A buzz term is appearing with increased frequency in the literature and programs surrounding education at both the public school and university levels: Cultural competence. Parents would do well to ask,"What is it, and how could it affect my children?"
The term “cultural competence” first arose in connection with health care services, where a standard definition is,"services that are respectful of and responsive to the cultural and linguistic needs of the patient." This means, for example, health care providers should be able to communicate with a non-English-speaking patient. They should take other cultural differences into account as well; for example, a clinic might arrange for a female doctor to perform a pelvic exam on a Muslim woman.
The term has migrated from health care to education, however, where its definition has shifted. In theory, cultural competence in the classroom can involve nothing more than training teachers to be more effective with children from diverse backgrounds. For example, a teacher may take a student’s race into account when assigning readings in history that are most likely to interest him.
But the term is notoriously vague and elastic in its application. This is not surprising. After all, its two component words – “culture” and “competence” – are themselves difficult to define.
Most of the formal definitions that are offered in policy statements clarify little. The one offered by the National Association of School Psychologists is typical, “Cultural competence is defined as a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations.”
The best way to slice through such obscuring jargon and arrive at an understanding of cultural competence is to examine how it functions as a policy in the school system. In practice, the term often looks like political correctness being applied in a new manner.
Political correctness is a term used by the New Left to refer to policies that aim at achieving ‘social justice’ and respect for minorities. (Minorities are defined in various ways including racially and sexually.) PC policies encourage speech or behavior that promote these goals and discourage speech or behavior deemed to be counter-productive. Thus, political correctness is a powerful tool through which schools can impose a social agenda. In this context, cultural competence acts as a filtering mechanism by which only those who agree or at least comply with the specific agenda can expect to be licensed, hired, or advanced within the system.
An example of how political correctness and cultural competence function in the public schools occurred in 2005. A Lexington, Massachusetts school sent kindergarten students home with a Diversity School Bag. It included a book with drawings of different families, including a gay couple, in order to indicate that all family arrangements are equally valid. As a father, David Parker objected.
He insisted that teaching attitudes toward sexuality was his jurisdiction as a parent. This is a common objection: namely, that the teaching of [italic]any[italic] social or sexual values to children is properly the jurisdiction of parents, not the government.
Parker was arrested when he refused to leave the principal’s office without the school’s promise to notify him if homosexuality was going to be discussed with his son in class. He co-filed a lawsuit to challenge the school’s policy. In late February 2007, the suit was dismissed from federal court. In his decision, Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf stated that parents have no right of input into public school curriculum. Families who don’t agree with the curriculum can send their children to private schools or home school.
The content of the controversial curriculum expresses political correctness: the goal of teaching children to accept the ‘proper’ social value of homosexuality and heterosexuality being equally valid family choices. In Lexington, that expression includes arresting a parent who strenuously but peacefully objected.
Cultural competence has the same goal but its methodology is different. Cultural competence is a policy applied to educators which requires them to conform to standards of political correctness as a prerequisite of their licensing, hiring, firing or promotion. The policy is a filtering process by which public schools attempt to ensure that administrators and teachers will express the ‘proper’ values to children. It directly targets teachers rather than students. As such, it tends to function more behind-the-scenes and, so, it is less visible to parents and the public. Yet the impact upon children's education is dramatic. By homogenizing the values of those who educate, other values tend to be pre-filtered out of the information and discussion occurring in a classroom.
Norman Levitt, a Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University, explains “'Cultural competence' is, in essence, a bureaucratic weapon. 'Cultural competence', or rather, your presumed lack thereof, is what you will be clobbered with if you are imprudent enough to challenge or merely to have qualms about 'affirmative action', 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', as those principles are now espoused by their most fervent academic advocates.”
In terms of the public school system, the clobbering of teachers who might disagree is often pre-emptive.
Consider the case of Ed Swan. In fall 2005, Swan was a student at Washington State University's College of Education (WSU) when he was threatened with “termination” from the program because of his conservative religious and political views. Without graduating, he could not obtain teaching credentials. The specific barrier to his graduation was the college’s 10-point"professional dispositions evaluation" form that rated a student’s “understanding of the complexities of race, power, gender, class, sexual orientation, and privilege in American society." Washington State (the government) requires the WS College of Education to attest to each student's good character before graduation; indeed, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education has urged that teachers in all states be evaluated on their “dispositions” – that is, on their moral stance and sense of social justice -- as well as on their knowledge and skill. (Disposition evaluation is one of the main tools through which cultural competence in teachers is assured.)
Swan failed the evaluation four times. His grades were A-level but his views were unacceptable. For example, he was critical of affirmative action programs because he believed the law should treat everyone the same. One evaluator wrote on the form, “[Mr. Swan has] revealed opinions that have caused me great concern in the areas of race, gender, sexual orientation, and privilege."
WSU’s threat of expelling Swan came with a loophole. If he signed a contract with the College to attend diversity training and agreed to their continuing scrutiny of his “disposition”, then he could continue through the program. Instead, Swan contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is renowned for taking legal action on behalf of students whose constitutional rights are being violated by the educational system. The contract demand was dropped. Swan was allowed to graduate.
WSU’s “disposition evaluation” is not uncommon. Robert KC Johnson – Professor of History at Boston College – commented in an article in ]Inside Higher Education (May 23, 2005) on the impact that political correctness has had upon teacher-training programs. Johnson wrote, “The faculty’s ideological imbalance has allowed three factors — a new accreditation policy, changes in how students are evaluated and curricular orientation around a theme of ‘social justice’ — to impose a de facto political litmus test on the next cohort of public school teachers.”
Johnson offered several examples of how specific universities have embedded “social justice” requirements into their teacher-training programs; he could have offered many more. In 2002, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education changed its accreditation requirements to require dozens of teacher training programs to measure each student’s disposition on “social justice.” The revised accreditation requirement read, in part,"Unit assessments must also reflect the dispositions identified in its conceptual framework and in professional and state standards…For example, if the unit has described its vision for teacher preparation as ‘Teachers as agents of change’ and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice.”
Most university teacher training programs now include some form of official commitment to ‘social justice’. Three of the examples offered by Johnson provide a sense of the ideological substance of these program commitments.
The University of Kansas program states that students should be “more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.”
Marquette’s program is committed “to social justice in schools and society” and to producing teachers who “transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.”
The University of Toledo states, “Education is our prime vehicle for creating the ‘just’ society,” since “we are preparing citizens to lead productive lives in a democratic society characterized by social justice.”
These ‘social justice’ commitments and requirements function as a form of ideological prior restraint upon which views will be expressed in a classroom.
Some of the specifics of what constitutes 'social justice' and 'equity' emerged from a May 2004 summit sponsored by the Oregon Department of Education. The summit’s purpose was to develop a specific proposal on how to implement 'cultural competence' in education, from kindergarten to university.
Attended by"over 100 of the State's leaders in education”, the summit split into various discussion tables that evolved definitions and specifics. One table reported that 'cultural competence'"entails actively challenging the status quo...one table noted the need to incorporate institutionalized notions of power, privilege, and oppression into the definition.... Thus, for many, cultural competence is transformative and political." In practical terms, a" culturally competent" teacher"advocates for social justice"; the teacher"exhibits awareness of key concepts" such as"privilege, affirmative action"; he or she must not only"apply cultural competencies" but also"believe it."
In its five-year projection, the summit proposed to"revise rules to achieve high cultural standards including possible revocation of licensure for culturally incompetent behavior" and"to require cultural competence for license renewal." In short, even teachers who were licensed might have to toe an ideological line in order to retain their licenses.
In March 2005, the Corvallis (Oregon) Gazette Times reported,"A quiet effort by state officials to require that all newly certified Oregon teachers be 'culturally competent' looks to be dead-on-arrival in the Republican-controlled House, despite firm support from education advocates." The House stumbled over the definition of ‘cultural competence’ from the summit, which was almost certainly the standard that would have been applied under law.
The words “quiet effort” in the above news story are all-important. Parents are generally unaware of the policies under which their children’s teachers are trained or licensed. When the specifics of those policies become known, there is often a backlash such as that express by Dave Mowry, a legislative coordinator for Rep. Linda Flores. On May 11, 2005, Mowry wrote in The Oregonian, “[T]he Teachers Standards and Practices Commission and the Oregon Department of Education are backtracking, saying they really didn't mean it...Then why is it in the definition and the five-year plan and on the commission's Web site?"
Oregon may be an extreme example but PC policies have a tendency to become extreme...and quickly so.
The best protection for children against political correctness is for parents to be aware. Happily this seems to be happening more and more. As it does, strange ironies can arise. On January 22, 2007, the Ironwood Daily Globe reported that parents in the small school district of Ontonagon, Michigan were taking Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf’s advice and homeschooling their children. The result? The newspaper continued, “Board of Education President Dean Juntunen made an appeal Monday for homeschoolers to enroll their children in the Ontonagon Area School District. Juntunen explained that due to a loss of student population this year and inadequate state funding, 'we will be using up our financial cushion’.”
