Frank’s Case Book

For much of the last few years, the Left and the Left media have not been discontent to just oppose Bush’s Iraq War policies. They have tried to pull the rug from under George Bush’s sincerity with regard to the Iraq War. This was particularly true when the war was not going well. Now that the surge has apparently worked despite what the chattering classes just knew to be true, this sort of noise has diminished. Nonetheless, as recently has 2007, the LA Times was whining that the Bush family was not setting a good example by serving in the military.

Jenna Bush was donating the her earnings from her book to UNICEF, yet the LA Times complained that the ``25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes.”

Of course, and the LA Times knows it, it is not  possible to hold  Bush morally responsible for his adult daughters’ decisions. There is no evidence that if any of the Bush children wished to serve in the military George Bush would have objected. Moreover, as Prince Harry of Great Britain discovered, despite the noblest of intentions to serve, the presence of celebrity can endanger other soldiers.

It is not unreasonable for parents to have mixed feelings about dangerous occupations for their children. For example, everyone would agree that firefighting is a noble and dangerous profession that is crucial for society. Yet there is no parent of a firefighter who does not worry about the safety of their child and many who wish their children would find a safer occupation. This does make parents hypocrites, but parents.

It is unlikely that the LA Times will rope President-elect Barack Obama with he same stilted standards it tries to bind Bush with. Obama was supported overwhelmingly by public school teachers’ union members. Yet when given the opportunity to use the services offered by his ardent supporters, he politely declined. He will not send his young daughters to a District of Columbia public school, something the President Jimmy Carter did. Despite having heaped praise on D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, Obama will be sending his daughters to the elite private school, Sidwell Friends. What does this say about Obama’s real assessment of DC public schools? This particular school choice is a decision made by the adult Obamas, not by their children as in the case of military service for Bush’s children.

This is not a criticism of Obama. He has an positive obligation to provide for the best education of his children. If he did less, we should all believe less of him. However, we should remember that Obama’s choice is an option that he withholds from others when he stands with the public school teachers’ union in refusing to give the parents of poor children even modest school choice.

Nor are we likely to see the LA Times praise Senator John McCain or Governor Sarah Palin for sincerity on their Iraq War positions since they have children who serve or have served there.

“…the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).” — Stephen Jay Gould.

The debate between some scientists and some believers over the issue of Intelligent Design is only useful in that illuminates the re-occurrence of issues that should have been settled rather definitively in the last century. The movement to promote Intelligent Design as a critique of Darwinisn is primarily reflective of a reaction by believers against some rationalists and humanists who wish to stamp out belief.

Intelligent Design posits an answer to a question that science, as a matter of axiom, refuses to allow itself. The essential argument of Intelligent Design is that Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not sufficient to explain either the origin of life or of its observed wondrous complexity and beauty.  Hence, there must be an “intelligent designer.” Although the theory of natural selection has proven extremely useful and effective in explaining observed evolution, there are surely open questions that need be addressed or observations that can not yet been completely explained.

One axiom of science is not to permit itself to resort to supernatural explanations. When confronted with the unknown or unexplainable, scientists must step a back and simply say science is not sufficient, at least not yet, of explaining the observations. An intelligent agent behind nature is excluded from the scientific solution set

Nonetheless, people are free to adopt the disciplines of science or not depending on their purposes and preferences. Indeed, one can assert the existence of an intelligent designer even if we find scientific explanations largely sufficient.

As Gould observes “…the magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.” Religion answers the questions of why not how. In any integrated personality, both these questions must be addressed, but there is no reason why an individual cannot use the different ways of thinking to address different problems. For example, no one would find it unexpected that one would use a different set of sensibilities for  scientific inquiry than literary or art appreciation.

At this point, the polemical extremes are battling it out. One one side we have evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who mock traditional believers and not too subtly paint them as simple-minded and religious belief as inherently destructive. On the other hand, Ben Stein in the new film Expelled criticizes the scientific establishment for using dismissals and tenure denial as a heavy-handed means to suppress criticism by Intelligent Design advocates. Science, which is based on open inquiry, is thus easy to paint as hypocritical.

