Roomin' House Blues

My Political Biography  For various reasons, dear reader, I need to post my political biography before further political activities,  This is not intended as a monument to my ego, but for the edification of others I will be working with politically, and my other readers as they can benefit from it. The latter part of my post will deliberately read like a resume, the beginning more literary.  Aristotle says that man is a political animal and I have been very much a political animal in my life, starting from a childhood infatuation with JFK, my burst of tears on his assassination, an early addiction to newspaper reading, and my rapt attention to the 1964 party conventions. My first practical political activity in the conventional sense was to canvass for a school bond at age 15 to better fund my public school. But I learned I could use leverage  at age 14 when I told an unfriendly parish priest that I could resolve the matter at hand by calling a priest I kne...

I have been studying aspects of communitarian and distributist thought, but I have not thought to explore roots of them in the Bible. Then Monday night at a Bible study someone referred to subsidiarity in the advice of Jethro to Moses. In the 18th Chapter of Exodus Moses's father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, seeks him out in the desert near Mt Sinai.  Moses greets him by bowing before him and kissing him, showing the respect he has for Jethro. Jethro praises and blesses Yahweh for the good he has done Israel and brings a holocaust to God. The next day Moses sits as the judge for all the disputes of Israel and the wait for judgement is from morning to evening.  Jethro instantly sees the foolishness of this and asks Moses why he sits alone while making people wait for judgement. Moses says all these people come to him to consult God.  But Jethro says you will wear yourself out and also these people. Jethro says that Moses should be the peoples repres...

I have been considering systems of economic and political thought that stem from Catholic social teaching and try to apply it.  In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo the 13th talked about the need to create greater social equality without extending the power and responsibilities of the state beyond it's proper role.   This proper role was not well defined, but it is clear that Pope Leo say in state socialism the dangers of too much state control over individual human beings and accelerated class conflict.  He did not, I think, have a libertarian view, although it would not be irrational to read that into the document.  But I think the fact that the emphasized that the state did have a proper role runs contrary to libertarianism.  He did say that the poverty and suffering of the workers needed to be alleviated and that greater access to production and property on the part of the workers was needed. It is from this that the idea of distributism,...

One of the tragedies facing many Americans right now is the loss, or potential loss of there home and everything they have invested in buying the home. In the popular imagination this is largely due to people who were not qualified being allowed to buy homes, but the reality is much more complicated. Many of those who got the dangerous sub-prime loans were qualified for prime loans without the difficult balloon payments.  Often there credit was fine, but the bankers could make more money on selling the sub-prime loans.  The consequences of the balloon payments have taken there homes and ruined there credit ratings. Others were barely qualified and cajoled into taking larger loans to by more expensive homes   Many people with prime loans, who formerly were economically secure, have lost there jobs or substantial portions of there income and as a result are now behind on there payments. If unemployment stays at over 9% there will be more people still ...