Jim Wallis of Sojourner’s fame wrote a book some year’s ago in which he described racism as America’s “original sin.” I have no reason to critique his opinion on the matter. Racism is a fundamental problem that has haunted American history from our nascent days, weaving it’s evil threads into our continental psyche long before the United States of America was a self-governing nation. Indeed, racism is an American problem, infiltrating continents North and South, beginning with the institution of slavery and leaving its wicked residue to plague us with social ills for centuries.
However, I would step back a bit and propose that behind racism is a deeper, more original “sin” of which racism is but one of many troublesome symptoms or poisonous by-products. America’s original sin is Greed - capitalized. Behind slavery was love of mammon which unavoidably leads to wickedness in many forms. Slavery was born out of a desire to maximize profits at the cost of human souls and bodies. As Christian scripture informs us, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Perhaps it is an overstatement to exclaim that mammon, or the love of it, is the source of “all” evil, but the biblical warning should alarm us to the insidious nature of greed.
In America greed has been institutionalized in the form of capitalism. “Greed is good,” serves as a mantra for much that is wrong in the American economy. This is not meant as a wholesale rejection of our nation’s economic system, but as a warning for those who would embrace capitalism without a critical assessment of its frequent harmful side effects. While there is a kind of genius behind capitalism in its most basic sense - that a person through hard work and perseverance might prosper - America’s history of slavery, racism, child labor abuse, migrant worker mistreatment, and major bank bailouts provide plenty of evidence pointing to the ways in which capitalism can become malignant. The increasing divide between the wealth of labor and that of management is a testament to the power of greed to rob society of reason and decency. If capitalism is unregulated by checks and balances on human avarice, the result is bound to be human suffering.
David Stockman, former manager of the OMB during the Reagan Administration, has bewailed the influence of crony capitalism in which corporations and politicians pander to one another, rigging the economic system so that free markets are no longer truly free, and national interests become indistinguishable from corporate profits. The Trump family fortune is but one example of how crony capitalism has benefited a very few at the expense of the many (For further reading on this subject try Andrea Bernstein’s American Oligarchs). In the post-Reagan years the unchecked growth of Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc., testifies to the failure of government to pull the reins in on corporate interests. If we “follow the money” we should not be surprised at the reluctance of politicians to be more restrictive of the corporations that fund their election campaigns.
Our present course of unchecked capitalism will inevitably lead to increased human suffering, not only in America but also around the world. U.S. profits have often been built on the misery of other nations. Trickle down economy has proven false. Greed leads to evil consequences. As corporations grow more powerful than governments, who will make sure that economies serve the public good? Has not the time come to break up trillion dollar monopolies in the interest of competition and sustainability? I write this simply to sound an alarm. When members of the Fed make ethically questionable stock market trades do we look the other way? I am not an economist and cannot prescribe a solution. I am only making an appeal for a more measured, regulated, sustainable, and hopefully, human, approach to capitalism.
Bob Dylan once sang that you have to serve somebody, “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord.” Jesus said one cannot serve both God and mammon. Who will we choose?
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