No Right Term

Here are the possible descriptions of the economic system that members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ call "Zion," and why each one doesn't quite work.

• Communism: usually seen as involving common ownership of property, including the means of production. Zion, though, still has private property, which is received as a stewardship according to our needs AND wants.
• Socialism: again with the social ownership. In smaller groups it can be managed as an anarcho-syndicalist commune like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail but in larger groups it ends up meaning control is exercised by a group of elites in the name of "the people." And again Zion still has individual decision-makers operating independently.
• Collectivism: this captures some of Zion but by no means all of it. Collectivism is a prioritization of group goals, which a Zion people would exhibit, but that says nothing of the nature of ownership and decision-making.
• Communalism: this has more to do with the governing structure than with the economic structure. Smaller communities with democratic decision-making might be a component of Zion, and given what we know about human nature, it is the most-likely political structure from which Zion can emerge (since affection requires habitual sympathy and the social limitations imposed by our finite brains limit the group to which I can feel affection), but the Kingdom of God will be all-encompassing.
• Communitarianism: like collectivism, communitarianism is probably a feature of Zion but not a perfect description of it. Individuals will be intimately connected to the community when they are "of one heart and one mind," but that alone doesn't define how economic decisions are made.
• Egalitarianism: it's actually interesting to think about whether or not egalitarianism is a facet of Zion. After all, if stewards receive differing stewardships, egalitarianism is limited. Like many people miss about John Rawls's concept of inequality, some inequality is preferable if it increases the welfare of the least-well-off, which it very well could. I'm better off landless with all the farmland in the hands of competent farmers than I am with my "fair share" of farm land being unproductive in my incapable hands. Some in Zion will have more, but they won't have a higher status because of it.
• Chartism: democracy-increasing political reforms that were often seen as socialism-adjacent, but that wasn't a given. We're seeing that most of these definitions can't get past the political system controlling the economy, but Zion isn't a political system.
• Utopian Socialism: this might actually be the closest to Zion if only because it naively ignored the politics of the system and figured it would just work out. A group of people that wants the best for all the members of the group don't need to worry about the political structure, theoretically. It never really worked out that way, though, because of honest disagreements about what constitutes "the best for all the members of the group." Without an omniscient referee to adjudicate disagreements, politics is necessary.
• Cooperativism: this has a lot of the qualities we probably end up seeing in Zion--an associated group voluntarily working together. In fact, the Zion economic reforms of the 1860s and -70s was the basis of ZCMI (Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution). But it's only the large-scale nature of the modern economy that gives impetus to cooperativism in Zion; we could have independent enterprises that merely pooled the products after production was completed.
• Intentional Community: groups of Zion people are definitely intentional communities (groups with a common purpose and philosophical outlook), but it is not true that every intentional community lives like a Zion community.
• Real Utopian Sociology: this is a school of thought pioneered by Erik Olin Wright that focused on "the study of feasible utopian models of society and pathways to achieve them," says its Wikipedia page. This field of study would be interested in how Zion operated but also in how any other utopian scheme operated.
• Associationalism: another political system, focused on voluntary associations of democratic groups. A plausible political structure adopted by a Zion people, but not at all a requirement.
• Zionism: strangely, the one with the closest name is the one that most misses the mark. To everyone outside of the Church, "Zionism" means exclusively the concern over a homeland for the Jewish people. Since the founding of Israel, "Zionist" has also come to refer to supporters of that specific Jewish homeland. Obviously this is unrelated to the economic principles I seek to investigate (although the kibbutz system in modern Israel is probably a pretty close approximation of what Zion probably looks like).

This is why, even though there are about a billion terms that might come to mind when you think of group-driven economic systems, none actually captures what I mean when I talk about Restored Christian Social Thought.

Mississippi River Discharge Volume

Last week I was sitting with two of my sons in a car in a parking lot in a rainstorm in the Mississippi River catchment area. Watching the paved surface gather the water into a drain, I thought that 250 years ago the natural lot would have absorbed some of what was becoming stream volume. Therefore, a similar rainstorm back then would have raised river levels less than what was happening today.

However, comma, there were just a few thousand people in my state back then whereas now there are 11 million. We all take water out of the system to keep ourselves alive and perform our daily functions.

So which is it? Is the volume of output at the mouth of the Mississippi River higher now than it was in 1772? My gut tells me it's higher now because of paved surfaces. But that's just a guess. I have no idea.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

The first problem of trying to write about the socioeconomic conditions known to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as "Zion" is that there's no linguistic framework from which to begin.

To everyone outside the Church "Zion" and especially "Zionism" have a completely different meaning. Zion refers to a peaceful, utopian place but has no connotations related to economic conditions. The main forums for discussions of Zion are Judaism and Rastafari, and neither is referring explicitly to the economic system described in Acts 2:44-45. One could argue it is implicit that a heavenly society would have a radically-different economy, but just about nobody outside of the Church would make the connection without a lot of thinking.

And Zionism usually means even more specifically the creation of a physical gathering place for Jews. Since the establishment of Israel the term is even MORE narrowed to basically refer only to the existence of Israel: Zionists support the Israeli state and antizionists oppose it.

It would be great if I could just take a cue from Catholic Social Thought (CST) and create the term "Mormon Social Thought," but in October, 2018, Church president Russell M. Nelson encouraged members to retire the term "Mormon," as it has little to do with Church doctrine and merely happens to be the name of an ancient adherent to the religion. Okay, then: Latter-day Saint Social Thought (LDSST)? No dice. "LDS" is on the outs, too. Restoration Social Thought? Restored Christian Social Thought? I don't know.

