Drove home the other day to find my friend Gregg pulled up in the driveway taking pictures of the mules and donkey in our pasture. He told me he had a shoot coming up where he needed a donkey or a mule and some chickens for a film and still shot production at some unknown stone ruins north of San Francisco. He didn’t know what it was for and he didn’t know the date. He asked if I would be interested in helping out and I gave him a tentative yes.
Gregg owns a company that supplies non-exotic animals for film and advertising. We were hunting buddies from the recent coyote attack days. We had kind of been out of touch for a while and it was good to see him again.
Over the next few days we found out the date, the location, the fact that they wanted one donkey and some chickens (not a mule), and that Gregg would be busy on a different job that day. So we, (Jennifer, Nick the donkey owner, and me) would be on our own. We would be the ‘professional’ animal trainers for the shoot.
Gregg took me to lunch the day before and gave me the skinny on what to expect and what we should do. Nick came over and we did a trial run on loading his 3 year old and barely trained Donkey, Abigail and setting her up with an old pack saddle that I had, complete with some rustic worn out leather rigging. She looked the part, but was not as cooperative as we hoped when it came to loading in the trailer. That night Gregg sent the contact list and directions to the location via email.
I got up early the next morning and got everything ready in the van and hooked up my two horse slant load. We met Gregg at the coffee shop near 101 to load his chickens into the back of my van. We were not familiar with the area and we were looking at a one and half hour drive so we left early. It was foggy and going to be a cool day for late May.
Jennifer sat in a strapped-down lawn chair in the van and was our navigator and assistant chicken handler. Nick would do most of the Abigail handling and I was to do my best at coming across as the professional lead trainer for the operation.
We didn’t get lost and were the first ones there. They had a greeter and she led us up the narrow mountainous dirt road to a spot where we could turn around and park. We had never seen or heard of such a place; many stone buildings perched on a rocky slope covered with old eucalyptus trees with views of dry rocky ledges and distance vineyards on steep slopes. The building apparently started in the 1850’s and we saw one stone building with the date of 1875. The location was chosen for the spring there that emitted soda water with naturally occurring lithium. An Army Officer owned the place and did so well, he was able to construct many magnificent stone buildings, stairways and other structures and turn the place into a resort. It had been in disrepair and decline for many, many years and the huge eucalyptus trees grew right out of the buildings.
Soon the limited and steep parking areas filled with trucks, vans, cars, people and equipment. One of the directors came up to me and then led me to the art director and she gave me an idea of what they wanted and where. I went back to the van and relayed the information to Jennifer and Nick. Soon after, we unloaded Abigail and got her ‘dressed’. I borrowed a cart and loaded the chickens on to it and we trekked down the dirt road to the first location. Abigail acted like a pro and she barely minded all the people vehicles and strange sights. She and Nick got moved back up behind a narrow stairwell to maneuver back and forth above it. The chickens were released at the bottom to work on the scratch we put out to keep them in camera.
The production was for a commercial to introduce a new TV show about scientists and the location was supposed to look like it was somewhere in South America. I guess it would pass, but I figure if someone knew enough about plants it might look a little strange.
On the stairs sat an oriental scientist with a GPS and a note pad. They kept him looking sweaty and he had no lines. I couldn’t find out if he was just an actor or one of the scientists who would be in the TV show. We were able to obtain other snippets of information, but we ended the day with many things still being a little sketchy.
One thing we were concerned about was Abigail’s roached mane. They had seen two sets of pictures of her; one set with her mane and another without. We did the shoot with in her ‘no-mane’ state and no one mentioned a thing about it, but we were pretty sure that no poor folks in South America would have a donkey with a roached mane.
They shot four locations along the road looking into the ruins and Jennifer wasn’t sure about taking pictures while we were working so that is why you don’t see any with the areas set up for the filming and still shots. We had three with the donkey and then all four with the chickens. The chickens were pretty easy to handle, but they had spilled their water in the crates and that mixed with the guano and they got pretty messy. I kept a rag towel with me for most of the day to keep myself from smelling and looking like them. On the first shot, one decided the scratch was not that interesting and headed for the edge of the road and a ten foot drop off into the eucalyptus forest below. She perched on the last rock and was trying to decide which way to leap as I snuck up with the net. I got her just in time. Then later, the same adventurous chicken took a hard right from the scene and into a decorative cistern of water and I netted her at the edge as she discovered that there was no easy way out.
Lunch was catered and the food was very good. At lunch we met a neighbor who knew my cousins and a few of our other neighbors. He was there serving as a medic for the crew.
Jennifer had fun and Nick was proud of his well behave donkey. He tied her up to a tractor near the lunch location and she gave a good bray whenever anyone walked up the road. He got a ton of questions about Abigail and one guy even asked Nick if he could feed the donkey a cookie. Nick politely declined; not wanting a sugared up three year old on the cliffs.
We shut down and packed up at around three PM and most of the crew had left by time we got packed up and ready to go. We took it slow and let a line of cars that left from another parking area that has left later pass us.
It was a good experience and we made a little money. Everyone was polite and helpful and I would probably do this again if given the chance.
Last night David Dunn gave a presentation to a few friends, neighbors, politicos and family members about the air pollution problem in China.
David works as a sales rep for the company where I work and he handles all of China for the Power Market. We sell airflow measurement equipment that in many cases can help with cleaning up stack emissions, improving efficiencies and otherwise enabling plant managers to tune their boilers for better operation and fuel savings.
Coal is a dirty burn, but emissions can be cleaned up with some fairly straightforward technologies. Some of them are not cheap, but great progress has been made in the US.
Not so in China. Practically no measurable progress has been made in China when it comes to improving the air pollution problem.
China has a nation wide pollution reduction policy for coal fuel power plants, but due to state induced cronyism, corruption, cheating and other cultural malfunctions, it is not implemented or enforced correctly. It has no teeth and the level of apathy on the subject is deep and widespread even though some claim that the work loss from air pollution is in the range of about 20%. That means about 20% of the workforce capacity in China isn’t there due to illness directly related to air pollution where about 60% is attributable to coal fired power plants. If you count ALL of the coal fired power plants in China, from the small steam plant for heating a rural community all the way up to the super large 1,000 megawatt power plants, there are ½ million of them. That is a staggering number and they are concentrated in the eastern half of the country where 95% of the population resides.
SOx and NOx are the health damaging culprits. They exist as polluting particles so small that they get into the lungs and are not expelled and cause all kinds of serious health problems. The US embassy in Beijing has a device on the roof of their building that measures this pollution. The data is published. The number scale used for severity of health risk is based on a range that is typically encountered in other cities throughout the world where air pollution is a concern. China’s numbers are typically 3 times worse than the most polluted cities in the United States.
David’s perspective is at the power plant and design institute level. He has been to more power plants in China than perhaps any other American. He speaks Chinese fluently and has translated our technical manuals into Chinese. He has spoken to countless people who work at these plants and sell to these plants including not only Chinese nationals, but also foreigners like himself from all over the world trying to break into the huge power market in China. It is, by comparison to other industries, a closed system with huge state funding programs that make it detached from the industry and consumer demands that are usually associated with markets that typically have some vestiges of free market operations. Note: despite some claims to the contrary, the power market in the US is not a free market – it is heavily regulated. In fact there is no such thing as a free market when a central bank controls monetary policy and the money supply; simple and irrefutable fact.
In any case, he gave us a very clear picture of what happens when the state runs an industry like the power market through and through and for many long years. No doubt, there are huge cultural differences, but I doubt that no one listening could help but think about the direction the US is heading with it incessant bail-outs, take-overs and meddling in the private sector – our future, if the US government remains on this track, will look very much like China. We might have less pollution, but we will have increased apathy, increased and more harmful cronyism and corruption, loss of entrepreneurship and loss of personal motivation.
If ever there was an example of a disconnected and death dealing Leviathan in the form of state control, one needs to look no farther than China and its power market.
On a brighter note and utilizing a pet theory of mine, it seems that China has realized that one way it can protect its vast holdings in US dollars at least for the time being is to spend them while they still have some value. David has brought in about ½ million in FRN’s in the last month or so in his business for our company. Kudos to David and to the temporary and fleeting benefits of a dying currency.
Garden and mules are calling with the growing season and longer days. Things are happening fast on the pseudo-farm. So who or what takes the hit? The blog dear readers. All twelve of you. I get a good one in every once in a while and certain people, one in particular, passes it around and my hits go up to well over one hundred. Within the next few days it is back down to a respectable twelve or so.
The good news is that I often have a little down time at work and can throw a goodie on the blog without wasting any time and I will probably continue to do that, but otherwise the blog page will receive no attention when I am home.
As I have mentioned MANY times before, you can visit www.lewrockwell.com and get just about EVERYTHING that I post here. I admit it, I am mostly redundant. Please go there and read it often. You will LEARN something useful. Otherwise get yourself, your family and your loved ones prepared. Nothing is more important. Well one thing is immensely more important and that is Jesus; may He bless us in our efforts.
Also, I have posted so much stuff here in the past and most of it is still relevant and educational, so go back and read some of it. Do some searches – the search function works well. I don’t think I will be missed. If you are like me, you are not that well prepared (I have most if not all of the “stuff” it is just not that well organized) and have a lot to do in that direction, so perhaps you should make the time to get prepared while things are still available and affordable. I would venture a guess that the majority of the people who read here and have read here are not well prepared.
Please don’t forget to pray.
I would also be interested to know if there is anyone who has an interest in what I am doing on the pseudo-farm with regards to what I grow and how and what I am doing with the mules and why and how badly. If I get a couple of thumbs up I will violate the theme and post some stuff about that from time to time.
MY COMMENTS: Those Republicans cannot teach with the holier than thou attitude of Rush. Seems Ron Paul may have a better idea concerning the rebuilding of the Republican Party. Seems numbers might prove him correct at least for now, although I would never claim that a majority usually has a corner on what is right. It will cease to be a thankless job once the majority wakes up. What wakes them up is what most of us do not want to see, but the longer we wait the worse it will get. Ending the Fed in a peaceful manner is, by far, the best recipe for a recovery with roots.
Monetary Policy and The State of the Economy hearing before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, July 18, 2007
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Paul, the ranking member of the subcommittee.
