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Delayed Recovery, Prolonged Depression

In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the Great Depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, the national unemployment rate stood at 17.4 percent.  Seven years later, after more than five years of FDR and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, after more than a doubling of federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at — 17.4 percent!  As economist Jim Powell points out in his devastating book FDR’s Folly, “From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent.  At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent.  Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9 percent of American workers were unemployed.  Living standards remained depressed until after the war.”
     In his celebrated First Inaugural Address of March 4, 1933, FDR unequivocally declared:  “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.  This is no unsolvable program if we face it wisely and courageously.”
     But for the president and his economic advisers, the task of putting people to work did remain an unsolvable problem — until world conflict led to sixteen million Americans leaving the workforce for the military, and millions more finding new jobs in humming defense plants.  Considering Roosevelt’s self-proclaimed priorities, the persistence of devastating unemployment (in an era when the typical family relied on only one wage earner and women for the most part stayed away from the workforce) should alone identify the New Deal as a wretched, ill-conceived failure.
     Other measures of recovery show similarly dismal results.  After the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Down Jones Industrial Average hit 250 in 1930 under Hoover (it had been 343 just before the crash).  By January 1940, after seven years of New Deal “experimentation,” the market had collapsed to 151; it remained in the low 100s through most of Roosevelt’s terms and didn’t return to its 1929 levels until the 1950s.  At the same time, federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product soared at an unprecedented rate:  from 2.5 percent in 1929 to 9 percent in 1936 (long before the wartime spending began).  In other words, the portion of the total economy controlled by Washington increased by a staggering 360 percent in the course of just seven years — without providing discernable benefit to the economy.
     Such statistics look so disturbing, so incontrovertible, that they raise serious questions about the survival of the myth that the New Deal fixed the Depression.

…

Crowding Out Charity

     …In The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas explores the numerous reasons why private-sector efforts work better than government initiatives in meaningfully transforming the lives of the downtrodden.  For instance, “a century ago, when individuals applied for material assistance, charity volunteers tried first to ‘restore family ties that have been sundered’ and ‘reabsorb in social life those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to other members of the community.’  Instead of immediately offering help, charities asked, ‘Who is bound to help in this case?’ “  This approach of course discouraged the extension of poverty as a semi-permanent status passed on from one generation to another.
     As Olasky notes, faith-based and private aid organizations also maintained the crucial ability to make distinctions between “deserving” and “self-destructive” poor.  “Charities a century ago realized that two persons in exactly the same material circumstances, but with different values, need different treatment.  One might benefit most from some material help and a pat on the back, the other might need spiritual challenge and a push.”  This echoes the clear division Reverend Joseph Tuckerman proposed in his classification of the poor he served as victims of either “paupery” or “poverty” — the first more in need of moral refocusing and the second in need of aid.  But bureaucratized and governmental interventions, no matter how well-intentioned, do not — cannot — make such distinctions, or help to repair or encourage the family relationships so essential to escape from poverty and dysfunction.

…

Erasing Embarassment, Encouraging Dependency

Charles Murray’s pathbreaking 1984 book Losing Ground asks an obvious question about Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and its aftermath in the late 1960s:  what caused the painful increase in poverty, illegitimacy, crime and social dysfunction at the same time that government spending to address these pathologies vastly increased?  He concluded that the well-intentioned and monumentally expensive programs of the period contributed to the problems, rather than to their solutions.  As President Reagan trenchantly summarized the situation:  “We had a War on Poverty.  And poverty won.”
     The unmistakable failure of Great Society programs related to their underlying assumptions:  they went far beyond the New Deal in erasing all distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”  The new welfare “entitlement” made all struggling citizens eligible for the same programs, regardless of the respectability or destructiveness of their behavior.  Social workers and politicians aimed to obliterate the stigma once associated with receiving benefits from the government.
     My barrel-maker grandfather never prospered in this society, but he always viewed the dole as an indication of failure and disgrace.  Like most Americans of his generation, he would rather go hungry than lose his dignity as an honest workingman.
     Great Society reformers worked hard to extirpate the sense of shame that previously kept the “working poor” from claiming government largesse, promoting “welfare rights” and insisting that the destitute bore no responsibility for their status.  But an individual who bears no responsibility for his situation exerts no control over it – and must depend on outside forces (in this case the federal government) for his redemption.  By removing the embarassment previously associated with taking public money, antipoverty programs encouraged a culture of dependency and discouraged self-reliance…

Michael Medved
“Government Programs Offer the Only Remedy for Poverty”
The 10 Big Lies About America

