Center For A Just Society Forums

Freedom from Want? by J. Victor Thompson

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST

Much of the political dialogue in this election year centers on a concern that the distribution of wealth in America is out of balance and that government should do something about it. A case is being made that the tax and trade policies of recent years have benefited a few at the expense of the many. The implication is that wealth is static and it is unjustly concentrated in the hands of the rich; thus, the electorate should vote for politicians who will justly redistribute it to the majority who deserve "their fair share." This would be done by levying an even higher tax rate on the rich while lowering or eliminating taxes on the non-rich, along with expanding government services in large sectors of the economy, like healthcare. It all sounds like the right thing to do. Certainly the Bible teaches that Christians are to be concerned for the poor. But what happens when government assumes primary responsibility for this role instead of the church and the family?

Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech in 1941 in which he made a case that people should enjoy four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. The first two, speech and religion, are found in the Bill of Rights. They require government to limit its power. Freedom from fear requires the government to expend substantial resources to provide for a national defense, something the founding fathers recognized as essential. The last one, freedom from want, is an added role for government. The Great Depression that Roosevelt stepped into as President and attempted to mitigate resulted in a massive expansion of the government's role in providing for its citizens wants. This new role for government has been with us ever since. The current economic downturn has brought about a renewed cry to have the government address more of our wants. The implication is that our wants will be satisfied if we simply elect those politicians who promise us the biggest and best package of government services paid for by taxing the "rich" and borrowing more money from abroad.

The confusion surrounding this issue is not over the virtue of its ends, but rather the means by which we get there. Ideally no one should want for the basic necessities of life. But should government take on the role of supplying our wants? What kind of expectations and behavior will be produced in citizens who look to government to provide for them? Will such citizens be highly motivated to be industrious, self-reliant, and productive? Will families have great incentive to stick together and help one another? Will the church be motivated to care for those in need, and will its members see any reason to support such efforts? Who will produce all the goods and services needed to provide for our wants, and what will be the motivation to produce them?

It is important to recognize that such a great redistribution of wealth can only be achieved by coercion: failure to pay taxes will ultimately result in the seizure of property and/or jail. Wealth is not some static thing that one simply needs to divide up fairly; it is produced everyday by people who work. People do not work to pay taxes, but rather to provide for themselves and their loved ones. As we build a bigger nanny state the incentive to produce wealth will fall and the expectation that we are entitled to having our wants supplied by government as a basic human right will grow. It should be obvious that this is not sustainable in the long run. We have a recent example of this failed system in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their armies were not defeated on the battlefield, rather their planned and coerced economy simply collapsed. Even the Chinese Communist Party figured this out, as Deng Xiaoping said, "to be rich is glorious." When the Chinese allowed their people to have property rights and build wealth their economy expanded and millions of people were lifted out of poverty.

So how should a just society provide for the real needs of the poor? First, it works best when those needs are provided for voluntarily by people who want to help and care. A willing and voluntary transfer of wealth does not kill the incentive of the wealth producer, but it actually acts as a motivator. The giver also has a stake in seeing that the gift is put to good use. There is no giant, costly, and inefficient bureaucracy standing between the giver and receiver of the gift. The model for this is the family. The family, and extended family, through most of history has been the provider for those in need. Another model is the church, including para-church ministries, where the same positive motivations of voluntary giving and caring administration of the gift are in place. Secular non-profit groups are also effective in providing for the needs of the poor. The well-intentioned desire to help the poor through an expansion of government has limits. Ultimately the government cannot satiate our desire to be free from want; it can only provide a framework that allows us to do that for ourselves and each other.

J. Victor Thompson is President of Bulwark Capital. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

And So It Goes by R. D. Fierro

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST

Late in the final set of a hotly-contested Olympic tennis match between an American, James Blake, and a Chilean, Fernando Gonzalez, the head umpire made a clearly erroneous call at a critical point. Returning a shot, Blake hit a sharp forehand across the net that skimmed Gonzalez's racquet before winding up out of bounds beyond the baseline. The umpire gave the point to Gonzalez.

Blake protested that since the ball had made contact with Gonzalez's racquet the out of bounds strike should have been charged to Gonzalez, and therefore he had won the point. The umpire ignored Blake's pleas and refused to change his call. Gonzalez eventually won the match.

One of the television commentators mentioned to his colleague that back "in your day, thirty years ago," Gonzalez would have been compelled by "gentleman’s tennis" to step forward and affirm that Blake was right. Gonzalez made no such effort. In fact, when one commentator, looking for Gonzalez, asked where he had gone, the member of the bygone era of gentleman's tennis characterized the Chilean as in a corner "hiding."

And so it goes.

Move now to the world of high finance where the Securities and Exchange Commission has recently allowed an order prohibiting the "naked shorting" of nineteen financial services firms, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to expire. The order was curious to begin with since the practice of naked shorting has been against the law for decades.

"Shorting" stocks involves the sale of equity shares that the seller does not own. In order to sell something he doesn't own, presumably the seller borrows the stock from someone who does have rightful possession, and then returns the shares at a later day. The seller hopes to buy the shares at a lower price than which he sold them, thereby making a profit. "Naked shorting" is shorting stocks without first going through the trouble of borrowing the shares. Many market commentators have observed that allowing someone to sell shares they don't own and haven't borrowed is akin to allowing them to create phantom shares in a company, i.e. it is tantamount to counterfeiting.

The SEC had enacted its temporary rule because naked shorting in today's market had become so widespread and prolific that the practice was threatening the viability of some of America's most important financial companies. This ignores, of course, the fact that by merely creating the rule the SEC was, in effect, admitting that it was not enforcing the ordinary laws against naked shorting—but that would be an entirely different column.

And so it goes.

