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Category: Economics

  • Elgin Hushbeck: A Cautionary Note On the Current Political Environment

    by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, Christian apologist, and author of Preserving Democracy, What is Wrong with Social Justice?, Christianity and Secularism, and Evidence for the Bible,.

    There is no question that Liberalism in general, and the Democrat party in specific are in trouble. Not only did they lose the last election, but with their defeats starting in 2010, they have lost over 1000 seats nationwide, completely reversing the solid majorities they once enjoyed. They are now clearly a minority party in turmoil, divided as to whether their problem is that they were too liberal, or not liberal enough.
    To be clear, I am nowhere near ready to declare the party dead. The reason is that the Republican party, even though it has a strong majority of the state and national elected offices across the country, is not without its problems. In terms of the number of elected offices, the Republicans are where the Democrats where just 8 years ago. So things can change very quickly and now it is their turn to deliver and should they fail, things might reverse yet again.

    The simple fact is that there is a reason Trump won and it has nothing to do with fake news stories desperately seeking to find some connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Did the Russians meddle? Of course, they did. They have been trying to influence things here for a very long time. That is what other governments do. Just as Obama tried to meddle in the Israel elections to defeat Netanyahu or the British election and Brexit. And let us not forget that one of FDR’s chief advisers at Yalta later turned out to be a Soviet Spy.
    The real question is: Did they actually affect the outcome in any meaningful way? Here, barring some yet unknown evidence, the answer is a clear “No.” Trump won and Clinton lost because of factors far beyond the Russians. The Russians may have leaked some of the DNCs emails, but they did not cause Hillary to set up her own email server and then lie repeatedly about how and why she used it. And it was not the Russians that caused the new revelations in the week before the election but an FBI investigation of Anthony Wiener on possible emails to minor girls that discovered a whole new batch of emails resulting in the late minute uproar. It was not Russians that caused Hillary to take the election for granted such that she, for example, never came back to my state of Wisconsin while Trump was campaigning here vigorously. In short, Hillary was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.

    While that explains why Hillary lost, it does not, except by default, explain why Trump won. While my view during the election was that both candidates were un-electable, but one was going to win, and frankly I thought it would be Hillary, I have come to believe that Trump actually won, and not just by default.

    One thing that was abundantly clear during the election was that voters are unhappy and angry with politicians. Democrats were hardly happy with Clinton, as was seen in the strong challenge from Sanders. Republicans of course rejected some of the best rising stars in their party to nominate Trump. While I will let Democrats speak to the democratic issues, for Republicans the reason was pretty clear. Since the 1960’s there has been an ongoing struggle within the Republican party between what might be called the Establishment Republicans and the Conservatives. Within the rank and file, Conservatives won long ago, but because of the power of incumbency, and other factors, Establishment Republicans remained dominate among elected officials.

    Thus, for decades Republican elected officials have campaigned on solid conservative principles, but have not governed that way. Whether it was government reform, repealing Obamacare, building the boarder wall, or a whole range of issues, election after election of strong promises, were followed by term after term of excuses. It would have been one thing had they fought and lost, after all no one ever thought that President Obama would sign a bill repealing Obamacare. Rather it was the perception that Republicans had talked themselves out of even fighting. For example, after years of pushing Republican elected officials, they finally passed a law to fund and build a wall along the Southern Border, but then the law was ignored, and the wall was never built even under a Republican President.

    In addition to this was the fact that for decades those in Washington on both sides seem so focused on their issues and agendas, that in a very real sense they had forgotten the people they represented, and more importantly the problems and struggles they face. It was not by accident that the states that switched from Blue to Red to give Trump the election were Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

    This is what Trump both saw and tapped into. He clearly does not speak the language of politics, but he spoke a language the people heard; and no, contrary to Liberal hyperbole, it was not a language of racism and bigotry. All of the Republican candidates this year, as in past years, said they would build the wall. The difference is that people believed, whatever his faults, Trump would actually do it. As Salena Zito summed it up “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

    So Trump is now the President and is moving ahead with his agenda as he promised he would do. Both Republicans and Democrats should be wary. For Republicans, it is important that they do not go back to business as usual. At the end of the day they must fulfill their promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare, build the wall, reform immigration, rebuild our infrastructure and our military and improve the economy and wages. In short, do the things that they campaigned on.

