Every Penny The Government Spends Comes Out Of Your Pockets

From: The Desk of John Stossel

“How is it the government is going to be able to spend a dollar in such a way that it generates a dollar or more in value?” asked George Mason University economist Peter Leeson. “A more likely possibility is that a dollar that government takes out of the private sector is a dollar the private sector doesn’t have to spend.”

Leeson is referring to the “broken-window” fallacy, which comes from Frederic Bastiat’s story about a boy who throws a rock through a shop window. Since the shopkeeper has to buy a new window, some believe the mischief will actually stimulate the local economy. The fallacy lies in overlooking that the shopkeeper would have spent the money some other way if he didn’t have to replace the window.

Every penny the government spends will first have to be borrowed from someone in the economy. So where’s the stimulus?

It’s also quite a conceit to believe that a few men in power are smart enough to know precisely how to spend trillions of your dollars.

“They’re exploiting a minor correction in the economy. … Markets go through corrections all the time,” Lydia Ortega of San Jose State University told me.

I pointed out that people say this correction is worse — maybe like the Depression.

“But markets need to go through this correction,” she said. “What’s happening now, what’s making it worse, is that people don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s so much uncertainty generated by the government spending.”

The more the government does, the more private investors wait.

“Part of the reason that people aren’t spending is they don’t know what these characters in Washington are going to do,” says Howard Baetjer of Towson University.

“Japan tried six spending packages in the early 1990s. The result? A decade of lost growth,” points out Ben Powell of Suffolk University. “It’s the government’s own policies that contributed to the bubble. The government’s not the answer to it.”

Read more here. . . .

Our Culture Lays The Soul In Ashes

John Piper

Quoting John Piper:

One of the curses of our culture is banality, cuteness, cleverness. Television is the main sustainer of our addiction to superficiality and triviality.

God is swept into this. Hence the trifling with divine things.

Earnestness is not excessive in our day. It might have been once. And, yes, there are imbalances in certain people today who don’t seem to be able to relax and talk about the weather.

Robertson Nicole said of Spurgeon, “Evangelism of the humorous type [we might say, church growth of the marketing type] may attract multitudes, but it lays the soul in ashes and destroys the very germs of religion. Mr. Spurgeon is often thought by those who do not know his sermons to have been a humorous preacher. As a matter of fact there was no preacher whose tone was more uniformly earnest, reverent and solemn” (Quoted in The Supremacy of God in Preaching, p. 57).

President Says “We Do Not Consider Ourselves A Christian Nation”

Quoting Gary Bauer:

President Obama also told his Muslim audience [on April 6, 2009], “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.” That’s odd. For a politician who claims to speak for the “common man” he doesn’t seem to know much about the common man. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 62% of the nation does consider America a Christian nation. I suspect the average viewer watching on Al Jazeera was thoroughly unimpressed by the president’s tolerance as he spoke to a nation that is 99.8% Muslim.

More broadly speaking, America is a Judeo-Christian nation, built upon the values in the Ten Commandments. If you asked Americans, “Do you consider America to be a Judeo-Christian nation,” I believe the percentage of folks agreeing with statement would skyrocket. If you asked, “Is America a Judeo-Christian-Muslim nation,” I suspect the number of affirmative responses would plummet. Because, with all due respect to moderate Muslims, Islam has contributed very little to the history of the United States. The last time I checked, the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were Christians, not Muslims. Our Founding Fathers were inspired by the Bible, not the Koran.

And here’s a historical footnote worth remembering: The first time America sent troops into combat overseas was when Thomas Jefferson ordered the Navy and the Marines to Libya to fight the Barbary Pirates. Still in its infancy, America was forced to confront militant Islam. Our Founding Fathers must be rolling over in their graves. President Obama literally bowed to a Muslim king, downplayed America’s sovereignty and denied its religious and cultural heritage. President Obama’s apologies for America and his attempts to be inoffensive to our Islamofascist enemies should offend millions of Americans.

President Obama is apparently unaware, like many Americans and Supreme Court Justices, of the Supreme Court ruling in the case of the Church of the Holy Trinity v. the United States in 1892.  In this case, after presenting a litany of precedents from American history, the Supreme court ruled that the United States is a “Christian nation”. (Barton, David.  Original Intent, pp. 49-51)

Protect Human Life And Rights Now

An Appeal From Gary Bauer:

While President Obama likes to talk about “reducing the need for abortion,” his administration is taking steps to repeal conscience protections for medical professionals. Make no mistake about the outcome of this action: religious hospitals, doctors and nurses will be forced to perform abortions or other procedures that violate their values. This issue exposes the extremism of Barack Obama and the Left. A woman’s “right of conscience” is protected to the extent that she can decide whether or not her unborn baby lives or dies. Now the Left wants to take away the right of conscience from doctors who want no part in the destruction of innocent human life. That is not “pro-choice” – it is pro-abortion. The administration is accepting public comments on this proposal, but the comment period ends April 9th. Please respectfully share your thoughts with the Department of Health and Human Services by sending an E-mail to proposedrescission@hhs.gov.

