On a Saturday morning, when my brain should be occupied by strategy for my kid’s soccer game or by the prospect of college football, I find myself wrestling with the idea that our notions of property are so deeply embedded in our culture, we don’t have a good vocabulary for discussing the underlying assumptions of property; particularly in the context of a policy debate. That can’t be normal.

I don’t have any good answers at the moment, and I’ve almost certainly covered this ground before. But, advocates of the property status quo can just say, “I think people ought to be able to keep what’s theirs.” It’s simple and sounds utterly reasonable; almost unassailable.

To contest this, someone who thinks that more equity is necessary to preserve the health of our political and economic systems has to spend a great deal of time and a great number of words deconstructing the word “theirs”; making arguments about when property rights vest in a person such that the thing can be said to be “theirs,” that property rights do not exist in any enforceable sense absent the cooperation of the government, and suggesting that the point at which rights vest is, itself, a policy choice and mostly arbitrary.

If you have to spend that much effort and verbiage countering a simple sentence, chances are, you’re going to lose the debate unless the listener is uncommonly patient and open minded.

Anyway, that’s what I woke up thinking about. Maybe I need a hobby.

I’ve seen a couple of references online to a recent study showing “US abortion rates plummet with free birth control.”

But that’s really beside the point. While a lot of the focus is on the horrors of killing babies, when presented with an effective way of reducing that number, a lot of abortion rights opponents are strangely unmoved. Or, it’s strange if one takes at face value the rhetoric about holocausts of murdered babies and whatnot. Less openly discussed is a desire that people, particularly women, stop engaging in unsanctioned sexual activity.

Having both of those goals is fine. There are reasons – not ones I agree with necessarily – for both policy desires. But, birth control and studies such as these serve to highlight priorities. It presents a choice. Which is worse? Unsanctioned sex or murdered babies? Seems like a no-brainer; baby-murdering seems like the worst thing ever if that’s honestly what you think is happening at an abortion clinic. Turning a blind eye to the painted Jezebels in your midst seems like a small price to pay.

And yet. A very small number of abortion rights opponents are willing to get on board with policies that make birth control more widely available.

Providing free birth control to women and teens in Missouri at high risk of unplanned pregnancies led to a drastic drop in abortion rates and teenage mothers, a study published Thursday found.

If the same results were replicated across the United States, free birth control could prevent 1,060,370 unplanned pregnancies and 873,250 abortions a year.

Teens and unmarried women might have sex – they might even get the idea that their behavior is acceptable; but you’ll have 873,250 fewer baby murders each year. Hopefully I’m not being disrespectful by saying that I simply don’t grasp your worldview if this is a close choice.

The construction of I-69 through the southern part of Indiana is still plugging along. Eric Bradner has an article in the Evansville Courier Press about the award of a $57.5 million contract to build a piece of it in Monroe County. Apparently that is for a 4 mile stretch of the total project which is 142 miles long.

I’m all for infrastructure and transportation and am a little excited to see how this one affects driving in Indiana. But, it is a reminder that we subsidize automobile traffic too; and we should keep that in mind when folks periodically complain about rail transportation not paying for itself.

I’ve been re-reading Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” lately. This isn’t a novel observation, but I see in the Mormons a pattern I guess is present in a lot of successful religions:

1. Prophet receives revelation and gathers followers.
2. Followers are persecuted.
3. Persecution tightly binds followers into a cohesive unit.
4. Followers escape persecution and gain temporal power.
5. Despite temporal power, followers continue to nurse feelings of persecution.

The Mormons were hounded out of every place they landed. (Not entirely without reason, it seems. Joseph Smith was not, apparently, a noble and lovable figure when it came to non-believers.) But, when Smith was killed and Brigham Young led them out to Utah, they gained temporal power but continued to nurse the traditions of persecution.

Christians were persecuted by the Romans, but eventually, they took over the Empire and Western Europe and, yet, you can go to Worldnet Daily, probably right this minute, and find some story about how unfairly Christians are treated these days.

Jews were persecuted, escaped, gained temporal power, lost it, and were persecuted again – quite a bit. I’m not sure where to put them today on the temporal power/persecution continuum.

