Tag Archives: capitalism

Jim Crow laws were anti-capitalist and the free market killed them

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If you believe the approved narrative, the post-bellum South was a monolithic hive-mind of sheet-wearing racists who couldn’t wait to codify their hatred into law. While this fiction validates statists of every stripe and allows northerners to feel morally superior, the truth is uncomfortable for both: large parts of the South were already desegregating on their own until the government stepped in to stop them.

That’s right. Before the Jim Crow laws of 1890–1910, tens of thousands of Southern businesses – black and white owned – served both races without a second thought. Streetcars in New Orleans, theaters in Charleston, barbershops in Richmond, saloons in Mobile, and first-class railroad cars from Virginia to Texas routinely mixed Black and White customers. In many cities the integrated establishments were not a courageous minority; they were the majority.

The free market was producing exactly what free markets always produce: a spectrum of choices, some segregated by private choice, most not. And the non-segregated ones were winning.

And then the government showed up to “help.”

Jim Crow Was Anti-Capitalist to the Core

Contrary to what the authors of the 1619 Project would have you believe, both slavery and Jim Crow laws were anti-capitalist. The fundamental premise of capitalism is that all exchanges of property between economic actors are voluntary. No one is forced to make an exchange against their will; and no one is forcibly prohibited from making an exchange with another willing actor. Freedom of association and freedom of contract are inherent to capitalism. Without them, whatever system is operating is not capitalism, whether supported by private business owners or not.

And many, in some southern cities most, private business owners were not segregating until forced to do so.

Every single segregation statute was a blatant violation of freedom of association and freedom of contract. The Louisiana Separate Car Act didn’t politely “ask” the railroad to add a colored car; it threatened prison for any conductor who let a Black passenger sit in the White section—or a White passenger sit in the Black section if he preferred the company. The Arkansas streetcar law of 1903 didn’t appeal to conscience; it fined drivers $25 (over $800 today) every time they failed to enforce the color line.

These weren’t “public safety” regulations. They were cartel enforcement mechanisms written by the losers in the marketplace who couldn’t compete with entrepreneurs – Black or White – who treated customers as individuals instead of racial categories.

White restaurant owners in Mobile didn’t lobby for segregation because they woke up one day disliking black people any more than they previously did. They did it because John Callahan’s café served Black longshoremen at the same counter for the same price and was stealing their lunch trade. White theater owners in Chattanooga didn’t care about “racial purity” until the Bijou started selling orchestra seats to Black patrons and cut their ticket revenue in half. White barbers in Little Rock passed a law banning barbers from cutting the hair of the opposite race because Black barbers had cornered the high-end White clientele.

And don’t think they only targeted Black competitors. White “race traitors” got it worse. The Richmond streetcar monopoly didn’t just want Black hack drivers gone; they wanted every White hack driver who still picked up Black passengers run out of business, too. Economic historian Jennifer Roback documented that Jim Crow laws systematically raised the cost of doing integrated business until only the state-protected cartel survived.

The Private Sector Tore Jim Crow Down First

Long before Rosa Parks or the Civil Rights Act, the unrigged free market was already integrating America—one ticket stub, one record sale, one sold-out stadium at a time.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Capitalists are terrible for capitalism

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U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by Senior Advisor Jared Kushner (standing, L-R), Vice President Mike Pence and Staff Secretary Rob Porter welcomes reporters into the Oval Office for him to sign his first executive orders at the White House in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, the familiar notion that a successful businessman would “run the government like a business” reemerged. We’ve heard this whenever a successful entrepreneur, usually a Republican, has run for president. Of course, the government cannot be run like a business for reasons I provided in 2012 when Mitt Romney was the latest candidate who would purportedly do so.

In short, the private marketplace runs on voluntary exchanges while the government runs on force. Success in the former does not prepare one for success in the latter. It may even make one less prepared for the intrigues of politics, as Donald Trump, Jr. seemed to be saying in his recent interview of Matt Taibbi.

But free market proponents often make the further mistake of assuming that a successful business owner will at least be prone to pro-free market policies. After all, who knows better the blessings of capitalism than a capitalist himself or herself?

This is also mistaken. While running their businesses in the marketplace, successful entrepreneurs are a great boon to society. But when it comes to policy, capitalists are terrible for capitalism. Among history’s most successful capitalists this has virtually always been true.

