Public Health Systems, 101

Frenetically Polishing the Brass

We understand that the New Zealand Treasury regards our public (and subsidised private) health system as a deep, dark fiscal black hole. It is the Minotaur in the room which the Treasury gnomes prefer to keep locked up and hidden in the dungeons. No matter how much tax payers' money is thrown at the beast, it voraciously demands more. There is simply not enough money or wealth to satiate the demand.

We believe there never will be. The more living standards rise, the greater the demand for health services. Whereas once we might have put up with a behemothic frame, when we become sufficiently well off, stomach stapling surgery becomes an option. Ah, you say, such things would never become part of the public health system--funded by tax payers. That kind of "cosmetic" thing would always remain in the domain of individual consumption, funded by personal assets. Not so. Widespread arguments are afoot asserting that "wellness" and "preventative" health prevents greater disease and expense in the future. But, of course, "wellness" is a plastic concept to be moulded to the fashions and foibles of the day.

As living standards rise, the affordable becomes first today's desirable, then, tomorrow's entitlement and demand right. So, rising living standards intensify demand for health services, which require more and more public spending.

Secondly, rising living standards increase longevity. The longer we live, the more health services we will require and utilise. The health expenditure required by an individual with a 90 year life span will be far greater than someone who lives to 45.

State funded health care systems are always sub-optimal and ultimately despotic. The more they succeed, the more quickly they break down. Health care requires trade-offs and choices. And the choices are usually intensely personal. Personal choices cannot easily be translated into a schedule of government rationed demand rights--which is inevitably what all public health systems end up becoming. Unable to fund everything, all public health systems must ration care, deciding to fund some things and not others. The socialist system takes money from citizens compulsorily via the taxation regime then it rations who will get care and under what conditions. Individual and family trade-offs are overridden. The horror of this system is that Big Brother makes decisions for you about your life, well being, and physical existence, and executes them with your money. If a society accepts that extension of government power, it will accept any and every subsequent extension. Civil freedom has lost any real meaning, lingering on as an empty formal concept. Decisions by bureaucrats ultimately control your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and all the more so as you age and become relatively more infirm.

The inevitability of arbitrary rationing creates an unstoppable political force amongst the voting public to reduce the rationing and increase public health expenditures. How terrible, utterly terrible was the government's decision to stop funding the expensive herceptin drug treatments for breast cancer! How arbitrary! And it was. That is the point. How easy, then, for a political party to garner popularity by promising to restore herceptin treatment. In the grand scheme of things it is a small amount of money. Actually, in the grand scheme of things it makes the demand for more and more health spending incrementally relentless and unstoppable.

Public health systems end up being run by health sector unions--which, as we all know, are interested ultimately in the power of the union. If you believe in class warfare--and all modern unions do--union strength is the ultimate concern because only a strong union will be able to wage war. A state of war requires temporary, emergency suspension of freedoms and rights. Modern unions believe in a perpetual state of class war, which justifies sacrificing the perpetual needs and interests of those they represent in order to strengthen the union so that it can fight more effectively now and in the future. Because the state of class war is perpetual, the interests, freedoms and rights of union members and workers are perpetually subordinated the the "greater good". It is a situation which reflects a miniature Nineteen Eighty-Four--permanent war is promoted to justify the powers of the collective.

Union militance and control in public health systems results in constantly raising barriers to entry to competitor workers and employees. Only the "guild-members" can trade. This is usually couched as an argument to protect professional standards, qualifications and so forth. Secondly, union militance resists any health worker layoffs and redundancies of union members. Thirdly, unions engage in political propaganda and join campaigns to extend public health funding and expenditure--as opposed to increased subsidies for the private health sector. Any suggestion that a system of decentralised decision making of individuals with respect to health is a far more just and efficient distributor of health services than the government is regarded as blasphemous. The unions are not interested in public health per se, but union dominated and controlled public health, in which case "big is good". This becomes a militant driver of demand for more and more public spending.

Finally, public health systems are wasteful. They are bureaucratic rule-driven, plan controlled systems with all the attendant foibles and waste, since it is impossible for any central plan to oversee providentially the wondrous complexity of human society. Conventions like "bulk funding" help assuage this, but only until the next central directive. The Borg must have control; therefore, it must assimilate all. Bureaucrats and politicians--that is, government--cannot help having wondrous plans and schemes using other people's money. And, being government, it must execute plans--for that is what power is all about after all. And, worst of all, because it is health and well-being we are talking about, government functionaries and politicians feel good about spending money and executing plans in the health sector. Are they not beneficent? Are they not loving, kind and good to be working for your health, so assiduously, with your (and your neighbour's) money? Are they not gracious and kind?  This helps explain why any foolish politician who would want to restrict or reduce public health spending is immediately cast in the public sphere as a monster of unparalleled dimension.

Public health systems are a relatively recent historical invention. They will not survive. They will eventually collapse under their own weight and relentless demand driven costs. But we acknowledge they will not be replaced until fundamental changes occur in our society that are comprehensive throughout. The arrogance of demand-rights religion must be repented of. Individual and familial and household responsibilities must be re-asserted and held sacred again. A far greater role for charities and charitable institutions in the health sector must have come into existence. A universal conviction that bad things actually do happen in a fallen world which can only be mitigated, not removed entirely needs to come to pass.  Like sickness and death, for example.  These things will only happen with a change of national religion--with a society-wide return to the God of our fathers. Only then will the current grasping, suffocating despotic state wither away to far smaller legitimate competencies.

These changes are so comprehensive and fundamental they will require not decades but generations to accomplish. But, in the end, God's time is our time. In the meantime, the present system will go to Hell in its own way. Tactical nous meanwhile calls for us to do what we can to mitigate its worst excesses, rather than redeem the unredeemable. You don't polish brass on a sinking ship.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

A Holy Ghost Mashup

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 09, 2010

At the begining of his Republocrat, Carl Trueman says quite rightly "that religious conservatism does not demand unconditional political conservatism."

The word conserve is a transitive verb, and there is no virtue or vice in any transitive verb. So you love, but what do you love? God? Ice cream? Child porn? The church you were baptized in? Your favorite pair of jeans? So you conserve, but what is it you want to conserve? The Kremlin Old Guard? Redwoods? Your stock options? The legacy of the first Christendom?

So you want to progress? Great. Where? To what end, and by what standard?

Trueman's book begins with the premise that whatever political critter we wind up being, it will be some genetically engineered combination of a donkey and an elephant. The politics of us in the kingdom must arise from some combination of the options offered to us by the worldlings.

I, along with Trueman, do want to offer a mashup of political options. But what I want to combine is the accomplishments of the Holy Spirit thus far in the growth of Christendom, maintaining what is still here, and recovering that which once here and needs to be brought back. In that sense I am conservative.

In another sense, I am progressive, wanting to move forward to all the political blessings set forth by the prophet Isaiah. I don't want a chicken in every pot, but rather a feast of fat things on the mountain of the Lord, a feast of wine on the lees, and of fat things full of marrow (Is. 25:6). In that sense I am a progressive.

If Jesus didn't do it through His Spirit, it is not worth conserving, and if Jesus isn't working toward that end by means of His Spirit, it isn't worth working toward either.

So this is a conservatism calculated to biff on the side of the head the most air-brushed Republican talking point out there, mess up his hair, and get him completely off message. This is a potent and virulent conservatism.

And it is a progressivism that actually has a scriptural definition of what might constitute progress, and hence is the sort of thing to make your average radical go white in the face. He starts yelling about theocracy, not because he is opposed to theocracy, but rather because he wanted the state to be that god, not Jesus. A bit of tough luck for him because the state wasn't crucified, and didn't come back from the dead on the third day.

Jesus did, and so we should listen to Him.

Pita Sharples Is an Honourable Man

Waterford Crystal Meets Monty Python

Our mothers used to tell us that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Apparently, Pita Sharples, leader of the Maori political party, must have been absent when this sage advice was being delivered.

Pita has been hard on the trail of disgraced, now resigned, TV talk-show host Paul Henry. An apology was not enough. Such outbursts as Henry's required more. Apparently some figurative blood had to be shed and utu to be taken before mana could be restored to--well, the Governor General perhaps, or the nation, or the Indian sub-culture in New Zealand, or the whole country of India--who knows.

Now that Henry has resigned Pita expressed his satisfaction. It's good to see at least his mana is back on the shelf, glistening like a prized piece of Waterford crystal. According to the NZ Herald,

Maori Party co-leader Dr Pita Sharples said the outcome was honourable. "Paul clearly recognises his behaviour has been unacceptable and this is an honourable outcome that will enable him to consider a new approach to public commentary."

Ah. A deft, unctuous comment.

Hold on. Is not this the same Pita Sharples whose mana was satisfied with a mere apology from one of his Maori Party MP's, Hone Harawira whose coarse racially charged venting brought him into such disrepute? Yes, a chastened Hone was welcomed back into the Maori Party and Parliament, after a mere apology. But if that worked for Hone, why not for Henry? Where was Pita then? "No, Hone, an apology is not enough. More is required. Utu and mana and all that." Where was Hone's resignation from the Maori Party and Parliament in order to ensure an "honourable outcome"?

