Free Market Religion and the Fear of Giving an Inch

Religious fundamentalists are desperately afraid of nuance or ambiguity.  They fiercely protect their beliefs by refusing to acknowledge anything that might begin the erosion process.  They instinctively recognize that the slightest chink in their armor of faith will precipitate, like the legendary hole in the dike, a disastrous sweeping away of their certainty and their fragile worldview.

For example, they claim biblical inerrancy even in the face of absurd contradictions such as the biblical acceptance of slavery and the long-discarded biblical punishments for blasphemy or violating the sabbath.  They refuse to accept scientific certainties about the geological age of the earth or the evolution of the human species.  Since the time of Galileo (and no doubt well before that in less historically publicized efforts), religious zealots have fought a rearguard battle against reason, science, enlightenment and logic.

A similar battle is being waged today by free market zealots against any efforts by the government to rectify income and wealth inequalities.  Any reasonable person, viewing the dramatic trends over the last 30 years, would have to admit that income and wealth have skewed dangerously toward a small percentage of the world’s citizens.  This trend is particularly evident in the USA.  Incomes and wealth for the bottom 2/3 of workers have stagnated as the upper class has become preposterously rich.

The efforts to address this imbalance center on a variety of taxation proposals, both corporate and individual.  There is no cry to abandon capitalism, to institute pure socialism or communism, or even to radically redistribute income. The measures proposed seek to obtain some portion of corporate profits and the income of the wealthy to fund much needed infrastructure projects, to combat climate effects, and to provide a more stable base for working families.

But free market zealots cling stubbornly to the mantra that the free market must be protected from any government manipulation and that the magical invisible hand will somehow guide the economy toward a happy and more equitable future.  Like their theological counterparts, they are fearful that any concession will bring about a total collapse of their carefully constructed house of cards.

And so, they trot out the classic counterarguments:  that this is class warfare, that the current efforts are expressions of envy of the ‘successful’ and rich.  They label it big government overreach and the road to socialism. 

If they would give an inch or two to allow modest efforts to test how we can improve the current polarization, then in the long run they would probably preserve a reasonable role for free market advocates.  But like the religious fundamentalists, who are unwittingly contributing to the rapid decline of all religious institutions, the free market curmudgeons will bring about their own demise with their stubborn refusal to budge at all in the face of obvious and imminent danger.