Cultural competence is an argument for homeschooling.
Kudos to RightBias (Nancy Morgan) for hosting Muslim cartoon week; the site currently offers 23 cartoons that highlight the cowardice and consequence of allowing radical Islam to stifle freedom of speech. The mission of Muslim cartoon week: To protest the growing wave of appeasement and censorship on all things Muslim. Personally, I would have tempered the mission statement to make it clear that it is radical Muslims and not "all things" Muslim that is the threat.
I believe the proximate cause of Muslim week was Random House's recent decision to pull a scheduled novel on Islam due to the publisher's fear that it would incite violence. On 08/07 Reuters reported, "The Jewel of Medina," a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones, 46, was due to be published on August 12 by Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG, and an eight-city publicity tour had been scheduled, Jones told Reuters on Thursday. The novel traces the life of A'isha from her engagement to Mohammed, when she was six, until the prophet's death. Jones said that she was shocked to learn in May, that publication would be postponed indefinitely....Random House deputy publisher Thomas Perry said in a statement the company received" cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”
Acme is in line with Larson's run for the House of Representatives as the LP candidate in Virginia where he is on the ballot. Of course, his run may also be a parody play. At least, the website listing his positions is a lot of fun to read. For example, Larson's position on defense: As Congressman, I will completely abolish the United States military and replace it with an anarcho-capitalistic system. Larson's position on health care: Government should stay completely out of the health care business. It should not regulate nor subsidize any treatments. Medicare and Medicaid should be shut down...
Cross Posted at WendyMcElroy.com.
Although the following article was first published on May 11, 2000 by Lew Rockwell, it directly addresses and debunks the currently-relevant concept of using the military in Iraq (Afghanistan, Iran et al) to 'promote' values like democracy or women's rights.
by Wendy McElroy
The concept of a"holy war" has been given new expression in the recent policy of"military humanitarianism" adopted by the United States and the United Nations. For example, the bombing of Serbia and the military occupation of Bosnia have been justified by the much publicized ‘need’ to prevent ethnic cleansing in the region. The announced motive behind these military aggressions was considered so holy that the standard protocols of international conflict – such as a declaration of war or territorial aggression on the part of the enemy – were forsworn.
Yet protocol is the essence of a holy war, especially as that concept has been developed in Catholic"just war" theory. For centuries, religious thinkers have struggled to resolve the apparent contradiction between the principle of"Thou shalt not kill" and the policy of war. The solution that evolved was expressed through standards by which to judge whether a war was just(ified), or not.
What Constitutes a Just War?
In their approach to war, Christian ethics and classical liberalism have much in common – namely, they both establish a theoretical framework in which it is wrong to harm innocent parties. Thus, it is interesting to adapt the basic structure of Christian just war theory to shed light upon the question,"Is a just war possible to those who refuse to aggress against innocent people?" In his book"War and Conscience," the minister Allen Isbell lists several conventional requirements that a just war must meet. They include: the war must be a last resort; it must have a just origin; it must have a legitimate aim; it should embody a reasonable level of force as a response; it must be waged by a proper authority against a proper enemy; the execution must be just; and, it must have the promise of beneficial victory. In short, a just war does not merely seek to achieve a proper end, it is also conducted by righteous means.
These protocols for a ‘just war’ capture a sense of what the qualifier ‘just’ usually means. ‘War’ can be defined as the declaration of conflict by one State against another by which it commits the people and resources under its jurisdiction to hostilities against the opponent’s people and resources. (Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has observed that each state actually declares war against three enemies: the other state; the people of the other state; and, its own dissenting citizenry.)
The definition of ‘just’ is more complex. Consider some of the requirements.
1. The war must have a just origin.
The use of force is justified only as a response to aggression – that is, in self-defense or in defense of an innocent third party. Moreover, proper force can only be directed at those who have initiated or are perpetuating the aggression. This is an individualistic approach. That is, the rights violated through aggression are individual ones, rather than the collective ones that traditionally lead to war, e.g. a violation of territorial soveriegnty. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine a war erupting through a massive violation of individual rights.
A practical problem immediately arises, however. The prerequisites necessary to assess the justness of the war’s origin – such as time, all pertinent information, arbitration by a neutral party – are rarely available at the point war is declared. A war might be adjudicated ‘just’ in retrospect, but this is comparable to holding a fair trial after a guilty defendant has been executed.
2. The war should be a reasonable response.
Just as you do not shoot people for traffic infractions, the level of wartime force must be appropriate to the aggression encountered. It must be no more than what is necessary to protect the individual rights of person and property.
The question of what constitutes a reasonable response is complicated by the presence of States that claim a monopoly over all wartime policy, including the ability to behave reasonably. Indeed, the State usurps the right to define what is reasonable. For example, a pacifist who believed that non-violent resistance is the most reasonable protection against aggression would not be allowed to behave according to his definition. Nevertheless, it is still possible to imagine a war with just origins that entails a reasonable level of force in response.
3. The war must be declared by a proper authority against a proper enemy.
If every human being has the right to self defense, then no one can properly take it from him. If a State acts only on behalf of those individuals who agree to place their right to self defense in its hands, then the State has proper authority to declare war. But it has no right or authority to do so on behalf of people who wish to be at peace. For example, in World War II, the United States had no authority to declare war on behalf of those Americans of German, Italian or Japanese ancestry who might have been understandably reluctant to engage in the conflict.
For the sake of speedy argument, let’s assume that the war is declared against a proper enemy.
This leaves the other two categories against whom the State also declares war – namely, the people within the enemy State and its own dissenting citizenry. Can this be done with proper authority? With regard to those who dissent within the State’s own borders, the underlying assumption of a ‘just war’ precludes aggressing against anyone who has not used force themselves. In short, it is never proper use force to coerce agreement from peaceful people.
With regard to the people of an enemy State, any act of war would have to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty so as to spare the former injury. A just war would have to eschew weapons of mass destruction and be conducted in a manner reminiscent of the 19th century, when civilians used to picnic beside battlefields, confident that the military on both sides would respect the distinction between civilians and combatants. It would require an extreme weakening of the current pervasive nationalism that classifies people by countries and uses that classification as a definition of innocence or guilt.
4. The war’s execution must be just.
This point is somewhat redundant but worth stressing due to the inability of modern weaponry and tactics to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. It is said that, as long as weapons are aimed only at valid targets, the bombing of enemy cities is valid. In short, the injury to innocents is excused as unintended, as" collateral damage." This argument misses the point. Although the injury inflicted upon the innocent may not an intended consequence of the bombing, it is a fully foreseeable one. It is not an accident that can be forgiven, but a known and predictable consequence of an action. Moreover, unlike an accident, war involves denying reparations to those wrongfully injured on the losing side. If anyone knowingly acts in a manner that will harm innocent people and denies them redress, he cannot subsequently hide behind the fact that this was not his primary goal.
Some argue for indiscriminate weaponry on the grounds of utilitarianism. That is, if one State is willing to use bombs, others must respond in kind or be devastated. This argument may be true. If so, it may be a reason to eschew either war or ethics that condemn harming the innocent.
Others claim that when your life is threatened, you have a right to respond defensively even it means firing into a crowd at the aggressor. The responsibility for unintended harm lies with the aggressor. If this argument is valid, an interesting math question arises. How many bystanders are you justified in harming in self-defense? Two, twenty, a thousand? What if the aggressor is in a building – can you blow it up in self-defense? If not, why not? After all, once the principle of eschewing harm to innocents is abandoned, how do you run the math on what number is acceptable? In war, the math embraces the millions of people who live in an enemy State. Bombing them is comparable to summarily executing a crowd of people in order to ‘get’ the aggressor in their midst.
The foregoing are merely a few of the protocols by which to evaluate whether a war is just. And with each question considered, the possibility of such a phenomneon becomes so increasingly remote as to become unimaginable.
The Free Market Alternative to War
Fortunately, a rich history of anti-war theory provides an alternative means to secure to international peace. The classical liberal Richard Codben expressed the core of this analysis when he said there should be as much traffic as possible between the peoples of the world and as little as possible between the governments. This vision leads to a world of both free trade and isolationism, wherein individuals deal freely with each other unencumbered by governmental ambitions and conflicts.
Unfortunately, the classical liberal view of war was dealt a virtual death blow by World War I. Indeed, the entire tradition declined as a result of the growth of government and disillusionment occasioned by that global upheaval. Classical libertarianism incurred such damage because its approach to war was an integral part of its theory of state and society.
Ironically, in turning to the State to solve conflict, people turned away from the one social mechanism that could ensure a peaceful society: the free market. One of the most eloquent explanations of how economic freedom can eliminate violence between individuals and nation was offered in 1733 by the philosopher Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire in a work entitled"Letters Concerning the English Nation." The"Letters" was written as though to explain English society to a friend back in France. Voltaire was particularly interested in how toleration rather than open conflict predominated in England. He choose religious toleration as his focus because of the bloodshed religious differences had caused in France.
