Ten virgins are going to a wedding and they bring their little oil lamps for light. Five of the virgins bring extra oil and the other five virgins only have enough to last the ceremony and go home. Well, the groom’s late (viz. “While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.” v.5) and everybody runs out the oil in their lamps, but the ones who brought extra oil refill their lamps and are allowed into the wedding. But because the bouncer can’t see the others in the dark, he doesn’t let them in because he doesn’t know if they’re invited or not.

The moral of the story is obvious: Be prepared.

And, more specifically doctrinally related: Be prepared for the coming of the Lord.

(Please note that the beautiful illustration by Gayla Prince portrays the ladies with extra oil as virtue and the ladies without extra oil as vice.)

Tonight I’m watching TV (*gasp*) and a commercial comes on that leads me down several pathways strewn with stones to trip over and pretty pansies to admire before I get to an observation I’ve never heard anyone voice and completely takes me by surprise:

The bridegroom was a bastard for not showing up on time and then punishing the ones who didn’t anticipate his assholishness.

Obviously I can’t know what Christ really taught because the Bible’s a mess and a half anyway, but the parable as it’s translated really doesn’t hold up as an analogy for your basic Christian theology. Why?

Because Christians are taught that Christ is going to return; you just don’t know when, so mind your Ps and Qs.

In the case of this bridegroom, he was expected at a certain time. The five virgins who didn’t have extra oil had no reason to expect that the bridegroom would “tarry,” so they had no reason to prepare. Further, casting them as “vice” because they had a reasonable expectation that the meeting time would be honored is just wrong.

Tell you what, though. If I’d gone to a wedding and had to wait so long for the groom to show up that I ended up having a good nap out of the deal, I’d’a said, “Fuck it” and gone home while I still had oil in my lamp.

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate, although the questions were definitely slanted enough to make you think twice about whether you were thinking or feeling, and tilting you toward feeling.

NOTE: This is the first in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I will be cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while; how, if the product you offer is free, can you make a living at it? Answer’s simple: You can’t. So why do we writers do this? Just be read? Really? I thought I might need therapy, which is when I began writing this post.

In David’s excellent post, How to Get Your E-book Read, my overriding thought was that getting read is not the problem. In the era of “information wants to be free,” getting paid will be the problem. His article was serendipitous because then I knew I wasn’t alone in my thinking and we began to talk. Since he and I started brainstorming last week about what facets of the money issue we could cover (and believe me, we’ve uncovered more facets than a 2-carat marquis diamond), I’ve seen three disparate conversations/articles concerning this.

First, this Dear Author thread (almost 550! comments) wherein an author stated that she pulled a series because her work was pirated so heavily she couldn’t make money on it and, further, that if a day came that she couldn’t make money writing, she’d just stop.

Second, Ara13 in this Publishing Renaissance thread says:

I read last week how one of this blog’s bloggers complimented a writer by saying she passed on her book to a friend. I winced. For me, that was a back-handed compliment. Sure, it’s great that you like my work and want others to be exposed to it, but if you really want to help, you’ll buy them a copy. Sorry, but being able to pay my rent and grocery bills allows me to pursue such a creative endeavor.

Third, this Time article, most of which is quotable, but this is the phrase that stuck out to me:

From a modern capitalist marketplace, we’ve moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional.

Postcapitalist.

Money optional.

I nearly had a heart attack.

When I was 18 and new to college, I had a teacher who told me, “Don’t give away your knowledge. You earned it, you paid for it in time, money, blood, sweat, and tears. Don’t give it away for free.”

I choked. It went against everything I’d been taught both at home and at church (Mormons have no paid clergy; it’s strictly volunteer), and I was horrified. Then that teacher went on to prove himself an asshole, so I felt vindicated.

But as I got on in life and saw that those who have knowledge and who teach for little or no money aren’t very…respected. And I read books of philosophy that changed my thinking. Yeah, one of them was Atlas Shrugged. Sue me.

Then I got along farther in life and saw that sharing a little quality knowledge is useful as well as generous. It’s empowering to giver and taker. It at once gives the receiver a fish so that he doesn’t keel over from hunger and teaches him how to use a fishing pole. It’s a personal choice in how to balance what to give, how much, and when. However.

There is a price:

1. Expectation and entitlement. As in, some people will then feel entitled to more of the giver’s knowledge, and possibly get upset when more is not forthcoming.

2. Devaluation. As in, whether it’s taken or not, it will be seen as disposable because it’s cheap or free. “This is advice is free, so it’s worth what you paid for it” takes on a whole new meaning in today’s postcapitalist, money-optional bazaar.

