Money, Greed, and Five Favorite Fallacies

As you may have noticed, my passion against Schneider has burned out a bit, since I finished reading him almost two weeks ago, though I will still do my best to blog through the rest of the book.  I read John Medaille's Toward a Truly Free Market and it was a fantastic breath of fresh air--I reiterate the recommendation I made before I read it: everyone should go read it.  More about it in due course.  For now, though, I'm afraid I have another very unhappy review to share, Jay Richards' Money, Greed, and God.  (I will admit up front that I did not finish this book.  I made it to the halfway point, and then determined that to continue, with no promise that I would ever be offered a coherent argument, was merely an act of self-flagellation.  I should also point out, lest I seem to be unfairly singling out really lame books to critique, like a scrawny third-grader beating up on kindergarteners in order to feel important, that the back cover of this book is bedecked with laurels like "the definitive case for capitalism," bestowed by none other than George Gilder, and is rated very highly on both Amazon and Goodreads.  If this is the definitive case for capitalism, then I'm afraid capitalism had better give up and pack its bags.)

This book is laced with unflattering ironies.  The author repeatedly adopts the stance, so attractive to American audiences, as the champion of common-sense over against the obfuscations of intellectuals, who spin webs of fantasy and idealism out of touch with reality.  But he does this while remaining consistently at the realm of abstraction, hypotheticals, and straw men, never deigning to come down and engage economic realities.  Sometimes this equals blatant falsehood, like where Richards asserts that “government spending as a portion of GNP has grown exponentially in recent decades.”  The actual growth?  12% (from 18.4% to 20.6%) over fifty years, and actually a decline in the last twenty.  (You can see all the details here.)

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Doug Wilson on the Eighth Commandment

Any regular reader of Doug Wilson's Blog and Mablog may have been surprised, yea, dismayed to read my recent post "Thou Shalt Not Steal," not unreasonably (given some interactions with Wilson on the previous incarnation of this blog)  imagining it to be a direct attack on Wilson's post earlier this month, "Football Players or Pirates."  As it turns out, I just stumbled upon that post today, and can thus assure you that Wilson was in no way the target of my post, despite the remarkable parallels in what was discussed.  I have always thought that attacking someone publicly without naming them was rather worse than doing it openly, so that is certainly not what I was up to.  However, since some may have already noticed it, since the contradiction between our conclusions is quite striking, and since it affords me a good opportunity for reiterating the significant and relevant parts of my earlier post, I might as well interact explicitly with his post now.

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"Thou Shalt Not Steal" (The Problem of Private Property, Part Two)

In Christian circles, if ever any question is raised which seems to constitute an attack on private property (as almost any attempt to critically discuss the subject seems to PP’s jumpy defenders), the response is likely to go something like this: 

“Well, the Bible speaks very strongly and highly of the importance and legitimacy of private property.  (Often at this point, the very peculiar language of a “sacred right” or a “sacred institution” is used.)  A defense of private property is built right into the Ten Commandments, with “Thou shalt not steal,” and the rest of the laws show a great concern for the rights of property-holders.  God’s approval of private property is further demonstrated by the approbation given to so many wealthy men throughout the Scriptures--from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Job and Solomon to Joseph of Arimathea, Barnabas, and Lydia.  In the New Testament, Jesus and the Apostles never call the institution into question, but on the contrary, they presuppose it and bolster it, whether through parables that feature wealthy landlords, or through the case of Ananias and Saphira, where Peter tells them that they were completely free to sell or keep their lands as they saw fit (Acts 4:4).”

Now, to those accustomed to take the institution of PP for granted (which is to say, almost every modern western Christian), this argument seems amply satisfactory.  But a closer look at the components of this case shows that they prove very little of what they are called upon to prove.  In this post, I’ll address the eighth commandment, and in a following post, the rest of this argument.

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Locke’s Right to Theft of Private Property?

Is “theft” ever just?  Is the right to private property absolute?  That is to say, does a man in urgent need have a right to the means of his sustenance so that he is entitled, if necessary, to take what he needs from a person who has more than enough?  Regular readers of this blog will recall that this has been a frequent theme of discussion here in the past year.  In the past, however, it was Aquinas who was commonly referenced as the chief example of this concession, this limitation of private property rights (common though it was in the classical Christian tradition).  But although John Locke often figures in such discussions as the symbol for the development of modern, capitalistic, increasingly absolute property rights, it turns out that this theme is not alien to his thinking either.  He remains more traditional than we might expect.  

Locke shares with Aquinas and the tradition the belief that in the beginning, the world and its goods were created for the common enjoyment and sustenance of all mankind, each of whom had an equal right to be nourished by the earth’s fruits.  Although he gets from this point to the lawful existence of private property via a significantly different route than Aquinas, this starting point means that he can hardly allow that anyone’s subsequent private property rights could extend to the point of denying basic sustenance to the starving.  

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