Anonymous - Longing Logos

May 7, 2020May 8, 2020

Jesus’s Power Is the Antidote

Many of us might feel understandably powerless right now, as we face numerous hardships. A dangerous pandemic is costing hundreds of thousands of lives. At present, there have been at least 240,000 deaths from it worldwide. Our democracy is slipping away. The person who has taken over the White House is evil, greedy, corrupt and traitorous, as are his cronies, who have taken over our government.

Many institutions, such as the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, among numerous others, have become corrupt in whole or in part due to the present administration. (See the latest development in Barr’s corrupt Justice Department.)

The economy is being destroyed, as Cohen and Hsu (2020) report, “more than 33 million people have joined the unemployment rolls in seven weeks…. [E]conomists expect the monthly jobs report on Friday to put the April unemployment rate at 15 percent or higher — a Depression-era level.”

Our planet is also being destroyed by greed and consumerism. Global climate imbalances are yielding strange results, such as plagues of locusts, murder hornets, and a polar vortex is forecast to hit the Northeast in the next couple days while the West is set to experience record heat.

White “vigilante justice” seems to go unchecked while black men are being subjected to modern-day lynching. More generally, the lives of black and brown people are being valued less than others. They are being treated as second-class citizens and have to operate under a different set of standards than other Americans.

Our social fabric is being eroded in other ways, as people have abandoned religious institutions, many of which have forsaken the path of Jesus and instead of worshiping God have been worshiping worldly things. Their hypocrisy and the general misguided nature of secularism has driven people into the arms of other false gods, such as paganism, scientism, or cult-like leaders, such as Richard Dawkins.

Younger people, in particular, are frustrated, as the changes they want are frequently thwarted often by older people, the people who should care about them, or the political or economic establishment, the institutions that should care about them. These are dark times for the nation and for the world, and it can all feel so hopeless.

Jesus’s Divine Power

However, for Christians and for the world, there is one great hope, one eternal light to which we can fix our fortunes and our spirits – Jesus Christ. Mathis (2020) writes, “In the final tally, Jesus stands alone. No other human has left such a deep and enduring impression on the world, and he did so in only three years of active public life.” This is an indisputable truth. No other person has had anywhere near the impact that Jesus has had.

Where did Jesus’s power come from? As Christians, we would answer from God, as he is one with the Father. For non-Christians, the broad details of Jesus’s life are the following. He was a poor Jew from Galilee, who was born in Bethlehem. He had a mere 12 Apostles. He had no social media platform, with no hoard of followers. He wrote nothing, not a single word. He had no degrees or certifications. He had no worldly titles, wealth, power or prestige (aside from being of the line of David). Jesus spoke words, and he performed miracles. He was crucified, and he rose from the dead.

Those who believe him to be a mere mortal might ask: how could his one life have transformed the world more than any other, and what insight might that provide regarding our current challenges?

Man’s False Power

The reality is that those with power now, like the Caesars of their day, will be largely forgotten or will become a cautionary tale for others aspiring to be like them and for those who are inclined to be seduced by them. None of us can predict the future, but one thing is certain: no human present or future will compare at all with the power Jesus has now and will continue to have.

Some Christians are handwringing about the state of the faith, its trajectory, particularly in the West, and the rise of secularism. They have little faith and need to have more of it in God’s plan. They need to trust him more. They need to focus on glorifying God and not themselves. They need to stop compromising their morality and Christianity for political expediency or a false sense of power. Real power rests in Jesus, in God, and we only have access to real power when we rest in him.

The Benefits of Jesus’s Power

The benefits of Jesus’s power as it resides in us is peace and hope. In our darkest hours, we can turn to him, to our Lord and our God, and know that we are loved. If we entrust in him our lives, his power becomes our power. One might ask: how does this translate in practical ways in the real world?

A feeling of peace and hope helps one continue to fight another day. One needs to keep the faith and fight the good fight until the end. God gives us that resilience. Our faith in Jesus is our strength, and as Christians, we should never forget that. We should also share his power manifested in us with others during our shared trials and tribulations. With this, we will be and will do what we are called to do – be the salt and light of the world.

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:13-16). Amen.

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020

On Defining Oneself by the Negative

A person in a negative is hard to see. Similarly, a person defined in the negative is hard to understand. To be simply and honestly Christian is to define oneself in a straight-forward and positive way: we are Christ-followers. Define who you are by defining what you are for. Are you for Jesus? If you say “yes,” then he has to be at the center of everything in your life. By everything, I mean everything.

Not in the Negative – Christian in the Positive

In this essay, Mattson (2020) highlights what we should all know and be clear about as Christians. He writes, “One of the hallmarks of following Christ is emulating his life. And this is what Christianity essentially is: Jesus. Christianity isn’t a political ideology, or a sovereign nation, or a set of laws legislating values or enforcing a society’s preferred brand of morality. Christianity is centered upon Christ.”

Instead of a positive self-definition, many Christians have fallen into this trap of negative self-definition, often leaving Christ behind as they refer to the world in which they are too much involved. Some are opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. Some are opposed to immigrants and non-whites. Some are opposed to, more generally, “liberal culture.” The list is long, tedious, and unhelpful.

Jesus denounced immorality and hypocrisy, but he was not defined by his opposition to these things or to the Jewish religious establishment and its corruption. Instead, what defined him was what he advocated, what he taught, what he asked of us, what he said and did. This is what we follow and try to emulate.

If you are about children and families, as most people are, by the way, then actually support families. Help poor families raise their children out of poverty. If you are about a certain cultural position, say traditional marriage, then support that cause. Broken black families, in particular, could benefit from real support from Christians, meaning financial, psychological and spiritual support.

