Tag: Justice

(v) – Justice

It’s easy to swallow little sufferings, and think–“God will give them justice, God will show them the little ways they have wronged me. They will be shocked when they finally see it.”

Flipping that thought on it’s head is terrifying: How many people have I quietly hurt, scandalized, or offended–and I have no idea? God will give me justice for that, too. I will be shocked when I finally see it.

Lord, help me to avoid giving offenses, and to bear my suffering (small or large) patiently.

AMDG

CDXXV – Revisiting Scootland

In my previous article, I mention briefly an idea which I realize solves a major challenge with my own fictional kingdom of Scootland (The first article of the series is HERE). In that series, I take great pains to talk about different factions and ways to control their power. One of the things I was least satisfied with was controls for an unjust King.

What I said in the previous article was this: “So a King could not be tried for a crime unless it was in an ecclesial court for a moral evil.”

This helps in many ways. Scootland, you will remember, has a mechanism for the people to represent their concerns to the King, but does not have a control that gives them means of redress if the King goes off the rails. Suggesting ecclesial courts is an interesting idea and I want to explore it for a moment.

First, we need to revisit my article where I explore the controls for Ecclesiastical power. In that article, I suggested that the dangers from the Church are that they would seek more power and influence and award themselves exemptions from laws; or the Church in Scootland would accumulate money (by way of corruption or exemption) and use it’s economic power to influence the King or the other operations of the State. The Church and the State must be mutually obedient and cooperative with each other, so conflict here threatens to tear Scootland apart.

Giving Ecclesial courts the ability to try a King comes with some extreme risks. We can control abuses in this way by preventing frivolous suits against the King in the Ecclesial system.

  • Petitioners would have to establish that the King committed a public, moral evil.
    • Private evils are between the King and his confessor, so ideally the King is already doing some private penance for his inevitable sins. Public evils are both visible to the public and negatively affect the public. Murdering someone is an obvious public evil.
    • Moral evils require the offense to be against God and not necessarily against man. One could not bring a case to the Ecclesial courts for taxes being too high, or the King not being charitable enough. The best rule of thumb is that the King has taken upon himself some authority which is not given to him–such as governance over life and death.
  • Only the King could be tried in Ecclesial courts. The domestic system of justice is perfectly adequate for civil and criminal law, so the Ecclesial courts are only necessary when the King is involved.
  • The Ecclesial courts cannot depose the King nor sentence him to death, but they can impose severe penances. Wrongfully murdering a subject could receive the penalty of providing for their necessities as long as they live, prostrating at the murdered persons grave, begging forgiveness on his knees from the family.
    • Steeper penalties, perhaps, if the King refuses to comply. Consistent refusal could include everything up to and including excommunication. The King must subject himself to the Church already, so it is no different here.
  • Petitioners who make severe accusations which are baseless receive the penalty the King would have gotten if he were to be found guilty. Perhaps the probable punishment is decided before proceedings begin so as to ensure fairness and justice and to prevent excessive penalties.
    • So if Johnny accuses the King of murdering his son, and the son appears in court to watch the trial, Johnny must offer the King some stipend, must prostrate himself before the King, and must beg the King’s forgiveness on his knees.
    • Refusal to comply would likewise receive the same steeper penalties, up to and including Excommunication.
    • The Church could investigate the claims with an Inquisition (!) before deciding to accept the case. When the case is accepted, the penalties would be decided, and then the parties would come before the court to speak in their own defense, hear witnesses, examine the evidence, and present their own.

The Church is prevented from using trials as a power grab because the things that are eligible for trial are extremely limited, the penalties are limited. The people are prevented from frivolously trying to shame the King in court by virtue of the fact that they will receive the same sentence he will if it turns out their accusation is false. The risks of a frivolous case are extremely costly, but if you are assured of your case you need not fear because you aren’t going before a representative of the King, but before the Church to which the King is equally and also subject.

This control is essential because it provides some means of redress should a King begin to have bad public morals. It is a mechanism by which the People can go directly to the Church.

I can’t help but think this would work–but again, I am aware of the potential for blindness to my own faults. Please–tear this idea apart! Have at it!

AMDG

CCCLXI – Addressing Some Open Questions

In our previous article, where we introduced a conceptual social model under the framework of the fictional kingdom of Scootland, there were some questions which were open and which were raised by commenter David the Barbarian. Let’s tackle some of them.

Question 1: What happens to the Suburbs?

To answer this, let’s try and understand why suburbs exist today. Suburbs exist around cities, and generally are oriented towards cities. Cities contain jobs, suburbs contain people, and transit allows the people to get to the jobs in a reasonable amount of time. The suburbs allow for people to own a decent sized plot of land yet still have all the convenience and benefits of city life. Suburbs are only possible in areas that do not use the land itself for income (as in the Rurlands), and are only possible where transit is achievable to and from the City. That is to say, there is some distance from the city beyond which the commute is impractical and within which it is more profitable for developers to build homes than to work the land.

