For a century after 1894,  most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In America, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health care system, the cost to the manufacturer is $800 per work. In 2006, General Motors paid $5.2 billion in medical and insurance bills for its active and retired workers. That adds $1,500 to the cost of every GM car sold. For Toyota, which has fewer American retirees and many more foreign workers, that cost is $186 per car. This is not necessarily an advertisement for the Canadian health care system, but it does make clear that the costs of the American health care system have risen to ap oint that there is a significant competitive disadvantage to hiring American workers. Jobs are going not to countries like Mexico but to places where well-trained and educated workers can be found: it’s smart benefits, not low wages, that employers are looking for.”

Thoughts?

I have a friend who is a conscientious objector. Actually, I have lots of friends who are conscientious objectors, including Jake But I was visiting with this friend, and he told me with absolute certainty that Christians can never achieve their ends through taking up the sword, or even by using “the sword” (i.e. national governmental power) to move toward biblical ends, like peace.

So I told him I agreed, and that was why I opposed Christian endorsement of government programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Needless to say, the case didn’t go over so well. Here’s the thing: while we are to be thankful for the governments God has placed in authority over us, the power they offer can be seductive. Why be the Good Samaritan, we think, when instead we can eliminate robbery and racial discrimination through social programs?

This is all well-intentioned. We see the systemic problems in the world and feel overwhelmed at how little we as individuals can do in the face of it, so we start looking for systemic answers and find them in the government. Thing is, it just doesn’t work, for a couple of reasons.

First, top-down problem solving for poverty issues falls prey to the same problems as any sort of top-down economic planning. The government can never judge the real needs of every individual in a nation as efficiently as you can judge the needs of your neighbors.

Think about welfare. No matter how many case workers and forms and bureaucrats they employ, the welfare system will never be able to help people that need help and turn down people that don’t in anything resembling the efficiency with which active individuals and private charities can do it, simply because there is too much complexity to effectively coordinate.

Second, one of the advantages that private individuals have in helping fight poverty is the fact that they’re using real money. Social Security is a good example here. Right now, Social Security is running a $600+ billion deficit. This is projected to hit $3.7 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.

Now, we could say all sorts of things about this, but here’s the point I want to make: at least some of the money the U.S. government is using to help elderly people survive is not representative of our actual wealth, or for that matter of actual anything. It’s make-believe money.

Yes, I know all the Keynesian arguments to support government debt, but I have a hard time buying it. When we both individually and colelctively spend imaginary money, money we don’t have, money that isn’t representative of wealth that we possess or could reasonably accumulate in the near future, we’re living in a house of cards. One day a little gust of wind is sure to blow it down. And when it does, there are going to be a lot more poor people than the ones we actually manage to “help” in the meantime.

Third, and most importantly, I simply don’t think that the sword can ever be used effectively to create these positive changes. It is only good for destroying things. Granted, this can be a huge blessing, as when it is weilded against criminals or tyrants. But when it’s the sword at our throats, trying to extort dollars to give to our neighbors, it’s a small thing for it to slip a little and leave us about a foot shorter. The Sheriff of Nottingham makes a very poor Robin Hood.

I understand why it’s so tempting to go this route. We live in a country that can afford to spend billions of dollars to combat social ills like poverty, unemployment, aging or AIDS. Next to this, the $40 a month I spend to support a family in Africa seems pretty paltry, especially when I see my neighbor driving a brand-new yellow Hummer home from the dealership. But I don’t think it’s the right or best way to address these issues.

Instead, we need to see a little bit more of the foolishness of God’s kingdom. We should work for justice and peace in the civil sphere, but it’s not the vehicle of blessing to the nations. In the kingdom of heaven, it’s the little citizens with their $40 a month contributions of which the New Jerusalem will be built.

To put it bluntly - I am convinced by Scripture that one Christian indwelt by the Spirit and living in obedience for Christ - is a greater force for good in the world than all the powers and principalities and presidents and democracies combined. No exceptions.

