First Trump blew up the Deep State's foreign-aid racket. Now he’s replacing permanent aid dependency with a doctrine built on growth, trade, and self-sustaining prosperity.
Excellent article and insightful. No doubt that socialists embedded in the federal government will be howling at the change but it needs to happen. We are hated the world over for giving handouts and we cannot understand it. By helping with a hand up - putting them in business - we will give the peoples of the world self esteem and self worth. Not to mention that we don’t have to keep them on the dole…
Foreign aid enriches bureaucrats, and kleptocrats. How many Third World leaders/tyrants have become fabulously wealthy by stealing from the American taxpayer?
The question socialists/communists can never answer is, "how does your system create wealth?" Of course, it cannot and never has. It can only redistribute (i.e. steal) wealth produced by entrepreneurial capitalism.
Great article until you lauded Capitalism as the cure without caveats. Both capitalism and socialism, stripped of Christ as the means and the end, ultimately collapse into the same human problem: idolatry of the heart. History shows that Capitalists without Christ can be just as selfish, evil and exploitative as Socialists, often worse. Remember the Robber Barons! And what about the oligarchs now at the top of the US food chain? Musk is closer to what we'd like to see in terms of Christian values but what about the rest of those skunks? They are as far from the biblical model of economic and monetary policy on the Capitalist side as Stalin and Mao on the Communist end of the spectrum. Why should we praise and preserve a system that allows them to grow perpetually richer in a nation that supposedly guarantees us limited government by the consent of the governed? How is that possible under Capitalism without biblical restraints? It isn't.
We're probably going to preserve American geopolitical hegemony under Trump, and that's good for Americans, but lets not fool ourselves: it's being done by one set of new US oligarchs overthrowing the old European ones, and we little people are just as much pawns and peasants to them as to the Socialists.
Okay, first of all, where did I say that? And in what possible universe can you find anywhere that I have suggested than anyone ought to be without Christ ever?
Second, what you're saying sounds pious, but is actually doing the left's work for it. You are saying that following God's law (in this case on property rights and envy) can somehow be bad if the person acting correctly doesn't love Him. That's just silly. Everyone is required to uphold God's righteous standards, whether they recognize that or not, and there are significant blessings that come from doing so compared to engaging in systematic lawbreaking. Compare Japan and Haiti if you don't believe me. Or just look at Deut. 4:5-8.
Man's sinful twisting of God's truths does not make them less true. I can extol the virtues of God's design for sex without having to caveat it with a laundry list of sexual sins. That's what you're attempting to do, whether you mean to or not. We are defined by God's standard, not by man's perversion of it.
I understand and appreciate your zeal for Christ, and I am grateful for it.
And now, my "Christianity Commands Capitalism", deliberately titled to provoke comments like yours above.
Thanks for the link to that article. I don't doubt your personal commitment to a Christian version of capitalism and wish it had been better reflected in this article. My comment was more a reaction to what seemed to me the standard "off the shelf" conservative argument for capitalism in the second part of your piece after a really great set of insights undergirded by original thinking in the first part.
I've been guilty of simply repeating the rote Capitalism v Socialism talking points verbatim in the past but today take every opportunity to expose that line of reasoning as a false choice. My personal turning point came from studying the Enclosure movement in England from the 16th though 19th Centuries that impoverished generations of common people (who had always previously used the "commons" for farming and grazing) just in time for them to be enslaved as factory workers in the Industrial Revolution. Marx and Engels exploited that grotesque example of exploitation of the poor by the rich to gain undeserved support for their false Communist "solutions." The American Founders intentionally incorporated anti-Enclosure laws throughout the first colonies -- laws that reflect benign "Social Justice" principles as a balance and correction to malign "Capitalist" ones. https://millennialistvagabond.substack.com/p/the-false-dawn-mamdanis-victory-and
Let's think through a handful of incontrovertible facts.
1. God has established ownership through His own ownership of all creation.
2. God delegates that ownership to specific stewards, starting with the Creation Mandate.
3. God prohibits theft.
4. God prohibits coveting (you may not even think about theft).
5. God requires the honoring of contracts.
6. God prohibits fraud.
7. God outlines what stewardship entails in countless places, but certainly not least of them the Parable of the Talents.
