Acton University 2017: What Does Christianity Have To Offer The Poor

[@UseYourHead414]

Bruenig is a Saint.

[@Skerbz]

E bruenig is great in this debate. i can't believe Anne Bradley is a real person. She has ridiculous viewpoints on supporting the poorest and the people most in need. Anne thinks it's impossible to solve anything without a free market solution, which is insane because the welfare of the poor are slaves to capitalism and competition against the privileged and the 1%.

[@zactsm]

That's a priest? He sounds more like a venture capitalist. Arguing against a just wage and for payday loans? Wow. Reminds me of Matthew 15: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me". "Leave them, they are blind guides," I know. But I'm just blown away that this guy is a priest. Makes me very sad about the state of modern Christianity.

[@Unclenate1000]

a just wage is determined by how productive the job is and the supply/demand for labor. Forcing someone to pay someone else a certain amount regardless of the value of the work being done is ironic to associate with justice. whats just is the voluntary, adult agreement between employer and employee as it directly concerns them, not a third party priding itself the authority to barge in by force.

[@KiljiArslan]

A just wage is what ensures human flourishing.

[@ThroughMyEyesASMR]

@mowgli I can't speak to this priest's moral standing before God -- meaning I don't know if he is a Christian. However, to assert that Matthew 15 applies to him, without actually knowing him and only based on his argumentation of state interference in economics, is a hurried accusation. It disregards Jesus's context and who this man is before God. Also, by saying he is a "blind guide" because he merely stated that regulating payday loans wouldn't address the problem is a gross mischaracterization of this passage. By doing so it lifts materialism as a more important solution to a different problem than the moral hypocrites Jesus was addressing and Jesus's solution. It essentially waters down Jesus's message.

[@chrisw5139]

Bruenig shouldn't have caved when pushed on "the poor are better off than ever before!" given the unmeasurable existential factors. It's also true that in the modern West the poor are more cut off from solidarity with the wider community than at any other time in human history.

[@johnstewart7025]

I heard someone say recently that while workers are more alienated ("neurotic") than they once would have been, that is the price of FREEDOM, which is what liberal democracy offered.

[@DragonTalkShow]

the libertarian "bureaucratic bloat" problem is he was going back and forth with Wear about is solved by not doing any means testing and doing simple, essentially universalized welfare programs, but they never actually talk about why those are bad other than some childish gesture to Venezuela or the USSR

[@stephenmcmurtry4138]

Absolutely wild that their argument boils down to: "Well, yeah, but everyone has iPhone now."

[@ryanherrmann3207]

Poor people are doing fantastic because there are now a lot of phones

[@steven3504]

simply awesome

[@riftaware3001]

I often hope that the people at Acton are smarter than they consistently appear, but then they do things like support child labor - they dash my hopes every damn time.

[@ryana6036]

I think the gap between rich and poor absolutely does matter, especially in a Christian sense, because a greater gap implies a greater moral failing by the wealthy. Yes it is true that the wealthy in our modern liberal society are far more wealthy than at any other time and even the poor are more materially rich than in the past. However, poverty still exists, especially once you consider that our liberal capitalist society demands greater and greater materialism in order to function (one cannot operate at full capacity in the modern day without a cell phone or internet access, and these necessities should not be considered measures of affluence). Poverty still exists, and it coincides with significantly greater means to alleviate it. The very rich need sacrifice even less than ever before to eliminate human suffering, and still they choose not to. This reality can be attributed in no insignificant sense to the outsized emphasis liberalism places on individualism and personal liberty, and to the capitalist virtue of self interest. Here we see liberalism's insufficiency. It has helped us take a great step forward, as feudalism and subsistence agriculture may have in the past, but its ability is not limitless. It has left many behind, and celebrating those who it was able to uplift will not save the forgotten. Our task, as Elizabeth Bruenig argues, is to continue forward addressing liberalism's flaws and working toward the next step forward, beyond liberalism.

[@Arthur_McGowan]

It should not matter to anyone that someone else has more income or more wealth. All that matters, morally, is misery. Misery should be relieved.

