Proposing a 28th Amendment (UPDATED)

On Facebook earlier today, I wrote that I would like to propose the following amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law exempting its members or their staff from any other law, federal, state, or municipal. All such exemptions are hereby declared null and void.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but the more I think about the basic idea, the more I like it. I'm sure it could be written better, and no doubt would need to be in order to do what it's intended to do; I think, for instance, that it should probably say that "Congress shall make no law exempting its members or their staff in whole or in part from any other law." Whether it would be necessary to include sentences or sections applying to the other two branches of the federal government, I'm not sure, but I could see that. And more generally, I'm no constitutional-law scholar, so I expect there are probably other issues with my draft amendment. But I think the basic principle is sound.

More than that, I think this is important. I think Congress' habit of exempting itself from the laws it passes, seen most recently with ObamaPelosiCare (if this is such a wonderful thing, why don't they want to live under it?), is profoundly undemocratic, and utterly opposed to the spirit of the Constitution which our representatives are sworn to uphold. I think correcting this absolutely rises to the level of a proper constitutional concern.

The biggest thing that I believe justifies addressing this issue with a constitutional amendment, though, is that Congress will never voluntarily restrain itself. Indeed, it would be impossible to get this amendment to the states for ratification by the normal process, because Congress would never pass it; they'd never admit they were deliberately scuttling it, but that's exactly what they'd do—and it would be a completely bipartisan effort, make no mistake about it. If we the people want this added to the Constitution, we'll have to do it by the other process specified in Article V: two-thirds of our state legislatures will have to request that Congress call a national constitutional convention to propose this amendment to the states. (Should a serious effort be made to do so, Congress might capitulate and pass the amendment to prevent a full-out constitutional convention, but that would be fine, too.)

Trying to amend the Constitution is no small thing under any circumstances. Trying to do so as a grassroots effort would be to attempt a very great mountain indeed. But I think it's worth doing, and I'm going to start talking to people, and writing about this wherever I can, to see if we can make this happen. I believe this is an important issue, and would be a change for the better for our nation; I believe it's worth the trouble.

Thoughts?

Update: I've had someone pass on to me another version of the same idea:

Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.

In some respects, I think that wording is better; the kicker, I think, is that any such amendment should make clear that not only is Congress forbidden in future from exempting itself from the laws it passes, but that all such provisions currently on the books are no longer operative, and thus that going forward, all the laws of the land apply to them, even those which previously did not.

A lyrical reaction to Sunday's vote

I have yet to find anything that better expresses my reaction to the passage of ObamaPelosiCare, and to the whole process leading up to it, than this. (Click on the title to see the video, which is the best part; courtesy of EMI, embedding is disabled.)

Here it Goes Again

It could be ten, but then again, I can't remember
Half an hour since a quarter to four.
Throw on your clothes, the second side of Surfer Rosa,
And you leave me with my jaw on the floor.

Just when you think that you're in control,
Just when you think that you've got a hold,
Just when you get on a roll,
Here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again.
Oh, here it goes again.
I should have known, should have known, should have known again,
But here it goes again.
Oh, here it goes again.

It starts out easy, something simple, something sleazy,
Something inching past the edge of reserve.
Now through the lines of the cheap venetian blinds
Your car is pulling off of the curb.

Chorus

I guess there's got to be a break in the monotony,
But *****, when it rains how it pours.
Throw on your clothes, the second side of Surfer Rosa,
And you leave me, yeah, you leave me.

Chorus

Words and music: Damien Kulash Jr.
© 2005 OK Go Publishing
From the album Oh No, by OK Go

Put not your trust in princes

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the Lord!

—Psalm 146 (ESV)

The proof of the pudding

There are many on both sides of the political divide who believe that the passage of ObamaPelosiCare is basically final, pointing to other great entitlement programs of the past such as Social Security and Medicare. They could very well be right; it's very hard to get rid of government bureaucracies once founded, as they have a way of creating their own constituencies. I remember Republicans campaigning on abolishing the Departments of Energy and Education; once they had the chance, they never even tried to follow through.

And yet . . . the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the health care "reform" package was sold on the promise that it would improve health care and reduce health care costs. Our president went around declaring that once the bill was passed, Americans would find out that we actually like it after all. Therefore, it seems to me that if it fails to deliver on those promises, there will be a sufficient political constituency to repeal this law (if one can refer to anything so bloated by a term which suggests organization and coherence).

As such, I'm guessing that if Robert Samuelson is right to declare that "Obama's proposal is the illusion of 'reform,' not the real thing," it won't last long. If I'm wrong and it improves our health care system, then the public will accept the significant new government intrusion into our privacy and autonomy, and it will stick around. This situation has at least this potential merit: ideas will be judged by their consequences. That, if nothing else, is as it should be.

