“The People are Revolting”  
May 14, 2017    Community Christian Church     Roger Ray, pastor

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Aristotle’s Politics, Book VI, Chapter 5

Poverty is the cause of the defects of democracy. That is the reason why measures should be taken to ensure a permanent level of prosperity. This is in the interest of all classes, including the prosperous themselves; and therefore the proper policy is to accumulate any surplus revenue in a fund, and then to distribute this fund in block grants to the poor. The ideal method of distribution, if a sufficient fund can be accumulated, is to make such grants sufficient for the purchase of a plot of land: failing that, they should be large enough to start men in commerce or agriculture.

In the midst of our adult class’ discussions of Noam Chomsky’s latest book, Requiem for the American Dream, I ran across a BBC interview with Chomsky in which he is defending his rather outrageous statement that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. The last time a Jewish guy said such radical things the government had him killed and his followers swore that he rose from the dead!

Chomsky defended this extreme statement by citing one issue in specific: the effective push to destroy the planet’s ability to support human life. You may call it deregulation, or job creating environmental policy, but the net effective is accelerating the already alarming degree to which human activity is changing the global climate, poisoning the air, water, and earth, and rolling back protections on food and drug safety. Whether these measures are not intended to kill off the human race or not is immaterial. The net effective of their program will do just that.

The problem is that we progressives already see these points and agree with them and those who do not see them, though they would swear that they had no desire to exchange the long term prospects of the human race for short term economic profits, they resolutely refuse to face what we call “facts.”

While deriding consumers of Fake News, science deniers, and the shallow end of the theological pool, gives the rest of us a bit of consolation and satisfaction, as a form of persuasion, it appears to be an utter failure. And as much as I respect the intellect of Noam Chomsky, calling the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in history is not likely to get many Republicans to sit down for a free and open exchange of ideas.

If it is not too late for me to even pretend that I can be a part of reconciling the deep divide in America today, I would like to call upon two of Chomsky’s own favorite resources he used in his book that come from before there was a Republican and a Democratic party in America, and, in the case of Aristotle, long before there was an America.

There are ways in which America is, or at least was, the greatest nation in the world. We certainly have not perfected either freedom or democracy and we have never had what could be called an entirely fair free market economy that was tethered to the common good and service to democracy but I think that it is fair to say that we have done a better job then whoever was in second place for most of the past century.

But pure democracy and an unregulated free market will inevitably lead to either anarchy of the Mad Max variety or a wealthy aristocracy of the sort that Mel Brooks parodied The History of the World, Part 1, where, during the French Revolution, Count DeMony visits the king and tells him that “The People are revolting” and the king replies, “They sure are, they stink on ice.”

But he claims to love the peasants when suddenly he turns to shoot skeet but rather than the traditional clay pigeons being thrown in the air, the king is shooting at peasants.

The complete insensitivity of the ruling class toward the suffering of the poor is often portrayed as either a primary factor or at least a contributing factor to most of modern history’s revolutions.

Aristotle was aware 2500 years ago that without some regulation, democracy and a free market would have a fatal flaw and that mortal vulnerability is called poverty. From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, anyone who has thought seriously about Democracy and the free market has realized that a nation endowed with both would, within a very few years, self destruct without some protections in place.

Now, we’re a church, and church folks can generally be assumed to be opposed to poverty. Granted, that a whole lot of religion treats poverty like a pious project that we just spruce up and give a fresh coat of paint now and again to keep our halos polished but underlying most spiritual traditions is a compassionate desire to elevate the lives of the poor.

But what about the Ayn Rand dimension of politics and banking, or the Ayn Rand in stained glass/fake religion we see in so much of modern politics? Minus the influence of a spiritual and compassionate perspective, what is their attitude toward poverty? 

I would like to argue that if the rich want more than anything to get richer, that mere greed should also motivate them to want to elevate the health, education, and hence, EMPLOYMENT of the poor so that they will get busy creating wealth and paying taxes.

Again, as St. Chomsky points out, in America’s early days, our founders set limits to Democracy so that the poor could vote and have an appearance of a voice in how the country was run, but they made sure that their votes didn’t count for much and that power remain in the hands of corporations and the wealthy. Aristotle proposed that we solve the same problem differently, that is, pay the poor enough for them to actually rise out of poverty…. Hopefully enough to become landowners but if not that, at least business owners.

And here, men and women, we have to acknowledge that either way works if your goal is merely to maintain peace and stability but if you want to really get the money machine going, creating wealth and growing the economy, then, honestly, the compassionate way works best. Being concerned about the nutrition, healthcare, education, and employment of the poor is not just a Jesus solution, it is an Adam Smith “Wealth of Nations” solution.

Republicans and Democrats don’t have to be at lager heads about universal healthcare, free college education, and replacing the minimum wage with a living wage if only we can get Democrats to realize that we want to grow the economy and if we can get Republicans to realize that short-term economic goals work against their long term best interests.

Democrats need to stop thinking in terms of food stamps and public housing and start thinking about free college education and better salaries. And Republicans need to stop thinking about exporting labor and building more prisons and get behind policies that really will lift all boats.

Let me give you one example from before Republicans and Democrats were a thing.  When Adam Smith left Scotland to see the newly birth democracy in America, he wrote about how our freedom of movement in labor was going to accelerate our economic growth so that we would shortly surpass Europe. In Europe and in Great Britain, labor was too tightly controlled by apprenticeships and trade unions. In the newly formed USA, laborers could freely move from place to place and from trade to trade based on skill and demand. This is obviously much better for both the laborer and the economy.

But two hundred years after Adam Smith published this praise of American labor freedom, we had accidentally killed the goose that laid the golden egg by tying healthcare to employment. Health insurance, which is crucial to modern life, can become so expensive that a person can’t leave a job where they have health insurance to go start a new business, become an inventor, or even quit work for a while to earn a degree or take job training.

What the old apprenticeship and trade unions did to impede the circulation of labor was nothing compared to our prison of health care being tied to our jobs. There were a number of reasons that America became a world dominating economic force but chief among those reasons was a work force that was free to move, innovate, invent, and change based on opportunity.

Take that away and our economy slows to nearly imperceptible growth. And, for the truly market driven among us, if a national health care program were enacted tomorrow by the time the markets closed the stock value of old corporations such as the automobile and high tech industries would skyrocket to new heights. The most expensive thing on any new car, refrigerator, or air conditioner today is the healthcare costs of their retired workforce. Remove that one thing, and American products immediately become much more affordable on the world market….remember when Detroit was the city that every city wanted to be? It could be that again if only we could see beyond the end of our noses.

I’m no diplomat and I have no desire to disguise the thousands of pages of liberal ire I’ve expressed about the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich but I am saying that facts are not partisan and that capitalism doesn’t have to become economic cannibalism. There is a way that America became greater than its peers among the nations of the world and we have, out of greed and moral laziness, surrendered much of our progress.

I think that we religious, bleeding heart, liberals can find a way to work with self-serving conservatives to make America great again if we can just get the 1% to agree that even they can be more wealthy if the 99% have an improved standard of living. 1% of a bigger pie is better than 50% of a tiny pie.

Chomsky is probably right in saying that the Republican party is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.

All I’m saying is that they don’t have to stay in that spot. We’re here to help whenever you are ready.