*Are Our Daily Habits Productive?

The economic woes the world has experienced over the past half-decade or so have exacerbated the perceived—and often real—gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement focused on the super-rich, the top one percent of Americans by income, complaining that these ultra-wealthy people should "pay their fair share" of taxes to support the poor. This disaffection with the rich was no doubt encouraged by the rhetoric of the current President and his supporters, who promised fundamental change in America and a progressive (read "socialist" or even "Marxist") redistribution of wealth under the guise of fairness.

The OWS movement, never truly coherent or successful in its aims, has fizzled, but its underlying spirit of dissatisfaction with the wealthy lingers. Just yesterday, while waiting for my truck to be serviced, I heard the cashier complain to another customer that the salary and benefits package promised to a local top bank executive was ridiculous. "No one," she said, "needs that much money, and there is no way we [bank customers] can make up for it." In other words, the executive was so overpaid that the bank would fail trying to pay it!

The OWS crowd assumes two foundational beliefs about the rich that are not necessarily true. First, they believe that the wealthy are born with silver spoons in their mouths, and having inherited their money from their parents—who are fixtures in a permanent upper class—thus did nothing to earn their mansions, luxury yachts and automobiles, and hefty portfolios. While this is true for a small percentage of the super-rich, the people who inhabit the top tier of the wealthy come and go with regularity as fortunes are made and lost in the volatility of the markets and the business world. The names on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans are different or in different places every year. America is still the land of opportunity—both to rise and to fall.

Second, OWS supporters believe that, if they did not inherit their money, the wealthy acquired their riches through underhanded means. By hook or by crook, by defrauding the poor or knifing their coworkers or competitors in the back, the wealthiest among us clawed their way up the ladder of success, leaving the ruined lives of others behind them. While a tiny minority of wealthy people may have taken this sordid route, the vast majority of top income-earners simply rolled up their sleeves and outworked everyone else. The Pareto Principle, also known as the "80-20 Rule" or the "Law of the Vital Few," essentially posits that 80% of the effects derive from 20% of the causes. In this case, it means that 20% of the people do 80% of the work—and the wealthy among us usually fall into that productive top quintile.

Earlier this week, a friend recommended an article to me on the website of financial guru Dave Ramsey, whose main goal is to help people get out of debt and establish a solid financial footing. The article, "20 Things The Rich Do Every Day," was a blog entry by a man named Tom Corley, author of Rich Habits, "the groundbreaking financial self-help book that shares the secrets of financial success by exposing the daily habits of wealthy individuals," according to his website, RichHabits.net. In short, Corley has found that wealthy people generally share certain habits that enhance productivity and thus prosperity.

Doing one or more of the habits on the list will not by any means guarantee a six-figure salary, but they are generally commonsense practices that can help a person do more and better with their time, energy, and skills. Here is a sample of the list:

1. 70% of wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day. 97% of poor people eat more than 300 junk food calories per day. . . .
3. 76% of wealthy exercise aerobically 4 days a week. 23% of poor do this.
4. 63% of wealthy listen to audio books during commute to work vs. 5% for poor people. . . .
10. 88% of wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day for education or career reasons vs. 2% for poor. . . .
13. 67% of wealthy watch 1 hour or less of TV every day vs. 23% for poor. . . .
19. 86% of wealthy believe in life-long educational self-improvement vs. 5% for poor.

The underlying premise behind Corley's list is that some people, by virtue of their daily habits, set themselves up for success and the money that invariably follows, while others doom themselves to being poor and staying poor by their unproductive everyday lifestyles. As the sample from the list shows, a good diet and frequent exercise can lead to productivity because the body will likely be healthy, allowing it to work better, longer, and harder. Cultivating the mind through education, creative listening, and reading keeps a person informed, engaged, and expanding his skillset. Finally, productive people do not waste much time on vapid entertainment.

In summary, a reason why the wealthy are wealthy is because they work at doing advantageous things while avoiding detriments and distractions. They do what is helpful and shun what is useless. As the old song goes, they accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. These are things anyone can do—and from a spiritual point of view, should do.

The book of Proverbs is teeming with advice on being productive and prosperous, such as these few: "Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise" (Proverbs 6:6). "Getting treasures by a lying tongue is the fleeting fantasy of those who seek death" (Proverbs 21:6). "Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings" (Proverbs 22:29). "By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches" (Proverbs 24:4). "Prepare your outside work, . . . and afterward build your house" (Proverbs 24:27).

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus heaps praise on those who wisely and energetically profit from His gifts and condemns the one who squanders them (Matthew 25:14-30). Many of His teachings use illustrations lifted from situations involving money, wealth, debt, wages, work, and stewardship. He even speaks of making "friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon (Luke 16:9), just before warning, "If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?" (verse 11).

