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. It is the central economic institution. It is the result of the division of labor, and it has become central to the division of labor. It is the source of price signals. The price system is the greatest source of information in history. But central banks and commercial banks now manipulate this price signal system by their policies of legalized counterfeiting. They have done so aggressively ever since late 1914 in Europe and ever since 1933 and then 1971 in the United States. They have placed the world on a fearful tiger. That tiger is fed by fiat money. It gets ever more ravenous.
The greatest threat economically today is a debt implosion. The level of worldwide debt is greater than ever before. It is unprecedented. It can only be sustained by new rounds of monetary inflation.
The previous periods of monetary inflation, all over the world, have extended the division of labor. The price signals have been manipulated by the banking industry. These signals are as counterfeit as the money. If the banking system ever ceases to inflate, bankruptcies will multiply. Today’s division of labor has been artificially extended by false price signals. We are in an international auction that is dependent on new rounds of fiat money, with the men in the back of the room lending out buckets of digital money.
We call a mild contraction of the division of labor a recession. A major contraction is called a depression. The world has not seen a depression since 1940. People are not mentally, emotionally, or financially prepared for another depression. This is why central banks continue to inflate. But the end of this policy is hyperinflation. That, too, contracts the division of labor.
When the division of labor contracts, most people get poorer.
Christian Economics in One Lesson
Christian economics must begin with the issue of ultimate ownership. This sets it apart from modern economic analysis, which begins with the issue of scarcity. Second, this leads to the issue of theft, which in turn raises the issue of ethics.
Buy NowThe recent passing of Ronald Sider is an opportunity for Gary to tell the sad history of Christian socialism in America. Acts 4-5 is often appealed to as an example of this, but as Gary points out, it was 1) voluntary, and 2) tied to the coming destruction of Jerusalem. Christians must not be manipulated into unproductive mindsets by academic and economic guilt peddlers.