The Crusades
As political and religious ideologies clash venomously in Washington, we need to pause and reexamine our values. A subset of our elected leaders have become so polarized in their thinking and so rigid in their political, economic, religious and constitutional ideologies that the problems we discuss over the table at home may not even be on the agenda in our nation’s capital.
While Vermont and many other states struggle with the Medicaid funding crisis and how to staunch the hemorrhage of citizens losing medical insurance, the current administration in Washington inveighs against every government program since their nemesis FDR held office, including some of their own. There is little discussion inside the Beltway of how Americans will either afford or access healthcare. More importantly, there is no discussion of what healthcare is. The administration’s solution for funding the shortfall in Social Security several decades out is simply not to, but rather to entitle disruptive private sector competition in financial markets that recently brought us the mutual fund debacle and the savings and loan scandal.
At work here is a deep clash in ideologies. For some it’s religious, for others, constitutional, but for either side, it is a force that brooks no debate or compromise, only edicts and blind allegiance.
On the religious side, I am unable to reconcile the Christ to whom I was introduced in catechism at Holy Family Catholic church in Morrisville in the fifties and, later in college in the sixties, the Christ of St Thomas Aquinas, with the administration’s Christ who blesses the unimaginable personal fortunes of today and promises the same to the struggling poor and middle class adherents of today’s suburban megachurches. Did Christ promise us the products of our own industry like SUV’s and WalMart gas grills, or spiritual salvation? How did this materialized vision of Christ get swept up in free market economics? How did Christ become a Hollywood star in an S&M flick? Will there be a place in our new society for the Christ who lived with and assuaged the poor and ejected the merchants from the temple and suggested that the well-heeled have a harder road to heaven? Will there be room in our society for Buddha, Allah, Yahweh. the Hindu deities and other spiritual entities greater than ourselves?
At the heart of this argument for which Christ seems to have become a hood ornament is the idea that property, the accretion and retention of wealth, are dominant values. The basis of this would appear to be the idea that anything the government does which abridges one’s personal wealth is either unacceptable or must be remunerated, even to future value. The flaw in this thinking is that the remuneration for abridgements such as taxation, zoning, regulation of any sort, minimum wage, OSHA, FTC, FCC, FDA and the like must be monetary. It is unacceptable that these government-imposed impositions on personal wealth could be in the service of a greater societal good that is not, in fact, monetary. In fact, there is little belief in this group in a “greater good.” Their argument is that, left to its own devices and the exigencies of a free market, businesses and individuals will, of necessity, do the right thing. Have we not tested this theory before?
The great service of religion to society is that it articulates an ethos, a moral structure that guides our behavior and enhances the spiritual well-being of its citizens with faith and grace. Children, adults, non-profit institutions, businesses and governments on an international scale need principles to guide them and laws reflecting those principles. We are a nation of laws. Law does not abridge the creation of wealth, it makes it possible. The lawless or corrupt societies of some African countries and post- Soviet Russia have lead to highly concentrated wealth, criminal chaos and genocide. The kind of measured economic growth that engenders broad-spectrum wealth creation and opportunity for all has as its base the principal of economic justice.
Hopefully the crusades will end soon and we will return to the business of solving real social and economic problems in our executive, legislative and judicial chambers.
Bill Schubart
3:47:22 AM 
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