1. What does the Lord abominate?

2. What is ... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 7/2/2009 10:44:35 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

John Adams once said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people. It is wholly unfit, he said, for any other. One of the places where this undoubted truth is most obvious is when we enter the realm of economics -- the place where many Christians refuse to bring the lordship of Christ to bear, and where some Christians even invert the biblical norms in the name of giving free nice things away. Who among us is so stone-hearted as to be against giving nice things away? Well, me, but only because this perverse charity begins by stealing nice things away from other people.

I have mentioned this difficulty before, but so far I have only been able to irriate numerous progressive oysters, and have very few conservative pearls to show for it.

When companies accept regulations, it is not long before they learn the rules of the new game -- they come to welcome those regulations, and more like them. The cost of them can be passed on to those ... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 7/1/2009 10:59:16 PM | Link to this post | Print this post | 15 Responses

1. What are the four classes of men outlined by Calvin?... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 7/1/2009 9:19:12 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

Nate had a really good interview hosted by Kevin Swanson here. The question asked and answered is "can Christians write interesting stories?" There is a lot of good stuff in this interview.

"At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11)

Second Timothy, Part 2

"To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord" (2 Tim. 1:2).

The apostle Paul thought of Timothy as a true and dear son, and addressed him that way. He had picked him up as a ministerial assistant several decades before this, when Timothy was probably around sixteen-years-old. He begins with a triune benediction -- grace, mercy, and peace -- and offers this in the name of the Father and the Son. The Spirit is not mentioned by name, but it is not as though He is excluded from Paul's concerns. Someone once said that when doing theology, you always have to say everything every time -- lest someone suspect you of heresy. But this is obviously not possible; Paul only mentions grace, mercy and peace here, but not faith, hope and love. What's the deal?

Not everything that is said has to be said. The Spirit is the one who proceeds from the Father and the Son both, and we see from our text that Paul pronounces a blessing on Timothy that comes from the Father and the Son -- Christ Jesus our Lord. The Spirit is here in the fruit He brings, which in this case is identified as grace, mercy, and peace.

One of the fundamental distinctions we need to learn to make is the one that exists between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The terminology here is DiLorenzo's -- Rothbard made the same distinction, talking about free-market capitalists and state capitalists. The difference is not a slight one -- think of a boar free in the forests and the Empress of Blandings. Think of a boar finding all his own acorns, and a very pink pig with all four feet in the taxpayers' trough.

If we have only two categories -- public sector and private sector -- we leave out some of the principal miscreants. Someone in the private sector who arranges for subsidies for himself, or barriers and restrictions for his competitors is certainly a businessman. He handles capital. But if we call him a capitalist simpliciter then we are blurring the very kind of distinction that words ought to equip us to make.

Public collusion with private interests... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/30/2009 9:54:27 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 14 Responses

1. What two things does Calvin aim at in this section?

President Obama has been diligently doing whatever he can do to stay out of the fracas that erupted in Iran after their elections, and he took this stand because of the history of American interference. The Iranian chokeholders were shooting down protesters in the streets, which our president was pleased to call a "debate." Perhaps at times it rose to the level of a robust debate.

But then, a small donnybrook broke out in Honduras, and the duly elected president (who was laboring mightily to make himself president-for-life) was grabbed where the pants hang loose and marched by their military to a nearby plane. President Obama denounced that little business on the same day it happened.

Ladies and gentlemen, students of logic, there is only one possible conclusion, and that is that the president believes that there has not been a history of American intervention in Central America. I search in vain for any other explanation.

. . . a collection of short stories. Some really fun stuff here. I really enjoy books that hold my interest when dealing with a subject I am not really interested in. I have never been to a "for real" hockey game, and have never seen more than a few seconds of a game on television. So I guess I would not be part of the natural market for this one -- but I really enjoyed this set of short stories in the genre called "hockey lit." Ewert has the Canadian/American thing down, and a knack for connecting you to his characters within a very short space of time. The language in the first story is a bit rough in a couple spots, but the prose is smooth throughout.

1. We must consider ourselves without what two things?

I need to get a few words down about Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Two of his disciples now respectively occupy the main seat in the Oval Office and the chair behind the desk belonging to the Secretary of State, and so I thought it was high time to go back in time and read some musings from this old guard pinko agitator.

Having read this small book, I am now prepared to say that Alinsky was a tactical genius, a man who knew exactly how to rattle the establishment. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. A born iconoclast, the necessary friction that arises in the course of said iconoclasm didn't bother him, not even a little bit. A bit of admiration was once offered by his ideological opponent William F. Buckley -- "Alinsky takes the iconoclast's pleasure in kicking the biggest behinds in town and the sport is not untempting . . ."

But in order to get to this shrewd tactical analysis, there are chunks of this book when the reader needs to wade... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/28/2009 7:39:59 PM | Link to this post | Print this post | 17 Responses

I can see that I need to add a few extra comments to my last musical exhortation. To cut right to the chase, the answer is that yes, as "pure music," Schonberg and all his ilk are out. Attempts to create music that fly in the face of how God (clearly) intended for music to be created are rebellious in principle. But note that I said "cacophonous all the down" and "dissonant all the way through."

The use of cacophony or dissonance is not a problem at all. As Chesterton put it, a book without a wicked character is a wicked book. The problem is not the recognition that there is dissonance in the world; the problem is in the attempt to pretend that we can declare that the world is the kind of place where dissonance is all there is. That kind of thing is high rebellion and Christians must have nothing to do with it.

