The Worldwide Demand for Gold and Silver

The Worldwide Demand for Gold and Silver

Gary continues his interview with Gordon Van Wechel with Alchemy Precious Metals about the worldwide demand for precious metals and how countries like China and India are influencing prices. The debasement of Isaiah’s day (Isaiah 1:22-26) was kids’ stuff compared to today. That was because of the limits of deception. Pour too much dross into the molten metal, and it will no longer look like silver [...]

The Importance of Owning Gold and Silver

The Importance of Owning Gold and Silver

Gary interviews Gordon Van Wechel with Alchemy Precious Metals. Part Two is here. The call for government intervention into market pricing is ancient. This call was resisted politically in the West until the decade before World War I began. After that war ended in 1918, the West saw the triumph of the isms: Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Fabianism, and the smaller isms that arose in the w [...]

Billionaires, the Economy, and Abortion

Billionaires, the Economy, and Abortion

Two huge topics that defined the Harris/Walz platform were taxing rich people and the right to abortion. Gary points out how both of these are misrepresented to appeal to uninformed voters. Most Americans are under the false impression that our system of constitutional government is a democracy. To be sure, there are certainly democratic elements present. The First Amendment to the Constitution st [...]

You're Paying for All of It

You're Paying for All of It

Gary discusses the economic envy and what is being “promised” by a certain presidential campaign. God owns everything, yet He is not tempted by evil (James 1:13), for He is righteous. The fact that a rich man forsakes God is not due to his riches “seducing” him, but to his own evil heart. You could as easily say that the poor man’s lack of possessions “seduces&r [...]

Solutions and Tradeoffs

Solutions and Tradeoffs

Help us turn $10K into $20K! Gary discusses the economic concept of tradeoffs. Thomas Sowell wrote about this years ago and it’s something that liberals do not understand. Because man is created in God’s image, he is an innately religious being: every aspect of his life will reflect his relationship to God. Man’s culture, therefore, is necessarily religious and covenantal, as Hen [...]

Big Name Retailers Have Decided to Kill Future Business

Big Name Retailers Have Decided to Kill Future Business

IMPORTANT NOTE: A longtime supporter of American Vision has just informed us that all donations will be matched, up to $10,000! Help us reach this goal and turn $10K into $20K. Please consider partnering with us and send your best donation to maximize this matching grant. Economist Robert J. Samuelson gets it right: “By not having children, people are voting against the future—their countries’ and [...]

The Blessing and Cursing of Wealth

The Blessing and Cursing of Wealth

For many Christians fundamentalism is viewed as a reactionary theological movement that does not offer a transformational worldview. For fundamentalism and its sister movements within the charismatic and neo-evangelical world to progress from being a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon and a cultural curiosity to being a cultural transformer with staying power, a comprehensive and long-term commitment mus [...]

The Real Minimum Wage Is Actually Zero

The Real Minimum Wage Is Actually Zero

California just implemented a law to force many businesses to pay employees $20 per hour. First, like so much of government regulation, this is theft. Only governments (and the mafia) can force people to pay more money for work they don’t do. Second, it’s a job killer for young people trying to get work experience. If you listen to Democrats, most Americans are working at jobs for minimum wage pay [...]

The Failure of Christian Socialism

The Failure of Christian Socialism

The passing of Ronald Sider in 2022 presented an opportunity for Gary to tell the sad history of Christian socialism in America. The mark of a Christian movement is its willingness to submit to the demands of Scripture. Not, mind you, merely to “principles” abstracted from their context and loaded with new content; but rather the actual, concrete, explicit statements of God’s wor [...]

Native Americans Want Redskins Name Reinstated

Native Americans Want Redskins Name Reinstated

Personally, I don’t care much about the names of buildings or sports teams. If residents of a city, municipality, or state want to rename a building after Barack Obama, as some in a town in NJ want to do, I’m fine with it so long as it doesn’t cost me any money. The name change won’t do one thing for black people. They won’t get a better education (see test scores Baltimore Maryland public schools [...]

