How to Nullify Hollywood’s Baneful Influence Upon Our Youth

Last week (Thursday, August 19th to be precise) was Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) Gore’s 62nd birthday.  Which brings to my mind the remembrance of her instrumentality in the founding of the PMRC (Parents’ Music Resource Center).  This organization became one of the leading forces behind the mid-eighties largely unsuccessful crusade against the recording industry’s publication of provocative (and possibly immoral) lyrics in music (which term, strangely enough, includes rap).  Cogitating upon these events naturally evoked memories of the 2000 Presidential Debates, particularly the third and final debate of the series.  George W. Bush, then Governor of Texas, was contesting the soon to be ex-husband of MS Gore, Albert A. Gore, then Vice-President of the United States.  The relevant transcript can be found here and search the page (under your browser’s Edit menu) for the word “hollywood”; the relevant portion of the debate will be immediately placed in view. 

The relevant question was asked of Governor Bush by a member of the audience, a MS Joyce Cleamer.  She wanted to know “if there’s anything that can be worked out with the — Hollywood, or whoever, to help get rid of some of this bad language and whatever, you know.”

Bush’s response was positively scary in its implications.  He begins with a Clintonesque “I feel your pain.”  He then boldly asserts that “government ought to stand on the side of parents.”  Then, “you bet there’s [sic] things government can do.”  I can’t help but notice that the question posed did not mention government, though that is most probably what the questioner meant.  Yet, at the very outset of his reply, in the very position calculated to establish its theme and first principle, Bush proposes that government is the answer to the purported problem.  He then adduces four ways that government can solve the matter:

1.     “We can work with the entertainment industry to provide family hour.”

2.     Provide internet filters on all government funded computers at, e.g., schools and libraries.

3.     Provide character education in our public schools.

4.     Fund after-school faith-based programs (perhaps to distract the children from the prurient trash surrounding them).

First, wherever you see expressions like ‘government’, ‘work together with’, and ‘industry’ together in the same sentence, be very afraid.  Any plan that begins as a simple co-operative enterprise between government and commerce is intended by its proposers to become, and will ultimately, inexorably become, a program of governmental control — in this case, censorship.  It won’t be called censorship, of course; the enabling legislation or regulation will assign a much more benign name in a manner similar to the Clinton Administration’s substitution of the term ‘contribution’ for a tax, or of ‘investment’ for government spending — the better to dupe the American public into believing that something good is about to happen.  Moreover, notice the focus of this proposal – ‘to provide a family hour.’  Really!  A Family Hour?  He can’t be kidding because he said it with a straight face. (the video can be streamed from here)  I presume he means an hour each day of television programming.  What will be done with the other 23 hours of the day?  I suppose, if we’re to take seriously a remark he makes near the end of his reply, we should simply turn off television during those 23 hours.  At the very least, this is a very stupid suggestion demonstrating, if any such demonstration were really necessary, that our politicians walk around in a continual stupor.

Second, internet filters are notoriously ineffective; ask any parent or teacher who has observed a teenager query the internet for information for Joseph McCarthy (the ’50’s Anti-Communist iconoclast) only to see numerous references to Jenny McCarthy (1994 Playmate of the Year) instead.  Even where they appear to work, any reasonably intelligent schoolchild can figure out ways to defeat them.  Nowadays, most school-age children know more about computers than their teachers or school/library administrators.  Furthermore, are schools and libraries the only places that children can find computers they can adapt to nefarious purposes?  If they can find computers elsewhere, what good does it do to put filters on government computers only?  Well, come to think of it, at least we won’t be able to blame government for contributing to the problem.

Third, the idea that public schools are qualified to teach (i.e., instill) good character in our children is laughably absurd.  In the first place, who is going to teach this good character?  In the second place, stated differently, who will determine what shall qualify as good character in the first place?  Are we to establish Good Character Commissions in each school or district to determine what will be taught?  Will we allow each teacher to determine for itself what e shall teach as good character?  If the former, who decides who is qualified to sit on the commission?  If the latter, how will we guarantee (or, should we guarantee) uniformity of instruction.  If not uniform instruction, what we will end up with is a Tower of Babylon at the base of which are a thousand different good characters, no two of which are the same.  Anyone who would seriously propose teaching natural science or mathematics this way would be certified as insane; then why good character?

