Dystopia Comes to Michigan: Detroit, Unions, and Welfare

         Because they are the two chief contributing factors in Detroit’s fiscal demise, I’m going to talk about (1) Detroit and unions and (2) Detroit and poverty, in that order. 

         (1) Detroit and Unions

         If you have gout, you must be careful what drugs you take and when you take them.  If you take drugs from the xanthine family, it can help control gout.  But if you take xanthine at the wrong time, it can actually cause an attack.  Labor unions are like xanthine.  They can do, and have done, some good.  But taken at the wrong time or in the wrong way, they produce problems, not solve them.  Detroit is a case in point:

         When the Detroit car makers were in their heyday, the unions thrived.  As a result, they became increasingly powerful and effective within southeastern Michigan.  They voted en masse for Democratic politicians and, as a result, those politicians often got elected.  Consequently, those elected politicians supported extending union representation to public sector workers.  Those public sector unions were very effective in acquiring generous pay raises, numerous vacation days, excellent health care coverage, and outstanding retirement packages for their members.  The unions could not, however, get for the city of Detroit the money it needed to pay for those impressive public sector benefits.  Even so, the city’s Democrat leadership, not known for fiscal restraint or for prudent taxation, simply went ahead and approved union contracts that the city could not afford without imposing higher and higher tax rates.  They taxed and they spent, which, for the Dems, is standard operating procedure.    When the tax rates got too high, auto workers and municipal employees, the chief beneficiaries of union power, jumped ship.  They moved out of Detroit into the suburbs, where their taxes went to support other communities, leaving Detroit a mere shell of a city, with block upon block of once thriving neighborhoods reduced to an urban desert.  In the ‘50s, it was white flight.  In the ‘60s, it was black.  Once folks reached the middle class and could afford to do so, they fled.  Detroit lost more than 60% of its peak population, declining from a population of almost 2 million to less than 700,000.  While the Detroit carmakers were thriving, things remained in, if not acceptable, then at least temporarily sustainable, condition.  They could afford to pay more, and did.  But once the carmakers had to compete against German, Japanese, Swedish, English, and Korean carmakers, the game changed dramatically.  Conditions worsened for everyone in and around the Detroit auto industry.  They had to re-consider, and even re-negotiate.  In order better to handle their worsening finances and their heavier financial burdens, workers moved out of town.  Retirees did too, taking their very large and generous retirement packages with them not simply to other towns or other states, but even to other nations, leaving nothing behind for Detroit but uninhabited houses and empty lots that produced no income for the city.  But the Democratic leadership of Detroit stayed the course.  It marched blithely and blindly in a direction it falsely believed was forward.  Despite a declining tax base, Democratic leadership continued to approve ever more generous contracts for its municipal union workers, and ever more welfare payments for its poor, thereby putting the city on track for a financial train wreck.  While the Democrats’ plan did not fix the problem, it did get Democratic politicians re-elected.

         With higher financial commitments, and fewer taxpayers to foot the bill for them, the city predictably plunged into greater debt, which it amplified by:  (1) extensive and expensive political corruption, and (2) maintaining a municipal superstructure much too large for its population and its tax base.  Over time, the city’s debt climbed not merely into the millions (or even hundreds of millions) of dollars, but to nearly 20 billion, which is clearly unsustainable for any city in rapid financial and population decline.  Detroit’s is the largest municipal failure in history, period.  That’s how terrifically incompetent Detroit’s leadership actually is -- the all-time worst.  Yet, rather than vote the incompetent Democratic bums out of office, Detroit voters kept them securely in place, voting Democratic regimes into power, one after the other, for more than 60 years in row.   No matter how badly Detroit Democrats did for their city, they kept control of it because they catered to the city’s most important voting blocks:  the unions and the poor, who wanted the money to keep coming.

         For this ongoing municipal travesty, Detroit voters have no one to blame but themselves.  Rather than judging the regime by its dismal results, they judged it by their own selfish concerns and by the regime’s mere stated intentions, as if those stated intentions were reliable and true and as if good intentions were ever a suitable substitute for good policies.  If your schools do not work, if the police take, on average, an hour to respond to a 911 call, if your favorite politicians get caught in scandals of various sorts time and again, then you need to change your vote.

         I’m talking to you, Detroit. 

         When outside entities, like the state of Michigan, came in to help the city out by taking on some of its financial burdens in order to operate traditional money losers like parks, Detroit voters, following the paranoid delusions of their race-baiting city leaders, resisted the offers, insisting that the state and other allegedly white-controlled entities simply wanted to steal things from Detroit.  Count on it:  If you vote on the basis of racial conspiracy theories, then you will vote self-destructively.

         The chickens, as the say, have come home to roost.  Detroit is the chicken coop.  It is now what it has been for years, perhaps decades:  It is incapable of self-rule.  It has gotten so bad that I suspect it might have to be disbanded and re-incorporated by fragments into other cites or else into the county or state at large.  Nothing less seems to offer any hope for the future.  Detroit voters cannot be trusted.  They vote for welfare programs and for union advantage, however unsustainable those things actually are.  Majority rule does not magically transform electoral nonsense into wisdom.  Detroit voters vote nonsense. 

