#113 People Should Be Free

#113 People Should be Free God wants people to be as free as possible in their political and economic lives.  There are ten ways in which freedom is being constrained in our world today.   The Declaration of Independence calls them “Inalienable rights,” because it assumes they come from God, not from Government.  Here’s the philosophical background.  The free view aligns with the Protestant concept that the human being is a free moral agent whose moral function requires the exercise of free will. For the Christian, every person is tasked with making moral decisions as voluntary acts of their own free will. The non-Christian view has no use for moral agency based on free will because the materialistic morality of utilitarianism is based on simple conformity to a social consensus of best practices. Conceptually, there is no room for an individual’s moral choice. It is this conformist materialist philosophy that is the root cause of the “cancel culture” aspect of the non-free folks.  In the free view, it is the individual who chooses; under the non-free view, the individual is one who conforms.  I’ve used a simple diagram showing that in free-market capitalism, economic decisions are made by individual choice.  In socialism, decisions are made by group force.  In Biblical Economic Policy, Sergiy Saydometov and I list ten Commandments of Economics.  The first one is, “People Should Be Free.”  Increasingly, people are becoming less free.  Here are ten ways.   1. Free Enterprise The title kind of explains what Christian Economists favor, doesn’t it?  Do you want a free economy or a government-constrained economy?  I’ve explained in many other podcasts that it’s only in a free-market capitalist economy that an individual can exercise the command to give.  In a Socialist economy, where the mantra is “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need,” people only get what they need.  What’s left-over to give? 2. Free trade Free trade makes nations richer, constrained trade makes them poorer.  Constrained trade is one of the few choices on which President Trump and President Biden agree, and they are both wrong.  100% of economists agree with the statement, “Trade with China makes most Americans better off because, among other advantages, they can buy goods that are made or assembled more cheaply in China.”  Whenever you get 100% of economists agreeing, we should probably pay attention.  If we really did get richer by buying products and services from our own country, wouldn’t buying only at the state level make our state even richer?  What about buying only in our county? City?  Maybe we should buy only products made on our street?  At our home?  Gets kinda ridiculous after a while doesn’t it?  The same rules apply at the national and house level: Make what you do best and buy the rest.  It’s pretty simple economics, and it also happens to agree with our Christian worldview.  I can’t find a scripture that tells us to discriminate against Mexicans or the Chinese. 3. Freedom from Government  In his book, Three Felonies a Day, Harvey Silverglate and Alan Dershowitz point out that we have so many confusing and contradictory laws, that bureaucrats make decisions for us.  Their point is that we are no longer guided by-laws made by our legislative bodies, that role has been turned over to entrenched bureaucrats whose job is supposed to be only the implementation of the laws.  In The False Promise of Big Government, Patrick Garry writes, “Big government does not help the poor, the working class, and the middle class, even though those groups provide the justification for big government.  In fact,