Thomas Brewton

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The Social Gospel Has Found its Savior

December 28, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Baby Boomers, who performed a frontal lobotomy on their spiritual life, find the meaning of life in secular environmentalism.

Read Lawrence Auster’s Deification of Gore in View From the Right.

Regrettably, well meaning Christian ministers like Rick Warren are supporting Mr. Gore’s junk scientism and the power of man over the earth, rather than sticking to faith in the one True God as Creator and Regulator of the cosmos.

In so doing they are verging perilously close to the social gospel, a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The social gospel reflected the rising popularity of the secular political state and its presumed capacity, when properly structured on the socialistic model, to produce earthly salvation without need for God and the Holy Spirit.
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What’s Wrong With America: the Liberal-Progressive Version

December 21, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It’s important to know what we’re up against.

The Sunday, December 16, 2007, edition of the New York Times carries a review of Robert Kuttner’s The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity.

The reviewer, Harry Hurt III, summarizes the author’s views:

“The potential of our economy to underwrite a society of broad prosperity is being sacrificed to financial speculation,” Mr. Kuttner declares in his new book’s opening chapter. “The winnings are going to a narrow elite, jeopardizing not only our broad prosperity but our solvency. In less than a decade, our government budget, gutted by tax cuts, has shifted from endless projected federal surpluses to infinite deficits. Our trade imbalances and financial debt to the rest of the world have grown from a modest concern to levels that could produce a crash.”

Mr. Kuttner cites numerous studies and statistics that show a staggeringly disproportionate distribution of wealth in America. Among the most telling is the fact that the median income of working-age families has actually fallen by 5.4 percent over the last seven years, adjusted for inflation, even as the gross domestic product has grown by 18 percent.

Let’s give Mr. Kuttner his due. He is certainly correct that, “Our trade imbalances and financial debt to the rest of the world have grown from a modest concern to levels that could produce a crash.” But ultimate responsibility for that lies with one of Mr. Kuttner’s heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, who started the socialistic policies of debasing the dollar and massive Federal deficit spending. Republicans have done very little to reverse those policies and must shoulder a good share of the blame for the severity of today’s problem.
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Inflation vs Demand

December 17, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Once again, inflation is not a result of rising demand by consumers or business enterprises. And the Fed’s interest rate tinkering does not cure inflation.

In an article titled Tips for TIPS, a Wall Street Journal reporter, who should know better, writes:

For now, few people see inflation as a major threat. The world economy remains strong and the dollar has been sliding, making U.S. imports more costly. But tighter credit and a badly sagging housing sector are expected to hurt U.S. economic growth, and government data suggest that higher energy prices so far haven’t had a broad impact on inflation. Indeed, investors believe that the Federal Reserve, which has cut short-term interest rates twice to quell market turmoil, will do so again.

Inflation is a general rise in the overall price level. And it results from only one thing: a deteriorating currency, that is, excessive money creation by banks, in particular, central banks.

The Federal Reserve has created an excessive money supply, and the recent cuts in the Fed’s interest rates are intended to make the money supply still more excessive. The Fed will implement those cuts by open market and direct purchases of securities from financial institutions, paying for them with bookkeeping entries to create previously non-existent money.

In contrast to overall inflation, increased demand raises prices for specific commodities.

Let’s take petroleum, for example. We have seen the price of oil, reflected in gasoline prices, rise and fall over recent years. But that is not general inflation. It is simply current and prospective demand exceeding current and prospective supply for that one commodity and its derivatives.

Absent ill-advised government intervention, when oil prices rise, some consumers and businesses will decide to curtail their use of oil and gasoline, feeling unwilling to incur the higher costs. The ratio of demand to supply will drop, and oil and gasoline prices will level off and eventually decline.

That’s why the Fed’s use of “core inflation” numbers to measure inflation is a sham. First, the Fed selects the price measurements to use in the core index. Second, movements up or down in specific commodity prices do not measure general inflation.
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The Spirit of Truth

December 15, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

How to put it to work in your life.

Pastor Rick Allen’s sermon on Sunday, December 2, at the Black Rock – Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) focused on understanding the Holy Spirit as a helper and supporter in our daily lives.

