Of the G-20 and Running the World

When you think about it, it is ridiculous.  In fact, it would be pitiful, if they were not so serious and did not have the power to do seriously bad things.  I am referring to the leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations, who recently met in Mexico, thinking that they run the world.

If the question were put to you, “Who runs the world?” there could be several correct answers, but none of them would be this group of people, or any subset of them.  Nevertheless, because they think that they do run the world, and because they act on that belief, they do a lot of things that not only do not work but that make things worse.  Then they gather again and try something else, much of which is designed to clean up the mess caused by their previous foray in hubristic action.

The world is a complex place, with billions of people each doing complex things and interacting with each other in complex ways.  Then the planet itself does a lot of complex things.  Take the weather, for instance.  With computers and a hundred years of scientific study, weather forecasters have succeeded in the ability to predict the weather with a passable degree of accuracy two or three days out.  Beyond that, the accuracy of forecasts declines to about 50-50 (flip a coin) and drops from there.  The ability to change the weather, after a lot of work and investment, remains elusive. 

You have to be very smart, or think that you are, to convince yourself that you can in any significant way control the economy of your own nation, let alone of the world together.  The Russians, who are very smart people, tried it for 70 years with less than success and with the death and misery of tens of millions of their people.  The communist Chinese gave it a go, too.  Lately they have been reluctantly recognizing that there might be a better way—though they act like they are still not so sure.

Consider how many of the most serious problems facing mankind today are caused by people like these G-20 government leaders who fancy that they run things.  A few examples:

• The economic malaise in the United States.  The U.S. economy has just passed through a very deep recession, caused by government programs that encouraged people to buy houses that they could not afford, investors to invest in the mortgages used to buy those houses, banks to take government investments in their capital that they did not need, and people who could afford to pay their mortgages to walk away and leave the keys on the counter.  To solve those problems, the U.S. government spent a trillion dollars it did not have, increased rules and regulations on businesses that could otherwise create new jobs, “created” a quarter of a million new jobs at the cost of eliminating a million jobs in the private sector, and threatened investors and small businessmen with stiff tax increases.  Economic activity remains in the doldrums.

• The second economic recession in Europe.  The European economy went into recession about the same time that the U.S. economy did, for rather similar reasons.  It then weakly recovered, briefly, and then went back into recession when the promises that the governments of southern European countries made over decades to buy votes at last became more expensive than they could borrow money for—let alone pay for.  Now, every couple of weeks Greece, Italy, or Spain goes into economic crisis, the rest of the European leaders make empty promises to solve the problem, followed a couple of weeks later by new crisis and another round of promises.  That has been going on for about a year, while economic activity heads south.

• The availability of energy.  From the gasoline that we put in our cars, the electricity that lights our houses, to the natural gas that warms our offices and homes government rules affect the availability, price, distribution, and supply of energy.  The United States imports enormous amounts of oil from unstable countries that use the money we pay for it to threaten our people at home and abroad.  Meanwhile, we have more than enough supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil located in oil shale and oil sands and off our own shores to meet all of our needs now and for the foreseeable future, but government efforts to run the energy business prevent us from using them.

These are just three groups of examples of many.  Once again I call on the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman, the great Union general of the Civil War, who famously refused to run for President of the United States with the assertion that if nominated he would not run, if elected he would not serve.  He gave his friend and colleague, U.S. Grant, who did not make such a refusal, a piece of excellent advice:

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)

If someone should ask you, “Who runs the country?”, the correct answer is, “no one.”  Plenty pretend to, and many others wish to, but none do and none can, and we would all be better off if they would stop trying.  Our nation’s founders would have recoiled in horror at the question, because they intentionally created a nation that no one could run.  Why else have three branches of a federal government, one of which is divided into two separate houses, and state governments take their share of governmental authority?  They had seen Europe and knew of Asia where people for thousands of years had royally messed things up by trying to run their countries.

Instead, the American founders created a system where each person would run his own life.  The leaders in government were to run the government, that for the most part was to stay out of people’s lives and keep foreign governments at bay should they have any thoughts of trying their hand at running the lives of Americans.

That vision of the founders has been fading.  Today, make a list of the things that you can do that do not involve some sort of authority or permission from government.  It will not be a long list, and it has not been getting any longer in recent years.  Then ask yourself if life has been getting any better.  If it has, congratulate yourself on your power to overcome.

