Census Registers American's Decline

This article gives the numbers and adds a human face to our economic disaster.  Speaking of a couple who is barely making it, the writer notes

“I’m turning over every rock looking for scholarships,” she said. “The money’s out there, you just have to find it.”

Well, here we go again... after noting the couple gets government help for "healthscare" this couple is looking for money to cover education.  What a system we have!

If we had a free market in health care and education, and everything else, we would be growing to where there would be enough to go around, at affordable prices.

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Unemployment Insurance, Goldman Sachs & Fraud

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER AP Economics Writer November 5, 2011 10:32AM

WASHINGTON (AP) — The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America’s unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

***People do not need unemployment benefits, they need work.  Not only is there no generator of new jobs, starting up your own business is near impossible.  I do see thriving businesses.  I was at one recently that was selling a safe product but in violation of a federal law.  Perfectly safe, customers happily buying it, no fraud, but against the law.  How many businesses are “making it” because they are willing to go face criminal sanctions?***

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

*** The crisis is not in unemployment, the crisis is in oppression by government at city, country state and federal level.***

Congress is expected to decide by year’s end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.

***It does not occur to anyone to give people regulatory relief and create wealth, only to borrow more and spend further in the whole.***

The ranks of the poor would also rise. The Census Bureau says unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people from slipping into poverty last year. It defines poverty as annual income below $22,314 for a family of four.

***They are not poor because they do not have unemployment checks, they are poor because they have no opportunity.***

Yet for a growing share of the unemployed, a vote in Congress to extend the benefits to 99 weeks is irrelevant. They’ve had no job for more than 99 weeks. They’re no longer eligible for benefits.

Their options include food stamps or other social programs. Nearly 46 million people received food stamps in August, a record total. That figure could grow as more people lose unemployment benefits.

*** How is a food stamp benefit different in any way from unemployment insurance?  I guess the thinking is since we can go on like this forever, we might as well.  Well, we can’t.***

So could the government’s disability rolls. Applications for the disability insurance program have jumped about 50 percent since 2007.

***So just as business people are cheating to stay afloat, obviously people are cheating welfare to stay afloat.***

The number of unemployed has been roughly stable this year. Yet the number receiving benefits has plunged 30 percent.

***Caution: Know your customer!  Has your customer base been people on welfare or unemployment?  Get set to watch them dwindle...  99 weeks ago was when the layoffs from the downturn got heavy.***

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that each $1 spent on unemployment benefits generates up to $1.90 in economic growth. The CBO has found that the program is the most effective government policy for increasing growth among 11 options it’s analyzed.

***This is a big reason why our economy is going bad, because people believe such nonsense.   if anything, each dollar spent means 90 cents in econ activity, not $1.90, becuase the buck is still owed somewhere, by someone.  Only people who never plan to pay anything back can think the way the CBO thinks. UI is a downward spiral.

The American system, as understood by the people in the commanding heights, is over.  If you believe in what they conditioned you to believe, then the future is very bleak indeed for you and yours.

Presently those in the commanding heights know their system is bankrupt, literally, and are busying stealing anything not nailed down on their way out the door. 

The Koch Bros, who own the Tea Party movement, got their oil trading money out of Goldman Sachs alum Jon Corzine run MF Global while 50,000 others are not so lucky.  Goldman Sachs alums run the Fed, US Treasury, and now Italy.  As I mentioned last week, a federal judge was miffed, but did nothing about Citigroup mulcting 700 million but only suffering 15 million fine.  Nice work for a Bank if you can get it.  (Taxpayers will make up the rest, eventually.)  Someone is risking a federal offense selling below grade fruit (perfectly safe) and yet dirt cheap, while people who steal hundreds of millions face no jeopardy.

Mish Shedlock was asked if we should be executing the president of Bank of America, Citibank and the top officers,  MF Global and others, as they do in China. (And they do, in China.)  Mish reasonably replied, no, we have a legal system that can deal with fraud and theft.

But it does not.  Judges tsk tsk, the SEC winks winks, and the powers that be steal steal.

