When calamity comes, the wicked are
brought down,
but even in death the righteous
have a refuge.

Proverbs 14:32

H/T to fellow Boston-area blogger, Miss Kelly for this long piece by atheist Sam Harris over at the Huffington Post. I can’t do much better than MK’s characterization: “surprising indeed”.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech. [emphasis added]

Apparently, and ironically, the WaPo refused to publish this… which only adds power to Harris’ argument.

The danger, of course, is in extending this argument (and its variants) to religion in general, and Christianity in particular (which Harris does elsewhere).

With apologies to the late great Barry Goldwater, one might say that dogmatism in the defense of truth is no vice… as long as the truth is really true and eternal and not just imaginary or personal.

What parent has not heard something similar to the headline of this post from his (or her) young child at some point? In the process of helping that child to mature towards responsible freedom and an awareness that s/he is not the center of the universe what parent has not experienced the pain of rejection? And what parent has not cringed and eventually accepted such insistence, knowing that whatever mess the child makes, they can eventually clean up and that the pain of the child’s failure will be their first necessary step on the road to true maturity, wisdom and humility? (I.e., recognizing that s/he doesn’t know all that s/he thought s/he did–and couldn’t).

I share the following only because I was reading it last night and found it profound. It relates to no particular current headline. It’s excerpted from John R.W. Stott’s 1986 classic ‘The Cross of Christ’, pages 160-162 [emphasis added]:

We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness… Surely, we say, there must be something we can do, or at least contribute, in order to make amends?…

The proud human heart is there revealed. We insist on paying for what we have done. We cannot stand the humiliation of acknowledging our bankruptcy and allowing someone else to pay for us. The notion that this somebody else should be God himself is just too much to take. We would rather perish than repent, rather lose ourselves than humble ourselves…

Other religions teach different forms of self-salvation. Hinduism, for example, [from which Buddhism is directly derived] makes a virtue of refusing to admit to sinfulness…

Quoting Emil Brunner, from his book ‘The Mediator’, page 474 (1927) Stott continues:

“All other forms of religion–not to mention philosophy–deal with the problem of guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a ‘cheap’ conclusion. In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him… But we cannot escape the embarrassment of standing stark naked before God. It is no use for us to try to cover up like Adam and Eve in the garden. Our attempts at self-justification are as ineffectual as their fig leaves.”

allegory, noun:“…figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another… a symbolical narrative”

I will leave the interpretation of the following as an exercise for the astute reader [links and emphasis added]:

…endorsed by presidential contender Hillary Clinton and cheered by daughter Chelsea, the filly finished second… behind favorite Big Brown… “There was no way to save her. She couldn’t stand,” DNC Chair Howard Dean trainer Larry Jones said. “She ran an incredible race. She ran the race of her life.”

As they say from time to time on radio or TV: you might want to have children go into the other room for this one. I share this only to illustrate a simple point — one that Alexander Solzynitsin once made (having lifted it from Fyodor Dostoevsky): that the potential for unmitigated evil exists within all of us.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation… instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, [SS doctor Aribert] Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second… the victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

INXS put it nicely also. It’s not clear why this is a lead story on the AP wire right now aside from this being Heim’s 93rd birthday. He may have been dead for some time. Or not.

The point is the same: human nature has not and will not ‘progress’ without submission to Christ’s saving work and will. The notion that ‘progressives’ want to sell us is that it can. They are wrong.

Heal the sick… Freely you have received, freely give. (Matthew 10:8)

I was sick and you looked after me… ‘Lord, when did we see you sick…?’
…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine,
you did for me.’ (Matthew 10:36, 39-40)

I find myself outraged this morning in a direction I would not have expected or allowed myself to be in the past and that is the intersection between sound business practice and compassion in healthcare. I’m as surprised to find myself writing about this as you may be to be reading it on these pages.

I know, it’s a touchy subject, especially in a political season. Therefore, I’m going to draw this as carefully as I can and urge commenters to do the same. I’m not proposing a practical earthly solution. I’m just distressed. I challenge anyone not to be.

Background: my late brother and only sibling was fortunate to receive top-drawer medical care for his leukemia before he died of it in 2005. Had he not switched jobs six weeks before he was diagnosed however, he would have found himself in precisely the same predicament as the woman featured in this WSJ article this morning: “Cash Before Chemo…”. (His previous employer had shredded — with almost no warning — what had once been great health coverage, capping annual pay-outs at $20,000.) In short, this touches too close to home.

