The following has been adapted from a letter to a friend, wherein I shared my impressions on Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Book To Heal a Fractured World. Besides recommending this book, my friend recommended an article or two from the Chabad website dealing with charity and capitalism in the light of the Torah. This letter takes aim at those as well.
TO HEAL A FRACTURED WORLD
Rabbi Sacks’s book has the encouraging subtitle “the ethics of responsibility.” However, chapter three, which you especially recommended, I found to be quite disappointing.
To be sure, I enjoyed a good many things that Rabbi Sacks included in this book. And, I’m not saying this just to sound nice before I get around to criticizing it. I’ve always enjoyed all accounts of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity – something which is highlighted many times in this book. His selection of stories of people doing magnanimous things is enough to make it worth the read. However, frequently enough I find scattered among these gems a certain tendency which I cannot help but disagree with. In short, it is the unmistakable plague of contemporary liberalism.
If one truly wishes to heal a fractured world, one of the very top priorities must be to utterly eradicate liberalism from the world. I doubt there is any deadlier affliction on the mental health of mankind – and, although I don’t know R’ Sacks well enough to make a judgment on his personality or character, it is clear enough in this book that he is helping to spread this bitter contagion.
One of the hallmarks of liberalism is its uncanny ability to twist terms into the actual opposite of what they mean. For starters, even the very term “Liberalism” – which in past centuries unambiguously signified the broad field of proto-libertarian principles and thought centered around the great fundamentals of individual liberty in the social, political, and market sphere – has come to signify what is truly the exact opposite! Today’s “Liberalism” is nothing less than the state-enforced abnegation of the individual in the social, political, and market sphere.
Liberals have gone far beyond corrupting the meaning of their brand-name; nearly all of their sacred watchwords are seen to mean the exact opposite. “Tolerance” is in fact, a policy of intolerance. “Diversity” is nothing more than policy of exclusion. “Reproductive rights” are only really non-reproductive rights. “Pro-choice” is really an unwillingness to make choices at the time when they should have been made, i.e., not to have reckless reproductive sex in the first place. “Gun-free zones,” which all proper liberals love, are really zones in which only certain people carry guns. “Planned Parenthood” should really be named Un-planned Parenthood. “Public education,” one of liberalism’s most cherished institutions, is really public de-education. “Social” policy is actually state policy. “Equality” is actually the wicked use of government to rip-off one person in order to give to another person, violating totally the idea of legal equality. We could go on and on with examples of this kind of real-life Newspeak-esque duplicity that even George Orwell could not possibly have anticipated.
While it seems that people of various backgrounds, motives, and proclivities encamp under the banner of liberalism, what is most striking to me is the unifying middoth of low self-esteem (inferiority complex) and envy. Even the elites among liberals can be easily perceived to suffer from these conditions. These are serious defects of character and they incline people to do a great deal of evil. Even if I were fortunate to be in a situation without any threat of state violence being wielded by anybody (most of all, liberals), I would nonetheless keep up my guard around them and still decry the latent evils of their ideology. These people will corrupt and destroy whatever is good, with or without a government at their disposal. Instead of helping to fortify good people against this threat, Rabbi Sacks willy-nilly endorses and helps it advance.
What is of specific interest here are the themes of “greed,” “justice,” “responsibility,” and “charity.” Ask a liberal to explain what “greed” is, and they’ll generally describe what is simply a productive person enjoying the fruits of their labor. Obama, a typical limousine-liberal who cannot see himself ever coming under the condemnation of his own words, [in]famously said in 2010, “At a certain point, you’ve earned enough money.” To liberals, “greed” is when non-liberals want to keep their property and object to the government stealing the fruits of honest labor. A man working diligently and productively year after year in order to finance a comfortable life of plenty for himself and his household – well, that’s “greedy!” However, when liberals use the government’s monopoly of “legitimate” violence to steal from that man and use the proceeds of robbery to fund cherished programs and constituencies [none of which are ever productive] – well, that’s not greed. No, no, no! That’s “justice” – social justice to be exact.