“They are born into privilege. Into lives of parties and presents and pretty pink toes. They are the center of worlds, the apples of eyes. They are the feet stomping in store aisles, enunciating each demand. They are the Gameboy, the iPod, and the Xbox in which they are perpetually plugged. They are defiant, obstinate, difficult to control. They are ADD, ADHD, Ritalin, and Prozac. They speak one language, they worship one god. They are oblivious to hunger, oblivious to war. They are the children of the West, and with each compliant caving in to their ever more extravagant demands (like “pedicure parties,” which are growing increasingly popular with girls under ten), their parents are further severing their connection to reality. As the global market comes crashing down, children nursed on the milk of capitalism will find the values with which they have been raised increasingly irrelevant. As attitudes shift and mindsets change, these tiny consumers will find themselves not at the center of the world, but rightly relegated to the fringe.”

– Sarah Nardi

Learn more about Buy Nothing Day here.

As I write this, I’m sitting in Love Library, the library of UNL’s City Campus that has over 3 million volumes. If you need a book for class, Love has it. And it probably has books about that book.

And if that isn’t enough, it has wireless connections for those of us with laptops. And it has probably 50-75 computers with internet and access to printers, which we can use for only nine cents per page.

Meanwhile, my friend Philip is in Lusaka, Zambia. He’s a Geography major and History minor at the University of Zambia. But he’s not in class right now due to an ongoing faculty strike at UNZA. That means Philip is back home in Minali, a small neighborhood in Lusaka. But even when the lecturers are receiving adequate pay and the campus is clean because the janitorial staff is being paid (which isn’t always a guarantee), Philip studies in a library with less than 1/3 the volume of books we have at UNL. And the books they do have may be up to 100 years old. And this is problematic not only because they’re outdated and in poor condition, but if its a historical text, that means it’s some imperialistic bs written by some racist sociologist at Oxford. And Philip is supposed to use that garbage for his research papers. Worse, what limited computers they have are old and have extremely slow internet connections.

Why do I bring this up? Today is Blog Action Day 08, a day where thousands of bloggers are joining together to raise awareness about global poverty.

Brother Maynard, Bill Kinnon, Tony Kummer, and Jamie Arpin-Ricci also have written for it, all of whom have posts worth reading. (Sidenote: Kudos to Tony for being the only reformed blogger I know of who covered this today. More on that in a day or two…) If you’re looking for ways to get involved with groups doing work internationally, you should check in with any of their blogs or go to the Blog Action Day website linked below.

However, if you’re looking for a way to get involved locally, here’s what you can do: You know how sometimes when you go to sell back textbooks you can’t sell them because a new edition has come out? Well, hopefully you still have the book. Because if you do, Philip or one of my other friends at UNZA could use it.

At the end of this semester, I’m going to be trying to organize a massive event where students donate old editions of textbooks to UNZA. We’ll send the books over to UNZA and they’ll get into the library. Then people like Philip can have recently-published books to use for their classes, rather than having to read old, outdated books whose info is unreliable and which may be written from the perspective of a racist imperialist who thought Africans were inferior.

Even if you don’t have books to donate, I’ll need to raise money to pay for shipping, which can be rather expensive.

So read the other posts and go find your old textbooks. And this December, we’ll send some books to Philip :).

There is certainly a place for discussing the causes of our economic woes; I don’t pretend that we should ignore the contributing factors to our woes as we seek a solution. However, this needs to be done in a gracious and non-partisan way, and as we do it we must recognize that there is more than enough fault to go around. Everybody’s chickens are coming home to roost right now, and the fact that there’s fowl in our neighbor’s house doesn’t allow us to pretend that we’ve flown the coop.

That said, there’s a deeper question we also need to be asking. When the blame game is being played, how should we as Christians respond? Most of us seem content to play it in the same way that the world does: desperately scrambling to shoot our neighbors before they shoot us. I think that this is unsatisfactory. There must be a more redemptive way to approach these issues, and I’d like to offer two thoughts on how Christians should handle attempts to lay blame.

1. Take the blame we deserve. We have all contributed to these problems in one way or another, whether in supporting a candidate who favored irresponsible economic measures or trusting big government to help the poor when we should be doing it ourselves. We need to own up to our share of the blame, to confess our fault before God, and to repent before the nation of our part in the sins which led us here. Before we start recommending the way forward, we as believers need to publicly acknowledge our part in the current situation.

