Baseball and Politics: Expansion

I desperately want a major league baseball team in Salt Lake.  I could see myself going to a few dozen games every season.  As a lifelong Red Sox fan I would have no problem switching allegiances to a new, local team (especially after the Sox have won a couple World Series recently).  The only way I see this happening is through expansion.

There are currently 30 major league teams.  There are 16 teams in the National League and 14 in the American League.  The reason they are unbalanced is because in baseball every team plays just about every day, and teams play in (typically) three game sets, so you need an even number of teams in each league to avoid scheduling problems.  This means that the NL Central has six teams while the AL West only has four.  It would be ideal to add a couple of western teams to even out the leagues and enfranchise some disenfranchised parts of the country (I think Portland would be perfect for a second team).

Early Mormon Cooperatives

I've been reading Building the City of God by church historians Leonard Arrington, Dean May, and (kind of) Feramorz Fox.  I wrote a post about the Law of Consecration and Stewardship here.

Not long after the saints arrived in the Great Basin, "gentile" traders and merchants arrived and started making huge money off the saints.  Brigham Young was against trading of any sort, but especially among the members.  His thought was that a man should be making something, or producing something, and that work in shops was okay for women, but not for men.  What's more, he was against the idea of a man gaining wealth at the expense of the producers.

Because members of the church were strongly discouraged from getting involved in trading, the gentile merchants had the market to themselves and became very rich at the expense of the saints.  This became very alarming to many members, who petitioned Pres. Young to allow the members to get involved in trading at a cooperative level.  At first he balked, but eventually relented.  Here is how the authors of the book describe the evolution of his thought process:

Finally, it is important that Brigham Young believed strongly in social equality.  Ideologically opposed to gradation of wealth and status among his people, he sought instinctively for a scheme that would prevent aggrandizement of a few at the expense of the many.  His opposition to the first association of Mormon traders proposed to him in 1860 was based partly upon these grounds.  He consistently encouraged the widest possible ownership of the new cooperatives, to prevent the establishment of a wealthy privileged class.  The cooperative movement was, thus, wholly consistent with his own social philosophy.

The Law of Consecration and Stewardship

I am currently reading the excellent book Building the City of God, which is a study of early communitarian efforts by the saints.  Though I'm obviously no historian, I thought it might be interesting to write a few posts about what I'm reading as I go along.  I just finished the section on the Law of Consecration and Stewardship, which was Joseph's early attempts in Kirtland and Missouri to get the saints to live a more perfect economic system.

The basic gist of the plan went something like this:  First, all members deeded their real and personal property to Edward Partridge, the presiding bishop.  In the earliest iterations of the Law the person would completely forfeit all property if they left the church, i.e. the church had full rights to the property.  Later, when civil courts eroded that away, the person could get real property back, but not personal property and not any of the yearly consecrations.  Second, Partridge would lease and loan back those respective properties to the individual, depending on their needs.  Third, the individual, though a steward over the land, would have the control to do with the property whatever he or she desired.  Finally, at the end of the year the individual would consecrate to Partridge any excess gains above what they needed.

The Enumerated Powers

I wish I could be a libertarian.  I really do.  In fact, I think we all do.  Nobody loves paying taxes, nobody loves a big bloated government, nobody loves politicians who are almost universally slimy and packaged and plastic.  I think we all have our own certain ideal for a government-light society.  But there is where the problem comes in: everyone's ideal is different.  Not only that, but those with the most money tend to force their ideals upon the rest of us until we can't take it anymore and turn to government to try to inject some sort of counter-balance.  The rich and powerful then try to game the new system, and away we go.

That is a basic back and forth we have in America today.  We are presented with a choice of who we hate more: corporations or government.  Both are big and ugly and powerful and inhuman and seemingly untouchable and, to our horror, actually really so intertwined as to be almost the same thing.  The financial reform legislation process highlights this fact nicely.  On the one hand you have Democrats trying to reform the system and put some regulations on how Wall Street functions in order to avoid another Great Recession, on the other hand you have Wall Street there every step of the way trying, and succeeding, to make the new reform as painless to themselves as possible, and with as many loopholes as possible.  The majority of Americans could not possibly be more confused about who to hate more.

Those that hate the government more have tended recently to question the constitutionality of federal government action, particularly as big reforms are being enacted to rein in the the insurance and financial industries' excesses.

What Would the Founding Fathers Have Thought About Ebay?

