Christianity and Capitalism

Every so often it is my distinct misfortune to read or hear someone wax eloquent about the evils of capitalism and imply, suggest, or say outright that Jesus was a socialist, or that He would have favored socialism, or that the early Christians practiced some form of socialism, or that capitalism somehow violates Christian teaching.

It's aggravating as the dickens. Aggravating because it reveals, at the least, appalling ignorance of history, economics, and the Scriptures; or worse, familiarity with one or more of those subjects combined with a serious deficiency in analytical thinking; or, worst of all, outright mendacity and lying. Combine this with the usual syrupy, dripping condescension that accompanies the commentary and you have a perfect recipe for annoying anyone who's devoted, say, 60 seconds of serious thought to the subject.

For what, exactly, is capitalism? It is often said that it is an economic system, but this really isn't the case. Capitalism, beloved, is nothing more--and nothing less--than the economics resulting from people--the mass of people, not merely elites--having both documented property rights and liberty. To the extent you deny the people liberty, or the right to administer their property and the fruits of their labor as they see fit, you depart from capitalism and pitch your tent in the Land of the Planned Economy, aka Socialism. Some prefer to deny those rights in toto; they are communists or socialists (Or fascists, for that matter. Surely you weren't unaware that fascism is but a variety of socialism?) Some prefer to deny them in part; they are liberals. Some prefer to deny them on an ad hoc basis as benefits them personally; they are political hacks, thieves, and liars.

Those who seek to guard and secure Man's God-given rights are commonly called "conservatives" these days.

It floors me that anyone even modestly familiar with Holy Writ would suggest that it does not recognize either the right to liberty or the right to property. How, if a man has not a right to life, do the Scriptures say, "Thou shalt do no murder"? And if a man has a right to life, how can anyone say that it is legitimate for another man to deny him the free use thereof, that is to say, to deny him his liberty? How can anyone be said to have a right to something if he has no right to control the disposition thereof? And if there is no right to property, how is it that the Scriptures say, "Thou shalt not steal," and "Let him who stole, steal no more?" How can any man steal what does not belong to anyone? The commands implicitly recognize the right to property.

And if the Scriptures recognize the rights to liberty and property, beloved, they recognize capitalism, for that is all that results when men have both!

These are amongst the rights the Founders of our country had in mind when they referred to certain unalienable rights granted from the Creator. Rights given by the Creator of mankind and which may therefore not be legitimately denied by men to men. It is largely the denial of such rights that constitutes injustice. Against this, the Scriptures warn us, and tell us that guarding against it is the proper role of the state. Hence, the Founders assertion that it is to secure such rights that governments are instituted among Men.

So much is obvious, as I said, to anyone willing to give the matter a few seconds of serious, analytical thought. I therefore do not hesitate to say that those who do not understand this have, at the least, simply not bothered to engage the material seriously. But there is more.

Consider, beloved, the track records of capitalism and the varieties of socialism. Capitalism has a track record of promoting liberty and economic growth and prosperity for masses of people. To this minute, it is the only economic--for lack of a better word, "system"--with a demonstrable track record of lifting millions of people out of poverty. (As an aside, the evils sometimes ascribed to capitalism are actually the evils resulting from greed, which usually results in the abuse or denial of property rights or liberty, and hence do not result from "capitalism" at all.) Socialism, on the other hand, especially when you consider that fascism and communism are but varieties thereof, has a track record of impoverishing and murdering hundreds of millions of people.

One is left shocked, stunned, in disbelief, at the notion that anyone could seriously suggest that a "system" that demonstrably lifts people out of slavery and destitution is somehow less charitable--and therefore less in accord with Christian beliefs--than a system that routinely enslaves, impoverishes, and murders people. But that is the position that people who take seriously the idea that Christianity is, or somehow should be, a socialist faith, are left with.

Ignorance can be cured. Here are some suggestions:

The Holy Bible
Money, Greed, and God
The Victory of Reason
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The Wealth of Nations
The Mystery of Capital

On Che Guevara

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying "What goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here.

Oh, Go Ahead and Make Yourself Look the Fool

I won't mind. I'll even sympathize a bit, having done the same to myself often enough.

There are certain subjects in this world about which the conventional wisdom, that which "everyone knows," is so badly wrong that unless and until you make a deliberate attempt to do the reading and bring yourself up to speed, you really risk making yourself look foolish in spouting off-hand comments about them.

Witness
The Venona Secrets
Blacklisted by History

Just sayin', it might be worth doing the reading, y'know? It might just turn out that your analogies are seriously flawed.

