A Disease of the Soul

Universal Acid of Resentment

The leftist mindset is fixated over money.  The origins of this addiction can be traced back to Marx’s materialistic belief that capital (i.e. money/wealth) ruled the world.  The oft-leaned upon excuse for leftist electoral failure is that “lesser-leftist” politicians have lots of money and they effectively steal elections by paying for the manipulation of the electorate, and, to compound the problem, the genuinely-leftist parties do not have sufficient money to spend and manipulate the electorate to keep pace.  So the competition is unfair from the get-go.

The lack of money is the leftist’s stock-in-trade excuse for electoral failure.  Given the vaguest chance that someone might provide some money, the leftist politician will be like a rat up a drainpipe.  When multi-millionaire German, Kim Dotcom arrived on the shores of New Zealand it became immediately obvious that he intended to use his millions “earned” through the Mega file sharing website to buy himself some influence.

Kim Dotcom during the press conference that followed his “Moment of Truth”. Photo / NZ Herald

He played the part of an unscrupulous, venal, self-seeking capitalist with more realism and panache than a Hollywoood A-lister.  He initially contributed to the campaign of right-winger, John Banks for the Auckland mayoralty.  When Banks failed to support him in his skirmishes with the law, Dotcom turned on Banks like a vengeful Fury.

The Left screamed “dirty politics”.  But, true to form and type, they then began to form their own line-up outside the door of Dotcom’s mansion.  Every one of them had their caps out.
  They were looking for the ace-in-the hole which would provide electoral success.  Money.  Tons of it.  After the leftists had walked the catwalk in front of Dotcom’s leering visage, he settled his money on a new party of his own creation.  It was a strange composite creature.  Dotcom thought, and the Left thought, that by bestowing millions of dollars upon his creation, electoratal success would inevitably follow.  Once again, it has failed miserably.  The crass materialism of leftism has been unable to deliver the goods.

For the Left, Dotcom has been a kind of Cargo Cult figure.  When it is all over, Dotcom will most likely be extradited to the United States to face charges of theft.  He will likely disappear into the US federal prison system.  But we expect that the bankrupt materialism of the Left will remain firmly in place.  Leftists will not have learned any lessons whatsoever.  They will maintain the herd-belief of the Borg that all of life is determined by money and property and who has more of it.  They will continue to put the Left’s  electoral failure down to not having enough of the folding stuff.  They will continue to despise their political opponents for being “rich”, and ipso facto, evil.  The Left will continue to gnaw upon its own resentful bones, in the dark.

Christians will never be fooled by such idolatry.  Christians will never be fooled by materialism and its present political manifestations of Marxism and socialism.  Christians worship King Jesus– King of all kings (Matthew 28:18).  Christians are merry warriors, exuberantly doing good to all men, but especially those of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10).  Christians are content if they can have food and clothing and shelter (I Timothy 6:8).  Christians, the Church, and Christian organisations always have just the right amount of cash to do what the Lord intends them to do, for He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and all the earth is His (Psalm 50:10).  Christians are bondslaves of the Lord–and are therefore free men and free women and free children.  Truly free.

Who would be a secular Leftist?  It’s a universal acid of resentment which eats everything away, including the soul. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Crawling Snake of Envy

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 25, 2014

I said recently that envy is the great invisible driver in our modern political conflicts. On what basis can I say this, and is this not a case of trying to read hearts?

First, we see the simple statements of Scripture as treating envy as public, visible, identifiable. But first, hold your horses. A bit further down, I will conclude by reconciling my point that envy is “visible,” and yet is the “great invisible driver.”

So then, where does Scripture describe envy as a public kind of sin? Pilate knew why Jesus was on trial before him, and it had nothing to do with the actual charges.

“For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy” (Mark 15:10).

Stephen, narrating the story of Joseph and his brothers, interpreted their hostility toward Joseph as driven by envy, even though the Genesis account doesn’t mention the envy by name (Gen. 37:4). The writer of Genesis says that the brothers saw that Jacob loved Joseph more, and they hated him — which is an instance of envy.

“And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him” (Acts 7:9).

Luke records the fact of mobs forming, but he is also able to tell (at a glance) why they were forming.

“But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming” (Acts 13:45).
“But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people” (Acts 17:5).

Failure to see envy is therefore not an instance of nobly refraining from reading hearts. It is actually a refusal to read the story. So then, do not try to read hearts, which only God can do, but feel free to read the story. Envy has public manifestations, and if you have those manifestations, then you have envy. That is what you are reading.

In addition to the fact that envy results in very public behavior that is readily identifiable, the Scriptures also teach us to see envy as a driving element of all conflicts. So to ask whether or not envy is present in our politics can be answered by asking whether conflict is present in our politics. Conflict is the smoke, but envy the fire.

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not . . . Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?” (James 4:1-2, 5).

What does envy travel cheek by jowl with? Who are its traveling companions? Well . . . “envy and strife” (Phil. 1:15), “envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings” (1 Tim. 6:4), and “malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Titus 3:3). Let me ask a simple question — in our political contests, do we have strife, railings, evil surmising, malice, and hatred? Sins are like grapes — they come in bunches, and with this variety of grape, envy is chief among them. In our modern political discourse, envy is like a rancid cluster from Eshcol, with two socialists carrying their economic agenda on a pole between them (Num. 13:23). It is not at all hard to identify — I mean, the grapes are the size of baseballs.

This just in. Michael Moore, champion of the working guy, is the owner of nine houses, including a Manhattan condo. Am I revealing an envious heart along with these details? Not a bit of it! I don’t want to take away any of his houses, and in fact, I am willing to wish that he acquire a couple more. What I wish he would lose is the Everyman Shtick. And the baseball hat.

Envy is the purloined letter of vices. It is hidden in plain sight. For those who have eyes to see, it is everywhere. For those who have a vested interest in not seeing it, things are quite different. Vested interests are quite an interesting phenomenon. As Upton Sinclair put it once, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And it is impossible to get a man to see something when his entire notion of a self-identity and respect depends upon his not seeing it. Men can take perverse pride in a lot of vices — drunkenness, fornication, anger, pride, casino heists — but no one wants to acknowledge the crawling snake of envy, however big it is — that dark impulse to hurt anyone who seems to have a superior capacity for happiness. It is almost impossible to see that snake without feeling like a snake, and so we have whole industries and political movements dedicated to helping us not see what we in fact are.

So what I mean is that envy is visible in principle, for those who have the vantage to see it, but that it is invisible whenever it is pridefully unacknowledged — which is virtually all the time.

We are in fact an envy-ridden people, and to see that fact straight on would be indistinguishable from repentance. And so we don’t look at it straight on.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Jabba the Catt

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog 

22 May 2014

In a sinful and fallen world, any blessing can be abused. The temptation to lord it over others is a constant one, and the human heart will use whatever materials are ready to hand — intelligence, looks, education, money, age, strength, and so on.

This means that inequity in the distribution of wealth does present temptations — most certainly, and welcome to earth. But Scripture teaches us to deal with sin where the sin is, which is under our own sternum. The cause of our faults is not to be located elsewhere. Lust is not caused by beautiful women, covetousness is not caused by other people owning things, and dishonoring parents is not caused by them asking you to do something.

If a man has five million dollars and I have five, then he will no doubt be tempted to believe he is better than I am. This is often and easily noted. What is almost never noted is my temptation to believe I am better than he is. If we both succumb to the temptation, we both commit the same sin . . . but at least he has a better argument. I am constantly reminded of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a Christian — “one who believes the New Testament is a divinely inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.”

If someone points out that great inequity of wealth creates a power relationship that is morally problematic, then what do we create when we create a mechanism that can fix this inequity? Right. We have created a larger power differential. Granted the problem is a big hole, why are we digging it deeper?

We justify this to ourselves by pretending that we are not digging it deeper, and we do this by leaving the government and its powers out of our consideration. But what happens when we do the sensible thing and include the government and its powers among the fat cats?

Those who lament this wealth inequity of ours, like Piketty does, want to “fix it” by jacking the marginal tax rate on the super-wealthy up to 80 percent, and up to 60 percent for those making between 200K and 500K. But how can you do this without creating an uber-wealthy entity — the government — which has now just successfully taken 80 percent of the earning of all the super-wealthy, and which has an army, navy, powers of coercion, and so on, and which comes into my house on a fairly regular basis in order to boss me around? Why are you guys arguing that we should take most of the money away from all the fat cats and give it to Jabba the Catt?

And the regular fat cats got that way by selling me goods and services that I really wanted, and which I can use to make my labor more productive. The coercive fat cats, the government, which by this point in a post like this should be spelled gummint, has created a power differential between themselves and me which is far greater, by orders of magnitude, than the power differential between Bill Gates and me. And on top of that, their track record concerning their actual uses of their power is demonstrably demented.