So let's pretend that you discovered a new continent with seemingly limitless natural resources, fertile soil, and a varied climate.  It began to be populated by people from every nation, religion, and walk of life and was thus tolerant and dynamic.  Essentially, the potential for growth and progress was boundless.  And let's pretend that those people turned to you and your colleagues to establish a government that would endure and upon which they could rely for generations to come.  What would you do?

Remember that this Constitution could endure for hundreds of years and see changes in the world that you cannot possibly imagine. Would you write a short document that gave a basic framework and allowed for a variety of interpretations to fit the needs of future generations?  Would you write a document that that had some broad language but a strict interpretation to be followed by all future generations?  Would you create essentially a large volume of specific statutes to be followed for all time?  Would you be confident that your wisdom should be followed explicitly by the progeny of your generation hundreds of years down the line?  Or would you want them to be able to adapt to a changing world while holding on to a few key principles of freedom that you hold dear?

These are, in essence, the issues that America's Founding Fathers faced while creating our new nation and producing a Constitution.  For a little context, here's a real rough sketch of America in 1790, just a couple of years after the Constitutional Convention.  America had about four million inhabitants, including about 700,000 slaves.  New York City was the largest city with about 33,000 people, Philadelphia was next with about 28,000, which means that the nation was overwhelmingly rural.  Most people were self-sufficient to the extreme, meaning they produced their own food and made their own clothes and built their own houses and bred their own horses.

The Greatest President

I'm no book reviewer, but I want to put a plug in for "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin and give a few impressions I had about Abraham Lincoln.

The book is a biography of Pres. Lincoln intermixed with biographies of his key Republican-rivals-turned-cabinet-members: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. It follows each from birth until Lincoln's assassination.

We are always told that Washington and Lincoln are the two great presidents and anyone else is a distant third, but I did not have a clear idea why apart from the fact that they both presided over and were victorious in the most important wars in American history. I suppose that is enough in and of itself to label them great, but of course there is so much more.

A few years ago I read "His Excellency" by Joseph Ellis. That is a biography of George Washington. In that book you get a sense of the iron will of Washington and the unquestioning devotion and respect he garnered from the entire country, including men much more brilliant than he was like Jefferson and Hamilton. But so much of what created that respect seemed lost to history. I found it difficult to connect with Washington and instead still just rely on the fact that he lead the nation to victory against the powerful British. Again, that is enough to justify our awe, but there still seems something lacking.

With Lincoln we have a much more complete understanding of him as a person and why he is so universally respected, both now and by his contemporaries, that by the time I finished the book I felt this deep respect and, this may sound corny, love for him. I will freely admit that when the book described the assassination of Lincoln I nearly became emotional, so thorough was my connection with him.

So here are some of the basic aspects of Lincoln's leadership that I took away. First, he was a master storyteller. He apparently had an inexhaustible supply of stories and anecdotes which he employed to make a point or to drive a point home. Listeners were then better able to understand, appreciate, and relay the message to others.

He also had that ability, which I have known in some people, to make any person feel like the most important person on Earth, and to make them feel welcome and respected in any situation. One illustration of this was when Fredrick Douglass, the great African-American orator and abolitionist, arrived at a White House ball where everyone was white and everyone seemed to be sneering at him. Basically, he was generally unwelcome. Lincoln approached him, however, with a big smile and a handshake and took time to sit with him and have a one-on-one conversation. He had a personal warmth that could make any person feel appreciated.

Lincoln did not hold grudges. There are too many stories to reproduce here where Lincoln turned the other cheek at an offense. This undoubtedly kept him more happy, but it also became useful when he needed some of these very people to assist him as he ran for and became President. He had a level of sincere magnanimity that is rare in the population in general, and completely missing in our political class. This trait even extended to Southern traitors and rebels, who he was willing to admit back into the Union with minimal restraints or conditions. Unfortunately he was assassinated before his plan for Reconstruction could be implemented.

Lincoln was patient. He waited patiently for the right moment (after an important Union win in the battlefield) to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, despite thunderous criticism that it be done immediately. He waited patiently for his turn to serve in Congress as others stepped in front of him. He waited patiently for subordinates in whom he trusted to prove their worth before acting hastily and letting them go. He knew he was right and he knew that patience would serve him better than haste.

This list could go on. He was a master judge of character. He showed sincere empathy. He was humble. He had an intoxicating sense of humor. His prose was poetic and powerful. He was a convincing orator.

He was the greatest President the United States has ever had, and he died a martyr, like so many of the greatest are fated to do. There have likely been other Americans as great as Abraham Lincoln, but never have character and circumstance aligned so perfectly.