Needing Need
December 3, 2008 by Erin Reynolds · Leave a Comment
(Guest Contributor)
Part 2
| Part 1 |
“The mother who bends over a little casket to leave her triune gift of roses, tears, and kisses may yet perceive, in the light of a higher revelation, that though the rose-wreathed casket bears the ashes of her cherished hopes, it is also ministrant to a need she knows not of.” -C. E. Sargent
Once a lifetime we are granted everything we absolutely need. Before we are born we receive precisely enough oxygen, water, and nourishment to survive and to develop the organs that are absolutely essential for existence.
After that, we are immersed in an abundance that we rarely comprehend or appreciate.
Those who fall subject to hunger or exposure to the elements usually die not because of insufficient matter, but because of insufficient methods of distribution and production.
When capability is misdirected, it often leads to incapacity.
America has tried to find the answer to hunger, AIDS, and war itself through war. Yet after so much warfare we are not much closer to peace.
The world’s method of solving problems is to attempt to destroy the problem, but all the while feed the source. We may do the same in our own lives. We create drugs and programs and counselors to fix societal problems, before considering that modern society might be the problem.
The solution to overcrowded prisons and overweight citizens could lie closer to home than we now teach. What we serve for dinner tonight might conceivably impact both prisoners and weight-loss programs; having family mealtime could change not only what but also where our children eat, now and in the future.
Gripped With Need In the Midst of Abundance
Although we have been born into significant abundance, many of us are not content with all that is readily available. One of humankind’s primary sources of malcontent is need. Frequently the reason many of us don’t respond to the needs of others is that we feel encompassed, debilitated, and humiliated by our own needs.
But need often grants more than it denies. This ravening wolf wards off more predators than we ever realize. This is hard to recognize at first, confirming that we don’t understand the true nature of need.
The average American doesn’t know what it means to be truly hungry, or scared or cold. We cannot easily relate to a prisoner of war that lived on starvation rations for decades, and worked outside in –60° weather without coat or shoes. We aren’t concerned about stretching a quarter cup of flour to last three meals.
Usually we find ourselves worrying about things such as our car’s faulty air conditioning, or stressing over the color of our teeth, hair and nails. Skin cancer in America is more likely to be caused by too many hours at the beach than from too many hours of working in a rice field. The increasing number of weight-loss programs alone ought to be a fairly accurate indicator of where one of our nation’s most consuming worries lies, not in sufficiency, but in overabundance.
With this superabundance to which most of us have become accustomed, how can our understanding of need be felt in any other context than what we have experienced first hand, in relation to what we want, not what we truly need?
Needs can be classified into a number of categories, but two types are easily recognizable. The first type of needs are those universal to all humans and are absolutely necessary for existence: food, water, or shelter. The second type includes needs that are relative to what we, specifically, possess and are not as closely related to our subsistence: a baker needs an oven, a sailor needs a ship.
But is there a need greater than any of these? Is there a higher need, which, if understood and fulfilled, could increase each person’s capacity and success, and put all other needs in perspective?
What Do We Really Need?
Perhaps if we had more time we could fit in everything we really needed to do, and thus avert disappointment. Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and philosopher, once counseled, “Do not act as if you were going to live 10,000 years.” He recognized that humans need increased capacity to utilize time, not more time.
This capacity can only be fostered by limiting, not increasing, that element of life. Ability must be tested if it is to be increased, just as muscles must be exercised if they are to be strengthened. To augment the element of time could indeed limit our capacity. Aurelius identified time as the universal ally.
None of us is cheated of one second of one day. One boy may live ten years, and his father one hundred. But each day of every life is filled with the same full measure of seconds, minutes and hours. Time was never the true excuse of failure, nor the real element of success.
What we need is not more time.
Perhaps more money would allow us to finally reach true happiness. This seems to have become the premise of much of today’s logic. If we usually find more exalted happiness than exalted looks among the wealthy, we might legitimately conclude that happiness and wealthiness are closely connected. But as it now stands, the meek are allotted to receive a greater inheritance than everyone else combined.
What we need is not more money.
So do we need more of anything?
The empty homes, and bursting hospitals, the refugee camps and unmarked mass graves issue a silent but resounding yes. We need more healing and helping. We need armies that protect more lives than they deny, treaties that allow more freedom than they revoke, and leaders that give more than they require.
Yet if we really need these things, are we condemned to die of want from such needs –- or is the surest provision for the solution’s endurance actually its temporary absence?
If Lincoln had libraries, would we have had Lincoln?
If Washington had peace, would we?