For the entire history of commerce, business owners have sought the aid of government power to limit or eliminate competition. In 1807, long before the Progressive Era, the New York State legislature granted Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, a 30-year monopoly on steamboat traffic in the state of New York. As Thomas DiLorenzo writes in How Capitalism Saved America, this allowed Fulton to charge exorbitantly high prices until Cornelius Vanderbilt defied the legal monopoly and undercut him.

The Progressive Era itself was a bonanza of crony capitalism. The popular myth about this period has so-called “robber barons” forming monopolies and exploiting customer and employee alike until progressives like Teddy Roosevelt came along to save the day with heavy government regulation.

As Murray Rothbard proved beyond any reasonable doubt, literally no element of this popular myth is true. In fact, it is the opposite of the truth. It is true that hugely successful business owners like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan attempted to form monopolies over various sectors of the economy. However, every attempt to do so without the government’s help ended in failure.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Who Killed Capitalism and the Internet?

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Back in the 1990s, there was this new phenomenon called “the internet.” It grew exponentially. Entrepreneurs saw the business potential for reaching more customers than they had ever dreamed they could reach through conventional methods. Consumers had more choices of every conceivable product – including information – than they ever had in history.

Like all technological advances, it produced big winners and big losers. Vast fortunes were made by those who built businesses that worked better on the internet. Vast fortunes were lost not only by those internet commerce replaced, but also by those who went long on businesses that didn’t work on the internet – Pets.com being the most infamous example.

The internet revolution was much like the industrial revolution in this respect. It advanced human flourishing in general exponentially but was decried by all those it damaged economically. Many brick and mortar retailers were put out of business, just as the automobile put blacksmiths out of business.

Legacy media faced annihilation. They were no longer the gatekeepers of information. The new generation of internet users had access to information from all over the world at the click of a mouse, including information previously filtered, spun, or suppressed by legacy media. There was a point at which those who had long decried its information gatekeeping and establishment propaganda gleefully counted down the days until the New York Times went bankrupt.

Governments didn’t like the internet much, either. Untaxable interstate commerce was replacing taxable brick and mortar commerce. Republican Congressmen lamented the internet was so new they didn’t know who to regulated it. And, of course, no government has ever liked the free flow of information. That’s why a First Amendment was necessary over two hundred years ago.

The current war on the free flow of information over the internet is led by the political left, but it didn’t start there. Long before conservatives were being deplatformed for opposing wokism, the political right was after internet publishers for criticizing the war on terror. Julian Assange is only the highest profile example. Online porn has also been targeted by the right since the internet’s earliest days.

As with laissez faire capitalism, it seemed like those who stood to lose had two choices: adapt or die. But there was a third choice: call in the government. And that’s just what all those who stood to lose did.

The decades-long destruction of America’s laissez faire free market was accomplished in much the same way.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why are the United States the richest country in the world?

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Cityscape view of a city

“We’re a rich country, we can afford to…,” says your average liberal. Complete the sentence however you wish. “Guarantee every American healthcare.” “Guarantee every American a college education.” “Provide a home for an unlimited number of immigrants who require food, clothing, and shelter the moment they cross our borders.”

But how did the United States become so rich? No one ever asks politicians that one, simple question. Forcing them to answer it would be illuminating. The likely first answers would be vague references to “democracy,” but that doesn’t jibe with reality. If anything, America became rich in spite of democracy, not because of it. Most of the Constitution is devoted to checking democracy at every turn.

Eventually, politicians might get around to the “land of opportunity” narrative. And it is true that the United States offered native-born and immigrant Americans opportunity unavailable anywhere else.

Opportunity to do what?

It’s as if no one even wants to say it anymore. The opportunity offered was to pursue one’s individual self-interest, unmolested by and mostly free of the larceny of any king, commissar, or legislature. America became rich operating under Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand of the market, which says that people pursuing their narrow selfish interests in an environment where property rights are protected will do more good for society than people attempting to advance some “common good.”

It worked. It still works, to the extent it’s allowed. When people have the opportunity to keep the money they earn and dispose of it as they see fit, they produce more goods for others to consume. What they don’t spend on consumption becomes capital used to expand productive capacity and produce even more goods for others to consume.

This is what made America rich and built the modern, technological world we have the privilege of living in today. In 1888, at the peak of libertarian American society, the government collected about 3 percent of GDP in taxes and ran a 50 percent surplus. President Grover Cleveland fought a decade-long war during his nonconsecutive terms to reduce tariffs, saying government surpluses invited “mischief.”

