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Title: The astonishing weakness of Hillary Clinton
Source:
TheWeek
URL Source: http://theweek.com/articles/569184/ ... shing-weakness-hillary-clinton
Published: Jul 31, 2015
Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Post Date: 2015-07-31 10:43:17 by Tooconservative
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Keywords: None
Views: 6862
Comments: 124
Hillary Clinton is as unpopular as she ever has been. Her favorability ratings have fallen to just 40 percent. Her campaign is already heading south, even though she has serious advantages over everyone else in the campaign, both Democratic and Republican. Her opponents in the Democratic field do not pose a plausible mathematical threat. Bernie Sanders can attract huge crowds in college towns, but he is going nowhere with the African-American voters who would be key to building an anti-Clinton Democratic primary coalition. Martin O'Malley's record, shaped by his transition from the Baltimore mayoralty to the Maryland statehouse, has made him radioactive to an activist Democratic base that wants criminal justice reform and that winces when a politician like him says, "All Lives Matter." Clinton is thus free to define her agenda apart from them. Because the Republican field is startlingly unanimous in its positions, Clinton has the opportunity of running against a coherent platform, while picking out its weakest spokesperson on every individual issue. She can run against Trump on immigration, against Huckabee on social issues, against Walker on foreign policy. But it's an opportunity that she has so far passed over. Perhaps she doesn't want to get bogged down in actual policy details, always unpopular with an electorate that grows fat on cliché but retches at details. Still, it means that the entirety of Clinton's campaign has alternated between distancing herself from the legacy of her family name, and stonewalling reporters investigating one scandal or another. In the first category, she has repudiated the tough-on-crime policies of her husband. She has strongly embraced gay marriage even though her previous support for traditional marriage was, according to Clinton, rooted in timeless religious principles. She has joined the new gender politics, despite her own history of slut-shaming her husband's mistresses. Calling Bill's pump-and-dump paramours "trailer trash" and "narcissistic loony tunes" is understandable in my own view, but considered impolitic today. Hillary Clinton has never won a competitive election. This can't be repeated enough. She beat Republican Rep. Rick Lazio for her Senate seat in 2000. And she defeated a mayor from Yonkers in 2006. In her first competitive race, the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, she began as a heavy favorite and she lost. What has she done to improve her chances in that time? She's aged well, I guess. And she served without distinction as secretary of state. The most notable addition to her CV was her strenuous support of military intervention in Libya, which has left that nation in ruins and vulnerable to ISIS. In turn, Libya has left Clinton with a new scandal about her home-brew email server and the deletion of thousands of emails that congressional oversight might have used against her. She has high name-recognition. Until she started campaigning she was polling well even with Republicans. She has the Obama coalition, and an electoral map where Republicans need significant pickups. But boy, it all seems underwhelming. What is the task for Democrats in the post-Obama era? Why is Clinton the one to take on this mission? After achieving a policy almost approximating universal health care, the dream of Democrats since Harry Truman, what are the Democrats to do? Are they pro-globalization? Do they have ideas for integrating the great wave of immigration to America that has occurred over the past 50 years? Do they have anything to offer the dying white working class? Are they for reforming any of America's major institutions? Clinton just seems like a mismatch for the party and the moment. The center-left darling of Wall Street talking up issues of inequality. The former Walmart board member posing as savior of American jobs. The "Smart Power" leader whose achievement at state was wrecking a nation and turning it over to Sunni terrorists faster than George W. Bush. A champion of women who pretended the leader of the free world was the victim of his intern. The wife of a man who flies on the "Lolita Express" with a porn star that was booked for "massages." The vanquisher of a Yonkers mayor. Is this really the best the Democrats can do? Yes, and that should worry them. Poster Comment: After a few weeks of Trumpsterism, the GOP has forgotten about Hitlery altogether. But she is self-destructing from her own scandals and repulsive public persona. Her name recognition and reputation are sky-high. And that is her biggest problem. The Dems know who and what she is. I think the writer overlooked just how repulsive her major Wall Street banking connections are with Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, the new UBS scandal, etc. That's pure poison to the Dem base voters, the bulwark of the Occupy Wall Street types. And the Xlintons are still loathed by the Obama Dem establishment.
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#59. To: TooConservative (#55)
No. The referenda that were approved provided free speech about abortion and the right to travel out of country to obtain an abortion. A legal case provided the right to obtain an abortion when the life of the mother was threatened, even by suicide.
I noticed he censored your comments.
The provision of routine or minor health care by insurance with a high deductible may be illusory if they cannot afford the deductible.
Those precisions on your part are correct. It is universal, however, in the sense that everybody has to pay for it. Those who don't buy the insurance will instead have to pay a tax penalty. Money is fungible, and it all ultimately goes into a big pot for distribution. So, those who get insurance, get it. Those who don't, pay a penalty. That puts money in the pot. If they get sick and don't have insurance, after their resources are exhausted they end up on Medicaid, and the gov't pays for their health CARE out of the big pot. It's not ideal, but a single payer could not get passed on the first round. Now that universal payment is in place, it will fester and not work, and future crises will force it to be shorn up again and again. And eventually those shore-ups, in times of concentrated political power, will result in single payer. We didn't get there in one step, just as we didn't get from Unemployment Insurance to Medicare in one step. But the foundation has been laid, and it will be built out incrementally. It's a pity we cannot have a cold-blooded political discussion of the requirement, establish single payer and payment schedules, and implement it, but we can't, so we have to do it in a drifty, messy, avoid- disaster sort of way.
No, we definitely should not forget that. And we should move to single-payer, universal Medicare, 80/20 coverage, with the 20 covered by Medicaid for the poor who cannot pay that portion. It should be paid by taxation, and there should be no "for profit" role of private health insurers in the 80. No should we forget that this "quarter-of-a-loaf" solution was made necessary by an opposition that refused to propose ANY alternative other than status quo, which is unacceptable. Also, it should not be the middle class bearing the bulk of the cost. Taxes need to be set so that the top 1/2% are paying the same rate on their wealth that the middle and working classes are. That would mean a very substantial tax hike at the top. In the early 1970s, the top 20% had about 50% of the national wealth. A concentration, but bearable. But today, the top 10% has 85% of the wealth. That is not sustainable and needs to be redistributed, through taxation and social insurance programs. There is a basic floor of education, health insurance, housing, food and old age pension below which nobody should fall. And the social infrastructure should provide for that. And it should be paid for with redistrbutive taxation, and also with direct federal exploitation of resources. Where there is oil and gold in federal ground, or state ground, a federal or state not-for-profit should be set up to exploit it directly, providing employment and providing a stream of resources directly into the federal treasury without going through taxes.
Revolution. And then the wealth was lost. It was socialism that made most of them billionaires in the first place. Lots of folks assume that wealth redistribution means the transfer of wealth away from the rich. Historically it is just the opposite. John Corzine would have been been ruined 20 years ago; except for a socialist bailout. The biggest piggies at the federal pig trough are the left wing globalist billionaires. And biggest wealth redistribution scheme today is the immigration invasion, a gold mine for the plutocrats.
The nice thing about universal near-poverty is that there is less jealousy and little rationalization employing inequality of income for theft. People plant what seeds they are capable of or harvest from the jungles and go about their primitive activities. In highly industrialized nations it is a different story.
Lucky for you this "pure BS" has been in place long enough for you to have learned to read, write and compute, and is in place now to provide you with retirement checks every month and Medicare against your raging bile duct condition. You believe all sorts of stupid shit,so the above comes as no real surprise. You are a natural slave in search of the ultimate Master. Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
Seriously? The Irish government actually has the authority to punish it's citizens for the things they do in other countries that is legal in those countries? Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
Why doesn't the Catholic Church just pay for everyone's medical care? After all,they are richer than any government,and that is the sort of thing they are supposed to do. That's why they pay no taxes. Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
Not socialism, crony capitalism. That was true of the robber barons of the 19th Century also. After the Civil War, the Republican Party dominated the government, all the way to the election of 1892. During that post-war period, the great trans-Continental railroads were built. They were built on government land, that was simply handed over to well-connected Republican businessmen, who build the railroads, called in the Federal cavalry whenever the Indians got in the way of what was, objectively, an encroachment of their land. The railroad barons were granted huge swathes of land on either side of the railroad also. Basically, they were granted all the land one day's journey on horseback from the railway line - meaning that they had a monopoly on all of the useful land. That land HAD BEEN federal or Indian, and it was simply handed over to the rail barons. They built the railroads and the price of the land along the railroads skyrocketed, and they became very rich. Pure crony capitalism. Note that when the ORIGINAL railroads were built back East, they were built by the states, not by free market private capitalists. The Penn Central Railroad, which became dominant, was built by a bond subscription from the State of Pennsylvania, and operated by the state during all of those long, difficult years of trying to make a railroad work. Only once it was profitable was it handed over…to connected crony capitalists….so that they could privatize the profits from a rail system undertaken, built and brought to profitability by public money. Ditto for the New York Central and the other major early rail lines. They were built and run by the government, and only handed over when they were established. In other words, all of the risks and expense were socialized, and the profits were privatized. With that experience, once it came time to build the trans-Continentals, the government skipped the government development stage and simply handed over tens of thousands of square miles of land, land that was guaranteed to explode in value once the rail line was there, to crony capitalists. The government COULD HAVE simply financed the railroad, or built the railroad directly with the Army Corps of Engineers. Then the government could have SOLD all of that land at its enhanced price. Instead, the utterly corrupt Republican government handed the land and all of the profits over to the best connected barons. The barons got rich, but they did not run railroads well. There were lots of near bankruptcies and bailouts. Socialism, meaning the public ownership of the productive means, is how the American railroads were originally built, and it's how the Interstate Highway system, airports and ports are STILL built and operated. Only once the people have borne the cost and the risk and the burden of getting everything up and running is some lucky well-connected billionaire consortium selected through corruption to pocket all of the profits. The Russian and Chinese socialists grabbed all of the private enterprises. But in America it was the opposite. The government BUILT the vast infrastructure, and crony capitalists arranged to have it transferred to them, And when big, well-connected private concerns go bust, the government steps in with public money to save them. My own view is this: government land should be developed by the government, with profit going into the treasury. There should be a Federal Oil Company, and where there's oil on federal land, the federal government should be drilling it and pumping it and selling it at market prices, with the profits going directly into the charity. Now, instead, private concerns get to exploit the oil, and give some percentage as a royalty to the government. Private concerns pay their executives and shareholders billions - that's where most of the profit goes. The actual cost of roughnecks, drilling and equipment isn't all that high. The profits are enormous, and the government touches maybe ten percent of it. If the Feds did it directly, the government revenues from the same oil would quadruple - all of the middlemen would be taken out. That oil belongs to the People. It is on federal land. Private concerns have no right to take the profits from it. That profit should be going directly into the People's pocket, the Treasury. That would allow for the balancing of the budget, the payoff of national debt and, eventually, once the debt interest was gone from the budget, reducing taxes. Ditto for gold, silver, uranium and the other things mined on federal land. Ditto for state land. There is no private RIGHT to exploit public resources. We should have federal and state corporations doing it directly. And since the money supply is a federal asset, we should have federal and state banks that directly provide the loans for people's primary housing and their education. The loans should be at the federal minimum interest rate for their term length. There is no reason to allow private actors to take a massive cut on the printing of a public asset: money. Private oil companies will exploit oil on private land, still. And there's plenty for private banks to lend for. But when it comes to housing and education, the bank profit needs to be stripped away and the government should lend the money directly to the people - which means that the government can extend loans, and forgive debt in times of unemployment, etc. That's how it ought to be. Note that unlike the USSR, there is no seizure of private assets proposed here, merely the intelligent exploitation of what are already PUBLIC assets by the government. The profits generated will enormously assist the budgetary situation. And the debt relief for housing and education will enormously UN-burden Americans. House loans should be lifetime loans. The government can get paid from the estate. Ditto for education loans. THAT is how you run a railroad, a banking system, and federal land. And THAT is how you redistribute wealth without privatizing it or imposing massive taxes. And yes, it is socialist.
But...but...their just saving jobs that Conservatives won't do. Being the Emperor's flunkies and whores of lobbyists still means they still retain power and get to rule over Republican peasants.
