Author: readerjohn

I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West. There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.

Economic Stork Theory

I recently finished reading John Mêdaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market, and have been transcribing some notes from it. It was both a helpful review of economics (in which my formal education is minimal, much as I enjoyed it) and a fairly powerful brief for Distributism as a “Third Way” economics. A conservative temperament doesn’t rush into things, so I’m taking it slow, but I like Distributism more and more.

The family is in some ways at the center of Distributist thought — unlike standard-issue modern economics:

If economics requires fully socialized participants, and if economics is about social provisioning, then the question of the family cannot be divorced from economic questions. For economic actors, producers, and consumers are “produced” and socialized within the confines of the family; without the family there will be  no next generation, and hence no future, for the economists to worry about. Therefore, it is the family that is the basic economic unit as well as the basic social unit. Modern economics tends to ignore the role of the family completely to focus on the individual. However, the individual, by himself, is sterile and not a self-sustaining entity. Neoclassical economics thus has no way to explain how new workers come into the economy, and hence it has no way to explain growth. John Mueller has characterized these shortcomings in economics as “The Economic Stork Theory.” In the stork theory, workers arrive in the economy fully grown, fully trained, and fully socialized. These storks born workers are a “given”; that is, there is no way to explain the growth in workers or their level of training and socialization, and hence little reason to support them with political or fiscal policies

…

It is an oddity of modern economics that it depends on treating the worker as just another commodity (labor) for purposes of pricing that labor, but treats the production cost of that “commodity” as something beyond the price system. If we take any other commodity, say a bar of pig iron, it is assumed that the price must cover the cost of production, maintenance,  and depreciation, or the product will be withdrawn from the market. But in regards to labor, this assumption is never examined. For labor has its own “production cost” (the family) and its own “maintenance” cost (subsistence and healthcare) and its own “depreciation” costs (sickness and old age). Labor cannot simply be withdrawn from the market when these requirements are not met. Therefore, labor – and the family – does not even gain the dignity of the bar of pig iron in modern economic theory.

(Pages 39-41)

In order to accomplish the material provisioning of society, the economy must provide for the material provision of the family, because the family is the basis of both the social and economic orders; it is the reason for having an economy and the indispensable condition of an economy.

(Page 43)

However, we need to note that that this [supply and demand] model applies only to commodities, that is, reproducible, elastic objects and services that are made mainly to be exchanged in the marketplace.

Obviously, many things do not fall under the category of a commodity in that sense. The supply  of rare wines and fine paintings is not affected by the price.  Even when a Monet fetches $30 million, Mr. Monet will not supply the market with any new pictures. Now the importance of Monet’s to the market is not very great, and we can ignore the impact, no matter how high the price. But there are three things of great importance to the market, which also have no equilibrium point; these things are money, nature, and man. Their price and quantity are not regulated by supply and demand, and they are not “manufactured” for the market …

(Page 72)

In chapter 4, we introduced John Mueller’s economic stork theory (EST), which demonstrated that economists have no way to account for arrival of workers in the economy. Even as they “commodify” the workers, economists have no way to account for the “production” of this “commodity”; the worker just  mysteriously “appears” in the economy. Economists are willing to talk about the production of other “commodities,” such as pigs or pig iron. They know that the price of these commodities must cover the cost of production, maintenance and depreciation, or the commodity will simply disappear from the market. When it comes to labor, however, they are reluctant to concede that this too is “produced” and has production, maintenance and depreciation costs. In other words, they can modify labor, and then refused to speak of it as they would any other commodity. Hence, even under its own terms, the neoclassical theory is incomplete; it cannot account for this rather basic “commodity” per se, but must accept its creation out of thin air.

Mueller’s economic stork theory has a rather curious corollary. Under the EST, The only useful work done in the economy is work done for wages or other economic rewards, and hence there are only two kinds of economic activity, work and leisure. Thus, there are only two kinds of individuals in this theory, what I call Partially Useful Individuals (PUIs) and  Totally Useless Individuals (TUIs). The PUIs are partially useful because they spend some of their time at “work” producing things in the exchange economy. The TUIs, However, don’t “work” at all. Rather, some of the TUIs,  otherwise known as “mothers,” spend their time in such leisure activities is taking care of household pets, some of these pets are called “cats” or “dogs,” and others are called “children,” another form of TUIs.

(Page 98)

Mêdaille, an economist, sticks fairly closely to his economic points. I, a curmudgeon (slightly younger than Mêdaille, actually), don’t need to. If Mêdaille is right, I don’t see how this standard market theory can engender enthusiastic support from any serious Christian believer to whom family also is central. (There are multiple ways in which our economy disrupts family. This only scratches the surface.)

