Money, Greed, and God--Part II

The Nirvana Myth

This is the second post in a series we will be publishing as we work through the recent book by Jay W. Richards, entitled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem (New York: Harper One, 2009). In this book, Richards identifies and rejects eight myths about money and wealth pervasive amongst Christians.

The first myth, widely believed, is that we can solve many problems and injustices in the world by changing the owners of property. Richards argues that everyone agrees there are grave problems in the world—and these problems exist to some degree or other in every human society. Such is the inevitable reality in a fallen world.

Many Christians hear repeatedly of blights that afflict their own particular country: poverty, illiteracy, disease, the gap between rich and poor, and other ills. Being Christians they tend to have a deeply felt compassionate concerns about these afflictions. They find such attitudes to be commanded in Scripture. But, then, at that point, many Christians lay their Bibles aside and turn to the smörgåsbord of options available in the world of Unbelief. Naturally, they find themselves drawn to align with those alternatives which appear to be compassionate and offer relief for the poor and downtrodden, since the Bible commands such compassion and concern.

What many fail to do at this point is think through what the consequences might be if Unbelief's proposed solutions were actually applied. They do not realise, or will themselves not to see, that a whole host of different, worse problems quickly transpire when solutions that call for a forcible, involuntary change in the ownership of property are applied. They naively believe that if “things were changed” a utopia would emerge in which all problems would have been overcome. Richards calls this the Nirvana Myth. The Myth contrasts, for example, societies built upon personal property rights (which naturally have attendant problems) with unrealisable utopian ideals which are naively supposed to remove or avoid problems altogether.

The Nirvana Myth is not simply the belief that good will triumph in the end or the belief that the Kingdom of God is already present in human history. It's the delusion that we can build utopia if we try hard enough, and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it does not measure up to utopia. (Richards, p.31)

Richards goes on to argue that if any generation ought to be utterly and brutally realistic about the folly of such an approach it should be we who live at the beginning of the twenty-first century, since we have the benefit of near hindsight. We can look back on the twentieth century which has tried just about every conceivable alternative to achieve Utopia and the terrible outcomes have been plain for all to see.

While Richards does not make this point, every Utopian scheme we are aware of in the twentieth century substituted personal property rights with communal or social property rights. Where persons living in such Utopian schemes continued to own property, it was only at the pleasure of the community or society. At its most extreme, the community through the power of the state was deemed to own all property. Private property was declared to be an act of theft.

Richards cites The Black Book of Communism which estimates that between 85 and 100 million innocent and defenceless people lost their lives to communist experiments in the twentieth century.

Never has an idea had such catastrophic consequences. It illustrated a grim, simple equation: extreme moral passions minus reality equals mass death. (p.21)

The variant of the ideology of communal ownership of property most familiar to us in the West is the “mixed economy” where private persons own property and have legal title to it, but the state can expropriate at legislative or regulatory will to achieve whatever ends it deems appropriate.

This is probably the most attractive to people driven by their emotions. When a government subsidizes the houses of the poor or gives out money to the unemployed or pays a retirement pension to the elderly it gives expression to our pity and assuages our guilt. Many see it as Christianity in action. But the actual record of such mixed economies is poor: a growing permanent non-working indigent class, alcoholism, drug abuse, high debt levels, low productivity, rising migration, increasingly violent criminal gangs, and a permanent underclass. Richards cites Thomas Sowell:

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. (Richards, p. 21)

The “third way” or the “mixed economy” is really socialism in sheep's clothing. Or, as Richards cites Richard John Neuhaus:

The vicissitudes of history . . . have not dissuaded [leftist intellectuals] from their earnest search for a “third way” between socialism and capitalism, namely socialism. (p. 18).

As the old saw goes, if you would be willing to prostitute your wife to another man for ten million dollars, we have established definitively that you are a pimp and your wife is a prostitute, and all we are haggling over is the price. If you would justify personal property rights being overridden to alleviate some great social evil then in principle the state can expropriate anything you own at its will. The state powerful enough to take from others in order to give us what we want is a state to be feared.

In summary, the Nirvana Myth falls down because personal property rights are not the cause of sin and evil in the world. In fact, inviolable personal property rights have the effect of restraining evil because personal property is effective in building protective walls against the depredations and evils of the predatory. The cause of sin lies elsewhere, in the Garden of Eden, a long time ago.

But the the terrible results of societies that consistently weaken or deny personal property rights have been demonstrated for all to see. When personal property rights are weakened, the predatory become more powerful, and wickedness waxes. The wicked seize or extort property, then use their immoral gains to engage in even more potent, despotic thefts, whilst whispering unctuously in the ears of their rulers, easing their path with the bribe. Finally, the state itself becomes the ultimate predator and oppressor.