Finally, since comments are not edited as well as blogposts, please excuse the grammatical errors that will occur more often with the comments.
Dec 11
To Peter Drucker's short post on the most successful leader of the 20th Century. This post appears on the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Regarding the number of challenges and the way those challenges were met, far superior to Winston Churchill was Martin Luther King Jr. Churchill's leadership was certainly admirable and during a tremendous time of crisis in history. But Churchill's effectiveness was limited to that leading his country through war. We should also note Churchill's attitude towards Gandhi.
In contrast, Martin Luther King Jr not only met war effectively, he gave us a new way to handle conflict and his way is not just more humane, it gives us the best chance at surviving a world where the proliferation of WMDs is inevitable. King's leadership not only accepts Gandhi but teaches us how to interact with people who are less virtuous than Gandhi.
BTW, my apologies to the Imaginative Conservative Blog for listing the above comment as being blocked. I discovered later that it wasn't blocked. This is my fault.
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To Jordan J. Ballor's blogpost about inflation and the minimum wage to be found on the Acton blog
I agree with the basic premise that minimum wage increases would be unnecessary if the price of necessities did not increase. However, the scapegoating of gov't for the problem seems to ignore the fact that the first mover in the seeking of protection from the competitive market are those in the private sector. And in an economy that is fueled by greed and based on competition, we have to ask whether the existence an actual free market is utopian, rather than something to be worked for.
For decades, bigger companies have socialized costs, a good point made by the person cited in the post but he forgot about, and privatized profits. This is true in the development of computers. For example, gov't would buy enough computers to make the venture profitable in its early days. Why? One possible explanation is that the free market doesn't really work. Another explanation is that because the market runs on greed, every advantage will be sought including those outside the market. Another example is when businesses underpay employees so that these employees must rely on some form of public assistance to get by (for an example, check http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11156)
And to show that the greedy from the private sector can gain even without the gov't's help, then we should look at the impact that food speculation by banks has on the price of food (check http://science.time.com/2012/12/17/betting-on-hunger-is-financial-speculation-to-blame-for-high-food-prices/ and http://www.wdm.org.uk/food-speculation).
But what is troubling in this article is who is targeted for the control of inflation. For if wage increases by itself was the culprit, then the pay for everyone from the CEO to upper management to mid management to analysts to techies to lowest paid employee would be fair game for controls or a freeze. But that is not the case here. It is only the minimum wage worker who is called on to sacrifice him or herself until the prices of items like food in an age where the market's only ethic is to maximize profits is controlled by the same market. And of course, the only solution to be found is in the removal gov't intervention.
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Dec 13
To a blog post by Mark Perry on how raising the minimum wage would hurt minority youths because it would also their unemployment rates. This was originally post on AEI blog and they accepted the comment I made below. However the Acton blog reposted it rejected the comment below:
Taking the current assumptions that come with our economy, what this article is asking Blacks first and the others second is, do you want employment with your poverty?
Of course this "law" from Friedman works with certain economies and heaven forbid that we use the statistics here to question whether our current economic system is adequate.
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Dec 15
To Ray Nothstein's post on Acton's blog who protested the calling of what he regards as religious liberty, "Christian Privilege."
I am not clear here whether the author thinks that there is Christian privilege in the US but in case anyone doubts if it still exists, note how the religions of Obama, Romney, and Ellison are scrutinized while the religion of others like McCain, Kerry, and Bush were not during their campaigns. That shows Christian privilege. And it seems to me that what some Christians want to do is to use their advantages to rule, in some degree, over America. And, as Jon Stewart pointed out, they tend to call resistance to their control, "persecution." This prompts the question, Who is Orwellian now?
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Dec 16
To a blog post on the Gospel Coalition's Blog. The post was by Trillia Newbell on how anyone can show hospitality
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To a blog post on the Imaginative Conservative's blog. The post was written by Stephen Klugewicz declaring that conservatives from the West were the only ones promoting workable virtues in the world
This post is nothing more than self-flattery. For if you know the sinful nature of people, how is that conservatives, unlike all others, have escaped sin's clutches? Do we need to point Reagan's history in Central America or alliances with both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden? Or was all of that evidence that conservatives don't believe in utopias?
And how is it that those on the Left are dismissed for seeking utopias when nobody I read on the Left expects a utopia? Is thinking that we can do better utopian? For if it is, then conservatives are declaring their hypothesis to be fact fact, that we can't improve on whatever they set their minds to.
Is is more dangerous or narcissistic that conservatives, as described in this post, externalize evil as they attribute to themselves to be the only ones who hold to principles whether or not those principles can be realized. And all of this occurs while they declare to those on the Left to stop seeking utopias because it is dangerous.
to Joe Carter's blog post on the Gospel Coalition's blog about a court ruling regarding one man's multiple partner with whom he cohabited.
This post seems more like one favors jumping to conclusions because of a past decision. We should note that we are not dealing with someone who is actually legally married to multiple spouses but one who has declared himself to be in union.
What we need to consider is Paul's attitude toward the person whom he had to discipline for sexual sins. Paul's concern (I Cor 5) was not the sexual mores of society, it was the integrity of the Church. Noting that we do have different historical contexts between then and now, we still have to ask ourselves if the reputation of the Gospel is threatened when we make laws that result in society becoming a supplemental disciplinary arm of the Church? For that was the issue with the Lawrence decision. And what if we relied solely on evangelism rather than legislation when it comes to influencing society's sexual mores?
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Dec 17
To a video on the Gospel Coalition Blog. The video talked about to whom we should minister to and where we should plant churches. A comparison was made between youth ministries that focus on key-kids first and building city ministries first.
I have two comments here. First, I very much related to the remarks about ministry to "key-kids" first in hopes of getting others to follow because of past volunteer work in Young Life. But when we examine that in the light of the scriptures such as when Paul talks about the kind of people who belonged to the Church then, we have reason to review that approach because it seems to deny the fact that God was calling the weak and foolish to shame the strong wise and because of what was said in the video as well as it was showing preference. So how much more should we examine that approach when it serves as an analogy to how we show preference in evangelizing the cities first because they are like society's key-kids.
Second, we tend to look down on people from different backgrounds than our own. It is true economically, culturally, racially, and even nationally. Martin Luther King Jr talked about the arrogance of the West thinking that it has everything to teach other parts of the world and nothing to learn. And without exposure to people from different backgrounds, we will be tempted to have that attitude toward people from rural areas if we are urban or from the suburbs and vice-versa. Such an attitude can hurt the desire to minister to and start churches more in rural areas because most people live in the cities and suburbs.
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To R.J. Moeller and his article on Free Enterprise, limited government and man's depravity. Here, Moeller made the comment that every Christian who is to the left of Milton Friedman on economics is in sin.
Isn't saying anyone living to the left of oneself is living in sin simply an externalization of sin? And isn't the externalization of sin a denial of our human depravity?
And don't simple statements, like the one Reagan made about socialism, worthy of examination?
Finally, doesn't a system that allows those who can make the most money autonomous the system that requires heaven to really work while remaining just?
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