Uncharted waters

I think Greg Sargent captured the significance of yesterday's big vote better than anyone I've yet read:

Last night’s big health reform victory made history in many ways, but in hard political terms perhaps the key one is this: This is the first landmark piece of reform that passed over the unanimous opposition of one major party.

Both Social Security and Medicare had bipartisan support. While they were both the achievements of Democratic presidents, there isn’t a clear sense in the public mind that it was entirely the work of one party over the implacable opposition of the other one.

Now an achievement of equal magnitude—health care reform, which will dramatically reshape a vital aspect of American life—is about to pass into law as the work of one party and one party alone. The other party emerges from this battle defined entirely by its unanimous opposition to it.

This could have more dramatic repercussions than any of us know right now, perhaps helping define the differences between the two parties for years, in a way that no other major political battle has.

Republicans say—publicly—that this will play in their favor, and claim the public will reward them for showing the fortitude to stand firm against a far-reaching expansion of government into a deeply personal aspect of our lives. Democrats counter that Americans will realize that the dreaded government takeover warned against by reform foes is a caricature—and that once they do, it will reinvigorate the pact between government and the American people.

All this is to say that the real argument underlying this fight—this chapter in the larger ideological showdown over the proper role of government in our lives, an argument that has taken mutiple forms throughout our history—is only beginning. There will now be an actual law that frames and defines this debate. And the fact that each party placed all its chips on competing visions dramatically ups the stakes, with untold consequences to come—not just for the parties, but for the prospects of future far-reaching legislative initiatives.

The one wrinkle he doesn't catch is the one Jay Cost highlights:

Harold Lasswell defined politics as who gets what, when, and how. By this metric, ObamaCare is bad politics for the foreseeable future. Like any major piece of legislation, this bill assigns winners and losers. The winners will be those who today are uninsured, but who will (eventually) acquire insurance. But there will not be a major reduction in the uninsured until 2014. So, the actual winners are going to be pretty few in number for some time.

Meanwhile, the losers begin to feel the effects immediately. Between now and the next presidential election, ObamaCare is going to pay out virtually zero dollars in benefits, but it will take billions out of Medicare. This is bad for seniors. They have an incentive to oppose portions of this bill (while supporting others, like the closing of the "Doughnut Hole," which Republicans will never repeal). While the Democrats will claim that this reduction in benefits will have no effect on the quality of their care, CBO is much less certain . . .

After decades of developing a reputation for defending the interests of senior citizens, the Democrats have put it in serious jeopardy with this legislation. And they've done so right at the moment when demographic shifts are making the senior population more powerful than ever.

How will it all play out? Only time will tell.

The parent-teacher dynamic, Gen-X style

I'd never heard of the site Edutopia before today, but one of my Facebook friends posted a link to an interesting piece: "A Teacher's Guide to Generation X Parents." It's ostensibly addressed to teachers (as you can see from the title), but it feels more like a piece of self-analysis as the author reflects on her own experience. The key to the article, I think, is this:

If you want to know what's unhealed from your own childhood, have children. Key to decoding our parental behavior is understanding that we are, albeit often unconsciously, doing for our children what no one did for us.

I don't disagree with that, but I'm still mulling the piece as a whole; the comments are quite interesting as well. If you're a parent or a teacher, check it out—I don't know if you'll agree, but it will give you something to think about.

Run your own TV ad

Check this out—Google strikes again:

Interesting to think about running TV ads for our little congregation . . .

The witness of David Livingstone

Today is the 197th anniversary of the birth of Dr. David Livingstone, the great medical missionary and missionary explorer to Africa. Though he's far less well remembered in the West than was once the case, he was a man who did great work for God and, I think it's fair to say, brought real blessing to the peoples of southern Africa. His Wikipedia entry sums up his legacy thus:

He had made geographical discoveries for European knowledge. He inspired abolitionists of the slave trade, explorers and missionaries. He opened up Central Africa to missionaries who initiated the education and health care for Africans, and trade by the African Lakes Company. He was held in some esteem by many African chiefs and local people and his name facilitated relations between them and the British.

Partly as a result, within fifty years of his death, colonial rule was established in Africa and white settlement was encouraged to extend further into the interior.

On the other hand, within a further fifty years after that, two other aspects of his legacy paradoxically helped end the colonial era in Africa without excessive bloodshed. Livingstone was part of an evangelical and nonconformist movement in Britain which during the 19th century changed the national mindset from the notion of a divine right to rule 'lesser races', to ethical ideas in foreign policy which, with other factors, contributed to the end of the British Empire. Secondly, Africans educated in mission schools founded by people inspired by Livingstone were at the forefront of national independence movements in central, eastern and southern Africa.