Occupy Walls Street is owned by Soros, and the Tea Party is owned by the Koch Bros, and the protestors in both camps are socially conditioned to believe “if we can just get the right person in government, then it will all be OK.”

There is no one at any level of government advocating freeing Americans to work.  Ron Paul does talk about eliminating the Fed, and about free markets, but there are not enough people who know how to work in a free market to support the rest.  And even if elected, the masses of protesters would shut down any effort that did not expand government, whether for war or welfare.

One could say the USA ended when Bush bailed out the financial industry, but you can go back to the bailout of Chrysler, or PennCentral, or Nixon going off the gold standard, but in any event, we are too far gone.  We mind have wound back to 1990, or 1980 or 1970, but not now.  On the other hand, we can go back to 1790, and make rules knowing what we know. The leaders are stealing anything not nailed down, war and welfare hustlers are making their bids for public office.  We see this every so often in history, every 75 years or so, somewhere.  Now it is USAs turn.  We're about to find out we are not exceptional.  This is good to know, because chaos is tradable, and out of chaos comes the spontaneous order in freedom.  We could choose to be another Hong Kong, but we are past the point of no return of becoming another Somalia.

We need two systems, one country.

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A Pointed Question From Alexa

We know that you have imported rugs from China.

My question is Why?

Rugs are available everywhere and there are so many dealers selling rugs and plenty of import stores selling quality imported hand-woven rug. What makes yours unique

Alexa

My rugs have no dye, wool comes in every shade from white to grey to black and all sorts of tans.... these can be blended to get up to 216 distinct colors, with no dye.  Next, I take North Coast Indian designs and have them laid out for carpets.  Great for that rustic room, cabin or ski lodge.

No one else is doing it.

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Serendipity

On my way to a Power Breakfast Meet I was enchanted by natural artwork on the blacktop.

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débrouillard and System D

Anthony checks in with something he picked up from Gary North, and I recommend www.garynorth.com to one and all.  The topic is the black market, France division, and what the powers that be know about who in France is called débrouillard.  (An incidently, my daughter, fresh back from  Paris, told me about sojourning into an alternate space, which turns out to the the lair of precisely these débrouillards.)    Here is the article Dr. North refers to...


Some quotes:

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call themdébrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." 

And...

Schneider presents his numbers as a percentage of the total market value of goods and services made in each country that same year -- each nation's gross domestic product. His data show that System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster than the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply his percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn't snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.

The comments lament that these people do not honor intellectual property rights, apparently unaware that IPR is recent and western.  It does so distress one that the natives do not subscribe to a system that makes no sense and harms progress!  The next complaint is there are no regulations.  USA economy is heavily regulated.  And a mess.  What this shows is an alternative to the rich/poor dichotomy, that we do not need regulations, or IPR, or NGOs or foreign aid.  Just stop crushing people.

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Church And State

We tend in USA to affirm the separation of Church and State yet argue as to the dividing lines.  It is really an argument of Church vs State, and who has supremacy, or at least supremacy in what areas.  The Catholic Church has a history of testing the limits of church vs state in many places and times over the last two millennia.  For about half that time the status quo of today would be unacceptable to the Church.  It is acceptable, on the surface today, only because the Church can say nothing about it.  So far there has been no enduring model of Church and State polity.  That arrangement is up for grabs at any time.

In the debate of Church vs. State the Church claimed ultimate arbiter status.  Via the experience with kings, the church's claim to divine right was arrogated by states unto themselves, and now we have the unstable truce wherein the state sees itself with in essence divine right, and the church teaching the state is an inferior entity to both church and family.  Lesson: don't make any claim for yourself that you do not want your enemies to make for themselves.

Reading Will Durant on the Reformation, one might get the sense that real argument was over real estate, or in essence, rents.  The church had grown so rich in property and income that Kings and Nobles coveted the Church's holdings.  Both Henry VIII and the Lutherans saw themselves as Catholics (and still do) just not beholden to a Roman pretense of primus inter pares.  This gets tricky, since Popes, Henry VIII and Luther, while fighting each other, also executed protestants.