Of Scarcity and Life without Limits

When you have an unlimited supply of something, do you even notice it?  Do the fish in the ocean know that they are in water?  How many thousands of years did mankind enjoy gravity before someone pointed out its existence?  Presumably men have long recognized the existence of air, because we could feel the wind and there was the occasional suffocation that demonstrated what lack of air would do.  Nevertheless, we all go through each day little thinking of the air that constantly surrounds us.

The almost universal aspect of our mortal existence is scarcity, the fact that there are limits to things.  Scarcity is as basic a law of economics as motion is to physics.

When we think of God, the limits are removed.  Is that a human conception, to make God seem to us as otherworldly?  Or is the overcoming of limits a characteristic of eternal life, the limits of mortality serving to help teach humans the value of the eternal things we will soon experience?

Consider the mortal condition and how many problems are tied to scarcity.  Most wars have been fought over scarcity, whether scarcity of land, resources, or power.  How would things be different if there were no limits to food, wealth, or water?  

Such speculation is the stuff of intriguing science fiction writing.  Certainly the galaxies of the universe seem infinite.  Man’s fascination with the night sky over the millennia has in no small part been due to its ability to draw the mind of man out of the mortal world where all seems limited, attracted and uplifted to something that appears to have no end.

Stepping from speculation to revealed knowledge, God has indeed taught us that mortality is temporary, as are its limits.  Throughout man’s existence on earth God has called to His children to overcome their limits, to learn from them and then to exceed them.  God has taught us how to do so, endowed us with the divine ability to rise above obstacles, and sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to make triumph over limits possible.  That triumph was symbolized by but not limited to His victory over death, rising from the tomb to immortality.  That gift of immortality has been promised to all.  Other victories over life’s limitations are offered to all, but the offer must be received.

While triumph over the limits of physical death is guaranteed to all, transcendence over many other limits is optional.  The intentional rejection of the means offered to transcend human limitations is what makes sin what it is, intentional action that limits human potential.  Sins such as dishonesty, covetousness, cowardice, violation of the laws of chastity, and all other evils make us smaller, stop our growth, undermine our progress, close doors to the advancement of our character.

Virtue, on the other hand, is to embrace all that ennobles, that builds character, that strengthens courage, that develops the divine capacity to love.  Honesty generates trust, generosity increases our fellowship, chastity reinforces the bonds between husbands and wives and sets the foundation for eternal families, and each act of kindness leads to greater kindness, revealing the divinity that is at the center of our humanity.  In every case we become more, without end to the process.

Prophets throughout the ages have taught that damnation means to be limited where otherwise there would be progress and increase.  The modern prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith, described damnation as “being barred, or denied privileges of progression. . . or stopped” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. II, p.227).

Does not death impose an end on all of this progress?  Indeed it would, if mortality were the last word.  Without Christ and His atoning sacrifice it would be.  Damnation would be the lot of all, progress forever foreshortened, all efforts ultimately meaningless, the grave the final limit.  All good would be temporary, swallowed in the permanence of death.

Christ in life, death, and resurrection, was the constant reminder that mortality’s limits could be overcome.  He walked upon the water and calmed the sea.  He fed the thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread.  He restored sight to the blind and healed all manner of diseases.  Christ summoned the dead back from the world of spirits.  He suffered death Himself, and yet in three days walked again among men, never more to die or to experience any other of mortality’s limitations.  Christ brought examples of eternity to us in this world to remind us what could and would be.

The ancient American prophet, Abinadi, joined with the prophets of all ages to proclaim,

And now if Christ had not come into the world . . . there could have been no redemption.  And if Christ had not risen from the dead, or have broken the bands of death that the grave should have no victory, and that death should have no sting, there could have been no resurrection.  But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.  (Mosiah 16:6-8)

To those who fully embrace the Savior’s offered redemption this promise:

Wherefore, all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs, and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.  And they shall overcome all things.  (Doctrine and Covenants 76:59, 60)

The destiny that God, our Father, has planned for all of His children who will accept it, is life without limits, provided that we learn how to live in such a world.  For that we swim today in an ocean of limits, with instructions from the eternal worlds on how to thrive and overcome.

