Of Personality and Order

While making no personal claims to psychological insight, I have found great value in the Jung-Myers approach to understanding human personalities.  Part of that approach identifies four major personality temperaments toward which each of us gravitates to one degree or another.  The work of Carl Jung and Isabel Myers—and many others building on that work—has elaborated the theory that in the world of people there is a variety of personalities all interacting and contributing to the social richness of humanity.  None of these four temperaments is “right” or “wrong.”  They are just different, and that difference is valuable and, moreover, worthy of understanding so that we can get along better in our interactions with each other.

I have seen all four of these temperaments in my small family of a mere 7 souls.  I consider the variety enriching to our family more than frustrating.  This insight has helped me understand where my children are coming from when I might otherwise think that any one of them has been replaced by a space alien.

Using that framework and watching my fellow travelers through life over decades of interaction, I have personally found it useful to describe the four temperaments in the following way, with regard to each person’s approach to his environment, or the world around us.

·         First (in no order of priority or relative value), there are those who come to grips with their world by seeking to be in harmony with their environment.  My wife is in this category.

·         Second, there are those who primarily seek to enjoy their environment.  I believe that two of my daughters are in this group.

·         Third are those who seek to organize their environment.  I think that I would consider myself as being in this group, along with perhaps a son and a daughter.

·         And a fourth group would be those who seek to protect themselves from their environment.  I believe that one of my sons would be found here.

Again, I emphasize that no temperament is better than the other.  They are just different.  And we need them all.  Moreover, some of each can be found in the attitudes of any one of us from time to time.  The point is which approach is dominant in the way we each live our lives.  Together, they all contribute to the success of our society.  That is to say, that whatever our temperament, we rely upon our brothers and sisters who have different temperaments to help make us and our society complete.

I do not consider this to be an accidental development but an essential element of God’s plan for the society of His children.  In several places in the scriptures God reminds us of the variety of gifts that He has given, emphasizing that we can and need to embrace and profit from each gift, all taken together.  “For the body is not one member, but many,” the Apostle Paul explained, and no part of the body can say to the other, “I have no need of thee” (see 1 Corinthians 12:14-21).

But does not all of this difference lead to disunity and perhaps even chaos?  It can, and has, but it does not need to.  Any personality trait, any temperament, any gift, if taken to the extreme or out of balance can result in harm to others.  There are plenty of examples in the long history of mankind of one taking advantage over another, either into anarchy or tyranny.  This is one of the structural failings of absolute monarchy or dictatorship, where too much of the society is guided by one person and his or her approach to the world.  The temptation to fit all of the people into that mold is natural and hard for the dictator to resist (if he even recognizes it).  On the other hand, there would be chaos if all had full license to live their preferences in disregard of others.

Many of the commandments of God are intended to help us to keep our differences in balance and to maintain the close society that allows us to be fully enriched by one another.  One of the chapters in The Book of Mormon explains this process as being the establishment of order by means of the ordinances of God (see Alma chapter 13).  The similarity in the words is not accidental. 

Entering into the kingdom of God is nothing more nor less than making a solemn covenant—pledged and witnessed by the physical ordinance of  baptism by immersion—to accept God’s commandments for a society of order as defined by God, an order that accommodates all human gifts and temperaments and organizes them into an harmonious whole.  The two greatest commandments of the kingdom of God are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (see Matthew 22:37-39).  In this system there are universal standards to bind us to one another by binding ourselves to our Savior Jesus Christ, who sacrificed to give us all the freedom to choose and be what those choices make us.

This verse from Alma chapter 13 describes the matter this way:

Now these ordinances were given after this manner, that thereby the people might look forward on the Son of God, it being a type of his order, or it being his order, and this that they might look forward to him for a remission of their sins, that they might enter into the rest of the Lord. (Alma 13:16)

Within the Savior’s order of peace there is full room to be at harmony with one’s environment, to enjoy it, in a well organized whole, where all are safe and at rest from fear.  Indeed, in the Kingdom of God is the one place where we all can have it all.  There is nowhere else like it for any of us.

Of Predictions and Prophecies

Two dangers to which members of our society—and perhaps members of many another society—have been prone is the eagerness to know the future, and dismay and disillusionment when the reality of the future does not play out as expected.  That makes predictors of the future in high demand and always at risk.

