Carl Wells Books

We’ve heard it all before, of course. “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, of course, one bite at a time. While this is so obvious as to scarcely seem worth talking about, I think we can forget how practical such advice is. We become daunted by some potential big task ahead of us. So we work very diligently for a few days, then we break down and desert the job entirely. Or we never even start. Clean the garage? The mess is so horrible! Why pretend we can do it? It’s easier to leave the chaos untouched.

Every year I have to trim the bush on the east side of my house. It is a big job, and I sort of dread it. This year I ate the elephant one bite at a time. I trimmed the bush a few minutes (two to five?) every morning after my running/walking, for about two to two and a half weeks. This did not tire me out either physically or psychologically. It encouraged me to see progress being made. The last day I had to get the ladder out to reach the higher branches and had to put in a full half hour, but with the finish line in sight this was not difficult to do. Call me a lazy bum for not doing the job in a few hours two weeks ago. Maybe. But on the other hand I really did get the bush trimmed, it looks fine, and I feel good about the accomplishment.

Lots of big jobs can get done if we accomplish them in small increments. How many times have you read the Bible? I suspect many Christians have read the Bible not even one time. That would be true of most non-Christians as well. But, even if you plan to be an enemy of God and of Christianity, wouldn’t it be a good idea to read the Bible enough to see what all the fuss is about? However, the Bible is a daunting book, long and not easy to read. It’s “easier” to not read it at all. But if you eat the elephant one bite at a time, the Bible can be read in a relatively brief period of time. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. If you read just one chapter a day, it would take you 1,189 days. That’s 3.257 years. That’s a pretty long time, but by reading only one chapter in a day the difficulty of the task was eliminated. And while 3.3 years (rounding) is a pretty long time, that pace, slow as it seems, would permit you to read the Bible ten times in 33 years. One of the great weaknesses of our current brand of Christianity is that our Bible knowledge is very low. Reading the Bible several or many times helps us form a deeper understanding of the character of God. Even reading just one chapter a day would permit us to gain a deeper knowledge of the Bible if we read enough years. Moreover, by reading one chapter a day, eventually you might be able to develop the discipline to read two chapters a day without straining too hard–which works out to ten readings of the Bible in 16.5 years.

The advantages of gradualism apply to many, if not all, big jobs. The garage, mentioned above? If it takes us a full year, at least it is clean at last–which it won’t be if we never start.

Do you have a book inside you? I think many people do. But writing a book is a big and daunting task. Most people have very busy lives. How do you find time to write a book!? By eating the elephant one bite at a time. Set aside two hours a week. Write your rough draft, two hours a week, for a year. Or maybe it will take two years. Another year to do the revision. Still another year figuring out how to self-publish. Four years is a long time, but in a lifetime of 70 or 80 years, really only a blink of time. If you never started, however, the book is still inside you, instead of on paper and published.

The Christian group emptytomb (unfortunately they were hiding behind the door when capital letters were passed out) tells us that Christians give the church 2.5% of their increase–which is exactly one quarter of the amount that God seems to require in the Bible. The Bible seems to me to teach that we need to be tithing. But, figure it out for yourself by your own reading of the Bible. Assume the tithe is required, or at worst is a good and sensible thing which will allow the church to advance in usefulness, and measure 2.5% against 10%, and we Christians don’t seem to be doing very well. We really don’t trust God. Most people would be appalled at the notion that they should tithe. However, my experience is that God understands our weakness, and is gentle with us. He rewards even our faint stirrings toward obedience. Say, for example, that you are earning $400.00 a week, and you put a ten dollar bill in the collection plate every Sunday. You are right at the national average for Christians giving to the church. You would like to do better, but you really don’t have the faith to tithe. So, eat the elephant one bite at a time. Resolve to give $15.00 a week for the coming year. That is 3.75%, still well short of a tithe. My guess is that God will bless you in that year, and you won’t feel impoverished by your additional giving. Then, if you feel as if it seems that God has your back, resolve to give $20.00 a week in the next year. Your giving would be at 5%–still not a tithe, but you are moving in the right direction. My guess is that most Christians would, within five years of beginning to eat the elephant one bite at a time, be giving a tithe of their increase to the church–and probably finding ways to be further generous with their money.

