Surprise, Surprise

What a surprise! The New York Times today endorsed the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama. Last time around, the influential daily newspaper endorsed John Kerry. The time before that, it endorsed Al Gore. Before that, it was two consecutive endorsements for Bill Clinton. Before that, it was Michael Dukakis. Before that, it was Walter Mondale. Jimmy Carter got two nods. Before that, it was George McGovern. Before that, Hubert Humphrey. Before that, Lyndon Johnson. And before that, John Kennedy. Umm. See the trend? In the last 100 years, the Times has endorsed only three Republicans. It just makes you wonder why the paper even bothers to announce their picks anymore.

Book Selling

"When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night--there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean." --Christopher Morley

Our Shepherd

"Reason, as well as Scripture, may convince us, that he who gathers the outcasts of Israel, who heals the broken in heart, who upholds all that fall, raises up all that are bowed down, and upon whom the eyes of all wait for their support—can be no other than He who counts the number of the stars, and calls them all by their names, who is great in power, and whose understanding is infinite! To this purpose likewise, the prophet Isaiah describes this mighty Shepherd, Isaiah 40:9-17, both as to his person and office."

"But is not this indeed, the great mystery of godliness? How just is the Apostle's observation, that no man can say, Jesus Christ is the Lord—but by the Holy Spirit! How astonishing the thought—that the Maker of heaven and earth, the Holy One of Israel, before whose presence the earth shook, the heavens dropped, when he displayed a faint emblem of his majesty upon Sinai, should afterwards appear in the form of a servant, and hang upon a cross, the sport and scorn of wicked men!"

"I cannot wonder, that to the wise men of the world this appears absurd, unreasonable, and impossible; yet to right reason, to reason enlightened and sanctified, however amazing the proposition be—yet it appears true and necessary, upon a supposition that a holy God is pleased to pardon sinners in a way suited to display the solemn glories of his justice. The same arguments which prove that the blood of bulls and goats is insufficient to take away sin, will conclude against the utmost doings or sufferings of men or angels. The Redeemer of sinners must be mighty; he must have a personal dignity, to stamp such a value upon his undertakings, as that thereby God may appear just, as well as merciful, in justifying the ungodly for his sake; and he must be all-sufficient to bless, and almighty to protect—those who come unto him for safety and life."

"Such a one is our Shepherd. This is He of whom we, through grace, are enabled to say—we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." --John Newton

Economics in One Easy Lesson

Economics, commonly known as the "dismal science," can actually be easily understood. Here are each of the basic economic philosophies explained in simple "two-cow" terms (first articulated years ago during a delightful dinner in Washington DC with Murray Rothbard):

Communalism: You have two cows. You keep one and give one to your neighbor.

Communism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and--from time to time--provides you with sour milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes them and sells you the milk.

Liberalism: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours it down the drain.

Socialism: You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point that you must sell them both in order to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow which was a gift from your government.

Free-Market Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Centralized, Multi-National-Corporation-Based, Government-Subsidized, Democratic Socialism: You have two cows. You sell one, force the other to produce the milk of four cows and when it dies you write off the depreciation, hire a lobbyist, and garner a government bail-out and tax-breaks in order to purchase two new cows. Repeat.

Economics: A Second Lesson

My friend, Steve Henderson from Munich, sent me an addendum to the above posting:

An American Corporation: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A French Corporation: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

A Japanese Corporation: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide.

A German Corporation: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A Brittish Corporation: You have two cows. Both are mad.

An Italian Corporation: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You break for lunch.

A Swiss Corporation: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

A Hindu Corporation: You have two cows. You worship them.

A Chinese Corporation: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the journalist who reported these numbers.

Enron Venture Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

An Author's Last Wish

When I am dead
I hope it will be said:
His sins were scarlet,
But his books were read.
--Hilaire Belloc

House Wars, Punic and Otherwise

In his remarkable book entitled The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson makes the point that "the best things in life" invariably "cost us something." We must sacrifice to attain them, to achieve them, to keep them, even to enjoy them. That is one of the most important lessons we can learn in life. It is the message that we know we ought to instill in our children: patience, commitment, diligence, constancy, and discipline will ultimately pay off if we are willing to defer gratification long enough for the seeds we have sown to sprout and bear. A flippant, shallow, and imprecise approach to anything--be it sports or academics or the trades or business or marriage--is ultimately self-defeating. It is not likely to satisfy any appetite--at least, not for long.

