Working on the finale

Trying to figure out a way to finish the religion series without alienating anyone, so it'll be another day.

Until then, a brief bit about Romney's experience as a private equity manager and as a venture capitalist.  Today, he derided the failed government investment in Solyndra as an example of "public equity", which for starters gives the loan program (which to remind everyone was started under Bush) that vague whiff of socialism that comes with the word "public".  More importantly, it allows Romney to conflate private equity, which is mostly what he did at Bain acquiring companies in leveraged buyouts, and venture capital, which is what the Solyndra loan was most similar to.  Venture capital is rich guys giving money to smart guys.  Private equity is rich guys buying smart guys' companies and doing whatever is most profitable for the rich guys, whether it be saving the company or gutting it.  Since Romney hope to wrap himself in his Bain experience to make him look like a job creator, it would beneficial to him if people confused private equity and venture capital.

Here's a good Op-Ed that explores the distinction, as well as other aspects of Romney's record.

This might make NWest's head explode

Spent most of the evening programming a cable remote, since technology makes our lives so much easier, so I'm taking a quick break from the religion discussion.  Instead, I'm going to take a quick look at a bill for which there are no fewer than three features which would make it appalling to Austrians and libertarians, like frequent commenter and friend of the blog NWest.  Here's an article which describes the bill.

1.  The bill focuses on a bank which was affected by the Dodd-Frank finance reform act.  Because its assets were just over $15 billion by a certain date, it was forced by Dodd-Frank to have a higher capital reserve, or amount of cash it is required by law to have in its possession at any time.  It's kind of like the law in Ocean's Eleven that forced the casino to keep a bunch of chips in the vault on the night of the heist.

2.  Because the capital reserve requirement would fuck over this one bank in New York, which donates to lots of politicians including one Barack Hussein Obama, it looks suspicious when people are supporting this bill which would only affect this one bank and allow it to essentially have $300 million that it's allowed to spend instead of having to keep it in reserve.  The bank essentially gets $300 million as a result of this bill, and it's donated lots of money to lots of people, including the President.  This item actually looks bad whether or not you're an Austrian.

3.  But it's not just any corporation kinda-sorta getting $300 million as the result of a single act of Congress.  It's a bank, which thanks to fractional reserve banking, can turn that $300 million into $4.5 billion in loans, essentially indirectly altering the monetary policy of the nation through an expansion of the money supply.

What makes it especially tough is that most people pretty much agree that the bank shouldn't have to kick in the extra cash, but it has to under the law as it stands today.  Doing what would make logical sense  requires lots of people who would have a powerful reason (lots of donations) to do the bank's bidding no matter what to vote for a bill that only helps one rich corporation, but would, at least to a Keynesian, help everybody.

Quite a sticky situation.

Why 1600 years of dominance still matters

So let's say you're considering leaving your parents' religion, and luckily you have a supportive family that wouldn't make you feel guilty for leaving the faith.  You're also able to look past the sunk costs of the time spent on religious activities.  You're fortunate enough to live in a region of the world where you can't be fired or otherwise lose your livelihood.

This last one is a recent development.  For almost 1600 years, leaving the church was economically impossible.   Thankfully, now atheists can leave the church without a particularly strong likelihood of financial harm.  But for all that time of financial/economic/overall dominance, the church was able to select the greatest minds of history to help its cause.

For our budding atheist trying to reason out his beliefs, they find themselves met with one body of argument created by greatest minds of the dominant organization of human history, while on the other side prior to the rise of the internet you have, what, Nietsche and Bertrand Russell?  And that's if you live in a community where Nietzsche and Russell are available in your local library or bookstore.  Otherwise, it's one questioner's thoughts against 1600 years of world-class ideas.  With the rise of the internet as well as a growing body of atheist writers and customers, the balance may shift at least somewhat as those without faith are more able to freely share their ideas.  But the accumulated works of Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, John Calvin, John Wesley and the rest of the intellectual elite for most of recorded history makes for a tough hill to climb.

