Moody’s Sees Bloomberg’s “Laughable” And Raises…
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PERA, PPC on July 13th, 2012
Being State Treasurer and trying to hold the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) to account can be a frustrating experience, as Walker Stapleton shared with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel in June:
“I asked for some basic financial information about the defined benefit plan, where people were promised a rate of return, a massively inflated rate of return of 8%, Sean, that everybody from Warren Buffett to Michael Bloomberg have said is ridiculous and insane and preposterous. And they keep this rate of return promise, on purpose, to pervasively underfund the plan, and create a liability on the backs of our kids and their kids, and future generations of Americans.”
Now, it’s not just Mayor Bloomberg, it’s Moody’s.
Moody’s Investors Service has asked for comment on a proposed adjustment to its valuation of the public pension liability in the United States. One of those changes would lower both the discount rate and the expected rate of return to a standard of 5.5%.
This would have the effect of tripling the estimated unfunded liability, from $766 billion to $2.2 trillion.
Trillion.
With a T.
PERA has more than 97,000 current benefit recipients receiving an average monthly benefit of nearly $3,000. It runs a sensitivity analysis on its liability, varying the rate of return and the discount rate from 9.5% (no adjectives need apply) to a merely overstated 6.5%. At 6.5%, it is barely 50% funded, and Colorado’s unfunded liability is just a shade under $37 billion.
A reasonable estimation back to 5.5% puts the unfunded liability at $45 billion, and the funded rate near death-spiral territory at 43.8%. I’m sure that when PERA releases its 2012 annual financial report in about a year, they’ll have done those calculations themselves. Here’s the recently released 2011 version.
Stapleton, a PERA board member, sued last year to get access to PERA records. That effort was rebuffed in Denver District Court in April.
“This is a battle for transparency that is going on all across our country,” Stapleton said on Hannity’s show. “It’s critical that we win this battle, because it’s critical for state budgets going forward.”
Romney’s New Ad Disappointing
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, National Politics, PPC on July 13th, 2012
One of the reasons I had – and still have – considerably more hope for the Romney campaign than I ever really did for the McCain campaign is that Romney has shown an ability to counter-punch, especially in the early, sparring rounds. But the Romney response to Obama’s discredited claims about outsourcing fall falt.
Let’s stipulate that a Democrat getting Four Pinnochios from the Washington Post on an ad is as close to metaphysical certainty that the ad is untrue as it’s possible to get in this lifetime. That still doesn’t make Romney’s response effective.
I’m unsure why featuring noted non-Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton doing the same thing that Mitt’s doing – telling Obama to cut it out – is supposed to help. To me, it just illustrates the tactic’s futility. It’s a little like Bob Dole futilely imploring George H.W. Bush to, “stop lying about my record.”
People expect their politicians to lie. People don’t expect their Presidents to lie, which is why Obama’s ad, explicitly saying that “What a President believes matters,” is so much more effective, even though the criticism would work better on him.
Daily Glimpse July 12, 2012
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on July 12th, 2012
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- New Jersey Budget Problem?
From the WaPo: The state’s fiscal woes have prompted serious concern from ratings agencies like Moody’s, which said recently that the state’s economy through the next year “will likely remain muted given recent tax revenue trends and our expectation that the state’s economic recovery will lag the U.S,” as the New Jersey Record reports. The revenue shortfalls […]
- Californians Break With Unions on Pensions
Walter Russell Mead on Californians and public pensions: What makes this all very much worse from the unions’ point of view is that if (and when) a truly major and prolonged statewide budget emergency comes, attitudes are likely to harden against them even more. When voters “get” just how much of a tradeoff they face […]
- The Political Cudgel – And The Embedded Nail
Pat Caddell: Why? Some Republicans are worried that the fight over Obamacare distracts from the issue of the economy. What these Republicans fail to realize is that healthcare and the economy are inextricably linked; Americans now realize that Obamacare was a detour on the road to economic recovery, so to remind them of one is […]
Knowledge With Understanding
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on July 11th, 2012
Recently, I posted about author Tom Holland, and his NPR interview where he claimed that any Muslim should be able to understand how he, as a non-Muslim, could try to make historical sense of the Koran, since he wasn’t bound by Muslim doctrine. Given the alarming level of violence directed by some Muslims (usually overseas) towards both Muslims and non-Muslims over the issue of blasphemy (for Muslims) or “slander” (for non-Muslims), I thought at the time, and still think, it represents the kind of self-delusion that one only finds with a high degree of education.
