LAURENCE BUTLER, a reader of this site, is the author of the following essay, which was written for an essay contest held by the Libertarian ISI group in Virginia. The topic of the contest was, “Can Character and Community Survive in an Age of Globalization?” Mr. Butler’s response was, in so many words, “No, they can’t.”  The essay is relevant to the recent discussions here on free trade and, though it is quite lengthy, I think readers will enjoy it and so I am posting it in its entirety.

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THE DISCUSSION of free trade continues. Many readers passionately argue that economic ideologues have caused the catastrophic de-industrialization of America.

A reader in the latest thread writes:

I have a B.A. in economics, something I am profoundly ashamed of. I have most of a Masters in Econ and did some courses with Murray Rothbard who was a spellbinding lecturer and like Milton Friedman had a simple, clear, brilliant, wrong answer for every complex question. Economists have spectacularly failed to predict or forestall two massive economic bubbles, two recessions and worsening unemployment (that’s just in the last 10 years). My own view is that the discipline is corrupt. Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes: 

Divorce has risen greatly since the government began to keep reliable statistics on the subject in 1870. In 1870, the divorce rate, the number of divorces divided by the number of marriages in any given year, was a mere 3.3 percent. This rate rose to 8.1 percent in 1900 and to 13.4 percent in 1920. The divorce rate rose continually in America from 1870 up until 1975, when it hit near 50 percent, and then, mysteriously, stopped rising any further. All the way from 1975 up until 2009, the most recent year available, the divorce rate has remained remarkably constant hovering around 50 percent during the entire time. 

Does this mean that family life in America as regards the issue of marriage and divorce is now stable? Did America enter a permanent plateau in its divorce rate after this rate had risen continuously for 100 years? 

The first thing I wish to point out is that prolonged stability in any social indicator, especially one as important as divorce, is highly abnormal. The cultural environment in America at the present time is anything but stable so an indicator such as the divorce rate being stable over an extended period of time is almost certainly due to conflicting forces working against each other that balance each other out. What is happening on the surface appears to be stable but what is happening underneath the surface certainly is in a process of great change.  Read More »

GREG JINKERSON writes:

Kristor has made brilliant remarks about the drawbacks of protectionism, but all of his criticisms are leveled against state-planned protectionism, rather than answering the axiomatic truth that a businessman is just as bound up morally with his community as any other individual. I don’t know where Kristor stands on the issue of an entrepreneur’s free moral obligation to the community where he does business, but judging from Kristor’s allusion to his own theological writings, I get the impression that he is sensitive to the spiritual dimension of trade, and I am in no way presuming to inform him of something he is already well aware of. I am as alarmed as Kristor by the idea of granting bureaucrats in Washington D.C. the power to dictate how and with whom private businesses are permitted to do business. But central planning and pure free trade are not the only two options available, and in criticizing the latter, I need not embrace the former. Read More »

ONE WOULD think Barack Obama had rarely been in American schools, real American schools, by the misty-eyed romanticism he attaches to them. This fervor was on display again in his jobs speech last night. There is nothing, in Obama’s eyes, that a school fully staffed by the graduates of our brainless, monopolistic educational certification institutions can’t do to lift human potential.

Following the messianic quest for an optimally schooled populace through its torturous contradictions, Obama has proposed creating construction jobs by fixing 35,000 school buildings. He also insists we employ more teachers – now. This is his idea of getting America back to work. Read More »

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the ongoing discussion of free trade, and especially Kristor’s excellent comments on protectionism.

Let me try to translate what he is saying into my own very simplistic terms. Let’s say the government had intervened to save our textile industry years ago and had imposed tariffs on clothing imports from Asia. Instead of buying pants, coats and shirts made in Indonesia and Vietnam, we would be buying clothes made in America. Read More »

Fisherman's Family, Winslow Homer (1881)

SOME PEOPLE say that modern industrialization took men from the home, and that this in turn led to feminism. I don’t deny that industrialization brought different demands, but men have for thousands of years left home in significant numbers. They left to fish, to hunt, to trap, to go whaling, to fight wars, to study, to mine, to pan for gold, to explore, and to sell goods.

And women have always waited for them.

It was only with modernity that large numbers of women lost the capacity for hopeful, watchful, ever vigilant waiting. It takes courage to wait.

A FEMALE READER writes:

Thank you for your site! Your thoughts have been very influential in my decision to quit my part- time job. I wanted to express my gratitude and share an article with you.

I came across this New York Times article about couples who decide to abort half of a pair of twins and I thought of the recent thread on your page, The Test Tube Family. Although the entire article is disturbing, on so many levels, I found this quote particularly horrifying : 

If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control. Read More »

“THE CHILD-FOCUSED DIVORCE” is the arresting title of an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that unabashedly promotes divorce. Illustrated with smiley family photos, a picture of a contented divorcée outside her home, and cartoon-like graphics of cuddly children, the piece by Elizabeth Bernstein is nauseatingly unsympathetic to the young while all the time appearing to champion their interests. Here is one more entry in the ideological contest to wreck as many homes as possible.

