APPENDIX E

FREE MARKET CAPITALISM

[This essay appeared in the 1984 book edited by Robert Clouse, Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views, published by InterVarsity Press. It was the first essay. Within a year, InterVarsity Press pulled the book. It sold 6,000 copies to my company, Dominion Press, at 25 cents each. The book's editor wrote to me saying that he could not understand this; the book had been selling well. I like to think that it was my essay and my three rejoinders to the statists who wrote the other three essays. I like to think that I was a great embarrassment to them. The neo-evangelicals who ran IVP were politically liberal, as their publication of D. Gareth Jones' pro-abortion book, Brave New People (1984), indicated. IVP soon suppressed that book, too, because of a successful public relations campaign by anti-abortion Christians. The English branch of IVP kept it in print, which tells you something about the evangelical community in England. I have retained the format in which my essay was originally submitted, including IVP's footnoting style. I include it in this book because it reveals the extent to which I relied on the Book of Deuteronomy, a fact noted at the time by one of the other essayists, William Diehl, who dismissed my essay because of this.]

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, KJV).⁽¹⁾

I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. (Ps 37:25)

The topic of wealth and poverty should not be discussed apart from a consideration of the law of God and its relationship to the covenants, for it is in God's law that we find the Bible's blueprint for economics.  Biblical justice, biblical law, and economic growth are intimately linked.  The crucial section of Scripture which explains this relationship is Deuteronomy 28.  There are external blessings for those societies that conform externally to the laws of God (vv. 1-14), and there are external curses for those societies that fail to conform externally to these laws (vv. 15-68).

And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God.  Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.  Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.  Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. . . . The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in his ways.  And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee.  And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee (Deut 28:1-5, 9-11).

Deuteronomy 28 is an extension and expansion of chapter 8, in which the relationship between law, blessings, and the covenant is outlined.  God was about to bring his people into the Promised Land, as the fulfilment of the promise given to Abraham.  The "iniquity of the Amorites" (Gen 15:16) was at last full.  The Canaanites' era of dominion over the land was about to end.  On what terms would the Hebrews hold title to the land and its productivity?  Deuteronomy 8 spells it out: covenantal faithfulness.  This meant adherence to the laws of God.⁽²⁾

Deuteronomy 8 reveals to us the foundations of economic growth.  First, God grants to his people the gift of life.  This is an act of grace.  He sustained them in the years of wandering in the wilderness, humbling them to prove their faith -- their obedience to his commandments (v. 2) -- and providing them with manna, so that they might learn that "man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth men live" (v. 3b).  A 40-year series of miracles sustained them constantly, for their clothing did not grow old, and their feet did not swell (v. 4).  He also provided them with chastening, so that they might learn to respect his commandments (vv. 5-6) -- the way of life.  Second, God provided them with land, namely, the land flowing with milk and honey (vv. 7-8): "A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass" (v. 9).  This also was an act of grace.

Life and land: Here are the two fundamental assets in any economic system.  Human labor, combined with natural resources over time, is the foundation of all productivity.  The third familiar feature of economic analysis, capital, is actually the combination of land plus labor over time.  (The time factor is important.  From it stems the economic phenomenon of the rate of interest: the discount of future goods against the identical goods held in the present.⁽³⁾ (Warning: I use footnotes to add explanatory material, to keep from cluttering up the text too much.) The original sources of production are land and labor.⁽⁴⁾  If the Hebrews were willing to dig, the land would produce its fruits. 

So much for the gifts.  What about the conditions of tenure?  They were not to forget their God.  They were not to "accept the gift but forget the Giver," to use a familiar expression. 

The very fulness of the external, visible, measurable blessings would serve as a source of temptation for them:

When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.  Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God. . . .  (Deut 8:10-14a) 

God provides gifts: life and land.  He also provides a law-order which enables his people to expand their holdings of capital assets (the implements of production) and consumer goods.  But these assets are not held by men apart from the ethical terms of God's covenant.  The temptation before man is the same as the temptation before Adam: to forget God and to substitute himself as God (Gen 3:5).  It is the assumption of all Satanic religion, the assumption of humanism, the sovereignty of man.  God warned the Israelites against this sin -- the sin of presuming their own autonomy:

And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.  But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day. (Deut 8:17-18)

These words lay the foundation of all sustained economic growth -- and I stress the word sustained. While it is possible for a society to experience economic growth without honoring God's law, eventually men's ethical rebellion leads to external judgment and the termination of economic growth (Deut 28:15-68).  It is this concept of God as the giver which underlay James's announcement: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." (Jas 1:17)

If men whose society has been (and therefore is still) covenanted with God should fall into this temptation to forget God and to attribute their wealth to the might of their own hands, then God will judge them:

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. (vv. 19-20).

The Paradox of Deuteronomy 8

God has given us an outline of the covenantal foundations of a holy commonwealth.⁽⁵⁾ This is as close as the Bible comes to a universally valid "stage theory" of human history or economic development.⁽⁶⁾  Long-term economic growth is based on men's honoring the explicit terms of God's law.  The stages are as follows:

1.  God's grace in providing life, land, and law

2.  Society's adherence to the external terms of God's law

3.  External blessings in response to this faithfulness

4.  Temptation: the lure of autonomy

5. Response:

a. Capitulation that leads to external judgment; or

b.  Resistance that leads to further economic growth

The covenant is supposed to be self-reinforcing, or as economists sometimes say, it offers a system of positive feedback.  Verse 18 is the key: God gives his people external blessings in order "that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers. . . ." The promise would be visibly fulfilled by their entry into the Promised Land, thereby giving them confidence in the reliability of God's word.  God's law-order is reliable, which means that men can rely on biblical law as a tool of dominion, which will enable them to fulfill (though imperfectly, as sinners) the terms of God's dominion covenant: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Gen 1:28). This covenant was reaffirmed with Noah (Gen 9:1-7).  It is still binding on Noah's heirs.⁽⁷⁾

The paradox of Deuteronomy 8 is this: Blessings, while inescapable for a godly society, are a great temptation.  Blessings are a sign of God's favor, yet in the fifth stage -- the society's response to the temptation of autonomy -- blessings can result in comprehensive, external, social judgment.  Thus, there is no way to determine simply from the existence of great external wealth and success of all kinds -- the successes listed in Deuteronomy 28:1-14 -- that a society is facing either the prospect of continuing positive feedback or imminent negative feedback (namely, destruction).  The ethical condition of the people, not their financial condition, is determinative.

Visible success is a paradox: It can testify to two radically different ethical conditions.  Biblical ethical analysis, because it recognizes the binding nature of revealed biblical law, is therefore a fundamental aspect of all valid historiography, social commentary, and economic analysis.  An index number of economic wealth is a necessary but insufficient tool of economic analysis.  The numbers do not tell us all we need to know about the progress of a particular society or civilization.  We also need God's law as an ethical guide, our foundation of ethical analysis. 

 

Ethics and Economic Analysis

A great debate has raged for over a century within the camp of the economists: "Is capitalism morally valid?"  Marxists and socialists ask this question and then answer it: no.  "But capitalism is efficient," respond the defenders of the free market.  A few of the defenders also try to muster ethical arguments based on the right of individuals to control the sale of their property, including their labor services, without interference from the civil government.⁽⁸⁾

This sort of ethical analysis has not convinced many critics of capitalism.  They reject the operating presupposition of free market economic analysis: methodological individualism.  As methodological collectivists, they deny the right of men to use their property against the "common good." Problem: Who defines the common good?  (The Christian answers that the Bible defines the common good, and sets forth the institutional arrangements that will achieve it.  The Bible teaches neither collectivism nor individualism; it proclaims methodological covenantalism.)⁽⁹⁾ Another problem: Even if the common good can be defined by humanistic social commentators, who has the right to enforce it?  Finally, can the State,⁽¹⁰⁾ through its bureaucracy, enforce the common good in a cost-effective manner?  Will the results resemble the official ethical goals of the planners?  What kinds of incentives can be built into a State-planned economy that will enable it to perform as efficiently as a profit-seeking free market economy?⁽¹¹⁾