Life-Cycle Adjustments

…reduced cost for most goods and services helps to explain the apparent contradiction between undeniable improvements in living standards and misleading statistics (beloved by alarmists) that show falling household income in recent years.
     Economist Stephen Rose… points to numerous ways in which frequently cited income figures fail to reflect reality.  Most obviously, they don’t include the value of benefits — particularly employer contributions to retirement savings plans and health insurance premiums — which have risen far more rapidly than wages.
     Rose, writing in the Washington Post, also shows that the statistics for household income ignore the changing size of American households — namely, many more people live in single-adult households now than thirty years ago… This means that even the same reported household income supports fewer people, resulting in more money per person and a higher standard of living.  Rose adjusts income numbers to account for the shift in household size and the boost in employer benefits and determines that “the real middle class median income has risen 33 percent, or $18,000, since 1979.”
     Ths numbers, in short, show steady and continuing improvement in the status of typical Americans, rather than a “war on the middle class.”  Placing the figures in the context of the normal life cycle brightens the picture even further.  In a Huffington Post piece titled, “What’s the Income of the Typical American?” Rose notes that most Americans earn less at the beginning and end of their adult lives without necessarily suffering in terms of living standards.  “Many graduate students have very low incomes for several years,” he writes.  “But few would classify this group as poor given their long term prospects… At the opposite end of the spectrum, retired people have much fewer direct expenses, often have paid off their mortgage, have a home filled with furniture and appliances, and are not likely to have to subsidize their adult children.  Consequently, a retiree’s income of $40,000 translates into a very different standard of living than a young couple with a new born child.”
     With this in mind, Rose focuses on “prime-age” adults between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-two and finds a median income of $60,000.  “Your typical husband-wife couple in this age range,” he adds, “has a median income of over $70,000; and couples in which both husband and wife work at least part of the year had a median income of $81,000″…
   The statistical evidence for a rising standard of living for every segment of the population is so overwhelming that charges of a “vanishing middle class” rely on sleight of hand that grossly distorts Census Bureau numbers.
     It’s true that between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of middle-income households ($30,000 to $75,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars) went down sharply, by 13.1 percent.  But lower-income households (below $30,000) also went down slightly (0.6 percent).
     What happened to these formerly middle-income and poor people?  They got richer.
     As a matter of fact, the only income group that increased at all was households earning more than $100,000, which rose by nearly 15 percent, from 13 percent to 28 percent of the population.  In other words, a major chunk of the middle class disappeared into relative affluence, not poverty.

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Increasing Leisure, Not Work

Despite the endlessly repeated charge that Americans work longer hours for less and less pay, the numbers actually show sharp long-term increases in both disposable income and leisure time.  Economists Mark Aguiar of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago examined five decades of time diary surveys administered by research universities and the government.  James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation reports the economists’ key findings:

• “Since the mid-1960s, the amount of time that the typical American spends working fell by almost eight hours per week, while the time spent on leisure activities rose by just under seven hours per week.”
• “This additional leisure time is equivalent to an extra seven to nine weeks of vacation per year.”
• “Leisure has increased unequally.  Less educated and lower-income Americans now work less and enjoy more leisure than Americans with higher incomes.  This explains part of why they have lower incomes.”

     Meanwhile, all Americans spend more time and vastly more money on recreational pursuits.  The Census Bureau reports that inflation-adjusted spending on recreational per capita soared from $854 in 1970 to $2,551 in 2005, an increase of nearly 300 percent.  Even as a percentage of total consumption, recreation went up dramatically — from 6.5 percent in 1970 to 8.7 percent in 2005.

…

The Myth of Permanent Misery

…A November 2007 Treasury report, based on 96,700 tax returns from 1996 and 2005, discovered that 58 percent of filers who found themselves in the poorest income group (the bottom 20 percent) in 1996 moved into a higher income category in just ten years.  In fact, after inflation, the median income of all tax filers increased by a solid 24 percent in the decade.  Two out of three workers had a real income gain since 1996 — contradicting the common charge that the working class has steadily lost ground.
     In terms of the American dream of reliable advancement, there’s been no nightmarish transformation.  The Treasury Department explains:  “The basic finding of this analysis is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last ten years as it was in the previous decade.”  There you have it, in the unadorned conclusion of the federal bureaucracy itself:  despite terrorist attacks, war expenditures, and hysterical denunciations of the Bush administration’s alleged devastation of the working class, ordinary Americans retained the same ability to climb the economic ladder that they enjoyed between 1986 and 1995 — the last years of the Reagan boom and the opening years of the Clinton expansion.
     …the economy functions exactly as it should — providing greater rewards for those with more experience in the workforce.  There’s no evidence whatever that today’s young people constitute the first generation in American history to fail to advance as they move forward into their prime earning years…

Michael Medved
“A War on the Middle Class Means Less Comfort and Opportunity”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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Nothing New in Foreign Fights
     …

     Even Pat Buchanan, the three-time presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.”   In his provocative, beautifully written book A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), Buchanan argues:

 The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie… What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking… To call the foreign policy that produced this result ‘isolationist’ is absurd.  Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests.  They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.

     Donald Kagan makes a similar case in Dangerous Nation (2006), insisting that many Americans remain misled or ill-informed about our purportedly isolationist past:

This gap between Americans’ self-perception and the perceptions of others has endured throughout the nation’s history.  Americans have cherished the image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world, usually in response to external attack or perceived threats.  This self-image survives, despite four hundred years of steady expansion and an ever-deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite innumerable wars, interventions and prolonged occupations in foreign lands… Even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach and purview and involvement across the continent and then across the ocean, Americans still believe their nation’s tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity.

     This misconception helped to produce one of the common (and ignorant) indictments of the Iraq war, with angry critics of Bush’s policy emphatically insisting:  “This is the first time in history we ever attacked any country that hadn’t attacked us first.”  In fact, virtually all our major wars began without some clear-cut enemy attack on American soil:  the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and the First Gulf War engaged the armed might of the nation based on incidents or interests, but not in response to sneak attack or mass assault.  In 230 years of history only the Civil War (where Lincoln cleverly lured southern forces into the initial bombardment of federal property at Fort Sumter) and World War II (where Japan struck at precisely one of those outposts of empire in distant Hawaii that anti-imperialists often decry) brought our forces into battle in response to blatant enemy strikes.

