This Is What Winning Looks Like

The infant mortality rate is calculated by dividing the number of infants who die within one year of birth by the number of infants who are born. The infant mortality rate is usually expressed as the ratio of infant deaths per one thousand live births.  

Prior to 1900, infant mortality rates of two and three hundred obtained throughout the world. The infant mortality rate would fluctute sharply according to the weather, the harvest, war, and epidemic disease. In severe times, a majority of infants would die within one year. In good times, perhaps two hundred per thousand would die. So great was the pre-modern loss of children's lives that anthropologists claim to have found groups that do not name children until they have survived a year. (emphasis added)

There is no reason to doubt the figures PBS provides above. There is reason to doubt the figure below:

The infant mortality rate started a long slide from 165 per 1,000 in 1900 to 7 per 1,000 in 1997.

In fact, this figure of 7 infant deaths per 1000 live births is a complete lie, a total fabrication. 

While it is the case that infant mortality began a long slide in this country from 165 per thousand in 1900, the legalization of abortion in the 1960's, and the nationwide legalization of in utero child murder in 1973, reversed that slide.

If we count abortion for what it is - infant mortality via infanticide - then the CDC shows us that our present infant mortality rate is identical to the rates seen before 1900.

The national legal induced abortion ratio increased from 196 per 1,000 live births in 1973 (the first year that 52 areas reported) to 358 per 1,000 live births in 1979 and remained nearly stable through 1981....  The ratio peaked at 364 per 1,000 live births in 1984 and since then has shown a nearly steady decline. In 2000, the abortion ratio was 245 per 1,000 live births in 49 reporting areas and 246 for the same 48 reporting areas available for 1999. This represents a 3.8% decrease from 1999 (256 per 1,000 live births) for the 48 reporting areas.

The pre-1900's rate of infant mortality was due to poor understanding of medical issues and relatively poor economic conditions. 


To what can we attribute our current high rate of infant mortality?
Well, we could blame the economy. 

It is true that the US economy underwent enormous inflation between 1965 and 1981, which might explain the high rates of infant mortality during that period.  It is certainly the case that the black community, which routinely kills the majority of its infants each year, is among the poorest in the nation. 


But blaming the economy seems somewhat disingenuous. After all, even the poorest country in the world today is richer than the richest country was in 1810. Even the poorest people in America are vastly better off than 90% of the rest of the world. Every American alive today is richer than John D. Rockefeller was in 1916. It's hard to say that poverty is the reason, because essentially no one in the world is poor, at least not when compared to 1810.  

We can make a very cogent argument that the Church's call to care for the poorest of the poor has not only been answered, but essentially completed. We won.

In terms of physical wealth and health, no one is as poor today as even the richest person was when Rerum Novarum was issued in 1891. The social justice people can sit down and enjoy their triumph. Everyone is wealthy, just as they say Leo XIII asked. 

No, it isn't the economy that is causing the high infant mortality rate. 

Rather, we seem to accept a high infant mortality rate today precisely because we are physically rich. We have the means to keep infants alive, we just choose not to use them. No matter where you go in the world, women's fertility is being systematically destroyed.  The number of children born to women each year is steadily dropping as the world's inhabitants becomes steadily wealthier. 

On average, the world over, the more money we have, the fewer children we have.

For most of human history, infant mortality has stood at around 300 per 1000. For a short century, between about 1880 and 1960, certain Western countries managed to get that rate down to just a dozen or so per 1000. 

We managed to become rich in children just as we were becoming rich in physical comfort. But, we didn't like having so many children around.

So, those same Western countries deliberately cranked infant mortality back up to where it has always historically been. No other country has ever managed to drop infant mortality to the exceedingly low rates the West has experienced, nor will they ever again. 

Why won't they? 

Because they'll abort their children out of existence as they become rich. The West has shown that it is acceptable to do that.

We won the war against physical poverty.
But, as the Fathers and Doctors of the Church liked to point out, physical poverty is nothing compared to spiritual poverty, the poverty of not knowing or living the Gospel.

We are indisputably physically wealthy.
Anyone who tells you different is either ignorant or deliberately lying.

But infant mortality is no different now than it was 1000 years ago, because the just distribution of physical riches was never really the problem.

