American Roman Catholics observe the Feast of Corpus Christi today.  In June 1791, just six months before his death, Mozart wrote a motet for this feast.  It is among the most exquisite and beautiful pieces of music ever written, no less moving and powerful because it is less than four minutes long.  A fine recording of Ave Verum Corpus may be heard here.  Enjoy.

I am not gladdened when two friends disagree, particularly friends whose work I have long admired.  But my purpose is not to address the substance of the disagreement between Scott Richert and Paul Gottfried on the morality of the killing of abortionist George Tiller.  My purpose is to make sure no one thinks that Scott should be caught up in some of Paul’s conclusions about the broader right-to-life movement.  Specifically, Paul writes that the condemnation of Tiller’s killing by right-to-life organizations makes him question whether “these groups are really appalled about the professional activities Tiller became rich by performing,” and Paul also suggests that “GOP party hacks” might profit from Tiller’s death by “presenting themselves as moderate ‘defenders of innocent life.’” 

Paul’s doubts about the right-to-life movement emphatically do not apply to Scott.  As a quick Google search could verify, Scott has written many times on the evils of abortion and the rightness of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the subject.  More to the point, his actions show a sincere conviction.  Scott and Amy Richert, as the parents of seven children, take seriously the teaching of Humanae Vitae.  My guess, based on a lifetime of Catholicism, is that the number of people who take seriously Humanae Vitae but are indifferent to the evil of abortion is approximately zero.

However, Scott’s opposition to abortion has not blinded him to the fact that many in the GOP have cynically used the issue for political advantage, with no intention of doing anything to make it illegal.  In fact, Scott wrote three articles for his Catholicism newsletter at About.com explaining that, even though “Abortion, as the slaughter of innocents, is the gravest moral evil currently practiced in the modern world,” that fact did not oblige Catholics to vote for Republicans whose opposition to abortion has proven to be ineffective and perhaps insincere.

Before stating that I had deliberately mischaracterized his argument and inviting readers to speculate as to my “motive” for doing so, Kevin Gutzman wrote that “Louis Hartz posited long ago that there is essentially no Right in America, that America is dominated by a broad Lockean consensus.  This strikes me as essentially true.”  He conclued by saying that “Hartz was correct:  there’s one wing in American politics.  The question is almost always what kind of Left it will be.”  After Chris Kopff objected, Gutzman responded by stating that the “traditionalists’ tradition is basically Lockean” and that that tradition was “egalitarian.”  Although Prof. Gutzman wrote his response to Kopff “as a student of M. E. Bradford,” and he informed Chris Kopff that Kopff’s reliance on Willmoore Kendall and George Carey “really will not do,” Bradford in fact downplayed Locke’s significance and agreed with Kendall and Carey in their definition of the “true American political tradition as both conservative and hostile to Equality.”  I read Gutzman’s statements as an argument that America’s political tradition is a liberal one, since John Locke was one of the seminal figures in the foundation of the classical liberal tradition.

But my essay is not about Kevin Gutzman, it is about the tradition of classical liberalism and what I see as some of the flaws of that tradition.  I urge anyone interested in this discussion to read all the essays, Prof. Gutzman’s as well as Prof. Kopff’s and mine.  And I further urge anyone interested in a sustained critique of the classical liberal tradition to read Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life.

Scott Richert has written a typically thoughtful piece on the murder of abortionist George Tiller, in the course of which he answers the questions Richard Spencer raised about the pro-life movement’s denunciation of that murder.  Scott’s piece may be found here.

In commenting on Chris Kopff’s excellent essay refuting the notion that Americans are doomed to be Lockean liberals, Richard Spencer wonders what I want to see in the realm of economics.  I would have thought the answer was clear:  I want to see a return to a protected national market, the system under which America rose to be the greatest economic power on earth, all the while keeping the federal government limited.  That system is well described in Pat Buchanan’s beautifully written and powerfully argued The Great Betrayal, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. 

It is odd, though, to see Richard invoking the name of Otto von Bismarck and the great era of global free trade that supposedly preceded the First World War, for that period saw both protectionist America and protectionist Germany outstrip Britain, which stubbornly clung to free trade.  During roughly that same period, the US went from having half of Britain’s production to twice that of Britain, all behind tariffs averaging over 40%.  And this is what Bismarck told the Reichstag on May 2, 1879:  “The dicta of abstract science do not influence me in the slightest.  I base my opinion on the practical experiences of the time in which we are living.  I see that those countries which possess protection are prospering, and those countries which possess free trade are decaying.”  The same may be said today, as the United States unfortunately loses ground to China and other Asian countries that rigorously protect their home markets.

The notion that globalism is no longer a serious problem because Obama has nationalized GM and Chrysler is also odd.  The massive trade deficits we have run for years have created many structural weaknesses in our economy, weaknesses this recession has exposed, and America is still shedding jobs in sectors subject to foreign competition year in, year out.  The sad decline of the American auto industry is but one result of globalism, and it is hard to see how we arrest the process of a more general American decay unless we address these structural weaknesses and begin protecting our home market again.  As Paul Craig Roberts wrote earlier this year, “The American economy has gone away.  It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried six feet under.”