David’s comment says:

The distinction between Urban and Rural is very mixed up, turned upside down in some ways, in our time. Traditionally, the rural estate, from the crofter to the plantation, is a mini-city, a great deal of its goods are produced by itself. The monocultural agro-business and the suburb are mostly a product of technology, as well as social and economic factors, of modernity.

So, what I now see this thought experiment as affecting is making suburbs, exurbs and ruralish areas much more urban and rural in different ways. They would have to be more compact and more self-sufficient. The commuter town would just not work. That all would probably be more good than bad.

The incentives in the Rurlands are for self sufficiency and efficient land use. Because the Land Tax penalizes acreage, the priority in the Rurlands is to get bang-for-your-buck. If you can provide for all your necessities, and do so cheaply, then you won’t need to compound your tax burden with sales tax, and you could even multiply your income by selling the surplus of goods you provision for yourself.

The incentives in the Cities are for income maximization per acre, because the Sales tax penalizes economic activity. If you can build a high quality, low maintenance apartment building, you will earn more income than you pay in taxes both Land and Sales. Commercial properties would likewise want to maximize inventories available for sale to people, and the service economy would want to maximize revenue-generating employment per acre.

So lets say I am a citizen of Scootland and I have a white collar service job near the city but I don’t want to live in the city.

The land use outside of the city would not be efficient because it would not be producing anything from the land; neither would it be income maximizing for anyone but the banks in the form of mortgages, but again the ideal use per acre is for multi-story high density housing or low cost high inventory commercial real estate. So Suburbs just would not be an efficient use per this tax structure, not to say they wouldn’t exist but they would be much smaller.

Edit: It just occurred to me that we would get a series of wealthy countryside villas, because only the wealthy would be able to afford land that doesn’t need to be worked, and they could build a nice and/or luxurious compound on a small enough plot to get recreational use out of it. This mirrors what I believe we saw in the ancient times.

This introduces another problem I hadn’t thought about, so let’s look at that next.

Question 2: Roads and Highways

The incentives in both the Rurlands and the Cities are essentially income maximization per Acre, but using different methods. The Rurlands method is maximizing income by self sufficiency; the Cities method is maximizing income by density. Surface Area becomes a hot commodity to the sovereign–the Sovereign’s goal is maximizing tax revenue generating surface area of his Kingdom. So let’s look at roads and highways for a moment.

  • They are expensive to maintain
  • They consume a lot of surface area
  • They increase the efficiency of transit between the Cities and the Rurlands.

To put it briefly: Roads present a tradeoff between the movement and sale of goods within the kingdom and income generating surface area.

To my mind this tradeoff incentivizes highways between population centers and is another mark against suburbs, because suburbs consume a lot of surface area without being self sufficient or income generating. We would end up with a system of villages oriented around specific economic activities and highways between them stretching over undeveloped commons. You want quick and efficient transit and you don’t really want a sprawling road system–you just want to get people and goods quickly and easily from point A to point B.

Question 3: Military and The King’s Peace

I decided to combine considerations of national defense and domestic peace enforcement. The King ought to have a small professional army deployable immediately in case of an invading, aggressive neighbor, but it ought to remain small. the domestic peace enforcers would serve as the next line–trained for combat but deployed to keep the King’s Peace within the national borders. They would be deputized by the Sovereign and be charged with ensuring peace and apprehending people who violate that peace until the Justice system can evaluate their case. In times of military crisis they would be deployed with the army.

The third line would be a pool of volunteers, like the national guard, who train periodically but are otherwise considered civilians. The fourth line would be drafting military age men, let’s call these Irregulars. To reiterate:

  • Small professional army, sized appropriately to effectively mitigate risks of immediate military danger.
  • Modest force of law enforcers, whose immediate priority is the King’s Peace but as martial men are also prepared for national defense.
  • A substantial force of Volunteers, who train periodically for some term but are otherwise considered civilians.
  • A huge pool of irregulars: military-age, able bodied, civilian men who are draftable in times of crisis, but not otherwise engaged in military activity.

The sovereign’s responsibility would be to avoid deploying them aggressively, as unjustified use of the populace would be immediately unpleasant to all the subjects; and to keep this military pool large enough to deter aggressive neighbors.

Law enforcement would be funded locally as much as possible, and it would be the responsibility of the Nobles to ensure they are well staffed and supplied. It would be the responsibility of the Sovereign to ensure law enforcers and national-guard volunteers are trained and equipped for combat if necessary.

