Heretics And Redistribution

About two years ago, I read St. Augustine's Confessions and then listened to the first third of The City of God. St. Augustine lived around the year 400 and when you read his work, one of the things that strikes you is how constant the human condition is. He had to deal with the same things we do and his observations are just as valid today. Tablet computers don't change the human heart.

I just finished G. K. Chesterton's Heretics (1905) and am working my way through William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951). Both deal with assaults on religion and Bill Buckley goes on to deal with academia's attacks on capitalism.

Everything old is new again in our dealings with the ivory towers of the universities.

The attacks on religion haven't changed much in the last 120 years. Richard Dawkins' smug insults are poor copies of George Bernard Shaw's clever witticisms. After reading* Chesterton's excellent ripostes against Shaw, mentally dealing with Dawkins is trivial and dull. And if Dawkins is boring, Buckley's Yale atheists of the late 1940s are positively coma-inducing. The tide of atheist creativity ebbs and flows, I suppose.

Going on to the economics portion of God and Man, it's another case of mankind retreading the same ground. The collectivist economics texts taught at Yale** decry income inequality, just like our favorite little fascist, Robert Reich. So the statists have been crying out against income inequality for decades while government has grown, grown, grown with no positive results.

We must do more to fight for Social Justice!

If government programs were going to lessen income inequality, wouldn't it be working by now?

* - Is reading the right word here? It's a book, but I listened to it. I always claim I read these audio books, but is that the correct term? I heard the book never seems quite right.

** - You heard that right. In 1951, academia was leftist, socialist and agnostic at best.