Short News and Commentary
By Christopher Pope, Todd Aiken, et al.
Watch What They Do, Not What They Say
The American people are truly generous. A few weeks ago the 400 largest charities in the U.S. reported that their total donations rose 12 percent in the latest year. Total charitable giving in this country now exceeds $260 billion annually. That is much higher on a per capita basis than giving in any other nation.
But not everyone in America gives proportionately. There are dramatic differences among regions, demographic groups, and political factions.
To begin, which do you suppose are the most generous states? Surely the bleeding-heart, share-the-wealth homelands like Massachusetts, Oregon, Wisconsin, and California, right? Wrong.
The Catalogue for Philanthropy compiles IRS data on charitable giving vs. income by state. Their measures show there is a big difference between prescribing benevolence and practicing it.
Remember all those rants after the 2004 election characterizing Red America as selfish and lacking in compassion? (If not, read Jane Smiley’s essay at Slate.com for a good sample.) As Massachusetts journalist Don Feder commented at the time, “liberals have concocted a fantasy version of America, where all of the nation’s brain power, productivity, and generosity reside in the Blue states, while Red America is a land of trailer parks, country-music bars, and Klan rallies.”
[Chart Here--See "Page Image" in upper right corner for details]
So note that the benighted Bible Belt and other culturally conservative states dominate the chart to the left. People in the Red states give away a bigger portion of their income than counterparts in havens of Blue liberalism like California, Maryland, Washington, Vermont, and Oregon. The least generous region of the country is deep-Blue New England: the six stingiest states are New Hampshire (#50), Massachusetts (#49), New Jersey, Rhode Island (#47), Wisconsin, and Connecticut (#45).
Look specifically at how the very Bluest of the Blue (as limned by the results of the 2004 election) rank in charitable giving:
[Chart here--See "Page Image in upper right corner for details]
Many people who proclaim caring and compassion in their politics apparently do not practice it in their own lives. A pluperfect example of this is John Kerry himself—who during the very years when he was savaging Reagan-Bush policies as “heartless,” “greedy,” “mean-spirited,” and “selfish” was discovered by reporters to have donated almost none of his own large income to any benevolent causes over the same decade.
The Catalogue for Philanthropy numbers do have weaknesses, however, so we oughtn’t level too broad an indictment based solely on their IRS data. Let’s consider some other evidence. Take the very different research findings from a forthcoming book that Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks recently summarized in the Wall Street Journal:
Consider two groups: One that believes the government should improve living standards for the poor, and the other which believes that people should take care of themselves, without government help.... [Some would] label the first group as “compassionate” and the second group as “uncompassionate.” But how do they compare in their private giving behaviors? According to the General Social Survey in 2002, the proponents of government spending are six percentage points less likely to give money to charity each year than the opponents, and a third less likely to give money away each month.
In other words, behavior self-reported to high-quality academic studies accords with the Catalogue for Philanthropy data: “Progressives” demand generosity with other people’s money, but don’t necessarily give away their own.
But let’s go even further. Brooks notes:
Maybe comparisons of monetary giving aren’t valid, though—because of income differences or religious issues, for example. So let’s look at a less problematic type of charity: blood donations. We have blood in more or less equal abundance, you can’t give it to your church, and a pint of blood is not tax deductible.
As a proxy for true, unselfish compassion, blood donation is perfect. It benefits unknown recipients, of all races, very often the poor, almost always someone in trouble. Back to the professor:
So who exhibits greater compassion by donating more blood? Once again, it is those opposed to government aid. These supposedly uncompassionate folks are 25 percent of the population, but donate more than 30 percent of the blood each year. Meanwhile, supporters of government spending to the poor are 28 percent of the population, but donate just 20 percent of the blood. If the whole population gave blood like opponents of social spending do, the blood supply would increase by more than a quarter. But if everyone in the population gave like government aid advocates, the supply would drop by about 30 percent.
Talk, as they say, is cheap.
But before we draw the grave conclusion that many political advocates of compassion are hypocrites, let’s look at one more form of behavior: volunteer work. We have before us January 2005 results from a study of voluntarism (conducted by Quinley Research of California for a Midwestern financial organization) that is representative of many other similar findings in survey research. This study did not ask people their political views, but it did tally results by the one factor that has been found to separate Red from Blue America (and an ethic of individual responsibility from political liberalism) more clearly than any other: church attendance.
