The View From 1776

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Verse 18 above (“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth…”) contrasts with verse 17 (For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”)

In his continuing exposition of the foundational Christian doctrine in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) used the term “natural man” to describe secularists who steadfastly deny our Creator God. 

The natural man looks into the mirror and sees his god: himself, the egotist for whom there is no higher power than his own mind.  The natural man is he who, like Protagoras (quoted in Plato’s Theaetetus), declared, “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that there are no independent, transcendent standards of right and wrong, that every person is free to make his own rules.

Natural man found great comfort in the 1920s and afterwards in the mind manipulation hypotheses of Sigmund Freud.  In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that the problems of western civilization arose from conflict between morality and deep-seated sexual desires.  The result was debilitating guilt; the solution was to junk morality and come to terms with one

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David Malpass assesses the problem.

Quote:

Every month Congress adds more federal powers and debt, voting as if its allegiance were to Washington, city of cranes, instead of to the voters and taxpayers. The financial services reform bill does little to reopen lending to small businesses but adds huge new federal powers, including the imposition of corporate taxes, to create a giant new bailout fund (think Son of Tarp)...

Delaying the day of reckoning, the Fed has committed its institutional credibility to monetary supercharging, as it did in 2003. By arbitrarily pegging the interest rate near zero for big banks and the Treasury, we’re living in a surreal framework in which the more federal debt, the better for GDP. Except that there are three huge losers: savers earning 0%, small businesses not hooked into zero-rate loans and future taxpayers saddled with the debt when interest rates zoom…

Longer term, the critical question is what the interest rate will be to finance the new mountain of federal debt. Will the $20 trillion in national debt be financed at today’s 4% rate or will it require 7%? It matters a lot to the budget and financial markets.
In the near term the financing rate depends on the Fed (though it denies that it controls bond yields). Over the next few years, however, the financing rate will depend on the market’s perception of the U.S.’ ability to pay all the debt on time and with dollars that still have value…

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There is every reason to suspect that the charges against Goldman Sachs are little more than a political ploy by the administration to shift attention away from its own financial improvidence and to add impetus to its proposed regulatory strangulation of the banking business..  Right or wrong, however, the SEC’s action questions Goldman Sachs’s reputation for probity.

In many respects the frothy nature of Wall Street securities dealings leading to the current crisis are reminiscent of the mid-19th century marketing of canal-building and railroad-building securities that financed the nation’s rapid industrial and agricultural growth from the 1820s until the 1880s.

During that period, far too many speculative financial deals were marketed by Wall Street banks, deals in which securities buyers often lost their money.  It was a time when bank notes issued as currency by banks all over the nation were equally varying in soundness. 

In the 1880s, two bankers imposed a higher standard of fiduciary responsibility.  Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb and J. P. Morgan at his eponymous firm endeavored never to market securities or to finance deals that had not been subjected to their judgment of financial soundness. 

Schiff, for example, would not handle a purely speculative financing.  He insisted upon traveling along the route for the proposed railroad to determine that sufficient population and economic development already existed to provide freight revenues sufficient to support debt service on the contemplated security issue.  By the time of the First World War, Kuhn Loeb’s reputation for responsible judgment placed the firm in the front ranks heading sale of Treasury bonds to finance our entry into the conflict.

Morgan, from his earliest banking days had exhibited superb business judgment.  Finding that they could trust both his honesty and business acumen, European banks, particularly in London, then the financial capital of the world, made J. P. Morgan and Co. their principal agent for dealings in the United States.

Ironically, Goldman Sachs has carefully cultivated the same ethic and has enjoyed a superior reputation for sound judgment and honesty.

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Political structural safeguards against arbitrariness were essential aspects of our Constitution.  Increasingly since the 1930s New Deal, under socialist Franklin Roosevelt, those safeguards have been destroyed. Ever more power has been taken from states and local governments and usurped by the Federal government.

That process has reached new depths of degradation in the Obama administration.  Treatment of bondholders in Chrysler and GM was of the same order as arbitrary seizures of money and property by monarchs, from King John to James II.  The proposed effective take-over of Wall Street by Federal bureaucrats is more of the same.

Read Michael Barone’s Gangster Government Becomes a Long-Running Series.

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Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) opened a series of sermons exploring the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  The epistle was written approximately 27 years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, while elements of Jesus’s life and teaching were still fresh in the minds of those who lived around him and were eye witnesses to his ministry on earth.

Pastor Gardner’s text was Romans 1:1-17:

1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God

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