Transcript: Episode 0052

This transcript:
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00:00:00 – 00:00:05:	Dr.

00:00:06 – 00:00:09:	Dr.

00:00:14 – 00:00:18:	Dr.

00:00:20 – 00:00:22:	Dr.

00:00:22 – 00:00:46:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm still woe.

00:00:46 – 00:00:52:	Today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is effectively

00:00:53 – 00:00:59:	a competing moral system that we have all been inculcated in our entire lives. So,

00:01:00 – 00:01:03:	just saying the evils of capitalism, I'm sure, made some people angry already.

00:01:03 – 00:01:09:	That's one of the things we enjoy doing here is pushing buttons that no one ever pushes.

00:01:09 – 00:01:14:	The reason that we're tackling capitalism today is that, as I mentioned a few weeks ago,

00:01:14 – 00:01:20:	when we're talking about the Reformation, there's a lot of confusion of kind.

00:01:20 – 00:01:25:	As I mentioned in the Reformation episode, that there's the history of the Western Christian

00:01:25 – 00:01:31:	Church, and the fact that for a long time Roman Catholicism was the only Christianity in town.

00:01:32 – 00:01:37:	And so, when someone looks back prior to 1500, there are those who say, well, if it's Christian,

00:01:37 – 00:01:41:	then it is Roman Catholic, and therefore they're interchangeable, without being able to separate

00:01:41 – 00:01:46:	the things that were distinctly Roman Catholic from the things that were more generally Christian.

00:01:47 – 00:01:53:	Capitalism kind of works the same way. We're going to go through a definition from mises.org.

00:01:53 – 00:01:58:	As I mentioned before, I used to be huge into Austrian economics. I read a lot more about

00:01:58 – 00:02:02:	that than I've ever read about theology, which I could have that time back because it was a waste.

00:02:02 – 00:02:06:	But I learned some interesting things that turned out mostly to be false.

00:02:07 – 00:02:12:	They're the number one resource for finding out what the best form of these ideas are.

00:02:12 – 00:02:16:	So, we're going to use their definition of capitalism to show

00:02:16 – 00:02:20:	what complete nonsense it is. As we go through it, I'm going to be laughing a lot because

00:02:20 – 00:02:29:	some of it's just facially false. It's literally historically just wrong. It's a lie. And yet,

00:02:29 – 00:02:32:	it's the sort of thing that as you are listening, and we say capitalism is bad,

00:02:32 – 00:02:38:	everyone is going to be thinking, oh, you don't like private property? Oh, you don't like prices for

00:02:38 – 00:02:45:	things being low? Oh, you want communism? Are you a socialist? These are all the knee-jerk responses

00:02:45 – 00:02:51:	to any criticism of capitalism. And the problem here that we're facing is that there's been a

00:02:51 – 00:02:59:	complete confusion of the category of the capitalist moral system with just basic human action,

00:02:59 – 00:03:06:	which to Ludwig von Mises' credit, his magma opus was titled Human Action. That is a good

00:03:06 – 00:03:14:	description of human economic activity. It's human action. And he adopted the path of praxeology to

00:03:14 – 00:03:20:	describe a sort of science of human action and how people would make choices, trying to be neutral

00:03:20 – 00:03:25:	about it. It's kind of one of those spurgy things that is another problem when we're talking about

00:03:25 – 00:03:31:	a subject like this. We're going to give their definition of capitalism. You will almost undoubtedly,

00:03:31 – 00:03:36:	if you've ever studied this, disagree with some aspect of it. And so say, oh, well, no, there's

00:03:36 – 00:03:41:	this other better definition with these different terms. And so if you'd only address that one,

00:03:41 – 00:03:47:	instead, all your criticisms would be invalid. What we're going to do today is, firstly, we're

00:03:47 – 00:03:53:	going to carve out all the things that capitalism takes credit for that it has no claim on because

00:03:53 – 00:03:57:	they've existed for thousands of years before anything that anyone would have considered

00:03:57 – 00:04:03:	capitalism existed. And secondarily, we're going to illustrate that what is left of capitalism that

00:04:03 – 00:04:10:	is actually some of its novel contributions to human action are all evil. It's all bad things

00:04:10 – 00:04:16:	that hurt your neighbor in ways that you wouldn't be hurting your neighbor without the moral license

00:04:16 – 00:04:22:	from the religion of capitalism, which is fundamentally what it is. So we'll make that case

00:04:22 – 00:04:28:	throughout this hour or two. Please hear it out. One other thing that I want to say up front,

00:04:28 – 00:04:32:	we're not going to offer any alternative. We're not going to say, instead of this,

00:04:32 – 00:04:38:	do this other thing instead. This is explicitly a critique. And no, we're not being lazy. And no,

00:04:38 – 00:04:44:	we're not being shifty. It is entirely permissible to look at a thing as it is and say, okay,

00:04:44 – 00:04:48:	here's an existing functioning system. Here's what these people do. Here's how it all works.

00:04:48 – 00:04:54:	That's here's what we've all bought into. Is it achieving the goals it was intended to achieve?

00:04:54 – 00:05:00:	Is it achieving harmful things? Is it hurting people? That is entirely not only permissible,

00:05:00 – 00:05:04:	but it's necessary. And it's something that should have been going on for hundreds of years.

00:05:04 – 00:05:10:	And pretty much just kind of went by the wayside. So today, when a man speaks out against capitalism,

00:05:10 – 00:05:14:	of course, you're going to think he's a commie. Of course, he's some radical leftist,

00:05:14 – 00:05:19:	because they will criticize it. Critique itself is something that Marx sort of formalized.

00:05:20 – 00:05:24:	We're not being Marxist here. In fact, capitalism itself as a category is,

00:05:24 – 00:05:31:	in a way, essentially Marxist. It's creating the same sort of dichotomy where assets are

00:05:31 – 00:05:37:	in capital or allocated to various classes. And the fundamental definition of capitalism,

00:05:37 – 00:05:43:	provided by Mises.org, not necessarily von Mises himself, the definition is

00:05:43 – 00:05:49:	effectively the transfer of capital from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. That was the

00:05:49 – 00:05:58:	gist of the big win that they are taking credit for. So that aspect is fundamentally Marxist on

00:05:58 – 00:06:03:	its face. This is an episode of Marxism. We're just going to talk about when we're doing the

00:06:03 – 00:06:07:	things that we all think are permissible, are we sinning? And so there's going to be some

00:06:07 – 00:06:11:	Bible study in here, but not a whole lot, because frankly, a lot of these things are a matter of

00:06:11 – 00:06:17:	wisdom. You don't need a proof text, and the Bible is not an economic treatise. There are various

00:06:17 – 00:06:25:	legitimate ways of going about one's economic activity that don't fall afoul of what God commands.

00:06:25 – 00:06:31:	There are, however, numerous things that fall afoul of what God commands that are normal today.

00:06:31 – 00:06:38:	And not only normal, but again, capitalism as a moral framework necessitates the pursuit of

00:06:39 – 00:06:44:	profit, of the increase of competition and efficiency. And all of those things,

00:06:46 – 00:06:53:	in some cases, do have upsides. So we're not condemning those per se, but in every single case,

00:06:53 – 00:06:59:	the pursuit of those at the expense of neighbor will always be sin. So that's the overview of what

00:06:59 – 00:07:04:	we're going to tackle today. I'm just going to begin briefly by reading through a few parts

00:07:04 – 00:07:09:	of the definition from Mises.org, and we're going to kind of discuss it. This will be a skeleton

00:07:09 – 00:07:16:	and jumping off point. The Mises.org website begins, what is capitalism? The civilization of mankind

00:07:16 – 00:07:21:	can be traced to the establishment of property rights. With property rights, individuals could own

00:07:21 – 00:07:26:	land, capital and goods, and then trade or sell them to others. This economic activity is referred

00:07:26 – 00:07:32:	to as the market. This doesn't mean it necessarily takes place in a physical market. It simply means

00:07:32 – 00:07:36:	goods and services are voluntarily traded. For most of human history, property rights have been

00:07:36 – 00:07:42:	limited to those in power. For example, a king or lord had ultimate control over those who lived

00:07:42 – 00:07:48:	under their protection. If the king desired beets, farmers were to farm beets. If the lord needed

00:07:48 – 00:07:54:	horseshoes, blacksmiths forged horseshoes. Ordinary people had the ability to trade among

00:07:54 – 00:07:59:	themselves, but those in power could direct their production if they so desired or punish those who

00:07:59 – 00:08:07:	resisted. The emergence of capitalism changed this. When I said they're facially false arguments

00:08:07 – 00:08:12:	predicated in the definition of capitalism, this is what I'm talking about. To say that private

00:08:12 – 00:08:20:	property rights emerged as a function of the capitalist system flies in the face of all recorded

00:08:20 – 00:08:27:	human history. You can go back 3,750 years to the Code of Hammurabi, and there are numerous

00:08:27 – 00:08:33:	sections that deal specifically with private property rights for individuals. When you read

00:08:33 – 00:08:36:	through the Code of Hammurabi, I was reading it last night. It's interesting. I recommend reading it.

00:08:36 – 00:08:38:	We'll link in the show notes so you can just find it anywhere.

00:08:41 – 00:08:44:	When you look through it, there's a clear distinction in classes where there are different

00:08:44 – 00:08:50:	grades of men in civilization. Some are the lowest station, some are the highest station,

00:08:50 – 00:08:55:	and they have different rights accorded to them. Even at the very lowest station,

00:08:55 – 00:09:00:	anyone was accorded private property rights in the Code of Hammurabi. This is nearly 4,000 years

00:09:00 – 00:09:07:	ago. This is not that long after the flood. One of them reads, if anyone is committing a robbery

00:09:07 – 00:09:13:	and is caught, then he shall be put to death. Another says, if fire break out in a house and

00:09:13 – 00:09:17:	some who come to put it out, cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house and take

00:09:17 – 00:09:23:	the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into the self-same fire. That's dealing

00:09:23 – 00:09:27:	not only with private property, but dealing with looters. Somebody tries to loot your house when

00:09:27 – 00:09:32:	it's on fire. You throw them in the fire. That is a protection of private property. Hammurabi

00:09:32 – 00:09:39:	didn't make this up. This is basically godly morality. We know this because 300 years later,

00:09:39 – 00:09:45:	about 3,450 years ago, roughly, give or take, Moses recorded the same thing from God's own hand.

00:09:45 – 00:09:52:	Well, God recorded unstoned tablets by his hand and handed them to Moses in the Ten Commandments.

00:09:52 – 00:09:58:	The entire second table of the Ten Commandments is about private property.

00:09:58 – 00:10:04:	Thou shalt not kill. Your life belongs to you above all other men. Obviously, it doesn't belong to you

00:10:04 – 00:10:09:	because, in a sense, because we're all bought with a price. In the slavery episode, we talked about

00:10:09 – 00:10:16:	that. Then you have your wife, you have your reputation, your goods, your chattels, everything

00:10:16 – 00:10:20:	that belongs to your real property. All of the different things that are listed in the second

00:10:20 – 00:10:26:	half of the Ten Commandments are explicitly private property, and they're not class-based.

00:10:26 – 00:10:31:	Everyone, every man, has accorded the same private property rights. Right off the bat,

00:10:31 – 00:10:36:	if we say capitalism is evil and you say, oh, you don't like private property,

00:10:36 – 00:10:41:	you've fallen for the trap that is found everywhere capitalism is defined. It's not just this one

00:10:41 – 00:10:46:	page. You can look at any of the various definitions in a dozen different places. They all

00:10:46 – 00:10:53:	predicate the creation of capitalism as that's the beginning of private property rights.

00:10:53 – 00:10:58:	It's completely falsehood. It's completely false. Right off the bat, one of the things that we do

00:10:58 – 00:11:04:	treasure, and we should, if you have something that's yours, that is your treasure, great or small.

00:11:04 – 00:11:09:	There are parables about this. If a man has a single calf or a lamb, it's a greater treasure to him

00:11:09 – 00:11:15:	than a king who has 10,000 cattle on the hills because the king has more than he could ever need.

00:11:15 – 00:11:21:	The man who has only one thing, that's everything he has. That's a greater treasure to him,

00:11:21 – 00:11:28:	and it's his private property. It's his possessive, the genitive. That has spiritual significance

00:11:28 – 00:11:33:	because these are blessings from God that are distributed by God to us unequally.

00:11:33 – 00:11:42:	All men are unequal. All men receive unequal gifts and abilities and talents and material.

00:11:42 – 00:11:47:	That's part of God's plan. The fact that there are class systems and the different men have

00:11:47 – 00:11:53:	different stations and different degrees of wealth doesn't reduce the value of the poorest man

00:11:53 – 00:12:00:	for that which has been given to him as a gift and for him as a steward. Please don't think the

00:12:00 – 00:12:06:	capitalism is synonymous with private property because it pre-exists, which means it exists

00:12:06 – 00:12:11:	without capitalism. Capitalism could have never existed. None of the promises that you hold dear

00:12:12 – 00:12:18:	as a capitalist are necessary for private property to exist. I think that's a crucial

00:12:18 – 00:12:22:	place to begin because a lot of what's downstream is predicated on just this sort of nonsense.

00:12:24 – 00:12:30:	And just reading through that first part of this definition from Mises, you would almost be tempted

00:12:31 – 00:12:35:	to try and give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're speaking about real property,

00:12:36 – 00:12:41:	but then they go ahead and list land, capital, and goods. And so they're speaking both about

00:12:41 – 00:12:46:	real property and chattel or personal property. And for those who aren't familiar with the terms,

00:12:46 – 00:12:51:	that's just the distinction. Real property essentially is land. There's a little more in

00:12:51 – 00:12:57:	the definition, but it's essentially land and personal property and chattel property are interchangeable.

00:12:57 – 00:13:04:	That would be all of the things you own that are not land. And so capitalism really can't claim

00:13:04 – 00:13:09:	either of those, but they really would have had a stronger argument if they tried to just base it

00:13:09 – 00:13:18:	on real property, because the emergence of more widespread ownership of real property and the

00:13:18 – 00:13:25:	recognition of those rights, historically, to some degree, coincides with the rise of capitalism,

00:13:25 – 00:13:32:	but it's not causally related to it. And of course, even historically, you had men who owned property,

00:13:32 – 00:13:38:	but you did have in feudal systems and others like that, it was larger ownership of property that was

00:13:38 – 00:13:45:	then through various contracts and such relationships delegated to others. I don't think we need to get

00:13:45 – 00:13:53:	into how those worked, even though they are related to how capitalism arose. And really,

00:13:53 – 00:13:57:	it arose as a function of usury, which we'll definitely get into in this episode,

00:13:58 – 00:14:02:	because you cannot really speak of capitalism without speaking of usury.

00:14:03 – 00:14:08:	There's one specific thing that I want to refer to on feudalism and serfdom, because

00:14:08 – 00:14:13:	it is true that capitalism was seen as sort of flipping the tables on those things.

