THE IMMORALITY OF PERSONAL WEALTH

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

Preaching a Gospel of Wealth in a Glittery Market, New York

"Remember," said Mr. Dollar, a familiar figure across the country because of his "Changing Your World" television show and best-selling books, "if you sow a seed on a good ground, you can expect a harvest."

Mr. Dollar, whose Rolls-Royces, private jets, million-dollar Atlanta home and $2.5 million Manhattan apartment, furnish proof to his followers of the validity of his teachings, is a leading apostle of what is known as the "prosperity gospel."

It is a theology that is excoriated in many Christian circles but is becoming increasingly visible in this country, according to religious scholars. Now, it is beginning to establish a foothold in New York City, where capitalism has long been religion.

Mr. Dollar - his real name - is the most prominent among a host of prosperity preachers that have put down roots in the city. He is quick to insist that he warns Christians to "love God, not money" and teaches "total life prosperity," meaning prosperity not only in finances but in everything from health to family life.

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I don't think I need to spend any time or energy arguing that this kind of thing is completely antithetical to everything Jesus stood for. In short, from a Christian perspective, this is blasphemy. However, I'm not at all surprised by this crackpot "Gospel of Prosperity." It's simply another sign of the times in which we live. The wealthy elites, who have owned and run this nation from its founding, have spent, for over a century, a great deal of effort in seducing American culture into abandoning it's traditional, anti-materialistic, Protestant work ethic, all in order to justify their own bacchanalian and brutal pursuit of mammon. Their efforts have succeeded wildly. Now, everybody thinks they're going to get rich; everybody thinks that's their right. Now, the most important of morals for Americans is the acquisition of wealth, which is so important that it generally trumps all that old fashioned stuff about compassion for the poor and the suffering.

Of course, the great irony here is that the vast majority of Americans will never be rich. (Hell, figuring that out about myself was probably the biggest factor in my political turn toward the left; it's way more difficult to support tax cuts for the wealthy when you're pretty certain that you will never be among their number.) They've been conned, dazzled by dollar signs and easy credit, into thinking that when push comes to shove, they're just like Bill Gates or Michael Eisner.

Which is just so not true.

From the Houston Chronicle:

CEO salaries now 400 times that
of an average worker's check

While SEC officials stressed the proposed rule does not limit how much companies can pay their top executives, commission members made clear they are mindful of the heights reached by executive compensation packages.

Commissioner Roel Campos of Houston pointed to studies that suggest chief executive officers now make about 400 times the salary of the average worker, up from 40 times a few decades ago.

"Are executives today 10 times better?" Campos asked.

Some compensation experts have warned that forcing companies to disclose such details will actually drive executive salaries higher, as top managers point to their rivals' compensation packages and demand similar deals.

But others predict the investor outrage when these totals are released will put the brakes on executive and director pay. That's not to say executive pay will decline.

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It's almost amusing that the above excerpted article is written in terms of "investor outrage," rather than in terms of "that ain't right;" that is, it's all about wealthy people's problems instead of everybody else's. Like I said before, from any serious Christian perspective, this 400 to 1 ratio is simply obscene. But then, I'm not a Christian myself, and I suspect that most of these wealthy people aren't either--after all, Jesus told the rich man that the only way he could go to Heaven was to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor; I don't see that happening anytime soon. So why do I think personal wealth is immoral? Simple: one only needs so much money, so many things, before one gets to a point of absurd redundancy; meanwhile, so many millions in the world go without. That's immoral. "But wait!" you might say, "people worked for that money! Don't they deserve compensation?" Well, yes, people deserve to be compensated for their time and energy, otherwise they're being ripped off. But why should one get so much compensation that it starves masses of people? Or makes them die because they didn't have access to medicine? Etc., etc., etc.

Look, I'm not saying that we do away with the profit-motive, which seems ultimately to be the engine that runs the economy. But the drive for profit has become an all-consuming cultural imperative which now overrides all other cultural imperatives. Profit ought not to be our religion. Do we really want to be like Star Trek's capitalist race, the Ferengi?


A real American

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