Spend, spend, spend: Obama's Solution to the Economic Crisis

I had hoped that after Obama was sworn in as President the hype would settle down, reality would set in and the public would begin to realize that this man, for all his pretensions, is really only a man.

It turns out that my hope was naive. If a routine trip to our local shops is anything to go by, Obama has already achieved the kind of mythic significance that has normally been reserved for assassinated presidents.

For example, at our supermarket you can buy Barack and Michelle trading cards (the political equivalent of American baseball cards). Not to be beat, our local craft store is selling Obama wall posters and calendars. And finally, the toy stores are selling Obama action figures, complete with a hand gun and lightsaber.

Amid all the Obama hysteria, far less attention is being given to his actual policies. I will leave the reader to judge whether the policies pursued during the Presidents’ first months in office have done justice to his reputation as a guru of wisdom and sagacity.

Stimulating Times

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Obama took the oath of office at a critical time in American history. Following years of oppressive taxes and careless spending under Bush, America is now facing the worst economic downturn since the great depression.

From the very beginning of his administration, Obama’s applied himself to the economic crisis with a vengeance. Following a Keynesian approach to economics, his solution can be summarized in three words: spend, spend, spend.

Obama’s spending plans culminated in what Charles Colson has called ‘one of the biggest grab-bag boondoggles in American history’, namely the $800 billion ‘stimulus package.’ Known now as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it aims to revitalize America by pumping unprecedented amounts of tax-payers dollars into the national economy.

Ever since the plan was enacted on February 17, it has been possible to track where all the new money is going through the government’s website

www.recovery.gov/. The results are interesting.

It seems that everyone is getting a piece of the pie. For starters, Government employees will be receiving pay rises in April, while the 12.5 million workers receiving unemployment benefits will also start seeing a boost in their weekly payments. Those whose employment was involuntarily terminated during the period between Sept. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009 will qualify for the 65 percent health care premium subsidy. The Social Security Administration's website has promised a one-time payment of $250 to the 55 million Social Security and other supplemental income beneficiaries.

That is not all. Obama is sending $200 million for a clean-burning power plant in Mattoon, Ill, $500 million to the National Institutes of Health offices in Maryland, $750 million to the National Computer Center in Maryland, $275 million to flood prevention, $200 million to public computer centres at community colleges and libraries, $650 million to the public in the form of digital TV converter-box coupons, $8 billion to an investment fund for building high-speed rail, $1 billion to administrative costs and construction of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office buildings, over $2.2 million to Virginia for programs providing meals to low-income seniors.

I wish I could say that the spending spree stopped there. $100 million has been set aside for constructing U.S. Marshals office buildings, $1.3 billion for NASA, $300 million for hybrid and electric cars for the federal government (including golf carts for federal workers).

Red Ink As Far As The Eye Can See

Obama’s $800 billion ‘stimulus package’ is just the first stage and doesn’t even include the $3 trillion-plus budget that he will be bringing forward in a few months. Nor does it include the $15 billion a year that he has promised over the next ten years for children's healthcare, computerized health records, educational reforms and developing resources for solar and wind power.

Altogether Obama is proposing to spend a staggering $3.6 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year, making previous irresponsible deficits look like child's play. (In reality, it will probably be a lot higher. Even as I write, headlines have broken that the President’s climate plan alone could cost as much at $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House's initial estimate.)

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Few people are asking where all the new money is actually going to come from. To Obama, the answer is straight-forward: simply increase taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

There is a slight problem, however. According to IRS figures for 2006 (the most recent year for which sufficient tax data is available), even if the government confiscated 100% of the taxable income of all Americans earning over $500,000, Congress would only get an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget and only a quarter of what Congress will have to fork out in fiscal 2010 under Obama’s spending proposals. And this doesn’t take into effect the collateral impact that burdensome taxation will have on the businesses government plunders and the jobs those businesses might otherwise have been able to create. It also doesn’t take into account that 2006 was a good year for the economy, whereas this year the economy shrunk by 6.2% in the 4th quarter and continues in a state of meltdown. That means that Congress will have significantly less revenue in their coffers than they had in 2006.

The cold reality is that Obama’s spending plan will have to be financed almost entirely by debt. Indeed, under his $3.6 trillion budget proposal, deficit spending for 2009 will increase to 12.7% of the Gross Domestic Product. That is twice as large a share of the economy as any deficit has run since World War II. By 2019 this pattern will have brought the federal deficit to 82% of the overall economy, according to analysts with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Now consider that America’s resources are stretched almost to breaking point, that the nation is already crippled with unpayable debt, and that the influx of new money is poising the nation for serious hyperinflation. When we factor in these considerations we have to question the sanity of a spending policy that gives us red ink as far as the eye can see. We also have to ask: even if all that money was available in Uncle Sam’s coffers, why not give it back to Americans in the form of tax cuts in order to re-stimulate business and investment?

The Necessity of Bankruptcy

Frank Borman once noted that, “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” In economics, as in religion, if people have the possibility of reward but not the potential for loss, then there is little incentive for prudence and discretion. As I have noted previously, this explains what happened to America during the period known as the ‘Great Depression.’

