Author Archives: Rob Harrison

God’s Grace, Our Counterfeit

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(Psalm 103:8-18; 1 Timothy 1:12-20)

“Conscience” is a problematic word. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. It’s not the word’s fault, mind you—what the word is supposed to mean is plenty clear. In the New Testament, “conscience” means the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will, and thus of right and wrong; literally the word means “to know together with,” and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live. We might even call it a sixth sense of sorts, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect.

The problem, rather, is in us. Our sinful nature resists this—this isn’t what we want the word “conscience” to mean. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK. And so what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

That, I suspect, is what Hymenaeus and Alexander had done. If you’d asked them, I’m sure they would have said their consciences were clear, but Paul says no; they are, he says later on, “liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron”—so damaged by the lies they’ve told and believed that just like a badly-burned hand, the nerves no longer work and they’re no longer capable of feeling. Their consciences aren’t clear, they’re dead. Determined to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe, they have closed themselves off to the voice of the Spirit of God speaking within them to tell them they’re doing wrong; they’ve rejected conscience in favor of their own counterfeit, and therefore have shipwrecked themselves, and Paul is writing this letter to help Timothy stop them before they do the same to the whole congregation.

Unfortunately, we see this sort of thing a lot; and it can be hard to distinguish from true acts of conscience. Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing. What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The issue here is that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution because we don’t want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept the mercy of God, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. Paul pours out gratitude for the great mercy God showed him, giving thanks that “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”—and too often, we look at that and we want no part of it. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick. We don’t need to repent, we just need treatment.

The Bible tells us we’re sinners, that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior—and we don’t want to hear that. We don’t want to hear the good news Paul preached, that we’re sinners saved despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it, solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; we don’t want to hear that because we just don’t want to believe that anything’s all that seriously wrong with us. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t, and he didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.

The apostle Paul understood this, because he understood far more clearly than we do the depth and significance of his own sin. This was a man who, by worldly standards, was a clear winner, a powerful and accomplished person; he was a highly-trained and successful intellectual—in our day, he’d be a tenured full professor at a major university or graduate school, with a list of publications as long as your arm—who’d had an amazing record as a church planter, starting more churches in his career than most denominations can manage in a year, or three, or even five. He was an unrelenting and indomitable voice for truth whose authority was felt across the Roman world. No one in the church today has anything even close to the sort of wide and deep influence Paul had. And yet, when he looked at himself, what did he see? Anything God should be impressed with? No, he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God. For himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” Now, was Paul really the worst sinner who had ever lived to that point? Not likely, no; but his sense of his own sinfulness and his need for God’s mercy was so great that it drove him to make that statement—as it would for any of us who saw ourselves as clearly as Paul did.

This is important, because this last statement is not just Paul’s personal testimony: it’s the point where he broke with the false teachers who were plaguing the church in Ephesus, and where he called the church to do the same. We don’t know the details, but it’s clear that the likes of Hymenaeus and Alexander were preaching a religion of “you can be good enough”; if you just obeyed their particular version of the law of God, if you believed the myths they spun out of the Old Testament and lived according to the rules they laid down, then you didn’t need this “mercy” stuff—you could be good enough to please God on your own. You could earn your salvation.

The proper term for this, of course, is legalism; and though a lot of folks would be surprised to hear it, legalism is just as much a problem now as it was then. The difference is, most of our legalists take sin far less seriously, and so they tend to offer a lot of warmed-over self-help principles combined with a counterfeit version of grace—one that doesn’t actually require things like repentance, and mercy, and being agonized by our own sin. Instead of understanding that the grace of God to us is his free gift of salvation despite our unworthiness, they see God’s grace as saying to us, “No, no, it’s really not that bad—if it makes you happy, you go right ahead.” They fail to understand that God’s grace isn’t about what we deserve—that’s justice. God’s grace is all about what he gives us that we have not earned and could never even begin to hope to earn. Confusing the two is a major theological error, a fundamental misunderstanding of who God is and who we are (and pretty much everything in between).

And yet this idea that we deserve grace, that we deserve to be forgiven, pops up all over the place. We seem to think that if we don’t think something’s all that big a deal, God shouldn’t either; that if we have an excuse or some kind of justification for our actions, he should be happy to accept it; and that if it happens that there is something that needs to be forgiven, that God should just say, “That’s OK, no big deal,” and let it go, no cost to us or anybody else. It’s the idea that God just wants us to be happy and fulfilled on our own terms, and that he’s good with anything we think will get us there. It’s an idea which is appealing, and widespread—and straight from the pit of Hell.