Existence itself is the Mind of God, God’s Word, eternal truth, towards which we can make our Pilgrim’s Progress with the help of the Holy Spirit.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. (John 1:1-4)

Existence, the Mind of God, Truth, is not a “thing” that can be touched, weighed, or analyzed in the manner of purely worldly things that are the subject matter of chemistry and physics. Focusing exclusively upon the materiality of our physical world is scientific, but it is only a small part of Truth. The laws of physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics are merely subsets of the Mind of God, whence come those laws of science.
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Primary Perspective

December 13, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Presidential primary campaigns illustrate politics as manipulation of, as well as pandering to, public opinion, with no necessary connection to political wisdom.

Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the New York Times, in a December 8 edition op-ed article, reflects liberals’ embrace of mobocracy at the expense of Constitutional government.

She writes:

Romney’s message, which boiled down to let’s-all-be-religious-together, was certainly different from the John Kennedy version, which argued that a candidate’s religion is irrelevant. But then Kennedy was speaking to the country, while Romney had his attention fixed on the approximately 35,000 Iowa religious conservatives who will tip the balance in the first-in-the-nation Republican caucus.

Can I pause here briefly to point out that in New York there are approximately 35,000 people living on some blocks? If my block got to decide the first presidential caucus, I guarantee you we would be as serious about our special role as the folks in Iowa are. And right now Mitt Romney would be evoking the large number of founding fathers who were agnostics.

First, there was no “large number of founding fathers who were agnostics.”
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Socialist Seers

December 4, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The cloudy crystal ball of socialist intellectuals must be, not just cleaned, but consigned to the trash heap.

Most commentators blame corporate greed and poor judgment for the subprime mortgage meltdown and the resulting squeeze in the financial community.

In reality, excessive Federal spending on the socialist welfare-state inaugurated by the New Deal, and the Federal Reserve’s over-expansion of the money supply to fund it, are the proximate causes for today’s financial mess. Without excessive money in the system, neither greed nor imprudence enters the picture.

Today’s mess could not have developed had President Roosevelt not deliberately devalued the dollar and repudiated gold payment clauses for the currency and Federal debt in the 1930s, while centralizing control of the Federal Reserve system in the Federal Reserve Board to facilitate Federal deficit spending.

As I have written frequently over the past couple of years, the Federal Reserve is an example of the inherent weakness of entrusting planning for the entire economy to a small group of intellectuals. See Financial Hurricane Ahead for a partial list of those postings.

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the two most recent Federal Reserve Board chairmen, are intelligent and talented men. But no individual, or small group of individuals, can assemble in real time all of the relevant data on economic conditions, process it, and comprehend it in a timely way to manage the entire economy. Picture an ant trying to build the pyramids solo.
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Total Truth

November 30, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A very tough standard for our relationships with God.

In the Old Testament, God was exacting when affronted by disobedience to his commands and, especially, by efforts to hide that disobedience from Him.

Pastor Steve Treash used the Book of Joshua, chapters 6 and 7, as his text for the Sunday sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut). These chapters recount the famous assault and conquest of Jericho, one of the first victories of the Israelites after their entry into the Promised Land.

All went according to God’s word to Joshua, except for one important detail:

[Jericho] and all that is in it are to be devoted to the LORD. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent. But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the LORD and must go into his treasury. (Joshua 6:17-19)

But the Israelites acted unfaithfully in regard to the devoted things ; Achan son of Carmi, the son of Zimri, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of them. So the LORD’s anger burned against Israel. (Joshua 7:1)

Having conquered Jericho, Joshua turned his attention to the town of Ai, expecting an easy victory. Instead,
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Distorting Plato

November 29, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The “common good,” Democrats’ current campaigning slogan, is a new name for the same old attack upon the moral virtues championed by Plato and Aristotle.

Academic propagandists of atheistic materialism have warped Plato’s dialogues into a formulaic skepticism aimed at discrediting Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian heritage.

A couple of illustrative examples:

A classic that used to be on most college reading lists illustrates the negative aspects of public opinion, the hook upon which liberals hang their demand for elimination of the electoral college and selection of the President solely by popular vote.

Plato’s short dialog, The Apology, recounts Socrates’s address to the Athenian assembly that was to decide whether his fate was to be death or exile. The democratic assembly, 501 Athenians chosen randomly by lot, and thus a good representation of public opinion, had already convicted Socrates of talking to young people in ways said to be subversive to the Athenian city-state.
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Paul Krugman: Social Magician

November 28, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Mr. Krugman waves his magic wand and presumes to banish future difficulties for Social Security.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in his November 16 piece, tells us:

But the “everyone” who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn’t include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.

As Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, put it in a recent article co-authored with senior analyst Philip Ellis: “The long-term fiscal condition of the United States has been largely misdiagnosed. Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country’s financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the growth rate of per capita health care costs.

First, while it’s true that Medicare and Medicaid will become the largest drain on Federal funds in coming decades, it’s not true that concern about Social Security in misguided. That’s analogous to saying that, compared to a category 7 hurricane, a tornado is no problem, because its total devastation is confined to a smaller area.
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Exporting Inflation to OPEC

November 26, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Upward pressure on oil prices intensifies.

Profligate spending at the Federal level, funded by the Federal Reserve’s creation of money out of thin air, in excess of the underlying increase in production of real, useful goods and services, is destabilizing worldwide currency exchange rates.

The dollar, since World War II, has by default been the world monetary standard. A responsible central bank in that circumstance has a duty to maintain a sound currency to prevent disruptions and dislocations in world commerce. The Federal Reserve has signally failed to fulfill that role.

The fault is not entirely the Fed’s. It can be traced to the Employment Act of 1946, which enshrined John Maynard Keynes’s socialistic economic doctrines as the official policy of the United States. The Fed was directed, among other missions, to manage the economy via currency manipulation in order to maintain full employment. Keynesian orthodoxy, which is the ideology of the Democratic Party, dictates that every economic glitch can be cured by increased Federal spending.

The Fed’s ever-ready response to the spurs of Federal spending has made it a poor steward of a sound currency for the rest of the world.
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Be the One to Thank God

November 24, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Occasionally people are aware that there is more to Thanksgiving than stuffing a turkey and themselves at the dinner table.

In Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut), Pastor Steve Treash’s text was Luke 17:11-19:

Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, each of us should follow the example of the leper and be the one to give thanks, praising God.

Reflect upon our many blessings, instead of lamenting what we don’t have.
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The War Against Unhappiness

November 16, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

New York Times proposes a follow-up program by the folks who brought us the War on Poverty.

In an extraordinary opinion piece in the November 13 New York Times, editorial board member Eduardo Porter endeavors to make a case for socialism’s Holy Grail: forced equality of income and government-regulated consumption as the road to happiness.

He writes:

The framers of the Declaration of Independence evidently believed that happiness could be achieved, putting its pursuit up there alongside the unalienable rights to life and liberty…for all the public policies aimed at increasing economic growth, people have been left to sort out their happiness. This is an unfortunate omission…

The key to understanding Mr. Porter’s concept is the underlying psychological principle of liberal-progressive-socialist theory, beginning with the Epicureans of ancient Greece, revived in the 17th century by Thomas Hobbes, and made a cornerstone of socialism by Karl Marx. That psychological principle is the idea that human beings are merely mechanisms that react to external, material factors inducing pain or pleasure.
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Are Federal courts again going to override states’ Constitutional rights?

November 14, 2007 by

Cloning Roe vs Wade
-By Thomas E. Brewton

A New York Times editorial dated November 10 argues that the task of moving stem cell research to the next level cannot be left to the states…As this page has argued before, stem cell research is of such importance and promise for the entire world that it deserves to be carried forward by a national program underwritten by federal funding.

Impelling the Times’s editorial pronouncement was the recent defeat in New Jersey of a $450 million bond issue for local stem cell research, a measure championed by the state’s socialist governor Jon Corzine. So far, liberals don’t have the votes in Congress, either.

Implicit in the Times’s editorial is the tactic that led the 1973 Supreme Court in Roe Vs Wade to ignore individual states’ Constitutional prerogative to exercise police powers, which are maintenance of law and order and protection of public health and safety. When the public opposes a liberal-progressive-socialist cause, liberals use judicial activism to do an end run around elected legislators and impose their will upon the majority.

James Madison is generally agreed to be the most influential single delegate to the 1787 Convention which drafted the Constitution. Judicial activism that infringes upon the Constitutional prerogatives of the states contrasts starkly with what Madison wrote on this subject in Federalist No. 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects [the so-called police powers] which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
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Chickens Are Returning to the Roost

November 13, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The exchange value of the dollar is declining at an accelerating rate, and China has blown the whistle to stop the game.

