It occurred to me that these two forces had one thing in common. Despite the millenia that have passed, they are both living expressions of what we might call the Yahwist project. The Yahwist project began thousands of years ago, when a band of Middle Eastern tribesmen believed that they heard a message from their local god. This deity, named Yahweh, told them something along these lines: “I am Yahweh, and I am the only god you may worship. I am higher than all other gods, and I created the universe. If you wish to receive my blessings, you must worship me and follow my commandments, which will create a just and prosperous society among you.” Thus began the Yahwist project. Every generation, group, and individual who embraces the call has had the difficult task of trying to discover just what such a call means in practice, but the quest for justice is central to it.

From the very beginning of the project, all sorts of schisms and disagreements arose among participants, but the distinctive features of the Yahwist project have continued to be expressed in almost every attempt at heeding its call. As Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others have tried to answer the call, each community has tried in its own way to obey what they understand Yahweh’s commands to be, and in each group this has led to some form of legal system, with certain standards of justice. Now, those of you who know how I think will know that I do not hold all religions or even all monotheistic religions equal. I hold Christianity above and against all others, but even if dissenting groups such as Muslims may be misled, it is nonetheless true that their religion is an attempt at following the Yahwist call and as such it will tend to produce certain standards of justice whenever it is not merely being used as someone’s route to power. The same goes for Catholicism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnessism, Orthodox Judaism, Reform Judaism, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc.

What does this mean for Christians? It means that, though we continue to cling to the truth-claims of our religion, we nevertheless have opportunity to see the hand of God at work in the struggles of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others for justice. The call of God has sounded throughout the world and it continues to call people, no matter how enlightened or confused, into its struggle for justice. It means that we may partner with whoever is willing to join us in expressing God’s love and justice to the world, even while making our disagreements clear. It means that those Pentecostal believers and that Muslim nurse are, on a certain deep and true level, playing for the same team, and their work will be more effective if they both recognize it.

Is Acts 2 in tension with capitalism?  Not in the governmental sense of the word.  Indeed, a principled capitalist would be outraged if anyone interfered with any group’s decision to pool resources and pursue need-based allotment.  Where the principled governmental capitalist must draw the line, however, is when someone tries to establish such a system of sharing by forcing other people into it.  That’s where it ceases being charity and becomes robbery.

You’ve heard it before, I’m certain.  It’s the pledge of allegiance, and by saying it the pledger promises his loyalty to a God-following Republic founded upon the ideals of justice and individual liberty.  But, like the commandments in Animal Farm, our judicial system has turned it into a mockery of its intended aims.  Attorney Danny Lampley, who has a personal objection to loyalty oaths, simply stood up in court respectfully during the saying of the pledge but did not say the words.  Judge Talmadge Littlejohn insisted that Lampley comply, and Lampley repeated his objection.  Then he was thrown in jail.  As The Agitator put it, “Give thanks for your freedom, son, or I’m sending you to jail.”  This is a disgusting reversal of all that American law is supposed to be about:  respect for individual disagreements and freedom of conscience, even for the non-patriotic types.  Here’s the story, complete with online facsimiles of the paperwork that sent Lampley to jail.

The article starts well, by acknowledging the difficulties involved in pinning down the exact meaning of “bribe,” and then dividing the usage of the word bribe into four categories:

• bribes to individuals operating with their private property
• bribes to employees operating with their employer’s property
• bribes to businesses operating with their private property
• bribes in the public sector

Then he addresses the four categories and makes a conclusion.  His first examination is of “bribes” to an individual to influence what that individual does freely with his own self or property.  He divides these “bribes” roughly into three groups.  The first is the use of simple incentives like coupons to induce someone to buy something.  Correctly, Skasiw rejects this case as unworthy of the name “bribe.”

The second sub-category in the “individual bribe” category requires a bit more thought.  Skasiw treats it as follows:

The best argument for the existence of bribery in the realm of individually provided services can be made in cases of misrepresentation: an influential restaurant critic offering a dishonest review, or a famous athlete pretending to use health products which don’t really help him.