Fourth, intellectual honesty should have compelled Bush to avoid the term ‘faith-based’ altogether, as, in this context, it is altogether disingenuous.  What the term really means is, religiously based organizations such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; or organizations operated by them or closely related to them.  Government should never take from or give to a church any good, whether money or otherwise; and no church should ever accept money from government or surrender money to government for any reason whatever, however noble the purpose may be.  That person or entity that gives the money, controls how it will be spent.  Well, except in the case of government; they control how they take money, from whom they take it, and how it will be spent.

From first to last, the question posed and Bush’s response to it concern moral issues.  Ever since mid-century, I have often heard the absurd assertion that government should not legislate morals.  Every law ever to issue from any legislative body (without exception) is concerned with morality.  Legislatures enact laws making murder or rape a crime because they believe these things are wrong and that severe sanctions aught to be applied to anyone doing these things; they institute a graduated income tax because they think it right to tax the rich more than the poor; they pass a law making cocaine commerce a crime because they believe it is wrong to traffic in cocaine; they enact a law to build a bridge across the Mississippi River because they feel it is right to provide ‘free’ transportation across the river to all comers.  Rights and wrongs are inherently moral concerns.  Therefore, it is not a matter of whether to legislate morality, but whose morals shall be legislated.  It is at this crucial divide that all controversies regarding legislation originate.  If enough legislators today believe fraud is wrong, they will enact laws forbidding it and specifying sanctions be applied to those who practice it.  If enough legislators tomorrow believe that fraud is right, they will rescind the laws enacted by today’s legislators.  If enough of tomorrow’s legislators are largely indifferent to the rightness or wrongness of fraud, they will leave the anti-fraud legislation enacted by today’s legislators more or less unchanged.  In a free democratic or quasi-democratic society without any objective moral foundation, that is as it should be.

I now switch ground momentarily, and consider what my answer to the question would have been.  I would have replied more or less as follows:  “MS Cleamer, while I thoroughly agree that the entertainment industry produces material that I consider to be utterly immoral, the courts, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that this material is a matter of freedom of expression.  In other words, the government can do nothing about it because to do so would violate first amendment guarantees.  I happen not to believe this, because the term ‘expression’ is not used in the Constitution, but rather the term ‘speech’ and ‘press.’  The First Ammendment says, ‘Congress shall make no law . . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’  Furthermore, as the Congressional Record of debate clearly indicates, the focus on these provisions was not any speech whatever, but political speech.  Until the mid-twentieth century, the federal courts consistently held that legislators can abridge certain kinds of speech (e.g., defamation, slander, libel, incitement to riot, or, heaven forbid, hate speech) or speech made under certain circumstances.  What I propose is that we consider the problem from a different angle.  How many parents accompany their children to the music store or video store to superintend what their child purchases?  How many closely supervise their children’s television viewing or music listening habits?  How many are familiar enough with their child’s friends to assure themselves that those friends or their families will not corrupt their child’s morals.  The entertainment industry is like any other commercial endeavor; it exists to supply a perceived need.  Take away the need by eliminating the market and no one will supply it.  The material exists because consumers of it exist.  If children were properly educated (indoctrinated) to not want to watch/listen to this material, and were prevented by their parents from watching or listening to this material, the problem would diminish without any legislator acting against it because the market would diminish.  Here are some suggestions I offer parents.  First, do not purchase televisions, radios, CD or DVD players, personal computers, or any other entertainment gadgets for your children; if they wish to be entertained, they can use the household entertainment systems.  Do not allow your children to use their bedrooms for any purpose whatsoever besides sleeping or changing clothes; their bedroom is not to be used to entertain friends and visitors or as a playroom.  Closely supervise what they watch on the family television or listen to on the family audio system.  Do not let them use the family computer unless closely scrutinized.  Spend time, lots of time, playing games with them, helping them with their homework, or planning other informative and interesting things to do.  Why not read with them a good book and discuss it with them?  There are many interesting, educational, and satisfying (even fun) things parents can do with their children to help guard them against evil.  Stop whining about the problem and fix it.”

Will extending unemployment payments stimulate the economy?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was recently quoted as saying, “Unemployment insurance. . .is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy…it injects demand into the economy…it creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name…it is a job creator. . .and for those reasons should be passed.”  (See the YouTube clip)

Is this true?  Unfortunately, MS Pelosi offers no reasons for believing it to be true.  I can think of many that it is not.