The economic crisis of the 1930s did not occur out of the blue, nor was it caused by a series of runs on the bank. Rather, it was caused by government intervening to cushion the consequences of imprudent investments, very similar to the way Obama is now trying to use the stimulus package to dampen the results of the foolish financial policies pursued in government and the private sector.

Leading up to the Great Depression, the American economy had experienced massive growth but much of that growth was illusory, propelled by investment in companies exceeding their actual profits. Because many companies had a value higher than their earnings (in some cases no earnings at all), people began to grasp that their shares weren’t worth as much as they paid. The banks realized this too, and so they began to call loans. Now naturally when banks begin to call bad loans, this creates losses. But this is not a bad thing. In a free market, both loss and growth are necessary components for stability, since bad business practices are then allowed to suffer their natural consequences. However, instead of letting things to take their natural course, the government stepped in to try to doctor up the economy. From 1923-29, the American money supply was increased 61 times by the Federal Reserve, not dissimilar to the unprecedented amounts of debt money Obama is now pumping into the national economy. This amplified inflation which accelerated the boom market, perpetuating the illusory sense of prosperity. Naturally the new money supply encouraged more imprudent investments.

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Things could only be put off for so long and in February of 29 the stock market ceased to expand, causing Wall Street to collapse. President Herbert Hoover responded by doctoring the market again. In ‘31 he launched the greatest peace-time deficit spending program in history to try to prop up the economy. All he achieved was simply to perpetuate the vicious cycle for longer.

During America’s recent economic boom, the Federal Reserve deliberately kept interest rates low in order to encourage investments. As in the 1920’s, this distorted the market because it allowed entrepreneurs to engage in malinvestments - investments which failed to take into account actual resource availability. America is now facing the necessary fall-out of such foolishness, and that is a good thing. However, instead of allowing the consequences of imprudence to play out, Obama is following the example of Hoover (right) in trying to artificially prop up the market. Through his Public-Private Investment Program, government will help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks' books. By thus removing the consequences of bad business practices, he is setting a terrible precedent.

In Government We Trust

If unchecked in fulfilling his promises, Obama will push government spending to approximately 40% of the Gross Domestic Product, up from about 33% in 2000. This would put the size of the US government within reach of Europe, where government spending currently eats up 46% of the GDP.

Now here’s the crunch: when Government reaches those kinds of colossal proportions, people begin to think of themselves, and God, differently.

Recently political scientists at the University of Washington studied 33 countries around the world and discovered an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance with a greater number of citizens not subscribing to any religious affiliation. As the report notes, “Countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have higher percentages of non-religious individuals.”

The implications of this study are clear: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish. This has already proved to be the case in Europe, in particularly in the Scandinavian countries where the Nanny state provides cradle-to-the-grave care for all its citizens.

Under Obama America seems to be headed towards Scandinavian-style socialism. As it becomes increasingly difficult to say no to government funds, everything from health care to energy to all the nation’s primary industries could become semi-nationalized. Indeed, this has already occurred with education and is in the process of happening with the financial and auto industries, thanks to government bailouts.

The state-dependency invoked by this kind of semi-socialism naturally orients citizens to think paternally of the state, as I argued in my post "Why I did Not Vote For Obama." However, unlike a responsible human parent, the paternal state thrives on dependency and is inescapably parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. This should not be a hard point to grasp, seeing that the government can only give away what it first takes from someone else (even deficit spending and arbitrary money-printing are essentially processes of confiscation, since the inflation these processes spawn removes value from the currency already held by the populace). The net result is that both the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.

How does this destruction play out in practice? Again, you only have to look at the Scandinavian countries to see. W. Bradford Wilcox observes that “many Scandinavians, especially young adults who have grown up taking the welfare state for granted, are markedly less likely to attend to the social, material, and emotional needs of family and friends than earlier generations. As a consequence, social solidarity is down and social pathology—from drinking to crime—is up. In Wolfe’s words, ‘High tax rates in Scandinavia encourage governmental responsibility for others; they do not, however, necessarily inspire a personal sense of altruism and a feeling of moral unity toward others with whom one’s fate is always linked.’”

Wilcox goes on to note that even if Obama’s audacious spending agenda provides short-term relief to the economic and social challenges that now beset the American people, in the long run the ‘Obama revolution’ is likely to erode both the religious and the civic fibre of America.

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Mary and Eve

Justin Martyr spoke about Mary as a type of Eve. Similarly, the church father Tertullian noted that “what had been laid waste in ruin by this sex [in Eve] was by the same sex reestablished in salvation. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. That which the one destroyed by believing, the other, by believing, set straight.” Through her obedience Mary functions as a second Eve, even as Christ functioned as a second Adam.

Marcelo P. Souza recently reflected on the similarities between Eve and Mary, noting “As Eve received the word of the fallen angel, and through the fruit and the tree brought death to the world, so the Second Eve, Mother of the Second Adam, also received the word of the angel – this time the words of life from the angel of God – and through the fruit of her womb, brought life to the world. As Eve stood by the tree of life and brought death, the Second Eve stood by the tree of death which brought life.”