Of Life and the Church of Christ

This past Sunday I was reminded, as I am often reminded, of one of the distinguishing features of the church of Jesus Christ:  it is alive.  That characteristic powerfully impressed me from my first attendance at a meeting of the church, when I was thirteen.  No more than 100 members, gathered in the rented second floor of a Grange Hall in a western New York village, hymns sung accompanied by a volunteer pianist on a beat up honky-tonk piano, sermons provided from the rank and file of the membership, Sunday School taught in a kitchen and class members sitting on a few folding chairs arranged around the cooking stove—all was alive and vibrant.  That same spiritual life was present when as a missionary in Spain we met with fewer than a dozen people in a swept-out garage.  And it was present when I joined thousands in a meeting at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City for the church’s annual June youth conference.  I have found it wherever I have gathered with the members of Christ’s church. 

In each and every case, the building contributed more or less to comfort but had little to do with the sense of the church being alive.  In my childhood I had been a frequent attendee at the meetings of Protestant churches in pleasant and neat but not ostentatious surroundings, and I have since visited some of the most magnificent cathedrals of the world.  But I sensed something palpably different and alive, noticeable even to a young teenager, when I first set foot in Christ’s church, and each time since. 

I conclude that the life comes from Jesus Christ, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, flowing through those gathered in His name at His call.  It is as the Savior promised to His saints, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20)  The Savior explained to the Sadducees anciently, who had the form of worship without its life, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:32)  The things I had been taught from the scriptures, revered as dead relics in an old museum in the other churches I had known, came to life in the church of Christ.

Unable to articulate precisely what he was seeking—other than the truth—the fourteen-year old Joseph Smith learned from God Himself in 1820 what was missing in the churches of his day, what held Joseph back from joining with any of them even after persistent earnest inquiries.  Said the Lord to Joseph, in answer to his simple prayer, “they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” (Joseph Smith History, verse 19)

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, just as the church of Christ of the saints in ancient days, is full of life, it is all about life and the overcoming of death.  Its victory over death is not just a promise for the future, beyond this world of mortality.  It brings life from the eternal worlds and extends it among men and women today, in this world where temporary things would otherwise seem to prevail. 

The Church reveres the prophets and apostles of antiquity and treasures their testimony, but it is led—as Christ’s living church always has been—by living apostles and prophets who receive direct revelation pertinent to conditions and needs in our day.  Along with the prophets come scriptures, as we write down the inspired words of the apostles and prophets.  With roots firmly planted in the ancient scriptures of the Holy Bible and The Book of Mormon, the tree of revelation has not withered or died but continues growing in Christ’s modern church, providing divine guidance to a world that never needed it more.

There are no crucifixes to be found in the modern church of Christ, not because the Church does not recognize the infinite atonement of the Savior, but because that atonement was fulfilled by the resurrection, the rising of the living Christ from the tomb, conquering mortality.  It is toward the living Christ that the saints of God focus their attention, not to the instrument of His torture and very real but very temporary death.

All of the ordinances and sacraments of Christ’s church are founded on Christ’s promise, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (Matthew 10:10)  In baptism, the new Christian rises up out of the water to newness of life, and the gift of the Holy Ghost is bestowed by the laying on of hands to bring about a spiritual rebirth, in both cases death overcome.   The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, celebrated each Sunday in the church, points to Christ’s defeat of sin and death, and His victory over mortality.  Christ emphasized this when as the risen Messiah He presented the sacramental bread to the ancient Americans with the commandment to partake of the bread, “in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you” (3 Nephi 18:7), his very real and immortal, resurrected body as much as His body that was torn and killed on the cross. 

The highest ordinance that God offers to His children is marriage for time and eternity, whereby man and woman are united in a family to last forever, without end.  In those families, children are welcome and encouraged and seen as the glory of their parents. Genealogical records are sought out and preserved, as the promise of life and family connections extends forever back and continues forever onward.  No one is to be forgotten, because the promise of eternal life extends to all. 

Death is very real, but in the church of Jesus Christ death is no mystery, through Christ it has lost its sting.   After all, mortality is the exception in a universe where the eternity of life prevails. 

Of Business Losses and Government Help

In recent days JPMorgan Chase bank announced that it suffered $2 billion in trading losses, and Washington is all a-twitter.  You would think that a government that runs deficits of one and a half trillion dollars would hardly notice any event of $2 billion, but the chattering classes who think that they should have some role in running everything are all chattering about it and how it clearly demonstrates the need for more regulation, i.e. more need for them to be involved in running private businesses.

Mind you, JPMC’s $2 billion loss is a lot of money to you and me, but this does not particularly affect you and me.  JPMC suffered the loss, and given the size of the bank and its earnings (it usually makes somewhere in excess of $4 billion each quarter) it will little affect its bottom line.  JPMC is not asking anyone else to cover its losses, other than its own shareholders, and they will not feel it much if the bank continues to be as well run as it has been.

