The entire financial crisis of the late 2000s as it has played out has sprung directly from one source. All the affected industries and bad assets have at their core one problem: loan default. The drop in home prices stemmed from people with subprime loans, people who should by all accounts not have had loans in the first place, defaulted.

The first problem was the government push for all people to be homeowners. Not everyone needs to be a homeowner, nor should everyone be. The government guarantee on these loans was the cause of the predatory lending practices that pushed up home prices by 95% in the past decade, and thus was also the cause of the wave of defaults that ensued once prices started to nosedive.

The feasibility of a debtor’s prison will obviously require the government to stay out of the financial system, lest there become any incentive to entrap people in impossible loans, as there has been in the past. But barring predatory loans, one of the surest ways to boost confidence in the economy from the bottom up is a debtor’s prison.

I will first make the case that this is a proper role of government. What then is that? Most libertarians/minarchists would restrict the role of government, criminally, to the prevention of violent or fraudulent acts, and civilly, to the enforcement of contracts. While the government currently engages in all sorts of monetary insurance (FDIC, bailouts, FNMA, etc.) that conform to neither of these roles (and in fact work against them), a debtor’s prison falls squarely under the role of the enforcement of contracts, and effectively eliminates the need for the former. No man is forced into taking out a loan against his will in a nominally free economy, and every loan is contingent upon agreement to a contract.

If anything, default and bankruptcy are improper government shields against personal responsibility, and at its heart, every financial crisis has been predicated on mass failure to repay loans. A debtor’s prison will first of all decrease moral hazard and adverse selection with regard to loans. With real consequences for the failure to repay a loan, people will be more careful in seeking them out, and more wary to default. Though there still remains some degree of inalienable default risk (a creditor cannot follow a debtor beyond the grave), it would nevertheless be a real and fundamental decrease, and a remarkable stabilizer to economies everywhere. In fact, implemented in any country, it would be a great boon to investment as the fundamental risk is substantially mitigated.

As a sidenote, bankruptcy would still be a necessary option for businesses and corporations, as the amount of debt accrued thereby that would force it into a state of bankruptcy far exceeds the capacity of the culpable to repay in a lifetime of manual labor. This is, however, already taken into account in current risk analyses, and neither diminishes the effectiveness of the debtor’s prison for the individual debtor, nor is a disimprovement from the current state of affairs.

The debtor’s prison is not entirely punitive either: the goal is not to punish, but to restore the debt by the expenditure of labor to which the debtor is suited (one cannot complain that these people are being taken off the labor market, as one of the foremost causes of loan default is failure to contribute to the economy in the first place: people don’t pay back their loans because they don’t have jobs. Thus there is little, if any economic cost to the action of taking the debtor off the labor market). Perhaps this can be the provision of public goods such as roads and parks, as the government would be hard pressed to get such a mass hired by firms on the market (the monitoring costs would be far too high). In such a case, the provision of public goods is merely a natural outgrowth of the proper government role of enforcing contracts, rather than a completely separate function, as it is now. Though the burden of the repayment of the debts would ultimately fall upon the taxpayer in this model as well, the disincentives against default, as well as the merging of the public goods function with the insurance function, would still reduce taxpayer burden significantly.

• 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 grammatical change prevent it, phonetic teleology in linguistics tends towards a state of rest, in which marked phonemes are eliminated and syllables tend towards consonant-vowel structure, simplifying consonant clusters (see the universal tendency towards CV syllabification).
• Though sin prevents it, spiritual teleology brings the individual to a state of final rest and fulfillment in God (Matthew 11:28-30).

Rest is the necessary defining feature of all ends, for if there is no rest, there are no ends. God rested on the seventh day of creation (Genesis 2:2) in order to signify that the initial act of creation had come to an end: it was complete. The earth itself was in a perfect state of rest with the Lord (note that this does not preclude labor, c.f. Genesis 2:15) – but it was sin that threw the earth into a state of unrest (Romans 8:20-22). In fact, in each of the above cases, it is imperfection that throws the system into a state of unrest. An economy will never reach equilibrium because knowledge is never perfect. The universe, left to its own, would in fact end in a state of perfect material equilibrium as entropy approached infinity – unless of course gravity, imperfection in space, caused it to crunch.

It is therefore not a stretch to say that the mark of the attainment of perfection or fulfillment is rest, for at that point there is nothing better to aim for. There are indeed those who equate life with change and thus see imperfection as a prerequisite of life, but this can only lead to nihilism: without final rest, life itself has no purpose. Human action is driven by the desire to improve one’s lot, but without final and permanent rest at the end, life is nothing but a series of actions with no meaning outside one’s own existence. Life is not action: in this imperfect world, it is acting to attain rest, in some form or another. In the next, it is the consummation of that desire (as a side note, Hell is so horrible simply because therein is neither rest nor hope of rest. Immortality on Earth, or in any perpetually imperfect state, would thus be an effective Hell after long enough). Final rest for the individual soul must ultimately be sought in God.