Mrs. Kelly’s ordeal began in 2006, when she started bruising easily and was often tired. Her husband, Sam, nagged her to see a doctor.

A specialist in Lake Jackson, a town 50 miles from Houston, diagnosed Mrs. Kelly with acute leukemia, a cancer of the blood that can quickly turn fatal. The small cancer center in Lake Jackson refers acute leukemia patients to M.D. Anderson.

When Mrs. Kelly called M.D. Anderson to make an appointment, the hospital told her it wouldn’t accept her insurance, a type called limited-benefit.

M.D. Anderson viewed Mrs. Kelly as uninsured and told her she could get an appointment only if she brought a certified check for $45,000…

The Kellys arrived at M.D. Anderson with a check for $45,000 on Dec. 6, 2006. After having blood drawn and a bone-marrow biopsy, the hospital oncologist wanted to admit Mrs. Kelly right away.

But the hospital demanded an additional $60,000 on the spot. It told her the $45,000 had paid for the lab tests, and it needed the additional cash as a down payment for her actual treatment.

In the hospital business office, Mrs. Kelly says she was crying, exhausted and confused.

The hospital eventually lowered its demand to $30,000. Mr. Kelly lost his cool. “What part don’t you understand?” he recalls saying. “We don’t have any more money today. Are you going to admit her or not?” The hospital says it was trying to work with Mrs. Kelly, to find an amount she could pay…

One day, Mrs. Kelly says, nurses wouldn’t change the chemotherapy bag in her pump until her husband made a new payment. She says she sat for an hour hooked up to a pump that beeped that it was out of medicine, until he returned with proof of payment.

First off, I know all too well the pitfalls of socialized medicine. They are myriad, dangerous and deep. Anyone who would deny them is not looking closely enough. They include: a lack of innovation (read: no development of lifesaving drugs and therapies) cruel, arbitrary, mind-numbing, resource-sapping bureaucracy and waiting lists for relatively ordinary procedures (not to mention more intricate ones) that can be terminal for some and painful for most. And those are just the headliners.

Anyone who has dealt with a state RMV would never in a million years propose it as a model for anything. And yet some propose it as a model for healthcare. Anyone who has been to Cuba or North Korea and been able to really look around and ask questions (a vanishingly small number) would never in a million years propose those as models for healthcare. And yet some do anyway. Few if any of us have any personal experience of draconian rationing of essentials (e.g., from the last big war: bread, gasoline, rubber, steel, butter, sugar, etc.) and yet that is exactly what socialized medicine is.

Yet it would be disingenuous of me, as a Christian, not to acknowledge that capitalism as a system, i.e., money as the sole, ultimate and most virtuous means of deciding how one should spend one’s time, allocate one’s resources and deal with one’s fellow human beings can also, at least at the margins, be a playground for the dark powers and principalities of this world. I.e., it can lead us to do things and accept things that we know in our heart of hearts cannot possibly be the way God wants them to work.

Trust me on this. I’ve done a lot of consulting on Wall Street. It is not the kind of place, i.e., it does not provide the kind of ruleset, within which anyone would want to grow old or frail or sick.

Jesus was hardly endorsing Marxism when he stated, in Matthew 6:24 that “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”

It’s a ‘hard teaching’ (one with which I have wrestled, and continue to wrestle) but there it is. The fact that we can’t figure out a voluntary (not state-sponsored) third way is merely evidence that we don’t have our heads fully wrapped around what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like or how He could possibly pull it off according to the world’s rules. (Hint: He doesn’t and he won’t. Instead, he is gradually substituting his own in the hearts of men and women, quietly, one by one. They are voluntary… but not optional.)

To put it another way, I can’t imagine, in the fullness of God’s kingdom that state-sponsored socialism and free-market capitalism are the only two choices — because that would constrain God to the rules of this fallen world and we know that he (and those in Christ) are not beholden to them (Colossians 2:20) and furthermore (Luke 1:37) that “…nothing is impossible with God.”