Question 4: Education & Universities

I like the idea of education being an ecclesiastical responsibility. This ensures that education is linked to the search for truth and that science, rhetoric, history, are all validly joined as aspects of God’s creation. There would already be a Church in every town and village, so why not include parochial schools as part of that? Tithes both from subjects and from the Sovereign (The sovereign being subject to the Church and not in competition with it) would fund pastoral duties as well as parochial schools.

Advanced studies would take three different tracks: Professional/Vocational schools, Seminaries, and Philosophical universities. Professional/Vocational schools would train students for work in a trade, in a profession, in a service, whichever. I went to school for Accounting, I would have gone to a professional school for accounting. Seminaries obviously would train both Priests and teachers. Philosophical universities would be for the truly advanced and learned men and women who are studying and advancing the search for truth. Seminaries would be funded by the Tithe, Professional and Vocational schools would be funded by private tuition and professional sponsorships/apprenticeships, and Universities would be something of a patronage model, like the arts. A learned man would receive a patronage to conduct his studies at a place of learning in some quest for truth. The patronage would pay for his necessities and a fee to the university to allow him to live there and access the academic resources of the university.

Question 5: International Trade

We’ve already built out a model for this, somewhat. The policy would be that products would not be permitted to leave the country so long as some domestic need is unmet. For example, if there are starving people anywhere in the country, the King would not permit exporting food. If there was a lumber shortage in one part of the country, we would not export lumber from another. Exporting is for surplus after needs are met.

Foreign investment would be tightly controlled as well. Again–foreign companies wanting to manufacture goods would not be able to export raw materials–raw materials would never be exported, because they must be used to serve domestic needs first. Neither could manufactured goods be directly exported unless domestic demand for them was fully satisfied. Effectively, anything produced and extracted, all economic activity, would be geared first towards satisfying domestic needs, and then be permitted to exit the country. It is the failure of this that leads to a permanent third world and exploitation of resources and workers in other countries. No matter what riches are offered, the most prudent thing is always to ensure domestic needs are met first. This creates an incentive in foreign nations and in domestic manufacturers to ensure domestic needs are met so that they can export to their hearts content.

Importing foreign goods would only be to supplement unmet demand internally. If population exceeds food supply, for example, we would need to import food, but we would not import food after the food supply caught up, because then the cheap import would serve as a disincentive for domestic production. This system would be balanced with tariffs.

That’s all for now. What else did I miss? In the next installment I think I am going to start exploring defects in the system using other states to illustrate when things don’t work according to the ideal.

AMDG

CCCLVIII – Zippy on Property Taxes and Currency

I was reading Zippy again, here comes trouble. I stumbled upon some comments of his in the wild on other sites and just really admire the clarity and force of his arguments. Now that I grok his points, his arguments are very frustrating to witness. He is saying things very clearly and it is literally only the blindfolds of his interlocutors that prevent them from understanding him. He was extremely patient at answering respectful questions and extremely diligent at ending the conversation the second it turned south.

So, one thing led to another and I end up at this article by Zippy that touches on Property Taxes and all my old gears started spooling up again.

This article is going to be a stab at restating Zippy’s argument in a way that I can understand so that when I try to fit my ideas of currency into it, I am speaking from an intelligible place.

“Usury is rent charged for something which does not actually exist. Thus usury is unjust: it is (…) a something-for-nothing taking from the borrower.”

“The value imputed for the property tax rests on the mere potentiality of selling the property for its assessed value. There isn’t any actual sale for actual dollars; there is merely a potential sale which does not in fact occur.”

“If it is intrinsically unjust to charge rent for something which doesn’t actually exist, it is also intrinsically unjust to tax what does not actually exist.”

These are the key premises according to Zippy.

There are some assumptions:

  • Currency as tax vouchers
    • This is the best explanation of the tax vouchers thesis I’ve seen from him so far: Currency has value as a means of exchange because it can be used to pay taxes.
      • I don’t agree with this because it feels tautological. I will revisit it in a subsequent post if I don’t touch on it here.
  • Property taxes are a tax on the potential sale.
    • I think there is an argument to be made that property tax is rent for use of sovereign land, and the assessed value is just a macguffin for calculating that. Zippy’s approach might be realist in that sense but I think it accidentally uses the wrong part of the transaction as the fulcrum for realist analysis.

Lets start digging into this with our ideas.

Currency and Taxation Revisited

I don’t like the tax vouchers idea because it is tautological. Currency has value because the sovereign accepts it as payment of taxes. It reduces the function of the sovereign to that of a tax administrator, and it presumes that currency is freely in circulation and the sovereign could accept empty cans of cola in payment but it chooses to accept greenbacks.

Currency is more complicated than that because only the sovereign can issue it, the medium of the currency itself doesn’t have to have any value whatsoever, and the exchange rate for real property changes based on the amount in circulation. Note that the issuance, valuation, and exchange of currency has nothing to do with taxation. Taxation is a separate function of the sovereign, and by no means the only function of the sovereign.