Instead of chastising others who do not fit your worldview – help those that do. If you are opposed to immigrants and non-whites, you really need to revisit Jesus’s teachings because there is no support in them for those positions. If you are opposed to “liberal culture” or “conservative culture,” how do you define those cultures? This one exercise in definition might not be as straight-forward as you might expect.

The Negative Is More Dangerous for Non-Christians

For non-Christians, the negative trap is even more dangerous. There is no one example to which they can set their compass, no star of Bethlehem, as Christians have in Jesus. They are stranded on a vast ocean, water everywhere yet not a drop to drink. What good is water if one cannot drink it, if it cannot sustain life? We have the water of life. We just have to have faith in the Word, and it will flow.

Non-Christians have to not just define themselves in the positive, as we do, but first, they have to determine what the positive actually is. What does the positive look like? Some atheists say that they do not like organized religion because it makes people into robots. Having a clear and positive self-definition as Christ-followers have in Jesus is not turning someone into an automaton. Instead, it is similar to the difference between a photo and its negative.

We are made in God’s image, and we have a clear image of God as man – an image in the positive. As any good Christian knows, emulating Jesus is hard. We will fail and fail again. We ask our God and each other for forgiveness. In this process, we become more aware of our own particular weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which we also take to the Lord in prayer to help us overcome them. There is nothing robotic in this lifelong spiritual journey. It is as individual as the prints on our hands and feet, as we are.

What is robotic, however, is looking to a stronger central government for direction on personal conduct, which really needs to be developed the hard way, that is character formation through individual introspection and reformation, and in the aggregate, a cultural unity that is as thin as the government’s decrees.

This is where Europe went astray. Its people, tired of the religious wars and their religious institutional failures, effectively abdicated morality to the government. However, governments are ill-suited for a task so complex and profound and are also even more prone to corruption than the church is while lacking a stable corrective mechanism as the church has. As argued here, Jesus Christ’s teachings are indelible and immutable; a nation’s laws are not. Once a bad leader rises to power, the country’s laws can be changed, and the leader can be hard to overthrow.

It is tempting but unproductive to define oneself by everything one is against, that is in the negative. Define what you are for, and then do the hard work of committing to those things and fighting for them. Put your time, talent and treasure into those efforts. This applies to Christians and non-Christians alike. The difference is that, for Christians, we have a clear picture – in the positive – of what that should look like.

May 1, 2020May 2, 2020

The Dangers of Blind Ideological Adherence

The dangers of blind ideological adherence apply equally to all. They are not limited to a certain political party or economic school of thought. When one objectively analyzes the present state of affairs of the real economy, the federal government’s and the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) actions have been an unequivocal failure.

It is both obvious and correct to say that the economy is not the stock market, and the stock market is not the economy. It is also correct to observe that there has been a clear divergence in the performance of the stock market and the real economy, with the stock market far outperforming the real economy. This divergence goes well beyond the ongoing dysfunctions in financial markets. It is also a grossly immoral outcome for the American people who, by and large, live and operate in the real economy.

Therefore, it would be incorrect to conclude that the Fed, whose dual mandate is price stability and full employment, i.e. to make sure that the real economy is performing well, is meeting its mandate because the stock market is performing well. I think this is elementary logic.

Objective Premises, Ideological Conclusion

Krugman, however, arrives at just this erroneous conclusion given the same premises. To quote Krugman (2020) in his last opinion piece in the NYTimes, as of the present, “G.D.P. report for the first quarter. An economy contracting at an annual rate of almost 5 percent would have been considered very bad in normal times, but this report only captured the first few drops of a torrential downpour. More timely data show an economy falling off a cliff. The Congressional Budget Office is projecting an unemployment rate of 16 percent later this year, and that may well be an underestimate.” Thus, we are both of the mind that the present economy is terrible.

Now, Krugman’s description of the stock market, again in his own words, “Yet stock prices, which fell in the first few weeks of the Covid-19 crisis, have made up much of those losses. They’re currently more or less back to where they were last fall, when all the talk was about how well the economy was doing.”

Now, here is Krugman’s assessment of the Fed’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, and by extension and implication, his assessment of its response to the present crisis, “Now, one question you might ask is why, if economic weakness is if anything good for stocks, the market briefly plunged earlier this year. The answer is that for a few weeks in March the world teetered on the edge of a 2008-type financial crisis, which caused investors to flee everything with the slightest hint of risk.”

Krugman continues, “That crisis was, however, averted thanks to extremely aggressive actions by the Fed, which stepped in to buy an unprecedented volume and range of assets. Without those actions, we would be facing an even bigger economic catastrophe.”

Explanation of the Ideological Argument

Let us consider the argument Krugman provides. The first main point is that the Fed responded to both crises by lowering interest rates, which is the standard monetary policy response to an economic downturn no matter how it is triggered, and lower interest rates hurt bond markets and help stock markets since market participants have to put their money somewhere.

Thus, the stock market is being helped by the Fed as a “side-effect” of its efforts to help the broader economy. (A debate worth having is how the Fed can gain better traction on credit availability and terms and do so without relying so heavily on financial markets for their transmission.)

Krugman’s second main point, although not as explicitly articulated, is that the Fed, acting as the lender of last resort, should have and has done everything it can, a “whatever-it-takes” approach, to mitigate the economic damage. This is the same ideological view that ended up prevailing in the last crisis (see this previous post), and by his assessment, this approach was a wild success.

Then again, maybe not, since Krugman also states the following, “While employment eventually recovered from the Great Recession, that recovery was achieved only thanks to historically low interest rates. The need for low rates was an indication of underlying economic weakness: businesses seemed reluctant to invest despite high profits, often preferring to buy back their own stock. But low rates were good for stock prices.”

