Monthly Archives: June 2022

Greg Gutfeld took on all-comers during a discussion on drug legalization during Thursdays edition of The Five.

The co-hosts discussed the impact of Oregons decriminalization of small amounts of almost all drugs. Oregon sought to make treatment available to drug users instead of jail cells. However, very few users have availed themselves of help and fatal overdoses have increased.

This is what happens when drugs are illegal, Gutfeld stated, noting that street drugs often contain the substance in uncertain amounts, as well as adulterants.

All of these poisonings are street concoctions, he said. We always just say, Oh, its opiates. But its actually a toxic poison, its street fentanyl. This is not prescription stuff. So if you loosened the restrictions on prescription [drugs], you will save lives.

He concluded, Thats all I have to say!

Jesse Watters wasnt convinced.

I am not buying this libertarian mumbo-jumbo, he said.

What? Its called facts, Gutfeld protested.

This is a perfect example of libertarianism gone wrong, Watters continued. Greg has been singing the song ever since I came on The Five. Legalize drugs, legalize drugs, decriminalize it. They did it. Oregon listened to Gutfeld. Now, look at Oregon. Everyones dead. Thats what happens when you listen to Greg. You die.

Gutfeld replied, What Im saying is, if somebodys actually using a safe drug, this doesnt happen.

Is heroin a safe drug? asked Jeanine Pirro.

People actually take heroin, yes, he replied. Do you know that fentanyl is actually a drug that is prescribed? Are you aware of that?

Did you know that youre wrong? said Watters.

You will never win this debate, Gutfeld shot back.

If you do what Greg says, you dont get the crap from China, Dana Perino chimed in.

Thats my point, he responded.

Watch above via Fox News.

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Watters and Gutfeld Throw Down on Drug Legalization

There appears to be some old-fashioned union busting going on here in Illinois. Some people I employ tell me theyve received mail thats intended to convince themor, more accurately, to trick theminto not paying dues to their labor unions.

I use a motorized wheelchair, so I employ a crew of people to assist me in my home doing everyday stuff like getting out of bed and getting dressed. Their wages are paid through a state program.

Theres no way that these raises would have happened if personal assistants had no collective bargaining power.

I call them my pit crew, but officially they are my personal assistants, whom the government recognizes as part of the SEIU Healthcare union.

The front page of the mailing my workers received, in big, bold letters, reads: It can be hard to make ends meet. Why should SEIU take your hard-earned money?

It goes on to claim that the union spends very little money representing its members, and instead spends it on lobbying and frivolities such as hotel rooms and catering.

It then suggests that you can opt out of SEIU and keep more of YOUR money in YOUR pocket.

Page two is designed to make opting out easy breezy. Its a letter addressed to SEIU Healthcare (in both English and Spanish) that begins: Effective immediately, I resign my membership from the Union . . .

If this reeks of libertarian propaganda, youve got a good nose: The mailer is put out by the Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian think tank that calls itself the strongest voice for taxpayers in the state.

It seems that the goal of this campaign is to financially drain SEIU, leaving workerslike theones in my crewwith no union representation at all.

That idea scares the hell out of me because, when Republican billionaire Bruce Rauner was Illinois governor from 2015 to 2019, the wages of personal assistants remained stagnant at $13 an hour. Rauner was a cold, nasty, libertarian type with great hostility toward unions. SEIUs negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement for personal assistants went nowhere with his administration.

Since then, my workers wages have gone up steadily. They currently make $16.50 an hour and will reach $17.50 an hour by this time next year. These increases are part of the collective bargaining agreement that SEIU reached with the current governor, Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who beat Rauner in the 2018 election. Pritzker is also a billionaire, but at least hes pretty progressive, as far as Democrats go.

I promise you theres no way that these raises would have happened if personal assistants had no collective bargaining power. Obviously, the higher wages make my life smoother because the higher the wages, the easier it is to find people suitable for the job.

If Rauner were still governor, personal assistants would probably still be making $13 an hour. And maybe their union would have been busted by now, and they wouldnt have to pay a few bucks a month in dues. But theyd have a helluva lot less money.

See the rest here:
Smart Ass Cripple: Libertarian Union-Busting Tactics Target Illinois Health Care Workers - Progressive.org

The Biden administration wants to make the tobacco industry cut back the amount of nicotine in cigarettes sold in the U.S. to non-addictive levels.

Why it matters: The bid to essentially take the buzz out of smoking cigarettes would be unprecedented in the long-running public health fight to curb tobacco use, which the FDA says leads to more than 480,000 deaths a year.

Driving the news: The FDA can't actually just ban cigarettes, but can create "product standards" that make them less attractive, experts say. So on Tuesday, the agency proposed a rule to establish a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes and other certain finished tobacco products. It is unclear if they would do it at once or gradually.

