Damn Straight, Your Eminance! Pope Calls for Massive Wealth Distribution

Right on, Father! Almost 20 years to the day after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pope Benedict XVI took aim at Communism's seeming polar opposite.

Sam Walton's children have more money than the Catholic Church. Seriously.

A more just and peaceful world requires "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth," said the Pontiff in a statement released on December 16th in preparation for World Peace Day. So is the Pope a Communist?

Hardly. Capitalism only appears to be the polar opposite of Communism. At the core of each ideology is a belief that tramples the individual while claiming to speak for the commoner. While Communism takes away the right of the individual under the State, capitalism takes away the right of the individual by way of the all mighty dollar.

Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe not, when you consider attempts to stifle freedom of expression via the Internet, or attempts to eliminate government meat inspection. Sure, a few people might die, but that would cost precious dollars!


E. Coli in hamburgers, poison pet food, led paint in children's toys. This is unregulated capitalism friends, and it ain't pretty. Unless you're at the very top, unrestrained capitalism doesn't enable life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Certainly not if you don't have health insurance. And if not for Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, along with massive tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance AND President Obama's recent reforms, most people in this country wouldn't be able to afford health insurance. They would simply be priced out of the market.

Pope Benedict called for--among other things--better education. Boy, this country sure does need it, because the uber-capitalists have actually led people to believe that the rich in this country are insufficiently rich. That's a theory that is beyond absurd.

Did you know that Sam Walton's children have more money than Warren Buffett or Bill Gates? Seriously, the four of them have a combined wealth of nearly $85 billion! And they can't pay their employees a living wage because?

The Pope has criticized unrestrained capitalism before. Perhaps with income inequality in the news courtesy of Occupy Wall Street, people will notice.

To be continued . . .

Slate Ain't What it used to be

It's a shame. Slate.com, a once respectable, opinions and commentary website, has devolved to unprecedented levels of shoddiness.

This didn't happen overnight. Rather, it started slowly. A small, rather innocent journalistic experiment in which reporters would not hide their biases, but rather share their opinions based on facts. It made for brilliant arguments (like Tim Noah's analysis on American health care coverage), thought provoking insight (ie, anything from Christopher Hitchens), and probing questions about human nature, taking politics out of the equation. And sometimes interesting commentary on sports, or media, or some other facet of American politics or culture. It was interesting, and it resided strictly in the fact-based community.

No longer. Microsoft had no need for this little thought experiment in 2004, and the opportunistic, money-losing Washington Post showed a rare display of financial acumen by purchasing the online entity. Over time, inferior journalists started writing guest columns that looked more like deceptive industry p.r. pieces than any legitimate journalistic endeavor. New "reporters" started to fill the bandwidth with CNN-style fluff, writing about whether or not a certain candidate will go up or down in the polls, as opposed to whether or not a policy proposal does or does not make sense.

The final nail in the coffin, perhaps, was when the Washington Post laid off Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer. Why? To what end? What industry in its right mind would lay off its best employees?

The future One World Trade Center

The Post, like most daily newspapers, probably isn't making a lot of money. It is probably losing money, or breaking even. So what did the wizards of finance over at accounting decide to do? Cut the payroll from the Online publication that is actually making money!

That's absurd. And it's probably why its "Moneybox" columnist, Matthew Yglesias is so laughably clueless about anything having to pertain with anything related to economic matters.

No more than two days ago, this Magna Cum Laude Harvard graduate posted a rather sophomoric brain-fart theory about economic development on Manhattan island (sorry about the harsh language, the university I went to in New Haven was on the wrong side of the tracks).

 Apparently, real estate in Manhattan would be cheap, if only the city of New York would remove the height restriction in certain neighborhoods. Is Yglesias aware that a new luxury high-rise goes up virtually every fort-night in midtown? Or that construction workers are currently building the largest office tower in the human history downtown?

It would be a waste of words to correct every wrong that Yglesias theorizes, but the man clearly doesn't understand that economics is demand-side. As long as Manhattan is populated with the richest people in the country, it will be an expensive place to live.

Not to outdo himself, Yglesias went off the rails again today, this time taking aim at Miley Cyrus for making a music video in support of "Occupy" protests across the globe. In Yglesias's warped world, Cyrus owes her wealth to income inequality and therefore, shouldn't empathize people struggling financially.

Yglesias doesn't stop there. He cites rising incomes in China and India as a reason for Cyrus's great wealth. The trouble with this logic is that when poor people start earning money, that decreases income inequality. Yglesias offers no explanation, though, as to why Miley's wealth should correlate with other people's hardship. Why is that?

There was a time when the more lucid writers of Slate would have something sensible to say (before they got fired, of course.) After all, no one who works should be poor. The rent wouldn't be too damn high if certain workers didn't make too much money. Why should a hedge fund manager make 20,000 times as much money as a pediatrician? Why should a health care CEO make make more money in an hour than a paramedic earns in an entire year? Why should some entertainers become millionaires when other people who do actual work (concert technicians, broadband installers, manufacturers of music equipment, airline pilots who fly Cyrus and other super-rich entertainers to concerts, etc) face financial hardship?

It is oddly fitting that a real economist (and former Slate columnist), Paul Krugman, published a real, coherent argument about salary and fiscal policy on the same day. It is somewhat tangential, but there is a reason why we tax wealth. And there is nothing wrong with someone who is wealthy suggesting that more people should have good jobs.

So it goes. I lament what is lost, and I refuse to stoop to level of my "professional" peers. I will continue investigating and writing informative online columns to fill the void that once was something.


Until next time, good night--and good luck.