         Speaking of political nonsense:  Just this week, several television talking heads said that Detroit’s failure was the result of government being too small.  I kid you not.  They think that if you can’t pay for the government you have, just make it bigger.  I can say nothing to such prodigious nonsense but this:  If you have no connection to reality, do not expect it to support your stupid views and do not expect to learn from reality when it proves you wrong.  The greatest municipal failure in history will not prevail to teach some folks this simple dystopic equation:  Unions +Democrats = Detroit.  Detroit = the greatest municipal failure in history.

         I could put it in a sentence:  If you want Detroit automakers to make a comeback, pray that the UAW makes inroads with foreign car makers.

         Those car makers are praying just the opposite, which is why, when they make cars here in America, they flock to right-to-work states, the list of which Michigan has recently joined.

         You can’t fix Detroit’s municipal ailments with casinos, with tax transfers, or with bigger government programs.  You cannot.  Government is not the fix in Detroit; government is the problem.  You can’t fix this problem by restructuring because no matter what structure you put in place bad political and economic policy will ruin it.  You fix it only by addressing what is wrong:  (1) unrestrained union greed and (2) the dissolution of the urban black family and the leftist political incentive system that dissolves it, to which I now turn.

         (2) Detroit and Welfare

         For more than 2000 years since Aristotle, we have known that whatever undermines the family undermines the culture.   Welfare payments, which drive fathers out of the home, do just that.  Those payments leave black youngsters without the fathers they need to provide the food, money, guidance, shelter, and examples that keep them on the straight and narrow.

         But welfare payments are predicated on the absence of father figures.   Consider this:  if you are a poor black young woman in the inner city who is living at home with your parents, and if you want personal freedom and the money that makes it possible, if you want a housing allowance, food subsidies, and medical attention, then have a child out of wedlock.   If you want more money, have more children -- but only by another man.  If your children are all by the same man, then the welfare bureaucracy thinks there’s a man around who ought to be footing these bills, and your checks will stop.  In short, they pay you to have children outside marriage.  The more children you have, the more money you get. 

         But sensible people know that poverty circles around broken homes, especially homes where the chief breadwinner is a woman with multiple children to support.  If you want to be poor, have lots of children outside wedlock.  In Detroit, more than 70% of the children in the black urban underclass are born outside wedlock, with no father around to support and guide them.  If you lack a father, your chances of dropping out of school sky rocket; your chances of taking drugs sky rocket; your chances of going to prison sky rocket; and your chances of having children who live the same desperate life you did sky rocket.

         It’s an incentive system from Hell.  When you pay folks to do the very things that make them poor in the first place, poor they will remain.  Remember this rule of political economy:  you get (A) more of what you subsidize and (B) less of what you tax.  Democrats subsidize illegitimacy, and more illegitimacy is what they get.  Illegitimacy is the handmaid of poverty.  In Detroit, illegitimacy is what they pay for.  In Detroit, it’s what they get, the result being countless folks locked into intergenerational poverty.  You do no favor for folks by turning them into mere wards of the state, generation after generation.  But you do keep them dependent upon government and keep yourself in political power, which seems to be the real purpose of such destructive government programs, whether they are aimed at the poor or the unions.

         That’s what leftists subsidize.  What do the leftists tax?  They tax prosperity.  They soak the rich, which means they drive away successful business owners, the only ones who have proved they are capable of making a profit and providing jobs for others, even in the hostile conditions provided by Detroit.       

         Here’s the headline:  Dystopia comes to Michigan.

         Watch out.  It’s coming to Illinois also; not just to Chicago but to the whole state.  After that, Washington, DC.

         Then we’re sunk, unless you change the way you vote.

         I’m talking to you, America.                           

The Mortgage Deduction, or The Makers and the Takers

         I think the mortgage deduction was a terrific idea and ought to be kept.  Indeed, it ought to be expanded.  We ought to give even greater tax breaks to those who buy and maintain houses.  We need what they do.  But lawmakers, with their insatiable appetite for confiscating and squandering other folks’ money on government-sponsored projects that simply cannot succeed, are now considering its elimination.

         The mortgage deduction is good for us in many ways.  Here are just a few: 

         Human beings are creatures of incentive.  They have a nose for, and tend to follow, the path of personal benefit.  The mortgage deduction is just such a benefit.  It gives folks a reason to work hard, to save, to buy a house, to maintain and improve that house, to grow a family, and to maintain stable relationships – all good things in so many ways.

         To work hard is to have a job, keep that job, and to produce goods and services, which adds to the nation’s wealth, not just to one’s own.

         To save is to live responsibly and to make available through banks and other lending institutions more money for investment by others, investment that creates more jobs and more goods and services, also adding to the nation’s wealth.  More jobs mean more taxpayers, which means more government revenue precisely because of the mortgage deduction.