So, do our daily routines set us up for success—financially, relationally, spiritually—or do they doom us to failure? Are they productive or unproductive? It is well worth our time to evaluate our lives for ways to improve them by adopting more profitable habits.

Liberalism and Legalism

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As our various governments become increasingly liberal, a horrifying—a word chosen with care—paradox becomes more apparent: A more liberal America is becoming less free. The conventional wisdom is that conservatism is restrictive while liberalism is liberating, but in practice, the opposite is true. While conservatives generally uphold standards to a higher degree than liberals do, they are in the main legal minimalists. Liberals, on the other hand, while they disdain moral standards—and do their best to tear them down at every opportunity—are legal maximalists. Because of this liberal trait, we find ourselves buried under an avalanche of laws, regulations, orders, procedures, and bureaucratic oversight and interference.

Many people fail to understand this aspect of the liberal mind, so it may take some explanation. The misunderstanding arises from linguistic and historical misconceptions about what "liberalism" is. Liberal is—or was—a good word. It derives from the Latin word liber, which means "free," and thus has the same root and underlying sense as "liberty." Classically, a liberal person was free in bestowing upon others; he was generous, in other words. Sometimes, his generosity extended beyond economics into more ethical areas to include freedom from prejudice on racial, ethnic, sexual, social, religious, or even national grounds. An individual could also be liberal in more aesthetic areas, depending on his attitude toward the arts, sports and entertainments, or fashion—for instance, whether he liked and promoted avant-garde artists in music, painting, acting, or poetry.

Historically, a political or philosophic liberal advocated expanding personal freedoms. For instance, the religious reformers of fifteenth-century Europe were liberals in the eyes of the Catholic Church, for they advocated stripping the Pope and his hierarchy of priests of their power and control over Christians. In a similar way, the men at the forefront of the ensuing Enlightenment campaigned for political and philosophical freedom, that is, for more democratic forms of government (as opposed to autocratic, centralized rule) and more reliance on human reason and science (as opposed to divine revelation via Scripture and church, which they considered "superstition"). Many of America's Founding Fathers, today considered quite conservative, were the "flaming liberals" of their time. They took Enlightenment ideas of liberty and put them into practice on a grand scale.

However, as political systems and cultures evolved, "liberal" slowly changed meanings. While nations have always been composed of people with a wide range of views, Western democratic nations soon developed the modern political spectrum by dividing into factions, known as political parties. Usually, the spectrum fell into two primary parts, which we call "the Right" and "the Left." Rightists desired things to remain as they were, or even to return to a standard of the past. Being advocates of the status quo, they became known as "conservatives"—they wanted to conserve or preserve the nation as it was.

Leftists, though, were not satisfied with the current state of affairs in one area or another. They desired to improve society: to better working conditions, to increase wages, to open access to wealth and privilege to more people, to raise the status of various minorities, etc. They did not want the country to stagnate, as they saw it, but to make progress in many areas of life. Leftists became known as "progressives."

So far, so good. Yet, despite being humanitarians and succeeding in many areas that needed to be addressed, the progressive spirit became poisoned through excess and evolutionary thinking. Progressives began to reach beyond merely improving society to remaking it along the lines of the then-new ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Soon, progressive parties around the world were controlled by atheists and communists who used their crude understanding of human psychology to persuade and control huge populations. The world has progressive thinking to thank for such historic movements as the Russian and Chinese communism, German National Socialism, most Third-World dictatorships, Liberation Theology, and even institutions that many people today consider more-or-less benign, like the United Nations, the World Bank, the AFL-CIO, and Greenpeace.

In the United States, with the defeat of Nazism in World War II and the advent of the Cold War, first "communist" and then "socialist" took on pejorative meanings. To be considered a communist was to be blackballed, making one's life almost unbearable and unsustainable. After a time, it was almost just as ruinous to be called a socialist, as most informed people understood that socialism is communism with a yellow happy face for a mask. Thus, in America, Leftists needed a new label, and "liberal" would work just fine—its benevolent meaning would hide a multitude of progressive ideas and programs.

Today's liberals repudiate the term because more people have caught on to their linguistic joke. But liberals they are, as their progressive ideas and voting records expose. Since their predecessors' failures to remake the world through revolution, they have decided to do the job through legal means, one law or regulation at a time. They are willing to let the nation evolve, as they believe man evolves, by increments, if need be—though they would love to see it make a progressive leap every now and then.

