MyRA: The Ugly Truth

        When I want to know what will happen in the wake of a particular piece of legislation, I don’t listen to those who proposed it or who voted for it.  That just tells me what they want me to think.  I don’t let them tell me what to think.  Neither should you.

         When I want to know what will happen with a particular piece of legislation, I don’t bother with the stated intentions of those who proposed it or who voted for it.  Good legislative analysis is not rooted in good intentions.  I don’t care a whit about their stated intentions; that’s just acting; that’s just a pose.  I care about results.  I look at what actually has been done in the past with legislation of this sort.  History, not histrionics, tells the tale.

         When I want to know what will happen with a particular piece of legislation, I don’t even read it.  The executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch do not think themselves constrained by mere words.  They are not led around by legislative language.  They lead legislative language around.  (Hint:  remember John Roberts.  He is the Chief Justice.  He can change laws by judicial fiat in order to make them Constitutional in ways he sees fit.  Remember Barack Obama.  He thinks the three branches of government are himself, his pen, and his phone.)  No, those folks aren’t constrained by language.  They make language do whatever they wish, and have done so for decades.   You remember:  “It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is."  So, why should I feel constrained by legislative words when no one else does?  I don’t care what it says.  I care what they’ve done with similar language and legislation in the past.  I read them, not the text.  We do not live under the rule of law but of law twisters.

         This is not cynicism; it’s realism.  Actually, it’s both.  Cynicism is where realism leads.

         So now, MyRA:          

         MyRA is the worst political idea I've heard in many years.  It's government applying the alleged pseudo-wisdom behind Obamacare to your retirement:
         "Like your IRA? You can keep it.  Like your investment counselor, you can keep him.  Period."

         Sounds familiar, right?  You already know the words and intonations by heart.  You can play them over and over at will in your head.  You already know the rule of thumb -- the government makes promises and does not keep them.  It works like this:  When you lie to Congress, it’s a crime.  When Congress (and the president) lies to you, it’s politics.  Get it?

         So, how did they talk and what did they do the last time they tried to manage our retirement, with Social Security?  They argued that everyone needed to be secure.  They would supply the security.  They said that folks couldn’t be trusted to save money for their own retirement.  They said that individuals and their families could not be trusted to make their own way through life.  They said we all needed government to do it for us.   They’d take money out of our paychecks and save it for us.  They’d keep it securely in a lockbox so that when we needed it, it would be there.  And we were comforted.

         Then somebody picked the lock.  Like crooks, like thieves in the night, somebody snuck into your lockbox, took all your money, and spent it on their favorite political items.  Shockingly, the “somebody” who stole and spent all your locked up retirement money turned out to be the same government folks who said they’d lock your money away.  They did.  They locked it away from you.  They spent it.  But they left you a chit, an IOU.  No, really, they did.  There really are paper chits promising to pay.   Really.  It’s guaranteed.  How do I know?  The government said so.  The crooks promised.  They left a chit.  You doubt a chit?

         The money they swiped went for all sorts of keen projects, like shovel ready jobs that either didn’t exist or were not needed; shovel ready jobs for which there were no shovels and no jobs.  We can only hope, even while we deeply doubt, that they got your money’s worth.

         But you’ve got a chit.  Be happy.         

         Do not ask yourself this troubling question:  If they are trying again to fix my retirement, then doesn’t it mean that they failed to fix it last time?

         Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

         And don’t ask yourself this question:  How well did the government do wiping out poverty when it declared a war on it?  If you do ask that question, here’s your answer:  They lost.  They’ll do as well wiping out your poverty in the future as they did wiping out poverty in the past.  Look at Detroit and see your retirement’s urban metaphor. 

         Regarding MyRA, I’m telling you this:  Pay no attention to what they say or write.  It’s all part of the ploy.  “We’re the government.  We’re here to help you.  We’ll take your money and we’ll manage it for you, or else we’ll pick someone to do it for us.  We’ll make sure that we reduce the risk of loss for you.  Trust us; don’t trust market volatility.  We’ll guarantee results.  We’re the government.”

         So, what sorts of companies does the government invest in?  To date, they’ve invested in at least 34 green energy companies, 17 of which have already gone bankrupt, despite the enormous influx of government, i.e. taxpayer, money:  Evergreen Solar (25 million dollar loss), Solyndra (535 million, or a million dollar loss for every Senator and Representative in Congress), Sun Power (1.2 billion), Fisker (529 million), and A123 Systems (279 million), just to name a few.  With genius investments of that sort, you can forget about Charles Schwab or Edward Jones.  You don’t need them.  You’ve got an ideologically deranged community organizer making your investment decisions.  You’ve got the government, and you’ve got those companies they will pick to handle investments.  Who will they pick?  Probably those companies like AIG, into which Washington already has its hands deeply plunged, companies so bad at investment and foresight that they had to be bailed out, and who owe their life to government.  They will play along.  I haven't seen hands that deeply involved since I witnessed a heat transplant.  The government's hand-picked lackeys will direct your money wherever the politicos desire.  Don’t worry.

