What Have We Lost in Becoming Rich?

The Christian case against capitalism

American Christians have long treated the economic question as a choice between capitalism and socialism, and because socialism takes private property, they chose capitalism and called it Christian. The choice was false. Private property, honest work, thrift, and fair dealing are older than capitalism by thousands of years, and God commanded or protected each of them long before capitalism existed. What capitalism added was permission. It took down the limits God’s law had set on gain and on lending at interest, and it did so in the name of consent. Capitalism kept its promise and made us rich. This paper asks what we spent to get there, and answers that we spent the household, the nation, and the soul.

Download the PDFOne-page summary (PDF)

The choice we were given

Since the Cold War the economic question has come to American Christians as a choice between two systems. Socialism puts land, tools, and business in the hands of the state, and communism, its hardest form, killed its own people and shut their churches. Capitalism left property in private hands, made the country rich, and let the churches stand. Christians chose capitalism, and many came to treat it as the economic side of the faith, something a Christian defends the way he defends the family.

The choice was false. On our compass, left and right ask one question: who should own land, tools, and business. Socialism answers the public, through the state, and capitalism answers private hands, and a Christian who has read “Thou shalt not steal” (Exod. 20:14) is right to prefer capitalism’s answer. But the compass asks a second question, and the choice we were given never put it to us: who rules what is owned. Capitalism answers that the owner does, bound only by the contracts he makes and the laws his fellow citizens consent to, so that a thing is worth whatever a willing buyer and a willing seller agree. Socialism answers that the state does. The old Christian answer was that God does, through the law he gave and the fathers, churches, and magistrates he set to keep it. That answer was never on the ballot.

Capitalism is liberalism applied to property. Our paper What Is Liberalism? traces the premise that men are born free and equal, so that no man may rule another without his consent. Capitalism carries that premise into the market, where goods are worth what free and equal parties agree to and what a man owns answers to no one above him. We rejected liberalism in politics and kept it in economics without noticing, because it came dressed in things we rightly love.

This paper argues that what capitalism added to the old economy is what the church condemned, and that Christians defend it for goods it inherited from God’s law. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

What capitalism is

Capitalism’s defenders and its critics define it in ways that agree more than either expects. Milton Friedman, quoting his own Capitalism and Freedom in 1970, gave business a single end: “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Hilaire Belloc, a Catholic critic, described in 1912 the society that results: “A society in which private property in land and capital … is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the state, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian, we call ‘capitalist.’” Friedman names the engine. Belloc names where it runs: ownership held by the few and most men working for a wage.

Both definitions assume private property, and neither finds anything new in it. Abraham paid for a field and its cave with “four hundred didrachms of silver approved with merchants” (Gen. 23:16). Naboth owned a vineyard that a king wanted and could not buy (3 Kingdoms 20:1–3). Property, markets, and money are as old as the patriarchs, and no one has called Abraham a capitalist. What is new is not that men own things and trade them. What is new is an order that lets capital multiply without limit and makes the multiplying its aim.

Aristotle drew the line more than two thousand years before Friedman. He set the management of a household, which seeks what the household needs, against the art of getting money, which seeks money: “Thus in the art of acquiring riches there are no limits, for the object of that is money and possessions; but economy has a boundary, though this has not.” The household knows when it has enough. The money-maker does not, “for all those who get riches add to their money without end.” Our word economy comes from the Greek for the management of a household. Capitalism kept the household’s name and adopted the money-maker’s rule.

Four marks set capitalism apart from the ownership and trade that came before it. Each existed before capitalism inside bounds that law and custom set, and capitalism took the bounds away. Gain is the end, and the end has no limit. Money breeds money, lent in the expectation that more will come back than went out, and the whole economy runs on that expectation. Labor is bought and sold like any other good. David Ricardo put it without apology in 1817: “Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price,” and he set the natural price at what enables the laborers “to subsist and to perpetuate their race.” And capital owes no country, which section 05 lets Adam Smith say in his own words.