00:14:14 – 00:14:21:	When you look at the feudal systems at Barons and Lords of the Manor and the contractual duties

00:14:21 – 00:14:31:	of serfs, the duties were tied to land. And so if a man was a serf, if he was either a freeman who

00:14:31 – 00:14:38:	made himself a serf to pay off a debt or something, he became tied to the land in such a way that it

00:14:38 – 00:14:43:	was transferable to his children. So when you're a serf, your kids are going to be serfs tied to the

00:14:43 – 00:14:50:	property. So the baron didn't own you per se, but he owned the land to which you were tied

00:14:50 – 00:14:57:	contractually. So he could sell the land and you effectively went with it. So if your baron sold

00:14:57 – 00:15:03:	the land that you lived on, that you had your small plot on, you worked on for him, to someone else,

00:15:04 – 00:15:10:	you would then answer them. That'd be your new boss, same as the old boss. And we think, oh,

00:15:10 – 00:15:16:	wow, that's slavery. Road to Serfdom is another famous book that came out of the Austrian school.

00:15:17 – 00:15:22:	The interesting thing about that is we still have effectively the same thing today. I was born in

00:15:22 – 00:15:26:	Northeast Ohio, in Ashtabula County, in a town that my family built 200 years prior.

00:15:28 – 00:15:35:	When I was born, I automatically became a citizen of Ohio. I had to obey the laws of Ohio. I had to

00:15:35 – 00:15:42:	pay taxes in Ohio. Everything, not because I agreed to any contract. I didn't sign anything. I was

00:15:42 – 00:15:47:	born. And because my father lived there, and I was born there, I inherited all the same legal

00:15:47 – 00:15:54:	obligations that he did. Now, the primary difference between a Serf and an Ohioan, well,

00:15:54 – 00:15:59:	there are several, but I'm not sure how many of the Ohioans actually win. The primary difference is

00:15:59 – 00:16:04:	that a Serf wasn't just free to leave. He was bound to the land, where someone in Ohio is free to

00:16:04 – 00:16:10:	leave, and many of us have. Other than that, it's kind of the same thing. You can absolutely inherit

00:16:10 – 00:16:16:	something that's tied to the land. As a citizenship works out, nationality, you know, small end works.

00:16:16 – 00:16:22:	When you are born in a place, you become a citizen of that place if it's your own people.

00:16:22 – 00:16:29:	And so, even though the idea of Serfdom and being tied to land sounds alien to us,

00:16:29 – 00:16:36:	we all have the same system today. Now, there are variations, but I own my house free and clear.

00:16:36 – 00:16:42:	I have no mortgage or anything. I still have a very large property tax bill every year. If I don't

00:16:42 – 00:16:48:	pay that, the state takes my property, my house, everything, and sells it to pay off that debt.

00:16:48 – 00:16:53:	And then someone else has it, and the other person will pay the property tax instead. And the state

00:16:53 – 00:17:00:	doesn't care who lives here as long as that tax gets paid. That's another aspect of Serfdom.

00:17:00 – 00:17:08:	There's a parcel with a duty on it. It's got to be paid annually. These systems are thousands of

00:17:08 – 00:17:14:	years old. And so, the formal structures around them change, but the principles don't. You don't

00:17:14 – 00:17:20:	pay your property tax, you lose your house. If you don't pay your baron when you're a Serf,

00:17:20 – 00:17:24:	you're going to get thrown in prison or you're going to face worse punishment. Same deal.

00:17:24 – 00:17:30:	Even in our system today, the penalty is always death. If I were to refuse to pay my taxes,

00:17:30 – 00:17:36:	and when the county said, you got to do this, the town in this case, said you got to pay your

00:17:36 – 00:17:41:	tax is like, no way, I'm not paying anything. Eventually, they're going to send the cops.

00:17:41 – 00:17:47:	And if a confrontation continues to escalate, someone's going to be hurt or killed because

00:17:47 – 00:17:51:	they're not going to take no for an answer. Because one of the properties of a state,

00:17:51 – 00:17:56:	something that the libertarians do get correct, is that the state is in essence, in one form,

00:17:57 – 00:18:04:	the monopoly of violence for a particular geographic area. And my town and my state

00:18:04 – 00:18:09:	have a monopoly on violence here. I can't go around committing violence to enforce my will.

00:18:09 – 00:18:15:	They can't. And their will is passed by statute. And one of the wills that are expressed by

00:18:15 – 00:18:21:	statute are that I have to pay property taxes. So I have to take it or leave it of option of

00:18:21 – 00:18:26:	selling this property and maybe going somewhere where there's no property tax. But I'm still a

00:18:26 – 00:18:31:	type of Serf. It's not called by that today. But again, these ancient things that were told,

00:18:31 – 00:18:37:	capitalism said all that aside, nonsense. It's all still here. New boss, same as the old boss.

00:18:37 – 00:18:41:	All they did was change the flag. Most of the rest is the same.

00:18:42 – 00:18:50:	I think maybe I will go into very briefly the history of some of how these systems arose,

00:18:51 – 00:18:58:	just because they will give people a general understanding of how we got to some of the

00:18:58 – 00:19:05:	systems we see today and some of the interest charges and such. And so under the feudal system,

00:19:07 – 00:19:11:	actually, before I get to the feudal system, I want to point out just a quick historical fact.

00:19:11 – 00:19:17:	We're not going to go over extensively the history of the church's treatment of the

00:19:17 – 00:19:20:	charging of interest and usury because we went over that previously in another episode.

00:19:21 – 00:19:28:	But just to give an idea of how uniform the condemnation of the charging of interest was

00:19:28 – 00:19:35:	historically, it was condemned by, for instance, Aristotle, Chrysostom, and Augustine. So Pagan

00:19:35 – 00:19:41:	and Christian alike condemned it as inherently wicked, the charging of interest. And notably,

00:19:42 – 00:19:48:	usury historically means the charging of any interest. It doesn't mean excessive interest,

00:19:48 – 00:19:54:	it doesn't mean interest over a certain percentage. It means money making a return,

00:19:55 – 00:20:00:	because money was held historically to be infertile, to be unproductive,

00:20:01 – 00:20:07:	and so it should not see a return. And that's important for this history, this little tidbit

00:20:07 – 00:20:13:	about feudalism, because the church knew this, and all the Christians knew this, the Christian

00:20:13 – 00:20:20:	rulers knew this, but they wanted to get around it. And so one of the ways they got around it

00:20:21 – 00:20:27:	was they set up a legal fiction, this is essentially pillpull is what we're getting into,

00:20:27 – 00:20:33:	but they set up a legal fiction whereby the owner of property could lease the property

00:20:34 – 00:20:41:	through a contract to another individual, and then that individual would pay a fixed sum back

00:20:41 – 00:20:48:	to the owner of the property, and you would effectively wind up with a charging of interest

00:20:48 – 00:20:54:	on the sale of that property, but in such a way constructed, contractually and legally in such

00:20:54 – 00:20:59:	a way that the church said, the Roman church said that no, that's not interest, that's fine,

00:20:59 – 00:21:07:	that's not usury. And so that is the beginning of where we see the charging of interest entering

00:21:07 – 00:21:14:	into the economic system. And we see this throughout Europe under the Roman Catholic Church.

00:21:15 – 00:21:21:	This is one of the things that was condemned by the conservative wing of the Reformation.

00:21:22 – 00:21:29:	Luther condemned this. Luther has a very good treatise on usury and just on the economy,

00:21:29 – 00:21:35:	trade generally. If I can find a free English version of that, that is a decent translation,

00:21:35 – 00:21:40:	I will put that in show notes. Again, unfortunately, the American edition is copyright encumbered.

00:21:43 – 00:21:45:	But that basically is the outline of where we have

00:21:47 – 00:21:54:	some of the modern problems we see today entering into the system in the 1500s. And this really is

00:21:54 – 00:22:01:	proto-capitalism is what we see. We see the rise of capitalism, the beginnings of capitalism in

00:22:01 – 00:22:09:	this era. And notably, those who critique capitalism in this era, the 1500s, 1600s,

00:22:10 – 00:22:17:	perhaps a little after that, they're not using the word capitalism. They describe the system,

00:22:17 – 00:22:25:	but what they call it is usury. And so for a while in Christian thought, capitalism and usury in

00:22:25 – 00:22:32:	certain writers, at least, are essentially interchangeable because the entire system is built

00:22:32 – 00:22:40:	on usury. And we see that today, obviously. Look at our system now. Everything is built on debt,

00:22:40 – 00:22:45:	on debt slavery. Quite frankly, it is interest slavery, it is usury, which is impermissible

00:22:45 – 00:22:50:	for the Christian. We went over that in the previous episode, we went over the verses,

00:22:50 – 00:22:55:	the parts of scripture that very clearly condemn the charging of interest. And yet that is what

00:22:55 – 00:23:02:	this system is built on. And so if a system is built on something that is per se sin,

00:23:03 – 00:23:08:	Christians cannot support that system. And that is the fundamental problem that we see

00:23:09 – 00:23:15:	with capitalism. But as a related point, I would want to highlight,

00:23:16 – 00:23:24:	neither woe nor I has a real economic ideology. I believe that is fair to say at this point,

00:23:24 – 00:23:31:	since you've rejected the the Mises stuff. And the reason for that is very simple.

00:23:32 – 00:23:39:	Economics is a tool. The market is a tool. As I've said before and elsewhere, I don't have

00:23:39 – 00:23:47:	an ideology of hammers, because a hammer is a tool. I don't need an ideology with regard to tools.

00:23:48 – 00:23:54:	Yes, you use good tools, because that typically winds up with a better outcome,

00:23:54 – 00:23:57:	but you don't have an ideology attached to the tool. You don't have,

00:23:58 – 00:24:04:	you don't look at the tool and say you must use this tool. You use the tool that is appropriate

00:24:04 – 00:24:09:	for the task at hand. And the problem we see when it comes to economics,

00:24:10 – 00:24:15:	is that certain economic ideas and certain economic systems are raised to the level,

00:24:15 – 00:24:20:	not of a tool, but of an idol. And so it becomes something where you have to say

00:24:20 – 00:24:25:	capitalism is right and you have to pursue this because it is capitalist. And that just

00:24:25 – 00:24:30:	doesn't make any sense, because you have to look at the point of the economy. What is the goal of

00:24:30 – 00:24:36:	an economy? And obviously it has a number of goals, but not least of them is serving your neighbor

00:24:38 – 00:24:44:	and serving all of your neighbors as best you can. Capitalism doesn't do that. And so you have to

00:24:44 – 00:24:50:	look at the economic system and look at what the goals are and figure out what is permissible for

00:24:50 – 00:24:56:	Christians to do and how best to pursue that. And capitalism does not do that, because it

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	becomes this idol that you have to, you have to worship essentially, because you have to say

00:25:01 – 00:25:08:	capitalism is good because it is opposed to X, Y, and Z. And so I have to do A, B, and C,

00:25:08 – 00:25:13:	because capitalism tells me I have to do that. And that just doesn't make any sense,

00:25:13 – 00:25:19:	because again, economics, the market, all of these related things are tools and they should

00:25:19 – 00:25:26:	be used and treated as tools. There's a great clip from a Tucker Carlson interview with someone

00:25:26 – 00:25:32:	else that I wasn't able to find the exact quote, but the gist of it was someone was asking him

00:25:32 – 00:25:39:	about economics. And he said, in effect, I don't see capitalism as some sort of religious thing.

00:25:39 – 00:25:45:	If your economic system means that my child cannot grow up and have a family,

00:25:45 – 00:25:49:	I will burn your system to the ground. I believe he used those exact words. I was having trouble

00:25:49 – 00:25:54:	finding, maybe if I find the clip, we'll put it in the show notes, but that's pretty much

00:25:54 – 00:26:00:	what Corey just said. Tucker and Corey and I don't agree on many things, but we agree on others.

00:26:00 – 00:26:05:	And Tucker came to that conclusion as a moral conclusion. He's mentioned that he's been reading

00:26:05 – 00:26:11:	the Bible a lot more recently as an Episcopalian for the first time in his life. He was astonished

00:26:11 – 00:26:15:	after he got fired by Foxy, started reading the Bible and realized there was some great

00:26:15 – 00:26:21:	stuff in there and it blew him away. And so he came to that moral conclusion. That was his

00:26:21 – 00:26:26:	instinct to begin with, but the principle is absolutely right. I don't care about your so-called

00:26:26 – 00:26:33:	system. If you're going to harm my family, then that makes you an enemy. And if you want to say

00:26:33 – 00:26:39:	that the enemy's name is capitalism, game on. That's a moral position and it's an entirely

00:26:39 – 00:26:44:	illicit one. And it's one that frankly, we should all be able to at least evaluate. Even if you

00:26:44 – 00:26:52:	disagree with us, you should be able to separate the principles of the thing from its outcomes

00:26:53 – 00:26:59:	to say, well, as Corey just said, if it's doing harm, it cannot be permitted. And I don't care

00:26:59 – 00:27:05:	what excuses you have for it. I mentioned earlier that Mises adopted praxeology and

00:27:05 – 00:27:12:	fleshed it out and the idea of formalizing human action to explain why people make economic

00:27:12 – 00:27:19:	calculations. And that is part of this. It is valuable that we all make economic calculations

00:27:19 – 00:27:24:	all the time. A price is a signal. It's a signal to the customer. It's a signal to the market.

00:27:25 – 00:27:30:	It's a signal to competitors. And these sorts of signals exist in everything. When you

00:27:31 – 00:27:36:	spend your time on something, that is a signal. We've said before, when we first started Stone

00:27:36 – 00:27:41:	Choir, we were shooting for about an hour per episode. I think the first one we did was like

00:27:41 – 00:27:45:	75 minutes. And then the second one was 90 minutes and we were kind of shy about that.

00:27:45 – 00:27:49:	And then almost immediately we did one that was two hours long. And we called it a double episode

00:27:49 – 00:27:54:	to like, oh, this is way too long. No one's ever going to spend two hours listening to a podcast.

00:27:54 – 00:27:59:	And it turned out that wasn't true because we have a lot of dense content. There's good content

00:27:59 – 00:28:03:	here, which a lot of people agree with. We're thankful for that's our goal. We don't want a

00:28:03 – 00:28:08:	lot of fluff and repetitiveness. So it turned out that people are willing to allocate two hours,

00:28:08 – 00:28:15:	maybe more in some cases, to one podcast from just two random guys. That is you voting with your

00:28:15 – 00:28:21:	time, which in some ways is even more valuable than your money. Money is fungible. Money is

00:28:21 – 00:28:26:	replaceable. You will never get the two hours that you spend listening to us back to do anything

00:28:26 – 00:28:33:	else. So when you spend it, you are voting with your ears. You're voting with with the sands of

00:28:33 – 00:28:38:	time that are that are fading away. They come and go and you can't get them back. And so to spend them

00:28:39 – 00:28:45:	is it is an expression of a personal preference to say, this is valuable to me. I would rather

00:28:45 – 00:28:49:	spend two hours listening to these guys talk about this than you know, whatever else, you know,

00:28:49 – 00:28:54:	nice and loud podcast. You know, one of the reasons we don't want to do video or anything more

00:28:54 – 00:28:59:	demanding is that you can put on a podcast and you can wash dishes or mow the yard or

00:28:59 – 00:29:04:	play video games or, you know, there are a thousand things you can do and still listen.