Before the Progressive Era, Americans kept almost everything they earned and employed it in the pursuit of their own happiness, not some politician’s five-year plan. They invested in or entered new industries without licenses, unencumbered by regulatory agencies, free to innovate as they saw fit. Figuring out a way to provide more for your fellow Americans at a lower cost made you rich. Simply working hard and saving responsibly made you comfortable.

In a word, what made America the richest country in the world wasn’t free speech, freedom of religion, or the right to vote. It was capitalism, as laissez faire as it has ever existed anywhere, before, or since. The protection of property rights and relatively free markets resulted in an accumulation of capital we’re still benefiting from today. It didn’t fall from the sky. It was saved and invested by people pursuing their individual interests. That’s what works.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Stop calling the media “the corporate press”

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It is not an exaggeration to say Americans were terrorized by their federal, state, and municipal governments during the Covid pandemic. Never before had society been locked down so brutally and for so long as during 2020-21. Not during the Spanish flu, where business closures in my hometown lasted three weeks. Not during the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed a significantly larger percentage of the population of the time.

Every step of the way, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to “you better hold off on Christmas” to “maybe a small gathering on July 4 (2021), if you’re vaccinated,” the media stood in lockstep with the totalitarian state, uncritically repeating its lies and endorsing its edicts.

The media lied about every aspect of the Covid pandemic, including the virus itself, the government’s mitigation measures, and the vaccines. They continue to lie every day for as long as each lie can maintain the faintest plausibility, after which it is quietly surrendered, waiting for resurrection after the amnesiac public forgets.

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has seen the transition from “Covid emergency” to “climate emergency” coming from a mile and two years away. And unlike Covid, the climate emergency won’t end.

This carries far graver implications than merely which septuagenarian Boomer occupies the White House. These lies are being used to manufacture acquiescence to an attack on civilization itself. Anyone who participates in such a scheme to subjugate the people en masse can only be described with one word: “enemy.” Touché, Donald Trump. You were right about that.

Thus, it is understandable to want to alert people to the fact the media is not their friend. Many, even “good libertarians,” have taken to calling the media “the corporate press.” This isn’t just unhelpful to the public. It’s counterproductive to freedom.

First, let’s consider what information is conveyed to the public when the word “corporate” is added to “press.” Regardless of intention, the overwhelming majority of people hear: “privately owned and operating for profit.” The problem with the media is they are for profit enterprises that are not owned or at least more heavily regulated by the government.

This is an anti-capitalist message the public is unfortunately too ready to embrace. But it’s neither true nor particularly helpful to encourage their belief that seeking profits is fundamentally at odds with the good of society. It’s just one more confirmation to those already so inclined that seeking profits in any undertaking is fundamentally problematic.

Libertarians may say that is not their intention, but what exactly is their intention? Do they really know? When asked, many will reply that “corporations are creatures of the state.” True enough. But they’re not referring to the guy who fixes their sink as “the corporate plumber” or the place they buy their groceries the “corporate grocer.” Yet both are almost certainly incorporated in the states wherein they operate.

Businesses aren’t incorporated for the same reasons they were hundreds of years ago. At one time, corporate status and its privileges – often a government-enforced monopoly – was granted because of a supposed “public benefit” derived from allowing the company to incorporate.

Today, companies incorporate mainly to limit liability and protect the owners from runaway juries in government-run courts. Creditors of today’s corporations enter relationships with the firms in full knowledge the shareholders’ personal assets are protected from liability. And while it is true third parties who never agreed to such release can be harmed and may have a natural right to seek compensation from the shareholders, they would never get the awards from corporations they get in government courts in any conceivable private court system.

Regardless, the media’s corporate status is no more relevant to their malfeasance over the past several years than malfeasance in any other business.

Another common excuse for the “corporate press” moniker is to point to the business relationships between the media and other corporations and call them “bought off” or words to that effect. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, spends billions on national TV advertising. Critics point to this and say it affected the way media reported on the Covid vaccines. “That’s why I call them the corporate press,” they say.

This is just another argument for why the free market doesn’t work. Certainly, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there would be no restrictions at all on this type of relationship and there wouldn’t be much more, if any, in a laissez faire minarchist society. This has nothing to do with the media being “corporate” and the antidote is not them being something else. The antidote is competition.

If the problem is a lack of competition, that also has nothing to do with the press being “corporate” and everything to do with the New Deal regulatory state, which decides which media is allowed to broadcast and which isn’t. Calling the media “the corporate press” distracts the public’s attention away from the government and misdirects the blame towards the private sector.

