19
MEASURING OUT JUSTICE And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt. Therefore shall ye observe all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: I am the LORD (Lev. 19:33-37).
The theocentric meaning of this law is equality before God's law. This includes strangers. The general principle is the familiar guideline known as the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.(1)
God reminded the Israelites in this passage that He had delivered them from Egyptian bondage, where they had been strangers. This deliverance had been an application of the fundamental theme of the Bible: the transition from wrath to grace.(2) The God who delivered His people in history (point two of the biblical covenant model: historical prologue) is also the God who lays down the law (point three).
One judicial application of God's historical deliverance of His people is the creation of a civil sanctuary: a place set apart judicially by God for those who seek liberty under God.(3) The establishment of a boundary is an aspect of point three. In this case, the boundary was geographical. It was to serve as a judicial model for the whole world (Deut. 4:4-8). Strangers in the land were expected to tell "the folks back home" of the benefits of dwelling in God's sanctuary. God prepared a place for strangers to live in peace through justice. This system of justice did not give strangers political authority, for they were outside the ecclesiastical covenant. But the system provided liberty. Conclusion: political pluralism is not biblically necessary for civil liberty.
There is no valid biblical reason to believe that God's ideal of sanctuary for strangers in a holy commonwealth has been annulled by the New Covenant. On the contrary, the sanctuary principle has been extended across the globe through Christ's universal gospel of deliverance (Matt. 28:18-20).(4) Nation by nation, the whole world is to become such a sanctuary.(5) But a biblical sanctuary is a theocratic commonwealth. That is to say, the extension of God's theocratic commonwealth means the extension of God's civil sanctuary: the transition from civil wrath to civil grace. The judicial evidence of this biblical civil grace is equality before the civil law. To maintain the blessings of liberty, all residents of a holy commonwealth are required to obey the Bible-revealed law of God. God made it quite clear: without corporate obedience to God's Bible-revealed law, no nation can maintain the blessings of civil liberty.(6)
Judicial Love There are three commands in this passage: to avoid vexing a stranger, to love the stranger, and to use honest weights and measures. We begin with the first. Leviticus 19:33 is a recapitulation of Exodus 22:21: "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." This is followed by the law commanding Israelites to love the resident alien (v. 34). One command is negative: do not vex. The other command is positive, or seems to be: exercise love. This positive injunction is followed by the phrase, "I am the LORD your God." This was a reminder to Israel of the sovereignty of the ultimate Enforcer.
The third law governs weights and measures. The question is: Are the vexation law (negative) and the weights and measures law (negative) two separate laws? Presumably, they are one law, for they are found in the same section. There is at least one link: the text's stated justification for each of these laws is historical, namely, the Israelites' experience in Egypt and their deliverance by God from Egypt. But these laws seem to be dealing with different issues: 1) the general public's vexing of strangers; 2) sellers' cheating of the general public.
The second law initially appears not to be a civil law, for it commands civility: "Thou shalt love him as thyself." That is, it seems to command a certain attitude toward someone. But biblical civil law does not command righteous behavior; it is limited to forbidding certain kinds of unrighteous behavior. It does not seek to compel goodness; it imposes negative sanctions against certain evil acts. That is to say, biblical civil law is not messianic. It establishes no positive civil sanctions for showing love to resident aliens. But without positive civil sanctions for righteous behavior, there is no civil law promoting righteous behavior: no sanctions = no law. Thus, if we interpret the command to love someone as meaning the inculcation of a positive attitude toward someone, this command is not a civil law. Also, no civil sanctions are attached to this law.
In apparent contrast, the third law is at the very heart of civil law: the enforcement of universal public standards of weights and measures. It forbids a public evil: "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment." This is a restatement of Leviticus 19:15: "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour." The principle of the rule of law is publicly displayed in the enforcement of just weights and measures.
The Example of Egypt
The text's historical references to Egypt are two-fold: residence in Egypt and deliverance out of Egypt. The Israelites had not been loved in Egypt. The mark of that lack of love was their enslavement. They had been vexed by their one-time hosts, whose fathers' lives Joseph had saved. They had not been treated fairly. So perverse were the Egyptians -- so unloving -- that God intervened to deliver His people. In doing so, He imposed negative historical sanctions against the Egyptians. The warning in this case law is clear: those who refuse to honor God by loving their neighbors will be placed under God's negative historical sanctions.
But this raises a question: If the sin of the Egyptians in not loving the Israelites was their act of enslaving the Israelites, rather than a mere negative attitude toward the Israelites, then the focus of the anti-vexation law may be judicial rather than psychological. This is my interpretation of the law. Love in this case can legitimately be understood as treating people lawfully -- as Bahnsen has put it, "showing love to our fellow men (by protecting them from theft, rape, slander, abortion, sexual deviance, etc.). . . ."(7) If so, then the two laws are doubly linked: both prohibit evil public actions; both are justified in terms of the Israelites' experience in Egypt.
Negative Sanctions: The State as Intermediary What about the State's negative civil sanctions? What does God's law establish as the proper negative sanction for refusing to love a stranger, in the sense of love as a positive attitude toward him? None is listed. This is to be expected, for civil government is authorized by God only to enforce laws prohibiting public evils. God does not authorize the State to enforce laws promoting the welfare of specific groups or individuals.(8) As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in 1850, law is "the collective organization of the individual's right to legitimate self-defense."(9) "Thus, as an individual cannot legitimately use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, for the same reason collective force cannot legitimately be applied to destroy the person, liberty, and property of individuals or classes."(10) The State is a defensive institution. The exercise of State power must be restrained by law and custom. Why? There are two reasons.
1. Savior State, Plundering State
The State is not to become messianic: a Savior State. The monopolistic authority of violence which the State lawfully possesses must be limited to preserving the peace. A judicial boundary must be placed on the exercise of such monopolistic power. If this is not done, then the State inevitably becomes an agency of political plunder. It is this development which threatens the judicial foundation of civil liberty. It creates the politics of revenge: getting even. This means either the politics of jealousy (wealth redistribution) or the politics of envy (wealth destruction).(11) Bastiat described the nature of the political problem:
It is in the nature of men to react against the iniquity of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by the law for the profit of the classes who make it, all the plundered classes seek, by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter into the making of the laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment they have achieved, can propose two different ends to themselves when they thus seek to attain their political rights: either they may wish to bring legal plunder to an end, or they may aim at getting their share of it.
Woe to the nations in which the masses are dominated by this last thought when they, in their turn, seize the power to make the law!
Until that time, legal plunder is exercised by the few against the many, as it is among nations in which the right to legislate is concentrated in a few hands. But now it becomes universal, and an effort is made to redress the balance by means of universal plunder. Instead of being abolished, social injustice is made general. As soon as the disinherited classes have obtained their political rights, the first idea they seize upon is not to abolish plunder (this would suppose in them more wisdom than they can have), but to organize a system of reprisals against the other classes that is also injurious to themselves; as if, before justice reigns, a harsh retribution must strike all, some because of their iniquity, others because of their ignorance.
No greater change nor any greater evil could be introduced into society than this: to convert the law into an instrument of plunder.(12)
Within three decades after Bastiat warned his fellow Frenchmen against the politics of plunder, itself a legacy of the French Revolution (1789-94), political plunder had spread to the English-speaking world. The free trade era in Great Britain, which had begun with the repeal of the corn laws in the mid-1840's, was steadily undermined after 1870 by a return to the older vision: empire.(13) This was paralleled by the political triumph of Bismarck and his conservative welfare State policies in the new nation of Germany after 1871, and by the political dominance of the Republican Party in the United States after 1861: high-tariff and (after 1890) pro-regulation.(14) The visible sign of this ideological transformation was the race for naval dominance. The First World War destroyed classical liberalism's policies of low taxes, low national debt, the international gold standard, free trade, and the free movement of peoples. The national passport became a way of life internationally. Under Nazism and Communism, so did the internal passport.
2. The Primacy of Grace
The exercise of State power must be restrained by law and custom. The State must not be allowed to become messianic: the Savior-Healer State. There is no need to use the threat of negative State sanctions to promote individual welfare, for God's grace is greater than man's depravity, total though this depravity may be in principle.(15) All that is needed for righteousness to triumph culturally is for public evil to be suppressed by the State, including the public evil of messianic statism. Grace is primary; sin is secondary. This was true under the Old Covenant, but it is even more true today. Satan was definitively defeated at Calvary. The Holy Spirit has come. God extends His worldwide dominion representatively through His people, the church. Satan suffers progressive territorial and cultural losses representatively as the gospel, empowered in history by the Holy Spirit,(16) is extended by the church in history.(17) Yet even under the Old Covenant, grace was primary. God is greater than Satan; God's covenants are more blessed than Satan's. There was never any need for a Savior State.
Because of the primacy of grace, God does not use the threat of negative civil sanctions against any corporate body in order to promote good deeds by individual members. He therefore does not use civil law to pressure men to do good. He uses civil law only to repress designated forms of evil. God in the garden did not threaten to impose negative sanctions for men's failure to dress the garden; He threatened to impose negative sanctions only for a violation of the judicial boundary around one tree. Similarly, biblical civil law imposes negative sanctions on those who commit prohibited acts. It does not offer positive sanctions to those who obey.