         Even though government bureaucrats are human beings, and even though human beings are creatures of incentive, don’t bother yourself to think about the incentives this program entails.  Ignore this:  With private investment companies, the incentive is for you to stay alive and stay invested.  They get their money when you stay invested year after year.  When you die and your money is withdrawn, their profit dies.  With government-run programs, however, their incentive is for you to die sooner so they can keep your money.  They can’t give it back to you because it’s already spent.  If they give you money at all, it’ll come from one of two sources, both bad:  (1) higher taxes, which means you pay you to replace the money government confiscated and spent, or (2) inflated money, the value of which has been drained by fiat dollars, which they are printing 24/7.  Inflated money is also a tax.  It’s the unspoken tax that shrinks every one of your dollars every moment of every day.  And if the money itself doesn’t materialize, they will give you a chit.  But if they don’t really want to give you either money or a chit because you are a Tea Party constitutionalist, they won’t pay.  Either they’ll sick the IRS on you and make you pay, or (because they control health care) they have the means to their desired end, which is not paying you by removing you from the scene, once you get old and more expensive.  Even when you die, your beneficiaries will not get all your money, much of which will be eaten up in various taxes and fees.  Remember, there’s even a death tax.  Dying isn’t free.  Dying won’t free you from Uncle Sam’s long arms.

         Even after you die, they’ll have lots of pet projects to fund and an unsustainable debt to pay off or to service with your cash.  Even dead, you will do the paying and the servicing.  OK, forget about paying off the debt.  They don’t really intend to pay it off.  All they intend is for you to cash in your chips.  And if you think government doesn’t kill its own citizens by the hundreds of millions, you’ve got a reading assignment:  R. J. Rummel’s Death by Government.

         Government will sell this bill of goods to you by convincing you that the market is too volatile to be trusted.  But if your investments are doing really well without the government, they know you won’t believe them and won’t want to give them your money, which, to them, is a problem.  In a prosperous market place, what’s an Alinskyite like Obama and his ilk to do?

         Create a crisis, that’s what, a really big one, which they determine will not go to waste.  If you think government doesn’t create financial crises and make them worse, you have another reading assignment:  John Taylor’s Getting off Track:  How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis.   In the wake of the government’s manufactured crisis, they’ll promise to protect you against losses, against the evil wiles of the greedy fat cats on Wall Street, the notorious 1%, whom they will blame for what went wrong.  Once enough folks are sufficiently scared that they agree to participate in the government program, government will move forward.  “Forward” means that what was sold as voluntary will be managed as required.  You will participate because you must.  You will give your money over, one way or another.

         They’ll guarantee good results, even if they can’t guarantee to put up a working website.  They’ll protect you.  They’ll make so it’s always a bull market.  And if they fail, they’ll give you a chit.   Bull chit.

Government and the Rising Cost of College

In his speech in Buffalo, President Obama declared his intention to bring down rising college tuition costs.

His speech makes plain three things:  (1) He thinks rising tuition is caused by colleges; (2) He thinks government is the solution to the problem, not one of its chief causes; and (3) He thinks he knows how much tuition all colleges and universities ought to charge and, therefore, which ones are charging too much;

He is triply wrong:

(1) As everyone who ever studied economics ought to know:  All other things being equal, when the demand for a good or a service rises, its price rises as well.  By providing grants and low interest loans to millions of students, the government has driven up the demand for college enrollment dramatically, thereby driving up the price as well.  When colleges educate more students, they must build new classrooms in which to teach them, new dormitories in which to house them, new dining halls in which to feed them, new health facilities in which to care for them, new athletic facilities in which to keep them fit and entertained, and new parking lots for their cars.

Colleges also must hire new admissions counselors to handle their applications, new campus police to keep them safe, and new maintenance crews to keep them comfortable.

They also must hire new faculty members.  Those faculty members require competitive salaries, health insurance, retirement funds, research sabbaticals, offices, parking lots, and secretarial staff.  Like the faculty, the secretarial staff requires salaries, retirement funds, insurance, vacations, offices, and equipment.

Did I mention that a larger student body requires bigger libraries, more books, and more librarians?

What money colleges cannot get from donors to cover these crushing new expenses, they must get from students. 

Of course, government intervention and the rising costs it entails are not limited to the demands of expanding enrollment.  Government intervention also includes government regulations that tell colleges and universities whom to hire, whom to enroll, and what to teach.  If colleges do not comply, federal funds are cut off.  To avoid that cut off, institutions of higher learning must hire whole departments full of educational bureaucrats to implement, to assess, and to enforce government mandates.  Those departments of compliance must be housed and supplied.  The bureaucrats who administer them require salaries, retirement funds, insurance, and vacations, as well as expensive, well-equipped and air-conditioned office buildings in which to do their work.  If colleges opt out of hiring and housing teams of bureaucratic overlords to manage the rigors of government compliance, they run the risk of falling afoul of the laws, in which case they invite not only the loss of government funds but also possible lawsuits, the costs of which are rising along with everything else.

The heavy expense associated with meeting the needs of more and more students -- and the heavy cost of government mandates on colleges and universities -- can exceed many millions of dollars per campus, depending upon the size of the school.  The aggregate costs to colleges and universities nationwide are perhaps incalculable.  In order to meet the rapidly expanding financial burdens that government intervention places upon them, colleges must raise tuition, sometimes dramatically.

In other words, government itself has done things that drive college costs into the stratosphere.  And now that it has, the President wants to punish colleges for the soaring prices he and his ilk helped produce.

Please note:  I am not saying that by opening up access to college for millions of service men and women via the GI bill that the government did wrong.  That is not my point.  I am saying that by doing so it has cost colleges and universities enormous amounts of money.

(2) Expensive as those forms of government intervention are for colleges, they are not alone, and they are perhaps not the worst.  By printing many billions of dollars in fiat money every month, and thereby shrinking the value of every American dollar on the planet as a result, the government makes it necessary for colleges and universities to charge ever greater amounts of money for the services they provide just to break even.  Because it takes more newly shrunken dollars to buy what old dollars used to, more dollars are needed.  Even if all colleges and universities decided against raising tuition in order to cover the costs involved in servicing more and more students, the government’s monetarist chicanery still drives up prices dramatically over time. 

