Category Archives: Money

HONORARY DEGREES

Conferring honorary doctorates is a regular practice at colleges and universities.  They are given for outstanding accomplishment in one’s field.  It is not a bad tradition, but I wonder how many businessmen get them because the respective school is hoping he or she will give plenty of money.  Money can buy you lots of things, including a degree, but it can’t buy you an education.  That takes money and effort!

WHO DEFINES REALITY?

If there is no God, we Christians are truly most to be pitied.
We missed out on so much potential for worldly success.
Our silly beliefs shackled us to a stupid fear that we were wasting our time making loads of money.
Go on You Tube and watch people like Tony Robbins.  Seems a lot happier than many
Christians I know.  Perhaps he is right…
Pretty depressing, huh?

 

We need to be discerning who we listen to and why.  Too many assume that the one with the microphone is the expert.  Americans have had a love affair with celebrity that goes back at least to the Jacksonian period.  Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about it in the 1830s.

Perhaps there are quieter voices who don’t have a microphone, but have loads of wisdom to impart…if we will just be less enamored with the dreadful din of celebrity.

 

GREED IS GOOD!

Gordon Gekko is the fictional character played by Michael Douglas in the movie “Wall Street.” Gekko became an icon of the money grubbing and unscrupulous person who jumps headlong into insider trading.  Gekko’s most famous line, “Greed is good” encapsulates his life’s creed.

Pastor Mike Woodruff recently drew my attention to “The Emancipation of Avarice” by Edward Skidelsky (First Things, May 2011).

The article is long and a bit technical in places, but here are a few nuggets worth pondering:

“But although once again popular, the term ‘greed’ is not yet intellectually respectable. In the eyes of mainstream economists, greedy people are simply agents with certain preferences acting on certain incentives.”

“The philosophers of the eighteenth century confronted a formidable legacy of thinking on the subject of accumulation, almost all of it hostile. This hostility was based not merely on aristocratic or monkish prejudice, as is often alleged, but on the reasonable supposition that the only intrinsically valuable thing in the world is a good human life.”

“Above all, all pre-Enlightenment thinkers agreed that avarice, whether primarily a spiritual or a political evil, is at any rate an intrinsic evil. Even if it has habitually bad effects, it is not bad because of these effects, but because of what it essentially is—a deflection of the will from its proper end, be that God, the public good, or some combination of the two.”

“The term ‘avarice’ was sidelined in favor of the more neutral ‘interest.’ ‘Self-love,’ originally an Augustinian term of opprobrium, was transformed by Rousseau, and Smith following him, into a neutral term designating a natural regard for one’s own welfare.”

“For the thinkers of the Enlightenment, by contrast, there is a clear-cut binary division between lawful and unlawful economic acts, and everything lawful is innocuous.”

For those who may be tempted to think otherwise, there is a huge difference between having money and loving it.  You may not have much money, but love it dearly.  The other side is also true: you may have a lot of money, but truly use it as a wise steward.