Christian Kinist Economics and Community 1.

INTRO Mark, tonight were talking about Christian Kinist Economics and Community. Why is economics important, and should we believe that there is a distinct Kinist economics? 2. MODELS AND CRITIQUES Before we get into the specifics of Kinist economic, lets address the problems with Marxism, Socialism, and Capitalism. Well, Josh, to begin, the most fundamental flaw of Marxism, Socialism, and Capitalism is that these systems all have their basis in materialism, that is, that matter is the only form of existence that is to be considered valid. Just to lay some groundwork, an economic system is an arrangement of human affairs that basically determines the ways that we manipulate matter and then distribute the results of that activity. The manipulation of matter is usually referred to in economic parlance as labor or production. In conventional economic discussions, what is typically at issue is who performs the production. The classic Marxist framing of the question is who owns the means of production? Is it the Bourgeoisie? Is it the State? Is it a corporatist syndicate of the bourgeoisie taking direction from the state? In any of these cases, the fundamental characteristic of these systems is that they are at best secular, and at worst anti-theistic. For a bible-believing Christian, this is a question of ownership. Throughout the history of the Western Church, the idea of ownership of property has devolved upon God. In orthodox Christianity, God is understood to be the actual owner (both de jure and de facto) of everything in the universe. So the orthodox Christian does not assign ownership per se to men, but rather stewardship. Stewardship is an institution of regency (that is, man acting as a delegate of God) that is intertwined with an understanding of the permissible uses of property. Those codicils of proper disposition of property in the genuine Christian experience are drawn from scripture. All other approaches deny Gods ownership of all things. So the basic difference between these economic philosophies is the locus of ownership, irrespective of the location and ownership of production which is a secondary, and merely technical question. Not unimportant, mind you, but not fundamental. a. In modern parlance, youre either a socialist or a capitalist. I thought we could discuss whats wrong with that view by defining and critiquing these economic models. Sure. Its been my experience that between the two competing systems (socialism and capitalism) their respective advocates attempt to divide between them the whole of human possibility. But on examination, there is less difference between them than we might think. Theoretically with socialism, it is society (a kind of amorphous, abstract entity), that decides the plan for the distribution of wealth. Whereas in reality it is always a political clique, a small group of political aparachiks that make this determination, irrespective of the outcome of popular elections. One of the chief ends of bureaucracy is to secure the continuity of centralized economic planning against any possible political outcomes, so the bureaucracy has to insulate itself against politics. In the U.S., this has been achieved through various means, one of which is the increasing power of the Executive branch, and its increasing latitude in establishing policies for enforcement of laws that in effect behave like new law. If you set aside the rhetoric of the different competitors for the office of President in the political process, the bureaucracy