Barriers to leaving religion: Part 2

As touched on briefly in Part 1, one's involvement with their parents' religion often begins right off the bat, before the child is even able to sit up, babble or do anything much at all.  From the first moments of conscious awareness, one already has a religious social identity and social network within the religion.  To the person wrestling with a decision to stay in the church, these would have to be sacrificed if one were to leave.

Many questioners also have parents, grandparents and other family members who would feel personally harmed by their family member leaving the church.  It would be like being on Let's Make a Deal, where you can choose one of three doors, but if you don't choose Door #1, it's going to make your grandmother cry.

From the believer's point of view, their loved one is giving up an eternity in Heaven, and it's understandable that they would become upset.  But the fact remains that, because of the structure of major religious belief systems and the social pressure that results, lots of people stay in the religion when they should otherwise leave, damaging both themselves and the religion.

Medical tests, false positives and how Jesus was right

I feel I need to back up a little bit and discuss how the church is harmed by the barriers to leaving the church I'll be discussing in my next few posts, as well as yesterday's.  To do it, I have to first go over some medical decision-making strategy.  Please bear with me.  And, for the record, I am not implying in the following that either religious or atheist people have a disease; it's just a metaphor.

In the medical field, our clinical pathology friends work to figure out which lab results indicate disease and which don't.  For example, if you were to check the amount of a molecule called creatinine as a marker for kidney disease, and you graphed the creatinine levels of healthy people and of people with kidney disease, you'd wind up with a graph that looks kind of like the one above, where you'd have two overlapping bell curves.  Some people who are healthy might have a somewhat high creatinine level, while some people with kidney disease might have a lower level for one reason or another.  The clinical pathologist's job is to decide where to draw the cutoff between a "normal" result indicating good kidney health, and an "abnormal" result which suggests further evaluation.  If you make the cutoff too low (at point A above), you'll get lots of false positive results (people with healthy kidneys but whose tests are judged abnormal).  If you make it too high (at point B above), you get false negatives, with your test failing to correctly identify lots of people with bad kidneys.

In the context of barriers to leaving the religion into which one is born, the two groups being compared would be not people with or without a disease, but "True Believers" and "non-True Believers".  The "diagnostic test" being "administered" is the questioning person's own judgment of whether or not to leave the religion.  The barriers to leaving the religion are factors that move the "cutoff point" such that there are more false positives, which would be people who stay in the church who based on their degree of faith/beliefs should leave.

So given these barriers to leaving, you wind up with lots of people staying in the church despite not having true belief.  Is such an idea an unfair attack on the church?  Actually, a fellow by the name of Jesus said in Matthew 7 that "wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."  He goes on to say “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles? Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’"

Jesus predicted a situation where many within the church would not be true believers.  It is my assertion, which I will discuss over the rest of the series of posts, that these barriers to leaving the church harm both those who would otherwise leave the church and the church itself, by keeping non-believers in the pews.  I certainly don't want the series to be interpreted as against religion.  With that in mind, the final post of the series will be a proposal on how the church can repair itself by returning to its pre-Constantine roots.

Barriers to leaving religion: Part 1

Over the course of a few posts, I'd like to take a look at how people leave, or consider leaving, the religion into which they were born.  Because of my own experience with leaving religion, many of the examples contained within will involve the Christian church, but I don't think the issues raised are in any way peculiar to Christianity.  I also think the issues raised are internal matters particular to members of whichever religion, which means that it's nothing (I think) I get terribly fired up about.  It's most certainly nothing I would ever lose friends or sleep over.

Most of the issues discussed will stem from involving children in the religion.  At the very beginning of most people's association with religion, they are placed at the center of a major religious ceremony, such as a bris or baptism.  They continue in the religion throughout their childhood before they reach the age where they are capable of questioning their association.  So they at some point reach the point where they questions their association with the religion of their parents.  Given the sheer number of hours spent on church activities between ones birth and one's questioning of one's own involvement with the Church, this forms a significant barrier to abandoning one's association with religion.

There are plenty of things I do, such as the Diablo game franchise or fantasy baseball, which take a few hours a week, as religion would, which would suck if I came to the realization that all that time I spent on that activity were wasted.  So as I was considering leaving the church, it occurred to me that, were I to sever all ties, I would have to write off the value of all those hours spent in services, Sunday school and confirmation as wasted.

