A Christmas Carol........socialist propaganda?

Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the whole lazy Cratchit clan had no right to expect any wealth redistribution from job creators like Ebenezer Scrooge.

The period in which A Christmas Carol was written also gave birth to the king of British socialism, Jon Stewart Mill....and you can bet it's no coincidence, that The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, has the same liberal name!

Ayn Rand would definitly dissapprove of Scrooge's caving in to corrosive altrusim. Mrs Cratchit (Emily), Belinda Cratchit, and young Matthew Cratchit had no jobs at all. Why should Scrooge be expected to provide for them!

Scrooge wasn't doing the Cratchit family any favors by cultivating and possibly creating a future of generational dependence on "entitlement roasted goose" and "big government figgy pudding".

This whole book is an attempt to force small business owners to become philanthropists first, and job creators second.

Ebenezer Scrooge was seduced by the same naive well intended liberal mentality the left has today in the US...and his guilt inspired individual charity was clearly moving the free world governments towards getting into the charity business.

 

LOLOL.. Have you read Dickens?

Its not about the lazy Crachits or socialism.

 

Xmas itself is a socialist holiday where everyone is encouraged to redistribute their wealth.

 

Yeah...to their own families and charities......nice spin though. Dizzy much?

 

But that whole guilt driven charity is what started us all in "the direction" of socialism. It started out as personal charity, and if we wouldn't have started down that road....we wouldn't have socialists like Obama......we'd just have job creators instead of welfare parasites!

 

ROFLMBO! Hilarious!

 

The chap really to blame is that commie Jesus.

 

And now we've come to what lies at the opposite end of the wacky political spectrum - Ayn Randland, where any showing of compassion is a seen as some sort of destructive socialist trapping. Humbug!

 

I dare say Jonathan Swift had the right idea about those poor Irish infants. If we had followed his example, Social Darwinism would be alive and well, and the market would be truly free.

 

Why do republicans hate him so?

 

Well, I really don't give two sh*ts about what Christmas USED to be thousands of years ago. Right now, to me, it is about FAMILY, and helping out the needy, voluntarily.

There is a HUGE difference between voluntarily giving out charity, and the government taking it out of your paychecks.

 

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/was-dickens-really-a-socialist/

Dickens spoke out for the conditions of the poor, but unlike most socialists, he wasn't anti-capitalist nor you will find much, if any, call for government to help the poor.

 

Dickens was a lively writer and had more social conscience than most, but socialist he WAS NOT - except possibly in that strange right-wing-American sense of 'decent human being'.

 

I suspect, few on this board have read Dickens.. They are simply assuming.

 

Particularly where he called for men with guns and the legal right to use them to go to homes and businesses to take what is produced by them and then to go to other homes and businesses and give out a small portion of what was taken. That is the very definition of charity.

 

Is that what American fundamentalists do? Only when they've been at the rotgut again, surely?

 

That was the point of the article. If anything, he lampooned bureaucracy and it's horrid inefficiency as much as he did the greed of some businessmen.

 

Well, Jesus actually accepted taxation as a function of society.

"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

He was a socialist to the extent that he didn't inherently reject taxation as oppression.

His view on taxes is actually what most people ascribe to.

 

I don't know what American "fundamentalists" do. While there are a number of them in my extended family, I remain fairly distant from them. I do know, however, what liberal/progressives tend to advocate and that they forget that in order for the state to give out wealth, it must first take it by force from those who have it. My understanding of Jesus is that he was not an advocate of violence for any purpose.

 

Him too!.....before Jesus it was a-okay to let your fellow man die of hunger outside your door, and that was good for all of us because it didn't inspire altruism....but no!.....now we're supposed to feed the poor.....and that whole loaves and fishes thing doesn't help very much with the expectations of the poor.

 

So a wealthy man voluntarily gives his wealth to other people.

The story is a vast left wing socialist conspiracy in what way?

 

Charity and love of the outsider, regard for the other was a function of the Samarians.. They were more prosperous, better educated and had a more diverse population than the south (Judah) .. They were considered poor, backward and xenophobia.

Hard to believe until archeologists started digging.. and the discoveries uphold that view.

Its reflected in two ways in scripture.. the story of the Good Samaritan and the fact that the Jews said of Jesus.. NOTHING good ever comes out of Galilee (of the Gentiles)

 

Did he?

Society is owned by government or is government, is what you claim Jesus was arguing.

So he advocated that violence be used in order to satisfy Caesar?

Considering that Tiberius Caesar, who was the ruler at the time that Jesus was teaching, was a sexual deviant of the worst time - supposedly into pedophilia and possibly bestiality, as well as a mass murderer, your argument is that Jesus actually supported that man and his function.

You miss that there was a plot to trap Jesus. He asked for a coin, which was not something he needed to do, and his answer was quite simple: Caesar is literally the owner of the coin as it has his seal and his image, so give it back to him in the tribute he demands.

I do not at all buy the argument that Jesus was advocating for taxation, which can only be taken by force and violates his stricture to not resist evil by force. Other than the cryptic nature of his answer, which was very cleverly done in order to protect himself and his ministry, it also suggests that one gives all things to God. After all, the government of the time claimed literal ownership of all the people and all the lands. Jesus or any of his peers could be enslaved or conscripted by the Romans at any time, at the Emperor's whim. If, as you say, Jesus supported taxation as a means of maintaining government, then he was contradicting everything else that he ever taught.

 

I voluntarily give to charities, and I'm FAR from wealthy.

 

It's not. Progressives generally don't believe in redemption of greed, which is why they demand that government take by force what they believe will never be given by peaceful means.