Yearly Archives: 2009
-
The Best Music of 2009
17. Letzte Instanz – Schuldig Alt-rock/folk metal Rather poppy, but catchy. Sounds like they’ve found a groove. 16. Amorphis – Skyforger Heavy metal Very catchy riffs, as far as standard metal goes. 15. Eluveitie – Evocation I: The Arcane Dominion Celtic folk/rock The acoustic sound works… sort of. It’s hit or miss, but many good [...] -
Copyright and a Culture of Monoliths
Though it was originally instituted for the protection of the distributors of media, copyright has come to be regarded in popular mindset as protection for the incentive of artists and innovators to create. The distribution industries know that the function of protecting the distributors as such has been made unnecessary by the advent of the internet, so they no longer try to justify copyright laws that way. They would have us believe instead that without copyright laws, actors, musicians, and writers could not make a decent living… -
The Stimulus: Beyond “Worked” and “Failed”
$787 billion worth of fiscal stimulus to get the economy back on track, and the best volley Conservatives can lobby is that it didn’t work. With the Obama administration’s widely off-the-mark estimates as to the unemployment rate with or without the stimulus (the actual job losses exceeded the estimates without the stimulus), the debate now [...] -
Inflation & Exchange: In Defense of Backed Currency
It’s easy to look at the character of a currency pegged to a particular value (whether dollars or gold) as regulation, and a floating currency as letting the market have its say about the relative values of currencies. But this abdicates from money its role as the unit of exchange – the anchor by which all prices are reckoned. One might well ask, why does money need to be an anchor?… -
“Natural Marriage”
Let us for the sake of argument grant that homosexuality is unnatural in some meaningful way. Guess what else is unnatural? Monogamy. Certainly the proportion of animals in the animal kingdom practicing monogamy is lower than that which practices homosexuality: Neither is unheard of, but both are comparatively rare. And if one can make an appeal to naturalness without reference to animals, then what constitutes naturality?… -
Proximity and Likeness: In What Sense is God the Good for All Men?
C.S. Lewis in the above passage from The Four Loves draws a contrast between proximity to God and likeness to God. And when we say that nearness to God is the Good for all men, it is important to keep in mind in which sense we mean that. -
Worth, Identity, and Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is in vogue in Western policy. From progressive tax rates to caps on executive pay, people like to see some sort of injustice in the fact that there are rich people and poor people. I will look here at the moral and philosophical presuppositions that are necessary to an egalitarian worldview. The egalitarian tends to justify leveling and redistributive policies on the basis of equal humanity. All men are created equal, they say, so why ought so much inequality prevail in our world?… -
Children Of Men and the Moral Ponzi Scheme
This post is intended to expand on the philosophical ramifications of a sociocentric theology. Whether Christian or not, the only feature required for the applicability of this post is the belief in the happiness of others or of society as a whole as a final moral end… -
Trinity and Tritheism: On Coequality
“Coexistent, coequal, coeternal.” These are the three adjectives typically used to describe the persons of the trinity. The Athanasian creed has given Christianity a fear complex when describing the trinity: it is the creed that deals most explicitly with the idea of the trinity, but also the only ecumenical creed with explicit anathemas. Thus, the trinity, like few other concepts in Christianity, is considered “untouchable” – a sacred cow of the Church… -
For Sensible Deregulation: Why We Need Net Neutrality (for now)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union was in trouble. It had been on a protracted economic slide for many years, and showed no sign of lifting. Mikhael Gorbachev, leader at the time, fancied himself a reformer, and went on a spree of deregulation and privatization. But coming from such a regulated environment, the sweeps of deregulation were not – and could not be – total. People were free to do things they were not before, but the perverse incentives still existed. The house of regulatory cards collapsed… -
Attitude To Business: A Call to Consumer Activism
We Libertarians and free market types very often allow ourselves to be defined by our opponents. Oppose regulation, they insinuate, and you are therefore in favor of all the dirty and devious practices a business might engage in. I’ve met more than a few who actually are. But opposition to regulation does not have to [...] -
Politics and Virtue: Positive and Negative Libertarianism
Why do we believe in liberty? Not as a question of natural rights versus consequentialism – that’s a different debate entirely. There are two ways to answer this question that cross the lines of the aforementioned argument: “I believe in liberty because I have faith in my fellow man that unconstrained, the market will drive [...] -
The Political Philosophy of Star Trek
Star Trek often catches a lot of flack from the American Right for portraying a Socialist space utopia. Certainly there is a vast, far reaching central government, and the human race is indeed portrayed as enlightened beyond self-interest. But should Star Trek be totally thrown out for its political philosophy? I believe there’s more to [...] -
The Balance
The balance concept of works is one of the most bedeviling concepts in pop religion. The idea goes, if I do more good things than bad things, God will accept me. Unfortunately, even Christians all too often buy into the balance model. Not so crude a balance model as exists in pop religion – we take James 2:10 to mean that even one act of sin outweighs all the good works in the world. This is passably true on the surface, but it is still fundamentally a balance model…
-
Consistent Egalitarianism
If we want to go after inequality in opportunity as such, the way to do it is not by handing out healthcare and welfare and social security. These efforts miss the fundamental engenderer of inequality by decades. The only consistent application of the egalitarian ideal is to nationalize child-rearing, and removing that right from parents. . . . -
Godliness vs. Godlikeness: Pride, Sanctification, and Nature
The goal of this article is to apply the ideas behind What Is Free Will? to the theme of A Humble or a Haughty Spirit. Having read both of these will be helpful in reading this article, as I justify in those articles some of the assumptions that I will take for granted in this [...] -
Objection Answered
For a time the question of culpability in predestination was one which I had a sense of the right answer, but had a hard time articulating in coherent categories. The Romans 9 argument, “God is God. He can do whatever He wants”, is true, as far as it goes – but also profoundly unsatisfying. Why [...] -
The Law as Values
People from the time the law was given have looked at it as a series of categorical imperatives – things that one must abide by no matter what and regardless of the reason. It becomes more about the action itself than the spirit behind it. It was exactly this thinking that led Jesus to rebuke the Pharisees for adhering to the letter of the law while completely missing its spirit (Mark 2:23-28)… -
Traffic Jams and the Free Market
Rush hour traffic in Raleigh gives the mind a lot of time to idly wander, and so was born a thought along the lines of Daniel Klein’s Rinkonomics: the trafficonomy.
