God is a Capitalist

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Biblical Critical Theory Is Not Biblical. It’s Watered-Down Marxism

 

bible
Mises WireRoger McKinney


Christianity Today magazine, founded by Billy Graham, chose Christopher Watkin’s book, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, as one of its 2024 Book Awards and the book most likely “to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.” Other Christian organizations promote the book too.

Nonreligious readers won’t care, but they need to keep in mind that most people won’t take a class or read a book on economics. I can clear a crowded room just by mentioning economics. But they do read books like this one or listen to pastors who do. Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of voters. So, any plan to change the direction of the country’s economic policies requires reaching them.

Watkin, a lecturer in French studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, trudges through the Bible applying his interpretations to his perception of modern Western culture. He calls his method “diagonalization,” in which he identifies extreme cultural views and places biblical principles in the middle.

But his diagonalization forces him to see only extremes, many of which don’t exist. Much of what he writes is reasonable, but his train derails when writing about the market:

Monday, January 1, 2024

There Is Something Wrong with the Economic Views of Theologians

 


  • mckinney1

Review of Kathryn Tanner: Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism

An old professor told our class decades ago to believe nothing from the popular press about economics and only half of what the financial press writes. I would add that if a theologian tries to teach you economics, hide your wallet and lock up your daughters! Kathryn Tanner’s Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism is a good example of such the tragic comedy produced by most theologians.

Tanner has taught at Yale Divinity School since 2010 after 16 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is an influential past president of the American Theological Society. Rosemary P. Carbine and Hilda P. Koster say, “Kathryn Tanner is, quite simply, the most accomplished theologian of her generation,” in their book The Gift of Theology: The Contribution of Kathryn Tanner. The errors in her book are so numerous that it would take another book to correct them, so I’ll concentrate on the assumptions underlying her argument.

Tanner’s premise is that capitalism, as evil as it was in the beginning, has morphed into a more horrible monster called financial capitalism. Socialists have over the decades invented stages of capitalism and it’s popular to decry the latest for the dominance of the financial services sector. Yet as usual, they lack evidence. The sector grew from 4% of GDP in 1929 to 8% in 2006 according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. While doubling, it’s still smaller than the healthcare or government sectors. The federal government absorbs over 20% of GDP. So, Tanner would be more accurate calling it state capitalism, but that’s an oxymoron.

Financial services have grown as a share of GDP because of the government, not the market. The author of the JEP paper cites the growth of home mortgages and the stock market as the main reasons. But few banks made home loans because of their risk until the federal government created Fannie Mae in 1938 as part of FDR’s New Deal to secure mortgages via mortgage-backed securities (MBS), packaged mortgage loans that are then sold to investors. Tanner describes MBS’s and other derivatives in her book. Housing prices, and therefore mortgages, are highly sensitive to Federal Reserve interest rate policy, which has promoted inflation for over a century. Housing prices have increased in step with the Fed’s printing new money and contributed to the growth in financial services.

Also, good economists have known since Fritz Machlup’s book The Stock Market, Credit and Capital Formation (1931) that most new money printed by the Fed goes into the stock market. Many people employ managers to guide their stock market investments, so, the Fed’s printing tsunamis of new money swells that part of financial services.

Tanner sees businessmen trying to please the stock market as evil. But is it? Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann demonstrated in Capital and Its Structure that the stock market guides investment toward those activities that please consumers the most as demonstrated by profits. Why should a business succeed that annoys consumers? Who should businesspeople try to please, if not consumers? And how will you measure success at pleasing them if not by profits? The professor doesn’t know.

Finally, Tanner laments the relative growth of financial services and the shrinking share of manufacturing and farming. But any decent economist would have told her that’s a good thing! All services have outpaced manufacturing and farming as a share of GDP because of productivity increases in those industries, meaning it takes fewer people to produce goods and food than before, when we were poorer. One aspect of becoming richer and reducing poverty is working less to produce more. 

Tanner assumes the U.S. has a capitalist system. But how much of the U.S. is capitalist or socialist is debatable. In my opinion, the U.S. hasn’t been capitalist since President Wilson created the Federal Reserve in 1913 and gave the government control of our money. Until the election of President Ronald Reagan, most economists considered the U.S. to be a mixed economy at best and the country has become more socialist since. And, the U.S. has implemented eight of the ten commandments of Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. But socialists need the U.S. to be capitalist so they can blame problems on their arch enemy instead of the socialist policies that caused them.

