The View From 1776

I have noted before that Wall Street Journal news reporters often display pervasive, sometimes subtle, liberal-progressive-socialist biases.  Unlike the Journal’s editorial board writers, among other things, they still parrot the nonsense popularized by economist John Maynard Keynes during the 1930s Depression. 

Since Keynesian economics is the reigning school of thought in socialistic academia, it’s no surprise that Keynesian nostrums are repeated, without evaluation, by today’s reporters.

One example is in the Journal article titled The Doomsayers Who Got It Right.

The Journal reporter writes:

Those who saw the crisis coming, on the other hand, fret that U.S. government spending on bailouts and stimulus plans that preserve failed business models could increase the likelihood of a worse calamity later.

They foresee a long season in which consumers cut their spending, and instead sharply increase the savings rate. That would be healthy for savings-anemic U.S. households, which have spent beyond their means for years, but deeply problematic for a country where consumers drive 70% of all economic activity.

The matter of concern is the statement that increased personal savings would be “deeply problematic for a country where consumers drive 70% of all economic activity.”

Keynes asserted that the root cause of our Depression was excess savings.  His thesis was that savings take money out of circulation, thereby reducing consumption and putting ever greater downward pressure on business activity and job creation.  The appropriate remedy, in Keynesian doctrine, is endlessly expanded government deficit spending.

This same thesis, needless to say, is widely advocated by Democrat/Socialist and liberal Republican politicians, by Wall Street operatives, and by liberal-progressive-socialist economists.  News reporters and commentators, in the main, go along for the ride.

So, what is wrong with the Journal reporter’s statement?

First, is assumes that money placed by individuals in savings accounts will no longer be available in the flow of economic activity, that it will, in effect, be buried in the back yard or under a mattress.

What really happens is that savings, through one channel or another, end up as increased deposit balances on lenders’ balance sheets.  Several beneficial effects arise from this.

One is that banks and other financial intermediaries have increased and more stable lendable funds.  Consumers with higher savings are more creditworthy and will find it easier to obtain bank loans.  Ask yourself why former investment bank titans Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley opted to become commercial bank holding companies and compete to get stable bank deposits.

Government stimulus programs, in contrast, produce temporary and therefore unreliable bursts of increased bank deposits, leaving lenders wary of significant increases in lending activity.

Another benefit is that, with balance sheets strengthened by stable savings deposits, financial institutions are less dependent upon Federal largesse and less likely to become ensnared in European-style regulatory management of lending and investment policy.  Innovative new businesses and existing small businesses, which create disproportionately more new jobs, will gain additional financial support. 

In contrast, as the price of bailout funds government is nudging banks into lending to keep Detroit’s Big Three automakers and the UAW union afloat, and to compel higher investments in the least profitable of auto products: hybrid or battery-driven “green” cars.

The second major problem with the erroneous Keynesian doctrine expressed in the Journal news story is that consumption does not in fact drive the economy.  The wages and profits, from which come consumer spending and saving, cannot exist without the long chain of business expenditures for investment in new equipment, new process, and for payments to materials suppliers and workers. 

Consumption expenditures are just one of the by-products of business expenditures.  Business expenditures are the real drivers of the economy.

Business expenditures for new investment and for production of basic, intermediate, and consumer goods are as large as, generally larger than, consumer expenditures.

The exception is a period like our recent one, in which government deficit spending leads to excessive fiat money creation by the Fed. That impels an unsupportable increase in borrowing, as the value of the dollar declines.  Consumer borrowing in this circumstance, as we have witnessed over the last 15 to 20 years, leads to negative savings.  Consumer spending was increasingly floated on credit-card and home-equity-loan borrowing.  Spending more than we produce does not make a healthy economy.  It just booms imports.

Government stimulus programs may be welcomed by businesses and consumers in the vain hope that they will provide relief from a recession.  But we know from unvarying experience, beginning here with the Roosevelt New Deal, that government stimulus spending never ends a recession.  In fact such spending tends to prolong and to worsen a recession.

