WWJD: Money Edition

Here's Michael Moore appearing on Piers Morgan over on CNN:



I'm not sure why Michael Moore said "Is it really?" in response to being asked if his success was due to capitalism unless that was in response to the phrase pure capitalism.  I'm also not sure what capitalism Moore is talking about when he refers to it in its current form and its "back in the day" form.  Sure, today's capitalism involves a large finance industry and the old capitalism made stuff, but it did it on the backs of slaves, children, immigrants and the poor putting in 12 hours a day, seven days a week, monopolies, the Senator from Standard Oil...

He states that America is against greed and income inequality, and I think he's right.  Examples like Theodore Roosevelt trust-busting and the rise of the middle class post World War II support this, but I feel like the U.S. government has shown itself to usually fall on the side of pro-greed and pro-income inequality.

But he does bring up the easy point that how we conduct ourselves financially contradicts the fundamental tenets of most religions, and there are chunks of the population who seem fine with that.  Those same chunks are often the ones who most strongly identify with religion, who insist on vetting candidates based on their professed religion, who push political debates to have moments like this:

McCain can't even give an unqualified Yes comfortably.  Sometimes this chunk of people create the political atmosphere where the next guy is just about dead last in line for the GOP nominee:

I'm always curious what this country would look like if we actually practiced what we preached so fervently instead of just paying lip service to the core tenets of many faiths like Christianity.  We seem to put a disproportionate amount of effort into the faith required to believe in religion compared to the amount of thought put into the collective actions asked of us by religion.