Where it came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Capitalism has no single founder. It came the way most errors come, one permission at a time, as the limit the church had set on gain was loosened, then handed over to consent, then removed. Luther saw the principle before it had a name. Selling, he wrote, ought not to be “a work that is entirely within your own power and will, without law or limit, as though you were a god and beholden to no one.”

The line runs one way. Locke kept a limit in nature and let consent remove it, ending the time “before the desire of having more than man needed had altered the intrinsic value of things.” Mandeville made vice the engine of a nation’s wealth. Smith filed Mandeville among the “licentious systems” and still built on self-love, a man seeking his own gain being “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Bentham asked that the usury laws be swept away in the name of consent, and he admitted that his rule “would level, you see, at one stroke, all the barriers which law, either statute or common, have in their united wisdom set up.” At each step something the church had restrained as a sin became a permission, and then a duty.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and capitalism is built from four. When a Christian defends capitalism, he is defending one of them. None of them belongs to capitalism.

Property. Private property existed long before capitalism did. “Thou shalt not steal” (Exod. 20:14) protected it before anyone had heard of capital, and Peter told Ananias that his land had been his own to keep or sell: “Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” (Acts 5:4). Capitalism did not give us property. It inherited property and changed what it means. Scripture holds property under a prior title, “for the land is mine, because ye are strangers and sojourners before me” (Lev. 25:23), and Aquinas taught that a man may own things while using them “not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.”

Naboth shows the difference. King Ahab wanted his vineyard and made a fair offer: “I will give thee another vineyard better than it; or if it please thee, I will give thee money, the price of this thy vineyard.” Naboth answered, “My God forbid me that I should give thee the inheritance of my fathers” (3 Kingdoms 20:2–3). By the market’s measure his refusal meant only that the price was too low. By God’s law it meant the vineyard was not his to sell. When a Christian hears the word property, he thinks of Naboth’s vineyard, an inheritance held under God. Capitalism means a thing with a price. The Christian hope is that every household hold such an inheritance: “every one shall rest under his vine, and every one under his fig-tree” (Mic. 4:4).

Work. God gave man work before he gave him a law to break. “The Lord God took the man whom he had formed, and placed him in the garden of Delight, to cultivate and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Paul made it a rule of the church, “if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thess. 3:10), and gave it an end beyond the worker: “let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Eph. 4:28). Capitalism is defended as the system that rewards hard work. Friedrich Hayek, the author of The Road to Serfdom, called that defense a misfortune in 1976 and noticed how common it had become: “It is probably a misfortune that … popular writers like Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger … have defended free enterprise on the ground that it regularly rewards the deserving, and it bodes ill for the future of the market order that this seems to have become the only defence of it which is understood by the general public.” The market pays for what buyers want, and capital earns its return whether its owner works or not. The Christian who works hard and calls it capitalism has credited the system with a virtue Hayek says it never promised.

Thrift and giving. John Wesley gave the Methodists three rules for money: “Gain all you can,” “save all you can,” and “give all you can.” Capitalism kept the first and dropped the limits Wesley set on it: “We cannot, consistent with brotherly love, sell our goods below the market price; we cannot study to ruin our neighbour’s trade, in order to advance our own … None can gain by swallowing up his neighbour’s substance, without gaining the damnation of hell!” What Wesley called swallowing a neighbor’s substance, capitalism calls competition, and it rewards the man who does it best. The second rule went next, because an economy that grows by consumption cannot afford thrift, as section 05 shows. The system has no use for the third rule at all.

The calling. The Westminster divines counted “a lawful calling, and diligence in it; frugality” among the duties of the eighth commandment (Larger Catechism Q. 141). Max Weber argued in 1905 that this Protestant sense of calling helped build the capitalist order, which would make capitalism a Christian child. Weber’s own conclusion runs the other way: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.” The system had used Christian diligence to get started, and “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” What remained of the calling, he wrote, “prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.” Christians who still see the calling in capitalism are looking at the ghost.

