This is black history month. Twenty-eight days in which to reflect on the struggles and triumphs of the American black experience. When it comes to interracial relations, America isn’t perfect, but, for goodness’ sake, we’ve made amazing progress!
From Dred Scott at the Supreme Court to Clarence Thomas in the Supreme Court, from cotton fields to emancipation, from “whites only” businesses to equal opportunity employment, from dreamers Rosa Parks and MLK to trend-setters Oprah and Jesse Jackson, from segregated schools to affirmative action, from the inner city to the Super Bowl championship and from Islamic grade school to the White House, blacks have written their American story with blood, sweat and tears. They have risen to each challenge and have overcome.
But this month, we should not live in naïveté. There’s a problem looming large over our heads, and it threatens to give us the biggest slavery problem in U.S. history.
I call it Darwinian economics.
We know about Darwin’s theory of “Natural Selection,” or the “Survival of the Fittest.” We know that he said “one general law lead[s] to the advancement of all organic beings,” namely, “let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
Darwin’s philosophy was publicly lauded by world-changers such as Margaret Sanger when advocating her eugenics, Comrade Stalin when fashioning his Red Russia, Adolph Hitler when implementing his Holocaust and Planned Parenthood when justifying its racism. Unfortunately, we have failed to recognize what Karl Marx clearly saw when he wished to dedicate his “Communist Manifesto” to Darwin. Darwin’s proposition that “the inhabitants of the world [are] in competition” seeded an economic paradigm of survival and self-interest.
Our economy is no longer based on mutual benefit or aid. A good capitalistic economy would be, since capitalism epitomizes the peaceful means of exchange: “If you do something good for me, then I’ll do something good for you.” It is an economic interpretation of the Golden Rule: I will do good to you because I want you to do good to me.
Instead, our economy is based on exploitation and plunder. The driving principle is the forceful means of exchange: “Unless you do something good for me, I’ll do something bad to you.” In other words, push your way to the top. If you can’t do that, at least do whatever it takes to keep up with the Joneses.
Lawmakers establish Darwinian economics through government intervention in private business, heavy progressive taxation, burdensome regulation and monopolization of the banking industry. Banks propagate Darwinian economics through interest, inflation and loan creation. Big business entrench Darwinian economics through centralized control, cutting “unproductive” staff, measuring success by the bottom line. The consumers -— you and I —- incarnate Darwinian economics through our outrageous spending habits in order to “keep up with the Joneses.”
Problem is that our selfish attitude is survival of the fittest for economics. It’s Darwin in money-speak. And it always brings slavery and exploitation.
Just like the slaves in early America, some 20 million illegal alien workers today are used to enable businesses to compete in an economy of horrific government regulation. The slave owners of the pre-Civil War era paid a lump sum of money up front to get years of backbreaking labor from their slaves. The employers of today pay a tiny fraction of what they should to get hours and hours of backbreaking labor from their modern-day quasi-slaves. Far from being treated as people with souls, this Spanish-speaking slave force is exploited as a commodity.
Yet the government red tape reduces business viability, the bank profiteering induces a high debt load and the materialistic mindset produces lost incentive for saving. Together they perpetuate a cycle of competition and paycheck-to-paycheck subsistence living for us as citizens.
No wonder we utilize foreign workers as human property.
But Christians can never rationalize injustice to humanity in any form. It took a war and the collapse of an entire economy to remove the evil of African slavery. So this month, we should heed George Santayana’s words: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
