Money: The God of This World

This week Pope Francis spoke out against the cult of money. Here is how Catholic News Service's Carol Glatz summarized his remarks:

Pope Francis called for global financial reform that respects human dignity, helps the poor, promotes the common good and allows states to regulate markets.

"Money has to serve, not to rule," he said in his strongest remarks yet as pope concerning the world's economic and financial crises.

A major reason behind the increase in social and economic woes worldwide "is in our relationship with money and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society," he told a group of diplomats May 16.

"We have created new idols" where the "golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal."

His words reminded me of one of the most significant books I've ever read, Protestant French philosopher Jacques Ellul's Money and Power.

First published nearly 60 years ago as L'Homme et l'argent ("Man and Money"), new French-language editions appeared in 1979 and 2007. I translated the English-language edition in 1984 and have been grateful ever since for the opportunity to immerse myself in this paradigm-bending book.

Money, Ellul argued, is not morally neutral. It is "Mammon, a demigod, a demon, an idol, a power from which we need liberation" (I'm quoting from David Neff's review of Money and Power in the February 15, 1985, issue of Christianity Today--and yes, he may have been biased, but damn, his review was good).

The problem isn't money, we say. The problem is that we don't have enough. Or that somebody else has too much.

No, says Ellul. Money is not neutral. "Jesus personifies money and considers it sort of a god. He does not get this idea from his cultural milieu. … This personification of money, this affirmation that we are talking about something that claims divinity . … reveals something exceptional about money, for Jesus did not usually use deifications and personifications" (p. 75).

Ellul explains that in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 Jesus shows that money is a power, a law unto itself that acts in the material world but with a spiritual orientation. In the Bible, power is never neutral. And it is often personal. Just as Scripture often portrays death as a personal force, so it also portrays money.

In the 60 years since Ellul wrote Money and Power (and even more in the 30 years since I translated it), the love of Money has taken root throughout the world in ways even Ellul might never have imagined. We fight wars to keep it, and to gain more of it. We damage the earth, deny social services to the poor, and pay ever smaller wages for ever longer hours, because to do otherwise would be bad for business. We don't enforce safety regulations or we outsource production to places with no regulations, so we can make higher profits on cheaper goods. And we have developed a theology of money in which the "free market" is the giver of every good and perfect gift - never mind the evidence.

Perhaps this is nothing new. It's been 2000 years since Jesus identified money with Mammon. But whether our love of Money is worse than ever before in the history of the world, or whether it is just business as usual, Pope Francis joins Jacques Ellul in reminding us that Money is a powerful false god.

If you like to get your reminders straight from Scripture, read Revelation 18, a gorgeously dark and dreadful poem about the fall of Babylon, surely Mammon's capital city, for she has deceived "all nations." As Babylon falls, so do the political leaders who "committed fornication with her" and the business tycoons who "have grown rich from the power of her luxury" and the multinational merchants whose ships "grew rich by her wealth."

The good news in Scripture is not that our stock portfolio has doubled or that our taxes have been cut or even that our nation's GDP is in recovery. The good news comes through an unmarried pregnant teenager: The Mighty One

has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

                                                  Luke 2:52-53

HOW AN ECONOMY GROWS AND WHY IT CRASHES by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew Schiff

One of my fiscally conservative friends told me I should read this book if I wanted to know why Keynesian economics are a politican's best friend. I interpreted that to mean "why Keynesian economics suck." Oh no, I thought. Booooring. But then she added that the book was funny, and my heart leapt up. I like funny books, even if they're about economics.

Yes, How an Economy Grows is funny. Peter D. Schiff and his brother, Andrew J. (known mostly for his lament about how hard it is for a family to live in Brooklyn on $350,000 a year), explain free-market economics by means of an extended fairy tale enhanced with hilarious cartoon illustrations by Brendan Leach.

The story begins with three men, Able, Baker, and Charlie, who live alone on an island and stay alive on a diet of one fish per person per day. (If it occurs to you that the first man's name should be spelled "Abel," that could mean you're a proofreader, in which case this book will drive you nuts: it is littered with typos.) Many generations later, the island has a brisk fish-based economy, a strong manufacturing sector, and a booming trade with other islands. But then a monsoon hits, and the powers that be (especially Franky Deep) decide to issue Fish Reserve Notes to use in trade instead of actual fish, and Lindy B. funds the Great Society by issuing ever increasing numbers of Fish Reserve Notes (without keeping actual fish in reserve), and Slippery Dickson closes the bank's fish window to foreign depositors, and Roughy Redfin grossly outspends his revenues, and George W. Bass and Barry Ocuda bail out the banks--every one of these leaders egged on by villains such as Ally Greenfin and Ben Barnacle--until eventually the Sinopians, who by this time own most of Usonia, decide to cut bait and keep their fish for themselves.

