Outside Canada, writes Natural Security columnist Chris Wood, dangerous magical thinking — what he calls Old Testament Economics — “is increasingly being called out for its error by economists more based in reality … a Reformation is sweeping the ecclesiastical strongholds of market idolatry.” Within Canada, the reality accepted by a growing body of economists is dismissed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his “secular congregation” — and that should concern everyone, writes Wood. An excerpt of his new column, Kool-Aid Economics (subscription):
Canadians have been aware for some time that their Prime Minister subscribes to an arcane fundamentalist strain of Christianity. Being the polite and generally go-along types we are, we have quite properly left his faith between the man and his God. However, it is now evident that Canada’s P.M. is a credulous disciple of another not-so-fringe and much more dangerous faith, about which we have every right to be deeply concerned.
That cultic faith is Old Testament economics.
Stephen Harper is an acolyte of an especially purist strain of neo-liberalism, a pseudo-scientific theology replete with parables, miracles and catechisms of faith. It is to reliable modeling of reality roughly what witches and alchemists were to modern science. (Then again, Harper might welcome the parallel; he has spent most of his majority term metaphorically stoning Canada’s public scientists and burning their labs.)
Nonetheless, among this faith’s central tenets is the idea that to make a profitable omelette, some eggs just gotta break. Or, as Harper himself has intoned, justifying his refusal to defend his country’s environment or the global climate: “No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.”
It’s the black and white thinking of dogma, like good and evil, believer or heretic. Choose one: a paycheque or, you know, air. We have a tragic history of this illusion in my country, where the rotten-egg stench of a pulp mill — often a town’s only reason for being — was colloquially described as ‘the smell of money’ … log in (subscription required*) to read Kool-Aid Economics.
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