Spend first, pay later

I have just published an article for the Spokane Examiner, being a response to Demoncrats asking for Congress to increase the U.S. federal debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion. Click on the following link to go to the article.

Spend first, pay later

To read other political articles I have written, click HERE.
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Relationships and Presence

In my Colson Center article 'Hollowing out the Habits of Attention (part 3)', I suggested that the temptation with online relationships—or even real-world relationships in which the majority of communication occurs through texting—is that we can act as if we were disembodied and thereby suspend the vulnerability and fragility connected to our body.

Michael Heim warned about these types of disembodied relationships back in his 1994 book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality,

“Today’s computer communication cuts the physical face out of the communication process. Computers stick the windows of the soul behind monitors, headsets and datasuits… The living non-representable face is the primal source of reasonability, the direct, warm link between private bodies. Without directly meeting others physically, our ethics languishes. Face-to-face communication, the fleshly bond between people, supports a long-term warmth and loyalty, a sense of obligation for which the computer-mediated communities have not yet been tested.”

In its most extreme manifestation, the preference for disembodied relationships finds expression in men who do not even want to have sex since virtual girlfriends can satisfy all their needs. Even in less extreme forms, however, the ubiquity of virtual communication is making it hard to be attentive to real flesh-and-blood relationships.

The really scary thing is that the more time we spend in front of the computer, the more our brain structures change so that we become unable to relate to real flesh-and-blood people. As Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan explain in their book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,

“As the brain evolves and shifts its focus toward new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills, such as reading facial expressions during conversation or grasping the emotional context of a subtle gesture. A Standford University study found that for every hour we spend on our computers, traditional face-to-face interaction time with other people drops by nearly thirty minutes. With the weakening of the brain's neural circuitry controlling human contact, our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss subtle, nonverbal messages."

What the Treasury Department is not telling Americans about the National Debt

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According to treasury figures released today, government spent $46.6 billion more in September than it took in, a month that normally records a surplus.
 
However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Few Americans are actually aware what a serious financial situation America is currently in.
 
The Treasury Department doesn't like to advertise the fact, but America’s national debt is larger than the total economies of China, the United Kingdom, and Australia combined and is quickly approaching or exceeding the USA's 14 trillion GDP. (It appears less than that in charts, because the government has been cooking the books since the Clinton Administration. They are not counting Social Security and Medicare obligations as part of the debt.) If the pattern continues over the next decade, the government will borrow approximately $1.72 million every minute.
 
Our debt to China alone is approximately $776.4 billion, having grown more than $240 billion in the last year.
 
How did we get to this point and what are the long-term consequences if America continues down this same course, borrowing itself into oblivion? How did America get itself into this position?
 
A Brief History of Fiscal Foolishness
 
When George Bush took office in 2001, he inherited a national debt equivalent to 57.4% of America’s yearly GDP. But he also inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion - the second successive surplus after roughly 30 years of budget deficits.
 
(For those who don't know, a budget deficit occurs whenever a country spends more money during a year than it has taken in. A budget surplus occurs every time the country takes in more money than it has spent during a year. The national debt is the accumulation of all the unpaid deficits in a nation’s history. Servicing the interest on the debt becomes a central part of successive budgets, making it progressively harder to achieve a budget surplus.)
 
Instead of building on the opportunity afforded by the surplus and reducing the national debt, Bush quickly ran up unprecedented deficits, as the chart below left reveals.

Not only did he engage in foreign wars costing hundreds of billions, but he also initiated an array of new government goodies on a scale unseen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. His Medicare Prescription Drug Act alone will cost more than $1 trillion by the end of the decade, possibly a lot more as the baby boomers begin accessing it.
 
Far too few people asked where the money for all of Bush’s new programs and his bank bailout was going to come from. The answer, of course, is that it could only come from running up huge budget deficits and digging the nation deeper into debt.
 
When Obama took office in early 2009, the economy was crippling under the weight of so much unpayable debt. Blaming his predecessors for the recession he inherited, Obama allegedly set out to correct their foolish choices. Among the irresponsibilities that Obama pledge not to repeat was the practice of making financial commitments that the country couldn’t afford. As Obama said in a speech to the Joint Session of Congress: “Now, part of the reason I faced a trillion-dollar deficit when I walked in the door of the White House is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for -- from the Iraq war to tax breaks for the wealthy.”

Darwin was wrong...again!

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason,” wrote Robert Jastrow in God and the Astronomers, “the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” 

 

Jastrow’s words come to mind whenever I hear about professional scientists being obliged to abandon, or at least to seriously modify, their Darwinian assumptions. From cutting-edge work in genetics to the latest discoveries in astrophysics, the evidence is increasingly pointing to one fact: Darwin was wrong. 

 

This has been impressed upon me recently, as I have been studying the way culture affects the human brain. Contemporary neuroscientists have been making some fascinating discoveries about the way our cultural preoccupations and artifacts alter the physiological structure of our brains, and, once again, Darwinian orthodoxy is being compelled to yield to new findings.