Switching gears, a couple of facts from the WSJ piece:

Uncompensated care cost the hospital industry $31.2 billion in 2006, up 44% from $21.6 billion in 2000, according to the American Hospital Association.
[That's a 6.3% compound annual rate of increase - U.G.]
…
An Ohio State University study found net income per bed nearly tripled at nonprofit hospitals to $146,273 in 2005 from $50,669 in 2000.
[That's a 23.6% compound annual rate of increase - U.G.]

According to the American Hospital Directory, 77% of nonprofit hospitals are in the black, compared with 61% of for-profit hospitals. Nonprofit hospitals are exempt from taxes and are supposed to channel the income they generate back into their operations. Many have used their growing surpluses to reward their executives with rich pay packages, build new wings and accumulate large cash reserves.

M.D. Anderson, which is part of the University of Texas, is a nonprofit institution exempt from taxes. In 2007, it recorded net income of $310 million, bringing its cash, investments and endowment to nearly $1.9 billion.

Numbers can be clarifying. The headline to this post is probably a lousy analogy. (I can immediately think of three or four ways in which that is true, so don’t bother taking pot-shots — pun intended.) But it nonetheless begs a couple of questions, and these are what I would urge commenters to think about:

Given a certain level of prosperity, and acknowledging the need to be able to perpetuate a viable system and improve it over time, what things are truly basic to our social contract with our fellow human beings? And the perennial if difficult one: What would Jesus do? And at least as important: what would he call us to do?

“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
- Archimedes (280-211 BC)

I waited patiently for the LORD;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
Blessed is the man
who makes the LORD his trust,
who does not look to the proud,
to those who turn aside to false gods.
- Psalm 40: 1-2,4 (NIV)

…everyone operates out of a basic worldview…
[and] all worldviews involve ideological and
philosophical assumptions — including the
secularist worldview. There is no neutrality.
- Dr. Albert Mohler, Friday, April 25, 2008

Mohler’s most recent blog post (see link above) takes a few paragraphs to get going but, as I’ve come to appreciate from him, it winds to a conclusion absolutely vast in its implications, yet based on a principle that’s as sound and as simple as the quote I have excerpted above, namely:

Those who wish to separate religious views, and the people who hold them, from legitimacy in the sphere of public debate are, in fact, imposing their own, whether they know it or not. They can claim no special, objective vantage or privilege and it is pernicious that they should be allowed to do so.

Thus the oft-forgotten emphasis in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting government from preventing the free exercise of religion (double negative; parse carefully!) has metasticized into a movement that wants to scrub from politics, law, government and public policy all traces of traditional religion, in favor of their own: a religion of anti-religion.

More later. Off to church…

[Four hours later, with a big pasta lunch and a handful of dark chocolate on board, all brain circuits firing...]

One irony is that they (the seculo-moralists) operate, wittingly or not, within a framework of religion-like precepts at least as dogmatic as any they attribute to traditional religion but without root in anything other than the average of public opinion at any particular moment. I.e., ‘grounded’ in nothing other than a great big ‘raft’ of public opinion that’s become un-anchored from anything eternally true.

I’m a student, professional practitioner, and huge fan of ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomena a la James Surowiecki’s book of the same name, but only for their apparent prescience on many factual questions. They aren’t terribly good at providing cannot deliver any meaningful guidance on moral ones, as I learned a few years ago, up-close-and-personal as a member of a particularly liberal Protestant denomination that sought democracy in everything… and divine, authoritative wisdom in very little. (Question for the day: If Moses had taken a vote in the desert, would the Jews ever have reached the promised land? Answer: Yes. Because God is God and He would have found a way regardless… however, under that scenario, the only one who would have made it would have been Moses himself.)

The SeMos (seculo-moralists) derive their power not from any deep-rooted principle, text, or systematic time-tested theology, but only from an instinctive impulse towards democracy in everything — an idea virtually unchallenged in the West in the 21st century. Paradoxically, they also draw power from our hunger to have someone tell us what to do, i.e., our all-too-human attraction to tyrants, both petty and otherwise. I can think of no better example of this toxic contradiction than the UN, where the averaging of world opinion has led to the demise of moral clarity and the elevation of those without any morals at all.