But honestly, there is plenty of competition, all the establishment’s attempts at “deplatforming” notwithstanding. The public holds the ultimate power here in simply refusing to consume – or fund – the establishment media. Everyone who objects to the content offered on cable television is free to cancel their cable subscription. Likewise their newspaper or other media subscriptions. Imposing this market discipline in lieu of complaining will do far more to change behavior.

In case you haven’t noticed, the one, common characteristic of the enviro-nazi, medical totalitarianism, and anti-western culture movements is their anti-capitalism. By some strange “coincidence,” the only solution to the supposed problems each of these seeks to solve is less capitalism. And regardless of any pedantic arguments to justify the expression, when people hear “corporate press” they hear “capitalist press,” period.

Referring to the media as “the corporate press” encourages all the bad instincts in the public that inspire them to go along with every incursion into our freedom. Let’s come up with a better pejorative.   

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

We are at war and I don’t mean in Ukraine

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Everyone knows there is something wrong. America and much of the world is now firmly into its third year of unrelenting “emergencies,” real and imagined, that forbid them from returning to the quiet comfort of their previous lives. For twenty-eight months they have been told they must sacrifice their personal interests for the government-media complex defined “greater good.”

It started with “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” a reasonable-sounding request in the face of a supposedly novel respiratory virus. One hundred years of science had already confirmed quarantining asymptomatic people is ineffective, but it was only going to be fifteen days.

It is only now, after the fifteen days turned into fifteen months or more in some places, after mask and vaccine mandates were enforced long after it was obvious both are ineffective, after the demand for sacrifice seamlessly metamorphized from “flattening the curve” to “slowing the spread” to “defending Ukraine” to “climate change emergency,” that a critical mass of people have finally realized they are being had.

If it were just your money they were after, it would be bad enough. And make no mistake, they do want that. Trillions have been fleeced from the many and handed to the few during this long con. But it isn’t just your money the perpetrators are after. Neither is it merely your freedom, although there is no “life” beyond biological existence without it.

No, the architects of this dystopia aren’t satisfied to loot your wealth and crush your liberty. Even controlling your physical movements isn’t enough. They want to control your thoughts, what many people would call your “soul.”

It’s not as if they make any secret of this. What else can the obsession with stamping out “misinformation” mean? They do not want you exposed to information contrary to their ends because you may think the wrong thoughts.

You may question whether the vaccines really are “safe and effective,” whether the war in Ukraine really is any of your concern (or “unprovoked,” for that matter), whether there really is a “climate change emergency” that demands you make enormous sacrifices to solve, or whether those sacrifices would really make a difference if there were.

There are only two possible reasons why information questioning any of the above narratives would need to be kept from you. Either the claims being made aren’t true and would not hold up to challenges or you are incapable of discerning truth from falsehood. If the former is true, there are criminal trials that need to be held. If the latter, then why this anguished cry about dangers to “our democracy?”

The question is constantly raised whether the architects of this assault on civilization are evil or merely misguided and incompetent. Does it matter? Is there even a clear distinction between the two? Was Vladimir Lenin evil or merely misguided? Did he not believe he was acting in the best interests of his fellow man and merely had to “break a few (million) eggs to make an omelet?” Can we not say the same for Stalin, Hitler, or Mao?

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We Are at War Table of Contents

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why We Can’t Stand Prosperity

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“They can’t stand prosperity.” My father used to say it about his beloved Buffalo Bills during periods in the 1970s when they were competitive but couldn’t quite break into the ranks of the elite contenders. He was referring to the team’s maddening habit of ceasing to do what had previously been successful and “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

What he said of the Bills applies to Americans in general.

There is no mystery to why the United States in a matter of decades grew from a few agrarian colonies to the richest, most powerful nation in history, surpassing competitors with over a millennium head start. It was capitalism. Period.

That’s what “the land of opportunity” meant, back when America was so styled. The opportunity was economic opportunity. The million-plus wave of immigrants who came here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t pursuing abstract notions of liberty. They were coming because there was an opportunity to make a materially better life for themselves and their families. That opportunity existed solely because America was economically freer – more “capitalist” – than the countries they left.

While America may be the most prominent example of capitalism’s success, it is by no means the only one. Indeed, history is replete with examples of economic freedom emerging, bringing with it unprecedented prosperity, and eventually being strangled by the re-emergence of state meddling.

Murray Rothbard documents this phenomenon occurring repeatedly throughout Europe in the pre-colonial period. More recently we’ve seen it in Asia, with the rise of the “Asian Tigers” in the 1990s, culminating in the rise of prosperity in China. During the same years, both Scandinavia and Canada dramatically cut taxes, regulations, and government spending to save their economies from becoming what Venezuela is today.

