Biblical Economics As Opposed To Neo-Liberal And Lefty Economics And Why Believing That People Are Not Objects Makes All The Difference

It's too bad that we're reliant on theories instead of explicit documentation about how the books of the Bible and their ordering came to be what they are because it would be interesting to know how the people who gave us those books and that ordering thought of what they did.

In his lectures you can hear on Youtube, Walter Brueggemann points out something that I'd never noticed about the story of Joseph, the one with the coat of many colors who was betrayed by his brothers, got brought to Egypt as a slave, who rose though his ability to interpret Pharaoh's dream of the fat and lean cattle to become Pharaoh's food Czar in the famine he told Pharaoh his dream was predicting.  What Brueggemann points out is that far from Joseph being a great exemplar of Jewish morality, he administered the people, especially the Jews who had fled to Egypt during the famine, into slavery.   He points out that it didn't occur to Pharaoh or his food Czar to give food from their surplus to starving people for free, he required first their property and when they were financially ruined, that they become his slaves.

I don't think it can be an accident that after the story of Joseph ends Genesis, the very next book is the story of the Jewish slaves, their misery and their liberation from slavery by God.  And once they are in the wilderness, free from Pharoah's proto-neo-liberal economy, they are given food for nothing by God.  There are many interesting facets to the story, Brueggemann points out that right after they've had the miraculous escape from Pharaoh and his gangster army, finding freedom doesn't have the easy security of slavery* some of them want to go back to slavery.  It's not a simple, linear, Hollywood kind of story, no matter what Cecil B told you - I doubt most of the people who saw the movie ever read the book - but the contrasting parallels between the details of the Joseph narrative and the Exodus narrative that immediately follows it are too striking.  Joseph signing on with Pharaoh, Moses breaking with Pharaoh (his adopted uncle, apparently),  enslavement of the hungry through extortion through food, freeing of people and giving them food for free,  the cagey move of storing up an abundant surplus of food and the economics of selling high in time of need (we do that through stock shares and lending and the such) and telling people to not hoard more than they need for the present except for the Sabbath.  Brueggemann points out the centrality to Sabbath in the Exodus narrative as a contrast to the grinding and unreasonable production quotas of the Pharaonic security state.

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I will repeat that I didn't consider John Paul II to have been a very good Pope and I still don't.   He was a terrible pastor as were the large majority of the Bishops and Cardinals he appointed, being more interested in centralizing power and authority in the Papacy and the Vatican than he was in administering to the needs of the Catholic People.   His narrow, European context of thinking and, I suspect, his relationships with the American government when he was in Poland led him to totally misunderstand the struggle of liberation in Latin America against the equivalent Pharaonic enslavement and his scandalous treatment of The People, especially of those Central American countries in which the Reagan administration and others mounted terror campaigns to prevent anything like democracy, liberation from the most grinding poverty enforced by violence and mass murder which John Paul II and thugs like Bernard Law either tacitly or explicitly went along with supposedly to oppose communist expansion.

The many sins of John Paul II, and there were many, led me and leads me to the conclusion that his canonization as a saint without addressing those sins as part of it is a scandal in itself.

And I didn't particularly like the cult of personality that he seemed to enjoy.  That was disgusting.

That said, even John Paul II, by force of the Biblical narratives and their meaning, wrote some truly radical documents on economics, I would hold that, in the end, they are far MORE radical than Karl Marx's view of economics because even John Paul II puts people and their needs to maintain decent lives over and above all other considerations  The idea of both the humane production of wealth and its distribution, including the provision of services, the concept of both individual and communal rights and dignity AND THEIR CONSCIOUS SERVICE THROUGH ECONOMIC ACTIVITY  puts it entirely above the materialist theories of Marx which, in practice, turned out to be both impractical and which led to horror where that was tried.  Marx's pseudo-scientific materialism guaranteed that individuals would certainly not be the central focus of any Marxist applied economics and that "the masses" would be more a mass of slaves maintained for the benefit of the system - mention of the fact that those in control of the system would inevitably turn into dictators and generate an oligarchy of, eventually, inherited privilege was discretely left out of it on the theoretical level but that's something which lasted even after the pretenses of communism were given up in places like Russia, the other Soviet States and China.   The Communist-created oligarchy is, ironically but not surprisingly, its most enduring legacy.