00:29:04 – 00:29:08:	And in some ways you can listen even better than if you were looking at our faces. You know,

00:29:08 – 00:29:13:	I'm not bad looking. I wouldn't mind being on video, but there's no point. I find it stupid to look at

00:29:13 – 00:29:18:	people to listen to them personally. It's just, I think it's dumb. I want to listen to the words

00:29:18 – 00:29:22:	that you're saying that maybe your face gets in the way, maybe make weird expressions or

00:29:22 – 00:29:27:	the goofy eyebrows or something and it's a distraction. So when you spend two hours just

00:29:27 – 00:29:33:	listening, you're saying this is of good use of my time. When you spend your dollars, your hard-earned

00:29:33 – 00:29:38:	dollars on anything, you're voting with them and saying of all the things that I could purchase

00:29:39 – 00:29:44:	with the time that I spent to earn this money, I choose to spend it on this. And

00:29:45 – 00:29:52:	essential in the capitalist system is the claim that that is unique to capitalism.

00:29:52 – 00:29:58:	When you look at the history of money, it goes back to the beginning. Every civilization we've

00:29:58 – 00:30:04:	ever found not only has coinage, you know, the Bible is filled with different kinds of coins,

00:30:04 – 00:30:12:	you know, denari, shekels, all these different weights of gold and silver were specific coins

00:30:12 – 00:30:18:	that were used to pay certain debts. So, you know, when a man was paid his day's wages,

00:30:18 – 00:30:24:	he couldn't go home and eat the denarius. He had to trade it for food. That's an economic system

00:30:24 – 00:30:30:	that is a monetary system. It's free trade. You know, even if there was a king or a pharaoh or

00:30:30 – 00:30:34:	something else, he still decided what he was going to eat that day and he spent his day's wages on it.

00:30:34 – 00:30:41:	So, again, these claims that capitalism has sold to everybody, you think, oh, man, you know, before

00:30:42 – 00:30:48:	the advent of basically the Enlightenment, everybody was a serf. And that's kind of where the

00:30:48 – 00:30:53:	handoff fundamentally gets anchored. You know, it's not clean, as Corey is saying. Like, there's

00:30:53 – 00:30:59:	historical evolution that moved from the feudal system, which was the most recent version of

00:30:59 – 00:31:06:	something before full-blown capitalism until we got to what we effectively have today. But all

00:31:06 – 00:31:13:	these things like prices and commerce and markets and individual trade for objects of value,

00:31:14 – 00:31:19:	it's been around forever. And another thing I want to read, Max, some more from the Mises

00:31:19 – 00:31:24:	definition of capitalism. They claim, you know, tasselier, but it's clearly implicit.

00:31:25 – 00:31:31:	Specialization of labor is intrinsic to capitalism. So what is capitalism goes on?

00:31:32 – 00:31:36:	Capitalism is mass production of goods to satisfy the needs of the greatest number of people.

00:31:37 – 00:31:42:	Capitalism was revolutionary by recognizing property rights for all, regardless of background

00:31:42 – 00:31:47:	and social standing. Under capitalism, even the most vulnerable in society had an absolute

00:31:47 – 00:31:51:	claim to their own labor and property. This did not guarantee equality of property,

00:31:51 – 00:31:56:	but capitalism eliminated any right by anyone else to infringe upon it. So there are two things

00:31:56 – 00:32:02:	going on there. One, when they talk about mass production, that is implicitly talking about

00:32:02 – 00:32:08:	specialization of labor, meaning that no man, you know, on the frontier in the New World,

00:32:08 – 00:32:13:	a man had to be able to build his house, you know, chop down trees, butcher deer, kill deer,

00:32:14 – 00:32:19:	plant crops, you know, his wife had to be able to clean all that stuff to be able to prepare it for

00:32:19 – 00:32:25:	him. She had to be able to make clothes. Like out on the frontier, you had whatever little amount

00:32:25 – 00:32:30:	you could carry with you, and you had to make the rest when you got there. That's the opposite

00:32:30 – 00:32:36:	of specialization of labor. That is subsistence level of living where you basically have to be

00:32:36 – 00:32:41:	a full-fledged generalist and everything to the point that you can do anything that needs done

00:32:41 – 00:32:47:	because there's no one else around to help you. It's also in economics. It's popularly used in

00:32:47 – 00:32:53:	the Desert Island example of economic theory, where you'd be in Desert Island where there are

00:32:53 – 00:32:57:	just two people there, you know, there's no money, there's no anything, and they have to,

00:32:58 – 00:33:03:	they need food, they need shelter. How do they decide how to do things? And so

00:33:05 – 00:33:11:	when specialization of labor comes along into, you know, a population group, what that means is

00:33:11 – 00:33:17:	that one guy can focus on being a farmer. He can get better at farming than he is at felling trees

00:33:17 – 00:33:23:	or building cabins because someone else can build his cabin for him or at least do, you know,

00:33:23 – 00:33:28:	help him out. So the hard stuff that someone else is more efficient at, he doesn't have to worry

00:33:28 – 00:33:34:	about because he's more efficient at growing food. And therefore, his specialization creates

00:33:34 – 00:33:39:	a surplus of food where he's producing more food than he needs for himself. He can sell some of it,

00:33:39 – 00:33:44:	and then he can exchange for other goods. And that specialization of labor builds up and builds up

00:33:45 – 00:33:50:	until you get to today, where most people can't, they can do a couple things, you know, maybe

00:33:50 – 00:33:54:	kind of okay. And everything else, they're just at a loss. Like you have to buy it from Amazon and

00:33:54 – 00:33:59:	go to the store. If not for that, and you can't call somebody to help when something breaks,

00:33:59 – 00:34:05:	you have no idea what to do. That's where most people are today. And so work at the terminal

00:34:05 – 00:34:11:	end of something that capitalism takes credit for. And to some extent, you know, I don't know

00:34:11 – 00:34:16:	whether or not to completely hang the state of man's incompetence today, including my own,

00:34:16 – 00:34:21:	like there are tons of things I should know how to do that I can't. I don't know how much

00:34:21 – 00:34:28:	of I can hang on capitalism, but you can absolutely state certainly that specialization of labor

00:34:28 – 00:34:34:	is as old as mankind itself. We see in the beginning of Genesis, when it describes Cain's

00:34:34 – 00:34:40:	children, as it goes down the list before we get up to the men who lived at the same time as Methuselah

00:34:40 – 00:34:48:	and Lamech and Noah. It says, Adab or Jabal, he was the father of those who dwell in tents and

00:34:48 – 00:34:53:	have livestock. His brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all who play the lyre and pipe.

00:34:53 – 00:34:59:	Zilla also bore Tubal Cain. He was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. And even Cain

00:34:59 – 00:35:07:	and Abel themselves were farmer and a shepherd. So this specialization of labor is literally as

00:35:07 – 00:35:14:	old as mankind itself. And intentionally also in that passage on Cain's genealogy, prior to the

00:35:14 – 00:35:20:	flood, you have instruments of bronze and iron. Something emerged in the 19th century, the tripartate

00:35:20 – 00:35:26:	system of distinguishing epochs of man as the stone age, the bronze age, and the iron age.

00:35:28 – 00:35:33:	And this is used by anthropologists as they're digging stuff up to help determine

00:35:33 – 00:35:38:	how old is something. Because even if you don't know anything about what you're looking at apart

00:35:38 – 00:35:45:	from where it is in the world, you can tell by what materials it's made from the degree of

00:35:45 – 00:35:50:	technological advancement that the people have. So I find it very interesting that bronze and iron

00:35:50 – 00:35:56:	are both mentioned because one of the things that's completely absent from a lot of the modern

00:35:56 – 00:36:01:	economic discussion as it goes back to the really ancient historical stuff is it completely ignores

00:36:01 – 00:36:07:	the Bible. Almost all the stuff is really predicated on evolutionary thought, relayed to man,

00:36:07 – 00:36:14:	where we were hunter-gatherers and then started settling and consolidating in cities,

00:36:14 – 00:36:20:	and that's the theory. It's false. Cain left and went to another city. He built a city, his

00:36:20 – 00:36:24:	children built a city. There were cities from the very beginning where they big? No, there weren't

00:36:24 – 00:36:29:	that many people. They got bigger and bigger. So you have cities, you have bronze, you have iron,

00:36:29 – 00:36:35:	all before the flood, and that flies in the face of many of the modern timelines for

00:36:36 – 00:36:41:	how we're told that human civilization advanced. When you look at the Bible, if you just believe

00:36:41 – 00:36:47:	it as a historical record, it's the oldest, most reliable historical record we have of anything

00:36:47 – 00:36:51:	because it was written by an infallible author. So when God says bronze and iron, and it's what

00:36:51 – 00:36:59:	those words actually mean, you know the theories that relate to stone and bronze and iron age

00:36:59 – 00:37:02:	being these distinct things that happened over much longer periods of time,

00:37:02 – 00:37:08:	cannot be true. If already prior to the flood, those things were occurring. So there's a lot

00:37:08 – 00:37:13:	that's missing just from the historical economic discussion of these things because people don't

00:37:13 – 00:37:19:	believe the Bible. Again, it's not that the Bible's economic treatise, but it's a historical record.

00:37:19 – 00:37:27:	If this was happening over 4,500 years ago, we can count on it. And so that specialization of

00:37:27 – 00:37:32:	labor is intrinsic to the definition of capitalism. And again, the second part of that definition,

00:37:32 – 00:37:38:	talking about revolutionary property rights, again, it was preserved in the Code of Hammurabi.

00:37:38 – 00:37:44:	It was preserved in the Ten Commandments. And other nations had similar laws. The fact that

00:37:44 – 00:37:50:	these codifications exist today because they're physical records that were preserved doesn't

00:37:50 – 00:37:54:	make them unique. It just makes them beneficial to show how old these ideas are.

00:37:54 – 00:38:02:	On the note of the history of coinage, I will put a link in the show notes to the Berlin State

00:38:02 – 00:38:08:	Museum, which has one of the most impressive coin collections in the world. And conveniently,

00:38:09 – 00:38:15:	they have digitized over 35,000 coins, and those can be freely browsed on their website. So

00:38:16 – 00:38:22:	trying to claim that capitalism is anyway connected with the rise in the use of money is

00:38:22 – 00:38:25:	absolutely ludicrous given the ages of some of these coins.

00:38:27 – 00:38:32:	I want to expand a little bit, just very briefly, on something I said previously,

00:38:33 – 00:38:37:	because I know that we do have Roman Catholic listeners, and I'm not being uncharitable

00:38:37 – 00:38:43:	to Rome when I mentioned that Rome permitted this to happen, and in some ways oversaw it,

00:38:43 – 00:38:49:	because Rome had a very big interest in this rise in the charging of interest

00:38:50 – 00:38:55:	for a specific reason. Rome was the biggest landowner of the time,

00:38:56 – 00:38:59:	and so they wanted to be able to profit from this system.

00:39:01 – 00:39:06:	One of the individuals who actually wrote on this subject at the time was none other than

00:39:06 – 00:39:14:	Johann Eck, yes the very same one, who was sent by Rome to oppose Luther. In 1514 he wrote a

00:39:14 – 00:39:20:	treatise arguing that charging interest was morally permissible, so long as it did not exceed 5%.

00:39:22 – 00:39:28:	Luther in part responded to that treatise, but in general was just writing on the matter more

00:39:28 – 00:39:35:	generally because it was happening at the time. He responded with the traditional opposition

00:39:35 – 00:39:42:	to the charging of interest. Yes, in some places you will find in Luther where he attempts to argue

00:39:42 – 00:39:48:	for capping interest at 5%, but the reason that he did that, you have to know the historical context.

00:39:49 – 00:39:56:	Certain loans at the time and the loans to which he was responding charged as much as 50% interest,

00:39:57 – 00:40:03:	and so he was attempting to mitigate the evil when he was saying that. If you read all of his

00:40:03 – 00:40:08:	writings generally, no, he held the traditional position that interest was inherently wicked and

00:40:08 – 00:40:15:	should be banned. That's what he wanted to see in society. On the point of the specialization

00:40:15 – 00:40:21:	of labor, I would actually say that it is fair to say that capitalism, as it has evolved,

00:40:23 – 00:40:29:	has resulted in men being less competent generally. Because historically,

00:40:31 – 00:40:35:	most men would have been producing, yes they would have been specialized to a certain degree,

00:40:35 – 00:40:43:	but they would have been producing some concrete, some tangible good, and if you put your mind to it

00:40:43 – 00:40:48:	and you put in the effort, you will get better at that over time. If you produce shoes for 40 years,

00:40:49 – 00:40:54:	you're going to be a pretty good cobbler at the end of 40 years. Today we don't have that,

00:40:55 – 00:41:00:	because capitalism, and this is why you end up with the lack of competence,

00:41:01 – 00:41:07:	capitalism pushes for profit and so-called efficiency, and if you push for those, what you

00:41:07 – 00:41:14:	end up with is cost cutting in as many places as possible, which typically means outsourcing

00:41:14 – 00:41:19:	in cheaper materials, and so you wind up with a product that is inferior to what would have been

00:41:19 – 00:41:26:	produced in an earlier economic system. The only benefit is that it's cheaper, but that's not

00:41:27 – 00:41:34:	actually a benefit, and the reason that it is not a benefit is because cheap products are not

00:41:34 – 00:41:42:	cheap. Cheap products are in fact extremely expensive, and that's not just in terms of resources

00:41:42 – 00:41:50:	consumed, including physical resources and time, it's expensive in terms of pollution and the

00:41:50 – 00:41:58:	environment, but additionally, and this is a core point of importance, it's not even cheaper

00:41:59 – 00:42:06:	in and of itself, because a cheaper good wears out faster, and so for instance, a great example

00:42:06 – 00:42:12:	of this, if you buy a cheap pair of shoes and you are someone who wears out your shoes, so someone

00:42:12 – 00:42:18:	who works at a physical job, you are going to need to buy new shoes practically every year,

00:42:18 – 00:42:25:	perhaps even more often with how low the quality is these days, whereas if you buy a good pair of

00:42:25 – 00:42:31:	shoes and they all used to be good, that's the problem here, capitalism has created that category

00:42:31 – 00:42:36:	of cheap, worthless shoes, if you bought a good pair of shoes, you could keep them for the rest

00:42:36 – 00:42:42:	of your life, yes you would have to actually treat them and repair them and occasionally resold them,

00:42:43 – 00:42:50:	but overall, they would actually cost you less money, so capitalism doesn't even

00:42:51 – 00:42:58:	achieve the goals that it says it does, it actually does the exact opposite, and so you wind up driving

00:42:58 – 00:43:05:	out the specialized artisans, you wind up driving out the competent men, because most people don't

00:43:05 – 00:43:11:	think through the consequences of buying the cheap item, and so they buy the cheap item,

00:43:11 – 00:43:17:	which means the artisan who produces the more expensive item that actually isn't more expensive

00:43:17 – 00:43:22:	if you run the total cost of ownership calculation, he's driven out of the market,

00:43:22 – 00:43:27:	and so what you wind up with is the sort of system we have today, where it is an ocean

00:43:29 – 00:43:36:	of cheap, virtually worthless products, and then at the far other end, extremely expensive goods

