Make Sure that Our Country Does Not Become Detroit

I'm sorry, but to pit the woes of Detroit on the current financial crisis is nonsense. Detroit is the product of too many governmental interventions and too much corruption. Why is it that some people believe the government will do good things when it promises to do good things? Why do we thing that the people who occupy public offices suddenly become better than ordinary people? Why do we believe that they will do what is best for all of us instead of what is best just for them? Why do we place so much faith in them?
Does something need to be done? Yes. The church needs to quit sponsoring politicians of both sides and start taking responsibility themselves. What will fix the economic crisis? Try giving up protectionist attitudes. Try abandoning lobbying efforts. What if all the Christians involved in business dropped all political funding. No money to the Democrats, no money to the Republicans, no money to the Libertarians, no money to Sojo, Focus, or any of them. No money to lobbyists. No money to labor unions. No money to patent lawyers. No money to lawyers, period. No money to anything touched by any of these things. That's your economic stimulus right there.
No. This particular stimulus won't work any better than FRD's, or Bush's did. Remember, unemployment was still in the double digits several years after FDR's plan went through. The bottom line is that the government can't help us with this, and we practice idolatry when we believe it can!
It's time for the church to re-adopt monotheism and the responsibility that entails.
Nathanael Snow

I appreciate the sentiments; but tend to frame it as "Detroit is us." The decisions of the nation (that means corporations, individuals, churches, block clubs, governments, wealthy persons, poor households, etc.) puts Detroit in the condition it is is in.

Is the patient ill. Yes.

My wife and I, searching for a home, toured a home whose owner was desperate to sell. She was an older woman with empysema (from a life of smoking) hauling an oxygen tank around behind her. We prepared an offer. The realtor sat down with the children and her to present the offfer. They all sat there--smoking.

They rejected our offer and the house sat on the market for a couple years--ultimately selling for much less.

Is the trillion dollar package simply a big oxygen tank we will be paying off for decades--or the miracle drug that heals the nation??????

This weekend I heard a pastor make a side comment about Obama (but more about the nation): "The nation wanted a king, so God gave them one."

That is not a slam on Obama. It is a sound critique of a nation. I believe this thing is going to get worse--not because we do or don't pass the 'rescue plan' --but because the patient prefers to have his last cigarette.

Come to think of it--maybe Obama's hidden smoking is more prophetic than I thought.

What is remarkable to me is that the Bible dictates the exact economic policies for getting out of this mess--to the letter!

Kidding, of course. The Bible doesn't say which economic stimulus plan we should implement or what might work best. Try as Wallis might to make the biblical case for Obama's plan, I'm afraid the answers to the current crisis are better left to economists.

Nathanael, what would you eliminate:

*the police?
*the military?
*the public school system?
*let bridges collapse like the one in Minneapolis?
*the Food and Drug administration?

I see things differently. The choice is between "good government and bad government", not "government and no government." There are social goods or common goods that have a place coming to us through government- as there is a place for business and church and non-profits.

To say "no money to government"- and for that matter, any of the groups listed above, is sad. The inevitable conclusion is "no money to anyone but me". I can't go along with that.

As I've read you before, I know that you can offer a much better question than, "What if we didn't send money to...?" I'm looking forward to your better questions.

Duhsciple

While I appreciate the expertise of economists, the current situation requires the best thinking of everyone.

Our beliefs and values come into play. Is infinite financial growth possible on a finite planet? I'm not an economist, but that doesn't make sense.

Living as if oil is an infinite resource is dumb. Practicing finance as if housing will never go down, in hindsight, was pretty stupid. Yet "we all" lived as if that were the case- and I don't remember many economists issuing any warnings about this.

And... what if we lived by the economics of the Lord's Prayer, rooted in the "wilderness manna economy"? Give US this day OUR daily bread. What if we practiced living living with "enough"- and sharing the rest with those who didn't have enough? Where are there economists working on that model?