Experience also teaches us that most predictors of the future do not know what they are talking about and are highly susceptible to failure.  That probably explains why the oracles of history and modernity are sphinx-like in their pronouncements, offering up vague prognostications whose insightful value can only be appreciated after the ensuing events occur and are appropriately explained—or explained away.

In modern times our most prolific prognosticators are sports-wizards who tell you before the season begins and as it evolves who will be the champions and who the losers.  Not far behind are the political experts who make a living pronouncing who will win in the next elections, hoping greatly that their predictions will take the energy out of the doomed candidates and make the prophecy self-fulfilling.  Also high on the list in recent decades are the economic gurus who predict with assurance and precision everything from jobless numbers to economic growth to interest rates.

Some of these last are actually becoming reliable after a sort in terms of how consistently wrong they are.  An oft-cited economist from Standard and Poors comes to mind, who you can now generally count on getting his jobless predictions backwards.  I am reminded of Raymond F. DeVoe, Jr., who generously remarked that, “Economists use decimals in their forecasts to show that they have a sense of humor.” (Raymond F. DeVoe, Jr., The DeVoe Report, February 7, 1996)  Economists love to produce charts with erratic lines displaying the recorded past and smooth lines presenting their forecasts.  These are helpful in that you can be sure that the future will look nothing like the lines of predicted future performance.  It would be wise to keep in mind the observation of Alex Pollock concerning the recent recession, “Among the many losses imposed by the bubble is a well-deserved loss of credibility on the part of central bankers and economists.” (Alex Pollock, “2007 Bust:  How Could They Not Have Known?”, Real Clear Markets, September 21, 2011)

All of this is not to say that it is impossible to predict the future.  There are certain trends that can be predicted within tolerable levels of probability, such as that flooding the money supply will usually produce inflation, that you get less of what you tax (be that income, jobs, investment, or healthcare, for example), or that the Yankees will before long win another World Series.

Aside from acting upon reasonable probabilities based upon experience, good data, and rational analysis, it is safe to say that man cannot reliably predict the future.  We can learn from history, because although history never repeats itself it can teach us lessons.  In the world of human action there is nothing new that is wholly new.  All of this, however, is in the realm of managing risks and probabilities, something that we all have to do every day just in order to act.  Nevertheless, while we expect certain things to happen, none of us on our own can know what will happen.

God can and does know.  He sees it all, and He is never surprised.  God’s omniscience is not limited by time or place.  Moreover, our loving and generous Father shares or withholds from us knowledge of the future, depending upon our need.  God has shared with me enough glimpses of the future to help me prepare and be prepared for when the events arrived.  Yet many is the difficult experience of life that I am glad to have had and learned and grown from, looking at the experience in the past, that I am not sure that I could have mustered the courage to face had I known with any clarity that it was coming.  God withholds from most of us knowledge of our manner of death, all the while equipping us with the knowledge that we need in order to live well.

There is much that God does want us to know about the future, our individual future as well as mankind’s future, to aid us in our daily living, to give purpose and direction to daily activities that might otherwise seem pointless or even hopeless, or to elicit from us extra efforts and undiscovered talents.  From the beginning of time our Father has sent to us prophets, fellow humans like ourselves, to whom He has revealed prophecies important to His children.  The prophet Isaiah brought comfort to Ahaz, the king of Judah, when his land was invaded.  He prophesied that the invasion would fail and to encourage him offered the sign of the coming of the Messiah and His miraculous virgin birth (see Isaiah 7:14-16).

Amos was another such prophet, who declared, “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7)  That is why Jesus Christ has sent us new apostles and prophets in our day, to inspire, counsel, comfort, uplift, and in many ways aid us by divine guidance in the difficult times in which people always live, we no less than God’s children in the past.

We need, however, to keep in mind the point that while God’s prophecies are reliable and never fail our loving Father is careful to tell us what we need while withholding what were better that we not yet know.  That can leave room for misinterpreting God’s prophecies and assigning to them meanings and dressing them up with interpretations not included by God in the vision.  When the prophecy is fulfilled in ways that vary from our own predictions and expectations it is not the prophecy of God that has failed but rather our own unwarranted assumptions.