While these "catholics" abused each other, they made alliances and combinations among themselves, with Protestants and occasionally Moslem leaders to either hold or expand their territory.

The Church clearly lost its moral voice as it became a great landowner, and now as it is reduced to museums and libraries on a Roman hilltop, it enjoys a moral authority that comes with poverty, something the Dalai Lama enjoys now that he is homeless.

Out of all of these various combinations the Church is still looking for a proper balance and role in the world.  Satan tempted Jesus with all temporal power, and since Satan could not fool Jesus, it  demonstrates Satan was offering something he could deliver.  In spite of this, the Church keeps seeking a place in the world. The recent announcement that the church likes the idea of a super-bank (and consequentially a one world government) is an example of how the game is played: the inevitable is the ideal.  If we are to have a one world government, the Church wants a place at the table.  The idea is although the Church may meet with Satan in the desert, it will not give in to temptation.  The Church is entertaining change, since the current polity is not working out so well for the Church.  Well, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Of all the combinations and cultures and pressures of organizing society in the Reformation it seems that the best combination came about in the Kingdom of Scotland, at least inasmuch as their kings can own no property, and the freedom of conscience and other beneficial aspects came together written in a survey of economics by Adam Smith, a moral philosopher.  It is those ideas that animated the theories of opportunists at various spots on the globe, in particular the American colonies and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

So much of what America was is well preserved in the political-economy of hong Kong: no standing army, less than half the people pay taxes of any sort and almost no one pays the top rate of 16%, money is issued by private companies, toleration of race and creed is legendary and easy since opportunity is unlimited. Charities provide the social safety net, and are sufficiently subscribed.

What happened?  Because Hong Kong is a free market, it is exceptionally difficult to amass exceptional wealth.  Hong Kong does have five times the billionaires per capita than the USA, but no where near the poverty since anyone who wants work can get it, especially there are no restrictions on starting your own business.  There is the problem, the USA government prefers big business by crushing small business.

Note the earlier comment that private companies issue the currency. One especially harmful advantage government affords big business gets in USA is banking.  Money is controlled in a way that generates too big to fail, limiting opportunity, expanding the division between rich and poor and makes war exceptionally easy.

A highlight of Hong Kong is the religious tolerance.  There is no power, government or church, to enforce any preferences.  And since all religion is voluntary (as opposed to the Reformation where real estate defined religious belief) there is no religious conflict in Hong Kong.

What is playing out in USA sure looks like a replay of the reformation, and we are in the phase just before the "religious wars" break out.  The religion of the Tea Party is war, and the religion of the Occupy Wall Street is welfare.  They both claim to represent the real America.  Occupy Wall Street will claim they are defending USA's original fairness, neglecting to recall the accommodation of slavery at our founding, and with our prisons presently redolent of Soul, how little progress our black brothers have made in the Welfare state. The Tea Party claims our military protects our freedoms and extends our mission, ignoring that the founding fathers expressly abjured standing military because soldiers in uniform militate against freedom. Military and freedom are enemies. A pox on both of their houses.  Between these analogously Lutheran and Protestant views stands the Federal Government playing the role of Roman Church, professing both welfare and warfare, both faith and works.

The Reformation was essentially about economic reform, and that is were we are.  It is astonishing to read the Reformation history, as laid out by Durant, and observe how closely the patterns can be laid upon our modern saga.

Within all of the wars and executions and so on, there were pockets of freedom and tolerance and peace and prosperity.  Wish that historians spent more time studying and writing on those pockets of peace and prosperity rather than the bloody failures.

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A Case Study In How To Save The USA Economy

I advocate deregulation for saving the USA economy.  Now the that government has announced the taxpayers will lose even more on the auto industry bailout.  Here is the justification:

"In 2009, the government initially forecast it would lose $44 billion on its auto industry bailout. It revised it down to $30 billion, and later to as low as $13.9 billion earlier this year.The administration and President Barack Obama have argued that any losses on the auto bailout were worth the hundreds of thousands of jobs saved."
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20111114/AUTO01/111140434/U.S.-boosts-estimate-of-auto-bailout-losses-to-$23.6B#ixzz1dtSke9ax

But those much heralded reductions have proven to be, like most government claims, nonsense. There is an alternative degenerate bailouts, and an excellent example of how USA could turn the economy around.

