Vanity Qus: Anyone met theologically conservative, but politically liberal Christians?

vanity thread | 14 July 2004 | myself

[walden]

I remember a verse of Paul's (sorry, don't have the actual reference) that basically to take care of the needy, but not of the able-bodied who will not work.

I also have a huge problem with the state being responsible to fulfill what ought to be done by private people and organizations. The state is coercion, plain and simple. Not only does the state do welfare badly, it also robs all virtue from the act of giving and helping. Coerced virtue isn't virtue at all. So, you end up with a system that encourages sloth in those who receive, and removes the virtue from those who give. What is good about this?

[NZerFromHK]

That's even easier. What do we mean by markets? What do we mean by justice? Capitalism itself works (relatively) well (or to borrow winston Churchill's style, "less wickedly") when we have a fallen world rampant with sin nature. Whether you use market mechanism to fulfill your greed depends on your hearts rather than the nature of market economic systems. I can use my greed to act as a corporate raider in taking over a public company in a free market economy such as the US system (just like Carl Icahn had done to TWA in the 1980s), and similarly, I can also use my greed to finance decadent entertainment and smuggle gold and countless other goods in a fully communist or a hybrid socialist-semi-market economy such as the contemporary People's Republic of China. (Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, was well noted for her looting of political enemies' valuables such as vases, antiques, etc, which in turn was "confiscated" from "class enemies", and an unsubstantiated report indicates that Li Peng's family had got fat over the partial privatization of several electricity utilities in Northeastern China - it was said they had gobbled up RMB 6 billion - around US$700 million).

In fact, because free market leads to a more decentralized scene in the economy it means that over time greeds of individuals were offset by other economic party, kind of like how multivariable systems stays stable when you apply a disturbance to it - unlike state socialism where if the greed comes from the publicly-owned operative or government regulator everything is doomed since there is no constraints to their greed. That's the primary reason why I favour free market over socialism. Of course, free market is only a tool - it needs a Christian heart - a heart born again in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God - to run really well. Without it, things are not going to go well.