John Edwards recently confessed that while he was a presidential candidate, giving speeches on the importance of strong moral values and family stability, he had an affair with a female contractor making films for the campaign. The story has been widely covered in the mainstream and tabloid press, with one of the lingering questions being whether Edwards fathered a child by the woman. In a televised interview Edwards adamantly denied that the child in question was his and visibly bristled when the reporter came close to questioning his veracity.

Presumably ex-Senator John Edwards was unable to connect the dots between just having admitted to infidelity and doubts about the honesty of his latest statements. In an ironic (or moronic) throwback to a Clintonesque defense ("I never inhaled") Edwards said that he only had extramarital relations while his wife's serious cancer was in remission.

And so it goes.

These are widely separated instances from sports, business, and politics with one thing in common or, more properly, not in common. The missing element in all of these examples is any sense of integrity by the perpetrators and any ability by them to understand a very simple fact. They wouldn't want to live in the world they represent and are creating.

The Chilean tennis player would howl to high heaven if he lost a match because an umpire made a call unjustly favoring his opponent. If the Wall Street high flyers walked into their Park Avenue apartments and found out that their neighbors had snuck in, removed their property, and sold it they would be on the phone with the police before the door closed behind them. If John Edwards had become president and one of his agency Secretaries told him a bold faced lie, creating subsequent substantial embarrassment, Edwards would likely have the Secretary (metaphorically) drawn and quartered.

Yet, of course, by their actions—and inactions—these people have sought to benefit from conduct they would rightly resist and condemn. The golden rule used to be "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Today's version seems to be "Do unto others before they get a chance to do unto you."

The sad fact is that it is so easy to come up with examples of this kind of mindset and behavior. From Paris and Brittany to Bill and Monica to Larry Craig and Mark Foley we have been treated to a steady parade of people in all spheres of life who don't find integrity to be necessary in their public or private lives. This phenomenon is not novel insofar as human history goes, but what may be new is our easy acquiescence of its pervasiveness.

Time was when Fernando Gonzalez would have been ostracized by the world of tennis and his reputation permanently tarnished. Who can forget the small boy plaintively saying to Shoeless Joe Jackson in the early twentieth century, "Say it ain't so Joe." Less than 30 years ago Gary Hart was hounded out of public life for a liaison on the yacht "Monkey Business." Today John Edwards feels comfortable going on national television to confess to a pervasive lie while simultaneously contending we should now all believe him.

Since the high and mighty apparently have no further interest in enshrining integrity and its ethical cousins as essential values in their lives, it is up to the everyday and ordinary—the rest of us—to ignore their example and seek to establish and maintain a more reliable moral compass. If we do not find and follow that compass, we will be saying "and so it goes" about honesty, decency, and virtue—and we won't like at all the world we have helped to create.

R. D. Fierro lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is Treasurer of the Board of the Pregnancy Help and Information Center. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org.

The War on Citizens by Chip Hammond

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST

On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms executed a search warrant at the facility of an aberrant religious group nine miles east of Waco, Texas. In a frantic call to 911 from Wayne Martin, a member of the group, indicates that the ATF entered the structure firing, and those inside returned fire in self-defense. In the exchange of gunfire four agents and six members of the group were killed.

As I watched in horror these events unfold on the news, one very disturbing element was that as the BATF pulled back licking their wounds, they complained bitterly that they had been shot at. Didn’t they expect to be shot at? If not, why did they show up in full battle dress with automatic shoulder-mounted weapons? It was hard not to draw the conclusion that they had intended to terrorize and bully these people.

The Sheriff of McLennan County went public, indicating that the assault had been unnecessary and that he could have executed the warrant by knocking. In the end another seventy-six members of the group died in the fire that followed the final assault on the buildings.

Bill Clinton identified Waco as the worst incident of his presidency. More than a few Americans agreed and were glad when the Clinton presidency was over so that "nothing like this could happen again." Nothing like it, that is, unless you live in the state of Maryland.

On July 28, a Prince George's County SWAT team broke through the front door of Cheye Calvo, Mayor of Berwyn Heights. The Mayor and his family report that the team immediately shot their two black Labradors, one of which was trying to flee. Further investigation has turned up two important facts. The first is that the Mayor and his family were innocent of the suspected crime for which their house was assaulted. The second is that police did not have a warrant that allowed them to enter without knocking.

Although the police have admitted that the Calvos were not guilty of any crime, they have not apologized. They have justified their violation of the U.S. Constitution and human decency with three excuses: someone in the house saw them before they knocked so they had to break in; they felt threatened by the dogs (apparently Prince George’s County is not, or does not believe it is, held to the standard of "reasonable fear" in regard to the use of force—its officers can simply shoot anything that makes them nervous); they were just following orders and procedure.

Another incident involving the police occurred a week later. On August 4, Don Curtis, a resident of La Plata, was awakened at 12:30 AM by his wife screaming that there were people in military assault gear running up to their door.

The gang verbally identified themselves at the door as the Maryland State Police Armed Response Team. According to Mrs. Curtis, the man who seemed to be in charge said he had to show Mr. Curtis some papers. Mr. Curtis came downstairs, still groggy from having been woken out of a sound sleep.

Don Curtis reports that he was then surrounded by seven people (none with identification), and one began to question him about what kind of guns he owned. He was eventually told that "the system" had "flagged" him because he bought ammunition for a gun that they had no record of him owning. It turns out that the police were wrong about the facts regarding which guns Mr. Curtis (legally) owned, and it is not illegal in Maryland to purchase ammunition for a gun one does not own.

Mr. Curtis purchased all of his guns in accordance with Maryland laws. Maryland law also requires that certain types of firearms be registered. Mr. Curtis does not own any of these types of firearms, but he says he was told by one of the (still unidentified) State Troopers that he should "voluntarily" register all his guns, "or this will happen again because 'the system' has flagged you."

