Just within the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen Congressional Republicans join with Democrats to buy into the idea that the federal government knows how to pay doctors for “quality” and “value.” It is the main concept behind the misconceived Medicare “doc fix” bill that the Senate will consider this week. If adopted, it would add $141 billion to the national debt in ten years and increase federal control of the practice of medicine.

So, if we are going to surrender even more of this power to the federal government, it might be interesting to see what the Obama administration thinks is important:

“The challenges we face are real, and they are clear and present in people’s daily lives,” said senior presidential adviser Brian Deese in a telephone conference call with reporters on Tuesday. Seven in 10 doctors are seeing effects on their patients’ health from climate change that is “posing a threat to more people in more places,” Deese said. (Bloomberg Politics)

As the culture wars intensify in America, let’s consider some of the roots of these contentious conflicts.

With the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries, a “modern” narrative was invented to explain the history of the West, the wider world, and humankind’s place in the universe. This narrative claimed that liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance could only be achieved through an “Enlightenment project” of secularism taking control of both the public square and the commanding heights of society and that the abandonment of metaphysics and religious tradition were essential for human progress. Proponents of this narrative then included Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edward Gibbon, and David Hume, and in the 19th century such writers as John Draper and Andrew Dickson White. With some exceptions, this worldview came to dominate western elite and popular thinking. However many historians have since increasingly challenged this narrative as fundamentally fallacious. Such historians as J.G.A. Pocock, Dale Van Kley, Derek Beales, and Jonathan Israel have discarded the claim of an exclusively secular “Enlightenment” and shown that there have been multiple and far more causal Enlightenments, based in various Catholic, Protestant and Jewish traditions. In addition and since the 1970s, historians of science Ronald L. Numbers, David V. Lindberg, and James R. Moore have refuted the erroneous and indeed propagandistic, secular claims of Draper and White that Christianity and science are adversarial.

Indeed, it has been these religious traditions that were primarily responsible for the revolutionary economic, legal, technological, and cultural changes that have uplifted the West, and that such changes began well before the 17th century. Sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that it was the Judeo-Christian tradition that produced all aspects of progress in the West, including the ideas of objective morality and truth, free-market capitalism, reason and science, natural law, individual liberty and the abolition of slavery and infanticide, civic virtue, and the rule of law. (Among his many notable books are The Victory of Reason, The Triumph of Christianity, How the West Won, and For the Glory of God.)

In “The Secular Theocracy,” I have also discussed the “Enlightenment project”‘s hypocritical and intolerant crusade that “exalts a sovereign and powerful state that pervades all of life and compels obedience not just to its mandates but to the secular nationalism of the Zeitgeist itself, for which the populace is forced to conform to and fund.”

Stark and others have further shown that the “secular Enlightenment” narrative rests upon numerous historical falsehoods that today are still taken for granted and commonly taught in schools. The following video discusses one such fallacy—why the Middle Ages were not the “Dark Ages,” including the “urban legend” that people then believed in a Flat Earth:

Last Friday’s very weak jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was greeted as bad news, but it disguised more good news for the heath sector: Job growth in March kept its steady pace. Obamacare’s healthcare jobs boost appears to be trending nicely despite weakness in February.

Almost one in five of the 126,000 jobs added in March were in health care, as shown in Table 1. Ambulatory facilities continued to add jobs at a faster rate than hospitals, while nursing and residential care facilities lost jobs.

From March 2014 through last month, health jobs grew at 2.49 percent versus only 2.24 percent for non-health jobs, as shown in Table 2. Jobs in ambulatory settings accounted for seven of ten health jobs created in the last twelve months.

Is Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe trying to become the liberal who is most despised by other liberals?

It might sound odd to hear such a question asked about an academic who once mentored a young Barack Obama about the nuances of constitutional scholarship, who liberals once embraced as a potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, and who represented Al Gore in the former vice president’s Supreme Court lawsuit against George W. Bush following the 2000 presidential election—but consider the evidence.

Exhibit A. In 2008, Tribe wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right that is more fundamental than any collective right to keep and bear arms as a member of a state militia or national guard unit. The piece was noteworthy for its iconoclasm and eloquence, but it was hardly the first shot the esteemed professor ever fired in the intellectual battle over gun rights.

