Of the Advent of the Savior and the Second Coming of Christ

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  The signs of the advent of Christmas are all around and growing in number and urgency.  Red and green appear with greater frequency and intensity on people’s clothes.  Each day yet one more house sports Christmas lights.  Our door is growing crowded with Christmas cards.  The calendar is filling with concerts, festivals, and celebrations.  Appeals to buy, sell, and contribute are becoming incessant.  Carols have taken priority for church congregations and choirs, and Christmas themes predominate in addresses from the pulpit.  The anticipation in children’s talk and faces is plainly growing.  You cannot miss it, and it all makes me feel happy, a perfect tonic to the growing darkness of the meteorological season.  Christmas day is imminent. 

And so it was prior to the actual birth of Jesus Christ.  Unlike for anyone ever born to the family of Adam, the birth of the Savior was foretold again and again for thousands of years prior to the event, with signs to encourage the believers of the marvelous day when the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would come to live among men.  As Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, Eve was promised that while the serpent (Satan) would bruise the heal of her seed (the Savior), He would bruise the serpent’s (Satan’s) head.  During the exodus of Israel from Egypt to the promised land the advent of the Savior was linked to the appearance of a star as a sign to Jacob (see Numbers 24:17).  Isaiah comforted King Ahaz by reminding him of the birth of Christ, giving him as a sign that “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14)  Micah foretold that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem, a prophecy so well known that King Herod directed the wise men from the east to go there to find the Christ child (see Micah 5:2 and Matthew 2:1-8).

Across the oceans, on another continent, the Americas, ancient prophets similarly foretold of the birth of Christ.  The prophet Alma declared,

For behold, I say unto you there be many things to come; and behold, there is one thing which is of more importance than they all—for behold, the time is not far distant that the Redeemer liveth and cometh among his people.  (Alma 7:7)

Another ancient American prophet, Nephi, had lived in the Old World before he and his family were led by God to the New World.  He was given a vision in which he saw “A virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins . . . bearing a child in her arms.”  An angel told Nephi that this child was “the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father!” (see 1 Nephi 11:14-21)

More than 400 years later yet another American prophet, a righteous king named Benjamin, reported to his people the testimony from an angel of the coming birth of the Redeemer:

And he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary. (Mosiah 3:8)

These and many other signs of the advent of Jesus Christ to the earth, announced for the encouragement of all who through many ages looked with hope and joy to the birth of the Savior, were predicted and fulfilled as prophesied.  The scriptural record could confirm, “it had come to pass, yea, all things, every whit, according to the words of the prophets.” (3 Nephi 1:20)

Today we stand thousands of years after that event.  Looking back, the signs and their completion are clear to see.  But we need not only look back, for we also can look forward to the return of Christ, not as a humble little baby but as the resurrected and glorified Messiah. 

We too are living in the midst of a season of advent, expectantly looking to the promised arrival of Christ to rule and reign on earth.  As with the Savior’s birth there are many predicted signs of the second coming of Christ, signs that are appearing in greater number and urgency.  For those who watch and are ready, it is a time of joy and happiness, even in a darkening season of the world.  Just as surely as all of the prophecies of Christ’s birth were fulfilled, so can we look with confidence to all that God’s prophets have foretold of His return.  For there will come a day, and not far off, when we, too, can declare, “it had come to pass, yea, all things, every whit, according to the words of the prophets.”

May our Christmas celebration of Christ be enriched by looking to His arrival in the past as the Babe of Bethlehem and forward to His return as King of kings and Lord of Lords.

Of Christmas in America and Life over Death

Welcome to Christmas and the whole Christmas season, doubly welcome this year because of the national focus of the media on the excessively trivial, even while things that matter a lot to a lot of people are happening all around us.  The media masters who have been running the presidential debates and proffering questions that emphasize the banal and the silly over substance and principle could use a vacation.

Welcome Christmas, when we can focus on things that affect real lives and the things that matter in real lives.  Welcome the opportunity to worship the Savior who brought meaning to our lives, while the leaders of men increasingly seek to pull meaning out of our lives or, failing that, distract people from all that holds lasting meaning and value and richness.

I include the routine censures of the “crass commercialism” associated with Christmas.  Those trite criticisms, trotted out at this time of every year since before the lifetimes of any of us, are really beside the point.  Is it wrong for people to seek in a myriad of ways to offer us their goods and services and to be rewarded when we eagerly respond to what they provide?  In a world of human interaction, what can be better than the free exchange of our abundance in the free markets of America.  Surely people can be as shallow in this season as in any other, and shunning bad taste merits no rebuke, but no praise of poverty over abundance will cure these ills.  Far from material things being irrelevant to Christmas, Christ and His creation and His atonement made possible the earth and the fulness thereof and our freedom to enjoy them.

True Christmas celebration comprehends all things important.  That celebration embraces the fulness of the goodness of the physical world in which we spiritual beings have been immersed.  To deny the physical and condemn its enjoyment in full measure is just as mistaken as to deny and neglect our spiritual being.  They must be taken amply together, neglecting neither.  As Christ revealed in modern times, “spirit and element inseparably connected receive a fulness of joy. . .” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:33)

Christ promises to us “every good thing” (see Moroni 7:25).  Unredeemed Death puts all good things out of our reach.  The sacrifice of Jesus the Savior overcame death in every significant way and brought all good things within our reach.

That is precisely why a fulsome celebration of Christmas must be a celebration of all good things, high and low, physical and spiritual.  These are the things that matter to everyone every day.  The brightness of stars, the love of family, the warmth of a home, the goodness of a savory meal, the beauty of music, the satisfaction of work done, the joy of light, the scent of the evergreen, the charm of children, the exhilaration of creation, and many million other manifestations of the goodness of God to His children are what Christmas means and are what power its celebration.

Christmas is the celebration of Life in all its goodness, a rejection of Death and the culture of poverty and decay and their worship by so many who would rip at faith and freedom.  Not accidentally faith and freedom--the very pursuit of happiness--were woven into the founding of American society.  The birth and physical life of Jesus Christ, including His own redemptive death and very real resurrection from the grave, merit all our praise, our worship, and our grateful enjoyment, still celebrated in America more than anywhere else.

I say, bring it on.

Of Public-Private Partnerships and Public Corruption

One of the popular phrases in Washington that makes me cringe every time that I hear it is public-private partnership.   This is a foreign concept, alien to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The Founders fled from the institution.  It had a rich history in Europe, and our Founders hated it, because it tended toward abuse (as it does today).  They had been methodically abused by it.

One example, the infamous British East India Company was a public-private partnership that engaged in colonization in America and elsewhere (perhaps most notably, India), harnessing the colonies with oppressive collars of monopolies that forced the colonists to do business only through the Company that enjoyed the privileges and powers of the Crown.  Those privileges were used to underpay the colonists for what they produced and sold and overcharge them for what they bought.  Fortunately for America, the Founders became champion smugglers, taking advantage of a land with an extensive seacoast and rich with usable harbors.  The smuggling was fortunate also for Britain, for without it the new British colonies in America would have been strangled in their cribs.

