Author: Brad Slusher

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Satan Doesn’t Negotiate

Recall the Biblical story about the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness. After fasting for 40 days, Jesus was presented with three specific tests.

The tests all appear to be an attack on Christ’s identity. “If you are the Son of God” (prove your power by turning the stones to bread). “If you are the Son of God” (prove God’s prophetic word about you). And finally, “worship me” and I will give you lordship over the kingdoms of the world (contradicting God’s prophetic promises about who Jesus was, again, his identity).

At no point does Satan ask Jesus what he would want. At no point was there ever negotiation. Here’s the offer. Take it or leave it.

Satan’s tactics have not changed much. Only his methods. His goal is still the same for those called to Christ’s kingdom, and it’s occurring on a scale like never before.

Christians rarely make it past the first test, that of turning a stone into bread.

“Wait, what? Nobody is asking me to do that!”, you say.

When Jesus responded to Satan, he was quoting Deuteronomy 8:3

“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna… to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

Deuteronomy 8:3

You’ve been made hungry all right. You’ve been purposely starved for a return to normalcy. At various places around the world we’ve seen a progression of mitigations imposed by self-important dictators:

  • 14 days to stop the spread.
  • Then months of lockdown.
  • Then months of masks.
  • Then more months of lockdown.
  • Then the jab.
  • Then broken promises about the jab.
  • Then more months of masks.
  • Then no public venues without proof of the jab.
  • Then no job without the jab.
  • Now another jab…

We were promised that if we performed well at each step that we’d finally achieve some return to a normal life (the New Normal ™).

Yet the goalposts keep being moved.

When the elites unify around an agenda, you know you are in trouble.

What does this have to do with being tempted by Satan in the wilderness?

They keep assuring us at each stage, that if we follow the science, and OBEY, we can stop the spread, achieve herd immunity, and get back to normal. Using our collective will, effort, and FAITH, trusting the (ever changing) science, we will perform a miracle in 18 months that has never been done before.

In essence, turning this rock we’ve been handed into bread through compliance.

It’s all a social conditioning program using the full gamut of psychological manipulation techniques. It doesn’t end there.

Now that we’ve been conditioned to obey in order to get a reward, like rats in a maze, and effective behavioral controls have been accepted by the masses, the goal posts will continue to be moved until the ultimate goal is achieved – and unfortunately, compliant Christians are going right along with the plan.

The Christian effectively looses his identity to that of the collective.

The devil is constantly exerting every wicked scheme, every evil strategy, every clever ruse he can come up with to distort this basic truth of the Christian message. The Christian church’s history demonstrates how the devil has tried to distort the fundamental truth of the gospel by twisting it so that it appears to be something else.

The Lie of the Antichrist by Wybren H. Oord
A wolf in sheep’s clothing

They arrested Pastor Artur Pawlowski in Canada for preaching the gospel, feeding the homeless & baptizing his daughter.

All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

The Devil

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The Practice of Defensive Voting

As an Anarcho-Capitalist, I’m frequently informed by my social peers that voting is wrong, as it is just the majority imposing their will on the minority, and therefore just civilized violence.

One of the cornerstones of the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) is the right of self-defense. That is, if someone is trying to steal from you, or make you to comply with their will using force, you have the right to defend yourself and your property.

If that’s true in the individual sense, is it any different in the collective sense?

If a plurality of voters is seeking to either pick my pocket or restrict my liberty via the ballot box, isn’t that just not another form of violence? And do I not have the right (even obligation) to defend myself?

I may-or-may-not derive some supposed benefit from the legislation, but it’s always asserted that “society” will certainly prosper! But this pre-supposes an outcome that is rarely measured, and the long-term effects which are never considered.

Let me give you an example from our most recent ballot, City of Tacoma Proposition 1.

The proposition would raise sales taxes a mere .1%, raising $5 million over a period of 7 years that would be devoted to spreading benefits focused on arts, culture, science and heritage programs. These would be primarily targeted towards creating public school programs, and weighted in proportion to students receiving free and reduced lunch (58% as of 2017). Sounds good, right?

Keep in mind that all these areas of instruction were commonly available in schools prior to No Child Left Behind. Another federal program with good intentions (and funding) that forced conformity across the nation and was eventually replaced with one slightly less restrictive, but the damage was done. Now class time is predominately devoted to increasing scores in reading, math, and science, to comply with state and federal guidelines to the neglect of all the soft-skills which they are only now acknowledging as truly important to childhood development.

So, now the City is trying to rectify a problem that they themselves created due to being incentivized by the all-mighty state and federal dollar, and doing so at additional cost to the taxpayers. Now multiply this type of problem across thousands of cities, each voting on dozens of initiatives every year, and you begin to see that it’s become nothing more than institutionalized theft. But it’s for the children!

1% tax hike here, another 2% there. The cost of a cup of coffee here, the price of a movie there. Surely it’s not too much of a sacrifice if it’s “justified” for safety, security, children, culture, and health. When does the forced fleecing end? When you are naked and freezing on the side of the road? (But you’ll get “free healthcare” so it’s good for you!)

