Political Power

Power doesn’t make you smart. It gives you the ability to appear smart by using power like a cudgel. Power, in fact, makes you lazy and stupid. It’s a drug that eventually corrupts your worldview so thoroughly you can’t see reality for what it is.

Tom Luongo

Fear

Something very sick is at work when a country cannot endure a prolonged period of peace. Something is dreadfully wrong when a people cannot abide leaders who promise to promote peace, instead conferring power on the most vicious and psychopathic who promise to be “strong”. Something is very wrong with a people that fears peace movements and applauds governments that vitiate them. Something is wrong with a people that cannot look at its history and its mistakes. Something is wrong when a people defends its government no matter what evils it perpetrates.

That something is fear. There is too much fear in the land, deeply buried in American hearts. There is fear of enemies of all sorts and descriptions: foreign enemies, minorities, various religions, anarchists and anarchy, terrorists, communists, nonconformists, health insecurity, job losses, drugs, gang violence, severe weather, climate change, losses of all kinds, illness, dying and death. No fear is too small not to be the foundation for some crusade or war.

Michael S Rozeff

New Allegiance

Evangelism is inherently political action. The gospel calls people give their ultimate allegiance to Jesus, not the nations state. It proclaims a kingdom that spans the entire world. It transcends ethnicity, culture, gender, economics and political affiliation.

Patrick Wu

Nation State

When Christians forget that they are fundamentally citizens of God's kingdom, not the nation state, they become arrogant or presumptuous in political matters.

Jennifer McBride

God is King

The modern world does not want to face the challenge of theocracy, the news that God actually has become king. What does it look like when God becomes king. That is the question the gospel attempts to address.

When God becomes king, he will put things to rights. He does not send in the tanks, he sends in the weak and the broken-hearted.

NT Wright

Socialistic Military

The military is a socialist institution.

Philip Blond - Radical Republic

Coercion and the State

The primary criteria available to consider is whether or not an organization can claim a monopoly of legal violence within a territory. If it can, it is a state. However, modern State leaders have understood this monopoly is not sufficient by itself to maintain their power. This is why they use ideologies to hide the violent nature of their authority and make the population more accepting of the state’s coercive methods.

In the West, since the nineteenth century, nationalism has largely filled the role of manufacturing consent to government domination, by drawing arbitrarily the contours of a fantasized historical and cultural community. After that came the welfare-state ideology which aims to develop a sophisticated system of fiscal redistribution that cultivates a strong feeling of economic dependence on the political class. And then came the ideology of democracy which allows the state to identify itself with society overall by promoting the illusion that the citizenry maintains control over the state bureaucracy.

Through these means, states in the West have been able to “legitimize” their monopolies over coercion.

For established states, achieving statehood confers a sort of title of nobility on the international stage. That is why many political movements aim to gain international recognition of their state. The status of “state” implies “civilized society”.

And yet, there is nothing honorable about the formation and maintenance of states. States are essentially bellicose and exploitative institutions. None of them can claim to be the fruit of a peaceful or contractual process.

Unfortunately, much of the problem comes from Western citizens themselves who don’t pay attention to their governments, which never hesitate to use a single tragic event in order to increase their power and their “protection” by limiting their citizens’ individual freedoms. By fueling and exploiting fear, governments create a vicious circle which exacerbates the security demands from their populations, which translates into an increase of states” prerogatives. Military spending increases in turn, which satisfies the powerful interest groups that make up the military-industrial complex.

Ferghane Azihari at Mises Daily

Church and War

War is a counter church. It is the most determinative moral experience many people have. That is why Christian realism requires the disavowal of war. Christians do not renounce war because it is often so horrible, but because war, in spite of its horror, or perhaps because it is so horrible, can be so morally compelling. That is why the church does not have an alternative to war. The church is the alternative to war. When Christians no longer see the reality of the church as an alternative to the world’s reality, we abandon the world to war.

Stanley Hauerwas

Civil Religion

Once the nation becomes the primary hermeneutical target of Scripture, the primary community of faith becomes the state. The church is eclipsed in this world and so is the kingdom of God.

And once the state becomes the primary community of faith because the Scriptures are applied primarily to the state, civil religion is at hand. The church no longer plays the role of prophet to the nation; it becomes a puppet of the state.

Alan Brevere at Faith Seeking Understanding

William Godwin

Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes,the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community and the common defense against external invasion.

William Godwin, an English political philosopher of the 18th Century.

Democracy

In a democracy, each party bids for votes with the money it intends to steal after it has won the election.

Bill Bonner on Democracy

Randolph Bourne.

War is the health of the state.

Randolph Bourne.

Rationality and Goodness

Economists sometime confine rationality and goodness.

Explaining something does not justify it.

Russell Roberts at the London School of Economics.

Mercy and War

The only mercy in war is a speedy conclusion.

Michael Scheuer

Ersatz Capitalism

I believe that this high and increasing level of inequality is not the inevitable result of capitalism, nor is it the working out of inexorable economic forces... The high and growing inequality in the United States is a result of its policies and politics, and those that have emulated the United States—the United Kingdom, for example—are seeing similar results. The inequality is a result of the country’s ersatz capitalism—rampant with monopolies and oligopolies, government-conferred benefits on corporations and the rich, bailouts for the banks, deficiencies in corporate governance, and tax laws that allow the richest to move their money to offshore tax havens and pay far less than their fair share of taxes.

From the Economist Magazine

Market Failure

Economies don’t fail. They do exactly what they want to do exactly when they want to do it.

Fed chiefs fail to improve them. Politicians fail to understand them. And everybody fails to appreciate them.

Bill Bonner on Market Failure.

Banking

Since banking is not a business that creates real wealth, it can only enrich its owners by taking money from other people. It does that by: (1) printing money (and buying the banks’ deadbeat assets); (2) fixing interest rates at artificially low levels (taking money that should rightfully belong to savers); and (3) generally encouraging inflation to rob everyone.

Bill Bonner explaining that the Fed is a vast cartel charged with making for its members and clients.

William Godwin

Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes: the suppression of injustice against individuals and the common defense against external invasion.

William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness.

Declaration

Nothing happens in the Kingdom of God until there is a declaration.

Bill Johnson

John Locke

In the second of his Two Treatises on Government, the seventeenth-century English political theorist John Locke accepted the inevitability of inequality stemming from the invention of money and private property. But having done so, he also had to acknowledge the need for a state to police the inequities that the market produces. Any state that could do this effectively, however, would also be strong enough to threaten the property holders it was meant to protect. And so a tension was born in the heart of liberalism: you can’t live with the state, since it might rob you, but you also can’t live without it, since the mob might kill you.