Throughout ancient scriptures there were many prophecies of Christ’s mortal ministry as well as of His triumphal second coming.  Many have confused the two, and such confusion led more than some to reject the Messiah when He walked among them in the land of Judea and Galilee.  Jesus Christ fulfilled all that was prophesied for thousands of years about His mortal ministry, including His sacrifice and death.  Yet many—but not all—eyes and ears were closed to Jesus because He did not fulfill mistaken expectations and traditions.  A similar pattern is playing out today as the hour approaches for the Savior’s return.

Inasmuch as God sees all, there is much that He sees and knows that He could not possibly explain to men bounded by the extent of their own experiences.  How would God explain to an ancient people some of the most common of daily happenings in our technological world?  And certainly we are as far removed from the realities of heavenly experience as the ancients were from our daily 21^st century experience.  That is to say that God’s prophecies can be fulfilled in ways far beyond human expectation or even imaginings prior to their fulfillment. 

When I was a missionary in 1979, I knew of the prophecy that the gospel of Jesus Christ would be preached to all nations, and I firmly believed it.  Yet I did not have the slightest clue as to how missionaries would ever be allowed beyond the Iron Curtain.  Little did I know that in less than a decade those barriers would come down peacefully and that the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist.  Knowing of the prophecy allowed many to prepare.  That preparation did not require knowledge of how God would work upon the nations to bring about His purposes.

I thank God for His ancient and modern prophets, and for the prophecies He has shared and continues to reveal, great and small, glorious and helpful.  As the prophecies unfold, my plan is to adjust my expectations to the unfolding reality of God’s work and take comfort in knowing that all will be fulfilled as God continues to reveal to those who will listen everything that they will need to know.

Of Physical Temptation and Exaltation

Many passages of scripture make plain that through the appetites of the flesh, especially when turned to lusts, Satan finds his readiest avenue for temptation. Here are just a few examples:

For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.  For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. . . . So then they that are after the flesh cannot please God. . . . For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die:  but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.  (Romans 8:5, 6, 8, 13, JST)

Besides writing that to the Romans, Paul similarly warned the saints at Galatia:

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh:  and these are contrary the one to the other . . . Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like. . . (Galatians 5:17, 19-21)

John, the Apostle, made a similar point:

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (1 John 2:16)

One more out of many, from the Epistle of James:

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.  Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin:  and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.  (James 1:13, 14)

Such passages have led unenlightened readers to embrace ancient Greek and Indian philosophies that consider all things material to be evil, seeing life as a continuing process to overcome the physical and leave the material world behind.  The philosophies that envision the struggle between good and evil to be the struggle between spirit and matter are at odds with other central principles of Christianity, particularly the Creation and the Resurrection.

If matter is evil, then why would God create a very material world in a vast, material universe, and call it “good”?

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.  (Genesis 1:31; see also verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25, in which the various phases of the creation are described as “good”).

In modern revelation, Jesus Christ explained further how God delights in providing the blessings of a very physical world to His children:

Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; yea for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul.  And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man; for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.  (Doctrine and Covenants 59:18-20)

The beauties of the earth are not accidental.  Neither is it a sin to recognize and appreciate their goodness.  Man was not born into a body into a material world as a punishment, as if placed in a straightjacket in a prison, both to be escaped.  Possession of a physical body was the next major step in a process of progression that embraces all good things, among them the very elements of the universe.

Again in modern revelation Jesus Christ explained,

The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy.  (Doctrine and Covenants 93:33, 34)

The power of physical bodies and the control of the physical world are so great that God provided a time of learning and testing through which man could learn to control the elements before receiving full, immortal control of them.  Mortality is designed as a brief time for each of God’s children to learn and understand the challenges and joys of a material world, eternal spirits clothed in temporary, physical bodies. 

The metaphor God uses to remind His children how important bodies are is the Temple (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 3:16, 17; Doctrine and Covenants 93:35).  God refers to bodies as Temples, sacred, to be used and cherished for eternal purposes as houses for the immortal spirits of men.  Since the beginning, God has given men laws and commandments as guides to use their bodies safely.  Just like all great instruments of power, physical bodies can enliven or enslave.  God’s commandments unfailingly show man the path to empowerment and away from captivity.  Sin is not in the use and enjoyment of the physical but rather in the misuse and abuse of the physical, whereby the spirit, rather than controlling matter, is overcome by it.  Nearly all sin can be traced to allowing appetites to govern action rather than letting the spirit in man—guided by the Spirit of God—rule.

