by Ken Sehested
“Stingy spenders hold back growth.” So reads the title of a recent USA Today business section story reporting that “penny-pinching consumers tainted” otherwise robust economic indicators.
Is it a trivial matter to complain about such screamer headlines?
Think about it for a minute. This is how propaganda works—as the world of corrosive commerce, with its monetizing of all relationships, slowly eats away at many of our cherished traditional cultural values (including religious values). Commitments to financial modesty and consumptive simplicity, conscious resistance to gluttony of every sort, are being cast as obstacles to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The high priests of finance are troubled and suspect impiety: “The failure of consumers to splurge with their windfall from lower gasoline prices is confounding economists.”
Pecuniary heretics unite, to launch a revolt against the god of fiduciary responsibility—a financial legal provision requiring that profit trump all other values! However small the weight of your influence, lend it to the Proverb’s supplication:
“Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, 'Who is the Lord?' or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God" (Proverbs 30:8b-9).
©Ken Sehested @ prayer&politiks.org