The Christian Worldview

David Wheaton: Why the rise of socialism in America? That is the topic of discuss today right here on The Christian Worldview Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Worldview is a nonprofit, listener-supported radio ministry. Our website is thechristianworldview.org, and the rest of our contact information will be given throughout today's program. As always, thank you for your notes of encouragement, financial support, and lifting us up in prayer.

Socialism has become mainstream in America. Political candidates representing the Democratic Socialists of America party, the DSA, are winning elections across the country. Their website says this, "Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism. You don't really have bills anymore. You have no debt. You don't need health insurance. You don't pay a mortgage or have a landlord because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities."

It goes on to say, "If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty. Building this world is the guiding star of our movement, the socialist movement. When we labor for our common good instead of private profit, we can all have a secure and dignified life and use our time and talents how we wish." Did you notice the "we, we, we"? Just like the rebels of Babel in Genesis chapter 11, building their city and tower in opposition to God.

Our guest this weekend to discuss the rise of socialism is Cal Beisner, founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an organization that advocates for policies that lift people out of poverty through principles such as private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and access to abundant, affordable, and reliable energy. Cal is also the author of two helpful booklets related to this topic that you'll be able to order from our website, thechristianworldview.org: "Social Justice Versus Biblical Justice" and "Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?" Let's get straight to the first segment of the interview with Cal Beisner.

Cal, it's so good as always to have you back on The Christian Worldview Radio Program. I want to start out with a quote from Ayn Rand, who was a Russian-born woman who ended up immigrating to America and was a writer and philosopher. Not a believer. She said, "There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end. Communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide." First off, could you draw the distinctions between these terms: socialism, Marxism, and communism?

Cal Beisner: Marxism is far the broadest concept because it gets into many issues other than economics and the relationship between the state and the market, the functioning of the economy. Marxism, of course, roots back to Karl Marx in the 19th century. In fact, just yesterday it was I finished reading Paul Kengor's really amazing book called "The Devil and Karl Marx," which in the early parts of it documents the extent of really serious, intentional demonic trafficking that Karl Marx and those around him did. This was most definitely an occult-rooted matter in Marx's life.

Marx was filled with hatred for any sort of authority, any sort of recognition of hierarchy or chains of authority and so on. He wanted to destroy all of that. But he focused basically on people's economic relationships. He saw the world as divided between oppressors and oppressed. The oppressors were, in his day, he believed, the capitalists. That is those who owned capital—tools, buildings, machinery, money—and then employed workers to use those tools in those buildings with those machines to produce products to sell.

He believed that the capitalists oppressed the workers. As it actually turns out, instead, it's very, very different. Capitalists can employ workers only if they're willing to pay the workers better than competing capitalists can. So, capitalists compete by raising the wages of workers. They can do that because the capital that they provide—the tools, the machines, and so on—increase the output of the workers. So, capital owners and workers are natural allies. The enemies, so to speak, are different capitalists because they're competing with each other for workers and for customers.

But Marx didn't see it that way. He believed that the entire value of any product in the market was from how much time did workers have to spend to create that product. This was the labor theory of value. Of course, this forgets that if I had a power splitter, I could have split a whole bunch of firewood this morning a whole lot faster than I did with my splitting maul. Now, I happen to enjoy using a splitting maul, so I don't rent a splitter, but I understand that the capital of a splitter, a power splitter, would have improved my output of firewood very considerably and reduced my fatigue. But I'm satisfied with my simple splitting maul instead.

Marx thought then of basically the oppressors are the capitalists, the oppressed are the workers. He believed that you could bring about a reversal of that and a spread of all property to all people equally by a revolution of the proletariat, the workers, against the capitalists. He believed that that would happen first in the most capitalistically developed countries like the United States, Great Britain, and so on. As a matter of fact, socialism has a step toward communism, we'll get there in a minute, didn't sell well in the highly developed capitalist countries precisely because the workers in those countries already had been lifted to an economic level far beyond anything that their previous generations could even have dreamt of.

Instead, the revolution took place in Russia, which was a place that had almost zero capitalist activity. It wasn't a revolution of the oppressed workers against the capitalists. It was a revolution of the, frankly, pretty oppressed masses against the Tsar and the whole nobility and royalty of Russia at the time. Now, we all know of course how all of that wound up under Lenin and Stalin. Millions and millions of Russians and Ukrainians and others were slaughtered intentionally by their government or starved intentionally by their government.