As it goes on to note, his life in Africa took a real toll on his family, which he regretted; he should not be idealized any more than any other human being. And yet, he is remembered and honored across southern Africa because of the work he did and the witness he bore for the gospel. And while he also endured considerable suffering and danger over the course of his life, he kept those things in gospel perspective:

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

While we might do things somewhat differently than he did, we would do well to learn from his example.

HT: John Piper

Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences

We human beings have the tendency to forget that we exist within systems of relationships, which are themselves part of larger systems, and that anything we do causes ripple effects. The consequence of this is that we tend to assume that we can change this one thing over here without changing all the other parts of our lives, because everyone else’s behavior will remain the same. Life doesn’t work that way, but we never seem to remember that. This is, I think, the biggest single reason for the Law of Unintended Consequences (which states, in its simplest form, that whatever you do will always produce consequences which you neither intended nor foresaw; Murphy’s codicil to that is that those consequences will usually be negative): we fail to consider that other people will adjust to the changes we make, and thus don't stop to think about how they are likely to do so.

This is, of course, true on a national and global scale as well as on a personal and local one; and we’ve just gotten a pretty big red flag regarding the possible unintended consequences if ObamaPelosiCare passes. To wit, a survey taken by a leading medical search and consulting firm and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine found this:

The poll finds 46.3% of primary care physicians (family medicine and internal medicine) feel that the passing of a public option will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.

Doctors also seem to understand the impact that will have as 72% of physicians feel that a public option would have a negative impact on physician supply, with 45% feeling it will “decline or worsen dramatically” and 27% predicting it will “decline or worsen somewhat.”

Why would they feel this way? Consider:

62.7% of physicians feel that health reform is needed but should be implemented in a more targeted, gradual way, as opposed to the sweeping overhaul that is in legislation.

The respected medical journal also found 41% of physicians feel that income and practice revenue will “decline or worsen dramatically” and 30% feel income will “decline or worsen somewhat” with a public option.

Just 28.7 percent of doctors support the pro-abortion health care bill pending in the House

The assumption tends to be that if doctors and others in health care don’t like the changes the government wants to make, they can just lump it; but that fails to take into account that they do in fact have another option: they can stop seeing patients. Or, alternatively, they can stop seeing some patients (as many doctors and hospitals already restrict the number of Medicare patients they’ll take on), or see them on a different basis.

If this bill passes, will it really mean that nearly half of our primary-care physicians will leave practice? I’m sure it won’t; but will it mean that some leave, and some work fewer hours, and some retire early, and that in general, the availability of doctors drops? For my part, I saw enough “reduced activity days” (read: one-day strikes) by doctors while we were in Canada that I have no doubt it will. How is that going to improve health care?

Proponents of socializing our medical system need to take this very seriously. As the managing partner of the firm that conducted the survey wrote,

Many physicians feel that they cannot continue to practice if patient loads increase while pay decreases. The overwhelming prediction from physicians is that health reform, if implemented inappropriately, could create a detrimental combination of circumstances, and result in an environment in which it is not possible for most physicians to continue practicing medicine.

Health-care reform and increasing government control of medicine may be the final straw that causes the physician workforce to break down.

Darth Vader and the ratchet effect

Doctor Zero over at Hot Air has done a brilliant job of capturing the essential falsity of government programs:

Even discounting the sewer system of underhanded deals and bribes needed to push ObamaCare through Congress, distorting it beyond any semblance of a carefully-designed plan, it’s foolish to accept it as a “solution” to health care “problems.” No government program is a solution to anything. I’m not referring to their inefficiency or cost. I’m talking about their very nature.

A government program is not a carefully-designed system, or even an enduring commitment. It is a promise. Systems require discipline. For example, the operation of an aircraft carrier is a very complex system, which relies upon many individuals to perform carefully-defined duties. Failure to perform these duties results in punishment or dismissal. All of the crew members understand this, so the system is reliable. When the captain orders a fighter to launch, he knows the deck crew and pilot will quickly obey. The crew and pilot, in turn, know that the captain would not order a launch for no good reason. Everything happens with speed, efficiency, and precision, because the system is illuminated by trust.

Government social programs don’t work that way. They can’t. Today’s Congress cannot bind future sessions with discipline. They can only saddle their successors with obligations. The national debt has grown to staggering proportions because debt is the only thing each new Administration and Congress inherit from those who went before.

When Barack Obama tries to convince you to accept a government takeover of the health-care industry, he is making a promise he won’t be around to keep. ObamaCare’s job-killing taxes are front-loaded, but in order to fool the Congressional Budget Office into giving it a respectable deficit score, its benefits are delayed for years. Even if Obama wins re-election, he would complete his second term long before the program was completely phased in . . . and no external authority exists to compel either Obama, or his successors, to honor the promises he’s been making. . . .

