Echoes in Eternity

So I had my first direct run-in with (I believe) the effects of Obamacare today, and it left me with mixed feelings. The company where I work sent out the annual email update regarding the costs of health insurance premiums. Usually, we see a bit of an uptick in costs, but this year, I saw a pretty significant dip in what it will cost me to cover my family with health insurance. Pretty sweet, huh? But then I read the details a bit further and discovered that the insurance company is going to an age-based premium grid. In other words, it depends on your age for how much you pay for your insurance. And, as one would expect, the costs increase with age. So I, as a 32-year-old, pay significantly less for my insurance than I would if I were 52. And this applies to the spouses of employees as well. So while I am seeing a decent decrease in the cost of premiums this year, my fellow employees over the age of 50 are getting hit by a huge increase.

Here is my theory for what is behind these drastic changes. Obamacare has a number of policy measures which could affect the state of health insurance, but two of the most egregious are the ban of pre-existing conditions exclusions and increasing the age that dependents can remain covered to 26. Obviously, both of these have significant costs involved. And since the costs of insurance have already been skyrocketing in recent years, insurance companies have to be a little creative in how they pass along the costs to their customers (you and me).

"Take a people who are able and strong. Place them in the wealthiest land on earth. Surround them with unparalleled opportunity. Then pay them not to work, not to strive, not to achieve. Pay them to accept nonproductivity as a way of life. Agree to subsidize their families with food, shelter, health care, and money if the fathers will leave.

Do this for two or three generations and see what you produce. You will have a people who are unmotivated and dependent, whose hopes and dreams rise no higher than their subsidies - a people who have lost the work ethic, who have learned that others will take responsibility for them and who therefore assert little discipline or control over their own lives. You will have emasculated their men, making them expendable and unnecessary to their families' existence. You will have created a generation of prideless, fatherless youth who believe that receiving and taking is better than working and investing. And when you have seen the hope disappear from the eyes of the young, you can be sure you have developed an effective formula for the destruction of a people. We call it welfare." - Robert Lupton

This is so, so good.

For every gallon of gas that is sold in the United States, on average, the local, state and federal taxes come out to 48 cents. The average profit taken away from every gallon of gas by Exxon is --brace yourselves for unsavory news about the oil buccaneers -- 2 cents. If you don't like oil profiteering, then you really have to learn how to see our public servants as the equivalent of 24 Exxons, stacked on top of your travel plans like they were so many leeches.

Exxon feels free to take that 2 cents because they explored, researched, drilled, transported, refined, transported, and sold the gas that you were interested in buying. The government is entitled to it . . . why?

God says not to steal, and not even to think about stealing by means of coveting. We have to learn that our bad attitude toward free enterprise is caused by the larceny in our hearts. We think the way we do about oil companies because we want a piece of the action, for nothing. We don't think that way about predatory taxation for the same reason that one thief doesn't see the larceny in the heart of his fellow thieves. We are looking for the kickback.

As a wise man posted somewhere, "It's not theft if you have to fill out a form." So the devotional thought for the morning is that Jesus wants you to feel sorry for Exxon. And when we hear this call to radical discipleship, our faith staggers. Who can do these things? And the reply comes, comforting our hearts, that with God all things are possible.

Zach Nielsen has a great post on the reason behind why we don't see many Down's Syndrome people anymore.

Because today 90% of women who are given the news that their baby in the womb has Down's, elect to have that child terminated through abortion murdered. I know that language sounds quite harsh and potentially inflammatory. But shouldn't we call it what it is? If we can agree that it is a human person in the womb, (we don't need a Bible to prove this, just a 10th grade science class) shouldn't we call it what it is? If it is a human person in the womb, should we be shocked when we hear the word "murder"? Shouldn't that shock lead us to stop the practice of it instead of softening language so that people's feelings don't get hurt by the word "murder"?

“The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. “Our whole lives are their business.” The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.

