[This is part 4 in a series on libertarian philosophy and the scriptures. See part one, two, and three]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

It has become increasingly apparent that secular theory, whether economics or philosophy, is insufficient in combating the statists who are not just foolish and “in need of an economics lesson,” as basic libertarian thinkers still arrive at, but are deeply idolatrous, lost in sin, or intent on robbery. We have to see that men have not arrived at statist political theory because they sat down and had a rational debate about which system would best serve the masses, but are in the position because the State is their (false) god that has exploited the evil in their hearts or because they simply enjoy doing evil.

Statism—the idea that political rulers are legitimate and necessary to social order—is a wicked and evil philosophy, not just an immoral and economically illiterate one, though it is that too. Men are not statists because they haven’t read enough economics to know that intervention doesn’t work, but because, without relying on the word of God or serving the Lord with all their heart, they have bought into the vain philosophies of men, trusted in their own wisdom, or been led by spiritual evil into believing absurd things. 

Without understanding things from a theological perspective, the majority of libertarian theorists, it seems, still express the idea that all we need to do is just bash enough people over the head with Economics in One Lesson and they will stop being statists. Many of them still believe in the fallacy that the rulers are just economically ignorant instead of bent on plunder, that they sincerely tried to make things better but “just don’t understand economics.” If only we sent the Pharaohs and their henchmen a copy of Hazlitt’s book, then they would realize his errors! Yeah, right! If only they would read the economics of price controls, they would be convinced and stop their interventionist pursuits! Yeah, right.

After a decade of trying to show people their fallacious ways of thinking and attempting to get them to turn from their support for interventionism by appealing to logic, reason, or history, I can only think of a couple of people who ever heard me out. I may have planted some seeds and helped the choir hold fast at times. But most of the people that I devoted sincere time to trying to show them of their socialist errors remain blind socialists to this day — because they are given over to the darkness and hate the light.

What I submit is that theory and logic—the tools of the Enlightenment age that have replaced theology—will not suffice as substitutes for God and His word in combating the great evils that are against us. Our people are spiritually sick and in need of repentance. They are serving false gods and need to come back to the One True God and learn His ways through His word and a relationship to their Creator. This is a war not just of “may the one with the superior logic win,” but a spiritual battle between good and evil. The State is not just founded in intellectual error; it is a demonic entity that has come to intentionally plunder and rule over people — no matter how much the economists try in vain to shout, “That won’t work!” 

We will never win without the word and work of God, and there is no such thing as liberty without God. The “natural law” philosophy of secular libertarians has, whether they meant it or not, given us a dead-end road to liberty that rested these truths on syllogism rather than the solid rock of “thus saith the Lord.” Men need to realize that statism runs against God’s perfect will and not just logic and reason, and just how profound it is that God laid down the economic and moral law in writing through His prophets. 

The value of secular theory

However, I am still unable to think that the free market economics or libertarian philosophy of the secular realm—where things are defended in terms of logic, reason, or theory rather than by the word of God—has done nothing for us. It has, albeit without acknowledging the Creator, inadvertently brought men to God’s law and order that He had put into the earth when He made it: that social cooperation and economic harmony comes from liberty, and that political intervention brings conflict and poverty. In my own case, God used these rather righteous works of men to build me up before I would find His word. Economists like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were explaining how God’s natural order works without referring to God — which I think was ultimately a fatal mistake, but nevertheless produced volumes of economic theory in the secular realm in which statists will have to contend with. 

Though we may wish for men like Mises and Rothbard to have had greater spiritual discernment, recognition of God, and citations of scripture to back up what they have said, it is hard to think they are not part of the fight against evil ideas that prevail in our world and that God had not had His hand on it. They meet the philosophies of men (almost always some form of statism and socialism) on their own grounds and present the righteous system of liberty as conducive to man’s nature and needs even according to the best means of logic, theory, history, or argumentation. Did they make a conscious decision to avoid religion because the secular humanist age didn’t allow it? There is certainly no way, using the same theoretical devices as others, that atheistic statists could dismiss them on grounds of being “religious.” Is that something that works in our favor? Or were they caught in the trappings of secular humanism themselves? If so, it seems their work was inhibited by failing to make it expressly theological. 