Dr. PAUL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome Chairman Bernanke. I share your concern for the inequality that has developed in our country. I think it is very real, I think it is a source of great resentment, and unfortunately, I think it is one of those things that puts a lot of pressure on Congress to increase the amount of government programs and government spending, which I do not think is the answer. I believe the inequality comes specifically from the type of currency we have. When there is a deliberate debasement of a currency, it is predictable that the middle class is injured, the poor are hurt, and there is a transfer of wealth to the wealthy, and until we understand that, I do not believe we can solve this problem. And if we resort to continued monetary inflation and more government programs, we will only make this inequality worse. This is exactly the opposite of what happens when you have a sound currency and free markets, because it is the sound currency and free markets which creates the middle class and creates prosperity and allows the best distribution of this wealth. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It comes from the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve has tremendous pressure put on them, because almost everybody wants low interest rates, except if you happen to be a saver, then you might not like artificially low interest rates. But, of course, that contributes to the lack of savings, which is another problem that we have in this country. We concentrate on inflation by implying, and everybody casually accepts that inflation is a price problem. But the prices that go up are one of the consequences of inflation. Inflation causes malinvestment, it causes excessive debt, and it causes financial bubbles that we have to deal with. But we have a lot of information today available to us to show that there is a lot of monetary inflation going on. For instance if you look at MZM, it is growing at almost a 9 percent rate. M3 is no longer available to us from official sources, but private sources tell us it is growing at a 13 percent rate. Of course, we can reassure ourselves and say that the CPI is growing at a 2.6 percent rate. But if you go back to the old method of calculating the CPI, closer to what the average person is suffering, and one of the reasons why there is inequality going on, is it is growing at over a 10 percent rate. The fact that the dollar is weak on the international exchange markets cannot be ignored. For instance, in just 6 months, the Canadian dollar increased 11 percent against our dollar. This should stir up some concerns. But one concern that I have, that I think is causing more problems and keeps us from coming to a solution, is the divorce between the exchange value of a dollar on the international exchange markets and the effort to lower the value of a dollar in order to increase exports, which can only be done through inflation, at the same time, believing that we can have stability in prices at home, because that is a disconnect that is not possible. If we strive for a lower dollar in exchange markets, we will have price increases here at home and we have to deal with it. I yield back.
[break]
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Texas.
Dr. PAUL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I find it rather ironic that the Federal Reserve has complete control over the money supply, yet it is the Treasury that is supposed to protect the value of the dollar. It seems like you have a little bit of responsibility for the value of the dollar as well. I have a question about the GDP. In the first quarter, our GDP did not do so well; it was less than 1 percent. Our population growth averages about 1.5 percent. So, if we have total wealth divided by the population, we actually have negative growth. Could this not be a part of the explanation as to why some people feel there is inequality and that they are not doing as well in the economy? Wouldn’t this explain some of the concerns that we have?
Mr. BERNANKE. Well, Congressman, that was, of course, a single quarter, and there were a number of temporary factors that held down GDP growth in the first quarter, including the liquidation of the inventory overhang, which I mentioned before, a swing in our trade balance – a temporary swing – and a temporary decline in Federal defense spending. All of those things have been reversing now, so I think we will be seeing in the second quarter something closer to a 3 percent growth. Between the first half of the year overall, it will be a more healthy rate of growth.
Dr. PAUL. We have a savings rate which is negative, and if we had true capitalism, this would be very, very serious because we would have no savings and no capital to invest. Today, with our monetary system, we resort to other means. We can create credit and money out of thin air, and it acts as capital by stealing value from the existing currency, and we have been doing that for a long time, so the process can continue, but it literally is inflation. Also, we can resort to borrowing overseas, and we are permitted, because we have the reserve currency of the world, to export our inflation, and that seems to be a free ride for us as well. How long can we fool the world? How long can we continue with the current account deficit of 6 percent? If our productive jobs are going overseas – and like the gentleman mentioned earlier about more jobs going overseas – eventually, this is going to catch up with us. Is it conceivable that we could live on capital formation by the creation of money and credit out of thin air? If that is the case, we would never have to go to work again if that is true. It seems like we really have to go to work. We really have to save, and we really have to invest, and we really have to get these jobs back. But I see so many of our problems as a consequence of a monetary system that discourages savings and encourages a free ride for us because there is still a lot of trust for the dollar, although that trust is going down every day. I think we have to face up to the consequences of what this might mean to us.
Mr. BERNANKE. Well, first, our national savings includes corporate savings as well as household savings. If you put those together, you get a positive number, so there is some net savings going on in the United States. Congressman, you are absolutely right that we are also relying pretty heavily on borrowing from abroad, which is our current account deficit. I think that is sustainable for a while because foreigners seem quite interested in acquiring U.S. assets. We have very deep and liquid financial markets. However, I also agree with you that that is not a long-term, sustainable situation by any means, and we need to be working to try to bring that current account deficit down over time. In answer to a previous question, I talked a bit about the importance of a structural change – increasing savings here in the United States, increasing attention to domestic demand with our trading partners.
Dr. PAUL. You did say in your talk that the predominant policy concern was inflation, which is encouraging that there is a concern. Of course, once again, inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and we have to deal with it. War sometimes is not healthy for a currency or for keeping prices down, at least inflation. It is hard to find throughout all of history when war did not create price inflation because, even in ancient times, countries resorted to clipping coins and diluting values or whatever – they inflated the currency – because people do not generally like to pay for the war. Yet, in the 1970’s, we had consequences of guns and butter. Now we are having guns and butter again, and we are having consequences, and it just looks like we may well come to a 1979/1980. Do you anticipate that there is a possibility that we will face a crisis of the dollar such as we had in 1979 and in 1980?
Mr. BERNANKE. The Federal Reserve is committed to maintaining low and stable inflation, and I am very confident we will be able to do that.
Dr. PAUL. So you are not answering whether or not you anticipate a problem.
Mr. BERNANKE. I am not anticipating a problem like in 1979 and in 1980, no.
Dr. PAUL. With your fingers crossed, I guess. Okay. Thank you.
PARIS – The worldly French and British who are taught history and read books are looking with wry amusement and some pity on the Americans who are now gripped by a renewed bout of Taliban terror.
About ten days ago, a bunch of lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen rode down from the Malakand region on motorbikes and pickup trucks and briefly swaggered around Buner, only 100 km from Pakistan’s capitol, Islamabad.
Hysteria erupted in Washington. “The Taliban are coming. The Taliban are coming!”
Hillary Clinton, still struggling through foreign affairs 101, warned the scruffy Taliban tribesmen were a global threat. Pakistan’s generals dutifully followed Washington’s orders by attacking the tribal miscreants in Buner who failed to obey the American Raj. Over a hundred people were killed, almost all innocent civilians, and thousands of refuges fled the government bombing and gunfire.
It would have been helpful had the anguished Mrs. Clinton read page 30 of my book, War at the Top of the World:
“In the first quarter of the 20th century…two colorful figures emerged from the barren mountains of the Northwest Frontier. First, a fiery holy man with a wonderful name, the Fakir of Ipi. The old fakir rallied the Pashtun tribes against the infidel and came within a turban’s length of taking Peshawar from the British, who spent a decade chasing the elusive fakir through the mountains of Waziristan.”
“Then, a fearsome figure, the ‘Mad Mullah’ (as the British press branded him), who rode down from the Malakand Pass at the head of 20,000 savage horsemen, determined to put the impious city of Peshawar (the main British Imperial base) to the sword.”
Like Mrs. Clinton, the good Christian ladies of the British Peshawar garrison had a very big scare. Cries were raised that the Mad Mullah and his wicked Muslims were going to lay fire sword on Peshawar and carry off its Christian ladies upon whose white bodies would be inflicted unspeakable Islamic abominations.
Plus ça change…. A century later, western imperial forces are again chasing unruly Pashtun tribesmen on the wild Northwest Frontier. Today, they’re called “terrorists” by western media and politicians. In the 1980’s they and their fathers were hailed as “freedom fighters” battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Pashtun (aka Pathan) frontier tribes – collectively mislabeled “Taliban” by western media – are up in arms again because they are being bombed by US Predator drones, and attacked by the Pakistani Army, which the US rents for $1.5 billion annually (the official figure; actually, it’s a lot more), to support its widening war in Afghanistan. Pashtun civilian casualties – “collateral damage” in Pentagonspeak – are rising fast.
The primary cause of the growing rebellion in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) is the US war in Afghanistan, which is rapidly spreading into Pakistan. Most Pakistanis see the Afghan Taliban and their own rebellious Pashtun as heroes fighting western domination, and scorn their own isolated leaders in Islamabad as working for the Yankee dollar.
Equally, the Pashtun tribes of NWFP were guaranteed total autonomy in 1947; Pakistan’s army was formally excluded from the Pashtun tribal region. Washington has pressured Islamabad into violating this basic provision of Pakistan’s constitution by sending troops and warplanes into the independent tribal region.
Even the British Imperial Raj’s most junior officer knew it was foolhardy to provoke warlike Pashtun. But Washington has done just this. Still, the Pashtun “Taliban” have no influence outside their Northwest Frontier and are not about to take over the rest of Pakistan.
But Washington’s ham-handed tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan are creating a bigger storm: a national revolution in Pakistan against the western-backed feudal oligarchy that has ruled it since 1947.
Pakistan is among the world’s poorest nations. Half its people are illiterate. Most subsist on $1.13 daily. The feudal landowning elite, only .5% of the population, holds over 90% of national wealth. Corruption engulfs everything. Democracy is a sham; the legal system a cruel joke.
Islamic law, however draconian, offers the only justice that cannot be bought. Growing resistance movements in Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan call for national leadership that represents Pakistan’s, rather than western interests. Pakistanis are humiliated by being forced by the US and Britain to wage war against their own people under the pretext of “fighting Islamic terrorism.”
The big question in western capitals is: “are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons safe?” Yes. For now. They are heavily guarded by crack army units and ISI, the military intelligence service, and will remain so unless the army splits in a power struggle. Pakistan’s nukes cannot be armed without special security codes.
Even so, there is growing speculation in Pakistan and here in Europe that the US, possibly in league with India and/or Israel, may attempt to seize or destroy Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
My esteemed colleague and regional expert, Arnaud de Borchgrave, warns Pakistan could become another Iran. I’m not so sure. Islamic parties have never commanded much support in Pakistan. There is no powerful clergy in Sunni Pakistan, as there was in Shia Iran. Pakistan has a long way to go before becoming an Islamic republic on the Iranian model. But Pakistan is certainly headed into very dangerous waters.
