reasontv on airbnb

Posted on August 26, 2013 by christopher fisher

An excellent profile of an amazing company by ReasonTV:

Posted in Economics, Goverment, Price Controls, videos | Leave a comment

negative theology

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

Negative theology is a theology in which God is said to only be known through attributes that separate him from this world. Per Act and Being:

It is a dogma whose truth is almost everywhere stated or assumed that the human being cannot know the essence or being of God. One consequence of this for our language is that, as they stand, out words are simply incapable of speaking of the creator. That is the truth underlying what is known as the negative theology: that God can best be characterized by thinking away the limitation inherent in words designed – or so the theory goes – to speak of created things.

Negative attributes would include: Simple, perfect, eternal (in the timeless sense), omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, impeccable, ineffable, invisible, infinite, unknowable. They are negative because they distance God from creation. They explain not who he is, but what he is not.

Atheist George H Smith, predictably is frustrated by negative theology. He first explains what it is and then explains why it is wholly unhelpful in understanding God:

Some of God’s attributes are obviously negative: “immutable” tells us that God does not change; “ineffable” tells us that God cannot be described; “infinite” tells us that God is not finite; “invisible” tells us that God is not visible. Even some terms that appear to be positive are essentially negative. To say that God is “eternal,” for instance, is to say that God is “not subject to temporal succession.” Furthermore, attributes such as “omnipotence” and “omniscience” signify capacities without limits, so they also stem (at least partially) from the negative way.

While the negative way logically presupposes positive knowledge of God’s nature, most of God’s negative qualities, because they entail the inherent contradiction of the “unlimited attribute,”cannot be translated into positive terms. The negative attributes of God do not provide us with any real knowledge of God’s nature; they are mere pseudo-attributes. Implicit within these characteristics is the premise: “reason will never understand this.”…

If the Christian wishes to use positive characteristics for God while retaining their meaning, he must reduce his God to a manlike or anthropomorphic level. On the other hand, if these predicates do not mean the same when applied to God as they do when applied to natural entities, then they assume some unknown, mysterious meaning and are virtually emptied of their significance.

A negative theology, a theology that distances God from his creation is one in which God cannot be known in any real sense of the word. Christianity, on the other hand, which teaches that Christ was the image of God, holds that God is knowable on a personal level.

Posted in Bible, Bible Critics, God, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Open Theism, Theology | 8 Comments

the great medical cost decline

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

The best way to illustrate with real life examples how “insurance” increases the price of services, is to compare covered procedures with uncovered procedures:

Cosmetic Surgery Prices. Cosmetic surgery is one of the few types of medical care for which consumers pay almost exclusively out of pocket. Even so, the demand for cosmetic surgery has exploded in recent years. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 1.7 million cosmetic surgical procedures were performed in 2008. That is more than 40 times the number performed two decades ago (for example, 413,208 in 1992).

Despite this huge increase, cosmetic surgeons’ fees have remained relatively stable. Since 1992, medical care prices have increased an average of 98 percent. The price of physician services rose by 74 percent. [See the figure.] The increase in the price of all goods, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 53 percent. Yet, an index of cosmetic surgery prices only rose only about 21 percent. Thus, while the price of medical care generally rose almost twice as fast as the CPI, the price of cosmetic surgery went up less than half as much. Put another way, while the real price of health care paid for by third parties rose, the real price of self-pay medicine fell.

As the figure shows, during downturns in the economy consumers become more price sensitive and providers respond accordingly with more competitive prices. Notice this phenomenon did not occur for medical care or physician services.

How much don’t people pay for insured activities:

For every $1 worth of hospital care consumed, the patient pays only about three cents out of pocket, on the average; 97 cents is paid by a third party.
For every $1 worth of physician services consumed, the patient pays less than 10 cents out of pocket, on the average.
For the health care system as a whole, every time patients consume $1 in services, they pay only 12 cents out of pocket.

