The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 6 of 12)

He said "football is a metaphor for American life." When I asked him what he meant he told me that football is America on many levels. "Football is brute force used to solve a problem. Football risks injury for money and renown. Football requires toughness. Most of all football requires many to work as one and respect strengths and weaknesses and each much use his in conjunction with others. Each much work against those of his opponents as well."

I think that does some us up reasonably well, except some of our solutions are pretty damned elegant, as are well thrown long passes and that one step that breaks a long run.

p>Perhaps a President who understands sport and their place in our psyche actually understands us. That wouldn't be an entirely bad thing. I'm sure Ms. Clinton and Mr. Effete from North Carolina like sports too. Ms. Clinton enjoys those muscular, sweaty male bodies and Mr. Effete, well he does admire the coiffures. br> -- Jay W. Molyneaux br> Denver, North Carolina /p> p> RELIGIOUS LEFT BEHIND br> Re: Doug Bandow's Chuck Colson's Short Circuit : /p>

It's very sad to read Chuck Colson's diatribe against Circuit City. He's a great Christian man and has had an important impact on my life, especially his writings on apologetics. I hope that his word processor was half cocked when he fired. What I fear, however, is a leftward drift of evangelical thinkers that I have been noticing for several years. His quote from John Paul II is very revealing. The Catholic Church has always been anti-capitalist and it seems that Colson's long standing desire for reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics has led him to swallow the Church's anti-capitalist poison. A few Catholics, like Novak, Thomas Wood, and the Acton Institute fight the Church's anti-capitalist bias.

With his enduring affection for Catholicism, Colson should read the writings of the Late Scholastics of the School of Salamanca (all Catholics) who were among the first scholars to propose a capitalist society. Capitalism remained an academic subject until the Erasmian Protestants of the Dutch Republic implemented the Salamancan ideas. Calvinist Protestants (another favorite of Colson's) viciously opposed free markets and free trade in the Dutch Republic, while Catholicism attempted to keep it contained within the Republic. Laissez faire capitalism is a product of the Protestant theology of the Dutch Republic, which fought for 80 years to gain its freedom from Spain. The godly Dutch didn't intend to create capitalism, they simply intended to build a government that matched as closely as possible the blue print in the Bible, especially considering the Bible's emphasis on private property rights. Free markets, they reasoned, are nothing but the natural expression of property rights.

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