Imagine yourself the owner of an aluminum ladder company. What do you do once every home owner in the United States owns a ladder? You go after renters. But what happens when that market is saturated? You better hope the ladders fail and need to be replaced. Or you buy another company, like one that makes cookies, and hope for profits on that product. (Or so I imagine how business people think.)
But imagine also hearing the Brit Hume commentary about abortion and the Planned Parenthood videos. You learn there that 55 million human lives have been taken through abortion. And you begin to think of all those customers who might have needed an aluminum ladder.
What got me thinking along these free-market lines was Rod Dreher’s posting of an American creed that goes out of its way to deride capitalism:
We believe in one Market,
Objective and Free,
maker of assets and security,
of all that is prosperous and possible.
We believe in the one true force, the Invisible Hand,
the Logic of the Market,
eternally co-existing with the Market,
regent of riches, assurance of efficiency,
trumpeter of technology, power behind politics.
Through him all transactions are made.
For us and for our prosperity
he gives value to all money
and enables all commerce;
by the power of the American Dream
he becomes incarnate in the hearts of all free men.
For our sake he guarantees the equitability of all commerce,
he re-assures all the laborers,
emboldens all the entrepreneurs,
and casts aside all the idle.
He ensures all debts will ultimately be repaid.
He is revealed in glory in America but his kingdom has no end nor boundary.
We believe in the American Dream, the hope and giver of the life abundant,
who proceeds from the Market and who with the Invisible Hand is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through Adam Smith and his economists.
We believe in one holy and universal Spirit of Growth.
We acknowledge the cost and risk of our choices.
We look for the extension of credit,
and the affluent life that is certain to come. Amen.
Dreher’s friend, the one who wrote the creed, explains that “consumerism and its underlying philosophy is as big of a cultural hurdle to serious Christian’s life as liberal sexual norms.”
It can be. But why isn’t consumerism also a friend of the unborn when you recognize how many potential consumers have been eliminated from the check-out line?
Old Life 