Dogs, Pigeons & Beethoven 

Let’s begin with a fact that no one disputes: different species have brains suited to the demands of their kinds; brain structures differ among species according to need. The brains of dogs, for example, have a greater facility than human brains for processing smells, because dogs need a high level of olfactory acuity to survive in the wild. Indeed, the odor-processing region of the canine brain is about four times the size of the one in your brain or mine. Or again, the brains of pigeons have the ability to process magnetic information, which they use to navigate vast distances accurately, whereas our brains do not have this faculty since we don’t need it; we can create and use navigational instruments. 

On the other hand, human brains possess structures that allow us to do all sorts of things that dogs and pigeons cannot, such as to reason analytically and to appreciate art. It isn’t that no one has ever tried to teach a pigeon how to do calculus or to relish the glories of the way Beethoven expanded the sonata-allegro form; it’s that no one ever could; the pigeon’s brain is structurally incapable of apprehending these things. 

Sea Gypsies & Taxi Drivers 

Interestingly, what is true as regards the brain structures of different species is also true regarding the brain structure of different groups of human beings—though only up to a point. Still, this fact raises some questions. 

Take, for example, the Sea Gypsies, a maritime tribe of people living off the coast of Thailand. These people have brains that facilitate exceptionally keen underwater vision. Not only can their brains override the reflex that normally controls the shape of the pupil, enabling a Sea Gypsy to constrict his pupils by 22 percent, but they can also accurately compensate for the refraction that occurs when light passes through water. To expect a non-Sea Gypsy like myself to exhibit the same facility would be like expecting a dog to deliberately bark in F major or a pigeon to coo in D minor. 

So how is it that the Sea Gypsies have this amazing ability? According to standard Darwinian theory, the explanation goes something like this: over thousands of years, our genetic makeup gradually changes to conform to the demands of our environments, leading to appropriate changes in the structure of our brains. Genes that have survival value will be perpetuated through succeeding generations, while those that do not will tend to die out. 

Thus, according to the Darwinian narrative, ­because Sea Gypsies spend much of their lives around the water and survive by diving to great depths to harvest food, their genetic makeup gradually came to include these unique capabilities, just as the genetic makeup of dogs came to include exceptional odor-processing faculties. In both cases, we are observing the results of gradual adaptation spanning thousands of years. 

 

But, as I suggested earlier, this evolutionary narrative has recently had to be abandoned by professional neuroscientists. We now understand that these types of variations in the brains of different people groups have nothing to do with genetics at all. The physiological structure of our brains, including hundreds of thousands of neuro-connections, do evolve to adapt themselves to our natural and cultural habitats, but this evolution occurs within a single lifetime without leaving a footprint on the genetic code. 

This was demonstrated through a study of brain scans done on London taxi drivers in the late 1990s. Researchers found that, in the cabbies, the posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that stores spatial representations, was considerably larger than in non-cab drivers. Now, clearly, a London taxi-driver’s genetic make-up is not fundamentally different from a London mechanic’s or a London web designer’s, yet there are very clear structural differences in their brains. 

Keep reading...

Forgotten Founding Father

Stephen Mansfield's biography of George Whitefield is a very good introduction to the work of this remarkable revivalist.

The book begins at the Bell Inn, in Gloucester England in the 1720’s where, had you been a visitor, you would have witnessed an unusual site. A small boy was acting out a sermon for the entertainment of the guests. It was not uncommon for this boy, the youngest among widow Elizabeth Whitfield’s seven children, to engage in theatrical re-enactments of sermons and Bible stories for the guests at his mother’s inn. But this time, something was different. Reciting the sermon he had heard on Sunday as a type of game, young George Whitfield was quite unprepared for the response he received as some of the onlookers began to weep.

It was a portent of things to come. When George grew up and became a famous preacher, he found that his words had a strange affect on people, provoking emotions for which he was often unprepared.

Born in 1714, George’s childhood was far from easy. His father died when he was only two, leaving the running of the inn to Elizabeth. After a disastrous second marriage and divorce, George’s brother eventually took over the management of the inn, while George was sent to the cathedral school of Saint Mary.

Scent and Spirit

The Spirituality of Smell, part 4

We live in a culture that has drunk deeply from materialistic notion that the visible world is all there is. According to this narrative, human beings are simply collections of matter and energy.

Aromatherapy, which acknowledges the importance of the human soul, goes against this reductionistic view of the world. As Kurt Schnaubelt writes in Medical Aromatherapy: Healing With Essential Oils:

“Modalities such as aromatherapy, which acknowledge the phenomena of the soul, will be vastly more successful in treating the real problems of our times than conventional medicine….Fragrance has always transcended the material planes of consciousness (science) and communicated directly with those of the soul (the psycho-social plane).” (Schnaubelt, pp 15-16)

How Uncle Sam Gets Your Money

In an article I wrote in October 2009, titled, "What the Treasury Department is not telling Americans about the National Debt" I explained how the government actually gets money. I pointed out that there are only three ways that a government can get funds to inject into the economy: tax, print or borrow.

Suppose government does the first: raises funds through taxation. In such a case, government can then only inject into the economy what it has first suctioned out, a point that was made with characteristic lucidity by Daniel Hannan in THIS short video clip.
  