As for the US-led crusade in Afghanistan and Northwest Frontier, we should recall the words of Victorian poet of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling: “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”
It really ticks me off royally when you and your allegedly conservative talk-radio colleagues dismiss all critics of the Iraq War as liberals who are interested in nothing more than winning back the presidency and/or who hate America. There may be liberal war critics out there who are primarily concerned about putting Hillary or Obama or Edwards or any Democrat in the White House, or who hate America, but you know full well that there are many Americans with impressive conservative/libertarian credentials who consider the war to be not only a blunder but downright criminal.
For several months, I’ve considered calling you to take you to task for misleading the listeners who consider you to be such a great American. But I used to listen to you regularly and still listen to you occasionally, and I know how you treat callers or guests with whom you disagree. My intention was to put you on the spot by simply naming a number of prominent conservative opponents of the war and to ask you to explain to your listeners why you don’t acknowledge these folks and their arguments. But I knew that you’d simply talk over me and accuse me of being a liberal, an accusation that to you and your “great American” listeners is enough to discredit anything the person so labeled says. So I considered presenting my anything-but-liberal pedigree first, but I’ve heard you talk over many callers and guests who have tried to resist your dismissal of them as liberals. So I decided to cope with my frustration through an open letter to you, as I once did with one to your pompous colleague, Rush Limbaugh.
You’ll probably never see this letter, but that’s all right, because though I’m writing it to you, it’s really aimed at your listeners, and some of them will have it brought to their attention by friends who aren’t as impressed by your rants as your listeners are. Even if I had called you, I was going to try to avoid arguing with you, as tempted as I’m sure I would have been to do so. No, I’m not afraid to argue with you, because I don’t think you’re that sharp. It’s just that I know your position on the war, I consider it to be simplistic, and I also know that I’m not going to change your constipated mind, so why should I argue with you on your court playing by your rules?
Sean, you’ve had George Will on your show a number of times, and you apparently consider him to be conservative. Yet the following comments he made to the libertarian Cato Institute don’t seem in sync with the prevailing Bush-bunch assumption going into the war that the Iraqis were just chafing for liberty and that a western-style democracy would be established in Iraq in a matter of months.
Tony Blair – a good American – gave a speech about values to a joint session of Congress three months after Baghdad fell. He said that our values are not Western values, they are values shared by ordinary people everywhere. False. The world is full of ordinary people who do not define freedom as we do, who do not value it as we do, who prefer piety, ethnic purity, religious solidarity, military glory, or the security of despotism. There are still all kinds of competing values in the world, and liberty has to be fought for and argued for and defined. It is a learned and acquired taste.
Isn’t George skating on thin ice here? Doesn’t he seem to be questioning the administration and talk-radio-conservative mantra about all those purple-fingered Iraqi voters with their new constitution being good to go if it weren’t for those foreign terrorists causing problems? Is George a closet liberal, Sean?
And then there’s your buddy Pat Buchanan, who you have on your show rather often. I subscribe to his The American Conservative magazine and regularly read his columns on the Internet. Pat seems to think that he’s conservative, yet he’s adamantly opposed to the Iraq war and so are all of those who write about it in his magazine. According to Pat, the war in Iraq “was not thought through. It was not only mismanaged, it was an historical strategic blunder to begin with.” And in a recent issue of The American Conservative, he noted that if we buy Bush’s claim that we’re “fighting for the right of Islamic peoples ‘to speak, and worship, and live in liberty,’” we’re caught in a dilemma. “Devout Muslims in Islamic lands do not believe people should be free to blaspheme or insult the Prophet. They do not believe all religions are equal or should be treated equally. They do not believe Christians should be free to preach in their lands. The punishment for those who do, and for those who convert from Islam in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as well as Iran, is death.” He goes on to note that wherever free elections have been held in the Middle East Islamists have won over Western secularism and asks: “Should U.S. soldiers die for democracy in the Islamic world, when democracy may produce victory for the political progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood? Is that worth the lives of America’s young?”
One of my favorite contributors to The American Conservative, Andrew J. Bacevich, would have answered Pat’s question with a resounding NO! even before he recently lost his Army lieutenant son in Iraq. Bacevich, himself a retired Army colonel who now is a professor of international relations and director of Boston University’s Center of International Relations is the author of The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. You probably haven’t heard of this book, Sean, because I suspect that it’s not on the neocon/warmonger reading list. But the blurb on the inside of the dustcover pretty well sums up Bacevich’s argument, and it’s short enough to not tax your attention span.
In this provocative book, Andrew Bacevich warns of a new and dangerous obsession that has taken hold of so many Americans, conservatives and liberals alike. It is the marriage of militarism to utopian ideology – of unprecedented military power wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values.
This perilous union, Bacevich argues, commits Americans to a futile enterprise, turning the United States into a crusader state with a self-proclaimed mission of driving history to its final destination: the world-wide embrace of the American way of life. This mindset invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy. As it alienates others, it will leave the United States increasingly isolated. It will end in bankruptcy, moral as well as economic, and in abject failure.
And Sean, even your late friend the outspoken Colonel David Hackworth (USA retired) believed that going to war with Iraq had nothing to do with combating terrorism and was a blunder. In one of his columns, he wrote:
So, fighting Iraq bears not the slightest resemblance to our triumphant World War II march across Europe. Almost the entire Arab world views us not as liberators occupying that bludgeoned country solely to pull Iraqis up by their sandal straps, but as Crusaders who’ve returned to finish the dirty work the Christian world started a thousand years ago. Deep in the hearts of most Arabs, we’re just the latest wave of infidels who are into violating their sacred land.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here, Sean? Are George Will, Pat Buchanan, Andrew Bacevich, and the late David Hackworth liberals and/or America haters because they’ve pointed out that other peoples aren’t like us and don’t appreciate the attempts by our government to make them like us? And is former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips a liberal for writing in his American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21 Centurythat while the attack on Iraq was “at bottom about access to oil and U.S. global supremacy,” it also had other intentions. “One was to fold oil objectives into the global war against terror. A second was to cement the U.S. dollar’s hegemonic role in global oil sales – and thus in the world economy. A third was to keep the invasion’s purpose broad enough to allow the biblically minded Christian right to see it, at least partially, as a destruction of the new Babylon, on the road to Armageddon and redemption.”
I can just hear you – “Phillips is just an establishment Republican, not a real conservative.” Okay, then how about columnist Paul Craig Roberts, the assistant secretary of the treasury under your idol Ronald Reagan, and a strong constitutionalist?
The evil that America has brought to Iraq transcends the tens [more likely hundreds] of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have been killed and maimed in the conflict. The evil goes beyond the destruction of ancient historical artifacts and the civilian infrastructure of a secular state and the decimation of lives, careers, and families of millions of Iraqis. The violence and killing that Bush brought to Iraq has spread antagonism between Sunni and Shiite throughout the Middle East with potentially draconian consequences. Bush’s war has turned Muslim hearts and minds against America and made terrorism an acceptable means to resist American hegemony. With his mindless war, Bush has created more terrorism than the world has ever seen.
Funny, Sean, how someone like you who is always talking about evil fails to see the evil done by our own government in our name in Iraq and elsewhere.
Here’s another interesting comment from Roberts for you to mull over:
American public opinion is being manipulated. In the name of protecting ‘American freedom and democracy,’ the Bush regime rides roughshod over both as it ignores both the public and Congress and proceeds with a catastrophic policy supported by no one but the Bush Regime and a cabal of power-mad neoconservatives.
Nothing can stop the Regime except the immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney. This is America’s last chance.
RIGHT ON!
I doubt if you ever read Charley Reese’s column, Sean, but he’s another strong constitutionalist and he made an interesting observation about a speech Bush made at West Point. “He didn’t talk about world terrorism. He talked about reshaping the Middle East, a fool’s errand if there ever was one. Our precious people are not dying for peace and freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are dying for corporate profits and to make the Middle East a safer place for Israel. The only people who are dying for freedom are the Iraqis and the Afghans who want to free their countries of our presence.” Yeah, I know, to you and your simpleminded ilk anyone who comes close to criticizing Israel is an anti-Semite, another label like “liberal” that allows you to stigmatize your opponents and avoid rationally examining their arguments.
Funny how you guys get so understandably rankled when you’re accused of being racists for justifiably criticizing the NAACP, or Jesse Jackson, or affirmative action, but are so ready to label anyone anti-Semitic who justifiably criticizes Israel, our political establishment’s relationship with that country, or even neoconservatives. So here’s another such comment from another strong constitutionalist, columnist and former National Review editor Joe Sobran:
No matter how much you love the Zionist state, it’s absurd to say it represents ‘our vital interests’ [as did Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia]. The opposite is more nearly true. We are embroiled in endless futile wars in the Middle East because our government supports Israel – a state based entirely on what in this country would be flagrantly illegal racial and religious discrimination – no matter what it does. It’s hard to say which is the worst feature of American policy in the Middle East, its shameless venality and hypocrisy or its sheer irrationality. It would make sense only if huge oil reserves were discovered under Tel Aviv.
Not being in his head, I don’t know if Sobran is an anti-Semite or not – but I doubt that he is. I DO KNOW THAT I’M NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE, however, and I agree with his comments. I thought that I’d better capitalize and bold type my disclaimer, because I know that you and your faithful are as good at selective reading as are the liberals you always criticize. Probably still won’t do any good, though. There was a time when I was a great admirer of Israel. I saw it as a spunky little country whose people had learned from the Holocaust that it doesn’t pay to be meek or weak. But then a few years back, I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu explain why a certain policy in the Middle East would benefit the United States, when it dawned on me that the policy he was pushing might well benefit Israel but it wouldn’t do anything good for the United States. I’ve become ever more distrustful of Israel and its American neocon and theocon supporters since then.
Sean, I could go on giving examples of people you ignore on the political right who never approved of the war or who have changed their minds about approving of it. I’ve never heard you dwell on Bill Buckley’s defection. A number of the original war opponents on the right have been listed by neocon David Frum in his National Review article “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Those on Frum’s list that I’ve already mentioned include Buchanan, Reese, and Sobran, and, with the exception of columnist Robert Novak, most of the rest have links to the paleoconservative Rockford Institute and its magazine, Chronicles, or to Lew Rockwell and his libertarian blog.
