Capitalist Idolatry

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is effectively a competing moral system that we have all been inculcated in our entire lives. So just saying the evils of capitalism, I'm sure made some people angry already. That's one of the things that we enjoy doing here is pushing buttons that no one ever pushes. The reason that we're tackling capitalism today is that as I mentioned a few weeks ago when we were talking about the Reformation, there's a lot of confusion of kind. So I mentioned the Reformation episode that there's the history of the Western Christian Church and the fact that for a long time Roman

1:28 Catholicism was the only Christianity in town. And so when someone looks back prior to fifteen hundred, there are those who say, Well, if it's Christian, then it is Roman Catholic and therefore they're interchangeable, without being able to separate the things that were distinctly Roman Catholic from the things that were more generally Christian. Catholicism kind of works the same way. We're going to go through a definition from Mises.org. As I mentioned before, I used to be huge into Austrian economics. I read a lot more about that than I've read or ever read about theology, wish I could have that time back because it was a waste. But I learned some interesting things. It turned out mostly to be false.

2:07 They're the number one resource for finding out what the best form of these ideas are. So we're going to use their definition of capitalism to show what complete nonsense it is. As we go through it, I'm going to be laughing a lot because some of it's just fake. false. It's is literally historically just wrong. It's a lie. And yet it's the sort of thing that as you are listening and we say capitalism is bad, everyone is going to be thinking, oh, you don't like private property? Oh, you don't like prices for things being low? Oh, you want communism? Are you a socialist? Like these are all the knee-jerk responses to any criticism of capitalism. And the problem here that we're facing is that there's been a

2:51 complete confusion of the category of the capitalist moral system with just basic human action, which to Ludwig von Mis' credit, that is his magmopus was titled human action. That is a good description of human economic activity. It's human action. And he adopted the path of praxeology to describe a sort of science of human action and how people would make choices, trying to be neutral about it. It's kind of one of those spurgy things that is another problem when we're talking about a subject Like this, you know, there's we're gonna give their definition of capitalism. You will almost undoubtedly, if you've ever studied this, disagree with some aspect of it. And so say, Oh, well, no, there's this other better definition with

3:38 these different terms, and so if you'd only address that one instead, all your criticisms would be invalid. What we're going to do today is firstly we're going to carve out all the things that capitalism takes credit for, that it has no claim on, because they've existed for thousands of years, before anything that anyone would have considered capitalism existed. And secondarily, we're going to illustrate that what is left of capitalism that is actually some of its novel contributions to human action are all evil. It's all bad things that hurt your neighbor in ways that you wouldn't be hurting your neighbor without the moral license from the religion of capitalism, which is fundamentally what it is.

4:20 So we'll we'll make that case throughout this hour or two. Please hear it out. One other thing that I want to say up front, we're not gonna offer any alternative. We're not gonna say instead of this, do this other thing instead. This is explicitly a critique. And no, we're not being lazy. And no, we're not being shifty. It is entirely permissible to look at a thing as it is and say, okay, here's an existing functioning system. Here's what these people do. Here's how it all works. That's here's what we've all bought into. Is it achieving the goals it was intended to achieve? Is it achieving harmful things? Is it hurting people? That is entirely not only permissible, but it's necessary. It's something should have been going on for hundreds of years, and

5:04 pretty much just kind of went by the wayside. So today, when a man speaks out against capitalism, of course you're going to think he's a commie. Of course he's some radical leftist, because they will criticize it. You know, critique itself is something that Marx sort of formalized. We're not being Marxist here. In fact, capitalism itself as a category is in a way essentially Marxist. It is a it's creating the same sort of dichotomy where assets are and capital are allocated to various classes. And the fundamental definition of capitalism provided by Mises, you know, dot org, not necessarily von Mises himself. The definition is effectively the transfer of capital from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat.

5:48 That was that was the gist of the big win that they are taking credit for. So it that that aspect is just it's fundamentally Marxist on its face. This isn't an ex episode about Marxism. We're just going to talk about when we're doing the things that we all think are permissible, are we sinning? And so there's going to be some Bible study in here, but not a whole lot, because frankly a lot of these things are a matter of wisdom. You don't need a proof text, and the Bible is not an economic treatise. There are various legitimate ways of going about one's economic activity that don't fall afoul of what God commands. There are are, however, numerous things that fall afoul of what God commands that are normal today.

6:31 And not only normal, but again, capitalism as a moral framework necessitates the pursuit of profit, of the increase of competition and efficiency. And all of those things in some cases do have upsides. So we're not condemning those per se, but in every single case, the pursuit of those at the expense of neighbor will always be sin. So that's the the overview of what we're going to tackle today. I'm just going to begin briefly by reading through a few parts of the definition from Mises.org. And we're going to kind of discuss it. This will be a skeleton and jumping off point. Mises.org website begins: What is capitalism? The civilization of mankind can be traced to the establishment of property

7:19 rights. With property rights, individuals could own land, capital and goods, and then trade or sell them to others. This economic activity is referred to as the market. This doesn't mean it necessarily takes place in a physical market, it simply means the goods and services are voluntarily traded. For most of human history, property rights have been limited to those in power. For example, a king or lord had ultimate control over those who lived under their protection. If the king desired beets, farmers were to farm beets. If the lord needed horseshoes, blacksmiths forged horseshoes. Ordinary people had the ability to trade among themselves, but those in power could direct their production if they so desired or punish those

7:58 who resisted. The emergence of p capitalism changed this. So when I said there are facially false arguments predicated in the definition of capitalism, this is what I'm talking about. To say that private property rights emerged as a function of the capitalist system flies in the face of all recorded human history. You can go back thirty, seven hundred fifty years to the code of Hammurabi. And there are numerous sections that deal specifically with private property rights for individuals. Now, when you read through the code of Hammurabi, I was reading it last night. It's interesting. I recommend reading it. We'll link in the show notes or you can just find it anywhere. When you look through it, there's a clear distinction in classes

8:44 where there are different grades of men in civilization. Some are the lowest station, some are the highest station, and they have different rights accorded to them. But even at the very lowest station, anyone was accorded private property rights in the code of Amarabi. This is nearly four thousand years ago. This is not that long after the flood. One of them reads If anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death. Another says, If fire break out in a house and some who come to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into the selfsame fire. That's dealing not only with private property, but dealing with looters.

9:26 Someone tries to loot your house when it's on fire, you throw him in the fire. That is a protection of private property. And Hammurabi didn't make this up. This is basically godly morality. And we know this because three hundred years later, about thirty, four hundred, fifty years ago, roughly, give or take, Moses recorded the same thing from God's own hand. Well God recorded on stone tablets by his hand and handed them to Moses. In the Ten Commandments, the entire second table of the Ten Commandments is about private property. Thou shalt not kill. Your life belongs to you above all other men. Obviously it doesn't belong to you because in a sense, because we're all bought with a price. So in the slavery episode we talked about that.

10:10 And then you have your wife, you have your reputation, your goods, your chattels, everything that belongs to you, your your real property. All of the different things that are listed in the second half of the Ten Commandments are explicitly private property and they're not class based. Everyone, every man is accorded the same private property rights. So right off the bat, if we say capitalism is evil and you say, oh, you don't like private property, you've fallen for the trap that is found everywhere capitalism is defined. It's not just this one page. You can look at any any of the various definitions in a dozen different places. They all predicate the creation of capitalism as that's the beginning of

10:52 private property rights. It's complete falsehood. It's completely false. And so right off the bat, one of the things that we do treasure, and we should I mean, if you have something that's yours, that is your treasure, great or small. Yeah, there are parables about this. If a man has a you know a single calf or a lamb, it's a greater treasure to him than a king who has ten thousand cattle on the hills, 'cause the king has more than he could ever need. The man who has only one thing, that's everything he has. that's a greater treasure to him. And it's his private property. It's his possessive, the genitive. That has spiritual significance because these are blessings from God that are distributed by God to us unequally.

11:33 All men are unequal. All men receive inequal gifts and abilities and talents and material. That's part of God's plan. So the fact that there are class systems and the different men have different stations and different degrees of wealth doesn't reduce the value of the poorest man for that which has been given to him as a gift and for him as a steward. So please don't think that capitalism is synonymous with private property because it pre exists and it which means it exists without capitalism. Capitalism could have never existed. None of the premises that you hold dear as a capitalist are necessary for private property to exist. I think that's a crucial place to begin because a lot of what's downstream is predicated on just this sort of nonsense.

12:23 And just reading through that first part of this definition from Mises, you would almost be tempted to try and give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're speaking about real property. But then they go ahead and list land, capital, and goods. And so they're speaking both about real property and chattel or personal property. And for those who aren't familiar with the terms, that's just the distinction, real property essentially is land. There's a little more in the definition, but it's essentially land and personal property and chattel property are interchangeable. That would be all of the things you own that are not land. And so capitalism really can't claim either of those, but they

13:06 really would have had a stronger argument if they'd tried to just base it on real property. Because the emergence of more widespread ownership of real property and the recognition of those rights historically to some degree coincides with the rise of capitalism, but it's not causally related to it. And of course, even historically you had men who owned property, but you did have in feudal systems and others like that, it was larger ownership of property that was then through various contracts and such relationships delegated to others. I don't think we need to get into how those worked, even though they are related to how capitalism arose and really it arose as a function of usury, which we'll definitely

13:56 get into in this episode, because you cannot really speak of capitalism without speaking of usury. There's one specific thing that I want to refer to on feudalism and serfdom because it is true that capitalism was seen as sort of flipping the tables on those things. When you look at the feudal systems at Barons and Lords of the Manor and the contractual duties of serfs, the duties were tied to land. And so if a man was a serf, if he was either a freeman who made himself a serf to pay off a debt or something, he became tied to the land in such a way that it was transferable to his to his children. So when you're a serf, your kids are going to be serfs tied to the property. So the Baron didn't own you per se, but he owned the

14:49 land to which you were tied contractually. So he could sell the land and you effectively went with it. So if your baron sold the land that you lived on, you know, that you had your small plot on that you worked on for him to someone else, you would then answer to them. That'd be your new boss, same as the old boss. And we think, oh wow, that's you know, that's that's slavery, you know, Road to Serfdom is another famous book that came out of the Austrian school. The interesting thing about that is we still have effectively the same thing today. I was born in Northeast Ohio in Ashabila County in a town that my family built 200 years prior. When I was born, I automatically became a citizen of Ohio.