But the subject appears to be in the air, as they say, and Peter Berger at the American Interest has penned a more thoughtful andcontemplative piece about the role that historical scholarship, as applied to the Koran, might play in advancing the cause of Islamic reformers, and in undermining the more radical elements that are gaining ascendancy in the Muslim world.
The Society for Biblical Literature, “the largest professional association concerned with Biblical and related studies; it is now strongly committed to a theologically neutral methodology of modern historical scholarship,” is getting ready to add the Koran to its portfolio of religious texts that it studies.
In its self-description the SBL says that it is “devoted to the critical investigation of the Bible”. A co-director of the consultation says that it would, among other things, seek to approach the Koran in the context in which the text arose, “as an historical, literary and religious text.” “Critical”, “context”, “historical” – these are words, used in connection with the Koran, that could get you killed in many parts of the Muslim world. But let me leave aside for the moment the question of the likelihood that such an approach could get a hearing among traditional Muslims. Rather I will ask a different question: Given the core affirmations of Islamic faith, is this approach religiously plausible for believing Muslims? It goes without saying that only Muslims can decide what they can or cannot believe; a non-Muslim can be a historian of Islam, he cannot be an Islamic theologian. However, a sympathetic outsider can ask a question that does not presuppose belief: Are there intellectual resources for such an approach within the Muslim tradition?
A short answer to this question is yes. This answer, though, needs to be explicated.
Berger then goes on to describe a Muslim school of thought that, while maintaining the divinity of the Koran, nevertheless leaves room open for its allegorical interpretation in places. Muslim reformers evidently often cite this school of thought and its methodology in support of their efforts to “reconcile Islam with pluralism, democracy and modern thought.” It’s Berger’s contention that rationalist investigation into the Koran’s origin and development might not merely be left alone, as Holland hopes, but might actually inform such Islamic speculation. How these discoveries would be integrated into Muslim thought would have to be left to Muslim theologians, of course.
If such ideas have a chance to work, they do here in the US, where most Muslims are far from radicalized, came here to get away from radicalization and its discontents, and where there is perhaps the most active effort to reconcile Islam with democracy and an officially secular society. While Berger would probably deny that he’s underestimating the resistance that such ideas would meet in the Islamic world, I think he is, even here in the United States. Both evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Judaism are testaments (so to speak) to the ability of serious faith to simultaneously absorb and ignore historical scholarly scrutiny of their texts.
And then, there’s the outright hostility of the clergy. Here’s Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni, in a speech to a mosque in Dearborn. Kazerooni is an odd duck, and I’ve written about him before. An Iraqi Shia, he left Iraq as a teenager to study in an Iranian madrassah in Qom. He is totally in the tank for the Iranian mullahs, having “given over,” as they say, a speech by Ayatollah Mezbah Yazdi, Ahmedinejad’s spiritual advisor, on the 21st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, at a mosque in London.
Also, note that at the beginning of his talk, at about 9:00 of the first clip, he obliquely praises the then-recent news of Hebollah’s ascendance to the leadership of the Lebanese government. So to go by external appearances is to deceive oneself about the nature of the man.
But here in Denver, he tries to portray himself as ecumenical, willing to work across religious lines for understanding between faiths. He’s had some success, at one point heading St. John’s Episcopal’s Abrahamic Initiative.
