The Press-Dispatch
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A-8 Wednesday, Februar y 14, 2018 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Lent is not an exclusive Catholic observation. It is a time of remem- bering the Lord's sacrifice, pas- sion, and death and can be traced back to at least the 3rd century AD, which predates the East/West schism by 700 years. Over the cen- turies, Lent became the period of time spanning seven weeks begin- ning on Ash Wednesday and end- ing on Good Friday. The partici- pant is encouraged to fast, pray, give, meditate, and repent. Why bother observing Lent? There is no Biblical command- ment to mark this a special event. If observed with the right atti- tude and motive, Lent can be a sea- son of reflection and preparation before one celebrates Easter. By observing Lent, a Christian can emulate Jesus Christ's struggle with the flesh in escaping cruci- fixion. What is your motive for Lent? Crosswalk.com's Aaron Damiani in a 2017 column highlighted sev- eral reasons how not to observe Lent. Damiani noted that for many disciples, Lent is a time for self- improvement, which misses the spiritual significance of Lent completely. To focus on self-im- provement takes the focuses away from Christ and centers it upon "you." Lent is not a season for weight loss. A ben- efit for controlling the desire to eat and gorge oneself as most Americans do is laudable. However, motive for abstaining from food is to wrestle with the flesh and to consider how Jesus wrestled with his own desires. Observing Lent is not to make God happy. The Old Testament prophets chided the faithful that God abhorred cheap and spiritless sacrifice. God is sovereign and ob- serving Lent does not make one able to control God. Lent is a spir- itual time for taking stock of life and its direction. Where do you have Christ in your life? Lent is a time for prayer and fasting. The Psalmist wrote to control the desires of the flesh is likened to taking a walled city. To purposefully ab- stain from food[s], we realize the crav- ings that enslaved us. But Lent is a spiritu- al journey, not a jour- ney to overtake an ad- diction. There are some who can't wait to tell others how much a strug- gle Lent is for him/her. Jesus ad- monished the listeners of His Ser- mon on the Mount that when you pray and fast, do it quietly and in secret. To live as a disciple means one should enhance his/her spir- ituality; but attesting publically to be spiritual misses the point. Lent is not a discipline and journey to enter into because my church says I should do it. Across denominations, people observe Minority View by Walter E. Williams The Weekly by Alden Heuring Let's limit spending Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond How not to observe Lent The U.S. is economically freer Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Good news: For the first time in a while, the United States isn't just economically stronger. It's ec- onomically freer. How do we know? Check the just-released 2018 "Index of Eco- nomic Freedom," an annual data- driven research project that scores and ranks almost every country. The U.S. isn't alone, I'm glad to say. Since it began measuring and documenting countries' eco- nomic freedom more than two de- cades ago, the world economy has become more open and prosper- ous. Countries once riddled with violence and poverty have em- braced the principles of econom- ic freedom – and set themselves on a path toward long-term devel- opment and prosperity. Our economic liberty has a pro- found effect on our daily lives. It influences how much money we make, what kind of work we do, how high prices and unemploy- ment are – even what kind of ap- pliances we can buy. So where does the U.S. fall on this year's Index? Our global rank- ing is No. 18. True, that's one slot lower than last year, but notice our score: 75.7 (on a 0 -100 scale, with 100 being the freest). That's 0.6 points better than last year's. That may not sound like much, but it's our first improved score in the last four years. A significant im- provement in the U.S.' score for "finan- cial freedom," which covers bank- ing regulations, more than offset a lower score in "government integ- rity," which measures such things as cronyism and corruption. An 18th place finish in a field of 180 countries isn't bad, of course. But that's 11 slots below where we finished in 2008. Indeed, the U.S. was once a regular top 10 finish- er when the Index was first pub- lished in 1995. Estonia, a former Soviet state, finishes ahead of us. We're not even the freest econo- my in the Americas. Canada beat us out again. But our recent slide has been halted, and we appear poised for more gains in the future. Looking back on my involvement with the Index, it is particular- ly gratifying to note its continued impact in this, its 24th year. Economic freedom continues to rise in a majority of the world's countries, and the In- dex has recorded its highest-ever world av- erage score this year. As countries compete to im- prove their scores and move up in the rankings, the real winners, of course, are their citizens. Improve- ments in