8. God plainly lists a taxation scheme involving amounts "as much as the tithe" as tyrannical.
So premises considered, tell me what economic system you could possibly construct apart from capitalism that would not be inherently sinful? I am not talking about voluntary communes like the Jerusalem church: Peter told Ananias and Saphira that they would not have sinned if they'd just been honest about their desire to keep whatever they had, rather than lying and thus defrauding. Voluntary arrangements are necessarily within the bounds of capitalism because they are by definition voluntary. Socialism not only requires but justifies (from its wicked point of view) force.
And further, do I have to label all sex as "Christian sex" or "non-Christian" sex to talk meaningfully about God's design for sex? Do I have to list all possible perversions any time I talk about marriage, just to make certain someone doesn't mean something unchristian?
Capitalism is required by Christianity. All people sin, and therefore all people engage in corrupt acts in all things that they do. This does not negate the principle, and God is in the process of redeeming all things: sin will cease, the unrepentant will be cast into the Lake of Fire for all eternity, and nothing will be misused or abused ever again.
But in the meantime, I do not see the need to qualify everything. It seems a bit dualistic. Right is right. Right is even right when bad people do right. And if they transgress the very clear boundaries God has placed on all human activity they do wrong. They do not thereby negate the standard: as Paul says in Romans, they thereby prove the standard righteous.
What I will not do is pretend that "Christian Socialism" is possible, any more than "Christian prostitution" would be possible. Socialism is not just a sin, but systematically intentionally sinful. And I don't think we profit by blurring the lines just because we recognize that Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and other brilliant capitalist thinkers are probably burning in Hell. So is Aristotle, but he had a lot of useful insights.
Great concept. How will it be implemented? What specific steps will they take? One thing I read somewhere is that they would simply remove the NGO’s from the equation and give funds directly to the country.
👏👏👏 Bravo, Dr. Martin! You explained the idea behind “trade over aid” very well! Instead of making the African nations becoming perpetual welfare dependents, we need to be helping them to help themselves.
Excellent article and insightful. No doubt that socialists embedded in the federal government will be howling at the change but it needs to happen. We are hated the world over for giving handouts and we cannot understand it. By helping with a hand up - putting them in business - we will give the peoples of the world self esteem and self worth. Not to mention that we don’t have to keep them on the dole…
"Trade, not aid;" capitalism, not socialism. Yes!
Foreign aid enriches bureaucrats, and kleptocrats. How many Third World leaders/tyrants have become fabulously wealthy by stealing from the American taxpayer?
The question socialists/communists can never answer is, "how does your system create wealth?" Of course, it cannot and never has. It can only redistribute (i.e. steal) wealth produced by entrepreneurial capitalism.
Great article until you lauded Capitalism as the cure without caveats. Both capitalism and socialism, stripped of Christ as the means and the end, ultimately collapse into the same human problem: idolatry of the heart. History shows that Capitalists without Christ can be just as selfish, evil and exploitative as Socialists, often worse. Remember the Robber Barons! And what about the oligarchs now at the top of the US food chain? Musk is closer to what we'd like to see in terms of Christian values but what about the rest of those skunks? They are as far from the biblical model of economic and monetary policy on the Capitalist side as Stalin and Mao on the Communist end of the spectrum. Why should we praise and preserve a system that allows them to grow perpetually richer in a nation that supposedly guarantees us limited government by the consent of the governed? How is that possible under Capitalism without biblical restraints? It isn't.
We're probably going to preserve American geopolitical hegemony under Trump, and that's good for Americans, but lets not fool ourselves: it's being done by one set of new US oligarchs overthrowing the old European ones, and we little people are just as much pawns and peasants to them as to the Socialists.
"Capitalism without Christ..."
Okay, first of all, where did I say that? And in what possible universe can you find anywhere that I have suggested than anyone ought to be without Christ ever?
Second, what you're saying sounds pious, but is actually doing the left's work for it. You are saying that following God's law (in this case on property rights and envy) can somehow be bad if the person acting correctly doesn't love Him. That's just silly. Everyone is required to uphold God's righteous standards, whether they recognize that or not, and there are significant blessings that come from doing so compared to engaging in systematic lawbreaking. Compare Japan and Haiti if you don't believe me. Or just look at Deut. 4:5-8.
