The Theory of Money and Credit
It is a great honor to be here today and to be the inaugural lecturer and I am thankful to Lew for writing this honor and to the Church Foundation as well for making funds available.
I was not aware, I have to say, that the Ludwig von Mises Institute has changed its name to the Luhmbann Mises Institute.
Some of the most common arguments advanced against the Christ system are those based on religious faith.
In fact, all forms of stateism can be tied to some forms of faith.
It may be a faith in a human being or a committee of human beings.
Certainly, socialism requires a great deal of faith and the abilities of central planners to collect relevant,
non-quantifiable, up-to-date information about the desires of millions of remote individuals.
It requires more faith, I think, to believe that a government can prescribe an efficient allocation of resources and methods of production to meet the most important of those desires.
This may not be the sort of faith evidenced by attendance at a church, synagogue, or mosque, but it is faith nonetheless, and in a sense it is religious.
As the status Bernard de Saint Croix wrote over a century ago, the modern nation is a history and a religion rather than a clear-cut idea.
Using the term religious faith then requires us to cover too much ground, so I will be more specific.
I shall deal in particular with the views of those identifying themselves as modern evangelical Christians.
Modern evangelicals have attacked the market economy on several fronts.
Residuals, parent church organizations and entire denominations have advocated government-run welfare systems, minimum wages, restrictions on hiring and firing employees, monetary manipulation by governments, trade restrictions and other major interventions.
Frequently, no attempt is made to show that the free market is, at some fundamental level, inconsistent with the Bible.
Recently evangelicals have been mimicking the secular environmentalists' assault on the market economy.
Pollution, deforestation, endangered and extinct species, food shortages and global warming are all, they say, evidence of our failure to be good stewards over creation.
Overconsumption, particularly in the industrialized parts of the world, is responsible, they say.
Personal frugality, coupled with government regulation and fraud along the unrepentant SUV driving glutton, is the answer.
Late last year, the Evangelical Environmental Network launched its What Would Jesus Drive campaign,
which associated low gas mileage with immorality and advocated stricter government fuel economy regulations.
So there is a great deal of activity on the environmental front and it is perhaps the most vigorous attack for markets that evangelicals have launched in the last 20 years.
This attack is not coming from Gaia worshiping cultists or fringe groups within the churches.
Major Protestant denominations and some groups of Roman Catholics have issued documents stating that caring for creation is inconsistent with the market economy.
Of course, many of these groups have stated that social policy was a better part of the century, so anti-market environmentalism may be viewed as a variation of the same old thing.
Not all believers have participated in this attack. There are quite a few, particularly in the more theologically conservative denominations, who have strong pro-market views.
But in most churches and seminaries today, a majority have been convinced that when it comes to the environment, the market economy cannot be trusted.
For most Christians, the idea that humans should be good stewards of creation is easy to swallow.
The trouble, as usual, begins when the particulars must be addressed.
How does one know which use of a resource constitutes good stewardship?
and Stewardship. Can the government identify poor stewardship and take steps to correct
a misallocation of resources? Modern evangelical environmentalism cannot solve basic questions
of resource allocation because it has rejected the foundations of rational economic calculation.
Like their non-Christian counterparts, evangelical environmentalists regard private property
as a source of environmental problems rather than the cause, rather than the solution.
Writing on the tragedy of the commons, Warren Wilkinson, a prominent figure among evangelical environmentalists,
claims that the overgrazing of the common pasture is due to private ownership of the cattle, not access to the property.
The first problem he writes is based on the hypothesis of individual interests detached from ties with nature, humanity or God.
So it is almost inevitable, he says, that resources held in common will be misused, or the common actions which need to be taken will not be taken unless someone can speak for the whole interconnected system, not just for one individual's interest.
For recently Calvin DeWitt has argued that the cause of creation has value, we should preserve it as we would a classic work of art.
He writes, when it comes to masterpieces created by human artists, respectors of Rembrandt keep and take care of Rembrandt's paintings.
and much more so, should respectors and worshippers of the Creator keep and take care of the Creator's works.
He would statement as an example a major problem within evangelical environmentalism,
the denial of individual valuations of resources in accordance with individual goals.
DeWitt assumes, in effect, that individuals have the same tastes and preferences and do not come up with different plans.
Therefore, de Wit is to be logically consistent, every person's subjective valuation of a particular natural resource must be identical.
This explains why de Wit chose a Rembrandt as an example.
De Wit assumes that we would not think of using a Rembrandt for anything other than visual contemplation.
