After the economic crash of 2008 South Park ran an episode I found particularly hilarious. It involved the various denizens of the town treating the economy as if it was some remote and peevish god who, in a fit of petulance, smote the people for some imagined transgression.
The episode was funny for the same reason anything succeeds in being funny: it was basically the truth.
Three thousand years ago the most mysterious matters to us were agriculture and medicine; we had little understanding of either and yet were entirely dependent upon them for our lives, and so naturally they became a matter of magical thinking, flawed quasi-religious dogma, and flat-out superstition.
Three thousand years later we’ve mastered agriculture to the point of being able to create square watermelons and medicine to the point of being able to re-wire genes for blue eyes. It’s now economics we approach with blind faith in dogma, superstitious awe, and unreasoned terror.
We got into the mess we’re in now some fifty years ago by thinking just this way: that the economy was some peevish deity to be placated with sacrifices and supplicated with feverish, half-baked doctrine held to fanatically.
Don’t believe me? Strike up a conversation with an adherent of so-called free market economics.
If you listen carefully, you’ll notice a weird resemblance between what you’re hearing and the ravings of a religious fanatic: an insistence on magical “proof” of certain axioms, an insistence on propositions that defy logic, and that staple of all true believers: the more you point out holes in their theories, the more vehemently they deny them.
Free-market economics (sometimes called corporate libertarianism) consists of the following beliefs:
That commerce never needs to be regulated because anyone committing a crime within said marketplace will magically be booted out by “market forces;”
That all generation of profit – absolutely all generation of profit – automatically benefits everyone;
That government should always and automatically do what business wants because the interests of business are always identical to the interests of the people;
And that economic growth can, in and of itself, solve all of mankind’s problems.
You can sit with a devotee of this theory for hours and point to hundreds of examples that disprove this theory, and they won’t budge; it’s like arguing about the divinity of the Virgin Mary with a devout Catholic.
If you listen very hard, the undercurrent you’ll hear in their voices is a shrill it has to be true! It must be true! I need it to be true!
I have come to believe their need for it to be true is based on a simple premise: they don’t know what else to do except believe this. It has to be true because admitting that it isn’t involves having no idea whatsoever what we should do instead. And that is even scarier than clinging to something provably untrue.
That covers people who actually believe in this bizarre theory. They’re egged on and supported, of course, by people who have little interest in economic theory but a major interest in getting rich under the comfortable provisions of the theory.
The simple truth is, any economy – local, national, or global – is not some remote deity or autonomous construct or even a thing, at all; it’s simply the aggregate of the actions of every person involved in it as they affect money, business, employment, and consumption. All an economy is is the combined actions of a group of people.
I think it’s this we most don’t want to understand; that the economy is simply us, and how we behave about money.
Few subjects are so fraught with emotion as our relationship with money. Not only is money survival – in the form of food, housing, medical care, utilities, and clothing – it’s comfort and security and safety and status and so many other things dear to the human heart. And I think we are all privately uneasy with this truth, that life is and must be in part about acquiring these things, and acquiring them is so often an ugly business.
There are so many things we do not yet understand about economics. To what extent is it a zero sum game – meaning that for one person to win, is it always necessary for someone to lose? (And if it is, does that mean human life is destined to always be a savage jungle, that we are all morally doomed?)
Are we awful for wanting the things we want? Does our desire for things mean we are defective in spirit?
We know, deep down inside, that those at the top live lives we’ve dreamed of; we know that if we lived in such palatial quarters, waited on hand and foot, we’d fight like hell to keep what we had. We know our dreams and they are seldom of a sunlit glade or a homespun cottage; they are so often of wealth, power, and fame.
Thus when we examine any matter of this thing called an economy we do not wish to see it all that clearly; we are blinded and paralyzed by our own complicity in what’s wrong, shamed by our own desires, and both defiant and guilty when we examine the matter of what causes what.
And this needs to change.
Next 