Don’t Play Cards With Jacob
[UPDATE below.]
I recently made the full circuit in my nightly Bible reading, and now I’m back in Genesis. I don’t have much profound to say in this post, except to note that yikes Jacob (son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham) was one crafty fellow.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Bible knows that Jacob first leveraged his older brother’s hunger and shortsightedness to obtain his birthright in exchange for a meal. That’s not fraudulent but certainly is a bit shady.
But then the real kicker was when (at his mother’s urging) Jacob dressed up as his brother in order to trick his father with poor eyesight that he was in fact Esau, in order to obtain his blessing. Esau comes back a few moments too late, only to learn that his younger brother is now his master. D’oh! (As a hairy, older brother myself, I can barely conceive of the horror.)
Then another major event occurs when Jacob wants to depart from the land of his father-in-law, for whom he has been working for decades (to win the hands of the guy’s two daughters–which itself is a complicated story and isn’t as weird as it sounds, so if you are atheist waiting to pounce at least read the story first).
So here’s what happens when Jacob and his father-in-law discuss the terms of his departure:
25 And it came to pass, when Rachel had borne Joseph, that Jacob said to Laban, “Send me away, that I may go to my own place and to my country. 26 Give me my wives and my children for whom I have served you, and let me go; for you know my service which I have done for you.”
27 And Laban said to him, “Please stay, if I have found favor in your eyes, for I have learned by experience that the Lord has blessed me for your sake.” 28 Then he said, “Name me your wages, and I will give it.”
29 So Jacob said to him, “You know how I have served you and how your livestock has been with me. 30 For what you had before I came was little, and it has increased to a great amount; the Lord has blessed you since my coming. And now, when shall I also provide for my own house?”
31 So he said, “What shall I give you?”
And Jacob said, “You shall not give me anything. If you will do this thing for me, I will again feed and keep your flocks: 32 Let me pass through all your flock today, removing from there all the speckled and spotted sheep, and all the brown ones among the lambs, and the spotted and speckled among the goats; and these shall be my wages. 33 So my righteousness will answer for me in time to come, when the subject of my wages comes before you: every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats, and brown among the lambs, will be considered stolen, if it is with me.”
34 And Laban said, “Oh, that it were according to your word!” 35 So he removed that day the male goats that were speckled and spotted, all the female goats that were speckled and spotted, every one that had some white in it, and all the brown ones among the lambs, and gave them into the hand of his sons. 36 Then he put three days’ journey between himself and Jacob, and Jacob fed the rest of Laban’s flocks.
37 Now Jacob took for himself rods of green poplar and of the almond and chestnut trees, peeled white strips in them, and exposed the white which was in the rods. 38 And the rods which he had peeled, he set before the flocks in the gutters, in the watering troughs where the flocks came to drink, so that they should conceive when they came to drink. 39 So the flocks conceived before the rods, and the flocks brought forth streaked, speckled, and spotted. 40 Then Jacob separated the lambs, and made the flocks face toward the streaked and all the brown in the flock of Laban; but he put his own flocks by themselves and did not put them with Laban’s flock.
41 And it came to pass, whenever the stronger livestock conceived, that Jacob placed the rods before the eyes of the livestock in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods. 42 But when the flocks were feeble, he did not put them in; so the feebler were Laban’s and the stronger Jacob’s. 43 Thus the man became exceedingly prosperous, and had large flocks, female and male servants, and camels and donkeys.
Don’t get me wrong, the father-in-law Laban is a shady guy too, but yikes I don’t want to play cards with Jacob, that’s for sure. And if you read the whole account of Jacob’s youth and growing up, he jumps from situation to situation, deploying deception left and right and then fleeing, often because people are quite understandably upset with him.
I had already known about these stories of course, but for some reason upon this reading it really jumped out at me that this was the same guy going through his life and acting like this. Upon retrospect, that makes sense, since it’s his character.
Yet what’s interesting is that I don’t really see it jumping out how Jacob trusted in God, at least not the way Abraham did or later King David would. (Even the famous dream of a ladder “scene” is more of Jacob striking a bargain with God, as opposed to submitting to His will.) Everybody is a sinner (except Jesus), so the oddity here isn’t, “How could God choose to bless a bad guy?!”
So I imagine our atheist friends will say, “Yep, the Old Testament is one sick book not safe for kids to read,” but I’m wondering what the believers think. Do you agree with me that Jacob is a surprising person to found the nation of Israel? Is part of the point (perhaps) that God made a covenant with Abraham, and God can fulfill His promises even working with somebody like Jacob?
Or am I being too harsh on the guy, and are there events where his faith really shines through that I’m forgetting? (Admittedly I haven’t reached the part yet where Joseph gets attacked by his brothers, so maybe the older Jacob will impress me.)
UPDATE: Heh, I should have been more patient. Literally the chapter I was on (and that I read about 15 minutes after originally posting this) gave me what I had been waiting for. Genesis 32: 3-12:
3 Then Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir, the country of Edom. 4 And he commanded them, saying, “Speak thus to my lord Esau, ‘Thus your servant Jacob says: “I have dwelt with Laban and stayed there until now. 5 I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, and male and female servants; and I have sent to tell my lord, that I may find favor in your sight.”’”