Unfortunately, Pita has reinforced the impression that there is a hypocritical double-standard in New Zealand. One suspects that reverse racism may be alive and well in the Maori Party--at least in the heart of its constituency. You, of all people, Pita should not have thrown that particular stone.

Ironically, Henry's future is assured. He is loved by the masses for his rudeness and irreverence toward sacred cows and politically-correct vacuity. He's a John Dean rebel, sans the brooding moodiness, with a Monty Pythonesque outrageous irreverence. He is likely to become a cultural icon in his own right now. Anyone wanting to lay odds on his doing a breakfast show at TV3 before you can say "Governor General", once his rumoured six-month gardening leave is over?

We believe Pita will be proved correct. Henry will indeed end up considering "a new approach to public commentary". If he is smart--and we believe he is--he will return to broadcasting as a turbo charged Henry, Mark II.

If Pita had paused to reflect a moment he would have buttoned his mouth--presuming he truly was offended by Henry's remarks, rather than just engaging in a bit of political grandstanding. Wasn't that why he was willing when push came to shove to accept Hone's "mere" apology and allow him back into the waka? Far better that, where he could be semi-controlled, rather than cutting Hone loose, and have him rage up and down the country conjuring up racist grievances. 


Maybe someone should sit Pita down and explain to him how the law of unintended consequences works.  Henry redivivus will be far more uncomfortably provocative, and popular, than the Henry who has just fallen on his sword.

The Russians Are Coming

Coldest Winter in 1,000 Years

Russian weather forecasters who, along with their countrymen, survived the Big Cold of 2010, are predicting (with 70% probability) Europe's coldest winter in 1,000 years. Now that would be a doozy.

Coldest winter in 1,000 years on its way

07 October, 2010,

After the record heat wave this summer, Russia's weather seems to have acquired a taste for the extreme.

Forecasters say this winter could be the coldest Europe has seen in the last 1,000 years.

The change is reportedly connected with the speed of the Gulf Stream, which has shrunk in half in just the last couple of years. Polish scientists say that it means the stream will not be able to compensate for the cold from the Arctic winds. According to them, when the stream is completely stopped, a new Ice Age will begin in Europe.


So far, the results have been lower temperatures: for example, in Central Russia, they are a couple of degrees below the norm.

“Although the forecast for the next month is only 70 percent accurate, I find the cold winter scenario quite likely,” Vadim Zavodchenkov, a leading specialist at the Fobos weather center, told RT. “We will be able to judge with more certainty come November. As for last summer's heat, the statistical models that meteorologists use to draw up long-term forecasts aren't able to predict an anomaly like that.”

In order to meet the harsh winter head on, Moscow authorities are drawing up measures to help Muscovites survive the extreme cold.

Most of all, the government is concerned with homeless people who risk freezing to death if the forecast of the meteorologists come true. Social services and police are being ordered to take the situation under control even if they have to force the homeless to take help.

Moscow authorities have also started checking air conditioning systems in all socially important buildings. All the conditioners are being carefully cleaned from the remains of summer smog.

Now that makes a change from the run-of-the-mill global warming meteorological predictions.

The More Things Change . . .

When a Snake Oiler Meets Venality

We have seen this before! In the early noughties a troop of investment banking marketers descended upon New Zealand and Australia, flogging structured finance instruments. Some wore pinstripe suits, spoke in plummy accents and hailed out of London. Others wore braces, loud ties, and hailed out of New York. They were selling "collateralised debt obligations" (don't you just love the euphemistic jargon), parcelled up into various risk tranches, each with respective credit-ratings and various statistical models assuring us that the risks of default were exceedingly low. And all this was being wrapped into managed funds, so that retail investors, the proverbial mums and dads, could get a slice of the heady action. And they did--in their thousands.

One had the distinct impression that it was the last gasp hurrah of a glorious party. Go out and flog this stuff one last time. Go to the end of the world, to the antipodes, to the colonies, where the gullible still reside. Sell and run. And they did and did. Now, when it all collapsed, shrieks were heard, blaming rotten and corrupt America for letting this happen.

But now it is a case of "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me". Bloomberg has reported that Illinois, that bastion of fiscal rectitude, has been struggling to find US citizens, pension funds, and institutions to buy its debt and fund its profligate entitlement, featherbedding, pay-off, deficit spending. So, guess what? The braces and loud ties have been dusted off again, and off shore the bond salesmen have trooped. A seven-country road show, with lights, bells, whistles, and back-slapping.

And, lo and behold, the stupid punters are once again stumping up their money. Lending to the most corrupt political establishment in the US! Why? Who would be so stupid?

The seven-country visit worked. The state sold one-fifth of the federally subsidized securities abroad the next month, tapping investors who are the fastest-growing source of borrowed cash for U.S. municipalities. Illinois, with the lowest credit rating of any state from Moody’s Investors Service, dangled yields higher than Mexico, which defaulted on debt in 1982, and Portugal, which costs more to insure against missed payments.

“U.S. states are among the cheapest sovereign credits in the world,” said Patrick Brett, a Citigroup banker who marketed the Illinois securities overseas. “You’re actually picking up a good amount of spread for arguably better credits relative to equivalently rated corporates and sovereigns.”

Don't you just love that language from Mr Brett of Citigroup: "arguably better credits relative to equivalently rated corporates and sovereigns . . ." This is a euphemism for "spin, spin, spin". If Illinois credit was sound, US investors would have picked it up. Because there is a real smell about state and local body deficits in the US--the smell of desperation--the locals know the risks and know that Illinois is the most intractably wretched, they fear the worst, and avoid them.

But, those greedy gullible overseas investors just cannot resist loud ties and braces. And we ask, who is the more culpable? Is it the dissembling snake oiler from Citigroup? Or is the greedy, smart-timing investor. But we are sure of this: when it all blows up, everyone will be unanimous that there is only one culpable entity in the dock--the big, evil investment banker. And those throwing the biggest, sharpest stones will be the oh-so-easily gulled investors who foolishly lent money to the most corrupt political establishment in the US, but whose venality willed them into a suspension of disbelief and prudence at the time.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Steering Clear of the Regnant Scoundrels

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 02, 2010

When we consider the temptations of nationalism, we have to think through how conservative Christians might be drawn into that error -- and it is an error.

We are first presented with a false alternative. On the one hand, we see those who despise America and its symbols. Think flag-burning, those who defend flag-burning, and all that. And then on the other hand, think of those believers who react against this and are lured into a syncretistic civil religion, in which a red, white, and blue cloth takes it's place as a third sacrament. This is, speaking theologically for a moment, demented. And yet it is "justified" because flag burning is not honoring the emperor, like the Bible says to do, and this syncretism is not flag burning. Ta da!

But there is another alternative. It is possible to render subordinated honor that is not idolatrous. Not only is it possible to do, it is necessary. But in order for this honor to be a biblical civil honoring, words like sacred, hallowed, and religion must be kept entirely and completely away from it. There must be a sharp line of demarcation that separates the kind of honor that is due to a nation and its magistrates and the kind of honor that belongs to God alone. That line of demarcation must be maintained by the kinds of words we use and will not use.


There is a true oddity here. The kind of resurgent civil religion that drives bluestate progressives bonkers is nevertheless the very kind of religion that was deemed necessary by men like Rousseau and Robespierre. Some progressives have been barking atheists, sure enough, but quite a few of them would have seen some splendid opportunities in the rise of this foolishness. Glenn Beck's theological mush, and his array of secular saints, provide just the kind of religion his enemies will need in order to provide a necessary societal glue, along with the kind of lump in the throat that will keep the yokels happy.

Let me say this again. Secularists are generally very bad at concocting religions, but are generally very good at the parasitic takeover of concocted religions once established. One religion is ultimately impossible for them to take over, because the triune God has given it a robust immune system, but a bunch of others are easy. Glenn Beck is putting together a dream religion for such a takeover. The progressives might as well have ordered it from the factory. For all Beck's hostility to the ruling classes, he is doing a lot of their spade work for them. He acknowledges that he is learning, but he needs to learn a great deal more.

If he wants a religion that cannot be coopted by the regnant scoundrels, then he needs to find one with an actual gospel in it. And testimonials on behalf of Abraham, Martin, and John are not even close to gospel.

The Iron Triangle, Part II

Centrally Planned "Creative" Destruction

In Part I of "The Iron Triangle" we interacted with Ethan Devine's, The Japan Syndrome, published recently in Foreign Policy. Devine traces the artificial boom of the Japanese economy and its subsequent bust--and long, lingering decline since. Japan is now a no-growth economy, with a burgeoning government debt that bodes an eventual second implosion.

But what of China? Well, China, which has now replaced Japan as the second-largest economy, has been following the Japanese prescription of export-led economic development.

The funny thing is that China borrowed much of its economic model from Japan: producing low-cost exports to fund investment at home while aggravating trading partners. At times, it seems like only the names have changed. Where Detroit automakers once denounced Honda and Toyota for dumping cheap, fuel-efficient sedans on American housewives, Treasury secretaries now wring their hands about the undervalued renminbi while China's trade surpluses yawn.