00:43:36 – 00:43:43:	that are still made in a traditional way, and so these things that cost these exorbitant sums of

00:43:43 – 00:43:48:	money today, well that's just the quality that your great great grandfather would have been able

00:43:48 – 00:43:53:	to buy at the shop down the street, and he didn't have to spend that much money on it,

00:43:54 – 00:44:00:	that's the consequence in concrete terms for many goods of the capitalist system,

00:44:01 – 00:44:07:	you wind up with lower quality, and over the lifetime of your purchasing of that category

00:44:07 – 00:44:13:	of goods, it costs you more, well why is that a system, why is that a thing, it doesn't make any

00:44:13 – 00:44:21:	sense, except it does, and the reason it makes sense is because capitalism benefits those who have

00:44:21 – 00:44:26:	the capital, now I know some are going to say well that sounds like a Marxist critique,

00:44:26 – 00:44:33:	Marx was not 100% wrong, this is a vitally important point that I am going to make here,

00:44:34 – 00:44:41:	some of the things that Marx said were correct, that's not the important point, the important point

00:44:41 – 00:44:48:	is, some of the things Satan says are correct, when Satan tempted Christ, at least attempted

00:44:48 – 00:44:55:	to tempt Christ, he quoted scripture, in so far as he was quoting scripture he was speaking the

00:44:55 – 00:45:02:	truth, was he using it in a manipulative fashion of course, was he misrepresenting it of course,

00:45:03 – 00:45:09:	but that doesn't change the fact that the core matter, the words themselves were true,

00:45:10 – 00:45:17:	it is possible for evil men to speak the truth, in fact evil men often do speak some truth,

00:45:18 – 00:45:26:	if you are a liar, if you are attempting to manipulate people, and you always lie, you always

00:45:27 – 00:45:32:	tell lies, you never tell the truth, you will not get anywhere, because no one will ever believe you,

00:45:34 – 00:45:40:	the best example of this one with which we are all unfortunately familiar these days

00:45:40 – 00:45:46:	is the politician, we all know politicians are liars, everyone knows that, no one doubts that,

00:45:47 – 00:45:53:	but they don't always lie, because if they always lied, if they only lied, no one would

00:45:53 – 00:46:00:	ever support any of them in any way, no they have to tell the truth, they have to say certain things

00:46:00 – 00:46:07:	to get into that position, the same thing is true of these systems, the same thing is true of

00:46:07 – 00:46:13:	capitalism, certain things that it says are correct are true, but look at the consequences,

00:46:13 – 00:46:22:	look at the outcome, look at what eventuates from the system, and so when you look at capitalism,

00:46:22 – 00:46:27:	because we today have the benefit of being able to look at it from a distance of centuries,

00:46:27 – 00:46:34:	this began hundreds of years ago and has been developing since, we can conclusively say it

00:46:34 – 00:46:41:	has not delivered on its promises, it claimed certain things, it said we'll get efficiency,

00:46:41 – 00:46:49:	well we got efficiency, but at what cost? We supposedly got innovation, but you can't prove

00:46:49 – 00:46:53:	the counterfactual and say that well capitalism caused the innovation, no because we see innovation

00:46:53 – 00:46:59:	in other economic systems as well, you don't see zero innovation in even communist China,

00:46:59 – 00:47:03:	you see significantly less than in the west, but that's for ancillary reasons,

00:47:04 – 00:47:12:	and so the claims of this economic system have not come true in time, and we can take that into

00:47:12 – 00:47:18:	account because we have the advantage of hindsight, not that you can't look at men like Luther and

00:47:18 – 00:47:24:	others in the history of the church who very clearly saw where this was going, they saw exactly what

00:47:24 – 00:47:30:	was going to happen, if you read their treatises, their critiques of the system as it was arising

00:47:30 – 00:47:37:	in their day, they look prophetic, I'll just read here a very short quote from Luther,

00:47:40 – 00:47:45:	daily the poor are defrauded, new burdens and high prices are imposed, everyone misuses the

00:47:45 – 00:47:50:	market in his own willful, conceited, arrogant way, as if it were his right and privilege to

00:47:50 – 00:47:57:	sell his goods as dearly as he pleases, without a word of criticism, I'll actually read one more

00:47:57 – 00:48:01:	quick quote just from the large catechism so this is in the confessional documents of Lutherans,

00:48:02 – 00:48:07:	no more shall all the rest prosper who change the open free market into a carrying pit of

00:48:07 – 00:48:13:	extortion and a den of robbery, where the poor are daily overcharged, new burdens and high prices

00:48:13 – 00:48:20:	are imposed, and everyone uses the market according to his caprice, and is even defiant and brags as

00:48:20 – 00:48:24:	though it were his fair privilege and right to sell his goods for as high a price as he please,

00:48:24 – 00:48:30:	and no one had a right to say a word against it, now certainly that echoes his earlier comment,

00:48:30 – 00:48:34:	these are from two different writings from Luther, but that's in the large catechism,

00:48:35 – 00:48:41:	that's hundreds of years ago, that's 500 years ago, it's the same thing we see happening today,

00:48:41 – 00:48:46:	because the system that was emerging in his day has reached a sort of maturity in ours,

00:48:47 – 00:48:53:	now of course it will proceed from its current mature state into let's say its final form as it

00:48:53 – 00:49:00:	were, but you can't support this sort of system as a Christian when you look at the consequences

00:49:00 – 00:49:08:	of the system for your neighbor, it goes against that fundamental rule, the fundamental command

00:49:08 – 00:49:13:	of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself, because that's not what capitalism says to do,

00:49:14 – 00:49:19:	capitalism says to charge your neighbor the highest price you can extract from him,

00:49:19 – 00:49:27:	and if you don't do that you're a bad capitalist, that is the opposite practically

00:49:27 – 00:49:32:	of what Christianity says, the scriptures tell you to lend without expecting a return,

00:49:32 – 00:49:37:	not even not to expect interest, not to expect the principal back, and you certainly aren't

00:49:37 – 00:49:42:	supposed to charge your neighbor the highest price you can, you are supposed to sell your goods for

00:49:42 – 00:49:49:	a fair price, and a fair price essentially is the effort and the cost that went into the good,

00:49:50 – 00:49:56:	not what the market will bear, not what your neighbor is able to pay, what is fair,

00:49:56 – 00:50:03:	that is the Christian standard, and it's simply not something that capitalism accepts,

00:50:03 – 00:50:06:	in fact it is something that capitalism explicitly rejects.

00:50:06 – 00:50:15:	It's worth paying attention to how scripture speaks of these economic crimes in Ezekiel 18

00:50:15 – 00:50:21:	and the application of the Levitical Law from 25 and elsewhere. Ezekiel writes,

00:50:21 – 00:50:26:	If he fathers a son who is violent, a shedder of blood, who does any of these things, though he

00:50:26 – 00:50:31:	himself did none of these things, who even eats upon the mountains, defiles his neighbor's wife,

00:50:32 – 00:50:38:	opposes the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore the pledge, lifts up his eyes to the

00:50:38 – 00:50:45:	idols, commits abomination, lends it interest and takes profit, shall he then live? He shall not

00:50:45 – 00:50:52:	live, he has done all these abominations, he shall surely die, his blood shall be upon himself.

00:50:53 – 00:51:00:	So in the same breath that God describes fornicating with your neighbor's wife and committing

00:51:01 – 00:51:07:	robbery and idolatry and other abominations included among those are lending an interest

00:51:07 – 00:51:16:	and taking profit and the sentence is death. That was God's law. Now it is not necessary to agree

00:51:17 – 00:51:24:	that the Levitical Law punishments must be enforced today. It is, however, necessary to agree

00:51:25 – 00:51:28:	that the Levitical Law, when it's calling these things abominations,

00:51:29 – 00:51:34:	is specifically speaking about moral matters. To lend an interest and take profit is a moral

00:51:34 – 00:51:38:	matter and the sentence God provided to his people was death.

00:51:40 – 00:51:45:	Just finishing up with the Mises definition of capitalism because it goes with what Cory was

00:51:45 – 00:51:50:	saying. Capitalism empowered consumers rather than those empowered to influence what was produced

00:51:50 – 00:51:56:	in the economy. This happens via the profit mechanism. If enough people had demand a good

00:51:56 – 00:52:00:	and it can be sold for more than it costs to produce, then that means the production of that

00:52:00 – 00:52:05:	good is profitable. Some of the richest people in the world today have made their money not from

00:52:05 – 00:52:10:	appealing to the rich but by appealing to the masses. Walmart's business model, for example,

00:52:10 – 00:52:14:	is geared towards selling goods cheaply to as many people as possible.

00:52:15 – 00:52:19:	Now isn't that an interesting contrast to what Cory was just reading from the large catechism

00:52:19 – 00:52:26:	and elsewhere in Luther? When the pinnacle of capitalist accomplishment is Walmart,

00:52:26 – 00:52:32:	which they specifically highlight, they took from the poor. They took the poorest people

00:52:32 – 00:52:38:	in the world and extracted so much money that there's an entire family of billionaires now.

00:52:38 – 00:52:44:	Not just a billionaire, but half a dozen billionaires. There is so much surplus to go around

00:52:44 – 00:52:51:	just from their portion of the profits on top of what the corporation took

00:52:51 – 00:52:56:	from all the poorest people in our country. How did Walmart do it? By destroying communities,

00:52:56 – 00:53:03:	by destroying producers, by destroying local shops. Before we record it, I looked up because I

00:53:03 – 00:53:08:	just had no idea. I wondered what a pair of jeans costs on Walmart. You can buy a pair of jeans on

00:53:08 – 00:53:16:	Walmart.com for 13 bucks. The libertarian capitalist argument for that is, well, that's

00:53:16 – 00:53:24:	wonderful. If someone only has $13, he can buy a pair of jeans. By itself, that's true. However,

00:53:24 – 00:53:29:	as Cory just said, you're buying a $13 piece of garbage. It's going to have a junk zipper.

00:53:29 – 00:53:33:	It's going to have junk buttons. The seams are going to be poorly done. It's going to be thin,

00:53:33 – 00:53:39:	flimsy material. It's going to wear out. If you buy a $13 pair of jeans, you're probably going to

00:53:39 – 00:53:44:	be buying several a year. Certainly, if you're using jeans the way jeans are intended to be used,

00:53:44 – 00:53:51:	it's not going to last long. If you had had the money to buy $120 pair of jeans that was made

00:53:51 – 00:53:57:	the way jeans used to be made in this country instead of in a sweatshop owned by the Chinese

00:53:57 – 00:54:04:	government 6,000 miles away, in that case, your jeans would last for many years and they would

00:54:04 – 00:54:12:	be easily repairable and be worth repairing. You would not be worse off in the end. Spending

00:54:12 – 00:54:17:	more money and putting it in your neighbor's pocket would have made you richer in the long term.

00:54:17 – 00:54:23:	You as a consumer, there's nothing in the world more expensive than being poor.

00:54:24 – 00:54:28:	If you have enough money that you can shop at one of the regular grocery stores, you have a nice

00:54:28 – 00:54:34:	selection of food. Really poor people tend to do a lot of their shopping today at dollar stores.

00:54:35 – 00:54:40:	It's one of the fastest growing segments in the entire consumer economy in the United States,

00:54:40 – 00:54:46:	the dollar store, where everything is junk. Everything is substandard. Everything is small,

00:54:46 – 00:54:52:	but it's cheap. It's super, super cheap. The poorest people in the country are buying garbage

00:54:52 – 00:54:58:	with money they don't have and it's getting worn out. It's not worth what they're paying.

00:54:59 – 00:55:03:	It's far worse for them. If you want furniture, what do you do? A really poor person,

00:55:03 – 00:55:07:	certainly if they're economically ignorant, is probably going to rent. They're going to rent a

00:55:07 – 00:55:12:	couch. When you rent from one of those rent center places where usually you pay weekly,

00:55:13 – 00:55:18:	usually within the first six to eight weeks, you pay the entire cost of the thing and you're

00:55:18 – 00:55:22:	still going to be making payments for a year or two. That is the most exploitative,

00:55:23 – 00:55:29:	revolting, wicked thing imaginable and it's everywhere in this country. You cannot drive down

00:55:29 – 00:55:35:	a single street in one of the poorer parts of any town in this country and not find a place where

00:55:35 – 00:55:42:	this sort of abuse of the poor is taking place all the time. No one has any moral outrage at it.

00:55:42 – 00:55:45:	What do we do? We say, oh, well, at least poor people are going to afford a couch.

00:55:45 – 00:55:51:	Sure, it's going to cost them $1,500 for a $200 couch because they're poor and they're dumb

00:55:51 – 00:55:57:	and they don't realize what they're paying, but they can only afford $13 a week so they get a couch.

00:55:57 – 00:56:05:	That's winning with capitalism. That is evil by any Christian moral standard. That $13 pair of

00:56:05 – 00:56:13:	jeans put my uncle in North Carolina out of business. When I was born, half my family's from

00:56:13 – 00:56:17:	the South, pretty much all in North Carolina, he worked for Wrangler Jeans. He was, I believe,

00:56:17 – 00:56:22:	a plant manager at Wrangler back when they still had plants in North Carolina. Wranglers in the

00:56:22 – 00:56:29:	last 40 years were still made in this country. His job, most of his job, he started there,

00:56:29 – 00:56:34:	I think, on the line. He pretty quickly made it up the ranks because he was smart and hard-working.

00:56:34 – 00:56:41:	He was a tough guy. He ended up overseeing the transfer of Wrangler's operations overseas,

00:56:41 – 00:56:45:	so he had to go, I believe, down to Mexico, which is where most of the stuff is made today,

00:56:45 – 00:56:51:	because capitalism says it's not enough to make a good product. You must make it cheaper and cheaper

00:56:51 – 00:56:59:	and cheaper, which is really interesting when you look at inflation. Inflation is at least several

00:56:59 – 00:57:04:	percent every year. Some years, it's a lot more. Right now, it's probably running about 12 percent

00:57:04 – 00:57:09:	across the board and maybe more than that, which means that if you had a dollar a year ago, you

00:57:09 – 00:57:14:	have 88 cents left today in that same one dollar, that's much purchasing power you have left.

00:57:16 – 00:57:24:	The value of your money is getting lower and lower, but the cost of goods is also going down.

00:57:24 – 00:57:29:	On one hand, it's nice that you can still afford something when you have less purchasing power.

00:57:30 – 00:57:36:	On the other hand, what happened in my uncle's case and happened to all of manufacturing in the

00:57:36 – 00:57:45:	United States, it was too expensive to make jeans in North Carolina where they had a lot of jobs.

00:57:45 – 00:57:49:	They were a lot of good-paying jobs. I don't know if it was a union shop, probably not in the South.

00:57:49 – 00:57:55:	I don't know. Maybe it was, but either way, union or not, they were making enough money in that

00:57:55 – 00:58:01:	community that a lot of people, it's like the joke if you've seen today, the Simpsons, when that show

00:58:01 – 00:58:08:	first started, Homer was a poor relatively single family and their single income household with two

00:58:08 – 00:58:16:	kids, three kids because they had the infant. It was a nice suburban two-story home. More than

00:58:16 – 00:58:22:	pretty much anybody can afford today. The house in the Simpsons probably goes for $500,000 today.