Was it the men, or the methods that made these leaders who they were? Maybe it was both. Lincoln needed books and learning. But more than needing books, he needed to need books. More significant than the hours of reading were the walks through the woods to get those books. More important than the knowledge he received was the price he paid to obtain that knowledge.
So it is with most of our greatest gifts; what we give will often reward us more and impact us more than what we receive. This is true of both good and ill.
The Reward of Paying the Price
Often we lay our excuses upon all that is absent in our lives. But as we achieve greatness we realize the significant thing we hold in common with others who have done the same is in having learned to appreciate, and even capitalize, on what we lacked.
Sometimes what we find in seeking to fulfill a need is not what we sought, but what we paid, and that payment becomes more meaningful and dear than it ever was before. Both need and fulfillment are elements of happiness. When our gaze rests finally upon the fulfillment, or at least the most outward manifestation of it, we have not understood real happiness.
Ask a group of mountain climbers where their view rests the longest once they have reached the summit of their climb. The exhilaration of the view does not usually lie in seeing a patch of ground under foot that could not be seen from the valley below. Rather it comes from seeing the valley below, but from an entirely new perspective.
It could be that what we need most is a change of view about what we already see. Our needs symbolize more than need; they represent a source. Each solution to a problem stands for something more than a solution; it implies a comprehensive whole.
The Test of Debt
Need and fulfillment are naturally united. But another aspect of existence, intertwined with each of these, is something we all know well enough by face and not enough at heart: debt.
Debt is one of our most potent tools and one of our greatest allies, if we use it wisely. Debt is an essential aspect of our development. What we go into debt for shows where our lives are really lived, on borrowed, or invested, time and means.
What this tool really proves is that there are few if any other choices before us; we can spend, or we can invest what was a gift in the first place. If much of what we possess is given from a Higher Power, then isn’t one of life’s great lessons about how well we deal with debt, and how well we respond to need?
And does that Power really care most about how much we have of anything? Isn’t it more concerned with how well we use what we already have?
Only those who invest what they are given, from time to talents, to money to means, ever approach fulfillment. Every other action, use and abuse, proves that such fulfillment is at worst illusory, and at best, borrowed. Only invested effort, or effort that seeks to magnify and improve, can yield happiness that is truly genuine.
This aspect of debt illustrates that often our greatest needs are internal, and will never be met by more money, more friends, more food or more recognition. In fact, these things may increase our indebtedness to ourselves and to the world. What empowers us is the ability, the gift, to augment what is already innate.
The key to a rest-filled sleep could depend more on what is in our heart, than what prescriptions we have in our bathroom cabinet. And while the latter might help us get through one more night, they are not what is helping us get through one more day. The really restful answer addresses both concerns.
The most obnoxious people we know could have more in common with us than our very best friends, in that both of us suffer from the same disease: discontentment. They, from discontentment with life; we, from discontentment with humankind.
The world’s prisoners of war are our neighbors, families, and friends who have lived through hell, but do not possess the language to ever tell about it. This restriction does not augment the torture, it is the only escape from it. Our deepest wounds are often couched in tears that are never shed, and in pain that is always subverted, not of necessity, but of our own choice.
Other people usually can’t comprehend our suffering. They often won’t understand our fears. And that’s all right because neither they nor we need to save ourselves. But we do need to be saved. We don’t need to magnify our battle scars; we need them erased.
Someone paid for what no one else ever could. Someone offers us the “Balm of Gilead” because no one else ever can, and no one else ever will. To be healed of pain, confusion and doubt we need only accept what we have already been given.
Our Greatest Needs
Our greatest need is acceptance, not receipt. We really need love, not license. We need to empathize with others, not detail our wounds. It could be that the only way to surmount the injustices of life is to refute their injustice, and embrace the only Judge whose judgment will finally matter.
We can encourage healing without inciting further injury. We can forgive without condoning what is wrong. Our needs can be changed and overcome; not, at least yet, by complete fulfillment, but certainly by more fulfilling needs.
Perhaps as we surmount the tendency to place responsibility for emptiness on our needs, we will find we are more full. A deeper need could demand and provide a deeper fulfillment. A deeper source could provide a higher triumph. A deeper debt could cultivate a stronger debtor, one capable of absolving more than his own debts, one dedicated to healing more than his own wounds. American need can lead to narrow-minded greed, or something much greater. The abundance we enjoy can hide our real needs, or illuminate them.
The time has come to consider what it is we truly need.
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This essay is Chapter 2 of Dinnertime Revolutions: Meeting the American Challenge by Erin Reynolds. Click here to purchase the book.
