Praying Along with Ronnie

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Praying Along with Ronnie Some things have changed in Washington, but God is still in residence Not Jimmy Carter's God, to be sure He was so busy worrying about Jimmy's soul that He lost track of the economy Every time prices or unemployment took a jump, Jimmy would don the old hair shirt and call on his fellow countrymen to repent God came to know Jimmy Carter's soul so intimately that He gave the election to Ronald Reagan Now nothing stands in the way of the salvation of Jimmy Carter, borne for four years but not to be borne again Ronald Reagan's God, for His part, has shown no particular interest in the soul of Jimmy Carter What moves Him is the marketplace The faith of the Reagan church in the marketplace or the free enterprise system or simply the United States is fierce Prosperity would reign forever were it not for those sinfully alluring foreign ideologies whistling and shimmying all over the place With God devoting so much time and attention to bestowing blessings upon this land, no wonder the rest of the woi Id is consigned to hungei, oppression and high mortality rates Look at the newspaper photographs All those tough-skinned neo 01 antique conservative businessmen and politicians and apparatchiks assembled in and around the new Cabinet like hustlers at a prayer meeting, singing the praises of the Lord before they get to dig into the turkey dinner Do His bidding and your rewards will surely appear Our new leaders are driven by faith that the Unseen Hand guiding men's economic destimes is in fact His Hand, once released from the knots and snarls of sinning bureaucracy, it will shower bounty upon all worthy investors Aren't they themselves proof of that9 Hasn't the truth been revealed in their own lucrative lives9 Can't they demonstrate by net worth how worthy they are in God's Eye9 Are they mixing up God and Mammon9 Maybe so—but then Mammon has been getting a bad shake for years in the Leftie-controlled media Jimmy Carter's God never had much time for the American economy, preoccupied as He was with the desperate condition ot Jimmy's soul Not so burdened, Ronald Reagan's God even has time to pondei the great question ot whether abortion is an act ot icdenip-tion or murder as He woi ks on the ta\ cut Nowadays, Ciod snainc, like a telly bean upon the Presidential tongue, is popped in to add zip to the Presidential thought processes If only God could accompany the new President to his press conferences, the answers might be more flavorful True Believers In economics, as in religion, the truth comes in many guises, the only constant is the 100 per cent certainty with which it is advanced by whatever denomination happens to hold the pulpit At the moment the supply-siders are entrenched and conversions are coming in at a prosperous rate Out there, beyond the tax cuts and the budget cuts, lies salvation There will be guns and butter, well, a little less butter for some on food stamps but lots of guns There will be gobs of oil for those who can pay for it, not to mention a friendly regime in El Salvador Happy are they who do the Lord's work Listen to George Gilder, whose text is Wealth and Poverty "Faith in man, faith in the future, faith in the rising returns of giving, faith in the mutual benefits of trade, faith in the providence of God are all essential to successful capitalism All are necessary to sustain the spirit of work and enterprise against the setbacks and frustrations it inevitably meets in a fallen world, to inspire trust and cooperation m an economy where they will often be betrayed, to encourage the forgoing of present pleasures in the name of a future that mav well go up in smoke, to promote risk and initiative in a world where the rewards all vanish unless others join the game In order to give without assurance of return, in order to save without the certainty ol future value, in ordertovvork beyond the requirements ot theiob.onehastohaveconlidencem a higher morality, a law ot compensations beyond the immediate and districting struggles ot existence \iuen, vv c ai c all supply -sulci s now \ level ot enthusiasm equal to that ot high churchmen expatiating upon the divine right of kings is today employed in teaching that it is harder for a poor man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is to shove a missile through the eye of a needle Blessed are the rich, brother, for they don't stand in welfare lines The GodoftheKeynesianshasfailed Some God' He could not stand up to an oil cartel Most Americans, whatever the church of their choice, are sensible enough to take a miracle where they can get it, and a truly zealous preacher has a way of bowling over even doubting Thomases Who knows, maybe those fellows are nght No point being stiff necked about it If some of the budget cuts prove cruel, why that may be a sign that in time they will prove kind At the very least, somebody is preaching something besides self-redemption Most people would much rather be comfortable than redeemed Maybe faith can move the inflation curve An axiom about doctrines that defy proof, from transubstantiation to psychoanalysis, is that they tend to be advanced most passionately by persons with a proprietary interest in the matter So, too, m economics—which, as MIT economist Lester Thurow reminds us, is a zero-sum game that divides society into winners and losers—people have a way of hunkering down with the truths that serve their own well being If you doubt this, try to persuade an auto worker that he will be better off in the long run without import quotas, or a farmer that price supports are holding back his initiative The commandment, Thou Shalt Believe What It Is Most Convement to Believe, applies in government and out, and on every level It applies to the Defense Department as to the Veterans Administration, to the purveyors of Equal Opportumty as to the purveyors of sugared cereals, to bankrupt corporations as to corrupt labor unions, to regulatory agencies that do too much regulating as to those that do none at all It is followed by, Thou Shalt Not Give Up a Jot or Tittle of What Thou Hast and Shall Hang Onto It With Might and Mam The supply-siders speak for those who intend to do the supplying Failed Gods For along time , socialists seemed to be fired by a purer faith than capitalists But the appeal of socialism has cooled, largely because the socialist preachers, so presumptuous as to promise heaven on earth, have not delivered Moreover, their cause has been tarnished by bully boys who, masquerading behind grand old socialist slogans, have been busy creating hells on earth wherever they land, competing with their foes on the right for the quantities of misery they can spread about and the quantities of power they can keep for themselves Whatever your opinion of your local Chamber of Commerce, it never ran any torture chambers The religion of the free market is again evoking the enthusiasm that it en-joyed before the Great Depression A couple of generations was needed for the memory of that time to fade and for the doctrines of William McKinley to stir the national soul again For 50 years, businessmen have been the butts of the intelligentsia There was even a moment m the 1960s when the nation was informed by advanced thinkers that the path to salvation could be mapped in the ghetto, where the inhibitions and neckties of the despised middle class had been shucked off and everybody was telling it like it was, etc But the prophets of the underclass life style have fallen mute, the prophets of equality of results are embattled, the virtues of thrift and enterprise and competition are again making the blood race The Rotanans are standing tall again A counterreformation is afoot Well, who knows7 Maybe preachers Jack Kemp and George Gilder and David Stockman are right, or at least no wronger than those who built churches of their own on the gospels of sociology and psychology Maybe economics, like other human endeavors, is powered by the spirit and not by the dollar, and an upsurge of morale is exactly the medicine the nation needs to get the old glands functioning again Oh, all nght, this faith like other drugs may have to be cut by a dab of reality as the veterans' lobby and the elderly and others of the elect are solaced by the day's elected ministers, but faith is nonetheless riding high The believers in the virtue of wealth and the saintliness of businessmen are out of the closet After a half century, Babbit is a good guy again So here we go on the crusade against demand-side economics, a new war against poverty, or against the poor, with new prophets and new texts and the old certainty that to him who invests shall be given the fruits of the earth In time, our latest prophets must be judged by their works, but for now they are carrying us along on their faith Hope flowers today even among skeptics We want to believe We need to believe We will believe Goodbye Jeremiah Hello, Norman Vincent Peale...