Taxation is a lawful function of the sovereign, and takes the form of a levy of property kind of like the draft is a levy of personnel. The specific mechanism of taxation can be just or unjust, but in principle taxation is allowed to the sovereign.

The easiest to understand and most just form of taxation is a direct levy. The sovereign says “I need One Billion scootbucks for some public good” and sends the bill down the chain such that every citizen of Scootland gets their portion of the billion scootbuck levy.

Progressive taxation changes the amount of the levy for each person based on their accumulated property. A person with more property has to pay a higher levy. A person with less property has to pay a lower levy.

Sales taxes are intelligible because they are a standing levy on economic activity. If taxation is “returning to Caesar that which is Caesar” then it is analogous to “pouring one out” for the boys–sacrificing the first part of a drink or a meal in homage to God or ones friends of fond memory. Sales tax is saying the first part of your economic activity should be to give a token to the Sovereign and the rest is barter between willing parties. Sales taxes are inherently progressive because people with more property have more means for transacting and so naturally transact more and pay more as a proportion of their income to the sovereign.

Income taxes are complicated, but it is similar to the Sales tax in that you are paying the first part of your economic activity to the sovereign. I receive a wage of SB100 and pay SB1 in homage to the sovereign so I take home SB99. Sales and Income taxes avoid the levy system and allow the sovereign to have a standing order of property from the people, in the form of default tokens received from economic activity.

This brings us to property taxes. Zippy’s thesis that property tax is a tax on a potential sale doesn’t make sense to me, because it’s not economic activity. It’s a tax on the property itself, as the name implies. As I suggest above, property tax could be construed as rent for use of a portion of the sovereign land. But if that were true, everyone’s property tax bill would be identical per unit of that land. What makes property taxes confusing is that they are based on the improved value of that land–improvements which the sovereign had no hand in other than to authorize via the delegated authority to acquire property that is currency. I would argue that the thing that makes property taxes unjust is the reliance on the improved value. It would be OK if property tax was merely a charge for use of property. This has negative economic consequences, sure, but at least if everyone had the same tax per acre then it would be intelligible and “equal”. Charging for the improved value penalizes improvements, and provides an economic disincentive. It is unjust the same way a progressive levy is unjust, because it penalizes people for the arbitrary reason of having property and not for the intelligible reason of using property.

Of course, the use of property does not automatically make a tax just, just that it does a better job of treating all subjects to the sovereign as equal in his paternal eyes. The benefit offered to the poor is taken away by the injustice done to the rich.

So, to quote the inimitable Zippy:

“Thoughts?”

AMDG

EDIT:

AHA! I feel very affirmed, I followed some links to the previous article and ended up at the Orthosphere. Zippy says in a comment there:

Again, precisely what is at issue is if it is possible for the sovereign to commit theft against his subjects (whether he labels it a “tax” or not), and under precisely what conditions.

Someone might contend that it is not — that all ownership is merely delegation of sovereign authority rather than a distinct authority in its own right under the natural law. But playing games with labels (“tax”) and declaring taxation licit is just a pointless nominalist rhetorical gambit which attempts to avoid what is at issue rather than addressing it.

My theory of currency is derivative of this: Currency represents future property, so it is a stand in for ownership until the unit of currency can be traded for a unit of real property. The delegated authority follows. Zippy is aware of this logical conclusion but did not follow it through to the currency used to acquire property. I don’t know why.

I’ll count this as a win though, it is nice to see I am not treading any new ground just discovering old ground that is so well worn as to be unrecognizable!

CCLXXXII – Any Enemy of Our Lady Is My Enemy

I just received an email from my parish that a grotto dedicated to Our Lady, with a statue of her and three smaller statues representing the children of Fatima, was vandalized beyond repair last night. I am deeply saddened by this–and surprisingly find myself angry. That isn’t just OUR Blessed Mother, that is MY Blessed Mother. And yours too.

This particular grotto is of profound personal importance to me as well. […] Just last night I attended a meeting of the Legion of Mary, and after the meeting went to offer flowers to Our Lady at this grotto. I might have been the last person to see the statue fully intact, excluding the perpetrators.

I am angry at this news–angry as if my own mother had been assaulted in the street. I don’t care so much about the personal loss of a place of fond memory–I know the grotto will be replaced and I have already emailed my parish Priest to offer my time, treasure, and talent, such as it is, to any efforts to replace the grotto. I don’t care so much either about the physical loss–though it is great. I am upset that a sacred place has been desecrated, that Our Lady has been treated with disrespect, that some soul in a place of torment and trial felt that this was a good idea.

To the perpetrator or perpetrators, I have only pity. Mary is literally Christ’s mother, so I can only pray that God have mercy on their souls. May their guardian angels bring them to repentance and convert them. May this loss–which, after all, is a merely physical loss–be turned to good for the conversion of souls with and through the intercession of Mary.

