The (insert you favorite here) Government Reform

A common and very dangerous misapprehension is that money is wealth. A moment's reflection should reveal the error of this way of thinking; just consider the Yen vs. the uS Dollar. Today, one uS Dollar is the same as 88 Yen, so is Japan 88 times as wealthy as the uS because they have 88 times as much money? Of course not. If we multiplied the number of uS Dollars by a factor of 88, would we be any richer? Well, whoever got the new money first would be, but as a whole, no.
Wealth is the goods you can buy with your labor, and the monetary unit is irrelevant in that respect. Zimbabwe is very poor because a day's labor will barely keep one alive for another day. The uS is relatively rich because a day's labor will feed a family of 4 for about a week. Goods are wealth, and the more excess of goods that are produced in a society vs. being consumed and destroyed, the wealthier that society can be.
Government produces no goods, because everything they have must first be taken from someone who produced that wealth. Government can only take and consume goods and so destroy wealth.
The so-called "Reforms" we are inundated with these days are nothing more than huge increases in the size of government, which as I said is a net destroyer of wealth in any society.
When it comes time to vote next year (if you are so inclined), remember that Bigger Government = More Poverty and vote accordingly.

Slavery

During the seven years of famine in ancient Egypt, Joseph kept the people alive by first selling the stored grain to them. Then when their money ran out, he sold them food in exchange for their livestock. Finally when the people had nothing left but their bodies and their land, they sold their lands to Pharaoh and themselves into slavery in order to survive. Joseph then allowed the people to remain in their land and to grow food there and to pay 20% of all they produced to Pharaoh who owned them and their land.
When the people of the united States pay more than double that percentage in homage to Augustus with little complaint, what does that tell us about the "Land of the Free"?

Hypocrisy

The gap between what we say and what we do is hypocrisy. As human beings, we are prone to inconsistencies such as these, but the correct way to deal with our own hypocrisy is to always keep the gap as close to zero as possible. As every child knows, true beliefs are reflected in actions, not in words, so when we discover that our actions diverge from our declarations, we must listen to the more convincing voice of action.
We must first know the truth, then act on that knowledge without compromise. If we then discover a gap, we must either confess our error of belief or our error of action. This is not perfection, but it is integrity.
The world watches carefully.

Government creates poverty

No government has never made a society more wealthy without stealing that wealth from another country. Within its own jurisdiction, it steals from one group and gives to another then charges everyone for the "service". Any society must be poorer in direct proportion to the size of its government. That is unless they start a war in order to steal the wealth of a weaker country.

Producers and consumers

The natural state of the world is that societies consist of producers and consumers. Producers are those who are net creators of goods that are desirable and for which people will trade their own labor or rightfully owned goods. Consumers are those that on net, produce fewer goods than they consume. I say that this is the natural state of the world because each person necessarily progresses through life by first being a net consumer as a child, then hopefully a net producer during his or her working life and finally a net consumer again in old age.

We have advanced as a civilization because millions of people have produced more than they have consumed for many centuries. But in recent centuries, humanity has encountered a troubling new trend in government encouraged consumption. Around the world, governments have learned to tax their people not only through direct collections, but also through systematic and intentional debasement of paper currencies. The proceeds of this debasement are then wasted on agressive wars (enriching the preferred military hardware providers), welfare (encouraging net consomption and guaranteeing re-election of certain politicians) and corporatism (enriching banks and other large corporations by protecting them from competition and also insuring large donations for politicians).

So government everywhere has gone from being a consumer of goods, which is bad enough, to being a destructive parasite on the the productive society. Have you ever seen a 1000 pound horse infested with 100 pounds of ticks? Why not? We instinctively know that when parasites reach a certain size in relation to the host, death for both soon follows.

Presently in the uSA, government consumption is over 40% of GDP. This is equivalent to a 1000 pound horse with about 700 pounds of ticks. How fast could that horse run? How long could it live?

Smaller government is not just a party platform, or the dream of pie-in-the-sky libertarians, it's a matter of economic life and death.

Statistics and Christianity

It has been said that there is no significant statistical difference between the Christians and non-Christians. As with any statistics, this doesn't really tell us much. As Mark Twain said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." I think he meant that numbers can be persuasive, but they are not always reliable.

Still, statistically Christians should look different from the society in general. Consider the following:

IF real Christians are defined by faith in Christ AND

IF faith in Christ produces tangible changes (such as obedience to His commands)

THEN somehow Christians should be statistically different from non-Christians.

SO, in regard to behavior touching on the morality and ethical behavior taught by Christ,

IF there is no statistical difference between the visible Christian church and the rest of the culture,

THEN within statistical error, there are about as many real Christians in the visible Church as there are in the rest of the culture.

Stated another way, there is about the same proportion of non-believers in the visible church as there is in the general society. A sobering thought.

Economic Theory

John Maynard Keynes economic theories, which are so dominant in the present economic crisis, make some assumptions about government that are interesting to examine. In Keynes estimation, the business cycle is caused by the animal spirits of fear and greed and the cure for these fluctuation is for government to overspend when animal spirits turn toward fear (the bust) and for government to underspend during the boom. The bureaucrats of today hear the first advice and love it because it means that government will always go from growth to growth. They ignore the second advice because that would mean a shrinking of government during the boom. From their perspective, smaller government can never be good.

Austrian economic theories also make some assumptions about government: their intervention into the free market is the very cause of the business cycle and nothing they undertake will make things better. In times of economic crisis, the government should tax less, spend less and never prop up losers or inhibit the market from reallocating resources away from the failures and toward others more likely to succeed in satisfying the wants of consumers. Then without government intervention in the bust, there will be no unsustainable boom and the market will only swing due to natural factors such as innovations, weather, etc. not because of interventions by government.

In the simplest terms, which of these seems more likely to be true? And which one is the most self serving?

Economic theory has profound consequences, just look at the 100+ million dead because of the theories of Karl Marx. Today, the world is suffering the results of almost 100 years of the bad economic theory that government intervention is the cure for the business cycle.