Romans 13 and Other Politicized Biblical Verses
Slave owners used the Bible to justify their immoral suppression of others' unalienable right to liberty and pursuit of happiness (never mind that whole Exodus story).Statists (particularly modern-day "progressives") tend to focus on a couple of specific verses which on the surface seem to rationalize submitting to earthly authorities in all things. The first is the infamous "render unto Caesar" (Mt 22:20-22). I've published a number of Facebook comments (also republished in this blog). Keep in mind that Jesus was executed by Rome, likely as a political threat, a destabilizing presence to an orderly empire. The New Testament includes many verses showing Jesus spurning or sidestepping earthly political ambitions (e.g., Jn 6:15). In fact, the Gospels seem to shift blame for the execution from the Roman occupiers to Jewish collaborators (Jn 18:31; Jn 19:11); part of this whitewash includes the controversial verse which seems to suggest Roman/Caesar's taxes are a legitimate obligation. Jesus is well aware that his enemies want evidence of His resistance to Rome, of claiming He is an insurrectionist. His response is really designed to emphasize a second, higher obligation and authority: to God. We later see this in the Passion, when Jesus references His kingdom (Jn 18:36) and argues its higher authority (Jn 19:11). But "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" does not suggest that Caesar has a legitimate claim for taxes at the point of a sword. Jesus points out elsewhere (e.g., the temple tax) that He doesn't want His mission to be confounded with an earthly agenda; He makes it clear that He has no moral obligation to pay the tax but He doesn't want to escalate the issue (re: the fish and the coins (Mt 17:27)).
Remember the first and great commandment is to love God unconditionally (Mt 22:35-40). The second is to love one's neighbor as oneself (i.e., equality under God's law). This, once again, reinforces the hierarchy of authority and obligation. It's no accident that the first few of the Ten Commandments focus on one's duty to God. The subsequent commandments deal with acting with integrity towards others--no unprovoked violence, no lusting after or seizing the assets of others. Rulers are not gods; we owe to rulers what we owe to others and ourselves AND VICE VERSA. In past posts, I've sometimes paraphrased the Caesar saying as "if you have borrowed Caesar's cloak, return it". It does not mean we treat rulers as equal with God; rather, rulers are one of us, subject to the same commandments. You don't have to go far in the Gospels to see that; recall how John the Baptist confronted Herod Antipas over the sinful nature of his remarriage, and Herod responds by imprisoning and eventually executing John (Mt 14).
Probably the most troublesome passage from a libertarian's perspective is Romans 13. There have been numerous commentaries from other libertarians (e.g., here). First, let me reproduce the passage for discussion.
1Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement. 3For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good and you will receive his approval, 4for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. 5Therefore, one must be subject, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honour to whom honour is due. [Romans: 13 1-7]Let's be clear: Paul does NOT say that rulers are infallible or without sin. Just to give a minor example from the Old Testament: God punishes King Saul for disobedience (1 Samuel 15). We see Moses warn Pharaoh of the consequences for not letting His people go. Paul is well aware that Jesus was executed by the Romans; He's not suggesting that the Romans were justified; in fact, the very nature of the Resurrection emphasizes the higher authority of God which transcends the law of men. Second, Paul himself and the apostles found themselves imprisoned or punished by the powers that be; they were responding to Christ's instruction to spread the Good News. So was Paul being hypocritical in his discussion here: wouldn't proselytizing be against God's discretionary authority exercised by intolerant rulers, or were the saints obeying a higher authority? What do we make of Biblical verses which warn against earthly rulers (e.g., Hosea 8:4; Psalm 146): if some rulers are not authentic, how do we decide a legitimate ruler? Surely Paul does not condone unjust laws, double standards, etc., which violate the letter and spirit of higher law.
Recall that Paul in Romans 12 wrote, "Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world." (For example, the Romans practiced abortion and infanticide.) This suggests that earthly rulers and laws are imperfect and we need to follow a higher authority; why then would he contradict himself in the very next chapter. In fact, Casey and others suggest that the translation is misleading, that a more standard translation from the Greek text is: "Let every soul be subject to the superior powers." (Recall Pilate during the Passion initially seems to defer Jesus' fate to the local religious authority, and Jesus says that the Jewish authorities who handed Him over is guilty of a greater sin. When Jesus interceded in the stoning of the adulterous woman, the Romans are not involved. There were Temple taxes.) My personal interpretation (of religious (e.g., elders, apostles) vs. secular authorities) is from context; Paul seems to focus on transgressions against God's commandments, not the arbitrary edicts of secular authorities. He does not suffer sinners gladly; if followers are sinful, God's judgment may be manifested through the judgments of others. But the whole discussion presupposes the free will of believers. On the other hand, Paul might have found ambiguity useful, because he wanted to spread Christianity throughout the hostile, skeptical Roman Empire, and he did not want the emerging Christian movement to be perceived as an insurgency, as a political rival/threat.