I don’t, honestly, know enough about Islam to put fit it in this pattern with any precision. I know that Muhammad was chased out of Mecca, went to Medina for awhile, then came back to Mecca where Islam exploded out of the Arabian peninsula. I imagine Muhammad’s time of exile figures prominently in the Islamic tradition and, regardless of the ebb and flow of temporal power, sees their religion as being under attack from non-believers.

I think that persecution, real or imagined, is useful in creating a barrier between the particular religious community and the Other. It creates feelings of solidarity with one another and a feeling of distinction from non-believers.

Another one of those “deserves a book – I’m going to give it 15 minutes before coffee” posts; so I apologize. It seems to me that there is a continuing trend toward consolidation of power away from local government and toward state government. I’m not enough of a student of Indiana history to know whether, if this sense is accurate, it’s something new or just one of those ebbs and flows you get. (For example, on the federal level, the tug of war between the Presidency and the Congress is cyclical.)

Mainly what brought this to mind was reading Kyle Stokes report on State Superintendent of Education, Tony Bennett’s, desire to give the State more power to run local school districts; along with a recent observation on this blog about efforts to increasingly regularize the functioning of trial courts under state, judicial governance.

There is also, off the top of my head, the Kernan-Shepard report which had a lot of (as yet mainly unimplemented) ideas for government reform that included state funding of the local judiciary. In 2008, the General Assembly passed legislation that took away local property tax levies as a source of school general fund revenues. The State also shifted funding for child welfare services from county property taxes to the State.

Like I said, a lot more to unpack than I have time for. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has felt a shift in power from local to State and whether that’s a good, bad, or indifferent.

There have been three really good blog posts in recent days, playing off of one another, and emphasizing some points I think are of value in planning strategy for Indiana’s future.

The first was Aaron Renn’s comparison of Gov. Daniels’ economic strategy versus Mike Pence’s. The second was Richard Longworth’s “Debunking St. Mitch.” And the third is Just Harter’s “I was emphatically wrong about my political beliefs.”

My take away, which isn’t really surprising now that they’ve spelled it out, is that racing to the bottom probably isn’t going to work for us. I’m sure there are places willing to go a lot further in that direction than I want to. Cutting fat is fine. Cutting bone is counter-productive. And, if I might mix my metaphors, you don’t want to eat your seed corn. And, again, as Mr. Renn says, you don’t want to live in the cheapest house or the cheapest neighborhood. And, I’m not sure we want the companies that want the cheapest house; at least not if we can figure out a way to attract other types of companies.

As Justin puts it:

[G]iven the obvious reference points we have of spectacular places to live with growth, economic stability, and social mobility like the Netherlands and even Canada and, here in America along the coasts, the trick to making life better is to make your people better and treat them as assets and not operating costs. You race to the top, not the bottom. The bottom is for commodity markets, and I don’t want to be a commodity.

He even has what strikes me as a pretty likely suggestion on what might be driving some of our present decline:

It seems more likely to me at this point that America’s problems are caused by a death spiral of employers withholding exorbitant profits from employees in favor of dubious managers and executives who don’t drive that much value in most places, which reduces consumer spending power around and around.

As Aaron pointed out, Governor Daniels at least had the nominal goal of raising the the net disposable income of individual Hoosiers. Had he succeeded in that, it might have reversed the downward spiral described by Justin. But, he didn’t, and Mike Pence doesn’t even have that as a goal. Pence just wants Hoosiers to have jobs. Working harder without ending up with more money in our pockets isn’t going to fix anything; it’s just going to mean we’re working harder. Work is a proud thing; but it ought to have a purpose.

Today is the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. In their effort to split apart the Union to preserve their right to own other people, the rebel forces, fighting in Maryland, killed approximately 2,108 American soldiers and wounded approximately 10,000 more. The rebels themselves had casualties of 10,318 with 1,546 dead.