caries on largely the same policy no matter who is elected, with some superficial differences. So thats socialism, a clique of political appointees determining distribution. With capitalism, it is another equally small group of individuals that determines the distribution of wealth, and these are the owners of private enterprises and boards of directors if public. Again, it is always a small handful of people determining the scheme of production and distribution. To the extent that they collude with one another (which has been show often enough) we might call them a cabal. It is a common mistake to think that corporations are against government, against regulation. After all, this is the mantra we hear from industry protection rackets like the U.S. Chamber of commerce. But that is a red herring. Lets take a recent example. When the Obama administration set itself the task of writing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (or how this legislation would alter the healthcare market, which is 1/6 of the total U.S. economy), who did it turn to? Well, you could be forgiven for thinking it turned to democratic party policy thinkers, but youd be wrong! The Obama administration, in cooperation with democrats in the Senate and their policy teams turned to Insurance Industry consultants and policy advisors. Essentially, they turned to healthcare industry lobbyists. The liberal state is justified and impelled to solve the issues (real or perceived) with capitalism. The two can almost be thought cognate. Hayek, among the Austrians, understood the connection between industrialism and the state, and by this intuition, eventually drifted into a kind of crypto-socialism which it took a generation and the arrival Hans-Hermann Hoppes analysis of utility to reveal. So what are the problems inherent in capitalism that it invokes the state to solve? Well what do we see around us. What are the greatest factors in our daily economic lives? Inflation and unemployment. But these are not phenomena that are inherent to economic activity per se, but only to certain economic arrangements, such as the monetary system. You can hardly avoid inflation, for instance if the monetary policy you have elected to implement generates inflation as a matter of course. Now these economic ills were not always present. For instance in the medieval economy unemployment and inflation were largely unknown. Modernity has replaced the risk of famine and deflation with the certainty of unemployment and inflation. The present unemployment situation, sitting at 7.0 even in the admitted figures published by the government is persistent. When economists refer to persistent unemployment they use a term to diminish the impact of the admission. They call it structural unemployment. What they mean by this is the amount of unemployment that is inherent to the conditions of the current economic system. That is, we are to expect that 7% of greater of the population will be without productive occupation. But since the real unemployment percentage is much higher, we can see that structural unemployment simply, again, reveals the dependence of late capitalism on the apparatus of the state. It is difficult to equate, as some laissez faire economists try to do, the connection between government regulation and unemployment, since regulation doesnt affect demand, but supply. Regulation is a factor in cost. But costs are simply priced into economy. They tend to inflate the economy from its cost basis. However its difficult to pin unemployment on regulatory cost when there is no spoilage, when products are not sitting unsold on shelves. The twin phenomena of unemployment and inflation are simply accepted as the operation of nature in the market. Bu they arent the operation of nature, but the operation of design. This gets us into the

subject of productivity. The god of industrial production is productivity. The making of more by fewer. But doesnt this create unemployment? The Austrians say it does not, but unemployment figures say otherwise. If unemployment were not systemic as a result of improvements in productivity by way of technology then the emergence of new industry, new capacity would emerge as free labor was absorbed by the increase of capital. But the new industries are not emerging, not nearly in the profusion, not nearly at the pace that is required. In fact, industrial capacity has declined over the decades since 1970. The new industries that do emerge, when they emerge, are immediately subject to the same market pressures, and end up succumbing to the same call to hyper-productivity as the legacy industries. It has to be said that both capitalism and socialism are philosophies of dependence, because both rely on the extreme division of labor, where hyper-specialization is rewarded. You often here the term cult of expertise, well this is nothing but hyper-specialization in action. The headstart of pre-existing value that is in all things by virtue of their creation by God The essence of value is therefore not labor, and not the additional value of intellectual operation on matter, but the participation in the telos of God that brings the potentialities of energy to fruition. That is, the basis of value is in Gods creation. God is the author of the matter on which intelligence acts, the author of the intelligence that acts on it, and hes the author of the energy to perform that act. So at every link in the chain of the creation of value, we see the presence of something only God could supply. Therefore God is the basis of value, and not anything in the human realm. Thus Christian economics is radically different from both socialism and capitalism. Christian economics makes profit secondary. Now this is going to disturb some of our more Puritanical listeners, but, frankly both species of economic materialism came out of the excesses of Protestantism. As a Protestant, therefore, I feel called on to try to correct some of the misapprehensions of Protestants with respect to the telos, or ends of economic activity, which is the Glory of God, and not enrichment. Christ says seek ye first, but what we have sought first in the West since the Enlightenment is rationalism (a species of materialist humanism). Even if we had a more mature, a more well-rounded humanism we would be better off than we are presently, in thrall to pure quantity. Even the Greeks and Romans were not so base as to believe that Mammon was the highest expression of human value, or that price could fully express value. You see, this is the essence of modern laissez faire economics: price is the communicator of all value, and the only sin is the presence of demand for which there is no product. But even a child can see the problem with this approach, since there certainly are forms of vale that are beyond expression in price, and there are certainly kinds of demand for which there should never be any supply. So you see that laissez faire economics (lets call it by its real name, which is free market or Austrian school economics) is at base atheistic. It throws off the rule of God, and Gods justice for the sake of what it calls liberty (economists call this efficiency) which is really only antinomian license, where antinomian means against law. In its special sense, we are speaking of Gods law, but there is a more general sense in which antinomian simply means anarchic, and creates a social condition sociologists refer to as anomie, or ungoverned and ungovernable. Tracking back to economics, Austrian Economics is radically anarchistic. Lets take an example. One of the economic laws of God has to do with the forgiveness of debt, so that debt