On the positive side, the Schiffs managed to keep me awake while they explained their economic beliefs. I am impressed by the fact that Peter Schiff accurately predicted the recession of 2008 while many economists were still saying "Don't worry, be happy." As a parsimonious descendant of Puritans, I agree that savings are basic to economic health and that excess debt is perilous. Like the Schiffs, I think we're in trouble when the goods we consume are mostly produced elsewhere and our major export is dollars. I fear that the Schiffs may be right when they say (as David Stockman recently did in the New York Times) that we're in for a big crash in the near future.

But when I look at the kind of government the Schiffs would like to have, I see some really big theological problems. You don't have to be religious to see the problems, however: I suspect they are theological problems because they hurt people.

First, everything in this book's imagined universe is about money (well, fish), and how to get more of it. Oddly, the actual fish that sustain life in the early chapters become means of exchange and even storehouses of reserves in the later ones. Our daily bread (Matthew 6:9-13) transmutes into the rich fool's overstuffed granaries (Luke 12:13-21). People who are poor are barely mentioned in the Schiffs' tale: on their island, the poor do not exist. By contrast, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the duty to care for the poor is one of the major themes. "Blessed are you who are poor," said Jesus, "for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). "You cannot serve both God and money" (Luke 16:13).

Obviously the poor are not well served by an economy that crashes, and perhaps the Schiffs would argue that their principles would be better for the poor than is our present precarious situation. Perhaps so, but that brings me to the second theological problem: the system the Schiffs describe might have worked very well before Adam and Eve developed a taste for apples, but in a world where everyone is infected with a touch of greed (see concupiscence), the Schiffs' system  is as dangerous as any other system we might invent. They do a fine job of showing how the government can screw things up--and indeed it can--but they are silent about how businesses can do the same. In their story, "Franky Deep" established disastrous policies in response to a monsoon--a natural disaster. In the real world, the Great Depression happened after decades of industrial monopolies, inhumane labor practices, and wild stock-market speculation--all unrestrained by the government.

I have no illusions about government. On the depravity scale, big government may be just as depraved as big business (though it's getting hard to distinguish between the two, since one buys the other and then uses it to accomplish its purposes). Ideally the two would form some sort of reciprocal deterrence system, checking each other's excesses, though that's not easy to accomplish in our multinational economy. But I think I know enough about greed to suggest that if businesses were left entirely to their own devices, the world's economy would soon consist of an interlocking network of immensely powerful monopolies that would "grind the faces of the poor" to an extent undreamed of by the prophet Isaiah (3:15). Heck, it's happening already.

So what's the answer to our economic woes? Well, if we--as individuals and as a nation--could somehow manage to understand that we need to pay (now, not during the next administration) for what we want, we could probably come up with something, especially if what we want includes concrete ways to lift people out of poverty. And yes, there are politicians (like Bill Clinton) and CEOs (like Bill Gates) who are devoting a lot of time and money to meeting human need.

But most businesses turn a goodly percentage of their profits into marketing whose aim is to persuade us that we always need more now; and most politicians spend vast sums trying to persuade us that if we elect them, we can have something for nothing; and most self-help books tells us that we really need to take care of ourselves better... and the beat goes on, and will go on, until one day it turns into the loudest crash yet, followed by ominous silence.

The Schiffs' ideas will not stave off the evil day, because the Schiffs do not take human nature into account. Politicians who follow their libertarian approach most likely have something other than ideas to sell. As do the Schiffs, for that matter, and they make no secret of it. Peter Schiff owns the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, "an SEC registered investment advisor and full service broker/dealer that seeks to help American investors prepare for a global economy that may no longer be dominated by the U.S. dollar." His brother Andrew--the financially struggling one--is its director of communications and marketing. Peter is also CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals: that is, he sells gold.

Their father, Irwin Schiff, whose ideas they develop in this book, is serving a 13-year prison term for tax evasion. His lawyer's contention that he "had been diagnosed with a chronic, severe delusional disorder relating to his beliefs about the federal income tax system" did not sway the judge.

