On the one hand, liberals tend to have a high view of the innate goodness of humankind. We're not bad, not really, and so we should not be treated as though we are. This is why liberal judges frequently give very lenient jail sentences to criminals who perpetrate horrible crimes. It also helps to explain why liberals put so much hope in education, education, and more education.

But apparently this high view of humankind is not universally - or, dare we say, consistently - applied. For example, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday against the plaintiff in the case Bruesewitz v Wyeth. The parents of Ms. Bruesewitz filed a suit trying to win damages for their daughter against the Wyeth corporation, the manufacturer of the vaccine which, the Bruesewitzes claimed, left their daughter with permanent injuries. The Court refused to award the damages sought, pointing the parents instead to a Congressionally-mandated fund, created by drug companies, for just such situations and needs.

Justice Sotomayor, writing for a two-justice minority, was outraged. She complained that the effect of the ruling would be to leave "a regulatory vacuum in which no one ensures that vaccine manufacturers adequately take account of scientific and technological advancements when designing or distributing their products."

In other words, in order to get drug companies to do good work, you have to be ready to punish them, and punish them good. Because drug companies are bad. Bad people run them, people who don't really want to create excellent and helpful products, but who only want to make money; people who don't look to the best of science and technology in bringing their drugs to market, but who cut corners everywhere and, who know, put false labels on stuff, just so they can make billions.

So most people are generally good, but people who work for drug companies, and corporations as a whole, are bad. You have to stand over them with a whip to get them to do anything right or good.

It's hard for me to reconcile these two facets of the liberal mindset. People often do very good things, even when they are motivated by mere self-interest. Liberals get this. This is how God, by His common grace, restrains sin from wreaking as much havoc as it might, were He not involved at all times and in all people's lives with His steadfast love and faithfulness.

Again, the liberals have it right about people being bad and needing to be checked. This is because of the law of sin that operates within each one of us. Why, then, do liberals work so hard to undermine the system of checks and balances in our Constitution by trying to make law through courts? And how have they managed to determine that only big corporate types - and their conservative admirers, of course - are really bad and need to be punished rather than let off easy?

This comes down, not to principle, but to passion. Liberals don't like it when people make lots of money, unless, of course, those who do plan to give large portions of that money to favorite liberal causes. Or unless liberals can enlist government to seize and redistribute that money in ways agreeable to the liberal mindset.

This is how a mind anchored chiefly in passion, as opposed to one anchored in unchanging truth, gets itself in trouble. When it becomes angry, outraged, or indignant, and has nothing fixed as a standard of justice and righteousness by which to assess those passions, the liberal mind is likely just to run where it will, at whomever it chooses, in order to "set things right" according to its passions. This can make for a certain amount of inconsistency, and even more bad public policy.

Not a good place to be when national leadership is your calling. And not a safe place for those subject to your decisions and policies.

Additional related texts: James 1.20; Proverbs 8.32-36; Proverbs 12.15, 16

A conversation starter: "Why are liberals - like Justice Sotomayor - so quick to condemn and want to punish America's corporations?"