Serving not Ruling

The political novelty that God brings into the world is a community of those who serve instead of ruling, who suffer instead of inflicting suffering, whose fellowship crosses social lines instead of reinforcing them. The new Christian community in which the walls are broken down not by human idealism or democratic legalism but by the work of Christ is not only a vehicle of the gospel or only a fruit of the gospel; it is the good news.

JH Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p.91

Patriotism

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none -- the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer -- then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative -- to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work -- people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Andrew Bavecich on Patrotism.

Hope

A leader is a dealer in hope.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Kicking the Bastards Out

The truth is, however, that running the bastards out of town is at most only half the battle, because there are always plenty of bastards waiting in the wings to betray the revolution and assume power themselves. In fact, chances are that the new bastards have already made powerful contacts within the military and police and quiet agreements with foreign governments to reinstate a moderated form of the old system even before the old bastard is finally ousted. They will assume the throne and re-enslave the people, perhaps slightly less onerously than before, but enslave them nonetheless.

The people are usually unaware of these betrayals, caught up as they inevitably are in the mania of the struggle to oust the old tyrant. Their entire focus has heretofore been on making sure the old bastard actually leaves and doesn’t come back, and they have developed a natural sense of camaraderie with their countrymen who participated in the revolution. They are thus open to being duped by betrayers who claim to be revolutionaries just like everyone else, but who actually have their own self-interest in mind, not the people’s freedom.

As soon as the old bastard leaves town, and with him the raison d’être of the protest and revolution, the people inevitably emerge in an intoxicated state. They are drunk on patriotism and chauvinistic nationalism, which they imbibed during the struggle to oust the old bastard. They observed that the victory of the revolutionaries was a result of their collective action, and they swell with pride for their nation and their countrymen. They let pride and collectivist thinking blind them to their individual vulnerability at the most critical moment of all. They are prideful sitting ducks.

The new bastards waiting in the wings will use this pride-induced blindness to maneuver themselves into the presidential palace. They will sing sweet songs to the revolutionaries, and claim to be the "representatives of the revolution," but they will now be sleeping under the same roof as the old bastard. Soon, the old representatives of the military and police will come to pay their respects at the presidential palace. Next, the representatives of various foreign governments will come to pay their respects and congratulate the new bastard, to be followed by the representatives of the labor unions, bureaucracies, and powerful corporations. They all come singing the praises of the new bastard, and they all come bearing gifts of various kinds. If he accepts their gifts, and he will, the death of the revolution is thereby consummated.

The people’s pride will not be quickly extinguished, however. They will boast for years, if not centuries, about their glorious revolution, and they will naively assume that any old bastard that lives in the presidential palace is a representative of the "revolution." They won’t even realize that the revolution was lost at the very moment that the old bastard fled town. The people’s pride and complacency allowed it to be lost.

One day, long after the revolution, some of them will look around and realize the new bastard is exactly the same as the old bastard they chased out of town so long ago. The new bastard imprisons and tortures people just like the last bastard.

Mark R. Crovelli on the Egyptian Revolution

Religion and Progress

Why is Islam so much more virulent and troublesome than Christianity at the moment? Part of the reason is that it necessarily places itself at the center of society-law, government, economics, morality, the works. Another factor is that most "Christian" societies, especially in Europe and cosmopolitan areas of the U.S., don't take their nominal religion all that seriously, at least not beyond paying lip service. They see it more as cultural decoration, much the way the more sophisticated ancients saw their traditional gods or secular Jews today see Judaism. But that's not at all the case with the average Muslim.

Doug Casey, who is an Atheist

Untouchable Military Spending

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat -- Iraq in 2003, Iran today -- replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric -- even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Andrew Bacevich on why Military Spending is unstoppable.

Bipartisan Cooperation

The real problem in Washington and the economy is deeper…it won’t be fixed by bipartisan cooperation – because both parties are wrong. They have to be wrong. They have to respond to the marginal voter, who is a lunkhead.

Bill Bonner on Misconceptions About the Consumer's Role in a US Recovery.

Truth and Jackasses

You always have to separate the cheap and tawdry from what is really worthwhile. You can't recognize something that is beautiful unless you can also recognize something that is ugly. And you can't really appreciate the truth unless you can compare it to a lie.

"Trouble is, it's not all equally balanced out. For every truth, there are hundreds of lies. For every noble, honorable, sincere and intelligent man there are hundreds of jackasses.