I have fear for the future of information.

What I truly fear is that all content, all information, all written entertainment, will be free and thus, devalued. The consultant (knowledge) and artist and musician and author need to be rewarded monetarily for their work or else they can’t eat.

Most consultants will find a way to monetize their knowledge. Chris Brogan does. Ramit Sethi does. Christine Comaford-Lynch does. Suze Orman does. No matter how much they give away.

Artists find ways to monetize their knowledge, from the elite to the bourgeois to the commercial to the assembly line.

Musicians tour and sell merchandise. (I probably should’ve used Radiohead for that example, but oh well.)

But most writers have no real avenue of residual earnings off their writing, except through direct sale of the work itself. Most writers will do whatever it is they do anyway without pay and continue to sling hash and throw themselves on the altar of “honing their craft” in order to earn the approbation of agents and editors (if they continue to exist in any number). They’ll take increasingly lower wages in order to be afforded the privilege of writing for money (i.e., “be a REAL writer”) for the cachet of having gotten The Call.

And then they’ll be pirated one way (cutting a print book open and scanning it) or another (file sharing).

Because the consumer has been trained via a number of methods to feel entitled to intellectual property and will, in turn, slap down any writer egotistical enough to say, “Hey, the work product of my brain is worth money.” They’ll do this through two methods:

Refuse to pay and not consume, then find free (possibly inferior, probably equivalent, possibly superior) content elsewhere.

Refuse to pay and consume anyway. Piracy.

No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.

Nor, I would add, a self-entitled public. It should be for sale.

Aside: I needed the expertise of an editor to thoroughly go over my book. I paid her. I will not disclose how much because I don’t want to think about it; however, she had expertise I did not and I felt…weird…about asking someone to do that much work for little to no money.

What’s the answer?

Hell, I don’t know.

Rand had her architect and her musician and her novelist ride off into the sunset poverty-stricken for the sake of their art, taking their work with them.

The Internet drowns in pundits and theorists claiming, “Information wants to be freeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

The writer in me, the one who was reared to give away knowledge, still hears the siren call of That One Person to whom what I have to say will make a difference in his life and possibly change it for the better—whether I know it or not.

The entrepreneur in me wants to make a living doing what I love to do. Validation is gravy, but I gotta have the spuds.

CAUTION: It’s long and way ranty. Because I do not believe any such systems can/will be abolished, I have come up with some complex solutions, even though I am well aware gummint is not into solutions.

My part time job is working graveyards at a grocery store on weekends. I check out people all the time who use food stamps. Before working there, I had a fuzzy sense of exactly what food stamps were used for, since it wasn’t something I thought a whole lot about. My only up-close-and-personal experience with food stamps happened to be that my best friend, single, with two children, used them. She was always very careful to buy cheap, whole foods, fresh produce, and the ingredients to make bread, as she makes it more cheaply than buying bread. Naïve me. I thought everybody was as frugal with their benefits as my friend.

You should see the crap people buy on food stamps! Not only do they buy pre-packaged, expensive junk food, expensive cuts of meat, shrimp and lobster, but then they turn around and buy whole cartons of cigarettes and lots of booze with cash. They buy tons of dog food for dogs that could eat your HOUSE and still be hungry an hour later—with cash! If they can’t afford to buy their own food, where do they get the cash for this stuff???

Anyway, I realize that it would be a futile effort to try to abolish the system altogether, so I would like to propose some reforms that would be the first step in the incremental abolition of food stamps. They are as follows:

1. Mandatory periodic drug and alcohol testing. I don’t have a problem with people who drink, but I sure do have a problem with people who drink on MY dime.

2. Limitations on the use of the food stamp credit card.

a. No usage between midnight and 6am (this is to discourage late-night trips to the store for a brownie mix, candy bars, and a case of Coke)

b. Use limited to once in every 24-hour period

c. No cash transactions during same trip through the check out line (this is to discourage cash beer, cigarette, and animal food sales; granted, this would be the hardest idea to enforce).