But know also this: Any enemy of Our Lady of Peace is my enemy. God’s justice and retribution is greater than anything I could offer, my revenge will be in helping to restore the grotto to a place of greater glory and to direct more souls to the care and intercession of Our Blessed Mother. I will wage war through prayer.

Please join me in battle, and pray the Litany of Loreto (Link Here) for the souls of the perpetrators, and for my Parish to consecrate itself more fully to Our Lady.

To Jesus, Through Mary

AMDG

CCXIX – Developing Economic Resources

There’s a point I arrived at in my previous article which I would like to expand upon. This is the comparative utility of money and resources.

In that article, I talked about how the corporate exfiltration of resources from developing countries in exchange for money was not an equal exchange: The party that receives money is the worse for it. There’s a few aspects to this idea so lets take them bit by bit.

The first aspect we need to make sure we understand is the nature of money and the nature of resources. Money is the means of exchange–we know it intuitively as the cash in our wallets, even if writing a formal definition is not very simple. Resources are raw materials which can be transformed by work into goods which can be brought to market. We understand this concept intuitively as well, even if the formal definition is wide ranging.

Money is useful as a medium for transferring value. If I own a house, I cannot carry that house with me and exchange pieces of it for goods. We use Money as this proxy. Money once was used in exactly this way when we had a Gold Standard–money represented actual, tangible portions of Gold and at any time could be exchanged for the equivalent quantity. Fiat currency is more complicated than I have the time or patience to get into here, but in short let us just say that a fiat dollar is money which is backed by a government rather than by a resource.

Resources are useful as a medium for storing value. I can store a house or I can store a pile of cash for thirty years. The pile of cash will not change in value, the house might appreciate in value based on the market. Raw materials are resources which store potential value. A gold deposit isn’t useful to anyone, but can be made into something useful for someone, and it is that potentiality that gives it value. A golden ring has actual value–the raw gold has been transformed into something that people want and are willing to exchange value for. Both the golden ring and the gold deposit will still be valuable in thirty years, but the cash–the money–will only ever be worth it’s face value. No one exchanges value for money, but people do exchange money for value.

This is an important preface to this next aspect. The developed world uses money to measure everything. This is because money is constantly being transferred, value is constantly being created, and the developed world interacts with itself on roughly equal footing. You can compare two developed nations by comparing their Gross Domestic Product (GDP)–a measure of the total money that changed hands within their borders. Gross Domestic Product doesn’t say anything about the value that is being transferred, but it does say how much money is being transferred. A “Rich” nation has lots of money. A “rich” person may not even have any resources or assets–just vast sums of money. This is all well and good, but a complete picture of financial health should capture some view of resources.

The developing world does not have much in the way of money. They are generally abundant in resources, either actual or potential, but want for money. Because the developed world measures everything by money, they see these nations and think them to be “poor” and so begin as best as they can the flow of money from the developed to the developing world. This is all well and good–but money is useful for transferring value, not for storing it. When money changes hands, value is transferring one way or another. Typically, money will be used to secure access to the potential value stored in the untransformed resources of developing nation. Then typically a company will transform those resources, and transfer them through their supply chain around the world, where they will transfer that value for more money than it required to make the transformation. The end result is a net flow of stored value out of developing nations, and a net increase in money for a company.

Why is this bad? The goal is that we want developing nations to become developed nations, through improvements to the standard of living and quality of life of the citizens of those nations. For a developing nation to really fuel their economic dynamo, they need the ability, technology, and cultural will to extract resources and transform potential value into actual value. The process of doing that will result in concrete improvements to the quality of life and standard of living.

A logical next question would be–well, why haven’t they done that? When the first movers went global, they gained the ability to negotiate with developing nations as if money was the most valuable resource, and made deals based on that. On paper such deals look fine: everyone is exchanging goods or services for money at an agreed upon price, everyone is happy! But when foreign actors enter a developing nation, secure the rights to their resources, and perform the transformation, they are denying the domestic actors the ability of acquiring that skill and expertise. The cultural will to develop their own competencies is muted and the technology is brought in and utilized by external parties, so the ability is not developed. Developing nations must be able to Extract, transform, and transfer value on their own to improve their economic welfare. Third parties can help with this process, but the process must be effectuated domestically.

This is why we see isolationist or high tariff policies working extremely well to incubate industries. This method was deployed by Japan and Korea in the technology industry, and by preventing foreign parties from interfering, developed their own competencies and are now highly skilled in that industry.