00:58:22 – 00:58:28:	That was a lower middle income household when the Simpsons started in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:58:28 – 00:58:33:	That's how much things have changed. That's what happened with jeans and everything else in the

00:58:33 – 00:58:39:	economy. Making in this country too expensive. What comes next, you ship it to Mexico. Then

00:58:39 – 00:58:45:	what happens? Labor in Mexico got too expensive. Most companies moved it to China, and then China

00:58:45 – 00:58:51:	got too expensive, so they moved it to Vietnam. Vietnam labor got too expensive, so they moved to

00:58:51 – 00:58:56:	India and Bangladesh and all these other places that a lot of people have never even heard of

00:58:56 – 00:59:02:	where you have people living on subsistence wages to make garbage that gets shipped at

00:59:02 – 00:59:09:	tremendous expense with tremendous pollution 10,000 miles away around the world so that someone

00:59:09 – 00:59:16:	can buy a $13 pair of jeans at Walmart. That's probably marked up 30% still. The problem with

00:59:16 – 00:59:22:	the capitalist economic calculation that, look, a guy can buy a $13 pair of jeans is that if instead

00:59:22 – 00:59:28:	of the $13 pair of jeans, if the only jeans on the market were a $50 pair of jeans, the capitalist

00:59:28 – 00:59:33:	system, the capitalist morality says that would make the world worse because his purchasing power

00:59:33 – 00:59:39:	has been reduced threefold. Instead of being able to afford three pairs of jeans for $50,

00:59:39 – 00:59:45:	four pairs, you can only afford one. The thing that's missing from that sort of single variable

00:59:45 – 00:59:51:	calculus is that if the pair of jeans that was made in this country that was made well the way

00:59:51 – 00:59:58:	things always used to be, a pair of jeans that would last him 10, 15, 20 years, if he could spend

59:58 – 01:00:06
$50 on that, yes, he would have less purchasing power in the moment, but he as a consumer would

01:00:06 – 01:00:12:	have jeans that were going to last him for a decade or more. That $50 is going into the pockets of

01:00:12 – 01:00:18:	his neighbors. It's going to go into the pockets of someone in this country. That's a key part of

01:00:18 – 01:00:24:	what's missing from this discussion in all the capitalist calculation is no consideration

01:00:24 – 01:00:32:	whatsoever for a neighbor. The only consideration is what is the lowest dollar amount I can spend

01:00:32 – 01:00:38:	on a thing. If that is your highest good, then your neighbor be damned. You don't care what happens

01:00:38 – 01:00:44:	to your neighbor because you're going to have more money in your pocket. That's a moral calculus.

01:00:44 – 01:00:50:	That is a moral decision. You're voting with your dollars to say, I don't care about my neighbor.

01:00:50 – 01:00:55:	I don't care that if I spent $50 on these jeans, my neighbor would solve a job and he would have

01:00:55 – 01:01:00:	pride because he would be able to feed his own family and not buy stuff at a dollar store that

01:01:00 – 01:01:05:	he knows isn't doing as much as he could if he could afford more. But the factory shut down,

01:01:05 – 01:01:10:	he can't find a good job anymore because all the jobs for guys who are just completely average,

01:01:10 – 01:01:15:	maybe a little below average, maybe a little above average, in poor neighborhoods and poor parts of

01:01:15 – 01:01:21:	the country, those jobs were all destroyed by capitalism. They were shipped overseas for one

01:01:21 – 01:01:29:	reason and one reason only. It was cheaper. I think that the profit worship, the profit idolatry

01:01:29 – 01:01:37:	in capitalism is central to this entire discussion. As I said last week now, I'm Doc, so I can talk

01:01:37 – 01:01:42:	more about what I did. I worked at Apple. I left in my 15th year at Apple. I worked in hardware and

01:01:42 – 01:01:47:	I worked in software. I always worked on the Mac and since I was five years old, I've always used

01:01:47 – 01:01:52:	Apple products. I like them a lot. I know them inside and out. I'm actually a domain expert on

01:01:52 – 01:01:59:	that stuff, which is why I never talked about it. Apple is one of the most profitable companies in

01:01:59 – 01:02:06:	the universe in the history of everything. Their profit for 2022 was their revenue, their gross

01:02:06 – 01:02:16:	revenue was $400 billion. Their gross margins for last quarter were about 45%. What that means is

01:02:16 – 01:02:24:	that for the cost of goods, for every $1,000 that you give Apple as a consumer, they will give you

01:02:24 – 01:02:32:	a product that costs them $550 to make in terms of manufacturing cost. Now, gross margin doesn't

01:02:32 – 01:02:39:	account for R&D or advertising or salaries or any of that other stuff. Their net margin, after

01:02:39 – 01:02:45:	all their business expenses are accounted for, is about 24%, 25%. I will say 25%, just keep the

01:02:45 – 01:02:51:	numbers rounded nicely. What that means is that for every $1,000 that you give Apple for some

01:02:51 – 01:03:00:	widget, their total all-in cost is $750. You're giving them $750 for a product and you're handing

01:03:00 – 01:03:06:	them an additional $250 just because they're Apple and it's the only way to get it. That's

01:03:06 – 01:03:12:	the profit. That's what profit means. It's above all costs. Now, it's interesting when you actually

01:03:12 – 01:03:22:	think about the net profit. Every supplier got paid. Every bill got paid. Every salary got paid.

01:03:22 – 01:03:26:	There's some very high salaries. I can tell you that personally. Guys who work there make a lot

01:03:26 – 01:03:33:	of money. All of that, 100% of all that compensation, all that reward for everyone involved in the

01:03:33 – 01:03:40:	production of Apple's products is encompassed in the $750 of the $1,000 that it costs for

01:03:40 – 01:03:49:	you to buy a product. The extra $250 is pure profit. Now, the thing to focus on when we're

01:03:49 – 01:03:56:	talking about profit is that, as Corey was saying earlier, when Luther was dealing with this stuff,

01:03:57 – 01:04:02:	people tried to pin him down and get him to put particular numbers on things. Say, well, what is

01:04:02 – 01:04:07:	the threshold beyond which something is sinful? That's not possible when we're dealing with these

01:04:07 – 01:04:14:	or matters of wisdom. Where that comes into profit is scaling back from Apple for a second. Let's

01:04:14 – 01:04:19:	take a very small example. Let's say that you decide that you want to start making dog biscuits

01:04:19 – 01:04:25:	in your kitchen and you want to sell them in a local convenience store. You're going to charge

01:04:25 – 01:04:30:	$2 per dog biscuit that covers what you can say to your labor to be worth. It covers all your

01:04:30 – 01:04:36:	material costs. All in, you can sell them for $2. Once you get those on store shelves,

01:04:36 – 01:04:43:	they start flying. The store owners can't keep them in stock. You do a week's worth of production.

01:04:43 – 01:04:48:	You take it to the store. They list them for $2 and they're gone within three days.

01:04:48 – 01:04:54:	The capitalist morality says, this is a price signal to me as a producer that I should raise

01:04:54 – 01:05:00:	my price because, on one hand, I could produce more. I could be making more of these things,

01:05:00 – 01:05:07:	but until such time as I do and to meet demand, I can profit off of the greater demand than I have

01:05:07 – 01:05:14:	supply by jacking up the price. There's the marginal utility calculation for maybe a dog

01:05:14 – 01:05:19:	biscuit is worth $2 to some people, but at $2.50 or $3, maybe half your customer is like, no,

01:05:19 – 01:05:25:	I'm not going to pay that anymore. But as long as there are enough customers to pay $2.50 or $3

01:05:25 – 01:05:30:	to continue to sell out, what do you care? You're getting that much more money from the same number

01:05:30 – 01:05:34:	of people that could possibly buy even though it's pricing some of the people out of the market.

01:05:35 – 01:05:41:	It effectively re-orients for the consumer who's going to get it, not who shows up first,

01:05:41 – 01:05:46:	but who is still willing to pay the higher price. Capitalism says, that's perfectly fine.

01:05:47 – 01:05:53:	When you look at the historic moral arguments in these matters, it goes to what Corey referred

01:05:53 – 01:06:01:	to earlier. If you can comfortably make the thing for $2 as a Christian, it is not permissible to

01:06:01 – 01:06:07:	sell it for $3. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because you are able to get away

01:06:07 – 01:06:14:	with it in the market does not make it morally permissible. Now, the reason that there's wiggle

01:06:14 – 01:06:19:	room here is that you just started in your kitchen, you were making them, it was just fun,

01:06:19 – 01:06:23:	you maybe had some extras left over from baking or whatever, and you didn't know how they were going

01:06:23 – 01:06:30:	to do. When they started going like gangbusters for $2, you realize that you're just getting by

01:06:30 – 01:06:37:	at $2, but you have ideas for scaling up, and maybe a bigger mixer or whatever, bigger oven,

01:06:39 – 01:06:41:	maybe eventually you could scale the point that you'd actually hire someone.

01:06:42 – 01:06:49:	In order to do that, you're going to need additional capital. The way to get that is either take a loan

01:06:49 – 01:06:54:	based on your revenue, that's the capitalist way to do it. Another possibility is to increase your

01:06:54 – 01:07:01:	price sum and save that money and use it towards increasing your production output so that maybe

01:07:01 – 01:07:09:	you charge $2.25 or $2.50, the additional $0.50 that you bank, you will spend on more production

01:07:09 – 01:07:14:	so that you can meet the additional demand. As you scale up what you're producing,

01:07:14 – 01:07:19:	you can get at the point that you can meet all the demand for all seven days with seven days

01:07:19 – 01:07:22:	worth of production. They maybe continue to scale up from there, you get into more stores.

01:07:23 – 01:07:31:	While it is okay for you to charge $2 for something, if you want to charge $2.25 or $2.50

01:07:31 – 01:07:36:	because you want to make it available to more people, I think there's a case can be made that's

01:07:36 – 01:07:41:	okay to charge $2.50, maybe for a while, because what's going to happen, some people will be priced

01:07:41 – 01:07:48:	out of the market at $2.50 versus $2, but when you scale your production, a lot more people will be

01:07:48 – 01:07:54:	able to buy your product, which they want, and once you get scaled up, you won't need that extra

01:07:54 – 01:07:58:	income. You could cut your price again. You could take it back down to $2. In fact, you might be

01:07:58 – 01:08:05:	able to cut it to maybe $180, $175, because with the increased economies of scale from your more

01:08:05 – 01:08:10:	advanced production process, it's not actually costing you as much per batch. If you're baking

01:08:10 – 01:08:15:	something, energy input is a lot of your cost. If you have a bigger oven, you can fit a lot more

01:08:15 – 01:08:23:	cookies in there. Suddenly, your energy cost per cookie, your biscuit comes way down. All these

01:08:23 – 01:08:29:	factors are an important part of the cost calculation as a producer. There's no point,

01:08:29 – 01:08:34:	no one is going to morally say you have to sell stuff at a loss. The question is,

01:08:35 – 01:08:40:	when you're taking profit, why are you doing it? If you're charging more than it's costing you,

01:08:40 – 01:08:47:	and obviously part of your net coming into you is going to be, what do I pay myself?

01:08:48 – 01:08:51:	Maybe there's wiggle room, or maybe you pay yourself a little bit more. You probably weren't

01:08:51 – 01:08:57:	paying nearly what the time was worth at the beginning. If you have room to pay yourself

01:08:57 – 01:09:01:	a little bit more, that's fine. There's no hard and fast number. You're like,

01:09:01 – 01:09:08:	you're baking dog biscuits. What's the value of that labor? There's a reasonable realm of discussion

01:09:08 – 01:09:14:	beyond which it's like, if you're raking in well into six figures as the cookie magnate

01:09:14 – 01:09:19:	in your kitchen, you're probably charging more than you should be. Back to the Apple example,

01:09:20 – 01:09:24:	one of the problems with Apple is that they make really, really, really good products,

01:09:25 – 01:09:30:	and they significantly overcharge for the upgrades, which is where a lot of that margin comes from.

01:09:31 – 01:09:36:	If you were to get one of the new M3 MacBook Pros or iMacs, they're really good machines.

01:09:37 – 01:09:41:	I don't own stock anymore. This isn't conflicted, but they're still good machines. It's what I tell

01:09:41 – 01:09:47:	people to buy. If you were to buy it, do not ever buy the base config, because to this day,

01:09:47 – 01:09:53:	Tim Cook, the bean counter, insists on making the minimum config eight gigabytes of RAM,

01:09:53 – 01:09:58:	which is obscene. It's way too low. It makes it a worse machine than it would be otherwise.

01:09:59 – 01:10:08:	That $250 a pure profit, I did the math earlier, my best guess is that the current

01:10:08 – 01:10:14:	base config of the MacBook Pro is eight gigs of RAM and half a terabyte of SSD storage.

01:10:17 – 01:10:23:	To increase that to one terabyte of storage and 16 gigabytes of RAM, which would be a legitimate

01:10:23 – 01:10:28:	base config, that would be a reasonable base config based on the general market, would cost

01:10:28 – 01:10:36:	Apple on that $1,600. My best guess is probably about an additional $75 per unit, which would

01:10:36 – 01:10:41:	take their margins on that machine overall, like just calculating the total margins on average,

01:10:41 – 01:10:48:	that 25% net margin that they're making, if all they sold were Macs, probably closer to 20%.

01:10:49 – 01:10:53:	So that's still, they're taking 20% more from you than it costs them. So when you give them a

01:10:53 – 01:11:02:	thousand instead of 750, the product is 800, and there's $200 a profit. What Apple is doing by

01:11:02 – 01:11:09:	gouging, by charging way more than they need, their profit comes from overcharging on the upgrades,

01:11:09 – 01:11:15:	and what they do, they have an unfathomable amount of money just sitting there. It's

01:11:16 – 01:11:20:	it's something that today in capitalism is pointed to as the greatest success story,

01:11:20 – 01:11:25:	really in the history of anything arguably, like every other company wants to try to emulate some

01:11:25 – 01:11:30:	aspect of Apple's success. There's no doubt they're successful. The question is,

01:11:32 – 01:11:37:	could they be doing better if they charged less? If they were a less profitable company,

01:11:37 – 01:11:41:	would they be better people for it? And one of the reasons I left was because it was always a

01:11:41 – 01:11:47:	leftist place, but it just became worse and worse and worse. And in the end, for that reason,

01:11:47 – 01:11:52:	other reasons, I just I couldn't stand being there. Didn't matter how much money they were paying me,

01:11:52 – 01:11:58:	I couldn't stand another second. When somebody is just taking as much as they possibly can,

01:11:58 – 01:12:05:	when they're extracting the maximum amount, that is per se immoral. It doesn't matter what the money,

01:12:05 – 01:12:12:	what the exact dollar amount is, they're taking as much as they can. And again, this is the difference

01:12:12 – 01:12:18:	between capitalist morality and Christian morality. A Christian cannot do that. A capitalist not only

01:12:18 – 01:12:26:	can, as Corey said, must. You must maximize profit. Now, there's debate around to what extent that's

01:12:27 – 01:12:31:	mandatory, but it's certainly the brass ring. It's what everybody wants to be as profitable as

01:12:31 – 01:12:37:	possible to pay as much to make as much. That's avarice. That's just it's pure greed to have more

01:12:37 – 01:12:42:	than you need. Because for the capitalist morality, there's no such thing as enough.

