(no subject)
I just started reading "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" by Matt Ridley and I came across this passage that I thought I would share.
"The experience left me mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, yet passionately in favour of markets in goods and services. Had I only known it, experiments in laboratories by the economist Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption - haircuts and hamburgers - work so well that it is hard to design them to fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so that they work at all. Speculation, herd exuberance, irrational optimism, rent-seeking and the temptation of fraud drive asset markets to overshoot and plunge - which is why they need careful regulation, something I always supported. (Markets in goods and services need less regulation.) But what made the bubble of the 2000s so much worse than most was government housing and monetary policy, especially in the United States, which sluiced cheap money towards bad risks as a matter of policy and thus also towards the middlemen of the capital markets. The crisis has at least as much political as economic causation, which is why I mistrust too much government.”
This is taken from page 9, in the prologue “When Ideas Have Sex”.
I notice that he specifies 'too much government' not 'Big Government', thereby distancing himself form the Tea Party nonsense that has grown up in the wake of the fiscal crises. I frankly concur, the US is an interesting example of Too Much Government but not Big Government. From Municipal/Local to State to Federal there are so many checks and balances that it is amazing that anything can get done and frankly not surprising that white collar criminals are able to get away with so much.
A friend of mine once mentioned that Gordon Pinsent once championed the revocation of all laws except for the 10 commandments; which are (to refresh my memory) depending on which source you get them from as follows:
From the Septuagint
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (so no Statues you godless heathens!).
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain (kind of hard to do as we don't actually know God's name... maybe it's hidden from us for just this reason).
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Okay... now which one? Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday?)
Honour thy father and thy mother.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Thou shalt not covet (the houses, wives, male servants, female servants, oxen, donkeys or anything that are your neighbours').
Philo says that Killing comes after Adultery in the ten commandments.
The Talmud makes the prologue a first commandment (I am the Lord thy God) and combines polytheism with idolatry (Thou shalt have no other gods before me/Thou shalt not make graven images).
Augustine follows the Talmud in combining verses 3-6, but omits the prologue as a commandment and divides the prohibition on covetousness into two, and follows the word order found in Deuteronomy 5:21 instead of Exodus 20:17.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church largely follows Augustine (but includes the prologue as part of the first commandment).
Lutherans omit the prologue and the prohibition on graven images (that's why they get to have guilt free statuary) and utilise the word order found in Exodus 20:17 rather than Deuteronomy 5:21 for the ninth and tenth commandments.
Reformed Christians (Sheesh no wonder they all can't get along if they're as divergent as this on the basics) follow John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, which mostly follows Philo but adds the prologue to the first commandment and keeps killing as the sixth and adultery as the seventh commandments.
Now, since faith is a personal affair, and it is hard to know the mind of a person who keeps faith personal, and unless you have it in for artists and sculptors, consider 'blasphemy' as an article of free speech and can get everyone to agree on which is the 'Sabbath' you really can't enforce the first 4 commandments. The fifth can get tricky as what one person considers 'honouring' another might feel to be insufficient, so that starts to get wrangle-some.
However, murder, stealing (burglary, cheating, fraud, robbery...including armed robbery and theft are all included under this aegis), and perjury are definitely crimes against the community and a violation of your fellow human being's rights.
Adultery is a bit tricky. Did you seduce the spouse of your neighbour? Did your neighbour's spouse seduce you? What led to the infidelity between your neighbours that allowed for adultery to occur? It can be a socially divisive act that can wreak havoc in the community but I tend to agree with Pierre Elliot Trudeau on this one, the Government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. What happens between two (or more) consenting adults is their own business.
Covetousness is also tricky. While it is known to be detrimental to one's own psychological health and well-being to compare one's self constantly (and particularly unfavourably) to another, we do this constantly and it is also cited as the reason we strive to improve ourselves. How to regulate covetousness? I don't think anyone can seriously manage that one.
What I find interesting is that there is no commandment against committing violence against your neighbour. Nothing about physical or verbal abuse. I also find it odd that adultery is the only 'sexual' misconduct mentioned. Surely Rape should be in there. Child molestation? Where's the prohibition against child molestation? You can't tell me that it didn't happen back then, I won't believe it.
So... were I to reorganise the Ten Commandments, I'd take a page from Hillel the Younger and his reiterating and rephrasing ideological heir Jeshua bar Joseph ha'Nazareti and using 'Do Not Unto Others As You Would Not Have Done Unto Yourself/Do Unto Others As You Would Have Done Unto Yourself' and compile it thus:
Thou shalt commit no Murder.
Thou shalt commit no Rape, or Sexual Assault or Molestation of any kind.
Thou shalt commit no Arson, Annexation, Appropriation, Burglary, Cheating, Deception, Destruction of Property, Embezzlement, Extortion, Fraud, Graft, Looting, Peculation, Pilferage, Pillage, Piracy, Plunder, Purloining, Rapacity, Robbery (armed or otherwise), Stealing, Swindling, Thievery and/or Vandalism.
Thou shalt commit no Assault, Battery or Violation of a person or property.
Thou shalt not threaten, verbally abuse or bully, commit no threat to any manner of communication whatsoever.
That's about it really. Respect yourself and each other. Five commandments.