[This is part 1 of a series on libertarian philosophy and the scriptures. See part two, three, four]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

If you’ve spent any time in secular libertarian circles trying to make statists aware of their foolish ideology of statism, you’ll know very well that very few “converts” are ever won through the standard “Enlightenment” means of logic, reason, evidence, or history.

One can explain to a statist all day long the economics of why monetary inflation must lead to higher prices, how artificially cheap credit causes economic recessions, or how these central bank schemes transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. We could show them that their legislation that they believe reign in the rich, such as their beloved interventions of the Progressive Era and Great Depression, are actually the very means used to secure privileges for the rich corporations that they hate. We could show how progressives are the real corporatists. We can show how the State, which they believe is necessary to check corporate power, is actually responsible for it. We can show them all day long how so-called “governments,” which they believe exist to protect the public and uphold and advance civilization, are nothing more than murderous robbers who have killed hundreds of millions of people in just the past century. 

But they simply don’t care. They remain dedicated to statism and socialism (the same thing) regardless of the evidence against it. 

This is because statism—the philosophy and ideology of organizing society through the means of political violence—is much more than just a philosophy; statism is a religion whose adherents are devoted to the devilish ideology of organizing society through the political means and raising up false gods to rule over them and manage social affairs as their lord and saviors. To go even further, statism is based in sin. Perhaps more than anything else (which would explain why politics and patriotism is so pervasive in our society), man’s rebellion against God is marked by a gravitation toward human governments. Statism—the belief, ideology, and idolatry toward human governments—is a prevailing manifestation of man’s sin, which entails getting behind the greatest and most evil institution ever known to mankind that, since it was first raised up, was decidedly an attempt to surpass the sovereignty of God and organize society according to one’s own “wisdom” (Genesis 4:16, 11:3-4). 

The view of secular economists

When we ignore the religious and sinful nature of the State and think only in Enlightenment terms of logic, reason, or evidence, we are bound to think, as most “secular” libertarians do, that we are only involved in a “battle of ideas,” in simply an intellectual struggle where we are fighting for the “best” ideas to win. “If only we could get everyone to read an economics book,” this kind of thinking goes, “they will realize their follies in central planning and political organization (which, in fact, leads to disorder).” Someone just needs to send Bernie Sanders a copy of Economics in One Lesson and he will stop being a socialist. (Yeah, right).

The problem we are getting at is that these superior ideas that free markets—the unhindered fluctuation of prices and the mechanism of profit and loss—are a better way of allocating scarce resources than the necessarily arbitrary commands of political rulers, or that men are better off free from bureaucratic government rather than inevitably living under the thumb of tyrants who believe they own other men, are already out there and still no one cares. More than just not having access to the right ideas, men are deeply deceived by the false god of the state and refuse to turn back.

Moreover, this thinking that our social struggle is simply a battle of ideas (which is another error of the secular line of reasoning) ignores the fact that these people are frauds and cronies, men who are given over to a reprobate mind, and propagandists who merely use these ideas as a cover for their true intentions of political plunder and rule over men. They are not actually True Believers in socialism whose minds would be changed if we showed them the follies of socialism, but merely use the pretended benevolent, “common good” ideas to deceive others into accepting their statist-interventionist agenda. We aren’t dealing simply with men who mistakenly hold bad ideas, but with men who are intent on plunder and domination.

Is our problem just economic illiteracy?

But men haven’t always seen the depths of the evil and sin behind socialism and statism, and have seen it as more a problem of men simply holding mistaken ideas, who presumably would change their ways if they had the right ones in mind. The most well-known classical liberal “Austrian” economist, Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), who is much admired by libertarians and free market economists, thus famously (in libertarian circles) states that “if socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.”

This is cute and funny at first, if you’re a somewhat simple-minded libertarian who doesn’t understand the deep problems involved in men gravitating toward socialist and statist thinking, which is inherently rebellion against God. It seems, at first, to make the point that socialists are simply economic illiterates in need of economic education. This gives some sense of pride to those who rightly see through the economic fallacies involved in statism and socialism. 