The intellectual incoherence is symptomatic of an intellectual disease that afflicts many of all ideological persuasions. It is an obstinate adherence to a set of beliefs even when the evidence clearly contradicts the ideology. Krugman knows this problem well. It could be reasonably argued that he popularized the term, “zombie economics,” which was the title of a book by John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us.

Ideologically Yours, Keynesian

In Quiggin’s words, which is what Krugman also believes, “For decades, their [market liberalism’s] advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many—members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess.”

Instead of assessing the Fed’s performance based on a thorough, unbiased evaluation of the economy after the last crisis or in the midst of this present one, Krugman instead concludes that the Fed, headed by Jerome Powell, has done an incredible job, giving them and him an A grade. What is the basis for Krugman’s conclusion? The Fed has responded in what he considers Keynesian fashion. His is an analysis based on the application of an ideology, Keynesian economics – not on its actual outcome. This is essentially a variant of “zombie economics.” Even if the response might be theoretically correct, the form of the present (and past) application is clearly wrong because the outcome is clearly bad.

Intellectual Honesty Is Not Optional

The dangers of blind ideological loyalty and purity apply to all, including the right and the left, whether they are politicians, economists, or even Christians. In reality, when one objectively analyzes the state of affairs of the real economy, the federal government’s and the Fed’s actions have been disastrously bad.

To be a good economist or policy-maker, more broadly, a good intellectual, is to be intellectually honest. It is to have knowledge of various schools of thought and to dispassionately pick and choose from them based on what actually works. There are those among us who consider ourselves liberal economists but base our analysis not on the application of any one ideology, left, right or center, but on its actual outcome.

The outcome of the Fed intervention in the financial crisis, which was not fully disclosed to the public, was plainly and simply terrible, and the outcome of the present intervention is even worse. The data and facts speak for themselves. Lastly, the counterfactual is not redeeming when the reality is damning.

April 29, 2020April 30, 2020

St. Catherine of Siena – The Essential Role of Mystics

In the Catholic Church, today, April 29, is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena. She is a beloved figure and one of the most important mystics and church leaders in history. Her remarkable life is worth revisiting any day but particularly now for the historical similarities and for the insights it provides into the soul of the church.

Catherine of Siena was born at a time of when the Black Death was decimating Europe. Estimates of the number of people felled by the disease differ, but they range from a third to almost two-thirds of the population. Also, as Black writes, “Less well known is that the plague continued to strike Europe, the Middle East and beyond for the next four centuries, returning every 10 to 20 years.”

In the video, Skipper explains that the pathogen “remains with us today,” speculating that our herd immunity, among other changes, might have led to its decline. Hatcher remarked that “Paradoxically, society was able to cope much better in the fourteenth century with deaths on this horrendous scale than we would be able to cope today, and this is primarily because people were, to a degree, self-sufficient and independent. Whereas today, we have such complex interconnections that deaths on anything like that scale would cause complete chaos.”

Even with relatively preliminary data, it is clear that the coronavirus pandemic is nowhere near as deadly as the Plague was. Hatcher’s statement was quite prescient, as this is indeed what the world has experienced. In spite of the coronavirus being considerably less deadly, it has wreaked tremendous damage, particularly economically.

On the other hand, similar to the Plague, an entirely possible outcome might be that we will have to live with a persistent novel coronavirus much like we live with the flu. We should all have been aware of this possibility from the start of our battle with the virus.

Catherine of Siena – Mystic

Mystics are a special group within the church, and Catherine of Siena is emblematic of them. They have a special relationship with God and live in a way that others might find baffling. Their beings and their lives seem to defy the laws to which the rest of us consider ourselves subject, and their passionate devotion awes and mystifies us.

More broadly, mystics serve a greater role in the church. They remind us that the church, as a whole, is actually a mystical body. To reprise the thrust of G.K. Chesterton’s argument from yesterday’s post, Christianity is really an irrational religion. Christians are not really about checking piety or other boxes as acts of devotion.

On the contrary, our faith is and always has been expressed by the irrational: the erection of stunningly beautiful testaments of love and devotion to our creator, which are visited by tourists and are destinations of pilgrimage for the faithful the world over, lives of tremendous sacrifice as Catherine of Siena’s or, more recently, Mother Teresa’s of Calcutta. We are called to not measure and calculate our love, but to leave it all behind and to live with faith abandon to our Lord. His will be done.

Perhaps, it is hard to sense this as most Christians, wrapped up in our daily, often tedious and stressful lives, worship in a more perfunctory but hopefully still sincere manner. We go to weekly services and progress through the liturgical calendar, paying a bit more reverence during its highlights. Again, in reference to yesterday’s post, if we are the “sense,” mystics are the “sensibility” of the church.

They make their way through the world in an enviable communion with God. What would seem entirely irrational for many of us, their reclusion, asceticism, sacrifice and visions, seem entirely in keeping with who they are. In the collective, they, along with the ascetics, are the legacy of John the Baptist, who resided in the dessert, eating locusts and wild honey, calling on his fellow Jews to be baptized, with one notable baptism.

Catherine of Siena’s power and influence in the church, which was considerable, as she is credited with convincing Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, did not really come from reason. Her power and influence came from her mysticism, her spiritual connection with God.

We are dust and to dust we shall all return. With death or the threat of it seemingly everywhere, let us remember this truth while also remembering that there are those who live and have lived among us who seem to have no fear of death. While their bodies surely return to dust, their spirits soar free of their bodies while still living. That is the power of deep faith in God. It is not rational. It is mystical.

April 28, 2020May 1, 2020

The Bible – Balance Found in Contradiction

So many people around the world turn to the Bible for consolation in their darker moments. We pray, and we read “the Good Book.” What is it about the Word of God that can be so centering? In this essay, Prior (2020) argues that it is because the Bible strikes a balance between “sense” and “sensibility,” a reference to Jane Austen’s classic novel.

