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2016

Peter Smith: The Pope’s More Spiritual Economics

Right or wrong in its economic specifics, the Pontiff’s Laudato Si encyclical draws attention to the wide material gap between rich and poor and to the insuperable problem of bridging it. The Pope surely has a point, even if his nostrums are not wholly of this world.
We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against caricatures we make of them.

—Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 1954

Reading can be a pleasure and sometimes, as we all know, a chore. I confess as a Christian—albeit not of the Roman Catholic persuasion—to having not read a papal encyclical before the latest, issued on May 24. On my rough count, Laudato Si’ (On care for our common home) ran to a daunting 40,000 words or so. The flesh is weak. I was deterred. However, my interest was piqued by media commentary on the Pope’s condemnatory views, or so they were portrayed, on the role of free market forces in guiding economic affairs. It turned out to be a rewarding read.

A first thing to say is that when Pope Francis is on his “home turf”, discussing spiritual matters, he is inspirational. I had to put his words down at times because they were so powerful and moving. On the other hand, his wide-ranging comments on the environment, to which the encyclical was primarily directed, were unremittingly one-sided. The way he begins sets his unchanging compass: “This sister [Mother Earth] cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods which God has endowed her.”

Instructively, as you read on, it becomes increasingly clear that the Pope’s perspective on the environment stems from, and is caught up with, his perspective on economics and capitalism. But stop here. Economics and capitalism take us down the road apiece from where the Pope starts. I think it is safe to say that the Pope starts with God. As you might expect, a number of conservative writers and broadcasters, in passing comment on the encyclical, started further down the road. And this, I believe, and as I will later explain, has led them into being more sharply critical of its economic content than is justified.

At one point John Maynard Keynes broke off debate with some of his contemporaries after the publication of The General Theory in 1936 because he did not believe that they were engaging his arguments with an open mind. Those who write with good will, hoping to persuade, are entitled to an open-minded reception. The Pope is no exception.

Germany Just Can’t Get It Right by Douglas Murray

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?

The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.

The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.

Blame Terror on Everyone but Terrorists! by Burak Bekdil

Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”

The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.

President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?

Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.

There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.

Keystone No, Kenya Pipeline Yes The U.S. says it wants to help finance an oil pipeline in Africa.

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?

A New Semester, a New Approach to Campus Turmoil The work of the Yale professor who was berated by students helps explain the ‘emotional stampede’ and how to address it. By Paul McHugh

College students are returning to school after the winter break, and administrators must be bracing for another semester like the tumultuous one just passed. That trivial circumstances like those at Yale University in November could provoke such unrest indicates how fraught race relations remain at schools striving to promote diversity.

Ironically, an incident caught on video at Yale—one that for many Americans seemed to epitomize how badly American higher education has gone off the rails—also offers an explanation for this spasm of protests and points toward a more productive way of addressing students’ concerns.
A demonstration by Yale University students and faculty, Nov. 9. ENLARGE
A demonstration by Yale University students and faculty, Nov. 9. Photo: Arnold Gold/New Haven Register/Associated Press

The incident involved a Yale professor named Nicholas Christakis, who was waylaid on campus by angry students. They were livid about a letter written by his wife, Erika, also a Yale teacher, who had suggested that the university’s recent admonishments about Halloween costumes, cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity perhaps were unnecessary, since young adults are capable of deciding for themselves what to wear for Halloween and might even learn from being “a little bit obnoxious.” Mr. Christakis was caught in an ugly scene, with one student in particular roundly cursing him.

Eventually the campus settled when Yale’s president reassured the students that he understood their feelings and would take measures to protect them from insult. Some distance will be put between the students and the Christakises. The school reports that Ms. Christakis, a lecturer in early-childhood education, has chosen not to teach this spring, and her husband is on what Yale called a “scheduled leave.”

French Interior Minister Warns of Islamic State Using Fake Passports Seeks better border controls to keep Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian, Iraqi passports By Matthew Dalton

PARIS—Europe needs to beef up its border controls to prevent Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports to smuggle its operatives into the region amid the mass of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Sunday.

Mr. Cazeneuve said he plans to discuss the issue with officials in Brussels before European interior ministers meet in Amsterdam later this month.

Mr. Cazeneuve’s remarks are part of a rush by European security authorities to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make Syrian and Iraqi passports that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Officials believe the group has obtained thousands of blank Syrian and Iraqi passports, plus equipment used by those governments to print the documents. Mr. Cazeneuve said several of the Islamic State operatives who killed 130 in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13 used false passports to slip into Europe undetected.