As in all things, Jesus Christ is the great example.  Already as God in the spirit before His birth, He entered into mortality to take upon Himself all of the challenges and opportunities of physical existence.  The Savior’s miraculous control of the elements is well known and recorded by legions of witnesses.  He also experienced the full depths of the challenges and pains of mortal, physical existence.

An ancient American prophet-king, named Benjamin, foresaw Christ’s mortal experience, and witnessed that He would not spare Himself from its full trials:

And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and abominations of his people.  (Mosiah 3:7)

To a modern American prophet, Joseph Smith, who was undergoing great physical trial and anguish, Jesus related how deep His own experience had been, and summed it all up with the declaration, “The Son of Man hath descended below them all” (Doctrine and Covenants 122:8).

What did Jesus mean?  He meant that after experiencing the full breadth and depth of what the physical world could do and offer, He let the will of the flesh be swallowed up in the will of the Spirit.  Doing the Father’s will, Jesus Christ physically and mentally suffered for the physical sins of all mankind of all time, meriting no portion at all of the suffering.  The Spirit of Christ conquered, in spite of all that the physical appetites or wants of the flesh in a physical world could demand, and He controlled His physical body to submit to what the physical would refuse if it could.  Remember, there was no point, in Gethsemane, in the kangaroo court of the Sanhedrin, under the lash of the Roman tormenters, or on the cross itself, where Jesus could not have said, “enough,” and stopped the suffering.  Surely His body called out for it, but His Spirit always remained in control of the flesh as he drank the dregs of the atoning cup of suffering to the very last.

Having conquered all of the demands of a physical world, Christ gained it all. On the third day, He did not pass into a nirvana of spiritual nothingness, but rather He took up again a very physical body, a permanent and immortal body, forever gaining all power and all joy that only comes from spirit and element, inseparably connected, with the will of the spirit always in command.  Christ gave up the physical body in death on the cross, subjecting the demands of the flesh to the demands of the spirit.  With His Spirit fully and forever in control, Jesus Christ took up His body again in perfection on resurrection Sunday.

In so doing, Christ made available to all of us every good thing, including all of the good things of God’s glorious—and very material—creation.

Of What I Believed and What I Found

Until the day that I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ I had not affirmatively adhered to any of the various creeds of the denominations of Christendom, none of them in particular, but I have always had faith in God and Christ.  My parents, acting upon the best knowledge and light that they possessed at the time, had me baptized when but a few days old into the Lutheran church (I think that it was the Missouri Synod, but I am not sure of that).  I was quite short of sin at the time of my infant baptism, a claim that I confess I could not make when I approached the waters of baptism on my own volition later in my youth. 

Also upon the initiative of my parents, and without any resistance on my part, I was a regular and active attendee at the protestant churches my parents attended.  I sang in youth choirs, and I tried to pay attention to the weekly sermons.  Often I would sit by myself on the front row, right in front of the minister’s podium, and watch him go page by page through his text.  I regularly attended Sunday School and was involved in the lessons.  It was at one such Sunday School where as a little lad I was taught by the Sunday School teacher, my mother, to build my house upon a rock.

In my childhood I grew up in suburban communities, richly endowed with a wide variety of Christian churches and sects, and when as a youth we moved to western New York I became acquainted with still others.  My experience was that people chose their protestant church in accordance with what suited them as to location, music, oratorical powers of the minister, the fellowship of the members, the physical facilities of the local building, worship customs and practices, meeting hours, and a variety of other factors.  Whether one denomination was “true” in comparison with another was not a question that I recall ever being raised.  The general attitude that I could discern was that each and all of the denominations were recognized as possessing no more or less truth of consequence as any other.

I do not remember a beginning to my faith in Christ or my assurance of the presence of God.  I recall them as much as I can recall anything from my earliest memories of my earliest thoughts.  What I was taught in my childhood reinforced that faith.  Indeed, if the churches taught anything, it was to have faith in God and in Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, I thought of more.  More than occasionally I pondered why the churches of the day were so different from the Church of Christ as described in the New Testament.  None of them was even close in resemblance.  I imagined that it would have been marvelous to live in the days when Apostles of Jesus Christ walked among men and when the gifts of the Spirit were abundant.  I also pondered, even as a child, the situation of people in China and elsewhere who had little knowledge of Christ and no access to His saving ordinances.  The churches offered no solution to the problem of these people other than to try to reach them by missionaries as much as possible.  But what was the fate of those who missed out in the meantime?  I never heard the question asked or an answer offered.