Then Devine issues a sober warning:

As pleasurable as it must be for China's leaders to have beaten Japan at its own game, the joke might soon be on them. In fact, they would do well to veer off of Japan's development path promptly. Sure, Japan's export boom funded stellar growth for four decades. But its undervalued currency eventually helped blow one of the largest bubbles in history, the bursting of which still hobbles Japan today. Japan's famously dismal demographics didn't help, but China's aren't much better. Beijing's one-child policy, introduced in 1979, has worked its way up the population pyramid such that China's supply of rural workers ages 20 to 29 will halve by 2030. Worse yet, China is much larger than Japan -- which means that the global consequences of a crash would be far greater. For the moment, Beijing is riding high, but China's sustained success depends on understanding where Japan went so badly wrong.

Once again the pattern is repeating itself. Centrally planned economies do not work: they create painful bubbles. It happened in Japan. It is happening in China. When government arrogate to themselves powers beyond that ordained for them by God, disaster inevitably results. How long will modern man insist on being so stubborn and stupid? is fast becoming an apt question.

Bulging foreign exchange reserves don't only irritate trading partners; they also stoke inflation pressures at home. Inflation is dangerous in a still-poor country where much of the population cannot tolerate higher prices for basic essentials, but it is a natural consequence of an undervalued currency. When Chinese exporters give their dollars to the Chinese central bank (PBOC), the renminbi they receive in exchange increase the domestic money supply and cause inflation. Official inflation statistics are rising, but they only tell part of the story. Massive liquidity in the system has caused a number of mini-bubbles such as garlic's hundredfold price increase over the last two years.

Giving exporters four renminbi per dollar instead of six would be the quickest fix, but China prefers "sterilization" instead of currency appreciation. In sterilization, the central bank issues bonds to soak up the extra renminbi. The catch is that China's dollar reserves earn dollar interest rates, so if the PBOC pays a higher rate on its own bonds, it pays out more interest than it earns. To keep from hemorrhaging money, the PBOC must keep China's interest rates close to U.S. rates. But U.S. rates are far too low for China, particularly with food prices rising and assets looking bubbly. The government has tried targeted policies such as price controls on certain foodstuffs and restricted lending to asset speculators, but the inflationary pressures are so great that this piecemeal policy resembles a game of whack-a-mole. (Emphasis, ours)

China's economy is starting to look remarkably like Japan's in the late nineties: bridges, bridges everywhere, rusting in the sun, whilst the domestic population suffers.

Although there is no doubt that this new growth strategy created tens of millions of jobs and a glistening national infrastructure, the attendant imbalances have created problems. Huang notes that by suppressing personal consumption and small-scale entrepreneurial activity in favor of state-owned enterprises and select multinationals, China's 1990s growth did not sufficiently benefit its citizens. "The story of the 1990s is one of substantial urban biases, huge investments in state-allied businesses, courting FDI [foreign direct investment] by restricting indigenous capitalists, and subsidizing the cosmetically impressive urban boom by taxing the poorest segments of the population."

Chinese authorities appear to have realised they, like Houston, have a problem. But, as in Japan, it it strains credulity to think that Communist Party central planning will solve it. The solutions lie in less planning, more freedom, and a willingness to embrace (relative) chaos that inevitably occurs when people and businesses are given freedom to do what they want to do. No more permits in order to blow one's nose.

To be sure, the government appears to be making an effort.

Using the full suite of policy tools available to a command economy, the government has removed tax incentives for some exports and added new ones for research and development while directing banks to curb lending and utilities to raise power prices for certain heavy industries. At the same time, new pension schemes, health-care coverage, and even a budding tolerance for collective bargaining with underpaid workers are intended to boost consumption. Although the Chinese authorities have long frowned on labor unrest, they have looked the other way at a recent spate of strikes and demands for higher wages. In fact, in some cases, local authorities have done the collective bargaining for their citizens by mandating higher minimum wages. Higher wages are easy political sells, but several initiatives even centrally plan creative destruction.

One of the more ambitious initiatives appeared on the website of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology one Sunday afternoon this August. The ministry lists 2,087 steel, cement, and other factories that must be closed by Sept. 30 of this year. . . . Chinese authorities have been known to dynamite inefficient factories to be absolutely certain they are closed for good -- not simply fired back up again by conspiring local authorities and businesses once the heavies return to Beijing.

But the problems are immense. Firstly, the service sector, which is what needs to grow rapidly, necessitates the flourishing of entrepreneurial freedom.

Dynamic service sectors are not generally compatible with central planning because service economies are naturally discombobulated. Technocrats can calculate where a new bridge or airport will have the greatest positive impact and then build that bridge or airport -- but it is much harder to dictate from on high the creation of the next Facebook or to manifest a thriving small business sector.

Then there is the issue of the aging population.

While none of these reforms is easy, China's ticking demographic clock makes them urgent. China's one-child policy produced a large demographic dividend in the 1980s and 1990s as those of working age had fewer dependants to support. Starting in 2015, however, China will suffer the inverse -- a growing number of aged relying on a shrinking pool of young workers.

Anyone want to go long on China? Be very, very cautious. Central planning creates bubbles, and bubbles burst. And when the China bubble bursts, it is likely to be a doozy.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Faint Heart, Fair Lady 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, October 03, 2010

In that great gallery of the Faith's heroes, Hebrews 11, we see the same kind of person, over and over again, but different earthly outcomes. Since the city we are seeking, whose maker and builder is God, is not an earthly city, we are given a wide range of possibilities here. Those possibilities include both winning and losing.

There is a certain of servant -- a worthless one, to use the words of his master -- who wants to stay close to the shore, play it safe, take no great risks, and bury his talent in a napkin. This approach is taken by the cowardly who think their master is a "hard master."

In the parable of the talents, the risk takers came back with more than they started with, but that doesn't always happen. The fellow who was given five talents made five more, and the man given two made two more (Matt. 25:14ff). But sometimes in our experience the man with five talents comes back with only three, and a little bit wiser. Nevertheless, the Lord praised the servants who were willing to lose.

Dabney refers somewhere to a pathetic kind of conservatism that has no intention of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. But there is also a kind of conservatism that has no intention of running the risk of success. The same kind of timidity underlies both. But biblical faith always swings for the fence.

And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephtha; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise (Hebrews 11:32-39).

Some conquered kingdoms, and some were sawn in two. Some stopped the mouths of lions, and some didn't. Some turned armies to flight, and some were marched off to camps by armies. Some quenched the violence of fire, and some were stoned. Some turned five talents into five hundred, while others had their one remaining talent emptied from their pocket before they were tied to the stake. But all of them overcame by faith.

The cowardice that is afraid of success is not biblical faith, and it will be that same lack of faith that, when it comes to the point, refuses to pay the price that a martyr would pay. Faith is willing for earthly success or failure, whatever the Lord has ordained for us. Cowardice is ultimately willing for neither, because cowardice won't take the risk of failure that is necessary in order for real success to occur. Faint heart, fair lady, and it became a proverb because it is true.

Health and wealthers want only the possibility of success. Doom and gloomers want only the possibility of ongoing failure. But biblical faith knows what it wants, and what it ultimately wants is not in this world anyway. Because the final reward is found in the resurrection, in the city to come, and not here, we are set free to attempt great things here. To different kinds of cowardice this looks positively reckless, but reckless in different ways. Some are afraid that our psalm singing will wake up the lions, while others are afraid that the psalm singing will stop the mouths of those same lions.

In the words of one insightful business executive, we must remember that nothing was ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

The Iron Triangle, Part I

A Thirteen Year "Recession", and Counting

Every so often an article appears on global-economics which demands serious reflection. Ethan Devine's recent piece in Foreign Policy, entitled The Japan Syndrome is one. The article is really about China and its economic and socio-political prospects, but it is written against the backdrop of Japan. If Devine is correct, then, the implications for New Zealand are material. One implication is that we would be foolish to put all our eggs in the Asian basket. Yet that is precisely what successive New Zealand governments appear to be doing.

Will we ever learn? Very unlikely. Politicians, as a species, believe their own press. They believe they really can make a difference when it comes to the economy. The naivety of our Prime Minister thinking that he could make a positive difference to our tourism industry is a case in point. Power and hubris are a heady narcotic. (Now to be fair, as we have often pointed out, the same naivety runs throughout the nation: the voters also overwhelming believe "yes, we can" is not only possible, but the sole authentic mode of government. "In government we trust" is the dominant idolatry and ideology of our age.) But we digress.

We will break down Devine's article into two posts. First, his recapitulation of recent Japanese economic history. Japan, in the eighties, was touted as the economic miracle and powerhouse for the entire world. In fact, right throughout this time, it was a glass-house economy, artificially propped up, skewed, unsustainable, and doomed to implode. As a result, Japan has had to endure one of the longest recessions recorded in human history. Today, Japan's gross domestic product is lower than it was thirteen years ago! What went wrong?

