Echoes in Eternity

Wow. ABC is now openly shilling for Obama's policies, as opposed to the slightly more subtle reporting they've done for the last couple years.

The WaPo had an unintentionally depressing article last week on how today's school children are getting behind causes. Oh, for the days when kids learned about good character as the priority over cultural fads. We're circling the drain...

"Polystyrene trays are bad for the environment and they have a big carbon footprint and they're made out of oil, which is bad for the environment, because it makes global warming," said Margot Bloch, 8, a third-grader at the school. Her mother, a peace activist, is among the club's sponsors.

On a side note, I've been told that The Goode Family is especially adept at ripping into politically correct families. I'm going to check it out.

From Money, Greed, and God:

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The Zero-Sum Game Myth is believing that trade requires a winner and a loser.
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Everything I Needed to Know About the Market I Learned in Kindergarten

It was sixth grade. We played the "trading game"... The teacher passed out little gifts to all of the students... [she] probably picked them all up in the dollar aisle at the local Kmart.

After giving every kid one gift, our teacher split the class into five groups of five students each. She then asked us to write down, on a scale of one to ten, how much we liked our gift. That was it. We didn't talk to anyone else. We just decided how much we liked our toy. Our teacher then compiled all the scores and added up the total.

Then she said we could trade with the other kids in our group. No one had to trade... Of course, a few students kept or got stuck with their original gift, but many ended up with a toy they liked more. Again, we graded our toys and the teacher added up the scores. The total score went up.

Then she told us that we could trade with everyone in the room. Now we all had twenty-four possible trading partners rather than just four...

After everyone had a chance to trade, we again graded our toys and added up the scores. The total number had gone way up. Almost everyone ended up with a toy he liked more than the one he started with. No one had a score that had gone down. The only kids whose scores didn't go up were the ones who happened to get gifts they really liked at the beginning...

I didn't get the point of the game until I played it again twenty-five years later. As it happens, the game teaches some of the most important lessons of economics.

Lesson One: Trading freely can add value even though the traded items remains physically unchanged.
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Lesson Two: Normally when trading freely, the more trading partners there are, the better.
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Lesson Three: A free exchange is a win-win game.
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Think about it. The trading partners wouildn't trade if each did not perceive himself as better off as a result. [This is what John Stossel calls the "double thank you."]
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Lesson Four: The game is win-win because of the rules set beforehand.

The players aren't allowed to coerce or steal from each other. A free market is not a free-for-all in which everybody can do what they want... Ideally, the players would be virtuous enough to play by the rules. But in the trading game, as in real life, you can't count on the virtue of others... So you need an outside enforcer. In the game... the teacher played this role. In real life, it includes parents, teachers, churches... and the government.

Lesson Five: Scarcity is almost always real.
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The peaceable kingdom of God with limitless plenty isn't one of the options. The basic options are a win-lose society based on the laws of the jungle, a lose-lose society of coercive socialism..., or a market where win-wins are possible...

Lesson Six: Opportunity costs.
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[N]o one gets to have more than one toy. In the real world, if I only have ten grand, I can't buy both a ten-thousand-dollar Chevy Impala and a ten-thousand-dollar first-issue Tales from the Crypt comic book... Trading can make me better off than I was before, but it can't give me everything.

Lesson Seven: Economic value is in the eye of the beholder.

I have to say, we need more of those teachers today as mentioned above. She was brilliant. Unfortunately, you're probably more likely to find a teacher who derides capitalism than actually understands it.

This is sickening...

[UPDATE] Ron Paul nails it on this issue.

A wonderful outcome to the depraved action of a mentally ill man: Tiller's partial-birth abortion clinic is closing permanently!

From Money, Greed, and God:

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The Piety Myth is focusing on our good intentions rather than on the unintended consequences of our actions.
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"Piety," said the Christian philosopher Etienne Gilson, "is no substitute for technique." What he meant is that having the right intentions, being oriented in the right way, doesn't take the place of doing things right. A pilot's caring deeply for his passengers and wanting to land a plane safely are no substitute for his learn how to actually land planes safely. Jesus suggest the same thing. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." Don't forget the third item: love the Lord with all your mind. And don't misunderstand heart. Your heart isn't just your feelings. In the Bible, heart refers to the seat of your will and your emotions. I hope you already have a heart for the poor. Lots of Christians do. But do you have a mind for the poor? Unfortunately, that's in rather short supply.

