I don’t generally post on Saturdays (I have a life, folks! Well, actually I don’t, but I like to schedule my time as if I did), but I want to say something about the Declaration of Independence today.

Have you noticed the opening paragraphs? How strange they are?

The framers start out saying (in brief), “Because we plan to separate from Great Britain, we feel an obligation to explain to the world why we’re taking this drastic action.”

Then they make this statement in Paragraph 2, which must have seemed very odd to many European readers:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it….

The very first reason cited for the existence of government is securing the rights of the people.

Not maintaining order and restraining social chaos.

Not the promotion and protection of trade.

Not the enforcement of godliness.

Certainly not the provision of social services to all citizens.

Securing the rights of the people.

Essentially (the authors were saying), government exists to do as little as possible, except when basic rights are threatened.

Where did this idea come from?

Much has been written about the sources of American political ideas. I haven’t read most of this material.

But I have a few ideas of my own. Continue reading Our Viking republic →

My publisher tells me we got a glowing review for West Oversea from the Norwegian-American Weekly. I was nonplussed for a moment, having never heard of this publication.

It turns out it’s the last man standing among all the Norwegian-American newspapers.

At one time there were more than 50 papers published in Norwegian in this country. Around these parts, Decorah Posten was the big player, but I think the Nordisk Tidende in New York was bigger. There was also Washington Posten out in Seattle.

A few years ago, it was down to Nordisk Tidende (which became the Norway Times) and Western Viking, which was a consolidated paper.

Apparently they merged Norway Times and Western Viking recently, and thoughtlessly failed to inform me.

All in all, I think our Norwegian conspiracy to undermine the republic isn’t going very well.

I’ve been listening to talk radio most of the day. At one point somebody (I think it may have been on Mike Gallagher’s show) referred to Thomas Paine’s words in “The American Crisis,” “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And it occurred to me that, like so many statements written in the past, it’s misunderstood today. Continue reading Try, try again →

How do you think of freedom? Perhaps you think of it as the absence of restriction. I think conservatives frequently define it to say the government is not regulating us. The free market is free from government regulation, you see. This negative definition is good as far as it goes, and perhaps the only way it makes sense when a politician talks of freedom.

However, freedom can be positively defined as the ability to fulfill your God-given roles in life, or more simply, the ability to do what is right. (These thoughts are not original with me, in case you are wondering; I’m just blogging off the top o’ me head.)

For example, think of an alcoholic with $20. He could have the first type of freedom by having no restrictions on him from his family or community, and with that freedom he could drink himself into stupor. While he would be free to drink all the whiskey he can afford, he would not be free from the whiskey’s bondage over him, and he would not be free from the turmoil or doubt that lead him to drink in the first place. How can he find that positive freedom? How can he gain the ability to what is right when he has sold himself into an alcoholic bondage?

He needs community. In a sense, he needs less negative freedom in order to obtain more positive freedom. It really does take a village to raise a child, but that village is family, church, and small community, not federal or state government. We may think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we actually act within a social context. We rebel against real or perceived restrictions. We align ourselves with teams or labels because we want to be part of that group, and we want that group to win, generally speaking.

And in the long run, don’t we want to be right? When we make our choices, don’t we want them to succeed, for them to be correct choices whatever that means? That works in community, first with the Lord who made us, next with our family biological or spiritual, and then with our larger community. The ability to do with is right is the upside of freedom.

Happy Fourth of July.

Oh, I want me one of these.

Thomas Sowell argues that proponents of government medical insurance use a lot of marketing language and make few arguments.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is “universal health care” provided “free” by their governments.

…

There are more than four times as many Magnetic Resonance Imaging units (MRIs) per capita in the United States as in Britain or Canada, where there are government-run medical systems. There are more than twice as many CT scanners per capita in the United States as in Canada and more than four times as many per capita as in Britain.

Is it surprising that such things cost money?

I was surprised and irritated when I heard the president say he could cut wasteful spending in Medicare by eliminating unneeded tests like MRIs and CT scans. The scans he said were wasteful were those that came back negative. So if a problem wasn’t found, the test was a waste of time?

The real solution to this is to put all the decision making in the hands of doctors, patients, and Christian neighbors who would be willing to help people pay for the care they need.