Repo man

About seventeen years ago, I was living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I was a resident missionary with STEM Ministries.

STEM is a missions organization with a focus on the North American church. By providing groups from the United States and Canada with short-term experiences in third world nations in the Caribbean and South America, it hopes to awaken the church in two of the wealthiest nations on Earth to the global scale of God's work.

In other words, it might seem really pressing to build a state-of-the-art nursery with a cappuccino bar for the workers, but there are Christians in the Dominican Republic where they'd be grateful for a corrugated tin roof to keep the rain and sun out.

It's a pretty straightforward proposition: Show American Christians what the rest of the world is like, and let God challenge their preconceptions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you forget right away, sometimes your experiences in the third world stay with you for the rest of your life.

While I was there, one of the nationals we worked with came to the ministry with a problem. He needed money, or the bank would take the land he and his family had been living on. Seventeen years is a long time, so I don't remember all the details. What I mostly remember is Steve Schmidt, our base director, mentioned that another missionary he knew would categorize this fellow's problems as the wealthy ignoring the plight of the poor, if not outright taking advantage of them.

Steve dismissed that as nonsense, since as he (correctly) pointed out, the fellow in question did have the money for the bank payment, or at least he used to. Like many people, he had used the money for other things, including things that he hadn't needed.

That's actually a common situation in Haiti, I'm afraid. A boujwa will come and buy a piece of property from someone for a handsome price, and tell him that he's going to build a house there in 10 years or so. Ten years will come and go, and then the boujwa will start building his house.

The former owner of the land, sadly, will still be on the property and will no longer have the handsome sum, which he theoretically could have used to buy land elsewhere, buy some goats or pigs to start a business and raise his family out of poverty, or something of the sort. Sadly, the owner usually will have done none of those things, and now has nothing left to show for the money he once was paid. It's all gone, and soon they are not only out of the money, they are out of the place they have lived for years.

There's no denying that the fellow who sold his home and then frittered away the money -- aside from any money that was put to a good use, like sending the kids to school -- made some really stupid decisions with his money, and in the end has to shoulder responsibility for his plight. On the other hand, it's a pretty cold thing to throw a family out of their homes, and leave them to fend for themselves.

Steve isn't that cold. He gave our national colleague some of the ministry's designated mercy money -- not enough to cover the whole payment, but a good chunk of it. The idea was that he would have to earn the rest of the money somehow, and make some adjustments, rather than us encouraging dependency on the "rich white missionaries."

Still, the story has stuck with me for the past 17 years because I can't shake the fundamental wrongness of evicting people from their homes. That feeling has stayed with me, and in recent months has grown still stronger, as banks that essentially preyed upon people by offering them mortgages that they couldn't afford, all in the name of making a buck. And while those homeowners have been thrown out onto the street, figuratively or literally, the executives responsible for the mess have been raking in huge bonuses even as the economy comes crashing down around the ears of the rest of us.

One fellow I know -- a dyed-in-the-wool God-is-a-Republican sort of Christian -- insists that capitalism is biblical. I'm not sure entirely how he justifies that, but there you have it. American-style capitalism unquestionably grew out of the Protestant work ethic practiced by groups like the Puritans and the Moravians, but it's quite a stretch to my mind to see Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" as being in sync with a text that never really got into particulars of economic theory beyond things like stressing the value of honest weights. At best, I can say that it is an extrabiblical economic system that can be shaped by biblical values of compassion (as opposed to the greed that drives the market most times).

But you know, home ownership is one area where capitalism keeps running afoul of biblical values, I think. In the U.S. economy, if I default on my mortgage, the bank theoretically has the legal right to foreclose on the mortgage and kick me, my wife, and our children, out onto the street.It doesn't matter if I've lost my job because of what the financial giants have done to the economy, it doesn't matter if they sold me a predatory mortgage for a market price that is three times the house's actual worth. If they have my signature on that mortgage contract, theoretically they have the legal right to kick me out of the house and try to sell it to recoup their losses.

There's something else at work here, though. While the hardcore apologists of a free market will expound on the virtues of tough love and making people take the consequences of their bad choices like parents disciplining an unruly child, it's not hard to find public sympathy for homeowners who are falling prey to economic forces that they have no control over.

There is something fundamentally unjust about evicting people from their homes. Not just unfair, but unjust. There is a fundamental connection between people and the homes they live in that we violate at our peril and to our shame.