The fundamental issue is ethical.  The question of efficiency is a subordinate one.  Few Marxists or socialist scholars seriously argue any longer that the substitution of socialist ownership of the means of production will lead to an increase of per capita output beyond what private ownership would have produced.  The debates today rage over what kinds of economic output are morally valid.  Also, who should determine what "the people" -- whoever they are -- really need?  The free market, with its system of private ownership and freely fluctuating prices?  Or the civil government, with its system of political competition and lifetime bureaucratic functionaries?⁽¹²⁾ The real debate is a debate over ethical issues, something that economists have tried to hide or deny since the seventeenth century.⁽¹³⁾ Economist William Letwin, who is wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this supposed triumph of value-free economics, does admit that there are difficulties with this outlook: "It was exceedingly difficult to treat economics in a scientific fashion, since every economic act, being the action of a human being, is necessarily also a moral act.  If the magnitude of difficulty rather than the extent of the achievement be the measure, then the making of economics was the greatest scientific accomplishment of the seventeenth century."⁽¹⁴⁾ Apparently even more important than Newton's discoveries!⁽¹⁵⁾  This faith in analytic neutrality has been reaffirmed by the developers of the two most prominent schools of free market economic analysis, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises.⁽¹⁶⁾

One reason why the critics have been so successful in their attack against the academic economists' hypothetically neutral defense of the free market is this: Hardly anyone in the secular world really believes any longer that moral or intellectual neutrality is possible.  This is why Christian economics offers a true intellectual alternative: it rests on a concept of objective revelation by a true Person, the Creator of all knowledge and the Lord of history.  The Bible affirms that neutrality is a myth; either we stand with Christ or we scatter abroad (Matt 12:30).⁽¹⁷⁾  The works of the law -- not the law, but the works of the law -- are written on every human heart (Rom 2:14-15).⁽¹⁸⁾  No man can escape the testimony of his own being, and nature itself, to the existence if a Creator (Rom 1:18-23). 

Socialists deny the possibility of neutral economic analysis, and their criticism has become far more effective as humanistic scholarship has drifted from faith in objective knowledge into an ever-growing awareness that all human knowledge is relative. (Marxists still believe in objective knowledge for Marxists, but not for any other ideological group.)⁽¹⁹⁾ Since all intellectual analysis is tied to a man's operating presuppositions about the nature of reality, and since these presuppositions, being pre-theoretical, cannot be disproven by logic, the socialist critic's logic is also undergirded by his equally unprovable presuppositions.⁽²⁰⁾ (There is a problem for non-Christian subjectivist thought, however: the breakdown of objective science.)⁽²¹⁾  Even a few economists are slowly coming to face the implications of subjectivism with respect to objective, neutral analysis, but not many, and their books are not yet influential.  These men tend to be associated with "new left" economics, and the "establishment" is not impressed.⁽²²⁾

As Christians we must always maintain that ethics is basic to all social analysis.  We must make clear what most professional economists prefer to ignore: It is never a question of analysis apart from ethical evaluation; it is only a question of which ethical system, meaning whose law-order: God's or self-professed autonomous man's? Because the Bible provides us with a comprehensive system of ethics, it thereby provides us with a blueprint for economics.⁽²³⁾

Biblical Law and Exploitation

The prophets came before Israel and called the people back to the law of God.  The people did not respond; the result was captivity.  The law of God, when enforced, prevents exploitation.  The case-law applications of the law are therefore to be honored.  Even the supposedly obscure case laws often have implications far beyond their immediate setting.  For example, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn" (Deut 25:4).  Paul tells us that this law gives us a principle: "The labourer is worthy of his reward" (1 Tim 5:18b).  Christ also said that the laborer is worthy of his hire (Lk 10:7).  In short, if we must allow our beasts of burden to enjoy the fruits of their labor, how much more should human laborers enjoy the fruits of their labor!

Problem: Who decides how much to pay laborers?  The church?  The State?  The free market?  The Bible is quite clear on this point: Laborers and employers should bargain together.  The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is based on the moral validity of the right of contract.  The employer hired men throughout the day, paying each man an agreed-upon wage, a penny.  Those hired early in the morning complained when others hired late in the day received the same wage.  In other words, they accused their employer of "exploitation." This was an "unfair labor practice." His answer: 

Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take [that which] thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last [laborer], even as unto thee.  Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?  Is thine eye evil, because I am good?  (Matt 20:13-15)

Wasn't he morally obligated -- and shouldn't he have been legally obligated -- to have paid more, retroactively, to those hired early in the day?  No.  When they were hired, he offered them the best deal they believed they had available to them.  He was "meeting the market."  Had a better offer been available elsewhere, they would have accepted it.  Alternatively, should he have paid less to the men hired later in the day?  No.  He owed them the wage he had agreed to pay.  Those hired in the morning had not known that a job would be available later in the day at the same wage.  They faced economic uncertainty.  (Economic uncertainty about the future is an inescapable fact of human action in a world in which only God is omniscient.  Any system of economics that in any way ignores or de-emphasizes the economic effects of uncertainty is innately, inescapably erroneous, for it relies on a false doctrine of man.)  They took the best offer that any employer made.  If they had been omniscient, they might have waited, lounged around for almost the whole day, and then accepted an eleventh-hour job offer.  "A full day's pay for an hour's labor: what a deal!"  (An analogous approach to salvation: refuse to accept the Gospel in your youth, so that you can "eat, drink, and be merry," and then accept Christ on your deathbed.  "A full life's worth of salvation for a last-minute repentance: what a deal!") But men are not omniscient.  So they act to benefit themselves with the best knowledge at their disposal.⁽²⁴⁾ The employer had done them no wrong.  Their eye was evil.

Christ used this parable to illustrate a theological principle, the sovereignty of God in choosing men: "So the last shall be first, and the first last; for many be called, but few chosen" (v. 16).  The employer had a job opportunity to offer men; God offers salvation in the same way.  The employer paid a full day's wage to those coming late in the day.  If this action of the employer was wrong, then God's analogous action in electing both young and old ("late comers" and "early comers") to the same salvation is even more wrong.  But this is the argument of the ethical rebel; Paul dismisses it as totally illegitimate. "What shall we say then?  Is there unrighteousness with God?  God forbid.  For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion" (Rom 9:14-15). 

One of the most important facts of economics is this: Employers compete against employers, while workers compete against workers.  Employers do not want rival employers to buy any valuable economic factor of production at a discount.  Those who hire laborers do so in order to use their services profitably.  They have no incentive to pass along savings to their competitors.  If a worker's labor is worth five shekels per hour to two different potential employers, and the worker is about to be hired by one of them for four shekels, the second employer has an incentive to offer him more.  He will offer him enough to lure him away from the competitor, but not so much that he expects to lose money on the transaction. The free market's competitive auction process therefore offers economic rewards to employers for doing the morally correct thing, namely, honoring the biblical principle that the laborer is worthy of his hire.

Similarly, workers compete against workers.  They want jobs.  If an employer is offering a job to one employee for more than another person willing to work for, the second person has an incentive to step in and utter those magic words: "I'll work for less!" He underbids the competition.  (When I say "underbid," I mean underbid in terms of money; I could also say that he overbids his competitors in terms of the hours of labor that he offers the employer for a given wage payment.) The free market's auction process offers an incentive to workers to offer employers "an honest day's labor for an honest day's pay." In short, the free market offers economic rewards to laborers for doing the morally correct thing, just as it offers employers.

Very, very rarely do employers and workers in a modern industrialized economy compete head to head.  These instances take place when neither the worker nor the employer has a good idea of his own competition, or when one of the two is ignorant.  Laborers may not know the going wage rate. Employers may not know if other workers are available for the money they are willing to pay.  So it becomes a question of negotiation, the same kind of negotiation that Esau and Jacob transacted for Esau's birthright (Gen 23:29-34). 

There is nothing wrong with competitive bargaining, as I explain in chapter eighteen of my economic commentary on the Bible, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis.  Normally, competing offers are well known to all parties; advertising has made information on pricing and services widely available.  "Help wanted" signs and classified ads do more for the income of the majority of laborers than all the trade unions in the land -- legalized monopolies established by one group of workers to deny the legal right of other workers to compete against them.⁽²⁵⁾ Nevertheless, where there are gaps in men's information, men must pay to improve their knowledge.  Information is not a zero-cost good.  Any system of economic analysis which ignores or de-emphasizes this economic fact of life is innately, inescapably erroneous.

When a society guarantees men that they will be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, it promotes the spread of information.  Men can afford to invest in the expensive process of improving their knowledge.  They are able to capitalize their efforts.  If they are successful in improving their knowledge about competing economic offers, either as employers or laborers, they reap the rewards.  Members of society are the beneficiaries, since better knowledge means less waste -- fewer scarce economic resources expended to achieve given economic ends.  The ends are set by competing bidders in the "auction" for consumer goods and services.⁽²⁶⁾ It should be recognized from the beginning that a deeply felt hostility toward the moral legitimacy of the auction process undergirds the socialist movements of our era.

 

Predictable Law

The Bible instructs a nation's rulers not to respect persons when administering justice (Deut 1:17).  Both the rich man and the poor man, the homeborn and the stranger, are to be ruled by the same law (Ex 12:49).  Biblical law is a form of God's grace to mankind; it is to be dispensed to all without prejudice.  This is the implication of Leviticus 19:15, which introduced this chapter.  The predictability of the judicial system is what God requires of those in positions of authority.

Predictable ("inflexible") law compels the State and the church to declare in advance just exactly what the law requires.  This allows men to plan for the future more efficiently.⁽²⁷⁾  "Flexible" law is another word for arbitrary law.  When a man drives his automobile at 55 miles per hour in a 55 m.p.h. zone, he expects to be left alone by highway patrol officers.  The predictability of the law makes it possible for highway rules to be effective.  Men can make better judgments about the decisions of other drivers when speed limits are posted and highway patrol officers enforce them.  The better we can plan for the future, the lower the costs of our decision-making.  Predictable law reduces waste.

The Hebrews were required by God to assemble the nation -- rich and poor, children and strangers -- every seventh year to listen to the reading of the law (Deut 31:10-13).  Ignorance of the law was no excuse.  At the same time, biblical law was comprehensible.  It was not so complex that only lawyers in specialized areas could grasp its principles.  The case laws, such as the prohibition on muzzling the ox as he treaded out the corn, brought the general principles down into concrete, familiar terminology.  In this sense, biblical faith is essentially a democratic faith, as G. Ernest Wright argues, for it can be laid hold of with power by the simplest and most humble.  We are surrounded by mystery, and ultimate knowledge is beyond our grasp.  Yet God has brought himself (Deut 4:7) and his word to us.  We can have life by faith and by loyal obedience to his covenant, even though our knowledge is limited by our finitude.  One need not wait to comprehend the universe in order to obtain the promised salvation.  It is freely offered in the covenant now.⁽²⁸⁾

The law of God gives to men a tool of dominion over an otherwise essentially mysterious nature, including human nature -- not dominion as exercised by a lawless tyrant, but dominion through obedience to God and service to man.⁽²⁹⁾

For example, consider the effects of the eighth commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." Men are made more secure in the ownership of property.  This commandment gives men security.  They can then make rational (cost-effective) judgments about the best uses of their property, including their skills.  They make fewer mistakes.  This lowers the costs of goods to consumers through competition.

Christian commentators have from earliest times understood that the prohibition of theft, like the prohibition against covetousness, serves as a defense of private property.  Theft is a self-conscious, willful act of coercive wealth redistribution, and therefore it is a denial of the legitimacy and reliability of God's moral and economic law-order. 

The immediate economic effect of widespread theft in society is the creation of insecurity.  This lowers the market value of goods, since people are less willing to bid high prices for items that are likely to be stolen.  Uncertainty is increased, which requires that people invest a greater proportion of their assets in buying protection services or devices.  Scarce economic resources are shifted from production and consumption to crime fighting.  This clearly lowers per capita productivity and therefore per capita wealth, at least among law-abiding people.  Theft leads to wasted resources. 

The internal restraints on theft that are provided by godly preaching and upbringing help to reduce crime, thereby increasing per capita wealth within the society.  Godly preaching against theft is therefore a form of capital investment for the society as a whole (what the economists call "social overhead capital"), for it releases scarce economic resources that would otherwise have been spent on the protection of private and public property.  Such preaching also reduces the necessary size of the civil government, which is important in reducing the growth of unwarranted State power.

What is true about the reduction of theft is equally true concerning the strengthening of men's commitment to private property in general.  When property rights are carefully defined and enforced, the value of property increases.  Allen and Alchian, in their standard economics textbook, have commented on this aspect of property rights:

For market prices to guide allocation of goods, there must be an incentive for people to express and to respond to offers.  If it is costly to reveal bids and offers and to negotiate and make exchanges, the gains from exchange might be offset.  If each person speaks a different language [as they did at the tower of Babel], if thievery is rampant, or if contracts are likely to be dishonored, then negotiation, transaction, and policing costs will be so high that fewer market exchanges will occur.  If property rights in goods are weaker, ill defined, or vague, their reallocation is likely to be guided by lower offers and bids.  Who would offer as much for a coat likely to be stolen?⁽³⁰⁾

The authors believe that the higher market value attached to goods protected by strong ownership rights spurs individuals to seek laws that will strengthen private-property rights.  Furthermore, to the extent that private-property rights exist, the power of the civil government to control the uses of goods is thereby decreased.  This, unfortunately, has led politicians and jurists to resist the spread of secured private-property rights.⁽³¹⁾

There is no question that a society which honors the terms of the commandment against theft will enjoy greater per capita wealth than one which does not, other things being equal.  Such a society rewards honest people with greater possessions.  This is as it should be.  A widespread hostility to theft, especially from the point of view of self-government (self-restraint), allows men to make more accurate decisions concerning what they want to buy, and therefore what they need to produce in order to offer something of value in exchange for the items they want.  Again, I cite Allen and Alchian: 

The more expensive is protection against theft, the more common is thievery.  Suppose that thievery of coats were relatively easy.  People would be willing to pay only a lower price for coats.  The lower market price of coats will understate the value of coats, for it will not include the value to the thief.  If the thief were induced to rent or purchase a used coat, the price of coats would more correctly represent their value to society.  It follows that the cheaper the policing costs, the greater the efficiency with which values of various uses or resources are revealed.  The more likely something is to be stolen, the less of it that will be produced.⁽³²⁾

When communities set up "neighborhood watches" to keep an eye on each other's homes, and to call the police when something suspicious is going on, the value of property in the community is increased, or at least the value of the property on the streets where the neighbors are helping each other.

We want sellers to respond to our offers for goods or services.  At the same time, we as producers want to know what buyers are willing and able to pay for our goods and services.  The better everyone's knowledge of the markets we deal in, the fewer the resources necessary for advertising, negotiating, and guessing about the future.  These resources can then be devoted to producing goods and services to satisfy wants that would otherwise have gone unsatisfied.  The lower our transaction costs, in other words, the more wealth we can devote to the purchase and sale of the items involved in the transactions. 

One transaction cost is the defense of property against theft.  God graciously steps in and offers us a "free good": a heavenly system of punishment.  To the extent that criminals and potential criminals believe that God does punish criminal behavior, both on earth and in heaven, their costs of operation go up.  When the price of something rises, other things being equal, less of it will be demanded.  God raises the risks ("price") of theft to thieves.  Less criminal behavior is therefore a predictable result of a widespread belief in God's judgments, both temporal and final.  When the commandment against theft is preached, and when both the preachers and the hearers believe in the God who has announced his warning against theft, then we can expect less crime and greater per capita wealth in that society.  God's eternal criminal justice system is flawless, and it is also inescapable, so it truly is a free good -- a gift from God which is a sign of his grace.  This is one aspect of the grace of law.⁽³³⁾  It leads to increased wealth for those who respect God's laws.

 

Compulsory Wealth Redistribution

The Bible says, "Thou shalt not steal." It does not say, "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." A society which begins to adopt taxation policies that exceed the tithe -- ten per cent of income -- thereby increases economic uncertainty, as do other types of theft, both public and private.  This increase in uncertainty may be even more disrupting, statistically, than losses from burglary or robbery, because private insurance companies can insure against burglary and robbery. After all, who can trust a civil government which claims the right to take more of a person's income than God requires for the support of his kingdom?  What kind of protection from injustice can we expect from such a civil government?  The next wave of politically imposed wealth redistribution is always difficult to predict, and therefore difficult to prepare for, so the costs of production increase. 

When Samuel came before the Hebrews to warn them about the evils of establishing a king in Israel, he thought he might dissuade them by telling them that the king would take a whopping ten per cent of their production (1 Sam 8:l5).  They did not listen.  (And, for the record, neither have Christians listened to warnings against the forty and fifty per cent taxation levels of the modern welfare State.) The Pharaoh of Joseph's day imposed a tax of twenty per cent (Gen 47:24-26).  Egypt was one of the great tyrannies of the ancient world.⁽³⁴⁾ It was probably the most massive bureaucracy in man's history until the twentieth century.⁽³⁵⁾ Yet every modern welfare State -- meaning every Western industrial nation in the late twentieth century -- would have to cut its total tax burden by at least half in order to return to the twenty per cent level of Egypt in Joseph's day.⁽³⁶⁾

Foreign Aid: State to State

Foreign aid means an increase in taxes in one nation, so that money can go to other nations.  State-to-State aid must go through official, bureaucratic channels.  Only in major emergencies -- famines, floods, earthquakes -- do foreign governments allow Western nations to bring food and clothing directly to their citizens.  They understand the obvious: The increasing dependence of citizens on goods from a foreign civil government increases their direct dependence on that foreign civil government.  He who pays the piper are in a position to call the tune.  Oddly enough, intellectual proponents of increased State welfare fail to recognize what leaders in Third World nations understand immediately, namely, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." With the benefits come controls and future political or diplomatic obligations.

When the United States sends food under Public Law 480 (passed in 1954), to India, the Indian government, not private businesses, allocates it -- or whatever is left after the rats at the docks and in the storage facilities consume approximately half of it.  (Rats and sacred cows in India consume half of that nation's agricultural output.⁽³⁷⁾ It would take a train 3,000 miles long to haul the grain eaten by Indian rats in a single year.⁽³⁸⁾) 

There is a great temptation for government officials of underdeveloped nations to use this food to free up State-controlled capital which is then used to increase investments in heavy industry -- investments that produce visible results that are politically popular -- projects that cynics refer to as pyramids.  These large-scale industrial projects are in effect paid for by the food subsidies sent by the West.  Without the free food sent by the West, these uneconomical, large-scale projects would be out of the question politically.  Even worse, foreign aid enables governments to spend heavily on military equipment that will be used to suppress political opponents or other Third World nations -- themselves recipients of Western foreign aid.⁽³⁹⁾

What would happen if the West were to stop shipping food at below-market prices?  Local farmers in the recipient nations have been hurt -- or in some cases, driven into bankruptcy -- by the West's below-production-cost food, so they have reduced investments in the agricultural system.  These nations have become increasingly dependent on the West's free food.  If the subsidies were to cease, the agricultural base might be insufficient to provide for the domestic population, for agricultural output has been reduced as a result of taxpayer-financed cut-throat competition from Western governments that gave away the food.  At the same time, if the subsidies were to cease, heavy industry projects could also go bankrupt (or, more accurately, may lose even more tax money than they lose already, and therefore become political liabilities). 

Let us not be naive about the political impetus for shipments of American farm products under Public Law 480.  The farm bloc and the large multinational grain companies are major supporters of the compulsory "charity" of foreign food aid, just as farmers favor the food stamp program.  Farmers can sell their crops to the U.S. government at above-market prices, and then the government can give the food away to people who would not have bought it anyway.  Politicians like the program also because the U.S. government uses the promise of free food as a foreign policy lever.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Government subsidies to Agriculture have become a way of life in the United States, as have government controls on agriculture.⁽⁴¹⁾

We know that foreign governments are hostile to what they refer to as "Western control," when private foreign capital comes into their nations.  Why this hostility?  Because pro-socialist political leaders in underdeveloped nations resent the shift of sovereignty from civil government to the private sector, both foreign and domestic.  Yet these same officials beg for more State-to-State aid from the West.  Why?  Because they control the allocation of this form of economic aid after it arrives.  The question of foreign aid, like all other forms of compulsory economic redistribution, raises questions of sovereignty. 

Should we recommend increased taxes in Western nations in order to "feed the starving poor" in foreign nations?  Is this what Christ meant by loving our neighbors?  Are Western tax revenues really feeding the starving poor, or are they financing the bureaucratic institutions of political control that have been created by pro-socialist, Western-educated political leaders who dominate so many of the Third World's one-party "democracies"?  Are poor people in the West being taxed to provide political support to wealthy politicians in the Third World?  Does the Bible teach that State-to-State wealth transfers are ethically valid?  Or does the Bible require personal charity, or church-to-church charity -- charity which is not administered by foreign politicians? 

These are fundamental questions regarding sovereignty, authority, and power.  In the construction of the kingdom of God on earth, should we promote the increased sovereignty of the political State?  Samuel's warning is clear: no (1 Sam 8).  Any discussion of government "charity" -- compulsory wealth redistribution -- must deal with this issue of sovereignty.

Other questions, closely related to the preceding ones, are these: Is the poverty of the Third World the fault of the West?  Is the Third World hungry because people in Western industrial nations eat lots of food?  Does the West, meaning Western civil governments, owe some form of reparations (restitution) to Third World civil governments?

 

"We Eat; They Starve"

Consider the words of theologian-historian Ronald Sider, whose best-selling book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, has become one of the most influential books on seminary and Christian college campuses all over the United States.  His introduction to the book sets forth the problem:

The food crisis is only the visible tip of the iceberg.  More fundamental problems lurk just below the surface.  Most serious is the unjust division of the earth's food and resources.  Thirty per cent of the world's population lives in the developed countries.  But this minority of less than one-third eats three-quarters of the world's protein each year.  Less than 6 per cent of the world's population lives in the United States, but we regularly demand about 33 per cent of most minerals and energy consumed every year.  Americans use 191 times as much energy per person as the average Nigerian.  Air conditioners alone in the United States use as much energy each year as does the entire country of China annually with its 830 million people.  One-third of the world's people have an annual per capita income of $100 or less.  In the United States it is now about $5,600 per person.  And this difference increases every year.⁽⁴²⁾

I can remember reading textbooks written in the 1950s that affirmed the wonders of American capitalism, and that pointed with pride to the fact that 6 per cent of the world's population produced 40 per cent (or 33 per cent, or whatever) of the world's goods.  But that argument grew embarrassing for those who proclaimed the supposed productivity of socialism.  Socialist nations just never caught up.  So capitalism's critics now complain that 6 per cent of the world's population (Americans) annually uses up one-third of the world's annual production, as if this consumption were not simultaneously a process of production, as if production could take place apart from the using up of producer goods.  This is word magic.  It makes productivity appear evil.

It is true that Westerners eat a large proportion of the protein that the world produces each year.  This has been used by vegetarian socialists to create a sense of guilt in Western meat-eating readers of socialist literature.  You see, our cattle eat protein-rich grains.  "Corn-fed beef" is legendary -- or notorious, in the eyes of the critics.  Because of this, argues Dr. Sider, the "feeding burden" of the United States is not a mere 210 million (the number of human mouths to feed), but 1.6 billion.⁽⁴³⁾ "No wonder more and more people are beginning to ask whether the world can afford a United States or a Western Europe."⁽⁴⁴⁾ (Outside of college and seminary campuses, not many people seem to be asking this question, as far I can see.  Certainly the Haitian boat people and Latin American refugees aren't asking it.  Neither are Jews who are emigrating from the Soviet Union.)

The psalmist proclaimed a poetic truth about God's ownership of the world by identifying these words as God's: "For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills" (Ps 50:10).  But "liberation theologians" are not impressed.  Dr. Sider informs us: 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that when the total life of the animal is considered, each pound of edible beef represents seven pounds of grain.  That means that in addition to all the grass, hay and other food involved, it also took seven pounds of grain to produce a typical pound of beef purchased in the supermarket.  Fortunately, the conversion rates for chicken and pork are lower: two or three to one for chicken and three or four to one for pork.  Beef is the cadillac of meat products.  Should we move to compacts?⁽⁴⁵⁾

Must we rewrite the words of the psalm (with the seven-to-one ration in operation):  "For every chicken of the forest is mine, and the soybeans upon seven thousand hills"? Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that a 1982 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicate that low-income Americans -- the people who liberation theologians supposedly want to deliver from "oppressive institutions" -- eat more meat per capita than high-income Americans.  Blacks consume more meat per capita than other racial groups do.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Thus, the "less meat" program would reduce one of the prime pleasures of the poor in America.

Unquestionably, Third World populations sometimes suffer protein deficiencies.  But any program of "social salvation through protein exports" is going to encounter problems that the wealth-redistributionists seldom consider.  People's food is fundamental to their culture.  Trying to stay on a diet has confounded millions of Americans.  Eating habits are very difficult to alter, even when the eater knows that he should change.  An education program to get Third World peasants to change their diets is going to be incredibly expensive, and probably futile.  "Rice-eating people would often rather starve than eat wheat or barley, which are unknown to them," writes biologist Richard Wagner.⁽⁴⁷⁾

This problem goes beyond mere habits.  Sometimes we find that people's diets have conditioned their bodies so completely that the introduction of a new food may produce biological hazards for them.  This is sometimes the case with protein.  Wagner comments:

Another even more bizarre instance was seen in Colombia, where a population was found with a 40 percent infestation of Entamoeba histolytica, a protozoan that generally burrows into the intestinal wall, causing a serious condition called amoebiasis.  However, despite the high level of Entamoeba infestation, the incidence of amoebiasis was negligible.  The answer to this puzzle was found in the high-starch diet of the people.  Because of the low protein intake, production of starch- digesting enzymes was reduced, allowing a much higher level of starch to persist in the intestine.  The protozoans were found to be feeding on this starch rather than attacking the intestinal wall.  If this population had been given protein supplements without concurrent efforts to control Entamoeba infestation, the incidence of amoebiasis would probably have soared, causing more problems than the lack of protein.⁽⁴⁸⁾

 

Cultures Are "Package Deals"

When a foreign culture introduces a single aspect of its culture into the life of another, there will be complications.  This single change serves as a sort of cultural wedge.  As the historian Arnold Toynbee puts it, "In a cultural encounter, one thing inexorably goes on leading to another when once the smallest breach has been made in the assaulted society's defenses."⁽⁴⁹⁾  Changing people's eating habits, apart from changing their understanding of medicine, costs of production, agricultural technology, risks of blight, marketing, and an indeterminate number of other contingent aspects of the recommended change, is risky when possible, and frequently impossible. 

Third World peasants often recognize the implications of a particular "cultural wedge" perhaps better than the Western "missionary" does: It may have a far-reaching impact on the culture as a whole -- an impact which traditional peasants may choose to avoid.  Unless the opportunity offered by the innovator is seen by the recipient as being worth the risks of unforeseen "ripple effects," the attempt to force a change in the recipient's buying or eating habits may lead to a disaster.  Or, more likely, it will probably lead to a wall of resistance.  Missionaries, whether Christian or secular, whether sponsored by a church or the Peace Corps, had better understand one fundamental principle before they go to the mission field: You cannot change only one thing. 

One of the classic horror stories that illustrates this principle is the Sub-Sahara Sahel famine of the 1970s.  This arid and semiarid area is vast.  It stretches across the African continent, and it includes the nations of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Ghana, Niger, Upper Volta, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and part of Kenya.  For l5 years, from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, the West's civil governments poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this region.  Yet between the late 1960s and 1974, hundreds of thousands of people starved, along with twenty million head of livestock.  They are still starving.  Why?  As with most agricultural tragedies, there was no single cause.  The area gets little rain: perhaps twenty-five inches in its southernmost regions, tapering off to an inch per year closer to the Sahara.  The nomads needed water for their herds, as they had from time immemorial.  The West gave them the water.  Here was a totally new factor in the region's ecology.  It destroyed them.  This was one major cause.

The other cause was the absence of enforceable property rights in land.  The nomads did not assign specific plots to specific families.  No one was made personally and economically responsible for the care of the land.  "All trees, shrubs, and pasture are common-access resources, so no individual tribesman has an incentive to conserve them, or add to their stock.  No individual can reap the returns of planting or sowing grass, which hold the soil together and prevent 'desertification.'"⁽⁵⁰⁾  Beneath the rock and clay and sand, there is water.  A subterranean lake of half a million square miles underlies the eastern end of the Sahara.  Drilling rigs can hit water at one thousand or two thousand feet down.  These boreholes were drilled with Western foreign aid money at $20,000 to $200,000 apiece.  About ten thousand head of cattle at a time can drink their fill.  Therein lies the problem.  Claire Sterling describes what happened:

The trouble is that wherever the Sahel has suddenly produced more than enough for the cattle to drink, they have ended up with nothing to eat.  Few sights were more appalling, at the height of the drought last summer [1973], than the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying cows clustered around Sahelian boreholes.  Indescribably emaciated, the dying would stagger away from the water with bloated bellies to struggle to fight free of the churned mud at the water's edge until they keeled over.  As far as the horizon and beyond, the earth was as bare and bleak as a bad dream.  Drought alone didn't do that: they did.

What 20 million or more cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, and camels have mostly died of since this grim drought set in is hunger, not thirst.  Although many would have died anyway, the tragedy was compounded by a fierce struggle for too little food among Sahelian herds increased by then to vast numbers.  Carried away by the promise of unlimited water, nomads forgot about the Sahel's all too limited forage.  Timeless rules, apportioning just so many cattle to graze for just so many days within a cow's walking distance of just so much water in traditional wells, were brushed aside.  Enormous herds, converging upon the new boreholes from hundreds of miles away, so ravaged the surrounding land by trampling and overgrazing that each borehole quickly became the center of its own little desert forty or fifty miles square.⁽⁵¹⁾

In Senegal, soon after boreholing became popular (around 1960), the number of cows sheep and goats rose in two years from four million to five million.  "In Mali, during the five years before 1960, the increase had been only 800,000.  Over the next ten years the total shot up another 5 million to l6 million, more than three animals for every Malian man, woman, and child."⁽⁵²⁾ It is not just Americans and West Europeans who raise and eat "protein on the hoof."

The traditional nomad way of life is dead.  Western specialists know it; the nomads know it.  They live in tent camps now, dependent on handouts from their governments, which in turn rely heavily on the West's foreign aid programs.  The West and the nomads forgot to honor (and deal with) this principle: You cannot change only one thing.

Cultural Transformation

The goal of charitable organizations that deal in foreign aid should be to bring the culture of the West to the underdeveloped nations.  By "the culture of the West," I mean the law-order of the Bible, not the humanist, secularized remains of what was once a flourishing Christian civilization.  This means that these organizations cannot be run successfully by cultural and philosophical relativists.  Missionaries should seek to impart a specifically Western way of looking at the world:  future-oriented, thrift-oriented, education-oriented, and responsibility-oriented.  This world-and-life view must not be cyclical.  It must offer men hope in the power of human reason to understand the external world and to grasp the God-given laws of cause and effect that control it.  It must offer hope for the future.  It must be future-oriented.  To try to bring seed corn to a present-oriented culture that will eat it is futile.  With the seed corn must come a world-and-life view that will encourage people to grow corn for the future.

It does little good to give these cultures Western medicine and not Western attitudes toward personal hygiene and public health.  It does little good to send them protein-rich foods if their internal parasites will eat out their intestines.  The naive idea that we can simply send them money and they will "take off into self-sustained economic growth" cannot be taken seriously any longer.⁽⁵³⁾  To attack the West because voters are increasingly unwilling to continue to honor the tenets of a naive faith in State-to-State aid -- faith in the power of political confiscation, faith in the power of using Western tax revenues to prop up socialist regimes in Third World nations -- is unfair.⁽⁵⁴⁾ P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics has made the study of economic development his life's work.  He has emphasized what all economists should have known, but what very few acknowledged until quite recently, namely, that in the long run, people's attitudes are more important for economic growth than money.  His list of what ideas and attitudes not to subsidize with Western capital is comprehensive.  No program of foreign aid, public or private, should be undertaken apart from an educational program to reduce men's faith in the following list of attitudes:

Examples of significant attitudes, beliefs and modes of conduct unfavourable to material progress include lack of interest in material advance, combined with resignation in the face of poverty; lack of initiative, self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility for the economic future of oneself and one's family; high leisure preference, together with a lassitude found in tropical climates; relatively high prestige of passive or contemplative life compared to active life; the prestige of mysticism and of renunciation of the world compared to acquisition and achievement; acceptance of the idea of a preordained, unchanging and unchangeable universe; emphasis on performance of duties and acceptance of obligations, rather than on achievement of results, or assertion or even a recognition of personal rights; lack of sustained curiosity, experimentation and interest in change; belief in the efficacy of supernatural and occult forces and of their influence over one's destiny; insistence on the unity of the organic universe, and on the need to live with nature rather than conquer it or harness it to man's needs, an attitude of which reluctance to take animal life is a corollary; belief in perpetual reincarnation, which reduces the significance of effort in the course of the present life; recognized status of beggary, together with a lack of stigma in the acceptance of charity; opposition to women's work outside the home.⁽⁵⁵⁾

A long sentence, indeed.  If the full-time promoters of Western guilt understood the implications of what Bauer is saying, there would be greater hope for both the West and the Third World.  What he describes is essentially the very opposite of what has come to be known as "the Protestant Ethic."⁽⁵⁶⁾ What is remarkable is the extent to which ideologically motivated guilt-manipulators have adopted so many of the very attitudes that Bauer says are responsible for the economic backwardness of the Third World.

Yes, the West continues to eat.  The Third World finds it difficult to grow sufficient food.  But Christians in the West are supposedly complacent.  They are well-fed, while their "global neighbors" go hungry.⁽⁵⁷⁾  It appears that the ancestors of "rich Christians" and rich Westerners in general were very smart: They all moved to those regions of the world where food is now abundant.  The Plains Indians, before Europeans came on the scene, experienced frequent famines.  There were under half a million of them at the time.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Yet, somehow, European immigrants to the Plains arrived just in time to see agricultural productivity flourish.  They now consume more than their "fair share" of the food, and their only excuse is that they produce it.  This, it seems, is not a good enough answer -- certainly not a morally valid answer.  The West needs to come up with a cure for the hungry masses of the world, but not the one that worked in the West, namely, the private ownership of the means of production.

Ronald Sider has a cure -- if not for the world's hungry masses, then at least for the now-guilty consciences of his readers, not to mention the not-yet-guilt-burdened consciences of the American electorate.  "We ought to move toward a personal lifestyle that could be sustained for a long period of time if it were shared by everyone in the world.  In its controversial Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome suggested the figure of $1,800 per year per person.  In spite of the many weaknesses of that study, the Club of Rome's estimate may be the best available."⁽⁵⁹⁾ And which agencies should be responsible for collecting the funds and sending them to the poor in foreign lands?  United Nations channels.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Private charity is acceptable -- indeed, it is better than the United States government, which sends food and supplies to "repressive dictatorships"⁽⁶¹⁾ -- but not preferable.  We need State-enforced "institutional change," not reliance on private charity, because "institutional change is often morally better.  Personal charity and philanthropy still permit the rich donor to feel superior.  And it makes the recipient feel inferior and dependent.  Institutional changes, on the other hand, give the oppressed rights and power."⁽⁶²⁾

But if the United States government is not really a reliable State to impose such institutional change, what compulsory agency is reliable?  He neglects to say.  The one agency he mentions favorably in this context is the United Nations -- the organization which has formally indicted Israel as a "racist" nation, and which welcomed the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yassir Arafat, pistol on his hip, to speak before the membership.⁽⁶³⁾

It is interesting that the Club of Rome drastically revised its no-growth position in 1976,⁽⁶⁴⁾ and in 1977, the year Rich Christians was published, the Club of Rome published a pro-growth, pro-technology study.⁽⁶⁵⁾  As William Tucker observes, "When you're leading the parade, it's always fun to make sudden changes in direction just to try to keep everyone on their toes."⁽⁶⁶⁾ Of course, it was favorable to vast State-to-State foreign aid programs. 

A Zero-Sum Economy?

A zero-sum game is a game in which the winners' earnings come exclusively from the losers.  But what applies to a game of chance does not apply to an economy based on voluntary exchange.  Unfortunately, many critics of the free market society still cling to this ancient dogma.  They assume that if one person profits from a transaction, the other person loses proportionately.  Mises objects:

. . . the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by the loss of others.  This dogma was already advanced by some ancient authors.  Among modern writers Montaigne was the first to restate it; we may fairly call it the Montaigne dogma.  It was the quintessence of the doctrines of Mercantilism, old and new.  It is at the bottom of all modern doctrines teaching that there prevailed, within the frame of the market economy, an irreconcilable conflict among the interests of various social classes within a nation and furthermore between the interests of any nation and those of all other nations. . . .

What produces a man's profit in the course of affairs within an unhampered market society is not his fellow citizen's plight and distress, but the fact that he alleviates or entirely removes what causes his fellow citizen's feeling of uneasiness.  What hurts the sick is the plague, not the physician who treats the disease.  The doctor's gain is not an outcome of the epidemics, but of the aid he gives to those affected.  The ultimate source of profits is always the foresight of future conditions.  Those who succeeded better than others in anticipating future events and in adjusting their activities to the future state of the market, reap profits because they are in a position to satisfy the most urgent needs of the public.  The profits of those who have produced goods and services for which the buyers scramble are not the source of losses of those who have brought to the market commodities in the purchase of which the public is not prepared to pay the full amount of production costs expended.  These losses are caused by the lack of insight displayed in anticipating the future state of the market and the demand of the consumers.⁽⁶⁷⁾

The "Montaigne dogma" is still with us.  The economic analysis presented by Ronald Sider assumes it.  He can be regarded as a dogmatic theologian, but his dogma is Montaigne's.  Consider for a moment his statistics, such as the Club of Rome's assertion that $1,800 a year would just about equalize the living standards of the world.  The Club of Rome assumes tremendous per capita wealth in the hands of the rich -- so much wealth, that a program of compulsory wealth-redistribution could make the whole world middle class, or at least reasonably comfortable. But the capital of the West -- roads, educational institutions, communications networks, legal systems, banking facilities, monetary systems, manufacturing capital, managerial skills, and attitudes toward life, wealth, and the future -- cannot be divided up physically.  Furthermore, there is little evidence that it would be sufficient to produce world-wide per capita wealth of this magnitude, even if it could be physically divided up and redistributed.⁽⁶⁸⁾

If we divided only the shares of ownership held by the rich -- stocks, bonds, annuities, pension rights, cash-value life insurance policies, and so forth -- we would see a market-imposed redistribution process begin to put the shares back into the hands of the most efficient producers.  The inequalities of ownership would rapidly reappear.

The important issue, however, is the Montaigne dogma.  It views the world as a zero-sum game, in which winnings exactly balance losses.  Then how do societies advance?  If life is a zero-sum game, how can we account for economic growth?  A free market economy is not a zero-sum game.  We exchange with each other because we expect to gain an advantage.  Both parties expect to be better off after the exchange has taken place.  Each party offers an opportunity to the other person.  If each person did not expect to better himself, neither would make the exchange.  There is no fixed quantity of economic benefits.  The free market economy is not a zero-sum game.

We understand this far better in the field of education.  For example, if I learn that two plus two equals four, I have not harmed anyone.  In the area of knowledge, we all know that the only people who lose when someone gains new, accurate knowledge are those who have invested in terms of older, inaccurate knowledge.  Could anyone seriously argue that the acquisition of knowledge is a zero-sum game (except, perhaps, in the case of a competitive examination)?  Would anyone argue that we should suppress the spread of new, accurate knowledge in order to protect those who have made unfortunate investments in terms of old information?

What should we conclude?  The Third World needs what all men need: faith in Jesus Christ and his law-order.  The Third World needs the increased economic output that is the inevitable product of true conversion to Christ.  It needs a new attitude toward the future (optimism).  It needs a new attitude concerning the power of biblical law as a tool of dominion.  It needs to abandon the bureaucratic State agricultural control systems that pay farmers only a fraction of what their agricultural output is worth, with the difference going into State treasuries.  It is not uncommon for West African  governments to pay producers as little as fifty per cent of the market value of their crops.⁽⁶⁹⁾

What the Third World needs is what we all need: less guilt, less civil government, lower taxes, more freedom, and churches that enforce the tithe through the threat of excommunication -- not a "graduated tithe," but a fixed, predictable ten per cent of income.  (A "graduated tithe" means a graduated ten per cent, which is contradictory.  It is a political slogan, not a theological concept.  It certainly is not a standard for State taxation: 1 Sam 8)

 

Land Reform

We are told endlessly that Latin American nations need land reform.  The government is supposed to intervene, confiscate the landed wealth of the aristocracy, and give it to the poor.  This is a variation of Lenin's old World War I slogan, "peace, land, bread." Is such a program legitimate?  Is it practical?

The Bible has a standard for land tenure: private ownership.  First, how can we respect this principle and still expand the holdings of land by the peasants?  Second, how can we keep agricultural output from collapsing when unskilled, poor peasants take over land tenure?

The answer to the first question is relatively simple in theory: We need to adopt the biblical principle of inheritance.  All sons receive part of the inheritance, with the eldest son obtaining a double portion, since he has the primary responsibility for caring for aged parents.  Rushdoony's comments are important: 

The general rule of inheritance was limited primogeniture, i.e., the oldest son, who had the duty of providing for the entire family in case of need, or of governing the clan, receiving a double portion.  If there were two sons, the estate was divided into three portions, the younger son receiving one third. . . . The father could not alienate a godly first-born son because of personal feelings, such as a dislike for the son's mother and a preference for a second wife (Deut 21:15-17).  Neither could he favor an ungodly son, an incorrigible delinquent, who deserved to die (Deut 21:18-21).  Where there was no son, the inheritance went to the daughter or daughters (Num 27:1-11). . . . If there were neither sons nor daughters, the next of kin inherited (Num 27:9-11).⁽⁷⁰⁾

By instituting the biblical mode of inheritance, the great landed estates of the Latin American world would be broken up.  The civil government would immediately gain the support of the younger sons of the aristocracy.  Land holdings would get smaller.  Those sons who choose not to farm can sell their land to productive peasants, or if the poor people have no capital initially, hire them as sharecroppers.  (In a capital-poor society, such as the American South immediately after the Civil War, sharecropping proved to be an economically sound arrangement.)⁽⁷¹⁾ The sons can buy the necessary capital, assuming they do not inherit it. 

With each death, the land holdings get smaller.  Will this lead to the destruction of productive, large-scale agriculture?  Not if it is really productive.  The size of land holdings could be increased by purchase by productive farmers.  Also, corporations could be set up that would issue shares of stock to owners.  The holders would leave shares of stock to their heirs, not the actual land.  Then heirs could sell these shares to other people, including members of the rising middle class.  Without single-inheritor primogeniture, there could be a rising middle class. 

One of the preludes to the American Revolution, especially in southern colonies, was the abolition of the English version of eldest-son primogeniture.⁽⁷²⁾ Puritan New England never did adhere to eldest-son primogeniture.  Historian Kenneth Lockridge writes: 

The leaders of the [Massachusetts Bay] colony reflected a general awareness of the unique abundance of the New World in the novel inheritance law they created.  In England, the lands of a man who left no will would go to the eldest son under the law of primogeniture, whose aim was to prevent the fragmentation of holdings which would follow from a division among all the sons.  The law arose from a mentality of scarcity.  It left the landless younger sons to fend for themselves.  In New England the law provided for the division of the whole estate among all the children of the deceased.  Why turn younger sons out on the society without land or perhaps daughters without a decent dowry, why invite social disorder, when there was enough to provide for all?⁽⁷³⁾

There was never a landed aristocracy in the New England because of this policy.  Primogeniture and entail (prohibiting the from selling the land) disappeared in all but two colonies prior to the American Revolution.

I offer this example of one possible social and economic reform to demonstrate how relevant biblical law is for all societies, and how a deviation from biblical law has led, over centuries, to the creation of a ticking time bomb in Latin American nations.  Instead of broadly based private property in land, and the development of a responsible middle class, Latin American nations now face the likelihood of Marxist revolution, with the State, not the people, gaining control over the land.  As Rushdoony remarks, "The state, moreover, is making itself progressively the main, and in some countries, the only heir.  The state in effect is saying that it will receive the blessing above all others.  It offers to educate all children and to support all needy families as the great father of all.  It offers support to the aged as the true son and heir who is entitled to collect all of the inheritance as his own.  In both roles, however, it is the great corrupter and is at war with God's established order, the family."⁽⁷⁴⁾

 

Conclusion

God's law is clear enough: The family is the primary agency of welfare -- in education, law enforcement (by teaching biblical law and self-government), care for the aged.  The church, as the agency for collecting the tithe, also has social welfare obligations.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The civil government has almost none.  Even in the case of the most pitiable people in Israel, the lepers, the State had only a negative function, namely, to quarantine then from other citizens.  The State provided no medical care or other tax-supported aid (Lev 13 and 14).⁽⁷⁶⁾

The balance of earthly sovereignties between the one (the State or church) and the many (individuals, voluntary associations) is mandatory if we are to preserve both freedom and order.  The Bible tells us that God is both one and many, one Being yet three Persons.  His creation reflects this unity and diversity.  Our social and political institutions are to reflect this.  We are to seek neither total unity (statism) nor total diversity (anarchism).⁽⁷⁷⁾ Biblical law provides us with the guidelines by which we may achieve a balanced social order.  We must take biblical law seriously.⁽⁷⁸⁾

The most effective social movements of the twentieth century's masses -- Marxism, Darwinian science, and militant Islam -- have held variations of the three doctrines that are crucial for any comprehensive program of social change:  providence, law, and optimism.  The Christian faith offers all three of these, not in a secular framework, but in a revelational framework.  The failure of Christianity to capture the minds of the masses, not to mention the world's leaders, is in part due to the unwillingness of the representatives of Christian orthodoxy to preach all three with uncompromising clarity. The world will stay poor for as long as men cling to any vision of God, man, and law that is in opposition to the biblical outline.

  We need faith in the meaning of the universe and the sovereignty of God.  We need confidence that biblical law offers us a reliable tool of dominion.  Finally, we need an historical dynamic: optimism.  We need a positive future-orientation for our earthly efforts, in eternity of course, but also in time and on earth.  People need to surrender unconditionally to God in order to exercise comprehensive dominion, under God and in terms of God's law, over the creation.⁽⁷⁹⁾ There is no other long-term solution to long-term poverty.  God will not be mocked.

Footnotes:

1. All of my citations of Scripture in this essay are from the King James Version.

2. On the question of Old Testament law in New Testament times, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1977).

3. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1966), chap. 18.  Let me give an example of the "discount for time."  If I were to announce that you have just won a new Rolls-Royce, and that you have a choice of delivery date, today or one year from today, which delivery date would you select (other things being equal)?  You would want immediate delivery.  Why?  Because present goods are worth more to you than the same goods in the future.  You might accept the Rolls-Royce a year from now if I paid you a rate of interest, in addition to the car.  In fact, at some rate of interest you would accept the later date, unless you have a terminal disease, or an unquenchable lust for a Rolls-Royce. 

4. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, 2 vols. (1962; reprint ed., New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979), I, pp. 284-87, 410-24. See esp. chap. 6. This book was republished in 1993 by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.

5. On the holy commonwealth ideal in early American history, see Rousas J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic (1964 reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), esp. chap. 8.

6. Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream about the great image was historically specific: four human empires (Babylon, Medo-Persia, Macedonia, and Rome), followed by the fifth Empire, God's (Dan 2:31-45).  This was not an "ideal type," to use Max Weber's terminology, nor was it a developmental model.  Hesiod's seemingly similar construction (Greece, 8th century, B.C.) -- from the Age of Gold to the Age of Iron -- was, in contrast, an attempt at constructing a universal model of the process of decay in man's history.  Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), lines 109-201.  The Bible's developmental model is based on ethics -- conformity to or rebellion against God's covenant -- not metaphysics, meaning some sort of inescapable aspect of the creation.

7. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982).

8. Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982).

9. Gary North, "Methodological Covenantalism," Chalcedon Report (Oct., 1977), published by the Chalcedon Foundation, Box 158, Vallecito, California, 95251. 

10. I capitalize the word "State" where I am referring to the new god of twentieth-century socialism.  I distinguish this from "state," meaning a regional agency of civil government in the United States.

11. One of the finest books ever written in economics covers these questions in detail: Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980).  Sowell is an ex-Marxist, so he knows the arguments well.  See also Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922; reprint ed., Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981).  This was first published in the United States by Yale University Press in 1953.

12. Gary North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1973), chap. 20: "Statist Bureaucracy in the Modern Economy."

13. "The distinction between moral and technical knowledge is elusive.  . . . From the standpoint of any science the distinction is absolutely essential.  A subject is not opened to scientific enquiry until its technical aspect has been sundered from its moral aspect. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men, in thinking of economic phenomena, forcefully suspended all judgments of theology, morality, and justice, were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil.  That separation was made during the seventeenth century. .  .  .  The economist's view of the world, which the public cannot yet comfortably stomach, was introduced by a remarkable tour de force, an intellectual revolution brought off in the seventeenth century." William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (1963; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1965), pp. 158-59.

14. Ibid., p. 159.

15. Letwin does not actually say this.  Perhaps he forgot about Newton.  Or perhaps he was referring solely to social science when he named economics as "the greatest scientific accomplishment of the seventeenth century." Or possibly he really meant what he wrote, which boggles the mind.

16. Mises writes: "In considering changes in the nation's legal system, in rewriting or repealing existing laws and writing new laws, the issue is not justice, but social expediency and social welfare.  There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a definite system of social organization.  It is not justice that determines the decision in favor of a definite social system.  It is, on the contrary, the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong.  There is neither right nor wrong outside the social nexus. . . . It is nonsensical to justify or to reject interventionism from the point of view of fictitious and arbitrary absolute justice.  It is vain to ponder over the just delimitation of the tasks of government from any preconceived standard of perennial values." Mises, Human Action, p. 721. 

Milton Friedman, in a classic essay on epistemology, writes:  "Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment." Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 4.  For a critique of the hypothesis of neutrality in economics, see Gary North, "Economics: From Reason to Intuition," in North, ed., Foundations of Christian Scholarship (Vallecito, Calif.: Ross House Books, 1976).

17. On the impossibility of neutrality, see the writings of Cornelius Van Til, especially The Defense of the Faith (rev. ed.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1963).

18. For a discussion of the similarities and differences between "the law" and "the works of the law" written on human hearts, see John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1959), I, pp. 74-76.

19. Marxists believe in objective truth -- proletarian truth -- but they hold that all other approaches are intellectual defenses of a particular class perspective.  All philosophy is class philosophy -- a weapon used by one class against its rivals.  Since history is objectively on the side of the proletariat, there can be objective truth for Marxists only.  See Gary North, Marx's Religion of Revolution (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1968), pp. 61-71. Reprinted in 1989 by the Institute for Christian Economics.

20. Compare Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, rev. ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).  See also Imre Lakatos and Alan E. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970).  The works of Herman Dooyeweerd, the Dutch legal philosopher, deal extensively with the pre-theoretical presuppositions of all philosophy: In the Twilight of Western Thought (Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1960); A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols. (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1954).

21. Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), chap. 15.

22. See, for example, Walter A. Weisskopf, Alienation and Economics (New York: E.  P. Dutton, 1971); Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, The Challenge of Humanistic Economics (Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979).  Lux is a clinical psychologist, not an economist, and Lutz taught at an obscure college.  Benjamin/Cummings is not a familiar name in publishing.  I am not berating these men, their publisher, or their employers, though I do not share their economic views.  I am pointing to the difficulty of getting such views discussed within the normal channels of the economics profession.  The economics profession has not adopted the forthright acceptance by these men of the obvious implications of subjectivism for the neutrality doctrine.

23. David Chilton, "The Case of the Missing Blueprints," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, VIII (Summer, 1981).

24. Again, consult Sowell's book, Knowledge and Decisions, for a detailed analysis of this issue.  Also, see the classic study by Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921; reprint ed., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Pubs., n.d.).

25. Gary North, "A Christian View of Labor Unions," Biblical Economics Today (April/May 1978), published by the Institute for Christian Economics.

26. Gary North, "Exploitation and Knowledge," The Freeman (January 1982), published by the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, New York, 10533.

27. Perhaps the most eloquent and scholarly work that argues for the connection between predictable law, human freedom, and economic productivity is the book by the Nobel Prize winner in economics, F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), esp. the first 15 chapters.  See also his trilogy, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973-80).

28. G. Ernest Wright, "Deuteronomy," in The Interpreter's Bible, vol. 2, p. 509; cited by R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, vol. 2, Law and Liberty (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1982), p. 413.

29. Rushdoony, Law and Society, pp. 403-6.

30. Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen, University Economics: Elements of Inquiry, 3rd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1972), p. 141.  Italics in the original.

31. Idem.

32. Ibid., p. 239.

33. Ernest F. Kevan, The Grace of Law: A Study in Puritan Theology (1963; reprint ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983).

34. See the study by Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1957).

35. Lewis Mumford, "The First Megamachine," Daedalus (1966); reprinted in Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).  See also Max Weber, "Max Weber on Bureaucratization" (1909), in J. P. Meyer, Max Weber and German Politics: A Study in Political Sociology (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), p. 127.

36. For a discussion of why Joseph's imposition of a twenty per cent tax in Egypt was not part of God's law for Israel, see Gary North, Dominion Covenant: Genesis, chap. 23.

37. Robert M. Bleiberg, "Down a Rathole," Barron's (11 August 1975), p. 7.  By 1975, the United States had sent to foreign nations agricultural goods worth about $25 billion.

38. The estimate of Dr. Max Milner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He says that in one recent year, rats in the Philippine Islands consumed over half the sugar and corn, and ninety per cent of the rice crop.  "Over 40% of the World's Food Is Lost to Pests," Washington Post, 6 March 1977.

39. P. T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), p. 94.

40. For background on the political support for Public Law 480 and the program's use as a tool of American foreign policy, see Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York: Viking, 1979), pp. 100-2, 122-28, 258-68.

41. William Peterson, The Great Farm Problem (Chicago: Regnery, 1959).

42. Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Downers Grove, Illinois:  Inter-Varsity Press, 1977), p. 18.  This book was co-published by the liberal Roman Catholic publishing house, the Paulist Press.  Unquestionably, it represents an ecumenical publishing venture.  Presumably, it reflects the thinking of a broad base of Christian scholars.

43. Ibid., p. 152.

44. Ibid., p. 153.

45. Ibid., p. 43.

46. Associated Press story, Tyler Morning Telegraph, 18 December 1982.

47. Richard H. Wagner, Environment and Man, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 523.

48. Ibid., pp. 518-19.

49. Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial and The World and the West (New York:  World, 1958), pp. 286-87.

50. John Burton, "Epilogue," in Steven N. S. Cheung, The Myth of Social Cost (San Francisco: Cato Institute, 1980), p. 66.

51. Claire Sterling, "The Making of the Sub-Sahara Wasteland," Atlantic (May, 1974), p. 102. 

52. Ibid., p. 103.

53. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1960).  This was a best-seller on college campuses in the early 1960s.  For a critique, see the essays by several economic historians in Rostow, ed., The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth (New York: St. Martin's, 1963). 

54. Examples of socialist (centrally planned) economies that have been propped up by U.S. government aid are Costa Rica, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Ghana.  See Melvyn B. Krauss, Development Without Aid: Growth, Poverty and Government (New York: New Press, McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 24-32.  Another example is Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo).  Consider also that government-guaranteed loans, as well as below-market loans through such agencies as the Export-Import Bank, constitute foreign aid, for banks loan investors' dollars to high-risk socialist nations that would otherwise not have been loaned.  The Soviet Bloc has done exceedingly well in this regard for decades.  On this point, see Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1968-73).

55. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 78-79.

56. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).  This book appeared originally as a series of scholarly journal articles in 1904-05.  See also S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Protestant Ethic and Modernization (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

57. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 30.

58. R. J. Rushdoony, The Myth of Over-Population (1969; reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), pp. 1-3.

59. Ronald J. Sider, "Living More Simply for Evangelism and Justice," the Keynote Address to the International Consultation on Simple Lifestyle, England (17-20 March 1980), mimeographed paper, p. 17.

60. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 216.

61. Idem.

62. Sider, "Ambulance Drivers or Tunnel Builders" (Philadelphia: Evangelicals for Social Action, n.d.), p. 4.

63. For a critical analysis of Sider's views, see David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald Sider, rev. ed. (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982). The book is now in the third edition, reprinted in 1996.

64. Time, 26 April 1976.

65. Jan Tinbergen (coordinator), RIO -- Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome (New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1977).

66. William Tucker, Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), p. 193.

67. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pp. 664-65.  Italics in original.

68. Gary North, "Trickle-Down Economics," The Freeman (May 1982).

69. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development, pp. 401-3.

70. R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 180-81.

71. Blacks much preferred sharecropping to working for wages on white-owned farms: Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 67-70.

72. Robert Nisbet, the conservative American sociologist, concludes that the abolition of primogeniture and entail (fixing land to the family line) was an important symbol of the American Revolution.  He admits, however, that few of the colonies in 1775 were still enforcing these laws.  Nisbet, "The Social Impact of the Revolution," in America's Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. 80.  Nisbet cites Frederick Le Play and Alexis de Tocqueville as sources for his opinion on the importance of the abolition of primogeniture and entail, pp. 82-83. 

73. Kenneth A. Lockeridge, A New England Town, The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 71-72.

74. Ibid., p. 181.  See also Gary North, "Familistic Capital," in the forthcoming book, The Dominion Covenant: Exodus (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), forthcoming. [The book was eventually titled, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion, 1985.]

75. James B. Jordan, "Tithing: Financing Christian Reconstruction," in Gary North, ed., Tactics of Christian Resistance (Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983).

76. Gary North, "Quarantines and Public Health," Chalcedon Report (April 1977).

77. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (1971; reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978).

78. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics.

79. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God's Program for Victory, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983).  See also Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant (1954; reprinted., Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1982).

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