Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D Morris

For those who live in a world of economic theory where everything is just a simple and rational debate of what works and what doesn’t without much regard to the emotions, motivations, and spiritual nature of the people behind such action, it often seems as if economic ignorance is the only thing that misguides politicians and statists alike into seeking certain policies or holding certain political positions that economists rightly see are sure to bring about negative results. They assume that if only people would listen to their theories and absorb these lessons, that they would turn away from the state systems that always intervene in economies to some degree. As Austrian school economist, F.A. Hayek, famously said, “If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.”

The problem with this is not only that people are hardheaded and often to refuse to listen to the truth, but that it isn’t even a quest for truth in the first place that they found themselves defending statism and socialism. Some people (politicians) consciously spew economic lies as a quasi-intellectual cover for their intentions to plunder people. Others defend the statist ideology because they are caught up in spiritual evil and haven’t repented from the philosophy of the world and turned to the Lord for truth.

When economists think it’s obvious that such and such policies shouldn’t be promoted by people or wouldn’t be if only they read an economics book or sat in at one of their lectures, they ignore the spiritual reasons that land people in the position of defending the worldly ideologies of statism and interventionism. Yet this view is rather common among economists who think that a simple effort to educate the public in the futility of intervention by walking them through the economic logic should suffice at getting them to abandon their ideas.

We often hear free market economists say, “How could these politicians enact this policy! It will be only make people poorer! Price controls don’t work! These people are so stupid!” They seemingly don’t realize that we’re ruled by evil men who are bent on plunder, not just incompetent fools who need to read economics books to see the truth. The real case is that those men who make “laws” in our society are not stupid at all, but are evil plunderers who know exactly what they’re doing: using the State to transfer wealth and privileges to one group of people at the expense of the other. These men precisely don’t care about economic theory, because it wasn’t rational debate that led to their decision to make such policies, but rather intentional plunder.

Thus, the men in power who make the laws don’t need to read economics books; they need to repent to the Lord, stop lying, and quit serving the devil who has sent them to steal, kill, and destroy. Yet it is often thought that they set up such plunder systems simply because they are ignorant and in need of economics training. It almost naively assumed that if politician X had read an economics book, that he wouldn’t have promoted such and such policies — as if the States isn’t an institution that exists precisely to transfer property from one group of people (taxpayers) to another (tax-parasites).

The evil side of statism and socialism

To explain the embrace of statist ideologies as a rejection of economic teachings does not do enough to account for the spiritual reasons that men fall into such traps. Nor does it account for the fact that most socialists do not even consider economic theories and subsequently reject them. Many people who embrace socialist ideologies do so without any sort of investigation into the economic feasibility of such schemes that they have already bought into in their sin. It is thus not simply due to a lack of economic knowledge that men support statism, but more so that people’s underlying sinfulness and ungodliness has led them to support such ideologies. Men may point to socialist philosophers to affirm what was already in their hearts. They may start reading Marx because they hoped to find intellectual ammunition for a wickedness that preceded their reading of these men. But it is never really these men themselves, nor the lack of reading the right ones, that causes men to support the violent system of political power. They do this because they already had it in their wicked hearts to do it.

It is naive to assume (as many economists do) that socialists have arrived at their views through rigorous debate and a rejection of economic teachings. In reality, things like emotion, moral failings, and a wicked heart, help drive men into accepting socialist schemes, rather than a genuine, intellectual pursuit of truth. The idea that socialists are just one economics lesson away from abandoning their ungodly devotion to statist schemes does not fully address the root problem of the depravity that makes men attracted to these ideas, nor the spiritual corruption that allows them to embrace such schemes. Statism is more so born in a rebellion against God than a failure to be economically educated. After all, when the Israelites sought a human king to rule over them, God called it a rejection of Him (1 Sam 8:7-8). They were even warned of what we might call the economic effects of setting up such a centralized system (1 Sam 8:10-18), and still, the idolatry for human rulers overrode their concerns for cause and effect.

Divine delusion

Furthermore, those lowly people among the public who advocate for statist and socialist schemes may well be handed over to these delusions by God, which presents an even stronger case against the idea that economics might change them (and probably helps to explain why it rarely does). They have been divinely blinded to the truth for their own evils. In many instances in the Bible, God himself deceives people who trifle with such evil ideas and gives them over to their own delusions (Jer 4:10). If men are sinful enough to think political violence is a legitimate means of solving social problems, then perhaps God is keeping them believing these lies, so they continue down on the road to destruction they deserve.