This kind of “reform” can only seem plausible because the people who tolerate this kind of rule are represented well. We are governed by thieves, and we are governed by thieves because our own hearts are full of larceny, covetousness, envy, and self-deception. How much money the super-wealthy own should be absolutely none of my business, and if I make it my business, then I am the predator, I am the thief, I am the envious one, I am the problem.

That’s a novel sentiment right there, one that more Americans ought to experiment with: I am the problem.
But in the meantime, you can always take the kids to the zoo we call Washington. They have taken all this wealth that they have confiscated and have gathered it together in one gigantic, lush bamboo grove, covering millions of acres — the native habitat of the pander bear.

And as you gaze at the very expensive exhibits, just mutter to yourself . . . I am the problem.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Envy Crackles

Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog
May 21, 2014

I recently raised a question in a Facebook thread that I wanted to expand on here. It has to do with the increasingly common idea that “inequality of income” is inherently a moral problem.

So here’s the question:
If you had a magic button in front of you which, if you pressed it, would result in all the poor people in the world being 5X better off than they are now, in real terms, but the price would be that the top 1% would be 100X times better off, would you press the button? Pressing the button would increase the inequality, but it would decrease everyone’s day-to-day income problems. Is the mere fact of the inequality a moral problem? Is the size of the gulf between rich and poor a moral problem?

There is another way of asking the question, only this way highlights the darkness of envy a little bit better. If you had a button in front of you that would cut the standard of living that poor people have by 50%, but would also cut the standard of living that the top 1% had by a much greater amount, thus reducing the inequality, would you press that button?

In case you hadn’t anticipated it, we do have a working version of this second button. It is called “government help.”

One of the central culprits in generating economic fallacies is the sin of envy. It is a creeping, cancerous wickedness. The questions given above are a litmus test for envy. If you would hesitate pressing the button in the first scenario, for even a moment, then you have discovered that your heart is a central part of the problem. And anyone who hesitates pressing the first button will end his course of economic damnation by insisting that hellish poverty for all is far to be preferred than inequitable wealth for all.

Now this is a thought experiment intended to reveal attitudes. In the thought experiment, we are assuming that nobody is getting ripped off or murdered in order to achieve these results. We are assuming no sweetheart deals with the White House. We are pretending that I am not a manufacturer of the new curly light bulbs lobbying Congress in order to make my old school Edisonian competition illegal. No dirty work.

I am also assuming that it would be genuine good economic news that doesn’t have a hidden price tag sprung on everyone five years down the road. In other words, we are simply talking about genuine good news for all that increases the inequality vs. genuine bad news for all that decreases it. Under those circumstances, what should we choose? We have isolated the factor we are testing for (inequality of income), and so what do we think about it?

I am not trying to square the circle here. There are rough approximations of these two kinds of societies on earth already, and if you are fleeing a refugee camp and are at the airport trying to decide which kind to go to, which kind do you go to? Do you go where you will be better off, and others will be way better off? Or do you go where everyone is equally miserable? If the latter, then why not just head back to the refugee camp?

The political philosopher John Rawls once mooted his version of the Golden Rule by telling us that we should envision the structure of our ideal society without knowing where we were going to be born into it. His version tended to flatten the inequities in society because your odds of being born a serf were very high, and your odds of being born the czar were low.

But like all zero sum thinking, this approach to cutting up the pie into very, very equal pieces tends to assume that the whole pie can only come in one size, and that this means that more for him automatically means less for somebody else. This is what always gives the “unfairness” argument what little traction it has.

But suppose I could create an ideal society where all the “serfs” were 5X better off than the average citizen today is, and the one percenters were demigods living in sky palaces. Now what?

To complain about such thought experiments as being “unrealistic” and that they fail to take into account the “unintended consequences,” is to miss the point. And the thought experiment does not reduce everyone to the level of materialistic cattle, wherein we are assuming that a man’s soul consists of the abundance of his possessions (Luke 12:15). Of course it does not. What does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

But if someone is insisting that we fix the spiritual problem caused by inequality of possessions, and I propose a means of addressing the problem, to the satisfaction of all the non-envious people in the room, it is odd if that person would then turn around and complain that I am reducing everyone to the status of mere owners of goods. If we are going to play that way, then what I should do is simply tell all the poor people to count it all joy when they meet various trials. Good for their souls.

Slow Learners

A Hundred Blows to a Fool’s Back Is Wasted Effort

The attempt to comprehensively regulate and legislate human commerce has been with us ever since Adam.  It has always ended in signal failure.  That alone should teach us something.

Medieval sumptuary laws are an example.  It was widely thought that a craftsman who plied his trade, selling goods or services to support his family was engaged in a holy and righteous calling.  But a merchant who bought and sold goods for a profit without adding any value to them was a greedy exploiter.  Go figure. Consider R. H. Tawney’s description:

“. . . But the man who buys [a thing] in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.”  By very definition a man who “buys in order that he may sell dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity.  He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, is serves the lust of gain.” [R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1923), p. 34f.]

Laying aside the matter of intentions, motives, and goals in such ways of thinking, just focus on the application of such ideas.
  The local craftsman makes baskets to feed his family.  The medieval mindset commended such work as holy.  He sells them at a profit to generate the income to feed his children.  Very Christian.  But a merchant who buys in one country and sells more dearly in another is (according to this style of casuistry) adding no value, and is just motivated merely by greed and filthy gain.  His actions are evil.  He is exploiting the person he bought from and the person he sold to.

But what happens if the virtuous local craftsman were to sell at a price higher than required to feed the children?  When do his prices become so high that they have moved from necessity to “the lust of gain”?  When does he become a usurious exploiter?  There is no standard to tell beyond the prejudice of the local community.  Avarice is defined as going beyond the local price custom.  But the custom has no ethical or moral warrant in itself. 

Economic life either remains restricted to a wage-and-price controlled village, or it allows economic advances beyond immediate and legitimate sumptuary needs.  If the former, poverty becomes a permanent institution.  Economic growth, raising the general standard of living, is severely impeded, if not prevented outright. 

Medieval sumptuary laws were tossed aside, not as a result of one cause alone, but a combination of factors.  For example, the churches of the Reformation remained strongly committed to late medieval sumptuary laws until they became manifestly impractical, riddled with inconsistencies, and, therefore, injustice.  Like all wage and price control systems they failed in the application.  Human action is so complex that casuistry becomes impossibly, ridiculously complicated. 

The twentieth century saw them return with a vengeance.  Communist nations practised a rigorous system of wage and price controls–with the same object in view, namely, economic justice for all.  They failed terribly and comprehensively.  Whilst the propaganda machine in the Soviet Union declared that bad weather caused bad wheat harvests, the regularity of bad weather stretching out over sixty years mocked the evil fools in the Kremlin.

Fabian socialism sought to achieve the same end, without bloody revolution.  Redistributive taxation systems–almost universal in the West–are a further application of medieval sumptuary laws, albeit thoroughly secular.  Like the medieval version, they are doomed to failure.  Like medieval laws they have been inevitably inconsistent in application,  impossible to administer fairly, and therefore unjust.  But the closeness in ideology to medieval wage and price controls can be seen in the similar appeals employed: the rejection and hatred of the exploiter, of the filthy rich, of the avaricious, and of the greedy.  Such appeals and ad hominem arguments echo the simplistic medieval mind, secularisation notwithstanding. 

What then of sins like greed and avarice?  Are they really evils, condemned by Scripture?  Of course.  But not all sins are crimes–in fact, far from it.  The vast majority are not.  Many sins are not to be subject to human administrations or rules or punishments.  All sins of illicit motive fall into this category.  A man or a woman may look with lust upon another–which is evil–but to make it a crime would be to destroy human society under the most repressive regime imaginable. Covetousness and envy provide further examples.

The Christian Church made a grave mistake with respect to sumptuary laws.  Let’s not repeat it.  It is the fool who will not learn from the blows Providence has delivered to our backs.  And let’s not get sucked in by the false moralising of the secular socialists about greed, exploitation, and usury, smeared over with a patina of distorted and misappropriated Christian doctrines about care of the poor and love of one’s neighbour. 

Those who do not learn from history’s legacy are doomed to repeat it. 

A Few Left Wing Moral Contradictions

Potemkin Fakes

Left wing ideologues tend to hate people with money.  More accurately they hate other people with money, particularly if the selfsame other people have more moolah than they. The ratiocination to arrive at this rather sophisticated position is complex and turgid.  It runs like this: rich people can only become rich by exploiting the weak and the dispossessed.  Therefore, their wealth is evidence of immoral usury.  Moreover, it proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Sophisticated reasoning.

Now of course when left wing folk manage to garner some money of their own, their money is righteous (by definition).  Their money has been earned whilst they have been standing up for the poor and downtrodden, so their money is clean, laundered money.  Everybody else’s is corrupt and evil–presumably because it was earned in trade, rather than from taxpayer funded salaries paid out to politicians.  A classic example was provided by the last Labour administration in New Zealand.
  The Labour Finance Minister of the time railed against “rich pricks” (in New Zealand, colourful, crude public language is considered the virtue of an intellectual sophisticate), whilst his boss, the Prime Minister, Helen Clark was actually a millionaire.  But in the binary leftist worldview, her wealth was righteous and moral because it was somehow garnered whilst not exploiting the poor. Everyone else’s wealth is to be sneered at because it is dirty money.