Dr. Mohler, in his Friday blog piece, takes issue with an article by Mary Warnock in the current issues of The New Statesman. Who is she and why should we care? Mohler writes:

Mary Warnock, formally known as Baroness Warnock of Weeke, is one of the most influential figures in the field of biomedical ethics and ethical philosophy. She emerged in the international limelight in 1984 when she headed the committee that brought the so-called “Warnock Report” that legalized IVF procedures in Great Britain.

OK so far. Fair-minded people could conceivably come down on either side of IVF — a biomedical advance that seldom brings people into the streets with placards and megaphones [pun intended]. At least in principle — at least nominally — IVF is an advance that promotes life. I personally know of several couples who, after much struggle and angst, have gone this route. It is not mine to say that their children are not amazing gifts, treasured to a degree that those of us who have not had to can even imagine. (As a bumper sticker I saw yesterday said: “Children are gifts from God”. The parents of IVF children know this viscerally).

In practice however, and despite such positive outcomes, IVF raises a host of ethical conundrums, not least of them embryonic ‘culling’ (in vitro and/or in utero; hmm… can you think of a word that rhymes with ‘culling’?) the status of frozen embryos (especially in divorce cases) and the displacement of massive resources, energy and money that might otherwise go towards adopting and caring for kids without parents, already walking around. As I said: reasonable people, both religious and non-religious can and do come down on either side on this one.

I make that digression only to point out that IVF is one of the least controversial of Baroness Warnock’s pronouncements. Yet it still is a great example of how one’s world view (or, I would submit, one’s view of the world, whether there is anything beyond it, and if so what that ’stuff’ is and how we can know it, aka one’s cosmological/eternal view, or lack thereof) inevitably informs how one views something like this. I ask you to hold onto that word ‘inevitably’ as you read the rest of this.

Dr. Mohler continues:

In recent years, Baroness Warnock has become a major proponent of a secularized vision of ethics — ranging across the field of ethical concerns. Baroness Warnock wants to make certain that religious and theological objections are not allowed to impede what she sees as scientific and medical advances.

And here, with the word ‘advances’, begins the problem. It is the same problem longtime readers know I have with the word ‘progressive’ as well. Advancing… towards what? Progressing… towards what? A statement about movement (e.g., for “change”) says nothing about direction, velocity or destination. It may bore and/or irritate some to go into semantics here, but without them we might just as well grunt and hit one another with sticks. Contrary to what the deconstructionists would have us believe, language is all we’ve got and it is sufficient (when properly used) to convey meaning, albeit with difficulty. (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John 1:1)

The word ‘advances’ (e.g., in medical technology) seems self-evident in the main, just as might a reference to ‘advances’ in auto safety (something on my mind after purchasing a 1969 Karmann Ghia for my wife for our 20th anniversary and discovering that it had only lap belts and no shoulder straps.) It is not the main that’s a problem. It is the margins. The areas in which one person’s ‘advance’ is another’s setback and vice versa. Biomedical ethics are rife with them, even as we can almost all agree on thousands of utterly non-controversial ones (antibiotics come right to mind).

Here is Baroness Warnock herself:

Society is not a religious organisation like a church. Laws must as far as possible be made in the interests, far wider than matters of faith, of all members of society, whether or not they hold any religious views. As legislators, MPs and governments must consider the consequences of the measures before them, how they will probably affect society and whether they will do more good than harm. It is the role of legislators to be consequentialists. They must not ask, “What does my religion teach about this measure?” but “Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?”

To our pluralist-indoctrinated ears, this seems reasonable at first glance — a high-brow version of Rodney King’s famous “Can’t we all just get along?” But I urge you to look closer. And think. Here is what I see, and it goes beyond what Dr. Mohler chose to treat in his first-rate critique:

To ask whether ’society will benefit’ from (fill in the blank) is to ask how one would know — again, at the margins — what is and is not a benefit and over what span of time. That is, it begs the question of what socio-moral framework ought to prevail in assessing benefits.

For example, if one takes a very long term but earthly view of ‘consequentialism’ (her word, slightly morphed) e.g., the coalescence of a culture able to persist over millennia, one has very few examples from which to choose historically; the most prominent by far being the the Judeo-Christian, aka biblical one.

(Oh irony of ironies.)

If one goes further, taking an eternal view, i.e., one in which there is a living moral force and reality no less true than that of gravity, that our souls persist after death one way or the other, and that the world is just a transit station and not our real home, then one’s answers to biomedical ethics questions in the first decade of the 21st century will be very different indeed from if one’s view of ‘consequences’ is framed only in terms of decades, e.g., whether my parents will benefit from therapies derived from human embryos.