         To buy a housemeans being responsible and productive for many, many years -- or else the house is gone and you are on the street.  Economic stability is good both for families and for the economy.  When millions of folks buy homes and keep them, it’s good for the nation.

         To maintain a homerequires constant investment, which means more commerce and more jobs.  It also means better neighborhoods and the persistent watchfulness needed to keep those neighborhoods that way.

         To grow a familyin an environment of hard work, responsible action, foresight, personal stability, and community involvement is a blessing to all concerned.  Children raised in that context with those values are an enormous asset to the nation on all levels.

         To maintain stable family and community relationships is the best apprenticeship for the next generation and its ability to provide future stability, which is the prescription for avoiding the devastation wrought in our inner cities by a welfare system that destroys families, encourages instability, and that fosters irresponsible action and violence.

         In other words, the politicians in Washington want to cut things that make the nation better, things like the mortgage deduction, but not cut the things that undermine us, things like welfare and entitlements, which injure the very persons they are ostensibly designed to help.  It’s as if they never heard that you get more of what you incentivize and less of what you tax.  Let’s incentivize responsible home ownership and not broken families.  To the left that sounds evil, which is proof the left does not understand what its higher taxes and its higher subsidies have done to America and its citizens.

         But please understand that I’m not simply blaming the politicians.  Ultimately, we’ve got no one to blame for this but ourselves.  We voted the bums into office.  We’re getting what we deserve.  We’ll keep getting it until we learn to vote more responsibly.  Home ownership tends to do just that.  It tends to make us vote more responsibly.  When you’ve got something, you’ve got something to lose, and you vote so as not to lose it.  When you’ve got nothing, you vote so as to get something.  There’s nowhere else to get it except from others.  That rapacious incentive is the death of personal responsibility and autonomy for all concerned, the makers and the takers.     

Why Taxing the Rich Simply Cannot Work

According to the prevailing leftist worldview, in order to cure the nation’s debilitating debt disease, and in order to aid the nation’s poor, we ought to raise taxes on the rich so that they begin to pay their “fair share.”

It’s a futile remedy.

If you took every penny from every person in America who made a million dollars or more last year, you could run the government for only a few weeks.  Taxing millionaires, even at 100%, won’t fix the problem.  Our problem is that we spend more than a trillion dollars every year that we simply do not have.

But when conservatives try to keep an out-of-control government from driving the entire nation over a cliff into the gaping maw of economic destruction, liberals claim conservatives lack compassion.  They do not.  They are trying to avoid scuttling the ship of state.  Avoiding a shipwreck is not lack of compassion because, when the ship sinks, all who are aboard -- the poor and the wealthy alike -- are set adrift in the open sea, a result that benefits no one except the Marxist sharks patrolling the waters of international dissolution.

Think about it:  Even if you tax the wealthy at 100%, not only you will not have enough money to do what liberals want to do via government, but you will have succeeded only in creating many more poor:  Those who once were rich now have nothing.  And once you have taken all their money, and succeeded in running the government for only a few weeks with it, from whom will you get money to run the government when that handful of weeks has passed?

You can’t get it from the poor because they don’t have it.  The only option left is the middle class, who then will be destroyed in short order.  Taxing the rich even at 100% will not work.  Even all their money combined will not solve the problem.  And if you do not tax the rich at 100%, you will have even less money to do what you think ought to be done via government, and that money will run out even quicker.  Once the money of the rich is gone, and you still wish to do what leftists want government to do, you must take the money of the middle class.  At that point, everyone is poor.

In short, you cannot fix what’s wrong by means of tax increases.

It’s simply impossible.
So, why pursue it?  I see no more elevated reason for doing than craven envy and destructive class warfare.  If you can, then let me know.
So as not to be unhelpful, I recommend the following ideas: 
(1) You must lower taxes all around, which leaves more money for investment, invention, and job creation. More workers means more taxpayers, which means more government revenue. In other words, I'm talking about the Laffer Curve, which has been proven correct at least twice.  (2) You must reduce the burden of government mandates, regulations, and red tape, which impose enormous financial burdens on businesses and force investors to withhold, at this, point, several trillion dollars in investment money, which is lying idle because investors don't know what injurious things will emerge from Washington next.  No one wants to lose.  They want to invest wisely, and they can't invest wisely because they can't trust Washington to provide a stable business environment.  No investment, no new jobs.  (3) Reduce spending drastically.  We ought not do nationally what the Constitution does not explicitly permit us to do at that level.  All those things have been reserved for individuals and the states. 

Richard Ebeling on the Great Divide

 The following analysis comes from my friend and former colleague, economist Dr. Richard Ebeling, to whom many thanks for permission to reprint his ideas.