The list of biblical civil prohibitions is relatively short. A list of positive dominion acts is inherently limitless. Again, this is because grace is primary and sin is secondary. Grace is judicially unbounded; sin is judicially bounded. Example: Adam could lawfully eat from any tree of the garden (unbounded) except one (bounded). Biblical civil justice cannot be established through an attempt to create a limitless positive law code; the list of representative crimes (case laws) must be kept short enough to be publicly read to the people on special occasions (Deut. 31:10-13). Thus, the State's job is not to threaten men for not doing good works, which would make the State as unbounded in its jurisdiction as good works are. Its task is to threaten men for committing a finite number of illegal acts, which places a boundary around the State.
This means that the failure of individuals to take active steps to love their neighbors attitudinally is not a threat to the social order. God does not threaten His covenant organizations with negative sanctions for the failure of individual members to perform positive acts of kindness. God may not bless those individuals who refuse to perform positive acts of charity, but He does not threaten the other members of covenant organizations. Thus, the State has no role as an intermediary between God and man in cases concerning men's failure to act positively. God does not authorize, let alone require, the civil magistrate to step in and compel such acts of charity in the name of God, in order to avoid God's negative covenant sanctions.
Corporate Sanctions The State imposes negative physical sanctions as God's delegated agent in history. If Israelite magistrates failed in this task with respect to individual law-breakers, God would raise up other agents of His justice to impose negative sanctions on the whole society. For example, when Judah refused to honor the sabbatical year of rest for the land, God raised up Babylon -- strangers -- to carry His people into captivity, so that the land would receive its long-awaited lawful rest. God's law had specified this as the appropriate negative sanction:
And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths. As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it (Lev. 26:32-35).
Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand. . . . To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years (II Chron. 36:17, 21).
The biblical justification for the State's imposition of negative sanctions against individual law-breakers is God's threat to impose negative corporate sanctions against the entire society if His Bible-revealed civil law is not enforced by civil magistrates. This is the distinctive principle of biblical civil government. I keep returning to this theme because it is central to biblical political economy. God's negative historical sanctions will be applied. The question is: By God or by the civil magistrates? Those in society who are innocent of a particular crime deserve protection from God's corporate sanctions.(18) The State is therefore authorized to impose negative sanctions on convicted law-breakers.
Biblical civil law is supposed to settle disputes between conflicting parties. The State intervenes and acts as God's representative agent for one or more parties -- the victims -- and against others.(19) But what about a case in which there is no victim to press charges? What about the so-called "victimless crimes" -- the sale of hard drugs, pornography, and homosexual "favors"? If the State were not acting to deflect God's greater judgments on the entire society, there would be no justification for civil laws against victimless crimes, for there are no disputing private individuals who come before the civil court in such cases. As libertarian economist and legal theorist F. A. Hayek reminds us: "At least where it is not believed that the whole group may be punished by a supernatural power for the sins of individuals, there can arise no such rules from the limitation of conduct against others, and therefore from the settlement of disputes."(20) Covenantally, however, there will be future victims of unprosecuted crimes of this type: judicially innocent members of society who will become recipients of God's corporate negative sanctions in history. Like the righteous prophets who went into the Babylonian captivity of Israel, so will the innocent be in God's day of corporate wrath in history.(21)
To Love the Imperfect Stranger "Thou shalt love him as thyself." Why does this positive injunction to love the stranger appear in a list of civil laws? There are no non-judicial criteria listed that indicate how the covenant-keeping individual can show love to the stranger. There are no negative civil sanctions for a refusal to perform positive acts of charity, let alone for not displaying a positive mental attitude toward strangers. Therefore, love in this case law must be interpreted judicially: treating the stranger lawfully, as if he were a full citizen of the holy commonwealth. It is the same meaning that Paul attributed to love: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law" (Rom. 13:10). Fulfilling the terms of the law is the public manifestation of love. This is what the civil law requires of the covenant-keeper.
What was the representative illegal act of not showing love in Israel? The oppression of strangers, widows, and orphans.(22) How men treated the least powerful members of society served as a representation of their covenantal status before God, just as Jesus warned regarding the final judgment:
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me (Matt. 25:34-40).
But was there a specific representative public act in Israel that defined a prosecutable oppression? Yes. The next case law identifies it: using rigged weights and measures. A seller of goods was not allowed to use one set of weights for buying goods and another set for selling these goods. He was not allowed to use one set of weights for some customers and another set for other customers. To do so would have testified to the existence of a God who imposes His law's standards in a partial manner. That is, it would have pointed to a God who shows favor to certain persons: one law for one group, another law for a different group. Again and again in Scripture, this is denied emphatically.(23) The essence of God's moral character, and therefore of His character as a judge, is the consistent application of His law.
Accompanying this law was an affirmation of God's character as a consistent judge, which also served as an implicit warning to the nation of Israel: "I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt." God had brought negative sanctions against the Egyptians for their unrighteous behavior; He would do the same to Israel. He said this explicitly just before the next generation entered the land of Canaan: "And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God" (Deut. 8:19-20).
Open Access and Impartial Justice When God delivered the laws governing the Passover to Moses in Egypt, He made it plain that the essence of biblical law is impartiality: "And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof. One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you" (Ex. 12:48-49). There would be one law governing access to the Passover; thus, there would be the rule of law in the nation. Access to the Passover was the archetype; predictable civil law was the manifestation of the more general judicial principle. That is to say, equal access to the means of grace is the standard of all biblical law: open to all men in history, and on the same terms. Therefore, all men within a society that is in covenant with the God of the Bible should have equal access to civil justice.
The Mosaic law's definition of what it meant to be an Israelite was this: lawful access to the Passover. But any adult male who consented to circumcision in Israel could gain lawful access to Passover.(24) This made illegal any racial definition of "Israelite"; the definition was covenantal-legal, not racial. The establishment of the judicial category of a covenanted people was followed by a command to enforce the same legal order law on all residents of the nation. If anyone could become an Israelite, then there could be no permanently closed caste of citizens (Deut. 23:2-3). This also meant that there could be no permanently closed caste of civil rulers. Anyone under the jurisdiction of that law was a potential Israelite. Today's victim of injustice could become tomorrow's civil magistrate.(25) There was to be open access upward politically; the rulers were warned to impose God's civil law impartially. This was designed to prevent the politics of revenge.
Just Measures and a Just Society The familiar Western symbol of justice is the blindfolded woman holding a balance scale. The blindfold symbolizes the court's unwillingness to recognize persons. The scale symbolizes fixed standards of justice: a fixed law applied to the facts of the case. Justice is symbolically linked to weights.
Justice cannot be quantified,(26) yet symbolically it is represented by the ultimate determinant of quantity: a scale. An honest scale registers very tiny changes in the weight of the things being weighed. A scale can be balanced only by adding or removing a quantity of the thing being measured until the weights on each side are equal, meaning as close to equal as the scale can register.(27) Even here, the establishment of a precise balance may take several attempts. An average of the attempts then becomes the acceptable measure.
The ability of men to make comparisons is best exemplified in the implements of physical measurement. The language of physical measurement is adopted by men when they speak of making historical or judicial comparisons. For example, the consumer balances his checkbook. This does not mean that he places it on a scale. Or he weighs the expected advantages and disadvantages of some decision.
The economist constructs an index number to compare "prices" -- meaning prices of specific goods and services -- in one period with those in another period. He assigns "weights" to certain factors in the mathematical construct known as an index number. He says, for example, that a change in the price of automobiles -- Hondas rather than Rolls-Royces, of course -- is more important to the average consumer than a change in the price of tea. This was not true, however, in Boston in 1773. So, the economist-as-historian has to keep re-examining his "basket of goods" from time to time: Which goods and services are more important to the average person's economic well-being? But there is no literal real-world basket of goods; there is no literal real-world average consumer; there is no means of literally weighing the importance of anything. Yet we can barely think about making comparisons without importing the symbolism of weights and measures.
The language of politics also cannot avoid the metaphor of measurement. The political scientist speaks of checks and balances in the constitutional order of a federalist system. These are supposed to reduce the likelihood of the centralization of power into the hands of a clique or one man. That is, there are checks and balances on the exercise of power. These are institutional, not literal.
The language of measurement is inescapable. This is an implication of point three of the biblical covenant model: standards.(28) As surely as societies create bureaus that establish standards of measurement, so God has established permanent judicial standards. Both kinds of standards must be observed by law-abiding people.
The Representative Case
The preservation of just weights and measures in the Mosaic Covenant was important for symbolic reasons as well as economic reasons. As a case law, it represented a wider class of crimes. It was important in itself: prohibiting theft through fraud. But there was something unique about the case law governing weights and measures: it was representative of injustice in general. "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure." The language of unrighteousness and judgment has a wider application than merely economic transactions. "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour" (Lev. 19:15). This states the fundamental principle of all biblical justice.
To understand why weights and measures were representative of civil justice in general, we need to understand what was involved in the specific violation. The seller could better afford the specialized weighing equipment of his trade than the individual buyer could. He was therefore in a position to cheat the buyer by rigging the equipment. But the narrowly defined crime of using rigged measures was representative of the whole character of the civil order: a violation of justice at the most fundamental level. Analogous to the businessman, the judge was not to use his specialized skills or his authority to rig any case against one of the disputants. The legal structure was regarded as a specialized piece of equipment, analogous to a scale. No one in charge of its operations was allowed to tamper with this system in order to benefit any individual or class of individuals. To do so would constitute theft. Injustice is seen in the Bible as a form of theft. This was Samuel's message to Israel.