Incidentally, I recently heard your fire-breathing, chicken-hawk, and I might add, obnoxious, buddy, Mark Levin interview Novak about his recently released autobiography. Though Novak was one of the conservatives Frum accused of being an unpatriotic America hater for opposing the Iraq War, and he acknowledges his opposition to that war in his autobiography, that fearless interviewer Levin, who regularly accuses opponents of the war of being liberal America haters, didn’t say a thing about the war and had nothing but praise for Novak. This, even though Novak, whose heritage is Jewish, has lamented in writing that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of hatred of Israel,” and that “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”
Sean, our former representative from southwestern Indiana, Republican John Hostettler, was one of six members of the House to vote against war with Iraq. If people hereabouts heard you call him a liberal, you’d be inundated with lawsuits brought by folks you caused to hurt themselves laughing. And then there’s Ron Paul, another of that six who, as you know and much to your chagrin, is now running for president on the Republican side. You try to ignore him as much as possible, but he’s the only person in the race on either side who has integrity, principles, and is a strict constructionist and original intenter concerning the Constitution. He also takes seriously the philosophies of the Founders that, as I pointed out in my open letter to Rush, you so-called conservatives ignore. George Washington: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible” (emphasis added). Thomas Jefferson: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none” (emphasis added). John Quincy Adams: “America . . . goes not abroad seeking monsters to destroy.” I know, you don’t think that Paul has a chance, and you may be right – but you don’t know why. He has the whole establishment against him.
As far as the war and its disastrous impact on our Bill of Rights go, you and your talk-radio so-called conservatives are nothing but useful idiots for the establishment. You all uncritically support wars anyplace the neocons tell the bumbler in the White House to start them, and any police-state method implemented in the name of security, but then you all get upset with that same bumbler when he and many on the Hill, including liberals, refuse to clamp down on illegal immigration and to protect our national sovereignty. Do you ever stop to wonder how the guy you think is so right when it comes to war and measures impacting the rights of ordinary Americans can be so wrong when it comes to protecting our own borders and sovereignty? Might there be some connection between his foreign and domestic policies? The following comments by LewRockwell.com blogger Steven LaTulippe, like Paul a physician and former Air Force officer, might give you something to think about. That should be a new experience for you.
When evaluating his [Paul’s] chances, it’s important to accept one fact about contemporary America. This is not a democracy, and certainly not a constitutional republic. America is actually a carefully concealed oligarchy. A few thousand people, mostly in government, finance, and the military-industrial complex, run this country for their own purposes. By manipulating the two-party system, influencing the mainstream media, and controlling the flow of campaign finance money, this oligarchy works to secure the nomination of its preferred candidates (Democratic and Republican alike), thus giving a ‘choice’ between Puppet A and Marionette B.
Unlike the establishment’s candidates, Ron Paul is a freelancer running on three specific ideas:
The federal government must function within the strict guidelines of the Constitution.
America should deconstruct its empire, withdraw our troops from around the world and reestablish a foreign policy based on nonintervention.
America should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, eliminate fiat currency and return to hard money.
This is not a political agenda. This is not a party platform. It is a revolution. The entire ruling oligarchy would be swept away if these ideas were ever implemented. Every sentence, every word, every jot and tittle of this agenda is unacceptable, repellent and hateful to America’s ruling elite.
Did you understand any of that, Sean? Who benefits from both open borders and the war? Not the American people. The various factions of our establishment aren’t concerned about us or our country; they’re interested in cheap labor (Indian, Chinese, Mexican, or any other), oil and other natural resources, manipulating our currency, selling expensive weapons systems, or implementing Utopian domestic or international agendas, etc., and maintaining social control through police-state methods and/or social engineering, primarily in order to acquire money/power for themselves and, in some cases, secondarily, for selected allies, associates, or clients.
As you may have guessed, I’m a supporter of Ron Paul, the non-establishment candidate, whether he has a chance or not. He’s the only politician to come down the pike in my nearly 74 years who I can truthfully say I support without qualification. I’m tired of choosing between Puppet A and Marionette B. I’m ashamed (with qualification) to admit that I voted for Bush II twice. The qualification is that my votes actually were against Al Gore and John Kerry from the liberal side of the establishment who I still think would have been worse than W, both domestically and internationally – though in my mind, the gap between them and him has narrowed considerably. I hoped – silly me – that W and his side of the establishment meant it when they promised not to engage in the nation building so dear to the hearts of the Clinton bunch. And, though I had no faith that he would appoint Supreme Court justices to my liking, I knew that neither Gore nor Kerry would do so. Even after he and his neocons had launched their criminal war with Iraq, I pinched my nose real tight and voted for Bush again. I didn’t see the Kerry side being any better on the Middle East, was still concerned about the Supreme Court, and knew that if Kerry won he’d push to extend or make permanent the idiotic and unconstitutional Clinton “assault weapon” ban. I’m a no-compromise supporter of the Second Amendment-guaranteed right to keep and bear arms as the teeth of the Bill of Rights. It’s not a guarantee of sportsmen’s rights. And since I’ve written many critiques of the gun-prohibitionist movement, a number of which can be found on the Internet, you can check my claims yourself if you think that I’m just some liberal not willing to admit it.
I despised the Clinton Administration, with its meddling in the Balkans and elsewhere, coziness with the UN, massacre of American citizens at Waco, and attack on the right to keep and bear arms and general trashing of the Constitution even without the excuse of 9-11. And I never thought that the day would come that the Republican side of the establishment wouldn’t provide me with a viable lesser evil to Hillary Clinton if she became the Democratic candidate for president. It has come. I won’t vote for any of the collection of establishment fools, fascists, and socialists that the major parties are offering up this time. I can no longer find any lesser evils among the establishment candidates, and I won’t make the mistake of voting for a warmonger again.
I suspect that you’ve never heard of Smedley Darlington Butler, even though you’re a worshipper of military heroes and Butler was certainly a military hero. So I’ll tell you a little about him drawing on a guest column I wrote for our local newspaper, the Evansville Courier & Press. In 1898 at 16, Butler lied about his age so that he could join the Marines, get a commission as a second lieutenant, and fight in the Spanish-American War. He was brevetted captain during the Boxer Rebellion before he turned nineteen, and became the Corps’ youngest major general when he was 48, retiring at that rank in 1931. He was one of only 19 people to win two Medals of Honor, and one of only 20 to receive the Marine Corps Brevet Medal that was awarded to Marine officers before they were eligible to receive the Medal of Honor. Pretty impressive, huh?
But when Butler looked back on his career, he not only didn’t like what he saw, he wrote and spoke about what he didn’t like, which I suspect is why you haven’t heard about him. In War is a Racket, his 1935 book, Butler wrote: “For a great many years as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket. Not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.” He defined a racket as “something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
In a 1935 magazine article, Butler wrote:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
And Butler made it clear that it was the guys who were propagandized into fighting them, particularly those who don’t come back or who come back maimed or psychologically damaged, who foot the bill for wars. He wrote about them eloquently. You regularly help propagandize guys into fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sean.
Butler was a Republican candidate for the Senate in 1932 and a popular speaker through the 1930s. He spoke to veterans and pacifists, communists and church groups. He believed “in the adequate defense of the coastline, and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight.” He believed that our army shouldn’t leave the country, that our navy shouldn’t go more than 200 miles beyond our shores, and that our military planes shouldn’t go beyond 500 miles for patrol purposes. I suspect that he might extend those limits, if he were still around, to compensate for today’s advanced air and sea technology, but I doubt that he would change his overall position. He wrote: “I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights” (emphasis added). BRAVO!!!! An admirer wrote that Butler “demonstrated that true patriotism does not mean blind allegiance to government policies with which one does not agree.” I would add that while he was often a hero when he was in the military, he became a patriot after he left it, but you and your useful idiot colleagues might find it difficult to understand that, Sean. For you guys, criticizing Bush and his neocons is the same as hating America.
Back in the days when I was of military age, all able-bodied males were eligible to be called up for military service. Having grown up during the flag-waving days of WWII, and since service was expected, though I never considered making a career of the military, I wanted to serve and eagerly jumped at the chance to get a commission through Southern Illinois University’s Air Force ROTC program. I did nothing heroic, but I’m quite proud of my service, because I spent most of my active-duty years at radar stations of the North American Air Defense Command. Those were the days, the mid-to-late ’50s, when the big concern was that the Soviets would send their bombers over the polar route to nuke us. If they had come, it would have been up to crews like those of which I was in charge to detect them, and to ground control interceptor (GCI) directors like me to guide our interceptors to their targets via radio and ground radar and set them up on their attack vectors so that the bombers could be shot down. Purely defensive – Butler would have approved. I was never called upon to harm people in other parts of the world who happened to be bugging our establishment at the time. Though I never thought about that in those days, I often think about it since the neocons got us stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I should have thought about it back in Vietnam days or even before then.
Sean, you’re always saying that our troops in Iraq are fighting for our freedom. Bull! A case could be made that American troops haven’t fought for OUR freedom since the Revolution, or with some qualification, the War of 1812, since the British were back on our turf then. Since then only the USSR could have done us great harm and we managed to avoid fighting them. The Confederate States were trying to leave the Union (as they had a right to do), not to conquer it, and the Union fought to keep them from leaving, not to free the slaves. Various American Indian tribes, Mexico, Spain, the Kaiser’s Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Iraq weren’t interested in conquering the United States, and couldn’t have done so if they had been interested, and Islamic militants can’t conquer us now. Washington, D.C. is far more of a threat to our remaining freedoms than are Islamic militants. And as nasty as the Nazis and Japanese imperialists were, many folks including John Toland in Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, Thomas J. Fleming in The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, and even his supporters like Robert Stinnett in Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor and most recently, George Victor in The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, have convincingly shown that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the darling of the neocons, provoked them into fighting us when they were doing their best to avoid doing so. Butler was right – war is a racket.