Traffic jams are in fact a lot like the free market. This is not a pejorative comparison, as if we could alleviate the jam…
-
A Microfederalist Manifesto
Q: What is the fundamental problem with government? A: It is unconstrained. There is no process to achieve the optimal amount of regulation or private sector intervention, and even if it is perchance achieved at one point, there is nothing to keep it there. The line between desirable and abuse of power is not in [...] -
The Ends of Institutions (Or, The Problem with Moral Theories of Government)
Institutions Versus Individuals Among political theorists, there is a debate among those who view the ends of government as protecting natural rights, and those who view its ends as promoting the maximum felicity of its citizens. The dichotomy may seem to be one of moral versus practical concerns, but so far as we define a [...] -
The Role of Physical Piracy in the Market Economy
In discussions about piracy, even among people who are otherwise ok with free piracy – downloading – those who copy CDs or DVDs and physically resell them on the black market are often condemned, to the point that there is a wide consensus on both sides that the outright prohibition of this sort of activity [...] -
Safari 4′s Messy Trail
Those of you who’ve been trying out the new Safari 4 beta – at least on the Mac, though I imagine you could find similar data trails on the Windows version too – have no doubt been impressed at its shiny new features. But if you’re a stickler for disk space like I am, or [...] -
A Teleology of Rest
Though the expenditure of energy prevents it, physical teleology tends towards a state of rest (diffusion, the second law of thermodynamics). Though the addition of new information prevents it, economic teleology is always tending towards a final state of rest (equilibrium) with regard to prices (Mises, Human Action, Chapter 14.5). Though borrowing, language contact, and [...] -
The Ends of Faith
Throughout the history of the Church, there have been countless movements that either rise and quickly wither, or completely reform the Church. Names like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards stand out as giants of the faith, while there are countless others whose ideas perhaps conform better to the modern zeitgeist, but whose names are obscured by the passage of time. What makes the reformers stand out against time, while other movements repeatedly die even after being repeatedly introduced? . . . -
Evolution of a Logo
-
The Effectiveness of Overthrow
Machiavelli, almost 500 years ago, had this keen insight on the apparent paradox that the stronger a government is, the easier it is to overthrow. He is of course speaking entirely from the perspective of conquering it as an outsider however – I intend to generalize the notion to include (and focus more on) the overthrow of the government from within… -
Objective or Subjective Value?
The foundation of liberal (in the classical sense) thought is freedom, for the purpose of the maximization of the happiness of man. Unfortunately happiness isn’t exactly a cut and dry concept. Libertarians of the Subjectivist school (Mises and his followers) believe happiness is maximized when man is free to do as he pleases: value, something’s [...] -
Do We Need a Government Healthcare System?
The American healthcare system is in trouble: costs are far too high. Not to the consumer – the average consumer pays only 16¢ on the dollar for medical expenses, after government and employers step in. The government pays for 50% of that, and even more for those on medicaid and medicare. The expenses are ballooning, far more quickly than many other areas of government expenditure (not including social security, of course). The government can’t pay a theoretical infinite sum in the indefinite future: something’s got to give. What are the causes of the ballooning costs?… -
Idea vs. Reality of Obama
Obama is highly regarded – not only in America, but almost everywhere abroad, where the opinions of our presidents often seem more polar than at home. They hated Bush even more than we did, and they seem so far to love Obama even more than we do. The idea of Obama is good for our [...] -
In What Sense does God Act?
What is human action? According to Mises, it is the use of means to attain ends. One acts towards these ends in order to gain utility, or to somehow improve one’s lot, however that looks for the particular person. This unfortunately runs into problems with the idea of the almighty, as Mises also points out [...] -
Wordle
This is the Wordle of the blog so far. I would have expected to see more economics relative to theology, but maybe economics just has a more varigated vocabulary. Or maybe I write about God a lot more than I realize. -
Ambassador-Camp.org
The new Ambassador Camp website has just gone live. From the Portfolio page: Ambassador Camp is an Christ-centered summer camp in Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina. This site was taken on after the old domain was lost to a hosting company that went under, and moves them from a very basic Frontpage website to something both [...] -
A Theory of Social Capital
Why do people act the way they do socially? What makes one person gregarious and another reserved? Does economics hold the answer? The answer to the last one is, of course, “duh”. Applying economic principles to human behavior of all sorts yields all kinds of interesting results, especially if it’s not strictly economic behavior. So in the spirit of Freakonomics, we’ll look at the act of socialization through a microeconomic lens…
-
Is God the Author of Sin?
Let it first be understood that this is a completely different, but not unrelated question from “Does God sin?”. To answer either question, we first need to define our terms. Sin is the valuation or desire for something less than good. To sin against another person is to have something less than their best interest in mind. Thus, if God is that highest good, sin in its most general form is to value anything more highly than God. This is what Jesus meant when He described Himself as the fulfillment of the law (Matthew 5:17): the law is an approximation, love is the form. The law is 3.14, love is ?. The law is a riemann sum, love is an integral. The law is a series of commands that approximate how the regenerate person acts, where love is what actually produces it in fullest form…