Some wield the Bible like a stick, to chastise or to criticize others. Some go further; they raise it as weapon to terrorize or to frighten others into compliance with their ideas of moral conduct. Some cynically refer to the Bible, the ultimate authority, to elevate their own standing, that is to be seen by association and by others as the ultimate authority. However, the Bible neither does nor claims any of these things. Like God himself, it simply is. One sits with it; one reads it; and one is changed through a personal, mysterious dynamic.

The Bible Is a Living Contradiction

There are many translations and versions of the Bible, and many ways to read it. Perhaps one of the ways to read it would be to take note of how many times the Bible substantively contradicts itself without being contradictory or untrue. Like a person with both a right and a left arm, with a right and a left leg, its stories and statements balance each other, and it is consistent and true in its whole.

Let me more specifically define what I do mean and do not mean by contradiction. I do not mean differences in accounts or historical details, which likely simply reflect errors in translation, memory, or other expected inconsistencies with an extremely old document. (See Sommer’s rather tedious enumeration.) I also do not mean incongruities between the Bible and the scientific understanding of man and the universe because if one believes in God, the rest is moot.

What I mean is that the Bible provides both guidance and no guidance. It gives answers and poses questions. It gives clarity while retaining mystery. The contradictions are the stories themselves. God gave man both free will and the Law to follow. The Bible asks us to believe in Jesus’s miracles, which includes raising people from the dead, and in Jesus’s death on the cross. Why would a man who is the son of an omnipotent God not save himself?

Well, to understand the answers to these questions is to better understand Christianity and why it provides solace for so many. One of the most striking aspects of the Bible is that one would normally find contradiction discomforting, yet in it, people find the opposite, they find comfort.

Atheists Misunderstand the Bible

Atheists often raise “contradictions” as proof of the Bible’s intellectual or inherent weaknesses and its false claims to divine inspiration. Sommer writes, “Humanists reject the claim that the Bible is the word of God. They are convinced the book was written solely by humans in an ignorant, superstitious, and cruel age. They believe that because the writers of the Bible lived in an unenlightened era, the book contains many errors and harmful teachings…. The Bible is an unreliable authority because it contains numerous contradictions. Logically, if two statements are contradictory, at least one of them is false. The biblical contradictions therefore prove that the book has many false statements and is not infallible.”

The opposite of an “unenlightened era” must be the Enlightenment. However, as Prior notes, the reaction to the Enlightenment was the equal and opposite reaction of Romanticism. Atheists’ argument reflects not just their inability to understand God but also, perhaps mainly, their inability to understand man.

G.K. Chesterton (1904) wrote, “Rationalism is fighting for its life against the young and vigorous superstitions…. Christianity, which is a very mystical religion, has nevertheless been the religion of the most practical section of mankind. It has far more paradoxes than the Eastern philosophies, but it also builds far better roads…. The Christian has a Triune God, ‘a tangled trinity,’ which seems a mere capricious contradiction in terms.”

There is a sort of Weberian quality to this line of Chesterton’s argument in which he implies that the very contradictions of Christianity lend themselves well to a more productive and prosperous society. Of course, exercising my own reason, he clearly provides no empirical evidence to back up his assertion.

However, from a strictly intuitive sense, perhaps a religion that comfortably lies at the intersection of the rational and the emotional, of the known and the unknown, of God and man, would also give man the best sense of balance to deal with all of the uncertainties of life. If one’s certainty rests in God, the uncertainties of life are but a drama in which one participates but does not direct. In this knowing, one can find liberation and resilience.

Chesterton also expresses these contradictions as follows, “The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.”

Chesterton continues, “The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic.”

To translate Chesterton for those less initiated in his style, by accepting the contradictions and the mysteries, Christians end up being more consistent than the rationalists or the Determinists. We own the contradictions, and therefore, in a consistently paradoxical way, the inevitable opaqueness of our beliefs ends up providing more light and being more transparent than others’ “more translucent” attempts to enlighten the world or to be truly honest.

Like the Bible – Man Is a Walking Contradiction

One might ask why. How could this be? Simply, because people are naturally contradictory. Thus, a religion that can honestly and authentically capture man’s state is going to be truer to man as he or she is. Christianity is not founded on an ideal idea of a person, but at its foundation is the Judeo-Christian understanding of a fallen man.

A perfectly rational man, as the humanists suggest we should all aspire to be, would not be man at all. It would be a computer or a robot. To be human is to be both rational and emotional, to have both sense and sensibility, to love books and argument and to love art and wonder. The Bible perfectly captures these divinely contradictory combinations such that in it, we find balance, and with it, we find wholeness, comfort, and God.

Related to this post

April 25, 2020April 30, 2020

Reality Bites 2x for 2 Gens: Gen X & Y

Let us retreat briefly to, by comparison, Generation X’s halcyon days of latchkey, Prozac, grunge and a general, somewhat melodramatic, malaise. Compared to their prime working years, the ages of 25 to 54, Gen X’s childhood and young adulthood seem rather romantic in retrospect.

Their parents sucked up to corporate management, with big hair to match big heads, eager to ascend the corporate ladder and stroke their egos along the way. Their children, now in broken homes, had to fend for themselves. Television became their best friends, maybe Mario Brothers, and there were the occasional bike rides with friends to the local candy store. Summers were spent outdoors, avoiding dysfunctional adults as much as possible.

