Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For October 28, 2015

This week's edition of Comments Which Conservatives Block is brief due to conflicts in my personal schedule.

Oct 27

To Joe Carter and his blogpost about how our current economic system has freed us from past tyrannies and drudgeries. This appeared in the Acton Blog.

The nightmare of living in the past, or what I like to call the tyranny of tradition, applies more than to what "Free Enterprise" has brought. We do like the romanticize the past. Political conservatives practice this with our nation's Founding Fathers and The Constitution. After all, The Constitution was written to strengthen the Federal Gov't and to inhibit changes to the status quo that favored the wealthy back then. Here we should that The Constitution was written to allow the Federal Gov't to better respond to nationwide dissent and insurgencies like Shays Rebellion. Our Constitution also included racist provisions and did not address expanding voting rights to those who did not own land. We should note here that Madison was afraid that the expansion of voting rights in England would lead to agrarian reform. Thus political conservatives take a literalist approach to The Constitution. And if such an approach was consistently applied, the Federal government would have to eliminate the FAA.

As for Free Enterprise, as with other great empires, our empire has achieved the greatest wealth in human history. And certainly the current global economic system has spread much wealth. But with the spreading of that wealth comes societies that are 'thing-oriented,' as Martin Luther King would refer to them. King saw racism, poverty/materialism, and war/militarism as necessary results of societies being thing-oriented. In addition, we might add that continued destruction of the environment from an addiction to our way of life is another necessary result of being a thing-oriented society. 

So while we celebrate how our "Free Enterprise" system has freed us from some of the drudgeries and limitations experienced in the past, some fringe detriments have been flying in under our radar that are declaring that without intervention and change, we will self-destruct.

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To Joe Carter and his short blogpost on how religion is redistributing the world’s wealth. This appeared in the Acton blog.

This article doesn't show how religion is redistributing wealth. It shows correlations and correlations do not imply cause and effect. In addition, this article suggests that religion in general rather than any religion in particular is spreading the world's wealth. Would it follow then that one religion is as good as another and that all religions lead to the mountaintop of material wealth?