Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics.
Gerard Casey is a professor of philosophy in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin,
adjunct professor of the Maryville Institute, Birmingham, UK, and an adjunct scholar here at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He received his B.A. from University College Cork, then went on to receive an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.
He also has a Bachelor of Law, a Bachelor of Laws, from the University of London and a Master of Laws from University College Dublin.
Some of his more recent and notable publications are as follows.
He has a book due out in May 2010 on Murray Rothbard, which is the volume 15 of major conservative and libertarian thinkers out from Continuum Press.
He has also published in 2010 Legal Polycentrum in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Economic Liberalism and Social Justice, Economic Affairs with Jay Meadowcroft, and Constitutions of No Authority, Spunarian Reflections.
His ASC presentation from 2009, which is the master, the indefensibility of political representation, has come out in philosophical inquiry.
So without further ado, help me welcome Professor Gerard Casey.
I'd like to begin by thanking the Mises Institute for the invitation to deliver this new church
lecture in religion and economics. It's really very gratifying to be asked to speak to such
a congenial group of like-minded people. As my academic mentor, the late Rath McInerney,
recently deceased, said once about the fellowship of Catholic scholars, it's nice to be part
of a group where you don't always have to begin from scratch. So I feel like that about
of the AAC. And though there is no party line to which everyone has to adhere here, indeed
the differences of opinion at this conference are both instructive and entertaining. The
palpable and sort of red-blooded commitment of all the speakers in attendance to Liberty
is refreshing and exhilarating. After three days of this conference, I attain a kind of
natural non-chemical high. So much so that one of these days I'm going to attract the
and the unwelcome attentions of the authorities as I go through.
Now the bad news. The bad news is that there are no pictures.
Okay, so sorry about that. The title is wrong.
So the title was for another paper which I haven't written and this paper doesn't have a title.
So we have a slight mismatch and so on. And there are remarkably
few jokes. The reason for that is you can blame David Gordon. So on two
trips to the Atlanta airport from here, I was
Now, unlike the previous talks I've given at this conference, there's no knock-down drag-out argument here. This talk is meant to be tentative and exploratory, and I'm going to leave as much time as I can at the end for questions and for discussions.
In fact, I feel a little bit confessional. It's almost like I'm sort of at an AA meeting.
You know, my name is Gerard Casey, and I'm an Austrian.
You know, in Irish politics, and sorry, in Irish polite circles, there's a rule which
is that you're not allowed to talk about religion, politics and sex, which means that there's
sort of, there's some awful long girls at dinner parties. What's there to talk about?
But anyway, so I'm going to range over a number of topics, did I say something about not telling
any jokes? I'd better stick with it. I'm going to range over a number of loosely related
connected topics and open up some themes for discussion. Now, the first thing I'd like
to point out with all due modesty is that I'm superbly qualified to talk about the issue
of religion and economics. My wife always says to me, by the way, don't use irony, nobody
ever understands it, so that was ironic. First of all, the reason is, as an ex-atheist who's
If as a Catholic you ever hear yourself described as devout, you know you're in serious trouble.
The second one is that I have no formal training in economics while little I know being gleaned
from my conversion, and I use the term conversion advisedly, to Austrianism some five or six
years ago.
Conversion occurs when material that was once organized by one paradigm is suddenly and
to some extent inexplicably reorganized by another.
All the same data is there, all the same facts.
What's different is the significance of those facts.
There's a discontinuity, often times radical, between the two paradigms, the old one and
the new.
Nevertheless, the new paradigm is to use the computer term backwards compatible.
Now I was converted to Catholicism when I was about 30. I won't bore you with the shocking
details, you'll have to wait till my autograph becomes out in paperback. That was ironic
as well. But in brief, the conversion was the result of a process in which the previously
dominant paradigm, a sort of very non-militant, laid-back, almost comatose, almost Californian
secularism had been undermined by a combination of personal circumstances, knowledge, changed
behavior and personal influence which conspire to produce a particular outcome in which one
and only one pattern made sense of all the data. A bit like C.S. Lewis, I found myself
very surprised and not at all pleased to be Catholic, but there we are. It really sort
of crabs your lifestyle, so I can say, but anyway. So many years later, I underwent a
similar experience in respect of economics. For most of my life, I regarded economics
Mises is a sort of mildly esoteric, if largely harmless, activity. I was broad-minded. I
wasn't that way inclined myself, but so long as I didn't frighten the horses, I was prepared
to tolerate these arcane activities and others.
A friend of mine went to Germany on a sabbatical. Now, he knew I was interested in money, not
just the perennial fact that I never seemed to have enough of it, but in the very notion
itself. And he brought me back, little did he know what he was starting. He brought me
Now, if you had to advise somebody where they were going to start, this is not the place.
I don't have to tell you that this book is not exactly an airport novel, readable in one
sort of large gulp. Most people presented with this work as their introduction to economics
would have had a sort of minor heart attack. The effect on me, however, was mildly electric.
