Someone asked for the source of one of my quotes the other day and in searching for it I found the original essay. The quote is the last paragraph. (see link)
In this current election cycle, it is a good idea to know the origins of some of the more baffling (to us) punitive, illogical and downright mean spirited themes, memes and policies being used by both the economic conservatives and the religious right. The following linked and excerpted essay appeared in Harpers Magazine in May of 2005, and traces the history of the rights seeming disdain for not poverty, but the poor, not work as much as those who have to work for a living wage. Their insistence that wealth is a measure of piety, and the visceral rejection of any kind of safety net whether it be government or church sponsored and maintained, is made clear.
Let There Be Markets:The Evangelical Roots of Economics
GORDON BIGELOW / Harper's Magazine v.310, n.1860, 1may2005
http://www.mindfully.org/...
a few relevant quotes from other sources:
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What then should we do about illegal aliens? Gary North makes the following suggestions: First, require proof of immunization, or require those without proof to be immunized. Second, abolish the minimum wage law. Third, abolish all public welfare programs. Fourth, abolish the requirement that the children of illegal aliens be required to attend public schools at taxpayers expense. Just let them work, at whatever wage they can get. In short, let them enjoy the freedom that we all want.
David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 47-48.
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"We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way."
Jay Grimstead, February 1987 (taped)
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Also see:
The Religion of Technology:
The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
DAVID NOBLE speaking at Seattle University 19feb98
http://www.mindfully.org/...
Let There Be Markets:
The Evangelical Roots of Economics
(excerpt)
Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. As mergers among media companies began to create monopolies on public information, ownership limits for these companies were not tightened but relaxed, because "the market" would provide its own natural limits to growth. When corporate accounting standards needed adjustment in the 1990s, such measures were cast aside because they would interfere with "market forces." Social Security may soon fall to the same inexorable argument.
The problem is that the story told by economics simply does not conform to reality. This can he seen clearly enough in the recent, high-profile examples of the failure of free-market thinking—how media giants have continued to grow, or how loose accounting regulations have destroyed countless millions in personal wealth. But mainstream economics also tails at a more fundamental level, in the way that it models basic human behavior. The core assumption of standard economics is that humans are fundamentally individual rather than social animals. The theory holds that all economic choices are acts of authentic, unmediated selfhood, rational statements reflecting who we are and what we want in life. But in reality even our purely "economic" choices are not made on the basis of pure autonomous selfhood; all of our choices are born out of layers of experience in contact with other people. What is entirely missing from the economic view of modem life is an understanding of the social world.
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Our modern world is rife with examples of our economic choices being limited by monopolies and corporate lobbyist written regulation and no more universal example than the current health care clusterf*ck need be invoked.
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When evangelical Christianity first grew into a powerful movement, between 1800 and 1850, studies of wealth and trade were called "political economy." The two books at the center of this new learning were Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). This was the period of the industrial transformation of Britain, a time of rapid urban growth and rapidly fluctuating markets. These books offered explanations of how societies become wealthy and how they can stay that way. They made the accelerated pace of urban life and industrial workshops seem understandable as part of a program that modern history would follow. But by the 1820s, a number of Smith's and Ricardo's ideas had become difficult for the growing merchant and investor class to accept. For Smith, the pursuit of wealth was a grotesque personal error, a misunderstanding of human happiness. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith argued that the acquisition of money brings no good in itself; it seems attractive only because of the mistaken belief that fine possessions draw the admiration of others. Smith welcomed acquisitiveness only because he concluded—in a proposition carried through to Wealth of Nations—that this pursuit of "baubles and trinkets" would ultimately enrich society as a whole. As the wealthy bought gold pick-le forks and paid servants to herd their pet peacocks, the servants and the goldsmiths would benefit. It was on this dubious foundation that Smith built his case for freedom of trade.
