Dave Brat, with the help of the Tea Party movement, defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary last night. It's one of the biggest upsets in modern American political history. Brat, a Libertarian, ran on a platform that derided corporate interest on Wall Street.

His most prominent talking point? "The Republican Party has been paying way too much attention to Wall Street and not enough attention to Main Street."

But Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, has written that Wall Street should be, in part, absolved. In 2011, Brat wrote "God and Advanced Mammon—Can Theological Types Handle Usury and Capitalism?" In it, he explains that the mortgage crisis began because "we wanted to force low-interest loans on the banks so that the poor could magically afford houses."

In the news, the recent economic unpleasantness called the "Global Financial Crisis" was set off by weaknesses in the housing market. Basically, we wanted to force low-interest loans on the banks so that the poor could magically afford houses. Sounds good. Banks made loans to anyone. Liar loans. They then immediately sold those loans to the government, who then took on the risk as well, and the rest is history. The sub-prime loans are still bend sorted out on Wall Street. Well-intentioned policy became a nightmare. Wall Street played its role and is equally to blame, but without the "coercion" in the housing market, there would have been much less crisis. This is my view.

Of course, this is not the case. Current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein sent an email to employees cheering them on for making "more money than we lost because of shorts" during the subprime mortgage crisis. Fellow Goldman executive Donald Mullen, in emails released at a Senate panel in 2007, bragged that it "sounds like we will make some serious money" during the crisis.

Wall Street is unrepentant about its lion's share of the blame for the homelessness of thousands, and this is the issue upon which Brat will run. As recently 2011, he did not believe that.

His fix for intentionally duplicitous loan practices is twofold. The first part?

More church.

Fifth, preach the gospel and change hearts and souls. If we make all of the people good, markets will be good. Markets are made up of people. Supply and Demand are curves, but they are also people. Nothing else. If markets are bad, which they are, that means people are bad, which they are. Want good markets? Change the people. If there are not nervous twitches in the pews when we preach, then we are not doing our jobs.

Once everyone has been made good by the church—and, remember, there must be no outliers who game the system for this plan to work—it's onto Step 2 for Brat: Assume that all good borrowers will automatically find good lenders through word of mouth.

Here is a short case study on this point. If a person with poor credit (high risk) wants to take out a loan, the bank has two options for that person. Say "no." Or charge a high interest rate to cover the added risk involved. Is it more just to deny the loan, or to charge a higher rate and give the poor person a loan? Or should we simply force the banker to make the loan at a lower rate? But then we are asking the banker to pay for the risk of the riskier borrower. That borrower may not like work and may sleep all day and eat snacks while watching television. Can we in good conscience make the banker, who in this case is a good hard-working person, pay for the faults of the sleeper with bad credit? Is that the knee-jerk Christian position? Let us just force people to be ethical. Let us force an ethical outcome. Let us force justice.

The story could of course be told with a greedy banker and a nice borrower with good credit, but in that case, I would just refer the good borrower to the good banker above.

As we know, this is a dream world. Goldman Sachs, in part because of those emails, was forced to pay the largest fine in the history of American business to the SEC—$550 million—for intentionally misleading investors in 2010. States have sued the bank separately for as much as $14.4 million. They were the "good banker," until it turned out they weren't that whole time.

Brat is assuming that all borrowers with good credit will magically be able to decipher non-predatory banking products and practices without an economics degree.

We know this to be magical thinking. It relies upon a utopian society wherein no entity abuses the system.

All of this disregards the very real suffering of those who have made a mistake or have been duped by a bank or, sometimes, have done nothing wrong at all—but still wound up homeless or broke due to exploitative loan practices.

These people still exist—not just in theory, but also in practice—but they are not Dave Brat himself, or on the chart provided, so he doesn't understand it.

Brat's research disregards the human element entirely. Not only does he not account for small or wide-scale corporate misconduct, but he is entirely beholden to the bottom line. In his thesis, he admires the economic growth rate in China's booming free market, and what that has done for median income.

"Capitalist markets and their expansion in China and India have provided more for the common good, more "social welfare," than any other policy in the past ten years. In fact, you can add up all of the welfare gains from public policy in the United States and abroad, and they will not approach the level of human gains just described. Incomes in China and India have risen from $500 a year per person to over $5,000 a year per person over the past twenty years or so. This is due to market capitalism. Over two billion people now have food to eat and some minimal goods to go along."

Of course, workers rights and quality of life for the working class in China are historically abhorrent. There were at least 50 strikes in China in February of last year, but they stopped counting and recently started simply arresting people instead. One organization counts the number of protests in China in the last year at over 1,500.

We can't know for sure, because free media and speech in China is "reserved for the free-speech Elite," according to a Congressional panel's report.

That rise in median income? It's coming from and staying at the top.

Those people at the bottom can't be heard. And they can't be informed of predatory behavior if the top is rigging it against them.

Just like in the United States, that story can't be told with one median income chart. You can create Dave Brat's utopia with one median income chart, but it will only make the poor poorer and the rich impossible to police.

Dave Brat isn't lying when he says that "the Republican Party has been paying way too much attention to Wall Street." He doesn't want anybody paying attention to Wall Street at all—even if they do wrong.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io