        The news media -- both the "mainstream" and the "fair and balanced" one -- has made much, since Tuesday's election results, of the ethnic, social, and cultural divide in the country in terms of which groups voted for which of the presidential candidates.  And it is clear that the two leading political parties appealed to different segments of the society.
         But the real divide in the country, may I suggest, is that between those whom John C. Calhoun called the "taxpayers" and the "tax-receivers" in the society.  That is, the divide is between those on opposite sides of the redistributive state.
         But it is not simply between those who, on net, pay the taxes and those who, on net, receive the taxes. (Though as Frederic Bastiat said, in the spider's web of transfers it is often difficult for a person to know if he has, on net, "gained" or "lost".)  It is the political philosophical divide between those who believe in the moral "rightness" of income and wealth redistribution and those who believe that an individual has an inherent right to that which he has honestly earned in the productive market place of trade and exchange.
         This is the real and true battleground of ideas within which the future of the country must and has to be fought out.
In this context it is important for friends of freedom to reach out and persuade people in various groups who have been falsely convinced that the "State" is their "champion."
         The Republicans and conservatives (and libertarians), I believe, have made a serious mistake in not reaching out to many in the Hispanic community who should be and can be receptive to the "freedom philosophy."  They or their parents came to America --like earlier generations of immigrants -- to make a better life for themselves and their children. Many of them are or desire to be self-supporting and hardworking, if only they had a chance to do so in the market. Many are or would like to be small business people, with the hope of being successful and leaving a legacy for their families.  Many are strongly community-oriented with an attitude of mutual self-help in times of personal or family trouble.
         But they have been duped by collectivist and altruistic rhetoric and demagogic politicians, inside and outside their own community, to believe that "capitalism" won't provide them with a "fair chance" and that the "State" is the only avenue for a better life through redistribution, regulation, and special favors to help the "little guy."
         What friends of freedom need to do is to help those duped in this way by the Statists to distinguish between (as Bastiat said) "what is seen and what is not seen," to understand that the siren call of collectivist promises is a road to their perpetual serfdom and not the path to the "American Dream."

The Rich, the Poor, and Justice

         Sometimes we ought to begin by defining our terms.  This is one of those times.  We need to distinguish between justice and equality.

         Justice is getting what you deserve.  It’s getting what is rightly yours.  It is getting what is yours by work, by investment, by inheritance, by purchase, by right, even by luck.  Because it is based on deserving, no moral objection can be raised to justice.  Equality, by comparison, is not getting what you deserve, but getting what everyone else gets, regardless of contribution or deserving.  Because of its distance and difference from deserving, from justice, a moral objection can (and sometimes should) be raised against equality.  Equality is justice only in cases and circumstances that really are equal.  Given the enormous and immeasurable differences in deserving, in effort, in morality, in natural ability, in contribution, and in circumstance among human beings, a species wherein no two members are exactly alike, the instances of equality being justice are rare, perhaps exceedingly rare.

         Yet some folks complain continually about the lack of equality, especially financial equality.  They complain, for example, if a particular policy benefits the rich more than it does the poor.  But you cannot raise an effective moral objection against a policy for no more morally profound or intellectually responsible a reason than that it favors the rich, or expands the gap between the rich and the poor.

         For instance, if I were to cut income taxes by 20% across the board, thus relieving the financial burden on all taxpayers, that policy would favor the rich more than the poor because you can’t cut taxes for those who pay none.  You can’t aid non-taxpayers with tax cuts because their tax break is already maximized.  Tax cuts favor the rich more than the poor because the rich are the ones who pay the most taxes:  The more taxes you pay, the more you benefit.  The less taxes you pay, the less you benefit.  And if, like nearly half of all Americans, you don’t pay income tax at all, you still benefit because those who do pay taxes still end up paying them to you.  They pay them to you by means of the elaborate, punitive, discriminatory, government redistribution scheme now in force in America.

         By the same token, if somehow, by my generosity, I were able instantly to double the money of every man, woman, and child in America, I’d think I’d done a rather good thing.  But those who oppose policies or actions favoring the rich would complain vociferously because by instantly doubling everyone’s money, my personal largesse had given more to the rich than to the poor, thus increasing the gap between them, as if by being generous I were being unjust.  And were I to increase everyone’s wealth tenfold -- an ostensibly good and generous action -- the same sort of consequences would obtain and the same silly criticisms would follow, even though everyone now had 1000% more money.

         Something isn’t bad just because it benefits the rich.  And it isn’t bad because it benefits the rich more than the poor.  It’s bad if it’s unjust, not if it’s unequal.

         Or, if you remain incurably addicted to the equality meme, then you ought to oppose our tax laws, which are the very embodiment of inequality, and which single out some citizens for financial punishment and others for financial reward in defiance of our Constitutional obligation to provide equal protection for all.  That is discrimination; that is inequality; that is injustice.  Yet those who trumpet equality and oppose discrimination press for it full tilt.  Against all reason and consistency, they oppose equal percentage tax breaks and they endorse tax code discrimination.

Jesus is not a Liberal: Correcting the Christian Left

          I have taken Becky Riley’s article below from The Christian Left’s website (thechristianleft.org)  I chose this article not because it is particularly good or particularly bad.  I chose it simply because it was the first to appear when I opened their site.  Had some other essay appeared, I would have chosen to refute it instead.  Her words are in boldface type and in quotation marks.  Mine are not.