    There will surely be a place for negotiation and compromise. After they build the wall and get immigration under control, I believe most Republicans would support allowing those already here illegally who have not otherwise broken our laws a way to gain permanent legal status, though not citizenship. Given the narrow margins in the House and Senate, this however, might require some Democratic support.

    This brings me to the Democrats and Liberals in general. Many are clearly in denial that Trump won and is now the President, so much so they are becoming completely irrational, as with the constant desperate attempts to find any hint of a possible connections between anyone connected to Trump and the Russians, as if that would suddenly reverse the election and Hillary could magically become President.

    Yes, we have desperate and irrational people within the Republicans ranks as the whole birther silliness demonstrated. But for the most part they are at the fringe. The current irrationally among the Liberals is found at the highest levels of the party and throughout the Mainsteam Media. There are repeated stories of how no President has ever done X or Y before, such as the comment I heard the other day of a reporter claiming no President has ever criticized his predecessor before Trump. Really? Such claims are normally played to great amusement on talk radio followed up by clips many Democrats in the past doing what supposedly had never been done before.

    As many know I was not a supporter of Trump. I did not think he would be elected. I think he still has a lot to learn about being President. But he is President and he is learning, and so far has done an ok job and I think over all his cabinet choices are pretty good.

    Elections have consequences. While I would not expect Democrats to just fall in line and support Trump, I would hope that the knee-jerk opposition to everything Trump, would be replaced by a more reasonable opposition that recognizes that he won. Dragging out every single confirmation battle as long as possible, only serves to make the government even more dysfunctional than it already is.

    I would remind them that an all or nothing approach can lead to victory, but it can also lead to ruin. Will some people be hurt by the repeal of Obamacare? Of course! In a country of 319 million people there will be some who it has helped, but there are vastly greater numbers have been harmed by it. The law was never popular and Republicans have won election after election across the country running on trying a different approach. Perhaps Republicans are wrong, but Democrats, and the people they represent would be better served if they productively join in and actively sought ways of mitigating any deficiencies they see, than their current block anything and everything approach. All or nothing often leaves you with nothing, and there are many in both parties that would benefit from learning that lesson.
     
     

  • Chris Eyres: Thanks for the trust …

    by Chris Eyres, an Energion Publications editor and former English solicitor.
     
    I’ve just listened to an interview with Walter Brueggemann on the topic of money, and as a result have his book on the subject on my wish list. I wrote a fair amount about property a little while ago (this is a link to the earlier post in that series), and it is very good to hear Brueggemann endorsing my view that possessions and money are not to be regarded, if you wish to follow the Biblical witness, as being “yours”; I like the concept of “holding on trust” which he talks of.
    Of course, I anticipate the argument that we can’t actually run a society based on these Biblical principles. G.K. Chesterton wrote “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried”, and I am very tempted to agree. As I’ve written before, there seems evidence in Acts 2-5 that the very early church was trying to take a view of economics which was essentially communitarian (particularly Acts 4:32), but the experiment does not seem to have persisted all that long, and the injunction in Leviticus to hold a regular “year of Jubilee” when all debts were cancelled and all land returned to its original owners does not seem to have been followed for very long, if at all – certainly there is no trace of it in the historical record; I ask myself whether the Pauline efforts to support the Jerusalem Church were in fact famine relief, or whether trying to follow Jesus’ and the Hebrew Scriptures’ injunctions regarding property might have had significant negative effect, in which case there would be some justification in saying that Chesterton was wrong in saying the ideal had not been tried.
    (Read more …)

  • Bruce Epperly: The Book of Ruth, Gleaning, and the Social Safety Net

    by Dr. Bruce Epperly
    Leviticus 19:9-10 proclaims:

