[He] Changed my mind

Time bombs blowing dust from within my head.
Between my ears explodes the epistemic bread,
Laying waste to my building blocks, One Rock short,
The newly founded Cornerstone, where all the weary port.
Buckets of debris are cleaned up with a stain,
Blood covered rubble is washed white in a Name.
From the same vein flows now a heritage acclaimed,
Calling to my mind all the bruising, battering, blame.
The great hurricane sucked it up in a flame.
Now a new thing, led by a new Head, aimed,
I'm thinking with a heart under Yahweh's reign.

Christianity and Capitalism - Kingdom building (QUOTATIONS)

Money, Greed, and God: Why capitalism is the solution and not the problem

Again, read this book. The following are my favorite quotations.

Page 7

Despite what you’ve been told, the essence of capitalism is not greed. It’s not even competition, private property, or the pursuit of rational self-interest. These last three items, rightly defined, are key ingredients in any market economy; but the heart of capitalism lies elsewhere.

Page 22

[Regarding Acts 4, and Christians holding possessions in common]

On the surface, this looks like communism. But it’s not. First of all, unlike modern communism, there’s no talk of class warfare here, nor is there any hint that private property is immoral. These Christians are selling their possessions and sharing freely and spontaneously. Second, the state is nowhere in sight. No government is confiscating property and collectivizing industry. No one is being coerced. The church in Jerusalem was just that – the church, not the state.

Page 27-28

God created the world good, but we have fallen. Things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. Each of us bears the effects of sin. No one is immune to those effects. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,’ said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

Page 31

[Regarding the Nirvana Myth – See previous post]

But the myth can have subtle effects even if we reject utopian schemes. To avoid its dangers, we have to resist the temptation to compare our live options with an ideal that we can never realize. When we ask whether we can build a just society, we need to keep the question nailed to solid ground: just compared with what? It doesn’t do anyone any good to tear down a society that is unjust’ compared with the kingdom of God if that society is more just than any of the ones that will replace it.

Compared with Nirvana, no real society looks good. Compared with utopia, Stalinist Russia and American at its best will both get bad reviews. The differences between them may seem trivial compared to utopia. That’s one of the grave dangers of utopian thinking: it blinds us to the important differences among the various ways of ordering society.

Page 53

The problem isn’t simply that taxes are too high. After all, not all forms of taxation are unjust. Every government has to collect taxes to fund services beneficial to all – to maintain courts, protect citizens from domestic and foreign predators, enforce traffic law and contracts, and so forth. These government functions stem from our inalienable rights. We have a right to protect ourselves from aggressors, for instance, so we can delegate that right to government. We don’t have the right tot take the property of one person and give it to another. Therefore, we can’t rightfully delegate that function to the state. Delegated theft is still theft.

Using the state to redistribute wealth from one citizen to another is different from general taxation for legitimate governmental functions, such as those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. Rather than promoting the general welfare, redistribution schemes involve a group of citizens voting to have the government take property from others and give it to them.

Page 94-95

Okay, but what about property? Maybe my intellectual property and diligence and ideas are immaterial, but what about land? Land has a location, boundaries, dirt. That’s matter if anything is. Yes, of course plots of land on the earth’s surface are made of matter. But that’s not what makes them property. ‘Property is not really part of the physical world,’ argues de Soto [Peruvian economist], ‘its natural habitat is legal and economic. Property is about invisible things.’ Although squatters may be able to extract some value out of land they occupy by sleeping there or by planting cash crops that they can quickly harvest to eat or to sell, that land is not their property unless it is represented as part of a formal system that is widely seen as legitimate. ‘Property is not the assets themselves, but a consensus between people as to how those assets are held, used, and exchanged,’ de Soto argues.

Page 120-121

Moreover, unlike Mandeville, Smith didn’t view all our passions as vicious. We may be passionately committed to a just cause, for instance. Still, he saw greed as a vice. So while he agreed with Mandeville that private vices could lead to public goods, he was an ardent critic of the Dutchman: ‘There is,’ he said, ‘another system which seems to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is, upon that account, wholly pernicious: I mean the system of Dr. Mandeville.’ You’d never catch Smith endorsing Gordon Gekko.

For Smith, pursuing your self-interest was not in itself immoral. Every second of the day, you act in your own interest. Every time you take a breath, wash your hands, eat your fiber, take your vitamins, clock in at work, look both ways before crossing the street, crawl into bed, take a shower, pay your bills, go to the doctor, hunt for bargains, read a book, and pray for God’s forgiveness, you’re pursuing your self-interest. That’s not just OK. In most cases, you ought to do these things. Only foggy moral pretense confuses legitimate self-interest and selfishness.

