We Do Not Have to Live Like Rats Fighting For Scraps

Perhaps like me, you also appreciate how The Onion publishes a recurring article about recurring mass shootings, entitled "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." In honor of the Big Despicable Bill that Republicans have pushed through Congress, and also because today a friend tipped me off to fix broken URL link in the article below (first posted in response to a related bill in 2019) I decided to follow The Onion's lead and move this article back to the top of my feed. It may not be news that there are no credible arguments—whether based in religious traditions, more general morality, or concern for our common good—to defend the sort of looting encoded in this bill. But still this bears repeating and further reflection.

I've imagined this blog, in part, as a place to gather and repost—when timely and useful—some of my earlier short pieces that are scattered to the winds. Recently the news cycle prompted me to recall one such essay, which I wrote for Dharma World in 2013, about neoliberal economic logic, religious values, and the common good.

hulsether_greed.pdf

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I am more proud of this essay than a strong majority of other things I’ve written, despite the slim-to-negative respect it garnered me as “academic productivity." Whether it found its audience when it came out—or can find it today—is unclear. In any case, when Dharma World asked me if I had anything useful to say on the topic of greed, I decided to sow this seed.

Sadly the article remains as relevant today as it has ever been. Here’s a teaser:

A few months ago, listening to the radio during a long car trip, I became fed up with news reports about Republican politicians who were blocking basic social priorities such as education and health care. They even refused to pay the interest on the debt from wars they had enthusiastically started! And all for the goal of reducing taxes on wealthy people. I wanted to respond, but how?

Of course, I realized that these politicians’ ostensible goals were “freedom” and reducing deficits. They presupposed a form of trickle-down theory in which growth produced by unregulated capitalism supposedly benefits everyone in the long run, no matter how much it skews wealth and undermines the social and ecological matrix on which it depends.

Nevertheless, it seemed unlikely that their future vision would prove true, and meanwhile it is clear that it severely disadvantages a majority of people–perhaps not every single person in the 99 percent, but close enough to make such shorthand serviceable.

It also seemed clear that the priorities of Republicans (and, to be fair, also many Democrats negotiating with them)–priorities such as wars, prisons, and agricultural subsidies for senators’ home states–were neither being demonized as “government spending” nor put on a chopping block. That designation was reserved for benefits important to ordinary people, such as education and health care, which were targeted for privatizing or downsizing to the maximum degree that these politicians could manage. In their vision, people in future generations would be worthy to have quality education only if they could afford private schools, to live without fear of bankruptcy only if they could afford health insurance and had no preexisting conditions, to live in safe neighborhoods only if they could afford a house in a gated community, and so on. They could achieve these things if they worked hard in a worthy career–and if they failed, it was their own fault.

Moreover, the strategy to pay for any remaining public investments was some combination of passing the debt to our children and shifting the burden to the most regressive attainable options, such as payroll and sales taxes, as well as building for-profit prisons, charging fees for government services, privatizing resources such as universities and parklands, and ending deductions for mortgage interest. Such policies would channel more money toward deserving investors to maximize growth.

Thus the ability to take pride in a common good, to imagine collective efforts to address social problems, or to notice a range of experiences that are not reducible to pursuing material advantage – even the ability to conceptualize “need” or “success” as something other than maximizing individual profit – all disappeared into a logic of individuals’ acting out “human nature” and “economic law” by pursuing their self-interest.

In short: human nature is greed, and greed is good.

The article continues, turning toward reflection about how to respond. It is relatively short. If you want to read more, click above for the download. Or click here to the whole issue of which this is a part. In the latter case you will need to scroll down to me.