Christians and Warfare
Today in church the pastor asked veterans to stand, then people with a veteran in the family, and then asked us to applaud them. It was pretty awkward but I sat there doing nothing; I wasn’t “making a point” but I also could not in good conscience applaud for people carrying out what I thought were horrible instructions. Then we went back to praising the Prince of Peace.
Beyond the obvious tension (some might say contradiction), there’s the added complication that the Christian churches that are the most pro-military also tend to be very distrustful of the US government’s assault on the church. They routinely lambaste the sick Western culture and value system depicted in the mainstream media. So why would we so blindly praise the efforts of the armed forces who follow the orders of these same government officials, in order to spread the blessings of our way of life to other people around the world?
I realize there is an unfortunate association historically among Christians and organized warfare. Is the present pattern in the US simply a reflection of that, or does it stem from something else?
Last question: Are the Christian churches in other countries also pro-military, or is that an American pattern?
(Note, I have in mind Protestant evangelical churches in the above remarks. I’m sure Quaker services are not so gung ho about the military.)
Krugman: Austerity Is Bad, Unless It’s Taxing Rich People
Krugman is up in arms over the faux austerians: All along they’ve been worrying about the budget deficits in Europe, but when France goes and raises taxes on rich people, they complain about that too! The nerve of these people.
Yet as usual, Krugman doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. In his zeal to attack the people bashing the French authorities, Krugman slips and says:
Again, the point is not that France is problem-free; the question is why this only moderately troubled nation attracts rating downgrades and so much apocalyptic rhetoric.
And the answer just has to be politics. France’s sin isn’t excessive debt, especially poor growth, lousy productivity (it has more or less matched Germany since 2000), poor job growth (ditto), or anything like that. Its sin is that of balancing its budget by raising taxes instead of slashing benefits. There’s no evidence that this is a disastrous policy — and in fact bond markets don’t seem concerned — but who needs evidence? [Bold added.]
And here I thought balancing the budget in the midst of a liquidity trap was a really really bad idea.
(For those keeping score: Krugman is the one relying on a crude notion of “aggregate demand” causing the recession, where tax cuts and government spending are both examples of “stimulus” albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness because of different “multipliers.” In contrast, right-wingers have always stressed supply-side effects, and said that the best way to grow out of a budget hole is to slash government spending, rather than raising marginal tax rates. For example, see my EconLib piece on all of this from January, and especially follow the link to the June 2010 ECB bulletin (start reading at page 83), giving historical examples of “expansionary austerity” and stressing the importance of reducing budget deficits via spending cuts, not tax hikes. I guess Krugman gets his ideas of austerians from guys in a bar or something? He obviously isn’t reading their actual positions.)
O’Driscoll vs. Sumner
There is just too much good stuff to excerpt from Gerald O’Driscoll’s lead essay at Cato Unbound on central banks. OK fine, here’s just a taste:
Does the literature make an intellectual case for ending the Fed? The 19th century economic journalist and Economist editor Walter Bagehot thought it would have been better if the Bank of England had never been created. In Lombard Street, Bagehot argued that a decentralized system of many banks of approximately equal size would have been preferable. Instead of reserves being concentrated at the Bank of England, reserves in the competitive system of banking would have been dispersed among all banks.
Concentrating reserves at a central bank was the cause, not the cure, for panics. The concentration of reserves exposed the banking system to periodic panics and scrambles for liquidity. Bagehot’s famous dictum that Bank of England must lend freely at penalty interest rates in times of panic was a second-best solution to a problem caused by centralizing reserves in that institution.
Now Scott Sumner responded (in a very polite and scholarly way). You know how I often complain that Sumner is a bit slippery?
Watch this. I’m going to excerpt from Sumner’s article, then make a point about it:
I believe O’Driscoll is overly optimistic about the effectiveness of gold standard regimes. In addition, I would argue that we should avoid policy regimes that are “tamper-proof.” We don’t know what sort of policy regime is best. Therefore we should have policy regimes that are easy to alter in a situation where they appear to be causing grievous economic harm.
…
O’Driscoll briefly discusses the possibility of combining fiat money and free banking. He ends up concluding that this sort of regime would be too susceptible to political tampering. In my view that’s a powerful advantage of a fiat money regime. Throughout history there are many examples of rigid monetary regimes that went seriously awry and caused great damage before they collapsed. In the early 1930s prices fell sharply under an international gold standard regime. Countries did not begin recovering from the Depression until they abandoned the regime. Argentina suffered from falling prices and nominal GDP in the late 1990s and early 2000s under a rigid “tamper-proof” currency board.
…
In many respects the eurozone of today is an even more “tamper-proof” monetary regime than a gold standard or currency board regime. It is extremely difficult for an individual country to exit the euro without triggering a collapse of their banking system. The euro is much more than a fixed exchange rate regime. The peripheral economies of the eurozone certainly would have sharply devalued their currencies if they had been able to do so.
…
So then it becomes a judgment call. How bad are the future mistakes under fiat money likely to be? And how bad might things end up under a rigid monetary regime such as a gold standard? In my view the downside risks from a return to a gold standard, however constituted, are far greater than the risks of persevering with fiat money and trying to make incremental improvements. [Bold added.]
As I hope the bolded statements above make clear, Sumner was not making offhand remarks that his proposal was less “rigid” than O’Driscoll’s. Nope, Sumner was stating it as the reason O’Driscoll was wrong (or at least one of the reasons).
In light of comments such as the ones I quoted above, the editor(s) at Cato understandably titled Sumner’s reaction essay, “In Defense of a Flexible Monetary Policy.” How could anyone possibly object to such a title, right?