[@mftalbot234]

@@Arthur_McGowan "It should not matter to anyone that someone else has more income or more wealth. " Well, it depends. At a personal level and given that we both have the minimum amount to make a go of it in the world, then yes - envy is not a good thing to nurture. In that sense you're right; the fact that my neighbor has more than me ought to be no concern of mine. If, however, there is a society in which a few prosper while the many either toil ever harder merely to keep up, or are actively getting relatively worse off, I think it is worth asking why that might be, and whether the answer says anything about the justice of that society. In that sense it IS a moral question, and that was the sense that Liz was addressing.

[@funkyred4]

Hey Ryan, I appreciate your contributions 💖

[@johnstewart7025]

Bruenig: liberalism overturned the traditional, organic way of life in Christian Europe and America. Thus, we are alienated from one another. Sirico: but liberalism/ capitalism has raised up many of the poor by freeing up human potential, creativity. He doesn't answer the alienation criticism. (Later he said property rights are different than the rule of law, which is certainly true in China where there "rule of law" is given only lip service.)

[@ryana6036]

I think that we see an inflated and more benevolent picture of markets than liberalism would otherwise produce because of democracy. A significant number of the poor lifted up under liberalism are not lifted *because* of markets, but because of interventions into them. Without social security, tens of millions more would live in poverty, and without social programs like SNAP millions of children would go hungry. But today we have programs where the politically powerful take money from excess and redistribute it to alleviate these sufferings. This is an effect of democracy, not of markets. The powerful do this in order to gain popular support because they secure their political power through popularity. Feudal lords could have chosen to give higher standards of living to their serfs, but there was no political incentive to do so. Capitalist markets by themselves do not provide any greater incentive than feudalism, it is simply because capitalism happens to coexist with democracy that we see these many more being lifted out of poverty through market interventions, and yet capitalism still tries to claim credit.

[@johnstewart7025]

If you assume that usury was prohibited under feudalism, that would have been an enormous brake on wealth accumulation right there. Then there was the printing press and specialization of labor, as well as settler colonialism and science. I do think that slavery was almost providing some of the "wealth creation" that would later be "created" by usury. So, if a king wanted something built, he would hire soldiers to go conquer a place and use those people as slaves to build his cathedral or what not.

[@Booer]

50:12 cool noise from a genius describing capitalist incentives

[@johnstewart7025]

Trying to be creative in a market economy: Bradley said that the market incentivizes creativity. But what if there is little demand for your creativity over the next week, let's say. Are you going to starve or be less creative and get a JOB!

[@brianshott7106]

For sure the anti-capitalist left needs to seriously look at what's happened worldwide over the past few decades to the poor in the developing world (and to some extent the first world): they've gotten considerably less poor, largely due to market-driven globalization (though state planning also played a role). Still, I don't know about these free-market Christians. Sirico says he doesn't care about how rich the rich get; he's only interested in raising the bottom. But an increasing gap between the two is still hugely important, even if the poor have gained. When the rich get obscenely rich, they game the whole system. It destroys our politics. And it hurts society through envy, resentment, greed... Bradley and Sirico have very little to say about this. Bruenig's interesting "rad/trad" mix is what made this debate.

[@TGAW]

Don't worry, child labor is totes okay because it keeps them from being trafficked.

[@Unclenate1000]

in some destitute countries, it keeps them from dying.

[@Arthur_McGowan]

Breunig's rapid-fire monotone is insufferable. Fortunately, it would have to make most people zone out, protecting them from her B.S.

[@NicholasWongCQ]

I can forgive the idiocy of advocating for a generous safety net, but I cannot forgive the idiocy of advocating for a minimum wage (and I mean ANY minimum wage).

[@NicholasWongCQ]

4 out of 10 commandments (6, 8, 9, 10) assume the right to private property.

[@chrisw5139]

10 out of 10 liberals retroject modern concepts onto our ancient forebears.

[@johnstewart7025]

@@chrisw5139 Well "subjective rights" DIDN'T EXIST before John Locke etc.