The Dower Power Hour

“What does the Bible require of men in the area of economics and business? What does the Bible have to say about economic theory? Does it teach the free market, or socialism, or a mixture of the two, or something completely different? Is there rally an exclusively Christian approach to economics? Modern economic thought is humanistic to the core, whether conservative, libertarian, Keynesian, Marxist, or whatever.”

The answer is, of course, contained and explained in the writings of Gary North. He opens with this:

The essence of democratic socialism is this re-written version of God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.”

“Economic democracy” is the system whereby two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner.

Christian socialists and defenders of economic planning by state bureaucrats deeply resent this interpretation of their ethical position. They resent it because it’s accurate.

When Christianity adheres to the judicial specifics of the Bible, it produces free market capitalism.

On the other hand, when Christianity rejects the judicial specifics of the Bible, it produces socialism or some politically run hybrid “middle way” between capitalism and socialism, where politicians and bureaucrats make the big decisions about how people’s wealth will be allocated. Economic growth then slows or is reversed. Always.

I think it’s interesting that people always look to their faith to justify their beliefs, even if it’s something relatively unrelated. Having taken a course about economics applied to religion and religion applied to economics, I actually know something about this. There is plenty of economics in the Bible but I would assert that its target audience has been dead for over a thousand years. If you’re not going to follow Deuteronomy’s provisions for animal sacrifices, why would you preach your own extrapolations that it condemns socialism?

People like this bother me because they rarely take the effort to try to understand the context in which these texts were written but spend 100’s of hours interpreting and forcefully applying their limited understanding of their concepts to modern society. Instead of investigating how modern translation of ancient thought applies to modern ideas they should study how ancient thought applied to ancient times and then make the comparison.

Gary North is a Christian Reconstructionist. “Most Christian Reconstructionists hold to a type of Postmillennialism that holds that Jesus will return to earth only after Trinitarian Christianity has become the religion of the majority of the planet, with God’s moral law as the civil standard for society. They believe that Old Testament moral and civil laws, such as those against adultery and sodomy and murder, should be presumed binding unless the New Testament says otherwise; this belief they call theonomy.”

He is also known for his incredible predictions. “In 1986, North co-authored with Arthur Robinson Fighting Chance: Ten Feet to Survival, a book urging the construction of backyard underground fallout shelters and stockpiling of gold and silver in anticipation of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In 1987, North predicted in Remnant Review that an AIDS epidemic would overwhelm the world’s hospitals by 1992.

In the late 1990’s, North predicted that Y2K would be a global catastrophe,[2] and promoted his theories in the media and in his Remnant Review newsletter and website. In December 1999 he retracted his position, and in a January 2000 ICE newsletter, he publicly apologized for his mistaken view of Y2K, saying he was baffled as to why the transition didn’t bring global chaos.”

Needless to say, this guy is someone we should clearly listen to and I encourage all of my readers to check out his brilliant, completely unbiased economic analysis of the Bible.