Socialists’ Attack On “Greed” Is Really Concealed Envy

Source: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Gordon Gekko in the motion picture Wall Street regurgitated what socialists have been saying for a century: capitalism is based on greed. Here is part of his monologue:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

As I wrote recently, the definitions of greed are confusing. Even the poorest in Western countries are guilty of egregious greed if we adhere to dictionary definitions. The writers who put those words in Gekko’s mouth appear to agree. But if greed is to remain an evil, should we call the self interest that Adam Smith identified as the motive of business people? Is loving one’s family and wanting them to live more comfortably greed? Is trying to produce a better mouse trap greed? Is striving to have enough to give to charities or churches greed?

Socialists see only two evils in the world today: white people and greed. If they could get rid of both, the U.S. would finally be exceptional and a city set on a hill that conservatives claim it is. But what happened to envy? According to Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, envy was considered the most terrifying of the seven deadly sins through history. He uses Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales as an example: (finish at Townhall Finance)

The U.S. Is Not Capitalist

Source: AP Photo/Russell Contreras

Is the US the vanguard of capitalism for the world? Is the US even capitalist? For most media pundits the answer is obvious: Yes! Everyone knows that! After all, the U.S. has always ranked high on the indexes of economic freedom.

At least one conservative writer suggests that the US may not be the capitalist champion that people think it is. In The American Economy Is Already Too Far Left for Comfort — or Prosperity, Martin Hutchinson wrote, “Americans already are living in a socialist society.” As evidence, he points to the size of the government: “First, the state sector is unimaginably larger than in Marx’s day, around 40 percent of GDP in the United States, when federal, state, and local governments are included, even if that number is smaller than many other economies elsewhere in the West.”

Hutchinson doesn’t mention it, but the US tax system is more socialist than those of Europe because the US taxes the middle class and poor at lower rates than European nations. Economists tend to underestimate the financial benefits of not being taxed. (finish the article at Townhall Finance)

Democrats Willing To Kill 90,000 COVID Patients To Discredit Trump

Source: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erwin Jacob Miciano

The number of patients who have died from the COVID-19 virus will have topped 175,000 by the time you read this. A vaccine is at least a year away. So far, the only treatment approved by the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is Remdesivir, which does nothing but slightly reduce the length of suffering and does not save lives.

Meanwhile, Fauci and the FDA are preventing doctors from using a treatment that shows the potential to reduce deaths by 50%. There is good evidence that 90,000 people died because Fauci and others questioned the studies that claim to prove the treatment works.

That treatment is the infamous Hydroxychloroquine, which often goes by the initials HCQ. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing, details the history of the use of HCQ against the virus and the debates over the studies in “Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale.” According to the best studies, HCQ could cut the virus’ ability to kill in half. Yet, Fauci and the FDA have decided to block its use and fine or imprison any doctor who gives it to a patient. And he is doing the same thing with another widely used treatment, plasma from patients who have recovered from the virus, which is championed by the Mayo Clinic.

Fauci’s has one beef with studies showing the effectiveness of HCQ and plasma: they haven’t gone through randomized controlled trials (RTCs). For Democrats, an RCT means the researchers give one group of patients the treatment thought to be effective and lie to the other group, telling them they got it but didn’t. They call the deceived the placebo group. RTCs are the gold standard of medicine, but they have problems of their own. They’re expensive and time-consuming. COVID-19 victims lack both. And it usually takes several RCTs over multiple years to please everyone in the medical field.

In addition, RCTs are not the gold standard Fauci proclaims. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2014 that 35% of the results of RCTs could not be replicated. That means they were junk science.

Some doctors think RCTs are immoral. Dr. Didier Raoult, from l’Institut hospitalo-universitaire in France, introduced the West to HCQ with azithromycin as a treatment for COVID-19 in its early days. Raoult is the most highly cited microbiologist in Europe. He has published over 2,000 papers. He has been given the French Legion d’honneur.

