The Bill of Goods

mostly written by my brother, Ray Klassen at thepilgrimagecontinues.blogspot.com. A few additional points of my own added.)

In the 80's most of us Christians were duped by the political puppets of the aspiring super-rich who sold us a bill of goods as part of a covert class war that they have ultimately won. Amazingly this bill of goods is still out there being touted by any number of people who after all these years, still see each entry on this intellectual invoice as obvious and axiomatic, standing by the same liars who promoted it in the first place. I say 'liars' because there is ample evidence that many of these talking points were known to be false by the people that originated them. That we bought into their ideas amounts to a swindle and a con game, and makes one wonder when reparations will be possible. It's been on my mind recently to itemize these ideas and provide some refutation of each. I recognize that my refutation will not be enough for many to simply about face on any of them as each are exploiting a deeply ingrained part of our cultural outlook, such that when what relate what I have now found to be true, many will simply read, and angrily dismiss. But that is the way of such things. So here, in not any particular order, the conservative bill of goods:

1. Small government is better than big government. Not true. We need adequate government. When reducing government in size is an end in itself, regulatory measures are put at risk. These regulatory measures, ideally, are there largely to limit the ability of corporate interests to endanger the public in any number of ways. These are not "job killing regulations". They are "life-and-health saving regulations." An undersized government lacks the appropriate power to inspect and enforce regulations. Frustration over weak, bad, or even nonsensical regulations (government is a human institution) is not a justification for wantonly slashing government size. Achieving an under-regulated, under-enforced "small government" can only advantage the rich and give them a free hand to increase their advantage.

2. Government salaries as well funded support for the less able constitutes waste. Related to point one in that the focus is misdirected onto the money that it takes to fund even adequate government and likewise not true. Government waste as a whipping boy is a huge talking point of those who wish us to vote in such a way as to limit their tax bill. As long as we are focused on that, we remain unaware of the obscene amount of wealth that is being removed to stay into the bank accounts of those who have promoting this. Even worse is the vilifying of the needy, who need the support of government to live, judging them by a standard which requires them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. "if only they would just get a job," or some such. Exploitation of this natural judgmentalism in our culture is par for the course. But there is again ample evidence that when support is made available, that many of the less fortunate are able to get far enough ahead as to be self-sufficient. But even if they are not, as humans and citizens of our country it's right to always give them that chance.

3. Tax cuts are good for everybody. (related lies: trickle down economics, "rising tide lifts all boats") Manifestly not true. Tax cuts are a measure that only marginally benefits the low and middle wage earner and egregiously over-benefits the top earning brackets. What tax cuts do is produce a downward spiral supported by points one and two whereby government is now underfunded and we demand that it become leaner and certainly meaner. People that were supported in some way lose their support because that is now labelled 'waste.' This deplorable state is even legitimized with a semi-virtuous sounding name, that is, austerity. But austerity is really not the enforced necessary poverty it appears to be. What it is is when those who are advantaged by wealth are allowed to increase their advantage utilizing government, which should have been in place to defend us against them but has now become their weapon.

4. Labour unions are evil, are all about greed, etc. etc. Very wrong. Most of the labour laws that benefit us today, limiting work weeks to ensure that families can have a life together outside drudgery, adequate wages, extended health plans come to us via union bargaining and since they came to us, have been steadily chiselled away again by big business. Parallel to that has been a successful propaganda campaign to vilify the unions and tar them with any number of charges. Okay. its a fact is that the unions haven't been pure. Organized crime has had its grubby paws on some unions. But the current wage differential between labourer and brass is yet another indication that the class war being waged by the super-rich against the rest of us is going very well for them. We would be wise not to invoke Paul's advice to slaves (a gross misapplication) or other authoritarian claptrap when a union votes to strike. After the current covid-19 crisis is over, I guarantee the nurses will want a better deal, for instance and they will deserve it.

5. Free enterprise. Yes. Just the phrase itself is questionable. Money is based on, wait for it, money. This is something that we've learning about as society recently. It's called privilege. If you start with any sort of advantage you can increase your advantage. If you start with a disadvantage, you will likely not transcend it but probably end with a greater disadvantage. The ableist myth propagated by the idea of Free Enterprise is that anyone, through hard work and God-given smarts, can start any business and get ahead. I think it's an example of the true Scotsman fallacy (look it up) because as soon as you would limit that 'anyone' and demonstrate that many cannot and have indeed failed utterly, the proponent will, by circular reasoning claim that they simply didn't work hard enough. And while Christians argue amongst themselves in this manner, Big Enterprise happily continues to tell its success stories in this rubric pointing to themselves as proof that "free" enterprise works. But until the government levels the playing field through progressive taxation, redistributing the advantage, we would be wiser to refer to this idea rather as privileged enterprise.

