Is Ethical Economics Socialism?

By: JaNelle B.


Maybe I’ve been watching C-Span for too long in search of an unbiased view of the American political system but have you noticed how the Republican Party / GOP been slowly subverting Christianity into some kind of “White-Anglo-Saxon-Only” ideology? I mean whenever a Republican Party on Capitol Hill tries to show the negative aspect of President Obama’s latest batch of “legislative proposals”, they end up sounding like Aryan Nation top brass of some Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While being unable to distinguish between fascism and socialism since the Reagan administration, have you noticed the GOP’s stance on the on-going economic crisis lately?

Back when I was very little, my uncle – an amateur stand-up comic – always used his somewhat bizarre wit as his well-worn material in providing solutions to life’s eternal problems. And he always manages to gets a laugh out of it. Like he used to say that Marxist-Leninist socialism wouldn’t have been such a problem if all the people are rich. It may be funny only the first time you hear it, but it did got me thinking lately. About how the “We are good Christians” Republican Party seeing a nation without poor people as a “socialist nation”. Are the Republican Party’s views on what passes for socialism has something to do with the on-going global economic crisis?

Most of my left-leaning economics professors have clung on to the viewpoint that the global economy – as it was shaped during the Reagan years – will only be profitable for Wall Street only when the disparity between the very rich and the very poor is at it’s widest. Add to that the way Reagan-era Republicans used to extol the virtues of the Protestant Work Ethic like it was part of the Ten Commandments. And you’ll start to harbor the impression that it is the Republican Party’s religious duty to keep sa substantial portion of the global population dirt poor. Or to keep the misery index of those who are working constantly high like what Michael Moore has always uncovered in his social justice in America-type exposés. But does it have to be always this way?

Many have praised Dr. Muhammad Yunu’s Banking for the Poor program and the host of microfinance and microcredit schemes modeled after it as a solution to the chronic poverty that plagues most of the developing countries around the world. And has passed various corporate social responsibility and ethical business governance checklists, so it is an ethical form of economics. It has been a runaway success because it allows the local poor to develop their own local knowledge to create a business enterprise that is well suited to their particular locale. And could give microfinance / microcredit clients better ability to adopt in our increasingly globalized economy because they have now access to a line of credit.

Microcredit and microfinance schemes had been recently criticized by their detractors as an ultra-subprime form of credit citing that the clients can’t possibly pay back the line of credit that is made available to them. Especially when they come from those developing countries where poverty is a common occurrence. But shouldn’t these poverty stricken people be given the chance to solve their own problems? After all, any rational person will always try to escape from poverty if given the chance.

Given the ease, in which scores of poor people in developing countries have manage to pull themselves out of poverty, microfinance and microcredit schemes have been criticized by some as a form of socialism. Though to me, maybe they’re just jealous because some people had managed to pull themselves out of poverty without experiencing the misery index that traditionally came with working in squalid conditions. Socialism or not, microfinance and microcredit schemes are the wave of the future due to the ethical nature of its economic structure.