The Boston Tea Party was a colonial revolt against monopoly powers exercised in the name of the British Government by the East India Company.  That this revolt took place in Boston was not unusual, as the power and influence of the Crown-endorsed Companies were stronger in Virginia and other places to the south than they were in New England.  The New Englanders were less accustomed to it and therefore felt its oppressions more keenly.  Crown companies had much less of a role (but were not unknown) in lands settled by freedom-seeking Puritans and Pilgrims.  The Jamestown Colonies were from the beginning Company expeditions.  But the Virginians and many other Americans grew increasingly weary of those public-private partnerships and the corruptions that they fomented.  The wide lands of North America encouraged a freedom that the public-private partnership of Crown and Companies was not able to stifle.

It took royal favor to create the public-private partnerships, and the maintenance of royal favor to continue them.  No surprise, then, that such favor had to be funded by steady payments from the partnership to the government officials possessing power to control the royal favors.  In exchange, government discretion, including the judging of right and wrong, was all too often influenced by what favored the partnership rather than what favored justice.

This was how public-private partnerships were corrupting on a personal level.  They were also corrupting to the State, corrosive of freedom.  In no small degree British freedoms from the King have been built by the power of taxation controlled by Parliament.  With great skill over centuries British Parliaments wielded the power of managing the government purse to win new freedoms from the British Kings.  Since there is money to be made by using government power in public enterprises, however, sovereigns can find ways to cash in on that value and avoid the accountability that comes with having to seek new taxes to pay for their programs.  In the great conflict between the Parliament and King Charles I, the King was long able to avoid resorting to Parliament and acceding to its demands for freedom by funding his operations through the sale of royal privileges to and by reaping revenues from the companies and other public-private partnerships.  He carried it too far and eventually lost his head, but the American Founders did not fail to learn the lesson.

Neither did our modern Presidents, many of whom have revealed a fondness for public-private partnerships as a means to extend government programs and influence, even to the exclusion of congressional and public oversight.  Franklin Roosevelt loved creating government-sponsored monopolies, even while giving many speeches against the evils of monopolies.  Today our economy is riddled with public-private partnerships, large and small, and they as always tend toward abuse. 

At the heart of the recent financial recession was the housing bubble supported by two of the greatest public-private partnerships in American history, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Created to promote government housing policy without using taxes or appropriations—and thereby escaping public accountability—their government privileges allowed them to borrow all the money they needed at prices little above government rates and use that advantage to drive competition out of the middle of the housing markets that they occupied.

When the housing bubble at last burst, the Treasury’s TARP used a public-private partnership with banks (most but not all of whom were unwilling partners) to push investors out of the banking markets and turn the financial crisis into a financial panic.  Once in office, the Obama Administration embraced TARP, to which they added a trillion dollar stimulus package that accelerated our budget deficit crisis.  The Obama stimulus package was lousy with public-private partnerships, a significant reason why it failed so miserably to stimulate our economy, destroying one or more jobs for each one that it promised to create through government favor.

The Faustian bargain at the core of the public-private partnerships corrupts all involved and touched by them:  the government that creates them, the partners who sell their souls for the advantages, and those disadvantaged by the whole unfairness.  Former Congressman Dick Armey—a foe of public-private partnerships—has often warned that when you partner with the devil, you are always the junior partner.

Of Civil Wars and Slavery

One hundred fifty years ago today Jefferson Davis was “elected” President of the so-called Confederate States of America.  For half a year up until then Davis had served as provisional president of the rebellion, not subjected to a formal election process.  With the election he had the trimmings of legality, enough to give him legitimacy in the eyes of most voters in the southern states.  Still, all that the phony election could do was make him the acknowledged leader of an unconstitutional rebellion against the best government then in existence on the earth.

There yet may be some shallow commentators who will claim that the rebellion was not about slavery.  You just need to ask them a couple of children’s questions—such as “Why”—to expose slavery as the fundamental reason for the break.  The attempt at secession from the Union, although threatened for years, did not take place until after the election of 1860 when Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated two different Democrat candidates and one independent.  In accordance with the procedures of the Constitution, Lincoln obtained a clear (and decisive) majority of votes in the Electoral College.  Then southern politicians in southern states started trying to peel away.

Why?, the six-year old asks.

Well, because they did not want to live under Lincoln as President, would be the modern firebrand’s reply.

Why?

Because he was in favor of the abolition of slavery and would be unlikely to do what the Democrat presidents had done before him to keep Congress from passing laws that would destroy slavery.

So the war was about slavery, then?, you might be forgiven for asking.

No, would be the reply.  It was all about states' rights.

Which states' rights?, you could ask without being rude.

Like the right to determine their own future, their own culture, their own institutions.

Which institutions in particular?, you should be expected to inquire.

Well, the institution of slavery in particular, the southern apologist would rejoin.

Are there any other southern institutions that Mr. Lincoln or the Congress were threatening? 

No, not really, responds your interlocutor, except maybe free trade.  Congress several times before imposed protective tariffs and restrictions on trade, and one time the southerners did rebel.  At least South Carolina did.

Did South Carolina really rebel and leave the Union over trade protection?

A truthful response might go like this:  Well, no, not really. No other states were much interested, and President Andrew Jackson, a southerner, by the way, threatened to send in the army.  The action became just talk and eventually died down.

So the only institution southern politicians feared for in 1860 was slavery?  So the rebellion is about slavery after all.

Here the defender of the indefensible would be left with nothing but denials and circular talk, leaving slavery as the only justification standing.

It is hard today to imagine Americans at war with each other, slaughtering each other for the better part of four years and over half a million people.  It took a mighty polarizing canker at the heart of the nation to allow it.

It may be easier to imagine American politics getting all pushed into an impossible situation by failure to come to grips with a monumental problem that only grew worse.  It was clear in the mid-1800s that slavery was unsustainable socially, politically, and even economically.  It was poisoning American government and society and polarizing the nation, but neither Congress nor President was willing to take it on directly.  Sure, there were several grand compromises, the heart of which was to avoid the problem rather than solve it.  The problem was pushed off to another day for someone else to solve.

Keeping millions of people in servitude was increasingly untenable and at odds with the governing morality of the nation, the morality that comprised the central spirit of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Neither of those documents ended slavery, but both set in place governing principles intolerable with slavery and that progressively undermined it.  That is why it took one last grand breaking of the Constitution—the southern rebellion—to try to preserve slavery.  Fortunately it was met by an even greater struggle to enforce the Constitution and as a result bring an end to the South’s “peculiar institution.”

We should be able to imagine that kind of an exercise in political catastrophe, because we have a no less intolerable situation threatening our nation today, a situation that only grows worse by the month as too many leading politicians fail to address it.  Those who try are lambasted by a media sympathetic to the whole evil business.  We have our grand compromises that in fact do very little other than put off dealing with the real problem.  The social welfare society of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his political heirs down to President Obama cannot be afforded by any nation, not even the United States, the wealthiest and most prosperous of them all.  A much less prosperous Europe is coming unglued over their social welfare system.  The process of buying votes with government programs and benefits paid for by future generations may make for temporarily clever politics, but it is fundamentally immoral, destructive of society and individual character, and economically unsound and unsustainable. 

President Obama hopes to buy a few more years before the day of reckoning (enough to get him past 2012 elections) by talking of taxing the rich.  Unless he is stupid, he knows that higher taxes—whether on the rich or anyone else—cannot solve the problem.  Today 48% of the population pays little or no net Federal taxes.  What happens to our republic when the line crosses 50% and the majority come to believe that they can live by taxing the rest of the population?  How long will the working minority put up with that modern slavery?

