Urbi et Orbi
This post comes to you in response to a request left by Ki-El in response to a previous post. We here at The Secret Base are always striving to engage more closely with our readers & are thus delighted to fulfill such requests. Ki-El wrote, "I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on Pope Benedict's whole 'redistribution of wealth' speech."

On Friday, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech which included words to the effect that, & I couch in this manner because I'm unsure in what language the speech was actually delivered, society needed "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth." This is entirely consistent with the teachings & policies of Holy Mother Church. For at least the last hundred & fifty years, since the emergence of the competing philosophies of capitalism & socialism, the Catholic Church has been a critic of both. The Church disdains the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few, be they plutocratic capitalists or bureaucratic socialists, favoring instead diffuse ownership of the means of production, not through collective ownership but through individual ownership of small shares of the whole. Some thinkers have tried to synthesize various encyclicals & proclamations into a fully fleshed-out economic philosophy, known as distributism, a third way that stands opposed to the false binary choice between capitalism & socialism. There is nothing new in a pope calling for wealth to be distributed more evenly amongst the population. This would be good for both the physical welfare of the destitute & the spiritual welfare of the rich (note that in Scripture those who are richly rewarded in this world will be terribly punished in the next).

What are my thoughts on "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth"? I agree absolutely with the principle, even if you & I might quibble over the details. I believe in free-market capitalism as a pillar of our country's broader commitment to freedom of the individual, but just as society places reasonable restrictions on my freedoms—I cannot shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, despite my freedom of speech—so too must there be protections against abuse & restrictions placed on even "free" markets. I am a Republican because I am a liberal, not a libertarian. (Liberalism, real liberalism, not the peculiar & frankly wrong American description of Leftism as "liberal.") I support the redistribution of wealth through mechanisms such as an old-age pension (in this country, Social Security) & a progressive tax scheme, wherein those in higher-income households pay a greater percentage of that income in taxes than do those in lower-income households. Do I want to see Social Security reformed? Yes, I do, because I think a number of reforms are needed both to ensure the solvency of the program & to make it a more effective means of ending poverty amongst the aged, its original purpose. Do I want to see a "flat" income tax or a nationwide sales tax such as the pernicious "FairTax"? No, I do not, because both of those policies, whilst supposedly based in "fairness," would both fail in their attempts to make both rich & poor pay an equal percentage of their treasure into the public coffers & would in fact create a regressive tax scheme whereby the least well-off amongst us would pay the highest share of their treasure in taxes. I do not think we should lower, let alone repeal, capital gains taxes, because to do so would merely shift a larger share of the public tax burden onto those in lower income households who derive most or all of their income through wages instead of capital gains. We need a complete rethink of our present day, Great Society-derived "welfare" system because all available evidence suggests that it is not alleviating poverty but instead creating a permanent underclass, generations of citizens who will forever be dependent upon Caesar for their bread. We need to redistribute wealth from the very rich to the very poor, not redistribute power from the town hall to the technocrats' committee room.

I favor minor, incremental changes to our present mixed economy, nothing that would be enough to transform our curious hybrid of capitalism & socialism into true distributism. This is in part because I'm not convinced distributism would work as smoothly & justly as its theorists theorize, & in part because I almost always favor gradual change so as to avoid the unpredictability & seemingly inevitable violence of revolution.

The redistribution of wealth is a right & just aim of public policy, good for both the body politic & the souls of the body politic. We might & probably would disagree about the proper degree of & mechanism for that redistribution, but that is precisely the purpose for which we have politics, to be the means through which we hash out those disagreements.

If these lines do not satisfy your curiosity, Ki-El, I'll be happy to take another stab at the issue. In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Bier!
I had a jones for Carlsberg yesterday, but none was to be found at my only known local source for Carlsberg. Curses! Not wishing to partake in the Samuel Adams Boston Lager my parents habitually keep on hand, after dinner I decided to have one of the bottles of Guinness Extra Stout I'd had sitting in the garage since an Epsilon gave them to me as repayment for a favor, even though Guinness Draught was the actual repayment he'd offered whilst pretending to having something beyond the most passing knowledge of Guinness. The Extra Stout wasn't as bad as I remembered, not at first, but the farther I got into the bottle the worse I was walloped by the dreadful aftertaste. The aftertaste lingered, & lingered, & lingered. Egad! At this point, I know I'm not going to drink the Extra Stout; so, it'll probably end up going down the drain, which would normally be a waste, but that sludge isn't fit for human consumption. I'd say it's a potent potable, but I'm not sure it should be considered potable.

The Queue
I've not purchased a comic book in a goodly while, but I still have quite a backlog of books I've not yet read from before the discipline necessary for Project RADIANT's success brought an end to that particular hobby. Both to keep me in a paranormal frame of mind to aid Project PARAFFIN & because I enjoy tales "From the pages of Hellboy" on their own merits, I've decided to intersperse comic book miniseries amongst the novels in the queue. When I exhaust my supply, the G.D.L. has a surprisingly complete library of trade paperback collections. Onward!

Baltimore is neither a comic book nor a collection, but "an illustrated novel." (Principally text with supplementary illustrations scattered here & there.) There are Baltimore comics that came after the debut novel; so, if that goes well they may well follow.

Recently
John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Christopher Moore, You Suck: A Love Story
Christopher Moore, Bite Me: A Love Story
Mike Mignola & Ben Stenbeck, Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels

Currently
Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire

Presently
David Ignatius, Body of Lies
Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D.: King of Fear
Len Deighton, City of Gold
Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth—New World
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

The Rebel Black Dot Hanukkah Song of the Day
Barenaked Ladies, "Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah" from Barenaked for the Holidays (T.L.A.M.)