The
Fenwick Review Testimonium Perhibere Veritati
December 2013
Volume XXI, Issue 3
The Independent Journal of Opinion at the College of the Holy Cross
Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong
On The Moral Consequences of “Capitalism” A Response to a Professor of Religious Studies
Professor David Schaefer Special Guest Contributor I was astonished to learn, in Patrick Horan’s excellent article responding to the “Christianity and Capitalism” faculty panel, that a member of Holy Cross’s Religious Studies department had described the “biggest failure” of capitalism as its “inability to adequately curtail environmental degradation.” Apparently this colleague is unaware that the countries experiencing by far the greatest environmental degradation over the past century have been the self-styled “socialist” regimes, including China, the former Soviet Union, and all former Soviet satellites. Ideological dictatorships, whether of
the Marxist or Nazi varieties, have little incentive to respond to citizen concerns about the environment – precisely because they are dictatorships. High officials of such regimes are well able to insulate themselves from the environmental effects of their policies; hence they focus instead on promoting enough “economic growth” to finance the military arsenals on which the regimes depend for their survival – along with the lucrative perks that the officials can glean from the economy. (They can gain much more wealth and power from factory production than from environmental cleanups.) To illustrate: just this past week alone, readers of the New York Times were shown multiple photographs of
Also in this Edition:
Top Employee Compensation Tables From IRS 990 Tax Forms ..... page 9
Chinese citizens covering their faces to try to protect themselves against Beijing’s horrifying (and quite visible) air pollution. Tens of thousands of Chinese people have lost their lives in recent years owing to such (preventable) disasters as floods, lax enforcement of building codes and regulations on food quality, and massive train accidents. The situation in Russia and some of its former satellites is hardly much better, if at all. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that the only nuclear-power accident ever to generate significant loss of life was the Chernobyl explosion in the Soviet Union – again, the result of the indifference of government officials, pressed only to generate “growth,” to citizen safety.
By contrast, the environmental situation in the U.S. and other liberal democracies is infinitely better – the result of the openness of our political system to the expression of citizen concerns, which has led to a massive improvement in air and water quality. (In fact, runaway bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency are currently seeking to impose pollution rules that go far beyond what would make any contribution to public health, but at considerable cost to taxpayers, without any statutory foundation whatsoever; the city of Worcester is currently endeavoring to defend its residents against such governmental overreach.) Continued on page 6
Mythology, History, and Ideology
The Emergence of the Golden Dawn in Greek Politics Nikolas Churik ‘15 ~ Foreign Bureau Chief ..... page 13
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