Making Things Right

False Messiahs

We are not sure if you have noticed, but the world is slightly short of being a perfect place.  People die, for one thing.  They get ill and suffer and expire.  Moreover, accidents happen.  On other occasions, human beings become angry and in a fit of rage they attack and murder other human beings.  Worse still, some coldly and systematically plot the demise of neighbours. 

You get the point.  We could go on for a long extended description of all the things which are wrong with the world.  In fact, the world would not contain all the books that would need to be written to describe exhaustively every aspect and scintilla of imperfection on this terrestrial ball.  The Christian calls this imperfect state of the world fallen.  The world is filled with evil (natural and unnatural).  Moreover, we–human beings–are responsible for the world’s fallen state.  The world was originally created to be without sin, evil, or wrong.  We humans (not Nature, not the animal kingdom, not the solar system) brought all this evil and imperfection to this planet.  In a fit of galactic stupidity we decided to rebel against our Creator and replace Him with ourselves as gods.

The fallen condition in which we live necessarily means that humanity spends a great deal of time and effort combating evil and protecting itself from the worst excesses of wrong.
  In this struggle fallen man finds himself searching for saviours of one kind or another.  A saviour is someone or something which will solve our problems and roll back (or at least contain) the dangers on every hand. 

For some, their saviour is wealth or enough money to build a moat defending them from harm or attack.  Wealth can protect from hunger, disease, crime–a whole host of impending threats.  For others, their saviour is an abstract facility, such as the facility of human reason.  If only we could all ratiocinate better, the world would become progressively more perfect, less fallen.  (This particular option is a thin disguise for the actual case: everything would be solved if other people would agree with me.)

Still others place their faith in a particular ideology.  The Greens, for example, believe that perfection would be achieved on every level if only there were less human beings and they did less.  The Greens believe that fewer, more quietistic human beings would solve all the world’s problems.  Human-less Nature is the saviour, humanity is the great threat and evil.  At root, the Greens detest the human race. 

But for the vast majority of people in the West, their saviour is the State.  Government, with its rules, regulations, conventions, education systems, taxing powers has the potential to be the saviour of mankind.  Any imperfection encountered can be vanquished with more state controls and rules.  This leads to a widespread faith in the Plan.  Government rules and regulations will solve all evils: actual and potential.  Behold, O man, your god.  Humankind will save itself through the government’s all encompassing Five Year Plan. 

Except it won’t, of course.  The gummint has so far failed to stop people getting ill.  Last time we checked, people still die.  They lose their tempers.  They fight and quarrel.  They get drunk even when alcohol is verboten.   In fact, it would appear that every marginal increase in state rules and regulations actually provokes unintended consequences that make the world more fallen than it was before some politicians and their cheering crowds got some bright ideas. 

So strong is the faith in government that people get positively angry if someone suggests to them that the state is incompetent–necessarily incompetent–and that it will only make things worse.  The outpouring of anger at such a seditious, blasphemous idea exposes the religious foundations of statism in bright relief. 

Here is just one example of the myriad failures of the government as our god.  Some important folk decided in their wisdom that one death on the roads was one too many.  Zero tolerance for road deaths.  How will this be achieved?  By the Plan.  The bureaucratic plan will comprehensively rule and regulate road behaviour so that all road deaths will be prevented in the future as we enter a more perfect world. 

First come the rules–constantly modified and tinkered with–to remove the imperfections of fallen human behaviour.  Then comes the hectoring.  This is followed by policing the rules: stops, breath tests, fines, suspensions, cancellation of drivers’ licenses, seizing of vehicles–we would need several long paragraphs to itemise all the compliance and policing powers and actions to ensure rule-compliance.  The  more zealous and comprehensive it becomes, the more risks and potential accidents there are.

How does that work?  Rodney Hide explains a present reality with which we are now all familiar:

Overtaking on the road safely and within the law is now all but impossible.

The speed limit on the open road is 100km/h. The police are applying zero tolerance. You can now be ticketed at 101km/h. The speed limit for heavy vehicles and cars pulling caravans, boats or trailers is 90km/h.

Do the maths. In good driving conditions we are advised to apply the “two-second rule”. At 90km/h that’s 50m. So you pull out 50m behind a truck and trailer, the truck and trailer is 20m long and you pull in once safely 50m past. You have to make 120m to pass safely.  If the truck is doing 90km/h and you stick to 100km/h it takes 43 seconds to gain that 120m.

At 100km/h you will have travelled 1.2km. You must allow for a car coming towards you at 100km/h. To pass safely you need 2.4km of clear road.  That doesn’t happen often.

So you wait for a passing lane. The traffic behind the truck and trailer builds up. Finally you get to a passing lane. The front cars take off – at 100km/h. I drove Auckland to Queenstown these holidays and typically only the first two cars would make it past.  I would then watch in horror as a couple of frustrated drivers would try to pass the line of cars and the truck and trailer without the benefit of a passing lane or a clear road. It was frightening. And predictable.

The rules and regulations increase risks and cause more accidents.  Most police officers are smarter than the politicians, though, which is a saving grace.  They use discretion–that is, until some mid-level police bureaucrat demands proof of compliance with the plan–and then it all turns to custard. 

The solutions lie in the government being retired as the omni-competent saviour of us all.  But the world will still be fallen.  Men will still manufacture saviours of all shapes and stripes.  Their solutions will only serve to exacerbate our fallen state.  Their saviours will only make the world more imperfect. 

There is only one amongst the human race who alone is qualified to be our Saviour.  He alone can deal with our fallen condition at its root.  All the rest only add to the curse.

Risible–But They Still Know Best

Zero Risk and Fourteen Tonnes of Trout

And now, a story which will resonate with all readers from around the world who have experienced the scintillating skills of bureaucrats at the top of their game.  

New Zealand is one of the last countries in the world to deploy the poison 1080 in an effort to control noxious pests (possums, stoats, weasels, rats–and so forth).  Whenever it is deployed in a vast industrial scale there are worries about it getting into the food chain.

At such times, not infrequently, the local bureaucrats and government functionaries get caught like the hapless possum in car headlights.  Then they proceed to talk out of both sides of their mouths so volubly that one suspects they have two, even three, tongues.  Here is the latest show from the travelling circus, coming to a neighbourhood near you:

The Department of Conservation [“DoC”] is warning anglers not to eat trout in areas where 1080 poison has been dropped – a reversal of its position seven months ago.  The caution comes just days before the trout fishing season opens on October 1. [NZ Herald]

So, what confronts us ordinary rubes here is a position reversal–a well known move favoured by bureaucrats under pressure.  What’s the problem?
  Well, imagine a mouse terminated by eating aerial dropped 1080 poison pellets.  Imagine, further, that said mouse got washed into a waterway, and was eaten by a hungry trout.  At that point, the flesh of the trout would contain levels of the 1080 poison that were beyond tolerable limits as defined by the NZ Food Safety Authority.

Now comes the risible double tongued bureaucratic-speak:

Yesterday, DoC advised anglers to take a “zero risk” approach and not eat fish from catchments where 1080 had been dropped.

Zero risk, eh.  Now we are approaching sacred mountain territory.  The gummint wants a society, apparently, in which there is zero risk. Let’s apply that to crossing the street, shall we?  Zero risk would be never to cross the street. Ever. Yup, that’s zero risk all right.

But the department said the risk to human health was extremely low.  “Researchers calculated that at these levels, an 80kg adult would need to eat more than 14 tonnes of trout flesh in one serving to have a 50 per cent chance of receiving a fatal dose.” [Emphasis, ours.]

Fourteen tonnes of trout in one serving to have half a chance of dying from 1080.  Don’t worry, mate.  The belly would have exploded long before 1080 poisoning could have taken hold.

Behold, the slavering forked tongue of the bureaucrat-possum in the headlights.  No problem eating a trout which has, in turn, eaten a poisoned mouse.  But, zero risk says there may, possibly, just be a teensie weensie problem–so don’t eat the trout.  But, the hapless bureaucratic possum hastens to add, in order for there to be a problem, you would need to eat 14 tonnes of trout flesh at one sitting–all fourteen tonnes, presumably, infected with 1080 poisoning. So, no problem at all.  But there might be.  But not really.  Don’t eat trout.  Best advice.  Ever. 

Bryce Johnson of Fish and Game said he thought DoC had played down the issue in its statement.  “They commissioned the research. If they’re saying take a zero-risk approach, and in the next breath saying you’ve got to eat 14 tonnes of trout flesh, it makes a mockery of their own advice.”