True greed is when a person covets another’s property so much that they are willing to use violence, or the threat of violence, to take it from them and use it as their own. The liberal ideology is the purest and most solid definition of greed anywhere. There is a well-circulated meme in the internet that has a liberal ironically musing: “Libertarians are so greedy; they won’t let me decide how their money is spent.” This is a spot-on portrait of the cognitive dysfunction of liberalism.
There is no escaping the fact that assigning the name tzedaka to charity is part and parcel of the characteristic liberal bent for word-recasting. And just as in all the examples above taken from modern times, confounding tzedaka with charity is a grave offense to both and if taken seriously will tend to distort a person’s view as to what is right and wrong. Add to this the element of religious obligation and you have a recipe for great societal harm.
Justice is justice, charity is charity. Each one’s value is preserved and honored only to the extent that they are held distinct from one another and appreciated for their own worth. Any time justice is misidentified as charity, some damage has been done to the goodness of the world that God created. Likewise, any time charity is misidentified as justice, some damage has been done to the goodness of the world that God created. For, answer for yourself: what greater insult could be paid to charity than to regard it as justice? And yet, this is increasingly seen in our world! People brazenly throw prudence and, ahem, responsibility to the wind and willingly make themselves dependent on charity (both the real kind and also pseudo-charity, the state-coerced kind). They treat it as if it were their due! They act as if it’s tzedaka, i.e., justice! (I cannot forget this youtube classic of a woman, living in poverty, who had 15 kids by various men, complaining, “somebody need to pay fo’ muh 15 keeds!”) Now, where did they acquire this way of looking at things? Well, they will hardly feel rebuffed by reading Rabbi Sacks’s book.
The opposite kind of miscategorization, i.e., of calling justice charity, is when a person acts in a way that is simply the abstention of doing harm to others (or making restitution for harms already done) but attempts to appear that he is doing something extra nice, something magnanimous. Example: a commandant of a prison camp announces to the inmates, “I had been firmly determined to shoot all of you and shove you into a mass grave this weekend instead of just working you to the bone, but at the last minute, my better judgment overpowered me. So, get yourselves back to your tasks! In light of my exceptional benevolence to you all, I hope to see heightened morale and increased productivity!”
Scenes such as this are to be found often enough in accounts from survivors of various prison camps, but this mode of moral perversion is common enough in less extraordinary circumstances as well. Abusive or sadistic spouses/parents have been documented to style their random refrainings from the usual torments as some especially gracious dispensation to their victims. Similarly, governments are very fond of patting themselves on the back for somewhat slackening the parasitical burdens, tax and otherwise, that they heap upon their host populations. The worst is when their victims also pat them on the back.
Whatever the case, whether charity is being passed off as justice, or justice as charity, I just can’t stomach it – especially if it’s from people who have a privileged relationship with the Shofet kol ha Aretz. Charity and justice are both exceedingly important, however, they must never be confounded – or we run the risk of perverting judgment. (Tangentially, I do wonder how significant a factor the charity-justice confusion was in preparing so great a number of Jews to play important roles in socialist/communist movements around the world.)
Let’s look at one of the more disturbing things in the Rabbi Sacks’s book:
“The nearest English equivalent to tzedakah is the phrase that came into existence alongside the idea of a welfare state, namely social justice. Behind both is the idea that no one should be without the basic requirements of existence, and that those who have more than they need must share some of that surplus with those who have less. This is fundamental to the kind of society the Israelites were charged with creating, namely one in which everyone has a basic right to a dignified life and equal worth as citizens in the covenantal community under the sovereignty of God.”
It sounds an awful lot like Karl Marx to me – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This is an ideal that has no logical end short of universal poverty and the extinguishing of the human spirit. Why should I expend the effort to improve my lot, if the fruits of my labor are just going to be taken from me and divided among everybody who did not expend a similar effort? The human soul just doesn’t work that way, nor should it! Notice what the rabbi said: “those who have more than they need must share some of that surplus with those who have less.” Well, who determines when I have more than I need? and how are they to make that determination? Is having a store of food for next week having more than is needed? Is having a savings account more than is needed? For that matter, is every action done with an eye to the future a selfish “unethical” economic surplus? The common lot of people are so little trained to consider the time-value of money, which is one reason they fall prey to these fallacies of Marx, et al.