Indeed, most of us would never dream of using a Rembrandt to pass a hole in the roof.
We think it appropriate that Rembrandts stay behind velvet ropes untouched.
For most people, Rembrandts fulfill goals that require hysterical preservation.
And most of nature is not so uniquely suited to the fulfillment of one purpose as is a Rembrandt.
Parts of nature have value to the individual according to how well each meets that individual's specific goals.
Unlike a Rembrandt where its highest value of use is, in most cases, its visual appearance, a tree is more versatile.
In both cases, value is inseparable from the achievement of individual goals.
DeWitt and others overlook the possibility that an object might be useful in achieving multiple mutually exclusive goals.
Yet it's clear that the same natural resource, an acre of land, for example, might be used to feed the hungry,
house the homeless, heal the sick, clothe the naked, or teach the ignorant,
as well as for simply viewing and appreciating the wonder of it all.
All of these goals have a place in a Christian's life.
The difficulty lies in deciding which goal to achieve with each piece of the created order.
Some evangelical environmentalists have attempted to pattern this line of reasoning
by claiming that it is too anthropocentric.
They argue that the value of some part of nature, say a tree,
It originates not in how well the tree meets human goals, but in the value that the Creator places upon the tree.
As Stephen Zollman Prasor wrote,
God's creatures are valuable not because of their usefulness to humans, though some are useful, indeed essential to us.
Rocks and trees, birds and animals, are valuable simply because God made them.
Their value resides in their being creations of a value in God, not in their being a means to some human being.
First of all, from a Christian perspective, God's valuations are fundamentally different from man's valuations.
Economists speak of value as being related to how much one is willing to sacrifice of one thing in order to have one more unit of another thing.
But for God, no such trade-off is necessary. He never needs to choose between a red-cockaded woodpecker and a tree.
3. He can have both merely by thinking them into existence.
Distinctions in moral values are valid for God and us.
Truth is to be valued over falsehood, faithfulness over infidelity, true worship over idolatry and so on.
But to speak of God having to make economic trade-offs as we do is inconsistent with Christianity.
Second, more to the point of this lecture, attempting to have economic valuations without humans
for Humans leaves us no way to discover these valuations.
Bill McCredder wants to separate value from human goals.
He says God's creatures are valuable not because of their usefulness to humans.
Well, as much as you may dislike it, you really have no alternative.
Because we humans are finite, we must value in an economic sense.
None of these advocates of Christ-free stewardship have been able to locate divine revelation
that informs us of the proper trade-off between replicated woodpeckers and trees.
In fact, the dynamic economy would seem to indicate that continuing divine revelation is necessary.
I know of no evangelical environmentalists who claim access to this kind of information.
Certainly, our individual economic valuations flow from our moral values.
And we Christians regard ourselves as having some divine revelation on what actions are moral evils and which actions are good.
So, for example, Christians regard rape as having a negative economic evaluation because it is a moral evil.
Thus, Christians would pay to have rape eliminated.
Christians have a moral obligation to appreciate God's creation, so trees and wildlife have a positive evaluation.
The problem arises when we must choose between the trees and housing of the homeless, since we humans cannot create ex nihilo, scarcity of wilderness, and scarcity of housing are real problems for us.
Without further information to help us decide which need is more pressing, we are left in chaos.
Good intentions alone are insufficient to make choices among multiple moral goals.
As economist P.J. Hill wrote, good intentions cannot ensure that people manage resources appropriately or prevent environmental degradation.
Given that much of what we see in the world is the unintended consequence of human interaction, simply reforming our intentions isn't inadequate policy prescription.
Most of the evangelical statements on the environment reveal an inability to solve the basic problem of deciding between alternative beneficial uses of the creative world.
One example is an environmental statement from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
This document states that caring, serving, keeping, loving and living by wisdom sum up what is meant by acting as God's stewards of the earth.
There is no way to tell from this how to balance the goal of environmental preservation with the goal of satisfying some other human need, though the authors apparently believe that the current trade-offs are inappropriate.
The authors have concluded in advance that the market is not the answer to their lack of information.
We have left with vague platitudes about stewardship with no explanation of how that stewardship is to be accomplished.
Paul Hain explains that we will almost certainly fail to achieve our objectives if we simply have people to become better stewards.
No one knows what stewardship of creation implies for his or her own actions.
Exhortations to change our lifestyles just do not give us sufficient information.
Advocates of marketless stewardship seem unaware of the severity of the problems the socialist planet faces.