6 Then the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, and he also is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.” 7 So Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed; and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two companies. 8 And he said, “If Esau comes to the one company and attacks it, then the other company which is left will escape.”
9 Then Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, the Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your family, and I will deal well with you’: 10 I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown Your servant; for I crossed over this Jordan with my staff, and now I have become two companies. 11 Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and attack me and the mother with the children. 12 For You said, ‘I will surely treat you well, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’”
OK, that’s what I’m talkin’ about…
For those who are confused: The Bible’s heroes (except for Jesus) are sinners. So the reason modern-day Christians (and I suppose Jews, though I don’t know exactly how they think of them) revere particular people from the earlier books in the Bible is NOT that they “lead good lives,” but rather that they trusted in the promises of God. Before hitting the above, I hadn’t seen Jacob really doing that.
Yet Another Attempt at the Government Debt and Future Generations Issue
Whoa, I almost spared all of you by forgetting to link to my latest article in the Freeman. I did my best to summarize what is wrong with the we-owe-it-to-ourselves “insight” on government debt. I’m pretty sure the example I spell out in the article is new. Anyway, here is the conclusion:
If an imperialist government paid for popular spending programs by levying a tax not on its own citizens but on a conquered land, the scheme would of course be a gigantic theft working across space and through the currency markets. Deficit finance is similar, working across time and through the bond markets. It allows today’s citizens to pay for government goodies by levying a tax on unborn generations who have no say in the political decision.
Krugman on the Fed and Plutocrats
Well, I am nipping at Krugman’s heels on this one, but I’m out of free articles for the month and I refuse to subscribe to the New York Times. I will show you guys what I’ve gotten so far, and maybe some of you can carry it over the finish line.
In today’s blog post, “Plutocrats and Printing Presses,” Krugman writes:
These past few years have been lean times in many respects — but they’ve been boom years for agonizingly dumb, pound-your-head-on-the-table economic fallacies. The latest fad — illustrated by this piece in today’s WSJ — is that expansionary monetary policy is a giveaway to banks and plutocrats generally. Indeed, that WSJ screed actually claims that the whole 1 versus 99 thing should really be about reining in or maybe abolishing the Fed….
What’s wrong with the idea that running the printing presses is a giveaway to plutocrats? Let me count the ways.
First…the actual politics is utterly the reverse of what’s being claimed. Quantitative easing isn’t being imposed on an unwitting populace by financiers and rentiers; it’s being undertaken, to the extent that it is, over howls of protest from the financial industry. I mean, where are the editorials in the WSJ demanding that the Fed raise its inflation target?
Beyond that, let’s talk about the economics.
The naive (or deliberately misleading) version of Fed policy is the claim that Ben Bernanke is “giving money” to the banks. What it actually does, of course, is buy stuff, usually short-term government debt but nowadays sometimes other stuff. It’s not a gift.
To claim that it’s effectively a gift you have to claim that the prices the Fed is paying are artificially high, or equivalently that interest rates are being pushed artificially low. And you do in fact see assertions to that effect all the time. But if you think about it for even a minute, that claim is truly bizarre.
OK, I found Krugman’s statements to be “truly bizarre,” because I’m almost positive he’s written several times on the audacity of the plutocrats whining about their situation, when they were rescued from their own bad decisions by the government. I’ve found two examples so far:
==> In a November 2008 post titled “Citigroup” Krugman wrote:
Mark Thoma has the rundown of informed reactions. A bailout was necessary — but this bailout is an outrage: a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more.
==> In a March 28, 2010 op ed Krugman wrote:
Now what? We have already, in effect, recreated New Deal-type guarantees: as the financial system plunged into crisis, the government stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets. There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. In effect, debts of shadow banks, like deposits at conventional banks, now have a government guarantee.
The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that?
So at this point, I see only two possible legs Krugman has to stand on:
(A) He could say that in the earlier pieces he was referring solely to TARP, and that the Fed had absolutely nothing to do with rescuing Wall Street firms. That is crazy, but I’m wondering if we can go further: Can someone find Krugman himself explicitly saying that the Fed rescued Wall Street?
(B) He could clarify that in his latest post, he is distinguishing the extraordinary Fed lending programs (TAF etc.) from generic quantitative easing. Maybe he wants to say that the current Fed critics at the WSJ and elsewhere aren’t being very nuanced, and that they are wrong for thinking that the Fed’s purchases of Treasuries per se help the banks, when really it’s all these other things that the Fed does that admittedly help the banks…
In any event, I am calling this a Krugman Kontradiction. Some may disagree with me, but remember I am, by definition, the judge of what is a Krugman Kontradiction. The only remaining question in my mind is to see if we can upgrade this to an actual contradiction by finding him explicitly saying the Fed bailed out Wall Street.
Release the hounds!
Potpourri
* If you’re the type of person who thinks it’s obvious that the Titanic should have had more lifeboats, then you’re obviously not an economist. (I’m not being snarky; I’ve often thought along the same lines as Steve Landsburg on this topic.)