But here is another slavery that the government welfare society is creating.  Even if we stop the whole process now, ending all government deficits where they are—no new debt—my children and grandchildren will still have to be twice as productive as we are today just to maintain current standards of living.  Today there are 4 workers for every retired person in America.  Current projections show that during my time in retirement (should I ever reach it) there will come the day when there are only 2 workers for every retired person.  At that time, more than half the production of my grandchildren will go to support other people and pay the debts piled up in many cases before the children of today and tomorrow were born.

Anyone care to predict how America’s social fabric will be held together then?

Of Good Times on Wall Street and Standing Out from the Crowd

The lot of people engaging in the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) party in New York City are a lot of things to a lot of people, particularly if you rely upon the glowing news reports about them.  Most Americans, let’s say 99% of them, have not been near any of the party goers, so we have had to rely upon the news media to tell us who and what they are.  A colleague of mine witnessed their march in Washington on a recent Saturday.  There were about 30 of them matched—or even overmatched—by the number of reporters accompanying the march, so in terms of numbers the parties seem to be well covered.

Still, for all that coverage I have to confess that I have not been able to get any specific or focused idea on who they are and what they want.  That is why I am indebted to Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen, who had the bright idea of sending his polling team to the party to ask the attendees themselves who they are, what they believe, and what they want.  As far as I know he was the first to come up with such an obvious idea and remains the only one to have tried it.  The occupiers were fortunately candid and forthcoming in the interviews.  I expect that they may be more on their guard in the future to repeat the party line, whatever that might be.

I understand that the OWS party goers represent 99% of the population (I am not sure if they mean 99% of America, or of the World, or of just New York City—the lack of Yankees baseball caps in the media photos casts doubt on this last possibility), 99% because they said so and the news coverage has repeated it, over and over again.  I suspect that puts me in the 1%, at least that is the percentage of fat in the milk I drink (I prefer whole milk, but my wife refuses to buy it).  In case you are wondering whether you are in the 99% that the OWS groupies represent, here is a list of characteristics of the New York City party goers, care of Douglas Schoen’s polling team, who interviewed 198 of them in their New York City party venue.  See whether you fit the list, keeping in mind that, in the words of O.J. Simpson’s attorney, if the glove does not fit you must acquit.

·         The majority are male.

·         More than half are 30 years old or older.

·        None of them are Republicans, although 14% are either anarchists, socialists, or belong to the “Working Families Party” (that sounds socialist to me, but maybe that just means that they are not Democrats).

·        Somewhat more than half of them, 56%, voted in the 2008 presidential election, and 74% of those for Barack Obama.

·       When asked what bugs them the most, 30% claimed the influence of corporate/moneyed/special interests; 5% claimed “everything” (sounds like the teenagers or maybe the college students); 3% identified America’s democratic/capitalist system; 2% each for bureaucracy, Bush tax cuts, military spending, the Federal Reserve, and Obama abandoning the left; that gets us up to 53% without moving on to the rest of the gripes that they offered.

·       When asked what this was all about, there was a similar variety of answers, with the lead going to the 44% who said mobilizing progressives or influencing the Democrats the way that the Tea Party has influenced Republicans (that may seem ambitious, but I suspect that it is as tough as pushing on an open door given the rest of the OWS demands); curiously, 5% favored a flat tax, a favorite of many conservatives; but 4% called for dissolution of representative democracy and capitalism, and another 4% were for a radical distribution of wealth, which amounts to the same thing; and that brings us to 57% without getting to the rest of the somewhat confused list.

·       When asked who is to blame, George Bush, Barack Obama, and Wall Street tied at 7% each (suggesting that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be as much of a focus for them as Wall Street); while the Republican Party only just edged out “The American People”, 16% to 15%; 5% identified the “Citizens United Supreme Court ruling”; which again gets us to 57% without going any further down the rather long list.

·       The closest point to unanimity among the party goers was that 98% agreed that civil disobedience was a good idea to achieve their goals, and even 31% believed that violence would be O.K., too.

·       Surprising to me was that these anti-Wall Street protesters were almost exactly evenly divided over whether giving TARP money to banks was a good idea, 51% opposed but 49% in favor.

·       Last point here, though there were several other questions, 65% agreed that government had a moral responsibility to guarantee healthcare, college education, and a secure retirement for all, no matter what the cost.

You are excused if you have trouble finding a clear theme in all of this.  If your head is spinning to some degree, just watch some TV or pick up a newspaper and you will learn once again what this is really all about.  I doubt that the reporters or commentators will note that there is almost a universal attitude at the OWS party that someone else is to blame for all things blameworthy.  Nor are they likely to point out that the demands of the unwashed 99ers revolve around getting others to do something for them or give them something.

This latter point seems to me to be one of the more distinguishing points separating the OWS Gimmees from the TEA Party activists.  The hundreds in the OWS crowd predominantly want to have government dictating to people how to live—while they have their hands out or want to put their hands in your pocket (a common complaint among the campers is that their stuff is constantly getting stolen by other campers).  The tens of thousands of TEA Party activists want to be left alone, want to keep what they have earned, want government to step back from making rules to control their lives.

Maybe at this point you are feeling very special, which is not a bad achievement for any writer.  If you feel that you do not fit into the Gimmees 99%, congratulations on being one in a hundred.

Of the Divine Traits of Humans and the Fatherhood of God

The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the History of the Peloponnesian Wars are among the Greek classics that are part of the classics-based education that my son receives at his school, a school that embraces our rich western heritage.  You may suspect and correctly so that he does not attend a government school (though we still get to pay—in many ways—for the bad education that other children receive in the government schools).

It is worthy of note that a common theme in many ancient western texts as well as in most cultures around that world is the descent of some person or group of people directly from God.  Why is that theme found so commonly among the ancients all around the world, east, west, north, and south?  A reading of Homer, Thucydides, and many other writers of millennia ago does not permit the conclusion that the ancients were dumber or less enlightened than more modern writers who would scoff at the idea.  The ancients seemed to have had their share of the dull, the average, and the brilliant as can be found in all ages, ours too.

Could it be that there is something to it, that there is a relationship between God and man that is close enough to be properly called familial, even of Father to son and daughter?  Is this a theme of the ages that will not die because it is based on reality? 

As the Lord prepared Moses for his mission to redeem the House of Israel from bondage in Egypt and restore them to their land of promise, He gave to Moses a vision of His dealings with mankind from its earliest days.  In the vision Moses was shown a prophet named Enoch.  Enoch was also taught by the Lord by vision, a vision in which he saw the panorama of the world only as God Himself could reveal.  When the mighty God wept because of the evil so prevalent among so many, the prophet was astonished and asked how the God of creation could weep.  Part of the Lord’s answer to Enoch included these words:

And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood. . .  (Moses 7:33)

Notice the relationship of Father to children, which also meant that in a real and not figurative way Enoch and all of the race of humans were “brethren”.  It was as a father in a very real sense that God wept for the misdeeds of His children and their cruelty toward their brethren, His sons and daughters.  This is a warm and authentic relationship with deity that men and women throughout the ages have craved and have instinctively felt.  

This is not to deny that there is a lot of mythology intertwined with the truth of man’s divine parentage.  There are powerful truths at the core of all enduring myths, the story in the myth often highlighting or demonstrating some fundamental verity.  While the scriptures can present truths in clarity and purity, even the myths of men preserve and transmit fundamental realities of existence.