Yet these problems were pointed out over 80 years ago by Ludwig von Mises.
In his book Socialism, Mises argued that because economic valuation was ultimately subjective,
the protection of private property and voluntary exchange is indispensable if an economy is to be rational.
In a complex world, we are constrained to use prices to assist in determining the particular uses of resources
that will best reduce the problems of scarcity. If we refuse, we are left with chaos.
This is a core problem with evangelical environmentalism today.
It has no rational method for economic calculation. Instead, we have appeals to inner wisdom.
The Lord Wilkinson wrote that we should not govern our use of creation with price information.
We should, he says, make wise and frugal use of it.
This sounds high-minded, but it's completely meaningless when it comes to making actual decisions.
How do we know what uses of resources are wise? How do we know what level of use is frugal?
Even the best of intentions cannot overcome the absence of price information that tells us how frugal to be with various resources.
Furthermore, as Mises argued, the presence of profits and losses is also a necessary ingredient for the efficient production and distribution of goods.
Christian stewardship does not benefit from doing away with the market system.
Prices, wages, and profits provide a way to count the cost of an endeavor,
which Jesus Christ said was a necessary part of wise decision-making.
Paul Payne provided a wonderful example of how acting of good intentions
without price information can actually lead to poor stewardship.
He said, Suppose that every inhabitant of Los Angeles was miraculously converted overnight
of the World, the University of St. Francis of Assisi.
We would no doubt see major changes
into the behavior of Los Angelinos,
but I would not be at all confident
that we would see a decline in air pollution
caused by the automobile.
Each newly-sacrified Los Angelino,
eager now to bring benefits and blessings
to all other beings,
would still need this car to do so effectively,
given the physical layout of the city
and its environs,
just as any current Los Angelino
desires to do any good,
This is a valuable asset for getting food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, for visiting those sick or in prison, and for earning income with which to do any of these things more effectively.
Citizens of Los Angeles who make the good stewards' choice and leave their cars at home end up getting less done, breathing more exhaust fumes, and dying earlier than those who refuse to behave like a steward.
That looks like very bad stewardship.
One way to see the anti-market tendencies in modern evangelical environmentalism is to look at the official statements of some of the largest Protestant denominations in certain Roman Catholic organizations.
As I've said, this antagonism toward market freedoms is not universal. There are many Christians who hold pro-market views.
But let's take a look at some of the documents on the environment that have appeared in the last 10 or 12 years.
Some of these official statements are lowest common denominator, platitudinous recommendations, like the document produced by the Wesleyan denomination.
Now, I'm good to all of you. You're all members of some denomination. I'll get to you eventually.
Seek informational environmental issues. Avoid polluting as much as possible.
Examine the pattern of our consumption and avoid unnecessary expense, unless presumed that when the authors say avoid polluting as much as possible, or to avoid unnecessary expense, they expect individual decision makers to take price information into account when deciding whether it's possible or unnecessary.
To the denominations credit, all of these recommendations except one can be achieved without resorting to state intervention.
The exception is a call to support political efforts, to make recycling available where it is not.
And I was tempted at this point to go in and follow in the tradition that David Gordon had laid out in Mises' review,
concentrating on that failing and elaborating on that, how he would phrase it.
Other denominations make more comprehensive attacks on the market.
Hope for a Global Future, a document produced by Presbyterian Church, USA, condemns market-based resource management as unjust, but does not provide an alternative to the market's role in calculation.
Somehow, however, the authors have managed to calculate that our current rate of consumption is too rapid.
In a section on resource exhaustion, the PCUSA statement asserts that we are, as it says,
living beyond our planetary means, maximizing current benefits, particularly for the affluent, at the expense of future generations.
And while the document admits that better technology and substitutes can forestall resource exhaustion, it states,
there really is no substitute for the conservation of non-renewable resources.
Predictably, the question of how much conservation is necessary is left unanswered.
Also predictably, prices are viewed as inadequate as a rationing mechanism.
As document says, current market prices made higher by temporary shortages
tell us only about near-term demand and supply conditions.
They rarely anticipate the longer-term effects of resource depletion.
By waiting to recognize environmental scarcity,
It will probably be too late to conserve non-renewable resources for the sake of future generations.
So we might ask, how do we know how to strike a balance between conservation of resources for the future and consumption today?
Our Presbyterian churchmen are left groping in the dark for answers while implying publicly that they know the correct balance.
Ironically, when the Presbyterian statement provides examples of resource scarcity problems,
they are traceable to an absence of a pricing mechanism.
