I can't say that I find much mutual agreement with former Pennsylvania senator and presidential aspirant Rick Santorum, but for a brief, mad moment yesterday, I thought that we had finally found some cause in common. My momentary ecstacy occurred last night, when I happened upon this ThinkProgress headline: "Santorum: ‘Huge Moral Failings’ Are The ‘Root Cause’ Of Our Economic Problems."
Immediately, I thought, "Huzzah, Rick Santorum, you are absolutely right!" And you'll find a lot of others who agree. Take David Francis, of the Christian Science Monitor, who in May of 2010 opined:
At the heart of the financial crisis lay a moral failing. Too many financial-industry officials, and often their customers, lacked the ethical training and guts to refuse to sell or buy "liar's loans" and other toxic mortgages. Too many were willing to operate a massive casino that traded financial derivatives of little constructive value.
Francis went on to cite Elizabeth Warren's criticism, that this moral failing "led to 'ripping the heart' out of the economic security of millions of middle-class Americans." And you know, the entire concept of a "middle class" has yet to even come up in the GOP debates. So, yeah! Rick Santorum! Run with the ball, brother!
Oh, what's that now? You're telling me that this isn't what Santorum was talking about?
SANTORUM: Letting the family break down and in fact encouraging it and inciting more breakdown through this whole redefinition of marriage debate, and not supporting strong nuclear families and not supporting and standing up for the dignity of human life. Those lead to a society that’s broken.
If you think that we can be a society that kills our own, and that disregards the family and the important role it plays, and doesn’t teach moral values and the important role of faith in the public square, and then expect people to be good, decent and moral when they behave economically, if you look at the root cause of the economic problems that we’re dealing with on Wall Street and Main Street I might add, from 2008, they were huge moral failings. And you can’t say that we’re gonna take morality out of the public square, morality out of our schools, God out of our schools, and then expect people to behave decently in a country that requires, capitalism requires some strong modicum of moral consciousness if it’s gonna be successful.
So there you have it: "capitalism requires some strong modicum of moral consciousness if it’s gonna be successful," and if it hadn't been for gay marriage and abortion, that whole "predatory lending-to-toxic derviatives-to-betting against your own clients" scheme would have worked out just fine.
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