Well, I’ve had my say, Sean – and got across much more than I would have if I’d called you. If, on the basis of their rejection of the neocon stand on Iraq you think that people like George Will, Pat Buchanan, Andrew Bacevitch, the late David Hackworth, Kevin Phillips, Paul Craig Roberts, Charley Reese, Joe Sobran, Robert Novak, and Ron Paul are, or were, liberal America haters who want nothing more than to have Democrats run the country, you’re an idiot. If you don’t think that these guys and others on the right who agree with them on Iraq are so motivated, you’re misleading the listeners you claim to be faithfully informing. If you aren’t aware that such prominent Founders as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams strongly warned against our country messing around in the internal affairs of other nations, you’re ignorant. If you are aware that they opposed such interference in the affairs of other nations and reject their position, you’ve neglected to inform your listeners of the Founder’s views and explained why it’s conservative to reject them. If you’ve never heard of General Butler, that’s understandable, since the militarists you worship aren’t inclined to publicize the war-is-a-racket philosophy he acquired through hard-earned experience. If you are aware of what he wrote years back and you can still cheerlead for what’s going on in Iraq today, you’re disgusting. Many of us are on to you, Sean. You’re far from being a Great American. RON PAUL IS A GREAT AMERICAN! As far as the war goes, you and your so-called conservative colleagues are nothing but useful idiots to our own establishment – no faction of which, left or right, could care less about protecting our national sovereignty or the original intent of our Constitution – and that establishment is a far greater threat to us and our remaining freedoms than any Middle Eastern religious/political movement.
Cheers!
William R. Tonso
August 25, 2007
William R. Tonso [send him mail] a retired sociology professor (University of Evansville) who has written a lot on the gun issue, both sociological and pro-Second Amendment. His recent book, Gun Control=People Control, is a collection of eleven of his essays previously published in Liberty, Reason, Chronicles, and Gun Week.
DOHA, Qatar — U.S. Soldiers have been encouraged to spread the message of their Christian faith among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population, video footage obtained by Al Jazeera appears to show.
Military chaplains stationed in the U.S. air base at Bagram were also filmed with Bibles printed in the country’s main Pashto and Dari languages.
In one recorded sermon, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling Soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.
“The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.
“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”
Local language Bibles
The footage, shot about a year ago by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former member of the U.S. military who spent several days in Bagram, was obtained by Al Jazeera’s James Bays, who has covered Afghanistan extensively.
Bays also obtained from Hughes a Pashto-language copy of one of the books he picked up during a Bible study lesson he recorded at Bagram.
A Pashto speaker confirmed to Bays that it was a Bible.
In other footage captured at Bagram, Sgt. Jon Watt, a Soldier who is set to become a military chaplain, is seen giving thanks for the work that his church in the U.S. did in getting Bibles printed and sent to Afghanistan.
“I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out,” he is heard saying during a Bible study class.
It is not clear that the Bibles were distributed to Afghans, but Hughes said that none of the people he recorded in a series of sermons and Bible study classes appeared to able to speak Pashto or Dari.
“They weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons,” Hughes said.
“The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”
Pentagon officials have so far not responded to a copy of the footage provided to them, but the distribution of Bibles in a place as politically sensitive as Afghanistan is bound to cause deep concern in Washington, our correspondent says.
Guidelines
It is not clear if the presence of the Bibles and exhortations for soldiers to be “witnesses” for Jesus continues, but they were filmed a year ago despite regulations by the U.S. military’s Central Command that expressly forbid “proselytising of any religion, faith or practice”.
But in another piece of footage taken by Hughes, the chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.
“Do we know what it means to proselytise?” Capt. Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.
“It is General Order Number One,” an unidentified Soldier replies.
But Watt says “you can’t proselytise but you can give gifts”.
The footage also suggests U.S. Soldiers gave out Bibles in Iraq.
In his address to a Bible study group at Bagram, Afghanistan, Watt is recorded as saying: “I bought a carpet and then I gave the guy a Bible after I conducted my business.
“The Bible wasn’t to be ‘hey, I’ll give you this and I’ll give you a better deal because that would be wrong’, [but] the expressions that I got from the people in Iraq [were] just phenomenal, they were hungry for the word.”
The footage has surfaced as President Barack Obama prepares to host Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, at a summit focusing on how to tackle al-Qaeda and Taliban bases dotted along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, will also take part in the talks in Washington, scheduled for May 5 and 6.
It’s healthy and now almost seems necessary, yea, getting away from the government – especially when it comes to the issue of money. But it is no joy ride either.
So I am one of those lucky ones, with a nine to five at a desk, a regular income and almost ten acres surrounding our little home. I call it a pseudo farm. We have sheep to keep down the grass and we don’t lamb anymore because of the coyotes and odd hours that they seem to like to give birth. As they get older and fewer, the pastures have more grass and I’ll have to look towards mowing or using the land for something else I guess.
Of course, around here, wine grapes are all the rage. I think that would be great in a normal economy, but I don’t see a normal economy now or in the foreseeable future. Shame on me. Nothing is “normal” in the economy anyway. Forty dollar bottle wine is the epitome of deficit consumption anyway. At least it helps you to forget if you drink enough of it.
A big portion of the land is used for silage for the family dairy which is in the process of shutting down and going to wine grapes.
I grow a vegetable garden and mostly freeze the produce, but this year, as we have done in some past years, we intend to also do some canning. I don’t sell any of it.
We also have some chickens and if you don’t count set-up and infrastructure costs we make anywhere from $4 to $16 per month. I also have two semi-trained mules that I just mostly feed. I did have the intention to use them for riding during my adventure vacations, but since the monetary/banking system is currently on its deathbed, our vacation days are pretty much over. They are currently in a very small pasture that is too close to the road and does not lend itself very well to training especially since I am also boarding a donkey and another mule for a good friend.
You can tell the pseudo-farm label fits nicely.
A hundred years ago, no one in their right mind would live like we do. Talk about economic distortions; they go right down to the end of our very own toes.
So I am a little antsy about the economy, as most people are and what to do about more land that will just need to be mowed once the dairy is out of the picture.
Maybe I should try to do some farming? It’s in my blood, but I am an engineer by trade and I just betcha that a lot of engineers that went into farming didn’t do too well. It seems to my way of thinking that the two mindsets are quite different. I hope I am wrong about that.
So I started thinking about using the mules in some fashion for this and lo and behold that’s what the old timers did, but with a bank in the picture none faired too well. The bank came with the tractor to replace the mules and then it went down hill from there I hear. I certainly can’t afford a decent tractor on my income so perhaps I can get some old horse drawn equipment, restore them and get going on some mule-driving training too! Sounds insane doesn’t it?
This first cash crop in this area was potatoes and there is still a successful potato operation not too far away. So I am studying about potatoes. Seems way better than grapes and something I might be able to handle given I can’t take vacations anymore.
I have some old agricultural circulars from about 1906 to 1923 or so that we found in one the old chicken houses out back that cover a bunch of family/small farm subjects; very interesting reading. There was even one on potatoes!
So I am also looking at a horse drawn mower and a sulky plow and trying to figure how to put all of this together without breaking the bank or my back. Seems like a lot, but the biggest thing is training the mules. One is 6 years old and the other is 13 and they both just had their birthdays this month. They wouldn’t admit it, but they both need a job. They have a little training already, but they will need a lot more for what I have in mind.
This is all swimming around in my head with the enormously strange, hugely optimistic, but logical idea that we might be having an alternate currency in our future or at least a thriving black market in our feeble and probably very effective attempts to get out from under the government sponsored tragedies lined up for our viewing pleasure. Yea, I would probably dance a friggin jig in my underpants out on the cover crop if I could sell a load of potatoes for some junk silver.
Strange what makes cranky old men happy these days isn’t it?
Two major government economists, Christina D. Romer and Ben Bernanke, have done influential research on the Great Depression. Both implicate the State-run gold standard of that era, which differed from the pre-1914 gold standard, as a major culprit in the Great Depression. (See here and here.) Their work parallels that of other economists such as Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin on the negative role of the interwar gold exchange standard. There is an emerging or existing consensus among economists about the negative effects of the gold-exchange standard.
Still, research continues. The precise role of the gold-exchange standard in the Great Depression remains a question mark. Richardson and Van Horn have evidence that New York banks “had large exposures to foreign deposits and German debt,” that led to problems when Creditanstalt collapsed. Bordo et al. contend that the gold standard did not fetter central banks. Murray Rothbard, Benjamin Anderson, and Richard M. Ebeling all emphasize the FED’s inflationary price-stabilization policies in the 1920s, which are connected to how the FED operated under the gold-exchange standard.
Suppose that Romer and Bernanke are correct about the role of the gold standard in worsening the Great Depression. This shows absolutely nothing about gold (or any other medium) as free market money. Romer and Bernanke do not bother to distinguish a State-run gold standard from a free market gold standard, i.e., use of gold as free market money. They ignore gold used as non-State or privately-generated money. They ignore any free market in money, whether gold, credits, silver, cowrie, copper, or anything else.
In this way, Romer and Bernanke provide us with a false choice: State-run gold standard or State-run paper money. Which pair of handcuffs do you prefer?
By this omission, the State-run gold standard becomes a straw man for any kind of gold money, including free market gold. Knock down the gold standard, as they do, and down goes free market gold money with it.
Romer says that “going off the gold standard and increasing the domestic money supply was a key factor in generating recovery and growth across a wide range of countries in the 1930s.” To her, the domestic money supply is the central bank–based money supply. She gives us only two alternatives. They are central bank money with a gold standard and central bank money without a gold standard. The gold standard she speaks of is the state-run gold standard, not a free market in gold, much less a free market in anything that the market chooses to be money.
Romer banishes the free market use of gold. It passes from view, consideration, and thought. She abolishes it. Where did it go?
Roosevelt killed it, although she does not put it this way. In her story, “Roosevelt temporarily suspended the gold standard, before going back on gold at a lower value for the dollar, paving the way for increases in the money supply.” What money supply? Central bank paper money. Nothing else.
Roosevelt restored the gold standard for international payments, but domestically he killed it. She entirely ignores the fact that gold could no longer be used privately as money due to Roosevelt’s gold seizure! Free market convertibility ended. She flushes free market gold as money down the memory hole. It no longer serves as an alternative to the State’s money. Romer thinks only in terms of State money, whether gold or paper, and nothing else.
To several generations of monetary economists and textbook writers, gold is a dirty word. This is either blind or biased scholarship or both. Free market money is nowhere on the map.
Bias in an administration’s top economists is no accident. They have self-selected into the existing system. They sit at the pinnacle of power in America. No wonder then that they acclaim the virtues of the State system of power. No wonder then that they refuse to acknowledge the alternative of liberty in economic matters. And since free market money is very likely to use gold as an important component, no wonder that they denigrate gold.
In his excellent article, “Two Kinds of Gold Standard,” Gary North carefully distinguishes the State’s gold standard from the free market gold standard. A gold standard, or more generally money, is either a product of voluntary exchange (a good), or else it is a forced currency that is the State’s product and forced into passing as a good.