The Bible backs me up on that. In ancient Israel, where my friend sees evidence of capitalism at work, that relationship was inviolate. An Israelite could buy the land of another Israelite, it's true, but only for seven years. Levitical law requires that when that seven-year period ended, the land had to be returned to its previous owner. The Torah also instituted the Jubilee, a period that came once every 50 years, where all debts were canceled, all slaves were set free, and all property rights were restored.

And therein lies a challenge for the American church as we stand on the cusp of what may blossom into the Second Great Depression. As we move forward, we must be mindful that we do have neither the right nor the authority to dictate to the rest of society how it should function.

But we should -- we must -- champion justice, and we have an obligation to advance alternatives to what our society practices, alternatives that respect and safeguard the basic dignity of everyone, especially those whose lives so often are chewed up in the cogs and gears of the systems that make our society work.

Some countercultural groups like The Jesus People in Chicago, or A Simple Way in Philadelphia, have explored the power and strength of communal living in contemporary society. Clearly that's not for everyone, but the alternatives are limited only by our faith and our imagination.

In the name of the one we claim to follow, we have a calling to do better.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Waiting for hammerfall as the economy teeters

The Dow is around 8500 now. So I think it's a fair question; what do we do for work, if layoffs happen?

Me, I'm simultaneously looking for work and trying to build my free-lance client base so I can have the bases covered either way. And if my clientele builds, theoretically I can recommend friends for other work, like web design, photography or illustration that are related to what I do but outside my ability set.

And because Natasha and I own our own house, live in a city with a high demand for rental property, and still are making our mortgage payments, we've talked briefly about letting the spare room or -- if we can find a way to make it work -- potentially the entire house, though I'd prefer to avoid that alternative if we can.

The big thing right now is to reduce expenses however we can. We make our own bread, and as many of our meals from scratch as we can, which has kept our food bill fairly steady the past year, particularly with the garden providing beans, tomatoes, and some other vegetables. I've been relying on the library more than ever for books and movies, and expect that if it comes to it during the winter, I'll probably spend most of the day there as well, using the WiFi connection to get my work done in a building where I don't have to foot the heating bill myself.

Some friends of ours came up with a great way to reduce their expenses, by sharing a house with another family. It gives them all full access to an entire house (for the most part), for half the price. Utilities are cut in two, food becomes cheaper per person because of the economies of scale, and the hosting family gets extra money for their mortgage while the second family is saving on their rent.

One perspective that I have found helps is to consider that everything you buy assumes the intrinsic value of the money you spent buying it. Thus, if I spend $14 on a pair of pants, those pants are worth $14 even if I can't wear them anymore. So, rather than throwing them out (and tossing my money into a landfill) or simply recycling them (thereby tossing my money into a recycling bin), I find some other use for the material, to get more bang for my buck.

Thus I have a rug made of old jeans; a tote bag also made from denim that saves me 2 cents every time I use it at the supermarket; a blanket-in-progress made from socks and other clothes too worn out to be useful as clothes, but quite warm as a blanket.

Our trash output has dropped to one garbage can every month, or less; we spend no money on fertilizer, because we compost so much; and I'm in the process of turning an old vanity sink into a game cabinet because I saw a new use for the wood and basic structure, with a few alterations.

If more of us had this attitude, and for a longer time -- it used to be standard practice for Americans, as in the rest of the world as well -- we probably wouldn't be in quite the dire straits that we're in now.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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bailout blues

I'm not opposed to the government stepping in and bailing out some of the financial giants that have gone down the past week. When your patient has gone into cardiac arrest, you need to keep the heart functioning. The financial sector is the heart of our economy.

What I object to is that there has been little effort made to provide support for Joe and Jane America who have lost their homes in this bubble burst. The benefit they will receive from this will amount to the "trickle down," which is to say that it does not exist. Those who do stand to benefit are the power brokers and uberwealthy whose decisions and actions put the economy into this mess. This is the government once more taking the side of the wealthy.

The economic effect of the bailout would have the same effect by bailing out homeowners, with the additional benefit of allowing working class homeowners to remain in their homes. This has been rejected for reasons that elude me. Discussions instead center on allowing homeowners to be thrown out of their homes, and protecting the brokers whose irresponsibility created the market crash.