And he refuses to conduct RCTs. He said, “We’re not going to tell someone, ‘Listen, today’s not your lucky day, you’re getting the placebo, you’re going to be dying.’” Dr. Doidge wrote,

“The randomization conflict almost always exists in serious illness, because we don’t generally study treatments on dying people that we think have no chance of working. Any clinician-researcher deserving the name knows that being a researcher does not cancel out the clinician’s Hippocratic oath to do no harm, or give them permission not to do what is best for the patient."

So here we are in the middle of one of the worst medical catastrophes in recent world history. People are dying by the thousands every day. What is Fauci’s response? He demands that doctors allow patients to continue to die until several years later when we have had enough lengthy RCTs to prove conclusively that the treatments work.

Meanwhile, Fauci promotes hand washing, masks (after first telling us they did no good) and ventilators, none of which have passed through the hallowed halls of RCTs. Eighty percent of patients put on ventilators die, but Fauci doesn’t demand that doctors quit using them. And the drug he promotes, Remdesivir, will do nothing but shorten the length of the illness by so little that most people won’t notice.

The studies showing HCQ and plasma to be effective are known as observational studies. In those, some doctors give the treatment to their patients while other doctors don’t for their own reasons. Researchers analyze the data using statistical techniques to control for other factors that may affect the results, such as age, weight, severity of the illness, how early the treatment began, and others. Economists use the same techniques in econometrics because they can’t do RCTs either. Then they compare results. Doidge wrote,

“Raoult opted for observational studies, in which as many patients as possible are treated. This is not a matter of choosing a design that is ‘fatally flawed,’ it is a matter of choosing a design that is not unnecessarily fatal to the patients. It’s is not sloppiness (as some of his critics would allege), but being true to the study question as he saw it: How can we save as many lives as possible…

“A lot of people have gone crazy,” says Raoult, “claiming that we were dealing with the most dangerous drug in the world, when almost 2 billion people have already taken it.” HCQ, he points out, has been given safely for decades, even to pregnant women, but is being made to look dangerous. […] “It is bizarre, but it is part of something, you know, that people are completely turned mad about one of the medics [sic] that have been most prescribed medications in the history of humanity.”"

What about the studies in Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed HCQ caused cardiac arrhythmias and a 30% increase in deaths in COVID-19 patients? The mainstream media trumpeted those stories. But those same media outlets refused to run a story a month later when both journals pulled the articles and accused the authors of fraud. Two of the best medical journals in the US were suckers for unsophisticated con men.

In the middle of an emergency, it’s criminal to withhold from dying people the only treatments that have shown some success in preventing death. There is a problem with HCQ: it’s in short supply because every country in the world but the US is giving it to their people. Dr. Fauci has nothing to offer.

Dr. Fauci isn’t stupid, so what motivates him? Dr. Doidge believes it’s politics:

“We live in a culture that has uncritically accepted that every domain of life is political, and that even things we think are not political are so, that all human enterprises are merely power struggles, that even the idea of “truth” is a fantasy, and really a matter of imposing one’s view on others. For a while, some held out hope that science remained an exception to this. That scientists would not bring their personal political biases into their science, and they would not be mobbed if what they said was unwelcome to one faction or another. But the sordid 2020 drama of hydroxychloroquine—which saw scientists routinely attacked for critically evaluating evidence and coming to politically inconvenient conclusions—has, for many, killed those hopes.”

Not to mention, killing people. Apparently, Fauci and the Democrat experts who support him would rather watch 90,000 people in the US die than give any credibility to President Trump in an election year. And the Democrat-controlled media and politicians support him.

First published at Townhall Finance   

How Capitalism Suppresses Greed

Source: AP Photo/Elise Amendola

Mention capitalism and the average person will fire back with, “What about greed?” They assume that capitalism is founded on greed and couldn’t survive without it, or that it rewards greed so that people are much greedier under capitalism than under socialism. The mere accusation of greed is intended to shut the mouth of anyone who dares to defend capitalism. But these indictments rest on faulty foundations.