The free market origination and use of a good as money is a matter of choice among free market participants. The good may be gold, silver, copper, or other metals, or some other kind of thing. People in a free market decide on their own what to use as a value standard and what to use as media of exchange or monies. Liberty and a free market include monetary freedom as an essential. The use of gold or anything else as money is a matter of voluntary choices and exchanges.
A State-run gold standard occurs when the State controls by force the monetary arrangements. States have done this in all sorts of ways and with many degrees of control. Money then becomes, wholly or in part, a product of the State, not solely of the free market. Monetary freedom is suppressed.
These two alternatives need to be kept squarely in view if the concept of monetary freedom is to withstand research that shows that the gold standard had economic problems.
My main point is this. Monetary freedom and its possible use of gold as money are not the same as the gold standard courtesy of a State-run system. Defects in the latter say nothing at all about the merits or demerits of the former.
If Romer and Bernanke’s research is correct, the State’s operations of its unfree gold standard helped to produce and exacerbate the Great Depression. But rather than blame the State or the central bank for the money and credit mismanagement that they produced, they blame the gold standard. They err in divorcing the gold standard from the State’s operations and manipulations. They err in falsely identifying gold with the gold standard. They err in supporting as a remedy the State’s money monopoly. Generations of economists have accepted this. They have redefined money as central bank notes whose link and convertibility to gold is very greatly attenuated. This system allows paper money to be manufactured at will by the State’s economists. It allows the inflation we have experienced.
It should be obvious that the public has little or no say in this system of money production. Such money cannot be refused as payment, and there are barriers to introducing other things as money. The markets do not determine what money is, how much there is, how it is created, or who gets it. The State determines all of this. The central banking system, freed from the constraints of gold and market acceptability, is set up to benefit the State.
As such, the system of State money is inherently unfair. All the questions that surround money – what will be money, how much of it will there be, who gets it, what is its value – are far, far too important in our lives to be left to the hands of others to decide for us. With State-forced money, it is too easy for us to be cheated. We are forced to accept a thing as payment for our services that has been, or is being, or will be debased and devalued into losing purchasing power.
The State’s power to create money is its power to command goods and services and absorb them from others without providing goods in return. The temptation to abuse that power is enormous. All governments that have this power abuse it, thereby cheating all those under their rule who are forced to accept depreciating money.
One obvious check and balance on the State’s nefarious money creation is for each of us to have the right to refuse to accept anything proffered as money that we do not wish to accept. Monetary freedom includes such a right. Another obvious check and balance is that anyone in society have the right to produce that which may possibly pass as money. Only sound monies can survive such a competitive process. The money schemes of those, including the State, who would attempt to produce unsound monies will be winnowed out by the voluntary choices of each of us, just as we winnow out other goods that fail to provide us with desired values.
There is far more at stake in monetary freedom. The State’s control over money gives our rulers the leverage to control many other facets of a society’s life. It gives them the resources to make wars and restructure society to its liking and that of its allied interest groups. It gives them power to create booms and then periods of unemployment.
Private control over money is a step toward greater private control by the public as against the State’s control over the public. Conversely, a large State invariably controls money and controls an undifferentiated public that includes many who prefer not to be controlled and affected by the State’s machinations. Those who favor a large State favor State control over money. Those who are against monetary freedom are against freedom generally. They do not want to let people out from under the State’s control.
In this as in other matters, I take a panarchic point of view. I separate cleanly arguments about the economic or social merits of alternatives such as gold and paper money from political recommendations. Economically and morally, I may argue against central banking and point out its faults and what it is doing to the nation. Politically, I do not argue for gold, a gold standard, a bimetallic standard, or any other specific kind of monetary system to be imposed on an entire territorially-defined nation. Politically, I do not argue that central banking be replaced in the U.S. by a gold standard or by free money or by anything. Rather, I argue that those of us who want to adopt alternative money systems have the liberty to do that without penalty. I argue for monetary freedom, and that includes the freedom of all those Americans who want to continue to use the FED’s money to do so. I would not take that freedom from them by ending the FED. If they do not feel that they are cheated or that the system is unethical, they are welcome to live with it. By the same token, if they have that freedom, then so should others of us have the freedom to use banks and money of our own choice.
Such a side-by-side use of alternative institutions and monies within one country is entirely feasible.
May 4, 2009
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York.
Confusion over the gospel abounds. I hear it from people all over the country and around the world. They don’t know what to believe. They aren’t sure what God requires. Is it turning from sins or commitment of life? Inviting Jesus into their hearts? Obeying the Golden Rule? Confessing their sins? Being baptized?
There is only one true gospel. The key is to discover and believe it. However, that isn’t necessarily easy to do, because many different gospels are being preached and it is hard to determine which one is correct.
Most forms of the gospel being preached today are what I call faith-plus gospels. These say that faith in Christ for eternal life is necessary, but that it is notenough.[1][2] Works must accompany faith, according to faith-plus gospels, in order for a person to make it to heaven. There are two versions of the faith-plus gospel. Salvation by faith plus works.Some say that one must have faith plus works in order to obtain salvation. A person lacking sufficient good works, or guilty of major sins, will not make it to heaven, even if he believes in Christ.[1][3] Salvation by faith that works.Others say that one must have faith that works. They claim that one is saved by faith in Christ plus nothing, but that true faith in Christ results in commitment, obedience, turning from sins, etc.[1][4] This may sound significantly different than salvation by faith plus works. However, it is actually another way of saying the same thing.
There is no real difference between saying that to be saved you must turn from sins, commit your life to Christ, and believe in Him, and saying that believing in Christ necessarily results in turning from your sins and committing your life to Him. Both insist that turning from sins and commitment of life is necessary to obtain final salvation. Salvation apart from faith or works.In addition to faith-plus gospels, there is one gospel requiring no faith at all! That is the gospel of universalism, which teaches that all are already saved, or will ultimately be saved. According to this view no one will spend eternity apart from God, even those who never believed in Christ. This view can surface anywhere, even in very conservative, evangelical churches. The motive may seem to be goodan abhorrence of people going to hellbut it is a direct contradiction of God’s Word. The way to keep people from hell is by proclaiming the true gospel that they might believe it and be saved, not by distorting the gospel.
The Bible Is the Only Reliable Guide to the Gospel
Understanding the gospel is not a matter of taking a poll. The majority is rarely right and that is especially true in terms of the gospel. Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult[1][5] is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Jesus unequivocally said that the majority of people are on the wrong road. Many are on the broad way. Few are on the narrow way.
The gospel is contrary to our expectations. Very few things in life are received simply by believing. (Actually, I can’t think of anything, other than eternal life, which is received by faith alone.) Thus, the gospel seems to be “foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
To be saved you must resist the impulse to follow the crowd. There is only one reliable guide to spiritual truth and that is the Bible.
When the apostle Paul went to the city of Berea, he began teaching in the Jewish synagogue. Paul’s traveling companion, Luke, reports that the Bereans “were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
Every person should study the Scripture to see whether the gospel they are hearing is correct. We should all be like the Bereans, searching the Scriptures, so that we will know what to believe.
The only condition of eternal salvation is faith in Christ. Even a casual reading of the Gospel of John, the only book in Scripture whose purpose is evangelistic (John 20:31),[1][6] makes this clear. “He who believes in Me has everlasting life” (John 6:47). “He who believes in Him is not condemned” (John 3:18). “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life” (John 5:24). “Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die [spiritually]” (John 11:26).
The Bible is God’s Word. As such, it is without contradiction. We can be sure that if these and many other passages list faith in Christ as the sole condition of eternal life and freedom from condemnation, this is indeed true. There are no other conditions.
What Is Faith in Christ?
Let’s begin by considering what faith is. Once we determine that, we will consider what faithin Christ is. Faith is the conviction that something is true.We all exercise faith every day. For example, most of us believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States because we have recognized that the evidence is convincing.[1][7]
Do you believe that you exist? That is, are you convinced that you are alive? I once met a college student who doubted his existence and that of everything in the universe. I was tempted to pinch him to give him some tangible evidence! Most rational people are certain they exist, no doubt about it. The evidence is overwhelming.
Though long past her childbearing years, Abraham’s wife Sarah believed that she was going to have a son. God had said she would: “By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11:11, italics added). Ninety-year-old Sarah was positive that God would keep His promise, and would do what He said. Abraham too was “fully convinced that what [God] had promised He was also able to perform” (Romans 4:21, italics added). Faith is being convinced or persuaded (the KJV has “fully persuaded” here) of the truth of somethingin this case, the promise that a son would be born to an elderly couple.[1][8]
The key to believing something is the proof in favor of it. Thus, despite popular opinion, faith is not really a choice. You don’t “choose” to believe that George Washington was the first President, that you exist, that two plus two equals four, etc. Similarly, Sarah and Abraham didn’t “choose” to believe that God would keep His promise to them regarding a son. When the evidence that something is true persuades people, they believe it. When they aren’t persuaded, they don’t believe it.
Let’s say you were on a jury. After listening to all of the evidence, you concluded that the defendant was guilty. Could you choose to believe that he was innocent? Of course not. You could vote not to convict, but that would be acting dishonestly, contrary to what you believed. The only way you could move from belief to unbelief or the other way around is if you came to perceive the testimony differently.[1][9]
Doesn’t this mean, then, that the evidence traps us? In a sense, yes. However, two people can look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions because they have different opinions on whether the evidence is trustworthy. We are guided by our perception of the evidence. We believe evidence that we perceive as true. We don’t believe evidence that we perceive as false.
Therefore, faith is not a decision. It is the conviction that something is true. It is especially important that we understand this, for much confusion about the gospel has resulted from the mistaken idea that we can be convinced that the gospel is true and yet not be saved until we decide to believe it. Faith in Christ is the conviction that He is the Guarantor of eternal life for every believer.Faith in Christ is sometimes called saving faith,since the Bible teaches that all who believe in Him have eternal salvation. There are many things that Jesus promised. When the Bible speaks of “faith in Christ,” it is talking about believing a specific promise that He made. Jesus explained that saving promise to His friend, Martha:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to Him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
John 11:25-27
“Do you believe this?” Jesus’ question to Martha cuts to the heart of the gospel. While Jesus promised many things in the course of His ministry, this one promise is the key to gaining eternal salvation. Jesus is claiming to be “the resurrection and the life.” Anyone who believes that has eternal life and will never die.
