Economics, Moral Rot, and You

Until February 3rd, East Palestine, Ohio, was notable for its tragic ordinariness

Freshman U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has essentially backed himself into a corner. Having successfully run for office as a novice candidate by supporting Trumpism and its appeals to supposed White grievances, he has tied himself to an agenda of stark deregulation. Yet the train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, was made possible by the Trump Administration rolling back two key regulations: freight train safety brakes, and prohibitions against shipping volatile chemicals through inhabited areas.

This disaster’s highly photogenic nature, with its biblical pillar of cloud looming over a chronically neglected town, creates inherent contradictions in Ohio. Though considered a swing state, Ohio has consistently leaned Republican for twenty years, and repeatedly supported candidates, like Trump and Vance, who promise to slash regulations. Although Ohio’s economy was notoriously hollowed by the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, the state trusts its rich to act right without legal compulsion.

Republicans overall, both elected officials like Vance and the voters who support them, must thread the needle between libertarian economics and an obvious need for government intervention. However, this problem isn’t strictly partisan. The East Palestine catastrophe has made visible a pattern unfolding across America, supported by both parties, reflecting the moral vacuity beneath America’s current economy. While one camera-friendly disaster dominates our media cycle, the same pattern unfolds throughout America on a smaller scale.

Philadelphia journalist Will Bunch describes a plastics factory in Monaca, Pennsylvania, that has received two high-level EPA violations since it opened last November. Dawson County, Nebraska, is currently battling its second railroad disaster just in February. These aren’t incidental disasters or routine entropy. For a factory to be cited twice in its first three months of operation suggests fundamental design flaws. Dawson County’s railroad is one of America’s busiest; it should be sufficiently maintained.

Approximately three train accidents and derailments, the yardstick for current political outrage, occur per day. Simultaneously, ownership of America’s substantially deregulated railroads has reached unprecedented levels of concentration: only seven companies currently control the Class I rail network, and most stations have only one company serving them. That’s a greater concentration than ever enjoyed (if that’s the word) by the 19th Century railroad barons whose names were splashed luridly across my high school history textbooks.

Public art currently on display in East Palestine, Ohio

Classic libertarian economics, espoused by Vance and Trump, contends that if we rescind regulations, everyone will generally do right. I reply: ordinary people like you and I might. The rich, immunized from consequences by their ability to buy lawmakers and regulators, won’t. Again, despite my name-dropping Republicans, this problem is substantially bipartisan; President Obama’s economic policies bolstered the banks that imploded the economy in 2007, while President Clinton signed the bill revoking the Glass-Steagall Act.

This bipartisan deference to the ownership class has simmered for years, but now it’s exploding. The East Palestine catastrophe follows close upon the Texas deep freeze, the worst wildfires in California history, and COVID-19 itself. Taken together, these repeated disasters demonstrate, in blaring neon letters written across the sky, that America’s capitalist class cannot be trusted to handle their resources responsibly. Both parties tiptoe around the seemingly inevitable conclusion that capitalist economics is morally bereft.

Don’t mistake me. Economics isn’t a binary; when I disparage capitalism, I don’t reflexively advocate communism. The retreating Soviet bloc left widespread poverty and environmental devastation in the 1990s, showing that old-line Communists didn’t care who they hurt in pursuing their economic goals, and the notoriously filthy Beijing air reveals things haven’t improved since. Capitalism and communism both reduce humans to economic agents, and slap price tags on the devastation they both equally leave behind.

The two economic theories which have dominated public discourse during my lifetime both produce filth, poverty, and abjection. And they do so because, for all their differences, they fundamentally agree that anything which cannot be priced, cannot be valued. Much like how America’s two dominant political parties frequently agree on more than they differ, humanity’s dominant economic theories share a moral destitution in which money is the only meaningful measure of human life and productivity.

Our world needs an economic theory with a moral foundation. Market socialism or Keynesian capitalism might offset the disasters we’re currently seeing, eventually, but they won’t address the moral rot that makes disasters like the East Palestine cloud possible. Economic models like Distributism center humans as moral agents, not economic agents. Without such a moral core, the problems currently unfolding around us will only continue accelerating, and the poor will suffer the most, and first.