Lux Lucet

For a few months there I wrote a series of weekly posts I called This ‘n That dealing with various stories from the week that was. Over the summer I abandoned that format for a weekly podcast. Well, I plan to keep the podcast going, but I thought I restart the weekly review post as well under the updated name The Week in Review.

I know, I know, that’s not really the most imaginative title in the world. But I think it’s certainly appropriate for the subject matter. So, without further ado, let’s get started…

They Just Don’t Get It

The Washington Post and the liberals who love it just don’t get it. They can’t figure out why Mrs. Clinton isn’t totally dominating the presidential race and let show their frustrations in a story titled, “Democrats wonder and worry: Why isn’t Clinton far ahead of Trump?” According to the article,

With Election Day less than two months away, Democrats are increasingly worried that Hillary Clinton has not built a formidable lead against Donald Trump despite his historic weaknesses as a national party candidate.

The piece goes on to quote former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle saying, “Generally, I’m concerned, frankly…all the things that Trump has done, the numbers should be far more explicitly in her favor, but they’re not.”

This is really an astounding statement. All the things Trump has done? What about the scandals that swirl about Mrs. Clinton everywhere she and her husband go? What about the unsecured DIY server chock full of classified State Department emails in her bathroom? What about the obvious lie upon lie she has told regarding her conduct in relation to said classified emails. What about strings that were pulled behind the scenes that caused the FBI to refuse to indict Mrs. Clinton, the most eminently indictable person since OJ Simpson? What about the Clinton Foundation Charity fraud? What about the disasters in the middle east created under her watch as Secretary of State? What about her being a bought and paid for tool of Wall Street corporatists? What about the failing economy, a legacy of the Obama Administration that hangs about her neck? What about the fact that she deigned to hold one, count ’em, one press conference in the last nine months, but seemingly has unlimited time to yuck it up with the donor class? 

All this seems to be lost on Daschle and company.

There is enormous, justified anger among non-elite voters are the direction this country has taken over the past several decades, and especially in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. The perception, and I believe it is a correct perception, among many ordinary Americans is that their country more and more is being run for the sole benefit of an elite group of globalist oligarchs who care nothing about either their well being or that of America.

As a small government constitutionalist, I have many disagreements with Donald Trump. That said, unlike Tom Daschle, I don’t think it’s hard at all to understand why people are attracted to him. Our nation’s leadership is visibly failing, and all the establishment politicians seem to know how to do is double down on what already isn’t working. More secret trade deals. More government interference in the free market. More unconstitutional wars. More taxpayer-subsidized mass immigration. People are sick of the arrogant, globalist oligarchy represented by Hillary Clinton. Trump, seeming to sense this, has resonated with voters with his slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” In speaking this way, the billionaire Trump comes off as a regular guy who cares about the concerns of actual Americans, rather than a stooge of the elite.

The elites among the journalistic and political class have spent the past year misunderstanding and underestimating both Trump and the anger felt by American voters. Perhaps it would do the Washington Post crowd some good if they were to spend a little more time talking with regular folks and a little less time with their billionaire donor buddies. Maybe if they did that, they wouldn’t sound so much like 21st century versions of Marie Antoinette.

As a brief closing thought on the campaign of Mrs. Clinton, while it is necessary for Christians to bring up and to criticize her many, obvious failings both legal and moral, stopping at that point means failing to do a complete job.  In addition to pointing out Hillary Clinton’s her extreme weakness as a candidate, we also must object to the idea of a woman president in general.  Isaiah tells us that female leadership is the sign of a ruined nation.  Athaliah, the usurping daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, nearly extinguished the line of Davidic kings with her mad power lust.  Paul forbids women even from speaking in church.  And if they may not speak in church, they may not rule in church, as speaking is the means of ruling.  And as John Knox pointed out, if they may not speak in church, a lesser thing, they may not rule in the national assembly, the greater thing. 

Oh, Those Wacky Central Bankers

According to Narayana Kocherlakota, recently retired president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and current University of Rochester economics professor, we have a problem right here in River City, and it starts with “C” and it rhymes with crash. It’s cash, I tell you. Cash, that’s our problem.

For my part, I was unaware of the evils of cash until just this past year when multiple personages of high rank and degree began to bewail the deleterious effect the humble greenback had on society. Oh, the humanity!

In a more serious vein, Kocherlakota’s recent article in Bloomberg Want a Free Market? Abolish Cash
represents a new low in central banker logic. According to Dr. K., if people have the option of saving money in cash – you know, good old fashioned Federal Reserve Notes – “the real interest rate could go deep into negative territory.”