You don’t say.  Either way, we suspect the bureaucrats are not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  They are engaged in a butt covering exercise.  Risk-reduction requires us to be intensely sceptical in such cases.  Zero-risk would mean never listening to them.  Ever.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow (About Banal Facilitators of Evil)

The Root of the Disease

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 8, 2014

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt writes this:

“Without Jewish help in administrative and police work — the final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police — there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower” (p. 117).

She goes on to quote someone who observed that it was scarcely possible for a few thousand people, most of whom worked in offices, to liquidate many hundreds of thousands of other people without the cooperation of the victims. Moreover, that cooperation frequently consisted of participation in the bureaucratic processing. Before being gassed in the camps, they had to stand in line and fill out numerous forms.

The subtitle of Arendt’s book is telling: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Or, to look at the threat another way, we also have to remember the banality of bureaucracy. At root it is the same banality.

Here is Lewis in the Preface of Screwtape:

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

Testing, Testing, Testing . . .

The Show Never Starts

When civil government assumes itself as demi-god powers to rule over families and their children, bad things happen.  When civil government forgets the most fundamental and essential duty of government is self-govenment, which in the case of overreaching state authority means restricting its own powers and overreaches, saying no to itself and its besetting lust for command and control, bad consequences necessarily follow. 

When civil government determines for itself that it has a duty and responsibility to teach children, subverting or replacing parents and families, illiteracy, innumeracy, and educational failure is the inevitable outcome.  One of the causes is that bureaucrats cannot stop being bureaucratic.  Instead of teaching, the bureaucratic mind requires measuring teaching, testing teaching, weighing teaching, and assessing teaching.  It’s what bureaucrats do.  The bigger the country, the bigger the government, the worse the educational outcomes.  Pity the poor US kids in government schools.

Michelle Malkin explains one consequence of government schooling:  a tyranny of testing.

Have you had enough of the testing tyranny? Join the club. To be clear: I’m not against all standardized academic tests. My kids excel on tests. The problem is that there are too damned many of these top-down assessments, measuring who knows what, using our children as guinea pigs and cash cows.

College-bound students in Orange County, Fla., for example, now take a total of 234 standardized diagnostic, benchmark and achievement tests from kindergarten through 12th grade. Reading instructor Brian Trutschel calculated that a typical 10th-grade English class will be disrupted 65 out of 180 school days this year alone for mandatory tests required by the state and district. “It’s a huge detriment to instruction,” he told the Orlando Sentinel last month. The library at one Florida middle school is closed for a full three months out of the 10-month school year for computerized assessments.

“It’s horrible, because all we do is test,” Nancy Pace, the school’s testing coordinator, told the newspaper. “There’s something every month.” My Colorado 8th-grader has been tied up all week on her TCAPs (Transitional Colorado Assessment Program), which used to be called CSAPs (Colorado Student Assessment Program), which will soon be replaced by something else.

One is reminded of a fundamental credo of ungoverned civil government: if it moves, tax it; if it moves faster, tax it more; if it stops moving, subsidise it.  Applied to state education testing supplants taxing: if a school exists, test it; if it grows, test it more comprehensively; if it looks like closing down, help it fill in its tests.  No wonder pupils graduate severely truncated in their ability to read, write and compute.   

Eastern Bloc Charter Schools

Unfavourable Portents

Will Partnership (charter) Schools ever get off the ground in New Zealand?  The bones and entrails are not favourable. 

The government education system in New Zealand retains a strong monopoly on all things educational in Years One to Thirteen schooling.  Independent education providers struggle because their parent constituency has to pay twice for their children to attend an independent school, free from government interference and control.

Parents pay for everyone else’s education via their taxes for the state education monolith; then they must pay directly for their own children to attend schools where the government system does not ram its dictums and controls into the school via countless rules, regulations, pettifogging supervision, and mandatory reports.  Meanwhile the government education system continues to graduate far too many students who can neither read nor write after thirteen years in the loving embrace of government schooling.  The upshot–more rules, regulations, and pettifogging supervision.  Result: no change.

The potential introduction of charter schools offered a glimmer of hope.  But the further things have gone, the less likely this will be the case.
  In the first place, there is little political will or support for the initiative.  The reform was the brainchild of the ACT political party; it received support for the initiative by National as a condition of ACT entering into coalition with National to enable it to have a majority in the Parliament.  ACT has one MP.  His particular record is not great.  One gets the strong impression that as far as the National Party is concerned, charter schools are a necessary irritant to maintain control of the Parliament.  There is no real commitment to the reform within government ranks. 

Secondly, the monolithic government education system–controlled by educrats, bureaucrats, and teacher unions–has brayed its opposition and resistance to charter schools at every turn, as expected.  The government has repeatedly demonstrated its naivety with respect to these vested interests of its own making.  It has foolishly sought to “engage” the government school sector and its attendant vested interests in a vain attempt to get them onside.  It persistently underestimates the implacability and strength of the opposition.  It demonstrates it does not understand the bureaucratic mind arrayed against it.  

We heard the other day about a principal who was delivering a guest lecture at one of Auckland’s government teacher training academies.  On the one hand he was lauding the esteemed flexibility of the current education syllabus, but at the same time was slamming the charter schools initiative.  Flexibility obviously has its limits. This is the classic prejudice of the bureaucratic mind: freedom for me (and us) but prohibitions and restrictions upon everyone else.  These ignorant prejudices are so ingrained in the government education system that few are now conscious of them.  Group speak dominates.  Successive government have simply failed to understand the visceral hatred of anyone who would change the system, except those changes which reinforce the power and control of the current educrats, unionists, and Ministry of Education operatives. 

Thirdly, charter schools are now looking like they will be a small pilot scheme which will run for a few years, carped at incessantly by monopoly establishment interests, then shut down as a failure.  It would appear that there will be around no more than four or five charter schools in the pilot.  This reinforces the impression that there is little enthusiasm in government ranks for the initiative. 

Fourthly, we have reviewed the draft contractual terms into which charter schools will be bound.  Granted, each Partnership School will have its own specific terms and conditions.  Precisely what these are will only be discovered after negotiations have been completed.  But the mandatory reporting requirements to the Ministry of Education are so frequent (quarterly), plus a whole bunch of extra reporting at the whim of government functionaries, that it appears that the Ministry is doing what educrats and government functionaries always lust after–uniformity, compliance, and control.  This would suggest that in New Zealand Partnership Schools will be government schools in drag–leading to the inevitable conclusion that Partnership Schools should be quickly placed in the “Why Bother” category. 

For example, it appears Partnership Schools will be subject to a dual inspection regime: the normal ERO government inspectorate regime will apply, but the Ministry will apply a separate inspection, audit, and review regime as well.  Double the reporting and regulatory burden faced by the government schools. 

One of the prevailing criticisms of teachers in the government school system is that increasingly they get less and less classroom time whilst more and more reporting, responding, form-filling duties are imposed upon them every year.  Meeting ever burgeoning compliance obligations means that teachers are less and less teachers, and more and more mere bureaucrats and government functionaries.  It appears that the Ministry of Education is not just going to want the same levels of destructive interference in Partnership School operations, but more! 

With such a controlling mindset the Ministry of Education has demonstrated once again that it cannot deny itself.  There is ever possible only one size that must fit all.  There is only one kind of education and it is government education. 

Someone will doubtless object that since the government is paying for tuition in Partnership Schools it has a right to monitor compliance with government rules and regulations.  But that mindset is the very point at issue.  If government is going bureaucratically to control all operations of Partnership Schools, why bother? If government compliance makes for successful schools, why is the government school system becoming expert in graduating illiterates and innumerates? Why would you keep foxes out of hen houses?  If governments succeed only to incompetence in every other area of human endeavour, why put schools in a distinct category? 

The best option by far would be for parents to be allowed to enrol their children in any independent school of their choice and for the government to issue a voucher for payment of school fees up to the level of per capital funding for a government school pupil.  This would allow at least some competition in what is currently a monolithic oppressive and increasingly dysfunctional government education system.  As far as education goes, New Zealand now operates like an Eastern Bloc communist country back in the sixties and seventies.  It is so controlling and repressive that it is like living in a time warp. 

It is possible that our fears will prove unfounded.  It is possible that when the actual contracts for respective Partnership Schools are negotiated with the Ministry there will be plenty of diversity and difference with the establishment.  We will see.  Anyone holding their breath?