15:32 I had to obey the laws of Ohio. I had to pay taxes in Ohio. Everything. Not because I agreed to any contract. I didn't sign anything. I was born. And because my father lived there and I was born there, I inherited all the same legal obligations that he did. Now, the primary difference between a surf and an Ohioan well, there's several, but I'm not sure how many of the Ohioans actually win. The primary difference is that a serf wasn't just free to leave. He was bound to the land, where someone in Ohio is free to leave, and many of us have. Other than that, it's kind of the same thing. You can absolutely inherit something that's tied to the land. That's how citizenship works, how nationality, you know, small land works.

16:16 When you are born in a in a place, you become a citizen of that place if it's your own people. And so even though the the idea of serfdom and being tied to land sounds alien to us, we all have the same system today. Now there are variations, but I own my house free and clear. I have no mortgage or anything. I still have a very large property tax bill every year. If I don't pay that, the state takes my property, my house, everything, and sells it to pay off that debt. And then someone else has it and the other person will pay the property tax instead. And the state doesn't care who lives here as long as that tax gets paid. That's another aspect of serfdom. There's a parcel with a duty on it.

17:02 It's got to be paid annually. It's these these systems are thousands of years old. And so, you know, the formal structures around them change, but the principles don't. You know, you don't pay your property tax, you lose your house. If you don't pay your your baron when you're a serf, you're gonna get thrown in prison or you're gonna face worse punishment. Same deal. You know, in even in our t system today, the penalty is always death. If I If I were to refuse to pay my taxes and when the the county said you gotta do this, the town in this case said you gotta pay your taxes like you know, no way I'm not paying anything, eventually they're s then send the cops. And if a confrontation continue continues to escalate, someone's going to be

17:45 hurt or killed because they're not going to take no for an answer. Because one of the properties of a state, something that the libertarians do get correct, is that the state is in essence in one form the monopoly of violence for a particular geographic area. And my town and my state have a monopoly on violence here. I can't go around committing violence to enforce my will, they can and their will is passed by statute. And one of the wills that are expressed by statute are that I have to pay property taxes. So you know, I have the take it or leave it of option of selling this property and maybe going somewhere where there's no property tax, but I'm still a type of serf. It's not called by that today, but again, these ancient things that

18:31 we're told, oh, capitalism set all that aside, nonsense. It's all still here. New boss, same as the old boss. All they did was change the flag. Most of the rest is the same. I think maybe I will go into very briefly the history of some of how these systems arose just because they will give people a general understanding of how we got to some of the systems we see today and some of the interest charges and such. And so under the feudal system Actually before I get to the feudal system, I want to point out just a quick historical fact. We're not going to go over extensively the history of the church's treatment of the charging of interest and usury because we went over that previously in another episode, but just to give an idea of

19:25 how uniform the condemnation of the charging of interest was historically, it was condemned by, for instance, Aristotle, Chrysostom, and Augustine. So pagan and Christian alike condemned it as inherently wicked, the charging of interest. And notably, usury historically means the charging of any interest. It doesn't mean excessive interest, it doesn't mean interest over a certain percentage. It means money making a return, because money was held historically to be infertile, to be unproductive, and so it should not see a return. And that's important for this history, this little tidbit about feudalism, because the church knew this, and all the Christians knew this, the Christian rulers knew this, but they wanted to get around it.

20:17 And so one of the ways they got around it was they set up a legal fiction. This is essentially pill pull, is what we're getting into, but they set up a legal fiction. whereby the owner of property could lease the property through a contract to another individual, and then that individual would pay a fixed sum back to the owner of the property, and you would effectively wind up with a charging of interest on the sale of that property, but in such a way constructed, contractually and legally in such a way that the church said, the Roman church said that no, that's not interest, that's fine. That's not usury. And so that is the beginning of where we see the charging of interest entering into the economic system, and we see this throughout

21:11 Europe under the Roman Catholic Church. This is one of the things that was condemned by the conservative wing of the Reformation. Luther condemned this. Luther has a very good treatise on usury and just on the economy, trade generally. If I can find a free English version of that, that is a decent translation, I will put that in the show notes. Again, unfortunately, the American edition is copyright encumbered. But that basically is the outline of where we have some of the modern problems we see today entering into the system in the 1500s. And this really is proto-capitalism, is what we see. We see the rise of capitalism, the beginnings of capitalism in this era This era. And notably, those who critique capitalism in this era, the 1500s, 1600s,

22:10 perhaps a little after that, they're not using the word capitalism. They describe the system, but what they call it is usury. And so for a while in Christian thought, capitalism and usury, in certain writers at least, are essentially interchangeable. Because the entire system is built on usury. And we see that today, obviously. Look at our system now. Everything is built on debt, on debt slavery, quite frankly. It is interest slavery. It is usury, which is impermissible for the Christian. We went over that in the previous episode. We went over the verses, the parts of scripture that very clearly condemn the charging of interest, and yet that is what this system is built on. And so if a system is built on something that is per

23:02 se sin, Christians cannot support that system, and that is the fundamental problem that we see with capitalism. But as a related point, I would want to highlight neither Woe nor I has a real economic ideology. I believe that is fair to say at this point, since you've rejected the Mises stuff. And the reason for that is very simple. Economics is a tool. The market is a tool. As I've said before and elsewhere, I don't have an ideology of hammers. Because a hammer is a tool. I don't need an ideology with regard to tools. Yes, you use good tools, because that typically winds up with a better outcome, but you don't have an ideology attached to the tool. You don't have You don't look at the tool and say you

24:00 must use this tool. You use the tool that is appropriate for the task at hand. And the problem we see when it comes to economics is that certain economic ideas and certain economic systems are raised to the level not of a tool, but of an idol, and so it becomes something where you have to say capitalism is right and you have to pursue this because it is capitalist. And that just doesn't make any sense. Because you have to look at the point of the economy. What is the goal of an economy? And obviously it has a number of goals, but not least of them is serving your neighbor and serving all of your neighbors as best you can. Capitalism doesn't do that. And so you have to look at the economic system and look

24:47 at what the goals are and figure out what is permissible for Christians to do and how best to pursue that. And capitalism does not do that because it becomes this idol that you have to you have to worship essentially, because you have to say capitalism is good because it is opposed to X, Y, and Z, and so I have to do A, B, and C because capitalism tells me I have to do that. And that just doesn't make any sense. Because again, economics, the market, all of these related things are tools and they should be used and treated as tools. There's a great clip from a Tucker Carlson interview with someone else that I wasn't able to find the exact quote, but the gist of it was someone was asking him about economics and he said

25:35 in effect, I don't see capitalism as some sort of religious thing. If your economic system means that my child cannot grow up and have a family, I will burn your system to the ground. I believe he used those exact words I was having trouble finding it. Maybe I'll if I find the clip we'll put it in the show notes, but that's pretty much what Corey just said. You know, and Tucker and Corey and I don't agree on many things, but we agree on others. And Tucker came to that conclusion as a moral conclusion. Uh he's mentioned that he's been reading the Bible a lot more recently as an Episcopalian for the first time in his life. He was he was astonished after he got fired by Fox, he started reading the Bible and realized there was some great stuff in

26:16 there and it blew him away. And so he came to that moral conclusion, you know, he that was his instinct to begin with, but the principle is absolutely right. I don't care about your so called system. If you're going to harm my family, then that makes you an enemy. And if you want to say that the enemy's name is capitalism, game on. That's a moral position. And it's an entirely illicit one. And it's one that frankly we should all be able to at least evaluate. Even if you disagree with us, you should be able to separate the principles of the thing from its outcomes to to say, well, as Corey just said, if if it's doing harm, it cannot be permitted. And I don't care what excuses you have for, you know, that's

27:02 I mentioned earlier that Mises, you know, adopted praxeology and fleshed it out. And the the idea of formalizing human action to explain why people make economic calculations. And that is part of this. That it is valuable that we all make economic calculations all the time. A price is a signal. It's a signal to the customer, it's a signal to the market. It's a signal to competitors. And these sorts of signals exist in everything. When you spend your time on something, that is a signal. You know, we said before, when we first started Stone Choir, we were shooting for about an hour per episode. I think the first one we did was like seventy-five minutes, and then the second one was ninety minutes, and we were kind of

27:44 shy about that. And then almost immediately we did one that was two hours long. And we called it a double episode. We're like, oh, this is way too long. No one's ever gonna spend two hours listening to a podcast. And it turned out that wasn't true because we have a lot of you know, it's it's dense content, there's good content here, which a lot of people agree with. We're thankful for that's our goal. We don't want a lot of fluff and repetitiveness. So So it turned out the people were willing to allocate two hours, maybe more in some cases, to one podcast from just two random guys. That is you voting with your time, which in some ways is even more valuable than your money. You know, money is fungible, money is replaceable.