Letter Five dismissed the idea that the English government had anything to do with the peacefulness of English society. Indeed, politics strongly favored tension, not tolerance since"No one can hold office in England or in Ireland unless he is a faithful Anglican." In Letter Six, Voltaire described how the peaceful society was a pure expression of the free market. He observed,"Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt."
English commerce established a social arena within which people dealt with each other solely for their own economic benefit and, so, ignored extraneous factors such as the other party’s religious beliefs. On the floor of the London stock exchange, the economic self-interest of the Christian and the Jew outweighed the prejudice that might otherwise cause violence.
Voltaire singled out for praise the same aspect of commerce that Karl Marx would later condemned. The market place was impersonal or, in more negative terms, it dehumanized people. They ceased to be individuals who were expressing their humanity and became interchangeable units who bought and sold. To Voltaire, the impersonal nature of trade was its great strength. It allowed people to disregard divisive factors that had historically disrupted society and caused war between nations.
Moreover, the peace created by commerce extended far beyond the instant of buying or selling. As Voltaire phrased it,"On leaving these peaceable and free assemblies [at the London Stock Exchange], some go to the synagogue, other in search of a drink..." In the end,"all are satisfied" because they have benefited. All are peaceful because they anticipate similarly benefiting in the future.
In Conclusion
Historically speaking, war has been the antithesis of justice. It returns man to a Hobbesian state of nature in which all are at war with all. Yet, also historically, there have been brakes that could be applied to protect societies from open conflict. An example of one such brake has been the need for a President to secure the approval of Congress before declaring war. One of the most disturbing trends within current warfare is the erosion of these safeguards against conflict.
Under the auspices – some would say the guise – of the United Nations, the United States was able to militarily devastate areas of Europe that had committed no act of aggression against it. The death and destruction was accomplished in the name of justice. Yet it was conducted in a manner that did not permit the questions that are necessary to establish whether a war is just. Moreover, the war and subsequent occupation have destroyed the only chance that the ethnically diverse region has for peace: the free market.
An earlier blog post Leave the United States if you can" in which I urge people to move their persons and wealth out of America has stirred controversy and prompted email inquiries. I want to answer one inquiry in a public manner: namely, “why have you become so pessimistic.”
By nature, I am not a pessimist. Nor am I currently pessimistic about my own life or the prospect of freedom in other areas of the world. But I see little reason for any optimism about freedom or prosperity within the US over the next several years; instead, I see the rise of a totalitarianism that is unparalleled in my experience. I know many people think nothing has fundamentally changed State-side; they believe the economy or society is just going through a bad patch. Perhaps people feel this way because they wake up every morning at the same time beside the same person, they eat a customary breakfast with coffee the way they like it and, then, drive well-known roads to work. Thus, life may be more stressful but it is basically unchanged, and anyone who warns them that a slow car accident is heading their way is an alarmist.
By contrast, I believe the United States has fundamentally changed since 9/11. Although many people’s lives follow the same routine as last year and the year before, I believe the political, economic and social framework that allowed Americans to be the freest and richest people in the world is now gone.
Here I must make a distinction between America and Americans. America to me is not geographical boundaries but a nation built (as much as I have ever known) along the principles of individual liberty and the celebration of productivity. I always resonated to Ayn Rand’s statement that she was more American than those born within US borders because she chose to be American. I am Canadian but I have chosen to make a lifelong study of American history and politics because it is fascinating and sometimes an expression of what I consider “the ideal”…or as close to it as flawed and self-contradictory human beings can come. When I say “America”, I mean the specific institutions (e.g. the Bill of Rights) which established a civil society sanspareils and protected the individual – largely against the State.
What do I mean by Americans? De Tocqueville described the American character superbly in Democracy in America, including the characteristic that later became known as rugged individualism. But why did Americans develop these characteristics more often and in a more heightened form than the French or Spanish? The answer can’t be genetic because there is no genetic American (I leave aside the issue of Indians); I don’t think it is cultural because (especially in de Tocqueville’s time) the U.S. was a patchwork of cultures and far less cohesive. I believe the American character arose as a result of breathing in the freedom, safety and confidence that true civil society offers to individuals. Rugged individualism arose largely due to the institutional structure of society in which people bowed their heads to no ruler and were expected to come to their own conclusions about their own lives.
I don’t think that structure still exists. The institutions that were the framework in which individualism flourished have been so discarded or distorted as to be unrecognizable. The justice system has no connection to justice. Police agencies do the opposite of protecting you from violence. Public schools do not teach how to think but how to obey. ‘Defense’ agencies are obsessed with conquering and occupation a nation that never attacked America. Ask yourself…if institutional frameworks like the Bill of Rights gave rise to rugged individualism, what sort of person results from the institutions of Big Brother government?
Is rugged individualism dead? I don’t think so. I see it whenever I look at the areas/issues where the fight for freedom is still raging – for example, the gun rights movement. But it has ceased to be a defining or prevalent characteristic in the American psyche or politics. Is the Bill of Rights dead? Of course not; in its essence, the Bill of Rights is a set of ideas/ideals that existed long before a piece of paper was signed; the continuing existence of those ideals does not depend upon any document.
Moreover, institutions and civil society can be rebuilt. This has happened repeatedly throughout history and around the globe.
But it will not happen in the midst of an economic crisis such as the one into which the United States is just starting to slide. Economic crisis, as much as War, is the health of the State. I don’t think the rebuilding of American freedom will occur with much effect for years. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying…liberty v. power is the best fight in town and one to which I committed long ago. But I'm also going to tell the truth as I see it vis-a-vis the odds of success...all the while being very grateful that the United States is only one of many, many places in the world. Just as ideals do not depend on pieces of paper, freedom has no natural native soil.
Make plans right now while opportunities still exist to secure your wealth outside of the authorities' rapacious reach because that door of opportunity may be slammed in your face in the near future. It is not merely that government at all levels is starving for the cash that's dried up from property taxes and, so, will steal and confiscate like a drunken highwayman. Many factors point to rise of the Total State, which will grind up your freedom, your future and the lives of those who resist.
I read about 12 news sources a day, from far-left to the Religious Right; month by month, there is a dramatic increase in reports of police brutality, government surveillance, crack-downs, the control of daily life down to the minutia of which oils you may cook french fries... And there seems to be precious little opposition to the arrival of totalitarianism. Perhaps the flood of oppression is too overwhelming and has caused a general paralysis; at times, that is my reaction. But, mostly, I think people are either focused on financial survival or they actually applaud the Total State. Even those who believe they believe in freedom are among the applauders because they buy the justifications being offered for the annihilation of civil liberties. For example, consider just one of the incredible and successful assaults on the due process and liberties of us all; in the name of defending women and children, the campaign against sex offenders has created a class of"untouchables" in class-free America -- people whom the government tells where to live, how to make a living, which sites they can e-visit, etc., etc. In the name of noble goals, the government has erased the idea of serving out a time in jail (which used to be called"paying your debt to society") and, instead, established the idea of indefinite sentences and 'forever' punishments.But the establishment of this caste system is just one aspect of the wild plunge into tyranny.
What should worry you the most is that everything has occurred before the economic collapse of the United States, which I believe will happen in the near future. (The timing depends somewhat on when"too many" foreign-held dollars are dumped back into America.) I expect a severe depression to unfold over the next few years. And nothing, nothing, nothing encourages the growth of State as much as people who are frightened and hungry/homeless. An entire population can turn to a leader much as children turn toward a parent...and for the same reason: to feel safe.
If an economic depression is added to the convergence of the police state with a total surveillance society, then I honestly don't know what will happen. But I do know that you don't want to be there to find out. Don't be fooled by those who say"but America has too strong a tradition of freedom for this to happen." Pre-Nazi Germans thought their culture was too sophisticated and fine to allow the triumph of barbarism. Leave.
Cross posted at WendyMcElroy.com
1) Increasingly, I hear the phrase"privatizing profits, socializing costs" (or losses) because, increasingly, the situation described is being imposed by politicians. The most notorious instance is the recent bail-out of the"Macs" -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- by which those quasi-private agencies are rewarded for almost criminal fiscal incompetence/irresponsibility by forcing taxpayers to absorb the cost. And, lest you believe the bailout is no more than some American taxpayers 'helping' some others who are Mac bond holders, heed these words from Freedom works, As politicians call for taxpayer bailouts and a government takeover of troubled mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, FreedomWorks would like to point out that a bailout is a transfer of possibly hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars to sophisticated investors and governments overseas. The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. Interestingly, on the same day the American taxpayer bailout of China was announced, another piece of news 'broke.' The Chinese government significantly reduced its subsidy of oil/gas...a subsidy that inflated gas prices and which the US government had exerted longstanding pressure to reduce.
2) A policy of zero tolerance has combined with the near-total monitoring of life by governments everywhere. Trivial behavior that either would not have been noticed before is now being scrutinized and punished....especially when such punishment is revenue enhancing. Consider two examples -- one British, one American.