Thus, they have taken over the governments of this land—not the visible leadership in many cases, but the invisible bureaucracy supporting the elected leaders. There, hidden from view and in many cases shielded from responsibility, they tinker with our freedoms, slowly changing "the land of the free" into a nation in a legal straitjacket. The legal code of the U.S. is mammoth, so massive that no one can keep abreast of it any longer. Why else has the legal profession in this country exploded except that 1) there are so many laws, people are breaking them right and left, consciously or unconsciously; and 2) teams of lawyers are necessary to handle the intricacies of the law? Liberalism is killing this nation. Legalism is its weapon.

Many people think that the church of God is legalistic—or that God Himself is legalistic. That is the furthest thing from the truth! God commands His creation, humanity, to follow only ten principles of living, the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5). While this may be an oversimplification, He does not overwhelm us with laws or change them every few years. All of His laws fit in one, easily accessible, unchanging Book. Compared to life under human liberalism, living under God's revealed way of life is liberating!

Do Americans Value Liberty?

This weekend, Americans will celebrate—with cookouts, picnics, parades, and fireworks—the 228^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from England on July 4, 1776, the commonly accepted beginning of the United States. At the time, the Colonies were already engaged in war with the Mother Country, blood had been spilled on both sides, costly sacrifices had been made, and heels had been dug in so that the stakes had become, as Patrick Henry had so eloquently declared, "Give me liberty or give me death!"

Though American forces won few battles during the Revolution, they won the war, exhausting the British forces through guerrilla tactics and the help of their French ally. In the end, America's ragtag forces had defeated the most powerful army on earth at the time, but it had cost a great many lives and destroyed cities, estates, farms, and businesses. To them, however, this was the price of freedom, and they willingly paid it.

In 1812, the next generation was called to do the same against the same foe. Then for successive generations there were Indian wars to fight, a war against Mexico, the bloody Civil War, war with Spain, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and now the Gulf Wars. Americans have taken up arms in the cause of human liberty here at home and all over the world, believing that freedom is an inalienable right of all mankind, not just of Americans. With Thomas Jefferson, they have believed, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time."

Liberty is a precious and rare blessing in the annals of humankind. Most societies, even among those considered to be free, have granted liberty only to certain classes of people based on birth, wealth, or merit rather than bestowing it universally, regardless of class. America was the first nation that attempted such a radical concept, enshrining it in its founding documents as a goal for future generations to strive to attain. Though its perfect application has never been achieved, it has provided a guiding light, a high ideal, over the past two centuries.

To many in America, it appears as if the events of the Revolution and the Founding are ancient history and thus irrelevant. They have grown up in an era in which freedom has been passively accepted as a birthright rather than cherished as a treasured gift or costly won on a bloody field. Younger Americans have been spoiled by the sacrifices of preceding generations, and for this reason, they do not realize the responsibilities freedom imposes. As the cliché runs, "Freedom is not free."

In this regard, a quotation often attributed to Thomas Jefferson (though actually from the pen of his contemporary, John Philpot Curran) is appropriate: "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance [frequently condensed as, 'The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,' a concept Jefferson echoed in his own writings]." This form of the quotation makes three things clear: 1) God is the source of true liberty; 2) God has granted liberty to men; and 3) man's responsibility to continue receiving liberty is to be awake and aware while on guard.

Against what? The context of the quotation deals with indolence—laziness—in the face of encroaching bondage. The warning is against apathy and lack of effort to restrain the forces, primarily in the realm of ideas, that threaten to reduce or eliminate human liberty. This is a necessary warning because, though most people would rise up in righteous anger against sudden totalitarianism, these same people tend to give their freedoms away piecemeal for security, bread and circuses, and promises of future reward.

In post-9-11 America, do Americans value liberty enough to stand guard over it against the approach of tyranny? Some do—the ones who have read the history and documents of the Founding Fathers and realize how rare and precious it is to live in a society where each individual is free to fashion his own life. Yet, the percentage of such people is shrinking year by year, as the older generation dies and progressive ideas influence the younger generations to give up liberty for high-sounding but enslaving concepts like income redistribution, diversity, multiculturalism, no child left behind, universal health care, and free college education. And even many of the older people, becoming fearful in their twilight years, are quick to trade their freedoms for security from terrorists and bill collectors.

Perhaps the most telling sign that Americans are willing to let their liberties slip away is the nation's level of immorality. The Bible is very clear that sin enslaves and destroys (John 8:34; Romans 6:6, 16), while God's way of life liberates (Psalm 119:45; Luke 4:18; II Corinthians 3:17; Galatians 5:1, 13). It is for this reason that the nation's second President, John Adams wrote, "The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people."

As we celebrate the anniversary of American independence this weekend, we should consider how valuable liberty is—both physical and spiritual—and how far we would be willing to go to secure and preserve it.