Paul was an imperfect messenger. That authoritarians would quote him out of context, claim some sort of divine endorsement or validation for unjust policies and decisions is predictable.But I'm personally fed up with Statist "progressives" trying to claim a mandate for secular authority in the words of the New Testament. Jesus did not preach collective political action. How many progressives know or will quote from 1 Samuel 8, which is an unambiguous warning against the morally corrupt, self-serving State; God certainly did not see the need for an authoritarian regime but saw in the collective demand for earthly authority a rejection of His own authority:
6But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16Your male and female servants and the best of your cattlec and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
Government IT Work: Can a Libertarian Work For the Government?
I recently did a journal post about one of my nephews' rants over a Trump proposal to limit automatic increases to mandatory spending, like Medicaid, which later evolved (at my initiative) in discussing of the Gini coefficient (a traditional estimate of income inequality; I went on to discuss several methodological problems with this statistic and point out what you use a personal income unit of analysis it's been flat since the early 60's). I also pointed out that I saw the 70%+ share of individual benefits in the federal budget an illegitimate expansion of the State and basically pointed out that I saw a need for a radically downsized, decentralized government.My nephew took a shot at the latter point, saying effectively, "Why don't you mention you've worked as a federal contractor (you hypocrite)?" I mentioned it in passing in that last post, but I think it raises an interest question as phrased in the header.
Let me start off by noting that I am bound by various agreements with the US government not to disclose information; in many contract positions, if and when you debrief (say, if you hold a classification), you are reminded that the government can prosecute and/or fine you for unauthorized disclosures, that if you have something like a blog (this was particularly raised with me on my last debrief), you have to submit any relevant material to be vetted before publication; I was also reminded that my commitment was a lifelong obligation.
I will point out a co-worker recently discovered that I have a political blog and warned me that it was risky. I do not surrender my free expression rights, other than those rights I've contractually waived as discussed. I will also point out that I have repeatedly condemned Bradley Manning and Eric Snowden; I've never bought into the rationalization they were whistleblowers; they in fact downloaded thousands of classified files for the sake of being classified. If and when I've contracted with the government, it was a voluntary agreement, and libertarians honor (or should honor) contracts. I generally do not even identify an employer, do not "friend" colleagues on social media. I don't think my own relatives know anything more than my home mailing address or a very generic description (e.g., I work at a federal facility in the area). If and when I discuss past contract assignments (e.g., in a resume), it may discuss things like COTS software/versions and my responsibilities in general terms. For example, an Oracle DBA is responsible for things like database operations, maintenance, backups and performance tuning. I would not discuss technical design, PII, security audits, etc.
But let me also note that I generally don't discuss similar things about former private-sector clients, with or without a binding contract. It's just part of my own professional ethics. But even from a utilitarian standpoint, I don't think a prospective client would trust an indiscreet DBA.
Let me say, with respect to the federal government, while I do believe that its size and scope is unacceptable and unsustainable, a minarchist like me is not opposed to core government functionality, e.g., common defense and the justice system. Moreover, the use of contractors is a variation of privatization. I've worked for at least a handful of companies in the last year of their contract, and renewals were canceled or awarded to other companies. In some cases, I (with a contingent offer) was submitted on failed bids. In another case, I had a contingency offer for a subcontractor position which required a special DoE clearance, and the clearance agency was chronically undermanned and hopelessly backlogged; I eventually had to take an alternate assignment. In one case, a new colleague, a retired Marine with prior clearances, etc., was delayed for over 4 months on starting regular duties because of bureaucratic inertia. We often have to "eat" federal holidays (with personal or vacation days) or facility closure days with little advanced notice. We routinely work uncompensated extra hours.
It's not unusual to have to maintain legacy applications or desupported versions of software. Just to give one example, one of my former employers had a contract to basically take "problem" projects the prime contractors had passed on. In one case, the prime contractors had failed twice to upgrade the application server for certain custom applications. They had told the client (DoD) that the custom applications had been upgraded. I think they had one dedicated developer on staff. After I upgraded the server, the prime contractors argued that I botched the upgrade because their applications wouldn't run. I basically traced to the problem to the fact that the vendors had NOT upgraded the applications, that they included obsoleted print codes. Oracle had changed its application server to support certain standard output formats (e.g., pdf files). I worked with the developer to fashion a proof-of-concept application report in pdf format. The enlisted project manager blasted me as "incompetent" for violating her rules, which included current operations. Current operations involved administrative assistants with busy work fussing with formatting document outputs from the application system--no longer necessary under pdf formats. I told her that Oracle was not going to change its product design so her administrative assistants could fuss over document margins; she responded that "we're the freaking military, and Oracle will do anything we tell them to". I pointed out that the application upgrade was not in my scope of work and said I had completed the upgrade. She rejected that, arguing that my scope of work was what she decided.
A related point: I had discovered Oracle had upgraded the application server and the target application server would soon be desupported. I wanted to put the new software on a test server; it was absurd to do the upgrade, just to do another upgrade a year later. The PM was unavailable, but I was told if I installed the new application server software without her consent, I could be prosecuted.