This headline from the Daily Mail: Trader is fined £300 (approx. $600 US)by council for using black bin bags instead of grey. The article opens, Customers shopping for clothes at the Charli boutique watched in amazement when two uniformed men marched in and threatened staff with criminal prosecution. Their crime? Putting out rubbish in the wrong-coloured bin bags. Council officers announced that the shop in Muswell Hill, North London, would be fined £300 after using black bags because they had run out of the grey version issued by the local authority. The designer store had been waiting since July 1 for a delivery of new bags, but by the 17th staff decided they would have to put their rotting rubbish out in four standard black bags.
This headline from WorldNetDaily: Pet owners get 72 hours to clean their own yards. The article opens, Residents of one Denver suburb are being told by city officials they have only 72 hours to clean pet poop from their own yards or face fines of up to $999.
3) Whether McCain or Obama is elected, taxes will rise. I suspect they will go up more under Obama because (as far as can be gleaned from the vagueness of his campaign) he favors a drastic expansion of the federal government. Meanwhile, each day, the two men seem to move closer to holding the same position on the money pit of war in Iraq/Afghanistan.
4) More governments on all levels -- federal, state, city, etc. -- are likely to consider the same option being fielded by New York City. The New York Post reports, Warning of an approaching economic calamity, Gov. Paterson yesterday called an emergency session of the state Legislature - and raised the specter that New York may have to sell off roads, bridges and tunnels to close a massive budget deficit. In a rare televised address, the Democratic governor cited"private-public partnerships" involving the sale of state assets - widely condemned by critics as fiscal gimmickry - as one way to stem a tide of red ink brought on by the sagging economy and woes on Wall Street. In other words, taxpayers who paid for the infrastructure may have to pay private companies for the right to use them. At least, with the tolls etc. extorted by government, there was a patina of fairness in that the revenue allegedly went back into rebuilding infrastructure etc.
5) the phonebook length legislation (e.g. the 700-page Mac bailout) being passed contains measures that are massive both in number and in scope. Market Watch declares "Devil in the details: The hidden tax traps in the housing-rescue bill." For example, In a blow to eBay merchants and others accepting credit cards, debit cards, or third-party payments, your merchant bank will now be required to send a report to IRS and to you with your total annual gross payment card receipts. In other words, IRS will get your total merchant credit card gross receipts for the year.
6) the immediate goal of Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and Congress is to prop up the system for one more day...the long-run impact be damned. They are administering CPR on the corpse that is the economy and, then, yelling"stabilized!" when a heartbeat occasionally flutters. Their efforts will make an already deep recession plunge further toward depression.
7) over the last decades, politicians have become addicted to grand schemes, social programs WRIT LARGE, blank check promises. They are not likely to abandon this bad habit simply because tax revenues are falling. They will continue to crank out the money -- thus lowering the value of every dollar currently in your pocket -- while they also try to pick your wallet clean. Of course, the thieving in a noble cause (call it environmentalism, universal medical care...whatever) will be accompanied by laws that make it more difficult for you to make a living because the cost of doing business will be hiked even higher. For example, Justice Department officials are proposing new regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 1990 law intended to prohibit discrimination on the basis of physical limitations. Among the new rules contained in a thousand-page Justice Department document are requirements that would affect most businesses, including miniature golf courses. The Associated Press reports that one proposal calls for miniature golf courses to make at least 50 percent of their holes accessible to people in wheelchairs. Disabled Americans indeed do need protection against discrimination. For example, public buildings such as courthouses should be accessible to them. But priorities need to be established, or the cost to the nation of complying with the ADA will become astronomical.
I could go on and on...But what's the point? Your taxes are going to go up, especially the"hidden" taxes that disguise themselves as fees or fines. Your hold on your own property is going to loosen. In some cases, there will be nothing you can do to preserve your wealth from the government thugs. In others, your greatest protection is privacy. For example, if you know that your trackable spending habits are going to be turned over to IRS. switch to cash only right now.
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19. That's the estimated number of times the Ozark police tasered 16-year-old Mace Hutchinson whom they found lying underneath a highway overpass with a broken back that apparently resulted from fall. (News item here.) The police had been summoned by a 911 call that, one presumes, was placed by people who wished to help the teenager. Mace did not obey the policemen's orders but spoke incoherently instead and, so, they tasered him up to 19 times -- each time repeating the command -- before one of the police wondered aloud whether they should call an ambulance. In intensive care for the broken back and broken heel, Mace had to wait two days for surgery because the tasering had raised his white blood count and caused a fever.
The police use of tasers on Mace is not being officially questioned -- of course! The official reason offered for taser use: the officers were concerned about keeping him out of traffic, keeping him from getting hurt. Yeah. They were worried about his health.
But the gender card will be played. The argument will run: women constitute 50 percent of the population; if women were truly equal, 50 percent of elected officials would be women; the percentage is far lower; therefore, women are not equal. This argument is false and reflects the changing definition of"equality" within feminism.
Equality used to refer to opportunity: women wanted their persons and property fully protected under the law and to have the same access as men to public institutions, such as universities and the courts. Women's call to vote grew so loud that"woman's rights" and"suffrage" briefly became synonyms. In 1920, ratification of the 19th Amendment assured the vote to American women. And, yet, few women were elected to political office.
Sixties feminists faced a problem.
Most legal barriers to women had been swept away. Yet"imbalances," such as the low ratio of female politicians, persisted and were viewed as proof that women were still oppressed. In their view, a true equality of opportunity would have rendered an equality of results.
The call for equality became a cry for women to have equal access to all aspects of society. This new view of equality broke with the old one in two important ways. First, the traditional distinction between"public" and"private" was erased. Equality of access no longer referred to public institutions but to privately-owned ones as well. Second, the law was asked to accord privileges to women in order to compensate them for past wrongs and to establish a"level playing field."
For example, affirmative action regulated whom a business owner could hire.
Today, almost two generations have been raised on this level playing field and have voted their conscience. Yet far fewer women than men are office holders.
One explanation is that '60s feminists were flatly wrong. Equal opportunity in life usually renders unequal results because outcomes depend on many factors other than the equality of either opportunity or access. For example, outcomes depend on the preferences of those involved, preferences that differ widely not only from group to group but also from individual to individual.
Consider how few female firefighters exist. This is not because women are barred from the profession. Indeed, fire departments actively recruit women to comply with affirmative action. The lack of female firefighters may be due to nothing more than the well-documented tendency of women to choose less dangerous, less physically demanding jobs that allow time for their families. In all likelihood, the imbalance has nothing to do with inequality.
Something similar may be at work regarding women office holders. If a majority of women do not choose a political career, if most women voters do not cast ballots for their own sex, this is a fascinating social pattern. But it doesn't necessarily say anything about women's equality: it only reveals women's preferences.
Nevertheless, politically correct feminists will proclaim that the election returns reflect the oppression of women. The definition of equality has changed once more to mean"equality of outcome," not of opportunity or access.
It is always instructive to read United Nations documents. The new term being used there is"substantive equality."
The International Women's Rights Action Watch is an organization with"special consultative status with the U.N.," that works to"facilitate the monitoring and implementation" of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). IWRAW speaks of CEDAW's demand that states"ensure an equality of results between women and men." To do so, CEDAW realizes that states need to treat women and men"differently." Women’s needs must be"specially recognised and catered for [sic] in the context of employment, education, financial services, politics and all other spheres of life."
In short, pervasive laws will benefit women and disadvantage men in order to achieve an equality of results.
Election results will probably be included, if only indirectly. For example, in Kosovo, the U.N. mandated a gender quota. Every third candidate in the 2001 election had to be a woman. Close to a third of the offices went to women. The elections were still called"free" because no one tried to rig the vote count, only the nominations. But, as the notoriously corrupt 19th century politician, Boss Tweed once declared,"I don't care who does the electing just so long as I do the nominating."
Dr. Mark Cooray has well expressed the difference between various concepts of equality within feminism."Equality of opportunity provides in a sense that all start the race of life at the same time. Equality of outcome attempts to ensure that everyone finishes at the same time." Cooray considers"equality of opportunity and freedom" to be"two facets of the same basic concept." Equality of results, however,"is the goal of radical socialism."
As long as women are as free as men to run for office and to vote as they choose, then whatever number of women are elected is the right number for an equality based on freedom.
[Although the article is 10 years old, the situation discussed remains the same.]
In March 1997, I spoke at the International Conference on Prostitution (ICOP), which was presented jointly by The Center for Sex Research at Cal State University Northridge and the sex workers' organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) L.A. To the casual observer, the conference appeared to run smoothly. Those who attended the luncheon address by the featured speaker -- former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders -- were treated to a good natured sight. As Elders warmed to her theme of sex education for the young, she slipped into an evangelical tent-shaking delivery that prompted shouts of"Preach it sister!" from a table of prostitutes by the dais. The laughter and spontaneous applause veiled a sad fact: the journalists, researchers and academics sat together in tight clusters, apart from sex workers. Overwhelmingly, the segregation of 'non-pros' had been instituted by the prostitute-activists.
