Maggie's Farm

A masterful and wise piece from Williamson: Catholics Against Capitalism:

That men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.

People of the cloth, like many academics, can be insulated from the realities of production and oblivious as to how or where their iPhones, cars, medicines, airplanes, and foods come from. Not from magic fairies or community activists.

Many of us are parasites, may hate to admit it, but it is important that we do so anyway. Including me, selling business services. Free market production is the engine which eliminates poverty and despair. Even Commie China realized that.

The rest of us are, sadly, parasites on that mechanism: doctors, lawyers, financiers, teachers, insurance salesmen, politicians, government employees, etc etc etc. Often useful and valuable, but still parasites on the producers. Over time, with technology, there are fewer producers and more service parasites to the point that we parasites can pretend that we have a functional economy of our own.

I have friends who make real things: sails for sailboats, parts for machines, tables, tires, oil wells, medical devices, artisanal goat cheese, and things like that. Also, harvest lobsters, harvest peaches, and blueberries. They are the foundation and we are the beneficiaries.

But Williamson's main point has to do with the Church's apparent faith in the State. What State, pray tell, run by whom? God? It's utopian lunacy or dystopian lunacy, take your pick.

I am grateful to our clergy, and if my criticism herein seems unduly uncharitable to these princes of the Church, it is only because their backward views on capitalism are doing real, material, irreversible damage to the world and especially to the lives of poor people, who are most in need of what only capitalism has to offer. His Eminence may not entirely understand it, but the banks and boardrooms are full of men and women doing more in real terms for the least of these than he is — more, in fact, than he would even understand how to do — and what he proposes mainly is to stand in their way. For God’s sake, stop it.

Me? Raised Roman Catholic, love the Church in the abstract, but an evangelical protestant at present. A long story of course, which I will never be able to find the words to explain, but wish the Church would focus on the blood of Christ instead of secular matters.

Now gone fishin' for the weekend. Block Island Sound. Maybe stop up by Cuttyhunk. Got beer, got girl, got boat, got gas, got bathing suit, got flip-flops. Will feed on Blues, Stripers, clams, and oysters. Life is good in New England. (Too bad the retarded government makes us throw back the small stripers and keep the big ones. As usual, government has it ass-backwards - kill the producer-breeders and throw back the useless small ones of whom 1/5000 will survive the Tuna, sharks, and Swordfish.)

Recipe tip: When you filet your Striper on the boat, cut out some thin slices, smear a little wasabi on them and maybe a splash of teriyaki. Then take a swig of Corona with lime in it to wash it down. That is heaven on earth.

Addendum: Latin America’s Leftist Slide