Though I am afraid at times that reducing one’s analysis to matters of “value free economics” runs the risk of stripping the analysis of what is, in fact, a deliberate plunder scheme of its spiritual, conspiratorial, and intentionally destructive nature (and Rothbard surely thought this too when he criticized Mises for sticking to economics alone), there is at the same time some understanding as to why able defenders of the free society in the twentieth century (e.g., Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard) kept their arguments within the secular-theoretical realm, besides that they were not Christians: They were intensely interested—fueled by the passion in their hearts for liberty—in refuting the state intervention that they knew to be destructive, but had to (in their time) be proven on merits (language, argumentation, logic, history, evidence, theory) that were more widely accepted in the secular-scientific ages as being sufficient means of proving the truth of something (e.g., that expansion of the money supply has to cause higher prices, given that monetary inflation is not the equivalent to the production of more goods). If this was a compromise to the world around them, it still seems to have produced a favorable outcome of beating the secular statists at their own game. They still proved that statism was in great error, albeit by means of human reason rather than the much more powerful word of God.

The secular-scientific age may have pushed them into thought patterns that caused them to formulate their edifices in terms of theory, logic, or reason—whether Mises’s theoretical economics unfolded from deductions of the axiomatic fact that “humans act” or Rothbard’s libertarian anarchist philosophy fleshed-out from the principles of the non-aggression axiom—that actually weakened their arguments against the statist interventionists, whose war against us is more spiritual than it is one of mere intellectual debate (what statist ever paused to take power until he could make an intellectual case for it before the people?). And this absence of God in their mouths may have weakened such a defense from systems which are based more in spiritual rebellion than they are in intellectual error. 

But it’s hard to think that there is no value in a body of social thought that is, through their work, insulated from even secular attacks through the demonstration of economic principles and the inability to violate them on economic grounds. Though God could have told us the same thing, the Misesians and Rothbardians refuted the “scientists” as their own game by laying down a scientific economics that was not empirical and yet proved that intervention would not produce the results or outcomes claimed by the interventionists. (Their claims and their true intentions, however, are two different things. Plunderers must always feed the public some pseudo-economic excuse for their policies, even if they don’t believe it themselves). These economists knew the works of the lying secular philosophers inside-out, and they refuted them on their grounds. Rothbard didn’t necessarily need to appeal to scripture (though I wish he would have); Keynes could be shown to be pimping-out a fallacious system based on the illogic of his own thinking (though Rothbard was also wise enough to attack Keynes the Man and show that he wasn’t a real economist). It was possible to show that the statist economists contradicted themselves by their own logic.

Pure economics

While my thesis is basically that such pure economics ignores the conspiratorial nature of statism, ie., that state rulers don’t care about economic theory because they have come to plunder and destroy, there is still something about pure theory that we may value. The value of economic theory is that it can refute the schemes of political interventionists, even under the best-case assumption that they’re not wicked men seeking power and plunder, by doing away with all those assumptions and simply asking if it is even possible for these things to work no matter the intentions of those who push for them. Of course, it’s an incorrect assumption to think the statist plunderers don’t know what they’re doing when they spin a philosophy of intervention as a supposedly scientific theory of how economies function, and unfortunately even many libertarians really assume the State tries and wants to make things better but just fails — that it is incompetent rather than evil, that it consists of good guys with bad ideas rather than bad guys with bad ideas.

But there’s also something to leaving out this correct conspiracy theory of government that they’re indeed intent on plunder, lest anyone claim we’re just “conspiracy theorists.” Though I believe it correct to view state action as the result of conspiracies and schemes against the people to take them for their property and put it towards the ends and interests of the rulers and their junior partners in plunder, pure economic theory has the strength of ignoring whether agents of the state are malevolent or not and still showing the folly in their policies. 