ICOP billed itself as"An Interface of Cultural, Legal and Social Issues." The conference was meant to bridge misunderstandings between researchers and prostitutes. The four organizers were Norma Jean Almodovar, the head of COYOTE Los Angeles, and Professors James E. Elias, Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough. (Bonnie died several months before ICOP opened.) Norma Jean tended to dominate. She had superior organizational skills and the credibility needed to convince prostitutes -- women who are law-breakers -- to attend a conference where they might be photographed. By the advent of ICOP, however, the organizers had become bitter foes, who almost came to blows.
The breach had been foreshadowed. Although ICOP opened its general session on a Friday morning, certain sympathetic researchers had been invited to pre-conference sessions with prostitute-advocates. I declined because I suspected a disaster was brewing. For well over a year before ICOP, I had participated in a online private e-mailing list called Whorenet. The list was part of the Prostitutes' Rights Movement (PRM) -- a vocal coalition of 'liberated' prostitutes. Whorenet was established in 1996 to allow prostitutes, researchers, and 'activist johns' to share information on political, sexual and personal matters.
The list became an unofficial clearing-house for ICOP. Many, if not most prostitute-activists expressed unrelenting hostility against even the most sympathetic non-pro researchers based largely on identity politics. The central tenet of identity politics is that only the members of a group (such as"blacks" or"prostitutes") can understand the oppression of that group. The PRM believed that regular women (non-pros) could not understand the injustice done to 'the prostitute.' Therefore, non-pros should defer to prostitutes and act as vehicles for their voices. This demand was often expressed with hostility. And, indeed, the researchers who attended the pre-conference sessions later spoke of being insulted. Some were told to leave the meetings to which they had been invited and attended at their own expense.
Like ICOP, Whorenet quickly evolved into what Tracy Quan of PONY (Prostitutes of New York) called"a caste system." In an August 1997 article in the on-line magazine Salon, Quan explained the caste system"...with sex workers sitting at the top and johns at the very bottom." Non-pro women seem to fall somewhere in between the extremes, landing closer to the bottom. Quan commented on the factionalism caused by the caste system,"A prostitutes' rights activist can score points by hinting that an opponent 'has never really been a hooker'."
Hostility spilled over from Whorenet into ICOP. For example, Norma Jean had asked the anti-prostitution feminist Kathleen Barry to be a keynote speaker in order to explore the radical feminist slant. Although willing to consider the invitation, Barry eventually declined because of threats to drown out her speech by heckling from the audience.
The threat of disruption was a woefully counter-productive tactic. Barry focuses upon streetwalkers, for whom abuse is common, rather than upon call girls for whom abuse is rarer. At ICOP, Barry would have met prostitutes who contradicted her paradigm and, perhaps, she would have revised her opinions. In this one instance, at least, a radical feminist was willing to open a dialogue. The rage of the PRM ensured silence.
The research conducted by sympathetic researchers has been damaged by identity politics as well. Consider one of the panels on which I spoke --"Session 11: Studying Whores: Rethinking Research Methods and Ethics." My topic was"The Problem of Advocacy in Research." I explored the tension involved in being both an advocate who favored decriminalization and a researcher who strove for objectivity. For example, in conducting research interviews, there was pressure to 'respect the voices' of the research subjects by, for example, allowing them to rephrase questions. Thus, the subjects themselves partly determined the content of the research. This called the validity of the research into question. I also asked how researchers could ignore the critical voices of ex-prostitutes from anti-prostitution groups such as PROMISE.
From the podium, the researcher Priscilla Alexander later claimed that asking such a question encouraged the murder of sex workers on the streets. This backlash was not surprising. The conversations of several academics upon whose work I had drawn was more than surprising: it was shocking. One academic casually admitted to ignoring or skewing inconvenient data. Another spoke proudly about having sex and taking drugs with her subjects as part of"research."
Both the PRM and Whorenet had lost their value as sources of data on prostitution.
Research from the Opposing Side
In 1994, Christina Hoff Sommers, professor of philosophy at Clark University, published the book Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. Sommers chronicled how a new style of feminist scholarship abandoned facts in order to pursue ideology.
Who Stole Feminism? caused a sensation because Sommers exposed some widely accepted"feminist" statistics as being utterly false. Perhaps the most notorious example was the feminist contention that approximately 150,000 females die each year of anorexia. The claim had caused a media furor, yet no one asked the most basic question: where did that number originate? Sommers followed the trail. Steinem's autobiographical Revolution from Within (1993) cited the figure, which came from Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1992), which came from Joan Brumberg's Fasting Girls (1988). Brumberg cited a 1985 newsletter of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association as her source. When Sommers contacted the President of the Association, she learned that the figure 150,000 referred to the total number of females with any degree of anorexia. The death rate was less than 100 per year. Yet the inflated figures were being used to promote legislation and government grants.
Current feminist"data" on prostitution was particularly puzzling to me because the view of prostitution had shifted dramatically from the seventies to the eighties. When the PRM sprouted in the early '70s, mainstream feminism embraced it. For example, in 1973 NOW endorsed the decriminalization of prostitution. As late as 1979, COYOTE publicly aligned with NOW in an effort to secure the ERA.
By the mid-eighties, the AIDS epidemic had made prostitutes' rights politically unpopular, but the change in feminist perspective cannot be so easily explained. The change was ideological. Broadly speaking, mainstream feminism shifted from prosex liberalism toward an ideology that considered many forms of consensual sex to be forms of patriarchal oppression. This was the influence of radical feminism.
A key book behind the shift in position was Barry's Female Sexual Slavery (1979), in which she described women who are abducted or sold for sexual purposes. Translated into several languages, the book was the basis for a 1983 United Nations report that bluntly stated"prostitution is slavery". Also in 1983, Barry founded the International Feminist Network Against Female Sexual Slavery in Rotterdam, which was funded by the Dutch government and the Ford Foundation.
Soon, the most vocal feminist position on prostitution included an attack upon capitalism and women's self-ownership. For example, in her book The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman explained that the principle 'a woman's body, a woman's right' enslaved women. She concluded,"...the individual as owner is the fulcrum on which modern patriarchy turns."(14)
If the feminist stance on prostitution was based on observable fact, how could the same act be liberating in the mid-seventies and enslaving a decade later? The realities of prostitution had not changed in ten years. Surely, the intelligence of researchers had not changed so significantly either. It seemed clear that research was being driven by ideology.
Unreliable Data on Both Sides
Emotion and ideology surround the issue of prostitution. And the people to whom the public looks for objective information -- researchers, journalists, and academics -- seem to distort the realities of the issue. It is difficult to trust studies or statistics, many of which contradict each other.
Yet reliable information is necessary to address social questions such as the relationship between prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), e.g. herpes, chlamydia, and gonorrhea. The United States has the highest rate of STDs of all Western nations, and some forms of prostitution seem to be vectors of transmission. For example, The Economist commented,"Black gonorrhea rates [gonorrhea among black Americans] are almost seven times higher than among Americans as a whole, partly because blacks have less access to health services and partly because of the spread of prostitution in exchange for crack cocaine." ("Barometer: the Invisible Worm" May 17, 1997) Dependable data is essential.
Is prostitution within America a vector of transmission? Some women on Whorenet thought it could be. One e-mail advised,"Don't brush your teeth before seeing a client. Chew gum, use mouthwash, whatever, but brushing may disturb the gums -- which is great for your gums, but it may cause enough of a breach to allow infections in."
In discussing STDs, it is important to distinguish between prostitution in America and in the Third World. Within countries like Thailand, prostitution unquestionably spreads even AIDS -- a relatively difficult STD to transmit. Consider the following excerpt from a yet-to-be published paper (reprinted with author's consent),"Globally, the incidence of HIV seropositivity among prostituted women is devastating. 58% of prostituted women in Burkina Faso, West Africa and 52% of Kenyan women in prostitution tested positive for HIV (Lankoande et a.l, 1988; Kaul et al., 1997)."
The PRM counters that: 1) American prostitutes are no more likely to be HIV infected than the normal female population because of widespread condom use; 2) the real vector of transmission is drug use; 3) criminalizing prostitution would increase infection by making prostitutes reluctant to seek medical information or assistance.
Nevertheless, the same paper claims,"Rates of HIV among U.S. prostituted women vary. For example, 57% in New Jersey. In Atlanta, Georgia -- 12% among women, 29% among men, and 68% among transgendered people in prostitution. (Elifson et al., 1999)."
The most interesting aspect of the excerpted paper is its source. Entitled"Prostitution: a critical review of the medical and social science literature in press, women & criminal justice," the paper was written by Melissa Farley and Vanessa Kelly. Farley is what the PRM calls an 'anti-sex' feminist who believes prostitution is a form of violence against women. Recently, Farley and I have conducted a modest exchange of research. I am not aware of another instance in which two ideologically opposed feminists cooperated on data relating to sex work.