It would also be foolish to place such faith in Republicans, or anyone else. Today’s Democrats are not unique in their corruption, a cancer that can be driven into remission with electoral chemotherapy in 2010 and 2012. Massive government breeds massive corruption through its very nature—it is the predictable behavior of people who are no less greedy, ambitious, or deceitful that the most rapacious robber baron. They hide their avarice behind masks of finely chiseled sanctimony, but as the final maneuvers toward the passage of ObamaCare illustrate, they’re just as quick to bend rules and perpetrate fraud as any white-collar criminal.

It would be a horrible mistake to accept a deal with the creators of history’s most staggering natonal debt, based on assurances they will place your interests ahead of theirs, for decades to come. As Darth Vader memorably explained to Lando Calrissian, the State can always alter the terms of the deal, and your only recourse will be praying they don’t alter it any further.

Government is Darth Vader, and we’re Lando. Read the whole thing—it’s unmatched.

The problem with Congress, from the horse's mouth

Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA): "If you don't tie our hands, we will keep stealing." It's astonishing to hear a member of Congress actually admit that.

The gospel of the rainbow

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again
become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

—Genesis 9:12-15 (ESV)

Yes, it’s the rainbow to which God is referring, but there’s more going on here than that; the rainbow is being used symbolically in a very interesting way. The bow, of course, was a major weapon for hunting; equally of course, it was a major weapon of war, the best way for human beings to kill either animals or each other at a distance. A drawn bow was a sign of hostility; in the ancient Near East, among Israel’s neighbors, stars in the shape of a bow would have been seen as a sign of the hostility of the gods. But here, God has hung his bow in the heavens—pointing up. It isn’t pointing down at the earth to strike, it’s pointing up, away from the earth. Instead of a sign of war and hostility, it’s a sign of peace.

And it’s one other thing, though of course the early readers of Genesis couldn’t know it. God had aimed his wrath against sin at the earth, striking it with the flood; now he would take that wrath and reverse it, aiming it up—at himself, at his own heart. Tim Keller argues, and I think he’s right, that what we’re seeing here is a prefiguring and a foreshadowing of the work of Christ: the rainbow isn’t just a sign of God’s promise that he will never again deal with human sin by flooding the world, it’s an indication of how he will deal with it, by taking all its pain and penalty on himself. God makes this covenant with Noah, he promises never to send another flood, because he already knows that his final victory over sin is going to come a very different way. He knows that while punishing us for our sin—or allowing the consequences of our sin to fall on us, which is often enough the same thing—is frequently necessary, all the punishment in the world will only produce a more cautious and circumspect sinner; it will never make a saint, and what God wants is for us to be saints. To accomplish that, he needs to show us grace, so that we can respond not with fear and the desire to avoid punishment but with love and gratitude and joy.

Thus we have the gospel of the rainbow, which gives the lie to the idea that the God of the Old Testament is somehow different from God as we see him revealed in Jesus. Yes, law is necessary; it’s necessary to show us, so clearly that we cannot avoid the truth, that God’s standards of holiness are too high for us to meet, so that we understand our desperate crying need for grace. Yes, punishment for sin is necessary, for many reasons; as rough as this world can be sometimes, it would be far worse if the evil that we do were never punished. But these things aren’t what God is on about, even in the Old Testament. He doesn’t want to terrify us into obeying him; he wants, rather, to love us into trusting him so that we obey him because we trust him, and love him, and know he loves us. That’s why his ultimate answer to more sin wasn’t more floods, more natural disasters, more judgment; his ultimate answer was the cross.

(Excerpted from “The Covenant of the Rainbow”)

The heroes of old

One thing you’ll find, if you spend a lot of time reading the literature of the ancient world, is that a lot of that literature focuses on stories of giant heroes, men who were incredible warriors and leaders because they were simply more gifted than the normal run of humanity—especially physically, as they were usually tall, powerful, and athletic. Don’t think Shaq, think a guy who could bench-press Shaq and then dunk him for good measure. The Babylonians had the story of Gilgamesh. The Irish sang of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cúchulainn. The British gave the world the epic of Beowulf, who killed the monster Grendel in single combat. And of course, the Greeks told tale after tale of demigods and other heroes, from brutal Hercules to crafty Odysseus, as well as the legend of the great city of Atlantis, lost beneath the waves. That’s just a few examples—there are plenty of others.

Now, your professional academic skeptics will tell you that these are all myths, and the first thing they’ll mean by that is “complete inventions”; but I’m not so sure. I won’t say that I believe a one of these stories happened exactly as we have them, but in my experience, stories don’t come from nothing, either; and the fact that we find these sorts of stories in so many different human societies suggests to me that there’s a kernel of memory lurking there in the back of the mind, that then works its way out in stories that are particular to each society and culture.

