Unaffirming political and economic activisms

Abraham Lincoln

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

Dr. Giles Fraser

"St Paul's Cathedral is built on a deep theological fault line. On the one hand it's set within the boiler room of global capitalism, and on the other it proclaims a theological story that has some pretty fierce things to say about money and wealth.

These two powerful tectonic plates, God and mammon, meet right under Wren's magnificent baroque masterpiece. It's little wonder that St Paul's can be one of the most challenging and uncomfortable places in which to do theology.

None of which is to say that the Church is in the pocket of any political creed or economic philosophy. Indeed, I'm not even completely sure that the Church should go too far down the road of proposing specific answers to complex economic problems.

Rather, it's the calling of the Church to draw attention to the human cost of financial injustice, and to reset the debate about our financial institutions firmly within the context of a bigger story about what human life is for.

This has nothing to do with bringing down capitalism. Markets create wealth and jobs, and indeed those who want to dispense with capitalism are often better at saying what they're against than they are at proposing convincing alternatives.

Nonetheless, part of the reason why Christianity is so suspicious of money is that the power and glamour of money can easily corral us into a narrower and narrower sense of what it is to be human."

Margaret Thatcher

"I'm never quite sure what you mean be consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies. Just let's take taxation for an example. Wherever I go I hear enormous resentment about the amount which people are paying out of their own pay packet in tax. And, this goes right across the income ranges. Socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average. You look at the figure on the beginning of a pay slip, sometimes it can look quite high, look along the slip to the other end, and see how many deductions you've had off, those deductions have increased enormously under Socialism ... "

"... I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people."

**Margaret Thatcher on Socialism

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人生不簡單之處，在於人必須事事躬親、持之以恆，方可尋找一套切合自己原則的信念和選擇。隨便或刻意以主義之名，以信仰之名，以大多數之名來替代自己所須的事事躬親、持之以恆，其前路亦將以新主義之名，新信仰之名，新大多數之名告終。倘若人生就是無限的選擇，二者擇其一即非人生、反人生也。

固然人生免不了要摸著石頭過河過紅海，惟世代人非先知非摩西，過河之法亦非得棒打大水領眾走旱地一途。

我見759阿信屋的故事等，即對某及某等財團心存惡感，想此乃人之常情。但同時亦警醒自己，我的惡感所為何事何干。

我獨以自己的認知、判斷、行動為芻狗。