Aristotle and the Subprime Mess

In any otherwise inexplicable financial event, the people who profit from it may be understood to have caused it. --Ben Stein

Not too very long ago, I got into a shouting match with a Prominent Economist, or rather, the PE got into a shouting match with me. Perhaps “shouting match” is the wrong term, since the conversation occurred in the cyber-space of the internet, where no one can hear you scream. Nevertheless, I thought I could distinctly hear the PE shouting through his keyboard. The PE was also a Prominent Member of the Left, with a sinecure at a left-wing think tank. My own bias is that “think tanks,” whether of the right or the left, are places where Prominent Thinkers are paid to stop thinking and start producing propaganda.

The particular question at issue was the cause of economic “bubbles”; my position is that they are caused by inequality in rewards (see The Investor's Dilemma.) The PE, on the other hand, seemed to be arguing that, one, there are no such things as bubbles, and; two, they are caused by a lack of regulation. I suppose that there is a sort of odd consistency in his position: things that don't exist are indeed caused by a lack of something. But for things that do exist, like bubbles, a lack of something can permit them to be, but cannot cause them to be. It is simply a mistake in the understanding of causation. As to the existence of bubbles (as if the reality of the current housing and credit bubbles were not enough to convince one), I quoted an economist as to the process of bubble formation, but I did not tell him who it was that I was quoting. He attacked and ridiculed the quotation. I then revealed that the quotation was from the Prominent Economist himself, from an article he had published not one month earlier.

I discovered that you can make either a Fool or a Friend of a PE, but not both. Needless to say, I did not make of him a Friend. Neither did I make of him a Fool; he did that by himself; my only intent was to present him with a source he could not impeach, a source with he then proceeded to make foolish. Still, his rage was boundless and his rhetoric so untethered from reality that it was amusing, so much so that I would almost rather (it is uncharitable to say this) have him as my Fool than as my Friend. But whether as Fool or Friend, he outlined “reforms,” some of which have been a part of banking regulations for 25 years now; it is typical of PE's that the deeper they go into think tanks, the farther they retreat from reality. In any case, he was suggesting any number of “new” regulations, but they all seemed to me to be merely ad hoc, to be an exercise in hindsight without any real principle behind them to distinguish good and bad regulations, between the necessary and the unnecessary or even harmful. In the course of the debate, he shouted that “Aristotle is not a good guide to today's financial system.”

On the contrary, Aristotle would grasp our problem immediately, since he addressed, more than 2 and a half millennia ago, precisely the same problems we are having today. Aristotle was himself a pretty fair economist, and there was not then the unfortunate divisions in knowledge which he have today, the endless “specialties” which not only keep students from getting a real, unifying education, but which keep the branches of knowledge from communicating with each other. But that's another topic. Back then, a philosopher was expected to be able to comment on practical matters. It would be considered foolish to have figured out everything and not be able to apply it to anything. In any case, the Aristotelian category which describes the subprime meltdown, and provides a principle of regulation, is the difference between natural and unnatural exchange.

Commentators have often regarded the distinction as a mere attack upon trade. It is nothing of the kind. Aristotle came from a trading nation and understood the importance of trade to the Greek city-states. He did understand, however, what modern economists have forgotten: that economic activity had a purpose, and one could judge economic activity by how well or how badly it fulfilled that purpose. The purpose of an economy was the material provisioning of the household, so that the family could flourish, and flourish not only economically, but socially, artistically, spiritually, and in every other way. For there is a material base to everything we do, and a proper economy is necessary for that material provisioning. Note here that Aristotle's economics begins not with the “autonomous individual” (as in modern economics), but with the needs of the family. And his economics had a purpose, household provisioning. Exchanges which aided in this purpose were “natural,” exchanges which did not were “unnatural.” That is, exchanges which were related to getting the things needed for the household were natural, because they fulfilled the purpose of economics and therefore had a natural limit. On the other hand, exchanges that were carried out only for the purpose of obtaining money had no natural purpose and therefore no natural limit; money can be extending infinitely, and infinite extension is the essence of the unnatural.

