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It must be the end of secularism
By Spengler

Secular liberalism stands helpless before a new century of religious wars, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla concedes in "The politics of God", a despairing vision of the political future published in the August 19 New York Times Magazine. [1] It is one of those important statements, like the "end of history", that will repeat on us indefinitely, like a bad curry. It comprises most of the Times weekend magazine, presented with all the pomposity the newspaper can summon.

For the few of us who asked not how to avoid religious war, but rather how best to fight it, Lilla's essay provides double validation. Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning. Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims, particularly to Professor Tariq Ramadan. If that sounds strange, it is not my fault. It is all there in black and white, as I will report below. But first, here is Lilla's de profundis:

For more than two centuries, from the American and French revolutions to the collapse of Soviet communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity - these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.


That is well enough, and Exhibit 1 for the prosecution is the president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Lilla quotes his May 2006 letter to the US president at some length, eg, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems ... Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice, and the will of God will prevail over all things."

Yet by wink and nudge, Lilla conjures us to believe that the true problem is not resurgent fanaticism in the Muslim world at all, but rather the new ascendance of Christian faith in the West. He presents not a shred of evidence for this outlandish charge. The reader will peruse the essay in vain for a word of explanation concerning the origins of Muslim fanaticism. Instead, the entire content is devoted to presenting the history of a Christian fanaticism that does not exist, and has not existed for a century or more. It may be that Lilla, a follower of Leo Strauss, is trying his hand at what Strauss called esoteric writing - concealing a message for adept readers. Whatever the motive, his argument is inconsequential and silly. Fascism, communism, neo-orthodox Protestantism, Zionism - any movement that elicited passion and commitment - all are summoned to the prisoner's box to hear Lilla's bill of indictment.

The generation that survived World War I, he writes, "craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse - one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine." Karl Barth, the anti-Nazi Swiss theologian, and the young Zionist Martin Buber are just as guilty as Marxists and Nazis.

Before all these dreadful people brought faith back into politics, Lilla avers, 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had saved civilization from religious wars by changing the subject of political thought to tolerance and compromise:


Over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.


Precisely how Hobbes accomplished all of this is a mystery known only to political scientists who take themselves far too seriously. The masses, after all, did not rally in the public squares waving little books of quotations from Chairman Hobbes. Never mind that the United States, which defined the modern democratic state, was founded by radical Protestant refugees from Europe who set out to build a New Jerusalem, and that impassioned religious faith has characterized American discourse from its founding. Lilla desires us to believe that an elite of political scientists much like himself managed to re-engineer the social order during the 18th century, before those awful fanatics came back. He reminds one of the scientists on the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who wander with their noses in the air and must be hit on the nose with inflated pig's bladders to prevent them falling over the edge.

And so we come to the first decade of the 21st century, Lilla argues, over which a terrible shadow lies: man's desire for redemption:


The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason ... It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his Leviathan.


Does Professor Lilla seriously believe that nothing has changed since the 17th century, when religious wars killed off half the population of central Europe? Christian America confronted the atheistic Soviet Union during the 1980s, and without a shot fired in anger, the Soviet Union collapsed. Where was the fanaticism, the rancor, the bloodlust on the part of the West? The greatest danger to central Europe today, which over the next century will suffer population declines comparable to those of the 17th century, is the absence of a notion of redemption. Secular Europe has lost its will to live and its desire to reproduce, a malady most prominent in the former communist countries where religious faith was most suppressed.

For that matter, where has Lilla uncovered a streak of religious fanaticism in the West? The previous pope did penance for the murder of the 15th-century Protestant rebel Jan Hus, and worshipped at the synagogue in Rome as well as the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Except for Northern Ireland, the Europeans long have ceased to quarrel about religious issues; in the US, the biblical religious always got along, more or less, and get along today better than they ever have. Toward what end does this messianic urge for redemption manifest itself, and what danger does it pose to the West? Again, there is not a line of argumentation, let alone a shred of evidence, to support the charge that man's desire for redemption has taken us to the brink of religious wars.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The adept readers of Professor Lilla's essay, the diehards of liberal secularism, know that Christianity is the enemy, no matter how docile, peaceful, quiescent and non-threatening it might appear. Christianity is guilty until proven innocent; the peaceful intentions of all Christian denominations toward one another and to non-Christian religions merely disguise an irrepressible urge toward violence, in the perverse view of the Lilla-Putans.