Thus, throughout the ages and into modern days themes of divine attributes of humanity persist, that raise man above the rest of creation.  Men make and use tools, increasingly complex tools.  In a parody of the words of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, I often say to my children,

In every job that must be done there is a tool.
You find that tool, and, snap, your job’s a game.
Without that tool your job’s a hassle.

So men have found since creation, and so tools have enhanced men’s ability to be creators, a divine trait of the great Creator.

Recently I noticed what to you may be a commonplace.  As far as I can tell, only humans have pets.  Other animals may develop symbiotic relationships with other creatures, but only humans seem to develop those special relationships with other species, a relationship founded upon love and affection, of master to pet.  I perceive divinity in it.  If you have ever had a beloved pet, you may sense what I mean.

Perhaps the case of man’s divinity, his innate heritage from God, his Father, can be opened and closed by this one evidence:  man’s ability to make music.  Yes, yes, yes, birds whistle and wolves howl, and so forth.  But they have been singing the same songs since the beginning.  Man’s ability to create music is apparently infinite in extent and variety, because it comes from the Infinite.  It is divine in origin and the clearest example to which I can point of man’s direct familial relationship to God.

The facile retort to this is that men are so evil, how can they be related to the divine?  I respond much as Fyodor Dostoevsky did to this old and thin objection:  the existence of evil does not deny the influence of God, but rather the good that thrives in spite of the evil is proof positive of the presence and influence of God.

My final point would be that none of this is new.  It is the oldest truth of all, understood by the first man and woman.  Paul taught it 2,000 years ago to some of the most sophisticated people of his day, the saints in Rome:

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:  And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.  For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.  (Romans 8:16-18)

Of the World Bank and Washington Parties

Last evening and this afternoon I was in Washington, D.C.  That would be an unremarkable statement, since I work in Washington.  But I am not often there in the evening and even less often on a Saturday afternoon.  I was in Washington at those unusual times because my son, I’ll call him Peter, was participating in a choral program at a church in the city.

I write this to explain why in the world I would be in Washington not only on a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon, but of all weekends, on the weekend when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are having their annual meetings.  Two out of every three years they hold their joint meetings in the capital of the Free World, the third year somewhere else.  They like holding their meetings in the capital of the Free World because they are very much interested in the capital of the Free World.

Finance ministers, government economic development experts, and related hangers on from all over the globe gather to talk about poverty and economic hardship in the poor countries and how the rich countries have an obligation to channel more money in the direction of the poor countries.  They have been doing this for something over 65 years.  And yet, with a few exceptions, the poor countries seem to remain poor, the most notable growth being in the number of poor countries.

Early in my career in Washington, back in the early 1980s, these meetings used to be a lot of fun.  The world’s largest commercial banks would hold lavish parties.  In those days the big banks, encouraged by the IMF, the World Bank, and their own governments, were big into lending money to the poor countries, billions and billions of dollars.  That money was supposed to fuel economic growth by funding big projects that politicians could take credit for and where they could have their pictures taken at elaborate ribbon cutting ceremonies.  The projects were started, some of them built, but very little economic development resulted.  The poor nations were not very good at paying back the loans.  In the mid-1980s it almost destroyed the banks.  Since then, they have gotten out of that business.  They stopped holding the parties, too.

Walking through Washington last night and this afternoon I could see nevertheless that lavish parties were still going on.  I am not sure who was hosting them.  I think that at least some were sponsored by non-profit groups.  But they were still lavish.  It was very difficult getting past the fanciest hotels and restaurants and some of the popular museums.  Stretch limos were packed in as the financial leaders of these poor countries were climbing out and milling around, dressed in tuxedos, evening dresses, and pricey jewelry, to hear speeches from well-paid development experts, delivering their latest reports on the tough financial times and their clever theories about the obligations of rich nations like the United States to send more money to the poor nations.

This afternoon we walked by Lafayette Square, within earshot of a group of protesters in front of the White House.  Somebody was bellowing through a bullhorn.  I could not quite make out what he was chanting.  I think it had something to do with the World Bank and IMF not giving poor nations enough money.  As I say, I could not quite make it out.  My son said it sounded all the world like,

No more pencils,
No more books,
No more teachers’
Dirty looks.

Of the Spirit of America and the Spirit of Tyranny

Last week I experienced two memorable events, each in its own way pointing to the spirit of America. One, appropriately enough, was called “The Spirit of America,” the annual presentation of the U.S. Army’s Old Guard, headquartered at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia. The program chronicled the history of the Army from its first days in the War of Independence to the present.

There is no reliance upon hyperbole in saying that the U.S. Army has been one of the most effective instruments in the history of mankind for the promotion of freedom. Without the Army, independence would not have been achieved and very likely not even attempted (the Army came into being a full year before the Declaration of Independence).

The very existence of the United States has been a beacon and stimulus to people around the world to strive for and obtain freedom. Would the colonies of Latin America have sought liberty without the successful example of the United States? How significant was the example of America to the struggles of the peoples of Europe to cast off their monarchies? To what extent did Great Britain learn from its painful mistakes administered by the citizens and Army of the United States and provide for a gentler path to liberty for its many colonies around the globe? The Army has been a reliable and effective protector of that beacon of American freedom.

With direct action, the U.S. Army became the essential element that gave force to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Without the victories of the U.S. Army over the rebels who rose up against freedom and constitutional government Lincoln’s Proclamation would have been a scorned piece of paper that offered false hopes to millions laboring in slavery.

In the Twentieth Century the U.S. Army helped bring World War I to its end, the western republics triumphing over the central monarchies. It was the U.S. Army that not only played the central role in defeating the dictators of central Europe and Japan in World War II, but wherever it went the U.S. Army left free republics in its wake, including among the vanquished nations. Again in Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, and Panama the U.S. Army fought for freedom and against tyranny. Throughout the Cold War the Army—together with the other important branches of the armed services, equally effective instruments of freedom—remained strong and active to protect the free world against totalitarian communism.

This idea did not originate with me. Our grandfathers knew these things. They were commonly understood until recent generations witnessed the armed services and even national defense itself become open questions with left-wing academics seeking to reintroduce into America, and dress in pseudo-intellectual clothes, the exploded Old World programs of tyranny and rule by elites. That the idea of the liberating role of the American military can seem fresh and insightful is a mark of how much the religions of tyranny have found a place in popular media and even in the education supplied in many government schools.

By contrast the spirit of America silhouetted the other event to which I referred. This was the speech of President Barack Obama before a joint session of Congress, outlining his latest plan to restore job creation that has been so effectively undermined by his economic policies. If you reach through the cloud of rhetoric, President Obama’s proposal does not rise above expanding the size of government and raising taxes on successful people and entrepreneurs. That is not the spirit of America.

That is the spirit of the old nations of Europe and Asia from which our forefathers fled to found something entirely different in the New World. That is the spirit where people get ahead by the favor of those in power, and the people in power take what does not belong to them to reward their supporters and hangers on. A leading news story of this week is the scandal of a bankrupt “green” factory that was awarded nearly half a billion dollars by the Obama Administration and used as a television backdrop to announce how government subsidies to “green” industry would pave the road to national prosperity. That idea is today just as bankrupt as the business. It seems that what made this business green was the color of the money that Washington elites poured into it from the U.S. Treasury.