The aim towards rest is the mark of Divine design. What other systems are there that tend towards rest – certainly there are more than I’ve thought of here?

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, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards stick out as giants and innovators among the faith, while there are countless other people that perhaps conform better to modern sensibilities as they are, but are obscured by the passage of time (for example, no one regards Pelagius anymore, even though Pelagianism – the discounting of total depravity – has been silently recreeping into pop theology for over a century). What makes the reformers stand out against time, while other movements repeatedly die even after being repeatedly introduced? Let us look at three categories of theology, and look at where the various reformers fell:

1: Autocentric Theology is a theology in which faith is a means towards personal gain. Though all faith is autocentric to some degree (otherwise why have it), I’ll limit the scope of the term here to faith as a means for increasing earthly well-being, by whatever means. This includes, obviously, Joel Osteen’s gospel, as well as the entire Prosperity movement. But less obviously it includes the seeker-friendly movement: by treating Christianity as self-help, the individual becomes the means, excluding God except as a means to these personal ends. Become a better person, fill the God-shaped hole in your life, live your Best Life Now – these are all the slogans of an autocentric theology.

2: Sociocentric Theology probably gets the most credit from the world of the three, and is even well regarded within the Church. Its ends are society – the poor, the opressed, and the downtrodden. Now while these are certainly noble goals and even commanded by scripture, they are not to be our final ends (Matthew 26:11). The category includes most obviously South America’s Liberation Theology, a strange blend of Marxism and Catholicism in which the Kingdom of Heaven is brought to earth through political activism (a means ineffective at best, outright dangerous at worst), but also less obviously the emergent church. Popular authors such as Rob Bell preach a “relational” gospel, in which the purpose of God is to restore humans to harmonious relationship with one another (see Sex God). This is only partially true: though he acknowledges that our interpersonal relationships stem from our relationship with God, the interpersonal connections are still made out to be, intentionally or not, ends in themselves. Like the autocentric theology of the seeker-friendly church, the sociocentric theology of the emergent church can only lead to mass exodus once the novelty wears thin and people find no reason to invoke the name of God to clamor for social justice.

3: Theocentric Theology is the historically orthodox position of the Church: a focus on God Himself as the ultimate good and the ends of faith. But backlash caused by folks such as Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist crew, who isolate themselves and flagrantly fail to regard society (and in fact work against it in many cases), has led people both within and without the Church to completely disregard theocentrism as a relevant option in modern society. Sociocentrism is in.

Theocentrism is, however, the only sustainable theology in the long run. Both the exodus from the seeker-friendly movement and the coming exodus from the emergent church are (and will be) results of a failure of distinction. The archetypal example is liberal theology: popular in the early 20th century, its goal was to uncover universal common nuggets of truth behind all world religions. This can only be done with autocentric and sociocentric theologies. Certainly the belief that all religions are essentially the same is now more popular than ever, but these believers do not regard themselves as Christians anymore. Why would they? As long as they keep basic moral tenets regarding self and others, they’re covered by this amorphous ecumenical religion.

The common thread among all the reformers that stand out in the history of the Church has in each instance been a strong theocentrism: it is the only proper way to commend the Christian faith. Augustine pioneered the idea of God as Himself the ultimate good. Luther rebuked the Roman Catholic Church for autocentrism in the sale of indulgences, among other things. Calvin and Edwards proclaimed the glory of God as the end of all history. Social gospels and self-help gospels have been creeping up since the beginning of the church, but they cannot – and do not – last. Where a sociocentric Christianity will be virtually indistinguishable from a sociocentric Islam, theocentrically, the two could not be more different. Where a sociocentric Christianity might as well be agnostic Humanism, it’s the theocentrism that sets it apart and commends it. Our focus needs to be first on God, and only then on society and ourselves as means to the glory of God. This is true Christianity.

I’ve said before that the term “Trinity” is itself a rather unhelpful term in describing God without further explanation. Though the doctrine fully expounded is entirely correct (there, I don’t want anyone accusing me of being a modalist now), the term taken as it is in mainstream Christianity can – and does – lead to misconstructions of the nature of God.

First, as was discussed in The Nature of Christ, Christ is to be seen as “Eternally begotten” of the Father in the sense that a word is begotten of its speaker, according to Justin Martyr. Christ is preexistent and eternal in the sense that the Word of God is preexistent and eternal (John 1).