There are all too many people who want to believe, as the great Christian thinker H. Richard Niebuhr put it, that “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross”; but that isn’t the truth. Our sin is real, whether we want to believe it or not, and so is God’s inability to tolerate it; and Christ didn’t come to tell us all we’re OK, he came to save us from the fact that we’re not. The good news of the gospel isn’t “I’m OK, you’re OK”; it isn’t that if you really want to do something, and you feel good about doing it, God will tell you to go ahead; it isn’t that we’re good enough for God, or that we can make ourselves good enough for God, or even that God’s too good to let such wonderful people as us go. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. The good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt; it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit.

Support citizen government; support Sarah Palin

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It’s no secret, of course, that I’m a supporter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Even if I weren’t, though—even if I were one of the Beltway types pulling for Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, let’s say—I would be angry at the way in which Gov. Palin’s opponents in Alaska have chosen to use an onslaught of ludicrous, frivolous “ethics complaints” to try to bring her down by bankrupting her with legal fees. (It’s not just me calling these complaints frivolous; the head of the committee responsible for addressing them, a Murkowski appointee who owes the governor nothing, has dismissed them all with that judgment, and has been musing in recent weeks about ways to make complainants pay for their complaints.) So far, not one of these complaints has passed even the first smell test, yet her enemies will stop at nothing to try to grind her down and bury her with legal debt defending herself for such actions as wearing a warm coat when she showed up for the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race.

Unlike so many of our professional politicians, Gov. Palin is not a rich member of our nation’s elite class, and she doesn’t have a trust fund or a private fortune to use to pay her lawyer; she’s a blue-collar woman with a blue-collar husband. As such, she started a legal defense fund to cover her legal bills, but her ankle-biting opponents have driven her bills up over a half-million dollars, so she has a long way to go. As such, my colleagues over atConservatives4Palin have launched a webathon, running through June 22, to help retire as much of her legal debt as possible.

I understand that these are tough economic times, and in general, I tend to be one who’s skeptical of donating money to politicians or parties, so I understand that point of view; but if you’re in a position to help, I encourage you to do so—whether you’re a supporter of Gov. Palin or not.

That might seem to be a strange thing to say, but hear me out. I firmly believe that one of the reasons why the political elite has tried so hard to marginalize and destroy this woman—elitists on the Right as well as on the Left—is that she’s not one of them; she’s not from the elite class, she didn’t rise through any of our political machines, and so she’s not beholden to them and they have no leverage on her. Our monoclonal political class likes its grip on power; sure, they have their ideological differences that reflect the differences in beliefs that exist in the rest of the country, but their deepest loyalty is to their class, their deepest commitment to business as usual. They are not truly representative in any meaningful sense.

If we want to change that, we need to elect people—liberals as well as conservatives—from outside that class, people who truly are a part of we, the people rather than “we, the Beltway.” Gov. Palin isn’t just a conservative politician, she’s a complete outsider to the Beltway, someone who came from a normal (if somewhat uncommon) American family, upbringing, and life. As such, she’s a test case for this: can any politician who is truly of the people, by the people, for the people long endure?

I don’t expect many liberals to support her, much less vote for her, because like anyone else, in general, liberals should vote for people who share their political principles, and she doesn’t; but I do think that liberals should be pulling for her to succeed, to thrive, to win re-election in 2010 and the GOP nomination in 2012, even if they then want her to lose in November. Why? Because if she succeeds, if she triumphs, she will show other potential citizen candidates that it can be done, and it can be endured, and it’s worth doing; if she succeeds, she will be followed, she will be emulated, and we will see others—in both parties—walking the trail she blazed. If Republican and Democratic voters are going to reclaim our parties for the principles in which they’re supposed to believe, it’s going to require candidates who are beholden to us rather than to the structures of those parties—and if that’s going to happen in our generation, it has to begin here, with Sarah Palin. We cannot let her be snuffed out if we want to see anyone else who isn’t machine-approved (and machine-stamped) run for anything much above dogcatcher.

As such, I’ll say it again: liberals who would like to see the Democratic Party break free of the corruptocrats who run it have just as much vested in Gov. Palin as conservatives who would like to see the GOP break free of the domination of its own trough-swilling pigs, and just as much reason to help her overcome this challenge. If you can, please give, so that this abuse of Alaska’s ethics laws will cease, and Gov. Palin can be on about the business for which she was elected.