In their appreciation of the importance of the family to children (future “labor” to economists, “human resources” to personnel departments), the French have shown themselves to be far more sophisticated than increasing numbers in the U.S. and than standard-issue “capitalist” economic theories.

The French! God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform!

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Confessions

  1. My hope sometimes trumps my experience.
  2. I really don’t care for sports any more.
  3. When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.
  4. I weep at concerts.
  5. I am, relatively speaking, a real blue nose these days.
  6. I do not believe that all religions are equally ridiculous to the nonbeliever.
  7. Wendell Berry has disappointed me.

Continue reading “Confessions” →

Corporate Freedom of Religion?

I’ve been doing quite a bit of Tweeting and Facebook posting, as well as a couple of blogs (here and here), on various business challenges to the “employer contraceptive mandate” of the PPACA, a/k/a Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare.” I’ve been doing so because of important – and vexing – questions of religious freedom.

I’ve been a bit of a religious freedom head case all my adult life. Forty years ago or more I was reading the Seventh Day Adventists’ “Liberty” Magazine and writing letters to its editor. That was before my delayed law school entrance at age 30. (By the time I got my B.S., I’d been in school away from home, living in dorms or boarding houses, for nine years. I was ready to move on to “life.”)

In law school, I took a special religion clause elective class in Summer School, being edged out for the “A star” (the top A) by my friend Joe Rebone.

I take free exercise of religion very seriously, coming about as close to an absolutist position as one can coherently come without countenancing anarchy. I’m not a relativist – I’m a firm believer in capital-O Orthodox Christianity – but I give wide latitude to people’s right to be wrong, expecting in return that they’ll not try to harm me for calling them Krustians, Happy Clappies, Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Gnostics, Dualists, Nominalists and other loathsome or risible things.

But even I pause at the idea that corporations and LLCs have a right to freely exercise religion — which comes into play when a smaller, or closely-held, business entity objects to buying contraceptive coverage for its employees on religious grounds. That’s the “vexing” part of these cases, and courts have split.

Personally and politically, I think the contraceptive mandate is sheer political pandering and a gratuitous insult to the kinds of folks who would almost certainly not vote for Obama.

First, it’s not insurance. It’s pre-payment of predictable “medical” expenses. But to talk much about that opens a can of worms because that’s exactly what “traditional” employer-provided health insurance has been since World War II. (For more on that topic, check this podcast.)

Second, to put it bluntly, young single women and single moms are disproportionately Democrat, compared to married women with children, who trend Republican. And the “Pro Choice” lobby is overwhelmingly Democrat, and loves slipping a wedge into the door, to be pounded on later to open it further. I don’t know how consciously the pandering to them figured in the initial passage of ACA, but the Julias of this world, dependent on government at all stages of life including their choice to have children out of wedlock, became a conscious target in the re-election campaign.

But legally, that doesn’t get us very far. Bad policy and political pandering isn’t necessarily unconstitutional.  Elections matter.

Nevertheless, a program like this that’s generally “constitutional albeit stupid and odious” (I just made up that category) might be unconstitutional as applied to particular employers. Howard Friedman, author of the Religion Clause blog, recently stepped out of his role as neutral chronicler to do some substantive commentary on the topic for Religion Dispatches:

Can business owners assert that their free exercise is being burdened when the coverage mandate is imposed not on them, but on their business? Does the for-profit corporation or LLC have religious beliefs of its own? Does General Motors practice religion? If not, do smaller corporations exercise religion? Or are the small businesses really asserting the religious rights of their owners?

It might seem strange to claim that a corporation (or an LLC) has religious freedom rights separate from those of the “real people” who own or manage it. An Oklahoma federal district court, rejecting a challenge by Hobby Lobby Stores to the coverage mandate, thought it was, finding:

General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors. Religious exercise is, by its nature, one of those “purely personal” matters… which is not the province of a general business corporation.

Hobby Lobby appealed, but the 10th Circuit Court refused to enjoin enforcement while the appeal is pending. So did Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Neither resolved the question of whether the business entity itself has religious rights.

However, in other ways, corporations often do have constitutional rights. A corporation cannot be convicted of a criminal offense without the protections given by the Constitution to criminal defendants. And in the famous 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights of political speech that “real people” do. If the First Amendment has been interpreted to guarantee a corporation’s free speech rights, does it also have free religious exercise rights guaranteed by the same Amendment?