Ah, but perhaps you are thinking that JPMC got some of that TARP money so involved in the financial panic.  That is true, JPMC was one of the banks whose arms were twisted hard by Treasury Secretary Paulson to take a forced government investment.  Those TARP investments spooked regular, private sector investors, who immediately ran for the sidelines, and the financial crisis was on, propelled (as most are) by bad government efforts to “fix” things.  JPMC did not want the money or need the money and in a few months paid it all back—with substantial interest—as quickly as Congress and the regulators would allow them to.  It reminds me of the elderly gentlemen who finally yielded to family cajoling to take a ride in a stunt plane.  Afterward he thanked the pilot for the two rides, his first and his last.  TARP was such a bad deal for those who received the investments (except for the couple of financial firms that might really have wanted it), that I do not think that any would want a second ride, perhaps not even again at gunpoint.

The recent loss by JPMC, in any event, was one well covered by the bank’s earnings in other of its many lines of business.  Curiously, I do not hear the chattering classes get exercised when each quarter Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac announces several more billions of dollars of losses, losses that they do ask for the Treasury Department to make whole.  Maybe that is because the regulators already run Fannie and Freddie.  Actually, there was a little bit of noise in the past few days when Fannie Mae announced that it had actually turned a profit for the last quarter, the first time in years.

One thing that disturbs me in all of the Washington humbuzzah over JPMC’s trading loss is the implicit notion that there is something wrong about a business losing money on an investment, something wrong enough to call forth a government role.  It seems to me that losses are just as much a sign of a normal market as gains are, that healthy markets have a good share of both.  Nobody seemed to lose money during the housing bubble, no matter what they did, but that was hardly a sign of a healthy market place.

What markets do when they are allowed to is reward good business decisions and punish bad ones, with gains and losses providing some of the most effective means of helping businessmen and their investors understand truly which is which.  JPMC made some bad business decisions and lost money, and the counterparties to those trades made good ones and earned money.  What role can government play in all of that other than to mess it up?

To get government involved in this process rests upon at least two preposterous notions.  First, it suggests that it is somehow the role of government to make sure that businesses do not lose money, otherwise, why all the fuss?  That, of course, was the Soviet business model that did so much to create modern Russia.  Second, and following on the first mistaken notion, it supposes that government officials will know better how to avoid business losses.  Anyone really believe that?  Share with me your examples, and I will pass them on to the Federal budget planners.

Of American Prosperity and Failing Villages

The Internet has been a boon for small businesses.  No longer is the market of the small business limited to the local community.  The Internet—together with an efficient system for making payments— allows customers to find the business and do business from near and far.
 
I am thinking at the moment of the used and rare book trade, although I have frequented other lines of small businesses via the Internet, including finding hard-to-get plumbing parts.  I love to walk into a book store, especially a used book store, and more often than not I leave with a new acquisition or two in hand.  I recall not very long ago buying a set of the debates surrounding the ratification of the Constitution.  As the bookseller rang up my purchase he asked whether I had found what I was looking for.  I told him no, that I had found what I was not looking for.  That is the way it usually is for me and a book store, the surprise and wonder of it, the discovery of things of which I had not before been aware or did not know were available to me.

It is a problem that there are not that many small bookshops around, maybe at most one in a town, two or three in a city.  I understand that it is a tough business.  You have to be willing to let musty old volumes sit around on your shelves for a long time, and those books are costing money while they sit there.

The Internet helps solve that.  You can search for a title or an author and find perhaps several sources of the book, long out of print, in bookshops scattered around the country, in towns and villages where you may have never been and would be unlikely to visit.

I have remarked how much I loved a couple of readers we used in grade school.  I could not even remember the names of the books or their authors, but I cherished them for the enthusiasm that they taught me for economic growth and development in America.  I learned a lot more than reading from those books.  I learned that America was a growing and developing country, always becoming more, richer, grander, harnessing the optimism of its people who came from many places but found in America a place where there was joy in the hard work of the present because you owned the results of what you did and what you did was build a more prosperous future that you passed on to your children and their children, who built on it in their turn.

Through the Internet I discovered that the books were written by Mabel O’Donnell, entitled Singing Wheels and Engine Whistles.  They told of the fictitious town of Hastings Mills built in the early nineteenth century on an Illinois prairie, a town that grew to become the prosperous city of Hastings by the early twentieth century.

