You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. But you cannot permit the strong to [maintain their power by] continuously crippling and exploiting the weak.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. Nor should you bring about wealth by encouraging miserliness under the guise of thrift. "Bind not the mouths of the oxen that mill the grain, and see that the worker is given a just wage," as the Good Book says [1 Timothy 5:18; RSV].
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. But the wage payer should not continuously lift himself up on the filthy, starving, broken bodies of his wage earners and their families; to do so [is to morally] place the wage payer and wage earner in the position of master and slave.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. Nor can you do it by demonstrating contempt for those who are less fortunate than yourself by paying them a subsistence wage, and denying them the opportunity for the education and other necessities they require to better themselves.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. Nor can you do it by making their very existence so tenuous that they have neither time nor inclination for developing "character and courage," because such virtues--in the meaning intended by Reverend Boetcker--are contrary to their ability to survive at the subsistence level. [Further, it requires great moral character and courage of a different--and I believe superior sort--to oppose the great number of injustices imposed by economically and politically powerful individuals and corporations upon the increasingly impoverished American people.]
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could, and should, do for themselves. Nor can you help men by making what they "could, and should, do" for themselves beyond the capabilities of all but a few, who forsake family, friends, home, every other comfort, and even their humanity, in an attempt to achieve a degree of wealth. Or as Karl Marx put it:
"To [the capitalist], therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need--be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity--seems to him a luxury. This science is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave [the laissez-faire capitalist system]--despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance--is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save--the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour--your capital." (Karl Marx, "Human Requirements and the Division of Labor;" Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, pp.120-121, 1844.)
I have used that particular quote by Karl Marx in many of my ninety-some articles over the last four years, because I think it speaks of the dehumanizing essence of laissez-faire capitalism better than any other statement I have found before or since. Marx may have been wrong in his solutions: overly dependent on an innate sense of brotherhood among the working class to achieve his objective. Marx also lacked the knowledge of human psychology that we have available to us today, including the existence of sociopaths making up roughly 4% of our population. Marx also attempted to achieve the total equality by bringing humans down to a lowest common denominator, rather than lifting as many as possible into the middle class that Aristotle thought necessary for the best form of government (see my 15 February 2011 OpEdNews article "The Ghost of Ancient Hellas," for more on this subject). Herr Professor Marx was also dealing with a brand-new system of what was then called "political economy"--what we today call economics--in the form of capitalism. He could see the faults in the system that were already apparent to any discerning individual, but the solution itself was, at best, guess work.
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