Re: What's the Matter with America?---Short Answer
- From: "htd" <herothatdied@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 28 Jul 2005 16:56:09 -0700
The Other wrote:
> "htd" <herothatdied@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Do you ever read these folks? The really up-to-their-eyeballs-in-it
> > Christian Righters have been told for over a decade now that there
> > is no way to improve the economic condition of the United States
> > without improving its moral condition. There are a substantial
> > number of people in this country whose thinking runs along the lines
> > of:
> >
> > ... If an end can be put to abortions, feminism, environmentalism
> > and gay sex then God will be pleased and America will be enriched;
> > nothing else will improve the condition of working stiffs, and
> > anyone who doesn't understand this just doesn't _get it_.
>
> But doesn't that contradict the whole _What's the Matter With Kansas_
> thesis (I haven't read the book)? You're saying that the "really
> up-to-their-eyeballs-in-it Christian Righters" have *not* sacrificed
> economic issues for cultural issues. They believe that cultural
> issues *are*, ultimately, economic issues. In other words, they just
> subscribe to a different economic theory than Paul Krugman.
If that's the case, they're also subscribing to a different economic
theory than Adam Smith, or anybody else since the development of
economics, did. Which is to say that it's difficult to keep calling it
economics once you get to the point that you're arguing that the
driving force behind economics, micro and macro, has nothing to do with
money supplies or resource availability or demand curves or anything
else, and is the sole function of Divine Will.
What I was trying to argue, and here Thomas Frank & I are in, I think,
concurrence, is that social conservatives aren't gone into some kind of
medieval-like aesceticism. Social conservatives do get upset about
their economic situation, but (and I have been observing this for years
in Christian publications and discourse) they are _bombarded_ with
arguments that are designed to convince the reader of the futility of
any effort to stimulate the economy any way other than through
trickle-down taxation schemes; with admonishments that to ask a
multi-millionaire to pay more in taxes than a $40Kpa family of four
does is not only futile, but it is also begrudging your "widow's
pence", it is the politics of envy and class warfare, etc; and with -
sometimes blatant - assurances of personal enrichment through virtuous
behavior (also sometimes blatantly defined as "tithing" - I have heard
a preacher tell stories of regular tithers receiving vacations and
speedboats in the manner of manna, as though his collection plate was
some species of really good JayCees raffle).
.
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