 20 of the 27 countries at or, in some cases (Germany, Italy, Greece), well above, the mark.  The median age in the US is right at 37, which is old and rapidly increasing, but still, it’s hardly the level of the EU, yet.  The population growth rate in the EU is nil, at roughly 0.098% per year.  The US population growth rate is far higher, almost a full percent per year.  The fertility rate in the EU is roughly 1.5 children per female, not even enough to replace the existing population as it grows old and dies.  In the US, the rate is right at replacement, 2.1 children born per female.  (Demographic information is derived from the CIA World Factbook.)  All the creatively destructive capitalism in the world won’t rescue Europe from stagnation and ultimate irrelevance if it does not start producing more children.

Henninger is correct that private equity played a role in America’s resurgently competitive economy, but it was minor, and mostly just along for the ride caused by its young, vibrant population coming of consumptive and productive age and discovering new ways of doing old things, a process that was helped by Presidents Carter and Reagan in their removal of structural governmental impediments (regulations, mainly) to economic activity, and the return of a sound and stable currency regime by the Fed. 

Private equity simply made hay while the sun shined.

Continuing a tradition begun in Powell v. Alabama (1932, indigent capital defendants incapable of defending themselves must be provided a lawyer) and Hamilton v. Alabama (1961, all indigent capital defendants, regardless of capacity, must be provided a lawyer), the U.S. Supreme Court smacked Alabama around a bit in a ruling issued January 18, 2012 over its handling of death penalty cases.  In Maples v. Thomas (a slip opinion not yet indexed, but available on the Court’s website), a case arising from the post-conviction petition and appeals of an Alabama death-row inmate, the Court ruled that a defendant whose attorneys fail to timely file an appeal of a post-trial petition is not liable for the negligence of his attorneys in the event they had effectively “abandoned” him.   The Court takes great pains to explain that negligence without abandonment will still be imputed to the attorney’s client, as the client is considered the attorney’s principal, and principal-agent law requires that the negligence of the agent be imputed to the principal, except, as here, when the agent has abandoned the principal. 

There’s almost too much here to do this in one post—from the cockeyed notion that a client and his attorney have a principal-agent relationship, to the abhorrent lack of resources provided to a criminal defendant in a capital murder trial in Alabama, to the reasons Alabama might have for generally relying on out-of-state pro bono representation for post-conviction appeals and petitions of its death-penalty verdicts, to why the Court deigned to excoriate the Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers that abandoned their client mid-appeal—these and more will be covered, but first, a quick summary of the facts culminating in the ruling.

Cory R. Maples was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997 for the murder of two acquaintances while they were parked in a car in his driveway.   The question of his guilt or innocence was not at issue in his petition for post-conviction relief, instead it was the adequacy of his representation at trial.  Maples was represented during the trial by two court-appointed Alabama lawyers, each of whom were paid roughly $40/hr for trial time, and $20/hr for time spent out of court, subject to a $1,000 ceiling for out of court preparations.

In 2001, Maples was offered pro bono (literally, “for the good”, commonly used to mean “free”) representation from two young lawyers associated with the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm in New York for the purpose of filing a petition for post-conviction relief (on the basis, inter alia, of inadequate assistance of counsel in violation of the 6^th Amendment to the Constitution) with the Alabama Circuit Court (the trial court in Alabama) in which Mr. Maples was convicted.   An Alabama attorney provided pro hac vice (literally, “for this turn”, used when an out-of-state lawyer is admitted to practice in a local jurisdiction for one particular case.  In Alabama, a local attorney must be retained to sponsor out-of-state attorneys wishing to appear before a court representing a client) services, that allowed the Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys to appear before the Alabama court for the purpose of representing Mr. Maples. 

In the summer of 2002, while the petition was still pending, the two lawyers left Sullivan and Cromwell for new jobs (a clerkship in a judge’s office for one; a staff job at the European Union for the other), neither of which allowed them to continue in their representation of Mr. Maples.   Neither of the lawyers informed Mr. Maples or the Alabama trial court of their move, nor asked leave of the court for permission to withdraw their representation (as was required). 