At this point, Mr. Curtis was fully awake and angry, and would not cooperate with the (still unidentified) police any further, at which point they left. Their parting words made a profound impact on Don Curtis: "Alright, Mr. Curtis, we are sorry to have harassed you."

Having been a police chaplain, and having a number of friends in law enforcement, I can tell you that not all police agencies behave this way, and many (I would hope most) officers who were "ordered" to behave this way would say "no." The Nuremberg Trials of the Nazis and the trial of Lt. William Calley fortify a culture that refuses to take "I was just following orders" or "I was just following procedure" as an excuse for wrong-doing.

These incidents highlight the folly of broad statements such as "I support law enforcement." One should no more make that statement than "I support ministers." Perhaps you may and should support ministers generally, but I wouldn't recommend supporting pedophilic predators in the ministry. Your support for ministers should be limited to those who use their office properly. The same is true for law enforcement. We should not forget that the Gestapo and KGB were members of the world-wide police fraternity.

It seems to me that the root of this problem stems from the militarization of police agencies. Decking out people in battle assault dress that looks eerily similar to patrols in Iraq, except for being black instead of desert tan, and arming them with M4 and MP5 automatic weapons in order to go "talk" to people fosters a certain psyche. It tends to produce a psyche that is not concerned about law, a psyche which believes like the tyrants in the days of the divine right of kings, "we are the law."

Many police agencies display a variation of the motto "To Protect and Serve." But when militarization leads to the assault and harassment of innocent citizens; when citizens are told that it's not enough that they follow the law, that they should "voluntarily" follow some arbitrary rules made up at the moment; when individual police officers or whole police agencies decide that it is time to wage a War on Citizens, there will be no one left to protect and serve. And if this happens the support that the police have historically enjoyed and counted on from citizens will be a thing of the past.

Chip Hammond is the Pastor of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Leesburg, VA. Please email your comments to forum@centerforajustsociety.org.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

Solzhenitsyn: Calling Evil What It Is - by Thomas Gilson

Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: 1918-2008

Can we still use terms like good and evil as if they signified something real? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn certainly thought so. Much of his genius was that he recognized genuine evil in the Soviet system, and named it so.

The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s massive history of the Soviet prison system coupled with his own account of life as a political prisoner, contributed mightily to the Soviet system’s undoing. Its worldwide effect rivals or exceeds that of any other work of literature in the 20th century.

He had written previously of the Gulag—in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The First Circle, among others—and through these works he had gained fame both in Russia and the West. In The Gulag Archipelago he detailed decades of atrocities down and placed the blame for them at their Leninist root.

When, through heroic efforts and much help, he managed to get it smuggled out and published, we in the West experienced it both as an authoritative history of Soviet prison practices, and as the first-person account of someone we already knew and cared about. Soviet evil had been unmasked as never before.

John LeCarré introduced one of his spy novels by asking wryly why we were so worried about Russia: every journalist who has spent a week in Moscow knows nothing works there! He was right, in a way. I visited Russia twice in the early 1990s, the first of those trips ending just days before the coup that closed out the Soviet era. Russia’s economy was clearly in shambles, its failure readily apparent in the streets, in the shops, and in the homes. The people’s spirit was nevertheless impressive. Russia’s literature and music have long told of strong encounters with deep suffering as well as deep joy. The same was apparent in the people I spent time with there.

But the system was evil. LeCarré’s question, though almost cute in its way, had an all-too-ominous answer. Russia’s military was a genuine threat, and the Kremlin was badly using and abusing its people. My visits to Russia took me also to Ukraine and Belarus. This was not long after the Chernobyl disaster had devastated both of those countries. Mothers told me bitterly of how the authorities had said for days, “Nothing is wrong, nothing is wrong, let your children play outside.” Radioactive ash was dropping from the sky on them the whole time.

We shy away from words like “evil.” This is partly because we’re not sure we’re any better; it’s partly a result of relativistic thinking that doubts there is such a thing as evil. Solzhenitsyn had seen evil at first-hand and at full strength, though, and was unafraid to name it what it was.

He was exiled from Russia in 1974. Four years later Harvard University awarded him an honorary doctorate and invited him to deliver a commencement address. There he aimed his well-trained eye upon the West; not because he thought it worse than the Soviet Union, but because, in his words, “since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West in our days, such as I see them.”

If Harvard was expecting him to wax eloquent about the superiority of the West, they were in for a surprise. The “most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days,” he said, was a “decline in courage.” We had become far to oriented toward our own comfort, he said. Further, we had let the law become our sole arbiter of what was right or wrong. In the process, “[t]he defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals.” He went on to say, “It is time … to defend not so much human rights as human obligations…. Life organized legalistically has … shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”

Evil. There’s that word again. Then came this keen analysis:

“Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil … was evidently born out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature.”

That “benevolent concept” was one with which he profoundly disagreed. It had arisen from deep historical roots:

“The mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. … [It] could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him … with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”

If that was unsettling to his mostly secular audience, he was not finished yet: “There is a disaster … which has been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious human consciousness…. Is man above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?”

Here was a message straight from the Gulag experience. In prison, Solzhenitsyn had discovered the Superior Spirit, Jesus Christ, and committed his life to Him. His eye was trained and his spirit steeled to see and pronounce the truth. He had honed his prophetic voice in his homeland; he had won great honor in the West. Without that credibility, he could never have gained the platform to say what he did at Harvard, for as he noted,

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trend of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.”

His own Harvard message was hardly fashionable. He had spoken of evil as if it was real; he had spoken of courage and responsibility as if they were real and they mattered. He had spoken of spiritual brokenness; and he had called for a spiritually-centered solution as if that, too, was real.

