Jehovah's resurrected children?

Jehovah's Witness literature often focusses on their version of the Blessed Hope (see, for instance, Life in a Peaceful New World). I haven't entirely pinned down what they expect to occur when, owing to their thinking that there will be a kind of probationary period (which is, I think, their version of the Millennium) and then Paradise. Nonetheless, this all is definitely after the general resurrection—which, by the by, is somewhat less "general" in Watchtower theology than for orthodox Christianity.

It occurred to me, though, that there are some pretty odd illustrations to go with the beliefs. For sure the illustrations are hardly determinative of the theology, but they are somewhat indicative at least of the way a Jehovah's Witness envisages the eternal state.

And the oddest thing is that it has children of all ages, including infants. So what? Are people having children out of wedlock, or are they getting married contrary to Jesus' own words on the subject?

Who needs a government?

Listening to a Today report on Liberia, a "failed state", it seemed remarkable to me that the guest editor and report's presenter, Zadie Smith—not an economist, political theorist, development expert, but an author—was working on the basis that a lack of government was the fundamental economic problem. She used the picture of "connective tissue", or rather a lack of it, to describe what a failed state is like, and that seems quite a good picture for it. But that does not mean that the solution is better government, as she seemed to be implying.

Government is needed to do certain things, like maintain law and order and protect the country, and once sufficiently developed, is able to do some good in fields like education and healthcare. But her examples were of a different order. Perhaps the most striking was of the rice farmers who went to the Ministry of Agriculture to procure a sickle and thresher to harvest a field of crops, only to be told that there were none in stock. A result of a lack of "connective tissue".

Her implicit conclusion was that if the problem is too little government, the solution must be stronger government, better government, more government. She went on to talk about a "trickle-down" theory, and this really was the same idea as classic supply-side trickle-down economics; the only difference was that the classical economists think that wealth trickles down from the wealthy, whereas she thought that wealth should trickle down from the government.

Smith is wrong. She is wrong, because to obtain funding governments slow down the economy, when selling goods they invariably get prices wrong and when distributing resources they cannot allocate them efficiently. They will not help the economy to grow by buying sickles centrally from multi-nationals, storing them in big warehouses and selling them when farmers come to ask.

On balance and under purely economic considerations, Liberians are probably better off without a functioning government: the problem is closer to home. Why ever does the farmer need to go to a government warehouse to buy a sickle?

In the good old days, we did not need politicians to get harvesting and threshing tools. We had blacksmiths, and so did African villages. Now we industrialised, but large swathes of Africa are not going to industrialise overnight. Where did all their blacksmiths go? And more to the point, why are we assuming that such a state of affairs must continue?

Rather than arguing for the building of a government out of whole cloth, possibly raising up the next Charles Taylor in the process, Smith should be arguing for the development of trades schools, where experts in essential skills can train young men and women in a trade which will be a benefit to those around them and give them a chance to earn an income. That will do real good, and will help Liberians to help themselves, rather than encouraging them to expect their government to stock all the tools, goods and services they require.

This is a hoot

Andrew Rawnsley proves that he is a comedic genius with his column in yesterday's Observer, charting how he thinks the following year will pan out as this year's trends amplify, combine and mutually re-inforce. I think my favourite part is the holiday antics in August.

Vote for the Lizard People!

You know it makes sense. (Thanks: Liberal Democrat Voice)

The Minnesota recount's best feature: comedy ballots. The surreal discussion about whether "Lizard People" is valid name for a person does raise an interesting point, though. Suppose that someone wrote-in "Democrats" for the Senate seat, you'd probably assess that their intent was clear and the vote should be assigned to the Democrat. So what if someone wrote-in "Lying, cheating b*st*ard"?

That's the spirit!

In post-Soviet Russia, protestors oppose tariffs (BBC). They get heavy-handed treatment by the police for their troubles.

In post-capitalist Britain, there would probably be dancing in the streets if the Government announced it was imposing a 50% ad valorem on imported cars.

Is socialism still relevant?

Thus asks Guy Sorman. Or, as the CiF's "cheezburger" counter-queries,

Is the world still flat?

Fixing the banks?

