economy

Why communism doesn’t work

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We know that communism doesn’t really  work on the macro level because we’ve seen countless occasions that it has led to mass extermination and poverty, USSR, China, Viet Nam, North Korea, and Cuba.  Or how about the collective cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorest countries in the world?  But perhaps, if enough really committed and redeemed people get together, just maybe it will work.  In an unguarded moment, PoserorProphet reminds us why communism doesn’t work in a micro community either:

Following Jesus is a demanding task and it is one of the reasons that community is so essential to our life as Christians.  It is impossible to follow Jesus on our own.  It is impossible to move into relationships of mutually liberating solidarity with people who have been abandoned, if you do so on your on.  You will burn out or blow up.

Again, I know this because I have experienced this.  When things started going wrong in our community in Vancouver’s downtown eastside and people started dropping out of participating in the work required to run the community, I decided to just take on more and more of that work myself.  That was unsustainable and my marriage still suffers from the consequences of that decision.

Actually, this is exactly why a lot of people, myself included, believe that communism fails every time it is tried. If you reward the unproductive people and punish the productive people, eventually no one will want to do anything anymore.  But I do have a couple of questions:  (1) Poser, don’t you think you should get this communism thing to work in a micro community before imposing it on the rest of the world?

At City of God, Andrew cites  a Ludwig von Misis Institute article defending private property from an a priori standpoint:

One of the points Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes is that the right to some private property is assumed by virtue of having a right to survive as an embodied individual. For example, surviving requires breathing, which requires an exclusive right to use the air surrounding one’s body. Similarly, surviving requires eating, which requires the right to be the exclusive consumer of some piece of food.

This leads to my second question for PoserorProphet. (2) When all private property has been taken away from people and all that is left is communal property, will we have to share underwear?  Isn’t that just a little unhygienic?  Or it will be like, “Ok, I’ll use it today, you use it tomorrow, but I want it back the next day.”

Crowded tenement building churches in Early Christianity, Part II: Philology

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The first part of this series was published in my personal blog.  There I react to a budding Master’s student at my alma mater, Regent College, dubbed “Poser or Prophet”, who had in response to the Brooks’ post, House Churches, written:

Also, the early church probably didn’t meet in houses. They probably met in what space they could find in crowded tenement buildings — although if the wealthier first floor resident(s) converted, they could meet there (because, you know, with the risk of buildings falling over or burning down — which tended to happen frequently — it was much better to live on the ground floor than in the penthouse!).

I mentioned that while I often disagree with Poser, this time I agreed, and I was able to find an extensive, though dated, bibliography supporting his view, including multiple examples of the term πολυοχλοικοδομη (poluochloikodome=“crowded tenement building”) in the Early Christian sources.  Text after text supported Poser’s position.

Now Poser has deigned to respond to little ol’ me as such:

Hi Peter,

Methinks you’re a little behind on the literature. For more on churches in tenement buildings, you could start with Jewett’s Romans commentary (it’s pretty much a must-read anyway) and you can follow the trail he provides.

I was deeply moved that Poser remembered my name.  But I felt even more deeply chastened for having not read what is obviously a seminal source, Jewett’s Hermeneia commentary.  Fortunately, being a rich capitalist pig, I own a copy of this book in my personal library.  I was able to read some of it and must say I’ve come to the position of disagreeing with Poser.  Jewett helped me to see that the Greek New Testament that I was using, the NTCB (The New Tenement Church Bible, Greek and English Interlinear ed., published by Zondoudhoorn’s Press, 2009), had fabricated the term πολυοχλοικοδομη / poluochloikodome.  Also I learned that the NIV, RSV and numerous other translations of the original Greek text, just had the term “house”, where I had found “crowded tenement building” in the NTCB!  Can you imagine my surprise?  Returning to my other Greek Bible (I own several of these), I found that the term οἶκος / oikos was used in many of these passages; maybe I should have paid attention when Doc Pecota suggested that we should put our vocabulary on 3×5 cards for the purpose of memorization.  Its been 28 years since I took first-year Greek, so I had to get out my Greek and English dictionary; fortunately, I have several of these because, as I explained, I am a rich capitalist pig.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that this term means “house”; I didn’t think Jesus let his followers own houses.  This term, I learned, is translated domus in the Vulgate of which I also own a copy, being a rich capitalist pig–the term domus comes into English as “dom-inant”, “dom-ination”, “dom-ineering”–this would almost even imply that the apostles, in defiance to the teaching of Jesus, tolerated the early Christian rich capitalists pigs, allowing them to have a dom-inant role in the church; in antiquity, evil householders and landowners were constantly exploiting and dom-inating everyone else.  Heavens.

I couldn’t find in the Vulgate the Latin term, insula (“crowded tenement building”).  So I asked a couple of scholars (who shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty) who are also rich capitalist pigs, having both had the privilege of studying up to the PhD level, to their shame:  one is an Oxford-trained Papyrologist and the other a Swiss national–probably descended from bankers–a professor of Historical Theology, and neither one knew the Greek term for insula.  So I concluded that the original New Testament was written by people who at very least tolerated rich capitalist pig householders; perhaps they even used these economic structures of death to promote the advancement of the Early Church.  Horror!