Here for the first time was an explanation of the phenomenon of money which not only
made sense to me, not that it explained why I didn't have enough of it myself, but which
made sense to me, but which had a ring of necessity to it, not merely plausible but
convincing. I quickly acquired most of Mises' other works and started to read Human Action.
Now if the effect of Theory of Money and Credit was mildly electric, the effect of reading
I got so excited reading this book, particularly the methodological section, the one that sends
most people to sleep, up to page 142. I even remember the page that I sometimes had to
put the book down and walk around the room to cool off. Now most books that produce that
effect in people have a different content. I don't read those books, not since the age
Now, while at a distance of some years the first fine, kind of careless rapture has diminished
somewhat, I still get a frisson of excitement every time I read this material. Seriously.
If I want to sort of brighten up a dull February afternoon, I just pick up that book and read
that stuff. Five or ten pages the book goes down, I have to walk around the room. It's
great. Now here was an account of human action, which at once gelled with what I knew from
from the philosophical tradition to be broadly correct, and that was one of the most exciting
parts of it for me, in other words, the way in which it dovetailed with what I had learned
from Maris Uttle and from Aquinas. It was really exciting. But an account which went
beyond the tradition to open up to theoretical consideration a realm of knowledge which I
had simply assumed to be at best open to historical treatment. Here was another paradigm which
provided a framework into which whole suites of material could be fitted and which provided
a basis for opening up new questions and new lines of enquiry.
I have to tell you, I mean, I'm sure it's the experience of most people involved in academia here
that you reach a stage in your teaching where you thought, didn't I say that last year?
Five years ago? Ten years? God, my brain has stopped working.
One of the reasons I did some low degree some years ago was just to make sure that my brain was, in fact, still functioning.
I'm still not sure whether taking a low degree was the right way to find that out.
Without ever explicitly realising the fact, we tend to assume that religion by its very
nature has something to do with God, and moreover with a God who has a certain relationship
with the universe. And while the religions that we in the West know best, Judaism, Christianity
in Islam, all follow this pattern, not every system of belief that is commonly recognized
as a religion in fact does. Confucianism, for example, has at best a shadowy conception
of a transcendent realm, which he calls Tien, as in Tiananmen Square. And by the way, Confucius
advises us, I like Confucius, he says have as little as possible to do with this realm,
don't mess with it. And Buddhism seems to have no conception of anything at all resembling
and Theistic God.
Hinduism of course has many gods, perhaps too many, several million in fact, which seems
to me to be overdoing it slightly, but only in certain versions does it resemble the theism
with which we are familiar.
Religion then is not necessarily concerned with God, or with an afterlife, but with the
ultimate source and ground of meaning.
Robert Nelson in his book called The New Holy Wars, Economic Religion versus Environmental
religion, from which I am plagiarising shamelessly in parts. I won't tell you which because
you think the good bits are mine. It says the following, a religion does not necessarily
have to involve the existence of a transcendent God outside this world. Most people have a
set of fundamental beliefs that both explains the place of human beings in the world and
guides their lives and the intellectual articulation of these beliefs in a formal way becomes a
theology. And he refers to a definition of religion given by Max Stackhouse as, quote,
A comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be, in itself, basically true and just, even if all dimensions of it cannot be either finally confirmed or refuted.
So then, religions don't necessarily involve the conception of God, but they provide overarching schemas of meaningfulness and significance within which one can locate one's own particular and limited experiences.
provide, in effect, a system of ultimate values, of ultimate explanatory concepts which enable one to make sense of one's experience and one's environment.
And so some things that don't look like religions on the face of it turn out to be religions.
Alright, now I want to bear that in mind because that definition of religion, and it's not unarguable, is going to be important for what I have to say.
Let me just shift gears slightly before I come back to my main point.
There are many perfectly respectable modes of human enquiry – history, economics,
psychology, physics, chemistry, biology – and all such enquiries have both a formal
and a material object. That is, they study some range of phenomena under a particular description.
While the human sciences, the Geistes Wissenschaften, all take man as their material object of study,
they differ from one another in their formal approaches. History studies human actions
under its own specific formality, psychology likewise and so on with the other disciplines.
And while there may be border disputes between various disciplines, say, for example, it's
between physical chemistry and chemistry, generally it doesn't lead to sort of fights,
but there can be border disputes, for the most part, each discipline is reasonably clearly
circumscribed and so they can coexist peacefully. Here as elsewhere, good neighbours, sorry,
good fences make good neighbours. I don't know if good neighbours make good fences,
but certainly who operates the other way around. Each mode of enquiring is intrinsically circumscribed
both by its material and by its formal object.
If a chemist, for example, starts measuring the reaction times
not of chemical substances but of the experimenters in his lab,
then he's no longer doing chemistry.
He's doing psychology.
It's important to realize this.
Now, disciplines tend to have imperialistic tendencies
that sometimes find expression as sort of lust for expansion,
a kind of desire for Lebensraum.
So it's been said that to a man with a hammer,
everything looks like a nail.
and as a father of three engineers, I tend to believe that engineers tend to perceive
the world as a set of problems requiring technical solutions, and likewise for other practices.
