Yes…Yes (2)
An appeal to all Christians
Are happy times to happen soon again? No, not until debt is paid and we have adjusted to a lower standard of living. Actually, surveys done in the past 50 years indicate that the 1950’s were the best of times, just before the universal advent of television.
Debt is a form of death. Debt is a mortgage on the future. The first part of the word ‘mort-gage’ is ‘mort’ which means death, the second part means ‘pledge’, thus a debt, a mort-gage, literally means to pledge one’s life until death-debt- does us part. Freedom to live does not come back until the mort-gage is paid. That applies to all debt. That’s the reason why God in Deuteronomy 15 stipulated that ‘every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts’, in other words, God wanted the Old Testament people to cancel all monetary obligations after seven years. He wanted his people to be free, because God knows that money has power, that money can easily become a force for evil.
Actually God even went further: Leviticus 25 states that twice in a century a year of Jubilee must be proclaimed in which everybody will receive back her or his original inheritance, so that a new beginning can be made, with all debts cancelled, all properties restored to their original owners and all bodily bondage abolished. In other words, God does not want rich people to ever grow richer, because God knows that instead of people using money, money has the tendency to use people, who then lose their freedom, which leads to spiritual death. Says Matthew 6:21 “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
So what’s happening in our real world, a world beset with debt? President Obama is desperately trying to correct the debt situation but rather than telling people to pay off their monetary obligations, to face reality, he has embarked upon an unprecedented increase in money supply, mountains of it.
During the previous depression – when there was little debt – John Maynard Keynes, the British economic whiz, advocated make work programs, and World War II proved to be the perfect remedy. Now the hole is much deeper, so deep, that the only escape possible is to slowly and painfully claw our way out of the pit and ever so cautiously extract ourselves from our deep debt predicament. However the Washington team, appointed by Barack Obama, wants to go back to Keynesianism: create money, cut interest rates and get funds to those banks that are in trouble. Never mind that this makes the hole deeper and deeper, made worse by more tax cuts, less tax income and more government job creation.
Granted immense deficits may boost the economy in the short term – politicians always go for the immediate cure first – but with the debt situation resembling an immense mountain valley, the current recession is bound to become a depression.
The 20th century Depression was cured by World War II, at a cost of 50 million lives. Unemployment was at 3 percent when it started in 1929. It jumped to 25 percent a few years later, and was still at 17 percent in 1939. Mobilizing millions of men to serve overseas, and, at home, creating jobs for many more millions to arm and equip them to fight, cured that depression.
Although war is never a solution, especially today with the sort of weapons out there, the possibility of a new war happening is not as remote as people might think. It is a well-known fact that the USA spends more on its military than all the other countries of the world combined spend on theirs, and the military everywhere always is a power of evil: after all, their job is to kill and destroy. Money-debt always leads to war, because ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’ says the Bible.
So how did we get into this ‘owe-owe’ scenario?
In the 1970s wages and economic growth stagnated while inflation increased. This created a new economic condition called ‘stagflation’, the worst of all possible worlds. As a result interest rates shot up and so did unemployment. With higher inflation, wages too increased somewhat, and the resulting higher employment cost caused employers to relocate factories to lower cost areas anywhere in the world, forcing workers to accept less pay, or, at best, preventing them from getting a raise.
Then Alan Greenspan, the US chairman of the Federal Reserve, acted: he lowered the cost of money to almost zero, with the result that house prices went through the roof, and millions of people used their rising home equity to obtain ever larger loans, creating an upward spiral in property values.
Now, with North America, especially the USA, losing jobs, while the employment available gives less pay – look at the GM and Chrysler workers – combined with the sudden fall in house prices and the collapse of the stock market, all this events have exposed the assets of the money houses on Wall Street and the City in London to be pure fraud, and has caused the great fall in monetary assets everywhere in the world were money in various forms is traded.
From Amsterdam to Zurich, from Brussels to Washington, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, in vain do all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – bankers, economists, policy analysts, and government leaders – try to put capitalism back together again. And they will fail, creating an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Christians to point the way out of this mess. This requires wisdom, and, as the Scriptures tell us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom”.
S tates in Europe, North America, and Asia have either spent outright, or exposed themselves to financial risks totaling well over $10 trillion – a figure so vast that I am sure that nothing even remotely similar has ever happened before. Just imagine: the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II cost a mere $9.3 billion (in constant 2005 dollars). According to the United Nations, it would cost $195 billion to eradicate most poverty-related deaths in the Third World, including deaths from malaria, from malnutrition, and from AIDS. So the amount of money committed by policymakers to save capitalism from itself is already fifty times greater than what it would take to save tens of millions of human beings from terrible daily suffering and premature death, which makes me to conclude that capitalism is the most unchristian system ever devised. If the wealthy nations instead invested that $10 trillion into the economies, health systems, and infrastructure of the Third World, rather than transferring it to the world’s richest banks, private financial institutions, and investors, they could usher in a new epoch in the history of the world community in which every human being would be guaranteed a livable life. Isn’t that what Christianity aims for?
That the financial bailout is a colossal misdirection and waste of public resources, however, is not the most scandalous thing about it. What is truly inhumane is that all this money is being spent to prop up capitalism itself – a mode of economic and social life that has corrupted and hollowed out our democracies, reduced great swaths of the planet’s ecosystem to polluted rubble, condemned hundreds of millions of human beings to wretchedness and exploitation, and enslaved billions of other animals in farms that resemble concentration camps.
Indeed Capitalism has the proper name. It’s solely for the benefit of capital so that those who have it will benefit.
Why should Capitalism fail? Is there a Christian alternative? Is money-debt the only form of future obligations?