But these things can still be used appropriately -- they just cannot be taken as a "stand alone" appropriately. Take Berg's Europa String Quartet -- there are parts of that thing that would be a great soundtrack for a creepy scene in a warehouse down by the harbor. Set it in something else that gives it the kind of meaning that can be had in God's good earth, then fine. But when people want to tell me that this is the way it is all the way through, then forget about it. Why should we receive in a piece of music a worldview which, if we read in a book, we would throw it against the wall?

Cacophony is not music that is loud or boistrous; it is more random and aimless than that. Think of the first twenty-five seconds of Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf-- that is cacophony. But in that case it used well precisely because of how it then resolves. Distortion for the electric guitar can be fine also because that is simply the electronic modification of the timbre of the instrument -- it does not lose the tonal center. For another example, wise composers know how to use dissonance in a way that "crunches" and then resolves.

The kind of thing that I had in mind in the previous exhortation was the kind of irritating alternative music that is far enough away from the musical center to appeal to rebels, and not so far away that the radio audience diminishes to about sixteen really cool people. The trick for these rebels is how to have the philosophy of the Schonbergs made palatable enough for the masses. When we get to that point, we will have at that point developed our orc music.

1. What happens when we evaluate ourselves before an earthly ... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/28/2009 2:34:56 PM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

As we seek to cultivate our understanding of the kind of music we should be offering to God—and the corollary of what we as a congregation should be learning how to perform—we find that we come up against another challenge.

Church musicians come up against a greater challenge than other ... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/28/2009 8:49:35 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 13 Responses

Our nation’s public economists usually refer to you in your capacity as consumer. This is in contrast to previous and wiser eras, when citizens were thought of as producers, and as savers. But we have departed from the way, and when disaster strikes, one of the things we think to do, is spend our... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/28/2009 8:48:02 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

Father, we bow before You as the one who ... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/28/2009 8:46:36 AM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

As I have been writing about health care, the point undergirding everything I have been saying against "affordable health care for all" is this: violence in order to achieve such laudable ends is still objectionable.

One commenter asked what the point of health care was. Was it to provide health care to those who need it, or was it to profit the providers? Absent coercion, the answer is both. The point is to make a profit by providing health care. Absent coercion, if you try to make a profit by not providing health care, then the time will quickly come when a competitor finds and exploits that rather egregious flaw in your business plan. But if you have introduced the state into the equation (with the best of motives, of course), what you have done is create the possibility of entities that don't provide the service offered, but which can remain in business anyhow, because they now rely on tax-payer monies extracted under the threat of force.

The object... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/26/2009 4:00:30 PM | Link to this post | Print this post | 79 Responses

Paul Begala has said that the GOP should stop lecturing everybody about sex -- because of the hypocrisy recently manifested in the behavior of Sen. Ensign and Gov. Sanford. But this overlooks the important role of hypocrisy in every decent society. As it has been well observed, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. When virtue is publicly honored, there will be those who do not live up to that standard but who nevertheless want to known as men who live up to it. As long as we have a fallen world, and we honor what we ought to honor -- marital fidelity, say -- we will have this problem.

It is no solution at all to remove the discrepancy the way the left has done, which is by dropping the honor of virtue. This is what Begala in essence is saying. But it is a good thing that there are still political parties and regions of the country where you can wreck your public life by what you do in private. It was no virtue for Gov. Sanford to head off to Argentina, but it was a cultural virtue that made going to Argentina necessary.

But there is a lesson for randy Republicans in this. Stop trying to save the country without explicit and ongoing dependence on Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is not Lord over all, then Begala is right.

1. What is the righteousness of faith equated with?

2. What... Continue Reading

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 6/25/2009 4:20:56 PM | Link to this post | Print this post | 0 Responses

The other day I saw the president fielding a question about his health care deform, and he said the kind of glib thing that appears to be all the rage these days.

He said, in response to a question about his proposal putting private companies out of business, that he didn't understand what the fuss was all about. Wasn't the private sector supposed to be far more efficient? Wasn't it the government that was the entity that couldn't do anything right? Why, the president asked, his befuddlement apparently sincere, would this put any private companies out of business? Let the best man win, and all that.

But he left out of his calculation the nature of the inefficiencies. When two private companies go head to head for market share, the one that competes most effectively will come out on top. The inefficient one won't. The president was appealing to this well-known business fact to buttress his claim.

But he left out of the picture the one thing that government agencies are very effective at doing, and that is the task of increasing their budgets every year, and staying in business regardless of their inefficiencies in performing their appointed tasks.

If the post office had been subject to full-throated competition, they would have been out of business by now. But the post office does not solely rely, as private delivery companies do, on revenue from their business to fund future operations. They get to supplement their income by means of lots of money collected from the people by men with guns and big, block letters on the backs of their jackets. The issue is coercion.

So the private companies that are threatened by the coming government intrusion should take up the president's challenge, but with this proviso. "Deal. But leave the guns at home. Then bring it on."

Incidentaly, not to get sidetracked here, but the same thing applies to private companies that get government funds. Government control of private industry is fascism, not socialism -- to may to, to mah to. Do not judge free markets on the basis of what happens in unfree markets. Don't judge free markets by what happens in controlled markets. Every form of economic control from the center is coercive and violent in principle, and when it comes to the economic life of a nation, a Christian's desire ought to be keep coercion to a minimum.

The government is not bad at everything. As we parse it out, this is what we discover. The government is very, very bad at providing quality health care. The government is very, very good at forcing you to use and pay for it anyway.

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