Much of the religious Left has long harbored a barely disguised longing for socialism. Usually not Marxist-Leninism, of course, despite the “I have seen it and it works” fantasies of some visitors during the early years of the Soviet Union. Shortly after the USSR’s collapse I attended an international conclave on economics in Oxford, at which chastened liberals—progressives in current parlance—recognized what they called “the judgment of history.”
Nor are most self-described socialists really socialists. Sen. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire owner of three homes who has never, to my knowledge, proposed nationalizing the entire economy. Rather, he wants to use abundant resources generated by private enterprise to fund his social objectives. Heck, that’s even Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping’s strategy: “socialism with Chinese characteristics” uses largely private economic activity to advance the ruling regime’s interests.
Nevertheless, there always have been softer variants of economic collectivism advanced by Social Democrats and their fellow travelers who imagined an electoral process that turned control of relatively free societies over to well-intentioned, all-knowing social engineers. As IRD has documented—and resisted—over the years, the mainline religious leaderships have often trended in this direction. Exhibiting similar tendencies among evangelicals were the Sojourners community and Ron Sider and Evangelicals for Social Action (now Christians for Social Action), which he founded. These activists generally sought to use the state to address genuine human trials and crises, but, unfortunately, with all too often counterproductive results.
Now nominal conservatives increasingly appear to be turning in a similar direction. President Donald Trump has never held to any consistent ideological position, so it comes as little surprise that he is seeking to return the United States to the past when mercantilism was in vogue. More unsettling may be Vice President JD Vance’s seeming enthusiasm for a state-directed economy.
Of course, the Bible does not enshrine any economic system. Fostering development and increasing growth weren’t the mission of the prophets and apostles. Indeed, the operation of neither the ancient Hebrew kingdom nor the New Testament Christian community offer much useful advice about how to organize and maintain a modern industrial society. People’s good intentions also mattered little. As James asked: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”
As Jesus’s brother understood, practical results matter. By that measure the president’s approach is falling short. For instance, his trade policy, if it deserves to be called that, is essentially a trade war on the entire world. His campaign has raised consumer prices, increased producer costs, crippled domestic manufacturers, and destroyed American jobs. The vice president recently insisted that “the economy is a tool to serve the dignity of the human person.” If so, he shouldn’t be talking up Trumponomics.
Particularly curious were Vance’s potshots at Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who did much in the 1970s and 1980s to revive classical liberal economic thought, along with the sort of policies generally promoted by President Ronald Reagan. I have a particular affection for Friedman, who I met while I was attending Stanford Law School and working part-time at the Hoover Institution. He later nominated me for membership in the Mont Perlin Society, a haven for classical liberals that had been created during the difficult days of the Cold War.
Vance dismissed Friedman’s ideas as most relevant “in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything.” Actually, the vice president gets that precisely wrong. As Lord Acton famously warned, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A free, competitive market system is most vital when the temptation and opportunity of government officials to misuse power is greatest. Then market dynamics may be the most powerful force available to limit the abusive and even tyrannical use of state power.
Vance correctly criticized turning economic development “into a sort of idol”—God has warned us against the love of money, after all—but the vice president should not dismiss the importance of economic growth, especially for those with the least. Even Marx recognized that the economic productivity of capitalism brought most of the world out of immiserating poverty. The expanding opportunities which Friedman helped create did more than any government program to reduce poverty and enhance dignity.
Moreover, governments have consistently gotten more wrong than right with their economies. The 20th century was the triumph of The Plan. World War I produced “war socialism,” which left the continent of Europe in ruins. Out of that conflict came the communists, fascists, and Nazis. Their attempts to create a “New Man” economically as well as socially and ideological varied in details but were uniformly a bust. The more moderate welfare states of the West, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, did much to impede recovery and slow growth. Nevertheless, “industrial policy” later became the rage in Washington, when US policymakers feared that Japan was going to overtake America economically. In 1991 a book appeared even predicting military conflict between the US and this new rising power. However, that nation’s economy soon stalled and everyone lost their belief that Tokyo was the future. While the US today frets over China’s advances, the latter has spent billions to bolster a semiconductor chip industry that continues to lag that of America.
While markets remain imperfect, government control is even less pristine. Private ownership limits the harm caused by any one incompetent or corrupt actor; state policy all too often multiplies the ill consequences of bad decisions. Moreover, the Trump family’s ostentatious profiteering from government policy offers an important caution to turning even more power over to any president. The reason influential economic interests spend billions of dollars to control American governments at all levels is to protect themselves from that authority and, all too often, otherwise use that power for their own benefit.
God doesn’t instruct us what to think about economics or politics. Only the totalitarian ideologies are foreclosed to believers. The notorious Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, who tried the July 1944 plotters against Adolf Hitler, opined: “There is one thing … which we National Socialists and the Christians have in common, and only one: we both demand the whole man.”
However, a market system better protects liberty. And more effectively responds economically. We should promote human flourishing. That is more likely to occur in a world in which the economy is broadly free and public officials, like the vice president, have only very limited authority to bend it to their will.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and a member of the California and D.C. bars. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author and editor of several books, including Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway) and The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington (Transaction).
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