3. Limitations on food selections. Users would be required to shop from a list of approved foods (a la WIC). There would be no paperwork like WIC, but a food stamp transaction would require the user to scan his food stamp card before checking out. The grocer’s UPC scanners would be required to be programmed to provide a fail-safe for the approved foods. As a concession to the grocer-as-policeman, the food stamp recipients would be required to work for the grocer free of charge by the state to do the data entry required to make this possible (BONUS: JOB TRAINING!). The following requirements would have to be reflected in the approved foods list.

a. Whole foods only (which mean that users would have to GASP COOK)

b. No shellfish, lobster, or other expensive cuts of meat; if a user buys chicken, he will have to buy it whole and learn to cut it up himself; no boneless, butterflied chicken breasts @ $2.99/lb when whole chickens are $.99/lb

c. No junk food, convenience foods, prepackaged lunches, soda pop, potato chips, cookies, specialty foods, box cereal, ice cream, pop tarts, TV dinners, bottled water, etc.

d. Store-brand canned food only; no name brands.

e. Minimum percentage of total monthly benefits spend on fresh produce (say, 10%; if a user’s monthly benefit is $200, he should be required to buy $20 in produce).

f. Inexpensive cooking spices should be allowed.

g. Toilet paper, cleaning products, and feminine hygiene products should be allowed, but again at the discretion of the state.

Now, I realize that this will require more bureaucracy to regulate, but I have three thoughts on this:

1. Government loves more bureaucracy; they should be very happy that their jobs will be secure,

2. If I have to help pay for the crap these people buy to eat, and there’s no hope of getting the food stamps abolished, then we should have the right to regulate the hell out of it, and

3. If the users refuse to work a regular job, then they should have to work to get their food (the food I’m paying for) home.

I guess what I’m most angry about is not so much that people get food, and cigarettes and booze and dog food on my dime, but that they’re so damn smug about it. You wouldn’t believe the arrogance of these people; their attitudes are nearly regal, as if they are special for being able to get their food for free while I, the chump who has to work two jobs (to pay my self-employment taxes, actually) waits on them.

Now, if you’ve never worked as a cashier at a place that takes EBT (aka food stamps), you really may not get the level of anger here, or why it exists. I’ll tell you why:

It’s the attitude.

AND

Charity should be voluntary, not mandatory. Taking money out of my pocket to give to those the state deems worthy takes away my choices and is, in effect, legalized theft. It deprives me of my freedom and it deprives those I would have given to.

The USA has the highest percentage of charitable giving in the world, and that is in spite of what is wrested by force from our paychecks by the gummint to give to someone else. In the article Why are Americans so generous?, one point came through loud and clear to me:

“Most people think Americans are generous because we are rich. However, the truth is that we are rich, in significant part, because we are generous. Generosity is not a luxury in this country. It is a cultural norm.”

Can you imagine what we’d give if we had that money back?

As I said on chosha’s blog A Little East of Reality, what’s going on with California’s Prop 8 and the LDS church’s involvement with that, is one of defining the term. What needs to happen is that the underpinning law defining the term needs to change and then let linguistic evolution take over as to what is and is not marriage.

Here’s what needs to happen:

You and your intended(s) go to a lawyer and draw up a contract (people already to this for prenuptial agreements). You specify things like kids, power of attorney, healthcare decisionmaking, who does and does not have access to your healthcare information (thank you, HIPAA), and other things that heterosexual couples just…get…legally because they’re married as defined by law. In this case, the contract becomes the law. The lawyer files it with the court (like a divorce decree, only it’d be called something else like, oh, a companionship contract), the state collects its data, and everybody’s good to go.

If you and your intended(s) then want to go to your local ecclesiastical entity (whatever it is) and have a rite performed, you do that. Or don’t, if you don’t want to.

Or…do none of the above and after X number of years, you’ve converted from cohabitating to common-law “marriage” and that could apply to whatever living arrangement you have.

Here’s the thing. You change the labels and the populace will decide what marriage is based on their vocabulary.

Since I’m a libertarian, I have no investment in regulating what people do with their bodies as long as it doesn’t endanger me and mine.

I also have no investment in helping the church attempt to define “marriage” in California (although thankfully I haven’t been asked because then I’d be forced to be rude) because marriage has historically been about money and alliances.

What I find hypocritical is that the people who are most invested in re-defining marriage to include same-sex couples then turn around and vehemently protest polyamorous unions, which should have the same protections under whatever law gets passed.

William Saletan goes to great lengths to define why this should not be allowed and I find that simply ridiculous. Two people know what they’re doing, but three or more don’t? Let’s protect you from yourselves!

Here’s the answer. The number isn’t two. It’s one. You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you. Second, the number isn’t arbitrary. It’s based on human nature. Specifically, on jealousy.

Ah, okay. There’s a good argument.

In an excellent Weekly Standard article against gay marriage and polygamy, Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute discusses several recent polygamous unions. In one case, “two wives agreed to allow their husbands to establish a public and steady sexual relationship.” Unfortunately, “one of the wives remains uncomfortable with this arrangement,” so “the story ends with at least the prospect of one marriage breaking up.” In another case, “two bisexual-leaning men meet a woman and create a threesome that produces two children, one by each man.” Same result: “the trio’s eventual breakup.”

