This demanding, nearly 65-year-old Prince of undimmed energy is certainly eccentric. In Highgrove, his country house, he has constructed a little mud-built hermitage with shelves full of spiritual classics such as the Philokalia, the compendium of Eastern Orthodox contemplative masters. There, by an open fire, he sits and writes many of the thousands of letters – funny, unguarded, self-critical, passionate, kind-hearted, occasionally querulous – which pour from his pen. He never ceases (literally never: aides say that he works every single day of his life) to think about the needs of the people he tries to serve.
(Prince Charles at 65: A modern man of undimmed energy ready to be king) H/T Rod Dreher, who profiled the Philosopher Prince last year with a pieced that included a quote from the Prince’s writing:
Modernism deliberately abstracted Nature and glamorized convenience, and this is why we have ended up seeing the natural world as some sort of gigantic production system seemingly capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit. … We have become semi-detached bystanders, empirically correct spectators, rather than what the ancients understood us to be, which is participants in creation. This ideology was far from benign or just a matter of fashion. The Marxism of the Bolshevik regime totally absorbed, adopted and extended the whole concept of Modernism to create the profoundly soulless, vicious, dehumanized ideology which eventually engineered the coldly calculated death of countless millions of its own citizens as well as entire living traditions, all for the simple reason that the end justified the means in the great ‘historic struggle’ to turn people against their true nature and into ideological, indoctrinated ‘machines.’
Never underestimate the power of a 65-year-old to penetrate to the heart of things. 65 is a heckuva good age, now that you mention it.
There’s just something about a liberal Catholic columnist, who has never once forthrightly said that he opposes abortion, that sets off some of his co-religionists when he delivers a schoolmarmish lecture on what a real conservative pro-lifer should support politically (hint: it’s “the liberal” position):
If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?
(E.J. Dionne, What’s the Matter with Motherhood?)
There is nothing to the … column but feeble attempts at point-scoring against pro-lifers. Not his fellow pro-lifers, you understand. E.J. Dionne, for more than two decades as a Post columnist who presents himself as a Catholic, has never written a pro-life sentence, and this column is not a sign that he has become concerned about abortion …
[T]he paragraphs quoted above reveal something else, and that is Dionne’s perfect incomprehension of what health insurance is. It is indeed about the pooling of risk, but no one willingly buys insurance against risks that, in the nature of things, do not and cannot concern him. Dionne thinks insurance is a scheme for the social redistribution of costs, but that is another thing entirely. By his reasoning, the social costs of insuring against floods at the Jersey shore should be addressed by requiring homeowners in Death Valley to buy flood insurance. The social costs of insuring against the death of airline passengers should be addressed by requiring people to buy flight insurance who never fly. And so forth.
(Matthew J. Franck, Is it Pro-Life to Make Single Men Buy Maternity Coverage?)
I’d be lying if I said that Dionne’s and Franck’s dueling column titles made me think of this, but it’s a convenient segue into two topics I love: religious freedom and constitutional law.
Even halfway-savvy lawyers put a lot of effort into “issue framing:” what’s the legal question at stake in a case? This matters especially on appeal and surpassingly in the U.S. Supreme Court.
First, he who sets the terms of debate tends to win the debate. Judges aren’t dumb, but they are human most of the time (a few reptilian examples come to mind, but never mind). At least it requires some fancy footwork for the other guy to explain why your version is wrong.
Second, if there’s a novel individual “right” you’d like recognized, frame the issue in terms of high generality. If there’s a state, for instance, that criminalizes sodomy, don’t ask “whether there’s a right to commit sodomy.” Ask something more like “whether the right of privacy, extending back to Griswold v. Connecticut in matter of intimate relationships, extends to protecting consenting intimate private relationships between members of the same sex.” That’s got a whole lot more je ne sais quoi.
Considering what the answer should be, I’m very pleased with how Alliance Defending Freedom has framed the issue in a petition for certiorari in the notorious Elane Photography case out of New Mexico:
Whether applying a state public-accommodations statute to require a photographer to create expressive images and picture-books conveying messages that conflict with her religious beliefs violates the First Amendment’s ban on compelled speech.
Doesn’t that just make you want to jump up and say “Well, duh! Hell yes!” That’s what it’s supposed to do.
Such is the notoriety of the case and the insouciance of the New Mexico Supreme Court opinion that I’m going out on a limb to predict that certiorari will be granted, and the New Mexico Supreme Court will be reversed.
I’d not be surprised even at a unanimous reversal. It has happened before, to a more prestigious state Supreme Court than New Mexico’s, where a similarly snotty, almost-unanimous state court opinion said, basically, “Get out of here, you bigots! You’re stupid and unpopular and your mother dresses you funny!” (“Since the defendants had no right to discriminate against members of GLIB, by operation of logic the city could not possibly have interfered with or infringed on any of their rights as asserted by the defendants. Thus, the judge properly dismissed the defendants’ cross claims against the city.”)
SCOTUS responded, in effect, “Whaddya mean ‘right to discriminate,’ you effete Taxachusetts jackasses? This is a case about whether the state, carrying water for a party crasher, can compel parade organizers to express a message they don’t wanna express? Capiche?”
ADF is not trying to break new ground. Irish Paraders and Boy Scouts come to mind as precedents for striking down the New Mexico decision on grounds that the state cannot compel expression. I don’t think I’m being delusional when I hear strong echoes of arrogant Massachusetts Justices coming from New Mexico Justices. When will they learn?
Beware when political horse-trading starts. Weird things can happen:
The White House has thrown its weight behind a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $10 an hour.
…
The legislation is sponsored in the Senate by Tom Harkin of Iowa and in the House by George Miller of California, both Democrats. It would raise the minimum wage — in three steps of 95 cents each, taking place over two years — to $10.10, and then index it to inflation. The legislation will probably be coupled with some tax sweeteners for small businesses, traditionally the loudest opponents of increases to the minimum wage.
“The combination of an increase to $10.10 and some breaks for small business on expensing unite virtually the whole Democratic caucus, and we are prepared to move forward shortly,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat.
… One official at the luncheon said that some Democratic senators from more conservative states favored an increase to $9 an hour, but including the expensing provision was enough of a sweetener to bring them behind the $10.10 proposal.
Under that provision, small businesses would be able to deduct the total cost of investments in equipment or expansions, up to a maximum of $500,000 in the first year. Including such a provision helped persuade the Senate to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the last two minimum wage increases.
Got that? See any problem?
Unfortunately in the Senate proposal outlined above, the small business tax cut is not a cut in the employer portion of the payroll tax, or some other salutary benefit to ease the effects of the wage hike. Instead, as Jordan Weissmann noticed over at The Atlantic:
In other words, this bill would make it more expensive to hire workers and cheaper to buy the technology to replace them. From a political horse-trading perspective, this makes total sense. From a job-creation perspective, it’s a little alarming.
Increased automation is one of an employer’s options in deciding how to respond to a minimum wage hike.
Oh. Duh.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 