01:12:44 – 01:12:52:	On the topic of that 13 pair of jeans, not to make myself seem too old, but I have

01:12:52 – 01:12:58:	a handful of pairs of jeans from when I was in high school, that are just now starting to wear out.

01:12:58 – 01:13:02:	So they're older, in fact, and probably a fair number of members of our audience.

01:13:03 – 01:13:08:	There's no chance that jeans I bought today, at least for anywhere near that price, even

01:13:08 – 01:13:14:	accounting for inflation, would last anywhere near as long. And so even in our own lifetimes,

01:13:14 – 01:13:21:	we've seen this precipitous decline in quality due to the incentives built into the system that

01:13:21 – 01:13:28:	we call capitalism. And Walmart, quite frankly, they picked a good example because Walmart is

01:13:28 – 01:13:36:	one of the biggest exploiters of this system. They underpay their employees. Walmart basically

01:13:36 – 01:13:42:	hires those who are on welfare and keeps them on welfare because of what Walmart pays.

01:13:42 – 01:13:49:	And so in fact, the entire system is subsidizing Walmart. And so it's exactly what I pointed

01:13:49 – 01:13:58:	out about the system. The system is designed to siphon money from everyone and give it only

01:13:58 – 01:14:03:	to the wealthiest individuals in the system. This is not a Marxist critique. This is not

01:14:03 – 01:14:11:	class warfare. This is just what capitalism does. And we see this even in the beginnings

01:14:11 – 01:14:17:	of capitalism centuries ago. This is one of the things that was pointed out by the early

01:14:17 – 01:14:22:	critiques and the subsequent critiques and subsequent centuries of capitalism.

01:14:23 – 01:14:31:	It created this gulf between the poorest and the wealthiest in society that historically

01:14:31 – 01:14:37:	had not been there. The only exorbitantly, if you want to use the term wealthy individuals in

01:14:37 – 01:14:44:	society historically had been certain kings. And even then, not by today's standards,

01:14:45 – 01:14:52:	the extremely wealthy, the 1% of the 1% in our current system are wealthier than

01:14:52 – 01:15:00:	historical kings with very few exceptions. Think about that. The king of a nation historically,

01:15:02 – 01:15:09:	relative to the poorest individuals in his country, had less wealth than is the case today for the

01:15:09 – 01:15:15:	wealthiest individuals and the poorest individuals in our system. And supposedly,

01:15:15 – 01:15:18:	capitalism, as they frequently claim, raises people out of poverty.

01:15:20 – 01:15:26:	In reality, what it has done is it has enslaved the vast majority of those living under this

01:15:26 – 01:15:35:	system to a lifetime of debt slavery. The current highest rate charged on a credit card

01:15:35 – 01:15:44:	is 36%. That's obscene. And that's not even that high because there are other loans that are

01:15:44 – 01:15:49:	permissible in this country, despite the fact that we still have so-called anti-usury laws. They're

01:15:49 – 01:15:56:	not very strong. They don't really do very much. They're basically toothless. But there are loans

01:15:56 – 01:16:02:	that charge even higher rates than that credit card. And notably, the credit card could charge more

01:16:02 – 01:16:08:	until they run up against some of those anti-usury laws. But they're ridiculous. The fact that this

01:16:08 – 01:16:15:	is permissible in our system should have Christians up in arms. This is disgusting that these things

01:16:15 – 01:16:23:	are allowed. And bear in mind that those who are exploited by this primarily are the poor

01:16:24 – 01:16:30:	and the ignorant. Those who are less intelligent are going to be more exploited by this system,

01:16:30 – 01:16:35:	because quite frankly, if you are numerate, you are going to be able to navigate this system

01:16:35 – 01:16:42:	better than if you are not. And so the particularly poor and those who are below average in intelligence

01:16:42 – 01:16:48:	are those who are most exploited by this system. And so you'll have those who will argue that,

01:16:48 – 01:16:53:	oh, capitalism did away with feudalism and slavery and all these systems. No, it didn't.

01:16:53 – 01:16:57:	It enslaved these people even more under worse conditions.

01:16:58 – 01:17:06:	Those who live in the drags of our society as it were, in the lowest echelon of society today,

01:17:06 – 01:17:12:	live under worse conditions than those who were serfs in the past or even slaves,

01:17:12 – 01:17:18:	because serfs and slaves were still provided for, to some degree, by their lords and masters.

01:17:18 – 01:17:25:	That is not the case today, because today you have exploitative corporations

01:17:25 – 01:17:32:	who see these individuals as employees. An employee, quite frankly, is just a term for abject slave

01:17:32 – 01:17:36:	when it comes to some of these larger corporations. Granted, it's going to depend

01:17:36 – 01:17:44:	on where you are employed and at what level. But if you're employed as a stalker at Walmart,

01:17:44 – 01:17:48:	Walmart doesn't care about you. Walmart sees you as entirely replaceable,

01:17:49 – 01:17:53:	and they will drop you at a moment's notice if they think they can do it and make more money

01:17:53 – 01:17:59:	somewhere else. They have no interest in you. They have no relationship with you. They have no

01:17:59 – 01:18:05:	duties to you. And that is simply not the case historically. For instance, under the feudal

01:18:05 – 01:18:12:	system, a feudal lord got all of his food from his serfs. That kind of gives him an interest

01:18:12 – 01:18:19:	in their welfare. There was a relationship there. There was a natural outgrowth of hierarchy.

01:18:19 – 01:18:24:	And not only that, but the feudal lord was probably related by blood to the serfs,

01:18:24 – 01:18:30:	granted at some attenuation, but at the level of a distant cousin. And so you have this natural

01:18:31 – 01:18:37:	ordering of things, this natural relationship between and among the individuals in the system

01:18:37 – 01:18:43:	that you do not see in capitalism. Because under a capitalist system, I have no relationship to

01:18:43 – 01:18:47:	the person who, for instance, this iPhone I'm holding. I have no relationship to the person who

01:18:47 – 01:18:53:	built that. I don't know that person. I will never know that person. It doesn't mean that you have

01:18:53 – 01:18:58:	to know every person who made every good that you buy. But if he's a man in the next town over,

01:18:58 – 01:19:03:	that is vastly different from if he is some faceless person employed by a corporation that

01:19:03 – 01:19:10:	employs millions of people on the other side of the world. And corporations know this and can

01:19:10 – 01:19:15:	exploit it. As we've mentioned before, if you can create divisions in your labor force, you can

01:19:15 – 01:19:23:	drive down their ability to organize and their ability to demand fair treatment. Capitalism

01:19:23 – 01:19:29:	encourages this. That is one of the incentives built into the system. First, it is done by exporting.

01:19:30 – 01:19:34:	It is done by importing goods from far away lands where they can be produced

01:19:34 – 01:19:39:	far cheaper and often with no regulations, including environmental regulations.

01:19:40 – 01:19:46:	And then it is done by importing those people into your own lands. Because guess what? That's

01:19:46 – 01:19:54:	even cheaper. So capitalism always exerts this downward force practically in every single way

01:19:54 – 01:20:00:	and in every single area it touches. And it just continues to cause this harm. And we are now living

01:20:01 – 01:20:07:	at sort of the tail end of it. We can see perhaps not how bad things can get because

01:20:07 – 01:20:14:	things can always get worse, but we can certainly see how bad they have gotten versus what we were

01:20:14 – 01:20:19:	told would be the good and what we were warned by certain men would be the bad.

01:20:20 – 01:20:24:	Well, the good hasn't materialized, but the bad most certainly has.

01:20:25 – 01:20:32:	The fact that you can buy that 13 pair of jeans does not make your life better. Because quite

01:20:32 – 01:20:38:	frankly, the existence of the 13 pair of jeans is the reason you can't afford the good pair of

01:20:38 – 01:20:44:	jeans if you cannot afford them. And even if you can afford the good pair, it's going to cost you

01:20:44 – 01:20:52:	relatively more than it would have cost you in the past to acquire the actual well made good as

01:20:52 – 01:21:00:	opposed to the cheap knockoff that we have today. What we're talking about for those who are versed

01:21:00 – 01:21:03:	in economics, perhaps some of you are screaming at us because we haven't used the term yet,

01:21:03 – 01:21:12:	but we're talking about externalities. There are many external costs to the things that capitalism

01:21:12 – 01:21:18:	encourages those within the system to do. And those externalities are not, or at least seldom,

01:21:18 – 01:21:28:	are taken into account. And so Apple, we could use Apple for an example. Even though Apple's

01:21:28 – 01:21:34:	products are expensive, because they are, even though they make a significant profit on them,

01:21:35 – 01:21:41:	the actual total cost of that device is not represented by the price.

01:21:42 – 01:21:47:	Because it does not take into account how much of American manufacturing has been hollowed out.

01:21:47 – 01:21:51:	Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the one who did this, because this was done before Apple.

01:21:51 – 01:21:59:	Apple has benefited from it. Apple has certainly not really reversed it, except to some small degree,

01:21:59 – 01:22:04:	as they've been incentivized to do so. But you don't take into account the hollowing

01:22:04 – 01:22:09:	out of the manufacturing, the brain drain that accompanies that, because if there are no jobs

01:22:09 – 01:22:16:	in the field, people aren't going to go into the field. And all of the other things, all of the

01:22:16 – 01:22:22:	follow on effects from that, because if someone loses his job, his good manufacturing job,

01:22:22 – 01:22:28:	well, then his family becomes poor. If his family becomes poor, that increases the burden on the

01:22:28 – 01:22:32:	welfare system. If you increase the burden on the welfare system, you have to increase taxes.

01:22:32 – 01:22:37:	If you increase taxes, other people become more poor. This is a vicious cycle that destroys the

01:22:37 – 01:22:47:	country. Eventually, capitalism destroys any country that adopts it. It is only a matter of time.

01:22:47 – 01:22:54:	And the biggest factor in how long it will take for capitalism to destroy a given country.

01:22:54 – 01:22:57:	And by country, in this case, I mean the political entity that constitutes

01:22:57 – 01:23:04:	the sovereign over a nation properly understood. But the biggest factor that determines how long

01:23:04 – 01:23:14:	it takes capitalism to destroy a country is inertia. If behind that country, you have centuries of

01:23:14 – 01:23:19:	built up infrastructure and all of these various systems that are somewhat resilient because

01:23:19 – 01:23:24:	of how long they have been around, it will take longer to destroy the system. And that's what we

01:23:24 – 01:23:31:	see. It took a long time for capitalism to destroy the West. Now there are those who will say,

01:23:31 – 01:23:38:	well, hasn't capitalism benefited East Asia, for instance? And the answer to that is no.

01:23:39 – 01:23:48:	What happened with those abjectly poor areas is that capitalists were able to bring in capital

01:23:48 – 01:23:55:	in order to drain it from other parts of the world. And this looks like you have a benefit

01:23:55 – 01:24:01:	to the local population. It seems like you have raised them out of poverty to some degree. But

01:24:01 – 01:24:07:	if you actually look at the long term, the real consequences, those living in these areas are

01:24:07 – 01:24:13:	still living in abject poverty. Now they're just enslaved to corporations. Yes, before they were

01:24:13 – 01:24:19:	serfs to a feudal lord and then above him to a king or whatever it happened to be in a given area.

01:24:21 – 01:24:27:	But they haven't exchanged slavery for freedom. They've exchanged one kind of slavery for a

01:24:27 – 01:24:33:	worse one. You have factories in China that install suicide nets on the outside of their buildings.

01:24:34 – 01:24:42:	That's not something that you saw under feudalism. Employees of large corporations

01:24:42 – 01:24:50:	live worse lives than did feudal serfs. That's just the fact of the matter and it's insane to think

01:24:51 – 01:24:55:	that people today will say that capitalism has created this wonderful world.

01:24:57 – 01:25:03:	Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than you, had more time with their families and their loved

01:25:03 – 01:25:09:	ones than you, had more holidays than you, and practically took off most of winter.

01:25:09 – 01:25:15:	And yet somehow we're supposed to believe that those who are working, 40 or more, depending on your

01:25:15 – 01:25:21:	field, certainly other attorneys out there will laugh at the number 40, but 40 hours a week,

01:25:22 – 01:25:28:	50 or more weeks per year for basically your entire life. And somehow that's supposed to be

01:25:28 – 01:25:34:	better than these historical systems. The claims of capitalism work only if you take them at face

01:25:35 – 01:25:41:	value and do not assess them at all. If you actually look at them in their historical context

01:25:41 – 01:25:45:	and you look at the consequences and you look at the promises versus what was delivered,

01:25:45 – 01:25:53:	it becomes absurd to believe that this system is good, even if you don't look at the scriptural

01:25:53 – 01:25:59:	requirements which it clearly violates left, right, and center. There is no way to look at

01:25:59 – 01:26:06:	capitalism and square it with Christianity. The only reason that Christians, particularly in the

01:26:06 – 01:26:10:	U.S. for their historical differences between the mindset in the U.S. and Europe on this,

01:26:10 – 01:26:17:	but particularly in the U.S. this is taken deep root. The reason that people support capitalism

01:26:18 – 01:26:23:	is because we have been propagandized to believe that the only alternative is communism.

01:26:23 – 01:26:29:	And if the only alternative to the system presented is communism, that's not a very hard

01:26:29 – 01:26:34:	sell, because you can look at what communism did and yes, that was worse, to some degree,

01:26:34 – 01:26:39:	because if you look at the longitudinal consequence, if you look at the long-term outcome

01:26:39 – 01:26:44:	of what capitalism has done in the West, capitalism has been just as destructive as

01:26:44 – 01:26:50:	communism. It went about it a different way. Communism usually lined people up beside a

01:26:50 – 01:26:54:	ditch and just shot them or exported them to a frozen part of the world.

01:26:56 – 01:27:03:	On the other hand, capitalism has undermined the family. It has undermined basically our entire

01:27:03 – 01:27:09:	economy. It has undermined traditional manufacturing. It has undermined not just manufacturing,

01:27:09 – 01:27:14:	but really the traditional production of any and all goods. It has caused brain drain. All of these

01:27:14 – 01:27:21:	consequences are in fact arguably harder to reverse, to overcome, than what happened in communism.