Let’s protect the women and children!

Then he resorts to quoting the Bible, so he loses credibility with me right there.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: What’s good for the homosexual goose is good for the polyamorous gander and I defy any same-sex couple to give me a decent argument why that isn’t so…

…but that’s not my main point. My main point is this: You make it a civil contract between consenting adults, then let society’s usage of the word “marriage” define the word “marriage.”

So here I am again, having to hold my nose to vote. I already knew this, you see, but I don’t get much worked up about this stuff anymore because a) too old for all this bullshit, b) got other things to do, c) does anybody really think this is going to be worse than Carter?, and d) did everybody forget that economies cycle and we’ve been LUCKY for the past thirty years that we haven’t had anything like this happen when they usually happen every 7 to 15 years?

Repeat after me: ECONOMIES CYCLE.

That’s their job.

So, anyway, I couldn’t have broken it down better than this:

..

Oh, who am I voting for?

Obama.

Because when he completely fucks up, maybe we’ll get a real fiscal conservative in the White House in 4 years (and I am so NOT looking at you, Mitt Romney).

Barack Obama: Untried newbie left-wing liberal with a yen to reach into my pocketbook. Yawn

John McCain: Moderate liberal who gave us McCain-Feingold attempting to pull the wool over the conservatives’ eyes. Yawn

(Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t thrilled with any other choice out there, either, so it’s not like I’m mourning the loss of, say, Romney, ’cause, oh, honey, I’m so not on the Romney wagon.)

Yeah, I’m not having a good time.

It’s like being stuck with your TV on one channel for eight months watching college football with teams you don’t care about. Say it was, oh, Missouri Tigers versus Kansas Jayhawks or University of Utah versus Brigham Young University and we could talk.

I’m a libertarian. Feminist. Pro-life. Not unwilling to see the artificial construct of “marriage” go away to be replaced by civil unions contracted for by consenting adults; yes, that includes polyamory. What’s good for the homosexual goose is good for the more-is-merrier gander.

I’m also a marginal objectivist, principally speaking. Yes, there’s the dirty little secret: I love Ayn Rand. On the other hand, her theories have flaws and I’m truly aware of those flaws. I love a lot of things I find flawed, like, oh, my church and Camille Paglia.

To read the blogs I do (mostly liberal ones because I already know how the conservative side thinks and I get bored sitting in the choir loft), you’d think it was a sin to like her work if you’re female and/or once you’ve passed the age of 25. You know, there just aren’t enough people outside of that demographic to have kept the thing leaping off the shelves like it has for the last five decades if that were true.

And then, oh, there’s Rush (the band, not the radio dude). I think they’re safely over 25, no? Please refer to the song: The Trees.

I’ve told you everything you need to know to understand what I do like about Rand, so let’s talk about what I don’t like about Rand:

1. Her strident objection to the Robin Hood principle.

Rand saw Robin Hood as a looter (a thief of the producers) to give to the moochers (the people who drained the system of its resources and put nothing back). “To steal from the rich and give to the poor.” Classic redistribution of wealth scenario.

What I don’t get is how she misread the story. If you remember, Richard the Lionhearted had gone off to the Crusades, leaving his brother, John, in charge of the place. John and his pet nobles began to impose heavy taxes against the people, against which they had no defense and then, no livelihood. What Robin Hood did was to steal from the tax leviers and entourages (the looters and moochers) to give back to the tax payers (the producers).

Not sure where or how she missed this.

2. Galt’s Gulch couldn’t run without the regular joes.

If I remember correctly, throughout Atlas Shrugged, the regular joe worker isn’t given enough credit for his contribution. Now, it’s been a while since I read it, but there are none in Galt’s Gulch. No matter how technologically advanced a society is, you need people to manufacture your commodities, to clean up after you (sewer and garbage), and to run the power plants so you can have read at night and get the interwebz. I get no sense that she made an accommodation for this matter of fact.

3. Rand’s atheism.

Oh, I don’t care if she believed in God or goats, but deep in my soul, I believe that objectivism is more suited to theism than atheism. Forgive me for not fleshing this out further because my thoughts on it aren’t coherent at the moment.

4. The lack of charity.

I’m not as generous as I’d like to be, but Suze Orman says it best: “Take care of yourself first, then take care of others.” In any case, I have a deep and abiding respect for private charity. The following is from an AP story from June 25, 2007:

“It tells you something about American culture that is unlike any other country,” said Claire Gaudiani, a professor at NYU’s Heyman Center for Philanthropy and author of “The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism.” Gaudiani said the willingness of Americans to give cuts across income levels, and their investments go to developing ideas, inventions and people to the benefit of the overall economy.