We mentioned the scarcity of potable water in certain parts of the world,
the reduced yields of open ocean fisheries, where drinking water is scarce,
is typically because it is a common access resource, not privately owned and rationed by the price system.
Likewise, open ocean fisheries are producing smaller catches because property rights and fishing banks are largely unprotected.
An abysmal resolution on energy policy supports extensive government intervention to achieve conservation and reduce pollution.
The resolution urges government to raise federal fuel economy standards,
subsidize the production and purchase of clean vehicles,
use taxes to fund renewable energy research and development,
include carbon dioxide as a pollutant, which I guess would make us all the important law of the EPA,
and Ban Drilling in the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge and subsidized energy consumption by low-income households and a variety of other suggestions.
Price information is regarded by the Episcopal Executive Council as irrelevant or inconsistent with an appropriate allocation of resources.
Each of their policy recommendations is in accord with the socialist ideal of central planning
planning rather than the market system of decentralized individual planning.
Governing fuel economy standards, just to take one example, will misallocate resources
and make drivers worse off.
Drivers have decided that the fuel economy is only one of many desirable automobile characteristics.
We want cash mileage, but we also want safety, comfort and performance.
In a free economy, each person has the freedom to decide what combination of those features they want in the vehicle,
and will have better information about their own preferences than any government regulatory agency could possibly possess.
The cheapness of gasoline in the United States today, even considering gasoline taxes,
tells the vehicle buyer how scarce gasoline is relative to other goods,
Without knowing the volume of oil reserves, the rate of new oil discoveries, the uses
the drivers in New Zealand might have for that oil, the advances in technologies of
extracting or refining oil, or anything else about the process, the buyer has enough information
to make an appropriate energy conservation decision.
If the oil reserves decline or supplies from the Persian Gulf are threatened, the price
of gasoline will immediately rise and people will begin conserving gasoline.
In short, any event that would lead a well-informed, well-intentioned environmentalist to promote gasoline conservation should, through the market process, result in just that.
In fact, it will be conservation of the best sort. Those who can cut back on consumption at the lowest cost of themselves will do so first, and not those who are committed with mean, great hardship.
So can we answer the Evangelical Environmental Network's question, what would Jesus drive?
Knowing everything that the Christ system communicates about relative scarcity, would
Jesus drive a gas-sitting economy box?
Of course, we cannot presume to know such things, but I find it more plausible that
he would have a balanced regard for other human concerns like safety and comfort and
I do recall that Christ once rode a donkey, which generates many more pounds of pollutants per mile.
By the way, Tommy Lorenzo believes that Jesus would drive a large four-wheel drive Ford pickup truck full of boxes in the back.
It was a carpenter after all.
I do recall that Christ once rode a donkey which generates many more pounds of pollutants per mile
After reading these denominational statements myself for several days, they began to merge in my mind. They contained the same exhortations to a vaguely defined stewardship and the inevitable condemnation of the market.
It's no wonder that Mises could say that Christian Socialism has taken root in the last few decades among countless followers of all Christian churches.
Again, I would remind you that this is not exactly all Christian churches.
The denominations I'm mentioning here are not all inclusive.
True to form, the Lutheran statement on the environment, which I mentioned previously,
deals with a comprehensive set of environmental issues and exhorts readers to a vaguely defying stewardship.
It is clear that the Lutherans who drafted this document had no use for free market pricing.
I mention the Lutheran statement because one paragraph under the heading of justice and sustainability
Sustainability Demonstrates an important and common flaw in evangelical environmentalism.
It reads, we recognize the obstacles to sustainability.
Neither economic growth that ignores environmental cost nor conservation of nature that ignores human cost is sustainable.
Both will result in injustice and eventually environmental degradation.
We know that a healthy economy can exist only within a healthy environment, but it is difficult to promote both in our decisions.
Well, setting environmental costs against human costs is problematic.
How can a choice be made unless there is some common unit of measurement by which to calculate these two costs?
Because value is subjective, so is cost, and therefore information about human costs is not directly observable.
The only information we do have about human cost is revealed through voluntary exchange.
In a voluntary exchange, each person reveals that the thing he acquires is ranked higher on his personal value scale than the thing he gives up.
Without explicit divine revelations, there is no other way of carrying values.
Environmental cost here must refer to some alteration or consumption of some environmental resource.
Ultimately, it is impossible to separate this environmental cost from human cost.
Environmental degradation refers to the loss of one or more of the properties of the environment that were useful to some individuals.
