The new deadly sins

The Vatican recently updated its list of deadly sins. In the old days, those included lust, gluttony and greed. Now, the Catholic Church has added pollution, mind-damaging drugs and genetic experiments as well as excessive wealth to its “do-not-do” list. I applaud the move and hope it will bring much needed variety and creativity to the typical confession. However, the Pope and his team still omitted a big sin that should be the deadliest of all and I’m talking about corruption. Seriously, this evil is spread all over the world, feeds upon all the other deadly sins and is cause for countless ills. The illicit wealth behind that curse can be counted in trillion of dollars and its burden disproportionately falls on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty. Governments are as guilty as individuals by closing their eyes on payments to officials to obtain the performance of acts they're legally required to do but may delay in the absence of handouts; that doesn't even count party or election financing that go on in most of the earth's nations. In numerous countries that we'll call "kleptocracies," bribery is the norm just because developing nations don't have the tax structure to pay civil servants adequate salaries. Most economists see it as evil because it creates non-productive, parasitic costs that add no value to the community. This subject is so far-reaching that it deserves a deeper discussion and for today, suffices to say that if the Vatican made corruption its top “deadly sin,” and governments enacted law with real teeth to deter it, we’d all live in a much better and more peaceful world.