Personal Liberties and Free Markets

American "libertarianism" has, at the heart of it, one single catastrophic flaw.  That flaw is this: the assumption that personal liberty and free markets are not in tension with one another.

Completely free markets...meaning societies in which there are no boundaries imposed on capital or the marketplace...are conducive only to the concentration of capital.  Capital, as a social proxy for power, acts precisely the same way all social power operates.  It is drawn to itself, as those with power are empowered to amass more power.  This is true politically, and it is also true economically. 

The two spheres are and have always been interwoven, as wealth supports the state, and the state protects wealth.  

What neither inherently protects is your personal liberty.  Without the clear boundaries established by disciplined adherence to constitutional law, the state can easily become a monster.  Without a constitutionally ordered state to counterbalance its unfettered venality and avarice, the market is no less dangerous.  Slavery and indenture are both, after all, the state of being owned, and that's economic.

In a market unresponsive to any purpose higher than itself, there is no motivation other than profit maximization, and profit maximization ultimately enslaves us all.  This is particularly true as the marketplace seizes control of information ecosystems, because then capital can create not just products and services, but our desire for those products and services.  

"Marketing," after all, is no different from propaganda.  Both seek to shape the minds of a malleable populace, because it's often easier to make people want your product than to make a product people want.

And Lord, do we now "want" some strange things.

Like, say, thousand dollar phones.  Or sixty thousand dollar SUVs.  Or health care that is cripplingly, overwhelmingly, inhumanly expensive.  We placidly accept the expectation that life must be spent forever in debt, that debt is the norm, that paying interest to a corporation for the privilege of buying groceries is just the way things work.

These assumptions are imposed because they are a profitable imposition.  They are also markers of a disordered market, where enlightened self-interest has been intentionally blinded.  

An unregulated and disordered market is the collective equivalent of an unregulated and disordered mind.  If driven by solipsistic self-interest alone, it is no more free than a soul trapped in megalomania or paranoid delusion.  

And we are trapped in that cage with it.

The Cake is a Lie

The markets are soaring lately, riding high after high and crest after crest.

In point of fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average now stands at record levels.  It's a bumper crop!  A jackpot!   A total economic turnaround from those disastrous days after the 2008 crash!  Look!  Stock values have more than doubled, with the Dow going from sixty-eight hundred and change to over fourteen thousand.

Things are awesome!

Only, they aren't.   The Dow, as even a math-challenged minister such as myself can easily observe, does not empirically measure the health of an economy.  It measures one thing: A price-weighted index of 30 stocks in United States dollars.  

What we know is that these stocks now cost nearly twice...in United States dollars...what they did in 2008.  Are there significantly more jobs?  No, not particularly.  Is there a revolutionary new force driving real economic growth?  No, there's not.  Job growth has been meh.  Incomes for all but the very top are flat, and the average household income has been falling.

What there has been a great deal more of over the last five years is money.  For five years, we've been printing money...in the form of the Fed buying bonds.   We've been doing that to the tune of $85 billion dollars every single month.

And so the exuberance on the part of Wall Street traders at the continuing surge of stock prices seems peculiar to me.  Would we be celebrating if the price of milk had doubled?  Or the price of gas?  Why should we similarly celebrate if the price of entry into the Capitalist Cornucopia has doubled?

In the absence of any significant increase in production or improvement in the real economy, what appears to have happened is a simple absorption.  We've printed money, and that money has gone directly into capital markets.  Given the absence of material growth, dollars are worth less, which means the number of dollars required to purchase stock is higher.

I cannot see any other logical way to interpret what I'm seeing.

Meaning that taste in your mouth is not cake.

Debt

As I was growing up, my folks whispered a subversive, un-American, anti-capitalist idea in my ear. Not only did they teach it to me, they lived it out. That dangerous idea: don't live beyond your means.

Outside of having mortgage debt, they took out no loans. Period. Ever. They always spent less than they made. That meant a humble but functional home. That meant cars that were purchased not as status symbols, but as ways to get around. Those cars were often purchased used, and they were purchased with cash on the barrel head. That meant clothes that...well...might have been in fashion 15 years ago, when they were bought. College for the kids? That was saved for. Home improvements? Paid in cash, after saving for years.

A credit card was a dangerous thing. It...meaning the one and only card you allowed yourself to have...was to be paid off every month, and watched as warily as a bobcat in a nursery.

As best we can, my family has tried as best we can to stick to this approach to financing our lives, while all the while feeling a bit strange. It's just so out of touch with the way the world works. This is not the way we good capitalist consumers have been taught to live. Nor, quite frankly, is it the way that our governments do business.

