The other day with Schools Of Government, I bemoaned the number of undergrads and graduate students in the United States who are stamped by the “academic” majors and programs within universities for the expressed purpose of preparing them for bureaucratic life and perhaps leadership in the municipalities, state and federal governments of these United States.
Depending on whose numbers you use, over 25% of our economy is government – and growing. And since government operates on OPM – other people’s money – that means that three-quarters of the country’s private net worth is floating the entire boat. Reason enough to thank your dry cleaner the next time you pick something up. That goes for anyone else whose hands are hardened by toil.
Fr. Sirico coincidentally brushed on that subject in his latest Acton Notes piece that the postman brought this weekend. He writes:
“The boom was a result of government intervention with markets, and the bust has been the inevitable result. Many people miss this completely. So they blame the most conspicuous sectors in society they can: businesspeople and traders on Wall Street, no matter how unjust this blame is.”
But leave it to George Will to tie all this together. In a current commentary titled “Blinded By Science” Will hits on a more specific dilemma facing Constitutional Government in America. And that’s what the science fanatics who promote climate frauds together with those about to be exposed in the nutrition arguments (Harvard’s just released an analysis of saturated fats. Stay tuned.) – assert with lucrative help of OPM from government and quasi-government bureaucracies. Those named in the articles include the just resigned Head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia; the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); and a U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change – Todd Stern.
Mr. Will suggests that this last fellow may be guilty of violating U.S. Constitutional law.
“It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern’s portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions which everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.”
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But as we move into the second full week in Lent, I’m comfortable deferring to the Ten Commandments on matters of temptation and sin. Specifically:
3. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth:
5. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me;
Today’s bureaucrats might pay particular attention to #5 – especially the part following the colon. Especially – according to a story Amity Shlaes tells – if their last name is Ickes.