In many other instances, God gives unrepentant fools over to the very delusions they buy into and keeps them from seeing out of them. “They do not comprehend or discern, for He has shut their eyes so they cannot see and closed their minds so they cannot understand” (Isaiah 44:18). If men are so wicked-hearted that they could believe in statist and socialist plunder, then God may well be keeping these men trapped in their own foolishness, unable to see out of it. As was the case in the Bible, “For this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” (2 Thessalonians 2:11).

This presents an even stronger case against the economists idea that statists and socialists are in need of an economics lesson to straighten up: they may well be given over to foolish thinking by the hand of God, who is allowing them to chase after their foolish and destructive ways and preventing them from hearing the truth and returning so that they will be destroyed for their evils. “Furthermore, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, He gave them up to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (Romans 1:28). There may be little reason to wonder why so few statists and socialists turn from their ways once considering that they may well be people whom God has poured upon them a deep sleep (Isa 29:20).

To explain the statist/socialist position as one of a rejection of economics does not account for the spiritual side of things. It isn’t that they just lack economic education and are an economics course away from turning away from their ideas, but that all men who don’t seek God and His wisdom and counsel are likely to fall into the ideological traps of this world. Socialists are not merely lacking economic education, which leads them to unwittingly support totalitarian political agendas. Socialists are people who “follow deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons,” who are “influenced by the hypocrisy of liars,” and “whose consciences are seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:1-2).

The idea of mere ignorance fails to explain the State’s own intervention. It isn’t like this institution of plunder taxes men because they sincerely believe it to be good for “the people.” It isn’t that they are well-intentioned do-gooders who forgot to consult the economic treatises of that science’s theoreticians. Rather, this intervention occurs because these people aim to gain resources and power for themselves. They know it doesn’t serve “the people,” which is merely collectivist cover for their robbery.

It is not economic ignorance that explains the system of political power we have today, with its numerous taxes, laws, and regulations on economic action. These things are instead explained by a class of people who knowingly rob the public for all they’re worth. They are serving their father the devil, and this is why murder and plunder is in their hearts (John 8:44).

Is it just economic ignorance?

While this assumption of economic ignorance in the rulers who pitch socialist schemes to the people (Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, et al) seems like a critique of them, that they are fools who should wise up to the economic workings of the world that we’re all enlightened to, I’m afraid it’s overly generous. To suggest that these “socialists” are merely economically ignorant treats them as good guys with bad ideas. It may be true that many of them are not aware of the evils they support (though they are nevertheless consumed by evil thoughts into supporting them). There are always the useful idiots among any group of people who go along with whatever the leading intellectuals tell them. But among the leading advocates and practitioners of the worldly philosophy of statism, we are dealing with bad guys with bad ideas, with tyrants who have come up with a clever political ploy to get their schemes over on the people. They make men believe that “socialism makes it to where ‘the people’ are served again.”

They either know their ideas are fraudulent and use them as a means of deceiving others, or they simply don’t care about the truth or lies of an idea whatever and pursue their agenda of political power regardless. Either way, an economics lesson isn’t going to change them. The last thing on a socialist’s mind is a supply and demand chart.

To go further, statists and socialists show signs of demonic possession. They seem to be led to these ideas by the forces of spiritual evil more so than to be some innocent people who just rejected economics. If you’ve ever interacted with actual Marxists in person, you would see there is something much more wrong with them than people who just haven’t been shown the economic truth yet. They have a crazed look in their eyes for the “workers revolution” they have dreamed up in their heads.

The fallacy as used today

Too many economic writers give the socialists the benefit of the doubt and assume that state interventionists (ie., socialists) have merely (out of ignorance) selected the inappropriate economic means in order to attain the ends they seek. They treat socialists as people who seek liberty and prosperity just like us, albeit lacking the correct knowledge needed to put the pieces together. As one article says, rather ignorantly,

“The ultimate goals of Marxians—improvement in material and social conditions of its adherents—are no different from those of their liberal counterparts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who enjoyed considerable improvements in standard of living; it is in the choices of means that they differ.”