But there remains a sure-fire way for the money of rich exploiters to be laundered into lily white righteous moolah.  This magical laundry process works instantly, as soon as some rich exploiter donates money to a leftist politician.  Instantly, the bad guy becomes good, his sins expiated.  Equally, all those he has exploited and expropriated from along the way to hoarding wealth are somehow restituted (no-one is quite sure how this actually happens).  Moreover, dirty money becomes lily white faster than the laundering of a Columbian drug cartel.

It is not surprising, then, to have seen all left-wing parties cosy up to Kim Dotcom–a self-styled plutocrat mogul–who is busily trying to buy his way into a position of political influence in New Zealand (primarily, it seems, to block his extradition to the United States to face indictment on reasonably serious charges.)  He has plenty of dance partners.  Like lemmings the left-wing parties have trooped out to his plutocrat mansion for one-on-one discussions: the Greens, New Zealand First (choke, choke), and even the Mana Party, currently the closest political manifestation of Trotskyitism on the political scene.  How can they compromise themselves so?  Easy.  As soon as Dotcom’s moolah hits a left-wing politician’s bank account, Dotcom’s soul will spring from purgatory, and his money will be lily-white.

The current crop of left-wing politicians and political parties are to be despised.  All of them to man, woman and transgendered ardently support political parties being funded by taxpayers.  But when the taxpayers recently revolted against such a blatant rort, they have all been reduced to polishing up their begging bowls whilst squatting outside the mansions of evil rich people.  The shame of it all.

But herein lies a deeper malaise.  In all the back rooms of the left-wing political parties you can hear the teeth grinding incessantly.  The reason little electoral traction can be found is due to not having money.  If only they had more money, the things they would be able to do!  The advertising, the events, the swishy cars–voters would flock to them.  In reality, none of them want to put in the hard yards of building a political party from the ground up–which requires, dare we say it, hard work and self-sacrifice and discipline and patience.  Not one of them is prepared to live in self-imposed poverty, donating every spare cent to the cause.  None of them want to build a political party which will take decades, if not generations of effort.  

They want instant self-gratification.  To achieve it, they want other peoples’ money.  They are up for sale.

We conclude with an illustration of the disease.  Trotskyite Mana cosying up to filthy-rich capitalist in exchange for some moolah–(as advocated on Facebook by Mana’s press secretary:

Guys, MANA DOTCOM!
Ok so we would be helping a fat white rich prick with a bunch of money, but it would obviously help MANA to! [sic] I’m not picking a side, just wanna be clear! The parties would not merge, we would share a list, and guaranteed MANA would have the top spots to start! If we did it, the difference could be 2 or 3 MANA MPs, and we remain our own party! It’s not all doom and gloom ! Could be the difference of having say John Minto and Te Hamua Shane Nikora in the House! Didn’t mention Annette Sykes cause she will already be there [sic] Doesn’t sound that bad when you look at it like that aye?

Some party faithful appear to have a different view.

Niki O’Connor: What has his skin colour got to do with it?? Imagine the uproar if that was reversed!!

Greig Wilson:  It sounds bad to me.

Paul Rose: I have a lot of respect for Hone and the Mana Party. That would vanish instantly if this loony idea came to fruition. It’s also not really keeping within the spirit of MMP.
 
Marion Peka:  Mana will come off as looking very desperate. Sad really.

David Gurney: You have got to be kidding!

Ebony Sullivan: Dont do it… please hes another john keys but worse… hmble your guys self and partner up wif maori you go to dotcom im out sori bt ur party would b his bitch seen it to many times.. better to lose honourably than to win disgracefully.

It’s Lenin versus Trotsky all over again.  What a hoot.  What a disgrace.  

Spitballing

Serious For All Of Twenty-Four Hours

Apparently Labour revenue guru, David Clark was just making things up as he went along when he pronounced that a Labour government would ban the country from using Facebook, unless it paid more tax in New Zealand.  It took only twenty-four hours for the Labour leader to put out that particular fire.  Labour and Cunliffe (who did not rule it out for twenty-four hours) and Clark now have more scorched earth on their collective face than burns from a P-lab explosion. 

This from 3News:

Banning Facebook was an extreme suggestion from Labour Party MP David Clark – and it took party leader David Cunliffe just 24 hours to shut it down.  Mr Cunliffe has now ruled it out completely, but ridicule from the Government still came hard and fast.

But here is the point.  Banning Facebook was not an extreme suggestion, at least not to the statist mindset of the New Zealand’s left.  Impractical and impossible to implement to be sure.  Covered with envious bile, naturally.  But the lust to control the lives of citizens is as natural and reasonable to the statist mindset as breathing the fecund air of their back room cabals. 

Here is another example of the genre–this time from David Parker, Labour’s shadow finance minister, via Hansard:

Hon DAVID PARKER: … Neither do we think it is fair that some of the multinationals plunder the New Zealand economy—like Google, like Apple, like Facebook—take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the New Zealand economy, compete with New Zealand – based companies, and pay virtually no tax. 

Note the emotive rubbish here.  We poor sooks in New Zealand are sitting like primitive idiots, powerless, whilst Google, et al.  plunder us.  That’s theft with menace, folks.  Look at all those poor countrymen whipped into line outside the Apple shop, being forced to by smart phones, lest Apple shoot their mothers and children. 

And these companies are said to be actually competing with New Zealand.  Parker, who hails from the deep, deep South must know of a secret, hillbilly silicon valley high up somewhere up in the Mackenzie Basin, bustling with high tech companies competing with Google and Apple. To be sure, no-one north of the Bombay Hill has ever heard of it.  But there you go. 

Mr Parker goes on to tell us that big international money is not going to impress him.  This chap is not for turning.

We in the Labour Party are willing to move on that, but the Government is not because once again it is preferring the interests of the wealthy. It is not willing to take on the multinationals, despite the fact that there is a glaring unfairness there, that they should pay their fair share of tax too, which they do not, and that there are mechanisms that could be used.

Oh, let’s go whole hog.  What about Toyota and Mitsubishi and Hyundai?  They take mega-millions out of New Zealand (that is, they sell lots of vehicles here) and they are not paying nearly enough tax.  But here is an idea, Mr Parker.  Why not slap tariffs on these goods and services on all these furrin companies?  That will do the trick.  We are sure that will be one of the “mechanisms” that you have in mind.

But here the deceit and the legerdemain becomes evident.  This harrumping about filthy rich, multi-national companies might play to the visceral ruminations of socialists.  But what is really under attack here is the ordinary kiwi, the despised rube, who will end up paying more for goods and services, and thereby forced into a lower standard of living, as a result of Labour’s ante-diluvian proposals.  Welcome to the world of visceral ignorant socialist envy, feeding off the lives of oppressed, downtrodden citizens.  The real workers’ paradise of the socialist.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

Besetting Sins

If I Cannot Have It, Nobody Can

Envy is a besetting sin of our age.  It is also the sin few people talk about, which may just be a clue as to how pervasive and enslaving it has become.  Envy is covetousness on steroids–its most egregious expression. 

Kevin Williamson describes envy thus:

Of the seven deadly sins, envy may not be the wickedest, but it is the most embarrassing. To be possessed by envy is to admit a humiliating personal inadequacy: We do not envy others those attainments that we think we too might achieve, but those we despair of ever possessing. Wrath, greed, pride, lust — all assume a certain self-possession. Sloth and gluttony are practically standard issue in times of plenty such as these. Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin.

But when does covetousness elide into envy, its most extreme manifestation?
Covetousness becomes envy when one is more satisfied with the destruction of the object of envy than anyone possessing it.  It is the spirit of, “If I cannot have it, nobody else can either.”  It is indeed, in that sense, the small man’s sin. 

An infamous example of envy at work  is found in I Kings 3, when two prostitutes both claimed the same child as their own.  One was the genuine mother; the other had smothered her own child to death accidentally at night.  She surreptitiously swapped her dead child with the living child.  The mother whose child had been stolen sought for justice before King Solomon.  In this celebrated court case, Solomon asks for a sword to be brought and the child to be divided.  The genuine mother of the child pleaded with the king not to do that, but to give it to the other woman.  We take up the story at verse 23:

Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; and the other says, ‘No; but your son is dead, and my son is the living one.'” And the king said, “Bring me a sword,”  So a sword was brought before the king.  And the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.”  Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means put him to death.”  But the other said, “He shall be neither mine nor yours; divide him.”  Then the king answered and said, “Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means put him to death; she is his mother.” 