Big Auto enjoys massive support in regulation and subsidy.

1. You cannot buy a car in USA from the factory, you must buy it from a dealer.  This allows the industry to control the market.

2. Government auto regulations require unnecessary features that add huge cost to a car.  The features are patented, so their prices are too high as well as mandatory.

3. The government has regulations on what a car can burn.  To support the Iowa corn growers, cars must burn ethanol mix, which causes cars to degrade quicker than usual.  This means cars will not last as long, so we need to buy cars more often.  This is an indirect subsidy to the auto industry, and means no one can recommend "no ethanol" in their cars and compete with Detroit on that basis.

4. The USA auto industry pools patents and you cannot make a car without the permission of the USA auto industry, because you will necessarily violate patents, especially on the nonsensical required safety features.  If you play the game and try to license the patents, you will find that the more you sell the more your competitors make.

5. Ally Bank is GMAC now that the government took it over, bailed out GMAC can continue to lose money financing cars.  A start-up will enjoy no such subsidy.

6. Workers ought to be free to unionize, but USA Labor Relations rules reward management that agrees to unsustainable conditions, with a guarantee that big auto would be bailed out. Today the pensions are guaranteed by ownership of a failing company.  Labor laws only require people meet and confer, not meet and agree.  Nonetheless, Big Auto agreed to impossible-to-sustain benefits because they know they would never be responsible for them.  

So what to do?

The programs would be -

1. Scrap the dealership rules.  Anyone can sell anything they make wherever they want.

2. Insurance companies decide what they want to see in a car, not government regulators.  Let buyers consult insurance companies on which car is best.   If the insurance companies know that airbags make things worse, or first responders hesitate around electric cars, then let the buyers know that and not be obliged to buy expensive and pointless safety or deleterious efficiency features.

3. Dump all regulations on what a car burns.  Right now the auto industry simply meets govt standards, and quits trying. Private industry will come up ever better more efficient power plants, because when there are no regulations, industry exceeds them in competition with each other.  Along these lines, let the courts return to the rule of law and property rights.  Let litigants sue auto makers for violating the "bundle of rights" that come with land ownership under common law.  Watch auto pollution disappear.

4. Eliminating patents in USA is desperately needed, but is not going to happen.  Happily for the auto industry, there is an excellent case for open sourcing all auto patents. The USA taxpayers own all auto companies in USA.  (Don't believe it? Withdraw government support of any company that disputes it.) Since we own the auto companies, we can agree to open source the patents.  Then people can make cars for what they cost, not what they have to pay over to billionaire welfare queens in Grosse Pointe.

5.  Liquidate Ally Bank.  In a free market those cars will get so cheap people will pay cash or put it on a credit card, like we do with computers, which is a relatively deregulated market. An iPhone today has more computer power than NASA had when it put a man on the moon, and it can do far more.  So it would happen with automobiles.

6. Unions are private associations and government should have no part in their activities.   There is no such thing as an outrageous union demand, only outrageous management concessions.    People say, "there are unions, therefore there are problems."  In fact, "there are problems, therefore there are unions."  Well managed companies are not unionized, because the treat workers fair.  The best place in the world to make autos right now is Detroit.  There is no place on earth with so much talent and skill concentrated from auto design down to factory assembly.

I've seen what freedom can achieve in Hong Kong.  I've been in the factories of our competitors around the world.  I am an importer by profession.  We, the USA, can beat anyone anywhere, in any field, if we are free to do so.  We are not, and that is not going to change.

There is no way that USA could ever act on this opportunity.  What might work is for USA to create a Hong Kong in the Detroit metro area.  One Nation, Two Systems.  In a free market, all of that talent would re-associate into the most awesome automakers in the world.  We've seen it before, but we cannot do it with our present system.  We need an alternative:  Freedom From, Freedom To.