Now although Western governments make liberal use of this option, the amount of revenue that is available through taxation is necessarily limited. For example, in order for America to meet its present commitments through taxes alone, the federal tax rate for each American household would have to increase by 42% by 2040 (a figure does not take into account the liabilities to business, and therefore to tax revenue, that always come as the corollary of burdensome taxation).

 

The other option is that government can print money ex nihilo. The problem is that governments which do that have never been able to resist the temptation to completely debase their currency, resulting in hyperinflation. All Western governments have handed over the authority to create money to private central banks (America’s version of this is called the Federal Reserve). But the banks do not create money through printing presses. Instead, they create new money electronically every time they issue a loan for more money than they actually have on deposit. The reason they can get away with this is because only a small percentage of commerce takes place with actual physical money. The commercial banks in America end up creating $98 for every $1 held on deposit, which means that most of the money in circulation is actually debt money. Since every loan increases the money supply (a supply that is represented in bank ledgers rather than hard cash), it also depreciates the relative value of the money held by everyone else. Thus, central banking is also inflationary. However, the requirement to pay interest curtails the borrowing to a certain degree. On the other hand, when governments print money or mint debased coinage, as in Weimar Germany and the last three centuries of the Roman Empire, they tend to completely debase the currency in a shorter period of time than happens under a central banking system.

 
What this means is that if the American government wants more money to spend then it can raise through taxation, the only option is to go to the banks and ask for a loan.
  


Further Reading

"What the Treasury Department is not telling Americans about the National Debt"


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Books!

Anonymous - that infinite font of both wisdom and folly - once said that "A library is a hospital for the mind."

How true. Books, at least the right sort, have the potential to keep us sane by giving our lives a larger context than our puny problems and preoccupations. They open for us other worlds which then enrich our own.

Good books also have the potential to keep us humble. It is the kind of humility which recognizes that I am not at the centre of things. As we commune with the great minds and heroes of the past, we are continually reminded of our own finiteness and frailty by contrast. But we are also given hope because we see that the great heroes and minds of the past struggled with the very types of things that we face.

Arthur Quiller Cooch (picture on right), the editor of that excellent tome The Oxford Book of English Verse, taught that the more educated we are the more humble we should be because we know how much we don’t know. He argued that truly educated people do not take themselves too seriously yet they know when serious things ought to be taken seriously. As Cooch put it, "The more deeply a man explores his subject, the further he will be led to consider the views of those who have studied and thought about it before him. The more conscious he will feel of his own fallibility and the fog of ignorance encompassing us all. He will read on and on and a growing modesty will deter him from seeking such positive assertions as are made by hastier less informed men.”

Books also help us transcend the petty preoccupations of our own age, as C.S. Lewis explains in his essay “On the Reading of Old Books.” When we explore our subjects and read the great authors of Western civilization, we begin to imbibe a worldview that is neither liberal nor conservative. Being liberal or being conservative are simply the effects of not having all of history to draw upon. Conservatives who dogmatically lock into imitating how things were done in the last two hundred years, or liberals who dogmatically lock into imitating how things were done in the last two hundred minutes, are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of both these wrong approaches is a confessional approach which relies on the whole of time, using the lens of what is good, right, true and beautiful throughout all of history (including recent history) as the standard of what things should be aspired to. By reading widely, or by reading the works of people who are widely read (which is often the best I can do), we gain a sense of perspective, releasing one from the bondage of present fades. Chesterton had something like this in mind when he wrote that,

"The first use of good literature, is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to be old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone."

I have not always availed myself of my library as I should. One of my current goals is to read more and write less. God-willing, this blog should reflect that by having more reviews and less ramblings.

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The Folly of Obama's Tax Plan

"A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

"Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006."

Keep reading by clicking HERE.

Essential Oils

As many of my readers know, I occasionally enjoy writing articles about health (for example, see my article about health food myths and my articles about health freedom.)

Recently I have begun researching the benefits of essential oils after seeing a Fox News report about a hospital that transformed itself through utilizing essential oils. Since then our family has been enjoying many of the invigorating and healing benefits inherent in these oils. From Peppermint Oil, which acts as an amazing Caffeine substitute and headache cure, to Thieves, which is a proprietary essential oil blend known for supporting the immune system, these oils are truly a God-send.

Incompetence in High Places, Heroism in the Common Place: America at her Worst and Best

by Terrell Clemmons, guest blogger

On December 10^th, 2008, Bernard Lawrence (“Bernie”) Madoff turned himself in to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Having chosen the time and date of his surrender, Madoff told two senior SEC officials that he was “finished,” that he had “absolutely nothing,” that “it's all just one big lie,” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”

The following day, the SEC issued a statement:

“The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors. Madoff admitted in this conversation that the firm was insolvent and had been for years, and that he estimated the losses from this fraud were at least $50 billion.”

Yes, thank you SEC public relations. It was a Ponzi scheme.

In the same press release, Linda Chatman Thomsen, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, was quoted saying, “We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration. We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors, and we are working closely with the criminal authorities to hold Mr. Madoff accountable.” The lofty-sounding statement warrants comment:

The Messianic EU

The EU flag was first introduced in 1955 as a symbol for the Council of Europe. Although the Council of Europe is a separate entity from the European Union, the latter adopted the flag as its own in the 1980s.