Please hire me

[Working till she drops]

A couple of years ago my 40-something cardiologist earnestly told me that the Social Security/Medicare problem was a cinch to fix--all we had to do was increase the retirement age. Right, I thought - I'm in my 60s and facing open-heart surgery, but once I recover I can go pound the pavement. My cardiologist is not an economist, however, and he's a good doctor, so I held my peace.

Yesterday's New York Times ran an article by Economic Scene writer Eduardo Porter, who should know better. In "The Payoff in Delaying Retirement" Porter writes:

What if there were a way for the government to ease the strain that the aging place on the budget while actually increasing their income in retirement, at little or no cost to their benefits? A well-designed reform would even improve the nation’s rate of economic growth. The way to do it is simply to encourage older workers to spend a larger share of their increasing life spans in the work force.

 Sometimes solutions that look good on paper don't work so well in the real world.

First, most boomers are already planning to work until they drop, since they have saved practically nothing for retirement. I'm not sure they need any additional encouragement. What they need is reality therapy.

Second, over the last decade or so, a lot of companies have downsized. Their PR departments speak of this as right-sizing. What it means is that (a) fewer jobs are available; (b) older workers--the ones getting the bigger paychecks because of seniority--are in greatest peril of being laid off; and (c) the remaining jobs require much longer work days. Such policies, good as they may be for a business's bottom line, are not conducive toward extending one's working years.

Third, it's hard for laid-off older folks to get entry-level jobs. Not only are they overqualified (whatever that means), but the jobs just aren't there. Ask any recent grad.

Fourth, while some older people can work at full capacity well into their 70s and 80s, many cannot. However cheerfully chirpy AARP publications may be, 60 is not the new 40. Over 70% of Americans between ages 60 and 79 have some form of cardiovascular disease, for example, compared to fewer than 40% of people between ages 40 and 49 (see data here). For every person between ages 40 and 44 who is diagnosed with cancer, more than eight people between ages 65 and 69 are so diagnosed (see data here). And those who plan to die with their boots on should be aware that nearly 14% of people over 70 have Alzheimer's disease (see data here).

But let's neglect all those potential problems and stipulate that those of us who are capable of working really should be working, at least until--shall we say--age 70. OK, I'll offer myself as a test case. 

I am 64 years old. I have a solid work history with excellent recommendations, though I have not had a regular employer for some 13 years and my industry--book publishing--is in a hard place. With three master's degrees and a background in teaching as well as editing, writing, and management, I'm quite versatile. My health has been pretty good since my open-heart surgery a year and a half ago (I will require excellent medical insurance, however). I have an extended network of other aging publishing professionals.  

So keep me off Social Security and Medicare for another five years. Offer me a full-time job with a respectable salary and benefits.

Or isn't "encourag[ing] older workers to spend a larger share of their increasing life spans in the work force" quite as simple as Mr. Porter believes?

Mr. Metz's 5% health-insurance surcharge

I'm having trouble understanding today's news about "Florida based restaurant boss John Metz, who runs approximately 40 Denny's and owns the Hurricane Grill & Wings franchise." According to an article in the U.K.'s Mail Online, Mr. Metz "has decided to offset [the extra cost Obamacare will bring] by adding a five percent surcharge to customers' bills and will reduce his employees' hours."

Here's what scares Mr. Metz: By 2014, Obamacare will require employers (of more than 50 workers) to provide adequate health insurance for full-time employees or risk paying a penalty (you can learn the details at the Kaiser Family Foundation's website).

If he's scared, it must be because his restaurants do not provide adequate health insurance for their full-time workers. Actually, Denny's does provide what their New Employee Enrollment Guide calls "affordable limited benefit medical plans to all eligible employees." (That was from their guide for hourly employees; salaried employees also get health insurance.) Is Mr. Metz ignoring Denny's benefits package? Or does he believe that the insurance is so inadequate that employees will choose to get insurance elsewhere? Or are his workers paid so poorly that they can't possibly afford even the low-cost option? Or does his own chain, Hurricane Grill & Wings, not offer this benefit at all? Because if he's providing decent health insurance that his employees can afford, he will not have any extra charges and so has no reason to add a surcharge to his meals.