Cutoffs for Gen X and Gen Y

The cutoffs for generations are not hard and fast, but for this purpose, Generation X were people born between the years of 1965 and 1980, and Millennials were born between 1981 and 1995. Placing the financial crisis in the year 2008, the oldest Gen Xers have or will turn 55-years-old this year, which means they turned 25 in 1990 and 43 in 2008. The youngest Gen Xers have or will turn 40-years-old, which means they turned 25 in 2005 and 28 in 2008. By comparison, the oldest Millennials have or will turn 39-years-old, which means they turned 25 in 2006 and 27 in 2008. The youngest Millennials have or will turn 25-years-old this year, the start of their prime working years.

Younger Gen X and Older Gen Y Hit Hard

As one can see by the breakdown, the generation that was the most affected in terms of prime working years by both the financial crisis and the present coronavirus crisis is Generation X. In fact, it is the most negatively impacted generation in other respects also. Both Gen Xers’ and Millennials’ parents are typically Boomers.

However, as the Boomers’ wealth increased over time, Millennials generally had more resources available to them than their Gen X siblings or counterparts. This gave Millennials a financial advantage as well as a social advantage, as the divorce rate stabilized, and their single mothers who had entered the workforce were better able to manage both work and family.

The resentment that these two generations, Generation X and Millennials, feel toward the Boomers is not just about the fact that the Boomers have effectively directed available resources for their benefit as described here, it is also that crises are, obviously, intensely destabilizing and damaging, particularly for those for whom it overlaps with their prime working years. Generation X and Millennials are the only two generations that have had their prime working years impacted by two crises. These crises also occurred in relatively short succession, a little over a decade apart.

It is quite different to try to weather a crisis after establishing a career than while entering the workforce or while still in the early part of one’s career. The younger Gen Xers and the older Millennials were still relatively young when the financial crisis hit, and they bore the brunt of the damage in terms of their careers. In fact, many younger Millennials might not have been nearly as impacted as older Millennials since many of them were still in school. The youngest Millennials were 13-years-old at the time of the financial crisis.

Gen X and Y – Resentment and Request

Although the Boomer generation has been a catastrophic failure, there is something rather simple that they could do that would help their children, if they care at all about them. They could retire. (We understand that there are some Boomers who sincerely cannot afford to retire at the standard age.) Many Boomers, however, remain in the workforce out of greed, power, and ego. Perhaps some Boomers think the world cannot manage without their genius and expertise, but we assure you, it can. We can quite reasonably argue that it might actually thrive again.

More generally, the Boomers’ “leadership” is entirely unwelcomed by younger generations at this point. Their generation’s management of the country has been an abysmal failure. Under their watch, there has been a deterioration in every aspect of American life: family, faith, work, the economy, societal bonds, political stability and on and on. And there have been two catastrophic crises.

The Boomers need to retire and allow other generations to lead and to fill their often coveted positions. We will do a better job than they did because there is nowhere to go but up. Our society is guaranteed to improve. So, Boomers, you have damaged our country and our careers enough. If your egos can possibly manage it, please retire. Trust us – we got this.

April 24, 2020May 1, 2020

Hard Truths – Boomers Brought Us Here

There are so many pieces on how the Baby Boomers have destroyed America, it is hard to choose which ones to highlight here. These articles are sometimes written by Boomers, the ones who can actually speak of the shameful, hard truths and not resort to callous defensiveness. They are the ones who can actually weigh the truth about the negative impact their generation has had on every subsequent generation as more important than their own personal feelings or the need to whitewash their generation’s awful legacy.

Perhaps the most entertaining piece written by a Boomer, although he does not want to be grouped with them, was Paul Begala’s (2017) essay, in which he states, “I hate the Boomers. I know it’s a sin to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals, they’d be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they’d be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they’d be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment—not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they’d be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded—a temporary association but not a team.” You get the idea. It is not a flattering portrait.

Boomers’ Defensiveness

Many Boomers, however, when confronted with these hard truths and unflattering realities about their legacy, react not by extending understanding and solidarity with the generations who have to live with the painful consequences of the Boomers’ decisions and actions, but rather, in a predictably egotistical and narcissistic fashion, by expressing outrage and hurling insults at those who have the temerity to call them out for their hypocrisy, selfishness, immorality and incompetence.

As Lewis (2019) wrote, “The 63-year-old—yes, Willetts is a Boomer himself—is well aware of the subject’s emotional resonance. Mostly, though, he is surprised that the rage tends to come not from Millennials, who feel disadvantaged, but from the Boomers, who feel attacked…. When we have all this power, we shouldn’t be surprised when younger people are rather resentful,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised they aren’t angrier.’”

Actually, we are angry and resentful. It is just that every time younger people express their justified outrage, either through calculated arguments or organic memes, such as “OK Boomer,” at the injustice we have experienced for the past about half a century under the Boomers’ tyranny of the vote and governance, the Boomers, like locusts, to use Begala’s imagery, swarm down upon us in an attempt to suppress our First Amendment right and silence us into submission. We will not be silenced.

Boomer Socialism

The Boomers have chosen to never make any sacrifices and instead have insisted on voting based on what is exclusively in their interests, without any regard to the interests of future generations, a consideration that prior generations paid to them. The ramifications of the Boomers’ decisions are evident in all aspects of our lives: housing, the economy, climate change, health care, education, child care; you name it, the Boomers have shaped the policy to their benefit and to other generations’ detriment.

The most obvious specific examples are in health care and housing. To point out the obvious, it is the height of hypocrisy to want Medicare for oneself but not for others, as this voter (granted a bit older than a Boomer but still reflective of the generation) expressed, Glueck and Tavernise (2020) “‘I don’t like Warren and I don’t like Bernie because they want “Medicare for all,”’ said Alan Davis, 80, dismissing the single-payer health care system promoted by Senator Bernie Sanders, 78. ‘I’m totally against it. I have a good health plan.'” In other words, socialism for older people, not to mention, for the rich and for corporations, but capitalism for everyone else.