Well, Reagan went out there courting the "Moral Majority" with his pro-life schtick. Of course, like Romney, when he was Governor of California, Reagan was pro-choice, supporting the abortion law. And Reagan installed Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. A "pro-lifer" Republican? No. A lying panderer. The Moral Majority bought it then, hook, line and sinker. Let me first thank you for at least addressing my questions and addressing your positions. That said, your narrative is not only wrong, but misguided and much of it untrue. What "shtick" did Reagan pull?? You seem to forget that a President is NOT a King (with all due respect to B. Hoosane.) The ONLY reason the "Moral Majority" was able to impose ANY moral influence upon America during Reagan's 1980s (and it was substantial) was because Ronald Reagan supported them and their mission -- as well as creating the freedom and political elbow room to do so. Reagan accomplished this while fending off the maniacs of the Left, moderates like Poppy Bush and his gangsters, AND a Dem-dominated Congress. Wait; Are you REALLY comparing Reagan to Romney? Reagan sincerely changed his entire life philosophy and you're dinging him for a past he regrets? He became PRO-LIFE and demonstratively PRO-GOD. That is TOTALLY unlike Romney, who was ALL about political expediency. HE NEVER CHANGED his philosophy. As to Reagan's appointments, yes he nominated Sandra Day O'Connor. And Kennedy (neither of whom were definitively "pro-choice," so you're speculating.) But he also appointed Scalia and Reinquist. The Gipper got knocked down on Bork and Ginsburg -- ALL rock solid conservatives. You seem to forget the mob of Dems who controlled Congress. If Reagan hadn't had to deal with a Dem-controlled Congress, would the complexion of the SC have been different? Both Bushes are a totally different story. Because THEY belong to the establishment GOP, they betrayed conservatism (Dubya gave us Alito, but also Roberts and yes, tried to impose Miers on the GOP before conservative Republicans strongly and vociferously opposed her. Forgot that, eh?) Despite Dubya Bush having a Republican majority to work with in BOTH the Senate and House, and arguably SCOTUS (before appointing chameleon Roberts) he and his GOPe brethren REFUSED to advance a single conservative policy -- never mind addressing Roe v Wade. No sane political observer would EVER compare Ronald Reagan to either Bush. (Poppy Bush was pro-choice right up until Campaign, 1980.) You STILL can't seem to differentiate between conservative Republicans and their agenda, AND establishment Republicans -- you know, the Republicans who call ALL the shots and collude with Democrats. The same Democrats YOU support for their fascist entitlement of MY money to subsidize Marxists and Marxism. They [the Christian rabble] are the Christian pro-lifers who, after 30 years of betrayal by a Republican Supreme court and every single Republican President from Reagan on, and also by every recent Republican Presidential nominee, and just this past week by the Republican Senate - Christian pro-lifers who persist in being Republican on the absurd insistence that the Republicans are "pro-life" - THEY are the Christians who are rabble. What they are, are partisan fools who refuse to open their eyes or learn anything from experience. Do you actually know the definition of "rabble"?? Pro-life Christians have had NO other party to support on the issue of abortion. Was your solution and chances to overturn Roe v Wade really increased by supporting the Democrat Party? ON WHAT PLANET? Pro-life Christians are put in a no-win situation, betrayed by liars. Yet they (we) hope hearts are change in THE ONLY PARTY who can logically and pragmatically overturn Roe V Wade. Those liars are ESTABLISHMENT Republicans, country club Republicans. THEY control the GOP. NOT conservative Republicans. Why can't you understand the ramifications of the power of the GOP's dominant wing? Back on 1988...1992....1996...2012...was your solution to support a Third Party? If so, which. If so, tell me the odds of not only a victory, but tell me exactly how establishment Republicans and Democrats were going to support a pro-life SC judge. Your problem Vic, is that you're idealistic, but so much so that your expectation are unrealistic. Look -- The Fix has been in since before WWII. Reagan's election has been to only outlier President who didn't belong to the establishment of either party. Reagan is why NO war was waged during his entire President. He ushered in an era of hope, of morality, of freedom, of America-First. Lumping him in as you've done with the likes of "George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell" is just plain nonsense. The Bible speaks about wealth redistribution, both testaments. The Bible makes it clear that this is mandatory for anybody who wants to go to Heaven. If one refuses to accept that, he defies God and is "Christian" rabble. Your definition of "rabble"...is pretty insulting. Your notion of scriptural "clarity" in support of "wealth redistribution" is total misrepresentation. I don't doubt that *you* believe your own meme. But by all means -- go ahead and provide scriptural citations that endorse government coercion and grand theft, and Marxist "wealth redistribution," please. Yes, there's is some responsibility to care for our brothers and sisters in need -- but that is a totally different case. And so too is worshiping money over worship of the Lord. But in NO case does Scripture ever sanction the confiscation of earned wealth over to others. As to the criteria for "Heaven," though you mean well, you've got that wrong as well. You have decided to make defense of the Republican Party a point of honor. It's a pity, because you have far more honor than they do. Again you miss the mark. I defend conservative Republicans for their intention to change the party from within. Your indictment of the Republican Party by default is an indictment of ALL Republicans. Vic, that just isn't true, isn't right, isn't fair.
The Catholic Church PROVIDES the medical care in much of Africa. The Church is not as rich as you think it is. There is lots of church land and buildings in old cities, which gives a high nominal, paper wealth. But maintaining those buildings is where a lot of the money that goes into the collection plate goes. Beyond the value of real estate, which is passive (and which, if liquidated, would mean there was no place for people to meet as a church), there is the value of all of the accumulated artwork of the past centuries. This is religious art. It was made and given as acts of devotion, or it was commissioned at a time when it was not too terribly expensive. The commissioning of that art, at the time, gave work to craftsman. Today, it sits there. Because it is beautiful and old, it is thought to be valuable. When little pieces of it go on the market for private collections, it fetches a good price. But the repository of such art in the Church is vast. That artwork, for the most part, served as a visual teaching aid and decoration to the religion. So, if the Church decided to liquidate it and sell it all to raise money "to pay everybody's health insurance", the value of all of that massive slug of art on the market would cause the market to crater for good. There would be no scarcity, and the actual value would be pennies on the theoretical dollar. Those are the two sources of the Church's "wealth" - land that churches, universities and monasteries sit on, and special purpose old buildings usable only for that function, and art that decorates the old buildings. Land and art and religious buildings generate no income in and of themselves. They are a drain. The only liquid wealth the Catholic Church has reposes in parish (and similar) bank accounts and the Vatican Bank. Most of that money comes from contributions of parishioners, and most goes to keeping the lights on. A significant portion goes to charitable work. Not much is put into endowments and management. If you liquidated all of the "excess" of the Church that is in all of these aggregate accounts, you would probably get a couple of billion dollars, all told. Not much more. The imagined "wealth" of the Church reposes in art - that would become worthless if it were sold en masse - and in single-purpose buildings and land. I do think that the Church should sell some of this stuff and have a smaller physical footprint, but the reason I think that is not because there is, in fact, trillions in wealth that could pay for these things - that's a mirage. It is to set the perfect example and follow the philosophy of the teachings. So no, sneaky, the Church itself cannot pay for everybody's health insurance. The Church is not the Levitical Priesthood of the Old Testament, which had a system of taxation formally ascribed to it in order to pay for the national charity. The Church was never assigned such powers or given such a role, and does not in fact have the wealth or power or support to do it. It is the responsibility of the people overall to do it. And that means government. Just about everybody needs expensive medical care at life end, and things like cancer exhaust the resources of most middle class people. Therefore, the government has to provide the means of treatment. It's a permanent loss, a cost of living, and it requires taxes to pay for it. Same thing with retirements, now that we live in cities and don't have family farms to go home to. You can resist that reality forever, but it remains so, and most people know that. Which is why people like you, on the right, need to reconcile yourselves to the fact of the need of a permanent, think, social support structure that covers education, medical care, basic housing and retirement. It's expensive, it's necessary. We can have an economy that is quite free of regulation, but we cannot have one that is free of a social safety net and very substantial taxes to pay for it. The Church cannot pay for all of it, and it is not the duty of the Church to do so. It is the duty of all of the people and their government to do so, and they do it. There is a permanent minority of people who reject that, consisting of many of the millionaires who dream of being billionaires (and who oppose the taxation that holds them back), and then people like you, who refuse to understand the realities of the world and who want to tear down the social state. Millionaires and misanthropes are the permanent minority, and you will never see the social welfare state dismantled. Never. So reconcile yourself to it, and work with people like me to ensure that it works and is probably funded, but that the logic of social welfare does not extend perpetually to mean "government gets to control everything", which is where both the right and the left have decided to go. Because government MUST provide the social safety net, and that means heavy taxes and institutions, that means that government will indeed be a large, inevitable presence. But that doesn't mean that the government has to control everything else BEYOND the safety net. THAT is where the Democrats and the Left go nuts: control EVERYTHING. On the Right side, there is an obsessive desire to control what people do with their bodies, in their bedrooms and for entertainment. There's no particular reason to tolerate the Right on that at all - it's simply the will to power. Both the Right wing and Left wing versions of oppression need to be slammed down - deregulate people, demilitarize the police, get the government off people's backs. But tax them as heavily as is necessary to maintain universal public education, universals health insurance, universal pensions and universal basic housing. Those are needs below which we cannot fall. It's a lot, and it's expensive. Government MUST do that, but it must not be permitted, or encouraged, to do anything MORE than that. This is the problem: the Right wants to control people's dicks. The left wants to control every penny of people's money. Truth is, we need about 50% of everybody's money, but the other 50%, and their dicks, are their own business. But people cannot be allowed to kill other people, and that means no abortion.
Do you indict all Democrats? Yes. Why? You will tell me that you indict them because they SUPPORT a party that is power crazed, corrupt, and does evil things, and that after all of these years they ought to KNOW BETTER, so they have no excuse. And you would be right. Now turn the mirror around. The same thing is true of Republicans. It is entirely fair to tar ALL Republicans with the perennial evils of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party has done exactly what it is doing, which is promote crony capitalism, since 1868. There has been more than enough time to see it, because it's obvious. If Republican rank and file choose not to see it, they are no different than Democrats: willfully ignorant and blinded by partisanship, and there is no more excuse for Republicans than Democrats. They both suck - every single one of them - BECAUSE they affiliate with evil parties and they ought to know better by now. There was no such thing as a "Good Nazi".
Yes I am.
How much time do I have? By DEFAULT Democrats support abortion. Big Government. An over-officious, immoral government. Presidents who abuse and defy the constitution, We-the-People, commit treason, and routinely lie. By DEFAULT Democrats are anti-Freedom, anti-constitution, and hypocritical. By DEFAULT Democrats are unable to discern reality from fantasy, lies from truth, good from evil. You will tell me that you indict them because they SUPPORT a party that is power crazed, corrupt, and does evil things, and that after of these years they ought to KNOW BETTER, so they have no excuse. And you would be right. Now turn the mirror around. The same thing is true of Republicans. WRONG. We come full circle once again because ONLY the establishments Republican fit into your default catagory. It is entirely fair to tar ALL Republicans with the perennial evils of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party has done exactly what it is doing, which is promote crony capitalism, since 1868. There has been more than enough time to see it, because it's obvious. If Republican rank and file choose not to see it, they are no different than Democrats: willfully ignorant and blinded by partisanship, and there is no more excuse for Republicans than Democrats. Unfortunately, you're locked into a rigid dogma that just does not apply. I understand your bitterness; I can relate to your resentment due to real betrayal of the Republican Party. But there are two wings of the GOP, and one has not been displaced. Until/IF that happens, things will change. If not, things will continue getting worse. Btw -- belief in the myth that Democrats actually care about "economic equality" is one of the Dem Party's biggest lies of all. In practice, it requires the demolition of the US Constitution.
Well then you *have* lost your marbles.
But one Party sucks TOTALLY. With one party you can breathe through a tiny straw. With the other there IS no straw. Does THAT matter?? YES. Because it's the difference between Life and Death. Attribute THAT life-saving straw to the conservative wing of the GOP (for the moment.) There may not have been such a thing as "good Nazi," but there was indeed such a thing as "good German."
