Dear George,
Man, in his ongoing ascent to the God-like purity that is his due, occasionally takes a counter-productive detour. In doing so, he turns his back on God and suffers the consequences of his sin until he repents and resumes his climb up the mountain of immortality.
Two words describe the goal towards which mankind aspires (three if you count the definite article): The Washington Consensus, which is nothing less than the creation of a free market drained of freedom just as blood is drained from a corpse. It is the elevation of financial capital growth over human capital growth.
The sin referred to above is the sentimentalization of poverty. "O! The poor children, the do-gooders sob, living in such filth, malnourished and teeming with parasites and disease, jammed into run-down favelas. We simply must do something about it." And so you end up with the counter-productive Millennium Development Goals that accomplish nothing other than draining capital from the marketplace that should properly be used to pay stockholder dividends and executive bonuses.
History is drawing to an end. That great dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is breathing its last. God has a plan for mankind and it is being revealed to us in the elementary contradiction between market efficiency and poverty eradication. You can have one or the other, but not both. And since the rich can afford better lawyers than the poor, the odds favor market efficiency.
Now, this creates a messy situation. There is something about a starving child that turns the public to mush. This can be a real drag on economic growth. Prosperity needs poverty if it is to expand. The open sewers of the poor make possible the marble bathrooms of the rich.
The antidote to this dilemma is the creative use of language. Jargon like “Washington Consensus” and “Free Markets” give a conceptual respectability to economic disaster. Conceptual Respectability is the paint that conceals the dry rot of corporatist exploitation. It gives the calloused cruelty of the rich an air of intellectual determinism. Margaret Thatcher articulated this determinism when she proclaimed, “There is no alternative.”
Abstraction is a gift from God. It deodorizes as it polishes. It is the thick wall that muffles the moans of the poor as our elites savor the quiet serenity of their gated communities that are the end-point of history.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:56:40 AM 
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