Stock Market

There is an underlying feeling of praise and blame related to many important and necessary factors in our lives.  We tend to identify ourselves, and the factors related to us (like family, or company, or education) with our successes, but tend to blame other factors than ourselves (perhaps family, or company, or education) for our failures.  One of the large fault-makers is related to the economy.  Sometimes it is the economy competent to advance or reduce our dreams, as I have observed firsthand in upturns/downturns during my lifetime.  Generally alert and careful persons managed well enough to find meaningful life in both knowing how to abound and to suffer want.  (Philippians 4:12-18)  The Apostle Paul blamed no one or thing for the negative periods of his life.  He didn’t want anyone to worry about him, and he did not worry about himself.  The economic status of persons is only marginal to the issues of God and mankind, except to provide a form of evidence about the quality of our beliefs and conducts during periods of plenty and want.  With cause known to God for equity to all, he permits good and ill to register in the lives of all.  The circumstances of God’s ideal creation, turned faulty by mankind, are shared with all mankind.

There is no way that we could enjoy the level of supply and luxury that we have in massive scale without the benefits of a source of capital that too few persons or families can accumulate or risk for business.  Of course there are a few exceptions, but nearly all major businesses yield ultimately to the ownership of the public represented in the shares of a business purchased by individuals and institutions so that the risks, the advances, the creativity related to the markets for goods and services can be financed and shared.  John D. Rockefeller did it, so did Henry Ford, and the largest companies in the world emerged in a few decades in the 1900s, as the transport businesses, utilities and others.  Public companies grew in small, middle and large dimensions.  Stock markets multiplied products.  Warren Buffet leads those using variances of the systems.  We cannot measure the trillions of dollars of larger business planning, and performance in the concepts.  This relates as fully to the appeal of creative persons needed for exotic talents so to advance society. It is a biblical idea.  The financial market is a good and necessary, thing in a technological society (as contrasted to an agricultural).  The problem, as so many problems can be identified, is not with the system but with the persons related to the system.  This system is divided into those who manage the system often identified as the industrialists (or bankers, or moguls, or even governmental economic manipulators), and those affected by the system, identified as citizens (or consumers, buyers, the mass of society).  The first are a marginal but important part of the mass, and the second are made a marginal but important part of the first.  When balanced in factors both the markets and the public do fairly well.  Values and morality serve a vital part to the social and personal context.

The basic problem is identified in the difference in those who invest for profit, in excess of the contribution they make in the system, and those denied their share of what they invest in the system.  If the market is made a gambling system for the rich or poor, the mass may be stymied in that greed.  When the market functions for the good of the human mass, and excess is not practiced either by the investors or the citizens, relative to greed, distortion or dissipation the plan works rather well.  The move up and down seems now unabated, demonstrated by excessive debt or human greed.  In a paragraph God would address all persons with the concept, come all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.  Take what you need, share what you have, give thanks for life’s provision, find humility for equality, do not depreciate anyone in the process, and remember that the joy of the Lord is not related to wealth or privilege.  Every balanced budget should own some savings/investments, or other collateral, like annuities or property with the attitude they are both saving and contributing to the effectiveness of a system that, when rightly financed and managed provides the greatest benefit to mankind than any other historical system.  Church denominations offer excellent programs.  When a system is managed for society in that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer there needs to be system amendment.  Freedom and society rest in the balances of life.