Firstly, Japan since the Second World War has been a centrally planned economy. Japan has a dominant religious commitment to social harmony, or wa. Now, this cultural value, based on a pagan cosmology, can be quite helpful when it comes to things like crime. Ordinary, run-of-the-mill Japanese do not like crime or criminals because it disturbs wa--a very bad thing. A cultural taboo. A no no. But when the values and principles of wa are applied to economics and economic systems there is an inevitable veering towards central planning and control by elites and oligopolies. The creative destruction of personal capital deployed and invested by sovereign citizens is an anathema and offensive. It is un-Japanese.   

Dithering was par for the course in a system designed to maintain the status quo. Although technically a democracy, the extent of Japan's central planning has at times matched China's. Japan has been centrally planned since it was ruled by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, eventually morphing into an informal alliance between bureaucrats, business leaders, and elected officials known as the "iron triangle." Difficult reforms were not in the triumvirate's best interest. Bankruptcies and unemployment are never palatable, but they are intolerable for a ruling class whose legitimacy depends on engineering social harmony.

We note, in passing, that the Japanese value of universal wa is anti-Christian.  In Christian cosmology, diversity is as ultimate as unity; the one equally ultimate with the many.  Therefore, diversity and difference, is as ultimate as unity and oneness.Note, also in passing, how New Zealand, with its own form of paganism,  has tried to replicate the wa of Japanese central planning. We have our own iron triangle of elected officials, bureaucrats, and business leaders trying to direct and steer our economy in preferred directions (value added production, export-led recoveries, high-tech industries, the knowledge economy). The result? Bubbles, bubbles everywhere, bursting as we speak.

This leads to Devine's second point. Central planning of economies usually leads to huge bubbles that burst spectacularly. So it has been in the case of Japan. The central plan called for exports, exports, exports. To be in wa with exporting, the Japanese currency had to be kept low.

Sure, Japan's export boom funded stellar growth for four decades. But its undervalued currency eventually helped blow one of the largest bubbles in history, the bursting of which still hobbles Japan today. . . .

Post-World War II Japan pioneered Asia's export-driven growth model, sextupling GDP from 1950 to 1970 and pulling more people out of poverty more quickly than any country except modern China. Japan achieved this remarkable growth with a weak yen -- which supported exports and discouraged imports -- and high savings rates, which funded massive investments in infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

But, in national economics, as in physics for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction--well, being a dismal science, and wonderfully messy, never exactly equal nor opposite, but a reaction nonetheless. Japan's export led miracle economy generated the opposite reaction of killing the domestic (consumption, service) economy.

An unfortunate side effect of export- and investment-driven growth is that it strangles the consumer. But that's kind of the point: The entire exercise depends on suppressing consumers as their cheap labor fuels exports. In Japan's case, the same undervalued yen that supported exports sapped consumers' purchasing power while yields on their savings were kept artificially low to fund cheap loans to corporations and government. And the shrunken share of economic spoils that did end up in the hands of consumers had no outlet but the heavily protected domestic market with its hopelessly inefficient and shockingly overpriced goods and services. When American humorist Dave Barry traveled to Japan in 1991, he was stunned to find department stores selling $75 melons.

Eventually the "iron triangle" worked out that they had to re-balance the economy and get that little old Japanese housewife spending.

In plain English, the Japanese were consuming relatively little while investing heavily in steel plants and skyscrapers, which didn't leave much for fish or tourism. Belatedly, Tokyo realized that a balanced economy must also have consumption and that coating the country with factories and infrastructure wouldn't do the trick. Japan tried to rebalance slowly through the 1970s and early 1980s: The yen was allowed to strengthen a bit each year, and consumption ticked up to 54 percent of GDP, while investment shrank to 28 percent by 1985.

But, this re-balancing act failed to work. Why? Because the internal consumption economy was so anaemic it could not cope. As exporters found the going more tough with a higher yen, they attempted to re-orientate their production and sales to the Japanese market, only to discover that a solid, efficient, productive service-sector economy did not exist. Distribution chains were hopelessly clogged with too many people. In a fast food restaurant, for example, it was not uncommon to find ten people on the forecourt, welcoming, greeting, bowing, ushering, smiling. Hopelessly inefficient

In the event, export-oriented industries did not adapt to a domestically led economy because the domestic economy was not fit to lead. Conceived as a tranquil oasis for the Japanese to enjoy their exporters' hard-fought gains in peace, domestic Japan frowned on competition. Former Japanese Vice Finance Minister Eisuke Sakakibara termed this the "dual economy," in which world-class exporters existed alongside domestic companies that were "very tightly regulated with a lot of subsidies from the government, which makes them extremely uncompetitive." As a result, productivity in Japan's service sector lagged manufacturing badly. Having nowhere better to go, the Bank of Japan's loose money found its way into stocks and real estate instead of funding innovation.

Japanese companies large and small punted in stock and property markets, generating huge paper profits that masked their inefficient domestic businesses. The Nikkei nearly quadrupled from 1985 to 1990, and land values in many areas did the same, leaving ample opportunity for companies to pad profits with stock and real estate investments. But when the bust came five years later, domestic companies were as inefficient as ever, only now also stuffed with debt and bad investments. And they had company.

Who could ever forget the $US35,000 annual golf course memberships? Now, there is a bubble!

But wa has prevented the necessary housecleaning, the essential creative destruction that lets the bubble burst properly, so that the economy can be re-aligned and begin to grow in a more sustainable mode. Instead, Japan's internal economy has gone from bad to worse--hence the shrinking GDP. (Again, in passing, we should note that we in New Zealand have another variant of wa--which, we remind ourselves is a thoroughly pagan idea--in that here pseudo-harmony is maintained by state welfare and entitlement payments. This, more than anything else, impedes the economy from cleansing itself and starting on a better footing. It perpetuates the hopelessly outmoded unproductive inefficiency of both our domestic and export economies. )

The bubble's burst knocked Japan down, but torpor in the name of wa has kept it from getting back up. From one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Japanese GDP has grown at less than 1 percent per year since 1991, and GDP today is lower than it was in 1997. Exports, though, barely missed a beat after the Plaza Accord: Despite the stronger yen, net exports actually increased in 1986 and are a bigger part of the economy today than they were in 1985. But without a functioning domestic economy, Japan cannot prosper, so it doesn't. Persistent overcapacity restrains private investment and consumption is the last thing on most consumers' minds, so Japan runs on exports and government spending. After 20 years of almost continuous fiscal stimulus, Japan has little to show other than mounting government debt, now nearly 200 percent of GDP.

And so, the Japanese economic miracle is fading into a wasteland. Is it not significant that no-one talks about Japan as New Zealand's cargo-cult partner to deliver us economic prosperity any longer? Yet in the eighties and nineties we were told repeatedly that in Japan lay our economic salvation. Now, a new saviour has appeared. We have seen his star in the East. His name is China.

In Part II, we will review Devine's argument that China's economic future is looking eerily like Japan.

Union Soft-Thuggery

Bullying into Silent Submission

Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart have done sterling work, along with others, in the US exposing the thuggery, lying, corruption, and standover tactics employed by some unions, particularly the SEIU.

In New Zealand, we have no such energetic journalists and bloggers tracking every move labour unions make--although we do have some. Maybe we are therefore entitled to conclude that labour unions in this country are clean, straight-up-and-down organizations. But, then again, an e-mail recently posted at Kiwiblog suggests otherwise. Welcome to the wonderful world of the teacher unions.

My name in xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx and I was on holiday in Rotorua with my family this week as it rained the entire time I spent most of time in the pool with the kids and had some very surprising conversations with other guest 2 who were teachers that disagreed with the strike of the post primary school teachers.

One Maori lady was a teacher from Hastings who told her principal that she didn’t agree with the strike and her principal told her “well your job isn’t safe then is it”. She replied “yes it is”. She also felt that some teachers are worth much more than they are getting paid but some teacher are “just lazy and not worth anything”. She felt the union should be protecting good teachers but they are protecting bad teachers.

The second teacher we met has been teaching for 20 years (not sure where) and she had never seen such political bias and bullying from Principals and left leaning teachers and it was pointless arguing with anyone as your on a hiding to nothing. She said that at election time you can’t admit you vote National or you are harassed as the only point of the union is to get Labour elected. Even the placards are red and white.

If what these teachers say is correct then a lot of good teachers don’t agree with the strike and they disagree with the union but are too scared to do anything or don’t want to because it’s a hassle then that is the bigger story.

By the way the primary school my kids go to is xxx xxxxx primary school and they support National standards so a lot of schools do. But as a primary school they are great and very inclusive so in fact national standards will make no difference to xxx xxxxx as they are excellent to start with.

You are in the position to canvass a wide audience you should ask for stories from other teachers about political bias and bullying from principals and unions. It’s time the teachers unions stopped bullying other teachers and parents as they only care about 1 thing – to gain power.

An Apology is About Right

Never Forget the Lesson of the Gypsies

Oh, what a kerfuffle. TV breakfast host, Paul Henry has said that the current Governor General does not look nor sound sufficiently like a New Zealander. The Race Relations Conciliator, Joris de Bres has weighed in, arguing that his employer, the state run television company should take action against him, because, well it is a state organ, so everything which is done on the state TV company is quasi-official.