Peace, Duhsciple

A lot of our cities are falling apart. Get on Google Maps Street View and take a tour of Cleveland and see what you think. Empty lots, abandoned buildings, boarded up houses. I wonder how many of our cities look like that? Is it time to just bulldoze the neighborhoods and turn the city into a park?

I don't believe government can be good, only less bad.
Yes, I would eliminate federal and state involvement in public schools.
I would eliminate standing armies, and allow voluntary militias.
I would privatize the roads, and eliminate the FDA altogether, and get rid of patents.
I would expect the police to intervene only when there is a victim attached to a crime.

But this is beside the point, because it will never happen. What CAN happen is that Christians can stop playing the game with the pagans. Instead of no money to anyone but me misses the point: That only Christians are responsible for the least of these.
Social or common goods, if they are indeed good for everyone involved, can be arrived at without the help of government. No one needs someone to coerce them into doing what is in their own best interest.
My criticism is against the mindset which presupposes that positive social change must be accomplished through the state. I contend that any such progress is immoral because it employs force to accomplish its ends. I am against any use of force which is not purely defensive in nature. I think Christ was as well.
Social change is most effective when accomplished apart from coercion, when it emerges naturally within voluntary associations from the bottom up instead of from the top down.
My argument also points out how much of the Kingdom's resources are being squandered on another kingdom.
NS

I think you're trying to say we should live like the Bible tells us to, minus Romans 13, of course. Guess what? Human nature dictates it will never work. We are all out only for our own best interests (Phil 2). Personally, I believe that we will continue a further slide into chaos, because we have put mammon before God. Your POV does nothing to address our selfish interests. Unfortunately, that's where gov't becomes a necessity. (Perhaps you should read about life in MIll Towns, Packing Plants, etc. before the Progressive Era helped to end the exploitation of human beings.

I want to clarify: what I meant was not that it will not work to live by the standards of the Bible; rather, Nathanael's belief in the free market to solve all problems will never work.

Why waste money on a bulldozer? When it becomes worthwhile to redevelop that land someone will do it. Of course, rent control laws can be blamed for the majority of inner-city demise.
NS

Not so, not so. First, Rom 13 tells us that the authority bears the sword for our good. I'm all for a judiciary with executive powers. I think the Constitution is merely the best we've done so far, but otherwise, nothing special. I am opposed to governments which are arbitrary law-makers. I believe in the common law.
As for human nature and selfishness, you are presupposing that everyone is selfish in a short-run sense of the term. But if people are selfish, and can see the long run, then they will co-operate in fair competition according to the rule of law in order to maximize total future gains.
If we are on a deserted island, and you fish and I pluck coconuts, we can share at the end of the day. If I kill you, then I have to spend part of my day fishing. If it even just takes a little while to transition between tasks, I am instantly worse off. It is my self-interest which makes me willing to co-operate. If I were indifferent, I wouldn't bother with you.
As for stories out of Sinclair's "The Jungle," ask yourself whether Jurgis and his family would have been better off if they had starved in Lithuania instead? Ask yourself if they were forced to stay in packingtown? Ask yourself if it was so bad then how did we get where we are today?
The Progressive Era was a bunch of goodie-two-shoes imposing their moral will on others through law instead of owning up to the full responsibility for the least of these. The Progressive Era brought us Prohibition, which unfortunately remains in anti-drug laws which empower gangs. The remains of the Progressive era impose child-labor laws on poor children around the world which force them onto the black market for labor, and we all know what that means.
Every good thing the state tries to do has an unintended consequence where someone else has to pay.
NS

Detroit was built on a house of cards to begin with. Unions set the price for labor sky high, which inhibited growth in non-auto industries. Governmental attempts to craft new social programs exacerbated the problem.

If we want to prevent the nation from becoming Detroit, the goal should be to look at what they did, and do the opposite.

Jim Wallis (Obama's answer to Father Coughlin) can try to drum up the hope all he wants, but as a former Michigan resident, I can tell you that the state is hopeless unless it legitimately changes.