Together the two events demonstrate what the spirit of America is and what it is not. The first is a legacy of personal sacrifice by free soldiers for the freedom of others. The second, the spirit of tyranny, would sacrifice other people for the expansion of government and the power of Washington elites.

Of Political Combat and Governing the Nation

There is an idea, common in public discourse, that is at best naïve and at all events silly. It is the mistaken idea that the chief problem of American government today is the unwillingness of Republicans and Democrats to set aside their differences and get on with the business of government. It apparently is based upon the assumption that there is very little in the way of principle, belief, or right and wrong in the proposals and policies of the two. In this notion, the two sides are just jockeying to see who will “win.” Perhaps that comes from the view that all too many politicians throughout time have not had much in the way of principles and beliefs, mingled with the approach to politics that sees it as some sort of sports event rather than a combat over how the nation is to be governed. These are certainly the attitudes of the shallow reporting that guides most of the newspapers and major media organizations today.

This view is demonstrably wrong. While strong differences of opinion have always been part of American government since its earliest days, the issues at stake have seldom been trivial. “Winning” in American politics has been and continues to be about how the nation is to be governed, not about who “ended” with the higher score. It takes a very superficial understanding to think that American politics is all some game. At its core, political combat in America has always been about freedom, those who wish to promote and protect freedom and those who seek to limit and control freedom, those who genuinely trust people and those who do not. There is no compromise in this combat that does not either promote or reduce freedom.

The most enduring political battle of the nineteenth century was over trade, whether to have free trade or to place restrictions on the ability of people to buy and sell with whomever from wherever they wished. Every compromise either expanded economic freedoms or reduced them. Average people were made wealthier or poorer by the results of the political fights over trade.

The hottest political battles of the nineteenth century were over slavery, whether to extend it or limit it, whether to preserve or to abolish it. All of the temporary compromises that were reached either expanded freedom or reduced it. In the end over half a million people in the United States died over this issue when the battle left the ground of politics and took to the field.

This exception to political battle in the United States, when we let guns rather than politicians do the talking, was when the political question cut to the core of what we were as a nation, a nation of “We the People.” As Abraham Lincoln correctly saw, America could not forever remain part free and part slave; it would eventually become all one or the other. The nation was becoming steadily freer, slavery being killed by economic reality. When the southern slaveholders could no longer use politics to keep slavery alive within the United States, they sought a solution in disunion and eventually war. They succeeded in ending slavery more quickly than anyone imagined.

Political conflict did not let up in the twentieth century any more than it has in the twenty-first. The important thing is not that we have political battle but that, with the exception of the Civil War, we have been willing to let our battles be fought out in legislatures and elections. The sad truth is, that to the extent we infantilize political conflict into a sporting contest it will cease to be a means by which we fight out the battles of how we govern. Rule of law will break down, and conflict will find its way out of the halls of government and into the arena of the streets.

Of Inflation and Words of Offence

The professional political commentators were all atwitter today about a word. It was one word from a comment that new presidential candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, said yesterday in discussion with some likely Republican voters in Iowa. The subject was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve Board. These are the monetary policies that affect the price of everything in the United States and the value of the dollar abroad.

This is what Governor Perry said. Read it carefully, and see if you have any difficulty figuring out what Perry’s message was:

If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all will do to them in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas . . . I mean printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion. Because all it’s going to be doing—we’ve already tried this—all it’s going to be doing is devaluing the dollar in your pocket. And we cannot afford that. We have to learn the lessons of the past three years.

Have you figured out what he was talking about, what his message was? This is not a trick question. His message seemed clear and obvious to me. That message was not what the professional commentators were largely talking about. I guess they missed it. As they interviewed each other, pretending that they were somehow reporting news, they zeroed in on Governor Perry’s use of the word “treasonous”. Was Governor Perry accusing the Federal Reserve Board Chairman of “treason” they all asked?

Having been interviewed by the TV talking heads on numerous occasions, I could not help imagining myself responding to their question. Of course they did not ask me, or anyone like me. They were busy interviewing each other.

But if I had been asked what seems to be the important question of the day—or, like Sesame Street puppets, the word of the day—I suspect I might have answered something like this:

“Are you asking me about a word or about the principle that Governor Perry was emphasizing? My religion teaches me not to make a man a transgressor for a word (see Isaiah 29:20, 21), but it is the principle, his message that we should consider if we want to evaluate his candidacy for President. What principles would likely guide him while in office? That is what we need to know if we want to have an intelligent conversation about who should be president.”

I would then add that it seemed to me that Governor Perry’s message was very clear:

Inflation is a bad policy, an especially bad policy at this time of a weak economy. We have tried it before, and it hurts the nation and the people. It would be particularly wrong for the independent Federal Reserve to choose inflation for political purposes.

That would be my recitation of Governor Perry’s message. I think I got it right. And I think that Governor Perry got it right.

Inflation is terrible. It breaks the promise embedded in money and makes it a lie. Remember that money is just a certificate of a promise between two people: I will give you my labor or goods or service in exchange for a promise that I can obtain something of equal value later. That becomes a lie if inflation means that when I redeem that promise I get something that government has reduced in value by depreciating the money that carries that promise. I provide $20 of labor and only get $18 of value in return. That is what inflation means. It corrupts that value of our goods and services. Even worse it corrupts the value of the promises we make and receive.

Inflation is particularly hard on retired people. These are people who set their money aside for 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more so that they could live off of it in their old age. Inflation cheats them, giving them only a fraction—sometimes only a small fraction—of the value that they set aside and hoped and relied upon for the rest of their lives. They lived a lower standard of living so that they could save for the future, only to find inflation make that future poorer for them. That is a life-time theft, when it is all too late to be reclaimed.

So if you want, go ahead and choose whatever word you want to describe inflation and its effects, especially if that inflation were inflicted on the nation for short-term political gain. Choose your word if that political inflation were to be inflicted by those public servants—the Federal Reserve Board—who took on the legal duty and responsibility to maintain stable prices, to fight inflation.

Whichever word you may choose, the policy of national inflation is wrong. Even if governments throughout history and into the modern era frequently resort to inflation when their national debt becomes too heavy to carry, it is still wrong. It is destructive and undermines the economy and robs the people who rely upon honest money.

Governor Perry was right to say, in very clear language, that it would be a major mistake for the Federal Reserve to choose that road, that the Federal Reserve must guard its independence from political pressure and hold to its legal mandate to fight inflation, not promote it.

If you must choose a word to describe it, go ahead. To quote Gilbert and Sullivan,

I conceive you may use
Any language you choose
To indulge in without impropriety.
(Iolanthe)

Of Government Debt and Historic Ratings

Apologists for the Obama administration desperately wish to make light of the unprecedented downgrading of the credit rating of U.S. Government debt from the virtually riskless category of AAA to the slightly riskier rank of AA. The apologists, when they cannot divert attention from the issue altogether, rely upon one or both of two arguments: 1) it was all a big mistake, an irrational and inappropriate decision; or 2) the downgrading does not really matter, it does not mean much.

Apology 1) merits this observation. Maybe it was a mistake. The other two major rating agencies so far have not taken a similar step, even while making noise about the possibility. That kind of public and open debate and disagreement is important for this land of free speech, most particularly with regard to opinions on government policies and their consequences.

