Paul’s Plans to Visit
Some people who just skip this last chapter of 1 Corinthians because it really isn’t very theological, but I find Paul imparted a lot of wisdom in his farewells. And, I’m systematic, so I prefer not to leave things out, which is what some of us would prefer to do with the first subject in Chapter 16.
With regard to the collection for the saints, please follow the directions that I gave to the churches of Galatia: On the first day of the week, each of you should set aside some income and save it to the extent that God has blessed you, so that a collection will not have to be made when I come. Then, when I arrive, I will send those whom you approve with letters of explanation to carry your gift to Jerusalem. And if it seems advisable that I should go also, they will go with me. 1 Corinthians 16:1-4
Give to the Lord’s Work
Paul had a practical philosophy of giving to the church, providing six guidelines as to how we should give. Before we look at these biblical guidelines, you must accept the Bible’s premise that you and I don’t own anything. Our home, cars, possessions, and money all belong to the Lord. We are merely stewards of the resources that God has entrusted to us. If you accept this premise, you probably won’t object to what I’m going to teach here.
Guideline #1:
Biblical giving is not optional but mandatory. The word translated “direction” is a strong word that is frequently translated “command” or “order.” Paul wrote with apostolic authority, calling for the church in Corinth to do what he had already directed the Galatian churches to do. Generous financial giving is one of the key characteristics of a mature Christian. This ties in rather nicely with the previous verse (15:58), where Paul commands the Corinthians to be “always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.” It’s like he’s saying, “Speaking of giving yourselves fully, let’s talk about financial giving.”
Guideline #2:
Biblical giving starts with meeting the basic needs of believers.
Typically, when a pastor preaches a message on money, it’s in order to generate pledges for the annual budget, buy land, or build a new building. Such matters concern most congregations at some point in their church history. But that is not where biblical giving begins. It begins with a heart that cares about the basic needs of other Christians for food, shelter, and clothing. That’s what the collection here in 1 Corinthians 16 is all about—sending a gift to Jerusalem so the believers there can survive. Their financial plight was due to famine, persecution, and economic sanctions against them, making it difficult for new converts to hold anything but the most menial jobs.
The above guideline indicates that we who are wealthy (every American, from a world perspective) have an obligation to help poverty-stricken believers as well as the persecuted church in foreign lands. Such support should never be treated as optional. Instead, the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ should be an essential part of our financial giving. This Christmas, what will you give to brothers and sisters in Christ who are less fortunate? When you think about giving to others, think about all God has given you. This ought to compel you to give generously to those who are less fortunate.
Guideline #3:
Biblical giving is the believer’s #1 financial priority.
Many Christians don’t give at all, and often those who do give do so sporadically. They might give two months in a row, skip three months, give one, and skip two more. Some people don’t give when they are on vacation, sick at home, or snowed in. Some don’t give if they miss the offering plate. Imagine standing before the Lord and explaining why you disobeyed His command to give. Do you think He’d be impressed if you explained that you just kept forgetting to write the check? We don’t think that way about anything else. If our mortgage comes due when we’re on vacation, we don’t not pay it because we’ll lose our house. The wise among us pay our house note before we go on our vacation. Why don’t we take what God is owed as seriously?
Today, you may need to reevaluate your financial giving. God’s Word is clear from cover-to-cover, we are to give to the Lord first, not last. This implies that giving to the Lord’s work should take place before other obligations are met. Every once in a while I hear someone say, “Well, I had to take a pass on giving for a couple of months because we had some unexpected medical expenses, house expenses, etc.” I don’t think Paul would buy that. If we would give the first part of our paycheck, then maybe we wouldn’t get into those tight spots in the first place. That’s the point of the Old Testament prophet, Haggai, who told the poverty-stricken Israelites that God was putting holes in their pockets because their financial priorities were amiss. Giving should come before bill paying, before pursuing hobbies, before eating out, even before repaying debt. And, if you consistently cannot afford to give God’s tithe, then you seriously need to look at your debts and income. People who pay off credit cards and don’t use debt often have a lot more money to give.
Guideline #4:
Biblical giving is every believer’s responsibility.
Ever get stuck by a word’s base meaning? Writer, right? Responsiblity = your ability to respond. This topic is about your response to God.
It’s an individual response. “Each one of you is to put aside and save ….” Notice that Paul didn’t excuse the poor, the slaves, the pastors, or the large family with three kids in college. Giving is every believer’s privilege and responsibility. We are all to be involved in giving regularly, whether we have a lot of money or we’re impoverished, whether we’re children or the most senior adult.
Unfortunately, many of us have erroneously assumed that if we don’t have a lot of money or are in debt, we don’t have to give. Nothing could be further from the truth! The greatest examples in Scripture of sacrificial giving come from those who are in the midst of poverty and persecution. God wants and expects us to give in spite of our circumstances or lack of wealth. The Lord will honor even a meager attempt to prioritize giving.
Guideline #5:
Biblical giving should be proportionate.
Paul wrote a believer’s giving should be “save it to the extent that God has blessed you.” In other words, the more we are blessed, the more we should give. There are two ways one can approach this matter. If you are giving a set percentage of your income, let’s say 10%, as your income rises your giving will automatically rise proportionately. But a more generous approach to proportionate giving is to increase the percentage of your giving as your income increases. In the case of a substantial raise, you will still be left with more than you had before the promotion. The issue is: where does your heart lie?
The New Testament does not require flat 10% giving. The tithe was an income tax system in the Old Testament. There were three tithes—two tithes per year for two years and on the third year an additional tithe of 10%, making it 30% for that year. The tithes for the third year were for the poor. It worked out to 231/3 % of income over a three-year period. Yeah, most people in America could not manage that since we already have the government in our pockets for 15-40% of our incomes. Then, additionally, we are supposed to give “offerings.” Israelites gave both tithes and offerings. All this was done for the national entity of Israel. A national entity needs an income tax system, so that was the purpose of the tithe. The New Testament does not command tithes for the church. The idea for the church is an offering of proportional giving or as God has blessed the believer financially. There is no percentage in this system of giving.
