Chrematistics
- Lafyva
- Sep 16, 2023
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 14
Finally, the ability-to-pay doctrine fails because it harms society by more sharply penalizing the most productive. Those that prove most capable in serving the needs of their fellow man (at least in a free market economy) by efficiently creating goods and services that others value are those who will fall into the highest progressive income tax brackets. “Penalizing ability in production and service diminishes the supply of the service – and in proportion to the extent of that ability,” declared Rothbard. The result will be greater impoverishment, felt most heavily by the low-skilled and low-income people who are always hardest hit by a stagnant economy.
Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis
The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said-so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully — "Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?" They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" 4in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" be comes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A "nice" meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
The Revenue Act of 1861, formally cited as Act of August 5, 1861, Chap. XLV, 12 Stat. 292, included the first U.S. Federal income tax statute (see Sec. 49).
Passed by Congress on July 2, 1909, and ratified February 3, 1913, the 16th amendment established Congress's right to impose a Federal income tax.
“It is Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world … the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought.… Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also.… Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man.… The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin.… Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically.”
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (pp. 105-106). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Such a point of view could be held only by persons to whom all prosperity or happiness is not only irrelevant but sinful. And this point of view could be held with such fanaticism only by persons to whom life, family, or any objective gain is worthless. This is a dominant idea in all the Russian Intelligentsia, an idea going back through Plato to ancient Asia: All objective reality is of no importance except as symbols for some subjective truth. This was, of course, the point of view of the Neoplatonic thinkers of the early Christian period. It was generally the point of view of the early Christian heretics and of those Western heretics like the Cathari (Albigenses) who were derived from this Eastern philosophic position. In modern Russian thought it is well represented by Dostoevski, who while chronologically earlier than Tolstoi is spiritually later. To Dostoevski every object and every act is merely a Symbol for some elusive spiritual truth. From this point of view comes an outlook which makes his characters almost incomprehensible to the average person in the Western tradition: if such a character obtains a fortune, he cries, “I am ruined!” If he is acquitted on a murder charge, or seems likely to be, he exclaims, “I am condemned,” and seeks to incriminate himself in order to ensure the punishment which is so necessary for his own spiritual self-acquittal. If he deliberately misses his opponent in a duel, he has a guilty conscience, and says, “I should not have injured him thus; I should have killed him!” In each case the speaker cares nothing about property, punishment, or life. He cares only about spiritual values: asceticism, guilt, remorse, injury to one’s self-respect. In the same way, the early religious thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, regarded all objects as symbols for spiritual values, all temporal success as an inhibition on spiritual life, and felt that wealth could be obtained only by getting rid of property, life could be found only by dying (a direct quotation from Plato), eternity could be found only if time ended, and the soul could be freed only if the body were enslaved. Thus, as late as 1910 when Tolstoi died, Russia remained true to its Greek-Byzantine intellectual tradition.
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (pp. 119-120). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.
There was also another basic distinction between Western Civilization and Russian Civilization. This was derived from the history of Christianity. This new faith came into Classical Civilization from Semitic society. In its origin it was a this-worldly religion, believing that the world and the flesh were basically good, or at least filled with good potentialities, because both were made by God; the body was made in the image of God; God became Man in this world with a human body, to save men as individuals, and to establish “Peace on earth.” The early Christians intensified the “this-worldly” tradition, insisting that salvation was possible only because God lived and died in a human body in this world, that the individual could be saved only through God’s help (grace) and by living correctly in this body on this earth (good works), that there would be, some day, a millennium on this earth and that, at that Last Judgment, there would be a resurrection of the body and life everlasting. In this way the world of space and time, which God had made at the beginning with the statement, “It was good” (Book of Genesis), would, at the end, be restored to its original condition. This optimistic, “this-worldly” religion was taken into Classical Civilization at a time when the philosophic outlook of that society was quite incompatible with the religious outlook of Christianity. The Classical philosophic outlook, which we might call Neoplatonic, was derived from the teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism, Pythagorean rationalism, and Platonism. It was dualistic, dividing the universe into two opposed worlds, the world of matter and flesh and the world of spirit and ideas. The former world was changeable, unknowable, illusionary, and evil; the latter world was eternal, knowable, real, and good. Truth, to these people, could be found by the use of reason and logic alone, not by use of the body or the senses, since these were prone to error, and must be spurned. The body, as Plato said, was the “tomb of the soul.” Thus the Classical world into which Christianity came about a.d. 60 believed that the world and the body were unreal, unknowable, corrupt, and hopeless and that no truth or success could be found by the use of the body, the senses, or matter. A small minority, derived from Democritus and the