"Why waste money on a bulldozer? "

I think this should become Detroit's official slogan.

Yes, the Madoffs of the world made off best when there was no pesky regulation from the likes of government; and charity and good works are best served by their ilk, unimpeded by oversight.

Everything should be completely voluntary, all good works and even good behavior. There is no inherent obligation on the part of anyone to help anyone else; that is totally self-determined and without restraint.

Only the Christian )even the last one left on earth) is responsible to do anything for anyone else.

And let the devil tke the hindmost!. In the immortal words of that great philosopher-king, Long John Silver, "Why, I say, let 'er rip!"

Well, the king, I think viewing the late development of the imperial presidency, isn't yet Obama, but rather King George.

Jerry Falwell (as well as many of us) was a whole lot fatter than Obama, too. Was that prophetic or no, mirroring a bloated and sclerotic nation?

"My criticism is against the mindset which presupposes that positive social change must be accomplished through the state. I contend that any such progress is immoral because it employs force to accomplish its ends."

Very well said. The Pharisees were largely about getting all Israel to look good and behave according to laws they thought were good for society. The Essenes were practically Amish living in relative exclusion. And others in Jesus' day were about political revolution. Jesus was about the Kingdom, hence your statement:
"My argument also points out how much of the Kingdom's resources are being squandered on another kingdom."

I can't for the life of me understand why Christians don't like others not doing what they want, and then going about trying to get power to force them to act and make decisions according to Christian ethics. Makes me ashamed to be a Christian, to be honest. Where is the respect for human dignity, freedom, and human rights? If fraud be present, let's prosecute! Otherwise stop trying to make power plays over the rest of society in the name of a supposed "good" government.

Father Coughlin was a Cathoic fascist sympathetic to Nazi Germany and anti-Semitic, blaming a world-wide Jewish conspiracy for America's depression-era woes. He had a radio program listened to by 37 million in a nation of a hundred million.

I don't see how Jim Wallis matches up in any believable way to that demagogue.

I think that we ought to see that it's not so much that the workers had their pay set sky-high as that the executives and Wall Street banksters they moved among had made their own greed their God. We're talking 400x plus the workers' pay for these high-flying egotists. Not for nothing was the Bull statue on Wall Street analogous to the worship of the Golden Calf.

Jim,

The decay in Detroit has been going on for decades. It's been apparent to everyone, native or not, since at least the late seventies. What you are seeing is the rot spreading into the suburbs.

Detroit is a tragedy of immense proportions. The incredible waste -- of roads and infrastructure, homes and businesses, and human lives, boggles the imagination.

The city itself has long been governed by a coalition of your left-of-center allies: unions, civil rights groups, African-American churches.

I am tempted to lay the blame for that at the feet of the left, but the awful truth is there aren't a whole lot of innocent people in Detroit on either side. A mess this big is bound to have a lot of people involved.

Wrath is traditionally considered one of the seven deadly sins, and I'm not aware of any rule that says that just anger cannot be deadly and self-destructive. For decades the government of the mostly black city made the grievances that African Americans had against whites the center of its entire governing philosophy. They were backed up by unions that were driven to win at all costs against employers -- including the government itself.

The result was a government that turned a blind eye toward corruption, drove businesses out of the city. And with them went jobs and opportunities. White flight was followed by black flight. There is very little of a middle class, white or black, in the city any more. And a city needs a real middle class. The dreaded bourgouisie of professionals and managers and small businessmen are key to making any economy go.

Black power by itself is not a workable approach to governing. But you can't put together a complete description of what went wrong in Detroit without accounting for the irresponsibility and outright bigotry of a lot of Detroit's whites.

I can't talk about the fifties and sixties much. I can talk about the seventies though. White flight was astonishing. The reaction of whites to the arrival of a black family can best be described as sheer panic. And once they resettled in Oakland County or Livonia or wherever the hostility was hard to miss.

