So after Al Gore's power-sucking mansion and John Edwards' palace have come to light, I'm thinking that modern big-name Democrats are more Catiline than Gracchi. 

By birth and temperament, I am not a country-club Republican.  Conspicuous wealth grates on me.  I don't like "the proud man's contumely" whether it comes from money or power.  I'm a bit of a small-d democrat in that way, probably owing in roughly equal parts to my religious outlook and my confirmed middle-American upbringing.  And I have a nasty left hook on the golf course.

But at least proud rich people have the natural restraint of conscience to temper their pride at some point.  (Granted, that point can be set so high that they're still plenty obnoxious, but bear with me.)  But a proud worshipper of power or fame faces no such restraint.  He (or she -- listening, Hillary?) is easily tempted to conflate his personal influence and publicity with his cause.  There have therefore always been Tribunes of the People who are a lot more interested in the Tribune part than the People part.  

This holds true across political and cultural boundaries.  There have always been true saints genuinely convinced of their religious calling, and committed to doing selfless good.  And there have always been princes of the church -- in every religious tradition -- who really, really like the "prince" part. 

I don't know if the present crop of political aspirants is more or less prone to this temptation, but Gore and Edwards in particular just scream "it's all about me."  I imagine reasonable people on the other side could identify some Republican analogues, but they escape me at the moment.

In today's National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger, reporting from the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, notes that he received an invitation to make his presence in Davos "carbon-neutral":

"The World Economic Forum sends us all a bulletin, via our WEF e-mail accounts: “Climate Change: Make Davos Greenhouse Gas Neutral.” The notice goes on to say,

Climate Change is at the centre of our discussions, and you can act now. Please consider compensating your greenhouse gas emissions related to participating in the Annual Meeting in Davos.

This is possible with 1 click at any kiosk or at the Davos Climate Alliance desk.

Many thanks for your help.

Don’t be emittin’ without remittin’! Replace your carbon footprint with cash! At least, I think that’s how it goes . . ."

I remember Al Gore announcing that he was "carbon-neutral," when somebody pointed out how much carbon he pumps into the atmosphere jetting around the globe for publicity events (not to mention heating and cooling his two sizeable houses).  The idea is that he buys "carbon credits," paying others to stop emitting carbon, to offset his own gas emissions. 

Maybe I could phrase that last bit better...

The whole thing strikes me as something Martin Luther and Johann Tetzel would have recognized:  Spew out as much C02 as you like -- but make sure you buy a Carbon Indulgence, drawing on the Treasury of Merit.  "When the coin in the coffer springs/Your conscience from greenhouse purgatory springs."

It's a nice enough approach, although not particularly practical to those of us unwashed masses who can't afford Herr Tetzel's offerings.

 In a discussion in the Corner on the purpose (if any) of petitionary prayer, Iain Murray recalled this quote from C.S. Lewis:
 
"Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate.

He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will...

It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so. They have not advised or changed God's mind — that is, His overall purpose. But that purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of His creatures."

(Emphasis added.)

In other words, the person who prays does not induce God to act, when He would not have otherwise acted.  What's happening is that God is allowing the petitioner to become in effect a co-sponsor of His enactment.  

TheProudDuck is migrating to Townhall.com from Blogspot.  (http://www.theproudduck.blogspot.com/)  Readers may now look forward to a continuation of the overlong and underfrequent posts that have so entertained my high-single-digit readership.

For anyone new, a sample of said overlong and underfrequent posts, from last Thursday:

***
I've said before that the greatest hardship poor Americans have to deal with is having to live with other poor Americans. That's not to say the poor are necessarily less "moral" than the wealthy -- there are plenty of rich people who are utterly wicked, as the Bible itself points out again and again, and who'd think nothing of stealing their own grandmother's life savings between rounds of golf. But the wealthy tend to keep their disorder private. Ken Lay may have been defrauding millions of people of their life savings, but I'm sure he was a nice enough neighbor, and very unlikely to steal your car stereo.

And having your car stereo stolen, your kid robbed at gunpoint, your daughter raped, etc. is probably the greatest suffering imposed by American poverty. By most objective measures, poor Americans' material standard of living -- based on living space and consumption of goods -- is comparable to the standard of living of many ordinary non-poor Europeans.

The problem is that economic inequality does matter in this one regard: Public disorder tends to become concentrated in those communities that are poorer relative to others, regardless of their absolute wealth. The reason for this is that public disorder arises largely from private disorder -- people's unwillingness to police themselves, leaving only the imperfect controls of the police to impose order. Private disorder is correlated with poverty; people with poor impulse controls aren't likely to be high achievers. People who are competent enough to rise in society will naturally prefer to leave disordered communities -- segregating them further as enclaves of lowlifes and making them even more disordered.

A liberal might say that the solution is then to eliminate economic inequality. She would be wrong. Eliminating economic inequality entirely is impossible, short of the full Harrison Bergeron treatment, since random contingency will always allocate talent, personality, and good fortune differently. And as long as even some inequality persists, people's natural inclination to self-segregate with people of equivalent class will persist, and the neighborhoods at the bottom will always be the roughest -- for the simple reason that people with sufficient means will always want to escape them. Thus, even with Sweden's relatively low economic inequality, there are of course still neighborhoods where a woman can't walk alone at night. (Those neighborhoods happen to be largely populated by Muslim immigrants, BTW, which is really starting to cheese the Swedes off, but that's another matter.)

Even though poverty is associated with disorder, with the poorer neighborhoods more disorderly than affluent ones, the absolute level of disorder in the poorest communities can vary. Cultures influence behavior. A culture that successfully imposes greater informal restraints on behavior will still have its poorest neighborhoods be the roughest ones -- but those roughest neighborhoods will be less disordered than the worst neighborhoods in a society whose culture does not impose such restraints. Thus, even though South Los Angeles and South Malmo (I'm guessing here) may lie at the bottom of America's and Sweden's respective wealth-and-order scales, South Malmo will be less disorderly than South LA -- because Swedes are less disorderly than Americans.

In other words, making America more like Sweden won't solve the problems many liberals claim it will -- because Americans aren't Swedes.