(3) Finally, I cannot imagine upon what possible basis Barack Obama thinks he can calculate how much tuition every college and university in America ought to be charging, or how much that tuition ought to go up each year.  But if, as he indicated in the past, he plans to punish colleges whose tuition rises too quickly or too much, then know it he must.  But know it he does not.  No one does. 

Suffice it to say that I am continually amazed at how much community organizers know, or think they do.

Why Obamacare Cannot Possibly Work -- Ever (re-post)

President Obama says he wants to control health care costs, on the one hand, and to bring millions upon millions of new persons into the health care system, on the other.

Seen together, the president’s goals are contradictory and mutually exclusive.  Here’s why:  If you intend to introduce tens of millions of new health care consumers into the system, then the demand for health care products and services will rise dramatically.  When demand rises dramatically, prices rise dramatically as well.  If the president wants to achieve his first goal, that of reducing health care costs, then achieving his second goal will make it impossible.  What his left hand gives, his other left hand takes away.

But suppose he succeeds.  That is, suppose he succeeds not at both these goals, which is impossible, but at just one of them.  What happens when the government drives down prices, and what happens when demand for health care products and services rises dramatically?   

When the government tries to control health care costs, the consequence for health care providers like drug companies, medical instrument manufacturers, and doctors, is to drive some of them out of health care altogether.  That is, if Washington restricts the profits of health care providers, some of those providers will re-allocate their quite considerable investments in directions away from health care, to places where government interference does not hinder or limit their financial success.  They simply leave.  In the wake of the coming government-induced exodus from the tyranny of price controls, fewer health care providers can or will remain.  Fewer providers mean fewer products and fewer services.  In your very first economics lesson, you learned that when the supply of a thing goes down, its price goes up.

In other words, the president’s program to control health care costs will produce the opposite result.  I promise you, health care after the president’s reform goes into effect will not be cheaper than it is today.  Health care after his reform will be more expensive than ever, far more expensive.

The costs faced by a pharmaceutical company to develop new and effective drugs are staggering.  Laboratories and equipment are staggeringly expensive.  Outstanding scientists demand high salaries.  The path to FDA approval is arduous, time consuming, and fraught with uncertainty.  The advertisement and distribution of the drugs that win approval are more costly still.  The upshot of all that expensive research, certification, and advertisement is dicey at best, and massive sums of money can be -- and have been -- lost.

In order to pay for the development, approval, advertisement, and distribution of new drugs and the cures they might make possible, therefore, drug companies must make enormous amounts of money on existing drugs.  If they do not, the development of new drugs will be stymied and cannot well continue.  Thus, by holding down prescription costs, by prohibiting what it considers exorbitant drug company profits, the government is, therefore, also prohibiting future drug development and future cures -- perhaps the one that will save your life or the life of a loved one.  We will never know what things could have been accomplished and would have been accomplished in health care if the government puts a lid on prescription costs.  If Obama’s health care reform passes, more people will get sick, more people will stay sick, and more people will die.

Consider the doctors:  If the government puts a cap on what a doctor can make for, say, intestinal surgery, then the very talented and intelligent folks who otherwise would have worked very hard to become wealthy surgeons will figure out how to make a very good living in other ways, perhaps in architecture, nuclear technology, or international trade.  In the shadow of government-restricted prices (and therefore government-restricted incomes), fewer and fewer of them will decide to undergo the long, difficult, and exceedingly expensive path through college, through medical school, through residency, and through certification in order to become doctors who can expect to earn less for themselves and their families than they would have earned had they turned their talents elsewhere and followed an easier and less restricted path to greater wealth.  The same thing will happen with the pharmacists.  If the president’s program goes into effect, the result will be fewer doctors and pharmacists serving the millions and millions more patients the president wants to get into the system.  In other words, there will be long lines -- very long lines -- at the clinic, at the emergency room, and at the pharmacy.

The lesson of price controls is not new.  Simply think of the government-imposed control on gas prices in the 1970s and the chaos, shortages, long lines, and rationing that followed in its wake  -- only substitute health care for gas and clinics for gas stations.

Or, to take a lesson from countries like Canada and the UK (where government health care plans have been in place for many years), waiting lines are unconscionably long and some people actually die waiting for their turn in surgery because there aren’t enough surgeons and operating rooms to meet the needs.  To avoid that fate, Canadians often cross the border to get medical care at their own expense in the US, in cities like Detroit or Buffalo, where medical care is far more readily available than in Canada.  In other words, they come to the system the president is trying to reform, and they leave the sort of system he is trying to emulate.  If the president’s counter-productive plan goes into effect, even Canadians will die. 

My point, if it’s not obvious, is that, judging by the incentives it creates and the consequences it generates, this is a health care plan from Hell.

But it’s worse than that, far worse.  By introducing millions more folks into the system at the same time that his cost control measures are shrinking that system, the president’s plan will strain our remaining health care resources enormously, perhaps to the breaking point, laying an unbearable demand upon what survives of a health care supply system shrinking under the effects of government price control policy.  The result for millions of Americans needing medical care will be catastrophic.  In order to meet the burgeoning demands that an expanding clientele puts on a shrinking system, the government will institute rationing.

Put succinctly, price controls lead to shortages; shortages lead to higher prices and to long lines; long lines lead to rationing; rationing health care leads to suffering and death.