In all that anger and hostility, the problem was sorting out the just anger from the unjust:. It cut both ways: among whites there were those who were understandably appalled by conditions in the city, and then there were those who just didn't like black people. Among blacks there were honest-to-God victims of racism who wanted equity, and then there were the political hacks who cried "racism!" when they were caught with their hands in the till.

And Detroit's white churches contributed to the whole poisonous atmosphere. Let me give your readers one example. There was a church in Redford (I won't name it here -- there's a good chance you know who I'm talking about though) that didn't allow black members until well into the 80's.

If you ask me, I don't think Detroit is likely to recover until there is a reckoning with our past -- all of it. I see churches in the area holding prayer services. They ought to be holding confessionals instead. If the churches in Detroit want to help, the first step is to confess our sins -- black, white, left, right -- our stupid bigotry and misguided anger, the refusal to even try to talk with our brothers. And above all the terrible waste.

There was a great city once, called Detroit. My God what have we done?

LV

Madoffs minions made mistakes with their millions. Their own fault.
But also the fault of a banking regime where inflation is so bad that the only way a person can earn a positive rate of return is to invest in stocks, usually the realm of only informed investors. Uninformed investors get what they deserve. No one has a right to positive gains.

And the fact is that only Christians have a good reason to care about others selflessly. Only Christians are regenerate and have a selfless nature.

There is no inherent obligation on anyone but to grab the most while they can and then die. Only when people work together voluntarily do things move beyond this point. Compulsive cooperation contaminates charity. No one wants to be forced to play nice together, they all resent it. But if there's a good incentive to play nice, it will happen all on its own.

Maybe we should all take a step back into history and figure out where this whole thing began. Many economists who aren't sell-outs to the government or big business would point to the un-Constitutional Federal Reserve System, which is designed to control the money supply. Add to this fiat currency of worthless paper dollars now-absence of a gold/silver standard, and we do not have a laizze faire (sp?) market, but a central planning system in cahorts with the State. Add to that the infusion of more and more money that inflates the currency, federal mandates to banks who must make loans to risky people or face consequences, and fractional reserve banking, and you've got a financial crisis waiting to happen.

Oh, wait... I think it's just happened.

Shucks...

Maybe government is the source of the problem. Maybe the greedy in Washington who want more power are the source of the problem. C.S. Lewis wrote:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Call that power-over plays and you've got the perfect post. -Especially since you quoted me ;)

BTW: Father Coughlin's parish, the Shrine of the Little Flower, was in Royal Oak, just a little north of Detroit.

LV

Sinners don't have to make greed their god - they are born that way. We all are. No twin is born saying, "Oh, no, dear mother, please feed my sibling first, I can wait just a bit and just have the leftovers." Balderdash.
Everyone takes all they can get. The question is how to best make that work to the benefit of everyone. If the only way I can get rich is by satisfying a customer's desires, then guess what? I'm going to go out there and satisfy as many people as I possibly can. These CEO's were not forcing anyone to give them money, not like the government is. Were many of them dirty? Sure! A lot of them were in bed with politicians, members of the world's second-oldest profession, how else do we define dirty? If there were torts un-prosecuted it was because of some political shelter. Were any of those workers forced to go to work? They went voluntarily because it was their best available option.

How extreme do you go with your egalitarianism? Shall we all earn exactly alike, even if some are more productive than others? Even if some willingly take on more risk than others? How much more should a CEO earn than the rank-and-file? How do you choose? How long will that wage last before another firm bids him away?
Should corporations be allowed to exist at all or are you against LLC's of every kind? Where do you draw the line NMRod? It is abundantly clear where I draw the line.
NS

Last time I looked, the Dalai Lama and Ghandi put some of these "selfless" and "regenerate" Christians to shame - and they felt they were compelled to act selflessly by the highest ethical considerations.

The problem with extreme libertarianism - as Alan Greenspan lamented recently - is it does not comport with the facts of human nature on the ground.