The Problem

In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.” (The Ticker)

There is a lot of information available regarding how members of the Congress of the United States are getting wealthy faster and with greater regularity than “average” people. Corporations of every sort get richer because of favorable legislation (those Congress people again) and by offering less for more. As the American Dream dies and there is an awareness the United States is no longer “the land of opportunity,” all bets are off on how long it will take for anarchy to fill the streets of cities and towns all across the fruited plain. The knowledge that “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” is becoming common.

Stiglitz and others have ideas and possible solutions to the dilemma. But they universally fail to find the underlying TRUTH which is the heart of the matter.

Men are “lovers of self,” and, as a result, “lovers of money.” It is a natural progression which Scripture clearly reveals. But it is only the beginning. There follows an entire sewer of characteristics that flow from the cesspool of self-love.

Here is a list – no doubt in part, of what follows:

“Boastful, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, without love for what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. . . . (The Bible)

The “American Dream” and the “Land of Opportunity” were the stylized goals of people who worshiped God and treasured Scripture. They were people who cared for one another, and conceived ideas in which equality of opportunity and freedom to pursue happiness untethered by burdensome inequity and greed were hallmarks of a Nation.

Now – we watch “America” die. Little by little, piece by piece, a Nation unravels.

Pray that God will send a leader of men and women who will turn our collective face to the LORD before it is eternally too late.