I was also taught by my mother to pray.  Prayer was a part of my daily routine.  I had a deep reverence for the Holy Bible, a copy being one of the first books I ever “bought” (by redeeming a book of green stamps).  The churches I attended taught from the Bible, particularly recounting the stories.  As I got older, I sensed, however, a hint of embarrassment on the part of minister and teacher about relying upon the Bible too literally.  We were not encouraged to bring a copy with us to church or class.

All of that changed after my mother invited the Latter-day Saint missionaries to come by and tell us something about their church.  She really had my brother in mind, since at the time he was wrestling with all of the distractions of young manhood.  She felt that they might do him some good.  When the missionaries arrived, I was home and he was not.  I listened and learned.

What the Latter-day Saint missionaries unfolded to me was the ancient Church of Christ in its fullness, all restored on earth today.  Once more living Apostles walked among men, with all the same gifts and powers of the Spirit manifested as they were nearly 2,000 years before.  The scriptures came alive, the Holy Bible resumed its place as a standard reference for daily living and communion with God, its messages and miracles embraced into real life rather than mere moral tales of antique lore.  As they did anciently, the living prophets and Apostles were revealing more from God, guidance directly relevant to our current and modern conditions, all fully in harmony with what God had always said.

One example I learned and had until then never been taught was news of the work to spread the message and redemption of Christ to all people, wherever and whenever they lived.  As the Bible taught and as modern prophets taught, those who left this life without access to the gospel of Christ would hear that message in the world of spirits, where they lived and waited for the day of resurrection to come when the Savior returned to the earth, as He promised.  None were to be left out, all to have as full a chance to receive God and Christ as would any other.

Echoing what I had always believed, the Latter-day Saints proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the Savior of all the world and of all mankind, His religion not just a faith for a segment of the population in one part of the world.  Together with the Holy Bible of the ancient east The Book of Mormon was a testimony from the ancient west that salvation is in Jesus Christ and in Him alone, proclaimed by two societies of antiquity separated by an ocean but united in the same witness from God of the divinity of His Son.

To these ancient testimonies of Christ were added the modern testimonies of men and women who knew.  The Latter-day Saints gained through their faith personal knowledge born of personal revelation of the Savior Jesus Christ.  Through prayer and many personal unimpeachable experiences their faith had grown to solid assurance.

To their witness I add my own, gained in the same way.  Building upon my own faith in Christ, exercising the familiarity with personal prayer taught me by my mother, I acquired just as the saints of old days and modern times a deep personal knowledge and assurance that God is real, that Jesus Christ is resurrected and the Savior of all, and that His Church is on the earth again possessing and manifesting all that it had anciently.

I found the true and living Church of the true and living God.  The interaction has made my life richer and better, deeper and full of value.  Since and from that discovery I have been gaining every good thing.

Of Man and Talking with the Father

David, as psalmist, asked God, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4)  David was driven to the question by contemplating the infinite works of God displayed in the night sky.  To him, all that man was, whatever man was and did, was insignificant when compared with God and His creations.

David went on to answer his own question, at least in part.  He recognized the divine attributes with which God has endowed man, crowning him “with glory and honour”, granting to man “dominion over the works of” God’s hands, that God has “put all things under his [man’s] feet:  all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.” (Psalm 8:5-8)

The marvels of nature and the creatures of the earth are breathtaking.  The complexity of the simplest forms of life eludes adequate description and elicits wondrous appreciation when carefully considered.  As marvelous as all these are, nothing on earth inanimate compares in wonder and complexity with living creatures, and there is no living creature to approach the wonder of man.

Of course some self-important yet self-despising scholars trouble to challenge the apodictically true pronouncement of God to the first man and woman that they were given dominion over all living things on earth (cf. Genesis 1:26-28).  But the very erudition of their failed philosophy still serves to demonstrate the intellectual chasm between man and the most intelligent non-human life form, a distance that is unbridgeably vast. 