And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto your voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you. And now, behold, the king walketh before you: and I am old and grayheaded; and, behold, my sons are with you: and I have walked before you from my childhood unto this day. Behold, here I am: witness against me before the LORD, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you. And they said, Thou hast not defrauded us, nor oppressed us, neither hast thou taken ought of any man's hand. And he said unto them, The LORD is witness against you, and his anointed is witness this day, that ye have not found ought in my hand. And they answered, He is witness (I Sam. 12:1-5).
Injustice is also linked with false weights and measures. Isaiah made all these connections clear in his initial accusation against the rulers of Israel: "Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them" (Isa. 1:22-23). False measures in silver and wine; princes in rebellion against God but companions of thieves; universal bribe-seeking; oppression of widows and orphans: all are linked in God's covenant lawsuit brought by the prophet. It was all part of a great spiritual apostasy -- an apostasy that would be reversed by the direct intervention of God: "Therefore saith the Lord, the LORD of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies: And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin: And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city" (Isa. 1:24-26). When the rulers of Israel's northern kingdom remained unwilling to enforce God's law representatively, generation after generation, God raised up Assyria to bring corporate negative sanctions for Him (Isa. 10:5-6).
Because weights and measurements are representative of the moral condition of society in general, the prophets used the metaphor of weights and measures in bringing their covenant lawsuits against individuals and nations. The Psalmist had set the example: "Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity" (Ps. 62:9). Micah castigated the whole society, warning of judgment to come, for they honored "the statutes of Omri" and did the works of his son Ahab (Mic. 6:16).
The LORD'S voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it. Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth (Mic. 6:9-12; emphasis added).
The essence of their rebellion, Micah said, was the injustice of the civil magistrates: "The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; and the great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire: so they wrap it up" (Mic. 7:2-3).
Daniel's announcement to the rulers of Babylon regarding the meaning of the message of the handwriting on the wall is perhaps the most famous use in Scripture of the imagery of the balance. "And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians" (Dan. 5:25-28).
Corrupt measures are a token -- representative -- of moral corruption. To be out of balance judicially is to be out of covenantal favor. The representative civil transgression in society is the adoption of false weights and measures.
Intuition and Measurement "Add a pinch of salt." How many cooks through the centuries have recommended this unspecific quantity? There are cooks who cannot cook with a recipe book, but who are master chefs without one. Their skills are intuitive, not numerical. This is true in every field.
There are limits to measurement because there are limits to our perception. There are also limits on our ability to verbalize or quantify the measurements that we perceive well enough to act upon. Oskar Morgenstern addressed this problem in the early paragraphs of his classic book, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations.(29) Our economic knowledge is inescapably a mixture of objective and subjective knowledge.(30) That is to say, we think as persons; we are not computers. We do not think digitally. We think analogically, as persons made in God's image. We are required to think God's thoughts after Him. To do this, we need standards provided by God that are perceptible to man. God has given us such standards (point three of the biblical covenant model). We also need to exercise judgment in understanding and applying them (point four). This judgment is not digital; it is analogical: thinking God's thoughts after Him. We are required by God to assess the performance of others in terms of God's fixed ethical and judicial standards.
In order to achieve a "fit" between God's standards and the behavior of others, we must interpret God's objective law (a subjective task), assemble the relevant objective facts (a subjective task), discard the irrelevant objective facts (a subjective task), and apply this law to those facts (a subjective task). The result is a judicially objective decision. At every stage of the decision-making or judgment-rendering process, there is an inescapably personal element, for which we are held personally responsible by God.(31)
Objective Facts Interpreted Subjectively
When we speak of objective facts, we often invoke the language of physical measurement. This is because we think analogically. Making subjective judgments is analogous to measuring things objectively. Yet we never measure things objectively, meaning exclusively objectively. It is men who do the measuring, and men are not machines -- and even machines have limits of perception. We ask: "Is the balance even?" "Is the bubble in the level equidistant between two points?" At some point, we say: "It's a judgment call." Analogously, we ask of other men's offers: "Is this on the level?" Discovering the answer is a judgment call: an evaluation based on one's observation of something that is beyond the limits of one's ability to perceive distinctions.
Consider the task of an umpire or referee in any sport. He is a person. He makes judgment calls. In modern philosophy, we find that the major schools of thought are analogous to the umpire's standard explanations of his decision. In baseball, the umpire "calls a strike." He announces that the pitched baseball passed within the strike zone of the batter's body (a variable in terms of his height) and above home plate. The batter protests. It was a "ball," he insists: either outside his strike zone or not above home plate. The umpire offers one of three answers. These three answers are expressions of the three dominant views of Western epistemology.
"I call 'em as they are." (Newton)"I call 'em as I see 'em." (Hume)
"They are what I call 'em." (Kant)(32)
To make a biblically valid judgment regarding the public record of the event under scrutiny, judges must perceive the limits of the law and the limits of the records. The public record of the event must reveal (represent) an act that took place within the "strike zone" of God's law. The actor must clearly have violated that zone -- that boundary -- of God's law. In the language of the common law courts, it must have violated that boundary "beyond reasonable doubt." The language of the law is imprecise here because the act of rendering judgment is imprecise. Yet juries decide, judges hand down punishments, and society goes on.
Intuition and Creation
Intuition cannot be verbalized, catalogued, or quantified, for by definition it possesses no rational structure, but it exists nevertheless. Every philosophical system ultimately must appeal to intuition to bridge the chasm between mind and events.(33) Without such a bridge, according to humanists, human choice and therefore personal responsibility disappear into one of three kinds of universe: a chaotic cosmos, a deterministic cosmos of mechanical-mathematical cause and effect, or a dialectical cosmos: mechanism infused by randomness, and vice versa.(34) (All three are said to be governed by the second law of thermodynamics and are headed for the heat death of the universe.)(35)
There is a fourth possibility: a covenantal, providential, created cosmos. Here is the biblical solution to the problem of human knowledge: the doctrine of creation. The world was created by God so that men, made in God's image, may exercise dominion over it. This theory of knowledge also relies on intuition: biblically informed intuition. Intuition is an inescapable concept. It is never a case of "intuition vs. no intuition." It is always a case of whose intuition according to whose standards.
Spiritual maturity is the ability to make biblically well-informed judgments. Christians must presume that intuitive judgments that come after years of studying God's Bible-revealed laws and making decisions in terms of them will be more reliable -- i.e., more pleasing to God -- than intuitive judgments that come from other traditions or that are the products of unsystematic approaches. There is no way to test the accuracy of this presumption except by observing God's sanctions in history on those groups that are under the authority of specifically covenanted judges.(36)
Objective Standards God decrees everything that happens. History happens exactly as He decreed it. He evaluates it, moment by moment, in terms of His permanent standards. This judgment is objective because God makes it, and it is subjective because God makes it. Man is responsible for thinking God's thoughts after Him. Man must obey God by conforming his thoughts and actions to God's law. Men do not have the ability to read God's mind (Deut. 29:29), but they do have the ability to obey. Men do not issue valid autonomous decrees, nor does history follow such decrees. God proposes, and then God disposes.(37)
The same is true of weights and measures. There are objective standards, and these are known perfectly by God. This knowledge is a mark of His sovereignty. "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?" (Isa. 40:12). Man must seek to conform his actions and judgments to these objective standards. He does so by discovering and adopting fixed standards. Physical standards are the most readily enforced. The archetypical standards are weight and measure. Even the passage of time is assessed by means of a measure. In earlier centuries, these measures were frequently governed by weight, such as water clocks or hourglasses filled with sand.(38) Measures have be perfected over time, most notably measurements of time itself.(39)
Occult man sees ritual as a means of gaining supernatural power for himself. Christian man sees ritual as a means of worshiping God and gaining dominion over himself and his environment, to the glory of God. Similarly, occult man sees measurement as a means of obtaining supernatural power.(40) Christian man sees measurement as a tool of dominion, beginning with self-dominion. The West is the product of such a view of measurement. A man wearing a wristwatch is someone under the influence of the Christian view of time. In the ancient pagan world, priests were the monopolists of calendars; this control was a major factor in maintaining their power.(41) In the West, very few educated people understand the details of the astronomical basis of calculating time, let alone modern cesium atom clocks, but virtually everyone has ready access to a calendar and a clock with an alarm. No longer does an elite priesthood exercise power through its monopolistic knowledge of the astronomical calendar. The advent of cheap printed calendars transferred enormous power to the individual.(42) Cheap calendars and clocks decentralized power, but thereby made individuals more responsible for the use of time, man's only irreplaceable resource.
The universality of the wristwatch makes it impossible for employers or sellers to cheat large numbers of people regarding time. Because access to information is cheap, time-cheating becomes more difficult. In fact, the employee is far more able to cheat the employer.(43) The employee is the seller of services. If he is paid by the hour, he is tempted to find ways to collect his pay without delivering the work expected from him. The salaried employee cheats more easily on his time account; the commissioned salesman cheats more easily on his expense account.
Specialized Knowledge
The biblical law of weights and measures teaches that the seller -- the receiver of money -- is identified as legally responsible. This requires an explanation. The buyer (consumer) has legal control over the distribution of the most marketable commodity: money. He possesses greater flexibility and therefore greater economic authority in the overall economy. We speak of consumer's sovereignty in a free market.(44) Then why is the seller singled out by biblical law as the potential violator? Doesn't greater responsibility accompany greater authority (Luke 12:47-48)?