Among Americans who “never” attend religious services, only 34 percent have done any volunteer work over the past 12 months. Among Americans who attend religious services “once per week or more,” fully 72 percent have donated their time to others. In case you are imagining that this just reflects hours given to church activities, the researchers uncovered contrary details. For instance, churchgoers outvolunteered secularists by 48 to 22 percent at non-religious non-profit organizations. They were twice as likely to give their time to schools (34 to 16 percent).
Much other hard evidence, some of it summarized in these pages over the years, demonstrates that Americans who are skeptical of “progressive” politics are also more likely to raise children, to serve in the military, to have close weekly relations with neighbors and friends. So there is no basis for ceding the moral high ground on “generosity” and “citizenship” to activists who advocate government nannying and redistribution of income. With their own dollars and deeds, the advocates of politicized compassion show less love of their fellow man, not more—which is perhaps why they are so anxious to mandate good works through state coercion.
Germany Fades
Reuters reported recently that 150,667 Germans left their country for good last year. Over the last decade and a half, around 2 million Germans have emigrated. Experts say that if undocumented migrants are added to these official figures, the actual flows are even higher.
The main impetus for the flow is Germany’s stultified economy. Unemployment hovers around 10 percent, and there has been little economic growth in the country for more than a decade. The top destination for German emigrants is the U.S., which has long benefited from German talent (about a quarter of America’s white, non-Hispanic population is of German origin).
“I won’t go back,” says 45-year-old business consultant Karin Manske—one of approximately 70,000 Germans currently living in Southern California. “I love the adventurous spirit here. You can start a business on a shoestring and work hard to succeed.”
The outflow of Germans over the last 15 years is the equivalent of about 7 million Americans moving abroad. But it’s even more significant because, in Germany today, children are not being produced to replace these adults. Under current German birth rates, every 100 productive adults will leave behind, at the end of their lives, only about 70 children. Start with that population shrinkage from low fertility, then subtract out-migration, and Germany is in a sad fade.
Silicon Valley Discovers Compromise
As the front door to the Internet, seeking “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google has acknowledged a sense of grave responsibility with the pithy motto: “Don’t be evil.” Yet, days after obstructing the efforts of the U.S. government to prosecute child pornographers, the search engine has now tailored a new interface to facilitate the Chinese government’s program of political censorship. Watchdog groups lamented a “black day for freedom of expression in China.”
Any user searching the Internet from China through Google.cn for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong,” “Dalai Lama,” or even “democracy” now finds Communist Party propaganda in the place of open discussion. In return for a lucrative spot within the “Great Firewall of China,” Google has sold out the principles of openness and universal access that it ostentatiously proclaims.
Unlike other American firms that have compromised with totalitarians, Google serves the Chinese people, rather than the Chinese state, and provides much that can assist the cause of freedom. Although the Chinese government employs an estimated 30,000 police to suppress Internet content, China now has over 100 million Web users, and Google alone indexes over 10 billion Web sites.
While the Politburo can now demand it ban a list of phrases, since Google’s pages are automatically generated in response to the idiosyncratic queries of its users, its content cannot be predicted and therefore properly controlled. Although it may be possible to block queries for “Mao Zedong,” censors will never be able to keep up with the multitude of euphemisms available—like “Beijing Butcher”—that may be used as code.
If anything, having Google provide the bulk of search results to Chinese Web users will be a good thing. Once thousands of Chinese people work for companies that depend on Google to stay in business, the American firm will be in a stronger bargaining position to insist on liberal content regulations. And, while Google.cn may not give people information on Falun Gong or Taiwan, it can lead them to a world inspired by the warnings of Orwell and Hayek. Through habits of free enquiry and open discussion, currents of popular opinion form beyond the reach of the state. The question then becomes when and how—not if—such opinions become law.
—Chris Pope is an AEI research assistant.
Answering Bossy Judges
Judicial overreach now extends to all areas of American society, from the right to own property to the definition of marriage, from the freedom to practice religion in public to the ability to run a competitive business.
Federal judges have even granted themselves the authority to raise taxes (see, e.g., “Runaway Judge,” TAE May/June 1995), though U.S. and state constitutions give this power only to legislative branches, not to unelected officials appointed for lifetime tenure. So much for “No Taxation Without Representation!”
More recently, big business teamed up with big government and an expansive Supreme Court to give local jurisdictions power to seize private residential property (through “eminent domain”) in order to hand it over to developers for upscale projects. Never mind the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that property may be taken only for public use; the Court has now broadened that definition to include private development that makes millions for select investors and government tax coffers.
