The Myth of "Prosperity"
It's not all about the Benjamins
One of the defining features of Leftist ideology is the search for the blessings of Christian civilization without having to pay the inconvenient prices of obedience and virtue demanded by Christian doctrine. Like the old thought experiment of the fish philosopher who doesn’t know what “wet” is — that’s simply the nature of the world around it and it can’t imagine anything different — all the ideas they see as good and blame Western, Christian civilization for oppressing and limiting have their roots uniquely in Western, Christian civilization.
For example, Karl Marx’s famous dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” that lies at the heart of Communist philosophy? It comes directly from the New Testament:
And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. … and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.
And yet Marx disparaged religion as “the opiate of the masses” and sought to build a system by which a lifestyle of the highest levels of Christian virtue could be built without its foundation. We see the same pattern again and again in the modern Left: the ideas that they scream about our society being deficient in — good treatment of women, of the poor, care for the sick and injured, the liberation of slaves, and so on — all of these are ideas that simply did not exist outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The idea that was so clear to Thomas Jefferson that he wrote that it was a “self-evident” truth, that all men are created equal? That’s not obvious at all to most people. What’s self-evident to anyone with eyes is that some people are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more beautiful, more intelligent, and so on. “All men” are obviously created highly unequal in virtually every way! And most civilizations throughout history have acknowledged this and never looked any deeper. But in a culture suffused with Protestant values, the notion that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) creates a transcendent bond, an equality of all mankind as children of God so fundamental that even a famously impious “freethinker” such as Jefferson saw it as self-evident.
The futility of prosperity-first policies
So it should hardly come as a surprise to see the same fallacious thinking being pushed by the Leftist infiltrators into conservatism, the libertarians. How often have you heard so-called “economic conservatives” berate us for trying to get things right on “unpopular” social ideas when we should be pushing for what really matters: policies to encourage prosperity? (Or “flourishing,” an alternative term that seems to be gaining a lot of traction lately.)
Like other forms of modern Leftist thought, libertarianism got started in the early-to-mid 20th century, gained traction in the 60s, and became ascendant in and after the 1970s, which is exactly when America’s financial soundness began to fall apart. Have a look at this chart from CRFB:
See that point in the early 70s, when the red line stopped going steadily down and the blue line stopped being mostly flat and started to really take off? That was President Nixon doing away with the Bretton Woods system, the “gold standard” that kept some semblance of fiscal responsibility in the finances of our nation and of the developed world in general. Since then, many claim that we’ve been living in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity, but the numbers tell a different story: we’ve been living in a time of unprecedented debt.
That prosperity isn’t ours; we’ve been borrowing to pay for it, both as a nation and as individuals. Here’s consumer debt over a similar time period. (Source: Wikipedia.)
And as far too many people learned in 2008, that which you “own” on debt isn’t really yours; it’s all too easy for someone else to take it away from you if anything goes wrong. This suggests that our “unprecedented prosperity” since the 70s is more illusory than real.
Has our standard of living gone up? Yes, clearly it has. As a child of the 80s who’s seen the world around him transform in so many ways, many of them (but definitely not all) for the better, I could never deny that. But like the proverbial Foolish Man and his cherished beachfront property, far too much of it is built upon an unsteady foundation that can and does leave it pulled out from under people at the slightest sign of trouble.
In the approximately 30 years from the end of the Great Depression to the end of Bretton Woods, America faced zero major financial crises. In the 30 years following (1971-2001) we saw two, the S&L crisis in the 80s and the .com bubble crash in the early 2000s, followed soon after by the Great Recession in the late 2000s. Clearly, policies of seeking after prosperity have failed to consistently produce it!
Back to cause and effect
Why is prosperity such a failure as a cause to fight for? Because it’s an effect, not a cause at all. True, stable prosperity is downwind from morality and virtue, and always has been. The idea is made clear in scriptural writings. The relationship is made clear in the Old Testament:
Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.
— Deuteronomy 29:9Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest.
Likewise, the aforementioned chapter 4 of Acts says that as a result of the early Christians’ righteous living, “neither was there any among them that lacked.”
Similar ideas are found in other religious texts. In the Book of Mormon, the idea that “inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land” is repeated in multiple places, and even the Quran gets in on the same theme. “O you who believe! Do not feed on usury, compounded over and over, and fear God, so that you may prosper.” All across the vast breadth of the Abrahamic religious tradition, we are told that prosperity is a result of living right, rather than an end unto itself.
But why would this be? Why can’t it be as straightforward as “try to work towards good ends and you’ll reach them with diligent effort”? I think it’s because, as W. C. Fields memorably wrote, “if a thing is worth having, it's worth cheating for.” When people seek to take shortcuts, to achieve prosperity for its own sake, it undermines the stability of that prosperity. Just look at the information that came to light in the wake of the 2008 housing bubble bursting, about just how many of the people losing their homes over bad mortgages never should have been issued those mortgages in the first place. They lied about their creditworthiness, the banks were all too eager to accept (and even actively encourage!) said lies, and a lot of fake prosperity ensued, followed by a lot of very real suffering.
Meanwhile, we’re told that “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10), that living a virtuous life is predicated on love for your neighbor. People who love their neighbor won’t try to cheat them. They won’t try to take from them wealth and status that they haven’t earned; they would prefer to knowingly give unearned wealth and status to those around them, to help build them up. And when you have a community full of people who believe this way, and act according to those beliefs, they shore their community up and keep each other from falling through the cracks, establishing a solid foundation for each other. Remember that in the aforementioned parable of the Wise Man and the Foolish Man, both of them were subjected to the same storms and flooding. But the one who had a solid foundation was able to withstand them, while the guy who built on fashionable illusions got wiped out.
If we want to gain prosperity in our society, we should not do it through policies that seek after prosperity. Rather, we should seek after the precursors to true prosperity: virtue, morality, and love. We cannot gain the fruits of righteous living without paying the cost of actually living righteously. We can pretend to, and get a pretty convincing illusion for a while, but when the floods and the storms of life inevitably arrive, the truth always comes out.
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