servitude, that is, slavery, is not fostered in a nation. Most people think the murder of 400, 000 Southerners was the end of slavery. But what do you call an economic system where a man can scarcely own anything, where every luxury beyond the barest necessity is had at the cost of debt, where 30% of a familys income goes to service debt of one form or another? I call that slavery. Its worse than straightforward chattel slavery of the brute kind, because it hides itself in habit, in the accepted conditions of life. The older form of slavery was far more salutary, since it had the advantage of honesty, that it was based in superiority of one form or another, intelligence, arms, strength, guile, or what have you. But the most effective form of slavery is one where the slave is unaware of his condition. We dont have time to explore it, but this is the reason for the Dewey reforms that were implemented in public education. The entire thrust of modern compulsory public schooling has been to create a generation of slaves who were unaware of their servitude.

i. Marxism and Socialism 1. Can you provide brief definitions of Marxism and Socialism and describe the difference? This is a little more difficult. Its always a far more difficult proposition to define things than it is to talk about them as though the definition is a forgone conclusion, presupposed in the discussion. But that is often why we are unable to have productive discussions concerning abstractions. It gives you an idea of the unimaginable genius of Adam, the first man, to have named (and in the name actually defined) every living thing. I take the Bible at its word that somewhere, sometime, the first man did this unimaginable thing. What to us today is unimaginable, as a result of our steep decline. Not only did man fall, and creation was cursed as a result, but man has, since that time, been in decline, he has been regressing for thousands of years. But back to our definition, Id say there are two definitions that are related to one another, the epigrammatic definition, and the long form definition, which is a kind of expansion of the epigram. So with regard to Marxism, Id say that Marxism is the political institution of atheism, and its development into a completely material science of envy, in the guise of human brotherhood, by a collection of mutually self-authorizing bureaucrats, who have a unique psychological profile, that is to say, they are formally malignant narcissists. Such traits youll find in the DSM, or Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or the diagnostic book that psychiatrists use to determine whether someone is sane. Marxism is therefore the political-economic product of insanity. Your audience should think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. Many in the reformed camp substitute the term humanism for atheism, since, as a technical objection, they insist that there are no atheists. To this I would agree, provisionally. They are humanists, but a special kind of humanist who actually hates humanity, at least in its present form. The scriptures quote the Lord as saying that all those that hate me love death. In fact I would say that in some sense they worship death. Materialism, at base, is the worship of death. Materialism elevates the time principle. That is, things come into being, exist for a duration or time, and then pass away. The passing away of things makes way for the new. So the Marxist, being a materialist, sees death as a necessary passage through which the new is brought into being. Being nothing if not dedicated Hegelians, the new