Bill Bonner

Selection

Any account of anything is bound to be selective. The human intellect does not have the capacity for comprehending the sum of things in a single panoramic view. Selection is unavoidable, but it also inevitably arbitrary; and, the greater the mass of information from which a selection has to be made, the more disputable will be the investigator’s choice.

Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History.

Job Creation

A businessman does not spend his day considering how a job is to be created. On the contrary, if he is a successful businessman, he spends his time thinking about those activities that he can engage in to produce a profit. Once he has determined the profitable activity, he then channels resources to achieve the desired result: making money.

It is from this profit motive, this potential increase in productive activity, that jobs are created. As a developer, I do not hire an employee before I have conceived of a construction activity that will earn me a decent return. I hire an employee when I have a productive need for his services. As Say so clearly understood, it is the productive activity that creates the employment that puts money in people's pockets that can then be used to purchase other products.

Fred Buzzeo on Job Creation.

Beast

The most alluring and dangerous deity in the United States is the omnipresent, syncretistic god of nationalism mixed with Christianity lite.

Michael Gorman in Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation (p.56).

Not Ready

Except for the very old, Americans have generally lived pretty easy, comfortable, safe, and prosperous lives.

That's why this downturn will be worse than the Great Depression. Americans are not prepared for adversity. During the Great Depression, most people still lived on farms. They heated their houses with wood they cut themselves. They grew their own vegetables. They canned their own fruit. They raised their own hogs. They knew how to survive.

That's not true today. We don't know what would happen in a major crisis. But people are not ready for it. They depend on the system...the cash machines and grocery stores...and the unemployment compensation and food stamps. I don't think they could stand it if theses things break down.

Bill Bonner's Particularly Gloomy Friend

Beauty

That's the great beauty of a real economy! It rarely takes you where you want to go...especially if you're an activist central planner or an interventionist finance minister. But no matter how much you struggle with it...no matter how badly you manipulate it...no matter how much you try to stitch it up with rules and regulations...

...it ALWAYS takes you where you deserve to go.

Bill Bonner

Democracy

If the idea of democracy is that voters put their heads together and select the most worthy candidate, the whole thing is a fraud. Just look at Congress. What voters really do is select the fellow with the best haircut, the best line of guff, or the smoothest fundraising machinery. And it helps to have name recognition. That’s how popular actors – such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger – were able to break into the business. People do not really select the best man for the job; they have no way of knowing what the job is or who would be best for it. Instead, they buy their candidates like bath soap...based on the jingle that most appeals to them.

Bill Bonner writing about America.

Government

William Godwin said,

Government can have only two legitimate purposes: the suppression of injustice against individuals...and the common defense against external invasion.

Fatal Attraction

One justification for democracy is that it provides us with ways of aligning government policies with the citizenry’s requirements and of holding governments accountable when their decisions do not accord with the majority’s wishes. But what happens when some citizens begin viewing these mechanisms as a means for encouraging elected officials to use the state to provide them with whatever they want, such as apparently limitless economic security? And what happens when many elected officials believe it is their responsibility to provide the demanded security, or, more cynically, regard welfare programs as a useful tool to create constituencies that can be relied upon to vote for them?

Samuel Gregg on Fatal Attraction: Democracy and the Welfare State

Fiction

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Frédéric Bastiat

Debt is Dangerous

Debt implies a strong statement about the future, and a high degree of reliance on forecasts. If you borrow $100 and invest in a project, you still owe $100 even if you fail in the project (but you do a lot better if you succeed). So debt is dangerous if you are overconfident about the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Trade and Freedom

Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do … What protection teaches us is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

Wisdom from Henry George

Risk Models

The problem wasn’t so much with the models themselves, but with how they were utilized. Rather than being used to discipline individual traders and trading desks, they were used to justify bigger and bigger speculative positions, and more and more leverage.

1. The risk models that were commonly used on Wall Street failed abysmally. Not only did they fail to protect their users from a bad outcome, they made such an outcome far more likely. In short, the risk models added to systemic risk.

2. In part, this was a failure of statistical modelling. The techniques that the risk modelers used weren’t up to the task they set for themselves. But it was also a problem of how the models were used. Rather than looking on them as a useful but limited tool, banks and other institutions used them as a substitute for proper risk management, and as a justification for taking on more leverage and more risk. This explains how the risk models made the entire system more risky.

3. At it’s root, the problem is conceptual. The financial market isn’t a deterministic system underpinned by laws of nature, and attempts to treat it like one—such as contemporary risk-management techniques—are destined to backfire.

John Cassidy on Whats wrong with Risk Models