The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It: Essays

By Carl Wells

There are three kinds of people in the world . . .

One, there are people who make the world worse.
Two, there are people who make the world better.
Three, there are people who look on the world and imagine that they can avoid the strife of the battle between good and evil.
The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It: Essays reminds us that if we act with the intention of making the world better, we will learn as we do. Even if mistakes are mixed in, in our acting.
The devil is in the details, of course. . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524654788

Carl Wells

Carl Wells enjoys living in Southern Indiana, in what might be described as Flyover Country, except that almost nobody flies over.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Ideas Move the World

Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law? And He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 22:36-40

We all appreciate the importance of the physical world. Give us frozen pipes one time, and we shortly will be singing the praises of the man who knows how to fix the problem and does so. We all live in the physical world, and instinctively we adjust our actions so as to bring ourselves as much physical comfort and as little physical misery as possible.

Thank heaven for the people with practical skills—the people who install our furnaces, fix our cars and our computers, design and build our houses and roads. I have very little mechanical ability—barely have enough sense to put air in the gas tank or whatever it is I am doing with that hose thingy at the service station—but I respect those with such skills. If I had children, I would try to help them discover and develop any practical skill they might have. There are countless trades that allow people to earn a very good living, while at the same time providing a sense of satisfaction because one is helping make other people’s lives better.

Having said that, we now also need to acknowledge that it is ideas which move the world. This is a mixed blessing. Because it is not only good ideas which move the world, it is also bad ideas.

When a culture acts in terms of bad ideas, there are bad consequences. Even the plumber and the mechanic, people with practical skills of great value to all of us, will find their lives changed for better or worse depending on what ideas are moving the culture around them.

The obvious solution is always to have only the best ideas, organize our civilization in terms of those ideas, and go on to reap the benefits.

The minor, niggling problem is that there is no agreement on what ideas are good. Name any topic where ideas count—economics, politics, sexual morality, religious faith, race relations, war and peace, and anything else important we can think of, and it quickly becomes clear that there is widespread disagreement on what ideas are good. And we often find—surprise!—that the ideas we consider good are not the ideas that are in large control of what direction our culture moves. Thus, for one example, the spend and spend and spend and money print ideas of a Paul Krugman are moving our nation in one direction, while the quite different economic ideas of intellectual pygmies like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and Gary North are currently mostly ignored and are not moving our nation in the direction such ideas would move us if they were believed by large numbers of people.

But which ideas are good and which bad? Are Dr. Krugman’s ideas good, and those of his opponents bad? Or are his ideas bad, and those of Mises and company good? Or are both sets of ideas bad? (It doesn’t seem logically possible that both sets of ideas are good, but perhaps both sets might be bad.)

What are the rest of us, mostly non-economists, to do? Great experts disagree. How can we, most of us with no particular genius for economics, decide which ideas should be moving the world, even if they are not yet currently doing so?

Perhaps the solution is to throw our hands in the air in frustration, say Whatever, and retreat to televised sports.

This is the solution most people choose. In fact it is the solution most Christians take.

But I would contend that the solution is no solution at all. It amounts to desertion of the field of battle. Because, without question, it is ideas which move the world. Bad ideas, if they are in control, move the world in a bad way. Good ideas, if they are in control, move the world in a good way.

And doesn’t the Christian claim to have the key to life, in his Christian religious faith? Doesn’t the believing Christian think and say that it is good to believe in and obey Christ, and bad not to believe in Him and obey Him?

Do biblical ideas have practical application concerning issues such as economics?

Those who would say no are legion. But in fact the answer is yes. God has arranged the universe in such a way that those who support obeying His will are supporting good ideas. And those who support disobeying His will are supporting bad ideas.

And one does not need to be a trained economist with excellent academic credentials, to figure out which ideas are within the will of God, and which are not. In fact countless trained economists with excellent academic credentials, many with excellent natural intelligence, are among the people supporting very bad economic ideas. Dr. Krugman is Exhibit A. He is no doubt very bright, has excellent credentials, and moreover has won what is often called, with only very slight inaccuracy, the Nobel Prize for economics (technically the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). And yet in being the champion of Keynesian economics, he is the champion of very bad ideas.

We don’t have to be sophisticated economists to understand why Dr. Krugman’s ideas are bad and are having a deleterious effect on our world. But we do need to be people who believe and support the direction from God which tells us, ‘You shall not steal’ (Ex. 20:15; the Eighth Commandment). Dr. Krugman and his myriad supporters are willing to dilute the money supply, thus reducing the value of each person’s savings. You worked an hour and earned enough to buy one pizza. Instead of buying a pizza, you decide to save your earnings in the bank for a rainy day, or to hide them under your mattress. Come back in a few years, and the money you earned in the hour you worked will no longer buy a pizza. It will buy three-quarters of a pizza, or half a pizza. The U.S., having followed the recommendation of Dr. Krugman and his allies, has stolen much of the value of the money you earned in that hour when you worked it a few years ago. Bad ideas moved and shook your world, but in fact they moved and shook the world of all of us.