Posted in Economics, Human Nature, Price Controls | 1 Comment

understanding insurance costs

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

Pretend you decide to spend a night out eating at Olive Garden. You arrive to find the restaurant filled with 49 other people, all who value and love Olive Garden’s food. But as soon as you sit down, the waiter informs you that tonight there is a special deal going on. All 50 people would not be served individual bills. Instead, all individuals would have their bills be added together and divided by 50 (the number of people). How would this effect individual spending habits?

Personally, I never order wine ($5) or soda ($2). Those are extra costs whose benefit does not outweigh the added cost to my paycheck. But in the scenario above, I would not be paying the $5. I would be paying one fiftieth of that cost (10 cents). While the extra consumption on my part would add $5 to the total consumption, personal costs would not be noticeable to my bank account. At this rate, I might as well order the fanciest wine that there is ($15 per glass, costing me 30 cents). The glass of wine might even be more expensive then the entire meal I wanted before the entering the restaurant!

If every person held the same logic, Olive Garden would make windfall profits that night. If everyone was only going to order a $15 meal before, but then upgraded to steak and fancy wine, every single person will now be ordering $30 or more. Before the cost sharing, only $750 ($15 x 50) would have been purchased. Afterwards, $1500 ($30 x 50) is purchased.

Naturally, this system drives up costs. While my individual decision to consume $15 more in food only costs me individually 30 cents, because everyone else is doing the same, my total bill reflects the shared amount. I may have entered Olive Garden believing I would only spend $15, but when I exit my bill would reflect the average amount ($30) no matter how much or little I consumed. The more people added into the equation, the more true this becomes.

Even if I was only in the mood for Soup and Salad ($6), the fact that everyone else is ordering expensive items means that I will never realized the benefits of skimping. I am better off ordering my heart’s desire, no matter the cost.

Of course, a business which ran like this would soon find themself out of business. When people can vote with their feet, they will choose not to subsidize other people’s behaviors (especially strangers). Instead they will patron a place which gives them the value they want.

In the insurance world, this is not a possibility. The insurance world works like the above scenario: everyone is incentivised to spend but no one is incentivised to skimp. The government has ensured that health insurance markets cannot work competitively. They have outlawed plans that only cover catastrophic events. They have outlawed plans that do not allow pre-existing conditions. They have outlawed cross-state competition. They have outlawed plans that discriminate. They have tied health insurance to having a job (should car insurance be employer provided as well?). In the insurance industry, the government has taken all possible steps to insure all insurance plans do not allow thrift to pay off. The only thing left for a healthy individual to do is to withdraw from the market, but of course that is now illegal too.

Posted in Econ 101, Economics, Goverment, Human Nature, Price Controls | 1 Comment

gun debates

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

Two excellent examples of how the left debates gun control. It is very telling that those on the left believed that Piers Morgan won these debates:

And

Posted in Guns, videos | Leave a comment

do not defend your right to own a gun

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

When talking about guns, debates seem to be of the standard script. Anti gun folks will point out shootings and crime. Pro gun folks will counter with statistical probabilities and examples of states. All of this is in the attempt to justify being able to own guns. But all this is missing the core issue.

From an excellent blog post from Reason.com:

It’s a question that’s become a bit of a mantra for would-be restricters of personal armaments who insist on knowing what possible justification gun owners could have for possessing semi-automatic rifles that have pistol grips, or for purchasing magazines that hold more than ten seven rounds.

But really, that’s all irrelevant. Because in free societies, you don’t have to justify owning things…

As I look around my office, I see a lot of stuff I don’t need… My ability to acquire pets and stuff that I want without having to justify the acquisitions is an expression of my personal freedom. If I had to go, Stetson Stratoliner in hand, to some puffed-up bureaucrat to beg permission to purchase the boxed set of Firefly DVDs or a mutt rescue dog, I would very obviously be living in a state of severely constrained liberty.

The appropriate answer to “Who the hell needs … ?” is “hey, if you don’t want one, don’t buy it.” The right to own stuff without an explanation is the right to be free.

When someone asks: “Why would you ever possibly need [insert item of choice]?” The appropriate answer is “Because I want one.” We should not have to justify our wants to some bureaucrat. We should be able to own what we want precisely because we live in a free society.