is always the expression of the highest, the greatest, the synthesis of all that was before. It was only with neo-Marxism that historical inevitability was set aside for a kind of liberal voluntarism, where man had to participate in the bringing about of the radical future, through struggle, and ultimately death. This is the real reason why Marxists have always been so comfortable with mass murder. I said before that Marxists hate mankind, and its true. That is, they hate the natural man, the created and fallen man, and only love the man of the future. In this way Marxists are necessarily transhumanists. The socialist man they have been trying to create since the time of Marx (and, incidentally before Marx, since Marx didnt create Marxism but merely systematized it using the historical view of Hegel) the socialist man that Marxists have been trying to create is not a human man, he is a post-human man. This is a very important point, because it distinguishes the eschatology of Marxism from the eschatology of Christianity, and more particularly, that of Reformed postmillennialism. Both envision the improvement of general conditions based on their own active principle. For Marxism this is political economy via the state, and for Christianity this is the Holy Spirit. However, with Christianity, the teleological end of uplift is the restoration of man as man, as created, creaturely man, and not the suprahuman. On the other hand, Marxisms teleological end terminates in post-human man, or sub-human, in something he cannot be and will never be, which is non-man. So Id say that in their desire to eliminate created man, natural man, and to put post-human man in his place, Marxists are in fact haters of humanity, not worshipers of it. Ids say that the most basic characteristic of a Marxist is a hatred for mankind and a love of death. And so, of course, it goes without saying that the Marxist, who formally and institutionally despise God, proves true to the scriptural injunction. Now, if I recall you also asked me to define socialism. I would say that the epigrammatic definition is that socialists are simply Marxists who are squeamish about murder. That is, they are Marxists who are less committed to Marxist ideology. Formally, they reject the rigid policy of state ownership of the means of production, but thats merely a technical distinction, like the other well-known academic distinctions. But typically academic distinctions are unreal, and intended to confuse rather than enlighten, so I scrupulously avoid merely academic distinctions between things, and try instead to get at the essential, rather than the formal. Socialists are incrementalists. They are looking for slow, incremental change to bring about economic conditions that will supposedly liberate man, but, again, they are materialists, who believe that the dilemmas of mans existence have a material solution. That its merely a matter of certain people having more stuff than others, a condition they consider unjust. Here again, we see a collection of dedicated ideologues who dont recognize Gods ownership of all that is, and mans place in the cosmos as regent of Gods creation, not its owner. Socialists also believe, whether publicly admitted or only tacitly held, that the means by which the socialist ideal is created is through the destruction of the natural man, through the destruction of the social institution that makes peculiarly human life possible, which is the natural family, or what some call the covenant family. In terms of socialisms hatred of this institution, there is no distinction. For me, the most prominent distinction is that with the natural family, human instinct, or natural law is used as the principal that governs its constitution. And in this case I would say that human instinct, is what the Roman Catholic scholars sometimes call an imperfect realization or yearning. Certainly the covenantal family is the superior conception, but the natural family can point us in that direction. You do not see the

formalization of the equality of the homosexual in traditional societies, because, again, they are natural societies. Paul speaks of this in Romans 2:14 where he says that, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. Here Paul is talking about the natural law, and by extension the natural family. The evangelicals have it wrong for the most part. The family of the church does not replace the natural family, it augments it, and is modeled on it. So, the Socialist desires to move man in the direction of the unnatural, for to a socialist, nature is nothing but a prison in which the creature of infinite capacity is held. Now, follow me here. This echoes something said by Spengler. We dont usually associate Spengler with socialism, but heres the connection. They both accept the limitlessness of mans capacity. They deny the fall. They deny mans incurable fallibility. Spengler speaks of the Faustian soul of the European. That it yearns for infinity. So much is true, but the socialist goes beyond this to postulate that indeed it is achievable. But that infinity is a material infinity. So the eschaton for the socialist, like that of the Marxist, is found in materiality, in limitlessness. But this is a denial of god, it is a self-apotheosis. But man cannot apotheosize himself without contradiction, without approaching death, because he has denied the source of his being. In becoming more than man, in elevating himself to godhood, he actually commits suicide by severing himself from the source of being. The Christian conception most hated by the Marxist or socialist is that of the contingency of mans being. Mans dependency on something higher than himself, which they view as slavery and the Christian views as a familial dependency, a bond, because they view their God as a father. The notion of the contingent, dependent, and creaturely status of man, with a specific nature, the idea of man as fallen, fallible, with certain prescribed and immovable limits, this is an idea that is heretical to the religion of death. Humans cannot escape caste thinking. It is inherent in human epistemology. The socialists tacitly accept a two-caste system: socialist man, and non-socialist man. The latter has no right to existence. He must give way for the collective interests (interests determined by a self-authorizing and autocratic elite), non-socialist man must give way to socialist man for the realization of these socalled collective goals. Traditional man, of course, accepts caste thinking as well, but with the humane refinement that man is divided into several spiritual castes. For this reason, perennialism has been referred to as a Fascist ideology, but mostly by people who dont understand what Fascism is. But for Christians, this idea is not totally foreign. We have to remember that Paul speaks of the division of the body of Christ into organs, and this idea is close to the traditional or primordial idea, but with the distinction that these roles are a result of the action of Gods will in history, and not independent material principles. The Kinist, which is just another way of saying the Occidental paleochristian, accepts this principle of the division of man, with the added nuance that the divisions of man are both spiritual and physical, since there can be no complete separation of the two. This idea is driven by our understanding of the created condition of man, a very elevated condition, but still a physical one in which man is a spirit-body oneness, a wholeness that is incomplete if man has been separated from his body, where in the Bible he is said to sleep, or what the Southern Agrarian, poet, and literary critic Allen Tate referred to as positivist man, who has a solely biological existence, an existence which is subhuman, which is even worse than bestial. Man, absent a properly oriented spirit is worse than an

