New Beginnings or Last Gasp--Part II

Last Gasp of Freedom

It seems like for folk in the US, the old Chinese curse has become a reality: they are indeed living in "interesting times".  In the first post in this series, we published a piece by Paul A. Rahe arguing that an historic opportunity is unfolding for a "conservative coalition of the willing" to roll back the creeping soft-despotic welfare state.

He claims that Obama has unmasked where soft-despotism leads--to a debt-laden, entitlement demanding monster.  People up and down the country are worried.  He sees very positive signs in the Tea Party movement, precisely because it is a popular, grass roots uprising against big (paternalistic) government, welfarism, and debt.  Thus he has argued the "New Beginnings" case.

Mark Steyn argues the opposite.  Obama is the end in the sense of there being no way back from here.  America is now too far gone.  In this second post in the series we present Steyn's riposte, published in NationalReview Online.

Tattered Liberty

From the January 25, 2010, issue of NR.

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shrivelled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is an illusion — and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more important, national decline is psychological — and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

But that’s to cast decline in its least favorable light, after it’s had a couple of generations to work its dark magic. As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire busted up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants . . . who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? You benefit from all the accumulated capital of the past without being troubled by any of the tedious responsibilities. Have another coffee and a piece of strudel and watch the world go by. To be sure, everything new — or, at any rate, everything new that works — is invented and made elsewhere. But genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and farmland wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering whether global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Dordogne remains to be seen. Yet in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table — Britain and France are members of the U.N. Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts — and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it: It’s no surprise to find that the post-great powers of Europe are the noisiest promoters of every fashionable nostrum, from the iniquities of the Zionist Entity to the perils of “climate change.” The European Union has attitudes rather than policies. A couple of years back, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post, opened his mail to find a copy of something called “Conclusions of the European Council,” a summary of the work done during the six months of Ireland’s “Euro-presidency.” A braver man than I, he read it, at least as far as Item 80: “The European Council expresses its deep concern at the recent events in the Eastern Congo, which could jeopardise the transition process.”

And that and a couple euros will get you a café au lait. The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” — whoops, “deep concern” — over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another — like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

And when you put it like that, what’s the downside?

Okay, since you ask, here’s my prediction: American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s. For one thing, we don’t appreciate how unusual the last transfer of power was. If you’re not quite sure when that took place, the British historian Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised — although it was hardly “devised” at all. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base — just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the ANZUS alliance Down Under to NORAD close to home, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic progeny is one of the smoothest transfers of power in history — and unlikely to be repeated.

Now look beyond the Anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies,” from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the Free World” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few NATO members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise — see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have postmodern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario — because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have common interests. There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above 1 million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million), and Singapore (3 million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions,” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those that salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of a mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the trash heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Czar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dime-store jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium would be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order — in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still be the most inviting target — first because it’s big, and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire Left and an increasing chunk of the Right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefited from an unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster, and more devastating than Britain’s — and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”


This article first appeared in the January 25, 2010, issue of National Review as “Welcome to Rome.”

Money, Greed, and God--Part VI

Personal Property Economics Celebrate Greed, or Not

The next myth tackled by Richards in his book, Money, Greed, and God is that personal property, and legal systems built around personal property protection and rights, represent nothing more than legalized greed, or, as Richards puts it, “the Greed Myth (believing that the essence of capitalism is greed)”. It was the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who first asserted that property is theft. To own something is to steal from the collective “everyone else”. This ethical postulate is a bit hard-core for weak-kneed socialists, so it has undergone a dilution. In the popular mindset, personal property—particularly the accumulation of “above average” amounts—has been morphed from an act of theft to an act of greed. (The widespread belief in the Greed Myth helps explain, incidentally, why so many relatively well-off people are racked with guilt, and want the government to “do something” for the poor. They are trying to atone for what they believe to be their sins of greed. These folk have been aptly dubbed chardonnay socialists.)

Either assertion (theft or greed) is deeply troubling to many Christians, because theft and greed are alike condemned and forbidden in the Scriptures.
The Bible excoriates the love of money (I Timothy 6: 9-10); it warns against the dangers of trying to amass riches. But the Bible also excoriates laziness and living for the moment instead of exercising thrift, saving, and storing up for the future. It was the third servant's unwillingness to take up his responsibilities and deal faithfully with what his master had given him that condemned him in our Lord's Parable of the Talents.

Richards points out that there is a difference between selfishness (which is closely related to greed) and self-interest. Self-interest is not self-absorption, but is related more to self-respect, and to taking responsibility for all that is under my sphere of interest. This is a classic ethical distinction which many people are really confused about.

Every second of the day, you act in your own interest. Every time you take a breath, wash your hands, eat your fibre, take your vitamins, clock in at work, look both ways before crossing the street, crawl into bed, take a shower, pay your bills, go to the doctor, hunt for bargains, read a book, and pray for God's forgiveness, you're pursuing your self-interest. That's not just OK. In most cases, you ought to do these things. Only foggy moral pretence confuses legitimate self-interest with selfishness. (Richards, p. 120f)

But, Richards goes further than this.

In fact, proper self-interest is the basis for the Golden Rule, which Jesus called the second-greatest commandment, after the command to love God. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). I'm supposed to use my rightful concern for myself as a guide in how I treat others. (Richards, p.121)

Not only that, but the Scriptures make it abundantly clear that we are creatures under covenant—which means that we are bound into other human beings in bonds of mutual obligation, such that their interests and concerns become my responsibility to one degree or other. Higher degrees of mutual responsibility attach to relationships where the bond of covenant is most powerful, such as family, dependants, church, the household of faith, and so on. Beyond this, we have covenantal obligations to our neighbours—who are those whom we encounter in our normal course of life who are in need. All of these form part of our self-interest, because our self is covenanted and bound to them.

Self-interest actually works to restrain greed and selfishness. Imagine a selfish butcher who would like nothing more than to defraud all his customers selling off bad cuts of meat as prime beef, and making his sausages 90 percent sawdust.

. . . even if the butcher is selfish, even if the butcher would love nothing more than to sell you a spoiled chunk of grisly beef in exchange for your worldly goods and leave you homeless, the butcher can't make you buy his meat in a free economy. He has to offer you meat you'll freely buy. The cruel, greedy butcher, in other words, has to look for ways to set up win-win scenarios. Even to satisfy his greed, has has to meet your desires. (Richards, p. 123)

In other words, under the realm of personal property rights and the free exchange of goods and services, even the selfish and greedy are curtailed and forced to act in a more self-interested than selfish manner.

Now to be sure there are plenty of conspicuous consumers who trumpet selfishness and greed. The wicked will always attempt to pervert the good. The fact that these people may extol—even idolize—private enterprise and personal property rights makes many Christians uneasy. But these folk represent nothing more than the syndrome of the embarrassing advocate. Moreover, the fact that some may have an acute self-interest in advocating personal property rights does not represent an argument against personal property.

But the question is begged, How much personal property is enough? Surely, there must come a point in time when someone has “more than enough” and to continue accumulating and gathering must represent gluttony, the love of money, or indulgence. But the question of “enough” begs another—Enough for what? If you are going to start up a new business, you can never have too much capital in reserve. Regardless of how much you think you will need, almost certainly you will under-estimate. If you are going to fund an orphanage, the demands for what you accumulate will be never-ceasing. If you are going to support a thousand missionaries on the field, there will be no limit to the amount of capital you will need. If you are going to fund the education of your grand-children and great-grand-children, how much capital will you need to lay aside? Lots.

