Pitts: Pope shares 'radical, extremist' ideals
Specifically, I like the idea that if I write a better book, have a better idea, build a better mousetrap, I will be rewarded accordingly. A system where everyone gets the same reward regardless of quality or quantity of work is inconsistent with excellence and innovation, as the mediocrity and inefficiency that beset the Soviet Union readily proves.
The woman who is successful under capitalism gets to eat steak and lobster whenever she wants. That’s never bothered me. What does bother me is the notion that the unsuccessful man who lacks that woman’s talent, resources, opportunities or luck should not get to eat at all. There is something obscene in the notion that a person can work full time for a multinational corporation and earn not enough to keep a roof over his head or food on his table. The so-called safety net by which we supposedly protect the poor ought to be a solid floor, a level of basic sustenance through which we, as moral people, allow no one to fall — particularly if their penury is through no fault of their own.
Maybe you regard that opinion as radical and extremist. Maybe it is. But if so, I am in excellent company.
Martin Luther King, for instance, mused that “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 8:13-15, that it’s wrong for some to live lives of ease while others struggle. “The goal is equality, as it is written: ‘The one who gathered much did not have too much and the one who gathered little did not have too little.’” In Acts 4:32, Luke writes approvingly of the early church that: “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.”
Which brings us to the pope — and Rush Limbaugh. As you may have heard, the former issued his first Apostolic Exhortation last year, “The Joy of the Gospel,” in which, among other things, he attacks the free market and what he calls an “economics of exclusion.” This had the latter up in arms on his radio show last month.
Source http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20140110/OPINION/301100009/Pitts-Pope-shares-radical-extremist-ideals?nclick_check=1
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