"Hough: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do.

"Moyers: We've all heard this from economists."

No, we've all heard this from left-wing economists -- for years. I can't recall in my lifetime when the left hasn't been telling us that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. Actually, thanks to free trade and the move from socialism to capitalism in the Third World, the global gap between the rich and the poor is rapidly decreasingly. It certainly is true that the economic gap between the US and Cuba, and South and North Korea is rapidly growing, but this is because of the catastrophic policies of the Left -- policies that were supposed to reduce inequality but instead created poverty. The truth is that the Left doesn't know how to create wealth. But they're experts on confiscating wealth from the productive and giving it to the unproductive, which just tells the productive to stop doing what they were doing and the unproductive to keep on doing that which has led them into poverty.

"[T]the central teaching of Jesus is-announced when he says, from Isaiah 61, "God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of Jubilee."'

The central teaching of Jesus was the imminent end of time. That is, we think he was an apocalyptic preacher but there are very, very few words that we can put into his mouth.

"Jesus Christ was a Jew. To his soul, he was a Jew. By the time he was 11 years old, people were absolutely astounded how well he knew the Jewish tradition."

Both these statements are false. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus Christ is a mythological figure created by Christians (mostly Greek-speaking former pagans) over the course of hundreds of years after the death of the man Jesus, about whom, again, we know next to nothing -- and we certainly don't know anything about what he was doing at age 11.

"[I]f you look it Acts 3, you will see that those followers of Jesus saw to it that people who didn't have enough to eat could come to that table and get enough to eat. That was the radical model they put out there. Nobody likes to talk about that very much."

Please, Leftists have been talking about this ad nauseam since the 60s. The idea is that Jesus was a socialist. It is a silly idea that has informed Liberation Theology to disastrous effect.

"[I]t is not at all in the spirit of American democracy to generate inequality, and to contradict equal opportunity in our society. Those are not the norms we've lived by."

These are exactly the norms of America. The whole idea of America is individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America was not founded to be a socialist utopia. America is not about economic equality. She is about equality before the law so that people can purse their own ideas of happiness. The end result is much material inequality. This is inevitable in a free society. The Leftist vision of freedom PLUS equality is a fantasy. The only way you can have equality of condition is to greatly empower the state. It requires destroying the free market and setting up a system of central planning in which the government owns the means of production. The result is a totalitarian police state. There is no "Third Way." There are only 2 ways to organize a modern economy: through the market or the plan. That's it. And even then who don't end up with equality of condition under socialism because the system still needs a coordinator class of bureaucrats who will inevitably decide to pay themselves more than anyone else. So you have traded material prosperity and political freedom for material poverty and a police state.

"If Tom Delay is acting out of his Born Again Christian convictions in pushing legislation that disadvantages the poor every time he opens his mouth ... And anybody who claims in the name of God they're gonna run over people of other nations, and just willy-nilly, by your own free will, reshape the world in your own image, and claim that you're acting on behalf of God, that sounds a lot like Caesar to me."

Firstly, Tom Delay believes in free enterprise. If you want to find disadvantaged poor people go to the socialist paradise of North Korea. Secondly, Hough is obviously suggesting that the moral position for the US and her allies was to keep Saddam Hussein in power so his regime could keep stuffing people into plastic shredders, raping women by the tens of thousands, gouging out the eyes of children in front of their parents, etc., etc. Amy, how on earth can you find this nonsense compelling? It's morally grotesque.

"It is the obscene degree to which economic inequality has taken hold in America that I think is highly questionable. There is no justification under Heaven for some corporate executives to make 1,000 times as much as their average worker."

Hough is right, there is no moral justification for this because under capitalism resources are allocated by the price mechanism. Who is going to determine the "moral" price for labour? The only entity that can do this is the government, and in order for the government to do this it must take over the economy entirely.

Here is a little history. Modern socialism emerged in France in the early 19th century. For 200 hundred years we have been waiting for the critics of capitalism to come up with a better system of organizing the production and distribution systems. They have tried repeatedly and have FAILED EVERY SINGLE TIME (and murdered more than 100 million people in the process).

"It's not a partisan issue. I mean, my God, who in the world could possibly stand up and say, 'I'm a Christian. I don't think we should really give much attention to the life of the poor.' Some do. But I don't think it's a party line thing."

Of course, economic policy is a political issue. The reason the British Labour Party abandoned socialism was because they couldn't get elected. It was only after Tony Blair managed to remove the Party's clause that committed it to nationalizing the means of production that voters (including working class Britons) were prepared to return the Party to government. Why? Because they understand something that economic illiterates like Mike Hough and Bill Moyers don't: socialism doesn't work. It doesn't work for the rich and it doesn't work for the poor.

These clods should a) read Albert Schweitzer and learn about the real Jesus and b) read Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" and learn some very basic economic theory.

Not to mention that the poor in America have a standard of living that is envied by even the middle-class in most of the rest of the world. Moyers thinks that becasue he can earn a comfy living at the public trough, everyone should.

Nicholas, I agree with almost all you say except this:

"Jesus Christ is a mythological figure created by Christians."

Um, wrong. Jesus Christ, as the historical record supports without question, was a real person. I can also tell you with a good deal of confidence that he was he he said he was.

Other than that ... the supposed growing gap between rich and pooer is really a straw man. It tells us nothing about the state of the poor, or what is really happening economically.

If Bill makes a $100 this year, and John makes $10 this year, there is a gap between rich Bill and poor John. Next year, when Bill makes $200 and John makes $20, the gap has grown, but isn't John better off?

And that's what tends to happen in this country over time. And it tends to happen in every capitalist country over time.

People who really care about the poor are capitalists (don't read into that, as some leftist nut might be tempted to do, that I'm saying all capitalists care about the poor -- obviously, that is not true). Only capitalism, combined with the rule of law and self-determination, can end true poverty.

Jesus the Jewish man existed. (Actually Jesus was a relatively common name in Palestine at this time, so there were many Jesuses wandering around.) But to believe that this man was the Son of God is a matter of faith.

Historians know very little about the man Jesus. Most of what we know comes from the authors of the Gospels. We do not know who these men were (they were not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- these names were attached later) but scholars believe they were writing 40 - 150 years after the death of Jesus. Their accounts of Jesus are much more works of theology than history.

Actually, scholars are quite certain that the gospels were written by Luke, Mark and John (Matthew is a bit more dubious, but undoubtably based on reliable source texts). I have a whole shelf of books by these scholars. It's a very credible case, if you ever care to look into it. The books aren't hard to find. And Paul wrote all but one of the espitles generally ascribed to him, and he was a contemporary of Jesus. Peter, an original disciple, wrote his letters. John his. This historical accuracy of the New Testament is pretty much beyond question.