Rand Paul's New Gospel: No rich, no poor

Rand Paul seems to be an innovator in religion, as well as in economics, sociology, and anthropology. His perceptions transcend the parochial traditionalism of religious icons like Jesus, not to mention the commonplaces of moral philosophers and economic analysts like Adam Smith or the cliches of Marxist analyses of alleged "classes". And he does it all with just a few words, saving us from heavy reading and the uncomfortable process of deep thinking and reflection. All it took was a brief explanation to Wolf Blitzer in early November about why he opposes rolling back the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 a year, if single, or $250,000 a year, if married. (See http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/rand-paul-there-rich-people/)

First there was the ringing statement of his new gospel's revolutionary insight: "Well, the thing is, we're all interconnected. There are no rich, there are no middle class, there are no poor; we all are interconnected in the economy."

(Commentary: with that, Senator-elect Paul neatly bypasses the largest single body of teaching contained in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Christian New Testament. There are no rich to be sent empty away, as per Mary and the Magnificat. The difficulty of getting a camel, or a Mercedes, through the eye of a needle is only a thought-experiment, not a warning to an imaginary class of monied people. Woe to the rich? A fantasy of the hyper-religious.)

Next came, not a mere flight-of-the-imagination parable, but a telling example that revealed the implications of the new Good News: "You remember a few years ago when they tried to tax the yachts. That didn't work. You know who lost their jobs? The people making the boats, the guys making $50,000 and $60,000 a year lost their jobs."

(Commentary: the main problem was that they taxed only new yachts. Those who have the money to buy a truly expensive boat found it easy to buy their expensive toys overseas and then bring them home to the USA tax-free, as used yachts. The fact that a poorly designed tax fell afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences doesn't mean that taxing the wealthy is generally a bad idea. It's just that a luxury tax on a very expensive item is relatively easy to evade.)

Then, the truth behind the truth: "We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people, so just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone."

(Oops, uh, I mean "Commentary": I thought there were no rich. Logical consistency doesn't seem to be the new gospeler's gift area. However, his clear meaning is that we're all dependent on rich people, even if they don't exist, so we'd better treat them very well. I'll leave it to you who are reading this to come up with Biblical passages that he has deftly obsoleted.)

Finally, the call to a new and higher moral standard: "Let's not punish anyone." This is accompanied by a vision of the coming reward. The new morality finds its highest expression in a tried and true commandment: "Let's keep taxes low and let's cut spending."

(Commentary: punishment is not banned so easily. Cutting spending always punishes someone. Keeping taxes low for the highest earners disproportionately rewards those who have already benefitted disproportionately from "the system" and its physical, institutional, legal, and intellectual infrastructure. A concomitant reduction in spending takes away disproportionately from those with less or with little. So it's natural that cutting spending and collaterally damaging the poor is popular with the many of the rich. It's viewed as just another "externality" -- if they forget about the possibility that cutting government spending at the wrong time may hurt the economy and their own interests. Regardless of that, if they can keep the PR working right, punishing the poor and the middle can even become popular with some of the poor, with more of the "working poor", and with lots of those in the middle. And so we have the mordantly amusing reality that many of the never-to-be-rich are ardent supporters, right now, of continuing the tax cuts for the highest brackets. That's not surprising. For a long time, people with low incomes and little, if any, wealth have been opposed to "Death Taxes" even though they've been levied only on the portions of estates that were above $3.5 million. In 2011, after a year of no estate taxes, the tax will be imposed on the amounts above $1 million or, if a pending bill is passed, $5 million. Either way, most people have no prospect of having estates large enough to be subject to the dreaded Death Tax. They'll still oppose it, though. As the NY State Lottery advertising slogan puts it: "Hey, you never know.")

Rand Paul and the NY State Lottery must be co-religionists.

God and Wealth

I'm a member over at a site called CrossLeft and I blog and comment there. CrossLeft's masthead slogan is "Join the Progressive Christian Movement". The question of the meaning of terms like "progressive", "liberal", and "left" comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to the presidential election campaign.

I had written a comment complaining that Obama and Clinton are too caught up in the corporate system, and received a reply from an Obama supporter that one can take anti-corporatism too far. Following that, someone else posted a drawing of his to illustrate the passage in Luke that ends with Jesus saying "You cannot serve God and wealth" -- or in the older translations, "You cannot serve God and Mammon".

So this is what I wrote next, with a few emendations at the end, coming from my comments to responders:

Angelo's illustration for Luke 16:1-13 stimulates me to write about corporations, conservatism, and Jesus' teachings. Yeah, again with the corporations.

It really seems so simple and straightforward to me.