When the provision of paternal security replace the provision of justice as the function of the state, the state stops providing justice. The ersatz parent ceases executing judgment against those who violate the law, and the nation begins losing the benefits of justice. Those who are concerned about the chaos into which the criminal justice system has fallen should consider what the state’s function has become. Because the state can only be a bad imitation of a father, as a dancing bear act is of a ballerina, the protection of this Leviathan of a father turns out to be a bear hug.” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 184).

Doug Wilson wrote an excellent post on the recent flap surrounding Ron Paul's comments in a recent Republican debate in favor of legalizing drug use and prostitution.

While many Christians are unsettled by Paul's idea of legalizing drugs, for example, I am far more concerned about the millions that have gotten themselves addicted to the crack cocaine of other people's money, and who need a daily fix of their power and privilege, paid for by beyond ridiculous economic policies.
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Adultery was a crime in ancient Israel, and a great deal of that activity is committed with prostitutes, and so, there you go. But smoking dope was not a crime under biblical law, and so there you go. And lest you think this would create a vast population of lotus eaters, the Bible does not give us warrant to create a great network of welfare payments that enable people to live like irresponsible potheads, getting dope from friends and their dinner of Cheetos from their food stamps. If we didn't fund it, we probably wouldn't have quite so much of it. Just a thought.
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Many of our modern statist do-gooders and bedwetters think they do not fit the description of the abusive rulers in the Lord's parable because their intentions (viewed under the magnifying glass of their very own wisdom) are so clearly good and full of the waft of sunny uplift. But they are the ones who created the wastelands of the modern American inner city, filled our American penitentiaries with millions of men, who live out their lives in the greatest dog pound ever, and who choked the economy that could feed the world by harassing hard-working men and women all day every day with niggling restrictions, regulations, and rules. Morever, they are impervious to any evidence that would actually demonstrate to them the desolations caused by their pride and officiousness.

Mark Steyn has a good piece on the problem this country faces with entitlements... particularly a "sense of entitlement."

I like to think that upon arrival in this great republic I assimilated pretty quickly. Within four or five months, I was saying “zee” and driving on the right more often than not. But it took me longer to get the hang of the word “entitlement.” You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use — “sense of entitlement” — in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.

Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible government — that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect.
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“Entitlement commitments are not debts,” wrote John Hinderaker of the blog Powerline. “Congress can wipe them out simply by repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

That’s technically true in the same sense that it’s technically true Congress can wipe out a lot of our debts — or at any rate our debtors — by nuking Beijing. But is either likely to happen under any scenario this side of total societal meltdown? Indeed, I find it easier to imagine economic collapse, secession, civil war, Mad Max on I-95, cannibal gangs of the undocumented preying on gated communities of upscale gays, etc., than any combination of House, Senate, and president “repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

Which is where we came in. Whether or not government “entitlements” are debts, they very quickly become a psychological disorder — and a “sense of entitlement” is harder to dislodge than almost anything else. Government entitlement breeds psychological entitlement breeds a utopia of myopia. I don’t mean merely in the sense that polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans still feel entitled to their entitlements, but in a more profound way.
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John Hinderaker is right. We can, in theory, repeal the entitlements. Repealing the sense of entitlement is the tricky part.

I see a lot of charities doing many good things in our inner cities, from urban housing development to cheap groceries. But until this country tackles the sense of entitlement that has crept into our hearts and eliminates the destructive entitlement policies that have helped that mentality to take root while also destroying our economy, those charities will continue to merely spoon water out of the Titanic's hold. Unless those moral and political leaks are repaired, we will continue to sink. It starts with repentance... unfortunately, our socio-political landscape is lacking prophets.

Ron Paul gives a lengthy reasoning for his position on abortion. It's very good.

Doug Wilson has a good post on how Christianity is necessarily political and thinking it isn't leads to a Kingdom of God that isn't of this world or intended to change our lives in the least.