Atlas Is Shrugging

Quoting Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund:

“All of this reads as if yanked from an Ayn Rand novel. The government, in a desperate attempt to avoid political pain caused by its own foolish economic mistakes and lax oversight, has poured billions into bankrupt companies. Then when those companies pass out bonuses they claim are necessary to retain qualified workers, the political firestorm leads government officials to propose tax rates that would make even British socialists of a half century ago blush. We are slipping into debates that have nothing to do with a free economy and everything to do with the government calibrating how to balance the favors it hands out with the inevitable moral outrage those favors engender.”

Church In The Age Of Show Business

Dave Brown, in his article “Entertaining Ourselves In Church,” writes about the effect of media on the presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

In 1985 Neil Postman, a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University wrote a fascinating book called, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It’s marvelously insightful and prophetic book about TV’s profound influence on the way we live and think. Postman points out that during the print era when we just had books, newspapers and pamphlets and such, there was a certain distance between the writer and the reader that caused reflection, evaluation and thinking to occur. But in the television era or the age of show business everything is entertainment. There’s no reflection or thinking, only sensual absorption and reaction to disconnected images passing before us. [As an aside, 60% of the high school graduates in this country will never again read a book.]

The problem, Postman stresses, is not that TV has too much entertaining subject matter, but that under its influence all subject matter is now presented as entertainment. “In court rooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.” Postman says that TV gives us, “news without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.” In other words, what Postman puts his finger on, is that TV is not only mindless but it is teaching us to be mindless. On the other hand Scripture, as we read, says “do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”; TV says be like the rest of the world and be transformed by chasing your feelings. Big difference!

Not so surprisingly this carries over into politics, where image over substance is so pervasive, but it has also profoundly penetrated religion. With more and more emphasis on emotional experience over the Bible and Biblical doctrines, we’re seeing churches mimicking the TV entertainment format. The new orthodoxy in many American churches seems to be everything must be turned into entertainment in order to get people to pay attention to us. Feeling good in church has become such an overriding concern in some places one wonders if they learn anything about God or even lose the presence of God in their worship.

Postman doesn’t write as a professing Christian, but he nevertheless scores this bull’s-eye about televangelists, “Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as a second banana. . . .”

This unremitting dose of entertainment throws reality out of kilter and fundamentally undermines traditional values. In a moral and spiritual sense, we are amusing ourselves to death. John Leith writing in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin had these observations:” It induces people to find meaning of life in being entertained. . . .

Celebrityism is the new belief system born out of the show business era. It is the illusion that things don’t happen unless famous people make them happen. A few years back the farm bill was bogged down in Congress and couldn’t get it through; so the chairman of the Agriculture Committee asked three Hollywood actresses to come to a hearing and testify in support of his bill; they were Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek. When they testified the media came and the legislation went through. What is curious is that none of these women grew up on a farm or worked on a farm or knew anything about farm policy but each had played farmer’s wives in the movies. . . .

I agree with Chuck Colson who has frequently pointed out that the problem with celebrityism – preached and celebrated in popular culture – is that we’re creating moral role models. We’re exulting immorality, degeneracy and the ‘what’s in it for me’ ethic; no wonder we have a crisis on our hands: teenage pregnancy, child abuse, kids killing kids, the disintegration of virtue, honor, responsibility and authority. . . .

How’d we get in this mess? Alexander Solzynitzin, the Russian Nobel prize winning novelist and great Christian prophet who stood against Soviet communism and told the world about its gulags, perhaps the greatest writer and mind of this century, put his finger on the reason. He said that after the 1917 Russian revolution when things began to disintegrate, there was an old folk saying that went, “Men have forgotten God and that’s why these things have happened.” Solzynitzin said that – “You can sum up the 20th century with the same old Russian proverb “Men have forgotten God, that’s why these things have happened”.

What do we do about the mess? Can we do something?

First, we in the church need to grasp a deeper sense of God’s holiness and a profound sense of our sinfulness and just how much we need desperately need God’s grace; we need to understand the basic human dilemma is that God is holy and we are not; and the only way out – the only reconciliation – is the Cross of Christ.

Second, we need to think Christianly, that is beyond ourselves, knowing there is transcendent meaning and purpose for life and that there is objective truth and moral absolutes, and that we all, everyone one of is accountable to God for our thoughts, words and deeds.

Third, we need to understand that we are called to challenge the wisdom of this age. As we read in 2Corinthians 10:5, “we are destroying every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God”. Whether we like or not, we are soldiers engaged in spiritual warfare. We’re battling for the souls and eternal destinies of our children, our grandchildren, our families, our friends and our neighbors.

Continue reading. . . .