These are not popular truths. Solzhenitsyn knew them more deeply than most of us ever will. He paid an unfathomable price for this education. We who have not paid such a price owe it to ourselves to give closer heed to the lessons he has left behind.

Tom Gilson is Director of Strategic Processes in the Operational Advisory Services team for Campus Crusade for Christ. His Blog may be found at http://www.thinkingchristian.net Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org

July 2: A Tale of Two Rulings by Chip Hammond

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST

This summer the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that have set off a storm of emotion. The two decisions, however, couldn't be more different in their foundations.

On Wednesday, June 25, the Court ruled on the question of whether a person can be put to death for raping a child. The state of Louisiana had a law on its books that allowed for the infliction of that penalty on those convicted of raping a child under twelve, and they were prepared to use it in regard to two convicted rapists.

But the Supreme Court struck down the state's ability to inflict this penalty by a five-four decision, split along ideological lines. The court's four liberal appointments (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Beyer) were joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee) to strike down the law.

Few people have been happy with the decision. Presidential candidate Barak Obama expressed disappointment. Candidate John McCain expressed something more akin to outrage. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said, "One thing is clear: The five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same 'standards of decency' as the people of Louisiana."

I come down on the side of outrage. I am close to a family that has endured the horror of child rape. "Hanged by the neck until dead" would be an apt punishment. I could cite Bible passages from the Old Testament that would support my contention, but that would be indulgent of me. The Confession of Faith of my own Church (this Confession's fingerprints can also be found throughout the founding documents of our country) states, "To [the ancient people of Israel] also, as a body politic, [God] gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require."

General equity must always be determined by a people. It seems equitable to me to execute child rapists. It did not seem equitable to five of the nine justices. In this we have a disagreement. And I must truthfully say that the disagreement is not over facts, but over principle and application.

The day after this decision was issued, the Supreme Court issued another. In the District of Columbia v. Heller case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms, not just the right of a nation's military to do so (as though any Constitution would find it necessary to stipulate that the military can have guns).

What is remarkable here is that this was also a five-four decision, split along the same lines: Kennedy again determining the majority by siding this time with Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas. This split is remarkable because, unlike the question of the application of the death penalty, this case was a matter simply of discovering facts, not of applying principle to a difficult question.

The facts in this case are not complex. They can be discovered by the average laymen. The dissenting members of the Supreme Court, who have access to the research engines of a historical and legal juggernaut, cannot possibly claim ignorance.

Thomas Jefferson said, "On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying to determine what meaning can be squeezed from the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."

That is a pretty good summation of the sacred task we entrust to the Justices of the Supreme Court. Just what was the spirit of the debates and the mindset of the Fathers as they codified the Second Amendment?

It is evident that the ideas of the English jurist William Blackstone had a profound effect on the founding of our nation. In the writings of our Founding Fathers, citations of Blackstone abound, second only to citations of Montesquieu. On the right-to-arms question, Blackstone wrote, "And we have seen that these rights... consist primarily, in the free enjoyment of personal liberty, and of private property.... to the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defence."

Richard Henry Lee wrote, "A militia when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves.... to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always posses arms, and are taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."

Thomas Paine wrote, "The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside."

Samuel Adams: ". . . [the] Constitution be never construed to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."

Noah Webster: "The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed."

I'll stop with these, not because I must, but because I'd need more space on my hard drive if I were to compile an exhaustive list of citations.

Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Beyer know these things. They apparently just don't care. They are not interested in what the Constitution says, but in what "meaning can be squeezed from the text, or invented against it" to suite their own ideological agenda.

To be sure, the ruling the Supreme Court is a victory for "The People." Had the phrase "The People" in the Constitution been construed by the Court to mean "the government" our nation would have begun its decisive descent to its own demise (read the rest of the Bill of Rights and you'll see why).

But we should be more than a little fearful that there are people on the high court who do not care about what the Constitution actually means. Before the lovers of liberty celebrate too loudly we should observe a moment of silence that this was one justice away from the deconstruction of our nation.

James Madison was prophetic when he wrote, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

Chip Hammond is the Pastor of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Leesburg, VA. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

June 19: Duty, Property and the Death Tax by Dick Patten

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST

Duty, Property and the Death Tax

By Dick Patten
June 19th, 2008

Americans typically (and grudgingly) accept taxes as one of Ben Franklin's two certainties in this world: "death and taxes." It is understood that a just society requires citizen contribution to the maintenance of necessary government institutions, and so we render to Washington that which is Washington's.

This moral justification for taxes does not, however, justify all forms of taxes. This is particularly the case when a tax impinges on the duties citizens owe to others and violates the God-given rights with which those duties are best fulfilled.

Christians have long believed that care for one's family—particularly children and grandchildren—is the top priority in a healthy society. Included in caring for one's own is providing for them as a means for future subsistence when the parents are gone. Scriptural passages, such as Proverbs 13:22, establish the moral duty of the "good man [who] leaves an inheritance to his children and his children's children."

This can be contrasted with other passages such as 1 Timothy 5:8, which explain the consequences for those who neglect their family: "But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever." Citizens of the city of man have a duty to provide for the subsistence and prosperity of future generations—those who will carry on society after the present generation is gone.

Along these same lines, the English statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke noted that society is a contract between "those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." It takes a degraded individualist to neglect the multigenerational nature of society and the importance of providing for one's own posterity.

It is consequent to this sacred duty to support one's family and future generations that Christians have generally accepted the concept of property rights. While the church has historically (and properly) repudiated selfish materialism, and it has equally accepted that the state rightfully must protect the ability to acquire, preserve, and trade assets.