“Biblical Quotes Supporting the Belief that Jesus Is A Liberal” -- By Becky Riley”
         Riley does not tell us what she means by the word “liberal,” but if she is a conventional leftist, it means she thinks that Jesus was a big-government, collectivist, egalitarian, redistributionist, pacifist, or something very close, which is exactly what emerges from her text subsequently.

“Peacemaking, not War Making: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Matthew 5:9] Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right... cheek, turn to him the other also. [Matthew 5:39] I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite-fully use you, and persecute you; [Matthew 5:44]”
         Although the Biblical text Riley quotes does not mention anything about war making, she herself includes it.  By including it on her own authority, she has transgressed the important difference between peacemaking and pacifism.  One can make peace without being a pacifist.  Thus, Jesus commends the peacemakers here, not the pacifists.  He commends those who proceed to peace, not those who proceed by peace.  By reading as she does, Riley overlooks several important points:
         (1) Peacemaking can be accomplished in many ways, one of them by ending war quickly.  If you want to make peace, then you must learn how to end war quickly.  In that sense, we have three peace academies in the US:  West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, where they produce military folks who are the best the world has ever seen at ending war swiftly and thereby making peace.  But, conversely, if you proceed by means of pacifism toward peace, you will not end war quickly. Rather, you will invite more war because tyrants will move upon you with all speed and purpose.  From you they fear nothing.  No nation was ever attacked because it was too strong and could defend itself and its neighbors.  But many nations, whether weak or pacifistic, have been attacked because they were unwilling or unprepared to deal strongly and swiftly with tyrannical opponents.  Military weakness invites war.  Pacifism invites war.  If you cannot fight, or if you will not fight, you eventually will have peace, but it will be the peace of surrender, of slavery, and of death, which is not the peace of justice, which alone is the peace of God.  Pacifists need to consider not only the qualities of a just war, but of a just peace.  Not all peace is just, not remotely.
         (2) Jesus Himself is not a pacifist, and neither is His Father.  Jesus, we recall, is the One in charge of Armageddon, and Armageddon is no peace march -- far from it.  Armageddon is so enormous a battle that it brings the entire world to heel.  War of this sort wasn’t something Jesus Himself cooked up.  He got it from His Father.  Jesus said that He did what He saw His Father do and He said what He heard His Father say.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, He saw his Father tell the Israelites to go into battle frequently.  He heard his Father command total war of His people and punish them if they did not do it.  Jesus saw, in short, what is obvious to any careful student of Scripture:  Yahweh is a warrior.
         (3) Peace is by no means the bottom line for Jesus.  That is not why He came.  Nor is it the means by which He proceeds:  “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matt. 10: 34), He said.
         (4) The context of the verse Riley quotes is the Sermon on the Mount.  That sermon was directed to the disciples of Jesus (Matt. 5: 2), not to congresses, politburos, or parliaments.  It deals with personal Christian ethics, not with national defense policy.  What is required of government by God and what is required of Christians by God are not the same.   While it might be required of Christians to turn the other cheek, governments cannot and must not work that way.  If someone hits you, you might do well not to retaliate, and to practice self-sacrifice instead.  But the government must not and cannot do that.  If your enemy flies jetliners into your skyscrapers in New York, you must not say to them that we have skyscrapers in Chicago too, and that they are free to attack them as well and to do so without fear of retaliation because we are turning the other cheek.  That’s because while individuals can practice self-sacrifice, governments cannot.  What is being sacrificed when governments turn the other cheek is not themselves but others, perhaps many thousands of others.  You cannot self-sacrifice others.  Jesus’ teaching here is not about national defense, but about his disciples’ personal lives and personal obligations.
         As before, the command not to resist evil and to love your enemies is directed not at governments but at Christian disciples.  Governments cannot love, nor are they directed here to do so.  But Christians are.  They are the ones whom Jesus addresses in this famous sermon.  Further, governments exist precisely in order to resist and restrain evil (Romans 13: 3).  Unless Riley wants to pit Jesus against both His Father and His apostles, her reading of these verses is sadly inadequate and distortively imprecise.  This is a matter of individual self-sacrifice, not public policy.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.          
   
“The Death Penalty: Thou shalt not kill [Matthew 5:21]”
         Matthew 5:21 does not say “Thou shalt not kill,” but “Thou shalt not murder.”  While all murder is killing, not all killing is murder.  Murder is unjustified killing.  Some killing is justified.  Some is not.  For Jesus to command what Riley asserts that He commands is again to pit the Son against the Father, which the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, as well as the example and explicit teachings of Christ Himself, prohibit.  The Son and the Father are not divided on the point.  God the Father permits capital punishment and has done so almost from the very beginning (Gen. 9:6), something He reiterated multiple times in the Mosaic law.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.

