Several my colleagues and I were chatting about the government's decision to increase the security alert yesterday when someone argued that Bush would benefit electorally from a terrorist attack because of a rally around the flag affect. Another colleague argued that such an attack would undermine Bush's claims that he's the right president during this war on terror.

The coverage of the politics surrounding the decision to elevate the security in NYC and DC yesterday had a strong undercurrent that resembled this debate. I was left wondering which is correct? I throw this question to my fellow bloggers and any readers out there interested (of course any discussion like this assumes that we don't want this sort of thing to happen. Hopefully it's merely a hypothetical exercise).

Forgive the self-indulgence, but I thought I might direct L&P readers to several articles I've written over the last week or so:

1) The Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed of mine last Friday which Congress to adhere to the Constitution, and vote on Medicare's decision to fund obesity treatments -- which basically amounts to a vast new entitlement, potentially more expensive than the prescription drug benefit. Since the Times requires registration, you can read the piece on the Cato website here.

2) Also last week, I wrote a piece for Tech Central Station on how laws aimed at curbing drinking and driving are chipping away at common criminal protections, most notably the presumption of innocence.

3) My latest FoxNews.com column poses a series of questions to President Bush and Senator Kerry that I haven't yet seen asked of them. It's a follow-up to my previous column, which posed similar questions to Vice President Cheney and Sen. Edwards.

4) Finally, I wrote another piece for Tech Central yesterday, which looks at Sen. Patrick Leahy's contradictory positions on dairy. He's prescribing milk as a partial solution to the childhood obesity problem, authoring legislation that would require public schools to serve more milk with school lunches and in school vending machines. Of course, at the same time, he's insisting on nationwide price supports to keep milk expensive, and to keep the diary industry happy.

The 9/11 Commission proposed creating a new intelligence director with control over budget and personnel for the 15 intelligence agencies. This proposal superimposes a new layer of bureaucracy above the intelligence agencies. In a time when the U.S. government is trying to counter small, shadowy, agile terror groups, it should be streamlining and consolidating intelligence bureaucracies not adding new ones. More bureaucracies exacerbate the coordination difficulties among them (the original problem). The one good point about the 9/11 Commission report is that budgetary authority and the hiring and firing of intelligence personnel would be consolidated in one person. Of course, this could be done by giving the current director of central intelligence those powers without creating a new national intelligence director and layer of bureuarcracy. (Also, we already have an terrorism threat integration center in the CIA. The president's new proposal combines the worst of all proposals. In response to political pressure generated by the commission and John Kerry's rapid approval of all of the commission's recommedations, Bush has adopted the recommendation of the new national intelligence director without granting him the budgetary and personnel authority to adequately do his job. So we have the new office and the new bureaucracy under the new appointee, but the same old problems with coordination and lack of means of reining in the disparate agencies.

For my sins I was traveling again this past weekend, and my hotel gave me a copy of my favorite newspaper to mock, USA Today. Lo and behold, however, on the front page—right there next to one of their pretty polychromatic diagrams—was a story of actual interest. Under the title “To Play Sports, Many U. S. Students Must Pay,” the paper reported indeed what I take to be the best educational news since the recalcitrant success of school voucher programs.

Apparently some school districts are so strapped for cash that they are asking—hold on to your seat now—the people who use certain services to actually pay for the services themselves. This is a bold and new idea to the educational establishment, and for many of the people involved in public schooling, including in particular the students who attend such schools and their parents, the idea is a dangerous one too. For what might it lead to? Requiring people who go to public schools to pay their whole bill? Why, that flies in the face of the venerable American tradition of “free” schooling for all!

Okay, I’ll stop with the sarcasm. The fees that students are being asked to pay by the few but increasing number of school districts is for extracurricular activities like sports and clubs, and the fees themselves range up to several hundred dollars.

Contrary to what the students, parents, teachers, and administrators interviewed unanimously believe, I see this as a great step in the right direction—for two principal reasons. First, it helps to reconnect freedom and responsibility. That is, by connecting, even in this partial way, the decisions people make (like whether to give their kids more schooling or enrol them in sports, clubs, etc.) to the consequences of those decisions (like the costs involved), it will be an incentive for people to investigate what they are actually getting for their money. And any scrutiny brought to bear on the scandalously profligate primary and secondary education industry in this country can only be to the good.

Second, it begins, again even in an admittedly small way, to level the competitive playing field between government schools and private schools. People who send their children to private schools (like me) have to pay for schooling twice: once for the government schools their children do not attend, and then again for the private schools their children do attend. People without children also are made to pay for the government schools regardless of the fact. I consider both of those outright injustices. But purely on consequentialist grounds the subsidy to government schools gives them an enormous competitive price advantage over private schools. Despite the latter’s general superiority in quality, many parents thus choose nevertheless to send their children to the government schools. Charging parents for their children’s participation in government school activities is one small step towards leveling the marketplace competition for students, bringing a much-needed measure of discipline to the government schooling establishment.

Selective implementation of user fees does not by any means solve all the problems with government schooling in America, but I believe it is a step in the right direction, and a hopeful sign for the future.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Two weeks ago I discussed what I called the"paradox of religious conservatism" -- namely, the fact that those who are allegedly dedicated to the supremacy of spirit over matter are in practice committed to subordinating the spiritual aspects of human life to the merely biological aspects. The latest confirmation of this comes in the form of an anti-feminist screed from the Vatican titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.

