Quote:
Originally Posted by suzzer99
My Uber driver was playing some AM Radio show - seemed ok not overly political. Then they had a guest - Father Joseph or something (so you can trust him!) who had written a book about Social Security in the free market. Highlights:
- We need to stop this inter-generational warfare and kids need to think about taking care of their parents, after all they took care of you when you were little.
- It's so important to kill Obamacare because we can see how hard it is to end something like SS once the cat it out of the bag.
- Who's a better steward of your money than you - the govt? They don't care about you.
- We need to end the stigma around privatizing SS - just own that **** (paraphrased).
- Zero acknowledgement of course that a freaking pension is completely standard in a first world country - like SS is some grand failed US experiment that's never been tried before anywhere else.
The creepy thing was how softspoken he was. And you know you can trust him because he's a father. The hosts weren't challenging him either and at one point he praised them for the good work they're doing. So they must be big free market fans as well. The bubble is subtle and pervasive and insidious.
Maybe worth pointing out here that one of the huge factors that led to wholesale adoption of Christianity and organized religion writ large, for millennium dating back to Late Antiquity up until the advent of the modern welfare state -- is that the church often functioned as the supplier of communal material sustenance when people were left without. The church is where single mothers, the disabled, the unemployed, the elderly went to get food, and clothes, and services. Consider the impacts on ingratiating the church with the community, how it empowered the church and religious leaders. The community relied on it for spiritual AND material support.
Related, it was a distinct movement within Christianity in both the US and Europe from the late 19th century and early 20th century to return to individualism and First Principles and away from social action. Prior to that, institutions like Jesuit education and the Salvation Army were part and parcel of how Christians saw themselves in the community and acted in ways that married civic involvement with religious institutions. Instead evangelical revivalism and a retreat from social action became common. Many Christians now rue the time greatly -- it allowed the state to fill in the gaps in needs by selling welfare state programs, public schools, etc. and adulterated what many saw as a fundamental role of the church.
No clue if it's the angle where that dude you were listening to is coming from, and it's subtle, but there are lots of conservative Christians who want to dismantle the state as a way to re-empower what they see as the Church's rightful role as the central organism of civic life.
I don't agree with their ends, but their diagnosis and identification of the factors that played out are probably very likely spot on. If you see the church as fundamentally central to the community, and want to restore it to that place, dismantling the welfare state is the correct play.