What is greed? Webster defines it as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed.” Synonyms for 'greedy' include: acquisitive, avaricious, avid, coveting, covetous, grabby, grasping, mercenary, money grubbing, rapacious. The Oxford dictionary says, “Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.”

The Merriam-Webster web site claims, “To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it's used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.”

Obviously, the next question becomes, how much do we need? If we took the dictionary definitions literally, anyone who aspires to more than what a native in the bush of Zambia has would be avaricious because even the poorest African living in a one-room hut with no electricity, toilet or water has enough food to keep him alive, shelter from the weather and one set of clothing.

The World Bank claims that 700 million people live on $2 per day or less. That they are alive indicates they have enough to get by. Do we really want to say that they are greedy to want more? I don’t think that is what most people in the West mean when they accuse others of greed. After all, those in the poorest quintile in the US are among the wealthiest people on the planet and in history. Is everyone in the West guilty of greed?

Finish the article at Townhall Finance. 

Why Are People Still Socialists?

Source: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

As Democrat politicians across the country from mayors to Congressmen and Senators openly demand socialism for the U.S., capitalists should wonder why free market economics hasn’t survived the onslaught of socialism for the past 150 years? Laissez-faire reigned in the Dutch Republic from 1600 until Napoleon crushed it, and it dominated the UK and U.S. throughout the 19th century.

Capitalism has enjoyed brilliant defenders: Frederick Bastiat in France and Francis Wayland in the U.S. as well as the great British and French economists of the 19th century. In the 20th we were blessed with Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and many more. More recently we’ve enjoyed the luminous books of Drs. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. All presented overwhelming evidence that socialism impoverishes and brutalizes the people while free markets enrich and liberates. But they have failed to convince a majority.

Why is it that socialism can fail miserably everywhere it has been tried for 150 years and still hold such an attraction for most people? It’s not just the lies that socialists tell, claiming none of those failed attempts were true socialism, that real socialism has never been tried. Intelligent people can see through the lies.

The failure is tactical. Defenders of capitalism have relied on economic consequences to persuade: capitalism works; socialism doesn’t. Socialists have won because they appeal to morality. The great poet T.S. Eliot understood this. Russel Kirk wrote in Eliot and his Age that for Eliot, “Economics must recognize the higher authority of ethics.”

Continue reading the article at Townhall Finance.

Even Angels Couldn’t Make Socialism Work

 

Source: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Before the collapse of the USSR, Russian workers would say, “We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.” Today, people who favor free markets often say that socialism would work if humans were angels, pointing to the incentive problem.

Hayek argued that socialism is necessary for small groups, such as families. In fact, applying capitalist principles to families would destroy them. Hayek believed socialism could work in small groups, like communes and churches, where everyone knows everyone else. Many theologians think the early church in Jerusalem practiced communism, although the context and Greek indicate they didn’t.

However, all communes from the Pilgrims to the kibbutzim have failed because of the incentive problem. Kibbutzim have continued to exist in Israel but have changed radically from the original design. It’s human nature to quit working when the diligent see the lazy getting the same rewards.

All socialist intellectuals understood the incentive problem but insisted that the widespread adoption of socialist principles would transform human nature, returning it to a state of innocence and eliminating the incentive problem. When that didn’t happen in the U.S.S.R. and China under Mao, socialist leaders turned to punishment, then execution for those who refused to emerge from their capitalist cocoons as redeemed socialist butterflies. North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela carry on that venerable tradition.

Continue reading at Townhall Finance. 

The Left Sells Socialism With Race

 

Source: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren


Read the history of the early days of socialism in Hayek’s masterpiece, The Counter-revolution in Science, and you’ll notice that socialism began life as a substitute for Christianity. They offered their own version of the doctrine of original sin: people are born innocent and turn evil only because of oppression and property is the greatest oppressor. Their “gospel” said that socialism could redeem mankind from evil by ending property and distributing wealth equally. At the same time, it would make everyone wealthy.