The legal question must be decided in terms of comparative authority in specific transactions, not comparative authority in the economy generally. A seller of goods and services possesses highly specialized knowledge regarding his market. Cheating by a seller of goods and services is therefore more likely than cheating by a buyer because the seller has an advantage in information. This is why biblical law singles out weights and measures as the representative implements of justice. Physical implements of measurement can be created more easily than other kinds of evaluation devices. The existence of a precise (though never absolute) physical standard makes it relatively easy to create close approximations for commercial use.(45) The availability of devices and techniques to specialists employed as agents of the civil government, in the name of the buyers, allows the operation of checks and balances on the checks and balances. The State therefore has a greater ability to police the sellers in this area than in most other areas.
On what biblical basis can magistrates police weights and measures? Where is the victim? Where is the court case? The problem here is analogous to the problem of measuring pollution or noise. The victims are not easy to identify, for they may not know that they have been cheated. The extent of the cheating cannot easily be ascertained by the victims in retrospect. The cost of gathering this information is too high. As a cost-saving measure (the language of measurement is inescapable) for past victims and potential victims, the State imposes public standards, and sellers are required to conform. As in the case of protecting potential victims of speeding automobiles, the State establishes boundaries in advance. The police impose negative sanctions for violations of speed limits, even though his victims have not publicly complained against this particular speeder. The driver did increase the statistical risks of having an accident, so there were victims.(46) They are represented by the police officer who catches the speeder.(47)
Competition and the Margins of Cheating The International Bureau of Standards was established by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1875. National governments covenanted with each other by the Treaty of the Meter. The nations' governments are pledged to honor the standards agreed upon. These standards did not originate in 1875, however, nor did they originate with civil government. It does not require a treaty to establish such standards. There can be official standards, but unofficial standards are far more widespread. The free market can and does establish such standards. In fact, the more technologically innovative a society is, the less likely that a civil government will be the primary creator or enforcer of the bulk of the prevailing standards. When it comes to establishing standards, the State's salaried bureaucrats are usually playing catch-up with the profit-seeking innovators.
All standards have boundary ranges. Market standards are likely to be less precise technically than civil standards, for participants in markets understand that the development, selection, and enforcement of standards are not cost-free activities. The degree of variance from a precise model or standard depends upon the costs and benefits of enforcement. It also depends on the locus of sovereignty of such enforcement: the consumers. In a free market, it is the buyer of goods and services (i.e., the seller of money) who is sovereign, not the seller of goods and not the State. The consumer has greater economic flexibility to take his money elsewhere than the entrepreneur or politician does. That is to say, the cost to him of seeking and obtaining an alternative offer for what he wants to sell (money) is normally far lower than the cost to the seller of specialized goods or services to seek and obtain an alternative offer. The seller of money has maximum liquidity. Money is properly defined as the most marketable commodity;(48) hence, the consumer, as the seller of money, is sovereign.
The seller uses implements to make measurements. No seller can do without such implements, even if he is selling services. At the very least, he will use a clock. The seller is warned by God to make sure that he uses these implements consistently as he goes about his business. Yet this is not quite true. The seller is not to supply less than the standard determines; he may lawfully give more. If he gives any buyer less than he has said he is giving, he steals from him. If he gives a buyer more than he says, he is not stealing. He is offering charity, or giving a gift, or being extra careful, or building good will to increase repeat sales. So, the business owner is allowed to give more than he has indicated to the buyer that the buyer will receive; he is not allowed to give less. The seller need not tell the buyer that he is giving an extra amount, but he is required to tell him if he is giving less.(49) The boundary, therefore, is a seller's floor rather than a ceiling.
Sellers compete against sellers; buyers compete against buyers. This is the fundamental principle of free market competition, one which is not widely understood. The buyer is playing off one seller against another when he bargains, even if the second seller is a phantom;(50) the seller is playing off buyer against buyer. Buyers compete directly against sellers only when both of them have imperfect information regarding the alternatives. No one knowingly pays one ounce of silver for something that is selling next door for half an ounce. The seller will not sell something to a buyer at a low price if he knows that another buyer is waiting in line to buy at a higher price. Neither will a buyer buy at a high price if he knows that another seller waits across the hallway to sell the same item at a lower price.
This being the case, it should be obvious why sellers who use false scales find themselves pressured by market forces to re-set their scales closer to the prevailing market standard. Their competitors provide a greater quantity of goods and services for the same price. It may take time for word to spread, but it does spread. Buyers like to brag about the bargains they have bought. Even though their tales of bargains increase the number of competing buyers at bargain shops, and therefore could lead to higher prices in the future, they do like to brag. This bragging gets the word out.(51) A seller who consistently sets his scales below the prevailing competitive standard risks losing customers. This pressure does not mean that all or even most scales will be set identically, but it does lead to a market standard of cheating: competitive boundaries. The better the information available to buyers, the narrower the range of cheating. None of this assumes the existence of a standard enforced by civil government.
The Scales of Justice
Much the same is true of the scales of civil justice. Word spreads about the availability of righteous civil justice. If there is open immigration, as there was to be in Mosaic Israel, it is possible for those suffering injustice to seek justice elsewhere. (This is a major advantage of federalism: those living in one state can move to another if they disapprove of the prevailing local situation. This allows the testing of ideas regarding the proper role of civil government.) The Bible assumes that word about national justice does spread:
Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:5-8).
The existence of a righteous nation in the midst of a fallen world of nations can lead to a competitive uplifting of civil justice in those nations that experience a net migration out. Emigration pressures unjust nations to revise their judicial standards. This is why totalitarian regimes place barriers at their borders. The threat of the loss of "the best and the brightest," also known as the brain drain, is too great. The barbed wire goes up to place a boundary around the "ideological paradises."
The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 was a symbolic event that shook Europe. It was the visible beginning of the rapid end of the legacy of the French Revolution of 1789: left-wing Enlightenment humanism.(52) It was a sign that the economically devastating effects of Marxist socialism were the inevitable product of injustice.(53) People in Marxist paradises wanted to escape. Given the opportunity, they would "vote with their feet." With the Berlin Wall down, there was an immediate exodus from East Germany. Simultaneously, Western justice began to be imported by East Germany. This leavening effect was positive. Within months, East and West Germany were legally reunited.
For this emigration process to serve as a national leaven of righteousness, there must be sanctuaries of righteousness. There must be just societies that open their borders to victims of injustice, including economic oppression. This is what Mosaic Israel offered the whole ancient world: sanctuary. This was God's means of pressuring unrighteous nations to become more just. He imposed a cost on evil empires: the loss of productive people to Israel.
On the other hand, widespread immigration can pressure a just society to become less just if the newcomers gain political authority. If they are allowed to vote, they will seek to change some aspects of the sanctuary nation's legal structure. For example, they may seek to legislate compulsory welfare payments: politically coerced subsidies paid to immigrants by the original residents. It is not God's intention to pay for a rising standard of justice in evil empires by means of falling standards of justice in covenanted sanctuary nations. His goal is to raise standards of justice everywhere. So, political pluralism is prohibited by God's law. Suffrage (the vote) is by covenantal affirmation and church membership, not mere geographical residence. This is why the biblical concept of sanctuary requires a biblical judicial boundary: covenantal citizenship.(54)
If justice produced indeterminate economic effects, and if injustice produced indeterminate economic effects, there would be no economic pressure on totalitarian regimes to tear down the boundary barriers. But justice does not produce indeterminate economic effects. Similarly, if the social world were what Meredith G. Kline insists that it is -- a world in which God's visible sanctions in history are indeterminate for both covenant-keeping and covenant-breaking -- then there could be no historical resolution of the competition between civil righteousness and civil perversity. This quasi-Manichean conclusion is the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption of amillennialism.(55) The leaven of justice in such a world would have no advantage over the leaven of injustice. But there is no neutrality in life; in a world of totally depraved men, such cultural neutrality could not be maintained for long. The leaven of evil would triumph. Yet it does not triumph, long term. Pharaonic tyrannies have all collapsed or become culturally impotent over the centuries. This fact testifies to mankind that God's sanctions in history are not indeterminate. Honesty really is the best policy, as Ben Franklin long ago insisted. In the competition between good and evil, the leaven of righteousness spreads as time goes on. Its visible results are so much better (Lev. 26:1-13; Deut. 28:1-14).
The Forces of Competition
The tremendous pressure of international economic competition cannot be withstood for long. It brought down Soviet Communism. Marxist tyrannies could not gain the economic fruits of righteousness without the moral roots.(56) They could not permit a modern economy based on computers, data bases, FAX machines, and rationally allocated capital in their rigged, corrupt, fantasy world of central economic planning and fiat money.(57) The reality of the Russian workers' saying under Communism could not be suppressed forever: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." That inescapable reality led to a falling standard of living and the eventual collapse of European Communism.