To understand the distinction, think about buying bread. If you are doing it to provision the family, you buy a certain amount commensurate with their needs, and no more. There is a natural limit; it makes no sense to buy up every loaf in the store, or every loaf in every store. On the other hand, if your purpose is merely to make money for its own sake, then there might be a point in buying up every loaf, of cornering the market and setting the price to increase your profit. Such trade is endless, with neither point nor purpose. It is unnatural.

So how does this apply to the subprime and the other financial follies? Let me suggest that banking that is unrelated to the natural ends of banking is unnatural, and likely to lead precisely to the mess we are in. Think about mortgages way back in the dark ages, that is, the 1980's. You went to the old Bailey Savings and Loan, the banker (who may not actually have looked like Jimmy Stewart) squinted at you real hard to determine if you were the kind of person who would pay the bank back for 30 years. And if your credit and collateral were in order, they gave you the money and you bought the house, you “provisioned” your family. This was called “3-6-3” banking: you paid the depositors 3%, charged the borrowers 6%, and were out on the golf course by 3pm. The depositors got a little return, the borrowers got a source of funds at a steady rate, and the village idiot got a prestigious job. The banker was using the bank's money, and was not likely to allow you to buy more house than you could reasonably pay for.

Compare that with modern banking. You go to the bank, the kindly banker squints at you real hard to determine if you will pay him back for two weeks. Because after two weeks, he will have sold the loan to somebody else, and you will be their problem, not his. He doesn't make his money from lending the bank's funds, but from originating loans, loans which he has no intention of holding on to. And if your credit and collateral are a little shaky, no problem, he'll help you doctor it up a bit, so that it looks a bit better to the fool who buys your loan.

In the first case, the loan is “natural”; it is well related to the credit of the borrower, the quality of the collateral, and the needs of the family. The bank and the borrower are in a long-term relationship, and if there are problems (as there always are in the course of life), banker and borrower can meet to determine the best course of action. The second case is quite different. Borrower and the real lender never meet, never know each other. The connection between the physical collateral and the loan gets broken and lost. The loan is packaged into MBSs (mortgage-backed securities), CDOs (collateralized dept obligations, CDOs-squared (or even cubed), and so forth. The trade is for the money only, poorly related to actual collateral and credit quality. And when things go wrong, there is little prospect that lender and borrower can find each other to work things out.

But subprimes are only a part of the unnatural trades. Even bigger, and more unnatural, are the other derivatives, such as options, warrants, and credit swaps. These are bets placed on the direction a particular market will move. The numbers involved are staggering. Bear Stearns had $15 Trillion worth (notional value) on their books, an amount exceeding the Gross National Product of the United States. And they were a small player; the overall market is estimated to be in excess of $500 Trillion, which exceeds the planet's GNP. Of course, the real exposures are only a fraction of the notional values, usually less than 1%. Still, the extent of these unnatural trades is staggering. There is no natural limit to these amounts; they can grow forever, and each increment of growth is an increment of risk, not just to the players, but to the whole economy; that's why the Fed is forced to bail them out, even though it means they profit at our expense. Ben Stein nailed it.

The derivatives are unnatural in another way: they are completely different from investing. Investing is the serious business of providing capital to entrepreneurs to expand and maintain production. Investing is always, potentially, a “win-win” situation: You invest in a factory, the factory is successful, and everybody wins. You make some money, the entrepreneur makes some money, the workers get jobs, the public gets an increased supply of some good, the productive capacity of the nation is expanded, and the commonweal enriched. The transaction is both natural and beneficial, and families are provisioned. But the derivatives are generally “win-lose” propositions; they are bets placed at either pole of a market, up or down. One person's gains are measured precisely by another person's losses. There is no net benefit to society. Whatever gains there are, are unnatural in being at the expense of someone else's losses.

The two kinds of exchange require two kinds of regulation. Natural exchange requires very little regulation, mainly enough to prevent fraud (the terms offered to the borrower are actually the terms delivered), and foolishness (adequate capital coverage, for example.) Beyond this, not much is needed. The banker is not going to encourage foolish borrowing, because he is using his own banks money. The process is self-limiting. Unnatural exchange, on the other hand, requires a positively unnatural amount of regulation. Every aspect must, potentially, be scrutinized by hard-nosed accountants and financial cops, with authority to look into every aspect of the business. It needs a corps of Elliot Spitzer's, but without the hookers. And since the exchanges affect not just the parties involved, but have the potential of bringing down the whole economy, then the body politic certainly has the natural right to regulate such unnatural exchanges, and regulate them to death, if needs be.