St. Thomas Aquinas, medieval theologian and philosopher, argued in his Summa Theologica that "the power to manage and dispense external goods is necessary for human life." Thomas answers the question "Are Individuals to Possess Property as Their Own?" with a three-part answer, affirming the personal stewardship, financial orderliness, and public tranquility that are promoted by property rights. His argument for property rights falls into his larger natural law articulations, which provided the basis for Christian moral theology.

In the modern world, inheritances and property rights take on an even greater significance due to the legal development of capital. Capital, as explained by the author and economist Hernando de Soto, is a means of allowing assets to earn money. Capital provides the financial support for entrepreneurs and business owners to purchase an office, hire employees, build equipment, and turn an abstract concept into a profitable product or service. Without capital, those ideas remain just ideas—no new product is developed, no wealth is created and no jobs are offered.

Because of capital, an inheritance is not simply a means to further the heir's own consumption, but is an opportunity for increasing the overall wealth in a society. The inheritance left by a father can be used by his son to start a business or invest in an existing operation—enabling the heir to increase his or her standard of living while also introducing new opportunities for the rest of society.

Oftentimes, the heir inherits a closely-held (family-owned) business, in which the family retains a majority stake ownership and passes it through generations of the family. Such family-owned businesses are responsible for over half of the jobs in America.

With this understanding, inheritances are seen as a gift not only to one's own children, but to the children of an entire community. In the words of Richard John Neuhaus, "private property is not the enemy of the common good but an essential instrument for realizing that common good." Everyone wins when new capital is invested in the economy.

Hence, it is all the more strange that U.S. tax policy would single-out and punish those who work hard, practice frugality, and leave their property to their children.

Unfortunately, this is the very operation of the Death Tax. At the current rate of 45%, the Death Tax is guilty of confiscating almost half an individual's life-earnings, after the $1 million exemption. Many individuals will "plan" their estate around the tax, which generally means removing their money from productive purposes to pay accountants and lawyers and "hide" their earnings in tax-free foundations and trusts. Such legal tax-avoidance prevents potential capital from being invested in the economy.

Even more distressing is the fact that the Death Tax is responsible for forcing countless family-business owners to sell off substantial assets—and sometimes the entire business—in order to pay the tax. This is due to the fact that family businesses are often cash-strapped but may have highly-valued assets.

This leaves the family with a large burden without the means to pay for it, except by selling off "hard assets"—the company's machinery, inventory, and connected jobs. Though the number of family businesses sold has not been quantified—the IRS has no form to indicate "how the tax was paid"—there are plenty of testimonials to document the tragedy. In fact, 64 percent of family business owners surveyed in the Family Business Review said the estate tax made survival more difficult.

Nearly 200 years ago, the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville predicted the disruptions that would result from an estate tax: "Estate law itself would take charge of destroying fortunes in each generation, and no one would create new ones. The poor man, deprived of enlightenment and freedom, would not even conceive the idea of raising himself toward wealth, and the wealthy man would let himself be carried along toward poverty without knowing how to defend himself."

Fast forward to the late 20th century, in which Tocqueville was generally correct in his prediction. The wealthy man is not carried along without a means to defend himself. However, the very means available for the wealthy man's defense—hiring lawyers and accountants, hiding wealth and selling business assets—indeed stunts the upward mobility of the poor man.

Death and taxes may be a certainty, but that doesn't justify the existence of taxation at death. Civil government's legitimate goal of raising revenue must be balanced against any social and economic disruptions—particularly those which impinge on the duty to provide for society's future generations.

For this reason, Congress should act to permanently and completely repeal the Death Tax.

Dick Patten is the president of the American Family Business Institute, the only organization solely devoted to full repeal of the death tax.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

May 10: On Science, Politics and Religion, Pt. 3 by Dr. Joel Brind

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 EST

On Science, Politics and Religion, Part III

By Dr. Joel Brind
May 10th, 2008

In this third and final installment on this subject, I propose to use recent events in the industrialized world to make the case that in this ostensibly scientific age, the institutions of science have themselves been usurped by secular anti-religious forces loyal to an agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with science, except to commandeer its influence and instrumentality to remake the world in a 'post religious’ image. More specifically, the field of biological science that has been wholly converted into an instrument of those pursuing this agenda. This is crucial because, in a society where the scientific establishment is widely viewed as the source of real knowledge, it is biology that defines the very nature of humanity, the keys to human health and longevity, the world of all living things, and our proper place in it.

As noted in the previous installment, a key turning point in modern biology was the appearance of the totally mechanistic explanation for the origin of life itself. Ironically, the first expression of these ideas by devout Marxists in the Soviet Union (A .I. Oparin) and England (J. B. S. Haldane) in the mid-1920’s coincided with the pivotal Scopes “monkey trial”, the first court test of the classroom teaching of "mindless evolutionism" (somewhat inaccurately referred to as “Darwinism”).

The very idea that the origin of life could be mindless and accidental has a certain charm in its utter simplicity, but it is in fact an insidiously self-annihilating proposition, for it requires the denial of the very existence of life itself as anything fundamentally real. As Oparin wrote in his 1924 book, “There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter. The complex combination of manifestations and properties so characteristic of life must have arisen in the process of the evolution of matter.”

This philosophical abomination became firmly entrenched in the scientific and educational establishment, underscored by the almost verbatim expression of the idea over 60 years later by the socialist Linus Pauling, one of the most venerated biologists of the 20th century. In 1987, near the end of his long life, Pauling could not define the line between mere aggregates of molecules and living organisms: “It’s quite arbitrary. The properties of living organisms are those of aggregates of molecules.”

Indeed, it is that very idea which permeates all the biology textbooks and which is taught—to the ruthless exclusion of all others—in biology classrooms all over the modern world. Alas, the simplistic appeal of mindless evolution continues to charm the ruling majority of credentialed biologists, including legions of medical researchers who, by and large, have the public (including political leaders) mesmerized as well.