David Wheaton: So, Cal, socialism is increasing in popularity, but what about the next step you mentioned: communism, which I still think has a negative connotation for most Americans? What is it about socialism and communism that are unbiblical?

Cal Beisner: Communism is, for Karl Marx, the goal of socialism. Socialism is the path toward communism. Communism is the complete absence of all property rights to any individuals, to any families. All property is just common to everybody. You fish in the morning, and you make love in the afternoon, and you have dinner in the evening, and life is just wonderful because everybody shares everything equally. Isn't that neat? The question is, who makes all of those things? Who makes the meals? Who grows the grain? Who raises the beef, and so on?

When you take away private property rights, you destroy the incentive to create. That's clear from even the Scripture's teaching about human nature. We are made in God's image to be creative and productive as He is. Over and over again in the Old Testament, we have promises that hard work, wise work, brings about gain, and that gain can be a blessing. So we see that many times. Socialism exists kind of on a spectrum. There are things that are sort of soft socialism: the welfare state, for instance.

People in America will say, "Well, if you think socialism is such a problem, look at Scandinavia. They're socialist countries, and they're wonderful. They're wealthy. People live really well there." Well, actually, they tried socialism in the 1950s and '60s, and it didn't work out very well there. They kept the welfare state, but those are highly capitalistic countries now. They have some socialism on the side mixed in, but overwhelmingly they're capitalistic, and that's why they're so wealthy.

So socialism is the path to communism. In socialism, you transfer ownership of productive property increasingly from private persons and corporations to the state. Then the state determines who does what work, when, where, who uses what resources for what purposes. Fundamentally, that's what we're asking is the question: who determines what resources get used at what costs for what ends? Who decides the trade-offs that are going to be made? For socialism, the answer is the state.

For capitalism, the answer is free individuals. Free individuals, though, having to act within the boundaries of God's moral law. There is no room in capitalism, for example, for Murder Incorporated. You can't have a private firm that specializes in murder. Or rather, you can, but you had better get arrested and tried and convicted and punished. But capitalism says private persons should own and use private property for the purpose of serving others to make a profit, but that profit comes only to the extent that you do serve other people.

David Wheaton: Well, that was a really great explanation of these terms Marxism, socialism, and communism. As you described that, Cal, I'm thinking, why on earth is the idea of socialism becoming so popular in our country today? In recent memory, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, was kind of the crazy socialist over the last 20 years or so. He's been in power longer than that. But then it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, and then of course, Zohran Mamdani. He had this to say just several months ago as part of this movement.

Zohran Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty. Many of these people have been betrayed by the established order. But in our administration, their needs will be met. Their hopes and dreams and interests will be reflected transparently in government. They will shape our future. If for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

David Wheaton: And we're going to replace the fragility of rugged individualism, referring really to capitalism, with the warmth of collectivism. That's socialism or communism. But it wasn't just Mamdani; there's now since he came in power, there's been a slew of far-left part of this party, DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America political leaders and candidates, by the way, along with many leftist churches from the mainline Protestant churches, leftist Catholic churches. And they're winning elections. Why, Cal, do you think there is such growing support for socialism in America? Has there ever been another time in our history when socialism has been so supported by voters?

Cal Beisner: I'm sure you won't be surprised by my first answer to that, and that is American schooling has been a dismal failure. How many Gen Z, certainly Gen Alpha, or even Gen X and Millennials, how many of them know the history of socialism and communism over the 20th century? How many of them have ever heard of "The Black Book of Communism," put together by a team of French scholars, all of them former communists, just simply documenting the numbers of human beings killed by their own governments?

Those governments were communist, and the number they estimate runs anywhere between about 100 million and about 250 million. Probably 180 million is the most likely rounded figure. But our schools, unfortunately even private schools, let alone our public schools, which by the way were shaped by socialist John Dewey, Marxist, and his disciples at the Columbia Teachers College, our schools have utterly failed to teach basic history, just simple facts.

Here's a different one that I think is important for us to understand. 150 years ago, most children started working on the farm where they lived by the time they were five. They kept working, and they saw the fruits of their labors in the family's flourishing. By the time they were 14, 15, 16, they were responsible adults. Many of them married by the time they were in their mid-to-late teens, and they took responsibility for their families.

What that means is that for about the first four to four-and-a-half, maybe five years of their lives, everything they received came to them without charge. From there on out, they worked. They earned their share of the family's meals and shelter and everything else. There didn't use to be a period of growth called adolescence. The idea started in the late 19th century with a sociologist whose name I can't remember at the moment. But adolescence has been this period between childhood and adulthood that we didn't use to even think about.