How can bad ideas be so powerful? How can You shall not steal be defeated so egregiously by the bad idea that it is greatly helpful to dilute the value of our money?

The answer has nothing to do with Dr. Krugman and those who agree with him. The answer is that Christ’s church is unwilling to live by You shall not steal. We claim to be Christ’s people, but we don’t pay God’s church our tithe. Moreover, we want Social Security, Medicare, free public education, and numerous other programs which give us free money—which free money can only reach us because it has been taxed away from others. We were the ones who agreed to elect the politicians to steal that tax money for us. We are blind to our own sin, therefore God has given us over to blindness in regard to how evil is Keynesian economics. Dr. Krugman is not a cause of our nation’s moral corruption. He is only a symptom.

In a church which believed and lived You shall not steal, people like Dr. Krugman would gradually begin to recede from public prominence. The economic snake oil he is peddling would begin to be seen for what it is: obvious nonsense.

Ideas move the world. You shall not steal, but by printing money out of thin air and by passing a law transferring tax money from other people to us, we can all be prosperous is a bad idea which is moving our world right now. God the Supreme Ironist has shrugged and said, Okay, fine; have it your way. God looks at our hearts (1 Sam. 16:7), and has noticed that most of us, Christian and non-Christian, are quite willing to steal from others. He has given us what we wanted: a bite and devour (Gal. 5:15) brand of Christianity, and type of nation, which refuses to protect the property of our Christian and non-Christian neighbors. The result is a corrupt form of government which works great financial harm to most of us. We wanted to steal, and did so, but a corollary result was that we also got stolen from. Wow, who could have guessed? Well, anyone with an understanding that God deals with us covenantally. The Supreme Ironist strikes again. We are feeling the effects of our very bad economic ideas, but few Christians or non-Christians have begun to understand why the effects are coming. We are still blaming the Democrats, or blaming the Democrats and Republicans.

The idea that You shall not steal applies to me in every aspect of life which means I can’t support diluting the money supply and can’t support political programs which want to steal money from my neighbor and give money to me is a good idea in which only a handful of people believe.

God deals with all of us covenantally. (See Chapter 2.) Disobey Him, and face the (bad) consequences. Obey Him, and receive good consequences.

It comes down to whether or not we believe God and obey Him. Hath God said? (Gen. 3:1) we ask ourselves, and to a large extent our answer is, Nah. Every Christian would say he believes that You shall not steal is a good idea that comes from God, but few are ready to make far-ranging practical applications of this truth we claim to believe.

We don’t need brilliant economists by the thousand. (However, thank heaven for the economists, brilliant or not brilliant, who don’t want to steal Other People’s Money. They make a large contribution in helping the rest of us think through these issues.) What we do need, and need desperately, is people who believe You shall not steal has countless real-life applications, and who also are willing to apply You shall not steal to the way they live their own lives.

When we see Christians begin to preach and live You shall not steal, with everyday applications that humble us and cause us to repent and live in a different way, we will begin to have hope that good ideas in economics can begin to drive out bad ideas.

What we say about economics can be said about every issue. God is not trying to trick us. He has not arranged reality so that only rocket scientists, brain surgeons, free market economists who have a natural (God-given) understanding of economic issues, and other brilliant people can function effectively in life. He has given us a reality in which loving and obeying Him, and making daily rubber-meets-the-road applications of His teaching and instruction, leads to satisfaction and safety and peace of mind—for ordinary people, and for brilliant people as well.

Issues of war and peace? Sexual morality? Politics?

These issues and countless more can be dealt with wisely. We can have good ideas about these things. But we will have to be willing to live our good ideas, not just give lip service.

We are going to need to learn to love God with all our being, and also to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matt. 22:37-40). When we do that, our good ideas will begin to move the world. Judgment begins at the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17).

Chapter 2

Covenantalism: A Beginning Solution to World Problems

This is no accident, for smallness is not only a convenience. It is the design of God. The entire universe is built on it.

Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations²

It seems to me that covenantalism provides the cure for what ails us. At least, it provides a beginning solution which will pull the root of bitterness (Heb. 12:15) from life for almost everybody. Long-term, the only solution will prove to be Christian covenantalism, but non-Christians and anti-Christians can take great solace from the fact that Christians, under biblical covenantalism, will leave them alone. Covenantalism as established by God in His word the Bible forbids Christians from trying to force Christian covenantalism on non-Christian people.

