What a week in the Enterprise! We enjoyed two of those rare back-to-back philosophical columns enlightening us about the decline and fall of civil discourse written by the Rev. Vance Mortensen on Nov. 5 and the economist Alan Beideck on Nov. 6 highlighting some big, BIG problems. Be not distressed that they missed some good points, but I’ll make them here.

Cheery Ben Franklin came up, as did Mark Twain, as well as Rabbi Hillel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Buddha. I’d like to add Jesus to this mix and to throw in the tale of the wise old owl who lived in an oak: The more he saw, the less he spoke; the less he spoke, the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like that old bird?

A hundred-plus years ago, Twain was accused of uncivil discourse with his jibe at democracy in “Huckleberry Finn,” in which a character states: Hain’t the fools the BIG majority in any town? And in an attack on hypocrisy he observes that they are two opposite types: the professional and the professing Christian. I’m afraid, as was Twain, the professing type makes up the BIG majority. This is why the only Golden Rule professing Republicans follow states: “Those with the gold make the rules.”

The good reverend failed to get to the nub of Christianity by simply citing the Sermon on the Mount, which scholars and pastors agree is the essence of the religion. Especially the part where Jesus says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I’d love to see a database that indexes all the speeches, interviews and writings of Republican politicians, and search it for evidence of Republicans who actually advanced the TRUE idea of the Golden Rule — or, for that matter, the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

But there is no honesty or sincerity in Republican-style politicized Christianity.

And Franklin, of course, promoted frugality and patience, high among our traditional national values: “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Has anyone even heard that one lately?

Compound interest has been dead and buried since the misbegotten reign of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve. (He was a youthful acolyte of Ayn Rand in her bizarre sex and philosophy cult.) Used to be that retired Americans had a safe and sane way of protecting their money in the local bank, but younger folks today don’t even know this way ever existed.

It was called the “miracle of compound interest,” and it made our lives healthier, wealthier and wiser. At 7.2 percent, principal doubles every 10 years, and at 10 percent, it doubles every seven. Thanks to Greenspan and his henchmen, this pathway to safety and financial security no longer exists. Today, we can see full-page bank ads in major newspapers hawking short-term certificates of deposit at 2 percent.

Retired folk can’t flourish at this rate because the Fed is owned and operated by the BIG banks of the corporate state for their benefit and their benefit alone. There is no political control beyond appointments, a situation touted by Wall Street as “independence from government interference,” when in reality the Fed is a Satan Clause controlled by the banks themselves.

The Fed fiddles while America declines. A quarter-century ago, 10 percent could be easily had by a simple investment in utterly stable utility company stocks, which paid that as a dividend, but Greenspan finagled the figures, conjured up “irrational exuberance,” kited the stock market and destroyed the savings of millions of older Americans. But the rich got richer.

Those who didn’t experience this “miracle” can’t conceive of the ludicrousness of our economy in the ’80s and ’90s when we were exposed to the sorry spectacle of the need to stimulate the economy all the time, instead of having the economy hum along as Adam Smith claimed would occur naturally because capitalism is “self-correcting.”

For example, every year, literally for decades, we could see TV reports that Wall Street expected the economy to suddenly perk up because of the stimulus of Christmas shopping, and when that didn’t work, it next claimed that income tax refunds would do the stimulus job. That never happened, either. We plodded along while the rich got richer with tax cuts they bought from the Republicans that also were supposed to provide the needed stimulus, but few below the ruling class managed to board that gravy train. Reagan campaigned to spare our grandchildren from inheriting these bills but failed.

Then Greenspan envisioned a burning bush. He would vastly lower the interest rate to stimulate investment until it was less than one-half percent. Great for the corporations and the greedy rich, but these cuts made older people’s lifeline of compound interest also dry up and they were forced, yes, FORCED by the Fed to find new investments to guard and grow their hard-earned retirement nest eggs.

The stock market became the only game in town, and all savable cash flooded instead to the stock markets, making the rich richer, of course, by injecting financial steroids into the markets even as the corporate executives slashed or eliminated dividends, and even pensions, and reduced the older generation into speculators and gamblers in a volatile market when they should have had safety and security for their retirement.

The dollar became vastly over-valued as cash from around the world was changed into greenbacks and “invested” in this Wall Street casino that the Fed created.

Not only did the markets prosper because of this abandonment of our traditional financial values; they also became, along with real estate, THE place to stash the ill-gotten gains of drug smugglers and corrupt foreign businessmen and politicians who stole their people’s wealth and put it in mansions in America. The massive run-up of housing prices in the decade since the Great Recession resulted because this stolen wealth that the Treasury allowed into this country has bloated house prices in places like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles.

Is this what Adam Smith intended?

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Rick Gombas lives in Saranac Lake.