Since the recovery from the 1999 dot.com bust, we have benefitted from cheap imports that kept inflationary pressures down. Our financial markets have been flooded with dollars from foreign holders, which meant low interest rates and a booming stock market.

That is coming to an end, unless the Federal Reserve reverses course and ceases its efforts to manage the economy by flooding it with excess money.

China, Middle Eastern oil producers, and other exporting countries have to raise the dollar prices on goods they export to us to compensate for the declining value of those exports in their own currencies. Some exporters are beginning to refuse payment in dollars, requiring payment in Euros or their own currencies.

An article in the November 8 edition of the Washington Times summarizes this latest development:

China roiled financial markets around the globe yesterday when it asserted that the dollar is losing its luster as the world’s reserve currency and that Beijing will swap some of its $1.4 trillion in reserves out of U.S. dollars and into stronger currencies like the euro and Canadian dollar.

China’s verbal assault on the dollar helped trigger a 360-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and came as French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned in a speech to Congress that the “disarray” caused by the dollar’s steep fall could lead to “economic war.” …

With the world’s largest reserves of dollars, China has been a major investor in U.S. Treasury bonds and debt securities and is the second-largest holder of U.S. government debt next to Japan.
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Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Can Figure

November 8, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Is Paul Krugman at it again?

Whose statistics are the right ones?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not in doubt. In his November 2 column he writes:

“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,” says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.”…

Let’s start with the facts: Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels — bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear.
Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates — the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they’re just wrong.

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.

So Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine” is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.

In contrast, a MedScape Medical News report, dated August 22, 2007, is headlined “Cancer Survival Rates Improving Across Europe, But Still Lagging Behind United States.”
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From Personal to Colossal

November 7, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Corporate globalism was preceded by the passing of relationship banking.

As recently as 1958, when I went to work in Wall Street, bankers took very seriously the idea of relationship banking. That is, bankers felt a moral responsibility both to evaluate the creditworthiness of potential borrowers, and to stick by those borrowers in their times of financial need.

Since then, investment banking and commercial banking have become vastly more abstract and impersonal, as the deals have become more colossal. Numbers, not personal character, seem to be the primary, if not the sole, criterion.

We are bombarded with TV ads assuring us that, no matter how bad our credit record, loans are available. Loans produced by such policies are part of the structured investment vehicles (SIVs) plaguing commercial and investment banks.

Banks are now so large that apparently senior officials no longer can monitor the quality of the assets they put on their books. The two most prominent examples are the CEOs of Merrill Lynch and Citicorp, who have lost their jobs for that reason.
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Peacenik Paul

November 4, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Paul Krugman and his liberal conferees still yearn to play in the sand box with their toys.

In his October 29 column, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman expresses the implicit liberal-PC-multicultural paradigm that all cultures and all peoples are interchangeable. Moreover, that people everywhere have the same thought processes and values as those of liberal-progressives.

Liberals, and presumably everybody other than Republicans, are against war, ergo Islamic jihadists must be misunderstood people who mean us no harm. We have therefore only to be nice to them in UN negotiations to insure world harmony and peace. (see Liberals Still Can’t Connect the Dots)

Mr. Krugman writes:

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

To put it kindly, Mr. Krugman is not always too careful about the accuracy of what he writes. His use of the quotation suggests that President Roosevelt was restraining hot-headed Americans who were imagining a war threat. The subject of the phrase was, in fact, the Great Depression.
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A Dangerous Church

November 1, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Christian churches should be noted for living and preaching the Gospel everywhere, though confronted with every degree of hostility.

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock – Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was preached by Rev. Larry Fullerton.

The word dangerous has more than one meaning in contemporary culture. It can refer, of course, to the threat of physical harm. It can also refer to someone with special skills, like an athlete who is always a potential scorer. Christian churches must become dangerous in both senses.

Missionary work comes to mind in the first sense. Black Rock – Long Ridge Congregational Church supports many missionaries around the world, for example in China and Muslim countries, where the threat of jail, torture, and execution is very real.

As churches here in the United States how do we become dangerous in the second sense?
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Nanny Krugman

October 31, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A New York Times propagandist believes that the political state must supervise conduct to compel social justice.

