The Lord Treats His Children Appropriately
Today the assistant pastor at my church discussed the first two chapters of Luke. I know I have said this before, but I will say it again, because it just jumps out at me when I read these passages, yet I’ve never heard anyone else mention it. But first let’s read a good chunk of the first chapter:
The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold
5 In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. 6 Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. 7 But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old.
8 Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, 9 he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.
11 Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. 13 But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. 14 He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, 15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. 16 He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
18 Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”
19 The angel said to him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. 20 And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time.”
21 Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple. 22 When he came out, he could not speak to them. They realized he had seen a vision in the temple, for he kept making signs to them but remained unable to speak.
23 When his time of service was completed, he returned home. 24 After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. 25 “The Lord has done this for me,” she said. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”
The Birth of Jesus Foretold
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Do you see it? The angel Gabriel tells Zechariah that his wife will give birth, Zechariah says that’s impossible, and because of this impudence he can’t speak until his son (John the Baptist) is born.
Yet the same angel goes to tell Mary she will give birth, she says that’s impossible, and the angel comforts her.
So here is my take on this:
(1) God is a pushover. Zechariah is an old priest who should know better; Gabriel basically gave him a slap upside the head and said, “Wassa matta witchou?” In contrast, Mary is a young girl who probably wasn’t asking in cynicism and doubt, but more in incomprehension. Just as a human father would understandably react differently with these two cases, so too does God Himself.
(2) For whatever reason, it was necessary that Zechariah be mute for 9 months. For example, this period surely chastened him and made him very serious about his son. Without having the gift of gab, he probably read the scriptures more intensely than he had ever done in his life. It would only be natural, then, that he would raise his son to become a man of incredible zeal.
The Best Quote From “The Untouchables”
I have to say, the movie was not as good as I was hoping, with such a cast and topic. But I definitely loved the following exchange:
Malone: OK, pal, why the mahaska? Why are you carrying the gun?
Ness: I’m a treasury officer.
Malone: Alright. Just remember what we talked about now.
[Malone walks away]
Ness: Hey, wait a minute! What the hell kind of policemen you got in this…city? You just turned your back on an armed man.
Malone: You’re a treasury officer.
Ness: How do you know that? I just told you that.
Malone: Who would claim to be that who was not? Hmm?
Someone should send that to Tim Geithner.
A Question for the anti-TSA Team
The more I think about it, the more it seems the TSA did the right thing, in saying pilots should be subjected to the same security filters as everybody else. (Note that I AM NOT DEFENDING THE TSA’S PROCEDURES.)
A lot of critics have been saying, “Those idiots! The pilot doesn’t need to take a bomb on the plane; he can just crash it!”
But hold on a second. On a big commercial flight, there are always two pilots, right? So if one of them is Jihadi Joe, and he starts banking toward the Sears Tower, might not his co-pilot tackle him? If so, then it would be good to know that Jihadi Joe has only his knuckles and his belt to use as weapons.
Furthermore, as the people in the comments of this David Friedman post pointed out, what’s to stop a compromised pilot from passing explosives to others after he gets through the checkpoint?
This is really a serious point. Think about it: Suppose you are a terrorist trying to take down a major commercial airliner, and the TSA only makes pilots go through metal detectors. Now you could pull a first-season-of-24 stunt and kidnap the daughter of some pilot, and tell him you’d let her go once he did a kamikaze at work.
But such a pilot would be stupid to obey you, because even if he were willing to trade his own life–plus dozens of passengers–for his daughter’s, he obviously wouldn’t trust you to follow through.
BUT, suppose you instead said to the pilot, “We will give you plastic explosives to smuggle in your pants through the checkpoint. Then you hand them off to Mustapha at the Taco Bell near Gate A4. After you do this three days in a row, we will let your daughter go.”
In this type of scenario, I think the pilot in question is much more likely to comply, especially if the terrorists don’t actually do anything with the explosives until they’re done with the guy.
Hence, I don’t think it was crazy for the TSA to initially insist that pilots go through the same procedures as everybody else.
P.S. Check out this brilliant quip from David R. Henderson (whose post originally brought me to Friedman’s):
“[O]ne should be skeptical of government running airline security when that same government still requires that flight attendants show you how to fasten a seat belt.”
“The Day the Dollar Died”
This is the coolest commercial for a non-profit organization I have ever seen. Their doomsday scenario is very plausible, in my view. (HT2 Jeff Tucker)
Ron Paul: “Enough Is Enough”
I have seen plenty of people endorse Ron Paul’s short speech on the House floor, but I hadn’t watched it until today. It’s really great that there is an actual guy in Congress saying this:
Just a Reminder: You Can Have High Unemployment and Price Inflation Simultaneously
I am working on a C4L rebuttal to this Greg Ip article. But I thought I’d give you guys a sneak peek on one of my points.
Ip apparently subscribes to the “we’re all Keynesians now” view when he writes:
People and businesses spend when their incomes are growing and they’re confident about the future…If…spending outstrips the economy’s productive capacity, inflation could result. But that’s years away: The economy today is awash in idle factories and unemployed workers.
