“You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.” (Exodus 22:20-26)

Before I go on with this post, I must stress that no “artifact” has exploded, burst, detonated, gone off, blasted in any city in Poland. For that I am very happy because I have a soft spot for Polish people. I also would like to stress that there are two days left in the month of October, this year of Our Lord 2023. May God bless and protect Poland and save us from false prophets.

There are many ways to exert violence over people. Economic violence is especially wicked because it separates Cain from Abel and allows the assassin to show his hands apparently clean from any wrongdoing. One of the many ways that economic tools can be weaponized against poor people is a phenomenon called inflation. Modern economies can prevent further impoverishment of their citizens by controlling inflation. New marvels like computers, statistics, precise analysis, etc. could be used in a positive way to curb the damage done by inflation. Yet, such tools are never used in that way. Governments of many nations have been happily printing too much money (thus causing inflation) in order to finance the lifestyles of the governmental upper crust.

God is watching while the global nomenklatura enjoys spending the money sucked from the pockets of poor people. That is what the book of Exodus explains. I sense that is the reason why Jesus blessed the poor and promises them the Kingdom of Heaven, while also predicting in detail how the exploiters of this world will get whacked. (See Luke 19:27 and compare with the passage quoted above.)

Inflation has some other applications. It can be a very precise indicator of the degree of economic violence applied to a society by the usual bands of knaves that populate governments. The higher the inflation rate, the more knaves are feeding at the people’s table without being invited.

Something tells me that God is about to give the knaves their comeuppance.

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:34-40)