I'm just libertarian enough...

to find this funny :)

(FYI the Boston Globe runs an excellent weekly editorial cartoon roundup in which you also can find such jewels)

Adunare (fresh back from the most eastern point in North America)

The Future Beckons

And apparently it's going to involve woolly mammoths with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads ... (via Ross Douthat).

Slumming

In yesterday's post Kawasaki talked about sharing the pain when it's time to lay off staff. Take a salary cut. Do something. 

Along similar lines (but kinda opposite), Detroit automaker CEOs are taking heat for dropping upwards of 20 gs on a trip to ask the US gov for money to save their cash-strapped companies.

See here.

Boy does this look sloppy.

The End of Wall Street

The problems that plagued Wall Street were variously cast in the last American election as individual greed and deregulation. The solution - it seems to me - lies somewhere in between. A provocative piece I enjoyed this morning on The End of Wall Street, by Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame. Favorite quote:

It's all laissez-faire until you get in deep shit

The Messy Business of Leadership

Guy Kawasaki, a Christian as well as a big name in the venture capital world, wrote an interesting article on the 'Art of laying people off'. I think it's a subject that takes a lot of courage to address, and for the most part, Kawasaki covers it well. 

Some of us may one day find ourselves serving our organizations from the top. Should that ever happen, I think this article has some wisdom to offer, helping manage a bad situation.

Two of the 12 points I'll share:

Take responsibility. Ultimately, it is the CEO’s decision to make the cuts, so don’t blame it on the board of directors, market conditions, competition, or whatever else. In effect, she should simply say, “I made the decision. This is what we’re going to do.” If you don’t have the courage to do this, don’t be a CEO. Now, more than ever, the company will need a leader, and leaders accept responsibility.

Share the pain. When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain, too. Cut your pay. In fact, the higher the employee, the bigger the percentage of pay reduction. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue-generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the boxseat tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.

The rest can be read here

"The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice" If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal." It has always been an uncertain mix of greatness and misery, joy and heartache, long-term plans and sudden disasters.

Here. See also, here

A Christian Theory of Public Policy

I was reflecting with a colleague recently that the great challenge of the contemporary Christian university student is how to practice leadership - where the word has become abused as a sort of catch all for charisma or clear minded thinking. Leadership, he defined for me, was about being able to make a decision, when the choices seem equal. Don't talk to me about making the choice between the obviously right and wrong - he said - a child can do that! If we are serious about moral formation we must do more than train ourselves (and our students) to make the right call, we must learn how to make the tough call, to weigh it morally, and wisely, with rich resources and deep prayer - but to make it indeed.

I am especially impressed with Stephen Garber's idea of proximate justice. It belies the easy idealist puritanism of Christian youth. In the words of my colleague, if you're going to play in the sandbox you're going to get dirty. Absolute purity is a pursuit, not a state, and in its pursuit we must guard our integrity - negotiate as best we can the contradictions of life and our belief.

I find my own moral wisdom in short supply. I am impatient, at times arrogant, and look for the obvious right and wrong. I can always find that angle, because the (mis)information always exists for the uneducated to narrowly judge a complex problem - international politics is rife with it.

What are some of the resources at hand to ameliorate this? I want to suggest - and would love to hear feedback - that one of the best resources thinking Christians in public policy have is just war theory. Just War gives us resources to help think through how to take an unpleasant, broken, piecemeal action - how to morally and wisely weigh the contradictions, and then nevertheless to act.

The missing link for Christians in policy - in my opinion - is just such a broad based theory of policy: sophisticated theological tools that can be used to read, weigh, and provide decision making capacity to an idealist generation.

Could Just War be a departure for developing a Christian theory of public policy in a liberal democratic society?