In order to assess the truthfulness (or falsehood) of the proposition that unemployment compensation is stimulative, we need, as with any economic proposition, to determine not only its immediate effects, but also its more remote. While it is certainly true that any money receved by those who have none will be spent almost immediately upon goods and services (thus ‘stimulating’ the economy), we must ultimately inquire where this money comes from, who pays it or from whom it is taken. Let’s first consider unemployment compensation more abstractly.

There exist only seven ways to pay for the compensation checks sent to the unemployed.

1.     Each employed person can save a portion of his wage or salary in some form of savings account during the years that he is employed that he may draw upon during periods of unemployment.  By saving as little as 5% of his salary/wage, and given the power of compounding interest, he will have saved enough money in seven years to supply him with six month’s worth of income.  At this rate, should he never have to draw from it during a full life of work, even if he make but minimum wage his entire working life, he will have accumulated $180,000 at a modest return of 5%.

2.     He can purchase unemployment insurance from a commercial carrier, the cost whereof will be a little greater and the benefit a little less than in 1 above because of administrative and actuarial costs.

3.     His employer can purchase unemployment insurance for him (i.e., on his behalf, in his name). Most employers, however, will hedge in such accounts with a multitude of restrictions, some reasonable and some less so, in order to reduce their costs.

4.    His neighbors can voluntarily pay him his former salary (or, at least, a significant portion of it) while he is unemployed.  This is a good system; it eliminates waste and fraud and encourages the unemployed to secure re-employment.

5.     He can steal from his neighbors enough money to sustain him ’til he secure re-employment.  Of course, if he get caught and incarcerated for doing so, his unemployment problem will have been solved: in a perfect world, he will be crushing rocks with a sledgehammer during the heat of the day, or digging ditches and refilling them, while spending his evenings in a suitably dark and doleful dungeon devoid of libraries, television, recreation rooms, etc.

6.     The government can pay his unemployment benefits.  This is not a good system because it scarcely differs from 5 above and allows the unemployed to sit on his derriere at home all day at others’ expense. Moreover, like any governmental (bureaucratic) system, waste and fraud are encouraged and, under such a system as this, there is little incentive for the unemployed to secure re-employment.

7.     He can plant enough money trees in his back yard to supply all the money he needs.  Since trees, once planted, require very little care, he can still spend most of his time as in 6 above.

In the United States, unemployment compensation is part of the Social Security System.  Each state is required to establish its own system.  Employers are taxed by both state and federal governments, though the states are the collectors for the feds.  The conditions under which the unemployed are qualified to receive compensation and the amounts payed vary from state to state.  But the states never collect enough to supply their needs even in periods of relatively low unemployment.  Naturally, it falls to the federal government to supply the lack as they usually will when Democrats are in power.

This is the matter MS Pelosi was addressing.  The federal government can pay for this program by either one or a combination of the following means.

1.     Increase taxes.  Doing this will take money from some and give it to others.  What the others will spend (stimulating the economy) the will not be able to spend (destimulating the economy). The net effect, because of administrative (bureaucratic) costs, waste, fraud, mismanagement, etc., is to destimulate the economy.

2.     Borrow the money.  This will stimulate the economy today, for our generation, at the expense of destimulating the economy later for succeeding generations when they finally have to pay for it by paying more taxes thus having less to spend.

3.     Print the money.  This will destimulate the economy both now and later.  More money for the same bunch of goods means higher prices for everyone which destimulates the economy.

Only under plan 2 above, will the economy be stimulated now, though at a heavy price later.

Hello world!

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first post.  I “borrowed” the name from the story of the Apostle Thomas in The Gospels, especially the report of his reaction to the post-reurrection appearance of Jesus (i.e., his doubt thereof).  The name also expresses my own native doubt or skepticism concerning practically everything.  I don’t know whether or not this kind of doubt characterizes all human beings; if it doesn’t, it should. Rene DesCartes (1596 – 1650) recommended the development of a kind of studied or methodical doubt in a philosophical treatise entitled, Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method) in which we find the famous proposition, “cogito, ergo sum” (i.e., “I think, therefore I am”).  This is one of those “First Principles” that philosophers frequently argue about, and about which I too shall say more anon.

The motive and purpose of this blog shall be to discourse upon and discuss with its visitors a wide variety of subjects I consider interesting in themselves but important to the ordered conduct of society and the body politic.  In order for discussion to work, I hope my visitors will return comments or observations as frequently as they may.  I cannot promise to reply to all of them, but I will answer as many as time allows.

Remember, this blog is new (as of 17 July 2010).  I will require some weeks or months to learn the ropes and become effective at it. Please be patient with me.