…

The Bedford Falls Experiment

     After the Cold War, American power represents the one indispensable element in sustaining hopes for an ordered and peaceful world.  Christopher Hitchens writes:

The plain fact remains that when the rest of the world wants anything done in a hurry, it applies to American power.  If the “Europeans” or the United Nations had been left with the task, the European provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would now be howling wildernesses, Kuwait would be the 19th province of a Greater Iraq, and Afghanistan might still be under Taliban rule.  In at least the first two of the above cases, it can’t even be argued that American imperialism was the problem in the first place.  This makes many of the critics of this imposing new order sound like the whimpering, resentful Judean subversives in The Life of Brian, squabbling among themselves about “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

     …

     The best way to put America’s place in the world in proper context is to call to mind a famous sequence from the most beloved Hollywood movie of them all.
     In It’s a Wonderful Life, small-town banker George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) contemplates a Christmas Eve suicide before guardian angel Clarence provides the ultimate life-affirming vision.  He provides the disheartened hero with a dark, dysfunctional view of the town of Bedford Falls as it would have been if he’d never drawn breath, the community taking shape without his good deeds and benevolent influence.  With that sharper perspective, George can go home to his loving family to celebrate the holiday with gratitude and joy.
     Those who condemn the United States should perform a thought experiment involving a global “Bedford Falls vision.”
     Imagine that the United States had never become a world power, or never existed at all.
     Would the ideals of democracy and free markets wield the same power in the world?
     Would murderous dictatorships have claimed more victims, or fewer?
     Would the community of nations strain under the lash of Nazism, Communism, or some vicious combination of both?
     Would multiethnic, multireligious democracy flourish anywhere on earth without inspiration from the groundbreaking example of the USA?
     Would the threat of jihadist violence and resurgent Islamic fundamentalism menace humanity more grievously, or not at all?
     No one can provide definitive, authoritative answers to such hypothetical questions, but merely confronting the questions should help put the American role in more complete perspective.  Just as George Bailey’s view of an alternative reality convinced him that “it’s a wonderful life,” even the briefest contemplation of the world without America should persuade us that “it’s a wonderful nation” — and an indispensable boon to all of humanity.

Michael Medved
“America is an Imperialist Nation”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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     Most negative people feel they could be positive if they had a different job, lived in a better place, or married a different person.  But happiness does not hinge on better circumstances.  A person with bad attitudes will still be a person with bad attitudes, wherever and with whomever he or she lives.
     By force of habit, each of us is either basically positive or basically negative.  Our circumstances change with the weather, but our attitudes stay the same.  The negative person defends his attitudes with the rationale of being realistic, while the positive person looks beyond the current state of affairs and sees people and situations in terms of possibilities…
     Negative interpretations are guaranteed to sap the happiness out of marriage.  But how do we cultivate positive attitudes when our spouses do something we dislike?  The answer lies in taking responsibility for our own feelings.
     I remember coming home one day flushed with excitement and eager to discuss some good news with Les.  I can’t remember the news now, but I remember his response:  lukewarm enthusiasm.  I wanted him to share my excitement, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.  “You upset me,” I later told him.  But the truth is, he didn’t upset me.  I upset myself.  That sounds a little strange, but it’s true.  Before exploring why Les didn’t join in my celebration, I jumped to a negative conclusion:  He doesn’t even care that something good happened to me.  He is only interested in himself.  Meanwhile, Les, who was feeling somewhat dejected that day because of a setback at work, was thinking, She doesn’t really care about me.  She is only interested in herself.
     Since that time both of us have tried to adopt a “no fault, no blame” attitude.  The idea is to suspend our negative evaluations about each other and remember that no one can make another person unhappy.  Everyone is responsible for his or her own attitude.
     Victor Frankl, more than anyone else, exemplified the human ability to rise above circumstances and maintain a positive attitude.  He was a twenty-six-year-old Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna, Austria, when he was arrested by Hitler’s Gestapo and placed in a concentration camp.  Month in and month out, he worked under the great smokestacks that belched out black carbon monoxide from the incinerators where his father, mother, sister, and wife had been cremated.  Each day he hoped for a few slivers of carrots or peas in the daily bowl of soup.  In cold weather, he got up an hour earlier than usual to wrap his feet and legs in scrap burlap and wire to shield them against the crippling cold of an East European winter.
     When Victor Frankl was finally called for inquisition, he stood naked in the center of a powerful white light, while men in shiny boots strode to and fro in the darkened shadows beyond the light.  For hours they assailed him with questions and accusations, trying to break him down with every accusing lie they could think of.  Already they had taken his wife, his family, his writing, his clothes, his wedding ring, and everything else of material value.  But in the midst of this barrage of questions, an idea flashed across Frankl’s mind:  They have taken from me everything I have — except the power to choose my own attitude.
     Thankfully, most people are not required to cope with such devastating circumstances as the Jews faced in Nazi Germany.  But the same principle that helped Victor Frankl survive the death camps — choosing his own attitude — applies to every difficult circumstance wherever and whenever it occurs.
     Millions of couples are robbed of happiness because one of the partners has developed a negative mind-set, blaming their unhappiness on things their spouse does or doesn’t do.  It’s one of the worst mistakes a person can make in marriage.  We often hear statements in counseling like:  “Her comments hurt me!” or “He makes me so angry.”  In reality, remarks and comments do not hurt or upset people; people can only upset themselves.  Of course, being upset is a natural reaction to something we dislike, but that reaction can serve as a trigger for a more constructive, positive response.
     When we recognize where the control resides — in ourselves and not in external events — we are able to reinterpret upsetting events and develop a positive attitude.