I was thinking, on the basis of something I read a while ago, about whether we really need a "lender of last resort" system. It functions as state protection for banks against the danger of a run, and as a protectionist measure, getting rid of it would obviously need a serious international effort. But suppose we did: how would a sensible bank operate if it couldn't get help in the event of a run?

Surely, it would operate like this. Instead of "borrowing short to lend long" as currently, banks would need to act so as to be as sure as they could that when a debt of theirs fell due, they could honour it. So, to take an example, a bank might offer a 5-year savings account; the money thus raised could only be used to lend for periods of up to five years.

Shorter savings periods are currently available, and even shorter ones still would probably become available. Longer loans, such as mortgages, would be funded by borrowing too; however, banks would probably be unable to fund mortgages through traditional savings accounts, and would instead go down the route of issuing what amount to corporate bonds, so that if savers want to redeem early, they can sell their bond to someone else. Instant access money would not have an interest rate, and in fact would probably attract a charge for administration.

In this way, a bank can never be run, since it always knows how much money it needs to have available for withdrawal and when, and no-one can demand their money ahead of time. Of course, a bank can still go bankrupt, since it can still make bad loans; but to re-iterate, it cannot experience a run.

Apart from charges for current accounts and instant access savings, the other chief drawback is higher lending interest rates. This illustrates the fact that the "lender of last resort" system has been responsible for lower interest rates than a free market would sustain, and therefore has fuelled unsustainable growth.

It seems to me that this isn't as mad an idea as first it may sound: get rid of the "lender of last resort" system and let the banks sink or swim. Customers, of course, would not be protected either, but (a) it's probably no bad thing to expect people to do a little homework before stashing savings away, and (b) we've already seen rescues of customers apart from the FSCS, which could still happen.

Thankyou, Philippe Legrain!

At long flipping last, a commentator says what I've been banging on about here. Writing in the Guardian, Legrain says,

Immigrants don't just take jobs, they also create them, as they spend their wages and fill roles in complementary lines of work. If Britain threw out its Polish workers there wouldn't suddenly be more jobs for British people—just as throwing women out of work wouldn't provide more jobs for men.

(Source)

Reading the comments section proves, as if we didn't already know this, that some Guardian readers don't understand economics. Slightly more surprisingly, we also learn that there are a good many people who think of themselves as progressive and liberal, and yet who are, in truth, neither.

Did I ever point out…

…that the most environmentally-friendly (and cheapest) way of moving goods whose factors of production ("ingredients") all start off in other countries is to minimise the shipping distance of the factors and not to minimise the shipping distance of the product? That's because factors are invariably bulkier and heavier than products. So, plucking numbers out of thin air, one shipload of cotton t-shirts may require two shiploads of cotton, and thus clearly it is better for the cotton to be shipped less far and the t-shirts shipped further: in fact, in the case of one-factor products, it is best for the manufacturing to take place as close to the source of the factor as possible.

Not only is it better for the planet, it's also good for the producer economy. Given that many of our factors are produced in poorer countries, you can see that there is a strong development argument for buying products made overseas, too.

And yet, this flies in the face of the way some politicians talk: they're all about buying things manufactured "locally". But sometimes it's better for the product to have been manufactured overseas, Mr Clegg, Ms Lucas!

It do make Oi laff

A bit over a week ago, I wrote to the Independent website technical and editorial teams drawing to their attention a rather nasty advert hosted on their site, from the TV Licensing "Authority" (Tyranny might be a better term). My complaint to Technical was that I suspected it was making their site practically unusable, as whenever it was on my screen, the whole thing slowed down noticeably. My observation to Editorial was that the Indy has an editorial stance against the database state, and to be permitting ads on the website which proclaim, "We know where you live. We know where everyone lives. You're all on our database." somewhat undermines that position.

A day or two later, the ads had disappeared, and wouldn't you know, the website is a lot faster.

Today? I read Philip Hensher's column, and his main topic is,

The little letters from the TV Licensing people, arrogant, bullying and quite dishonest

It do make Oi laff.

It's a great name for a fraudster

Bernard Madoff. As in, Bernard Madoff with all your money. $50bn of it, which is quite impressive, and he winked not a few banks' hoods (or is it the other way around?).

And to cap it all off, it turns out that Bernard Madoff with a load of money from a Horlick. She made a Horlicks of her investment, then.