Don't bother to try to liberalize Islam, Lilla intones: "A number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a 'liberal' Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand."

The only hope lies in "renovators" rather than "liberalizers" on the Islamic side, Lilla concludes, such as Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Given the admitted bankruptcy of his position, it is to these Islamists that Lilla proposes to surrender the broken sword of secularism.

Regarding Ramadan's terrorist connections and totalitarian ideology, I summarized the principal issues in a June 12 essay (The faith that dare not speak its name). Lilla is not stupid; he knows that Ramadan and his co-thinkers offer a radically conservative version of Islam steeped in the doctrine of religious conquest.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology ... like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan ... whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien "abode". To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.


In the full light of day and in recognition of this danger, Lilla nonetheless proposes that the grandson of the founder of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood is the last best hope for religious peace in the world:


Perhaps for this reason, Ramadan [has] become [an object] of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like ... Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation - and we cannot - we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease co-existence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.


It is as if the High Priest of Reason had ascended its Temple to offer himself as a sacrifice to the Goat God. Professor Ramadan personifies everything that Lilla hates, and Lilla knows it. But Ramadan has one redeeming virtue. He is not a Christian. Lilla does not love Reason; he simply hates Christianity with all his heart, and will make alliance with whichever of her enemies might be available.

Lilla's essay summarizes a book to be released this month. Don't bother.

Note
1. The politics of God, New York Times Magazine, August 19.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH21Aa02.html

Republicans' fertile future
Through the past three decades, conservatives have been procreating more than liberals

Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer

Sunday, September 17, 2006
Chronicle illustration by Lance Jackson and Rick Nobles

If you're a liberal, here's what you can do to make Karl Rove a very happy man: Get yourself a labradoodle. Or any other kind of dog, for that matter. Even a cat will do.

Just don't have children.

[Podcast: Republicans are red-hot breeding machines]

That way you'll maintain a fertility gap that already is invisibly working to guarantee the political right will outnumber the left by an ever-growing margin.

Over the past three decades, conservatives have been procreating more than liberals -- continuing to seed the future with their genes by filling bassinets coast to coast with tiny Future Republicans of America.

Take a randomly selected sample of 100 liberal adults and 100 conservative adults. According to an analysis of the 2004 General Social Survey -- a bible of data for social scientists -- the liberals would have had 147 kids, while the conservatives would have had 208. That's a fertility gap of 41 percent. Even adjusting for other variables like age and income, there is a gap of 19 percent.

Now superimpose this on a map of the United States. The highest fertility rate is found in the most Republican state, Utah, home to the Mormon Church. The lowest fertility belongs to Vermont, a state liberal enough to be the first to sanction gay unions.

The states with the next highest fertility rates, according to the latest National Center for Health Statistics survey, are Arizona, Alaska and Texas, otherwise known as "red states." States with the next lowest fertility rates are Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, all "blue states."

So what does it mean that the birth rate in Salt Lake City far outstrips that of liberal San Francisco (where dogs supposedly outnumber children)?

"Liberals have got a big 'baby problem,' and it risks being the death of them," contends Arthur Brooks, professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs. He reckons that unless something gives, Democratic politicians in the future may not have many babies to kiss.

"When secular-minded Americans decide to have few, or no, children, they unwittingly give a strong evolutionary advantage to the other side of the culture divide," writes Phillip Longman, senior fellow at the New America Foundation. "If 'Metros' don't start having more children, America's future is 'Retro.' "

But wait, you may say: the attitudes of the parents don't determine what ideology or political party their offspring will adopt as their own. Yet they usually do.

Political scientists have long found that 4 out of 5 people with a party preference grow up to vote the way their parents voted. In fact, while many people experience a temporary rejection of their parents' politics in very early adulthood, virtually nothing is more predictive of your political ideology than that of your parents -- it's more of a determining factor than income, education or any other societal yardstick.