    When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

    The God of Israel recognized the reality of poverty. God was well aware that poverty is more often the result of accident and misfortune than laziness. As the Hebraic scriptures, or Old Testament, constantly asserts, God hears the cries of the poor. Abraham Joshua Heschel described God’s relationship to the world in terms of “pathos,” God’s passionate care for the vulnerable, grounded in God’s experience of their pain.
    God is not aloof, but our companion every step of the way. Passionate for justice, the details of life matter to God, as can be seen from Hebraic laws and prophetic critiques. God is concerned that the scales for weighing be exact, that farms be maintained by owners and not foreclosed, that lending be a matter of ethics and not profit, and that every child be fed.
    Gleaning, or what we would describe as the “social safety net,” was not optional nor was it a matter of generosity. It was law! God’s law, and it was required of landowners and institutions. The divine passion inspired prophets to cry out against the injustice of economic inequality and the dissonance of poverty in the midst of plenty. Everything is personal to God, and this means business and government as well as individual relationships.
    Ruth and Esther CoverThe Book of Ruth is more than a pretty love story. Now, I must confess that I like the happy endings of Hallmark movies. I delight in performing weddings and celebrating at wedding receptions. The Book of Ruth is often invoked in weddings and the relationship of Ruth and Boaz is often seen as purely romantic. But, it was also a matter of economic survival and the welcoming of a foreign women into the Jewish community.
    Ruth can be read as immigration story, as a reminder that strangers have a place in our communities because they are God’s children, too! Ruth can also be read as an argument for a strong social net provided by government and business as well as personal generosity. Worried about their survival, Ruth goes to the wheat fields to gather food, the leftovers at the edges, and perhaps to catch the eye Boaz, who will provide economic security for this mixed race family. As scripture notes: “And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, ‘Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.’”
    Ruth had a right to glean in the fields. She was poor and she was a foreigner and God’s law mandated that Boaz provide out of his largesse for the well-being of the power. All’s well that ends well. Ruth marries Boaz, bears a child, and becomes the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king. Dig deeper, the greatest king was the descendant of a foreigner, an immigrant, and a welfare recipient. Although she was single and childless at the time, Ruth’s experience is similar to today’s single parents, the working poor, doing their best to support a family on a minimum wage job. Ruth’s experiences is also mirrored in the couple, both of whom work in the service industry, perhaps serving our lunches or cleaning our rooms, who barely scrape by, who receive no sick leave from their employers and must go to work or not be paid or lose their job, and who live from paycheck to paycheck and must depend on government services for health care and child care. (For more on Ruth, see Ruth and Esther: Women of Agency and Adventure.)
    In the midst of the election cycle, the Book of Ruth challenges any form of “dog whistle” politics that asserts that the poor are lazy and undeserving, and highlights “welfare queens” (with the implication that these are people of color) while neglecting our nation’s subsidies of corporations, many of whose employees must receive their health care from the government, our tax dollars, because wealthy corporates often fail to give benefits or a living wage to their employees.
    In today’s world, the practice of gleaning was a tax. It was God’s requirement, codified in Hebraic law. Generosity was encouraged in Israel, but generosity is always optional and arbitrary. Law is a requirement. Those who call themselves Christians would do well to look at the principle of gleaning, as well as the sabbatical and jubilee years, as a reminder that we have a social responsibility for the poor and vulnerable and that governmental support for vulnerable people is a necessity and not a luxury in securing the protection and the common good of the nation. This means fair taxes for the wealthy and corporations, who gain the most from our economic and governmental systems. Christians would do well to challenge candidates for whom lower taxes are an idol and who want to “starve the beast” and in so doing, starve our families and children.
    To God, it’s never just business or public policy or profit, its people and their joy and pain. God rejoices when the city streets are safe, children are laughing, everyone has enough to eat, and families are secure. God delights in just such public policies and governments that care for the least of these.

