R.H. Tawney, who I quoted in my earlier post, was a Christian, actually. Here's a great quote from him:
"...the man who in time of peace plays on public necessities to amass a fortune—the monopolist, or the speculator who corners the market, or the urban landlord who grows rich by other men’s industry—is morally on a par with the merchant or manufacturer who holds his countrymen to ransom in time of war."
And an excellent quote on freedom, egalitarianism, and elitism:
"If a high degree of practical equality is necessary to social well-being, because without it ability cannot find its way to its true vocation, it is necessary also for another and more fundamental reason. It is necessary because a community requires unity as well as diversity, and because, important as it is to discriminate between different powers, it is even more important to provide for common needs. Clever people, who possess exceptional gifts themselves, are naturally impressed by exceptional gifts in others, and desire, when they consider the matter at all, that society should be organized to offer a career to exceptional talent, though they rarely understand the full scope and implications of the revolution they are preaching. But, in the conditions characteristic of large-scale economic organization, in which ninety per cent. of the population are wage-earners, and not more than ten per cent. employers, farmers, independent workers or engaged in professions, it is obviously, whatever the level of individual intelligence and the degree of social fluidity, a statistical impossibility for more than a small fraction of the former to enter the ranks of the latter; and a community cannot be built upon exceptional talent alone, though it would be a poor thing without it. Social well-being does not only depend upon intelligent leadership; it also depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests, and the diffusion throughout society of a conviction that civilization is not the business of an elite alone, but a common enterprise which is the concern of all. And individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not, and that, whatever their position on the economic scale may be, it shall be such as is fit to be occupied by men. …."
And one more on how Capitalist ideology obfuscates the issue of modern private property:
"The real analogy to many kinds of modern property is not the simple property of the small landowner or the craftsman, still less the household goods and dear domestic amenities, which is what the word suggests to the guileless minds of clerks and shopkeepers, and which stampede them into displaying the ferocity of terrified sheep when the cry is raised that “Property” is threatened. It is the feudal dues which robbed the French peasant of part of his produce till the Revolution abolished them. How do royalties differ from quintaines and lods et ventes?"
But I agree, that's why I'm always harping on the moral baseline of how far we are willing to let people fall. I don't think I'll ever be a pure socialist, but many ideas informed by socialist thoughts inform or are compatible with my thinking.
. Shame too, because there's a lot of puerile college boy dumbshyt out there to be exploited.
