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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 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. [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 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. [...]
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 [...]
If you are going to debate a topic, it’s important that you define terms. So much of what our government does is based on muddied definitions of terms. You almost never hear the words “abortion” and “homosexuality” by advocates of these practices. They choose terms to obscure what really takes during an abortion and what kind of sex homosexuals engage in. To mask what is really going on, they lead [...]
Today’s Marxism has little to do with Karl Marx. Marxism in its purest form is an attack on capitalism, not culture. Once workers united against their capitalist exploiters, so the argument goes, the inevitability of Communism would be realized, and everyone would be equal with no exploitation. During the panel discussion that I participated in at Liberty University during the Falkirk Faith Summit [...]
On today’s podcast, Gary discusses taxes, politics, the elite, and Bernie Sanders. Socialist Bernie wants to tax those evil rich people that can afford super-yachts. The way for politicians to sell a tax increase to a majority of voters is to persuade middle-class voters that only the rich will pay the new tax. Middle-class voters keep buying this obvious lie. They are told that there is too [...]
Were the miracles in the Bible tricks? Was Jesus an extraordinary stage magician? Did He pretend to raise people from the dead, walk on water, and feed thousands? Was Jesus like Jim Jones, using some of His followers to concoct an elaborate deception on the people to build a following of nationalist zealots to overthrow the Romans? Some people believe this, even though Jesus rejected any notion of [...]
Theologians virtually ignore the economic commentary in the Bible. In the few cases where it gets any attention, economic commentary in the Gospels and other New Testament writings tend to lapse into simplistic class warfare nostrums. Liberation theologians import Marxism wholesale (but they try to sell it retail) into theology. Academic historians of first Century Palestine/Judea have been pushin [...]
“You shall not steal” is a fundamental biblical commandment that’s found in both Testaments (Ex. 20:15; 21:16; Lev. 19:11, 13; Matt. 19:18; Rom. 13:9). If property is theft, as one Christian stated on his Facebook page, then every person in the world is a thief because everyone owns something. Property rights are fundamental in the Bible, so much so that they’ve been written into our nation’s laws [...]
Biden and Co. want to steal more money in the form of taxes in the name of “the people.” The people will be fooled into believing that taxing the rich is for the greater good, and they have a right to use the power of government to reap the benefits of the immoral confiscation. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wore a dress with “Tax the Rich” emblazoned with large blood-red letters while she [...]
Jerry Newcombe’s article below explains the negative implications of government interference in the economy. Subsidies disrupt the economy at many levels and often cripple the people they are meant to help. Anyone familiar with government wealth transfer legislation that has been designed to help the poor knows that when something is subsidized you get more of it. There have been multiple generati [...]
As the Cuban crisis unfolds, we are seeing an unprecedented number of protesters. Some of these dissidents could lose their lives for their bravery. A friend of mine from church is from Cuba. Carlos was a political prisoner for 18 months in his home country. His crime? Trying to escape Cuba. Eventually, he did get to escape. I asked him about today’s protests. He said, “62 years later—this i [...]
