Dennis Prager, Big Business, and Big Government

At National Review today, Dennis Prager says that the left is dangerous because it craves power instead of money—and power in the service of Big Government leads to the Holocaust, Mao, and Stalin. Sure, some big corporations may not always "play by the rules," but they don't have the power to send you to a concentration camp.

Key graph:

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

Prager's diagnosis, of course, misses the concern that most liberals have about Big Business—which is that money and power are not separate things: Money purchases power, which can give (oh hell, let's use the phrase) "moneyed interests" an outsize influence in the lives of individuals.

Sometimes, that even translates into the ability to arrest you, shut you up, and kill you. Shell, the oil company, has been accused of funneling payments to militants in Nigeria, for example. In the United States, doctors in Pennsylvania are prohibited from telling patients about the "fracking" chemicals that might be poisoning them. The list of examples is endless.

A smart conservative friend often says the problem is bigness itself—a problem that exists whether that bigness is in government or in the business sector. That sounds right, or close to it anyway. It's certainly much closer to right than Prager, whose hatred of Big Government leads him to make pronouncements about benign activities of Big Business that make him either extremely naive or simply a shill.

Is it 'bigoted' to oppose gay marriage?

Ben and I debate gay marriage in this week's column for Scripps. Rather than give you my take in this space, I want to offer Ben's—because I find it somewhat troubling:

At a certain point -- long before the president concluded that the political benefits of supporting gay marriage this election cycle outweighed the disadvantages -- millions of Americans concluded that it's important affirm that marriage is exclusively a union between one man and one woman. 

Those people are called bigots, and worse. 

Be wary of those national polls showing a majority now supporting a redefinition of marriage. People who don't like being called bigots might just lie to pollsters. Pre-election polls in North Carolina predicted the vote on that state's constitutional amendment would be closer than the 20-point blowout it turned out to be. 

For the partisans of gay marriage, North Carolina's vote was an expression of bigotry and hatred, plain and simple. No other explanation could possibly suffice. 

Only bigotry -- and nothing else -- could explain similar votes in 29 other states. 

Only bigotry -- and nothing else -- could explain how six in 10 black voters in California voted in favor of Proposition 8, the 2008 constitutional amendment reaffirming the traditional definition of marriage, and cast their ballot for Obama at the same time. 

Maybe "bigotry" isn't the sole property of one side of this argument.

What Ben's argument does this week is replace any debate about the merits of gay marriage with familiar-if-tired conservative martyrdom-making. "They're calling us bigots!" doesn't really tell us why heterosexuals should get to exclude homosexuals from the legal right to civil marriage. (To be fair: This kind of martyrdom isn't usually Ben's rhetorical style, and he has made more substantive arguments about this in our previous debates on the issue.)

I myself think opposition to same-sex marriage comes from too many sources to reduce simply to "bigotry"—though that certainly is the motivation of some opponents. But I do think that many opponents of same-sex marriage have justified their religious opposition to a civil right by creating a counter-narrative of victimology.

Rights aren't a zero-sum affair: I myself would be content to live in a country where my gay friends could get married and my Christian friends express their disapproval. And contra Ben's statistics, the ability to get millions of people to vote against rights doesn't really tell us much about the legitimacy of those rights.

About the Philadelphia Inquirer's augmented reality app

I missed the debut of the Philadelphia Inquirer's "augmented reality" app over the weekend—you point your mobile device at the newspaper, and the device starts playing a video linked to that particular story in the newspaper—but the Daily News' Janathan Takiff says it's getting an "undeservedly bad rap." But it sure doesn't sound like it. Listen to Takiff's explanation:

The naysayers clearly didn't read the instructions (spelled out in the Inky yesterday but not in the app) about how the Aurasma AR technology works in practice. This ain't rocket science. Once you've installed the free Inquirer AR app on your camera-equipped iPhone or iPad, you look for a photo or advertisement in the paper that has a little gothic "I" symbol in the corner. You then point your Apple device's camera lens at the same image. A few seconds later a companion video starts playing on the Apple screen and speakers. Here comes the HARD part. You have to TAP TWICE on the screen, AFTER the video starts to play, so you can then move your iPhone or iPad away from the page and continue to watch the mini-production. If you DON'T tap twice, the video stops as soon as you move the device's lens away from the coded image. Oh, and to then get the video to stop running, you DOUBLE TAP on the screen again. There's also the option with some of the triggered mini-videos/commercials to then jump to a connected website - like the busy home page of the National Constitution Center. To perform this feat, tap just ONCE on the website bar in the corner of the video. Tap twice and the magic trick doesn't work.

Oh sure, that's easy then.

 I'm dubious about a mobile app whose main purpose is to get you to read the newspaper. But I'm even more dubious of an app that's complicated and doesn't come with in-app instructions of how it should be used. That's unlikely to bring mobile users to the newspaper, but it might bring newspaper readers to their mobile devices. Is that what the Inky was aiming for?

 As it happens, there are three reviews of the app at iTunes. Two of the reviews are one star. The third is five stars—posted by "ScribeJT." I'm guessing that's Takiff himself (a writer with the initials "JT"?)which seems a little cheesy—since this app he's reviewing was created by his employer.

As I've said before, the Inquirer needs to keep experimenting. Experiments are often going to end in failure. And the idea here is kind of cool. But if the audience is giving you a bad rap, Takiff, it's most likely deserved. Telling them they're wrong probably won't fix your problems.