A central cause for the bitter divisions among people is that almost all of us insist upon a one-winner-takes-all type of world. If the liberals rule, they insist upon making the laws for 320,000,000 of us. If the conservatives rule, they supposedly would plan to make the laws—although in this era the conservative brand is so muddled that one wonders what they really might plan to do. However, at least theoretically, conservatives might rule in a vastly different way from liberals, and they too would be ruling all 320,000,000 American citizens.

Covenantalism solves these problems. Reading the Bible, we see how God deals with people groups. It would be ideal if every group of people decided to make a covenant with the God of the Bible. But most don’t. (At least they have not done so at this point in world history.) People make a covenant with their own god or gods. There are consequences, usually of the bad variety. God exists and rules world history. When people insist upon disobeying Him, they must accept the consequences. But God is the one to decide what the consequences should be, and when they should arrive. Thus we learn that the replacement or punishment of the Amorites was delayed, because ‘the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete’ (Gen. 15:16).

Meanwhile, God’s people Israel were in a covenant with the God of the Bible. But a covenant is not a mushy, sentimental, pious-sounding bunch of words. A people which claims to have a covenant with God is required to obey Him. The blessings of covenanting with God are enormous, but there are concomitant responsibilities. The Old Testament is largely a record of bad consequences arriving on God’s covenant people because they refused to obey Him from the heart.

Here is a people group which is described as having ‘made a covenant with death’ (Isa. 28:15). However, God did not honor it. ‘And your covenant with death shall be canceled’ (Isa. 28:18). Who were these people? The Philistines? The Moabites? Perhaps the Babylonians? No, these were God’s people in Judah. A covenant with God is a wonderful thing, but it is an edged tool which requires honest and careful handling, or God will cancel it. Christians, take warning.

Covenantalism is practical. While right now we insist upon telling everyone what they must do, and as a result embitter those who resent having to do what they don’t want to do, covenantalism allows people to live in terms of a view of reality that suits their own wants and desires.

Everybody, whether he knows it or not, lives in terms of some covenant. A covenant with one god or another is completely inescapable. The god, of course, may be non-supernatural. Thus countless Americans have made a covenant in which man is the god. Man will decide which laws will be established and obeyed.

From the Christian point of view, such a covenant is a covenant with death which God will cancel eventually. But meanwhile, these people can and should be left strictly alone. God can handle them.

The Christian does not shrug at the humanist madness. Far otherwise. We can try to warn them. But we should also be planning to establish Christian nations which are consciously covenanted with the God of the Bible.

The U.S. is collapsing morally and financially. The reasons for this are many. The most ominous reason, and one that warns us that very difficult times are ahead for all of us, is the antinomian (anti-God’s-law) Christian church. Even the Bible-believing church refuses to acknowledge that God’s word instructs us to apply our faith to every aspect of life. We want to have comfortable middle class lives, we want to think well of ourselves, and we want to go to heaven when we die (after a very long time on earth). To obey God and to apply His teachings to how we live on earth? Not so much. The ineffectual Christian church is the key problem in the U.S., and will continue to be so until/unless the church wakes up.³ But there are other problems besides the church. The late Leopold Kohr (1909-1994) has identified a major one. Kohr was Jewish, but wrote very respectfully of our Lord and of the Christian faith. The problem Kohr identified was: bigness.

Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence, social as well as physical, and all I have done in fusing apparently disjointed and unrelated bits of evidence into an integrated theory of size is to demonstrate first that what applies everywhere applies also in the field of social relations; and secondly that, if moral, physical, or political misery is nothing but a function of size, if the only problem is one of bigness, the only solution must lie in the cutting down of the substances and organisms which have outgrown their natural limits. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.⁴

Consult his sprightly and thought-provoking book, The Breakdown of Nations for details, but it seems clear that he is on to something profound. When an entity gets too big, bad things happen. That is particularly true of nations.

The U.S. is simply too big. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of ‘an Empire of Liberty’⁵ was an impossible dream. Had the colonies remained united in a loose federation such as existed under the Articles of Confederation, there was a hope that such a dream might have come to fruition eventually. But once the central state became powerful, liberty was doomed. Our downfall began early, with the Constitution—more likely even earlier, with the rebellion against Great Britain—and although we might have arrested the slide at many points … we didn’t. The War to End Limited Government, 1861-1865, ended practical hope of tight reigns on the power of Leviathan. After nearly a generation of recovery from the war, and of internal development, by 1898 the U.S. was poised for pushing around other people—other people in other countries, and other people within our own country. The result has been more than a century of bullying. It continues at record pace today. The modest republic of George Washington’s day is no more. When asked by a lady at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, whether we had a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin replied, A republic, if you can keep it. He knew there might be a problem keeping it. He was right. We didn’t keep it. We became too big, and too big for our britches.