…

This idea—that a corporation and its owners should be treated as the same person—is a well-known concept in corporate law, commonly referred to it as “piercing the corporate veil.” Most of the time, lawyers warn their corporate clients to do everything possible to avoid this “piercing,” since the doctrine is usually invoked when creditors of a business are making claims against the personal assets of a company’s shareholders, seeking to recoup their losses from an insolvent business by going after its owners. There is a vast amount of case law on when a court should allow “piercing the corporate veil” to reach shareholders’ personal assets, often focusing on abuse of the corporate form, misleading of creditors, or lack of corporate formalities. Business lawyers look to whether the corporation is the mere alter egoof its owners and routinely advise their corporate clients to emphasize the corporation’s separate existence from its owners.

However, the pleadings filed in many of the contraceptive mandate challenges purposely blur this line, collapsing the beliefs of the business with its owners, inviting “piercing.” As the district court concluded in a challenge brought by Tyndale House, a for-profit publisher of Bibles and Christian books:

when the beliefs of a closely-held corporation and its owners are inseparable, the corporation should be deemed the alter-ego of its owners for religious purposes.

Courts that have allowed businesses to assert the religious exercise rights of their owners have rarely, if ever, referred to the “piercing” cases brought by corporate creditors against business owners. This omission hides the unintended consequences that may be in store for small business owners who identify too closely with their business firms. These owners may be unaware of the new personal liability for business debts—including liabilities to the government—that they are risking by equating themselves with their business for purposes of religious expression. They may be inadvertently inviting the government to hold them to their word—that they and the business are one—when it comes to other matters as well.

I have become uncomfortable with the idea of corporations insofar as they are used to insulate owners from the consequences of reckless, high risk and speculative ventures whereby the owners hoped to “make a killing.” Any time a corporation goes broke, it saddles its creditors with the loss (unless it’s Too Big to Fail, in which case it saddles all of us with the loss, as its executives laugh all the way to the bank). I know one roofer wiped out by the bankruptcy of a large department store chain after he replaced one of their roofs on his own nickel, for instance. If he was smart, and he too was incorporated, he may have saddled his own creditors in turn.

This is exactly what corporations and limited liability companies are supposed to do in the case of honest failure. But after the last few years, “honest failures” barely are visible in the thicket of moral hazard.

Yet some pious business people have chosen to do business in those liability-limiting forms. Their seeking both to limit liability while claiming that the business entity is really them for purposes of free exercise of religion is both dubious (whence numerous losses as well as wins so far on contraceptive mandate challenges) and dangerous if successful, as Professor Friedman outlines.

If you’re even a bit of a religious freedom head case, stay tuned. This probably is going to some interesting and unanticipated places.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Oppression in America

It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.

So ends a Timothy Dalrymple reflection on the Louie Giglio incident, which he described thus:

An evangelical pastor with a sterling record, who had developed strong relationships with President Obama and particularly his office of faith-based initiatives headed by Joshua DuBois, who had turned his enormously successful Passion conferences against the problem of human trafficking, was just publicly humiliated and shouted out of the public square for professing fairly standard Christian views on human sexuality and the possible redemption of our desires through the transformative power of the gospel of Christ. On the advice of the faith-based office, Giglio was invited to deliver the benediction, the LGBT community raised a hue and cry, and the White House quite obviously (see here and here) pressured him to step aside.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Louie Giglio until Friday. I’m an ex-evangelical, still a practicing Christian (in the most historic sense), and have ceased trying to keep up with the doings of the evangelical subculture. Still, as in the current kerfuffle, those doings come to my attention often anyway.

But it sounds as if Mr. Giglio is an exemplary and center- to center-left figure, except that he does, or once did, believe that what we do with our genitals matters.

I’m not going to oversell what happened to Giglio. He was going to get to give a very public prayer. Now he’s not going to get to give that very public prayer. That’s not exactly being sent to the Gulag.

But I do think it’s ominous that a guy with so stellar a record was keelhauled for a remark from 20 years ago, as Dalrymple’s links do pretty well confirm, and that mainstream media aren’t eager to let that cat out of the bag:

Here’s how the fourth paragraph of [Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s] report appeared on The New York Times website early yesterday afternoon.

An official with Mr. Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee said the committee, which operates separately from the White House, vetted Mr. Giglio. People familiar with internal discussions between administration and committee officials said the White House viewed the selection as a problem for Mr. Obama, and told the panel on Wednesday night to quickly fix it. By Thursday morning, Mr. Giglio said he had withdrawn.

This paragraph was one of the most significant that I read yesterday because it confirmed that the White House had initiated pulling Giglio from the inaugural program. Yet by yesterday evening and in today’ print edition, this part had been removed from Stolberg’s report.