As Thompson (2020) wrote, “The federal government already guarantees single-payer health care to Americans over 65 through Medicare. Senior citizens already receive a certain kind of universal basic income; it’s called Social Security. While elderly Americans might balk at the idea of the government paying back hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt, they are already the grand beneficiaries of a government debt subsidy: The mortgage-interest deduction, a longtime staple of the federal tax code, effectively compensates the American homeowner (whose average age is 54) for their mortgage debt, thus saving this disproportionately old group approximately $800 billion in taxes owed to the federal government each decade. The economist Ed Glaeser has likened these policies to ‘Boomer socialism.'”

In addition, with respect to housing, it is not just the mortgage-interest deduction, but as Lewis wrote, older people often actively prevent more housing from being built, which increases its cost; “Often, Willetts would…then head over to a local residents’ association meeting, where he would talk to ‘completely decent people’ in their 50s and 60s who owned their own home but wanted no further houses to be built in their neighborhood.”

More generally, the Boomers ushered in the era of “greed is good” under Reagan. This period was the beginning of the end for the country and for the labor movement that had been considerably strengthened, essentially during the Bretton Woods period. The new era corresponded with a focus on consumerism, with consumer demand becoming the driver of the US economy, along with it, a trade deficit, financialization, and these changes among others created gross imbalances in the economy, particularly between the haves and the have-nots, which inevitably also meant between old and young, and contributed to the destruction of the planet. The Boomers are also the reason that the nation, really the world, is suffering under Trump and his corrupt, incompetent administration.

Pew’s Maniam and Smith (2017) found that “In 2016, as in recent years, Millennials and Gen Xers were the most Democratic generations. And both groups had relatively large – and growing – shares of liberal Democrats: 27% of Millennials and 21% of Gen Xers identified as liberal Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. By contrast, Boomers and Silents were the most Republican groups – largely because of the higher shares of conservative Republicans in these generations. Nearly a third of Boomers (31%) and 36% of Silents described themselves as conservative Republicans or Republican leaners, which also is higher than in the past.”

Boomers’ Political Dominance

The unfortunate reality is that the sheer size of the Boomer generation has distorted our politics. As Lewis said, “Boomers have bent the gravity of politics toward themselves and their needs.” Some have claimed that this is ageism or a phony generational divide. It is not. It is based on reality. It is based on facts. It is based on statistics. It based on hard truths. Deal with it. The real impact that an extremely large, selfish and short-sighted generation has had on American politics and economics is ultimately, as we are witnessing now, to the detriment of all Americans. After all, it is older Americans that are most vulnerable during the coronavirus pandemic, and they are also the ones who put an entirely unfit president in the White House.

The Boomers are the single worst generation in, at least recent, American history. No amount of outrage or defensiveness on their part is going to change that reality or assessment. They are the reason our nation is at this absurd point, and they need to own it. Despite their reflexive defensiveness, the Boomer generation needs to be held accountable for their actions, including their vote. We will not participate in the whitewashing of what is obviously a terrible legacy, their complete failure in judgment, decision-making and governance.

Unfortunately for the rest of our society, we are also facing the reality that we have to deal with or clean up their mess. The only way to end their political dominance is for younger generations to vote in large numbers based on their own interests. A fair and well-functioning democracy reflects the diversity of its constituents, and one of those important factors is age. It is as legitimate a consideration as any other aspect of one’s identity. Let us make sure our interests are being represented at all levels of government. Gen X, Y, Z – let’s band together, and let’s vote and run for office. Let us define our destiny.

Related to this post

April 21, 2020May 1, 2020

Lehman’s Lasting Legacy on the Federal Reserve

It has been only a little over a decade yet it feels like a century ago perhaps because it also feels like the latest iteration of the Gilded Age. On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. In (this summary of) his paper, Laurence Ball (2016) asks, “Why did the Federal Reserve [Fed] let Lehman Brothers fail?” He follows with, “Fed officials say they lacked the legal authority to rescue the firm, because it did not have adequate collateral to borrow the cash it needed.” He (p2) writes, “According to Bernanke (FCIC testimony, 2010): ‘[T]he only way we could have saved Lehman would have been by breaking the law, and I’m not sure I’m willing to accept those consequences for the Federal Reserve and for our systems of laws. I just don’t think that would be appropriate.’”

Ball (p2) disputes the Fed’s official line and Bernanke’s explanation. Instead, Ball concludes “that the explanation offered by Fed officials is incorrect, in two senses: a perceived lack of legal authority was not the reason for the Fed’s inaction; and the Fed did in fact have the authority to rescue Lehman.” He argues that, based on a de novo examination of its finances, Lehman did have enough collateral and that the Fed prevented it from using the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF).

The sensitivity around this question is that Lehman’s failure was a cataclysmic event for financial markets and for the global economy. If the Fed had allowed it to fail on dubious grounds, it would reflect a gross error in judgment and even incompetence. Ball (p3) states, “The record also shows that the decision to let Lehman fail was made primarily by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson,” even though this is the Fed’s purview not the Treasury’s, and the decision was made presumably considering political sensitivities. (You might also recall that Paulson was the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, a competing investment bank, and if there were any ulterior motives, that would have been corruption.)

Therefore, the primary questions are: Why did the Fed not rescue Lehman? Did it have the legal authority to do so? Did Lehman have adequate collateral available? Were there political or other reasons for the decision?

The Complexities

In fairness to the Fed, it can get sued, and it has. Most notably, it got sued by former AIG CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who after a fair amount of drama lost his case with the court ruling that he did not have legal standing to pursue it. Instead, AIG did, and it had declined to do so. (In case you are interested in listening to Greenberg’s side of the story.) The prior ruling, in June 2015, had ruled in Greenberg’s favor but awarded no damages, and as Moyer (2017) reports the court stated that “the Federal Reserve had overstepped its authority in taking the stake in A.I.G.”