28:22 You will never get the two hours that you spend listening to us back to do anything else. So when you spend it, you are voting with your ears. You're voting with with the sands of time that are that are fading away. they come and go and you can get them back. And so to spend them is it is an expression of a personal preference to say this is valuable to me. I would rather spend two hours listening to these guys talk about this than you know whatever else. You know, nice thing about a podcast, you know one of the reasons we don't want to do video or anything more demanding is that you can put on a podcast and you can wash dishes or mow the yard or play video games or you know there are a thousand things you can do and still listen and in

29:04 some ways you can listen even better than if you were looking at our faces. You know, I'm not bad looking, I wouldn't mind being on video, but there's no point. I I find it stupid to look at people to listen to them personally. It's just I think it's dumb. I want to listen to the words that you're saying that maybe your face gets in the way. Maybe you make weird expressions or you have goofy eyebrows or something, and it's a distraction. So when you spend two hours just listening, you're saying this is of good use of my time. When you spend your dollars, your hard-earned dollars, on anything, you're voting with them and saying, of all the things that I could purchase with the time that I spent to earn this money, I choose

29:42 to spend it on this. And And essential in the capitalist system is the claim that that is unique to capitalism. when you look at the history of money, it goes back to the beginning. Every civilization we've ever found not only has coinage, yeah, the Bible is filled with different kinds of coins, yeah, denari, shekels, all these different weights of gold and silver were specific coins that were used to pay certain debts. So, you know, when a man was paid his day's wages, he couldn't go home and eat the denarius. He had to trade it for food. that that's an economic system. That is a monetary system. it's free trade. You know, even if there was a king or a pharaoh or something else, he still decided what he was gonna eat that day

30:33 and he spent his day's wages on it. So again, these these claims that capitalism has sold to everybody. They think, oh man, you know, before the advent of basically the Enlightenment, everybody was a serf. And that's kind of where the handoff fundamentally gets anchored. You know, it's not clean. As Corey's saying, like there's there's a historical evolution that moved from the feudal system, which was the most recent version of something before full-blown capitalism, until we got to what we effectively have today. But all these things like prices and commerce and markets and individual trade for objects of value, it's been around forever. And another thing I want to read Max some some more from

31:19 the Mises definition of capitalism, they claim tacitly here, but it's it's clearly implicit, specialization of labor is intrinsic to capitalism. So the what is capitalism goes on. Capitalism is mass production of goods to satisfy the needs of the greatest number of people. Capitalism was revolutionary by recognizing property rights for all, regardless of background and social standing. Under capitalism even the most vulnerable in society had an absolute claim to their own labor and property. This did not guarantee equality of property, but capitalism eliminated any right by anyone else to infringe upon it So there are two things going on there. One, when they talk about mass production, that is implicitly talking about

32:02 specialization of labor, meaning that no man, you know, on the frontier in in the new world, a man had to be able to build his house, you know, chop down trees, butcher deer, kill deer, plant crops, you know, his wife had to be able to clean all that stuff to be able to prepare it for him. She had to be able to make clothes like out on the frontier, you had whatever little m amount you could carry with you, and you had to make the rest when you got there. That's the opposite of specialization of labor. That is a subsistence level of living where you basically have to be a full-fledged generalist and everything to the point that you can do anything that needs done because there's no one else around to

32:43 help you. It's also in in economics, it's popularly used in the in the desert island example of economic theory, where you be on desert island where there are just two people there, you know, there's no money, there's no anything, and they have to you know they need food, they need shelter. How to they decide how to do things and so when specialization of labor comes along into you know a population group what that means is that one guy can focus on being a farmer he can get he can get better at farming than he is at felling trees or building cabins because someone else can build his cabin for him or at least do m you know, help him out so this the hard stuff that someone else is more efficient at, he doesn't have to worry about because he's more efficient

33:30 at growing food. And therefore, his specialization creates a surplus of food where he's producing more food than he needs for himself. He can sell some of it. And then he can exchange for other goods. And that specialization of labor builds up and builds up and builds up until you get to today, where most people can't they can do a couple things, you know, maybe kinda okay. And everything else, they're just at a loss. Like you have to buy it from Amazon and go to the store. If not for that, and you can't call somebody to help when something breaks, you have no idea what to do. That's where most people are today. And so work at the terminal end of something that capitalism takes credit for and to some extent, you know, I don't know whether

34:11 or not to completely hang the state of man a man's incompetence today, including my own. Like there are tons of things I should know how to do that I can't. I don't know how much of I can hang on capitalism, but uh you can absolutely state certainly that specialization of labor is as old as mankind itself. We see in the beginning of Genesis when it describes Cain's children, as it goes down the list before we get up to the men who lived at the same time as Methuselah and Lamak and Noah, it says Adab bore Jabal, he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal Cain. He was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.

34:58 And even Cain and Abel themselves were a farmer and a shepherd. So this specialization of labor is literally as old as mankind itself. And interestingly also in that passage on Cain's genealogy prior to the flood, you have instruments of bronze and iron. Something emerged in the nineteenth century, the tripartite system of distinguishing epochs of man as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. And this is this is used by anthropologists as they're digging stuff up to help determine kind of how old is something. Because even if you don't know anything about what you're looking at apart from where it is in the world, you can tell by what materials it's made from, the degree of technological advancement that the

35:47 people have. So I find it very interesting that bronze and iron are both mentioned because one of the things that's completely absent from a lot of the modern economic discussion is it goes back to the really ancient historical stuff, is it completely ignores the Bible. Almost all the stuff is really predicated on evolutionary thought related to man, where you know we were punter-gatherers and then started settling and consolidating in cities. And that's the theory. It's false. Cain left and went to another city. He built a city. His children built a city. There were cities from the very beginning. Were they big? No. There weren't that many people. They got bigger and bigger. So you have cities, you have bronze, you have iron, all before

36:30 the flood. And that flies in the face of many of the modern timelines for how we're told that human civilization advanced. When you look at the Bible, if you just believe it is a historical record, it's the oldest, most reliable historical record we have of anything, because it was written by an infallible author. So when God says bronze and iron, and it's what those words actually mean, you know the the theories that relate to stone and bronze and iron age being these distinct things that happened over much longer periods of time cannot be true if if already prior to the flood those things were occurring. So there's a lot that's missing just from the historical economic discussion of these things because people don't believe the Bible.

37:15 Again, it's not that the Bible's an economic treatise, but it's a historical record. If this was happening over forty, five hundred years ago, we can count on it. And so that specialization of labor is intrinsic to the definition of capitalism. And again, the second part of that definition when talking about revolutionary property rights. Again, it was preserved in the Code of Hammurabi. It was preserved in the the Ten Commandments. And other nations had similar laws. You know, the the fact that these codifications exist today because they're p Physical records that were preserved doesn't make them unique. It just makes them beneficial to show how old these ideas are. On the note of the history of coinage, I will put a

37:59 link in the show notes to the Berlin State Museum, which has one of the most impressive coin collections in the world, and conveniently they have digitized over thirty five thousand coins and those can be freely browsed on their website. So trying to claim that capitalism is any way connected with the rise in the use of money is absolutely ludicrous given the ages of some of these coins. I want to expand a little bit just very briefly on something I said previously, because I know that we do have Roman Catholic listeners, and I'm not being uncharitable to Rome when I mention that Rome permitted this to happen and in some ways oversaw it because Rome had a very big interest in this rise in the charging

38:48 of interest for a specific reason. Rome was the biggest landowner of the time, and so they wanted to be able to profit from this system. of the individuals who actually wrote on this subject at the time was none other than Johann Eck, yes, the very same one, who was sent by Rome to oppose Luther. In fifteen fourteen he wrote a treatise arguing that charging interest was morally permissible so long as it did not exceed five percent. Luther in part responded to that treatise, but in general was just writing on the matter more generally because it was happening at the time. He responded with the traditional opposition to the charging of interest. Yes, in some places you will find in Luther, where he attempts

39:41 to argue for for capping interest at five percent, but the reason that he did that, you have to know the historical context. Certain loans at the time, and the loans to which he was responding, charged as much as fifty percent interest. And so he was attempting to mitigate the evil when he was saying that. If you read all of his writings generally, no, he held the traditional position that interest was inherently wicked and should be banned. That's what he wanted to see in society. On the point of the specialization of labor, I would actually say that it is fair to say that capitalism, as it has evolved, Has resulted in men being less competent generally. Because historically, most men would have been producing, yes, they would have

40:33 been specialized to a certain degree, but they would have been producing some concrete, some tangible good. And if you put your mind to it and you put in the effort, you will get better at that over time. If you produce shoes for 40 years, you're going to be a pretty good cobbler at the end of forty years. Today we don't have that because capitalism, and this is why you end up with the lack of competence. Capitalism pushes for profit and so-called efficiency. And if you push for those, what you end up with is cost cutting in as many places as possible, which typically means outsourcing and cheaper materials, and so you wind up with a product that is inferior to what would have been produced in an earlier economic

41:23 system. The only benefit is that it's cheaper. But that's not actually a benefit. And the reason that it is not a benefit is because cheap products are not cheap. Cheap products are in fact extremely expensive, and that's not just in terms of resources consumed, including physical resources and time. It's expensive in terms of pollution and the environment, but additionally, and this is a a core point of importance, it's not even cheaper in and of itself, because a cheaper good wears out faster. And so for instance, a great example of this If you buy a cheap pair of shoes, and you are someone who wears out your shoes, so someone who works at a physical job, you are going to need to buy new shoes practically every year.

42:19 Perhaps even more often with how low the quality is these days. Whereas if you buy a good pair of shoes and they all used to be good, that's the problem here, capitalism has created that category of cheap, worthless shoes. If you bought a good pair of shoes, you could keep them for the rest of your life. Yes, you would have to actually treat them and repair them and occasionally resole them. But overall, they would actually cost you less money. So capitalism doesn't even achieve the goals that it says it does. It actually does the exact opposite. And so you wind up drawing out the specialized artisans, you wind up driving out the competent men, because most people don't think through the consequences of buying the cheap item.

43:10 And so they buy the cheap item, which means the artisan who produces the more expensive item that actually isn't more expensive if you run the total cost of ownership calculation, he's driven out of the market. And so what you wind up with is the sort of system we have today, where it is an ocean of cheap, virtually worthless products, and then at the far other end, extremely expensive goods that are still made in a traditional way. And so these things that cost these exorbitant sums of money today, well that's just the quality that your great great grandfather would have been able to buy at the shop down the street. And he didn't have to spend that much money on it. That's the consequence, in concrete terms, for many goods of the capitalist

44:00 system. You wind up with lower quality, and over the lifetime of your purchasing of that category of goods, it costs you more. Well, why is that a system? Why is that a thing? It doesn't make any sense, except it does. And the reason it makes sense is because capitalism benefits those who have the capital. Now I know some are going to say, well, that sounds like a Marxist critique. Marx was not one hundred percent wrong. This is a vitally important point that I am going to make here. Some of the things that Marx said were correct. That's not the important point. The important point is, some of the things Satan says are correct. When Satan tempted Christ, at least attempted to tempt Christ, he quoted

44:50 Scripture. In so far as he was quoting Scripture, he was speaking the truth. Was he using it in a manipulative fashion? Of course. Was he misrepresenting it? Of course. But that doesn't change the fact that the core matter, the words themselves, were true. It is possible for evil men to speak the truth. In fact, evil men often do speak some truth. If you are a liar, if you are attempting to manipulate people, and you always lie, you always tell lies, you never tell the truth, you will not get anywhere because no one will ever believe you. The best example of this, one with which we are all unfortunately familiar these days, is the politician. We all know politicians are liars. Everyone knows that.