“Crime and Punishment: If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone at her. [John 8:7] Do not judge, lest you too be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. [Matthew 7:1 & 2.]”
         Setting aside the textual challenges one might raise to the verse Riley quotes from John, one must challenge her designation of this passage as pertaining to “crime and punishment” rather than to “sin and punishment.”  Not all sins are crimes; nor should they be.  For better or worse, adultery is not a crime now the way it was in Jesus’ day.  If it is not a crime, and Riley thinks it should be, then the punishment prescribed by the law for this crime must hold too, which means death, and which means her comment earlier on killing is out of court.  If she wants the law’s prohibitions against adultery, but not its punishments, then she is unjustifiably arbitrary.  She is picking just half of the package deal and tossing the rest blithely away.  If she wishes adultery not to be a crime, then her designation of it as a crime is false.
         So also is her application of this passage to the allegedly necessary sinlessness of critics and judges.  Paul, you’ll recall, called himself “the chief of sinners”(1 Tim. 1:15).  Yet, despite his self-confessed colossal evil, he often rebuked those who sinned, both Christians and non-Christians.  In so doing, Paul was not transgressing the teachings of Jesus, which, in this case, were directed by Jesus at certain very specific accusers, those who brought this woman to Him.  Do not make the mistake of thinking that every statement of Jesus is meant to be applied literally or to all times and all places.  Sometimes they are; sometimes they are not.  Sometimes Jesus is painfully specific; sometimes He is just as painfully universal.  One way to tell which is which is to see how the apostles themselves understood Christ and applied His teaching.  If your view makes the apostles wrong -- and Riley’s does just that with every apostle because every apostle was a sinner and every apostle was a rebuker as well -- then you have misunderstood Christ’s intention.  You and I are not Christ-chosen and Christ-trained apostles.  They were.  If your view makes them out to be wrong, then likely you are wrong yourself instead.
         The judging here condemned is not to be confused with discernment, with assessing the spiritual condition of someone so that you might better deal with them in a prudent, honest, and more effective manner.  You deal with others best by assessing as carefully as possible whether or not they are converts and whether or not they are converts in rebellion to God and to the fellowship of believers.  If they are unconverted, you must deal with them in one way:  “This is a non-Christian person.  I must share with them the gospel of Christ.”  If they are converts, you deal with them in another way: “This is a fellow believer, but one who has rebelled against God and has injured the church.  I will not evangelize this person; I will counsel repentance, including repair of life and fellowship.”   To discern these different conditions and to deal with others on that basis is not to judge and is not here precluded.  For example, to advise a Christian against homosexual activity is not to judge, but to discern and to counsel wisely.  To judge is to pass final and ultimate judgment upon them, to condemn them to Hell.  Condemning them to Hell, not discerning their actual spiritual condition, is what is here prohibited.
         Even if “to judge” meant here what Riley wrongly thinks it does, then she would need to spend a great deal of time correcting her liberal colleagues, who are quick to “judge” their conservative counterparts as greedy, selfish, racist, and homophobic.  But then again she could not do so, because to do so would be to “judge.”  
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal. 

“Justice: Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. [Matthew 5:6] Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy [Matthew 5:7] But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. [Matthew 6:15]”
         Again, Riley mis-designates the verses she quotes.  To seek after righteousness and to find it is not a matter of justice (whether of the individual or the political variety), as she says it is.  It is a matter of mercy and grace.  To be merciful is to be what Jesus requires of His disciples.  Mercy invites mercy.  This text has nothing to do with individual justice, or with government, or with how governments ought to punish crime.  It is not really about justice at all, even though Riley so designates it.  It is about mercy, though not government mercy.
         Indeed, one must fear the government that does not punish evil, but that merely exercises “mercy.”  Mercy is not the divinely designated function of government, as Paul indicates in Romans 13:1ff.   This text has nothing at all to do with being a liberal, unless liberalism means that the state must be merciful to criminals rather than to be just.  As a nation, we have, and ought to have, a system of justice, not mercy.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.

“Corporate Greed and the Religion of Wealth: In the temple courts [Jesus] found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and other sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. [John 2:14 & 15.] Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. [Luke 12.15.] Truly, I say unto you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. [Matthew 19:23] You cannot serve both God and Money. [Matthew 6:24.]”
         Riley unjustifiably identifies what Jesus opposed here as “corporate greed,” which is both grossly false and naively anachronistic.  Her designation says more about her than about what is happening in this text.  Jesus is not fighting “corporate greed,” here, or even fighting greed at all.  He is fighting against profaning the Temple because He has within Him a burning love for God’s house (John 2:17).  Greed, much less “corporate greed,” is not in view.
         Further, Riley seems not to notice the way in which this passage militates against her notion of peacemaking mentioned above.  In response to the profanation of the Temple (and not to “corporate greed”), Jesus sat down and deliberately wound together a whip with His own hands. With this whip He violently cleared out the Temple, clearing it both of men and of beasts.  In so doing, He was not making peace, and certainly not in the Riley style.  Nor was He being merciful, which Riley also lionizes above; nor did He decide not to resist evil.  He resisted it vigorously.  If Riley reads these texts correctly, Jesus breaks his own rules because He does not do with them what Riley thinks ought to be done.  Either that or Riley misreads them.  Unless Riley thinks that Jesus does not practice what He preaches, then she needs to rethink from the bottom up what she says about Jesus’ words and the way she interprets them.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.
              