The wealth of individual RCC churches should not part of this conversation. By "Church," I'm assuming RCC Central, aka the Vatican. Several centuries of the accrued vast wealth by the Vatican will never be known. It's not as though they can be audited. Not even the Nazis dared intrude into the Vatican's financials. It might be rather embarrassing, given the recent Pope's LOUD criticism of Capitalism.
Several centuries of the accrued vast wealth by the Vatican will never be known. It's not as though they can be audited. Not even the Nazis dared intrude into the Vatican's financials. It might be rather embarrassing, given the recent Pope's LOUD criticism of Capitalism. Well, if the price of getting people to recognize that, under the commandment of God, we ARE our brothers' keeper, and we DO have the responsibility, as children, as parents, as neighbors, as voters in a state, to take care of all of the people around us, cradle to grave - and to protect them before the cradle, and to try to set them on the right path for what happens after the grave - if the price for that is the complete liquidation of the Catholic Church, selling all of its property, auctioning off the art, opening up the bank accounts of the Vatican and the parishes and all the Holy Orders, pooling them, and having all of that go to poverty relief, and everafter operating the Church as an unpaid clergy, preaching in houses and fields, like Jesus and the Apostles, with no rectories and no salaried priests with health insurance and retirement checks - if that is the price required to force the issue of what we are required to also do through government, and personally, until the needs are met - then fine. I'm for it. Dissolve the material church and return to a spiritual church only. The Catholics first, and then also the Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians - all of them. Christianity can be preached in private homes and public parts, by unpaid clergy, just like in China. The visible Church of building and meeting halls and paid professional clergy can disappear. If that is the price that you require in order to turn the conversation back to the focus on dealing with the permanent economic problem of mankind: weakness, dependency, poverty, illness, death, and the need for the whole society to make sure that the least of us all has his needs met and his dignity preserved, then I am ready, willing and eager to return to the pure example of Jesus and the Apostles and dismantle the corporate church, tear down its buildings, sell the land, empty its accounts, lay off the paid clergy - shut it all down. End all the tax breaks - with the Church down, synagogue and mosque and private charity get no tax breaks either. Let it just be men, businesses and government, with Church a voluntary, unpaid, unpropertied organization. And once we've done all that, the need will still remain to care for the unborn, and the born, and to educate, and to ensure people have housing, and to ensure everybody has food, and to ensure that everybody has medical care, and to ensure that everybody is provided for in his or her old age. Everybody, not just Americans. Chinese, Indians, Africans, Mexicans and Indonesians too. "Am I my brother's keeper?" was an insolent question asked by Cain to God. Jesus answered it. Yes, you are. Lover your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all. If your price for loving our neighbor as ourselves, for getting to that conversation, is the complete dissolution of corporate Christianity and a return to the unpaid, completely charitable, unpropertied Christianity of Jesus and the Apostles. then so be it. It is a price well worth paying. Since I have no POWER to compel the Catholics, the Bapists and the Presbyterians to sell their buildings, empty their accounts, lay off their clergy and turn into Home Church movements, what would you have me do, then? I would have YOU leave the Republican or Democrat Parties, because they are dishonest and evil and will not change. So, since the Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Orthodox, Nazarene and Evangelical Churches, owned and operated by their respective paid clergy, will never dissolve themselves and cut off their pay, would you have me, then, renounce my affiliation with all Churches, because they have property? It is a fair question. I don't think that the Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Evangelical, et al, Churches really are the equivalent of the Republican and Democrat Parties. I think they are better than that. However, your question, aimed directly at the possessions of the Church, implies that they are. It would appear that you are saying to me that because the Catholic Church doesn't divest itself of its possessions, its no different than what I say the Republican and Democrat Parties are. And that may be a fair point. I would say that applies equally to all Christian Churches that own buildings and have paid clergy. The Catholics pay their clergy peanuts relative to the others. A Catholic priest makes maybe $25,000 a year, but he has his house, medical care, education and retirement provided for him. And of course he has no children to support. Other clergy of mega churches make millions per year. All of that, Catholic and Protestant, would need to be liquidated. And if they won't (and they won't), I guess you'd be telling me that to be consistent, I would need to disassociate myself from all Christian Churches that own property or have a paid clergy. And if I did so, if I walked out of the Catholic Church and ceased going to any Church, because they own property and pay clergy, and that isn't what Jesus did, and you insist on liquidation as the standard, will you then be ready to acknowledge that you, too, should walk out of the evil Republican Party (or Democrat) - that it is better to be alone than to be affiliated with something that has moral taint? And then can we have the discussion of what God demands. Does God demand that a man separate himself from those things which have moral taint? Does he? I perceive moral taint, black as hell, in the ideology and behavior of the Republican and Democrat parties. You perceive moral taint in the Catholic Church. So, is that what you're asking me, to renounce the Catholic Church because it is immoral in your eyes. That is what I am asking you to do with the Republican Party: renounce it because it is immoral. Are you throwing that back at me and saying that I must also renounce my affiliation, to organized Christianity, for the same reason? And if I pay that price in order to have the conversation with you - if I walk out of the Church because it is tainted and compromised, in your eyes - will you, likewise, walk out of the Republican Party and your Church, because the Republicans are tainted and compromised, and because your Church has all of the same financial flaws as the Catholics: owns buildings, has endowments, has big cash flow, etc. Yes?
I believe the U.S. has done precisely that when it felt like it. Territorial jurisdiction now seems to extend worldwide. Art. 40, Sec. 3 states, As the Constitution gave an equal right to life to the unborn as to the mother, it could be interpreted to grant to the government the power to stop a mother from leaving the country to exterminate the protected life of the child. I read there was a court ruling interpreting it otherwise, but I have not searched up and read the opinion.
That't what I was referring to. Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
"My Kingdom is not of this World" This is the way I understand Scripture. Judaeo-Christian belief tells us that the only God controlled earthly government that ever existed was in the Garden of Eden. Man, being what he was, messed that up. From then on, we have been on our own. In the Old Testament, God DID have representatives (spokesmen, if you will) who made His will known to the people. The people could listen to these Judges and later, prophets. (or not). There IS after all that thing called "free will" that God put in us. The people looked around, saw all the other nations had "kings", and decided they wanted a king, too. (Gee, kind of sounds like "all other countries have socialized health care. We need to have it, too." But I won't go there now.) The Israelite's desire for a king frustrated the prophet Samuel, but God told him "they have not rejected you, they have rejected Me." (I Samuel 8:7). So God gave them Saul, and it didn't work out so well. David followed, then the wisest king, Solomon. That was pretty much the high water mark for Israel. Many kings -some good, but most bad - followed after that. Eventually, like all EARTHLY kingdoms, Israel divided, then fell to its enemies. Not to get too deep in the weeds here, but the main point is that while Israel was referred to as "God's chosen people" (Exodus 19:6; Deut. 7:6), they (as individuals or a nation) were never denied their free will. They had the free will to follow the Mosaic laws and its sacrificial system. Or not. They could reconcile themselves to God and presumably reside with Him in the afterlife. Or not. There was a 400 year inter-testimental period between Malachi the prophet, and the Advent of the Christ (i.e. Messiah) When Our Lord came on the scene, Israel was far from being the kingdom it once was. It was just a province, a backwater, of the mighty Roman Empire. The Jews were a conquered people (they, understandably, didn't like it one bit) Several of Jesus' disciples were revolutionaries who misunderstood His talk of a kingdom as being an Earthly one vs. a Heavenly one. They saw Him as their ticket to throw off Roman rule and re-establish Israel. Simon the Zealot, and likely Judas, are two who fell into this category. There may have been others. That, of course, isn't what Jesus was about then. It's not what He's about now. I have to respectfully disagree with you when you imply that "works" is a prerequisite for entering Heaven. John 3:16-18 gives us the roadmap for entering Heaven. Our pitiful and pathetic works cannot add to His perfect sacrifice. Now I know that you are RC and I am not, and there are honest, theological differences. My purpose isn't really to debate those, here. But let me close with this: You and I, though we follow different Christian doctrines, can likely agree on this: God is absolutely the HIGHEST AUTHORITY there is. Yet he DOES NOT require us to obey Him - to follow Him. He (way back at Creation) gave us Free Will. An all powerful government, however; one that you envision with the resources to provide cradle-to-grave care; will NEVER allow free will. You follow and do what the government says, OR ELSE. You may not intend it or mean it that way, but I see your all-powerful government as putting itself ABOVE God. And one of the things both the Old and New Testaments agree on - God does not bless those who put themselves above Him. That goes for governments as well as individuals. Finally, caring for the poor and infirm has always been an INDIVIDUAL commandment. The entire theme of the book of James in the Bible is "Faith without works is Dead" (James 2:14-26). In other words, if we are to follow Christ and trust in Him, we will "naturally" want to do what pleases Him. (i.e. feed, clothe, otherwise help the poor and less fortunate than ourselves) WE are commanded to do so. NOT our governments. You can argue passionately (as you have done) for big government, cradle-to-grave solutions to all of mankind's ills. You can search (but I do not think you will find) a humanistic Utopia. People have been searching in vain for that throughout history - perhaps you'll succeed. I just caution that when you say that GOVERNMENTS are commanded to do by God what we - as individuals - should be doing, that you are on shaky theological ground. And I'm not even a Theologian :-)
Rufus, go back and read Exodus through Deuteronomy. They are a divine constitution for Israel, which God established as his people. Now read Joshua and see how it is directed. Then read how, when the people clamored for a king in the time of Samuel, that God told Samuel that they were not rejecting him (Samuel), but rather, were rejecting Him (God) as their king. So you need to adjust your understanding of Scripture. God established and ruled a full on kingdom, with people and territory. He gave it all of its laws, and established how everything was to be. He promised them that as long as they did it all, that he would be with them and they would have that land. He also promised them that if they refused to do what he told them, he would destroy them, drive them out and give the land over to others. The enter Old Testament is an account of how God established a state and ran it, and how the Israelites kept breaking his laws, and how he kept calling them back. The Mosaic covenant does not have one thing to do with eternal life or final judgment. There is nothing anywhere in it about any of those things. It's all about Israel and the laws of the people in Israel. To get to the promise of eternal life for obeying a law, you have to come forward to Jesus. In the Old Testament, the state that God set up had a very heavy charitable component written into the laws. That was what the tithe of the Levites was FOR: poverty relief. It was why interest on loans was prohibited to Israelites, why Israelites had to loan each otter money, why debts were forgiven after 6 years, why Israelites could not be sold as slaves, why children had the obligation to care for their parents, and vice versa. and why there was a skein of complicated laws regarding slaves that essentially gave each slave the "out" of becoming an Israelite and worshiping God, transmuting his slavery into indentured servitude. That's what it actually says. When we come to Jesus, who calls the whole world, not just the Jews of Israel, there is a great deal regarding poverty relief, including the stern warning that when the poor cry out, as you treat them, you treat Him, and will be judged accordingly. The entire Scripture drips with concern for fellow men, and warns not to make idols, and not to break the law over money. A heresy has arisen among Christians that exalts the charging of interest and pretends - contrary to what Jesus SAID - that treating the poor right is optional, a matter of personal choice. Well, sure it is. Just like killing somebody is a personal choice. But if you make the wrong choice, you get thrown into the flames.
The judges had the power to put them to death for breaking various commandments. The judges also had the power to enforce restitution for Israelites who did not fulfill their obligations. God's law was not optional in Israel. It was mandatory, and it's key provisions - against murder, enslavement of fellow Hebrews, idolatry, blasphemy and sabbath breaking were enforced by the death penalty. It's economic provisions were enforced by double, quadruple and quintuple restitution. Nothing about the law of Israel was optional. The judges were not there to give opinions. They were there to enforce the law, on pain of death, on the Israelites. The judges themselves became corrupt, however, and did not enforce the law. The Hebrews let themselves off the hook. The government itself - the judges - did not give honest judgments and the people went slack. So God sent prophets to exhort them to return to the law - or else. Those prophets were frequently killed. FInally God sent his Son, and they crucified him. Then God destroyed the sacramental state of Israel forever and threw open the Kingdom of God to those who followed his Son, only. There is no promise of eternal life in the Old Testament, only a promise of Israel, and only as long as there was good behavior. Jesus himself pronounced the death sentence on covenantal Israel, made a new covenant with each man anywhere who will follow him. Was killed, raised, ascended, and thirty years later God sent the Roman army to utterly obliterate the Temple and the priesthood, making it impossible to fulfill the Torah even if the Jews wanted to. So that's that. Christian heretics try to resurrected the corpse of dead covenantal Israel, whom God himself executed. It's a shame, but it's part and parcel with the same sort of tomfoolery that the ancient Israelites did - ignoring what God actually SAID in favor of what they preferred to believe. Too bad for them. To bad for the erring Christians. The text says what it says, and what it says is what I've said.
