Rubio Needs To Choose Christianity Over Statism

Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

At the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C. are two large statues titled “Man Controlling Trade.” They were commissioned in the late 1930’s near the height of America’s love affair with socialism and depict muscular men controlling the powerful draft horses of the market for the “common good.”

The myth that the state can control the market and make it produce what bureaucrats want and reward those whom bureaucrats deem worthy is ancient and harder to kill than zombies. Even in the 1930s intelligent people understood that free markets create wealth (reduce poverty) in almost miraculous ways. Marx admitted as much. But markets don’t make everyone equally wealthy, as the envious demand, and they don’t create the utopias of socialist fantasies. Of course, neither does socialism.

So, many people dream of harnessing the wealth generating power of markets to the socialist’s fantasies and having their Kate and Edith, too. The problem is that the power of the market lies in its being free, much as Samson’s strength was in his hair. Markets have always existed. Even the USSR had them. They have rarely been free. Freedom empowered existing markets in China to lift half a billion people from starvation poverty in a single generation.

African-Americans Are Among The Richest People On The Planet

Source: AP Photo/David Goldman

According to the New York Times, living in the US is awful! Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board and the author of the forthcoming The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society, wrote that.

Life expectancy declined for the poorest 20 percent of Americans. Shockingly, the difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.

Rising inequality also is straining the health of liberal democracy. The idea of “we the people” is fading because, in this era of yawning inequality, there is less we share in common.

Political Power Is The Ring That Should Be Destroyed

Source: U.S. Geological Survey via AP

As the US plunges into another festival of foolishness, also known as the campaign to choose the next president, we should pause to consider what we’re doing. We have created a political position in which the person in the seat exercises enormous power over the lives of millions beneath them, power very much like that of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien wrote in a letter, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” And he offered the world brilliant political wisdom in his masterpiece. Sauron the Dark Lord created the ring to achieve dominion over Middle-earth. Several of the characters believe that they can use the power of the ring for great good. Tolkien proves them wrong. The only solution to the problem of the Ring, and the salvation of Middle-earth, is to destroy its power in the fires of Mordor.

But Americans think we know better. We just need to put the right person in the seat of power and they will wield it for the benefit of all. Maybe. George Washington did it well, but the list of rulers in history with Washington’s character is short. A much greater number have been evil.

The Scandal Of Christian Socialism

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Mark Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Christianity Today magazine called it the most influential book of the decade in 2004. The next year Time magazine listed Noll among the top 25 most influential evangelicals. The problem, Noll wrote, “... is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

But the real scandal of the evangelical mind is the left’s phobia of economics and Noll offers evidence. In his 1994 book he wrote, “Increasingly throughout the period before the Civil War, evangelicals came to assume the God-given character of liberal political economy... this was done without a great deal of thought.”

But Noll was wrong. Paul Heyne wrote in “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion,

continue at Townhall Finance. 

Inverted Yield Curve Doesn’t Cause Recessions, But It Predicts Them

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Source: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

One of the big financial news stories of the past month has been the inverted yield curve, which means that the interest rate on long-term government debt is lower than that on short-term debt. During expansions, interest on short-term government debt is lower than long-term. In other words, things are upside down. Inverted yield curves are rare events and often predict a recession within two years, although a couple of recessions have happened without the curve inverting.

John Tamny recently chastised market pundits for claiming that the Fed’s monetary policy is too tight and caused the inverted yield curve. The writers and talking heads who make that claim are followers of a school of macroeconomics known as monetarism. Milton Friedman was a famous monetarist. Monetarists believe that monetary policy drives everything. They have no objective measure of “tight” or “loose” monetary policy. Policy is too tight if the economy is slowing and too loose if inflation gets out of control.

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The Irony Of Socialists Comparing Trump To Hitler

Source: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Socialists’ reflex reaction to the election of a Republican president has always been to compare him to Hitler and their treatment of President Trump follows the script. In their minds, he must be the American Hitler because, they claim, he is a racist; he is a capitalist; and he dictates policy instead of consulting socialist experts in federal agencies. Socialists miss the irony in their comparing Trump to Hitler because of their ignorance of history.

The closest the US has come to an American Hitler was President Roosevelt and the left in his day understood it. The evidence comes from their reaction to FA Hayek’s most famous book, The Road to Serfdom. The book came out in 1944 before Roosevelt’s death and socialists in the US saw it as an attack on his policies of central planning so they attacked Hayek for writing it. Several publishers rejected it. But it sold 230,000 copies and a Reader’s Digest version sold 600,000.

Continue at Townhall Finance. 

New National Conservatism Is Old Mercantilism

Source: AP Photo/Richard Drew

Recently some conservatives got together at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City to plot the future of what they hope is a new movement. Headlined by Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Ambassador John Bolton, the meeting attempted to...

“Bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing."

One writer who attended the conference reported on the speech by Mary Eberstadt, an essayist and novelist at the Faith and Reason Institute. Eberstadt argued that,

“[...] We ought to ask what is actually conducive to the human flourishing of our country’s citizens.

“Libertarianism [...] is simply incapable of answering this question. It lacks the moral foundation necessary to understand the good of the human person, and it fails to develop the habit of mind that looks to the wisdom that preceded Adam Smith and Austrian economics. Because libertarianism exalts autonomy and self-determination above all else, it is willing to accept immense human suffering—such as that caused by the opioid crisis, our culture’s deep sexual disorder, the breakdown of the American family, and the scourge of racism—as so much collateral damage. To libertarianism, these things are surely regrettable, but they are ultimately an acceptable price to pay for individual freedom."

continued at Townhall Finance.