To Joe Carter and his blogpost praising Adam Smith’s theories. This appeared in the Acton blog.
One more thing about Adam Smith that should be mentioned: he is often misunderstood by many conservatives who promote his views. The invisible hand idea is one such area where Smith was misunderstood. The invisible existed in a context of national interests. And what Smith taught about the invisible hand has been blown away by today's global neoliberalism.
And under-understood is Smith's teachings on self-interest because Smith, if I have correctly read his interpreters, reduced all motivation to self-interest. But such goes against the Scriptures as well as the examples we have seen in the lives of individuals we have known (see http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/08/capitalism-gospel-of-love-george-stanciu.html ).
Something else that conservative promoters of Smith seem to have missed is that from almost the very beginning of our nation up until FDR, our nation's economy didn't abide by Smith's free trade. Our government employed protectionism in order to give our infant industries time to grow in order to become competitive and beyond. Such a success story does not imply a carte-blanche support for protectionism. It does show that a carte-blanche support for free trade is not merited.
There are other misperceptions as well but the above will suffice.
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August 28
To Eva Brann and her blogpost review of Martha Nussbaum’s book that speaks against the for-profit view of education. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative Blog.
What seems to be missing from the review on the book about the de-emphasis on humanities in education is what seems to be an inverse relationship between emphasis on the humanities in education and materialism. The more the humanities are removed from education, the more educational success is measured in terms materialistic criteria for its graduates: income, purchasing power, accumulated wealth, technological advances, etc. It isn't that such criteria have no place in society; It is that being human means more than just what wealth we have accumulated and what things we own. Thus, the more society restricts measuring itself to just materialistic measurements, the more our relationships between individuals and between groups are relegated to oblivion.
Why does materialism reign when teaching the humanities is minimized or eliminated? It is because the more we use the obtaining of material goods for the measurements of success, the more we succumb to the maximizing of profits ethic. And we should note that that ethic is a cannibalizing one that devours all other ethics and values that get in its way. For example, breaking the law is not longer unethical if doing so helps one get largest ROI. In fact, then breaking the law becomes an ethical requirement so that one can maximize one's own profits. And those profits are material goods only and show no regard for how maximizing one's own profits may hurt others.
We should note that in a Capitalistic economic system, there is already a an overemphasis on materialism and thus on the maximization of profits ethic. Removing the non-material aspects of what it means to be human from education, such as what we see with the removal of the humanities, removes part of our humanity from education. And this filtering out of the humanities is being done in both not-for-profit and for-profit educational institutions. Such is the result of reducing education so that it fits entirely in the business model.
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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on why economic transactions do not have to be based on a zero-sum game. This appeared in the Acton blog
There are several problems with Carter's approach here. First, wealth creation depends more on the supply of resources than on the number of wants. And that makes moot the idea that humans have an 'unlimited number of wants.' What should be focused on is the number of resources we have vs the number of wants we can meet.
Another problem is that denying the existence of the zero-sum game in economics seems to be a return to the reason why people attempted to build the tower of Babel: It was to reach heaven or God. It was an attempt to create a utopia. And God prohibited it lest people's pride, based on what they have accomplished, led them to believe that they did not need to depend on God.
But perhaps the biggest concern of the writer is that of rationalizing extreme self-interest. For maximizing personal profits becomes morally acceptable when there is no significant cost to be borne by others. But neither the facts on the ground nor reason support the existence of extreme self-interest. Here, we will define extreme self-interest as the interest one has for themselves alone. Extreme self-interest ignores the growing wealth disparity in the world. Extreme self-interest ignores the exploitation of workers and other people whose labor created the wealth in the first place but were not rewarded based on the wealth they created. Extreme self-interest ignores the environmental costs of maximizing personal profits.
The conservative utopian dream is that one can exercise extreme self-interest without being morally responsible to share with others what they have harvested..But something else should be said. That the kind of system that Carter, the author of the article advocates has a very llimited view of economics. Carter defines economics as:
as the science of purposeful individual action in an attempt to satisfy an unlimited number of wants with a limited set of means.
But Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Kneef, has noted that the Greek root for the word 'economics implies a holistic approach to the study. A holistic approach would encorporate more than just what the individual is free to produce, but also how a given system causes people to relate to each other. Without including how people relate to each other in the study of economics, we develop a view of economics that is as dangerously materialistic, though in a different way, as Marxism's materialism is. And when we add to that the idea that economics revolves around the individual, we develop a view of economics that is modeled after Cain's famous rhetorical question to God after God inquired about Able's disappearance:
Am I my brother's keeper?
One must ask if Carter's view of economics show that his loyalties side with a particular form of materialism rather than with God's Word. For the NT Scriptures are clear from Lazarus and the Rich Man to James as he rebukes the wealthy for exploiting workers, one cannot work and live as just an individual whose moral obligations to help the poor are solely determined by one's own good will. And we should note how in Church history, that sometimes when the Church sided with wealth and power, it suffered attacks and persecution for having ignored those in need.
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