Archbishop Demetrios’ Encyclical for the Beginning of the Ecclesiastical New Year

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1. 51
   Ryan Close says:

   September 3, 2009 at 9:56 AM

   This is untrue. How can you tell me that I believe one thing manifestly contradictory to what I have repeatedly written and then demur me for posting long responses in my defense? To be very clear, on almost every point you have described a political position I passionately fight against daily as if I held to it. In my defense I remind you that:

   a) I read and interacted with many articles that were suggested to me.

   b) I do not advocate “The Third Way” which is a contemporary political movement I know very little about and may just be a form of centrist statism that I deplore.

   c) Rather than being vague I have given details and policy positions that only amount to removing the privileges a certain class currently enjoy and removing impediments to entrepreneurial enterprise. I have also demonstrated that this is the way things used to be in early America.

   d) I do not advocate any social welfare at all, such as when I said it would be ideal to promote a society where as few as possible, even 0% of citizens, would be state dependents, therefore countering the claim that “they never suggest how to solve grave financial problems of high level of government expenditures on their social welfare programs.” I am not one of “them” anyway.

   e) My “economic prescriptions” are more free trade, protection of privet property, promotion of entrepreneurship, and severely limited government. I wish to limit federal government to the point that it operates on a tithe of a 10% state tax. I don’t see how we could possibly disagree on my “economic prescriptions” unless you think the federal government should not be cut back as far.

   f) I even said that I repudiated single payer government health care in my previous post at the expense of being ridiculed in Canada!

   g) And even I agree with farmer Blake Hurst that it is perhaps more humane to raise chickens and turkeys in sheds rather than outside where they can be decapitated by weasels or die in a rain storm. I read the article!

   You think I want to coerce the world with sweeping changes for the sake of moral outrage. I just long for the status-quo of America 100 years ago when more small businesses were owned by more people and there was less government interference. That’s not moral outrage, its nostalgia. Rather than demonstrate that there isn’t such contemporary government interference you resort to telling me I believe the exact opposite of what I say I do.

   I don’t see how what I believe is socialism, statism, or egalitarianism. I am in complete agreement with Jefferson, Dabney, Wendell Berry, and Clark Carlton, veritable giants for traditional conservatives, whom none would dare call a progressive, whose very name makes progressives shudder. And I would go live on a farm if I wasn’t indentured into white-collar employment. Besides my farm could be confiscated by tyrannical state agencies because there is no such thing as privet property.

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2. 52
   Ryan Close says:

   September 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM

   We don’t disagree about statism either. Everything you said about statism I rejoice to loudly agree. I don’t think the “state” can create anything let alone a utopia. Articles on my website demonstrate what a fierce and informed opponent of statism I really am in it’s every manifestation:

   The political principles that under gird the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution go back to the English philosopher John Locke. According to Locke and his spiritual heirs such as Thomas Jefferson, the function of government is to secure the liberty of individual citizens. Freed from the burdens of indentured servitude and the depravation of life, citizens mature and then enter into the kind of industry best suited to result in Prosperity and Virtue ending in abundance, hospitality, and generosity. This belief, that the purpose of government is to secure the liberty of its citizens, necessarily entails limited government. Limited government allows opportunities for more self-government, improved representation, and choice in the political process.

   Today a massive centralized government has grown too big and too corrupt to allow for any meaningful representation or self-government. Furthermore, the government’s goal is to grasp as much political control for itself and for corporate concerns by promoting a culture of fear. By means of a crippling tax burden, obligatory bureaucratic regulations, and the systematic limitation of individual rights the government is slowly eroding the personal integrity, independence, and liberty of their people.

   Since it is the nature of governments to seek greater power and control through tyranny, political philosophers have been very suspicious of politicians. Therefore the principles upon which this nation was founded sought to limit the power of government. That is why the United States Constitution did not prescribe a limited number of people’s rights. Instead it delineated clear boundaries and limits as to what government could and could not do leaving most of the power and rights in the hands of the people.

   Clark Carlton, in his letter, writes, “The equation is quite simple: the bigger the government is, the more it tries to do, the less freedom is available to its citizens. The purpose of government within the American tradition, then, is neither to make its citizens righteous nor to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, but to protect their God-given liberty.” This is the political philosophy known as “political liberalism.”

   And how about this grave warning from my article The Politics of Antichrist,

   If the traditional society was envisioned as helping people live virtuous lives, now the purpose of society is to keep people from suffering. Where as the first goal aims at removing impediments to virtue it left open the possibility of suffering. In fact it thought of suffering as something that could sometimes build character. The end result is a nation of mature, productive, strongly independent, and liberally generous people. The second goal aims at removing opportunity for suffering by limiting individual rights and “protecting” people from themselves. The end result is a nation of immature, lazy, and strongly dependent people with an entitlement attitude “cared for” by a state that encompasses all of life within its total grasp.

   ‘When Mussolini first coined the word “totalitarianism”, it was not a pejorative slur, nor was it something connoting tyranny; rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its total grasp. The oppressive totalitarian state always begins by being the compassionate totalitarian state.’

   The classic British and American traditions have prized liberty just as highly as safety, as encapsulated in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

   Richard Weaver warned of this tendency toward the totalitarian, ‘total care’ state in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”

   So how can you honestly accuse me of statist pretensions when I expose the dangers of statism in such a nuanced way for all the world to read?