Marx added little to the original socialism of Saint-Simon. However, by the time he came along economists had begun to lob devastating critical Molotov cocktails at socialism and Marx couldn’t respond. So, he invented a silly idea that the bourgeois and proletariat had different systems of logic, what Mises called polylogism, then claimed that was the reason the bourgeois couldn’t understand socialism, let alone embrace it. In other words, the evidence and reasoning of economists were merely fabricated tools of the bourgeoisie to keep themselves in power.

He foolishly promised that capitalism would impoverish the working classes then cause them to revolt and drag onto the world stage international socialism. Later, he determined that the capitalist had beaten down workers so thoroughly that workers could not respond to their misery. So, it would take armies, guns and massive death to rescue them.

Socialists and capitalists debated the economic rationale for socialism throughout the 20th century until the collapse of the Soviet Union and its puppet states in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. The quick collapse of socialism surprised and dismayed its sycophants. Without the promise of wealth, they had to find a new camel to sneak the burden of socialism into the capitalist tent. Right away, they kidnapped the environment as the excuse for a socialist takeover.

Hey, Disney, Hamilton Betrayed His Wife And His Country

Source: Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly successful Broadway musical Hamilton would embark on its fourth tour this fall had the virus not canceled it. Instead, a video version will begin airing on Disney+. It helps to appreciate the magnitude of Miranda's accomplishment to know that T. S. Eliot, often called the greatest Christian poet of the 20th century, met moderate success at infusing theater with verse. Eliot considered Shakespeare to be the greatest poet in English because he integrated the two so well.

The hero, Alexander Hamilton was a signer of the Constitution and was a founding father with faults. He cheated on his wife who forgave him, as Miranda points out. And he betrayed his country with his founding of a national bank. Hamilton was well-read, so he had to know that the Bank of England was founded and given a monopoly on currency in exchange for financing war against France. Before governments could borrow unlimited amounts from banks, they had to tax the people to pay for soldiers and weapons, so wars were much shorter.

And Hamilton had to know about the South Sea Bubble in England and the Mississippi Bubble in Paris. In both cases, the banks established by the governments of England and France issued tsunamis of new currency that resulted in rocketing prices in stock markets, housing, carriages, and horses. Both bubbles burst in 1720, leaving the two countries much poorer. Richard Cantillon made his fortune in the Paris mania by short selling stocks and insisting on payment in gold rather than the worthless paper money. Cantillon explained the failings of the Paris bank in his Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, published in French in 1755. Hamilton may not have read Cantillon, but he quoted from Postalthwayte's Universal Dictionary, which reprinted much of Cantillon's book.

Tulsa Race Massacre Reveals Resilience Of Black Entrepreneurs

Source: Courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society & Museum via AP


President Trump's recent rally in Tulsa didn't attract the expected crowd, but it was a good one. There was no violence and the President was at his best. One of the best things to come out of the event was increased awareness of the massacre of over 300 black citizens in Tulsa 99 years ago, the worst racial violence in US history.

Many former slaves left the deep south after the Civil War for Oklahoma expecting less discrimination among the tribes. The community in Tulsa became so wealthy it earned the nickname of the Black Wall Street of America. But many confederates also migrated and soon outnumbered the tribes and blacks. The KKK moved into Tulsa in 1920 and began looking for an excuse to attack the black community. It found one in the fabricated story of the rape of a 17-year old white girl, Sarah Page, by a 19-year old black boy, Dick Rowland.

National Conservatism Will Lead Us To Greater Socialism

Source: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

American Compass is the new “think” tank created by the National Conservative movement to persuade voters to adopt socialist economic policies. A recent article, Planning for when the market cannot, attacks the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and his explanation of knowledge in the market:

“Ultimately, Hayekian critiques of government planning are compelling only insofar as one is willing to ignore practical reality. His theories may have been adequate as anti-Soviet propaganda, but they are completely useless as a guide for policy.”

Are We Headed For Inflation, Deflation, Or Stagnation?

Source: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

With the historic collapse of oil prices and glutted tankers sloshing around off the coast of Los Angeles, some forecasters are predicting deflation as far as they can see. They tend to believe that shocks to supplies cause inflation or deflation in commodities that spreads through the economy like a virus.