Originally, adolescence was thought to go from maybe 10 or 11 years old to 15, 16 years old. By the time you were 17 or 18, you were ready to be an adult in the real world and take responsibilities. Now, people are thinking in terms of adolescence that runs to the mid-to-late 20s, even the early 30s. Through all that time, you're not working for what you consume. You're receiving it all free of charge thanks to your parents or thanks to government handouts, or both.

But you don't understand by real personal experience the connection between hard work and the use of capital—tools, machinery, and whatnot—that go into making that hard work productive. You don't understand that; you've never experienced it. So you have essentially lived in a micro-socialist economy until your mid-20s to early 30s. Everything worked out just fine there. Your tuition got paid, or at least you got a nice loan guaranteed by the government at a very low rate, and you didn't have to start paying it until way later. Everything worked out just great. So what could be wrong with just spreading that to everybody else for all of life?

I think that's another part of why so many young people especially are turning more toward socialism today. Then too, I think there's the laudable motive among many young people who say, "I see people around me who are living in squalor, who lack basic provisions that I take for granted. I want them lifted out of poverty. I want to see them cared for." Well, the state promises to do that in socialism. So you have a laudable motive, a laudable end: caring for those who are poor, lifting them out of poverty.

But what you don't realize is that the means that you have chosen are deadly. We know they're deadly from the history that you don't know. We know they're deadly too because when you do not see a connection between your work and the risks you take on the one hand, and your rewards on the other hand, you lack incentive to work and work hard. I think that helps to explain the enormous lack of workforce participation, especially among young men in America today. So many of them have just, they just don't have a desire for a job. Living in mom and dad's basement, they're doing all right, watching their pornography, listening to their music and their podcasts. It's a very sad thing. But we do need to learn history. The great Harvard sociologist and philosopher George Santayana is famous for having said, "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." I sure hope that we can get our memory back before that happens.

David Wheaton: Socialism is on the rise in America. The Democratic Socialists of America are winning elections all across the country. Often promoted in Christian terms—equality, dignity, common good, rights for all—the reality of socialism ends in human misery and rebellion against God. Cal Beisner, founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, has written two excellent booklets that refute socialism and its supposed merits. The first is "Social Justice Versus Biblical Justice," and the second is "Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?" To order one or both, visit our website, thechristianworldview.org, or call 1-888-646-2233.

The Christian Worldview is a nonprofit, listener-supported ministry. If you'd like to help us impact listeners with the biblical worldview and the gospel, consider becoming a Christian Worldview partner who regularly gives a specified amount to the ministry. As a thank you, Christian Worldview partners automatically receive many of the resources featured on the program throughout the year. To become a Christian Worldview partner, call us toll-free at 1-888-646-2233 or visit thechristianworldview.org.

Welcome back to The Christian Worldview. Our topic today is, why the rise of socialism in America? Our guest is Cal Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Cal, I've never heard of a socialistic or communistic society that revered God. Is there something about this that takes us back to Genesis 11, where unregenerate mankind is always trying to get back to Babel, where they can build their society apart from God?

Cal Beisner: Karl Marx absolutely hated God. He was determined to destroy all faith in God as best he could. So certainly the hatred of God is key to Marxian socialism. Now, there have been socialist movements in the history of Christianity. In fact, Thomas Molnar wrote a fascinating book called "The Perennial Heresy" that ran the history of various different socialist movements within Christendom over the past roughly 1,900 years before he wrote his book.

These come usually from a misreading of various passages of Scripture. That misreading has cropped up over and over again in church history and even recently. The evangelical left is fond of pointing to, for example, the Sabbatical Year law that says that in the seventh year of a debt, you're supposed to cancel all debts. In the 50th year, after seven Sabbatical Years, all property is returned to its original owner, all debts are canceled, etc. Now, of course, if one is thinking as I've just said that, one already begins to see a problem there. Wait a minute, if all debts are canceled every seven years, then that means that they're canceled in the 49th Sabbatical Year, so what debt is left to be canceled in the 50th year, the Jubilee Year?

So there must be a problem of interpretation here. The problem is starting with translation. The Hebrew that is sometimes translated "cancel," it's a very simple verb, it just means to let drop, to let something drop. If we look at all the uses of that verb in the Hebrew Old Testament, we find that there isn't a single one that has to be permanent. Most of them have to be temporary. Specifically related to the Sabbatical Year, we read in Deuteronomy 15 that in the Sabbatical Year, we are to let drop the debts that others have toward us.