In other words, Baroness Warnock’s framing leaves open the most fundamental question of all: one’s view of life, the universe and everything. It is not an idle question, and it is not one for which it is possible to adopt the simplistic notion of dividing religion from everything else. (A notion no more plausible than the widely prevailing but anti-common-sense notion that one’s personal and public lives can and or should be entirely separate.)

In essence, Baroness Warnock is asking us to accept the word ‘benefit’ as patently obvious to everyone and therefore not open for discussion. (Reminds me of a certain Tennessee ex-Senator’s approach to climate science… but we’re not gonna go there today.) That tacit request to accept the notion of benefit as non-controversial is patently absurd in light of what she (correctly) observes (and which Dr. Moher notes) earlier in her article, namely, that moral consensus no longer exists — at least in Britain. Small wonder. We’re next. Baroness Warnock writes:

…the comfortable assumption of coincidence between moral beliefs and the criminal law is no longer justifiable. Though much of the law remains squarely in accord with what society believes to be right, we are more conscious than ever before of sometimes irreconcilable differences. As private individuals, we may be content to advocate a practice of tolerance, a kind of moral relativism, but in public life, in legislation and the enforcement of law, there is no room for relativism. Society survives only if it is subject to the rule of law, and the law must be unequivocal, and must be seen to apply to everyone alike.

To which Dr. Mohler responds:

Put into plain language, Warnock believes that society is now so divided over basic moral questions that no moral consensus now exists. Thus, the law must choose sides and “must be unequivocal.” In other words, one side wins a total policy victory.

Where does all of this leave us? (Besides with a blog post that might make Tolstoy shudder.) Just here — I hope: With a Toto-like pulling-back of the curtain of secular righteousness covering up an argument that pretends to far more power and authority than it actually deserves.

Seculo-moralists would like to draw a line around all ideas and mores they deem ‘religious’ (or at least religious and outside of their instinctive comfort zone) and thus preemptively constrain the influence of those ideas in society at large.

In so doing (and here is the problem) they tacitly grant themselves the authority to define what should go into that dis-empowered box of views (i.e., those that stem from traditional religion) and what should go into another box we might call ‘diluted for seculo-pluralist consumption’. At its best, one might call this the averaging of morality. At its worst — as I am asserting — it leads not to averaging but to tyranny.

Rather than accepting the messy, pluralist stalemate Baroness Warnock observes, she seeks, in the name of unspecified ‘advance’, to tilt the socio-political playing field in such a way that (to quote Orwell) “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. It is the same impulse that argues for ends justifying means. We know where that leads, and its ugly.

What is unacceptable is that, in so doing, the ‘SeMos’ seek to deal themselves the trump card that would empower them to define what guideposts you and I may use in the public sphere in arguing for what is and is not ‘progress’, what is and is not an ‘advance’, what is and is not right, what is and is not true. In short, they seek to constrain the political and social power of anyone who does not buy in to their secular world view. They are tyrants by any other name.

———————-

End note relative to the picture at the top of this post: Was I the only one unaware that 2008 is the ‘Year of the Frog’? And is it too kitschy to mention (as I learned in an e-mail late last week) that F.R.O.G. stands for ‘Forever Rely On God’? Have a blessed week everyone!

John. It’s probably my favorite book in the bible. And thus it’s with some hesitation that I republish the following short spoof. But it makes an important point — one I’ve observed firsthand — and with good humor (an oft-overlooked attribute of the Lord). And it’s by a priest — from Holland by way of Australia (two of my favorite places). H/T: The Black Cordelias.

“The Gospel of Nice” (and no, it’s not pronounced like the city in southern France):

Jesus shared with his disciples, “I am the Nice Shepherd. I never say no to my sheep. They love me and I love them and I do anything they want. When the wolf comes I smile and say hello and welcome him into the flock because my flock is inclusive and welcoming.

Other shepherds are not nice. They are divisive and bullying. They have rules for the sheep. They do not accept the wolf and do not let the sheep play with him.

