Harold Kildow writes: In case you haven't heard, the global warming/carbon tax/21st century energy/giant leap forward cap and tax bill passed the House of Reprehensibles tonight, otherwise known as the Waxman Markey bill. If implemented, it will destroy this country's economy.

Chances are slim that it will pass the Senate, but it is a non-zero probability, as the eggheads say. That means we are still very much in danger from the misdirected thinking, false science, ill will, and libido dominande (lust for power) of members of our own government. The Democrats, led by the One, intend to reduce this nation to the level of just one of 191 nations on earth. No manifest Destiny, no American Exceptionalism, and no more status as lone super power. We are on the way to becoming the most populous banana republic on earth, with corruption and demagoguery second to none.

Give Barack and the Nancy Boys that much; they are bringing to their anti-Americanism the American predilection for swinging for the fences, going all-out. If you are shooting for a corrupt regime, pull out all the stops! More is never enough! If some is good, more is better! Like some kind of crazed craps player, they are trying to run the table, jamming into law legislation no one has read. How many time bombs do you think might be hidden in a 1200 page bill that no one has read? Is this outrageous to you?

How does any of this line up with our constitution, let alone the natural rights philosophy that underpins it? This is tyranny and usurpation, and the direction should be clear to all by now. No good has ever accrued from having a government with this much power. Our constitution was the pathbreaking innovation that formed a turning point in history. Madison's sacred fire of liberty is being systematically smothered under the wet blankets of unconstitutional intrusions and outright power grabs like the energy bill just passed, the upcoming health care legislation, and the fait accompli of government control of the auto and finance industries.




Give a listen to the Heritage Foundation's analysis of this mess, along with Rush Limbaugh's commentary. And then call or write your Congressman.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham University) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

In an earlier post, "Life Under the Regime of Science," I shared this MasterCard "Priceless" ad to which Jonah Goldberg in The National Review drew my attention. It features a child instructing his father in how to shop in an environmentally responsible way. But the father is not asking for the advice. The cute child is presented as wiser than his young, unshaven, slightly goofy looking father who we are supposed to believe is clueless and careless. "Making dad a better man: priceless."



A reader in Ottawa, Canada, alerts us to a similar ad that was aired in our neighboring country to the north where individual liberty is viewed as a dangerous notion among those who think only politically pure thoughts.



Mr. Glennie shared these insights:

In Canada here, there are `public service announcements' that feature the `scientist' / TV host / environmental nut David Suzuki.

In this spot, Suzuki is seen sitting (in a treehouse, apparently in the middle of the night) with a group of children, who are letting him know how they are `reducing their carbon footprint.'

Then, one of the children whispers to Dear (Leader) David: `Jimmy's parents don't believe in conserving...'

Beyond the obvious question as to why a 70-year-old man would be in a treehouse at night with a group of children unrelated to him, it shows the totalitarian mindset behind present-day `environmentalism'.

After all, the lad isn't informing on "his own" parents, but those of someone else.

It is startling that neither Suzuki, the producers of the spot, nor yet the energy company that subsidizes the production cost, would have stopped to think about these things.

There is an interesting little detail they throw in. When one of the children addresses him respectfully as Dr. Suzuki, he interrupts and insists that she call him "David," and then the conversation continues. Why would Powerwise* take this extra step in undermining adult authority among children? (This "Call me David; Mr. Suzuki is my father" attitude is common enough as it is.)

*According to their website, powerWISE is funded by the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, Ontario Power Authority and local distribution companies.

This is a moving video and musical tribute to the Iranians who are protesting for their democratic rights in Tehran.



People don't invest this level of passion and bloodshed only to call it day and resign themselves to a sham democracy. With the right leadership, this uprising could bring significant change and introduce an enduring spirit of liberty that previously was dormant and unaware of its strength. Notice that the protests involve everyone from university students to middle aged women swinging handbags.

Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has released an analysis of the disputed (let's say it: "stolen") Iranian election poetically entitled, "Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election." Here is a summary of what they discovered:

• In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.

• If Ahmadinejad's victory was primarily caused by the increase in voter turnout, one would expect the data to show that the provinces where there was the greatest 'swing' in support towards Ahmadinejad would also be the provinces with the greatest increase in voter turnout. This is not the case.

• In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.

• In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces flies in the face of these trends.

Note: "Whilst it is possible for large numbers of voters to cast their ballots outside their home district (one of 366), the proportion of people who would have cast their votes outside their home province is much smaller, as the 30 provinces are too large for effective commuting across borders. In Yazd, for example, where turnout was above 100% at provincial level, there are no significant population centres near provincial boundaries."

