Ron Paul on MSNBC, Tea Parties, War, Economics

Why Economics Should Be Important for Christians

by Shawn Ritenour

It is not uncommon for Christians to treat economic science with suspicion, because, it is often assumed, economics deals with the things of this world. It must therefore be tainted by the assumption that consumers are selfish, entrepreneurs are greedy, and the market is a cold mistress to the poor and needy. What the world needs instead, it is thought, is love sweet love, and besides the Kingdom of God is not of this world, so why should we care about production and consumption? This attitude is unfortunate because good economics is not dependent upon any specific assumption about the morality of human motivation to action and, as I point out in my new book, Foundations of Economics: A Christian View, God also cares about the material aspect of our existence.

An obvious point too often forgotten is that God did, after all, create a material world – “all things visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. God explicitly tells us that his, largely material, creation was very good. In Proverbs we are told to learn from the ant which provides material provision for itself in the winter by working hard in the summer. In Deuteronomy God related blessings and curses that would be visited upon his people depending upon whether they were obedient or disobedient. When obedient, God would bless them with many children, cattle, and much food. When disobedient, God would curse them with barren wombs, small harvests, and shrinking herds. These blessings and curses, therefore, were largely material in nature. Additionally, Jesus himself came in the flesh. Clearly God is not Platonically anti-material.

This point is also explicit in the first mandate given to man after creation. Even before sin and the fall of man, God told our first parents to “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over… every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). As David Hegeman points out in his primer, Plowing in Hope, this mandate requires filling, working, keeping, and ruling creation.

Hegeman also notes that fulfilling God’s dominion mandate requires wise balance. It is possible that we rashly try to draw too much from creation too quickly, make changes too abruptly, or do so without replenishing the earth. We can, however, err on the other extreme and act as if nature is a museum and we are its curator. We can attempt to keep the earth in its pristine natural state, by prohibiting all development, outlawing all new construction projects, and refusing to allow the erecting of any new factories. Acting in this manner results in our failure to reap the resources necessary for our continued existence and the very cultural development decreed by God

In light of the cultural mandate, therefore, an important question comes to the forefront. How do we wisely develop God’s creation? More specifically, how do we fulfill the cultural mandate to have dominion over creation and fill the earth with people without our starving to death or killing one another in a barbaric struggle for survival? These are not moot questions. Whether they know it or not, these are the questions economists work at answering every day. Different societies choose different paths in answering these questions and reap vastly different results.

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The American Sucker – Wake Up America!

The Non-Mystery of Inflation

by Mark Spangler on Mises Daily

[The Freeman, 1978]

Nowadays people from every walk of life are concerned about inflation.

What actually is inflation? Is it inherent in a free market economy? Who or what is the cause? Unions, government regulations, merchants, federal deficits, or middlemen? Can inflation be stopped, and how?

What to do? Most people are desperately confused and searching for answers. Society is facing nothing short of a crisis. In answer to this grave situation comes Henry Hazlitt’s latest book, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It. As Mr. Hazlitt himself begins the book, “no subject is so much discussed today — or so little understood — as inflation.”

Henry Hazlitt estimates that a dollar of today is worth less than 25 cents of a 1940 dollar, and certainly no one has to be told that a dollar continues to buy less and less. Yet, how many people realize that since 1940 the federal government has increased the money stock by well over a thousand percent? Hazlitt reports that at the end of 1939 the total number of dollars in the economy was 63.3 billion, and at the end of 1977 that figure stood at 806.5 billion. Anyone who is aware of these events should surely sense a logical connection between constantly rising prices and a continuous expansion of the money supply.

Mr. Hazlitt points out that there are two sides to every price.

A price is an exchange ratio between a dollar and a unit of goods. When people have more dollars, they value each dollar less. Goods then rise in price, not because goods are scarcer than before, but because dollars are more abundant, and thus less valued.

He clearly explains that the present predicament of ever-soaring prices results from a deliberate government policy to flood the economy with more and more dollars simply by “printing” them. In fact, the term inflation originally meant increasing (inflating) the money supply. Today the term is commonly used to mean the most evident consequence of creating money, generally rising prices.

So, nothing at all is mysterious about inflation; it is government intervention pure and simple. Why, then, do government leaders continue to inflate and why do the printing presses go undetected by the general public?

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This New Bubble Could Be Our Last.

“Our society is now based on consumption .. 70 per cent of the GDP. This is more than we produce. So to pay our bills, we use funny money invented in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the fiat dollar based on credit (debt).. the fractional reserve system.

In 1930’s you bought what you could afford. You saved up to buy your home. The easy credit of the 90’s has destroyed the country. Now you borrow what you can’t afford .. and the nation’s done the same.”

“Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing … and producing next to nothing … defines the ‘Bailout Bubble.’ Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the “Bailout Bubble” pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another.” “This is much bigger than the Dot-com and Real Estate bubbles which hit speculators, investors and financiers the hardest. However destructive the effects of these busts on employment, savings and productivity, the Free Market Capitalist framework were left intact. But when the ‘Bailout Bubble’ explodes, the system goes with it.

THE above are extracted statements made on the US and world economy by Gerald Celente, the head of the Trends Research Institute, a top trend-forecasting agency in the world. He had predicted accurately a number of previous events such as the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Russian economic collapse, the 2000 Dot-Com bubble burst, the 2001 recession, the US housing market collapse of 2008, among others. You may be wondering what this has got to do with the Nigerian banks and their MDS. The answer is a lot. In the current world economy, a bank will typically extend credit to borrowers in excess of the fund reserve it carries at any point in time in a practice known as fractional reserve banking.

By doing so, banks effectively increases the total money supply in the system above that of the total amount of fiat money in existence. Fiat money is a term used to define money that is not backed by reserves of another commodity such as gold, silver, or other tangible mineral or asset. The reality of this practice is that a bank will not have access to sufficient cash (fiat money) to meet all the obligations it has to depositors if they all decide to withdraw the balance of their accounts or deposits. Fiat money is usually given value by the government. The United States switched indefinitely to fiat money in 1971, with many developed countries’ currencies fixed relative to the US dollar. Our banking system is not home grown. Our financial theories and economic systems are largely wholesale adoption of western systems.

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The Obama Deception

Enjoy. I’d love to hear what you think of it.