The envious mother would rather that her opponent had no child and be as she was, than the child be let to live.   Envy wants to bring all men down to my (or my group’s) disadvantaged, poor, benighted position.  “If I cannot have it, nobody can have it,” is the shibboleth of envy.  It is the most destructive and extreme form of covetousness.  Its motive is malice and hatred of mankind.

Another face of envy is hatred of alms and the generosity of others.  Envy would rather the wealth of the more better off be destroyed than be given to others.  As Edmund Spenser wrote about Envy personified:

He hated all good works and virtuous deeds
And him no less, that any like did use
And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds
His alms for want of faith he doth accuse.
[Cited by Williamson in National Review Online]

Then again, envy would rather that no-one get ahead, rather than one or two excel.  We call this, in New Zealand, the Tall Poppy Syndrome.  Anyone who excels, succeeds, gets ahead can be subject to withering criticism and general opprobrium.  Envy wants all to be at our level, and its malice takes more satisfaction at the mighty falling than we aspiring to and achieving their level. Envy’s social organising principle is enforced egalitarianism. 

Envy broods over the disparity between rich and poor, and becomes apoplectic when the gap widens.  Never matter that the poor might have become better off in aggregate.  It’s that the rich got more rich, at a faster rate.  Better that no-one (including the poor) got richer or better off than the gap between rich and poor become bigger.  If I cannot have what you have got, then nobody should have it.  Thus, envy’s malice. 

Finally, note the envious chord in the Obama doctrine about increasing taxes upon the wealthy.  When it was pointed out to him that there is absolutely no evidence that taxing the wealthy more did anything to make the poorer better off, he responded with something along the lines of, “I don’t care.  It’s the principle of the thing.” 

[The envious]  convince others — and themselves, probably — that they are driven by compassion, but they are in fact driven by envy: Note Barack Obama’s insistence that tax rates on the wealthy should be raised even if doing so produced no fiscal benefit — it’s just “the right thing to do,” he said, necessary “for purposes of fairness.” The battle hymn of “Nobody needs that much money!” has a silent harmony line: “And I get to decide how much is enough!”

The principle of envy is, “If I (and my fellows) cannot have it, nobody can”.  Better that neither of us have the baby, than the baby live and that other woman have it.  Envy is covetousness on steroids.

 

Modern Aristo-Plutocrats

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Marie Antoinette’s infamous, “Let them eat cake” has entered the popular lexicon as a byword for sociopathic disdain for the poor.  There is some serious doubt as to whether poor old Marie ever uttered the phrase.  It was attributed to her by one Jean Jacques Rousseau who never let the facts get in the way of a ripping slander. 

Rousseau’s Confessions (in which the slander appears) was written in 1768–two years before Marie Antoinette moved to France.  The line also appears in Rousseau’s journal notes “years before Antoinette was born.”  Ouch.  But it proved a useful pretext and propaganda tool to stir up envy and anger, inciting the odd riot or two.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.172.]

The picture of an uncaring, wealthy aristocracy who hate the poor abides.  It appeals to our baser instincts.  It certainly appealed to Rousseau who, himself, was an acute despiser of the poor and a “suck-up-to-nobility-kind-of-chap”.  If Rousseau could not join the aristocracy, he hated them; when he was welcomed and celebrated in their circles, he fawned over them.  He was a pathetic fellow in so many ways. 

But his bitter word, falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette, lives on.  Ironically, it is amongst modern democrats and socialists that the sentiment conveyed by Rousseau has the most traction.  Uber-wealth and gaudy displays are the hallmark of the modern celebrity culture, along with a fashionable assuaging commitment to socialism.  The latter serves to salve the conscience for all that wealth so ostentatiously on display.  Marie Antoinette had nothing on our modern aristo-plutocrats.

From medieval times through the end of the Enlightenment, kings and queens draped their monarchies will sumptuary laws and rules of grammar to communicate to all, including themselves, that they were special.  The only place in America where such arrangements endure is in the oxygen-enriched confines of Hollywood doyens (and those outposts of modern medievalism known as college campuses). 

Jennifer Lopez bars people from photographing her elbows.  Mariah Carey has an assistant whose only job is to hand her towels.  Also, wherever Mariah goes, her courtiers must first remove posters of rival “divas”, lest they offend her delicate sensibilities: Thou shalt have no divas before me!  Kim Basinger is “allergic” to the sun and requires an assistant to carry an umbrella to protect her on the off chance she might be exposed to solar radiation. . . .

Sylvester Stallone . . . once refused to continue with an interview until his hotel room was painted a more “likeable” peach.  Mike Myers almost quite the filming of Wayne’s World because he didn’t have any margarine for his bagel.  Sean Penn had an assistant swim the dangerous and polluted currents of New York’s East River just to bring him a cigarette.  Only members of Jennifer Lopez’s double-digit entourage re permitted to gaze into the windows of her soul.  Various stars travel with full-time aromatherapists, masseuses, acupuncturists, and, one presumes, court jesters.  Oprah Winfrey has a bra handler.  Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, and, of course Barbra Streisand are just a handful of the folks who think they’re on the same plateau as Japanese emperors, Turkish pashas, and medieval kings.  [Jonah Goldberg, op cit., p. 175f.]

Poor Marie would have been left gasping with incredulity.  But virtually to a man or woman these latter day monarchialists also espouse socialism for the masses–by which they mean others–most notably business corporations and “rich people” (that is, people less wealthy than themselves), should be made to pay for the poor via government extorted redistribution.   Ah, that noble member of the lumpen proletariat who swam the river to bring Sean Penn his cigarette!  The glory of the heroic labourer displayed for all to gaze upon with wonder.  And Sean choreographed it all.  Long live King Sean.

Just a few days ago we were treated to the embarrassing spectacle of Oprah Winfrey taking umbrage at a member of the lower classes in Switzerland who apparently did not realise just how wealthy Winfrey was.  A shop assistant (like all good thrift-conscious Swiss) tried to steer Winfrey to consider a cheaper handbag. (In Switzerland they call this customer service.) Winfrey was offended. Cheaper!  Does she not know who I am?  Winfrey then reportedly went on a crusade of self-affirmation, grandly disclosing to the world that for a while she considered  going back to the store to buy out all the stock just to make the plutocratic point that she could.  But maybe that was a bit too gauche.  Instead she made herself out to be a victim of racism, which was fifty times worse. But, let’s be clear.  Winfrey was the victim here. Her aristocratic sensibilities had been offended.  Maybe her bra-handler mishandled her underwear that day and Winfrey was in a bad mood.  Good help is hard to find, after all. Who knows.  More importantly, who cares.

For our part, we recall the proverb learned at the kitchen table: “a fool and his money are soon parted”.  And so it shall no doubt be for our modern monarchial plutocrats. In the meantime, spare a thought for these poor creatures, having to live one’s life surrounded by fawning Rousseauesque bra-handlers, elbow protectors and cigarette fetchers.  They deserve the prison walls of their self-spun cocoons.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America (About Inheritance and Covetousness)

That Comfy Little Covet-Cubby

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

 Douglas Wilson

A number of people in my generation are coming to an age when issues of inheritance are becoming more and more . . . relevant. Our parents are being gathered to their fathers, and we are left to sort out the stuff. The fact that we do not do well in this is not a new phenomenon. We should recall that the grudge that the older brother had toward the prodigal was all tangled up with inheritance issues.

And then there is this.

“And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:13-15).

The last of the Ten Commandments tells us not to covet stuff we have no claim to whatever — and it is still a most necessary reminder. No commandment trips us up like this one does.
In our day, we have a vast governmental apparatus dedicated to helping us get our paws on our neighbor’s stuff, and we have a vaster kultursmog of self-justifying assumptions to help us call that greasy little feeling in our hearts a zeal for social justice. But the Tenth Commandment is talking about our neighbor, someone unrelated to us.

Here, in this passage, Jesus warns us explicitly about covetousness in the context of a dispute about an inheritance. Here we are told not to covet something we believe we have a legitimate claim to — we are told not to covet our own.

Things can get pretty tangled pretty quick. There wasn’t a will, grandma promised the same thing to three different people over a span of two decades, objects with sentimental value do not have the same value family-wide, and so on. Jesus didn’t even start to get into it. His retort was fairly blunt — who made me the executor? Think about that — there is going to be a reading of the (garbled) will, the font of all the trouble, and you do the most pious thing you can think of and invite Jesus to it. And get this — He refuses. Why would He climb into that particular snake pit?

But He does give us a principle to hold on to. It doesn’t matter that it is yours by rights. Beware of covetousness. It doesn’t matter that she promised it to you when you were ten and your pigtails were really cute. Beware of coveting what you believe with all your heart is your own. Jesus will go with us into that room, but only in the garb of freedom from covetousness. If we put on Jesus, that is what it has to look like.

