John C. Bogle and John Edwards: separated at birth?

29 September 2007

John C. Bogle was on Bill Moyer's show last night. I had never heard
of him before and if he hadn't been on Moyer, I probably would have
ignored him. I mean, he's just another post-Pearl Harbor white guy
flogging his particular flavor of conservatism, if not the Zionist
Fascist agenda of the Project for the New American Century and it
bores me and pisses me off to listen to anyone spouting the party line
of the Karl Rove wing of the GOP, so why pay attention to another
minor league demagogue.

But then, because he was on Moyers, I listened to him for a while
and realized he is seeing exactly the same thing I'm seeing in the
price of gold and John Edwards is seeing in his Two Americas stump
speech and the only real difference is that his nomenclature is
superior to mine. For example, his description of the "financial
economy" pretty well frames my objections to hedge funds based on the
price of gold, especially when the Secretary of the Treasury and the
Chairman of the Federal Reserve are in collusion with the Roy Hunt-
*** Cheney wing of the GOP to boost the price of gold as close to
$1,000/oz as possible. I mean, if you add what I am seeing in terms
of the relationship with the price of gold and the liquidity crises it
is causing with what Bogle and Edwards are talking about, you have a
seamless field of political misbehavior connecting the dots composed
of stupid white male Bushie voters referred by Senator Clinton in 1993
as the vast right wing conspiracy. I mean, when conservatism is the
organizing principle of Karl Rove's political agenda, it isn't
inappropriate to group individuals according to their embrace of
conservatism or not embrace.

The fact of the matter is that MoveOn.org is generally embraced of
conservatism in an Opposite George kind of way. Conservatism is an
ideology and it is not sufficient to merely construct an argument
based on the opposite of conservatism, which is the nature of
Dialectical Materialism. Conservatism and capitalism are not the same
thing and constructing a contrarian argument will not create a system
superior to conservatism nor elevate it to the status of capitalism.

I infer from a very cursory googling that John C. Bogle has written a
book, "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" as a response to William
Greider's "The Soul of Capitalism". I can't remember exactly who
Greider is, but I think he is the person who wrote the article on
David Stockman that led to the famous "wood shed" episode during the
Boll Weevil Congress of the Reagan Administration. I don't know if
they see themselves as kindred spirits or antagonists. If the latter,
I'm aligned with Bogle.

According to the Google headline, Greider apparently makes the
argument that capitalism is a moral system of social behavior. I
agree that Adam Smith's capitalism is a moral study of aspects of the
sociology of the Bible. Adam Smith does not invent a thing, except a
nomenclature to describe the laws of economics as they are revealed
pretty blatantly along the entire arc of the narrative. The novelty
of Smith's observation arise from the revolution of the mind that
Newton was having during the Enlightenment.

To say that Adam Smith's capitalism is a moral system is redundant.
Conservatism is not capitalism. Conservatism hijacks the nomenclature
of economics by corrupting definitions to suit the deviant conventions
of fallacy and fantasy I associate with the laissez-faire, free
market, gold based business model of the Harvard Business School.
Conservatism as a system of thought requires the slavish memorization
an infinite variety of sound bites that must be assembled into a
running cliché that parrots the semantics of Karl Rove's perception of
reality, Mr. Thompson made flesh. As a system of moral values, the
organizing principle of conservatism as proposed by William F. Buckley
is defined by the 9 P's: Picking Parents Properly Prevents Post-Partum
Poverty, Penury and Probate. In contrast, Adam Smith's capitalism is
based on The Parable of the Talents: like they say: Jesus Saves, but
Moses Invests. Adam Smith explicates how this operates by abstracting
patterns of interpersonal communication as if the Holy Spirit doesn't
exist. The Economics are tools of metaphysics which allow us to
discuss elements of the human condition on essentially the same
mundane frame of reference as plumbing: *** flows down hill. You can
trace the cash flows in the economic ecology of Jesus just as clearly
as a virtual reality display of the human circulatory system. The
organizing principle of the economics of Jesus is Mercy and the engine
of change is generosity of spirit as manifest existentially of faith
in action and the economics of Jesus is a subordinate element to human
rights in the cosmic organization of the US Constitution.

John Bogle is all about the economics of Jesus. And the connection
between the economics of Jesus and the US Constitution is the Parable
of the Talents, which demonstrates the relationship of free enterprise
to economic development in an agrarian milieu. The same thing Smith
talks about. The Bible is all about bottom-up capitalism: the roof of
the Temple in Jerusalem was literally sheathed in gold from the
regional tourist trade of religious pilgrims. It's gleam could be
seen from below the horizon on sunny days. Jesus didn't object to
this. He objected to the religious powers-that-be interpreting the
Law for their personal profit in the same way conservatism interprets
economics to justify racism and class warfare as the Original Intent
of the Framers of the US Constitution.

Conservatism is the economics of the Anti-Christ.

And that's the truth.

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