* When people criticize my theories on private police and judicial services, they seem to be unaware of just how awful government “justice” is in practice.
* Rothbardians will be pleased that I starved Callahan’s upcoming presentation.
* David R. Henderson gets kinky in his discussion of Warren Buffett.
Thoughts on Obama’s Crackdown on Oil Speculators
I’m a hot little tamale over at IER’s blog today. An excerpt:
Successful speculation in the commodities markets serves a useful role in reducing price volatility and providing liquidity. By jacking up the penalties on ill-defined crimes, the Administration will actually make oil prices move more erratically. The president’s finger-wagging at the big bad speculators is just a rhetorical ploy to distract attention from his nonsensical energy policies.
East Coast and West Coast Togetha on Graeber
OK, Nashville’s not on the east coast, but in the title I’m trying to get across that Brad DeLong and I see eye-to-eye when it comes to David Graeber’s magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
When I first posted my critical review of Graeber’s book, in the comments Dan Hewitt pointed us to Brad DeLong’s negative reactions (1 and 2) to Graeber as well. Check them out; they’re funny. To give you the punchline, Graeber claims that Apple computer was founded “by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages…” So if you think about it for not too long, you will realize that unless he means the biological “laptop,” this is clearly a bogus claim.
Now for the purpose of my post today. DeLong quotes from Graeber’s exasperated defense of his book, regarding the nonsense Apple anecdote:
Allow me to reassure the reader: You have absolutely no idea how frustrating this is, especially as the stupid line has been held out, reproduced, sent around in every conceivable way to suggest that nothing else in the book is likely to be factually accurate To which all I can reply is: well, notice how this is the only quote in the book that happens with. That one sentence gets repeated a thousand times. No other one does. That’s because it’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong like that.
OK, so for starters, not too many authors run around saying, “[I]t’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong like that.” Most authors go for a zero-tolerance policy on “flagrantly wrong” sentences in their historical books. (I wonder if Manson at his parole hearing said, “My goodness, that one thing…”
But beyond that, Graeber is simply wrong that that is the only “flagrantly wrong” claim in his book. Here are my two favorites, but the margins in my book are littered with “OH CMON” and other such remarks. Graeber seems to think that the absence of such complaints in his reviews means that nobody found any errors besides the Apple debacle, so let me clarify: I didn’t bother bringing the following up in my own review since (a) my space was limited and (b) I didn’t want to sound petty. So check these out, and remember, part of what Graeber does in his book is chastise the economics profession for being idiots:
Economists like Karl [sic] Menger and Stanley Jevons later improved on the details of the story, most of all by adding various mathematical equations to demonstrate that a random assortment of people with random desires could, in theory, produce not only a single commodity to use as money but a uniform price system. (p. 28)
Now, John Maynard Keynes himself was much more open to what he liked to call the “alternative tradition” of credit and state theories than any economist of that stature…His conclusion, which he set forth at the very beginning of his Treatise on Money, his most famous work, was more or less the only conclusion one could come to if…(p. 54)
Actually, there is a third reason I didn’t bring these two up before: It was so inconceivable to me that Graeber could have meant what the plain words imply–namely, that Carl Menger contributed to the work of Adam Smith by adding in mathematical pizzazz, and that Keynes’ most famous book was his Treatise on Money–that I assumed something had happened ‘twixt keyboard and publication. And hey, for all I know, maybe that is still the case. But prima facie, we’ve got at least two more howlers to add to the pile.
Last thing: I’m NOT claiming Graeber is an idiot. His book actually has some very interesting factoids, and he has an unique perspective on these issues. However, now I’m not sure I should trust his recounting of the “factoids.”
Now I Can’t Get to Colombia!
The recently-passed Senate Bill 1813 has an interesting provision:
SEC. 40304. REVOCATION OR DENIAL OF PASSPORT IN CASE OF CERTAIN UNPAID TAXES.
(a) In General- Subchapter D of chapter 75 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by adding at the end the following new section:
‘SEC. 7345. REVOCATION OR DENIAL OF PASSPORT IN CASE OF CERTAIN TAX DELINQUENCIES.
‘(a) In General- If the Secretary receives certification by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue that any individual has a seriously delinquent tax debt in an amount in excess of $50,000, the Secretary shall transmit such certification to the Secretary of State for action with respect to denial, revocation, or limitation of a passport pursuant to section 4 of the Act entitled ‘An Act to regulate the issue and validity of passports, and for other purposes’, approved July 3, 1926 (22 U.S.C. 211a et seq.), commonly known as the ‘Passport Act of 1926’.
As with all of this stuff, I actually don’t know if this type of passport-revocation had been in there all along, and they are just amending the details. Anybody know?
Learn Principles of Economics Online
Hey everybody, just a reminder that Wednesday my Mises Academy class starts, highlighting the most important stuff for a beginner from my Lessons for the Young Economist. Here is the infomercial about the course, and note we now have a screen shot of the syllabus.
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