Was the Old Testament premillennialist?

One of the claims dispensational premillennialists like to throw about, as if this proves their case, is that the Old Testament prophets were "premillennial" in their eschatology (e.g., Walvoord). Thus, they argue, so should we be.

Yeah, but no, but yeah, but…

The Old Testament prophets were "premillennial" in that they looked forward to the inauguration of the Messiah's reign, a reign which would be preceded by the arrival of the Messiah on earth, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come!

And, well, that happened, didn't it? Isn't that what Christmas is all about? Don't we sing about it?

Hail to the Lord's anointed,
great David's greater son!
Hail, in the time appointed,
his reign on earth begun!

The Old Testament prophets were "premillennial" for precisely the reason that we must be amillennial: Christ's first coming, and specifically the events of Easter, were the inauguration of his reign.

Nothing Must Be Done!

The Government has been accusing the Opposition of being the "do-nothing" party; this of course isn't entirely accurate, but there is a sense in which the charge sticks. Writing in today's Times, Matthew Parris makes the case for a Tory embrace of this charge, and of turning it on the head of the Government.

The other hurdle - how to sell inaction in popular language - is less daunting than it may seem. “Hands off” is not an implicitly unwelcome sentiment to the British. “Stop fiddling around; you can't fix it” and “Stop boasting of powers you don't possess” are perfectly capable of chiming with the public mood. Couple that (as Mr Cameron did at the LSE) with the message that the fiddling and grandstanding is being done at the voters' expense and will have to be paid for, and you have a potentially powerful pitch. I regret that the word “pissing” should be unsuitable for a Tory poster. “It's our money you're pissing into the wind, Gordon” might otherwise strike a chord.

(Source)

I would add to that message the case that just as you and I don't possess perfect information, neither does the Government; and therefore, any action the Government tries to take will necessarily be ill-informed, ill-judged and ill-adapted to the circumstances as they exist on the ground.

To take an example, it is often said, and correctly, that the economy won't recover until the housing market does. The conclusion drawn by sloppy thinkers is that the Government should try to prop up the housing market in order to hasten the demise of the recession. But this is nonsense; the point is that the housing market's recovery is conditional upon housing reaching a level of pricing at which it becomes sustainable once again. So in fact, to hasten the demise of the recession, the Government should do precisely nothing with regard to manipulating the housing market [1]. Propping up the housing market would merely prolong the recession and throw even more people out of work. Letting housing find its appropriate level is difficult, but necessary.

Letting the recession run [2] also requires a Government willing to acknowledge that it doesn't know everything. Perhaps the slogan for the Opposition should encapsulate the message, "They don't know what they're doing; neither do we. The difference is, we know it."

[1] This does not preclude the Government making use of prevailing market conditions in order to construct social housing more cheaply. That would be the Government acting as a market participant and not as the market's guiding force.
[2] This does not preclude the Government acting to ensure that people on the margins are not left destitute.

When Church Fathers go off-message

Augustine could be a queer old bird when he wanted.

We know, too, that some men are differently constituted from others, and have some rare and remarkable faculty of doing with their body what other men can by no effort do, and, indeed, scarcely believe when they hear of others doing. … Some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing. … Seeing, then, that even in this mortal and miserable life the body serves some men by many remarkable movements and moods beyond the ordinary course of nature, what reason is there for doubting that, before man was involved by his sin in this weak and corruptible condition, his members might have served his will for the propagation of offspring without lust?

(City of God, XIV.24. Source.)

Implicitly, he's suggesting that had the fall not occurred we'd be able to form a flatulent orchestra. Bizarre.

Polly Toynbee has her Lauper moment

Yes folks, these are her "True Colors":

Meanwhile a second anti-state battleground had opened up, as libertarians of right and left attacked the government for Big Brother-like interference with the privacy and freedoms of the citizen. Labour's plans to introduce identity cards, to allow police to hold terrorist suspects without trial for 42 days and the widespread use of CCTV cameras in public places were seen by conspiracy theorists as sinister encroachments on ancient civil liberties.

(Source)

People with concerns about civil liberties are "conspiracy theorists". "Libertarian" is a dirty word. "Government good, big government better"; and goverment intrusions on the citizen's private life go hand-in-hand with government intrusions on his economic life. In the world of La Toynbee, the government doesn't make horrendous mistakes, people can be trusted with absolute power over others, and letting people get on with their lives is plain nonsense.