One reason for the failure of stimulus programs is that consumers, already fearful of losing jobs, tend to use stimulus payments to reduce debt and to increase savings.  Very little of it goes to added consumption goods spending.  President Bush’s stimulus program early in 2008 was a flop.  President-elect Obama’s will end the same way.

Another and more fundamental reason is that business does not like uncertainty.  When the Federal government begins tinkering with the economy, as it did in the Depression and as it is doing now, it creates new layers of bureaucracy to administer new and more restrictive business regulation.  Government typically increases business taxes at the same time, while mandating costly new business methods (think of the looming presence of president-elect Obama’s Carol Browner and other other Al Gore environmentalists).

In such times of high costs, low profits, and prospective government experimentation and regimentation, prudent businessmen hesitate to increase production or to make new production investments.  And without production increases there will be no increased payments to suppliers and workers and therefore no wage increases or added jobs.

Government stimulus spending financed with more debt adds to inflationary pressures.  This is what occurred in the 1970s stagflation.  During a high inflation period, which almost certainly will hit us within the next couple of years, people’s nominal incomes increase, but their costs of living rise even faster.  Worse, as their nominal income rises, they are pushed up into higher tax brackets.

The final injury of the fiction that consumer spending drives the economy is that the government pays for its ineffective, indeed counterproductive, stimulus programs by stealing consumers’ lifetime savings.  By the mid-1980s, when the 1970s stagflation was finally halted by Paul Volcker, the real purchasing power of consumers’ lifetime savings was less than half what it had been before President Johnson’s Great Society welfare-state entitlements set in motion our destructive 1970s inflation.

In The Enduring Word of God I wrote that, “Rather than world peace, anticipated by 19th century liberal-progressive-socialists, their moral relativism, secularity, and philosophical materialism inflicted bloodshed and tyranny on a scale unprecedented in history...”

To the list therein should be added the 1960s-70s student activists’ idea of a gift to humanitarian causes: pulling out of the Vietnam War and leaving Vietnamese and Cambodians to the tender mercies of the victorious liberal-progressive-socialist Pol Pot and his socialist confreres. 

An estimated 2 million people were tortured and executed to further the socialist Religion of Humanity known as communism.  As Stalin is reported to have said, one death may be a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic.

No word of apology, sympathy, or regret ever has been made publicly by Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, or other leaders of SDS and Weatherman underground.  Mr. Ayers, to the contrary, remains defiantly active in promoting mandatory inculcation of socialism in our public schools.  He is on record in an interview with the New York Times, published with extraordinary coincidence on 9/11, stating with regard to Weatherman bombings, that they did not do enough.

These are the friends and mentors of president-elect Obama.  These are exemplars of the Baby Boomer generation cadre that has done its utmost to destroy the remaining vestiges of personal morality, without which our Constitution has been stretched beyond recognition.

Given this legacy of liberal-progressive-socialism, president-elect Obama’s active support for murdering millions of babies, some in the grisly methods of partial-birth abortion, is hardly surprising. 

Murder by abortion is, to libertine liberal-progressive-socialists, just another statistic on the road to sexual promiscuity and sensual gratification.

Pastor Dan Gardner preached the sermon Sunday at the Cohocton (New York) Assembly of God Church.  His text was Isaiah 40:1-8:

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling: “In the desert prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. 

“And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.  For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All men are like grass, 
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.  The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them.  Surely the people are grass. 

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.

The following is the gist of Pastor Gardner’s sermon, with my interpolations and extrapolations.  Any misrepresentations are mine, not his.

As far back as 2200 BC, 4,200 years ago, those who were to become the people of Israel, were devoutly aware that their universe owed its existence to a God whose almighty name was so awe inspiring that it could not be spoken.