The question of the ability of the U.S. to continue to service its debt is certainly open for debate. What is not debatable is that we are now in a condition where it is debatable. We have not been in a situation—since the emergence of the United States onto the world stage of major nations—where our ability to service our debt was at all in question. That we are is new, historic, and not disputed. Under the Obama Administration a lot of unthinkable things have suddenly become all too thinkable, from socializing medicine, or backing away from our support for Israel, to the government taking over the banking system. Add to that list of unthinkables the riskiness of U.S. Government debt.

Apology 2) is without merit. The noise from the Obama Administration suggests that it really does matter, a lot. It is important to note that the S&P decision came after the Congress and the Administration very predictably reached agreement on raising the debt ceiling. The issue is not about the debt ceiling. The issue would still exist if there were no debt ceiling. The issue is the natural debt ceiling, the one that comes when the debtor is no longer able to make good on his promises of repayment. The downgrade is advice to all investors anywhere in the world that the safety of U.S. Government debt can no longer be taken for granted. It has moved from being riskless to an investment that carries some risk—you may debate how much, but you can no longer deny that there is some.

Maybe there is great wisdom in that. Maybe all government debt, from any source, should be recognized as carrying risk. There is always political risk. History is replete with evidence that governments lie to their own people and to their investors, so perhaps a Triple-A “riskless” rating should never be given to any government promises. But apart from willingness to pay, to honor debt agreements, the recognition today is that the U.S. government debt is on a trajectory to where the government cannot—to where it will be unable to—honor its debt commitments.

That is not unprecedented. There are several historical examples where governments amassed debts that were too heavy to repay. It has usually led to the downfall of the governments. The Roman emperors tried to manage their uncontrolled spending on cheap popularity by debasing the coinage (a form of inflation) that wrecked the economy and eventually the empire itself. The debts of the English King Charles I led to rebellion that cost him his head in 1649. A similar chain of events brought on the French Revolution. More recently, the Soviet debt crisis of the 1980s set in motion the final events that broke up the USSR. Other sovereign debt crises are unfolding today before our eyes. All that S&P said was that the U.S. Government cannot act like it is immune from joining the sad list without making major changes in spending and borrowing programs.

Which is to say that the S&P decision matters greatly. There will be much debate about how much it matters, but only charlatans or simpletons will maintain that it does not matter at all. Once you have lost your virginity, there is no reclaiming it. It is a watershed to move from perceived risklessness of debt to the recognition of some risk. Risk costs money, as investors have to hedge against the possibility of some degree of non-payment, whether through changes in terms or through repayment in debased (inflated) currency.

Already investors are starting to move some of their money out of government debt—now exposed to greater market risk—into bank deposits where even with interest rates artificially depressed by the Federal Reserve the principal is not exposed to changes in market values. More significantly, an important anchor of certainty in our economy—the assumption of absolute security of U.S. Government debt—has been pulled up, rougher going for any ships that have to navigate an economy already turbulent with uncertainties.

In the early days of the Obama presidency the media and the President himself were eager to point out how this or that development was history-making, that this or that initiative was historic. Downgrading the credit rating of the debt of the U.S. Government is certainly historic. Let us hope that President Obama does not make any more history.

Of the Love of Christ and the Law of Restoration

When Jesus Christ visited His people in the ancient Americas after His resurrection in Jerusalem He taught them lessons that He had preached to the Jews in ancient Judea. The pre-Columbian American record of Christ’s teachings proves that the Sermon on the Mount and other words of Christ in the Bible are not mere inventions of the Savior’s followers. Separate witnesses to the same message, with an ocean in between them, demonstrate the consistency of Christ’s words and the veracity of the record.

One of those important teachings involves our attitude toward others. In the Americas He taught, as He did to the Jews,

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother: Let me pull the mote out of thine eye—and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (3 Nephi 14:1-5)

In short, fallible as we are, we are little qualified to judge the faults of others, and doing so puts us in danger of being similarly subjected to imperfect standards. If we prefer patience and tolerance applied to us, then we should practice them when considering others.

Now, let us add to this discussion another important virtue. In modern times, when Jesus Christ restored His Church on the earth He listed the virtues needed to do His work:

Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence. (Doctrine and Covenants 4:6)

I would particularly draw attention to the virtue of “brotherly kindness”. I would ask, what is the difference between being nice and being kind? I would suggest that being nice is related to manners and politeness, an important but perhaps shallow virtue. I have experienced people who are very nice and polite but who are rather unkind. I have, similarly, known people who were rather rough in their manners and outspoken and direct in their language but who were deeply kind and caring. In this context, I consider kindness related to charity and love. I think that is what is meant by “brotherly kindness” in the scripture. I prefer kind people to nice people, if I had to choose.

Next we turn to a greater and more important virtue, the most important of all. Here is how the ancient American prophet Mormon described charity (again, similar to the definition revealed an ocean away by the Apostle Paul):

And charity suffereth long, and is kind [notice again the connection between kindness and charity], and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him. (Moroni 7:45-47)

While this is an ideal, it is clear that God does not intend it to be an unreachable ideal. Through the atonement of Jesus Christ charity has been placed within the reach of all of us, and God intends all of us to obtain that supreme virtue.

When the Prophet Joseph Smith was being treated with anything but kindness, in the depth of a dank prison pit in a Missouri winter, the Lord revealed to him how to treat others. The Lord instructed the Prophet, and us, to engage with others “by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile. . .” The Lord further instructed us to “be full of charity towards all men,” and as we did so, the Lord promised, “The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41, 42, 45, 46).

Thus we see that it is through the atonement of Jesus Christ that we have access to the presence and influence of the Holy Ghost, which influence changes our hearts and fills us with charity, the greatest of all. It is with that changed attitude that God wants us to interact with our fellowmen here and in the eternities.

This may all still seem a bit theoretical. The ancient American prophet Alma explained a very simple and practical approach, one that I have found confirmed over and over again.

For that which ye do send out shall return unto you again, and be restored. . . (Alma 41:15)

Alma called this the law of restoration and explained that, as we show mercy, justice, and goodness toward others, the same will return unto us. The more we try to give away love, the more that love grows within us. As we practice the love of Christ, we will develop the love of Christ as a personal virtue, a practical approach to something that means everything.

Of Families and Everlasting Reunions

Some family traditions are seemingly untraceable; we do not know where or how they got started. We just do them as part of the warp and woof that weave the family together. But there are some of which we know where and when they began, because we began them. In a few days we will start a new tradition in our family that promises to help unite our family forever, because it is intended to remind us that families go on and on through the generations and that the members of the family are connected to the family eternally.

We will gather all members of the family in what is projected to be a biennial reunion. We envision a combination of daily living and recreation, punctuated by family devotionals. The devotionals are intended as a unified worship of the Father of us all upon whose power we rely to make these family relations everlasting.

Inconstancy is one of the constants of mortality. Plans are made and changed or forgotten. Pledges are given and revoked. Promises are made and broken. People are born, mature, grow old, die, and fade from the memory of the living. All earthly things seem to fail and fade.

Yet many wish and hope for the sweetest experiences and relations of life to continue unceasingly. God, the Father of us all, has promised that they can. They are found most bountifully within the family. How in this world of all things temporary and changing do we find the power to make things everlasting and unchanging?

We can only find it by drawing the power and influence of the eternal world into this one. God Himself has to do it. Because our Father in Heaven wants us to bring our families into heaven, He has established heavenly places on earth where heavenly promises can be made by mortals, made eternal by the participation of God in the promise-making and His help in the promise-keeping.

