Blood Oil and free markets

In last week's episode of EconTalk, Russ Robert's interviewed Leif Wenar on his new book, Blood Oil, about the impact of resource trade with tyrants and despots. Wenar argues that the current trade in natural resources, particularly oil, is not a true free-market economy because free markets depend on values such as private property. As Wenar points out, if I took over a corner gas station by force no one would suggest that I had the right to then sell the oil owned by that corner station because I don't actually own those resources. When we trade for natural resources with nations run by despots who separate their state's resources from their citizens--Saudi Arabia, Russia and Equatorial Guinea receive some analysis in the interview as different ways of doing the same thing--we are engaging in an unjust system which rewards pirates who steal resources from their rightful owners and corrupt the market.

Robert's is deeply impacted by Wenar's argument, but brings up concerns about both Wenar's somewhat interventionist-sounding plea that the government ban trade with such despots, pointing out that the criteria for a despot are somewhat subjective: why should we attack Equatorial Guinea's leader's savage exploitation of oil while ignoring China's more mild exploitation of labor? Wenar's main argument is that, while labor exploitation is bad, natural resources present something of a unique case. His arguments for this are good, but I would suggest a couple of critiques of both Wenar's solutions, and Robert's concerns:

First, I'd recommend that, rather than seeking to establish an objective criteria for how much despotism is too much despotism (at which point government sanctions need to take over), we would be wiser to mandate transparency: let the public know what they're buying (i.e. gas stations post what percentage of their oil is purchased from what market - Wenar intends to begin posting such data to his website in the near future).

Second, and this plays into the first answer: we need to acknowledge that there is a spectrum between despotism and ideal economic freedom: Robert's point about how to decide that Equatorial Guinea is too despotic but China is okay can be extrapolated to point out that the US isn't perfect in economic freedom, but it's a lot better than Equatorial Guinea. We need to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good: by not regulating the outcome but requiring transparency from merchants the public can exercise subjective judgement about how much encroachment is too much, and the market can work against truly despotic situations like Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea while exercising more caution in our treatment of China or the US.

Marriage and community in Brooklyn

Abby and I watched Brooklyn last night (a really great film, by the way) and, maybe because I preached on marriage last Sunday, it made me think about the importance of the community in a marriage: we make vows before witnesses because our feelings are remarkably fickle as a means of keeping us true to vows--which are actually the means of keeping us "happy" in the older and fuller sense of the word: fully flourishing. 

[Spoiler alert!] Eilis Lacey and Tony Fiorello took vows in private; she loves him, is most happy with him, should be with him; but when she goes back to Enniscorthy, (Ireland,) to visit her mother she has community pressure to accept Jim Farrell's pursuit of her, take Rose’s old job, and have the local version of the “good life” she may have desired growing up. She hasn’t said she’s married at first because she doesn’t want to let people down: there was to be a public wedding at some future time, maybe when more family could be involved, so she keeps the marriage secret, and the community works against it since they don’t know about it. When Ms. Kelly confronts her about the one shred of community involvement in the wedding (Kelly is distantly connected to the family Eilis and Tony randomly bumped into at the Brooklyn court house) the community does its work [in a way this is like Smith’s invisible hand] even though the connection was so tenuous and the intentions of the person who was the actual instrument were not honorable. Eilis’s declaration “I’m Eilis Fiorello” places her back in her correct place in the universe again; publicly the wife of the husband she loves, bound back to the new home she has made in Brooklyn… 

(The fact that Tony’s family’s plan is to build a neighborhood on Long Island and extricate themselves from the community they are part of and settle in a place that requires ridiculous amounts of infrastructure to maintain, and where there is no community to join seems to actually break the continuity of the narrative since it means their goal is really to escape Brooklyn; but the film is putting authenticity over narrative on this point since it’s a historically accurate—if ultimately unhelpful—goal.)