We believe strongly in the right of freedom of speech. Like all such rights, it is not absolute. There are always limits to such freedoms. But freedom of speech is important because it limits the authority of the community and the state over the individual. If the State can tell me what we can and cannot say, it is claiming control over my body and mind; my ideas, thoughts and beliefs.  We have been reduced to slavery.

Freedom of speech rights mean, as everyone always points out, that we have to hear some pretty offensive stuff from time to time. In our view, verbal discrimination on the basis of race, or viewing humanity through the prism of race, is ignorant, wrong, stupid, anti-Christian, and derisory. But that does not make it an ultimate sin, nor ought it to be a crime. It does not make it beyond the pale of free speech--regardless of the state of our current human rights legislation which we believe is anti-free speech.

On the other hand, argument, debate, mockery of, scorn, and rejection of false or stupid ideas is fine also. That too, falls under the rubric of free speech. Thus, the fact that folk have expressed outrage, disgust, hostility, or strident disagreement with Henry's comments is just fine, too. But the fact that his speech, in this instance, offended many and enraged some, does not mean that Henry's speech should be outlawed, proscribed, or fall, therefore, under the interdiction of censorship.

Therefore, our view is that Henry's apology for causing offence is about right. As to whether he should be allowed to continue as the host of a breakfast show, that is a matter for his employers. In the end, they have to meet market. Their argument has been, well, actually Henry accurately reflects the views of a surprisingly large number of people. They may be right or wrong about this. If they are wrong, they will eventually pay a commercial price. If they are right, they are providing a helpful and needful window on the true state of affairs in this country. Hiding it, or covering it over, or ignoring it will not make it go away. Far, far better to have it out in the open so it can be debated, refuted, affirmed or otherwise argued over.

But to call for more is not appropriate. If society can shut Henry up because his comments have been offensive to them, society can move to shut up anything that becomes offensive to it in the future--which, incidentally, translates inevitably into "offensive to those in positions of power". Just as Hone Harawira's coarse and offensive characterisation of white people was "sorted out" by an apology, that is about the limit of what we believe would be appropriate with respect to Henry's latest "contribution" to society. Anything more would make us very nervous indeed. We need to continue to stand up for Henry's right to speak freely. 

As the adage goes, "I was silent when they came for the gypsies, and then . . ."

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Dufflepudian Eschatology

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, October 01, 2010

One of the great difficulties we have with perspective, especially on cultural, historical, and political issues, is the difficulty we have with the scale of events. One of my favorite quotes comes from Christopher Dawson, when he said that the Christian church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient. But "waiting patiently" still needs to be interpreted on a scale. Are you talking about waiting patiently for your wife who is a few minutes late for a coffee date, or are you talking about waiting patiently for the glacier to get to the sea?

When I say that if Christians get engaged in the political process and "make a difference," the effect of what I am urging is going to be determined by what scale I am on. Am I on the five-year scale or the five-hundred-year scale? And some might exclaim, "Who ever heard of activism on a five-hundred year scale?" Exactly, and that's a good chunk of our problem. Martin Luther was once asked what he would do if he knew the Lord was coming back tomorrow, and his answer reveals a mentality that is foreign to too many of us. He said that he would plant a tree.

We want results and we want them now. We are short-term thinkers. We want convenience store reformations. Now by arguing this, I am not saying that no differences whatever will be noticeable during the course of our lives. We can see the seedlings grow. Some. But God is the one who gives the increase, and He gives it on the scale that He is operating with. Whether the Lord returns in the year 2110 or in the year 9753 radically affects whether we think we are making good time. We are like little kids in the back of the van who, at the start of their vacation to the other side of the country, when their father gets to the end of the driveway, ask if "we are there yet?" 


There are some cultural problems that have gone clean out of our lives, and we don't notice because that is what they did two hundred years ago. There are other stampeding follies that are so natural to us that they seem like the air we breathe, and yet schoolchildren of the future will scarcely credit the tales that will be told of us. An example? Oh, there are plenty, but I just don't want to wreck my moral authority by pointing one out.

Our progress is agonizingly slow, like the exasperating and yet endearing Dufflepuds. Coriakin is patient with them, and he will get them there, but it's going to take a bit. But he is a retired star and can afford to be patient.

The worst thing about the zeal to reform is the presumption of omniscience when there is largely ignorance. And once the realization of our ignorance sets in upon us, the temptation is to give up entirely. But we set ourselves to reformations and institution-building if we simply obey God's laws (for He is omniscient), and leave the results to Him. The fact that we don't know how to give the increase should not keep us from plowing and planting. This is what distinguishes the true reformer from the disastrous social engineer.

The social engineer is the Dufflepud who thinks there must be something wrong with Coriakin's laptop, and hoses it down in order to fix it.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Timing is Everything

See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people." (Deuteronomy 4: 5--6)

The Bible consists of 66 books, dozens of human authors, employing four different languages, spread across several cultures, written over a course of 1500 years. All is the living Word of the Living God. There are some books in the Bible, however, that are more important than others, in the sense that these particular books more powerfully explain and shed light upon the whole Bible.

In the Old Covenant corpus, four books are most important: Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms and Isaiah. How do we know this? Because these four books are quoted and referred to most often in the New Covenant corpus. The apostolic writings of the New Covenant, which is the culmination and fulfilment of the Old, draw most often upon these Old Covenant books to teach, illustrate and explain the fullness of redemption and revelation in Christ Jesus.

Thus, if we are seeking an Old Covenant introduction, we could do no better than to focus upon these four critical books of the Bible.

Whilst Deuteronomy has many themes, one that is particularly central is the relationship between Israel as a nation and the Unbelieving nations that surrounded them. This is of special interest to us living under the New Covenant in His blood because we are called to go into all the nations of the earth and transform them into covenanted discipled nations of our Lord.

In Deuteronomy 4: 5--6 we receive instruction upon how our city is to be set upon the hill to be noticed by the Unbelievers that surround us. Firstly, as a people we are to keep God's statutes and judgments. This will set us necessarily set us apart from Unbelievers, even as we live amongst them. We will keep one day holy to the Lord out of seven. We will join with the Lord's people to worship Him alone. We will not tolerate any other gods. We will fear the Lord and not use His holy name as a curse word. We will marry only those within the faith. We will raise our children very differently from the way that Unbelievers around us raise theirs. Our lives will be filled with songs of praise and thanksgiving to our great God for His mercy, His love, and His Christ, our Redeemer. Our schools and our schooling will be very different--not only in what is taught, but how it is taught--and so forth.

These things represent the wisdom and understanding of God's people--and they set us apart from the practice and culture of Unbelief which surrounds us. It is what the people "see" when they look at us. These things make us very distinct--and the more pagan and unbelieving a culture becomes, the more distinct and different we are. The more the darkness of paganism descends, the brighter the light of God shines in His people, even as the candle shines more brightly at night.

The more families and marriages break down amongst the Unbelievers, the more wonderful and attractive Christian marriages become. The more children rise up to curse and hate their parents, the more glorious adult Christians who revere and honour their aged parents seem to Unbelievers. And this leads them to say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people," because even as the created world around us is beautiful and wonderfully made, reflecting the glory of God Himself, so His work of redemption and salvation amongst His people, is a glorious reflection of the beauty of God Himself.

And in this, God is glorified. In this context and these circumstances the preaching of the Gospel is further empowered amongst Unbelievers. An historical illustration of this can be found in the time of our Lord, where the Jewish synagogues throughout the world were also populated with "God-fearers"--Gentiles who had come to understand the disgusting effects of idolatry and who saw in the faith of our fathers a truth and beauty that drew them out of their darkness towards light. It was these God-fearers who responded immediately to the preaching of the Gospel in the synagogues.

It remains true, however, that most often the initial response of the Unbeliever to seeing faithful Christian families living according to God's statutes, is mockery and disdain, if not downright hostility. But as their own lives crumble and the wastage of Unbelief becomes ingrained in their pores, often disdain changes to grudging respect, and then even longing, if not envy. These things, however, take time, even more than one generation. But faithfulness over time is an emblem of truth and genuineness.

It has pleased God to take time, much time, to bring His Kingdom to pass. Our lives are short; His Kingdom is everlasting. We need to ensure that our brief lives reflect profoundly the everlasting realities, so that generations to come will say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people."

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

That Fortress of Fraud Called Congress

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, September 29, 2010

One of the basic decisions confronting the secularists is whether they give priority to secularism, which is a result, or to democracy, which is a method. Democracy might wind up with a government that is not secular in the slightest, and a secular dictataor might insist on a secular state despite the majority of his citizens wanting it to be some other way. Secularism and democracy are not synonyms.

If they were foundationally democrats, secularists ought not to mind, after 500 years, if an overwhelmingly Christian populace voted in the blue laws again, where ordinary commerce ceased on the Lord's Day. But if they are foundationally secularist, it doesn't matter to them if that is what a society-at-large wants to do. He is still against it. But why?