First, as “the resurrection,” He guarantees, “He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.” That is, He insures bodily resurrection from the dead to all who believe in Him. Since we know from other Scriptures that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected (Daniel 12:2; John 5:29; Acts 24:15), this must refer to the resurrection of the righteous, also called the first resurrection (Revelation 20:5-6). Jesus is promising that death will not keep a believer from bodily participation in His eternal kingdom. All believers will live eternally in glorified bodies in Jesus’ kingdom.
Notice that this promise has no other conditions. Many add to what Jesus said and end up with this distorted gospel: “He who believes in Me and turns from His sins and perseveres in good works, though he may die, he shall live.” That is not what Jesus promised. A person who believes this altered message does not believe what Jesus said.
Second, as “the life,” He certifies, “Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” This is another way of reinforcing what He has just said. In verse 25 He confirms that physical death cannot keep the believer from bodily participation in the eternal kingdom. In verse 26 Jesus affirms that no believer will ever experience spiritual death. As “the life,” Jesus is the Guarantor of eternal life: “Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” He guarantees the believer will never lose eternal life. All who believe in Him are secure forever.
Some say, “Yes, He is the Giver of eternal life; however, to be saved takes more than just believing. You must also commit your life to Him, turn from your sins, confess Him, obey Him, be baptized, etc., etc., etc.” Once again, if a person is convinced that this distorted message is true, then he doesn’t believe what Jesus is saying. Jesus made it clear that the only condition is being convinced that He guarantees eternal life to all who believe in Him. Add anything to that and you have a different gospel.
Martha believed Jesus’ promise. In answer to the question, “Do you believe this?” she said, “Yes, Lord, I believe.” She then went on to acknowledge Him as “the Christ, the Son of God, who is come into the world.” She knew that Jesus was the Messiah and as such, He certainly fulfills His promise to give eternal life, life that is forever secure, to every believer (compare John 20:31). Martha understood that there were no strings attached. She knew that she had eternal life and that she would never lose it because Jesus, as the Son of God, was trustworthy.
The apostle Paul sums up what Martha, and every Christian, believes when they come to faith in Christ: “However, for this reason I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering, as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life”(1 Timothy 1:16).In order to be saved, we must believe on Jesus for everlasting life. On the basis of His death and resurrection, He always fulfills His guarantee to give everlasting life to all who believe in Him for it.
Martha did not decide to believe in Jesus for eternal life. She was convinced of the truth of what Jesus said and hence she believed in Him in the biblical sense. Faith in Christ does not erase every problem.It greatly saddens me when I hear some evangelists tell the unsaved to believe in Jesus for benefits other than eternal life. “Believe in Jesus and He will heal your broken marriage.” “Believe in Him and He will turn your finances around.” “Become a Christian and all your depression will vanish.” People who believe in Jesus for a better marriage, for financial prosperity, or for emotional well-being, are not guaranteed eternal salvation.
Many today think they are saved because they went forward at some meeting and gave Jesus their life, believing in Him for something other than eternal life. While it is true that He can help us with all issues in life, that is not the promise of the gospel, and the help He gives is not necessarily the deliverance we want. He doesn’t guarantee a happy marriage, good finances, or freedom from depression to every believer. There are many factors other than faith in Christ, which influence these things. However, the only condition of eternal life is faith in Christ!
What Saving Faith Is Not
It is sometimes helpful to consider what something is not. This is particularly true of saving faith. Contrary to popular understanding, none of the following are a part of or a synonym for saving faith: believing general Bible truth, promising to serve God, praying, walking an aisle, being sorry for your sins, turning from your sins, inviting Jesus into your heart, believing with a special kind of faith, doing good works, or having heart faith. Believing general Bible truth.You can believe many biblical concepts and still miss the one truth that is savingthe truth of the gospel. For example, you can attest to Jesus’ deity, His virgin birth, and His bodily resurrection, and yet not believe Jesus’ promise to give you eternal life freely if you just believe in Him for it. There is only one truth that will save: Jesus’ guarantee that anyone who believes in Him for eternal life has it. Promising to serve God. Promises, promises! Almost every child who goes to a Christian camp makes some sort of commitment in front of a campfire. If all the young people who promised to become missionaries had done so, there would never be a lack of workers on any mission field in the world.[1][10] Many have vowed to serve God in the hope that their commitment would cause God to save them. Because it is possible to promise sincerely to serve God, and yet not be convinced that Jesus freely gives eternal life to all who just believe in Him, commitment isn’t an absolute indicator of saving faith. (Many cult members are radically committed.) Pledges to serve God in hopes of gaining salvation actually become a stumbling block, for to be saved one must believe in Christ alone for eternal life, not Christ plus commitment. Praying.A very popular evangelistic technique today is to ask unbelievers to pray to become Christians. However, there is not one biblical example of anyone ever praying to be saved. Jesus never led anyone in a prayer of salvation, nor did any of the apostles or evangelists mentioned in the Bible. A person is saved by believing in Christ for eternal life, not by praying.[1][11] Walking an aisle.Asking unbelievers to come forwardto walk the aisle or come to the front of the auditorium in order to be saved is another popular evangelistic practice without biblical precedent. A person may stand before others with complete sincerity and with a strong desire to be saved and yet return to his seat not having believed in Christ for eternal life. Coming forward will not save. Only believing in Christ will save.[1][12] Being sorry for your sins.A popular song of years past contained the phrase, “Cry me a river.” You may indeed shed many tears, be extremely sorry for your sins, and yet not believe in Christ for eternal life. No amount of anguish over sin can open the way to heaven. Only believing in Christ alone can.
Recognition of one’s sinfulness shows a person that he needs a Savior, and this acknowledgment may result in tears. But the presence or absence of tears is not the point. Nowhere does the Bible say that being sorry for your sins is a condition of eternal life. There is but one requirement: believing that Jesus is the Guarantor of eternal life to all who just believe in Him. Turning from your sins.Can someone undergo radical changes in his or her life without believing the gospel? Of course. Often, for example, unbelieving alcoholics give up drinking. Moral reform is certainly possible. And it is a good thing to do in the sense that it is always best to follow God’s blueprint for living, whether or not you are a Christian. Yet, moral reform will not save.
In fact, if people think that turning from sins is a condition of salvation, their faith in moral reform can actually prohibit them from being saved. To be saved, a person must believe that Jesus guarantees eternal life to all who believe in Him. Inviting Jesus into your heart.Another very common and unfortunate evangelistic appeal is telling people to invite Jesus into their hearts in order to be saved. The problem here is that they can invite Jesus into their hearts and yet not believe in Him for eternal life.[1][13]
Some individuals have invited Jesus into their hearts hundreds of times. Whenever they doubt the efficacy of what they did (with good reason), they just repeat the invitation, thinking: Maybe I didn’t invite Him in sincerely enough the last time.[1][14]Jesus enters the lives of people the moment they believe in Him for eternal life. Believing with a special kind of faith.Some pastors today teach that saving faith is different than everyday faith.[1][15] This, however, is just not true. All faith is the conviction of the truth of some proposition. What makes saving faith saving is not the uniqueness of the faith, but its object. Saving faith results instantly in eternal salvation because it believes in the right object: the guarantee of life made by Jesus Christ to every believer. Doing good works.Saving faith should not be confused with doing good works. In their zeal to call people to godliness, some pastors and theologians today mingle the two.[1][16]
A desire for godliness is admirable. However, it is simply not true that in order to believe in Christ for eternal life you must also do good works and forsake bad works. Works have no place in saving faith. Saving faith is based solely on what the Lord Jesus has already done and promises to do for us. It is not based even in part on what we might do for Him.
The thief on the cross was a terrible sinner who was at death’s door. He had only hours left to live. He couldn’t offer Jesus any good works, any service, any moral reform. He could only believe in Him, and that he did. Even though Jesus’ own disciples were disheartened and had lost faith in His return to set up the kingdom, the thief boldly said, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Jesus’ response shows the freeness of the gospel for all who believe in Him: “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Head Faith, Heart Faith, and Mind Games
How do you convince someone that saving faith is not just faith in the gospel, that it includes commitment, turning from sins, perseverance in obedience, and the like? Since there is no verse in Scripture that identifies saving faith as anything other than believing the gospel, you’d have a hard time proving your view from the Bible. However, there is an easier way.
The best way to sell the idea that saving faith includes the kitchen sink is through the use of pejorative terms like intellectual faith or head faith. Some preachers and teachers tell people that just believing the facts of the gospel is intellectual faith or head faith. Then they espouse the idea that the Bible teaches that the faith that truly saves is heart faith.[1][17] Heart faith can include almost anything. However, heart faith raises potential problems. How much commitment, turning from sins, obedience, and the like is enough? The biblical evidence demonstrates that this supposed distinction between head faith and heart faith is really a mind game.
First, the Scriptures never refer to the head as the source of thinking and feeling. In addition, the word head is never associated with faith in the Bible.[1][18]
Second, of the two remaining words, heart and mind, the Scriptures often use them interchangeably.[1][19] Both refer to the inner self where one thinks and believes[1][20] and feels.
Third, the mind is not viewed as being inferior to the heart in Scripture. In one of the most famous verses on sanctification in the Bible, Paul exhorted the believers in Rome, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Similarly, he exhorted the Ephesian believers, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:23). Paul spoke to the Corinthian believers of having “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). Luke said that the Lord “opened [the disciples'] understanding [literally mind in Greek], that they might comprehend the Scriptures,” that is, the Old Testament Scriptures, concerning His resurrection (Luke 24:45).
Fourth, while the words believe and faith occur approximately 450 times in the Bible, only a few passages specify where belief takes place.[1][21] They speak of believing as though the reader of Scripture knows what that means and where it occurs.
Believing in Christ is the sole condition of eternal life. There is no such thing as special types of faith called heart faith and head faith. Saving faith doesn’t include commitment, obedience, or turning from sins. It is merely the conviction that Jesus is speaking the truth when He says, “He who believes in Me has everlasting life” (John 6:47).
There Is No Additional Step
Many well-meaning people unintentionally introduce a lot of confusion when they say something like this, “Do you believe that Jesus, by His death and resurrection, freely gives eternal life to all who believe in Him? Great! Now would you like to trust Him?”