Page 128

Money makes entrepreneurial investments possible since it allows the entrepreneur to compare the value of different opportunities using a standard unit of measurement, just as a square foot allows you to compare the size of two plots of land, even if they’re on opposite sides of the planet.

While money represents bonds of trust within a community, an investment is an act of trust that extends into the unknown future. Like the coconuts of the mumi, investments are a gift. Such gifts don’t conform to a selfless ideal, of course, but rather to what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called the Law of Reciprocity: ‘The essence of giving is not the absence of expectation of return, but the lack of a predetermined return.’ Like gifts, capitalist investments are made without predetermined return.

Many Christian critics of capitalism look at capitalists and see only the superficialities. They notice that entrepreneurs work with money and seek to multiply it. They associate greed with money, money with entrepreneurs, and so greed with entrepreneurs. This simpleminded reasoning fails to distinguish the modern entrepreneur from the medieval miser. Entrepreneurs don’t look at their money but through it to what it can do. The money in hand is a means, not an end, even if one of the possible ends is more money. They risk actual wealth in the hope of multiplying it. They pursue visions; they seek to create something they imagine may fulfill some need or desire…

Page 130-131

In fact, entrepreneurial capitalism requires a whole host of virtues. Before entrepreneurs can invest capital, for instance, they must accumulate it. So unlike gluttons and hedonists, entrepreneurs set aside rather than consume much of their wealth. Unlike misers and cowards, however, they risk rather than hoard what they have saved, providing stability for those employed by their endeavors. Unlike skeptics, they have faith in their neighbors, their partners, their society, their employees, ‘in the compensatory logic of the cosmos.’ Unlike the self-absorbed, they anticipate the needs of others, even needs that no one else may have imagined. Unlike the impetuous, they make disciplined choices. Unlike the automaton, they freely discover new ways of creating and combining resources to meet the needs of others….

Very few critics of capitalism understand this. But the problem isn’t just with the critics. Too often, even the fans of capitalism neglect the entrepreneur, focusing on free markets rather than on free men and women. Adam Smith, for instance, was rightly intrigued by the invisible hand. Most economists have followed Smith preferring to study the measurable market rather than the mysterious man. Too often, elusive entrepreneurs get replaced with simple abstractions like supply and demand. It’s easy to see why this picture is so attractive. If economists can assume that everyone is producing and trading according to something simple like ‘self-interest,’ they have some hope of predicting what will happen in an economy. Everything is account for, and we don’t have to worry about the virtues, vices, and surprises of individual businesspeople. In short, we get capitalism without capitalists.

Page 149

[Regarding Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success]

‘The rise of the West,’ Stark argues, ‘was based on four primary victories of reason’:

1. Faith in progress within Christian theology

2. The way that faith in progress translated into technical and organizational innovations, may of them fostered by monastic estates.

3. The way reason informed both political philosophy and practice to the extent that responsive states, sustaining a substantial degree of personal freedom, appeared in medieval Europe

4. The application of reason to commerce, resulting in the development of capitalism within the safe havens provided by responsive states.

Stark especially identifies the development of systematic theology, ‘formal reasoning about God,’ in Christianity. He argues that such intellectual exercises were not trivial, but eventually led to tangible social progress.

To defend his thesis Stark spends much of his time describing the profound cultural and technological innovations that emerged in the so-called Dark Ages. Despite centuries of bad climate, during this time improved water mills, windmills, horse collars and horseshoes, wheeled plows, chimneys, eyeglasses, clocks, stirrups, the magnetic compass, and may other inventions sprang up. Similarly, education and capitalism emerged not with the Reformation or the Enlightenment, but in medieval monasteries.

Page 150

Stark probably focuses too much on reason. Other Judeo Christian themes clearly contributed to capitalism as well. Here are just a few:

· The idea that God’s creation is good, even if marred by sin

· The idea that private property is right and proper, not a material evil

· The Christian moral code as a whole

· An optimism about the future tempered by the doctrine of original sin—which together encouraged hard work, investment, innovation, limited government, checks and balances, and a distrust of utopian schemes.

Page 165

Contrary to the stereotype, capitalism is not compatible with a vicious populace. Consumerism in particular is actually hostile to capitalism, at least in the long term. Thinkers as diverse as Max Weber and Karl Marx understood that capitalism and overconsumption could not long coexist.