But even in the present, what of economic inequality? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the Minneapolis Jewish community has achieved a Sacksian utopia: all economic inequalities have been perfectly leveled out by devotedly pursuing Rabbi Sacks’s principle that “those who have more than they need must share some of that surplus with those who have less” day after day, year after year, until all surpluses were completely equalized. Then what? Everybody has a house with 2.5 rooms, everybody has 1.4 cars, and everybody has a net balance of -$89,345. Well, what if, in this situation, I felt inspired to live at a higher level of comfort and enjoyment: I wanted a sailboat. I secretly saved away more and more money until I bought myself a sailboat. Now, how are my actions to be viewed? Have I betrayed anybody? If yes, how? If no, then we can safely disregard Rabbi Sacks’s principle and forget about economic egalitarianism once and for all.
Now admittedly, Rabbi Sacks uses the word “need” – as in “those who have more than they need.” Frankly, I don’t care that he specified the word need. First of all, it is still not helpful. I “want” to keep my second lung and second kidney, but at this moment, I am sure there is somebody out there that “needs” my second lung or second kidney. Until economic egalitarians are going to insist on strapping people to operating tables and forcibly removing ‘redundant’ organs (starting with themselves, of course!) it is not very compelling to hear them saw away about John Doe having an obligation to part with his “surplus” wealth.
Rabbi Sacks, in our section quoted above, also asserts that, in Jewish society “everyone has a basic right to a dignified life.” This again falls into all of the objections that every assertion of positive rights does: to what level of dignity does everyone have a basic right? and how is that dignity to be produced and sustained? and what if one person’s positive right to dignity interferes with another’s? and what if somebody has lived such an ignoble or bloodthirsty life that he has effaced all dignity from himself?
Later, Rabbi Sacks invents a term, mind-boggling for its contradiction to all good sense, “distributive justice” and contrasts it what that old-fashioned cold, hard “retributive” justice that mankind has always been familiar with! Well, one thing I have no tolerance for is justice with any special qualifiers attached to it. To accept the qualification “retributive” justice naturally opens the door for other, exotic species of “justice.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no justice but justice. Social justice and “distributive” justice are merely liberal double-speak attempts at upending justice in order to make way for their unjust interferences and coercions.
Another patently wrong assertion: “There is nothing inevitable or divinely willed about social and economic inequality.” But I assert that economic and social inequalities are inevitable, and in many – perhaps even most – cases divinely willed and laudable. People who look upon economics superficially only notice that there are rich people, poor people, and people somewhere in between. They might look at the vast differences in the wealth of various individuals and think, “how unfair that these households live luxuriously and these households live poorly!” However, somebody who is truly interested in knowing what is “fair” is going to have to look behind the scenes and discover why these inequalities have come to be. Generally speaking – and yes, I admit there are exceptions – a disparity in wealth is directly related to a disparity in productivity. If you don’t produce much value to society, your avenues for making a comfortable living are narrowly limited to career fields like soliciting gifts, theft, and working for the government.
I wish more people would stop complaining about the disparity in incomes and instead focus on the root problem: the disparity in productivity (and also, differences in time-preference). Why are some people highly productive, while others are not? My experience running a business has shown me that some people are simply poorly motivated, not ambitious, not imbued with good work ethic, not punctual, and not concerned with the quality of their work. Moreover, some people cannot hold onto money. There was a guy I had to pay every day. He could not wait until week’s end. You might wonder what financial needs pressed down upon him so heavily and urgently. Out of respect for the privacy of his personal affairs, I never asked for an explanation, but what I can tell you is that he never tired of gushing about all the “fun” he and his girlfriend regularly had while gambling at the horse races. I made numerous efforts to coach him, both in regards to his work and to life in general, but the fruits of these efforts were always short-lived. Before long, he quit. This is just one of many stories I can tell you from my own experience. My friends who are also small business owners all have the same kind of stories to tell.