When family and friends suffer or die because they couldn’t get the health care they required, Americans will begin to regret the votes they cast in recent years, and they will struggle to return to the system that served them better -- if by then a return is still possible.

My dire tale of higher prices, shortages, long lines and rationing is understated.  I have purposely left the most expensive and most dangerous part of the President’s health care reform until the end.  To this point, I have focused primarily on health care providers and health care consumers.  I turn now to health care bureaucrats -- perhaps the most wasteful and dangerous element of the President’s entire misbegotten scheme.

Depending upon precisely what sorts of things one includes in the equation, health care is approximately one-seventh of the entire American economy.  To bring that much business under the watchful (but myopic) eye of government requires a simply enormous army of bureaucrats.  To them will fall the power of evaluation and analysis of every sort, and the power to enforce their decisions.  Almost nothing could be worse – unless you decide to put it all under the IRS.

The notion that government tax bureaucrats and career politicians are competent to determine (from a distance, at a desk, or in a committee with other bureaucrats) what drugs “ought” to be prescribed, what tests “ought” to be conducted, what procedures “ought” to be undergone, and what “ought” to be the proper cost of every consultation, operation, test, or procedure in every American locality from Anchorage to Key West is unmitigated hubris and foolishness beyond measure.  Those bureaucrats do not even know or understand how little their own jobs and services are worth; they absolutely cannot know the worth of the jobs of medical researchers and neuro-surgeons in varied localities across the nation, and what they “ought” to be paid for doing them.  Nor will they know what things “ought” to be done for (or by) patients they have never met and never will meet.

Precious few of the apparatchiks empowered by the government to make these decisions will be medically trained.  Indeed, there aren’t enough properly trained bureaucrats in the world to make this program work.  Almost none will have seen face-to-face even one of the persons whose lives and health they hold in their red tape entangled hands.  Indeed, they will not be dealing with persons at all, as they see it, but with “cases” – cases that must be dealt with according to the case book, the standard operating procedures compiled by other bureaucrats in other parts of government who spend their professional lives doing equally impossible jobs with equally deleterious effect.

Consider the bureaucrats.  Like all other persons, bureaucrats are creatures of incentive.  Those with careers in the medical bureaucracy will wish to succeed.  They will wish to rise ever higher in the bureaucracy, to be in charge of ever increasing portions of taxpayer money and to exercise more power than now they do.  In order to rise up the bureaucratic ladder, they must preside well over the affairs inside their bailiwick.  They must follow the rules.  They must keep their departmental budgets balanced.  While I am in favor of governments living within their means, the implications of doing so in health care are staggering.

It often happens that almost 90% of a person’s lifetime health care expenses occur in the last two or three years of life. When we get old, we get expensive. If the government is overseeing the program by which your health care costs get paid, and if that program is dangerously low on money, the bureaucrat in charge of your case, who knows that it’s cheaper to die than to live, who knows that his or her budget is nearly depleted, and who wants to look good to his or her superiors, will be sorely tempted to reason this way:  “At 76, old Joe has had a long life.  His country has been good to him for many years.  It’s time for Joe to pay the system back.  It’s time for Joe to cash in his chips.  That way, his own physical suffering is ended; my personal and professional burdens are eased; and others can move one step forward in the waiting line.  If old Joe dies, it’ll be better for everybody, including me and Joe.”

If you think I am making this up, I absolutely am not.  I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears directly from government bureaucrats themselves. 

When government bureaucrats invade health care, the inevitable result is something much like veterinary medicine:  If your dog is sick and you take it to the vet, the vet examines it and says, “Spot has a problem, and it will cost $300 to fix it.  What would you like to do?”  The vet says it to you, not Spot, because you are paying the bills.  If you don’t have the money to pay for the necessary procedures, it’s bad news for Spot.  Spot might die.  When the government is in charge of paying the health care bills, and the bureaucrat in charge of your case doesn’t have the money, you’re Spot.

Theology and Bureaucracy (part 3)

         Institutionally mandated bureaucratic action is not the same as prudent, compassionate, enlightened, or humane action, whether we consider its origin, purpose, motive, or effect.

         The difference between humane action and bureaucratic action is the difference between human solidarity, a “we” relationship among equals, on the one hand, and a task-to-be-completed and a problem-to-be-solved function, on the other.  The former is an I/I relationship; the latter is a pre-programed interaction between two mere its.  The former is a relationship within a community; the latter is a function within a machine.

         To see more clearly what a bureaucracy is, compare it to the church, that is, compare it to the church as it ought to be, not to the church as it too often is.  The church is a body; the bureaucracy is a mechanism.  The church is animated by the Spirit and by love.  The bureaucracy is not animated at all; it is driven.   No spirit of love lies at its heart.  It has no heart, only rules, regulations, and functionaries where hearts ought to be.  It is not about persons but procedures, policies, and practices, from which the truly human has been systematically and purposely evacuated, where the guidebook reigns supreme, and where imagination, creativity, and compassion are sacrificed to the system’s inflexible and inhuman requirements.  The sad thing is this:  Rather than the bureaucracy growing to resemble the church, the church has grown to resemble the bureaucracy.  As a result, souls have withered, clerical souls especially.   

         Within the bureaucracy, the mutuality of persons evaporates.  It is no longer you and I face-to-face because we are no longer ourselves.  We are not persons among persons.    

We are functionaries, on the one side, and cases with numbers for names, on the other.