This two-step approach to saving faith is confusing. How does a person who already believes something choose to trust it? Say, for example, that you believe that Jesus is God. Do you also need to choose to trust His deity in order to really believe it? Of course not. You believe in Jesus’ deity if the evidence convinces you that He is indeed the Second Person of the Trinity. What you believe, you trust to be true.
The same is true with the gospel. If you believe it, you are saved. Jesus guarantees it.
Sometimes this supposed distinction is illustrated by means of a chair and belief in its ability to hold one up. The illustration goes as follows.
“Do you believe that this chair will hold you up if you sit in it?”
“Yes, I believe it will.”
“Okay, then have a seat.”
“No, I won’t do that.”
“Then you don’t really believe the chair will hold you up, for to truly believe it, you must trust that it will hold you up. And you only trust it when you take a seat.”
The illustration is patently false. Only a masochist would sit in a chair he didn’t “really believe” would hold him up. You sit in a chair because you already believe it is dependable, not in order to believe it is.
The only condition of eternal life is belief in Him for it. Once you do that, you have eternal life. There is no additional step involved.
Yes, Believing the Gospel Is Enough!
Saving faith means believing the gospel, believing in Christ alone for eternal life. Nothing else is saving faith. Not only is believing the gospel enough, but it is the only way to salvation. Jesus guarantees eternal life to all who believe in Him for it. Do you believe this?
[1][1] This article is chapter 1 in a book by this author entitled Confident in Christ: Living by Faith Really Works set for a February 1999 release date. 2 An exception is universalism. Universalists say that God is so loving and gracious that the death of Christ saves everyone, regardless of what they believe. 3 One evangelist who has been in the ministry for 51 years recounted his testimony by quoting from a letter he wrote shortly after his conversion: “It has been over nine days since I smoked a cigaretteÖI am now taking part in all the church work I canÖI have been born again. You may think I will get over this in a few days and be back to normal but I will never be the same again. I had not been born again before now. I did believe but I did not have the love of God” (Challenge to Evangelism Today [Fall 1997]: 1,emphasis added). Clearly for this evangelist believing, while necessary, is not enough. One must also love God by living an obedient life. 4 This is sometimes called Lordship Salvation. It is the view that to be saved you must not only believe in Christ for eternal life, but you must also yield to His Lordship over your life. While Lordship Salvation typically refers to Calvinists who believe in salvation by faith that works, it applies equally well to Arminians who believe in salvation by faith plus works. See the appendix on Lordship Salvation for more details. 5 The word translated difficult (thliboÑ) actually is better translated as confined or narrow. See A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, by William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, Second edition, revised and augmented by F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker from Walter Bauer’s Fifth Edition, 1958 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 362. Both the gate and the road to which it leads are narrow. Since a different Greek word, steneÑ, is used for the gate, a word which also means narrow, it is probably best to refer to the way as confined, a synonym for narrow. 6 Books such as Galatians and Romans present the gospel to Christians to make sure they remain clear on the gospel. However, no other book is written to tell unbelievers how they might have eternal life. All other books in Scripture are addressed to believers. 7 Of course, some don’t think of it in these terms. They may think they believe it simply because they were told that it was true. Their elementary school teacher told them that George Washington was the first president and they believed her. However, that is believing evidence. Taking a teacher at her word is not really any different than taking God at His word. The issue is the trustworthiness of the one making the statement or promise. Of course, elementary school students have lots of additional evidence to convince them that Washington was the first president. Our textbooks say so. Our national capitol and one of our States are named after him. And his likeness appears on the dollar bill and the quarter. 8 Jesus is called the Son of Abraham in Matthew 1:1. The promise that Abraham believed did not merely concern the birth of Isaac. It also concerned the birth of Abraham’s ultimate Son, the Messiah, the Savior, and the Giver of eternal life. Abraham believed in this coming Son for eternal life (Genesis 15:6; John 8:56; Romans 4:21-22; Galatians 3:6-14). That is, Abraham believed in Christ long before the incarnation. That is why Paul could rightly say that Abraham is the father of all who believe in Christ. And that is why Jesus Himself could truly say, “Abraham rejoiced to see My day” (John 8:56). 9There is one sense in which continuing in unbelief can be a choice, when one refuses to even look at the evidence. A person raised in another religion might choose not to read the Bible, attend church, listen to Christians, or read Christian books. While, of course, God could upset those plans and bring a witness into one’s life that was unexpected and unavoidable, apart from such intervention a person might indeed be able to choose to remain in unbelief. However, even then, the unbelief is based on a conviction that Christianity is wrong. 10 There might even be more workers on the mission field than there are in the home churches! 11 If a person came to believe the gospel while he was praying a prayer, he would be saved. However, it is not a good idea to ask a person to pray something that he doesn’t already believe. And, if he already believes it, then he is already saved without the prayer. 12 Of course, if a person comes forward and a counselor is used of God to convince him that Jesus guarantees eternal life to all who believe in Him, then he would end up being saved. However, coming forward is not a condition, any more than coming to church in the first place is a condition. A person can be saved at school, at work, in her car, in a foxhole, on a basketball court, or anywhere, with or without an aisle or a preacher! 13 In my early days in evangelism I used this appeal. I remember one student at my college who invited Christ into his life. I gave him some material to read and scheduled an appointment for the next week. When we met for follow-up, he told me that the material I had given him said that Jesus was the only way to God, but that he didn’t believe that. “Really,” I said. “Then why did you invite Jesus into your heart?” He told me that he was a Bahai and that he had invited Jesus into his heart because he wanted all of the prophets in his heart. 14 Of course, this approach is futile. Each time the person doubts, he invites Jesus in “one last time.” It becomes more difficult to do this sincerely since it seems so hypocritical. The only way to be sure that Christ is in your life and that you are eternally secure is to believe Jesus’ promise that all who simply believe in Him have eternal life. 15 John F. MacArthur, Jr., Faith Works: The Gospel According to the Apostles (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1993), 42. 16 Bernard Koerselman, What the Bible Says About a Saving Faith (Chandler, AZ: Berean Publishers, 1992), 138-39, 143, 160. Note: the cited statements are all headings of sections in a chapter entitled “A Saving Faith.” See also Curtis I. Crenshaw, Lordship Salvation: The Only Kind There Is!An Evaluation of Jody Dillow’s The Reign of the Servant KingsAnd Other Antinomian Arguments. (Memphis: Footstool Publications, 1994), 58-59; James Montgomery Boice, Christ’s Call to Discipleship (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 113-14; Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Lord of the Saved: Getting to the Heart of the Lordship Debate (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1992), 19. 17 There is a tract called “Missing Heaven by Eighteen Inches.” It argues that you would miss heaven if you believed the gospel with your head rather than with your heart. Head faith is dangerous, it suggests, because you may think you are saved simply because you believe the facts of the gospel. Yet without the heart commitment, that “faith” is not saving faith at all. 18 The word head occurs approximately 330 times in the Bible. Of those, the vast majority refers literally to the head. The figurative uses include lifting up the head, which refers to being placed in a position of honor or having one’s former status reinstated (Genesis 40:13; Job 10:15), blood or wickedness being on the head, which refers to guilt and judgment coming against persons for their wicked deeds (1 Kings 2:37, “your blood shall be on your own head,” 1 Samuel 25:39, “the Lord has returned the wickedness of Nabal on his own head”), and head as ruler or authority over others (2 Samuel 22:44, “head of the nations,” 1 Corinthians 11:3, “the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God”). There is absolutely no biblical warrant for speaking of head faith. 19 For example, “Thus my heart was grieved, and I was vexed in my mind” (Psalm 73:21). There is synonymous parallelism here. That is, the two halves of the verse are saying the same thing using synonyms. To be grieved in your heart is to be vexed in your mind. The same thing is evident in Hebrews 8:10, “I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts.” Mind and heart are used synonymously there.
Another example is found by comparing Luke 24:25 and Luke 24:45:
“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.”
“And He opened their understanding [lit. mind], that they might comprehend the Scriptures.”
Those two passages are talking about the same thing. The disciples were slow of heart to believe the prophetic teaching of the Old Testament Scriptures regarding His resurrection. So what did Jesus do? He opened their mind that they might comprehend those Scriptures. There is no difference whatsoever here between believing in the heart or believing in the mind. Compare also 1 Samuel 2:35; Psalm 26:2; Jeremiah 11:20; 20:12; and Ephesians 4:17-18. 20 The mind is associated with believing in at least three passages (Luke 24:45; Romans 14:5; Ephesians 4:17-18). In these three passages the words believe and faith do not occur. However, synonyms are present. Luke 24:45 is discussed in the immediately preceding note. In that text, opening of the mind is shown to be antithetical to being “slow of heart to believe” (verse 25). Romans 14:5 reads, “Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.” Ephesians 4:17-18, which, like Luke 24:45, equates the heart and mind, says, “The Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkenedÖbecause of the blindness of their heart. 21 One passage, Romans 10:9-10, directly speaks of “believ[ing] in your heart.” That is set in contrast with “confess[ing] with your mouth.” The former is internal; the latter external. The former is by faith alone. The latter includes works. “Confessing with your mouth the Lord Jesus” is the action that involves commitment, obedience, and turning from sins, not “believing in your heart that God raised Him from the dead.” Nor is believing with your heart defined as some special kind of faith that might rightly be called heart faith. Paul is merely indicating that saving faith takes place internally, as opposed to confessing Christ in word and deed, which takes place externally. Romans 10:9-10 is dealing with salvation from the wrath of God, both eternally and temporally. Believing the gospel is the condition of escaping the wrath of God eternally (“with the heart one believes unto righteousness”all righteous people go to heaven; hence, the only way to escape the eternal wrath of God is faith in Christ). Confessing Christ is the condition of escaping the wrath of God here and now (“with the mouth confession is made unto salvation [from God's temporal wrath]“). For a discussion of Romans 10:9-10, see Zane C. Hodges, Absolutely Free! A Biblical Reply to Lordship Salvation (Dallas and Grand Rapids: Redencin Viva and Zondervan Publishing House, 1989), 197-98.
Four other passages, none of which is dealing with saving faith, indicate indirectly that belief takes place in the heart (Mark 11:23; 16:14; Luke 8:12; 24:25). However, in each of those verses the point is just that belief takes places internally. And, as we have already seen, in the last of those passages believing in the heart is equated with believing with the mind.
MY COMMENTS: I admit that I was confused about this. Thanks to Tim (aka Uncle Greenbean) for ringing my bell.