My personal conviction is 10% of one’s income is a good guideline – a target to hit – for most people. Some people who are poor or deeply in debt may need to build up gradually to 10% as they retire debt or their income increases. That’s fine. Giving is ultimately a matter between the individual believer and God. Don’t assume you’re violating God’s command if you truly don’t have 10% to give, but don’t think you’re doing just fine if you’re giving 10% when you’re really wealthy. I would suggest that the vast majority of American Christians, if we avoided credit card debt and bought houses and cars we can actually afford, can and should give more than 10% of our income to the Lord. Sadly though, many Christians are more concerned with their standard of living than their standard of giving. For many of us, prosperity has become a greater test of character than poverty.
When it comes to giving, ask two questions:
- How has God prospered you?
- To what degree do you want to express your gratitude to Him for all that He has given you?
Guideline #6:
Biblical giving should not be motivated by pressure.
Looking again at 16:2 we see that the apostle was asking that the collection be made each week so that there didn’t have to be a fund drive when he arrived. He was in Ephesus as he wrote this letter, and he had plans to travel to visit Corinth in the future. He knew that his credibility and charisma were such that he could generate a huge offering with his personal presence, but he didn’t want them to give under that kind of pressure.
Pressure, of course, works. Countless churches and ministries have funded vast building projects through high-pressure fund-raising efforts. Just because it works, doesn’t mean it’s right and Paul seems to have understood that.
In addition to the above six guidelines, there is a concluding principle that has more to do with how offerings are handled than with how they are given.
Biblical givers have a right to expect integrity and accountability from those they give to.
Verses 3-4 explain that it is the responsibility of every congregation to entrust its funds into the hands of trustworthy members. Paul didn’t say, “Give your money to me and I will handle it for you.” Instead he urged the church to choose their own representatives to disburse the gifts. Obviously, integrity matters. Churches and Christian charities should have the highest level of financial accountability observable in society.
I challenge you to either continue or begin giving generously and cheerfully. Not only does gracious giving please the Lord, but there are also legitimate personal blessings involved.
But I will come to you after I have gone through Macedonia – for I will be going through Macedonia – and perhaps I will stay with you, or even spend the winter, so that you can send me on my journey, wherever I go. For I do not want to see you now in passing, since I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord allows. But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, because a door of great opportunity stands wide open for me, but there are many opponents.
Now if Timothy comes, see that he has nothing to fear among you, for he is doing the Lord’s work, as I am too. So then, let no one treat him with contempt. But send him on his way in peace so that he may come to me. For I am expecting him with the brothers.
With regard to our brother Apollos: I strongly encouraged him to visit you with the other brothers, but it was simply not his intention to come now. He will come when he has the opportunity. 1 Corinthians 16:5-12
Go to the Lord’s People
These verses explain how Paul and his ministry partners were willing to go to minister to believers and unbelievers alike. There are at least five observations worth making from these eight verses. First, Paul had plans and goals to share the gospel with unbelievers and build up the churches. He had a schedule mapped out. He didn’t just trust God and sit on his hands. He took initiative and moved forward with holy ambition.
Do you have a plan to share Christ and build up His body? If not, why not? Today, make a promise to yourself and God to share the gospel, write down the names of three unbelievers and three believers, and develop a plan to share Christ with those individuals.
Second, Paul submitted his plans and goals to Christ. Words and phrases like “perhaps,” “wherever I may go,” and “I hope to remain with you for some time, if the Lord permits” reveal Paul’s sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. Although he had plans and goals that he wanted to accomplish, he was always striving to make sure that he was doing what God wanted him to do.
Are you willing to relocate and change jobs if God calls you to? Would you be willing to take on a new ministry? God longs for willing hearts.
Third, God eventually opens a door of ministry for faithful believers. Admittedly, sometimes it takes many years but God has a way of blessing our meager efforts. Paul wrote “for a wide door for effective service has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.” This “open door” in Ephesus brought great evangelistic fruit. However, with the fruit there were many adversaries. This is to be expected. Where there is light there are bugs. When God pours out His blessing, Satan sends adversaries to destroy God’s work. Those involved in ministry of any sort should expect opposition. It is important to recognize “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:13).
Fourth, Paul valued ministry partners. In this section, he spent considerable ink talking about Timothy and Apollos. In the passage that follows he will mention five more valuable coworkers. Paul recognized how important other ministry leaders were to his ministry and to God’s kingdom. God uses teammates (brothers and sisters) to help us to accomplish His purposes for our lives. More importantly, He uses the purposes He works in us to accomplish His kingdom agenda in the world. Have you expressed gratitude to God for all that He has accomplished in your life? Have you said “thank you” to your Christian teammates?
Going requires more of us than giving and that should be acknowledged. It’s hard with jobs and children and life to pick up and go to Africa or South America – but let’s be honest, the early Christians did much of their ministering right where they were – in the marketplace, mending tents, as they interacted with the people around them. Do you do ministry at work, the grocery store, on your Facebook page? Are you willing to?
We’re part of God’s work team if we’re willing to let Him guide us in the plans He has designed for us. Today, will you commit yourself to fulfilling God’s plans for your life? Will you submit yourself to Him in the areas of giving and going?
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Hi, this is Brad.
Although Lela has a lot to say about the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, I asked to go first. Yeah, here I am – a man commenting on sexual harassment. Go on, throw vegetables. Lela will make soup!
Lela says I should start with a disclaimer.
I think men like Harvey Weinstein are disgusting jerks who deserve what they get. There’s no excuse for abusing a woman or requiring her to give up sex for a job. That’s just totally degrading and shouldn’t be accepted by anyone.
Now that you’re done cheering that at least one man in the world “gets” it, let me burst your bubble. I think it goes both ways and it’s not just a man-woman thing.
When I think about my high school sexual encounters, I was probably a sexual harasser by today’s standards. I “pestered” girls to date me. It didn’t usually take a lot of “pestering”, but I didn’t usually take “go away” as the only answer. I’d try back a few times. That worked with a girl I dated for over a year and it certainly worked with my wife. I “bothered” Lela at her job … I was a customer and she was staff. I made “unwanted” comments and gave her compliments. At first, I was just an annoying and noncompliant (well, my employer was noncompliant, I just was there to receive the note) guest of the campground where she worked, but later she accepted my compliments and my request for a date and the rest is history.