Yet there is a crying need to get beyond ideology to good data. The public discussion on prostitution has become an ideological brawl in which both sides bend research to promote political agendas and to slander opponents. Those on the sidelines who feel bewildered by a conflicting flood of arguments and evidence should find solace in the fact that some researchers are just as bewildered.
There is reason for hope. For one thing, some radical feminists now call for the 'decriminalization' of prostitution for women, although not for johns. True, they are using the word somewhat differently than the PRM and their ultimate goal is the elimination of prostitution. Mine is still decriminalization. But, perhaps, we are beginning to use the same words. And to co-operate... cautiously.
People call me"an exception." They baldly state that most kids on the street would never choose low-paid honest jobs over well-paid criminal ones. How do they know? Government does not permit a comparison to exist. At sixteen, I decided that 'profits' are not all monetary -- but this was something I knew at fifteen and fourteen as well. I knew that prostitution and drugs were violent, disease-prone worlds in which I had no future. Even if only a minority of under-aged runaways would make the same choice, how can anyone in good conscience deny them that opportunity?
Another common comment is that I should have sought the assistance of a governmental agency. There are at least two things wrong with this advice. First, runaways are on the streets because authority figures in their lives have betrayed them. Most of them will not willingly relinquish control to yet another authority. Second, there is an assumption that government protects children, yet this is the same government that denies them the right to their own labor. History frowns upon the belief that government protects children's rights.
The History of Child Labor Laws
Consider child labor in 19th century Victorian Britain -- the well spring from which modern child labor laws evolved. Immediately, hideous snapshots flash in the mind: five-year-olds being lowered into coal mines, wan children at textile mills, a Dickenesque Oliver asking for"more". These images are used to condemn the free market and the Industrial Revolution against whose evils a humanitarian government is said to have passed child labor laws. This analysis is badly mistaken.
For one thing, it misses a key distinction. Early 19th century Britain had two forms of child labor: free; and, parish or 'pauper' children. Historians J.L. and Barbara Hammond, whose work on the British industrial revolution and child labor is considered definitive, clearly recognized this distinction. The free market economist Lawrence W. Reed, in his brilliant essay"Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution," goes one step farther. He recognizes the importance of the distinction.
Free labor children lived with their parents or guardians and worked during the day at wages agreeable to those adults. But parents often refused to send their children into unusually harsh or dangerous work situations. As Reed notes,"Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate 'free labour' children; they could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable." For example, the unacceptable position of 'scavenger' in textile factories. Typically, scavengers were young children -- about six-years-old -- who had to salvage loose cotton from under the machinery. Because the machinery was running, the job was dangerous and injury was common.
Fortunately for businessmen willing to use the State to their advantage, government had no qualms about sending parish children to work under running machines. Reed explains,"These youngsters [parish children]...were under the direct authority and supervision not of their parents...but of government officials." Parish workhouses had existed for centuries, but Victorian society with its stern Protestant work ethic was unique in considering poverty to be a personal moral failure on the part of the poor. Sympathy for the downtrodden was also lessened by the fact that taxes for poor relief in 1832 were over five times higher than they had been in 1760. Gertrude Himmelfarb's book"The Idea of Poverty" chronicles this shift in attitude toward the poor from compassion to condemnation.
In 1832, partly at the behest of labor-hungry manufacturers, the Royal Poor Law Commission began an inquiry into the"the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor." Its report divided the poor into two basic categories: lazy paupers who received governmental aid; and, the industrious working poor who were self-supporting. The result was the Poor Law of 1834, which statesman Benjamin Disraeli called an announcement that"poverty is a crime." The Poor Law replaced outdoor relief (subsidies and handouts) with 'poor houses' in which pauper children were virtually imprisoned. There, the conditions were made purposely harsh to discourage people from applying. Virtually every parish in Britain had abandoned workhouse children who, being bought and sold to factories, experienced the deepest horrors of child labor. In this, the workhouses were merely continuing a practice common before the Poor Laws.
It is no coincidence that the first industrial novel published in Britain was"Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy" by Frances Trollope. Michael was apprenticed to an agency for pauper children. Nor is it coincidence that"Oliver Twist" was not abused by his parents, but by brutal workhouse officials in comparison to whom Fagin was a humanitarian. And, remember, at the age of twelve with his family in debtor's prison, Dickens himself was a pauper child who slaved at the Blacking Factory. Reed observes,"[t]he first Act in Britain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not 'free labour' children." The Act was explicit in doing so.
Even workhouse children with solvent parents could not always escape the grasp of officials. The"Ashton Chronicle" (June 23, 1849) published an interview with pauper child Sarah Carpenter, who explained:"My father was a glass blower. When I was eight years old my father died and our family had to go to the Bristol Workhouse. My brother was sent from Bristol workhouse in the same way as many other children were - cart-loads at a time. My mother did not know where he was for two years. He was taken off in the dead of night without her knowledge, and the parish officers would never tell her where he was."
Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses for which it was largely responsible. Once more, government was"a disease masquerading as its own cure." To their credit, some reformers realized that regulations to help the poor did precisely the opposite. Thus, the classical liberal John Bright -- a leader of the Anti-Corn Law movement that championed the poor -- voted against the Factory Act of 1844 in the British House of Commons. The Act reduced the hours of work for children between eight and thirteen years old; it also reduced the ability of poor families to survive.
But what of the other side of the equation -- the businessmen willing to use pauper children as slave labor? Consider one example. To assuage labor shortages at his textile mills, Samuel Greg took children from workhouses. Indeed, children were offered to him. In February 1817, the Vicar of Biddulph wrote to him:"The thought has occurred to me that some of the younger branches of the poor of this parish might be useful to you as apprentices in your factory at Quarry Bank. If you are in want of any of the above, we could readily furnish you with 10 or more at from 9 to 12 years of age of both sexes." Usually, such children were apprenticed to an employer until the age of twenty-one.
When the local parishes no longer provided sufficient labor, Greg went as far as Liverpool and London for children. Some parishes paid businessmen like Greg between two and four pounds to take a child off their hands. The children received their board and lodging from Greg, as well as a small salary.
Greg saw himself as a humanitarian and, by contrast with workhouse officials, he probably was. In"The Philosophy of Manufactures" (1835), Andrew Ure wrote:"At...the great firm of Greg and Son....stands a handsome house, two stories high, built for the accommodation of the female apprentices. They are well fed, clothed and educated. The apprentices have milk-porridge for breakfast, potatoes and bacon for dinner, and meat on Sundays."
But no amount of decent treatment can obscure the fact that the children were stripped of the one thing they possessed -- their labor and the right to contract. Nothing can convert the violation of their rights as laborers into an act of benevolence by Greg or by government officials.
Contemporary Child Labor
Government's victimization of children through denying them their rights as laborers is not merely a matter of history. In September 1990, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), already adopted by the UN General Assembly, came into force. The human rights violations involved in child labor began to receive unprecedented attention.
There is no question: children around the globe are being coerced into slave labor situations that are appalling, and should be prohibited. No one -- not parents, employers, or governments -- should be able to coerce children into or prohibit them from entering work situations. Children old enough to be supporting themselves are old enough to make their own decisions.
The foregoing statement seems heartless. The reverse is true. The only real protections children can enjoy are the family structure and their ability to be self-sufficient. In an ideal world -- a Western world -- families are prosperous and supportive: children are protected and educated. In Third World countries, parents often cannot provide the basics of life for their children, who must trade their labor for sustenance. The greatest act of benevolence is to recognize their right to contract and to work in the same manner as adult rights are respected. Anything that interferes with the self-sufficiency necessary for their survival is child abuse.
This is what Third World governments, under pressure from the UN and the United States, are doing. They are denying children the right to their labor -- to self-sufficiency -- by prohibiting children under a certain age from working. In some countries, the minimum age is now eighteen. And the standards of abusive child labor are so broadenly defined as to prohibit the possibility of voluntary child labor. For example, Article 32 of the UNCRC affirms a child's right to be “protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development." These standards would virtually eliminate all forms of child labor, whether coerced or voluntary, abusive or not.
In an article within"Child Workers in Asia" (Vol. 15. No. 3, 1999), Sulaiman Zuhdi Manik describes a work situation in Indonesia. Namely, there are children"working on fishing platforms, called ‘Jermal’, in the middle of the sea" where conditions are brutal. The solution imposed,"An Indonesian Minister of Labour Circular Letter dated 1997 forbids child workers on Jermal and a 1998 Circular Letter from the Governor of North Sumatra forbids the Jermal owners to hire children under 18." Are the children who are seventeen there by choice? Did all Jermal owners coerce or abuse their child laborers? And what became of the suddenly unemployed children?
Only the latter question is answered in the article:"They are still being hired and forced to work under terrible conditions." What forces them? A coercive individual, or the reality of poverty through which they must survive?