If the economic theories of Laborem Exercens and other documents issued by the two conservative, even reactionary Popes were made law in the United States, the results would be considered intolerably radical by the free-press, large parts of academia our billionaire oligarchs and their lackeys and those who hope to become rich in the lavish corruption of our eutrophic imperial system**.   And there are many other pastoral letters by other Popes and bishops and councils of Bishops (though not so much the US Catholic Conference of Bishops since JPII) not to mention other clergy and theologians, etc. of other denominations, Jewish, Christian and perhaps as much if not more so, Muslims. 

The American left, where I wasted the larger part of my adulthood, is even more pathetically corrupted by a snobbish, elite materialism that pretends to be better than the vulgar materialism of the billionaire oligarchs while being largely its servant and, through its devotion to foreign dictators, communist and post-communist and the Marxist system that produces them, its dupe.

The total and complete failure of the left that either is in the hands of or led by or can accommodate  materialist ideologues for a half-century is proof in the laboratory of real life that a left that is materialistic will be no alternative, at all.   They won't even prevent the worst that can happen under our system, they will weaken the chances of the least bad in favor of the very worst.  The presidential election of 2017 which pitted the most investigated, most vetted example of our politics, probably the most competent and proven candidate against Trump who was known to be totally corrupt, totally incompetent and totally compromised and that American left did its best to defeat the least bad candidate we have had since 1976. 

The  hoax of the would be "Constitutionalists" widely accepted on the left that the sensible requirement of disestablishment by the government in its official acts and practices means that the left must be secular (for that you can read "atheist')  has defeated us over and over again.  The last real progress made by traditional American liberalism, the Civil Rights struggle, was empowered largely through the Churches, when it deviated from that in the late 60s, under the influence of more academically fashionable and anti-religious figures, it started to fail.  The same has been true of every other part of the left.  That's even true of the LGBT rights movement.  It was through the deep involvement of churches in my state which led it to be the first state in the country to secure marriage equality through the ballot, the most reliable means of securing rights, far more reliable than depending on courts for that.

I don't think there is any evidence that a non-religious left can ever succeed and the cases where anti-religious, alleged lefts have succeeded in gaining power, well, those results are, when not enforced through violence, temporary,  mixed in the best cases and horrific in the worst of them.  The "leftist" governments they produce are horror shows, not any liberalism a moral person would ever want to support and which no sane person would choose as their government.  The snobbery of the college credentialed "left" for which atheism is part of the admissions requirement is enough to ensure they will never be elected except where there is a big enough college or some other anomalous population.

It doesn't work, it hasn't worked, pretending it is going to suddenly - though without a miracle which atheists aren't allowed to invoke - start happening is luancy.   A left that isn't hostile to religion would at least not alienate people who are religious, which is, by and large, most people, it would have the means of asserting the rightness of equality, equal rights and the binding moral obligation to provide those. It wouldn't mistake The People for "the masses" as a natural resource to manage instead of the possessors of rights, the image of God, though not necessarily the voice of God.  A left that never gave that up in favor of pseudo-scientific scientistic materialism would have held power and persuaded far more people of its preferability.  We can be fairly confident of that because of the result of the past half-century of their domination of the official American left.

*  The claims of Thomas Huxley that emancipation only meant that slaves could now be killed or allowed to die because they weren't valuable as property is an assertion of the same thing.   As the billionaire oligarchs, our present day Pharaohs, can replace more and more workers with robotic machines, they have less of an interest in maintaining what they and their thugs in the Congress, Executive and Judiciary consider human dross, surplus people.

**  I doubt even the Pharaonic system of Egypt would have allowed in or kept a Donald Trump in place as long as "American democracy" has.   To pretend it hasn't all gone to hell or that that capacity is built into it through the Constitution is to collaborate in supporting its.  I'm not going to lie about a Constitution and Bill of Rights that produced and maintains a Donald Trump or a Mike Pence or a Paul Ryan or a Mitch McConnell or a Supreme Court that can contain the likes of Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.   Their presence at the very head of the government is all the evidence anyone needs that the Constitution should be replaced because it can lead to where we are now.