When I was a young man catting around, it was assumed that if a girl willingly got into bed with you without any clothes on and didn’t say “No, stop!” that it was consensual sex. According to our 20-something daughter, you now have to ask permission at every step of the process. Wow! Sex as a contractural relationship? Well, that sucked all the fun out of it!
I hear there’s a list of alleged sexual abusers in the media circulating. I’m sure there are men on that list who deserve to be there. However, as a heterosexual white male, it disturbs me that members of my gender are presumed guilty until proven innocent and that most of the nation doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. On at least one talk show, I have seen concerns of false accusations brushed aside with “well, women are being protected, so it doesn’t matter whether a few reputations or professional lives are destroyed in the process. Seriously, if you’re the one who hasn’t done anything wrong and your career is destroyed by false accusations – it matters … to you, to your spouse, to your kids, and to your creditors and business partners.
Anyone familiar with comedian Christopher Titus?
He was the first physically fit white male I ever heard admit publicly that he had been abused by a woman. This is a man whose psychotic mother credibly threatened to kill his father on numerous occasions and did eventually kill one of her husbands. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he hooked up with and eventually moved in with a girlfriend who regularly hit him. When he finally had had enough and called the cops, they arrested him rather than her.
I appreciated his social bravery because I dated a girl who, a few weeks into our relationship, got drunk and tried to crack my head open with a bottle. I’d been raised not to hit women. I didn’t know what to do to make her stop. Fortunately, the neighbor lady came over to investigate the noise and I made my escape. I’m sure she thought I was the one abusing my date, not the other way around. The girlfriend called me the next day, all apologetic and promising never to do it again. We continued to date for a little while after that until I heard her laughing with her girlfriends about how scared I’d been when she swung it at me. And, yeah, I know how screwed up that is.
Lela and I have since encountered several men who quietly admit to having been abused by women – more often than not emotionally, but also sexually and physically. Since we men almost never admit to be terrorized by someone smaller than us, you can bet our few encounters translates into thousands, maybe millions, of men who have been victims of domestic violence, but are too embarrassed to talk about it.
But let’s talk about sexual harassment. When I was in school, girls weren’t usually the initiators in relationships, but by the time our kids were in high school, they were. Our daughter is a knockout … that’s not just Dad saying it. The dozens of boys I had to beat back from the car whenever I picked her up at school said it. A bold dancer who is now a semi-professional musician, I’ve never met a girl who better turned aside sexual harassment while hardly breaking her stride. She is pretty. She doesn’t need what most guys are offering. And, she’s known that since junior high. I’m sure there are plenty of other girls who feel harassed and scared, but that was never a problem for Bri in school, though she tells me that out on the road, she has had more issues with that.
On the other hand, our son would come home wondering why girls insisted upon embarrassing him by making comments about his (toned) body, his hair, his walk and his general sexiness. He didn’t kiss his first girl until middle of sophomore year, not because they weren’t throwing themselves at him, but because he was shy. He was surprised one swim team meet when a girl on an opposing team asked him to go have sex with her and when he turned her down, she spread a vicious rumor that he was gay. He isn’t. He just thought he should respect girls enough not to have sex with them standing up in a bathroom stall in the boys locker room.
But, let’s talk about the sexual harassment I have personally encountered. I’m going to skip the times I think they were coming onto me because I’m so hot and just go with the times I know they were crossing a line.
There’s the woman in a professional course who decided to pull up her t-shirt, barring both breasts so that she could nurse her baby. Yeah, you have a right to nurse your baby (I think all mothers should), but there are ways to do it that don’t sexually harass the men in the room. I’m pretty sure, if I unzipped my pants and “let it all hang out” you’d scream sexual assault (and that is a criminal offense that will see you on a sex offender registry), so why is it different when you do it? Oh, that’s right. Men are disgusting pigs for being turned on by sight, but women aren’t held to the same standard.
When I was 20, I was broke – between decent jobs, working for minimum wage at a bakery. I rented a room from this guy I met on the bus. I didn’t know him other than to have a couple of conversations with him as we rode. Seemed like a nice guy. The room was affordable and in a decent building. It beat the alternative to living under a bridge. Two days after I signed the lease, I discovered he was gay. No big deal. I didn’t care. He was dating someone and it didn’t seem to matter … until, about three months into the lease, he didn’t have a gay guy to hook up with and he started harassing me. The next three months were hell. I had no desire to have gay sex. I couldn’t afford to move out. He would not leave me alone even when I told him repeatedly that I wasn’t interested. It even came to blows one night when he and a “friend” decided to “teach me what I’d been missing”. They came into my room while I was sleeping and tried for force the issue. I had to fight back and I was a strong construction worker while they were wimpy office workers, so I was able to make them stop. Two days later, my father asked me to come to Alaska with him and I jumped at the chance just so I could break my lease and run somewhere “Mike” couldn’t follow me. He found me on Facebook a few years ago and I literally felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I think I know how women feel who have run from a stalker and he finds them on social media years later.
Like the “women who have terrorized men” scenario, I suspect this happens to a lot more straight people than they’re willing to admit.
So, here’s the thing – I think sexual harassment is wrong no matter who is doing it to whom, but I also think we can’t be so mechanical about the definition. If we want to insist that a man can’t compliment a woman on her appearance at work, can’t ask a coworker out, ask more than once, etc., then we should insist that women and homosexuals do the same. What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose and the turducten, too. But if we’re planning that level of scrutiny of sexual attraction, we might want to consider the problems we’re causing with it. I met Lela at her place of work. In fact, every girlfriend I ever had, I met at work (school is work for teenagers). Most people met their spouses at work. Few Americans go to church anymore, so that’s out. That leaves meeting women to date … where? The bars? Laundromats? Seriously, where do we meet people we’re attracted to where we can actually spend time getting to know one another? Statistics say most of us do it at work, but if that’s not allowed … what substitute do you propose?