….

Remember, advanced capitalism needs financial habits and institutions that allow wealth to be reinvested so that wealth itself becomes wealth producing. That requires not only that wealth be created, but that some of that wealth be saved rather than consumed. Delaying gratification is restraint; it’s the opposite of gluttony. So consumerism is hostile to capitalist habits and institutions. This is why statistics about consumer spending are not reliable indicators of the long-term health of an economy. Every economy will have consumption. But a sustainable capitalist economy needs large portions of wealth creating, saving, and investing as well.

Page 166-167

[Regarding the case articulated by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful that argues against global capitalism]

Sometimes it makes sense to buy locally. In the summer, I can get the best vine-ripened tomatoes at the Fulton Street farmers’ market about a mile form my house. But applied to everything, the advice to ‘buy local’ ignores most of the lessons of basic economics. If correct, the United States would be better off if we had stayed separate colonies trading goods, services, and capital only within the borders of each colony. And we’d be better off if the individual cities just traded within their borders, and still better off if the neighborhoods—wait—individual families—wait, individuals—just traded with themselves.

Only a few lone survivalist nutcases try to take the local-is-better philosophy to such an extreme, but that’s the logical end of the illogical train. Stopping the illogical train at the state or county level only masks the irrationality, and that only very thinly.

Page 180-181

In The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises points out that the literati often make the mistake of comparing the furniture, art, and architecture available to the aristocracy in previous centuries with mass-produced things that are widely available to the average person now. Capitalism gives many people – the great unwashed – the means to make choices denied earlier generations. By definition, the great unwashed don’t always make refined choices. Lots of people think Domino’s pizza makes for a heck of a good meal. They have neither the time, nor the budget, nor the inclination to find and frequent the local gourmet Italian restaurant. But isn’t it better that they can enjoy Domino’s pizza in heated homes that have to live a subsistence existence where such luxuries are a fantasy? That’s the relevant comparison between past and present.

Critics complain about vulgar popular culture. Much of it is vulgar, of course, but the vulgarity isn’t unique to capitalist countries. And it’s easy to miss the hundreds of well-funded literary societies and libraries and art galleries, the opera houses in larger cities, and theater companies in Midwestern towns, and the symphonies in cities everywhere. In previous centuries, only aristocrats enjoyed such pleasures. Capitalist wealth has made them available to vastly more people.

….

Sure, some things are just ugly. I don’t know anyone who thinks ordinary strip malls and oil refineries are beautiful. But that’s not their purpose. It’s unreasonable to expect every building to satisfy high standards of artistic merit. Uniform aesthetic laws, for, say, grocery stores would jack up the price of many bottom rung of the economic ladder. Sometimes surface beauty takes a backseat to other concerns. That’s OK.

Page 191-192

If we get past the short-term spikes in energy prices and look at the big historical pictures, it quickly becomes clear that energy has grown cheaper and cheaper over time. When England switched from wood to coal, energy became more abundant and energy costs went down. Over the long run, energy has continued to become less scarce and less costly. Think about it. You can get free electricity for your laptop in random outlets in most American airports. Such a thing would have been unimaginable in earlier times, and still is in impoverished regions today.

….

‘The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.’ [Sheik Yamani, Saudi Arabian oil minister and founder of OPEC]

….

History again and again teaches a basic lesson: the fact that there’s a fixed supply of wood or coal or oil or uranium doesn’t mean that we are doomed to run out of energy supplies. The image conjured up is of some fixed pot of stuff called ‘energy,’ where the big kids are getting more than their fair share. We need to use less so that others can have more. So complains feminist theologian Sallie McFague: ‘We do not love nature or care for two-thirds of the world’s people if we who are 20% of the population use more than 80% of the world’s energy. There is not enough energy on the planet for all people to live as we do (and increasingly, most want to) or for the planet to remain in working order if all try to live this way.’

But what exactly does McFague mean by ‘80% of the world’s energy’? Presumably the ‘world’ refers to the earth, and not the universe. But she can’t be thinking of all the energy in all the earth’s matter. That amount of energy is almost unimaginably high. At any time, we’re using only the tiniest fraction of that. Besides, the earth isn’t a closed system. We get energy from the sun. Thus, she can’t be talking about all the currently feasible energy sources, since there’s a whole lot of uranium, sunlight, wind, waves, and river currents, for instance, that we’re not using for energy. And she’s quantified the total so precisely that she can’t be referring to all the oil, since we don’t know how much oil the earth has.