I could go on. The follow-up project would have been to upgrade a "website-in-a-database" product to Oracle Portal. I soon discovered the supported upgrade path included now obsolete versions of application server. Oracle has a policy against shipping obsoleted software. I had to deal with an Oracle Tech Support stone wall on the issue. They pointed out that DoD knew years earlier that the product was being desupported and should have acquired bridging software while it was still in support status. I finally got them to agree to ship the software, but I didn't know what I would have done--contact other military facilities to see if they had the CDROMs in question available?
In the Oracle space, RAC (real application clusters) had suddenly become hot among Oracle customers, at least a dozen or so years back. Without going into tedious detail, RAC makes it possible for Oracle databases to be highly available (24 x 7), something highly desirable for Internet applications. Under traditional enterprise licenses, a database is tethered to a specific server, so if you needed to do operating system security patching or deal with hardware issues on the database server, the database would be unavailable to users. In RAC, other servers connect to the same database, and if one server has to go down, users can be seamlessly rerouted to an alternate server. Oracle has basically charged twice the licensing fee for RAC, noting that the software could be deployed on cheaper software. Almost none of my government clients have deployed RAC; I couldn't put it on my resume. I remember trying to rejoin Oracle Consulting a few years back, and it went nowhere because of RAC.
So quite often in the government space, you're typically dealing with older versions of software, which won't attract the interest of most private-sector companies. Most of us geeks actually like to be at the cutting edge of technology. I have had a number of private-sector companies who basically handed me the keys to the car and told me if any of their staffers caused an issue to let them know. Government work isn't like that. To give an example, back in WV, I discovered that another vendor had the contract to do the patching on my own database servers. I've often had to tackle helpdesk issues, like reseeding a malfunctioning computer mouse or helping a GI figure out how to navigate the new KVM switch.
And when you factor in very generous benefit packages, the government clients that you are mentoring often make higher overall compensation, never mind the incomparable job security. I've worked for at least 3 companies no longer in business, others where I've been laid off the week after successfully concluding a project that had been behind schedule when I joined a project after the company president personally lobbied me.
I've had to put up with really petty client behavior. Probably the signature incident was a case where I had a scheduling meeting with a Wisconsin county DBA. I was commuting 83 miles one-way each day; I had to be at the county courthouse every morning by 7:30 AM, because the project manager did not trust the county DBAs to bring up the test server services. If I had patching to do, I had to wait until 7 PM. Our contract required me to walk the two DBAs through our planned ERP upgrade. She no-showed our meeting time. It turned out she took time off (in the middle of a business day) to have her dog's nails clipped. So the next day my colleagues and I stopped by the restroom on the way out to a fast food lunch, I said, "You guys will never believe why I had to stay late last night..." What I didn't know was the county IT manager was in one of the stalls and eavesdropped on the conversation. He was livid about this contractor who didn't know his place as a "guest" and demanded that my company's VP walk me off the project immediately. My VP pointed out that my replacement would push back the project several weeks.
This is the same client which was contractually required to do backups of the relevant test server. One Friday I specifically called the county system administrator to say I suspected we were having hardware issues because Oracle was giving out very weird error messages. He was in a state of denial but for some reason eventually rebooted the server, and the RAID drive files all went to lost & found, i.e., we had to go to backups. Only to discover the DBA's did not include one of the datafiles in their backup script--plus there were no backups of the ERP software. Miraculously I was able to fish the missing datafile out of lost & found and was able to bring the database up. But I had to spend all weekend reinstalling ERP software and applying dozens of megapatches--because the client had testing scheduled for Monday morning. My boss later presented an invoice for my services, but the county rejected it, saying it was a fixed-bid project and "shit happens". The fact the county broke its contractual duty to back up the server made no difference. My boss basically ate the invoice in hopes of a followup "Project 2.0".
That's not to say my employer was without fault. Originally I had been trying to return to Texas in 2001, and the company had posted a position on an Austin, TX project. The company President personally lobbied me to take over their floundering reference project in Wisconsin which was at least 6 weeks behind schedule on a fixed-bid project. The company used their Wisconsin client to win projects in Oregon and Austin. But they were unwilling to pay travel expenses beyond 4 weeks but would instead pay relocation (there's a whole soap opera over that: among other things, the VP demanded a new test upgrade database by the end of the month--not required by contract--but I had move-out plans that weekend which now had to be scrapped, my California landlord had already rented out my apartment, etc.) So the company president had negotiated down my salary, promising that I would get a project bonus. Keep in mind I was basically putting in 12 hour days, not to mention the lost weekend described above; when I pressed HR on the long-promised bonus, she told me that on page 36 or so of the employee handbook, it states that bonuses aren't applicable to fixed-bid projects. It was totally unethical; the company president had knowingly deceived me during negotiations.
A lot of public sector gigs often require very difficult tasks under heavy constraints, you often have to face unprofessional behavior by public employees, and it's not necessarily steady work. I basically look at the opportunities the market gives me. The job I've probably enjoyed most: a private company acquired by Equifax in the mid-1990's. (The company was growing about 30% a year before Equifax ruined it.) All our clients were in the private sector; in one of my boxes is a handwritten letter from an SBC (AT&T) executive thanking me for serving as their corporate DBA (this was just before telecommunications reform and their in-sourcing relevant applications).