Capitalism’s Christian defenders concede more than they notice. Michael Novak, whose The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) set out the Christian case for the system, held that its economy depends on a moral and cultural order outside the market, an order he called pluralistic and liberal. A year earlier he had carried the import further than any of the four truths. Recalling that “one of my favorite texts in Scripture has been Isaiah 53:2-3,” the prophecy of the suffering Christ, he wrote, “I would like to apply these words to the modern business corporation,” and he called the corporation “a much despised incarnation of God’s presence in this world.”

Where it leads

Capitalism made the nations that adopted it rich, and we do not dispute it. Moses warned Israel what riches cost before Israel had any: “lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses … and thy silver and thy gold are multiplied to thee … thou shouldest be exalted in heart, and forget the Lord thy God” (Deut. 8:12–14). Riches were always a danger, and the old paths kept them inside limits. Capitalism took the limits away. We count three things it cost, and each follows from something it added.

The nation. Adam Smith said it plainly: “A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.” Later in the same book he set land against capital: “The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies. The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.” Thomas Jefferson put it in four words in 1814: “merchants have no country.”

Smith titled his book The Wealth of Nations. Capitalism delivered the wealth. A people is bound to its land and capital is bound to its return, so an order built on capital pulls against an order built on a people. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal stated the logic plainly in 1984, when it proposed “a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.” Scripture sets the bounds that capital ignores: “When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations” (Deut. 32:8). The law of usury drew a line between brother and stranger. Israel could not lend at interest to a brother, but “Thou mayest lend on usury to a stranger” (Deut. 23:21). The Gospel moved the line outward. Aquinas read the law to teach “that to take usury from any man is evil simply, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel.” Capitalism moved the line the other way. Christ made every man a brother, and capitalism treats every man as a stranger.

The household. Before capitalism the household was the first economy. The virtuous wife of Proverbs “views a farm, and buys it: and with the fruit of her hands she plants a possession,” and she “makes fine linens, and sells girdles to the Chananites” (Prov. 31:16, 24). She buys, makes, and trades under her own roof for her own house. Capitalism, as Belloc described it, leaves the land and the tools with a few and the rest with a wage. The father who once worked his own field or shop went to work for another man, in time the mother followed, and the house that once produced became a place that consumes. Communism did not spare the household. It finished the work by another road. Soviet Russia made abortion legal in November 1920, when, as its own decree observed, “The legislation of all countries” punished it. The two systems disagree about who should own the means of production. Neither leaves the household at the center, and both pull its members out of it, one into the market and one into the state.

The soul. Capitalism did not invent greed. Achan saw a mantle, silver, and a wedge of gold in the spoil of Jericho, and “desired them and took them” (Josh. 7:21). Capitalism exploits greed. It treats covetousness as fuel rather than as a sin to be restrained, and an economy that must keep growing must keep men wanting more than they have. Victor Lebow said what that requires in the Journal of Retailing in 1955: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.” Paul called it “covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5), and Christ named the choice: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24).

Wesley watched riches work on his own people. In 1786 he wrote: “I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion … For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.” Christian diligence produced wealth, and the wealth consumed the faith that produced it: “So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.” His remedy, in the same text, was the third rule, that those who gain all they can and save all they can must give all they can. Capitalism keeps the riches and has no place for the remedy.

Communism wanted souls too, and it came for them in the open. It shut churches, taught atheism in its schools, and demanded that men confess what they did not believe. A Christian could see the attack and refuse it, and many refused it at the cost of their lives. Christ told his disciples whom not to fear: “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matt. 10:28). Capitalism’s attack is harder to see because it is wanted. It offers the world for the soul, and men make the trade willingly, a little at a time, and call it prosperity. Christ priced that trade himself: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26). In John’s vision the merchants of Babylon carry gold, silver, fine flour, and sheep, and their cargo list ends with “slaves, and souls of men” (Rev. 18:13).

Marx was right

Karl Marx described what capitalism does to a people more accurately than most of its Christian defenders have, and we say so plainly. In 1848 he and Friedrich Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie, the class that owns capital, “has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” It “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” It “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

He said little that Smith and Jefferson had not said first. He differed from them in being glad of it. In a speech on free trade that same year he explained his vote: “the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” The father, the church, and the nation: Marx named all three, and he was right about all three. He supported capitalism’s dissolving work because he wanted the old order dissolved, and he saw capitalism as the road to communism.

He was wrong about much else. He forecast that the modern laborer “sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class,” and in capitalist nations the laborer grew richer instead. He was wrong above all about the cure, which changed the owner and kept the dissolution. The Manifesto took the charge “Abolition of the family!” as its own, and it added, “The working men have no country.” Smith’s merchant had no country, and Marx promised the worker the same.

Naboth’s story holds both systems. Ahab offered to buy the vineyard, and when Naboth refused, Jezebel had him put to death on false witness and the king took it anyway (3 Kingdoms 20:7–16). The market’s way and the state’s way both treat the inheritance of the fathers as something that can be made to change hands, and Naboth’s answer refuses both.

The old paths

Christians did not need capitalism to love property, work, and fair dealing. The church taught all three for centuries before the word existed, inside limits that capitalism removed. “Ask for the old paths of the Lord; and see what is the good way, and walk in it” (Jer. 6:16).

God owns, and man holds in trust. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof” (Ps. 23:1). Land could be used and handed down but not sold out of the family for good, “for the land is mine” (Lev. 25:23), and the prophet pronounced woe on its consolidation: “Woe to them that join house to house, and add field to field, that they may take away something of their neighbour’s: will ye dwell alone upon the land?” (Isa. 5:8). The Larger Catechism counts “unjust enclosures” among the sins against the eighth commandment (Q. 142).

Gain serves an end. Aquinas allowed trade when its gain served the household, the needy, or the country, “lest his country lack the necessaries of life.” Paul set the measure: “having food and raiment let us be therewith content” (1 Tim. 6:8), for “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare” (1 Tim. 6:9).

Money does not breed money. The law forbade it three times. “If thou shouldest lend money to thy poor brother who is by thee, thou shalt not be hard upon him, thou shalt not exact usury of him” (Exod. 22:24). “Thou shalt not receive from him interest, nor increase” (Lev. 25:36). “Thou shalt not lend to thy brother on usury of silver, or usury of meat, or usury of any thing which thou mayest lend out” (Deut. 23:20). The Psalm counts among the righteous the man who “has not lent his money on usury” (Ps. 14:5), and Ezekiel says of the usurer, “he shall by no means live” (Ezek. 18:13). Christ went past the law and told his disciples to “lend, hoping for nothing again” (Luke 6:35). The line ran between lending and partnership. Aquinas forbade the lender a fixed return, and he allowed the man who entrusts his money to a merchant “so as to form a kind of society,” at his own risk, to take “part of the profits derived from his money.”

The councils held the line Scripture drew. The Council of Nicaea deposed clergy who lent at interest, citing the Psalm (canon 17). The Third Lateran Council of 1179 complained that “the crime of usury has become so firmly rooted that many, omitting other business, practise usury as if it were permitted,” and it denied notorious usurers communion and Christian burial (canon 25). The Westminster divines kept usury on their list of sins against the eighth commandment, with “engrossing commodities to enhance the price” beside it (Q. 142).

Wages are owed, not only agreed. “Thou shalt pay him his wages the same day, the sun shall not go down upon it, because he is poor and he trusts in it” (Deut. 24:15). God is a swift witness “against them that keep back the hireling’s wages” (Mal. 3:5), and “the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth” (James 5:4).

Price answers to law. Luther’s rule was to sell “as dear as I ought, or as is right and proper,” and he gave the test: a price at which the merchant “would get his due and have an honest living.” He wanted magistrates to appraise costs and fix such prices, and where neither law nor custom fixed them, he told the seller to “seek not avaricious gain, but only an honest living.”

None of these are the rules of socialism. Every one of them assumes private property, private trade, and private wealth. They are the rules of property held under God, and they belong to the Hierarchist corner of our compass, where ownership is private and authority comes from above.

Seven objections

“Capitalism has done more than any system in history to lift people out of poverty.” Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus make a version of this case in The Poverty of Nations (2013), which looks to the free market for the way out of poverty. We grant the riches, including what credit and the open pursuit of gain produced, and the title of this paper grants them. A good result does not make a forbidden means lawful: “Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just” (Rom. 3:8). Scripture does not count riches a sin. It tells the rich what their riches are for: “That they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate” (1 Tim. 6:18).

“Christ’s parables approve interest and the agreed wage.” The master in the parable of the talents tells the idle servant, “Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury” (Matt. 25:27). Luke gives the ground of the sentence: “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant” (Luke 19:22). The servant is judged by his own account of his master, “an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown” (Matt. 25:24), and the servants who are praised gained by trade: one “went and traded with the same” (Matt. 25:16). In the parable of the laborers the householder asks, “didst not thou agree with me for a penny?” and “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” (Matt. 20:13, 15). He pays every man “when even was come” (Matt. 20:8), as the law required, and he uses his liberty to give the last more than they earned: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” The parable rebukes a grudge against generosity. It does not teach that a wage is just because it was agreed.

“The only alternative to capitalism is socialism.” That is the false choice this paper was written to break, and sections 01 and 07 answer it. The old paths assume private property throughout, and Naboth’s refusal condemns the queen’s seizure as surely as it declines the king’s price.

“Capitalism is not based on greed. Greed is in the heart, not the system.” Jay Richards gives a chapter of Money, Greed, and God (2009) to the question “Isn’t Capitalism Based on Greed?” and answers it no. Greed is in the heart. Christ named “covetousness” among the evils that come “from within, out of the heart of men” (Mark 7:21–22). But “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient” (1 Tim. 1:9), and Christian nations restrained greed by law because it lives in the heart, with laws on usury, on engrossing, and on false weights. Capitalism took the restraints down and harnessed the appetite. It exploits greed, and an order that pays men for what God’s law restrains is not neutral.

“Calvin permitted interest, and the law forbade only usury from the poor.” Calvin allowed interest on conditions in a letter of 1545, and Richards counts the old condemnation of interest among the myths his book answers. We hold the line Scripture draws regardless of Calvin. Some of the law’s texts name the poor brother, but Deuteronomy does not: “Thou shalt not lend to thy brother on usury of silver, or usury of meat, or usury of any thing” (Deut. 23:20). The Psalm and Ezekiel name no condition at all. The Westminster Confession binds Israel’s judicial laws “further than the general equity thereof may require” (19.4), and the general equity of these laws is that money lent does not breed money from the borrower. Luther, before Calvin wrote, gave Christ’s rule for lending: “Lend, hoping for nothing again.”

“Hamilton and the tariff show that capitalism can be national.” A tariff is a magistrate telling capital where it may not go. Smith granted that a man prefers to employ his capital “as near home as he can,” but “provided always that he can thereby obtain the ordinary, or not a great deal less than the ordinary profits of stock.” The home preference lasts while the profits are equal, and a tariff is the magistrate keeping them equal. The national part of national capitalism comes from the magistrate, which is the argument of section 04 applied to the nation.

“Weber showed that Protestant diligence built capitalism, so capitalism is Protestant.” Weber’s own conclusion, quoted in section 04, is that capitalism used the Puritan’s calling and no longer needs it. If Christian diligence helped build capitalism, the diligence belonged to the church, and capitalism kept the diligence and left the faith behind.

What the Christian does instead

Rejecting capitalism does not mean withdrawing from the economy. A Christian buys, sells, hires, and works beside his neighbors, under a different law.

He owns what he can. Where he is able he holds productive property, land, a trade, a shop, a share in the business he works in, and he means to hand it down: “A good man shall inherit children’s children” (Prov. 13:22).

He keeps the household an economy. What his house can make, mend, grow, and teach, it does not buy, and he provides for his own as a matter of faith (1 Tim. 5:8).

He lends without usury, borrows little, and invests as a partner. “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another” (Rom. 13:8). Where he puts money to work, he shares the risk and the profit rather than taking a fixed return, as Aquinas allowed, and his church can make lending among its members a work of love rather than a source of gain.

He pays what is owed. If he employs men, he pays them in full and on time (Deut. 24:15). When he sells, he asks what gives him his due and an honest living, not what the market will bear.

