Our Ruling Class is Fleecing You

3. For toward the close of the nineteenth century, the new kind of economic life that had arisen and the new developments of industry had gone to the point in most countries that human society was clearly becoming divided more and more into two classes. One class, very small in number, was enjoying almost all the advantages which modern inventions so abundantly provided; the other, embracing the huge multitude of working people, oppressed by wretched poverty, was vainly seeking escape from the straits wherein it stood.

4. Quite agreeable, of course, was this state of things to those who thought it in their abundant riches the result of inevitable economic laws and accordingly, as if it were for charity to veil the violation of justice which lawmakers not only tolerated but at times sanctioned, wanted the whole care of supporting the poor committed to charity alone. The workers, on the other hand, crushed by their hard lot, were barely enduring it and were refusing longer to bend their necks beneath so galling a yoke; and some of them, carried away by the heat of evil counsel, were seeking the overturn of everything, while others, whom Christian training restrained from such evil designs, stood firm in the judgment that much in this had to be wholly and speedily changed.

5. The same feeling those many Catholics, both priests and laymen, shared, whom a truly wonderful charity had long spurred on to relieve the unmerited poverty of the non-owning workers, and who could in no way convince themselves that so enormous and unjust an in equality in the distribution of this world’s goods truly conforms to the designs of the all-wise Creator. – Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno

You cannot serve God and Mammon. Our country is now foursquare in the service of Mammon and the lie is that if you will go along with this system, you will eventually get to join the one percent. The reality is that this carnivorous system is systematically impoverishing a greater and greater percentage of its citizens with each year. And while it does, we hear cries for more statism from the Left (who are in the pockets of corporations) while on the Right we hear positively idiotic attempts to anoint Ayn Rand’s inhuman celebration of naked power and the Superman, coupled with celebrations of Paul Ryan as Aquinas and Rand as Aristotle. And capping it all: routine denunciation of Catholic social and economic teaching with slogans like “Ordination is not an economics degree” (a trope as silly as “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries”). Dale Ahlquist does the autopsy on this nonsensical rejection of this Church’s right to speak to this profound issue of Catholic faith and morals.

We ordinary American are well past due to listne to the Church here, because our Ruling Class is increasingly treating the US, as a resource to be used up and then discarded once it falls apart. They are so filled with patriotism they are already starting to fly the coop for offshore tax shelters even as they vampirically continue to bleed our country dry. There is always hope, of course. But it is not in Mammon. It is in repentance and Jesus Christ’s gospel: which includes the Church’s full social teaching.

HT: Caelum et Terra