The New Normal

Wonderland Really Exists

Alice’s Wonderland was a strange place.  Reality had vanished.  When government overreach in an attempt to rule, regulate, and create out of nothing, reality skips out of town.  Wonderland takes its place.  If America truly is an exceptional nation, its “exceptionalism” may lie in its tolerating some of the most stupid follies of an overreaching, arrogant government.

The EPA once again raises its biofuels standards — for biofuels that still do not exist 

Hot Air 
Posted at 7:41 pm on January 31, 2013
Erika Johnsen

The Environmental Protection Agency’s brazen contempt for free-market economics evidently knows no bounds.

Less than a week ago, the Environmental Protection Agency received a slap on the wrist from a federal appeals court that ruled that the EPA may not force oil companies to pay for an credits for failing to comply with a rule mandating that they incorporate a certain amount of cellulosic biofuels into their product. The EPA estimated that the industry would produce and make available for purchase 8.7 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels in 2012, but the industry only actually produced less than 21,000 gallons — and the court thankfully decided that the EPA could not inflict regulatory punishments based on their wildly enthusiastic and fanciful projections.

You know, government projections? Like how the Obama administration also projected that we’d have positive fourth-quarter economic growth and that ObamaCare would reduce health care costs? How’d that work out for us?

EPA don’t care, because this time — no really, guys, this time — they know what they’re doing.

EPA raised how much cellulosic biofuel — those made from non-edible feedstock — it expected refiners to blend this year as part of the renewable fuel standard.
EPA set the mark at 14 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel, up from about 8.65 million gallons last year. …
“U.S. EPA worked hard to ensure that the cellulosic biofuels volume standard for 2013 would be tied directly to the commercial production of cellulosic biofuels expected to come online this year,” Brooke Coleman, executive director with the Advanced Ethanol Council, said in a Thursday statement. …
“The court recognized the absurdity of fining companies for failing to use a nonexistent biofuel. But EPA wants to nearly double the mandate for the fuel in 2013. This stealth tax on gasoline might be the most egregious example of bad public policy, and consumers could be left to pay the price. EPA needs a serious reality check,” API Downstream Group Director Bob Greco said in a Thursday statement.

In any rational sphere of time and space, the EPA would have lost its authority to mandate private businesses to comply with their fanciful notions of biofuels compliance, especially seeing as how even real greenies say that many biofuels have a net negative effect on the environment. What excuse do they have for making these egregious and expensive policies other than helping out their buddies, Big Ethanol?

The EPA is out of control, and they don’t particularly care who knows it.

The EPA is in its own Wonderland.  

The Omniscient Bureaucratic Plan

Government As Papa

We are all familiar with the inevitable stupidity, wastefulness, inanity and bizarre outcomes when life is ordered by government bureaus, laying down regulation upon regulation.

God’s created world is fearfully and wonderfully complex.  Nuclear physicists are only now beginning to realise just how complex.  Human beings, unique as the image bearers of God Himself upon the planet, are likewise subtle, complex, variegated, diverse, and complex.  Consequently, a bureaucratic plan setting out to order human actions is doomed before it starts.  Its outcomes and results are inevitably bizarre and would be laughable if they were not also sinister.

Here is just one example:

KAYSVILLE — Davis High School has been fined $15,000 after they were caught selling soda pop during lunch hour, which is a violation of federal law.  The federally mandated law prohibits the sale of carbonated beverages after lunch is served. The program is an effort to help fight childhood obesity and to have young students make better food choices.

The mandate allows for carbonated beverages to be sold before lunch, but restricts students from buying lunch, then purchasing carbonated drinks afterward.  “Before lunch you can come and buy a carbonated beverage. You can take it into the cafeteria and eat your lunch, but you can’t first go buy school lunch then come out in the hallway and buy a drink,” said Davis High Principal Dee Burton.  Principal Burton said he does not understand the law with rules that seem to be contradictory.

“We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice. We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff,” said Burton. The school is bound to obey the law, however, if they want the $15,000 the federal government gives to subsidize their school lunch program. 

Burton said the money they will use to pay the fine was typically used to help pay for their music and arts department among other school activities.  Burton said his pop machines will continue to stay completely unplugged until they can figure out how to get them all into a room with a door that can be shut and locked during the lunch hour.

The ultimate security for the average Westerner is the Bureaucratic Plan.  Most would read the story above and respond by calling for a better Plan.  Revise the Plan! would be their reflexive, conditioned demand.

Those more astute and aware of idolatry’s invidious insinuations into the heart would reject the very concept of the Plan itself.   It has replaced a belief in the providence of God.  Any grand aspiration is too risky unless it be regulated by the Plan.  Whereas in other cultures risks are willingly accepted and exploited in an attempt to move forward, in the West there is a dread of unforeseen or negative consequences.  A Bureaucratic Plan must be set up to mitigate risks and bad outcomes from the beginning. “Do I dare?” asked Prufrock.  Not without government rules and regulations holding our hands.

But creation itself is far, far too complex to be so rationalistically structured, micro-managed, and paternalistically ordered.  Human action, much more so, due to human creativity, inventiveness, coupled with human perversions.  The more comprehensive the Bureaucratic Plan, the greater the damage, folly, and harm done.  The spheres of human action lawfully subject to state administration must be severely restricted–lest we suffer the consequences.  The folly and tyranny of the Bureaucratic Plan will be our inevitable lot.

Cede to the government the power, for example, to provide health and wellbeing and the inevitable Plan to deliver the false promise will end up overreaching, seeking to control every human action.  All actions could “legitimately”  be coded healthy or not; all could be regulated as approved or not. 

Should one breathe upon another?  Do we dare, or do we not?  What does the Plan say?  Should we drink soda before lunch or after?  What does the Plan say?  The United State used to profess that it was in God they trusted.  Now the trust of that people lies is in the endless Bureaucratic Plan.  Layers upon layers of rules and regulations, the unending Sarah Lee effect, seek to replace the good providence of God. 

“In God we trust”, or “In Government we trust”?  The United States along with all Western nations made their choice about a century ago.  Luther once famously quipped that the only part of the human anatomy not laid claim to by the popes of his day was the rear-end.  The bureaucratic popes of our day have gone way, way beyond that.  Isn’t life under the Bureaucratic Plan just grand? 

In Government We Trust

Puncture Wounds

Bureaucracies, it is universally believed, are costly, inefficient boondoggles.  Nevertheless, hope does spring eternal in the human breast.  Equally universal is the belief that a bureaucracy can be reformed, made better.  A tweak here, a personnel change there, a reform or two and hey presto, a new bright shiny efficient common-sense bureaucracy will emerge. 

We believe the idiocy of bureaucracy is an inevitable result when governments exceed the mandate given them by the Almighty.  Breaking divinely appointed bounds inevitably means that bad consequences will follow.  Costly, inefficient, stupid boondoggles are the consequence of expansionist government. 

New Zealand has a socialist accident compensation system.
  All accidents are paid for by the state–that is, the taxpayer.  This requires that the government regulate and administer the funding, the treatment, and the rehabilitation of everyone who suffers an accident.  It is a no-fault system, so one can be suffer an accident as a result of extremely foolish behaviour–but the government pays out.  No questions asked. 

Socialist zealots tell us that our Accident Compensation system is the best in the world.  It is pretty close to nirvana.  Its “glory” is that it is universal.  Everyone gets compensated.  Everyone gets treated. 

But if you peel back the bedcovers, beneath lies a putrid mess.  A bureaucratic mess.  An inevitable bureaucratic mess.  When civil government sets out to get bigger than the Almighty, bad consequences follow. 

Here is a little expose in the NZ Herald. 

A grazed knee, insect bites, a splinter in a finger – the Accident Compensation Corporation is paying out for the most minor of injuries, even if parents don’t ask for it.  While ACC is required by law to cover all physical injuries resulting from an accident, some Herald readers have been startled to find out what has been deemed worthy of taxpayers’ money.  In many cases, claims are not lodged by claimants, but by doctors who must ensure the paper trail starts on the right track should an injury worsen.

ACC has assigned case managers to a 4-year-old who went to the doctor to have a splinter removed from an infected finger, and a 3-year-old who was bitten by insects. Another woman, who asked not to be named, received a letter from ACC after her 17-year-old daughter scraped her knees at Auckland’s Macleans College. The school nurse gave her a couple of bandages – and lodged a claim with ACC. “The people cost involved in doing all of that,” the mother said. “For a plaster … I don’t think we will be requiring any follow-up treatment at the taxpayer’s expense.  How many stubbed toes can you put through, just in case one day it turns out to be something?”