Dr. Les Parrott III  &  Dr. Leslie Parrott
“Can You Say What You Mean and Understand What You Hear?”
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts

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Corporate Power Brought Progress, Not Oppression

Ubiquitous lies about “robber barons” reflect larger distortions about the Gilded Age, in which they reshaped the country.  While leftist historians have always derided the era following the War Between the States as a time of corruption and complacency, no single generation in human history raised living standards more rapidly, absorbed and assimilated comparable waves of immigration, settled more vast and remote frontiers, built as many new states and glittering cities, or brought a nation so quickly to the top rank of world power.
     In the introduction to their book The Confident Years, about U.S. life from 1865 to 1914, the editors of American Heritage magazine enthused, “It was a period of exuberant growth, in population, industry and world prestige.  As the twentieth century opened, American political pundits were convinced that the nation was on an ascending spiral of progress that could end only in something approaching perfection.  Even those who saw the inequity between the bright world of privilege and the gray fact of poverty were quite sure that a time was very near when no one would go cold or hungry or ill clothed.  These were indeed the Confident Years.”  In other words, an era of rampant capitalist power that saw the emergence of giant corporations that touched the lives of every American corresponded with the most dynamic and dazzling achievements in our history.
     Of course, the period also witnessed a surge in radicalism (among both agrarian populists and urban unionists) and a good deal of labor unrest.  But Harvard historian Crane Brinton pointed out that revolutionary sentiments generally develop in periods of long-term economic progress, not abject deprivation.  When business produces a sharp increase in living standards, the “revolution of rising expectations” leaves workers and farmers impatient for more rapid advancement.
     The working class, in fact, benefited mightily from the explosive growth of the Gilded Age.  As Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff document in their History of the American Economy, between 1860 and 1890 real wages increased by a staggering 50 percent in America.  Meanwhile, the average workweek shortened, meaning that the real earnings of the American worker increased by something more like 60 percent in just thirty years…

Corporate Growth Brings Cheapter Goods, With Better Jobs

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, economics professor at Loyola College in Maryland, highlights the deeper impact of corporate expansion.  “Capitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better, and cheaper goods,” he writes in his 2005 book How Capitalism Saved America.  “When Henry Ford first started selling automobiles only the relatively wealthy could afford them, but soon enough working-class families were buying his cars.”
     The efficiency and productivity made possible by corporate organization gave typical Americans a range of choices and an economic power unimaginable for prior generations.  Federal Reserve Board economists W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm make this clear in their book Myths of Rich and Poor:

A nineteenth-century millionaire couldn’t grab a cold drink from the refrigerator.  He couldn’t hop into a smooth-riding automobile for a 70-mile-an-hour trip down an interstate highway to the mountains or seashore.  He couldn’t call up news, movies, music and sporting events by simply touching the remote control’s buttons.  He couldn’t jet north to Toronto, south to Cancun, east to Boston or west to San Francisco in just a few hours… He couldn’t run over to the mall to buy auto-focus cameras, computer games, mountain bikes, or movies on videotape.  He couldn’t escape the summer heat in air conditioned comfort.  He couldn’t check into a hospital for a coronary bypass to cure a failing heart, get a shot of penicillin to ward off infection, or even take aspirin to relieve a headache.

     Jeremiads about the “horrifying” gap between rich and poor miss this point — that poor people in America’s twenty-first century enjoy options and privileges that even the wealthiest couldn’t claim a hundred years ago.  Far from oppressing the working class, the corporate system has vastly improved the purchasing power of all Americans.  Cox and Alm note that a worker in 1900 labored two hours and forty minutes to earn the cost of a three-pound chicken; in 1999, a mere twenty-four minutes of toil could buy him the bird.  If anything, the growth in rewards for working have only accelerated in the past fifty years.  In 1950, typical workers put in more than two hours to afford 100 kilowatts of electricity; by 1999, the cost had dropped to fourteen minutes…

 The False Choice of “People vs. Profits”

Adam Smith defined capitalism more than two hundred years ago in The Wealth of Nations, describing the essence of the system as a series of mutually beneficial agreements:  “Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.”  This captures the essential fairness and decency of the free-market system, which relies on voluntary associations that enrich both parties.
     Concerning the process of industrialization, which saw millions of workers empowering the engines of major corporations, the great economist Ludwig von Mises trenchantly observed:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job.  They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them.  Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them.  It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play.  These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children.  These children were destitute and starving.  Their only refuge was the factory.  It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

     The same process applies to newly opened factories throughout the developing world today, despite the efforts by antiglobalist and anticorporate activists in the United States to obliterate the only jobs that keep suffering millions from a return to misery and destitution…
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Michael Medved
“The Power of Big Business Hurts the Country and Oppresses the People”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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Pro-Faith Judges