From what I understand of the bailout that was rejected Monday -- and I can't imagine the one being considered now differs much in this regard -- is that it would have allowed no golden parachutes for CEO's hired after the bailout. Those who presided over the worse financial collapse in 70 years, however, still get theirs.

In other words, it still protects the wealthy malefactors while managing to screw over the little guy. What a country.

This may be how the world works, and how it always has worked, but I see no reason why we should tolerate or accept it, nor that we should facilitate it. Our government was founded to protect the people from tyranny, and that includes economic and financial tyranny as well as political. It is within the purview of the government, in granting the emergency aid, to lay down stipulations for receiving that aid. That includes "No bonus for failing."

The people who have presided over the crash of WaMu, Lehman Bros., AIG and the others are not entitled to turn a hefty profit over their greed and incompetence. The U.S. Government was, the last I knew, planning a rescue operation that would reward them personally for their failure, and then close the barn door after all the horses had left, so there would be no more golden parachutes for later failures.

I call that wrong. Anyone with me?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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alarmism?

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"

— Revelation 6:5-6

Am I being a bit dramatic here? Maybe.

On the other hand, you try living on unemployment checks, a little part-time work that has dried up, and the odd free-lance assignment you can find, for three months, with no insurance for two months. See how calmly you take it when the economy goes to hell in a handbag while leaders of both parties preen and posture and prepare to bail out the wealthy power-brokers who screwed it all up, while accusing each other of posturing and telling the people who need help the most, "Sorry, you have made your bed and now you must lie in it."

Yeah, I'm a little preoccupied about the mess, and I've been praying for grace and faith for myself, wisdom and compassion for our congressional leaders, and common sense and compassion for the fat cats who have driven us to this point.

Still, it's hard not to see some divine action in here. God has used us to judge and lay low a number of empires and evil regimes the last hundred years or more. It's not hard to picture him saying, "And now I shall judge the ax."

We have done a lot on the international scene that we have felt justified in doing simply because we could and it was in our "national interest," as though that meant it automatically was in everyone's best interests -- wholesale destruction of the American Indian nations, for starters, without getting into our colonialesque behaviors in Africa and Asia.

And if I'm being melodramatic and expecting the worst, let me just say that expecting the worst means you're rarely disappointed, and occasionally surprised in a pleasant manner.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.

A few predictions about where gas is taking us

With gas at nearly $4 a gallon in most parts of the country and topping $5 in some states, I'd like to make a few predictions about the next few years.

1. Big Oil is going to be as popular as President Bush. There's going to be some serious pushback against oil companies for making record profits while the rest of are forking over $60 or more to fill up our gas tanks. Right now it's just congressional hearings. I'll be surprised if we don't see some sort of regulatory controls put in place, and soon, to rein in the energy speculators who are driving oil costs up so high, so quickly.

That's soon as is in "under the next presidential administration." Bush is solidly in the Republican camp that holds that government regulation of corporations and business is fundamentally bad for America. Whoever our next president is, we're likely to see a different policy take root, one that allows greater regulation of commodities such as oil, such as we had before the Reagan administration began dismantling regulation.

2. People are going to drive a lot less. Forget canceled or scaled-down vacations, basic day-to-day travel is going to take a hit. We're seeing some of that already, as commuter trains are becoming more popular in areas where they exist, as more businesses encourage carpooling, and so on.

Speaking for myself, I've made a tremendous effort to combine trips, even if it means delaying getting something for a few days. I've gone without milk for three days rather than make a trip to the supermarket before I take Rachel to gymnastics on Thursday, right next to the supermarket. We also walk a lot more. I walk Evangeline to school every day now, and back from school when I can, and I expect on Sunday that we will walk to church as well.

We're likely to see changes in the way people attend church or other houses of worship, for that matter. People who have been driving 20 minutes or more to attend worship services somewhere else probably are going to stop. Many of them will just stop going, and others who don't stop going will at least look for a place closer to home.

That will hold true for other things as well. I imagine that we're going to see a rise in the number of people who live near where they work. They'll either get new jobs, or they'll move. A 40- or 60-minute commute by car just isn't going to be feasible anymore.

3. Cars are going to change as well. Remember how upset Detroit was at the thought of tough new mileage standards that were still weaker than anything else in the world?