Although I don't think I could credibly claim to be among the liberal left, they have my respect as a group of people who share many concerns and goals, although we would differ on methods and some principles. Well, these honourable friends frequently bemoan within the general left-wing a worrying tendency towards statism, control-freakery and an utter refusal to stop meddling. Here's hoping this article gets wheeled out time and again as they attempt to argue the state out of those places where it has no right to go, and to show to the world what the statist left really thinks about citizen's rights.

Another broken Brown promise

This has to be the definition of "kicked into the long grass". The scandal of Equitable Life has rolled on for eight years; the Parliamentary Ombudsman started a report in 2004 and completed it in July this year, calling for an apology and compensation from the Government for mis-regulation.

A few weeks ago, I watched the Prime Minister promise, with his own lips, a response before Christmas. Now Harriet Harman has told us that the promised response won't come until after. He makes the acceptable announcement but sends a lackey to report the broken promise: Macavity's not there!

Of course, we can tell what's going on. Do we seriously entertain the possibility that Flash Gordon, Saviour of the Universe, will ever accept that this happened on his watch, in his department, and he owes those policy-holders an apology and compensation for the very real failures of a regulator which simply did not apply, in that terrible banker's jargon, "due diligence"?

What is an evangelical?

I reported earlier on the Guardian's new belief section, and observed that they had ignored Protestant Christianity. Well, this week, they are asking, "What should evangelicals believe? What must an evangelical think and do to make him or her worthy of the name?" The answers, thus far, are:

John Richardson: The evangelical 'atmosphere' depends on three essential qualities

Christina Rees: We need to remember that the focus of early Christians was not a holy book or even a special rite or ritual, but a set of relationships

Justin Thacker: As Jesus showed through the Sermon on the Mount, behaviour is as important as belief

John Richardson's article (he who is known in the blogosphere as the Ugley Vicar) is fair, but Rees is very muddled and Thacker is deeply concerning. He illustrates, as I read him, the theological drift of the EA, as orthopraxy is elevated over orthodoxy, as if belief is less important than action.

God's action precedes our own, and therefore our right believing must be prior to any right acting, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth…

Crash Gordon may think he's been saving the world, but the truth is, his International Rescue Consensus (also known as Blunderbirds) is foundering.

The German finance minister has spoken out in a forthright attack on the Government's foolhardy policy, calling it "crass" and "breathtaking". He pointed out that the VAT reduction will do (this is the technical term) naff all for spending, and that you don't solve a problem caused by excessive credit by trying to borrow yet more. He also criticised the sharp swing from what he described as "supply-side economics" to those of Keynes.

The Night of the Long Arm

Despite the immediate "Godwin FAIL" of the post, I think the Adam Smith Institute's Junksmith has a point when he posits the following as a potential press release from yesteryear:

The German government yesterday denied any prior knowledge of the SS and Gestapo raids which killed 85 people on the "night of the long knives." In a statement Herr Hitler said, "This is a purely operational SS matter, and government policy remains one of non-intervention." Fieldmarshall Goering said it would be wrong to intervene in an ongoing SS investigation. Reichsminister Goebbels accused those raising the issue of "a blatant attempt to intimidate the Gestapo and prevent it from carrying out its duties," while Herr Himmler announced that there would be an internal SS enquiry into the incident, chaired by himself.

(Source)

PMQ, 10-Dec

Mr. Speaker, the committee we established on Monday, in the teeth if I may say so of the valiant efforts of a combined Opposition, was called the Speaker's Committee. The matter at hand was House of Commons business and not Government business. Can the Prime Minister explain why the Government had a three-line whip out on House business, and why the Speaker's Committee in name has become the Prime Minister's Committee in effect? And can he explain why the British public should believe a word he says about the non-involvement of Her Majesty's Government in that affair, given that he has seen fit to strong-arm this House in such a manner?

"Why our industry needs your money"

Aware that US taxpayers may need some explanation of the bailout of their car industry, a new advertising campaign has been launched by the Big Three to do precisely that. Click on the picture to see the full thing.