“Paying Taxes & Separation of Church & State: Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. [Matthew 22:21]”
         First, the separation of church and state is not in view when Jesus says to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.  Please recall that neither the ancient Romans nor the ancient Jews believed any such thing.  To the Romans, Caesar was a god, and he required religious sacrifices from his subjects precisely because he was a god.  To the ancient Romans, there was nothing like the modern American notion of the separation of church and state to which Riley alludes.  The same holds for the ancient Jews, including Jesus.  To the ancient Jews, Israel was a theocracy, one over which Yahweh was to be king and in which His laws were to reign supreme.  To the Jews, the notion of the separation of church and state was unthinkable, just as it was to Jesus, a Jew.  For Riley to classify this text as “the separation of church and state” is simply to do great violence to the text itself and to impose upon it alien categories and meanings.
         Second, in light of the fact that the entire earth and all that is in it belongs to God, Riley needs to think more carefully about what Jesus means when He says to give to Caesar, a fake god, and to God what rightly belongs to each.  If she asks herself what is God’s, and answers it correctly, and then if she asks herself what is left, and answers it correctly, then she will know better what is Caesar’s, what is not, and what Jesus means.  Even Rome’s political power itself, and the putting to death of its citizens and inhabitants, including Jesus, belongs to God, not ultimately to Caesar (John 19:11).
         Third, paying taxes is not evil.  No sensible citizen thinks it is or that it God prohibits it.  But paying unjust taxes, or paying taxes for unjust purposes, such as slaughtering the young by abortion, is evil, and enormously so.  When she endorses paying taxes here, the folks Riley seems to have in mind, the rich conservatives, pay far more taxes than anyone else in the nation.  Nearly half of Americans pay no income tax at all.  If paying taxes is required by this text -- and the way she reads the command to give to Caesar what is his seems to demand it -- then Riley needs to address the non-paying 50% who pay no income tax at all, not the ones who do all the paying, the ones she seems to have in mind.  And by what twisted logic are we to assume that our money, the money we for which we ourselves sacrificed and labored, belongs to Caesar?  If I am to give him what is actually his, then how does he have claim over my earnings and my income, as if it were his?  Caesar didn’t make it.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.

“Community: Love your neighbor as yourself. .[Matthew 22:39] So in everything, do to others as you would have them do to you.[Matthew 7:12.] If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. [Matthew 19:21]”
         Riley seems to think that conservatives do not love, and do not do to others what they want done to them, as if liberals were practicing this and conservatives were not.  On this point, Riley is flatly wrong.  Conservatives are better at it than all others, period.  (Please read that sentence again, and keep reading it again until it sinks in.)  If Riley thinks that conservatives are not merciful or generous, then she simply isn’t paying attention.  I can do no more to enlighten her on this point than to recommend that she read Brooks and Wilson’s book, Who Really Cares, which demonstrates decisively that the religious and the conservatives in America -- not the liberals -- give the most both to the poor and to secular charities, not just religious ones.  In fact, they are the most generous such group in the history of the world, yet Riley feels compelled to lecture them, not her stingy liberal cohorts, on this point.
         When Jesus tells the rich young man in Matt. 19: 21 to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, Jesus is giving specific directions to one man, based upon that man’s personal spiritual defects and deficiencies, identifying for that man what he ought to do.  Jesus is not addressing Himself to every person everywhere and at all times.  Nothing is wrong with being wealthy.  Abraham was very wealthy.  David the king was very wealthy, as was his son Solomon.  Joseph of Arimathea was wealthy.  The problem is not having wealth but in wealth having you.  Jesus was pointing out this man’s great moral failing, which was not this wealth but his self-righteousness and selfishness.  He actually told Jesus that he had kept all the commandments (v. 20), which was an impossibility and a lie of self-delusion.  In order to point out the young man’s self-righteous failings, failings he did not recognize in himself, Jesus told him to give up his wealth.   But that commandment was too hard for the young man.  He couldn’t do it.  So he went away sad (v. 22).  From this incident the disciples drew the wrong conclusion.  They wondered:  If the wealthy, with all their resources, can’t succeed, then who can (v. 25)?  Jesus corrects them:  What that rich young man could not do, God could.  God could give him what he and his alleged law keeping and his wealth never could.  God could heal his shortcomings.  Grace makes it possible (v. 26), not human effort or human possession.  The point Jesus makes here about this incident is not about wealth but about God’s grace, a lesson He makes explicit to the disciples, but which liberals like Riley overlook.
         Put differently, Jesus is not a fool.  He does not think that the best way to help the poor is to become poor yourself.  That’s not what He is advising.  To do so would be to place an even greater demand on others, who have more than enough poor to care for already.  To create more poor is not how you help the poor.  Indeed, to Jesus, the poverty issue has no solution, not in this life:  “The poor you will always have with you,” He says (Matt. 26:11).  By saying so, He was not suggesting that more wealthy people become poor.
         Furthermore, Jesus does not command us to help the poor by means of government-sponsored redistributionism -- not once, not ever.  He talks about the good Samaritan in this regard, not the good bureaucrat or the good government giveaway.  These obligations to the poor are your own, and you must not pawn them off onto government, as if government were a suitable agency of Christian love, or as if the obligations of Christian love could be hired out to political or bureaucratic surrogates.  No; you must do it.  You must get out into the trenches of poverty and assist real persons in real ways, and not assign this obligation over to government, as if your tax return were your tithe.

