re: #210 Pie-onist Overlord

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It’s more than that. As the article I linked to a couple of days ago noted, the people calling themselves conservatives regard capitalism as an ethical system, one that picks winners and losers.

However, cognitive linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio, author of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy,” told Salon there’s a very direct connection between social and economic conservatism, based on their moral outlook. Two things stand out about how conservatives talk about economy, Osorio said, based on several years of intensive observation and analysis. First is the “the tendency to compare it to something natural — a body or the weather or moving liquid,” she said. “But the other idea undergirding their worldview, and thus shaping perceptions of poverty, riches, inequality and desirable economic policy, is the idea that the economy exists for a specific purpose: to reward the good and punish the bad. It’s a moral arbiter; simply having great riches indicates you deserve them because the economy loves you the best. Thus, it follows that poor people deserve to be poor and we can know this because they’re poor.”

It’s, in my opinion, Calvinism dressed up in pseudo-economic language.

ETA: Oop. I just saw the picture and thought it was the original, non-satirical picture. My bad.

Point still stands though.