That usefulness may not involve an alteration of an actual state.
True, some may value the environment for mineral deposits or farmland.
Others, however, value it for a scenic view or for the wildlife habitat it provides.
Therefore, one person's degradation may not be another person's degradation.
A farmer viewing the encroachment of indigenous plant life onto his cultivated field may regard this return to a natural state as damaging,
while another person may find cause to celebrate the erasing of man-made stars on the earth.
of the Earth. Environmental degradation, or cost, is not objective, but is subjectively perceived by those individuals who might use the environment in some way.
The concept of environmental cost is nonsensical without reference to the impact on the decision-making individual. That person has individual goals.
The event some call degradation either furthers or hinders the accomplishment of its ends.
The inanimate environment does not seek ends and therefore cannot be said to incur costs.
Can there be such a thing as environmental cost that is not reducible to human cost?
The environmental cost is really a subset of human cost. We are back to the problem of comparing human valuations.
The only feasible solution is a price system, which implies private property rights and the freedom to voluntarily exchange that property.
You have property rights in the environment, much less pricing of the environment is anathema to our environmentalist church.
The statement of the American Baptist churches begins with an uncritical review of the science of global warming, ozone depletion and resource exhaustion.
The document as a whole identifies any damage to the environment as sinful in regards to use of resources for private gain as necessarily inconsistent with the common good.
It reads, We can choose to disobey to the irresponsible, disrupt and disturb the peaceable relationship of creature and creation.
We can choose to use nature's resources only for what we perceive as our own immediate interest.
Such action is sin. It is a violation of the basic covenant wherein we are called to stewardship.
We could quibble with the idea that all creation would be at peace except for the existence of this public-selfish interlocutor called man.
When we are focusing here on the problems that confronted evangelical environmentalists,
when they tried to get by without market pricing, the core problem is a familiar one by now.
If using nature's resources for our own immediate interest is simple, how are we to assess the needs of others?
The writers try to bypass this problem early in the document by using the analogy of a household.
One of the words translated as steward in the Bible is oikonomos, meaning the manager of a household.
One suspects that the authors find this analogy attractive because those abominable market prices
are not normally part of a household's internal resource allocation process.
Paul Hanging explains why this concept of household stewardship cannot carry through to the larger economy.
He says, the problem is that we live in a complex, decentralized, highly specialized society that no one controls or can control.
What we call our economy is not an all analysis to a household or anything else that could possibly be managed.
In modern industrial society, characterized as it is by extensive and minute division of labor, is a social system far too complex to be managed by any oikonomos, not endowed with godlike powers.
In a household with usually two to six individuals, it is relatively simple to estimate the needs of that small number of people without assistance of prices.
Penalties, explicit or implicit, for failure to work for the good of the whole household, are readily available.
Once we move beyond a handful of individuals in close association with one another,
prices become indispensable as a way to communicate the intensity of need.
The Baptist statement criticized using resources for our immediate interest.
Using the Earth's resources today does not apply a lower standard of living for future generations.
Burning cheaper fossil fuels today, instead of using cleaner and more expensive sources of energy,
will allow greater expenditure on research, education, and permanent or semi-permanent capital.
For example, housing or infrastructure that would be used for decades.
Would it be better to deplete to future generations the outcomes of that research and education,
The need for future generations are taken into account. If a commodity is expected to have a sufficiently higher price in 20 years, suppliers have an incentive to maintain that price.
and change some quantity of that commodity to sell at that time.
Even if the individual supplier is not expected to be alive to collect those future revenues,
the supplier does at least have the incentive to make the firm attractive for a buyer who will be around to collect.
The immediate interest firms have in profits, both current profits and expected future profits,
tends to produce a result that is beneficial to both living and future generations.
In contrast, political systems allow only the living generation to have political power.
Politicians, after all, are not elected on the expectation of future votes.
It would seem that political solutions would be more likely to neglect the interests of future generations than with a market system.
Yet this is exactly the proposed solution.
The Baptists say,
As Christians and faithful stewards, we bear the responsibility to affirm and support programs, legislation, research and organizations that protect and restore the vulnerable and the oppressed, the earth as well as the poor.
The authors of the Baptist statement, like many others, read into certain biblical texts a message consistent with their own status and environmentalism.
The example is their statement on the Old Testament law of Jubilee.
This was a law that set a particular year for the freeing of slaves,
indentured servants, and returned land to the tribe that originally owned it.
