Tasty Tidbits 10/15/11

1. Occupying Lafayette.
2. A Secular Case for Distributism.
3. “Screw each other and everybody gets rich.”
4. Bishop and Diocese Indicted for not reporting child abuse suspicions.
5. T   o   w   e   r      o   f      B   a   b   e   l.
6. More Anti-Mormon Extralegal Religious Tests.
7. Ron Paul’s pro-life ad (and cagey substance).
8. St. Basil on Theft.

1

Late afternoon, I heard a ruckus, outside but within earshot of my office. Suspicion confirmed. “They” were occupying Lafayette:

I went out, sold a little Distributism, signed (I’m a little rueful) a pretty generic petition asking that Congress do something about jobs. Then, as soon as the TV truck came and went (I assume; I’d gone home by then), they were gone.

I’m rueful, by the way, because:

• What I signed onto may have been less generic than I rationalized, and may promote statist solutions.
• Self-employment in an honorable trade or craft is better than a “job” (workin’ for The Man).

“They” are us.

(Pardon the odd formatting. I can’t figure out how to fix it.)

2

Brian Green at TheMoralMinefield blog sings the secular, ethical praises of Distributism quite nicely, taking OWS as a point of departure and disclaiming detailed economic expertise.

Basically, our current system is centralizing power and destrying the vital middle class. It’s a good, quick read.

3

Great Britain’s Red Tory Phillip Blond was in New York today. Rod Dreher liveblogged it (so the quotes are choppy and probably imprecise):

We have now the rhetoric of free markets but the reality of closed markets. We’ve made it harder for people to participate in the markets. We’re recreating serfdom, both in Britain and the USA. … Hayek’s vision [is] being replaced by the cartel state. That is, he says capitalism as we now practice it is actually anti-capitalist.
…
Individual households have become Keynesian. — that is, individual households have been fueling the economy through high levels of deficit spending. And we’ve finally gotten to the bitter end of that — the literal bankruptcy of that model.
…
If you have extreme individualism, you’ll need extreme collectivism. That is, if we value extreme individualism, we will require a powerful central state to protect the weaker folks. And this is corrupting to the health of society.
Blond says in our time, “the Left has taken apart the marriage, the family, and any form of social cement. The Left will use the state to create autonomy. The Right has used the market” to do the same thing. Both are tearing the social fabric apart. “I think we’re in a situation in which the Right is creating a constituency for the Left on an unprecedented basis.”
…
Blond said the modern Left and the modern Right have remarkably much in common. I know it sounds odd, but it’s true.” He said New Left in the 1960s promoted liberalization from traditional moral norms to emancipate individual desires. Then the New Right that followed promoted liberalization from economic strictures. What’s happened has been a social disaster, especially for the poor. The only people who have made out fine have been the wealthy. Blond had a great line about he morality of the sexually libertine left, when applied to economics by the economically libertine right: “It produced an economy where people thought you could screw each other and everybody would get rich.” 
…
Real wages have not gone up over last generation for most people, and declined for men. Debt has skyrocketed over last generation. The “killer statistic,” says Blond, is that far more American households — 50 percent, he claims — are now receiving some form of welfare payment from the government.

4

The Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, and the diocese he leads have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls.

I Tweeted

Extreme indifference or prosecutorial showboating? Bishop indicted for not reporting suspicions. http://j.mp/mZ7a01

Rod Dreher thinks its sad news that it’s come to this, but good news that someone’s acting. He provides some of the background:

Bishop Finn and the diocese had reason to suspect that the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, might subject a child to abuse, the indictment said, citing “previous knowledge of concerns regarding Father Ratigan and children; the discovery of hundreds of photographs of children on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including a child’s naked vagina, upskirt images and other images focused on the crotch; and violations of restrictions placed on Father Ratigan.

For the record, most laws requiring reporting of Child Abuse cases have no exceptions — not even the Confessional. I would expect a Priest who heard a confession of child abuse to break the law, and would support his doing so. But there was no plausible claim of any privileged occasion here.

5

I’ve been thinking for a while that the story of the Tower of Babel may be a telescoped version of a history that looks something like late 20th and early 21st Century America.

6

I keep hearing people who oppose Romney on Mormon grounds saying that if Romney believes the bizarre claims of Mormonism, is there anything he wouldn’t believe? I wish people who say that would stop for half a second to consider the implications of their claim. If a secularist employed that rationale in the voting booth, he could never trust the judgment of the sort of candidate who believes that God became a man and was raised from the dead. Somebody who believes that, no telling what they’ll believe, eh?

(Rod Dreher) I differ from Rod Dreher a bit on this one: I do think Mormon claims are more implausible than more orthodox Christian claims.

But they plainly do not produce glassy-eyed wackos, so I’m with Rod at the end of the day: Mitt’s Mormonism is not among the many, many reasons to be lukewarm or cold toward him.

I don’t know whether to hope or despair at this sub-Tidbit. Some conservative South Carolina folks were parsing the GOP field for All Things Considered on NPR. About Romney:

• The held his Mormonism against him at least a little.
• They correctly said Mormons do not, unlike them, accept the Nicene Creed.
• They didn’t know how to pronounce “Nicene Creed,” which makes me wonder where they picked up that distinction.

7

I wondered if Ron Paul, personally pro-life, would actually support federal action on the subject, since it would be pretty consistent with his overall views to say “that’s a state issue” — which is what he said at the Palmetto forum. His official site, if you read it carefully, is kind of cagey on the subject.

I still likely would vote for him if a GOP primary was held tomorrow. He’s the only hopeful who’s not hubristic on foreign policy.

8

He who strips the clothed is to be called a thief. How should we name him, who is able to dress the naked and doesn’t do it, does he deserve some other name? The bread that you possess belongs to the hungry. The clothes that you store in boxes, belong to the naked. The shoes rotting by you, belong to the bare-foot. The money that you hide belongs to anyone in need. You wrong as many people as you could help.

(Saint Basil the Great; HT Jason Rossiter at Google+)

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Bon appetit!

To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett (weird name) to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.

I also post some standing advice, which “goes without saying” – until I change my mind, at least:

• If it’s “too big to fail,” break it up into harmless little pieces.
• Petroleum is going away. Get used to it and adjust now.
• No nation ever got rich selling each other burgers, Girl Scout Cookies, and raffle tickets.
• Repent. Yes, you. And me. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”