Catholic Republican lawmakers are rattled by Pope Francis, whose recent comments have shaken up assumptions about their church and its relationship to their political party.
Pope Francis has drawn sharp criticism from the hugely influential Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives for his remarks on the unrestrained free market and “trickle-down” economics, which he dismissed naïve and unsupported by the facts
Limbaugh branded those statements as “pure Marxism,” but Sarah Palin was less harsh, admitting only that the pope’s statements sounded liberal to her, and her former 2008 running mate offered mixed reviews.
“His economic perspective I’m not particularly enamored with, but his advocacy for the poor, his lifestyle example, his more modern outlook on social issues — I’ve been very impressed,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) attended Catholic school as a youngster and graduated from Notre Dame’s law school, said he found the pope’s reference to “trickle-down economic” demeaning and off-putting, but he said the pontiff’s message should be considered in context.
“I genuinely believe … supply-side economics does more to help people come out of poverty, move up in the world … but on the other hand, we shouldn’t be dwelling on wealth,” King said. “The guidance I’d take from this is, when I support conservative economics, I should do it in a way that helps the most people.”
Republicans and Democrats have failed the American people at all economic levels. Neither party has addressed concentrated ownership of the means of production or the limited opportunity to build wealth through ownership.
The inequality of opportunity to empower EVERY citizen to become a productive wealth-creating, income-producing capital owner is the REAL source of economic inequality.
Full Production and Equal Ownership Opportunity should be the top economic priority if we are to put our nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice!
We will never realize a full-employment society unless we reform the system and break the lock by the present wealthy ownership class that ensures that the FUTURE will continue to be owned by them. Full employment, other than taxpayer extracted and incurred national debt make-work dependency, must rely on real economic growth. And even then it would be a relatively short-run endeavor during the time period it takes to build a FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen. The technology exists to employ human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc., which holds the promise of eliminating human toil work and significantly improve production efficiencies as the FUTURE economy is built.
Our national economic policy needs to eliminate all barriers to enabling productive capital acquisition to take place through commercially insured capital credit. By doing so the result would be a quiet revolution in which economic plutocracy will transform to economic democracy.
It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
For specific policy solutions see the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797 and support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm.
See “President Obama Puts Spotlight On Economic Inequality” at http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-puts-spotlight-economic-inequality-1387811548 and at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/president-obama-economic-inequality_b_4491098.html.