While the insulting phrase"a woman is not a copy of a man" (insulting in its implication that feminists do regard woman as a" copy of a man"), which news reports have most often quoted from the document, does not in fact appear to occur in it, the rambling diatribe certainly does condemn the"human attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning," and complains that among feminists"physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary."

For the Vatican, by contrast, women's biological role as mothers determines their spiritual destiny, which is -- you guessed it -- a" capacity for the other." As I've noted before (see here and here), one of the strategies of patriarchy is to define the function of women as fundamentally other-directed. Of course the Vatican document is quick to assure us that"in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be 'for the other'" (as if such a celebration of servility would be any more palatable if the servility were reciprocal) -- but women, we are told, are"more immediately attuned to these values," and it is their task to"live them with particular intensity and naturalness." One of the chief function of women, the Vatican opines, is to serve as a"sign" of this doctrine of universal servility by exemplifying the distinctively feminine virtues of"listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting," and thereby"recalling these dispositions to all the baptized."

In short, although every human being is called to self-immolation, women are supposed to specialise in it -- and all because of the reproductive role that nature happens to have assigned them. Isn't this precisely the biology-worship I've been complaining of? (Needless to say, these men in dresses also have no patience for those who" call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father" and"make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent." Here too, the spiritual must be subordinated to the biological rather than vice versa.)

The Vatican anticipates the charge of biology-worship and seeks to rebut it. Although"motherhood is a key element of women's identity," this"does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation"; on the contrary, the"Christian vocation of virginity”" contradicts"any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny." (Of course, for a religion that condemns birth control, virginity is the only alternative to motherhood on offer.) Still, virginity is described as a kind of metaphorical extension of biological motherhood:

Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.

In short, even women who are not mothers in the literal sense are still expected to model their human interactions on motherhood in a way that goes beyond what is asked of men. The Vatican, more subtle than its Baptist brethren (no surprise there!), insists that woman's role as a"helpmate" marks her not as an"inferior," but rather as a"vital helper" on a man's"own level" -- but all the same it is woman, not man, whose essence is defined in this other-regarding way. It is femininity, not masculinity, that is defined as"the fundamental human capacity to live for the other and because of the other." (From an individualist perspective, what greater insult to women can be imagined?)

The Vatican seeks to evade the charge of biology-worship by insisting that male and female are not purely biological categories. (Though when feminists say precisely this, the Vatican attacks them for emphasising gender over sex!) Although the"temporal and earthly expression of sexuality" is"transient and ordered to a phase of life marked by procreation and death," the distinction between male and female is described as"belonging ontologically to creation" and therefore as"destined ... to outlast the present time," albeit"in a transfigured form." Those who in the present life take vows of celibacy"for the sake of the Kingdom" are prefiguring"this form of future existence of male and female." But far from being the negation of biology-worship, this point of view elevates women's biological role in reproduction to a metaphysical principle entailing special duties of feminine servility from which even the grave will apparently offer no escape. (Though insofar as feminine self-immolation is supposed to be an inspiring model for men to imitate, this conception is no picnic for either sex. Thus patriarchy and altruism are complementary parts of an interlocking system that oppresses both men and women -- albeit not equally.)

The Vatican throws a sop to the feminists by acknowledging that"women should be present in the world of work and in the organization of society," and"should have access to positions of responsibility." But can women really be expected to compete on equal terms when they must also shoulder the special burden of serving as a visible"sign" of the servile virtues?

The Vatican also pays women the old false compliment of a special feminine"sense and ... respect for what is concrete," as"opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society." That sounds very nice; but propagating such a view of women is hardly likely to enhance their success in intellectual careers. (Admittedly some feminists have made precisely the same mistake, trumpeting hostility to abstraction as some sort of liberating"feminine voice" and"ethics of care," when in fact such stereotypes are more plausibly regarded as artefacts of women’s subjection.)

The document's tepid support for women's"access to positions of responsibility" is vitiated by its condemnation of feminists who"emphasize strongly conditions of subordination" and urge women to"make themselves the adversaries of men." Should feminists ignore the existing conditions of subordination? It is such conditions, and not those who point them out, that are responsible for adversarial relations between men and women. The goal of feminists is to abolish these adversarial relations by abolishing the conditions of subordination that maintain them.

The Vatican's insistence that men and women are equal partners is likewise belied by the document's stress on the"importance and relevance" of the fact that in incarnating himself as Jesus Christ, God"assumed human nature in its male form." Even for those who accept the (to my mind blasphemous and un-Biblical) notion that God once became a human being, one might have thought that he picked a male form for the simple reason that a female preacher in first-century Palestine would have had even more trouble gaining a hearing than Jesus did. But the Vatican apparently sees it as signifying that divinity is more appropriately expressed in male rather than female form. Thus patriarchy is undergirded by patriolatry.

In one of his better moments, St. Paul wrote that in Christ"there is neither male nor female." (Galatians 3:28.) In short, our physical biology does not determine our spiritual vocation. The Vatican document ingeniously interprets this passage in precisely the opposite sense, to mean that"the distinction between man and woman is reaffirmed more than ever," in that the"rivalry" which has"disfigured the relationship between men and women" will be replaced with harmony once the sexes reconcile themselves to their Church-assigned roles. In short, the ideal held out to women is: peace through surrender.

To this, the only proper answer can be: no peace without justice!

Écrasez l’infâme!