Tom’s Big Picture

A great analysis of the decline of paleolibertarianism at LewRockwell dot com:

vdare.com/misc/080514_pendleton.htm

I can sometimes barely stand to read their reactionary blog anymore.

My take: Lew Rockwell, like Paul, is at heart an autistic libertarian with no loyalty to flesh-and-blood people, just his pet abstractions of liberty and limited government. Problem is that those abstractions, while worthy, can only be sustained by certain flesh-and-blood people. A foundation of European stock seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for liberty-respecting government.

After the 1994 Republican revolution, Rockwell thought that right-wing populism might provide a vehicle for his abstractions. But when the Heartland united behind Bush after 9/11, and Bush subsequently abused that trust to advance the Likud Party’s foreign policy agenda, Rockwell was horrified at the consequences. And on that I partially agree, though I am not as morally outraged. Whether it’s Saddam or U.S. troops, the people of Iraq are probably predestined to live under some sort of occupation since they are incapable of functional self-government and enjoy too many natural resources to be left alone in their squalor. If we’d just take their oil and stop building bridges and schools that they will blow up when we leave, the whole enterprise might at least break even and not ruin us.

So Rockwell writes an essay after the 2004 election titled “Red State Fascism” where he abandons the right wing and seeks an alliance with the anti-globalist Left. As a pragmatic ideologue, he’s simply trying another strategy. Since Ron Paul never even came close to the electoral success of Buchanan, it looks like a failed one.

How many raids on polygamous Muslims?  How many raids in the ghetto?

Your kids are next, says Ilana Mercer.

Steve Sailer continues to bring us the most interesting stories.  For over a year, he has been telling us about the fascinating Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor.  I must say I find him a most interesting person, highly intelligent, and if I didn’t know he was black, I don’t know that I’d recognize him as such.  How is it that someone who is clearly 3/4 white identify so strongly as an African-American?

The irony is that the liberal press is racist in seeing Wright as just another black pastor saying crazy stuff, but in reality he’s quite the intellectual.  He’s a Marxist liberation Afrocentric intellectual, but nevertheless he’s a complex and interesting person.

This press conference is pure gold.  Sailer comments that he bets Obama is wishing he had tithed the full $700,000 on his $7 million income instead of $53,000.

Sailer’s articles on Wright here.

These teapot tyrants need to be shut down:

For a long time I have struggled with the practical implications of God’s Will. What I mean is that I failed to see how God’s Will, while undeniable, could be any sort of real comfort. It’s a variation of the old “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People” problem.

I remember one of the Oprahfied celebrity rabbis out on the West Coast producing a book of the same title. His conclusion was to simply deny God’s sovereignty, that God was not in control since things contrary to His Will took place. But this is no solution for a Christian. This particular rabbi, ate up with the Pharisees’ cultural legacy of supremacist, self-righteous thinking and feeling entitled to God’s blessing, simply morally rejected a sovereign God who offended his fallen sense of right and wrong. As a Christian, I know we are fallen and deserve death, all of us.

So my issue is not a moral rejection of God (who would I be to do that?), but rather a stoic unwillingness to take any comfort in God’s Will. Taking as a given we are fallen and deserve to die, we can lay no claim to anything better than that. Thus, any comfort from God’s Will is foolish, since any range of outcomes, ranging from death to happiness, would fit.

I remember from a few years ago a nice family in my area, with three or four beautiful kids, active in church, the husband a doctor earning an honest living helping people. One day the husband, about thirty years old, comes home and gets a pounding headache. Eventually, it’s so bad he calls 9-1-1. By the time they get him to the hospital, an aneurysm had rendered him a vegetable and within 48 hours he was dead. His children, the youngest an infant, will grow up without their natural father.

Now, I don’t blame God for this. He can do with us what He wishes. What I objected to is the idea that trusting in the will of God is any sort of real comfort. When people say this, I often think it an excuse for passiveness or inaction, as if doing something could prevent the Will of God from coming to pass. Or else, it’s a coping tool that my analytical mind rejected as practically baseless.

Yes, we can take comfort in the will of God, as long as we can take comfort in the worst possible things happening to us. Now some would say that even bad things, such as one’s children growing up fatherless, will work out for good according to God’s will. This view presupposes two things that aren’t really true, A) that bad things don’t really happen, they just look bad, and B) God will come behind and clean up bad things for Christians so that they aren’t really bad and are really a net gain in the long run.