Tanner makes those mistakes for the same reason most theologians do: they rely exclusively on the works of socialists for sources. Tanner doesn’t disappoint, opening hers with a summary of Max Weber’s ancient tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. No competent economic historian venerates Weber the way theologians do because he got very few things right about the origins of capitalism. But socialist theologians love the book because Weber makes capitalism look ugly and assumes the worst motives for capitalists.

Had Tanner been interested in the history of capitalism, she could have learned from great economic historians like Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Alejandro Chafuen and others that the principles of capitalism came from Catholic theologians during the Reformation who distilled them from natural law and the Bible. Those principles became associated with Protestantism because the Protestant Dutch Republic first implemented them, followed by England and its colonies. The Calvinists Weber sued for the paternity of capitalism were its most virulent opponents next to Catholics.

Instead, Tanner relies on socialist sociologists such as Weber, the French philosopher Michel Foucault and a long string of sociologists. The closest to an economist I found in her footnotes were the French socialist Thomas Piketty and Wolfgang Streeck, a German economic sociologist at the Max Planck Institute.

Because she relies on socialist sociologists, her straw man is stuffed with the typical cliches. Employees are slaves unable to earn a living wage. They are cogs in a cruel machine. Managers are the slave masters cracking the whip to force the slaves to pull harder and tote more. Governments are helpless victims of their financial masters. The only socialist cliché Tanner left out was poor widows with hungry children trying to appease the landlord with the handlebar moustache so they can live one more week in their dilapidated shack.

For example, in chapter three, “Total Commitment,” Tanner tells us that American workers must sacrifice all for our jobs and paying our debts:

Making a deadline on time may require putting everything into meeting it at every waking moment. It may require maximum concentration and exertion, not just at work but at home, too. Servicing one’s debt may require scrimping and saving on every item purchased and constant creativity in coming up with the necessary cash, turning every meager possession into a possible source of revenue, renting out one’s already cramped space, finding buyers for unwanted junk, pawning what one would like to keep, selling one’s food assistance coupons, and so on.

In chapter four, “Nothing but the Present,” Tanner writes that:

The scarcity of time and resources enforced by profit-maximizing firms makes the present task urgent for workers and therefore preoccupying and all-consuming. There is no time to waste because a pressing deadline is looming. One does not have the luxury of waiting to see what might happen; no time exists for extend reflection or can one defer decision until tomorrow.

Relying exclusively on socialists, Tanner absorbs their anthropology that asserts people are born good and turn bad because of oppression. She appears to be a genuine Christian and knows the historic Christian doctrine of original sin that says people are born with a tendency to evil that only Christ can cure. But in this book, she jettisons Christian anthropology for the atheistic socialist one, an inconsistency common among theologians.

Tanner claims that financial capitalism changes the way people think and shapes their character in such a way as to make them enthusiastically support it. Her purpose in writing the book was to show how Christianity could “gum up” that process of forming humans. In an interview she said:

I'm assuming with him [Weber] that capitalism has a culture to it, that it brings with it a particular way of understanding one's self and one's relationships with others. And it's at that point, you could say the person-forming character of capitalism, it's there that religion can most easily, I think, come into the picture and object to the way in which persons are being shaped. And I think that's one of the central features of finance capitalism, that it tends to target the whole person for profit-generating purposes, not just what you do at work, but the whole of your life isn't being understood in basically this capitalist way.

Tanner’s solution is to meditate on God and understand that his grace is not in short supply. “I hope I have shown the coherence of a whole new world to be entertained as an imaginative counter to the whole world of capitalism as it presently exists, and pretends to be all-encompassing, to have no limits, nothing outside itself.“

Like most theologians, Tanner frightens readers with a story of the world set on fire by the dastardly capitalist dragon, then gives them a water pistol to quench the flames. If financial capitalism is guilty of the crimes she describes, we need a revolution, not meditation.

Tanner is right about financial services. There is something wrong. But it’s government control of the economy and banking that causes the problems, not capitalism.