Yet he DOES NOT require us to obey Him - to follow Him. He (way back at Creation) gave us Free Will. An all powerful government, however; one that you envision with the resources to provide cradle-to-grave care; will NEVER allow free will. You follow and do what the government says, OR ELSE. God's law always was, and still is, "Obey me or die." In ancient Israel, he established justices to impose physical death on those who broke the divine laws,. and they did execute people, and impose fines on them, and other punishments, for breaking the law. The law was not optional in Israel, ever. Men had the free will to break it, and if they broke certain laws, they were put to death for it by God's judges. If they broke the economic laws, they had twice or four or five times taken from them as punishment and restitution. If they broke other laws, they were whipped and beaten. Free will means we're not automatons. It doesn't meant that there are no earthly enforcement mechanisms for breaking God's law. Jesus was not a secular king. He said that the Torah was the law until the end of the world., so it still is. Much of it does not apply - the rituals are gone with the wind. We're not Hebrews, so we don't get a farm in Israel if we follow the law (all that was ever promised; some Christians seem to think that the promise for obeying the law of Torah was Salvation. That's a silly belief. The Bible does not say that, ever. What it DOES say, to the Hebrews, is that if they follow all of the Law, they get to live ion their prosperous farm in Israel in peace. There is no promise of anything having to do with the afterlife anywhere in the law of God before Jesus. THAT promise, of being accepted into THAT Kingdom, comes with Jesus. It is just as necessary to obey Jesus' commandments to be part of his kingdom as it was to obey YHWH's if you wanted your prosperous farm in Israel. "What good does it do you to say you follow me if you don't obey my commandments?" Jesus asked that. I don't know how he could have been any clearer. But in case of any doubt, he said plenty of other stuff - that if you don't forgive, God will not forgive you. Note well: the Baptized, washed in the blood born again Christian will NOT BE FORGIVEN HIS SINS BY GOD, IF he refuses to forgive the sins of others against him. Jesus said that explicitly, directly, and unambiguously. And yet there are Christians who preach the opposite, in direct opposition to what God SAID. It's a debate of sort, but it's a debate between heretics and Jesus. I choose Jesus. What Jesus said, he meant literally. I take it literally. In some places, what jesus said appears to conflict with what Paul said. In those places, Paul is wrong because Jesus is God.
I do not favor an "all powerful government". Sweden doesn't have an all-powerful government. Neither does Denmark. Or Finland. In fact, those people are by and large left freer to choose to sin than Americans are. The American state imposes all sorts of criminal penalties against various personal sins that those states leave up to the choice of the individual. But Sweden, Denmark and Finland and Norway understand that men have basic needs, that these needs are part of the natural world, that they do not go away, and that philosophy does not bid them to disappear. The needs are material: to eat, to be clothed, to have shelter, to be educated, to have medicare care when ill. Those things are basic needs, they are very expensive in the aggregate, and they are the birthright of every man. To put it differently, all men profit from a country's rule of law. There are no billionaires, or millionaires, in lawless lands, because there is s state of savage war. For people to have peace and prosperity there must be law, and law by its nature must be imposed and enforced by the state. There never has existed, and never will exist, any other way to do it. God himself ruled Israel, a theocracy, through human judges and Levite tax collectors. The magistrate is appointed by God for good. So, Sweden and Finland, Dammark and Norway are states, as is the USA and every other country. Those states have laws, which they impose by force if necessary. They collect taxes to pay for the authorities. And they collect taxes to make sure that everybody eats, is clad, is housed, is educated, and has health insurance. Taxes are high, in the 40%. That's what it costs to make sure that the least in society have adequate food, clothing, housing, education and health care. This is not a crushing out of free will. And it's not an all-powerful state. It's a state facing a practical need, and using its power to harness the resources to fulfill that need. In the Soviet Union and China they went further, took AL the property, in order to concentrate all of the power to do everything in the hands of the leaders. That is not free, and it does not work - all human initiative is crushed, and you end up having starvation, at least in China. But that is not Scandinavia, or France, or Holland or Luxembourg, or Switzerland or Austria. In those places, there is the understanding of the basic needs of man, and the understanding that the state is the best-positioned to address them. The basic needs are addressed basically. There is plenty of margin of freedom - 60% of income is NOT taxed away - to break out and do as one pleases. Sweden is not the Soviet Union. Finland is not Red China. Denmark is not Cuba. They are countries like the US, but they fulfill their holy obligation to care for the poor, sick, orphan, young, old and frail, and they do it to a good standard. They're also all confessional states. They all have the original form of Protestantism as their established religion, and pay a church tax also. So apparently these devoted followers of Marin Luther never thought that it was not the obligation of kings and modern states to care for the poor. And they're right too: it is.
What you've described thus far is a Theocracy. It still requires an intermediary - that is, a person(s) in the middle, between the Ruler (God) and the ruled. In your examples, He's not there in physical form. Because it was a theocracy, there was no distance between the civil law and the Mosaic law - it was one and the same. My point with the Garden of Eden reference was that was the only time in Scripture (that I am aware of) that God was on the scene ruling in physical form. That was the point I was attempting to make. In any event, there are no Christian or Old Testament theocracies around today, so it's a moot point. I will possibly concede your point about the Law vis-a-vis eternal life. I always thought that in the Old Testament, keeping the Law was a prerequesite for eternal life. Like I said, I'm not a theologian, and we're running the risk of getting into the theological weeds. My only response to that is once again John 3:16-18. Simple and straightforward. Once again, you've described a Theocracy. It's interesting, but has no relevance to governments today (and certainly not the gov't in DC) Yes You're not advocating we become a Theocracy, are you? I - as a Christian - am I hope not unusual in my admiration of what the Founders tried to do when they decided not to have an official State religion. Perhaps I'm biased, but I truly believe that separation of Church and State (as they meant it, not necessarily how it's practiced today) is the best for the advancement of Christianity. We (as Christians) should believe that - Christianity is, after all, the Truth. Can we say otherwise and still consider ourselves Christian? Finally - In my previous post to you, I made the observation that an all-powerful government (which you seem to advocate) runs the risk of placing itself on a level above a Sovereign God. I made the statement that God will not bless anything (individual or group of individuals) that do so. In fact, God's wrath will come against them. One - had you thought of that angle? Two - if you had not thought of that angle, does it change at all your desire to see that all powerful government providing all those benefits because of some supposed God connection? I agree with much of what you say - your posts provoke thought. I share your concern about the poor, and my wife and I (without getting into specifics - only we, God, the IRS, and Turbo-tax know) go way above and beyond the Tithe. It's an individual - not a government - thing.
I was responding to a couple of posts previous - so you may have covered some of my points. Gonna go to bed now, I'll look these over tomorrow, and perhaps respond then. Ciao
Crony capitalism is crony socialism, the yin and yang. The Penn Central Railroad was the result of the 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads. The Pennsylvania Railroad was the one that bought up the Main Line of Public Works in 1857. This was primarily a canal system which used several railroad sections, mainly for portages, including one of the Alleghenies. Philadelphia was attempting to catch up with New York City following completion of the Erie Canal, but the latter had the advantage of crossing the summit between the Atlantic Seaboard and the west at a much lower elevation. The Pennsylvania Railroad was interested in the railroad sections, the canal was just part of the deal. Pennsylvania sank 58 million into the system, and the taxpayers were stuck with a lemon. The Johnstown flood resulted from the collapse of a reservoir originally built for the canal system. Really bad timing, they poured money into a canal system that would have been better spent on railroads. There was a credit bubble at this time, which led to speculation and infrastructure mania, with considerable malinvestment. The debts drove Pennsylvania and 7 other states into bankruptcy.
There you go. Yep, that's the way it's always been. The big projects are built by government. If they're profitable, cronies get the profits. If they fail, the public gets the losses. We just saw this on the grandest scale in human history with the Wall Street bailouts. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. My preference is for government to operate what government builds, and for government to exploit the resources on government land. Have the profits from these enterprises and this exploitation go into the treasury, to pay the budget, rather than handing it over to private actors so they profit and the public only gets pennies on the dollar of the profits - but eats all of the losses. The more money government can extract from the ground, and by selling energy, the less money they have to take in taxes. And what's with privatizing prisons? It's an invitation to abuse and slave labor. Why don't we privatize the military while we're at it. Same logic. We've already privatized Congress: they're all bought and paid for. Truth is, we're a crony capitalist kleptocracy, and the only possible way to fix it is for people like you, me and the others on this board to hate that to come together as a movement to do it. And the further truth is that that's impossible, because individual men of little means have strange ideas in their heads and will fight each other rather than cooperate, and simply accept the rulership of the kleptocrats. Status quo has the enormous advantage to it that actual cooperation among men generally can only be compelled by force or induced by payment - and average men like us have neither force nor wealth at our command. So, without money or power, we would have to nevertheless find a way to cooperate with each other, to systematically move forward as a mass. It could not be violent, at least not for decades and decades, because the status quo has the army and the police. It would have to be peaceful. What do we have that could unite us? Certainly not religion. Christians are still fighting over the ideas of the 1500s. It's fair to say that many of the most motivated of all Christians well and truly hate Catholicism more than they hate crony capitalism. So no unity will come through Christ or faith. What then? Well, nothing. There is nothing that can unite us. And therefore, divided, we fall, and we will continue to be dominated. Demographic changes may change this. One need only look at Latin American history to realize that Latinos are explosive people with a habit of frequent rebellion and insurrection against their overlords. Americans have no tradition of that, but we are importing that tradition, and as we do, it will probably eventually take root here. But that's for the distant future. For most of our lifetimes, we're living in a kleptocracy that is more and more feudal, and we won't be able to shake it off, because we Americans can't cooperate even on a chat board, so how the hell are we EVER going to do it when property and power are involved? We won't.