Moreover, a fundamental issue is whether you are going to fund in perpetuity or as a one-off contribution. If your concern is to fund in perpetuity, you will need to maintain the capital and fund out of earnings on that capital. You will need far more than you initially think.

So, the issue of “too much” is irrelevant. What Christians must learn is that wealth is a fiduciary obligation—something we work to accumulate, but then have to account to the Lord for our stewardship of the same. The more capital, the more responsibility. That is the essence of what it means to be a faithful steward.

New Beginning or Last Gasp--Part I

A New Birth of Freedom

Paul A. Rahe
Republished from BigGovernment

Back in November, when Peter Robinson interviewed me for Uncommon Knowledge, he waited until the last segment to throw down the gauntlet, asking me bluntly why I was so much more sanguine regarding the future than was the estimable Mark Steyn. My reply, which caught him off guard, was what he jocularly called “a low blow.” For I said something like this: “Mark Steyn is a Canadian. What would you expect? I’d be a pessimist myself if I were a Canadian.”

I would not want to deny that my ad hominem argument struck a bit below the belt, but I nonetheless thought it apt, and I have not in any way changed my mind. Mark is a man of keen understanding and quick wit, and he bears comparison with George Will and Charles Krauthammer, the very best of our pundits. Moreover, as a Canadian who has lived in Great Britain, he has firsthand experience of the profound damage done by what I, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, termed soft despotism in my recent book. When he writes, in a recent post, “ it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished,” he is surely right. Indeed, I agree with almost every word in the following:

Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: . . . the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (i.e., evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon.

Mark’s ruminations make for a depressing read, as does the longer version that originally appeared in the pages of National Review, but what he has to say comes close to being on the mark. If the program passed in the House of Representatives on March 21st and signed into law thirty-six hours thereafter is fully implemented and left in place for any considerable length of time, it will complete the project begun by the Progressives when they first took control of the federal government in 1912. We will, as Mark argues, be indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans; our character as a people will change; we will be transformed into subjects and wards of the state, and we will no longer be citizens; our economy will stagnate; and we will have neither the resolve nor the resources with which to defend our country and its way of life. If we acquiesce, we really are doomed.

This is what gives me hope. For we are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. The British and the Canadians lacked the spirit of resistance – though, to be fair, it lived on in the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

We Americans are made of sterner stuff. During the Cold War, we defended the Free World. In our absence, I am convinced, everyone else would have given way. I do not mean that we are everything that once we were. The public school system, the welfare state, the consumer culture, the sexual revolution, social security, and Medicare have sapped our sense of self-reliance, our energies, and our strength. After Pearl Harbor, entire fraternities marched into town to join the armed forces. On 9/11, I was teaching a class at the University of Tulsa entitled Historical Studies in the Origins of War. That evening my students interrupted my lecture to ask that I speak about what had happened that day. When I told them that we were at war and asked how many of them intended to enlist, not a single hand went up. We are, sadly, less instinctively apt to insist on looking after ourselves than were our forebears.

But, Mark Steyn to the contrary notwithstanding, we have not yet entirely lost the American spirit. What happened at the town halls in August, what took place in Virginia, in New Jersey, and, most dramatically, in Massachusetts proves the contrary. Barack Obama and his minions are indeed persuaded that public sentiment does not matter. They could not care less that the citizens do not consent, and they believe that what they have done cannot be undone. “Yes, we can,” they chant. But the truth is they can’t, for they are wrong.

Never, in the history of the United States, has a political party dared, in the face of public opinion fully formed and fiercely adverse, to carry so ambitious a bill without a modicum of cover from the opposition. What the Democrats have done is a breathtaking expression of contempt not just for public sentiment as revealed in the polling data but also for the verdict handed down by the people of Massachusetts at the polls in January. What they have done would never have been attempted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had a healthy respect for public opinion. What Barack Obama calls the audacity of hope is reckless in the extreme.

As I have argued in a recent post, Abraham Lincoln was right when he wrote, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” What this means in the present circumstances cannot be overestimated. The Republicans, if they seize the occasion, will have the rapt attention of their compatriots. If they expose fully the tyrannical ambition at the heart of the healthcare bill, they not only can, they will prevail. All that they then have to do is to restate in contemporary terms what FDR said with an eye to Herbert Hoover and the business progressives of the 1920s and the early 1930s: that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives,” for, as is perfectly obvious, that is precisely what Barack Obama and his minions are attempting to do.

This is, as Mark Steyn insists, a very dangerous time. In my judgment, however, it is also a time of almost unprecedented opportunity. We have options that have not been vouchsafed to the friends of liberty for more than sixty years. For, if the Republicans manage to articulate, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the rationale for limited government as that rationale is pertinent to the healthcare bill, they will at the same time have articulated the grounds for doing away with the administrative state, and everyone will recognize the consequences.

The larger danger – which I analyzed in detail in Montesquieu & the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift – has never been that we Americans would succumb to socialism as a consequence of a coup d’état of the sort being attempted by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and their acolytes. The larger danger has always been what Tocqueville feared: that the citizens of liberal democratic republics would gradually and unobtrusively come to depend on centralized administration for help in every aspect of their lives. Our propensity to drift in the direction of obliviously surrendering our liberties one by one in search of a security that no government can really guarantee has always been where the greatest peril lay.

Like Mark Steyn, I view Barack Obama as “one of the most consequential presidents in history,” but not for the same reasons. In my view, he and today’s Democratic Party represent the last gasp of the Progressive impulse. The tyrannical ambition hidden at the heart of Progressivism’s quest for what Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed “rational administration” Barack Obama has made manifest; and to all with eyes to see, the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century is now perfectly visible. As Obama himself has insisted in speech after speech, the moment in which we now live is a “defining moment.” What is required in what he calls “this defining moment” is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a new birth of freedom.” The period we just entered could be our finest hour.

We will see. Hopefully, Rahe is right . . Ed.

Paul A. Rahe holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History and Politics. He is author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992) and of Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (2008), co-editor of Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws (2001), and editor of Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy (2006).

In 2009, Professor Rahe published two books: Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, which has as its subtitle War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. He can be reached at www.paularahe.com.

John Polkinghorne on Unseen Realities

The Humility of Authentic Science

In the hands of Unbelief, science has asserted itself to be the world's orator, standing at the rostrum of infallible certainty. At least those who are not scientists so assert.

However, those who are engaged in hard science (not the pseudo-sciences of evolutionary biology, or global warming) and are actually having to confront the hard and difficult realities of the actual empirical world, uncertainty, imprecision, and doubt lie at every turn. Every discovery seems to open up whole new vistas of complexity and uncertainty, doubt and challenge.

Quantum theory and chaos theory are two prime examples.

The following interview was published recently in In Character. The interview introduces Polkinghorne as follows:

An eminent particle physicist, John Polkinghorne helped make one of the breakthroughs that transformed modern physics: the discovery of the quark (an unseen but fundamental constituent of matter). He held the prestigious post of Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, but in 1979, Polkinghorne surprised many with the announcement that he planned to become an Anglican priest. Author of numerous books and articles, Polkinghorne is a Knight Commander of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), and the 2002 recipient of the Templeton Prize. He is founder of the International Society for Science and Religion and of the Society of Ordained Scientists.

Whilst there is much to challenge and debate in the interview, both theologically and epistemologically, it does contain some really significant insights. Probably the most trenchant and powerful is the restatement of the orthodox Christian doctrine of the infinite immanence of God in the Creation (in contrast to the absent Clockmaker of deistic idolatry.) This is to say that the Creation is upheld and governed in all its parts, particles, and perspectives by the perpetual, unceasing spoken words of God.