Thus, if the Fed indeed had legal concerns, the ensuing events would suggest that they were reasonable and legitimate. Also, in the United States, rehypothecation of collateral (repledging) is limited by Rule 15c3-3 of the SEC, but the United Kingdom had no such restriction. Lehman’s bailout would have included its foreign subsidiaries including its UK-based broker dealer. Thus, in terms of the counterfactual, had collateral been posted, it is uncertain who or which institution would have had final claim to it: other holders of the collateral or the Fed.

This potential concern for the Fed seems supported by Ball’s (p5) description of its actions, “The entity that Barclays almost purchased on the 14th, and which famously filed for bankruptcy on the 15th, was Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LBHI), a corporation with many subsidiary companies. Most of these subsidiaries also entered bankruptcy immediately, but one did not: Lehman Brothers Inc. (LBI), which was Lehman’s broker-dealer in New York. The Fed kept LBI in business from September 15 to September 18 by lending it tens of billions of dollars through the Primary Dealer Credit Facility; after that, Barclays purchased part of LBI and the rest was wound down.” Also, LBI was heavily involved in the repo market, with its book still relatively intact perhaps due to access to the PDCF, and LBI’s disorderly unwinding might have been detrimental to the important money market.

Prior to Lehman’s failure, the Fed managed the sale of Bear Stearns, another failed investment bank, to JPMorgan Chase. The Fed subsequently set up the PDCF. (Another question that remains perhaps even more of a mystery is why Lehman did not avail itself of the PDCF earlier when its insolvency would not have been in question.) The Fed’s intervention in AIG involved a considerable equity stake, as the corporation was effectively nationalized. Thus, these two outcomes, managed sale and nationalization were not bailouts in the sense of what was to come.

Lehman – The Lesson Learned

Lehman’s bankruptcy triggered a credit crunch, and the Fed’s reaction was an alphabet soup of “special facilities,” including ones for the money market mutual fund industry, which experienced a run, and commercial paper, which froze. The Fed effectively backstopped trillion-dollar industries and provided trillions of dollars in additional support to various institutions. The knee-jerk reaction suggests that the Fed and others underestimated the impact of Lehman’s failure, and in its aftermath, decided to dramatically reverse course to a “whatever-it-takes” approach.

Lehman – The Lesson to Unlearn

The last lesson needs to be unlearned. As it turns out, what we have really learned is that moral hazard is a serious concern that has not been adequately considered or appreciated. The correct approach is to either allow firms to file bankruptcy or truly nationalize them. The focus of bailouts should be people not corporations. The American people’s tax dollars are not a piggy bank for irresponsible corporations. They are its collective contribution to build a better society for themselves.

Dramatically reversing course from what was once a more free-market ideology to a bastardized version of Keynesian economics takes the American economy and people from one extreme to another. This legacy of Lehman’s downfall is rearing its ugly head as the Fed bails out entire industries and corporations with no restraint and no accountability during this present crisis. It was irresponsible and immoral then, and it still is now. The American people deserve better.

Related to this post

April 18, 2020April 30, 2020

Symmetric Storm, Asymmetric Shock and the Immorality of Fed Policy

Some have called it “the great equalizer.” In some ways, this is an accurate description. The pandemic does not discriminate, although certainly some people are more vulnerable to the disease. One could also describe the coronavirus pandemic as a symmetric storm, one that is howling across the world so fiercely that some are wondering if they are, in fact, hearing the harbinger of the apocalypse. However, the effects of the pandemic, like previous crises, are not symmetric but instead, have resulted in an asymmetric shock.

The response of the “technocratic class,” in true elitist fashion, has also been anything but symmetric. It has been a moral failure of monumental proportions. However, this is nothing new; it is just a new low. For decades, the elite in the United States and around the world have been more preoccupied with advancing their own political, academic and professional careers than about the people they are privileged with the responsibility of serving, the people whose interests they have a moral obligation to protect and to promote.

Instead, central banks and other institutions around the world have created policies that cater to the powers that be, multinational corporations and the rich. Understandably, monetary policy is difficult for many people to understand beyond basics, such as the lowering and raising of interest rates, its theoretical effects on inflation and unemployment and, perhaps, a general understanding of the mechanisms with which central banks implement the policy, what was, in the United States, known as open market operations.

Fed Response 2008

In response to the financial crisis of 2008/9, the United States central bank, the Federal Reserve (Fed), started using a set of monetary policy tools that fall under the umbrella of unconventional monetary policy. One of these policies is known as quantitative easing. It should be noted that these are experimental policies (the Japanese experience notwithstanding), and the experiment is clearly failing. Prior to the financial crisis, the Fed maintained a balance sheet that was around 800 billion.

After hitting the zero-lower-bound, meaning interest rates could not be lowered any further (aside from negative interest rates, a topic for another day), the Fed resorted to quantitative easing. They began purchasing assets not to target short-term interest rates, money market rates, such as the fed funds and the repo rates, but to lower longer-term interest rates.

Fed – Interest Rates and Morality

The Bible clearly prohibits usury, more precisely, charging interest at all; for example, “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest,” Exodus 22:25, and “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest,” (Deuteronomy 23:19).

McCleary and Barro (2019, p11) in their book, The Wealth of Religions (support your local bookstore), wrote the following with respect to the secularization hypothesis: “Secularization applied to some aspects of John Calvin’s city of Geneva and its regulation of economic activity, especially the distinction doctrinally made between interest and usury. Interest was an economic necessity for commercial and financial transactions and was allowed by the authorities. The maximum interest rate, set at 5 percent, was regulated by the Genevan government and the Consistory, a corporate religious-moral committee of the government whose judgments were enforced by the city council…”.