economic policy that en- hance economic freedom have en- abled hundreds of millions to es- cape poverty, and countless others to enjoy levels of prosperity never before seen. Though we sometimes lose sight of it amid the daily grind of politics and the massive over- flow of information and misinfor- Little Murder on the Prairie Valentine's Day Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Reform Federal Law Enforcement Lucid Moments by Bart Stinson Forty years ago, my fiance and I went to a sun-baked public square with about half a million Pana- manians to hear President Jim- my Carter give a speech in clunky Spanish that he'd learned in four years at Naval Academy. We went early and got a good spot up front where we could see all the Latin American dignitaries arrive. I was just a private in the Ar- my, and they sure as heck weren't going to save a seat for me. A fter several minutes, I looked to my right and saw that an older American couple had struck up a conversation with my future wife. They were U.S. Senator Frank Church and his frumpy soulmate Beth. She was no trophy wife, def- initely a daughter of Idaho. Both were friendly and genuine people, and I returned to my barracks that night reassured that good guys like Church were in charge of our government. I was naive, of course. He was a very ethical man, a World War II veteran and unquestionably a pa- triot. But part of Church's compli- cated legacy as a Senator—despite the best of intentions—was to de- prive our intelligence agencies of the programs and personnel that probably could have prevented the September 11, 2001 attacks, and improved our batting average in other for- eign policy misadven- tures, as well. By the time we met him, he'd already chaired the so-called "Church Committee" (Senate Select Com- mittee to Study Gov- ernmental Operations with Respect to Intel- ligence Activities) for a couple of years. He conducted the Senate hearings that led to the Foreign In- telligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That was the enabling legisla- tion that created the Foreign In- telligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is the court that the Obama FBI and Department of Justice manipulated to authorize and renew warrants for the surveil- lance of Trump associates during the campaign and early in his pres- idency. Church had sterling motives. "If a dictator ever took charge in this country," he said on Meet the Press, "the technological ca- pacity that the intelligence com- munity has given the government could enable it to impose total tyr- anny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the gov- ernment, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the govern- ment to know." Why did Church, a former Army intelli- gence officer, want to bring American intelligence agen- cies to heel? "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America," he told NBC,"and we must see to it that [U.S. intelligence agencies] operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we nev- er cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." By restraining U.S. intelligence agencies, Frank Church and his Senate colleagues may very well have bought us 40 years of liber- ty. But they didn't just protect us. They also protected foreign ene- mies who no longer had to wor- ry about penetration or "clandes- My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Con- gress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the feder- al budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 – our gross domestic product – to- taled about $19 trillion. If the Con- gress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately. Taxing us is one way that Con- gress can do that. But federal rev- enue estimates for 2017 are about $ 3.5 trillion, leaving an account- ing deficit of about $500 billion. So taxes are not enough to cover Congress' spending. Another way Congress can get us to spend less privately is to enter the bond mar- ket. It can borrow. Borrowing forc- es us to spend less privately, and it drives up interest rates and crowds out private investment. Finally, the most dishonest way to get us to spend less is to inflate our cur- rency. Higher prices for goods and services reduce our real spending. The bottom line is the federal budget is always balanced in any real economic sense. For those enamored of a balanced budget amendment, think about the fol- lowing. Would we have greater per- sonal liberty under a balanced fed- eral budget with Congress spend- ing $4 trillion and taxing us $4 trillion, or would we be freer un- der an unbalanced federal budget with Congress spending $2 trillion and taxing us $1 trillion? I'd prefer the unbalanced budget. The true measure of government's impact on our lives is government spend- ing, not government taxing. Tax revenue is not our problem. The federal government has col- lected nearly 20 percent of the na- tion's gross domestic product al- most every year since 1960. Feder- al spending has exceeded 20 per- cent of the GDP for most of that period. Because federal spending is the problem, that's where our focus should be. Cutting spend- ing is