animal, and commits crimes that are unthinkable in the case of animals. Crimes against entire classes of Gods creature, crimes driven by sickness which go far, far beyond the natural world, where crime is unknown. Nature, which is of course red in tooth and claw even so is not genocidal. So for the Occidental Paleochristian, the telos of man is a return to his primordial state, a oneness of body and spirit in immortality, but within the confines of the specific nature God created for man. Not man as a God, but man as fully man, not the subhuman man of the modern fascist-capitalist-industrialist state, not man of the communist-industrial state. As we said before, those two systems are branches of the same root. Returning to socialism for a moment, looking back, if you think about the Fabian socialists of 19th Century, or fin de sicle England, men such as George Bernard Shaw, they were socialists par excellence, right? These men were the descendants of Darwin and Bentham. They were utilitarians. This group bears the greatest resemblance to those socialists who are actually in power today, with one essential distinction. The socialists (or we could call them fascists, since there is really not a great deal of difference) the socialists who exercise power today are not the true believers of yesteryear. I maintain that Shaw and his ilk were true believers, in their way. But the socialists who populate elite circles today are socialists of convenience. The wield socialism like a tool to move societies incrementally to one world government. But what does that look like? Its a formalized system of haves and have-nots. You see, these men and women are trans-humanists, but, unlike the old fashioned Marxists, they are consciously so. They publicly embrace a post-human world. Or, let me draw a fine distinction here: a post-human world for themselves, and a subhuman world for the non-elect, that is the non-elite. In fact, they do believe that they are a different species than the remainder of humanity. These are titans and thinkers from only the most exclusive salons. Men such as Bill Gates, thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil, and Zbigniew Brzinski. Their motivation is different than the Fabian of old. They are socialist-fascists because they see this ideology as a means to disguise their actual intent from the serfs. But in the fascist future, we are worse off than the serf of old. Very much worse off. The serf of old looks like a king next to the serf of the future. Many thinkers in this area, the ponerologists, the prophets, the dystopian futurists, all these, they love to use a term the coined called neo-feudalism. But this is a libel against feudalism. With feudalism, a formal reciprocal relationship between Lord and peasant or serf existed. A peasant had rights that could be and were enforced against the interests of Lords. They had a great deal of freedom and economic security relative to the standards of the time, when even kings slept on straw mattresses often enough. We did not see the totalitarianism of today in the old feudal system because there wasnt the technical means to achieve it. But I also suspect, there was less desire for totalitarian politics in those days. Im of the school of historian Christopher Dawson, and more recently Anthony Esolen, in that I think a great libel has been perpetrated against the Middle Ages by the proponents of laissez faire industrial capitalism, and the chattering class that promulgates the ideology that supports it. 2. Whats basically wrong with Marxism and Socialism? The quickest answer to this question is that neither system, as we mentioned before, recognizes the ownership of all that is by God, and therefore does not recognize Gods economic laws, which are recorded in scripture. In seeking to make economics a science that operates according to supposed laws, like gravity or electromagnetism, Marxists and Socialists replace Gods law, and mans status as a