Kazerooni is also a doctoral student at the University of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology, and quite clearly recognizes the threat that academic examination of Islamic tradition poses to orthodox Muslim belief. Beginning at around 1:50 of the clip below, he begins a long peroration, exhorting young Muslims to enter the academy, not to learn academic techniques, but to prevent and forestall their use as they relate to Islam:
So it’s not as though American Muslim clerisy is unaware of the threat to their authority and to traditional beliefs posed by academia.
Still, Berger’s is an interesting thought, and one that indicates a great deal more understanding of how Muslims view the world and their book than Holland’s naive assertions.
Adolescence Just Keeps Getting Longer
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics, Health Care, National Politics, PPC on July 11th, 2012
Two posts getting some attention today. First, this from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic:
And then this, from Taylor Cotter over at the Huffington Post:
I suppose that I’m grateful that I can make all my car payments and start saving for retirement while most of my friends are living at home and working part-time jobs — but I often find myself lamenting the fact that I’m not living at home and not working a part-time job. From my perspective, these are just some of the life-changing, character-building experiences that I may never have.
Now, it’s easy to laugh at Taylor, and Lord knows, I have. Oh, the struggles of not starving, not having to live at home. The horrors of being able to go out for drinks and read a book from time to time. The sheer insipidness of knowing that your rent is paid and there’s food on the table. Really, who wants to live like that?
But at a more serious level, the fact that she seriously thinks that she’s missing out on something by not spending mandatory time in her parents’ basement or her old room, shows that that may slowly be turning into the norm. It slows down adulthood, accumulation of both social and financial capital, and becomes harder and harder to reverse. Subsidizing the trend by putting 25-year-olds with masters degrees on their parents’ health insurance only aggravates the problem.
As young Taylor shows, it can become a desirable thing to start off your life that way. And when you think about it, why stop at 26? Or 30? Why not keep going all the way to early retirement. (Retirement from what? If you have to ask, man, you just don’t get it.) Well, the Greeks and the Spaniards show why.
Michael Barone likes to say that American has the worst 18-year-olds and the best 30-year-olds. That’s because the time immediately after college toughens kids up, and teaches them what the real world is like.
God help us when 40 becomes the new 30.
Daily Glimpse July 11, 2012
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on July 11th, 2012
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- The plan to dismantle Egypt’s Great Pyramids.
Assyrian News Agency, Via Althouse: According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids–or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi’i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s […]
- New farm bill likely to be a budget and trade disaster
Leave it to the government to buy high, sell low: Effectively, Price Loss Coverage is a price-based income support program. When the market price for a commodity covered by the program falls below a new and, by historical standards, very high target price level, farmers will almost certainly get a payment for every acre they […]
- Europe’s Zionist Anti-Semites
Well, as long as we’re not their biggest complaint… Most went to Israel with a deep-seated conviction that the country — given its presence on the front line in the conflict with Islam, as Strache told SPIEGEL ONLINE last year — deserves greater support from Europe. Most came back with an even deeper mistrust of […]
- What’s Holding Back The Facebook Mobile App?