However, popular Trinitarian doctrine, especially seizing on the Athenasian terms “coequal” and “coeternal”, has turned this into a dramatic misrepresentation of who God is, and its alleged sacrosanctity effectively stifles discussion of the issue that characterizes most other inferential doctrines. The assumption that God’s threeness is as sacred as His oneness is a dangerous (and often anti-intellectual, as such a contradictory approach usually comes with the explanation “you’ll never understand it”) interpretation. The oneness of God is sacred (Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema); the threeness of God is incidental to His redemptive work in the world (Matthew 28:19-20, the Great Commission). Now before the Modalist accusations come, let me say that God acts through three persons of the Trinity simultaneously in the world. It would be irresponsible exegesis to say that God shifts from one person to another throughout history, as the Sequential Modalists do. But it is also an improper reading of the entire Old Testament to say that the persons of the Trinity are essentially separate and act independently of one another.

The idea of the separateness and independence of the persons of the Trinity have been particularly insidious in creeping into the Church unquestioned. Christ is certainly divine as can be seen throughout each of the gospels and Paul’s epistles. But it is not a divinity apart from the Father. Likewise with the Holy Spirit: His divinity proceeds from the Father, and is not an essentially separate divinity. Any Christian will be quick to tell you that there are by no means three Gods, but the way Trinity is talked about among mainstream Christian circles, that’s exactly how it’s conceived. The denial of tritheism comes as anti-intellectual doublethink from people who besides the terminology believe exactly that. Such thinking can be seen everywhere the persons of the Trinity are depicted in Heaven talking to each other as separate persons (for example in Paradise Lost).

I believe that God is glorified in correct knowledge of Him, which is not unattainable insofar as He has made it known to us. But if our belief is never open to scrutiny, it is essentially a disparagement to the value of the answer to the question. I hope that the doctrine of the Trinity will in the coming years become less of a sacred cow to the Church and be opened up to the scrutiny to which nearly every other doctrine of inference has been subject, that it may be purged of errors that have crept into our understanding thereof.

When cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they … are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily. But in republics there is more vitality, greater hatred, and more desire for vengeance, which will never permit them to allow the memory of their former liberty to rest; so that the safest way is to destroy them.
-Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 5

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.

Let us regard the power of a government for coercion as a fraction from 0 to 1, with 0 being anarchy and 1 being totalitarianism (Such a measurement could never in fact be quantitatively made. However the logistical problems inherent therein are irrelevant to the discussion: for us it matters only that a government could be placed on this scale relative to other governments, as the number itself is irrelevant except insofar as it can be said to be greater or less than another. It is thus an ordinal, and not a cardinal scale). This number can be thought of as an overthrow effectiveness coefficient (hereafter denoted by Ω). For our purposes we will only look at overthrows of subjugation rather than overthrows of liberation – i.e., moving from a lower coefficient to a higher coefficient – for the problems of relinquishing power where it before existed are of a qualitatively different sort than of obtaining power where it before did not. The former may be looked at on another occasion.

It is at this point necessary to draw a distinction between the act of overthrow and the ease with which one establishes and maintains its substitute rule. The overthrow of a government becomes easier the less powerful it is – that is, the probability of success can be thought of as an increasing function of force used (whether from within or without), and a decreasing function of Ω. However, the ease of maintenance of that rule once obtained is an increasing function of both force and Ω. In general, the easier it is to depose a government, the harder it is to rule its people.

Why are the weakest and most limited governments the hardest over which to maintain control? Machiavelli, in the passage above, attributes it to entirely cultural factors, and is right in doing so with regard to invasion from without. The people of the freer state resent their loss of liberty, whereas those of the totalitarian state never had any to miss.

This is, however, only a special case: more generally, the reasons are more institutional than cultural. The institutional factors are only obviated in the case of external invasion because the invader necessarily carries with him established institutions with which to bind his captives. In the case of an internal revolution on the other hand, such institutions do not already exist. This is where it becomes the most useful to think of Ω as an overthrow effectiveness coefficient: the societal impact of the collapse of the existing government is determined by it. For example, it would be rather easy to overthrow a minarchist state. But the effect on society would be minimal. Many people would doubtless not even be affected in any meaningful way. More powerful institutions must be formed from scratch, and only with great difficulty can a group from within enslave a formerly free people. The overthrow was easy, but the efficacy of the overthrow towards the establishment of substitute rule was very low.

If on the other hand Ω is closer to 1, the effects of a government overthrow upon society will be very noticeable. It will be first of all more difficult to overthrow as the existing power has by necessity more physical power at its disposal. Even in the event of success, if the government uses fiat currency, the crisis of confidence will most likely lead to hyperinflation. But once these obstacles are hurdled – if the new group successfully deposes the current regime and restores some semblance of normalcy to society – the institutions of coercion and control are already fully functional. Such a revolution, once completed, will find little difficulty in keeping itself in power: the overthrow itself was difficult, but was very efficacious toward the establishment of substitute rule.

Perhaps these institutional factors are ultimately cultural as well. Certainly institutions of coercion and control are not maintained without some degree of complicity from the populace. But the question of whether culture or institution is logically prior (or whether either can spring from the other) is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that no matter the source of the overthrow, the principle of the inverse difficulty (ceteris paribus, at least) of overthrow and maintenance still hold.