How did this idea spread so quickly? The mechanistic idea of life—rendering even human beings no more worthy than any other lifeless commodity—had already taken hold of the medical community in Europe by the 1920’s, and the idea that some human beings are “not worthy of life” was picked up and put into large scale practice by the Nazi’s during the holocaust of the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Ben Stein has just produced an excellent major motion picture documentary entitled “Expelled”, which documents this gruesome connection. While not quite as infamous, the slaughter of civilians by Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in Communist China outdid, in sheer numbers, the atrocities committed by Hitler during World War II.

Another key event in the takeover of biological science by the mindless evolutionists occurred during the 1950’s. In yet another ironic parallel with political history, Oparin’s theory was put to an important experimental test at the same time that US Senator Joseph McCarthy was infamously leveraging his Congressional powers to investigate reports of Communist infiltration through the entertainment business. In 1953, University of Chicago chemistry graduate student Stanley Miller conducted his now famous experimental simulation of Oparin’s origin of life. He constructed a closed system consisting of a flask containing the presumptive primordial oceans (inorganic salts in water), the presumptive primordial atmosphere (methane and ammonia), a source of heat and simulated lightning (static electrical discharges), a condenser (simulating precipitation) and a collecting flask. After days of letting this completely inorganic system run, Miller examined the chemicals collecting in the collecting flask, and Eureka!
Amino acids—so-called “organic compounds”, which were heretofore believed to be makeable only by living beings—were identified.

Miller’s experiment is described in every general biology textbook published, along with descriptions of his apparatus and the conclusion that Miller had provided experimental verification of the Oparin hypothesis. Thus, at the very time McCarthy was so publicly ranting and raving about Hollywood, the fundamental basis of Soviet doctrine about man’s ultimate nature and origin quietly marched unopposed into the biology classrooms of schools throughout the industrialized world.

In reality, Miller’s experiment provided no such verification of Oparin’s mindless evolutionism. Rather, he had merely demonstrated that some relatively complex carbon-containing compounds could be formed abiotically. In other words, they are really not organic after all. But primed by decades of theoretical allegiance to the mechanistic doctrine of mindless evolutionism, the misinterpretation of Miller’s results formed the capstone of fundamentalist biological doctrine that still reigns supreme over half a century later. Miller expressed his own spectacular misunderstanding when he said, “But now we know that there is no vital force and organic compounds are just those that contain carbon.” One recent biology text states matter-of-factly: “We owe our existence to an accident.”

Any alternate hypotheses regarding the origin and nature of life which would imbue life itself with some primordial intelligence (ideas we may collectively place under the rubric of “intelligent design”) are routinely and derisively denounced and even legally kept out of the biology classroom, a policy also documented in Stein’s recent film.

At the outset of this series of articles this author made the bold claim that the mindless evolution hypothesis, rather than being an application of objective science, has in fact no scientific merit whatsoever. While almost no biologist recognized by the mainstream would agree with this claim, there is yet some hope when one looks to other sciences; physics in particular. Hope lies in the particularly clear way in which a genuinely scientific view has been expressed by one whose name is still synonymous with ‘brilliant scientist’. In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote:

“(E)very one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

There is no doubt that, when the day comes again that a truly scientific worldview is accepted by the biological establishment, the teaching and practice of science will once again be worthy of its name.

Joel Brind, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biology at Baruch College, City University of New York. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org

May 2: Lawsuit Reform and the Right to Trial by Ken Connor

Fri, 2 May 2008 00:00:00 EST

Lawsuit Reform and the Right to Trial

By Ken Connor
May 2nd, 2008

This article is a response to Lindsay Boyd's Town Hall article, "Lawsuit Climate 2008: The REAL Climate Crisis."

Last week Lindsay Boyd, Townhall.com’s Associate Editor, posted a glowing review of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform’s recently released “Lawsuit Climate 2008: Ranking the States.”

Before readers vest too much credibility in this “survey” of the civil justice system in all 50 states, some warnings are in order.

First, a poll of in-house counsels and senior litigators who represent corporations with annual earnings in excess of $100 million guarantees a remarkably narrow view of state court systems. After all, these individuals are all responsible for defending corporations against lawsuits. Not exactly a broad spectrum of opinion!

Further, buried in the “methodology” section of the report is the tacit admission that the attorneys surveyed were not expected to have direct, in-depth knowledge of a state’s court system.

Interestingly, the $100 million corporate earnings floor happens to bring into the survey some of the business interests – notably pharmaceutical manufacturers and insurance companies – that are among the largest financial backers of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and also the most frequent subjects of serious legal claims of negligence and/or misconduct. Their participation in this bogus “survey” represents nothing more than a very self-interested attempt to undermine confidence in the civil justice system and fuel efforts to raise ever-higher the bar of citizens’ access to the courts.

The U.S. Chamber routinely rails against “greedy trial lawyers,” counting on reflexive support from conservatives in its efforts to undermine the civil justice system.

But conservatives should be wary of buying what the U.S. Chamber is selling.

As a trial lawyer for thirty-five years, I am among the first to admit that the civil justice is imperfect. But access to the court system is a constitutionally protected right, and at a time of rampant corporate misconduct it is a right that needs to be zealously defended. Conservatives who believe in the Constitution and the need for checks and balances in our public life should agree.

Ken Connor is the Chairman of the Center for a Just Society. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org

April 25: "Secular" Discrimination Against Religion by Zachary Gappa

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST

Many people today are concerned about the "separation of church and state." More often than not, this means keeping religion out of the public sphere. They say the public sphere ought to be "secular," free from talk of religion lest someone be offended. Religious freedom is interpreted as the freedom not to hear another person's religious convictions.

