Link love

Peter Singer: Why we must ration health care. H/T Milan.

Bryan offers some lessons from NZ's ETS.

Die-hard contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham on everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes.

Cartographic conflict: a potted history of WWII.

Ben rants about men's groups.

Paul Krugman asks "who cooked the planet?"

If only gay sex caused global warming, or, why do we pay more attention to some threats than to others?

Losing the wood for the trees, and vice versa: or, the eschatological reconciliation of complex goods

"...evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole,. whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a subordinate and premature 'whole', such as the nation, may of course become evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of mankind."

- Reinhold Neibuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 14.

In this account, evil is a failure of contextualisation, a mistaking of a part for the whole, an insufficient awakening to the complex goods of the world. There may be other aspects to an account of evil (not simply the intellect, but also our will and imagination and desire are corrupt. All evil is not simply ignorance), but this is an important point to ponder. Is my desire for some good thing actually undermining someone else's blessing? Or is the way that I am pursuing my desire making it harder for others to love life? Or perhaps even more subtly and yet disastrously, might the aggregation of many individuals pursuing their various goods diminish the common good of each?

And yet, there are still "various levels" at which the good is to be sought, noticed, preserved and pursued. It will not do simply to replace a myopic individualism with a hypermetropic collectivism. It is often difficult to see how the good of both the individual and the wider community can be attained when they come into conflict, but if life is not ultimately a competition then it is possible to attempt the creative and imaginative task of seeking an integration between apparently competing goods in hope that such a reconciliation is possible. Or, in other words, we hope for win-win situations.

Yet our grasp on what is good, on what constitutes a life truly called blessed, is fragmentary. The complexity of all the various goods in a single human life, in society and throughout the created order is too vast for any individual to comprehend. And so we continue to mistake partial goods for complete goods and even our provisional attempts at reconciliation may end up creating new injustices. We may even despair of the possibility of win-win outcomes in many situations. We may conclude that it is a dog-eat-dog world and for me and mine to do well, others must do poorly.

And so, this belief (in the non-competitiveness of human, and indeed creaturely, flourishing) is a tenet of faith, presently unseen and repeatedly thwarted by a fallen world. It is an eschatological hope for the reconciliation of all things, anticipated in Christ's earthly life and promised and inaugurated in his resurrection. And so today we seek signs and foretastes of this future reality, bearing witness to the one who is alive and brings life to all. Today is not the day to achieve this final reconciliation, but we must be content in our discontentment, eschewing utopian fantasies for the good that it is possible to do today.
Good to see that Niebuhr agrees with me.

In praise of... taxation

    Give to everyone what you owe: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.       - Romans 13.7

Thank God for taxes
Taxation: as inevitable as death, and usually about as welcome. Both major parties in Australia have promised large tax cuts at the start of their respective campaigns, and the electorate rejoices in its new-found wealth.

But before joining the celebration, spare a thought for the cost of these cuts. Taxation is a good thing. "Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation", according to US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The creation and enjoyment of wealth is not possible without stable society, which, in a world riddled with mistrust, requires effective government, and thus taxation. The government is not stealing "your" money; it is creating the conditions of possibility for an effective economic system at all. It makes no sense to speak of the money you would have had if the government did not levy taxes.

Ethicist Peter Singer considers a hypothetical corporation producing automobiles:

...the corporation could not make its cars without a legal system that fosters and protects mining rights, private ownership of land, an accepted currency, systems of transport, the production and sale of energy, the existence of an educated labour force, corporate oversight, the protection of patents and the prevention of monopolies, judicial resolution of disputes, national defence and the protection of trading routes. Even if it could make them, without security and at least a moderate degree of prosperity, few people would buy them. In other words, without taxes, and the system of regulation that could not exist without taxes, the corporation would not be able to pay [its employees] and if, somehow, [they] did get paid, the money would be of little value because [they] could not be secure in [their] ownership of anything [they] bought with it.

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital - including technology and organisational and governmental skills - rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences betrween average incomes in rich and poor countries that cannot be explained by differences in effort, he suggests that social capital is probably responsible for at least 90 percent of income in wealthy coutries like the United State.

- Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil, 16-17.

Of course, there is such a thing as intolerably high taxation, which ends up detracting from the common good. And of course, there are no guarantees of efficiency, especially when governments value re-election over public service. Nevertheless, taxes are fundamentally a blessing towards the common good, for which we ought to give thanks. Let us praise what is good.
Eight points for the country in the picture. Or twelve for the building, a national seat of government. But please don't guess both.