Curious about what the Powerline philosophers might have to say about the passing of one of the great men of our time--and maybe, so long as I was polluting my eyeballs, studying their take on the pope's economic views as well--I punched in their URL so that you won't have to.
The sum total of their response to Mandela's death was penned by Steven Hayward. It's quite brief, and I don't want to link to it, so I shall set down the whole thing:
News is crossing the wire in the last few minutes of the passing today of Nelson Mandela, at the age of 95. I never quite knew exactly what to make of Mandela. During his long years in prison, when his clearly loathsome wife Winnie and the African National Congress were openly pro-Communist, I naturally feared the worst. But around the time Mandela was released I happened to make the acquaintance of Leon Louw, one of South Africa’s leading (perhaps only) libertarian intellectuals. Leon noted, among other things, that Apartheid was essentially just another form of centralized socialism. About Mandela he said to reserve judgment, and that he was optimistic about Mandela’s future.
I started to think Leon was on to something when one of the first things Mandela did after gaining his freedom was divorce Winnie. I’m not a close student of South African affairs, but there was certainly a marked contrast between Mandela’s stewardship of the transition to full democratic rule there and the course of events in most other African nations such as Zimbabwe, which seem to follow the rule “One man, one vote–once.” RIP.
Yes, it's hard to know what to make of Mandela. On the one hand, he was a Commie with a "loathsome" wife; on the other, I know a guy, a "libertarian intellectual," who said judgment should be reserved. After all, we can't rally behind apartheid, which to the discerning eye of a libertarian intellectual is too much like "centralized socialism."
Mr Hayward's readers aren't as puzzled as he. The very first comment:
It takes minimal research to establish that Mandela was a communist terrorist. He headed an organization which targeted non-combatants with bombs in public places. White guilt / liberalism etc is short of black saints so Mandela's happy face is a convenient image. FWIW I'd be delighted to see Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell or Ben Carson as president, but sanctifying bogus heroes fails in the long run.
Eleven Powerline readers "liked" that. There's more:
Mandela was an Israel-loathing anti-Semite, a champion of the "Palestinian" terror entity, and a slanderer of the Jews. Read his note to Thomas Friedman, in which he bashes Israel for its defensive measures but has not one word of criticism for the Islamofascists who plot daily to murder Jews. And in which, like Arafat and other Jew-hating terrorists, he demands a "right of return" and, in essence, the obliteration of the Jewish state. I don't really care how he "rests."
Alas, it gets worse. Real men aren't shy about being racial bigots:
Ultimately, the question is what South Africa has become after the radical change. The general idea of Apartheid was to keep the savages from encroaching on the European derivative population. The Mandela idea was to let every man be free. Now that every man is free, not only are white European-derivatives the subject of lawlessness and corruption, murder, etc., but so are the blacks. Mandela, the Communist, is a hero for this change? That just goes to show you what a lot of P.R. can do.
You perceive now there is division within the wing-nut faction. To some, apartheid was too much like "centralized socialism." To others, its bad name may be attributed to PR slanders. A real rainbow coalition.
Regarding the pope's Marxist economic views: nothing. John Hinderaker, however, has a post concerning how absurd it is that President Obama is complaining about economic inequality. The argument has to do with the following table showing (Hinderaker's words) "the average annual inflation-adjusted GDP growth percentages during the last five presidential administrations":
Ronald Reagan (1981-1988): 3.4%
George H.W. Bush (1989-1992): 2.2%
Bill Clinton (1993-2000): 3.9%
George W. Bush (2001-2008): 2.0%
Barack Obama (2009-2012): 0.8%
Let us put aside such obvious objections as the fact that it's easier to drive into the ditch than to get out once you're in it--especially when the bad driver persists in working against you. If we accept the argument on its own simple terms, a wee bit of arithmetic reveals that, during Democratic administrations, the economy has been growing at an average annual rate of 2.87% while during Republican administrations the figure is 2.6%. This is the Powerline argument for Republicans?