We're going to see how fast Detroit can design more efficient cars. Cars made in America are going to be smaller and lighter, and they're going to get a heck of a lot better than 24 mpg. Two-seaters like the Fortwo will become more standard for singles, married couples without children, and commuters; and even family cars will change. We're going to see a lot fewer sport utility vehicles and no Hummers, and a lot more hybrids.

New York and Los Angeles already are running some experiments with fuel-cell cars. If any politicians out there are smart and have an eye to the future, they're going to make it a priority to buy those cars for city and state-owned fleets.

That will drive down the price of the cars, for starters, but it also will lay the foundation for a distribution infrastructure for hydrogen fuel, making widespread use more feasible.

4. People are going to continue to buy less. Who can afford to spend $40 taking a family of four out to eat at a restaurant when you can feed that same family for less than $8 with a homemade meal?

And with food and fuel costing so much more, and with fuel driving up the cost of everything it's used to transport, who's got the money for frivolous purchases? Expect less expensive Christmases and birthdays, more hand-me-down clothing, and more of an effort to salvage things we once would have thrown away without a second thought.

5. People with yards are going to realize that there are better things to grow on their land than grass. If you pay $2 for a pound of tomatoes, but can buy an entire tomato plant for that same $2 at a nursery, where are you going to spend your money?

You may buy tomatoes until yours are ripe enough to eat, but we're going to see a lot more people having a go at gardening. I've already saved a bundle on the lettuce we grow in our garden, and I hope to save more on beans, tomatoes, yellow squash and zucchini. Maybe even some spices and some cucumbers. We'll have to see.

Just about everyone can grow some sort of vegetable. Even apartment-dwellers typically have a porch where they could put a tomato plant in a ten-gallon pot, or a windowbox where they can grow lettuce cheaply. A smart politician, or at least one with a sense of leadership, is going to make "liberty gardens" into a matter of patriotism, as FDR did with victory gardens during World War II.

It wouldn't take much effort to turn vacant lots into community gardens, to keep people from going hungry, nor would it take much sacrifice for corporations with huge and useless lawns to convert some of that space over to community agriculture, saving themselves the cost of maintaining their lawns and banking themselves some serious goodwill in the public eye.

trickle down, trickle up

I understand the principles and how Reaganomics is supposed to work, but I don't buy it. Haven't for years. The divide between blue and white collar classes grew tremendously during the Reagan-Bush years, because while the rising tide might have lifted all boats, it lifted the yachts much higher than it lifted the rowboats and rafts.

Let's call it what it is: It's giving favors to the wealthy. I don't see that as particularly compatible with a Kingdom of God mindset.

I'm not sure over the long haul that all boats have been lifted, nor am I convinced that Reagan's trickle-down policies deserve all the credit they get for getting the economy going again. The economy is a complex system, and it's reductionist to the point of absurdity to credit the recovery of the economy in the 1980s solely to an economic policy that favors the wealthy over the working class.

There are other factors to consider, including efforts by the Fed during the Carter years to reduce inflation, and the sharp decline in oil prices owing to supply shocks in the Middle East that led to a vast increase in the amount of oil on the market. You're my age; I'm sure you recall the days of gas rationing and can imagine the constraints that placed on travel and transportation, and the palpable relief we all felt when rationing ended. He may have been president when that happened, but I don't think Reagan deserves credit for changes in the oil market.

Nor does Reagan deserve credit for Fed policies that had been in place well before he was elected to the presidency. I recall in 1984, though I was only entering ninth grade, some of the debate as to whether Reagan should be credited for the economic recovery, or if it should go to Carter, though I can't say that I was attentive enough to the issue at the time to understand the arguments involved.

Did trickle-down economics have some role in the economic recovery? It's possible; still if you make that money available to the neediest members of society, it also is reinvested, in their neighborhoods, both in terms of purchases and in terms of long-term capital improvements and investments, with start-up businesses and such. And it'll eventually trickle its way up to the "lucky ducks" at the top of the pond too.

Reaganomics also assumes that the wealthy and the corporations will spend their money here in America to increase their wealth. The flow of manufacturing jobs and industry to India, Mexico and especially China reveals that to a pretty bad assumption.

I know how the free market is supposed to work. I took economics years ago. I know how Reaganomics is supposed to work.

