I hovered over the work bench with the zeal of the proverbial kid in a candy shop, not quite able to hide the smile on my face.  This was really fun!

“What are you trying to do, bring Lazarus back to life?”

Clearly, my co-worker didn’t have as much appreciation for the old generator as I did.  He was right.  The 20 year old Honda powered freebie had spent the last decade in a hay loft, and it looked like it.  It was too worn/rusted/covered in muck to know anything more than it was apparently a Honda 9 horsepower engine, and this only because it was marked on the recoil starter which was no longer attached to the engine.  On the other hand, the only thing more fun than spending my breaks and lunchtime pontificating on the state of the world would be fixing up ‘Lazarus’. 

So, after blowing some compressed air to get rid of the hay and loose dirt, fixing the recoil was the first item of business.  The spring was loose on one end, and couldn’t be bent back to stay in place.  I drilled a hole in it and secured it with a small piece of #12 wire, tightened it up, rethreaded the pull string, and it worked like a champ.  Next, the fuel tank and line needed to be cleaned and it was ready to dump in some gasoline and get a preliminary test.  On the second pull it choked, and on the third it started!  I only dared run it for a few seconds without any good oil, but knew victory was at hand.

There was still a lot to do.  Changing oil, cleaning the air filter, making a gasket to solve a fuel leak at the sediment cup, changing the spark plug, degreasing, cleaning, painting, and re-wiring the generator end (farmers have a way of rigging just about everything).  To get an idea of the final product, here’s a view of a brand new version of the same model:  http://www.trexgenerators.com/-pi-84.html?osCsid=30ebd224a4d744a284b0317fe4f0e291.

Where am I going with this rambling?  Today, looking at the restoration of ‘Lazarus’, I’m questioning the value of our throw-away society.  When something doesn’t work right we just toss it aside and get a new one.  The attitude sometimes seems to spill over into our friendships, marriages, and many other aspects of life.  What if we changed our view of things and people?  What if we saw them for what they could be, instead of dusty, dirty garbage?  What if we put a bit of effort into making things better?

I could have purchased a brand new generator (though I must say, not for the $25 I invested in this one).  It wouldn’t have a few dings that I couldn’t fix.  It would be a bit quieter.  But, to be honest, I wouldn’t care for it the way I care for Lazarus.

The 1980 U. S. hockey team has nothing on this story.  The best I can tell, it was quoted from the book The Best of Success, A Treasury Of Inspiration. 

 The year was 1983.  In Australia, the long-distance foot race from Sydney to Melbourne was about to begin, covering 875 kilometers–more than 500 miles!  About 150 world-class athletes had entered, for what was planned as a six-day event.   So race officials were startled when a 61-year-old man approached and handed them his entry form.

His name was Cliff Young, and his “racing attire” included overalls and galoshes over his work boots.

At first, they refused to let him enter.  So he explained that he’d grown up on a 2,000 acre farm, with thousands of sheep.  His family could afford neither horses nor tractors so, when the storms came, his job was to round up the sheep.   Sometimes, he said, it would take two or three days of running.

Finally, they let Cliff enter, and the race began.  The others quickly left him behind, shuffling along in his galoshes.  But he didn’t know the plan included stopping each night to rest, so he kept going.

By the fifth day, he had caught them all, won the race, and became a national hero.  He continued to compete in long-distance races until well up in his seventies.  He was an inspiration to millions and a great encourager of younger runners.

In his honor and memory, in 2004, the year after his death at age 81, the organizers of the race where he first gained fame permanently changed its name to the Cliff Young Australian Six Day Race.

I was walking through the Church History Museum by Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City, when I saw something that made me smile.  There is a small space dedicated to each leader of the church that contains a few items to sum up some aspects that would be attributed to him.  As I walked by the space for Ezra Taft Benson, there was a Time magazine cover, which he was on as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture.  It had a quote of his:

“No real american wants to be subsidized.”

I had to smile because I, too, have a problem with subsidies, a few problems actually.  The first problem is that people quickly become more interested in the subsidy than the actual business.  It is often far more lucrative.  It often makes a losing business a profitable losing business at taxpayers expense.  This leads to the second problem:  Business is started simply to gain a subsidy, or it shifts its business model from a successful, profitable one to a model set up to gain subsidies.  We see this in the alternative energy field.  Now we have the third problem, which is when companies, such as General Electric, find out that it is so much easier to gain taxpayer’s money than consumer’s money, that they flex political muscles to get the right subsidies offered to make huge profits.  I call this blatant theft.