I reject this view, as I believe bad things really do happen, and though the ordinary means of grace can work in spite of bad outcomes, this does not mean a bad outcome (e.g. one’s children being fatherless) is somehow romantically cast as an ideal or preferred outcome. But I understand why people believe this, and I try to be silent about it as much as I can, for I wish to deprive no one of comfort.

Some may see a contradiction in my views, in how I can acknowledge man’s fallen nature (and man’s deserved sentence of death), and yet then complain that God’s will is of no comfort. Actually, what I said was that God’s will was to me of little or no practical comfort.

So while I acknowledge I deserve nothing from God of my own accord, at the same time I want to avoid bad things happening to me and my family. And since I deserve nothing from God, I could not see how I could expect anything from Him and thus, how His will could be of any practical comfort. In the long run, of course, God will set everything aright. But in the long run, we’re also all dead. And I do have very practical concerns about this life in the meantime.

Yet I cannot deny that this view, that I once held, while logically sound is somewhat inconsistent with Scripture, where God is portrayed, for Christians, as a caring father who intervenes frequently on our behalf. It makes sense more from a Deist sense than a Christian one.

Then I made a critical connection with two other concepts related to belief and assurance.

1. Why Faith is Required to Believe: I have heard it said that there is enough evidence of Christianity to either believe or not believe. Unlike obviously false religions like Mormonism or Islam (that are internally contradictory and thus cannot be true), Christianity is plausible, yet there is no absolute proof. A minister explained this to me in this way: it is a mystery, but for some reason God wants us to have faith for salvation. If proof were absolute, say by sight or the physical, visible presence of Christ, then faith would not be required and God would not get what He requires from us. This is why while everyone will be a believer at the last judgment, this belief will not save anyone, as the window of opportunity to be saved by faith will have closed.

2. The Necessity of Vague Assurance: I often look at things in terms of their impact on human behavior, the unintended consequences of things. One good example is the welfare state. On the surface, helping poor people with money and food looks like a good thing, until you see the unintended consequences (though many conservative blacks, the population most impacted, doubt the unintended part as their people have become the electoral slaves of the Democratic Party): illegitimacy, criminality and a permanent dysfunctional underclass. Similarly, I see as untenable any system of theology that gives people absolute assurance of salvation. The Calvinist position, which amounts to a rigorous version of “once saved, always saved, if truly saved”, is tenable. The Church of Christ and Catholic position, that of losing salvation, while more Biblically problematic, is also tenable. What is not tenable is the position of irresponsible evangelicals who promise people assurance through the saying of a prayer, guaranteeing salvation based on one moment of belief. Such a position actually makes people less likely to be truly saved, by holding out the possibility of salvation independent of personal responsibility and behavior. Salvation is not an end in itself, and by making it so and making it guaranteed evangelicals stymie the real heavy lifting of sanctification.

So how are these related to the problem of taking practical comfort in the will of God?

Simple, as both are examples of complex feedback loops and the mechanics of human behavior. Let’s take my example, that of a young thirtysomething father. What if God indemnified all Christian fathers of young children against death or disability?

1. First of all, such a phenomenon would make the problem of #1 most acute. Little faith would then be required. If Christian fathers could jump off cliffs and be shot in the head and live, then that would be pretty solid physical proof of Christianity.

2. Christian fathers would do some stupid stuff playing around with their invincibility. Why not crash a motorcycle, or drive at 100 mph? This is a silly example, but this IS what would happen.

Just a few thought experiments like this and it becomes obvious that God cannot and will not be used as a vending machine. His intervention will always be undetectable and unpredictable. Else, fallen man would use any “insurance” with impunity. This is a concept economists call “moral hazard“:

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

We see this in the current housing crisis in most of the country. The feds gave an implicit guarantee on mortgages, so banks and other lenders got stupid in handing out loans. More loans means more money chasing the same number of houses, which means price inflation in housing. Price inflation invites speculation and creates a bubble. Moral hazard is summarized by the proverb, “No good deed goes unpunished”.

The longer I live, the more I realize how non-linear and unpredictable life is. I am convinced that if God wanted to, there are innumerable opportunities for Him to slip in and out, put His thumb on the scale, without anyone noticing. Our world is extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions (i.e. it’s chaotic, sorry I couldn’t resist the math geek-out), probably by design!