While economics—for the sake of a stronger and stand-alone argument— thus allows us to ignore the nefarious reasons that rulers want to feed people, “protect” them, or “educate” them (to control them), we should also remember that none of this can actually be accomplished for economic reasons, even if the interventionists were actually well-intentioned people (they’re not). Interventionist schemes that are hatched up by ivory tower economists (e.g., Keynes) don’t work even assuming men are true believers with good intentions who just want to help society out (they’re not).

So even if we are generous enough to drop the (correct) conspiracy theory of history that helps us to understand political action as the result of scheming to create a group of beneficiaries and a group of people extorted to fund the benefits, these programs do absolutely nothing to make society richer on the whole. There is no new production of wealth when government taxes one group of men to fund a given project, but (at best) a transfer from A to B. Taxes do not create new wealth. The State is not a producer, but a taker, and so can add no new wealth to society. These are basic facts that economic theorists are right in establishing. 

These provide a good secular basis for challenging what are really attacks on the kingdom of God. They help us see that even if someone truly wants to help the poor, socialism is still not how you do it — and this isn’t just some unfounded or “religious” objection to “socialism” pushed by people who buy into “fiction books” or “mythologies” (or whatever the heathens might accuse of for following the word of God). The poor are not helped by government distribution of existing property, which only destroys the very production efforts that actually make society richer; they are helped only by savings and new investment. Those socialists who think that we’re opposed to their schemes because we just don’t like the name “socialism” haven’t yet realized that we oppose them for the praxeological reasons that they can’t actually achieve the ends aimed for (earnestly or ostensibly). That someone is benevolent does not then make a cause for the continuance of a program that we know, on economic grounds, does not produce new wealth and, therefore, does not make society richer as a whole. This is simply the facts — the economics; it says nothing of the plunder scheme. To have “good guys” (they’re not) doing bad things still doesn’t make sense.

We can’t judge things based on what they claim to achieve, though these claims of welfare often dupe Christians into thinking that it would be unchristian to not support state programs that ostensibly help the poor, simply assuming this to be both a practical and godly way of feeding the poor. (Many “Christians” sadly arrive at the political idea of progressivism, where they illegitimately infer from the Biblical call to be charitable toward others that this means we must be statists, when this couldn’t be further from the truth, statism being the very means we forsake the Kingdom of God for the violence of men). The fact is that such socialist programs don’t work, and this is what economics has proven and what matters to us. On economic grounds alone, then, there could be nothing unchristian about opposing welfare, for it is not the means of helping the poor. We don’t even have to say anything of the attitudes behind opposing welfare, of the seeming lack of sympathy that comes along with many who oppose these programs. That such language used against state welfare may be harsh or “disdainful” does not make government taxation suddenly a benefit to the poor, and it isn’t the magical and empathetic wishes of good guys that make them work either. It is true were are called to serve the poor, but it is a great error to think this means that it should be done via the political means of violence. Indeed, this is precisely the way of selling your neighbors out—against the instruction of Jesus—to false benefactors who exercise authority.

Thanking the secular theorists

At the end of the day, I think we have to be quite grateful for the work that thinkers like Mises and Rotbard did in the secular realm of anti-socialist economic theory and libertarian political philosophy. Surely, the Lord had something to do with it when they wrote against those who scheme against God’s kingdom, though they never acknowledged Him and probably didn’t think like this themselves. God surely used them to lay down massive treatises that few of us are capable of writing, and yet which inadvertently explain the cause and effect nature of God’s natural economy. 