One of the things that makes me think so is that the Bible, too, knows of the existence of these heroes of old, these men of renown—but as is so often the case, it has a rather more skeptical take on them than the rest of the world. Part of this is that those heroes of old were such violent people as a whole; for all the complaints about all the wars in the Old Testament and all the times God commands the Israelites to utterly defeat another nation in judgment for their idolatry, the Bible nowhere celebrates war the way most ancient texts do. It has no long passages offering lovingly-detailed descriptions of battle, and it never glorifies warriors for their feats of arms. War is certainly presented as a necessity in various places in the Old Testament, but there is no trace of the theme common in the ancient world that the purpose of life was to win glory and the way to do so was through valor in combat. That’s a big, big difference between the Scriptures and, say, the Tain, the account of Cúchulainn and the great Ulster cattle raid.

(Adapted from “The Days of Noah”)

I have to agree with David Brooks

which doesn’t happen all that often anymore; but he’s really sounding like he’s been mugged by reality when it comes to the whole health care debate:

Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass”—a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it. . . .

Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane? . . .

Yes, my own view may be distorted by the fact that I’m disappointed in the health care bill. But at least I violently opposed the nuclear option when the Republicans tried it a few years ago. I don’t think it is mere partisanship that makes me believe that representatives should have the guts to actually vote for the legislation they want to become law.

Either this whole city has gone insane or I have or both. But I’m out here on the ledge and I’m not coming in the window. In my view this is no longer about health care. It’s just Democrats wanting to pass a bill, any bill, and shredding anything they have to in order to get it done. It’s about taking every sin the Republicans committed when they were busy being corrupted by power and matching it with interest.

That last sentence is the key, I think. The Republican Party doesn’t have clean hands on this, though they’ve yet to do anything that took quite as much gall as what the Democrats are doing here; the GOP abandoned its principles and supporters both for the siren song of the pleasures of power, and they quite rightly got kicked to the curb by the voting public for it. They deserved the losses they took, and if the political pendulum swing that looks like it’s coming in November in fact materializes, it will happen despite the fact that the GOP, quite frankly, still doesn’t deserve it.

That said, whatever the Republican Party might be guilty of, the Republican base still has the right to be heard from, and we are not happy with what the Democrats are doing; and who else ise going to represent us than Republican politicians? Joe Conason can ding Republicans all he wants for hypocrisy in their newfound concern for proper process, and I won’t defend them—but wrong is no less wrong because it’s pointed out by a hypocrite. Fundamentally, “you do it too” isn’t an argument (except for electing people like Sarah Palin who are outsiders to the Washington mindset). Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) can insist until he’s blue in the face that Americans don’t care about process, but he’s wrong; and quite frankly, to the extent that he’s right, we as Americans need to change that. Something I learned from math class and relearned from studying baseball is that good process is important, because doing things the right way is a better predictor of good future results than good current results; until we get the political process right in this country, we’re going to keep on fouling ourselves up.

Copyright, corporate shortsightedness, and the free market

I have to admit, I’d never heard of the group OK Go until a month or two ago when my brother-in-law played me the video for their song “This Too Shall Pass,” from the album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. I enjoyed it, but the group didn’t really stick in my consciousness until they released a second video for the same song, featuring a most remarkable Rube Goldberg machine:

At first, the most interesting question to me was, did they really shoot that in a single take? (Answer: yes, but it took them over sixty tries.) With that answered, I discovered that in truth, the most interesting question is this: why did they make a second video to the song when the first one (featuring the Notre Dame marching band) was perfectly fine? As Dylan Tweney wrote on the Wired website,

OK Go developed a reputation for making catchy, viral videos four years ago with the homemade video for “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing around on treadmills. The company ran afoul of music label EMI’s restrictive licensing rules, which required YouTube to disable embedding, cutting views to 1/10 of their previous level. Now, the new video is up—and it’s embeddable, so the band seems to have won this round with its label—and is already generating buzz on YouTube and on Twitter.

Actually, it’s not so much that OK Go won the round as it is that they cut ties with their label and went independent. As one commenter on another OK Go video (“We’re Sorry YouTube”) put it,

OK Go got into a huge fight with EMI and Capitol over how their viral videos were distributed. They wanted You Tube viewers to be able to watch the videos without worries about the labels coming down on people who posted. In the end, they ended up leaving EMI and Capitol and forming their own label. In fact, they were so mad that's why they created a second video for “This Too Shall Pass” with the Rube Goldberg machinery. This video is just their humorous way of dealing.

In the cheap political calculus that floats around, it’s usually assumed that because conservatives support big business, big business is politically conservative—which in economic terms means in favor of deregulation and the free market. In truth, though, this is a long way off the mark; big business is very much in favor of regulation, because regulation is the simplest way of squashing competition. It’s certainly easier than actually having to outcompete people. Thus the approach of big companies like EMI to something like YouTube is generally to try to regulate it by one means or another so as to maintain as much control as possible over how their material is used; they want to ensure that nothing happens that they don’t approve, and that they don’t miss any opportunity to make money.