Evidences are abundant, but I offer a handful in illustration:  no creature but a human can write even the simplest book let alone a Shakespeare play.  No creature but a human can build anything remotely as complex or useful as a typical suburban house let alone a modern skyscraper.  No creature but a human can invent musical harmonies let alone compose a Beethoven symphony.  No bird of any kind can fly as fast or as high or transport as much weight as one of the more simple jet planes let alone a modern airliner.  Elsewhere I have pointed out the curious example of man’s dominion in that (as far as I have observed) humans are the only creatures on earth to have pets.  Even man’s destructive abuse of his powers serves to emphasize his possession of abilities of a kind beyond the ken of any other creatures.

Man has not been given these gifts as the most favored of God’s animals.  He receives them by inheritance, and the gifts that man exercises in mortality are but intimations of what God the Father has prepared for His children in the eternities.  So Paul taught the Romans,

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)

With these gifts come responsibilities.  In modern times the Lord reminded His children that the riches of the earth and of all creatures,

are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul. 

And it pleaseth God that he has given all these things unto man; for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.  (Doctrine and Covenants 59:18-20)

This confidence coupled with accountability assigned to man by the Creator may be significant reasons why prayer is so simple, why communication with God is so direct, as child to Father.  We are like Him, and He is mindful of us.  Communicating with God is not like a dog trying to communicate its wants to its master.  When God created the earth, all creatures were to multiply, “after their kind”, but God created man and woman, “in his own image” (cf. Genesis 1:21-27).  He wants us to talk with Him and places no barriers between us and Him, because we are of a kind. 

It takes no more faith—and no service charges—to talk with God than it does to communicate with your aunt in Cleveland.  But you do have to believe in Him as much as you do in her.  And He is even more eager to take your call.

Of the Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers

In the 1990s I was part of a congressional delegation to Argentina.  At that time the Argentine economy was growing strongly and steadily, inflation was low, the currency was pegged to the dollar, convertible 1-for-1.  Trade barriers were being lowered, commerce was booming.  I recall asking Argentines what could possibly darken what seemed to be a very bright future.  They were quick to reply:  “Here in Argentina we have no rule of law.  You can have no confidence in getting justice from the courts.”

That reminded me of Washington Irving’s observation on a European judge, from his famous work, The Alhambra:

It could not be denied, however, that he set a high value upon justice, for he sold it at its weight in gold.

Not long after that visit, the politics of income redistribution and confiscation threw the Argentine economy into turmoil, where it has remained.

I recently spoke with an economist friend of mine, who was waxing eloquent about the attractive monetary and tax policies in Bulgaria.  I remarked that this would probably invite foreign investment.  He replied, “No, there is no rule of law there.”

The point is that good economic policy cannot long survive inadequate legal safeguards.  Many businesses that made major investments in China, attracted by a market of a billion people, have learned that the lack of a reliable legal and justice system in China has undermined much of the business value they thought to find.  A similar story has been holding back investment and economic development in Russia.

Bringing that home, I would venture that concern for changing rules (or even lack of rules)—the substitution of arbitrary bureaucratic powers in Washington over objective rule of law—has been inhibiting more robust investment in the United States, a major cause for our current anemic economic recovery.

An ancient king in the Western Hemisphere, named Mosiah, warned, “because all men are not just it is not expedient that ye should have a king or kings to rule over you.” (Mosiah 29:16)  Because men are not consistently just, freedom has historically rested upon rule by law rather than rule by men.

Fundamentally, that was the very reason for the American Revolution.  Our revolution was based on the rule of law, an assertion of the rule of law, a response to violations of the rule of law by the English king and parliament.  Most of the Declaration of Independence is a lengthy litany of violations of law by the English rulers.  The Revolution was designed to take power away from man and men and rest it upon laws and rights, soon to be secured by a written supreme law embodied in the Constitution.  Any erosion in the force and effect of the Constitution is an erosion of the rule of law and of the freedoms that rely upon law for their defense.

The Progressive Movement that thrived about a century ago, and found a major advocate in the federal government in President Woodrow Wilson, aggressively proposed an alternative to the rule of law.  This program was the Rule of Experts.  Their new view—and it really was a very old view though they dressed it up in modern-sounding rhetoric—was that there are Benign People, Experts, who know the process of modern government better than most people do, to whom we can safely yield governing authorities. 