And, now, the text of the interview itself:

Humility is an important virtue in the world’s great religions. What is its role in science?

It’s important in science in the sense that science often finds the world very surprising, and therefore, if we approach it with certain ideas in our minds, and we think we are absolutely right and feel proud of our intellectual ability, we may not be humble enough to realize that we need to change our views.

The most striking example of that, of course, is quantum theory. Nobody could have thought that something could be sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle. But we just had to accept that and recognize that this is just how the world works. So the line I would take about humility and science is that we must be humble before the remarkable world in which we live.

Comparing religious people and scientists, which group does humility better? Sometimes religious people claim that scientists are wildly arrogant people who think that knowledge begins and ends with them. On the other hand, many scientists see religious people as both arrogant and ignorant.

I can’t award a prize between the two groups. They both have their problems, not actually via science or via religion, but directly from human nature. Certainly scientists who make arrogant claims that science tells you everything worth knowing are making a boastful claim that just doesn’t stand up. Science tells us how the world works, but it really doesn’t try to tell us about matters of meaning or value or purpose, which are equally important. So there are, of course, in the scientific community un-humble people, who try to be imperialist about the successes of science and claim that it’s the whole story. There are un-humble people in the religious community as well — there are but there shouldn’t be — who think that their particular interpretation of the understanding of scripture or the nature of God is the one that everybody ought to accept and accept immediately. I think in both communities there are substantial numbers of people who are simply truth-seeking people and who are looking for motivated belief and are prepared to change their beliefs if they find that evidence and experience make them do so. And they are the people, on both sides, who show the cousinly relationship between science and theology in the search for truth.

Do science and religion approach reason in different ways? Is the reasoning of faith different from the reasoning of science? Can either help the other to get a more complete understanding of the universe?

I suppose the answer is yes and no. I think both science and religion are concerned with the search for motivated belief. They are not just plucking ideas out of the air but they have reasons from experience to support the ideas they believe to be true. But the way they seek them is somewhat different. Science is looking at the world as an object — as an “it”—which you can pull apart and do with what you want. And with science you can repeat things. You can do the same experiment over and over again until you feel sure you understand what is going on. And that gives science a great secret weapon. But there are great swaths of human encounter with reality where you meet reality not just as an object but where there is a personal dimension. Unlike with the scientific experiment, no personal experience is ever going to be exactly repeated. If we listen to a Mozart quartet, even if we play the same disc twice, we shan’t experience it in quite the same way on each occasion. Similarly, the encounter between persons, even more the encounter with the personal reality of God, has to be based on trusting and not on testing. If I were always setting little traps to test my friends, I would pretty soon destroy the possibility of friendship between us. And certainly religion respects that you shall not put the Lord your God to a test. So there are differences between the two. But the motivation, the search for truthful understanding through well-motivated belief, is a common feature. Of course, religious understanding is much more complex obviously because of its personal character.

You’ve made a powerful argument for religion. Now can you tell me what, exactly, humility is in your tradition? Does it crush human beings or bring them to fulfilment? Do we need religion to bring about humility? Is it a virtue in the secular world too?

Let me deal with the second point first. I think that there are lots of virtues that are central to the religious life — humility is one, compassion will be another — but religious people don’t have a monopoly on these things. Many, many people realize the power of goodness, the power of humility, and the power of compassion. Atheists can be humble in their capacities as truth-seeking people. The only difference in that respect is that I think that we religious people know where these things come from — they come from intuitions of God’s good and perfect world, the grace of God. Humility involves two things: first of all, it involves recognizing who we are, what our status is.

The fundamental mistake, I think, is to believe that we are somehow beings who can do it on our own. The fundamental mistake is for creatures to think they are the creators. Doing it my way is not, I think, the recipe for a good and fulfilling life. I think we need the grace of God to help us; we are not fated to be independent in that sense. God wishes us to act freely and to embrace divine mercy freely. But God knows that we need His grace and humility in order to do that. So humility is concerned first of all with recognizing our status.

More generally, it seems to me that humility is concerned with recognizing and responding to the reality of things. Humility isn’t the Uriah Heep sort of thing, where clever people try to pretend that they are stupid, or beautiful people try to pretend that they are ugly. Humility recognizes things as they are and sees ourselves as we are, and helps us to be grateful for the gifts that we have, to recognize that we certainly don’t have all the gifts, and to be equally appreciative of other gifts when we see them in other people. Humility is to rejoice in the success and fulfillment and gifts that other people possess so that we don’t always have to be top of the class or get more gold stars than anybody else.

Is it important to be able to prove the existence of God?

Well, I don’t think it’s possible to prove the existence of God. There are many things I don’t think you can prove in an absolutely cast-iron, logical way. You can prove that two plus two equals four; you can’t prove the foolishness or falseness of ridiculous assumptions. I could maintain that the whole world came into existence five minutes ago and that our memories of the past were created at that moment. I don’t think you could defeat me in logical argument about that, though we all know that would be an absurd thing to say.

So proof, cast-iron proof, is pretty limited and not actually a very interesting category of things. I believe in quarks and gluons and electrons. I believe that’s the most intelligible, economic, persuasive interpretation of a whole swath of physical phenomena, but I don’t think I’ve proved their existence in the two plus two equals four sense — just as I can’t prove the existence of God. What we need, I think, is beliefs that are sufficiently well-motivated for us to feel that we can commit our lives to them, knowing that they may be false, but believing that they are the best explanation. I’m very sold on motivated belief but I am not sold on knowledge through proofs either in science or religion, or anything in between.

What is motivated belief?

I call myself a bottom-up thinker. I try to move from experience to understanding, to look at experiences, which may be our own experiences or accounts of others; in fact, in the religious case, they are very extensively accounts of experiences other people have had which we believe are being truly described to us and which support particular beliefs we are seeking to embrace. It means that we don’t just sit and dream things up out of our heads. It’s very important that we deliver ourselves from fantasy. You see, I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think that might be the case?” If you are going to propose something surprising and counterintuitive to me, then you need to produce evidence, something to persuade me that that might be the case, perhaps experiments.

That is motivated belief. It contrasts with top-down thinking. Top-down thinkers have certain big ideas, clear and general ideas, which, if you grasp, they have the key to understanding everything. I think it’s the other way around. I think you should start at the bottom and the ideas will grow out of experience rather than being imposed upon it.

Does quantum physics make deism’s God obsolete?

Quantum physics shows, I think, that physics has not proved the closure of the world in terms of its own laws and equations. Physics can’t tell us that the exchange of energy between bits and pieces is the only thing that is going on in the world. Quantum theory, and in a different way chaos theory, have a more subtle picture of the world. If the world were simply mechanical, as people thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it would just be a gigantic piece of cosmic clockwork, and its creator would be an unseen cosmic clockmaker. That’s the creator who just makes the clock and lets it tick away. Quantum theory is something more subtle than that. We can believe a world in which we ourselves interact — we’re not clockwork at all — and we can believe in a world in which God interacts. We can believe in a God who doesn’t just sit and wait for it to happen but is involved in the unfolding of creation.

Aldous Huxley, who wrote about scientific and religious matters, moved a long way from the atheism of his grandfather, T. H. Huxley. I’ve wondered if it wasn’t the earthy aspects of Christianity that turned him off. Not rarified enough for Huxley?