More to come.

What about emphasizing personal responsibility when helping the poor?

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Giving his opinion of the discussion at Nathan Calquhoun’s blog, Dan posting at the City of God also came down against the Olympics, though not as hard as some others.  He agrees that it is also just a party for the rich, but the insufferable thing is that we taxpayers have to pay for the Games, and then told we have to like the games:

What is really oppressive about the Olympics is how we are all supposed to like it. I mean rich people also have private playgrounds in places like Macao or Monaco but we aren’t all expected to embrace these playgrounds like we are the Olympics. It would be nice if some Olympics organizers would just own up sometime and say “look, we’re bringing in a bunch of amateur athletes because they’ll act as free entertainment for celebrities and captains of industry, by the way, your taxes pay for this so we’ll let you watch at home too.”

I wrote the following comment:

________________________________

Would you say that the sin of the Olympics’ rich and powerful is one of omission, of ignorance, or of willful disregard? I am trying to see how the new Pharisees conceive of sin. I guess that the most important thing is that the chief sinners are the wealthy and powerful, because they like to have their exclusive parties (like smoking stogies and drinking champagne and beer on the rink after winning the gold medal?).

I don’t see how any of this protesting helps. To me it appears as heavily motivated by the politics of envy. As my friend explained to me this morning, the real problem is that the money spent on the Olympics should have been spent to help the poor, provide housing, lasting jobs, etc. This strikes me as envy. One begrudges how the funding is spent. George Will recently said at CPAC that envy is the one deadly sin of the seven from which the sinner does not receive even momentary pleasure.

Finally, I suggest the politics of envy does nothing to help the poor because it places the responsibility for their situation on others. Walter Williams has explained the formula for avoiding poverty as such:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

Williams’ formula emphasizes personal responsibility. It seems to me that having the Olympics or not having them will neither help nor hurt Vancouver’s poor. Spending the money on the poor instead of on a big international circus will not help the poor. For the problem of the poverty will not be solved by throwing money at it. Liberal democracies have been throwing money at poverty for decades now, and the problem has not gone away or even become less. Many, myself included, believe that welfare has only exasperated the problem.

We live in Canada, not Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa where there is little hope of escaping endemic poverty. Many millions of poor have come to North America, including my own forebears (on both sides of my family), and have enjoyed the freedom to make a very nice life here. They were not, for the most part, oppressed nor discriminated against because of their poverty but allowed to work, to study, and to realize their potential.

Source, Walter Williams’ article:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4223

The Absurd Incoherence of the Left

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Has anyone ever noticed the absurd incoherence of the Left to be both at the same time anti-progress, Luddite in their position on environmentalism, and socialist redistributionists with regard to economic policy?  I have.

Take for example the recent anonymous blogger at Nathan Calquhoun’s blog who protested the Olympics in Vancouver.  He is evidently in favor of greater redistribution of wealth to the poor, but at the same time, against the oil sands and other forms of mining which create wealth both in Canada and abroad.  My dear leftist friends, you can’t have it both ways.  If you want to continue your socialist agenda of redistribtuion, you have to get out of the way of the evil capitalists so that there is wealth to redistribute!  But if you block every kind of progress, particularly here in Canada, in the resource sector, I don’t see how you can ever achieve your redistributionist utopia. If memory serves, when David Suzuki contemplating politics a few years ago, he was planning to join the NDP party (though he remains non-partisan).  But how can he square the redistributionist and union sentiments of the NDP with his green Luddite stances?

Soon-to-be Canadian citizens like myself learn that there are three major sectors of the Canadian economy:  (1) resources; (2) manufacturing; (3) service.  Kill one of those sectors and you will have less wealth to give to the poor.   Even yesterday talking to my good friend who is a leftist I told him that I had increased my Canadian oil investments last week and he was surprised by my insistance that oil is a righteous investment.  Yet he was upset too about the poor in Vancouver not having a chance to receive any benefit from the Olympics and the government funding that went to the games.

Oil is a righteous investment

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A lot of religious people, especially environmentalists (but even some Christians), consider petroleum a sin.  By contrast, here are some reasons that oil is a righteous investment:

(1) Oil is a plentiful energy source which was created by a good God who made all things for our benefit (Genesis 1-2).

(2) Oil is the energy of choice which fuels production in world’s strongest economies and helps to provide for the general well-being of billions of people.

(3) Oil is was provided by our Creator as an extremely efficient fuel source, unlike ethanol and other biofuels which derive from grains and other foods, which God provides to us for food because he loves us.  The use of biofuels has led to an increase in global food prices which have greatly hurt the poor.  The consumption of oil and other petroleum products such as natural gas and coal have no such negative consequences for the world food market.

(4) Oil is proving to be a renewable resource and not a fossil fuel.  Therefore, it is not something that we will run out of; we will not see Armeggedon because we run out of oil, but perhaps if we are not allowed to exploit sources of oil that we know exist.

(5) Anthropogenic global warming is a hoax.  Therefore, there is no substance to the main argument against oil–the fear that the planet will turn into a ball of fire.