But Hayek’s statement simply isn’t true. Statists and socialists did not become who they are—idolaters of human governments—because they “reasoned” their way there or bought into the logic of someone writing in defense of interventionism into the free society. It’s not like they read the works of statist philosophers, accepted their lines of reasoning, and then said, “I think I’ll be a statist after surveying the landscape of ideas.” Very few supporters of statist ideology have read, or even know of, the intellectuals—Hobbes, Malthus, Hegel, Marx, et al—who really stand behind the statist philosophy in the modern age. They have bought into these ideas long before some “intellectual” came along to rubber-stamp their false ideas. The intellectuals they may find who support their position are an afterthought, and they weren’t needed in order for men to arrive at such positions (See: 1 Samuel 8). Men were Marxists and Keynesians in their hearts before Marx and Keynes ever walked the earth. These men came along only to intellectualize the evils that men were already willing to buy into. They weren’t the creators of statism, but merely another of its pseudo-scientists who came to provide a seemingly convincing argument for the God-supplantation program that was already in operation.

Keynes’s book, The General Theory, for instance, came after the American government was already carrying out the interventionist policies and mechanics that he wrote about. He was just another crony intellectual signing off on it. It wasn’t as if Keynes was merely taking some dispassionate approach to economic theory in search of the truth, despite his book being named the General Theory. Rather, as one article says of him, “Keynes held a long-standing belief in inflation and public spending. His General Theory was the culmination of his search for an intellectual foundation on which to support his belief.” Keynes was not a real economist, but rather just another statist “intellectual” trying to provide some cover for violent and fraudulent intervention into the market, which greedy men already supported outside of any economic reasoning. The libertarian-anarchist economist Murray Rothbard thus wrote of this convenient timing of Keynes on the scene:

“Governments are always seeking new sources of revenue and new ways to spend money, often with no little desperation; yet economic science, for over a century, had sourly warned against inflation and deficit spending, even in times of recession. Economists— whom Keynes was to lump into one category and sneeringly disparage as ‘classical’ in The General Theory — were the grouches at the picnic, throwing a damper of gloom over attempts by governments to increase their spending. Now along came Keynes, with his modern ‘scientific’ economics, saying that the old ‘classical’ economists had it all wrong: that, on the contrary, it was the government’s moral and scientific duty to spend, spend, and spend; to incur deficit upon deficit, in order to save the economy from such vices as thrift and balanced budgets and unfettered capitalism; and to generate recovery from the depression. How welcome Keynesian economics was to the governments of the world!”

The point is that while these false prophets of statism may have helped men to solidify their beliefs by putting the “authority” of height (Keynes) and beards (Marx) behind such ideas, they aren’t solely responsible for leading men to them. It wasn’t just “bad economics” that led men to be statists. They got there because the false religion of the State offers men the apparent opportunity to abdicate responsibility, to use the resources of others for projects and programs which they desired, so they found themselves worshiping the devices of man, the State. No socialists ever weighed all the options, read the economic literature, pondered the rights-violations of political power, and decided they would still be a socialist. They got there because they had it in their hearts already to buy into such sinful, rebellious philosophies that go against the Kingdom of God. If such thoughts were assisted by the false gods of our world (e.g., the politicians, intellectuals, military leaders), these men were only exploiting what men already had within them. They will thus not simply be “reasoned” out of it, because it didn’t take Keynes to make a Keynesian. Economic education may do something to keep men from turning toward the ungodly philosophy of statism (Hayek himself said his socialist dreams were “dashed” upon reading Ludwig von Mises’s book Socialism), but that example is an exceedingly rare exception.

The sad reality is that if you literally beat socialists over the head with a thousand-plus page economics treatise, they would still be socialists. Men are clinging not simply to “bad ideas” but to false gods, to excuses for their bent towards laziness, cowardice, theft, and general immorality. And men don’t give up their gods upon the presentation of better secular arguments; they stop serving the false gods of men when they come to know Christ and follow the true King.

Stupid or evil?

A closely related idea to this notion that economic illiteracy is our only problem is that governments are benevolent and stupid rather than malevolent and evil, that they don’t foresee the “unintended consequences” of their actions. With their failed economic education, this thinking goes, they embark upon policies that end up ruining things rather than achieving what was (according to this thinking) supposedly their “goal.” If they had known economics, they would have known better! (Yeah, right).

