Category Archives: political-economy

The trap set for the poor

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I’ve been pretty skeptical/opposed to preaching a “benefits revolution” for some time now.  I see it as abuse of the poor by middle class Christians (who get plenty of benefits themselves that they don’t feel guilty about).

But this post almost changes my mind:

Despite the EITC and child credit, the poverty trap is still very much a reality in the U.S. A woman called me out of the blue last week and told me her self-sufficiency counselor had suggested she get in touch with me. She had moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more. I told her I didn’t know what I could do for her, but agreed to meet with her. She showed me all her pay stubs etc. She really did come out behind by several hundred dollars a month. She lost free health insurance and instead had to pay $230 a month for her employer-provided health insurance. Her rent associated with her section 8 voucher went up by 30% of the income gain (which is the rule). She lost the ($280 a month) subsidized child care voucher she had for after-school care for her child. She lost around $1600 a year of the EITC. She paid payroll tax on the additional income. Finally, the new job was in Boston, and she lived in a suburb. So now she has $300 a month of additional gas and parking charges. She asked me if she should go back to earning $25,000. I told her that she should first try to find a $35k job closer to home. Also, she apparently can’t fully reverse her decision to take the higher paying job because she can’t get the child care voucher back (the waiting list is several years long she thinks). She is really stuck. She tried taking an additional weekend job, but the combination of losing 30 percent in increased rent and paying for someone to take care of her child meant it didn’t help much either.

Basically, we have a system that pays people to stay poor.  It is a system, incidentally, that also supports higher economic groups: those who manage these bribes-for-poverty program, and an educational establishment to train the bribers.

How do you save people from this without making them feel bad for receiving the benefits that they lose when they get a better job?!

We act like we are soooo superior to the societies of the past with their lords and landed serf.  What hypocrisy.

Have I mentioned today how much I hate the state?

A finance blog decides to post some more relevant theology than you will get in any Reformed dogmatics text

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The head of Goldman Sachs literally said he’s doing “God’s work” with his banking activities.

The head of Barclays also recently told his congregation that banking as practiced by his company was not antithetical to Christian principles.

Are they right? Is big banking as practiced by the giant banks in harmony with Christian principles?

Read the rest at Guest Post: Big Bankers Say They’re Doing God’s Work … Are They Right? « naked capitalism.

But this should all be ignored because it mixes kingdoms?  Give me a break!

Not faith but a lack of forclosure in their histories

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While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

Read the rest at: Peggy Noonan: We’re Governed by Callous Children – WSJ.com.

Between monarchism and anarchism–Tolkien

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My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional Monarchy.’ I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights not mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang,’ it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocacy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints… is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 63-64).

via “The Hands of a Healer”: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Understanding of Kingship by Lauren Calco.

United States Federal and States’ government death panel takes shape

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I don’t believe in the welfare state.  This program should never have started up.  It claimed compassion but what it ended up doing is allowing people to “farm out” (for free!) their responsibilities to their relatives.

And now after we’ve created a dependent populace of whom some (how many?) have no other recourse, we take away their food.

I’d like to see OK budget and see what is being spent on “higher education” at the 13th grade (i.e. community colleges).  Are you telling me that the cuts just happen to come from the populace with the least social and political clout?  Doubt it.  This is just the other end of the bell curve from abortion.

We should be cutting all the money being given to the able-bodied young before we ever touch the senior dependents on government funds.

And who really cares?  None of us have had to be personally involved in helping such people for a long long time.  The government was supposed to keep them closeted so our consciences are clear.

Awesome virtue of “conservatism” revealed

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These are staggering figures when you consider that the Left currently dominates the Executive Branch of the US Government, both Houses of the United States Congress, the federal bureaucracy, huge swathes of local government in many big cities, academia, the public school system, and most of the establishment broadcast and print media in America. The figures show there is a huge disconnect between the American public and those who wield much of the political power in the country.

Read the whole awesome thing: Barack Obama has failed to defeat conservatism in America – Telegraph Blogs.

What is awesome about this?  It means that conservatives don’t gravitate toward plunder and power or even pulpits.  There are two visible minorities: a) those who want to use conservative votes for their own power, and b) those who want power so that it isn’t used against them anymore (these are not mutually exclusive categories).

