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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Oasis
a synopsis of Robert V. Andelson and James M. Dawsey: From Wasteland to Promised land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World All of us, no less than the
Hebrews in Egypt, are captives of structures imposed upon us. To enslave people, today as three thousand
years ago, is to rob them of the value of their labor. Millions
of working people living in severe poverty are robbed of the fruits of
their labor. Through various forms of exploitation, especially the
monopolization of land rights, large segments of humanity are
oppressed, dehumanized, held in bondage. One
factor enabling governments to legalize land theft and lend
respectability to exploitative landlordism is the general silence of
religious and intellectual leaders about humanity's common rights to
land.
We begin to penetrate and overcome this silence when we realize that the Wasteland is wasted land, unfulfilled potential, producing no "milk and honey." Speculators in both urban and rural areas hoard land on which the hungry, the homeless, and the jobless could feed, shelter, and employ themselves. Keeping valuable lands idle causes artificial shortages that drive up rents which poor people must pay for poor land. Land hoarding deserves much of the blame for creating the Wasteland: it forces people into the "desert." There, people find the oases controlled by more land monopolists who must be paid a ransom for access to nature's life-sustaining water. And as we will see, the primary focus of Biblical economic laws was the prevention of precisely this sort of usurpation of God's gifts to all creatures. Read the whole synopsis Henry George: Thou Shalt Not Steal
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Wealth
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... because democracy
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prosper
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