Shemitta & sexual chuqot to’eivah

The difference between violating the laws of shemitta and violating the laws in Leviticus 18 of sexual perversion (both of which could trigger national exile from the land) is that the laws of shemitta pertain only to when the people of Israel are sovereign whereas the sexual prohibitions pertain to the sovereignty of any inhabitants of the land. 

As such, the violation of the laws of sexual perversion are an abomination (and the performance of those rites are regarded as chuqot to’eivah) in a way that the violation of the laws of shemitta are not. 

Belong to everyone

Once the economic power is made to redound to the resources which are at the source of the production process the extractives lose their incentive to inflict the resource curse. 

By putting the resources in God's trust, and by having God, every seven years, command those resources to belong to everyone in the society, the society can go on to lift the resource curse. 

As a fund

That the land must lie fallow during the sabbatical year is the mechanism by which God makes sure the land will always function in the society as a fund and not be employed as a depletable stock. 

Land & money

The laws of sheviit and shemitta together comprehend the two dimensions of resource curse: land and money. 

The reason why the laws of land is called sheviit while the laws of money is called shemitta is because land is made by God whereas money is made by people. 

The suspension of property rights regarding the land does not require the same sort of release by the putative property owner that a similar suspension of property rights would invovle when it is with respect to money-creation in the form of the extension of credit. 

Unsustainable growth

The antidote to unsustainable growth in a society is a society built around balance. 

Under the sabbatical year system the sus period builds up income and exhausts the capital; the sheva period exhausts the income and builds-up the capital. Such a system forecloses the society from reaching shmeinah, excess and obesity, which excess would make it vulnerable to the resource curse. 

National scale

Implementation of sheviit laws must be national in scope because individuals can't really accomplish the task unless they're operating at the national scale. 

Asking individuals to accomplish the tasks of stewardship is an empty exercise because stewardship at anything lower than the national scale is doomed to fail. Stewardship is not only about good intentions; stewardship is about defining property rights properly and enabling a commercial system that works according the dictates of gift exchange alongside market exchange. 

The teaching of the Chumash is that stewardship must occur at the national level. That is the genius of the biblical teachings. That is the point of the laws of sheviit and shemitta. 

A better strategy would be to find a country whose citizens would be amenable to the ways of natural stewardship and then as a demonstration project to implement the ways of natural stewardship at the national level to show the world how it is done and what the national advantages to such an approach really would be. That would be the 'light unto the nations' part of the mandate. 

• The advantage of such an approach would be that it is not anti-corporate, it is pro-stewardship. 
• That it is pro- means it doesn't have to be angry. 
• It also means it doesn't have to be negative. 
• It means that it is planning for the inevitable collapse of the mechanical systems by describing what will take their place. 

Gandhi proposed such a approach when he taught non-violence. Non-violence presumed the containment and the eventual collapse of illegitimate power. 

The problem with Gandhi's teachings was poor timing. Had the Muslim world not descended into an epochal resource curse at almost exactly the moment his teachings were coming to the fore, his wisdom would have been far more clearly manifest in the world today. 

Land was a fund

The modern day industrial economy needs to manage the use of the natural resources by both labor and capital. 

People need to think through how the industrialization of the productive processes factors into the relationship between the farms and the cities, especially insofar as the Israelite ministry seemed to have been shunted to the cities away from the land. 

In any case, the protection of the natural resources must be key to the proper design of any economic order. The difference between the relationship to the natural resources of the ancient world’s agrarian order versus the modern world’s industrial order is that, to the ancient world, land was a fund whereas, in the modern world, raw materials tend to be a stock. 

Plus, the industrial order harnesses energy sources in a way that is more refined and more intensive than the way the agrarian order did. 

Finally, the social organization of work is more important in a technology-heavy industrial economic system than it is in a technology-light agrarian system. 

Fund-mining conduct

Steroids and mind-enhancing drugs are part of the same fund-mining conduct that has been exhausting the entire planet. 

Food is fuel

Food is fuel. 

Part of the challenge of making a sustainable world is making not only renewable energy but also renewable food. 

Unearned wealth & the pursuit of wealth and glory

The norms for managing excess need to be made more clear. 

• Unearned wealth is bad for the individual's soul. 
• Unearned wealth rots the character of its recipients. 
• The pursuit of wealth and glory is a prideful endeavor. 
• The pursuit of wealth and glory results in the distortion of the planet's ability to support the world’s human population. 
• The pursuit of wealth and glory is the basis in society of class distinctions. 

The curtailment of the pursuit of wealth and glory and the disempowerment of unearned wealth should be the foundation of society's every public policy. 

Fresh and local food lovingly prepared and shared

Sustainability and social justice and food with fresh flavor served in a community setting – these are the three prongs of covenantal partnership. 