Of course, modern regulation tends to be just the opposite: we regulate to death natural exchanges, while letting unnatural exchanges go completely unregulated, even unmeasured. The only involvement of the body politic comes at the end, and only then to pay the bill. Brain-dead denizens of think tanks propose endless regulations that profoundly miss the point because they do not grasp the point. And they do not grasp the point, because they do not grasp Aristotle; they believe he has nothing to teach them. But in truth, there is nothing new under the sun, only new forms of ancient follies.

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Small is Bountiful

Joseph Stalin had a very easy method of estimating the size of new factories. He would find out the size of the largest factories in the west and then order that a bigger one be built. Whole cities were conjured up out of thin air to support vast industrial complexes. Nor is it any accident that these new cities were often built by slave labor, since the human person was sacrificed to mere size and power. But as simplistic as this method might seem, the dictator was only following in the economic orthodoxy received from both East and West. For capitalist doctrine dictated that bigness by itself lead to economies of scale and more efficient production. And Karl Marx, who was a great admirer of capitalist production technique, had decreed that increasing scale of industrial establishments led to a “wider development of their material powers.”

This cult of bigness as an end in itself had its justification in economies of scale. However, it totally ignored the corresponding dis-economies of scale. But there were more serious problems, as the cult made certain assumptions about the nature of man and even about nature itself, assumptions which do not bear up under close examination. Man had to be reduced to a utility-maximizing hedonist, guided only by pleasure and pain. But even this was too “humane” for the neo-classical economists; man had to be further reduced to a mere cog in an economic machine, at best equal to any other factor of production. But this stood economic science on its head: instead of being a tool to serve man's material needs, man became a tool of the machine, just another servo-mechanism in an industrial complex. And just as man was reduced to a cog, so nature was reduced to just another undifferentiated resource to be consumed in the name of “efficiency.” It became impossible from within economic theory to distinguish between natural and man-made objects, and between renewable and non-renewable resources. In other words, by reducing man and nature to mathematical abstractions, economics made a clean break with reality, becoming less of a science and more of a cult. Economics lost any descriptive power whatsoever, and lost any predictive power it might have had. As the economist Paul Ormerod noted:

By definition, any model necessarily abstracts from and simplifies reality. But the model of competitive equilibrium is a travesty of reality. The world does not consist, for example, of an enormous number of small firms, none of which has any degree of control over the market in which it is operating. ...it is large multi-national companies…which dominate the world economy. It is entirely illegitimate to make the link between the model and the observed success of the Western market economies.

It was in this climate of giganticism that the English economist E. F. Schumacher wrote, in 1973, his classic work, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The title is significant because Schumacher wished to restore the human person to his central place in economic theory, a task that also meant restoring a human scale to economic enterprise. At the time he wrote his classic work, Schumacher was a recent convert to Catholicism, and found in the Church's social encyclicals precisely the tools he needed to correct economic science. This may strike some as rather odd; that a purely moral doctrine was necessary to complete a purely “scientific” endeavor. But in fact the humane sciences (and economics is certainly a humane science) are all rooted in the moral order, that is, in some theory of proper human action. Thus, Schumacher did not make economics less scientific and more “moralistic,” but both more moral and hence more scientific.

It has been 35 years since Schumacher's book was published, a long enough period of time to evaluate his impact. This task has been undertaken by Joseph Pearce in Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, a book which updates Schumacher's work and applies it to the current situation. This is a necessary task, because economics deals with a world that is always changing, and economic theories must be constantly re-examined over time to see how well they bear up under the weight of experience. And in Pearce's judgment, Schumacher has stood the test of time, for small, as it turns out, is not merely beautiful, but bountiful; in terms of hard-headed economic reality, returns to small capital exceed those to large capital. Indeed, bigness creates a cancer, an internal “logic” which can only sustain itself by growth at any cost, particularly costs in terms of the environment and the human person. Of course, cancerous growth must sooner or later kill the host, and this is the process that we witness today, in the parade of tragic headlines about the economy. Indeed, as capital accumulates, it must take on ever-greater risks to get even a marginal return, and as the risks pile up, the danger to the credit system (and hence to the whole economy) become unmanageable (see The Investor's Dilemma and The Investor's Dilemma II.)

