Posted on 09/26/2015 6:31:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When it comes to considering the arguments of newly resurgent Christian progressives, we hold these truths to be self-evident: Jesus was not a socialist, the Bible is not an economics textbook, and while scripture commands believers to help the poor, it also commands the poor to help themselves. As Pope Francis gains rock-star status on the economic left, Christians would do well to remember not just scripture, but the economic reality of recent world experience.
This morning, the pope addressed Congress with relative restraint. Rather than decrying the perceived excesses of global capitalism — calling it, as he once did, the “dung of the devil” or the “new colonialism” — he used more measured language. He urged American politicians to exert their primacy over “the economy and finance,” creating a community that shares its goods:
If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life.
While the words may be less fiery than those Francis has used in the past, their meaning is still clear: Politicians exist in part to mandate public economic sacrifice in the name of a nebulous “common good.”
Yet one must take great care when making religious claims about political management of the economy, never forgetting that ideology can’t trump human nature and outcomes matter more than intentions. I can agree wholeheartedly with the Pope’s calls for an ethical capitalism in which great wealth carries with it great responsibility. I remain wary of the rhetoric of redistribution.
One can scour the entire Bible without finding any example of progressive taxation or any endorsement of large-scale government redistribution of wealth. Instead, the default position is that the individual owns his property and the worker deserves his wages. While charity is an unquestioned obligation, scripture also places responsibilities on the poor that would make any good progressive blanch.
The Apostle Paul condemns idleness, saying, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” In the book of First Timothy, he goes even farther: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The bible even conditions church aid to widows on their age and reputation for good conduct: Young widows are excluded for fear that they will grow “idle.” These words sound extraordinarily harsh to modern ears, yet they reflect divine insight into fallen human nature — rewarding idleness will breed more idleness.
#share#Indeed, in the only government God did establish — ancient Israel — the “welfare” system stood in stark contrast to modern custom. Here’s how He commands the Israelites to use their possessions to care for the poor:
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner.
Not only is private property recognized (“your land”), but the welfare that does exist requires the poor to actually engage in the harvest to collect the gleanings.
God commands nations to strengthen the hand of the poor, and outcomes matter. Recent history demonstrates that capitalism, not socialism, is the great engine that lifts people out of poverty. In 2013 The Economist asked, “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” The answer wasn’t redistribution, but economic growth:
Fast-growing economies in the developing world have done most of the work. Between 1981 and 2001, China lifted 680 million people out of poverty. Since 2000, the acceleration of growth in developing countries has cut the numbers in extreme poverty outside China by 280 million.
China grew, incidentally, when it became less socialist and more capitalist, and almost a billion people have joined the middle- and upper-class as a result.
The pope calls on politicians to serve the “common good.” The common good, however, is best served by a rejection of the progressive economic politics he favors. In the battle between the advocates of growth and the advocates of redistribution, err on the side of growth. Capitalism is what makes the poor man rich.
— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.
Scripture also states that if a man will not work, then let him also not eat!
Pack up your pope crap and hit the road.
FROM ST. PAUL’s LETTER TO THE THESSALONIANS:
“For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it.
On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you.
We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate.
For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
(2 Thessalonians 3:7-10 )
“Socialism is not in the least what is pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created . . . Each step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists” - Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
I want a president who will fight to protect me, my family, my friends and my fellow ethnic Americans of all races. Yes my ethnicity is American. American is my homeland. I want a president who will stand and fight against those who tell me and my fellow ethnic Americans that we are the problem in the world. I want my president to say Americans are not the problem in the world. Americans are tolerant and generous. Americans have made the world a better place. Americans have given much to help others and Americans are not going to give up their culture or their homeland to invaders who want to destroy that culture and subject us to their less then generous domination. I want my president to stand and fight. I want my president to never give in and never give up in the fight against the injustice of liberals, socialists, communists, islamics and others who want us to call wrong right. There is wrong and there is right and neither one is the same thing. I want a president I can be proud. I want a country I feel save to live in and proud to pass down my ethnically American traditions to future generations.
ethnicity: noun: ethnicity; plural noun: ethnicities
the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.
no such thing; the Word is the Word.
Thus Paul maintained his tentmaker trade. I know a number of pastors who have kept their engineering jobs for the same reason at Paul the Apostle. Many times these are very small churches or churches that serve poor neighborhoods.
Thanks!
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