There are exceptions: While only 20 percent eschew their parents' ideology, they do, after all, add up to a lot of people. And despite ample instances of Republicans in Southern states being raised by parents who once identified as Democrats, those parents were actually conservative Democrats who became Reagan Democrats and ultimately migrated to the GOP. The party labels changed, but the political ideology remains consistent from generation to generation.

"Right now this theory really applies to political parties as well as ideology, because the parties have become incredibly well sorted by ideology," says Marc Hetherington, associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who studies political identification. In other words, in 2006 a conservative is going to find a cozy home in the Republican Party, and a liberal can expect the same in the Democratic Party.

Thus Democrats will breed Democrats, and Republicans will breed Republicans -- the blue states reddening every day.

This phenomenon has prompted writer Steve Sailer to offer a prescription for ensuring a GOP majority to his readers in the American Conservative. "Because Democrats win when Americans don't marry and don't have children," he notes, "publicly label them as what they are: the party that thrives on loneliness."

In truth, it's more complicated. As far as sex goes, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats report having it with equal frequency, according to an online survey taken in November by Ken Berwitz, partner in the market research firm National Qualitative Centers Inc. Liberalism doesn't induce celibacy or frigidity, any more than conservatism can be mistaken for an aphrodisiac.

So how else to explain the fertility gap?

Limited space is one consideration. Liberals are most concentrated in cities, but such urban dwellers pay more for far less real estate than do rural dwellers -- meaning they have less money to pay for the costs of children, and fewer rooms and smaller yards in which to put them.

Religion is another factor. Some of the most ardent conservatives are religious fundamentalists who believe they have been bidden by God to go forth and multiply. These conservatives, now overwhelmingly Republican, see large families as blessings, abortion as sacrilege, birth control as potentially sinful. Indeed people who attend church weekly are twice as likely as those who seldom attend to say their ideal family size is three or more children. (This "relentlessly pro-natal" orientation, Longman contended in a recent issue of the journal Foreign Policy, threatens a not-too-distant future in which zealous Christians and radical Muslims inherit the Earth and usher in "new Dark Ages").

Conversely, other influences depress the number of children born to liberals. Liberal women are statistically more likely to delay childbirth into later years than are conservative women, and they may also be more open to abortion, although the data is unclear. Gays and lesbians, who vote Democratic by a roughly 4-1 ratio, are much less likely to have children than heterosexuals. And some on the left advocate fewer children as "socially responsible" to lessen the toll on the planet's finite resources.

When it comes to California, the wildcard is our burgeoning immigrant population. Here, the highest fertility rates are among Latinas, an ethnic group that is historically liberal on economic issues and allied with the Democratic Party. This might seem to suggest that time is on the side of liberals in the Golden State, which already has become bluer since the Reagan years.

Conversely, the highest fertility rates are among Latinas who are in the country illegally, lacking voting rights. As they move through the cycles of first-, second- and third-generation immigration, their fertility rates drop and they may become more economically conservative precisely at the time they are more likely to vote. Already they identify as conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay rights.

So are their offspring destined to be liberal or conservative?

"Therein lies the interesting political question," observed Michael Alvarez, professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology. "Depending on how the political parties react to Hispanics in the near term, and the future, they could largely gravitate to one party over the other -- or they could evolve into a swing electorate."

Such uncertainties about behavior and demographics make some experts like Alvarez wary of forecasts that liberals will become an endangered species.

Demographics are, almost by definition, processes of distilling complexity into generality, messy diversity into neatly tied bundles of averages. Several caveats could belie a liberal "baby bust." Party identification could wane, or a third party emerge.

And a cataclysmic political event might shake up the sorting that makes the Democratic Party indisputably for liberals and the GOP the only choice for conservatives, prompting offspring to remain faithful to their parents' ideology while switching parties. Example: Another major terrorist attack might prompt the GOP to nominate a candidate like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is also pro-choice on abortion and a supporter of gay rights and gun control.

In the meantime, liberals might mull over their options for thwarting Rove by bridging the fertility gap. In the Italian city of Venice, vendors sell tourists wishing to feed the ubiquitous pigeons bags of birdseed surreptitiously laced with birth control. But infiltrating the water system in Salt Lake City seems a rather diabolical tactic in pursuit of political domination.

