RUTHFULLY YOURS

(This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 1994. Michael Novak died Friday at 83.)

Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is a bad system of government, except when compared to all the others. Much the same might be said of capitalism. It is not a system much celebrated by the poets, the philosophers or the priests. From time to time, it has seemed romantic to the young; but not very often. Capitalism is a system that commends itself best to the middle aged, after they have gained some experience of the way history treats the plans of men.

My own field of inquiry is theology and philosophy. From the perspective of these fields, I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it is quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alternative.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Sound evidence for this proposition is found in the migration patterns of the poor of the world. From which countries do they emigrate, and to which countries do they go? Overwhelmingly they flee from socialist and Third World countries, and they line up at the doors of the capitalist countries.

A second way of bringing sound evidence to light is to ask virtually any audience, in almost any capitalist country, how many generations back in family history they have to go before they reach poverty. For the vast majority of us in the U.S. we need go back no farther than the generation of our parents or grandparents. In 1900, a very large plurality of Americans lived in poverty, barely above the level of subsistence. Most of our families today are described as affluent. Capitalist systems have raised up the poor in family memory.

The second great argument on behalf of capitalism is that it is a necessary condition for the success of democracy—a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. The instances of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Chile (after Pinochet), South Korea and others allow us to predict that once a capitalist system has generated a sufficiently large and successful middle class, the pressures for turning toward democracy become very strong. This is because successful entrepreneurs speedily recognize that they are smarter and more able than the generals and the commissars. They begin demanding self-government.

As has been recognized since ancient times, the middle class is the seedbed of the republican spirit. Capitalism tends toward democracy as the free economy tends toward the free polity. In both cases, the rule of law is crucial. In both, limited government is crucial. In both, the protection of the rights of individuals and minorities is crucial. While capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together, particularly in the world of theory, in the actual world of concrete historical events, both their moving dynamism and their instincts for survival lead them toward a mutual embrace.

On this basis, one can predict that as the entrepreneurial spirit grows in China, particularly in its southern provinces, we can expect to see an ever stronger tide in favor of democratic institutions begin to make itself felt. The free economy will unleash forces that propel China toward the free polity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-military-men-and-a-diplomat-trumps-national-security-candidates-1487554639

President Donald Trump interviewed four candidates for the job of national security adviser Sunday, and may meet more on Monday, a White House spokeswoman said. The vacancy was created after the president’s first adviser, Mike Flynn, resigned under pressure last week.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster

A military strategist with extensive battle experience, Gen. McMaster is now director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Eustis, Va. Gen. McMaster, 54 years old, is a decorated officer with leadership experience in military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a 1984 graduate of West Point, where he played rugby.

Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen

Gen. Caslen, 63 years old, spent his entire career in the Army, including key leadership roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1975, where he was the football team’s starting center for two years. He returned as school superintendent in July 2013.

John Bolton

The security adviser role isn’t the first vacancy to cause Mr. Trump to look to John Bolton, 68. He was previously considered as a possible secretary of state, and then to be the No. 2 official in the State Department.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a frequent commentator on Fox News.

Keith Kellogg

Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr., 72 years old, is a retired three-star general in the U.S. Army, who has this past week been acting national security adviser following Mr. Flynn’s departure.

The acting national security adviser, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg Photo: Reuters

He served in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, and was later a special forces adviser to the Cambodian Army.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed amid a torrent of mainstream-media reporting and disgraceful government leaks (but I repeat myself). Among the most intriguing was a New York Times report the morning after Flynn’s resignation, explaining that the former three-star Army general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was “grilled” by FBI agents “about a phone call he had had with Russia’s ambassador.”

No fewer than seven veteran Times reporters contributed to the story, the Gray Lady having dedicated more resources to undermining the Trump administration than the Republican Congress has to advancing Trump’s agenda. Remarkably, none of the able journalists appears to have asked a screamingly obvious question — a question that would have been driving press coverage had an Obama administration operative been in the Bureau’s hot seat.

On what basis was the FBI investigating General Flynn?
To predicate an investigation under FBI guidelines, there must be good-faith suspicion that (a) a federal crime has been or is being committed, (b) there is a threat to American national security, or (c) there is an opportunity to collect foreign intelligence relevant to a priority established by the executive branch. These categories frequently overlap — e.g., a terrorist will typically commit several crimes in a plot that threatens national security, and when captured he will be a source of foreign intelligence.

Categories (a) and (b) are self-explanatory. It is category (c), intelligence collection, that is most pertinent to our consideration of Flynn.

At first blush, this category seems limitless: unmooring government investigators from the constraints that normally confine their intrusions on our liberty (e.g., snooping, search warrants, interrogations) to situations in which there is real reason to suspect unlawful or dangerous activity. Intelligence collection, after all, is just the gathering of information that can be refined into a reliable basis for decisions by policymakers.

The original story of Saint George and the Dragon dates back to the 7th century, the narrative maintaining that in a fictitious town in Libya there lived a king who chose to appease the evil dragon in the town’s lake that was poisoning the countryside. With the agreement of his subjects, the appeasement involved feeding the dragon two sheep every day. But when there were no more sheep, the King’s subjects started feeding their children to the dragon, chosen by lottery.

When one of the lots fell on the king’s daughter, he told the people they could have all his gold and silver and half his kingdom if his daughter were spared, but the people refused. As his daughter walked to the lake to be fed to the dragon, fate intervened–– Saint George happened to be riding by.

Saint George stabbed the dragon with his lance, then placed a collar around its neck and, with the princess at his side, paraded the wounded monster through the streets of the town. The townspeople were terrified, whereupon Saint George promised to slay the beast if they all converted to Christianity, which they did quite promptly. What a rich parable––with variations of course––on today’s political scene.

THE 2017 VERSION

In my version, the poisonous dragon is radical billionaire George Soros, who has made it his life’s work to poison vibrant democratic systems of government throughout the world in order to actualize his globalist vision of One World Government in which unicorns prance in gorgeous meadows, everyone speaks a polyglot Esperanto, capitalism is destroyed, food and shelter and meaning in life are provided by egomaniacs who know better than everyone else what is good for We the People, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as Jesus and Buddha, are all dead because only government is the god worthy of being worshipped.

In an interview with The L.A. Times, Soros admitted the following: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.” And when asked by Britain’s Independent newspaper to elaborate on that passage, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

In other words, the guy actually believes he is god! That was in 2003, when Mr. Soros was investing a formidable amount of his fortune into defeating President George W. Bush in his run for a second term in office. That effort failed, but the dragon got busy with other things, including making huge investments in organizations that would carry his radical message to new heights: the progressive Media Matters for America with its obsessive pursuit and vilification of conservative media, the Secretary of State Project, focused on electing leftists to that office to oversee the election process, like they did in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race that magically produced absentee ballots which gave the election to Al Franken instead of the popular incumbent Norm Coleman.

Also, as spelled out by journalist Mike Ciandella, the radical National Council of LaRaza, the abortion factory aka Planned Parenthood, the leftist Associated Press, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, as described by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, ACORN known for rampant voter fraud, and the following huge number of leftist groups. And that is not to omit the over-$100 million Mr. Soros has spent on, among other of his fetishes, Obamacare, anti-illegal-immigration groups, and anti-Israel organizations.