45:45 No one doubts that. But they don't always lie. Because if they always lied, if they only lied, no one would ever support any of them in any way. No, they have to tell the truth, they have to say certain things to get into that position. The same thing is true of these systems, the same thing is true of capitalism. Certain things that it says are correct are true. But look at the consequences, look at the outcome, look at what eventuates from the system. And so when you look at capitalism, because we today have the benefit of being able to look at it from a distance of centuries. This began hundreds of years ago and has been developing since. We can conclusively say it has not delivered on its promises.

46:37 It claimed certain things, it said we'll get efficiency, well we got efficiency. But at what cost? We supposedly got innovation, but you can't prove the counterfactual and say that well capitalism caused the innovation, no, because we see innovation in other economic systems as well. You don't see zero innovation in even communist China. You see significantly less than in the West, but that's for ancillary reasons. And so the claims of this economic system have not come true in time, and we can take that into account because we have the advantage of hindsight. Not that you can't look at men like Luther and others in the history of the church who very clearly saw where this was going. they saw exactly what was going to happen.

47:25 If you read their treatises, their critiques of the system as it was arising in their day, they look prophetic. I'll just read here a very short quote from Luther. Daily the poor are defrauded, new burdens and high prices are abandoned. Everyone misuses the market in his own willful, conceited, arrogant way, as if it were his right and privilege to sell his goods as dearly as he pleases, without a word of criticism. I'll actually read one more quick quote just from the large catechism, so this is in the confessional documents of Lutherans. No more shall all the rest prosper who change the open free market into a carrion pit of extortion and a den of robbery, where the poor are daily overcharged, new burdens and high prices are

48:13 imposed, and every one uses the market according to his caprice, and is even defiant and brags as though it were his fair privilege and right to sell his goods, for as high a price as he please, and no one had a right to say a word against it. Now certainly that echoes his earlier comment, these are from two different writings from Luther, but that's in the large catechism. That's hundreds of years ago. That's five hundred years ago. It's the same thing we see happening today. Because the system that was emerging in his day has reached a sort of maturity in ours. Now, of course, it will proceed from its current mature state into let's say its final form as it were. But you can't support this sort of system as a Christian when

48:59 you look at the consequences of the system for your neighbor, it goes against that fundamental rule, the fundamental command of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself, because that's not what capitalism says to do. Capitalism says to charge your neighbor the highest price you can extract from him. And if you don't do that, you're a bad capitalist. That is the opposite, practically, of what Christianity says. The scriptures tell you to lend without expecting a return, not even not to expect interest, not to expect the principle back. And you certainly aren't supposed to charge your neighbor the highest price you can, you are supposed to sell your goods for a fair price. And a fair price essentially is the effort and the cost

49:48 that went into the good. Not what the market will bear, not what your neighbor is able to pay, what is fair. That is the Christian standard, and it's simply not something that capitalism accepts. In fact, it is something that capitalism Explicitly rejects. It's worth paying attention to how Scripture speaks of these economic crimes in Ezekiel eighteen and the application of the Levitical law from twenty-five and elsewhere Ezekiel writes If he fathers a son who is violent, a shedder of blood, who does any of these things, though he himself did none of these things, who even eats upon the mountains, defiles his neighbor's wife, opposes the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore the pledge, lifts up his eyes to the

50:39 idols, commits abomination, lends it interest and takes profit. Shall he then live? He shall not live. He sh he has done all these abominations, he shall surely die, his blood shall be upon himself. So in the same breath that God describes fornicating with your neighbor's wife, and committing robbery, and idolatry, and other abominations. Included among those are lending an interest and taking profit. And the sentence is death. That was God's law. Now, it is not necessary to agree that the Levitical law punishments must be enforced today. It is, however, necessary to agree that the Levitical law when it's calling these things abominations, is specifically speaking about moral matters. To lend an interest and take profit is a moral matter, and

51:35 the sentence God provided to his people was death. Just finishing up with the Mises definition of capitalism because it goes with what Corey was saying. Capitalism empowered consumers rather than those empowered to influence what was produced in the economy. This happens via the profit mechanism. If enough people demand a good and it can be sold for more than it costs to produce, then that means the production of that good is profitable. Some of the richest people in the world today have made their money not from appealing to the rich but by appealing to the masses. Walmart's business model, for example, is geared towards selling goods cheaply to as many people as possible. Now Now, isn't that an interesting contrast to what Corey was just

52:18 reading from the Large Catechism and elsewhere in Luther? When the pinnacle of capitalist accomplishment is Walmart, which they specifically highlight, they took from the poor. They took the poorest people in the world and extracted so much money that they there's an entire family of billionaires now. Not just a billionaire, but half a dozen billionaires. There is so much surplus to go around just from their portion of the profits on top of what the corporation took from all the poorest people in our country. And how did Walmart do it? By destroying communities, by destroying producers, by destroying local shops. Before we recorded, I looked up because I just had no idea. I wondered what would a pair of jeans cost on Walmart.

53:07 You can buy a pair of jeans on Walmart.com for thirteen bucks. The libertarian capitalist argument for that is well, that's wonderful. If someone only has thirteen dollars, he can buy a pair of jeans. By itself, that's true. However, as Corey just said, you're buying a $13 piece of garbage. It's going to have a junk zipper, it's going to have junk buttons, the seams are going to be poorly done, it's going to be thin, flimsy material. It's going to wear out. If you buy a $13 pair of jeans, you're probably going to be buying several a year. Certainly if you're using jeans the way jeans are intended to be used, it's not going to last long. If you had had the money to buy a hundred and twenty dollar pair of jeans that was made the way jeans used to

53:52 be made in this country, instead of in a sweatshop owned by the Chinese government six thousand miles away, in that case, your genes would last for many years and they would be easily repairable and be worth repairing, and you would not be worse off in the end. Spending more money and putting it in your neighbor's pocket would have made you richer in the long term. You as a consumer. There's nothing in the world more expensive than being poor. If you have enough money that you can shop at one of the regular grocery stores, you have a nice selection of food. Really poor people tend to do a lot of their shopping today at dollar stores. It's one of the fastest growing segments in the entire consumer economy

54:39 in the United States, the dollar store, where everything is junk, everything is substandard, everything is small, but it's cheap. It's super, super cheap. So the poorest people in the country are buying garbage with money they don't have and it's getting worn out. It's not it's not worth what they're paying. It's far worse for them if they you know, you want furniture, what do you do? A really poor person, certainly if they're economically ignorant, is probably gonna rent. They're gonna rent a couch. When you rent from one of those rent a center places where usually you pay weekly, usually within like the first six to eight weeks you paid the entire cost of the thing and you're still going to be making payments for a year or two.

55:20 That is the most exploitative, revolting, wicked thing imaginable. And it's everywhere in this country. You cannot drive down a single street in one of the poorer parts of any town in this country and not find a place where this sort of abuse of the poor is taking place all the time. And no one has any moral outrage at it. What do we do? We say, oh well, at least poor people can afford a couch. Sure, it's gonna cost them $1,500 for a $200 couch because they're poor and they're dumb and they don't realize what they're paying, but they can only afford $13 a week, so they get a couch. That's winning with capitalism. That is evil by any Christian moral standard. Yeah, that $13 pair of jeans put my uncle in North Carolina

56:08 out of business. When I was born, you know, half my family's from the south, pretty much all in North Carolina. He worked for Wrangler Jeans. He was, I believe, a plant manager at Wrangler, back when they still had plants in North Carolina. Wranglers in the last forty years were still made in this country. His job, most of his job, you know, he started there, I think on the line, he pretty quickly made it up the l ranks because he was he was smart and hardworking. He was a tough guy. He ended up overseeing the transfer of Wranglers operations overseas. So he had to go, I believe, down to Mexico, which is where most of the stuff is made today. Because capitalism says it's not enough to make a good product, you

56:49 must make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Which is really interesting when you look at inflation. Inflation is at least several percent every year. Some years it's a lot more. Right now it's probably running about twelve percent across the board, maybe more than that. Which means that if you had a dollar a year ago, you have eighty eight cents left today. In that same one dollar, that's much purchasing power you have left. So So the value of your money is getting lower and lower. But the cost of goods is also going down. And on one hand, it's nice that, you know, you can it's still afford something when you have less purchasing power. On the other hand, what happened, you know, in in my uncle's

57:34 case, and it happened to all of manufacturing in the United States, it was too expensive to make jeans in North Carolina, where they had a lot of jobs. There were a lot of good-paying jobs. I don't know if it was a union shop, probably not in the South. I I don't know. Maybe it was. But either way, union or not, they were They were paying they were making enough money in that community that a lot of people, you know, it's like the the joke if you've seen today The Simpsons, when that show first started, you know, Homer was a poor relatively single family in or single income household with two kids, three kids 'cause they they had the infant. It was a nice suburban two story home, more than pretty much

58:16 anybody can afford today. You know, the house in the Simpsons probably goes for $500,000 today. And yeah, that was a lower middle income household when the Simpsons started in late 80s, early 90s. That's how much things have changed. And that's what happened with genes and everything else in the economy. Making it in this country too expensive. So what comes next? You ship it to Mexico. But then what happens? Labor in Mexico got too expensive. So most companies moved it to China. And then China got too expensive, so they moved it to Vietnam. And Vietnam labor got too expensive, so they moved it to India and Bangladesh and all these other places that a lot of people have never even heard of where you have You have people living

58:58 on subsistence wages to make garbage that gets shipped at tremendous expense with tremendous pollution, 10,000 miles away around the world, so that someone can buy a $13 pair of jeans at Walmart that's probably marked up 30% still. The problem with the calc capitalist economic calculation that look, a guy can buy a $13 pair of jeans is that if instead of the thirteen dollar pair of jeans, if the only genes on the market were a fifty dollar pair of jeans. The capitalist system, the capitalist morality says that would make the world worse because his purchasing power has been reduced threefold. Instead of being able to afford three pairs of jeans for fifty bucks and four pairs, you can only afford one.