Clearly there is something wrong here.  The ACC needs reforming.  Get rid of the stupid wasteful bureaucratic idiots running the system.  Not so fast.

But ACC, doctors and schools say that although such bureaucracy can seem over the top, lodging a claim creates an essential paper trail should an injury worsen.  Secondary Principals’ Association president Patrick Walsh said schools reported all injuries to ACC after being stung for not doing so.

“The classic examples are sprained ankles … it gets treated, no ACC form is filled out and subsequently you find out there is quite a serious fracture in the ankle.  “It requires extensive and expensive treatment. And then you get the parents wanting the original form … and the doctors, and ACC.”

What is over the top is the attempt by civil government to take over the role of God Himself and become the one who providentially superintends and takes care of mankind.  When perverse statists attempt such a utopian project, bad consequences follow.  Inevitably. 

But Aucklander Gillian Richards said she was still bemused her 4-year-old son Daniel has an ACC file after going to the doctor to have a splinter removed from his finger which had become infected.  “It just seemed a bit over the top. He’s in a kindergarten, and every scraped knee and banged elbow is documented, and we get a letter at home.”

Alasdair McIntosh said he and his wife were baffled when they received a letter from ACC early this month saying their 3-year-old daughter Danielle’s injury was covered.  “The wife and I are looking at each other going, ‘What injury has she had?”‘  Mr McIntosh phoned ACC, and was told his daughter’s injuries were insect bites for which the family doctor had prescribed an ointment after a visit last month.  “We sort of laughed about because insect bites hardly rate as an accident …”

 Oh, no.  Insect bites are serious accidents.  Why?  Well, they are wounds.  All it takes is for one to go septic and forever after the treatment of all insect bites falls under the providential care of the divinised state. 

An ACC spokesman said because insect bites were classified as “puncture wounds” they were deemed an injury.

Insect bites a “puncture wound”.  Such idiocy is inevitable when civil governments rebel against the Living God and overreach themselves.  Rebellion against God has inevitable consequences–bad consequences.  Idiotic, inept bureaucracy is one of them. 

It’s Not Just Denmark that is Rotten

“We Fear Something is Wrong . . .”

When government arrogates to itself powers and roles not granted to it by the Living God bad consequences are inevitable.  One of these is that governments rapidly grow to incompetence.  Hence the never-ending jibes based on government folly sand stupidity and waste.  Here is yet another (real) example, from The Telegraph.

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

NHS health guidelines state clearly that drinking water helps avoid dehydration, and that Britons should drink at least 1.2 litres per day 

By Victoria Ward and Nick Collins

6:20AM GMT 18 Nov 2011

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact. Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

NHS health guidelines state clearly that drinking water helps avoid dehydration, and that Britons should drink at least 1.2 litres per day.

The Department for Health disputed the wisdom of the new law. A spokesman said: “Of course water hydrates. While we support the EU in preventing false claims about products, we need to exercise common sense as far as possible.”German professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer, who advise food manufacturers on how to advertise their products, asked the European Commission if the claim could be made on labels.

They compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval. They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.

However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement.A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control. Now the EFSA verdict has been turned into an EU directive which was issued on Wednesday. 

Ukip MEP Paul Nuttall said the ruling made the “bendy banana law” look “positively sane”. He said: “I had to read this four or five times before I believed it. It is a perfect example of what Brussels does best. Spend three years, with 20 separate pieces of correspondence before summoning 21 professors to Parma where they decide with great solemnity that drinking water cannot be sold as a way to combat dehydration. “Then they make this judgment law and make it clear that if anybody dares sell water claiming that it is effective against dehydration they could get into serious legal bother.

EU regulations, which aim to uphold food standards across member states, are frequently criticised.Rules banning bent bananas and curved cucumbers were scrapped in 2008 after causing international ridicule. Prof Hahn, from the Institute for Food Science and Human Nutrition at Hanover Leibniz University, said the European Commission had made another mistake with its latest ruling. “What is our reaction to the outcome? Let us put it this way: We are neither surprised nor delighted. “The European Commission is wrong; it should have authorised the claim. That should be more than clear to anyone who has consumed water in the past, and who has not? We fear there is something wrong in the state of Europe.”

You don’t say!

>S-Files

>Cutting Cloth Properly

The ContraCelsum S-Award Committee has voted to bestow an S-Award on Sean Hughes.

Mr Hughes is our kinda guy.  The government recently created a new bureaucratic organ–the Financial Markets Authority (“FMA”).  The intent and objective of the FMA is to keep all players in our financial markets on the straight and narrow.  Now this we regard as a legitimate role of government–lawful, if you will.  Detecting and punishing fraud, deception, dissembling and dishonesty with respect to the property of others is what God has instituted civil government for.

>Move Along, Nothing to See Here

>Rigorous Audits as Far as the Eye Can See

Does New Zealand suffer from corruption? That’s like asking whether the sun will rise tomorrow. Of course we suffer from corruption.

New Zealand has an army of organizations and “service providers” dependant upon government grants and largesse. It has another army of bureaucrats aspiring to regulate everything, including even the rear end of cows. Large dollops of unworked for cash, just waiting to be appropriated, for innumerable causes and concerns, is far too big a temptation for some. State appropriation easily becomes a personal expropriation. Corruption is inevitable under such conditions.

What is becoming more evident, however, is that the corruption appears increasingly systemic. We mean by this that it is becoming institutionalised. Personnel “flit” from bureaucracy to service provider, from gamekeeper to poacher. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours–all on the taxpayer’s dollar. This is the lesson emerging from the Taeaomanino Trust scandal.

Now, at first glance, it appeared that the TT scandal was of the garden variety kind–that is, a few Trust executives skimming off a bit of government money to line their own pockets, coupled with a smelly dose of nepotism. This, according to the Dom Post:

A taxpayer-funded trust – awarded Government contracts worth up to $1.5 million – is being investigated by police after more than $100,000 went missing. Taeaomanino Trust, based at Porirua, faces allegations about over-inflated expense claims and senior managers employing relatives and then pocketing their salaries. . . .

Ifopo So’o, who founded the trust with his wife, Paula Masoe, was dismissed in March last year after $107,000 went missing.

The Ministry of Social Development, upon hearing the smelly rumours, commissioned an audit by Deloittes. It was damning.

The Deloitte report investigated 10 allegations about the trust and its staff. It found:

Two relatives of Mr So’o and Ms Masoe were employed as cleaners but did not clean at the trust. Their wages were diverted into accounts held in Ms Masoe and Mr So’o’s name.

Ms Masoe claimed expenses of $3500 for a carpet but there was no evidence it was laid.

$5058 was claimed for accommodation and training – but no receipts provided.

The trust’s New World card was used to buy baby wipes, lamb chops, salmon fillets, fruit and vegetables.

Expenses were claimed for cigarettes and magazines. Ms Masoe claimed $4500 for use of her personal vehicle.

Ms Masoe was overpaid for 93 days of leave.

Despite this, six months later the good old TT was awarded a government grant of half a million dollars to help poor families. Then, to add insult to injury, the government recently awarded a Whanau Ora grant to TT

Last month Taeaomanino was selected as a provider for the controversial Whanau Ora scheme, in a contract thought to be worth up to $1 million. . . . (A Ministry spokesman) added: “Taeaomanino Trust has recently been awarded Whanau Ora funding. I can assure you that the trust was subject to a robust and rigorous tender process.”

(A Trust spokesman) “Since the trust was formed, it has been subject to many audits and reviews as part of the rigorous government and DHB tender and contract awarding procedure.”

Do you get the impression there is a bit of mutual butt covering going on here? Now the plot thickens, and corruption appears to be oozing out in yet more places, like a PSA blasted kiwifruit vine.

A Child, Youth and Family worker tasked with investigating a taxpayer-funded trust facing damning allegations is now a senior manager there.

Sandie Hill was a CYF approvals assessor and was asked to conduct an inquiry into Porirua’s Taeaomanino Trust in February last year. The review followed the resignation of operations manager Ifopo So’o, who admitted misappropriating more than $100,000.

Four months later, after she had completed her review, Ms Hill left CYF to take a job as the trust’s operations manager, replacing Mr So’o.

In a further twist, her CYF supervisor, Matey Galloway, had just completed a year-long study placement with the trust.

Good old Matey. Yup, those audits and reviews were clearly robust and rigorous. “Move along, move along. Nothing to see here.”