Throughout history, countries that freed their economies from mercantilist or socialist controls, even if not completely, have seen a dramatic reduction in poverty and rise in living standards. Nowhere is the opposite true.

Yet, in almost every case, including America, people just “can’t stand prosperity.” There is always and everywhere an instinct to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Even among Americans today who by no means consider themselves socialist, there is an inherent resistance to allowing the conditions that has made the lives they lead possible.

Why?

Ludwig Von Mises wrote an entire book exploring the reasons for the “anti-capitalistic mentality.” I believe his insights were correct, especially in in terms of academia’s resentment towards the way free markets reward less educated, “vulgar” businessmen with more wealth than they enjoy themselves.

Walter Block has done research with fellow academics indicating there is an evolved preference in humans to prefer what he calls the “direct benevolence” associated with socialism over the “indirect benevolence” of the market economy.

Then, there is the plain, old human failing called, “envy.” The market economy results in the most prosperity for the most people, but it doesn’t distribute that prosperity equally. In fact, it doesn’t “distribute” prosperity at all. It allows each individual to keep the fruits of his labor and dispose of them as he sees fit. Some people are able to produce more than others and therefore accumulate more wealth.

There are some people who simply cannot abide this. Forget that no system has ever produced economic equality, least of all socialist systems, but the fact that no one even seems to be trying to correct this unjust inequality, in the envious person’s eyes, makes him resentful of the capitalist system that allowed the rich person to accumulate so much more than he.

While the above explanations certainly provide part of the answer, I do not believe they address the primary reason so many people are resistant to economic freedom. We use reason to overcome our passions and even our evolved instincts every day. But there is one instinct, one emotion that I believe transcends all the rest in motivating us to be suspicious of freedom.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Here Comes Another Recession Wrongly Blamed on Capitalism

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recession-comingThe stock markets sold off on Friday, and financial media headlines were dominated by an inverted yield curve, a key recession indicator for the past several decades. Was the selloff just a pullback as equity prices consolidate before heading for new highs? Or is this the top of a dead cat bounce after the December market meltdown?

Economic indicators are somewhat mixed. Unemployment remains low at 3.8 percent, although it is always important to consider what kinds of jobs people are doing, what they are producing, and why. Unemployment is always low just before a bubble pops, as monetary inflation leads to unsustainable expansion.

Meanwhile, February saw a nearly subterranean jobs report, and December’s much-ballyhooed number was revised downward from 312,000 jobs to just 227,000. Holiday retail sales, reported as “heating up” during December, ended up declining by 1.2 percent, the biggest drop since 2009.

That a recession is coming is a certainty. The question is when. And whether it hits in 2019 or 2020, you can bet it will take center stage in the political arena, with Democratic presidential hopefuls climbing over each other to blame President Trump and the Republicans. The GOP will find it hard to fight back after taking full ownership of the tail end of this ten-year, inflation-fueled bubble.

As ridiculous as we free-market types always find it, a recession during a Republican presidential administration is always characterized by our opponents as an indictment of capitalism, even though the business cycle is driven much more by monetary policy than anything presidents of either party do. And the Federal Reserve is not a capitalist institution. It’s an economic central planner Karl Marx considered a vital part of moving society towards communism.

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Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

But without government, who will plow the snow?

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web-GMCSierraSnowPlow03Many of my southern friends who have never lived in the north may not know how snow removal works up here. What if you’re elderly or disabled and can’t shovel/snowblow your driveway? Or what if you just don’t want to?

As usual, capitalism saves the day. There is a vibrant market of snow plow contractors who will guarantee your driveway is always plowed for an extremely reasonable rate – usually $300-$350 for the entire winter for the average suburban driveway. If it snows too many times, they lose money. If their projections are accurate, they make a profit.

They take 100% of the risk to do something most people don’t want to do, in the hope of making some extra money during winter slow periods for their regular businesses (many own lawn service/landscaping businesses).

Purchasing their service is 100% voluntary. No one but you votes on how much they are paid or whether you buy their services at all.

To every guy or gal out in a truck right now, likely up and working long before dawn, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE AND MAY YOUR MARGINS BE HIGH!

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

What Bible is Pope Francis reading?

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popeTAMPA, December 18, 2013 – There has already been a lot said about Pope Francis’ EVANGELII GAUDIUM, in which he is critical of free markets. Reactions by Christian proponents of capitalism have ranged from respectful disagreement to full-on denial that he was critical of the market at all.