Frankly, I resent reading a book wherein a rabbi, i.e., somebody who should know better, is reciting all the modern, liberal, emotionally-based and factually-flawed complaints about wealth inequality and exhorting readers to part with their honestly earned money in the name of “distributive JUSTICE.” And again, I do believe in the value of giving charity and have acted on this belief to no small extent. But the basic fact that there are rich and poor in the world is, on its own, no reason at all to give charity. In fact, giving charity to a person when all we know about him is that he is poor means that we can make no reasonable prediction whether the charity will be beneficial in the least, or whether it might even be harmful to the recipient. And, when charity is being done, it is not, not, not justice. It is something altogether different. The act of giving charity – voluntary, sincere charity – especially when coupled with wisdom and discernment, should be lauded as magnanimity and not under-appraised as mere “justice.”
Also, a book with the subtitle “the Ethics of Responsibility” ought to focus on the responsibility that is so significantly lacking in the world, i.e., the responsibility one has to one’s self to be diligent in his work, to make an honest living producing goods or services that people are willing to pay for, to not be a financial burden on others, to pay his pills, to be punctual, to feed himself and his family, etc. If people would only do this, quite literally almost of the poverty in the world would vanish.
I recently read an article on Chabad’s website (I think you may have suggested it to me) by R’ Sacks, called, “The Limits of the Free Market.” Rabbi Sacks’s muddled economic thinking continues: “There’s nothing surer: the rich get rich and the poor get poorer.” This socialist canard is a classic example of things people will accept, believe, and repeat without ever thinking whether it is true or false. All it takes is just a bit of reflection to see that this saying is no truer than the oft repeated stupidity that all Jews are rich (and mix Christian blood into their matza dough). The poor are getting poorer??? Really? So when I see a “poor” person these days, I’m actually looking at somebody whom the poor people of a generation ago (or a century ago) would have considered to be poorer than themselves? Hmmmm… Am I supposed to believe that the poor today own less material property than the poor of the past? Am I supposed to believe that the poor of today enjoy less comforts and conveniences than the poor of the past? Am I supposed to believe that the lowest-paying occupations of today are harder than the lowest-paying occupations of yesteryear? Ask yourself: who enjoys a higher standard of living, the “rich” households of the 19th century or the “poor” of today’s America? Today, poor people live a life that the elites of past eras could not visualize in even their most indulgent dreams.
The fact is, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer, and it is all thanks to capitalism. Churches and synagogues did not make this happen. Governments did not make this happen. Charity and altruism did not make this happen. What made this happen is the aggregation of diverse, rational self-interests in the market setting, the division of labor, the respect for private property, and the accumulation and investment of capital. In short, capitalism (or, as detractors prefer, “greed”) is what brought form, beauty, and plenty to a human social-economy that was void and without form. Even Communist China was forced to tacitly acknowledge this fact as evidenced by the sweeping reforms which started under Deng, such as the “Special Economic Zones” which allowed for the importation of capital and global market activity that lifted China from genuine poverty and started it on the road to becoming the economic giant that it is today. “Greed” has fed vastly more mouths and elevated far, far more living standards than socialism or charity have or ever could.
To rebut R’ Sacks’s complaint about CEOs making 300 times what some of their employees make: so what??? It’s not an apples to apples comparison. CEOs have far more productive skills and responsibilities than the folks in the mailroom or the guy waxing the floors of the corporate HQ. 300 times is simply a matter of degree. If it were only 3 or even 300,000 times, that, in and of itself would not matter. During the interview, you and your company basically negotiated your salary. You both voluntarily settled that your salary should be $x.xx. If later on, you find out that the CEO is making $300x.xx, how does this make your negotiated salary a bad one? It’s the same salary you had beforehand. If the discovery of your bosses’ superior incomes gives you a bad feeling, the problem is yours alone because the feeling is a sinful one called envy. Again, look beyond income and consider things like productivity. Besides, I’m willing to bet that Rabbi Sacks makes much more than some of the people in his employ. If I’m right, it doesn’t bother me at all.