early Ionian scientists through Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius, rejected the Platonic dualism, preferring materialism as an explanation of reality. These materialists were equally incompatible with the new Christian religion. Moreover, even the ordinary citizen of Rome had an outlook whose implications were not compatible with the Christian religion. To give one simple example: while the Christians spoke of a millennium in the future, the average Roman continued to think of a “Golden Age” in the past, just as Homer had. As a consequence of the fact that Christian religion came into a society with an incompatible philosophic outlook, the Christian religion was ravaged by theological and dogmatic disputes and shot through with “otherworldly” heresies. In general, these heresies felt that God was so perfect and so remote and man was so imperfect and such a worm that the gap between God and man could not be bridged by any act of man, that salvation depended on grace rather than on good works, and that, if God ever did so lower Himself as to occupy a human body, this was not an ordinary body, and that, accordingly, Christ could be either True God or True Man but could not be both. This point of view was opposed by the Christian Fathers of the Church, not always successfully; but in the decisive battle, at the first Church Council, held at Nicaea in 325, the Christian point of view was enacted into the formal dogma of the Church. Although the Church continued to exist for centuries thereafter in a society whose philosophic outlook was ill adapted to the Christian religion, and obtained a compatible philosophy only in the medieval period, the basic outlook of Christianity reinforced the experience of the Dark Ages to create the outlook of Western Civilization. Some of the elements of this outlook which were of great importance were the following: (1) the importance of the individual, since he alone is saved; (2) the potential goodness of the material world and of the body; (3) the need to seek salvation by use of the body and the senses in this world (good works); (4) faith in the reliability of the senses (which contributed much to Western science); (5) faith in the reality of ideas (which contributed much to Western mathematics); (6) mundane optimism and millennianism (which contributed much to faith in the future and the idea of progress); (7) the belief that God (and not the devil) reigns over this world by a system of established rules (which contributed much to the ideas of natural law, natural science, and the rule of law). These ideas which became part of the tradition of the West did not become part of the tradition of Russia. The influence of Greek philosophic thought remained strong in the East. The Latin West before 900 used a language which was not, at that time, fitted for abstract discussion, and almost all the dogmatic debates which arose from the incompatibility of Greek philosophy and Christian religion were carried on in the Greek language and fed on the Greek philosophic tradition. In the West the Latin language reflected a quite different tradition, based on the Roman emphasis on administrative procedures and ethical ideas about human behavior to one’s fellow man. As a result, the Greek philosophic tradition remained strong in the East, continued to permeate the Greek-speaking Church, and went with that Church into the Slavic north. The schism between the Latin Church and the Greek Church strengthened their different points of view, the former being more this-worldly, more concerned with human behavior, and continuing to believe in the efficacy of good works, while the latter was more otherworldly, more concerned with God’s majesty and power, and emphasized the evilness and weakness of the body and the world and the efficacy of God’s grace. As a result, the religious outlook and, accordingly, the world outlook of Slav religion and philosophy developed in quite a different direction from that in the West. The body, this world, pain, personal comfort, and even death were of little importance; man could do little to change his lot, which was determined by forces more powerful than he; resignation to Fate, pessimism, and a belief in the overwhelming power of sin and of the devil dominated the East. To this point we have seen the Slavs formed into Russian civilization as the result of several factors. Before we go on we should, perhaps, recapitulate. The Slavs were subjected at first to the Viking exploitative system. These Vikings copied Byzantine culture, and did it very consciously, in their religion, in their writing, in their state, in their laws, in art, architecture, philosophy, and literature. These rulers were outsiders who innovated all the political, religious, economic, and intellectual life of the new civilization. There was no state: foreigners brought one in. There was no organized religion: one was imported from Byzantium and imposed on the Slavs. The Slav economic life was on a low level, a forest subsistence economy with hunting and rudimentary agriculture: on this the Vikings imposed an international trading system. There was no religious-philosophic outlook: the new State-Church superstructure imposed on the Slavs an outlook derived from Greek dualistic idealism. And, finally, the East never experienced a Dark Ages to show it that society is distinct from the state and more fundamental than the state.
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (pp. 98-101). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.
In the East the older families which inclined toward the Republican Party because of the Civil War were largely submerged by waves of new immigrants from Europe, beginning with Irish and Germans after 1846 and continuing with even greater numbers from eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe after 1890. These new immigrants of the eastern cities voted Democratic because of religious, economic, and cultural opposition to the upper-class Republicans of the same eastern section. The class basis in voting patterns in the East and the sectional basis in voting in the South and West proved to be of major political significance after 1880.
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (p. 87). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Blake Ross, chrematistics unbound. It is the expression of the ex nihilo doctrine of creation. Nothing is intrinsically eternal, i.e. there are no Forms of the things, there are only resources - including human resources - and goods. Thus, nothing punishes You undisputably if You go against the Limit. The Horizon is always pushed forward. Liberal AND totalitarian.
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