Tête-à-Tête-Tête

OK… I gave my apologies in advance, to RW, who turned me on to this wonderful column at Townhall.com - “10 of the Greatest Pieces of Conservative Wisdom”. I don’t get paid to do this, so I’m going to have to give a rejoinder in parts. Today begins with the first quote, from humorist P.J. O’Rourke:

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

Does this really sound like a conservative quote? Honestly, to me, it sounds like Malaclypse the Younger, famous for such nuggets as:

If you want in on the Discordian Society
then declare yourself what you wish
do what you like
and tell us about it
or
if you prefer
don’t.

There are no rules anywhere.
The Goddess Prevails.

Throw in a little “Instant Karma”, and suddenly we have conservatism? Don’t seem quite right to me.

John Hawkins, the author of 10 Pieces…, who presumably does get paid, elaborates somewhat on this theme:

But what’s wrong with saying,

* You’re about to lose your house because you got a subprime loan to buy a house $300,000 more than what you could afford. Sorry, but it’s your own fault.

I guess it’s just a rhetorical question, but, what’s wrong with answering it? I will. What’s wrong with saying it could include:
1) It’s pointless. The paramedic might say to the injured motorist, “Hey - you had a big wreck because you took your eyes off the road. Sorry, but it’s your own fault.” But that doesn’t do much to heal the injuries. It doesn’t do much to heal the injuries of the other family members in the car, and it doesn’t do much to heal the injuries of the family that was in the other car - the one with a careful driver who kept her eyes on the road. In fact, it accomplishes very little.

To carry that back to the mortgage holder who stands to be foreclosed upon… He has a problem - his family has a problem. The community they live in has problems. The lender has problems. The lender’s investors have problems. Fingerpointing, besides being a useless response, is also a tad childish.

2. It’s inaccurate. For lot’s of reasons. One reason is the old saw that it takes two to tango. There was a bank who made a questionable decision: to loan money to someone less likely to be able to repay it. The bank, quite possibly, was in a better position to realistically estimate the borrower’s ability to pay than the borrower herself. So, if we can find value in assigning blame for the difficulty, then perhaps the bank deserves some finger-pointing as well. And if so, then we can probably find some other problems with those lending practices. But let’s move on, as the lending practices are not the only inaccuracies here. Oftentimes, subprime mortgages go out, not to make it possible for a buyer to get into a house $300k more than the borrower “can afford”, but instead to provide the borrower with a lower “teaser” interest rate than they were getting under an existing mortgage, or to provide the borrower with some needed liquidity against equity acquired on the first mortgage. Naturally, this can be done for “good” reasons (for the borrower) or for “bad” reasons… I guess it’s an excercise in subjective values for the reader to decide which is which. But, just an example of something that is at least an “understandable” reason, consider the case of a borrower who encounters an unexpected major medical expense that his sadistic insurers cover at only 50% (it was 75% last year, but that was when they were charging lower rates), and the choice is between losing one’s health and job, and insurance, and home or taking out a risky loan. I know what I would chose in similar circumstances. In fact, though I’m of the class of people who is educated about the perils of an ARM and have never taken one, I have refinanced for liquidity for what seemed to be good reasons (including in part medical reasons), and I am paying a heavy premium for it now. It’s rarely something as simple as a borrower seeing a home several hundred thousand dollars more than he can afford, buying it, and losing it quickly. With the recent economic downturn, I’ve seen numerous associates “downsized” and a labor market that virtually assures they couldn’t land “on their feet”. I don’t know, personally, of any who have lost their homes as a result, but I would not be surprised of it if I did. And it wouldn’t have been as much because they could not afford the home when they bought it, as that they could not afford it after the axe - very unexpectedly - fell.

There is another illustration John Hawkins gives for the O’Rourke quote - again couched in the question, “what is wrong with saying…”

* Maybe you wouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet if you hadn’t dropped out of high school and had 3 babies by 3 different men by the time you were 25. It’s not the government’s job to take the place of your children’s father.

I guess the first thing that is wrong with saying this is that it makes one sound like Neal Boortz, which, in turn, makes one sound kind of dumb. But that’s superficial, so let’s just jump past that.

Of course, again, there is the “childish finger-pointing” criticism that can be brought to bear, except that it doesn’t cover the assertion that the government shouldn’t help keep your kids from starving to death if you can’t manage it on your own. It only covers the first part. But, for that second part, I suppose the answer is that it fails to answer the question - if it isn’t the responsibility of “we the people” to do our best to provide some kind of chance for these children that their mothers cannot provide, then whose job is it? And/or should we leave them to repeat the cycle their mothers’ either started or continued from previous generations… or to die? Maybe the answer is “churches”. Well, maybe so. Except they aren’t solving the problems. They are doing some great work - don’t get me wrong. But all the churches, philanthropists, and Foundations in our country are willing and able to address only a tiny fraction of the problems. That’s because those fine people - those churches, philanthropists, and Foundations, only include a fraction of the people in our nation. They only have access to a tiny fraction of the resources of this nation. And, they divide their time between addressing those issues and host of other issues - some important to all of us and some important only to those working on them.