You know the way when you buy a car, the roads are full of that model, suddenly there are
millions of them out there, you see them everywhere.
Similarly, when you have your own particular discipline, everything seems to be, you know,
beware of going to a doctor who specializes in a particular disease, you may have that
When a particular discipline aspires to universal domination, it ceases to be that discipline,
it has given up any claim to empirical grounding and it has become in fact an ersatz religion
in the sense in which I have sketched above. Thus history can become historicism. Evolution
can evolve in the hands of the dreaded Dees, Dawkins and Adenor for example, into evolutionism
By the way, you should see Jerry Fodor's latest book on this. Well, Darwin got wrong. If you haven't read it, read it. It's good read.
Psychology turns into psychologism and science into scientism.
Similarly, economics can become economism and the study of our environment can become, and here I coin a term of art.
I would normally use environmentalism, but I want to coin a term of art for the, if you like, universal expansion of the legitimate study of environment.
of Environment, I'm going to call it environmentism, just for the sake of this paper.
Now we might regard these developments as forms of intellectual cancer, in which a proper
part of the whole aspires to become the whole and so abandons its natural limitation. That's
what happens to real cancer. Some cells get above themselves and want to take over the
whole body. It's really bad for you. Now if there is one thing I do believe, it is that
all truths are co-possible. Despite this, it is still possible for one to experience
and certain elements of cognitive dissonance in one's epistemic commitments, and this is a spur to further enquiry.
So many of the topics that are dealt with in discussions of religion and economics have to do with areas of possible overlap,
in which it appears that one's religion dictates X when one's economics dictates not X.
If you subscribe, as I do, to an authoritative, if you don't believe in an authoritarian, authoritative religion, this can be a particular problem.
OK, if your commitments are to religion that historically tends to be marked by resistance and revolution, then you probably have more scope.
So I'm not saying these areas are only problems for Catholics, but Catholics seem to experience them in a particular way.
Sometimes the overlap can be represented, then, if you like, as an overlap between religion on top and then economics underneath,
or sometimes as a sort of tripartite between religion, ethics, sort of more or less on the same level and then economics underneath.
sort of vertical relationship.
Now, much good and definitive work has been done along these lines, not least by Dr. Thomas Woods
in his superlative book, The Church and the Market.
Again, if you haven't read it, do.
If better still, buy it and read it.
The book is downstairs.
I thought we could also do that.
I get a kickback from tomorrow, right?
I don't, actually.
The history of the 20th century is in part a history of the rise and fall of a variety of secular,
are what I'm going to call intramundane religions, Marxism, fascism, national socialism, Freudianism, secular humanism, evolutionism, and the latest fashionable intramundane religion called our environmentism.
I'm going to look at this in a bit more detail.
So I'm going to look at one of them, Economism and Environmentism, where Economism is the standard neo-orthodox school understood as the ideological wing of the progressive political movement.
and environmentalism is the elevation of environmental issues to the status of unchallengeable religious dogma.
It's important to note in this context that the relationship between religion and
economism and religion and environmentalism and religion here now used in the sort of
standard way in which we use it is not the vertical relationship I've talked about earlier
but a horizontal relationship between competing religious frameworks.
So it's not one over the other but they're all now starting out here on the same level
Despite the emergence and burgeoning of the inter-mundane religions, it's interesting
to realize that even in a rapidly expanding post-Christian world, our thoughts and experiences
are still shaped by our Christian past, so much so that we are hugely influenced by it
even though largely unaware of this continuing shaping.
Islamic and environmental religions are secularisations of the core messages of Christianity.
The power of potential civic religions such as feminism or left puritanism, nowadays the
dominant civic religion is, as I said, the not-so-jolly green giant, is that they claim
to be tolerant while being every bit as totalitarian and oppressive as any of more traditional
religions has ever been, assuming that to be correct, for the sake of the argument.
Rothbard, interestingly true, believed that society must, of necessity, have some overarching
set of constituted beliefs. If it is not one set, it will be another. He said, some religion
is going to be dominant in every society. If Christianity, for example, is scorned and
tossed out, some horrendous form of religion is going to take its place, whether it be
communism, New Age occultism, feminism or left Puritanism.
I have to tell a joke. A man is walking down the street at about five late at night and
he feels a gun press on the back of his head and the voice goes, Catholic or Protestant?
And he thinks rapidly and he goes, atheist? And there's a moment of baffled silence and
then the voice goes, Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?
To illustrate my point, I've constructed a table here, which is incomplete by the way and you can take it as an exercise to fill in some of the blanks, which lists some of the central concepts of a theistic religion, this time Christianity, but it could have taken other ones but it's the one I know best, and then locates, in part at least, the equivalent concepts in Economism and Environmentism.
So, let's take the central notion of God in Christianity.
For me, the corresponding notion in environmentalism is, well, nature, or the planet, described
in Earth First, for example, as, Earth is the goddess and the proper object of human
worship.
What would it be for economism?
The answer is, well, the government.
Sin
Well, for environmentalism it's consumption or pollution, for economists it's scarcity.