(Denny Burk, another evangelical of whom I’d not heard until this morning.)

What kind of pressure was brought to bear? Well-reasoned?:

ThinkProgress discovered that Giglio had said some nasty things about homosexuality, including that it’s a sin, that it can be cured, and that it’s a “malfunction.”
As you can imagine, Malfunction-Americans weren’t terribly thrilled about yet another anti-gay bigot appearing at yet another Obama inaugural.
In the ensuing uproar, Louie Giglio was suddenly no longer giving the benediction.
…
Louie Giglio is free think gays have a malfunction that he can cure.  And we’re free to tell him to take a hike.  Religious bigots have an awfully hard time dealing with the concept of mutual free speech.  They love the idea that they can say whatever hateful thing they want.  But then they get very upset and confused when someone gives them a piece of their mind in return.
I can’t prove that the White House told Louie Giglio to take a hike.  I’m simply reading tea leaves.  And the tea leaves I’m reading are making me more and more pleased about how the White House has handled this issue.
I wasn’t pleased that Giglio was selected in the first place.  It was a huge oversight, considering past history.  But they fixed things fast, and to our satisfaction.

(John Aravosis) This is a “progressive” version of the right’s incorrigible misrepresentation about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” thought. “Nasty,” “anti-gay bigot,” “religious bigots,” and “hateful” are very broad-brush and very dubious. It is possible to “love the sinner” while hating the sin, and it does not sound to me as if Giglio is a hater in the mold of Fred Phelps.

The silver lining in this – and, yes, it’s an ominous cloud – is the adage that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. A court recently declined to decree same-sex marriage into his state’s laws precisely because the lobby seeking it is powerful, well-funded, well-connected, and has gained such remarkable cachet in just a few decades that they really don’t need courts carrying water for them any more. They can make their case politically, as they did in several referenda last November.

Perhaps it is something of a paradox that as their political clout grows stronger, the constitutional claims of same-sex marriage advocates become weaker. But if powerlessness is a legitimate variable in judicial decision-making, it is hard to gainsay the view of Judge Jones:

The question of “powerlessness” under an equal protection analysis requires that the group’s chances of democratic success be virtually hopeless, not simply that its path to success is difficult or challenging because of democratic forces. . . . The relevant consideration is the group’s “ability to attract the attention of the lawmakers,” an ability homosexuals cannot seriously be said not to possess.

Of course the advocates of same-sex marriage will continue to press their case in courts of law. They would rather convince five justices of the Supreme Court to impose their agenda on the country than try convincing the country itself.

Yup: “It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.”

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Theophany 2013

On January 6, Eastern (Orthodox) Christians celebrate Theophany, not Epiphany. It is second only to Pascha (Easter) in importance, for it is the feast which celebrates the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity to the world through the Baptism of the Lord.

The major hymn:

When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, worship of the Trinity wast made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of His word. O Christ our God, Who hath appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee.

In contrast, Epiphany for Western Christians celebrates the visitation of the Biblical Magi to the Baby Jesus, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles.

Secondarily, in the east, we recall:

When the Lord entered the waters of Jordan, He sanctified every drop of water on the face of the whole earth.  Thus, water no longer is a mere object used or abused – some thing out of the tap.  Rather, water is now a medium for cleansing the heart, blessing the soul, and healing infirmities; for every drop has touched the sacred flesh of the Lord Christ!

(Devotional for 1/4/13, italics added) So we also do on this day the Great Blessing of Water.

As a former Protestant of relatively “low church” sensibility, I must corroborate the devotional: we Orthodox Christians decidedly do believe that the Most Holy Trinity communicates grace through physical means, not just invisibly and spiritually. If you doubt, remember the woman healed merely by touching the hem of Christ’s garment, or the dead man raised when he touched Elisha’s bones.

It’s not magic, and sick people don’t typically leap up instantly healed after anointing with oil or holy water, but such parts of my Bible I didn’t underline as a Protestant amply attest physical means of grace.

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Postscript: My Priest is down with the flu, so a subdeacon and I must lead a Reader’s Typica – a service missing all but the “bones” of a liturgy. (You surely didn’t think we’d improvise, did you?) Here’s a meditation on some of what we’ll be missing, by a favorite priest/blogger, Fr. Stephen Freeman.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Orthodixie

There seems now to be more than anecdotal evidence that Orthodox Christianity is growing rapidly in the U.S. I don’t recall whether the evidence is more than anecdotal that it’s growing especially fast in the southern states, but that certainly is a widely shared impression, and forms the basis of this video, which looks at two parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in South Carolina.