1. In Luke, Jesus says "You cannot worship God and wealth."

2. Business corporations whose stocks are publicly traded in the market have, under current law, only one duty -- a fiduciary duty to their stockholders. That means they're obligated to put stockholders' financial interests above all else. Net income and net worth are their only bottom lines. The production of wealth is the sole interest of these fictive legal persons.

3. As a legal person, a corporation of this type is literally a soulless person and feels unconstrained by any human values other than "wealth is good", "more wealth is better", and "no amount of wealth is enough". Thus, maximizing profits is at all times its only operational goal. Providing products and services are but means to this goal.

4. This strange wealth-seeking person is given perpetual life by its charter. It nevertheless may die, but if it makes profits, it need not ever die. With perpetual life comes the absence of 'death taxes'. The 'estate' is never broken up and redistributed to its human heirs; its wealth can build to a level far beyond that which is possessed by a single human person. The most successful corporate persons become economic entities that are larger than most nation-states. With size comes financial power. With financial power comes political power.

5. The human persons who own stock in this fictive legal person are free from any legal responsibilities for what their corporation does. If they don't like what the corporation is doing, they can sell their stock. If they continue to hold their stock, they have no practical influence on "their" corporation's behavior. The structure of corporate governance makes it extremely hard for stockholders to have any significant impact on corporate policy and behavior.

6. Except as restricted by governmental regulation, the corporate personages are therefore set free to do as they like. The cumulative effects of what they like to do have, over the last couple of centuries, changed the face of the earth and changed the terms of human existence . Thus, the true revolutionary force in 'modern times' has been the corporation, aided by corporate-enabling and corporate-promoting nation-states. The Soviet Union's counterrevolution couldn't hold up against the corporate-based system' ability to harness science and technology to produce wealth and power. And China's has been absorbed by the same system within which it is now a major contender for power.

7. Wealth and power, relatively concentrated in key sectors, have made the corporation the dominant and defining institution in our society. People adapt to its needs more than it adapts to people's needs.

8. Our society has in this manner created a class of fictive legal individuals who constitute a totally new type of ruling class. These rulers are beyond the reach of the teachings of Jesus. "Serving Mammon" (I like the old words sometimes), they are unable to "serve God". Or, correlatively, "to serve humanity". Is it any wonder we non-fictive human individuals and our human societies have problems?

9. Those who serve these servants of Mammon as executives and highest-level support staff have generally taken for themselves the respectable term "conservative". They function as the human part of the new ruling class. (It's estimated that perhaps only 30,000 people constitute the "ruling class" part of the "upper class".) Their definition of "conservative", stripped of parochial social and cultural issues (the materials of "the culture wars" in the USA), comes down to maintaining the status quo of corporate domination.

10. Our constitutional structure and the structure of our election laws make for a two party system which is hard to challenge or change. Both parties are conservative in that they work to maintain the corporate system. One party tends to work to enhance corporate power, the other to improve the terms of the deal through incremental changes and reforms which help to stabilize the corporate system. FDR is the prime example of the latter, despite the fact that his reforms weren't experienced as merely incremental by the diehards of the corporate enhancement bloc. He took the label of "liberal" rather than "progressive", as "progressive" had become an outmoded and pejorative term. It was associated with basic challenges to the corporate system which had failed and which no longer had any traction.

11. The term "liberal', having been demonized and made into a pejorative by the Republican corporate party, was in turn rejected by many reformers within the Democratic corporate party, as well as by outsiders to the "left" of that party. "Progressive" became the term of choice for many. It had the virtue -- and the vice -- of blurring distinctions between the incrementalist reformers within the Democratic Party and the "leftist" system-challengers outside of the party. The virtue is that it has made it easier to form some coalitions across ideological lines in order to resist, in mostly ineffectual ways, some of the most extreme actions of the Republican Party. The vice is that it blurs ideological differences in a way that confuses thought and diffuses action. It makes it harder to discern what changes improve and support the corporate system, and what changes actually start to change the system.

12. Jesus said "You cannot worship God and wealth."

What do we mean when we call this place "CrossLeft" and ask people to "Join the Progressive Christian Movement"? Do we see connections between the words "You cannot serve God and wealth" and our American institutional life? Are we to abet those corporate persons and their servants who worship wealth? If we oppose them, how? And how do we discern the difference?

That is, do we take corporatism on as a major opponent? If we do, as I think we must, then what constitutes real opposition and what doesn't?

Those are the questions that will do much to define what we mean by "CrossLeft" and "Progressive Christian Movement". The tags "leftist", "liberal", and "progressive" are far less important than the issue of where you draw the boundary between "conservative" and "non-conservative" -- or more precisely, "corporatist" and "non-corporatist", as some paleoconservatives and Burkean conservatives see the dangers of corporatism.

