The Market God and the Other God

Senator Charles Grassley (R) from Iowa is attempting to close a loophole in the tax code that allows hunters on safari to write off the entire cost of their hunting trip as long as they gift their trophies to a museum. Grassley likened this loophole to someone flying to Paris, buying a sweater, donating it to the Salvation Army, then writing off the entire trip to Paris. (NY Times Editorial Page, Friday, Dec. 2, 2005).

According to the editorial, hundreds of glass-eyed trophies gather dust in storage facilities across the U.S., presumably in those precincts that service the special needs of the over privileged; museums have no use for the offerings as they are neither rare, nor of any scientific value: most of these "wild beasts" were raised in private game farms expressly for postmodern slaughter by quasi-Teddy Roosevelts. The editorial did not mention if the great white hunter’s gun bearers refer to their masters as “Bwana.” Neither did it mention if the hunters referred to their gun bearers as “Caddy.”

This is an example of the kind of entrepreneurialism that our business / corporative elite practices, an entrepreneurialism redolent of the grand old days of the robber barons when Thorstein Veblen christened this kind of activity "conspicuous consumption.” This kind of consumption is supported by a type of entrepreneurialism sometimes referred to as "sucking at the government teat."

This practice takes two basic forms, the first involving the bribing of government representatives (like "Duke" Cunningham most recently) to get lucrative no bid government contracts, and/or the opening up loopholes in the tax code so that one's masters and oneself can save government all the trouble of collecting it. This is one of the ways that business and government are working together to make government more cost effective. I use the terms business and government interchangeably here. In this case, a loophole was opened so the terminal pleasures of the hunt could remain unsullied by any expenditure other than the lives of the faux "wild beasts." This maneuver must be counted as a real "win win" for the brutalist classes. Not only are the empowered to kill farm animals posing as wild beasts, they let the average taxpayer pay for it all.

This kind of crony capitalism would be taken by strict neo-liberal free marketers as a corruption of the "free market," and rightly so. In this ideology, a truly free market would restrict government to the role of the "night watchman" state, and would not intefere in the production of the miraculous goods provided by that free market. The free market is thus raised up by the neo-liberal free marketers who reign in Washington as the absolute arbiter of good and bad, and quite remarkably, good and evil, too.

In this simple model of economic value in which all values are essentially economic values, whatever people buy is good; whatever they do not buy is bad. The number of items bought or unbought is also seen as indicative of goodness and badness. This ideology is, of course, is an apologia for the status quo. Those who wield the most economic and political power now are not about to give up their plutocratic prerogatives for some hare-brained free market economic theory.

But there's also another ideology that supports the notion of an infallible Market God. It is called Christian fundamentalism, many sects of which embrace the Calvinist inspired belief that to succeed in the marketplace is to succeed as a child of God. This mechanism is described in detail in BETWEEN JESUS AND THE MARKET: The Emotions that Matter in Right Wing America by Linda Kintz.

Of the funds it provides to faith-based initiatives, this current government / business combination favors those Fundamentalist churches which best enact and support the free market creed. These churches in turn offer to the poor stern lectures intended to install in them the discipline necessary to transform one's self into an entrepreneurial capitalist, (as well as a religious bigot).

In these faith-based initiatives, this powerful ideological combination – the dualistic divinity of the Market God and the Other God -- redeems social parasites with parables that prove the moral virtues of capitalism according to Ms. Kintz. Presumably this instruction includes the injunction that one must find in oneself the moral discipline required to ascend to the status of billionaire Bwana.