Courts have also assumed vast regulatory authority. In 2005, a judge encouraged people to sue McDonald’s for enabling obesity among its patrons. This November, judges in Washington state established what amounts to a new category of parenthood by declaring a lesbian who lacks either biological or adoptive links to a child to be the legal co-parent.
Those of us who object to judicial imperialism of this sort recently got chastened by American Bar Association president Michael Greco, who warned last October that “those who would tear down our courts for short-term political or other gain threaten the very fabric of our republic.” I surely agree that short-term political gain is not a good basis for jurisprudence. But resisting the judicial branch’s power grab is not about transient political advantage; it grows out of deep concern for the long-term health of our country and worry that we are losing the freedoms and stability our Constitution has traditionally guaranteed.
To Greco and thousands of attorneys like him, the separation of powers is a one-way street: It’s fine for a federal judge to tell Congress a statute is unacceptable, but if Congress responds to a jurist who is overstepping his authority, we’re told the “fabric of our republic” is suddenly at stake. Balderdash. The greater threat to our nation is that the other two branches of government will fail to hold courts accountable to their Constitutional mandate and its inherent restrictions, as has been the pattern for a generation now.
It’s indisputable that many federal jurists have used the bench to realize political objectives unachievable through the legislative process and nowhere countenanced in the Constitution. When one branch of government goes afield in this way, the other two branches should check that effort and restore the balance of power our Founders created. Congress and the executive branch have allowed the judicial branch to run unchallenged for too long, to the detriment of our liberty.
Tools exist to remedy this imbalance. In the last Congress, I introduced The Pledge Protection Act to preserve the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and used that bill to educate my colleagues on Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution—which gives Congress the authority to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts. More recently, we’ve developed a working group of congressmen and senators, grassroots organizations, media, and traditional legal scholars to coordinate projects whose common goal is to stymie the judicial power grab.
As Chief Justice John Roberts recently stated, we must force the judiciary back into its proper role as umpire—rather than player or rule maker.
—Rep. Todd Akin is a member of the House Judicial Accountability Working Group.
Welcome to Iran
The world is “a little bit late” in coming to understand the true nature of Iran’s Islamic regime, says expatriate Joseph Akrami. As a youth in Iran, says the soft-spoken filmmaker, “I wanted just one thing: to get out of that hellish country.” Akrami’s new documentary A Few Simple Shots is a stark and disturbing explanation why.
Three years in the making, and one of the only films in existence documenting the human rights abuses of one of the most ruthless regimes in the world, this work is both grim and gripping. A recent screening at the American Enterprise Institute wasn’t a typical night at the movies. Akrami has produced a rare combination of images capable of riveting an audience while inducing their repulsion. Audience members gasped, wept, and at times turned their heads away from the screen.
For most us in the West, it’s difficult to comprehend an establishment that routinely arrests, imprisons, tortures, and executes its own people. But for the Iranian mullahcracy, terror is the key to staying in power. Why else would officials lash a young girl to death for wearing a bathing suit in her own backyard?
The heart of the film is the personal testimonies of Iranians describing their experiences in state-run prisons: the grown man, sobbing into the camera, trying to describe how much more painful it was to watch a fellow inmate be tortured than to endure it himself; the young woman, accused of unlawful activities against the regime, recalling that her “trial” lasted two minutes; the dark-eyed young man remembering a dear comrade with whom he was imprisoned as a teenager, and who was cruelly executed at the age of 17.
Still more startling is the sequence of state videos displaying the punishments and executions of condemned citizens, made for broadcast to Iranian homes. In the background, the Blue Danube Waltz plays cheerfully, a grotesque contrast to the bone-chilling scenes of prisoners being lashed, maimed with machines, stoned to death, and buried alive.
“Regimes that treat their own citizens this way will attempt to inflict the same kind of treatment on the rest of the world,” said Michael Ledeen, AEI’s Freedom Scholar, as he introduced the film. “It’s not a question of whether we will eventually come into conflict with them, but when they will come after us.... It is their nature.”
Akrami himself is in danger. The Islamic Republic is keeping tabs on him and his work. “They follow me in Canada,” he says matter-of-factly. “They know who I am, and I don’t care. I don’t care. My people have been suffering for a long time, and I don’t want them to suffer any more.”