You might be absolutely right about that. There are certainly people who are very much open to spiritual reality but who want it in a slightly ethereal form. One of the things that is attractive to me is — as I believe William Temple put it — that Christianity is the most material of the world’s religions. It’s concerned with the word made flesh; it’s concerned with embodiment, as in the resurrection of the body. Of course, it’s concerned with spiritual reality, but it wants to hold the two together. That absolutely rings bells with me. I don’t think that human beings are destined to be, so to speak, apprentices of angels. I don’t think our destiny is to get rid of this encumbrance of the fleshly body and just float off into some sort of spiritual atmosphere. I think we are embodied beings.

Do you think that the diversity of the world’s religions — I am referring especially to the non-Abrahamic religions — poses a challenge to religious belief?

Yes, I do. I think there are two great problems for religious people. First, there is the problem of evil and suffering. The second problem, which is really pressing at the moment, is the question of how the world’s faith traditions relate to each other. They are almost all thinking about the same domain of human experience. They have certain commonalities. All the world’s faith traditions commend compassion, for example. They are all operating in the same sort of area, but they have such different things to say about it.

Just take the question of human nature. The three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — see the human person as of unique and abiding significance. Our Hindu friends see the human person as being recycled through reincarnation. Our Buddhist friends think life is an illusion from which to seek release. These are not three sets of people saying the same thing in different cultural languages. They are three sets of people saying different things. I think that the dialogue among the world’s faith traditions is just beginning. I think it will be long and painful, but I don’t think the answer is to look for a lowest common denominator. When you do that you get a very anemic picture of religion.

Peter Hitchens--Part VI

Not Exactly From Pacifist Stock

Atheism and Apologetics - The Rage Against God
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, April 05, 2010

Peter Hitchens' next chapter was profound and moving. Entitled "Britain's Pseudo-Religion and the Cult of Winston Churchill," he makes the brave move of identifying the carnage of the two great wars of the 20th century as a massive blood sacrifice to false gods. He does this on the basis of the meaning that was assigned to the struggle in England, a meaning fundamentally antithetical to the claims of Christ.

Of course, he does not do this out of any sympathy for the poor, misunderstood Nazis. Because the sacrifices in the two great wars were mind-boggling, and because the courage and bravery involved were staggering, to point out this underlying problem takes a great deal of courage. This is a God-and-country problem, and the problem is that the latter frequently wants to swallow up the former.

There are some false gods that require no courage to attack -- drunken frat parties, let's say, or excessive consumerism at Christmas. But modern states summon their devotees to the highest pitch of commitment, and represent what might be called a serious religion. If that is challenged, the response is often a response of great anger. The sacrifices in themselves make it a very serious idolatry, but not everything about it is bad.

As pseudo-religions go, ours was attractive and elegant, and it contained many decent and godly elements (p. 67).

Unfortunately, the virtues that are in evidence make it a more destructive idolatry, not less destructive. In England, evidences of this peculiar form of worship are everywhere.

The great cult of noble, patriotic death has its shrines everywhere, thousands and thousands of them (p. 69).

Americans who wish to begin to understand the extent of the British commemoration of war should imagine a Vietnam memorial in every town and city in the country, the center of an annual ceremony and parade and for much of the year adorned with fresh wreaths (p 76).

The thing that is missing from this honor shown to the dead is a sense of a transcendent God who judges all the nations, and not just those nations on the opposite side of all our conflicts. The God of the Bible does not come when kings and rulers whistle for Him. The cause can even be just, and the "good guys" can still do enormous damage by refusing to trust in the Lord. Think of Ahaz. And there is a vast difference between actually trusting in the Lord, and trying to use the Lord to prop up the war effort, whatever it is.

What is the thing that is being worshipped in these places? It may counterfeit the majesty of great churches and imitate their mystery and grandeur. But it not God. It is an attempt to replace God, an attempt that failed (p. 77).

Later, when Peter found out a bit more than what he had been taught about the war as a child, it "unraveled my entire faith in the whole pseudo-religion we once called, 'We Won the War'" (p. 67).

At the same time, even while he refuses to merge God-and-country into one holy faith, Peter demonstrates the enormous distance that separates him from the shrill leftist critics of nationalism.

I do not mean to be disrespectful. In fact, I am not disrespectful. I love Remembrance Day still. It is a noble remembrance of fine soldiers who did their duty with chivalry and courage, and only a dolt could fail to honor them for their unselfishness and devotion (p. 79).

Leftist critics of nationalism are angry at the parochialism involved -- at the petty claims made by petty states. They want internationalism, and various regionalism and nationalisms just get in the way. They don't like the local baals because they want one great Baal. But Christians object to such idolatry because God inhabits eternity and He looks down upon the sons of men, and sees that the nations are but dust in the balances.

So the central problem is not that England fought the war, but rather how.

Those who fought so hard to defend Britain against its material enemies did so at a terrible spiritual cost (p. 80).

In fact, I think it safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to Christianity in my own country than any other single force. The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three-quarters empty after 1945 (p. 80).

But then Peter concludes the chapter, chillingly, that, however bad war is -- and it is terrible -- there "are even worse things than war" (p. 80). The next chapter is about the time he spent living in the Soviet Union.

The central lesson that should be gleaned from this chapter is of enormous importance. The God-and-country riff functions differently in the United States, but, as with all great powers, it presents a real danger. But, before anybody gets their defenses up, it presents a danger entirely different than the danger that Jim Wallis thinks it presents. This might take a minute to explain.

My wife and I both come from military families, and we were caught up, directly or indirectly, in many of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. An uncle on my father's side had his destroyer sunk by the Japanese. An uncle on my mother's side was killed in the invasion of Sicily. My father-in-law was wounded at Guadacanal, and also flew bombing missions throughout the Korean War. My father's destroyer was blown almost clean in two in the Korean War. I did my part in the Cold War harassing the Soviets, and I have seen mother Russia through a periscope. I think it would be fair to say that we don't exactly come from pacifist stock.

So we were willing to fight, kill, and die for our nation's security. But the leftist assumption that military men are nothing but brain-washed killing machines (or, as we submariners called ourselves, "steely-eyed killers of the deep") is pretty far wide of the mark. It was my father, a graduate of the Naval Academy, who taught me how to dissect propaganda -- our own propaganda -- and to reject it with contempt. It was in these military circles that I was taught to hate every confusion between the claims that Christ had on me, claims that were and are total, and the claims my nation had on me, which were limited, bounded, and kept in a box.

Jim Wallis begrudges a lump in the throat at a Fourth of July parade, afraid of the incipient idolatry, but does not begrudge men with guns and block letters on the backs of their windbreakers taking away half our incomes for the sake of his coercive redistributions. The biblical phrase that comes to mind is fools and blind. In the recent noise about Jim Wallis, I saw a cover of the magazine Post-American, published many years ago, where Wallis and others had draped a statue of Jesus in the American flag, along with the caption "and they crucified Him." They thought they were being very wittyclever, and were chortling about how they are really frosted the cornpones out there who had muddled up Jesus with Uncle Sam. And there is some of that on the right, and whenever it is encountered it ought to be treated like the blasphemy it is.

But Wallis now advises the president, and his tune has changed. When it comes to coercive taxation, he is one of Rehoboam's crowd, telling the president to lay it on. Obama's little finger will be thicker than LBJ's loins (1 Kings 12:10). And when Wallis is telling Obama that Jesus wants a little more socialism around here, what flag is flapping on the pole outside? Right. The American flag . . . and Wallis has apparently come a long way. The American flag is now an acceptable mantle for Jesus, because it is draped over the shoulders of socialism.

In this chapter, Peter Hitchens shows how this difficult and crucial distinction is done right. The Christian approach to this thorny problem is to honor God above all, and to render sharply subordinated honor to our assigned nation, whatever that nation may be. This is in sharp distinction to those who, in the grip of self-loathing, are in love with "every century but this, and every country but their own." Without faith in the transcendent God of Scripture, this is impossible. As Peter shows in this chapter, the consequences are deadly. When the living God is linked up in the minds of the people with the gods that die, then, when those gods eventually die, as they always do, you have led a generation up to the edge of atheism.

