"Occupy Wall Street" and Morality

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest is morally superior to the system it protests.
That’s not to say it’s completely righteous, but God supports it over the system. I say this, despite my certainty the protest is partly the result of Shadow Government PsyOps. That the protesters are being used does not detract from the justice of their essential claims, any more than Satan quoting Scripture makes the Bible wrong. You can find a copy of the OWS official statement here. It’s a laundry list which will tend to weaken the more effective focus of what seemed the original purpose, but that may reflect the effort to garner wider support across the activist community at large. It’s risky politics, but may work out well enough. What matters here is the core reason: Calling attention to the criminal enterprise which government and Big Finance together have become, demanding an end to it. This is the part God will bless and prosper.
(Update: The list at the link may not be official, after all. Minor point here.)
It’s not as if God needs to take a class in economics and finance. His revelation condemns usury for a good reason. The logic is not all that hard to follow.
The underlying assertion is God created us for better things. We broke it, but He gave us that choice. Now that it’s broken, our options are limited. As the designer of this whole thing, and the One who keeps it working for the duration of its existence, whose hands are altogether actively and intimately engaged in things every moment, He has revealed the optimum route for getting the best of what’s possible. He still permits rejection of His revelation, but it comes at the cost of increasing human suffering, along with the fundamental cosmic moral culpability for causing it. While the particulars of the penalties are only partially explained, they are nonetheless certain.
God forbids usury. It’s okay to make loans to other folks, but it’s not okay to charge interest on that loan. The purpose of loans is not to make monetary profit directly, but to improve the general climate of human welfare. If you can’t quite grasp how that benefits you indirectly, you are trying very hard not to see it. It’s not ignorance; it’s hateful stupidity. In general, helping others helps you. God expects you to claim His promises of improving your welfare through improving the general welfare as sufficient motive. Charging interest on loans enslaves your fellow humans to you, and you cannot possibly have any good motives in that.
We all understand pretty quickly that improved material productivity improves the general welfare. More is better; what you don’t use yourself is potentially trade goods. The problem is when we are so focused on the stuff, we forget why stuff is good. God draws the line of “decreasing returns” a lot lower than mere spreadsheet calculations suggest. If getting more stuff means taking advantage of your economic dominance to compel folks to do nasty and depressing work, you have defied God’s intentions. Giving those folks the option to starve is not much of an option.
If you have relative wealth compared to your fellow humans, God says you need to acknowledge His assistance in getting it. Governments and communists make the claim to a share based on specious semantics and petty greed, but God doesn’t need your stuff, nor you. Human governments only pretend they are God. They also are subject to His whims. Of all interested parties in this discussion, His is the most valid claim: “If it weren’t for Me, you wouldn’t have been born. Everything which happens to you after that is by My permit.” So when He says He has an interest in your property, you need to negotiate His terms for letting you continue keeping it, along with your life.
God claims His purpose in letting you accumulate wealth is because you have been appointed to use it wisely for His broader agenda. You get to waste a lot of it on yourself in return. His terms are pretty lavish, to be honest. Your part is to then use some of it to benefit others. Not because you owe them, but because you owe Him. They are His appointed recipients of your excess. In making distribution, you are required to ennoble them as much as possible for that very reason. That is, without catering to whiny demands of entitlement, you reach out in such a way that expresses your recognition of their importance in the grand scheme of things. Their poverty does not make them beneath you, as if your economic position marks you as God’s favorite. Material wealth is only one of many forms of treasure. All humanity is commanded to share the richness of whatever it is given to them.
It’s the ultimate divine specialization of human labor. It isn’t justice for you to draw up contracts by which you leverage your particular kind of wealth to control the other kinds. Yes, you are to guard against the material greed of those who abuse their other forms of wealth to get yours. Justice is not to be had in some libertarian anarchist paradise, resting on human reason and concrete social codes of law. Justice rests on drawing together into communities of kinship based on shared DNA or on covenant commitments. Your neighbor down the road is presumed to be distant kin until he acts like an enemy. But folks in one big happy family typically don’t deal too sharply with one another. You are generous and willing to take some losses because instincts alone tell you that’s necessary, as you equally share in whatever it is the others contribute in the long term.
If nothing else, they put up with you. We rightly presume that means they can in some fashion appeal to God on your behalf, and you can be sure He does hear. He says so. It’s not legalistic trade in merit points, but a deeper and more fluid moral fabric.
So when you look at the current banking system, you realize it’s far cry from what God requires. Then you compare that with what the OWS folks say, and it’s easy to see they are much closer to His requirements.
You can have economic growth without debt at interest. It will be slower, but it will also be morally correct. The fallen world is rough enough when we embrace God’s Laws. There will always be people poor in material goods, so poverty itself is no indicator of injustice. Jesus, God’s own Son and the ultimate revelation, said poverty was inescapable as a fact of human existence. He also said trying to balance the scales by shifting material wealth directly is pointless. But debt-based economics aggravates the problem. It grants artificially increased buying power, economic leverage, to those who already have material wealth. In the process, it inflates whatever passes for money, and weakens they buying power of the poor. It robs them of what little they have by making it worth less. Indeed, it directly cheapens their labor, so they have to work harder to get what little is available to them. Any suggestion debt-based economic growth floats all boats is an outright lie, intellectual dishonesty.
If it means smashing the whole system and destroying Western Civilization itself, we are morally obliged to support destruction of the debt-based economy.
Addenda: Since writing this, the movement has devolved into another protest-for-the-sake-of-protest thing. It was a good idea hijacked quickly by professional activists.