Posted in Goverment, Guns | 3 Comments

the summum bonum

Posted on August 20, 2013 by christopher fisher

It is important to understand Augustine’s teaching on the ultimate good (summun bonum) because it is the source of many doctrines in modern Christianity. Without this key teaching, many of the negative attributes of God may have never solidified. It then is important to understand what this teaching entails and what implications it imparted to Christian teachings. Only then can we re-evaluate our own understanding of Christianity in light of possible Platonic contamination.

During the time of Augustine there were two main competing views on the nature of “good”. Platonism stressed that the “the good” (a synonym for “god” in their vocabulary) was an unchangeable perfection (similar to Plato’s Theory of Forms). To the Platonist, god was an anti-concept that could not be compared with material being in any real sense. The “good” of the Platonic god, was not “good” that humans could understand. It was an ultimate ideal state. Any “good” in the material world was merely shadows of that unchanging perfection. In fact, material world was less than ideal and any good philosopher would dedicate their life to reaching this ideal state (through meditation and abstaining for things of the flesh). Augustine adopted these ideas directly from Plato and incorporated them into his primary teachings:

The highest good, than which there is no higher, is God, and consequently He is unchangeable good, hence truly eternal and truly immortal. All other good things are only from Him, not of Him. For what is of Him, is Himself. And consequently if He alone is unchangeable, all things that He has made, because He has made them out of nothing, are changeable.

Notice that Augustine contrasts that which is mutable and created against that which is immutable and uncreated. The created was a shadow version of the perfect. Augustine explains all this in his book On the Nature of Good. In this writing he tried to convince his main opponents that this “good” of Platonism was true while their dualistic thinking was false. They were called the Manicheans (followers of Mani), and Augustine had been a hearer for them for approximately 9 years.

The Manicheans were dualistic. They represented the other main thought on the nature of “good” during the time of Augustine. Whereas the Platonists saw evil as the departure from the good, the Manicheans saw good and evil as two competing powers. The good could not be contaminated by the evil and could not touch it. The “good” was not the cause of everything (as it was for the Platonists), because they claimed that evil could not be caused by the good. Modern Manicheanism might be found in Christians who claim everything evil is caused by the devil (as if the devil was an equal but opposite force to God).

Augustine argued that although God was the cause of all things and the ultimate good (the summun bonum), that free will was the reason for evil. This allowed him to say that God had ultimate power, yet evil could exist. Because we do not have have his opponent’s response, we might be safe to assume they were less than impressed.

It is important to note, the Bible does not speak in these terms (of the Platonists or the Manicheans). The Bible does not rattle on for pages about intangible concepts that bare no relation to God’s creation. Augustine specifically learned his teaching straight from Plotinus, and literally (and admittedly) reinterpreted the Old Testament to fit this Platonic theology.

Posted in Augustine, God, Greek History, History, People, Plato, Plotinus, Theology | 6 Comments

john maynard keynes was a homosexual pedophile

Posted on August 19, 2013 by christopher fisher

Most people are aware of the term Keynesianism as the system of thought that believes the government must engage in deficit spending to create growth. John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, and governments have been using it as an excuse to spend more money ever since.

Even less people know of Keynes, the man. Keynes hated Victorian values, and sought a moral destruction of society:

The first was their overriding belief in the importance of personal love and friendship, while scorning any general rules or principles that might limit their own egos; and the second, their animosity toward and contempt for middleclass values and morality. The Apostolic confrontation with bourgeois values included praise for avant-garde aesthetics, holding homosexuality to be morally superior (with bisexuality a distant second), and hatred for such traditional family values as thrift or any emphasis on the future or long run, as compared to the present. (“In the long run,” as Keynes would later intone in his famous phrase, “we are all dead.”)

Keynes took his homosexuality very seriously. Being the meticulous man he was, he kept diaries of all his sexual encounters. Here are some instances from when he was around 28 years of age:

Keynes lists his sexual partners, either by their initials (GLS for Lytton Strachey, DG for Duncan Grant) or their nicknames (“Tressider,” for J. T. Sheppard, the King’s College Provost). When he apparently had a quick, anonymous hook-up, he listed that sex partner generically: “16-year-old under Etna” and “Lift boy of Vauxhall” in 1911, for instance, and “Jew boy,” in 1912.