Yes, Rufus, it was a theocracy, a direct theocracy, and yes, the intermediary was very much there in physical form. It's all there in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, and then repeated in Deuteronomy. Joshua shows it unfolding. Judges shows hundreds of years of it working as designed. But then with Samuel and forward through the Kings and Chronicles, we see it fall apart as men reject God and go for a human king. The kings are all terrible. Saul is terrible. David, the beloved, turns out to be a killer and an adulterer, and the product of his license is civil war. Solomon, "wisest man ever", falls utterly into sexual license, adopts and protects all sorts of pagan rituals, and leaves the country a financial mess which promptly falls apart at his death, never to be reunited. Then we get century after century of civil war, mostly terrible kings, a handful of kings who try to be good but who won't enforce the WHOLE law…and finally God throws Israel to the Assyrians, Judah to the Babylonians. Chastized, he brings them back and, under Persian overlordship, lets them have a little rump state again. They set the forms back up again, but go back to religious indifference. The Greeks come and try to impose Hellenism, the Jews revolt, gain a temporary independence, are acquired by the Romans and start to resist them. God sends his Son to open a new chapter - 90% of the Jews reject them, and Jesus pronounces the doom clauses of Deuteronomy - the part of the covenant that says that if the Hebrews DON'T obey the law, they will be utterly destroyed and driven out. He dies. And in that generation God sends the Romans to erase the Temple and the priesthood, making it no longer POSSIBLE for the Jews to obey the full law even if they wanted to. The law remains, with the promise of the land, BUT to get the land in peace the Jews had to follow the whole law, and God made it so they CAN'T - no priesthood, no Temple. Therefore, Israel can never be brought back. A western colony can be built by force in the land of Israel and call itself Israel, but it won't have the peace and prosperity God promised, because it's not the Israel of the covenant. There are no priests to perform the mandatory rites, they cannot just MAKE priests - the only priests acceptable to God are in one bloodline, and they died in 69 AD and cannot be found. Israel is over. The only thing that the old covenant ever promised the Hebrews was a peaceful and prosperous farm of their own in the land of Israel, IF (and ONLY if) they followed the whole law. If they didn't, the covenant promised them destruction and dispersion. Which is what they got, and what they will continue to have until the end of the world. The only covenant that God offered to allow men to enter the City of God in the afterlife is the covenant of Christ. But that's not what we're talking about here, so let's stay focused on ancient Israel. If we examine the government of ancient Israel, as God set it up, using Montesquieu's schematic of three branches of government: Legislative, Executive and Judicial, we find that there is PLENTY of physical, on-the-ground intermediary in God's system. God set up Israel to be the EXAMPLE to all other people, and one of the reasons that he kept saving it even though it was rebellious towards him was because of the very bad example that it would give to the world, that God "could not save" "his own" people. This is an argument that Moses first makes to him, and is repeated in the Old Testament. After the incident of the golden calf, God tells Moses he's going to exterminate the Hebrews and give Moses leadership somewhere else. Moses begs God not to, and argues with God that if God did that, the Egyptians and everybody else around would say that God just led the Israelites out into the desert to slaughter them. God accepted the logic of that argument, and many times thereafter you hear his tell a prophet that the people will be smitten but not completely cut off, for his name's sake. God had a stake in the survival of Israel - his own reputation depended on it. And in truth, Israel didn't work out. The people rejected God. But let's look at its government, as set up by God. First, the Legislature. There was none. At all. God gave all the law, the entirety of it, to Moses (and a little bit through Joshua). One feature of the Law as God gave it was that the Hebrews were not to take one word out of it, but also they were not to ADD any words either. God gave the law, the ENTIRE law. He made it a sin to break his law. He made it a sin to not enforce his law. AND - very importantly - he made it a sin for any man to add so much as a single additional law. God sat over Israel as legislator king. He made its laws perfect, foresaw and provided for everything, and specifically denied the Israelites ANY avenue for the making of so much as a single ordinance. There was no legislature, no city council. No tribal council. Nothing. No man in Israel, from the lowest peasant to the High Priest, had any power to make one single additional rule to bind men beyond what God gave in writing through Moses. To do so - to add one rule on any subject - was a defiance of God, a direct breach of the law that prohibited making any laws. God gave the WHOLE law, and he expressly denied the Israelites any power to make one single additional rule for themselves, in any situation, ever. This is what FAITH required: that God, being God, foresaw everything, and that every circumstance that the men of Israel would ever encounter, until the end of time, was already foreseen by God in his law, and already provided for in that law, and that if men follow that law EXACTLY, without subtracting anything and without adding anything, it will work out best for them. God wasn't just the SUPREME Legislator, he was the ONLY legislator. The Torah is a legal constitution, but it is one that contains every law or ordinance that Israel was ever permitted to have. It even told the Israelites how they were to make latrines. So, in this sense, the Theocracy was real and absolute. Picture America. Now have a 300 page Constitution that contains every law, covering everything that is to be legislated, and has a clause in it that says that it can not be changed or amended ever, that none of the laws can be suspended, and that none of the laws can be added to. This constitution establishes the structure of government, and it provides no Congress, no State legislature, no city council, no local meeting - and indeed that expressly forbids any such group from ever making one additional rule, law, ordinance or statute, or modifying anything. The physical presence of God as Legislator was that written book - the Torah - whose terms say that it is the ENTIRE law, ALL of the rules, from God, and that men never, until the end of time, have any right or power to ignore one single rule, or to add even a single rule, and that if they DO God will punish them. And then, within that book, we find no provision for so much as a representative town meeting. God never gave mankind the power to make law to govern other men. The making of law by men to dominate other men is ITSELF a sin, and the enforcement of that law by violent force, of police and armies, is murders. The Legislative power belongs to God alone. The entire law is contained in the Torah and in Jesus, and it can never be changed. Except that Jesus DID change that, for he said to Peter and the Apostles: I give you the power of the keys - what you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Jesus gave the Church a flexibility that YHWH never gave to the Hebrews. BUT, just as we saw with the Hebrews before them, the Church abused that power and killed people to enforce its laws. Now let's look at the second branch, the Executive. God provided no permanent executive for Israel. The heads of families were executives for each family clan. The commandment "Honor your Father and Mother" means just exactly that: your father and mother have status over you, and you owe them honor - your entire life. Jesus makes it clear that this also means you owe them financial support for their entire lives. But past the family and the clan, Israel had no executive. In time of danger, God promised to send a Prophet as a war leader. And he did. Samson, Gideon, and so many others. God did not let Israel be destroyed. BUT the Israelites, once again, just as with the written law, had to have FAITH. Faith means Trust. They had to TRUST God that he would come through. As the Israelites saw the enemies massing around their borders, they had to remember that God saw all, and that when the time was right - in God's eyes and not before - that God would send them a prophetic commander to save them. However, God did NOT give them a full-time King, or police force, or army. It was only to come together in crisis, and for victory, it had to wait on the prophetic supreme commander God would pick. Note that God's insistence that men TRUST him - for that is what the word "to have faith" MEANS - it means TRUST that God will do what he said - is pervasive in the Bible. Christians have divided over what "Faith Alone" means, but it is much clearer if one looks that history of Israel. God gave a law, and forbade them from making other "needful" laws. God's point was no, I've given the ENTIRE law, the things that are in it you don't think are needful will one day be, so you must keep it all even if it makes no sense to you. And the things you think are missing are not there for a reason, so you must not ADD any laws you think are "necessary", because if you do those laws you make will end up being a stumbling block that crushes you. I am God, and I see until the end of time. I have given you a complete, detailed law that governs everything about which there needs to a rule for your good. You must TRUST ME and follow all of those rules, even if you don't understand me. And when I tell you that you cannot make even ONE MORE RULE, that making additional rules is a sin, I mean that too. You may think that I have left something out, some rule you desperately NEED because of present circumstances. I am God, I foresaw all of your present circumstances, and I know that it is necessary for the times to come NEXT, that you cannot see, that you make no law governing that thing. I did not make a law, and you must discipline yourself to live WITHOUT additional laws. You cannot take any away, and you cannot add any. Only in this way can I promise that you will be able to peacefully and prosperously occupy your promised farms until the end of the world. If you change my law at all, you all be destroyed, because the very thing that I was protecting you against will come to be. You must put ABSOLUTE TRUST in God. When you see enemies beyond the borders, you can call the army, to be ready, but you cannot march to war, or appoint a supreme commander. You must wait on God. "But what if God doesn't send one?" You of little faith! I said I would not permit Israel to be destroyed, and I will not. But if you go ahead and appoint your commander without me, if you do not wait on me to send my prophet in the time that is right for you, you will destroy yourselves. That is what the Israelites did, too, by demanding a King. It is how Saul destroyed himself also. At the crucial moment, Samuel tarried. Saul went ahead without him, because he thought it militarily expedient, and took other decisions he considered good and expedient in light of the victory. And Samuel arrived and told Saul that in doing so he had alienated God. Saul, the King, was to SIT THERE, and let the opportunity pass, and WAIT FOR GOD. This requires FAITH - FAITH that God will provide a better result. When men add laws, or subtract laws, they end up destroying any possibility of their long-term happiness and peace. When men take up command and take up the sword and compel, without being appointed prophets of God, they end up bringing calamity on themselves. God did it regarding the Sabbaths too. Every 7th year was the year of rest. Nobody was to plant crops. Whatever grew in the field was to grow of its own. It could be taken to eat, but there would be no formal harvest. And of course the poor were always authorized, by God, to walk through the fields and eat of them. Crops and land were not the ABSOLUTE property of their owners - they were the conditional property only. The poor had a first right to EAT and cross, and what is more, if in the harvest something was dropped, the owners had no right to pick it back up: God reserved that for the poor. NOR did the owners have the right to go BACK and harvest the later crops. They had the right to plant and harvest ONE TIME in their fields. All the rest of the food produced there was NOT there. It belonged to the poor. In California once I was driving a back road past an immense grapefruit grove. It stretched on for miles and miles and miles. The trees were laden with fruit, and there were ripe fruits on the ground under the trees everywhere, stretching back as far as the eye could see into that forest of fruit trees. It smelled wonderful and was very appetizing. I wanted some, because I was hungry. I drove up and down that roadside for several miles, looking for a roadside vendor, a farmer's stand, somewhere to get one of those grapefruit. There was none. What there was, were large signs tacked up on posts every few hundred feet, with huge letters: "NO TRESSPASSING" and a stern warning not to take any fruit. This was an American commercial citrus farmer protecting his property. As far as he, and American law, are concerned, every single one of those grapefruit, including the tens of thousands falling off the tree onto the ground, are his, and his alone. For anyone to enter is trespassing, and for anyone to take as little as a single grapefruit lying on the ground, destined to rot, is, according to this farmer and American law, stealing. Before God, American law is wrong and that farmer is wrong. Those fallen fruits do not belong to him. The whole crop and the land itself all belong to God. The farmer did not make the tree grow nor bud, flower and fruit. God did. God permits the farmer to make a good living off the usufruct of His land and his trees, and that is well. But God authorized the sojourner, the passerby, the poor, to walk through those lands - the farmer had no right to keep them out - and, if hungry, to eat fallen fruit. However, God forbade the passerby from GATHERING fruit in a basket and carrying it away. THAT is stealing. Had I gotten out of the car and taken and eaten a fallen fruit, I would have been entirely within my rights, and had the farmer or the police interfered with me, they would have been spitting in the face of God. When Jesus and the Apostles walked through the field on the Sabbath, and some of the hungry Apostles took some grain and chewed on it, they were not stealing. God authorized that. They were not challenged for stealing either, merely for Sabbath-breaking, for "harvesting" on the Sabbath. But eating is not harvesting. The harvest is an economic gathering in. Picking something and eating it because you're hungry is a God-given right. Notice all of the human laws that have been added to God's law to say "No, you can't do that". Those laws are all evil and wrong. That's what happens when you add to God's law. You're wrong, and you do evil. But men don't even SEE that. And THAT is why, in Israel, God so explicitly left out any Legislature at all, and only sent an Executive in time of crisis. And it meant that the Israelites had to trust God - to have faith and WAIT on God. He who does not trust God enough to wait on him is a man of little faith. During the Exodus, God provided the manna. And he forbade them to gather manna on the 7th day, the rest day. No, they were to gather a double portion on the sixth day, and that would carry them through. Also, he forbade them from gathering extra on any day, from putting some away for tomorrow, "Just in case". Whenever the Israelites gathered extra, it turned to worms and rotted, and God was displeased. But that did not happen on the