By the 1820s and '30s, this foundation had become increasingly troubling to free-trade advocates, who sought, in their study of political economy, not just an explanation of rapid change but a moral justification for their own wealth and for the outlandish sufferings endured by the new industrial poor. Smith, who scoffed at personal riches, offered no comfort here. In The Wealth of Nations, the shrewd man of business was not a hero but a hapless bystander. Ricardo's work offered different but similarly troubling problems. Working from a basic analysis of the profits of land ownership, Ricardo concluded that the interests of different groups within an economy—owners, investors, renters, laborers—would always be in conflict with one another. Ricardo's credibility with the capitalists was unquestionable: he was not a philosopher like Adam Smith but a successful stockbroker who had retired young on his earnings. But his view of capitalism made it seem that a harmonious society was a thing of the past: class conflict was part of the mod-ern world, and the gentle old England of squire and farmer was over.
Economic conservatives and social conservatives pine mightily for those golden days of feudalism. The castles and cathedrals for the Monarchs and Bishops and huts and hovels for the rest of us. The author details the evangelicals political rise in the early 19th century England, their elimination of the British Church/state partnership of parish social services in the Poor Law of 1834 and the creation of workhouses and poor houses where near slave labor conditions for elderly and children were the inspiration for Dickens and other social commentators of the period. What do the neo feudalist do?
Change the definition of the words of course.
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The phrase "political economy" itself began to connote a cruel disregard for human suffering. And so a generation later, when the next phase of capitalist boosterism emerged, the term "political economy" was simply junked. The new field was called "economics." What had got the political economists into trouble a generation before was the perception, from a public dominated by Dickens readers, that "political economy" was mostly about politics—about imposing a zealous ideology of the market. Economics was devised, instead, as a science, a field of objective knowledge with iron mathematical laws. Re-modeling economics along the lines of physics insulated the new discipline from any charges filed on moral or sentimental grounds. William Stanley Jevons made this case in 1871, comparing the "Theory of Economy" to "the science of Statical Mechanics" (i.e., physics) and arguing that "the Laws of Exchange" in the marketplace "resemble the Laws of Equilibrium."
The comparison with physics is particularly instructive. The laws of Newtonian mechanics, like any basic laws of science, depend on the assumption of ideal conditions—e.g., the frictionless plane. In conceiving their discipline as a search for mathematical laws, economists have abstracted to their own ideal conditions, which for the most part consist of an utterly denuded vision of man himself. What they consider "friction" is the better part of what makes us human: our interactions with one another, our irrational desires. Today we often think of science and religion as standing in opposition, but the "scientific" turn made by Jevons and his fellows only served to enshrine the faith of their evangelical predecessors. The evangelicals believed that the market was a divine system, guided by spiritual laws. The "scientific" economists saw the market as a natural system, a principle of equilibrium produced in the balance of individual souls.
Let the market decide eh?
When Tom DeLay or Michael Powell mentions "the market," he is referring to this imagined place, where equilibrium rules, consumers get what they want, and the fairest outcomes occur spontaneously. U.S. policy debate, both in Congress and in the press, proceeds today as if the neoclassical theory of the free market were incontrovertible, endorsed by science and ordained by God. But markets are not spontaneous features of nature; they are creations of human civilization, like, for example, skating rinks. A right-wing "complexity theorist" will tell you that the regular circulation of skaters around the rink, dodging small children, quietly adjusting speed and direction, is a spontaneous natural order, a glorious fractal image of human totality. But that orderly, pleasurable pattern on the ice comes from a series of human acts and interventions: the sign on the gate that says "stay to the right," the manager who kicks out the rowdy teenagers. Economies exist because human beings create them. The claim that markets are products of higher-order law, products of nature or of divine will, simply lends legitimacy to one particularly extreme view of politics and society.
Because the neoclassical theory emphasizes calculations made by individuals, it tends not to focus on the impact of external and social factors like advertising, education, research funding, or lobbying. Consumer behavior, for an orthodox economist, is a kind of perfect free expression. But as any twenty-three-year-old marketing intern, or any six-year-old child, can tell you, buying things is not just about the rational processing of information. The Happy Meal isn't about satisfying hunger; it's about the plastic toy. Houses aren't for shelter, they are for lifestyles. Automobiles aren't transport, they're image projectors. Diamonds aren't ornaments, they are forever. We buy things partly based on who we are, but at the same time we believe that buying things makes us who we are and might make us into someone different.
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Read the rest at the link at the top of this page.