Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

YOU MIGHT WONDER why Aristotle is so interested in incontinence that he devotes the whole of Book VII of his Nichomachean Ethics to it. Is that really a problem for philosophers to worry about?

Well, it is, at least the kind of incontinence that Aristotle worries about.

The continent man is one "ready to abide by the result of his calculations" while the incontinent man is "ready to abandon them." Why does the continent man abide by his calculations? Because he knows "his appetites are bad, and refuses on account of his rational principles to follow them." The incontinent man, on the other hand, abandons his rational principles "as a result of passion."

But if you chop logic like the sophists, worries Aristotle, then you might end up unraveling your rational spaghetti into believing that "folly coupled with incontinence is virtue." For if continence makes a man stand by a false opinion, then it is good if an incontinent man, that abandons "any and every opinion", abandons a false opinion.

Aristotle briskly clears away the problem of this sophistical mirage, the virtuous incontinent, for he argues that the incontinent man is in the position of someone "having knowledge in a sense and yet not having it, as in the instance of a man asleep, mad, or drunk." He is like a city that "passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them". He is neither good nor bad, just a muddle.

But what about the continent man with the wrong opinion? Well, Aristotle says, these are likely strong-headed people, "hard to persuade in the first instance and not easily persuaded to change". This is to suggest that an continent man can be consumed with "passion and appetite". On the contrary, the "continent man will be easy to persuade". For being a man of rational principle, he is not led by his appetites and his pleasures, but readily bows to rational persuasion.

But let us not confuse the incontinent man with the self-indulgent. The first stands by his choice, and is not apt to repent his follies, while the incontinent man means well but is led astray by his passions. The self-indulgent man is "incurable and the incontinent curable." Think of the difference between dropsy and epilepsy, says Aristotle. The "former is a permanent, the latter an intermittent badness."

So that's all right!

| perm | comment(0) | | 01/27/12 9:04 am ET

The Anguish of the Reactionary President

BACK IN THE old days, rulers ruled. They ruled over everything, from church, to military, to trade.

But then came the modern mechanical era. God no longer kept the planets in their orbits, and an "invisible hand" seemed to guide merchants and consumers without the constant intervention of a wise ruler.

What is a ruler to do? He worries about "inequality." Not because he's caring and compassionate, or even because he's a brilliant technocrat, but because if you want to meddle with the workings of the "invisible hand" you have to start out by saying that the "invisible hand" isn't doing the job. It's making some people too rich and leaving some people behind as too poor.

Thus Marx. Thus the British Fabians. Thus the American Progressives. Thus the New Deal. And thus our modern "progressives," university liberals, and President Obama.

It's not that the president is a socialist, but that socialism is just one phase in the serial attempts of the modern educated elite to justify its rule over the "commanding heights" of the economy, the culture, and politics.

In President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, we see the box that he and his educated elite friends are in. They want to rule. They want new programs. They want new regulations. They want to be patrons, and they want us to be adoring and grateful clients.

But the science is in. The "invisible hand" really works. And it really works better if the government isn't endlessly manipulating the economy to get out of its latest jam with money printing, debt defaults, and endless subsidies.

And now the educated elite has run out of money. But the band plays on.

In his speech the president has to walk a fine line. He must invoke the great narrative of American exceptionalism, quoting Abraham Lincoln. But he must twist it to fit his ruling-class agenda. Thus he invokes "fairness" to justify increased taxes on the rich. Here's the data from the IRS on this. The rich pay a huge chunk of federal taxes, the rest of the top 50 percent pay almost all the rest and the bottom 50 percent pay almost nothing. What the bottom 50 percent do pay goes towards payroll taxes, i.e., Social Security and Medicare.

I've been arguing with a left-wing friend recently about "inequality." He has a chart that shows that median income went up with average income in the 1950s and 1960s. But since 1980 the median income has lagged the average income, so the rich have been getting more of it.

Folks like Walter Russell Mead and Megan McArdle tell why this happened. The post-World War II economy was corporatist. The benefits were parceled out by an inside deal between the Big Units: big government, big unions, and big corporations. But this crony capitalism ran out of money in the 1970s, as the rest of the world recovered from World War II and began to compete. But then breathtaking new developments in technology and commerce poured gigantic fortunes into the laps of the entrepreneurs that took the opportunities and made them into consumer products, men like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Then there was Sam Walton who built Wal-Mart up from nothing to become the world's biggest retailer. There's nothing fancy about Wal-Mart, just hard work to buy low and sell low, and provide an emergency operations center so Wal-Mart can flood assistance into disaster areas.

But what about the salvific progressive political leader? Where does he fit in all this? He really doesn't. We really don't need him. That is why the educated elite keeps coming up with new end-the-world scenarios. That's what political leaders and religious leaders have always done to persuade us to follow them.

And that's the point. Obama ran for office as a salvific leader under whose transformative leadership the "rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." But really, global warming is a crock, and we've been working successfully on the environment for half a century, since about the time that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

The great Montesquieu imagined the modern government with its separated powers: legislative, executive and judicial. This was not an argument against tyrants, but an argument about the inevitable tyranny of a unified government.

