Posted on 05/24/2013 8:07:53 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
What are golden calves for? To be ridden by kings. The story in Exodus is a story of people enslaved to the state, led by God to freedom, but who keep lapsing back to the security of Egypt with its divine king and its steady meals and without the burden of choice. Moses was on the mountain receiving The Book of the Covenant, the civil implementation of the ten commandments, a short national constitution with a small state and strong protections of property rights. While he did that, the people reverted, and tried to reconstitute Egypt and its political cult.
Over the past two hundred years, the world, led by England and the U.S., has moved toward enormously higher levels of economic freedom and the resulting prosperity. Since the fall of the Soviet experiment, that was extended to more of mankind. But since the financial crisis, the general trend in the world has been to go back, to extend to the state power over markets. Any call to elevate the state even more, to collect our assets and melt them into some collective image which we can all ride backwards in history to the time before the free-market seems like a call to go back to Egypt, to security and slavery.
The pope attacks the market order because he finds it ‘faceless’ and ‘lacking any truly human goal.’ He’s right: the market does not have a face. But that’s only because it has 7 billion faces. It doesn’t have a human purpose, but that’s because it has 7 billion human purposes. If you want an economy with a face and a human purpose, then the Egypt of the Exodus era is your place and the Pharaoh of the exodus is your man.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Christians talk about Christ but today they mean Marx.
As I told my DRE recently, "Don't tell me all these Bishops who can understand the 'nuance' of how natural family planning is NOT birth control, can't understand market economics."
He just shook his head and agreed with me....
WE cannot forget that that David Ricardo and Karl Marx looked upon men and women as purely economic beings. Neither is compatible with Christian thought. The only advantage of economic liberalism over Marxism is that it does not idolize the state. It does leave room for intermediate social institutions. However, it leads to cartels that join with the state to reduce the power of such institutions.
The Catholic Church has always spoken out against socialism; Popes of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries wrote encyclicals against it. The concepts of private property and rights to keeping one’s wages were central themes. While it is easy for haters to single out the relationships the Church had with some right-wing governments in early twentieth century Europe, that opposition to socialist (and by extension, Bolshevism) was key.
The Christian people of Europe knew what they were facing in the 1930s; Stalin had demonstrated it for them in the Ukraine (and Spain). Many decided that they would at least have freedom to worship and private property rights with fascism; the United States fought on the side that would deprive them of those rights. For eastern Europe, those rights would not return for nearly 50 years.
However, my concern isn't really with the RCC, per se. I am not Catholic, for one thing. For another, my own Church, or rather denomination, the Southern Baptists, have been making noises that I do not like lately.
The institutions may waver or stray, nut God's Word is constant.
In the case of the Catholic Church, Americans (of all faiths) have to separate what the Vatican’s positions are from those taken by the American Catholic Church; the latter often pushes/magnifies those stances which it thinks will be palatable to the larger public, while ignoring/dulling those messages that would make it clear that Catholics can never truly assimilate in an American culture determine to eliminate rules, norms, or morality.
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