Now, I don’t want to minimize the importance of intellectual property and intellectual property rights; it’s morally wrong when people who create things don’t profit from their creations as they should, and I’ll even grant that the companies which connect musicians and authors and other creative types to those who want to buy their creations should also make an appropriate profit for their work. But the approach EMI took here is extremely short-sighted, because it treats the economic process as a zero-sum game; thus it assumes that if someone is able to, say, watch an OK Go video someplace other than on YouTube (i.e., someplace that doesn’t have an ad for EMI up right next to the video), that represents a lost profit opportunity which can never be recovered. That simply isn’t true.

Rather, what OK Go understands and EMI (like many other corporations) doesn’t is that giving things away can often be the best way to make money. The best illustration of this I know of is the success of the Baen Free Library at Baen Books. Baen, founded by the late Jim Baen, isn’t a huge publishing company by any means, but it’s a significant one in the world of science fiction; and spurred on by Eric Flint, one of their authors, they opted years ago to start making a significant number of their titles available free online. As Flint explained at the time,

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. . . .

Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market—especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people—is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom. . . .

We expect this Baen Free Library to make us money by selling books.

How? As I said above, for the same reason that any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author. . . .

I don’t know any author, other than a few who are—to speak bluntly—cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer’s audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.

Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author—and it’s ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it’s the one form of promotion which people usually trust.

That being so, an author can hardly complain—since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author’s table. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. . . .

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the “gap” between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

Of course, some might be skeptical: is it really working? Well, about a year and a half after Flint launched the Library, he wrote an extended piece showing that the Library had actually boosted sales of the books Baen gave away—by quite a significant amount, actually.

The Library's track record shows clearly that the traditional “encryption/enforcement policy” which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties. . . .

Making one or a few titles of an author's writings available for free electronically in the Free Library seems to have no other impact, certainly over time, than to increase that author's general audience recognition-and thereby, indirectly if not directly, the sales of his or her books.

I believe it also—I leave it up to each individual to weigh this out for themselves—places such authors on what you might call the side of the angels in this dispute. For me, at least, this side of the matter is even more important than the practical side. It grates me to see the way powerful corporate interests have been steadily twisting the copyright laws and encroaching on personal liberties in order to shore up their profit margins-all the more so when their profit problems are a result of their own stupidity and short-sighted greed in the first place.

I will leave you all with one final anecdote. Napster, of course, is held up as the ultimate “villain” with regard to the so-called problem of online piracy. The letters I received as Librarian were addressed to the issue of books, not music. Yet I was struck by how often—perhaps in a hundred letters—the writers would mention their own experience with Napster. And, in every instance, stated that their purchases of CDs increased as a result of Napster—for the good and simple reason that because Napster enabled them to sample musicians, they bought music they would not otherwise have been tempted to buy because CDs are too expensive to experiment with.

Not enough? Well, check out what Janis Ian had to say. Or consider a personal anecdote: a few days ago, Ray Ortlund put up a blog post with a video of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s song “Pride of Man.” An embedded video, note. I’d never heard of the group before, and neither had Sara; we now own a copy of their “Best of” album, and I think there’s pretty good odds we’ll buy more before all is said and done. If the record labels had their way (or if, at any rate, they all operated like EMI), that sale would never have happened.

Yes, copyright is important. Yes, intellectual property is important. The laborer is worthy of his hire, after all. But using copyright as a club, seeking ever greater regulation of people’s behavior out of fear of what they might do, isn’t just philosophically problematic—it’s unprofitable, because it has a dampening effect and a chilling effect on the very market on which companies depend. A receding tide lowers all boats, but a rising tide lifts them. Just ask Eric Flint.

On the real St. Patrick

I posted this last year, but it deserves a repost, too; there's a lot we don't know about St. Patrick, but what we do know is very impressive—he was truly a great and a godly man. The American Spectator website ran two pieces last year that are well worth your time, a shorter one by James M. Thunder and a more detailed piece by G. Tracy Mehan III called "The Solitude of St. Patrick." I commend both to your reading, especially if you aren't familiar with the true life and accomplishments of this towering evangelist-bishop of the early church; if you are, they won't be news to you, but you ought to read them anyway, because St. Patrick is one of those people who's always worth spending time with. And then go and read his Confession, which stands to this day, over 1500 years later, as one of the greatest Christian books ever written. Here is deep wisdom, and a great love for God; here is a true saint, and a model for the church.

