I grew up Southern Baptist, amongst people who were pretty convinced that there was a giant, one-world-government-type plan that would eventually lead to the coming of the antichrist. Usually this plan revolved around the Federal Reserve, the Council of Foreign Relations, Democrats, people from Hollywood or New York City (a.k.a gay people), and Prince Felipe of Spain (seriously, someone said he was the antichrist). I was young, and did not question the collective wisdom of my elders until late high school and college.
I grew up and learned that the world is a lot messier then such a simple list can contain. First, I learned that it was a lot more likely that if there was a plan, it had little to do with antichrist, and far more to do with the consolidation and expansion of wealth. If the love of money is the root of all evil, then surely, by extension, we can say that any group aspiring to money above anything else is a violation of the maxim.
I learned that there was precious little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, at least how they have existed for the last 40 years. Democrats brown-nose liberal groups and Republicans brown-nose Christian groups, but neither is working towards the will of commoner. They are both in the business of expanding government (read: big business) and throwing enough bones to the people to keep us from revolution. It’s easier to do since we are all blissed out on television and facebook.
So sure, there is a plot, but it is not the one that the Tea Party folks think it is. It is a much more insidious and evil plot, that would simply love to move toward deregulation. It is the plot that allows billions of dollars to flow toward a small amount of people. If we moved the country towards Libertarianism, people could probably take a little more money home, but it would require a great decrease in our militarism worldwide, and furthermore, that little bit more that people can take home isn’t what is going to push them over the edge to being millionaires. Decreasing taxation and decreasing corporate regulation will most benefit corporations and the 1% of the world that owns them.
If there are any tea party folks out there reading this, I’d love to know what you think of certain types of regulation. For instance, Toyota has had a giant recall and been forced to pay penalties for some engineering problems recently. Should we have let the market take care of that? Wasn’t it only the publicity of the problem that forced them to even issue the recall? Would such things ever occur in a self-regulated environment?
Every comfort, every safety concern, your 8 hour workday and retirement package, your decent salary at all was all fought for on the social battlefield of the late 1800′s through the mid-1900s. We gained the stability we enjoy right now because of those fights. The markets didn’t give them to us. Strikes, and movements, and unions did that. The markets will always take from us, and never give back except in illusions. As Billy Bragg puts it, “The lessons of the past were all learned with worker’s blood / Mistakes of the bosses we must pay for.”
Walter Rauschbusch, arguably the founder of the social gospel movement, writing in 1907 in “Christianity and The Social Crisis”:
Nations do not die by wealth, but by injustice. The forward impetus comes through some great historical opportunity which stimulates the production of wealth, breaks up the caked and rigid order of the past, sets free the energies of new classes, calls creative leaders to the front, quickens the intellectual life, intensifies the sense of duty and the ideal devotion to the common weal, and awakens in the strong individuals the large ambition of patriotic service. Progress slackens when a single class appropriates the social results of the common labor, fortifies its evil rights by unfair laws, throttles the masses by political centralization and suppression, and consumes in luxury what it has taken in covetousness. Then there is a gradual loss of productive energy, an increasing bitterness and distrust, a waning sense of duty and devotion to country, a paralysis of the moral springs of noble action. Men no longer love the Commonwealth, because it does not stand for the common wealth. Force has to supply the cohesive power which love fails to furnish. Exploitation creates poverty, and poverty is followed by physical degeneration. Education, art, wealth, and culture may continue to advance and may even ripen to their mellowest perfection when the worm of death is already at the heart of the nation. Internal convulsions or external catastrophes will finally reveal the state of decay.
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