"Bow before me, and I shall grant your heart's desires!!"
In these difficult financial times, many of us find ourselves thinking about money. We may even find ourselves thinking about how we think about money. We’ll call it “Economic Epistemology.” I realize it’s election season, but when public figures start using moral words like “greed,” you know things are going badly.
Public figures have also been using the word “socialism,” a lot. One party has used the term more than the other, but both have used it to insult the other.
And a few days ago I had a startling revelation. People accuse each other of socialism when they propose to use government money (which is really public money) to benefit people who are not like them.
It works like this:
If you offer to give tax cuts to the lower and middle classes, Republicans cry “socialism!” They do this because they are rich, and would like the government to help them stay that way. And a good way to do that is to keep other people from getting any.
If you offer corporate bailouts and tax cuts to corporations, Democrats cry “socialism!” They do this because they would like to be rich, and for the government to help them get that way. And a good way to do that is to take money from people who already have a bunch.
Am I way off?
Anyway, enough incendiary talk from me. Here’s some incendiary talk from our friend G.K. Chesterton on democracy, the doctrine of human sinfulness, and the corrupting power of wealth:
“If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.
Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity.
Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest -- if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this -- that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable.
You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, "I respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes." But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes." For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history.
In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.”
Preach on brother!
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