Erin Reynolds is a graduate of George Wythe University with a Bachelor’s degree in Statesmanship and a Master’s Degree in Education. She has taught in a number of venues, including spearheading a group to Uganda. She resides in Cedar City, Utah.
Fear, Expediency, and the Economy
September 25, 2008 by Mike Wilson · Leave a Comment
So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear.
Daily we face the onslaught from the media. A murder here, a rape there. Illegal immigrants taking your jobs here; globalism outsourcing your job to over there. It is called news. Fundamentally, however, it is fear-mongering — and if succumbed to, it is fatal to our soul.
Both political parties attempt to play on fear, portraying the opposition candidate in the most negative light possible to the point where this campaign has become more immature than a kindergarten shout-down (”My dad can beat up your dad!”). In order to achieve support for means that we know are questionable, those in office instill fear of the unknown or the different. Fundamentalism Muslims are referred to as “Islamo-fascists” (a convenient compounding of any word to denigrate the former term).
Our current economic situation is a result of fear…fear of work, fear of hard times, fear of the housing
market plunging more deeply. This fear will cause us to operate from a position of expediency. Expediency resulting from fear pushes us towards means that seem to be fixes to the fearful problem, but are really methods that will, like termites, slowly eat away at our structural foundation.
In the years of the Roaring 20’s, economists (mainly following the theories of Irving Fisher) were convinced that slowly increasing the money supply would allow for continued expansion of the economy without increasing prices too much or causing any damage to the financial and industrial structures. However, an economist in Austria (Ludwig von Mises) was writing a contrary view, contending that increasing the money supply, thus lowering interest rates and making borrowing cheaper and more attractive than savings, might just pull the rug out from under the glass table on which the economy sat. He felt that “if monetary policy pushed ‘market’ interest rates below the ‘natural’ rate, the central bank could create an unstable business cycle that could lead to financial disaster” (’natural’ rate of interest defined to be “the rate that equalizes the supply and demand for saving based on the social rate of time preference”) [Skousen--The Big Three in Economics].
Mises predictions were ignored and the Federal Reserve in the U.S. continued to increase the money supply and lowered interest rates below the natural rate such that structural imbalances were introduced into the economy, contributing to the Great Depression.
Fast-forward to the 1990’s, a time of great economic growth and increases to the money supply as demonstrated by the decreasing interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve over the last 18 years. What are we facing again? An economy that isn’t saving because the cost of borrowing was cheaper than it should have been is loading the investment market with mortgage-backed that are described as “radioactive toxic waste.” Fear of the economy slowing down during the 90’s and the early 2000’s gave impetus to regulators to adjust the money supply to such a degree that it is likely to have dropped the market rate of interest below the natural rate of interest, leading to the instabilities we’ve seen over the last few months, coming to a head these last ten days.
We know that in order to prosper we need to save. However, we buy into the information spoon-fed to us by a media that is inherently a business and operates on a 24-hour news cycle, thus it is not only subject to fear-mongering, but media is also an objective participant in the generation of economic fear. Politicians also aren’t hesitant to promote fear since our fear gives them greater power as we feel a deeper need for security and every politician will tell us that “changing horses midstream” is a dubious and dangerous proposition.
I started this post with a line from Bruce Springsteen’s ironic warning entitled Magic. We need to listen to the warning voice by holding onto “everything [we] know and [letting go of] what [we] fear”. We must recognize that fear, as described in the following lyrics, is a dangerous thing and if allowed, will turn our heart black and take our God-filled soul and “fill it with devils and dust.”
Now every woman and every man
They want to take a righteous stand
Find the love that God wills
And the faith that He commands
Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive.
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?
Fear’s a dangerous thing.
It can turn your heart black, you can trust;
It’ll take your God filled soul, fill it with devils and dust.
Decisions based on fear using expediency instead of principles will most often destroy those fundamental principles. Let us be aware of what is seen and unseen and make decisions based on principles and re-establish liberty.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
Adjusting Interest Rates (errr…What’s Really Going On)
September 22, 2008 by Mike Wilson · 1 Comment
This will be short. While we are witnessing some of the most aggressive and interventionalist economic policy we’ve seen in decades this week, I’ve had the chance to be reading ideas from free market gurus like Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat. I don’t agree with everything Bastiat has to say (I agree with most of Smith’s points) but I wanted to discuss two policies that are used to deal with economic difficulties in the United States and talk about their ramifications.
Fiscal Policy
Fiscal policy is the idea promoted by John Maynard Keynes that when the economy isn’t growing, the quickest and most sure way to increase economic growth is to stimulate demand. This is most efficiently done by deficit spending (he only recommended it over the short term) wherein the government directly plants money into the economy. The “stimulus checks” that went out earlier this year were examples of fiscal policy in the Keynesian sense. Does it work? Growth in the second quarter increased to the extent that economists expected. Does it fix things long term? No. It’s a short term solution, most often in response to fundamental problems with saving and investing. We’ll discuss this in a later post.