As Pastor Gardner noted, our Western world has turned its back on the Word of God, but the Word of God remains there.  God’s Word is creation itself.  Our world was formed by the Word of God.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  (Genesis 1:1-3)

In a more philosophical vein, around AD 60, the disciple whom Jesus loved wrote:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

The Word of God, the ground of being itself preceding the creation of our universe, was, is, and will be there, completely outside our world, yet regulating it with His laws of nature.  Those laws uniquely gave humans the power of a fully rational mind coupled with free will.  We humans can be led to the wisdom of age-old experience, but God does not compel each individual to follow that wisdom.  It’s up to us to seek Jesus and to believe in the Word of God.

In today’s sermon, Pastor Gardner noted that there are three scholarly approaches to validating the Word of God: internal evidence in the Scriptures, external evidence, and bibliographical evidence.  Pastor Gardner focused today upon the first of these.

Within the Bible we find an abundance of internal evidence attesting that every word in the Bible is Divinely inspired. 

The word “inspired” is rich in symbolic significance.  Inspiration literally means “breathed in.”

...the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

Thus we can speak of the living, revealed Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit in human rationality.

No student of the physical sciences, no atheist or agnostic, despite continual efforts, has ever been able to fathom how God created life on earth.  Instead they posit some incredibly silly hypotheses about coagulating mud crystals, becoming by random chance, the progenitors of DNA, or else they shrug their shoulders and assume that the world had no beginning, that it has always been as it is.

What internal evidence in the Bible is our basis for believing it to be the Truth?

First, Pastor Gardner related, the Old and New Testaments contain at least 668 prophesies of future events, prophesies often made decades or even hundreds of years before their fulfillment.

The prophet Daniel, for example, almost 250 years before the events, foretold conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great and the subsequent split of his empire among four generals. (Daniel 8:15-26)

The prophet Isaiah, more than 150 years in advance, foretold that the Israelites would be released from their Babylonian captivity by Persian king Cyrus:

...who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please; he will say of Jerusalem, “Let it be rebuilt,” and of the temple, “Let its foundations be laid.” (Isaiah 44:28), and

I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight.  He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the LORD Almighty. (Isaiah 45:13)

C. S. Lewis, the celebrated convert from agnosticism in adulthood, was a specialist in mythology.  He tells us that nowhere in mythology is there the wealth of specific detail about every-day things that characterizes the Old and the New Testaments.

Biblical accounts are not myths made up by men.  Particularly so the four Gospels.  They were written, within 30 to 50 years of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, by eyewitnesses, men who were living with Jesus every day during his roughly three year ministry.

As Lewis also said, nobody willingly subjects himself to the abuse, physical punishment, and the martyrs’ deaths of these men just to defend a myth.  A typical eyewitness account is that of the disciple John:

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)

The apostle Paul, transformed by his experience on the road to Damascus, writes in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:21)

In the first of Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians:

And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe. (1 Thessalonians 2:13)

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. (Psalms 119:89)

Since the middle of the 18th century, Westerners have increasingly turned away from God and have sought counsel among false prophets who tell us that their modern religious gnosticism can, through the secular political state, perfect humanity and human society here on earth.

This is the legacy of the French so-called Enlightenment (not to be confused with the earlier English, Scottish, and American Enlightenments). 

French intellectual contributors to the Encyclopedia, from the 1750s onward, poisoned the world with their secular, philosophical materialism and the post-Revolution doctrines of Auguste Comte’s positivism. 

Comte’s Religion of Humanity denied the existence of God and hubristically declared that the proper object of worship was humanity itself.  We were to worship ourselves, because the prophets of secularism, Saint-Simon and Comte, later Marx and Lenin, claimed to have discovered ineluctable laws of history that decreed the evolution of society beyond the Word of God and into a new scientific age, in which intellectuals would lead us to perfection.

The sermon topic was why should one believe the Holy Scriptures?  A parallel question is why should any intelligent person place his faith in liberal-progressive-socialism?

