Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  The passages describing this communal arrangement, argue Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, are not prescriptive but descriptive. It’s not a command for all believers but a description of what those early believers were doing.20 The communal arrangement by the early church was not for the entire community of mankind but only for the church, and it was not intended to be permanent but rather to avert a temporary crisis.21 The Book of Acts tells of other early believers who didn’t sell their possessions. Mark’s mother Mary, for example, held on to her house (12:12). Simon, the tanner, did the same (10:32).

  Other passages in both the Old and New Testaments implicitly affirm the right of individuals to own private property. “At its core, socialism calls evil something that God calls good,” writes Mark Ward, and that is “[t]he right to private property.”22 Ward notes that many of the laws God gave to Israel protected property rights (Exodus 21:33–33:14). The right to private property is implicit in the eighth commandment—“Thou shall not steal”—as well as in the tenth commandment, as noted earlier. In theory, pure socialism or Communism involves the abolition of private property, but in practice property is commandeered by the state—an elite, tyrannical few. To avoid misunderstanding, we should note that while Christianity doesn’t ordain socialism, it does command that we voluntarily and with a loving spirit give freely and otherwise support the poor and others in need. There are few things clearer in scripture.23 As Robert Morey argues, however, “[A]ny government that violates the dignity and freedom of human beings is not ordained of God.”24

  Far from mandating socialism, Christianity is incompatible with it. Socialism and Communism are in conflict with biblical teaching on the depravity of mankind. They are utopian systems that cannot work, among other reasons, because they are based on the belief in man’s perfectibility.25 The leftist pursuit of earthly utopia is a humanist conceit—a form of idolatry that contradicts biblical teaching and is grounded in the fantastical notion that if we try hard enough, through our unaided human wisdom and scientific knowledge, we’ll be able to achieve heaven on earth.

  “Voluntary socialism” is another oxymoron. All forms of socialism entail centralized control of the economy and substantial encroachments on liberty.26 The government’s coercive redistribution of people’s property is vastly different from individual philanthropy. When people act under coercion they aren’t proceeding from a charitable spirit. Thus, socialism is directly antithetical to economic freedom. “The so-called economic freedom which the planners promise us means precisely that we are to be relieved of the necessity of solving our own economic problems and that the bitter choices which this often involves are to be made for us,” writes Hayek. “Since under modern conditions we are for almost everything dependent on means which our fellow men provide, economic planning would involve direction of almost the whole of our life. There is hardly an aspect of it, from our primary needs to our relations with our family and friends, from the nature of our work to the use of our leisure, over which the planner would not exercise his ‘conscious control.’ ”27

  Christian theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong addressed Christianity, socialism, and freedom in his 1907 book on systematic theology. He concluded, “Socialism abolishes freedom, which the church cultivates and insists upon as the principle of its life. Tertullian (wrote), ‘It is not the business of religion to compel religion.’… By abolishing freedom, socialism destroys all possibility of economical progress. The economical principle of socialism is that, relative to the enjoyment of commodities, the individual shall be taken care of by the community, to the effect of his being relieved of the care of himself.”28

  SOCIALISM’S RECORD OF BRUTALITY AND DEVASTATION

  The historical record is unambiguous and indisputable—socialism has consistently devastated human lives and entire nations. In the name of progress, it has brought poverty, misery, despair, and often dictatorship and death. The twentieth century stands as a permanent indictment of socialism. The socialist states and regimes of the Soviet Union, Red China, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are responsible for murdering more than 100 million people.29 Indulging the convenient fiction that fascism is right-wing, leftists pretend that Nazism was not socialist, even though socialism was in its title and platform. Walter Williams observes that no such record of brutality has occurred in countries with free-market economies.30

  Socialism has failed—not because the perfect group of geniuses hasn’t come along to correctly administer it but because it is inherently flawed. Socialism has been disastrous everywhere.31 Consider Chile’s horrendous experience in the early 1970s, when the government’s imposition of socialism flatlined the economy. The cost of living rose by 746 percent, unemployment soared, and the chaos finally sparked a coup, which substituted one repressive regime for another.32 Argentina tried socialism in the late 1940s under Juan Perón, who enacted wage and price controls, nationalized many industries, took over private property, and radically increased government spending. This led to an economic catastrophe and hyperinflation that once again ended in a coup. The new regime retained the socialist model, leading to economic stagnation. After further forcible regime changes, by the late 1980s the nation was reeling from 12,000 percent inflation.33

  A few short years ago Venezuela was the wealthiest nation in South America—before socialism brought about abject poverty.34 A UN report revealed that the army’s death squads have executed thousands of young men.35 Yet the American left couldn’t praise this socialist nightmare enough. When Trump declared solidarity with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom and condemned the brutality of the Maduro regime, few Democrats responded receptively.

