Economic Penance

My emotive response to the ongoing financial crisis centers on the fear and uncertainty it has produced with respect to employment, retirement, investments, and the next generation's future. I understand these negative feelings. I'm less certain about the concomitant feelings of Schadenfreude, Capitalist Pigs! I seem to be at war with myself.

I suspect that most of those in the upper and lower extremes of class would be puzzled about my apparent paradox. After all, I was raised in an academic environment (father a professor and Dean at Bethel Seminary). I'm almost rich (Obama's viewpoint). I have an advanced degree. I've been a state worker with some influence, a research fellow and an adjunct professor. I drive a Volvo and my wife and I haven't had any credit card debt for over twenty years.

The message from the top: "Quit complaining, you knew what you were getting into, help us restore the natural order." The view from the bottom: "Rub the scales off your eyes and help us create a more just society."

I've clearly benefited from the era of trickle-down economics that began when a scholar drew a graph on the back of a cocktail napkin and showed it to Rumsfeld and Cheney. I've received a hefty portion of the leftovers and spoils of a culture that worships The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Trump, Gordon Gecko, hedge fund managers, and all things CNBC rather than CBS. Why am I so unsettled?

At first I focused on the financial crisis itself watching central banks all over the world trying to build a makeshift and unproven levee system with trillions of dollars of printed money in a desperate attempt to preserve the status quo and keep the waters at bay. Let's hope their engineering skills are greater than the Army Corps of Engineers.

Blaming all this on the power elite and watching them suffer was kind of fun for a while. I suffered a little but I wasn't on the Titanic. The problem with getting joy from the suffering of others is that it's hollow.

As if waking from a dream, I slowly became aware of my responsibility in the crisis. I've been a puppet of the ruling class getting drunk on the opiate of consumption happily living under the delusion that I've "made it" because of a few trinkets thrown my way allowing me to occasionally think I'm one of them and not one of the masses. I willingly let myself be used to produce a world where the rich get disproportionately richer, the poor remain only slightly better off and I get just enough to be sated into submission. Mea culpa.

I should have known better. I'm an evangelical and I know Calvin. I'm also pretty familiar with economic philosophy. A few weeks ago I rummaged through several boxes in the basement and found Das Kapital (utopian treatises even fade and turn brittle over time, who knew?).

Man is totally depraved whether acting alone or in concert. None of us should be surprised that the edifices we build need regulation. Left alone as toddlers, we grab the stool in the kitchen to get into the cookie jar. Acting together we build Towers of Babel (the mortar of which is pride) on foundations of sand. When storms come our efforts are undermined by the rising waters resulting in a great crash (Matthew 7:24-27). We seem predestined to never learn this lesson. Someone could have made serious money creating the long-term contrarian Calvin Hedge Fund.

Marx predicted that two of the by-products of capitalism would be alienation and immiseration which when combined with other factors usher in a new era of socialism/communism. The widespread and intense negative reaction to the fiscal crisis may represent a tipping point. The era of massively disproportionate levels of compensation is no longer acceptable.

Animus is now alienation. Enough!! Non-super-rich citizens of the world unite!

The historicist method used by Marx to understand social development foresees the natural fall of capitalism and the rise of socialism/communism. Evidence that the transition is occurring ... unemployment, crashing profits, despair, misery, nationalization, class warfare...

Milton Friedman pointed out that the sole criteria to judge the validity of an economic theory is its ability to predict. The philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, posited that the best way to assess the merit of a theory was not through verification but falsification. What do the events of the last few months reveal? Despite Popper's refutation of the predictive ability of historicism, Marxist thought may still have utility.

Is there another invisible appendage guiding history to its predetermined end? What can be said about other economic schools of thought? A few rational conjectures appear to be in danger of refutation.

Calvinist theology and Marxist philosophy appear to be useful in the effort to understand and interpret the current fiscal crisis. As the event unfolded I became aware of the dissonance within. What do I need to confess? The idealism I had in my early twenties to love my neighbor and help the poor and oppressed was sold for thirty shekels of silver. The material assets I've accumulated were built on the tacit support of a system that benefits the few by exploiting the many.

It's not really my fault you know. I can't help it that I was born into a world dominated by original sin. I wasn't the one that took the bite out of the apple.

Stephen V. Anderson lives in a suburb just west of Albany, New York. He's a part-time stay at home dad and occasional adjunct professor in criminal justice and public administration at SUNY-Albany, where he's a doctoral student in public administration.

By Stephen V. Anderson |  February 5, 2009; 10:46 AM ET
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