CNN reports on it here.

The Iranian government could have engineered a squeeker, but not such a close one as to require a recount. However that would have called into question what they see as the obvious superiority of the theocracy as it stands. It should be loved by the people of the Islamic Republic, and so they could not stomach rigging any outcome other than one that clearly expressed that love. But, of course, given the obvious and widespread popular dissatisfaction with the government, their overstatement made the lie utterly transparent, the uprising inevitable, and the ferocity of the uprising deep and sustained.

The video is set to Pat Benatar's "Invincible," the theme song from the film, "The Legend of Billie Jean" (1985). Music and words by Simon Climie and Holly Knight. The song appears on "Seven the Hard Way" (1985) and "Best Shots" (1989), a compilation album, as well as the film's soundtrack. (I have not seen the film and I do not plan to see it.)

These are the lyrics

This bloody road remains a mystery
This sudden darkness fills the air
What are we waiting for?
Won't anybody help us?
What are we waiting for?

We can't afford to be innocent
Stand up and face the enemy
It's a do or die situation
We will be Invincible

This shattered dream you cannot justify
We're gonna scream until we're satisfied
What are we running for?
We've got the right to be angry
What are we running for?
When there's nowhere we can run to anymore

We can't afford to be innocent
Stand up and face the enemy
It's a do or die situation
We will be Invincible
And with the power of conviction
There is no sacrifice
It's a do or die situation
We will be Invincible

Won't anybody help us?
What are we running for?
When there's nowhere,
No where we can run to anymore

The song then repeats itself.

Perhaps thirty years after Komeini's Islamist Revolution history will repeat itself, but more constructively.

Marvin Olasky's* cover article in the recent World, "The Sixth Wind," responds to recent (gleeful) speculation at Newsweek that Christianity in America may be coming to the close of its 400 year history (Jon Meacham, "The End of Christian America," April 4, 2009).

Olasky sees Christianity not as dying but as catching its second wind. More precisely its sixth wind. The first was the pilgrim faith that met our shores in the earliest colonies. The second and third were the First and Second Great Awakenings (1730-55; 1790-1840). The fourth was the revivals emerging from the Civil War and transforming the cities in the late nineteenth century. The fifth he says came when "Billy Graham and others came to the fore amid threats of nuclear war." This is what I would call the Evangelical Awakening. Since the modernist controversy and the Scopes trial in the 1920s, Bible believing Christians had withdrawn. Under the leadership of Carl F.H. Henry (Christianity Today), Harold Ockenga (Fuller Seminary), and Billy Graham, Evangelicals re-emerged, re-engaged, and re-produced (both naturally and evangelistically). I am unaware that it had anything to do with nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, Olasky claims that American Christianity is now getting its "sixth wind."

Meacham cites a decline in religious identification among Americans, but this is simply a function of nominal Christians who were raised in the Eisenhower generation's "comfortable pew" of the old mainline churches finally conceding that, truth be told, they are actually atheists and agnostics. Those who were religious before and now more committedly religious. What Meacham has uncovered is actually a greater religious polarization in society.

The good news is that Christians will stand out more strikingly in Christlikeness. This is what Jon A. Shields found. He is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the author of The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton University Press, 2009). He confesses, "although my liberal Protestant upbringing initially made me feel out of place hanging out with conservative Christians, I found them disarming, gracious, and more misunderstood than I ever imagined."

John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief at The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the British news magazine's Washington bureau chief, have is co-authored God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin Press, 2009). Undistracted by the personal animosity that blinds some to the obvious, they recognize the social utility of Christian faith and the Christian churches. Christianity "helps suburbanites to form communities in the atomized world of the Sunbelt . . . ordinary people all over America to deal with the problems of alcoholism and divorce, wayward children and hopelessness . . . the hard-pressed inhabitants of the inner cities to deal with the chaos that surrounds them."

On a more personal and passionate level, however, Wooldridge objects to atheist dismissal of Christian faith, even though the does not profess the faith personally. "Christians are the people looking after the homeless, the drug-addicted. Where is the atheist homeless shelter? Atheists are only interested in themselves."

Wooldridge is not surprised that "God is back" and that accordingly, atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are in a publishing panic. In a World interview with the two Economist authors, he says, "The extraordinary thing about American religion is its capacity to reinvent itself and reassert itself."

Terry Eagleton is a distinguished English professor at the University of Lancaster in the UK. He has recently published Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009) and is scheduled to give the Gifford Lecture in March 2010 entitled "The God Debate."

"Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?" Eagleton's answer: Nothing else—not science, not reason, not liberalism, not economics—works. He concludes, "If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world."

Olasky also cites the return of literary critic A.N. Wilson to humble trusting in Christ.

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti. To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy.

Olasky then concludes eloquently and encouragingly.

Christianity's ride through 2,000 years, and in America for 400, has always been a roller coaster: up and down, slow and fast, sometimes sideways, always planned by God but unpredictable for man. The first time around a roller coaster is terrifying for children. They do not know that a power beyond them is in control. ...

The apostle Paul was not unduly impressed by temporary ascents and descents. His confidence did not depend on which emperor was in power or who the next emperor might be. He knew that a benevolent reign would allow more to hear the gospel, but a hard reign would create inspiring testimonies that would show how the gospel sustained believers amid pressure—so Christ's cause would win either way.

Paul from prison told the Philippians that "what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel." Paul told the Corinthians that "in all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy." What afflictions has the church in America faced that we should be grumpy pessimists?

*Full disclosure: Marvin Olasky is my boss (Provost) at The King's College in New York City. But, really, I could call his article fit only for composting and he wouldn't care.

Lou Pritchett is the renowned former VP at Proctor and Gamble and author of Stop Paddling and Start Rocking the Boat. Here is his open letter to the President. (Both Snopes and Urban Legends say it is authentic.)

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

Read Jonah Goldberg's nod of qualified approval here.

1) Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. "Iran would be risking U.S. attacks on its land-based military."


3) Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. "[D]oing so would risk direct U.S. retaliation against Iran"


5) Iran launches missile attacks on Israel. This would "provoke an even broader Israeli counterstrike, which at some point might well involve Israel's own nuclear capability."

Harold Kildow writes:

"It hath been taught us since the primal state, that he which is was wish'd until he were."

Shakespeare's axiom of popular susceptibility to demagoguery is fleshed out in Stanley Fish's NYT piece on Obama this morning, "Yes I Can." Stanley Fish is one who commands the sort of respect reserved for the likes of the serpent in the garden; towering intellect, competent in the dark arts of persuasion, and capable of making his auditors enjoy their hornswaggling at the hands of an expert sophist. (Fish is very great admirer of Milton's Satan, who he also greatly resembles.) Yet today he lays aside his sophist's hat and, worried lest the One give away the game like some prestidigitator whose trick is showing, gently admonishes Obama while demonstrating to the rest of us the sheer mastery of the upward gyre of demagogic, narcissistic self possession.

Last week I was driving home listening to President Obama’s speech on the General Motors bankruptcy, and I heard the full emergence of a note that had been sounded only occasionally in the two-plus years since the announcement of his candidacy. It was the note of imperial possession, the accents and cadences of a man supremely aware of his authority and more than comfortable with its exercise.

Imperial possession, indeed--and it looks like he intends to possess quite a bit more before he's done. Fish's analysis of the progression of Obama's use of the first person singular, which makes Bill Clinton seem a tongue-tied school boy by comparison, is instructive. Indulging in his own form of idolatry, Fish admiringly compares Obama to Don Corleone, who began a patriot and ended by striking the pose of a Roman emperor:

Obama is still idealistic and a patriot, but he is now also an emperor and his speech shows it.

That Fish shows no alarm at the implications of that sentence is telling in itself. Postmodernism is about power--unmasking its surreptitious manifestations in the oppressor class, while drawing its practitioners and acolytes like moths to a flame in their almost desperate willingness to do anything to get and hold power themselves. It is in this sense that Obama is the first postmodern president, although again Bill Clinton made a pretty good run at it. Thus, Fish is an admiring observer (and in time, with the rest of us, a servant) of the new emperor for whom egotism and narcissism are recommendations.

In the beginning, observes Fish, it was about "us". Obama began with sentences like "It’s humbling to see a crowd like this, but in my heart I know you didn’t come here just for me.” “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy”; “Let us be the generation that ends poverty”; “this campaign can’t only be about me; it must be about us.”

Fish ably shows the transformation as the campaign progressed:

When he wins the Iowa caucus on Jan. 3, 2008, the rhetoric alters as he imagines himself (perhaps for the first time) performing in the office he aspires to. “Let us” is replaced by “I’ll”: “I’ll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers.” “I’ll be a president who finally makes health care affordable.” “I’ll be a president who ends this war in Iraq.”
[...]
Everything alters in the inaugural address (Jan. 20, 2009). The promises are now made to an America that is asked only to stand by while they are fulfilled. “Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. “But know America” — or, in other words, “hear me” — “…they will be met.” And later, when he says, “We will build the roads and bridges… We will restore science to its rightful place… We will harness the sun and winds,” the “we” is now the royal we: just you watch, “All this we will do.”
[...]
By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we has flowered into the naked “I”: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.” “I called for action.” “I pushed for quick action.” “I have told each of my cabinet.” “I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.” “I refuse to let that happen.” “I will not spend a single penny.” “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.” “I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.” That last is particularly telling: it says, there’s going to be a second term, I’m already moving fast, and if you don’t want to be left in the dust, you’d better fall in line.
[...]