Monday, November 6, 2023

Killers of the Flower Moon Is about Government Failure

 

oil field

Most reviewers of the motion picture Killers of the Flower Moon distill just one lesson from the story: greed is deadly. The love of money leads to evil. But the real lesson should be of government failure.

The movie follows the bookKillers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. It tells the story of the Osage tribe during the 1920s oil boom in Oklahoma. Tribal members became very wealthy because of the discovery of oil on tribal land, and many white people committed fraud and murder to steal that wealth.

Friday, October 20, 2023

Government-Enforced Paid Family Leave Is Not Pro-Family


Paid family leave—meaning the government paying or forcing businesses to pay for one or more parents taking time off to spend with a newborn—seems like a slam dunk idea to the Christian Left. According to a recent article in Christianity Today, “Christians Shouldn’t Need a Mandate to Provide Paid Family Leave,” “We should provide the best family leave possible. Christians who own or manage businesses ought to lead the way on family leave.” The article lists three benefits of parents taking time off to be with newborns:

  1. Parental leave could save lives. “There is clearly a link—even if indirect—between maternity leave and babies surviving.”
  2. Old Testament purification rules, “which in practice gave new mothers a rest after birth,” are similar.
  3. Men need to spend time with their children in the initial weeks after birth or adoption. “Research has shown ‘fathers who take paternity leave are more likely, a year or so down the road, to change diapers, bathe their children, read them bedtime stories, and get up at night to tend to them.’”

Point one is debatable, point two is irrelevant, but point three is a post hoc fallacy. Paid parental leave doesn’t cause men to become better fathers; good fathers take parental leave.

Common sense tells us that it’s good for mothers and fathers to spend as much time as possible with new babies. However, the conclusion that businesses or the government must pay for this time is another fallacy—a non sequitur, or a logical leap across the Grand Canyon. Fathers and mothers should save and pay for the leave themselves.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Christians don’t suffer from consumerism.






For decades, any article by Christians about the evils that afflict modern society have included consumerism. For example, A Gospel Coalition author wrote this:

“None of us is a conscious convert to this religion of consumerism. We are discipled in it from childhood. It offers a story that attempts to rival the biblical story. In the consumer story, creation exists for our amusement and satisfaction. The perennial problem isn’t sin but lack. We don’t have enough—enough money, enough devices, enough experiences, enough entertainment. This cultural god has invited all to come and make sacrifices, promising in exchange material prosperity, comfort, and security. And this ‘salvation story’ has deeply shaped business in our world today…You cannot serve God and money (Matt. 6:24).”

How many people would recognize themselves in that description of consumerism? Not many. Would they see family or friends in it? Not likely. I don’t know of many non-Christians who fit that description, let alone Christians. Who do you know lives for nothing more than to acquire more? That depiction of consumerism is an example of the straw man fallacy.



The Bible doesn’t mention consumerism, but it refers to a more realistic equivalent, greed. What is greed? A common definition is the desire for more. Many Christians admire the Amish for their simple lifestyles and anti-consumerist mentality. But the Amish are grossly rich compared to most people in the world today, especially the hundreds of millions living on $3 per day. If we should be satisfied with the bare necessities for life, then anyone with more stuff than the tribes in the Amazon are greedy. After all, a lean-to for shelter, a cloth to wrap around our hips and an occasional meal of monkey meat is all we need.

The Bible makes clear through examples what greed means. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar (Luke 16), and that of the bigger barns (Luke 12), Jesus showed that greedy people refuse to help the poor. James condemned employers who refused to pay workers their wages (James 5). Jesus indicted Pharisees for refusing to care for their elderly parents by dedicating what wealth they might give them to the Temple (Luke 11). John the Baptist told soldiers not to extort money from people or falsely accuse them of crimes and warned tax collectors not to take more than required (Luke 3).

Can we distill a principle about greed from these? How about this: greed is the love of money so strong that one is willing to do something immoral to get or keep it? That’s why Jesus condemned those who served money rather than God (Matthew 6:24). Can Christians be guilty of such greed?

While we can’t live sin free, greed will not characterize the lives of Christians. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus contrasted the lives his disciples would lead with those of unbelievers. The parallel passage in Luke 16 shows Pharisees scoffing at this principle. The verse preceding his statement about serving money warns about envy. Paul defined greed as idolatry (Ephesians 5:5) and wrote that people characterized by a greedy lifestyle will not go to heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). Greed like that of the Pharisees is a sure sign you’re not a follower of Jesus.

