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An age old conflict in politics: morals versus money (1 Viewer)

Craig234

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It would be easy to fill a book with topics about the conflicts between morality and money historically. But I'm summarizing.

In the 'old days', there was a clear ethic that morals had to come first - to the point that even being involved in money much was felt to be sort of 'dirty' and left to 'lower classes' to deal with, which is the origin of a lot of the history and bigotry and Jewish people were sometimes 'moneychangers'; and also how kings would run into conflicts between their desires and their finances.

(The Islamic world has its own history with the issue; as of the 1970's, it was Islamists forces who, working with western banks like Citibank, designed banking processes that worked within Islamic restrictions that enabled them to get great riches in the Muslim world that could be used to support Islamist groups).

We're seeing some of that now. Morally, we see a powerful thug, Putin, murdering innocent people, attacking a democracy for his own benefit, and we oppose it. Not with war - because he's a nuclear power - but with other measures.

And it's somewhat seen as distasteful to care about the financial costs to support the 'right side'.

Aid that will total over a billion dollars. Costs of massive numbers of refugees to host countries. Especially the costs of sanctions.

We should punish Russia. OK, cut off their trade. Except we need the things we import from them. Cut off their oil exports, that's their dominant funding, except that Europe gets 40% of its oil from Russia. Cut them off from the financial system - except that some of that will really cost the west a lof of money, also. So take them off of SWIFT - selectively.

It's a hell of a topic to talk about 'what's right' - and then to somehow weigh it against 'but what are the costs' and figure out how to balance the tradeoffs. For example, could it be much more sensible financially to sacrifice a small country to an aggressor than to have devastating costs to try to combat them?

The very discussion is 'ugly'. When a child killed in a war is in the same sentence as the finances impacted to try to protect them. It's not supposed to matter. But that's a bit naive. So discussed and acted on in hushed tones, behind closed doors, with deceptive language to couch and disguise the hard choices and the issues.

It's a very old topic, how societies balance 'what's right' and money. Sometimes they align; sometimes they don't.

Currently, Europe seems to be making a real effort to side with morality - Germany agreeing to cancel the pipeline, Europe agreeing to expensive sanctions and a deprivation of oil. It's not quite clear yet how and when finances will become a bigger factor. But hard to not think it's coming the longer the crisis lasts. It's an inherently ugly issue.
 
We're seeing more of the conflict. The US is telling Putin not to reduce the oil he sells the west; they're estimating if Putin just reduces it, that gas would hit $150/barrel and gasoline prices would get very high. So we're determined to keep buying Russia's dominant export.

 

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