Tom’s Big Picture

Since their defeat in the late 1970’s in the SBC, socialists and theological liberals (often one and the same) have been clawing their way back into positions of influence in the evangelical world.  Taking advantage of the soft analytical focus of the postmodern era, they have been careful to avoid outright attacks on the Bible, but carefully twist its message for their political agenda.

Groups like Sojourners and other quasi-evangelical left-wing groups often are able to influence young evangelicals, their church experience usually leaving their heads full of feel-good mush more than doctrine, by taking advantage of young peoples’ idealism and foolish assumptions about their ability to change the world. The liberals promote some “new, vain thing”, stirring up the young with cynicism against tradition and their elders, that inevitably leads to greater power for liberals and the government orifices they control.

The Marxists keep marching, and it is this persistence more than anything that we in the opposition must take to heart.  Only when we are willing to fight as hard and as long and against great odds, in other words when our faith exceeds theirs, will we win the battle.

Of particular concern is the tendency of the “Christian pop culture” towards this kind of thing.  When our youth look to shiftless musicians (Christian ones, but still still shiftless artsy muddle-headed types) as theological guides, problems are bound to arise.  Witness the CCM world’s fawning over the socialist manifesto parading as Christian parable called “The Shack” (for a review click here).

It all goes back to the Social Gospel, a movement that must be terminated by the orthodox Christian mainstream.

Gary North’s latest essay on this subject is a gem.  Choice quotes:

If voters can be made to feel guilty about their economic success, they can be manipulated. This is why the politics of guilt manipulation is at the heart of the welfare state.

In a systematic political program to make people feel guilty, the Social Gospel movement within Protestantism has played an important role for over a century.

The Social Gospel movement, which began in the United States in the 1880’s, shared an ethical principle with the Progressive movement, which began at the same time and in the same social circles. This ethical principle can be summarized as follows: Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.

Defenders of the welfare state may wax eloquent about justice and fairness and the moral high ground. But no matter how lofty the rhetoric may be, as you are listening, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Where is the gun?
2. Who is holding the gun?
3. At whom is the gun pointing?

Today, there is a small, dedicated movement within the evangelical Protestant camp that regards Federal tax increases and Federal welfare increases as crucial to extend the kingdom of God in history. This is a recent development.

Top Ten Male-Bashing Ads

Make that the top ten white male bashing ads. I could theorize about this, but the most obvious explanation is that advertisers sometimes like to be funny, and that means somebody has to be the butt of the joke. However, in our politically correct age, white males are the only people left with a sense of humor who won’t boycott you if one of their group members is portrayed in a less-than-flattering light.

This propaganda is having an effect. More reason to never let your kids watch TV. This may sound extreme, but think of the most degenerate little queer screenwriter in Los Angeles, a complete hostile alien to your way of life. That’s who’s writing the scripts to everything on TV. Get a clue, invest in this thing called a DVD player and deliberately pick what they watch.

This latest post by Chris Ortiz is very brave. Click here to read his post about Anti-Southern Bigotry.

I’m not exactly a theonomist, but I do keep up with their work and am working my way through Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (it’s a great study of the Law, even if one doesn’t always agree with the degree of strictness Rushdoony wishes us to observe). The heart of Rushdoony’s work IMO is his concept of Dominion, of limiting the scope of both church and state and expanding the realm of the multigenerational extended family according to Biblical principles.

We hear a lot these days about the outrages of CEO pay, of golden parachutes and the like.  This is natural enough in a system where a few at the top manage the assets of the many shareholders.  Democracy is a poor form of government and it leads to abuses, both in the private and public sectors.

The real mystery is why so many companies are public to begin with.  Why don’t the Fords still own all of Ford?  The reason is no one wants responsibility.  The descendants of great men who start great enterprises want the benefits of ownership but not its responsibilities.  And unethical men are more than willing to take a huge cut of the profits, sell rip-off common stock to the public and pocket the rest.  Common stock is a pyramid scheme at present, and its true value will be apparent when baby-boomer retirement forces investors to attempt to live on dividends instead of ephemeral capital gains.

These great men failed to nurture in their families the desire for ethical leadership and dominion over assets.  They produced trust fund babies.  Much of this can be chalked up to hyperindividualism, a defect of the post-Enlightenment West.  There is a construction company in Japan that has been in the same family for 1000 years.  The world’s largest cymbal company, Zildjian, has been in the same family for almost 400 years.

The inefficiency of the corporate form of ownership, on so many bases, should be an encouragement to those willing to take the task of wealth-building and child-rearing seriously.  Capital always flows to the hands best fit to manage it.  But we have to stop seeing wealth as a means to avoid responsibility (or worse, reject wealth as evil based on pietist nonsense) but an opportunity for stewardship.

The meat market for Albinos.