This idea that governments don’t see the negative effects of their policies (which are, however, still recognized as destructive) is unfortunately rampant in libertarian circles. Probably the majority of average libertarians (i.e., men with a self-righteous aversion to state authority) still think—following Hayek’s idea that socialists just need to understand economics—that “Bernie Sanders just needs an economics book” and he will reform his ways, as if this crony isn’t fully aware of who he is serving (the Adversary) and what he is doing (stealing, killing, and destroying). They think that economic education is our primary goal. “We just need to show them the economics! Someone mail Bernie a copy of Man, Economy, and State so he will stop doing the things he does!” (Yeah, right).

Perhaps hundreds of articles on popular libertarian websites could be found expressing the idea that the only problem with the interventionist statists is their “economic ignorance” and, as Hayek says, if only they understood economics they would stop imposing destructive economic policies. (Yeah, right).

As economically illiterate as some socialists may be, it is not this illiteracy that drives them. Socialism is an evil, sinful, Luciferian ideology that tempts men toward what is probably the greatest, most evident form of rebellion in men: the desire for political godhead or the worship of such an institution of human power. It isn’t simply poor economic ideas that motivate these people. As I have already said, very few people who identify with socialism have undertaken the miserable task of trudging their way through Das Kapital. It is the sin in men, and the rebellion against God, that leads men to statist-socialist ideology. Such vain philosophies of men are what you get when you abandon God’s word for the ideas floating around the world.

Getting statists back to God

Again, as anyone who has spent time in secular libertarian or free market economic circles knows, rarely is any adherent of the religion of statism converted upon being presented with economic logic or philosophical reasoning. I spent the better part of a decade trying to do this, and while I may have planted some seeds, I don’t really recall one person coming to me saying, “Thanks for showing the error in my thinking and exposing the economic fallacies of state intervention…I am no longer a statist/socialist.” And this is because it wasn’t merely bad thinking that has these people to their position in the first place, but rather their rebellion against God.

It is not like we are lacking economic treatises that explain in great detail the inner workings of a market-based system. It is not like we haven’t had socio-economic works around for over a century that indeed expose the logical fallacies of socialism. It is not like we don’t have both the political and economic aspects of these same issues combined into one volume. It is not like we don’t have simple, concise books that explain all the basic problems of those who believe they can use political power to make economies work better. 

I’m afraid, however, that we need something much more than “libertarian philosophy” or “free market economics” to steer men away from the idolatry toward the State, which again is based more so in sin and rebellion against God. For all the great words that were written in defense of what may as well be called God’s liberty, most of these were ultimately failed secularizations of the grand system of order that the Creator has given us in His word. These humanized works could not possibly have the effect on men that the living Word and Spirit of the Lord is capable of having. 

Men need to know God to keep from statism. Only when one comes to know the Lord will they have no other “gods” (e.g., the State) before the Lord God our Creator, who is the only God (Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 4:35, 32:39; 2 Samuel 22:32; 1 Kings 8:60; 2 Kings 19:15; 1 Chronicles 17:20; Nehemiah 9:16; Psalm 83:18, 86:10, 89:6; Isaiah 37:16, 37:20, 44:6, 44:8, 45:5, 45:6, 45:14, 45:21, 45:22, 46:9; Hosea 13:4; Joel 2:27; 1 Corinthians 8:4; Mark 12:29, 1232; John 5:44; 1 Timothy 1:17, 2:5). 

Men need to follow after the one true and living God, our Creator, and hear His instruction to “not go after other gods to serve them and to worship them” (Jeremiah 25:6), if they are to keep from having other (false) gods (e.g., politicians, systems, documents, etc). Only then can they keep from following after the political false gods who promise them (falsely) “salvation” once they occupy the office of human government, only to destroy them in the process. They need to hear the word of the Lord, “do not provoke Me to anger with the work of your hands, and I will do you no harm” (Jeremiah 25:6). Then they can keep from coming under God’s judgment, which—perhaps paradoxically—is dealt out by God using the evil State as His instrument (Isaiah 7:17, 10:6), which naturally brings about the destructive consequences that God intends to use to correct the deviant and rebellious statists (Ezekiel 39:28).  

Until then, atheists—it doesn’t really make sense to consider them truly “godless” since they do indeed have a “god” in the State or in themselves—will continue seeking a secular substitute for God, which is most often found in the State. It is no coincidence that men without faith have chased after the political false gods. This is precisely what men do when they don’t know God as provider and savior. 