sixth day. The extra gathered then held over. God's whole message: you depend on me for your food. I will give you enough food to eat always. You must trust (have faith in) me. You not to set aside anything extra. I know what you need. And you are not to gather on the 7th day. You are to rest. God made the same rule later with the Sabbatical Year - Israel was to TRUST that in the 6 other years God would provide enough to tide over the 7th year, along with that which grows of its own in the fields. The real test came in the Jubilee, the 50th year. For the 49th year, being a multiple of 7, was a Sabbatical year, but the 50th year was ALSO a Sabbath year. Which meant that the Israelites did not have new grain and had to live off of their stores for two and a half ears: the 49th year, and the 50th year, and the 51st year too, until the time of the harvest that year. They had to TRUST GOD that he would provide the excess in the preceding years, and enough wild growth in the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, to tide them through. That was the faith required, and it was the same faith required regarding the executive. As to the third branch of government, the Judicial, this was very much the intermediary of which you speak. This was the permanent, heavy, government of Israel. There were two levels of this. First, there were the Levites. They were spread throughout the tribes. It was to them that the people were to bring the first fruits, and the tithes. This was in addition to what was brought to Jerusalem and the priests for the three festivals. The first fruits and tithes served two purposes: first, they fed the Levites themselves, who were a tribe granted no land other than the fields right around the Levitical cities. And then the bulk of the tithe (which was in the form of agricultural produce) was distributed by the Levites to the poor, the cripple, the infirm, the orphan - whoever needed it. So, God didn't give his state a Legislature or an Executive, but he DID give them a religious welfare agency. The Levites served as judges also. The other role of Levites, and others so appointed by them, was to be judges. There was a judge for every ten men, and for fifties and hundreds and thousands. And at the apex of it all was the High Priest, at the altar of the Tabernacle, and HE had in his possession the Urim and Thummim, oracles by which God could be consulted directly for an answer in a doubtful case. Part of the Torah is a whole set of ways that God directed judges to try and decide cases. For example, in a capital case, nobody could be put to death without the testimony of two or three witnesses. Also, witnesses had no choice but to testify - if they knew something, they had to say it. Each witness faced the same penalty as the accused for lying, be it by telling an untruth or by concealing an exonerative truth. This, in a murder or adultery case, the witnesses who perjured, and also those who knew the truth but refused to speak, were themselves to be put to death. God established a parallelism in his law, and established the canons of judgment to reflect that. All told, over 13% of the population of Israel was part of the judiciary, and in addition there was the Levitical welfare apparatus (tithes were for charity, but they were not at all optional). 131 of every 1000 were judges: 100 judges of 10s, 20 judges of 50s, 10 judges of hundreds, 1 judge of thousands, and above him, the High Priest (with the Urim and Thummim). And besides this (without considerable overlap), the Levites were on of the 12 Tribes of Israel, and they judged, and they also were the keepers of the treasury of the land, which was in the form of tithes, which were the only taxes, and their ENTIRE purpose was to feed the Levites and provide poverty relief. So yes, Israel was a theocracy in the truest sense of the word: it was ruled directly by God, as lawgiver. God had no intermediary in the giving of law. Moses was his scribe. The High Priests and Levites were his judges and administrator. Indeed, the word we like to translate as "priest" is a functional title that means, in essence, administrator. We have a tradition of "separation of Church and state". But Israel had no separation. There was no Church at all. The people were the people of God, and the administrators of God collected the taxes, distributed them as welfare, and served as judges to enforce God's law as given. There was no legislature sitting debating new laws, because there was no ability to make or change God's laws at all. There was no executive or police force. In time of danger, God made a prophet and the men formed the army and followed him. No other government has ever been a true theocracy, or CAN be, because there is only one God, and the only place he ever ruled directly was ancient Israel, and he destroyed it. So, a place like Iran we might call a "theocracy", because it's ruled by a religious organization, but it isn't, because it's not God who is ruling directly. We should call Iran a "mullahocracy" or some similar term. In any case, I don't advocate that we attempt to reconstitute the government of ancient Israel. That would be useless - because God would not really be ruling us that way - and impious - as if we could bind God to dance to our forms. What I DO urge is in keeping with what Jesus meant when he said that not a penstroke nor a dot would pass away from God's Law until the end of the world. But how can that be? Didn't Jesus make all foods clean, and forbid divorce, and didn't God destroy the temple and end the rites? And anyway, didn't we just say that the law God gave to Israel did not promise eternal life, or really say anything about the afterlife at all, and only promised a farm in Israel? Yes, all of that is true. It oftentimes seems that Christians are entirely too anxious to "get out from under" the Law without ever taking time to comprehend what the law said, and what it's POINT really was. You know it instantly: any Christian who thinks that the Law was about Salvation of the soul, passing final judgement and entering Heaven after death simply has not read the Old Testament. Perhaps he has skimmed through it, looking for points of reference to what he believes, but that's all the Old Testament serves for to Christians who are so in the dark as that: it's a mine for "gotcha" quotes to prove some point. In fact, though, what the Old Testament is, is a record of Creation, and then God's selection of a particular family and the people associated with that family over time, to establish a moral path for man through teaching by example and repetition. Covenantal Israel was the archetype of the state, governed according to the wisdom of God and under the laws of God, completely undiluted (in concept) by the opinions of man. All of the written law of Israel is God's opinion about everything, every single thing, that is - or ever will be, until the end of the world - of importance to the happiness and right living of mankind. God pulled a bunch of slaves, most of them unrelated, out of the strongest ancient Kingdom. He took the time to smash flat each and every major deity in that Kingdom's pagan pantheon, by making miracles that specifically assumed command of the natural element that the Egyptian god controlled, and then using that element to torment the Egyptians, thereby demonstrating God's mastery not just over the Egytpians and Pharaoh, but over each of their named gods in his her her own element. The pantheon of gods in whom the Egyptians believed in intensely enough to spend all of that time and energy building those colossal pyramids, were all defied to their face by the Lord God of Hosts, El Elyon, the Most High God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Pharaoh was actually persuaded pretty early to let the Israelites go, and would have several times. It was God Himself who kept sending his spirit to harden Pharaoh's heart, so that Pharaoh would not let them go, thus paving the way for God to directly smash down before all of Egypt another Egyptian god. Consider the plague of frogs. Frogs? Darkness, blood, gnats, scalls - these things are all painful or scary, real punishment of humans in a way that makes them fear. But FROGS? They don't bite. They're not poisonous (at least not in Egypt). All they did in the plague was just come out of the rivers and marshes annoying everybody, and then die and stink. That's annoying, but it's not even the first plague. Plagues before that inflicted pain and perhaps death and destruction - and yet suddenly God "goes soft" and send FROGS? Frogs. Why? The answer is not found by looking at the effects on humans. God knew that Pharaoh would let the Israelites go as soon as God stopped hardening Pharaoh's heart. Pharaoh himself relented early on. God kept intervening to change Pharaoh's mind and make him more obdurate. Why? So that God could make more plagues, like the frogs. Part of this was to be a symbol for all time, but the true symbology is mostly lost on us because we look at the people and God, and we don't see the rival spirits, the gods of Egypt. Egypt was THE great kingdom, the only one at the time, and it had a pantheon of powerful deities, deities who were real - they performed miracles also. The Egyptian wise men were not illusionists. Their gods turned their sticks into snakes. But the stick from El Elyon ate up the other snakes. Each of God's plagues of Egypt seized the element of an Egyptian god and ruled it to the disgrace of that lesser god. The river goddess was a frog goddess. The Greeks called her "Plataea". But the Most High God brought forth the frogs, and had them die in heaps: demonstrating to all of Egypt that the river goddess was powerful, even in her own element, against El Elyon, the most high God. Jesus did no less when he spoke with demons and cast them out, into pigs, or into the air, etc. Other spirits are real, and the gods of the ancients were often these spirits that accepted worship and divine service in exchange for favors. But when the Father, the Creator, the Most High God, steps onto the stage, the lesser spirits who have accepted worship tremble. In Egypt, he hurled one lesser god after another into the dirt and muck. Pharaoh, the ruler, was said to be descended of the sons of Ra, the god of the sun. And maybe he was. Recall that certain of the angels did descend both before and after the Flood and have offspring by human females: the Nephilim. The Great House of Egypt ("Paroh" in Hebrew means "Great House" - the Greek word "Pharaoh" is a transliteration of this; it doesn't mean "king") got its position somehow, and by its own legends this was because the people believed that the Great House, Paroh, were descended from the sun God. Maybe at some point they were Nephilim. And perhaps the way that the Egyptian astronomers determined the solar cycle to predict eclipses was through the aid of some of these spirits, these lesser gods. Who can say? What we can say is that when God imposed the darkness on Egypt, the penultimate plague, he was striking directly at the sun, at Ra, at the highest of the Egyptian deities, and demonstrating to all of Egypt that God Most High, El Elyon, was higher than the Sun, higher than Ra, that Ra could not resist or control him. The FINAL plague, the Passover, had a purpose also. In Egypt, the first born of every Egyptian house was consecrated to the service of the gods. The first born were the priests and priestesses of Egypt. By striking down the first born, specifically, El Elyon, God most high, stripped Egypt of its entire religious structure - all of its priests and priestesses - in one night. A modern equivalent would be that God comes and kills in one night every priest, minister, brother, nun, reverend and deacon in the world, completely annihilating the entire Christian clergy in one night, leaving none alive. What happens then? All that is left are lay people, and what do they know about deeper theology? So, God mastered the Egyptian gods, then he killed their whole clergy, and then he let Pharaoh relent and let the Hebrews go. All of this was intended to demonstrate a lot of things to everybody, for all time: that the Most High God is above their gods, EVEN THOUGH their gods can indeed perform miracles - they are subordinate. That God is the master of everything. Also, that God can choose a no-people - the slaves of Egypt were not all, or even mostly, descendants of Jacob, they were a polyglot of people from everywhere - and he can make them into a people by his own will. Also, that God can crush the mightiest human state in one night by directly reaching in and killing its entire ruling class: the Egyptian priesthood was the ruling class (they were not celibate). More subtly, Pharaoh actually DID get the message from God early on, and was ready to let the Hebrews go several times. It was God who hardened his heart in order to continue to make the example. By contrast, the Hebrews who came out of Egypt saw all of these miracles and more - "faith" was not a question of BELIEF to them, it was a matter of TRUSTING God, that we would see them through. He did them nothing but good, and yet THEY kept THEMSELVES hardening their hearts and stiffening their necks against him. He kept telling them not to, but they kept doing it, to their own destruction. There is a lesson in that, but we should note that the Exodus story shows TWO kinds of people - the kind that is prone to listen to God (Pharaoh, and his magicians who told him "This was the finger of God" when they saw it, and who told him "Egypt is being destroyed!"); God had to harden Pharaoh's heart several times. Left to his own free will, Pharaoh would have let the Israelites go after the first couple of plagues. And then there's the kind that, even in then face of miracle and blessing, are NOT willing to listen to God, or to trust God, who keep on rebelling. God intentionally CHOSE a people of the second type, indeed a no-people whom he made a people, and knowing from the beginning that they would fail, nevertheless established his exemplary state among THEM. Had he done it among the Egyptians, had he simply revealed himself as above Ra and cast out the Egyprian gods, HE would have been the God of Egypt, and you can bet that the Egyptians would have been very faithful in executing his laws too, not rebellious the way the Hebrews were. He picked a no people, a rabble of slaves, and made them a people, wreaking a miracle of statecraft out of the most rejected, downtrodden, ignorant, poor, lowly, stubborn and stupid people. Jesus also builds the Kingdom starting with individuals, and it is much easier for people who are at the bottom to see and follow God than for people who are rich and comfortable. Also, God did not hate the Egyptians, though the Hebrews might have been inclined to. Two of the laws in Torah, from the mouth of God, are 'You shall not oppress a foreigner, for you were once strangers in a strange land.' And 'You shall not oppress an Egyptian, for he gave you refuge in his land.' Note that while Americans are swift to dismiss worrying about the Indians because that was "long ago" and we don't want to think about it, God was still crediting the Egyptians saving the family of Jacob and Joseph and letting them settle there and treating them well, over four hundred years later. And remember, it was once again into Egypt that the Holy Family fled Herod, who sought to kill the baby Jesus. It was safe in Egypt that Jesus passed the first few years of his life. Egypt is not really the problem. The Egyptians were led astray by demons, and followed them. But Pharaoh was not stupid, and he was not unrelenting. God had to keep hardening his heart in order to perform all of the signs, throw down all of the gods, and teach all of these lessons I have been writing about for all ages. But those lessons are not taught if people do not read them. If they just look at what God said and did and put it in the simple framework of "Jews good/Egyptians bad" then they fail to see what God was teaching. This happens with the whole Torah. Jesus upheld the law, but