Many years ago, Nancy and I had an oblique connection to an unpleasant inheritance spat. We determined at that time that we never wanted to receive anything that was unblessed. If it was unblessed, we didn’t want it. If it was really unblessed, we really didn’t want it. Moreover, as part of this, we resolved never to be “those people,” the people who say “it isn’t so much the sterling silver zahzzysahzzy, it’s the principle of the thing.” It is too the zahzzysahzzy, ensconced in its comfy little covet-cubby down in your heart.

It is an inheritance dispute, and so it really might be yours. All the more reason for letting it go.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Good Friday and the Death of Same Sex Envy 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 29 March 2013

Allow me to start with my conclusion so that when I wind up there at the end, there will be no surprises. The same sex marriage crusade has nothing whatever to do with what people can do sexually in private, and it has everything to do with what you will be allowed to say about it in public. We are not talking about whether private homosexual behavior will be penalized, but whether public opposition to homosexual behavior will be penalized. Further, there is only one effective response to this, which is the cross of Jesus Christ.

When I have made this point before, the comeback is always something like, “No, no, you Christians will still have the guaranteed right of free speech . . . honest.” And if you believe that, I have this Cypriot bank account I would like to open up for you . . . it’s insured.

The words may sound reassuring but they have the significant disadvantage of being false. Bunyan’s Faithful had a good hunch.

“Then it came burning hot in my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.”

Some of the things that IQ tests throw at you are questions that mark your ability in pattern recognition. One of the reasons that evangelical Christians fail so miserably in these cultural IQ tests we keep taking is because of precisely that failing — we don’t do pattern recognition well at all. Patterns remind us of that legalistic church we grew up in. Not only can we not see the pattern, we think it might be a sin to think that there could be a pattern. In fact, we are so bad at it that Lucy has pulled away our football a hundred times, and we don’t even know that she is doing that. At least Charlie Brown knew the potential problem coming up.

In this relativistic age, we are solemnly assured that there are certain things off the table. No, we would never go for that. Do you remember what they were telling you ten years ago? What would we never go for then? Twenty years? No, no, they say, patting our hands reassuringly. Polygamy? Out of the question. Incest? No way! Pedophilia? Beyond the pale. Bestiality? Don’t be a sicko.

But then, while the battle over “consenting adults with same-sex marriages, adorned with lasting and mature life-long commitments” is still ongoing, comes now Victoria’s Secret with a new line for teen-agers — “Bright Young Things.” These jailbait undies had messages on them like “Feeling Lucky?” and “Call Me.” Our family was talking about this last night and Nate said they should actually have messages like “Don’t touch this, Uncle Earl.”

So we really need to work on pattern recognition. We would see it if we thought about it, but we don’t want to think about it because that makes us realize that we might have to demonstrate courage some time soon in our lives. But think about it. What will you be ridiculed for opposing ten years from now? What will you be a “hater” for in 2023? Anybody who thinks that the sexual revolution is about to realize all its goals within the next year or two, and then we will all settle down in peaceful democratic harmony, is someone who probably ought to have their car keys taken away.

This is Good Friday. This the day that we mark the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus. This day was the day He spread His arms out wide to gather up the sin of the world. And at the festering center of that great mass of sin, we find putrid sin of envy. Envy bites and spits, and wants nothing to do with the way of holiness. But Jesus still died, and with Him we see the conquest of envy. Jesus died so that envy might die. Jesus died so that envy will die.

Because we in the Church have faltered in preaching, really preaching, the substitutionary, vicarious death of Christ on the cross, we have seen a great resurgence of envy in our day. It is the sin that is driving all these overwhelming cultural challenges that face us. This sin is at the heart of all of it. We are bad at federal math because we want somebody else to pay their “fair share.” We want homos to be able to marry because of a thirsting envy that thinks it can be slaked with something as absurd as the label “marriage.” We butcher children because we envy the lifestyles of those who are unemcumbered with having to care for little ones.

Envy is not the entire old man, but it is an essential organ of his. Take away a man’s liver and the man dies. Take away the old man’s envy, and he will die too — and will rise a new man in Christ.

Protective legislation is something that envy will always demand, but when the legislation is passed and signed, the unhappy ache is still there. So then there will be legislation against anyone who dares point out that the ache is still there. He must be shut up, for how can we have a true democracy with all these haters running around loose? So we can call two men in the sack together “married,” and we can police any hate speech that might hint otherwise. But there is one thing we cannot do. We cannot take those two men and turn one of them into a woman, and make the other one a man who wants to be with a woman. And so the ache and self-loathing will only ramp up further.

Yes, yes, I know . . . there are surgeons who claim to be able to make one of them a woman, and this is yet another testimony to how far envy will go. Just as the priests of Baal cut themselves with knives, so the acolytes of Envy hire the surgical knives. But all they can do is mutilate a man and call it woman. Yes, and some of these men even arrive at this state of mutilated masculinity, call themselves women, and then promptly become lesbians. Envy likes to toy with its prey before the final devouring.

This is why there is no simple political solution for the peculiar kind of frenzy that has got us all by the throat. America needs to come to Jesus. By this I mean that America needs to come to the divine Son of God who became a man for us, and who lived a perfect, sinless life on our behalf, who went to the cross — as we mark on this day — was buried in a cold sepulchre, and who rose again from the dead, and all in accordance with the Scriptures, which cannot be broken.

Unless and until we do that, we will continue to be confounded by the differences between red ink and black ink, men and women, children and lumps of tissue. We have been struck with a judicial blindness, and the only one who can heal our sight is the Lord Jesus. Pray that He walks to the very center of our country, Nebraska say, pray that He spits on the ground there, and applies the mud to our eyes. Far better that than the mud we have been applying to everything else.

But change the metaphor. America needs to know that when Jesus comes to our house, He will go through all of the rooms and throw many of our most precious things out. But the first place He will go is down into the basement to find that ramshackle cardboard kennel where we keep that semi-domesticated sewer rat Envy. We always used to go down there in the evening and feed it the delicacies of spite we gathered during the course of the day. But when Jesus goes down there, knife in hand, it will not be to feed it anything. We should really get accustomed to the sound of that squealing we hear, because when the reformation comes, there will be a lot of it.

Envy at Work

Hating  Business

The Left’s pathological hatred of business is nothing more than a hangover from antediluvian cloth cap socialism.  It continues to seethe palpably in the rank and file of the unions, the Labour Party and the Green Party. 

This contempt for business springs from primitive socialist principles such as its dystopian egalitarian ideal (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need); the idea that all profit represents exploitation of labour; and the notion that businesses run for profit represent institutionalised theft, whereby if a business makes more than break even financial results it is charging too much; it is “ripping off” its customers.  Finally, the Left believes that business owners are lazy: they allegedly make money off other people’s hard work whilst they themselves do little or nothing.  

This cluster of bizarre, incoherent cluster of  beliefs make up the Left’s antipathy to business and business owners.  Beneath it all lies a more sinister, destructive social evil–envy. 

Rodney Hide takes the on the Left’s pathology up front.

Bravo the Real Business Class 
By Rodney Hide
Sunday Mar 10, 2013
NZ Herald

The left’s latest cause is for businesses to cough up a “living wage”. They really have no idea. They think running a business is easy.  That’s because they have never done it. The left think you just turn up each day and the profits are deposited each week.

But many businesspeople don’t make the minimum wage, let alone the “living wage”. They work all hours. They sweat about making the wage bill each week. And they must suffer the depredations of petty and contradictory government rules.

We are very lucky to have them. The income they generate pays all our wages, either directly or indirectly. Politicians, teachers, police officers and government officials pay no net tax. Their wages are paid out of taxes. The tax they pay is nominal only. They owe their lifestyle to businesspeople who generate the income on which all tax is paid.

Business would survive without government. But government wouldn’t survive without business.  Lefty politicians pay lip service to small business. And then attack big business. But big business is just a small business that succeeds.  It’s incoherent to be for small business but against small business succeeding.  Besides, business success is the social success that matters most. It’s the success of providing what people actually want at a price they are prepared to pay.

The anti-business sentiment that runs through New Zealand schools, universities, politics and media is bizarre.  It’s a sentiment borne of a lack of experience and comprehension.  It’s behind the left’s call for a living wage, the idea that prosperity can somehow be conjured out of the air simply by calling for it. 

We also see the left’s ignorance when business succeeds and when it fails. They see the money that follows business success as somehow unearned. And they see business failure as something odd, something wrong, and as someone’s moral failure.  They view with disdain the loss of jobs, but don’t thank Mainzeal for providing the jobs in the first place.  Besides, those who lose jobs are invariably picked up by others in business who can use their skills and time to better effect.

The exceptions to re-employment aren’t the fault of the market but of government rules, regulations and handouts that vainly attempt to protect people from the vicissitudes of life. 

We need more business people. The continual struggle and challenge to employ people and resources to best effect is what makes an economy dynamic and wages higher.  The businesspeople picking themselves up from failure are to me the boxer pushing himself up from the mat bloodied and bruised, sweaty and wearied, refusing to give up and determined to fight on.

