Perhaps those who criticize Capitalism see its abuses more than those who support it. Abuses such as control of gov't (see the TPP), the undeniable growing disparity of wealth, and the ever present exploitation of both the environment and employees.
In addition, what is reported by many who support capitalism is heavily filtered. For example, while citing statistics that claim that the free enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than ever before, most of those gains have come in China where there is more gov't control than free enterprise in their economy. In addition, what is defined at poverty is really abject poverty and would be unliveable in the West. Also, the tradeoffs involved with China bringing more people out of abject poverty include sweatshop labor conditions and environmental degradation. Of course, none of that included the militarism needed to keep certain nations in line.
In the end, what we see with capitalism is what we see with any empire. Life is good for those living in the Capitol while life in the Districts is abusive and exploitive--to use Hunger Games terminology.
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To Bruce Edward Walker and his blogpost lamenting how different conferences are directing nations and economies to ‘de-carbonize’ because of how such a process would kill our economy. This appeared in the Acton blog.
What is sadly assumed in this article is that our economy and way of life is not harming the environment. Thus, the changes proposed by those who want to decarbonize the economy are easily interpreted as lunacy because why destroy by trying to fix what is not broken.
The problem with this article is that once one removes the tragic assumption cited above, one sees that our economy is putting a gun to our head by telling us to choose between future survival or present economic collapse. That the signs of how our way of life and economy are destroying the environment can been seen in other ways than future predictions of what the increasing CO2 level in the atmosphere. One such way is just to look at the increasing dead zones and acidification that is occurring to our oceans. What is sad here is that pointing to the increasing number of species that are becoming extinct is not enough to cause people to question the direction of the status quo.
Perhaps our problem, and possible cause of death, is that we are too thing-oriented, to use a Martin Luther King Jr. term. to care about how our way of life and economy are destroying the environment.
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Joe Carter and his blogpost declaring that unemployment is a spiritual problem. This appeared in the Acton blog.
There are two points to make about the article above. First, it seems mistitled. All we have here are some basic statistics with only one mention of spirituality. That mention is the naked assertion that unemployment is a spiritual problem. This is said to motivate Christians to pay attention to what is being reported.
The second problem is that calling unemployment a spiritual problem is done from one perspective only: that of the person looking for work. Unemployment, in this series, has never been described as a spiritual problem from the perspective of the employer and business owners. And considering how many jobs were offshored in America especially to places where manufactures can exploit workers and/or the environment, one would think that unemployment, if described as a spiritual problem, would involve talking about the spirituaiity of those with wealth who either caused or increased it.
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