Misdirection and Confusions

Nuclear Weapons and the Hands That Bear Them

Nuclear issues have to the fore in recent days, what with President Obama's grand summit which has drawn more nations to the US to confab since the international meetings which set up the United Nations.

Gwynne Dyer, writing in the NZ Herald, opines that the summit it just a symbol, but at least it is a conversation starter. Who could be opposed to talk, right? Confabulation is a medium in which Obama seems to set a great deal of store.

But let's step back and think about the broad parameters of the debate over nuclear weapons. Obama has publicly declared his long term goal is to rid the world of all of them. This tells us that he believes them to be intrinsically evil. He apparently puts nuclear weapons in the same category as, say, rape or incest. But, he must also believe that they are a necessary evil, which would explain why he is prepared to maintain his own nation's nuclear capability--at least for the present.

Are nuclear weapons intrinsically evil? If one would answer in the affirmative, presumably one would also include all weapons of war--say, semi-automatic rifles, tanks, bombs, and fighter aircraft in the same category. Whatever argument one may advance to remove all nuclear weapons from the world it would apply with equal force and veracity to all weapons and technologies of war.

If someone may object and argue that it is the immense destructive force of nuclear weapons which makes them inherently evil. The risk that they could destroy the entire world puts such weapons in a different category which amounts to intrinsic evil. But this is emotive clouding. If a primitive village can be wiped out by machine guns, it is not the smaller quantum of deaths which makes machine guns acceptable. A murder is a murder is a murder. The death of one man, Abel led to his blood crying out from the ground to God.

If nuclear weapons are intrinsically evil, so too is the machine gun--for both alike exist for one purpose, and one purpose only--to kill human beings. Both alike can kill in large numbers.

We would argue that nuclear weapons are not intrinsically evil at all--no more so than any other instrument or weapon of war. It is the use to which they may be put by men that makes them either evil or good. Evil resides in the human heart and is expressed in human actions. Evil does not reside in things.

Obama's rhetoric in calling for a nuclear-weapon-free world reflects the idealistic world-view of the West in general which looks for evil not in the human hearts, but in externalities. Change the circumstances and the environment and righteousness will dawn upon mankind--at least that's what makes sense of the actions and pontifications of most in the West. When boiled down Obama's stance on nuclear weapons, whilst typical, is akin to calling for a ban on gun ownership or knife bearing. If the inanimate object is removed, men will become righteous and act righteously. The Christian knows this to be a naive and misdirected argument.

Ironically, the Obama summit actually recognizes this--at least to some degree. The specific focus has been on taking action to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda--who will use them, we are told--and we do not doubt it. This, apparently is in contrast to nations such as Pakistan, Great Britain, the United States etc, who will not--at least as a first strike.

Here we come to the nub of the issue. Having nuclear weapons is not the issue. What will be done with them is the all important matter. Ought we to be deeply concerned that Israel has (allegedly) over 200 nuclear warheads? We have never lost the least amount of sleep over it. Ought we to be worried that North Korea has nuclear weapons? Indeed we should, since that nation considers itself at war with South Korea and calls for the subjugation of the South.

Should surrounding nations be concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons. Absolutely. Their president--a president in good standing let us add--has routinely and regularly called for the extermination of another state--Israel. This, it seems to us, is a de facto declaration of war of Iran upon Israel. That state of war should be reckoned to exist until Ahmadinejad and his doctrines are officially and formally removed in Iran.

If that be accepted as a fundamental principle, then all "pre-emptive" strikes by Israel against Iran to destroy their nuclear weaponry and resource are not only justified, but a necessary act by the Israel government. It would be derelict in its duty to God and its people not to so act.

But, were Iran to eschew Ahmadinedjadism and armed jihad against Israel, whether they had nuclear weapons or not would be neither here nor there. If Iran committed itself to a policy of recognition of Israel as a legitimate state, and of a complete and permanent cessation of any military aggression--either by direct or indirect means--against any other state, they would be welcome to nuclear weaponry.

If we are not prepared to take this position, then a whole can of worms inevitably opens. One such worm is the implication that all nuclear weapons are intrinsically evil, which implicitly condemns all those nations which holds any military capability whatsoever--which is clearly contrary to Scripture. Another worm would be an insinuation that an Islamic state should be regarded as "bad" states--as the Great Satan--which sort of sounds a bit familiar.

In a fallen world, war is an inevitable reality, even as crime is. But an absolutely vital issue is whether any nation's war is offensive or defensive in its goals, purposes, and intents. Defensive acts of war are a necessary duty of the civil magistrate. Aggressive or offensive war is always evil. And aggressive war has surely started when one nation calls for the annihilation of another.

Money, Greed, and God--Part V

A Pie That Can Limitlessly Expand

In this series of posts on Money, Greed and God, we come to the fourth Myth. We suspect this myth is probably the most pervasive of all. Its widespread currency explains why so many people are guilty about being well-off and why they believe the government should redistribute wealth to help the poor. Richards calls this the Materialist Myth—that wealth is finite, uncreated, and can only be transferred between people. It can neither be increased nor diminished. In other words, like matter, wealth can neither be created nor destroyed—hence its denomination as the Materialist Myth.

Now a moment's critical reflection will expose how stupid this myth actually is. Consider an agricultural subsistence society which lives from hand to mouth. For simplicity's sake, let's assume this society has only ten families. Only two families are able to produce sufficient food so that they can feed themselves comfortably throughout the whole year, even in the winter. Eight families are going hungry in the winter.

The Materialist Myth assumes that all the food which could possibly be produced has already been produced at all times. Therefore, those who have a comfortable amount of food have too much; their food needs to be redistributed so that the rest of the eight families get more and escape starvation in the winter. We may also call this the Fixed Pie Size Myth.

But if you don't fall into the error of the Materialist Myth your first response—and the only sustainable response—would be to help the other eight families to produce more food than they are currently doing. Clearly, this can be done. More crops can be grown, more animals can be farmed, because like humans both animals and crops multiply. The resource is not finite, but can be creatively expanded. The earth can be tended in such a ways that it buds and brings forth. Richards tells the story this way:

From the Middle Ages until the present, stone and wood implements were gradually replaced by metal plows and wheeled carts pulled by oxen and then horses. Technology such as seed drills, reapers, steam power, tractors, and combines transformed farming, so that fewer people could produce more with less land. Everything from pest control to better cultivation made farms even more fecund. Farms sprang up in areas that were previously arid. And yet, as recently as 1900, four fifths of the world's population still lived on farms.

By the 1970's, though, only half the world's population was farming. That's the worldwide average, however. In much of the world, people still engage in primitive subsistence farming, as they have for centuries. That means they grow just enough to feed themselves, if they're lucky. In the United States and other societies with solid private-property laws and high technology, however, a much smaller percentage of people make their livelihood by farming. One 1.9 percent of the American population now lives on farms, and yet they produce enough not only to feed the American population but to export abroad. In principle, the state of California could now grow enough to feed the planet. We have reached a unique moment in history. (Richards,p. 99)

A negative example, where wealth has been destroyed in our lifetimes, is Zimbabwe. That country's farms once feed most of Africa. But under dictator Mugabe, property laws have been eroded, and farms confiscated. The upshot: Zimbabweans could not survive now without millions and millions of tons of wheat and corn being given in aid.