The EU flag bears 12 stars on a blue background. Why only 12 stars? Unlike the flag for the United States, which had stars successively added as additional states joined the union, the number of stars on the EU flag remains fixed at 12. What is the significance of this?

Perfect Rulership: The Utopian Aspirations of the EU

In the Bible, as well as in various other spiritual traditions, twelve represents the number of perfection, especially in the area of rulership. This symbolism has not been overlooked by the pioneers of the European movement.

The German website www.dw-world.de/ gives the following explanation about the EU flag:

"The number of stars was never intended to change with fluctuation in membership: Twelve symbolizes perfection in various traditions throughout history. There are, for example, 12 symbols of the Zodiac, 12 hours on a clock and 12 months in a year -- and just as many Tribes of Israel, Olympian gods and tables of Roman law."

What makes this symbolism so potent is that EU has been undergirded with aspirations of perfection ever since its inception. With utopian zeal, the pioneers of a united Europe have defended the project by attributing to their institutions near messianic status.

Secular Sanctification

One of the chief areas where this Messianism plays out is in the EU’s promotion of secular sanctification. The EU is concerned, not simply with promoting law and order, but in how we should think, how we should speak, what medicines we may take, what wealth we may retain, what risks we are permitted to run, how we should spend our money. In short, the EU is interested in managing the minutia of our personal lives, claiming for itself the kind of authority our Saviour invoked in Mt. 28:18. It is totalitarian in the original sense of the term.[1]

The Eschatology of the EU

Another area where EU’s Messianism can be seen is in the assumption that a united Europe has ushered in a new era of peace and unity. This perspective seems to have been behind the decision to arrange the stars of the EU flag in a circle. As the German website www.dw-world.de/ again puts it: "The stars were arranged in a circle to represent the ideal of unity among the people of Europe." This is significant, since apologists of the EU, like apologists for ancient Rome or German Nazism, point out that their empire has made one new humanity out of previously warring pluralities, ushering in a new world order of peace. In this respect the EU presents a vision of eschatological progress not unlike the pretensions of the Babel architects. However, it should not be overlooked that unity of the EU, like unity under Rome or Hitler, comes with a price-tag: the freedom of the constituent nations.

European integration is often seen as the final stage in an eschatological climax triumphing over the forces of nationalism, war, self-interest and isolation in order to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. In a speech at Louvain in Belgium in February 1996, the German Chancellor famously warned that European integration is “a question of war and peace in the twenty-first century”. With the stakes so high, one hardly dare oppose any policy which holds out the promise of increasing integration. Thus, in November 1995, a member of the Bundesbank directorate declared that monetary union was “the last step in a process of integration...in order to bring Europe peace and prosperity...” Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Minister for Security and Interior, was clear about the spiritual aspirations of European utopia in 1938 when he said that

"Above and beyond the concept of the nation-state, the idea of a new community will transform the living space given us all by history into a new spiritual realm...The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people, a Europe without unemployment, economic and monetary crises, a Europe of planning and the division of labour, having at its disposal the most modern production techniques and a continent-wide system of trade and communications developed on a joint basis, will find an assured foundation and rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic barriers are removed.... Nations and human beings only develop to the full when they participate actively in a great common destiny."

The Challenge of the Church

Due to the rampant individualism of the contemporary church, Western Christians are largely without the categories needed to steal the EU’s thunder. We fail to see the EU as a counterfeit church because we fail to see the church as a truly international corporate movement. Unlike the early Christians, our idea of salvation does not include a concept of Christendom. We understand what redemption looks like for individuals, but we have no vision for what it looks like for cultures and for the international community. Thus, we have nothing to offer as a challenge to the idolatrous Messianism of the EU.

On the other hand, the early Christians challenged the Roman Empire by offering an alternative model of international solidarity. They pointed out that God did intend to make one new man out of many, He did intend to create a new humanity united by a common goal and He did intend to create international unity. After all, this was one of the lessons of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit triumphed over the curse of Babel and reversed the confusion between the languages. Where the early Christians disagreed with the imperialistic ideology was in the means to these goals. They realized that such unity could only properly be achieved through the work of the gospel. All secular alternatives are doomed to failure. As Peter Leithart put it in his excellent book Against Christianity,

“Rome was important for the early Christians, however, not because it threatened local cultures but because it was a counterfeit world-empire, which is to say, a counterfeit church.”

Similarly, the European Union should be important for contemporary Christians, because it preaches a false catholicity, holding up an eschatology of peace and plenty which can only be attained through recognizing Christ as the point of integration.

Footnote

[1] When Mussolini first coined the word ‘Totalitarianism’, it was not a pejorative slur at all, nor was it something connoting tyranny. Rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its grasp. It refers to a state in which the personal is political and the political is personal.
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The Craft of Research

I've just finished reading about half of The Craft of Research (unfortunately the library won't let me renew it anymore), an extremely valuable book for those just embarking on postgraduate work, especially those who have had no formal training in academic research. The book gives useful advice on everything from selecting a thesis topic to the nuts and bolts of the actual research process. and makes a good compliment to Patrick Dunleavy's book Authoring a PhD Thesis. Here's are some random tips from the book put into my own words:

The Living Room

In the house where I grew up, when you walked through the door you had a choice of three options. You could turn right and you would immediately be in the “family room.” Or you could turn left and go into the “living room.” Or, you could go straight ahead to the hallway, which would usher you to all the other rooms of the house.