No question, the tribulations of borrowers who are defaulting on subprime mortgage loans are real. Those borrowers deserve our sympathy and our prayers.

But that is very far from saying that the Federal government can and must regulate choice to prevent individual misjudgment.

A more important underlying cause than lack of Federal regulation was described in Infantile America:
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Applying Christianity

October 27, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It has to be more than an intellectual understanding. We must strive to live it.

Pastor Steve Treash’s sermon at Black Rock – Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was the last in a series on the practical application of Christian principles to family life.

Those sermons’ messages can be summarized under the headings of:

Love of God: Families must have a spiritual passion for God and godly life. They must converse about God and with God. They must pray together.

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:28-30)

Love for Other People: Jesus continued: The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:31)

Christianity is a positive, not a negative and critical faith. Other people must see in us the positive effect of the Holy Spirit. A cold and critical manner is the opposite.
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The Family Golden Rule

October 21, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The survival of human dignity and individual rights depends upon vitalizing Christian churches to fill the role that the socialist political state endeavors in vain to play. That role centers upon the family.

For several weeks, Steve Treash, Senior Minister at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) has preached on the Bible’s messages for family cohesion and happiness.

Our church is an outreach oriented one, aiming to continue the ministry of the earliest Christian churches, which in the turmoil of the early Roman Empire, were the principal refuge and solace for the poor, widows and orphans, the ill, and the persecuted. In addition to Sunday services focused on the elements that engender a fulfilling family life, Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church offers to all comers a full range of support services, from marriage counseling to family financial planning and assistance.
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PC Education: Lost in Space

October 20, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A liberal Yale professor takes a critical look at his cohort’s handiwork.

Politically-correct, multicultural education, like a lost spacecraft drifting forever in space with no destination and no way to return home, has lost contact with real life. It has become a caricature of science, a bastardized version that Friedrich Hayek called scientism.

Jacob Laksin’s review on the City Journal website of Yale professor Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life describes the growing irrelevance of liberal education in the hands of liberals.
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Darwinian Evolution: the Foundation of Liberal-Socialism

October 2, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A reader believes that characterization is completely absurd.

Commenting on Scientific Snake-Oil, ryan wrote:

“Darwinian evolution [was] concocted originally to discredit the Bible and to support the philosophical materialism of the socialist religion.”

This statement is completely absurd. Can you supply any facts whatsoever to support this claim?

My answer:

There is abundant evidence that Charles Darwin was, as early as his voyage on the Beagle, interested in some hypothesis, any hypothesis other than that offered in the Bible, to explain the fantastic varieties of animal and plant life. Darwin’s works, the outgrowth of similar studies in geology by Charles Lyell, were rebuttals aimed directly at Judeo-Christian doctrine found in the Bible.

Darwin, by the time of his voyage on the Beagle, had become a convinced agnostic. In one of his manuscripts regarding his abandonment of Christianity, Darwin wrote: Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. As Gertrude Himmelfarb notes (Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution):

The progress of his disbelief must have been sufficiently advanced by 1838, when he became engaged to be married, to provoke his father’s warning about the advisability of concealing one’s doubts from one’s wife.
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1929 Parallels

September 25, 2007 by 2 Comments

By Thomas E. Brewton

Central banks are not so wise or powerful as most people assume them to be.

The over expansion of credit fueled by the Federal Reserve between 1922 and 1927 has many parallels to the “irrational exuberance” of financial markets since the beginning of the Clinton administrations.

In the Wall Street Journal‘s September 21 edition, reporter Brian Blackstone writes:

Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh on Friday cautioned against assuming that the Fed will prop up asset prices or protect individual financial institutions…

In Economics and the Public Welfare, a book that cannot be too highly recommended, Benjamin M. Anderson described a similar situation confronting the Federal Reserve in 1926.

Mr. Anderson’s assessment is authoritative, because he was chief economist for the Chase National Bank, then one of the world’s largest, from 1920 to 1937. During that period he was in close contact with major bankers in the United States and central bankers around the world, as well as being closely involved with Chase’s large corporate clients.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Economy/Finances - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Federal Reserve’s NewSpeak

September 16, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Like Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel, the Fed chairman uses words to mean the opposite of reality.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking at a German central bank conference, stated:

…my reading of recent developments is that although some of the details have changed, the fundamental elements of the global saving glut remain in place.