The myth that wealth is neither created, nor destroyed, but is finite (and therefore poverty needs to be tackled by redistribution from the wealthy to the poor) is usually connected to the pie metaphor. Wealth is seen as a pie of fixed, finite dimensions which is divided up amongst the people of the world. If someone takes a big piece, less is available for others.

Think of the pie. It's a physical object; it has a pieish size and shape. It can't shrink much, and it certainly can't grow. We don't know where it came from. It's just there on the kitchen counter getting cold. All we can do is divvy it up and eat it.

But that's not how wealth works in a market economy. Wealth isn't just three: it's not a physical object. No one can simply divide it up at will; and above all, the total amount of wealth can grow over time. It hasn't stayed he same. (Richards, p.86).

And we may also add, the total amount of wealth can shrink over time (as the case of Zimbabwe demonstrates).

The key thing to understand is that wealth, although it involves matter and materials (such as gold, silver, diamonds, corn) it is itself immaterial. After all, since value is subjective, the entire worth of all that we own is only what someone else is prepared to pay for it, should we decide to sell it. Consider the case of a business—an unprofitable business—with no employees, but owning a patent on a design for a revolutionary alternative fuel motor vehicle. It's fixed assets consist of a couple of sheets of paper, detailing the design. Its intangible assets include a legally enforceable patent on the design. The owner of the business, lacking capital to take it any further, decides to sell. Toyota buys the business and its patent for $5 billion dollars. (Note, this value and this transaction could not be reified without strong, enforceable personal property rights.)

Now, the question is this: Is the business owner less or more wealthy after the sale? Did he become wealthy overnight? No and no. Assuming the price was at fair value, the business owner's wealth stayed the same after the sale as it was before. It is just that the form of his wealth changed. Even after the sale, his wealth remained as immaterial as before—it just consisted of a rather long number in a bank account balance. Richards summarizes:

For centuries, economists thought the economic value of a good or service was something we can touch or see—either something in the matter itself or in the amount of labor it took to produce it. Instead, economic value is about how we value goods and services. In a competitive market, prices are packages that contain information about how much a good or service is valued, and how scarce it is. At the very heart of economics, then, is a reality that exists not in material objectives but in our individual and collective minds. (Richards, p.94)

Wealth, then, is something that exists first in the mind and heart of human beings. It's a judgment of value and worth. That's why Jesus parable about the kingdom has meaning. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field; which a man found and hid; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field.” (Matthew 13: 44)

Richards has an excellent couple of sections in this chapter linking these obvious realities through to the divine revelation of Creation. In creating the world, God reveals Himself from the outset as having a work-week. After He had created man, He delegated the task of further creation and development to him.

God is king over the heavens and the earth, and appoints us to have dominion as kings and queens over his creation. He creates simply by calling things into existence. He then commands us to create according to our power, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” . . . (T)he key point is that our creativity comes from God. It doesn't compete with him. As Creator, God has made us with the awesome power and responsibility to create.

These chapters of Genesis aren't economic texts, but they still cast light on the most important truth of economics: not only do we create wealth, but, in the right circumstances, we create more and more wealth. Wealth, rightly applied, begets more wealth. (Richards, p.97,98)

The problem, then, is not the extreme disparity between the wealthy and the millions in abject poverty. The problem is poverty, period. The challenge is to work out how the millions and millions of people that live in abject poverty can be enabled to become wealth creators in their own right. In other words, to deal with the problem of poverty in the world, we need to see more wealth generated—by the poor themselves.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

Political Reform Closer to Home


Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, April 03, 2010

My standing joke is that we ought not to allow chaplains to pray in Congress, because the Bible says that we are not supposed to turn a den of thieves into a house of prayer. And make no mistake -- Congress is a den of thieves.

Now Scripture gives the civil government the authority to tax, of course, but that authority is not unbounded. There is a point where legitimate taxation becomes legalized plunder, and we have long since passed that point. So why do we allow this to continue -- since we outnumber them?

Well, the answer is that our elected representatives are not confiscating all this wealth for themselves personally -- although they are doing quite well, thank you. They are more clever than that. They are taking this plunder, and distributing it to others in such a way as to create constituencies with a sense of entitlement. And if you create enough of these constituencies, and tangle them up enough, then this creates the need for pollsters, political consultants, and political experts, and the science of modern politics is born. The modern state is the broker at the great auction of stolen goods.

Now it is easy for us for blame the scoundrels and miscreants of Congress for being such scam artists. But the success of their scam depends entirely on millions of

Americans willing to be on the take. We are represented by these people for a reason. There are multiple examples of this, but the howls of outrage that resulted from Obamacare pilfering Medicare is a case in point. Subsidized prescriptions create a constituency, inflation creates a constituency, student loans guarantee a constituency, ad infinitum, and anybody who thinks that the distributors of all this largesse don't know how to play one constituency off the others is way underestimating them.

Now I recognize that things are far enough gone that it is extraordinarily difficult even to perform ordinary functions without getting some benefit thrust at you, and I also recognize that there are differences between direct subsidies and other things like tax credits, and so on. The thing is complicated. But I have said for years, and continue to say, that we have to learn how to refuse the benefits first. Tax resistance will be vain if it comes from people who want their free chocolate milk from the government, but who cry tyranny if anybody asks them to pay for it. Refusing the benefits first is an important lesson for us all to learn, and I need to develop that further sometime soon. At this point, the main temptation to resist is the temptation to give way to constituent-think.

But what about the sense of helplessness that sets in around this point? Good news -- there is something else we can do even before that, and it does not involve dealing with the government. This is reform that is antecedent to politics -- although it has political consequences.

We have to stop thinking and living as those who presume on those who are close to us. When FDR announced, with monstrous sophistry, that "we owe it to ourselves!" he was appealing to a false sense of family, and he did it so that we could start treating this pseudo-family with the same moral carelessness that many had developed with regard to their real families. But this cavalier attitude toward the property of loved ones is deadly. Someone once defined home as the place where you go when you are tired of being nice -- and if we are comfortable with that, then there is something deeply wrong. But "being nice" involves more than just a pleasant demeanor. The same principle extends to issues of property.

"Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith, It is no transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer" (Proverbs 28: 24).

So here is a very practical personal step that every Christian who is concerned about the future of our nation can take. This is something that is within reach. It does not depend upon some political upheaval across the continent, and so there is no need to feel helpless. And if you do not take this step, then you are a companion to the destroyers in Washington. They continue to represent you, and they are representing you well.

Inside your family, have you borrowed money and not returned it? Have you busted things and not made it good? If the thing you busted belonged to anybody outside the family, would you have felt the need to make it good? But not here? Have you frittered away what your mom gave you for other purposes, and consoled yourself with the fact that "it is no transgression"? Have you been sloppy with the property interests of anyone close to you, because they were close to you?

Turning the hearts of the fathers back to the children, and the hearts of children back to their fathers (Malachi 4:6) is something which, of necessity, contains a significant financial component (Mark 7:11). And of course, if this does not happen, God comes and strikes the land with a curse. And if you doubt whether that is happening, take a look around.

When Parents Murder Their Children

The Spirit of the Age

Of all the crimes found in the annals of the human race, children being murdered by their parents must surely rank as one of the most horrific and extreme.

We do not mean parents killing their children by neglect, such as when they unintentionally withhold from them those things necessary for sustaining life, like timely medical treatment. Nor do we refer to the unintended killing of a child through a fit of wanton rage or momentary loss of control. These things are bad enough.