Finally, the biggest problem I see with subsidies is that they distort the outcome of choices.  I believe that God sent us here to earth to learn by our own experience.  This means that we are to make choices and learn by experience the results those choices bring.  We often call it “choice and accountability”.  I believe evil is not found so much in making a mistake, but in not learning from a mistake.  When we subsidize business or behavior, we are taking the accountability away from the choice.  We are causing a mistake to have incorrectly good results or causing an OK decision to have amazingly great results.  Either way, we have ruined the equation of choice and accountability.  We have ruined freedom, because without the knowledge of true choices and true results, we are not able to make decisions based on what we really want and are really able to do.  This, as Bruce R. McConkie explained (The Millenial Messiah, pg. 666-667), was the major opposition to God’s plan.

Back to the real world, it was refreshing to see the Canadian mainstream media explain the results of their poor decisions on subsidies.   See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-sorry-lessons-of-green-power-subsidies/article2417284/.

I hope we can have the foresight to see that freedom is based on not manipulating the results of decisions.  Failing is a good thing when failure has been earned.  To have sympathy for failure and take away the consequence is a cruel thing to do.  To have empathy for failure and help someone to truly succeed requires more effort, but is the correct and charitable way.  In the long run, our freedom depends on learning these simple concepts.

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, therefore is not an act, but a habit.  -Aristotle

**During the busy spring and summer, I will be posting 2-3 times per week.**

This may seem to be a dumb question at first thought, but what is money?  To answer this question we’ll look at perhaps the first form of money, the IOU.  We’ll then fit this into a modern context to give my theory of what money really is and what really backs our dollar.

Many years ago, when money wasn’t as common as it now is, people often worked together with simply their word as a bond to return the favor.  Building a log cabin is much easier with a few hands, so a few people would get together and build one house with the promise that they would help build all of their houses.  If we write this promise on paper, we have a basic form of money–a piece of paper that can be traded for work from another person.  It essentially says you added this much to our economy, and are therefore entitled to receive the same amount.  You built 1/4 of my house, so I’ll build 1/4 of your house.

The move up to gold coins or gold backed paper money isn’t a big stretch from here.  Instead of measuring the input or output directly (house for house), we find a commodity that pretty much has universal value.  Any input or output from the economy is then measured by the standard of the value of this commodity.  1/4 of the house may then be said to be equal to 10 gold pieces for example.  The 10 gold pieces could then purchase 1/4 of a house or 5 wagons or 10 wheelbarrows, depending on the needs of the person who earned the gold.  The basis for the money has not changed.  It is still the trust that by working for someone today, the worker can receive an economic marker and trade it for the value of the work he did.  He can do this immediately or in the future.

Now we fast-forward (this was an old practice used when cassette tapes were the technology that carried our music) to todays money.  What is the foundation for its use?  I propose that it is still the same.  It is the idea that I can work, receive a marker for the value I have given to the economy, and use that marker to take that value out, in whatever form I may desire.  I trust that this is the case or I would have no reason to go to work.  If my input was making cars, but I couldn’t exchange that input for the farmer’s input of growing food, then I couldn’t feed my family.  I work on the assembly line in the trust that my labor can be converted to food and shelter by the economic marker we call money.

Now for the curve ball.  This is the thing we call inflation or its twin brother of money printing.  When the government seeks to have “modest inflation” or they print money out of thin air, what are they doing?  They are making promises that have no economic justification.  10% inflation says, “I didn’t build 10% of your house, but I’m taking that amount from those who did.” 

Rather than get mathematical about this, I would question what this does to the foundation or the reason we use money.  It undermines the trust that I will be able to receive the same service I gave.  If this trust is undermined to the point of being broken, what happens next?  In the end, money is nothing more than a promise, and trust in that promise by the recipient.  I believe good monetary policy should focus on maintaining the integrity of the promise that a person can get from the economy the full value of his earnings from what he put in.  On a little higher note, if everyone were fully honest, would there really be any need of money?