01:27:23 – 01:27:30:	But in either case, both of these systems are anti-Christ. Both of these systems are evil,

01:27:30 – 01:27:35:	and so as Christian we don't have to support either one if someone tells you that you have two

01:27:35 – 01:27:43:	choices. Unless they're offering you food, they're probably lying. Or at the very least,

01:27:43 – 01:27:48:	you should assess whether or not that person is lying. Yes, sometimes there is a real binary

01:27:48 – 01:27:53:	choice. It is heaven or hell. There are binaries. But a lot of times when someone tells you can

01:27:53 – 01:28:01:	choose A or B, they're attempting to get you not to consider C and D and E because they want you

01:28:01 – 01:28:07:	to choose B because A is so abhorrent. And that's the case with this. When someone tells you,

01:28:07 – 01:28:13:	oh well you have to be a capitalist, else you're a communist, they're not telling you the whole

01:28:13 – 01:28:18:	truth because there are other options. And we know that because historically you didn't have

01:28:18 – 01:28:24:	capitalism or communism. But you had an economy because people bought and sold, markets existed,

01:28:24 – 01:28:32:	they had coinage. And so if there is historical precedent for other options, then no, the options

01:28:32 – 01:28:37:	are not capitalism or communism. That is a false binary. The person who tells you that is trying

01:28:37 – 01:28:44:	to mislead you. And so as Christians, what our duty is, is to look at what God has said on these

01:28:44 – 01:28:50:	issues and then to deal with our neighbors in love. Because love your neighbor as yourself

01:28:50 – 01:28:58:	is the second greatest commandment. You can't do that and be a good capitalist. And if a system

01:28:58 – 01:29:04:	tells you that you have to do X, Y, and Z to be a good member of that system, a good advocate for

01:29:04 – 01:29:10:	that system, and you look at X, Y, and Z, and then you look at scripture and it says, do not do X,

01:29:10 – 01:29:16:	do not do Y, do not do Z. Well there's a very real problem here and you're going to have to choose

01:29:16 – 01:29:23:	one or the other, the system or scripture. One of the other fascinating aspects of comparing

01:29:23 – 01:29:32:	things as they stand today with serfdom is the positive obligations that the Lord had to his

01:29:32 – 01:29:38:	serfs. You know, Corey mentioned that they were, the Lord, you know, the manor was dependent on

01:29:38 – 01:29:45:	the serfs for his food. He was obligated to them to protect them, just as today, you know, I pay

01:29:45 – 01:29:52:	property taxes and my town is obligated to protect me with police protection, except they're not.

01:29:53 – 01:29:58:	Because there's been a Supreme Court ruling some time ago that ruled that the police have no

01:29:58 – 01:30:03:	positive duty to any individual to protect them from anything. You individually are completely on

01:30:03 – 01:30:09:	your own, even though there are police and even though they have a monopoly on violence in your

01:30:09 – 01:30:15:	area, if they fail to protect you, they're not liable. They have not failed in their duty in

01:30:15 – 01:30:23:	any legal sense that they can be held accountable for. So that was not true of the Lord. Now you

01:30:23 – 01:30:29:	couldn't necessarily take your bear into court if he didn't protect you from marauders, but if he

01:30:29 – 01:30:35:	didn't do that, A, he was not going to be able to eat and B, the serfs were likely to rise up and

01:30:35 – 01:30:42:	hurt him. Maybe they burned down the manor. Possibility of violence against the head was

01:30:42 – 01:30:51:	always present in those hierarchical systems. And so undergirding the entirety of the capitalist

01:30:51 – 01:30:57:	argument for the betterment of the world is that increased individual freedom.

01:30:59 – 01:31:04:	Now the problem with saying that you've increased individual freedom is freedom to what?

01:31:05 – 01:31:12:	Freedom to buy worse, more dangerous products. Freedom to live a life that is detached from

01:31:12 – 01:31:19:	your neighbor. These are all inherent to capitalism, and they are freedoms in the sense that capitalism

01:31:19 – 01:31:24:	granted a license to behave in ways that Christians would not have done in the past.

01:31:25 – 01:31:32:	But this is why we've gone after freedom in the past, it's not a positive good. You are always

01:31:32 – 01:31:38:	a slave to something, and the blessing of Christianity is realizing that as a slave to Christ,

01:31:39 – 01:31:47:	you are free from these sorts of appetites, not completely, but you are given grace,

01:31:47 – 01:31:54:	you are given sanctification to be able to resist the desire to be avaricious, to envy what your

01:31:54 – 01:32:01:	neighbor has and try to have more than him. Now there's certainly a case to be made that when

01:32:01 – 01:32:06:	you see, you know, if you're a young single guy, and you see a married guy with, you know, a new

01:32:06 – 01:32:11:	kid and a pretty wife, you should absolutely admire that. And you should say, I want that for

01:32:11 – 01:32:18:	myself. That is not envy. At least that's not envy in any sinful sense. When you look at that and

01:32:18 – 01:32:23:	you say, I want that for myself, you shouldn't be despising the man because he has something you

01:32:23 – 01:32:31:	don't. You shouldn't be lusting after his wife and saying, I want to take her and make her mine.

01:32:32 – 01:32:36:	You shouldn't hate God for giving him blessings that you have yet to receive.

01:32:36 – 01:32:41:	Those are all the ways to handle that situation improperly. The proper way is to say,

01:32:42 – 01:32:47:	that guy is further along in his life than me. He has stuff that I want for myself,

01:32:47 – 01:32:51:	that I know are blessings from God, that I know that I can want with a clean conscience.

01:32:52 – 01:32:56:	I'm going to do what I need to do in my life to try to achieve those things myself.

01:32:57 – 01:33:00:	And then it's up to God whether or not he delivers it to you.

01:33:01 – 01:33:09:	Capitalism doesn't work that way. Capitalism is dependent on you fundamentally envying the

01:33:09 – 01:33:15:	lifestyles of others and trying to emulate and do outdo them. Not because you want to share

01:33:15 – 01:33:21:	and joy, but because you want to just have more stuff. That's really what it comes down to.

01:33:22 – 01:33:27:	And when you look at the arguments on the Mises webpage and pretty much any place

01:33:27 – 01:33:32:	where there's an argument for capitalism, it's predicated in terms of lots more freedom

01:33:32 – 01:33:38:	and lots more stuff. And pro-capitalists will say, well, that's an increase in standard of living.

01:33:38 – 01:33:43:	As Corey just said, there are many standards of living by which serfs lived unimaginably

01:33:43 – 01:33:48:	better than us. Maybe they had their homes in some case, well, 20 years ago,

01:33:48 – 01:33:52:	it would be true to say that their homes probably weren't as nice as many of ours

01:33:52 – 01:33:57:	today with the completely deranged housing market, which is itself, incidentally,

01:33:57 – 01:34:04:	a terminal state of capitalism playing out in the endgame. I mean, look at housing in

01:34:04 – 01:34:09:	particular. I think it's a perfect example. For the last 20, 30 years, what have we had?

01:34:10 – 01:34:15:	Mexican laborers and other South American immigrants, so-called, they're aliens, they're

01:34:16 – 01:34:22:	invaders, most of them are illegally come to this country and they will do jobs like roofing.

01:34:22 – 01:34:29:	You know, other things in the housing sector that displaced a lot of blue collar white men

01:34:29 – 01:34:33:	in this country. My parents, when they were redoing some stuff on their house,

01:34:33 – 01:34:36:	they were so excited a bunch of Mexicans showed up to do it because they were cheap.

01:34:37 – 01:34:43:	Every boomer is like that. You get the cheapest labor, you get the best deal, and you nailed it.

01:34:44 – 01:34:52:	That's, it's seen as a moral victory when it happens, not considering the externality that

01:34:52 – 01:34:56:	when there are a bunch of Mexicans up on your roof, that means there are a bunch of white guys

01:34:56 – 01:35:02:	who can't feed their kids the tonight because you didn't give them 20% more than the illegal

01:35:02 – 01:35:09:	alien would have cost to do a worse job than the white guy would have done. When your choice is

01:35:09 – 01:35:15:	profit or failure as a capitalist, you're always going to chase the money. You're always going

01:35:15 – 01:35:21:	to take the cheapest option. The Mexican illegal day labor would have to be really, really bad.

01:35:21 – 01:35:26:	And even then, most people today are still probably going to roll the dice. And then,

01:35:27 – 01:35:32:	when all these boomers go to sell their houses, what do they do? They try to get top dollar for

01:35:32 – 01:35:40:	the house. Now, in a vacuum, you could debate whether or not that makes sense. I think that the

01:35:40 – 01:35:46:	existence of the housing market as it stands today is fundamentally dislocated from fundamentals in

01:35:46 – 01:35:54:	so many ways. There'd be a separate podcast series just to discuss that. But one of the

01:35:54 – 01:35:59:	key moral elements that's present in every housing sale is to whom are you selling your house?

01:36:00 – 01:36:04:	And over and over, we have all seen stories. Or hopefully, if you're paying attention,

01:36:04 – 01:36:11:	you've seen and heard stories from at least until the housing market blew up in the last two years.

01:36:11 – 01:36:17:	You'd have a young family. Maybe the dad's 30. He has a new wife. They have their first kid.

01:36:17 – 01:36:24:	He's finally saved up enough that he can afford to make a bid on a house. He thinks he can finally

01:36:24 – 01:36:30:	just barely squeak into a home. And what happens in the housing market, in the free market?

01:36:30 – 01:36:35:	This man, this young man with not a lot of resources, he's at the upper limit of what

01:36:35 – 01:36:44:	he can afford, is in competition with banks, with enormous commercial real estate operations,

01:36:45 – 01:36:52:	with housing flippers who are buying places, marking them up and reselling them with people

01:36:52 – 01:36:57:	for a while. We're buying them as Airbnb's just to use as profit firms,

01:36:57 – 01:37:00:	even though it would destroy the quality of the neighborhood when they did it.

01:37:01 – 01:37:09:	And so, as a buyer, you're helpless. As a seller, you are not helpless. You are culpable. If you own

01:37:09 – 01:37:14:	a house and you're putting it on the market and you were given a choice between a couple,

01:37:14 – 01:37:20:	like the young couple, that's trying to buy their first home, and a cashpire that's going to pay

01:37:20 – 01:37:27:	$50,000 more, you are sinning if you don't sell the house to the cheaper buyer. It is evil to

01:37:27 – 01:37:31:	give it to the person who's going to give you more money for it when they don't need it as much.

01:37:32 – 01:37:38:	And we're all really allergic to the idea of need. But when you look at the basic situation there,

01:37:39 – 01:37:45:	it's easy to figure out. The young guy who's just barely right at the edge, frankly, you should

01:37:45 – 01:37:53:	probably cut him a break. In those circumstances, I would knock another 5% off to help them out.

01:37:53 – 01:37:58:	That's completely within your discretion as a seller. You can sell to anyone you please,

01:37:58 – 01:38:03:	and you can sell for whatever price you please. Capitalism, the morality of this religion, says

01:38:04 – 01:38:10:	the $50,000 greater cash buyer, that's the one you got to take. Sorry, guys, I have no choice.

01:38:10 – 01:38:16:	There's a better offer on the table. I have to take it. Nonsense. Complete horse crap. You can

01:38:16 – 01:38:22:	sell to whomever you wish. And when you fail to sell to someone who's your actual neighbor,

01:38:22 – 01:38:28:	who actually has a fundamental need, not only like, hey, this guy needs a house, but this man is

01:38:28 – 01:38:34:	forming a family. He's establishing roots in a community. He's doing everything that we all know

01:38:34 – 01:38:39:	needs to occur in communities for them to be sustained and preserved. That guy is the guy

01:38:39 – 01:38:45:	who needs to be rewarded. If that means that you don't get as much money, if you're selling your

01:38:45 – 01:38:52:	house for $100,000 more instead of $150,000 more than you paid for it, it should be a no-brainer.

01:38:53 – 01:38:58:	And yet, because of capitalism, every buyer in virtually every situation is going to take

01:38:58 – 01:39:02:	the greater offer and just shrug and say, yeah, that's the market.

01:39:04 – 01:39:10:	This is a complete despising of neighbor to do such a thing. And it's completely normal in capitalism.

01:39:11 – 01:39:17:	I think that is the key element of all of these calculations, regardless of what other system

01:39:17 – 01:39:25:	might meet our lofty ideals, when you are willing to screw over your neighbor for a few more bucks,

01:39:25 – 01:39:32:	you're evil. It's an impermissible thing as a sin. And you should consider those profits

01:39:32 – 01:39:38:	to be blood money, because you have hurt your neighbor for the sake of what? Of more money

01:39:38 – 01:39:43:	than you needed in the first place, so that you can have more stuff. See, this religion just builds

01:39:43 – 01:39:49:	up and builds up. And so it's internally consistent. You look at that whole thing and like, well,

01:39:49 – 01:39:54:	I got an extra $50,000. I can give more to charity. I can get all manner of things you can do.

01:39:55 – 01:39:59:	I'm not saying that's wrong to take a profit on something when you're selling a capital asset

01:39:59 – 01:40:06:	like that. The question is, to whom are you selling it to? Because when you're doing harm

01:40:06 – 01:40:14:	to someone, that is the greater moral imperative than how much money you make for it. Neighbor

01:40:14 – 01:40:20:	is the essence of this entire argument. When you try to produce a good more efficiently,

01:40:20 – 01:40:25:	and that means you have to use cut rate parts, maybe parts from further away, where if you could

01:40:25 – 01:40:31:	just spend 10% more, you could buy from someone closer, maybe some in your own state, even your own

01:40:31 – 01:40:37:	town, your neighbor, someone who actually matters in your community, just as much as you would hope

01:40:37 – 01:40:41:	to matter. Capitalism says, don't do that. It says, don't give it to the guy who's nearby,

01:40:41 – 01:40:49:	because he costs more. Same with competition. It's very common. You will see two grocery stores

01:40:49 – 01:40:55:	side by side or very near each other, two different chains or a chain store in a local store.

01:40:56 – 01:41:03:	That is evil. Zoning in local communities should forbid that. I don't think there should ever

01:41:03 – 01:41:08:	be a case where you have one grocery store right near another. Why? Because a grocery store is a

01:41:08 – 01:41:16:	neighborhood source of food, and the only reason to set up another one adjacent is direct competition

01:41:16 – 01:41:22:	to undercut the other guy. Now, when it's megacorporations that are doing it, they could care

01:41:22 – 01:41:26:	less. The communities are just a place for them to extract as much profit as possible.

01:41:27 – 01:41:30:	We in our communities have a choice about what sort of behavior we permit,

01:41:31 – 01:41:36:	and we don't have to put up with this crap. There are some places where it's actually possible for

01:41:36 – 01:41:41:	locals to shoot down those sorts of things and say, no, not in our neighborhood. There should be more

01:41:41 – 01:41:47:	of that, not less. All these things are moral calculus. They're moral calculations that we

01:41:47 – 01:41:56:	undertake every day, usually unconsciously. You have some sort of internal compass, and you're

01:41:56 – 01:42:02:	like, I would rather buy American. Made in the USA was a thing for a while, buy local. These are good

01:42:02 – 01:42:10:	things. The more local, the better. And you need to do it with the full awareness that it's reducing

01:42:10 – 01:42:15:	your purchasing power. You're going to have to pay your neighbor who's growing stuff on a smaller

01:42:15 – 01:42:23:	plot more than you can pay Walmart for your vegetables. There are times when your resources

01:42:23 – 01:42:28:	are so tight that if the only possible way you can maybe your family is to buy the cheapest thing,

01:42:29 – 01:42:34:	that's what you have to do. We're not making a cut and dried argument that it is always

01:42:34 – 01:42:40:	impermissible to do X. What we're trying to make the argument for is that your neighbor is always,

01:42:41 – 01:42:46:	they're right there with you, whether you ignore them or not, there's always someone nearby to whom

01:42:46 – 01:42:52:	you could be buying or selling or trading or cooperating or assisting in some other way.