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Some few days after this was published, I noticed a comment on it elsewhere to the effect that these books are all suspect--suspect because, God forbid, they are published by Regnery Press. Nothing Regnery Press publishes can be worthwhile, you see, because they are a conservative publishing house.

Oh.

Of such stuff is blissful ignorance made...

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On the Infamous "Have You No Decency?" Remark

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Every so often I will read some commentary involving or referring to Joe Welch's infamous riposte to Joe McCarthy--"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"--and almost without exception, the commentary makes it clear that the writer knows only part of the story behind that remark. It was only a few weeks ago that I read another such bit of commentary. I thought, at the time, "You poor devil. You have only part of the story, and have no idea what an ignorant footstool you've made yourself out to be." And I thought, too, that it would be a good thing for the correct story to be "out there" in the blogosphere.

Anyone genuinely interested in the full story of Joe McCarthy has been perfectly free to pick up M. Stanton Evans' massively researched and painstakingly documented Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies for a couple of years now. Of course, most of the people who cite Mr. Welch's remark are not interested in the whole story; they are simply interested in making McCarthy look bad. They do not care that McCarthy has indisputably been proven correct: the federal government in the thirties, forties, and fifties did harbor quite a lot of communists. Nor do they care overmuch that communists persist to this day, that our wonderful president, Barack Obama, Peace Be Upon Him, has been known to appoint avowed communists such as Van Jones to positions of power and influence.

I have often thought that such people either have convinced themselves that communists are a thing of the past, something from the "old days," a specter, a phantom, a chimera which Republicans hope to use to scare up a few more votes, or even that communism itself has been hideously misrepresented. It was/is a simple reformist agrarian movement, they think. Nice spread-the-wealth folks. Can't possibly be as bad as those conservatives or Republicans.

I must disagree. Communism was, and is, a murderous, totalitarian ideology, and hard-core communists are, at heart, themselves murderers.

Now, I know--I know--that at this point, some poor soul is even now scrambling for his keyboard, eager to inform me that conservatives have no room to talk, that, after all, fascism is a murderous ideology, too, and fascism is a totalitarian ideology of the right. Sorry. It isn't true, and in trying to argue for it, you are only making yourself look more uninformed than you already did. Read this excerpt, and learn that fascism sprang from the bosom of socialism, is, in fact, simply a different variety of socialism, and learn that your devastating counter-argument is stillborn: fascism, too, is a creation of the left, not the right.

I hesitated somewhat before typing up this lengthy quote from the book. My fervent hope is that reading the material will cause at least a few people to take the step of actually ordering and reading the book, but nevertheless, this extended quote is perhaps somewhat longer than most authors would prefer. Should Mr. Evans (and I will not be satisfied with someone merely claiming to be Mr. Evans) ask me to take the post down, I will of course comply, but hopefully he will approve my intent and reap some additional sales. The remainder of this post is from the book and will give you a much fuller sense of the genesis of Mr. Welch's remark to Senator McCarthy. If I have missed any typos, I apologize, but they are perhaps inevitable in the copying of such a long section. Anything in bold is something I have emphasized. Lastly, I would be remiss in not mentioning that in the book, Mr. Evans includes a photocopy of the New York Times article to which he refers.

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Having thus exhibited his instinct for the capillary, Welch would outdo himself in a third notable episode of this nature--the matter of Frederick Fisher. Fisher was a young attorney from Welch's Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr, brought down to Washington to help prepare the case for Stevens-Adams. In getting ready for the hearings, Welch had asked Fisher if there were anything in his background that could prove embarassing to the Army.

Well, yes, said Fisher, there was. He had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which was indeed a problem. As the Guild had the year before been branded by Attorney General Herbert Brownell as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party, and before that by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as the party's "legal bulwark," it was decided such past membership would be an incapacitating factor in hearings so heavily devoted to issues of subversion. Fisher was sent home to Boston.

Nevertheless, his name would show up in the hearings, as Welch was cross-examining Roy Cohn in what would be a famous confrontation. This began with the standard Welch technique of exaggerated buildup, to the effect that Cohn had been remiss in not communicating whatever he knew about Communists in the Army directly to Robert Stevens. This colloquy is worth quoting in extenso as an example of Welch in action and the degree to which the lovable codger could change his mien as needed.

WELCH: If you had gone over to the Pentagon and got inside the door and yelled to the first receptionist you saw, "We got some hot dope on some Communists in the Army," don't you think you could have landed at the top?
COHN: Sir, that is not the way I do things.