Syracuse's Brooks offers this suggestion to Democrats instead: Quit having pets.

E-mail Vicki Haddock at vhaddock@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/17/INGEJL45D11.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Shamed scientist's 'breakthrough'
A scientist who faked his research may have actually made a groundbreaking advance - without even realising it.
South Korean Woo Suk Hwang became famous after claiming to have extracted the world's first stem cells from a cloned embryo.

It emerged he had lied about his work, and the source of the cells.

But analysis in the journal Cell Stem Cell reveals he may have produced stem cells from human eggs alone - potentially even more useful.


I've always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs
Professor Azim Surani, Cambridge University
The Hwang episode, uncovered in 2005, is one of the most notorious scientific scandals of recent times.

His work at Seoul National University earned him the status of national hero, and even led to his face appearing on a set of commemorative stamps.

Unethical eggs

Hwang said that he had created cloned human embryos by placing the nucleus from the cell to be cloned into a "hollowed out" human egg, then managed to extract stem cells from the resulting embryos.

Scientists are excited about the potential of stem cells because they are the body's "master cells", with the potential to become any cell type in the body, perhaps replacing those lost through ageing or disease.

However, it later became clear that he had used eggs from young female researchers at his laboratory to create the embryos, itself a major ethical breach - and that the resulting stem cells did not come from cloned embryos.

With his research discredited, he was dismissed from his post at the university, and charged with fraud and embezzlement.

The latest twist came from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in the US, who looked closely at his data, and found the cells were actually from a different type of embryo.

'Virgin birth'

Researchers said that the distinct "genetic fingerprint" of the stem cells means they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called "virgin birth" method, or parthenogenesis.

This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm, and has been achieved in animals.

However, before Hwang, no one had managed to produce a human embryo using parthenogenesis which lived long enough to allow the extraction of viable stem cells.

Dr George Daley, who led the analysis, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: "Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones.

"In fact they had produced the world's first patient-specific embryonic stem cell, and that is very valuable.

"Scientists interested in modelling complex diseases would like to be able to move a patient's own cells into a petri dish in their embryonic form."

'More useful'

Professor Azim Surani, from the University of Cambridge, has carried out years of experiments to produce parthenogenetic stem cells from mice.

He said Hwang had probably inadvertently stimulated the human eggs to begin dividing while trying to produce cloned embryos.

Professor Surani said Hwang's unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently.

"I've always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs - it is far less ethically challenging, and the efficiency of these cell lines is likely to be higher than those produced from cloned embryos," he said.

However, scientists do not know how significant the lack of contribution from the father's DNA will be.


Hear more about the new analysis on Science In Action on the BBC World Service. (Check World Service schedules for broadcast times)

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6929203.stm

Published: 2007/08/03 09:58:57 GMT

? BBC MMVII

July 16, 2007 Issue
Copyright ? 2007 The American Conservative


My Body, My Choice

Not all Americans who don?t have health insurance need pity?or policy.

by James L. Payne

If I lived in Massachusetts, as of July 1, 2007, I would be violating the law. That?s when the state will require everyone over 18 years old to have health insurance. I don?t have health insurance, I don?t want it, and I refuse to buy it even though I can afford it.

Evidently, the idea of forcing everyone to buy insurance has broad appeal. The Massachusetts House approved the law requiring insurance 154 to 2, and the Senate backed it unanimously. Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt enthused that in forcing people to buy health insurance, ?Massachusetts is the first state in America to reach full adulthood,? and he urged the rest of the country to leave ?adolescence.? The Heritage Foundation endorses the plan; its health policy researcher Edmund Haislmaier calls it ?a testament to the power of good ideas.? The popularity of the Massachusetts measure makes me fear that in a few years my refusal of insurance will be a crime everywhere in America.

It?s understandable that policymakers are eager to eliminate the uninsured. For years they?ve been told that we are the flies in the ointment of healthcare policy. It is said we are either wrecking the healthcare system by using services we don?t pay for, or we are deprived of needed medical care and therefore objects of pity and subsidy.