What they're saying: "This would be really historic," Dorothy Hatsukami, a professor at the University of Minnesota who researches tobacco policy, told the Wall Street Journal. She's among a number of researchers who study tobacco regulatory science much of it funded by the FDA and examined the positive impact of low-nicotine cigarettes on consumer behavior and health, per WSJ.

The other side: Critics say the policy move would make little sense.

Between the lines: One thing backers and critics agree on is the reduction in nicotine could cause confusion among smokers who think cigarettes will become safer.

The big picture: The FDA first weighed setting a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes in 2018, elevating tobacco regulation to a level not seen since the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.

See the rest here:
Biden administration wants to take the buzz out of cigarettes - Axios

"The Economics of the Parables" (Regnery) is the most recent book by Fr. Robert Sirico, co-founder of the Acton Institute. (Images: Regnery and Acton Institute)

Fr. Robert Sirico is President Emeritus of the Acton Institute and the retired pastor emeritus of Sacred Heart Parish in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of numerous essays and several books, including Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, A Moral Basis for Liberty, and The Entrepreneurial Vocation.

His most recent book is The Economics of the Parables (2022), published by Regnery.

Fr. Sirico recently spoke with CWR about economics, liberty, libertarianism, Catholic social teaching, the parables of Christ, and current challenges facing the Church.

CWR: Fr. Sirico, your economic worldview, and that of the Acton Institute, has been described as libertarian. Is that accurate?

Fr. Robert Sirico: There has long been a problem with political labels; the word libertarian is one such example. I have avoided the libertarian label because it is often confused with libertine or associated with the idea that whatever is free is good, and that is certainly not something I hold to. I rather prefer Lord Actons insight that liberty is the political end of man. The problem arises when people think that liberty is mans telos or lifes goal. Of course, Truth is mans telos as so clearly and repeatedly taught by St. John Paul II, who deepened my own approach to economic and political matters.

Liberty is only an option, a potential. Of itself, liberty has no content. It is merely the context in which virtue or vice can be perused.

Milton Friedman once told me that he feared Christianitys insistence on truth claims would result in another Inquisition. I countered that the truth of which we speak is not coercive but something to be proposed, not imposed, which, of course, I stole from Vatican II. At least we agreed that liberty is necessary for society, but not sufficient.

CWR: What is libertarianism?

Fr. Sirico: I supposed it can be boiled down to the non-aggressive principle, which prohibits the initiation of force. Again, thats fine, as far as it goes, but we need something far more robust. We want something more than a free society; we want a good society as well.

CWR: Much of Catholic social teaching condemns socialism and doctrinaire Marxism. However, most of Catholic social teaching condemns various elements of capitalism and economic liberalism. How can one be a good capitalist and a good Catholic?

Fr. Sirico: Capitalism is another of those tricky words that requires clarification. What the Church condemns is a capitalist ideology. Again, informed by St. John Paul, I prefer to speak of the entrepreneur, the empresario who creatively employs his economic initiative in developing resources for human betterment, guided by an ethical orientation under the rule of law. In this way, entrepreneurial activity actually serves the common good.

I once heard (I cant recall from whom) Catholic Social Teaching summed up as condemning the roots of Marxism but only some of the branches of Capitalism.

CWR: Pope Francis famously condemned trickle down economics in Evangelii Gaudium(EG). What do you think of that?

Fr. Sirico: I wonder what the pope would say about a form of economics that percolates up rather than trickles down? I would like to see the pope think about the implications of his statement in EG that, Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.

This describes the free market economy about which I am speaking. Free competition in a market, without the kind of mercantilist favoritism the Holy Father would be familiar with from his native Argentina, actually disables larger companies from preventing individuals and smaller businesses to offer alternatives. This economic freedom has the added advantage of increasing the knowledge of the real costs of production, through free pricing.

Politically dominated economies are really less informed than freer ones because they hinder the information that those outside the favored class possess. This increase in knowledge enables businesses to be better servants.

CWR: There is a school of conservative Catholics known as post-liberal. What are your thoughts on the idea that Enlightenment liberalism is dead?

Fr. Sirico: The rise of the various kinds of post liberal, integralist, or nationalist tendencies has been a deep concern to me. It is not as though such experiments have not be tried, with disastrous results, in the past. The critique of Enlightenment liberalism is perhaps a little too unnuanced in that it fails to see the fact that there was a variety of Enlightenment liberalisms in contention. The reverence for the human form, reason, the scientific method, and human rights was not the invention of secularist humanists. All this came from Christianity, and I would contend that the best of the Enlightenment, including free markets, comes out of thinkers like the sixteenth-century Scholastics of Salamanca.