How many tasks could be accomplished if we ate the elephant one bite at a time? I think the answer is, countless. Think for example of your neighborhood. Is there a lot of trash scattered on the streets? What if you picked up a little bit of trash every time you took your leisurely once-a-week walk? You, all by yourself, would have the entire neighborhood spotless within a few weeks or months. If you live in a town small enough, one church all by itself could keep the entire town almost spotless, with a little bit of persistent picking up of trash. This would be a gracious gift to the entire town. We are recipients of grace, so we should be willing to extend grace to others.

Gradualism works. Persistence is required, of course. Call persistence perseverance, and clearly it is a biblical principle. Perseverance comes in the middle of a list of virtues which seem to lead one to another. “Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love.” (2 Peter 1:5-7)

Eating one bite of the elephant works, but only if we persevere in eating. One bite won’t do it. We need to eat that second bite the next day. And the day after that. And then, it almost seems, pretty soon we have arrived at God’s kingdom of godliness, kindness, and love! That may sound ridiculous, but how would we feel if, after a few months or a year, the entire United States were litter free, because American Christians as a whole did a little bit of picking up of trash, once a week for as many months as it took? We would feel surprised, but very pleased, with a great sense of accomplishment. God told us to cultivate and keep the garden (Genesis 2:15). Maybe we really could do that, if we persevered in moving toward that goal one day at a time.

Pick out your elephant–make it as small an elephant as you want–eat a bite a day, and see what happens.

My most recent post featured The Big Short, book and movie. The book, by the gifted Michael Lewis, was a best seller six or seven years ago–and deservedly so. The 2015 movie followed the book in spirit, and was also fascinating. Both showed how corrupt Wall Street was and is–and how our national government partakes of that corruption. (Did you ever wonder why Hillary Clinton receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for her speeches to Wall Street people? Let’s just say it is not for the originality and excellence of her ideas, or for her deep love of the free market.)

Today I will give you mostly quotes from The Big Short, the book. I will add a few comments of my own, in brackets. Some words have been edited by me, to fit what is intended as no worse than a PG-13 rated blog. The ellipsis is Mr. Lewis’ rather than mine. The page numbers are from the Norton paperback edition.

‘”It took me a while to figure out that all of this stuff inside the bonds was pretty much exactly the same thing,” said Charlie. “The Wall Street firms just got the ratings agencies to accept different names for it so they could make it seem like a diversified pool of assets.”‘ (p. 128)

“The meaningless flow of words might have left the audience with the sense that it was incapable of parsing the deep complexity of Morgan Stanley’s bond trading business. What the words actually revealed was that the CEO himself didn’t really understand the situation.” (p. 218)

“It’s too much to expect the people who run big Wall Street firms to speak plain English, since so much of their livelihood depends on people believing that what they do cannot be translated into plain English.” (p. 218)

‘Most of 2006 and early 2007 Dr. Michael Burry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an email he wrote, “The partners closest to me tend to ultimately hate me. . . . This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven’t identified what it kills. But it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.” (pp. 224-225) [This was from a man who was ultimately proved very right about the fraudulence of the bond market, and made huge profits for his investors as well as for himself.]

‘”What–the entire American population woke up one morning and said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to lie on my loan application’? Yeah, people lied. They lied because they were told to lie.” The outrage that fueled his gamble was aimed not at the entire financial system but at the people at the top of it, who knew better, or should have: the people inside the big Wall Street firms.’ (p. 228)

‘Eisman obviously thought it insane that anyone would sink huge sums of money into any Wall Street firm. Greenspan he viewed as almost beneath his contempt, which was saying something. “I think Alan Greenspan will go down as the worst chairman of the Federal Reserve in history,” he’d say, when given the slightest chance.’ (p. 229) [Granted, but Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen have been competitively wretched.]