  Many of them want to take us down that Venezuelan road, to a place where three million people have fled their own country (and the UN expects that number to top five million by the end of 2019),36 93 percent of those remaining live in poverty, and roughly that percentage say they don’t have enough to eat.37 The nation’s health system has disintegrated, with more than one hundred private and public hospitals found to be in deplorable condition. Seventy-nine percent of these facilities have no access to water, 14 percent of their intensive care units have been shut down, and more than 80 percent can’t perform ultrasounds, X-rays, or CT scans. Between a third and half of all doctors in public hospitals have left. There is a shortage of 85 percent of medicines, so patients have to bring their own medications, along with their own bandages and surgical gloves.38 Seven million people suffer from malnutrition, and the hunger rate has tripled since 2010.39 All this in a nation rich with oil, gold, and other natural resources.40 Meanwhile, the family of the late despot who led the nation’s socialist “revolution,” Hugo Chavez, owns seventeen country estates over more than 100,000 acres and has liquid assets of $550 million. Chavez’s daughter Maria has a net worth of $4.2 billion.41 So much for the equitable distribution of resources in socialist nations!

  “BUT SWEDEN”

  Grasping socialist apologists desperately cite Sweden as the one exceptional oasis that proves socialism works. Even some free-marketeers grudgingly acknowledge Sweden’s success, which they attribute to its homogenous culture. But the evidence isn’t so clear. Some argue that socialism nearly destroyed the Swedish economy and that free-market reforms revived it.42 Furthermore, it was not Sweden’s socialist decades but its years of economic freedom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—coupled with its avoidance of war and consequent preservation of resources—that initially ignited its entrepreneurship and prosperity.

  Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, argues Stefan Karlsson, Sweden was mostly poor, and it escaped this fate through sweeping market reforms in the 1860s, which enabled it to benefit from the spreading Industrial Revolution. Sweden had the world’s highest per-capita income from 1870 to 1950, but this was because of its freedom tradition, which started to erode in the 1930s under the Social Democrats who came
to power in 1932. Piggybacking on its previous decades of success, the government still presided over one of the freest economies in the world in the early 1950s. But from 1950 to 1976, Swedish government spending spiked, the number of government employees jumped, the welfare state rapidly expanded, and taxes and government transfer payments sharply increased. Under the cumulative weight of these socialist programs, the economy weakened in the late 1970s and 1980s, culminating in a deep recession in the early 1990s as Sweden fell to between fifteenth and twentieth place in international income rankings.43

  During that period, unemployment rose alongside government programs disincentivizing work, increasing disability payments, and subsidizing sick days. “The growth of taxes and benefits punished hard work and encouraged absenteeism,” writes Kevin Williamson. Swedish economist Johan Norberg maintains that the onset of socialism changed the national psychology so that it became acceptable to game the system and defraud one’s taxpaying neighbors.44 Williamson notes that one reason Swedes have tolerated high levels of taxation and an expansive welfare state is that the country’s programs involve less redistribution and operate more as government-imposed forced savings, such that people are largely the beneficiaries of their own taxes, especially compared to the United States.

  Following its downturn, Sweden’s economy began to perform better following another round of free-market reforms, though socialists credit the turnaround to lingering high taxes and welfare programs. “Yet as should be clear, the relative improvement of performance is due not to high taxes (lower now than previously), but to free-market reforms,” writes Karlsson. “The reason Sweden no longer trails the rest of Europe is that these reforms, which have not been implemented in most continental European countries, have made the Swedish economy relatively freer.”45

  “AN EQUALITY OF POVERTY”

  Contrary to leftist dogma, mankind has experienced poverty throughout history, but capitalism has greatly reduced it in the past two centuries, creating unprecedented prosperity.46 Great accumulations of wealth and inequality preceded capitalism and have been with us throughout history. Today, people operating in a free-market environment voluntarily give money and participate in enterprises owned by the wealthiest people. No law requires us to buy products from Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, and their owners are not elected officials. “By contrast, most of history is a tale of economic and political power held by the very few,” writes Thomas Del Beccaro. “If you lived in the Middle Ages, you lived in a system where those in political power, i.e., the kings, nobles, gentry, and churches, also owned the greatest accumulations of land—the wealth of the age. Your service to them was required and you were often tied to their land.”47