         Remember this the next time you vote:  The bigger the government, the bigger the bureaucracy; the bigger the bureaucracy, the smaller the human being and the smaller the realm of authentic human life and interaction

Theology and Bureaucracy (2): Dr. Faust Goes to Washington

In response to the burgeoning growth of independent thinking in his day, Frederick the Great is reputed to have said, “Reason as much as you wish, but obey.”  In so speaking, Frederick laid the foundation of modern bureaucratic government.

The mechanics of bureaucratic rule must be obeyed.  If you are a bureaucrat, you are not permitted to reason, to create, or to feel.  You are not permitted to be authentically human.  You are permitted only do as the manual prescribes, or else be replaced by one who will.  Bureaucrats are functionaries and servants, not persons.

In response to the challenges they face daily, bureaucrats are not permitted to say, “Let me think about that.”  The may say only, “Let me look it up.”  If the manual is silent on the point, they say, “Let me ask my boss” (who will in turn ask his).

If you want a place in the bureaucracy, and especially if you want that place to rise, you have to pay a price:  a soulectomy or a conscienceotomy.  Take your pick.

Many there be who pay it.

Faustocracy flourishes.

Humanity withers.

Theology and Bureaucracy

Sound theology is rooted in the Bible.  Because the Bible is theologically front-loaded, sound theology needs to take into account what we know about God, about human beings, and about creation.  We begin there:

The first thing we learn about God in Scripture is that He is a communal and articulate Maker.  His very name, Elohim, is a plural word.  In its opening verse, the Bible combines that plural name with a singular verb (“create”), thus demonstrating that God is a plurality in unity.  He is communal; indeed He is Divine Community, something He Himself indicates a few sentences later when He declares His creative intention regarding us in Genesis 1: 26:  “Let us (plural) make (singular) man in our (plural) image (singular).”

Second, when we say that God is an articulate Maker, we mean that He makes worlds by His powerful and creative Word.  All reality emerges from his Word and relies upon it.

Relatedly then, the first thing we learn about human beings is that we are made in God’s image, implying that we, too, are to be communal and articulate makers.  To be in His image means that we are to be both God’s picture and God’s partner.  Like Him, though on a lower level, we are to exercise dominion over the earth; we are to fill it and to subdue it.

To be like God and to do as He did -- communally to bring order out of chaos by our words and to carry out the dominion mandate -- is a high and serious calling.  The burden of this brief essay is to explain the ways in which bureaucracy hinders that high calling, both in its communal and verbal dimensions.  In short, bureaucracy, as do all things, has a theology, in this case a very bad one.  It is our focus.

         “Bureaucracy” is a portmanteau word combining the French word for desk or office (“bureau”) with the ancient Greek word for government or rule (“kratos”).  Thus, bureaucracy is “government from the desk,” or “rule by office.”

Notice that from this conception of governance all living things have effectively been removed.  It posits no identifiable living being, whether divine or human.  No persons are left to speak, to bring order out of chaos, or to do so in communion with others.  More importantly for the desk dweller, no one is left to answer or to blame.  Instead, government is the function of a nondescript, faceless, nameless office -- a deskocracy.

         No doubt a real human person sits behind that desk, but not a person functioning like God in God’s stead, not a person who, by his or her words, brings wisdom, insight, compassion, creativity, and eloquence to bear upon the task at hand, namely bringing order out of political and social chaos and making the best he or she can of the earth’s potential.  That’s not what happens at the DMV, or in any bureaucracy I can imagine.

         Within the organization, within the ruling deskocracy, humanity has been defaced, removed, and exiled.  Those who operate within it find their essentially human characteristics eliminated:  (1) Conscience is gone.  Officials may no longer exercise compassionate judgment or offer creative solutions to the dazzling array of challenges that interaction with real human beings incessantly brings.  They must follow procedures.  They must follow the manual, which replaces conscience.  (2) Discernment is gone.  Bureaucrats may not bring wisdom, creative compassion, or personal insight to bear upon the infinite variety of human circumstances that confronts them; they must do as directed by the manual, a text written and approved by other nameless and faceless apparatchiks inside the system.  (3) Community is gone.  Bureaucrats no longer are human beings dealing with other human beings; they are caseworkers handling cases -- cases with numbers -- and doing so in the sterile and schematic way prescribed by the approved, unresponsive, bureaucratic procedures aimed at nothing so much as getting quickly to closure and moving on to the next case, the next number.  You’ve heard it over the loudspeaker:  “Number 17, please.”

         In other words, what the deskocracy does to its workers, it does also to those for whom it allegedly works:  It makes them non-persons, or tries.

         Consider this scenario:  If you are a bureaucrat, if you occupy a desk, and if you actually tried to treat human beings as individuals by dealing with them not as numbered cases but in accordance with their infinitely unique and unpredictable circumstances, you could never finish your work, or even a significant portion of it.  That failure tells you how distant from human reality, both political and theological, government by desk truly is:  Good deskocracy is, literally, impossible.  Deskocracy simply cannot accommodate the facts about us.  But rather than despairing of its foolishness, rather than bringing the whole wrong-headed misadventure to a merciful end, rather than adjusting itself to human and theological reality, it doubles down.  It marches boldly forward, undaunted even by reality itself.  It aims to do what cannot be done.  It aims to change human nature, to remake it in its own image, to undo what God Himself has done, and to accomplish what only the redemptive grace of God can accomplish, namely to make human nature anew.

But the new you, the one intended by deskocracy, is not a redeemed and better you.  It is a soulless and faceless number, just like those whom the system sends to deal with you.  Of course, soulless and mindless go together.  Having made the deskocrats sacrifice conscience for procedure, the system now finds reason to sacrifice reason as well, and to the same god -- systemic uniformity -- which devours free intellect the way Moloch devoured children.

