Right-Wingers in Panic Mode

Perhaps a nationwide recognition that leaving everything up to the

free market does not benefit everyone will help conservative Christians shed their
misconceptions.

“We
are, finally, having a national discussion about inequality, and right-wing
commentators are in full panic mode,” wrote Paul Krugman on Friday, in his
New York Times column.

Well good, it’s about time. “The lion's share of the
benefits from recent economic growth has gone to a small, wealthy minority,
while most Americans were worse off in 2005 than they were in 2000,” he
explained. Perhaps a nationwide recognition that leaving everything up to the
free market does not benefit everyone – hurting the less fortunate at
the expense of the rich – will help conservative Christians shed their
misconceptions.

In
response to my posts expressing surprise at how one could be Christian and
vote against policies to alleviate poverty, readers have responded that it’s
not that all conservative Christians don’t care about the poor, or simply ignore
all those verses in the New Testament about poverty. It’s just that many of
them disagree with me about how to best help the poor.

Indeed,
as disappointed as I am that most of my Christian classmates, if politically
active at all, are huge Bush supporters, I am nevertheless moved by their
compassion for the less fortunate. Many of these GOP-supporters spend nights
volunteering at the homeless shelter; others spent their spring vacations in Louisiana and Mississippi
to help manage the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

And
yet, many of these conservative Christians don’t like paying taxes because they
generally distrust the government, perceiving it to be bureaucratic and
inefficient. Many are ideologically opposed to “forcing” people to give up
their hard-earned money in order to help others; they prefer private charities as
vehicles to aid the less fortunate. To these critics of government aid, I can
only repeat Jim Wallis’ argument that, “All the private charities in the
country put together could not feed all the hungry people!” He makes a worthy
point, that private charities simply lack the infrastructure and resources to
provide enough aid to the poor, if all government agencies charged with this
duty were dismantled.

I’ve
had a harder time countering the other common rejoinder from not only GOP Christians,
but economics majors: leave the free market to be guided by the Invisible Hand,
and everyone will benefit. I often point out that the free market doesn’t
provide public goods such as public education, roads, highways, police forces
and national defense, so taxes are part of the price we pay for living in a
free society.

Fine,
they’ll concede, but aside from providing those things, we ought to leave the
economy alone as much as possible, in order to maximize national growth and
prosperity. This is when they start reminding me what we learned in first-year
economics: that if you give people in the highest income brackets their tax
money back, they’ll start spending their income on goods and services which
stimulates the economy and eventually, their spendings will “trickle down,” and
make everyone else better off. Not being an economics major, I was often unable
to respond intelligently to this claim, other than to say that it just seems
intuitively impossible that everyone in society benefits from a tax cut to the
richest 1 or 2 percent.

Until
now. There it is, in fine print in the New York Times: “Now the rich are
getting richer, but most working Americans are losing ground.” So there. How
does the free market fix that?