Even if I had a name for it, there's no succinct way of stating what it is. There are a TON of terms for things LIKE it, but none actually fits. I'll write later this weekend about the variety of terms and their distinct meanings. And I'll try to determine which collection of them does the best job describing what I mean. But for now, I guess I'll call this socioeconomic system Restored Christian Social Thought (RCST).

Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?

I was born in Pittsburgh and have remained a Pittsburgh sports fan all my life, even though I moved away when I was four years old. So this week I am frustrated that yet another hockey team defeated the Penguins in a playoff series after their coach used coded language to ask his team to injury a Penguins player.

In the past it has been Barry Trotz with the Washington Capitals. This year it was Gerard Gallant with the New York Rangers. But it's the same story: a coach down in a series against the Penguins gives public comments about "getting tough" or something and in the next game one of his players concusses a Penguin.

Funny how they never take "getting tough" to mean winning more faceoffs or playing more shifts late in the game. It's almost like "getting tough" doesn't mean getting tough, it means "injure someone."

Walmart Grocery Pickup Needs to Pick It Up

My wife has been using Walmart grocery pickup for years now. When you create your order, it puts a temporary hold on your card for the amount of the order. When you pick up the order you have the option of refusing any substitute items, which would then change the total cost.

The way things worked at first, by the time I got home and opened my banking app, the final total cost had already processed. Now, though, it takes up to 10 days for the transaction to go through, and it often goes through in multiple components that sum to the order total instead of just one transaction that equals the order total. This makes the service such a bookkeeping nightmare that I no longer want to use it.

Last week my wife placed an order that came to around $85 dollars. The day of the order she refused some substitutions so what she brought home cost around $70. Walmart had $85 blocked out on our card for a week, until today when the block went away. But they STILL haven't taken ANY money. Eventually they will do a few transactions that will sum to $70. What was wrong with the old system, where it took 15 minutes for the exact total to go away?

That's just the bookkeeping end of things. It doesn't even begin to address the fact that they merged their great grocery app into their terrible everything-else app.

I understand that entropy comes for us all, but this isn't just something falling apart, this is someone actively making things worse, like a web designer working for Amazon. Stop ruining things that work just fine.

Another Blistering Hot Take

Every self-checkout kiosk should recognize when the customer has begun paying on the point-of-sale (POS) machine and not require you to push a button that says "I'm going to use the other machine to pay now."

Walmart gets it right: it asks you how you're going to pay and then, when you start paying with a card, it goes, "Oh, he's paying with a card."

Every other grocery store on Earth, however, won't start taking information from the POS machine until you tell it to. Even though I'd be pretty confident estimating that at least 95% of shoppers use a card to pay.

Neutered. Or Am I?

Part of the new job (and so the end of A Random Stranger) is a strict policy of nonpartisanship. There was a time when the controversy fueling my blog came from the ambient idiots along my path, but I've tried to become less critical of others, so the controversy had to come from politics. Now that that's off limits, one might suspect that my blogging days are past their prime.

Behold, my most elegant solution: strongly held apolitical opinions! I can rant in favor of the Oxford comma and in opposition to men wearing super-tight pants (or super-short pants without socks), and until political parties take a stance on these issues, I'm home free!

Here's my first apolitical hot take: scrolling signs should scroll from right to left when your language reads from left to right. Across the street from my office is a scrolling sign that gets it completely wrong. It's an ad for Heartland Bank, but you don't find that out until the very end of the scroll. First it's for K. Then it's for NK. Then it's for ANK. Finally some clarity: BANK. But which bank? Nobody knows yet! D BANK. ND BANK. And so on. I can't believe the manager didn't see this sign in operation for ONE SECOND before saying, "This is obviously backwards."

Settling In

I moved to Ohio the first weekend in March and began my new job the next Monday. My family stayed in Florida for another eight weeks. I moved with the half of our possessions that they could do without. I told my wife, Nancy, that it probably looks to the neighbors like an amicable divorce. She went to work and then I loaded the moving truck with the kids. I made sure to kiss her goodbye outside for all the neighbors to see, but I think some were still surprised when I came back two months later to help them move.

Living on my own for two months was pretty secretly great. But that was probably because I talked to my family every day and knew it was just for eight weeks. I got to only buy the food I wanted to eat and go to sleep whenever I was tired.

Our daughter, Ella, started her missionary training online towards the end of March, and at the beginning of April she went to the Provo, Utah, Missionary Training Center (MTC). She is learning Mandarin Chinese and will serve in the Boston area, arriving there towards the end of May.

Our oldest son, Will, completed his Eagle Scout award before we moved but was unable to have his board of review. He either has to go back to Florida to do it in person or the council has to allow him to do it remotely. We hope that in the time of coronavirus the council is fine with remote procedures, but we'll see.

Our second oldest son, Linus, finished his baseball season in Florida. Other parents and coaches keep telling us how great he is, so I guess we have to take this a little more seriously? But I REALLY don't want to become a baseball parent. I'm not in the requisite shape to fight anybody in a parking lot, which I'm pretty sure is de rigueur.

Our youngest son, Simon, has not had any significant changes in his life, but it seems kind of jerky to mention every kid EXCEPT him.

At the end of April I flew back to Florida. It was what we call The Williversary, which is our wedding anniversary and Will's birthday (April 28th). We loaded another moving truck, dealt with surprised neighbors who thought we'd split up, and drove to Ohio.

I've been very busy with everything that a new job and new house involve, but ideally that's settling down now. So much so that perhaps semi-regular blogging can make a comeback in my life. Remember, my goal is to keep blogging until either 1) blogging becomes cool again, or 2) society enters a new Dark Age where the Internet no longer works because some combination of solar flare and nuclear war has destroyed all electronics. Unfortunately, it's looking more and more like #2 will be the winner of that horserace.