But the Sabbatical Year is a larger piece of legislative Scripture. Back in Exodus 23:11, we read that also in the Sabbatical Year, you are to let drop your agricultural land. You're not to farm it. Does that mean you never go back and farm that land again? Certainly not. Well, if that's the case, then to understand the term the same way in the same corpus of regulation or legislation, we have to see, ah, what we're supposed to do is in the Sabbatical Year, we suspend collection on debts so that all of our brothers and sisters in Israel get to enjoy the same benefit of a year off from our hard labors and we can just enjoy what God has grown for us all. We don't have to pay debts. But you resume the collections the year after.

Similarly with the Jubilee Year, we're told in Leviticus 25 that when someone purchases land, he's not really purchasing the land itself. The text itself says it's actually the harvests. So the price is determined by the projected value of the harvests from origination of this to the next Jubilee Year, subtracting the value of harvests in the intervening Sabbatical Years that the text doesn't specify that, but that would surely have been taken into consideration. What happens is that when a buyer has supposedly bought this land, he's really buying the crops intervening, and how does he get those crops? He has to work for them. If he doesn't, then he doesn't get some of the payback, but that's his problem, not the seller's or the borrower's problem.

David Wheaton: Cal, what about those passages in the early chapters of Acts that are often used as proof texts that early Christians were socialists?

Cal Beisner: People will also misuse Acts 2 and Acts 4 about the early church having all things in common. What's clear there is that the giving was voluntary, not involuntary. That's made clear in Acts chapter 5, where Ananias comes and presents part of the price of a piece of land that he sold and he lies to Peter and says it's the full price. Peter points out that he has lied not just to Peter but to the Holy Spirit, and Ananias then falls dead. But in the process, Peter says to him, "While the land was yours, wasn't it under your control? After you had sold it, wasn't the money under your control?" You didn't have to lie about this. It wasn't the question of whether he was required to sell and give away. It was the question of his dishonesty about it.

Similarly in 2 Corinthians chapter 8, people will appeal to this that says that the goal of the giving between the people in Corinth and other parts of Greece to help out the people in Jerusalem was that there might be equality. "Aha, see now, equality. That's the aim here, right?" Well, if you read the text carefully and if you compare it with a related text in Romans chapter 15 about giving, what Paul has in mind is, look, these folks in Jerusalem, they sent missionaries who gave to you to meet your spiritual poverty that you might have spiritual abundance. They're now materially poor. You're materially abundant. So now give to them. So there's equality. The equality is giving from your abundance to their need as they gave from their abundance to your need. So there are passages that people will wrongly use to try to support socialism. I've discussed all those at some length in my booklet "Social Justice Versus Biblical Justice."

David Wheaton: Speaking of those who are religious who twist Scripture, there's a perfect example of this. His name is James Talarico. He is running for the US Senate as a Democrat in Texas. He went to some leftist seminary. He said this recently in a Zoom call with some of his supporters.

James Talarico: Multifaceted threat of a climate crisis, economic crisis, and a social justice crisis. I think that kind of new deal effort would be the only approach to start to address all three in a thoughtful and meaningful way. And also thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country. And I think only understanding the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them.

David Wheaton: He started out by saying there's a multifaceted threat of climate crisis, economic crisis, and a social justice crisis. What's your response to that?

Cal Beisner: Well, let's see. How much time do we have here? I could really go into. I started off by pointing out that Karl Marx saw all the world as oppressors and oppressed. You're seeing the same approach here, only now the oppressors include white males especially, white people, and then capitalists, and then those who are messing up our climate, right? So now we've redefined the oppressors. The whole cultural Marxist movement redefines oppressor/oppressed in various different ways: male versus female, white versus colored, straight versus gay, hetero versus trans, and so on. All of these are new ways of trying to point to oppressors and oppressed.

You know that I've done a great deal of work on the climate change issue. The good science tells us climate change is real. Human activity has probably contributed significantly to it over the last century and a half or so, especially perhaps the last say 70 years, that a major part of our contribution comes from our use of fossil fuels. And there are some problems that come with climate change. But as the great economist Thomas Sowell has frequently put it, there are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.