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We like to think that universal basic income is a new idea that has never been considered before, but that would be untrue. Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson) dealt with the concept in 1966 and his arguments against it are still valid 50 years later. I’ve provided some notes and organization to his arguments. You can read the original at this location. https://fee.org/articles/income-without-work/ Lela
Income without Work
Henry Hazlett
A group of social reformers, impatient with the present “rag bag” of measures to combat poverty, propose to wipe it out in a single swoop. The government would simply guarantee to everybody, regardless of whether or not he worked, could work, or was willing to work, a minimum income. This guaranteed income would be sufficient for his needs, “enough to enable him to live with dignity.”
The reformers estimate that the guaranteed income ought to range somewhere between $3,000 ($22,776.60 today) and $6,000 ($45,553.21 today) a year for a family of four.
This is not merely the proposal of a few starry-eyed private individuals. The National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, established by Congress in 1964, brought in a 115-page report to the President (Johnson) on February 4 of this year recommending guaranteed incomes for all. And in January the President’s Council of Economic Advisers indicated approval of “uniformly determined payments to families based only on the amount by which their incomes fall short of minimum subsistence levels.” This plan, they declared, “could be administered on a universal basis for all the poor and would be the most direct approach to reducing poverty.”
The plan is spelled out and argued in detail in a book called The Guaranteed Income, a symposium of articles by ten contributors, edited by Robert Theobald, who calls himself a “socio-economist.” Mr. Theobald has contributed three of the articles, including his preface.
Of the following three paragraphs, Mr. Theobald prints the first two entirely in italics:
“This book proposes the establishment of new principles specifically designed to break the link between jobs and income. Implementation of these principles must necessarily be carried out by the government….
“We will need to adopt the concept of an absolute constitutional right to an income. This would guarantee to every citizen of the United States, and to every person who has resided within the United States for a period of five consecutive years, the right to an income from the federal government to enable him to live with dignity. No government agency, judicial body, or other organization whatsoever should have the power to suspend or limit any payments assured by these guarantees….
“If the right to these incomes should be withdrawn under any circumstances, government would have the power to deprive the individual not only of the pursuit of happiness, but also of liberty and even, in effect, of life itself. This absolute right to a due-income would be essentially a new principle of jurisprudence.” (emphasis Lela)
The contributors to this volume have arrived at these extraordinary conclusions not only because they share a number of strange ideas of jurisprudence, of “rights,” of government, and of the true meaning of liberty and tyranny, but because they share a number of major economic misconceptions.
Strange ideas about:
- jurisprudence
- “rights”
- government
- true meaning of liberty and tyranny
- economic misconceptions
Nearly all of them seem to share the belief, for example, that the growth of automation and “cybernation” is eliminating jobs so fast (or soon will be) that there soon just won’t be jobs for even the most industrious. “The continuing impact of technical change will make it impossible to provide jobs for all who seek them.” The goal of “jobs for all” is “no longer valid.” And so on.
Ancient Fears of Automation
The fears of permanent unemployment as a result of technological progress are as old as the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They have been constantly reiterated in the last thirty-five years and as often completely refuted. (more than 80 years now). It is sufficient to point out here that not only has the average unemployment of slightly less than 5 per cent in the last twenty years not been growing, and that two-thirds of the jobless have usually remained so for periods of not more than ten weeks, but that the total volume of employment in the United States has reached a new high record in nearly every one of these years.
Even if it were true, as the authors of the guaranteed income proposal contend, that the American free enterprise system will soon become so productive that more than anybody really wants can be produced in half the time as now, why would that mean the disappearance of jobs? And how could that justify half the population’s, say, being forced to work forty hours a week to support the other half in complete idleness? Why couldn’t everybody work only in the mornings? Or half in the mornings and the other half in the afternoons at the same machines? Or why could not some people come in on Mondays, others on Tuesdays, and so on? It is difficult to understand the logic or the sense of fairness of those who contend that as soon as there is less to be done some people must be supported in idleness by all the rest.
No historical evidence that increased productive eliminates jobs, but even if it did, people could work parttime. “It is difficult to understand the logic or … fairness of those who contend that … some people must be supported in idleness by all the rest.
“An Absolute Right”
But that is precisely the contention of the advocates of the guaranteed annual income. These handout incomes are to be given as “an absolute constitutional right,” and not to be withheld “under any circumstances.” (Theobald’s italics.) This means that the recipients are to continue to get this income not only if they absolutely refuse to seek or take a job, but if they throw the handout money away at the races, or spend it on prostitutes, on whiskey, cigarettes, marijuana, heroin, or what not. They are to be given “sufficient to live in dignity,” and it is apparently to be no business of the taxpayers if a recipient chooses none the less to live without dignity, and to devote his guaranteed leisure to gambling, dissipation, drunkenness, debauchery, dope addiction, or a life of crime. “No government agency, judicial body, or other organization whatsoever should have the power to suspend or limit any payments assured by these guarantees.” This is surely a “new principle of jurisprudence.”
Unrealistic Cost Estimates
How much income do the guaranteed-income advocates propose to guarantee? They differ regarding this, but practically all of them think the government should guarantee at least what they and government officials call the “minimum maintenance level” or the “poverty-income line.” The Social Security Administration calculated that the 1964 poverty-income line for nonfarm individuals was $1,540 a year. A nonfarm family of four was defined as poor if its money income was below $3,130. The Council of Economic Advisers has calculated that by this standard 34 million out of our 190 million 1964 population, or 18 per cent, were living in poverty. This is in spite of the $40 billion total spent in welfare payments, of which it estimated that $20 billion (in the fiscal year 1965) went to persons who were, or would otherwise have been, below the poverty-income line.
How much would a guaranteed-income program cost the taxpayers? This would depend, of course, on how big an income was being guaranteed. Many of the income-guarantee advocates think that a guarantee merely of the poverty-line income would be totally inadequate. They appeal to other “minimum” budgets put together by the Social Security Administration or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some of which run up to nearly $6,000 ($45,553) for a family of four.
One of the contributors to the Theobald symposium makes the following estimates of the cost to the taxpayers of different guarantees:
- For a “minimum maintenance” level of $3,000 a year: total cost, $11 billion a year. ($835 Billion a year today)
- For an “economy” level of $4,000: $23 billion a year. ($1.7 trillion annually)
- For a “modest-but-adequate” level of $5,000: $38 billion a year. (almost $2.9 trillion annually)
These figures are huge, yet they are clearly an underestimate. For the calculations take it for granted that those who could get government checks of $3,000 to $5,000 a year, as an absolute guarantee, without conditions, would continue to go on earning just as much as before. But as even one of the contributors to the Theo-bald symposium, William Vogt, remarks: “Those who believe that men will want to work whether they have to or not seem to have lived sheltered lives.”