I cheer their courage and doggedness and what they give us all.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A World of Right Reason 

Money, Love, Desire – On Scandal
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 18 February 2013

When the apostle describes a generic condition of unbelief, it is interesting how he does it. When we lived in unbelief, what was the atmosphere we breathed continually?

“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3).

For Paul, putting off the old man, the old way of being a human, involves shedding the snake skin of malicious snark. “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice” (Eph. 4:31). He says something very similar in Colossians. When we lived in the world of unbelief, all such things were natural. “But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth” (Col. 3:8).

This is not limited to the apostle Paul. It is not one of his personal hobby horses. James tells us that the spirit in us veers off toward envy (Jas. 4:5), but hastens to reassure us that God gives more grace. The implication is that apart from such grace, malice and envy are the normal default settings for us.
Peter assumes the same thing. When we come to Christ, we do so “laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings” (1 Pet. 2:1).

Now all this ties in with what I have been arguing about how the world runs on envy and accusation. You can see how easily a number of such sins cluster together. The best defense is always a good offense, and rather than waiting around to be accused, many who are riddled with guilt look for opportunities to point the finger first. Their envy selects the target, the accusation puts the target back on his heels, pride makes victory mandatory and lies necessary, and so forth.

Now God’s intention for the company of believers is not to have this spirit of accusation imported, only with the addition of theological and orthodox adjectives in the accusations. We are called to do something different, and not to do the same thing decorated differently.

This means that God’s picture of the world outside is a world of tangles, strategems, lies, vituperation, malice, back-biting, and all the rest of it. God’s picture of the company of saints is that of a great pavilion, set apart from the “strife of tongues” “Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man: Thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues”(Ps. 31:20).

But of course, this is not how the world of unbelief describes itself. The world of unbelief describes itself as a place or urbane sophistication, or frankness, of scientific inquiry, of openness in dialogue, of integrity and mutual affirmation. Remember that the devil, the accuser, is the father of lies (John 8:44), and this is the central lie. He loves the word integrity.

Acceptance of this line of propaganda is what keeps many dissatisfied unbelievers from asking the right kind of pointed questions. In their minds, there is no question but that their world is filled with malice and envy. The home they grew up in was full of it, their education was full of it, their circle of high school friends was full of it, and all their ex-lovers were the worst. But one of the things the spirit of accusation does is reassure the unsettled that the system is fine. Such a parishioner is told that the holy mother Church is above it all — he has just been unfortunate in his choice of pew. But Scripture declares that the whole church of High-Minded Accusation is riddled with hypocrisy. The whole thing is a mess, front to back.

When someone comes to realize that the whole system is bad, they have come to the point where they will consider “putting off the old man.” In order to come to Christ, a man has to do more than depart from himself, although he must certainly do that (Matt. 16:24). A man must depart from the world (1 John 2:15; Jas. 4:4). He must repudiate the system of accusation, and the entire apparatus of it. True conversion is departure from one world, and entry into another. Regeneration is the result of dying to the old humanity and coming to life in the new humanity. The work of the gospel in the world is to highlight and make manifest the high contrast between children of God and children of the slandering accuser.

The distinction is not found in temples. The Hindus have temples. The distinction is not altars. The Buddhists have altars. The distinction is not possession of a sacred text. The Muslims have that.  The distinction is not reason and science. The atheists have some of that.

“In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:10-12).

And because of this new birth into a world free of condemnation and accusation, we find that all these things have been added to us. We are a living temple made up of living stones, our lives are offered up as living sacrifices on a perpetual altar, we have a book teeming with everlasting life, and our brains, once broken and full of malice, have been set free. We are born into a world of right reason.

The "Invisible Hand" At Work

 Vlad the Impaler Whacks France

Providence has a way of trammelling the avarice and humbling the hubris of  the New Model Man.  Believing he answers to no-one but himself, the Great Humanist Man steps forth to create, as if ex-nihilo, the perfected human society.  His key tool is law–the laws of command and control. 

At that point, all of creation seems to conspire against our pathetic Hero, making nugatory his grand designs and utopian schemes.  We call this the work of Providence–or what Adam Smith termed the Invisible Hand.  Christians know and believe it to be the Hand of the Living God, governing the world to secure His purposes, not those of our pathetic Hero.

Taxing the rich more has become fashionable again in the envy-dripping drawing rooms of our modern Don Quixotes.
  Let’s extract more money off the rich so that we can fund our utopian plans. From Obama to David Cameron to Francois Hollande–glistening avatars all of the New Model Man–the envy wealth tax has been applied.  But a counter conspiracy begins, as if by magic.  The rich move.  They decamp to more clement places. 

The latest example is French actor, Gerard Depardieu who has decamped to live in Belgium, and, in one of the most delicious ironies of the year, has been granted Russian citizenship by Vlad the Impaler.  This from Stuff:

Depardieu has waged a battle against a proposed super tax on millionaires in his native country. French President Francois Hollande plans to raise the tax on earned income above €1 million (NZ$1.58 million) to 75 percent from the current 41 percent, while Russia has a flat 13-percent tax rate. . . . As Depardieu’s criticism of the proposed tax roiled his country, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called him “pathetic.”Depardieu responded angrily in an open letter. “I have never killed anyone, I don’t think I’ve been unworthy, I’ve paid €145 million in taxes over 45 years,” the 64-year-old actor wrote. “I will neither complain nor brag, but I refuse to be called ‘pathetic’.”

Depardieu said in the letter that he would surrender his passport and French social security card. In October, the mayor of a small Belgian border town announced that Depardieu had bought a house and set up legal residence there, a move that was slammed by Hollande’s newly-elected Socialist government.

Overnight, the French government’s tax base shrinks.  Put taxes up upon the wealthy and less wealthy people pay in tax.  Funny that.  The law of opposite unintended consequences at work.  The New Model Man is consigned to shouting insults and shaking clenched fists.  And for Depardieu, to be aided and abetted by Vlad the Impaler adds bitter insult to cruel injury.

The Kremlin statement gave no information on why Putin made the citizenship grant, but the Russian president had expressed sympathy with the actor in December, days after Depardieu reportedly said he was considering Russian citizenship. “As we say, artists are easily offended and therefore I understand the feelings of Mr. Depardieu,” Putin said.

Who would have thought that Vlad was such a tender hearted, sensitive guy?

But this is not just a French phenomenon.  In Maryland, US the state government deliberately targeted the wealthy in an envy tax to plug its deficit hole as its reckless spending on creating the New Model Man and the perfected human society yawned into a chasm.  The results were perfectly predictable:

A new study finds Maryland’s attempt to raise tax revenue by hiking taxes on “the rich” has backfired, as the state’s wealthy job creators simply packed up and moved.

“The study, by the anti-tax group Change Maryland, says that a net 31,000 residents left the state between 2007 and 2010, the tenure of a ‘millionaire’s tax’ pushed through by Gov. Martin O’Malley,” CNBC reports. “The Change Maryland study found that the tax cost Maryland $1.7 billion in lost tax revenues. A county-by-county analysis by Change Maryland also found that the state’s wealthiest counties also had some of the largest population outflows.  “In total, Maryland has added 24 new taxes or fees in recent years, Change Maryland says. Florida, which has no income-tax, has been a large recipient of Maryland’s exiled wealthy.”

Maryland is worse off than ever before.  Its utopian pretensions are crumbling into dystopian folly.   They have just been whacked by the Invisible Hand of the Lord.  And it’s not just Maryland:

Maryland isn’t alone.  As California raises taxes on that state’s productive citizens, many have fled to Nevada and Texas in record numbers.

All in all, states with lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich, are finding job growth grow at twice the national rate.

The Great Humanist Man steps forth proudly to cast off the shackles of the Son of Man.  He, Who sits enthroned in the heavens, laughs at their folly.  His providential law of opposite unintended consequences once again smacks down the arrogant and the proud. 

This, of course, is not to say the rich are righteous.  Far from it in many, many cases.  The difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven remains a timeless reality, as does the extreme difficulty of a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  But it is to say the confabulations and conspiracies of  the New Model Man to create the perfect world are as condemned as any secular Unbelieving rich person’s arrogance.  That the two should work against each other, frustrating their respective dreams and pretensions, is as ironic as Vlad extending the sensitive hand of compassion to a wealthy man.  Usually he imprisons plutocrats, then steals all their property.  For the good of Russia, naturally. 

Bitterness and Thwarted Hopes

Hell Hath No Fury . . . 

It’s official.  Well, it’s in the Guardian, so that makes it a grave matter, non?  It was only a few short months ago that Francois Hollande was elected President of France.  He came into the Champs-Elysees riding a big white horse, touting the biggest election victory for socialism in living memory.  He was going to turn Europe around.  He was going to tax the rich (70 percent at the margin).  He was going to stand up to Angela Merkel.  He was going to rein in France’s soaring public debt.  He was . . . .  Now, it seems he was going . . .  always going to go down the tubes. 