The international free market has no universally enforceable standards of weights and measures, yet it operates more successfully than any other economic system in history. Private arbitration sometimes is invoked. Usually, national standards are closely observed by market participants. There are great and continuing debates over which standards should be adopted internationally, especially as international trade increases. But even without formal political resolutions to these debates, the international market continues to flourish. In the medieval world, there was an internationally recognized "law merchant," and it has been revived in modern times.(58)
Gresham's Law
But what about Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out good."(59) This is the pessimillennial view of history as applied to monetary theory. But Gresham's Law is misleading. It has an implied condition, but only people who understand economics recognize the unique nature of this condition. The law only applies when a civil government establishes and enforces a price control between two kinds of money. Then the artificially overvalued money remains in circulation, while the artificially undervalued money goes into hoards, into the black market, or is exported. Bad money drives out good money only when governments pass laws that attempt to override the free market's assessment of relative monetary values. This is not to say that there should not be civil laws against counterfeiting, but it does mean that counterfeiters must be very skilled to compete in a free market order.
The same is true of religion. Christians contend with cults, but cults are imitations of Christianity. Today, we see no fertility cults that self-consciously imitate the older Canaanite religions. Bacchanalia festivals are no longer with us, at least not in a self-consciously cultic form.(60) New Age advocates may seem numerous, especially in Hollywood and New York City, but there are very few openly New Age congregations of the faithful. Religious counterfeits must take on the characteristic features of Christianity in order to extend their influence beyond traditional borders. The rites of Christianity have many imitations around the globe, but the rites of Santeria do not.(61)
A wise counterfeiter will not try to pass a bill that has a picture of Groucho Marx on it. Successful counterfeits in a competitive market must resemble the original. This is why there is, over time, a tendency for covenant-breakers to conform themselves to the external requirements of God's law until they cannot stand the contradiction in their lives any longer.(62) Then they rebel, and God imposes negative sanctions, either through His ordained covenant representatives or through the creation.(63)
A Final Sovereign The Bible identifies judges as covenantal agents of God. Unlike the free market, where consumers are sovereign, the State requires a voice of final earthly authority. This does not mean that one person or one institution has final authority. Biblically, no institution or person possesses such authority in history; only the Bible does. But there must be someone who announces "guilty" or "not guilty." Someone must impose the required sanctions. Civil sanctions are imposed by the State.
This means that legal standards must not fluctuate so widely that men cannot make reasonable predictions about the outcome of trials. If there is no predictability of the outcome, then there will be endless trials. Conflicting parties will not settle their disputes before they enter the courtroom. A society should encourage predictable outcomes; otherwise, individuals cannot be confident about receiving what the law says they deserve.(64) It is because the outcomes of trials are reasonably predictable that conflicts are settled before they come to trial.
Hayek's comments in this regard are extremely relevant. He announced a conclusion, one based on decades of study of both economic theory and legal history: "There is probably no single factor which has contributed more to the prosperity of the West than the relative certainty of the law which has prevailed here. This is not altered by the fact that complete certainty of the law is an ideal which we must try to approach but which we can never perfectly attain." He then went on to make this observation, one which relies on the concept of the thing not seen: "But the degree of the certainty of the law must be judged by the disputes which do not lead to litigation because the outcome is practically certain as soon as the legal position is examined. It is the cases that never come before the courts, not those that do, that are the measure of the certainty of the law."(65) In other words, self-government is basic to all government, but predictable law, predictable enforcement, and predictable sanctions must reinforce self-government if a society is to remain productive. The clogged courts of the United States in the final third of the twentieth century are testimonies to the breakdown of the certainty of civil law, as well as to the effects of tax-financed law schools that have produced over 700,000 lawyers.(66)
Justice in Flux
There is little doubt that the proliferation of lawyers in the United States in the latter years of the twentieth century is a sign of a major breakdown of its moral and legal order. There are 18 million civil cases each year in the United States: one case per ten adult Americans. The United States in 1990 had some 730,000 lawyers -- 70 percent of the world's total. In 1990, Japan had 11 lawyers per 100,000 in population; the United Kingdom, 82; Germany, 111; the United States, 281. Japan had 115 scientists and engineers per lawyer; United Kingdom, 14.5; Germany, 9.1; United States, 4.8. Economic output per hour, 1973-90: Japan, 4.4 percent; United Kingdom, 3.3 percent Germany, 2.8 percent; United States, 2.3 percent.(67) The idea that the State can provide perfect justice is a costly myth.(68)
Civil government today has become what Bastiat predicted in 1850. After 1870, throughout the West, the view of the State as an agency of compulsory salvation spread. It escalated rapidly after 1900, when Social Darwinism moved from its "dog-eat-dog" phase to its State-planned evolution phase.(69) Wheaton College economics professor P. J. Hill has described the process: the decline of predictable law and the rise of the transfer society. "The idea of the transfer society is a society where property rights are up for grabs."(70) The problem with such a society is that so many people start grabbing rather than producing.
We've become a society in which the rules are in flux, thereby prodding people to spend a large amount of their time and resources trying to change the rules to their benefit. Our book(71) argues that in the beginning the Constitution was a set of rules for a few areas that pretty much encouraged the entrepreneurial type of person to go out and make better mousetraps, to create wealth. Somewhere around the 1870's the constitutional climate started changing dramatically, not by amendment but by interpretation. The Constitution became interpreted in a more casual way. There was a rise in what we call "reasonable regulations;" the Supreme Court said the state legislatures could pass any sort of regulations they wanted about economic affairs so long as they were "reasonable."
That meant, of course, that people spent a lot of time trying to get regulations written to their advantage or to the disadvantage of their competitors, because there was no clear-cut standard. And today almost nothing in the economic arena is unconstitutional. . . .
Today, much of the economic game is in the political arena. It is played by getting rules on your side, or making sure that somebody else doesn't get the rules on their side against you. The action is in Washington, D.C.
It's interesting to look at the statistics of many large companies and see how much of their time goes into lobbying, where their business headquarters are, who the big players are, etc. It turns out that it's just as important to try to make sure that the rules favor you as it is to produce better products. Any society in which the rules are not clearly defined, whatever they are, is at risk. You need a society of stable, legitimate and just rules in order to have people productively engaged.
I would put it this way: Theft is expensive. In a society where theft is prevalent people will put a lot of their efforts into protecting themselves -- into locks and police guards, etc.
Government can prevent theft, but can also be an agency of theft. If this is the case, then people will look to government to use its coercive arm to take from other citizens. In such a world of "legal theft" people will devote resources to protecting themselves and to getting government on their side.(72)
Open Entry vs. Open Access
Open entry to economic competitors on a free market is not the same thing as open access to political competitors in a civil government. The free market is not a covenantal institution possessing a lawful monopoly as an ordained representative of God. Civil government is. Allowing open access for office-seekers within a single governmental structure is not the same as allowing rival governmental structures within the same sphere of political authority. There has to be a hierarchy of authority, meaning a chain of command, in all three covenantal governments: church, family, and State. There is no such hierarchy in a free market. The consumer's decision is sovereign on a free market: to buy or not to buy. He is not comparably sovereign in a covenantal institution: to obey or not to obey apart from the threat of lawful sanctions. He is under external authority.
Civil government must enforce certain physical standards of measurement, if only for purposes of tax collection. The idea that a free market can provide profit-seeking courts as a complete substitute for the final earthly sovereignty of a civil court (assuming its widespread acceptance by family and church courts) is a myth of libertarianism. The essence of a free market system is that it does not and cannot make final declarations. Why? Because the essence of the free market is that anyone can step in at any time and announce a higher bid. The market, if it is truly free, cannot legally keep out those who offer higher bids.(73) Therefore, there can be no final, covenantally binding bid in a free market, since the market system allows no appeal to a superior, covenantally binding institution. If voluntary agreements are subsequently broken, there must be an agent economically outside of the market and judicially above the market who can sovereignly enforce the terms of the agreement. The free market is open-ended because it offers open entry; open entry is the heart of a free market. The resolution of disputes requires the presence of a representative covenantal agent who can dispense justice in God's name. Disputes are usually resolved before they reach this final declaration, but only because of the presence of this agency of final declaration. And this final court of appeal must be able to appeal to a higher court: God's. This means that it must declare God's law.
Victim's Rights and Restitution The fundamental principle of biblical civil jurisprudence is victim's rights. The State is to act as the agent of injured parties. If the injured party is unwilling to prosecute, the State is not to prosecute.(74) Does this mean that the State may not prosecute the seller who is discovered cheating by means of false weights and measures? If not, why not?
There are criminal cases in which there is no identifiable victim. The classic example is the case of a driver who exceeds the speed limit does not injure anyone but who thereby imposes risks on other drivers and pedestrians. The State in this case is allowed to impose fines on the convicted speeder. The money should be used to provide restitution for those who are injured by a hit-and-run driver who cannot subsequently be located or convicted.
What about the seller who uses rigged scales? The State cannot prove when this practice began; it can only prove when the practice was discovered. It probably cannot identify who was defrauded. This means that many of the victims cannot sue for damages. Should the seller not suffer negative sanctions?
One possible way to resolve this dilemma is for the State to require the seller to provide discounts for a period of time to all of his past customers. The discount would be determined by the degree of scale-tampering: double restitution. If the scales were 10 percent off, then he must offer 20 percent discounts. To make sure he does not simply raise his retail prices before he starts offering the discounts, the State would fix his retail prices as of the day the infraction was discovered. Any customer who could show a receipt from the store would have access to the discounts.
Because of modern packaging and mass production, not many stores would come under this threat. The butcher in the meat section of a supermarket would be one seller whose scales would be basic to the business. But on the whole, modern technology transfers responsibility back to the companies that sell the packaged products to retail outlets. How, then, could the law be enforced on them? To require them to offer a discount to a retailer does not benefit the consumer; it provides a profit to the retailer. One way would be for those who have receipts for a product to be able to buy that firm's products for a period at a discount. The firm would then be forced to reimburse the retailer for the difference. This is a sales technique used by manufacturers in gaining market share in supermarkets: discount coupons. It could be imposed by the State as a penalty.