You see, if the gospel says that repentance and belief actually mean something in this world -- like canceling that sex change operation, or forgoing the nuptials with someone whose genitalia are uncannily similar to yours, or letting your kid stay alive, or even worse, having a repentant king say that such goings-on ought not to be going on -- such particulars might create a stumbling block. No stumbling blocks! We must preach an unfettered message of repentance, by which we mean that we must thunder a message that every man must repent of "stuff." Like what? You know, stuff.

Doug Wilson has an excellent piece on the dangers of political loyalties.

[T]he issue is not whether you vote Republican or not. The issue is whether you trust Republican. If we do that, then we are a bigger fool than we look.

It is not as though God is making us choose between evils, with us trying to figure out which one is the lesser. Voting Republican is not a venial sin, with a vote for the Democrats being a steaming hot mortal one. The issue on all these things is why and how. Trusting the Democrats is certainly a mortal sin. Trusting the Republicans is a venial one . . . but a sin nonetheless. Christians really ought to knock it off. But trusting perfectionistic third party candidates is obviously the Pathway of Light, upon which, if you walk, no political temptations whatever can behall you. Right? Well, suit yourself, friend. If you never enroll in the class, then nobody ever gets to grade your papers.

At the same time, the coordinates of my convictions do place me a bit out of the mainstream. I do sympathize with the sentiment that says, "If God had wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates." But just as we get the representatives we deserve, so also we get the candidates we deserve. We are not mis-represented. We are not under-represented. We are represented well.

My hope and prayer is that this representation will at some point in the near future signal a turn which can only be described as a political repentance. Repentance means a change of mind, a different direction entirely -- and not just the same old disobedience, only slower. A man in an adulterous relationship, who only sees his mistress once a week now, cannot call his tapering off repentance. A man getting drunk every other weekend cannot think of this as a repentant lifestyle because it is nothing like it used to be back in college. If sin were the city pool, it does not ultimately matter if you are only up to your ankles in the kiddie pool, or doing cannonballs off the high dive.

When it comes to spending, the Republicans are grannies who get into the sherry cabinet way more than they ought to, and Obama is Charlie Sheen. Such comparisons do not redound to anybody's glory, but they do affect what we might decide to do about it. The grannies have an admitted problem, but we do not need to take them off to rehab on a stretcher. Like we do with some people.

Just when it seems like the federal government's ever-expanding power and reach has finally hit terminal velocity, up pops even more absurd new laws and legislation. First this week was the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act and its ridiculous ban of snack food in public schools. And now today, the utterly corrupt Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the fabrication of any cribs with sides that drop... all because 30 babies have died in crib-related accidents in the last decade. In that same time period, 15 MILLION babies were killed by a little procedure called abortion... but no one is banning that. Also in the last ten years, approximately 30 children have died because they swallowed balloons. So I'd imagine that we very well may see balloons made illegal next week (I wish I were joking). The CPSC is the same organization that brought us the horrendous Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008 and the "Year of the Recall" in 2007. If we're going to try to reduce the federal deficit, I'd recommend starting by defunding the CPSC, since it has single-handedly put thousands of people out of work and destroyed hundreds of companies.

This is good news! Huge, in fact, as it has much broader implications than just gutting ObamaCare. The Supreme Court will ultimately decide this though.

John Stossel has a great piece on the importance of property rights in growing and sustaining wealth and prosperity. It all comes down to the simplicity of having one's own mailing address... something Americans take for granted. I have an address because I own a plot of land in Crystal, Minnesota. As Stossel points out, because of that, I can borrow money for investment and any business I start out of my home can be legally recognized. In developing countries, due to the lack of rule of law, property rights are either non-existent or capricious in nature. You may live in a home, but nothing is legally stopping the government or an individual from claiming that home for himself**. That is why if poor countries are ever going to begin to prosper, they need property rights. And to get those rights, they need a stable rule of law. And to get that rule of law, tyrants and dictators need to be removed and struggling democracies need to be strengthened. Which is why a simple government military intervention can sometimes do more long-term good in one day in a particular country than all of the Western charties can in a year. Or it can do much harm.