I’m self-employed, which essentially means I have a few hundred bosses all at once. I’m sure that not a few of them make more than I do by many orders of magnitude. Doesn’t bother me at all, and most importantly, it doesn’t harm me at all. I have my life, my goals, my circumstances, my achievements, my value, my way of integrating and interacting productively and beneficently in the market/society, and they have theirs. One of my customers (i.e., bosses) has a rug under his dining table that costs $30,000. The most expensive rug in my house is about $25. Based on rug-comparisons, he’s 1,200 times wealthier than I am. (Perhaps this rug disparity is actually much greater, since I suspect that some of the other rugs in his house are probably even more expensive. Why bring up the rug comparison? Because it’s about as meaningless as salary comparisons between CEOs who have rare talents, experience, and achievements and low-level or entry-level workers who, due to their inexperience and as-yet undeveloped skills, are essentially dispensable. Or, it’s about as silly as being shocked and indignant that the 20-year-old operator of a French-fry machine in Podunk, Arkansas makes way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way less than the Senior Vice-President of North American Operations at McDonalds.
And what, is monetary income the main thing in life? Isn’t happiness in life supposed to be far greater than salaries and expensive possessions? Rabbis are people I expect should know better than this. What I’d like to see is no rabbis complaining about income-inequality and instead teaching people how to be happy by banishing envy, jealousy, and covetousness from their hearts. I’d like to see rabbis exhorting people to be healthily inspired by the economic successes around them and coaching them on how to achieve similar success. The one rabbi I know of who does this is Rabbi Daniel Lapin; may God extend his years and reach.
“Limits of the Free Market” ???? In a free-market setting, (or even in less-than-totally-free-market setting such as here in the USA, where there is an increasingly burdensome amount of government interference), by far, the greatest cause of poverty is bad ideas. Bad ideas. I lived in poverty at one time. I even found my food in supermarket dumpsters and, as my only transportation, had a nothing more than a bike. Why? Nothing but the ideas – forces inside my head – that placed me in that situation. Once I dumped those ideas, my life changed immediately. When I became a capitalist, I became increasingly successful and I increasingly found fulfillment and meaningful gratification in life. The free market is not what limits people from having a good life. Un-free minds are what limits people.
There is a scarcity of economic understanding both in the Orthodox community and in the general population. I have found very few people who can explain the time-value of money as it relates to interest, let alone a dozen other areas in economics.
Another article at Chabad.org was a hoot: “A Culture of Dependency,” by Elisha Greenbaum. Greenbaum starts by praising the good intentions of compassionate socialists, even though he later makes it clear that their vision is short-sighted and ultimately flawed: “After all, what could be nobler than to demand that society’s wealth be redistributed fairly, guaranteeing equality of opportunity and freedom from hunger to all?”
What could be nobler??? I can think of countless nobler things! First of all, it would be nobler to not expropriate wealth from its producers, period. Secondly, it would be nobler to recognize these producers as the individuals they are, each one made in God’s image and endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and not some nebulous legal fiction called “society” which, under this meaningless and face-masking label, can be ripped off with lighter pangs of conscience. Thirdly, it would be nobler to elevate hungry people by inspiring them with the ideals of productive labor and enterprise.
Again, it is true that Greenbaum comes around squarely against the welfare state, but it is critical to note on what grounds he does so: the grounds of utility. What’s not to like about the welfare state? As Greenbaum sees it, the fact that the welfare state doesn’t actually produce well-being but instead lowers both living standards and middot. It is – remember – “noble” as far as intentions go, but the fruits it produces are simply not helpful to those who are supposed to eat them.
Put aside the fact that state-welfare systems are based wholly on evil, sinful violence – what causes Greenbaum to criticize such systems is that they don’t work so well.
But, if it appears that Greenbaum is defending capitalism as against socialism, this appearance goes only so far, as he later reveals that he has no appreciations for capitalism and, really, next to no economic understanding whatsoever:
“To earn money from one’s ingenuity, skill or effort is healthy; to receive a kickback for nothing [i.e., lending on interest] is inherently destructive.