Who Would Do the Work?
He goes on to point out, with refreshing realism, how hard it is even today, before any guaranteed income, to get people to shine shoes, wash cars, cut brush, mow lawns, act as porters at railroad or bus stations, or do any number of other necessary jobs. “Millions of service jobs are unfilled in the United States, and it is obvious that men and women will often prefer to exist on small welfare payments rather than take the jobs…. If this situation exists before the guaranteed income is made available, who is going to take care of services when everyone can live without working—as a right?”
Who is, in fact, going to take the smelly jobs, or any low-paid job, once the guaranteed income program is in effect? Suppose, as a married man with two children, your present income from some nasty and irregular work is $2,500 a year. Comes the income guarantee, and you get a check in the mail from the government for $630. This is accompanied by a letter telling you that you are entitled as a matter of unconditional right to the poverty-line income of $3,130, and this $630 is for the difference between that and your earned income of $2,500. You are happy — for just a day. Then it occurs to you that you are a fool to go on working at your nasty job or series of odd jobs for $2,500 when you can stop work entirely and get the full $3,130 from the government.
So the government would, in fact, have to pay out a tremendous sum. In addition, it would create idleness on a huge scale. To predict this result is not to take a cynical view, but merely to recognize realities. The beneficiaries of the guaranteed income would merely be acting sensibly from their own point of view. But the result would be that the fifth of the population now judged to be below the poverty line would stop producing even most of the necessary goods and services it is producing now. The unpleasant jobs would not get done. There would be less total production, or total real income, to be shared by everybody.
The Shifting “Poverty Line”
But so far we have been talking only about the effect of the guaranteed income on the recipients whose previous incomes have been below the poverty line. What about the other four-fifths of the population, whose incomes have previously been above it? What would be the effect on their incentives and actions?
Suppose a married man with two children found at the end of a year that he had earned $3,500? And suppose he found that his neighbor, with the same-sized family, had simply watched television, hung around a bar, or gone fishing during the year and had got a guaranteed income from the government of $3,130? Wouldn’t the worker begin to think that he had been something of a sap to work so hard for a mere $370 net, and that it would be much better to lead a pleasantly idle life for just that much less? And wouldn’t the same thing occur to all others whose earned incomes were only slightly above the guarantee?
It is not easy to say how far above the guarantee any man’s income would have to be for this consideration not to occur to him. But we would do well to remember the following figures: The median or “middle” income for all families in 1964 was $6,569. The median income for “unrelated” individuals was $1,983. People with these incomes or less — i.e., half the population—would be near enough to the guarantee to wonder why they weren’t getting any of it.
Someone Must Pay
If “everybody should receive a guaranteed income as a matter of right” (and the italics are Mr. Theobald’s), who is to pay him that income? On this point the advocates of the guaranteed income are either beautifully vague or completely silent. The money, they tell us, will be paid by the “government” or by the “State.” “The State would acknowledge the duty to maintain the individual.”
[T]he government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.
The state is a shadowy entity that apparently gets its money out of some fourth dimension. The truth is, of course, that the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else. The whole guaranteed-income proposal is a perfect modern example of the shrewd observation of the French economist, Bastiat, more than a century ago: “The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”
“The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.” Bastiat
Rights vs. Obligations
None of the guaranteed-income advocates explicitly recognizes that real “income” is not paper money that can be printed at will but goods and services, and that somebody has to produce these goods and services by hard work. The proposition of the guaranteed-income advocates, in plain words, is that the people who work must be taxed to support not only the people who can’t work but the people who won’t work. The workers are to be forced to give up part of the goods and services they have created and turn them over to the people who haven’t created them or flatly refuse to create them.
{T}he people who work must be taxed to support not only the people who can’t work but the people who won’t work.
Once this proposition is stated bluntly, the spuriousness in all the rhetoric about “the absolute constitutional ‘right’ to an income” becomes clear. A true legal or moral right of one man always implies an obligation on the part of others to do something or refrain from doing something to ensure that right. If a creditor has a right to a sum of money owed to him on a certain day, the debtor has an obligation to pay it. If I have a right to freedom of speech, to privacy, or to the ownership of a house, everyone else has an obligation to respect it. But when I claim a “right” to “an income sufficient to live in dignity,” whether I am willing to work for it or not, what I am really claiming is a right to part of somebody else’s earned income. What I am asserting is that he has a duty to earn more than he needs or wants to live on so that the surplus may be seized from him and turned over to me to live on.
[If] I claim a “right” to “an income sufficient to live in dignity,” … what I am really claiming is a right to part of somebody else’s earned income.
What the guaranteed-income advocates are really saying, behind all their high-sounding phrases and humanitarian rhetoric, is something like this: “Look, we find ourselves with this wonderful apparatus of coercion, the government and its police forces. Why not use it to force the workers to pay part of their earnings over to the nonworkers?”
Lack of Understanding
We can still believe in the sincerity and good intentions of these people, but only by assuming an appalling lack of understanding on their part of the most elementary economic principles. “This book,” writes Robert Theobald, “proposes the establishment of new principles specifically designed to break the link between jobs and income.” But we cannot break the link between jobs and income. True income is not money, but the goods and services that a money will buy. These goods and services have to be produced. They can only be produced by work, by jobs. We may, of course, break the link between the job and the income of a particular person, say Paul, by giving him an income whether he consents to take a job or not. But we can do this only by seizing part of the income of some other person, say Peter, from his job. To believe we can break the link between jobs and income is to believe we can break the link between production and consumption. Goods have to be produced by somebody before they can be consumed by anybody.