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WELCH: And although you had this dope and a fresh and ambitious new Secretary of the Army, reachable by the expenditure of one taxicab fare, you never went during March, if you had it in March, did you, is that right?
COHN: Mr Welch--
WELCH: Just answer. You never went near him in March?
COHN: No, I--
WELCH: Or April? Did you?
COHN: Mr. Welch--
WELCH: Tell me, please.
COHN: I am trying, sir.
WELCH: Or April?
COHN: No, sir.
WELCH: Or May?
COHN: I never went near him, sir.
WELCH: Or June?
COHN: The answer is never.
WELCH: Right. Or July?
COHN: I communicated--
WELCH: Or July?
COHN: No, sir--
SENATOR MUNDT: I think we have covered July.
WELCH: I think it is really dramatic to see how these Communist hunters will sit on this document when they could have brought it to the attention of Bob Stevens in 20 minutes, and they let month after month go by without going to the head and saying, "Sic 'em Stevens."

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COHN: May I answer the last statement?
WELCH: I only said you didn't say, "Sic 'em Stevens," and you didn't, did you?...You did not say "Sic 'em Stevens." Is that right?
COHN: Sir--
WELCH: Is that right?
COHN: Mr. Welch, if you want to know the way things work, I will tell you.
WELCH: I don't care how it works. I just want to know if it is right that you did not say, "Sic 'em Stevens."
COHN: No, sir, you are right.
WELCH: I am at long last right once, is that correct?
COHN: Mr. Welch, you can always get a laugh...
WELCH: Mr. Cohn, we are not talking about laughing matters. If there is a laugh, I suggest to you, sir, it is because it is so hard to get you to say that you didn't actually yell, "Sic 'em Stevens."

When McCarthy finally objected to this burlesque, the discussion wandered off to other topics. However, Welch was soon back in "Sic 'em Stevens" mode, arguing that Cohn was at fault for not having personally rushed to inform Stevens the instant that data on security problems at Monmouth surfaced. This recapped what had gone before, but with additional Welchian furbelows:

WELCH: ...you didn't tug at his lapel and say, "Mr. Secretary, I know something about Monmouth that won't let me sleep nights?" You didn't do it, did you?
COHN: I don't, as I testifed, Mr. Welch, I don't know whether I talked to Mr. Stevens about it then [in September 1953] or not...
WELCH: Don't you know that if you had really told him what your fears were, and substantiated them to any extent, he could have jumped in the next day with suspensions?
COHN: No, sir.

***

WELCH: Mr. Cohn, tell me once more: Every time you learn of a Communist or a spy anywhere, is it your policy to get them out as fast as possible?
COHN: Surely, we want them out as fast as possible, sir.
WELCH: And whenever you learn of one from now on, Mr. Cohn, I beg of you, will you tell somebody about them quick?
COHN: Mr. Welch, with great respect, I work for the committee here. They know how we go about handling situations of Communist infiltration and failure to act on FBI information about Communist infiltration...
WELCH: May I add my small voice, sir, and say whenever you know about a subversive or a Communist spy, please hurry. Will you remember these words?

This hectoring of Cohn, be it noted, came from the small voice whose clients had been pressuring General Lawton to restore asserted security risks at Monmouth. Even more ironic, if possible, it was premised on the selfsame "purloined letter" Welch had dismissively treated as a "carbon copy of precisely nothing." Now he was contending that Cohn was grievously to blame for not hand-delivering this copy of "precisely nothing" to Robert Stevens by the fastest possible method.

After sitting through these Welch sermonettes about exposing every subversive or Communist suspect Cohn had ever heard of, and being extra quick about it, McCarthy at last broke in by raising the issue of Fred Fisher. Having brought Fisher to D.C. to help out with the hearings, McCarthy opined, Welch had little standing to lecture others about proper methods of Red-hunting. In a tone heavy with disdain, McCarthy stated:

...in view of Mr. Welch's request that information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher, whom he recommended incidentally to do work on this committee, he has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh years and years back, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party...We are now letting you know that this young man did belong to this organization for either 3 or 4 years, belonged to it long after he was out of law school...

And subsequently:

Jim [Juliana], will you get the news story to the effect that this man belonged to this Communist front organization?

This drew from Welch a much-celebrated answer, featured in all the usual write-ups and replayed innumerable times in video treatments of the hearings. It was the distilled essence of Joe Welch, worth studying in detail to get context and flavor. Along with certain other statements on Fred Fisher, Welch assailed McCarthy as follows:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us...Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentlemean, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. (Emphasis added.)