         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.      

“Equality & Social Programs: But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. [Luke 14:13 &14.]”
         As she has done so frequently, Riley mislabels the texts she quotes.  Nothing here is about “equality and social programs.”  That is not what Jesus mentions; that is not what He has in mind, even if Riley does.  Inviting others to your feast is not a matter of “equality” or of “social programs,” but of charity and generosity.  Equality is not mentioned or alluded to anywhere in the text.  Neither are social programs.  We are exhorted here to aid others because they are needy, not because they and we are equal.  Riley herself smuggled in the notion of equality.  Jesus doesn’t mention it at all.  The same goes for social programs, which are utterly absent from the text.
         As for equality and income redistribution, one wonders what Riley would make of Jesus’ instruction to take from the poor and give to the rich (Matt. 25: 28).
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.
  
“Public Prayer & Displays of Faith: And when thou pray, thou shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou pray, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret… [Matthew 6:6 & 7]”
         Riley seems to think that here Jesus is prohibiting religion and religious practice in public.  He is not.  He is prohibiting the sort of self-aggrandizing showboating to which the Pharisees and others were prone.  If Jesus were doing what Riley seems to think, then He would fall far short of His own teaching, and so would His disciples.  He Himself prayed and preached in public multiple times, even at His crucifixion, where He uttered multiple public prayers.  The disciples prayed and preached in public many times as well, beginning at Pentecost.  Indeed, the entire Jewish tradition to which Jesus and His disciples adhered required praying and other religious practices in public year round.
         Jesus is not renouncing public displays of faith and religion.  He is saying that if you do these things to get recognition from people, you have no reward left to you.  For such persons, it is far better to go off in secret, where no one but God sees.  Someone like Jesus, Who came to fulfill the law, and not to ignore it, or gainsay it, or set it aside, Someone Who belonged to a religion of public prayers and public displays, was not denouncing His own religion or His Father, Who gave these commands to be followed publicly.  He is denouncing the self-centered display that brings glory to you as pious and not glory to God as merciful and powerful.
         Nor is Jesus saying that governments ought to be secular and that government ought not to declare public days of prayer, of remembrance, or of thanksgiving.  Much less is He banning the public mention or invocation of God, for which so many modern liberals seem to yearn.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal. 

“Strict Enforcement of Religious Laws: If any of you has a son or a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? [Matthew 12:11] The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. [Mark 2:27.]”
         Jesus here is not forbidding, or even criticizing, Sabbath observance.  He observed it all His life.  Rather, He is restoring the Sabbath to its proper use, which is for human benefit.  The main benefit involved in the Sabbath is rest.  The Sabbath is the day of rest, and is based upon God’s own practice in Genesis after creation was complete.  Human rest and recuperation, which is the purpose of the Sabbath for us, are very important.  Our laws ought to provide for them.  But, sometimes situations emerge or needs arise that are more important than rest, things like the well being of one’s family or property, which Jesus specifically mentions.  In such instances, the Sabbath rest can be suspended.  But that suspension is the exception, not the rule.  For liberals to take this passage to mean that Jesus opposes public Sabbath laws is simply and fully false.
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.
    
“Individuality & Personal Spiritual Experience: Ye are the light of the world. [Matthew 5:14]”
         That we are the light of world is true.  But it is not a liberal statement.  It means that we have an obligation to let our light shine, something liberals, like Riley above, seem to oppose because they think that we ought not to do such things in public, as if Jesus commanded us to put our light under a bushel and not out in the open (Matt. 5: 15).
         By letting our light shine, we are working to “bring every thought captive to Christ,” as Paul admonished us (2 Cor. 10: 5).  We do so because Christ is Lord.  Indeed, He is Lord of all things, not just some.  If Christ is Lord of all things, then nothing -- nothing -- is properly secular.  If nothing is properly secular, then anything pursued in a secular fashion is at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  Yet, liberals like Riley want to make government secular, including public schools and even the Pledge of Allegiance.  Christ is Lord of all things. He is Lord of the marketplace, the academy, the laboratory, the arena, and the public square.  It is in those places, places that are properly His, even if the world and the liberals do not know it, that we are to be the light of the world.  They need light in a dark place, and those places all are now deeply lost in darkness.  We Christian conservatives intend to let the light shine because we know that government without God is your worst nightmare, not your dream come true.  It seems not to strike Riley as odd, foolish, or undesirable that convicts can read the Bible in prison but that students cannot read the Bible in school.  If students were permitted to do so, we might have fewer convicts. 
         Nothing Jesus says here makes Him a liberal.

 “Follow the Truth.....wherever it leads you!?”
         Indeed.