It was the modern abandonment of this kind of cultural substantiveness, this pattern of lifetime reading that provoked G.K. Chesterton to remark, "The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking."

Happily, Ben House has, in his new book as in his whole life, undertaken the costly, difficult, and arduous process of reconnecting that long, thin, delicate thread for all of us. He has begun reconnecting it by preserving the practical lessons and profound legacies of Christendom without the petty prejudice of humanistic fashions or the parsimonious preference of Enlightenment innovations. He has begun reconnecting it, all the while avoiding the trap of noticing everything that went unnoticed in the past while failing to notice all that the past deemed notable.

Reading the chapters of Punic Wars and Culture Wars, it is evident that Ben understands that the best sort of history is always a series of lively adventure stories—and thus should be told without the cumbersome intrusion of arcane academic rhetoric or truck-loads of extraneous footnotes. History from that perspective is a romantic moral drama in a world gone impersonally scientific—and thus should be told with a measure of passion, unction, and verve. In Ben’s hands, history, books about history, and books about books about history come to life. Thus, these “irrelevant things,” as he has dubbed them in his introduction, actually prove to be among the most relevant of all things.

But, to have undertaken such a work as this, it is readily evident that Ben has had to work hard. By dint of great intellectual ardor, he has disciplined himself to think, concentrate, make connections, and draw conclusions—affording him a richness of insight that otherwise would not have been possible.

Ben ably demonstrates the fact that a healthy appreciation for the gritty work of history not only enables us to recall many of the famous lives, deaths, movements, triumphs, disasters, opportunities, and controversies, but it provides us with tantalizing details of some of the most important lessons and profoundest inspirations that the long legacy of human civilization has to offer us as well. In other words, Ben has undertaken the practice of that old discipline of moral philosophy—and he has done so without apology.

Henry Cabot Lodge once asserted, “Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shoveling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.” This is precisely the kind of work that Ben House has undertaken here. Lots and lots of shoveling. Together with the great historians of the Christian tradition, he has snapped the spell of smothering modernity with a sane backward glance at the worldview that gave flower to the remarkable liberty, justice, and hope enjoyed by the lands of the West.

There are only a certain few books that actually have the power to ruin a reader. All too uncommon is the volume that can actually reshape your way of thinking, seeing, and living. Ben talks about a few of those rarities within the pages of this book (just out from Covenant Media Foundation). What he fails to tell us is that this book, his book, must necessarily take its place among them. So work through it—knowing that it very well may in fact, ruin you.

On the Nightstand

Demythologizing Columbus

1. Several sources make much out of the “fact” that Columbus “captured” more than 500 Native Americans on his second voyage to bring back to Isabella and Ferdinand. The problem with this much-repeated “fact” is that the second voyage included only 17 ships, each carrying less than 100 men. The crew numbered 1,200 alone—so, there was hardly room for another 50 souls, much less 500. Do the math. To be sure some Tainos Islanders were brought aboard ship and taken back to Castile and Aragon, but not as slaves. Rather, they were brought back more as exotic, foreign emissaries and representatives--the objects of both curiosity and evangelism.

2. It is often mentioned that Columbus brought his “captives” back from the second voyage in 1494 to be sold in the slave markets of Seville. The problem is that those markets did not open or receive royal sanction until 1508. Columbus died in 1506.

3. On the third voyage, his close friend and personal secretary, the young Bartolomé de las Casas, began reworking the transcripts of Columbus’ logs—which is the sole source of virtually all of the Admiral’s writings. Years later, de las Casas would become the fiercest critic of the emerging imperialistic slave trade amongst the Castilian and Aragonese conquistadors. Interestingly, in his scathing and encyclopedic books exposing the horrors of chattel slavery, he never once criticized Columbus—or even implicated him to any degree. To de las Casas, Columbus always remained a Christian hero--flawed, like any other sinner, but a hero nonetheless.

When Panic Strikes

"Leaving the game plan is a sign of panic, and panic is not in our game plan." --Chuck Noll, Former Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach and Four-Time Super Bowl Champion