Government assumes everything is based on the economy. Even the constitution is interpreted this way, in terms of the right to pursue happiness etc. The old view was expressed well in Marlowe's Faust:

For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss.

The old bliss was man's greatest happiness that he had pleased the Lord and would live in Heaven. Faust had different ideas. But this isn't about religion. It's about how to be happy, and is economics the key to it. If it isn't, (and rich people are not good examples of happy people), what does it take and how should government work to help people attain it?