So she must be referring to the total amount of available energy being produced at the moment. And that one little verb changes the picture entirely, since it begs the question, Who’s producing it? Usable energy isn’t just sitting in a battery somewhere, first-come, first-served. Somebody has to produce it. So unless the energy consumers are stealing from the energy producers, what’s the problem? Some places produce, buy, and consumer more energy than other places. The problem isn’t that some places are able to produce or buy ample energy. The problem is that other places are not.

Page 202

Remember, environmental protection is a costly good. Societies start to worry about the environment once they have solved basic problems of survival. Americans with four-bedroom houses, three square meals, two cars, and one dog are much more likely to fret about recycling, topsoil erosion, and the plight of fish in the local reservoir than are Africans who live in shantytowns. The developing world will become more environmentally conscious if and when it becomes economically wealthier….

Moreover, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to adapt to change. Any change in the economy or the climate is going to hit the poor the hardest because they have the fewest means to adapt. So even if the current warming trend continues and makes it harder on the poor, it’s much wiser for us to help them to become wealthier than to stage quixotic campaigns to regulate civilization back to the Stone Age.

Page 206

We know market economies grow. So why do we often fall for claims that contradict what we already know? Because we forget what late economist Julian Simon called ‘the ultimate resource’—the creative imagination of human beings living in a free society. The more human beings in free society’s there are, the more inventors, producers, problem solvers, and creators there are to transform material resources and to create new resources. Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource.

‘If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.’ [Chinese proverb]

Page 209-210

The Top Ten Ways to Alleviate Poverty; or, Creating Wealth in Ten Tough Steps

1. Establish and maintain the rule of law.

2. Focus the jurisdiction of government on maintaining the rule of law, and limit its jurisdiction over the economy and the institutions of civil society.

3. Implement a formal property system with consistent and accessible means for securing a clear title to property one owns.

4. Encourage economic freedom: Allow people to trade goods and services unencumbered by tariffs, subsidies, price controls, undue regulation, and restrictive immigration policies.

5. Encourage stable families and other important private institutions that mediate between the individual and the state.

6. Encourage belief in the truth that the universe is purposeful and makes sense.

7. Encourage the right cultural mores—orientation to the future and the belief that progress but not utopia is possible in this life; willingness to save and delay gratification; willingness to risk, to respect the right and property of others, to be diligent, to be thrifty.

8. Instill a proper understanding of the nature of wealth and poverty—that wealth is created, that free trade is win-win, that risk is essential to enterprise, that tradeoffs are unavoidable, that the success of others need not come at your expense, and that you can pursue legitimate self-interest and the common good at the same time.

9. Focus on your competitive advantage rather than protecting what used to be your competitive advantage.

10. Work hard.

Page 214

‘If our present order did not exist we too might hardly believe any such thing could ever be possible, and dismiss any report about it as a tale of the miraculous, about what could never come into being.’ [F. A. Hayek]

Christianity and Capitalism - Kingdom building

I will likely post my favorite quotations from Dr. Jay Richards's 2009 book, Money, Greed, and God: Why capitalism is the solution and not the problem, tomorrow. It's a fantastic read - and only about 200 pages.

In the book he blasts away eight (8) specific myths that have confused men as to the true character of capitalism. These myths are:

1. The Nirvana Myth - contrasting capitalism with an unrealizable ideal rather than with its alternatives
   
2. The Piety Myth - focusing on our good intentions rather than on the unintended consequences of our actions
3. The Zero-Sum Game Myth - believing that trade requires a winner and a loser
4. The Materialist Myth - believing that wealth isn't created, it's simply transferred
5. The Greed Myth - believing that the essence of capitalism is greed
6. The Usury Myth - believing that working with money is inherently immoral or that charging interest on money is always exploitative
   
7. The Artsy Myth - confusing aesthetic judgments with economic arguments
8. The Freeze-Frame Myth - believing that things always stay the same - for example, assuming that population trends will continue indefinitely, or treating a current "natural resource" as if it will always be needed)

If you want to understand capitalism, you need to read this book. If you want to understand why Christians should back capitalism as the best possible mechanism for engendering virtuous economic activity (regardless of sentiments - given that those of most men are immoral), then listen to Richards. You won't be disappointed.

Even those whose arguments he skewers have recommended his book.