So, suppose that we really think that climate change is a big problem. How are we going to affect that? How are we going to slow, stop, or reverse the warming of the Earth's surface? Well, we're going to have to stop using fossil fuels. What happens if we do that? Well, let's see. Roughly half the food grown in the world right now is absolutely dependent on fertilizers made with the Haber-Bosch process that pulls nitrogen out of the atmosphere using natural gas. We stop using fossil fuels, we lose half the world's agricultural production. Which means half the world starves to death. 4 billion people gone.

The rest of the world depends very, very heavily on all kinds of transportation systems and concrete and steel and all sorts of other things that absolutely rely on fossil fuels for their production. Get rid of fossil fuels, well, not as quickly as the starvation of the 4 billion, but in perhaps a few more years, you're going to lose another 2 billion or so people. This is not just my thinking on this. This is put out by several different major economic studies done on this which I've discussed in some articles on Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation's blog.

Now let's try to compare. What have been the harms to humanity from so-called human-induced climate change? Well, let's see. Since the year 1900, the average annual human mortality rate, that is percentage of humans dying, from extreme weather causes has fallen by more than 99%. So what that tells us is that no matter how bad any effects on weather have been from climate change, they have come nowhere near offsetting the benefits to human life that we get from hydrocarbon fuels: fossil fuels, oil, coal, natural gas.

Now I haven't even touched there another benefit from those. Every time we burn coal, oil, and natural gas, we add CO2 to the atmosphere. Now that CO2 is what's called a greenhouse gas. It absorbs heat reflecting out from the surface of the Earth toward space, sends some of that heat back down toward the surface. That warms the surface. Okay, that's very simple physics. What we're forgetting is the other impact of added CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants grow better. On average, for every doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in which plants grow, you get a 35% increase in plant growth efficiency. They grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures, in wetter and drier soils. They make better use of soil nutrients. They increase their fruit-to-fiber ratio. They resist diseases and pests better.

Consequently, their ranges expand to areas that used to be too hot or too cold for them, too wet or too dry for them, soils that weren't sufficiently nutrient-rich for them. But not only do their ranges expand, their crop yields expand. So NASA estimates that CO2 added to the atmosphere from 1960 to the present is responsible for an increase in leaf area index, that is green cover over the Earth, equivalent to twice the vegetation on the continental United States from 1990 to about 2017. And it continues beyond that; there just hasn't been another study since then. This is tremendous, and what that means is that this CO2 is increasing crop yields, making food cheaper for everybody around the world.

The real oppressors here, the real oppressors, Mr. Talarico, are the wealthy Western environmentalists who want to force developing world countries where primary energy comes from wood and dried dung, the local air pollution from which the World Health Organization estimates kills two to four million people a year. These wealthy Western environmentalists want to tell all those people, "You can't use coal, oil, and natural gas to lift yourself out of poverty." That's oppression. A common term for it now is climate colonialism. If Talarico is really worried about oppression related to climate change, he needs to look at that instead.

David Wheaton: David Wheaton here. For a limited time, we are offering "My Boy Ben" for a donation of any amount to The Christian Worldview. The book is the true story of a yellow lab that I had back when I was competing on the professional tennis tour. It's about relationships—with Ben, my parents, with a childhood friend I would eventually marry—but ultimately with God, who causes all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. You can order a signed and personalized copy for yourself or for your friend who enjoys a good story, loves dogs, sports, or the outdoors, and most of all, needs to hear about God's grace and the gospel. Go to thechristianworldview.org or call 1-888-646-2233.

Follow up on an earlier comment you made about the biggest danger to the climate and to people's well-being and to social justice around the world for those in poverty are Western affluent leftists environmentalists. One of them is a man named Hasan Piker. For listeners who don't know who he is, Piker is the self-proclaimed socialist Twitch streamer. He's been part of the program The Young Turks. He said he would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time, and he once claimed America "deserved" 9/11. He lives in a nearly $3 million home in West Hollywood. His net worth is estimated to be $35 million. He makes an estimated $4 million per year on our capitalist system, but pushes socialism for everyone else. Hasan Piker said this when asked about his expensive home.

Guest (Male): At what point does your very expensive home stop being a basic human necessity and something that essentially reinforces the very system that you're critiquing?

Hasan Piker: I don't think the purchases that you make necessarily—I mean, if you're buying a private jet, that's a little different, but I don't think the purchases that you make, as long as you're not using it to engage in capital accumulation, imply something less ethical than whatever purchase you're making in general. I have a house. The reason why it's so expensive is because it's in West Hollywood.