CWR: Michael Novak played a crucial role in your formation. However, the thought of Novak and other neoconservative Catholics seems to have declined in popularity since the Obama presidency and the Pope Francis era. What will historys verdict be on the Catholic neoconservatives?

Fr. Sirico: I came to know Michael Novak after reading his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, where for the first time I discovered a Catholic theologian conversant with the kinds of economists who drew me into an understanding of the free economy and prepared the way to the recovery of my Catholic roots.

Initially, we began a correspondence and when I began my seminary formation in Washington, DC, we became friends. Thanks to that friendship, I quite literally had a front row seat to the burgeoning neoconservative movement of those years in the early to mid-1980s. The Novaks would host a regular series of dinners parties in their home, which I attended (and even cooked for at times) to which the leading lights of the neoconservative movement came: Clare Booth Luce, Charles Krauthammer Irving and Bea Kristol (Gertrude Himmelfarb), Jack Kemp, Robert Bork, and many others.

Progressive thinkers came, as well as poets, artists and musicians. It was anything other than an ideologically closed conversation, often with internal debates among allies. I recall Clare Luce taking on Jack Kemp, Irving Kristol, and Bill Bennett (then Education Secretary under President Regan) all at once in a debate over the proper understanding of virtue. I wrote a bit about this in a previous book, Defending the Free Market .

Mind you, I never considered myself to be a neocon and disagreed at times with any number of them on what I saw as too robust a trust in military intervention or the welfare state. But I am indebted to that experience, which augmented my seminary training, where I was engaging with the likes of Avery Dulles, SJ, Charles Curran, and John Tracy Ellis (the dean of American Catholic history) at the time.

All of this taught me that intellectual movements come and go and sometimes return. The competition in articulating ideas serves to refine our understanding of the truth of things (whether economically or intellectually). In very different language, Newman describes this process theologically in his work on the development of doctrine. I think history will judge the neocon contribution of that period to have been valuable in helping to bring a great intellectual depth to conservative ideas more generally.

As to the specific Catholic contribution, it did more to advance the intellectual credibility of Catholicism in the latter 20th century than any other movement that comes to mind. From its influence flowed vocations to the priesthood and religious life, an army of well-formed lay people who came to occupy important positions in business, government, and academe. If the popular focus has been deflected for the moment, I am confident in the resilience in some of its key ideas, and that its contributions will be retrieved and developed in coming generations. I certainly see nothing like this in the present circle across the Tiber.

CWR: The Republican party could once count on a coalition of conservative Catholics, Evangelicals, and Jews who were united on a host of social and economic issues. However, the rise of Donald Trump appeared to demonstrate that a new conservative coalition will drive the Republican Party in the twenty-first century. Has social conservatism been eclipsed?

Fr. Sirico: I might see this a little differently. I dont recall a complete unanimity of the various elements of those social and economic issues, but that people were more willing to work with others with whom they may have disagreed. I never had a sense that I would be excluded from the Novak Salon because I was not supportive of the drug war, for example. We would debate it (mind you, debate, not pronounce talking points), and work on whatever other priority was at hand that we agreed upon.

What strikes me in the current era is that it is very centered on personality, and this can be both politically fragile and culturally dangerous. Today it is not just the left that engages in cancel-culture.

If we are talking in an American context, there is the additional problem within the Catholic Church in that the factors that would promote such a cohesive conservative coalition are weakened by a timid episcopal leadership, who themselves are weakened by the confusion and lack of substance coming out of Rome.

Some of this could be corrected by the emergence of the new technologies, but I am afraid there is so much anger and grand standing and downright intolerance to engage in deeply conflictual yet civil discourse, that until this resolves itself, we are in for an unpleasant period.

What is sorely needed is people willing to speak past the barricades once again. Only in this way can ideas be refined and put to useful purposes.

CWR: Millennials and members of Generation Z have a strongly negative view of capitalism and are attracted to various forms of socialism. Are the glory days of capitalism behind us?

Fr. Sirico: Of course, it was Reagan who said that Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. The threats to freedom come from both the right and the left who are much more similar that many people realize. I suspect that the negative view of capitalism, as you call it, is largely uninformed and esthetic. Ask most of the Gen Xers what they mean by capitalism (or socialism, for that matter) and you will find they havent exactly been reading Hayek or Piketty. In fact, I doubt may are reading very much at all, other than tweets and headlines.

So, the solution to ignorance is information, but information that people consume. This means we need to look to story, parables if you will. Thats one of the reasons I wrote about the Parables Jesus employs a mode of teaching that is accessible to multiple layers of culture, age, and intellectual levels. Their durability is demonstrable in that we are still talking about them.

