Open for Business?

CNN reports that Obama has declared that “The government will be open for business.”

I can guess at what Obama means by saying that. I also think that the idea of the government being open for business is very descriptive of what politics is most often about: business, the blessed (capitalist) economy; the system that requires consumers more than persons, the homoeconomicus.

At this point, critics may point out that businesses are made of people. “Without business,” someone might object, “people would suffer and die and you would be unemployed.”

This is true.

But it is also false. The question I want to raise here is not so simplistic. The question becomes whether business is the tail or the dog. If the government is “open” for the primary sake of the tail, things are out of order.

Business is important, but it is only important in service to the whole person, all persons. A government that is open for business, risks ignoring the tertiary—at most—value of business, the secondary value of the human person, and the primary value of God.

In other words: A government that is open for business may indeed be quite closed to human persons and to God.

If this is true, then our government has been closed all along.