Posted on 02/11/2010 12:18:15 PM PST by GonzoII
(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 10 - The economy needs ethics to survive the recession, Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday in a return to a recurring theme in his addresses focusing on the need to rethink the global economy along moral lines.
''The global financial crisis has impoverished no small number of people,'' he stated during a general audience at the Vatican.
Underscoring the need to put ''people back at the center of economic decision-making,'' the pope said ''a new code of business ethics'' was required to usher in the transformation.
As an example, he pointed to the figure of St Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) who spent his life preaching against avarice and pride, two qualities Benedict blames for the recession.
End the amoral neo-paganism of the progressives and liberals then the economics will come back.
Exactly. For all the intellectual genius of the Roman Catholic faith I just don’t understand why their leading lights are (almost universally) economic idiots. I just chalk it up to 90% of their flock being in poor or semi-socialist settings I guess.
On the contrary, "compassion" killed the economy. Governments trying to provide for those who failed eliminated the Biblical principle of "reap what you sow". Suddenly if you did something and it failed, well, no penalties, no real setback. Failure no longer carried any penalty.
Government trying to be compassionate is what caused the recession; we need a hard, uncaring, critical eye to deal with economics and finances. Factoring in "human costs" and the like will only extend what has happened.
Money has no emotion. Money has emotions attached to it. The failure is attaching emotions to an unemotional, inanimate object: money.
I find that hard to argue against. It was avarice and pride that drove the entire world to live with “acquisition” on its corporate mind. I'm not speaking solely of business. I'm talking about the population of the world. Everything and everybody has become expendable in order to “make it big”. Waste, squandering resources, not recycling (i.e. having shoes resoled, not buying faddish things), those qualities that made our parents and grandparents seem like “Debbie Downer” were the major reasons they could always reach down into that sock drawer and pull out a fiver on a “rainy” day. We (and businesses) didn't live that way. It was easy come; easy go. I make it; I spend it.
What I can't go along with is that it has to be an upheaval of proved policies. You can be a covetous, greedy, corrupt person and not have a dime to your name. It isn't time to soak the rich. It's time to get a grip and learn that not everything has to be attained today. The most valuable and cherished things are those you might wait a lifetime to get — or die with a smile because that dream kept you going to the end.
I mean, even the 18th century ideas that the American system have their foundation on, acknowledge that only a moral people could sustain our system of government and economics.
Yes. But they were far more wary of immoral people in government than in private enterprise.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” - John Adams
PLacemark.
Will read and ping out later. Looks as though good explanation of why liber(al)tarian ideas will never work.
I think that the Church should be oriented on helping those poor benighted souls that have not or can not adapt to the social condition of free market charity. I would trust a priest with a donation long before a government hack. On the other hand, the doctrines of political correctness and liberalism might have infiltrated even the Catholic Church, I know it has definitely infected the American laymen of that body.
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Covetousness and greed are also ruinous to the individual character and the social body as a whole. When basic morality is rejected, Dog Eat Dog and the devil take the hindmost is the law of the land. Without the basic moral absolutes taught in every religion, human beings revert to worse than beasts. Cheating, all kinds of corruption and lying become SOP. As we see in the headlines daily. No one is punished, the gov does it, the financial institutions do it, the big guys generally get away with it. All because greed, envy, lust, covetousness - they're not "bad" any more.
Neither government has the emotion of compassion.
That the government killed the economy there is little doubt; that the government, particularly of the Left playes to our compassion is also very true.
And still, compassion is a virtue and greed is a sin. The lack of foresight that the financiers ought to have had as they securitized the real estate market was a direct result of two things, greed and the government enabling the risk taking at the taxpayer expense. The latter is something a compassionate ruler would not do, but heartless democracy does now and again.
Elect thieves, and you should not expect anything but thievery from them.
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Precisely. Greed is hardly limited to the private sector. Look at what the public employee unions have done to many states. The states are heavily in debt, to the point of near-bankruptcy, because of the greed of the public employee unions.
Benedict says nothing about compassion here. I read "avarice and pride" as referring to government officials who want to get their hands on our money -- money that they didn't earn.
What we typically have is thievery done at the taxpayer expense enabling public sector that are driven by greed, and the result is suffering of the powerless American voter.
The mortgage crisis is a good example. The government, — which can only benefit from people depending on it for welfare housing — guarantees mortgages through Freddy Mae. That is an act of theft, because you and I did not agree to guarantee anything to people we don’t know making decisions we cannot advice for or against. The mortgage marketer then realizes that he only needs to make a profit on a few month, off a mortgage supposed to last 30 years. That is greed: decisions made in the short term because you can run away from the consequences in the long term.
Another example. Catholic moral law prohibits lending for living necessities: that is usury (*). That is because if you buy groceries and gasoline on debt, then someone — a banker — found a way to muscle more money than the stuff is worth out of you. Yet who is responsible to the plastic culture that pervaded the everyday consumer exchange and is eating up the livelihood of the middle class? The government who will only grow if you get poorer, and greedy bankers at the Visa.
So why shouldn’t I listen to the Pope on economic matters, but to trust the Bernankes in Washington is just fine?
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