Interest rates above the regulated rate were considered usurious; however, they explain that this was raised to 6.7 percent while Calvin was still living and to 10 percent after his death. With these and related actions, the city of Geneva apparently liberated itself from the theological restriction and began what they describe as “the secularization of economic activity in Geneva.”

Another way to describe it would be, thus began the unleashing of unbridled capitalism. The immorality of usury is obvious. One only has to look at its modern manifestations, such as Payday loans. Even the actions of the recently deceased former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker who raised interest rates to control inflation, an action which predictably led to a recession, should be reexamined to possibly find a better approach.

The immorality of the opposite of high interest rates, low interest rates, particularly for an extended period of time, has not been adequately discussed or perhaps even considered. Volcker’s successor, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan depended on this form of management to prop up financial markets and, arguably secondarily, the real economy, which has had various negative effects, such as asset price bubbles, excessive speculation and crises among others.

Fed – Bailouts

In more recent years, financial markets have become dependent not only on perpetually low interest rates but also on eye-popping amounts of central bank intervention, trillions of dollars, often in the form of “special facilities,” financial/legal vehicles that the Fed has been using to circumvent its requirement to hold only government-issued (T-bills, Treasuries, etc.) or government-backed (Agency MBS) securities. (The exact totals of “bailout” money, regardless of whether it is on the balance sheet or in special facilities, depends on how one counts it and what the Fed has been willing to disclose. It should be required to disclose it all.)

Not only are the Fed’s policies causing imbalances and other issues, but the key question is: why are the very corporations that have been causing our economic and financial problems being bailed out with trillions of dollars while the American people are suffering and being abandoned by the institutions that are supposed to be serving them? These central bank actions (both here and abroad) are exacerbating the asymmetric shock on the rich and the poor, on richer and poorer countries.

The Fed will attempt to provide pacifying, pseudo-intellectual arguments to justify these grossly immoral actions. They cannot obfuscate the truth. The institution is failing the American people whose taxes are being used in ways that are detrimental to their interests and contrary to how they should be used. This exploitation of the American people and corruption of the Fed needs to stop. The American people and people around the world deserve better from their institutions, their leaders and the “technocratic elite.”

Related to this post

April 15, 2020April 29, 2020

Between the Scylla of Shut Down and the Charybdis of Open Up

Between the Scylla and the Charybdis — Johann Heinrich Füssli – Odysseus in Front of Scylla and Charybdis

Christians have historically navigated between the Scylla of legalism and the Charybdis of license. The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis, and God basically gives Adam and Eve one simple “law” to obey. Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed him and thus began mankind’s odyssey.

Scylla of Legalism

As we move further into the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, there is a proliferation of laws. As Father Longenecker (2014) explains, “For the first time obeying a law code was the way to make God happy.” Perhaps it was also a way for Moses and Aaron to keep an unruly, disobedient and ungrateful caravan of freed Hebrew slaves from angering God and from exhausting them any more than they had.

Then comes Paul and Christianity. Longenecker says, “Unfortunately, the law is not enough, and St Paul unlocked the riddle by telling us that the whole reason for the law was not to make us good enough, but to show us that we could never be good enough. The Christian religion was another innovation. Instead of living by the law, we are called to live by faith in a dynamic relationship with God.”

Charybdis of License

Most people, even Christians, might ask: what does it mean to be “called to live by faith in a dynamic relationship with God”? It does not provide any real guidance. Although Christians have forgotten or ignored much of the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments continue to have a simplicity and practicality that is conducive to obedience. It is much easier to follow laws if one can actually remember them. License on the other hand requires no memorization and no restraint. Its potential destructiveness is also obvious.

Scylla of Shut Down and the Charybdis of Open Up

Today, as we debate the Scylla of shut down and the Charybdis of open up the economy, we would do well to remember that the safest passage in this crisis is navigating between the two extremes. The left seems to lean toward shutting down, maintaining stay-at-home orders, and the right seems to lean toward opening up, returning to normal.

There are economic consequences to maintaining restrictions that are too strict that go well beyond the stock market but affect ordinary people in real and painful ways. We need to be sensitive to the financial precariousness of their lives and understand that their economic vulnerabilities can quickly develop into other problems, such as domestic violence, child abuse, inescapable poverty and debt.

On the other hand, no restrictions at all would almost certainly exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus, which would bring with it not just illness and death but also economic ramifications, as people would be required to go to work and would feel compelled to do so even if they were feeling unwell.

This is not a matter of right versus left, legalism or license, shutting down or opening up. It is a matter of assigning proper weight to the risks associated with veering too much in one direction or the other and finding the correct middle path. Jesus’s perfect navigation between the extremes of legalism and license is often underappreciated. He never actually lowered the standards or diluted “the law.” In many respects, he raised them. However, he simultaneously extended tremendous compassion and generosity.

We would do well to adopt his approach to the extent we could – strict but compassionate. Ideally, our government would have acted faster and with more preparation and planning, in particular, making sure that we had adequate tests and medical equipment and were tracing any people suspected of having come into contact with the virus. They would have had to follow stricter self-isolation guidelines, i.e. quarantine, while the remainder of the population could have continued life under a laxer set of preventive measures. Alas, neither competence nor compassion can be found in the present administration.

My Brother’s Keeper

For the rest of us, let us live in faith in God and in each other. Let us be our brother’s keeper and think of others’ interests as well as our own. Let us remember that some among us are more vulnerable to sickness and death while others are more vulnerable to poverty, which can also lead to sickness and death. Let us not judge others for their particular fears or frustrations, but instead let us pray that our leaders will arrive at a reasonable set of guidelines that avoids both the health and economic dangers to the greatest extent possible.