The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s unprovable. It can only, logically(!), be taken on faith. What a coincidence. God has created a world where He can only be known and believed in by faith. Almost like it was meant to be that way, huh?

So how do I take comfort in God’s will? If you were hoping for something life-changingly inspirational, I’m sorry to disappoint.

All I’ve got is something typically Calvinist.

Our comfort in the will of God is as follows: whatever our situation, things could be, but for God probably would be, and but for God definitely should be worse. A lot worse. Working within the constraints of His holiness, man’s fallen nature and His long term plans, the world we live in is better than it would be otherwise thanks to His undetectable and unpredictable, and thus unexploitable, but frequent interventions.

I feel really torn over the Mormon sect out in San Angelo. On the one hand, I recoil at the thought of the government taking kids away from their parents. Their practice of polygamy and teen marriage is deplorable, but it’s not acute child abuse so much as it is a warped alternative culture. What bothers me is how this is portrayed in the media, as they harp on the fact the kids wear modest clothes, don’t watch television, don’t eat junk food, are homeschooled and are polite. I think they’re pulling a guilt-by-association to smear homeschoolers in general.

And I do have a natural loathing of Child Protective Services, and all the little tyrant social workers who in their heart of hearts hate parents with a traditional view of childrearing and family, eager for the least reason to use the guns of the state to remove children from homes they deem “abusive” because they have the wrong political views. And now we learn that the whole raid was triggered by a fake abuse claim, yet they still keep the kids.

But at the same time state governments have been dealing with various sects of polygamous Mormons for over a hundred years, and they simply violate Western norms of society to such a high degree that their tolerance is impossible. But, really, they aren’t doing anything that wasn’t done in the Old Testament by Abraham or others that we admire. They’re wrong of course to do so, but still.

We’re talking about people of essentially Scandinavian descent (Mormons pull from the same high-latitude stock as the Quakers historically) with all the discipline, fertility and extended kinship solidarity of Muslims. If allowed to grow, they might be unstoppable.

Sometimes the public school system can be quite the source of comic relief, as evidenced by this recent historically-challenged protester of China’s hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics:

On a related note, here’s the Chinese Olympic Stadium now under construction:

Did they really mean to make their stadium look like the ejected remains of some bad Lo Mein takeout? And here is the 1936 Berlin stadium:

Of course, the Chinese might have preferred a more monumental stadium, but the fundamental reactionary nature of political correctness forbids it. The Nazis had good taste in music, art and architecture, largely because it was a malignant hypernationalism that celebrated the natural German talents in those areas. So in reaction we must all suffer through ugly architecture, dissonant “modern” music and degenerate art. Thank goodness the Germans aren’t renown for their cuisine, else our senses be deprived of at least one remaining pleasure.

I once heard a conservative describe liberalism as a religion like Christianity, except that instead of Jesus they substitute Hitler, or rather what they view as anything that is anti-Hitler.

Even the immigration issue can be seen in this light. So while Germany went down in flames, Hitler has his revenge at last. The following is from the introduction to Peter Brimelow’s excellent book Alien Nation:

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965.

And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.

Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one. You can be for this or you can be against it. But the fact is undeniable.

There are so many double standards in this story it boggles the mind. Apparently Hasidic Jews, among America’s most wealthy ethnic groups, were able to get “minority” status for themselves for purposes of federal contracting. Sailer breaks an important story that sweeps from a roid-raged punk in Miami Beach to an Israeli-owned gun shop in LA to Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson):

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazing-adventures-of-men-with-gold.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/hey-feds-theres-this-thing-called.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-did-diveroli-family-qualify-for.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/general-theory-of-afghan-ammo-swindle.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-aey-hasidic-enough-to-be-eligible.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/alleged-transcript-of-diveroli.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/packouz-were-not-hasidic.html

These are the same people who run the rip-off lowball “camera shops” you see in magazines that operate out of Brooklyn.  Unfortunately, I’ve had this experience personally!  Sailer’s working theory is, oddly enough, loosely based on the 2nd amendment:

Why the Hasidim?