This just isn’t true at all. It is not the case that both advocates of free markets and socialists have a shared end of prosperity, but that the latter simply selects the wrong means out of ignorance. It assumes that the socialists’ motivations are based on economic information alone (or the lack thereof). If they had been better educated by economists, they would change their mind. It assumes that they only misunderstand the problem and mistakenly select the wrong means (state violence), and that they wish someone would show them the right way. It assumes that socialists are honestly engaged in economic debate with us but just consistently come to the wrong conclusions about the appropriate means needed to achieve some given end. It assumes that if they know that X resulted in Y rather than their aimed result of Z, that they would abandon X. It assumes that they actually want increased prosperity and peace, rather than to impoverish the masses and advance the statist agenda out of the chaos they create in the absence of markets.

The rulers and intellectuals who spread the socialist idea are not genuinely interested in furthering the cause of liberty and prosperity, and they don’t think that intervention is an acceptable half-way measure where some sort of “managed capitalism” can be tolerated. It has always been an effort of the socialists to use violent political intervention—they know this destroys a market economy—to inaugurate their socialist vision where all property and capital is “socialized” into the hands of “the people.” Many Marxists even rally democratic socialists to not be contented with such half-way gains of intervention, because communism—the complete abolition of private property and markets—is the real goal. Thus, intervention is just a policy of destructionism, meant to disrupt the market order and substitute socialism for a free society centered around trade. It is not something used by men whose end-goals are “no different” from ours.

How do socialists reject economics?

Since most men are bent on plunder or have evil in their hearts to pursue a statist agenda, it doesn’t make sense to think that economic education is all that rulers and their statist followers are lacking — that “we only differ in the choice of our means” to the same shared vision of obtaining peace and prosperity somehow. It really isn’t the case that socialists are engaged in economic debate, review the arguments of the free market economists, and make a conscious decision to reject them. Rather, socialists have bought into these ideas on faith, because they have made the State into their god, and because they have evil in their hearts to try and use the political apparatus to sabotage society and build a totalitarian system on its ashes (although one they pretend will be a “dictatorship of the proletariat”).

We might then ask what is meant by this assumption that that statism or totalitarian comes about from a rejection of economics? Do we mean because people never knew economics? Or that they were shown it and denied its validity? The first case wouldn’t quite serve as a defense of the idea that many economists are trying to get at when they say that economic ignorance leads to totalitarianism. It is one thing to never know or care about economics; it is another to see it and deny it. Only in the latter, where one had the chance to accept its principles, can we say that a rejection of the economics is really a cause of statism. Yet, these are never really the circumstances of the average socialist who never even gave economics a chance and are still socialists. 

The rejection of economics by statists and socialists alike is usually of the former type: they never even bothered with economic theories. That is, they don’t care what a science of means (economics) has to say about policies that they want to aggressively pursue regardless of any negative consequences for their enactment. Their main objectives are the end of state control regardless of whether their stated goals are achieved. The denial of economics by the average statist is thus more so a total disregard of economics, not a survey and subsequent denial. Thus, they are statists because it was already within them to be statists, not because they said “so and so’s theories aren’t true.”

The type of rejection among most socialists then is a total one, and presenting the case to them wouldn’t change their mind. Rejecting economics thus does not really explain the reason for statism. The article quoted above suggests that statists mostly adopt the latter form of ignorance of surveying the theories and then denying them. It suggests that socialists are economic theorists who however come to a different set of conclusions about the means needed to attain given ends. It suggests that they earnestly seek to know what means are available and suitable to attain X end, but that they fail to grasp the true means. 

Is it just economic ignorance?

Economics in the Austrian School sense of the term is often defined as the science of means. It is not concerned with ends as such, but merely the question of whether or not it’s true that X leads to Y or not. 

This presents another problem of the thesis that statism is largely the result of mere economic ignorance. The difference between socialists and economists is not a matter of means. Libertarians and Marxists are not simply both looking for ways to get to point Z, with one suggesting that X is the suitable means and the other suggesting that Y will get us there. The ends sought are drastically different too.

Socialists are not merely trying to attain prosperity but consistently failing to arrive there and bringing about impoverishment as some accidental result. Hence why socialists have argued that impoverishment is an acceptable trade-off for such arbitrary and undefinable goals as “equality” or closing “wage gaps.” It is permissible in their eyes to enact policies that reduce overall wealth if they can reason that it will make everyone “more equal.” They are completely fine conceding that taxation may discourage production and hamper overall wealth generation, if they believe that men can be made more materially “equal” as a result. Likewise, socialists are willing to attack individual liberty if it supposedly means making someone more “free” by transferring another person’s property to them.