There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat...Accompanying the “I”’s are a bevy of “my”’s, which reach out to embrace the universe. The third time he says “my auto task force,” it sounds as if he were referring to a lap dog. Ditto the mention of Karen Mills, “my Small Business Administration” chief. When he thanks Canada and Germany for doing their part, it is as if those sovereign nations were doing him a personal favor to which he was entitled. When he invokes “my administration” you might think he was talking about some prized possession. (My daughter…my ducats.) It is always “I couldn’t in good conscience,” “I became convinced,” “I wanted to ensure,” “I instructed,” “I recognized,” “I want” (three times), “I’m calling on Congress.” At least he doesn’t say “my Congress,” although that is certainly implied.

Fish never indicates directly that there is anything problematic with any of this. His concern is that Obama not offend against taste, or perhaps against the canons of imperial dictatorship:

An occasional passive construction to soften the claim of agency would be a good idea (even though the grammar books warn against it). It’s one thing to be calling the tune; it’s another to proclaim it in every sentence.

So, a little advice from the old professor to the young would-be Caesar: it is better to be feared than loved, but dial back the "naked I" before you take the crown.

-- Harold Kildow (Ph.D. Fordham) is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

Here we go again. More apotheosis of Barack Obama. More elevation of the sitting President to divine status.

The New York Times, under the auspices of simply reporting on what's happening out there, gives us yet another spread of Obama celebration art ("Obama's Face (That's Him?) Rules the Web," May 30, 2009). (Of course, I am also publicizing these things in my own small way, but you know where I stand on the matter.) One of the paintings is utterly dreadful. Perhaps the title of the article recognizes that. "Team Player" is just trite. It depicts Obama in a D.C. basketball uniform wearing #1. Get it? Sure you do. There is also one that is quite good ("Looking Presidential" by Mimi Torchia Boothby) with his wedding ring figuring quite prominently on his pensively and prayerfully placed hand.

Then there is the man in the white suit. What does Ron Keas have in mind with "Fountain of Hope?" In the background is the White House in front of which is a fountain of white water, in front of which stands Barack Obama dressed entirely in white: suit and shirt, but no tie. My wife's first reaction was that he does not look like an American President. American Presidents don't wear white suits. As usual, she put her finger on the central disturbing point. He looks like a Central or South American dictator. Even facially, he looks like a thin Hugo Chavez. And of course, this glorification by art is what they do with their leaders in dictatorships.

The apotheosis is in the phrase "Fountain of Hope." God, according to the well-known hymn, is the "fount of every blessing." The image of a fountain or spring is that of an inexhaustible supply of blessing, in particular of water, the means of life, and thus figuratively of life itself. Psalm 36:9 says, "For with you (the Lord) is the fountain of life; in your light we see light."

I thought perhaps that the artist intended to criticize either the President or his followers with this painting. But, no. Ron Keas is just a terrible painter. See for yourself at keasart.com. He has a whole series of hagiographic paintings of the next re-founder of our republic. He also does Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.

Speaking of blighted civilization and the end of the world...

If you know anyone from Cleveland OH, you should pass this along.



Wasn't Dennis Kucinich the mayor of Cleveland?

This is where godless, evolutionary thinking gets you.

David Brooks, reflecting on the role of empathy in jurisprudence, and Nicholas Kristof, sharing research on why liberals and conservatives take the positions they do, both offer teachings from evolutionary psychology as thrillingly helpful advances in our self-understanding.

David Brooks, "The Empathy Issue," (New York Times, May 29, 2009).

Nicholas Kristof, "Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal," (New York Times, May 28, 2009).

Of course, if all our notions of good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful and vile, are simply the products of evolution, and are thus not true in themselves and as they present themselves, but are merely useful for the preservation of our species as a whole, then morally serious people are dupes and romantics, and the cruelly ambitious, megalomaniacal Machiavellian is the only sensible human being.

What Allan Bloom called "Nihilism with a happy ending" requires not looking at your nihilism too closely.