Unfortunately, even most professing Christians are unaware that they are unwittingly abandoning God for other “gods” when they trust in the State — that they share a false god with atheists in the State. They don’t realize that this is a primary path of abandoning the Lord: to trust in the “gods” of men. They have not recognized that there is really no greater contradiction than “God and country,” between the Sovereignty of the Lord or the false claims of the political gods to “national sovereignty” and the alleged “authority” over given territories in which they have managed to gain a monopoly of the supposedly legitimate (“lawful”) use of violence over (e.g., the “United States”). 

Improving on Hayek

As long as men don’t know God, then, they are bound to chase after false gods like the State and its varying ideologies (socialism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism, statism in general, etc). We can keep writing economics books all we want, but they aren’t what men are waiting on to be changed. Men are in need of a heart of flesh bestowed by God, not economics treatises.

F.A. Hayek’s famous quote might be better stated as, “If socialists knew the Lord, they wouldn’t be socialists.” (This is not contradicted by the fact that people consider themselves “Christian socialists” or think their brand of American conservatism and statist ideology is compatible with the basic Christian position that Jesus Christ is King. These men, despite their claims of allegiance to Jesus Christ, still do not know the Lord and have made for themselves other gods. They still have to answer the call of the holy Spirit unto soul-searching and repentance. There is frankly no such thing as a “statist Christian.” A man can either serve God, in which case his allegiance is given exclusively to the King of kings, or he can serve the State, in which case he has abandoned service to God. But he can never do both. A man cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13). 

This is why statists and socialists alike are never changed upon the presentation of an economic edifice which does indeed refute their ideological political systems: statism-socialism is their god. 

Hayek himself admitted that mere political theory against the dangers of socialism has not sufficed to stop men from embarking upon such a path, though he failed to address the sinful nature of all political-interventionist (dis)orders. In his most popular work, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek pointed out that,

“Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.”

Appreciating libertarian theorists

There is some appreciation we can have for the secular thinkers in the world of libertarian philosophy and free market economics — F.A Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, et al. 

I am not ready to dismiss entirely the work they have done, nor to dismiss God potentially working through them despite their own spiritual ignorance or lack of appeal to ultimate Truth. They met the secular statists on their own grounds and proved, without appealing to theological arguments which would have been written off as based in “religion” or “mysticism,” or something of the like, in the secular-humanist academic world in which they wrote, that statism and socialism are not workable or sustainable systems even in terms of logic and reason. 

But, that was also, at the same time, their weakness. As I have implied, statists and socialists don’t care about these arguments. You can present all the proof in the world that statism is plunder and results in the destruction of society, you can show the labor camps, prisons, and death tolls, and still men will not believe it until they stand upon the rubble. Indeed, Ludwig von Mises and peers wrote several roughly thousand-page treatises irrefutably proving—with logic but without an appeal to the wisdom of God—that socialism was literally unworkable and unsustainable. Probably very few socialists have ever read them, many fewer have been converted from folly by them. History itself has borne out the failure of socialist programs and general statist organization of society throughout time, and still statists believe in these methods of organizing people and property. 

Desecularizing libertarianism 

What is needed for statists, socialists, and secular libertarians alike is for men to discover God and His word, for folks to be touched by the Holy Spirit and see the blatant evils in such ideas as political violence, which go far beyond simply trying to “argue,” in secular terms, which system is economically or ethically better for men. 

The secular age of the twentieth century scared men out of political theology and made them rest their case on secular ways of thinking, which were always the enemy’s ground for winning arguments and the case for statism. The secular statists scared men out of supporting their arguments with God’s word, which would rightly take the righteous high-ground and offend the atheistic-socialists even more, and caused them to attempt to erect a foundation on such grounds as “natural law” or “argumentation ethics,” which is not the solid rock of the Lord.  They were told that standing on God’s word was “superstitious,” “unscientific,” “archaic,” or something of the like. They either caved, or simply didn’t know the Lord themselves, and tried to make the case for liberty on secular grounds, which had obviously failed to stop the religion of statism from growing. Even Murray Rothbard himself, the great expositor of anarchist libertarian theory in the twentieth century, admitted (upon seeing but another failed secular attempt at a foundation for their ideas) that his own “natural law” grounding of the principles of liberty was “almost wimpy.”

