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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Losing Our Moral Compass in Pursuit of Profit, Efficiency

by Caroline Arnold
Published on Sunday, December 12, 2010 by the Record Courier (Ohio) & republished by
Commondreams.org


Recently, on a cold morning with a little snow fooling around in the bright air, I was chilled by this sentence in an AP news story:

"The idea isn't to just raise revenue, economists say, but finally to turn Americans into frugal health-care consumers by having them face the full costs of their medical decisions ("Tax Break on Employer Health Plans Targeted" Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, AP 11/29/10)

Oh, of course -- all Americans should face the full costs of their decisions to have broken bones, heart attacks, or sick children, right?

Even more chilling to me were the underlying assumptions that economists/technocrats decide what's best for everyone, and that it's just as important -- if not more important -- to turn Americans into tame consumers for the private sector as it is to raise revenues for the common good.

This led me to some further, chillier assumptions:

  • democracy and politics are messy and unmanageable and must be replaced by the disciplined professionalism of scientists, technicians and economists.
  • ordinary citizens lack the ability to deal with the "real world" of money, brokerage, extraction of natural resources,wars, weapons and political power, and must be kept out of decisions about them or even knowing about them. 
  • our most important moral obligation to our children is to not leave them any debts.
  • to be secure we must pre-emptively kill terrorists, would-be terrorists, might-be terrorists, geriatric terrorists, stone-throwing juvenile terrorists.....
  • the economically sound is the morally right.

In his recent book "The Logic of Discipline", Alasdair Roberts proposes that democracy has been undermined by financial liberalization, free trade and a globalized economy. Technicians, economists and managers, he observes, are very skeptical of the ability of democracy to make "the right decisions" for financial stability and security, and they doubt that ordinary politicians and voters are ‘disciplined' enough to make sensible policy decisions.

Before joining Senator John Glenn's Washington staff in 1985, Caroline Arnold (csarnold@neo.rr.com) was a teacher, founded a small business, and served three terms on the Kent (OH) Board of Education. In retirement she sits on the boards of Kent Social Services and Family & Community Services in Portage County and is principal cellist of the Stow Symphony.
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