Others look to the Fed gorging itself on anything that resembles financial paper and predict hyperinflation like that of Germany a century ago or Zimbabwe recently. Historically, growth in the Fed’s balance sheet signaled a rapidly expanding supply of money that would ignite inflation. So which will it be: inflation, deflation, or stagnation?

Christianity Today Editor Hard On Trump Voters, Easy On Adulterous Theologian

The theology of economics from the time of Christ to today shows that from the 2nd century to the 16th, theologians followed pagan writers such as Aristotle and Cicero who saw commerce as one of the world’s worst evils. From the 16th through most of the 19th centuries, they taught laissez-faire. From the late 19th to today they teach socialism for the most part.

Why has the theology of economics changed so radically? The Bible hasn’t. The answer lies in the fact that theologians can’t think for themselves on the topic and merely baptize the philosophy popular among “intellectuals.”

Karl Barth exemplifies the problem. Most readers won’t know Barth but your pastor will, so you might pass this on. I mentioned that Mises had become a fan of the theologian in his later years in spite of Barth’s rabid socialism. Readers should learn about Barth whether you’re a Christian, atheist or other because he has exerted the greatest influence on regressive Christians who call themselves “progressive.” It is often said that Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI called Barth the greatest theologian since Aquinas, but no one provides a reference. Consider these accolades:

The Economy Cannot Be Stopped And Restarted Like A Machine

Source: AP Photo/Lee Jin-man

Socialists in the US have demanded that President Trump switch off the economy until the virus plague has passed and then switch it back on as if it were a car engine. The recent bounce by the stock market suggests many investors believe something similar and are confident the economy will run smoothly once switched back on.

However, we’re about to learn an important economic lesson: the economy is not a machine, but an ecosystem. Damage to one part of an ecosystem can have long-run and unforeseen effects on the whole system. China learned that in 1958 when Chairman Mao ordered people to kill sparrows because the birds ate too much seed. He accused sparrows of eating four pounds of seed each day. Of course, socialism was the real reason for falling grain production, but socialists never admit their system has faults.

So people beat pots and pans to frighten sparrows from the trees in hopes that they would fly themselves to death. They destroyed sparrow nests, eggs and chicks. Those who had guns shot them. Government institutions rewarded those who brought in the greatest number of dead sparrows.

Still, the grain harvest continued to decline. In 1960 Mao rescinded his order to kill sparrows because a few brave scientists pointed out that sparrows also eat insects that destroy crops. But it was too late. The Chinese had driven the sparrow population to near extinction, so insects continued to ravage harvests for years. The locust population exploded and swarmed the countryside. In the mid-1960s around 30 million Chinese starved to death due to ecological damage compounding problems from Mao’s Great Leap Forward and other socialist nonsense.

On a much smaller scale, the US has suffered from similar hubris. Fire management policies by the government allowed dead wood and brush to pile up for decades in the nation’s forests. As a result, forest fires today are unmanageable catastrophes.

In the west of the US, we eliminated the wolf population in order to save cattle and sheep. That caused the deer population to grow unimpeded. Eventually, deer couldn’t find enough grass to eat, so they ate the leaves and bark from trees, which killed them. The lack of trees on riverbanks caused greater erosion that destroyed river ecosystems. The reintroduction of wolves has brought surprising improvements in rivers.

So what could go wrong with the current shut down of the economic ecosystems of the US and many nations? On the surface, it might seem as if only retail businesses will be affected as shoppers stay home, and once the virus has run its course will return and everything will be fine. After all, the media regurgitates daily the mainstream economic fallacy that consumer spending is 70% of the economy.


The truth is that socialist-leaning economists designed GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to reflect consumer and government spending. Government spending makes up about 20% of GDP. I’ll help Democrats with the math: consumer spending plus government spending equals 90% of GDP. That leaves 10% for production. In other words, we must produce only 10% of the economy in order to consume 90%. That kind of math is the reason so many people live on the edge of bankruptcy.