The issue of greed should cause Christians to ask why are Americans, and the West, so wealthy? But to answer that question, Christians must learn economics. In the 19th century, theologians like Francis Wayland considered economics to be part of natural theology or general revelation and necessary for informed Christians. Wayland was a Baptist pastor and president of Brown University. He wrote one of the best selling economic textbooks of his century, The Elements of Political Economy.

Economic history teaches that Americans are so wealthy because we have implemented Biblical principles of government. The theologians at the University of Salamanca distilled those principles from natural law with Biblical support during the Reformation. Adam Smith called them the principles of natural liberty. Marists referred to them as capitalism.

Those principles made the Dutch Republic first, then England, the U.S. and the rest of the West miraculously wealthy. See this graph for an illustration. In the past generation, slightly freer markets have lifted over 500 million people from starvation in India and China, according to the World Bank.

Still, some will say we should give all our wealth to the poor. That was the model for Europe for 1,500 years. Many of the nobility would give all their wealth, usually land, to the Church when they died or entered a monastery. As a result, the Church before the Reformation owned one-third of the land of Europe, which it used to help the poor. But such enormous charity never lifted anyone out of poverty; charity merely maintains life in poverty. Millions continued to starve to death in frequent famines. Only with the advent of capitalism, which gave the poor the tools to produce more, did poverty begin to decline in the Industrial Revolution.

Those who refuse to learn economics, which include most theologians and philosophers, often believe that the West is rich because the West stole the wealth of poor countries. Some will point out that the West consumes 80% of the world’s production, which is true. But the West produces 80% of the world's output, too.

Economics teaches us that consumption and production are two sides of the same coin. Consumption without production is impossible. Production without consumption results in waste. So, demands that we consume less are also demands that we produce less. And producing less means that we will be poorer.

So where does that leave American Christians, the poorest of whom are among the wealthiest on the planet? Should we give all we have to the poor until we are as poor as Haitians? Should we keep our wealth and live in perpetual joyless guilt? How can we have the joy of Jesus if we are burdened with guilt from so much wealth? Guilt seems to be the only emotion Christians should have according to the many theologians who write about consumerism.

We need a better theology of wealth and The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth by John R. Schneider provides one. He wrote that God created the world in part for us to enjoy. Any wealth acquired honestly is a blessing from God. We shouldn’t despise such a gift. We should give a portion of our wealth to the poor, but we should never assume we can eliminate poverty through charity; that would be the sin of pride. Nor should we attempt to eliminate poverty by impoverishing ourselves.

Solomon offered practical advice for wealthy Christians in Ecclesiastes:

“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God . . .” (2:24–26).

“There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man . . .” (3:12–15)

“Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him . . .” (5:18–20)

“I commend joy, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.” (8:15)

“Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do . . .” (9:7–10)



“If a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all. . . . Rejoice, O young man . . .” (11:8–12:7)

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Jesus is an anarcho-capitalist

 





Most arguments for capitalism hinge on the consequences: capitalism enriches people while socialism impoverishes. But few Christians will take a class in economics so they will not care about consequentialist arguments. They consider morality more important than consequences and capitalism to be inherently immoral. Yet, almost half of the country is evangelical or Catholic. We lovers of liberty can’t afford to ignore them. How do we address their moral concerns without succumbing to theonomy? One way is to connect Jesus with capitalist principles.

Modernist theologians from Germany who denied the deity of Christ, fabricated the idea that Jesus was a socialist over a century ago. Both Protestants and Catholics promote that nonsense today. What were Jesus’ real views on politics and economics?

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Bank failures another sign of the evil of monetary manipulation











Recently, banks have failed, and the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates another 25 basis points, or 0.25%. Some analysts say banks are safe while others cry that the sky is falling. Who is right? Christians need to discern the financial signs of the times. 

Jesus warned his disciples to get out of Jerusalem when they saw a sign: “When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city,” (Luke 21:20,21). The early church followed Jesus’ advice and fled to Pella in modern Jordan, thus saving the small group from a similar fate. 

Solomon wrote, “A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences,” (Proverbs 27:12).