Re: the Market as God

["W.R. Needham" <rneedham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You might also like to look at:

THE GLOBAL MARKET DOCTRINE: A STUDY IN FUNDAMENTALIST THEOLOGY
John McMurtry, College of Arts, Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph


http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/ECON/needhdata/McMurtry-2.html

and, also by McMutry::

How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of
Private Property and Money

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/ECON/needhdata/McMurtry-1.html

Bob Needham


>A leftist Jesuit recommended the following to me:
>
>(For the whole thing, see
>http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm)
>
>The Market as God:
>
>Living the New Dispensation
>
>by Harvey Cox
>
>A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going
>on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my
>lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to
>expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have
>to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to
>discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
>
>  Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà
>vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of
>Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the
>Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind
>descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of
>the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the
>inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put
>them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall,
>and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only
>thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive
>temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and,
>ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose
>of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian
>economies. Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
>
>The East Asians' troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical
>deviation from free-market orthodoxy -- they were practitioners of "crony
>capitalism," of "ethnocapitalism," of "statist capitalism," not of the one
>true faith. The East Asian financial panics, the Russian debt repudiations,
>the Brazilian economic turmoil, and the U.S. stock market's $1.5 trillion
>"correction" momentarily shook belief in the new dispensation. But faith is
>strengthened by adversity, and the Market God is emerging renewed from its
>trial by financial "contagion." Since the argument from design no longer
>proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity -- believed in
>despite the evidence. Alan Greenspan vindicated this tempered faith in
>testimony before Congress last October. A leading hedge fund had just lost
>billions of dollars, shaking market confidence and precipitating calls for
>new federal regulation. Greenspan, usually Delphic in his comments, was
>decisive. He believed that regulation would only impede these markets, and
>that they should continue to be self-regulated. True faith, Saint Paul
>tells us, is the evidence of things unseen.
>
> From ATLANTIC MONTHLY, March 1999.
>
>Harvey Cox is a professor of divinity at Harvard University.
>His most recent book is Fire From Heaven (1994).
>
>Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine


»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»
Dr. W.R. Needham
Director, Canadian Studies
St Paul's United College
University of Waterloo, N2L 3G5
Tel:    519-885-1460 ext 209
Fax:    519-885-6364
web: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/ECON/faculty/needham.html

***************************************************************************