The world over, there is a direct correlation between increased infanticide and "winning" social justice issues, that is, successfully redistributing physical wealth.

Someone might want to mention that to the bishops. 

Caring for the Poor

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” – James Madison, author of the Constitution.

Between 1791 and 1804, Haiti was a French colony in a state of revolt. The Haitians were attempting to overthrow the enslaving French and establish their own republic. In this attempt, they were successful. But this same attempt created a large number of French refugees, many of whom fled to the United States.

Americans felt a debt of gratitude to the French for the inestimable help the French navy had provided American troops during America's recent revolution. Without the French navy, the Americans could not have triumphed. Many called for the government to provide assistance to the refugees.

The quote above was James Madison's response to those calls.

Madison very much wanted to help the refugees, but he knew there was no way to justify that help within the confines of the Constitution. The money was taxpayer money meant to be expended on matters of national importance. It was not to be squandered on specific individuals at the whim of legislators. If help were to be given, it had to be given by individuals and private organizations.

The USCCB 
Today, some of the more reckless bishops in the USCCB have called for Paul Ryan's head. His budget, they claim, is not Catholic.
It does not care for the poor.

But the Constitution has not changed since Madison's time. There is within it, to this day, no provision whereby public funds can be disbursed for private benefit.

As an elected official, Paul Ryan has a duty to care for the funds entrusted to him. The bishops have a duty to recognize Ryan's duty.

Let's put this another way.

Assume you were a bank teller. You are a friend of mine. I walk in and plead with you. I need money. My family is starving, my children homeless. I need money. You know it is true.

As you stand at your station in the bank, you realize you have money close at hand - a whole drawer full of it. Would your Catholic faith justify you in giving part or all of the money in that drawer to me?

If you refuse to reach into the bank till to hand me money, would you be violating your Catholic faith?

That's essentially what the USCCB is demanding of Paul Ryan.
There are poor people.
Paul Ryan is standing at the bank till.
"Give them the bank's money!" cry some of the USCCB bishops.

There is no provision in the Constitution which permits this.
The bishops know this, or should know this.
Their attempt to read into the Constitution something which is manifestly not there should be worrisome.


The Abortionists
The USCCB is not the only group who has tried to read into the Constitution something that is not there.

"[S]pecific guarantees... have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," according to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

This was the basis upon which contraception and abortion was legalized.

The USCCB protests mightily against this false reading of the Constitution.

Many of its bishops now protest mightily in favor of their own false reading.

God gives us everything we have out of His own abundance.

I am supposed to imitate Him by giving to other people out of the abundance He has given me.

My charity imitates the divine charity.

I can hold a gun to your head and take your things, but I cannot force you to be charitable.

Confiscation is not charity, it is taking.

Taxation is not charity, it is taking.

Insofar as I take resources from you, I take from you your ability to imitate God's generosity.

I steal from you your ability to be charitable as God is charitable.

I violate your ability to image God.

When a child is legally aborted, the state takes of the life of a child.
When a man is unreasonably taxed, the state takes the man's ability to imitate the life of divine charity.

Both are sins, the first much more heinous than the last.
But, if the first is allowed, the last seems not so much a sin.

In attacking Paul Ryan, the USCCB is imitating Planned Parenthood.
There is a reason they do this.

It is the job of Christians to care for the poor.

It is not the job of the government - at least not any government ruled by the US Constitution - to care for the poor.

We Christians should care for the poor without looking to the government for help. The government should assist us in this endeavor by drastically lightening the load of taxes it imposes on us.

When we are lightly taxed, we have excess goods which we then give to the poor ourselves. This allows us to imitate the life of divine charity directly. 

We get to practice the presence of God by practicing constant charity with the resources we have earned through our work and won through God's providence. The government should be small, weak, and out of the way so that we can proclaim and live the Gospel without hindrance, interference or government intermediary.

Charity flows from individuals towards individuals. Government's role is to facilitate this one-on-one charity, not confiscate it. The government can never become what we already are.

Christians are children of God. 
The Church is a real person, ensouled by the Holy Spirit. 
Charity is love between individual persons. 
The Church can practice real charity because the Church is a person.
Government is not a person.