Warning: Anglo-Saxon terms employed to satirical effect.

(Thanks: hundriver at TMF.)

I don't how I does it…

I jus' does it.

A week before my own post, the Telegraph ran an article, of which I was completely unaware, in which Terence Kealey, the VC of Buckingham University and Senior Fellow in Education at the Adam Smith Institute, wrote about the problems of a centralised standard in examinations. He doesn't propose a solution, but implicitly, he suggests that a solution akin to my own would be the way forward.

In the debate on the Gracious Address, "Call me Dave" pointed out that the Tories originally proposed, and therefore support, the Government's policy of an "independent exams regulator"; presumably they're not really bothered about standards in education either. Michael Gove's a bright chap; can't he see the problem here?

Behold, a man who knows his own mind

Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con): Earlier this afternoon, Mr. Speaker told us that he regretted the fact that the office of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) was searched without a warrant. Does the Prime Minister share that regret?

The Prime Minister: That is a matter for the inquiry to decide, which is the right thing to happen. (Hansard)

His own opinion is for a committee of inquiry to decide. Great.

Incidentally, in the midst of all the hand-wringing about banks not lending to people—and ignoring the fact that, as I relayed yesterday, they're being forced to lend to the Government—has anyone started asking the simple questions? The simplest question is this: if I had £100,000 to spare, would I lend it to someone, or a number of someones, to buy a house?

Debasing the gold standard?

I was turning over a thought or two about education, and realised that the much-bemoaned decline in standards can be attributed, at least in part, to a standard observation from economics. Gresham's Law states that "bad money drives out good". More precisely, it states that when commodity money is in issue and the government requires that every unit be accorded an equal face value with every other, then the money with a lower actual value will drive out the money with a higher actual value, because the producer of the "bad" money will make a higher profit than the producer of the "good" money.

And what has this to with declining educational standards? Well, the GCSE and A-Level are "gold standards" in education; they're "commodity money". And we have a number of providers, each of whom is (implicitly) competing to acquire market share, as they get paid per student. Since employers treat a WJEC '98 History GCSE as the equivalent of an OCR '08 History GCSE, you can see that Gresham's Law could well apply. The GCSE and A-Level should, according to Gresham, devalue over time.

And whaddaya know, they do. I remember being told by a teacher that while the school generally followed a particular examination board for GCSEs, we were using a different one because it was easier to get a good grade. It's a perfectly rational decision if one 'C' is equivalent to another; but you can see that it will drive the qualification down in quality.

I don't know whether it's illegal to treat GCSEs and A-Levels as being of different values according to year and examining board, but it certainly shouldn't be; in fact, it should be positively encouraged. It's what stops American diploma mills from driving decent universities out of business, and if it were legal and widespread, it would halt the decline in standards here, too.

A free market in qualifications would see examination boards compete on price and quality, as schools would no longer be looking for the "easiest" GCSE but rather for the best GCSE, which discriminates the most fairly and does the best by its students. And it will maintain standards, because a board which is constantly leaking quality will lose custom rapidly.

Ofqual est delenda!

Hello, Mr. Left Hand, meet Mr. Right Hand

The Government has thrown billions at the banks, and is making deep grunting noises about the necessity of lending this money out to borrowers. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has cut rates, and Alistair wants to make all the boys play by Mervyn's rules, twisting their arms to pass on the cut.

The FSA, meanwhile, has quietly forced banks to improve their liquidity by using all that moolah to buy—oh, yes—gilts, effectively lending money to the Government. In fact, the money the Government shelled out to the banks in preference shares was some £50bn, well below the estimated amount of assets the FSA estaimtes banks will have to move, which is somewhere between £87bn and £353bn. What they gave with one hand, they have taken away with the other!

Martin Luther goes to the movies

Clive James' Point of View is always worth listening to, and he was absolutely stellar this week. He was talking about the way Hollywood glamourises violence, by, as he put it, trying "to make us imagine we're the glamorous figure, the one in the close-up." I advise you not only read, but listen to, the whole thing; he is incredibly perceptive.

He says, in his peroration,

I'm sure that when the businessman gets kidnapped I'll see the driver getting shot, but I doubt if we'll hear anything else about him. Yet he's the one we should think about as one of us. The one who doesn't matter.