Claimants to Be Trusted, Taxpayers to Be Examined
One reason for the agitation for an unconditionally guaranteed income is the dislike of some social reformers for the “means test.” The means test is disliked on two grounds — that it is “humiliating” or “degrading,” and that it is administratively troublesome — “a comprehensive examination of means and resources, applicant by applicant.” The guaranteed-income advocates think they can do away with all this by using the “simple” mechanism of having everybody fill out an income tax blank, whereupon the government would send a check to everybody for the amount that his income, so reported, fell below the government’s set “poverty-line” minimum.
The belief that this income-tax mechanism would be administratively simple is a delusion. Before the introduction of the withholding mechanism, before the reporting requirements for payments made to individuals in excess of $600 in any year, and the still more recent requirements for the reporting of even the smallest interest and dividend payments, the income tax was in large part a self-imposed tax. The government depended heavily on the taxpayer’s conscientiousness and honesty. To a substantial extent it still does.
The government can check the honesty of individual returns only by a random or arbitrary sampling process. It is altogether probable that more evasion and cheating go on in the low income-tax returns than in the high ones—not because the big-income earners are more honest, but simply because their chances of being examined and caught are higher. The amount of concealment and falsification that would be practiced by persons trying to get as high a guaranteed income as possible would probably be enormous. To minimize the swindling, the government would have to resort to the same case-by-case and applicant-by-applicant process as it does to administer current relief, unemployment insurance, and social security programs.
Is a means test for relief necessarily any more humiliating than the ordeal that the taxpayer must go through when his income tax is being examined, and when every question he is asked and record he is required to provide implies that he is a potential crook? If the reply is that this inquisition is necessary to protect the government from fraud, then the same reply is valid as applied to applicants for relief or a guaranteed income. It would be a strange double standard to insist that those who were being forced to pay the guaranteed income to others should be subject to an investigation from which those who applied for the guaranteed income would be exempt.
Is a means test for relief necessarily any more humiliating than the ordeal that the taxpayer must go through when his income tax is being examined, and when every question he is asked and record he is required to provide implies that he is a potential crook?
Finally, the income-tax mechanism would be irrelevant to the real problem with which the guaranteed-income advocates profess to be concerned. For the applicants would presumably be reporting last year’s income, which would have no necessary relation to their present need. An applicant’s income in the previous year or other previous period might be either much higher or much lower than it is today. The process would not meet present emergencies, such as illness or temporary loss of employment. The guaranteed-income payment might either come too late or prove unneeded or excessive.
Old Subsidies Never Die
One of the main selling arguments of the guaranteed-income advocates is that its net cost to the taxpayers would not be as great as might appear at first sight because it would be a substitute for the present “mosaic” or “rag bag” of measures designed to meet the same goal — social security, unemployment compensation, medicare, direct relief, free school lunches, stamp plans, farm subsidies, housing subsidies, rent subsidies, and all the rest.
Neither the record of the past nor a knowledge of political realities supports such an expectation. One of the main selling arguments in the middle 1930′s, first for unemployment insurance and later for social security, was that these programs would take the place and eliminate the need for the various relief programs and payments then in existence. But in the last thirty years these programs have continued to grow year by year with only minor interruptions. The result is that public assistance payments (including old age assistance, aid to dependent children, general assistance, etc.) have risen from a total of $657 million in 1936 to $4,736 million in 1963, an increase of 620 per cent. And this cost is in addition to the present $30 billion or more that the Federal government now spends annually on social security and other welfare programs.
So not only may we expect that the guaranteed-income would be thrown on top of all existing welfare payments (we can expect a tremendous outcry against discontinuing any of them), but that demands would arise for constant enlargement of the guaranteed amount. If the average payment were merely the difference between an assumed “poverty-line” income of, say, $3,000 and what the family had earned itself, all heads of families earning less than $3,000 would either quit work or threaten to do so unless they were given the full $3,000, and so allowed to “keep” whatever they earned themselves. And once this demand was granted (in an effort to avoid the wholesale idleness and pauperization that would otherwise occur), the people whose earnings were just above the government minimum, or less than twice as much, would point out how unjustly they were being treated. And the only “logical” and “fair” stopping place, it would be argued, would be to give everybody the full minimum of $3,000 no matter how much he was earning or getting from other sources.
Anyone who thinks such a prediction farfetched need merely recall how we got into the present system of paying everybody over 72 social security benefits regardless of his current earnings from other sources, and paying benefits to every retired person over 65 regardless of the size of his unearned income from other sources. By the same logic, the British government pays comprehensive unemployment, sickness, maternity, widowhood, funeral and other benefits, and retirement pensions, regardless of need or the size of the recipient’s income.
Incentives Undermined
We have seen how the guaranteed-income plan, if adopted in the form that its advocates propose, would lead to wholesale idleness and pauperization among nearly all those earning less than the minimum guarantee, and among many earning just a little more. But it would also undermine the incentives of those much further up in the income scale. For they would not only be deprived of the benefits that they saw millions of others getting. It is they who would be expected to pay these benefits, through the imposition upon them of far more burdensome income taxes than they were already paying. If these taxes were steeply progressive in proportion to income, as is probable, they would discourage long hours and unusual effort.
It is difficult to make any precise estimate of the effect of a given income-tax rate in discouraging or reducing work and production. Different individuals will, of course, be differently affected. The activities of a man whose whole income comes in the form of a single salary from a single job will be differently affected than those of a surgeon, a doctor, a writer, an actor, an architect, or anyone whose income varies with the number of assignments he is willing to undertake or clients he is willing to serve.
What we do know is that the higher income-tax rates, contrary to popular belief, just don’t raise revenue. In the current 1966 fiscal year, individual income taxes are estimated to be raising $51.4 billion (out of total revenues of $128 billion). Yet the tax rates in excess of 50 per cent have been bringing in only about $250 million a year — less than 1 per cent of total income tax revenues and not enough to run even the present government for a full day. (In other words, if all the personal income-tax rates above 50 per cent were reduced to that level, the loss in revenue would be only about $250 million.) If these rates above 50 per cent were raised further, it is more probable that they would raise less revenue than more. Therefore, it is the income‑tax rates on the lower and middle incomes that would have to be raised most, for the simple reason that 75 per cent of the personal income of the country is earned by people with less than $15,000 gross incomes.