‘”The upper classes of this country raped this country. You f—– people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all those years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’ And no one ever gave a s— about what I had to say.”
Actually, Eisman didn’t speak those final sentences that morning; he merely thought them.’ (pp. 232-233)

“Before, they [two young men who identified the fraudulence of the bond market and made huge profits as a result] had no money. Now, they were rich; but they feared they had no ability to preserve their wealth. By nature a bit tortured, they were now, by nurture, even more so. They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right.” (p. 242)

‘”I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy,” said Charlie. “Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t.” He and Jamie spent a surprising amount of their time and energy thinking up ways to attack what they viewed as a deeply corrupt financial system.’ (pp. 242-243)

“The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less. Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.” (p. 244) [This insight spills over into our evaluation of our political system. We all grew up thinking that grown-ups were in charge. But, after numerous disastrous foreign interventions, after our torturing, after our murder of babies, after the destruction of the dollar, after the wretched welfare state has destroyed millions of lives, we need finally to wake up to the fact that grown-ups are not in charge. Despicable, thoughtless, evil people are in charge–and we let them stay in charge. We are going to have to become the grown-ups–or leave the filthy in control.]

“What had happened was that he had been right, the world had been wrong, and the world hated him for it. And so Michael Burry ended where he began–alone, and comforted by his solitude. He remained inside his office in Cupertino, California, big enough for a staff of twenty-five people, but the fund was shuttered and the office was empty.” (pp. 247-248)

“The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on.” (p. 260)

“By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars’ worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer.” (p. 261)

Read the book and tell me if you think it is as helpful as I think it is. The movie is excellent too, but remember that it is R rated for “pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity,” so you may want to give it a miss. Or you can shut your eyes for a few seconds. You won’t be able to shut your ears, of course. Use your own judgment.

Those of us who love the free market–sign me up!–have a lot to learn about the difference between free market capitalism and crony capitalism. If we think Wall Street is on the side of free market capitalism, maybe we have another think coming.

One book which helps us begin to sort out what is really going on in the big Wall Street firms, and in our national government, is The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. This was a #1 bestseller in about 2010 or 2011. The author is the gifted Michael Lewis. He takes a topic which is extremely difficult to understand, and teaches us enough so that we get the gist of what is going on, even if we don’t come close to a deep knowledge. If we get only the gist, I don’t think we need to feel too bad. Wall Street itself, with all its very intelligent people, didn’t understand what it was doing.

Selling “short” is paying money out to bet that the market will go down. If the market goes down, one wins one’s bet. If, however, the market goes higher, one loses one’s investment. What happened was that in the early 2000s, many companies were selling home mortgages to people who really did not have good credit or even good jobs. The people were often signed up with “teaser” loans–a low interest rate for two years, after which the interest went dramatically higher. This was certain or almost certain to lead to default in a high percentage of cases.

Many mortgage loans were bundled together in bonds. The bonds were then sold as very low risk financial entities. They might be less than prime mortgages–hence the name subprime–but strength in numbers indicated that they were still very low risk. But they weren’t low risk at all. They were high risk. The big name ratings agencies (Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s) were asleep at the switch–or worse. So people and institutions were buying bonds they thought were solid investments, when they were the exact opposite.

The Big Short tells the story of several people who, independent of one another, figured out that the bonds were rotten investments, and were likely to go to zero in value within a couple years. They were all shocked by what they were finding out. They doubted their own senses. Surely they were missing something? The more research they did, however, the more it seemed that their instinct was correct–these bonds were toxic.

All of these people, again independent of one another, found a way to short the bond market. In some cases a new type of financial instrument had to be created. They placed their bets. If they were wrong, they would lose a lot. But if they were right, they would make millions. There was no guarantee they were right. Time would tell.

We know what happened. They were right. The bonds went to zero. The short bet paid off millions to the people who had discovered the idiocy of the bonds and had backed their hunch with serious money. This could have meant the end of many Wall Street firms. But our essentially fascist national government stepped in to rescue the Wall Street firms with taxpayer money. We, the rubes, were fleeced again.

Reading about all this is fascinating. At times it can make your blood boil at the evil involved, by both the Wall Street people and by our national government. But we need to know. We need to stop being rubes. Facing reality about our rubishness (to coin a word), would be a good start.

A brilliant movie entitled “The Big Short” was made in 2015. Warning: it is R rated for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity, so it is not for everyone. The book does not give us sexuality/nudity, but it also gives us vulgar language. Read and/or watch at your own discretion. The movie follows the book in spirit if not in complete detail. It is brilliantly paced, acted, and directed. The movie also does a superb job of exposing the evil at the core of our system. Both are warnings to us rubes: wake up or keep on being fleeced. The choice is ours.

Here are a few quotes from the book.

