No one would think of me as a conservative, and I am not happy that Hobby Lobby won. But I see a great deal of truth in the paragraph below. For the same reason, I cannot possibly be a libertarian. This economy—like the one it displaced—is not neutral; it is based on certain assumptions about human nature and implicitly teaches its participants to model their own behavior on those assumptions. The anthropology at the base of our modern economy is that of rationally calculating, utility maximizing individuals who have learned to understand both human labor and resources as commodities, who seek always to calculate economic activity in terms of price (hence, are always called “consumers”) in ways that obscure any connections between what is purchased and its implications for our communities. We have thoroughly accepted the separation of markets from social, moral, and religious structures—indeed, the only way that we generally speak of “morality” in economics is that which is provided after the fact not by communities and the people within them, but only by the now-distant State through regulation and redistribution.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 21:02:53 +0000