An interview with myself

Responses I'd give if I were ever challenged about these subjects

The reason you repeatedly insist health care isn’t a right is because you want people inured to the idea that it’s a privilege.

No, I’m on record as saying that it’s not a privilege either. It’s just a service, an economic good. Any kind of “health care,” and that’s a very broad term, exists only because someone somewhere wanted to become a surgeon, or pharmacist, or nurse, or respiratory therapist, or radiologist or chiropractor. When this discussion arises, I often respond with a question, which I’ll now pose to you: How did people in the year 1300 exercise their right to a triple bypass?

You have said that you’re really not too worked up about hypocrisy, since someone being a hypocrite doesn’t prove anything about the veracity of the principle they’re being hypocritical about. Are there any exceptions to that? 

Yes. Climate alarmists. The fact that they use apocalyptic rhetoric to try to drum up fear among the public and then hop on private jets to go to conferences in fancy locales indicates to me that they’ve calculated that they can live in a way that runs counter to what they’re peddling, and the cattle-masses will still buy their phony vision of doom.

The reason you need to quit pointing out what you find objectionable about Trump is that it gives aid and comfort to the Left. Presidential elections in America are binary choices, and it’s Trump or a Democrat. 

That’s an insufficient reason for me to clam up about his narcissism, his bombast, his crudeness, his incoherence, his insistence on having his ring kissed, and his abysmal foreign policy performance. Yes, the odds look good for him to be reelected. But that is not an unmitigatedly good thing for this country. We’ll get some more good judicial appointments and other policy moves, but he’ll continue to embarrass Americans, confuse our allies, and perpetuate the illusion that the country’s economic destiny rests in his hands. 

It’s time to move on from the culture’s acceptance of homosexual marriage.

There are two levels to the refutation of this.

Let’s start with the Biblical level. Granted, it’s not going to carry any weight with the secular agnostics who make up an increasing portion of society, but it’s the most important level. Real, sound-doctrine Christianity starts from the premise of scriptural authority. And while there are parts of the Bible that require sometimes years of study to fully understand, Romans 1:26-28, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and Leviticus 18:22 are quite clear even to someone reading them for the first time. Now, these can’t be cherry-picked in order to portray them as harsh. The Bible has to be taken as a whole, and it is clear from so viewing it that God has no wish that anyone should suffer eternal torment. Each one of us has some kind of sinful pattern that is uncomfortable in the extreme to grapple with. Grapple we must if we’re going to be reconciled to our Creator. 

Now, on to level two: Until the last 20 years at the outside, there has never been a society anywhere in the world that had a definition of marriage that included two people of the same gender getting married. That’s over thousands and thousands of years of human history and around a globe that is 24,901 miles in circumference. 

What’s your response, when in debates about public education, to those who say education is a common good like roads?

It is not. There's a narrow window of opportunity for a parent to instill as much of the family's values and sense of what's needed for someone to effectively engage the world throughout life, about eighteen years at the outside. That window must be protected. The alternative is saying that government should instill some kind of core set of values to be embraced by everyone growing up in our society. (Of course, there is such a core set of values, but government's hands should be nowhere near it.)

Do you have one particular hero among America’s founders?

Yes, James Madison. I think the test for any initiative Congress considers is, would James Madison approve? Plus, speaking of the above-mentioned roads, I love the story about Congress sending him a road-improvement bill when he was president and how he said that he could find nothing in the Constitution that would authorized the federal government to spend money on such a project.