How to Ruin the Power of a Great Story

Paul Krugman took a shot at lousing up the Christmas Carol.

The Christmas Carol is the most timely story at Christmas with its clarion call for personal charity and kindness. However, Krugman sees it as a support for statism:

Hey, has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book, where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund. “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week. What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?
 

Krugman then proceeds on a somewhat rambling lazy columns that you can get away with as an experienced columnist.

Of course, Scrooge didn’t argue against the Welfare State. He argued that his paying for the British Welfare State covered any duty of kindness to the poor. This neither affirms nor supports the Welfare State. As for Government workers, transferring Dickens’ sympathy for the 19th Century British underclass to 21st Century Government workers with generous pay, benefits, and vacation packages is pure conjecture. This is the case any time we speculate as to what the opinion of the long dead might be on a modern political issue.

Ann Coulter, while referencing Scrooge in her title, “Scrooge is a Liberal” she didn’t offer a conservative deconstruction of the book. Instead, she listed how Americans who tend to be more conservative are statistically more personally generous as well which after all was what the Christmas Carol was about. This would seem to give lie to Krugman’s theory of the cold and hard conservative.

In a larger sense, both columns attempt to diminish the larger point of the Christmas Carol. Any time, we take scripture or a great piece of literature and we declare, “It’s about those other people,” we innoculate ourselves against the power of the story, because it doesn’t apply to us.

The message of the Christmas Carol is clear. In our lives, we should be about the business of helping others and alleviating the suffering that pervades so much of our Earth. Not only that, we’ll be held accountable in the next life for how we use the gifts that God has given us.

No wonder some would rather talk politics.

Read more at Adam’s Blog