Ken Lay Rip But Still A Crook - Road to the Middle Class

A Democratic friend seemed surprised that this was so. After all, if you read the New York Times every day you likely think that the Enron fraud was hatched in the offices of Halliburton and signed off by then-Governor Bush in Austin.

Of course, Democrats don’t realize that Republicans feel just as angry as they do about Enron. And Republicans don’t just feel outraged by Enron’s frauds. We also feel betrayed, because we know that there are many Democrats just waiting to blame Republicans and the whole capitalist system when a corporation like Enron collapses. And also hurts because we know that Democrats will be trying to stampede some new regulatory burden on business.

No doubt Democrats have been wondering all along when the fix would be in on Enron. When were Enron’s corrupt Republican friends going to bail them out? Well, it looks like the Republicans’ God stepped in and did the dirty deed.

Columnist Peggy Noonan reminds us that there is another aspect to all this.

Ken Lay, Enron CEO and convicted felon died this week of a massive heart attack. But he also died of a broken heart.

His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him.

Deserved as his conviction for fraud might be, he was also a human. And Noonan recalls a friend who remarked how hard we humans are on each other. How we are all little pirates, and how we are more breakable than we know.

Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics how

[she] once had a priest tell [her] to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament... so that [she] could feel the love of God pour over her.

If you wonder what all the sin and redemption stuff is all about in Christianity think of it this way. It is a way for humans to save themselves when the little pirate in them is broken. When they are in danger of dying from a broken heart.

But Ken Lay is still a crook.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

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David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
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US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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