fallen image bearer with purely material causes for economic phenomena, and as a result, they can only present us with purely materialistic solutions to economic problems. A specifically Christian economics is the product of the admission that God is the owner of the universe, and that we are his regents, not owners in and of ourselves. Therefore we dont, if we are committed to this principle, make the rules for the disposition of property, but God does. This qualification of the concept of ownership changes everything. It conditions (or should condition) our conception of private property. So if your entire worldview is built on contractual relationships that spring from the idea of private property, based first in so-called self-ownership, as is the philosophy of John Locke, then ii. Capitalism 1. How about a brief definition of capitalism? iii. Capitalist problems Mark, as you know, Capitalists (including Libertarians, conservatives, and Christians) defend many evils inherent associated with capitalism: 1. Usury Usury is the destruction of the middle class, but its also what has enabled the middle class to continue in its delusion that it has wealth. Id like to throw a few usury defenses at you for you to rebut: a. Capitalists offer such defenses of usury: i. just a little bit is OK ii. Any amount is OK as long as its voluntary and contract based. After all, its a service. iii. Without it no one could own a home and a car! iv. Some cant afford college, etc. 2. Corporations and family problems Lets discuss a different aspect of capitalism, namely corporations. In your view, what are some problems with corporations? (Below in red are my thoughts that you can build upon if desired.) a. Remove dad (and mom) off their productive property and onto the productive property of a rich man in exchange for a wage. b. Family wages remain at subsistence levels, (at best) while CEOs wealth increases. (In 1970, families made it on single income, while today two income families are barely making it. The average income adjusted for inflation hasn't increased in 40 years, although the average productivity has. CEO pay, however, has increased exponentially. c. Pay each worker according to his marginal utility, rather than as a real human whose check is his livelihood rather than a means to buy commodities. What a worker is entitled to in order support his family is justice, not charity. d. Capitalist choose cost efficiency (as consumer) and profits (biz owners) over blood, localism, and stable communities.

e. It's permitted the decomodification of the economy. We deal in money rather than wealth, things as things rather than things of value. We have stuff but most stuff is bought on debt and is junk. We want jobs, not productive property. Off-shoring is a classic example. 3. Insurance problems Lets talk about some problems with modern insurance, which seems to have replaced real communities of like-minded people. In my view, the difference is one trusting local kinfolk vs. grouping together with folks we probably shouldnt mingle with, in order to have strangers assume risks we probably shouldnt be taking. What problems do you see with modern insurance? Its a wealth redistribution system based on risk, from those with low risk to those with high risk.

4. General Industrial problems Similar problems to Corporations: mass society, mass production, consumer-centric, resource-devouring, etc. 5. General Technology problems Could easily be its own show, but basic issues. iv. Heres a great quote on Marxism and Capitalism similarities. Your response is welcome. Like Marxism, capitalism ensures that the bulk of society will be composed of workers laboring for a wage, unlikely to ever become the owners of productive property. Like Marxism, capitalism ensures that the bulk of these workers will never have any significant political power, because they will never have the economic independence that will grant them an influence in the political process even remotely similar to that of the owners of productive property. Like Marxism, capitalism ensures that society is strictly defined into two classes, those who control the use of productive property and those who dont. Like Marxism, capitalism ensures that those who belong to the first group have the bulk of power, including power over those who belong to the second. Donald Goodman III, Distrubtism and Marxism, in The Hound of Distrubitism b. The Big Biz vs. Big Gov myth i. Youve privately shared concerns you have with the merge of big gov and big biz, their psychological operations, their existence as planning machines, latestage capitalism, etc. Can you elaborate? This should be a fun section! This is an interesting question, because it touches on the extreme public ignorance in terms of where economic planning occurs. Any ignorance on the part of academics has to be willful, since they are fully aware of the location of this

