I take it as a given that Christians are called to be a force for good and for decency in the world, and that this good and this decency are best exhibited face-to-face with people you know and live with. The debates that arise when I write about what I am going to write about …
Here’s An Idea
Refugees are now pouring out of Zimbabwe, former Rhodesia, and I have a modest proposal. Let’s have a moratorium on all new proposals about international affairs, proposals designed to improve the lot of others and end injustice forever, until all the people who insisted on the course we followed with Rhodesia (for foundational moral reasons) …
Velcro Candidate
This is about the time in the campaign season that I start wishing that I could bring myself to vote for McCain, if for no other reason than to irritate the handwringers and Europeans. But alas, I am a man of principle. McCain would only irritate them for about 20 percent of the right reasons. …
Some Transactions Are Zero Sum
“But only redistributive processes are zero-sum games; protective tariffs, mortgage subsidies, and armed robberies all transfer wealth forcibly from one person to another. Economic transactions are voluntary exchanges, which means that both parties perceive themselves as benefiting. A given economic transaction is zero-sum only if one party has miscalculated or been deceived” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols …
Gimme Gimme
“All true needs—such as food, drink, and companionship—are satiable. Illegitimate wants—pride, envy, greed—are insatiable” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 107).
Repentance Is Not Scooting Your Shelf Idol to Face Right for a While
“Those pathologies cannot simply be subsumed under such labels as liberal, conservative, or radical. The ideologies common to American politics all have a share in them; none has clean hands . . . . political rhetoric, the media, and the educational establishment have badly distorted the political and economic landscape, making it appear that the …
Ah. Just Some Men. I See It All Now.
“Humanitarianism is saviorhood, an ethic perfectly suited to the theology that divinizes man. But the theology that divinizes man, it turns out, only divinizes some men” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 87).
Reverse Dehumanization
“If we look at the villains instead of the victims — the police, politicians, social workers, businessmen — we find that the humanitarians have given them free will. They do not speak about the industrialist’s tyrannical father, the loan shark’s miserable childhood in an orphan home, the politician’s neurotic mother. Those people are responsible for …
And Eventually These Big Checks Will Bounce
“The culture of Western nations in which humanitarian thinking is dominant is a rentier living off the moral capital accumulated by its predecessors and giving no attention to replenishing it. When it runs out, the horrors begin in earnest . . . Humanism is a philosophy of death” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, pp. 81-82).
A Floating Poverty Line
“Sentimentality, as we have seen, finds expression in autonomous, pragmatically based decisions on right and wrong, and in the refusal to declare absolute standards on all matters, including poverty. What sometimes seems to be an intellectual vacuity in humanitarian polemics is associated with this trait, which we may think of as the propensity to define …