OK, so then how is it possible that in late 2008, Zimbabwe had price inflation so ridiculous, that prices doubled every 25 hours, while in January 2009, the official unemployment rate was 94 percent? That seems like a lot of idle factories and unemployed workers. And, just to be clear, I’m saying that in my humble opinion, the (price) inflation rate of 79.6 billion percent could be construed as “high.”
Scott Sumner’s Funeral: A Shovel-Ready Project
Sumner keeps digging himself deeper on this issue of “income is meaningless and pernicious.” To refresh your memory, Scott first advanced this thesis here. Then I criticized his view here.
I figured Scott would say, “OK, ya got me, I was just speaking in hyperbole because income taxes drive me bonkers.” But no, Scott doubled down. First he quoted me, when I wrote:
In the comments section of his first post, I asked Sumner if he had a problem with the standard definition of income. I reminded him that it is the amount of consumption that one could afford, without reducing the value of capital. Sumner replied, “I do not object to your definition. … I guess ‘meaningless’ was a bit strong, but what possible use is there for a concept that measures how much consumption one could do [without] impairing one’s wealth?”
This reply actually flummoxed me; it’s akin to asking what possible use there is for the concept of profit. Specifically, a household needs to calculate its income, in order to know if it is “living beyond its means.” We can make the analysis more esoteric if we wish. For example, one of the key issues in Austrian business-cycle theory is that people during the boom period enjoy a false prosperity — a high standard of living — because they are unwittingly consuming their capital. These crucial issues are dependent on the basic definition that Sumner finds useless.
Scott then replied:
I hate it when people quote my comments; often my brain is fried by the time I answer my 100th comment in a day. But I’ll stick by this one. Profit is useful because it tells firms whether to enter or exit an industry. Positive economic profit suggests you should enter, and negative economic profit is a signal to exit. But income is a signal for . . . what? Surely not for consumption. Yes, it tells you how much you can consume without digging into capital, but why would you want to consume that much? I had negative income in 2008, but I didn’t decide to do negative consumption. I dug into my capital—which Bob suggests is violating the recommendation of Austrian business cycle theory. Entschuldigen sie bitte! (That’s ’sorry’ in Austrian.)
Cue the music.
OK I will make this brief, since Scott needs to work on his next blog post promoting counterfeiting. Here goes:
(1) Note the goofy rhetorical move, by which Scott tries to demonstrate that one’s consumption is independent of one’s income. OK I can do the same thing, to “prove” profit has nothing to do with whether a business enters or exits an industry. “Scott, I know a business owner who lost money in 2009. And yet he didn’t exit the industry! That violates your I-call-myself-a-conservative-but-I’m-not-really economic views!” How do people feel about my demonstration? Should we now throw out “profit” as a meaningless concept?
(2) Scott, suppose you get a job from a rival school. But they don’t tell you how much your new income will be. Does this matter to you? If you did accept the new job, without knowing your paycheck, you’re saying you would be fine? That bit of information wouldn’t influence any of your personal financial decisions, like say, how big a house you would buy in your new city?
(3) Scott, how far are you going to push this farce? Are you claiming that accountants are wasting their time when they draw up Income statements for firms? (And if so, do you realize that an income statement is also called a profit-and-loss statement?)
* * *
As always, I want to reiterate that Scott Sumner is a really really sharp guy. That’s why I continue to grapple with him. For example, by the end of this recent post Scott almost had me applying to be a Fed governor, so sure was I that I could centrally plan the economy.
Jeff Tucker, Pioneer
I have noticed more and more that Mises.org is gaining real street cred (and even Street cred). I think it’s partly the general resurgence in interest in the Austrian School, but I also think it’s that the Internet is becoming a more accepted source of information. (It used to be a derogatory thing to say, “I read this on the Internet,” but that is quickly becoming analogous to saying, “I read this in a book…”)
So Jeff Tucker is a great pioneer and visionary. For years he has been making Mises.org awesome. Jeff is always ahead of the curve. He was making Mises.org accessible to blog readers when I wasn’t sure what a blog was.
People often ask me, “What’s the deal with Jeff Tucker? Does he actually do anything besides approve articles?” And I explain that Jeff knows enough about computers and the Internet to be able to hire really great, technical people to do all the behind-the-scenes stuff that you take for granted. You just expect that every day, there will be 3 or so new articles up at Mises.org, and that if you want to see the shopping list that JoAnn Rothbard gave to Murray in 1983, that you can find the scanned PDF at Mises.org. (It is my understanding that Mises.org gets attacked by Marxist hackers almost as much as WhiteHouse.gov.)
So let us give thanks to Jeff Tucker, who decided to plant the Austro-libertarian flag in a fertile crescent in the blogosphere. For years, non-Austrians could scoff and dismiss us as “people who have to publish their rants on the Internet,” but that is now coming to a close.
Someone should write a song, “Internet killed the TV star.”
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