Where intellect and conscience go, beauty goes too.  No one, I dare say, ever left a government office with the grateful impression that they’d been standing for hours before Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or listening to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”  Deskocracy is the death of beauty, truth, and goodness; the death of their Divine origin; and, therefore, the death of the truly human as well.  The name on the desk before which you sit, and   the departmental name on the door through which you passed when you entered, are the names on your tombstone. 

         Because one of the things that raises us above the animals and makes us like God is the creative speech that brings order out of chaos, one ought to consider the anti-human, anti-reality language of bureaucratese, which is an endless immersion in the passive voice.  Unlike in active and indicative speech -- speech in which doers do deeds -- in the language of deskocracy, even though no one actually does anything, “mistakes were made.”   It’s not that Mr. Jones did wrong.  That is too personal for bureaucratese.  Mr. Jones could do no wrong because “procedures were followed.”   No deskocrat can say, “I goofed,” because in bureaucratese there is no “I,” just desks and procedures to which no effective appeal can be made and to which no accusation of personal failure can stick unless, of course, there is a Congressional hearing and the system has to offer up one of its own as a scapegoat.  Rather than imitating the speech of God, which brings things like human beings into existence, bureaucratese takes them out of it.

         To be true to yourself and to the God Who made you like Him, you must resist the de-personalization of the cumbrous and mechanistic overlord that occupies all the desks.  You must resist it in eloquent, courageous, purposeful concord with other human beings determined to keep the inestimable gift God gave them.  Either you win or it does.  If it wins, you will be folded, spindled, stapled, and mutilated.  That dire end is your only alternative to the freedom and dignity that are yours as God’s picture and partner.

I cannot tell you precisely, step by step, how that victory is accomplished.  Simply for me to try would be to mimic the deskocracy and its arrogant procedures.

But I do know this:  You are a human being.  You and your allies must insist on being treated as children of the King, as royalty.  If you do not win back that respect for yourself, if you do not carve it out by your own will, cunning, courage, eloquence, and excellence, you will never have it again -- not in this life, and not from this deskocratic tyranny.  The deskocracy is not programmed to deal with children of the King.

Obama and the Colleges

In his State of the Union address, President Obama declared his intention to cut federal funding for colleges and universities where tuition rises too much.

His plan makes plain three things:  (1) He thinks rising tuition is caused by colleges; (2) He thinks government is the solution to the problem, not one of its chief causes; and (3) He thinks he knows how much tuition all colleges and universities ought to charge and, therefore, which ones are charging too much;

He is trebly wrong:

(1) As everyone who ever studied economics ought to know, all other things being equal, when the demand for a good or a service rises, its price rises as well.  By providing grants and low interest loans to millions of students, the government has driven up the demand for college enrollment dramatically, thereby driving up the price as well.  When colleges must educate more students, they must build new classrooms in which to teach them, new dormitories in which to house them, new dining halls in which to feed them, new health facilities in which to care for them, new athletic facilities in which to keep them fit and entertained, and new parking lots for their cars.

Colleges also must hire new admissions counselors to handle their applications, new campus police to keep them safe, and new maintenance crews to keep them comfortable.

They also must hire new faculty members.  Those faculty members require not only competitive salaries, but also health insurance, retirement funds, research sabbaticals, offices, parking lots, and secretarial staff.  The secretarial staff requires salaries, retirement funds, insurance, vacations, offices, and equipment.

Did I mention bigger libraries, more books, and more librarians?

What colleges cannot get from donors to cover these crushing new expenses, they must get from students. 

Of course, government intervention and the rising costs it entails are not limited to the demands of expanding enrollment.  Government intervention also includes government regulations that tell colleges and universities whom to hire, whom to enroll, and what to teach.  If colleges do not comply, federal funds are cut off.  To avoid that cut off, institutions of higher learning must hire whole departments full of educational bureaucrats to implement, to assess, and to enforce government mandates.  Those departments of compliance must be housed and supplied.  The bureaucrats who administer them require salaries, retirement funds, insurance, and vacations.  If colleges opt out of hiring teams of bureaucratic overlords to manage compliance, they run the risk of falling afoul of the laws, in which case they invite not only the loss of government funds but also possible lawsuits, the costs of which are rising along with everything else.

The heavy expense associated with meeting the needs of more and more students -- and the heavy cost of government mandates on colleges and universities -- can exceed many millions of dollars per campus, depending upon the size of the school.  The aggregate costs to colleges and universities nationwide are perhaps incalculable.  In order to meet these rapidly expanding financial burdens, colleges must raise tuition, sometimes quite dramatically.

In other words, government itself has done things that drive college costs into the stratosphere.  And now that it has, Obama wants to punish colleges for the soaring prices he and his ilk helped produce.

I am not saying that by opening up access to college for millions of service men and women via the GI bill that the government did wrong.  I am saying it costs colleges and universities enormous amounts of money.

(2) Expensive as those forms of government intervention are for colleges, they are not alone, and they are perhaps not the worst.  By printing many trillions of dollars in fiat money, and thereby shrinking the value of every American dollar on the planet as a result, the government makes it necessary for colleges and universities to charge ever greater amounts of money for the services they provide just to break even.  Because it takes more newly shrunken dollars to buy what old dollars used to, more dollars are needed.  Even if all colleges and universities decided against raising tuition in order to cover the costs involved in servicing more and more students, the government’s monetarist chicanery still drives up prices dramatically over time.