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Reason On China's Black Market Wenzhou

Reason magazine has an interesting article on the Chinese city of Wenzhou, long known for its entrepreneurial initiatives.  When Deng Xiaoping wanted to replicate the Hong Kong reality in oher ares of China, Wenzhou was one of the areas he picked.  The writer does posit Wenzhou as a black market city and I would reply that what we call black market may to the rest of the world be common sense.

A couple of interesting points most people may not note...  one garment maker asks "why bother exporting when one cannot keep up with domestic demand."  Just so...  this domestic demand should be kept in mind when people think the Chinese are stuck dealing with USA.

Another point is immigrants from Wenzhou have landed in Italy, revitalizing the garment centers they live in.  Back to cheap management...  Chinese managers are in Italy, a country in economic distress.  Some talk of these people not quite following regulations or paying taxes, but then see what happens when tax exemptions are taken (if not really given?)  IN USA we offer these to big companies and the big companies do well by them.

Wenzhou does do quite a bit of export business, and Wenzhou is wealthy... here again, USA trades with the rich parts of China, not the poor parts.

Wenzhou sounds very much like San Francisco 1880 or New York 1810...  yes China is headed to difficulties, but so did those other towns in their time.  Indeed, Wenzhou looks like Hong Kong 1880, and in 30 years it will look like Hong Kong today.  (Commenters again compare less government to Somalia, instead of Hong Kong.  It is such a common trope that I believe it must be a talking point given to the trolls.)

I've been reading history of the reformation by Will Durant.  Pretty amazing stuff.... it is so clear that the wars of religion were really about real estate and money flows, much like wars today, and I guess ever were.  The reformation had Roman Catholics talking faith and works, the Lutherans talking faith alone, the Anglicans talking by the book, and all claiming to be the true Catholic Church and all at the same time condemning protestants like Zwingli and Calvin  (predestination is pretty strange...)

Anyway, their wars were settled by real estate quiet title action.  They made a treaty and divided up lands.

The conflicts forming in the US are so much like the Reformation.  The Federal government is the Roman Church, and the occupy wall street and the tea party each purport to be the one true religion.  The Occupy Wall Street say by welfare alone, and the tea party says by warfare alone, and the Feds say by welfare and warfare.  Nobody is arguing for freedom, as they have it now in China.

Our decline is inexorable, ll the news regarding government actions taken, mean nothing and will go nowhere but further down until someone in power says "we will deregulate...."  It does not matter what it is.  Deregulate banking would be great (when regulations and subsidies and insurances are set up by government to protect you no matter what... you were never deregulated.)  Or insurance... or medicine... or education.  Or better yet, manufacturing...  until we do that, there is no economy upon which to base a recovery.

The powers that be will never do it.  There is a great model available, the Soviet Model.  A killer elite keeps the masses enslaved in welfare while the elite exports natural resources to keep the regime propped up.   You get the Soviet Lifestyle, they get the caviar and vodka...

Deregulation is the way out, but it is now a bad word.

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Who Discovered Microloans?

Usury is a sin in Jewish, Moslem and Christian religions.  Microloans have a usury component, and they are controversial in Moslem countries especially.  Grameen Bank, and countless other organizations have spread microloans through Moslem countries, by targeting the poor and women.  I met a women from Guatemala at an economic development conference and asked her about microloans.  She replied they were a trap.  

People do not need credit, they need freedom, freedom to contract, freedom from force or fraud.  Poor countries suffer from lack of freedom. The USA backs the regimes in charge of poor countries.

President Obama’s Mom worked for Tim Geitners dad, setting up Microloan programs in Asia in the late 1970s and 1980s.  