  • Goodbye to Politics

    Goodbye to Politics

    [Editor’s Note: This is another post in our series of “Why I changed my mind.”]

    by Steve Kindle

    Head-Brown smallI am the grandson and great grandson of two North Dakota state senators. In fact, my great grandfather, Steen Nelson, was the first state senator in his district when the state was accepted into the Union in 1889. His son and my namesake followed him in office. Steve Nelson’s only child was a woman, so that ended our family’s lineage in the senate. (Women earned the right to vote six years after my mother was born,) Norman Brunsdale, the state governor at the time, was my grandfather’s best friend. My family ate dinner at the governor’s mansion so often, it was like a second home. Later, when Brunsdale became a U.S. Senator, he called on my brother where he was serving in the army in Germany. The chief justice of the North Dakota supreme court was often a guest in our home.
    My family was steeped in conservative Republican views. We loathed FDR and JFK. Barry Goldwater represented our views perfectly. I cast my first presidential election vote for him. I became the son and grandson that made the family proud. Naturally, I was encouraged to follow the men of the lineage into politics. This led me to a very conservative Christian college where I first majored in political science. My intention was to return to North Dakota with eyes on public office.
    But, something happened. I became a Christian. I was convinced that politics was a secondary pursuit, and that I should change my major to Bible and enter the ministry. However, Right Wing politics would be my handmaiden in my ministry, as I saw it as what God wanted for America. My controlling understanding was this: If America can get its politics right, everything else that follows would be good and right.
    A lot has happened over the years to move me away from right Wing politics in particular and politics in general. It parallels my move away from fundamentalism and into progressive Christianity. Where I once felt that what was best for the individual was best for the nation, I now believe that the community’s needs are prior. As an example, quality health care in America is based on one’s ability to purchase it. This leaves out millions of Americans who can’t afford it. For me, health care is a right, on par with any right articulated in the Bill of Rights. To achieve this end, those who can afford it, will be the source for those who can’t. My model for this is the idealized conception of early Christianity practiced by the Jerusalem church where everything was held in common, and everyone’s needs were met by the whole church.
    Today, I am as far removed from the political as possible. It has become increasingly apparent to me that not only is politics not the answer, it is largely the problem. As long as we believe that a political solution will cure our ills, we will never attempt to implement God’s realm on earth.
    I recently conducted a seminar I call “Jesus versus Caesar.” In it, I attempt to show that Jesus’ ministry was the counterpart to how Rome ruled the world. Jesus vision of how God wished the world to work was in opposition to Rome’s view, and led to his crucifixion as an enemy of the state. Rome’s use of military might, oligarchy and its patronage, usury, and income inequality, all reinforced by Imperial Religion, served as a contrast to Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God as an egalitarian community ruled by Jubilee. Luke  4:16-19 In this community, the only rule is the Golden Rule. The only ethic is love God and our neighbor as ourselves. There are no enemies, only each other and our call to work for the well-being of one another.
    Politics works on another plane altogether. Its notions of “to the victor goes the spoils,” divide and conquer, us versus them, winners and losers, has no place in God’s vision for the world. Therefore, I engage in political conversations merely as a good citizen. I have no illusions that anything resembling the Kingdom of God will emerge from political activity. With the church’s consumerist mentality and unwholesome entrance into the political sphere, I have my doubts that it can do any better than Rome.
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  • “Does Capitalism best express Christian economic values? —NO!

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is part of our series on controversial questions. A NO post will normally follow a YES post. Join in by posting your comments.]

     by Chris Eyre

    Chris has been with Energion Publishing since 1997 and fills a variety of rolls, mostly behind the scenes. Expect to hear more from him in coming months. The English spelling in this post reflects his London roots.