(3) Finally, I cannot imagine upon what possible basis Barack Obama thinks he knows how much tuition every college and university in America ought to be charging, or how much that tuition ought to go up each year.  But if he plans to punish colleges whose tuition rises too quickly or too much, then know it he must. 

Suffice it to say that I am continually amazed at how much community organizers know, or think they do.
Finally, to ask the obvious question:  Where in the Constitution does the president have either the power or the repsonsibility to control college tuition?  

Euro Folly

Forgive my indelicate language, but what the Hell are world leaders and Wall Street investors thinking?  The Eurozone is on the verge of colossal financial collapse, and the Euro itself is in its death throes.  In order to save the whole doomed package, Europe turns to Washington, which is already more than 15 trillion dollars in debt, for a bailout, and Washington consents.  In response to this dance of folly, Wall Street goes up nearly 500 points in a day.  Tell me, please, how can one bankrupt business bail out 15 other bankrupt businesses, and why do otherwise sane people cheer the vain and ridiculous attempt?

The Euro is gone.  It cannot sustain the multinational overspending that Europe has indulged in for decades.  The time to pay up has come, and the only money they've got for payment is money from a nation that has none, a nation more than 15 trillion dollars in the hole, a nation that borrows money from China in order to pay its own staggering shortfall, a nation that actually buys its own debt and simply ramps up the government printing press to warp-speed in order to conjure more fake money by which to do it all. 

The issue that confronts us is this:  Crushing debt caused by unsustainable multi-government overspending, the absence of a gold standard, looming hyper-inflation, and the folly of tying radically different economies together under one centrally manipulated currency, especially when nations like Greece shamelessly lie about their financial condition and cook their books in order to sneak into the Eurozone in the first place – all coupled with the buffoonocracy in Brussels, which neglected its due diligence and simply didn't notice the Greek chicanery.

The system almost collapsed under the burden of saving Greece, which is not yet saved.  When it has to save Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland too, the curtain will fall.  Then everyone will wish they were Switzerland, which declined a spot in the Euro’s mad march to self-immolation, and which now has perhaps the strongest currency in the world.  I’m not saying Switzerland won’t feel the rain and hear the thunder of the financial dungstorm that surrounds it on all sides; and I’m not saying it won’t feel the earthquake, both the tremors and the aftershocks.  It will.  But better to sustain those things in Switzerland than anywhere else on the continent.

The Euro and its zone were a doomed idea from inception.  It never could be made to work.  It cannot be made to work now, especially by economically-challenged community organizers from Harvard, who haven’t heard that Keynes was wrong, and who have not yet figured out that the more you invest trying to make an impossible idea work, the more you lose.

The best advice is to sustain the hit now, which will be painful but endurable, rather than tossing more (fake) money down that rat hole, which is just a one-way street to disaster.

The deeper you dig, the higher out you must climb.

Lay down your shovel, Mr. Obama.

Lay it down now.

You’ve rambled on wearily about shovel–ready jobs.

This is not one of them.

Freedom, Government, and Your Soul

Some years ago, in an Introduction to Political Thought course I was teaching, while we were discussing the American Constitution, I asked my 29 students if they would rather be free or safe.  All but one chose safety.  Monica, the lone dissenter, a girl who wore black to class every day, chose freedom.

When I asked her why, she said, “Unless you are free, you can never be safe.”

She was exactly right, of course.  Hers was an insight lost on too many contemporary Americans, who would much rather be safe than free.  For safety and security, they would willingly surrender to the nanny state all or part of nearly every freedom they have.  The nanny state is quite willing to provide for them in every way, from health care, to education, to housing, to retirement, to food subsidies -- as if government could live your life for you, and fulfill all your moral and personal responsibilities in your stead.  All government requires in return is that you sacrifice your independence and your inalienable responsibilities, which are the obverse of your inalienable rights.  (The inalienable rights that cannot be taken away imply responsibilities that cannot be forfeited or assigned.  Just as the rights are irrevocably yours; so are the obligations they entail.  If you want to keep them, rights and freedoms are challenges you must live up to.)  Government asks only that you become a permanent ward of the state, and vote in accordance with your dependency.  Too many modern Americans do not know what George MacDonald knew:  Security is a mortal’s greatest enemy.

You can never be what you were meant to be if you cede your responsibilities over to the state -- or to anything else.  To do so is to rob yourself of the chance to be yourself, to be the man or woman God intends.  He intends you to be conformed to the character of his Son, Whom no one ever accused of selling His soul to Caesar for a meal or a handful of coins, as if government were His God, bureaucrats were His bishops, and federally produced case manuals were His Bible.  Those things are not the means to freedom.  Truth is (John 8: 32).  And if you want to make free persons, you must bring them to the Truth (John 14: 6), not bind them to the state.  When governments operate as they ought, they are the protectors of freedom.  When they operate as now they often do, they are among its greatest enemies, and therefore also the enemies of sanctification and your soul.

Remember this:  Government money always comes at a price.  That price is your freedom and, therefore, your self-determination and spirituality.  If you expect to derive your security and your provisions from government and not from God or his people, then your very soul is stymied.  It was made for God, and for God only.  It cannot thrive or grow by feeding at the government trough.  Lift your eyes Higher, and your soul will follow.


P.S.  A few weeks later, after making her comment about human freedom and security, black-wearing Monica came to class dressed all white.
"Monica," I said, "you're wearing white!"
"Yeah, she replied, "I'm depressed."