Conservative Christians are suspicious of democracy also, so that is not my point. Being suspicious of the results that democracy might come up with is a perfectly respectable thing to do -- if there was one thing that gave some of the Founders bad sweats in the middle of the night, it would be democracy. H.L. Mencken once defined democracy as the establishment of truth by the expedient of counting noses, and promulgating it afterward with a club. Democracy can do bad things, like Obamacare ferinstance, and that is why we need a constitutional republic, where certain things are recognized as off the table. Certain basic issues are not up for a vote.

This is why it is important that we have certain inalienable rights that our Creator gave us, and not rights that were bequeathed by the latest referendum, or by the kindness of the king. If the Lord gives, only the Lord can take away. If the State gives, then the State can take away, and blessed be the name of the State.

The point here is that the Christian has a natural point of appeal above every human institution -- whether that institution be popular elections, that fortress of fraud we call the Congress, the faux-imperial White House, or the black-robed Nazgul who ghoulishly prey on the unborn. One of them singly, or all of them together, can be withstood by one courageous man with an open Bible. "You may not, as Yahweh reigns, do this thing." To take such a stand would require courage, as John the Baptist had to have in order to rebuke Herod, but to take such a stand would not require an ability to follow a convoluted set of political contradictions. Life is simple. God outranks the king. The king is to do what God says, not the other way around. "What a strange religion you Christians have!" I can hear someone saying.

But for the secularist, what outranks the highest human authority? What text can a secularist point to when he is trying to stand against certain democratic measures? It matters not if the democratic measure is a great idea or a howler. So long as he differs with it, it should not matter to him if the people are voting to close Home Depot on Sundays, or if they are not suffering a witch to live. There is no God above the people, right? Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try.

So he considers those measures extreme. But define "extreme," boyo.

The Will of the People Versus Freedom

Inverted Trees

We were grimly amused to read of a debate taking place in the Auckland "Super City" elections. Some mayoral candidates were confirming their intent, if elected, to get the council involved in providing housing for the poor and indigent.

No! No! No! said some. This is unconscionable. It is not the job of a local body to provide housing. That is the job of central government. It is entirely wrong to duplicate what central government is already doing.

Here we are confronted with a big fat question-begging elephant in the room. Granted that central government does have a ministry of housing and spends millions upon millions of dollars upon housing for the poor and indigent. The question is why this ought to be central government's job or responsibility or preserve or bailiwick in the first place.

Now the people sounding the objection to local council involvement in housing were limited government, free-marketers--of the worst kind. We mean by this that their free-market principles are not based upon any rigorous philosophical or religious principles. They are, go-with-the-flow free marketers. Government has taken upon itself the responsibility to heal, educate, house, clothe, feed, and brush the teeth of everyone. Great, say our fair weather free marketers. Just don't go any further. Don't do any more. Their concept of freedom is the ever diminishing and shrinking "freedom of the gaps", of what's left, of what government has not yet encroached upon.  This kind of  freedom is that which is sibilantly hissed by Wormtongue. 

These are wolves-in-sheep's-clothing free marketers. They espouse freedom and limited government, but gladly accept any extension of government power (once it has become established and institutionalised). They are conservative free marketers. They espouse the abstract ideal of limited government and protection of property and individual rights, but want to conserve any extension of state power just so long as it has become conventional and accepted by the population at large.

Liberty, freedom, and self-responsibility are not mere abstractions to be conjured with. Unless, of course you are a humanist, and you really do believe that all government, all law, all civil rules and regulations come from the hearts of men and possess no higher authority than the "will of the people". If so, then no extension of government power is intrinsically or implicitly or absolutely wrong, provided the people want it. If the people want the government to be involved in providing houses for the poor and indigent, then freedom rights, private property rights, and free-market principles must be restricted to what's left over. There is no limit to the extension of the powers of government once justified and authorised by the consent of the governed. This means that liberty, freedom and self-responsibility are meaningless and vacuous concepts.

The "will of the people" can neither establish nor protect freedom. The will of the people must never be sovereign, if freedom is to be established maintained in society. This is so self-evident that only the confused would stumble over it. Take, for example, any civil dispute between us and our neighbours--say, over something like boundary pegs or broken contracts. If our freedoms and rights are to be subject to the "will of the people" all it would take is for sufficient numbers of people to side with our contentious neighbour for our freedoms and rights to evaporate more quickly than raw alcohol upon the skin.

The sovereign will of the people is but one fruit of freedom, not the root, trunk, and branch of it. Inverted trees are the Devil's parody on all true and good living things.

Screwtape on the Demand for Constant Change


The devilish Screwtape, writing to his nephew Wormwood, with counsel on how to get Christians to turn away from the Enemy (=God) by exploiting their fear of the Same Old Thing:

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.

To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.

And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable.

But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.

He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.

He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.

He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.

And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both.

And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids.

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (reprint: HarperOne, 2001), pp. 135-137.

Posted in Justin Tayor's blog.

Mad or Not

Hitler Was a Perfectly Rational Man

There has been a discussion going on in Auckland recently as to whether Hitler, Stalin, and latterly Ahmadinejad were mad--that is, bonkers (a psychiatric techical term, for those unfamiliar) or insane. The overwhelming consensus in the discussion was that these folk clearly were and, in the case of the president of Iran, are.

But what does that mean? Clearly, under our legal system it would mean that none of these tyrants are to be held accountable for their actions. There would be no moral concupiscence in their crimes because they were unable to distinguish between right and wrong. But why the rush to declare them mad? Why the overwhelming consensus that Hitler was insane? Are we to conclude that the Nuremberg trials were a terrible travesty of justice?

The standard answer to this question is that no sane person would ever have committed such unspeakable horrors. This assertion, in turn, rests on an unspoken premise: that sane people do not commit horrors, or, more subtly sane people do not do evil things. Whilst this premise is a complete nonsense, when it comes to those whom our culture identifies as the Black Beasts--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.--folk tend to take mindless comfort in it.

We suspect that there are some strong drivers which seduce people into such mindlessness. The first is that our culture has stopped seeing things in ethical categories. Concepts such as sin, evil, righteousness, and depravity have dropped out of the popular lexicon as the Christian faith has waned. The doctrines of original sin and of the fallen nature of humanity have been replaced with Enlightenment assumptions about innate human goodness. They have also been eroded by the pervasive cosmology of evolutionism which does not operate with categories of right or wrong, but of fitness for purpose--a very different concept entirely.

If the culture believes that mankind is innately righteous, then the existence of evil must have extrinsic causes. We see this all the time. The common ideology of victimhood is an example. Crime exists because of poverty. Drunkenness is caused by easy access to alcohol. People are not wrong or sinful when they are drunk; they, rather, are the victims of big brewery and supermarket businesses. They are being exploited as victims for money.

When someone commits unspeakable acts of extreme horror, however, these explanations wear a bit thin. OK, so Hitler did not have a strong, stable family background. But neither do millions upon millions of others, and they do not murder six million Jews. So, another causal explanation must exist. The consensus of the age is that Hitler, then, was not evil, but mad. Poor chap couldn't help it.

This nonsense is comforting to people. For if Hitler were evil, and was a human being, then that implictly might say something about all human beings. Modern man does not want to go down that track.

Hitler was clearly not insane. He was eminently rational. So was Stalin. So is Ahmadinejad. They had a clearly defined world-view, with premises, organising principles, meta-narratives, values, ethics, and assumptions which facilitated rational evaluation and decision making. An evil world-view to be sure, but rational nonetheless. All lived pefectly consistently by their lights.

Hitler, to cite just one illustration, took Darwinism and evolutionism seriously--far more seriously than people do today, most of whom merely use evolutionism as a lazy warranting concept to justify their agnosticism or Unbelief. He believed in higher and lower forms of life, including higher and lower forms of humanity. Within this ideology and cosmology he opined once that Maori were sub-human, primitive, ape-like creatures who deserved extinction. This is a perfectly rational position.

And if readers take umbrage at the idea that to hold Maori to be primitive ape-like sub-humans is perfectly rational, then consider an example closer to home. Just a sort time ago, within living cultural memory, it was openly asserted that Aborigines in Australia did not have souls and were not human beings. This, of course, was also perfectly rational within the Darwinian scheme of things. Are we really seriously going to assert that the majority of European settlers in Australia were insane? OK, a lot of them were convicts--but insane? We think not.

One is clearly not mad to hold such views. Evil, yes. Wicked, yes. Depraved, yes--but not mad. Darwinism itself as a religious cosmology is likewise evil, wicked and depraved. When men, in their wickedness embrace evolutionism it is their innate wickedness that makes the evolutionist cosmology attractive and compelling. It is like answering to like.

When our modern world cheerfully and self-righteously crusades for abortion and murders twenty-thousand innocent and defenceless children in this country every year, sacrificing them upon the grisly bloody altar of human rights, paying for the sacrifices with our tax exacted money, it is perfectly rational in doing so--by its own lights. Yet, evil, monstrously evil to be sure. And the rationale is very, very close to Hitler's evolutionism--that is, the unborn child is sub-human; therefore, it is reasonable to kill it.