These holy places are the holy Temples of God, built under God’s direction, dedicated by His authority, sanctified by His presence. Inside these holy Temples heaven takes up residence on earth.

Imperfect man and woman can enter into these Temples, there join hands under the authority of God, and make solemn promises that can unite them as a family that may last forever. The promises may last forever, because God is a party to the promises. By those who hold heavenly power and authority to act in His name our Heavenly Father wraps binding cords of eternity around the hearts of the participants. As the mortal husband and wife remain true to God He keeps them united and through the atonement of Jesus Christ overcomes their mortal imperfections. This blessed association is available today to all who will.

Heavenly connections thus made and honored reach through the generations, tying grandparents, parents, and children together, on and on throughout the past and future. As each new child is born, he or she is connected to the family, and as each family member passes beyond this life the connections remain unbroken.

And we do not have to wait to celebrate this family union. We will remember and celebrate it this week, and for every day to come. Our Father intended it that way.

Of People and Government

One hundred-fifty years ago William Tecumseh Sherman was engaged in the early efforts to put down the rebellion in the southern slave states. He had the idea that it would require several hundred thousand troops. The savvy people of the day seriously thought that Sherman was crazy. After the war and more than a million soldiers later Sherman had another insightful comment:

My opinion is, the country is doctored to death, and if President and Congress would go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, the country would go on under natural influences, and recover far faster than under their joint and several treatment.
(William T. Sherman, letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1868, in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, p.922)

We need more Shermans today. No one knew better than Sherman what government could do militarily. He also knew its limitations and understood that military competence does not transfer to economic competence.

The federal government, having caused the recent economic turmoil and the resultant recession by an elaborate and pervasive system of guaranties and subsidies, then precipitating a financial panic with massive intervention programs that drove investors out of the markets, quickly followed up with new laws to take over the healthcare and financial systems, simultaneous with uncontrolled spending. The government has tried all that it can do—and far more than it should do. The government’s quack medicine recurrently and unpredictably applied, like in the 1930s, is making sure that private initiative has little chance for recovery.

This highlights the fundamental question: do you or do you not trust people. This is not a new question. It is as old as government, which is practically as old as time. The evidence of the ages is clear: trusting people is the only economic system that works.

The reason is not complicated. Government economic programs are run by men and women making decisions about things that they do not fully understand, applying their own incentives to other people’s money, property, and talents. As smart as these men and women might be—and they are neither smarter nor dumber than the rest of the population—they are not smart enough to know enough to run an economy of over 300 million individuals making billions of economic decisions every day. No mortal is, and until the Second Coming of Christ government remains in the hands of the mortals.

Fortunately, if you trust the people you do not need to make their choices for them. Leave them alone, and they will know best how to invest their money, how to create new jobs, how to invent new products, how to be more efficient, and they will do it in the best ways that they know how, because their own money, resources, and reputations are on the line. Those who are best at these many tasks will succeed the most.

Because government has different incentives and does not work that way, the founders of the United States adopted a government whose founding document begins with the words, “We the People”. Today we have a changing system of government, increasingly based upon the idea of, “You the People”, and it is not working very well. That formula never has.

Of Depressions and Government Rescues

The government is running out of things to do. I am referring to the economy and with reference to improving the economy. A successful government program to recover from the financial crisis and recession that the government caused is turning out to be much harder than presidential candidate Barack Obama promised.

All prolonged recessions and depressions are caused by governments. The recent financial crisis occurred, first, because the elaborate house of cards of government promises and guarantees that dominated the mortgage and housing markets was flattened by a puff of the wind of reality. With government reinforcement and in fact much prodding, builders were encouraged to build more houses bigger and faster than people could use them, realtors were rewarded for selling them, mortgage brokers were drawn to get mortgages for people who could not afford them, and investors were lured into thinking that there was no risk in pumping their money into funding these mortgages. Reality eventually took over, as it always does.

All of this would have caused a major recession, but former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ensured that the recession would turn into a full blown financial panic. Nearly every Sunday in the fall of 2008 Paulson was on national camera, little hiding his deer-in-the-headlights expression, announcing the latest desperate and ill-conceived Federal financial rescue program. Remember that the disastrous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (that was not used to purchase assets after all) was Paulson’s idea. The markets were spooked by it. Markets tanked when Congress defeated it and tanked again when Congress passed it about a week later (sweetened with enough pork to buy needed votes). Investors went on strike.

President Obama has been unsuccessful, coming up on three years, in ending the strike. In fact, each time investors have shown some interest in coming back some new government plan or program has renewed enough uncertainty to drive investors back to the sidelines. For example, in early 2009 bank stocks were starting to recover until the Administration decided to impose stress tests to see how banks would fair if the Obama recovery plan failed. Investors returned to their seats to watch, and even the regulators’ findings that the banks could weather continued recession did not bring more than a tepid response from bank investors. The Obama Administration’s plan to restructure the entire banking and financial system—realized in the Dodd-Frank Act—has served to warn investors against taking new investment risks until they could see how it would all play out. It now seems clear that the financial crisis has been replaced by a regulatory crisis, with the regulators already falling way behind the mandates of the last Congress to write hundreds of new rules and no bank able to make any business plans extending much beyond a few months.

The housing markets remain at depression levels. New Dodd-Frank rules are making it much harder for families to get, lenders to offer, and investors to fund new mortgages for new houses. Is an economic recovery even conceivable with housing and mortgage markets mired in depression?

Our government has tried pulling its other levers. The United States has never, ever, witnessed the amount of government spending intended to stimulate the economy artificially. The Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply by trillions of dollars. Most of that Federal Reserve money has gone into funding government deficits, driving down the value of the dollar, and stimulating the prices of gold, silver, oil, and other commodities. The government takeover of the healthcare system, it was argued, was the only way to control medical costs that were said to be harming the economy.

Of course, there are more government actions waiting in the wings. The Administration wants to raise taxes dramatically, especially on investors and businesses—the energy business, the banking industry, investment firms, anyone who uses carbon (one of the elements necessary to life and essential to breathing), “rich” people, and small businesses that would be caught in the definition of “rich people.”

And yet the economy remains in the doldrums. Nothing seems to work. It conjures up memories of the Great Depression, that economic recession that Franklin Roosevelt was eager to take over. Through the whole decade of the 1930s FDR tried one thing after another to restore economic recovery, but nothing worked. Instead, FDR helped weaken world faith in representative government, greatly encouraging the willingness of desperate people to embrace the desperate measures of the dictators in Italy, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union who gave us World War II.

The Obama Administration has tried everything that government can do. Why not now try getting government out of the way and letting the people solve this one as they always have? Investors still have plenty of money ready to invest, if they were only confident that the rules would not change and that their investments would not be taxed away. Businessmen would be eager to hire new employees if they only knew how much the employees would cost and that some new government program would not impose new costs and burdens on their business. Banks would love to lend to businesses and provide mortgages if the regulators would stop changing the rules and discouraging banks from making loans to anyone other than to the government.

Maybe there is the worry that government will not get credit for the recovery if there is no new government program to point to, no government guarantee to praise, no stimulus spending to trumpet. Maybe that would be O.K. But I would be ready to vote for the government leaders who removed the obstructions to investment, lowered tax rates, lifted regulatory burdens, and dispelled the clouds of regulations and barriers to growth that are gathering on the horizon.