This relatively-huge amount of time spent in church before one becomes consciously-aware forms a huge barrier to exiting the religion.  If I were to decide that fantasy baseball is stupid and worthless, the hundreds of hours I spent improving my performance in my fantasy baseball leagues would be a source of regret.  So I feel a desire to continue feeling that a hobby of fantasy baseball is worthwhile.  I imagine that for people considering leaving the church, the hundreds of hours spent in the church would fill a similar source of potential regret.

In the next post, I'll discuss how the religious views of others, such as a grandmother who would cry if she found out her grandchild weren't a Christian, would make leaving one's "natural" religion more difficult. (EDIT: actually, I'm going to go in a slightly different order, so we'll get to crying grandmas later)

Did Romney give away the game on the budget?

In an interview with Time Magazine, Mitt Romney betrayed the last 3 years of Republican/Tea Party rhetoric.  At one point (ctrl-F for "trillion" to find exactly when), he states:

Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%.  That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression.  So I’m not going to do that, of course.

So Romney says cutting spending too fast can harm economic growth.  One wonders, then, why he has criticized Obama for not cutting spending faster.  Does he think Obama should have slowed the economy by cutting spending more over the past three years?

He goes on to advocate a system of small cuts in the short term with longer term cuts.  Which is, honestly, absolutely 100% the correct strategy.  And it's also exactly what Obama has been doing over the past three years.  Spending has risen more slowly during Obama's presidency than any other recent administration, including Saint Ronald.

This is yet another example of an area where the President has been following what both sides would agree in their more sober moments is the proper strategy.  I continue to be confident that the irrational, reflexive hatred of Obama will wither away once people really start paying attention to politics again.

Cutting out the Canadian middle-man

The Senate today voted down an amendment which would have allowed for the re-importation of medications from Canada, where price controls keep consumer costs down (at the expense of shareholder profits or ongoing research, depending on your source).  Sen. John McCain lamented the failure of the bill and blamed it on lobbying by pharmaceutical companies.

I prefer to think that it failed because it's a stupid policy.  Why would we set up a system where drugs are shipped to Canada, sold to a re-importer at a cheaper price because of price controls, and then shipped back here?  We could just put in price controls here and save on shipping.  There's precedent for price controls, which were put into place under noted socialist Richard Milhouse Nixon.  McCain and his supporters, including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, need to drop the fig leaf (make that "maple leaf") of Canadian price controls and just advocate price controls here at home, if that's their goal.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

But i was spectacularly wrong in my post about Bush v Gore and Obamacare, as pointed out in the comments.

Here's an area where traditional media just can't compete with the interwebs.  I've watched a ton of cable news coverage on the subject, and read lots of newspaper and magazine articles, but these were unable to address the area of confusion I had in my thinking about the case.  But by laying my thoughts in the open, it was possible for others to point out the flaws in my reasoning and help my understanding.

I start to get kind of burned out on the blog every now and then.  One thing that keeps me motivated is the tremendous diversity of expertise and viewpoints among my meager readership.  I'm by no means an expert on everything, but between the lot of us, we're pretty good.

Romney made his record fair game

There's this growing trend in conservative circles to defend any business practice which makes money.  The latest example is found in comments today by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who accused the President of waging an attack on capitalism itself in his criticisms of Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital.  There is even some discussion of whether criticism of Romney's tenure is fair game, with the President getting disagreement even from within his own party (though those Dems criticizing him all have ties to private equity firms).

Of course discussion of Romney's business record is legit, given the centrality of his business experience to his argument for his candidacy.  If he is going to say he should be President because he was successful in business, it is worthwhile to assess how he came to be successful.

The criticism from the Obama camp is not arguing that Romney's business tactics should be illegal or looked down upon.  But it's to indicate that much of his expertise is in fact in destroying businesses, not building them as he claims in his stump speeches.

Romney rarely ever talks about his time as the governor of Massachusetts, and of course he never talks about his life in the Mormon church.  The centerpiece of his candidacy is his time at Bain.  So how could it possibly be that Obama's the bad guy for discussing every aspect of Romney's experience?