But the happy reality is that bigness contains the seeds of its own destruction. The leaders of the U.S., feeling no restraint upon their actions, have done things to us financially which must, sooner or later, have catastrophic results. When those results begin to arrive, the ability of Leviathan to keep bullying will come into question.

Needless to say, the sociopaths will not be in a hurry to stop bullying, no matter how severe the disasters befalling the U.S. They are empty people, and the only way they feel satisfaction in life is if they are center stage and are shoving the rest of us around. They don’t mind a few or many dead bodies, as long as the bodies are not their own. But reality exists. At least that is my hope. My hope is that reality exists, and will bring circumstances upon this country which will cause all of us to believe that we can free ourselves from Leviathan and from the sociopaths in control of Leviathan.

Here is where Kohr’s insight about the problem of bigness and the potential for covenantalism intersect.

In place of one power-mad central state in North America, we can have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of small nations—each one covenanted with its own god.

The advantages seem clear. You want a nation in which abortion is legal and paid for by the state, in which anyone professing Christianity is subject to the death penalty? Excellent. Go for it. On the other hand, you want some version of a Christian nation, in which aborting babies calls for the death penalty for the people aborting the baby? Go right ahead.

With several dozen or several hundred or several thousand small nations on this continent, we all would have a chance to suit ourselves as to what brand of nation we want. Wouldn’t that be to the advantage of us all?

People who believe in the kind of economics espoused by men like Paul Krugman could live in nations where such ideas held sway. Those of us who believe such ideas are disastrous could live somewhere else.

Probably none of us would find a nation with ideas completely in accord with our own. But we would all find a place where we could have hope of influencing our small nation toward ideas closer to our own. I would not expect to see a nation established on this continent which mirrored my ideas very closely. I’ve been a Christian about 40 years, and I’ve had ample proof that my kinds of ideas are held by a tiny minority of Christians. But I also feel confident that one or several small Christian nations would come close enough to my kinds of ideas as to give me hope for the future. I would expect to influence that country toward more biblical ideas, of course! But at the worst I would be in a place where hope lived.

We are all hopeless now. All, or almost all, at least. We can’t influence Leviathan. He is going to do what he wants. We know it. We have to just take what comes, without recourse. With the breaking up of the U.S. hope will once again be a realistic option.

Covenantalism simply says: make a covenant with whatever god you choose. Accept the consequences. Learn from the consequences if you prefer—or don’t learn if you prefer not to learn. Leave other people alone. If God wants to give a people or a nation bad consequences, He can do so in His own timing and in His own way. If He wants to give them good consequences … why? Maybe we can learn from others.

Notice how the end of bigness will limit our ability to do harm. If the U.S. had not existed, it would never have attacked Iraq, and thus would not have destroyed a country and would not have rooted out the country’s Christian population. It was an insane war from the start, but was possible only because of our bigness.

Assume that the same percentage of sociopaths existed in a country of 10,000,000 as existed in a country of 320,000,000. Assume that sociopaths are in control of the country of 10,000,000, as they currently are in charge of our country of 320,000,000. The likelihood that a country of 10,000,000 people would attack a country of almost 26,000,000 people (Iraq in 2003) or 37,000,000 people (Iraq 2016) is small—even sociopaths can count and they don’t like long odds any better than the rest of us do. Even sociopaths are restrained by math facts which indicate the sociopaths might get a sound beating if they attack the larger country. Not that sociopaths care if ordinary people get killed or crippled. But defeat in war might have other consequences which are bad for the sociopaths themselves. They might get thrown out of office and thus lose some of the perks of power and prestige.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama are dangerous, unprincipled men. But put them at the head of a nation of 10,000,000, and they will initiate less evil than if you put them at the head of 320,000,000 people. Put them at the head of a nation of 3,000,000 people, and they will do even less harm. They simply won’t have enough bigness to do great evil. And their evildoing will be limited even more when their people can drive or even walk twenty or forty miles and slip over the border into a country which offers a more sensible type of covenant.