David Wheaton: You would think people would notice this, but it doesn't seem to move the needle that these people are huge hypocrites amassing capital, whether through houses, properties, or finance, and yet railing against the capitalistic system, Cal.

Cal Beisner: Wealth redistribution for thee, not for me. He is the current historical setting in America of the Nomenklatura in the Soviet Union. The Nomenklatura were the high-ranking bureaucrats of the Soviet communist system. They had their dachas, their vacation homes out in beautiful places well away from Moscow. They had plenty of exotic foods on their tables. They had very comfortable homes and all of this. Meanwhile, the average Russian was standing in long lines to get moldy bread. What we're seeing here is the identical thing going on.

But here, people like Hasan Piker have become celebrities. And you know, I've known a lot of young people who embrace socialism in theory anyway and who are very upset about very wealthy corporation executives or stockholders and the like. But they see certain people as celebrities, and because they're celebrities, they're immune from criticism. I think it's partly because these young folks—or some of them not so young, I have a relative who very happily said to me, "I feel the Bern" about Bernie Sanders—they make celebrities out of these people and therefore they're outside the limits of critique because somehow or other they stand for what these people want, though they're not living that way. When Al Gore had five different homes, one of them on the beachfront in San Francisco, another one in Hawaii, his home in Nashville all by itself used 30 times as much energy per month as the average home in Tennessee. When Al Gore was doing all of that, the people who almost worshipped him as the prophet of climate doom, they couldn't say anything negative about that. Why not? Because it would undermine the credibility of the man who was their celebrity. Similar thing with Piker.

David Wheaton: Final question for you, Cal, about our current economic system where just a few massive companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Tesla, NVIDIA, AI companies are the major engine of the economy. That if one isn't invested into the stock market, it's really hard to keep up with inflation and the cost of living. And we see all over the news that the younger generation is not able to afford to buy a home, and our national debt is now over $40 trillion. Why isn't jettisoning capitalism and embracing socialism the answer?

Cal Beisner: When critics of socialism point to the failure of socialism in socialist countries all over the world, and that's the entire record, the defenders always say, "Well, it wasn't really proper socialism. Socialism hasn't failed; it hasn't been tried." That's historical nonsense, but that's the way they answer. It's very tempting to give a similar answer here on this. And the reality is the national debt, these problems with inflation and so on, that's not capitalism. That is government interference in the free market.

People think of inflation as rising prices of all the different goods that we buy. Technically, that's not inflation. Inflation is an expansion of the money supply. And that expansion of the money supply causes the rise in prices. We're told by the Fed its aim, its target is long-term 2% inflation. That is, every year, a dollar is worth 2% less than it was the year before. That's the target. As if somehow or other that should be comforting. At 2% annual inflation, the money in your wallet loses half its value every 36 years.

Now why am I supposed to be grateful to the Fed for achieving that? I don't understand that. That's theft. It's called counterfeiting. When the Fed does it, it's legal. It's not right. It's still theft. If I go out and counterfeit money, I'm expanding the money supply, which means I'm increasing demand, which means I'm increasing demand for labor, increasing employment, right? Isn't that good? But I go to prison for it.

No, we need to get back to sound money policy. I've discussed this at length in my book "Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity," a basic intro to economics. We need to get back to that. The problem is, when you run up a national debt of over $40 trillion, the only way we're going to pay off that debt is by more inflation. Which means that it will impoverish people. It will take away at 2% inflation, it will reduce the value of the money in your wallet to half every 36 years. At 4%, it'll do it every 18 years. At 9%, well, what's 72 divided by 9? Every eight years, your money loses half its value. We had 9% inflation for a while under Biden. This is craziness. Christians who care about not seeing government steal from everybody in the population except those who get to benefit from the inflation—meaning the bankers, the people employed in government who get to use the money early on before it loses its value, before the public becomes aware that there are so many more dollars out there—Christians who care about the command not to steal need to be firmly opposed to that kind of policy.

David Wheaton: Cal Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, thank you for your ministry of helping people to think based on a biblical worldview. We need that desperately.

Again, our guest today has been Cal Beisner. Capitalism certainly needs restraints because of sinful human nature. But socialism is far more dangerous and unbiblical because it makes the state God, it takes away the incentive to work, which God designed for man even before the fall. Because it takes away private property, which God intended for man to own, it infringes on individual liberties as it forces its definition of equality on everyone. And because it has never led to human flourishing or worship of God, but rather the opposite: human misery and rebellion against God. So be not deceived about socialism.

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