I am the Nice Shepherd. I lay down for the sheep and the wolf. They love me lots and call me by my first name. We love ourselves and we form community. We do not like those other sheep who will not play with the wolf. We do not have them in our flock. We call them names and show them they are unwelcome because they are not welcoming like us.”

Here’s the original. The picture in the spoof is subtle but priceless.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of what’s currently going on in global commodities markets. No, wait, please don’t click off. This is not a piece about investment strategies or portfolio management. I’m not talking about oil or silver or gold. I’m talking about massive increases in the prices of the most basic food staples such as corn, rice, soybeans and wheat — and not just because the value of the U.S. dollar has plunged. This is global. This is, literally, our daily bread.

Those of us blessed with the wherewithal to shop at Whole Foods Market and charge it to the credit card we pay off blithely each month and for whom the biggest food-related decisions involve organic vs. pest-free, chicken vs. beef vs. ostrich or buffalo, or that really tough late-in-the-week working-too-hard decision: take-out vs. experimenting with a new gourmet dish we just saw Iron Chef or Top Chef may not be excused (as much as we very much might like to be) from delving into the sad, sick, scary details of fact-filled stories like this one.

If the dirt ‘cookies’ don’t get your attention, then something inside you has died.

That link just happens to come from Deroy Murdock at National Review (the by-line being a story unto itself in the tradition of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Clarence Thomas, but that’s a bunny-trail we’re not going to go down this morning.) What’s remarkable is that the story is virtually mirrored (I’m told) in reports by NPR and other outlets on the far opposite end of the conventional political spectrum. (Ask yourself: How often does that happen? And then: When it does happen, what credibility does that lend such a story? And if you’re still inclined to Socratic dialogue: What does that say about the demonization of conservatives?)

But I digress. My thrust here is not politics but religion; specifically, false ones, and the all-too-real consequences of substituting the lie of human omnipotence and control for the simple truth that God reigns supreme and we supplant him at our eternal peril. Bear with me. I’ll explain (or at least try to).

Once one plays out the scenarios for persistently high food prices the implications for the future of, well, practically everything are apocalyptic, to put it mildly. I’m in the scenario business (writing them for big companies who pay me to do so) and so I have a privileged position from which to observe that when people hear the term ’scenario’ they tend to think one of two things: 1) five, ten or more years in the future and faraway or else 2) some numeric perturbation in a spreadsheet that will affect the value of their financial holdings.

The kinds of scenarios I’m talking about here are different. They don’t take very long to play out at all. Try fasting for 24 hours and you’ll see what I mean. Try being forced to fast for 24 hours — or more — (something I’ve never had to do, thank God) and things become even clearer. Try watching your child ‘fast’ for 24 hours and be unable to do anything about it and the implications become crystal clear.

As a highly-esteemed MIT professor put it at a meeting I was facilitating for a client last week: “people who don’t have enough to eat have nothing to lose”. The results are playing out in real time. You’re all smart people so I won’t bother linking to a bunch of headlines you’ve probably already read. Food riots are breaking out all over the world and there’s no reason to think they’re going to get better any time soon. What I want to focus on are the causes, and this is where it gets interesting — looping back around to the false religion I’ve been tilting at for some time that used to be called ‘global warming’ until it became apparent that things weren’t warming so they started calling it ‘climate change’. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s Murdock in the NRO piece [emphasis added; links in original]:

Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate (5.75 percent of gasoline and diesel by 2010; 10 percent expected in 2020), America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022, including 15 billion from corn) have turned corn farms into cash cows. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn to motors rather than to mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.

Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed (which consumed 40 percent of 2007’s 13 billion bushel U.S. corn crop) has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them. (For details, click here.) [savor the steak now; the price drop is obviously temporary -ug.]

All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo. On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “As crops are sold for alternative-energy production, food prices have soared: The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”

As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year” — assuming 1.2 pounds of grain each, daily.

In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people. That has to hurt.

“There is growing consensus that we need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda April 10, urging discussion of the issue at July’s G8 Summit in Hokkaido. “Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing,” Brown added.

President Bush announced April 14 that the U.S. would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.

This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.

…obeying Congress’ 2022 diktat will require a corn crop equal to 115 percent of 2007’s U.S. output, with every kernel going to ethanol, none for food. The consequences would be calamitous — from movies without popcorn, to over-farmed and under-rotated fields, to growing global starvation.