Poverty for All
It is certain that high income tax rates discourage and reduce the earning of income, and therefore the total production of wealth, to some extent. Suppose, for illustration, we begin with the extreme proposal that we equalize everybody’s income by taxing away all income in excess of the average in order to pay it over to those with incomes below the average. (The guaranteed income proposal isn’t too far away from that!)
Let us say that the present per capita average yearly income is about $2,800. Then everybody who was getting less than that (and would get just that whether he worked or not) would, of course, as with the guaranteed-income proposal, not need to work productively at all. And no one who was earning more than $2,800 would find it worth while to continue to earn the excess, because it would be seized from him in any case. More, it would soon occur to him that it wasn’t worth while earning even the $2,800, for it would be given to him in any case; and his income would be that whether he worked or not. So if everybody acted under an income equalization program merely in the way that seemed most rational in his own isolated interest, none of us would work and all of us would starve. We might each get $2,800 cash (if someone could be found to continue to run the printing machines just for the fun of it), but there would be nothing to buy with it.
A less extreme equalization program would, of course, have less extreme results. If only 90 per cent of all incomes over $2,800 were seized and people could keep 10 cents of every “excess” dollar they earned, there would of course still be a little incentive to earn a little more. And if everyone could keep 25 cents out of every dollar he earned above the $2,800, the incentive would be slightly higher.
But every tax or expropriation must reduce incentives to a certain extent. The effect of the guaranteed-income proposal would be practically to wipe out incentives for those earning (or even wanting) no more than the guarantee, and greatly to reduce incentives for all those earning or capable of earning more than the guarantee. Therefore the guaranteed-income would reduce effort and earning and production. It would violently reduce the national income (measured in real terms). And it would reduce the standard of living for four-fifths of the population. The government might be able to pay out the specified amount of guaranteed dollar “income,” but the purchasing power of the dollars would appallingly shrink.
The Negative Income Tax
Recognizing the calamitous erosion of incentives that would be brought about by a straight guaranteed income plan, other reformers have advocated what they call a “negative income tax.” This proposal was put forward by the prominent economist, Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, which appeared in 1962. The system he proposed would be administered along with the current income tax system.
Suppose that the poverty-line income were set at $3,000 per “consumer unit” (families or individuals), and suppose that the negative income tax (which is really a subsidy), were a flat rate of 50 per cent. Then every “consumer unit” (this is the statisticians’ technical term) whose income fell below $3,000 would be paid a subsidy of, say, 50 per cent of the difference. If its earned income were $2,000, for example, it would receive $500; if its earned income were $1,000 it would receive $1,000; if its earned income were zero it would receive $1,500.
Professor Friedman freely concedes that his proposal, “like any other measure to relieve poverty… reduces the incentives of those helped to help themselves.” But he argues that “it does not eliminate that incentive entirely, as a system of supplementing incomes up to some fixed minimum would. An extra dollar earned always means more money available for expenditure.”
It is true that the “negative income tax” would not have quite the destructive effect on incentives that the guaranteed income would. Nevertheless, once the principle of the negative income tax were accepted, the demand would immediately arise that the minimum subsidy to be paid should be at least “adequate” to provide a minimum income to support a family “in decency and dignity.” So we would be back to the minimum guaranteed income, plus supplemental subsidies for those who already had some earned or private income of their own. If this minimum were set at $3,130 for a married man with two children (to return to the Social Security Administration’s “poverty-line” figure), this subsidy would be reduced, say, by 50 cents for every dollar earned, and therefore would not stop entirely until the family’s own earned income had reached $6,240.
Not Enough Rich to Soak
How many billions of dollars in subsidies this would involve, and what rate of income tax would be required on all families with incomes above $6,240 to raise the revenue necessary to pay these subsidies, if any rate could, I leave to the professional statisticians to calculate.
But it is obvious that this program could not be paid for by “the rich.” If we were to subsidize all family incomes below $6,240 it would be hardly consistent to tax them. Yet net incomes below $6,000 (after exemptions and deductions) are now taxed at rates up to 22 per cent, beginning with 14 per cent even on the first $500 of net income. In fact, all personal net income of $6,000 or less is now the source of nearly 80 per cent of all personal income tax revenue. Yet, as I have already pointed out, the Census Bureau calculates that the median income for all families in 1964 was only $6,569; and taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $15,000 or less receive three-quarters of the total personal income there is to be taxed.
Neither a “negative income tax” nor a guaranteed income plan of the dimensions being suggested could possibly be put into effect with dollars of present purchasing power.
It may be added that the negative income tax would have all the administrative problems that would afflict the guaranteed income proposal — fraud, corruption, necessary applicant-by-applicant investigation, and irrelevance of payment to present need.
And once the main principle of either proposal were accepted, the minimum subsidy or guarantee demanded would be bound constantly to increase. Anyone who doubts this need merely consult the history of unemployment insurance and social security benefits since the plans were initiated in the 1930′s. It is significant that several of the advocates of the guaranteed income acknowledge that their idea originated with the more modest negative income tax proposal of Milton Friedman. They just expanded it.
So knowing what we do of political pressures, and of the past history of relief, “social insurance,” and other “antipoverty” measures, we are forced to conclude that once the principle of either the negative income tax or the guaranteed income were accepted, it would be made an addition to and not a substitute for the present conglomeration of relief and “antipoverty” programs. And even alone it would drastically reduce the productive incentives of those earning less than the guaranteed amount and seriously reduce the incentives of those earning more, because of the oppressive taxation it would necessarily involve. Its over-all effect would be to level real incomes down, not up.
Even at present our large and overlapping assortment of relief and antipoverty measures is seriously reducing incentives to the production that would otherwise be possible. Our social reformers have been everywhere overlooking the two-sided nature of the problem of reducing poverty. The obstinate two-sided problem we face is this: How can we mitigate the penalties of misfortune and failure without undermining the incentives to effort and success?
The Poor Laws of England
Our social reformers — who sometimes talk as if no government ever did anything to relieve the plight of the jobless and the poor until the New Deal came along in 1933 — are constantly deploring the alleged indifference, callousness, or niggardliness of our forefathers in dealing with the poor. But wholly apart from private charity, previous generations in their governmental capacity were sharply aware of the problem of poverty and made some effort to alleviate it almost as far back as the records go. There were “poor laws” in England even before the days of Queen Elizabeth. A statute of 1536 provided for the collection of voluntary funds for the relief of those unable to work. Eleven years later the City of London decided that these voluntary collections were insufficient, and imposed a compulsory tax to support the poor. In 1572 a compulsory tax for this purpose was imposed on a national scale.
