WOLFISM XIII from Wolfie's blog

When I call Mammon forth into consciousness by uttering the great truth of macroscopic human relations – “Money makes the world go round” – I blaspheme, and wantonly.

For if money makes the world go round, then God does not. There is no right hand of Providence. There is only the left hand of commerce and finance. There is no heavenly grace. There is only supply and demand. And to Abraham’s three flocks of bleating sheep, this is blasphemy most foul.

Furthermore – and this is a more subtle point – if money makes the world go round, then neither the rise of the capitalists nor the rise of the proletariat has the final claim on history’s trajectory, for the two are the heads and tails of the same coin (a particularly apt metaphor). Money is the master. Capitalists and the proletariat are merely vassals. Let them tussle all they will, at the end of the day they bend the knee to the same lord. And to Adam Smith’s disciples as well as to Karl Marx’s zealots, this stinks with the stench of blasphemy.

Additionally, if money makes the world go round, then political systems do not. So-called democracies have no defense against the hegemony of money. Nor do dictatorships. Nor do single-party technocracies like China or oligarchic thugocracies like Russia or repressive theocracies like Iran or corrupt kleptocracies like Somalia. Money rules them all and with an iron fist. All of them throw their vaunted principles or megalomaniacal ambitions out the window when the laws of supply and demand come knocking at their doors. But don’t say this out loud on the streets (of at least some) of these countries. It’s blasphemy!

Finally, if money makes the world go round, then culture does not. Literature is a commodity to be bought and sold. Philosophy is a market for college textbooks and professorial tenure. Music is a vehicle for selling ads. Art is a collectible. Theater is for putting butts in seats with buckets of popcorn on laps. All of these can only really be understood from the perspective of supply and demand. Let the historians of literature, of philosophy, of music, of art, of theater, ground all their treatises in economics, or else spout lies. Oh, to say this in the halls of academia! Such exquisite blasphemy.

Money, money, money, money, money. ISCHYROS DIAVOLOS!