But the market doesn't work that way. It's predatory, and by the time supply and demand correct things like overreliance on fossil fuels for our transportation needs, it's too late. Gas has passed $3 a gallon in most of the country and is climbing higher, and our government officials feel like congratulating themselves on tough new mileage requirements that are weaker than any major market elsewhere in the world already requires at a minimum.

The Constitution set up government to protect us from tyrrany. I say that includes the tyranny of corporate America as much as from tyranny of government, or any other form of tyranny that can exist.

economic policy

I just read a fascinating column from the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson about what politicians can do to mess up the American economy, such as failing to have a national industrial policy beyond "Leave the businesses alone, and they'll do what's best for America."

In the late '90s, unions and liberals opposed permanently normalizing trade relations with China. But orthodox economists and even more orthodox editorialists heaped scorn on all these ideas, which died quiet deaths -- even as the governments of nations that have supplanted us as the world's manufacturers (most notably, China) adhered to domestic content regulations and invested heavily in strategic industries, to the betterment of their citizens.

Today, 20 years after we decided not to have an industrial policy, we have an industrial base that employs an ever-smaller number of Americans. What has kept us afloat during the current decade hasn't been our productive capacity but the inflation of our assets -- the rising value of our homes, against which we've borrowed to purchase the things we could not afford out of our stagnant paychecks. To the extent that the United States had a macro-economic strategy, it was Shop Till You Drop.

So we've shopped. And now we've dropped.

Read the entire column

Obama has suggested boosting America's economy with "green collar" industry, by having the government invest in that much the way it once invested in steel and other heavy industry. It makes sense to me.

Ways you can wreck the U.S. economy at home

It's time to ruin the U.S. economy.

As President Bush and our congressional representatives repeatedly have reminded us, it's our patriotic duty to keep on spending money so our economy can stay afloat. That's why the government is issuing $12.5 billion in tax rebates: so we'll spend it and stimulate a sluggish economy.

It follows, then, that if you're honoring other economic principles of thrift, investing and saving money, adopting a pay-as-you-go attitude, do-it-yourself-ing, and delaying needless purchases, that you are unpatriotic and working to undermine the economy further. So, it's time to list ways that each of us is hurting the U.S. economy. Tried and true, or bold and experimental, it doesn't matter. Just list away.

1. Thrift. I love to read. Always have. I've been known to go to a bookstore and plunk down $60 or $70 in a single visit to feed my addiction. Alas, in my zeal to destroy the U.S. economy, I am no longer buying books for myself. I'm borrowing them from the library, and from friends who I know have them. Worse, I'm encouraging others to follow my footsteps in irresponsibility. I recently started a book club, and lent my copy of our first read to two other people so they didn't buy copies. That's $14 I kept away from economic stimulus. I do the same with movies too.

2. Delaying needless purchases. I have no cable or satellite TV, nor high-speed Internet. I probably keep about $80 to $100 of economic stimulus locked up in savings, debt reduction or utilities by skipping out on these. And that's just the immediate loss to the economy.

When you consider that I also miss all those commercials for movies to see, restaurants to eat at, cars to buy, wireless phone service to subscribe to, and everything else, I'm probably withholding thousands of dollars from retailers and service providers each year. True, we do occasionally buy a season of a favorite TV show -- we just bought Season 3 of "Battlestar Galactica," for instance -- but since a season of a show costs less than a month of cable TV, it hardly works out. (On the other hand, the lack of commercials makes the show much better to watch.)

 I also have no cell phone, none at all.

3. Do-it-yourself . I can bake pizza for eight for less than $6, make two loaves of bread for less than $1, and make more than 200 chocolate chip cookies for less than $5. Food even tastes better this way.

By not buying from Pizza Hut, I save around $30; by not buying bread at the supermarket, I save more than $4; and by not buying Chips Ahoy, I save about $23, give or take. And there's not even any high fructose corn syrup in my baking, which means I'm saving even more money on medication by not developing diabetes or other weight-related health problems.

I have a date with the bathroom sink this weekend to fix an annoying pipe leak; God only knows how many hundreds of dollars I may be keeping from the economy if I fix that by myself. Admittedly, this isn't all it's cracked up to be if you don't know what you're doing, but it's still a good place to start.

4. Savings and investment. When we get our tax rebate, we plan to invest some of it for retirement, and use the rest of it to pay down our debt. Similarly, once the car is paid off, we plan to redirect those car payments toward debt. (For the record: mortgage, college loans, and a home-equity line of credit we used to repair the roof and add insulation to the house. No month-to-month credit card debt.)