So why is he adding a surcharge and downgrading his workers to part-time status?  According to Fox News, "To further offset the costs, Metz, who oversees roughly 1,200 employees as president and CEO of RREMC Restaurants, LLC, said he also will slash most of the staff's time to fewer than 30 hours per week." If Mr. Metz is providing inadequate insurance - or no insurance at all - to his full-time employees, I can understand why he would want to make all jobs part-time. That way he would face no government penalties for his miserable benefits policy. But if by reducing hours (and hurting his workers even more than he's already doing) he manages to escape the penalties, then why is he adding the surcharge?

Mr. Metz seems to be sending the message that he hates Obamacare. He may not realize it, but he's also sending the message (whether true or not) that he's a rotten employer who provides inadequate employee benefits, would rather cut workers' hours than be required to treat them humanely, and then is willing to make diners pay more for supposed additional costs - even though he has managed not to incur them.

I was going to end there, but then I got to thinking: maybe this isn't only about Mr. Metz. Maybe he really can't give his workers adequate pay and benefits and still stay in business. Maybe this is really about us.

We Americans in the upper 53% have relatively inexpensive houses and cars and clothing and groceries and restaurant meals (when compared with the rest of the world). We manage this by sending much of our manufacturing overseas and by paying squat for services

The people who grow our food, process our meat, bring the food to our tables, wash our dishes, clean our offices, and care for our aging parents often do not earn enough to support their families and must rely on tax-supported programs just to survive (in Florida, Mr. Metz's home state, a person working two 24-hour-a-week minimum-wage jobs, 52 weeks a year with no time off, would bring in $19,144 before payroll taxes; in neighboring Georgia, where Mr. Metz has a few restaurants, the minimum-wage two-job worker would make just $12,854).

But we Americans have relatively low taxes - which means that our social safety net has a lot of holes in it.

Did you know, for example, that "Wal-Mart's poverty wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store[?]. In state after state, Wal-Mart employees are the top recipients of Medicaid. As many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps" (check it out here).

So what happens to these underpaid workers if we continue to demand lower prices and lower taxes?

Obamacare, though it needs improvement, is an important step toward justice. Mr. Metz's surcharge could be another step in the right direction if it enables him to insure all his employees.

However, if diners reduce their tips by the amount of the surcharge, restaurant workers will end up with even less take-home pay than before. If Americans continue to push for lower taxes, more and more of the working poor will fall through the safety net. And if Mr. Metz goes ahead and reduces the hours of his full-time workers so that they won't qualify for health insurance, the extra 5% will go directly into his pocket.

Advice for November 6: Choose your battle wisely

Vice-President Aaron Burr spoils his political career by
killing former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Yesterday during the Prayers of the People at St Barnabas, someone in the congregation spontaneously thanked God that the American election season is almost over. Everyone laughed.

One reason this election has brought out the worst in us is that we are fighting two battles at once. I fear that, no matter who wins the presidency, we will continue to fight these battles. We will probably still be fighting them in 2016.

We are fighting an economic battle between those who believe that the federal government should spend tax dollars on the military and little else, and those who believe that the federal government should also play a major role in assuring health care for all, supporting the indigent and elderly, rebuilding our infrastructure, and aiding disaster-stricken areas.

At the same time, we are fighting a moral battle between those who believe the federal government should allow individuals the freedom to decide whom to marry and whether to carry a child to term, and those who believe the federal government should outlaw abortion and recognize only heterosexual marriages.

The two major parties have divided up our concerns in unexpected ways. The Democratic ticket is communitarian in economics and libertarian in morals; the Republican ticket is just the reverse. This creates a problem for people who are consistently communitarian or libertarian.

A lot of students at Miami University of Ohio, as Bill Keller points out today in "The Republican Id," are consistently libertarian: they are enthusiastic about Republican economics but reject Republican morals. For them, economics trumps morals: the majority support Romney.

Most Catholic bishops, on the other hand, are consistently communitarian: they support Democratic economics but reject Democratic morals. For many bishops, morals trump economics (see David Gibson, "Catholic bishops make last-minute push for Romney"): they too support Romney.

The students are far smarter than the bishops.

If Romney and Ryan are elected, there's a good chance that federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will be gutted (click here for five good reasons to be worried, even if you're over 55), along with smaller programs such as highway construction, education, and food stamps. There's not much chance, however, that abortion or gay marriage will go away. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not outlaw abortion; it would return the question to the states. As long as a woman had enough money, she could simply travel to wherever abortion was available.