Rather than world peace, anticipated by 19th century liberal-progressive-socialists, their moral relativism, secularity, and philosophical materialism inflicted bloodshed and tyranny on a scale unprecedented in history: the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (in which more than 70,000 French citizens were slaughtered in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood); two devastating world wars; Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) regime (that perpetrated the Holocaust and also slaughtered a few million Poles, Czechs, and Russians); the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which slaughtered, at a minimum, more than ten million people); Mao’s Communist China, which liquidated a similar number of millions of people; down to recent and current repression in Cuba under Castro, in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.

Reverence for life, especially for that of each human being, including the unborn, is a bed-rock principle of Christianity and of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  Liberal-progressive-socialists, despite their claims of “caring” about the masses, have been unperturbed by the liquidation of many tens of millions of their fellows by socialist political states in the name of perfecting humanity.  And they have eagerly embraced the murder of millions of babies via abortion.

Why did liberal-progressive-socialists ignore the Word of God and remain apologists for these barbaric actions? 

The answer is that intellectual brilliance seldom is accompanied by wisdom and judgment.  Without guidance from the Holy Spirit and the self-restraint that comes from acknowledging God as the Creator of the universe, it’s too easy for intellectuals to fall victim to self-worship.  Denying God, they believe that their superior intellects can master nature (witness Al Gore and the power-trip myth of man-made global warming). 

Liberal-progressive-socialists, who scathingly ridicule Christianity and our Judeo-Christian moral heritage, look into the mirror every day and see the god whom they worship: themselves.

And now this admonition is for you, O priests.  If you do not listen, and if you do not set your heart to honor my name,” says the LORD Almighty, “I will send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings. Yes, I have already cursed them, because you have not set your heart to honor me…

For the lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction—because he is the messenger of the LORD Almighty.  But you have turned from the way and by your teaching have caused many to stumble; you have violated the covenant with Levi,” says the LORD Almighty. (Malachi 2:1-2; 7-8)

One of the great ironies of liberal-progressive-socialism is its claim to deal only with objective, scientifically measurable truth embodied in the tangible aspects of nature.  Yet their historicism gives us nothing concrete at all.  Liberal-progressive-socialism’s intellectual hypotheses depend upon unquantifiable abstractions such as “humanity,” “history,” the “laws of history,” the “world community,” “workers of the world,” the “proletariat,” and “social justice.” Nowhere in human history have these theoretical concepts had an objective existence.  They are nonetheless key components in the guiding dogma of liberal-progressivism’s gnostic religion of socialism.

The Truth is that God created a vast variety of individuals and gives each of us the opportunity to renounce our self-centered, hubristic vanity and to turn to Him for guidance.  Following the Bible’s great commandments - have no God but God and worship Him only; love your neighbor as you wish to be loved yourself - is the only approach in this life toward the real perfection that is to be found in Heaven. 

His Word is and was, and will be eternally in place.  We, in our short lives, can only endeavor to participate in the mystery that is God’s Revealed Word.

Too many people fail to understand the totality of liberal-progressivism’s cultural and economic aims.  Too many fail to see that, if liberal-progressives are permitted to prevail, a Constitutionally governed United States will cease to exist; that it will be subsumed under a world-government, socialist tyranny.  Ultimately individual political and economic liberties will disappear; all economic, cultural, and political decision will emanate from on high in the councils of an elite of state-planners.

For a foretaste, one has only to look at the degree of socialistic, bureaucratic control already imposed by the European Union’s councils in Brussels. Look also at what the incoming Democrat/Socialist administration plans for regulating health care, health insurance, the automobiles we will be permitted to drive, and the extent to which socialist labor unions will be accorded an effective veto over corporate and educational management decisions.  You may want more goodies from Uncle Sugar, but they come at the price of the liberties for which the colonists fought in 1776.

In that vein, read my earlier post, Armageddon Tomorrow.

Linda Kimball’s The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism (thanks to Maggie’s Farm for the link to this essay) gives us the historical background and outlines the terrifying aims and methodologies guiding liberal-progressive-socialism.

