{"id":15478,"date":"2013-05-14T09:07:40","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T13:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=15478"},"modified":"2013-05-14T06:19:32","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T10:19:32","slug":"smart-people-saying-smart-things-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/05\/14\/smart-people-saying-smart-things-100\/","title":{"rendered":"Smart people saying smart things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Warren Buffett on Gold<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end.<\/p>\n

What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As \u201cbandwagon\u201d investors join any party, they create their own truth \u2014 for a while.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconvenience to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.<\/p>\n

The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labor are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the laborer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious than where they are low.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alisa Harris: \u201cNo, Kathryn Joyce Is Not Attacking Good Christian Parents\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nowhere does Joyce claim that the extreme cases, particularly those involving child abuse, are representative of evangelical adoptions. She is consistently at pains, in both the book and her interviews, to stress that the people she\u2019s writing about are almost all good people with admirable intentions. She does point to a well-documented trend, that spans from fundamentalist evangelical groups all the way to major organizations like Focus on the Family and the Southern Baptist Convention, in evangelicals advocating international adoption as a kind of acceptable social charity work that doesn\u2019t compromise fundamentalist positions on sexual ethics. It changes nothing that Merritt has never heard of some of the adoption organizations involved; anyone who has actually been through the process certainly has. In both her book and her Mother Jones<\/em> story<\/a>, Joyce charts the history of this rising phenomenon without overstating its size or influence.<\/p>\n

As is often the case when mainstream reporters present portraits of evangelical behavior that cut through their own self-justifications, Merritt tries to sidetrack the story with detailed assessments of the exact size and influence of certain books and organizations Joyce mentions and claim she has attributed some sort of outsize influence to them. The goal seem so be help evangelicals circle the wagons, not to consider that some in their tent \u2014 almost all very good people \u2014 are participating in what has become a global network of child trafficking to serve the desires of Western parents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Rev. Phil Jackson: \u201cGod is pissed off and so am I\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a passage in Luke 7:11-16 in which Jesus stops a funeral and heals a child from death, brings him back to life, and gives him back to his mother. How I dream of that moment. But, I also believe I can work to stop the funerals in the first place and bring our young men and women back to Christ, back to their families, and back to their communities. This means working for personal transformation of young people\u2019s lives. But it also means looking at the structures we live in and asking how they can change to make our streets a safer place to grow up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Steve Benen: \u201cSenate easily approves fix for flight delays\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

When the sequester started kicking children out of pre-K, Congress did nothing. When this stupid policy denied low-income seniors the benefits of Meals on Wheels, Congress barely noticed. When sequestration cuts put new burdens on cancer patients and cut housing aid to struggling families, most of Congress shrugged its shoulders.<\/p>\n

But when business travelers ran into flight delays on Monday, a unanimous Senate approved a fix without breaking a sweat on Thursday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warren Buffett on the shortcomings of gold; Adam Smith on the importance of paying high wages; Alisa Harris on the hatchet jobs written falsely accusing Kathryn Joyce of writing a hatchet job; the Rev. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}