There’s much more in the piece about the environmental impacts of growing lots more corn — some obvious, and some I was unaware of — along with the safety concerns raised by ethanol fuel. Read it.

What I find particularly sad are the reasons why this all came to pass — many, though not all of which were entirely preventable. Why is it that Congress, the European Union and others foresaw nothing particularly ominous — no dire unintended consequences — in what should seem conceptually obvious to even a small child:

If we burn the food, there is less of it to eat.

The root cause lies, I would submit, in a perverted but popular earth-worshiping view of environmentalism that sees not trade-offs and tough choices with significant moral components and impacts on people that entail the need for honest debate, humility, caution and discernment, but self-evident absolutes (e.g., drilling in ANWR as totally off limits no matter what; ‘global warming’ as the ultimate trump card justifying practically anything; narrow emotional anecdotes or computer models as the keys to understanding massively complex interdependent and highly uncertain, chaotic systems).

Credit the New York Times, among others, with being reasonably forthright in warning of just what seems to be happening. E.g., this article from last December (“As Ethanol Takes Its First Steps, Congress Proposes a Giant Leap”) [emphasis added]:

Congress is on the verge of writing into law one of the most ambitious dictates ever issued to American business: to create, from scratch, a huge new industry capable of converting agricultural wastes and other plant material into automotive fuel.

The potential benefits include reducing the nation’s dependence on oil and the emissions of gases that contribute to global warming. But the goals Congress is considering are so sweeping, analysts say, that it is not clear they can be achieved.

No fuel of the type in question has been produced commercially in the United States. Even in the view of people who back the idea, the technology to do it is immature, the economics are uncertain, and the potential for unintended consequences is high.

You can say that again — with feeling. The sleight-of-hand in the article’s title is obvious though. And silly. JFK’s vision of sending a man to the moon was ambitious. At least he didn’t claim that it would be virtuous — not in the way that global warming mandarins do about their unprecedentedly ambitious bet with humanity or that Congress and the EU have done with ethanol mandates. At least the Apollo program didn’t consign millions to starvation within months of being funded.

Then there’s the irony that ethanol programs do nothing for carbon emissions (not that anyone should care … or if they do care, they should maybe encourage more carbon emissions, lest we freeze.)

I end on an even more ominous note.

The last time we went down this road in earnest was at the start of the Great Depression. Government distortions and the protectionism that went hand-in-hand with them were front and center (though not wholly to blame) for at least exacerbating and arguably causing that economic pit. And the consequences were not, any more than they are now, theoretical or purely financial. People starved to death. Social and political unrest reached a peak.

That all proved fertile ground for demagoguery and world war and genocide were the results. Millions more died. (Did I mention I wrote scenarios for a living?) One of those distortions involved the promotion of ethanol for fuel. Now the government is at it again, promoting notions already proved false: that ethanol reduces carbon emissions; that carbon emissions cause global warming and that it is global warming that causes death and destruction (when in fact, a warmer climate has, historically, been associated with less volatile weather patterns and seasons more conducive to agricultural futility fertility).

From this morning’s WSJ [emphasis added]:

A major theme of Pope Benedict’s papacy has been the importance of reason and faith coexisting. Reason without faith, he has said, leads to empty materialism, while faith without reason leads to extremism, as in parts of the Middle East. The pope sees the U.S. as effectively blending the two, despite its excesses, many observers said.
…
Mr. Bush plans to travel to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Tuesday to welcome Pope Benedict when “Shepherd One” arrives. That is believed to be unprecedented treatment for a visiting dignitary in the U.S., according to a White House spokesman, who said Andrews has no record of a president going there to receive a visiting head of state.

For those inclined to hit the comment button with a Lutherian or Calvinist mini-lecture over that last item, keep in mind that the Pope is no ordinary head of “state”.

Whether one grants him divine authority or merely great respect, and whether one thinks he is a unique emissary from God or merely one of many commendable souls attempting to carry forward Christ’s mission on earth, it is right and good that the president demonstrate something we used to think laudable when I was in Boy Scouts but which has fallen into disuse in the decades since: reverence.

It’s in stark contrast with this perverted version of ‘reverence’ for demonstrably unrepentant terrorist thugs.

Off to NYC on business the next three days, then tied up with clients here. Have a good week, everyone.