>Stranglehold

>Money Laundering, Unions, and Politicians

Some folks have been asking the national education unions to “show us the money”. Lots of moola is being spent promoting the “spontaneous” orchestrated litany of outrage from the Boards of Trustees of 225 primary schools who are not complying with the Ministry of Education in the matter of national testing. Over $100,000 has been donated to the cause by the Principal’s Federation–an educational union–to pay for PR spin, messaging, framing, tilting, and geeing up lazy media in their campaign against government education policy.

Well strike me down and call me a dead parrot, we hear you say. Where did the money come from? It came from you and me. That’s right, you read correctly. The taxpayer forks over money to fund the workings of the school Boards of Trustees. The Boards of Trustees have donated to the principal’s union, which in turn has used it to engage in a political campaign.

According to Kiwiblog, which has drawn on Whaleoil :

Now talking of the campaign against national standards, it is important to stress again that sadly the taxpayer is being forced to fund most of this campaign. Membership of the various principals’ associations is not paid for by the principal, but by the taxpayer through Vote Education.

Whale Oil has some documents showing the extent of the taxpayer funding – around $100,000 from the regional principal associations.

Whaleoil has the documented evidence here.

You might ask, How did this come about? Well, it is part of a collective bargaining contract with the Ministry of Education. The principal’s union is to be funded by the taxpayer, in Vote Education, via the budget for Boards of Trustees. This came about during the previous Labour Government’s reign–during which there was a deliberate objective of funding as much union activity as possible using taxpayer’s money. It was payback and payoff time.  But the rort has been engineered through clandestine means, with taxpayer’s money being laundered through various conduits until everyone either forgets or fails to see that we are all funding unions–who are working against (in this case) us.

This is scandalous. But it illustrates why all state sector unions must be de-registered. State sector unions inevitably engage in graft, fraud, corruption, and featherbedding–as is the case here. Our allegation is that corruption is intrinsic to state sector unions. What we see operating in the education sector unions is not an aberration–it is an inevitability.

Here is how the inevitability of corruption plays out. Unions are interested in two things primarily: increasing income for their hierarchy and members, on the one hand, and stifling competition for their members, on the other. Therefore, they have a vested interest in supporting and voting and campaigning for those politicians and political parties which will bestow more of your money upon them. And they do. Politicians need support, both monetary and organizational resources for campaigning. So a faustian bargain is struck. Unions support left-wing politicians and political parties, who, in turn, pay off their union supporters, using tax payers funds through the government spending budget. As time passes, state sector unions exert more and more control over government policies–regardless of who is occupying the Treasury benches–because they have the money, resources, and strangleholds over the operations of government departments.

This results in a perverse inversion of government where the taxpayers end up increasingly in servitude to state sector unions, and the unions, for their part, operating under the protection of a legislated monopoly, effectively hold us all to ransom. Instead of being public servants they become tyrants, holding all of us to ransom. We become the state servants. They become the masters of us all.

No Western democracy can long endure which allows state sector unions.

>Nanny State is Back . . .

>Puffing Big Clouds of Smoke

Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.

The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)–for the good of others.

The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”. They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda–lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.

Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats’ figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely “politically convenient”, he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.

The ministry’s latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear. Rather, it’s a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.

The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.

Here’s how they derived the figure – number reckoning revealed courtesy of an Official Information Act request and extensive correspondence with the ministry.

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group. The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.

But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs. It’s easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs. Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. We know that.

And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy. But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Therefore, you have to compare the full life-cycle costs to the public health budget of smokers and non-smokers.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking. We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.

And, perversely, the deadlier cigarettes are, the greater will be this bias. The younger smokers are when they die of smoking-related illnesses, the greater will be the measured cost difference between smokers and non- smokers because a smaller proportion of comparable nonsmokers would be incurring end-of-life costs.

In other words, smokers save the public health system money! And, oh, by the way. We have not begun to factor in the huge costs to the country of longer living non-smoking people who commence receiving New Zealand (taxpayer funded) Superannuation at 65, and continue long into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Far, far cheaper to see people killed off by smoking at 45.  So, if the anti-smoking bureaucrats want to argue fiscal costs to cloak their nannying, beware the double-edge of the sword you hold.

The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish–pure and simple. Crampton concludes:

. . . be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.

So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!

When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted.  To achieve total abolition of tobacco the  individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it’s a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The “we-have-a-plan-for-you” bureaucrats are hard at work.

But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

>Too Complex to be Run by Bureaucrats

>I, Market Economy

Central planning never works.
Jonah Goldberg
September 8, 2010
National Review Online

No one in the world knows how to make the computer monitor you are looking at (and, if you’re reading this on your phone, iPad, or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either).

Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.

This is hardly a new insight. In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

The pencil tells the story of its own creation. The wood comes from Oregon, or perhaps California. The lead, which is really graphite, is mined in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The eraser, which is not rubber but something called “factice,” is “made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.”

To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about something called “cloud computing.” In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number-crunching doesn’t actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.

Do a Nexis search and you’ll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a “revolutionary” advance in information organization. And in one sense, that’s obviously true. But in another, this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman’s head. So are the intangible but no less real lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and contained in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution to my daughter’s second-grade curriculum.

More relevant, the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner.

The latest proof of Hayek’s insight can be found not only in the economic winter that goes by the label “recovery summer,” but in the crown jewel of the stimulus known as “cash for clunkers,” which subsidized car purchases that would have happened anyway. That’s a major reason the auto industry just had its worst August in 27 years. Meanwhile, lower-income buyers are seeing used-car prices soar thanks to the artificial scarcity created by destroying perfectly good “clunkers.”

But that’s a small point in the grand scheme of things. According to progressives, the financial crisis discredited “market fundamentalism” and created a burning need for a more cooperative society where “we’re all in it together.” It’s an ancient argument, with many noble intentions behind it. But it rests on a misunderstanding of one simple, astounding, irrefutable fact. The market economy is cooperative, and more successfully so than any alternative system ever conceived of, never mind put into practice. Admittedly it doesn’t feel that way, which is why everyone wants to find a better replacement for it. But they never will, for the same reason no one can make a pencil.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

>Grisly Thud

>Miranda Devine on Australia’s Cancer

Grisly Thud of Kneecapped Rudd
Sydney Morning Herald

And we should be thankful for the many failings of the Rudd government over such a short time. They have demonstrated spectacularly, in the home insulation debacle, in the sinful waste of Building the Education Revolution, in the farce of the ETS, in the risky and ill-considered resources tax, how useless and incompetent big, bureaucratic government really is.

We have seen the mindset that drives the central planning and expert bureaucratic interventions of modern progressive-styled government. They make grand promises and spend up big, encouraging all sorts of distortions and rip-offs and rent-seekers, placing naive belief in regulation, showing little concern about mounting debt, and covering up problems with spin and marketing flim-flam.

Then, when it all falls in a heap, and the polls turn sour, instead of mending their ways, they change leaders, with the aim of staying one step ahead of the electorate, a whole party of artful dodgers. It will backfire on them in spades. Even if they win, they lose.

>The Devolution of the Law Commission

>Malignant Cancers

Democracies in the West have degenerated into soft-despotic smothering administrative regimes. The State, with the consent of the people, has expanded its tentacles into every field of human action to rule, regulate, control and administer. It has vastly overreached its God-ordained powers.

When governments play-at-being-deities bad consequences always follow. One is that the law quickly becomes an ass–a tangled web of arcane, contradictory, costly, ineffective, outmoded rules and regulations that that quickly pass their use-by date. In an attempt to deal with the inevitably asinine character of the law under soft-despotic states the device of the Law Commission was created.

The fundamental objective of a Law Commission is to “clean up” and rationalise redundant and irrelevant laws. As Wikipedia has it:

A Law Commission or Law Reform Commission is an independent body set up by a government to conduct law reform; that is, to consider the state of laws in a jurisdiction and make recommendations or proposals for legal changes or restructuring. Their functions include drafting revised versions of confusing laws, preparing consolidated versions of laws, making recommendations on updating outdated laws and making recommendations on repealing obsolete or spent laws.

All well and good. But the law of bureaucracies is that they are cancerous. That is, they grow and expand to where they take charge of their host governments and begin to control government itself. Law Commissions are no exception. The latest report on alcohol in New Zealand shows that the Law Commission has grown cancerous indeed.