“Howie Hubler lost more money than any single trader in the history of Wall Street–and yet he was permitted to keep the tens of millions of dollars he had made. The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions–if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.” (pp. 256-257)

“Thus was born TARP, which stood for Troubled Asset Relief Program. Once handed the money, [U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival. For instance, the $13 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs, as a result of its bet on subprime mortgage loans, was paid off in full by the U.S. government: 100 cents on the dollar. These fantastic handouts–plus the implicit government guarantee that came with them–not only prevented Wall Street firms from failing but spared them from recognizing the losses in their subprime mortgage portfolios.” (pp. 260-261)

“The world’s most powerful and most highly paid financiers had been entirely discredited; without government intervention every single one of them would have lost his job; and yet those same financiers were using the government to enrich themselves.” (p. 262)

One topic touched on briefly is how the move from privately held partnerships to public corporations was a factor in the irresponsible behavior of Wall Street firms. Whether corporations are biblical, or an escape from personal responsibility, is a subject for another day. The following quote includes one censored word; this is a family blog.

‘The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong it’s their problem,” he [John Gutfreund, former leader at Salomon Brothers] said–and obviously not theirs alone. When the Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the United States government. “It’s laissez-faire until you get in deep s***,” he said, with a half chuckle.’ (pp. 263-264)

The solution to our financial and political problems are not to pass seventy or seven hundred laws which supposedly are going to make cheating impossible. The solution is I think twofold. 1/We really do need to face the fact that we are rubes, and that we can and should stop being rubes. The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, makes an admirable contribution in teaching us that we are rubes but that we don’t need to be. 2/More fundamentally, as individuals we need to develop a profound personal integrity, an integrity which wants not only not to cheat anyone, but also to protect the property of others–on sort of a cosmic scale. If we do that, the scumbags on Wall Street, and the scumbags running our government, will eventually be replaced by honorable people. It may take a long time, but if we never start, it will never take place at all.

I am short Wall Street, and short the U.S. government. I think my bet will pay off eventually. I will probably be long dead, but that’s fine. Lots of generations of people are coming after me.

Minimum wage laws are seen as a way to help poor people have a better life. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour? Fine, we’ll raise that to $15.00 an hour, at least in certain progressive cities, and allow people working in fast food joints to earn a decent wage instead of the peanuts they are receiving now.

The problem is that minimum wage laws hurt the very people they theoretically want to help–people with a weak educational background, young people just trying to enter the work force, people of color, people who really want to work but have very minimal skills.

We all want other people to flourish, right? So pass a law that everyone has to be paid at least $15.00 an hour, and other people will flourish just like that. What could possibly go wrong?

But the person running the business has to make a profit off the labor of person he hires, or he can’t stay in business. So he has to sell his burgers for a lot more. Or he has to replace his now-expensive help with increased automation. Or both. He hires a lot few workers. Marginal workers who were useful at $7.25 an hour, are a luxury the employer cannot afford at $15.00 an hour. Many workers will be out of a job.

While we may want other people to flourish, the fact is that we cannot help other people to flourish by pointing a gun at employers and saying, “Pay your workers what we insist you pay them!”

Do we REALLY want other people to flourish? I’m not so sure that we do. Liberals, for example, are the people who push minimum wage laws most dramatically. Do they want to help people? What they want is to feel good about themselves, to feel that they are more generous than other people. “See, here I am insisting that Joe Schmoe earns $15.00 an hour flipping burgers, while you selfish defenders of the free market don’t care a hoot about Joe.” But then if Joe loses his job entirely because he is not worth $15.00 an hour, that’s just too bad. It’s certainly not the liberals’ fault. “Hey, no one should have to work for such small wages! We’ll create a government program which trains Joe to learn a new skill, so he can earn $20.00, $30.00, $40.00 an hour. Who could possibly have guessed that raising the minimum wage would cost Joe to lose his job? Meanwhile, Joe is receiving excellent unemployment compensation payments, until he has his wonderful new job after he goes through the training we will generously provide.”

But I wonder how many of the rest of us, Christians and conservatives, REALLY want other people to flourish? Because if we did, wouldn’t there be a whole lot more push-back against the insistence upon minimum wage laws? Minimum wage laws discourage the employment of people of low skills–the people who really need help!–and we don’t particularly give a rat’s patoot. “I’ve got mine, Jack.” Oh, a handful of Christians and conservatives have done a wonderful job of pointing out the harm that minimum wage laws do to ordinary people including people of minimal skills, but their numbers are minute compared to the legions of us who shrug and go with the flow. If it were not so, minimum wage laws would face enormous, principled, and loud opposition. Instead there is mostly . . . crickets.