what does that MEAN? He didn't uphold the food law - but God said that was to keep the Israelites healthy in Israel. It was not a spiritual issue. Remember, God gave Israel a defined land, and no mandate to go and take more anywhere else. God knows all, including biology. If you are sending a primitive people with no knowledge of germ theory into a hot land of deserts, swamps and stagnant rivers and seas, and you want them to be healthy, but you can only use their language, not modern language. What do you do? You give them a list of foods that are clean for them and unclean. How can you explain why. Why are fish with fins and scales "clean", but bottom-feeding catfish unclean? Why are birds that eat seeds clean, but birds that eat blood and carrion unclean? Why are the only clean mammals cud-chewing with cleft feet? (They don't eat blood, and therefore do not have blood-borne parasites). Had the Promised Land been in Norway, would got have forbidden eating oysters and crabs, which are in abundance in those cold clean waters? They are also abundant in the flat, hot, fetid, stagnant sewage- laden mud flats of Egypt and Israel. but they are certainly not good for you. God knew what he was doing. The Israelites didn't understand why they had to tear down a house that had recurring "leprosy", even after scrubbed and the infected part was pulled out. We know: the house has toxic mold growing within the walls, and local abatement will not get rid of it. God knew: he said 'tear it down and discard the unclean ruins outside of the town'. COULD anybody in 1500 BC have known about toxic mold, what it was and how it worked? Could that even be conveyed in ancient Hebrew? Or blood-born parasites? Or toxic amoebae? God knew, and he knew they wouldn't understand. He wanted them healthy in his kingdom, and so he told them what to do, and told them they must do it. They just had to trust him and do it, not knowing why. We can see why. But for the first 3250 years of the Torah, nobody could understand why. Was it just some strange ritual? It was strange, yes. It was a ritual, yes. But it always had a purpose. God always knew what he was doing, and he always said to just DO IT - DO what he said, follow the laws, TRUST ME that this is best - and don't take anything out of the law. And so it goes on through the whole law. God wanted the state he set up to be perfect, so he gave it a perfect set of laws. We cannot reproduce that state in its entirety: God has never promised us prophets or farms, or given us Urim and Thummim by which to consult him directly. But the wisdom and purpose of God's laws remain. So when we look into them and we see a detailed economic order, if we disregard it thinking "Well, thank God we don't have to follow THAT, because we're Christians!" We are being bone stupid. We're looking at God's wisdom, designed for the ages, designed by perfect intelligence to address all of the myriad overlapping problems, and we've decided that God is just not good enough for us - we know better - so we do what we want, and then everything turns into calamity, just as God warned the Israelites. And then we have a choice: we can RELENT and listen to God, like Pharaoh would have - God had to harden his heart to prevent that so he could make the lesson, but he's not going to harden OUR hearts. Or we can harden our hearts and stiffen our necks, like rebellious Hebrews, and continue to do it our way, and continue to fail catastrophically. Take a good look at how hard people abuse me here on this site for simply conveying God's law of money as written. And look how offended people get when I tell them truly that they are rejecting God and his revealed, detailed law - the only way that will ever WORK - in order to serve money. THEY DON'T CARE. Think of those Israelites, standing in the desert, seeing the pillar of fire, having walked through the ocean, and STILL grousing that God won't provide them water, or meat, or whatever, still refusing to obey him. What did that avail them in the end. If we continue this discourse, I'm going to focus on Jesus, just Jesus. It is Jesus who says that the Law is fully the law until the planet is destroyed, so all of those economic provisions of God's wisdom are STILL God's wisdom and still true. But if a Christian wants to assert his "free will" to blow off God and do it a different way, as we have, then we need to be warned of our death by Jesus, who has his own direct things to say about economics. On another thread, I intended to move forward from Genesis to Revelation, in order, discussing what God says about economics. The audience I am targeting, really, are the stiff-necked, hard-hearted "Christians" who have deluded themselves into believing that if it has to do with MONEY, then God's law is all voluntary. Jesus never said a thing about homosexual sodomy. Never did. To see the death penalty for that, you have to go back to the Torah. That's where that law is. That's the only place it is. Paul refers to it. He doesn't make a new law. Why is it that Christians will say that God hates homosexual sodomy, based on the Torah, but then are incapable of HEARING what God has to say about interest, debt forgiveness, poverty relief? It is because those "Christians' are stiff necked hard-hearted people who serve money. That's why. They need to open their eyes and stop it. Likewise, we've seen defenses of slavery - SLAVERY! - in the South. No Christian can defend slavery. But they have tried to. Hard-hearted, stiff necked, blind fools. And where do these beliefs that we can blow off God and just follow our own ideas come from? Satan. They come from Satan. If we continue this discussion, I'm going to let Jesus have the last word. On and on Jesus goes about the poor, about the duty to help them. And the Apostles actually follow the example too. In fact, two early Christians are struck dead by God right at the feet of Peter over a manner of insincere donations. But what do I hear Christians say? That none of this MATTERS, that all that matters is whether or not you believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Jesus himself totally rejected that very argument. "WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO YOU TO SAY THAT YOU FOLLOW ME IF YOU DON'T KEEP MY COMMANDMENTS?" - Jesus of Nazareth
Always a good plan. As I pointed out earlier, you have this at one end of the spectrum: ~John 3:16-18 NIV But then we have the book of James, and this - James 2:14-26 On the surface it appears to be a contradiction. How do I - as a Christian - reconcile this? By focusing on the word "believes" in the John passage. To me, believing is not just simply saying the words "I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Yes, it starts there, but belief has to have shoe leather attached to it. That's where the James passage comes in. A Christian, guided by The Holy Spirit (2nd Person of the Trinity), will respond to His promptings when so guided to help the poor or less fortunate. To do otherwise is to deny one's faith. His or her belief is not genuine. This is going to have to serve as my final comment per this theological discussion - at least for now. I'm not as prolific a writer as you, and I simply cannot summarize my faith any clearer than that. I'd like to get back to a point you made in an earlier post, however. First off, the USA is much larger - population wise - than the countries you cited. A system designed to work there will not necessarily work here. Second, those countries do not have a massive illegal immigration problem. Their politicians to my knowledge are not saying to the rest of the world "come here, jump our fences, and we will provide you free health care". Finally, Norway does not play world policeman like the USA; Denmark does not have military bases in dozens of places. Sweden is not going around the world fighting in un-declared wars. Taking on those cradle-to-grave Socialistic programs WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in our other expenditures is not only foolish, it is suicidal. And it is dishonest. You cited these countries apparently because of their Protestant roots. That's fine, but it's irrelevant to today. As irrelevant as saying the USA is governed by a Constitution when in fact and in practice it is not. So those differences will - in my opinion - doom the USA's foray into Socialism to failure. One final observation - I don't intend it to be a criticism but it may come off that way. Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM" Fact is - we are NOT them. People used to come here FROM those countries to WORK here - to better themselves and their families. Ask yourself - why did they do that? They were escaping in some cases those very Socialistic utopias that some (you?) seem to want us to become. I'm not a rah rah flag waving, USA love it or leave it type of guy. Certainly, I know and am honest about our faults and shortcomings as a nation. By the same token, however, there are some things RIGHT about the country. Perhaps it would be cool to remind ourselves of that once in a while.
Rufus, they didn't. Europeans did not come here to escape socialism. The English came here to escape various forms of religious oppression, and because the poor English were herded off their lands and hounded into debtors' prison by the arch-conservative aristocratic feudal right - the ORIGINAL "crony capitalists" par excellence. The Dutch came, in few numbers, to trade with the Indians. The French came (not to the US but to French territory) to trade with the Indians and to convert them to Christianity. The Germans came to America to escape the grinding poverty of monarchy, which was arch-traditional in its economic order. The economic order that the hard right proposes in America, with absolute ownership and essentially no government but the decisions of the land and factory owners - THAT was the system in monarchic Europe and in the pre-Civil War South. The Germans in the "out" groups religiously were out of jobs and property, and they left for religious freedom in the English colonies. Then came the Revolution. After that, next came the Irish. The Irish came because the English treated them like the Americans treated the Indians. It was the sheer opposite of "socialism" - it was genocidal tyranny. England was the world Empire, super rich. She let a million of her subjects die of starvation a day's sail away because they DIDN'T have any functional system of government poverty relief, and didn't believe in it. When the famine hit, the English government let the Irish die. And when the Irish agitated, the English rode them down as Catholic racially inferior scum. No Irishman or woman ever immigrated to America because of "socialism" - not one. Ever. Next came the more Germans, and Italians, and Scandinavians. They came because of massive overpopulation in Europe, oppressive governments holding down unrest, and the complete LACK of socialism in traditional, conservative Europe that REFUSED to set up systems to feed people. That's why the Russians had a revolution during World War I. They were already poor, they'd lost 10 million in an endless war with Germany, and there was no relief for them at all in that rigid aristocratic system. So they overthrew it. THAT is where socialism was born. Some Russians fled Russia to America at that time, but they were fleeing desperate poverty, not socialism. Before the USSR, socialism did not EXIST, in ANY European country. Almost all of the great waves of European immigration to America happened in the late 19th and pre-World War II 20th Century, and NONE of it was due to socialism, or social welfare programs. There were no social welfare programs in Europe to speak of. The Church handled it, and did so weakly, with overwhelmed resources. Social welfare really came into full force in most of Europe AFTER World War II…and with it, immigration to the US STOPPED, because the Europeans had what they needed at home. The LEAST immigration to the US from ANY European country of any size was France, and that was because, with their revolution in the 1780s, the French stripped the land and wealth of the aristocrats and made themselves middle class, and so they had no REASON to leave. Immigration to the United States from Europe came about because of right wing capitalist and aristocratic systems that did not believe in social welfare, and that left charity to the Church. THAT is what created burgeoning masses of desperate people who came to America as a SAFETY valve. And that is, by and large, the condition of Latin America too. Those are not socialist countries down there. They are capitalist. They have very threadbare social welfare systems. Charity is left to the Church. As always, the Church does not have the resources to do it, so the poverty is grinding and horrible. People immigrate to America to escape that. Europeans set up social welfare in their own countries and STOP emigrating to America in any numbers. Latinos haven't set it up well in theirs, and still pour into America. In other words, the reality is that socialism never had anything to do with people leaving Europe or Latin America to come to the USA. The come because of poverty in systems that are not and never were socialist. Once countries become "socialist" or at least erect social welfare, the mass emigration stops. People prefer to remain at home.
I don't. The only thing I do say is that we ought to emulate the French health insurance system, because that is the closest to ours, in terms of being insurance (as opposed to the direct provision of care), and because the doctors are independent, and because France has a very high quality medical treatment standard, on a par with ours. They have single payer. Essentially, the French have US Medicare, but it covers everybody. THAT is what we SHOULD do. Be done with Medicaid, and with private insurers and pools and that nonsense. Extend Medicare to cover everybody, just as it covers the over-65s now. Increase taxes to pay for it, and have done with it. What I say is that we should put the limits in our laws that are in the laws of God. Unpayable debts need to be dischargeable. We've done the opposite.
Especially those who think lazy non working people need to have the same kind of Healthcare that decent working people have. Sounds like they have bought into the crap taught in American schools nowadays, "You're special" even though they aren't... Health disasters can strike anybody and wipe them out, and make them unable to work. But yes, since you put it in precisely those terms, then the answer, precisely in those terms, is that lazy non-working people need to have the same health care coverage that decent working people have. Their kids also need an education. The economy will certainly apply all the judgment you like when it comes to where they live, what they have, whether they are able to drive at all, what their clothes look like, that they never get to go on vacations, that they have no entertainment - you can be sure not to subsidize any of that. But you cannot let them suffer and die for want of care. And you cannot let them starve for want of food, or freeze for want of basic shelter. And you cannot deprive their kids of an education in order to punish the parent. If you think we should, then there's nowhere to go but to have a battle over it, and it will be decided by power. Actually, it already has been decided by power. We have a social safety net, and we're not taking it away. The Christian logic of the social safety net means that we're going to strengthen it. So I guess you're going to pass the remainder of your life bitterly hating the system under which you live. Even as you enter your final illness, protected from hunger by Social Security and receiving you care through government payment (Medicare) you'll still hate the system. Hate away. You'll never change it. The majority of people understand what has to be done. The biggest waste in government is not in social safety net. It's in the overseas military empire. Want to focus on something worthless that should be ended? Focus on THAT.