Gaudiani said Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation. In philanthropic giving as a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranked first at 1.7 percent. No. 2 Britain gave 0.73 percent, while France, with a 0.14 percent rate, trailed such countries as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany.

My church has a long and storied history of giving and taking care of others, starting with its abolitionist efforts, then feeding the Native Americans who were driven off their lands by the US government (with which they could identify most poignantly). We have a welfare program. We have emergency plans that whip into action when disaster strikes.

It’s incumbent upon those of us who profess to follow Christ’s teachings to be charitable and take care of our neighbors:

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction… James 1:27

That said, you can see where I’d disagree with this:

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue. [From Playboy’s 1964 interview with Ayn Rand”]

I do believe it’s a moral duty and primary virtue. I just don’t believe it should be mandatory (i.e., taxation for the purpose of redistribution of wealth).

I disagree with her in specificity more than I agree, but she makes her case strongly and I can distill the core principles I agree with and discard the rest–and value her on that basis.

My love for her thought is simply the principles of excellence, self-sufficiency, keeping what one earns without the government taking it to give to someone else, producing and earning.

And, oh, the sex. Hawt.

In truth, there are as many factions to libertarianism as there are people who identify as such. Get ten libertarians in a room and you’ll get 11 opinions that span not only a spectrum across an idealogy, but span the spectra of idealogies.

There is one thing that unites us, however, and that is the belief in choice. Sometimes, as in the case of abortion, whose choice is up for debate, but in the end, libertarians want to be able to choose how they live their lives without having their homes raided by overzealous religious bigots in the form of Child Protective Services, without having their businesses regulated to such an extent that they are hamstrung, without having their earnings stolen straight out of their paychecks.

In Abraham 4:1, a plan was presented and a son of God said, “Behold, here am I, send me, I will be they son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.” Then Christ offered his plan and the glory to the Father. The Father goes on to tell Abraham in verse 3, “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down.”

This concept is our gospel. It’s the fulcrum of what we as Latter-day Saints believe and why. Without this, we’d be just another protestant religion albeit with some seriously weird kinks.

I made the point over at Feminist Mormon Housewives that compulsory taxation for the purpose of giving it to other individuals in our society was antithesis to the gospel, the gospel of agency, which is to say, the ability to choose between good and evil. In return, it was brought to my attention that the actual point was not that Lucifer had proposed this plan, but that he wanted the glory. Yet God makes it very clear that Satan’s greater sin was that he “sought to destroy the agency of man.”

Our Creator’s goal is to bring all of us home again…with caveat: That we actually learn something.

And there’s the sticky wicket. One cannot learn the principle of anything by compulsion. One doesn’t learn generosity by having money taken from his paycheck arbitrarily and given to someone else, no matter how much the someone else needs it. The choice to be generous on our own, to provide for our weakest with that money, has been stripped from us.

Obviously, libertarians wouldn’t have a problem with some measure of taxation because things do need to be paid for: roads, bridges, fire, police, water treatment, a military. Oh, you know, those things that establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. There are better ways to collect those funds than via the IRS, but that’s another six posts. However, I will not deny that they are vital to the successful running of a country and everyone needs to share in that cost.

Of course, I know what most of the first jumping off point of this post will be, because it’s used (either disingenuously or ignorantly) as the first point of dissent in the debate: promoting the general welfare, which has been used to justify enormous charitable Congressional expenditures since the New Deal. So let’s get that out of the way right now.

James Madison put this succinctly enough in the third session of Congress in 1794, when an expedition of French refugees had arrived from the Haitian Revolution, and Congress sought $15,000 for their aid. This is the quote from the annals:

“Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Furthermore, Mr. Madison said, “The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” [Italics mine.]

So, yeah, one of the geniuses behind the Constitution didn’t think it was such a good idea.

Whew. Now, with that addressed, I’ll conclude my original point:

If we believe in a gospel of agency, then having our earnings taken from us to be given to someone else is denial of agency. Thus, the redistribution of wealth via compulsory taxation is, by definition of our gospel, evil.

I shall now offer myself up for crucifixion. In fact, please do. I need the publicity.

kthxbai

There were two age demographics: late 30s and up and…their kids. The youngest I saw was sevenish, but if there was anybody there between the ages of mom-and-dad-forced-me-to-come and 30, I didn’t see them.

It was the most sedate audience of a hard-rockin’ concert I’ve ever been to, but then, most all of us were old and fat. No matter. By halfway through the second half I was ready to get laid.