Archive for church
1 March 2012
From Seven Ox Seven, Part One: Escondido Bound, the second of three excerpts from pages 219-228.
Copyright © 2007 by P. A. Ritzer
And to whom or what were the lawful and the lawless passing on their responsibility and freedom when they passed them on to the state? Well, at least in the United States of America, a republic, they were passing on their freedom and attendant responsibility to a seemingly innocuous form of government, a representative government, a government of elected peers. But those peers, too, were human. They, too, only ruled as well as they were willing to form their consciences to the rule of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” and to act in accordance with those consciences. Besides, once a matter like the slaughter of the buffalo was referred to the state, the state, in regard for all its citizens, was required to rule at a higher degree of generality than that of the individual conscience with its single subject, so that the general law of the state would be less adaptable than the more immediate and specific law of the individual conscience. Ergo, the individual lost freedom. For at that point, even if circumstances presented a situation in which the individual could act in a certain way in good conscience according to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” he might no longer be able to do so according to the laws of the state, because he had relinquished his responsibility and freedom to the state and was the more subjected to it.
Tom considered a simple hypothetical case in this matter of the buffalo. In that case, those hunting the buffalo, lawful and lawless alike, would continue the slaughter despite the obvious signs of it being wrong, if in nothing else than the prodigious waste of meat. Elected representatives of the people, outraged at the waste and the precipitous reductions in the numbers of the animal, would eventually pass a law to forbid the killing of the buffalo. Given that scenario, the following case unfolds. A man out on the prairie comes upon a lame buffalo bull that has been left behind by its herd and is obviously going to die. The man has a family who, though they have some food and are not starving, could make good use of the meat from the bull. Now, however, according to the new law, the man with the family must not kill the bull, and so the lame buffalo moves on to die in some remote place where the meat will go to waste. Before the law, the man could have legally killed and butchered the bull and fed his family with the meat, and he could have done so in good conscience. Now, after the law, his only legal option is to not kill the bull. His conscience must now weigh the law against the hunger of his family and the waste of the meat. If the man decides in good conscience, after weighing the matter, that it is better to kill the bull to feed his hungry family rather than to let the meat rot, he has decided, in good conscience, to break the law. This is no small matter, because in a free society laws should exist to protect the unalienable rights of the citizens; therefore, the conscientious person, in good conscience, should normally obey the law.
In such a case, then, the law, the conscience, or both have been compromised. This conflict between conscience and law comes about as a result of the refusal of earlier hunters to form or obey their consciences. It is a result of those earlier hunters’ failure to rule themselves, a result of their having handed over responsibility to the state, which, by its nature, must rule in a more general way than the conscience. That the man in the hypothetical case is not a hunter illustrates another point: when citizens turn over responsibility to the state, not only do they turn over, with it, their own freedom, but also that of every other citizen, even the most conscientious.
Tom reflected on how his hypothetical case also illustrated the communal nature of man, the latent sacramentalism awaiting men’s acceptance of and cooperation with grace. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” If one is diminished, all are diminished. So John Donne let the world know in poetry, some two and a half centuries before, what the Church had been teaching for some sixteen centuries before that, having been taught it by Christ. Neither man nor a man lives in a vacuum. The act of a single man changes the world, the universe, regardless of how private or public the act. A good act has the capacity to yield good consequences far beyond the immediate effect; so does an evil act have a similar capacity to yield evil consequences. Therefore, for man (the creature in whom matter and spirit are combined in one nature, created with free will, in the very image of God), all his actions entail responsibility. Responsibility is a natural concomitant to human actions. To shirk responsibility is but an illusion, as the shirker is responsible for that shirking. And because human actions entail responsibility, each human action deserves its due consideration. When humans fail to accept the responsibility for their actions; when they refuse to give those actions due consideration; when, after such consideration, they refuse to act on the conclusions of an informed conscience, then events like the slaughter of the buffalo result.
Thus, Tom considered three broad categories of men: the conscientious, those who formed their consciences and acted according to them; the lawful, those who waited for the state to pass laws to legislate their behavior and thereby relinquished their freedom and its attendant responsibility to the state; and the lawless, those who had no respect for the law and would defy the law as they saw fit, until they were prevented by the state from doing so, thereby passing on all of their freedom and its attendant responsibility to the state. Consideration of these led Tom’s mind onto consideration of another category of man, call them the semi-lawful.
(continued in Part Three)
Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer
17 October 2011
Recently I was asked to comment on the value and some outcomes of a Catholic education.
Value: Basically, for me it just comes down to learning truth within the reality of God’s creation and Church: truth within reality.
Outcomes: One hopes that a person comes out of a Catholic education with a committed sacramental relationship with God and neighbor and all creation and the knowledge and understanding to live that to fulfillment.
Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer
7 September 2011
I have been itching to write this piece for years.
The solution: End federal student loan programs!
And I have been hoping to see that solution enacted since the end of my college education so many years ago.
When I stood face to face with the debt I had accumulated during four years of college–which is nothing compared to what students face today–all I could think was: What a racket! Did they ever see us coming. The school has got the money; we students owe the money; the deep-pocket lender–either the government or the government-backed lender, ultimately the taxpayers–is owed the money. It was all just a matter of course. If you wanted to go to college, even if you were paying your own way, your parents filled out the financial-aid papers, and then you got your package of scholarships, grants, and loans. Take those loans out of the picture, and how much less expensive might college be.
Consider a hypothetical case. Say Vernon owns a shoe store. It has been in his family for generations in the same neighborhood. He sells his shoes for $30 a pair. Considering supply and demand, it is a fair price. Shoemakers get a reasonable profit from making and selling their shoes. Customers get a reasonable price for a quality pair of shoes. Vernon makes a reasonable profit, and he and his employees make a fair living.
Now liberal politicians–who are never more liberal than when spending other people’s money–decide that everyone should have a pair of shoes; so they pass the Federal Shoe Loan Program. Everyone who qualifies can borrow up to $30 for a pair of shoes, the loan backed by (or owed to) the federal government. Up to this point, people had shoes according to what they could afford. They budgeted and saved for them. Some had better quality or more expensive name brands, but people had shoes. For those few really destitute people who could not afford shoes, the churches, synagogues, and other local organizations–to which Vernon and his fellow citizens freely contributed–helped them out.
The day the Shoe Loan Program was passed, Vernon knew one thing: the price of his shoes had just rocketed up to as much as double what it had been. The day before he was making a living selling his shoes at $30 a pair, now loans for shoes are available for up to $30. The person who could afford $30 yesterday, now has another $30 available to him. It may be that the price does not double overnight, as it will take some time for the effects of the loans to make their way all through the market, but Vernon’s price will begin to rise immediately, and more over time, to catch up with the artificial inflation the loans brought to the market.
Of course, to liberal politicians, generous as they are with other people’s money, Vernon is a cruel, selfish capitalist. But wait. He has costs too. And once the market detects the inflation, artificial though it may be, his costs are also going to rise. Why? Because now that people have $30 more to spend on shoes, until the price of shoes sops up all of that extra $30, they will have whatever of that $30 that does not go to shoes to spend on other goods and services, and prices will respond by going up. And they will be going up for Vernon too. The shoemakers will know there is more money to spend on their products, and so they will raise their prices. So will Vernon’s grocer and dentist and podiatrist.
Ultimately, the borrowers will owe the money, the lenders will be owed the money, and the government will be backing those lenders, which will add another cost in the form of taxes to cover for those who will default on their loans. So the taxpayers are rewarded with one more opportunity to pick up the tab. Are not the liberal politicians who love to spend other people’s money wonderful. What a slick way to play the savior while facilitating the steep rise in the price of a product and passing on the costs to the citizens who keep voting for them because they are so generous, loving, and good. And keep in mind, with the increase in the price of shoes caused by the artificial inflation, the $30 will no longer buy a pair of Vernon’s shoes. So, those who vote for liberal politicians will demand higher loans, and the liberal politicians will supply them, which will cause more inflation, which will require higher loans, and on and on and on.
Now apply it to college. With all that easy student-loan money, is it any wonder that between 1982 and 2010 college tuition and fees rose more than 4 times the growth rate of inflation (439% to 106% [consumer price index])? Or look back even further. When my mother received her full-tuition scholarship to a private women’s college in the Midwest for the years 1946-1950, tuition there was $150 a year. Today, tuition at that same school is $31,360 per year or higher, over 200 times what my mother paid 60 some years ago. To put that in perspective, compare it to a book I found on my shelf. It was published in 1952 and sold for $4. If a comparable book sold today at the same rate of inflation as the tuition at my mother’s alma mater, a new copy would cost over $800. Instead, a comparable book can be purchased today for less than $30.
And with students graduating (or not graduating) from college with so much debt, there is another cost that redounds to the liberals’ advantage. That cost is the loss of entrepreneurship. At a time when a person might be best situated to take a considerable risk, when he is most likely to be unmarried without dependents, when he might be most willing to live hand to mouth out of his car so that he might apply his singular talents to the realization of an idea or dream, he will now be saddled with so much debt that he cannot even consider pursuing such a venture. Instead he will need to take his place as a cog in the system that the liberals are forever constructing of faux-compassion components like government student loans, the system that facilitates liberals’ control over other people that is their motivating principle. And by placing young people in such a position, liberals neutralize the most independent, those who pose the greatest threat to their control. And liberals also neutralize the threat of the talents and aspirations of those who may be more talented and aspiring than themselves.
Now apply the same reasoning to other faux-compassion programs that liberals have foisted upon us, programs that enhance their power and control and increase our taxes and debt.
Where does illegal immigration fit in? Bear with me.
(to be continued in Part Two)
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