The town and characters were a literary fiction, but they captured the real spirit and efforts of what happened all over America at that time.  Elsewhere I have quoted a passage from the first book, Singing Wheels, in which the founder of the town, then numbering but a few dozen cabins occupied by hardworking people with dreams, shared with his son the dream of how the town would grow, transforming the surrounding prairie into prosperous farms and the town into the prosperous center that would serve them all.

In the second book, Engine Whistles, the grandson of that founder is chatting with a train engineer about what made the town into a thriving city of 12,000 inhabitants, and growing.  The engineer proudly tells the boy, Tom, that it was the railroad that put Hastings on the map, and the vision of the men—including his grandfather— who brought the railroad to Hastings.  At first Tom agrees, but on second thought Tom argues that there was more to it than that.

“A railroad doesn’t make a town,” he said with a thoughtful look in his blue eyes.  “The railroad didn’t make Hastings.  My grandfather did.”

“Come, now, lad,” boomed engineer Bill, a note of amused disagreement in his voice.

“Yes, he did, too!” insisted Tom, hurrying on and allowing no time for argument.  “He came west in a covered wagon when there wasn’t even one cabin in the valley of the Big Turtle.  He knew it was a good place for a town, and so he built a lumber mill.  Then he cut down trees and sawed lumber so that other people could build homes, too.  He’s the one who made the town!” (Mabel O’Donnell, Engine Whistles, p.37, 38)

As a child growing up in south Florida, I saw that story playing out around me, as each year new homes, businesses, churches, highways and much else were built.  Economic development was the way of life.  When I was a teenager my family moved to western New York, to a much older village, much like Hastings, built in the early nineteenth century by men of vision, a village that thrived into a bustling business, industrial and even cultural center of some 10,000 people. 

But I arrived in the village’s twilight.  It still numbered 10,000 people and still retained something of its old spirit, with several manufacturing and business establishments and even a college.  By the time I and my schoolmates left—and it seemed that most of us did leave—the college had folded up, as had all but one of the manufacturing firms and many of the businesses.  I understand that the biggest employer now is the local hospital system, a close second being the ugly sum of the various state and local government agencies.  People were very happy to get a new state prison built nearby.  The heavy taxation and regulations emanating from Albany made business too expensive and leached away the village’s future.  Just recently, driven by tax burden, the remaining inhabitants of the village voted to give up their village charter.

A different story, that one, but one that has its echoes in too many places.  I wonder whether that was the America that the Dutch, Germans, Italians, Irish and others who built the village had in mind for their descendants. 

I am very glad that I found Mabel O’Donnell’s books through the Internet and was able to buy them and read them again.  You will have to get your own copies, though, as I am passing mine on down to my grandchildren.

Of Good King Wenceslas and Government Charity

Just past Easter and far enough away from Christmas I suppose that it is safe enough for me to write a few words in criticism of what I think is my least favorite Christmas carol.  I love Christmas carols and have many favorites.  There is one, however, that I particularly do not like:  “Good King Wenceslas.”  As I understand the case, the carol was written in Britain in the 1800s based upon legend and traditions dating from many centuries earlier.

Upon reflection I have to admit that I very much like the tune and often find myself whistling it, despite the fact that I very much dislike the words.  Actually, the words can be kind of fun, too, but I find their message repulsive.

Here are the words and message, or at least the first three stanzas, where most of the harm lies.  First stanza:

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the feast of Stephen

When the snow lay round about

Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night

Though the frost was cruel

When a poor man came in sight

Gathering winter fuel.

All very pretty.  A wealthy man of power enjoying a holiday associated with charity for the poor.  It is night time, with the moon shining on a smooth landscape of deep, white snow.  It is cruelly cold, but of course the king is surely nice and warm, enjoying the beautifully charming view.  The cherry on this lovely winter dessert is provided by the quaint and appropriate arrival of a poor man trudging through the snow. 

It is almost impossible to have a Christmas story nowadays without someone in poverty to bless the tale.  Poverty is so worshiped at Christmas time that it makes one wonder whether the poor in the stories are poor enough, as if to make one glad for the ready supply of poor people and even tremble at the thought of the supply ever becoming short.  No problem with that in Europe, especially old Europe.  And of course traditional Asian societies and all but few modern African ones rest upon having large and ready supplies of poor people, with the modern doctrines of communism and socialism superimposed upon them to institutionalize poverty and ensure that its alleviation can be an eternal goal ever to be invoked but never to be achieved.  One of the world’s criticisms of America is that our “poor” live so much better than even the well to do of much of the rest of the world, but the current American presidential team has been working mightily on addressing that criticism.