This would reward those consumers who save their receipts. If this procedure is too complicated for the victims to be fairly compensated, because of the nature of the product -- a "small-ticket item" -- then the firm could be required to offer discounts across the board to all future buyers of that specific product for a period of time. The firm would also be required to identify on the packaging of that product an admission of guilt, so that the discounts would not be regarded as an advertising strategy. Finally, the discount reimbursements to retailers would not be tax-deductible as a business expense to the seller.
Evangelical Antinomianism and Humanism's Myth of Neutrality For a scale to operate, it must have fixed standards. If it is a balance scale like the one the famous lady of justice holds, it must have fixed weights in one of its two trays. There is no escape from the covenantal concept of judicial weights. This is the issue of ethical and judicial standards: point three of the biblical covenant model. Mosaic law stated that within the boundaries of Israel, honest (predictable) weights were mandatory. It did not matter whether the buyer was rich or poor, circumcised or not circumcised: the same weights had to be used by the seller. Israel was to become a sanctuary for strangers seeking justice. The symbol of this justice was the honest scale.
Which judicial standards were mandatory? The Bible is clear: God's revealed law. National Israel was not some neutral sanctuary in which rationally perceived natural law categories were enforced. That unique sanctuary was where biblical law was enforced. Those seeking sanctuary in Israel had to conform to biblical civil law. The metaphorical weights in the tray of civil justice's scale were the Mosaic statutes and case laws.
Because the modern Christian evangelical world is self-consciously and defiantly antinomian -- "We're under grace, not law!" -- Christians emphatically deny the New Covenant legitimacy of the concept of biblically revealed laws. They assume that men can develop universal, religiously non-specific moral standards in the same way that the world has developed universal physical weights and measurements. They prefer to ignore what the Bible reveals about covenant-breakers: those who hate God love death (Prov. 8:36b). The closer that covenant-breakers get to the doctrine of God, the more perverse they are in rejecting the testimony of the Bible. They interpret God, man, law, sanctions, and time differently from what the Bible specifies as the standard. They affirm rival covenantal standards.
A holy commonwealth would establish the law of God as the civil standard, but modern evangelical Christians hate the revealed law of God above every other system of law. First, they affirm as the binding standard the myth of neutrality: religiously neutral natural law. Second, they affirm their willingness to submit themselves to any system of law except biblical law. They announce: "A Christian can live peacefully under any legal or political system," with only one exception: biblical law. Modern Christians see themselves as perpetual strangers in the perpetual unholy commonwealths of covenant-breaking man. They deny that liberty can be attained under God's revealed law. God's revealed law, they insist, is the essence of tyranny. They seek liberty through religious neutrality: the rule of anti-Christian civil law. They seek, at most, "equal time for Jesus" in the satanic kingdoms of this world. They forget: the "equal time" doctrine is the lie that Satan's servants use while dwelling in holy commonwealths. When Satan's disciples gain civil power, they adopt a new rule: "As little time for Jesus as the State can impose through force."
Geisler's Norm
Norman Geisler, a fundamentalist philosopher with a Ph.D. issued by a Roman Catholic university, and a devout follower of Thomas Aquinas,(75) has insisted that all civil law must be religiously neutral. We must legislate morality, he says, but not religion. This means that civil morality can be religiously neutral. "The cry to return to our Christian roots is seriously misguided if it means that government should favor Christian teachings. . . . First, to establish such a Bible-based civil government would be a violation of the First Amendment. Even mandating the Ten Commandments would favor certain religions. . . . Furthermore, the reinstitution of the Old Testament legal system is contrary to New Testament teaching. Paul says clearly that Christians `are not under the law, but under grace' (Rom. 6:14). . . . The Bible may be informative, but it is not normative for civil law."(76) The suggestion by those whom he calls "the biblionomists" [biblionomy: Bible law] that God's law still applies today is, in Geisler's words, a "chilling legalism."(77)
We need legal reform, he insists. "What kind of laws should be used to accomplish this: Christian laws or Humanistic laws? Neither. Rather, they should simply be just laws. Laws should not be either Christian or anti-Christian; they should be merely fair ones."(78) There is supposedly a realm of neutral civil law in between God and humanism: the realm of "fairness." This means that Mosaic civil law was never fair. Those who believe that the Mosaic civil law was unfair refuse to say explicitly that this is what they believe. It sounds ethically rebellious against the unchanging God of the Bible, which it in fact is. Nevertheless, this rebellious outlook is universal within Protestantism in the twentieth century; it has been since at least the late seventeenth century.
This theory of neutral civil law denies Christ's words concerning the impossibility of neutrality: "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24). "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad" (Matt. 12:30). The neutralists insist that Christ's denial of neutrality does not apply to the civil covenant. Geisler writes: "God ordained Divine Law for the church, but He gave Natural Law for civil government."(79) They insist, as Geisler insists, that true civil justice can be obtained only by removing all visible traces of Christianity from civil government. This is not humanism, he insists; this is merely neutral civil justice.
But there is no neutrality. There has never been a neutral kingdom of civil law, and there never will be. Facing the reality of this historical fact, this question inevitably arises: Which is worse, secular humanism or God's law? When push comes to shove, Geisler identifies the greater evil: God's law. "Thoughtful reflection reveals that this `cure' of reconstructionism is worse than the disease of secularism."(80) Christians supposedly must content themselves with living as strangers in a strange land until Jesus personally returns in power. A question for premillennialists: Will Jesus enforce the Mosaic law or a system of neutral natural law during His premillennial kingdom? Premillennial defenders of natural law theory refuse to address this question in print. If they answer "Mosaic law," they have admitted that it is intrinsically morally superior to natural law. If they answer "natural law," they sever the God who declared the Mosaic law from that law. They prefer to remain silent.
The Christian antinomians' view of civil law has implications for their doctrine of eschatology. This is why virtually all amillennialists and premillennialists defend natural law theory and political pluralism, while attacking theonomy. They see themselves as God's people as losers in church history.(81) The most they hope for is a cultural stalemate.(82) They prefer to live meekly and impotently inside cultural ghettos rather than fight a cultural war in the name of Christ.(83) They do not believe they can win; therefore, they deny the basis of fighting in such a war, namely, a uniquely biblical judicial alternative to humanistic law. They deny the legitimacy of Bible-revealed judicial standards that would make possible an explicitly Christian social order during the era of the church. Their antinomian social ethics is a corollary to their pessimistic view of the church's future. God has granted them their desire: they live at the mercy of their enemies who control the various social orders of our day. But the walls of their ghettos have holes in them: public schools, television, movies, rock music, and all the rest of humanism's lures.
Unlike the Israelites in Egypt who cried out to God for deliverance (Ex. 3:7), today's Christians prefer life in Egypt to life in the Promised Land. God cursed the exodus generation: death in the wilderness. But He did not allow them to return to Egyptian bondage. Today's Christians may grumble about certain peripheral aspects of their bondage, but they do not yet seek deliverance from their primary bonds, most notably their enthusiastic acceptance of religious and political pluralism, natural law theory, and the first-stage humanist promise of "equal time for the ethics of Jesus." They hate the very thought of their responsibility before God to establish covenanted national sanctuaries.
Conclusion "Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity" (Job 31:6). The imagery of the balance scale is basic to understanding each person's relation to God, either as a covenant-keeper or a covenant-breaker. Weights and measures are also representative biblically of the degree of civil justice available in a society. If those who own the measuring instruments of commerce tamper with them in order to defraud consumers, either specific groups of consumers -- especially resident aliens -- or consumers in general, they have sinned against God. They have stolen. If the civil government does not prosecute such thieves, then the society is corrupt. The continued existence of false weights and measures testifies against the whole society.
There are limits to our perception; there are limits to the accuracy of scales. This applies both to physical measurement and civil justice. Society cannot attain perfect justice. There must always be an appeal to the judge's intuition in judicial conflicts where contested public acts were not clearly inside or outside the law. This does not mean that there are limits to God's perception and God's justice. Thus, there will be a day of perfect reckoning. Over time, covenantally faithful individuals and institutions approach as a limit, but never reach, the perfect justice of that final judgment. This brings God's positive sanctions to covenant-keeping individuals and institutions, making them more responsible by making them more powerful. Progressive sanctification, both personal and corporate, necessarily involves an increase in God's blessings and also personal responsibility.
The State is required by God to enforce His standards. The free market social order -- a development that has its origins in the twin doctrines of personal responsibility and self-government -- requires civil government as a legitimate court of appeal. But the bulk of law enforcement has to be individual: "Every man his own policeman." No other concept of law enforcement will suffice if a society is not to become a society of informants and secret police. Secondarily, law enforcement must be associative: market competition. Buyers and sellers determine the degree of acceptable fluctuation around agreed-upon standards. Only in the third stage is law enforcement to become civil. Here, the standards are to be much more precise, much more rigid, and much more predictable. Representative cases -- legal precedents -- are to become guidelines for self-government and voluntary associative government.
Summary God established Israel a civil sanctuary: a place where liberty was available to strangers to God's church covenant.
The civil sanctuary principle is still operative.