Whoa! and Woe!

Three weeks ago, I read another prophetic word of woe in church, this time from the Book of Amos.

The current translation in the Lectionary begins with "Alas for those who are at ease in Zion" instead of the older "Woe to those who..." Preferring the word "woe" to the tamer "alas", I asked for and got permission to make the substitution. When I reached the lectern, I was so focused on "woe" and on finding just the right tone and emphasis for that opening cry that I forgot the standard introduction: "A reading from the book of Amos, the 6th chapter, beginning at the first verse." Without preamble, I launched into the prophet's attack on the idle, uncaring rich. Later, I was told that I had certainly grabbed people's attention.

I think Amos would have liked that. Leading off with "Woe" is like hitting a jackass with a two-by-four in order to get his attention. The message following that first hit is always one that the hearers don't want to listen to. That's generally because they're the rich and powerful, satisfied with their riches and secure in their dominance.

Amos' word to them is that their Homeland Security is an illusion: "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure in Mount Samaria". The continuation of the sentence makes it clear that Amos is talking to the power elite: "the notables of the first of the nations to whom the House of Israel resorts." The sarcasm of "the first of the nations" continues. Amos asks these "notables" if their little statelet is bigger and stronger than its neighbors. Well-known to his contemporary audience, but not to his modern one, all three of the places he mentions had already been conquered by the Assyrian Empire. So the implication is that despite your pretensions, guys, you're next.

And his warning is clear: "you that put far away the evil day" have put aside any idea that your actions will be judged, will have consequences. And so you "bring near a reign of violence", the retribution for your actions.

And why? Amos runs through a list of decadently luxurious pleasures enjoyed by his targets: lounging on fancy furniture, eating high on the lamb, amusing themselves with idle songs, swilling wine in bowls, anointing themselves with fine oils. And it's not that these pleasures are intrinsically bad -- this isn't a diatribe against gluttony or sexual debauchery, for example. The problem is that with all these perks of prosperity, the notables have forgotten the important things: they "are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!" And exactly what is the ruin of Joseph? It runs all through Amos' book: it's the "trampling of the head of the poor into the dust". (Amos 2:7) Joseph is "the poor of the land" who have been brought to ruin by cheaters, swindlers, profiteers, who buy them for silver or for a pair of sandals. (Amos 8:4)

Because the wealthy are not grieved, they shall be the first to go into exile when Assyria makes its next conquest. Then "the revelry of the loungers shall pass away."

Amos hereby strikes another blow in the unending battle of prophets against the type of prosperity gospels that substitute the wealth of a few for the prosperity of the people. He says "whoa!". Change now! Or it will be "woe!"

And today there are still hardly enough "whoas" and "woes" to go around.

On wealth and Prosperity Gospels

As an amateur actor who hasn't been on stage for a very long time, I like it when my wife and I are chosen to read the scripture lessons to the congregation. I prefer the "Old Testament" reading, particularly when it's from one of the prophets. The texts are so boldly dramatic. I usually talk my wife, a professional actress, into reading the Epistle, which generally calls for minutely nuanced handling of long convoluted sentences. (She's good; she's very good.)

Not long ago, when my turn to be a lector rolled around, the passage was from Ecclesiasticus (or the Book of Sirach), part of the Apocrypha. Not a canonical work in the Hebrew Bible, but still a satisfyingly brilliant tirade against arrogance, injustice, and wealth.

The passage started off strong at the 7th verse of chapter 10: "Arrogance is hateful to the Lord and to mortals, and injustice is outrageous to both. Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth.* [New Revised Standard Version] (I tried to deliver "and wealth" as a quietly released bolt from a cross-bow, aimed at each forehead.)

But this isn't about personal sin; it's about the rise and fall of nations. This could be talking about us, right here in The Land Between The Oceans. People who are used to the Bible aren't surprised to hear injustice and pride condemned. But wealth? As the cause of the fall of a nation? What about all those passages that say if you do right, you will prosper?

Prosperity, however, is not just a personal thing. It's national. Again and again, prophets rail against the dire consequences to the whole people when the nation gets it wrong.

So, according to this Wisdom of Ben Sira, it must be that in a land of injustice and arrogance, great wealth moves to the hands of the avaricious, the deceitful, the loving idolators of wealth, the breakers of the laws of justice -- as well as to the hands of the merely clever and lucky. Riches in the hands of the few is very different from a well-distributed prosperity that comes from good crops, useful manufactures, and honest trade.

A real Prosperity Gospel would needs be a justice and humility gospel first: one that goes beyond looking for personal prosperity. Otherwise, the Wealth of Nations produces the fall of nations. Thus says the Wisdom of Ben Sira, for one. Among many Biblical writers.