“The money one earns from interest is almost dishonest, equivalent to eating the bread of shame. You’re not working for your sling-back, not producing or contributing to the development of the world. The other guy is doing all the work, and you are just piggy-backing on his efforts.
“G-d created us with an inbuilt need to succeed, to conquer our personal demons and to write our own success stories. To allow oneself to slumber away in a cocoon of indolence and dependency, relying on others to provide, with no sense of personal obligation, is to turn our back on reality and it demonstrates a total lack of faith and responsibility.”
First of all, I am forced to assume that Greenbaum thinks that capital, here in the form of funds available for borrowing, just magically appears somehow. For, he calls the act of earning money on it “receiving a kickback for nothing” and contrasts it with earning “money from one’s ingenuity, skill or effort.” At this point, Greenbaum’s erroneous thinking should be completely clear. But on the other hand, even the most basic fundamentals of economics are not widely understood, so I will explain: In order for Mr. A to have funds available for lending, these funds had to somehow come from somewhere. How did this come to be? Well, first Mr. A engaged in productive labor – something Greenbaum might call “earning money from one’s ingenuity, skill or effort.” But that’s not all. No. The second part is really critical: Mr. A must either produce more than his consumption habits, or, Mr. A must decrease his consumption habits below the level of his production. Either one of these is laudable in that Mr. A foregoes instant gratification in exchange for higher future returns.
Whoever wishes to elevate their standard of living and have what to live on when it’s a rainy day, needs to consume less than they produce and invest the difference in round-about ways of production which bring about greater margins of profit. You see, Greenbaum writes all this stuff about how good and healthy it is to earn money from your efforts (evidently, by him, only mental and physical efforts count), but then writes a bunch of baloney essentially against capitalism and investing. “Earning money from one’s ingenuity, skill or effort” is not the end-all be-all of a healthy financial life. Even vagrants, beach-bums, gamblers, and drunkards are usually able to do this much. To distance one’s self from hand-to-mouth living is to exceed the mental and physical efforts and enter into a higher struggle that requires an effort that comes from deep within a person’s character. It is a mortal being’s spiritual struggle against a naturally high time preference.
The saying goes, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. This saying is inadequate, for no man knows how long he can keep fishing. We should go further and say, teach a man to consume less than he catches and teach that man to exchange his surplus for round-about means of higher production, as in a fishing boat with nets, and his reward for struggling against his inclination toward a high time preference will be greater income. Teach a man to see even his now-increased income as a surplus to be invested in round-about means of still greater production, and his reward for struggling against his inclination toward a high time preference will be even greater income. Now, after all this character-rooted appetite-denial, our fisherman has become a man of means. He is surrounded by opportunities – opportunities that are possible because of his grit and future-mindedness, and, we must point out, if our fisherman employs his means in a way that earns him money, it could not at all be said that he’s “receiving a kickback for nothing.” No. He’s receiving returns on his deferred gratification! He could buy a fleet of fishing boats, he could buy stocks in other enterprises, or, he could lend money… But, one of these options has an inexplicable taboo attached to it. And the taboo cannot be logically/morally differentiated from any other productive use of capital.
Now, it is because of this deferred gratification – the hallmark of “capital”ism – that advanced society, technological development, and things like retirement funds, etc. have an existence. This flies right in the face of Greenbaum’s absurd comment that the lender is “not producing or contributing to the development of the world.” Greenbaum ought to remember that the vast majority of people would be excluded, or at least nearly excluded, from making large purchases without a market for money, i.e., savings and loans on interest, all based on the fundamental forces of supply and demand. The originary interest rate is simply the ratio of the value assigned to want-satisfaction in the immediate future and the value assigned to want-satisfaction in remoter periods of the future. It manifests itself in the discount of future goods against present goods. On top of this, various types of concern about the security of the principal also factor in, and from this we get actual market interest rates. There is no black magic here. No mean-spiritedness. No sinfulness in the least. A market for money is in no way morally different than a market for bread, bicycles, or labor. The fact that some people may take on loans in order to finance a highly consumptive lifestyle and fall into unfortunate and burdensome debt traps is not any fault of the lender, it is purely the fault of the foolish borrower – who is foolish, not for borrowing per se, but for borrowing for foolish ends. Otherwise, it’s akin to saying that if people have more kids than they can financially and emotionally support, it is the fault of the doctors, midwives, hospitals, etc. and not the fault of the recklessly-reproductive parents. Again, bad ideas at work.