Rather, we are referring to those cases where a parent, with malice aforethought, deliberately murders his or her child. The newspapers today carry news stories about a man in Melbourne, formerly a resident of New Zealand, who killed his three daughters, then took his own life. Killing those who depend upon you, then taking your own life, is an unspeakable evil. There is no other phrase that is appropriate.

It is a crime that is so contrary to nature, so terrible a denial of natural human instincts, so extreme a rebellion against God that instinctively we want to categorize it as an act that could only be performed by one clinically insane. Details of the case are sketchy, but apparently the father cared deeply for his three children. But he clearly considered that his life was not worth living and that with some perverted process of reasoning decided that it was better that his children also die.

What is does display is an extreme manifestation of what has become the prevailing, predominant evil of our age. The sin of self-absorption, or narcissism, is now so culturally predominant and ingrained that few think about it any more. The credo of our Unbelieving world has become "I believe it's all about Me". In Britain in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the credo was "I believe it's all about God, King and Country". Both creeds are wrong and constitute a rebellion against God. But we cite the older credo in order to shine a spotlight upon the current one.

Does not the older creed sound completely foreign to our modern ears--so foreign it appears to belong to another world entirely? Yet it was believed (often fervently) by our parents and grandparents--which after all is a relatively short time ago. The strangeness of the older creed to our ears underscores how profoundly and comprehensively the modern creed has captured the heart and mind of our culture. For an Unbeliever, if it's not all about God, King and Country, which professes that the objects of our primary devotion and loyalty lie outside of ourselves, it's almost certainly going to mean that one's ultimate loyalty and devotion will alight upon oneself. And that's exactly what has come to pass.

Our age has become preoccupied with gratuitous, egregious self-absorption. It can be seen everywhere, in ways too numerous to mention--but try these for size: demand rights and the ideology of entitlement; the proportion of our economic production and activity devoted to entertainment; the rapid growth of cosmetic surgery; the pedagogy of repeated affirmation and avoidance of failure in our schools which underpins the NCEA system, as well as the resistance to introducing national standards for reading, writing and maths; killing one's children whilst they are still in the womb; incessant appeals to pity in public discourse; gyms lined with mirrors; and the indulgent pablum found in popular women's magazines.

If you take up the lens of our narcissistic culture and look upon the father who killed his own children his actions are understandable. They are just an extreme form of the dominant credo of our age. Whilst the act itself remains unbelievably perverse--it is not foreign to us. It is, after all, just one more way of expressing the narcissism of our age.

The streets of Athens are piled high with rotting, putrid garbage; but to the narcissistic residents of that city they continue to effuse a self-indulgent glory.

Doug Wilson's Letter from America

The Pin Doesn't Have to Be Big

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, April 01, 2010

A former student wrote me about my "ten-point theology of resistance" to Obamascare and, boiled down, the question had to do with how all this relates to what we have taught here in Moscow for years about the centrality of worship. There are some related questions, but they all revolve around that one. Since I didn't think he would be the only one with that question, I thought I would post something about it here.

We have taught for many years that worship is warfare, and so the question is "how does this kind of practical "active resistance" tie in with that?" Another related emphasis of ours is that theology comes out your fingertips, and whatever comes out of your fingertips is your theology. A regular feature of my prayers is that in our worship services we would (in the power of the Spirit) ascend into the heavenly places and glorify Jesus Christ there. Having done so, that we would be in a position to ask God to glorify the name of Christ on earth, as we just finished glorifying His name in Heaven. This is how I believe the kingdom comes -- "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." It is the will of God that Jesus Christ be glorified. As we glorify the Lord in Heaven, the Father glorifies Him on earth, all through the power of the Spirit, and as this unfolds, the kingdom comes.

But as the kingdom comes, there is a point where it, you know, comes . . . as in, shows up.

Another feature of my prayers is that our people would establish the rhythm of their lives around the worship of God on the Lord's Day, and that each week we would pour the foundation of the structure that will be built in the week that follows. I pray that everything we do -- education, business, arts, kite-flying, poetry, mercy work, political engagement and anything else -- would be self-consciously built on that foundation. But surely it would be odd if this were the prayer of many years, and yet no poems ever got written, no businesses started, no kites flown. To change the metaphor, at some point you have to start letting the clutch out. In the realm of politics, there comes a point where you do this (pointing to a particular political action) because of that (pointing to the worship service). If this does not happen, then the centrality of worship is nothing but over-blown language, Christian kidding themselves on Sundays.

In my ten-point post, my reference to gospel-preaching (and worship is a central form of gospel proclamation) did come last, but not because it was an insignificant add-on. In my mind, it is and always will be the sine qua non. Without it, everything else is just heaps of vanity.

So why this, why now? Why is Obamascare the trip wire? And what should Canadian and British Christians do, as their health care system is already a fait accompli? Do they have an equal responsibility to "actively resist?" Well, yes and no. The battle goes differently at different places along the line of battle. A faithful soldier can have many different responsibilities, depending on his circumstances -- advance, retreat, or just hold on. But those responsibilities should not include listening to the propaganda broadcasts from the enemy on the radio, and believing them. When it comes to comparisons, we should use a reasonable calculus and not a carnal calculus. This is because sometimes Frodo turns out to be a more important guy than Boromir.

The last question is this: why is this health care bill so important? "Yeah, it's bad, but shouldn't we just keep our heads down, and continue to labor on building up the church?" Two points -- a church crammed full of people who think this kind of thing is acceptable is not a built up church, but rather a compromised one. And second, the reason for politically-engaged Christians to take action here is this. When Reagan sent the troops into Grenada, it was an insignificant move militarily, but it had a monumental impact. Up to that point, the communists had the "irresistible force of history" argument on their side, and a reversal (however tiny) was enough to puncture that illusion. When the balloon is big, the pin doesn't have to be. Statism seeks to operate using the same illusion. There is a real chance that this health care mess will be first defunded in 2010 and repealed in 2012. If it is, a major illusion (the inevitability of statist progression) will be undone. And if that happens, the new opportunities for the church will be enormous.

Money, Greed, and God--Part IV

Personal Property, Free Trade and Win-Win

This is the fourth post in a series working through a recent book by Jay Richards, entitled Money, Greed and God, in which he presents a biblical framework for economics, capitalism, free trade, and private property.  In his third chapter, Jay Richards deals with the Myth of the Zero Sum Game. This myth says that in every trade or exchange of goods there must be a winner and a loser. It is a very common fallacy. His analysis and rejection of this myth is one of the most important chapters of the book.

He begins by describing a game he played in school. The teacher divided the class into groups of five students apiece. Then arbitrarily the teacher gave each pupil a gift—all from the Two Dollar Shop. Then, without consultation, each pupil had to write down on a scale of one to ten how much they liked their particular gift. For each group the total of scores was added up.

Next, each group was allowed to trade their gifts within the group. No-one had to trade. But, lots of exchanges took place. Then when all the trading had stopped, everyone had to score again how much they liked their (new) gift. In each case, for every group, the total score went up.

Finally, group barriers were broken down and everyone was free to exchange and trade with anyone else in the class. Once again, when the trading had ceased, everyone was asked to grade on the same one to ten scale how much they liked their gift. This time the total number had gone way up. No-one had a score that had gone down. This game, says Richards, teaches one of the most important truths in economics and how human societies based on personal property function freely.

There are key lessons that emerge from this simple game. The first is that when trade and exchange is freely undertaken, aggregate value can rise substantially even though the goods traded remain physically unchanged. The second is that normally the more trading partners there are, the higher the value outcomes for everyone.

Third, free exchange is a win-win game. Everybody benefits. Now to be sure some players may be better off than others, but everyone ends up better off than at the beginning, unless someone decides not to trade. Then, at least, they are not worse off.

