Solve our fiscal mess! (Just don't cut my benefits or raise my taxes.)
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Maybe we have the government we deserve . . .
Building Virtue
Raymond Hain, in the context of extolling the virtues of a new book of essays by Philip Bess, lays out several arguments for the "new urbanism." This caught my eye:
[This is the most] striking difference between the various communities in the walkable neighborhood and the various communities in the suburbs: the communities of the neighborhood typically overlap, whereas the communities of the suburb do not. Though suburbanites still live, work, play, worship, and shop, there will be very few people, if any, with whom they will have more than one activity in common. We live with people other than those with whom we work, and we pray with yet a third, different community.
The most important feature of contemporary suburban sprawl, then, has little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with its fragmenting character. Suburbia makes possible and promotes a division between the various individual activities that make up our lives. But while our activities seem fragmented, we must find a way to integrate the various activities in which we engage so that our lives are a harmonious and unified whole. The task of integration, of recognizing the various human goods and pursuing them as a single human agent in search of happiness, is the central task of human life. And it is in terms of an integrated pursuit of the final end that each of the moral and intellectual virtues finds its place.
I'm tempted, as a child of the suburbs who has spent his entire adult life living in cities, to validate my own choices and shout "hurrah!" While the walkable community does offer some advantages over the suburb in this regard, though, I think it's easy to overstate the difference. Integration is difficult in the modern subdivision, to be sure. The task of integration can also be extremely difficult in walkable communities, especially to the extent that urban life can be marked by lower levels of trust and a greater sense of anonymity. And it seems like building a walkable community that also has sufficient employment opportunities to keep everyone working within that community is a very difficult trick to pull off. Even if we get out of our fenced-in back yards and onto the front porch, that's a long way from working and worshipping together.
Hain is not very optimistic about the prospects for another reason, as he concludes:
It looks like all this [integration] is only possible if enough people agree on the end, the general shape of human happiness as a whole, and this agreement on what matters most shapes and makes possible all the other integrative activities of our community. But what if we no longer agree on this (and, frankly, this seems exactly the situation we face today)? Bess reminds us that suburbia represents a turning away from public life towards private life. Front porches have become back decks, and public squares have disappeared. Suppose we were to rebuild those public squares, and all of us spent our evenings on our front porches. We might discover, to our dismay, that we had almost nothing to talk about.
In any event, it's well worth reading.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Tax Day reflection: let's cut spending and raise taxes
Political parties have an (outrageous, in my view) tendency to take a zero-tolerance approach to even the most sensible legal reform that is perceived to intrude on one of the party's sacred issues. For Dems, don't even try a pilot school voucher programs for needy kids or limit the grisly and widely abhorred practice of partial-birth abortion. For the GOP, it now seems that the party has reached a near-consensus on an issue that holds significant peril (in my view) for the country going forward: taxes can be cut, but never raised. I know I've jumped onto this soap box already, but since it's Tax Day and there are new statistics available, I think it's worth revisiting the conversation.
Given the rhetoric about taxes coming from leading Republicans, a visitor from another era would think that we are currently laboring under oppressive tax rates. I have a hard time seeing an average federal tax rate of 17% as oppressive (9% if we include those who pay no taxes). Especially for the super-wealthy, these are the golden days. Government spending needs to be cut significantly, but ruling out any tax increases is irresponsible, especially for those who see the payment of taxes as "part of the duty of solidarity." (Compendium para. 355) Is the proper rate of taxation a matter for prudential judgment? Of course, but balancing the budget solely by cutting expenditures will threaten the well-being of society's most vulnerable to such an extent that, in my view, it's pushing the boundaries of legitimate discretion. I maintain that it is difficult to square an absolutist approach that precludes any possibility of increased tax revenue with the values reflected in CST.
UPDATE: Tax Prof Blog has an interesting paper and comment thread about current corporate tax rates.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Should Catholics be advocating for statehood for D.C.?