Rethinking the FB mobile app from outside: Yet maybe the problem isn’t just Facebook. (C’mon haters, there’s a lot of great information in Facebook, or we wouldn’t all use it.) Maybe the problem is that Facebook is too worried about being Facebook to rethink its experience on mobiles. Gabi certainly makes a case along those lines. […]
- Positive Liberties and Legal Guarantees
From Bleeding Heart Libertarians: I believe both negative liberty and positive liberty, so defined, are morally important. It matters that people are not subject to continued wrongful interference, from each other or from the state. It also matters that people have the effective means to exercise their wills, to do as they please (provided they […]
- A Plea for Smart, Forward U.S. Military Engagement
From The Diplomat: Our military posture should thus be tailored in a strategic way that reflects the imperatives of regional threats and respects the interests of partners and allies. In places such as the Korean peninsula, the Straits of Hormuz, or Malacca, a clear, visible U.S. posture is required; in other regions a less visible, over-the-horizon […]
- What Moves? Culture & Interaction Design
Seems so intuitive, doesn’t it? The choice of metaphor dictates the proper design for interaction. Similar issues show up in other domains. Consider the standard problem of scrolling the text in a window. Should the scrolling control move the text or the window? This was a religious debate in the early years of display terminals, […]
- The Birth of Conservative Judaism
Not a European-pedigreed movement, but largely an American attempt at reinvention: But [Schechter] did not intend to pioneer a movement. Rather, using the model of the United Synagogue in Great Britain, Schechter sought to create what Cohen calls “Americanized traditional Judaism” by training English-speaking, secularly educated rabbis who would preside over synagogues that would pray […]
- Re-opening the American mind
Reconsidering Allen Bloom’s book, 30 years later: Liberals are most closely associated with the promotion of this relativist outlook, and they (rightly) took Bloom’s criticisms as being directed at them. But then they – as well as conservatives – concluded that Bloom must be calling for a return to absolute, traditional values. But that’s not […]
- This is what global cooling really looks like…
So it turns out that this era is neither the hottest, nor the fastest-warming in the last 2 millennia, after all: h/t Watts Up With That
- How Europe Can Support the ‘Pivot’
Will it? The overriding—and heartening—impression I took away from the week’s events was that our European friends are serious people grappling with serious diplomatic and strategic problems. One question came up repeatedly, suggesting it weighs on their minds. How can seafaring countries like France support the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, or the “rebalancing” between oceans, […]
- New Mercatus Paper on the Costs of Special Interest Politics
Mercatus introduces a new series of papers on the costs of special interest politics: The financial bailouts of 2008 were but one example in a long list of privileges that governments occasionally bestow upon particular firms or particular industries. At various times and places, these privileges have included (among other things) monopoly status, favorable regulations, […]
- Lost in LaMancha
Via Marginal Revolution: Grandiose projects across Spain now sit empty and dying. The New York Times focuses in on Ciudad de la Luz, a mega-movie studio built far from cultural centers that is now foundering. The Daily Mail takes a look at Spain’s “ghost airport,” a billion Euro project that was meant to serve 5 million passengers a year […]
- Check Out NASA’s Amazing New Panoramic Photo Of Mars
NASA’s new panoramic picture of Mars: But go to the page to see a phenomenal inline zoom.
- Where Do Jobs Come From?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Jobs come from an expansion of economic activity, which is called economic growth. Where does economic growth come from? There are only a finite number of places. Any answer to the question about where jobs come from that does not invoke resources and innovation (but also effort and luck) is incomplete. I’m pretty […]
- E.P.A. Idiocy in Action: Inventing New Technologies for a Bogus Problem
From the Captain’s Journal: A pair of new technologies could reduce the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and help utilities comply with existing and proposed environmental regulations, including requirements to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both involve burning coal in the presence of pure oxygen rather than air, which is mostly nitrogen. Major companies […]
WalMart Hatred and Racism?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Economics, PPC on July 9th, 2012
I don’t tend to post a lot on purely social issues. But there are times when the two issues intersect in their own very illuminating way. During the June 26 hearing on the Colorado Health Care District redevelopment, one gentleman, one of three African-Americans in the room, took exception to some of the concerns being expressed by the neighbors of the proposed project:
“I’m a civil rights activist and a member of this community. I have family and friends who live here in this community. I’m here tonight – I thought I came here for peace and unity. But I see, that’s not going to be the case. Why? Because I sit over there, stood over there, and heard you all use all these buzzwords and code words. ‘We don’t want that element out here. We don’t want our property values to go down. Those are code words to say we don’t want black and brown people…”
(Shouting and yelling)
“You say ‘No,’ then why don’t you…”
“We don’t want the people who shot the police officer.”
“You know something, I don’t either, I don’t want them either, and I’ve stood on the front line saying put his butt in jail. But at the end of the day, what I’m saying is this. You want to be fair about it, Wal-Mart has been a friend of the African-American community, and I think that it will continue to be a friend to our community, and we need their help, and we need your help.”
