tommcguire
God did not intend for people to suffer.
Adam & Eve having made their own trouble by pride and disobedience brought suffering into the world which was created without suffering – so face the facts.
So today most PEOPLE make their own trouble and suffering, because we are fallen, and some cause suffering to others.
Economic poverty in rural and urban America is cause of tremendous human suffering. As I understand, your interpretation of them: let the rich get richer. Let them buy what they want, no matter how excessive, no matter how harmful it is to the poor. Let the rich have their million dollar toys, build their castles, and enjoy their $200.00 a bottle of wine. Just do not tax them. While children who are neighbors do not have enough to eat. Yes, that is a reality today in America.
Because you are pre-occupied with trade unions you appear to fail to appreciate any economic fundamentals in the natural laws of cause and effect. The envy and disgust conveyed in your diatribe does nothing to solve anything. The “reality” of want which you portray, just like your example of the lady who could not pay for petrol, fails to convey or understand WHY.
Thus you fail to see why the U.S., which had so much going for it for so long, now has so much economic pain. The facts of the socialist FDR policies that precipitated the Great Depression are ignored. The facts of the more recent meltdown are unknown to you, just as for Greenspan:
In Congressional testimony October 23, 2008, Greenspan thought he had erred on financial deregulation. The New York Times wrote, “a humbled Mr Greenspan admitted he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.”
What a confused “concession”, as the self-correcting power of free markets in the 1920’s had been shown !
However,
the root of the crisis can be found in the federal finagling going back to the Carter era. **The Federal Reserve **was created by an act of Congress, its chairman government appointed, endowed with
monopoly privileges, and with principles opposed to those of the free market because dedicated to central economic planning, – the discredited idea of the twentieth century.
Economist Larry Kudlow and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Steve Moore point to the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) that purported to prevent denying mortgages to black borrowers - by pressuring banks to make home loans in “low and moderate-income neighborhoods.” Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the “credit needs” of “predominantly minority neighborhoods.” The higher a bank’s rating, the more likely that regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition. (30/3/2008)
The debacle of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), Fannie May and Freddie Mac, that bought loans from the Banks and often bundled them as mortgage–backed securities for sale to investors, enabled the banks to issue more mortgages, fuelling the inflation of home prices by artificially diverting resources into mortgage lending. These are known as sub-prime mortgage securities. Adjustable rate mortgages, fueled by people speculating in house purchases, and artificially low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve, were a major factor in defaults as prices fell in 2006.
Federal intervention creating a feeling of prosperity stimulates the boom-bust cycle, resulting in an inevitable crash. The free market is always blamed for that crash. These artificial booms, wrote economist Henry Hazlitt, must end "in a crisis and a slump, and . . .worse than the slump itself may be the public delusion that the slump has been caused, not by the previous inflation, but by the inherent defects of ‘capitalism.’ " (
What You Should Know About Inflation, 2nd ed., Van Nostrand, 1965, 18).
The same political establishment now blamed the banks and Wall Street for the subprime mortgage crisis.
More intervention cannot solve previous interventions which have distorted free enterprise.
The Popes have some realization of the cause and effect of economic laws:
“If I were to pronounce on any single matter of a prevailing economic problem, I should be interfering with the freedom of men to work out their own affairs. Certain cases must be solved in the domain of facts, case by case as they occur…[M]en must realise in deeds those things, the principles of which have been placed beyond dispute…[T]hese things one must leave to the solution of time and experience.” [Pope Leo XIII. Quoted in *The Church And The Market, Dr Thomas E. Woods, Lexington Books, 2005, p 4].
Pius XI wrote of “matters of technique for which [the Church] is neither suitably equipped nor endowed by office.”
Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, 41]….“economics and moral science employs each its own principles in its own sphere.” [QA, 42].
Did you not know that 68% of all income taxes come from the top 10% of earners? (Woods, p 142).
I fail to see how what you have said about the late scholastics interpret the pray of Mary: “He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.”
While rightly condemning all greedy and heartless, perhaps you also failed to see Christ’s reward for prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance:
In the parable of the talents, Jesus lauds the servant who has multiplied talents – “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Mt 25: 14-30). Christ certainly praised the wise use of the fundamental right of economic initiative and prudence in this parable.
Abu:
