Roger Ray, D.Min.
Now, it's not as if fiscal scolds really arrived at their position based on statistical evidence. As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination. - Paul Krugman, published Dec. 29, 2013 under the title Fiscal Fever Breaks
Money does not exist. Money is a concept. To illustrate this point, the philosopher Alan Watts used the analogy of a carpenter who came to work one day and was told that they could not finish building the house he was working on because they had run out of inches. A carpenter builds out of lumber but measures the lumber in inches but inches are not real.... Inches are a concept. Money is not real. It is used to measure the value of things and to make it easier to trade in objects, labor, energy and land.
Actual wealth resides in resources such as land, rare metals, energy sources, food, water, building materials, labor and vehicles. Money is just a concept we have invented to help us to distribute real wealth. Currency only works if we agree on the system and play by the economic rules that create it.
Real wealth is created when we build something, grow something, mine something, or assemble something. Unfortunately, our economic system allows for a great deal of real wealth to be transferred into the hands of people who do not create wealth, they simply own assets or control them through financial instruments and institutions. When we have idle workers who are not building, growing, and making things then our total real wealth is going down. The best of economic systems keeps people working in the creation of real wealth.
When the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, was speaking poetically of the way the world should be, how it could be if God were in charge, he said about workers that:
"They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.." (Isaiah 65.21-22)
The remnant of Israelites living in Babylon had been slaves. They built houses for their masters. They had been gardening to grow crops for their masters. And their memory of their people was the memory of slavery in Egypt and service to Assyria. They longed for justice and to them, what justice looked like was an economic system in which the poor got a share in what they produced.
In ancient times as well as in modern times, there is always some pressure on the economic system to give a smaller and smaller share of the produce to the people who are doing the producing and a larger and larger share to people who manage the financial institutions, the government, the land. From time to time, societies find that they have to restrike a balance between the rich and the poor or their entire society will collapse. This scenario has been seen on every continent in every age of history.
Often, it is the voice of the prophet, of the religious community, that tries to encourage a civilization to turn back before jumping off the economic cliff of no return. The liberation theology movement among Catholics in Latin America of the last century, gave us the phrase, "God's preferential option for the poor."
They noted that throughout the Old and New Testaments, there was a distinct preference given to the poor by God through the prophets, apostles and saints. For those of us in the progressive movement, this awareness of a spiritual concern for the poor can be traced to our choice to see ourselves as being connected to one another.
We have no shortage in our time of politicians who unashamedly cite the self centered philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand liked to call her views "objectivism" though some liken it to libertarianism. It reminds me more of a "I got mine" philosophy than of anything else. Most of us live in a world somewhere between the extremes of absolute selfishness and of absolute self-abnegation. Very few have followed the gospel imperative to "sell all we own and give to the poor," and not many more could accurately be portrayed as being an Ebenezer Scrooge. But between the extremes of Scrooge and St. Frances, there are a whole lot more people leaning towards the Scrooge end of the scale.
Not because it is mandated in scripture or because it is a part of a romanticized view of poverty but because we have chosen a life defined by radical compassion, we will not silent give our consent to an economic system that unfairly, unjustly, even irrationally impoverishes the many to enrich the few.
If you listen to the political rhetoric of our day, we must hate paying taxes and we love to vilify the lazy that live off of public assistance while rarely questioning why the top 1% in America is taking 25% of the money that is being earned in our nation.
We have an economic system in our country that looks fair but is, in fact stacked in favor of the rich.
It is as if you were going to play Monopoly with three friends but the friends started playing thirty minutes before you arrived. You play by the same rules, with the same dice and an equal buy-in from the bank but they will have already bought all of the assets and set up houses and hotels on the places where you will have to go.
No matter how hard you work, they are going to end up with everything you have. Increasingly, our system of economics will prevent the poor from ever being able to work their way out of poverty and will erode the middle class out of existence.
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, preached that we need a revolution in how we think about the distribution of wealth. She said, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."
When economic commentators insist that we cannot pay those who build, grow, or manufacture, our nation's real wealth a living wage because it would "hurt the economy" then you should immediately realize that you are reading an irrational defense of a filthy, rotten economic system that discourages the creation of real wealth in favor of simply transferring existing wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. They are asking you to accept a system in which they have already won and you have already lost before you ever get to roll your dice.
Those who resist raises to the minimum wage or who insist upon legislation that undermines the unions that protect worker's jobs, wages and benefits often cite studies that conclude that it is the greed of teachers, fire fighters, labor union members and selfish young people who want to go to college that is threatening our economic future. They use these studies, as Paul Krugman says, "the way a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not for illumination."
The stock market continues to climb to new heights, making the rich ever more rich, while real wealth remains stagnant or, in fact, is declining, eroding the middle class and undermining the economic future of our nation. We have been sold a malignant myth that wealthy people are job creators. That is a ridiculous claim. Rich people don't hire new employees unless there is a consumer demand that makes having more employees profitable. Demand in the marketplace is what creates jobs and demand comes, as more people are able to buy things.
Still, the far right cries out against labor unions, and a president that they insist upon labeling "socialist" while our nation's existing wealth continues to be handed over to the super rich and the middle class disappears before our eyes.
Naomi Klein describing the documentary "The Shock Doctrine" about her important research into the rise of disaster capitalism, says:
We are witnessing a transfer of wealth of unfathomable size. It is a transfer of wealth from the public hands, from the hands of government collected from regular people in the form of taxes, into the hands of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the world. Needless to say the very individuals and corporations that created this crisis.
The system that is set up to enrich corporations and is controlled by the same corporations will never be able to change the system into something that will work for the welfare of the whole nation. But what system works to create wealth and bolster the middle class?
Economist Robert Reich has a very plausible answer, the system employed in the United States of America between 1947 and 1977 when we built America's middle class and created the standard of living that was the envy of the world. Reich says in his documentary, "Inequality for All":
Look back over the last hundred years and you'll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income -- as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 -- the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.
Conversely, Reich points out that when we allow the greedy to control the system and grab all of the assets for themselves, the whole system crashes. He says:
During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion -- as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day -- growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 -- the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.
We tend to assume that great religious leaders were all very poor and that spiritual people must therefore be suspicious of wealth. Frankly, I think that is counter to what really alleviates human suffering. Sure, if there were only a hundred apples in the world and we were only a hundred people, no one should eat ten apples. The truth is that we have put a lot of apple growers out of business and fired the people who pick them.
While we do not trade in the guilt and fear of past religious eras, there is still such a thing as evil. It is evil to be so greedy that you hoard resources in a way that puts some out of work, forces others to work for poverty wages, and leaves many living on the edge of death. That's not evil because the Bible says so, even though it does; but it is evil because it causes suffering.
It seems most likely to me that whatever this is of heaven and hell in the universe is what we do with this life and so, having devoted ourselves to seek the greatest good for the largest number of people, working to defeat a system that creates widespread suffering for the comfort of a few so that we can replace it with an economy that puts people back to work and makes the basics of life available to everyone is the only way we can keep from turning heaven into hell.