Punishment, environmental disaster, global warming, inflation, recession.
Salvation, sustainability, economic progress.
Original sin, now there's an interesting one.
Agriculture, the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago. That was a bad move.
That leads to alienation from nature and then even worse things like the Industrial Revolution.
On this side, poverty. Eden, the Garden of Eden, harmony with nature, disturbed by agriculture, not the servant.
Heaven, restored nature, unspoiled nature, abolition of scarcity, churches and cathedrals,
wilderness, untouched areas, banks.
The Bible, I don't know what to put over here, right?
Samuelson's Phenolics, already getting honourable mention earlier today.
The priesthood or the pope?
Well, I don't know who to put in for the priesthood over here on the environmentalist side,
but certainly Al Gore gets the pope.
There's a question about that.
And economists at large, constitute the priesthood.
Latin as a hieratic language?
Well, I don't know what to put over here.
and so on, indulgences, I don't know what to put over here for the economists, but carbon
offsets go over here, and so on, so you can have a lot of fun with these, so if anyone
wants to help me out with the blanks, feel free to do it.
We could even construct, I hope nobody will take this in their part, it's not meant to
be blasphemous, but we could even construct a sort of creed, but there's not only had
time to sort of sketch out the first few words, so here would be this sort of environmental
You have to do one yourself for the economist's creed and you have to fill in the blanks.
So instead of, I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, of
all that is seen and unseen, you get, I believe in the unity of nature, or Mother, the all-encompassing,
who is heaven and earth, I believe all that is clean and not unclean.
Okay?
And so on.
And you finish off.
So the exercise is for you.
Now, let me just a few more remarks on this, then, just to try and illustrate the point
here.
Again, I'm not talking about economics operating within its own particular limits, indeed,
and even environmentalism working within its own limits, but the extended and expanded form of both.
Nelson writes again in his book, and I quote,
Economic religion for much of the 20th century exalted human control over nature.
Environmental religion today offers a precisely opposite view.
And he says the progressive gospel was, quote,
there must be a central coordinating intelligence for all of American society
and it would fall to the federal government to fulfill this role.
global warming isn't a tactical problem to be solved by appropriate means, it's a sin,
and sin in religion is non-negotiable. You can't say, well, I'll pay prices, what do
you need to offset? Sins are not things you can commit. So whenever, I've often, when
talking about these things on the radio or discussing them, and you say, well, there's
There are hundreds of ways of solving this and you have to look at the cost-benefit and cost-benefit must-benefit.
Global warming is always wrong, no matter what solution you come up with or what you suggest,
it's always wrong, it's always a problem.
For some radical environmentalists, indeed, human beings are a blight on the face of the Earth,
so David Foreman thinks we're cancer, and Paul Watson the aides of the Earth.
And while these are extreme opinions, I suggest that many environmentalists, in the radical sense of which I'm talking about them,
have similar sort of views.
In fact, environmentalism is probably the last acceptable mode of racism, because it
turns out that there are too many people. And when you press people on it, they always
turn out to be too many of the wrong kinds of people. Although in polite society you would
never say what those are, but they're not us. I leave it to you to figure it out.
I noticed, by the way, that I was up at five o'clock this morning because I couldn't sleep.
Well, I slept from six last night till five and then I was awake so I worked on this paper and one of the reasons I'm more incoherent than normal is A. I'm sleep deprived and B. I've written all over this paper and I can't read it properly but I noticed that reading USA Today, they regard was, I guess, Professor Michael Mann, okay, they report, by the way, without a trace of irony that Professor Michael Mann, one of the people at the centre of the so-called climate gate scandal, is being investigated by his university
University, Penn State, to determine whether his actions, quote-unquote, undermine faith
in the science of climate change.
I couldn't believe that when I read it at five o'clock this morning, I thought there
is a God.
It fell right into my lap.
Okay, where are we?
Now I want to talk about, okay, so religion understood in the expanded sense in which
which I'm talking about it, and environmentism and
and economism in the sense in which they are religions
are all working, if you like, on the same plane
jostling each other for positions.
Now, there's a strategy here, which is the sort of
strategy of positioning yourself in the sort of
naked public square, where you portray yourself
in your own position as being perfectly clean
and everybody else, if you like, is having dirty hands.
I want to show you how this works in this area.
So there's a powerful incentive for each of the
secular religions to position themselves
as uncontroversial factual positions, when in fact
They are imbued with a whole raft of normative and metaphysical assumptions.
And Nelson agrees.
He talks about, quote, the powerful normative assumptions and the processes of theological
reasoning that underlie the thinking of economists, environmentalists, the like.
Traditional religions, on the other hand, we are told, must be quarantined, kept well
away from polite society, but our secular religions are neutral, uncontaminated by value
preferences and so everyone can be forced to practice them.
Of course, the agents of diffusion are the schools.
That's how it works.
The problems then with religious disputes is that they involve disagreement about fundamentals.
The rules of engagement, the description of the problem, the efficacy of solutions, all
these are disputed matters. Nothing can be taken for granted. It's a clash of worldviews
or to use the philosopher R. J. Collingwood's term, clash of absolute presuppositions.