Song for St. Patrick's Day

According to the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, in New York City, Lenten disciplines are suspended by special dispensation on St. Patrick's Day; so I thought I'd repost this wonderful prayer in honor of that great (and much-misappreciated) saint. He probably didn't write the caim (encircling prayer) that's often called "St. Patrick's Breastplate," but I don't know that it matters much—I expect he would have approved. This is the Kuno Meyer translation, which has its own title.

The Deer's Cry

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of the Cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of the resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In prediction of prophets,
In preaching of apostles,
In faith of confessors,
In innocence of holy virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak to me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in a multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts body and soul.

Christ to shield me today
Against poisoning, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding
So there come to me abundance of reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye of everyone who sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.

The responsibility of our representatives

There was a remarkable article in The New Republic two weeks ago by William Galston with the revealing title, “The Public Isn’t Enthused About Health Care Reform. So What?” Galston opens with this:

“With the passage of time,” former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes today, “President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy, including sending 30,000 additional troops to Iraq when most Americans were bone-weary of the war, will be seen as one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” Wehner may turn out to be right. And his argument has broader implications that deserve our attention.

Wehner tacitly defines political courage as the willingness to go against public opinion in pursuit of what a leader believes to be the public interest. Fair enough. And unless one believes—against all evidence—that democracies can do without courage, so defined, it follows that there’s nothing necessarily undemocratic about defying public opinion when the stakes are high. After all, the people will soon have the opportunity to pass judgment on the leader’s decision. And they will be able to judge that decision, not by the claims of its supporters or detractors, but by its results.

Now, it might surprise some folks that in large part, I agree with Galston here. He cites Alexander Hamilton in support of his position; I would go back further, to one of the inspirations of the modern conservative tradition, Edmund Burke (emphasis mine):

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Properly understood, we elect officials to represent us, not to be our puppets. What they owe us is, first, an honest description of their character and beliefs, so that we can vote for them with an accurate understanding of how they would represent us; and second, to represent us with integrity in a manner consistent with that description. As such, there is no question that Barack Obama, for instance, ought to seek the passage of what he honestly believes to be the best laws possible, whether they are popular or not. Public unpopularity is not in and of itself an argument against any law, initiative, or executive action.

That said, I think Galston goes too far when he writes,

Note that to accept this argument, as I do, is to deny that President Obama and the Democrats are acting high-handedly—let alone anti-democratically—in moving forward with comprehensive health insurance reform. They genuinely believe that the public interest demands it—and that the people themselves will eventually agree. And they know that the people will have the last word.

This paragraph fails for two reasons. In the first place, Galston is comparing a legislative effort by President Obama and the Hill Democrats with an executive decision made by George W. Bush—which in this context is comparing apples and dragons. Had President Bush forced a declaration of war against Iraq through Congress in the face of rising majority opposition, that would be a direct parallel—and the Left would without question have called such action “high-handed,” “anti-democratic,” and a whole host of other things that would have been far less complementary. And they would have been right. What President Bush actually did was to make a decision which was unilaterally his sole responsibility to make as the ultimate commander of our nation’s military forces; which is a very different thing.

In the second place, the high-handed and anti-democratic nature of the actions of the Democratic Party leadership does not rest in the fact that they are proposing policies which are currently unpopular. If they believe those policies to be best, they are honor-bound to do so. Where it rests is in their unwillingness to allow the democratic process to work to their detriment. Were they to follow the rules, it seems clear that at this point, they would lose—but rather than accept that fact, and either compromise with more moderate folks in Congress (to produce a bill that could draw sufficient support) or lose honorably and move on, they have resorted to arm-twisting and attempts to subvert the process. True, they are far from the first to do either; but the fact that wrong has been done before doesn’t make it right.

To understand the key point here, we must I think return to Burke:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

If this is true (and I believe it clearly is), then it is at least as true that our representatives betray us if they sacrifice their judgment to anyone else’s opinion either, and especially if they do so for personal or political gain; and this is exactly what President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are trying to push a number of House Democrats to do. Do they have the right to push an unpopular agenda? Yes, and the responsibility to do so, if they believe it best—but only within limits. They are exceeding those limits in a manner which is, yes, high-handed and anti-democratic, even if it is also courageous, and there’s nothing wrong with calling them on it.

The reconciliation farce

If you listen to the news, you probably know that both the House and the Senate have passed health care bills; that the two bills differ; that the Senate Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority; and that rather than allowing even the slightest bit of Republican input to revise the bill—just enough to pick up one Republican vote—the administration and the Democratic leadership on the Hill have opted to use the budget reconciliation process to solve the problem. There's been a fair bit of handwringing over that, but it’s what they’re ostensibly going to do.