I never tended to spend much time in the living room, except during holidays when my dad would set up an electric train around the Christmas tree. Apart from those times, there wasn’t much to do in the living room. I much preferred to go into the rooms that facilitated activities.

I once asked my mother why the living room was called that. She replied it was because it was a place to live. The concept intrigued me. Never before had I thought of living as a separate activity that people did, abstracted from everyday life. I then asked my mother why the family room was called the family room. She replied that it was because that was the room where we went in to be a family.

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Final Comments on Scripture and Tradition

This debate on scripture and tradition, though very stimulating and helpful, is using up too much of my time and energy that I need to spend grading papers and doing things with my children. This will therefore be my last post on the subject, although my friends may feel free to continue to post responses and rebuttals.

Another Objection

The friend whose questions I tried to answer in my last blog entry, has written to suggest that there are still a number of problems with my position. He writes as follows:

"At lunch I mentioned that your comparison between the authority of the creeds and the authority of a parent is an "apples to oranges" comparison. Let me explain that a little further. The authority of a parent is defined Biblically. Children are supposed to be respectful to their parents and to obey them as much as they are able. Parents are supposed to bring up their children in a godly manner and to not provoke them to wrath. This does not mean, however, that children have to believe everything that their parents teach them. When they reach adulthood in particular, they need to understand why they are expected to believe certain things, rather than simply accepting it because their parents told them to. In matters of theology, this means going back to the Bible and checking it through that. In some cases, they may find that their parents were wrong, and when they do, they still need to handle their differences with their parents in a respectful manner, but they are not required to give up their "private interpretation" in favor of the "secondary authority's" teaching.

In the same way, the authority that leaders in the church are given means that the people beneath them should generally be obedient and respectful, but it does not mean that they are to simply accept everything they are taught. Paul was an apostle with all of the authority that goes with thatposition, yet he was pleased when the Bereans checked his teaching against scripture. The teachers in the church are supposed to teach, but theyshould teach what they can be sure of (the Bible), and not their ownopinions. If Scripture is clear and something then they can teach itdogmatically, but if it is unclear, then they should not insert their ownopinions. In regard to the creeds then, they cannot be justified simply because theyare what the church has taught. This would be like saying that something is correct because your father told you so and he has Biblical authority.

Since they also do not teach us anything different than what the Scripturesteach, I would still maintain that they are redundant and not necessary for the correct interpretation of the Bible."

My Response

Although you begin by reiterating that the analogy between the authority of the church and the authority of parents are like apples and oranges, your argument suggests otherwise. In the first paragraph you define the nature and limits of parental authority and then you go on, in the next paragraph, to suggest that the authority of leaders in the church operates “in the same way…” If it operates in the same way, then in what sense releavent to our discussion are these two spheres of authority different and how does this difference undermine my position?

We seem to both agree that, (A) parents and church derive their authority from the Bible; (B) parents and the church are to teach those under them to do and believe what the Bible teaches, rather than invent new doctrine; (C) if a parent or church departs from Biblical doctrine, the child or Christians are under no obligation to do or believe what is being taught. Where I disagree is that it follows from A, B and C that the authority of the church is unnecessary.

You seem to have misunderstood my position on a number of points. My second to last response should have laid to rest the idea that I was advocating an unthinking acceptance of everything that the church ever taught. In fact, I said just the opposite in my last response in answer to your point about Trent, and I did so in a way that was consistent with still maintaining a robust view of church tradition. Hence, the points you are making now, though correct, are irrelevant to refuting my position. I also never said that something could be justified simply because the church had taught it. I can see how I might have given that impression in my first formulation, but my subsequent qualifications HERE and HERE attempted to address that. You would have to prove that such a priori acceptance of all church teaching is a corollary of my new qualified formulations, which I will now restate for a third time:

Secondary authorities (such as church tradition and parents and pastors) should be used to help us understand what the primary authority of scripture is saying. Because these are not our only means for understanding Scripture, however, we are also able to evaluate these secondary authorities on the basis of Holy Writ. When we do this we find that church tradition, as represented in the early creeds (particularly the first 6 ecumincal councils), is entirely in keeping with what the scripture teaches. This increases our debt to these formulations as secondary tiers of authority.

Your final paragraph seems to be a non-sequitur. How does it follow that because the creeds duplicate scriptural teaching that they are unnecessary? I can object to that on the Reductio ad absurdum principle since this same line of reasoning could lead you to say that the Holy Spirit or Sunday school teachers are unnecessary for understanding scripture. Since scripture specifically declares that both the Holy Spirit and teachers in the church are means by which Biblical truth is conveyed to His people, it follows that they most certainly are necessary. The same principle applies to church tradition. I presented some scriptural arguments for this in my last post.


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A Power is Growing in the East

At a time when public opinion about the EU is at an all-time low, the European Union is refashioning itself as a global entity.
 

