Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Proponents of freedom generally recognize that the statist/socialist scheme to centralize property, goods, and services under state control does not truly benefit the supposed “common good” as socialists claim, and that all steps toward it must necessarily destroy society.

But often this view that state intervention indeed destroys society is seen as more a matter of fact of the policies, rather than something the state rulers knew would result from their statization of society. While many recognize that States fail to serve “the common good” or “we the people” who they claim to represent, they often overlook the fact that these outward claims that violent intervention is carried out for the public benefit were always a deliberate deception by those in power, not merely an error on their part. They assume that the men who rule the world are just fools who have simply failed to understand that free markets are the best system for peace and prosperity of the masses — that the Lenins and Stalins of the world were just under the sway of Marxian ideology who truly thought socialization was a means to liberation, rather than these men being power-hungry murderers who used socialist ideology as a cover for their real intentions of ruling over men and destroying society. 

Despite their ability to identify economic fallacies, many free market economists still seem to believe that the ruling elites are simply uneducated in economics, and that providing them with an economics lesson would bring them to their senses. “Someone mail Bernie Sanders a copy of Economics in One Lesson!”

Those who have seen through the economic fallacies of intervention themselves have a tendency to think that the only problem is that other people haven’t seen what they’ve seen. If only they could teach the rulers of their errors, they would turn from them. They tend to view the rulers as economically naive, believing their role is to educate the policy-pushers on economic principles. When Vice President Kamala Harris recently proposed price controls, many free market economists questioned if they would have to explain the flaws of such policies all over again. “They will only hurt the very people they’re intended to protect!” “Someone needs to send Kamala an economics book!” 

The real intentions

The problem with thinking that we’re governed by good men with bad ideas is that the ostensible reasons given for any government policy (eg, monetary inflation to supposedly help the poor) are merely publicly stated rationales to cover for their true motivations of expanding state power and transferring wealth to themselves and the beneficiaries of this political institution. They need a reason to get their political agendas over on the populations they enslave and so package their schemes with a “public good” narrative to sell it. In order to build up a military class of corporate contractors, legislators who sign off on the deals, Pharaoh-servants who retire from these systems, and other beneficiaries of the war machine, they make everyone believe these people are “fighting for our freedom” and that you must transfer them trillions of dollars a year for your own good. Such plunder has become normalized in the American mind today, who may lament paying taxes, but nevertheless think there’s no way around having to fund a military to “keep us safe.”

While “the people” may buy into these lies, the politicians themselves are aware that these policies serve agendas other than what the public are led to believe. They know they are using deceptive schemes, even preying on the economic ignorance of the public, to advance their own interests at the expense of the people they pretend to serve. This deception has been particularly strong for Americans, who might be resistant to overt socialist schemes done in the name of the “common good,” but who readily bought into the “we the people” constitutional propaganda.

We should not assume that the men who rule over us are simply economically illiterates who keep botching their otherwise well-intentioned efforts to serve “the people.” Nor should we believe that simply educating these plunderers will stop their interventions. As Murray Rothbard recognized, every policy hides a conspiracy to redistribute wealth or benefit one person at the expense of the other, with the economic reasoning used merely as a cover for this plunder. As he wrote,

“For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the ‘public good.’ Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.”

Government agents are fully aware of the flaws in policies like taxation, credit expansion, and tariffs and the destruction they cause to the average person. They knowingly enact these measures to benefit certain groups at the expense of others. These actions are not carried out because they lack economic understanding, but rather are done in a calculated effort to serve specific interests. As Rothbard used for an example,

“Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors.”

There are always special interests at play when it comes to politics, always one group of men who are attempting to live at the expense of another, always an arm of political violence to swing against one group of people and an arm to hand out benefits to another. 

Government is plunder 

The real reason for the political disasters the world has suffered under forever runs deeper than merely ignorant politicians lacking economic understanding. The real problem is that we are governed by deliberately wicked, malicious individuals who knowingly exploit and plunder the people. It is willful evil, and not mere incompetence, that explains the nature of government. It is not a matter of accidental or incidental plunder which could have been avoided with a semester studying economics at the university, but a calculated extortion scheme perpetrated by those in power.

The men who rule over us are not merely making terrible decisions in their continued economic ignorance. They are evil men who are bent on extorting the people and have organized a political system—the legalization of plunder—that is set up for that purpose. 

“They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt one another with a net. Both hands are skilled at evil; the prince and the judge demand a bribe. When they powerful utters his evil desire, they all conspire together” (Micah 7:3).

The systematic destruction of society was not an accidental byproduct of policies hatched by men who would have known better if they had read their Ludwig von Mises. Rather, it was a deliberate design by those seeking to raise themselves up by destroying others.

We are not ruled by well-meaning but misguided do-gooders who are awaiting an economic epiphany, but rather malicious, ungodly men intent on exploiting their fellow man to line their own pockets and get rich from robbing their neighbors. 

“For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men. Like cages full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become powerful and rich. They have grown fat and sleek, and have excelled in the deeds of the wicked. They have not taken up the cause of the fatherless, that they might prosper; nor have they defended the rights of the needy” (Jeremiah 5:26-28). 

From God’s point of view, the world is not ruled by foolish lawmakers who repeatedly embrace flawed ideas that lead to “unintended consequences” that they would have wished to avoid if only they knew better. God knows it is much worse than this. We are ruled by men who knowingly pursue spoliation schemes and willfully extort and pillage the people they claim to protect, by men who are not worried one bit about the ramifications of such policies for the average person and know exactly what their robbery will mean for other men. As God saw,

“Your eyes and heart are set on nothing except your own dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood, on practicing extortion and oppression” (Jeremiah 22:17). 