In May of 2003, the Alabama trial court denied Maple’s petition for post-conviction relief, and sent notices to each of the attorneys; the two Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers that had departed the firm nearly a year prior and the local attorney that provided pro hac vice services.  The notices to the Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys were “returned to sender” by the firm’s mail room.  The local attorney received the notice, but had pledged (in contravention of Alabama law on such matters) to serve as local counsel only for the purpose of allowing the New York attorneys access to Alabama courts in order to represent Mr. Maples in his post-conviction petitions and appeals.   The defendant, Mr. Maples, was not informed of the denial of his petition. 

Alabama allows 42 days to appeal the denial of a post-conviction petition.  Because neither of the two lawyers actively representing Mr. Maples knew of the denial, nor did Mr. Maples, the time for appeal lapsed without an appeal being filed. 

Once it was discovered what had happened, replacement lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell requested that the defendant be allowed an equitable extension of the time for the filing an appeal, which was denied by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, and affirmed by the Alabama Supreme Court.   Maples then petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus to the federal District Court, which was denied, which he then appealed to the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which appeal was also denied. 

Thus this unfortunate case ended up in the Supreme Court, where the Court judiciously refused to allow attorney procedural error to prevent Mr. Maples from appealing the denial of his post-conviction petition, reversing the lower court rulings. 

The intersection of procedural and principal-agent law:

I’ll never forget the instructor’s observation the very first day of my first-year procedures class at the University of Texas School of Law.  While pointing out that the impetus behind reform of the rules of legal procedure previously undertaken by the legal profession had been to ensure cases were decided on the merits and not on the basis of arcane procedural matters, it still was the case that if you knew procedural law well enough, you needn’t know much substantive law. 

What is procedural law?  Simply put, it is the rules of court through which litigated disputes are resolved.  Procedural law and rules are to litigants in a courtroom as are the rules of the game of football to the teams on the gridiron, with the judges as the referees.   It would obviously be impossible to win a football game without knowing something of the rules governing play.  Likewise, it would be impossible to win at court without understanding the rules through which litigation is resolved. 

Until wholesale revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure over half a century ago, each state had its own arcane rules, mainly developed after the common law heritage bequeathed by our English ancestors.  Typically, playing the game of litigation in each state, and in each particular jurisdiction therein, required understanding the specific language used to describe, and required to be contained in, particular pleadings.  Just as in a football game where referees often seem to favor the home team, the courts were practically inaccessible to lawyers unfamiliar with the jurisdiction, so heavily tilted was the litigation playing field in favor of local counsel.  The judges and local counsel spoke a special language only they understood.   

The adoption of the Federal Rules in 1938, upon which most states then modeled their own state procedural rules, as was the plan, was intended to rebalance the field, to re-tie the blinder around the eyes of Lady Justice.  Arcane procedural rules would no longer work to the advantage of only those in the know.  In football terms, both teams would know what constituted a foul.

But law and justice are the first derivatives of politics (which itself is the first derivative of economics) and the old adage that all politics is local applies even more forcefully to the dispensation of justice.    Thus it wasn’t long before arcane and specific interpretations of the new rules in different jurisdictions meant that local practices deviated substantially from the uniformity envisioned by the new rules, returning favor in local litigation to local attorneys familiar with the particular judge and how he might apply and interpret the rules.  This process was magnified in states like Alabama that elect judges, as divining the line between law and politics in such jurisdictions is often a near impossibility.

The abiding point here is that the dispensation of justice, even after decades of attempted reforms of courtroom procedures aimed at achieving homogenization and uniformity across jurisdictions, remains the province of the local judge and trial counsel.  My first-year instructor in procedural law was correct:  if you know procedural laws and rules (as only the local bar is able), knowing substantive law rarely matters. 