In the real world, we can only consume what we produce, leaving aside borrowing from other nations. So we should expect production to be about 50% of the economy and that’s what we find in a new measure of the economy designed by the Austrian economist Mark Skousen called gross output (GO).

Most consumers are producers and all producers are customers to someone. So when retail businesses shut down, they injure the middlemen who supply them with goods and services. Damage to the middlemen upset transportation and production. Production of automobiles and homes are special cases in that they are capital goods used by consumers that have been hit hard by the shutdown. Banks and insurance companies are suffering because customers without jobs are not paying back loans or making premium payments. Landlords face losses because renters can’t make payments.

The $2 trillion rescue package could prolong the damage to the economic ecosystem because it’s targeted mostly to increase consumption on the advice of mainstream economists. However, without an increase in production, greater spending on consumption will only cause prices to rise due to shortages, as we have witnessed. The main problem we will face in resuscitating our wounded economic ecosystem will be a shortage of capital goods because we have spent so much on consumption, as the greatest economists of the past century, Ludwig von Mises and FA Hayek, reminded us. That would require increased investment in production, especially capital goods.

Good economists had euthanized the mercantile notion that the king could ride the economy in the same way he controlled a horse, but Keynes resurrected that nonsense and gave it academic cover. Most mainstream economists continued to perpetuate the myth and politicians embrace it because it pretends to give them great power over our lives.

We will suffer the consequences, but the media, politicians and mainstream economists will never admit they were wrong. They will continue to blame the emaciated capitalism that exists.

Tlaib’s Trillion Dollar Coin Hoax

Source: AP Photo/Jim Mone

Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib has sponsored the "Automatic BOOST to Communities Act" because she thinks she has stumbled upon a novel idea to stimulate economic recovery from the effects of the Chinese virus. According to Dr. George Selgin,

The BOOST Act's goal is to "provide a U.S. Debit Card pre-loaded with $2000 to every person in America," where the cards could be "recharged with $1,000 monthly until one year after the end of the Coronavirus crisis."

To finance the debit cards, Rep. Tlaib wants the US Treasury to use its Constitutional powers to mint money to make a one-ounce platinum coin and stamp it with the value of $1 Trillion. The Treasury would deposit the coin with the Fed and draw on it to pay to the debit cards. The point of the scheme is to avoid having the federal government borrow more money and instigate another fight in Congress over debt limits. And she doesn’t want future generations to have to pay the debt with higher taxes. The author of a Barron’s article on the coin calls Rep. Tlaib’s plan “elegant” and “not a bad idea.”

What Should The Federal Government Do About The Virus?

Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Democrats have a motto: Never let a crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to expand the scope and power of the state. Wars, natural disasters, and epidemics always feed Leviathan. Is that what we want, considering that the state often makes things worse, such a causing the shortage of tests for the COVID-19 virus?

Everyone but a handful of libertarians want the state to provide relief in the healthcare crisis. Currently, the federal government is offering a smorgasbord of old, failed, programs in which most of the funds are wasted or stolen. The Adam Smith Institute has a better idea for the UK government: let insurance companies handle it.

Should Business Managers Consider Stakeholders?

Source: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Recently the Chicago Booth school of management asked leading economists to agree or disagree with this statement: Having companies run to maximize shareholder value creates significant negative externalities for workers and communities. The questionnaire was prompted by a statement from the Business Roundtable that businesses were bound by a “fundamental commitment” to all stakeholders, including shareholders but also customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which they operate. Most agreed or strongly agree, although the largest single group included the uncertain.

The New ‘Conservatism’ Is Leading Us To Socialism

Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

President Trump’s trade war with the rest of the world has energized new conservatives and inflated their egos. They see the future in an economy directed by Washington, D.C. And like their socialist counterparts, they must trash the science of economics in order to promote their goals.

Oren Cass’ article “Hayek’s Broken Promise” is the latest example. Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, claims that Hayek promised a trade balance if we allowed the market to work. Because the US has experienced decades of imports larger than exports, Cass concludes that Hayek broke his promise. But Cass only advertises his ignorance of economics and Hayek by publishing such claims.