First, there is the “in-group morality.” Some Muslim in Afghanistan loses an eye because his bullet explodes in his gun? Eh … The taxpayers of America have to shell out more to make up the loss? Eh …

Second, there is the simple psychological ability to not be distressed about other people’s anger, whether justifiable or not. Most people become uncomfortable when people around them become angry and they try to mollify the angry person. (The Japanese are among the world leaders at feeling psychic pain when people around them aren’t content.) In contrast, the kind of people who flourish in these kind of bait and switch businesses don’t mind other people getting angry at them. They just get angry right back, angrier even. It’s fun.

My cocktail party theory of the origins of this stems from Robert Heinlein’s famous phrase, “An armed society is a polite society.” In most of medieval Europe, you didn’t want to get into screaming arguments with acquaintances because they might pull out a sword and run you through. Well, medieval ghettos were largely disarmed, so the verbally hostile weren’t excused from the culture and gene pool.

So, the bottom line is that anybody sensible would be cautious before buying from Hasidic-owned businesses that don’t specifically have a good reputation, like B&H. Take that super-duper quoted price and add a percentage to account for all the hassles you are letting yourself in for.

But, of course, nobody is supposed to think like that. The media won’t print that kind of advice. And the poor federal government isn’t supposed to treat Hasidim skeptically, they’re officially supposed to bend over backwards for them and treat them like a legally privileged minority!

Update: Of course, in neither of Efraim’s two mugshots is he wearing a beard or a hat, so I guess he’s Hasidic for federal contracting purposes, but a wild and crazy guy for the ladies.

Not many people know this, but 90% of the costs of affirmative action are hidden from sight. One engineer getting a promotion over another because he’s black causes a bit of economic damage, and certainly a lot of personal damage to the victim. But where the bills really get paid for the Racial Extortion Coalition is in government contracting.

You see, the leaders of minority groups aren’t usually so interested in the welfare of their group as they are in their own personal wealth and power. The elites of any group, your Barack Obamas and Jesse Jacksons, are the most important to placate and preferences in contracting allow minority elites to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of taxpayers. As Tom Wolfe’s Reverend Bacon put it, it’s a highly leveraged investment in “steam control”.

This system of preferences milks taxpayers for shoddy goods and/or exorbitant prices based on quotas that various governments have to meet when contracting with suppliers. It’s the soft, fat underbelly that no one talks about, as the taxpayers get quietly fleeced.

Even Texas does it!

www.window.state.tx.us/procurement/prog/hub/hub-certification/

Hint: make your wife the owner of your business if you want to do business with the state.

I had an engineering professor at A&M who shared this tip, and so I will share it with you.

This professor was a conservative Christian and an elder at a large church in town, and taught me Engineering Economics.  It’s the class where I figured out I was a lot better at economics than engineering.  Whereas I was an average chemical engineer (i.e. about average among the 14% who start and finish a chemical engineering degree without washing out), in this class I did really well.

I found it amusing that people smarter than me in something like, oh say Mass Transfer Operations (distillation towers made my brain hurt), totally shut down when it came to financial calculations.  Garden-variety amortization was too much for some of them.

Anyway, this professor shared a particularly interesting tax strategy I’ve never heard anyone else talk about.  The key to his strategy is the fact that the state of Texas allows you to pay your property tax for a certain year in either December of the same year or January of the following year.  There’s no penalty, and when you pay is up to you.

He would pay last year’s property tax in January and this year’s property tax in December.  In that year, he would also double-tithe (or alternatively, save up last year’s tithe in an interest bearing account and give it in January of the “on” year).  Then, in the “off” year, he would take the standard deduction instead of itemizing, which is $10,700 this year.  If you’re in the 25% marginal bracket (typical middle class situation), then this is a savings of over $1000 per year in taxes!

One key part is that you might have to own your house to do this, as the mortgage company usually escrows and pays your property taxes on the same date every year.  And your charitable giving has to be such that you would exceed the standard deduction, otherwise it’s pointless.  So it’s really a strategy tailor-made for financially secure Christians whose incomes are not too high (as the gummint starts taking away deductions and such when you make too much money- if there’s anything that’ll make you want to start the revolution now, it’s when you meet fedgov’s little friend named AMT).

I shared this with a conservative Christian friend (who has since reformed his view to align with mine) after I heard it.  He thought it was neat, but was concerned that such maneuvering, while legal, might be sinful.