Robert Wenzel reports:

As I have reported many times, I suspect Geithner's father is/was high level CIA and used the Ford Foundation as cover to travel Asia.
What NYT fails to mention is that Geithner's father was in charge of microfinance in Asia for the Ford Foundation and the Obama's mother ran microfinance for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. In other words, Geithner's father was the boss of Obama's mother. This is what I wrote in March. 2009:
Geithner's father, Peter Geithner, was head of the Ford Foundation's Asia grant making for a period in the early 1980s, including micro finance grants. He traveled and lived throughout Asia – which to me smells like a perfect CIA cover.
Obama's mother Ann Dunham-Soetoro developed the micro-finance program in Indonesia.
Geithner's father and Obama's mother most certainly knew each other. According to Ian Wilhelm of the The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation says, "they met at least once in Jakarta."

Muhammad Yunus discovered microloans in 1976, according to Wikipedia.

"He was offered a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to study in the United States. He obtained his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University in the United States through the graduate program in Economic Development (GPED) in 1971.[11] From 1969 to 1972, Yunus was an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN."

GPED “has benefited over the years from the generous support of the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as from numerous agencies sponsoring students across the globe.”   

Small world.

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The "Debates"

I wish we really had debates, where pro and con was forensically argued, instead of opportunities for people to say "I am for good things and against bad things."  If we had debates, pro and con, it would have been Ron Paul vs. Newt Gingrich, and America might have learned something.

But Ron Paul, a dissenting voice, got 86 seconds to speak.  Jon Huntsman actually did a better job of articulating why torture is wrong, although Ron Paul had the better facts.

The debates showed the world that the Republicans are for unprovoked attack and torture in foreign policy, and bribery before all else.  The idea of zero based foreign aid (I like it, as long as it stays at zero) until foreign powers tell us what they can do for USA means anyone who takes USA money is a traitor to his own country.  Well, it is true now, but it has cover.  I guess republicans are into transparency.

There was Bachman, Paul, Cain and Perry who are Protestants, Gingrich and Santorum are Catholics, and Huntsman and Romney are Mormons.  100% of the Catholic candidates endorse pre-emptive war, murder and torture as foreign policy, in spite of the fact that all three are expressly condemned actively by church teaching.  Santorum, the "pro-life" Catholic, was particularly hopeful that we do far more torture and murder than to which we admit. Perhaps one reason Gingrich converted to Catholicism was because one can claim to be a Catholic and at the same time reject its teaching, without fear of contradiction at the immediate level (Rome is high above and far away, and scandal is a local bishop's problem.  Or no problem, apparently.) The protestants did better, with 25% (Ron Paul) decrying crime as foreign policy, and Mormons better yet at 50% (Huntsman) decrying crime as foreign policy.  Of course these statistics are not reliable, but the debates are silly too.  What is clear is if you are decent and go into politics, you will not get heard.

Local bishops will sometimes timorously step forward and caution a Catholic candidate who promotes abortion, which always causes harm and never does any good, but never step forward to caution a candidate on torture, pre-emptive war and murder, which always causes harm and never does any good.

500 years ago the Catholic Church was not a voluntary organization, today it is.  As a voluntary organization, it is safer to be around.  But voluntary goes both ways, people are free to join, people are free to disassociate, and the Church is free to say "mustn't darken our doorway."

There was a point when Jesus lost most of his followers.  Voluntary organizations that speak the truth run that risk.

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Israel And Freedom & الشريعة & الجهاد

A reader colloquies:

Some time ago, you had an analogy of the Biblical Joseph and centralization of resources. I found it very interesting to see that Joseph was actually a bad guy, since every Christian considers him a hero...

***Joseph managed to alienate his brothers whose responses ranged from murder to selling Joseph down the river. After difficulties, Joseph ascends to the heights of power in Egypt, and advises Pharaoh of policies that lead to the ruin of the Egyptian economy, and beyond, causing his family in a foreign land great distress (harmed by Joseph’s policies as laid out in Gen 41).  

