{"id":6761,"date":"2011-09-30T09:33:50","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T16:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=6761"},"modified":"2011-09-30T09:54:22","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T16:54:22","slug":"it-is-not-the-economy-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/it-is-not-the-economy-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"It Is Not the Economy, Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"America by Bruce Walker –
\nLife is the pursuit of truth, of love, of honor, and of liberty. America was created not for purposes of comfort or money. It was created so that each of us could seek, unmolested by public needs, a private path to what is right.<\/em><\/p>\n

Watching the Republican debates, listening to the droning of our dreary presidential flop, reading what wise pundits on the right as well as the left say, one might assume that economics was the standard of all policy and politics. Twenty years ago, when Bill Clinton ran for president, his mantra was clear: “It’s the economy, stupid!”<\/p>\n

I pray that we do not surrender to the damnable vice of utter materialism. If we do, nothing can save us. America is a rich nation which is being drained and hobbled by those who hate it with unbridled venom. “God damn America!” Obama’s preacher screeched. All over the world and all over our nation, grotesque little monsters frown and sneer at our country. <\/p>\n

They hate us, but they do not hate our wealth, nor do they particularly hate how wealth is divided in our nation (every nation, without exception, has its “upper ten percent,” its “super-rich” and its “very poor.”)\u00a0 We think that the attack on America is based upon economics because those who hate us spout class warfare all the time.\u00a0 But that is simply another lie told by those who think lying is fine.<\/p>\n

Modern life, particularly in America and modern industrialized societies, is pure luxury compared with any other era of human history.\u00a0 Our biggest health problem is obesity, yet because the left cannot discard the hopelessly silly notion of rampant hunger in America, one is likely to find in the same leftist screed a condemnation of our heartless indifference to childhood hunger and a call for fat poor kids to exercise more.<\/p>\n

Look at the object of consumer consumption today.\u00a0 Software, particularly computer gaming, takes up a huge chunk of discretionary spending.\u00a0 Cable television is stuffed like a pig with venal, vaporous, and vicious programming.\u00a0 The coronation of all forms of celebrity leads us into countless cul-de-sacs of despair as Casey Anthony<\/a> is vetted for a career in pornography.<\/p>\n

Why do leftists here create phantasms like global warming and demand holy altars to worship dirt?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are places where real need is desperate, particularly in Africa, but the cause of hardship is not economic.\u00a0 Rather, it is political. \u00a0Leaders cannot have their subjects affluent.\u00a0 These wretches must, instead, be forced into corrals of poverty.\u00a0 All the trillions of dollars of aid which America and Europe have given to these nations have not helped the poor.<\/p>\n

Why would anyone want his own people poor?\u00a0 Why do leftists here create phantasms like global warming and demand holy altars to worship dirt?\u00a0 Why do they ignore the ghastly deconstruction of wholesome youth, which is the sole aim of state-controlled education and culture?\u00a0 It has nothing to do with money or with markets or with any other aspect of conventional economics.<\/p>\n

Reach back to Orwell and to C.S. Lewis, writing more than sixty years ago, and grasp what these prescient men saw then.\u00a0 In 1984<\/em>, there was grinding poverty for nearly all, but a modicum of affluence for members of the Inner Party. \u00a0Orwell leaves no doubt that the societal poverty is a central policy of the Inner Party.\u00a0 Obsessed with simple survival, the slaves of Oceania have no room for any greater existence.\u00a0 If manna fell from Heaven, the Inner Party would gather it all up and burn it.\u00a0 Orwell describes a secular Hell.<\/p>\n

Stuff cannot give us purpose or peace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

C.S. Lewis describes a spiritual Hell.\u00a0 In The Great Divorce<\/em>, Lewis shows us a society in which anyone can create anything he wishes just by wishing.\u00a0 Although the reader can see their utterly hopeless and accursed existence, these subjects of godless afterlife do not know that they are in Hell.<\/p>\n

Stuff cannot give us purpose or peace.\u00a0 Any society which focuses on “stuff” will end up, whether as rich as Beverly Hills or as poor as Havana, worshipping false gods and living horrible lives.\u00a0 When Republicans say that “jobs” is the only real issue, when Republicans seem to believe that prenatal infanticide, snickering defamation of Judeo-Christian faith, or flaying of family in the torture chambers of leftism is a distraction, let us hope that they do not mean it.<\/p>\n

Obama and his orcs view life as a soulless struggle for stuff without a Great Watchman who judges those who lie and steal and bully in pursuit of some invented “noble” goal.\u00a0 This is entirely and eternally wrong: life is the pursuit of truth, of love, of honor, and of liberty.\u00a0 America was created not for purposes of comfort or money.\u00a0 It was created so that each of us could seek, unmolested by public needs, a private path to what is right.<\/p>\n

life is the pursuit of truth, of love, of honor, and of liberty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It is the left which rewrote our history to make the Founding Fathers ciphers in some vast battle between capitalism and socialism. \u00a0In 1938, Dorothy Thompson, the first journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, wrote a small book which explains how history professors were teaching students to interpret history from the standpoint of materialism, as if the Constitution should be read wholly in the life of the economic status of the men who framed it, with the presumption that they were incapable of disinterested thinking.\u00a0 Thompson warns that this will shrink human life to sterile economic analysis of life.<\/p>\n

The war we fight involves jobs, money, taxes, and other elements of economics — and it is perfectly proper to make arguments in favor of ordered liberty — but the heart of our battle to defend our way of life would not end if next year we found a way to synthetically create all we might want without any effort beyond our wishing for it. \u00a0Peel back the thin and translucent layer of stuff and find a vastly deeper and more vital conflict between men who would be gods or druids to empty nature-worship and people who have immortal souls and know the infinite importance of that truth.\u00a0 It is not the economy, stupid.<\/p>\n

HT: American Thinker<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Walker – Life is the pursuit of truth, of love, of honor, and of liberty. America was created not for purposes of comfort or money. It was created so that each of us could seek, unmolested by public needs, a private path to what is right. Watching the Republican debates, listening to the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[67,72,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives","category-leftism","category-moral-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}