Obama: It could be worse

I was at a neighborhood festival over the weekend when a Democratic activist approached and asked if he could count on my vote for President Obama this November. "Well," I said, "I haven't been too thrilled with him on the civil liberties front." "Nobody's perfect," the man shot back. "The other guys would be worse." In today's Boston Globe, John McCain steps forward with a reminder that my activist friend was probably right:

“How is it that Assad is still in power?” Wiesel said. “How is it that the Holocaust’s number one denier, [Iran’s Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.”

Under John McCain, then, the United States would definitely be going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Don't get me wrong: As The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf pointed out last week, Obama has been by any measure a hawk in office. I wasn't all that happy with his handling of Libya; but I must admit that his actions there were characterized by a level of restraint. With John McCain as president—assuming he's not just an aging blowhard, but reflecting his real policy choices—military restraint would seemingly be non-existent. I'm cynical about the accomplishments of our current president ... but the other guys would be worse.

No, really: Are the feds trying to end farm chores for kids?

Reason weighs in with round two of the debate:

Farm Bureau notes that DOL claims its “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” will not change the “parental exemption” in the current law, but Farm Bureau says DOL’s new language would not include an exemption for farms that are incorporated or formed as family partnerships. 

“Many farm families in Pennsylvania and across the United States have incorporated or formed a family partnership for estate planning, insurance and other reasons.  They are still family farms with moms and dads making the decisions over what work duties their children have been trained to do and are capable of doing in a safe manner.  Farmers understand that there are potential dangers on the farm and they abide by existing farm labor laws,” added [PFB President Carl T.] Shaffer.

That doesn't sound right. This is what the proposed rule in the Federal Register says:

The Department interprets ``operated by'' the parent or person
standing in the place of the parent to mean that he or she exerts
active and direct control over the operation of the farm or ranch by
making day-to-day decisions affecting basic income, work assignments,
hiring and firing of employees, and exercising direct supervision of
the farm or ranch work. A ranch manager, therefore, who meets these
criteria could employ his or her own children under 16 years of age on
the ranch he or she operates without regard to the agricultural
hazardous occupations orders, even if the ranch is not owned by the
parent or a person standing in the place of the parent, provided the
work is outside school hours.

To me, that very much sounds like that if you are running a farm—even if, for legal reasons, the ownership is incorporated or in a family partnership—you can put your kid to work on the farm.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting everything I'm reading here. But everything that conservative and libertarian outlets are saying about the proposed child-labor rules for farms doesn't seem to comport with scrutiny of the actual rules.

The Daily Caller is misleading you about family farm regulations

Some of my conservative friends are angry about this story in The Daily Caller:

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Well, not quite. As documentation, the Caller links to this somewhat-vague press release from the Department of Labor announcing the proposed rules. The press release then says the actual rule will be published in the Federal Register on Sept. 2. So what does the Federal Register say?

The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers and in no way compromise the statutory child labor parental exemption involving children working on farms owned or operated by their parents.

This is at the very outset of the rule. It's hard to miss if you're bothering to look at it directly. Which means The Daily Caller A) didn't or B) did, but chose to ignore it.

A conservative friend protests: "What about farms owned by aunts or uncles?" Well, it turns out that hasn't strictly been allowed for a few decades. As the Federal Register notes:

Accordingly, application of the parental exemption in agriculture has been for over forty years limited to the employment of children exclusively by their parent(s) on a farm owned or operated by the parent(s) or person(s) standing in their place. Any other applications would render the parental safeguard ineffective. Only the owner or operator of a farm is in a position to regulate the duties of his or her child and provide guidance.

And:

The Department has, for many years, considered that a relative, such as a grandparent or aunt or uncle, who assumes the duties and responsibilities of the parent to a child regarding all matters relating to the child's safety, rearing, support, health, and well- being, is a ``person standing in the place of'' the child's parent (see letter of Charles E. Wilson, Agricultural Safety Officer, Division of Youth Standards of April 7, 1971 to Mr. Floyd Wiedmeier). It does not matter if the assumption of the parental duties is permanent or temporary, such as a period of three months during the summer school vacation during which the youth resides with the relative (Id.). This enforcement position does not apply, however, in situations where the youth commutes to his or her relative's farm on a daily or weekend basis, or visits the farm for such short periods of time (usually less than one month) that the parental duties are not truly assumed by that relative.

Again: "None of the revisions proposed in this NPRM in any way change or diminish the statutory child labor parental exemption in agricultural employment"

In other words: If you are a farmer, and you're putting your kid to work on the farm, you can still put your kid to work on the farm. If you're a farmer and your niece comes to spend the summer with you, you can put that kid to work on the farm. According to the rules, it's been this way a very long time.

 What the rule does is make it harder to hire somebody else's under-16 kid to work on your farm. That's different. And it's worth debating the worthiness of that rule. But the idea that the Obama Administration is prohibiting kids from working on their families' farms? Not quite true.

Podcast: Timothy Noah on 'The Great Divergence' and income inequality

Ben and I have a long discussion with Tim Noah about his new book. Go here to listen to and download the podcast. It's informative! And a personal note: I haven't been blogging lately because—for me, anyway—blogging often ends up being a tribalistic "so's your old man!" exercise. I can write about why Mitt Romney's a doofus, but it's probably not going to be terribly different from the take of 100 other political bloggers. So I'm trying to figure out how to do more thoughtful and more original work. The podcast, for what it's worth, fits that goal: Rather than lining up on one side of an issue or another, we can take time with smart people to really talk through an issue. Ben and I still end up with different takes on an issue, but the distinctions seem less forced than in other formats—and in podcast form, we get to explore the distinctions a little more. I'm proud of the work we're doing on the podcast. Our hope is that it becomes a first-rate destination for authors to talk about their books on American politics, policy, and history. That's what we're trying to build. And that does feel more thoughtful and original.