And so the sort of non-religion versus religion strategy, in other words, what you've got
is religion but mine is just an ordinary factual position, is in fact a version of the no position
It is a rhetorical attempt to win the argument before the argument even starts. In fact,
on this level, it is one religion against another, so there cannot be a neutral position.
No one can claim neutrality. Many traditional heresies involve an attempt to eliminate the
distinction between the human and the divine, to make gods of men or to make gods of the
natural world as indeed did the pagan religions against which Judaism and Christianity contended.
What we see in environmentalism is a return to paganism where God or the gods are immanent
in or identified with aspects of the natural world. To see nature as God is very different
from seeing nature as evidencing or showing forth the glory of God. Celtic Christianity
Society, for example, had a genius for reading nature as evidencing the glory of God. The
earlier monks often saw the glory of God reflected in the beauty of nature, a view captured in
an early 20th century poem by Joseph Plunkett.
I see his blood upon the rose, and in the stars the glory of his eyes. His body gleams
amid eternal snows, his tears fall from the skies. I see his face in every flower, the
The Thunder and the singing of the birds are but his voice, and carven by his power, rocks are his written word.
All pathways by his feet are worn, his strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, his crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, his cross is every tree.
I know even though that poem was written in the early 20th century by Joseph Plunkett, who, by the way, was shot by firing squad as one of the revolutionaries in 1916,
It's very much indicative of, if you like, a tradition of seeing God in nature.
But for these Christians, if traces of God could, as it were, be seen in the world of nature,
they were quite clear that nature was not, repeat, not God.
This is the genius of the Judeo-Christian and, indeed, subsequently, the Islamic tradition.
Nature, whatever it is, is not God.
Now, common to both economists and environmentalists, on the other hand,
common indeed to all inter-mundane religions,
is the belief that heaven on earth is possible.
This is probably one of the greatest of all heresies, right?
The kingdom of God, if you're a Christian,
is not, repeat, not of this world.
For economists, it's progress towards a world
without scarcity or approaching that world,
while for economists, it's return to Eden,
to a world either without man
or with a significantly reduced human population.
Environmentalism in the end, then,
is a kind of atavistic romanticism,
and back to nature, return to Eden, to the myth of the golden age.
Now, in this final section, I want to again change gears once more.
I hope that you'll have many questions and maybe we'll knit up some of these somewhat
diverse themes.
I want to talk about the current crisis from the perspective of economics and religion.
The current global financial crisis that began in 2008 has been widely touted as evidence
of the failure of what the popular press and electronic media like to call unrestrained
and Capitalism. Writing in Barents in March 2009, Randall Forsyde noted wryly, quote,
Will capitalism survive? was the question before the lunch table on Wednesday. It hasn't
been tried, I replied, at least not since the McKinley administration and certainly
not since 1914, when the Federal Reserve started operations in earnest.
And again, I'd like to draw your attention to The Fount of All Wisdom. It was that paper
Two top economists worry that Washington is wasting the financial crisis, squandering
a chance to prevent a repeat of Wall Street's 2008 meltdown. Notice, it's not wasting money
or resources or your future, it's wasting the crisis. I couldn't believe this again,
and I thought, there is a God and he loves me, thank you for two good quotes from the USA today.
Simon Johnson and who else, Joseph Stiglitz, chastise policy makers for believing that
quote, financial markets could police themselves and correct their own excesses.
Bring on the state.
Anyway.
So what the crisis is evidence for however, is not the failure of capitalism as such,
about which one might say as Ghani has reported have said about western civilization, that would be a good idea.
But the peculiar nature of modern banking, in particular the incestuous relationship
between the commercial investment banks, the central banks such as the Federal Reserve or
the European Central Bank and governments, a topic on which Rothbard and other Austrians
have written extensively.
The immediate solution to the problem is masterly inactivity.
Unfortunately, governments are not in the business of doing nothing and so either failing
to recognise or denying that it was their policy interventions and their state-supported
The central banks that produced the boom-buzz cycle in the first place feel compelled to
intervene again to rescue society from what they fondly imagined to be the excesses of
unrestrained capitalism.
But leaving to one side the economic inappropriateness of the responses to the financial crisis,
what we also witness is the use of the crisis for the legitimation of an ever-increasing
range of interventions in the market economy and ever more irksome restrictions on our
personal liberties.
I had a peculiar experience coming through Atlanta Airport. I had to go through security on the way out.
I knew if I raised a question they were going to strip search me so I didn't say anything.
But I couldn't figure that one out.
What am I going to smuggle out of the airport that is going to do damage to Atlanta or the USA?
I couldn't figure that one out. It's a mystery to me. I still don't know. Anyway.
The motto might be, never let a good crisis go to waste.
As we saw with Stiglitz, the criticism of the government is that it is wasting the crisis.
As in the case of military and political crises, which though invariably generated by government
action are to be cured by what else? Yet more government action, so too with economic crises.