When McCarthy then attempted to give some background on the National Lawyers Guild, plus a strong tu quoque about the harm done to the reputations of Frank Carr and other young McCarthy staffers by the charges Welch had signed his name to, the Army counsel again lamented the injury to Fisher:

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

And, finally:

Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have been within six feet of me, and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have brought it out If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it with you further. (emphasis added.)

Subsequently, we're told, Welch broke into tears and the audience in the Senate chamber responded with sustained applause. Thus the incident most remembered from the hearings, and generally viewed as the moral Waterloo of Joe McCarthy. The reckless evildoer had exposed young Fred Fisher and his former membership in the National Lawyers Guild, thus scarring the innocent lad forever, and the good, decent Welch had protested this shameful outing of a youthful indiscretion.

All of which seems very moving, and is invariably so treated. It looks a little different, however, when we note that, well before this dramatic moment, Fred Fisher had already been outed, in conclusive fashion, as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild--by none other than Joe Welch. This had occurred in April, some six weeks before the McCarthy-Welch exchange, when Welch took it upon himself to confirm before the world that Fisher had indeed been a member of the Guild, and for this reason had been sent back to Boston. As the New York Times reported, in a story about the formal filing of Army allegations against Cohn-McCarthy:

The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr. the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization. Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball, Jr., from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher's place. (Emphasis added.)

Giving this news item further impact, the Times ran a sizable photograph of Fred Fisher, plus a caption noting he had been relieved of duty with the Army's legal forces. Having caused this story to appear in the nation's most prestigious daily and reputed paper of record, Joe Welch would seem to have done a pretty good job of outing the innocent lad from Boston. (it was undoubtedly this news story, or an equivalent, that McCarthy was asking Jim Juliana to bring him.) It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy. So the suspicion once more dawns...that something was unspeakably evil when, and only when, done by McCarthy, but perfectly proper when done by Welch and/or his clients.

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Counterpoint? Find it here. And yes, if you're wondering, I did go back and change two words in my introduction, two words which may, in retrospect, have been over the top. That's the beauty of the "edit posts" function of blogger...

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Hitler on Socialism

There are, if you care to look for them, abundant evidences that Adolf Hitler was a socialist and, socialism being a thing of the political Left, it's fair, in my opinion, to point out that Leftists therefore have the honor of having most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' genocidal murderers to their credit. Just for giggles, start here, with Hitler himself, quoted, apparently, by John Toland:

We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions

No, I didn't go check the book out from the library to read the quote for myself. Feel free to doubt its veracity if you so choose. For me, I've seen far too many examples of this sort of thing to have any doubt whatsoever that it is representative.

Why write about this? Meh. Annoyance, really. Largely because I get a little tired of Leftists continually painting themselves as innocent of evil, when the reality is that Leftist ideology has been responsible for more war, death, and murder than you can shake a stick at. Will they take responsibility for Mao? No. For Lenin? No. For Stalin? No. Pol Pot? The Khmer Rouge? For Adolf Hitler? No. And yet to argue that these people weren't Leftists, died-in-the-wool Leftists, requires a break from reality of staggering proportions.

And yet they do argue this. Those people aren't real Leftists/Socialists/Communists, you will hear. Real Leftism/Socialism/Communism has never been tried.

So why do Leftists do this? In my opinion, it's because it would require admitting to themselves that their Leftist ideas contain the seed of more hate than just about anything else in the modern world, save, possibly, Islam. And this, they will never do.

Fascists, Fascism

Every ignorant fool out there who hollers "Fascist!" at people who oppose limitless welfare spending or homosexual marriage would love for you to forget this (or they don't know themselves), but fascism is just another variety of socialism; that is, it's not a right-wing or conservative thing at all, but rather a leftist phenomenon. It differs from other varieties of socialism chiefly in two ways: it is an explicitly nationalist socialism, whereas other varieties of socialism, especially communism, are more internationalist in their thinking, and it is more willing to tolerate private ownership of capital, as long as the state still directs everything.

I can't tell you how many people shout "Nazi!" or "Fascist!" without understanding--or perhaps deliberately forgetting--fascism's socialist nature. But it's glaringly obvious; the most infamous fascist state in history, Nazi Germany, made it plain: "Nazi" is just an acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or "National Socialist German Workers' Party."

So, no, fascism isn't right-wing totalitarianism after all; it's another variety of leftist, socialist totalitarianism. The fighting between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in World War II was something of an internecine struggle between two competing varieties of socialism--and inescapably means that socialism of one variety or another is responsible for the murders and killing of almost inconceivably enormous numbers of people.