If we want to help poor people of minimal skills, young people, black and brown people, people who want to work, ordinary people of every sort, the best thing we could do for them is to end minimum wage laws entirely. (Ending unemployment compensation and other forms of welfare would be helpful too, but let’s limit this fantasy wishing to one topic for the day.) Then anyone could get a job. He might not be earning $15.00 an hour, or even $7.25 an hour, or even $5.00 an hour, but he would be working.

Man is created in the image of God. We were made to work. Even before the fall, we had work to do. (Genesis 1:26-30) Every one of us needs to feel that we are being productive, that we are not simply cumbering the earth with our presence. Oh, of course our bent toward sin makes us willing and often even eager to live on the production of others, but we pay a horrible price psychologically when we do not work and support ourselves. We may not consciously realize that we are paying a price, but we pay it. Our self-respect is tied up with our willingness to work.

Christians and conservatives are capable of understanding these simple truths. But by and large we do not understand them. Why? I suspect that this is a covenantal judgment on us. We ourselves are breaking the Eighth Commandment that we not steal. (Exodus 20:15) We won’t tithe. We insist upon receiving Social Security, Medicare, and free public education. Therefore we can’t and don’t think clearly about all kinds of economic issues, including minimum wage laws. We are more like the liberals than we like to imagine–more concerned with having a high opinion of ourselves than with protecting ordinary people.

Henry Hazlitt wrote a wonderful book entitled Economics in One Lesson, first published in 1946. If you care about protecting and helping ordinary people, here is a superb place to learn some economics. He devoted Chapter XIX to minimum wage laws. Read him for yourself, if you feel so led, but here are a few quotes.

“You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.”

“A nice problem, moreover, will be raised by the relief program designed to take care of the unemployment caused by the minimum wage law. By a minimum wage of, say, $1.15 an hour, we have forbidden anyone to work forty hours a week for less than $46. Suppose, now, we offer only $30 a week on relief. This means that we have forbidden a man to be usefully employed at, say $40 a week, in order that we may support him at $30 a week in idleness. We have deprived society of the value of his services. We have deprived the man of the independence and self-respect that come from self-support, even at a low level, and from performing wanted work, at the same time as we have lowered what the man could have received by his own efforts.”

“The more the individual worker produces, the more he increases the wealth of the whole community. The more he produces, the more his services are worth to consumers, and hence to employers. And the more he is worth to employers, the more he will be paid. Real wages come out of production, not out of government decrees.”

The minimum wage laws are one of the many, constant, and growing attacks on Christian civilization. The attack of $7.25 an hour is bad enough. $10.00 an hour will be worse. $15.00 is worse still. That liberals are attacking civilization is no surprise. Their goal is to kill God and to boss us all around, and to feel incredibly righteous as they do so.

What is our goal?

The current U.S. debt is approximately $19,928,000,000,000.00 (19.928 trillion dollars). That amounts to about $61,000.00 debt per citizen. Counting taxpayers only, the debt is $165,000.00 for each one. You will be “shocked–shocked” to learn that the debt continues to go higher every day. Go to the U.S. debt clock on the Internet for detailed information. (Be sure to fortify yourself with a stiff drink before you do so.)

But does the debt matter? I remember a few years ago when there was discussion over whether the debt ceiling limit should be raised, as it always is raised. Apparently a few in Congress wanted to not raise the limit, the idea being that as long as we keep raising the limit, we are going to keep borrowing and thus getting ourselves in deeper financial difficulties. I was listening to the radio, and one of the parasites at National Public Radio, her voice dripping condescension, told us how irresponsible the deficit scolds were. It simply didn’t even occur as a faint possibility to this intelligent, articulate, highly educated, highly paid member of the elite running this country, that there was the tiniest, tiniest chance that continuing to go horrifically in debt might have terrible consequences for the country in the long or the short run.