Pearce takes each of the principles of Schumacher and examines our current situation in light of these principles. Here we will find the current themes of free trade, land use, the environment, sustainability, democracy, technology, and militarism (among others) analyzed in terms of the failure of current economic theory to understand these things, or to make meaningful statements about them. Schumacher's understanding of human scale and human purpose, on the other hand, provides the practical tools with which we can understand and interpret the current situation. This emphasis on the practical is crucial. It is easy to come up with abstract systems and explanations; but systems that have never existed and theories that cannot be tested should be viewed with suspicion. As The Wit has noted, “philosophy is easy; plumbing is hard,” and if a system can't be plumbed in practice, one would be well-advised not to install it. Of ideas that deal with the operations of the day-to-day world, practice is the only true test of an idea.

The ideas of well-distributed property, human-scale production, family-centered economics, worker-owned firms, etc., are derided by the theorists as mere Romantic notions. But in fact, these ideas are well-tested, not only in history, but in the present moment. We may point to thousands of examples, from large-scale enterprises like the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (with 80,000 worker-owners and $20 billion in sales), to the economy of Emilia-Romagna (40% of which comes from cooperatives), to thousands of ESOP's, and to thousands of other examples. These ideas work, and it turns out that it is the theorists of the established order who occupy a fantasy-land that is not well-connected with reality. The example that Pearce takes particular delight in is that of the success of the micro-breweries. I like this example, not only because I like good beer, but because 35 years ago, when the industry was dominated by two companies (Busch and Miller), I wrote a paper predicting that they would face challenges from regional and micro-breweries, enterprises that did not exist in any numbers at that time.

This book is a useful and valuable addition to any distributist's library, and I recommend it to all who are interested in understanding our current situation, and the way out of it.

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The Return to Realism

Recently, banks and mortgage companies have made some bad loans. Quite a few of them, actually. In any sane economy, this would not really be a matter of much concern, expect to the people involved. The banks would have taken their losses; the borrowers would have lost their homes, and the rest of us would have said “tsk, tsk,” and gone about our business. But in fact, these bad loans have affected all of us and will certainly slow down the economy, if not collapse it outright. How could such a thing happen? How could the vast majority be damaged by a small minority? In a sane—and realistic—economy, the connection between the loan, the lender, and the asset is clear, and the effects of the arrangement, good or bad, are limited to the parties involved; the bank takes the risks seriously and the borrower evaluates the costs cautiously. But for the last 10 years, this has not been the case in the housing market. The banks were not really interested in making a loan, but in getting a marketable security which they could then turn around and sell to someone else; they were less concerned with real risk because they intended from the first to pass that risk along by understating the real dangers of the loan. The connection between lender and borrower was broken, as the loans were broken up into more and more abstract and complex securities which were then sold, re-sold, re-packaged and re-sold again, each time at a higher and higher level of abstraction, and at a further remoteness from the actual borrower and the home upon which the loan was based. The result is that the virus of bad loans spreads throughout the financial system, and people who thought they had little connection with the sub-prime market find their portfolios larded with risks they did not know they had. Pensions funds, money-market funds, stocks of all kinds, bonds, hedge funds, banks and brokerage funds and other investment vehicles are shown to have more risks

But as bewildering (and dangerous) as the process of financial intermediation is, what is more amazing is that the people who engage in it are generally labeled “realists.” The farther their works take them from the real world, the more they seem to be regarded as realists; the more remote the economy is from real things, the more its sages are regarded as “hard-headed realists.” Whatever one might think of an economy built on such abstractions, one can at least protest the semantic corruption of labeling a thing with its opposite. The first step to accurate thinking is to accurately name things. And when one sees (as we are all now seeing) how much abstraction is involved in current economic arrangements, how far “money” is removed from the things that money ought to represent, one is justified is labeling such an economy “idealism” or even “romanticism,” even if one doesn't regard hedge funds as particularly romantic.

A realistic economy is based on the production of real things, and has as its realistic goal the adequate support of real families. Without a realistic appreciation of the connections between things and money, between production and rewards, between man as a producer and as a consumer, between man and his social and natural environments, no realistic thinking about the economy—or anything else—can take place.