Which is why the curious imputation of attorney negligence to the client seems, on its face, a craven miscarriage of justice.  If only local trial counsels and judges know the rules and procedures governing the outcome in a court of law, how could a litigant, who can be presumed mainly innocent of such matters, truly act as the attorney’s principal, implicitly directing his actions before the court, and responsible to suffer the consequences for his attorney’s negligence when it occurs?  The question is particularly poignant in the case of indigent criminal defendants.

The bar would object that an attorney’s negligence is actionable by his client, i.e., if an attorney misses a filing deadline, his client has a cause of action against him for his negligence.   But what difference would a cause of action make to a client such as Mr. Maples, whose very life might have been forfeited due to his attorney’s negligence?  Civil damages are hardly sufficient, no matter how large they might be, for the loss of one’s life.  And how would a litigant know whether his attorney was negligent in his representation, except in obvious and egregious cases like Maples?

Yet the Court went to great lengths in its ruling in Maples to retain the fiction that a litigant is the attorney’s principal, and thereby suffers the consequences of the attorney’s negligence, carving only a narrow exception in this case for when an attorney effectively abandons a client without notice.

Alabama’s expensive attempt to contain expenses in capital cases

The Court also went to great lengths to excoriate Alabama for its dismal system of providing representation for indigent capital defendants.  Although not directly relevant to Maples, as the dissent of Scalia and Thomas correctly observed, it still is a point worth making.  Mr. Maples’ convoluted path through the post-conviction petition and appeals process might have been completely unnecessary had he been afforded competent and experienced criminal defense lawyers at trial.  The State, were it sure of facing the direct expense of properly funding a capital defendant’s representation, and the indirect expense of having to fight competent local counsel in the courtroom, might hesitate before pushing for the death penalty in every case in which it might be applicable.  As things stand even today (compensation per hour is up to $70), an indigent capital defendant can be assured that the resources and expertise allotted his defense will be barely sufficient to present the appearance that he was represented throughout the proceedings, and nothing more. 

As the majority opinion pointed out, Alabama is alone among the states in not providing indigent capital defendants with post-conviction representation for petitions and appeals, relying instead on the charity of others (mainly anti-death penalty non-profits) to provide its capital defendants with representation post-conviction.  Thus it was that Sullivan and Cromwell’s young lawyers got involved, being good citizens and good junior associates by donating their time to helping Mr. Maples petition for relief from his conviction.   Such pro bono work is considered beneficial for the firm’s image, and of course, tends to enhance the reputation within the firm of those directly engaged in it.

But, if by not funding legal representation for death-row petitions and appeals, Alabama seeks to ensure its death-row inmates remain there, it is a clever, and superficially, inexpensive strategy to effectively invite out-of-state attorneys to represent capital defendants in their post-conviction petitions and appeals.  No out-of-state attorney could possibly provide representation before a trial court as capably as a local attorney with some experience in that particular court.  The local court’s bar comprises the judge’s friends, golfing and fishing buddies (including the district attorney and his assistants) and political campaign contributors.  The local population upon whom the judge will depend for his reelection served on the jury that convicted the defendant, and likely recommended the death penalty.  (In Alabama, the judge can overrule a jury’s recommendation on the penalty to be imposed, ruling for death [far more common] when life is recommended by the jury, or ruling for life, when death is the jury’s recommendation).  Granting a post-conviction petition for relief without some local clamoring to do so would be political suicide.

Why didn’t the Court excoriate the Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers?

But for the “abandonment” of Mr. Maples by his Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys, he likely would not have missed his appeal deadline. 

The Court spent plenty of time off-point, explaining the flaws in the capital punishment system in Alabama.  Could it not have also explained that the actions of all three attorneys involved—those at Sullivan and Cromwell and of the local pro hac vice counsel—were utterly inexcusable, reflecting poorly on the whole of the legal profession?