Government cannot be a child of God. 

Government is incapable of practicing divine charity because government is not a person. 

The bishops of the USCCB do not seem able to distinguish between God and government.

Thus, they compel Paul Ryan to do something which violates Catholic Faith.

They have become the evil they claim to fight.

This is a source of sadness for all Catholics.

P.S. 
The original article ended with the line above, but I have been thinking about this and a further disturbing thought occurred to me.


Certainly the bishops know everything I have said above. 
So why do they continue to push for something so wrong?

Many answers could be given to that question, but one answer is particularly disturbing: the bishops do not trust their flocks.


The bishops don't trust that, if left to our own devices, we will be good Catholics.
They believe in government employees.
The do not believe in their own parishioners.

They believe you can be paid to be a good Catholic, you can be employed to be one.
But they do not believe their own parishioners can be good Catholics (unless those Catholics are also government employees, I suppose).


Governments care, parishioners don't.


John Chrysostom, a doctor of the Church, pointed out that if the rich man has more than he needs, then he is stealing from the poor. If I have ten pairs of shoes in my closet, but I only really need two pair, then I have stolen the other eight pair from the poor. 

A poor man who is in desperate need, a poor man who has asked for sustenance from someone who can provide it, but is refused that sustenance because of the provider's lack of charity, has a right to take what he needs - it is not theft, in that case, for the poor man to take it. 

The need must be very great - it must be life-threatening, in fact - but if it is a very great need and the miserly rich man will not satisfy it, then the poor who take that great and necessary thing have not stolen from the rich. Rather, the rich were stealing from the poor by withholding it. The poor man is just acquiring what is, in justice, his. 

In that scenario, the miserly rich man is the thief. 

Bishops think their own parishioners are just a pack of thieves.

Bishops wonder at many lay people's low opinion of bishops.
Given the evidence, laity may legitimately wonder at the bishops' low opinion of us.

Solidarity... With the USCCB

In the last five years, I have visited The Catholic Thing only twice, because their commentary is consistently stupid. That having been said, someone recommended an article to me that is so incredibly stupid I could not refrain from writing this post.


Peter Brown attempts to lay out the differences and similarities between subsidiarity and solidarity. Insofar as he sticks to just that, he does a fair-to-middlin' job of it.


But, Lord, have mercy!
His examples are simply, incredibly, inexorably, inexecrably stupid. 


Take this jaw-dropping whopper of idiocy, for instance:

The Knights of Columbus was originally set up along the friendly society model. ... A small community could provide for the health care that was available in 1870. It was much harder in 1910. It would be impossible today with the cost of care for, say, cancer or heart disease easily running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If subsdiarists really want the 1870 community model , then the tradeoff is accepting 1870’s health care. Any takers? 

Who in the name of God's green earth does he think pays for health care today? Tooth fairies? Does he think NO ONE pays for health care? That bodies pile up in the streets, unshriven, unwashed and unburied?


Insurance companies are, in terms of financial subsidies, functionally identical to friendly societies. There is zero difference between them in that utilitarian sense. 


And of course the cost of modern medical care for cancer or heart disease is NOT "impossible today". If it WERE impossible today, then no one would be able to pay for such care. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people successfully pay for such care every year, and most of them DO NOT pay for it out of their own pockets. 


These bills are paid off by the modern equivalent of "friendly societies" - insurance companies. It's just that Blue Cross/Blue Shield run a much tighter financial ship and are much better businessmen than say, the The Union of Illustrious Catholic Parishioners of East Timbuktoo. Well, and BC/BS doesn't hold as many prayer meetings. 


Furthermore, "friendly societies" are not moribund. If Brown had bothered to do ANY research, he would have discovered that the Knights of Columbus has one of the highest-rated life insurance companies in the nation. Brown apparently fails to realize that the vaunted "solidiarity" can be attained through either secular or sacred institutions. Both work. Obviously. 


So, the community DOES already pay for health care.
Community members pay via whichever insurance company each member of the community chooses to join. Those who don't choose to join STILL have their health care paid for by another community institution - the Catholic hospital - or by yet another community institution, the state or federal government.




When Did Friendly Societies Begin to Fail?


