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| - This is the power of 'us.' By giving power to thousands of users like you, we all have the power to build up the body of Christ around the world by providing free, high quality, easy to use resources for all areas of ministry. "May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples." (Gen. 28:3, NIV)
- The Values describe the principles we want to operate by.
- Money. It's the most valued thing in the world. Every culture has money. But what is more valuable than money? The human body. Life is our most valued thing. Without it, we cease to exist. What makes up the human body? Organs, blood, consciousness. How about the five senses: hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, and most importantly, taste? Without it you would have no concept of deliciousness. You would never know the valued taste of chocolate, candy, fruits, veggies, and meat. Especially human meat. Speaking of human meat, here comes a delicious morsel right now.
- You can use the box below to create new pages for this mini-wiki. preload=Values/preload editintro=Values/editintro width=25 values are very important
- Values are universal principles or ideals that we implicitly accept as guidelines for action. Values are a primary determinant of human accomplishment.
- In a diverse society, many values systems must exist. Some will value social standing, some wealth, and some will value an abstract set of virtues in different proportions from their neighbor. Some may believe that lying is socially expediant while theft destroys their self-worth. Another person may believe that lying and theft are both contemptable. It would be far easier to develop a stable government where the values of all citizens were the same. All systems must be based on some set of values, whether they are immoral, moral, or amoral.
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| abstract
| - This is the power of 'us.' By giving power to thousands of users like you, we all have the power to build up the body of Christ around the world by providing free, high quality, easy to use resources for all areas of ministry. "May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples." (Gen. 28:3, NIV)
- The Values describe the principles we want to operate by.
- Money. It's the most valued thing in the world. Every culture has money. But what is more valuable than money? The human body. Life is our most valued thing. Without it, we cease to exist. What makes up the human body? Organs, blood, consciousness. How about the five senses: hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, and most importantly, taste? Without it you would have no concept of deliciousness. You would never know the valued taste of chocolate, candy, fruits, veggies, and meat. Especially human meat. Speaking of human meat, here comes a delicious morsel right now.
- In a diverse society, many values systems must exist. Some will value social standing, some wealth, and some will value an abstract set of virtues in different proportions from their neighbor. Some may believe that lying is socially expediant while theft destroys their self-worth. Another person may believe that lying and theft are both contemptable. It would be far easier to develop a stable government where the values of all citizens were the same. All systems must be based on some set of values, whether they are immoral, moral, or amoral. The differences in values makes distinctions like justice, fairness, and equality tenuous concepts. Indeed, the definitions of these terms are wholely dependant on your personal perspective. How, then, do we define the values that a government must adhere to? Here, we must divorce ourselves from preconceptions and determine, apart from our personal values, what is critical and what is dangerous in the hands of a government with the power to compel action, to extract property, and to demolish freedom. Do the values that government promotes have an effect on everyday life? Do they have an effect on how we view moral virtue, and the things to which we apply the labels good... and evil? Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, so what does our history tell us? In a society where slavery is legal, the average person is far more inclined to believe that slavery is okay. In a society where graft and corruption is rampant, these activities are much less stigmatized. In a society that allows the government to educate their children, by compulsion if necessary, the society tends to view this as fine. A society that mixes religion with government often has no compunctions about requiring women to wear particular clothes and act in particular ways. Children educated in the Middle East are likely to see America as a scourge and plague, because their government run schools tell them that this is so. In communist societies, workers are likely to view their salaries as their due, regardless of their individual merit. In capitalist societies, merit and skill are more likely to be viewed as positive traits of character. Given the spectrum of opinions and values across the globe, it seems glaringly obvious that the government under which one lives has an enormous influence on individual values. Further, it seems that the rules of society highly influence what we view as right and wrong. A friend, Razvan, told me a sad tale in the parking lot one December evening. He lamented the values of communism that he had recently escaped. He said that good men would go to work, put forth an honest effort, and receive a modest living from the franchise. He said that these people would return home to see a neighbor, who never goes to work, with a truck full of merchandise, origin unknown. It was obvious that the goods were obtained through fraudulent means, but the climate of communism was more likely to reward that person socially. The person with the truck full of television sets was seen as the "smart" one. He had used the system to "get ahead". He said that it was their version of the "American Dream". Razvan said that morality was turned on its head, the guilty rewarded, and the honest punished, in a prepetually cycle of sufferring, where the only way to obtain a comfortable life was to submit to the worst parts of our nature... to steal, lie, and collude to the detriment of all society. While I would recoil at anyone saying that this thief was a good person, it is apparent that this appraisal is grounded on my perspective. I am forced to ask, "If I was in that exact situation, would I have a tendency to come to the same conclusions and act in similar ways?" It is the rules of communist society that create the incentives that allow this type of evil to proliferate. Or is it? Maybe it is just the evil Russians with their loose moral code that makes this inevitable. We must look a little deeper. Hong-Kong. While mainland China embraced communism, the small island of Hong-Kong maintained a free market economy. While mainland China dealt with riots and famine, the island flourished. These are exactly the same people under different forms of government. When China began to open up its markets to the rest of the world, Hong-Kong invested in the cheap labor available a short distance away in the mainland. They found that the employees on the mainland were extremely unproductive. Many sat idle, doing nothing. Many worked lazily and even took naps on duty. Communism had divorced from them the idea that your salary derives primarily from your individual production. They were foreign to the idea that working hard could actually benefit the worker through increased salary. Some estimates in "The Elephant and the Dragon" put the mainland production at 20% of the production that similar