Like you and every other person, I have no just right to prescribe for another person where he may come and go, with whom he may contract as employer or employee, and with whom he may buy, sell, and otherwise associate, so long as he does not violate anyone’s justly acquired private property rights or otherwise infringe on anyone’s natural rights. I don’t own other people; nor do you; nor does anyone else.

As everyone from John Locke to the Founders of the United States to the general run of political philosophers has recognized, the people are, in justice, the political sovereigns, and the government possesses no rights of its own, but only powers delegated to it by the sovereign people, who make this delegation solely to defend their natural rights more effectively.

This past year I was on the academic job market, applying for faculty positions at a variety of colleges and universities. As a woman making a critical career move, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in cover letters, resumes, statistics about cost of living, state income taxes, health insurance, and, of course, salary information.

Chances are you’ve heard the statistic on numerous occasions, “women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for exactly the same work.” I certainly heard this several times throughout my job search in various contexts. This issue of the supposed “gender wage gap” came up again recently during the 2015 Oscars when actress Patricia Arquette used the platform to call for wage equality stating,

To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s time to have wage equality once and for all. And equal rights for women in the United States of America.

Social media exploded. Bloggers, politicians, and others applauded Arquette for her statements. The familiar and rallying cry of “equal pay for equal work” was everywhere. While few would disagree with the sentiment that men and women should receive the same compensation for the same services, the position espoused by Arquette and others that women are systematically underpaid is just plain wrong. Of the many economic-related fallacies to be cited as gospel on a regular basis, this one drives me positively insane.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s legendary statesman, who died last month at the age of 91, posed a challenge to those of us who believe in political and economic freedom (and all other freedoms). His combination of authoritarianism and economic freedom, of social engineering and self-reliance, worked. The result was a society that is more prosperous than most others, but free only in some respects.

For years, the best examples one could come up with to show that the marriage of economic and political liberty could work were the liberal democracies of the developed world, whose achievements originated in centuries past and different circumstances.

Lee Kuan Yew’s credentials became strong as many countries that also gained independence in the 1950s or 1960s opted for a mix of nativism and collectivism that kept them poor while tiny Singapore, with no natural resources, emerged as an economic powerhouse. While Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro—not to cite Mobutu, Idi Amin Dada, and others—destroyed the chances of a decent life for many generations, Lee Kuan Yew created the conditions for a 124-fold increase in Singapore’s per capita income in half a century.

The White House is starting to lose confidence that the Senate will uncritically swallow the Boehner-Pelosi-Obama so-called Medicare “doc fix”.

According to The Hill, the Obama administration is pleading with the Senate to pass the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) immediately after the Senate reconvenes on April 13. If not, the bill stalls, the administration will have to start processing doctors’ claims at a significantly lower rate of payment on April 15.

This pressure mirrors that of Obamacare supporters such as AARP and the American Hospital Association, which are lobbying hard toward the same goal: recruiting Republican legislators onto Obamacare’s B-Team by getting them to vote for this perpetual extension of the current Medicare payment system, which Obamacare made worse by centralizing decisions about “quality” and “value” in the federal government.

Easter is the day of liberation—the day the greatest earthly power has done its best, unleashed its ultimate weapon—and been defeated.

I’ve previously posted (here and here) a few thoughts on Easter’s significance to me, and this year turn to the insights of N.T. Wright—the renowned New Testament scholar, former Bishop of Durham and current professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

His output is prolific, impressive, and varied—from thick, scholarly tomes, to breezy, accessible guides to each of the books of the New Testament. Throughout, Wright reminds us time and again that we must read the New Testament in its context—in the lives and times of the first-century Jewish followers of Jesus. Yes, the truths are timeless, but we cannot simply transport the words wholesale into our 21st century mindset. And we cannot simply take a passage here and a citation there, string them together, and make our case. The Bible is an entire narrative.

It is by such taking of snippets, and disregarding the context in which they were written, that the same passages are used to make quite completely opposite points. A common case in point is Romans 13: 1-7, in which Paul, writing to the early Christians in Rome, tells them to obey authority and pay their taxes. Given that Nero was the ruling authority, and the taxation being levied was unfair and excessive, this is frequently cited, especially by “conservative” Christians, that this constitutes orders for us, in all times and all places, to obey authority and pay our taxes.