These cases create no violation of property rights.[1] The public may feel deceived, but they have no property rights over the newspaper that runs the column or the television station that airs the commercial. Furthermore, the restaurant critic’s reputation and future marketability will rise or fall accordingly, as will the athlete’s, limiting their dishonesty.

From a personal-advice standpoint, Skasiw is correct that people shouldn’t trust advertisements and anyone who trusts such a promotion is ripped off by his own foolishness.  But from a libertarian-law standpoint, Skasiw seems to be overlooking a legal detail.  Austrolibertarian thinkers tend to support the legality of consensual exchanges of money for goods.  But one important exception exists in the case of fraud, where a seller makes a sale by deceiving the consumer about what they are buying–that is, by not delivering what was offered, but refusing to refund the buyers money upon the pointing out of this fact.  And if a celebrity endorses a particular pill, is not the pill being sold as “the pill celebrity X uses for his Y”?  If the buyer is not actually given the pill celebrity X uses, then the company selling it and the celebrity have conspired to defraud the consumer.  This seems clear.

Skasiw does admit that in some cases fraud may occur, but for some reason fraud is limited to him to not include false advertisements of the kind mentioned above.  He does not define “the point of fraud,” but concludes that inducing someone to commit fraud is not bribery, for reasons also unclear.  One would imagine that the word “bribery” would include all cases of money changing hands to induce someone to deprive another of justice.

Of course, if the misrepresentation reaches the point of fraud, a case can be made for breach of contract between consumers and the restaurant or the sellers of health products, but fraud is a crime separate from bribery.

Bribes in the case of individuals operating with their own resources, do not exist. The misrepresentations often associated with what we call bribes are constrained by free-market competition.

And although he doesn’t come out and say it explicitly in his last sentence, he seems to be saying that what the market naturally constrains is not criminal.  This, if he is indeed implying it, is a strange yardstick for justice, to say the least.

His treatment of “Bribes to Employees” is well done and even-handed.

His “Bribes to Businesses” section addresses whether the student who gives his school money to “earn” a higher grade is guilty in any legal sense.  He concludes that the student is not, because there is in place no contract guaranteeing that an “A” is an “A” in any meaningful sense.  Here, it seems, the argument is on shaky ground, because of a large unspoken assumption that underpins it.  Skasiw is assuming that there exists no such thing as an implicit contract between a buyer and a seller, and that whatever is not in written form does not matter.  For if implicit contracts do indeed exist, clear grade corruption would be a violation of the contract between the other students and the school — for anyone buying schooling services which are known to include grade records is buying what he believes to be meaningful rankings of himself.  To show an extreme example of the place of implicit contracts in business, let us imagine that someone ordered $10,000 dollars worth of pizza for a massive event.  The pizza is delivered, but upon opening the boxes, the buyer finds dead cockroaches in every single box, next to the pizzas.  Can the recipient sue for breach of contract?  If we take Skasiw’s doctrine on grades to its logical conclusion, the recipient has no right to sue for a refund, because no contract exists specifying that cockroaches may not be in the box — I say this not to be cruel, but just to point out that implicit contracts must not be ignored.  I would argue that the man may indeed sue for a refund, on the grounds that all pizza contracts, unless otherwise agreed upon, come automatically with the unspoken contract not to put dead cockroaches in all the packages.

I realize, of course, that implicit contract is messy, and perhaps more difficult to recognize legally than explicit contract, but it is nonetheless a valid legal concept.

Then Skasiw does a good job of explaining how the production of “public goods” incentives the use of bribes.  Wanting to underscore his belief that government is the only inherently problematic sector with regard to bribes, he closes his analysis with

A close adherence to property rights leads to the conclusion that illicit bribes only exist in the public sector.

And although the general feeling behind the conclusion is something I must agree with, it’s wording forgets that its author has found true bribes to exist in the private sector when employees misuse their employers’ property.  And so his argument could have ended more precisely if it had instead closed with

A close examination of the incentives for bribery in the light of a libertarian theory of property rights leads to the conclusion that bribes are only a systemic problem in the public sector, where no satisfactory disincentive to bribery exists.