Right after he finished, one of the audience members yelled after him something about Wal-Mart keeping wages down. But that wasn’t his point. His point was twofold: first, without Wal-Mart, many of those people wouldn’t have jobs at all, and second, Wal-Mart keep prices down, making many things more affordable to people with lower incomes.
Now, I don’t think most of the people in the audience were consciously racist. But I do believe that the charge stung precisely because, as good liberals (the precincts surrounding the development voted from 75% to 85% for Obama in 2008), they believe themselves to be incapable of racism. And to be sure, their bias isn’t the kind that leads someone to put on the bedding and burn crosses.
But it is paternalistic. They are unable to imagine that they have neighbors who can’t afford the options they’d put in the place of WalMart, and who would welcome a WalMart in walking distance. And they were stunned to hear from a black man that he very much wanted something that they were convinced he had no business wanting.
Almost 60 years ago, Billy Wilder had Humphrey Bogart, in the character of Titan of Industry Linus Larabee, explain things to his ne’er-do-well kid brother, William Holden, in the 1954 Paramount picture, Sabrina:
Wilder wasn’t a corporate shill. In The Apartment, he showed that he understood as well as anyone how to satirize the business world. But this is a lesson that many of those yelling about Wal-Mart that warm evening might bear in mind.
Daily Glimpse July 9, 2012
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on July 9th, 2012
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- The Muslim Brotherhood Owns Egypt
Commentary reviews the history: Since then, at each turn of the road, as the Muslim Brotherhood gradually hijacked the Egyptian transition, commentators told us there was no need to worry. The Muslim Brotherhood would only contest a small number of seats (they did not); they would not have a candidate of their own for the presidency (they did); and their […]
- Israel in NATO and the EU?
Bulgaria’s former foreign minister in the Times of Israel: Israel should more assertively seek to join NATO and the European Union, Bulgaria’s former foreign minister has told The Times of Israel. If anybody is qualified to give Israel such advice, it’s likely Solomon Passy, who spearheaded the former Warsaw Pact member state’s successful membership bids […]
- Why Germany Just Got More Nervous About The Prospect Of The UK Leaving The EU
We can work it out: “It won’t be easy, but arguably, the Germans have more to fear from being left isolated within the eurozone than they do from a new bargain with Britain. If the choice is between the UK leaving or getting some EU powers back, Berlin may – after a lot of posturing, […]
- Looking Back From a Better Place
From an old oleh in the Times of Israel: I don’t have to worry that my next bus journey could be my last or think about where I am physically sitting in a café or restaurant, or even whether to risk going to the café or restaurant altogether. Today, I cannot ignore the suffering of […]
- Get the UN’s Hands Off the Internet
From the Mercatus Center: While a greater role for the UN is still a long way from it “taking over the Internet” as some fear, this is just the beginning. If this year’s meeting is successful, the countries that get their ideas adopted in the treaty will be even bolder at meetings already planned for […]
- Bleeding Heart Libertarians Bottom Line on Worker Freedom
BHL explain where they’re coming from on worker freedom: We BHLs are for the most part not hard, deontological libertarians. We are liberals who think that a major part of the justification for property rights and market institutions has to do with their expected consequences for all decent, conscientious people. We think that in the […]
- No troop reduction in Jammu and Kashmir: Army
From the Times of India: Observing that security situation has improved in Jammu and Kashmir, Army on Monday said there was no move to reduce the number of troops deployed in the state as it might lead to problems for security forces engaged in counter terrorist operations for over two decades. “No, there is no such proposal… […]
- Chemical engineers use lasers to put new spin in computing
Perhaps some advances in quantum computing: “Quantum computing is one of the holy grails of science and engineering,” says Reimer. “In conventional computing, we use the charge of electrons, either positive or negative, to encode either a zero or one. That’s a ‘bit,’ the basic building block of digital calculations. We can also encode a […]
- Track Record In China Sets Cisco’s “TOS” Scandal In A More Sinister Light