Greenbaum’s preference for capitalism is very shallow and partial at best. He seems to be much more approving of skillful types of hand-to-mouth living than of capital accumulation. You have to wonder, with Greenbaum’s assessment of money-lending, what he thinks of lending money to non-Jews. One commenter on the article put it nicely: “Why wouldn’t it have the same “bread of shame” effect to take interest on a loan from a non Jew? Wouldn’t that be comparable to a desecration versus a kiddush Hashem?” I’m glad at least this person sees through the mumbo-jumbo. But what’s far more annoying to me is that Greenbaum, like the liberal Sacks, turns concepts 180 degrees around and still calls them by the original names. What is an ethic of responsibility? Why, accepting an “obligation” to provide for the irresponsible. What is a culture of dependency? Why, nothing other than the culture of industrious people supplying hard-earned and hard-saved capital to the loan market!!!
Just ponder the corruption of thinking in Greenbaum’s condemnation of those who engage in the industry of for-profit lending:
“The money one earns from interest is almost dishonest, equivalent to eating the bread of shame. You’re not working for your sling-back, not producing or contributing to the development of the world. The other guy is doing all the work, and you are just piggy-backing on his efforts.
“G-d created us with an inbuilt need to succeed, to conquer our personal demons and to write our own success stories. To allow oneself to slumber away in a cocoon of indolence and dependency, relying on others to provide, with no sense of personal obligation, is to turn our back on reality and it demonstrates a total lack of faith and responsibility.”
In other words, Greenbaum thinks it is the lenders who are dependent! He accuses lenders of “slumbering away in a cocoon of indolence, relying on the providence of others.” !!! Now, I’ve mentioned bad ideas a few times. Bad ideas can cause a lot of destruction. I don’t get worried by the fact that some people believe Moshe Rabbenu stood 10 amos tall. What harm could come of this? But when people who don’t really understand capitalism denigrate it and think they are thereby involved in the beneficent promotion of capitalism’s alternatives, there is reason to be concerned, even angry. We have numerous historical examples of this and it has lead to tremendous suffering every time. Moreover the most potent threat of this type is one that comes from a religious source. Religious devotion, when misunderstood or built upon false foundations, can incline even good people to do monstrous things.
Especially during my teenage years and up through the Bush administration, there was a lot of fear-mongering from the left about the dangers of the “religious right” – people they feared would crimp the liberal lifestyle by banning abortions and allowing religious expression in public places, etc., things which for the most part aren’t even close to being positive, active impositions upon the general population. While I must admit, I know of a scant handful of (uninfluential) big-mouths on the right who would love to establish a practical theocracy, the fear the left has of these people is way overblown. But, I do believe there is something from religious people and institutions that is truly menacing to all life on earth – and that is the religious left.
In retrospect, we see how completely wrong the soviet revolutionaries were to oppose religion. Had they merely enlisted the help of religious-left people who espouse the same doctrines as Pope Francis, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Van Jones, Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s pastor), numerous orthodox rabbis and certainly the entire movement of Reform Judaism, whose doctrine of “ethics” is essentially socialism, i.e., social justice, i.e., the “distributive” justice of Rabbi Sacks (and this is by his own words!). Liberalism is on the march in this country because of these men and the countless millions who follow them and share their doctrines. They don’t need to establish a theocracy, they merely, as God’s supposed spokesmen, put a divine imprimatur on one oppressive left-wing project after another until the job is done. Never has the quip “God, save us from your followers,” been truer than in regard to these folks.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” – C.S. Lewis
against the god of force 