Here is the Guardian‘s summary:

When François Hollande became French president in May, he kept his old mobile phone number so old friends could still reach him to give their frank views. The first Socialist party president in 17 years may be regretting that now: six months after the victory street party at Paris’s Bastille, where he vowed to save Europe from one-size-fits-all austerity, his popularity is plummeting.

He has now broken the record as the most unpopular French president at the six-month mark of a mandate. Only 36% of French people have confidence in Hollande, according to the latest poll by TNS-Sofres for Le Figaro magazine. By comparison, the rightwing Nicolas Sarkozy had 53% approval ratings six months after his election in 2007.

What’s the problem.  Well, the received wisdom within the Left Wing world view is that it is not a matter of personality or policy.  It is execution.  Hollande is still a nice, unassuming guy.  It’s just that his government has proved to be less firm than a wobbly jelly. 

By contrast, Hollande’s opinion poll nose-dive is not about personal animosity – he has kept up his image as a modest president – it’s his politics, specifically his way of doing politics, which is under attack. The Socialist leadership and government is seen as confused, accused by its opponents of amateurism and inaction. Even the leftwing daily Libération recently dubbed Hollande and his prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault “The Apprentices”.

But the problems lie deeper than that.  Hollande ran a typical socialist campaign appealing to envy and greed.  The reason ordinary French folk were suffering was because of the rich exploitative nasties who earned more than the average bloke.  It was because of the Germans’ demand for austerity.  It was caused by the nasty fat-cat, cigar smoking bankers.  Since  all France has accepted the socialist world-view hook, line, and sinker pretty much since the Napoleonic revolution, anachronisms notwithstanding, these arguments appeared persuasive and powerful. 

Secondly, the socialist solutions to the problem were facile and easy to implement: tax the rich.  Isolate the enemy; then move in for the kill.  Any rich Frenchman or French business refusing to stay in the country and take the hit 70 percent tax seppeku cut to earnings was an implicit traitor to France.  Red meat to the socialist’s viscera that one–and they wanted to see lots of it spilling forth on the pavements. 

The core problem is that Hollande played to the electorate to win the election.  He aroused simplistic, naive expectations of straightforward, easy solutions where the only pain would be someone else’s.  But the truth and reality is far different.  Hollande now appears to know that.  Having aroused such visceral socialist expectations he has had to backtrack, dilute, prevaricate, water down.  But an electorate steeped in socialist nostrums and simplistic solutions were never likely to be impressed.  Moreover when a people believe government is a god, and the god fails to deliver, look out.  A nurtured sense of betrayal begins to take form.

The Guardian is not giving up on the vision.  To its mind

Hollande is forced to respect EU demands to cut the French deficit. But he must also persuade voters he has his own ideas. The old cliche of France being a country impossible to reform has given way to a searching quest for real structural solutions to rising unemployment, dying industry, low competitiveness, stuttering growth and the threat of recession.

Hollande favours slow, gradual “negotiation” in contrast to what he calls the “brutality” and headline-grabbing of the Sarkozy era. He has said there will be no “shock treatment” for Paris’s uncompetitive economy, despite an impatient Germany fearing France is the next sick man of Europe, but instead a slow, five-year-long approach. But his consensual approach has been construed in the public eye as inaction.

In other words, Hollande aroused the expectations of socialist France, promised decisive measures and easy solutions, appealed to envy and now is trying to walk it all back.  The electorate is increasingly angry and bitter.  Its secular god is not delivering; it is impotent.  Hell hath no fury like a scorned electorate riddled with socialist dogma and entitled expectations.  

As always in such circumstances the causes and effects are thick and complex.  Our summary above is doubtless simplistic–yet, we believe, true as far as it goes.  There will be other causes for electorate dissatisfaction.  For example, Lucia over at NZ Conservative has argued the case for electorate anger at the Hollande government’s intent to enforce genderless marriage upon the country in early 2013.  Issues such as this will doubtless be adding fuel to the fire.

Beware Guilt-Ridden White Liberals

Lunacy on a National Scale

New Zealand has shot itself in the head.  This is not some trifling wound to an extremity such as the foot.  This is a wound which makes the whole nation comatose, zombie like.

The received wisdom–promulgated by guilt-ridden whites–is that this country was stolen from Maori–the indigenous people at the time when European settlement began.  Every failing and inadequacy of the Maori race has been attributed to the grievance of that alleged injustice foisted upon them.  White elites have tormented themselves over this and resolved to put matters right.  Consequently, successive governments have agreed to a process whereby Maori can approach a tribunal, funded by the government, to investigate Maori grievance claims and make rulings in favour of Maori.

The socially liberal guilty conscience has been assuaged by this ingenious device.
  The Waitangi Tribunal  has been hailed as a wonderful example of a successful truth and reconciliation process.  But it is all a charade.  It is successful only insofar as it produces a constant flow of money from the rest of New Zealand to Maori. It’s New Zealand’s version of dane-gelding–that ancient practice of leaving gold on the shores to persuading raiding Vikings to take the money and go away.  Once the money spigot looks like getting turned off, Maori erupt in a splenetic febrile war dance–and guilt ridden whites tremble in their beds at night, clutching their revisionist rosary beads to their guilty breasts.

The actual historical cases of rip-off by the Crown against Maori are finite, historically provable, and remediable.  But as time has progressed, Maori claims have morphed into faux, manufactured grievances to keep the money train running.  Guilty white elites have rushed to agree.  So, now, the Waitangi Tribunal has lost all credibility.  It is a laughing stock to all except guilty white elites.

Rodney Hide, writing in the Herald exposes the nonsense.

Who would have believed it? Singing a song can make a river yours. Plus give you a chunk of a power company and a say over how that company’s run. Well, that’s what the Waitangi Tribunal says.  It’s not quite enough to just sing a song. You should also know the river’s taniwha [a mythical Maori beast] and use the river to wash away spells and curses. But the clincher is to recognise the river’s life force. Then it’s yours.

I am not making this up. These are the indicators that the tribunal says prove customary ownership of the country’s rivers and lakes. The tribunal concludes that New Zealand’s water systems, including beds, banks, water and aquatic life, are possessed by Maori. They say the closest English cultural equivalent to Maori customary rights is full ownership. The tribunal declares that Maori have rights of exclusive access and control of the water.  That is, Maori can decide who can and can’t use water.

The good news is that the claimants aren’t seeking to benefit from non-commercial uses of the water.  Well, not yet. That could still happen. It’s clear from the tribunal’s conclusions that Maori could do so if they so choose.  The tribunal says the claimants for now just want their property rights recognised, payment for the commercial use of their water, and enhanced authority and control over how their waterways are used. . . .

The ownership of water in underground aquifers is a little murkier than that of rivers and lakes. The tribunal says some of the country’s aquifers are owned by Maori. Those where taniwha lurk. Again, I am not making this up.  Grown-ups have written this report. And you work each week to pay them to do it. It’s extraordinary stuff.

I am all for property rights. They should be recognised and upheld. Property rights are essential to a peaceful, prosperous society.  But property rights must be certain and stable. There are no property rights where they are endlessly litigated. That’s why the Romans had a statute of limitations. It wasn’t possible under Roman law to go back to the dim, dark days to contest ownership.

So, too, with early English law. The cut-off date for claims of adverse possession was the day in 1135 when Henry I died. That date was then shifted forward to the coronation of Henry II in 1154. And so on.  The 1540 Act of Limitation prescribed a 60-year period for property claims. It makes sense. The statute of limitations serves to ensure certainty. Otherwise every piece of land and resource is open to endless claim and counter-claim. There is then no certainty or security and therefore no property rights.

It’s not possible to trace legitimate possession in an unbroken chain of legitimate transactions back to the original owners for any piece of land or enduring property. Human history has been too violent and untidy to do so. Hence the need for an arbitrary cut-off date.  But here we are in New Zealand with the tribunal reaching back to the dim, dark days to establish ownership. In doing so it tosses property rights in the air and and stretches our understanding of the past. It creates costly uncertainty and pits neighbour against neighbour as property rights are contested again and again.

The tribunal appears to have no grasp or comprehension of the cost and conflict it is inflicting on New Zealand.  The difficulty of reaching back to 1840 is made all the worse by Maori back then having no legal system, no concept of ownership, and having just endured 30-plus years of inter-tribal warfare that rewrote traditional hapu and tribal boundaries.

The Roman and English legal systems that declare “possession is nine-tenths of the law” and “finders-keepers” may seem arbitrary and unfair for those on the wrong side of the cut-off date. But it sure beats the pre-1840 system.

The tribunal’s happy-clappy view of pre-European property rights is a historical lie.  Song-singing and taniwha-spotting were no defence against a rampaging Hongi Hika or Te Rauparaha. Back then, it was “might makes right”.  A Maori could own only what he could grab – and hang on to. And that never included a river.