2. Take the blame we don’t deserve. This is where things will make us uncomfortable. After we have taken our share of the blame, as I meditate on the gospel, I am convinced that we need to take as much of our neighbor’s guilt upon ourselves as well. As Christians, we are uniquely equipped to lose at the blame game because of the work of Christ. By bearing our guilt for us and giving us His righteousness, He has put us in a position to bear a burden of blame for our neighbors who cannot bear it themselves. We ought to follow in the path of Jesus, offering ourselves in place of others.

It’s this second point that I think is most important right now. We certainly do deserve part of the blame for our nation’s economic woes. What’s more, we should now be leading the way in sacrificially giving to help our neighbors avoid foreclosure. That said, even if we did all these things, we wouldn’t be doing something uniquely Christian. It will only be when we willingly allow the accusing finger to be pointed at us rather than those who may well deserve it that people will be seeing a model of Christ’s love spread before them – a love which suffers injustice in order to do good to those who don’t deserve it.

This then is the ultimate point: Christians have no business playing the blame game at all unless they play to lose. Any attempt by Christians to pin the fault on another group, even if it’s deserved, is antithetical to the cross. Sure, we might need to dialog about the mistakes that led to this point, but never with the aim of excusing ourselves or condemning our neighbors. When the recriminations and accusations start to fly, the model of Jesus is to interpose ourselves between them and their targets. To do less is to fail to look to the cross.

The media assume that when religious people express interest in the problems of poverty and disease, they must have taken a left turn politically. But one can be interested in solving such problems without believing that government is the solution. “Our government has spent trillions of dollars in Africa,” says Mr. Warren, “and the standard of living is worse now than it was 50 years ago.” He knows whereof he speaks, having launched a massive effort to help the country of Rwanda rebuild itself. “There is only one way to get people out of poverty and it’s not charity. It’s jobs.”

While many pastors admonish their congregants to “teach a man to fish,” Mr. Warren says that is “not good enough.” He explains, “If all you do is teach a guy to fish, you create a village of fishermen and everybody does the same thing. They all catch the same fish. They all sit on the side of the road. They all sell the same fish. The same fish rots. They go home and they never get above subsistence level.”

As if channeling Adam Smith, Mr. Warren continues, “You have to develop a complex economy, where one says I’ll make the hooks, I’ll catch the fish, I’ll can the fish, I’ll skin the fish, I’ll fry the fish, I’ll do the fish accounting, I’ll build the boats. I’ll franchise the fish markets. The answer to poverty is business development, not charity. . . . Trade, not aid.”

If you’re interested, check out the whole article.

(HT: JT)

– Daniel Taylor, The Myth of Certainty

Amongst young people like myself it’s easy for us to allow life experience to control our perception of what is true. I imagine this is a tendency amongst all age-groups but I can only speak for my young, idealistic, often-naive self.

This tendency informs our ideas about Young’s “man-created trinity of terrors” - economics, politics, and religion. Borrowing from Eric’s idea of regulative theology, we have to speak of each of these institutions as the Scriptures do. Many of us have experienced the pain caused by the abuse of these institutions and so we find the institutions as a whole disagreeable. Our problem is we mistake disagreeable for evil. We think that abuse of an institution is a statement about the institution, when really it’s a statement about human beings.

It is absolutely true that all three of these institutions have been abused by countless numbers of people. And if we’re silent on this point, we’re failing to speak prophetically to those around us. That has far too often been the sin of boomer evangelicals. They’ve mistaken what is American for what is Christian and countless young people - myself amongst them - have been devastated as a result. However, if we accept a flat, simplistic analysis of these institutions based on bad life experience, we’re failing to respect all of truth. We’re choosing that which we find to be palatable and ignoring that which is disagreeable. Biblically speaking, we don’t have a lot to go on when it comes to the right kind of politics, economics, or religion. We aren’t given an explicit, exhaustive statement of how religious institutions should organize themselves, we’re never told whether capitalism or socialism is God’s preferred economic philosophy, and we’re never told what party to vote for.