Harold Kildow adds:

David,
I've been amazed to watch as the influence of evolutionary psychology has seeped through the humanities and social sciences like effluent from a leaking sewer pipe through stacks of cardboard in a basement. There is now nothing that cannot be explained by way of survival value, especially now that we have the concept of group survival value, a transparent and illegitimate move around the problems of empathy, altruism, love, and self consciousness existing in creatures competing in the survival of the fittest sweepstakes. Humans are superior because we evolved superior characteristics, ergo, evolution is true. It is a circular argument, no? Affirming the antecedent? Oh, and this little bit: Darwinism good, social Darwinism not good. Why not?

Tell me if I'm wrong about the development here: evolution is posited as establish fact, based on 1) the analogy (illegitimate) of superior, hereditary traits within species, to transmogrification between species. White moths become black moths to survive, etc. 2), "Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny"--human fetuses appear to look like other species while gestating, and this proves humans developed historically from other species. 3) A drawerful of pieces/parts of fossilized bones give the barest outline of a suggestion of a penumbra emanating from a dream of Wallace and Darwin that all species have a common ancestor. A dream come true! 4) A fair amount of DNA is shared by all living things, with chimpanzees and humans somewhere north of 98%. We are superior to chimpanzees, therefore we evolved from them, since we are so close genetically. QED.

From these hints is raised a grand theory of auto-genesis; at some point in the history of the boiling cauldron of chemical soup that was the early earth, one of those inorganic molecules learned how to replicate itself, and viola! information began to exist along side of, and exclusive of, energy and matter, all by itself. Not only did the incredible protein carrier for information appear by itself (DNA), but also the information to be carried to the next generations, with increasing complexity--all this in the face of iron law # 2 of thermodynamics, which has the universe running down, I believe. Evolving complexity from a cosmos-sized explosion, the very definition of chaos and disorder, culminating in a self-conscious being able to speculate about the one thing that does not exist--telos, or the purpose of it all. A little joke played on us by that original self-life-giving molecule perhaps. What a card! And what an opening for those darn Machiavellians--they're barely more than self-replicating carriers of accidental DNA, but they're having all the fun!

(Harold Kildow, a fellow blogger at Principalities and Powers, holds a Ph.D. in political science from Fordham University where he studied with Mary P. Nichols and Michael Zuckert.)

The Obama people are having a hard time coming up with a way to pay for their universal government health care program. But now that they own General Motors, it may cross the minds of more than a few that this corporation might be useful for paying for the health plan.

The problem is that government (and unions, also big stakeholders now) are incapable of running an industry, i.e. making good products that people want, providing good customer service, and, in all of this, making a profit. So to the extent that government is involved in GM, the car maker won't be turning a profit and funding anything.

But government will certainly get involved in actually running GM. It will prove too tempting not to. That means that business concerns will be subordinated to political concerns. Just yesterday I saw a Senate committee excoriating GM executives for shutting down dealerships and the manner in which they did it. What these politicians were thinking was obvious. We own this company now, so we'll use it to keep people in their jobs. That is, they'll use it as a welfare system, not a business. Think of the way factories functioned in the old Soviet Union.

We are also seeing gleeful Democratic pols pushing to shut down the production of moneymaking SUVs (vehicles that liberals see as evil planet-destroying machines in general, but useful and cool when they own them themselves because, well, a few don't make that much difference) and expand the production of fuel efficient "green" cars that nobody wants but that everyone should want.

But really what difference do markets and profit make? If government should run the health care industry because everyone needs health care that is affordable and accessible regardless of ability to pay, then surely the same is true of cars. Think of it this way. Everyone needs a job, and cars are necessary for most people to get to their jobs. Government can now help put people in cars regardless of their ability to pay. Furthermore, for the sake of our health and for "the survival of the planet," we all need to be driving the right cars. Given what's out there, clearly the market is not able to direct either producers or consumers to socially and environmentally responsible cars. But the government can help there too.

Government ownership and management of, and political fiddling with, the auto industry may provide Americans a valuable lesson in what the government can and cannot do well, regardless of what in principle is should be doing. Or those lessons may come too late. On the other hand, the GM deal may prove to be a great leap for the government even more deeply into providing for everyone's "basic human goods," such as health care, cars, houses, schooling (with hot breakfast and lunch), retirement, and perhaps even tucking you in at night.

Consider the disastrous British experience with government ownership of the auto industry, especially when militant unions are involved. Follow this series of videos.

And here again for the fun of it is the Congressional Motors ad you've seen before:


I saw another mock ad for a new American car that reads this way: "You wouldn't buy our lousy cars. So now we're taking your money anyway. The Bailout. Coming in January."