This all being said, I welcome Roman Skasiw into the fold of the Austrian dialogue with (metaphorically) open arms.  And I encourage anyone who wants to read a thoughtful look at war to read his article on Narrative and the Memory of War.

Last Tuesday, many within Churches of Christ voted for Obama, especially those who have come to see that voting for social justice is just as important as voting against abortion–both are pro-life orientations. Deuteronomy, for example, is just as concerned about just wages, fair treatment of aliens, and protection for the poor as it is protecting innocent life. Unjust wages and abortion, I believe, are both murder (read James 5:1-6, for example).

Aside from the extreme difficulty there is in defining any meaningful boundary beyond which a wage becomes “unjust,” let’s look at the James 5:1-6 passage (Darby translation).

¹Go to now, ye rich, weep, howling over your miseries that [are] coming upon [you].

²Your wealth is become rotten, and your garments moth-eaten.

³Your gold and silver is eaten away, and their canker shall be for a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have heaped up treasure in [the] last days.

⁴Behold, the wages of your labourers, who have harvested your fields, wrongfully kept back by you, cry, and the cries of those that have reaped are entered into the ears of [the] Lord of sabaoth.

⁵Ye have lived luxuriously on the earth and indulged yourselves; ye have nourished your hearts [as] in a day of slaughter;

⁶ye have condemned, ye have killed the just; he does not resist you.

To imagine that these six verses are a statement that paying low wages in the US (and remember, “low wages” in the US are positively luxurious when compared even to “high wages” in biblical times) is somehow equivalent to murder is the result of an incredibly bizarre series of mental contortions.  I won’t even try to elaborate.

For the past 3 days we have been staying in Jerusalem, which is in Israel proper, so most of our interactions have been with Israeli organizations, and Israeli people. Actually only one of the five organization we have met has been palestinian (Sabeel). The other four (Families Forum, Israeli Commission Against Home Demolition, Women in Black, Negev Coexistence Forum for civil equality) have been Israeli founded. So this is the most exposure that I’ve had to Israelis, and I’ve had some mixed experiences.

Our time with Women in Black yesterday was spent standing on a corner with a group of elderly Israeli women holding up signs that said “Stop the Occupation” in Hebrew, English and Arabic. We were not a large group. There were only about 20 of us and 12 were the CPT delegation. We had many people drive by and yell things at us like “shame on you” in hebrew, giving us the middle finger and on at least one occasion attempting to spit on us. There was one individual walking by who told us to get our facts straight and he asked us why we sided with those palestinian terrorists instead of Israelis. He mentioned that if we visited palestinians they would cut our throats. He ended his rant by mentioning, “We kicked their butts in 48 now the[y] just need to go back.” when asked where they need to go back to he mentioned Lebanon or Syria (Neither or which Palestinians are from). This encounter was probably the most disturbing of the day because it showed how the two sides of the conflict are dealing with two totally different sets of facts. I wouldn’t even know where to start a conversation with a person with that point of view.

That evening we took part in another Israeli led action (although I never found out what the group leading it was. This action was huge. There were 400 people, mostly Israeli young people demonstrating at Sheik-Jarah in Old City Jerusalem. There was a group of former refugees who had legally bought homes in Sheik-Jarah, but the Israeli government was kicking them out of their homes. The group marched to a home that had been taken and given to a Jewish family, while other parts of the group went to homes that were being targeted. It was good to see a large group of Israelis standing with Palestinians.