…Established “official” churches survived in several states well into the nineteenth century.  Connecticut disestablished its favored Congregational denomination only in 1818, New Hampshire in 1819, and Massachusetts in 1833 — some forty-five years after the adoption of the First Amendment.  The changes reflected the religious “quickening” of the time (viewed by some as a second Great Awakening), with new sects and philosophies clamoring for recognition and fresh adherents.  In any event, public opinion and legislative decisions, not judicial dictate, brought disestablishment.
     The leading judges of the early Republic outspokenly endorsed governmental support for religious institutions.  John Marshall, the father of American jurisprudence and for thirty-four epochal years (1801-35) the chief justice of the United States, wrote a revealing letter to Jasper Adams on May 9, 1833, declaring:  “The American population is entirely Christian, and with us Christianity and Religion are identified.  It would be strange, indeed, if with such a people, our institutions did not presuppose Christianity, and did not often refer to it, and exhibit relations with it.”
     His colleague on the Court (1796-1811), Justice Samuel Chase, wrote a 1799 opinion (Runkel v. Winemill) that held:  “Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the pace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people.  By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion, and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.”
     The most authoritative explanation of the First Amendment came from Joseph Story, a Supreme Court justice from 1811 to 1845 (appointed by President Madison, the father of the Constitution) and, as a longtime Harvard professor, the leading early commentator on the Constitution.  He observed:

The general if not universal sentiment in America was that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship.  An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.  The real object of the First Amendment… was to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.

     None of today’s Christian conservative organizations seek to institute the “national ecclesiastical establishment” clearly prohibited by the Establishment Clause.  The leading organizations on the Religious Right — Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the American Family Association, the Traditional Values Coalition, and so forth — all represent interdenominational coalitions, drawing Catholics and Mormons, Episcopalians and evangelicals of every sort.  Meanwhile, those who worry over Christian conservative influence clearly favor the folly described by Justice Story:  a “state policy” to hold all religions “in utter indifference.”  This effort to sever ties between faith and state — including the absurd efforts to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or the motto “In God we trust” from our coinage — produces precisely the sort of “universal indignation” Justice Story predicted nearly two hundred years ago…

Rejecting the National Hymnal

…In the emotional days after the September 11 attacks, secular activists objected to performances of “God Bless America” or “God Bless the USA” in public schools, but their inability to suggest faith-free alternatives highlighted their alienation from the American mainstream.  All our most revered nationalist songs emphasize the Republic’s special connection to the Almighty.
     Our national anthem indicates that the idea of this relationship preceded today’s Religious Right by at least two hundred years.  “The Star-Spangled Banner” includes Francis Scott Key’s incontrovertibly religious sentiments in its final verse:

Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation
Then conquer we must when our cause it is just
And this be our motto:  “In God is our trust.”

     The nation’s other most beloved patriotic hymn, “America the Beautiful,” features a chorus with the cherished line, “America!  America!  God shed His grace on thee.”  Katharine Lee Bates began writing the words after reaching the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado in 1893 and entering a state of near-religious-ecstasy upon contemplation of the Great Plains to the east.  She included verses that repeatedly ask assistance from the Almighty…
     Meanwhile, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the stirring marching song of the War Between the States, isn’t merely religious (with its chorus invoking the biblical word hallelujah) but is also specifically Christian.  The final, moving verse — most often sung in a reverent hush — poetically declares:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

     Finally, “America” (also known as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”) provides no safe haven for those who yearn to disentangle religious and patriotic messages, not with its inescapably churchy concluding verse:

Our fathers’ God to Thee
Author of liberty
To Thee we sing
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light
Protect us by Thy might
Great God, our King.

     The most recent of the popular patriotic melodies first appeared on the eve of World War II as a love letter to the nation from an immigrant boy who became the leading Broadway composer.  Irving Berlin donated all proceeds from “God Bless America” to the Boy Scouts (another politically incorrect institution) and implored the Almighty to “stand beside her and guide her / Through the night with the light from above.”
     Some contemporary Americans clearly feel uncomfortable with our long history of weaving together a sense of national identity with claims of divine mission, our consistent assumption that the Almighty has selected this nation for His purposes.  These alarmed opponents of “theocracy” have every right to argue that we will enjoy a brighter, better future by severing the old association between faith and nationalism, but they shouldn’t mischaracterize the past — or suggest a return to an era of absolute church-state separation that never existed.

Michael Medved
“The Founders Intended a Secular, Not Christian, Nation”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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The “slavery debate” undermines appropriate pride in this nation’s role as history’s most potent force for freedom and human betterment.  Like the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans offers a ready-made opportunity for those who fear and resent the United States to highlight our society’s allegedly racist and rapacious character.  The guilt-mongers seize on slavery to spread ubiquitous lies about America — that this nation bears unique culpability for the devastation of Africa and the enslavement of its sons and daughters, and that the United States based its formidable wealth and power on stolen labor of countless slaves.
     The proper response to these distortions rests on four important propositions:

1. Slavery is a timeless, universal institution, not an American innovation.
2. The slave economy played only a minor role in building American power and prosperity, and for the most part retarded economic progress more than advanced it.
3. America deserves unique credit for rapidly ending slavery, not distinctive blame for its establishment.
4. There’s scant reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off had their ancestors remained behind in Africa…