But in general, Conservatives work for a living and live at peace.  It would be awesome to see this translated more faithfully in rhetoric about foreign affairs.  But it is still a great virtue and gives us hope for future consistency.

Civilization is by faith

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The thing about Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa is that it keeps dropping profundities that seem to exceed the needs of an “issues book.”  For example, from page 58:

Aid and social capital: a matter of trust

Social capital, by which is meant the invisible glue of relationships that holds business, economy and political life together, is at the core of any country’s development.  At its most elemental level, this boils down to a matter of trust.

As discussed earlier, among development practitioners there is increasing acknowledgement of “soft” factors–such as governance, the rule of law, institutional quality–play a critical role in achieving economic prosperity and putting countries on a strong development path.  But these things are meaningless in the absence of trust.  And while trust is difficult to define or measure, when it is not there the networks upon which development depends break down or never even form.

While the word “governance” is used here, it can’t possibly be reduced to a theory, structure, or model of the state.  She’s talking about he social custom of integrity and the blessing of being able to expect integrity.

What is sad is that Christians have adopted such a magical and superstitious understanding of the word faith, that they can’t even see that it is all Peter Leithart is talking about.  I have actually read a reviewer ask “where is faith” in his amazing book.  It is like accusing a man for writing about color of apostasy from belief in the existence of light.

As I wrote once,

God wants you to trust him the way politicians ask you to trust them. Jesus wants you to trust him the way you trust your doctor. Trusting God is not a qualitatively different act from accepting payment by means of a check. This should be the faith our children see in us. It should be the faith the world sees in us. No other faith declares that God exists.

For the world is built on faith. Cultures are formed around trust in something or someone. “The American Dream,” Democracy, Motor cycle culture, Sports. Our trust in Christ should be just as concrete and it should forge us into a unique community. It should create a different world.

And that is the tragedy.  No one trusts their doctor, they want the government to confiscate him.  Yet no one trusts politicians either in general, except for clinging superstitiously to one’s own tribe.  But even that will be gone, along with trust in bankers or anyone else.  And that means collapse.  A friend just pointed me to this: America’s Soul is Lost.

No, not just another meltdown, another bear market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street’s “too-greedy-to-fail” banks. Faber is warning that the entire system of capitalism will collapse. Get it? The engine driving the great “American Economic Empire” for 233 years will collapse, a total disaster, a destiny we created.

OK, deny it. But I’ll bet you have a nagging feeling maybe he’s right, the end may be near. I have for a long time: I wrote a column back in 1997: “Battling for the Soul of Wall Street.” My interest in “The Soul” — what Jung called the “collective unconscious” — dates back to my Ph.D. dissertation: “Modern Man in Search of His Soul,” a title borrowed from Jung’s 1933 book, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” This battle has been on my mind since my days at Morgan Stanley 30 years ago, witnessing the decline.

Has capitalism lost its soul? Guys like Bogle and Faber sense it. Read more about the soul in physicist Gary Zukav’s “The Seat of the Soul,” Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” and sacred texts.

But for Wall Street and American capitalism, use your gut. You know something’s very wrong: A year ago “too-greedy-to-fail” banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now, magically they’re back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing Federal debt are killing taxpayers.

Yes, Wall Street has lost its moral compass. They created the mess, now, like vultures, they’re capitalizing on the carcass. They have lost all sense of fiduciary duty, ethical responsibility and public obligation.

Here are the Top 20 reasons American capitalism has lost its soul:

Read the rest.

The perfect revenge

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By some strange coincidence I am reading Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which are both worth reading.  Reading them together though, is a bizarre experience.

I may write an argument to show that Moyo is an undercover Austrian, but I’ll have to wait and see.  What is clear from reading her book on development in Africa is why we’re not going to see much more of it in North America in the foreseeable future.  And it is also clear that Barack Obama, Sr., along with many other fresh young optimistic victims, came to the US and got propagandized in how to be powerful bureaucrats.  Apart from aid itself, how much damage and death have we inflicted on the African continent by converting their leaders to Keynsians at best and outright socialists at worst?

It is completely appropriate we have the President we do.  God is not going to let us wreak economic degradation on others and not experience it ourselves.  The son avenges the father even though he has no idea how justice is really unfolding from his administration.

Eye for an eye.