    Eyre picThe question asked is “Does Capitalism best express Christian economic values?”, which I interpret as meaning free market capitalism, rather than (for instance) the nascent Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model.
    So, what passages in scripture best enable us to see what Christian economic values might be? One might start with the account of the early Jerusalem church in Acts 2:44-45, “And all who believed were together and had all things in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need”.
    Having all things in common would be an expression of the second part of the Great Commandment from Mat. 22:36-40 “You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Selling their possessions and distributing them to all would seem to flow from the parable of the rich young man in (inter alia) Mark 10:17-31, “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’” He went on to say, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God!  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Also, of course, according to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26), “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
    Many reading this will immediately think that this had to be a short term situation, perhaps having regard to the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return and the institution of the Kingdom of God on earth. And some will think of Paul’s collection for the Jerusalem church, referred to in 1 Cor. 16, 2 Cor. 8 and Rom. 15, and suspect that the Jerusalem church had effectively beggared themselves. I am, however, mindful that Jesus also said (Matt 6:25-34), “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” and “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
    If there is a major fault I can see in the Jerusalem church attitude, it is that the evidence is that it shared equally only between its own members. Implementing the principle of “love your neighbour as yourself” however has guidance as to who your neighbour is in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), in which it is clear that your neighbour includes those of another religion and race, and traditional enemies. These days, it should probably be the parable of the Good ISIS insurgent. Help should have been for the whole community, and not just the group of followers of Christ.
    But, I hear said, this is just totally impractical, it cannot work. G.K. Chesterton however said “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” There have been some decent attempts (generally shorn of explicitly Christian content, for instance the anarchist communal enterprises during the Spanish Civil War), but never a widespread trial. I should underline that a statist controlled economy (which is often seen as the only alternative to unbridled free market capitalism) is not what I think is the nearest to a system Jesus might have approved of. However, something like the Jerusalem church might well be a halfway house to a truly Christian economics.
    Let’s turn to free market capitalism. At first sight, a free market looks a wonderful idea. You produce something which someone wants, and you agree a price with them. If someone else sells cheaper than you do, you have to lower your price to compete with them, and without any conscious decision making other than everyone getting the “best buy” and, on the other hand, selling at the “best price”, prices are kept low and competitive.
    There are two problems with this. The first is in the motivation it assumes on the part of both buyer and seller – the buyer is looking to pay as little as possible for as much as possible, the seller to sell as little as possible for as much as possible. Both are assumed to be working entirely out of self-interest. Self-interest is not a Christian value; it ignores the command to love your neighbour as yourself.
    The second is that it fails to work in practice except in very limited circumstances. What we actually see are monopolies (even on a very small scale you get those – there just is not room for two competing sellers of some goods in my town, for instance) and, where there isn’t quite a monopoly, a cartel, agreeing not to compete on price. As time goes by, one supplier becomes dominant because they can sell a little cheaper, and then economies of scale kick in and they become cheaper yet, and you have another monopoly (which is then protected from someone else entering the market by selling at a loss until the new entrant fails, at which point the losses are recouped by raising the price).
    Another problem kicks in when talking about markets in, for instance, stocks and shares. What governs those prices is more what people think is going to happen to the price in the future than a dispassionate view of how well the underlying company is doing, so they are prone to boom and bust cycles.