Unfortunately, this freedom of religion is freedom from religion. The Founders specifically guaranteed the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech by demanding that the government not make any laws to limit these freedoms. The first amendment in the bill of rights states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…." The Founders understood that these freedoms were in danger of being eliminated from the public square.

Sadly, these freedoms of the individual are no longer respected. The ultimate freedom is no longer the freedom to speak or practice one's religion, but the freedom to not be offended by anyone else. It is now seen as rude if one person defends their religious beliefs publicly. Beliefs about morality are no longer welcome in the public sphere. The only place left for religion is within the walls of a person's home or church. This new understanding of religion's place in culture has destroyed the freedom of religion which the Founder's sought to protect. Worse yet, Americans have ceased to understand religion altogether.

Most in today's culture believe that a person's religious beliefs do not have a broad impact on their view of life. In reality, a person's beliefs about right and wrong, justice, and how they live their day-to-day lives are dictated by their religious beliefs. For the Christian, these standards are rooted in a belief in the God of the Bible. For a Muslim, they are rooted in the Koran. And for an atheist, they are rooted in the belief that there is no God.

People do not realize that a "secular" public sphere inherently assumes that there is no God. Since every person's religious beliefs impact the way they view the world, a secular sphere discriminates against those whose opinions are rooted in their belief in God. The secular sphere accepts the beliefs of the atheist—that God does not have an impact on public life. For instance, a Christian will often differ from an Atheist in his or her view of public law because their core beliefs are different. One example of this is Christians who oppose euthanasia on the basis that God gives humans life and does not give them the discretion to end their lives. In contrast, many atheists would argue that, since there is no God, humans are free to end their own lives whenever they deem appropriate. By removing God from the public debate on euthanasia, secularism discriminates against the opinions of the Christian.

The idea that a person can divorce his or her daily judgments from their beliefs about God is a faulty view of the human being. Our core beliefs constantly affect our choices and actions, whether we are consciously aware of this fact or not. Thus the idea that these "religious" beliefs can be banned completely from "secular" discourse is simply false. A ban on the discussion of God merely discriminates against those who believe in God in favor of those who do not.

This kind of religious discrimination is seen clearly in a recent lawsuit filed in the UK by The Christian Institute against Google. The Christian Institute sought to purchase an advertisement from Google, "so that whenever the word 'abortion' was typed into the popular search engine, its link would appear on the side of the screen." Google refused this request, stating, "At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of web sites that contain 'abortion and religion-related content'".

If Google had simply declined to allow advertisements involving the controversial topic of abortion, their decision would be completely understandable and fully within their rights as a private company. By removing a controversial topic from their advertisements they would not be discriminating against one religious view in favor of another. But this is not what they did.

Instead, Google accepted "adverts for abortion clinics, secular pro-abortion sites and secularist sites which attack religion," while refusing to accept The Christian Institute's "religious" ad. They did not shun the topic of abortion—just the "religious" view on abortion. In other words, they have discriminated against those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief in God in favor of those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief that God does not exist. This is a clear case of a company choosing to discriminate against one religious view in favor of another, and it is unsurprising that The Christian Institute filed suit against Google, claiming they had violated the UK's Equality Act 2006 which outlaws discrimination "on grounds of religion or belief".

Google's policy is yet another example of the modern embracing of secularism. People no longer understand that everyone is religious. In other words, everyone assumes certain facts about God, morality, and justice as they lead their lives. Those who do not believe in God are still making certain assumptions about God which impact their view of the world, and even those who "do not believe in right or wrong" have assumed that no God exists who divides right from wrong. Everyone has beliefs about God and beliefs about morality which impact their decisions.

The word "secular" is used to mask discrimination against religion—as if there were people who had no thoughts on God or morality. The theory of secularism is used to ban those who believe in God from the public square, leaving freedom of speech only to those who do not believe in God. If we continue to fail to grasp the true nature of secularism, those who believe in God will not be granted equal standing in public discourse.

Zachary Gappa is the Director of Research for the Center for a Just Society. Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org

April 21: Radical Racism, Darwinism and Hitler, Pt. 2 by Thomas Gilson

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST

Radical Racism, Darwinism and Hitler, Pt. II

By Thomas Gilson
April 21st, 2008

This is part two of a two-part series. For part one, see here.

As outlined Part I of Radical Racism, Darwinism and Hitler, the pro-Intelligent Design film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed alludes to a connection between Darwinism and Nazism. Richard Dawkins has howled in protest. Following his lead, John Rennie complains in Scientific American over the way Expelled "says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context."

Dawkins contends that if a relationship between Darwin and Hitler exists, it is because "Hitler was ignorant and bonkers enough for his hideous mind to have imbibed some garbled misunderstanding of Darwin." We have all of Germany to explain, however; not just one bonkers madman. Why did virtually the whole nation approve and participate in Hitler's atrocities?

Richard Weikart has explored this question in his book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Tying together multiple historical threads, providing the context Rennie called for, Weikart finds that yes, there were many lines of thought leading toward Nazism, but Darwinism (as understood at the time) was an essential part of it all.

Racism existed long before The Descent of Man. Anti-Semitism goes back millennia. Darwinism did not create them and does not philosophically entail them. As a matter of historical fact, however, Darwinism became that which gave them, for Germany, scientific consensus for a foundation, and the force of moral necessity. We have asked, how did Hitler bring a whole nation along with him? He convinced the people that eugenics and genocide were good things. How could he have persuaded them so? They were well prepared for it by what had come out of German Darwinian science.

Now let's pause for a deep breath. This is horrifying and outrageous. Emotions, rightly emerging in response to this, may yet hinder us from recognizing the facts. It's worth reiterating that nobody says this is what ought to have happened. Yet it did happen, as we will see illustrated in a few brief snapshots provided through Weikart's scholarship.