Child-focused divorce? Isn’t that like, say, “homeowner-focused burglary” or “teller-focused bank robbery?” In other words, there is no such thing as child-focused divorce in any meaningful sense of the term. That parents may mitigate the damage wrought by divorce does not make it child-focused. A divorce is only child-focused in the sense that all the damage is focused on the children.

Here is most of the article, with my comments in brackets: Read More »

THERE was an unusual moment in last night’s debate among Republican candidates in California. On the issue of immigration, the moderators from NBC and Politico ceded the floor to Jose Diaz-Balart of Telemundo, who stood directly in front of the candidates. The suggestion was that any of the candidate’s answers on immigration affected Latinos and Latinos only.

All of the candidates, except Romney, did poorly on the immigration issue, failing to reject amnesty directly.

The debate otherwise showed a party invigorated by its opposition to Obama. Despite the claim by some reporters that they “locked horns,” the exchanges between Perry and Romney were civil and engaging. The contest is between them. Any notion that Bachmann is up to the task of being president was dispelled for me by this debate. She appeared weak and somewhat robotic. Her reference to herself as a “mom” was dumb and Palinesque. She appears to be serious about this claim that she “raised” 23 foster children, taking it one step further on the national stage.

However, all of the eight candidates, including Bachmann, did a good job of explaining some of the basic premises of conservatism, especially why mandated health insurance and public entitlement programs are immoral. I liked Ron Paul’s answer at the end: Read More »

KRISTOR writes:

Free trade  would work great for us, and we would retain all those high tech industries, if we wanted to. But we don’t. How can I tell that we don’t? Because unlike the Chinese, we load all sorts of economic burdens on our producers: regulations, high corporate taxes, labor rules, etc. We prevent business. The Chinese try to remove those burdens, wherever they can. They bend over backwards to promote business. Read More »

IAN FLETCHER, author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace it and Why, which has been discussed here before, debates Forbes columnist Tim Worstall at Huffington Post. Fletcher writes:

America right now is being inexorably stripped of its most valuable industries by its naïve embrace of one-sided free trade. Here’s the Harvard Business Review‘s list of industries we have already lost: Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes: 

The American Community Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau, has added some questions about marital events to its annual survey. The 2009 American Community Survey results have been released and a report-titled “Marital Events of Americans: 2009” has been issued. These findings confirm the widely-publicized reports of the National Marriage Project, which have shown a widening social gap, with divorce and illegitimacy rates much higher among the uneducated.

Before offering these newest findings of the American Community Survey, I would like to comment on the focus of the National Marriage Project, which has enormous influence in the national conversation over family decline. 

The Marriage Project consistently promotes the idea that if only everybody took up the values of the well-educated, or somehow learned the secrets of marriage success that the college educated know, everything would be fine and dandy. There are two problems with this orientation. 

First of all, the well-off are just that, the well-off. If everybody was educated then those at or near the top would simply be average. The fact that the more successful are more successful is true but not interesting. The fact that there is a distribution of level of success in people’s family life is again true but not surprising. Read More »

Two Men in a Canoe, Winslow Homer (1895)

A FAN writes:

My housewife (of 50 years now) and I love paddling a canoe. That painting by Winslow Homer of a tandem canoe underway in serious water is something that has special meaning to us.

Few things compare with the cooperation, teamwork, and occasional skill required to negotiate treacherous waters in those unique watercraft. Wilderness canoeing is a beautiful way to “recreate,” to see God’s handiwork up close, and to “iron out the wrinkles in your soul.” The experience is a lot like life’s journey. It helps you learn to trust and to depend on each other. 

Another sport that somewhat compares to it would be tournament doubles tennis with your spouse as partner. Things can get serious there also! It will show you where your weaknesses are. You need to be well married to do either successfuly and if you have married “the wrong one?” Either of these two pastimes will probably be a good indicator.

A READER FROM ARIZONA writes:

Regarding your post on Satanic imagery on children’s clothing, Mexican culture has us beat by a long way on this “symbolism” beginning with the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, which may have existed in Indigenous cultures. There are skulls and skeletons everywhere and it is not confined to that particular celebration. The obsession with skeletons permeates the culture. Across the line and in Mexican shops this side of the border the things are pervasive. Clothing, folk art and every type of object are covered with them. Read More »

TO READERS who have enjoyed the previous posts on the ideas of architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, I recommend this excerpt from his book, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction. He writes:

In wanting to explain a cultural mystery — why the world renounced emotionally-nourishing buildings, and instead embraced buildings that literally make us ill — one comes up against severe obstacles. It is not that methods for producing humane buildings are unknown, nor that there is a lack of architects to build them; society has made a conscious decision to build what it does. Furthermore, enormous energy is spent in convincing people that our contemporary built surroundings are good, even though almost everyone feels otherwise. There is a basic disconnect between what we feel, and what we are told we ought to feel — or forced to accept. Answers to these questions lead us from architectural theory into social beliefs and systems. [cont.]