Formed in 1986, it now employs 32 people, with an annual budget of $4.3m. It would argue that it is under-resourced (the complaint of all cancerous bureaucracies). It has a point–after all New Zealand is sinking in an ocean of laws and regulations, growing exponentially by the year. Sir Geoffrey Palmer, President of the Law Commission lamented in 2006

Massive amounts of law are made in New Zealand every year, of which primary legislation sometimes does not produce the greatest bulk. Today, New Zealand’s primary laws comprise nearly 1100 statutes; 1096 to be precise. We had only 600 principal Acts in 1978. Under the authority of today’s Acts there are 4292 instruments published in the statutory regulations series. There exist also, according to the Parliamentary Counsel Office website, 273 sets of “deemed regulations”; this last number, the site warns us, may be incomplete.

How many pages of law this amounts to I cannot say because it is too big a job to count. The largest statute we have – the Income Tax Act 2004 – covers 2088 pages and takes three volumes of the 2004 statutes. There were seven volumes that year. This proliferation of forms of lawmaking poses problems in itself. But it also poses significant problems for the system of government as a whole. It makes it much more difficult ever to see the body of law as a whole.

One would have thought there is so much helpful work the Law Commission could do in recommending rationalisations and repeals of legal irrationalities, redundancies, contradictions, and blind alleys. But the Labour Government in August 2008 decided to focus the Commission’s attention upon the Sale of Liquor Act. This was something the Commission ought to have tried its utmost to avoid, but under President Palmer it could not help itself. It not only welcomed the Government’s stipulation, but decided to conduct a “root and branch” review of alcohol in New Zealand. President Palmer also indicated that he had a personal interest in this matter, and that he would ensure that Commission pursued its task with vigour. It turns out he was not dissembling.

Now, consider the brief that the Law Commission was given included the following in the Terms of Reference:

To consider and formulate for the consideration of Government and Parliament a revised policy framework covering the principles that should regulate the sale, supply and consumption of liquor in New Zealand having regard to present and future social conditions and needs.

Question: since when is it the statutory duty and function of the Law Commission to have regard for the “present and future social conditions and needs” of New Zealand and New Zealanders? According to the Commission’s website, the objectives of the Commission are:

to improve:
• the content of the law
• the law-making process
• the administration of the law
• access to justice
• dispute resolution between individuals
• dispute resolution between individuals and the State.

It would seem to us that the Commission’s role is expanding way beyond the intent of the original act setting it up. Now, we probably cannot simply blame the progressive philosophies and proclivities of President Palmer. It will also be the fault of the (then Labour) Government. But a malignant cancer upon the body politic the Law Commission has undoubtedly become.

So now New Zealand has the benefit of a 500 page monstrosity reviewing one piece of legislation–a review that has taken the Commission into issues of future public policy and social needs of New Zealand. It aspires to regulate exhaustively alcohol in every sphere of human and national life. The “scope creep” of the Commission will consign it to ineffectiveness; it has simply become one more engine for the rampant proliferation of soft-despotic laws, rules and regulations.

As one blogger put it–the nanny state has come back with a vengeance. The Law Commission has now moved from amelioration of administrative constipation to compounding the problem many times over. Under President Palmer it has become a sad case of “if you cannot beat them, join them”. But, more malignantly, the Law Commission is yet another example of a cancerous bureaucracy taking over.

>Bureaucrats Pure as the Driven Snow

>A Great Guffaw Moment

The West believes passionately in the sinlessness and perfection of man as an article of faith. At least in an abstract sense. Mocking and sneering at the Bible’s declaration of universal human depravity, the West has turned from the worship of God and replaced it with a spurious reverence for man.

This deep and profound religious attachment to man, which is now the established religion of the West, is the ultimate and final expression of idolatry. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and sinned, the Serpent acutely revealed what was the essence of the matter: in the day they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil man would become like God, knowing good and evil for themselves. (Genesis 3:5)

“Primitive” cultures and civilisations were steeped in idolatry. It was an intrinsic part of the world-view. Men speculated over and created deities; they made representations of them; they bowed down to them and sacrificed to them. The truth of the Serpent’s assertion lay hidden beneath the surface. Man bowing down to dumb idols does not much seem like man being as God. Yet it was. It was man who was determining for himself what gods existed, how they acted, what they were like, and how they were to be mollified and won over.

In the West, in the post-Enlightenment age, the veneer disguising the Serpent’s proposition has been stripped off and tossed aside. Man has come forth asserting boldly and without shame his prerogatives to determine good and evil for himself. No longer does the modern man feel the need to genuflect to a higher power or entity in pseudo-humility. No longer does he fear retribution if he fails to do obeisance. In the West, man has grown up. There is no truth, right, wrong, or reality higher than the ratiocinations of the Western human rationalist mind.

It has finally emerged–the truth of Satan’s observation about man as god. It has taken millennia, but eventually, in the West, the rebellion of man against God has reached its apogee. Man no longer feels the need to “hide” or disguise his assertion of supremacy and autonomy: he is confident enough to assert it outright. There is no entity or being higher than man. There is no god to be worshipped. There is only man. Idolatry has now reached its most consistent expression: it can go no further in terms of its overtness or the consistency of its outworking.

Another way of expressing this is to say that in the West idolatry has taken its most extreme form; the rebellion of man against God has matured to the point of succeeding in building a civilisation that is more or less consistently grounded upon the proposition that man is god. And this is a first in human history.

But just a few pesky problems remain. Whilst in the West man is now definitely in charge (at least in his own mind) Western civilization continues to be beset with a daunting array of problems ranging from disease to crime; poverty to illiteracy; credit crunches to obscene bonuses paid out to, in President Obama’s words, “Wall Street fat cats”. We could go on with an extensive litany of “sins” that remain part of modern experience. Man may be charge, but the old saw about lunatics running the asylum bites a bit too close to the bone.

Thus, human perfection and sinlessness must be seen as a relative concept. Some are more sinless and perfect than others it would seem. And here we come to one of the great guffaw moments of our age. In this most extreme form of idolatry, the West is forced to cast about for someone, some representation of humanity, that is more godlike who can be trusted to lead the race out of its remaining problems to its final perfect state.

In order for our extreme idolatry to maintain a veneer of credibility there must always be at least one class of human beings which has achieved a greater slice of divinity, which has risen above the petty and the petulant, which has achieved one of the key attributes of deity. This attribute is essential to lead other men in the West to their final perfected state, to an existence where manifold problems are solved once and for all. It is the attribute of absolute disinterest, of pure objectivity, which would lay aside self-interest, and act only in the interests of others, or for the good of man as a whole. Only such men and women are worthy of being trusted and believed in so as to lead all in the West to final perfection. When man is god, it will always turn out that some men are more divine than others. It is this deifying, not just of men in general, but of a specific type of man, or class of man, or individual as being more divine than others, and therefore worthy of our trust to bring man to perfection, which is the guffaw moment. It is the great joke of the age.

This uber-deifying of a certain man or class of men is so common and so intrinsic to the West that it no longer seems remarkable. It has achieved the status of being beyond debate, a truth to all intents and purposes self-evident.

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal gives us a classic rendition of this psychosis and spiritual blindness. He is writing about John Kenneth Galbraith, about whom he says many interesting things, which we will hopefully get to discuss in another post. Galbraith, of course, is probably the most lauded economist in the US in the twentieth century, and Galbraith has some very definite views about which section of Western society has achieved absolute disinterest and is godlike enough to lead the rest of us.

Dalrymple points out that Galbraith had a deep disdain for private business corporations–a disdain which is coming back into vogue. He held that the bigger and more successful a private business became, the more its management developed a bureaucratic mindset and began to look after its own interests. Clearly business managers, as a class, have not yet achieved the levels of perfection that are required of those whom we can trust. Where, then, does Galbraith place his faith?

In Galbraith’s case, he places his faith firmly in government bureaucrats. Dalrymple takes up the narrative:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

For example, the chapter entitled “The Bureaucratic Syndrome” in his book The Culture of Contentment refers only to bureaucracy in corporations (and in the one government department he despises, the military). Galbraith appears to believe in the absurd idea that bureaucrats administer tax revenues to produce socially desirable ends without friction, waste, or mistake. It is clearly beyond the range of his thought that government action can, even with the best intentions, produce harmful effects.

And later:

Galbraith explains resistance to higher taxation thus: “It is the nature of privileged position that it develops its own political justification and often the economic and social doctrine that serves it best.” In other words, men—except for Marx and Galbraith—believe what it is in their interest to believe. It is hardly surprising that Galbraith always writes as if what he says is revealed truth and counterarguments are the desperate, last-ditch efforts of the self-interested and corrupt.

Galbraith never solved, or even appeared to notice, the mystery of how he himself could see through self-interest and arrive at disinterested truth. In general, his self-knowledge was severely limited.