Bible nerd's playlist: Jeremiah 29

I love Jeremiah 29. It's one of my favorite passages (though I'm somewhat skeptical of the value of having "favorite" portions of God's Word since you're implying less preference for others...), and not because of the oft-miss-applied Jer. 29:11, but because of the often-overlooked passage that immediately precedes it (Jer. 29:4-7, especially Jer. 29:7!). "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city... and pray for it"; here's two great sermons laying that out:

Tim Keller, Redeemer PCA, NYC, "[RISE] Serving the City"

Dan Rogers, Christ the King, Dorchester, "The J29 Project"

Dr. Will Barker on subscription in the PCA:

The methodology made clear in the Synod's response to the Hemphill case [Samuel Hemphill, the subject of the first Presbyterian heresy trial in North America in the early 1730s] is the historic method of subscription in American Presbyterianism. It also is the method that we should employ today. The  candidate professing to adopt the Westminster Standards should declare any exceptions that he may have, and then the Presbytery should decide whether his exceptions are such that he cannot be deemed as sincerely taking his ordination vow (e.g., the second ordination vow). If that is the case, then the Presbytery should not approve him for ordination. On the other hand, if the Presbytery determines that his exceptions do not represent a violation of his ordination vow, he  should be ordained and should also be able to teach such exceptions, since he is conscience-bound to  teach the whole counsel of God, as revealed in Scripture, whose authority he also has affirmed  elsewhere in his ordination vows. But he should teach such exceptions with utmost sensitivity to the peace and purity of the church.

-- William Barker, "System Subscription," Westminster Theological Journal, 63 (2001), 6, http://files1.wts.edu/uploads/pdf/publications/wtj/barker-spring-01.pdf accessed 11/11/15

While this may sound like a historical theologian nerding out (Abby thinks so), how pastors discus their convictions and hold each other accountable to those convictions is an important part of being biblical.

The cost of infrastructure vs. incramental growth

Two videos from Strong Towns on what infrastructure actually costs, and a different model for growth than just borrowing from our children:

First the downer:


Then a more hopeful option:

The dangerous effect of immigrants on native culture...

We have a natural tendency to fear the "other," regardless of how like us that "other" is. Today, the image of the Irish as a dangerous foreign element in Bostonian culture is nonsensical to any but the most elite Brahmin circles. In 1869, however, that was far from the case:

The urge to look backward was particularly strong in Boston, where natives were grappling with the growing presence and power of the Irish. In 1869, the author William Dean Howells took a walk through an immigrant section of Cambridge known as Dublin, where he felt less like a native and more like a traveler in a foreign land. The language, customs, and dress seemed exotic to Howells, and he regretted that the Anglo-Saxon population was "now as extinct in that region as the Pequots." He read the future of his own people in the large number of Irish children playing in the streets. It appeared likely, wrote Howells, that "such increase shall--together with the well-known ambition of Dubliners to rule the land--one day make an end of us poor Yankees as a dominant plurality." The demographic shift from Yankee to Irish would soon become evident in politics as well. In 1884, just fifteen years after Howells's visit to Dublin, Bostonians elected Hugh O'Brien as their first Irish Catholic mayor.

-- Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, 254

Howells's fear of ceasing to be a "dominant plurality" seems particularly arrogant in modern PC phraseology, but is actually not far from how many of us think. The fear of the "other" helps us to excuse attitudes and theories which denigrate members of other races and ethnicities. The Church is very susceptible to these attitudes too. The connection between "God and country" which I celebrated as a young Christian--along with many other Christians--often leads us to a belief that our specific nationalism is somehow tied to the purest expression of our faith. I have heard numerous comments from Christians which view immigrants with the same attitude Howell exhibited. Given my first European relatives "got off the boat" in 1639, I'm guessing I have plenty of ancestors who took similar attitudes to some of these Christians' ancestors when they arrived...

A source of American religious consumerism:

In the churches of Puritan New England, "Sunday after Sunday, week after week, year after year, even generation after generation, the same underlying narrative provided the interpretative horizon for reading and hearing the Scriptures. The narrative of Scripture was found in the order of salvation. Salvation, however, was not understood as individual participation within the biblical narrative that told how the God of creation made a promise to Abraham that was fulfilled in Jesus in order to bring about a witness in the life of the church as a foretaste of the new creation. Instead, salvation was limited to a story of the individual moving from sin to salvation to service in preparation for eternity in heaven. The spiritual movement of an individual's life became deeply encoded as the meaning of Scripture within the emerging European-based North American culture."

-- John W. Wright, Telling God's Story, 55.