Monetary Policy
The second type of financial policy used to adjust the economy is referred to as monetary policy. This idea was promoted by Milton Friedman and implemented during the 1990’s and earlier part of this decade by Alan Greenspan. It’s name, monetary policy, would indicate that it has something to do with money policy, which it does. However, when the Federal Reserve meets to discuss monetary policy it is presented as an adjustment to the interest rate. The lower the interest rate the cheaper it is to borrow money and this cheaper credit encourages the economy to expand. It encourages borrowing for capital investment, home purchasing, car purchasing. It discourages savings (again we’ll talk about saving in a minute).
How, then, does the Fed adjust the interest rate? They do so by affecting the money supply. In order to make money cheaper (lower the interest rate) they do what microeconomics says will cheapen any commodity — they increase the supply of money. They do so mainly by buy bonds on the bond market and thus increasing the amount of circulating capital. With an increased money supply, banks are more willing to lend to each other and to consumers and consumption increases.
Besides the inherent problems with increasing consumption without addressing production and supply, monetary policy (although less traumatic to long-term economic fundamentals than fiscal policy and deficit spending), because of the way it’s described, has the tendency to impoverish the poor. Increasing the money supply doesn’t make anyone richer. All it does is increase the number of transactions and thus stimulate exchanges, but if there isn’t any more production of labor and capital to purchase, no real growth takes place. But because it is couched in the terminology of “lowering interest rates” instead of “increasing the money supply”, most people don’t realize that it is the money supply that is being adjusted, not the interest rates directly. This affects the laborer more than the owner/merchant in the following way. From Bastiat’s What is Money?:
Under the influence of ignorance and custom, the day’s pay of a country laborer will remain for a long time at a franc, while the saleable price of all the articles of consumption around him will be rising. He will sink into destitution without being able to discover the cause…But this rise in prices is not instantaneous and equal for all things. Sharp men, brokers, and men of business, will not suffer by it; for it is their trade to watch the fluctuations of prices, to observe the cause, and even to speculate upon it. But little tradesmen, countrymen, and workmen, will bear the whole weight of it. The rich man is not any richer for it, but the poor man becomes poorer by it. Therefore, expedients of this kind have the effect of increasing the distance which separates wealth from poverty, of paralyzing the social tendencies which are incessantly bring men to the same level, and it will require centuries for the suffering classes to regain the ground which they have lost.
Remember that this is from one of the most outspoken free market promoters of all time. I think that his assessment is correct. It takes longer for the day laborer, the wage earner, to realize that everything is costing more money because of the increase in supply of dollars, while he is making the same amount of money, than for the business man whose decision-making awaits all the financial news on Bloomberg, FOX, or CNN. One way to lessen this effect would be to change the terminology for what the Fed does: tell everyone that the Fed is increasing the money supply, not that it is lowering interest rates. And be aware when ever anything is done for expediency. There are almost alway unseen costs associated with those interventions.
Move the Cause of Liberty by (1) subscribing to the Sentinel, a free weekly newsletter boldly illuminating the principles of freedom in a darkening nation, and (2) pledging your Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor to the Cause by signing the Declaration of Dependence.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
Georgic Economics: The Genesis of Liberty
August 18, 2008 by Hyrum Lefler · 5 Comments
What is meant by a “Georgic Economy?” It occurs when families plant seeds after preparing the ground; they then water, tend, protect, and eventually harvest. In our modern day, it is experienced by families who adopt Georgic Principles in their finances. It is compared to banking as well: Banks plant seeds (of capital) and harvests increase over time.
When America shifted from agriculture to industry they outsourced (unwittingly perhaps) the planting of seeds for their livelihood, to others. The professional farmers provided the food, and the professional financiers provided the capital.
We Americans now do the opposite of banks: We receive products first, then pay for them over time — providing bankers with a harvest. In essence, Americans began choosing material comforts over economic freedom. We lost the principles of Georgics.
The Georgic Economy is not a new concept or practice. It has peeked its perspiring head several times throughout history. Adam was taught this economy by God in the Bible. We see it again with Abraham. It was then forgotten by the Israelites in Egypt — and it took God forty years to revitalize it in the people! The Greeks had it early on; they cultivated it in their rocky soil, only to have the vine blossom in the Golden Age and wilt in the scorching heat of flamboyance and frivolity. The Romans built a powerhouse economy using Georgic principles, but eventually rejected Georgics for bread and circuses.
