Sunday 31 July 2011

Tea Party Theology and Economics

There was an interesting article in today's WaPo about the Tea Party and the challenges that John Boehner faces in working with them. I found a short story at the end of the article telling. It describes a meeting at a chapel of three South Carolina Tea Party Republican congressmen:

At one point, Duncan said, Mulvaney picked up a Bible and read a verse from Proverbs 22: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”
“It’s telling me to really be bold, to really fight for structural changes,” Duncan said.
“Mulvaney snapped the Bible closed. And I said, ‘Guys, that’s all I need to see,’ ” Duncan said. “Tim said, ‘Yep.’ And we stood up and walked out.”

I found it fascinating. It's one thing to be engaging economists from the Chicago school of economics in discussions over Laffer curves and the like, at least we're all presupposing relevance of data and empiricism. But how does one reason with and negotiate with men who reject context and economic theory and reality in favour of simplistic readings of 14 word aphorisms written a few thousand years ago. "That's all I need to see". Pretty much says it all. I guess maybe the Democrats need to just dig into the book of Proverbs to fight back on this one. Personally, this reminds me of Prov 26.9.

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