It is very important that you take note of what the poor man of poverty is doing on this bitter cold and crisp evening, the very night after Christmas.  He is gathering firewood, something that it would be more than unpleasant to be without in such a cruel frost.

With the second verse the plot deepens:

“Hither page and stand by me

If thou know’st it, telling

Yonder peasant, who is he?

Where and what his dwelling?”

“Sire, he lives a good league hence

Underneath the mountain

Right against the forest fence

By Saint Agnes’ fountain.”

This tells us much, far more I think than many who sing this song perceive.  In this oppressive cold darkness with only the cold moon for light the peasant had wandered a good three miles from his home in search of something to burn to keep himself warm, three miles (the English league is 5280 yards).  Moreover, it could be expected that the home three miles away was colder still, being in close proximity to "the mountain."  Perhaps these points are not missed by the casual caroler, but does the caroler also note that the peasant lives next to a forest?  As we look at the next stanza, keep in mind this question:  why would someone who lives next to a forest walk a good three miles in search of something to burn?

“Bring me bread and bring me wine,

Bring me pine logs hither.

Thou and will I see him dine

When we bear him thither.”

Page and monarch forth they went,

Forth they went together

Through the rude wind’s wild lament

And the bitter weather.

It is at this point in the song where it is intended that we who sing or hear the words are to begin to be warmed.  Touched by the predicament of the poor peasant, wandering a good three miles the day after Christmas to gather firewood just to stay warm on that bitterly frigid night (we are informed in this verse that the cold was made intense by a rude wind), the good king not only sees to the provision of firewood for the poor man but deigns to deliver the wood himself, along with bread and wine.  This is the core of the story of the song, confirmed in the remaining verses by the miracle of the page, nearly freezing to death on the king’s errand of mercy, finding warmth by stepping in the very snowy footsteps of his master.

Before I continue with my criticism, I will add that I entirely agree with the last lines of the carol, the moral of the story:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure

Wealth or rank possessing

Ye who now will bless the poor

Shall yourselves find blessing.

This is all very true, demonstrated repeatedly throughout history.  I would add that any person, of any rank or means, who gives of himself to bless the poor will find blessings in return, occasionally blessings on earth and always blessings where moth and rust do not corrupt.

And giving of oneself is the point.  Was Good King Wenceslas really giving of himself?  This was the king, giving of the royal resources.  I seriously doubt that the king baked the bread, or pressed the wine, or chopped the wood that he was providing.  They very likely came from some other poor peasants (in some degree even from this peasant himself) in the form of a tax by one name or another.  It is all very nice to be generous with other people’s sweat.  All very Old World, nice and feudal.  That was the way of things in those days. 

Moreover, and in answer to the question that I posed earlier, the poor peasant had trudged three miles, looking for something in the deep snow that he might be able to burn, when he lived right next to the forest, because the forests all belonged to the royalty.  It was a serious crime for any peasant—regardless of how close he lived—to “poach” either firewood or game out of that forest.

That is to say, that Good King Wenceslas, overcome by a moment of pity, was acting to relieve for a moment a misery that he himself participated in causing and inflicting.  Given the age, I am sure that the poor man was appropriately grateful as the king and his page watched the poor man eat in his hovel, and all were appropriately warmed in heart and mind as the king returned to his castle for the rest of the winter.  The perpetuation of the legend has assured that the king received a bountiful blessing of good public relations for his gesture.

This all may be well and good for the land of the nineteenth century British monarchy, but any American should be ashamed to sing this song, other than in mockery.  Our Founders fought a revolution and gave their best efforts, and some gave their lives, to throw off monarchy and end royal forests and feudal domains.  They recoiled at the practices of corrupt monarchies who tried to ward off grievances against royal prerogatives and taxes by tossing the occasional crumbs of “charity” to the masses.  They saw through the game of taxing the people so that the governors could provide a few well advertised benefits to the many while quietly heaping largesse on their cronies.