Islamic Guilt, Greed, and Cruelty

     …The Islamic slave trade involved barbarity and greed that resembled and sometimes exceeded the monstrous cruelty for which European slave merchants stand rightly condemned.  Ronald Segal, author of Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, said in an interview that in the Muslim world “the casualties involved in enslavement wars were absolutely unspeakable.”  Moreover, slave ownership was more widespread in Islamic societies, so much so that “even small shopkeepers owned slaves.”  The wealthy collected concubines as status symbols “the way people in the West collect motorcars”; one ruler had fourteen thousand…
     Slavery continued openly in the Islamic world for nearly a century after its elimination in the West.  Muslim slavers filled the vacuum left by the British abandonment of the slave trade in royal possessions in 1822.  In Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Moses Nwulia asks, “What earthly comfort did the slave derive from being told that henceforth he was beyond the reach of the grasping hands of the white Europeans but good game for the supposedly benign whites from Asia?  What spiritual enlightenment did he derive from being told that the same God who created the Christians and Muslims frowned upon Christian slave trade but sanctioned Muslim slavery?”
     That same “divine sanction” continued for the Islamic world well into the twentieth century:  Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962.  The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine…
     The organization Christian Solidarity International continues to purchase Sudanese slaves in order to free them, recently paying $100 (or two cows) for an adult captive.  A press release revealed that in March 2007 alone the group bought ninety-six male slaves, who had been seized as part of the Muslim northern government’s “jihad” on the nation’s Christian and animist south.  Six of the young men had been raped by their Islamic masters, and 99 percent had received frequent and sadistic beatings.
     The long, savage history of Muslim slavers and their depredations in every corner of Africa makes a mockery of the trendy sentimental attachment of many African Americans to an alien Islamic culture that not only abused their ancestors but still afflicts their cousins.  The fascination with Arab names (Jamal or Ayesha, not to mention Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), even among non-Muslims in the black community, and the glamorization of Arab civilization as somehow authentically African grow in spite of the incontrovertible evidence of more than a millennium of brutal Islamic enslavement.
     Activists and agitators who obsess over America’s dark history with slavery make scant mention of the undeniable record of Islamic exploitation and viciousness, even though by the most conservative estimate the Muslim world transported and enslaved at least twenty times as many Africans as ever made their way to the British settlements that later became the United States.

Promoting Poverty, Not Prosperity

…the persistence of slavery in southern states limited the pace of economic development, while abolition in the commercial states of the North led to quickening growth in population, wealth, and productivity…
     Anticipating the “irrepressible conflict” with the North, the editor of the Lynchburg Virginian understood his region’s painful vulnerability.  “Dependent upon Europe and the North for almost every yard of cloth, and every coat and boot and hat that we wear, for our axes, scythes, tubs and buckets, in short, for everything except our bread and meat, it must occur to the South that if our relations with the North are ever severed,” he wrote, “we should… be reduced to a state more abject that we are willing to look at even prospectively.”  By the census of 1860, the percentage of the population that was enslaved had slumped to 12.5 percent (due to robust immigration to the free North) and citizens of the Union states outnumbered white Confederates by a ratio of more than three to one.
     The prewar statistics comparing the booming, bustling North to the underdeveloped, agrarian South hardly show a national economy dependent on slavery.  Even if we leave out the four “border states” (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky) that ultimately stayed in the Union, the North enjoyed every advantage for a protracted struggle.  In northern states, railroad mileage (covering a similar geographic area) beat the South by a three-to-one ratio, and southern commercial shipping proved virtually nonexistent.  In terms of bank capital, the North topped the South by more than four to one, while the value of the North’s manufactured goods exceeded southern production by a staggering ten to one.  In short, by every measure the slave-based economies developed far less prosperous and powerful societies than their northern, industrialized counterparts — an economic gap that dictated the outcome of the nation’s most devastating conflict…

Credit for Abolition

Present-day anguish over the historic shame of slavery plays an increasingly prominent role in even the most glowing accounts of the nation’s origins…  Contemporary sensibilities indict the patriot generation for its failure, in the midst of launching its unprecedented experiment in self-government, to uproot instantaneously an ancient institution passed on to them by their fathers and grandfathers.
     Nevertheless, the debate over the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention showed that even Founding Fathers from southern states had developed profound discomfort with the continued seizure and enslavement of Africans.  George Mason of Virginia condemned the “infernal traffic” and Luther Martin of Maryland viewed any protection of the slave trade as “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character.”  Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who crafted the language for large sections of the final draft of the Constitution, thundered against slavery itself, denouncing it as a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven.”
     The opponents of the slave trade succeeded in securing a constitutional provision for ultimate elimination of the importation of human cargo.  Later, in urging ratification of the Constitution, slaveholder James Madison argued in Federalist No. 42 that this provision constituted “a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate for ever within these states” what he termed “an unnatural traffic” that amounted to “the barbarism of modern policy.”
     Within a mere hundred years of these founding arguments, the successors and allies of these men of principle and practicality had succeeded in abolishing slavery not just in their fledgling Republic but in all the nations of the West.  During three eventful generations, one of the most ancient, ubiquitous, and unquestioned of all human institutions (considered utterly indispensable by the “enlightened” philosophers of classical Greece and Rome) became universally discredited and finally illegal — with Brazil at last liberating its enslaved hordes in 1888.  This worldwide mass movement (spearheaded in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere by fervent evangelical Christians) brought about the most rapid and fundamental transformation in all human history.
     While the United States (and the English colonies that preceded our independence) played no role in creating the institution of slavery or even the trade in African captives (pioneered by Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and other merchants long before the establishment of British North America), Americans did contribute mightily to the spectacularly successful antislavery agitation…