GDP is only effective at comparing like nations. Germany and the United States can be compared on industrial power and consumerism using money as a proxy. Developing nations can be compared using money, but it would be most useful if there was some measure of the amount of value transformations which are taking place. If we compare disparate nations by a measure that is not well suited to them, we will misdiagnose the problem and so prescribe an incorrect remedy. If the problem is relieving poverty, raising the standard of living, improving the quality of life around the entire world, it first involves understanding how value can be transformed and retained within developing nations.

AMDG

CCVIII – Bronze Age Ramble

There’s a history channel on youtube that has done an excellent series on Rome which I recommend to all with the slightest interest. It is simultaneously approachable and detailed. They did a video on the Bronze Age Collapse over the summer and it has captured my imagination. The main reason I have spent so much time thinking about this is because of letters (or rather, clay tablets) written by the King of a city called Ugarit in 1200 BC about a mass migration of strange peoples into their lands:

“They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and chariots are stationed in Khatte, and that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka? They have not arrived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate. May my father be aware of this matter. Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report somehow so that I will know.”

After receiving a reply to his previous message, He wrote: “When your messenger arrived the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt, and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!”

This is a chilling pair of messages, for both it’s humanity and it’s vividness. It’s oddly relatable in terms of tactics. A similar letter could have been sent by a British leader during the Battle of Britain in World War 2. The desperation in the final refrain is unmistakable, and it’s not hard to imagine the King leaving his beloved city for the last time, fleeing for his life and looking back on it’s ruins once he was a safe distance.

I am sure the King of Ugarit thought the arc of history was long and tended towards justice. It’s hard to see how that’s the case when Ugarit lies in ruins to this day. The only part of history that tends to good is Salvation History, and that peaked with Christ and now we are left to our own devices and the grace of God.

I’m reminded of John 12:25: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto life eternal.” May you know it! May you know it!

LXX – Tonlieu

Kristor wrote another excellent article over at Orthosphere which I have been stewing on for some time. Rather than write another essay in the comments, I’ll keep my remarks here. Read it first, before reading this!

It’s a Privilege To Be Here

On it’s face, I like the premise of Tonlieux.  It is coherent with my past expressions regarding rights and authority. In short: That Authority is derived from God via the Sovereign[1], and rights are a logical fallacy and not helpful in determining who is owed what duties by a government. A wayfaring stranger crossing the border from another country has no claims on the hospitality of his newfound host. A sovereign owes to that stranger no obligations; the stranger has no privileges in this land. That same stranger, crossing at a legal point of entry, presenting valid identification does have a claim on the host, the minimum claim of hospitality in exchange for an agreement to abide by the laws and customs of the host.

The present immigration system is designed to work like that, provided our subordinate authorities actually enforce the rules. The basic framework is complicated by questions of human rights, which don’t exist: Are we treating wayfaring strangers well when they wander into our land? There is a puzzling question of Justice: Are we allowing them due process? We technically do not owe them this, non-citizens aren’t bound by the constitution in the same way, but as far as I can tell this is extended as a courtesy to all those within our borders.

Tonlieu works to put a monetary value on access. Kristor explains his suggestion for an Optimal Tonlieu. I cannot dispute the economics of his proposal. I do, however, see a problem: Enforcement.

An Invisible Wall Made of Money

Our border is such that there are millions of illegal immigrants – that is to say, Sovereign citizens of a nation other than ours – who presently reside in and lay claim to the accidents of citizenship without any of the essences. Furthermore, there is such a volume of incoming foreign citizens that the mind boggles. A tonlieu is effective for travel that is limited by some mechanism, but when I can walk from A to B, how does it prevent our present situation? How can it help resolve it?

It seems Kristors primary suggestion is deterrence. Not being bound by law, the foreign citizen is thus in danger of disappearing into the abyss of human evil. One challenge is that I am not sure how our present system, even without tonlieu, isn’t also designed this way. Does the Constitution protect foreign citizens? I don’t believe it does[2], or if it does only in passing. So fundamental to this proposal of tonlieu is a society which behaves somewhat differently than it does today.

Second, if foreign citizens arrive en masse, and begins perpetrating human evil against it’s host, what can a tonlieu do against it? Certainly there is more money to be made in illegally and repeatedly crossing a border, perhaps smuggling goods, than in abiding by the law. Nothing short of an organized and concerted effort by the host sovereign can reclaim any land physically held by the group of foreign citizens–some might refer to that process as “repelling an invading force”.

A Solution

It seems to me that tonlieu, while an effective solution for people the world over who already abide by the law, is deficient in the practical reality only insofar as it doesn’t address or prevent the problems that exist right now, and adds assumptions which aren’t supported by experience.

