In Charles Dickens’ story “A Christmas Carol,” the ghost of Jacob Marley sharply rebukes Ebenezer Scrooge for defending his myopic devotion to “business” as life’s only worthy value:

“Business?! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

This list of transcendent values has not held up well in the battle of sound bites that characterize contemporary politics and that lionize business above all else. The virtue of promoting the common welfare especially has been eclipsed by a belief in the self-policing virtues of the free market. The conservative political view is that the “invisible hand” of market forces, if left alone, will work its magic and provide not just jobs, but jobs that build self-esteem, that promote self-sufficiency, and that provide role models for children. This is the vision promulgated by the LePage Administration through the words of DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew.

There are some interesting parallels between Dickens’ young life and our less literary Gov. LePage. Both are rags-to-relative-riches stories. But the lessons they took from their tempering childhood experiences differ greatly.

Charles’ father was sent to debtor’s prison for living as a middle class head-of-household “beyond his means.” His salary at the Navy’s pay office apparently did not match his wife’s consumer expectations for what constitutes “the good life.” As a debt prisoner, he did not earn a wage for his prison labor; his work simply paid part of the expenses for his family’s stay at the prison. This was “job-lock” Victorian-style.

Charles was, at age 12, considered too old to be housed in the prison with the rest of the family, as was common then. Instead he had to leave school to support himself and the family with wages he earned in a factory pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish. He felt abandoned by his family as he spent his days at this toxic and dismal job, and this indelible experience informed many themes that are identified with Dickens’ most memorable literary works.

The only hope for release from debtor’s prison was that a rich family member might pay the debt – perhaps through an inheritance after a death. When Charles reached 15, such a gift of circumstance allowed the Dickens family to pay enough of the family debt that Charles could be free to return to school and later to find work as clerk at a law office through family connections. There he found in himself the literary skill that carried him through his adult life and on to lasting fame.

Paul LePage was likewise from a large hard luck family. Young Paul left home at age 11 after an abusive episode with his father, a mill worker and an alcoholic. He scrapped around as a youngster on the streets of Lewiston until a generous family took him in and gave him the sort of love and nurturing that restored his self-esteem, rewarded his sense of industry, and set him up for later success in life. Paul’s biography reads somewhat like a Dickens novel, where some random gift of charitable providence blessed him early enough in his young life that cynicism and doubt did not set permanently in his mind, and the yoke of alcoholism and addiction did not command his moves.

And yet the lesson that he has taken from this experience is not the softened benevolence of human compassion nor the understanding that the lowest rungs on the ladder are widely spaced but become closer and easier to clutch the higher one ascends. No, he cleaves instead to the narrowly hard-hearted conservative mantra infusing our times: that in a free market you are rich because you deserve to be rich and you are poor because you deserve to be poor. His view from the top of the ladder sees ascent as a purely personal choice.

Our government social welfare programs, inadequate and flawed though they are, are far more sensible and sympathetic than in Victorian times. But the fact that they exist today is evidence that “business” alone is not a governing virtue. “Humbug” says LePage.

Eben Rose lives in South Portland.