And They Said Bush Was Clueless

But the previous week the administration blew off the Rule of Law in the Chrysler bankruptcy. It stiffed the senior secured creditors in favor of a junior creditor, a labor union. That’s probably unconstitutional, because the US Constitution calls for “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.” You can see why the founding fathers might think uniform bankruptcy laws were a good thing. It would provide protection for creditors, never the most popular people in society, against a politically favored special interest like a labor union.

If you are not going to favor secured creditors over a politically powerful interest, why bother having laws, or a Rule of Law at all? Just let the unpopular people go to the wall. Tell them to hire a politician next time.

There seem to be two ways of looking at the Rule of Law. For liberals the Rule of Law is all about the protection of brave liberals fighting against racism and sexism. But if you read the history of law in the Anglo-Saxon world, you find out that law is mostly about deciding what to do when things go wrong in day-to-day living and commerce. For instance, there is the law of bailments. It’s nothing special, but it covers the case of the restaurant valet that damages your car, and it has existed at least since Babylonian times.

Anyway, it seems that President Obama’s devotion to the Rule of Law is only rhetorical. He is going to keep the Bush policies on terrorism, but will keep making speeches to entrance liberals like James Fallows at The Atlantic with “the quality of [his] thought.”

The neutering of bankruptcy law in the Chrysler case is not rhetorical; it is real. And, to echo Talleyrand, it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder. For consistent bankruptcy law is as important to a smashed-up corporation as a well-run trauma center to an accident victim.

Capitalism is a social technology in the same way that the a trauma center is social technology. You can let the technicians organize and run it, subject to law, or you can stick your political nose in and order the professionals around. Just to show who’s boss, you can mix in a special deal for a powerful interest.

Time and time again in the last century, liberals have insisted that only political power can deliver the right kind of service from business. First we had to have a Federal Reserve System because you couldn’t trust the Money Trust. That worked out well. The dollar is now worth 2.5 cents.

Then they decided that America’s corporations had to have strong unions—in 1935 right in the middle of a Great Depression. That worked out well. It plunged America into a second depression in 1937.

They decided that senior citizens had to have subsidized health care. So now health care for seniors is eating the budget alive, and that’s before the $40 trillion that’s promised but not funded.

They wanted everyone to have “affordable housing.” Well, now they have their wish. Pity they had to blow up the banking system to get there.

And these are the people that called President Bush clueless!

There is another way. We could let capitalism get on with its job of delivering products and services that people are willing to pay for. Then we could start to figure out how to deliver health care that people could afford.

Against the clunking fist of the liberal administrative state we conservatives must call for a conservative sociable state. Social animals, humans are at our best when living in a world of reciprocal sociability; we are at our worst when issuing administrative orders to people that can’t answer back.

Marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher recently showed how reciprocal sociability works. While watching a lesbian and an evangelical in a focus group discussing gay marriage, her associate was appalled at the way that the participants would compromise. They had no principles, he complained.

"No," I said. "They are trying to figure out a way in which everybody can be OK. It’s really great to live in a country where people are like that."

It’s the difference between liberal world and conservative world. In liberal world highly evolved elites get to decide on the issues and force everyone else to get with the program. In the conservative world of families, churches, and associations we are just trying to figure out a way in which everyone can be OK.

Yet conservatives insist that we believe in permanent principles that cannot be changed, and liberals insist that everything they do is based on empathy and compassion for other people. What is going on here?

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

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

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
C�sar Gra�a, 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

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
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

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
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...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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

mysql close