 

Memo to the President: the British are a proud people, too

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and you might want to start treating them like it; which means stop dissing them by doing things like transferring Islamic militants to Bermuda without discussing it with the British government when Great Britain is responsible for Bermuda’s security and foreign relations. Needless to say, the British Foreign Office is furious at our government—again. These are potentially dangerous folks (which is why the Obama administration barred them from re-entering the US) who trained in Tora Bora; they aren’t the kind of folks you just dump on your neighbor’s lawn without bothering to consult them (at least if you care at all what your neighbor thinks of you).

When Barack Obama promised to make America popular around the world, he should have added a phrase: “except with our allies—they can go hang.”

Sarah Palin talks policy

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Two good interviews for Gov. Palin today, with Matt Lauer this morning and Wolf Blitzer this evening; they did want to talk about David Letterman’s vile behavior as well (Blitzer only briefly, Lauer at greater length), but beyond that she got substantial time to talk about the progress on the Alaskan natural-gas pipeline, the state of American politics, and the political future. Both Lauer and Blitzer did their jobs very well, I think, conducting interviews that were respectful without merely being puffballs, and Gov. Palin did well in answering their questions and making her points.

 

Keep the pressure on CBS/Letterman

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It appears that CBS and David Letterman have been feeling some heat for the latter’s vile comments about Willow Palin, since he felt the need to offer a mealy-mouthed half-baked pseudo-“apology” that amounted to “Oops, I meant to make vile comments about Bristol Palin.” Sorry, not buying it, and not buying that that makes it all OK even if I believed him. I think R. A. Mansour summed up my thoughts well in her updates on this post:

We are fighting this because if we let this slide then we are saying that the Palins are fair game for everything. If their 14-year-old daughter is not off limits, then nothing is. If this heartless jerk can get away with this, then what next? Can we expect jokes about little Piper? When is enough enough?

I would be disgusted by this if it were anyone’s daughter.

Are you upset by this? Then make your voices heard. . . .

Call CBS at 212-975-3247. Melt their phones.

Call every women’s organization you can think of. Call every sexual assault victims organization you can think of. Call every child protection advocacy group you can think of. Call every teen pregnancy organization you can think. Get a comment from all of them. Ask them if they have anything to say about David Letterman’s jokes about the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. Ask them if they think it was alright that David Letterman declared that his joke was really about Gov. Palin’s 18-year-old daughter. Does it make it alright that he was mocking an 18-year-old mother? And if they have no comment, ask them why. Ask them what makes the Palins any different from any other family.

Don’t stand for this. Do you want ordinary citizen politicians? Well, the Palins are ordinary people. They got into politics for the right reasons. They wanted to serve. And this is how they are treated. If you want more people to get into politics for the right reasons, then you had better defend this family—otherwise what other family would put themselves out there when this is how they know they will be treated?

As she goes on to note, it’s also a good idea to put pressure on CBS’ advertisers, and Sebastian Gray at HillBuzz has excellent advice on how to do so productively.

Update: HillBuzz suggests M&M Mars, Olive Garden, and Kellogg’s, with specific strategies for each as well as another general strategy post; and here’s another good list of advertisers to target, courtesy of Judy Silver at The New Agenda:

Aveeno (owned by Johnson & Johnson)
Canon
Charmin (owned by Proctor & Gamble)
Citibank
Downy (also owned by P&G)
Hellman’s
Lexus (owned by Toyota)
Nissan
Rogaine

Is it worth pushing these companies? Gray says yes, that if we’re persistent, we will see results:

CBS is in real trouble right now. Katie Couric just clocked the lowest ratings for a news broadcast on American television in HISTORY. Ad revenues are down everywhere, and once a month when Dr. Utopia gets on the TV and commandeers primetime for one of his ego trip national addresses, the networks lose tens of millions of dollars.

CBS cannot afford to lose M&M Mars or any two other large advertisers. If you direct all of your firepower at three big players like this, all selling products to families, and you heed my advice above, SOMETHING will happen before a month is out. You just have to put a little Al Sharpton in your life, be persistent, and write, write, write.

I would also add that it’s worth calling out CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves on this one. By way of comparison, here’s his statement on Don Imus after Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos”:

From the outset, I believe all of us have been deeply upset and revulsed by the statements that were made on our air about the young women who represented Rutgers University in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship with such class, energy and talent. While we have already made our disappointment and outrage clear, I would like to take the opportunity to offer my personal apologies to the Rutgers team, its impressive Coach, and the entire Athletic Department and Administration of Rutgers University. CBS has nothing but the highest regard for that establishment and its students, and we are sorry that offense was given in such a brutal and insensitive manner.

I would also like to extend an apology to everyone beyond Rutgers. Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society—all races, economic groups, men and women alike. In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many emails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.

And here’s what Moonves has had to say about Letterman’s significantly more vile attack on the Palin family:

*sound of crickets chirping*

Apparently, the head of CBS doesn’t care when “offense [is] given in such a brutal and insensitive manner” to conservative women, or worry about “the effect language like this has on our young people” when the purpose of that language is to hurt a Republican. This sort of hypocrisy is simply not tolerable; call him on it. Contact his office, but also do everything you can to make it clear that Moonves is a hypocrite and a chauvinist fraud.

On this one, we know where the real feminists are standing: liberal or not, they’re standing with the Palins; they understand that “sexism isn’t selective, and misogyny isn’t something that only applies to certain women.” May all of us rise up and say “Enough!”—whether you care about the Palins or not, for your own sake, and the sake of your daughters. For the sake of my daughters. Enough is enough.

Update: Kudos to NOW, which issued a great statement on this. They’re clearly trying to use this as a lever on conservatives, but more power to them:

NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives.

I’ll second that, and give them credit for putting principle over party, and for being smart enough to do so in a way that really advances that principle. What NOW has done here is the sort of move that could really make a positive difference in political conversation in this country, as I think the response at Hot Air from Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey shows, and they deserve applause for that.

Some people are slow learners

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and some people just aren’t willing to let the truth get in the way of taking down a political opponent. It appears that Conor Clarke of The Atlantic fits in at least one of those categories; less than a week after one memorably inept attempt at a hatchet job on Sarah Palin, he’s taken another wild, factually-impaired swing. I’m not sure what he’s trying to prove, but if it’s that he’s a complete tool, he’s managed that much, anyway.

David Letterman is despicable

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In case you didn’t see it, we have here a case of a 62-year-old white guy, on national television, making crude, cruel sexual comments about a 14-year-old girl and calling them jokes. How is this possible? Well, only because said 14-year-old girl is the daughter of Sarah Palin, and therefore the OSM doesn’t consider her to be fully human, let alone a “real woman.”

I appreciate the statements on this from her parents (posted on Facebook, but not, apparently, on the SarahPAC website):

“Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”

—Todd Palin

“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl are not only disgusting, but they remind us Hollywood has a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands—that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.'”

—Governor Sarah Palin

This should not be a liberal/conservative issue (as Tommy Christopher has said well)—the divide here should be between people who think it’s appropriate to make crude sexual comments about women, particularly in public and particularly underage girls, and those who recognize that such things are sick and wrong and do not constitute appropriate public discourse. Don Imus got fired for less; in a just world, David Letterman would receive the same fate. Please contact the higher-ups at CBS and Letterman’s advertisers (Joseph Russo has posted the list) and tell them Letterman’s behavior is unacceptable and intolerable.

Links and thoughts on Obamanomics

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Here’s a video comparing and contrasting the media’s economic reporting during the Bush administration with their approach now that their man is in the White House:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eO5pDbf6et8

The creator of that video writes,

By the middle of 2003, a mild recession had ended and the economy turned around big-time, with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs and whopping GDP growth of 7.5% in the third quarter. Yet month after month, the national media downplayed the good economic news with the dreaded “but,” as in “Positive economic indicator X was released today, but the economy is still in the toilet . . .” (Oh, by the way . . . George W. Bush was President back then.)

Of course, with President Obama now in the White House, the media’s economic coverage is the mirror opposite. As the unemployment rate skyrockets and hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every month, the bad economic news is spun by Obama’s friends in the media: “Negative economic indicator Y was released today, but it’s not nearly bad as we’d expected, and besides,unemployment can be fun!”

But hey, at least the Pelosi/Obama super-duper extra-special economic stimulus package has softened the blow, right? At least job losses aren’t as bad as projected, right? . . . Well, actually, it hasn’t worked out that way:

All in all, I’d say that’s not exactly the recovery we were promised. I know Newsweek called Barack Obama our first Vulcan president, but offhand, I’d say the media coverage of his economic policy is more likely the result of a few Jedi mind tricks. As Randall Hoven says, I think it’s about time to call this “the Obama recession.” (HT: Shane Vander Hart) Most people aren’t to that point yet, but The Nation is now predicting that if and when the official unemployment rate goes above 10%, they will be.

