Just when everything seems dead, what better thing to happen than dual rainbows arc over one’s hometown? (Photo Jacob Tulis)
By David Tulis
Twin rainbows that people all across Chattanooga beheld Monday at 8 a.m. are a reminder of God’s providence. Let’s see its papers, its MSO (manufacturer’s statement of origin). Its significance is not with the Rev. Jesse Jackson organization nor with the precious labors of the tolerantistas at the homosexual lobby.
Its origins are in biblical Christianity, which ought to start showing a little nerve and seizing back the icon from interlopers, draping it over day care center entranceways, senior citizens homes dining halls and against radio station studio backwalls.
The rainbow is a picture of revitalization from the time of Noah when he, his wife, his three sons and their wives disembark from the ark. It is a picture of two aspects of God’s character — His wrath and his mercy. The rainbow is “the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for generations.” The substance of the promise is that “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Gen. 9:16, 11). The covenant God establishes on this point, as are others, is unilateral. It is restated five times in a span of seven verses in Genesis chapter 9.
Rainbow hints in Chattanooga
Chattanooga’s news cycle these past two days offers stories touching on the idea of revitalization. Rebuild, reconstitute, reframe, revitalize, revivify, reconstruct, recast are verbs in the theme of the day just past, the Lord’s Day, and of the rainbow.
➤ Local economy continues being revitalized by mid-level venture capital outfits seeking to connect pools of existing money with entrepreneurs. The biggest of three local investing groups is Chattanooga Renaissance Fund, which raised F$3.2 million for a dozen companies and is trying to gather F$7 million for more. The best quote in a Sunday story about local capital is from Miller Wellborn: “We don’t need any businesses leaving Chattanooga because of funding and I think what we’re building here can help nurture and support a lot of businesses by putting great ideas with the people and the resources they need to succeed.”
Lacking in Chattanooga: A high-end group to give F$300,000 to F$1 million, according to the story. I would add: A low-end group for the small investor — people like you. Between the F$2,000 to F$100,000 range.
I propose an investment hub chartered as a co-operative and paying rebates and price breaks as profits roll in. Chief requirement for investors: Contentment with profit even if it isn’t 12x ROI (a lofty return on investment for local capitalists in the sale of Quickque). Revitalization for local economy. A lococentric perspective, patient capital.
➤ Is the “gig” part of city revitalization? Mayor Andy Berke says yes. He tells NPR’s “All Things Considered” show that the gig is powerful for its potential. “I tell people all the time that you don’t need gigabit-per-second technology to load ESPN.com faster. But we’re starting to see companies who are looking at us, coming here and making decisions, understanding that they will need more capacity in the future and Chattanooga has that today.” The F$300 million fiber-optic Internet network has huge overcapacity on federal taxpayers’ nickel, and won’t justify itself financially. But there is always the great virtue, shall we say, of hope.
➤ Mayor Berke, writing in Sunday’s editions about the city’s violence reduction program, seeks ampler life in local economy. The problem he faces is that armed thugs and gang members don’t act in terms of personal relationships and local economy, but in the same way as do national Democrats, Republicans and the federal government itself. The national power solves all its problems by force — by violence or statute. Mr. Berke opposes what in the 1800s were called duels of honor, armed conflict, weaponized personal grudges. He favors interaction, entrepreneurship, collegiality, education, mentoring, “life skills” training — “the unified, moral voice of a community who wants violence to stop.”
➤ Glass Street Collective. The newspaper also published Monday a story about the private social work in a run-down part of Chattanooga. Two women in their 20s, Teal Thibaud and Katherine Currin, are sponsoring an event in April on bettering the lives of residents by “community development, entrepreneurship, government, transportation sustainability, design art and media.”
➤ Weston Wamp, an ambitious Republican son of former congressman Zach Wamp, is reviving his push Monday for the seat held by U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann. The congressman’s spokesman Chip Saltsman made snide comments about Mr. Wamp. “We always expected he’d run again because that’s what Wamps do,” Mr. Saltsman told the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “And I know Weston’s in a hurry to be something, to be somebody.” The contest pits two men of noble calling, the incumbent a lawyer, the challenger a public relations practitioner. Roy Exum in Chattanoogan.com lambastes Rep. Fleischmann for having introduced four bills in the federal legislature; if Mr. Fleischmann has virtue as a representative, it is in the number of times he voted NO and an unwillingness to add verbiage to the U.S. code.
Finally, a flood of a different sort
➤ A forecast that pretends to be a rainbow, but isn’t, is the wild expansion of credit that ruins the national currency and devastates common people, the widow, the orphan and the poor. Inflation is defended as a nirvana in a global credit crisis spawned by a perilous overextension of credit prior to the 2008 collapse. “The central banks are trying to end the crisis with even more credit and money,” says anarcho-libertarian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German, “even though this was caused by too much money and credit. Therefore, the next crash will be even more severe than the previous.”
In an interview with Wirtschaftswoche, Germany’s leading business weekly, Mr. Hoppe says it is impossible for central banks to dry up their ocean of liquidity, to “taper,” as we say in the U.S. — doing so overturns a practice of inflation.
The central banks are trying to save the paper money system by any means. I’m afraid the next step is to eliminate the remaining currency competition through a centralization of money and banking. At the end there might be a kind of global central bank, with a global single currency, into which the dollar, euro and yen are merged. Freed from competition with other currencies, this central bank would then have even more room for inflation. The crisis would not be over, but would return with a vengeance on the global level.
This rainbow was seen all across Hamilton County on Jan. 13, 2014. A view from my front porch at 8 a.m.
Sources: David Flessner, Ellis Smith, “Venture funds grow to boost startup firms,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, Jan. 12, 2014
“Mayor Berke touts Chattanooga’s gig on NPR,” Times Free Press, Jan. 13, 2014
Andy Berke, “Shootings in the Crosshairs,” Times Free Press, Jan. 12, 2014
Yolonda Putman, “Foot soldiers for change: 40 young leaders from across the country to gather in Chattanooga,” Chattanooga Times Free Press website, Jan. 13, 2014
“Taxes are expropriation,” Hans-Hermann Hoppe interview in Wirtschaftswoche, Jan. 7, 2014. The magazine is a German business weekly.
