Book on race advertises failure of state programs

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith rocked the white evangelical world when it came out in 2000. It appealed to the evangelical’s love of wool shirts and launched a new genre of books and articles promoting white evangelical guilt over racism. In 2013, Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith was the booster rocket to keep the movement in orbit.

 Structural racism in the US in spite of the Civil Rights movement horrified the authors of Divided by Faith. By structural racism they mean free markets. They wanted to tax the rich at higher rates and redistribute it to poor. That such taxation would hurt rich blacks and that most of the poor are white (though the poverty rate among blacks is higher) didn't enter their calculations. 

Frustrated by the white evangelical insistence on individual responsibility and personal evangelism, they determined to move white evangelicals away from their fixation on the individual and toward solving structural issues through the government. Their solution was for white evangelicals to get to know blacks personally by having them to dinner and integrating churches. They reasoned that if whites could know black people well enough they would become as socialist as the authors. 

The derelict economics of the Benedict Option

Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option: A strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation was a best seller last year. It’s difficult to complain about most of what Dreher has to say in his book. It would be like opposing motherhood and apple pie. He advocates building stronger churches and communities, praying and reading the Bible more and improving our children’s education.

The problem with this book and his earlier one, Crunchy Cons, is that his solutions have nothing at all to do with the causes of the illnesses he associates with modern Western culture. The first chapter of the Benedict Option laments the moral decline of the US as evidenced in the endorsement of homosexual marriage and the full hug of transgenderism. The second chapter traces the origins of these problems to the following:

Fourteenth century: The defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism in medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds...

Fifteenth century: The Renaissance dawned with a new, optimist outlook on human potential and began shifting the West’s vision and social imagination from God to man...
Sixteenth century: The Reformation broke the religious unity of Europe...

Seventeenth century: ...The Scientific Revolution struck the final blow to the organic medieval model of the cosmos, replacing it with a vision of the universe as a machine...

Eighteenth century: The Enlightenment attempted to create a philosophical framework for living in and governing society absent religious reference...

Nineteen century: The success of the Industrial Revolution pulverized the agrarian way of life, uprooted the masses from rural areas, and brought them into the cities...
Twentieth century: The horrors of the two world wars severely damaged faith in the gods of reason and progress and in the God of Christianity...

Is the GOP tax plan moral?

Socialists complain that the recent tax reform package passed by Republicans in Congress and lauded by President Trump as America’s Christmas present is immoral because it provides some relief to the wealthy. Behind the complaint lies the offense to socialists that rich people exist at all. Unless a tax plan euthanizes the rich, socialists will consider it immoral.

It’s important to keep in mind that when socialists talk about morality they don’t mean what people have meant for two thousand years. For most of Christian history morality meant those principles that would cause humanity to prosper if we follow them. We got them from God because only our Creator knows what is best for us. Socialists murdered God in the Enlightenment and changed the definition of morality to mean whatever socialists prefer. That is the socialist MO: redefine words so that their arguments win by default.

Why executives make the big bucks

Socialists suffer seizures when the subject of CEO salaries surfaces. They never tell us how much more money than a janitor a CEO should make, so it’s clear that no matter what the salary they will harm themselves by their extreme response if it is any higher.

British socialists are advertising their envy in a new report “of companies that Theresa May said risk damaging ‘the social fabric of our country’ by paying bosses too much money,” according to comments by the Adam Smith Institute. The author explained,

"The public register was published on Tuesday by the Investment Association, a trade body of investment firms that manage the pensions of millions of Britons."

The register lists every company in the FTSE All-Share Index which has suffered at least a 20% shareholder rebellion against proposals for executive pay, re-election of directors or other resolution at their shareholder meetings.

Of course, the source of the outrage is pure envy and no amount of economic reasoning or facts will dissuade the left. But can free marketeers justify the highest CEO salaries? There are two reasons that CEOs earn such salaries: 1) marginal revenue and 2) knowledge.

Distributism ideology always leads to socialism

Christians are concerned about the rise to dominance of transgenderism and same-sex marriage in the US. But they shouldn’t worry because R.R. Reno, editor-in-chief of First Things, has the solution: a kinder, gentler capitalism. His essay last October spawned a series of rigorous rebuttals at Public Discourse, the last of which is here. Reno lamented the economic “freedom” that Michael Novak promoted in his classic book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, has destroyed morality in the country:

The “new birth of freedom” that Michael championed largely came to pass. And it has tended to weaken the two other legs holding up society: democratic institutions and a vital religious and moral culture. Michael observes that “greater incentives will stimulate greater economic activism.” True, but he did not recognize that ever-greater economic activity can crowd out political engagement and sideline religious and moral authority. This is what has happened. Capitalism, now global in scope, is swallowing up more and more of civic life, so much so that in some contexts economists and policymakers present free market principles as ironclad laws about which we have no choice. Dwindling manufacturing jobs, technological displacement, global flows of labor and capital—we are told we have no alternative. This is a cruel reversal of what Michael commended as the source of freedom and openness...We are drowning in freedom... Age-old expectations of marriage and children have become choices. We can even choose to become male or female.

The dismal science gets morality

Several authors want to make an honest woman of dismal science. Among them are Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton who wrote Identity Economics, and Sam Bowles who penned The Moral Economy. Project Syndicate posted a quick review by Ricardo Hausmann who wrote, “Two recent books indicate that a quiet revolution is challenging the foundations of the dismal science, promising radical changes in how we view many aspects of organizations, public policy, and even social life. As with the rise of behavioral economics, this revolution emanates from psychology.”

Cognitive psychology spawned behavioral economics and its proponents have grabbed six Nobel prizes for telling us that humans are not always rational. Behavioral economists tried to corral the older Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMF), which actually said that in the long run professionals make the market behave rationally. EMFers always knew that in the short run people could act irrationally and often did. Behavioral and EMF economists talked past each other for the most part because the first dealt with the short run and the latter with the long run.

The new economics proposed by Akerlof and company want to improve behavioral perspectives by adding morality to the dismal science, which hasn’t been a part of mainstream economics since Adam Smith. Behavioral economics led to calls for the state to nudge people in the direction economists thought best for them,

such as forcing them to opt out of rather than into better choices....The new revolution assumes that when we make choices, we do not merely consider which of the available options we like the most. We are also asking ourselves what we ought to do.”

Akerlof and Kranton propose a simple addition to the conventional economic model of human behavior. Besides the standard selfish elements that define our preferences, they argue that people see themselves as members of “social categories” with which they identify. Each of these social categories – for example, being a Christian, a father, a mason, a neighbor, or a sportsman – has an associated norm or ideal. And, because people derive satisfaction from behaving in accordance with the ideal, they behave not just to acquire, but also to become....In the process, we may understand that we vote because that is what citizens ought to do, and we excel at our jobs because we strive for respect and self-realization, not just a raise.

Will political polarization cause divorce?

A few writers have wondered since the election of President Trump if the country is so fractured that another great divorce like that of the Civil War is in our future. Pew Research has provided the statistics to fuel the debate. Recently, John Hawkins wrote “Do Conservatives And Liberals Have Enough in Common to Keep A Country Together Anymore?” on Town Hall. As if counseling troubled marriage partners, Hawkins asked what we have in common?

The Constitution? Conservatives believe in it. Liberals believe in a “living Constitution” which is fundamentally no different than having no Constitution at all.

Religion? Conservatives tend to believe in Judeo-Christian values. Even atheists who are conservative tend to at least be friendly to those values. Liberals mock Judeo-Christian values.

What about patriotism? Conservatives tend to love their country. Liberals love this country like a wife-beater loves his spouse.