Then there is the question of why an inexperienced, rash, horny (or needy) and unwise youth - one who is inexperienced, rash, horny (or needy) and unwise by nature - would drop out of school, or choose a partner who couldn’t be trusted to hang around and help parent a child. Add to those questions the ones that bring in issues like border-line mental illness - or full-fledged mental illness, and one starts to wonder not “what’s wrong with saying….?” but instead “…who the hell would even think this way?”

Then of course there’s the inaccuracy of the premise. Sure there are a few female high school dropouts who have had 3 babies by 3 different daddies by the time they were 25. No doubt about it. But the social programs that help those women and their kids are the same ones who help a majority of women who did not drop out of high school, and who have not had 3 babies by 3 different daddies by the time they are 25.

Then, also, there is the complicity of those 3 men in the process… or the one man, or the two men… or whatever the number. Since this seems mainly to be a question of finger-pointing, then what’s wrong with asking about their part in it? What’s wrong with doing our finger-pointing in their direction?

* Your business wouldn’t be struggling to hire workers today if you hadn’t hired a work force that is 90% illegal aliens in the first place. So, if your business suffers while you replace the illegals, you have no one to blame but yourself.

This is an interesting closing illustration for our P.J. O’Rourke quote. First, it’s a hat-tip to “liberalism”, as it focuses on the culpability of the employer who takes advantage of labor from illegal immigrants and therefore does his part to make illegal immigration an on-going problem in our society, rather than focusing on the culpability of immigrants who cross borders illegally to take these employers up on their offers of slave wages and conditions. At the same time it conforms to the conservative standard of referring to people who cross borders illegally as “illegals”, while not referring to people who drive over the speed limit illegally, who employ illegal border-crossers illegally, or who “out” covert operatives within the CIA using the same nomenclature. And it speaks of the “consequences” (going back to O’Rourke’s quote) of hiring such illegal immigrants as the “suffering” of one’s business while one replaces those “illegals”. So, that leaves plenty of conservative room for a regime that punishes the immigrants by deporting them -away from their livelihood and their babies- and “punishes” their Pied Pipers by having them suffer the inconvenience of having to replace these workers with someone else who will work for slave wages under slave conditions. No consequences for them comparable to the consequences of the “illegals” whom they employ…

We have these lines in the sand, and we come together on one side of that line and vote, if we are allowed to, to make it “illegal” to cross them. We even have good reasons for doing so, and we have good reasons for making it “legal” for us to sometimes pick up those who cross and send them back to the others side. We have good reasons for making it “illegal” for our people to employ those who cross “improperly”. Here, it would pay O’Rourke and his disciples to differentiate between natural consequences and logical consequences. It turns out that crossing that line in the sand brings “logical consequences”, imposed by a group of people who represent “authority” on one side of the line. This isn’t quite the same as the “natural consequence” of crossing the line: the natural consequences include a statistical proposition weighed in favor of increased personal and familial prosperity, thanks in part to those who employ the immigrants. Those doing the employing incur upon themselves a logical consequence (if caught) of a small fine, and a natural consequence of having cheap labor that does not require expenses for basic safety standards. In other words, John’s shake of a finger at the capitalists who employ illegal immigrants is a bit disingenous. He surely understands that these employers have already hedged against the chance of being caught with illegally acquired labor and have already found that the savings of using such labor outweigh the possible costs… just as the laborer has done. It is an arrangement that benefits both employer and illegal immigrant enough to make it a foregone conclusion that it will take place (under current rules, with current “logical consequences”), but which hurts American workers and puts immigrant workers at needless risk. And the risk that the employer will have to “suffer” while replacing the immigrant worker is a joke to laugh about with his or her friends.

I guess that’s why O’Rourke is a humorist. I’m just not sure that Hawkins is being intentionally funny, himself.

In any case… the issue does come down to a philosophical question about how we should try to balance natural consequences - which work very well to bring about evolutionarily successful species, and not too much else, against “logical” consequences - which we impose as a response to our impulses that stem from our values including our self-interest, with the goal of creating the best possible society for ourselves and our fellow humans and other organisms. Unfortunately, O’Rourke’s quote, as pithy as it is, and Hawkins analysis - clumsy as it is - don’t quite suffice. We will have to dig a little deeper.