An Introduction to Christian Economics
Wheeler, Timothy
"An Introduction to Christian Economics" It is mythic: the lonesome buddies myth, the On the Open Read myth, the myth of the Yankee struggle for success out of adversity. OK, they don't make it, but they work at making it. They...
...That debasement of the currency is accompanied by moral decline has been observed in every inflation, not least by Peletiah Webster at the time of the racking "Continental" inflation that prolonged and nearly ruined the American Revolution: "We have suffered more from this cause [paper money inflation] than from any other cause or calamity...
...Roosevelt and his advisors saw Churchill as an imperialist and practitioner of "power politics" in the grand tradition...
...Stalin at a minimum wished to recover the territories that had been ceded in the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Riga: Finland, parts of Poland, Bessarabia, and Kars and Ardahan (controlled by Turkey...
...He starts with the pure definition, "any increase in the money supply," and summons up flawless arguments against it...
...10 for $12...
...Warmly recommended to students of laissez-faire...
...They were particularly concerned with formulating common negotiating positions prior to the three great wartime conferences--Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam...
...The volume is essentially a recounting and analysis of the complex diplomatic relations among the Allies during World War II...
...The Prime Minister of course hoped to produce the means of balancing Soviet power on the continent...
...Yet both the Keynesians and the Chicago school of economists share the notion that inflation stimulates the production of new wealth...
...All these fall under Part I, "Monetary Theory...
...I do not mean to imply that North's prose resembles that gray-green sludge that Distinguished Professors of Economics pass off as writing...
...So how can there be such a thing as "Christian economics...
...Neither men alone nor their governments can turn stones into bread...
...He entertained the notion, as related by Rexford Tugwell, that at such a conclave, "...the famous Roosevelt charm...would have its chances...
...The American decision makers, however, refused to cooperate out of consideration for Stalin's sensibilities about the West "ganging up" on the Soviet Union...
...Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves" (Isaiah 1:21-23...
...Churchill consistantly advocated resurrecting France as a Great Power, and he also proposed the creation of a Balkan federation...
...Charts only path to better living...
...Four or five of the essays are devoted to the subject of inflation, including one with the catchy title, "Gertrude Coogan and the Myth of Social Credit...
...Box 9622, San Diego, Calif...
...The British perceived a world organization as a vehicle for preventing the United States from returning to her traditional isolationist posture...
...Not at all...
...It distorts the market's pricing mechanisms and thus makes efficient allocation of resources impossible (one by-product: pollution...
...Mistitled or not, the essays are very good indeed...
...The Soviet Union had been at odds with the capitalist nations since 1918...
...The authors also include chapters detailing the peace conferences and treaties signed with various Axis powers, and several appendices dealing with such matters as the present status of the Munich Agreement...
...Whether scarcity is expressed in biblical or scientific terms, the Christian economist knows that it imposes a limit on human action that men cannot overcome...
...Shows what you can do to correct the situation...
...It encourages unscrupulous debtors to discharge their debts with depreciated paper worth a fraction of the sum owed...
...From these wellsprings he has drunk deeply of erudition and, like most young writers, he tends to use rather more of it than is called for...
...In a word, counterfeit money produces counterfeit industry...
...Roosevelt is not like that...
...it was full of judgment...
...You cannot achieve good ends with thieving...
...It redistributes capital from efficient (by preinflation standards) producers to less efficient producers...
...As for France, Roosevelt harbored an abiding prejudice against the French due to their shoddy performance in the war and a personal dislike for de Gaulle...
...Institutional theft leads to social disaster...
...Examples abound...
...Re-enthrones the economics, morals and politics of something-for-sornething...
...The Soviet Union could potentially dominate all of continental Europe...
...You cannot turn stones into bread...
...The economic stimulus flows to the less efficient, state-favored, otherwise noncompetitive industries, at the same time efficient producers are being driven out of business...
...Not even the one about Gertrude Coogan, which takes on the Crank (anti-international banking conspiracy) Right...
...Cordell Hull paraphrased the following incredible conversation: "Roosevelt spoke of making an appeal to Stalin on grounds of 'high morality' so that plebiscites should be held in the Baltic states and eastern Poland...
...You cannot create wealth by printing paper bills and designating them money...
...As North explains it, economics works because it is based on the right "givens," on premises borrowed from Christianity...
...The Christian would add: inflation is theft...
...and "The Theology of the Exponential Curve...
...They're not as bad as they sound...
...Martin's $35.00 Even the bitterest of enemies can be united by a common danger...
...Scarecrow straddles that line between sentiment and sentimentality...
...In a couple of the essays, he quotes Isaiah on the moral and financial ravages of inflation: "How is the faithful city become an harlot...
...Indeed, a gush of new paper money does appear to stimulate productivity at first...
...He dips his hand only for bigger coins...
...Don't worry if these section headings have a somewhat forbidding ring to them, as do such essay titles as "Urban Renewal and the Doctrine of Sunk Costs...
...The Economics of Women's Liberation" (which slams the notion of "equal pay for equal work...
...They put their wounded selves into the struggle and fail the test: one fades out, the other goes courageously on, on, we guess, to more failure, however dogged his zeal...
...It cannot be both awful and splendid, though parts are one or the other...
...The difficulties involved in the maintenance of alliance cohesion were rooted in the conflicting long-range political objectives entertained by the Big Three...
...Debunking, however, is not the purpose for which the book was written, as the revisionists and their writings are seldom acknowledged...