One solution, with or without tonlieu, is to enforce the laws as written, and expurgate the foreign citizens residing illegally. This presents the same deterrent force proposed in Kristor’s Optimal Tonlieu. Another solution is to reduce the size and scope of government to minimum constitutionally enshrined services. Fully private healthcare may produce enough of a profit to charitably fund certain needs of illegal immigrants prior to their swift deportation. Never let it be said that America treats it’s visitors, welcome or unwelcome, without dignity. Charity can also pick up much of the slack in service of the needy, without the need for government as arbitrator. In fact, the 10th Amendment may be a justification for 100% of the proceeds of Tonlieu to go towards the state a person enters. This would provide a profit motive for State’s to maximize collected proceeds by Tonlieu.

“But Scoot, why does that profit motive not exist when managed federally?”

The Federal government is in such deep debt, the money would be immediately leveraged or appropriated. I have no confidence in our administrators to effectively manage the money. Further still, subsidiarity would dictate that the enforcement of the tonlieu and thus the benefit thereof go to the closest possible unit of society.

We can enforce immigration if we enforce our laws. The number one problem is not how our structure is designed, but in how it is being administered.

[1] – I am still puzzling over how the Chain of Authority, i.e. legitimacy, functions in a democratic society, expect writings on this in the future.

[2] – The 14th Amendment includes language “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”–the language of “person” vs. Citizen is at issue here, and this is why Illegal Immigrants enjoy such comfortable lifestyles. So, in my article, I am wrong, but begrudgingly so.

XLI – Don Quixote Tilting against the Patriarchy

This comment and subsequent thread were extremely interesting and presented a lot of information in the context of Chivalry, Feminism, and Male Privilege.

My aim here is to offer a rebuttal of some of the key points in defense of Chivalry and in opposition to both ‘feminism’ and the satirically styled ‘male privilege’.

First, let us establish the thesis to be rebutted:

Premise 1 – Courtly Love is how people understand Chivalry; both should be condemned.

Premise 2 – Chivalry, as it pertains to women, serves more to reinforce the false ideology of feminism than to detract it.

Premise 3 – Chivalry allows women, at times, to get away with murder, literally.

Thesis – Chivalry may once have had value, but does no more due to the linguistic evolution of the word and it’s use and conflation with related ideas. This new conception of chivalry may once have protected, but now it enables, a class of people who capitalize fully on the advantage.

Accuracy of Past or Present

The first challenge is to establish which has the most value: Contemporaneous usage of a word, or the original and historical usage of the word. For this we can find plenty of arguments for or against each side of the argument.

The word idiot is derived from the greek idiotes which means ‘Layman’. In essence, the word originally described someone who does not take up their civic responsibility. In a democratic society such as theirs, where they cast lots for lawmakers, one who shirked this duty was a liability to society. The condemnation of the civic class on the private man caused the word to assume it’s implied rhetorical meaning as the one we now know in our dictionaries. idiot is presently known to all as a mentally deficient person. If, based on my recent musing about elections, I described myself as an idiot, all would understand me to be referring to myself as mentally deficient, and none would consider (and fewer would know) that my intent was referring to myself as simply a non-civic layman.

A word more closely resembling the concept of Chivalry is virtue, derived from the latin virtus which retains nearly the same meaning, and some additional meanings, across time: Virtue is the body of values and traits that make the ideal man. The ideal man has changed only slightly over time, but many of the virtues have remained the same.

So this reduces us to two options: Has Chivalry, as a word and idea, retained it’s original meaning and gained additional ones, or has it’s meaning changed entirely from it’s original sense?

Chivalry derives from the latin Caballus (horse) and via french chevalier (knight, or person who rides a horse), to chevalerie (art of horse riding / art of knighthood), and then anglicized in its present form Chivalry (code of martial honor). The contemporary dictionary definition retains both the historical sense (“the medieval knightly system with its religious, moral, and social code.”) and the contemporary sense (“courteous behavior, especially that of a man toward women.”) This leads me to believe that Chivalry has acquired additional meanings, like Virtue; rather than changed entirely, like Idiot.

The Body of Meaning

Now that we know we are not dealing with simply one word and one definition, but rather the historical word and it’s broad collection of meanings, we must parse out what is relevant to our discussion or not. There are two primary concerns here. First: Is ‘Courtly Love’ contained within the body of meaning surrounding Chivalry? Second: Is ‘Courteous behavior (…) toward women’ distinct from other definitions or can it be subsumed into the greater idea?

Regarding Courtly Love: This idea is tangential to Chivalry, but was argued as the ‘cultural definition’ of the word. The dictionary definition reads as follows:

a highly conventionalized medieval tradition of love between a knight and a married noblewoman, first developed by the troubadours of southern France and extensively employed in European literature of the time. The love of the knight for his lady was regarded as an ennobling passion and the relationship was typically unconsummated.