According to Brown:

"The friendly societies actually began collapsing well before the emergence of the modern welfare state."

Maybe the man could pick up a book and read it sometime. Originally, the monasteries were the source of everything we consider "welfare". The modern government-run welfare state doesn't begin anywhere in Europe until the governments destroy the monasteries. England didn't need welfare and poor houses until Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries. Europe didn't need government-run welfare until Napoleon destroyed the monasteries. 


In the 1880s, Bismarck began old age pensions, medical care, unemployment insurance and all the rest of it as part of his Kulturkampf - his bid to destroy the power of the Church in Germany. He had lost the battles he created through overt attacks on Church authority in the 1870s, so he went to more subtle and nuanced attacks in the 1880s. He followed Julian the Apostate's strategy. As we now see, it worked. 


Friendly societies fell apart because the government TOOK all the money that had been given to friendly societies. If Brown had just read Chapter 7 of Larry Elder's "Ten Things You Can't Say In America", he would have known that:

"In 1871, the Chicago fire nearly destroyed the city, yet it entirely rebuilt itself without any government aid.... Economist Thomas Sowell notes that nearly 70 cents of every welfare dollar never actually makes it to aid the intended victims.... In 1910, before England's massive welfare state, there were 26,877 registered mutual aid societies, and some estimate there were nearly as many unregistered ones... When, however, England decided to federalize welfare, the number of mutual aid societies plummeted.... since government took over aid to the needy, individual assistance was no longer required. And, since individuals saw taxes go up to support a welfare state, they felt less inclined to give more on top of that which the government already required."

Even if they wanted to give more, they couldn't. The government had taken their excess.


Then Brown makes the absolutely ludicrous claim that friendly societies can't work in a highly mobile society such as ours. 

Another thing that killed the friendly societies was the other modern capitalist phenomenon: social mobility. With people increasingly moving from farm to city and from city to city, the social solidarity that made the societies work fell apart.

I ask the dear Lord in heaven, how any man can write anything so stupid and still get it by editors, still get it published? Of course, friendly societies were created PRECISELY in response to a highly mobile society. Why did the Knights of Columbus form, for instance? To care for millions of Irish immigrants who had each journeyed thousands of miles from their homes. Where did the English friendly societies originate? Why, in the mobility forced upon English farmers as a result of the enclosure movement. 


Friendly societies have always been a RESPONSE to mobility. They are welcoming committees, stabilizing influences for a mobile people. He's got the cart firmly in front of the horse, and now wishes the horse to dance backwards to match his tune. 


The Coup de Grace


And, to prove that Peter Brown is a complete idiot, he testifies to it:

But what would replace the friendly societies after the world wars and the Great Depression delivered the coup de grace? There was really no one left but the state and some private insurance beset by the same adverse selection problems that killed the societies. As the adverse selection problems inherent in private insurance have grown, the state has assumed an ever greater role. 

Oh, those poor governments! They just stood by and sighed while two world wars and a great depression broke out for no reason at all! The governments had nothing to do with any of that! And of course, the state just HAD to step in to save all those poor insurance companies, who would barely survive if it wasn't for benevolent government assistance!


Horrors! Think, Emily, think what the world would be like if government was too small, too weak, to save us from the nasty wars and depressions we inflicted on ourselves! If only our governments had been stronger then, we would NEVER have had such terrors! 


Oh, whoa is me! I faint at the thought of small, weak government! Oh, hold me!


Yeah.
Whatever.


At the turn of the last century, with the racist Woodrow Wilson at the helm, the American government stole power from the people, passed laws to eviscerate and emasculate people, so it could accumulate the power it wanted. 


The government stole the friendly societies' money, stole their social power, broke their legs and blamed it on ... what... social mobility? And Peter Brown actually expects us to buy into this claptrap?


The government is currently destroying the secular equivalent of friendly societies by destroying insurance companies and related organizations. And we're going to blame it on some nebulous "problems of modern society"? 


Really?!?! 


Peter Brown may or may not be a theologian.
He is certainly an idiot.
But he is not a completely useless idiot - he highlights how our bishops think.


So, if you ever wanted to read something by a USCCB stalking horse, Peter Brown is your man.