...Roosevelt was a Wilsonian romantic who, in the conduct of foreign affairs, evinced a startling naivet6...
...The Crisis of Soviet Economic Planning...
...The United States (and naturally the Soviets) steadfastly opposed Churchill's designs...
...John Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nichols, two distinguished English historians, have made a major contribution to this task...
...righteousness lodged in it...
...R iew An Introduction to Christian Economics by Gary North Craig $9.95 What we have here is a collection of Mr...
...Roosevelt and the United States, through the establishment of a new type of international system, hoped to replace the "outmoded" balance of power systems and spheres of influence...
...In addition, Washington surmised that London was attempting to dupe the United States into helping maintain the British Empire...
...It usurps and centralizes power in the state...
...P.O...
...How can you fuse Christian belief with a value-free science...
...personally and through others...
...Churchill and Eden continually worked to coordinate diplomatic policy with Washington...
...Aristotle The unmasking of the subterfuges perpetuated by the Cold War revisionists is continually gaining momentum...
...Timothy Wheeler The Semblance of Peace The Political Settlement after the Second World War by John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls St...
...it lapses into mawkishness, then rises fitfully to genuine humor laced with spunk...
...The prescient Churchill realized that a shattered Europe would produce a vacuum extending from Russia to the Channel coast...
...It acts unevenly, enriching those individuals or businesses nearest to, and favored by, the state at the expense of those furthest and least favored...
...Puts blame where it surprisingly belongs...
...It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, and done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our enemies...
...North's essays on economics, only a few of which are explicitly Christian, and none at a level one would call "introductory...
...Inflation is an invisible, unpredictable tax on capital...
...How can there be a valid economics except in a God-ordered world...
...3:17-19...
...A Balkan federation smacked too much of spheres of influence for American taste...
...But the new paper is in fact stealing existing wealth, for those who do the inflating and those nearest NEWEST CHALLENGE TO CURRENT CONSENSUS Lively new guide for corrective thought-leaders Assigns rewarding new course to be pursued...
...Social Antinomianism...
...92109 The Alternative November 1973 25 them...
...He even went so far as to tell Stalin that, "...the first 26 The Alternative November 1973...
...FDR wrote Churchill in March, 1942: "I hope you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department...
...The Grand Alliance was an uneasy gathering from the start...
...ican...
...Stalin and the Soviet Union sought to "...regain for the Soviet Union the territorial strength and political influence which Tsarist Russia had exercised in the past and if possible to exceed it...
...Churchill and Great Britain foresaw postwar Europe in terms of the "power political" concepts so disdained by the Americans...
...It is wrong...
...Offers -~,~i~g new view of profit...
...To a Christian, that question is inverted...
...Great Britain-standing alone and completely drained by the war--would not have the resources to balance Soviet power...
...Initially the Americans distrusted the British as much, and frequently even more, than they did the Russians...
...It ought to be obvious...
...He also has the knack of picking just the right quote to tack down a point...
...It is not supposed to make moral judgments about what is right, fair, or just...
...North writes well, with occasional wit...
...Freshly .^,lP.A~u debunks something-for-nothing promised through government, unions, business or magic...
...The new system was to be a concert of Great Power global gendarmes acting under the auspices of a world organization...
...I Discloses little known extent of union power and its abuses...
...But this degree of scholarship, while limiting his readership, is the more rewarding to those who have the background and intelligence to stay with him in his skilled discussions...
...The assistance of the United States and a revived France was required...
...The book has three other sections: "Economic Survival," "Christian Stewardship and Resource Allocation," and "Antinomianism...
...Chapter on political sophistication worth the whole book...
...It encourages manufacturers to hide price increases in the form of poor and shoddy merchandise...
...Sheds new light on cause and only possible cure of inflation and unemployment...
...Roosevelt sought to convene a peace conference in early 1940 during the Sitzkrieg...
...The emphasis is placed on those negotiations and events that relate to the postwar settlements--the semblance of peace that became the Cold War...
...The authors argue that the failure of Washington and London to present a united front encouraged Stalin's aggressiveness...
...Economics, as a science, is "value~ free...
...For instance, the all-important economic fact of scarcity is an exact counterpart of God's curse upon the earth (Gen...
...to bring peace...
...They suspected the Prime Minister of seeking to involve the United States in a conflict with the Soviet Union in the pursuit of that odious concept--the balance of power...
...Others of the essays seem a bit sassier and more inviting: "The Ethics of Monetary Hoarding...
...North has studied the great works of von Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Rushdoony, Roepke, and Hazlitt...
...He placed an inordinate amount of faith in the ability of charm and goodwill to conquer different Weltanschauungs and national interests...
...And Roosevelt...
...North is at his best on the subject of inflation...
...but now murderers...
...North brings the best of both sides to these essays, although the book is heavily weighted towards, and most useful for, the economics...
...It is worth noting Stalin's private reaction to Roosevelt's "charm" and appeals to "higher morality" as told by Milovan Djilas: "Churchill," said the Marshall, "is the kind who if you don't watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket...
...Christianity, of course, does deal with moral values...
...Postpaid Send check or money order direct to the publisher LOEFFLER &: CO., INC...
...I reach back now to recollect my mood when I saw it, to try to see what I put into Scarecrow, to determine (and I fail at the effort just now) why I am now dangling between giving a slap or a buss to this extraordinarily moving, yet unconscionably artificial film...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