Sullivan and Cromwell, had it truthfully been concerned with aiding the administration of capital justice in Alabama could have simply done what Alabama has refused to do, and hired a local, well-connected attorney to take up Mr. Maples’ cause.  It surely understands the home-cooking nature of local litigation.  It surely knew its attorneys, no matter how bright their freshly-minted legal minds might be, were no match for the political realities on the ground in Alabama.  That the firm allowed its attorneys to get personally involved anyway, and then apparently failed to follow-up on their efforts, possibly costing Mr. Maples the chance at a life-saving appeal, yet did not receive even a derogatory hiccup in the Court’s opinion—this is the sort of thing that causes such widespread distrust and disdain for the legal profession.   It has the appearance of the Court not wishing to bash one of its own.

Lawyers seek monopolistic control over the levers of justice, but only if they enjoy immunity from liability when their manipulations prove incompetent, or when they are inattentive.  With great power comes great responsibility.  The legal profession has created a system whereby it exercises great power, but suffers little of the burden of responsibility.  While the Court justifiably railed in its dicta against Alabama’s capital punishment system, it could have offered at least a sentence or two about the responsibilities lawyers have to their clients.

Conclusion

There is no other way this case could have been decided.   A civilized society does not execute a man for his lawyer having failed to timely file some paperwork.  It makes Alabama look silly and stupid to have refused the death-row inmate’s appeal on procedural grounds—did Alabama really think its refusal would stand the light of day as the time for execution drew near? 

The crux of Mr. Maple’s original petition, which was denied, and which failed on appeal for lack of timeliness, was inadequate assistance of counsel.  The Sixth Amendment, enshrining the right to the assistance of counsel, inter alia, reads as follows:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

With Obama’s signature on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the Sixth Amendment has effectively been nullified in its entirety, so long as the detention is of a person the Administration, in its unfettered discretion, deems a terrorist, and is conducted by the US military. 

It’s not far-fetched to imagine a day when Alabama, historically profoundly suspicious of federal interventions in its affairs, seeks federal assistance to detain individuals in order to free itself completely from the procedural obligations imposed by the US Constitution.  Had Mr. Maples been deemed a terrorist, and been detained by the military, none of this subsequent litigation would have been necessary, or even permissible.  He wouldn’t have gotten the death penalty, perhaps, but neither would he have even been afforded a trial.

Levy could be more careful in his choice of words.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary, fulsome means “offensively flattering or insincere”, but a subsequent note explains that the word is often used to mean simply “abundant”.  I think Mr. Levy meant that Mr. Gingrich abundantly praised the  private equity industry, not that his praise was offensively flattering or insincere. 

Mr. Gingrich’s razor-sharp wit is no doubt even now discerning distinctions as to why it is perfectly consistent for him to attack Mr. Romney for his experience as a private equity manager after having fulsomely praised the industry in which he worked. 

Yet, Levy’s use of ”fulsomely” might accidentally have been apt in describing Mr. Gingrich.  When has Mr. Gingrich been anything other than ”offensively flattering or insincere”?

He occasionally employs his literary talents to pen essays for the Wall Street Journal, usually concerning some aspect of international conflict, always a hawk propounding the virtues of strong defense, which for him, like the Israelis with whom he served, means a proactive, preemptive defense, keeping a watchful eye over potential threats, and eliminating them before they’ve had to opportunity to fully coagulate. 

So it is no surprise that he believes the Iranian nuclear threat must be eliminated before it reaches fruition.  He begins his argument by laying out the reasons why an Iranian nuclear threat would be different from all the rest, resorting to the ages-old tactic of demonization, a necessary predicate for instilling the blood-lust required of killing other humans:

To assume that Iran will not close the Strait of Hormuz is to assume that primitive religious fanatics will perform cost-benefit analyses the way they are done at Wharton.

Thus, Helprin claims the Iranians disregard the self-preservation calculus that animates the behavior of all living creatures.  As such, Helprin not only de-humanizes them, he de-animates them, making them something other than ordinary living creatures.  In effect, he claims Iranians are aliens.