    Of course, except on a very small scale (without economies of scale), it is not a matter of a single person producing something, it is a matter of an employer with multiple employees, it is a matter of needing capital from somewhere in order to set up the business; both separate the work of production from the sale of the product. But, I hear, workers contract freely to work for the capitalist, and there is again a free market. The fact that the employer or the provider of capital makes most of the money, and not those who actually produce, is fair because it is a free market.
    This is just not the case. A free market demands that both seller and buyer are free from overwhelming need to contract at whatever price the other demands. Except in circumstances of labour shortages (which rarely arise except in the case of people with specialist skills), the employer can employ anyone, the worker fears starvation and the gutter and is compelled to accept what the employer is willing to give. This is good free market capitalist economics; it reduces the cost of production for the employer and increases the profit margin.
    It is not, however, remotely Christian. The employer is not only failing to love the employee as himself, but is taking advantage of rather than benefiting the poor (for instance by giving them all his money…). In a truly Christian economy, the fear of starvation and the gutter would not be there, because the rich would be queuing up to give the poor money.
    Indeed, free market capitalist economics value people only as units of production or units of consumption. The less you pay in wages the better, the more they pay for what they buy (and the more they buy) the better. A Christian economics would value them as people and, I suggest, value them the more if they are poor (hungy, thirsty or unclothed), a stranger, sick or imprisoned (Matt. 25:31-46). Capitalist economics, in other words, values only money. If you work for a capitalist enterprise, you are likely to be sacked for giving anything away or for selling it at a lower price than the employers demand; you are forever going to be pushed to produce more at a lower cost and sell more at a higher price. To make more money. As Gordon Gecko says in “Wall Street”, “Greed is good”.
    There is the problem. Paul said “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10) and Jesus said “You cannot serve God and money” (Luke 16:13). The word used for money there is “Mammon”, which Christian theology has traditionally seen as a false god or prince of hell (Gregory of Nyssa, Cyprian and Jerome certainly thought this way; Gregory equated Mammon with Beelzebub).
    All this for something which you cannot eat or drink, which you cannot wear, and which has only the value we permit ourselves to be deceived into giving it unless and until it is converted into something real. In addition, if you consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while the lowest level (physiological) can be attended to fairly readily with money, safety requires more than money, and having more money links badly with all the higher needs of humanity (“Money can’t buy you love”), though we are deceived into thinking that money gives us security and others are deceived into esteeming us more for “having” more of it.
    It is also the case that in every free market capitalist system (and the more so the more nearly that approaches the ideal), the principle of “trickle down economics” which benefits the poor because it benefits everyone does not work. Marx got a lot of things wrong, in my eyes, but the one thing he got right was that free market capitalism concentrates wealth (and so power and the ability to choose what one does with life) in fewer and fewer hands, particularly where there is no labour shortage. “Thus says the LORD:  For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals – they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way. “ (Amos 2:6-7)
    So, capitalism gives us a system which results in us valuing each other by the amount of this Satanic fiction we consider each of us to have and concentrating that in fewer and fewer hands. We live in fear of not having it (which is a primary reason why we do not try a truly Christian economics) and are compelled into getting more of it, and letting others have as little of it as possible.
    I therefore think that I was entirely justified in a recent Global Christian Perspectives webcast in calling Market Capitalism the “system of Satan”. It is the opposite of a Christian economic system.
    The trouble is, just as Jesus observed when he said “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17), we are stuck with this system. I am myself too consumed with the fear of destitution to go as far as I think I should towards a truly Christian view of economics, and can only chip away at the edges (by, for instance, not buying from companies which I know oppress workers particularly badly, and by paying more than I need to where a seller is plainly poor, as well as the normal charitable imperatives for which there is no justification in Market Capitalism). The fact that we are stuck with it, however, should not blind us to its Satanic character and the fact that we should aim at something better.
    Capitalism is not a matter of “best expressing Christian values”, it’s a matter of expressing their opposite.
     