For the critics of capitalism, the problem is market freedom, the solution is tighter
regulation and control of the market. In reality, of course, the problem is the unholy trinity
of Government Banks and All Forms of Welfare, whether global, corporate or individual.
The solution is to allow markets to operate with real freedom, not the phantom simulacrum
of freedom that they currently enjoy, to require banks to operate in non-bankrupt mode, interest
rates to be determined by the demand for and supply of money, preferably real money, and
to insist upon the immediate cessation of confiscatory state policies that are used
to fund all forms of clientelistic welfare.
The Austrian approach to economics, of which Rothbard was a leading exponent, has never
have never been more needed, nor has it ever been more relevant. Unfortunately, it's never been more likely to be ignored, or even to be attacked as part of the problem, rather than accepted at the heart of the solution.
Coming to the end.
I'd like to finish with just some reflections, these more personal perhaps than anything I've said before, on Christianity and freedom.
With the exception of strict Calvinism, and possibly some less than orthodox strands of
Catholicism such as Jansenism, Christianity by and large is committed to the belief that
God is free and so is man.
Man is free metaphysically inasmuch as his actions, though conditioned by factors such
as heredity, environment, training, education, association and so on, are nevertheless not
determined, practically inasmuch as his actions are not constrained by factors outside himself.
Now, for those of us who are Christians, we believe that man is created in the image and
likeness of God, that likeness is most obviously manifest in our possession of intellect and
will. Our capacity to grasp reality by means of our intellect is a dim reflection of God's
creative knowledge, limited intrinsically by our finite nature. Our freedom too mirrors
the divine freedom. Milton, in Paradise Lost, has God speak of man thus, I formed of them
So this really is a central Christian belief.
For those of you who are theologically sophisticated, you might recall the theological controversies
regarding the relationship of graced freedom.
There were five, maybe even more, schools of thought.
Thomism, Augustinianism, Molinism, Congruism and syncretism.
All of these various systems, however, respect the basic data
founded upon scripture and tradition that God is omnipotent
and that the human will remains free under the influence of efficacious grace,
which is not irresistible.
In fact, the disputes between the five schools got so bitter
that in the end the Pope told them all to shut up, right?
Stop arguing among yourselves, stop calling each other rude names.
As long as you hold on to those two central data,
Any theory that's consistent with it is acceptable. Now get on with the job.
Freedom, then, is a constitutive element of man, both metaphysically in the indetermination of his
will and practically in the non-limitation of his actions. I believe that God made us to know, love
and serve him in this life. I believe that God loves us with a love that is utterly disproportionate
to our merits and that he wishes us to love him back in return. Why? That's a mystery. But that
That love must be a free response to his overtures. Even in the sphere of human actions, love
to be love must be free and unconstrained. However much we way want someone to love us,
that love is to be worth anything, must be freely given and not coerced.
The burden of many fairy tales, operas, films is that pseudo-love, produced by Magic Potion
or its latter-day technological equivalent, is no love at all. The desired end, the love
of the beloved, has been attained only by the means of the very destruction of the beloved,
God who loves us in a measure that passes all understanding will not force us to love him.
In the end he respects our choice even if that choice is mysteriously to reject him.
Here then is my key point and I mean this with the absolute, I'm absolutely serious
on this.
If God, who manifestly has the right to do with his creation what he wills, will not
coerce us, what creature can presume to take it upon himself so to do?
I believe therefore that my religion is not only consistent with libertarianism, properly
understood, but that in fact, and here I'm pushing the boat out a little, it actually
entails it.
Alright, let's just start some fights.
Okay. So let me then finish. Given the commitment to liberty then that lies at the heart of
my religious beliefs and the commitment to the core truths of Austrian economics demanded
by reflective rationality, if all truths are composable then there can be no fundamental
conflict between my religion and my economics. There may be apparent conflicts but I know
a priori that those apparent conflicts are indeed apparent. As Rothbard recognised, some
Some perhaps many libertarians are libertines and libertinism is in conflict with my religious
commitments but libertinism is not a necessary consequence of libertarianism, any more than
statism is a necessary consequence of religion.
In reflecting then on the supposed quarrel between religion, sorry, the supposed quarrel
between religion and science, to take an example from the past, is exemplified in the dispute
between Galileo and the Church, it was said that religion teaches us how to go to heaven
and not how the heavens go. So religion does not teach us how the heavens go and it doesn't
teach us how chemistry goes or physics goes or economics goes, that's not its job. Mark
Twain once noted that rumours of his death had been greatly exaggerated and we can say
the same for the supposed quarrel between religion and economics, provided that that
that religion allows for the reality of human freedom.
The quarrel between them has been much exaggerated.
Thank you very much.
So, if you have any questions, exhortations, expostulations?
I'll have him read the Gospels again.
The question was, what would I say to people who say that Jesus is the first socialist
and I'd say read the Gospels.
I don't deal with it here but I've written a short paper on this and I went through and
found all of the passages where Jesus talks about these things.
I mean, there are all sorts of interesting things, like the parable of the talents.
Anybody pay attention to that?