According to these writers, however, the Jubilee year was a year of land reform.
It is a recognition that all land basically and ultimately belongs to God,
and that no person or group has the right to destroy it
or to use it unendingly for unjust personal or institutional gain.
Suppose you didn't use it endingly for unjust personal or institutional gain.
The message of the Jubilee year had nothing to do with the destruction of land or the use of it for personal or institutional gain.
is not a land reform in the modern sense in which the state seizes land from its rightful owners and transfers it to those of its choosing.
It was a restriction on the market alienability of the land, not on the use of the land.
This is a twisting of biblical interpretation to grant power to the state.
As the biblical scholar and economist here in North has argued, the time and place for applying that law is along the past.
No judicial appeal to any of those laws is valid today, through rights.
Those who appeal to them risk placing us in bondage to a Bible of permanent chattel slavery
or the imposition of permanent slavery to the messianic welfare state.
For many evangelical environmentalists, however, their interpretation of the Bible is apparently based on their personal brand of statism.
Protestants are not the only ones having problems with the concept of stewardship.
One key Roman Catholic statement acknowledges that allocating resources for their most appropriate uses is not easy, but it goes even further in suggesting ways to solve the problem.
Stewardship implies, they say, that we must both care for creation according to standards that are not of our own making, and at the same time be resourceful in finding ways to make the earth flourish.
It says, even as we rejoice in Earth's goodness and the beauty of nature, stewardship places the responsibility for the well-being of all of God's creatures.
In the ecological crisis, a common responsibility, quote John Paul II, promotes world government as a way to exercise stewardship over the environment.
He says, the concepts of an ordered universe and a common heritage both point to the necessity of a more internationally coordinated approach to the management of the Earth's goods.
Later, in Centesimus Annus, the same Pope contends, it is the task of the state to provide for the defense and preservation of common goods, such as the natural and human environments, which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces.
What is it about the nature of goods that precludes their market alienability, or what is the logic of the distinction between goods that promote goods that satisfy collective needs and goods that satisfy individual needs?
Certainly, Christian thought regards certain goods or services as properly marked inalienable, such as children or murder.
This distinction is never made clear in St. Thessalonians.
But an appeal to the nature of the good or service, as is done, is not likely to produce consistent understanding among Christians.
While we consider rivers, oceans, scenic wilderness and even air quality as marketable goods,
In the writings of modern evangelical environmentalists runs a disturbing theme. The idea that it is possible for a small group of individuals to improve upon our use of the environment through coercion.
In the name of stewardship they lay claim to control of every aspect of our lives.
Private property, a protected institution throughout the Bible, is regarded as dispensable.
Of course, evangelical environmentalists deny that destroying private property is part of their plan.
Mises wrote about these types decades ago to avoid drawing the logical conclusions of their premises.
He said, they give one to understand that they are combating only the excrescences and abuses of the capitalist order.
were a protest that they have not the slightest desire to abolish private property and they continue to constantly emphasize their opposition to Marxist socialism.
They constantly proclaim that they do not wish to attack private property, but what they would retain is only the name of private property.
If the control of private property is transferred to the state, the property owner is only an official, a deputy of the economic administration.
Almost completely neglected by the Evangelical Environmentalist is the recognition of the dangers to human life and freedom of handing over such powers to the state.
The Bible contains multiple examples of the misuse of state power.
To trust the state, to put our interests first, and to sacrifice our liberties for the empowerment of bureaucracies is to deify and idolize the state.
Evangelical environmentalists are seeking salvation in the very institution that has been responsible for slaughtering catalyst members of Christians.
Turning over regulatory power to the state is a fatal mistake.
Another evangelical environmentalist of a very different sort, named Calvin Weisner, has contended that environmentalist central planning contradicts another Christian moral standard, that is to avoid pride.
To claim that a bureaucrat or a committee of bureaucrats can have sufficient knowledge to plan an economy is to lay claim to one of the attributes of God, omniscience.
Bison wrote,
Humility applied to environmental stewardship should lead us, in the light of the vast complexity of human society and the Earth's ecosystems,
to hesitate considerably at the notion that we know enough about them to manage them, as opposed to enforcing the rules of justice.
particularly that we are confident enough of our knowledge to assert our management preferences in place of the free choices of those who disagree with us.
Mises' observations on the impossibility of socialist calculation should leave the environmentalists for humility.
Market prices represent, in summary form, billions of inexpressible assessments of the value of the different parts of creation
In a complex world, caring for creation is impossible without them. Thank you.