Of Mountebanks and the Second Coming of Christ

I have been wanting to write this for months, but I have been reluctant. I have been wanting to write this ever since I heard the bizarre claim on the radio by false prophets that they knew the exact date of the second coming of Christ. I have been reluctant, because I did not want to help draw attention to these con artists and inadvertently stimulate the curiosity of an unwary reader that could bring him within their grasp. We are close enough, now, to the day when their deception will be revealed, so the chance of there being further victims is small.

Today is May 20, 2011, and I am still here. I will still be here tomorrow, the date that the diabolical deceivers have given out as the day that Jesus Christ would return to the earth in glory. These mockers of the Savior are correct that tomorrow will fulfill prophecy, for as it comes and goes they will have demonstrated the fulfillment of Christ’s warning given to His disciples shortly before His crucifixion. As the Savior sat on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Temple, Christ prophesied of His return to the earth in the latter days. Jesus warned,

Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. . . . if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. (Matthew 24:23, 26)

The Savior then explained, that when He returns to the earth, no one will need to tell you, for all will see and know. It will be just as obvious and apparent as the sunrise:

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. . . .
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. (Matthew 24:27, 30)

Tomorrow will be the end of just one more in a long line of frauds. Unholy mountebanks, avaricious men and women in pursuit of power, wealth, sport, or personal aggrandizement, have played and will continue to play upon the emotions and fancies of those who mix their longing—and lack of patience—for the return of the Savior with a spiritual gullibility, unilluminated by an allegiance to the guidance of Christ and His prophets. These sheep, unwilling to rely upon the Savior’s promises on His own timetable and in His own ways, line up to be unmercifully shorn.

For us and for them it could be otherwise. Jesus Christ Himself gave an ironclad safeguard against these deceivers, a foolproof test that has protected believers for almost 2,000 years. If anyone tells you the day or time when the Savior will return, do not believe him:

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. (Matthew 24:36)

I consider it unwise to lay claims to more knowledge than the angels or to follow any mortal who makes such claims.

So tomorrow will come, and tomorrow will go. I will be here, and you will be here, but the leaders of the latest unholy fraud will likely be gone, long gone, probably along with much of the funds of their followers. But do not look for them in heaven; I recommend seeking them in some more earthly paradise, with swaying palm trees and drinks served with little umbrellas.

Of the Dodd-Frank Act and Preparing for the Next Crisis

Last year Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Act. As advertised, the Dodd-Frank Act was to restructure the entire financial system of the nation to ensure that we do not have another melt down of the economy, at least not one related to the financial system. With that promise, the Dodd-Frank Act set in motion an extensive program of federal government control of the banking and investment industries. Ever after, financial firms would be more responsible to bureaucracies in Washington than they would be to their own customers, but everything financial would be “safer.”

The Dodd-Frank Act is failing. In fact, judged by the most demanding measures possible, those set out by its framers in the Administration, it is an abject failure. And it is getting worse, not better, and it is making financial things worse, not better. A repeat of the troubles of 2007 through 2009 is becoming more likely rather than more remote.

A few days following enactment of Dodd-Frank, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner gave a speech at New York University’s Stern School of business in which he outlined six principles that would guide implementation of the new law. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should judge the success of the implementation by those six principles. Secretary Geithner challenged us to do so. He said, “You should hold us accountable for honoring them.” In a few days it will be ten months since President Obama signed the law in a formal White House ceremony. Let us examine progress of the last ten months by the standard of the six principles.

Principle One: Speed, moving as quickly as possible to bring clarity to the new rules of finance. The Dodd-Frank Act mandated an unprecedented program of new regulations that are so numerous and complex that describing them defies hyperbole. Estimates range between 250 and 500 new regulations to be promulgated. One of Washington’s prestigious financial law firms, Davis-Polk, noted by way of illustration that one of the agencies tasked with writing new regulations, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), normally has at most four regulations that it is working on at a time. At the end of December the CFTC had 31 regulations under work.

But starting regulations is not completing them. The Davis-Polk study noted that the law required 26 regulations to be completed in April 2011, but not a single deadline was met. Some 40 Dodd-Frank regulations are now behind schedule. That is not to criticize the regulators, who are cutting as many corners as possible to meet the deadlines. It illustrates how impossible it is to implement Dodd-Frank as mandated.

Principle Two: Full transparency and disclosure, with the regulatory agencies consulting broadly as they write new rules. Compliance with this principle is even worse than the speed test. In fact, in a vain effort to meet the unrealistic deadlines of the Dodd-Frank Act, regulators are shortening comment periods, consulting with each other as little as possible, and in general trusting to their own hasty judgment far too much. One agency head remarked to a banker group that the agency leadership did not need to have long discussions with the public; they have been thinking about the issues and already know what they want to do.

Principle Three: Avoid layering of new rules on top of old, outdated ones, eliminating rules that do not work, and wherever possible streamlining and simplifying. Barbara Rehm, a financial reporter with the independent trade newspaper American Banker, recently observed, “None of the numerous people interviewed could name a single rule that has been repealed or simplified.”

Principle Four: Avoid risking killing freedom of innovation, striving to achieve a careful balance, safeguarding freedom and competition. Since enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act there has been no innovation in the financial services industry, as businessmen do not know what they will be allowed to do and what will be banned once the Act is implemented. Actually, it is worse. The best minds in financial firms have been focused on how to meet the needs of the regulators rather than on how to meet the needs of their customers, and the only competition is among the regulators over who can be “tougher” on the financial industry.

Principle Five: Make sure that we have a more level playing field, both between banks and non-banks as well as with regard to America’s foreign competitors. In this category the talk and promises are extensive and good. So far there are no results. In fact, foreign regulators are quietly backing away from copying the regulatory excesses of the Dodd-Frank Act, positioning American firms to surrender the global financial leadership that they have built up over the last 100 years.

Principle Six: Actually, Secretary Geithner provided a bonus, squeezing two parts into this last standard. Part One: Have more order and coordination in the regulatory process so that regulatory agencies are working together, not against each other. Coordination among the regulators is haphazard at best, with plenty of agency competition in evidence. The new Orwellian Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has not even been set up, and the other regulators are already competing with it to show who can be more punitive on financial firms in the name of helping their customers. Even the States are joining in, with various state attorneys general pressuring banks to cough up $20 billion to some kind of fund to be used by officers of the Obama Administration to help the fortunate troubled homeowners of their choice.

Principle Six, Part Two: Conduct a careful assessment of costs and benefits of the burdens involved with the regulations. Cost/benefit analyses have been cursory at best but more often non-existent. The inspector general of the CFTC recently chastised his agency for ignoring meaningful inquiry into the cost of its proposed regulations. Ten Republican legislators, troubled by this neglect, sent a letter to all the financial regulators asking for their cost/benefit analyses. There has been no reply.

Ten months into the implementation process, how must we judge the Dodd-Frank Act? Holding Secretary Geithner and the Obama Administration to their own standards, it is hard to avoid a conclusion of complete failure. This is no surprise to those of us who criticized the whole premise of the Dodd-Frank Act, that the government failures that brought on the financial crisis could be resolved by increasing the role of government. So far government is failing in the regulatory implementation crisis created by the Dodd-Frank Act. Do not look to government to be ready to respond to the next financial crisis when that arrives, especially if the confusion of the Dodd-Frank Act helps to hasten that day.