Wealth creation vs distribution
ON GOOD FRIDAY 1778, Dr Samuel Johnson, in his return from morning church, met his old fellow collegian, Mr Edwards, whom he had not seen for nearly 50 years, and who, after practising as a chancery solicitor, had retired to a little farm in Stevenage. In the course of talk Edwards uttered the sentence which was to make him famous for ever: ‘You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson, I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but I don’t know how – cheerfulness was always breaking in.’
Mr Edwards in 1778 was considerably younger than I am now, when 90 years can no longer be the ‘distant scene’ of Cardinal Newman’s hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’: I cheerfully, but hopelessly, turn to philosophy to postpone mental disintegration.
This week I have been attempting Soren Kierkegaard’s prodigious work ‘Either/Or’ which is saying, in short and as far as I understand it, that Christianity must either be obeyed or abandoned. By chance, and contemporaneously, I came upon Deputy Richard Graham’s letter claiming a solitary consistency in reminding States members from the back benches of ‘A need for wealth creation not wealth distribution’. (Open Lines, 14 November) ‘But why, I thought, the Either/Or? Why may we not have both?’; for Kierkegaard does allow that there are circumstances in life when it would be ridiculous or a species of madness to apply an ‘Either/Or’ and this might well be one of them.
I read Deputy Richard Graham’s letter a second time thinking that he must be propounding some philosophical or economic theory too hard for me to grasp. But I determined that his opinion, such as it is, given entirely without explanation or argument, that the economy of a country must be one of wealth creation and not wealth distribution, must be judged a ‘ridiculous’ circumstance to apply an Either/Or and that it would seem to amount to little more than the prayer of the 19th century industrialist: ‘God bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife: us four, no more.’ Amen .
THE REV. LESLIE CRASKE,
3, Mount Row,
St Peter Port.