How Faith in Capitalism as Sacred Tradition Works

As near as I can tell, our culture works by saying, “What is okay for a giant corporation is a contemptible sin for a poor person.”

So, for instance, if I, as a private citizen, were to break into your home and because I thought you might have something I want, the police would arrest me.  But when the Apple Corporation, as a private corporation, wants to send goons to break into your home because they think you have something they want, the police help them.

Similarly, when a poor person at an OWS protest says, “I am an imcompetent sponge who expects you to pay my debts for school” people (rightly) heap contempt on him.  When a giant corporate CEO says, “I am an incompetent sponge who drove my company into the ground and now expects a bailout and a golden parachute of $37,000,000” we give it to him and point to the OWS ninny as the real problem.

And likewise, when a poor person tries to sell her baby like a piece of meat, the MSM covers this story with shock. But when a giant rich evilcorp wants to chop up a lot of babies and sell them as meat for embryonic stem cell research, people who oppose this are denounced as enemies of science by the MSM (rich corps all), despite the fact that cures resulting from ESCR currently stand at an impressive ZERO, while adult stem cell research has yielded all sort of happy results.

The reverence, pity, tenderness and compassion American culture has for the immensely powerful and corrupt is one of the strangest spectacles of our civic life. It is one thing to see rich corps funding their own agitprop in their defense.  It is quite another to see the massive amount of Stockholm Syndrome from people defending such corporations while they are in the very act of having their pockets picked by bailouts. Where Christian culture once taught us to lavish special concern on the alien, the orphan and the widow, we have very successfully instituted a culture that burns with weepy solicitude for the wealthy, arrogant, and grasping.  We retain our sense of sin (and rightly so) when a thug knocks over a 7-11.  But we somehow can’t seem to hold on to it when immensely powerful and rich people rob us of billions as a reward for being Too Big to Fail.  We tremble at the word “redistribution of wealth” instead of having the common sense of Teddy Roosevelt who realized that a Standard Oil that is too big to fail is too big–and busted up the trusts.  We fail to understand that the problem with capitalism is that it tends to create too few capitalists–not to mention the fact that (as we see above) vast wealth tends to act as a buffer between men and their increasingly great sins.