“It’s a central question,” he said in an interview with French media. “It’s a phenomenon that will continue if we are not able to halt it.”

Officials say Islamic State likely obtained those materials when it overran the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Without reliable lines of communication open, particularly to the Syrian government, Western officials have little clarity on what passport numbers are linked to stolen passport books containing fraudulent identities.

Professor’s Views on Islam Divide a College Teacher at religious school is under fire for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God By Douglas Belkin

CHICAGO—A professor’s effort to express solidarity with Muslims by wearing a head scarf and saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is dividing a small private Christian school as her tenured position hangs in the balance.

Professor Larycia Hawkins, placed on administrative leave and awaiting a hearing before nine faculty members at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago, told reporters last week she “is flummoxed and flabbergasted” by the school’s response but won’t cower “in fear of the enemy of the month” as defined by “fundamentalists of every stripe.”

Ms. Hawkins, a 43-year-old associate professor of political science, announced on Facebook she was donning the hijab during the pre-Christmas season of Advent. She said her aim was to show support for Muslims amid a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

School officials said they had no problem with the hijab or her support for Muslims, but took offense at comments in her Facebook post in which she said Muslims and Christians worship the same God. That conflicts with the school’s statement of faith, which holds that God consists of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Muslims don’t believe in the Trinity.

The Commercial Philosopher The Enlightenment is often miscast as the ‘Age of Reason.’ In truth, it dethroned rational philosophy in favor of sociology and psychology. By Jeffrey Collins

In the summer of 1776, the celebrated diarist James Boswell visited the Edinburgh home of David Hume, where the philosopher lay dying. Hume, atypically thin and “ghastly” in pallor, was nevertheless “placid.” Interrogated by Boswell, he affirmed his view that the afterlife was an “unreasonable fancy.” With “death before his eyes,” Boswell reported, Hume blithely predicted his own annihilation. “I maintained my faith,” wrote Boswell, but “left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.”

This scene often serves as a miniature representation of Hume’s career. Boswell’s watery piety crashes against Enlightenment reason. Superstition flinches before knowledge. The sang-froid of Hume’s godlessness amazed contemporaries, and modern atheists have treasured the tale.

James A. Harris’s “Hume: An Intellectual Biography” punctures most of this mythology. Though an atheist, Hume was nowhere near as dogmatic as his current admirers. He was certainly not a rationalist. His reputation for philosophical intrepidity, furthermore, has been overblown.

North Korea’s Cuban Friends The Castro boys now have a U.S. Hellfire missile to share with Kim Jong Un. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

You’d think that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wouldn’t have a friend in the world these days. His relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to starve his own people is evil madness. Last week even communist China condemned the supreme leader’s fourth nuclear test, which the chubby little psychopath called “the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb explosion.”

But Mr. Kim is not all alone. He still has the Caribbean’s Cosa Nostra—aka the Castro family—as a friend and ally. The Cold War may be long over, but Cuba is sticking by the North Korean pariah.

This bond exposes Americans to grave risk. Analysts fret that Pyongyang is developing missiles and miniaturized warheads that will allow it to lob a bomb into the continental U.S. But having a desperate ideological pal 90 miles from U.S. shores magnifies the danger. In the past 21/2 years Cuba has tried to smuggle weapons to Pyongyang, engaged in high-level meetings with North Korean officials, and secured U.S. military technology. Anybody want to connect the dots?

Trump and Cruz Have Trouble in the Middle Independents will decide the general election, and they’re far from sold on the Republican front-runners By David W. Brady

A terrible way to forecast the 2016 contest is to gauge whose supporters are the loudest. Presidential elections are not decided by partisans or ideologues.

The arithmetic is pretty simple: 41% of voters in the 2012 presidential election described themselves as moderates, and 29% as independents. Almost all Republicans (93%) and self-described conservatives (82%) voted for Mitt Romney, but that wasn’t enough. Even if Mr. Romney had won every Republican or conservative voter, it still wouldn’t have been enough.

Because there are roughly 5% more Democrats than Republicans, the GOP needs a solid majority of independents to win a national election. In 2012 Mitt Romney outpolled Barack Obama among independents, 50% to 45%. But that didn’t take him across the electoral college finish line.

It is safe to predict that the proportions that held in 2012 will be about the same this year. About two-thirds of the voters will not be Republicans. Thus it is vital to pay early attention to how each of the candidates is doing among independents. A long, drawn-out primary that forces candidates to make strong appeals to the party’s ideological base can hurt the eventual nominee in November