“Ostensibly” being, I think, the key word, because I don’t believe it’s ever going to happen, even if the House passes the Senate bill (which is far from assured at this point). Jeffrey Anderson laid out the reasons why two weeks ago, though most people don't seem to have caught on:

Senators want nothing to do with “reconciliation”—whether politically or for what it would do to their chamber—and they already like their own bill (which the House would then already have passed) just fine. The President would then already have gotten a bill through both chambers, and while House members would complain powerlessly, he would dip his pen in the ink and visualize himself in the history books. He might even try to score a few extra political points by saying, As you know, we intended to use the reconciliation process to make a few small changes to the Senate bill. While I know that there was some disagreement from some people, I think that that process would have been entirely appropriate to pursue. But some people are uncomfortable with it, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. It’s important to remember that our democratic institutions deserve the benefit of the doubt. Also, the American people understandably think that we’ve been focused on health care long enough. So that’s why I am making the decision not to pursue “reconciliation.” Instead, I am moving on to a jobs bill. . . .

House members would be left holding the bag. Target squarely on their chests, they would now get to face their fuming constituents after having passed a $2.5 trillion bill that would allow public funding of abortion, would send $100 million to Nebraska, $300 million to Louisiana, $100 million to Connecticut, would exempt South Florida’s Medicare Advantage enrollees from annual $2,100 cuts in Medicare Advantage benefits, would raise taxes, raise deficits, raise health costs, empower Washington, reduce liberty, politicize medicine, and jeopardize the quality of health care. Most of all, they would feel the citizenry’s wrath for having voted to pass a bill that only 25 percent of Americans support.

Anderson’s argument was only strengthened when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that not only must the House pass the Senate bill as is before reconciliation could be used to amend it, the President must sign it into law. That sounds more than a little fishy to me, but there it is: if the House passes the Senate bill, it will have to become law before anything can be done to change it. Figure the odds, at that point, that either the President or the Senate lifts a finger to do so. Why should they? The Senate Democrats, as noted, are content with their bill, the President will be content to have signed sweeping health care legislation, and both will want to put the whole long, bruising slog behind them; why reopen the battle unnecessarily to consider making changes Senate Democrats won’t vote for anyway?

For all the talk about trust, there’s no doubt in my mind: if the House passes the Senate bill, that’s the end of it. If House Democrats get hung out to dry for it, as far as the Senate and the White House are concerned, that’s just the price of victory.

Not dead yet

Sorry I’ve been AWOL—it’s been a combination of being very busy, my computer acting up, and focusing my attention on a couple longer pieces which still aren’t finished. More will be coming shortly, I promise.

Today is definitely a tortoise-and-hare day

The way today is going, that particular combination was just too perfect for words.

The most critical health care reform

even ahead of tort reform, I think, is the simplest: cost transparency. As Barbara Kiviat writes,

A big part of the reason consumer goods are so cheap in the U.S. is because people always know what they're paying. As a consequence, consumers can push prices lower by voting with their feet. If CVS tries to sell me a toothbrush for $4 when the one at Rite Aid goes for $3, I will shop at Rite Aid and CVS will learn its lesson. This dynamic almost entirely accounts for the success of Wal-Mart. Yes, Wal-Mart has more efficient (and therefore cheaper) distribution than almost any other company on Earth, but the whole reason Wal-Mart is going for cheap in the first place is because there are hundreds of millions of Americans who demand it—a demand that is listened to because people are able to make well-informed decisions about when to walk away.

Lately I've been wondering if we might not be wise to unleash such price-crazed consumerism on the field of health care. The great health care debate has two prongs. I don't know the best way to expand coverage to the uninsured. But I do have an idea about how to drive down the eye-popping cost of medical treatment: price tags. . . .

I have long been fairly quiet about health-care policy because I feel I don't know enough about the intricacies of the debate. But one thing I do know about is the price-setting power of the enlightened consumer. I know about the effects of price transparency, and I know about what happens when you give Americans the tools to hunt for deals and value. Think about Wal-Mart. Think about going on Expedia to comparison shop airline tickets. Think about the first question you ask when you are considering buying a particular house.

Now think about health care.

Read the whole thing—it's great.

Climate and the American media

The theory of anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming is in serious trouble, but you wouldn’t know it if you get your news from the big U.S. outlets. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a list of climate stories broken by the British media that have been ignored by the American media. His list is an impressive one, and it doesn’t even include the Daily Mail story challenging the credibility of Dr. Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The evidence mounting against AGW—and against the integrity and credibility of the folks pushing it—has grown to such an extent that even Canada’s Grey Lady, the Globe and Mail, felt compelled to take note of it; but the New York Times? Fuhgeddabouddit. When your motto is All the News that’s Fit to Print, and “fit to print” means that which fits your agenda, then clearly, there’s no reason to take notice of such inconvenient stories. “When the facts and the politics conflict, sir, print the politics.”