Michael Medved
“The United States is Uniquely Guilty for the Crime of Slavery…”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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Guilty Germs

No one disputes that the first four centuries after European contact brought a devastating decline in the number of Native Americans.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, government officials found only 250,000 Indian survivors in the territory of the United States… Meanwhile, scholarly estimates of pre-Columbian North American population range from 1.2 million all the way to 20 million…
     Beyond all arguments about the levels of native population at its peak, historians have reach unanimity on the prime cause of its rapid decline:  infectious disease brought about between 75 and 95 percent of Indian deaths after European settlement began.  In his critically acclaimed best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fate of Human Societies, UCLA professor Jared Diamond observes that “throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population… The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance.  Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers.”
     Diseases spread far more rapidly than European settlement and decimated even those Indian societies that had minimal contact with the newcomers… Contrary to the popular image, “conquistadors contributed nothing directly to the societies’ destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything”…
     The decimation of native populations by microbial invaders represented an enormous human tragedy, but in no sense did it constitute a crime.Constant Battles:  The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage shows that genocides and land raids among regional and ethnic groups had always been the norm for native peoples…

“Smallpox Blankets” and Biological Warfare

But didn’t British authorities, and later the Americans, show criminal intent when they deliberately infected innocent tribes with the deadliest of eighteenth-century diseases?  Whenever callers to my radio show begin talking about the premeditated mass slaughter of Native Americans, it’s only a matter of seconds before they invoke the diabolical history of “smallpox blankets” — the bedding and clothing cunningly provided to unsuspecting tribes in order to infect them with the variola major virus…
     Amazingly, the notion persists that the unimaginable devastation brought about by this disease stemmed from elaborate and brilliantly executed schemes devised by mass murderers — at a time when even the most sophisticated physicians possessed no real understanding of germ theory…
     The horribly misleading charges about germ warfare have achieved a monstrous life of their own, leaving many (if not most) Americans with the impression that diseases that decimated native populations resulted from a conscious, long-standing policy of the U.S. government.  No such master plan for mass murder ever existed, of course, so that all efforts to scour abundant bureaucratic records have produced only a few nasty postscripts in letters from British — not American — officials in 1763, and the largely exculpatory evidence concerning an epidemic in Mandan territory in 1837…

Bury the Truth at Wounded Knee

…The original confrontation at Wounded Knee Creek occurred after Big Foot’s band of 120 warriors and 230 women and children gave up fleeing from the authorities who wanted to restrict them to a reservation.  The Indians surrendered to the troops of the Seventh Cavalry, but when the soldiers ordered them to disarm, some of the Miniconjou tried to hide the rifles they considered essential to their suvival and dignity.
     Before nine in the morning on December 29, two soldiers began to struggle with an Indian named Black Coyote, who demanded that he be paid for his rifle.  One of Black Coyote’s fellow tribesman described him as “a crazy man, a young man of very band influence and in fact a nobody,” while two other Miniconjou suggested that he was also deaf, which might explain his behavior.  As the two troopers tried to wrestle him to the gound he managed to fire a shot into the air.
     In response to the single shot, a medicine man named Yellow Bird threw a handful of dirt into the air — an important symbol to his fellow members of the Ghost Dance cult, who believed that their rituals would bring dead warriors and dead buffalo back to life and rid the world of all white men.  Five or six of Yellow Bird’s followers then stood up, threw off their blankets in the bitter cold, produced the rifles they’d been concealing, and began firing directly toward K troop.
     The melee that followed, like most other purported “massacres” of Native Americans, featured fierce fighting and losses on both sides.  The battle raged for hours, with the Indians demonstrating expert handling of their well-maintained, repeating Winchester rifles and also engaging in fearless hand-to-hand combat.
     By the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of Big Foot’s band of 350 had been killed or wounded; at least 153 died (including at least 44 women and 18 children too young to fight).  Among the U.S. soldiers, 25 died and 39 were wounded.
     The statistics indicate the one-sided nature of the fight, but it was a fight, not an unprovoked slaughter of unarmed innocents.  Neither the soldiers nor the government that commanded them had any intention of killing Indians that day, despite the mythology that’s grown up around the tragedy.  With true genocidal intent, the soldiers could have simply used the artillery they brought with them…

Tribe Against Tribe

In recent years nearly all pop-cultural accounts of pre-Columbian North America feature potent elements of nostalgia, stressing the supposed dignity and gentleness of native societies in order to emphasize the tragic aspects of purported genocide by white invaders.  For instance, the lavish Pocahontas–Captain John Smith movie The New World (2005) arrived with a handsome promotional brochure explaining that the Jamestown settlers of 1607 found a “noble civilization” that “had lived in peace for hundreds of years.”
     For ranchers, miners, farmers, and soldiers who lived their lives in constant and legitimate fear of Indian attack, however, the indigenous cultures seemed neither noble nor peaceful; their regular description of Indians as “savages” reflected an observed pattern of terrifying brutality.  Moreover, most of the white newcomers to the West understood that the bloodthirsty habits that so frightened them unquestionably predated the arrival of Europeans in North America.  Even while directing their rage at white intruders, the natives continued their age-old tradition of withering intertribal warfare, constributing mightily to the failure of all efforts at resistance.
     The various tribes never lived together in harmony and mutual respect, no more than the Neolithic cultures of Europe, Asia, or Africa coexisted without desperate and punishing conflict.  Societies among the Indians and all other aboriginal peoples conducted devastating wars against one another, that at times became struggles for domination, conquest, replacement, or even extermination.
     Harvard anthropologist Steven LeBlanc spent years studying the Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest and only gradually came to reject the popular notion that North American tribes had once composed a gorgeous mosaic of diversity, living side by side in peace and dignity.  In his research, he discovered pueblos built on mesas from the years 1275 to 1325 — long before Europeans had arrived in the New World — that housed more than a thousand residents each, designed to be impregnable to inevitable attack.  LeBlanc’s book Constant Battles:  The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage shows that genocides and land raids among regional and ethnic groups had always been the norm for native peoples…