Then there is the esthetic critique. If what people think capitalism is the Wolf of Wall Street or the Kardashians, then I am with them. This is why a balanced and effective communication of the Church teaching is so practically and morally necessary: We have to demonstrate that the work ethic and private property is indispensable to generosity and self-giving. That there is a harmony of interests, not always a conflict.

But we have to show that, not just give people the data. People are rarely compelled by data, but they are moved by wisdom. Catholic apologists need to cultivate ways to employ humor, music, drama and parables into making the case for Christ.

CWR: Catholic media outletsespecially in Americaseem increasingly split between a left-leaning or Left Cath coalition and an aggressive form of traditionalism. Is there a way to heal this divide?

Fr. Sirico: This is very true. We need reliable sources of communication that understand that just because everything seems to be going insane around us, we dont need (and we dare not), get caught up in that insanity. There is a difference between being assertive and confident and being belligerent, even as there is a difference between being weak and being temperate.

The healing of the divide can be promoted by good and successful models. And I would like to say here, and not to pander, that I think The Catholic World Report is so critical in this regard as a model of professional balance with clear fidelity to the mission of the Church. I would like to think that the Acton Institute is another example of this, both within and outside the Catholic community. For a long-time we have tried to instill in our writers and staff what we describe as the right tone and timing.

That means to enter a conversation with the right language and tone that does not push people up against the wall, but gives them time to consider a different perspective. And then there is the question of prudence as to when something needs to be communicated. As a kid from Brooklyn mother used to say whats on my lung is on my tongue. So, given that influence, I dont always succeed in this, but I try.

If it is any indication that there is a hunger for this kind of approach, the Acton Institute has had its most successful year last year, in the face of COVID. I think people are looking for safe havens.

CWR: What would you say to Catholics who are often confused and even fatigued by the state of the Church?

Fr. Sirico: I would say that I am one of them. Here is what I try to do for my own well-being, spiritually, and emotionally.

I find real comfort is in reading the history of the Church. I fell in love with Newman many years ago and he sustains me in many ways, both in the beauty of his prose, which I find soothing, and the perspective he offers from his vast knowledge of the Church throughout the ages. As unbelievable as it may seem, our dear Mother the Church is not at her lowest ebb in this moment. There have been much darker times in her past from which she managed to emerge stronger and more glorious.

Another opportunity in gaining perspective is meditative prayer. Somehow, I find my troubles dissolve when I bring them to the Tabernacle.

Friendships likewise remind us that we are not alone and it is always comforting to know from like-mind comrades that we are not crazy, or at least not alone in the craziness.

And how could I not add service to others? As a priest I have many (perhaps too many) opportunities to help others, often just by listening. Personally, I find it greatly rewarding to accompany others in their pain and in their joys.

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Economics, politics, and the parables of Christ: An interview with Fr. Robert Sirico - Catholic World Report

In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden's bungled policy statements and abysmal approval ratings.

1:35: Biden botches inflation, gas prices, taxes, and bicycling.

29:21: Weekly Listener Question: Even though most, if not all of you, are resigned to the fate that we'll never see a Libertarian president elected, those of you who do vote typically still vote for the Libertarian candidate, from what I gather. So, my naively hypothetical question is: Were a Libertarian ever elected president, what realistic things would you like to see on their "First 100 Days" agenda? The online libertarian crowd, of course, loves to post routinely about Abolish the Fed, Defund the CIA, Disband the ATF, and much more. Still, in reality, not all libertarian wishes can be granted with the power of a pen and a phone. Rightly so, mind you. Even a well-intentioned liberty-minded dictator is still a dictator, but there are things presidents can do that would be incremental steps toward a society with more freedom. The first thing that comes to mind for me is using executive pardon capabilities for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, but the list certainly doesn't stop there. So, I'm very interested to hear your Libertarian presidential wish list ranging from complete anarchy as KMW would have it to Nick's likely entirely drug-related list to Peter's statist apologist desires and cocktail party requirements, and even whatever baseball mandates and classic rock reforms Matt would request.

40:35: Polarization in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court decision on abortion.

46:17: Media recommendations for the week

This week's links:

"A Wonky Evisceration of Biden's Bad Deficit Math," by Veronique De Rugy

"Blame High Gas Prices on Red Tape," by J.D. Tuccille

"Fixing Our Economic Woes Is as Easy as Looking to the Past," by Bruce Yandle

"Political Violence Escalates in a Fracturing U.S.," by J.D. Tuccille

"Kamala Harris Is a Cop Who Wants To Be President," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

"Remarks by President Biden at the 29th AFL-CIO Quadrennial Constitutional Convention," by Joe Biden

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsors:

Audio production by Ian Keyser

Assistant production by Hunt Beaty

Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

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Biden Falls Off the Metaphorical Bike - Reason