Hollywood encourages us to see ourselves as the hero, to identify with him (or her) and to see ourselves as the heroes of our own lives. It isn't simply that we support the hero, although certainly we do; it's that when the hero Biff!s and Ka-pow!s the villain, we're supposed to wish that we could be like that, and perhaps even go so far as to think of ourselves like that. We're meant to leave the cinema walking two inches taller.

And by doing this, we miss the character who is really like us, the one who doesn't matter. We're being directed towards a kind of glamour which never satisfies, because we can never attain to it.

James isn't a Christian, but I think he was basically groping around the theology of the cross, hence my title. You see, the cross is the polar opposite of Hollywood: Hollywood tells us that we're the heroes of our own lives; the cross tells us that we're the villains. Hollywood portrays heroism as glamour, sex and killing; the cross shows the true hero, being heroic through submission, pain and death. Hollywood's story puts me on a pedestal; the cross puts me in my place.

The culture of Hollywood and the theology of the cross are utterly antithetical. Does it mean I should stop watching films? No; I watched the latest James Bond yesterday. But I watched it very differently from the way I might otherwise have done.

Plus ça change?

The Telegraph has a list of "how things were" in 1951, the last time the Bank of England rate was at 2%. They've given prices adjusted for inflation, and this is what we get comparing with the true modern price:

• A litre of petrol cost 88p. Today, a litre of unleaded costs an average of 91p.
• A loaf of bread cost 58p. That's about what I pay, although I freely admit to buying cheap bread.
• A cinema ticket cost 21p. Blimey, I paid £4.50 last night and it was cheap night.
• Cars cost something like £12,000. The manufacturer's price for a Renault Mégane is about that now.
• Dentures cost £100. Now, they cost £194; of course, this is a centrally-driven price and not a market price.
• A camera would set you back £120. Again, you can get them more cheaply, but £120 isn't unreasonable.
• The average house cost £48,000. Hahaha. Give it eighteen months and we'll see.

So it's an interesting exercise, and interesting to speculate as to the underlying factors driving the changes.

Ye gods, saving will drive us into penury!

As if. Read Hazlitt, who pointed out that,

Saving, in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending. The usual difference is that the money is turned over to someone else to spend on means to increase production.

So far as giving employment is concerned, spending and saving give as much as spending alone, and put as much money in circulation. The chief difference is that the employment provided by the spender can be seen by anyone with one eye; but it is necessary to look a little more carefully, and to think a moment, to recognize that every dollar of saving gives as much employment as every dollar that the spender throws around.

The point, of course, is that invested and saved money is passed to someone else who spends it, mostly on capital goods. Saving is thus implicit spending, and an investment in everyone's future. I contend that it is therefore a public good and that the Government should not discourage it. The Savings Gateway, announced in the Queen's Speech, is a social engineering policy with a savings component; perhaps the Government will see its way clear to doing something more effective, such as exempting savings from income tax at least at the basic rate, thus placing savings interest on a par with share dividends.

Co-incidence?

One might almost have thought it planned.

In today's Times, Daniel Finkelstein argues for localism in public services on the basis that we can't tell which policies work by trying the sequentially; only letting local communities all over the country try all manner of different policies will give us some sense of good policy directions. He gives as an example education, where an American study suggested that more time in school works well, while a Swedish experiment suggested the reverse. In what I can only judge to be groping towards the idea of a 'controlled test', he concludes that we cannot conclude anything properly, and need a glorious free-for-all, a veritable smorgasbord of policies from which local communities can pick and choose at will.

In today's Independent, the Tories' children's spokesman, Michael Gove, argues that we need to emulate the Swedish system—not the experiment, but the smorgasbord which made the experiment possible, a free schooling system. Such a system will allow parents the authority to take control of their children's education themselves, rather than putting up with the provision made by local bureaucrats. Fee-paying parents will take an interest in their offspring's education, and by putting the rich and poor on a "level paying field", we can see that poorer areas will profit disproportionately from the resulting uplift in standards.

When the election comes, I have promised myself that I shall post on the 'hopes and fears' contained in all three major parties' manifestos. This localist sentiment among Conservative front-benchers is a genuine 'hope', even though as previously discussed, we may 'fear' that power will corrupt that hope.