Kevin Williams has a very thoughtful piece on Capitalism for yesterday’s Day of Thanksgiving. While not directly thanking God (which the Pilgrims did on that day back in 1623), he confronts the wave of Socialism that reared it’s ugly head on November 6 and does a nice job of defending it when most cannot stand against the “kindness” onslaught of those believing that Government directed economies (Socialism, Communism) and behaviors are VERY MUCH superior to customer / individual self-directed choices (Capitalism). In part (reformatted, emphasis mine):
There is a part of the Christian tradition that relates charitable giving to the Seventh Commandment, which is the prohibition on theft. The idea is that the world and all that it contains are God’s gift to corporate mankind — “the universal destination of goods,” in theological jargon — so that the man with two coats holds one of them unjustly when his neighbor shivers in the cold with no coat at all. Private property, in this understanding, is instrumental in promoting the common good, but it does not supersede the primordial gift.
There is great grace and goodness and wisdom in that. But it simply assumes the existence of coats and coat factories, the vast and incomprehensibly complex apparatus of coat-production that incorporates materials, effort, and intelligence from people all over the world, coordinating the efforts of men and women who do not speak the same languages, share the same religion, reside in the same countries, or even know of one another’s existence — from goose farmers to computer programmers to chemical engineers.
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