Our expectation is that this nonsense will go on forever–or at least until we undergo a form of national repentance.  Why?  Because the guilt ridden white establishment, the governing elites, have bought the revisionist historical lies.  They will always opt to pay, pay, and pay again.  And the payment will come from citizens, through the taxation system–one way or another.

New Zealand has shot itself in the head.  The wound is slowly bleeding out.  But the guilt ridden liberal elites feel good about it.  The death of the country will atone for their collective guilt feelings.

All of this is a perfect illustration of the biblical maxim that those who refuse to believe in the Living God end up clutching lies to their breasts–and the lies eventually kill.  Those who hate God’s wisdom, says the Scripture, love death. (Proverbs 8: 35,36)

The Politics of Envy and Hate

Broken Moral Compass

Want to know what’s wrong with the West?  Bono, speaking of his native Ireland, puts his finger on the problem.

In Ireland people have an interesting attitude to success; they look down on it. In America, you look up at . . . the mansion on the hill and say, “One day . . . that could be me.” In Ireland, they look up at the mansion on the hill and go, “One day I’m gonna get that bastard.”
Bono

The Myth of Social Equality

Cruel Envy

It’s an old saw, but with all the nonsense swirling about calling for equality and the terrible evils of inequality, it’s worth repeating.  What would happen if we introduced egalitarianism into sport?

The analogy is re-presented by Martin Robinson in the NZ Herald.  Yes, it has been said before, but worth repeating, especially because the champions of egalitarianism are lifting their lusty voice everywhere.

Kicking equality myth into touch

By Martin Robinson

Thursday Jan 5, 2012

Reports on the distribution of wealth in New Zealand usually reveal increasing inequality. Rugby is a good example of this widespread trend.

New Zealand rugby players come in all ages, shapes and sizes, and both sexes. Players vary greatly as regards their skill levels, commitment and training schedules. Rewards for players are extraordinarily unequal, as most actually pay to play while a very few are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is this fair or unfair? Should the Labour Party, the Greens or the Occupy Auckland movement campaign for more-equal payment of rugby players? Should the “greedy” All Blacks be forced to hand over some of their colossal income to the more impoverished fellow players? Should the Government intervene to reduce this glaring disparity in rewards?

Reducing the pay of All Blacks and spreading it among the less well rewarded rugby players, even if it is a good idea in theory, poses immense practical problems. Would the All Blacks agree to a significant pay cut? If they did, the team would become a 2nd or 3rd XV of players who were willing to play for the reduced reward. We would never beat the Aussies, and maybe the All Blacks team would disappear. So the equality campaign would have succeeded in narrowing pay differentials, but at the cost of destroying the world’s greatest rugby team. . . .

Every family is unequal. Both my brothers are much richer than I am, but I don’t envy them or think there is anything unfair about it. I don’t regard them as greedier than I am.  I am the poor relation. If I had worked harder, invested more wisely and spent less time on holiday, I would have more money in the bank, but they are the choices I made. I don’t regret anything so I’m content with our financial inequality. When I met my brother on holiday on the Gold Coast, I stayed in a motel-cum-backpackers while he stayed in the Sheraton.  Of course, my attitude could be very different. If I was an envious person, I could deplore the “injustice” of inequality, or blame Rogernomics and the capitalist system. Why should my brother drive around in a BMW coupe while I have a Suzuki? Why should he live in a gated community with a pool while I live in a plain two-bedroom unit? Well, he has earned it and I have not. It’s as simple as that. . . .

Every week, a thousand Kiwis are heading to Australia. Is this because Australia is a more equal society than New Zealand? Not one person is going for that reason. They are going because Australia offers more opportunity. Successful societies are the ones that provide the most opportunities, not the ones with the most equality of income or wealth.

The way to reduce poverty in New Zealand is to increase exports, improve workers’ skills and productivity, create more wealth and jobs, and then raise the minimum wage.  If New Zealand is becoming more unequal, the answer is for us poorer ones to work and save harder and smarter in order to even things up.

* Martin Robinson is a freelance writer living in West Auckland.

Well, actually we have seen it happen–the monumentally stupid idea that everyone should get the same recognition, the same reward because everyone is equal.  In children’s sport and primary school prizegivings there are now many egalitarians who practise what they preach.  Every child is rewarded equally so that no-one is “left out”. Everyone eventually earns “Best Player of the Day” in the course of the season.  We have watched it.  It is naive, puerile.

It is also immensely damaging to children, because the unspoken sub-text is: “Envy rules and rocks”.  Kids learn it very quickly.  It corrodes their souls. 

The World of Marxist Academia

Unmaking Decent Society

It’s a terrible world–at least according to Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at Auckland University.  Tim has provided us with his peculiar version of festive cheer, declaiming systemic injustice in New Zealand society.  And what is this gross injustice?  It is deeply imbedded income inequality.  You know–same old, same old.  The rich are getting richer and the poorer are not keeping up. 

This egregious situation is a threat to what Hazledine nominates as the Decent Society (upper caps are his).  According to Hazledine the Decent Society appears to be one where there are no great disparities between the unseemly wealthy and the grinding poor.  It is a society where incomes cluster around the median.  “Unrestrained, short-sighted greed” is unmaking us all. 

Hazledine goes on to give an example of the very thing he is decrying.
  Tim is a professor of Economics at Auckland University.  (For our US readers, please note that in the English educational system, “professor” denotes not a lecturer or teacher, but the top shebang in an academic department.) He tells us that the Vice-Chancellor’s stipend at Auckland University is $640,000 pa.  Ten years ago, his predecessor’s income was $360,000 pa. 

What possible justification could there be for such an obscene, (short-sighted greedy) increase?  Tim, an academic expert in economics, soberly tells us that there is “no objective economic reason” to justify this increase, and that the “vice-chancellors’ pay should have increased in real terms four times more than pay on the shop-floor”, and, more to the point, one presumes, why the current vice-chancellor’s pay should be six times the income of a senior lecturer (which he also notes). 

Tim, the economics expert, asserts that since there is no objective economic reason to justify these obscene salaries, the only justification that can be offered is “expert testimony” from salary panels, advisers, and consultants.  Basically it’s a lottery.  “Pick a number,” Tim tells us.  Any number.  As long as it is big. 

Hold on.  Back up the truck.  The 2008 “award” for professors at Auckland University (of which Tim is one)  was an income of $126,498 pa.  At that time, the median income in New Zealand was $67,028 pa.  Tim was earning double–double the median income in New Zealand.  And pay on the “shop floor” at the minimum wage meant you would be earning $26,000 pa.  Our good professor in 2008 was earning nearly five times as much as the poor working stiff in New Zealand.  What objective economic reason could possibly justify that kind of income discrepancy?  By Tim’s lights we would have to say, none.  None at all. It’s obscene. 

Tim’s union had just gone into negotiations and picked a number.  A big one.  No rational economic justification.  It’s guys like Professor Hazledine, racked with greed and envy, who are complicit in destroying the very same Decent Society they purport to defend.  They are part of the problem.  They are the problem.

Well, actually they are the problem, but not for the reasons they advance.  For Tim’s protestations and his fulminations against the salary of his boss prove far too much.  They condemn everyone who makes more than the median wage, Tim included.  And since envy is so destructive and abrasive, let’s all be reminded that Tim’s income is way, way above the median wage. 

Tim is destroying the Decent Society not because he earns well above the median wage, but because of his economics of personal greed and envy.  His arguments are devious, self-serving and hypocritical.  He dishonours the very university in which he serves.  By rational economic lights he is being paid way, way beyond what he is worth. 

Greed and envy when proclaimed from a bully pulpit do enormous damage to decent society.  Tim’s salary should reflect the damage and dishonour he does to us all. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Not Compassion at All

Money, Love, Desire – The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, December 14, 2011

You have a button in front of you, placed there by a helpful genie. But instead of giving you the standard three wishes (and why doesn’t anybody ever wish for ten wishes?), the genie has limited your options.

If you push the button, the real income of all the “have-nots” in the world will double overnight.
Their health care will be twice as good as it is now, their disposable income will be twice as large, their houses will be twice as nice, and so on. But another consequence of pushing this button will also be the fact that the “haves” will see their prosperity increase ten-fold. They will all be ten times richer, thus enabling them to swank around all day.

To spell it out, this means that the divide between the rich and poor will widen, but will do so in a way that leaves the poor undeniably better off.

This is your ethical “dilemma,” and part of your test is whether or not you even think of it as a dilemma. Would you refuse to push that button out of hard principle? Would you push it, but with a guilty conscience? Or would you, like me, push it while whistling a cheerful air, with your hat on the side of your head?

If you would not push it, or if you would push it reluctantly, then that urgent yearning for social justice that you feel all the time in your gut is not compassion at all, but cancerous envy. It is evil. It is a deadly sin that must be mortified. You don’t love the poor at all — you hate the rich, and you want to use the poor as a club. And why would this malevolent genie want to take your precious club away?