The History of Sin
The Puritan impulse for social reform produced social control that has been secularized, centralized, and has achieved a kind of permanence within government bureaucracy.
The Puritan impulse for social reform produced social control that has been secularized, centralized, and has achieved a kind of permanence within government bureaucracy.
The resurgent claim that the modern economy was built on slavery is yet another attempt to attack capitalism while also claiming "we are all to blame" for slavery. The slave owners of old tried a very similar tactic.
Rising property values are nice for those who own property, but they raise the barriers to home ownership and business startups for everybody else.
If violence is the key to creating wealth, as Desmond insinuates, then the communist nations would have created fabulous amounts of wealth given the brutality of 20th-century Stalinism.
Defenders of slavery so vehemently opposed free labor, they claimed the "wage slavery" system was even worse than slave labor. The idea being that slavery is morally superior to wage labor.
The resurgent claim that the modern economy was built on slavery is yet another attempt to attack capitalism while also claiming "we are all to blame" for slavery. The slave owners of old tried a very similar tactic.
Slavery was a monstrously unfair and immoral institution. It was also inefficient, compared to a system based on free labor.
It is troubling that after a decade of an economic expansion, the US government is still spending money as it does during and immediately following a recession. It is as if the economy is now in a state of permanent "stimulus."
The greatest single contribution we could make to ending killing and violence is to end America's foreign wars.