But the problem soon proved a very serious one for the people of that age. The upper class was very small numerically and proportionately. The middle class itself was always very close to what we would today call the poverty line. The workhouse and other conditions imposed on those on relief seem very cruel to us today. But our ancestors were in constant fear that if they increased relief or relaxed the stern conditions for it they would pauperize increasing numbers of the population and create an insoluble problem.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, indeed, the cost of poor relief began to get out of hand. The total cost of the poor law administration increased fourfold in the thirty-two years between 1785 and 1817, and reached a sixth of the total public expenditure. One Buckinghamshire village reported in 1832 that its expenditure on poor relief was eight times what it had been in 1795, and more than the rental of the whole parish had been in that year.
In face of statistics of this kind, England’s Whig government decided to intervene. It appointed a royal commission, and in 1834 a new and more severe poor law was passed in accordance with the commission’s recommendations.
The guiding principle of the new law was that poor relief should be granted to able-bodied poor and their dependents only in well-regulated workhouses under conditions inferior to those of the humblest laborers outside. This seemed harsh, but the commissioners had argued that “every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent laborer is a bounty on indolence and vice.”
If the pendulum swung too far in the direction of severity and niggardliness in the middle nineteenth century, it may be swinging too far in the direction of laxity and prodigality today. As weeping subsidization of idleness, such as is proposed by the guaranteed income, would only weaken or destroy all incentive to effort, not only on the part of those who were subsidized and supported, but on the part of those who would be forced to support them out of their own earnings. There could be no faster way to impoverish the nation.
The Cure Is Production
One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing the wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institutions that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place. They take for granted the existing size of the economic pie; and in their impatient effort to see that it is sliced more equally they overlook the forces that have not only created the pie in the first place but have been baking a larger one year by year. Economic progress and justice do not consist in beautifully equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.
The only real cure for poverty is production.
The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism — the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise. This system maximizes production because it allows a man freedom in the choice of his occupation, freedom in his choice of those for whom he works or who work for him, freedom in the choice of those with whom he associates and cooperates, and, above all, freedom to earn and to keep the fruits of his labor. In the capitalist system each of us, with whatever exceptions, tends in the long run to get what he creates or helps to create. When each of us recognizes that his reward depends on his own efforts and output, and tends to be proportionate to his output, then each has the maximum incentive to maximize his effort and output.
No Effective Poverty Programs for Underdeveloped Countries
Capitalism brought the Industrial Revolution, and the enormous increase in productivity which this has made possible. Capitalism has enormously raised the economic level of the masses. It has wiped out whole areas of poverty, and continues to wipe out more. The so-called “pockets of poverty” constantly get smaller and fewer.
The condition of poverty, moreover, is relative rather than absolute. What we call poverty in the United States would be regarded as affluence in most parts of Africa, Asia, or Latin America. If an income sufficient to enable a man “to live with dignity” ought to be “guaranteed” as a matter of “absolute right,” why don’t the advocates of a guaranteed income insist that this right be enforced first of all in the poor countries, such as India and China, where the need is most widespread and glaring? The reason is simply that even the better-off groups in these nations have not produced enough wealth and income to be expropriated and distributed to others.
What we call poverty in the United States would be regarded as affluence in most parts of Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
One of the guaranteed-income advocates, in a footnote, admits naively: “We must also recognize that we still have no strategy for the elimination of poverty in the underdeveloped countries.” Of course they haven’t. The “strategy” would be the introduction of free enterprise, and of incentives to work, to save, to accumulate capital, better tools, and equipment, and to produce.
But would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have. The capitalist system has made this country the most productive and richest in the world. It has continued to achieve its miracles even in the last generation, and to increase them year by year. It has raised the average weekly factory wage from less than $17 in 1933 to $110 today. Even after the rise in prices is allowed for, it has more than doubled our real per capita disposable income — from $893 in 1933 to $2,200 in 1965.
Allowed to continue to operate with even the relative freedom that it has enjoyed in recent years, the capitalist system will continue to produce these miracles. It will continue to make progress against poverty by a general increase in income and wealth. But shortsighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.
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For example, Transformation Project is largely inspired by the news. It’s sort of bleak out there in divided American these days, which just begs for someone to write an apocalyptic about people overcoming the mess created by the demon spawn of division and tyranny. Rather than fuss overmuch about the Resistance, the Revolutionary Communist Party of America and Black Lives Matters planning a series of “color revolution-like” demonstrations around the US during the month of November, I choose to write about Kansas farmers hiding corn from off-the-lease USDA agents who mean to take what these farmers grew and give it to people in the cities. Which is worst – reality or fiction? The reader gets to decide, I guess.
So, what do I do when “my muse” stops talking to me? That rarely happens because I shift around from project to project to keep myself from getting bored. BUT … when I find myself staring at a blank screen with nothing coming to mind and that lasts more than a day, I usually take a small break. I go hiking in the woods … design and construct a quilt … read a bunch of books. I once binge-watched three seasons of Vampire Dairies … and, no, I’m not a fan and I don’t write supernatural fiction, but apparently that month of wasted time was what was needed to get my inspiration back.
Regular readers of this blog know that I didn’t vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and that I think politics are not among the solutions to our problems. I try to dish up a steady fare of political philosophy here — to give people an understanding of what’s going on and where we ought to be headed rather than a Republican or Democratic line of bull. I’m a non-partisan, conservative-leaning, libertarian. When I say “conservative”, it doesn’t mean I’ve stepped back from the radical notion that liberty is better than tradition. It simply means my default position is that idiots (otherwise known as politicians) shouldn’t strive to make big changes in society or government without a full-throated consultation with the people, who are the ones who will be stuck with the consequences. If the people want to make changes, we should be allowed to do it, using the constitutional procedures. Change should always be driven by us, not by the elites who would be our rulers.
aurorawatcherak 