Virgil the Poet, coined the phrase to describe this economic genesis of liberty in The Georgics (29 BC) and had it read to Octavian, who continued his course for power, along with his people. He became Emperor in 27 BC, and the 800 year-old Republic continued imploding into the pompous Roman Empire.
Georgic economies found life in pockets and bore fruit in the Great Economic Revolution at the turn of the 1st Millennium (See Will Durant’s Story of Civilization Volume IV), in the Renaissance, and in Puritan England. Many of the Puritans, known for their work ethic and devotion to God, sailed to American (beginning in 1620) and on American soil this economy blossomed, birthing the greatest movement of freedom that has ever spread across the world.
As the British surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, their drummers played the march “The Day the World Turned Upside-Down.” (see Siege of Yorktown.) The world had turned upside-down; the Founding Era of our nation rested firmly upon the shoulders of a Georgic Revolution.
Every burst of liberty on the landscape of humanity has been preceded, fueled, tempered, and preserved by Georgic revolutions. We as Americans will not find and secure liberty by legislating it in Washington. It will not be securely founded if spurred on only by discussion, persuasion, rhetoric, and hype. Liberty is a consequence of work — of hard work, sacrifice, patience, and perseverance. Our government’s over-spending on social programs, subsidizing, and other fear-mongered policies, are symptoms of the real problem: We forgot, and eventually refused to admit, that we must first plant, before we can reap.
It is time, once again, to “turn the world upside-down.” YOU are an American! Experience a Georgic Revolution in your own life, for thus it must spread across our land if we are to succeed in moving the Cause of Liberty with any permanence and authenticity. We must do this as our Founding Fathers did. This must be pursued in the natural pattern: Georgic Revolution first, political revolution second. The Founders lived the Declaration long before they ever signed it…
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
21st Century Georgics: An Introduction
July 29, 2008 by Hyrum Lefler · 4 Comments
A key factor in maintaining freedom is sustainable economic forms. Are you maintaining freedom through the financial principles and practices you are using? Have American families adopted the economic forms necessary for the preservation of a free people?
The average American household pays over 34.5% of every dollar earned to interest payments. Forget about the taxes — that is serious bondage! Our system has become top heavy, threatening our economic solvency as a nation and necessitating large government bailouts to offset their blunders. When a government is forced to tax its people heavily to keep economic centers of capital from collapsing, how can we expect it to reduce in size? To force such a thing is tantamount to economic collapse.
We have allowed our wealth to centralize and grow in the hands of OTHERS. We have given them our money and the control of it for the “magic of compound interest” and then turned around and borrowed from them with a price.
Families are the foundation of American stability and economic growth, and it is time for families to regain real control of the resources of the economy. What do I suggest? We obviously cannot steal all of the money and put it in our families’ accounts! No, I am suggesting that we have all of the resources we need, and they flow through our hands day after day, and we relinquish control of them day after day. This is because we do not understand money; or, more importantly, we do not understand economy.
The Roman Poet Virgil wrote The Georgics in 29 BC. The concept of “Georgics” that came out of this poem was widely debated and discussed in the founding era of our country. The word basically means “to work the land.”
In early spring-tide, when the icy drip
Melts from the mountains hoar, and Zephyr’s breath
Unbinds the crumbling clod, even then ’tis time;
Press deep your plough behind the groaning ox,
And teach the furrow-burnished share to shine.
That land the craving farmer’s prayer fulfils,
Which twice the sunshine, twice the frost has felt;
Ay, that’s the land whose boundless harvest-crops
Burst, see! the barns.
It was felt by many of our Founders that this connection to the land, to hard work, and the dependence on God that is pre-supposed when seeds are planted, had a profound effect of building an independent and free people — especially when coupled with the other Foundations of Freedom.
Up until 100 years ago, 97% of Americans worked the land with plows — they were farmers. Short of a massive catastrophe, that isn’t going to happen in our time. What can be done in our day to bring the Family Farm — or at least its principles — back to life?
We must first understand Georgics. In the coming weeks I will be posting several articles outlining the basic tenets of Georgic Economics, with links to sites where you can learn how to establish a rebirth of freedom in your family through Georgic principles and forms.
American families must become independent centers of the U.S. economy if our liberties are to be preserved. I am calling for a regeneration of organic, financial systems centered in and controlled by America’s families.
Move the Cause of Liberty by (1) subscribing to the Sentinel, a free weekly newsletter boldly illuminating the principles of freedom in a darkening nation, and (2) pledging your Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor to the Cause by signing the Declaration of Dependence.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
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