59:41 The thing that's missing from that sort of single variable calculus is that if the pair of jeans that was made in this country that was made well the way things always used to be, you know, pair of jeans that would last him ten, fifteen, twenty years. If he could spend fifty dollars on that, yes, he would have less purchasing power in the moment, but he as a consumer would have genes that were going to last him for a decade or more. And that fifty dollars is going into the pockets of his neighbors. It's going to go into the pockets of somewhere someone in this country. That's a key part of what's missing from this discussion in all the capitalist calculation is no consideration whatsoever for neighbor.

1:00:26 The only consideration is what is the lowest dollar amount I can spend on a thing. If that is your highest good, then your neighbor be damned. You don't care what happens to your neighbor because you're gonna have more money in your pocket. That's a moral calculus. That is that is a moral decision. You're voting with your dollars to say, I don't care about my neighbor. I don't care that if I spent $50 on these jeans, my neighbor would still have a job and he would have pride because he'd be able to feed his own family and not buy stuff at a dollar store that he knows isn't doing as much as he could if he could afford more. But the factory shut down, he can't find a good job anymore because all the jobs for guys who are just completely average, maybe

1:01:10 a little below average, maybe a little above average, in poor neighborhoods and poor parts of the country, those jobs were all destroyed by capitalism. They were shipped overseas for one reason and one reason only. It was cheaper. I think that the prophet worship, the profit idolatry in capitalism is central to this entire discussion. You know, you know, as I said last week, now I'm Doc, so I can talk more about what I did. I worked at Apple. I left my 15th year at Apple. I worked in hardware and I worked in software. I always worked on the Mac. And since I was five years old, I've always used Apple products. I like them a lot. I know them inside and out. I'm actually a domain expert on that stuff, which is why I

1:01:53 never talked about it. Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the universe in the history of everything. Their profit for 2022 was or their revenue, their gross revenue was four hundred billion dollars. Their gross margins for last quarter were about 45%. So what that means is that for the cost of goods, for every hundred, for every thousand dollars that you give Apple as a consumer, they will give you a product that costs them $550 to make in terms of manufacturing cost. Now, gross margin doesn't account for RD or advertising or salaries or any of that other stuff. So their net margin after all their business expenses are counted for is about 24, 25%. We'll say 25%, just keep the numbers rounded nicely.

1:02:47 So what that means is that for every thousand dollars that you give Apple for some widget, their total all-in cost is $750. So you're giving them $750 for a product and you were handing them an additional $250 $50 just because they're Apple and that's the only way to get it. That's the profit. That's what profit means. It's above all costs. Now it's interesting when you actually think about the net profit. That's every supplier got paid, every bill got paid, every salary got paid, and there's some very high salaries. I can tell you that personally. Guys who work there make a lot of money. All of that, 100% of all that compensation all that reward for everyone involved in the production of Apple's products is encompassed in the

1:03:36 $750 of the thousand that it costs for you to buy a product. And the extra $250 is pure profit. Now, the thing to focus on when we're talking about profit is that as Corey was saying earlier, when when Luther was dealing with this stuff, people tried to pin him down and get him to put particular numbers on things. Say, well, what is the threshold beyond which something is sinful? That's not possible when we're dealing with these are matters of wisdom. So where that comes into profit is scaling back from Apple for a second, let's take a very small example. Let's say that you decide that you want to start making dog biscuits in your kitchen and you want to sell them at a local convenience store, you're

1:04:24 going to charge two dollars per dog biscuit. That you know covers what you consider your labor to be worth, it covers all your material costs. All in you can sell them for two bucks. And once you get those on store shelves, they start flying. You can't the store owners can't keep them in stock. You do a week's worth of production, you take it to the store, they list them for two dollars, and they're gone within three days. The capitalist morality says this is a price signal to me as a producer that I should raise my price. Because on one hand, I could produce more, I could be making more of these things, but until such time as I do, and to m to meet demand, I can profit off of the greater demand than I have supply by jacking up the price.

1:05:10 And you know, there's the marginal utility calculation for, you know, maybe a dog biscuit is worth two bucks to some people, but at two fifty or three, maybe half your customer's like, No, I'm not gonna pay that anymore. But as long as there are enough customers to pay two dollars and fifty cents or three dollars dollars to continue to sell out, what do you care? You're getting that much more money from the same number of people it could possibly buy, even though it's pricing some of the people out of the market. So it effectively reorients for the consumer, who's going to get it, not who shows up first, but who is still willing to pay the higher price. Capitalism says that's perfectly fine.

1:05:47 When you look at the historic moral arguments in these matters, it goes with what Corey referred to earlier. If it if you can comfortably make the thing for two dollars, as a Christian, it is not permissible to sell it for three. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because you are able to get away with it in the market does not make it morally permissible. Now, the reason that there's wiggle room here is that, you know, you just start it in your kitchen, you were making, it was just fun, you know, maybe you had some extras left over from baking or whatever, and you didn't know how they were gonna do. When they started going like gangbusters for two bucks, you realize that you're you're just kind of getting by at two dollars, but you

1:06:31 have ideas for scaling up and you know, maybe a bigger mixer, whatever, bigger oven. Maybe eventually you could scale the point that you'd actually hire someone. In order to do that, you're going to need additional capital. The way to get that is either take a loan based on your revenue. That's the capitalist way to do it. Another possibility is to increase your price sum and save that money and use it towards increasing your production output. So that you know, maybe you charge 225 or 250, the additional 50 cents that you bank you will spend on more production so that you can meet the additional man demand. So as you scale up your what you're producing, you can get it to the point that you can meet all the demand for

1:07:17 all seven days with seven days worth of production. They maybe continue to scale up from there. You get into more stores. So while it is okay for you to charge $2 for something, if you want to charge $225 or $250 because you want to make it available to more people, I think that's a case can be made that it's okay to charge $250, maybe for a while. Because what's going to happen, some people will be priced out of the market at $2 for $50 versus $2. But when you scale your production, a lot more people will be able to buy your product, which they want. And once you get scaled up, you won't need that extra income. You could cut your price again. You could take it back down to two. In fact, you might be able to cut it to maybe 180

1:07:59 once. Because with the increased economies of scale from your more advanced production process, it's not actually costing you as much per batch. You know, if you're baking something, energy input is a lot of your cost. If you have a bigger oven, you can fit a lot more cookies in there. Suddenly your energy cost per cookie, your biscuit comes way down. So all these factors are are an important part of a cost calculation as a producer, and there's no There's no point, no one is gonna morally say you have to sell stuff at a loss. The question is, when you're taking profit, why are you doing it? If you're charging more than it's costing you, and obviously part of your part of your net coming into you is going to be what do I pay myself?

1:08:48 Maybe there's there's wiggle room where maybe you pay yourself a little bit more, like you probably weren't paying nearly what the time was worth at the beginning, if you have room to pay yourself a little bit more, that's fine. So there's no hard and fast number. You're like your bacon dog biscuits. It's what's the value of that labor? There's a reasonable realm of discussion beyond which it's like if if you're raking in well into six figures as the as the cookie ba magnate in your kitchen, you're probably charging more than you should be. And so back to the Apple example, one of the problems with Apple is that they make really, really, really good products and they significantly overcharge for the upgrades, which is where a lot of

1:09:29 that margin comes from. So if you were to get one of the new M3 MacBook Pros or iMacs, they're really good machines. I I don't own stock anymore, this isn't conflicted, but they're still good machines. That's what I tell people to buy. If you were to buy it, do not ever buy the base config. Because to this day, Tim Cook, the Bean Counter, insists on making the minimum config eight gigabytes of RAM, which is obscene. It's way too low. It makes it a worse machine than it would be otherwise. So that $250 of pure profit. I did the math earlier. My guess, my best guess is that the the current base config of the MacBook Pro is eight gigs of RAM and half a terabyte of SSD storage. To increase that to one terabyte of storage and 16 gigabytes of

1:10:21 RAM, which would be a legitimate base config. That would be a reasonable base config based on the general market. Would cost Apple on that sixteen hundred dollars, my guess best guess is probably about an additional seventy-five dollars per unit, which would take their margins on that machine overall, like just calculating the the total margins on average, that twenty-five percent net margin that they're making, if every if all they sold were max, probably closer to twenty percent. So that's still they're taking 20% more from you than it costs them. So when you give them a thousand instead of $750, the product is $800 and there's $200 of profit. What Apple is doing by gouging, by charging way more than they

1:11:06 need, their profit comes from overcharging on the upgrades. And what do they do? They just they have they have an unfathomable amount of money just sitting there. it's something that today in capitalism is pointed to as the greatest success story really in the the history of anything, arguably. Like every other company wants to try to emulate some aspect of Apple's success. There's no doubt they're successful. The question is, could they be doing better if they charged less? If they were a less profitable company, would they be better people for it? And one of the least reasons I left was is it it was always a leftist pay place, but it just became worse and worse and worse and in the end for that reason, other reasons,

1:11:48 I just I couldn't stand being there. Didn't matter how much money they were paying me, I couldn't stand another second. When somebody is just taking as much as they possibly can, when they're extracting the maximum amount, that is per se immoral. It doesn't matter what the money, what the exact dollar amount is, they're taking as much as they can. And again, this is the difference between capitalist morality and Christian morality. A Christian cannot do that. A capitalist not only can, as Corey said must, you must maximize profit. Now there's debate around to what extent that's mandatory, but it's certainly the brass ring. It's what everybody wants to be as profitable as possible, to pay as much, to make as much.