politically challenging. Ev- ery spending constituency sees what it gets from government as vital, whether it be Social Securi- ty, Medicare and Medicaid recipi- ents or farmers, poor people, edu- cators or the military. It's easy for members of Congress to say yes to these spending constituencies, because whether it's Democrats or Republicans in control, they don't face a hard and fast bottom line. The nation needs a constitu- tional amendment that limits con- gressional spending to a fixed frac- tion, say 20 percent, of the GDP. It might stipulate that the limit could be exceeded only if the president declared a state of emergency and two-thirds of both houses of Con- gress voted to approve the spend- ing. By the way, the Founding Fa- thers would be horrified by today's congressional spending. From 1787 to the 1920s, except in war- time, federal government spend- ing never exceeded 4 percent of our GDP. During the early '80s, I was a member of the National Tax Lim- itation Committee. Our distin- guished blue-ribbon drafting com- mittee included its founder, Lew Uhler, plus notables such as Mil- ton Friedman, James Buchanan, Paul McCracken, Bill Niskanen, Craig Stubblebine, Robert Bork, Aaron Wildavsky, Robert Nisbet and Robert Carleson. The U.S. Senate passed our proposed bal- anced budget/spending limita- tion amendment to the U.S. Con- stitution on Aug. 4, 1982, by a bi- partisan vote of 69 -31, surpassing the two-thirds requirement by two votes. In the House of Represen- tatives, the amendment was ap- proved by a bipartisan majority (236 -187), but it did not meet the two-thirds vote required by Article 5 of the Constitution. The amend- ment can be found in Milton and Rose Friedman's "Tyranny of the Status Quo" or the appendix of their "Free to Choose." During an interview about the proposed amendment, a reporter asked why I disagreed with the committee and called for a lim- it of 10 percent of GDP on feder- al spending. I told him that if 10 As I sometimes do, I'm taking a few weeks of reckless self-indul- gence to write some short fiction in place of the normal column for- mat. Last time, it was a horror sto- ry. This time, I'm paying homage to two of my favorite childhood authors – Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie se- ries, and prolific mystery writer Ag- atha Christie – with a murder mys- tery set in the same period and re- gion as Wilder's youth: the pioneer towns of the Great Plains in the late 1800s. Enjoy! The first snow of the winter mo- seyed down from the sky in big fluffy chunks, and those fluffy chunks were just about all anyone could hear all the way across the Platte Valley. Somewhere in that valley lay a cluster of houses and barns and storefronts called Stuhr, and only one light was shining in all of Stuhr on this snowy night. John Truett was out at the edge of his yard, splitting logs. John was a thorough man. He hadn't expected to come outside to- night, but even after kindling a fire in the hearth, bringing down blan- kets from the loft for his wife and the girls, and sitting down to read the newest almanac and a Proverb or two before bed, he'd remem- bered to check around on things. He checked around on things ev- ery night without exception – the dogs, the firewood, the fence, and so on, every night – but some nights he remembered to check right after dinner, and some nights he didn't remember until right be- fore bed. When he found the firewood pile down to half a dozen split logs, he nodded in silence and thought to himself, "it's a good thing I remem- bered to check around on things tonight," and then he grabbed the axe, told his wife, Theresa, he was taking the lantern out to split logs, and took the lantern out to split logs. John soon realized he'd underes- Ever wonder where the word Val- entine came from? Valentine's day, also called Saint Valentine's Day or Feast of St. Valentine is an annual holiday celebrated on February 14. Saint Valentine (Italian San Valen- tino, Latin Valentinus) is a widely recognized third century Roman Saint and since the high middle ag- es is associated with the tradition of courtly love. St. Valentinus was born in the year 226 AD in Terni, Italy and was martyred and buried at a cemetery north of Rome. The Roman Catho- lic church continues to recognize him as a saint and authorizing him as such on February 14. He is also venerated in the Anglican and Lu- theran faith, and by some Eastern Orthodox faiths. His remains apparently are de- posited in St. Anton's church in Madrid, Spain where they have lain since the late 1700s. Some of his remains also are claimed to be in countries like Ireland and Italy, Checkoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Vienna, Malta and Scotland. While reading about his history, I started to get glassy eyed because of the many backgrounds and claims made about him so I had to quit. Besides, I suspect readers of my article would not be too inter- ested in the details of the history. If you really are curious, search and see how much information will pop up. There are many. • • • As far back as I can remember in my younger years-especially my teen years, I associated this