R.C. Sproul on Monarchy
At Sunday school (where they study the Bible before the actual worship service) we watched a 23 or so minute video from R.C. Sproul on monarchy in the Bible. (I think this is the link to it, but it’s $2.)
Libertarian Christians like to show not only atheists but also neoconservative Christians just how much God was against monarchy (with a human head). When Israel demands a king to be like the other (pagan) nations, here is what God told Samuel:
6 But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” So Samuel prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them. 8 According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day—with which they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. 9 Now therefore, heed their voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and show them the behavior of the king who will reign over them.”
10 So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king. 11 And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. 12 He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to beperfumers, cooks, and bakers. 14 And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. 16 And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men,[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. 18 And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.”
19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, “No, but we will have a king over us, 20 that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
Like I said, it’s understandable how libertarian Christians would say, “See guys? Stop equating religion with the State. Yes, religious officials throughout history have used theology as a club against their sheep, but they were perverting the true doctrines. God sounds like Nock when the people want to grow their secular State.”
But I want to bring up something else. Notice that God lets them choose something that He knows is wrong. As Sproul says in his lecture, here God is acting like the father in Jesus’ famous parable of the prodigal son. The man lets his son go off and make disastrous life choices, in order for him to eventually come back and be welcomed again into the family, wiser.
I admit that there are some passages in the Old Testament that are…difficult. But the character of God is far more nuanced than the caricature of a petulant tyrant that you get from Hitchens et al. I’m pretty sure if a town in North Korea asks to secede and join South Korea, Kim Jong-un wouldn’t say, “Well, they’re rejecting me. OK let them go, but warn them that with free speech comes the annoying paparazzi. And wait to see how gross Burger King fries are.” No, he’d probably have the leaders of the region imprisoned or shot.
“Fed on Trial”
C-SPAN has posted the footage from FreedomFest in Vegas this past July. If you’re bored, at least check out 12:20 when Kennedy hugs me. Bucket list item, check.
Contra Krugman Is Here
With the first three episodes. Subscribe on Stitcher or whatever you crazy kids do…
Steve Landsburg Passes the Torch
Steve has a very touching and interesting tribute to Don (now Deirdre) McCloskey, who taught him price theory at Chicago. Steve explains that it was McCloskey who was responsible for drawing him away from pure math and into economics, with an almost religious fervor. (That’s my term, but you’ll see that Steve uses language like “gospel,” “evangelist,” and “disciple” to refer to microeconomic analysis.)
I can’t say that Steve’s book The Armchair Economist made me decide to become an economist–that would be due to the writings of Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, then Hazlitt and Rothbard–but Steve’s book definitely showed me that economists could make their subject interesting to the average person, the same way some physicists could intrigue the public and make science “cool.”
Even more challenging, Steve didn’t rely on surprising empirical evidence to hook the reader, the way Freakonomics does. Instead, Steve just thought through issues. That is quite impressive to write a page-turner that simply “thinks about” stuff like popcorn prices at movie theaters.
Mises, 134 Years Young
From my hagiographical piece at the American Thinker:
One of Mises’s earliest achievements was to bridge the two fields we now call microeconomics and macroeconomics.Originally, the classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had embraced variants of a labor theory of value in their teachings. Then, during the so-called Marginal Revolution of the 1870s, economists replaced the labor theory with the modern subjective theory of value, which sees all market prices as determined ultimately by the underlying preferences of consumers. It doesn’t matter how many labor-hours it takes to manufacture a product, according to subjectivism; if nobody really wants it, it will fetch a low price.
Economists gradually recognized the superiority of the new “subjective marginal utility” approach, but by the dawn of the twentieth century they still thought this worked only for “micro” explanations. The theory could explain, for example, how many bananas traded for how many apples, but economists still thought they needed an entirely different, “macro” framework to explain the money prices of goods.
Enter Ludwig von Mises. In his 1912 book, translated with the title The Theory of Money and Credit, he showed how to apply the theory of marginal utility to explain all market values — even the value of money itself. In so doing, Mises put individual money prices, and the purchasing power of money, under the umbrella of a unified theory of value.
Trolling, Trolling, Trolling Down the River
Largely because I’m technologically impaired, I don’t follow a large number of blogs. So even if I zing a certain blogger regularly, he should feel flattered. In that light, I offer the following two items:
==> I was mostly being a smart aleck when I pointed out that Scott Sumner was being Krugman-esque when he seemed to be saying that the Fed’s pivotal September rate decision would be a “natural experiment,” except when things didn’t play out the way Scott would have predicted. I figured Scott would either ignore me or say something like, “*sigh* OK Bob, I didn’t phrase that right, what I meant was…” and we would move on with our lives.
But look at the exchange between Scott and others who jumped into the fray, including David R. Henderson. Scott kept digging himself deeper. At one point he wrote: “David, Yes, I meant it’s a natural experiment who’s outcome is hard to read. I thought we’d get a clear reading, but we didn’t. So it’s as if there was no experiment at all. The test tube was accidentally dropped on the floor, before we could get a clear reading of the contents.”
Yikes! Scott agreed with David’s paraphrase of what Scott could have been trying to say, but then went totally off the rails. Vivian Darkbloom smelled blood in the water and pounced:
“The test tube was accidentally dropped on the floor, before we could get a clear reading of the contents.”
That’s not it at all. The contents of the test tube, i.e., the record of the stock market movements, is very clear. The fact that you don’t know what conclusions to draw from the contents of that test tube doesn’t mean the contents are unknown because the test tube was dropped. Science shouldn’t disregard test results simply because they don’t go the way one originally predicted. This isn’t a case of a dropped test tube; it appears to be a case of throwing the contents of the test tube out after the experiment was conducted It is not as if there was no experiment.
Now to be sure, I’m not saying Scott Sumner’s ill-advised handling of this challenge to an offhand remark on his blog post destroys the case for NGDP targeting. Indeed, I continue to be impressed with how much traction the idea is gaining, when seven years ago nobody knew what NGDP even was. All I’m saying is, keep your eye on that Sumner fellow.
==> In more lighthearted news, try this fun trick. First–and the order is important–read this Gene Callahan post. Second, read this one.
Jesus and Old Testament Prophesies
What outsiders may not realize is that the Old Testament really does contain passages that remarkably foreshadow Jesus’ ministry. As Jesus Himself says in Luke 24:
44 Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” 45 And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.
Here is a list of OT prophecies concerning Jesus. Some of them you could say are fuzzy, but others aren’t. For example Micah 5:2 says:
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
Though you are little among the thousands of Judah,
Yet out of you shall come forth to Me
The One to be Ruler in Israel,
Whose goings forth are from of old,
From everlasting.”
I love that one in particular, because during His life some doubted Jesus could be the Messiah, since He grew up in Nazareth (but He was actually born in Bethlehem).
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