Oh wait, Sumner did. On his blog linking to the exchange, Sumner writes: “My only quibble is the title they gave my essay. I favor maximum policy rigidity—the pegging of the price of a NGDP futures contract.”
My point in bringing this up, is I want you Sumner fans out there to realize I’m not merely whining when I say the guy is slippery. I’m not saying he’s a liar, just saying he is slippery. You spend months reading him, to understand his world view and why, for example, you should “never reason from a price change,” and then you’re told that a jump in stock prices proves QE is working. It’s truly why I am not following him as closely as I used to, because I don’t feel that he’s a stationary target.
The Government Should Not Legislate Colors, or Morality
Suppose you heard the following:
BOB: The government shouldn’t legislate colors!
GENE: You don’t really believe that. You think it’s OK for Maxwell to go around bashing people’s heads in with his silver hammer?
Replace “colors” with “morality” and you’ll see what’s wrong with Gene Callahan’s recent post.
I Was Wrong on “Opting Out”
Even though complaining about the TSA is the new libertarian pastime, I had never gotten that worked up about it. Of course, I agreed with the intellectual arguments that the TSA and their policies were a horrendous violation of liberty that didn’t make us safer. But since I personally travel a lot for business, I took the road more traveled and went through the scanners. I even made a naughty joke about it to get fellow libertarians to cut me some slack.
I was wrong. Everybody should be opting out as a matter of principle.
I realized this when coming back from my recent trip to Galt’s Gulch in Chile. Since we were both performers at the event, musician Jordan Page and I happened to be on the same return flight. Jordan is, shall we say, quite vocal with his views. (For example, his guitar case has a sticker that says, “FLUORIDE IS POISON: Read the back of your toothpaste.”)
Anyway, Jordan was clearly opting out. I had never done it, so I asked him stupid questions like, “When do I actually tell them I want to opt out?”
I was amazed at what happened. Before we had given any indication of hostility, we were waiting in the line to the side to be patted down. The TSA guy working the scanner said, “You guys are opting out?” We said yes. He answered, “Good luck,” implying that we were doing something foolish. He then said, “C’mon guys through this, I got a two for one special!” Jordan said something like, “No thanks, I prefer liberty to tyranny.” The guy got really mad and said, “That’s not funny.”
Some of the TSA employees were sympathetic, letting us know it might be a few minutes before we could get patted down. But others were snippy. For example, I was standing exactly where the first guy had told me to wait, and then another employee needed me to step aside to get through the swinging door. She said something like, “Excuse me, but I need to, you know, go to work?” As if I were inconveniencing her with my selfishness.
The patdown itself was PG-13 bordering on R-rated, but it was an older guy who announced everything he was about to do and was clearly uncomfortable with the whole situation. (Unlike Jordan’s snarkiness, I was using the strategy of extreme politeness in the situation. I think both approaches have their pros and cons.) After it was over, Jordan congratulated me quite publicly, and then told me, “I’m so proud of you. You popped your TSA cherry.” (By the way, he gave me permission to blog all of this.)
Jordan then said, “Yes, this takes more time and is even more intrusive than the scanner. But if everybody walks through the scanner, then they win.” I now agree with him, and from now on will try to get to the airport with plenty of time to make sure I can opt out without missing my flight.
If you have never done it, I encourage you to get to the airport early and opt out at least once. Be completely courteous about it. The government claims it’s not forcing anyone to get the possibly harmful and embarrassing body scans. See whether they live up to that in practice, or if you get the sense that they are very disdainful of people who exercise what–we are told–is our option.
If everybody who objects to the TSA opts out, it would force the government’s hand to either discontinue the scanning or to drop the farce that it is “voluntary.” That’s why I will be opting out as much as possible in my future traveling.
Krugman on Government Fiscal Hole: “Death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.”
In 1984, one of the minor characters early on disappears because he was just too enthusiastic in his zeal for Big Brother. I always think of this guy when Paul Krugman unfurls his refreshing candor and explains the full implications of his brand of political economy. The below clip is from a talk Krugman gave in DC back in February, but it confirms the “paranoid” warnings of those claiming that death panels and middle class tax hikes are on the way. Krugman literally says this. (HT2 Lennie Jarratt)
The smoking gun analysis starts at the 1:00 mark when Krugman explains:
Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs. The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give….We’re going to need more revenue….We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes…on the middle class, maybe a value added tax….And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care, doc pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So the snarky version…which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.
I encourage you to click the video (you can just start at the 1:00 mark) to see Krugman’s nonchalance and the audience laughter. Ha ha ha, the government deciding who lives and dies because it’s taken over health care, and right-wingers are routinely mocked for making the exact same claim. How droll.
Blimey Cow Recognizes Talent
The main video is entertaining as usual, but starting at 3:00 they incorporate a Status Update I posted on Facebook. You can see I got writing credit.
Libertarian Christians
(The more typical phrase is “Christian libertarians” but I think we would all agree that our faith is more important than our [anti-]political views.)
I am still in Chile and do not have a long time to blog, so let me just say this: There is a perception that most libertarians are atheists. There even appears to be a logical consistency here: “I don’t believe in political overlords and I don’t believe in a tyrant in the sky.”
I don’t have time to do justice to the compatibility of Christianity (or monotheism more generally) with Rothbardian libertarianism, but you can try this for a taste. I just want to note that this widespread perception is false; there are many libertarian Christians, even among leaders in the movement, and I’m not just talking about the obvious ones. The quiet ones don’t speak up because they don’t enjoy being denounced (oddly enough).
So say it loud and proud, my brothers and sisters in Christ: You have nothing to lose but your shame.
Recent Comments