Should Bloomberg Exist?

Source: AP Photo/David Goldman

“Should you exist?” the moderator at the Nevada Democrat debate asked Michael Bloomberg. The question might have been dangerous had the audience assumed the moderator was referring to Bloomberg’s Jewish heritage. But he meant Bloomberg’s financial status as a billionaire. Other Democrat politicians have stated that billionaires shouldn’t exist in the US. Bloomberg responded that he deserved the money because he worked hard for it and was giving it all away. The crowd booed.

Whether or not billionaires should exist is a complex question. The answer from a Christian perspective depends on how he earned it. If he stole it, then he should be in jail and making restitution instead of running for president. From pre-history until the advent of capitalism in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, people who didn’t inherit wealth got it through looting the enemy in war, kidnapping for ransom, taking bribes as a government official, bribing judges to steal from others or all the above. That behavior birthed the idea that people or groups cannot increase their wealth except by stealing it from others.

Get God is a Capitalist free!

Amazon allows me to offer the Kindle edition of God is a Capitalist for free once a quarter. It's already free for Prime customers. Sorry! They won't let me give away copies of the paperback. And they allow us just five days to make the offer in. I'll make the Kindle version available for free for non-Prime Amazon members March 15-20. Enjoy! Get one for your pastor.

What Would Jesus Say About Inequality?

Source: AP Photo/David J. Phillip

How you answer the question “What would Jesus say about inequality?” depends on how you define the “words of Jesus.” Many “scholars” limit them to no more than “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Others include only the quotations in the Gospels attributed to Jesus. Most Christians see the entire Bible as the words of Jesus because, being God, he wrote it.

Let’s start with the Gospel quotations. One passage that comes close to dealing with inequality is the parable of the Ten Talents (Matthew 25:14-30). In it, a rich man gave one servant five bags of gold, one two bags, and the third got one bag of gold to invest, “each according to his ability.” Jesus recognized that different abilities will result in different outcomes, although he is vague about the rewards they receive.

The Christian Origins Of Austrian Economics

Economics and religion overlap because both deal with people. Austrian economics is the most Christian of the schools of economics partly because its view of people, time, and money fit Christianity like a glove. This is true, although the greatest economists of the Austrian school in the 20th century -- F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises -- were agnostics. Mises may have become a Christian late in life.

Another argument for the Christian origins of Austrian economics is that the school can trace its genesis back to the Godly theologians associated with the University of Salamanca, Spain, in the 16th and 17th centuries. Church fathers in the early years of Christianity had embraced the economics of Aristotle and Cicero rather than that of the Bible. Their reasons for doing so have been lost, but it may have been due to the tendency of churches suffering persecution to elect young converts from the nobility as bishops because they enjoyed political power. The sons of nobility had a high regard for the great philosophers of antiquity and tended to baptize their economics.

Did Mises Become A Christian?

Having grown up as a Jew in Poland then Vienna at the turn of the last century, Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist of the 20th century, had every reason to hate Christianity because they had murdered Jews for centuries. But worse for Mises, Christian intellectuals promoted socialism as Godly economics. Mises saw no way to reconcile economics and Christianity, as he wrote in his book Socialism: An Economic and Social Analysis, published in 1922:

The Gospels are not socialistic and not communistic. They are, as we have seen, indifferent to all social questions on the one hand, full of resentment against all property and against all owners on the other. So it is that Christian doctrine, once separated from the context in which Christ preached it—expectation of the imminent
Kingdom of God—can be extremely destructive. Never and nowhere can a system of social ethics embracing social co-operation be built up on a doctrine which prohibits any concern for sustenance and work, while it expresses fierce resentment against the rich, preaches hatred of the family, and advocates voluntary castration…

[Our] evidence leads to the negation of the question asked above: whether it might not be possible to reconcile Christianity with a free social order based on private ownership in the means of production. A living Christianity cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism.