PURITAN NEWS WEEKLY

www.puritans.net/news/

12/09/03

 

 

CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS

 

  

By J. Parnell McCarter

 

 

At Puritan News Weekly we have chronicled how conservatives in America are becoming increasingly reliant on Romanist political pundits as their source of information and perspective.  One method by which Romanist political pundits are getting their message across is through think tanks.  Two prominent examples are the Ludwig Von Mises Institute and the Acton Institute.

The founder of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute is Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., (see  http://www.mises.org/about.asp ).  Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., (rockwell@mises.org) is founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., and vice president of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, Cal. He is the editor of six books, most recently The Irrepressible Rothbard., and author of thousands of articles appearing in journals, magazines, newspapers, as well as a commentator for radio and television. He is editor of the famed daily newsite, Lewrockwell.com. (Here is a reason he was not in favor of Moore’s Ten Commandments monument: “There are other reasons not to warm up to the 10 commandments in the court house. The version Moore chose is a sectarian one promoted by Calvinist and fundamentalist Protestants, but rejected by Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. (The difference has to do with whether the first commandment should be split into two parts to seem to justify iconoclasm.)” (see http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/commandments.html)   Rockwell is a Roman Catholic libertarian humanist, and he has included in the institute some men from prominent Jesuit institutions:

The Senior Faculty  

The mission statement of the institute is as follows:

“The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), with a vast array of publications, programs, and fellowships, the Mises Institute seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth.”

The founder of the Acton Institute is Rev. Robert A. Sirico, a Roman Catholic priest. It was co-founded by Kris Mauren, also a Roman Catholic.  Its Board of Advisors is as follows, which also includes men from Jesuit institutions:

The institute describes its mission (see  http://www.acton.org/about/  ) as follows:

“The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is named after the great English historian, Lord John Acton (1834-1902). He is best known for his famous remark: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Inspired by his work on the relation between liberty and morality, the Acton Institute seeks to articulate a vision of society that is both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing. To clarify this relationship, the Institute holds seminars and publishes various books, monographs, periodicals, and articles.

The Acton Institute organizes seminars aimed at educating religious leaders of all denominations, business executives, entrepreneurs, university professors, and academic researchers in economics principles, and in the connection that can exist between virtue and economic thinking. We exhort religious leaders to embrace the principles of economics as analytic tools in the consideration of economic issues that arise in their ministry, on the one hand, and, on the other, we exhort business executives and entrepreneurs, to integrate their faith more fully into their professional lives, to give of themselves more unselfishly in their communities, and to strive after higher standards of ethical conduct in their work. Our conferences are held primarily in the United States, but we also conduct some conferences in Europe and Latin America. More information on these seminars can be obtained at from Acton programs.”

(It should be noted that Lord Acton was a prominent Roman Catholic philosopher.)  Its Board of Directors consists of prominent businessmen and businesswomen, who no doubt provide some of its funding.

Both of these institutes publish some useful information.  But what is troubling about this picture are the half-truths of their message.   According to their philosophy, humans are not fully reliant upon scripture as their foundation of knowledge.  Rather, human reason can ascertain the appropriate economic system independent of the Bible.  Ethical philosophy, which is necessarily connected to economic policy, is studied independent of scripture. Thus, it is quintessentially humanistic, as is the libertarianism it promotes.  And, consequently, it is thoroughly compatible with Roman Catholicism, but not with Biblical Protestantism.

Confirming this thesis, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute acknowledges its roots in Romanist Scholasticism:

“The story of the Austrian School begins in the fifteenth century, when the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, writing and teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain, sought to explain the full range of human action and social organization. These Late Scholastics observed the existence of economic law, inexorable forces of cause and effect that operate very much as other natural laws. Over the course of several generations, they discovered and explained the laws of supply and demand, the cause of inflation, the operation of foreign exchange rates, and the subjective nature of economic value--all reasons Joseph Schumpeter celebrated them as the first real economists.  The Late Scholastics were advocates of property rights and the freedom to contract and trade. They celebrated the contribution of business to society, while doggedly opposing taxes, price controls, and regulations that inhibited enterprise. As moral theologians, they urged governments to obey ethical strictures against theft and murder. And they lived up to Ludwig von Mises's rule: the first job of an economist is to tell governments what they cannot do.   The first general treatise on economics, Essay on the Nature of Commerce, was written in 1730 by Richard Cantillon, a man schooled in the scholastic tradition. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to France. He saw economics as an independent area of investigation, and explained the formation of prices using the "thought experiment." He understood the market as an entrepreneurial process, and held to an Austrian theory of money creation: that it enters the economy in a step-by-step fashion, disrupting prices along the way. Cantillon was followed by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the pro-market French aristocrat and finance minister under the ancien regime. His economic writings were few but profound. His paper "Value and Money" spelled out the origins of money, and the nature of economic choice: that it reflects the subjective rankings of an individual's preferences. Turgot solved the famous diamond-water paradox that baffled later classical economists, articulated the law of diminishing returns, and criticized usury laws (a sticking point with the Late Scholastics). He favored a classical liberal approach to economic policy, recommending a repeal of all special privileges granted to government-connected industries… Mises saw the beginnings of the revival of the Austrian School that dates from the appearance of Man, Economy, and State and continues to this day. It was Rothbard who firmly established the Austrian School and classical liberal doctrine in the U.S., especially with Conceived in Liberty, his four-volume history of colonial America and the secession from Britain. The reunion of natural-rights theory and the Austrian School came in his philosophical work, The Ethics of Liberty, all while he was writing a series of scholarly economic pieces gathered in the two-volume Logic of Action, published in Edward Elgar's "Economists of the Century" series.”

 

In contrast, Biblical Protestantism recognizes the extent to which man’s reason and conscience were corrupted by the Fall, unlike Roman Catholic and Baptist theology which assume men can construct just political states where laws are derived through human reason.  Man must rely upon scripture alone for the foundation of truth concerning economics and politics (as well as knowledge in general), otherwise man will travel off course due to human depravity.  The Bible alone must be our foundation, and not humanist reason.  It is ashamed when professed Protestants turn to humanist reason instead.

When human reason invents economic principles to design economic policy, it typically falls into various traps.  One trap is the libertarian trap, which does not adequately regulate human depravity, by denying safeguards such as usury laws (which prohibit exorbitant interest rates) and Sabbath laws.  Another trap is the communist trap, which does not adequately protect property rights.  But scripture provides sound principles of economic justice.

Even more fundamentally, for a society to enjoy prosperity long term (including economic prosperity), she must please God, for God alone is the fountain of blessing.  But to please God in truth, we must turn to scripture.  There we learn how to serve and worship him as individuals, as families and as nations.  “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”