Fourth, economic value is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, value is subjective. This is probably the biggest mistake made when people think about property—yet it is self-evident and obvious if one bothers to reflect for a nano-second. A neighbour might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying and meticulously restoring a classic Ford Mustang, whilst for you it is of little consequence.

Confusions start to arise when the neighbour comes to the point where he wants to sell his Mustang and no-one is prepared to pay him what he thinks it is worth. He ends up getting mad, thinking that everyone is exploiting him, ripping him off, simply because they don't agree with his particular abacus of value. “It's not fair,” he tells himself. But fairness has got nothing to do with it. It's just that others do not perceive the same value in the Mustang that he does.

Or consider the young couple wanting to buy their first home. House prices are so high there is no way they can scrape together an adequate deposit, let alone service the mortgage they will need. They conclude that they are being unfairly oppressed because others do not agree with their particular calculus of value when it comes to houses. They join a movement calling on the government to build houses that they can afford—that is, a house that is worth what they think it ought to be.

A constant refrain of the idea of “objective” value as opposed to subjective value is found in disputes over labour and wages. My labour is worth so much; I deserve to be paid accordingly. Worth to whom? Is the question that is begged. Usually when people make this kind of claim they look at whether the company is making a profit; if it is they feel emboldened to demand more money in wages working for the company. It reinforces the idea that their labour must be worth more.

But the amount of profit a company is making is not the measure of value. The real measure of value is whether there is another company looking for employees which values your contribution more than your current employer. The more companies there are and the more competitive the labour market, the more likely it is that you will find an employer who agrees with your assessment of the value of your work.

Richards is careful to qualify that economic value is not ultimate value.

We are talking about economic value, not ultimate value. My ultimate value in the eyes of God is not the same as my economic value. Our true value is not found in our intelligence, skin color, good grooming, strength, or stock-market prowess. No one has the authority to make one person more valuable than another. “All men are created equal”--equal in value and dignity—because all of us are created in God's image. Our equality does not vary with the wants and needs of consumers in the marketplace. So ultimately, the small handicapped child in rural India is worth just as much as Bill Gates who has created millions of jobs. Gates's wife, Melinda Gates, gets this: “One life on the planet is no more valuable than the next. (p.68)

The heart of the matter is that when it comes to personal property, whether in the form of labour or goods or services, free trade makes it possible for people to play a win-win game—to the betterment of everyone. But, and here is the nub of the issue, free trade that is win-win can only flourish when personal property rights exist and are enforced.

Let's return to the schoolroom game again. If someone came into the room claiming that some of the pupils had to withdraw from the game because they did not really own the Two-Dollar items, the game would have completely broken down. This leads us to title of property as a necessary condition for trade to take place. Cultures and societies which fail to recognise title (that is, legal ownership) of property languish in poverty and under-development. This observation is probably one of the most important parts of Richards's book.

Property titling, argues Richards, derives from the Bible as necessary extensions of the eighth and tenth commandments. Consequently, historically strong titling of property is found predominantly, but not exclusively, in the West.

If you live in the United States, Europe, Japan, or a former British colony, you probably take such procedures for granted. In the United States every square inch of dirt from San Diego, California to Caribou, Maine belongs to somebody. And it's easy to verify. But many parts of the world today still lack rules for buying and titling land as formal as those recorded in Genesis 23. Most people in those parts of the world are dirt-poor for the same reason.

Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto has argued that a formal property system is the key that unlocks the mystery of capital. . . . In much of the developing world people may cultivate and live on land they don't clearly own, or own only “extralegally”. They don't have titles representing their ownership, documents that the legal authorities will protect and accept as binding. As a result, a farmer may toil over the same plot of land for decades but never get beyond hand-to-mouth subsistence farming, producing just enough to survive. The land serves only it immediate physical purposes, and doesn't become a real asset. The farmer can't exploit its untold potential. He acts for the short term, not the long term. Since it is held informally, or “extralegally”, de Soto calls such land “dead capital”. (p.73)

Consider the case of poverty and degradation in Haiti—since it has been much in the news in recent months. Property titling in Haiti is (not atypical) but virtually impossible.

In Haiti, you have to jump through 65 bureaucratic hoops just to lease land from the government. Buying the land? Another 111 hoops. It would take a diligent Haitian nineteen years to pull this off, assuming he could get the time off from work, if he has work. And the fact that he's acquired property legally doesn't necessarily mean that his situation won't change tomorrow, since the country itself frequently changes owners. (p.74)

In societies where titling is not done, and where the state does not defend and enforce personal property rights, property (in particular, land and housing) cannot be traded; it cannot be used as an asset. It does not become capital, which can be used as collateral for debt finance or equity finance. It cannot be sold to release capital. Where titling over land and buildings in particular is non-existent or weak, people are consigned to living as serfs.

Personal property rights and a free trade market are two vital conditions for economic advance and wealth, together all the welfare and protection that is derived from being better off. The free market enables the production of a vast array of ever-expanding goods and services in a manner so complex that no-one creature (human or angelic) could ever plan or organise it. The free market is a most wonderful providence in action.

In 1958, a man named Leonard Read wrote a little essay called, “I, Pencil”. He wrote it from the viewpoint of an “ordinary wooden pencil” that was explaining its origins. We think a pencil is simple. And yet a single pencil requires what Read calls “innumerable antecedents”, involving millions of people from Albania to Zimbabwe, performing all sorts of different tasks. First, there's the cedar tree harvested from northern California. Then there are the saws and trucks and ropes and other equipment, all built in different places; the mill in San Leandro, California; the trains to transport the wood; the processing plant with kiln and tinting; the electricity from the dam to power the plant; the millions of dollars in equipment used to build the pencils; the graphite from Sri Lanka, mixed with clay from Mississippi and chemicals from who knows where; the wax from Mexico and beyond; the yellow lacquer with caster oil; the brass to hold the eraser, forged with metals from mines from around the world; the eraser made with factice from Indonesia and pumice from Italy. Finally, there re the trucks that deliver the pencils and the stores that sell pencils to the public for about ten cents each. All of this and much more is needed to make one yellow pencil.

There are at least three marvels here. First, few who contributed to the pencil meant to make a pencil. . . . Second, as the pencil in Read's tale explains, “not one single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”. That knowledge isn't stored in any one place but is dispersed among millions of people. . . . Third, no (human) mastermind oversees the process. It's all co-ordinated by people working freely in specialized jobs following the price of countless goods and services. This is one of the greatest wonders of the universe, but it's gotten the worse press. (p. 78,79)

The bad press given the free market has to do with people competing with each other. Competition, it is said introduces a win-fail component into free trade. Two competitors are trying to trade; the buyer selects one, but not the other. At least one loses. He does not get to trade. But—and here is the valid objection that most critics of the free trade market simply shut their ears to—the one who lost out because his trade did not clear, is not down and out. He or she can turn around and find someone else to trade with. He has the opportunity to regroup, regather, and reapply to consumers.

Moreover—and this is the second caveat most anti free-trade-market folk miss—the “logic of competition in a market is not about destroying [commercial] enemies. It's about serving consumers better than your competitors.” (Richard, p. 81) You can only trade successfully and in a sustainable way if you continue to put the needs of your customers ahead of your own. And if you stray from the path, your competitors are there to keep you honest or take over. Personal property rights being exchanged in a free trade market under the discipline of competition is nothing other than the heart of Christian social ethics.

Chapter Three is one of the most important in Richards's book. It gets to the heart of what's good about personal property rights and the very positive unintended consequences of being allowed to trade one's God-given property freely.