The command to avoid vexing a stranger is civil and personal: one law for all.
The command to love the stranger, if a positive injunction, is not civil: no civil sanctions attached.
Love in this law meant treating people lawfully -- what the Egyptians had not done to Israel.
The command to avoid false weights and measures is civil.
The State is authorized to impose only negative sanctions.
This removes the possibility of a Savior State, which is a plundering State.
This avoids the politics of jealousy and the politics of envy.
God's grace is greater than man's depravity; hence, the State need only restrain public evil, not promote welfare.
Grace is judicially unbounded; sin is judicially bounded.
The State must be judicially bounded.
The State may not lawfully compel men to do good (unbounded goal); it penalizes specific evils (bounded goal).
God raises up foreign nations (strangers) to execute judgment in history against a covenanted nation whose magistrates refuse to enforce God's civil laws.
The State must execute God's sanctions against law-breakers if God's corporate negative sanctions are to be avoided.
This is the judicial basis of laws against "victimless crimes": pornography, homosexual favors, and hard drugs.
Loving the stranger in this instance means treating him lawfully.
Using false weights and measures is the representative prohibited act: economic oppression.
Equal access to civil courts is the strangers' defense.
This represents equal access to the means of grace.
Being an Israelite was a judicial status, not racial.
Justice cannot be quantified, yet its symbol is a scale: honest weights, blindfolded judge.
We use the metaphor of weights in our discussions of economics and political science.
False weights symbolized injustice.
Injustice is a form of theft.
Injustice is spiritual apostasy.
Every act of measurement contains an element of intuition: beyond the boundaries of measurement.
Men think analogically, not digitally.
We render judgment imperfectly.
Intuition bridges the gap between mind and events.
There is Bible-informed intuition and intuition not informed by the Bible.
Weights and measures are objective: known by God.
We are to use measures to gain dominion over nature, including ourselves: wristwatches, calendars, etc.
This reduces the seller's ability to cheat the consumer.
Biblical law makes sellers of goods and services responsible: they possess greater specialized knowledge.
The State announces boundaries in advance: weights and measures.
The free market often establishes these standards first.
The seller must not cheat the buyer (seller of money); he is allowed to give the buyer more than he paid for, however.
Sellers compete against sellers; buyers compete against buyers.
Word spreads in the free market about false measures.
This pressures corrupt sellers to re-set their scales.
Word spreads about civil justice, too.
Population movements out of a society (emigration) tend to force unjust nations to re-set their civil justice scales.
Immigration tends to lower the recipient nation's standards, which is why the State must not be pluralistic, i.e., political sanctions given to uncovenanted newcomers.
This is why the biblical concept of sanctuary requires a concept of covenantal citizenship: to protect the integrity of the sanctuary.
If justice produced indeterminate economic effects, there would be no pressure for evil nations and empires to change their ways.
International economic competition places pressure on evil nations and empires.
The good will progressively drive out the bad in life when civil governments enforce biblical law.
Most Christians believe this with respect to economics, but not with respect to politics (theocracy vs. pluralism).
Men need predictable civil laws in order to plan their individual courses of action.
Self-government requires predictable civil laws and sanctions.
The proliferation of lawyers is a sign of social and moral breakdown.
This is one curse of the welfare State: rent-seeking through State coercion.
A free market is open-ended because it offers open entry (competition).
A civil court, being a monopoly, needs a final judicial standard; it is closed-ended.
The State must prosecute those who employ false scales.
One possible sanction: mandatory discounts offered to previous buyers with sales receipts.
Modern evangelical Christians resist the idea of a biblical sanctuary.
They reject the idea of theocracy -- the corollary of biblical sanctuary.
They prefer the idea of a religiously neutral civil order: "equal time for all religions."
This requires a theory of religiously neutral natural law: common to all religions, acknowledged by all religions.
Natural law theory is humanism's most successful myth.
The result is the acceptance by Christians of cultural and civil bondage.
Evangelicals deny the sanctuary principle, for they deny God's revealed law.
They seek only sanctuaries for churches in strange lands.
They much prefer life under covenant-breakers to life under God's revealed civil law.
Footnotes:
1. Jesus said: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets" (Matt. 7:12).
2. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), p. 3.
3. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 2: "Sanctuary and Suffrage."
4. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
5. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
6. Those people who seek to defend the ideal of civil liberty -- sometimes called "civil liberties" -- apart from an appeal to God's Bible-revealed law-order are indulging their preference for humanism: Stoic natural law theology or Newtonian natural law theology. In either case, they have abandoned the Bible's explicit method of retaining the blessings of liberty: Trinitarian, covenantal, oath-bound constitutionalism.
7. Greg L. Bahnsen, No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), p. 205.
8. A good example of the distinction between positive and negative sanctions is the distinction between public health programs and socialized medicine. Public health programs repel "invasions" of the entire community by specific germs, bacteria, or whatever. Socialized medicine transfers money from one person to pay for the medical treatment of someone else. It imposes a negative monetary sanction against one person in order to grant a positive monetary sanction -- minus about 50 percent for handling -- to another person (actually, two people: the patient and his physician).
9. Frédéric Bastiat, "The Law" (1850), in Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, translated by Seymour Cain; edited by George B. de Huszar (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1964), p. 51. Reprinted by the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.
10. Ibid., p. 52.
11. Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, Egalitarian Envy: The Political Foundations of Social Justice (New York: Paragon House, 1987).
12. Bastiat, "The Law," p. 55.
13. This new vision was promoted in word and deed by Cecil Rhodes and his successor, Alfred Milner. The Round Table group, begun in England and exported to other English-speaking nations, was the spearhead. John Marlowe, Milner: Apostle of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivedon (New York: Books In Focus, 1981). Reprinted by Angriff Press, Hollywood, California.
14. The Democratic Party, under President Grover Cleveland (1885-89; 1893-97), continued to defend classical liberalism, but then, under the influence of fundamentalist Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan after 1896, who failed three times to be elected President, it became even more interventionist than the Republican Party, and has remained so ever since.
15. The totality of man's depravity is judicial rather than historical. If man's total depravity were historical, society would be impossible. Total depravity refers to man's judicial condition before God as a covenant-breaker. James described it well: "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (James 2:10). Guilty of all: total depravity.
16. Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 195-97.
17. Grace is primary in eternity, too. The final resurrection leads to either the sin-free New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. 21, 22) or the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). While both are eternal in duration, the New Heaven and New Earth allow expansion and development, as covenant-keepers work out their salvation with neither fear nor trembling. They will increase their knowledge of God and thereby increase their glorifying of His greatness. There is no ethical development for those in the lake of fire. They begin their existence here with impotence, which never ends.
18. This is why, in the case of an unsolved murder in a field, civil magistrates from the nearest city were required to kill a heifer and have the priests sacrifice it in a nearby valley (Deut. 21:1-9). The blood covering had to be made, either by the shed blood of the convicted murderer or by the heifer.
19. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7; North, Victim's Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
20. F. A. Hayek, Rules and Order, vol. I of Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 101. It is interesting that the politically liberal Anabaptist theologian, Ronald Sider, takes the line promoted by libertarians regarding victimless crimes: ". . . persons should be free to harm themselves and consenting associates . . . as long as they do not harm others or infringe on their rights." Sider, "An Evangelical View of Public Policy," Transformation, II (July/Sept. 1985), p. 6; cited by Bahnsen, No Other Standard, p. 214.
21. Meredith G. Kline and his disciples have denied the existence of predictable corporate sanctions of God in New Covenant history. Meredith G. Kline, "Comments on an Old-New Error," Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184. Cf. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 8. Kline and his disciples have thereby implicitly denied the biblical justification for civil laws against "victimless crimes."
22. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 22.
23. See the citations in Chapter 14, above, under "No Respect for Persons."
24. The Mosaic law did not specify how a woman could gain access apart from a circumcised male head of household.
25. "Tomorrow" is here meant in a figurative sense: it took ten generations for Moabites and Ammonites to become full citizens (Deut. 23:3), i.e., men entrusted with the authority to impose civil sanctions.
26. See below: "Intuition and Measurement."
27. There are physical limits on the accuracy of scales. The best balance scales today can measure changes as small as one-tenth of a microgram. Grolier Encyclopedia (1990): "Weights and Measures." God's civil law calls for equal justice, not perfect justice. Cf. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 19: "Perfect Justice."
28. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.
29. Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (2nd ed.; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963). Morgenstern wrote a book on game theory with John von Neumann, one of the most gifted mathematicians of the twentieth century. Morgenstern was aware of the limits of mathematics as a tool of economic analysis. A more recent treatment of the problem is Andrew M. Kamarck's Economics and the Real World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). See also Thomas Mayer, Truth versus Precision in Economics (Hampshire, England: Elgar, 1993).
30. Morgenstern writes: "All economic decisions, whether private or business, as well as those involving economic policy, have the characteristic that quantitative and non-quantitative information must be combined into one act of decision. It would be desirable to understand how these two classes of information can best be combined. Obviously, there must exist a point at which it is no longer meaningful to sharpen the numerically available information when the other, wholly qualitative, part is important, though a notion of its `accuracy' or `reliability' has not been developed. . . . There are many reasons why one should be deeply concerned with the `accuracy' of quantitative economic data and observations. Clearly, anyone making use of measurements and data wishes them to be accurate and significant in a sense still to be defined specifically. For that reason a level of accuracy has to be established. It will depend first of all on the particular purpose for which the measurement is made. . . . The very notion of accuracy and the acceptability of a measurement, observation, description, count -- whatever the concrete case might be -- is inseparably tied to the use to which it is to be put. In other words, there is always a theory or model, however roughly formulated it may be, a purpose or use to which the statistic has to refer, in order to talk meaningfully about accuracy. In this manner the topic soon stops being primitive; on the contrary, very deep-lying problems are encountered, some of which have only recently been recognized." Morgenstern, Accuracy, pp. 3-4.
