Can't Buy Me Love, Sojourners Magazine/June 2004

This article is well worth the read. Dionne is arguing that the very language of the marketplace has so permeated our discussions that we run the risk of incorporating the free market values for everything--including things that it is ill-suited to address. This seems to me a continuation (or better articulation) of my previous argument that the Church, by so accepting market capitalism, had lost the ability to act morally and prophetically.

A few highlights: Dionne makes the point that many of have made--that criticism of capitalism seems threatening even as capitalism has no real challenge any longer. to challenge it seems to present a rejection of core American values instead of embracing those very values.

Even to make arguments critical of the market of the sort I just offered is seen as risky. After all, has not the market proven itself to be an efficient creator of wealth and a shrewd allocator of resources? Doesn’t the death of communism prove that capitalism is the only system that works?

The paradox is that it’s precisely because the market has triumphed that it is now in such need of serious criticism. Because no one with any likelihood of taking power wants to upend capitalism, criticisms of the system are as safe as ever—and also more urgent. What needs to be opposed is not the market itself, but claims that the market can do things that it can’t.

As the thoughtful moderate writer Matthew Miller has pointed out, even though the economy grew by 40 percent in the decade between 1992 and 2002, the persistence of deep social problems proved that economic growth is not an elixir. "How can it be," Miller went on, "when even after this boom, we have 40 million people without health insurance, 15 million family members of full-time workers in poverty, and schools that are as desperate as ever?"

The other point he makes very well is that once you have basically endorsed the "all is fair in capitalism" kind of value system, then your discussion of morality is distorted.

The public domain of "moral" talk is narrowed, usually to the personal and the sexual. But morality speaks to the social as well as the personal. The social, in turn, affects the personal.

This speaks to part of my deep frustration with the Christian church and Bush v. Clinton. Clinton's sins were intensely personal and intensely sexual. Yeah, I know, R, he committed perjury. And that is a very serious crime. But when Christians across the nation discussed his sins, they were more about Lewinsky than his "what is is" statement. Contrast those with Bush's sins. His personal sin is one of the past--he quit drinking. But his social and economic sins are much broader and by themselves, effected far more people--investors, land holders, etc. As I have argued elsewhere, his campaign's actions in SC are arguably as immoral as we have seen in any recent time. To play on a region's racism, while at the same time slandering someone is despicable. But if our measuring stick for morality is limited to the sexual and the personal, that is easily written off as just politics.

Anyway, this is well worth the read.