But maybe the parasite was right! Maybe deficits don’t matter. Just keep going deeper in debt, and it won’t matter. “We only owe it to ourselves,” as we often hear. Are we good for the debt? If you loan an honorable person $10,000.00, and he needs to borrow an additional $5,000.00, you may well loan him the additional $5,000.00, as long as you are confident that he really will begin to pay you back soon. But if you loan a dishonorable person $10,000.00, and he wants to borrow an additional $5,000.00, you may instead decide that you made a mistake in loaning him the original $10,000.00, and that it is time to say “No more.” Better to lose $10,000.00 than $15,000.00.

The U.S. is not honorable. We will not pay the money back. We are not good for the 19.928 trillion in dollar bills. It was foolish to run up the debt, and bad consequences will come eventually. Default? Hyperinflation? Collapse of the dollar? Riots in the street? Starvation? A disunion of the country, as we split into smaller units? (That last one would be a good consequence, however, not a bad one–but even that might well include many bad things happening.)

Reasonable estimates indicate that the federal debt will increase by about a trillion dollars a year in the near future. And that is under the current president who is considered a conservative and a selfish grinch by the left-wing media. It doesn’t matter which party holds power as president or as Congress. We are just going to keep on spending.

What are the chances that we can stop adding to the debt? The chances are zero.

We don’t really believe that the debt matters. We will go on until reality steps in and says you have to stop. Most people, whether of the elite or of the ordinary people, are just like the NPR parasite mentioned above. “We can keep on doing this. The consequences won’t be bad.”

We all like to spend. Especially we like to spend other people’s money.

And we don’t mind spending a lot of taxpayer money for things that should cost almost nothing. Two examples.

1/The Department of Education has about 4,400 employees and spends a yearly budget of $68,000,000,000.00. That is about $15,454,545.00 per employee. Are the American people getting their money’s worth out of this expenditure? Can our children read, add, subtract, divide, and multiply? Are they safe in school? Are they learning to think?

The state of Indiana is spending about $9,566.00 per student for its public education. (That is money BEYOND that spent by the Department of Education.) Do you think we are getting our money’s worth? If you were a parent and you wanted to teach your child to read, add, subtract, divide, and multiply, do you think you could get that job done with a budget of $9,566.00 per child? Could you do that at home in a few hours a day, with no travel expenses, no enormous buildings, maybe for a few hundred dollars a year to pay for educational materials? I think you could–especially if you really cared about wanting your child to learn. It’s your kid. If you don’t care, who will?

2/The Department of Energy has about 93,094 employees, with an annual budget of about $27,900,000,000.00. That’s about $300,000.00 per employee. To do what? If I want to buy gasoline, I can drive to the service station and buy gasoline. The free market provides what I need at competitive prices. The $27,900,000,000.00 the taxpayers pony up for the Department of Education is a dead loss. Moreover, the 93,094 employees could be working at real jobs where they produce something we all want. Instead, they are parasites, producing only misery for the rest of us.

We all want free stuff. We want Social Security, we want Medicare, we want our children educated at public expense. So who is going to tell the federal government, “Stop spending money you don’t have!”? Who? The church? Where members give one-quarter of the tithe God requires? Nonsense. The church is where the problem started.

Who will step forward and say we have to live within our means?

Nobody. Financial reform will not come from any of us.

The only thing which will teach us is reality. If reality gives us a two by four up the side of the head, we might begin to wonder if maybe enormous debt was not such a wonderful idea after all. But only reality will get our attention. We will only change if and when we absolutely have to do so.

Maybe the NPR parasite had it right. Just keep going into debt, and all will be well. I don’t think so, though. I think reality is organized a different way. Enormous debt is dangerous for individuals and families, and it is dangerous for governments and nations. Such is my theory.

Is there any realistic hope that the problem with debt can be fixed prior to some potentially dangerous default? Well, maybe not a “realistic” hope, but there might be hope of a sort. Our nation’s financial problem started with the irresponsibility of the church. If the church suddenly were to move gradually but steadily toward responsibility, so might the nation. God deals with us covenantally, but also mercifully. Educate your children at your own expense. Pay your bills promptly. Tithe to a Bible-believing church. Vote to protect your neighbor’s money rather than to steal it and redistribute it.

Even if these small personal reforms have no large effect on the nation as a whole, they are good things to do and are pleasing to God. That is far more important, for us as individuals made in the image of God, than whether or not a bankrupt, thieving, murdering empire can be reformed.