TechCrunch on a controversy involving home routers and Cisco’s Terms of Service: Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin experiencedthe issue himself after buying a Cisco Linksys EA3500 dual-band wireless router. Soon after installing it, he was notified of a firmware update. A sign up page appeared for Cisco Connect Cloud when he tried to access the browser’s internal administrative Web […]
- UK Judge says Galaxy Tab ‘not as cool’ as iPad, awards Samsung win in design suit
Your product is so uncool, you couldn’t possibly have stolen it from Apple, an we’re not sure why Apple would want to claim it, anyway: A judge in the UK handed a win to Samsung in anintellectual property dispute, calling the Galaxy Tab “not as cool” as the iPad, and therefore not likely to get […]
- No Vote Fraud? New Twist in Rangel “Win”
From Commentary: At a time when Democrats around the country, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have been vociferously claiming there is no such thing as voter fraud in the United States and that efforts to uphold the integrity of elections are a form of racism, the senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus appears to […]
- Goldfinger’s Dictum and the Democrats
From John Steele Gordon at Commentary: How about 17 times? That’s the number of states that elected Republican governors in 2010, thanks to Tea Party demands for fiscal conservatism. And as Breitbart reports today, 17 is the number of those states that have seen a drop in unemployment since January 2011. While the national unemployment rate has dropped […]
- How Romney Can Win: The GOP candidate should stand for free markets—and align himself with the vast majority of Americans.
Luigi Zingales at the City Journal: A recent New York Times op-ed by Bill Scher, “How Liberals Win,” must be commended for its honesty. Scher presents a compelling historical narrative of how Democrats are happy to ally themselves with big business in a Faustian pact to foster anti-market policies. … In fact, by inverting Scher’s argument, one […]
- Global warming will expand forests over what are now grasslands.
Via Ann Althouse: These burgeoning forests will then rather neatly lock up in the biosphere all that extra carbon that we have been releasing into the atmosphere. Or some of it. But the major point of this paper is that far from climate change being a threat to the tropical forests, it looks as if […]
- Seizing home loans through eminent domain: more like grand theft mortgage than a silver bullet
The American Enterprise Institute comments on California’s latest scheme to “jump-start” the housing market” With billions of dollars at stake, the plan’s legality will be challenged by bond holders resulting in a multi-year legal battle. We are already 6 years into the crisis. This will only further delay the clearing of markets. The question is […]
- Higgs Boson May Be An Imposter, Say Particle Physicists
From God Particle to Fraud Particle? Today, Ian Low at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and a couple of buddies comb through the data in an attempt to throw some light on this question. Their conclusion is that the data is consistent with at least two other particles that are not the standard Higgs boson. […]
- Volcano House for Sale
In Vegas, of course: Initially the house was commissioned by Vard Wallace, an engineer who built a business selling drafting machines and airplane parts to the likes of Lockheed & Co. during World War II. Wallace, also an inventor who patented the first “skateboard” (a plank with wheels and a short pole for steering), picked […]
- MoveOn.Org Apologizes For Condemning Racist Anti-Semite Candidate
Reports Breitbart.com: MoveOn had written an e-mail to its members that Barron was “unfit to serve” because he has spent his career “specializing in divisive, offensive, and just plain outrageous statements and behavior.” Now, in an amazing twist, MoveOn e-mailed an apology – for its condemnation of Barron — to its members, according to the New […]
Grey Eminence
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Defense, History on July 8th, 2012
by Aldous Huxley
Most people know Cardinal Richelieu as the architect of France’s foreign policy during the reign of Louis XIII and the Thirty Years’ War. Less well-known is his right-hand man, Father Joseph du Tremblay, the subject of Aldous Huxley’s biography Grey Eminence, which has been called the “best book on the intelligence operations of the French state” of that period.
Father Joseph was a Capuchin monk, and even before entering politics, a serious mystic, whose successful evangelism seemed merely to take time from his efforts to achieve union with the Godhead. His piety was not a pose; he would continue to honor his vow of poverty to the point of rigorous self-denial, right to the end of his life. In their personal lives, Richelieu lived in luxury, while Joseph lived the Church teachings.