Two recent comment threads (here and here) have struggled with the application of subsidiarity in the American legal context, including its application to the District of Columbia. Sandy Levinson ratchets up the rhetoric a bit in a post titled "Obama as Colonial Master." An excerpt:
Thanks to the Constitution, the District of Columbia has an anomolous status. It is, for some purposes of federal jurisdiction, a "state," and, of course, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, DC gets three electoral votes. However, as any resident of DC emphasizes, it continues to be treated as a ward of the national government, the equivalent of a colony without voting representation in the House or Senate or, more to the point, any of the autonomy that is presumably attached to being a state in our particular federal system. . . .
The City Council of DC has voted to spend the tax money of its own citizens to help pay for abortions of presumably poor and vulnerable women. Whatever one's views on abortion, there's no doubt at all that what John Marshall once called a "sovereign state" could choose to spend its own tax dollars on such a public policy (unless, of course, the Court holds that fetuses are "persons" protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, which not even Scalia has advocated). Only a colony, without any rights that the administering power need respect, could be prevented from passing such a program.
. . . . Barack Obama betrayed not only his contituents in DC, but also his ostensible and ostentatious devotion to "democracy" around the world by acquiscing to the denial of self-government to the District of Columbia.
Maybe abortion is not the best context in which to grapple with the issue, but it still presents the question: is the status of DC a problem for those who take subsidiarity seriously?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Islamic bioethics: an outsider's view
Tonight I returned from the University of Michigan, where I was privileged to participate in a conference on Islamic bioethics. Granted, I'm neither a Muslim nor a bioethicist, so the invitation to me was especially gracious -- I was there to address the interplay of law and religion in American health care more broadly. This was not an interfaith dialogue, so I had the opportunity to observe what was primarily a conversation among Muslim scholars and physicians aimed at developing Islamic bioethics for the American context. I learned a lot, but what struck me were some of the similarities between their project and the ongoing project of developing Catholic legal theory. Just a few quick observations:
First, many participants perceived a need within Islam to pay more attention to -- and cultivate more expertise regarding -- context. The scholars of Islamic law are central to the endeavor, of course, but they must be in dialogue with experts who know the practice of medicine and American health care in particular. As Tariq Ramadan put it in his talk today, the authority of the text (as interpreted by the scholars) must be joined with the authority of context. It sounded very much like a call for the laity to step up in helping develop Church teaching.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Vouchers back in business
I'm glad that a budget deal was reached, especially because it includes funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholars Program (the program that allows low-income students to attend private schools). Though favored by such non-conservative luminaries as Marion Barry and The Washington Post, opposition from the Democratic leadership has been insurmountable -- at least until last night, apparently.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
"Don't tell this rebel congregation it's not real."
Get Religion takes the Cleveland Plain Dealer to task for its one-sided puff piece on a breakaway "Catholic" parish.
Leaving the Church
Depressing statistics from Germany.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Emergency contraceptive rule struck down in Illinois
Several years ago Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich promulgated a rule that required pharmacies to dispense emergency contraceptives. Today, thanks in significant part to the tireless advocacy of Catholic University law prof Mark Rienzi, an Illinois court struck down that rule as a violation of the Illinois Healthcare Right of Conscience Act, the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Here's an excerpt of the court's ruling on the free exercise claim:
The evidence at trial established a Free Exercise violation because the Rule is neither neutral nor generally applicable. The Rule and its predecessors were designed to stop pharmacies and pharmacists from considering their religious beliefs when deciding whether to sell emergency contraceptives. The record evidence demonstrates the Rule and all prior rules were drafted with pharmacists and pharmacy owners with religious objections to selling emergency contraceptives in mind. This lack of neutrality requires a strict scrutiny test be applied to this Rule. Furthermore, the law is not generally applicable. The Rule excuses compliance for a host of "common sense business" reasons, but not for religious reasons. And the variance process is, by the government's admission, a system of individualized governmental assessments that is available for non-religious reasons, but not for religious ones, even though the government acknowledged that the proximity of willing competitors nearby Plaintiffs' pharmacies made any health-related impact of their religious constraints unlikely.
The court rejected the pharmacists' Fourteenth Amendment argument (as laid out in Rienzi's law review article that was discussed on MoJ a while back). It will be interesting to see if this ruling stirs things up on the litigation front in other states.
Friday, April 1, 2011
The changing American family
A new study shows that, of American women with two or more children, 28% have children with multiple fathers -- roughly the same percentage of American adults who have college degrees.
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