The path to reclaiming a covenantal awareness runs through the provision of local, fresh, lovingly prepared and shared food in every public function every political player must attend. It would instruct the populace while at the same time enticing the political class back into a sustainable universe. 

Teaching moderation

The teaching of moderation and non-violence should become more simple when the brittle systems of global interdependence begin to collapse as the twilight of the oil gods begins to set in. 

The impulse for the instruction of moderation and non-violence will be coming from the then looming threat of unworkable systems literally coming apart at the seams. 

Sova first

After the Middle Ages mankind learned to conquer the natural world and to harness it with advances in technology which overwhelmed the natural order. That conquest of Nature gave man a sense of power and control that was unprecedented. It led to the present day quotient of hubris the world is having to suffer. 

Now people need to learn a new skill – self-restraint; not piety so much as satiety. For that people need a variation on the teachings of Gandhi. Gandhi taught non-violence more than he saught sova. The Western world, with its uparalleled abundance could better learn sova first and then learn non-violence. 

Sova standard

The sovereign's monopoly on power almost automatically and irresistibly extends into his monopoly on the extraction of the fertile core, be it in the land, under the land, in the oceans, in the air, or in the reproductive capacity of man or beast. Furthermore, the sovereign has a monopoly on money and on credit and leverage. 

The ability of the society to discriminate between subsistence and super-abundance, which is to say, the ability of a society to establish a sova point, along with society's ability to discriminate between productive versus speculative risk is the key, and most fundamental, standard for the society to establish for itself. 

On the basis of that standard the society will be able to establish norms of sustainability that will have the effect of enriching and deepening the quality of life in that society and on this planet. The object is for the government and the culture to establish not just the poverty line or a basic living standard; the object is to establish a sova standard beyond which it is unbecoming to strive to accumulate wealth and hoard excess or surplus. 

God's role is to serve as counter-weight to the sovereign and to remind him of the severely limited sova point it is necessary to maintain while at the same time it is also God's role to remind the people of their cultural responsibility to protect their fertile cores and not to submit in servility to the temptations of a weak-willed ruling class. 

Read and apply Scripture

Neither the secular world nor the orthodox world has a grip on how Scripture can inform the contemporary ecological situation on the planet. Both sides are still battling over issues that were fashionable half a millennium, a whole millenium, even two or two and a half millennia ago. 

Neither the secular nor the orthodox know how to read and apply Scripture's teachings to the present day circumstances either of Israel or of the planet. Neither the Christians, the Muslims, nor the Jews nor, for that matter, the secularists know how to apply Scripture's teachings to the problem of income distribution or aid to the poor; none of them know how to manage the excess of consumption, power, influence and arrogance the leadership of the clergy as well as the monarchy or the oligarchy have established for themselves; none speaks to a dignity and an autonomy before God for which Scripture calls as a pre-condition of covenantal relationship; etc. 

The critique of contemporary leadership, be it religious or secular, must be not with respect to their own terms, which are tired and serve as mere distractions, but in terms of how they address the issues of the day, of leadership, of the abuse of power (on the right), of a loss of direction and an aimlessness (on both the right and the left), of the relation between the haves and the have-nots; of the mining by the industrial economic order of the renewable source of productivity on the planet. 

Not theology

The Protestant Reformation was at bottom a response to the imperial exploitation of the German people by the Roman Pope. 

The revolt was less against hypocricy and more against extraction, which, it so happened, led to hypocricy, degeneracy and corruption. 

The Reformation was about the material and economic relations that ruled in that time, not so much about the theology.  

Strong marketing campaigns

The real challenge is not so much to build a better mousetrap, it is to build a system that rewards the builders of a better mousetrap in the face of the proliferation of worse mousetraps that have better marketing campaigns associated with them, where the inferior mousetraps with strong marketing campaigns force the superior mousetraps to focus on and solve the wrong problems, problems for which the worse mousetraps are better suited and are competitively superior. 

The real challenge is not to make a better currency but to repeal Gresham's Law. 

Savings glut

To say the world is experiencing a 'savings glut' is to say the rest of the world isn't over-consuming the way America is. 

That the over-production is enabled by the wholesale mining and wasting of the planet’s fertile core is the long-term, serious issue. 

That long-term issue the other side of the problem to the short-term issue of talking about the challenges of the present day economy as a 'savings glut'. 

Isolated economic orders

When global trade grinds to a halt at the end of the oil era and as energy costs become too great to sustain the world’s economy it will become feasible for Israel to install the shemitta system. 

The end of global trade will return nations to their isolated economic orders, more closely resembling how they were in the ancient world. 

Israel will then be able to lead the world in the new way for nations to organize their economic activities. 

Ordinariness

People should not seek glory in other people. People should rather seek a sense of connection with other people in the lowest common denominator, in the ordinariness of people-to-people contact. 

If you would know glory, go to Nature and know her intimately.