The tool of all evil

Erik Cramb on the relevance of the Epistles of St. Paul

I sometimes have a wee irreligious chuckle to myself when a colleague talks of the letters of St. Paul. If you are not familiar with them, they do go on a bit. It’s no wonder they’re often called the Epistles of St. Paul, and, if in modern times we use the term ‘epistle’, it’s usually used to have a grump about the length of somebody else’s arguments.

Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America, goes totally in the opposite direction with sound bites, devoid of detail, on his Truth Social platform.

But, there’s lots of stuff in St. Paul’s letters that we might do well to heed today. For example in his letters to Timothy, his younger assistant - who I was once scolded for calling him Paul’s apprentice - Paul writes “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction for the love of money is the root of all evil.”

Speaking on the radio as the war being waged upon Iran by the United States and Israel, a prominent economist, defending the wild fluctuations of the price of oil, claimed, “It is the inevitable response to The Law of Supply and Demand.”

I believe that if the love of money is the root of all evil, then the Law of Supply and Demand is the tool of all evil.

Eminent economists are today saying that the apparent prevarications of Donald Trump, one day saying the end of the war is very near, then saying we will have to blow Iran to smithereens, then saying negotiations are under way is in fact a strategy to send the price of shares in oil and gas going sky high one minute only to dip just hours later. While all these contradictory announcements are being made, Trump’s insiders are making billions of dollars on global stock markets claiming merely to be honest entrepreneurs only responding to the ‘Law of Supply and Demand’. There is clear evidence of a very present danger of a global plunge into ruin and destruction.

Published 25 March 2026