The key idea here is that it is a literary device. After the crusades, Chivalry captured the cultural imagination of Europe, resulting in an astounding volume of work romanticizing Chivalry. These were almost all satirized in Cervantes’ work, Don Quixote, who depicted a man obsessed with books of chivalry and who rode off on a mad adventure typically involving hallucinating events differently than they actually played out.  Courtly Love is also disputed as being an actual historical practice, and is instead regarded as exclusively a literary device. Chivalry then is a historical concept that predates Courtly Love, and it’s contemporary definition bears no resemblance to Courtly Love, other than, arguably, platonic deference to women. Therefore Courtly Love is a distinct idea that is only associated with Chivalry in fiction, and not in fact.

Secondly, what can we say regarding that deferential idea? Chivalry, as noted previously, includes a religious and moral code which includes a set of virtues. Especially since Chivalry is associated with the Crusades, they were considered militant Holy Orders who were religiously obligated to conduct themselves in a way that would esteem the Church. As a celibate holy order (in structure, if not in practice), these Knights were obligated to not just defer to women but to defer to all people except their enemy. Conduct themselves virtuously, in other words. Polite deference to women is included in that idea.

Chivalry versus Feminism

The inception of this discussion was with a blogger somewhere renouncing chivalry. He claimed, in part, that Chivalry enables feminism and encourages poor behavior by women, by virtue of unwarranted deference. Rather than deferring to them, Men and Women should be treated as equals, with all the good and bad that that implies.

There are a number of points here that must be addressed in turn. First: Does Chivalry, in fact, offer dangerous deference to women? Second: Feminism is something that should not just be discouraged, but fought against, and chivalry is not the most effective means thereof. Third: Men and Women should be treated as equals.

Begin at the beginning: Does Chivalry offer dangerous deference to women? I answer: No. Chivalry, properly conceived in both it’s historical and contemporary sense, is centered around this idea of virtue. A chivalrous man is obligated, first and foremost, to treat all people with dignity and respect. If someone does not treat him with respect, he is obligated to love his enemy but not to his own detriment. Considering ad absurdem: Chivalry does not bar a man from defending himself if a woman is holding him at gunpoint, compared to a man holding him in the same situation. Chivalry does not bar a man from chastising a woman who is rude or aggressive towards him. Chivalry does not bar a man from encouraging the practice of virtue in those around him. Women who believe Chivalry requires deference, do not understand Chivalry. Men who believe the same suffer the same misconception.

Secondly, regarding Feminism. ‘Armchair Crusaders’ have a bizarre fascination with feminism, as if it is a force that needs to be fought. The best solution, in my mind, is to ignore it. Feminism, that toxic blend of toxic individuals, men and women alike, who are unable to self soothe when life doesn’t go easily for them, is being cultivated and encouraged by social forces outside of any individuals control. The best thing anyone can do is have lots of kids and raise them in virtue. So Feminism doesn’t merit a response, and Chivalry is not and never was a ‘tool’ for fighting feminism, and it is certainly not additive to the problem, unless someone who misunderstands chivalry waves the flag of chivalry to justify their behavior. Chivalry, properly conceived, is indifferent to the ravings of entitlement.

Thirdly, I will be brief: Men and women are not equals, and so should not be treated equally. The article this conversation was born in was about women being eligible for the draft. Women should not be eligible for the draft, not out of chivalry, but out of a sense of cultural preservation. When the men die in battle, women must heal a broken nation at home. If men and women die in battle, no one will be left. It is a practical matter. Equality is deleterious to social health.

Murder: A Woman’s Crime

There was another, more outlandish claim, that Chivalry literally allows women to get away with murder. In evidence: A stat that women commit about 10% of the murders, but make up less than 3% of the executions. Also, some articles from the early 20th century.

First, Men are evolutionary hardwired to be sympathetic to women. A woman crying has a powerful instinctive effect on men, and that has nothing to do with Chivalry. So some disparity should be allowed for that. Second, I don’t believe ‘committing murders’ and ‘executions’ are congruent statistics, since the death penalty is not universally legal. There are a number of variables between murder and execution that could easily reduce the proportion of women. Finally: Justice is, and should be, blind. Feminism or Chivalry should have no part in it, and I have not seen adequate evidence that the justice system is stacked favorably to women. Yes, men bear a heavy portion of incarcerations and penalties. However: Men also commit a heavy portion of the crimes which deserve it. This is not a hardship to men, this is inherent in our nature. A sufficient number of people will always have a greater portion of men committing crimes than women.

Chivalry is Dead, Long Live Chivalry

The premises on their own do not stand, and the Thesis itself is built on misconceptions about chivalry and feminism and what they mean and the consequences thereof. Chivalry, as a body of virtues, is still a force for good in the world, if it draws people to learn about the virtues it implies. It’s historical and contemporary definitions are not so out of sync as to be totally different from each other, and society would do well to cultivate more chivalry, rather than renounce it and decrease it.

I hope this has served as an effective rebuttal to the discussion about Chivalry.

AMDG