Expanding on their work

As much as we may wish Mises or Rothbard had not neglected God, since most all of what they say can be reconciled with the scriptures, the time is now for us to build further on their shoulders, as we stand also on the Most High Shoulders of the word of God. We need to show not just that the scriptures supported these same ideas of free people, voluntary exchange, private property, decentralization, and self-governance, as if we are trying to impose some ideology on the word of God, but that what these philosophies and ideas have said—that there is harmony, peace, and prosperity when men relate to each other freely, and conflict and destruction when violent political systems are chosen—is scriptural. What many libertarian theorists and free market economists have said is merely a secularization of what God has said, not something that we are reading into the word of God.

But now the great task before us is for this great “theory” of liberty from statism to be desecularized and placed back in the hands of the Lord. We need not be afraid, as they might have been in a secular world unfriendly to “religion,” to make the theological case for liberty and support it by the word of God. This is the only way it will ever succeed and climb out of its stagnation.  

It wasn’t a shortcoming of their body of work to have left out God, if we are now here to add it. Rothbard was able to explain the evils of statism in a way that captivated many libertarians who were yet neglecting to see that God says the same thing. He understood the evils of statism more than your average Christian, who has been duped by false preachers into believing the State was a divine and holy institution given to us for law and order. The Lord works in mysterious ways. He worked, I have no doubt, on these men. Rothbard, especially, often says things that are right in line with the scriptures, but in language that people for some reason didn’t get from their reading of the scriptures themselves. Mises, for instance, calls out the statolatry of men who worship the State in his book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, which is virtually what all the Biblical prophets spent their time doing. Rothbard points out how the State props up its system of robbery with lies, as do the scriptures when they speak of the false prophets who mislead the people (Jer 5:21, 14:14, 23:1-40). This may be a case of God using an agnostic writer to lead people closer to Him and His truths. 

Our goal now is to desecularize this work and place it back in its rightful home among God’s word. For the political theory of Rothbard—free people, free markets, private property, a decentralized and anarchist system of law and order as opposed to centralized statist system—was a godly theory to begin with, and it was only our secular age, I suppose, that led Rothbard to working within these terms and patterns of thought. Rothbard’s “anarcho capitalism” is more so a rediscovery of the work of God than it is some truly secular finding or invention from a man, hence why he was standing more or less alone in a world of statists and socialists as he fleshed-out his ideas.

It is on us now to show that most of what Rothbard has said is scriptural and to get it back on the firm foundation of standing on the word of God rather than attempting to defend them with vague secular substitutes as “natural rights” or “argumentation ethics.” Rothbard was right on many things, but without Christ as the Rock, his philosophy is standing on sand. He built a castle, albeit one without a firm foundation. 

But the work of these men—who are rather exceptional to the rule that men are cronies who invent statist philosophies—no doubt helps us to understand the mechanics of the plunder scheme that is also explained by God, how these people carry it out, and their main means of robbery. I hesitate to say that one reason people don’t understand the political theory of God is that they don’t have much of an understanding of political theory and economics to begin with, and would be greatly enlightened to this plunder system if they had read any work of Rothbard first. Because, strictly speaking, we don’t need Rothbard; scripture is sufficient itself to explain the political plunder system we live under, and indeed cuts even harder than what the secularists have said. But the free market economics and libertarian political theory of Mises and Rothbard helps. Anyone who knows the work of Mises and Rothbard already and takes to the Bible will see immediately what’s going on, even though we may not like that men seem to require this aid. And people who have no background in economics or the philosophy of liberty tend to miss the political nature of the scriptures.

I think we can still be grateful for what the secular theorists have done in the advancement of the free society that God explained. They are certainly an exception among men, and among secular theorists, who for the most part arrive at various renditions of the same statist philosophy—democracy, socialism, communism, fascism, intervention—when they don’t consult God. You are most likely to find a Keynes or a Marx if you’re searching for economic and political truths outside the realm of theology (and, of course, even within it, given that false prophets are everywhere). Most men are statists as a result of their own godless reasoning. Somehow, amazingly, men like Mises and Rotbard have more or less expounded the system of God’s liberty without relying directly on the word of God. It’s hard to think they offer us nothing.