Moral Economics

To ignore moral considerations in economics is slapping God in the face. He gets tired of it after a while.
The symbolism of Babylon is, “Everything has a price, and that’s all that matters.” It’s the bedrock of materialism, that we can construct a worldview and system which ignores God, replacing Him with something far less. The original Babylon chose a misleading astrology over God’s revelation. It won’t matter what that some else is; anything other than God is lesser and ineffective. But God deals with humanity on a longer time scale, for the most part, than any human life itself. It’s just as well folks don’t live so long as Methuselah any more (969 years), because it would only add longevity to our weaknesses and folly. But we are fully aware of that longer time span, when we choose to rise about the gorilla level of intellect — creatures which essentially start from scratch with each new generation. We have history, if we dare pay attention.
There are certain moral absolutes which we have ignored for ages: Do loan or give to your neighbors; don’t charge interest; pay day laborers at the end of the day without fail; wipe all system debts every generation; etc. Significant accumulations of wealth are a sure indicator of immorality, because the only reason God permits prosperity is because we are supposed to share. We are morally obliged to give away enough to keep us from becoming significantly more powerful than our neighbors. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not simply a sweet platitude, but a summation of all our dealings with our fellow humans. Their needs are your needs. (The meaning of “neighbor” is also answered in that context.) These things are not subject to debate; they are absolutes for which God has left no doubts in His revelation. And the Apostle Paul makes it clear you don’t have to know about Him or His name to get it right. He permits a wide array of belief which excludes Him, so long as it arrives at the same basic conclusions.
So it won’t matter what your theory is. If the results don’t match those standards, you are doing something wrong. Human sin kills, but not always immediately in the literal sense. You can be morally dead long before your body tumbles into the grave, and kill a lot of other folks along the way. By the same token, what help we see offered these days is subtly designed to keep on killing. The modern Western theoretical framework for charity is as abominable as refusing to help. It is all cynically designed to enslave. We don’t have room to describe a course of correction here, so I’ll leave it at this: We need to start from scratch almost everything we do regarding economics.
The fundamental assumption is you should get by, and do well enough, but extravagance is a moral red flag. I care not a whit your favorite economic theories and what you call it from your frame of reference — America has raped the world economically. We seem to have absorbed the notion we earned it all simply because we were able to get our hands on it. If whomever was sitting on it didn’t want to use it, we felt justified stomping them into the ground on our way to claiming it for ourselves. Our Enlightenment based assumptions of what’s fair and moral in the process offers no protection from God’s wrath. In essence, what we have done is absorb the natural productivity of others and walked off with an inordinate share. Not content with that, we also stole from our own future. We didn’t simply accumulate an immorally high share of resources, but consumed them with profligate abandon. We have created an appetite by which we simply cannot conceive of less as justified. “Dammit, the world owes it to us!”
In simple terms of economic reality, the system we constructed was unsustainable. In case you haven’t noticed yet, we done sucked all the juice out and it’s going dry. The refill rate won’t keep up with our consumption, but we have truculently rejected any discussions of what that refill rate was. Like most people, I’ve had it up to my ears with silly talk from the Mother Earth worshipers of Greenpeace, Earth First, and the like. We were commanded by God to explore and reap the harvest of His provision, including petroleum and whatever else we can find here, but get it without destroying everything in the process. Deep ocean drilling is not inherently immoral at all, but doing it with reckless disregard for safety is immoral. God expects us to find and use, not make a stinking filthy mess for someone else to clean up later. He’ll do a lot of it Himself, but that may come at the price of vast losses in human life.
That the blood of that loss is on our hands cannot be disputed. In the Court of Heaven, we are culpable. We can’t claim ignorance. Until He is ready to end this situation and conduct that almighty reset of His Creation, He’ll continue to run Creation as He sees fit. It won’t matter if you believe in Him; we are all accountable. This world has built-in corrective measures and ignoring them because it can’t be quantified in our science won’t save us any sorrows. You can characterize it as you wish, but the best way to understand and predict what’s coming next is to realize we have blown our limited opportunity by wasteful living, by demanding more than our share, by rejecting the notion there is such a thing as a fair share.
In more than one religious tradition in this world, to shorten your neighbor’s rations so you can lengthen yours is equivalent to murder. It’s our turn to die now.