Do you know what this number is?
So the word democracy comes from two Greek words. The first is deme, meaning a district, together with its dwellers. The second is kratos, meaning rule or authority. A place is a democracy to the extent that it is ruled by the people living there. The United States is an indirect, or representative, democracy because we elect people to represent us for the purposes of governance and rule. We feel ourselves to be rather egalitarian on top of it all because we don't have very clear, rigidly defined social classes. A man might be born of two beggars, and yet end up with billions. The opposite of an egalitarian democracy would be something like an oligarchic (Greek, again, for "leadership by the few") aristocracy.
Many of the world's nations are democracies in some way, shape, or form, and the United Nations (UN, or ONU in the romance languages) is ostensibly a democracy. Many Americans don't like our country being a part of it because they feel it interferes with our national self-determination. Interestingly enough, many people in smaller and less-developed countries feel likewise.
Well, to see whose sovereignty is more imposed upon, or at least to see who is making out better in this whole international way of running things, it is hard not at least to consider who's got more, and who's getting more. I don't mean that I am richer, dear reader, or that you are. Times are hard, sure enough. But does any of us in the US honestly think for a moment that we'd be doing better in Mogadishu or Brazil? Up until the last couple years, most Americans had more and more - more food, more clothing, bigger houses, and we are only now starting to think about ways to economize, to make do - and that's something 5/6 of the world's population has had to do for as long as anyone can remember.
The funny thing is that tonight, while working on my Greek, I came across the word aristos (Mt 22:4) and didn't know what it meant, so I looked it up. It means feast. Aristocracy, then, literally means rule by the those who feast. In the global economy, which is staggering everywhere, have we been the global aristocrats without even really noticing it? It's a old jibe (and wives' tale, in my experience) that even our convicted prisoners have cable TV. Whether it's true or not, it is telling. A friend of mine once powerfully observed that the West is like a great big shopping mall, with the rest of the world standing outside, looking in the windows, and we only letting them in to mop the floors.
Aristocracy, rule by the elite, by those who feast, should naturally disturb a Christian and leave him disquieted. Is it not so that we Christians worship a king who was poor?
Keynesian economic principles, which have held ascendancy among our elite for some decades, indicate that we can get out of a recession by spending money. It makes sense. Kinda. Or does it?
I mean, it's what most of the media says over and over again. All the bailouts and stimulus packages are based upon that idea. But let's unravel it for a minute, and see if it holds to the light of common sense.
The recession is caused because money is tightening up - for individuals and companies. Money is tightening up because we are paying more out, individually and nationally, than we are bringing in - or at least we're getting there. A major source of payments out is the interest on debts that we owe. But if we borrow more money (and thus have higher debt service payments) we are supposed to be able to spend more money and thus everyone will earn more money.
Except, because most of what we buy is made overseas, we won't really make that money back. Other countries' residents will, just like they have been, increasingly, for 30 or so years, and especially since the free-trade bonanza of which NAFTA is a paradigmatic (but unfortunately, not a lonely) example.
So we will borrow money from foreigners so we can buy things from foreigners (or from the credit card companies we use to buy the stuff) at interest. So we owe them more money than when we started, and have higher monthly payments, and are deeper in debt, and money tightens up again and the debt is passed on, like a snowball, to our children - until it is too heavy and crushes some poor generation at last. Are we that generation?
Does anyone else think this "solution" is insane? A recipe for individual, corporate, and national bankruptcy?
We need a new way of doing things as a nation, in particular, but in the West in general.
Watch these YouTube videos and let me know what you think. One of the featured guests on the videos, Gerald Clemente, makes points that remind me of the forgotten (or perhaps never well-known) economic approach called distributism. Listen carefully to him.
But does anyone else think that a multi-gajillion (that's 700 with about a billion zeros following it) dollar bail-out right now is a bad idea? I mean, we've already floated $10,000,000,000,000 in debt in the last 8 years. That's ten trillion dollars, if you lost track of the zeros. No joke. That's $33,500 per man, woman, and child - citizen, visitor, undocumented migrant in the entire USA in debt in the last 8 years. About 70% of it is owed to Chinese interests, I believe. Now, who still thinks a bail-out right now is very smart? Maybe I'm being too conservative or old-fashioned. I mean, what's another trillion or so dollars borrowed from our bossom buddies? I mean, I've got an extra $33,500 laying around to pay off what we already owe - don't you? And so do each of our children, or retirees, and our well-paid guest workers.
At the very least, does anybody else think that some personal responsibility is called for?
Now, we don't want our economy to tank (by objective standards left unreported, it is not doing badly at all, and certainly not in a recession). And we certainly don't want to see lots of new homeless. Perhaps a solution this mess might be something like:
1) Defaulted adjustible-rate mortgage (ARM) loans are legally cancelled and their collateral (the house) is reclaimed by the lending institution, which then has no further recourse against the borrower.
2) Banks get the houses, but will receive no further money, so should not auction them too cheaply. What they do with the houses (probably auction them) is their business.
3) Dispossessed (and presumably bankrupt) borrowers are given, as a one-time gift, a voucher for two months' rent (a LOT cheaper than bailing out the mortgage industry) so they have some time to get their lives in order without being homeless.
4) Laws prohibiting the current nonsense, repealed in the 1990s and 2000s, are restored with criminal penalties attached to irresponsible lending. Whatever laws (still) exist that could possibly be applied to land as many of these yahoos in jail as possible, for as long as possible, would be well applied right NOW.
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Of course, all these steps are intermediate steps to a more permanent solution. I actually stand with the consensus among the world's traditional ethical systems (including the Jewish and Christian) in holding that lending at interest is immoral. Not just high interest, but at any interest. Investing with a share of the risk and profit is perfectly alright, but to expect money to grow on trees (that is, to give someone money, and without working for it, or knowing what they are going to do with it, expect more to be given back - NO MATTER WHAT) is ludicrous. They are looking for something for nothing. The whole present problem is caused by greed - the greed of investors, of bankers, and of potential home-buyers. We are seeing some fallout from that; how many bailouts before we recognize that the massive industry exploiting usury is just flat-out stupid. With the exception of a house (which is very expensive, and also a very solid investment, generally) - if you cannot afford it, you do not need it, and you shouldn't take out a loan for it.
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If I've offended anybody out there, or hurt their feelings, GOOD. STOP being stupid and greedy and indebting us all to the Chinese! If you're a friend of mine, it's not personal, really. You still need to stop getting us all into messes, though, even if I like you a lot. This is serious.
If you have been living irresponsibly with respect to finances, and I did for most of a decade, and got into and only recently out of a LOT of debt, I cannot recommend the following link highly enough. Dave Ramsey makes his living teaching people sound principles of personal finance. No get-rich-quick schemes here, but just learning how to work hard, save your money well, and retire comfortably with your responsibilities met. But I warn you, it is a real call to conversion that Dave sells. Back in the springtime, I went through his 13-week program (for a whopping $95) and it changed my life.
Ryan Matthew Haber
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