31. See Appendix G, below: "The Covenantal Structure of Judgment."
32. There is a fourth possible reply: "Shut up. You're only a figment of my imagination." (Berkeley)
33. For case studies of this assertion in the field of economics, see Gary North, "Economics: From Reason to Intuition," in North (ed.), Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1976), ch. 5.
34. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).
35. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.
36. If God's sanctions in history are random in the New Covenant era, as Meredith G. Kline insists that they are, then there is no way to test this presumption. Intuition-based decisions would become as random in their effects as God's historical sanctions supposedly are.
37. The radical humanism of Marx's partner Frederick Engels can be seen in his statement that "when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes -- only then will the last extraneous force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect." Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1878] 1934), p. 348.
38. The sun dial was an exception, but it could not be used at night or on cloudy days.
39. It can be persuasively argued that improvements in the measurement of time in the late medieval and early modern eras were the most important physical advances in the history of Western Civilization, without which few of the other advances would have been likely. See David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1983).
40. The design and construction of the Cheops pyramid stands as the most stupendous surviving manifestation of this faith in weight and measure. See (with reservations) Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York: Harper Colophon, [1971] 1978); Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed (4th ed.; New York: Bell, [1880] 1978).
41. This was especially true of ancient agricultural dynasties that were dependent on rivers. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1957] 1964), pp. 29-30. For an extraordinary examination of ancient man's priestly mastery of both astronomy and time, see Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit, [1969] 1977).
42. Benjamin Franklin made himself famous throughout the American colonies with Poor Richard's Almanack.
43. The most graphic recent examples of such cheating in the modern office are computer games that allow a player to tap a key on the keyboard so that a fake spreadsheet appears on the screen. When a supervisor approaches the player, he taps the key, and it then appears as though he has been studying some intricate aspect of the business: above all, a numerical aspect.
44. See below, "Competition and the Margins of Cheating."
45. The U.S. National Bureau of Standards (founded in 1901, but in principle authorized by the U.S. Constitution of 1787) establishes key lengths by using a platinum-iridium bar stored at a specific temperature. This, in turn, is based on a not quite identical bar stored by the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements in Sèvres, France. But these bars do not match. Also, when cleaned, a few molecules are shaved away. Scientists now prefer to measure distance in terms of time and the speed of light. A meter is defined today as the distance a light particle travels in one 299,792,458th of a second. Time is measured in terms of the number of microwave-excited vibrations of a cesium atom particle when excited by a hydrogen maser. One second is defined as the time that passes during 9,192,631,770 cesium atomic vibrations. Malcolm W. Browne, "Yardsticks Almost Vanish As Science Seeks Precision," New York Times (Aug. 23, 1993).
46. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 489-91.
47. Fines should be used to set up a restitution fund to pay victims of drivers who are not subsequently arrested and convicted. Idem. The history of civil law in the West since the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 has been the substitution of fines for restitution: Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990), ch. 3.
48. Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1912] 1953), pp. 32-33.
49. A manager or employee must be precise: to give more is to steal from the owner; to give less is to steal from the buyer.
50. The phantom buyer may walk in this afternoon. The seller is not sure. Neither is the buyer.
51. There are limits to this. If the buyer has found an exceptionally inexpensive seller, especially a small, local seller who may be ill-informed about market demand, and if he expects to return to make additional purchases, he may not say anything to potential competitors. He does not want to let the seller know that there are many buyers available who are willing to pay more. There is a "bragging range." That is, there are boundaries on the spread of accurate information. Accurate information is not a free good.
52. We can date the end of that tradition in the West: August 21, 1991, when the Soviet Communist coup begun on August 19 failed. Boris Yeltsin and his associates sat in the Russian Parliament building for three days, telephoning leaders in the West, sending and receiving FAX messages, sending and receiving short wave radio messages, and ordering deliveries of Pizza Hut pizza. So died the French Revolutionary tradition. Sliced pizza replaced the guillotine's sliced necks.
The reason why the leaders of the coup did not have Yeltsin arrested or killed is that the head of the Air Force, who was also head of the Russian branch of the secret police (KGB) -- which was in a turf war with the Soviet KGB -- on Monday, August 19, presented the leaders with an ultimatum: harm Yeltsin, and the Air Force will drop a nuclear weapon on the hotel in which the leaders were staying. They believed him. So does the man who told me this story: Anthony Easton, the American businessman who had previously set up the multi-channel television reception system in that hotel. One of Easton's high-level Russian contacts told him.
53. This was the message of F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an international best-seller. Western intellectuals scoffed at its thesis for over four decades, though in diminished tones after 1974, when he won the Nobel Prize in economics. The scoffing stopped in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union's economy. A few months before he died in 1992, Hayek was awarded the United States medal of freedom. He had outlived the Soviet Union. He also had outlived most of the original scoffers. As he told me and Mark Skousen in an interview in 1985, he had never believed that he would live to see the acclaim that came to him after 1974. Few men who move against the intellectual currents of their eras live long enough to see such vindication. He died in March, 1992, at the age of 92, receiving international acclaim: "In praise of Hayek," The Economist (March 28, 1992); John Gray, "The Road From Serfdom," National Review (April 27, 1992). As The Economist noted, "In the 1960s and 1970s he was a hate-figure for the left, derided by many as wicked, loony, or both." By 1992, no one remembered such scurrilous attacks as Herman Finer's The Road to Reaction (1948). Milton Friedman, who was on the same University of Chicago faculty as Hayek, wrote that Hayek "unquestionably became the most important intellectual leader of the movement that has produced a major change in the climate of opinion." National Review, op. cit., p. 35.
54. North, Political Polytheism, ch. 2.
55. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, pp. 76-92; ch. 5.
56. Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
57. On the truly fantastic nature of the Soviet economy, see Leopold Tyrmand, The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative: A Primer on Communist Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
58. Benson, Enterprise of Law, pp. 30-35, 62, 224-27. See also Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), ch. 11. The Jews who dominate the international diamond trade make bargains without public contracts, and they never appeal to the State to settle disputes. These merchants have their own courts that settle disputes. It seems likely that they do not pay income taxes on every profitable trade.
59. "Bad money drives out good money," the law really states. Yet in a very real sense, the familiar formulation is correct: bad money does drive out good. It creates black markets, cheating, and many other evils.
60. Mardi Gras and Carnival are such festivals.
61. Bill Strube, "Possessed with Old Fervor: Santeria in Cuba," The World & I (Sept. 1993). This African-Cuban voodoo cult is closely associated with homosexuality. Ibid., p. 254.
62. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 6: "Sustaining Common Grace."
63. Ibid., ch. 8: "Filled Vessels."
64. "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison" (Matt. 5:25).
65. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 208.
66. In the case of lawyers, Say's famous law holds true: production creates its own demand. The old story is illustrative: when only one lawyer lives in town, he has little work. When another lawyer arrives, they both have lots of work from then on.
67. "Punitive Damages," National Review (Nov. 4, 1991).
68. Macklin Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
69. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A: "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty."
70. "The Transfer Society: An Interview with P. J. Hill," Religion and Liberty, I (Nov./Dec. 1991), p. 1. This is a publication of the Acton Institute.
71. Peter J. Hill and Terry Anderson, The Birth of a Transfer Society (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989).
72. Hill, "The Transfer Society," pp. 1-2. Cf. Gary North, "The Politics of the Fair Share," The Freeman (Nov. 1993).
73. Biblically, if some offer is inherently immoral, price is irrelevant. Prostitution services aimed at married people can lawfully be suppressed by the State, but not in terms of price. No offer is allowed. There is no open entry, for there is no legal market. Any discussion of whether prostitution is lawful or unlawful between unmarried individuals must begin with the specific case law: "And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire" (Lev. 21:9).
74. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 7.
75. Aquinas, he said in 1988, "was the most brilliant, most comprehensive, and most systematic of all Christian thinkers and perhaps all thinkers of all time." Angela Elwell Hunt, "Norm Geisler: The World Is His Classroom," Fundamentalist Journal (Sept. 1988), p. 21. This magazine was published by Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Geisler was at the time a professor there. The magazine has ceased publication. Geisler resigned from the school in 1991.
76. Norman L. Geisler, "Should We Legislate Morality?" ibid. (July/Aug. 1988), p. 17.
77. Idem.
78. Ibid., p. 64.
79. Ibid., p. 17.
80. Norman L. Geisler, "Human Life," in William Bentley Ball (ed.), In Search of a National Morality (Baker Book House [conservative Protestant] and Ignatius Press [conservative Roman Catholic], 1992), p. 115.
81. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, chaps. 7-9.
82. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1984] 1988), ch. 11: "The Stalemate Mentality."
83. Gary North, "Ghetto Eschatologies," Biblical Economics Today, XIV (April/May 1992).
If you are interested in receiving Dr. North's FREE monthly e-mail newsletter send an e-mail to:
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out.