There is another benefit to the historic American policy of protectionism.  It deepens ties between Americans and arrests the march toward globalism.  The tendency of free trade, of course, is precisely the opposite.  As French liberal economist Frederic Bastiat wrote, free trade is intended to lead to the “peaceful, ecumenical, and indissoluble union of the peoples of the world.”  When I look at the loudest proponents of free trade today, I see a newspaper whose former editor told Peter Brimelow, “the nation-state is finished,” and a website that consisently takes that line, going so far as to object when the Navy prevents the payment of ransom to Somali pirates by rescuing their American hostage, and praising Somali society as a model for us all.  It is true that we have gone far down the road toward the borderless world desired by Bastiat, Bartley, and Rockwell, and it will be difficult changing course, but I want no part of that world at all.

Those interested in the origins of the financial crisis will profit from reading University of South Carolina law professor William Quirk’s take, which appeared in Chronicles and is now available at the Chronicles website here.

A piece in Pravda denouncing Obama’s economic policies as Marxist is making the rounds among American libertarians.  It has appeared at Lew Rockwell’s website, then Kevin Gutzman linked to it here, and now it is on the Takimag main page, and folks are linking to it at Facebook and similar sites.  Clearly, it has struck a nerve.  But the author of that piece, Stanislav Mishin, will not be a folk hero to libertarians for long, since he is not one of them.  In fact, Mishin is an unabashed economic nationalist, as this post of his from May 16 shows.  In his May 16 post, Mishin quotes Karl Marx’s support for free trade, writes that “With these words, the Marxists and socialists joined the cause behind the greedy internationalists, who put Free Trade into the forefront,” and notes that free trade today still “benefits the Marxists, as the victims of Free Trade are driven into their waiting grasp.”

It is a shame that Mishin’s status as a libertarian folk hero will be short-lived, because his arguments deserve serious consideration.  His May 16 post describes the many nations that have benefited from protectionism, even as nations that embraced free trade have declined.  His list has an unfortunate, though understandable, omission.  Mishin seems to be under the impression that America has always embraced free trade, even though the roster of American protectionists includes such men as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, and America became the world’s greatest manufacturing nation behind tariff walls.  By contrast, our long deindustrialization has been the result of free trade, and the collapse of the manufacturing sector has produced exactly what Mishin says it does:  people whose communities have been devastated by plant closings end up looking to government for help. 

Nor can we pretend any longer that America’s deindustrialization is without consequence.  Cheerleaders for the “new economy” that was supposed to take the place of manufacturing have been largely, and rightly, silent of late.  In order to be wealthy, a county needs an economy devoted to wealth-creating activities, and America’s economy has become more and more devoted to government since we embraced free trade.  As Paul Craig Roberts notes in his regular examinations of the employment figures, sectors subject to foreign competition are no longer creating jobs here.  The growth that is taking place is occurring in sectors that are sheltered from foreign competition or connected to government, such as health care and education.  One of the recent top ten lists that always seem to show up at Yahoo recently listed the top ten cities for job growth in the United States, a list that naturally included Washington and also featured several state capitals or cities housing major state universities.  If libertarians wish to achieve their goal of a limited government, they would be well-advised to revisit the tradition that contributed to American prosperity for many decades during which the federal government was a tiny fraction of its current size.

With only one second left, everyone thought the Cavs had lost.  Except LeBron James.  Then he did this.  What a shot.  What an athlete. 

Over at NRO, John Derbyshire touched a nerve yesterday when he suggested that, for most Americans, a college education is a waste of time and money.  Many readers wrote in to agree, and there surely is something to what Derbyshire says.  The escalating cost of higher education, which has outstripped inflation for many years, is a scandal.  My father got a first class engineering education at Case Institute of Technology, which at the time of his graduation in 1960 was the most expensive school in Ohio.  He was able to pay for his education by working over the summer at such jobs as selling hot dogs at the Cleveland Zoo.  Today, undergraduate tuition at Case Western Reserve University is $34,450 and the school estimates living costs at $15,294, bringing the total annual cost of a year of undergraduate education at Case to $49,744, a sum no student could pay with summer earnings and that exceeds the annual salary of millions of Americans.  Can anyone claim with a straight face that improvements in education since 1960 justify such an enormous increase in cost?

In fact, what we have done is transform the bachelor’s degree into the equivalent of a diploma from a good public school circa 1960, with this difference:  the high school diploma was free, and the bachelor’s degree is very expensive and getting more expensive all the time.  It is hard to see how Americans have benefited from this.  But Obama wants all Americans to go to college, and he is increasing the already massive federal subsidies to the higher education system.  The stimulus package includes $14 billion for an expanded college-tuition tax credit, $15.6 billion for increased Pell Grants, and $1.3 billion for university research facilities.  Of course, Obama knows that, in addition to being leftists themselves, many teachers and professors use their classrooms to indoctrinate their students in leftism.  The more interesting question is why so many Republicans support these subsidies, and even advocate expanding them,  in the form of the retraining programs we are told will solve the problems caused by globalization.

You can’t make this stuff up.  What first drew my attention to this AP story on the battle over gay marriage in Rhode Island was the way the writer emphasized the Catholicism of Rhode Island politicians in a way it is hard to imagine other groups (except evangelical Protestants) being identified.  Why I’m writing about it is this curious fact:  a leader of the proponents for gay marriage in Rhode Island is Cassandra Ormiston, who unsuccessfully asked the Rhode Island Supreme Court to let her divorce her lesbian partner, whom she had married under Massachusetts law.  The Rhode Island Supreme Court said no, on the grounds that Rhode Island did not recognize gay marriage.  So, apparently, Ormiston wants Rhode Island to recognize gay marriage so she can get a gay divorce.  Such are the struggles on the endless road to true equality.