If you're a student at a highly rated university like Miami, you probably figure you'll be one of the elites that would be helped by Romney/Ryan economics. As one of those elites, you could find your way around Republican moral strictures. So yes, as long as you're not concerned about people who haven't done as well as you, it makes sense for you to vote for survival of the fittest. (In a decade or two you may discover you're less fit than you thought you were, but you can vote differently then.)

The Catholic bishops, on the other hand, are showing themselves to be as wise as doves and as harmless as serpents. Even if they get their way - in the name of religious liberty! - Americans will continue to use contraception. They will continue to marry or live with whomever they please. They will continue to get far too many abortions (though if abortion goes underground, a lot more women will die).

Catholic bishops have little effect on American morals (even among their own parishioners: click here to see statistics on abortion rates and here to see statistics on contraceptive use among Catholics), but if they tip the election to Romney/Ryan, they may have a major effect on American economics - an effect that goes against more than a century of Catholic social teaching. In the name of freedom and small government, more families will struggle to put food on the table, to send their children to college, to find adequate housing, to care for their aging parents. Americans will continue to die younger than people in countries with universal health care. Our highways and bridges will deteriorate, and environmental pollution will increase. We may tumble back into recession or even depression.

Here's my point. Our next president's policies will probably have a major effect on America's economic health and, very likely, the economic health of the world. His policies will probably have a minor effect, if any effect at all, on America's morals.

If you like Romney/Ryan's Darwinian proposals, if you think the financiers who are paying for their campaign will help the middle class, if you believe that trickle-down economics help the poor (or if you think the poor shouldn't be helped), if you think business can thrive in the absence of a strong infrastructure, if you think climate change is a hoax, and if you trust for-profit health insurance companies with your life, then by all means vote for Romney-Ryan.

Just don't think they're going to bring about moral renewal in America.

10 grumpy observations about the first debate

1. Mitt Romney is a bully. We knew that.
2. Barack Obama doesn't know how to stand up to bullies. We knew that too.
3. Jim Lehrer really doesn't know how to stand up to bullies. Jim, just cut the mike.

4. Neither candidate stuck to facts. We are not surprised.
5. This may be because neither candidate knows what is factual. This is worrisome.
6. Or it may be because neither candidate cares about facts. This is even more worrisome.

7. America's economy is in profound poop. No surprise there.
8. Neither candidate has a plan that will help very much. No surprise there either.
9. Only once was the word "sacrifice" uttered--after the debate was over, by commentator Mark Shields (click this link and listen to minutes 7:06-7:24), who pointed out that the concept was entirely missing from Romney's discourse. Shields may know more about how to fix the economy than either candidate does.

10. Will the presidential debates sway the undecided voter? This SNL clip says it all.

Alas, I can't get the actual clip to embed on my blog.
Click HERE to see it. It's less than 2 minutes long.

Our nonpartisan American runaway train

Art by Stephen Slade Tien
via Wikimedia Commons

I freely admit what you already know: I am a wonk. So when the book I'm reading, The Moral Measure of the Economy, laid out a bunch of fearsome statistics going up to 2005, I was compelled to update them. I'm not going to bore you with all the stats. I'd just like you to notice one thing that seemed odd to me. Maybe you can tell me what's going on.

We all know that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider. What I didn't know was that, whatever the forces may be that are driving rich and poor apart, they don't seem to be related to one party or the other.

Here's what the book says:

In 1985, the average income of the top 5 percent of families was 13.5 times as much as the average income of the bottom 20 percent. In 2004, the top 5 percent made almost 21 times as much as the bottom 20 percent.

So I looked up the Census Bureau table that gives this information (it's here; go to Table F-3 and click "All Races" for the Excel file), and I calculated the ratio for each year since 1966, and I made this chart. The short silver bars at the bottom represent the average income of the bottom 20%. The long green bars represent the average income of the top 5%. See the gap widen ...

Here's what seems odd to me:

• From 1966 to 1981, the ratio is pretty stable: seven years of stable Democrats, nine years of stable Republicans.
• In 1982 the gap starts to increase. It gets steadily larger through eleven Republican years.
• In 1993 the gap suddenly jumps from 1:16 to nearly 1:20. From then on, through ten Democratic years and eight Republican years, it never goes below 1:18. Since 2000, it has always been nearly 1:20 or higher.

