It took government involvement such as anti-trust legislation and the NLRB to get anything resembling fair treatment of workers.

I’m not sure what you’re smoking, but the NRLB (and the Wagner Act) have killed and offshored far more good-paying jobs than it’s every come close to dreaming of saving.

I’ll give you, though, that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was a good piece of labor legislation. Seeing how it was written in 1896, one good piece of labor legislation in 230 years isn’t all that much to be proud of.

Unfortunately, this one bit of good legislation gets wiped out by all of the crappy legislation (Minimum wage laws, Wagner Act, Walsh-Healey, NRLB, etc., etc.) that’s come out since then, and that only serves to *worsen* conditions for all.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t believe the scriptures endorse any economic system, and I believe a case could be made that it rejects all of them in some sense.

I would agree, in a general sense, though I would say that the overarching arc of Scripture expresses the desire that man should be free, and that – in his freedom – he should choose to care for others.

Martin Olasky’s brilliant work, The Tragedy of American Compassion, does an excellent job of showing that government-sponsored “compassion” is no compassion at all – it only enslaves the poor, institutionalizes laziness, deadens communities to the needs around them, and has dragged down every society that has become addicted to it. The idea that “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” comes directly from Scripture, and it’s sad that a Jewish Rabbi has such more a firm grasp on the nature of work and the slavery of government “compassion” than an ordained Christian.

For the first 100-125 years of this country, the primary concept of assistance for the poor was to help those who were willing to work to escape from poverty and to allow those unwilling to work to “hit bottom” sooner, so that they would be willing to work. Giving your money to an aid agency to care for the poor is not compassion – it is farming responsibility to someone else – often someone who is not even going to care about the individuals in the community.

The reality is that America has been a racist country from its outset. And the less Christian it has become overall, the less racist it has become.

The whole “racism” vs. “capitalism” meme is pretty tired, false and discredited, so I’m not sure why you keep trotting it out.

I knew there had to be a reason I didn’t like Toledo.

Great article, Brendt!