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One of Houston’s many treasures is Jack Burke (earlier posts here), the 86 year-old co-founder and owner of Champions Golf Club. The energetic Burke was recently slowed by a "mild" stroke (my late father used to say that the only mild strokes were those that happened to someone else), but that didn’t stop Jack from taking his family to Augusta National Golf Club last week for the Masters, where Burke is a former champion (1956). John Garrity provides this fine article on Burke’s Augusta National visit (H/T Geoff Shackelford), which includes the following hilarious and typically Burkean anecdote that former Masters champion Bob Goalby tells fellow PGA Tour member, Miller Barber:
"You know Miller?" Goalby arches an eyebrow. "He’s got about 14 curlicues in his backswing, and then he sticks the club straight up in the air with no wrist cock. Anyway, he asked Jackie for a lesson."
"They went out on the range, dumped the balls out. Miller said, ‘I’m mixed up on my backswing. Watch me hit some.’ So he hit about a dozen balls before Jackie turned and started walking away."
"Miller’s got this squeaky voice. He shouted, ‘Jackie! Jackie! Where are you going?’ And Jackie said, ‘Back to the clubhouse. I’m not going to live long enough to figure out that backswing.’"
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From Bill Flanagan’s recent interview with Bob Dylan:
What’s your take on politics?
Politics is entertainment. It’s a sport. It’s for the well groomed and well heeled. The impeccably dressed. Party animals. Politicians are interchangeable.
Don’t you believe in the democratic process?
Yeah, but what’s that got to do with politics? Politics creates more problems than it solves. It can be counter-productive. The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don’t think they have titles.
H’mm.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
David Henderson makes an insightful point about the Ryan Moats/Robert Powell run-in in Dallas last week in which Powell (the policeman) exhibited an utter lack of common sense, much less prosecutorial discretion (and this incident is apparently not the first time that Powell has exhibited this type of behavior):
So what is the essence? The issue of control. Read the abridged transcript of the interaction or, better yet, watch the whole 20-minute video. What comes out loud and clear is that the policeman was upset because the driver, Ryan Moats, tried passionately to tell him the nature of the emergency, whereas what Robert Powell saw as being primary was that Moats wait patiently while Powell wrote him a ticket. Even once a nurse came out from the hospital and assured the policeman that Moats’s mother-in-law was dying, Powell, writing the ticket, said, "I’m almost done." Must get that ticket written no matter why Moats jumped a red light. [. . .]
This is the nature of government whether the government employees are policemen with guns on their sides or sometimes in their hands or are teachers in government-financed schools. The whole Powell-Moats incident reminds me of a passage from Steven E. Landsburg’s book, Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life. Landsburg tells of the propaganda his daughter Cayley’s teachers subjected her to about the importance of not letting the water run when she brushed her teeth. Landsburg writes:
[. . .]
Where is the pattern, then? What general rule compels us to conserve water but not to conserve on resources devoted to education? The blunt truth is that there is no pattern, and the general rule is simply this: Only the teacher can tell you which resources should be conserved. The whole exercise is not about toothbrushing; it is about authority.
The Moats-Powell incident is a micro example of the government’s proclivity to exert power arbitrarily. That essential nature is being largely ignored as the Obama Administration runs headlong into seeking even greater governmental regulation over broad sectors of the economy.
Given that one of the clearest lessons of the 20th century is the capacity of large government to cause unspeakable evil, any effort to centralize more power in the federal government should be subject to the most careful scrutiny and not the type of superficial posturing that Congress has exhibited to date.
Count me as not confident that Congress will oblige.