1:12:34 That's avarice. That's just it's pure greed to have more than you need. Because for the capitalist morality, there's no such thing as enough. On the topic of that 13 pair of jeans, not to make myself seem too old, but I have a handful of pairs of jeans from when I was in high school that are just now starting to wear out. So they're older in fact than probably a fair number of the members of our audience. There's no chance that jeans I bought today, at least for anywhere near that price, even accounting for inflation, would last anywhere near as long. And so even in our own lifetimes, we've seen this precipitous decline in quality due to the incentives built into the system that we call capitalism.

1:13:23 And Walmart, quite frankly, they picked a good example because Walmart is one of the biggest exploiters of this system. They underpay their employees. Walmart basically hires those who are on welfare and keeps them on welfare because of what Walmart pays. And so, in fact, the entire system is subsidizing Walmart. And so it's exactly what I pointed out about the system. The system is designed to siphon money from everyone and give it only to the wealthiest individuals in the system. This is not a Marxist critique. This is not class warfare. This is just what capitalism does. And we see this even in the beginnings of capitalism centuries ago. This is one of the things that was pointed out by the

1:14:16 early critiques and the subsequent critiques in subsequent centuries of capitalism. It created this gulf between the poorest and the wealthiest in society. that historically had not been there. The only exorbitantly, if you want to use the term wealthy individuals in society historically, had been certain kings. And even then, not by today's standards, the extremely wealthy, the 1% of the 1% in our current system are wealthier than historical kings, with very few exceptions. Think about that. The king of a nation historically, relative to the poorest individuals in his country, had less wealth than is the case today for the wealthiest individuals and the poorest individuals in our system. And supposedly capitalism, as they frequently claim, raises people out of poverty.

1:15:20 In reality, what it has done is it has enslaved the vast majority of those living under this system to a lifetime of debt slavery. The current highest rate charged on a credit card is 36%. That's obscene. And that's not even that high because there are other loans that are permissible in this country, despite the fact that we still have so called anti usury laws, they're not very strong, they don't really do very much. They're basically toothless. But there are loans that charge even higher rates than that credit card. And notably the credit card could charge more until they run up against some of those anti-usury laws, but they're ridiculous. The fact that this is permissible in our system should have Christians

1:16:12 up in arms. This is disgusting that these things are allowed. And bear in mind that those who are exploited by this primarily are the poor and the ignorant. Those who are less intelligent are going to be more exploited by this system, because, quite frankly, if you are numerate, you are going to be able to navigate this system better than if you are not. And so the particularly poor, and those who are below average in intelligence are those who are most exploited by this system. And so you'll have those who will argue that oh well capitalism did away with feudalism and slavery and all these systems. No it didn't. It enslaved these people even more under worse conditions. Those who live in the dregs of our society, as it were,

1:17:03 in the lowest echelon of society today, live under worse conditions than those who were serfs in the past, or even slaves, because serfs and slaves were still provided for, to some degree, by their lords and masters. That is not the case to day. Because today you have exploitative corporations who see these individuals as employees, and employee, quite frankly, is just a term for abject slave when it comes to some of these larger corporations, granted, it's going to depend on where you are employed and at what level. But if you're employed as a stalker at Walmart, Walmart doesn't care about you. Walmart sees you as entirely replaceable, and they will drop you at a moment's notice if they think they can do it and make

1:17:53 more money somewhere else. They have no interest in you, they have no relationship with you, they have no duties to you, and that is simply not the case historically. For instance, under the feudal system, a feudal lord got all of his food from his serfs. That kind of gives him an interest in their welfare. There was a relationship there, there was a natural outgrowth of hierarchy. And not only that, but the feudal lord was probably related related by blood to the serfs, granted at some attenuation, but at the level of a distant cousin. And so you have this natural ordering of things, this natural relationship between and among the individuals in the system that you do not see in capitalism.

1:18:39 Because under a capitalist system, I have no relationship to the person who for instance, this iPhone I'm holding. I have no relationship to the person who built that. I don't know that person. I will never know that person. It doesn't mean that you have to know every person who made every good that you buy. But if he's a man in the next town over, that is vastly different from if he is some faceless person employed by a corporation that employs millions of people on the other side of the world. And corporations know this and can exploit it, as we've mentioned before, if you can create divisions in your labor force, you can drive down their ability to organize and their ability to demand fair

1:19:20 treatment. Capitalism encourages this. That is one of the incentives built into the system First it is done by exporting, it is done by importing goods from faraway lands where they can be produced far cheaper and often with no regulations, including environmental regulations, and then it is done by importing those people into your own lands. Because guess what? That's even cheaper. So capitalism always exerts this downward force practically in every single way and in every single area it touches. And it just continues to cause this harm. And we are now living at sort of the tail end of it. We can see perhaps not how bad things can get because things can always get worse, but we can certainly see how bad

1:20:10 they have gotten versus what we were told would be the good and what we were warned by certain men would be the bad. Well the good hasn't materialized, but the bad most certainly has. The fact that you can buy that thirteen pair of jeans does not make your life better. Because quite frankly, the existence of the thirteen pair of jeans is the reason you can't afford the good pair of jeans, if you cannot afford them. And even if you can't afford the good pair, it's going to cost you relatively more than it would have cost you in the past to acquire the actual well-made good, as opposed to the cheap knockoff that we have today. What we're talking about Talking about for those who are versed in

1:21:00 economics, perhaps some of you are screaming at us because we haven't used the term yet, but we're talking about externalities. There are many external costs to the things that capitalism encourages those within the system to do. And those externalities are not, or at least seldom are, taken into account. And so Apple, we could use Apple for an example. Even though Apple's products are expensive, because they are, even though they make a significant profit on them, the actual total cost of that device is not represented by the price. Because it does not take into account how much of American manufacturing has been hollowed out. Now, I'm not saying that Apple's the one who did this because this was This was done before Apple, Apple has benefited from it.

1:21:53 Apple has certainly not really reversed it, except to some small degree, as they've been incentivized to do so. But you don't take into account the hollowing out the manufacturing, the brain drain that accompanies that, because if there are no jobs in the field, people aren't going to go into the field. And all of the other things, all of the follow-on effects from that. Because if someone loses his job, his good manufacturing job, well then his family becomes poor. If his family becomes poor, that increases the burden on the welfare system. If you increase the burden on the welfare system, you have to increase taxes. If you increase taxes, other people become more poor. This is a vicious cycle that destroys the country.

1:22:39 Eventually, capitalism destroys any country that adopts it. It is only a matter of time, and the biggest factor in how long it will take for capitalism to destroy a given country, and by country in this case I mean the political entity that constitutes the sovereign over a nation, properly understood. But the biggest factor that determines how long it takes capitalism to destroy a country is inertia. If behind that country you have centuries of built-up infrastructure and all of these various systems that are somewhat resilient because of how long they have been around, it will take longer to destroy the system. And that's what we see. It took a long time for capitalism to destroy the West.

1:23:29 Now there are those who will say, Well hasn't capitalism benefited East Asia, for instance? And the answer to that is no. What happened with those abjectly poor areas is that capitalists were able to bring in capital in order to drain it from other parts of the world, and this looks like you have a benefit to the local population. It seems like you have raised them out of poverty to some degree, but if you actually look at the long term, the real consequences, those living in these areas are still living in abject poverty. Now they're just enslaved to corporations. Yes, before they were serfs to a feudal lord, and then above him to a king, or whatever it happened to be in a given area. But they haven't exchanged slavery for freedom.

1:24:25 They've exchanged one kind of slavery for a worse one. You have factories in China that install suicide nets on the outside of their buildings. That's not something that you saw under feudalism. Employees of large corporations live worse lives than did feudal serfs. that's just the fact of the matter, and it's insane to think that people today will say that capitalism has created this wonderful world. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than you, had more time with their families and their loved ones than you, had more holidays than you, and practically took off most of winter. And yet somehow we're supposed to believe that those who are working forty or more, depending on your field, certainly, uh other attorneys out

1:25:19 there will laugh at the number forty, but forty hours a week, fifty or more weeks per year for basically your entire life, and somehow that's supposed to be better than these historical systems. The claims of capitalism work only if you take them at face value and do not assess them at all. If you actually look at them in their historical context, and you look at the consequences and you look at the promises versus what was delivered, it becomes absurd to believe that this system is good, even if you don't look at the scriptural requirements, which it clearly violates left, right, and center. There is no way to look at capitalism and square it with Christianity. The only reason that Christians, particularly in the US, for their

1:26:07 historical differences between the mindset in the US and Europe on this, but particularly in the US this has taken deep root. The reason that people support capitalism is because we have been propagandized to believe that the only alternative is Alternative is communism. And if the only alternative to the system presented is communism, that's not a very hard sell. Because you can look at what communism did, and yes, that was worse. To some degree. Because if you look at the longitudinal consequence, if you look at the long term outcome of what capitalism has done in the West, capitalism has been just as destructive as communism. It went about it a different way. Communism usually lined people up beside a ditch and just shot them,

1:26:51 or exported them to a frozen part of the world. On the other hand, capitalism has undermined the family, it has undermined basically our entire economy. It has undermined traditional manufacturing. It has undermined not just manufacturing, but really the traditional production of any and all goods. It has caused brain drain. All of these consequences are in fact arguably harder to reverse, to overcome, than what happened in communism. But in either case, both of these systems are anti-Christ. Both of these systems are evil. And so as Christian, we don't have to support either one. If someone tells you that you have two choices, unless they're offering you food, they're probably lying. Or at the very least, you should assess whether or not that

1:27:44 person is lying. Yes, sometimes there is a real binary choice. It is heaven or hell. There are binaries. But a lot of times when someone tells you you can choose A or B, they're attempting to get you not to consider C and D and E because they want you to choose B because A is so abhorrent. And that's the case with this. When someone tells you, oh well, you have to be a capitalist or else you're a communist, they're not telling you the whole truth because there are other options. And we know that because historically, you didn't have capitalism or communism. But you had an economy, because people bought and sold, markets existed, they had coinage. And so if there is historical precedent for other options, then no,

1:28:31 the options are not capitalism or communism. That is a false binary. The person who tells you that is trying to mislead you. And so as Christians, what our duty is, is to look at what God has said on these issues, and then to deal with our neighbors in love, because love your neighbor as yourself is the second greatest commandment. You can't do that and be a good capitalist. And if a system tells you that you have to do X, Y, and Z to be a good member of that system, a good advocate for that system, and you look at X, Y, and Z, and then you look at scripture and it says, do not do X, do not do Y, do not do Z. Well there's a very real problem here, and you're going to have to choose one or the other, the system or scripture.