It sounds akin to the ancient theory of Divine Right of Kings, that the monarchs of the world are chosen by God and endowed with greater wisdom and perspective than the average man and woman.  To their benign expertise and fatherly care was to be entrusted the governance of the rest of us.

The modern Rule of Experts people have much the same view, that these experts were endowed by their universities and other sources of expertise with ability far above that of most, and it would be wise to trust ourselves to their benign care.  Not very democratic, and in fact these Benign Experts make no secret of their impatience with the Congress and other constitutional brakes on arbitrary authority.

As King Mosiah wisely pointed out that men are not always just, it is also appropriate to recognize that putting men in government does not make them any more reliably wise than the rest of us.  The American Founders thought to address this problem by dividing political power among not only three branches in the Federal Government but also by embracing the federal system of dividing government with the States.

The current regulatory structure and program of the United States rest heavily on the idea that Benign Experts should be entrusted with authority for many of the big questions facing Americans and for many of the much smaller questions, too.  That is certainly the structure of the Dodd-Frank Act, to offer one recent, prominent example among many.

Charles Calomiris, of the Columbia University business school, described the theory of the Dodd-Frank Act and related regulations this way:

The implicit theory behind these sorts of initiatives, to the extent that there is a theory, is that the recent crisis happened because regulatory standards were not quite complex enough, because the extensive discretionary authority of bank supervisors was not great enough, and because rules and regulations prohibiting or discouraging specific practices were not sufficiently extensive.

(Charles W. Calomiris, “Meaningful Banking Reform and Why it Is so Unlikely,” VoxEU, January 8, 2013)

This program of federal regulation has been imposed increasingly in contravention of the basic constitutional principle of separation of powers, by merging legislative, executive, and judicial authority in “independent” regulatory agencies.  The unelected federal regulator today decides the details and specifics of binding mandates, identifies violators of those regulations, assesses guilt, and applies penalties.

Taken together our current regulatory system, by merging rather than maintaining the separation of powers of the Constitution, is eroding the rule of law.  It is returning us to the age old practice of rule by men, with all of the potential for abuse of rights and freedoms, abuses that fill up most of the sadder pages of human history.

During the debate over the creation of the new financial consumer Bureau, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Dodd boasted that with this new agency people would no longer have to come to Congress for the enactment of new consumer laws.  The Bureau would take care of all that.

There are serious operational flaws—too often overlooked—in the program of governance by Benign Experts.  First, the regulators are not dispassionate umpires, limited to calling the balls and strikes.  These umpires are also players in the game, the federal agencies each having their own set of particular interests and incentives that they take care of first.

Second, reliance on Benign Experts assumes an unproven, undemonstrated level of knowledge, insight, and forecasting skills.  AEI President Arthur Brooks, in his book, The Battle, provides one of many examples of this flaw:

Federal Reserve economists were still forecasting significant positive growth and moderate unemployment in May and June 2008.  They believed that economic growth in 2009 would be 2.4 percent, and unemployment would be 5.5 percent.  What we experienced instead was negative growth, double-digit unemployment, and the destruction of at least $50 trillion in worldwide wealth.  No one can get the numbers exactly right, to be sure.  But getting them this much wrong certainly lends a whole new meaning to the expression ‘margin of error.’

(Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle, p.46)

It is not that regulators are dumber than the rest of the population, but they are no smarter either.  The regulatory problems are increasingly too great for any designated group of humans to solve. 

Third flaw, mission creep:  power attracts power.  Even if the tasks are too great, require too much knowledge, insight, foresight, and other skills in unachievable degree, the regulators still take them on, especially if the task increases the reach and influence of the agency.  

I offer two examples from an example-rich environment.

Basel III capital rules started from a simple idea, that banks all around the world should be subject to the same capital standards.  Capital (the financial cushion a bank carries against losses) is one of the three key elements of sound banking, the other two being liquidity and earnings.  These international rules did not remain simple.  Developed by an international team of experts from around the world, who labored on them for years, the rules number hundreds of pages, affecting the entire financial structure and business model of a bank, any bank.  Congress was not involved and has no particular role in approving the rules.  When exposed to public review they attracted thousands of comment letters expressing dismay that they are a bad fit for the U.S. economy.  In the end, though, the regulators can go ahead with what they alone think is best.