The question of what happens to children by government decree is dealt with more candidly on the UNICEF web site. It describes garment factories in Bangladesh"following the introduction of the Child Labor Deterrence Act in 1992 by US Senator Tom Harkin. The Bill would have prohibited the importation into the US of goods made using child labour....[W]hen Senator Harkin reintroduced the Bill the following year...garment employers dismissed an estimated 50,000 children from their factories, approximately 75 per cent of all children in the industry."
UNICEF admitted to surprise at the consequences. The children"were trapped in a harsh environment with no skills, little or no education, and precious few alternatives." In follow-up visits to homes and villages, UNICEF discovered that the" children went looking for new sources of income, and found them in work such as stone-crushing, street hustling and prostitution - all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production. In several cases, the mothers of dismissed children had to leave their jobs in order to look after their children."
UNICEF's proposed solution: increased governmental involvement and programs. Having forced children into more hazardous labor and causing poor families to lose the income of mothers, the real solution to child labor never seems to occur to such agencies. Namely, to call for the labor rights of all children to be respected. Instead, they promote the opposite: they call for the inability of children to contract their labor as free human beings.
Some pieces of legislation seem to address the difference between voluntary and coerced child labor. For example, on June 12, 1999, the White House issued an Executive Order entitled"Prohibition of Acquisition of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor." Moreover, the Order's definition seems adequate:"'Forced or indentured child labor' means all work or service (1) exacted from any person under the age of 18 under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily; or (2) performed by any person under the age of 18 pursuant to a contract the enforcement of which can be accomplished by process or penalties." Critics might and should decry the further intrusion of government into the sphere of business, how can the Order be criticized on the basis of harming voluntary child laborers?
It will do so in the same manner as the bill proposed by Senator Harkin. The Executive Order instructs the Department of Labor to"publish in the Federal Register a list of products, identified by their country of origin, that those Departments have a reasonable basis to believe *might* have been mined, produced, or manufactured by forced or indentured child labor."[Emphasis added] At the mere whiff of such a mention, any prudent American business will cease to deal with the suspected producer. At the mere possibility of being mentioned, foreign business -- like the garment industry in Bangladesh -- will dismiss child laborers, voluntary or not.
Thus,"The Economist" (January 15-21, 2000) advises rich nations who wish to ease the pain of Third World child labor"to send the children aid rather than impose harmful trade sanctions. If exports made by child labour are banned, children often end up unemployed or in unregulated sectors such as prostitution."
Conclusion
The foregoing analysis will seem callous to many. This is especially true of the many good hearted people who support child labor measures in the belief that passing a piece of paper through a governmental body will change a complicated social situation. Such people sleep better at night because they have"done something." One of the things they accomplish is to make fifteen-year-old runaways in their own back alleys turn to prostitution. The effect on Third World children may be far more devastating.
Clicking through to the Atlas Shrugs blog revealed the headline ATLAS EXCLUSIVE: FINAL REPORT ON OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE FORGERY CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN. Near the end of the extensive analysis, the reader is pointed to a long list of earlier, similar pieces, which include [T]he [birth] certificate is still a horrible forgery", Mystery, Clarification and Obfuscation of Obama's Birth Certificate Forgery, Atlas Tech Expert Declares Obama Birth Certificate, Who died and made him the final word on Obama's, The"Missing" Obama Birth Certificate Seal, SUCH A LIAR: OBAMA'S FAKE BIRTH CERTIFICATE and, RELEASE OBAMA'S BIRTH CERTIFICATE!
My stumble? Why is this campaign being led by the Atlas Shrugs site? I hope this is an aberration within the Objectivism and not an indication of how, well, stupid the general Objectivist movement has become over Obama. (Stupid is the word Reason Magazine uses.) There are so many excellent reasons to lambast Obama that it just cheapens their opposition if this is all they come up with.
For a well-reasoned counter to the forgery charges, click here.
Jury nullification has been established in common law since 1670 when an English jury refused to convict William Penn for the crime of preaching Quakerism. They were imprisoned for doing so. In a legal precedent, the English high court ruled that juries must be free to reach their own decisions without fear of punishment by the court. In 1735, jury nullification was affirmed in America when publisher John Peter Zenger was tried for printing"seditious libel" without first receiving the government's approval. The judge instructed the jury that no facts were in question since Zenger admitted the sedition. All that remained was the legality of his act and such"issues of law" were matters for the court to determine. The jurors were instructed to find Zenger guilty. Within ten minutes, they declared him not guilty.
Since then, the right and power of a jury to de facto overturn a law has been the subject of debate and inconsistent application. Advocates of individual rights tend to embrace jury nullification as a key aspect of trial by jury. 19th century individualists shared this tendency, with Lysander Spooner's treatise Trial by Jury often considered to be the definitive word. The first chapter of this work is entitled"The Right of Juries to Judge the Justice of Laws."
Nevertheless...
...an interesting debate on trial by jury erupted in the pages of a key 19th century individualist periodical, Liberty (1881-1908). The debate did not revolve around the usual controversies, such as the propriety of subpoena -- the so-called"right" of the state to coerce testimony. Instead, it addressed the propriety of trial by jury itself and, thus, by necessary implication, of jury nullification. The debate raised important questions that should be considered before accepting the strategy of fully informed juries.
Perhaps the first question is how a group of twelve people can claim any right unless an individual has assigned it to them. Can a" collective" right supercede individual ones? After all, it cannot be said that the defendant has relinquished his rights due to committing an aggressive act as this is the very finding that the jury has been convened to determine.
The 16th century classical liberal John Locke believed that the need to protect"life, liberty, and estate" in society led men to form government. In exchange for protection, men willingly relinquished the right to adjudicate their own disputes -- that is, the right to try their own cases in court. Locke also posited a form of tacit consent by which those who had not explicitly agreed were still bound to trial by jury. As long as a man remained in society, he consented to its jurisdiction, including its right to adjudicate disputes. Radical individualists in 19th century America generally demanded a more explicit transfer of authority from the individual to any collective entity. For them, how a jury had the right to sit in judgment on someone who objected to the process was a quandary.
In 1889, Liberty ran a series of articles by Victor Yarros collectively entitled"Free Political Institutions: Their Nature, Essence, and Maintenance." The series was advertised as"an abridgement and rearrangement" of Trial by Jury. Spooner's work had not addressed how juries acquired the right to try a case in any detail. But Yarros considered this issue to be so important that he repositioned text from Spooner's concluding chapter.
Yarros' version began with a statement of what Spooner called"free government":
"The theory of government is that it is formed by the voluntary contract of the people individually with each other." From here, Spooner had contended that certain laws or conditions were so obviously beneficial that all members of society would explicitly agree to them. Spooner considered trial by jury to be one of these overwhelmingly beneficial conditions.
The debate in Liberty refuted Spooner\x{2019}s assumption. At least some people would not consent to trial by jury. Adolph Herben declared that he preferred trial by experts rather than by laymen who would be ignorant of technical matters that might be crucial to his case. He deemed it absurd to hang a person on the"mere opinion of twelve ordinary men." Spooner had anticipated the objection from"ignorance." He argued that juries should not be granted power on the basis of their wisdom, but because they were not as vulnerable to corruption as judge and other officials.
In another Liberty article, however, Steven T. Byington argued that juries would be corrupt, at least, in the form of being biased. He quoted from an editorial run by the Times of Natal -- a newspaper from an English speaking country in which racism made"trial by jury" for black defendants a mockery. Judgments simply could not be obtained against whites who committed crimes against blacks. Byington claimed that in the presence of such prejudices,"trial by jury" became an instrument of injustice. The prejudice did not even need to be widespread to have a disastrous impact on the integrity of the jury system."If only ten per cent of the people were of this sort, more than sixty-four per cent of the juries would include one or more of these men to prevent a conviction. In order that there should be an even chance of twelve men taken at random being unanimously willing to judge according to certain principles, it is necessary that there be not so many as six per cent of the population who reject those principles."
Byington further objected to jury nullification due to"the need for certainty." He referred to laws"where it has been reasonably said that certainty is sometimes more important than justice." For example, publishers might well prefer a clear and consistently enforced standard of obscenity by which they could predict the legality of an article rather than rely upon the unpredictable decision of twelve men.
Perhaps the most interesting of Byington's objections was a practical one. He maintained that courts in a free society would arise in a free society would be unlikely to adopt the jury system because it was clumsy and expensive. Any free market court system that used juries might well operate at a distinct disadvantage by having to charge considerably more than its competitors. Thus, the modern form of a voluntary court -- arbitration -- does not include a jury. Byington speculated on how justice would be provided in a"society where things are done on a business basis." He wrote,"[D]efensive associations will have their judges, and their treaties as to the method of arbitration when two associations are on opposite sides of a case, and these tribunals of one or three professional judges will settle all cases where some one does not distinctly demand a jury. I suppose a case will almost never come before a jury except on appeal..."
