How can the party that worships at the feet of capitalism not understand their patron saint.

This post from Rortybomb got me thinking about the how the fundamental assumptions of people determine the immediate goals that they pursue. I have dealt with semi-related topics in the last few posts on libertarians, dealing mainly with how their belief in the unequivocal nature of the right to personal liberty leads to all sorts of undesirable places. It seems important here to clarify what I mean by fundamental. What I am driving at is the basic ideas that a person (or a group of people) think are of paramount importance in the working of a economic, political, or social system. So equality before the law seems to be a principle that all people believe to be a necessity in structuring a society. This idea is of the kind that influences how people think about the way in which we structure the legal system, or even the services that we provide to our rural residents. In short it colors broad swatches of the intellectual debate that determines what our actual policies are going to be.

Which brings me to who the Republican party thinks is the engine of our capitalist economy. I think it is at this point general knowledge that Republicans have bought into the Randian notion that the capitalist and innovators at the top of our economic pyramid are that driving force, that they are both necessary and (probably) sufficient to the continued growth of our shared prosperity. The post at Rortybomb makes the point that this directly contradicts the analysis of Adam Smith, who saw the cooperation of huge amounts of people as being the means by which capitalist societies were able to provide material comforts for their members. The author of that post does a great job quickly laying out Smiths position as opposed to that advocated by Rand and Carnegie, and which has subsequently been appropriated by the Republican party. I want to leave that issue aside and focus on how this fundamental assumption has led to many of the current troubles of the country.

It seems to me that the assumption that the first principle when dealing with economic, political and social policy concerns should be their affect on the 'job creators' is the underlying cause of many of the seemingly intractable problems that are plaguing our society. I think you can see this dynamic at work in the debates over the deficit, welfare programs, or even campaign finance reform. To use the deficit as an example, in arguing against any a tax increases on the already affluent, Republicans make the case that tax the rich and business would penalize the job creators, thereby harming the interests of society in general. As an aside I take the recent Republican fulminations against Obama's payroll tax cut as evidence that they are only concerned with the tax rates of the wealthy. Now it has to be said that if the job creators are who really power our continued economic growth and progress than it logically follows that their interests and well being should be given added weight when determining public policy. So while in broad outline The Republican party and I share the same basic goals, continued economic growth and prosperity for a ever growing share of the worlds population, the mechanisms that we would choose to achieve those goals are decidedly different because the assumptions about what drives said growth are so far apart. Because starting from a different principle can lead to such different places it is worth asking whether or not the underlying assumptions are accurate representations of reality.

Now seems an opportune time to acknowledge that the interests of those at the top of the pyramid should be considered when debating policy, while maintaining that living, working, and material conditions of the vast majority of people is the factor that should be given the most consideration. At this point I am going to leave this empirical question of whose fundamental assumptions are closer to reality for another day, though I will leave you with the question of why the patron saint of capitalism has such a different take than the party that is supposed to revere him.