Both parishes have a number of converts along with “cradle Orthodox.” The second is led by a Charleston-born, back-slapping, charismatic Greek restauranteur/Priest. Yup, a southern-fried Greek is Priest in a Russian Orthodox parish!


I don’t know for certain why Orthodoxy is especially appealing to Southerners, or why, again anecdotally, it holds special appeal for men – being one of few Christian traditions in which men appear to gain interest before women and to be quite faithful in attendance.

I suspect, along with others who have suggested it first, that it’s because Orthodoxy is demanding (whence the appeal to men) and congenial to people who have rejected consumerism to a greater extent than most Americans (concentrated in the south) and who have concomitantly tired of the marketing gimmicks of megachurches and their wannabe imitators. In Orthodoxy is found sobriety and orientation toward God, not to what research says are this year’s trending “felt needs.”

But just as Jonathan Haidt has found that political orientation is largely instinctive, with narrative explanations and arguments following and not always being very accurate, so my hunches may be tainted, as may even the bona fide explanations of male and southern Orthodox converts.

Apologies to Fr. Joseph Huneycutt for borrowing his podcast name for this blog entry, but it fit entirely too well to resist. And a H/T to the evocatively named, considering the topic of this particular entry, “Byzantine Texas” blog.

Too Big to Govern

Not too long ago, I encountered an item reminding me of a little-remarked feature of our national polity: the immense dilution of the meaningful individual voice in governance.

At our nation’s founding, each Congressman represented few people – 50,000 or something. Today he or she represents roughly 700,000. This historic figure may be wrong, but the difference is by orders of magnitude.

And even at that, with 435 members, Congress is pretty unruly. We really can’t grow Congress back to where a Congressman represents something like the relatively few of yesteryear. It would be totally unworkable.

This leaves voters alienated from the national government.

In contrast, I have for a number of years, on and off, participated in my local Chamber of Commerce’s “Third House” program. Every Saturday or two during the Indiana legislative session, the “Third House” meets to eat an excessively large breakfast, hear reports from our representatives and to give them feedback on Bills that affect us. They sit at table and break hash browns with us, sharing a common cup of orange juice. Thus there’s informal chatter as well as formal reports from them to us and votes by us to inform them. It’s not uncommon for as many as 5 State Senators and Representatives to be present, nor for our input to influence their votes.

So what if we broke up government and devolved power back to the states so as once again to empower and dis-alienate voters? We’d still need, I think, a national assembly to provide for the national defense and a few other limited functions, but there would be multiple more regional assemblies. Like, maybe, fifty of them. Doing meaningful things independently of what happens in Washington, DC.

This ought to appeal to the Left counterculture and to the Right as well. Indeed, although I still very much consider myself a conservative, I’m finding plenty of kindred spirits on the Left, courtesy of this wonderful gathering place of cyberspace.

But I just described (except for the cyberspace thingy) Federalism, the intent of the Founders. Somehow, some centripetal force has driven the real power toward Washington, DC contrary to the original design. We can argue about why (I have some half-baked theories, riffing off the trope “nation with the soul of a Church” the dogmas of that Church being “democracy” and “American Exceptionalism” and the undermining of Federalism’s political safeguards by the direct election of Senators), but it’s hard to argue that the effect has been entirely healthy (or so it seems to me).

This gives me great appreciation for the wisdom of the Founders, who gave us a Republic, if only we’d kept it.

These thoughts brought to you courtesy of a goading by this Wilfred McClay article on Federalism.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Obama’s statist “religious freedom”

This, from Heritage Foundation’s Dominique Ludvigson via the Wall Street Journal, fleshes out what I mean when I call Obama’s insouciance on religious freedom “statist”:

Religious institutions and individuals should not have to sue the government to preserve the freedom to define their own missions. But they’re left with little choice in the brave new world unleashed by the national health-care law.

The HHS mandate breaks with our best traditions of recognizing the free exercise of religion as a public good and broadly accommodating religious practice and expression. It sees religion as “in the way” and interprets religious freedom as narrowly as possible – as freedom for worship and religious exercise within the walls of a church or only among its members.

The requirement also commandeers and marginalizes some of the very institutions of civil society that help preserve limited government.It’s the symptom of a broader disease – the Obama administration’s belief that government has unlimited power to curb freedom at will. Religious liberty is just the first casualty of that unchecked power.

Please remember that I’m pretty sparing in my criticisms of Obama and don’t just emote for or against this.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.