The Economic Collapse and a Torah Solution

Torah can help guide our financial system

By Rabbi Shmuel Kaplan

The financial crisis is absorbing the attention of the country. How will the crisis unfold? What will the solution be? Who will be the winners and the losers?

Where the crisis originated and what is the root cause is receiving scant attention, and that is what I want to address.

In human economic affairs, there is a built-in paradox. On one hand, if economic activity is tightly regulated and controlled by the government, as in the communist module, then all initiative, energy and drive is sucked out of the system and it ultimately collapses, as we witnessed in the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

On the other hand, if we do not have any (or only minimal) regulation and permit an unfettered free market, then greed becomes the dominant drive in the system, which ultimately is also doomed to fail, as is happening before our eyes in the U.S. today.

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