6. We must enshrine Christian morality in law. Here's the one where the super-rich (such a moral group) lead us along by the nose. They know our hot-button issues -- our nostalgia for the way things were when "evils" by the score were invisible because they were underground. Drugs, abortion, Feminism, LGBT, etc.: The super-rich know that if they can get us riled up about these issues, we are distracted from their depredations.They know that if they can package up promises to bring back the past along with all of their other dastardly schemes, we'll vote for them.  Secondly each of these categories represent people whom the donor class want to silence. The war on drugs for example is evidentially a creation of the Nixon Republicans to silence the hippy and black left.  Outlawing abortion does nothing to help children live. The evidence is out there. Countries with liberal abortion laws have fewer abortions because co-incidentally they also have in place what actually helps children live, which is social support for the mothers of said children. But that eats into the profits treasured by the super rich. In the case of LGBT, it's not so much a political silencing but more of a divide and conquer tactic. While we waste our time wishing that this segment didn't exist thinking 'if only we could ban them through legislation,' we are distracted from finding the real culprit.

7. Capitalism is Christian. False. No governmental system is Christian. But capitalism more than any system has few friends in the pages of scripture. Where do I start? Try the book of James. Condemns in no uncertain terms the oppression of the rich and the obsequious toadying of the rich by the church. Look at the Jubilee economic system (maybe never really tried -- we don't know) presented in Leviticus. Every fifty years, a reset. A limiting, balancing factor par excellence. Look at all the prophet's words against oppression by the rich on the poor. Oh, but you say, that's not against capitalism, that's against oppression by the wealthy. Let's have a wake up call, if you please. Wealth is oppression. If I have, it means that someone else doesn't have. If I have more, then someone else has less. Sounds terrible, but this thing has a scale. Here in the middle class, the oppression factor is maybe not as egregious. But when we realize that half of the world's wealth is owned by 1% of its population, the oppression is extreme.

The wealth gained this way represents legalized tax evasion. Legalized through swindling the Christian white middle class vote through this bill of goods in the 1980's. We voted this way (tax cuts!) thinking it would do us good. but little gain has come our way and our ranks, which should have been swelled by many others entering the middle class as wages went up instead of down have been depleted and we are losing power to what are now not merely the wealthy but oligarchs, people who can and do outright buy political power to ever increase their hold on society. Democracy is dying. The legalized tax evasion has other dimensions too. The rich have access to tools the poor do not. Holding companies, offshore accounts, stocks, etc. etc. represent an upward spiral accessed through privilege. It's a thing crying out for a societal limiting factor. (something Judeo-Christian maybe, like the Jubilee year?) But no, we've eviscerated government so that they haven't the resources to control this. Maybe it's time to wake up.

Thus far my brother. I added a few more articles of my own.

8. The best way to run a health care system is at a profit. Yeah right. Just ask New York and California how constant cost-cutting is benefiting them today. An empty bed may not be a source of revenue, but it's a source of resiliency, something that a health care system needs at times like these. And for Canadians yearning for a private system, if the public system isn't working well enough, the answer isn't a private system, it's more funding -- with oversight, of course! to prevent waste and boon-doggling -- for the public system. And that funding needs to be generous enough to support something like the potential maximum need, even if you need to raise taxes on the richest to support it.

9: The right to keep and arm bears (not that one, nitwit, the other one: The right to keep and bear arms). "Clocks don't bring tomorrow, knives don't bring good news" as a Canadian singer once wrote, and a gun in the home is a bigger threat to its inhabitants than it is to any miscreant that might come around to bother you. Only someone with lawless intentions needs a machine gun, a semi-automatic or large clips.

And I can only echo and magnify the call to wake up. The current system is messed up in so many ways and we are complicit in the damage that has been done. Accepting these as a priori truths, never to be questioned has brought us to this pass and it's time to question all of them because all of them are lies; and lies or not, they are at odds with what it means to be a Christian in a society where the citizens are responsible to take part in government, the responsibility that falls to us with those freedoms that we love to be thankful for.