Did you hear the one about the community college students in the San Francisco area who paid people to change the grades on their transcripts, so that they could get into better 4-year institutions when the time came to complete their undergraduate degrees?
Seriously, did you hear about it? The only thing that shocks me about it is that anyone else is shocked by it. In its own small way, this scandal reveals the true dangers of an unregulated free market economy and the attitudes is creates. The unspoken foundation of the unregulated free market is that everything can be had for the right price. It makes everything into a commodity to be bought, sold, traded, or trashed and replaced as the whim strikes and as the pocketbook permits.
And that is just plain wrong. Humans, as social beings living in societies, have a community of purpose (often spiritual) that in its best manifestations rises above mundane money-grubbing. Societies exist because no person can do everything he needs to survive, let alone to thrive, all by himself. We are all in this together, and if we all give a little bit to help each other, we all are better off in the long run. But the free market teaches "I'll get mine any way I can, and you can go to Hell."
This is why I am still surprised that so many fundamentalist Christians are such fervent supporters of an unregulated free market economy. It seems to contradict the most basic of Christ's teachings. But then again, I was raised Catholic, where being poor and suffering too often is considered a positive good (as long as it's someone else, someone you can help, and not you, yourself who is suffering too much). I simply cannot wrap my head around the Church of Protestant Prosperity.
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