Something is causing our nation to become more and more unequal (in opportunity as well as in income, as Joseph Stiglitz points out in The Price of Inequality: you can read an excerpt here). Whatever it is, neither Democrats nor Republicans have effectively dealt with it.

Economics is a complicated science: 

     - is our rising inequality a failure of understanding? 

Tax hikes, even for the rich, are hard to get through Congress: 

     - is it a failure of will?

The princes of Wall Street, Wal-Mart, and multinational corporations are doing just fine: 

     - is it a triumph for their lobbyists, who spend more and more every year?

And if we find it distressing, who are we supposed to vote for, anyway?

Good government, bad government--"everybody's confused"

Before beginning the next paragraph, please click here and listen to Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy performing "Only the Lord Knows." If you haven't already bought the whole album - it came out two years ago - you really should. Especially during this acrimonious election season. (I commented on it here.) Mavis and Jeff knew what was coming in 2012...

I pick up the paper, I put down the paper,

Turn on the TV, I get confused.

People on this side say the people on that side,

They lyin', say they lyin'--everybody's confused.

OK, now imagine taking a dozen or so suburban Catholics--some of them staunch conservatives, others committed liberals--and making them talk to one another about public policy for two and a half hours every Wednesday evening during the two months leading up to the election. Give the group a sexy name, like "Living Solidarity: Government, the Federal Budget and the Common Good" (such a name keeps a group's size manageable). Ask them what they think the government does well, and what it does badly. Try to keep them from killing each other.

Actually things went surprisingly smoothly at my parish's adult-ed group last week. The moderator told us repeatedly and in manifold ways that we must be polite to one another, and we were, even when talking about government successes and failures. And then we learned that one of our assignments would be to strike up a two-minute conversation with a stranger, each week on a different topic. This week's homework: "Ask someone you don't know: What is something you appreciate that government does? What is something you hate about what government does? Be specific."

Oh, right. If someone standing in line behind me at Trader Joe's tried that on me, I'd ask him to watch my cart while I dashed back to the produce department to pick up more broccoli rabe. No way am I going to let some political nut turn my peaceful shopping expedition into a shoot-out. And no way am I going to turn myself into an agent provocateur either.

So I put my questions on my Facebook page, Madame Neff's Salon, and discovered that some people hate speeding tickets while others appreciate them. Other than that, here are the answers I got:

What is something you appreciate that government (federal, state, or local) does?
Emergency services like fire, police, and ambulance. The Post Office, which--unlike FedEx, UPS, or the Pony Express--is required to serve all areas of the U.S. Schools. A good legal system. Enforcement of laws and rights: property rights, religious rights, right to protest, freedom of speech. OSHA. The FDA drug review. Health care. Programs that help poor people and those who experience disasters. Programs that guarantee clear air, water, safe food, safe buildings, etc. Roads, transportation,some communication. A state program for at-risk children that offered subsidized physical, occupational and speech therapy for our son. Medicare.

What is something you hate that government (federal, state, or local) does?
Picky laws: Prohibiting plastic bags. Outlawing marijuana. Banning large sugary drinks. Banning smoking outside. Subsidies to private enterprise (tax breaks, funding research and development, etc.) without demanding repayment or a share of profits. Unnecessary war. War without the approval of Congress. The salaries of elected or appointed government officials. Torture.

If I got back in line at Trader Joe's, broccoli rabe in hand, and still had to answer the questions, I'd probably tell the pushy stranger that I really like--or would like--excellent public education, universal health care, Social Security, interstate highways, food security programs, regulations to protect the environment, regulations to keep financial institutions honest, family health-care leave, paid maternity leave... well, by the time I got to that many points here in Republican DuPage County, I expect my interlocutor would have scooted into another check-out line, as far from me as possible.

But if he stayed to listen, I'd also tell him that I really hate the way our government--federal, state, and local--promises so many of these good things but then refuses to fund them. On a more personal level, I hate the way so many Americans think we should have more services but lower taxes. Read, for example, Greg Sargent's article in the August 2 Washington Post, "Americans hate government, but they love Medicare, Social Security, and environmental regulations."

I'm looking forward to hearing my classmates' opinions. I think we can manage not to throw overripe fruit at one another, especially if we keep in mind Mavis and Jeff's call to humility:

What to do, what to do now?--

Only the Lord knows, and he ain't you.

Listen to them!