I’ve Been Meaning To Write a Post On Boston…
. . . but Ron Paul beat me to it.
As someone who lives in Massachusetts, I was horrified not only by the lockdown and unwarranted searches of innocent people’s homes, but also by people’s blase’ attitude towards it all. It is truly a non-issue for most people in my area. But at least Dunkin’ was open.
While watching CNN one morning, I took note of a soldier walking down a Boston street in full camo with a bomb sniffing dog. Full camo… in an urban setting. What exactly was he supposed to be blending in with again?
I can’t help but feel that a police state of a uniquely American flavor is coming, and it will be welcomed with open arms by the citizenry.
I Couldn’t Not Post This
Too funny.
Don Boudreaux is Right
Don on Laissez Faire. The reasoning he gives is largely why I became a libertarian; not only do I not want others interfering in my life, but that same graciousness must be extended to others as well. I wrote a piece on it way back when, though not so well written as Don’s, here.
The more expansive is the scope of government authority, the more my life is subject to commands issued in part under the influence of people who read Usmagazine.
Scary.
Yes, scary indeed.
The Kingdom of God is like a Post Scarcity Economy
John 6 1-15 says:
Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), 2 and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. 3 Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. 4 The Jewish Passover Festival was near.
5 When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
7 Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages[a] to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”
8 Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, 9 “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). 11 Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks,and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
12 When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” 13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” 15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
We just covered this passage in church today, and although I have heard the story before, I found it interesting from an economic perspective.
Economics centers around the idea of scarcity; resources are scarce, yet our wants are endless. The purpose of economics is to attempt to explain how and why people make the decisions they do in light of the limitations that they face. Going by the subjective theory of value, items cannot be said to have intrinsic value in and of themselves. People choose to trade what they have for things that they prefer more, and attempt to satisfy as much of those wants as they can with their finite resources, and the willingness of individuals to trade for things is what determine’s an item’s value.
However, in this story Jesus completely breaks those rules. The very thing that most limits us here on earth in our ability to satisfy our wants and needs, scarcity, is completely broken. All of the five thousand are fed, to the point where there is even twelve baskets left over! This of course points to how God is able to abundantly meet our needs, and isn’t bound by the same constraints as us humans.
My immediate thought is to say, “Well, in a post-scarcity economy, that would mean that everyone’s individual ends are satisfied, because there is no longer any reason for them not to be; everyone would be able to ‘afford’ whatever they want.” That would lead us towards the joy of heaven, where we experience happiness and community like we never had on earth. However, there is still a constraint here, at least from an earthly perspective. Jesus didn’t simply multiply the silver coins (which, from other sources I’ve read that an average day’s wage at the time would be one denarius, and if we assume a denarius to be one tenth of an ounce, then it would be $542.60 in today’s dollars to buy all the bread needed), and allow everyone to buy their own bread. After all, perhaps some people preferred wheat bread to barley bread, or some didn’t like fish (admittedly unlikely), or what have you. Jesus directly provided for their needs; he didn’t simply provide everyone the means to provide for themselves as they saw fit (ignoring, of course, the practical problem of how they would actually do that in this exact situation, with presumably no market nearby). What this tells me is that we as Christians are still to seek Jesus for our needs, that He still retains some sort of control over how we are provided for, even in a post scarcity setting.
There’s one more thing I would like to highlight: The people try to capture Jesus and make him King, by force. Besides the irony of trying to force someone to rule over you, Jesus rejects the idea and escapes. It reminds me of 1 Samuel:
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead[b] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to theLord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
21 When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. 22 The Lordanswered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
Then Samuel said to the Israelites, “Everyone go back to your own town.”
Quote of the Day
This comes from Frederic Bastiat in The Law:
The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.
They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority.
Quote of the Day
This passage appears in F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, pages 112-113 under the heading Our Animistic Vocabulary and the Confused Concept of ‘Society’ (footnotes omitted):
[I]n the study of human affairs difficulties of communication begin with the definition and naming of the very objects we wish to analyse. The chief terminological barrier to understanding, outranking in importance the other terms we have just discussed, is the expression ‘society’ itself – and not only inasmuch as it has, since Marx, been used to blur the distinctions between governments and other ‘institutions’. As a word used to describe a variety of systems of interconnections of human activities, ‘society’ falsely suggests that all such systems as of the same kind. It is also one of the oldest terms of this kind, as for example in the Latin societas, from socius, the personally known fellow or companion; and it has been used to describe both an actually existing state of affairs and a relation between individuals. As usually employed, it presupposes or implies a common pursuit of shared purposes that usually can be achieved only by conscious collaboration.
As we have seen, it is one of the necessary conditions of the extension of human cooperation beyond the limits of individual awareness that the range of such pursuits be increasingly governed not by shared purposes but by abstract rules of conduct whose observance brings it about that we more and more serve the needs of people whom we do not know and find our own needs similarly satisfied by unknown persons. Thus the more the range of human cooperation extends, the less does motivation within it correspond to the mental picture people have of what should have in a ‘society’, and the more ‘social’ comes to be not the key word in a statement of the facts but the core of an appeal to an ancient, and now obsolete, ideal of general human behaviour. Any real appreciation of the difference between, on the one hand, what actually characterises individual behaviour in a particular group and, on the other, wishful thinking about what individual conduct should be (in accordance with older customs) is increasingly lost. Not only is any group of persons connected in practically any manner called a ‘society’, but it is concluded that any such group should behave as a primitive group of companions did.
Thus the word ‘society’ has become a convenient label denoting almost any group of people, a group about whose structure or reason for coherence nothing need be known – a makeshift phrase people resort to when they do not quite know what they are talking about. Apparently a people, a nation, a population, a company, an association, a group, a horde, a band, a tribe, the members of any particular place, all are, or constitute, societies.
To call by the same name such completely different formations as the companionship of individuals in constant personal contact and the structure formed by millions who are connected only by signals resulting from long and infinitely ramified chains of trade is not only factually misleading but also almost always contains a concealed desire to model this extended order on the intimate fellowship for which our emotions long. Bertrand de Jouvenel has well described this instinctive nostalgia for the small group – ‘the milieu in which man is first found, which retains for him an infinite attraction: but any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny’.
The crucial difference overlooked in this confusion is that the small group can be led in its activities by agreed aims or the will of its members, while the extended order that is also a ‘society’ is formed into a concordant structure by its members’ observance of similar rules of conduct in the pursuit of individual purposes. The result of such diverse efforts under similar rules will indeed show of a few characteristics resembling those of an individual organism possessing a brain or mind, or what such an organism deliberately arranges, but is it misleading to treat such a ‘society’ animistically, or to personify it by ascribing to it a will, an intention, or a design. Hence it is disturbing to find a serious contemporary scholar confessing that to any utilitarian ‘society’ must appear not ‘as a plurality of persons… [but] as a sort of singe great person’.
Today marks the 21st anniversary of Hayek’s death. His was a great mind, and we could do well to have more thinkers like him.
Quote of the Day
This comes from Kierkegaard (HT to Tongue Sandwich):