This leads to a reuniting of the family, but in Egypt.  Joseph has assimilated and Jacob (Israel) sees his legacy as Israel, not Egypt.  Nonetheless, the Israelis flourish in Egypt, for a very short while, and before Jacob dies, he sets  his house in order, creating the twelve tribes of Egypt of his sons, but not Joseph.  There is no tribe of Joseph.  Jacob employs Joseph’s two sons to make up tribes (the tribe of Levi is set aside to attend the temple.)  Although Joseph was in the beginning Jacob’s favorite, in the end he is not so favored.  So it often goes with patriarchs.

Now, this is not my reading, I can never make much sense of the Bible myself.  Here I follow Leon Kass, who can make sense of it.  His book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis covers this very well around page 640.

At any rate, after a brief period of Egyptian assimilation, the next Pharaoh “knew not Joseph” and the Jews are enslaved in Egypt for some 400 years.

Only Christians could turn this into a happy story.***

. Another example you gave was with Samuel, who wanted people to live in a free society. Would you happen to have more Biblical examples like this?

***Samuel was a prophet, and it was God Almighty who wanted his people to live in freedom, Samuel was merely communicating God’s will.  The Jews were merely the first to directly reject God’s will.  Today, Christians in the USA are merely the latest.  To my mind, “render unto Caesar ...” and other passages modern Christians willfully mis-interpret to mean “reject God’s plan.”  Just as Joseph sought to assimilate in Egypt, most Christians try to assimilate in USA.  It never works, and usually something has to give, and in shipping the more maneuverable has to make way for the less maneuverable.  As usual, it is God who is more maneuverable.  

For more biblical commentary on this the protestant scholar Gary North is fecund.  www.garynorth.com....  nose around and find his free books on biblical commentary.***

Also, in a free society, wouldn't you have things such as "an eye for an eye"? Didn't Israelites have this when they were living in an anarchy-like state?

***Yes, and it is the basis of Sharia  الشريعة law today, and is vastly superior to our system.  If you believe in God, you would believe the system He recommends, or would at least give His system the benefit of the doubt.

Recently in Sharia-governed Iran, a woman who was blinded in an acid attack by a jealous suitor, was about to pour acid in his eyes (in the eye for an eye, there has to be two witnesses, and the victims must deliver the punishment).  At that point she withheld punishment and forgave him.  End of case.

(Except of course the man now goes through life rather disdained by his fellow Moslems, who will have anything to do with such a creep?)

Eye for an eye is permitted, not required. Eye for an eye rarely leads to loss of eyes as punishment.  What it immediately does is put perpetrator and victim on the same plane.  It is often the powerful who harm the weak.  In eye for an eye, the eyes of the powerful are forfeit if they blind the weak.  In practice, the powerful are very open to a settlement.  This woman may have “forgiven” her attacker because he paid for a crew of servants for the rest of her life.  And in Sharia and Mosaic Law the courts do not interfere with settlements.

Think of the Bhopal Chemical disaster when Union Carbide ran a shaky operation that exploded and killed 3000 people immediately and 20,000 eventually, with countless people blinded.  Although courts found the president of that division criminally liable, he escaped to the Hamptons where he enjoys fresh air and inspiring views.  The victims have received practically nothing.

Now imagine with what alacrity the responsible parties would have addressed the victims if their eyes were forfeit.

In our system, since the state rules by divine-right, in criminal matters the victim has no power.  One particularly powerful possibility under Sharia is forgiveness, which allows one to commune with God, something not permitted, nor even contemplated, in our system.

The western legal system is designed to protect the powerful against its victims.  Specifically Immanuel Kant pointed out, as the USA was forming, the internal contradiction of the USA political system:  we have separation of powers, but we allow officers of one branch to simultaneously serve in another.  That is, it is foolish to let lawyers serve in the legislative or the executive branch, or either. This is prima facie conflict of interest.  His observation almost 250 years ago was spot on.  The USA system cannot be reformed, and violent revolution never works.  So that leaves personal transformation.  And under Sharia, if your dealings with others are so inconsiderate as to cause them harm, you will find yourself answering for your action with equal harm.  Talk about motivation to personal transformation!

And incidentally, this is the common understanding of the term jihad الجهاد, that is the struggle for personal transformation.  In that sense, we are all called to jihad.

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