But in believing as he did, Galbraith reflects the most widely held “vote” in the West for the class of men who have achieved higher states of deity and who can be trusted to lead us lesser gods into nirvana. It is the gummint. It is the state bureaucrat who is the ultimate disinterested, self-denying, other-centric human being. All these are attributes of deity. It is this breathtaking folly which makes us split our sides with laughter.

But, we are careful not to make our mirth too public. To question the higher-being-status of government functionaries comes perilously close to blasphemy in our age. Is it not self-evident that some are more human (and thereby more divine) than others? Is it not self-evident that whatever problems remain, government functionaries will deliver us from them? It is not self-evident that the more problems that arise the more functionaries we need? These things are believed by all, and are beyond dispute.

In the West we have made ourselves to be gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves. Government bureaucrats got there first. Human civilization’s greatest tragic farce.

>The Drowning Tide of Bureaucratic Administration

>Creeping Totalitarianism

The previous decade, which saw a continuing Labour government in New Zealand, also witnessed an explosion of bureaucratic management of society. The two are connected. When Helen Clark first became Prime Minister she revealed that one of her high priorities was to rebuild and restore a “quality public service”. This has to be on of the greater oxymorons of the decade.

All governments have centrist and controlling tendencies. But the “do good” prejudices and pretensions of the Left make them far more likely to want to reduce, if not banish, the messy attributes of freer societies. The armoury to build more ordered, planned, rational, and organised societies inevitably turns toward weapons of planning and regulations–which means a significant increase in planners, auditors, reviewers, advisers, orderers, and monitors with the full cluster of committees, boards, bodies, and functionaries–that is, bureaucrats.

The present government has justified its tolerance of a much-increased state administration on the grounds that we are now in a recession, and it would merely make things worse to lay off thousands of state functionaries. But it has held out the hope that when economic growth picks up it will start to cut the state sector significantly, removing layers and layers of self-perpetuating administrative waste. But is history is any guide, the prognosis is not good. As governments proceed the tendency to be captured by its officials becomes overwhelming.

Meanwhile, Australia is now going through a similar bureaucratisation under Kevin Rudd. In her regular Sydney Morning Herald column, Miranda Devine describes a process that is now all-too-familiar to New Zealanders.

Pettyfogging bureaucracy is just creeping totalitarianism
November 5, 2009

. . . . The spread of brain-dead supplicants to the state has grown with the rise of the bureaucratic class, which reached its zenith when the former Queensland bureaucrat and chief jargon generator Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister.

He may be a perfectly fine human being but he believes in one thing – that systems and processes can solve any problem, that if you have enough meetings, summits, talkfests, reviews, studies, probes, resolutions and facilitations, preferably with some connection to a United Nations body, solutions will miraculously occur without hard decisions being made. . . .

Bureaucratism obfuscates with jargon that is impossible to understand, making your mind behave like a skittish colt. You finally give up and turn away with a sense of failure, suspecting that if you had tried harder you might have reached the golden truth. Only there is no golden truth. It is all dense verbiage, with no reason to exist except itself.

Bureaucratism operates by adding layers of complexity to a problem so that much time and effort can be spent on assembling the architecture of that complexity and then solving the problems created by that architecture. You become so caught up in solving the human resources issues or occupational health and safety concerns or constructing risk analysis that the original problem is rendered meaningless.

Take the consultant called in recently to define the “strategy and objectives” of a big metropolitan rail network project. He told me he was stuck with senior management who thought safety was their first priority, “ahead of moving an ever-increasing number of people across the network”. He told them the only safe train network is one that has no trains.

The Institute of Public Affairs showed recently that state bureaucracies were growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year, as expressed by the cost of state public sector workers. The number of state public servants nationwide has grown from 972,000 in 2000 to 1.2 million last year. They all need something to do, and the results can be seen in the dozens of small ways our lives are burdened with bureaucratism every day.

Try getting a passport renewed at Neutral Bay post office. They will have you back and forward retaking photographs to eliminate a shadow or the hint of teeth. Any deviation and your application can be spiked. You cannot collect the application form from the post office. You must download it from the internet and print it out. But woe betide you if the margins are a millimetre too wide. You will be running back and forward to the printer for days. It is like being lost in a Kafka play. There must be people who enjoy such useless activity.

The main problem with pettyfogging bureaucracy is that it puts immense power in the hands of people who are constitutionally unfit for it. It is evident from early years in the school playground that some people are destined to be paper shufflers. But give them power and they become drunk with it, wielding it not only unwisely but unjustly.

It may be tempting to think of over-bureaucratisation as a benign, though annoying, malaise that will pass quickly. But one of its strongest early opponents, the US president Ronald Reagan, argued it was as much a threat to liberty as communism. As his biographer Steven Hayward recently told ABC radio’s Counterpoint, Reagan believed bureaucratic government, ”undermines self-rule and consent of the governed”.

Governments in Australia, the US and Europe “don’t have secret police or concentration camps but they do behave arbitrarily and sometimes … even lawlessly, and are not very accountable to voters. So even in our two-party systems in Western democracies we are governed in some important respects like a one-party state.”

The great shining symbol of bureaucratism’s triumph over freedom is, of course, the carbon pollution reduction scheme, and its elaborate bureaucratic apparatus, which brooks no dissent.

The CSIRO economist Clive Spash, for instance, reportedly has claimed CSIRO management suppressed his research criticising emission trading schemes. Spash said he was not allowed to publish his paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, because it commented on “policies”, as if no CSIRO scientist had ever done such a thing.

The totalitarian threat of bureaucratism is nowhere as clear as in the climate change industry’s creeping assaults on liberty.

>Size Does Matter–For a Time

>Why We Continue to Survive Socialism

In New Zealand we live in one of the most regulated and controlled nations on earth. Soft despotism is more advanced here than just about anywhere. The “revolution” of the Douglas years is now a distant memory. The past ten years have seen a criminal squandering of much of the hard won gains of the eighties and nineties.

The Trans-Tasman newsletter had this to say:

No Government can ever get policy initiatives and responses 100% right. History shows too many imponderables from oil shocks to war, from disease to depression and simple lack of aspiration, to ensure perfection. They can only aim at good, not perfect, results.

What Governments are indeed sworn to is the search for profitable directions and good results, say well above the 50% and hopefully towards the 80% mark.

Observers are still surprised to think how, in the prosperous decade from 1999, the Clark/Cullen Government retreated from those goals. In seeking greater social justice, it chose to slice and dice the national cake.

Cited in Kiwiblog.

Pursing “social justice” is code for sanctioned government theft, redistribution, rules, regulations, controls and an explosion of government intrusion upon society. But still we limp on. Like the mortally wounded bull in the ring, leeching spears make the very life blood drip in rivulets upon the ground, but still the beast staggers on. How can this be?

One reason is accidental. It is the very smallness of the country which prevents the worst excesses of soft despotism being manifested. Politicians are accessible: the massive ship of state, while vast, can still be given the odd course correction to avoid the worst of the rocks. The smallness of the country makes the “feedback” mechanism more direct and focused.

We in New Zealand have universal public health care, compulsory state education, a universal (non-means tested) entitlement to one of the most generous retirement funding schemes in the world, perpetual sickness and unemployment benefits should anyone choose not to work, a pervasive and invasive occupational safety and health regime, a no-fault universal accident insurance scheme–to name but a few. All of these bring in their wake a vast state bureaucracy, committees, commissions, rulers and regulators, administrators, advisers, and compliance officials who have a mandate to govern almost every human action. Yet still Leviathan staggers on.

In the US, by contrast, the country is having conniptions over introducing a public health system. The signs are that government involvement in this naive exercise in social justice will collapse inwardly. Why will public health in the US be the end (as Mark Steyn has argued) whereas in New Zealand we have struggled on with it for decades? One simple and direct answer is the size of the US means it is inherently more complex; complexity means sclerotic legislation and administration which in turn means that the system is unworkable from the very beginning.

The various public health bills now circulating through the Congress are respectively over 1,000 pages in length. No legislator has or will read them. It is impossible to do so with any comprehension–even if months were allowed for the task. Consider the honesty of one Democratic Senator, Tom Carver (who is a specialist in health care legislation).

When asked about one of the bill’s which his committee has been working on he disclosed that:

he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people.

“I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.

Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as “arcane,” “confusing,” “hard stuff to understand,” and “incomprehensible.” He likened it to the “gibberish” used in credit card disclosure forms.