1:29:20 One of the other fascinating aspects of comparing things as they stand today with serfdom is the positive obligations that the Lord had to his serfs. Yeah, Cory mentioned that they were the Lord, you know, the manor was dependent on the serfs for his food, he was obligated to them to protect them. Just as today, you know, I pay property taxes and my town is obligated to protect me with police protection. Except they're not. Because there's been a Supreme Court ruling some time ago that ruled that the police have no positive duty to any individual to protect them from anything. You individually are completely on your own. Even though there are police and even though they have a monopoly on violence in your area, if they fail to protect you, they're

1:30:12 not liable. They have not failed in their duty in any legal sense that they can be held accountable for. So that was not true of the Lord. Now, you couldn't necessarily take your baron to court if he didn't protect you from marauders, but if he didn't do that, A, he was not going to be able to eat, and B, the serfs were likely to rise up and hurt him. Maybe they burned down the manor. Possibility of violence against the head was all Was always present in those hierarchical systems. And so undergirding the entirety of the capitalist argument for the betterment of the world is that it increased individual freedom. Now the problem with saying that you've increased individual freedom is freedom

1:31:04 to what? Freedom to buy worse, more dangerous products, freedom to live a life that is detached from your neighbor. These are all inherent to capitalism. And they are freedoms in the sense that capitalism granted a license to behave in ways that Christians would not have done in the past. But this is why we've gone after freedom in the past is it's it's not a positive good. You are always a slave to something. And the blessing of Christianity is realizing that as a slave to Christ, you are free from these sorts of appetites, not completely, but you are given grace, you are given sanctification to be able to resist the desire to be avaricious, to envy what your neighbor has and try to have more than him.

1:31:57 Now There's certainly a case to be made that when you see, you know, if you're a young single guy and you see a married guy with you know a new kid and a pretty wife, you should absolutely admire that and you should say, I want that for myself. That is not envy. At least not that's not envy in any sinful sense. When you look at that and you say, I want that for myself, you're you shouldn't be despising the man because he has something you don't. You shouldn't be lusting after his wife and saying, I want to take her and make her mine you shouldn't hate God for giving him blessings that you have yet to receive. Those are all the ways to handle that situation improperly. The proper way is to say that guy is further along in

1:32:44 his life than me. He's has stuff that I want for myself that I know are blessings from God, that I know that I can want with a clean conscience. I'm gonna do what I need to do in my life to try to achieve those things myself. And then it's up to God the w whether or not he delivers it to you. Capitalism doesn't work that way. Capitalism is dependent on you fundamentally envying the lifestyles of others and trying to emulate and to outdo them, not because you want to share and joy, but because you want to want to just have more stuff. That that's really what it comes down to. And when you look at the the arguments on the Mises webpage and pretty much any place where there's an argument for capitalism, it's

1:33:29 predicated in terms of lots more freedom and lots more stuff. And pro-capitalists will say, well, that's an increase in standard of living. As Corey just said, there are many standards of living by which serfs lived unimaginably better than us. Yeah, maybe they had their homes in some case well, twenty years ago it would be true to say that their homes probably weren't weren't as nice as many of ours today, with the completely deranged housing market, which is itself incidentally a terminal state of capitalism playing out in the endgame. I mean, look at housing in particular. I think it's a perfect example. For the last 20, 30 years, what have we had? Mexican laborers and other South American immigrants, so called, they're aliens, they're

1:34:16 invaders, most of them are illegally, come to this country and they will do jobs like roofing, any other things in in the housing sector that displaced a lot of blue-collar white men in this country. My parents, when they were redoing some stuff on their house, they were so excited a bunch of Mexicans showed up to do it because they were cheap. Every boomer is like that. You get the cheapest labor, you get the best deal, and you nailed it. And that's that's in the it's seen as a moral victory when it happens, not considering the externality that when there are a bunch of Mexicans up on their on your roof, that means there are a bunch of white guys who can't feed their kids the tonight because you didn't give them twenty percent more than the illegal alien

1:35:02 would have cost to do a worse job than the white guy would have done. When your choice is profit or failure as a capitalist, you're always going to chase the money. You're always going to take the cheapest option. the Mexican illegal day labor would have to be really, really bad. And even then, most people today are still probably going to roll the dice. And then when all these boomers go to sell their houses, what do they do? They try to get top dollar for the house. Now, in a vacuum, you could debate whether or not that makes sense. I think that the existence of the housing market as it stands today is fundamentally dislocated from fundamentals in so many ways that that's there'll be a separate podcast series just to discuss that.

1:35:51 But one of the key moral elements that's present in every housing sale is to whom are you selling your house? And over and over, we have all seen stories, or hopefully, if you're paying attention, you've seen and heard stories from At least until the housing market blew up in the last two years. You'd have a young family. Maybe the dad's thirty, he has a new wife, they have their first kid, he's finally saved up enough that he can afford to make a bid on a house. He can finally he thinks he can finally just barely squeak into a home. And what happens in the housing market, in the free market? This man, this young man with not a lot of resources, he's at the upper limit of what he can afford, is in competition

1:36:38 with banks, with enormous commercial real estate operations, with housing flippers who are buying places, marking them up and reselling them with people who are for a while were buying them as Airbnbs just to use as profit farms, even though it would destroy the quality of the neighborhood when they did it. And so as a buyer, you're helpless. As a seller, you are not helpless. You are culpable. If you own a house and you're putting it on the market and you are given a choice between a couple like the young couple that's trying to buy their first home and a cash pyre that's going to pay fifty thousand dollars more, you are sinning if you don't sell the house to the cheaper buyer. It is evil to give it to the person who's gonna give

1:37:29 you more money for it when they don't need it as much. And we're all really allergic to the idea of need, but when you look at the basic situation there, it's easy to figure out. The young guy whose k is just barely right at the edge, frankly, you should probably cut him a break. In those circumstances, I would you know knock knock another five percent off to help them out. That's completely within your discretion as a seller. You can sell to anyone anyone you please, and you can sell for whatever price you please. Capitalism, the morality of this religion says the fifty thousand dollar greater cash buyer, that's the one you got to take. Sorry guys, I have no choice. There's a better offer on the table.

1:38:11 I have to take it. Nonsense. Complete horse crap. You can sell to whomever you wish. And when you fail to sell to someone who's your actual neighbor, who actually has a fundamental need, not only like, hey, this guy needs a house, but this man is forming a family. He's He's establishing roots in a community. He's doing everything that we all know needs to occur in communities for them to be sustained and preserved. That guy is the guy who needs to be rewarded. If that means that you don't get as much money, if if you're selling your house for a hundred thousand dollars more instead of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than you paid for it, it should be a no-brainer. And yet because of capitalism, every buyer in virtually every such situation

1:38:57 is gonna take the greater offer and just shrug and say, yeah, that's the market. This is a complete despising of neighbor to do such a thing. And yes, completely normal in capitalism. I I think that is the key element of all of these calculations, regardless of what other system might meet our lofty ideals when you are willing to screw over your neighbor for a few more bucks, you're evil. It's an impermissible thing and is a sin. And you should you should consider those profits to be blood money because you have hurt your neighbor for the sake of what? Of more money than you needed in the first place. So that you can have more stuff. See this religion just builds up and builds up and so it's

1:39:45 intern it's internally consistent. You look at that whole thing and like, well, I got an extra fifty grand. I I can give more to charity. I can you know all manner of things you can do. I'm not saying that's wrong to take a profit on something when you're selling a capital asset like that. It's the question is to whom are you selling it to? Because when you're doing harm to someone, that is the greater moral imperative than how much money you make for it. Neighbor is the essence of this entire argument. When you try to produce a good more efficiently, and that means you have to use cut rate parts, maybe parts from further away, where if you could just spend you know 10% more, you could buy from someone closer, maybe someone in your own state, even your

1:40:31 own town, your neighbor, someone who actually matters in your community just as much as you would hope to matter. Capitalism says don't do that. It says don't give it to the guy who's nearby because he costs more. Same with competition. You know, it's very common. You will see two grocery stores side by side or very near each other, two different chains or a chain store and a local store. That is evil. Zoning in local communities should forbid that. I don't I don't think there should ever be a case where you have one grocery store right near another. Why? Because a grocery store is a neighborhood source of food. And the only reason to set up another one adjacent is direct competition to undercut the other guy.

1:41:18 Now when it's mega corporations that are doing it, they could care less. The communities are just a place for them to extract as much profit as possible. We in our communities have a choice about what sort of behavior we permit. And we don't have to put up with this crap. There are some places where it's actually possible for locals to shoot down those sorts of things, say no, not in our neighborhood. There should be more of that, not less. All these things are moral calculus. They're moral calculations that we undertake every day, usually unconsciously. It's usually you just you have some sort of internal compass, and you're like, I would rather buy American, you know, made in the USA was a thing for a while, buy local.