It’s important to distinguish between one’s politics and likely reality. What I mean is that one’s politics is based on some high but reasonable percentile of the possible, a lofty goal. One’s planning, however, should be for the likely reality. The following is not what I want to happen, but it is what has happened and will likely continue to happen:

This morning I had occasion to venture into a mall, a place I rarely go. Given the inhospitable summers where I live, and being out and about in the earlier morning hours with my family, we decided to go and walk around in the retail temple of American life. Indoor malls tend to attract unsavory characters with nothing better to do than loiter, but in the two hours before lunch, before most of the urban wildlife wakes from their post-nocturnal slumber, it can be a tolerable experience.

I think what shocked me today were prices. Father’s Day cards and a couple of trinkets from Hallmark: $23. A few paperbacks and a children’s book from the bookstore: $33. With a median income per wage-earner person of about $30,000, my morning outing represented four hours of labor, or 10% of someone’s workweek. In 1998 dollars (just ten years ago, and approximately where my price indexes are stuck mentally), that’s just $23,500.

What Pat Buchanan predicted fourteen years ago in his seminal work The Great Betrayal has come to pass. The American elite has abandoned any pretense of being a real nation and thus, they have killed the middle class.

Debt will sustain the trend a bit longer, but American living standards are going to drop.

Part of me sees this as inevitable. Absent a restraining force (a sense of loyalty to one’s nation or family, which Westerners seem to pathologically lack), the animal spirits of capitalism will do their job. Capitalism has succeeded in providing abundant material goods at cheap prices to masses of people. But it is also having a leveling effect.

If a Chinaman can assemble cars as well as an American at a cheaper wage (and this is especially true if their competitors are the affirmative-action-crippled unionized-spoiled-brats of GM and Ford), then if the gap is sufficient to pay for the switching costs and transportation costs of bringing goods to market, then the work will go to China. Combine this with an alienated and decadent elite in this country who would rather lose money outsourcing (as many of them do) than give their own people decent-paying jobs and the process is inevitable.

And once it starts, even paternally-minded business owners will be forced to offshore or else be driven out of business by consumers increasingly driven by price. Losing jobs makes Americans poor which makes them more price sensitive which makes companies offshore to cut costs and then Americans lose more jobs. The decapitalization of this country is occurring at a breathtaking rate. Since Bush took office, U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined 25%.

This is an important statistic because for most of world history, wealth has been distributed very unequally. Economists believe this is because of a phenomenon called information asymmetry. The most valuable roles in society are physically idle roles that specialize in information processing. Unfortunately, the genetic lottery is very unequal in its distribution of information processing skills (i.e. intelligence, with a strong non-linear component due to the winner-take-all economic law of “low price gets the sale”), thus resulting in wildly unequal distributions of wealth. This is not fundamentally unjust, just reality.

The advent of manufacturing, on the other hand, for the first time made it possible for an average person to have enough productivity to justify a middle-class wage. In a national setting with high material demand and a limited labor supply, wages can rise to just under the actual economic value of the work.

But it does not have to be this way. Open up your labor markets to an influx of people, and those wage rates will be bid down. Profits will be beat down and the temporary anomaly of a middle class will be destroyed.

This is happening in American at a pace unprecedented even by the decadent standards of the contemporary West. Europe, with all its socialist rot, is careful about preserving jobs for its people. They suffer from immigration problems as we do and also from moral degeneracy, but there is something admirable in many European countries’ genuine concern for the plight of their average people. We may disagree with some of their methods (high taxes, ugly socialism), but the elites of Europe are somewhat better than the elites of America in this regard.

This may go back to our Second Revolution of 1865. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said “Live not by lies”. Post-Lincoln, this country has tried to define itself not as a particular nation for a particular people, but as a country based on an ideology, Equality. This ideology is so evidently false that like the Soviet system before it, the elites merely mouth the politically-correct words while undermining its basis in their behavior and actions. Intel isn’t offshoring to Gambia, but to China, based on the very real inequality between the two nations of people living in those places.

The tragedy of this false ideology is that the true American nation, the Anglo-American core, is denied the use of language that could express a common interest and the means of self-defense. The elite cravenly attacks the middle classes when they attempt to organize themselves (witness the decrying of calls for immigration law enforcement as “racist”), all the while engaging in highly unequal, discriminatory practices among themselves.

Their kids will never be bussed into the ghetto and don’t even apply to the public universities where affirmative action is most rudely practiced. They rarely have to interact with the sheer incompetence and annoyance of everyday life in America these days, as more and more competent Americans are replaced with hostile foreigners in every sphere of life. When was the last time the CEO of Citibank or Microsoft stepped into a post office and came face-to-face with modern American reality?

Politically, it is our duty to continue to fight for our nation, whatever the odds. But, on a personal level, we must plan for what seems likely. I’ll paint that picture more specifically in a subsequent post.