As Kohr told us, God’s plan is to work by smallness. He has arranged the earth so that small people groups have limited power to do harm to others. Even His people the Israelites were split into twelve tribes, and when King Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, tried to bully ten of the tribes, they effectively seceded (1 Kgs. 12:1-19). When Rehoboam made immediate plans to force the seceding northern kingdom back into political union with his southern kingdom, God, via the prophet Shemaiah, informed Rehoboam and his supporters that they ‘must not’ fight against the split-off kingdom (1 Kgs. 12:21-24). For once God was obeyed (1 Kgs. 12:24), although needless to say Judah and Israel eventually found plenty of excuses to go to war with one another.

God plans to change the world by smallness. The way He will advance His kingdom is by the obedience of His people as very small units—as small nations, as churches, as families, as individuals. As non-Christians see how blessings fall on the obedient, perhaps some of them will begin to hunger to become God’s people as well.

Example is the most powerful witness of all. God knows that. He rightly has confidence in the power of very small nations, churches of any size (but all relatively small when measured against the earth’s billions), families of any size, and individuals, to lead the earth toward His peaceful kingdom (Isa. 11:1-10). Paul, we remember, was one man. He did not even have a wife and children to support him. Empowered by God, he was mighty to help change the world in a good way. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have power enough to support God’s people in their endeavors to obey and please Him, without needing bullies to force people to some kind of feigned obedience.

Notice how quickly covenantal thinking pulls the root of bitterness from life on earth. When we mind our own business, leave other people alone, and live in terms of our own covenant with our own god, we need not quarrel with others.

Islam, a dangerous and violent religion, can be safely left to itself to covenant with Allah. Nations which permit Muslims to immigrate to their country are slitting their own throat—but then there are consequences for being a pluralistic humanist country (or a foolishly pluralistic Christian country). When you make a covenant with death, the consequences tend to be bad, and the consequences show up sooner or later. Pluralistic humanism is simply one type of covenant with death. Permitting the immigration of Muslims into a non-Muslim country is bad for the foolishly pluralistic country—and delays the time when Muslims begin to learn that their faith is a covenant with death. As Ernest Renan said, ‘Muslims are the first victims of Islam.’⁶ Covenantal thinking at least permits us to quarantine Muslims among themselves until the truth of the Christian gospel changes their hearts. Christians can be vigorously active in taking the gospel to Muslims. Long-term, the gospel is the only thing that will allow Muslims to think clearly about how the world is put together. Who knows, maybe the gospel will work better than invading and trashing their countries, killing and crippling their people, and attacking their wedding parties with drones. It’s just a theory.

Covenantalism pulls much of the root of bitterness even from quarrels among Christians. Our differences among ourselves are immense. Why not a dozen or ten dozen small Christian nations, each one covenanted with its own version of the Christian God? Currently there are enormous swaths of American Christianity which are largely antinomian. A tiny handful of Christians hold a high view of the continuing application and practicality of God’s law in our era. Why not have one or two small Christian nations which admired and applied God’s law, and let eight others or ten others or six dozen others make their covenant with God in a manner which gets rid of most of God’s law? Who is harmed by the one or two tiny Christian countries which highly respect God’s law? They’ll be a flop, of course! Maybe their citizens will learn something, and change their covenant with God into something more biblical. Meanwhile, why quarrel? The proof will be in the pudding—in short, in the living. A few decades will teach us a lot, I suspect.

This is how God plans to change the world—by good and bad examples, with people left alone by others. God will bring appropriate sanctions, but it will be in His timing, and to the degree He feels is suitable.

Early in this essay I said that the most ominous reason for the collapse of the U.S. is the antinomian Christian church. The word ominous is chosen carefully. The church is not ready for freedom and responsibility. We have been living like slaves, not like free people, and we are not ready to rule ourselves. If the death of Leviathan gives us an unexpected opportunity suddenly to rule ourselves and to make several or many covenants with the biblical God, we are unlikely to take good advantage of the opportunity. Most Christians have made an idol of the United States. We will think we need only tweak things a bit to get back to the good old days. We will return to our folly as a dog returns to its vomit (Prov. 26:11). Tweaking won’t work. We need to make self-conscious and thoughtful covenants with the God of the Bible.

The more of us who start thinking about such things now, the better chance we will have of creating a few countries where God is honored. Leviathan is committing suicide. We need to begin to think about how we can pick up the pieces, and how we can salvage a few places on the North American continent where God is honored and there is hope for the future worthy of the word hope.⁷

Chapter 3

Why Is the Middle Class Disappearing?

Today we’re going to tell you why America’s middle class is getting poorer. …

In the early 1970s there were about 200,000 new U.S. businesses created each year (net of closures). Now, the number is negative.

Why are Americans getting poorer?

Look no further. No new businesses (net). No new jobs (again, net). No new wealth.