However, we’re given some basic concepts that must inform the way we consider these institutions: We’re told that the church should be under the authority of elders and that deacons exist for mercy and service. Further, we’re told that elders will be judged more harshly than their parishioners, should they ever abuse their power. (If that point had been taken seriously, I think many in our generation would have radically different perceptions of the church.) We’re told that we should be responsible with our wealth and that if we wish to have wealth, we ought to be willing to work for it. However, we’re also told to be known for our generosity, which is certainly at odds with typical American capitalism. Finally, we’re told that government structures exist for the good of their citizens, but we also see the early church being persecuted by the political power-brokers for their failure to conform to the government’s accepted norms. (Interestingly, the early church did not allow their members to serve in the military. Historically, we don’t have any evidence of Christians serving in the military until 174 AD and even then, it was not generally accepted until 313!)

In other words, Scripture’s charges ought to us leave us in a place that doesn’t fit within the regimented, comfortable, American institutionalism of most boomer evangelicalism. But it ought to leave us equally out of place in much of the younger, anti-institutional evangelicalism that is currently emerging out of the boomer generation. The problem with boomer evangelicalism was not that it was too institutional. It was not that it was too tied to American culture. It was not that they were all Republicans. Rather, all those things were symptomatic of a larger problem, namely the failure to let Scripture guide their attitudes toward these issues. If our generation is unable to see this, someday our kids will be bemoaning the same failings in us.

– The Shack, p. 179

Thoughts?

-Psalm 128:1-2

One of my reading projects for the summer has been several books on economics. One of the things I have been realizing as I have studied is how much a certain understanding of money and wealth has warped the way we as Christians think about our earthly possessions. But first, I want you to stop for a minute and think about your computer. Think about all the work that went into making it, the thousands of different inventors and craftsmen. Think about the years of their lives people poured into honing their own skills in order to develop them to the point where they could create a microchip or write Mozilla Firefox. Realize that the ability of these people to do this was created by the tens of thousands of others who were farming, making clothes, building houses and driving trucks with such a degree of efficiency that there was enough surplus for these thousands of computer-innovators to consume it while they were developing the computer. Realize the incredible complexity of transportation and market forces, of retail and currency which caused the specific computer you own to get from where it was made to your store and provided you with the income with which to purchase it while also making it affordable enough to purchase. And lastly, realize that little or none of the process was controlled by some sort of governmental regulative agency to ensure that raw talent people were born with 60 years ago was transformed into your Macintosh or Dell.  The only force behind all of this, ultimately, was the Lord’s providential hand manifested in a market system which He ultimately created.

I have us go on this thought experiment because I think that we tend to regard money, markets and capitalism as bad things. We are deeply suspicious of them and often feel that if we dip our hand in, we’re sure to get infected. There is no question that the “love of money” is a root of all sorts of sin. However, what I want us to recognize is the other side of the proverbial coin: economics should lead us to worship because it teaches us that God blesses abundantly. He causes our cups to overflow. He interweaves human actions in markets, good and bad, to create a system through which the entire world works together for the good of those in it. With no economic exchanges - no trade between one person and another - human beings are guaranteed to live in gross poverty. The fact is that, while wealth is certainly unequally distributed, without financial exchange and trade, it would essentially be nonexistent for everyone.

All of this to say what I centrally think: a certain neo-Socialist mindset has taught many of us young Christians to think that wealth is a moral evil. While there is some good correction here for excesses of the last generation, it is a fundamentally flawed premise because it destroys our ability to praise God. The right way to deal with money is not to abhor it but to worship God for and through it. When we recognize that our capitalist markets are a vehicle of incredible blessing from God and engage with them in light of this truth, we are enabled to be generous and Christian with our resources. Our obedience will come from praise rather than guilt. As long as we fail to see things this way and instead hate the rich as see money as a contaminant, we will fail to honor God with it.

Indeed, I see the fruit of this in many young people’s lives. They decry the guy driving around his Lexus or SUV as a greedy, evil person without even knowing him. Yet is it the man who took the rich blessings of the Lord and invested them in education, markets and a career or the one who blows it all on fast food, video games and a part-time job so they can sleep in? It is true that the rich man may be the oppressor, and the bible condemns oppression. Yet the sluggard is no better, and until we see money as a gift of God to be stewarded and given thanks for, it is the latter sin which we are often guilty of. Thank the Lord for His abundant blessings, and use them to live out this thanksgiving. To fail on either part of this command is to turn aside from the calling of Christ.