Byington contended that trial by jury was a response to government and not a free market phenomenon. A court system that evolved within a"society where things are done on a business basis" would be arranged differently. In a free market evolution, the disadvantages of trial by jury would loom large: its expense, the unpredictability of its verdicts, the problem of dissenting defendants, the widespread tendency toward prejudice... For Byington, trial jury was not a"right" but a"wrong."
Conclusion
Trial by jury presents interesting problems for those who champion individual rights. In one particular instance, a jury may be an effective weapon against oppressive government. In another, it may be a vehicle for unjust prejudices. In both cases, it is necessary to explain how juries derive the right to judge those who object to the process. How does a collective entity rightfully acquire such power over a dissenting individual?
The ordinance states,"It is unlawful for any person to make forceful contact, strike, or do bodily harm to, attempt to make forceful contact, strike, or do bodily harm to, threaten to make forceful contact, strike, or do bodily harm to, either verbally or by action or gesture, to any peace officer in the performance of such officers official duties, or attempt to perform such duties. Profane, abusive, insulting, taunting, or provoking language directed to a peace officer which may reasonably promote a violent response or reaction shall be deemed a violation of this section, whether accompanying the aforesaid actions or not." [Emphasis added]
In short, around a cop, you have no freedom of speech. Nor do you have any real idea what he might consider"provoking language." Apparently the police in Lafayette are so badly trained that cuss words can"provoke" them into uncontrollable violence. Since this is the same police force that recently tased to death a 19-year-old kid accused of growing marijuana, this assessment may be true. Which is all the more reason to give them less and not more power over your life...let alone the power to regulate which words may come out of your mouth. On the other extreme, perhaps the cops of Lafayette are so delicate that rude words shatter their fragile psyches. Perhaps the ordinance was inspired by a court incident where a 200 lb cop broke down on stand and wailed,"Your honor the defendant was mean to me!"
Cops already abuse their authority with near impunity; they can literally get away with murder. Now a Lafayette cop can arrest you for uttering words that -- in the sole opinion of that judge-and-jury officer -- are obstructive or provoking. Do you really want to live in a country that gives that authority to men with guns?
On the bright side...and, yeah, the situation is so oppressive that I consider this to be a glimmer of hope...maybe Lafayette just wants your money. Maybe they see monitoring your cuss word as a cash cow and they are actually indifferent to imposing social control beyond what is necessary to make you stand still as they pick your pocket. I suspect the ordinance is inspired by a combination of both motives. Moreover, even if it is fiscally-motivated, it is sure to be misused by"sensitve" cops who will gladly crack your ribs for being disrespectful.
The entire essay can be accessed by clicking here
VOLUNTARYTRADE: Paul is the primary sponsore of HR 1094, the "Sanctity of Human Life Act," which states, in relevant part: "The Congress finds that present day scientific evidence indicates a significant likelihood that actual human life exists from conception....The Congress declares that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception, without regard to race, sex, age, health, defect, or condition of dependency." So where in the Constitution does Congress have the authority to make either of these findings/declarations?
ANOTHER MEMBER'S RESPONSE: No where --- and most certainly not in any part of Art.I Sec.8! But then, how long has it been since the `minor detail' of "un-Constitutionality" has stopped the majority of members of Congress from voting to pass a Law? however, arguably what the authors of this Bill are trying to do is to extend 14th Amendment Protection to the "pre-born." Such a Bill would provide a legal "fig leaf" for anti-Abortion legislation --- notwithstanding the fact that Congress was never delegated the power to make such legislation, unless perhaps one wants to try to argue that the "Necessary and Proper" clause granted them that Power after the 14th Amendment was passed (which would make the entire argument circular).
VOLUNTARYTRADE: Funny you should bring up the 14th Amendment. Paul wants it applied to zygotes, but not certain (*cough* Mexican) children actually born in the United States. He's proposed the following constitutional amendment: "Any person born after the date of the ratification of this article to a mother and father, neither of whom is a citizen of the United States nor a person who owes permanent allegiance to the United States, shall not be a citizen of the United States or of any State solely by reason of birth in the United States." So the great libertarian saviour opposes individual rights to brown-skinned infants and those who don't "owe permanent allegiance" to a government. Wow.
BLITZER: Congressman Paul...What do you say about this whole issue of church and state and these issues that are coming forward right now?
PAUL: Well, I think we should read the First Amendment, where it says, "Congress shall write no law.” [NOTE: the actual wording is "Congress shall make no law."] And we should write a lot less laws regarding this matter. It shouldn’t be a matter of the president or the Congress. It should be local people, local officials. The state should determine so many of these things that we just don’t need more laws determining religious things or prayer in school. We should allow people at the local level.
That’s what the Constitution tells us. We don’t need somebody in Washington telling us what we can do, because we don’t have perfect knowledge. And that’s the magnificence of our Constitution and our republic. We sort out the difficult problems at local levels and we don’t have one case fit all, because you have a
Supreme Court ruling like on Roe versus Wade; it (ruined ?) it for the whole country.
There are at least four disturbing aspects to Paul's statement that the separation of Church and State should be decided on the local level -- from state legislatures to town meeting to local school boards.
1) to get a technical and lesser point out of the way...the self-described Constitutionalist is advocating an unconstitutional position. The Fourteenth Amendment provides, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Those privileges and immunities are delineated in the first ten Amendments (the Bill of Rights) -- the First of which was clearly intended to provide for freedom of conscience/religion by removing state involvement in promoting or quashing specific beliefs.
2) He apparently does not believe in the tripartite division of power -- the Executive, the Legislative, the Judicial -- because he wants to hobble the Supreme Court so that it cannot act as a check and balance. If he attempts to change the power and the role of the Supreme Court, then he will be acting unconstitutionally in this regard as well. Elsewhere he has stated,
"[I]f federal judges wrongly interfere and attempt to compel a state to recognize the marriage licenses of another state, that would be the proper time for me to consider new legislative or constitutional approaches."
3) Since he believes "the difficult issues" like the relationship between Church and State should be sorted out at the local level, I must assume he believes that all the other "difficult issues" -- e.g. the right to bear arms, the availability of due process -- should be decided on a state-by-state or even city-by-city level. The Bill of Rights is a profoundly pro-natural rights document; Paul's diminishment of the Bill of Rights is profoundly pro-statist, leaving natural rights to the discretion of tens of thousands of local governments who are free to act as petty tyrants.
4) The establishment of theocracy is not and cannot be a libertarian position and, yet, this is the door Paul is deliberately opening. It is not merely abortion that will be targeted. Consider two quotes from Paul: "If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act[.]" AND "I was an original cosponsor of the Marriage Protection Act, HR 3313, that removes challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act from federal courts' jurisdiction."
The man would impose a Religious Right Conservate agenda upon the nation and circumvent Constitutional protections offered to the individual by appealing to "state's rights" and "local authority." Since when do libertarians consider states to have rights? Only individuals have rights and those rights can be violated as easily by a state government as by a federal one.
The story raises the fascinating issue of whether the imprisonment of an innocent but potentially deadly young man can be justified.
Libertarian theory gives a clear answer. The imprisonment is not and cannot be justified. The young man has committed no crime; he is a self-owner with the same individual right to freedom as anyone/everyone else.
For the sake of argument, however, let's up the ante. Let's assume he is not just a potential threat to people who are vulnerable to this strain of tuberculosis but that everyone who comes into contact with him will die. I would advocate some form of isolation -- forced if necessary -- but I would not and could not justify it on libertarian principle. My advocacy of using force would rely on the fact that the Typhoid Mary/Robert scenario destroys the intellectual framework of libertarianism. In other words, libertarianism rests on the political worldview of rights being universal -- possessed in equal measure by all human beings. My exercise of a right does not interfere with your ability to exercise the comparable right. For example, my right of free conscience -- the freedom to reach my own conclusions about morality, religion etc. -- in no way prevents you from exercising your judgment on similar matters. This framework is sometimes called "Lockean." It contrasts with a "Hobbesian" worldview by which human beings are in a state of nature, a war of all against all; that is, my life requires your death. Within a Hobbesian world, individual or universal rights make no more sense for human beings than they do for wild animals whose lives are a natural cycle of being both predator and prey.
In short, libertarian principles make sense only within the context that is specifically stripped away by Typhoid Mary. The situation does not destroy the validity of libertarianism, which continues to address 99.99% of all situations in life and 100% of those most people will confront. Nor does the situation place libertarianism at a disadvantage relative to other political theories since none of them provides a good answer to Typhoid Mary or lifeboat situations. The dynamic of situation does mean, however, that in the absence of libertarian principles I will fall back on the default justification of protecting my own life and the lives of those for whom I care. I would interfere with the young man's freedom as little as I possibly could to achieve my goal...but interfere I would. I would not appeal to the State because giving such power to that pack of snarling dogs would end up with my being badly bitten. But I would assist another party in ensuring the isolation.
Another thing I wouldn't do? As stated earlier, I would not justify any of my actions through an appeal to libertarianism. No such justification is available.
You are invited to browse and join http://www.wendymcelroy.com/smf a libertarian BB that I moderate.
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