We’re not dealing with people who simply think that their means justify their ends, such that state violence is permissible in that it attains the end goal of “the common good” and prosperity of “the people,” but men who “take bribes to shed blood” (Ezekiel 22:12). We are not dealing with men who rob the populations they rule over because they, in their economic foolishness, sincerely think it is the best way of caring for them, but with men who shed blood for unjust gains (Ezek 22:13). 

The State is not simply an organization formed by benevolent men who erroneously think that such political violence would be the best way of taking care of “the people,” by men who just failed to see that economic theory could predict that they would fail to achieve their stated policy objectives. Rather, the State is a plunder conspiracy set out to trap men and squeeze them for all they’re worth, replete with class of intellectuals and false pastors to defend it in the eyes of the people, who may well be ignorant of the causes and effects of their conditions and the political policies put over on them.

“The conspiracy of the princes in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing its prey. They devour the people, seize the treasures and precious things, and multiply the widows within her. Her priests do violence to My law and profane My holy things. They make no distinction between the holy and the common, and they fail to distinguish between the clean and the unclean. They disregard My Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives for dishonest gain. Her prophets whitewash these deeds by false visions and lying divinations, saying, ‘This is what the Lord GOD says,’ when the LORD has not spoken. The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy and have exploited the foreign resident without justice” (Ezekiel 22:25-29). 

The evil men who run the governments of the world would not be changed if they read an economics book, because it isn’t a matter of ideas that led them to their position, but rather a wicked attempt to rob other men. The men who rule over us and called themselves the “government” know that they’re plunders. They don’t care about your economics book. 

“Her princes are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, leaving nothing for the morning. Her prophets are reckless, faithless men. Her priests profane the sanctuary; they do violence to the law” (Zephaniah 3:3-4). 

It isn’t that politicians actually intend to help the poor but fail to do it because they wouldn’t listen to economists about the means-ends connection between their policies and reality. Rather, they are specifically looting the people at the expense of the poor and well aware that their acts impoverish men. 

“Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves. They all love bribes and chasing after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, and the plea of the widow never comes before them” (Isaiah 1:23).

It isn’t that the policies of politicians are truly intended to help the poor, but that they fail to do so because they had the wrong economic ideas about the ways the world works. Rather, they are enacted precisely to destroy the poor. We are ruled by men “who enact unjust statutes and issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of fair treatment and withhold justice from the oppressed of My people, to make widows their prey and orphans their plunder” (Isaiah 10:1-2). The state rulers know they have come to destroy the poor, and don’t care one wit about some lowly economist trying to advise them that their policies “will only hurt the poor you intend to help” — as if there is only a disconnect between their intentions and their actions, rather than a lie.

Those who try to make some rational argument to government agents of how, eg., their tax burdens are too much and can’t be paid, don’t understand that we are ruled by men who are “oppressors of the widowed and fatherless…who defraud laborers of their wages” (Malachi 3:5). Not only do they want people to serve them and transfer property to them, but they want to keep the burden so heavy that men aren’t even able to comply with their commands (for instance, tacking interest on tax debts and court fines so men will stay in bondage and can be recycled back through their jails again). Those who say “the system is broken” don’t realize it’s working exactly how the plunderers want it to work: for their benefit and not yours. Those who try to point out to the government that their “justice system” is getting things backwards don’t realize that the whole point of the monopolization of justice by the kingdoms of men is to pervert justice and truth. We’re ruled by men who “oppress the righteous by taking bribes [and] deprive the poor of justice in the gate” (Amos 5:12). There’s no reason to wonder why child traffickers connected with the government don’t go to prison, but the man who refused to get a “drivers license” from Pharaoh is thrown in a cage or the man who was beat up by one of Pharaoh’s law enforcement agents can’t successfully sue the tyrant. We are ruled by men “who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of justice” (Isaiah 5:23). 

The men who rule over us are literally evil, not mere economic ignoramuses who mess things up by accident because they were untrained in economic science and didn’t know any better. In fact, Bernie Sanders knows more economics than the foolish libertarian who thinks that all Bernie needs is to be schooled by some economist. He knows exactly how the world works, and he doesn’t care, because he’s an evil plunderer serving his father the devil. It isn’t that these men don’t understand libertarian ethics or economic principles, but that they don’t care about you and your ideas of freedom. Their whole raison d’etre is to pervert law and justice, to pervert God’s kingdom with their evils. As one prophet observed, 

“Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:4). 

We aren’t being taxed merely to pay for some supposedly necessary and indispensable public services that allegedly couldn’t be provided privately because of “externalities” or some other after-the-fact economic rationale attached to the effort, but rather precisely to get men down and keep them poor. We are ruled by men who “trample on the poor and exact from him a tax of grain” (Amos 5:11). 

Conclusion 

The value of economic education then might be to keep the public for falling for the schemes of politicians. But it is not to keep the politicians from enacting policies that they already know are plunderous. These men are not in need of economics books, but of repentance for their wicked ways.

The sooner we realize that we are ruled by wicked men who do not care about us whatsoever, the sooner we can realize that we must seek justice and order on our own, apart from their systems, which cannot be reformed — not even if they were just theoretically run by economic and ethical fools who just needed the right ideas. For such systems are founded and sustained in plunder and can’t be reformed. They must be abolished.

Repent and seek the Kingdom of God.