Borrowed Capital Makes the World Go ’Round

Borrowed Capital Makes the World Go ’Round

With some variations, those who hold to a biblical economic model share many fundamental principles with advocates of an unregulated free market, or, as I hope to demonstrate, free marketers share many fundamental economic principles with advocates of a biblical worldview. John W. Robbins writes, in his critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, “That the structure of knowledge that she erecte [...]

The Economy in Action: Does Anyone Know Anything?

The Economy in Action: Does Anyone Know Anything?

“Nobody knows anything.”[1] William Goldman, not to be confused with William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, sums up the problem of attempting to be certain about the success of a film—“Nobody knows anything.”[2] Goldman should know. He was a successful novelist and screenwriter with several Academy Awards and big screen blockbusters to his credit.[3] Goldman was not saying that Hollywood ty [...]

Why You Should Consider a Side Business

Why You Should Consider a Side Business

Gary interviews a friend from his church about advice Dr. Gary North gave him to set himself up in a business while still holding on to his existing job. The highest costs of government intervention into the market process are ethical costs. Most people who believe in private property recognize that the state has become immoral when it uses coercion to intervene into market exchanges. They see tha [...]

The Curse of Unequal Economic and Judicial Balances

The Curse of Unequal Economic and Judicial Balances

The unequal application of the law in terms of economics and politics is real. I listened to a discussion about taxation led by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. It was good as far as it went, but one phrase was missing: By what standard? Wealth redistributionists appeal to inequity, that is, some people make more money than other people, and as a result they should be taxed at a higher rate. [...]

Teaching Simple-Minded People about Economics

Teaching Simple-Minded People about Economics

If you’ve ever been in a discussion with people on Facebook, you know there are a lot of simple-minded people. Worse, there are ignorant and arrogant people who spew some of the worst rhetoric. Some of it comes from Christians. The following is a short course in “How to Teach Simple-Minded People about Economics.” American Vision did not create it. The following is what I (Gary DeMar) know about i [...]

What Makes Something Valuable?

What Makes Something Valuable?

Gary talks about his decision to sell his comic book collection, as well as the concept of collecting and value as a whole. The story of Paradise thus gives us important information about the origin and meaning of precious metals and stones, and therefore of money as well. Right from the beginning, God placed value upon gold and gems, having created them as reflections of His own glory and beauty. [...]

Student Debt and Loaves and Fishes

Student Debt and Loaves and Fishes

Gary discusses the next phase of the Democrats’ disastrous economic policy in an attempt to buy votes in future elections. There are two owners: the lender and the borrower. The lender owns money. This is a capital asset. It could be used for consumption purposes, but the owner is a capitalist. He prefers to put his money to use in order to gain even more money later on. He looks for borrowe [...]

Using Taxes as a Political Weapon

Using Taxes as a Political Weapon

Gary reveals little knows information from the 1970s proving that the IRS has a long history of using its power to push social agendas, including education. Many new private Christian schools were formed during the 1970s because negative changes in the public schools (completely unrelated to desegregation) had alerted parents of the need for specifically Christian education. These private schools [...]

The Failure of Christian Socialism

The Failure of Christian Socialism

The recent passing of Ronald Sider is an opportunity for Gary to tell the sad history of Christian socialism in America. In 1972, a collection of articles by F. A. Hayek was published in Great Britain: A Tiger by the Tail. It was on central bank inflation. The tiger today is much larger. It is much more dangerous. The world is still on the tiger’s back. Money is the most marketable commodity. [...]

Electric Cars and Government Intervention

Electric Cars and Government Intervention

Gary discusses electric cars, economics, and the current administration’s love affair with making political laws influenced by climate change. Almost every business in the United States started and prospered without the help of the government. This does not mean that once some businesses started and prospered that they did not try to use the power and authority of civil government to thwart [...]