In the past, I did end up voting for the legalization of marijuana and the removal of the monopoly on alcohol distribution by the State of Washington, but both those came with onerous taxes that serve to strengthen the state bureaucracy by feeding it tons of cash. I figured restoration of liberty even with a level of servitude is better than nothing. There are a lot of businesses prospering and people staying out of jail because of it.

Your best bet, and the only one that is fair and consistent with the NAP, is to vote against any incursion by legislators or bureaucrats that takes your money by force or fraud, and curbs your natural rights.

Here’s what you should be voting against in the Washington State and Pierce County November, 2018 General Election:

Washington State:

  • Initiative Measure 1631 (Carbon Tax) – a horrible piece of regressive taxation that will have no measurable improvement on emissions, but will create a huge cash cow ($2,305,470,073) for bureaucrats to buy influence and votes.
  • Initiative Measure No 1639 – another horrible piece of legislation that will make the majority of gun owners into felons if they don’t comply. Redefines a standard semi-automatic rifle as an “assault rifle”, and requires gun registration with local law enforcement.

Pierce County:

  • City of Tacoma: Proposition 1 – Tacoma Creates
  • Pierce County Rural Library District: Special Election Proposition 1: Levy Lid Lift
  • Town of Eatonville: Advisory Vote No. 1 – Recreational Marijuana Businesses
  • Gig Harbor: Special Election – Proposition 1 – Sales and Use Tax for Transportation Improvements
  • Bethel School District No. 403 – Special Election Proposition No. 1 – General Obligation Bonds $443,000,000
  • East Pierce Fire & Rescue – Special Election – Proposition No. 1 – General Obligation Bonds $80,000,000
  • Fire Protection District No. 6 – Proposition No. 1 – Six-Year Levy Lid Lift
  • Fire Protection District No. 17 – Proposition No. 1 & No. 2 – Six-Year Levy Lid Lift
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Low-Skilled Workers Flee the Minimum Wage

What happens when, in a country where workers are free to move, a region raises its minimum wage? Do those with the fewest skills seek out the regions with the highest wage floors?

New minimum wage research by economist Joan Monras of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) attempts to answer that question. Monras theoretically shows that there should be a close relationship between the employment effects of raising the minimum wage and the migration of low-skilled workers.

When the demand for local low-skilled labor is relatively unresponsive (or inelastic) to wage changes, raising the minimum wage should lead to an influx of low-skilled workers from other states in search of better-paying jobs. On the other hand, if the demand for low-skilled labor is relatively responsive (or elastic), raising the minimum wage will lead low-skilled workers to flee to states where they will more easily find employment.

To test the model empirically, Monras examined data from all the changes in effective state minimum wages over the period 1985 to 2012. Looking at time frames of three years before and after each minimum wage increase, Monras found that

  1. As depicted in the graph below on the left, those who kept their jobs earned more under the minimum wage. No surprise there.
  2. As depicted in the graph below on the right, workers with the fewest skills were having an easier time finding full-time employment prior to the minimum wage increase. But this trend completely reversed as soon as the minimum wage was increased.
  3. A control group of high-skilled workers didn’t experience either of these effects. Those affected by the changing laws were the least skilled and the most vulnerable.

These results show that the timing of minimum wage increases is not random.

Instead, policy makers tend to raise minimum wages when low-skilled workers’ real wages are declining and employment is rising. Many studies, misled by the assumption that the timing of minimum wage increases is not influenced by local labor demand, have interpreted the lack of falling low-skilled employment following a minimum wage increase as evidence that minimum wage increases have no effect on employment.

When Monras applied this same false assumption to his model, he got the same result. However, to observe the true effect of minimum wage increases on employment, he assumed a counterfactual scenario where, had the minimum wages not been raised, the trend in low-skilled employment growth would have continued as it was.

By making this comparison, Monras was able to estimate that wages increased considerably following a minimum wage hike, but employment also fell considerably. In fact, employment fell more than wages rose. For every 1 percent increase in wages, the share of a state’s population of low-skilled workers in full-time employment fell by 1.2 percent. (The same empirical approach showed that minimum wage increases had no effect on the wages or employment of a control group of high-skilled workers.)

Monras’s model predicts that if labor demand is sensitive to wage changes, low-skilled workers should leave states that increase their minimum wages — and that’s exactly what his empirical evidence shows.

According to Monras,

A 1 percent reduction in the share of employed low-skilled workers [following a minimum wage increase] reduces the share of low-skilled population by between .5 and .8 percent. It is worth emphasizing that this is a surprising and remarkable result: workers for whom the [minimum wage] policy was designed leave the states where the policy is implemented.

These new and important findings reinforce the view that minimum wage increases come at a cost to the employment rates of low-skilled workers.

They also pose a difficult question for minimum wage proponents: If minimum wage increases benefit low-skilled workers, why do these workers leave the states that raise their minimum wage?


Corey Iacono

Corey Iacono is a student at the University of Rhode Island majoring in pharmaceutical science and minoring in economics. He is a FEE 2016 Thorpe Fellow.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.