This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 21, 2011 - A commonly misquoted adage advises that money is the root of all evil. The original, which comes from the first epistle of Paul to Timothy, actually reads, "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." The distinction involves more than mere semantics.
If money were in fact the root of evil, it quickly follows that it must be evil in and of itself. The righteous would thus be left to wander the streets naked and unsheltered, reliant upon the kindness of strangers for subsistence. But if money is inherently bad, how can alms-giving be good? Rather than a virtue, wouldn't charity -- the sharing of filthy lucre -- be a vice?
Paul avoids such absurdities by citing the adoration of money as the source of woe. He sees the worship of wealth for its own sake as the cause of problems while cash can be either good or bad, depending on how it's used. Cupidity is a sin; affluence is a comfort.
A similar misconception is often made regarding politics. Watching the debt ceiling debate unfolding in D.C., it's tempting to conclude that politics is the root of all evil. That judgment, however, directly contradicts the principles on which the republic was founded.
The Constitution is political compromise incarnate. Small states are granted equal footing with large ones in the Senate, while populous states enjoy greater representation in the House. As originally drafted, free states struck a devil's bargain with slave states by allowing the latter to count three-fifths of their indentured souls to determine the size of their delegation in the lower chamber.
Legislative caprice is constrained by executive privilege and disputes between the first two branches of government are resolved by an independent judiciary appointed by the executive and funded by the legislature.
Given their insistence on checks and balances, the founders obviously anticipated lively political debate and, just as obviously, did not anticipate that the debaters would be uniformly noble and wise. The system was designed to accommodate conflict and limit foible. The process turns rancid, however, when politics becomes the end, rather than the means, of governance.
On Nov. 11 of last year, I predicted the present stalemate on Capitol Hill in a column the Beacon ran under the heading, "Barn-burner coming to D.C." A centrist electorate had just installed a radically polarized House of Representatives.
I noted that "moderate Democrats ... (had) paid the price for public dissatisfaction with agenda of their leftist colleagues" in the 2010 off-year elections. They were replaced in large part by so-called tea party Republicans. Meanwhile, leftist Democrats representing liberal enclaves were re-elected.
Thus did veteran Ike Skelton lose his seat in rural Missouri while Nancy Pelosi was safely retained by voters in San Francisco. The result was a House-elect that was at once both more liberal and more conservative than most of the voters it would represent. The first big challenge facing this contentious group would be to raise the debt ceiling because a country operating almost exclusively on borrowed money was about to max out the national credit card.
The virtue of living within your means notwithstanding, the government has to continue to borrow to stay in existence. That's because almost 92 percent of its current revenue is spent before it's received. It goes toward interest on the national debt, entitlements and various other obligations. The government thus has slightly more than 8 percent of its income to fund all of its operations.
You simply cannot cut spending enough to balance the books. We could, for instance, completely eliminate the armed forces. That dire solution would leave the nation defenseless, grossly inflate unemployment rates and drastically reduce revenue because of the resultant loss of income tax paid by the troops themselves, civilian employees, independent contractors and suppliers. Even if we were to endure these privations on behalf of fiscal austerity, we'd still need to borrow about $592 billion this year just to pay the bills.
The Democrats could have avoided the present impasse during the lame-duck congressional session after last fall's elections. Because they still controlled the Congress at that time, they could have raised the debt ceiling on their own accord. But doing so would have let the Republicans off the hook. That would have been good government but bad politics.
The GOP is now stuck hosting a tea party on Wall Street. Big-money backers recognize that America must continue to borrow to avoid the havoc that debt default would wreak on financial markets. Tea partiers, however, demand lower taxes and balanced budgets. Presumably, they'd also like fried ice.
In 2006, Republicans controlled the Senate and G.W. Bush sat in the Oval Office. When a vote was held to raise the debt ceiling, every Democratic senator voted against the measure. One especially vocal opponent was a freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. All but three Republicans voted to hike the ceiling and the bill passed 52-48.
Today, the parties' political fortunes have been reversed and so have their respective positions on the same vital issue. To paraphrase St. Paul, the love of politics is the root of all kinds of evil.
M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.