The Pope is Right...the Right is Wrong

What bothers me in this endless debate is if you criticize capitalism you are automatically branded as anti-free market, socialist or worse.  And the branders are usually those on the right who deal in he 'dog eat dog', 'just win baby' world of a capitalist myth.

Marx, Lenin and the boys criticized capitalism at its core.  But their communist manifesto failed hugely for two reasons:  the dictatorship of the proletariat never evolved into democracy; and stifling government overreach killed innovation and motivation to succeed.

The Pope who is most certainly not a socialist, in his recent statement, points to the excesses of capitalism.   He rightly criticizes the insanity of 'trickle down' economics.  He points to one of capitalism's weaknesses, allocation of wealth.

I always use the  Hollywood metaphor.  First, as we watch say the Academy Awards, we note the winners, the few actors who succeed and are the absolute rich winners.  Meanwhile there are thousands in Hollywood who are either support players, or starving artists.  The winners make huge salaries, and accumulate great wealth.

And who provides this wealth?  We do.  Every time we buy a ticket, motivated by endless advertising of the movies, we add to the few actor's wealth and yes support the rest of the industry.  But, the wealth we trade basically for entertainment is not distributed evenly or close to fairly.  It flows to a few at the top.

Ronald Reagan was an actor, and a product of this phenomenon.  He originally was a Democrat, but as his career matured and he got  richer, the marginal tax rates, taxing levels of high income at high percentages, drove him nuts.  Reagan never explained, nor considered I would guess, that these high tax rates were mostly used to pay off WWII, the most expensive war  in human history, and then sustain the Cold War.

Along the way his heart hardened, to those in the United States, who in the midst of the most dynamic economic growth in our history, stayed behind in poverty.

To the conservative mind set, that could not happen in a system that was producing unheard of wealth, and therefore it must be "their faults".  It was the welfare queens, the slackers, those lulled in laziness by give away government programs.

Meanwhile, the facts were that Popes were even then,  writing the same kinds of criticism of world and United States capitalism that  Pope Francis just did.

Look, there are losers who chose their lot.  But the vast majority of the poor in the United States for all our history are hard working poor.   My father, who is 90, just yesterday for the thousandth time, told me my grandfather who worked for the railroad, always looked forward to Christmas, because he moved up the 'extra board' and got work, because those who higher in seniority took the holidays off.  My dad told me he had a Christmas because of the extra board.  My grandfather was a hard working man, who was victimized by the depression, but never gave up, stayed with Southern Pacific, and fought his way through the Great Depression.  He was no slacker, he was just poor.  He also was 1/4 Cherokee.

 For a variety of reason, mostly race before 1964, whole segments of our society have been mired in irreversible poverty.  The United States had a system of segregation, Apartheid, that was not ended until 1964.  It created a huge caste system, that forced my grandfather to never admit he was Cherokee (he would have been fired).  It produced chronic unequal opportunity in the United States for over a hundred years.  And that poverty still drags us all down, as we endlessly debate and maybe even fight over the Affordable Care Act for example.

I got my hair cut yesterday.  The lady cutting my hair was new.  I asked if she was new, and she said not really, she had worked for the shop over a year ago.  Because of her age, a young mother I guessed, I asked if she had a child.  She slowly said not, she had a ulcerated colon, that had to be removed, and nearly lost her life.  She said she had three operations, and was in the hospital for weeks.

I asked if she had insurance, knowing that the shop probably could not provide it.  She said she did not, BUT BECAUSE SHE WAS UNDER 26 SHE WAS COVERED UNDER HE PARENT'S POLICY!

Right there, right there, it sits.  The unequal distribution  of income, of health insurance coverage, that the Pope warns about, was at least buffered for the 24 something who was cutting my hair.  Right there she was saved from a life of poverty, and her parents from bankruptcy, by the ACA.  It works!  Government intervention in the free market works to protect the major damage that capitalism will cause if not regulated.

But we endlessly debate the ACA.  We endlessly debate the obvious inequities that have produced a huge class of have- nots in this county, and throughout the world, that ultimately will deeply threaten peaceful societies everywhere. Conservatives, who cling to harmful and hateful assumptions of human behavior that are flat wrong, cause endless damage and drive us toward war.

We need to listen to the Pope, and the radical right needs to just shut up!