Weikart traces a trail that moves from Darwin's contribution to moral relativism—a historical process carefully documented by Weikart—to its landing upon a new ethic: evolutionary progress as the highest good. "Progress," of course, was the multiplication and expansion of the Northern European "species" (as some called it), coupled with the elimination of less developed races.

Chief among Germany's Darwinian scientists was Ernst Haeckel, of dubious fame for his doctored drawings of embryos, ostensibly providing evidence for evolution. This was not his only foray into creative artwork. In another woodcut he "showed" by comparative physiognomy (p. 107 in Weikart's book) that Papuan and Hottentot humans were more closely related to simians (apes) than to Europeans. (Time for another deep breath.)

The new moral duty was to move the species to a higher plane. German zoologist Robby Kossman explains how that was to be accomplished (p. 78):

"We see that the Darwinian world view must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of the life of the human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human state also, like every animal community of individuals, must reach an even higher state of perfection… through the destruction of the less well-endowed individual."

Eugenics—the forced sterilization or even killing of "worthless" (minderwerthig) persons naturally follows on this. It's certainly a violent take on morality. In a book that went into four editions, The History of Culture in its Natural Evolution, Friedrich Hellwald wrote (see p. 169),

"Science knows no 'natural right.' In nature only one right reigns, which is no right, the right of the stronger, violence."

Given German Darwinists' view of the races of man, genocide could hardly lag far behind eugenics. Haeckler's protege Heinrich Ziegler wrote (p. 171),

"According to Darwin's theory wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower or morally degenerate peoples must give place to the stronger and the better developed."

Weikart acknowledges that some Darwinians were pacifists, but generally because the wrong people—the strong and intelligent—were killed, thus thwarting the evolutionary progress of the species.

Weikart summed up over 200 pages of similar material thus:

"It should be clear that among the German educated elites the notion was widespread that racial extermination is an inevitable process that may be lamentable but is ultimately beneficial for humanity—. Racism existed long before Darwin, of course, but Darwinism did radicalize racism in the late nineteenth century, providing scientific justification for racial inequality, racial competition, and even racial extermination. In harmony with the rising tide of positivism and materialism, Darwinism also helped sweep aside ethical considerations."

Hitler latched onto this sense of "scientific" responsibility for uplifting humanity through elimination of its "lesser" exemplars. Anti-Semitism seems not to have been specifically advocated by the Darwinian scientists preceding him, but a moral groundwork for it had been laid. Racial extermination was approved, which became a handy arrow for Hitler to aim at one group in particular. An entire nation joined him in releasing the bowstring.

I find myself taking another one of those deep breaths. I agree with Dawkins and Rennie that nothing about this is right. Yet it happened. The two of them may remonstrate against Expelled for claiming there's a connection between Darwin and Hitler. They cannot, however, change the facts of history. Darwinism contributed significantly to Nazism, and even to the Holocaust.

April 16: Radical Racism, Darwinism and Hitler, Pt. 1 by Thomas Gilson

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST

Radical Racism, Darwinism and Hitler, Pt. I

By Thomas Gilson

April 16th, 2008

Did Darwinism lead to Hitler and the Holocaust? Richard Dawkins, atheist extraordinaire, finds it outrageous that the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed would suggest such a thing.

Even 60 or more years after the events, nothing stirs up emotions quite like Hitler and the Holocaust—and rightly so. Its horror wasn't just in the numbers of people who were swept away, imprisoned, and killed. It was in the cold-bloodedness of it all: virtually an entire nation's agreement that this was a fine and moral thing to do. It still brings chills.

Thus we could fairly expect that one like Dawkins, holding to neo-Darwinism as the explanation for all of life, would be highly averse to associating Darwinism with Nazism. John Rennie (in Scientific American) also finds this terribly distasteful. They both point out that even if such a connection exists, it doesn't disprove evolutionary theory. True enough—but there's something about the suggestion of such a relationship that bothers them deeply.

I haven't seen Expelled as of this writing, so I won't presume to comment on how well it handles this Darwin-to-Hitler connection. But did such a link actually exist in history? Or did the film's producers simply manufacture it? Is it real, or is it crass manipulation?

The answer matters a great deal, because so many leading thinkers in Western culture, like Dawkins, take evolution to be the sole explanation for life. There are questions beneath questions here: what difference might it make if we are to rely on this as our ultimate truth regarding life?

Dawkins's perspective on the question is worth exploring. He complains that drawing Nazi ethics out of Darwinian science is just wrong. "It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is,'" he says. On this point he is quite correct. In philosophical/ethical terms, Darwinism surely does not lead logically to the conclusion that one ought to exterminate other races. The "is" of Darwinism—its explanation of natural history—does not lead to any oughts at all.

But does that not leave a hole large enough to drive a whole Panzer division through it? If evolution is the sole explanation for all of life, and if it supplies no oughts, then are there any oughts at all? There's a serious problem here, which Dawkins blithely illustrates in the same article:

"As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian)."

His moral beliefs have nothing to do with his beliefs about the nature of life. From where, then, do they come? In The God Delusion, Dawkins speaks to the cultural and historical relativity of morality. His own morality here seems suspiciously informed by the current cultural climate, and to be otherwise ungrounded. This is not to deny that he has valid and laudable moral opinions—but they are curiously disconnected from all else he holds to be true. On what basis has he chosen them? How does he know they are superior to, say, Hermann Goering's? Just by his feelings?

The answer, if there is one, is certainly not obvious; and therein lies a hint to the connection between Darwin and Hitler—but only a hint. If Darwinism led to the Holocaust, it did so only in one nation. Why was that, and how did it happen? ...

See Part 2 of "Radical Racism, Darwinism, and Hitler" on 4-17-08