The historian Wright reminds us that Paul was writing to a particular people, living under particular circumstances, in a particular time. Paul himself spent a great deal of his missionary life in various prisons, and his life was ended by torture and beheading in Rome by the very authorities of whom he wrote in this letter—so if those who cite this passage to defend obedience to rulers are correct, Paul apparently did not follow his own entreaty.

So what was it all about, and what does this mean at Easter?

According to Wright:

…Paul is saying … that the Christians, who were regarded as the scum of the earth in Rome at the time, must not get an additional reputation as trouble-makers. No good will come to the cause of the gospel [the “good news” of Jesus] by followers of Jesus being regarded as crazy dissidents who won’t cooperate with the most basic social mechanisms. Paul is anxious, precisely because he believes that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, that his followers should not pick unnecessary quarrels with lesser lords. They are indeed a revolutionary community, but if they go for the normal type of violent revolution they will just be playing the empire back at its own game.

To take Paul’s letter as an instruction for Christians to live as meek subjects of the State makes a lie of Jesus’s life, and especially death and resurrection: Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. Jesus was tried, convicted and killed by the all mighty Jewish and Roman authorities—but he did not stay dead.

And so to Wright’s “An Uncomfortable Truth at Easter:”

The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the final putting-to-rights of all things. In the light of the resurrection, the church must never stop reminding the world’s rulers and authorities that they themselves will be held to account, and that they must do justice and bring wise, healing order to God’s world ahead of that day. Those who want to depoliticize the resurrection must first dehistoricize it, which is of course what they have been doing enthusiastically for many years – and then we wonder why the church has sometimes sounded irrelevant! But we who celebrate our risen Lord today must bear witness to Easter, God’s great act of putting-right, as the yardstick for all human justice.

And this is the cry to we beneficiaries of Christ’s teachings, the Spanish scholastics, the Austrians, the great expositors of liberty and rights and truth and justice: by seeking these things in this world, we must therefore pick our fights judiciously, choose the hill we’ll die on, keeping our eyes on and always measuring against the true yardstick.

With a growing Common Core opt-out backlash by parents and students against one-size-fits all government schooling, it’s no surprise that the latest innovation in educational choice is allowing more parents to personalize their children’s learning through educational savings accounts, or ESAs. As I explained in a recent Washington Times opinion piece:

The concept behind ESAs is simple. Parents who do not prefer a public school education simply promise not to enroll their child for the upcoming year, and 90 percent of what the state would have sent to the public school is deposited into that child’s ESA instead. Parents then use a type of “debit card” to pay for education services and supplies, including private school tuition and fees, online courses, tutoring, therapists, and testing programs. Importantly, leftover funds remain in the child’s ESA and can be used for future education expenses, such as college.

Arizona became the first state to enact an ESA program in 2011, followed by Florida in 2014. Both programs serve students identified as having special educational needs. Arizona has sinceexpanded its program to include students in or assigned to failing public schools, students from the foster care system, as well as children of Active Duty members of the military stationed within the state. Proposed expansions introduced this year would make students being raised by their grandparents, those who live on Indian reservations, and students on public school waiting lists eligible for Arizona ESAs. Gov. Rick Scott has also proposed $5 million in additional funding to expand Florida’s ESA program.

ESA programs in Arizona and Florida are enrolling nearly 2,600 students combined and are helping parents customize their children’s education to degrees few Americans could otherwise afford. Not only are parents more satisfied, students are thriving academically and socially for less than what it costs in a public school setting.

The ability to choose not simply where but how their children are educated results in high parental satisfaction with ESAs, according to follow up studies. Fully 100 percent of participating Arizona parents reported being satisfied with the program, with 71 percent reporting they are “very satisfied.” In contrast, just 43 percent of parents reported any level of satisfaction with their children’s previous public schools.

No wonder this spring at least 22 state legislatures are considering or introducing ESA legislation.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freidman noted, just because we finance education through government, that does not mean government should be in charge of delivering education. “Education spending will be most effective,” Friedman explained, “if it relies on parental choice and private initiative—the building blocks of success throughout our society.”