When the federal government actually acknowledges that the country has a double-digit unemployment rate, when a figure that is above 10 percent becomes that official number—something that the trend lines suggest could happen this summer—the country reaches an emotional and political tipping point. . . .

Politically, it is the point at which people start looking for someone to blame. . . .

If the country is socked with a double-digit unemployment rate, and if the actions of the administration that is in charge are seen as feeding the increase in joblessness, that’s the political point of no return.

Of course, we’d be at that point (and beyond it) already if it weren’t for the way the government calculates things, since as John Nichols points out in that article, the real number is a lot worse than the official one:

America already has double-digit unemployment.

In fact, the real unemployment rate, as opposed to the official rate, is well over 15 percent.

That’s because the official unemployment rate—which as of Friday stood at 9.4 percent, following another leap in jobless claims for May—is not, as economist John Williams has noted, “figured in the way that that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression.”

What happens when we include people who have stopped looking for work because they do not believe there are jobs to be found, along with part-time workers who would like to be working full-time?

Then, we start looking not at the unsettling 10 percent figure but the far more frightening 20 percent number.

Ed Morrissey gives Nichols “high marks for intellectual honesty” in coming right out and saying this;

Normally, the Left likes to trot that out during Republican administrations and leave it in the barn during Democratic presidencies.

Morrissey agrees with Nichols’ conclusion even as he rejects his prescriptions:

Even if we wildly disagree on economics, we agree that Obama will own this unemployment cycle, and soon. The 10% mark is a psychological barrier that Obama simply cannot avoid. Even without it, blaming Bush has a shelf life whose expiration date is rapidly approaching. Bush didn’t spend trillions of dollars in 2009 and promise that it would create “or save” jobs. Voters will get tired of hearing how many jobs Obama thinks he’s “saved” while unemployment continues to rise.

Obama has been in charge for almost five months and got every single bit of economic policy he wanted from Congress. If the economy remains mired and debt keeps skyrocketing, people will start to ask what they got for all of their great-grandchildren’s money.

This will only be exacerbated if the president gets his way, since he’s pushing a change to our nation’s tax structure that will drive more jobs overseas. Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll believe Steve Ballmer, who ought to know:

Last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer came to Washington to announce what Microsoft would do if Obama’s multinational tax policy is enacted.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S.” If Microsoft, perhaps our most competitive company, has to abandon the U.S. in order to continue to thrive, who exactly is going to stay?

In surveying the issue—President Obama’s proposal to end the deferral of multinational taxation—Kevin Hassett (a former advisor to the McCain campaign) asks,

Why does Obama advocate a policy that so flies in the face of everything that economists have learned? How could Obama possibly say, as he did last month, that he wants “to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens?” Further, how could Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner call a practice that top scholarship has shown increases wages and employment in the U.S. “indefensible?”

I have to admit I am at a loss. Maybe it is good politics to bash American corporations, and Obama isn’t really serious about making this change happen. But if the change is enacted, and domestic corporate taxes aren’t reduced to offset the big tax hike, the result will be a flight from the U.S. that rivals in scale the greatest avian arctic migrations.

Incidentally, that scholarship includes “the same James Hines who recently wrote a sweeping review of international tax policy with Obama’s top economist, Larry Summers,” so the president’s economic team has to be well aware of what the unintended consequences of his proposal would be.

I’ve said this before, I think, that the great flaw in leftist economic theory is that it assumes that people’s economic behavior doesn’t change when tax laws change—and that’s just not true. Make something more expensive, people will buy less of it; make doing business in your jurisdiction more expensive, people will go where it’s cheaper. The Left understands this when it comes to things like tobacco and gasoline, which is why they’re all for higher taxes on both and were unbothered by last summer’s $4-a-gallon gas, but when it comes to taxes, they just don’t seem to be able to see it.

This is particularly problematic since the richer a person is, or a company is, the more they can do to avoid paying taxes if taxes are high enough to make it worth the effort. The more you raise taxes, the more the elite dodge them, and the more the burden falls on the middle class and below; the result is a tax structure which is functionally much more regressive and unfair, regardless of how it appears on the surface. Throw in the fact that under such circumstances, the folks who have the money are much less likely to use it to create jobs in this country, meaning less growth and less money in the economy, and most people get hit coming and going. We’re already seeing that under this administration; from where I sit, I think the economy’s likely to recover somewhat anyway, but the recovery will be weaker and slower and less complete because of this administration’s actions and policies.

And if, as I’m still very much afraid, al’Qaeda pulls off another major attack in the middle of all this, all bets are off.