He will not gain by harm, and he gives. Wesley forbade gain that hurts a neighbor “in his substance” or “in his body,” and the end of a Christian’s work is “that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Eph. 4:28).

He speaks. Nehemiah, as governor, told the nobles, “The thing which ye do is not good” (Neh. 5:9), and made them restore “their fields, and their vineyards, and their olive-yards, and their houses” (Neh. 5:11). A Christian may tell rulers that God’s law governs lending, land, and wages, and that a magistrate who lets capital do as it pleases has laid down part of his office.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not condemn trade, profit, or wealth. “Abram was very rich in cattle, and silver, and gold” (Gen. 13:2), and Joseph of Arimathea was “a rich man” and Christ’s disciple (Matt. 27:57). Aquinas allowed trade for the household, the needy, and the country, and so do we.

It is not a case for socialism, and it does not make capitalism the root of our disorder. Section 06 shows socialism finishing the dissolution capitalism began. Our other papers trace the root to liberalism, the premise that authority comes from consent, and capitalism is that premise applied to property.

It does not condemn the borrower or the partner. Scripture’s prohibition falls on the lender. Aquinas held that “it is lawful to borrow for usury from a man who is ready to do so and is a usurer by profession; provided the borrower have a good end in view, such as the relief of his own or another’s need,” and he allowed the partner a share of the profit. The Christian with a mortgage, or with a share in a business, has not committed the sin the law names.

It speaks of a people, and of every man who takes its terms. “Under capitalism you will lose your soul” is said of a people. A nation that lives by capitalism’s rule will lose its soul, as Wesley watched the Methodists losing theirs, and a Christian keeps his by refusing those terms, as the martyrs kept theirs by refusing communism’s. Christ keeps his own: “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28).

It stands or falls on one premise. If capitalism could exist without lifting the limits on gain and on lending at interest, the conclusion would fail. Sections 02 and 03 answer that premise from capitalism’s own defenders, from Locke’s “larger possessions” by consent to Bentham’s case for usury and Friedman’s “one and only one” responsibility. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

Download the PDFOne-page summary (PDF)

Texts and editions

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Aristotle, Politics I.9, trans. William Ellis.

Council of Nicaea (325), canon 17, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 14. Third Lateran Council (1179), canon 25.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.66 a.2, q.77 a.4, q.78 aa.1–2, 4, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920).

Martin Luther, Trade and Usury (1524), trans. W. H. Carruth, in The Works of Martin Luther (1915).

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 19.4. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), QQ. 141–142.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§31, 36, 37.

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), “The Grumbling Hive.”

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), VII.ii.4; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), I.ii, III.iv, IV.ii, V.ii.

John Wesley, Sermon 50, “The Use of Money”; “Thoughts upon Methodism” (1786).

Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury (1787), Letter I.

Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 17 March 1814, Founders Online.

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), ch. 5.

Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade,” Brussels, 9 January 1848. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888), chs. 1–2.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), trans. Talcott Parsons (1930), ch. 5.

Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (1912), §1.

People’s Commissariats of Health and Justice, “On the Protection of Women’s Health,” Izvestiia VTsIK, no. 259, 18 November 1920.

Victor Lebow, “Price Competition in 1955,” Journal of Retailing (Spring 1955).

Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.

F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), ch. 9.

Michael Novak, Toward a Theology of the Corporation (1981); The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), introduction.

Wall Street Journal, editorial page (1984).

Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God (2009), introduction and ch. 5.

Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus, The Poverty of Nations (2013).

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering (King James Psalm 72 is Psalm 71, 1 Kings is 3 Kingdoms), supplied words unbracketed. New Testament from the King James Version. Wesley’s 1786 text is quoted as Weber gives it, Hayek as Walter Donway gives him (Econlib, 2019), Novak’s corporation passage as Michael Sean Winters gives it (National Catholic Reporter, 2010), and the Journal editorial as Econlib reproduces it. Novak’s three systems and the theses of Richards and of Grudem and Asmus are paraphrased. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com