Theological Journal – July 8 Economics: From Moral Theology to Autonomous Ideology

Some thoughts from Erich Fromm: "for the scholastic theologians, such economic categories as price and private property were part of moral theology...Through a number of steps eighteenth-century capitalism underwent a radical change: economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values. Indeed, the economic machine was supposed to be an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will. It was a system that ran by itself and according to its own laws. The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for [humanity]? but by the question: What is good for the growth of the system? One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the assumption that what was good for the growth of the system (or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the people. This construction was bolstered by an auxiliary construction: that the very qualities that the system required of human beings egotism, selfishness, and greed—were innate in human nature; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them." From To Have or to Be, 1976

When the Lt. Gov. of TX argues the elderly should be willing to die for “the economy” he reflects this bastardized understanding.