activity. Austrian School economists despise government central planning of economies, since they believe that governments cannot acquire the knowledge of all facets of the market to the extent that prices and wages could be effectively set. This is certainly correct, but also it is a very limited perspective, and almost certainly willfully ignorant of the role of corporations in central planning. In allowing very large corporations (or oligarchies of corporations) to control broad segments of the economy, their own internal planning apparatuses substitute for government central planning. Why do you need government economic planning committees, as you have under communism, when central economic planning is occurring routinely in corporations controlling these titanic macro economies, such as the petrochemical economy. That leads to another error people make, which is to assume there is such a thing as a singular, unitary economy, when in fact there are many, each with its own dynamics and factors. The pretrochemical economy does not work like clothing retail, and vice versa, since their market conditions are vastly different. For instance, there is no bottleneck in the supply chain as there is with gasoline and the need to refine it, and the limited capacity of those refineries. So central economic planning is occurring even beyond areas where it is obviously ocurring in government, with corporations acting as surrogates in this context. It is obvious that equity markets are centrally planned by capital investment firms. There are many others. This way, the economy can give the appearance of a certain freedom, while at the same time being tightly controlled. So in that respect the Austrians are correct that it would be far better if the economy had no central planning, even though they dont recognize all its agents. Im not sure we have time enough to delve as deeply as wed like into this topic, but lets just take a single example of the 3. CONCLUSION a. Solutions i. Finally, lets talk about solutions. What is the proper role of free market? Well, lets go back to definitions here. The term free market is defined many different ways, in some ways that are antagonistic to Christianity, and some that are compatible with it. As Kinists, we speak of a concept we call biblical liberty. This is the freedom that we have, carved out for us by God, to live free of regulation and encroachment in areas that the bible does not regulate. This is not an original concept, but derives from the exegesis of the 70s and 80s Tylerites and Reconstructionists, such as North and Rushdoony. A market that is utterly unregulated, as in the laissez faire or Austrian scheme is not a free market in the biblical sense, because it responds to pressures other than Gods law, is regulated by forces other than Gods law, and relies on an unbiblical concept of economic law that asserts that markets are self-regulating when in fact they are not. In the so-called free market of the Austrian conception, the only regulatory forces are assurance against force and fraud. But what of assurances as

to the salutary character of products and services? In the laissez faire market, there are no protections against moral abominations, unbiblical products and services coming available in the market. If there is demand for abortion, then abortion will be provided. If there is demand for pornography, then pornography will be provided, if there is a demand for sexual slavery, then sexual slavery will be provided. So, it is a wonder how presumably Christian economists, such as Gary North, could align his economics with that of the Austrians in all but the most trivial details. The only sin in Austrian economics is the failure to provide a product for which there is demand. This is seen asand Im going to use a swear word hereregulation. For the Austrian School economist, it is regulation that is the abomination, not pornography, not abortion since that is an economic arrangement between a willing adult buyer and seller. 1. Does it not come down to family-owned biz, horticulture, handicraft, and locally focused entrepreneurship? ii. I think we should be thinking about some important things, especially as our economy and culture imploding. Do you have any advice to offer on the following topics? 1. Communities How should we be taking steps to physically invest in physical communities? 2. Prepping 3. Communication An advice about secure communications? Darknet and such? 4. Etc 5. Etc iii. Recommended Resources and Wrap-up 1. Thanks for doing this important show, Mark. Can you offer our listeners ways they can learn more about these things? Ways folks can get in touch with likeminded Kinists who want a future for their children?