Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter soon. In the meantime, we editorial lackeys thought we'd share with you his delightful article on "What Having a Dog Can Teach You about Life," first published in The Dadly Virtues (Templeton). Here is an excerpt: Here is wisdom: Have a kid? Get a dog. Want a kid? Get a dog. Don't want a dog? Get a cat, which is like training wheels for dog ownership. Have a cat already? It's probably time to get a dog. Don't like dogs? You're wrong. Those of you already encumbered with a very small human in your home -- and I don't mean Robert Reich -- might be asking, "Why?" After all, the humanoid is already making demands on my tolerance for poop disposal and unremunerated feedings. Why would I saddle myself with more and similar obligations -- particularly when the four-legged dependent will make demands on me forever and will never carry on the family name or provide me with any kind of tax benefit, or expand the borders of my empire into the barbarian lands of the Gauls? I can make the practical case. Dogs make good guards, particularly of young children (though this varies by breed; Dachshunds, for instance, are tubular snapping turtles). They are fun to look at and can be entertaining companions. Children raised in households with dogs are less likely to get various immune system–related ailments, such as eczema or asthma. And I suppose if you were starving to death you could consider a canine an emergency reserve supply of protein. But such arguments fall under the category of rank utilitarianism or instrumentalism. And I want to make a broader case for the beasts, so let me start with first things. I am a father. I have one child, and let's clear the air right up front: She is better than your child. Maybe not on some test or in a meaningless contest of athletic skill. Certainly if cleanliness is next to godliness, she's a midlist offering, at best. She is better because, as Marines say of their rifles, "This one is mine." She is my greatest concession to relativism. My kid is more important than your kid because . . . well, just because. It is an assertion I make in defiance of mere reason and with support of unprovable dogma that runs underneath my feet like veins of granite stretching to the earth's core. I don't begrudge you for disagreeing. In fact, I would think less of you if you didn't. If you told me that you like my kid more than you like your own kid, my first response would be to file for a restraining order. I bring this up because there is an old notion that keeps reemerging in public life, each time pretending to be something new: the collective ownership of kids. Plato introduced the idea in the Republic. Robespierre wanted to create special reform schools -- back when the word "reform" had real teeth to it -- that would indoctrinate kids into the family of the state. Hitler famously proclaimed, "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" The Soviets lionized kids who turned in their parents for disloyalty, which, in Soviet life, meant that the parents were holding back food and, instead of giving it to the state, were using it to feed their family. Back in the sexist days when totalitarianism was always masculine, these sentiments were couched in stern, patriarchal terms. Now that we're more enlightened, the same idea has been repackaged as a mommy thing. "We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families," Wake Forest professor Melissa Harris Perry cooed on MSNBC a couple years ago. More than a decade before that, Hillary Clinton insisted that "as adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child." It's my view that we have a Second Amendment largely to make sure that no one makes the mistake of thinking that my kid is their kid. But one needn't be so strident. One can simply argue on empirical grounds that this is a really stupid idea. The simple fact is that before we are citizens or Americans or anything like that, we are humans (you could look it up). It was Kant who said, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." And if there's any truth to that, surely you can't organize a healthy civilization around the idea that large numbers of people can be made to care about an abstraction -- "the children" -- as much as they care about the very real and manifest creature that is their own child. This is a variant of Friedrich Hayek's "knowledge problem." Just as a widget manufacturer must have a superior ability to set prices for his widgets rather than a bureaucrat in Washington, so too must a parent -- speaking generally -- have superior ability to decide what is best for his kid. "My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do," Phil Gramm famously explained to a woman. She shot back, "No, you don't." To which Gramm replied, "Okay, what are their names?" This is a long way around the barn on our way to dogs, but bear with me (which is what Tonto would say by way of explanation if he had an ursine kemosabe). Without naming names, a certain editor baited me into writing this chapter by revealing himself to be an evil monster when he told me -- this is a direct quote -- "I hate dogs." . . . Read the whole piece here. | 
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