What I’m Crunching — June 30, 2024
Our church is nearly one year into a pastoral transition. Our senior pastor of 33 years retired last August. The process has been both exciting and unsettling.
Serving on an 11-person transition team has given me opportunity to revisit work I’d done years ago to better understand the two biblical church offices: Elder and Deacon. This book on Deacons is well done, simple to understand, and quite comprehensive. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a true-to-Scripture evaluation of the office of Deacon.
How Governments Control Money
We have learned that money is a tool with five characteristics and that it serves three functions. Thiers’ Law states that, under normal market conditions without price controls, good money drives out bad money. Most societies globally, however, do not have completely free markets without price controls.
Interest rates are the most fundamental price control: they determine the price of capital. Every service or commodity is priced in money; fixing the cost of money (interest rates) impacts the price of every other good or service. Governments control the cost of capital. In this, they have an incredible power.
Let’s look at why governments grab and seek to maintain this power, how they have exercised it in the past, and what the future could look like.
What I’m Crunching — June 23, 2024
This book is another step toward my goal of reading one biography on every US President. It’s highly rated and I see why! Morris does an excellent job bringing out the formative factors that produced the Roosevelt most of us know as the 26th President of the United States of America.
Money Rankings on a Quality Scale
Money is simply a tool with five characteristics: durability, portability, divisibility, acceptability, and scarcity. In post #4, we saw that money has three different functions: store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account.
I’ve made a rubric to help visualize how various monies compare. This point should be emphasized: all measurements or rankings are relative to other forms of money. There is no objective measure. This ranking is also somewhat subjective, though I trust you will see it is fair.
What I’m Crunching — June 16, 2024
This book has been wrecking me this week. After a tough conversation with my coach, I started digging in. I’m guilty of excessive busyness, hurrying, and expecting everyone around me to do the same. It produces a toxicity that affects every area of my life. I see that now, and I’m (unhurriedly) working to fix it.
Here are two impactful quotes: