Updated: 2/24/20
Then Jesus told them a parable, saying, “The field of a rich man yielded abundantly, and he reasoned with himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I do not have a place to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all of my grain and other goods. I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods stored up for many years. Rest easy, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Foolish man, tonight your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ That is what someone is like who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21).
I have analyzed this parable in detail in my economic commentary on Luke. My analysis appears in Chapter 25.
From the point of view of humanistic economic analysis, the rich man was doing an exceptionally good job. He had crops to store. He had so many crops that he needed more barns. He was serving the public. He was doing his share in answering one section of the Lord’s prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). [North, Matthew, ch. 12:B] The humanistic economist would not praise such an individual, for the humanistic economist believes that praise or condemnation is never justified in the name of scientific economics. To praise or condemn would involve an ethical standard, and the humanistic economist insists that all economic theory is value-free. Nevertheless, in the back of his mind, a free market humanistic economist would say that this man was a benefit to the community. His agricultural operation was showing a profit. It was growing. He should have continued doing more of the same. That is what economic profitability means for every individual. Profitability means that consumers are asking a particular seller to continue to do whatever it was that he has been doing.
Jesus said otherwise.
Jesus did not suggest that he was doing anything illegal. Jesus did not suggest that he was in some way exploiting poor people. He had nothing critical to say about the man’s business efficiency. But he made it clear that this man was going to hell, as described in Luke 16. This implied that the man’s soul would eventually be reconnected with his resurrected body, whereupon he would be dumped into the lake of fire for all eternity (Revelation 20:14–15). In short, this man was a cosmic loser.
The Christian economist has a theological obligation to make it clear that success in selling is not the same as success in living. The Christian economist has a moral and theological obligation to do this specifically as an economist, not simply as an observer. There must be no separation between the Christian economist’s work as an economist and his work as an evangelist, theologian, and economic advisor. Economic theory is far from being value-free. Nothing is value-free. Economic theory is far from being autonomous from God. Nothing is autonomous from God. Christian economics is governed by the Bible, just as Christian everything else is supposed to be governed by the Bible.
Jesus’ parable of the barn builder should be representative of everything that is presented as Christian economic analysis. Ethics is fundamental to Christian economic analysis. The revelation of the Bible is fundamental. Jesus gave a parable warning us against making an eternal error that will lead to eternal negative sanctions. We should take this warning seriously. It does not matter if we want to get a job in a tax-funded state university that does not allow this kind of discussion. If we are going to teach economics in the name of Christ, then we have to consider the question of ethics.
It is certainly possible for a humanistic economist to discuss what the barn builder was doing in terms of meeting a market. Consumers wanted to buy his crops. He had to store the crops somewhere. It is certainly legitimate to discuss the questions of thrift, capital formation, hiring laborers to build barns, and other aspects of this enterprise. I have no doubt that a competent humanistic economist could provide an accurate assessment of his motivation, his priorities, his economic plan, and the most likely outcome of that plan in history. What the humanistic economist does not want to discuss is the outcome of his plan that evening. Neither did the barn builder. The outcome of that plan was eternal torment. The barn builder made a catastrophic mistake. He was a good entrepreneur with respect to history, and he was a fool with respect to eternity.
Christian economics has to deal with the issues related to his foolishness. The words of Jesus that follow the parable are authoritative.
Jesus said to his disciples, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat—or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes. Consider the ravens, that they do not sow or reap. They have no storeroom or barn, but God feeds them. How much more valuable you are than the birds! Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his lifespan? If then you are not able to do such a very little thing, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies—how they grow. They do not labor, neither do they spin. Yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass in the field, which exists today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! Do not look for what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not be anxious. For all the nations of the world look for these things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you. Do not fear, little flock, because your Father is very pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Make for yourselves purses which will not wear out—treasure in the heavens that does not run out, where no thief comes near, and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:22–34).
I devoted Chapter 26 to this passage in my commentary on Luke. If we take this literally, it would indicate that all Christians should live in poverty. But if they did, then how could they build the kingdom of God? How could church buildings be built? How could evangelism programs be funded? How could Christians become dominant economically in society, providing employment to the vast masses of humanity? What Jesus was saying was this: our attitude regarding our wealth should be “here today, gone tomorrow.” Maybe our wealth will be gone tomorrow, or maybe we will be. For those Christians who worry about their economic status, this is a warning. They should re-think what it means to live as a Christian in history. Christians should not be so tied to their economic status that they lose track of their economic callings before God: the most important thing they can do in which they would be most difficult to replace. They should not wish for poverty for its own sake, nor should they wish for wealth for its own sake. They should not seek anything for its own sake, other than building the kingdom of God. To seek anything for its own sake is to seek autonomy from God.
From the days of classical Greek philosophers until the present, there have been promoters of the idea of the separation of ethics from philosophy and science. The promoters of this viewpoint want to escape the burden of conforming to any ethical system, especially the ethical system that is the source of their funding. Philosophers and scientists want the funding, but they do not wish to conform to the ethical standards of the people who are providing the funding. They want autonomy, but they also want the funding. This has been basic to covenant-breaking man’s thinking from Adam until the present. Men proclaim their autonomy, but they also demand authority: subservience of others. Men claim autonomy from God, but they demand power as if they were God. This is the Adamic outlook.
Beginning with the creation of tax-funded universities in the late eighteenth century in what is now Germany, salaried philosophers, scientists, and especially social scientists have insisted on the doctrine of neutrality. They have insisted they are ethically neutral in their work as academics. They have insisted that they conduct their investigations neutrally. This is the dominant myth of academia today. Academics have used this myth to justify their funding by money collected from taxpayers who do not share their anti-God, anti-ethical presuppositions. They want the funding, but they do not want to be forced to conform to the prevailing ethical standards of the day. So, they have invoked the myth of neutrality.
In the case of economics, a few economists have been quite forthright about this separation between their supposedly detached investigations and any system of ethics. Ludwig von Mises was probably the most forthright of all economists in his insistence on such a separation. I am unaware of any statement by any economist that matches this one with respect to the separation between God and economic logic. This is paragraph two of the Introduction to his main book, Human Action (1949).
Philosophers had long since been eager to ascertain the ends which God or Nature was trying to realize in the course of human history. They searched for the law of mankind’s destiny and evolution. But even those thinkers whose inquiry was free from any theological tendency failed utterly in these endeavors because they were committed to a faulty method. They dealt with humanity as a whole or with other holistic concepts like nation, race, or church. They set up quite arbitrarily the ends to which the behavior of such wholes is bound to lead. But they could not satisfactorily answer the question regarding what factors compelled the various acting individuals to behave in such a way that the goal aimed at by the whole's inexorable evolution was attained. They had recourse to desperate shifts: miraculous interference of the Deity either by revelation or by the delegation of God-sent prophets and consecrated leaders, preestablished harmony, predestination, or the operation of a mystic and fabulous “world soul” or “national soul.” Others spoke of a “cunning of nature” which implanted in man impulses driving him unwittingly along precisely the path Nature wanted him to take.
In Chapter I, “Acting Man,” Part 6, “The Alter Ego,” he wrote this: “Praxeology [the science of human action] and history are manifestations of the human mind and as such are conditioned by the intellectual abilities of mortal men. Praxeology and history do not pretend to know anything about the intentions of an absolute and objective mind, about an objective meaning inherent in the course of events and of historical evolution, and about the plans which God or Nature or Weltgeist or Manifest Destiny is trying to realize in directing the universe and human affairs.” On the final page of his book, he wrote this: “In this sense we may say that economics is apolitical or nonpolitical, although it is the foundation of politics and of every kind of political action. We may furthermore say that it is perfectly neutral with regard to all judgments of value, as it refers always to means and never to the choice of ultimate ends.” He ended where he began: an assertion of the autonomy of economic theory from the idea of God and from all value judgments. Economic theory is value-free.
He was not alone. George Stigler was one of the most prominent economists in what is known as the Chicago School of economics. He won what is called the Nobel Prize in 1982. (Its real name is this: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.) In his second book, The Theory of Competitive Price (1942), he discussed the issue of ethics. “Ethics is the study of values; so in the means-and-ends terminology ethics considers the relative desirability of the various ends. The philosopher, and not the economist, attempts to decide whether a consumer should prefer recitals of the modern dance to spiked beer. Strictly speaking, words like should and bad cannot occur in an economic discussion—at most one may say that an action is not appropriate to the end in view” (p. 15). This is the operating presupposition of all modern humanistic economics. It is so widely assumed that economists do not begin their textbooks with any such declaration.
There is an operational problem with this outlook. I began writing about this in Chapter 4 of the first volume in my series on the economic commentary on the Bible: The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (1982). It now appears as Chapter 5 in the updated version of that volume: Sovereignty and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Genesis (2012). Economists are constantly asked to give advice to governments. They are the only social scientists who are taken seriously enough by government agencies and politicians to be asked to provide this advice. But if economics is value-free, then on what basis can economists offer such advice? They cannot offer this advice as scientists, certainly. That is because they claim autonomy from politics and ethics for their work as scientists. But if their work as scientists has any meaning at all for practical applications, then the results of their investigations must be related to politics. This means that it has to be related to ethics, for politics is always a matter of conflicting ethical views in society.
I will discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 4. I simply mention here that there was a debate between Roy Harrod, a Keynesian, and Lionel Robbins, then a disciple of Mises, which took place in 1938. Robbins argued against the idea that there should be a graduated tax on income. Those who favored it said that the value to the rich man of one additional unit of income is much less than the value of this unit of income to a poor man. Therefore, the state is justified in extracting a higher percentage of taxes from the rich man than from the poor man. Robbins argued that there is no such justification, since we cannot make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. There is no objective value scale. He was correct on the basis of modern economic theory, which was first promoted by Carl Menger in 1871. “Hold on,” said Harrod. If that is the case, then no economist can legitimately make any recommendations about anything in the name of science. Robbins backed off from his position. He did not want to surrender the idea that economists, as scientists, can offer legitimate and accurate advice to governments. But he never explained why his original argument was not accurate. It was accurate, given his presuppositions about subjective value theory. I discussed this debate at considerable length in Chapter 5 of Sovereignty and Dominion.
Almost a decade earlier, Frank H. Knight, the founder of the Chicago School of economics, had reached the same conclusion. In a 1929 essay, “Freedom as Fact and Criterion,” he announced: “No discussion of policy is possible apart from a moral judgment.” Then he wrote this: “Freedom and coercion are ethical categories, and the only question in regard to which discussion can possibly be carried on is the question of what power ought to be exercised, or how and under what circumstances. Why should one not be as free to use political power as economic power? As far as the mere notion of freedom is concerned, there is no reason why the majority in a democratic state, or the sovereign group in any state, should not dispossess and exploit the rest of society at their pleasure.” This essay is Chapter 1 of his 1947 collection of essays, Freedom and Reform.
Even more to the point is Knight’s 1939 essay, “Ethics and Economic Reform,” printed as Chapter 4. He used the ethical term “vice” to describe the social theory of our era. “One of the vices of Western thought in the social sciences and of certain of the most popular schools of philosophy is that of ‘reducing’ value judgments to statements of preference, asserting that ‘this is better’ or ‘ought to be done,’ ‘really’ means merely, ‘I like it’” (p. 49). Yet this is exactly what all schools of free market economic thought assume, not excluding Chicago School economics. The men whom Knight taught at Chicago adopted exactly this view of ethics and social thought. This is why they sought to avoid all ethical elements in their economic theories. Knight was a nineteenth-century liberal, as he forthrightly admitted. He believed in what is sometimes called the night-watchman state. So did the most famous members of the University of Chicago’s economic department, beginning in the 1940's. But they refused to integrate their economic theory with this view of the older liberalism. They insisted that economic theory is value-free. If it really is, then it is useless, Knight taught. “Every social order, in fact all organized action, all social life in all human life, is necessarily ethical, in so far as its character is a matter of deliberation and conscious acceptance on the part of its participants.” (p. 48)
Economists do not persuade most politicians, let alone the masses, of much of what they say. Why is this? Because people operate in terms of ethics. They also operate in terms of self-interest. They want to believe that their self-interest is consistent with their ethics. They search for an economist to justify whatever compromise they have worked out between their ethics and their economic self-interest. So, there is always a market for an economist to come in the name of economic science to argue for whatever the person or special-interest group is paying him to recommend. The economist is willing to devise arguments to favor whoever is providing the funding. As an academic, he has invoked the myth of neutrality: what he is doing as a scientific economist has nothing to do with ethics. The special-interest group that is putting up money for him to argue for whatever is beneficial to the special-interest group is willing to go along with this deception, since it helps the special-interest group to hire someone who claims to be an ethically neutral scientist. The special-interest group is not about to hire some other economist who argues against the policy promoted by the special-interest group, also in the name of value-free economic science. The political game goes on.
The economist who claims to be ethically neutral also claims that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between ethics and economic outcomes. He claims to be able to evaluate economic causation in the name of efficiency alone. This standard of efficiency is also supposed to be evaluated in non-ethical terms. Step-by-step, from the initial assumption of ethical neutrality and therefore ethical autonomy, the economist extends this doctrine of neutrality to every area of life that is governed by economic causation. He argues that the assumption of the myth of neutrality provides workable analytical tools to investigate every area of life that is subject to scarcity, which means every area of life. His concept of economic efficiency also rests on the myth of neutrality. But it is clear from Jesus’ parable of the barn builder that this assumption is wrong. It is dead wrong. It is eternally dead wrong.
The issue here is causation in history. The humanist believes that the God of the Bible is irrelevant to historical causation, except in so far as people may believe in such a God, and then take actions in terms of this belief. Humanists are willing to grant that individuals who believe in the God of the Bible may have influence, but they are dedicated to the proposition that there is no such God, no law-order created by God, and no causation that is based on God’s authority, the Bible’s authority, and the structure of society.
Economists are convinced that the laws of economics are autonomous. These laws are not dependent upon politics. They are not dependent upon a particular legal order. They are built into the market order. They are superior in operational impact than opinions regarding religion, politics, and jurisprudence. Any interference with these economic laws of the market order by religion, politics, and jurisprudence will reduce the efficiency of participants in the market order. In other words, there are costs to ignoring the laws of economics, and therefore the laws of economics should be honored by people who want greater economic efficiency, greater output, and therefore greater wealth. If this means dishonoring the laws of religion, politics, and jurisprudence, the officially neutral economist says that he has no scientific opinion on this matter, but it is clear from his writings that he does have an opinion. People should honor the laws of the market, not any other laws, if they want to get richer. Economists have this on their side: most people want to get richer. We are back to point three of the covenantal laws of economics (Chapter 2): “People prefer more.”
Christians must take a stand against the doctrine of the myth of neutrality. Jesus said: “The one who is not with me is against me, and the one who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). Specifically, they must take a stand against this doctrine as it applies in the field of economic causation. There should be no discussion of economic efficiency apart from ethics. The barn builder was efficient. He had a growing business. He needed more barns to store the grain. From the point of view of economic efficiency, he was a success. But Jesus made it clear that he was not a success. He was a failure.
Christian scholars should begin with this presupposition: the myth of neutrality is false. It is a myth based on worldly self-interest. Christian economists should therefore begin with the presupposition that the myth of value-free economics is a myth. The myths is related to the doctrine of intellectual autonomy. It rests on the assumption that God is not in charge, and God’s Bible-revealed laws are not authoritative in history. It rests on the assumption that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between biblical law and success or failure in history.
It is possible to have success in history without acknowledging the God of the Bible or the authority of God’s law. The barn builder clearly was such a person. But to imagine that the barn builder was correct in his assumption that neither God nor God’s ethical standards applied to his life is to join with the barn builder in his rebellion against God. It is to give encouragement to other barn builders who operate with the same presupposition. The presupposition is wrong.
Because there is such a thing as common grace, it is possible for barn builders and their apologists to justify his actions in the name of meeting consumer demand. This rests on the presupposition of the sovereignty of the consumer. Free-market economist W. H. Hutt came up with this term: “consumer sovereignty.” It was incorrect in at least two ways. First, sovereignty is a legal category, not an economic category. It has to do with ownership. The consumer is no more sovereign than the seller. They are both sovereign legally. They both own property. This sovereignty is derivative. It has to do with the delegated sovereignty of the dominion covenant. Second, consumer sovereignty confused the concept of economic authority with legal sovereignty. Economic authority has to do with dominance in a market. The consumer is dominant in a free market because he owns money, which is the most marketable commodity. He is dominant alongside other consumers, who also have money, and who bid to be served by producers. A great advantage of the free market is that it grants this authority to consumers. But this does not mean that consumers are sovereign. They are not sovereign. Neither are producers. God is sovereign. He lays down the rules of success and failure in ownership. He then enforces the rules that He has laid down.
This is why the Christian economist who is systematic in his defense of an exclusively Christian approach to economics has to maintain that economics is value-laden, not value-free. Success or failure in the field of resource allocation is governed by ethical standards. These standards apply to history because they have implications for eternity. The barn builder was unwilling to acknowledge this. Jesus did not criticize him for building barns. He criticized him for not paying attention to who owned his barns, namely, the Creator God of the Bible. The God of the Bible insists that there is more to economic efficiency than temporal economic efficiency in a competitive market. Men are not wise in selecting an efficient way to go to hell. They should be willing to accept a reduction in their temporal efficiency for the sake of not going to hell.
The Bible provides two primary ethical standards for judging whether or not you have chosen an efficient way to go to hell. The first is the weekly sabbath. The second is the tithe. Someone who conducts his business by personally taking one day a week off is conducting his business according to God’s standards. Someone who gives 10% of his net income to his local church has conformed to the law of the tithe, as I explain in Chapter 44. Someone who does both of these things has preliminary evidence that he is conducting his affairs in an efficient way. His actions do not testify against him.
The economist who comes in the name of Christ has an obligation to point out to readers that there is more to economic efficiency than temporal profitability. An individual had better make up his mind whose kingdom he is working to build. He should make up his mind whether to serve God or mammon. The Christian economist owes it to his reader to tell him about the Christian laws of economics, which are not the same as the laws of economics that are described by humanistic economists in their textbooks, treatises, and scholarly journal articles.
In Chapter 7 of the Student’s Edition, I argued that the humanistic economist presupposes the autonomy of man. This presumed autonomy is cosmic. Man is presumed not to be under the authority of the God of the Bible. More specifically, the humanistic economist argues that economic science is autonomous. It is not under the authority of any ethical system or any other system of causation. Economists have been saying this longer and louder than other social scientists. This began in the late seventeenth century with a group of British economists known today as mercantilists. This is the argument of William Letwin in his book, The Origins of Scientific Economics (1963).
This argument rests on what I have designated as the myth of neutrality. This myth goes back to classical Greek philosophy, but it has been basic to higher education ever since civil governments began using taxpayers’ money to establish and operate educational institutions. The justification for using confiscated money to finance education has been that education is ethically neutral, and therefore no taxpayer’s money is being used to subsidize an enterprise that he is philosophically or ethically opposed to. This justification has been utter nonsense from day one, but it is the universal belief of the world's most widely accepted state-funded religion today: the tax-funded educational system. Any attack on the myth of neutrality is inescapably an attack on tax-funded education. This is recognized clearly by members of the various academic guilds. They hold their positions of authority and above-market salaries because of the widespread acceptance of the myth of neutrality.
Christian theory in every area of academics must begin with the denial of the myth of neutrality. To deny the myth of neutrality is inescapably to affirm the authority of some ethical world-and-life view. The Christian scholar should defend a Bible-based world-and-life view. This is why no Christian should accept the legitimacy of the claim that any academic enterprise is ethically neutral. This is also why economic theory is not value-free. Every academic discipline is value-laden. Within the social sciences, none is more insistent on value neutrality, and therefore there is no greater discrepancy between theory and practice than economic theory. The Christian reconstruction of economic theory must therefore begin with the presupposition that there is no such thing as value-free economic theory.
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