This is an unnecessary battle resting on a misunderstanding of the appropriate relationship between science and religion.

“A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome —ahead of freedom will end up with neither. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who will use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.” – Milton Friedman, Free to Choose.

We often do not recognize the intellectual giants of an era until long after their passing. This fortunately was not the case for economist and the plain-spoken polemicist Milton Friedman who died November 16, 2006 at the age of 94. Friedman received professional recognition by winning the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 for his work on “consumption analysis” and “monetary history and theory” as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom for contributing to the idea that “man’s economic rights are as vital as his civil and human rights.” Friedman matched his professional notoriety with the ability to explain his economic and political ideas to lay people. In his seminal TV series “Free to Choose,” broadcast ironically on PBS, Friedman took his case for economic and political freedom to millions of viewers. The series was an outgrowth of a book by the same, co-authored by his wife Rose. Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. described the book as an “important, shrewd, omnicompetent readable guide to reasoned thought for those who choose to be free.”

The early decades of the last century marked the rise of collectivist ideology that maintained that societies are run more efficiently if centrally managed. The course of the century made clear that such societies are lees free and generally less economically well off.

Friedman walked in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek the Austrian economist and political philosopher who wrote The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that whether Fascist or Socialist, centrally-controlled societies inexorably led to a loss of freedom and individual autonomy regardless of the how well-intentioned the motives of government are. Friedman continued the making case arguing that free enterprise is a necessary component to any free society. It is the market that insures that no one power, the government, a business, or a union has too much power. Indeed, Friedman argued that free markets protect both workers and consumers more than effectively than governments or unions.

Friedman is perhaps best known as an articulate spokesman for vouchers for public education. Like any monopoly public schools are inefficient and primary serve the interests of the monopoly and not the customer. If parents were given a “voucher” to spend for their children at any school, publicly or privately run, the will of parents rather than education bureaucracies would be sovereign. Those schools that most efficiently met the needs of parents seeking the education of their children would be the ones that prospered. In the book Free to Choose, Friedman demonstrated that the decreased educational output was correlated with the growth of larger and larger educational bureaucracies. Comparing the periods 1968-1969 to 1973-1974, the “number of students” in public schools “went up 1 percent, the total professional staff went up 15 percent, and teachers 14 percent, but supervisors went up 44 percent.”

Opponents of vouchers argued that it would harm the poorest students the most, but Friedman countered that they would be the most empowered. Presently, parents already have some choice in education, only it is means tested. Wealthy parents can send their children to any school they want to. The middle class can do they same at significant economic sacrifice, while the poor have no choice but to accept their local publicly-run school. Armed with vouchers, poor parents would begin to have some of the same choices as wealthier ones. All schools would improve under the pressure of an education market.

Friedman’s wit and ire was most passionately directed at the conceit of some school administrators who object to vouchers or any market approach to education on the grounds that educational professionals are more component to make such decisions than parents. Friedman derisively cited the headmaster of a school in Kent England as suggesting that “I’m not sure that parents know what is best educationally for their children.” This arrogance is a consequence insulated bureaucracies. [See this exchange from “Free to Choose” at YouTube.]

By way of comparison, even though the cost of medical care is a complex mixture of private and public spending, people are still generally free to choose their own doctors and medical treatment. Even though medical treatments are far more complex the educational decisions, everyone would cringe at a system that forced specific doctors and treatments on patients on the grounds that doctors know better than patients what is medically best for them.

Milton Friedman’s happy manner made it impossible for some on the Left to demonize him as uncaring and his academic credentials made it difficult to caricature as a Neanderthal Conservative. The force of his intellect and clarity of his exposition were important factors in ushering in the Reagan Revolution and the Right-ward shift of the country. It is an important measure of his success that it is hard to remember how truly revolutionary and liberating his voice was in the 1970s. Many present Conservatives were suckled on words of Milton Friedman. For those who were intellectually aware of the political debate during that time, his loss is a heavy one mitigated by the fact that his words will live on in his books and television series.