01:42:52 – 01:42:58:	And when you ignore him and your sole focus is on what is going to be the most profitable thing,

01:42:58 – 01:43:04:	that's how you end up with Amazon trucks and Amazon boxes everywhere in the country. There's

01:43:04 – 01:43:09:	probably more Amazon box litter than anything else in our landfills because they have managed to

01:43:09 – 01:43:15:	undercut every single local store through their centralization. And now Jeff Bezos, I don't know

01:43:15 – 01:43:20:	who he is currently, but he's certainly one of the three richest men on the planet. As Corey said,

01:43:20 – 01:43:23:	historically, he's one of the richest men in the history of the universe.

01:43:23 – 01:43:30:	In money is power. And just like the Walmart guys, he didn't accumulate that by selling things to

01:43:30 – 01:43:35:	rich people. He did it by selling it to the normal everyday guy to us. I buy a lot of Amazon stuff

01:43:35 – 01:43:42:	less now. I mean, I don't buy much anymore of anything, but we're not trying to make the

01:43:42 – 01:43:49:	case that we're guiltless in these calculations, but they should always be part of the Christian life

01:43:49 – 01:43:54:	to think, am I doing the best thing for my neighbor? And that question should always come

01:43:54 – 01:43:59:	before am I turning a profit? And just back to scripture briefly, you don't have to look very

01:43:59 – 01:44:05:	far anywhere in scripture to find that that is the norm. Am I helping my neighbor is a Christian

01:44:05 – 01:44:14:	question? Am I getting more profit? You won't find that. You will never find that in Christian discourse.

01:44:14 – 01:44:18:	In fact, today it's so common among Christians, including some of the most

01:44:18 – 01:44:24:	right staunch Christians, conservatives, super conservatives, are often the most ardent defenders

01:44:24 – 01:44:30:	of capitalism is a tremendous problem. It's a huge problem because there's a morality that is

01:44:30 – 01:44:37:	baked into their decision to say, this is good and right and moral because profit and efficiency

01:44:37 – 01:44:41:	and competition and neighbor just goes out the window. You won't hear them talk about neighbor,

01:44:42 – 01:44:46:	except why I saved a bunch of money so I can donate it to something. Well,

01:44:46 – 01:44:52:	what cost did that come from? Is that blood money or not? And in a lot of cases, it's going to be.

01:44:53 – 01:44:59:	I want to briefly give a fact pattern. And I want you as the listener, or if you're listening in a

01:44:59 – 01:45:05:	group, we know some of you do that, you as the listeners, try to figure out the decade in which

01:45:05 – 01:45:13:	this took place. So in this fact pattern, there is a political sovereign. He directs his attorney

01:45:13 – 01:45:21:	general to look into the monopolization of certain parts of the economy. That attorney general does

01:45:21 – 01:45:27:	as he is told. He finds monopolization amongst certain players in the economy. Technical language

01:45:27 – 01:45:34:	here. He begins proceedings against them under the existing anti monopoly laws

01:45:35 – 01:45:41:	to prosecute them for the monopolistic exploitation of the market. Then

01:45:43 – 01:45:50:	some individuals related to that monopolistic player go to the political sovereign and remind him,

01:45:51 – 01:45:58:	by the way, you owe us a great deal of money on these loans we gave you during your last election

01:45:58 – 01:46:06:	cycle. It would be a shame if those came due, including all of this interest. That political

01:46:06 – 01:46:13:	sovereign unsurprisingly then directs his attorney general to cease the proceedings against that

01:46:13 – 01:46:21:	monopolistic player. Now for those who are versed in legal history and related matters,

01:46:21 – 01:46:25:	that probably sounds like something that has happened any number of times in the last hundred

01:46:25 – 01:46:33:	years. The gentleman who in this case it was a letter that he wrote to the sovereign was actually

01:46:33 – 01:46:41:	Jakob Fugor of the Fugor banking dynasty. This happened in the 1520s. So lest you think that this

01:46:42 – 01:46:49:	what we have today, the sort of corruption we see, is something that is unusual for capitalism,

01:46:50 – 01:46:57:	we see it happening right at the very beginnings of the capitalist economy with the banking system.

01:46:58 – 01:47:04:	We see this sort of corruption at the beginning and we see it today. This is inherent to the

01:47:04 – 01:47:09:	capitalist system. This is not something that is novel. It is not something that happens only in

01:47:09 – 01:47:18:	our day. It is not something that is avoidable. And one of the most perverse things about this system

01:47:19 – 01:47:23:	is that not only does it make everyone guilty because inevitably it does,

01:47:24 – 01:47:31:	but because of the way it works, because of these feedback loops, every time someone participates

01:47:31 – 01:47:38:	in this system, it entrenches the system by making things worse for everyone else and also

01:47:38 – 01:47:45:	worse for the individual who has participated. But it also at the same time makes it very difficult

01:47:45 – 01:47:51:	not to participate in the system because it becomes all-encompassing, which is really the economy

01:47:51 – 01:47:56:	has become effectively what the United States is. The United States at this point is a bizarre

01:47:56 – 01:48:02:	that happens to have a very large military. That's what capitalism has done. And so when you buy

01:48:02 – 01:48:09:	something from the big box store instead of the small farm down the street, well, not only have

01:48:09 – 01:48:15:	you got something that is almost certainly going to be lower quality, but you've impoverished your

01:48:15 – 01:48:21:	neighbor because that was a sale that could have gone to him and he could have used that money to

01:48:21 – 01:48:26:	fix his roof or pay for something for his children, any number of other things. And because he doesn't

01:48:26 – 01:48:34:	have that money from that sale, he has to go and buy cheaper goods as well. And so he buys

01:48:34 – 01:48:40:	something cheap also at another big box store. And that puts out of business the cobbler down

01:48:40 – 01:48:46:	the street or the tailor or any of a number of other merchants who would have been in business

01:48:46 – 01:48:52:	if not for that patronage of the large corporate store that has come in and destroyed the local

01:48:52 – 01:48:58:	economy. And that's the feedback loop that capitalism creates. And again, it is that ever

01:48:58 – 01:49:05:	downward pressure that impoverishes everyone. Ultimately, that is what capitalism does. It

01:49:05 – 01:49:12:	does not raise people out of poverty. It does not make life better. It impoverages. It impoverishes

01:49:12 – 01:49:18:	everyone sucks all of the wealth of the local economy and basically reduces everyone to the

01:49:18 – 01:49:24:	level of a debt slave. That is the ultimate outcome, because that is the goal of the system.

01:49:24 – 01:49:33:	It is designed to do that. Satan is very fond of A.B. testing. For those who aren't familiar with the

01:49:33 – 01:49:41:	term, the most common form of A.B. testing is if you have a website, you will put up two different

01:49:41 – 01:49:48:	versions of either a sales page or copy whatever it happens to be. And you will see which one

01:49:48 – 01:49:53:	leads to a greater conversion percentage. Conversion is just whatever your goal is. If

01:49:53 – 01:49:58:	it's a product, it's to sell the product. And that's A.B. testing. You'll see which one performs

01:49:58 – 01:50:02:	better. And then you go with that one. And then you'll test that one against another B.

01:50:02 – 01:50:07:	And you keep doing that. You keep refining as you go. Satan does the same thing. He's very

01:50:07 – 01:50:13:	fond of it. He's done it many times in history. One way that he did it in the last century or so,

01:50:13 – 01:50:19:	last couple centuries, was he paired off capitalism and communism. Well, which one

01:50:19 – 01:50:24:	is more effective? Which one will cause the greatest amount of human suffering possible?

01:50:24 – 01:50:30:	Because that's his goal. Turns out that both work pretty well. Capitalism works better.

01:50:31 – 01:50:38:	Because capitalism makes everyone complicit in the system. There were many who lived under

01:50:38 – 01:50:43:	communism who accepted communism only because the alternative was to get shot and dumped in a ditch.

01:50:46 – 01:50:51:	On the other hand, many of those, particularly men who claim to be Christian,

01:50:51 – 01:50:57:	will ardently defend capitalism. You didn't see men who were Christian ardently defending

01:50:57 – 01:51:07:	communism. Communism destroys a society. But communism is so inherently per se on its face

01:51:07 – 01:51:12:	wicked that Christians really are not going to be suckered into it. Anyone who claims to be

01:51:12 – 01:51:18:	a Christian and also claims to be a communist is one of those two things. And I think we all

01:51:18 – 01:51:24:	know which one it is. But there are many men who in good conscience, seemingly, claim to be

01:51:24 – 01:51:30:	Christian and capitalist. They'll even go so far as to claim that capitalism is the most

01:51:30 – 01:51:36:	moral economic system and that Christians must support it. And so it is capitalism

01:51:36 – 01:51:42:	that is more destructive, that is more wicked than communism ultimately because of the outcome,

01:51:42 – 01:51:49:	because of how much damage and how pervasive that damage is. And we're living again at the tail end

01:51:49 – 01:51:59:	of it. We are living in the consequences of capitalism. And in some ways I have to envy Luther

01:51:59 – 01:52:03:	because when I read Luther's writings on these subjects,

01:52:04 – 01:52:11:	he is able to address himself to perhaps not Charles the Fifth, who was not very fond of

01:52:11 – 01:52:16:	Luther at this point, but he is able to address himself to godly sovereigns. He is able to address

01:52:16 – 01:52:23:	himself to a Christian prince, to a Lutheran prince. He is able to tell these men in his

01:52:23 – 01:52:29:	sermons, and he does so quite boldly in his sermons and his treatises, you have a moral duty

01:52:29 – 01:52:36:	to fix these things. You have a moral duty to stop these men from monopolizing these markets and

01:52:36 – 01:52:42:	exploiting the poor, from charging interest, from usury, those two are synonymous, from all of these

01:52:42 – 01:52:51:	various things. You, to whom god has given the sword, have a duty to address these matters. As a

01:52:51 – 01:52:57:	Christian you are duty bound, you are morally bound. And he goes so far as to say, I am burdening

01:52:57 – 01:53:04:	your conscience with this. This is your duty, and you are not a Christian if you do not do it.

01:53:05 – 01:53:12:	And I envy him because he gets to say that and we don't, because we don't have Christian rulers

01:53:12 – 01:53:17:	to whom we can address our complaint. We don't have Christian princes to whom we can say,

01:53:18 – 01:53:22:	Scripture says that you are sinning by permitting this evil to continue in your lands.

01:53:23 – 01:53:28:	We today do not have that luxury, because we live under a wicked government,

01:53:28 – 01:53:35:	we are governed by evil pagans, not by Christians. And so that leaves us in a different position.

01:53:36 – 01:53:42:	It leaves us in a position where we have to do things entirely locally, and perhaps this is

01:53:42 – 01:53:49:	good to some degree, because most things should be local. But we as Christian men have to start

01:53:49 – 01:53:56:	by doing things locally. We can build up from there, but we can't appeal to a prince because we

01:53:56 – 01:54:01:	don't have a godly prince. So we don't have the option of top down. We don't have the option of

01:54:01 – 01:54:08:	enforcing regulation and rules that will change these matters for the better, that will push them

01:54:08 – 01:54:13:	in a Christian direction. Now, if you happen to live somewhere where that's actually an option,

01:54:14 – 01:54:18:	you're very lucky and you should pursue that. But generally speaking, most of us,

01:54:19 – 01:54:24:	our options are going to be amending our own personal behavior on a daily basis.

01:54:26 – 01:54:32:	And so if you have the option to shop at the small family store, by all means do so.

01:54:33 – 01:54:39:	If you have the option for your neighbor to do your gardening, if you don't happen to have the

01:54:39 – 01:54:43:	time or the skill to do it yourself, by all means do that. Don't hire the illegal alien.

01:54:45 – 01:54:51:	These are the little things that matter. You have to build the relationships with your neighbors,

01:54:51 – 01:54:55:	build that network, build a community, because that is what Christians are supposed to have.

01:54:55 – 01:55:00:	That is what an actual functioning society looks like. But it is most certainly one

01:55:00 – 01:55:08:	that Christians should build. What we have today does not look in any way, shape, or form

01:55:08 – 01:55:13:	Christian. And that should terrify each and every one of us who lives under this system.

01:55:14 – 01:55:20:	Because surely God is going to ask us, why did you willingly participate in that and not only

01:55:20 – 01:55:26:	participate, but many of you defended it? That is not what we are supposed to do as Christians,

01:55:27 – 01:55:33:	we are to hold to what God says in his word. We are to love our neighbor as ourself,

01:55:33 – 01:55:39:	and we do not do that when we simply think, well, I can get this item 50 cents cheaper if I go on

01:55:39 – 01:55:46:	Amazon, or a dollar cheaper, whatever it happens to be, spend a little more money. And again,

01:55:46 – 01:55:52:	with the caveat, if you are able to do so, we recognize that this system, as we have said

01:55:52 – 01:55:57:	many times in this episode, creates poverty, creates debt slaves, creates

01:55:59 – 01:56:05:	quite frankly, a set of perverse incentives. We recognize that is true. But if you are able,

01:56:06 – 01:56:10:	patronize the local business, help your neighbor, hire your neighbor,

01:56:11 – 01:56:17:	don't participate in the evil system if you are able to avoid doing so.

01:56:17 – 01:56:25:	And so, at your church, get a list of men who have certain skills. If you need a plumber,

01:56:26 – 01:56:33:	hire the plumber who sits next to you in the pews. If you need a roofer, hire the one who

01:56:33 – 01:56:37:	sits next to you in the pews. That man is your neighbor, at least he should be your neighbor,

01:56:37 – 01:56:43:	I hope you don't have to commute three hours to church. If that man is your neighbor,

01:56:44 – 01:56:50:	then you should be dealing with him if you can. The Christian solution to the problems we face

01:56:50 – 01:56:55:	is local. If we are faithful in these matters,

01:56:57 – 01:57:03:	I do believe that God will give us a faithful leader, a faithful prince, at some point.

01:57:04 – 01:57:09:	I'm not as pessimistic about the end necessarily being right around the corner. It could be,

01:57:09 – 01:57:16:	I don't know, I won't speculate. But when it comes down to it, as Christian men,

01:57:17 – 01:57:24:	we ultimately have control only over our own actions. And so, it is those actions

01:57:24 – 01:57:29:	that we should conform to scripture, that we should conform to love of neighbor.

01:57:30 – 01:57:35:	And from that, we'll grow these networks of relationships, these interconnections,

01:57:35 – 01:57:42:	that build up a Christian society. It is a lot easier to stand up a Christian prince

01:57:42 – 01:57:48:	in a Christian society than it is to just sit and hope that God will give us a Christian prince,

01:57:48 – 01:57:54:	and he will impose a Christian society on a pagan people. The latter is unlikely to happen,

01:57:54 – 01:58:02:	in this day and age. And so, it is our duty, as best we can, with what God has given us,

01:58:02 – 01:58:09:	to act as Christians in our lives. And that includes, in our economic dealings,

01:58:09 – 01:58:18:	which should be, by and large, with our immediate, if possible, neighbors.

01:59:02 – 01:59:03:	you