You didn't respond to my point re: Denmark, Norway, Sweden being much smaller countries than the US and not having the world policeman obligations that the US has. Although France is larger (65 million), it is nowhere near the population of the 300 plus million in the US. Plus France does not have the US illegal immigration problem. (They import Muslims, but AFAIK they are doing so legally). So once again: How do you take a already financially underwater Medicare system and ADD clients to it - WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in other US expenditures. (Note: I'm not arguing whether we should or shouldn't reduce the US footprint around the world. I'm just saying it's not going to happen. Ahh, doctors. And nurses, PA's, etc. Professionals that are required to provide that "free" healthcare that everyone seems to want. Have you been to a waiting room recently? Wait long? And that's with our current system. My wife is in the medical field - will probably be retiring next year. People are GETTING OUT of the field. Without anything else changing, wait times are only going to get worse. What's going to happen when the system is flooded with NEW clients? It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a doctor (Med school expenses, etc.) Who is going to pay that? If you say "private", will a doctor come out of school that deep in debt and be willing to work for government wages? Will he/she be willing to be a gov't slave (after all, if it's my "right" to have free healthcare, someone has to be forced to provide my "right.") Right? If you say public funding, that's just going to add to an already unfathomable debt. I don't know anything about the French standard, so all I'll say is the US is probably near or at the top in the world (as to medical breakthroughs, technology, R&D, etc.) I can personally attest to that, having had a quadruple bypass 10 years ago and still being here to tell about it. Again all that sounds very nice - but refer to the counter-points I made earlier. As much as Socialists and Statists wish it were otherwise, there is still this thing called "supply and demand". They cannot pass a law to repeal it. Yes, the gov't can provide "free" healthcare to everyone - just as it could provide free Cadillacs to everyone. But what good is it if I go down to the Cadillac store, find a line ten miles long (everyone wants their free Cadillac, doncha know), and am told I have to wait 10 years for mine? I want it NOW! That's a silly example - here's a better one. In April of 2005, I was experiencing shortness of breath. No pains or anything, just that. That was on a Friday. On Monday, I had an angiogram; on Tuesday I had open heart surgery. Argue all day long about the pros and cons of Zero Care, single payer, yada yada yada. All I can say is - if we had one of those systems in place then instead of the system that WAS in place, I probably wouldn't be here. We've discussed Theocracies ad infinitum. The only thing our corrupt (and yes, evil) current government is going to do about "the laws of God" is laugh at them.
I did, but I did so in my own way. Now I will respond directly and clearly, so that it isn't left vague. The Nordic countries physically comprise vast territory, much of it quite difficult. They have a smaller population than the US as a whole, but each of the Nordic countries has the same population as major US states. There Scandinavian system is scalable. The second part of what you said is indeed a key difference, but I need to correct your language. The US does not have world policeman obligations. We are not obligated to be the world's policeman. We have arrogated that role unto ourselves, we do it badly, at enormous expense to ourselves, and the money we waste on those inappropriate activities does indeed go missing where we need it to invest in our own people. Empire has never worked well in the long run for any country. You get to be "great" - whatever that means - but "great" doesn't matter. And the price of the "greatness" is to hollow out and ultimately be worse off for it. England ended up impoverished by her empire. Spain fell from number one nation to a 300-year also-ran because she ate up her seed corn trying to maintain an empire. The USSR imploded because of an obsession for spending prodigious sums on a vast, unusable military. And the US has spent trillions to establish and try to maintain an empire that is a pure drain on American lives, limbs and resources. We have no "world policeman obligation". The obligation does not exist. We have operated under the fantasy that it does, and that we "must", but it doesn't, and we cannot afford it. Sooner or later, we will give up the empire. If we were intelligent, we would give it up willingly, and rather quickly. The sooner we stanch the bleeding, the quicker our finances will improve. But if we're stubborn and persuade ourselves that we "must" maintain our imperial role, then we will continue to do as we've done since 1946: go into debt to maintain an oversized military deployed all over the world, and then lose wars because we cannot politically bring our forces to bear. The string of defeats since World War II is stunning - China in 1949, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. I do not speak of defeat as a boardgamer might, looking at some rulebook - I speak in real terms: when you are the sole nuclear power and you lose most of an army and get driven halfway out of a country (Korea), you have been defeated. When you invade a country, overthrow its government, lose control of the political situation, and end up with a new government that is aligned with your worst enemy in the region, and that cannot control its own borders against the worst sorts of threats (I speak of Iraq), you have been defeated. When you invade and sit, at enormous expense, and know you have to be there forever because as soon as you leave the place will revert to the same people you drove out (Afghanistan), you have opened a permanent bleeding abscess on your body politic, out of which your money will drain forever, until you admit defeat and withdraw. And the more stubborn you are about refusing to admit defeat, the worse damage you inflict on yourself. So right here, in this military empire, this role as world policeman, we have identified THE key area where the money is, was, and has been, to fund the social safety net. You ask where we would get the money to do what we ought to do, and there is your answer: we will fund a proper social safety net by ending the US world empire, bringing home the armed forces, deeply cutting the now unnecessary excess forces (and placing the remainder on the Mexican Border to stop the illegal flow of aliens and drugs), and using all of that cost savings to quickly balance the budget. With a balanced budget, and a tax code that is properly structured, the money that formerly went to the twin drains of empire and debt interest will be freed to more rapidly retire debt, and then ultimately to improve the social safety net.
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestDidn't the Irish abortion ban fall like 8-10 years ago in a popular referendum?
#60. To: buckeroo (#58)
#61. To: TooConservative (#56)
it largely redistributes middle-class healthcare to poor childless adults who don't work full-time jobs.
#62. To: Fred Mertz (#60)
#63. To: nolu chan (#54)
Actually it is non-universal, and it is not health care, but expensive, high-deductible health insurance.
#64. To: TooConservative (#56)
(Edited)
So we shouldn't forget how expensive this "free" healthcare is, that it largely redistributes middle-class healthcare to poor childless adults who don't work full-time jobs. T
#65. To: Vicomte13 (#46)
Because to be a billionaire, you have to be smart. And smart people with a lot of money know their history. They know what happened in France. And in Russia. And in China. And in Mexico. And in so many other countries, where the rich were allowed to get super-rich, and the poor were allowed to rot.
#66. To: Vicomte13 (#45)
They're poorer than here, but in most of those places, they live longer.
#67. To: Vicomte13 (#53)
No,it was Dim/socialist dogma,which is nothing but pure BS.
#68. To: nolu chan (#59)
The referenda that were approved provided free speech about abortion and the right to travel out of country to obtain an abortion.
#69. To: Vicomte13 (#63)
The referenda that were approved provided free speech about abortion and the right to travel out of country to obtain an abortion.
#70. To: nativist nationalist (#65)
t was socialism that made most of them billionaires in the first place.
#71. To: nativist nationalist (#16)
And the cuckservatives will support them every step of the way.
#72. To: Vicomte13 (#17)
(Edited)
The specific lies?
#73. To: sneakypete (#69)
Why doesn't the Catholic Church just pay for everyone's medical care? After all,they are richer than any government,and that is the sort of thing they are supposed to do. That's why they pay no taxes.
#74. To: Liberator (#72)
(Edited)
Your indictment of the Republican Party by default is an indictment of ALL Republicans. Vic, that just isn't true, isn't right, isn't fair.
#75. To: Liberator (#72)
Are you REALLY comparing Reagan to Romney?
#76. To: Vicomte13 (#74)
(Edited)
Do you indict all Democrats? Yes. Why?
#77. To: Vicomte13 (#75)
#78. To: Vicomte13 (#74)
(Edited)
They both suck - every single one of them - BECAUSE they affiliate with evil parties and they ought to know better by now. There was no such thing as a "Good Nazi".
#79. To: Vicomte13, sneakypete (#73)
The Church is not as rich as you think it is.
#80. To: Liberator (#79)
he wealth of individual RCC churches should not part of this conversation. By "Church," I'm assuming RCC Central, aka the Vatican.
#81. To: sneakypete (#68)
Seriously? The Irish government actually has the authority to punish it's citizens for the things they do in other countries that is legal in those countries?
3° The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.
#82. To: Liberator, Vicomte13 (#79)
By "Church," I'm assuming RCC Central, aka the Vatican.
#83. To: Vicomte13 (#17)
The Bible speaks about wealth redistribution, both testaments. The Bible makes it clear that this is mandatory for anybody who wants to go to Heaven. If one refuses to accept that, he defies God and is "Christian" rabble.
~Jesus, Gospel of St. John, chapter 18 verse 36
#84. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
This is the way I understand Scripture. Judaeo-Christian belief tells us that the only God controlled earthly government that ever existed was in the Garden of Eden. Man, being what he was, messed that up. From then on, we have been on our own.
#85. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
In the Old Testament, God DID have representatives (spokesmen, if you will) who made His will known to the people. The people could listen to these Judges and later, prophets. (or not).
#86. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
God is absolutely the HIGHEST AUTHORITY there is.
#87. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
#88. To: Vicomte13 (#84)
Rufus, go back and read Exodus through Deuteronomy. They are a divine constitution for Israel, which God established as his people. Now read Joshua and see how it is directed. Then read how, when the people clamored for a king in the time of Samuel, that God told Samuel that they were not rejecting him (Samuel), but rather, were rejecting Him (God) as their king.
So you need to adjust your understanding of Scripture. God established and ruled a full on kingdom, with people and territory. He gave it all of its laws, and established how everything was to be. He promised them that as long as they did it all, that he would be with them and they would have that land. He also promised them that if they refused to do what he told them, he would destroy them, drive them out and give the land over to others.
The enter Old Testament is an account of how God established a state and ran it, and how the Israelites kept breaking his laws, and how he kept calling them back. The Mosaic covenant does not have one thing to do with eternal life or final judgment. There is nothing anywhere in it about any of those things. It's all about Israel and the laws of the people in Israel.
To get to the promise of eternal life for obeying a law, you have to come forward to Jesus.
In the Old Testament, the state that God set up had a very heavy charitable component written into the laws. That was what the tithe of the Levites was FOR: poverty relief. It was why interest on loans was prohibited to Israelites, why Israelites had to loan each otter money, why debts were forgiven after 6 years, why Israelites could not be sold as slaves, why children had the obligation to care for their parents, and vice versa. and why there was a skein of complicated laws regarding slaves that essentially gave each slave the "out" of becoming an Israelite and worshiping God, transmuting his slavery into indentured servitude.
That's what it actually says.
When we come to Jesus, who calls the whole world, not just the Jews of Israel,
there is a great deal regarding poverty relief, including the stern warning that when the poor cry out, as you treat them, you treat Him, and will be judged accordingly.
The entire Scripture drips with concern for fellow men, and warns not to make idols, and not to break the law over money.
A heresy has arisen among Christians that exalts the charging of interest and pretends - contrary to what Jesus SAID - that treating the poor right is optional, a matter of personal choice. Well, sure it is. Just like killing somebody is a personal choice. But if you make the wrong choice, you get thrown into the flames.
#89. To: Vicomte13 (#88)
#90. To: Vicomte13 (#70)
Not socialism, crony capitalism.
#91. To: nativist nationalist (#90)
#92. To: Rufus T Firefly (#88)
What you've described thus far is a Theocracy. It still requires an intermediary - that is, a person(s) in the middle, between the Ruler (God) and the ruled. In your examples, He's not there in physical form.
#93. To: Vicomte13 (#92)
If we continue this discussion, I'm going to let Jesus have the last word.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good[a] is that? 17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! 20 Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; 23 and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. 24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.
I do not favor an "all powerful government".
Sweden doesn't have an all-powerful government. Neither does Denmark. Or Finland.
#94. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
People used to come here FROM those countries to WORK here - to better themselves and their families. Ask yourself - why did they do that? They were escaping in some cases those very Socialistic utopias that some (you?) seem to want us to become.
#95. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM"
#96. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM"
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#97. To: CZ82 (#96)
Especially those who think lazy non working people need to have the same kind of Healthcare that decent working people have. Sounds like they have bought into the crap taught in American schools nowadays, "You're special" even though they aren't...
#98. To: Vicomte13 (#95)
The only thing I do say is that we ought to emulate the French health insurance system, because that is the closest to ours, in terms of being insurance (as opposed to the direct provision of care),
and because the doctors are independent,
and because France has a very high quality medical treatment standard, on a par with ours.
They have single payer. Essentially, the French have US Medicare, but it covers everybody.
THAT is what we SHOULD do. Be done with Medicaid, and with private insurers and pools and that nonsense. Extend Medicare to cover everybody, just as it covers the over-65s now. Increase taxes to pay for it, and have done with it.
What I say is that we should put the limits in our laws that are in the laws of God. Unpayable debts need to be dischargeable. We've done the opposite.
#99. To: Rufus T Firefly (#98)
You didn't respond to my point re: Denmark, Norway, Sweden being much smaller countries than the US and not having the world policeman obligations that the US has.
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