  That general condition, with little opportunity for social mobility, prevailed until a few centuries ago, when capitalism and the Industrial Revolution changed everything. In The Lessons of History, Will Durant explains that capitalists gathered the people’s savings into productive capital by promising dividends and interest, then financed the mechanization of industry and agriculture as well as the rationalization of distribution. Consequently, goods flowed from producer to consumer as never before. The capitalist “put the gospel of liberty to his use by arguing that businessmen left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater abundance of food, homes, comfort, and leisure than has ever come from industries managed by politicians, manned by government employees, and supposedly immune to the laws of supply and demand,” writes Durant. Free enterprise spurs competition and “the zeal and zest of ownership arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men.… Competition compels the capitalist to exhaustive labor, and his products to ever-rising excellence.”48

  Economics professor Deirdre McCloskey argues that the Industrial Revolution led to a worldwide economic transformation marked by “poor people who are rich by historical standards, ordinary people in charge of their own politics, women with jobs outside the home, children educated into their 20s, retirees living into their 80s, universal literacy, and the flowering of the arts and sciences.”49 Likewise, Luke Muehlhauser researched the condition of mankind over the sweep of history by examining six metrics of human well-being: life expectancy, GDP per capita, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, war-making capacity, energy capture (people’s access to food, livestock, firewood, and in modern times, electricity), and the percentage of people living in a democracy. His data, spanning from 1000 BC to the present, show that for most of human history there was simply no progress in any of these six areas. Living in extreme poverty, people were close to starvation most of their lives. Economic historian Joel Mokyr says that life expectancy in 1750 was about thirty-eight at most and much lower in some places.50

  Most significant historical events actually had little effect on people’s longevity, freedom, economic productivity, and prosperity. But the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s dramatically improved human lives in all these categories.51 There’s a reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not in China: though China had previously experienced faster scientific progress, Europe developed a culture of competitive scientific and intellectual advancement. “Europe creates a competitive world that encourages intellectual innovation,” writes Mokyr.52

  One major difference between capitalists and socialists, as noted, is that capitalists believe in wealth creation. They understand that economies are dynamic—that economic output is not a zero-sum game with a finite pie of output. They consider economic decisions in terms of incentives they create, focusing more on results than supposedly good intentions.53 Having a heart for the poor, by itself, doesn’t put food on anyone’s table. But, as noted, an economic system that incorporates incentives and other mechanisms to maximize production is more likely to lead to broad-based prosperity, whereas command-control economies are guaranteed, in the long run, to spread the misery, in part because incentives don’t operate in such systems. “Unfortunately, true socialists are pushing for a government that would drive Americans into a society in which everyone is guaranteed an equality of poverty,” writes Jeff Charles. “No system of government can ensure that inequality doesn’t exist. Under socialist and communist governments that strive to provide equality of outcome, citizens are still grouped into the haves and have-nots.… There are two separate classes: those who rule, and those who are ruled.”54

  Dr. Sowell notes that when India and China introduced market forces in the late twentieth century, they each began to experience dramatic economic growth. Within a decade an estimated 20 million people in India rose out of poverty. The number of people in China living on a dollar a day or less fell from 374 million in 1990 to 128 million in 2004.

  Clinging to the false perception that economic output is fixed, socialists have diminished their expectations accordingly. This has been true, albeit on a lesser scale, in the United States. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama each indicated that Americans should expect anemic economic growth rates in perpetuity—no more than 1 or 2 percent.55 They inspired pessimism about the future, which is especially ironic in Obama’s case, since he ran on a platform of “hope and change.” They called for economic sacrifice rather than assuring Americans that a rekindling of their entrepreneurial spirit would revive growth.56 But in each case, their successors, Presidents Reagan and Trump, reignited the economy through pro-growth policies of cutting taxes and regulations, thus shattering their predecessors’ predictions of permanent malaise.

  THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKET

  I remember asking my dad when I was a young boy what would happen if no one wanted to do certain jobs. “What if no one wanted to be a policeman or fireman?” I asked him. I confess not remembering his precise answer, but he assured me that it would always work out. Despite my naïveté then, it really is a basic question. In a free economy with no central planners, something has to ensure that essential jobs do not go unfilled. This is where the metaphorical “invisible hand
of the free market” comes into play. The concept originated with Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations:

  Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.57

  Smith wasn’t advocating greed but merely pointing out that when individuals act out of their own self-interest in a free market, greater benefits accrue both to the individual and to society at large. How likely is it that government bureaucrats, far removed from the people whose lives they attempt to control, could make spending choices for people as beneficial as if the individuals made those choices themselves? The planners would have to be omniscient to do so, and no one ever accused bureaucrats of omniscience. “Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit,” writes Milton Friedman. “No external force, no coercion, no violation of freedom is necessary to produce cooperation among individuals all of whom can benefit.”58