Okay, so one guy gets five, one guy gets two, and one guy gets one.
Right?
And the guy who gets five has to go off and he turns up with another five.
I hope I got it right, so correct me if I'm wrong.
And the guy who does two does likewise.
And the guy who got one said,
Master, I was afraid that I would lose the money and I buried it.
And here it is, you get it back, just as you gave to me.
And what did he do?
Gets a pat on the back?
No, no, he gets a kick up a certain part of this anatomy until he didn't do his job.
Now, hang on a second, there's a presupposition in this parable, right, which is, you got
five talents?
You better go use them.
Don't let them sit there, find some entrepreneurial activities and go make some money, right?
How does that square with Jesus as a socialist, right?
How about the parable of the workers in the vineyard, right?
Right? Guys come along, he goes to the workers and he says, takes them on with crackadon
six o'clock in the morning and says, I'll give you one denarius, one penny and they
say, great, we'll do that and they work all day and then he picks up some more people
later on in the day and picks up some more and then he goes, picks up some guys with
just one hour to go and they all turn up and when the pay time comes, he pays the guys
who came in last first and gives them one denarius. So when the guys who were hired
But first, they come up, they think, that's great, we're going to get some more money.
And they don't.
And they complain.
And then he says, it's my money.
I can do, did I cheat you?
Did I break our agreement?
Have I not a right to do with my own as I please?
So read the Gospels.
Say to your friend, read the Gospels, yeah?
Again,
OK, the question is,
in the context of
I'm not a Muslim, I can't speak with authority on this, but from the little I know, I'm told
that just as in Christianity there are very different views and very different understandings
of what is required.
I once was at a conference in Switzerland and there was a chap there from Morocco who
who gave a paper in French, which I was struggling to figure out.
But I thought I understood most of it.
And at the end of it, I said to him, I found that very interesting,
could you say those things in Morocco?
And he said, no.
And I said, well, come and talk to me when you can.
So I don't know.
It's a short answer to that question.
I simply don't know.
There are some people who say yes.
Some people say no.
How would you separate economists from Murray Rothbard?
__________
Well, okay, in Rothbard's case, it's quite clear that if you look, for example, in Power of Market
and the chapter in there, what he's doing in there, the normative ethics doesn't come in.
When he wants to do that stuff, he wastedly gets to the ethics of liberty, and then he's quite cured about it.
Okay, so it's an atom, and so when he's talking about, even in the context of ethics when he's talking about it, he makes a clear distinction between, if you like, the requirements of justice on the one hand, and a fully developed ethical life.
It's interesting, by the way, that this is actually what you find, despite the fact that Rothbard was extremely, extremely critical of Adam Smith, this is what you find in the theory of moral sentiments.
This is Smith's idea in Theory of Moral Sentiments, justice are the things that are demanded of
you by all, simply by virtue of your being human. They are things you may not deny to
anyone in which you must require of everybody. But this is not the prescription for the ideal
of the complete moral life. You can satisfy all the requirements of justice and be a miserable
person, in other words, and no one can love you. You could effectively be a sort of Scrooge-like
character and satisfy all the requirements of justice. So you have to be careful about
Rothbard clearly acknowledges that when he's talking, he's confining himself to this very limited sphere and people persist in misunderstanding what he's doing and take him to be talking about, if you like, the entire moral life and he says, no, of course not, it doesn't make any sense, please don't misunderstand me.
Economism, I mean, so even Austrian economics could become
Economism if you took it, if you like, to be the answer to
all of life's questions, to provide all of your ultimate values, and if that's what it was doing
then you will have problems between Austrian economics thus understood
and your religious values. But as long as each of them, but again,
by the way, I mean, look, I mean, I'm a Catholic, I believe the Pope is infallible, does that mean that if he thinks
that, you know, Golden Girl is going to win the 230th New Market, then I'm going to put my
No, what do I look like, a fool?
Right?
Okay, I mean, unless the focus has been
spotting racing form for a long time
and even then I would think about it
its infallibility does not extend
to the racing results
it extends to matters of
faith and morals
not to economics
not to chemists
there is no Catholic chemistry
there is no Catholic physics
and there is no Catholic economics
I mean, this point seems to me sort of so blatantly obvious that I don't quite, when people sort of question, I don't quite understand what the argument might be.
I mean, I've had all of these things. People say to me, how can you be a Catholic and hold all of these horrible libertarian views?
And I go, well, I hold these horrible libertarian views actually because I am a Catholic, because I believed, as I said towards the end,
that according to my faith right at the heart of it right at the very heart of
it is this mysterious freedom which is given to us which extends right down to
the extent that we can actually reject the ultimate gift which is offered to us
however though you know there is no such thing as a free lunch except salvation
okay that is actually completely and utterly free that's probably why we're
so suspicious okay here take this what's the cost nothing
You could have it, but happily you don't have to do it, and for the most part, I don't know of any, maybe there are crazy Austrian economists out there, I'm sure there are, who might, if you like, become economists in the sense in which I use it, but I don't know any, and if they are, we'll expel them.
about a dispute I was having with some sort of individual server that's about marketing
and what I loved about it was I thought I was taking a part for a line and your argument
was my only problem was that I was too timid.