All of this serves to introduce a book about realism in economics, Allan C. Carlson's Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-swilling Englishmen created Family-centered Economies—and Why they Disappeared. And since it is a book about realism, it begins with a fairy tale, or at least a theory too easily labeled as a fairy tale, namely the Distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Of course, it is precisely the fabricators of the exotic fairy tale known is the current economy that apply this label, but Prof. Carlson presents Distributism in all its realism, and details for us the real and practical program advanced by the “Chesterbelloc” and its real legacy and influence in the world between the two world wars, and even after.

One of its great legacies was the movement towards a family wage, that is, a wage sufficient to support a man and his family without putting his wife and children to work. This wage was a reality for a long time. But a combination of forces—feminism, socialism, and capitalism—conspired to kill it. Now, my only problem with “feminism” is that it is far too anti-feminine and far too pro-capitalist. The feminists would have us believe that it was a patriarchal conspiracy by the capitalists that kept them in the home and out of the factory. But the facts are otherwise, as Prof. Carlson shows. The National Association of Manufacturers, as early as 1903, supported “equal pay” for women, and wished to abandon all reference to families in the construction of pay scales. Indeed, getting women into the labor market served two goals for them: it lowered the cost of labor (by increasing the supply) and it allowed them to commodify the work previously done in the home, thereby creating new industries to (inefficiently) replace the things that mothers used to do. Eventually, the successes of the family wage movement were overturned, and women were “liberated” to work in the factory. The odd result is that wages over-all declined to the point where the economic survival of the family required women to work in the market-place; what was once a matter of “liberation” has now become a matter of necessity. But if the “economic” viability of the family depends on multiple wage-earners, its social success must, at the same time, decline. For the family produces the most important and most indispensable economic quantity, the fully socialized and educated human person. Despite the ambitions of the capitalists, socialists, and well-meaning statists like Hillary Clinton, the functions of the family cannot be taken over by the state-supported day-care center. In this case (as in so many) what is good for big business and big bureaucrats is bad for the family and society. And even, as it turns out, bad for the economy. Without realistically recognizing the unique role of the family, which means recognizing the unique role of women, no economy can be stable. Indeed, healthy families (rather than the building of great fortunes) is the whole point of any economy, and without recognizing this, the economy becomes pointless.

Carlson walks us through the great movements associated with realism in economics: the political success of the peasant movements in Eastern Europe (until they were killed by the fascists), the early attempt to build a agrarian-based economy in the early Soviet Union (until the peasants were crushed by Stalin), the Christian Democratic movement (until it was subverted by corruption), and many other movements built on economic realism. The book is a good read, well written, able to make what might be a dry topic exciting, almost adventurous.

However, there is a problem. All of the examples that Prof. Carlson cites were, in the long-term, failures; a combination of factors, political, military, and cultural, conspired to overthrow the real successes. But such a view gives entirely the wrong impression. Distributism and agrarianism have had, and continue to have, great successes. The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, the “Land to the Tiller” program of Taiwan (which catapulted a backward society into an industrial powerhouse in only one generation), the distributive economy of Emilia-Romagna (Bologna, Italy, where 40% of the GDP is from cooperatives), ESOPs, mutual banks and insurance companies, and hundreds of other examples. Indeed, Distributist enterprises consistently exhibit competitive and social advantages over more capitalistic firms. Without understanding this, the book might give the wrong impression, the impression of a series of romantic failures. (I might (im)modestly offer my own book as a corrective on this point.)

That having been said, this is an enjoyable and informative read, and anyone interested in building—or rebuilding—a economy based on realism will find it useful. I believe that the usefulness of this book will increase as we come to realize the increasing unreality (and weaknesses) of the current economy. Eventually, reasonable men will want answers, practical answers, to the hard questions that will soon overtake us. This book is a good start towards giving those answers.