What’s sinful IMO is sending one more penny to the federal fetus butchers than the minimum absolutely required to keep them from unconstitutionally seizing your person and property.

But that’s just me.  I’m a moderate on the issue.

The real conservative movement has always been a coalition between libertarians and social conservatives.  Both groups have been sold out and used at times by Republican Party elites.  Many leaders of the grassroots have themselves been grafted into the Washington establishment.

The mainstream libertarians castigate Paul for daring to declare that Caesar has no clothes: every tax cut achieved by the libertarian wing of the party has been neutralized by the hidden tax of inflation, as the government simply prints the money they need instead of taxing it.

The evangelical social conservatives delude themselves of their influence.  About the only measurable difference they’ve made is starting a war with Iraq, half-convinced Saddam was the anti-Christ, even dusting off the Nostradamus to justify their pre-ordained conclusion.  Devoid of hope and alienated from the culture of their country, much of Christian activism has become a rapture cult about as practically relevant as the Heaven’s Gate people out in California.  For if all hope is pinned in the rapture, then if they are wrong about the rapture, the strategy is suicide.  We have the Iraq War because the power elite (or rather the Likud wing of the power elite) wanted it for Israel, and American evangelicals served as the useful idiots to move it along.  Witness Pat Robertson’s early endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, cross-dresser and supporter of gay rights and abortion, as an example of evangelicals’ decadence in their Israel Uber Alles delusions.

And now it is 2008.  Libertarians and social conservatives, having abandoned principle long ago, get bland liberal John McCain as the nominee, a recycled rerun of Bob Dole (the scary thing is that unlike Dole, McCain is crazy, and will probably win against the Democratic nominee, as the idiot white liberals indulge their multi-culti fantasies by nominating Barack Hussein Obama; they had their shot at a southern white boy, John Edwards or even good-old-boyish Bill Richardson, who would have fooled enough of our people to have defeated McCain, but their fantasies got the better of them).

The continued enthusiasm for Paul and Huckabee, however, represents a remnant among Republican primary voters.  This remnant has denied McCain majorities in many states and is a thorn in his side as he tries to convince us that this year’s choice between two evils is not a toss-up.

The enthusiasm for Huckabee, as I’ve documented, is unwarranted, but represents a healthy form of identity politics among evangelicals.  He’s our ess-oh-bee, dang it, and we want to be represented by him rather than a Yankee from Massachusetts.

Paul, on the other hand, has very much to admire.  Problem is, he advocates an early Virginian and Jacksonian libertarianism with the language of a third-generation German Pennsylvanian.  Germans are a great people, arguably among the greatest, but theirs is a culture with low emotional content, an objective voice so-to-speak and this comes across with Paul.  Everything is abstract, to the point that he would not attack his opponents.  To backcountry Celts, this smacks of weakness.  To my Celtic brain, if they’re so wrong, why the heck are you so nice to them?   We’ve got Martin Luther passive-aggressively nailing theses to churches (a very German thing to do) when we really need William Wallace to work up the Celts for war and unite the clans.

Paul is a great man, the greatest in our government, but I don’t think he is the man.  He’s too great, really, to ever lead a mass democratic movement.  Doesn’t he know you can’t just go around telling the truth anymore?  I mean, he just came out and said that we were to blame for putting ourselves into a ant’s nest in Iraq.  We started a land war in Asia and we’re bleeding to death financially from the occupation.  But, Mr. Paul, don’t you know you can’t go around saying that?  Blame it on the neocons or another scapegoat, but never tell the voter he is responsible for self-inflicting his problems.  That’s not a winner politically.

Divided into libertarian and evangelical camps, this remnant will continue to suffer defeat.  As a member of both groups, I think we need each other.  It’s clear at this point that the libertarians have the money; Paul gets about 10% of the vote but has more money than anyone.  The evangelicals have the votes, but Huckabee can barely keep his campaign afloat.

But what we really need is a leader who understands both groups and the two most powerful themes in politics: us versus them and something for nothing.  This person will have to be astute enough to sell something to the American people that they don’t really want to buy, yet be pure enough to deliver on it once in office.

Rather like someone innocent as a dove and wise as a serpent.  The odds are against it, but to paraphrase Huckabee, we’re long past the point where the odds were for us.  We need a miracle.