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On the Idols in the Marketplace

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

The stimulus package at about 780 billion dollars puts back into the civilian economy approximately two-thirds (or if Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is right, two-ninths) of what the Iraq War took out of it.

I worry. If the new package is not more stimulating than a Saturday night visit to the state fair side shows, my metaphorical mattress will have lost its stuffing. George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s style of state socialism — command economy military expenditures — took my money. Let us hope that Obama’s civilian version of socialism puts it back.

The congressional opponents of the stimulus, worshipping a government of only police and military, hypocritically call the stimulus ‘socialist,’ ‘un- American’ and a ‘Europeanization of the economy.’ According to evangelist Bill Keller, it is also “un-Christian.” That European social democracy Obama is peddling is not good old Americanism, and they are upset.

Well, for their information, America does not equal modern ‘free market capitalism’ — which, incidentally, didn’t even exist when the founding fathers were going about their founding. At that time, the North had its system of small businesses and farms (few really large corporations or chains); the South had a highly controlled semi-feudal slave plantation economy. Multi-national corporations owned by global stockholders that have grown so large they are now deemed ‘too big to fail’ were utterly unknown then.

Even in Great Britain, the free market that had as its prophet Adam Smith dominated the British economy only from the 1830s onward — the system existing only in utero in Smith’s time (1750s-1770s) in the west of England and parts of Scotland. Big Business capitalism did become a dominant economic force in America beginning with the Civil War (1861-65) on up through the period of the ‘robber barons’ (1870s-1910), before coming under some state control during the Populist and Progressive movements (1890-1920) and the New Deal. But there’s nothing quintessentially American about corporate capitalism. We’ve had it for less than half our history.

Free market capitalism is not particularly Christian either. Its great modern theoretician, Ayn Rand, created a nontheistic idealization of robber barons and non-regulatory governments that do only police and military work. While her most powerful modern acolyte, former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has defended her philosophy in the public press, he only recently recognized that his and her anti-regulatory mania created the present crisis. In recent testimony before a congressional committee, Greenspan, according to news accounts,

admitted that he had been ‘partially wrong’ in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry and that the credit crunch had left him in a state of shocked disbelief.

Nor was Ayn Rand’s predecessor and capitalism’s great prophet, Adam Smith, a big Bible-thumper. He was either a Deist or an agnostic, depending on which scholar you read. He recognizes only one transcendent providential force — greed — that in his world, as in Ayn Rand’s, will make everything good. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he imagines a farmer, greedy and self-absorbed who, guided by an “invisible hand,” produces vast quantities of grain, feeding others only to profit himself. Smith never mentions how much his ideal farmer wastes on whoring or gambling or building his great house, or how much human capital he destroys by beating and starving his peasants as my ancestors were beaten and half-starved on like farms in Sweden.

In the Wealth of Nations (1775), Smith applies his “invisible hand” to the free market producer who, working in a national economy, “intends only his own gain” while he is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end” — the welfare of his whole nation — “which was no part of his intent.” No mention whatsoever of the darker corollaries of his market producer’s system: colonialism, multinational corporations that create international economies for exploitation, and armies used to extract wealth from other nations.

While Smith in other places reveals contempt for pure greed and lack of empathy, his students since have not. But they have followed him enthusiastically in arguing that a nation should suspend its free market ideology to pay for the police and military.

The invisible hand version of market economics became Christian truths under President Reagan, who told rightwing evangelicals and fundamentalists that he was “on [their] side” while he filled his administration with functionaries wearing Adam Smith buttons chanting the “Greed is Good” mantra. In keeping with Rand and Smith, Reagan moved money from the welfare state to the warfare one, and his admirer, George W. Bush, followed suit. God Wants You To Be Rich, the screed of right-wing economic guru Paul Pilzer, has become the statist version of Christianity — justifying our extraction of wealth from a starving Third World and a bombed-out Islamic one, while destroying the sacrifical center of most western religions and of religions like Gandhi’s Hinduism or the Dalai Lama’s Buddhism.

‘Greed is good’ selfishness and militarism are, of course, idolatry — a state religion fabricated from a perversion of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. It is not the religion of Amos, the prophet, or of the Jesus who told the rich young ruler to sell all to give to the poor and in his mountain sermon blessed the meek and urged people to take no thought for the morrow.

We can hope that the cult of aggregated individual greed, protected by a national military that extracts wealth in its behalf, has come crashing down with the recent clattering down of Wall Street. But what will replace it? We have lost most of the common, the village square, the ritualization of community. We have jettisoned the myth of the common profit of humanity or the commonweal (or ‘commonwealth’) that was supposed to be at the heart of the state from the thirteenth century to the Declaration of Independence. We have lost our center.

The present economic and military crisis is very much also a religious one in the broadest sense. What we have done defies the central message of most of the great religions of the world and certainly of Christianity. As Karl Barth, the neo-orthodox theologian, put it, “Fundamentally, the command of God… is self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against its denial in any form — and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong.”

That of course has been the message not only of the prophets but also of many secular thinkers. But it is not the message of Rand or Smith or Pilzer or the Bush/Cheney Administration. Let us hope that it is the Obama message.