These points may apply to some uninsured, but not to all. Some of us belong in what might be called the ?successfully uninsured? category. We are not freeloaders. We believe we have a moral obligation to pay for the medical care we receive, and we always pay for it. I put no burden on doctors, hospitals, or taxpayers, and politicians are wrong to assume I am part of America?s healthcare problem.

Politicians are also wrong to assume that I am pitiable. Like many Americans, I have significant savings and can afford medical expenses out of pocket. (Census Bureau figures for 2000 show that over 18 million households had assets in excess of $250,000.) Our savings make it possible for my wife and me to decline both private insurance and Medicaid. (We are 68.) Those without savings are in a different situation: they probably need insurance or subsidy or charitable help. My point is that if you can handle your own medical bills through savings and personal responsibility, this is a sound approach. Politicians should encourage this state of self-reliance, not make it a crime.

What makes being insurance-free so desirable? The first advantage is flexibility. Several years ago, my wife had a serious bout with cancer. The successful treatment involved surgery to remove the cancer and local radiation. After much study, she decided to refuse the more massive radiation treatment recommended by the doctor and pursued alternative therapies, including acu-puncture, nutritional therapy, massage, and naturopathic medicine. Every decision was made in terms of what seemed best to treat this illness. We were not drawn into using inappropriate therapies because they were ?free? nor did we pass up desirable therapies because they were not covered.

The second advantage of being insurance-free is that we avoid bureaucracy. We don?t fill out forms, we don?t make phone calls trying to find out what?s covered, and we don?t play games (with the collusion of doctors) trying to get things we need paid for by someone else. If an aching back necessitates a different mattress, we go out and buy one and don?t waste time and money trying to prove to some clerk that it?s covered. When the government offered a new pi?ata of benefits in the form of prescription-drug coverage, we escaped the frustration of figuring out how to deal with its staggering confusion. While other seniors were closeted with lawyers and sons-in-law trying to decide what to sign up for, we went hiking.

But what will happen if I face a medical problem that requires more than my savings? Consider a parallel question about some other commodity, say housing. I announce that I believe in paying for housing from my own financial resources. Someone asks, what happens if there is a house I want that costs more than I can afford? The obvious answer is that I don?t buy it. I limit my housing consumption according to my resources.

That?s the same answer I give about medical care: if something costs too much, I do without. This position, so obvious and sensible in other areas, is considered untenable when it comes to medical care. In this realm, the prevailing assumption is that everyone is entitled to all the health services he needs or wants.

It?s one thing to announce this entitlement as an ideal but quite another to make it work. In the real world, medical resources are limited, and therefore all approaches to healthcare funding employ rationing.

In tax-based systems, administrators establish waiting lists so that some patients die before their opportunity for treatment comes up. They ban the use of expensive treatments and alternative therapies. And without exactly saying so, they underfund medical facilities so that patients wait in the halls of emergency wards, for example. In commercial insurance plans, rationing is implemented by restricting coverage to specific procedures and specific doctors and by setting upper limits to coverage.

Paying your own medical bills is simply another way of limiting consumption: if a treatment costs too much, you don?t buy it. The advantage of self-rationing is that it is frank and open and thus avoids the whining and blaming that characterize bureaucratic systems.

Covering your own treatment also lets you see that there are more socially constructive ways to use funds than spending on healthcare. Suppose that fixing your limping gait requires complicated care, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. If others pay for this care through a government insurance program, you might agree to accept it. But suppose you are paying for it with your own savings. Now you might think twice about spending the money on yourself. You might know of a school for autistic children that could put the money to good use. Or you might have a grandchild who needs the money to start a business.

Such decisions are indeed difficult, but we need to face them if we are to make sensible choices about healthcare. Today we are not facing them. We are hiding behind the confusion of a tangled government/corporate system that pretends we can have all the medical care we want.

Spending my own money on healthcare helps me set a rational limit to medical spending, even on spending to preserve my life. Not buying health insurance and not allowing politicians to force others to fund my needs helps me keep my consumption of medical resources within fitting bounds.

This way of looking at health insurance may be old-fashioned, and it may not address all the gaps in healthcare systems, but should it be a crime? 

______________________________________________

James L. Payne has taught political science at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Texas A&M. His most recent book is A History of Force: Exploring the Worldwide Movement Against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed, and Mayhem.