God knows your heart. Spiritually you're better off a little mixed up about economics than indifferent to human suffering. Economically, though, only what you do is important, whatever your reason. Buying a bunch of bananas at Costco will have the same economic effect no matter why you buy them.
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In fact, it's morally self-indulgent to feel good about our motives when it comes to actions that affect the world... when it's time to roll up our sleeves and actually try to help someone, fixating on our motives can become a stumbling block. It can distract us from discovering the right action at the right time.
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Henry Hazlitt, an economic journalist, thought this was so important that he defined economics in terms of consequences. "The art of economics," he said, "consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

This is one of those principles that are easy to get and even easier to forget. Unfortunately, Christians have supported all sorts of policies that were well motivated but that made matters worse, not better. Let's look at a few popular policies that are long on compassion but short on prudence.

A "Living Wage"
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Fair Trade
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Foreign Aid
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Government-Run Welfare

(p. 35-49)

The Piety Myth concept is so important in all areas of life, not just economics. While liberals tend to be the worst violators of the idea that as long as you do something, it doesn't matter what you do, everyone (especially Christians) should remember to guard against it daily. Spend your time, money, and effort on useful things. Be discerning!

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UPDATE: In related news, a challenge to Republicans.

[Republicans] have decided, as a matter of firm principle, to have no solid center. Because the breeze is blowing slightly to the right, they have tied the helium balloon of their core principles to whatever the Democrats are currently saying, and waft gently (to the right) as they dream of the next election.

Doug Wilson has an excellent piece today on the motives behind the new Marxist push in America to take from the rich and give to the "poor."

The word envy enters a lot of political and economic discussion, but it is usually referred to the envy of those who stand to gain materially after the smoke of redistribution all clears away. When someone runs on a platform of free choocolate milk for everybody, envy is driving the whole thing, and it is barely disguised. When those without money outnumber those who have it, and the question of equitable distribution comes up for a vote, how does that vote usually go? As the wise man said, it is two coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. Like I said, that is how political envy is usually thought of, and it ought to be thought of a lot more. That is a big part of our problem.

But envy also operates at another level, a much higher level. This is what we find on display in the behavior of the pampered and privileged who wrap themselves in the dogmas of the hard left. Why would they do that? Envy doesn't explain it, at least not the kind of envy outlined above. These people already have all the chocolate milk they could want. Correct that -- they actually have all the carob-flavored coconut water that they want, which is another subject, albeit related.
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[M]en envy more than material goods. They also envy power, and the ability to dispose of others with the flourish of a pen. And when the envious are driving a nation down, each new economic crisis is used as an excuse to fix what they believe to be the real problem, which is lack of personal political control. The crisis is used, not to address the economic woes, which are simply the presenting problem, but rather to address what they believe to be the real crisis -- the fact that they cannot control everything. Yet.

From Money, Greed, and God:

The Nirvana Myth is not simply the belief that good will triumph in the end or the belief that the kingdom of God is already present in history. It's the delusion that we can build utopia if we try hard enough, and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it doesn't measure up to utopia.

We learned in the twentieth century that acting on this myth can be disastrous. Never has there been a greater gap between ideals and outcomes than in communism. In fact, so many people would not have been led astray if communism had advertised baser goals. No, communist brutalities needed the cover of some grand moral vision. Communism appealed to, even if it inverted, man's moral impulse. This is the worst outcome of the Nirvana Myth.

But the myth can have subtle effects even if we reject utopian schemes. To avoid its dangers, we have to resist the temptation to compare our live options with an ideal that we can never realize... It doesn't do anyone any good to tear down a society that is "unjust" compared with the kingdom of God if that society is more just than any of the ones that will replace it.

Compared with Nirvana, no real society looks good. Compared with utopia, Stalinist Russia and America at its best will both get bad reviews. The differences between them may seem trivial compared to utopia. That's one of the grave dangers of utopian thinking: it blinds us to the important differences among the various ways of ordering society... The free exchange of wages for work in the market place starts to look like slavery. Tough competition for market share between companies is confused with theft and survival of the fittest. Banking is confused with usury and exploitation. This shouldn't surprise us. Of course a modern capitalist society like the United States looks terrible compared with the kingdom of God. But that's bad moral reasoning. The question isn't whether capitalism measures up to the kingdom of God. The question is whether there's a better alternative in this life. (p. 31-32)

HT: My wonderful wife.

So Obama wouldn't promote the National Day of Prayer, but he will make June the national "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month?" It's particularly interesting how President Barry repeatedly mentions the "HIV/AIDS epidemic" in this country. I thought that lie was put to bed long ago. It's not widespread (not talking globally), nor is it an epidemic like the typical disease where one has little-to-no ability to protect oneself. With AIDS, if you're a heterosexual and monogamous American, you're extremely unlikely to get it. If you're a pervert who enjoys intimate time with your own gender and filling yourself with mind-numbing drugs, you're highly likely to contract it.