Michael Medved
“America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans”
The 10 Big Lies About America

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     In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled.  This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.  So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.  And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.  While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
     Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock.  The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were struck with great fear.  The angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord.  And this will be a sign for you:  you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”  And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying:  “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Luke 2:1-14

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One of the most entrenched assumptions of relativism is that there is such a thing as morally neutral ground, a place of complete impartiality where no judgments nor any forcing or personal views are allowed.  Each takes a neutral posture towards the moral convictions of others.  This is the essence of tolerance, the argument goes.

Moral neutrality, though, is a myth…

Tolerance and Moral Neutrality

One of the alleged virtues of relativism is its emphasis on tolerance.  An extremely articulate example of this point of view was written by Faye Wattleton, the former President of Planned Parenthood.  The piece is called, “Self-Definition:  Morality.” 

     Like most parents, I think that a sense of moral responsibility is one of the greatest gifts I can give my child.  But teaching morality doesn’t mean imposing my moral values on others.  It means sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as I do — and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves.
     My parents’ morals were deeply rooted in religious conviction but tempered by tolerance — the essence of which is respect for other people’s views.  They taught me that reasonable people may differ on moral issues, and that fundamental respect for others is morality of the highest order.
     I have devoted my career to ensuring a world in which my daughter, Felicia, can inherit that legacy.  I hope the tolerance and respect I show her as a parent is reinforced by the work she sees me doing every day:  fighting for the right of all individuals to make their own moral decisions about childbearing.
     Seventy-five years ago, Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to liberate individuals from the “mighty engines of repression.”  As she wrote, “The men and women of America are demanding that… they be allowed to mold their lives, not at the arbitrary command of church or state but as their conscience and judgment may dictate.”
     I’m proud to continue that struggle, to defend the rights of all people to their own beliefs.  When others try to inflict their views on me, my daughter or anyone else, that’s not morality:  It’s tyranny.  It’s unfair, and it’s un-American.

This is impressively and persuasively written, one of the finest expressions of this view available in the space of five short paragraphs.  It sounds so sensible, so reasonable, and so tolerant, but there’s a fundamental flaw. 

Wattleton’s Fundamental Flaw

Faye Wattleton’s assessment is based on the notion of neutral ground, a place that implies no moral judgment.  Wattleton is not neutral, however, as her own comments demonstrate. 

In her article, Wattleton in effect argues that each of us should respect another’s point of view.  She then implies, however, that any point of view other than this one is immoral, un-American, and tyrannous.  If you disagree with Wattleton’s position that all points of view are equally valid, then your point of view is not valid.  Her argument commits suicide; it self-destructs.

In fact, Wattleton has her own absolute she seeks to impose on other people:  “Fundamental respect for others is morality of the highest order.”  This is a personal moral position she strives to mandate politically.  She writes, “I have devoted my career to ensuring a world in which my daughter, Felicia, can inherit that legacy.”  What legacy?  Her point of view.  How does she ensure this?  By passing laws.  Faye Wattleton has devoted her career to ensuring a world in which her point of view is enforced by law.

I don’t object to anyone seeking to use the political process to enforce his or her particular point of view in this way.  In our system, everybody gets a voice, and everybody gets a vote.  We each get to make our case in the public square, and may the best idea win.  Because we each can vote, no one can inflict the majority with his point of view (unless, of course, he’s a judge).

What is disturbing in Wattleton’s article is her implication she is neutral, unbiased, and tolerant, when she is not.  She is entitled to her point of view, but she’s not neutral.  The only place of true neutrality is silence.  Speak up, give your opinion, contend for your view, and you forfeit your claim to neutrality.

As a case in point, in May, 1994, Congress passed a law making it a federal offense to block an abortion clinic.  Pamela Maraldo, then president of Planned Parenthood, commented to the press, “This law goes to show that no one can force their viewpoint on someone else.”  The self-contradiction of her statement is obvious:  All laws force someone’s viewpoint. 

Moral neutrality seems virtuous, but there’s no benefit, only danger.  In our culture we don’t stop at “sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as [we] do — and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves,” as Wattleton says, nor should we.  This leads to anarchy.  Instead we use moral reasoning, public advocacy, and legislation to encourage virtue and discourage dangerous or morally inappropriate behavior.

Faye Wattleton is offering an ethic which, although it sounds fair and tolerant, turns out to be the most bankrupt of all moral systems.  It’s called moral relativism.  It’s not even tolerant, as Ms. Wattleton makes clear when she condemns those who disagree with her.  It sounds persuasive, but it’s also misleading and fallacious.

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excerpted from
“The Myth of Moral Neutrality”
by Gregory Koukl