The argument then turns to magnifying the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the hands of these irrational, other-worldly beings:

Inexpert experts will state that Iran cannot strike with nuclear weapons. But let us count the ways. It has the aerial tankerage to sustain one or two planes that might slip past air defenses between it and Israel, Europe, or the U.S., combining radar signatures with those of cleared commercial flights. As Iran increases its ballistic missile ranges and we strangle our missile defenses, America will face a potential launch from Iranian territory.

Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. Subsequently, the U.S. completed 67 water-supported launches, ending as recently as 1980; the U.S.S.R. had two similar programs; and Iran itself has sea-launched from a barge in the Caspian. And if in 2007, for example, 1,100 metric tons of cocaine were smuggled from South America without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of Iranian nuclear charges of 500 pounds or less ending up in Manhattan or on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The idea that Iran would attempt any of the described dangers depends on the veracity of Helprin’s claim that Iranians don’t care in any ordinary way about the cost-benefit calculus such actions would entail.  Any Iranian nuclear attack on US soil would result in the complete and utter destruction of the Iranian state.   Persia would become a smoking heap of nuclear ash.  To believe that Iranians are not well aware of this, or to believe that they are aware of this, yet would instigate such an attack anyway, grounds Helprin’s argument in mysticism.  It is not the Iranians that are primitive religious fanatics that don’t do cost-benefit analyses, it is Helprin. 

Helprin ends with a call to action implying that destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons would be relatively easy:

[the President] should order the armed forces of the United States to attack and destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons complex. When they have complied, and our pilots are in the air on their way home, they will have protected our children in their beds—and our children’s children, many years from now, in theirs. May this country always have clear enough sight and strong enough will to stand for itself in the face of mortal threat, and in time.

Conclusively destroying a nation’s ability to create nuclear bombs is not necessarily such an easy task as the visual image of dropping a few bombs and flying home that Helprin creates. 

Neither is there any way to do anything today that will guarantee our children’s children safety.  That a government is capable of such a thing is the sort of lie promulgated by governments the world over to, among other things, allow vast expansions in their power and control over their own populations.  It is certainly the same lie used by the US government to rape its own constitution over the past decade. 

Destroying Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon may, for a time, protect the world (and particularly, Israel, which seems more to the point) from the danger of an Iranian nuke.  But it will do nothing to protect the world from the danger of another rogue state acquiring nuclear capabilities, and it would create in the Iranians the impetus for revenge, which could be accomplished using plain old TNT based bombs.  It doesn’t matter how one dies, whether by nuclear or conventional bomb blasts.  Dead is still dead. 

Sometimes the best defense is not a good offense.  Sometimes the best defense is protecting the borders while concentrating on strengthening the foundations of one’s own society.  The US has nothing to fear from Iran, nuclear or otherwise, and never had.  Israel perhaps does, but Israel should not be dictating American foreign policy.   Israel was important when the US faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union and its sphere of hegemony, which included much of Arabia.  In the post-Cold War world, Iran could make good on its threat to wipe Israel from the face of the earth, and the US would be hardly affected at all.  This is the dispassionate, non-ideological reality.   So far as Israel is concerned, Helprin and a great many others beating the drums for Iranian war seem to be simply creating intricate rationalizations for doing what their comity and charity for Israel compels them to seek.  America owes it to itself, and particularly its service members, to think not with its heart, but with its head, when deciding whether to commit blood and treasure to conflict.

The only existential threat the US now faces is itself.  The US must find the courage to face its external fears without destroying itself internally.  Its people must realize that no government has ever been able to protect its population from the threat of threat, and to reject its self-aggrandizing claims to the contrary.  This is the clear sight and strong will upon which the survival of the American republic depends.

Helprin’s prose is as compelling as ever.  But in this instance, his argument is wrong.