Ahmedinejad is a Shi'ite Muslim--reportedly an ardent "Twelver Shīa" Muslim. This means that he believes that the twelfth Imam, born in 869 is still alive, yet hidden by Allah. He is about to reappear (a second coming) to smash Israel and the entire world into submission to Allah. Ahmedinejad believes that nuclear conflagration will be part of the appearing and the submission of the world. That is why Iran must develop nuclear weapons--to prepare for the Imam's appearance. That is also why he has been busy widening public streets in Teheran to accommodate the triumphal processions the twelfth Imam will lead.

Ahmedinejad is a perfectly rational man. He is also a workhorse for the powers of Satanic darkness. But, then, so are all who are involved in the abortion industry--both its cheerleaders and its practitioners who perform the human sacrifices on the altar of human rights.

Christians hold these views about Hitler, Ahmedinejad, social darwinists, and abortionists without self-righteousness. They can speak plainly about evil and depravity, because they also profess the total depravity of the entire human race descended from Adam by ordinary generation. All Christians know that there is no evil of which they are not capable. Lurking within them, apart from being baptised into the death and resurrection of our Lord, lies the evil rationality of Hitler and Stalin and the abortionist. Every Christian knows that given certain circumstances and opportunities there is no evil of which they are not capable. Every Christian looks at Hitler or Pol Pot and professes, "There, but for the grace of God, am I".

And they are both rational and righteous to make such a profession.

Presiding Over a Painful Demise

Michael Cullen's Reputation will Survive Intact

We have been grimly chortling into our cornflakes over the poetic justice of it all. Michael Cullen--one of the most economically destructive politicians ever to slough off the warrants of government--has just been appointed chairman of NZ Post. Now there will be plenty of folk who will once again be wondering at the moral compass of the present government. Michael Cullen, an academic (history) turned politician, has almost single handedly skewered the New Zealand economy.

One will never forget his profligate waste of the citizen's money in a desperate political ploy to ensure re-election, and his self-serving political motivation to throw away our fiscal surplus to make it harder for the National Government. One can still here his chortling in Parliament, saying of the surplus, "I have spent it all". And don't get us started on his repurchase of NZ Rail, which against all commercial and Treasury advice, for sake of socialist ideology, blew off over one billion dollars in overpaying Toll Holdings--which the Aussies gleefully characterised as the "Sale of the Century".

One searches in vain for worse examples of a venal politician being willing to weaken and compromise the interests of a country for sake of personal political point scoring and gain. Public servant Dr Cullen is not. Yet, current Prime Minister John Key--seemingly oblivious to such malfeasance (and there is no other word for it)--has been more than willing to employ Dr Cullen in governance roles over government owned businesses. It's as if Key believes that politicians are all just playing a game. Everything is all a bit of fun, really. No hard feelings. Nothing personal. Destroy a country--who cares. We are all good old boys.

One grimly looks forward to the long shadow and influence of Dr Cullen swanning around continuing to shape and push New Zealand in left wing directions--in much the way another former Labour politician, Sir Geoffrey Palmer has done. New Zealanders vote these guys out, and they just hang around like bad smells, enjoying government perquisites, continuing their destructive ways from other vantage points.

But there is a grimly ironic side to all this. The offical notice of Cullen's appointment to NZ Post contained this sober warning:

State Owned Enterprises Minister Simon Power today announced . . . . (A)t New Zealand Post, Hon Michael Cullen has been appointed chair from November 1 to replace Rt Hon Jim Bolger. . . ."I look forward to working with Dr Cullen to develop NZ Post's strategy to accommodate declining mail volumes and a challenging financial environment."

NZ Post, like all government owned postal services around the world, is in trouble. It is a sunset industry. It is inevitably going to go the way of the dodo bird. It is a horse-and-buggy service. Moreover, NZ Post owns Kiwibank--another socialist initiative--which while Minister of Finance, Dr Cullen championed. Kiwibank is supposed to be the replacement gem in the crown. It will turn out to be a voracious gobbler of capital and in the longer run will weaken NZ Post still further.

It is inevitable that the entire business will be broken up and sold off in the end. We expect that Dr Cullen will have to bear the ignominy of gloomy annual public reporting. NZ Post's failure will reflect back on to him. Warren Buffett once remarked that when a business leader with a superb reputation takes charge of a bad business, it is usually the reputation of the business which survives intact. In this case, we have a leader with an exceedingly bad reputation taking public responsibility for an equally exceedingly bad business. Dr Cullen's reputation will now be irrevocable and irredemiable for posterity.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Dancing ACLU Lawyers 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, September 28, 2010

One of the problems with using Constantine as a marker is that there is a tendency to anachronism, attributing to him any subsequent malfeasance on the part of Christians in power. But the Constantinian settlement was, by and large, a tolerant one. Lactantius, the early church father who tutored Constantine's children, was an apologist for this kind of toleration, which, in his day, was a toleration of pagans.

But there is a distinction between toleration of the views held by others, and toleration as an absolute desideratum. The former is crucial to every form of civilized society, Constantine let pagans continue to be pagans, and to think like pagans, and he let them continue to serve in the army (for example), but at the same time, Constantine ended the pagan sacrifices -- a momentous step, and foundational to all religious liberty.

This distinction is necessary because at a certain level, the whole society has to decide whether to go this way or that way. For example, democracy does not mean that everybody votes for president, and the winner gets to be president 57% of the time, while the loser only gets to be president on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It is not like a custody battle. The public sacrifices for the whole society either have to be performed or not. The public square cannot be a pantheon -- for if it is, then the state is god, and that is idolatry. Calling it "secularism" doesn't fix it.

There must be a God over all. That God may tell us not to hassle the people who don't believe in Him, and that is precisely what the triune God does tell us. In this mere Christendom I am talking about (you know, the idyllic one, down the road), Muslims could come from other lands and live peaceably, they could buy and sell, write letters to the editor, own property, have that property protected by the cops, and worship Allah in their hearts and homes. What they could not do is argue that minnarets have the same rights of public expression that church bells do. The public space would belong to Jesus.

Our secular gods promised to do exactly this kind of thing, saying that if we kept this public space "neutral" (as they defined neutral), then all would be allowed to do our own thing on our own time. But this secularism is teetering, and is clearly displaying its hostility to the Christian faith. What I am saying here is that a Christian settlement would do a better job of protecting the true rights of Muslims and secularists, than secularists do in protecting the rights of Christians.

The argument goes this way. If I wanted Muslims to have the right to refuse baptism (which I would certainly want), then I would have to argue that case in the name of Jesus, and from the Bible. Obviously, I think that it can be done. But if I wanted to argue from the premises of secularism that all of us are anything more than meat, bones, and protoplasm, where do I go to make the argument? The implications of a godless universe have worked their way into the structure of our laws, and it is not too long afterwards that the darkness falls. And it won't be the kind of night that you can dance away.

When tolerance becomes a universal virtue, suspended upon its own air hook and nothing else, then you come to think you can't say no to virtually anything -- including those things which will issue a fatwa against your silly views of tolerance. The universally tolerant do say no to one thing, however, and that is to any idea of Christendom. If you mention sharia law, they will talk about the rich cultural diversity that is found in certain parts of Ohio. But if you mention biblical theonomy, as being perhaps more attractive in other parts of Ohio, you will find these folks with heads between their knees, breathing into paper bags, in preparation for writing a hysterial letter to the editor. This is because universal toleration is suicidal. In Proverbs, Wisdom says that all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36), and they really do.

Our fin de siecle secularism is fully prepared to embrace that which will destroy it pronto, and to shun as a menace that faith which actually invented true toleration.
But I propose a contest. Let's build an altar of stones, an altar of absolute toleration. Let's have ACLU lawyers dance around it until noon, cutting themselves with knives, and hitting themselves on the head with briefcases. Let us build another altar, and ask Elijah to stretch out his hands toward Heaven, and call upon Yahweh. The God that answers with a truly free and tolerant society . . . He is God. Let us serve Him.

Rudders on the Prowl

The Liberal Lion of Auckland Roars

OK, we consider ourselves thoroughly ticked off. We were just stupidly going along with the idea that prisoners ought not to be able to vote. It seemed reasonable. Paul Quinn's private member's Bill to that effect seemed like a sound common sense measure of retributive justice.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere Brian Rudman the liberal lion of Auckland dumped on us big time. He pilloried us for "inventing new and twisted ways of pulling the wings off prisoners". How loathsome could we get? Clearly we needed to rethink our position.

We breathlessly began to look through Rudman's indictment for coherent arguments against our naive and stupid opinion. First was a really trenchant ad hominen attack on people like us. Rudders pointed out that we were all elitist snobs who could not bring ourselves to think that our votes should rub up alongside the votes of criminals. Good one, Brian. That really hit the spot. Nothing like a bit of good old poisoning of the well to get people away from your opponents and rushing over to the side of the liberal lion. Clearly Rudders must have been paying attention when he was a neophyte in logic classes at his dear old Auckland University.

