All posts by Wintery Knight

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The latest podcasts from Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Here are some helpful podcasts from Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse.

The first two talks were given to 110 lawyers in training at an Alliance Defense Fund event. I highly recommend them. If you like informed, passionate advocates of social conservatism who are also experts in libertarian economics, then you’ll enjoy these podcasts!

Podcasts

  1. Marriage & Sex
    (June 12, 2009) Dr. J guest-lectures on the economic and societal impact of marriage and sex.  This talk, delivered at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship in Phoenix, is a little over an hour long.  Its companion talk was podcast on June 23, 2009.

    Direct download: Sep02_09.mp3

  2. Iowa Supreme Court: Same-Sex Marriage
    (June 12, 2009) Dr. J guest-lectures on the recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling on homosexual marriage.  This talk, delivered at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship in Phoenix, is a little over an hour long.  Its companion talk is podcast on September 2, 2009.

    Direct download: June23_09.mp3

  3. Informed Consent, et. al.

    (August 25, 2009) Ignorance = Informed Consent?  Dr J sheds some light on this troubling trend, the groups behind it, and how mothers and children are losing out. (Note: this program is about Oklahoma overturning the law that requires doctors to conduct an ultrasound before performing an abortion.

    Direct download: Sep04_09.mp3

  4. Defense of Marriage Act
    (August 19, 2009) Dr J appears on Issues, Etc to discuss the Obama Justice Department’s impending defense of DoMA.  She also shines some light on the strategies of the homosexual movement as they attempt to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.

    Direct download: Sep03_09.mp3

  5. #4: Same-Sex Marriage in Vermont
    (September 1, 2009) Vermont becomes the 4th state to legalize homosexual marriage.  Dr J and Todd Wilken discuss how it happened, the next target(s) of the homosexual lobby, and why it’s so important for supporters of traditional marriage to respond.

    Direct download: Sep05_09.mp3

It’s more fun to discuss these issues if you get the proper training first. Dr. Morse is the William Lane Craig of social issues, and social issues matter. If the left makes it illegal to advocate socially conservative positions in public, then we run the risk of not being able to teach Biblical values to our own children.

Can a social conservative support social safety net programs?

The full text is available in a PDF here. (H/T Stephen Baskerville)

I highly recommend this essay to social conservatives who do not yet understand why limiting the size of government is vital to preserving the autonomy of the family.

Every social conservative should be in favor of limited government, even in fiscal matters, not just on social issues. In my view, any social conservative who wants the government to tax “the rich” or big corporations is in reality undermining social conservatism.

The more money is taken from individuals, families and corporations, who have no political power to influence your family, and given to secular-left government bureaucrats who cater to left-wing special interest groups, the more the family is endangered.

Excerpt:

State controlled programs today in developed countries, almost universally, are polyamorous-friendly and monogamy-hostile. This is unjust from every perspective of political analysis because those who choose monogamy are, generally, the most effective, the cheapest and the safest in raising the next generation.

But they are unjust mainly because it is a universal, inalienable right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, including raising them in their culture.

Further, the social welfare state asks the monogamous to support the polyamorous, and uses the universal safety net insurance scheme (or taxes) to ensure that the monogamous pay more to support those who choose the polyamory culture. This is plainly unjust, but even more so because the monogamous do not have their own culture-friendly programs and their own children are the target of the culture of polyamory’s “Janissary” scheme. Justice will increase and tensions decrease when that culture of polyamory begins to pay its own costs.

One way to progress in this direction and to make the behavioral bureaucracy to serve both cultures is to give all parents, parents of both cultures, and control over the program money set aside for their children. That is giving parents vouchers, in one form or another for all three program areas

The social welfare safety net will still be in place but the parents (be they monogamous or polyamorous) will choose who holds the net in place for their children.

This requires a huge political effort on the part of the monogamy culture. Diverting the flow of money from the special interest groups (organized doctors, teachers, schools) and instead directing the voucher money (cost per child served) to the parent– who can then choose the individual doctor, teacher or school they want. The professionals will still receive the same amount of money. But instead of serving a bureaucracy they will be cooperating with the parents. But such a change is a big one in the political order and the culture of monogamy must harness itself to the task.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Obama appoints SEIU union executive to create manufacturing jobs

Story from ABC News. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

In Cincinnati tomorrow, President Obama will announce that he’s appointing Ron Bloom his Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy, White House sources tell ABC News.

Bloom is currently Senior Advisor to Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner as a member of the President’s Task Force on the Automotive Industry, named to that position in February. He will remain in that position even while he takes on his new task.

Jammie Wearing Fool writes:

The name Ron Bloom is one that we need to start paying attention to. He has a long history of being the negotiating face of unions in a suit. He is a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked for the unions beginning with SEIU for decades. The most recent union he represented was the United Steel Workers (USW) before becoming a part of the automotive team that Obama put together.

The problem is that unions don’t create manufacturing jobs – they lose them. Says who? Says Lawrence Summers, that’s who. (I.e. – Obama’s buddy Larry Summers!)

Excerpt:

Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy. Also, those who lose high-wage union jobs are often reluctant to accept alternative low-wage employment. Between 1970 and 1985, for example, a state with a 20 percent unionization rate, approximately the average for the fifty states and the District of Columbia, experienced an unemployment rate that was 1.2 percentage points higher than that of a hypothetical state that had no unions. To put this in perspective, 1.2 percentage points is about 60 percent of the increase in normal unemployment between 1970 and 1985.

Talk about the fox guarding the hen-house! Obama’s economic ignorance strikes again!