No Sacred Cows Please (Except Real Ones)

There is no human endeavor, no matter how potentially noble, beneficent, inspiring or at least in some way useful that is beyond corruption and misuse. There are athletes who take steroids. There are politicians who have been bought and sold. There are high profile actors who are callous womanizers. There are popular musicians debauched on hard drugs. There are unfair tax laws that benefit only the wealthy. There is unfair favoritism of the economic elite in government. There are unworthy people protected by various organizations. There are religious leaders who are complete hypocrites who bilk their congregations. There is irresponsible use of natural resources. For every good person and good effort there is its opposite in every sphere of human experience. In a democracy, a free press and a free academy are necessary to reversing the encroachments of corrupt influences through factual exposure, intelligent criticism and constructive analysis to restore morally and ethically responsible practices, means of accountability and regulatory monitoring to protect the vulnerable from harm. Now we have political pundits calling upon the American public to accept a new notion: that the art and practice of capitalism should be above criticism, correction and regulation. To be clear now, capitalism is just a means of acquiring the material goods to generate productive economic activity. It is a potential strategy of survival, success and social utility. Nothing more, nothing less. It can serve the good of society, and it can be just as easily twisted to serve the ill, just like a rigged carnival game. There is nothing inherently virtuous or indelibly perfect about the art of capitalism. It's just a social tool. That's it. And it has a long history of both broadly beneficial achievement and pervasively abusive exploitation. It attracts humans good and bad in its varied aims, like all human forms of activity. Therefore watchdogs and laws are necessary to prevent it from doing the worst kinds of potential harm, such as an aggregation of too much wealth in too few hands, which inevitably has a corrupting influence and bad effects for the laboring masses. If we shut off our brains, and shut off the power of government to protect regular people from the powerful on this issue, then we are saying that capitalism is more important than democracy. If we say capitalism can do no wrong, then we are endowing it with the perfection which God alone possesses. In other words we are falling into a trap we were warned of long ago in metaphorical terms by both the Jewish and Christian religious testaments: do not make a god of Mammon (a pagan deity of wealth) lest you destroy all that the one true God (who teaches us love, compassion, truth and social justice) intends for us and our moral well being. A perspective based on either spirituality or reason arrive at the same conclusion: there is nothing so pure that it is above constructive criticism and even legal correction. We are a species endowed with the power of both reason and conscience, and therefore given a mission to rise above savagery. We should not excuse, ignore or sanctify anything that falls away from the promise of that endowment of higher purpose, whether it came by biological evolution, the will of God, or both. In democracy there are no sacred cows, in the metaphorical sense. But you are free to hold a real member of the bovine species as sacred from the slaughter, if you are so religiously or ethically inclined. Human nature is a mixed bag, and its checkered nature should never be blindly ignored, in either politics, entrepreneurial practice or education. There are criminal minds among the rich (wealth has nothing inherently to do with legitimacy) as well as among those below them. Capitalism can be a good thing, but only if it is held in equal partnership with the principles of democracy.