Doug Wilson has some humorous reasons to be grateful for this proclamation:

10. That, despite the glowing rhetoric, nobody appears to have noticed that equal rights for bisexuals means that such marriages (when we get there) would have to have a minium of three copulating units. So the good news is that President Obama is still guilty of hate-criming the bisexuals. And imagine my astonishment that he is doing this legally. And nobody pushing this seems to be aware of how filled with hate they all still are.

9. That this happened at a time when we have an example to follow as we craft our responses. All we have to say is that we think a wise heterosexual, having lived that life, should be able to make better judgments than someone who hasn't had the richness of that experience. That's all.
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6. That they are unwittingly paving the way for the legalization of polygamy, which will prove to be the basis for the rebuilding of the Republican Party. Then watch out.

5. That the president issued this proclamation while at the same time holding to the same position on gay marriage as recently articulated by the winsome Miss California, thus showing in yet another way that he is filled to the brim with thought crimes and all manner of evil.
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3. That they had the foresight to press these issues in the midst of an economic downturn. Sexual energies are powerful when harnessed, and suppose, say, the nation's shoe manufacturers are languishing. All you have to do is proclaim National Footwear Fetish Week, and bam! there you are, back in the game.

2. That the president is clearly hearing Dick Cheney's footsteps everywhere. On foreign policy certainly, but now that the former VP has declared himself a tolerance-monger on gay marriage, Obama is getting chased down the road by him on this issue as well. You can cluck at both of them with moral disapproval all you want, but the entertainment value is still high.

1. That they are working us into this slowly. September as it turns out is Screw the Pooch Month, but the American people won't be ready for that for, oh, weeks yet.

"This global-warming frenzy has all the marks of a classic sociological phenomenon known as groupthink. As a rule, when partisans appeal to "consensus" in a scientific dispute, chances are that: (a) there's not a consensus; (b) the partisans are trying to silence dissent and marginalize dissenters; and (c) the evidence for their view isn't that great. No scientist worth her salt would appeal to consensus in making a case for, say, the theory of continental drift." (Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God, p. 195)

As mentioned before, abortionist Dr. Tiller was killed this weekend in his church. I also happened to watch the film "Valkyrie" this weekend, which got me thinking about the parallels between assassinating Hitler and killing Tiller. Assuming one isn't an absolute pacifist, for Christians, what makes the former morally acceptable but the latter decried as evil? Or are they both wrong or both good? After all, if you saw a small child about to be killed by a man, wouldn't it be a very moral thing to kill him (or at least violently resist him)?

Greg Koukl has an excellent discussion of this very question here. Basically, he argues that killing Hitler would have likely saved many thousands of lives, whereas killing a lone abortionist may save very few (and hurt the overall objective of saving the lives of the unborn).

Imagine for just a minute commandos in the Second World War impersonating Nazi officers, dropped behind Nazi lines to infiltrate concentration camps. Their mission? Destroy the gas chambers. Now mingling incognito with the rest of the camp cadre, they have many opportunities to kill other soldiers, even officers. Even the Commandant. But do you kill the individual executioner or do you go after the gas chamber? In this case, it seems that killing the individual would be wrong even though he was truly murderous, because it would keep the commandos from fulfilling their larger mission. And their failure would mean more lives lost in the long run. The short term gain would be no victory because the machinery of destruction would still be in place. Do you see that?

What this illustration shows is that there is no necessary contradiction in the view that abortion is a holocaust, yet the killing of individual abortionists is properly condemned. In fact, it is precisely because we hold to the innocent humanity of the unborn that we insist on an approach to this solution that is directed at the machinery of the killing--the laws, the economics and the deep human need that makes the alternative appealing. That's our focus.

[UPDATE: Doug Wilson has posted some good thoughts on this matter:

Sure, we condemn the murder of Tiller now, like good citizens, but we will only do so unless and until the targeted murder of such individuals is determined by the Supreme Court to be a consitutional right we didn't know we had. Turns out they found it in a recently discovered penumbra somewhere. Once they say it is okay, we will all immediately shut up about it, right?

Well, no, because the Supreme Court doesn't have the authority to declare murder okay, and only ghastly human beings like Tiller think they do. When such men take the Supremes up on their invitation to any slaughter that has been given the legal okay, they are helping to create a society in which lawlessness reigns. They cooperate with those who frame mischief with a law. But once this lawlessness has taken root, the bright boys running everything start to discover that lawlessness has certain shortcomings as a social theory.

One last comment. The fact that Tiller was a member of Reformation Lutheran pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with our nation. But even this highlights another interesting feature. If the suspect Roeder in fact is the guilty party, and is a member of a conservative church somewhere, the chances are pretty good that he will be excommunicated (as Paul Hill was) for his bloody ways. The chances that someone like Tiller would be excommunicated from a liberal church for his bloodlust are chances approaching zero.