How Does Your Church Allocate Its Resources?

From A Life Apart: Hasidism in America:

When the Satmar Rebbe came to America he saw many empty synagogues and only a few religious schools. He said, "We will do exactly the opposite from these Americanized Jews. We will get by with small synagogues. Instead, we will build big schools with many children learning the Torah."

Everybody Wants a Free Pony or A Civics Primer for Horse Lovers

Adapted from my comments at Althouse.

Everybody wants a free pony, and there's no easier way to get votes if you're a politician than by buying them with pony promises. But you can't promise ponies to everybody at the same time because you'd run out of ponies, and no one would believe that you had so many ponies to hand out anyway. So each politician, or pony handerouter, picks a few groups and promises them ponies.

Of course, that just makes more people want ponies because if one guy gets a free pony then the next guy thinks it's only fair that he gets a free pony too. And the people who do get free ponies just want more free ponies because after you've finagled the first one for free, the finagling begins to feel a bit like being paid what you're owed. You're a good guy, right? If the world is handing out free ponies, why shouldn't you get yours?

Unfortunately, there aren't enough ponies. And ponies are never free. That's the reality. But politicians don't get elected easily by dealing in reality. They get elected easily by promising ponies.

Take Social Security for instance. The government said it would take ponies from everyone, breed the ponies, and then give everyone his ponies plus some extra ponies at retirement.

But politicians being politicians, they couldn't stand to see all those ponies sitting idle in the government stables when they could be trading those ponies for votes. So they opened the stables and traded all the ponies.

People got angry that all their ponies were gone, but the bureaucrats said, "Don't worry. We'll just take even MORE ponies from your children, and we'll give the ponies to you!" People like ponies so much that they thought this was a pretty good deal. "Surely our sweet children won't mind giving us all those ponies," they thought, "and besides, we don't have to ask them."

And so it went on.

But even that wasn't enough ponies for the politicians' pony trading appetites.

The Chinese politicians had plenty of ponies, and they didn't have any votes to trade them for. So the American politicians borrowed a few trillion ponies from the Chinese politicians and handed out the Chinese ponies to their American friends. The American politicians promised that American babies would grow up and work very hard to collect lots and lots of ponies to give back to the Chinese politicians.

You probably think that you can't sign contracts for ponies with the names of people not yet living. But you aren't a politician. The politician says, "Enslave the babies and the babies of the babies and the babies of the babies of the babies! Chinese ponies for everybody!" And he usually gets elected.

So what will future generations think as they toil and toil and toil to pay off our "free" ponies? "Yes, life is now very hard, but at least our ancestors had free ponies." Is that what they will think?

I doubt it.

I think we all know they'll take us for horse thieves. I guess we're counting on not being around to suffer the traditional penalty for that. Too bad. Because if we keep going on as we are, we'll deserve it.

My Full Answers to Patrick Gavin of Politico

There's this today. I have a minor quibble with the context in which my quote was presented, but it's no big deal. It's a nice, little article. These were my full answers to the questions Gavin emailed:

Did you know you were nominated?
No.

How do you feel about being on the list?
Family commitments have kept me from blogging as regularly as I'd like lately. I suppose this offers some motivation to get back into it when possible as it seems I haven't been entirely forgotten just yet.

What do you think of the #1 winner?
My young children currently dominate my time, so I'll have to admit to being unfamiliar with the work of most people on the list, including that of the winner. I've heard that her show is excellent though.

Who do you think is the hottest left wing woman?
I don't think "hotness" is a very interesting subject, but then, I'm not the target audience for these lists. Dennis Kucinich's wife is stunningly beautiful, I think.