This whole “almost wimpy” attempt of Rothbard to ground “libertarian theory” on something solid just shows the desperation that secularists have in providing some sort of philosophical defense of liberty—“economic efficiency,” “natural rights,” “argumentation ethics,” anything— in the absence of founding it on God and His word. 

For all the great work that was produced in the secular-enlightenment age in defense of liberty, I’m afraid we will have to make the case for liberty through the word of God if it is ever to mean anything and be truly transformative. We will have to base our truth-claims on the word of God, rather than, as the anarchist-libertarian philosopher Hans Hoppe sought to do, on the facts-of-the-matter of argumentation, which are not as convincing to men as being overcome by the Spirit of truth (see here, here, and here for the basics of Hoppe’s approach to defending the libertarian ethic). We will have to seek not just some vague notion of “liberty” with a philosophy to back it up, but the Kingdom of God. For then, as the Lord Jesus Christ tells us, “all these things will be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). We don’t need to out-intellectualize everyone and win a secular battle of ideas. We are told, rather, “Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established” (Proverbs 16:3). Praise God. 

We will have to put our hope and faith and trust in the Lord to advance His Kingdom, by turning men to God and his “program” for liberation from man-gods who call themselves “governments,” not in our own futile, secular evangelizing of “libertarian” or “economic principles” which have done little to interrupt the statist devices of men. 

But Hayek had faith in the secular advancement of the theory of liberty and didn’t think it needed God. He once said, with admirable ambition:

“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage….Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost” (Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, 1967).

This is not enough. God isn’t anywhere to be found in the ambition of Hayek to advance liberty, and where God isn’t found—just as in the case of socialist’s hope for a politically-enforced utopia—men are doomed to fail. There is only liberty where there is the Spirit of the Lord.

Men need to work on the Kingdom of God, not just some sort of philosophical notion of a free society, as much as these ideas may overlap and as much as they have created a loose “liberty movement.” They need to be working with the Spirit of the Lord in them, not just as an “intellectual adventure” as Hayek thought of it. And the “philosophic” foundations of a free society must be Christ the cornerstone, not just a “living intellectual issue.” Its implementation is not just an intellectual affair or challenge, whereby we beat men with the right ideas about economics or ethical philosophy, but will require men working on a building for the Lord. Amen! We need much more than the “power of ideas” on our side; we need the power of the Lord and His word on our side, with men working with the Spirit in them to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Unless libertarian intellectuals make the spiritual shift to serving God rather than mere philosophical principles (however ethically and economically sound they are), the prospects for freedom are nil. And unless statists and socialists are granted repentance by the Lord, they will keep serving the satanic system of human government on the wide way which leads to destruction.

I submit that the secular theorizing of libertarian philosophy and free market economics will forever be limited to small, niche circles until it is soundly on the solid rock of the Lord. There is no safety in the intellectual systems of men, be they authoritarian or libertarian. We must join the psalmists in singing, “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” (Psalm 18:2). Liberty is God’s and lacks a stable ground to stand on when defended in secular terms such as “natural rights.” Instead, we must see that God says, “I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation” (Isaiah 28:16). We are trusting too much in our own “logic” and “reasoning,” the wisdom of the world. The scriptures tell us, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6). Amen. 

“For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). We need men to remember that God is our rock (Psalm 78:35). Our problem is not that men lack the right philosophical or economic ideas, but that they have forgotten God as their Rock (Deuteronomy 32:18). 

Conclusion

For now, the “theory of liberty,” as expressed by anti-authoritarian philosophers like Murray Rothbard in their just and noble attempts to fight statism and socialism, is a great edifice without a foundation. Appeals to “logic,” “reason,” or “natural law” will not suffice to fight off a statist ideology that is (though not based in God) necessarily religio-theological. Until the theoreticians of liberty find the confidence and ability to base their arguments on thus saith the Lord, rather than try to show that “the logic” leads to libertarian conclusions if only men would follow it, their ideas will remain nothing more than theories that struggle to fight off the necessarily “religious” nature of the sinful ideology of statism and do nothing for the soul estranged from God. They are blind men leading blind men into the ditch.

If secular libertarians return to God and begin to wield the sword of the Spirit, they may thereby lead men to God’s kingdom through His word, and then the statists are through. Praise the Lord, if it be His will, our great liberty thinkers are going to realize that their anti-authoritarian ideas will be indestructible with God on their side. Amen!