A Tsunami of Malice | Blog & Mablog

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Democracy is, as the fellow said, two coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. But if the sheep is the rich guy, then the parable needs to be expanded. In the global economy, sheep can always move assets offshore, and you know, this metaphor is getting away from me.

The point of warning against an envious mentality that wants to pillage the rich must be made because God requires it, and not because we believe that the rich, poor buddies, are incapable of taking care of themselves. And God does requires this, particularly in election years.

“Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Ex. 18:21).

In a godly realm, one of the qualifications for civil rule at every level is that a man must hate covetousness. This is not a requirement that he hate an invisible sin, one that no one can ever identify or be certain of. No, it is a requirement that he hate the very tangible and envious fuel that makes most modern societies run.

I could spend a lot of words establishing every step in this argument, which I hope to do later. But let me just make some assertions now. An old blues song says that everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Everybody wants the poor of this world to be removed from their poverty, but nobody wants the discipline of protecting developing middle class assets by law. By the poor I mean the people who live in cardboard shacks and who scour garbage dumps to find their dinner. I have been to Haiti, and I have seen poverty.

If we try to get them out of poverty by handouts, we are simply perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Whatever our felt motives, we are hating the poor. But if we try to establish a genuine middle class, where people are allowed to keep the fruit of their labors, a cry goes up. A climate of covetousness will require anyone who gets into that favored condition to flee his nation, with his money, which will therefore remain in grinding poverty.

Those who want to be involved in political discussion without overtly and openly hating covetousness are not guarding themselves the way they ought. And because of this, those who raise concerns about covetousness and envy, the very concerns we are commanded to raise in such discussions, are routinely accused of carrying water for the rich, of being rich themselves, or of wanting a big pile of gold to sleep on top of, like a dragon.

But covetous envy only ruins the rich sometimes. It ruins the poor always. Envy is a tsunami of malice that wipes out everyone in the low-lying areas.