His sexual preclusion to young boys did not stop there. Although his later diaries were encrypted, he visited plenty of places when child sex was en vogue. From a very disturbing biography on Keynes:

He and his fellow leftist reformers however, had no compunction in exploiting human degradation and misery in Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Constantinople (Istanbul). These served as convenient spawning grounds for the establishment of enclosed brothels filled with children, who were compelled to satisfy the unnatural lusts of high-born English socialists.

Keynes always ready to guide others freely advised his fellow debauchees to go to Tunis, “where ‘bed and boy’ were also not expensive.”

To make matters worse:

In academic deviate circles, Keynes acquired underground fame as a skilled connoisseur who was able to spot potential material for future debauchment among the male children at Eton (eight to sixteen years of age), as well as the youth of Cambridge. The Keynes-Strachey correspondence is replete with reports of such expeditions to both Eton and Cambridge University.

Although a being an evil person does not make someone intellectually wrong, it should give pause to thought. If Keynes valued the short term, the here and now, instant gratification, and a destruction of the family, what are the effects of the policy he advocated?

Posted in History, Leftists | 2 Comments

God and his testimony

Posted on August 19, 2013 by christopher fisher

Greeks appear to stress a theology of divine being, Hebrews of divine action… there is a tendency to identify the divine attributes by a list of ‘omni’s’ and negatives – omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent, infinite, eternal, and the rest – and then paste on to them conceptions of divine actions

In Act and Being, Colin E. Gunton points out the odd method by which we study God in modern Christianity. We start with assumptions of various divine attributes and then deduce further attributes (this is before even looking at the text of the Bible). This process is an entirely Greek method of thinking, as opposed to the Hebrew method of testimony (experience):

Similarly, the treatment of omnipotence notoriously defines it, again in a priori terms, as the capacity to do everything but will a contradiction, there is no reference to what God actually does in the economy of creation and redemption. That is to say, Aquinas having set up the ontological framework for his theology… everything else follows by a process of logical deduction… We have an analysis of the God-world relation in largely cosmological terms, untrammelled by reference to those particular divine acts in which God is revealed by scriptures actually to operate. That is to say, the basic concepts come from philosophical, or, should we say, Greek theology. We are in the presence of an entrenched tradition which owns more to Greece than scripture and, despite modification, dominates the treatment of attributes until this day.

I would caution against coming up with an a priori list of attributes. It does damage to the text of the Bible, morphing the meaning into something not meant to be communicated, and it also fogs our understanding of God. If God is good, let the Bible show it (like creating a paradise for man). If God is righteous, let the Bible show it (like destroying a world full of sinners and saving the righteous). If God is relational, let the Bible show it (like coming to Adam and letting him name the animals). If God is powerful, let the Bible show it (like leading millions of Egyptian slaves from bondage). The Bible tells us about God through testimony, not abstract philosophy.

Posted in Bible, God, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Open Theism, Theology | 1 Comment

on tariffs and coersion

Posted on August 18, 2013 by christopher fisher

Don Boudreaux on import tariffs:

If American shrimpers waved guns in consumers’ faces and threatened to shoot if these consumers insist on buying low-priced imported shrimp rather than buy higher-priced domestic shrimp, such thievery would be punished with jail time. Fortunately for American shrimpers and many other domestic producers, they need not themselves engage in such distasteful and risky activities. Uncle Sam does it for them.

I have made this same point previously. If a dad had a son who was applying for a job, it would be immoral for him to stand outside the business with a shotgun stopping any competition from interviewing. But this is precisely what the government does to those who are “illegal immigrants” or “those under 18”. They interfere with a business owner’s God given right to freedom of association and freedom of contracts, in order to pursue their policy agendas. This is tantamount to theft.

Posted in Economics, Goverment, Labor | Leave a comment