Man's sinful twisting of God's truths does not make them less true. I can extol the virtues of God's design for sex without having to caveat it with a laundry list of sexual sins. That's what you're attempting to do, whether you mean to or not. We are defined by God's standard, not by man's perversion of it.
I understand and appreciate your zeal for Christ, and I am grateful for it.
And now, my "Christianity Commands Capitalism", deliberately titled to provoke comments like yours above.
https://www.rodmartin.org/p/sunday-essay-christianity-commands
Thanks for the link to that article. I don't doubt your personal commitment to a Christian version of capitalism and wish it had been better reflected in this article. My comment was more a reaction to what seemed to me the standard "off the shelf" conservative argument for capitalism in the second part of your piece after a really great set of insights undergirded by original thinking in the first part.
I've been guilty of simply repeating the rote Capitalism v Socialism talking points verbatim in the past but today take every opportunity to expose that line of reasoning as a false choice. My personal turning point came from studying the Enclosure movement in England from the 16th though 19th Centuries that impoverished generations of common people (who had always previously used the "commons" for farming and grazing) just in time for them to be enslaved as factory workers in the Industrial Revolution. Marx and Engels exploited that grotesque example of exploitation of the poor by the rich to gain undeserved support for their false Communist "solutions." The American Founders intentionally incorporated anti-Enclosure laws throughout the first colonies -- laws that reflect benign "Social Justice" principles as a balance and correction to malign "Capitalist" ones. https://millennialistvagabond.substack.com/p/the-false-dawn-mamdanis-victory-and
Let's think through a handful of incontrovertible facts.
1. God has established ownership through His own ownership of all creation.
2. God delegates that ownership to specific stewards, starting with the Creation Mandate.
3. God prohibits theft.
4. God prohibits coveting (you may not even think about theft).
5. God requires the honoring of contracts.
6. God prohibits fraud.
7. God outlines what stewardship entails in countless places, but certainly not least of them the Parable of the Talents.
8. God plainly lists a taxation scheme involving amounts "as much as the tithe" as tyrannical.
So premises considered, tell me what economic system you could possibly construct apart from capitalism that would not be inherently sinful? I am not talking about voluntary communes like the Jerusalem church: Peter told Ananias and Saphira that they would not have sinned if they'd just been honest about their desire to keep whatever they had, rather than lying and thus defrauding. Voluntary arrangements are necessarily within the bounds of capitalism because they are by definition voluntary. Socialism not only requires but justifies (from its wicked point of view) force.
And further, do I have to label all sex as "Christian sex" or "non-Christian" sex to talk meaningfully about God's design for sex? Do I have to list all possible perversions any time I talk about marriage, just to make certain someone doesn't mean something unchristian?
Capitalism is required by Christianity. All people sin, and therefore all people engage in corrupt acts in all things that they do. This does not negate the principle, and God is in the process of redeeming all things: sin will cease, the unrepentant will be cast into the Lake of Fire for all eternity, and nothing will be misused or abused ever again.
But in the meantime, I do not see the need to qualify everything. It seems a bit dualistic. Right is right. Right is even right when bad people do right. And if they transgress the very clear boundaries God has placed on all human activity they do wrong. They do not thereby negate the standard: as Paul says in Romans, they thereby prove the standard righteous.
What I will not do is pretend that "Christian Socialism" is possible, any more than "Christian prostitution" would be possible. Socialism is not just a sin, but systematically intentionally sinful. And I don't think we profit by blurring the lines just because we recognize that Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and other brilliant capitalist thinkers are probably burning in Hell. So is Aristotle, but he had a lot of useful insights.
Great concept. How will it be implemented? What specific steps will they take? One thing I read somewhere is that they would simply remove the NGO’s from the equation and give funds directly to the country.
A little light on detail at this point, but the gist of it is no reform, no cash.
👏👏👏 Bravo, Dr. Martin! You explained the idea behind “trade over aid” very well! Instead of making the African nations becoming perpetual welfare dependents, we need to be helping them to help themselves.
Here is recommended reading to help everyone better appreciate why capitalism is such a great thing:
* The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
* Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
* Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton and Rose Friedman
* Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell
* South Africa’s War Against Capitalism by Walter E. Williams
* Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Racism? by Walter E. Williams
* Why Not Capitalism? by Jason Brennan
* The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert D. Murphy
* The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
* The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism by Paul Kengor