Sorry about the sarcasm. We are only imitating our opponent. Consider this for instance:

However, if former Treasury analyst Mr Quinn were to venture out of his economic textbooks, he might discover that a democracy based on universal suffrage is the form of governance that has evolved in countries of our kind, and that however much we might roll our eyes at some of the more odious views and actions of those we disagree with, it's proved to be a more resilient, and fairer, system of governance than any other on offer.

Tut. Tut. Now, just to get this right. Universal suffrage democracy is the big deal. Any restriction, any disenfranchisement is a clear and present danger to democracy--the fairest government of them all. We know so; Rudders asks his magic mirror daily, and he tells us so. So, you see, disenfranchising prisoners is the thin end of the wedge: it is blasphemy, blasphemy, he tells us.

Well, Brian old chap, how about fourteen year olds, or three year olds for that matter? No, seriously. Answer the question. We just want to know whether you are willing to countenance any restrictions upon suffrage whatsoever. Is universal suffrage really universal, old boy? And if not, then presumably you will need to go through some ratiocinations to restrict voting to say, maybe, people eighteen and older. And as soon as you do--well, then, we need to urge you to get your head out of your ideological ostrich hole and just for once in your life learn that

a democracy based on universal suffrage is the form of governance that has evolved in countries of our kind, and that however much we might roll our eyes at some of the more odious views and actions of those we disagree with, it's proved to be a more resilient, and fairer, system of governance than any other on offer.

Don't you for a moment suggest, arrogant chap, that you can roll your eyes at the views of a child, as if somehow the political opinion of a child were not as good or sophisticated as your own. Sauce for goose and gander, old boy.

Next argument. Brian sententiously informs us that banning a prisoner from voting is arbitrary.

You cannot blanket ban anyone who crosses the prison door whether it's one day or three years, because it's arbitrary.

Arbitrary is bad. Blanket bans are bad. So they are on three year olds--and as for withholding the vote from a seventeen year old--cravenly arbitrary. "Arbitrary" would be where there is no rational selection in deciding who should have the vote. One would think that disenfranchising prisoners is anything but arbitrary: it is a clearly defined category, and one which self-selects. And it is hardly a blanket ban. It is a very specific and focused ban.

Ah, but who are we mere mortals to question the superior wisdom of the liberal lion of Auckland? We are backwoods rubes, after all. Let's hasten to Brian's next argument: he gets all worked up citing the expert opinions of the priests and priestesses at the temple of human rights.

The Human Rights Commission echoed this, calling "the right to vote in elections, without discrimination, ... one of the most fundamental of human rights and civil liberties." Arguing that people are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment, the commission said "disenfranchisement has no proven deterrent effect and it can actively undermine the ability of prisoners to engage constructively with the very society to which they will be released when discharged and, thus, their eventual social rehabilitation."

People are "sent to prison as punishment, nor for punishment . . ." That has to be the most scintillating sophistry we have read in decades. Where do these people get this from? Look, just humour an old hayseed for a moment. Going to prison is a punishment, but you don't go there to be punished? Wow. We never saw that one coming? You need to have a university degree to work that one out. Clearly removal of every freedom right in the book, and the suspension of virtually every demand right in the book is intrinsic to incarceration. Is that punishment, or not? Does it involve a suspension and removal of rights, or not? Well, of course it does. Even we dumb rubes who don't have history degrees from the good old Auckland University can see that.

So the real question--and the one you have to argue to carry your case, old boy--is that voting rights need to be placed in a special category as being more important and more fundamental than every other human right which has been suspended and prorogued by virtue of being a prisoner. Now, we know why you don't want to argue that--it would be a very, very difficult argument to mount. If imprisonment means anything, it means a suspension of rights. You can only carry the case if you prove that suffrage rights trump all those other rights which are lost when one is incarcerated.

Now, through the bluster and emoting, Brian does make an effort, in a sort of half-baked way. Again, citing his mentors, the Human Rights Commission, he parrots their idea that

The commission argued that "modern democracies are based on the concept that all people - including prisoners - have rights simply by virtue of their common humanity" and therefore, "to disregard their right to vote becomes a fundamental breach of the social contract".

Dear me. Question begging is not an argument. What is at issue is whether prisoners have a right to vote. A mere assertion that modern democracies are based on the concept of prisoners being able to vote will hardly do. The issue is whether they ought they to be so based on such a concept. Dear Brian, while it may seem compelling to cite the Human Rights Commission it means nothing. You have to actually stand there and make an argument for the position--not just beg the question.

You are dealing with backwoods rubes, after all. We like to think things through--slowly, to be sure. We cannot keep up with your lightning fast brain. Make an argument, Brian. Don't just assert. Until you do we will cling to old fashioned nostrums such as, maintaining the rule of law and social order is foundational to civil society and civil rights.

An incarcerated criminal, by definition, has acted to attack and undermine both civil society and the civil rights of others. A condign punishment is that for an appropriate time the criminal's demand rights, freedom rights, and civil rights be removed by force by the state. The relevant principle of justice is that the one who undermines and attacks civil society and the civil rights of others should suffer withdrawal from the benefits of civil society and have his rights suspended. Justice therefore requires the suspension of voting rights of criminals during the time of their punishment. It is a grave injustice to allow voting rights for incarcerated criminals.

Your move, Brian.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

About as Unique as a Pint of Salt Water 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, September 27, 2010

One of the foundational temptations for us as we consider our forms of social organization is the temptation of thinking that we are unique, and that no one has ever been in the soup we are in. Globalization, the Internet, micro-chips, frankenfood, and wireless hot-spot coffee shops all make it impossible for us to even conceive of a "mere Christendom." To talk that way, I am told, is to exhibit my delusional side.

But our problem is actually as old as it gets. Our deracinated rootlessness is an off-the-rack K-Mart problem. There is nothing new under the sun, the preacher says, but especially not this.

When C.S. Lewis wrote of "men without chests," he did not discover this phenomenon by googling it up on his iPhone. When Yeats wrote that "the center cannot hold," he did not come to this conclusion in a sports bar with fifty television screens going, with the volume turned down on all of them so that we could hear the U2 song that was blaring over the crowd. If he had, it would have been appropriate, but he didn't. Cultural decadence is something that has happened routinely to civilizations for millennia, and it is a sign of our cultural narcissism that we are somehow surprised by it happening to us. The surprise is not sincere, it is not honestly come by. Somebody really ought to read a book.

In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community's life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce each other, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power. Decadence is a falling off, a falling apart from a previous unity (Sanders, The Deep Things of God, pp. 109-110).

Gerontology is the study of how people age, and the people who are hyperventilating over our cultural dissolution really need to be informed that there is a body of work on cultural geronology that extends over many centuries, and what we are confronting now is nothing new. And this means that what we need to do is exactly what every other culture that has come apart at the seams has needed to do, and that is to believe in Jesus.

We dress differently than did the Elizabethans, and we publish books differently than did the ancient Jews. We fly through the air, and the Babylonians didn't. We eat better than did our great grandfathers. We can go down our roads a lot faster than Julius Caesar could go down his roads. But this does not change the fact that our hollow men are remarkably like the hollow men of old, and that our forgiven men act remarkably like Abraham did.

Jesus did not tell the Church to disciple the nations until the invention of the microchip, and to troubleshoot some sort of accommodation after that. Jesus did not say to preach the gospel to every creature until they start hooking cameras up to the grid in order to televise everything. He did not tell us to baptize the nations until the rise of the nation/state, that glorious phrase for some that trumps all obedience, and to then retreat to the baptism of individuals, if that. Jesus did not say that all men would be drawn to Him until people with magenta hair dye and multiple piercings started to get gigs on reality television shows. Our problem is not globalization, for pity's sake. Our problem is unbelief, and it is a very boring and ancient form of unbelief. We are about as unique as a pint of salt water a hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii.

So here is an appeal to the hollow men. The reason for that culture-wide internal ache and the resultant bizarre antics on the public stage, is that you don't know God. And the reason your sages, philosophers, wise men, statesmen, and late night jesters can do nothing to make sense of what is happening, but flail instead, is that you don't know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The reason you point helplessly to the invention of the latest whatsit as the cause of all our troubles is that you are fighting the Holy Spirit's work of convicting us of sin, righteousness, and judgment.

You have not acknowledged that the Lord Jesus was crucified in the public square by the authorities, and it is far too late to be hushed up now. A central part of the difficulty in trying to hide what He did is that He came back from the dead, and not in a corner somewhere, and then He told His disciples to be talkative about what happened. That resurrection, and the proclamations of it, cannot be hushed up either. Jesus is therefore the Lord of heaven and earth, which makes Him Lord over all our cultural corrosions. His Word tells us what to do about them, and it tells us what not to do about them.

So our leaders are not standing at a unique crossroads -- this has happened many times before. The decision they need to make is a simple binary one -- either to believe in Jesus or not. And the fact that large sections of the Church would be panicked if they did is not an illustration of a high water mark in theological development. It simply means that the cultural corrosions of unbelief have not left the Church unaffected.