And the Devil Take the Hindmost

Abstract:Analyzed as implicit assertions about moral values, the 2022 revelations of systemic disinvestment in Jackson’s public water system and the state’s theft of federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families both represent the larger violence of systematic resource extraction and wealth hoarding that generalizes to the nation the political economy of the plantation. Under the allegedly scientific and value-free rubric of “economics,” moral values are asserted every time a budget is proposed, a bank charter is issued, a mortgage is written, or a ledger is balanced. Questions of distribution, extraction, care, labor, production, reciprocity, and subsistence rest upon inescapably moral assumptions: what is fair, who owns, who owes, who makes, who takes, what is work, and what—who—is property. Just as inescapably, the norms that compete to govern moral life require particular orderings of economic resources and obligations. A “fully loaded cost accounting,” in historian Nell Irvin Painter’s words, must be demanded of economic assumptions that deny their cruelly punitive model of the market as a perfect moral sorting device—and devil take the hindermost.