Grave Consequences For Children With Gay Parents

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Slight but I believe related thread hijack, branching off a point DanaC raised: capitalism does something about poverty. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark, traces the somewhat surprising interrelationship between the medieval Catholic church and early capitalism, among other factors that worked in combination to make Western society materially and financially successful beyond all other societies, and offers some opinions why. It's more a history than a work of advocacy, though there's a bit of that too here and there.

The Catholic church nowadays has an anticapitalistic, antibusiness reputation, but this was not always so; it grew, says Stark, out of disenchantment with the abuses of the Industrial Revolution. In earlier times, the sheer scale of the business of managing the monastic estates and their assets, plus the Church's not trying to suppress the late-medieval Italians who were inventing banking and high finance, pretty much required that capitalism be devised.

[xoxoxoBruce]

During the Industrial Revolution, weren't most of the big money people Protestants, leaving the Catholic church financially dependent on the working class, in England and the US?

[jonesieQ]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

...traces the somewhat surprising interrelationship between the medieval Catholic church and early capitalism, among other factors...
...plus the Church's not trying to suppress the late-medieval Italians who were inventing banking and high finance, pretty much required that capitalism be devised.

"among other factors"...is putting it mildly, no? The Church was in bed with the wealthy Italian Renaissance banking families - needed to be - because the Church's power suffered a serious decline during & after the Black Plague. The Protestant movement then disempowered them further. This coincided with Gutenburg's printing press which had begun the evolution of education for the other 95% of the population. And the movements toward Humanism and Individualism also forced the the Church's hand. Preceding all of this was the Magna Carta which laid the groundwork for the move away from feudalism and toward the nation-state, as well as toward mercantilism, which was the early stage of capitalism.

The Church could no longer control the populace as it had pre-plague, and it could no longer control government as it moved toward the nation-state, so its power had to expand in another way...global wealth...and with the global expeditions and discoveries of the time, and the mutual back-scratching of the wealthy, it achieved its goal. The Church knew it could guarantee its survival only through the power of assets.

Capitalism does raise the quality of life, no question. But the time for the free market, Adam Smith routine is over. The evolutions of our societies and systems since the Industrial Revolution have brought new standards. Laissez-faire systems, particularly now, are just abusive to a majority of the populations.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah, it's really hard to drag the peasants away from the TV long enough to get a good pitchfork and torch parade.

[9th Engineer]

Capitalism does raise the quality of life, no question. But the time for the free market, Adam Smith routine is over. The evolutions of our societies and systems since the Industrial Revolution have brought new standards. Laissez-faire systems, particularly now, are just abusive to a majority of the populations.

Brought new standards is an understatement. Tripled life expectancy and made it possible for people to independently provide for their families would be nice additions as well. The abusiveness you mention is the result of people being told they should be getting services they can't pay for as well as being deceived into thinking that they have a right to many things that are still very expensive. People feel entitled to things without earning what it really takes to provide them. The one area I think we could stand to make some improvement on is health care, not universal health care, affordable health care. The reason everything is so expensive is that ~27% of people who use our ER's don't pay a dime for it, and that cost is passed to everyone else. In addition, physicians must carry gross amounts of private insurance which drives wages up.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by jonesieQ

Capitalism does raise the quality of life, no question. But the time for the free market, Adam Smith routine is over.

Not remotely. In fact, your first sentence in this paragraph reduces your second sentence to nonsense.

The evolutions of our societies and systems since the Industrial Revolution have brought new standards. Laissez-faire systems, particularly now, are just abusive to a majority of the populations.

Helpful of you to give me an idea of what anticapitalist and antihuman lies the economically illiterate Left will try next -- particularly the skewed notion that increasing wealth, rather than organizing scarcity, is "abusive to a majority."

Laissez-faire plus ethics and well secured property rights are the principles that teamed together work, and those who tell you capitalists aren't influenced by ethics are trying to sell you falsity and class resentment -- shoddy goods, and you shouldn't buy them. For longterm success and greatest wealth -- and is there a good capitalist who wouldn't want them? -- fair and ethical dealing is the one road that works every single time. Yeah, jerks have prospered before. You can ask the Enron guys how that turned out.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Laissez-faire plus ethics

And these ethics, you just sort of hope that they have them?