The supposed risk of savers creating real deeply negative interest rates is a new variation on the old Keynesian canard of the paradox of thrift. And it reeks of nonsense just as bad as the original.

As a counterpoint to Kocherlakota’s comments, consider the following chart produced by one of the good doctor’s central banking colleagues Andy Haldane of the Bank of England:

According to this remarkable graphic, interest rates, and interest rates represent the price of money, the most important price in the economy, interest rates are at their lowest in 5,000 years. Yes, you read that right. Interest rates right now are the lowest they’ve been in recorded history.

And even this chart doesn’t do full justice to the absurd state of affairs in the world’s bond markets. As of June 2016, there were $11.7 trillion worth of negative-yielding government bonds. And how did this bizarre and unnatural financial prodigy occur? Was it the fault of savers? No it was not. This Frankenstein monster was the brainchild of central bankers of Dr. K’s ilk.

According to Dr. K. the unhealthy propensity of savers to save must be overcome by, drum roll please, the abolition of cash. “What’s the fix for this problem?…The right answer is to abolish currency and move completely to electronic cash.” This, Dr. K. insists, is the very essence of the free market. In reality, it is complete nonsense.

There is no more anti-free market, fascistic organization in all the world than a privately owned central bank with a monopoly on the creation of money, of which Dr. K’s former employer, The Federal Reserve Bank, is Exhibit A. And the notion that giving such an organization even more control than it already has represents an advance of the free-market is laughable on its face.

Not that cash is all that great, mind you. It loses value, as Dr. K. notes. Of course the cause of the loss of its value, as Dr. K. doesn’t note, is the Federal Reserve itself. But that’s another story. But one of the biggest benefits to cash for ordinary Americans, and one of its biggest drawbacks for oligarchic central bankers, is that people can always take it out of the bank when the whackadoos running the monetary system get out of control and decide to punish savers by charging them for the privilege of saving money, which is exactly the effect of negative interest rates.

Instead of allowing the central bankers to steal money from their bank accounts via negative interest rates, savers simply withdraw their funds in cash and put it under their mattresses. Why the nerve of some people! Have they no respect for their betters?!

In the end, it’s all about control. Dr. K., his central banking buds, and the politicians who love them want to have more of it. Justice demands they have less. End the Fed.

Antichrist and Migration

Francis I, the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist, had a busy time of it this past week. He kicked things off by holding a canonization mass for Mother Teresa. According to CNN, the Albanian born nun was put on a remarkable fast track to sainthood just two years after her death in 1997.

CNN goes on to comment, “The pope waived [the normal five-year] waiting period [after a candidate for sainthood’s death] in part, some believe, because of her fame and reputation. Never a an institution to appeal to popular opinion (sarcasm alert), I find such statements about Rome shockingly disrespectful.

Now, where was I? Ah yes, I was about to bring up the other major step pope Francis took this week concerning the cause nearest and dearest to his heart, that of inundating the entire Western world with radical Islamic welfare migrants.

As Reuters reports, the pope has shaken up the Vatican hierarchy by merging, “four Vatican offices into a ‘Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development’ starting Jan. 1.”

The long and the short of it is that this shake-up will allow the pope to, ” ‘temporarily’ take personal charge of migration.” In other words, he thinks he will be more effective at forcing more jihadist welfare cases on the already beleaguered peoples of Europe than the current Vatican bureaucratic arrangement allows.

Rome has long had an affinity for Islam. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Muslims, “profess to hold to the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day” (841).

This affinity for Islam is really a part of Rome’s overarching lust to rule the world. One of the ways Rome intends to accomplish this is by bringing all religious groups under the authority of the pope, and the Babylonian Harlot will say anything to achieve her ends, even if it means destroying European civilization and promulgating patent lies such as the one about Muslims adoring the one true God.

But Allah is not the triune God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Muslims are not of the faith of Abraham. If they were, they would confess that Christ is the Son of God, that he atoned for the sins of his people by his death on the cross, and that the sole mediator between God and man and will one day return to judge the quick and the dead. But this they do not do. And Rome knows this full well.

But I will say this for Antichrist, at least he’s not a total hypocrite when it comes to Muslim migrants. As Reuters notes, “In April, after visiting a migrant camp in Greece, the pope brought three families of Syrian refugees back to Rome with him.” Three whole families? Wow. Now that’s what I call leadership by example.