Read it to understand why liberal-progressive-socialists are enemies of the historical modes and morals that constitute humanity.  Terms like “caring” and “social justice” are code words for the most barbaric methods of human repression ever imposed upon the world.  Their import is the police state imposed with KGB-style terror.

Left-wingers will denounce this characterization as provocative and divisive.  The fact, as even a moment’s reflection reveals, is that provocation and divisiveness originated with liberal-progressive-socialists, who first attacked Christianity, Judeo-Christian morality, the human soul, individual responsibility, and political liberties under a government of very limited powers.  What liberals denounce is merely an attempt to defend civilization against the onslaught of the barbarians.

Read Why Detroit Has an Especially Bad Union Problem: Collective bargaining agreements mean the UAW can make or break Big Three CEOs.

Related articles are:

Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops

Labor Union Greed

Labor-Liberal Incest

Labor Unions Admit They Are Killing American Jobs

Labor Unions: A Brood of Vipers

Labor Unions: Double-Edged Blade

NO ONE IS SMARTER THAN THEIR CRITERIA...
By Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC
WWII & Korean  War
a point-man/follower of The Lion of Judah
http://www.choicemaker.net

Though the election is over, Gov. Sarah is being attacked by the leftist-humanists because they fear her re-appearance on a future ballot. They are afraid and rightly so! She is a perceptive, excellent candidate to represent  the Founders’ Principles and our American way of life with intelligent courage.

Additionally, since no one is smarter than their criteria, the collectivists are working from a pre-chosen mediocre (and worse) set of man-made, carnal-ruled opinions that delimit perception of consequences-of-choice prior to choosing. In other words, they lack Vision. Based on a universe-sized ignorance, such devices are self-imposed, thus the lefties can accurately and historically be defined as unintelligent.

On the other hand, Sarah and her chosen criteria, which are far superior to any man-made system of opinion, reasonably scare those who possess no practicing standard greater than mediocrity. Their collectivist  opinion rises no higher than eyebrows - or belly-button.

Sarah lives life governed by God’s superior transcendent principles as found in The Holy Bible.  Judeo-Christian principles are the founding precepts of the greatest nation in human history: America!  Including, but not limited to, Human Defined: Earth’s Choicemaker, Unique Individual Value,  Personal Rights and Responsibility, and Representative Government. Add: The Creative Process is a choice-making process and functions best in Freedom.

Sarah is recognized by friends and admirers as a worthy representative of all that is wonderful about America. 2012 will be here shortly. Keep your eye on this courageous intelligent leader  -  and pray! 

The writer gives us both concise definitions of the various manifestations of gold standards (some of which are not real gold standards), and an excellent monetary history.  He makes it clear that fiat money inflation is the acid that has repeatedly corroded our economy since early in the 20th century.

For a list of links to articles that I have posted in the past couple of years on the same general subject, see Helicopter Ben Hovers.

See also How FDR Destroyed the Dollar.

If you believe in man-made global warming, as president-elect Obama and his EPA appointees do, your belief has to be based on blind faith in a reversionary paganism.  Your faith must also be coupled with the conviction that socialist state planners can control, not only our economy, but the entirety of God’s creation.

Your faith is blind ignorance, because there is absolutely zero proof for it.  Regarding the computer models upon which your faith is based, read Top 10 Dud Global Warming Predictions.

As the article states, computer models are not scientific devices to analyze data, seeking a rational hypothesis.  Model builders start with predetermined conclusions and endeavor to fit selected data to those conclusions.  To date, computer models have been completely useless in predicting what actually happened in the past. 

Computer models are devices for projecting what might happen if all of your personal prejudices were actually true.  As the old admonition puts it: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

We can’t even predict with complete accuracy what will happen to the weather in a relatively confined geographic area within the forthcoming week.  Yet Al “The Bloviator” Gore expects his blindly faithful acolytes to accept his predictions of what will happen a decade from now.