Rubio Needs To Choose Christianity Over Statism

Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

At the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C. are two large statues titled “Man Controlling Trade.” They were commissioned in the late 1930’s near the height of America’s love affair with socialism and depict muscular men controlling the powerful draft horses of the market for the “common good.”

The myth that the state can control the market and make it produce what bureaucrats want and reward those whom bureaucrats deem worthy is ancient and harder to kill than zombies. Even in the 1930s intelligent people understood that free markets create wealth (reduce poverty) in almost miraculous ways. Marx admitted as much. But markets don’t make everyone equally wealthy, as the envious demand, and they don’t create the utopias of socialist fantasies. Of course, neither does socialism.

So, many people dream of harnessing the wealth generating power of markets to the socialist’s fantasies and having their Kate and Edith, too. The problem is that the power of the market lies in its being free, much as Samson’s strength was in his hair. Markets have always existed. Even the USSR had them. They have rarely been free. Freedom empowered existing markets in China to lift half a billion people from starvation poverty in a single generation.

African-Americans Are Among The Richest People On The Planet

Source: AP Photo/David Goldman

According to the New York Times, living in the US is awful! Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board and the author of the forthcoming The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society, wrote that.

Life expectancy declined for the poorest 20 percent of Americans. Shockingly, the difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.

Rising inequality also is straining the health of liberal democracy. The idea of “we the people” is fading because, in this era of yawning inequality, there is less we share in common.

Political Power Is The Ring That Should Be Destroyed

Source: U.S. Geological Survey via AP

As the US plunges into another festival of foolishness, also known as the campaign to choose the next president, we should pause to consider what we’re doing. We have created a political position in which the person in the seat exercises enormous power over the lives of millions beneath them, power very much like that of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien wrote in a letter, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” And he offered the world brilliant political wisdom in his masterpiece. Sauron the Dark Lord created the ring to achieve dominion over Middle-earth. Several of the characters believe that they can use the power of the ring for great good. Tolkien proves them wrong. The only solution to the problem of the Ring, and the salvation of Middle-earth, is to destroy its power in the fires of Mordor.

But Americans think we know better. We just need to put the right person in the seat of power and they will wield it for the benefit of all. Maybe. George Washington did it well, but the list of rulers in history with Washington’s character is short. A much greater number have been evil.