04 Apr 2018

I saw some guy has this as his pinned Tweet.

01 Apr 2018

Has it been long enough for me to re-post this one?

29 Mar 2018

I had to dig this up for some people who hadnt heard of it. Thought I would share (again) with you folks.

26 Mar 2018

I always like to skim articles like this to see how someone could come up with a title like that. In my (obviously defensive) reaction, I would say the author points to things that are clearly not consistent with classical liberalismlike using armies to engage in free tradeor he is simply mistaken about historical causalitylike blaming the Great Depression on the gold standard.

However, this is surely what a true socialist thinks when reading a libertarian author who documents the horrors of explicitly socialist regimes. So, are we both at fault? Or do I get to say Thats not what my philosophy entails! but the socialist doesnt get to disavow Pol Pot?

25 Mar 2018

This is intended for believing Christians, and perhaps even there will only interest Protestants. I was working through different interpretations (coming from professing Christians) on the same stipulated events from Biblical history. I should stress that both sides can point to ample scriptural evidence for their perspective, and yet they paint quite different pictures of the nature of God.

Note that I am going to exaggerate the interpretations in order to bring out their contrast. Obviously in reality, most Christians would not be purely one or the other. And in fact, the resolution of this might be that both sides are stressing certain features of a very complex reality.

Interpretation A

Adam and Eve committed the Original Sin in the garden of Eden. The wages of sin is death.God Himself had warnedAdam that if he ate of the tree of knowledge, he would surely die.

Since Adam and Eve sinned, humanity was cursed. God is a just God, so He couldnt just overlook sin. He needed to punish it. However, God poured His wrath out on Jesus, who took our place on the cross.

A good analogy for this perspective is that God is a judge who announced to a defendant that he owes a billion dollars because of his crimes. The defendant cannot possibly pay this amount. The judge wants to show mercy on the man, but the judge is just and cant simply overlook the law. But then the judges own son volunteers to pay the fine for the man, so that justice is served, but the guilty defendant is saved by the innocent son.

Interpretation B

Ive previously discussed a whole sermon from John Crowder critiquing the above perspective; heres a blog post I found while searching for stuff just now. Here, let me just summarize some of the pushback:

Would you punish your kid in order to satisfy your own wrath at somebody elses kids crime? So are you saying God is a worse parent than you? Does God the judge really not care about tailoring the crime to person who committed it?

After their sin, Adam and Eve hid from God. He went out looking for them. It wasnt that they were in close union and then He expelled them because of their transgression.

Paul actually writes, Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior (my emphasis).

God didnt kill Jesus, we did. Yes, of course that event was a crucial part of His plan for our salvation, but it doesnt seem to have the same flavor as (say) God using His servant the King of Babylon,let alone God ordering Joshua to wage war in His name, in order to effect divine retribution. It was more akin to God using the quite conscious crime of Josephs brothers to achieve good. (I.e., its not that the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross thought they were carrying out Gods wishes.)

So we see God willing to allow this horrible thing to happen to His Son *if it would help*, but why does it help? Its not because God needs to see somebody die, and He doesnt care who it is, just as long as theres some bloodletting.

Rather, *we* need to believe that we are truly forgiven. If Jesus can endure that and still ask His Father to forgive those who had just tortured Him and nailed Him to a cross, then theres nothing you did that is unforgivable. Its arrogance to think youre worse than David, Peter, Saul and the sins they committed.

22 Mar 2018

Some of this may be repeats, but I havent posted my stuff in a while and need to catch up

==> Ep. 49 of the Lara-Murphy Show covers Chapter 2 of our new book, The Case for IBC.

==> Ep. 50 of the Lara-Murphy Show is a bonus episode, featuring my remarks at the Yale Political Union debate on climate change. At the link, I give highlights in case you are pressed for time. (Note, the audio isnt great, but if you give it a chance you can adapt and tell what Im saying.)

==> A recent post at IER: The Gas Tax Has Little to Do With Road Costs

==> Contra Krugman ep. 129 is about tariffs (and a fun clip from Jesse Jackson).

==> Contra Krugman ep. 130 is about Robert Reich.

==> On the Tom Woods Show, I debate against MMT.

19 Mar 2018

I know there is some bad blood on this topic, but I am being sincere in my praise for Hayek. Anyway:

Mises and Hayek were both brilliant economists who made numerous contributions in the Austrian tradition. Yet is inaccurate to refer to the Mises-Hayek position in the famous socialist calculation debate, and to do so obscures the Misesian understanding of calculation, which is necessarilymonetarycalculation. Although scholars should always take care to exercise courtesy in their assessments, it is proper to disentangle distinct arguments that are sometimes lumped together.

13 Mar 2018

Im sharing this on a Tuesday because I was traveling and dont want to keep missing my Sunday posts

In church, because of the lyrics of a song we were singing, I started thinking about the character of Jesus. (If youre not a believer, you can still appreciate the character of Jesus as depicted in the gospel accounts.)

After the Last Supper, when a mob came out with clubs and swords to take Him into custody, Peter intervened with his own weapon in a misguided attempt to save Jesus. (Of course, Jesus saves Peter, not vice versa, in the grand scheme.) Everybody knows the famous line when Jesus says to Peter, Put your sword back in its place, for all who take up the sword die by the sword. (This has been adopted by popular culture as live by the sword, die by the sword.)

However, as I stressed in this essay, what Jesus said next is incredibly intimidating. He continued with Peter: 53 Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?

As I commented in that essay:

Do you understand what a bad*ss Jesus was? He had the option of calling down heavenly slaughter upon His enemies, but refrained from doing so, electing instead to let these ignorant fools mock Him and torture Him to death. And why? Because thats how much He loved them. That type of moral strength should make your jaw drop.

Now, was Jesus a sucker? Did people take advantage of Him? Did He not know how the world really worked? Did He not know what you had to do to get ahead in life?

Now what really struck me in church this week, wasnt the stuff about the twelve legions of angels, but the line that came right after it. Jesus didnt say to Peter, Oh, I have to be arrested, tortured, and murdered, because otherwise humanity is lost. No, instead His argument was that this needed to happen to fulfill the Scriptures. If God said it through His prophets, then it was going to happen, end of story. To suggest otherwise was talk from the devil. Its always impressive if someone is willing to endure torture and death for a cause, but when the cause is, The fulfillment of the Word of God, it is extra admirable.

Just to top it all off, when Jesus was dying on the cross, it occurred to Him to look up to heaven and say, Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

As Bob Dylan says, youre going to have to serve somebody. If you think you dont serve any man (or woman), you might be right, but Dylan elaborates: It might be the devil, or it might be the Lordbut youre gonna have to serve somebody. I choose the Lord.

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