workers with similar equipment were producing on the island. The difference must fall entirely on the differences in the methods of organizing labor... communism and capitalism. In a capitalist society, increasing your productivity typically leads to an increase in rewards. When you remove this route to wealth and influence, people will still seek it. They will seek it through any channels that are available to them. Are we possessed of such vanity that we are willing to claim that we are better? We are different? Is there something in an American birth certificate which bestows greater wisdom? More humanity? Better judgement? No. We are similar, although not identical people placed in different circumstances. We are told different things by our governments, which everywhere have claimed the right to decide what our children must learn. In every country that embraces similar methods of organization and control, similar mannerisms are almost always exibited by the population in general. A government that secures the freedom of religion, religious tolerance results. In a country that embraces individual contribution, that contribution tends to be far greater than countries that do not. We can not be careless with the incentives we create for people, good and bad, living all around us. Also, consider the effect of public perception of the government. If the people view the government as a protector of their liberty, a benign or beneficial institution for the advancement of human progress, then that government will tend to be effective. Once this perception slips away, the government becomes a blight in the mind of many individuals. A large number of people in this situation will find nothing wrong with taking what they can from this corrupt institution, viewing it as fair compensation for the damages that the government has created. In this system, when we wish to help those who desperately need some temporary assistance, we invariably end up giving a large percentage of our resources to those who simply seek an easier life for themselves or their families. Those with actual needs are unnecessarily deprived of those resources that society has lovingly given for their benefit. By using the government as an intermediary, we rely on the public perception of the government to keep people from abusing the system. Any system that attempts to help the less fortunate cannot withstand the additional burden that political costs and self serving interests impose on that system. When the government steps in to solve social issues, it sets into motion the same forces that cause its actions to fail. Resources are taken from one for the benefit of another. Any country that does this will engender mistrust and animosity, that, when mixed with the policies themselves, deprive the citizens of the ability to help those that we truly and earnestly wish to help. Also, the beneficiaries of the public wealth must be determined by some politician, somewhere. There is no incentive for these flawed individuals to do anything other than maximise their election potential. They pander to large groups and promise the moon. They promise to end poverty, and we cheer. Decades later, when poverty still exists, they take more resources... give out more gifts... pass more laws... and poverty still persists. As a free individual, I should not be forced to give the products of my labor to any institution that I find degrades our very humanity, rewards bad behavior, or places an unfair burden on another free individual. As a free citizen, if I had a choice of poverty programs to implement, my two cents would go to securing loans for small businesses in underdeveloped communities. I feel that my two cents will do far more good in this way than any number of public housing programs which history has shown to be collossal failures. I may wish to help the poor directly, but my concience may direct me to donate only to those funds that do not help addicted drug users. I may decide to help ONLY addicted drug users, and that must be our liberty to decide. I may decide to only fund secular schools, or only religious schools. I may wish to help the environment by donating to programs that research solar energy, or I may wish to focus on cleaning up our water. All of these programs must be decided on by those whose productivity is being allocated. Allocating our effort politically is the worst possible way to allocate those scarce resources for the achievement our common goals. To take a thousand dollars from John, all that is required is legality. Everything the government does is by definition legal, given that the right forms are signed and the correct signitaries bribed. The question then becomes, on what do we spend this extracted funding? If you are a politician, you will spend it on a voting block for political favor... but wait! John wanted to spend that money vaccinating children in Africa. He knows that this small donation will save the lives of four human beings across the globe. Can we really, on any moral grounds, decide that John must spend this money to pay for one months rent for a single mother in LA, at the expense of the four human lives that John intended on saving with this gift? Government cannot express the values of society more accurately than the members of that society can express themselves. The only thing the government is capable of doing is to override those values which society expresses, replacing them with values which provide political advantage and control. This is not the way to help the less fortunate, to protect the environment, and to preserve the liberty that has provided the highest standard of living and the freest society in the history of the world. We fail because we attempt to enforce our individual values through the sword of government. When we promote our values through leadership and example, the effect is far more effective and fulfilling. Every value we attempt to force at the point of the sword serves only to sacrifice our liberty. It is that liberty which promotes the best in us. When wealth and acclaim can only come by serving society, people serve society. Liberty, when combined with tools designed to coordinate us in the promotion of our individual values is the only realistic perscription to cure our societal ills. We have the opportunity to build the type of society that our ancestors have always dreamed of. The only roadblock to this society is the political distribution of our effort for the aid of special interests and the public figures who wish to acquire votes from these interests. Liberty is the only value that America embraced which had not been previously pursued. Liberty leverages the self-interest of three hundred million individuals in America. Liberty causes business to exist ONLY when that business serves the society in general. It forces corrupt or inefficient business out of the market in favor of those business which more closely meet the needs of individual consumers. The free market serves us because it is free. When the market becomes compelled, resources are diverted into those hands which possess sufficient political influence to withdraw that wealth. Liberty is the only value which allows the expression of all values in society. Liberty requires tolerance. Liberty requires self-discipline. Liberty requires eternal vigilance. The people of America require liberty.
- You can use the box below to create new pages for this mini-wiki. preload=Values/preload editintro=Values/editintro width=25 values are very important
- Values are universal principles or ideals that we implicitly accept as guidelines for action. Values are a primary determinant of human accomplishment.
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