You're a wimp, okay.
But my question is, I sort of haven't had an answer to this in quite a while, but I
Can you be a Catholic and be a market anarchist?
I don't know whether that's, that doesn't answer the question whether it's coherent or not, I don't mean to be frivolous, no there isn't, seriously yes, I think so, I don't quite, I can't grasp the cogency, if you like, of any argument against that particular position, it seems to me that, look, one of the things I tend to get from my Catholic friends on this is, you're being really sort of mean and you're, what about the preferential option for the poor and all the people I'm saying, look,
Do with your money as you will.
Okay, and the example I always give, and sorry if it's a bit hackneyed, is this.
And Grafton Street, by the way, is the main shopping street in Dublin.
It's important to know this for this story.
Okay, so Tom Woods and I are going down Grafton Street.
And Tom, being a generous soul, there's somebody panhandling.
And Tom reaches into his wallet and takes out a ten-euro note
and throws it into the guy's hat.
And he says to me, Casey, don't be so mean, come on, give something to the guy.
And I go, no.
and he goes, oh come on, I mean, you know, he's obviously in need and I go, no
and he says, I'll never speak to you again and I say, don't tempt me
but he says, you know, I refuse to associate with you unless you do it
and he tries to persuade me and he tries to do all sorts of things to do it
and I say, no, no, no, no, no
he can do all of those things
all of those are perfectly legitimate
the one thing he cannot do
is reach into my pocket
take out my wallet
No matter how deserving the cause, no matter how sound your judgement is on that, no matter
how defective my understanding is, you cannot make those decisions for me.
If I'm a Christian, as I am, I believe I have an obligation, which extends well beyond the
requirements of justice, but the way in which I satisfy that obligation is down to me.
And in the end, the only one who can judge whether or not I have satisfied my religious
requirements to look after those who are less well-off than myself is not the state, it's
not Tom Woods even, though I'd much rather Tom did it, okay?
It's actually God.
In the end, the only judge who will stand over me to ask me, in other words, to say,
I was thirsty, did you give me to drink?
I was hungry, did you give me to eat?
And if the answer is yes, then I've satisfied my obligations.
Nobody else can make that judgment.
And that of course is what the state does, that is what the state does all the time.
It says there are all these poor people they need looking after, here, take your money
and we'll do it for you.
Now apart from the fact that it's theft, which it is, it's also remarkably inefficient.
A lot of the money seems to disappear before it ever comes out of the other end.
So that's the utilitarian argument, but the principal argument is it's theft.
So the question is, can a Catholic be a market anarchist?
Yes, I have not seen any argument to persuade me that there's any problem here and I don't
So I don't expect, I'm confident to expect, confident in expecting that I won't find any argument, and I actually did like your piece, as you know.
Yes?
So, a long ago, Mises spoke of state knowledge, which I think is a pretty great word to play on the mission that the state set itself up in respect to the stock.
What's happening, bizarre to me, especially, you know, I'm not a person on the fly, but only a little carrying for a few years now,
and what absolutely shocked me is how state psychology has made an interesting difference in terms of the church and I'm not a catholic but my experience is that when there's a lot of church, there's a lot of business.
...
yeah no no it's a very good question
pardon me wants to say I don't know but I'll offer you some
I'm often impressed when I go into Church of Ireland, which is the Anglican Church in Ireland, it's called the Church of Ireland, and I sometimes go for various reasons, or in England, you look at all the plaques on the walls to colonel this and colonel that, and so on, and you think, am I in the wrong place?
I'm always shocked, by the way, when I go into a church in this country and see the stars and stripes.
That's... I mean, even in Ireland, you won't find the Irish flag up.
It's quite striking, what everyone thinks about it.
And I'm not trying to denigrate the particular symbol and so on.
It's just not the place for it.
And on a Sunday morning, we often have prayers of the faithful
and some of them pray for our civil leaders.
And I say, yeah, they need a lot of praying for us, or do I, if it comes to that,
but not for the reason you think, not to guide us and do all that,
but basically to go and leave us alone.
So I never say amen to that one.
I always opt out of that one.
Can I come back to the main point?
How entrenched the state auditory is.
It is absolutely amazing.
I'm teaching several courses now.
I've come out of the closet as a libertarian
and shocked all my colleagues and students.
They can't quite believe that I'm serious, but I am.
The protestations always begin with,
What would you do about roads? What would you do about schools? What would you do about
this? And I say we have answers to all of these things. In fact, we had schools before
we ever had the state doing it. We had roads. All the roads were private. All the rails
were private and so on. And they go, but, but, but, but. And of course, Rothbard's point
in most of his works is just that, in other words, the ideological imprinting of this from
from the earliest age is so deep that even when you convince people by arguments, the
kind of cobwebs that still remain, allow it to retain, to remain in position. And so once
they leave your baleful influence, it asserts itself. They kind of go, oh, it's crazy. It's
a sort of mental straw.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. We're finished.