Do Not Go To Bible College

This has been one of my most popular articles on this blog…

My time as a missionary in Cambodia has been teaching me that, most often, my abilities which are most useful to the people around me are the skills I learned back in Canada before I came out here.

If my son approaches me as he’s nearing completion of high school, and says he wants to be a missionary or a pastor and he wants advice on how to do that, my first instruction will be to stay out of Bible College.

Here’s what I’ll then tell him:

1) “Get a job in a construction trade, one that trains through an apprenticeship program. I’m an electrician myself, so I’ll suggest that one over any other.”

What will he learn in a trade?

a) He will learn how to value hard work and working with his hands.
b) He will learn how to be resourceful.
c) He will learn how to respect…

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Thomas Sowell Quotes #4

“In the most varied conditions in countries around the world – whether in Third World countries or in economically more advanced countries, and whether in countries where the majority or the minority has the higher skills – those seeking either the leadership or the votes of lagging groups tend to offer them four things:

Assurance that their lags are not their fault.
Assurance that their lags are the fault of some more fortunate group that they already envy and resent.
Assurance that the lagging group and their culture are just as good as anybody else’s, if not better.
Assurance that what the lagging group needs and deserves is a demographically defined ‘fair share’ of the economic and other benefits of society, sometimes supplemented with some kind of reparations for past injustices or some special reward for being indigenous ‘sons of the soil’.

“In addition, racial or ethnic leaders have every incentive to promote the isolation of the groups they lead – despite the fact that isolation has been a major factor in the poverty and backwardness of many different peoples around the world.

“Where a lagging group is concentrated in a particular region of a country, leaders of such groups have incentives to promote secession from the more advanced part of the country… The people themselves may also benefit physically by being spared the public embarrassment and private shame of being visibly outperformed repeatedly by others in the same economy and society.”

~from Wealth, Poverty and Politics, page 268-269

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Quotes #11

“Mankind writes its own history long before the historians visit its battlefields; days, festivals, holidays, the order of meals, rest and vacations, together with religiously observed ritual and symbols, are sources of political history, though rarely used by the average political or economic historian…

“It is not necessary to record the everyday life of a nation for a thousand years in order to know its aim and inspiration. The great creations of history do not reveal their deepest sense nor their soul every day. But each has its wedding day; and the words and songs, the promises and laws of this period of a nation’s life express its character viva voce and settle its destiny once and forever.”

~from Out of Revolution, page 8 & 9

No, Trump is Not Hitler

trump-win

Some people I know are saying that Trump will create a fascist dictatorship in America. He’s the next Hitler! That, of course, is nonsense.

In order for Trump to become a dictator he would have to seize sole control over all of America’s wealth, consolidate all the authority over the military into a very small controllable group of people, disarm the American people, and become master over the economy. Obviously that’s not what he plans to do.

People are saying he’s a dictator because he is a loud mouth bully. Well, maybe he is a loud mouth bully, but that hardly means he’s a threat to American freedom. Hurt feelings are not a threat to freedom.

But look at the list of what he’d have to do to create a dictatorship and then ask yourself which party in the American system is actually trying to do those things.

The threat to American freedom is not from the right.

The Right to Left Political Wormhole

wormhole
Often when people think of the left wing/right wing political scale, they think of far left types of governments as being communism or socialism, while a far right example would be fascism. But that is not accurate.

The further right you go on the scale, the smaller the government gets. A libertarian, for example, who wants private schools, private healthcare, private road building, etc., would be quite far right on the political scale with the government being responsible for very little, and private citizens being responsible for much.

So, not only will you find communism and socialism at the extreme left end of the scale, but you will find fascism there as well, as fascism requires a large controlling government structure. The only real difference between communism and fascism is that fascism allows for private ownership while the government still controls the economy. What then, would lie at the far right? It would be no government, or anarchy.

It’s understandable, though, to mistakingly place fascism at the far right, as an anarchy can very quickly morph into a fascist dictatorship. In an anarchy, where individuals control everything, it’s just a matter of time before some of those individuals become very powerful, and, in order to maintain their power, they will have to actively oppose the rise of any others to the same level of power. Boom — there’s your fascist dictatorship. So, there is a wormhole from the far right (anarchy) to the far left (dictatorship).