There is no such thing as a “global savings glut.” There is, however, a global, inflationary over-expansion of the money supply, by the Federal Reserve itself, to fund the Federal government’s always-growing welfare state and pork-barrelling by individual politicians.

The current bust in the real estate market and the implosion of the subprime mortgage market are examples of what former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan called “exuberance” in the marketplace, induced by the Fed’s excessive expansion of the money supply over the past several years.

If one reads chairman Bernanke’s statement literally, he equates Federal spending with saving. If that were true, each of us could become rich by spending to the max on our credit cards. In that lexicon, the more you spend, the more you save.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Islam - Islamofascism - Media Bias - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

More on Middle Eastern Turmoil

September 13, 2007 by

By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-Progressive-socialism caused today’s mess, not matter how far back into history we go.

Commenting on Mr. Slater Bakhtavar essay, Mr. James Veverka states, “Nonsense. Carter was a fool regarding several things but the primary cause of the deep problems of the middle east is the effects of colonialism and the partitions after WW1.”

Mr. Veverka neglects to state that this is merely another way of laying the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of liberalism.

Before World War I, most of the Middle East was controlled by the Islamic Ottoman Empire, not by Western colonial powers.

He also neglects to state that the partition of the old Ottoman Empire after World War I was largely at the impetus of President Woodrow Wilson, an iconic liberal-Progressive, along with Georges Clemenceau, the leader of socialist France.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - History - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Iraqi Confederation?

September 8, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We tried it in the United States from 1781 until the Constitution was ratified in 1789.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer observes that the political process in Iraq is moving in the direction of informal partitioning into a Kurdish region in the north, a Sunni region, and a Shiite province in the south, with Baghdad as a mixed religious/ethnic capital region.

In superficial respects, such an arrangement is similar to the government in the United States under the Articles of Confederation, instituted after our War of Independence.

There is, however, a crucial difference between the arrangement among the original thirteen states and the situation in Iraq. The American states were unified, whatever their geographic, economic, and religious sectarian differences, by a common English heritage of constitutional government and by the fact that ours was a Christian nation in which religious toleration was firmly established.
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00Publius Contributor - Budget - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - History - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Taxes - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Infantile America

August 21, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Collapse of the subprime mortgage market reflects the “don’t trust anybody over 30″ mentality of the Baby Boomers.

From 1605 until the late 1960s, Americans universally subscribed to Benjamin Franklin’s maxim,”A penny saved is a penny earned.” Since the Baby Boomer student anarchism of the late 1960s and 1970s, we have become a nation, on balance, worshiping infantile, instant, hedonistic gratification.

Liberals’ ideas about “values” have to do with the absence of personal restraints and with material goods and services, which is what the welfare state is all about. Values for the colonists were the elements of spiritual morality, the intangible qualities that differentiated humans from other animals.

The values of 1776 preached individual self-restraint, self-reliance, and hard work for the future of one’s family. Liberal values give us what has been called a juvenocracy, a society dominated by the heedless pursuit of instant gratification that is characteristic of inexperienced youth: devil take the hindmost; eat, drink, and be merry.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Family - History - Media Bias - Religion - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Atheistic Desperation

August 19, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Atheists thought that God really was dead.

French revolutionary philosophers and the socialist theoreticians who followed them in the early 1800s were captured by what British socialist Graham Wallas called the liberal fallacy: the self-absorbed assumption that whatever their reasoning told them had, by definition, to be the truth and, furthermore, that everyone else on earth would naturally agree with their conclusions. It is a form of tunnel vision that ignores all factors other than what interests liberals.

We see this today in the prescriptions of liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats. They are confident that, because they abhor war, so too does Al Queda. Because liberals are willing to relinquish our national sovereignty to the UN, confident that every dispute can be resolved by rational discussion, they assume Islamic jihadists are wired the same way.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Macroeconomics and Market Meltdown

August 18, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Big government, abetted by Keynesian macroeconomics, fostered today’s macro meltdown in the financial markets.

Collectivism in the Federal government since the 1930s New Deal is paralleled by the emergence in financial markets of giant, multi-national financial institutions. Both reflect the detached, numbers only, view of socialistic regulators who deal in large abstractions called “the economy” and “the workers.”

As Stalin is reputed to have said, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic. Make it big enough, and it can be made to seem in the best interests of society.
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