See the actual interview below:

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=GdkUaGkUkU

Here is the point: if the legislators cannot understand the bill, what hope is there for those who must interpret and apply it? Very quickly the whole thing (if ever passed) will become a boondoggle of the worst sort. It will weigh upon the nation like the proverbial albatross. It is difficult to see the US ever coming back.

So if any in New Zealand think that the US and public health is a survivable issue by virtue of the fact we, in our nation, have survived for decades with our particular version of the boondoggle, think again. Because we are small, our version may take another ten decades to kill the nation off. In the US, it would be a matter of one or two decades at most.

When the hubris of unbelieving men demand their governments go beyond the limits and bounds ordained by Almighty God, the life blood of a polity begins to drip out upon the ground. Whilst men cling to their vanity and Unbelief the drops eventually become a mortal haemorrhage.

>Prevention is Much Worse than Cure, Part II

>Preventative Justice a Cloak for Leviathan

Western democracies find themselves in the vice-like grip of a soft despotism. None are exempt. The very nations which once rejected absolutist governments of all kinds are now busy re-imposing a new absolutism. But it is of a different hue from tyrannical kings or emperors. It is “soft” in the sense that its promulgation of endless rules, regulations, restrictions, directions, and controls are all in the name of “helping” subjects.

Every Western democracy has gone down this path. Without exception. All political parties in these democracies now tread down this road—the only differentiation being their relative pace. The dominance and pervasive nature of this soft despotism, of an endless, burgeoning state control over every facet of human life, betrays its true wellspring. It comes from the dominant, established religion of the West.

Man is autonomous; collective humanity, the State, is required to fill the vacuum left once the Living God was “banished” from modern life. The citizen now looks to the State to be creator, redeemer, messiah, saviour, and provider. The State’s duty and responsibility is to manufacture as near as possible a Paradise upon earth. This incubus has led Western governments to move to adopt preventative law.

The use of the law ostensibly to prevent a potential evil occurring some time in the future has been significantly responsible for the rapid growth of the soft despotism, which is now the hallmark of the West. In New Zealand, the regimes of OSH, traffic laws, state-run health, state education, and state welfare are all manifestations of this religious ideology. But it does not stop with these. Every year sees fresh expansion, extension, and promulgation of state controls, rules, and regulations over both already controlled areas, and new areas. This is not to say that citizens do not welcome these developments. They do. Often they lead the charge for more rules and regulations. Is it not reasonable to expect one’s messiah to perform and make Paradise just that much nearer?

What is the alternative? It is breathtakingly simple in principle, although radical in the extreme, given the soft-despotic world which Unbelievers prefer to inhabit. It is neatly encapsulated in the Law of the Lord as found in Deuteronomy 22:8—“When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it.”

This is the law as it is meant to be constructed and function within Jerusalem, never Athens. In this one precept, the entire distinction between law as a preventative versus law as a principle of justice stands sharply displayed. Firstly, some background. In the ancient East, roofs were flat; in the evening they were cool; therefore, they were places for hospitality and entertainment. If you built a house and did not put a railing up to prevent the guests or family members falling off you would be held responsible if someone subsequently did.

Here is the heart of the principle: if someone suffers harm as a result of our actions (or inactions, in this case) we are responsible. The bloodguiltiness of the harm falls back upon us. Notice that responsibility is imputed to acts both of commission and omission.

Notice, also, that there are endless applications of this precept—to virtually every area of life. Everything we do carries risks (potential and actual) for ourselves and others. This what it means to be firstly a creature, and secondly to be a creature in a sinful, fallen cosmos. As someone once acerbically put it, “S—happens”. If we cook food improperly and our guests become ill, we are responsible. If we drive, so as to cause harm to others, we are responsible. The law—justly—maximises personal responsibility for harm done to others.

Thirdly, notice that this principle of law and justice is in stark contrast to the libertarian view, which would re-write the statute as follows: “When you build a new house, it’s up to you as to whether you should make a parapet for your roof; if anyone falls off it’s their own stupid fault.”

Thirdly, it now should be abundantly clear how western soft-despotic societies would pervert this law into a tyranny through the application of preventative justice. Fundamentally, the law and its intrinsic principle of justice would be changed from personal responsibility for harm done to others into a regime of prevention of the harm ever occurring in the first place. Of course, to accomplish this there would need to be a building code which would specify the materials, height, railing width, and construction method of all parapets on all houses (and very quickly, of the entire building.) Then, there would need to be an inspectorate to ensure that the parapet was constructed according to preventive standards. All home owners without a parapet would need to be prosecuted and fined. This would require a prosecution department or division. Then, at the first instance of someone actually falling off a roof, a complete revision of the parapet code would be required, and new stipulations for parapets promulgated. In addition, the investigating committee responsible for drafting the new code would inevitably point out that some activities on the roof were safer than others, but all activities were more dangerous if alcohol were involved. Therefore, new safety regulations would be promulgated to limit, and eventually ban, all alcohol consumption upon roofs. In the meantime, codes of acceptable alcohol consumption levels and amounts over time would be written. Police and local authority compliance officials would need to be equipped with equipment to enter households and breath-test guests at random to ensure that compliance with the alcohol consumption on roof code was being observed. Repeat or extreme infringement would result in the courts banning individuals from being on roofs for months, even years at a time. Some extreme offenders would be banned from roofs for life. Moreover, it would become clear that children were more vulnerable to roof accidents so new laws would be passed requiring that children on roofs be in the company of a supervising adult at all time. Special child-proof locks and gates were now added to the roof-parapet building code. Significant penalties were promulgated if any home owner did not have such equipment installed in their houses. Unfortunately, some children would still fall off roofs, whereupon the government would believe it had failed in its fundamental duty to prevent harm. The citizens would agree, and so eagerly supported a new zero child-death-from-roof-falling target. To achieve this target, the government would then ban all children from all roofs at all times. Parents who were found to have children on their roofs would have their children removed from them and placed in protective custody. This would be administered by a new compliance authority to be named the Child Safety Service (CSS). The need, however, to prevent people falling off roofs remained, and despite the best endeavours of government to protect people from harm, it still would occur. Finally, the government would move to ban all flat roofs, requiring instead that roofs be slanted and sloped and gabled. However, this meant that construction and maintenance of the new authorised roofs would became more dangerous, leading to a new raft of rules and regulations and changes to the building and safety codes. Meanwhile, now that entertaining on roofs were banned, households would be forced to spend more time indoors. The heat would no doubt prove oppressive, leading to an explosion of demand for air-conditioners, which, in turn, would lead to a tangible increase in the consumption of electricity. Since this produced significantly more carbon dioxide, a poisonous gas, laws, rules and regulations would have to be promulgated for standards of efficiency for air conditioners and limits for use in domestic premises. A new state agency would be created to inspect and ensure compliance with the Responsible Electricity Use regime. Moreover, to prevent greater harm to the environment, the government would be “forced” to introduce an electricity tax to discourage excessive use.

This is what we live under in the West. There is no end to it. It is an unstoppable leviathan whose tentacles are squeezing the life-breath out of Western democratic societies.

In the Christian frame the matter is simple and direct. You ought (not have) to have a parapet on your roof. If you don’t and someone gets hurt, you will be held responsible. No building codes. No inspectors. No petty rules and regulations coupled with an endless bureaucratic enterprise to define, inspect, prosecute, make, and mould in a vain attempt to make you responsible.

You have to drive responsibly. The rules of the road are defined. No-one, except other people damaged by your actions police the rules. Prevention is not allowed as a “policing” action. Only actual damage. If anything happens to cause harm to others as a result of your driving or your vehicle’s poor condition, the guilt of their blood is on your hands; you will be held accountable; you will be made to pay full and complete restitution (which in the case of a loss of someone else’s life may result in a literal lifetime of servitude to make restitution via work.) The courts are near and accessible to anyone making a claim for restitution against you.

Imagine a society where there is no traffic policing, no ministry of transport, no state vehicle certification regime, no breath testing, no vehicle registration, no ACC regime, no rules for cell-phone use in vehicles—only a comprehensive regime of torts, where if you do any harm to anyone else, you (and, in the case of a minor, your parents) will be held liable. In this simple Christian perspective, prevention is not the objective. Prevention does not define or inform justice. Responsibility for actual harm caused to others does. This is the essence of Christian social justice.

So, we say to the crowd: will you have Christ or Caesar? Will you have Jerusalem or Athens? At this point in our history, the crowd overwhelmingly roars, “We will have Caesar and his Athens.” And so the coils of Leviathan grip tighter and tighter. The nation becomes weaker and weaker, more and more slavish.

It is only under the justice of Christ that we will become mature and truly free.