The latter group is not facing reality. While having since clarified that he is not Marxist, the pope clearly rejected the laissez faire approach to the market in favor of the highly regulated, redistributionist model promoted by the left. His offering is chock full of the usual sophisms leftists use to justify overriding freedom of choice in exchanges of property.

There is no need to address each of the pope’s arguments against free markets from a purely economic perspective. Tom Woods has already done this thoroughly during his December 6 episode of the Tom Woods Show, “Pope Francis on Capitalism.”

What is more surprising than the pope’s leftist economic ideas is his ability to ignore the overtly pro-capitalist themes in the gospels themselves. Jesus’ teaching consistently holds capitalists up as heroes. He never once even hints that the government should direct economic affairs.

The misconception that Jesus’ message is anti-capitalist probably stems from the same confusion that pervades all leftist thinking: the inability to distinguish voluntary from coerced human action. Jesus often exhorts his followers to voluntarily give to the poor. Nowhere in the gospels does he suggest that the Romans or the vassal Jewish government should be empowered to tax the wealthy to provide for the poor.

Tax collectors are de facto sinners, remember?

Jesus also warns against the temptations that great wealth may expose one to. Being consumed with accumulating wealth to the exclusion of all other concerns leaves no room for devotion to God or charity to one’s fellow man. This is summed up in Luke 16:13 when Jesus says,

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Again, Jesus charges his followers to manage their own passion for wealth. There is no suggestion that the government should be involved.

Jesus doesn’t expound on political economy because, as he told Pilate, “my kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). However, his parables have consistently pro-capitalist themes.

In the parable of the bags of gold (Matthew 25: 14-30), the servants who choose to be capitalists with the master’s money are richly rewarded upon the master’s return. The servant who chose not to be a capitalist is not only not rewarded, he is “cast into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!”

Certainly, the story is symbolic. The money in the story represents the abilities given to each individual by God. But even on that level the story does not support the anti-capitalists. First, the master, the ultimate capitalist in the parable, actually represents God. Certainly, Jesus would have found another way to make his point if capitalists were de facto sinners (like tax collectors).

Notice also that the servant who chooses not to invest the master’s money is the one given the least. Symbolically, he represents the person who has the least natural gifts or who is born to disadvantage. Does Jesus suggest that the other two servants should be taxed to help him? No. The most disadvantaged servant is expected to do the best with what he has. He isn’t punished because he achieves less. He is punished because he fails to try.

In two other parables, Jesus represents God as the owner of a vineyard. In Matthew 20: 1-16, he makes the point that it is never too late for salvation and that a repentant man can claim the same salvation as one who has been devout all of his life. He represents salvation as wages paid to laborers. When a laborer who worked longer complains that he is paid no more than one who only worked an hour, the master replies,

“Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.”

Again, the message is spiritual, but Jesus uses the very libertarian, capitalist idea that no one is entitled to any more wages than both parties voluntarily agree to.

God is again depicted as the owner of a vineyard in Matthew 21: 33-41. In this parable, the vineyard owner is even more overtly capitalist. Verse 33 in particular highlights that it is the previous work of the owner in planting the vineyard, hedging around it, and building a tower that makes the land productive before it is ever rented out to the husbandmen.

In other words, the capitalist has sacrificed his own consumption in the present to invest in land and capital goods to improve the productivity of the land. This has created an opportunity for the husbandmen to be more productive by working on the owner’s land than they would be on their own, without the land or the capital goods the owner has provided.

The owner then enters a voluntary agreement with the husbandmen whereby each party keeps part of what is produced. Both owner and husbandmen benefit from the agreement. The owner is entitled to the profits because he is the one who created the opportunity by sacrificing his own consumption in the past.

The husbandmen are evil specifically because they act like Marxists and renege on the agreement. They kill the owner’s agents and even his son, hoping to seize all of the wealth for themselves.

In verse 41, Jesus teaches that the owner will destroy the Marxists and rent the land to other husbandmen who will make him profits. The right of the owner to profits is affirmed, the idea that the workers are being exploited or should be able to take more than the owner has agreed to pay them is completely absent.

Nowhere in any of these parables are socialist ideas advanced. On the contrary, God is consistently represented as a capitalist and his children judged by how profitable they are to Him.

While the purpose of the parables is to teach a spiritual lesson, these are not the literary tools that an anti-capitalist author would employ. Jesus’ pro-capitalist bias couldn’t hit one over the head any harder, prompting the question:

What Bible is Pope Francis reading?

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.