The question that fascinates Huxley is how a fellow mystic, so loyal to the Church and its divine mission, could devote his public life to the perpetuation of what amounted to a war of extermination in Germany. It was a question that Fr. Joseph’s contemporaries asked, and one that marred his reputation almost from the time he took office. It would follow him even to his funeral.
To fully understand what’s at stake, one needs to understand the position that the Thirty Years’ War holds in German history. The war’s destructiveness was unmatched for its time, killing about half the German population, reducing the rest to utter poverty and starvation. Armies, foreign and domestic, pillaged what food their was, and destroyed urban production.
It was the conscious policy of France – both Richelieu and Joseph – to extend it as long as possible, precisely to inflict this damage on France’s most dangerous continental rival.
For Richelieu, the motivation is easy to see. But when Father Joseph took a position as Richelieu’s right-hand diplomat, the motivations were a little more subtle. Joseph identified France’s interests with God’s. He seems to have truly believed that a strong France would advance the Church’s interests in the world. More than anything, he wanted another Crusade against the Turks, to recover Constantinople and the Holy Land. (Constantinople had only been Ottoman for about 150 years; Christian rule there wasn’t a living memory, but it also wasn’t terribly distant, and much if not most of the city’s population remained Orthodox.)
Spain had actually expressed interest in the enterprise, but wanted overall leadership. To Joseph, anything other than French leadership was unimaginable. In order to accomplish a French-led Crusade, France would not only have to turn Germany into a highway for Catholic troops, it would also have to break the power of the encircling Hapsburgs, who sat on the thrones of both Spain and Austria. Thus France’s support for the Dutch resistance to Spanish rule, and the strategic support of the Lutheran Swedes against the Austrians, using Germany as their battlefield. Catholic France’s support for Protestant armies against other Catholic powers only fed the cynicism about its motives.
That such cynicism existed at all was a result of the mixture of religious and political roles, and of religious and nationalistic motives. The Peace of Westphalia has been seen as establishing a secular international order. But such an order was only possible because governments – even diplomats who had Church titles – had been pursuing a nationalistic foreign policy for decades beforehand. Only such a worldview can explain France’s actively promoting German bloodshed almost as an end unto itself, and delaying a crusade until France could lead it.
David Goldman, a.k.a. Spengler, flatly states that our position with respect to the Muslim world is roughly that of France of the early 1600s to the rest of Europe. Still the main power to be reckoned with, we should pattern our Middle East policy on France’s: divide and weaken, intervening only directly when absolutely necessary. And just as France became the dominant European land power for over 200 years after the War, so we can manipulate the Sunni-Shia divide to our advantage.
And yet, Huxley, in a somewhat mystical moment, notes simply that violent actions rarely if ever have salutary results. Germany remembered. Germany rose to challenge France, and Germany never really forgot the horrors that French diplomacy had visited upon it. It was a vengeance that was fueled by a moral indignation, as well, that France had posed as a religiously-motivated power, even as it reduced Germany to cannibalism.
Huxley answers his central question by concluding that Father Joseph simply bargained away, piece by piece, the practical tenets of his mystical faith in pursuit of his more concrete policy goals. At a personal level, his extreme piety convinced him that God would forgive whatever compromises he had to make to ensure France’s success.
We too have our ideals, that such a purely realpolitik foreign policy would betray. And years down the line, some future Huxley might also find that, in pursuit of national interests, we had, little by little, allowed ourselves to completely bargain them away.
Amortize This!
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Education, Finance, PERA, PPC on July 6th, 2012
In Pension accounting, the amortization period is how long it would take to pay off the current unfunded liability, based on current contributions, and current employees.
Typically, pensions try to keep that time at about 30 years, or a normal, long career. That does a pretty good job of matching contributions to liabilities.
The amortization period for PERA’s school fund is now 59 years.
PERA’s retirement age is 58.
Retirees who haven’t even been born yet are having their benefits amortized by current contributions.
Sleep well.
-
You are currently browsing the archives.