As we see, socialism is not actually about shared ends and mistaken means. It is about different ends altogether, and whatever wicked means are necessary to get there, including killing people to obtain their goals. We do not share the end of liberty and prosperity with socialists. Their ends are socialism, not liberty. And they will lock people in prisons and enslave them on labor camps to obtain their totalitarian ends.

But socialism is uneconomic, right?

From a pure economics perspective, we can indeed say socialism is uneconomic. Looking at things from a pure economics perspective, which leaves out the emotions and personalities behind people who adopt ideas, we can say that socialism is theoretically flawed and entirely unworkable. But this is where the naivety of the economic theorist comes in. He assumes that economic knowledge is the main motivating factor that leads one to pursue certain policies that don’t bring about the stated aims. He assumes that everyone cares to look at the economic facts and will be converted to the cause of liberty if he were presented with them. 

It is true from the outsider’s view that interventionism is, in fact, economically ignorant. X policy doesn’t in fact achieve Z result. But this assumes that the proponents of X ever truly believed that it did — again, that the socialists differ from us only in their means.

It is not the case that all those who champion economic intervention do so because they are economically ignorant. This may be true of some people. There are always a few souls who have been deceived into advocating ideas that they would turn away from if knew better. But it doesn’t explain the masses of people who buy in statism as a rather spiritual, religious matter. Economics indeed never mattered to them. They aren’t statists because they never took an economics course or went through it and rejected its teachings. They are statists because they are first and foremost statists. They love power, rulers, control, Great Men, personalities, ideologues, centralized authority.

It may be true in a sense that others “deny” economics who pursue socialist policies. But this isn’t so much a denial anyway. They know it doesn’t work and still pursue it. They wouldn’t be changed with an economics lesson, because they are plunderers.

So if the willful cronies won’t be changed, that leaves only the people who have never come across economics. Yet, we have argued that this won’t change many of them either. 

The article quoted above states that “a significant number of people are incapable of following through the extended chains of reasoning required for comprehending economic arguments.” Why then should we think that mere economic knowledge is what is going to turn people around? Are men statists simply because they haven’t read Man, Economy, and State? And if they aren’t capable of these extended chains of reasoning, why should we think economics holds the solution for changing men’s minds? 

The need for economics to reform men seems to be overstated. It places too much value and power on “economics” to convert men to liberty. It isn’t a failure to understand economics that men have had their eyes on statist and other interventionist schemes, and it isn’t an economics lesson that will stop them. Nor is it some failed economic ideas that have led men to statism, as if all statists read Marx and got filled with economic fallacies. Men have bought into the lies and schemes of the State because they had it in their hearts to support these plunder systems. They never needed Marx to think the way they do. All that was necessary to be deceived by the popular ideas of “the world was to reject God and trust in their own wisdom. What men need in order to stop buying into the lies of statism is not an economics lesson, but repentance from the demonic spirit of statism that grips them. 

Too many economists seem to think that socialists faithfully and dispassionately grapple with economic ideas and then reject them, and that the source of their interventionist pursuits stem from their confused ideas about economics. It is more so the case for average statists that matters of economics have never even crossed their minds as they pursue utopia through political violence. While it may be the case that higher up cronies have encountered economic arguments, they have “rejected” them only in the policy sense that they pursued them regardless of knowing they won’t work. They didn’t think the economic ideas were wrong, but “ignored” them only because they were in the way of their agenda.

While it may be true that men wouldn’t be socialists if they understood economics, the key word “if” makes all the difference. We can’t assume that all men want to understand economics, that they are to hear why their ideas won’t work, and that they would abandon them if only they realized the fallacious means they have adopted.  

While it is certainly economically ignorant from the perspective of the economist that men should advocate interventionist policies, since X may not achieve Y in some objective appraisal of the situation, men gravitate toward the ideas of statism and socialism because they have it in their heart to do so. They did not survey the economic literature, make an effort to understand them, and reject the teachings of its theorists. Rather, such theories had no sway on them whatsoever and never factored into their fixation on political power systems. 

While it’s true that socialists are economic ignoramuses as a matter of fact that their ideas cannot be justified by economic science, this does not explain why they are socialists. Statism and socialism are ideas held by men who are deeply lost in sin. They are idea of men who are lost in the world and need to seek God to find the truth.