Now we need to expand Montesquieu's ideas into a Greater Separation of Powers, between the political, the economic and moral-cultural sectors. Obviously the scope and power of salvific political leaders will be much reduced.

President Obama and his ruling class will kick and scream all the way to their eventual irrelevance. Oh well. I can handle that if you can.

| perm | comment(0) | | 01/26/12 9:45 am ET

Duck and Cover, Mr. President

I SUPPOSE THAT President Obama knows what he is doing with his class warfare strategy for reelection. His State of the Union speech was complete with Warren Buffett's secretary, the one that pays more, percentage-wise, in tax that her boss. But I'd like to warn you, Mr. President, that there is a ballistic missile en route that may well change the terms of trade in the current political...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/25/12 10:18 am ET

Obama is not a Friend of Catholics

YOU CAN UNDERSTAND that the liberal Catholics would want to find a way to support Barack Obama. After all, he believes in a lot of the same stuff they do: social justice, and solidarity. So it's not surprising that they would support Obama in 2008. But now they are finding out that Obama isn't returning the compliment. William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal: Now, suddenly, we have...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 01/24/12 10:50 am ET

Educrats Chase Teenaged Sailor Round World

HOW ABOUT THAT 16-year-old Laura Dekker from Holland, who just finished a round-the-world solo cruise in her 38 foot ketch Guppy? How about those child-welfare authorities that were hounding her and her parents? Miss Dekker fled abroad in 2010 when Dutch child welfare authorities took legal action to try to stop her making the voyage. She later won a 10-month court battle, promising judges she...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/23/12 1:48 pm ET

What About That Mean?

EVERY VIRTUE, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition. Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well." Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better? Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes. It is "an intermediate between excess and...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/20/12 12:34 pm ET

The Green "Fight Against Big Oil"

WHEN ACTOR Robert Redford writes that the Keystone XL decision is an historic victory against Big Oil. He writes: President Obama has just rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a project that promised riches for the oil giants and an environmental disaster for the rest of us. His decision represents a victory of historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/19/12 12:48 pm ET

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

STALIN FAMOUSLY inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had. Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven”. Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13. OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/18/12 1:33 pm ET

Who Gets to Judge?

IF WE SAY, as we did yesterday, that we in western society are dealing with the Two Great Crimes of Modernity, then what do we do about it? The two great crimes are really quite simple. Capitalism's great crime is plantation slavery, when business owners got to own the people that worked their sugar plantations, first in Cyprus, then in the West Indian sugar islands and Brazil. And then there...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/17/12 12:31 pm ET

Two Great Crimes of Modernity

LET'S TELL it like it is. Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno, is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men." Oh, gee, we already did. in Modernity's Original Sin. But let us do it again in a slightly different way. The Original Sin of modernity, the application...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 01/16/12 12:23 pm ET

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient |

| 01/13/12 12:58 pm ET
Barack Obama, "Vulture Capitalist" |

| 01/12/12 1:16 pm ET
Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument |

| 01/11/12 1:47 pm ET
Make Some Lemonade, Mitt(1) |

| 01/10/12 1:08 pm ET
What's the Story? |

| 01/09/12 1:58 pm ET
Let's Keep Things The Way They Are |

| 01/06/12 12:33 pm ET
Obama Deepens the Divide |

| 01/05/12 12:08 pm ET
Can Romney Beat the Mark of Bain? |

| 01/04/12 1:16 pm ET
Decline of Violence and Guns |

| 01/03/12 1:31 pm ET
Pinker's Better Angels |

| 01/02/12 1:24 pm ET

| January blogs | December blogs |

OPED

2012: It's Bain Capital vs. Obama Capital

I HAVE BEEN worrying for months about Romney and the Bain Capital problem. How was Romney, if nominated for President of the United States, going to deal with Democrats trying to hang Bain Capital layoffs round his neck? Paul Kengor goes into great detail on this.

This week Mitt Romey, in an “informal” campaign plane interview, showed us how it is going to be done. Said ...

| more | 01/20/12

The Bad News on Unemployment

Conservatives are anxious to see bad news in the drop in the headline unemployment rate to 8. ...

| more | 01/20/12

Steven Pinker and the Decline of Violence

Obama's Sterilized Society

Obama's Freeloader Economy

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

THE SUPRISE OF REDNECKS debouching from the Appalachians into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the past, now that God was dead.... more

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Cleary, Edward L. et al., Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

The Once and Future Liberalism
Walter Russell Mead: there is no going back to blue.

Obama Offends the Catholic Left
no religious exemption on ObamaCare

Gingrich's Secret Weapon: Incredibly Innovate Campaign
Clark Judge says the flaky Newt is smarter than he looks.

Teenage sailor Laura Dekker becomes youngest to sail world
but the educrats are after her for truancy...

the New American Divide
Charles Murray: the divide between upper middle class and the rest.

> archive

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the kingŽs peace, the law of contract, and private property.