All things considered, I am extremely unpatriotic.

the rise and fall of the american empire

A friend of mine from my biweekly D&D sessions sent me a lengthy piece from CTheory that analyzes political, social and economic trends in the United States today, and looks ahead to the next fifty years. It's a fascinating essay, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of it either. It's fairly lengthy and not as readable as one would wish for something this complex. I definitely see the power to what the author is saying, though, on several points:

• America has become a nation of consumers rather than producers. Our industry has been outsourced to other countries, and many "American" businesses are, more truthfully, multinational companies with assets so widely scattered it's hardly fair to say that they're American in the sense that originally would have meant. Our factories are in Mexico and China, our tech support comes from India, and plenty of other intellectual services, such as architecture, have been outsourced to places like Egypt, where the knowledge comes more cheaply than from a place here in the U.S.; and even our food is grown all over the world. It makes shareholders happy when the bottom line is blacker, but it makes us progressively less capable to provide for ourselves. As fuel costs continue to soar, we can expect the price of the goods we consume to rise also, and we'll have little alternative,since we've shut down our factories, developed our farms, and outsourced everything else.
• Our economy is riding an inflated bubble, and we're probably facing another Depression in the next ten years. Savings reached zero percent this year, and people are borrowing like crazy to get everything. It's a "standard of living" issue, but our standard of living is preposterous, with the things we "need." The writer notes -- and I agree -- that we've inverted the Protestant work ethic that made our nation what it is (or was). Instead of working hard with a delayed gratification, we've opted for a model of instant gratification where we get what we want now, even if we don't need it, and spend the next twenty or thirty years working our way out of debt. We do this not just with houses, but with cars, education, appliances, entertainment and pretty much everything else we buy. That's unsound economics, as anyone who remembers Black Friday in 1987 will attest.
• We're ignoramuses of our own history and culture. I actually thought this was an interesting stament in the piece you sent, since the author makes the point that our pop culture is recycling itself, with remakes of old TV shows, movies and TV shows as movies, a la "Dukes of Hazard." Part of this is the dimming of the American mind, to be sure, but it also hearkens back to the lost tradition of storytelling, where people would retell familiar stories from one generation to the next. What I gleaned from this point was that our new mass storytelling isn't connecting to our cultural heritage -- our history, Shakespeare, antiquity, the Bible -- it's connecting to recent stuff instead, and most of it fairly lightweight, like superhero movies or "Dukes of Hazzard." Rather than wrestling with the deep and troubling stories told by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo or Moses, we're going for the simple-minded morality tales of Batman fighting the Scarecrow, and the Duke boys getting the upper hand on Roscoe P. Coaltrain.

I'd have to say that I think a lot of the analysis here is dead-on, and it makes me think of a line from Alex Ross' "Uncle Sam" comic with Vertigo a few years back. Brittania, talking to Sam, recalls when she fell from glory and then adds: "Of course, when you fall, it's going to make what I went through look like a bloody cricket match."

And as the writer interprets from current events, it's not that the United States is going to fall. We've already started to topple.

twenty-five cents' worth of trickle-down

Speaking personally, I think the only trickle-down benefit I've received in the 17 years I've been in the work force was the quarter I found in the parking lot back in '96.

The aggregation of wealth to an increasingly small minority is not a good thing, and it is not something we should cheer. True, the gospel isn't about money and it's foolish to argue that Christ's sole or even primary concern is that the poor become wealthier. That's Marxism, not Christianity.

Money is a spiritual force, not merely an economic one, and it is one that has twisted American society into unbelievable knots. There's nothing wrong with having money, but judging by our preoccupation with accumulating and retaining wealth, I'd say we don't have money. It has us.

Laissez faire is as destructive to a society as democracy. The one leads to a cutthroat mentality as robber barons rise to the top and crush whomever they want; the other leads to popular but ultimately ineffective officials who win on the merits of personality rather than actual ability. And try as we might, no regulation or amendments or legislative efforts will ever correct those problems. They'll just give us new opportunities to make things worse.

I don't know which is worse: Democrats who use the "class warfare" notion to advance their cause politically, or Republicans who just don't care, as long as their power base and interests are served.