   By “socialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin” I meant statist socialism and corporate monopoly capitalism. I said before that, Statist socialism [has] as it’s goal that 100% of people are employees of the state, 100% of people are dependents of the state, and 100% of a states GDP is from government spending. Monopoly capitalism also has as it’s goal that 100% of people become employees of corporations. I am advocating a system where as few people as possible are employees because they own their own business. A system where as few people as possible are dependent on government welfare because they are self-sufficient, and more than that, they have excess to be liberally generous.

   Statist socialism and corporate monopoly capitalism can merge easily because by the first the worker is provided a minimum wage rather than a family wage and no opportunity to start a business of his own. By the second he is provided state welfare benefits.

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3. 53
   Ryan Close says:

   September 3, 2009 at 10:03 AM

   I totally agree that “government controlled economies penalize virtue and reward vice.” But government control is exactly what we have today. I am pointing out that we have never had a free market and it would be better to start now with a free market. I am trying to say we have been under a form of soft corporate socialism since FDR, where the small cabinet shop paying workers a family wage is stolen from by the government to give to Big-Box-Stores to put the cabinet shop owner out of business and create 50 minimum wage jobs and result in more state welfare dependents. Progressives want more state welfare dependents. Neo-Conservatives are in favor of corporate favoritism. They go hand in hand. And that is today’s status quo.

   So how is what I am saying anything like “socializing health care?” Did I say “the inequities of the present system are reason enough to turn the entire enterprise over to secular elites?” No I did not. I said, turn it over to mom and pop, give my neighbors a chance to get ahead by becoming entrepreneurs.

   Since John Couretas said he was arguing for no such nonsense, referring to “monopoly capitalism” and we all agree that if there was a free market without state favoritism and more entrepreneurship then more people would be better off, then how do we even disagree?

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4. 54
   Ryan Close says:

   September 3, 2009 at 10:18 AM

   “Distributism” not “distributionism” does not ignore “a fundamental reality of economics: resources and wealth move to the most efficient and/or powerful actors in the economy.” That’s my basic point. More free market for more people is better for more people. When governments interfere in the market to help in the movement of resources and wealth to the most powerful actors, monopoly capitalism is ensured. But distributism disagrees with you that the most powerful actor, the government, should interfere to make things better. It shouldn’t interfere at all. In any way! First of all, I believe that government should be the smallest actor. Secondly, government interference has already gotten us to the point where there is less free market for most people.

   I too see computers and the internet creating a more localized and distributed economy because it democratizes information. I also agree that tyrannical governments have always been threatened by the internet so that the Cyber-security Act of 2009 is another attack on liberty such as we have already seen in dictatorships around the world. In fact it is perhaps too obvious since every college philosophy and social science student understands this very principal. Thus it is perhaps the clearest evidence of the growing statist tyranny we see in America today.

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5. 55
   Ryan Close says:

   September 4, 2009 at 6:12 PM

   Your inability to abide any constructive criticism of the contemporary economic regime and it’s society leads you to arbitrarily label me as backward and romantic because I see virtue we could learn from in the past.

   In traditional societies the birth rate of illegitimate children was around 3% or 4%. Today it is almost institutionalized. Your attack of my ideal of small property and decentralized production just because it is not contemporary is as logical as attacking conservative sexual values because illegitimacy is currently in vogue.

   Just suggesting that the thousands of family owned slaughterhouses at the beginning of the 20th century were better than the few centralized slaughterhouses owned by only four companies makes me in your eyes a champion of polio, wife beating, racism, famine, anti-technology primitivism, and strangely neo-Marxism. I don’t understand it but I am going to let it go.

   As far as egalitarianism, there are many definitions. In my opinion there is a kind of Christian egalitarianism that is implicit in the Scriptures: “Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike…” (Deut 1:17) “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism…” (Acts 10:34) A form of egalitarianism is also at the core of American political thinking. Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. called these words the creed of the United States. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 says, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property.” Yet the progressive movement in the United States has extrapolated from this traditional understanding to a new form of egalitarianism. “Equality of outcome” is a form of social justice rhetoric which seeks to reduce or eliminate incidental inequalities individuals in a society. “For example, granting a greater amount of income and/or total wealth to poorer individuals or households at the expense of relatively wealthy individuals or households.” This is the statist re-distribution of wealth that results in equalizing of poverty and destroys the work ethic. I simply acknowledge that an over bearing corporate capitalism can also crush a man’s work ethic through despair.

   Lastly, wikipedia defines socialism as referring “to various theories of economic organization advocating state, worker or public ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation.” Capitalism refers “to an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in new technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor.”

   Distributism, as I understand it, is like decentralized small capitalism. It does not want state or public control of the means of production, allocation of resources, or anything at all. It wants the means of production and allocation of resources to be privately controlled by more private individuals, particularly families. Distributism does not refer to an egalitarian method of compensation but to coerced remuneration of labor and industry through capital traded in a free market. Profits are distributed to owners just as in capitalism, just that there are more owners. The state has nothing to do in “forcing” people to be owners except not inhibiting ownership or small property and protecting privet property. Wages are paid to labor, though I think a “family wage” rather than a “minimum wage” is most conducive to the sustained existence of the work force, as even Adam Smith admitted. A “minimum wage” is a state regulation that helps keep the work force from starving, and like all state regulations should be abolished.

   I cannot say it clearer than that. I am sorry if I have been vague in the past.

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1. Archbishop Demetrios on the new ecclesiastical year « De unione ecclesiarum says:

   September 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM

   [...] 1, 2009 Copied from the American Orthodox Institute [...]

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