July 16, 2007 Issue

http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_07_16/article.html

This is the Fugio cent, the first American money authorized by the Continental Congress in 1787. The combination of the caption "FUGIO" (Latin: I flee) and the sundial form the expression "Time flies", and the motto, in distinct contrast to the current "In God We Trust" was the admonition "Mind Your Business".

It's hard to imagine money like this being minted anywhere on the planet these days, let alone in this country, where nobody, anywhere, at anytime, seems to be able to mind their business.

I post this as a reminder as to how distinctly different a country this has become from the one bequeathed to us by our founders.

I think I'd prefer a return to the original motto on our currency, given that our current population would likely profit from a frequent reminder.

French Voters Give Sarkozy A Big Boost
PARIS, Jun. 10, 2007
(AP) Voters resoundingly endorsed President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to overhaul the French economy, giving his party a commanding lead Sunday in the first round of elections for parliament, according to preliminary official results.

With 82 percent of the vote counted, Sarkozy's UMP party had 40 percent of the vote, while the opposition Socialists had 25 percent, the Interior Ministry said.

Sarkozy's conservatives have a strong advantage heading into the decisive runoff next Sunday, on track to expand their absolute majority in the 577-seat parliament. Control of the National Assembly is central to Sarkozy's agenda of tax cuts, labor reforms, and other plans to try to shake France out of its malaise.

The election sapped support from the fringes _ including Jean-Marie Le Pen's once-influential extreme right National Front and the Socialists' farther-left allies _ and leaves France facing a parliament tilted unusually well to the right.

Turnout was 61 percent _ low for France _ which pollsters blamed on a lack of suspense. The UMP has been widely expected to win since Sarkozy's strong victory over Socialist Segolene Royal in the presidential election last month. The main question was how badly the once-powerful leftists would lose.

Socialists tried to rally backing for the second round, tapping fears of an all-powerful "Sarko state" if the president's camp gets a lopsided majority.

"There are crushing majorities that crush, dominant parties that dominate, absolute powers that govern absolutely," Socialist leader Francois Hollande said.

Sarkozy's backers say a convincing mandate is the only way to get the French, eager to strike and wary of globalization, to reform.

"We want to set off a shockwave of confidence, a shockwave of growth," a buoyant Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Sunday night.

He laid out his agenda for change for the summer and autumn: reform of universities, making transport strikes less crippling, new anti-crime measures, freeing up the labor market and a plan to cut the large national debt.

Many outside the conservatives' circle dread the months to come.

Labor unions and student groups stand ready to resist with the kind of mass protests that logjammed reforms by former President Jacques Chirac.

Francois Bayrou, the third-place finisher in the presidential vote, warned of a "terribly" one-sided parliament.

"One day, France will regret this lack of balance. It is not healthy," said Bayrou. His fledgling new party MoDem won about 7 percent.

The Socialists' downfall may send the party soul-searching about its direction in an era when many European leftists have moved to the center and come to terms with global capital markets.

Polling agencies TNS, Ipsos and CSA concurred that the UMP would expand its majority, but varied widely in projecting how many seats they would win: They predicted between 383 and 501 for the UMP and other mainstream right groups, and between 60 and 185 seats for the Socialists and other leftist parties.

In the current parliament, the UMP has 359 seats and the Socialists 149.

The National Front, which played the kingmaker in parliamentary races past and won 15 percent in 1997, won just over 4 percent this time _ and not a single seat.

The Communists, who held 86 seats in parliament in the 1970s, are projected to win no more than 12 this time. The party's struggle for workers' rights has had substantial influence on French politics for many years.

The parliamentary election marked a milestone in modern French politics: Voters look set to return the outgoing majority to power for the first time since 1978.

Any candidate who wins more than 50 percent of the vote lands a seat straight out. In most cases there is no immediate winner, so all candidates with more than 12.5 percent of the vote go to the runoff.

A total of 7,639 candidates from 14 parties wre vying for five-year terms in the assembly.

The interior minister said at least 53 candidates _ all from Sarkozy's camp _ won by an absolute majority in the first round.

___

Associated Press writers John Leicester and Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.



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