That is, I'm convinced, why the world increasingly finds itself in such a financial fustercluck. When you can live large, charge after charge, eventually, inescapably, you'll drive yourself into personal ruin. When housing speculation feeds off of the false abundance of irrational subprime lending, suddenly homes are driven out of reach of the average family. When those loans fail, as they inevitably must, our entire financial system totters. When entire nations decide to live high on the borrowed hog of their sovereign debt, the system shakes even more. That shaking hasn't even really begun, kids. Endemic debt has this way of destabilizing societies, be they the ancient Hebrew people or our newfound global community. That's the reason debt was viewed so warily by the Torah. A society that allows indebtedness to run rampant..at any level...will eventually tear itself to pieces.

We conveniently forget, even in this putatively "Christian" nation, that our sacred texts never ever no not never teach that the false abundance of debt-driven living is something worth seeking.

Do not be a man who strikes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts; if you lack the means to pay, your very bed will be snatched from under you.

I can't imagine that our comfy bed of debt will still be under us, as a nation, for very much longer.

Save the Whales

Every Sunday on my way to my bitty church, I pass my local up-and-coming independent mini-mega church. They've been running a sermon series for the last month or so on heaven, and the question posed on their signage today was a simple one: ANIMALS IN HEAVEN?

The purpose of such a question is rather simple...will there be a doggie door on our heavenly mansion for Mr. Barky? Anyone who has a pet to which they've had deep emotional ties really doesn't want there to be any question: Captain Fluffykins will be there forever and ever.

Of course, I tend to find that way of understanding heaven a bit simplistic, but when you get right down to it, I think...sure. Yes. Of course animals are there. If you're OCD about scriptural references, it straight up says so in Ecclesiastes. Not the cheeriest of prooftexts, but hey, it answers the question.

Animals, of course, tend to be simpler creatures, and one could argue that they're considerably less aware than we are of their surroundings. As beings that have less self-awareness, they aren't prone to the type of destructive self-seeking that defines human sin...and therefore they'd just automatically get in. That, I would think, would be the theological position that a thoughtful pastor consoling a churchgoer at the loss of a companion animal might provide if pressed.

There's a deeper fuddle to this, though. Not all animals lack self-awareness. Higher primates like chimps and orangutans and gorillas clearly demonstrate memory, awareness of themselves as selves, and are even capable of grasping and expressing certain forms of human language. They can show compassion towards one another, and are also capable of intense brutality. But can they sin? If they have self-awareness, the answer would seem to be yes. If so...then are they somehow inherently unsaved according to the evangelical rubric? Koko the Gorilla never signed that she had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, after all.

A solid counterargument would be that even the brightest of the "lesser creatures" are like children, and thus not fully culpable for their actions. But...what about creatures that aren't meaningfully "lesser" than many folks who've responded to an altar call. Elephants have fairly sophisticated infrasonic language, and have brains and vocabularies that meet or exceed those of most reality TV stars. Cetaceans are clearly our equals, although the forms and structures of their intellects are very different from ours. That doesn't matter, though.

If they have sentience, and they have will, and they are aware...then from the basic underlying assumptions of orthodox theology, they should be capable of sin. But they don't know nor can they know Jesus, as they're not able to read the tracts we earnestly press up against the glass wall at SeaWorld.

Does this mean they're inherently damned? Or just that the contemporary evangelical understanding of sin and Christ's purpose isn't quite adequate to the task of explaining it's way through this conundrum?

I'm Rather Fond of Trebuchets, Actually

There was a fascinating editorial in the WaPo this last week written by Robert J. Samuelson, a conservative economic commentator whose writings are always thought provoking. It was a description of what he perceives as an assault on the foundation of American capitalism, entitled "Capitalism Under Siege."

Most of the article referred back to the work of eminent economist Joseph Schumpeter, who felt that capitalism contained within itself the seeds of it's own destruction. In addition to it's dynamism, which we enjoy during the boom times but that seriously bugs us during the busts, capitalism's creation of excess resources establishes:

...an oppositional class of "intellectuals" who would nurture popular discontents and disparage values (self-enrichment, risk-taking) necessary for economic success.

As I read this, I found myself agreeing, but thinking that perhaps it isn't just "intellectuals" who are the problem for capitalism. The threat to the core values of capitalism does not just come from leftist professors on campus and busybodies who need to get out there and have a real job.

It comes, I think, from Christianity as well. Working diligently is a Christian virtue, sure. So is being willing to take risks and not cling to the things that this world values. Complacence and indolence wouldn't have gotten the apostles very far.

But self-enrichment? Not really. Christian faith has very little use for self enrichment. If it happens to us as a collateral result of our hard work, then...well...you have more responsibilities in terms of how those resources are used. As a goal towards which we orient ourselves, though, it is rather explicitly and repeatedly rejected by our Lord and Savior.

It's why folks like Ayn Rand despised Jesus people...because within His life and teachings, there lies something very very incompatible with the competitive culture of self that is at the beating heart of the free market.