Fw: (no subject)

From: "Jan de Koning" <jan@dekoning.ca>

> At 02:18 PM 01/07/2004 -0400, wallyshoes wrote:
> >John W Burgeson wrote:
> >
> >snip
> >
> > >
> > > "2.) There are indeed financial benefits to being married. Some of
> >them I
> > > dislike -- like all the social security benefits etc. We :libertarians
> >
> > > would
> > > be happier if these social programs never came into existence. The
> >world
> > > worked fine before them. There are numerous people trying to stick
> >their
> > > hands in the taxpayers pockets. Now there will be more."
> > >
> > > Yeah. The world worked fine. For those who had wealth. For those left
> >on
> > > the short end of the stick, too bad.
> > >
> > > "Let them eat cake," said Marie. She got what she deserved.
> >
> >Typical burgy cynicism.
> >
> >I was dirt poor as a kid. & the system worked fine without the
> >government.
> >Charities did what needed to be done. If you were sick, you got heath
> >care
> >(doctor or hospital) for little or for zero $. If you were an orphan,
> >there
> >were homes for you and you had the benefits that most medium income
> >people
> >did. I knew orphans and later worked for one. If you were old and
> >without a
> >support system, charities took care of you.
> >
> >It is only you political liberals who think that the government is the
> >solution to all our social problems.
>
> Not only the liberals, so say the conservatives. But read the Bible on
> poverty, and how we should react: Ezekiel 16: 49 ff. where God tells us
> how to deal with poverty. In the present circumstances voluntary giving
is
> not enough, as a matter of fact, I read that personal giving is down to
> about 2% of income on average. The Lord tells us in Ezekiel how He will
> deal with those who do not want to deal with the issue of poverty.
>
> Jan de Koning

In one of his 1984 ASA Annual Meeting keynote addresses, Herbert Schlossberg
identified 3 causes for poverty:

1. misfortune
2. injustice
3. laziness, for lack of a better single word.

It seems to me that from scripture several facts emerge:

1. The law of God has amazingly few laws compared to the over 1.5 million
laws on the books in the U.S. alone. (Probably only a few less in Canada,
Jan?)

2. When God's laws deal with the poor, they mainly attack injustice
(oppression of the poor by the power elite) and also require some generosity
for the unfortunate, such as not harvesting all the crops in one's field.

In my study of the world-system it is clearly the case that a multitude of
laws destroys law itself, for inconsistencies develop among them,
destablizing the coherence of the corpus of law as a whole. So I find the
scriptures to be libertarian in spirit, in the sense of keeping laws simple
and few.

Secondly, those at the top oppressing those at the bottom of society is a
dominant theme running throughout history, leading to (I would venture) most
of the injustice that has occurred. God's laws mitigate, if not prevent,
this System of evil. Even one of God's laws that none of his people like
(including ancient Israel, it appears), the Jubilee law, is amazing in its
ability to reset this concentration of power at the top that comes about
over time due to unequal abilities of human beings. (The Jubilee law also
seems to track the Condratieff cycle, for you economics fans.) Jubilee law
upsets the Monopoly end-game and preserves society by occasional resets,
which economic study suggests is needed every 50 to 60 years.

So am I a liberal or a conservative? The terms are essentially meaningless.

Dennis Feucht
Received on Wed Jun 2 14:17:22 2004