Love by Proxy: What Liberals Do Not Understand

You don’t send a boy to do a man’s job.  If you do, the job won’t be done right.  Not all persons can do all jobs.  Not all jobs, and not all obligations, can be assigned to others.

The job of Christian charity, and with it the obligations of Christian love, are like that.  You must carry out your own obligations.  You can’t pawn them off onto others -- government bureaucrats, for example.  There’s no love by proxy.  You can’t hire someone else to love your wife or your children.  You must do it yourself.  If you don’t, it won’t get done.  Christian virtues don’t work like that.  You can’t assign your faith, hope, and love to others.  Even the mere attempt is a failure.

Love for others, and the moral obligations it entails, looks like the Good Samaritan, not like the government bureaucrat.  The Good Samaritan found a man in a very sorry state, a man from a group who despised Samaritans.  But the Samaritan knew that things like ethnic differences, and the prejudices that often accompany them, are no reason to set aside one’s moral obligations, or to give them over to someone else.  No; you must carry them out yourself.  So the Samaritan provided food, medicine, and shelter out of his own pocket.  He also provided time, effort, and companionship.  He didn’t go to the local, or even the regional, Samaritan authorities to carry out his obligations for him.  He did it himself.

It’s far better to carry out the obligations of Christian love yourself than to slough them off onto the government because, as soon as you inject government bureaucracy into the equations of love, everything changes:  The poor man or woman with whose difficulties you are faced does not stay a man or a woman.  They become cases.  They are no longer persons loved by other persons; they are cases handled by caseworkers.  Caseworkers do not proceed by the dictates of enlightened and redeemed Christian conscience, or by the attachments and obligations of Christian love as explained and exemplified in Scripture.  They go by the manual; they go by approved bureaucratic procedure.

In other words, both the victim and the bureaucrat assigned to handle the victim’s case are dehumanized:  One becomes a case, the other a mere functionary, a faceless and nameless apparatchik. The humanity of the one and the conscience of the other are evacuated.

It’s far wiser and better to deal with a downtrodden person yourself -- to find out personally what went wrong and to decide in conjunction with the victim exactly how to move forward.  Because the circumstances are as different as the persons to whom they pertain, you must do this face to face.  You won’t find the answer in a government publication.  That’s not where Christian love is sussed out for you in all its self-sacrificial detail.  You can’t figure what to do or how to do it best unless you get into the very life, history, motivations, and choices of the persons to whom you owe the obligations of love.  You might find that they are, indeed, simply victims of circumstance, that their current plight is the result of no fault of their own.  If you do, you seek one set of solutions.  But if you find that current challenges are the result of one or more personal failings, then you must look elsewhere for an answer.  The moral, spiritual -- and therefore personal -- failings that caused this human disaster must be effectively addressed, and that prescription will come from the Bible, not the caseworker’s manual.  It inevitably will include repentance and sanctification conducted along explicitly Christian guidelines.  Real answers to this human problem are found nowhere else.  The bureaucracy and its manuals are hopeless on the point, and can serve only to make the problem worse, not better.  That’s why, after nearly 50 years of Great Society-type schemes from Washington, and after pouring more than 17 trillion dollars into poverty relief, poverty has gotten not better but worse.

Please do not miss my point:  We have given America’s poor a million dollars more than 17 million times -- and all the while poverty got worse.  Poverty is not a money problem.  It’s the result of another, prior, problem, one you cannot discover or address without personal involvement and the self-sacrificial commitments of Christian love.

If, in pursuit of that Christian personal involvement, you discover that this struggling person, or this struggling person’s family, cannot be aided effectively by your own private means, then you must go to your church.  You pool your resources, whether for Christian counseling, or for food, clothing, and shelter.  When you do, you’ll discover that the real solution is almost never money.  While the government might determine poverty by dollar figures, by financial averages, and by impersonal calculations -- and then hand out checks as a solution -- you’ll quickly see that money is neither the problem nor the answer.  Apart from bad luck, lack of money is normally the consequence of the problem, not the problem itself.  You must ask yourself, “Why doesn’t this person have the money to obtain food, clothing, and shelter?”  Until you discover the real problem, you cannot fix it.  Discovering the real problem is going to take a lot more time, effort, personal knowledge, and therefore personal involvement, than the caseworker and the caseworker’s manual can permit.  Solving the problem is going to take more Biblical wisdom and authentically Christian counseling than the government could ever offer at any level.
Just as in the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, if you make government the proxy for Christian love, the proxy, not the real suitor, wins the love and allegiance of the lady.   If you make government the proxy for Christian love, the result will not be love for God or dependency on God, but on government.  Dependency on government produces a permanent underclass, not free and fulfilled men and women.   

As good stewards of the gifts and resources God has provided, we must never squander them in hopeless and ill-considered remedies.  To avoid that squandering, we must tie our charity closely to the character, actions, and obligations of the downtrodden themselves, without which no solution for their challenges is possible, and without which their human dignity is withered and undermined.

It makes about as much sense to assign the obligations of Christian love to the government as it does to assign national defense to the Baptists or the Episcopalians.  You give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s, not what God’s and, through Him, yours.

Do remember that in the 2Oth century alone, an allegedly civilized century, governments directly caused the death of more than 167 million of their own citizens.  Governments are good at death.  They are not good at Christian charity.  If you think that governments are an agency of Christian love, you are not paying attention.  There’s no love by government proxy.  Your tax bill is not your tithe.
When Christian conservatives say they oppose the government welfare system, it's not because they lack compassion.  It's because they think we can do better.