It is the great myth of modern advertising that mere prosperity can give us happy, fulfilled and purposeful lives. But shopping can't satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. The market fuels a relentless cycle of working in order to buy more things, which takes precious time away from family and community and thus threatens our moral balance. One need only look at the front pages of our newspapers. Listening to them talk, you discover that something has gone terribly wrong in their value systems.
Affluence helps to mask moral and spiritual poverty.
There also is a third kind of poverty in our political life, a civic poverty. Widespread cynicism about politics, the alarming decline of voter turn-out, the increasing control of our political system by moneyed elites and the coarsening of our public debate can be best understood as aspects of this civic poverty. Money so controls the political process that it is no longer hyperbole to say that politicians' votes are up for sale. Campaign contributions have become the quid pro quo in politics. The conventions this summer vividly dramatize this.