Today we met a different group of Israelis. After Israel became a state in 1948 they kicked out a large number of the native Palestinians, but those who stayed were given Israeli citizenship. One of these groups were the Bedouin people who lived in the Negev desert. This is the group we met with. These Bedouins were not nomadic, but lived in small villages. Although they are Israeli citizens the Israeli government refuses to build them a school, or to offer their children transportation to one. When the town tried to build one the government tore it down, even though it is law that every Israeli child have the opportunity to go to school. Besides this injustice the Bedouins do not have access to water or electricity, even though there is an Israeli power plant in the middle of one of the Bedouin villages. Besides this Israel does not recognized them as the owners of there land, even though Israel moved the Bedouins into that region, and created the villages! Because Israel does not recognize the Bedouin’s ownership they claim the right to demolish homes or entire villages. We talked with a Bedouin who’s home was destroyed two days before his wedding! We also talked with a leader of a village who showed us a demolition notice that said his entire village would be demolished sometime in the next two weeks. These orders are given with no alternatives for the bedouins. They have no where else to go, so when their homes are torn down they just build new ones (usually more remote each time). These are people who live in the desert. There is no plan to put anyone else on their land, but they are still being kicked out, and they are Israeli citizens. If this is the way that Israel treats it’s citizens I’m a bit scared to see how they treat those they view as their enemies. Today was very hard for me, but good to see. The Bedouins still have hope even in the face of all this. The activists keep coming out. There is still hope.

Peace,
Jonathan

Here’s Amos 1 13-15:

Thus says Jehovah, For three transgressions of B’nei Ammon, and for four, I will not turn away their punishment;  because they have ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead to enlarge their own territory.  And I will set fire to the wall of Rabbah [their capital city], and it will devour its palaces, with shouting in the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind;  and their king will go into captivity, he and his princes together, says Jehovah.

Here’s Amos 2 6-8

Thus says Jehovah, For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away their punishment;  because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes;  who trample on the heads of the poor as upon the dust of the earth, and they turn aside the way of the lowly.  And a man and his father go in to the same girl, to dishoner my holy name.  And they lay themselves down on clothes taken in pledge by every altar, and they drink the wine of those they condemned in the temple of their God.

And Amos 3 8-11

The lion has roared;  who will not fear?  The Lord Jehovah has spoken, who can keep from prophesying?  Announce this in the palaces at Ashdod, and in the palaces in the land of Mizraim, and say, Assemble yourselves on the mountains of Shomron, and behold the great tumults in the midst of it, and the oppressed in the midst of it.  For they do not know to do right, says Jehovah, they who store up violence and destruction in their palaces.  So thus says the Lord Jehovah, An adversary will encircle the land, and he will take away your palaces will be looted.

Amos 4 1-2

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are in the mountain of Shomron, who oppress the poor, and who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, Bring us more to drink!  The Lord Jehovah has sworn by his holiness that behold, the days will come upon you that he will take you away with hooks, and your offspring with fishhooks.

Amos 4 11 (one Mitchell point if you can tell me what this might have to do with social justice)

I have overthrown some of you as God overthrew Sedom and Amorah, and you were like firebrand plucked out of the flames, yet you have not returned to me, says Jehovah.

Amos 5 8-9

Jehovah is his name, who strengthens strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled will come against the fortress.  They hate him who rebukes in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks uprightly.  So because you enact taxes upon the poor, taking from him taxes of wheat;  you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them;  you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink wine of them.  For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins.  They afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from what is rightfully theirs.  So the prudent will keep silence in that time, for it is an evil time.  Seek good, and not evil, that you may live;  and so Jehovah, the God of Hosts, will be with you as you have spoken.  Have was is evil, and love what is good, and establish justice in the gate.  Perhaps Jehovah God of Hosts will be gracious to those who remain of Joseph.

Amos 6 1-8:

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and put their trust in the mountain of Shomron, who are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came!  Pass to Calneh, and see;  and from there go to Hamath the great;  then go down to Gath of the Philistines–are they better than these kingdoms?  Or is their border greater than your border?  You who put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near;  who lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves in the stall;  who chant to the sound of the viol, and invent for themselves instruments of music, like David;  who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest ointments;  but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.  Therefore they will now be carried off into captivity with the first who are carried away, and the banquent of those who stretched themselves out will be removed.  The Lord Jehovah has sworn by himself, says Jehovah the God of Hosts, I abhor the excellency of Jacob, and hate his palaces;  therefore I will deliver up the city with all that is in it.