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| Job Growth Moderating; Or Is It? | A Nation of Shoplifters |
Ken Lay: RIP But Still a Crook
by Christopher Chantrill
July 07, 2006 at 3:45 pm
DID YOU KNOW that in Enron’s home town of Houston they regard the Enron collapse as a tragedy rather than an example of capitalist rascals at work?
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.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
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
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
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
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
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
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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