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News that's Fit to Print

It isn't often that a major newspaper runs even a single editorial on a distribtist theme like the family-centered economy. But yesterday, the Dallas Morning News ran not one, but three editorials on this issue. The first was from Patrick Deneen, Europe's Secret. He recounts a three week trip through Europe, but not the Europe of either the American liberal or “conservative”narratives, which mainly concern places like Amsterdam, Brussels, and the Hague, but through the small towns of Bavaria, Austria, and Switzerland. In this Europe,

Nearly every household seems involved with the land in some way or another, whether through a small garden and wood stand or a larger farm. In the back yard of many homes, one still finds chickens that roam free; fruit trees that are now bearing apples, pears and cherries that will be made into jam; water barrels that catch rainfall with which families water their plants. Nearly every yard has an enormous pile of wood, stacked carefully and in perfect symmetry.

Because of laws governing closing times and zoning restrictions, family businesses and small companies still dominate the landscape. Owning the stores in which they work, proprietors are far more knowledgeable about the products they sell than one typically finds among minimum-wage workers in American retail megastores. And in many cases, families live above the businesses they run.

Prof. Deneen points out that this Europe contradicts the grim narratives of both the right and the left:

In America, it is our liberals who praise the liberties of Europe while overlooking the conservative impulse of its self-restraint. Meanwhile, our conservatives condemn the statism of Europe without understanding that efforts to conserve – to be conservative – require the active support and laws of government in order to combat the tendencies of markets to produce waste and undermine thrift.

In the second editorial, the redoubtable Allan Carlson answers questions about his forthcoming book, Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared. Talking about how a family-centered economy might come about in this country, Prof. Carlson says,

A contemporary American Third Way would build on those sweet cultural revolutions already spreading in the land. Homeschooling, a rarity three decades ago, now embraces 2.5 million children and is reinventing American education on a family-centered model.

After a century of decline, family-scale agriculture is growing again. "There has never been a better time to be a farmer" crows Small Farmer's Journal this month. Market demand for organic foods has tripled the income of many family farms; there are 4,500 farmers markets in 2007, up from 1,750 in 1994; Community Supported Agriculture farms, where farmers and their customers form a partnership, may number 3,000 (none in 1985). A surging worldwide demand for milk has also reinvigorated family dairies.

Meanwhile, the number of home-based businesses in the United States may be as high as 36 million, quadruple the number found in 1990. Since most American laws and regulations still favor mass schooling, agribusiness, centralized factories and big-box chains, these gains remain fragile. All the same, the political party that genuinely embraces this emerging family-centered Third Way will know success.

Carlson's last line is particularly important. Rather then being politically impotent, Distributists and like-minded people hold the key to political power in this country, if only they realized it. In this age where officialdom worships global giganticism for its own sake, the party that embraces the local business, the family farm, the sufficient family, will be the party that achieves power, and achieves it most securely.

Finally we have Crunchy-con Rod Dreher's editorial, Not even our parks are safe. Rod is the editorial director of the Morning News and doubtless responsible for this Rare Display of Sanity in a Major Metropolitan Newspaper. His comments are directed at the individualism which has become the basis for both the “Liberal” and “Conservative” politics and ideology. In reality, the liberals have abandoned true liberality and the conservatives have nothing to conserve. Rather, both have surrendered to a cultural conformity, where the intensity of the arguments in in direct proportion to their triviality. Rod notes,

My friend Tom Kelly has lived in Washington all of his long life. During his Depression-era boyhood, families would escape the heat by sleeping under the stars in the public parks, everyone together, happy as clams. Can you imagine?

And here we are, wealthy and free beyond anything our grandparents could have conceived, but afraid to let our children go to the park on their own. How rich we have become, and how very poor.

This theme of cultural poverty amidst material wealth is one that resonates with me personally. I grew up in New York City in the 50's (giving away my age) in a poor neighborhood. But the odd thing was that I didn't know it was poor until I left it. Indeed, it seemed very rich to me. For example, there is the matter of transportation. No one on the street had a car. Yet, for 15 cents, the subway, and the City, were ours. My brother and I would love to go to the Museum of Natural History to see the Tyrannosaurus Rex that dominated the lobby, or the Blue Whale that hung in the basement. Or we could go, at our leisure, to Coney Island or even Far Rockaway. At 8, we were truly men of the world. My own children, by contrast, grew up in a prosperous Texas suburb; there were always two cars in the driveway, but there was no transportation, at least not any available to them alone. And it's just as well, for there was no real place to go; the cultural highlight of the city was the shopping mall.

Congratulations to Rod Dreher and the Dallas Morning News; finally, some news that's fit to print.

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