Patrick: An elderly friend of mine came by today to complain about how Obama is ruining our economy, and how if only the government would leave businesses alone and not tax them, everything would be alright. I reminded him that Bush and Cheney were in power for 8 years, leading up to the present economic woes. Obama's been in office for about 6 weeks. Blaming him for our problems seems a bit disingenuous to say the least. Republicans have chanted their mantra about "less regulation" for years, and that has opened the doors to all kinds of problems. Why? Because of greed. And it isn't only individual sin that is a problem; corporations can sin too. Here's an article from a former free-market thinker who realized that corporations sometimes need to be controlled by good regulations.
From "First Things":
Evangelicals and Economics: Reflections of a Conservative Protestant
By Hunter Baker
"Several months ago, I heard a story that forced me to give more careful thought to my views on the built-in morality of the market. A large airline on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002 asked employees to make substantial wage concessions. They agreed. The airline returned to profitability, and management acknowledged that it had the workers to thank, but in the subsequent years, instead of restoring the wage concessions, it awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives...
"The story jarred me. Somehow, I had never applied my Christian conception of a sinful world to corporate behavior..."
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