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 . . .

What this blog is about

No one who works should be poor.  This fundamental tenant of human decency and respect essence is under attack in too many places--and it's not just the shouting heads on Fox News or the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. It's everywhere.

It's in in the business section of the New York Times. It's practically standard fare at the University of Chicago School of Economics. It's a fixture of one major political party, a statute that another major party is too full of cowardice to challenge. And yes, it's  even on NPR and PBS. Every day.

I first saw this poster at a Bursar's Office. Only one of us got rich.

This blog exists because when I graduated from high school 10 years ago, I was told in no uncertain terms that a college degree was going to make me rich--and I needed that education to find out how to wisely spend all that money.

This last decade has been the decade that wasn't in terms of job growth. This country has just as many jobs in 2011 as it did in 2001. If we had adapted the economic policies we have now from the onset of when this country was founded, not a single American would have worked. That's worse than the Soviet Union!

Well I say no more. No more should Americans of both political stripes take an existentialist approach to our economic system. Stagnant job growth should be viewed as a failure of economic policy as apposed to the wheelings and deelings of "the invisible hand." No more should nonsensical abstract concepts like "innovation" take precedence over actual, measurable economic output. No more should politicians attack smokers and drinkers as the sole targets of "sin" taxes, as the sin of excessive greed causes more harm to our economic system and thus, should require heavier taxation. And no more should politicians and economists be fixated on providing economic growth to China and India. Nothing personal, we've got to take care of own first.

There will be plenty to blog about. It's pretty weird--to say the least--to hear Scott Walker attack public school teachers as a vestige of communism or listen to Barack Obama calmly explain that he intends to cut home heating oil subsidies for the poor. That's weird, all right. But when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Who knows, I might even end up on CNN--not that anybody watches that network anymore.

~The Connecticut Yankee.