The battle was a tactical stalemate – in no small part because of Union General McClellan’s extreme cautiousness – but forced the rebels out of Maryland and gave President Lincoln sufficient political cover to issue the Emancipation Proclamation five days later. That Proclamation did not, technically, free very many people because it applied mainly to areas in rebellion and not under the control of the U.S. government. But, as the Union re-gained control of the territory in rebellion, the slaves in those areas were freed. This also had the strategic effect of dissuading France and England from recognizing the Confederates. With the Union having won at least a nominal victory and explicitly tied its efforts to ending slavery, France and England couldn’t support the Confederacy. Far from seeing it as a positive good worth committing treason over – as the officials in the state governments of the South had done – France and England had abolished the practice.

The Confederates were on their own. They were weaker and in the wrong. Eventually, the United States would win and preserve our country.

Nancy A. Youssef and Amina Ismail, writing for McClatchy Newspapers,
have a good play-by-play on how a poorly made, intentionally offensive video clip went from being pimped by its anti-Muslim zealot creator to a reporter to being the ostensible focal point of the latest round of violence and protest in the Middle East. (Our old friend Terry Jones, the grand standing, Koran burning Florida preacher makes an appearance).

Part of the problem seems to be, culturally, a lack of understanding and appreciation for our First Amendment. The Middle East is full of places where government can and does suppress speech it deems troublesome. When the U.S. doesn’t suppress something here, it probably looks to them like an endorsement on some level. In addition, our exposure to so much garbage because of the First Amendment gives us a sort of strengthened immune system we take for granted. Getting violently angry just because someone said something deliberately obnoxious strikes us a bizarre.

The story of that anti-Islam “film” that is the subject of a lot of anger in the Middle East is weird. The purported filmmaker is, at best, a pseudonym. It might just be some poorly spliced clips jammed together to piss people off. It was posted on Youtube and nobody seemed to notice until:

Spreading the word about the film were two men, an Egyptian-born Christian activist in Washington, D.C., named Morris Sadek and his friend Terry Jones, pastor of a church in Florida who made headlines last year when he burned a Quran. Terry Jones says he hasn’t seen the full two-hour film but he liked what he saw in the preview.

Now, it appears, that al Qaeda used protests as a smoke screen for an attack on the Libyan embassy.

For all guys like Jones and organizations like al Qaeda probably actually hate each other, they certainly have common ground. Leaders of Christian and Muslim extremists alike have a joint interest in having their followers angry at one another. It makes the leaders strong.

Seems like the period just before a Presidential election is the most fraught with danger for American foreign policy. There has to be a great temptation among the candidates to make policy statements based on the lowest common denominator of the electorate instead of what might be in the country’s best long-term interests. “Vote for me! I’m manlier! The other guy is a wimp!” Don’t get me wrong; there is a certain amount of that all year, every year. But, just before an election, when so much is at stake and when such declarations might actually motivate enough low-information American voters to make a difference; that’s dangerous timing.

We’ll see how this dynamic plays out with the attack on the Libyan consulate and the saber rattling of Israel toward Iran and attempts to lock the U.S. into Israeli policy decisions.

For only minimally coherent reasons, the dynamic reminds me of the Dropkick Murphys epic tune, “Barroom Hero”:

Face down in the gutter won’t admit defeat though his clothes are soiled and black,
He’s a big, strong man with a childs mind, don’t you take his booze away!

He’s been at it for years drinking balls and beer he’s a hero to most he meets,
But inside he cries black swollen eyes, this man he sheds no tears!

Now his wife and kids sing a different tune as they worry about their daddy dying,
But this arrogant fool breaks every rule it’ll be nothing but pride that kills him.

Could he listen no he won’t that’s all she wrote he’ll be dead before the daylight shines,
But the thoughts and prayers of a million strong might keep this fool from dying.

He’s a legend in the bar with every scar fights a thousand bigger men,
But now he fights and loses got all the bruises will someone please step in?

Cause this Irish fools got a great big heart he keeps climbing back in to the ring
In the low down circles where he holds his court this man he once was king.

I guess it’s the juxtaposition of being stupid, drunk, brave, and a hero to the folks at the bar; meanwhile the family is worried about their daddy dying.