A second example would be the Federal Reserve.  One hundred years ago this year the Fed was created with a specific, identifiable, and rather narrow purpose, to provide liquidity for the banking system in times of financial stress.  Before long, the Federal Reserve gained control of monetary policy and built up the practice of controlling interest rates.  Later, it was given the task of promoting maximum employment.  Under Dodd-Frank the Federal Reserve’s role in supervising banks and bank holding companies was expanded to supervising any financial business considered to be significant for financial stability.  Each of these powers has drawn the Federal Reserve away from its narrow, objective task, to broad fields of subjective authority. 

Perversely, this expansion of authority into more judgmental areas is eroding the independence of the Federal Reserve, making it yet one more political player in Washington, with responsibilities that far exceed human ability to fulfill, but which reach to every business and every home.  The Fed’s prolonged policy of keeping short-term interest rates at or about zero has penalized all who save and live off of their savings, transferring trillions of dollars from savers to borrowers, the biggest borrower being the Federal Government, a policy decided by a small group of Washington experts.

I offer a partial but simple solution to point us back toward strengthening the rule of law and reducing our exposure to the rule of man and men, however expert they might be.  Return the lawmaking and the policy decisions to the elected representatives.  It is a messy process, but exactly the messy process that the Founders intended to preserve freedom from the encroachment of arbitrary and oppressive government.  The regulators, which are theoretically part of the executive branch, should be left with the duty of implementing the laws and policy decisions that the elected and accountable representatives make. 

If Congress were required to write the rules and mandates and delegate to the executive agencies only the execution, the mandates of government would be circumscribed by the limitations of a legislative body forced to be directly accountable for what it has wrought.  It is easy for legislators to complain about bad regulatory decisions, when all too often these are decisions that Congress never should have delegated to regulators in the first place.

We would still have laws and regulations, but the laws might be more direct and specific, and perhaps fewer and surely smaller.  We would probably not have Dodd-Frank Acts that number thousands of pages read by no congressman or Senator, containing a cacophony of half-baked ideas and multiple solutions to the same problem, all left for the regulators to sort out.  

And legislators might recall this caution, from Thomas Paine:

Laws difficult to be executed cannot be generally good.

(Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man)

Of the Meaning of “Still” and the State of the Union

Notice how frequently these days when discussing the state of the American union, or any parts thereof, people rely upon the word “still.”  That is a bad sign.  When someone says, “I am still able to see my own doctor,” he or she implies that continued access is in doubt.  Rather than reassuring, it insinuates caution and reveals anxiety.  What do you hear when someone says, “At least I am still married”?

You do not commonly hear people using “still” in connection with things that they are sure of.  If a baseball player boasts, “I can still hit the ball out of the park,” is he likely to be in his prime or in the twilight of his career?

Allow me to offer for your consideration a dozen recent objects of STILL in public discourse about the condition of the nation:

·         The United States is still the largest economy in the world.

·         The United States still has the strongest/best military in the world.

·         The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency.

·         The United States still is a free country.

·         America still is the land of opportunity.

·         The Supreme Court still can be counted on to defend the Constitution.

·         By hard work and best effort you still can become anything you want.

·         My children will still have a better life than I have had.

·         My children will still live in a bigger house than the one I grew up in.

·         In this country you can still get the best healthcare.

·         America still has the deepest, most liquid, and efficient financial markets.

·         At least the air you breathe is still free.

Undoubtedly, you can think of more for the list.  Then, there are some things we do not hear people saying “still” about any more:

·         America is the best place to get an education.

·         Americans make the best cars.

·         I can freely speak my mind.

·         I can trust what I hear or read in the “news.”

·         You can count on the elections not being rigged.

I forbear going on.  You can add more if you wish.  There are some topics where the doubt is too palpable for people to venture “still” in their expressions.

If we leave the discussion at that, then we have a sad commentary on the sad state of the union.  The expression of “still” in our conversation can reveal a desperate clinging to the past with a forlorn wish that things will work out for the future, without doing the good works to make the good future happen.

I would suggest, though, that “still” can also mean “not over,” or “not gone.”  We need not settle for “still” and do nothing about it.  That which we value can be reclaimed from assault and reinforced, the erosion stopped, the tide turned.  After all, John Paul Jones is famous for winning a naval battle from the deck of his sinking—but still afloat—flagship, because he used it as a platform from which to regain what was lost.  “I have not yet begun to fight!” is still part of the American heritage.