1:42:01 These are good things. The more local, the better. And you need to do it with the full awareness that it's reducing your purchasing power. You're going to have to pay your neighbor, who's growing stuff on a smaller plot, more than you can pay Walmart for your vegetables. There are times when your resources are so tight that if the only possible way you can feeb your family is to buy the cheapest thing, that's what you have to do. We're not making a cut and dried argument that it is always impermissible to do X. We're trying to make the argument for is that your neighbor is always they're right there with you, whether you ignore them or not, there's always someone nearby to whom you could be buying or selling

1:42:48 or trading or cooperating or assisting in some other way. And when you ignore him and your sole focus is on what is going to be the most profitable thing, that's how you end up with Amazon trucks and Amazon boxes everywhere in the country. There's probably more Amazon boxed litter than anything else in our landfills because they have managed to undercut every single local store through their semp centralization. And now Jeff Bezos, I don't know if he is currently, but he's certainly one of the three wick richest men on the planet. As Corey said, historically he's one of the richest men in the history of the universe. And money is power, and just like the Walmart guys, he didn't accumulate that by selling things to rich people.

1:43:30 He did it by selling it to the normal everyday guy to us. I buy a lot of Amazon stuff less now. I mean, I don't buy much anymore of anything, but We're not trying to make the case that we're guiltless in in these calculations, but they should always be part of the Christian life. To think, am I doing the best thing for my neighbor? And that question should always come before am I turning a prophet? And just back to scripture beef briefly, you don't have to look very far anywhere in scripture to find that that is the norm. Am I helping my neighbor? Is a Christian question. Am I getting more profit? You won't find that. You will never find that in Christian discourse. And the fact that today it's so common among Christians, including some

1:44:17 of the most right, staunch Christians, conservatives, super conservatives, are often the most ardent defenders of capitalism, is a tremendous problem. It's a huge problem because there's a morality that is baked into their decision to say this is good and right and moral because profit and efficiency and competition and neighbor just goes out the window. You won't hear them talk about neighbor. Except, well, I saved a bunch of money so I can donate it to someone. Well, what cost did that come from? Is that blood money or not? And in a lot of cases it's going to be. I want to briefly give a fact pattern and I want you as the listener, or if you're listening in a group, we know some of you do that, you as the listeners, try to figure out

1:45:04 the decade in which this took place. So in this fact pattern, there is a political sovereign. He directs his attorney general to look into the monopolization of certain parts of the economy. That attorney general does as he is told. He finds monopolization amongst certain players in the economy, to use technical language here. He begins proceedings against them under the existing anti-monopoly laws to to prosecute them for their monopolistic exploitation of the market. Then some individuals related to that monopolistic player go to the political sovereign, and remind him By the way, you owe us a great deal of money on these loans we gave you during your last election cycle. It would be a shame if those came due, including all

1:46:03 of this interest. That political sovereign, unsurprisingly, then directs his attorney general to cease the proceedings against that monopolistic player. Now for those who are versed in legal history and related matters, that probably sounds like something that has happened any number of times in the last hundred years. The gentleman who, in this case, it was a letter that he wrote to the sovereign, was actually Jakab Fugar, of the Fugar banking dynasty. This happened in the 1520s. So lest you think that this what we have today, the sort of corruption we see, is something that is unusual for capitalism, we see it happening right at the very beginnings of the capitalist economy with the banking system.

1:46:58 We see this sort of corruption at the beginning, and we see it today. This is inherent to the capitalist system. This is not something that is novel, it is not something that happens only in our day, it is not something that is avoidable. And one of the most perverse things about this system is that not only does it make everyone guilty, because inevitably it does, but because of the way it works, because of these feedback loops, every time someone participates in this system, it entrenches the system by making things worse for everyone else, and also worse for the individual who has participated. But it also at the same time makes it very difficult not to participate in the system, because it becomes all encompassing.

1:47:50 Which is really the economy has become effectively what the United States is. The United States at this point is a bazaar that happens to have a very large military. That's what capitalism has done. And so when you buy something from the big box store instead of the small farm down the street, well, not only have you got something that is almost certainly going to be lower quality, But you've impoverished your neighbor because that was a sale that could have gone to him, and he could have used that money to fix his roof or pay for something for his children, any number of other things. And because he doesn't have that money from that sale, he has to go and buy cheaper goods as well. And so he buys something cheap also at another big box store.

1:48:38 And that puts out of business the cobbler down the street, or the tailor, or any of a number of other merchants who would have been in business if not for that patronage of the large corporate store that has come in and destroyed the local economy. And that's the feedback loop that capitalism creates. And again it is that ever downward pressure that impoverishes everyone. Ultimately that is what capitalism does. It does not raise people out of poverty. It does not make life better. It impoverages it impoverishes everyone. Sucks all of the wealth out of the local economy, and basically reduces everyone to the level of a debt slave. That is the ultimate outcome because that is the goal of the

1:49:24 system. It is designed to do that. Satan is Satan is very fond of A B testing. For those who aren't familiar with the term, the most common form of A B testing is if you have a website, you will put up two different versions of either a sales page or copy, whatever it happens to be, and you will see which one leads to a greater conversion percentage. Conversion is just whatever your goal is. If it's a product, it's to sell the product. And that's A B testing. You'll see which one performs better, and then you go with that one, and then you'll test that one against another B. And you keep doing that and you keep refining as you go. Satan does the same thing, he's very fond of it. He's done it many times in history.

1:50:10 One way that he did it in the last century or so, last couple centuries, was he paired off capitalism and communism. Well which one is more effective? Which one will cause the greatest amount of human suffering possible because that's his goal. Turns out that both work pretty well. Capitalism works better. Because capitalism makes everyone complicit in the system. There were many who lived under communism who accepted communism only because the alternative was to get shot and dumped in a ditch. On the other hand, many of those, particularly men who claim to be Christian, will ardently defend capitalism. You didn't see men who were Christian ardently defending communism. Communism destroys a society.

1:51:02 But But communism is so inherently per se on its face wicked that Christians really are not going to be suckered into it. Anyone who claims to be a Christian and also claims to be a communist is one of those two things, and I think we all know which one it is. But there are many men who in good conscience seemingly claim to be Christian and capitalist. They'll even go so far as to claim that capitalism is the most moral economic system and that Christians must support it. And so it is capitalism that is more destructive, that is more wicked than communism, ultimately, because of the outcome, because of how much damage and how pervasive that damage is. And we're living, again at the tail end of it.

1:51:49 We are living in the consequences of capitalism. And in some ways, I have to envy Luther, because when I read Luther's writings on these subjects he is able to address himself to perhaps not Charles V, who was not very fond of Luther at this point, but he is able to address himself to godly sovereigns. He is able to address himself to a Christian prince, to a Lutheran prince. He is able to tell these men in his sermons, and he does so quite boldly in his sermons and his treatises, you have a moral duty to fix these things. You have a moral duty to stop these men from monopolizing these markets and exploiting the poor, from charging interest, from usury. Those two are synonymous, from all of these various things

1:52:44 You, to whom God has given the sword, have a duty to address these matters. As a Christian you are duty bound, you are morally bound, and he goes so far as to say I am burdening your conscience with this. This is your duty, and you are not a Christian if you do not do it. And I envy him because he gets to say that and we don't is we don't have Christian rulers, to whom we can address our complaint. We don't have Christian princes, to whom we can say Scripture says that you are sinning by permitting this evil to continue in your lands. We today do not have that luxury, because we live under a wicked government. We are governed by evil pagans, not by Christians. And so that leaves us in a different position.

1:53:36 It leaves us in a position where we have to do things entirely locally, and perhaps this is good to some degree, because most things should be local. But we as Christian men have to start by doing things locally. We can build up from there, but we can't appeal to a prince because we don't have a godly prince. So we don't have the option of top down. We don't have the option of enforcing regulation and rules that will change these matters for the better, that will push them in a Christian direction. Now if you happen to live somewhere where that's actually an option, you're very lucky and you should pursue that. But generally speaking, most of us our options are going to be amending our own personal behavior on a daily basis.

1:54:26 And so if you have the op to shop at the small family store, by all means do so. If you have the option for your neighbor to do your gardening, if you don't happen to have the time or the skill to do it yourself. By all means, do that. Don't hire the illegal alien. These are the little things that matter. You have to build the relationships with your neighbors, build that network, build a community, because that is what Christians are supposed to have, that is what an actual functioning society looks like, but it is most certainly one that Christians should build. What we have today does not look in any way, shape, or form Christian. And that should terrify each and every one of us who lives

1:55:13 under this system. Because surely God is going to ask us, why did you willingly participate in that? And not only participate, but many of you defended it. That is not what we are supposed to do as Christians. As Christians, we are to hold to what God says in his word. We are to love our neighbor as ourself, and we do not do that when we simply think, Well, I can get this item fifty cents cheaper if I go on Amazon or a dollar cheaper, whatever it happens to be. Spend a little more money, and again, with the caveat, if you are able to do so, we recognize that this system, as we have said many times in this episode, creates poverty, creates debt slaves, creates quite frankly, a set of perverse incentives.

1:56:02 We recognize that is true, but if you are able, patronize the local business, help your neighbor, hire your neighbor, have you Don't participate in the evil system if you are able to avoid doing so. And so at your church, get a list of men who have certain skills. If you need a plumber, hire the plumber who sits next to you in the pews. If you need a roofer, hire the one who sits next to you in the pews. That man is your neighbor, at least he should be your neighbor. I hope you don't have to commute three hours to church. If that man is your neighbor, then you should be dealing with him if you can. The Christian solution to the problems we face is local. If we are faithful in these matters, I do believe that God

1:56:59 will give us a faithful leader, a faithful prince. At some point at some point. I'm not as pessimistic about the end necessarily being right around the corner. It could be, I don't know. I won't speculate. But when it comes down to it, as Christian men, we ultimately have control only over our own actions. And so it is those actions that we should conform to Scripture, that we should conform to love of neighbor, and from that will grow these networks of relationships, these interconnections that build up a Christian society. It is a lot easier to stand up a Christian prince in a Christian society than it is to just sit and hope that God will give us a Christian prince and he will impose a Christian society on a pagan people.

1:57:52 The latter is unlikely to happen in this day and age. And so it is our duty, as best we can, with what God has given us, to act as Christians in our lives, and that includes in our economic dealings, which should be, by and large, with our immediate if possible, neighbors.