For more--and highly recommended--reading on this, see Jonah Goldberg's excellent Liberal Fascism.

Communists, Communism, Marxists, Marxism

Not all socialists are communists, but--and, oh, boy, would a lot of people like you to forget this--all communists are socialists. People often overlook this, or try to; many would love to overlook the indisputable fact that one of the worst totalitarian states in history was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, aka "Communist Russia."

Communism is an explicitly godless--it was communists who coined the infamous phrase that "Religion is the opiate of the people", and it is no accident that many atheists are also communists--militant, violently repressive, international-in-design socialism. It is socialism's usual thieving oligarchy carried to a murderous extreme. Communists have been responsible, probably, for the murders of more human beings than any other ideological group--any group period, really--throughout the planet's history.

Communism's most influential and famous theoretician was Karl Marx, hence communism is often called "Marxism." It should send shivers down the spine of any knowledgeable, caring person that Barack Obama said in his own autobiography that he was drawn to Marxist professors in college; that it doesn't, to my mind, indicates that people have no clear idea of what Marxism means anymore.

In short, it means murder and oppression. Murder and oppression by the state, in the name of the people, for the sake of plunder, for the benefit of an oligarchy or dictator.

Occasionally, you will hear some ignorant fool--tool--opine that real communism has never been tried. By this, he means that it's never reached it's ostensible goal of such total brotherhood among men being reached that the state ends up withering away and leaving mankind in a kind of bucolic, egalitarian, eternal brotherhood of love. This is, of course, an admission that it's never worked, not once in all the times it's been tried. Communists often blame this on the fact that they have enemies--that the whole world isn't yet communist--and try to aggressively export their insanity.

At bottom, what you've got with communists are people hell-bent on setting up an oligarchy or dictatorship to dominate and plunder the people, all in the name of the people. I often think of this clip when I think of communists, though I wouldn't go as far as cursing a communist.

I would sure as thunder curse communism, though.

Socialists, Socialism

There are big, long, hairy articles on socialism out there (and it doesn't hurt to read them), but I'll keep my definition of socialism brief if you'll bear in mind that it's not intended to set a standard for the ages.

Socialism might be fairly said to be liberalism run amok. The basic idea is for the community--in practical terms, the government--to either own or control the property and/or the means of production, and to distribute the proceeds thereof to the population. The idea is for this to result in equitable distribution--everyone in the community having enough. The idea has often been summarized by the phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

It sounds all nice and charitable. In practice, it never works. It's never worked as intended throughout, as far as I can tell, all of human history. It doesn't work because it flies in the face of human nature and man's God-given rights--amongst which is, according to Thomas Jefferson, liberty, which surely entails liberty to own something and to dispose of it as one sees fit. Since socialism doesn't work, never works, has never worked, in practice, what actually happens is one of two things. The first is rare; people can admit that they were wrong. This is what happened with the Pilgrim community at Plymouth Rock. At first, they attempted something of a socialistic lifestyle, and the result was a disastrous aggravation of already bad conditions. The next year, they abandoned that plan and assigned each family a plot of ground and gave them the liberty to work it and to do as they would with the proceeds--which lead directly (though admittedly it was not the only factor) to a far better harvest.

The second thing that can happen--what almost always actually happens--is that this theoretically egalitarian system actually turns into a means whereby the few not only plunder the many, they lie about it and expect everyone around them to echo their lies. It turns into robbery by an oligarchy, with the added insult that those being robbed must praise the goodness of the whole system. For an excellent fictional--but very true to life--treatment, read George Orwell's Animal Farm.

When you hear people talk about how wealth is distributed (they won't say, "earned"), and almost always, these days, when you hear people talk about "fairness," or "justice," or, in one famous, recent incident, "spreading the wealth," what they are really talking about is socialism. They just don't want to use that word because they know socialism has been largely discredited in people's minds as a viable system (or possibly, they are just disturbingly ignorant). And where you hear people talk about socialism, what most of them are really talking about is robbery by means of the police power of the state, with themselves cast in the role of robber baron.

Socialism exists in varying degrees. In some countries, it's not too advanced. In others, it's far enough advanced that they are often described as "welfare states." In others, it's a hideous nightmare wherein pointing out that the system doesn't work will cost you your life.

It is possible, in my opinion, to be a Christian and a socialist. Such people would, in my opinion, be terribly misguided and misreading the Scriptures, and ignoring the nature of man and the lessons of history, but they might be educable.