Is economics the new church?

Truly paradigm-shifting ideas often come from the margins and sometimes arrive completely accidently.  And it almost always takes a long time for the value of new theories and discoveries to be evident.  Challenging conventional wisdom is not something society encourages.

The how-to-solve-it announcement yesterday gathered up all the discourse to appease conventional wisdom as it was speaking to Society.  The complexities of politics demand that. 

The announcement is better looked at in philosophical terms.  It was a humanist kind of offering rather than an economic one.  It offered a religion rather than a cure.  The masquerade of a cure revealed itself through the use of medical terminology, such as "stress test" for financial institutions.  It offered an illusion of power to us by the promise of transparency which will be available on the comically unfinished website financialstability.gov.

Does that mean it was bad?  Of course not.  It just did not speak in the kind of detail everyone had hoped for.  And, if the plan had proposed something truly radical and innovative, what would happen then?

What are we asking for?  Is economics the new church?  If so, yesterdays sermon was a from the American Universalist Individualist New Capitalist sect.  Here are my notes:

1. They will look at these things we call financial institutions in great detail.  Like a doctor rather than a scientist.

2. There will be a Thing designed.

3. The gentle Talf will roam the fields, eating and growing.

4. You the individual will have somewhere to live.

5. They will talk to the rest of the world.

6. The plan will adapt and change.

The economic paradigm has already shifted and the prescriptions outlined above keep that in mind.  In other words, vagueness is the new black.  Where we will end up is a complete mystery.  In that regard, it is not a church.