My objection to this trend is somewhat personal. In these popular jeremiads against thrift, I fear a tradition of Protestant prudence, one in which I was raised, is given short shrift. But some of those fusty Protestant mores were in fact meant as charity. For example, most of us know that elderly relative or hard-pressed friend who will never take money when it’s offered. Try as McCarraher or Hart might, they cannot explain such refusals only as cases of rugged individualism alongside its companion sin of pride. Such refusals might also be the only means of charity for those who cannot otherwise afford to give to others, thus passing on the gift to those who are even more in need than they are.
Or we risk ignoring simple principles of common wisdom that are now neglected by most. Until adulthood, I had no idea that others were not raised with the advice to pay off their full credit-card balance at the end of each month, as long as they can. This should be proverbial. It is easy to do in all but harsh circumstances (as there surely are among the impoverished). But few do it even in normal, “middle-class” circumstances: Recent data show 50 to 60 percent of middle-income households now have credit-card debt—the most among the tax brackets. So this wisdom is now a point of privilege, one I have only by virtue of being raised by boring Baptists, and one that many of the upper classes are all too happy to use for themselves while they preach against it in public. For the sake of the poor, this should not be so, and certainly not because various intellectuals have denigrated frugality.
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