At the heart of the EU’s global aspirations is the European External Action Service (EEAS). Headed by Baroness Ashton (right) and financed with an annual budget of 5.8 billion, the EEAS is launching the European Union into a global movement.

Essential Oils

As many of my readers know, I occasionally enjoy writing articles about health (for example, see my article about health food myths and my articles about health freedom.)

Recently I have begun researching the benefits of essential oils after being told about them by our friend Stacy McDonald and seeing a Fox News report about a hospital that transformed itself through utilizing essential oils.

Since then our family has been enjoying many of the invigorating and healing benefits inherent in these oils. From Peppermint Oil, which acts as an amazing Caffeine substitute and headache cure, to Thieves, which is a proprietary essential oil blend known for supporting the immune system, these oils are truly a God-send.

Esther and I havetogether a blog giving information about essential oils. Do visit our blog and tell other people about it. To get a good quick overview I suggest you watch the Good Overview of Essential Oils Video that we posted. Also see Esther's article 'Fighting Colds, Flu & Other Infections With Essential Oils' and her article, 'First Aid with Essential Oils.'

 

Robin and Esther Phillips

Esther and I are distributors for Young Living, the primary provider of therapeutic grade essential oils. This means that we can buy the oils at wholesale prices, but it also means that if we refer someone else to become a distributor, Young Living pays us a commission. So, in addition to getting the oils we love at a discount, we’re able to make a side income.
 

Becoming a wholesale member is quick and easy and gives you instant wholesale discounts. Once you receive your member number, use it to get wholesale prices on all future orders! Just like any wholesale buying club, there is a fee to join (think Costco, Sam’s Club etc.). The difference here is that you don’t just pay a fee and start shopping – you get all sorts of products with your fee! And, unlike Costco or Sam’s, there is NO yearly fee; as long as you spend at least $50.00 during the year in essential oils, you’ll maintain your wholesale status.

The wonderful thing about it is that anyone who is a distributor not only benefits from the wholesale prices, but can earn commissions and bonuses simply by referring others. (To learn more about the referral program, see ‘Making Essential Oils an Enjoyable Business Opportunity.’)

Here’s the simplest way to sign up as a wholesale customer:

1.    Click HERE
2.    Select the “Independent Distributor” membership type.
3.    Enter my member number: 1297759
4.    Choose the “Start Living” kit of your choice (I recommend the Everyday Oil Kit).
5.    Click “I Agree” on the distributor application.
6.    Once you’ve completed this process you will be given your own member number, which will allow you to start shopping with wholesale prices immediately.
 

Again, once you have joined, in addition to benefiting from the phenomenal discounts, you can also become benefit from commissions when you refer friends and family.
 

To learn more about this, visit our Grasping the Essence blog.

Amy Carmichael

Few would have expected David and Catherine Carmichael’s eldest daughter, Amy, to grow up to become one of the world’s most famous missionaries. Born in 1867 in the small village of Millisle, Northern Ireland, there was nothing particularly unusual about this girl, who was known for her wilfulness, tomboyish and propensity to get into mischievous pranks. Little did the Carmichael parents realize that their daughter would be God’s tool for rescuing hundreds of children from a life worse than death in the darkness of the Indian jungles.
 
Though Amy’s father died when she was five, the gap was amply filled by the widower Robert Wilson. Cofounder of the Keswick Convention, Wilson was a catalyst for the holiness movement in England and a support for many missionaries around the globe.
 
When she was in her young twenties, Wilson asked to be allowed to adopt Amy, for whom he felt a special fondness after the loss of his only daughter. Thus it was that Amy moved in with Mr. Wilson and his sons to work as his secretary. The job put Amy in direct contact with many of the missionaries around the world, including Hudson Taylor, Theodore Monod and F.B. Meyer. This was no doubt instrumental in pressing upon Amy the call to mission work.
 
An Unlikely Missionary
 
Amy was an unlikely candidate for the life of a missionary. She suffered from neuralgia, a disease that stimulates the nerves to feel pain and forced Amy to spend entire weeks in bed. Moreover, she felt reluctant to leave Robert Wilson, as the two of them had grown extremely attached to each other. Yet the call of Jesus upon her would not go away. Around this time she wrote to her mother that

“Everything, everything seemed to be saying ‘Go’, through all sounds the cry seemed to rise, ’Come over and help us.’ Every bit of pleasure of work which has come to me, has had underlying it the thought of those people who have never, never heard of Jesus; before my eyes clearer than any lovely view has been the constant picture of those millions who have no chance, and never had one, of hearing of the love which makes our lives so bright.”

Amy initially had no idea where she wanted to go, only that she needed to go somewhere. Rejected by the China Inland Mission because of her frailty, she was eventually able to go to Japan as a Keswick missionary with the Church Missionary Society. In the providence of God, however, Amy was only able to stay in Japan for fifteen months because of ill health. God had other plans for this young woman.
 
Amy remained restless, eager for a new assignment. The opportunity presented itself nine months later when she was accepted by the Church of England Zenana Mission to go as a missionary to India. Sailing for India in 1895, little did Amy realize that she would remain there for the next fifty-six years.

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