  • Does Capitalism Best Express Christian Economic Values? —YES!

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is part of our series on controversial questions. A NO post will normally follow a YES post. Join in by posting your comments.]

    by Elgin Hushbeck

    PicThe quick and easy answer is a resounding yes. However, many have a distorted view of capitalism and thus will be puzzled by such a response so it requires some explanation. To begin with we must define what is meant by Economics, then Capitalism and finally we must determine just what Christian Economic values are.
    Economics is the study of the means for creating and allocating scarce resources. At first blush an equal distribution might seem to be the best, but many factors quickly arise. What if there is not enough to go around? These are, after all, scarce resources. How do need and desire factor in to the distribution? Numerous other such questions and concerns can be raised and in dealing with these the study of economics is born.
    While historically there have been a number of economic systems, today there are two main camps, differing in their method of controlling the allocation of resources. The earliest of these camps, Capitalism, dates from the late 18th century, seeing the means of control in a marketplace governed by competition in which individuals are the ultimate deciders, choosing what is best for them.
    In the early to mid-19th century others saw Capitalism as too chaotic and began developing an alternative theory. Inspired by the tremendous advances in science, advances that led to improvements in the quality of life by taming and controlling nature, the proponents of socialism sought to adapt scientific principles to likewise tame and control the economy.
    Now the preceding descriptions are by necessity brief, but it is the means of control, whether in the chaos of the marketplace, or the scientific determination of planners that marks the major division today. It is also noteworthy that these two camps are mutually exclusive. The more you pursue one, the less you can pursue the other.
    It is also important to point out that the common characterization of Capitalism, i.e., that of corporate leaders controlling the economy, is as antithetical to Capitalism as it is to socialism. The key to capitalism is a marketplace governed by choice and competition, not central planning. It does not matter whether the central planning is done by government, or by corporate leaders acting in their own self-interest; it is still centralized planning and therefore not capitalism. To be clear, I would not see planning by corporate leaders as a form of socialism, just a corruption of capitalism, though at times business and government do act together to control the economy. This is crony-capitalism, a corruption of both Capitalism and Socialism.
    As for values, just what, as Christians, should we seek in an economic system? While the reduction of poverty, is fairly easy, I am not sure a completely biblical list can be given. This is because the concerns of the Bible are somewhat different than our daily economic well-being. Nor are economic systems themselves inherently concerned with values. That said, some of the things I look for in an economic system beyond just the reduction of poverty, are more abstract concepts such as an improved quality of life, self-determination, and empowerment.
    When it comes to judging Capitalism and Socialism against these standards, some final factors need to be considered. First while theory is all well and good, what is more important is what the system actually produces in a long term and sustainable fashion.  Second, while it is important to compare likes, in reality, critics of Capitalism often compare the goals of socialism against the worse failures, or even a distorted caricature of capitalism.
    In fact, Capitalism is often caricatured as grounded in greed and producing selfishness. To the contrary, the studies are pretty clear that those supporting free market approaches tend, on the whole, to be more generous and charitable.
    Nor should this be much of a surprise. In any actual marketplace governed by choice and competition, the caricatured Capitalist would fail as people took their business elsewhere. Rather than greed, the core of capitalism is mutual exchange, and this exchange encourages a concern for others. While, as in all human endeavors, examples of human failings are all too common, that does not change the core. Thus management books and seminars deal with topics such as keeping your employees happy, providing better customer service, developing long term relationships, the importance of honesty and integrity, seeking Win-Win situations, etc..
    Capitalism encourages individuals to improve themselves, deferring satisfaction today, and working hard for the future. In doing so it encourages the earned success that studies show is strongly linked to happiness, and as I mentioned earlier its focus on others also results in people who given more of their time and money to others than do their socialist counterparts.
    In addition, the closer one moves to capitalism, i.e., the more competition and choice there is, the better things will be. In contrast, while space does not permit a complete explanation here, socialism faces three huge problems. The first is that the economy is so large and complex that understanding all the various factors needed to create a plan is impossible. Second, the power to enforce a plan results in a loss freedom, which for large plans move the state towards and sometimes to totalitarianism. Third, there is a question about long term sustainability of large socialist governments on issues of debt and demographics.
    Nor is government immune from the same human failings that afflict every other human organization. When you are wronged by a business in a free market you can go elsewhere, and even appeal to government for redress if need be. When government wrongs you, where can you go?
    Ultimately, the key advantage of Capitalism is that it focuses on the creation of wealth rather than its redistribution, resulting in a better standard of living and providing the means to being more generous. The results of this are seen in the fact that since 1970s the worse form of poverty has fallen by 80% as a result of the introduction of capitalist programs such as micro-credit.
    Thus while not really Christian, Capitalism reduces poverty, allows people to live better and happier lives, and results in people who are more generous in their giving to those in need. Not bad for a system who primary focus is the efficient creation and distribution of resources.

    Elgin’s books can be viewed and ordered here: https://energiondirect.info/authors/authors-d-k/elgin-hushbeck-jr
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