None of that would be tolerated today in America.  Or would it?  How about a nation hungry for energy while plentiful supplies of energy lie locked up under government-owned lands, and all that the government offers are windmills and algae farms?  How about trillion dollar “stimulus” appropriations bills that build a bridge or a road here and there, while administration cronies walk off with billions of dollars in grants and loans not expected to be paid back?  How about major taxes on job providers to pay for some more government handouts while driving the job providers to cut back or close up shop?  The charity of modern governments is no more virtuous than it was at the hands of the old benevolent despots.

At least in the land of We the People our leaders do not inherit their jobs and can be thrown out for misrule.  Yet, the trick worked in Europe for Good King Wenceslas.  Will America’s own Good King Wenceslas be celebrating another Feast of Stephen in the White House, or will he be packing on Boxing Day?

Of Easter and the Constitution

One morning in Tennessee, 150 years ago, many thousand U.S. soldiers were quietly enjoying breakfast on a beautiful spring Sabbath, thinking of little more than passing a quiet Palm Sunday and sometime soon thereafter continuing the destruction of the rebel army in nearby Corinth, Mississippi.  That was, until the rebels came calling and rudely interrupted breakfast.

By the end of the battle the next day the rebels were in full retreat, but over 13,000 Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing, and nearly 11,000 rebels had met the same fate.  Shiloh turned out to be a major victory for the United States Army, opening up nearly the whole western part of the rebel confederacy to invasion.  The impact of the victory was missed by much of the population of the loyal states, however, whose senses reeled from a bill of losses of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers never seen before in the life of the Republic.  General U.S. Grant, whose coolness under pressure made the victory possible, was mercilessly criticized in the press.

The nation little understood that the casualties of Shiloh would be only the first of many tens of thousands more who would suffer from civil war in the land of Washington and Jefferson before 1862 would be over.  Then there would be 1863, 1864, and 1865 to follow, running the tally of destruction ever higher.  In 1865, near the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln summed up in his marvelous second inaugural address—for a term of office that would last the rest of his life, less than 6 weeks—“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. . . . Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

All Americans today benefit from that profound victory and the others that brought an end to the rebellion and that upheld the Constitution.  It was a strange and new thing for the world that the words on a piece of paper, written by men of an earlier generation, could create a system of government and affect so many lives.  It was the lives of those who fought to sustain the Constitution that gave it that life, men who insisted on living by those words and organizing a free society within the protections of its provisions.

The same is true today, as with each generation:  we are called upon to uphold that Constitution, those words on a piece of paper, and hand it on down, as strong as ever, to our children.  Those men who died at Shiloh cannot do our work for us today.  Neither can the men who fought and died in Europe and the South Pacific and on many other places of battle.  Just as important as those who died to preserve the Constitution are those who have lived to maintain the Constitution.  They, however, could do no more than pass that freedom under constitutional law to us.  We have it today.  What will we do with it?

As Ronald Reagan taught in his 1967 inaugural address as Governor of California,

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.

We must not let it become extinct.  It is under challenge from enemies without, who hate the freedom and worth of the individual enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it is endangered by those within the nation—some in very high places of power and responsibility— who see the Constitution as a barrier in the way of their plans to replace individual rights, value, initiative, and worth with the ages old system where the government and the governors run the lives of the people and decide who wins, who loses, who gets what, and how much.

Our forebears fought a revolution and crafted a new system in the New World to get away from that rule by the few.  The lesson we need to learn anew, is that it is the job of the many individuals who make up each generation to win that freedom again, because there will always be those eager to impose their will on others and use and direct and take the resources that they themselves did not earn, who will want to have their way with other people’s money and other people’s lives.

No one’s sacrifice is the same as anyone else’s.  Read no unfairness in that, because to sacrifice is to absorb unfairness.  But we cannot avoid the call to sacrifice.  Not even Christ, the greatest of all, could.

As we celebrate Easter we should remember the sacrifices of the Savior, by which He absorbed all unfairness.  Those sacrifices made Easter possible, by which all that is wrong is overcome and ultimate freedom bought for each person born into this world.  We are privileged by Christ to be given the chance to join in that effort to preserve and extend the blessings of freedom to our families, our friends, and to people we do not know and may never meet.

At Gethsemane, then Golgotha, and from the Garden Tomb, Christ has created the framework that makes freedom possible.  He inspired the founders who built a nation of freedom as the beacon to all mankind that it has been for over 200 years.  As our Easter worship, let us take up the last call given by Abraham Lincoln to the nation as the Constitution was reaffirmed in struggle, who recognized the great value of America for the world:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.