** Of course, in this country, we're steadily losing our property rights. Because of serious abuses of eminent domain, American bodies of government (local or federal) have been taking people's homes and property from them without consent and sometimes without proper compensation.

As many people know by now, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of one-time senator and full-time scoundrel John Edwards, passed away this week from cancer. I hope she finds in the next life the faithful Husband that she never found in this life. Unfortunately, this interview doesn't give much hope that she knew Christ as her savior. In it, she says that she decided that God wasn't one who intervenes but one that "promises salvation and enlightenment." Now that last part is true (though what she meant by that is anyone's guess), but the first part shows that she had a confused understanding of God, probably stemming from a Prosperity Gospel-ish view of Him. If God doesn't heal you when you ask, then it must mean that He is either unable to heal you or that you don't have enough faith. The Prosperity Gospel never bothers to ask if perhaps it is not His will to heal you. This is a sad example of wrong theology leading to wasted suffering. Praise God for those who don't lose faith in the God that intervenes when they suffer.

If you're like me, your first reaction to last week's huge WikiLeaks disclosure was either one of ambivalence or even a little feeling of "about time." But in truth, such leaks as these will likely do much harm and little good for the world. Theodore Dalrymple explains:

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.

The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the means.

Doug Wilson has some great comments about Glenn Beck in the video below.

Russell Moore has an excellent post on this weekend's tragic Glenn Beck rally in D.C. The tragedy lies not in what people were rallying around (conservative values), but that Beck, a Mormon, has somehow become the face of Christianity in the political sphere. And what's worse, tons of evangelical leaders don't seem to see the problem, they are so blinded by their political leanings.

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

This is an interesting article from a British paper. Interesting in part because it gives a glimpse at the European media's view of American politics.

Can it get any worse for President Obama? Undoubtedly yes. Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people
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The “let them eat cake” approach didn’t play well over two centuries ago, and it won’t succeed today.

2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership
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[A] staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do.

3. Obama fails to inspire

In contrast to the soaring rhetoric of his 2004 Convention speech in Boston which succeeded in impressing millions of television viewers at the time, America is no longer inspired by Barack Obama’s flat, monotonous and often dull presidential speeches and statements delivered via teleprompter... Even Jimmy Carter was more moving.

4. The United States is drowning in debt
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5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat
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This is not an approach that is proving popular with the American public, and even most European governments have long ditched this tax and spend approach to saving their own economies.

6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake

In an extraordinary act of political Harakiri, President Obama leant his full support to the hugely controversial, unpopular and divisive health care reform bill, with a monstrous price tag of $940 billion, whose repeal is now supported by 55 per cent of likely US voters.
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7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive
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8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration

It is hard to think of a single foreign policy success for the Obama administration, but there have been plenty of missteps which have weakened American global power as well as the standing of the United States. The surrender to Moscow on Third Site missile defence, the failure to aggressively stand up to Iran’s nuclear programme, the decision to side with ousted Marxists in Honduras, the slap in the face for Great Britain over the Falklands, have all contributed to the image of a US administration completely out of its depth in international affairs.
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9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security

10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness
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It is difficult to see how a US president who holds these views and does not even accept America’s greatness in history can actually lead the world’s only superpower with force and conviction.
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There is a distinctly Titanic-like feel to the Obama presidency and it’s not hard to see why. The most left-wing president in modern American history has tried to force a highly interventionist, government-driven agenda that runs counter to the principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, and limited government that have made the United States the greatest power in the world, and the freest nation on earth.
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President Obama is increasingly out of step with the American people, by advancing policies that undermine the United States as a global power, while undercutting America’s deep-seated love for freedom.