ECONOMIC THEOLOGY | 2001-08-25
Communists have slaughtered far more than a hundred million people trying to impose the economic theology of Marx, Lenin, and the rest.
But in a way, the democratic socialist Intellectuals were worse than the Communist ones. Their economic nonsense kept the entire Third World in stagnation and abject misery for generations. That was worse than death.
All those years, planners trained at Harvard and the London School of Economics went back to their native lands and tried to plan their countries out of poverty.
All the universities were proud that they had trained economists from all the poor countries.
Every single country these Intellectuals took over got worse and worse.
The planners themselves, however, did what they wanted to do: they had a slave population, jobs, and power. So academics and other wordsmiths still love socialism.
There are still statues of Lenin here in Russia, and no social science department in the West is anything but a rabid fan of Economic Planning.
When some people look at Lenin, they think of a Great Idealist. Others think of the horrors he caused or some World Conspiracy idea they have going.
What I see when I look at Lenin is something that only a battered but all-too-honest old political expert from South Carolina would see.
To me, Lenin is a guy who was a Hero of the Working Class who never did an hour's labor in his entire life.
This is equally true of Marx. This is equally true of Trotsky. Likewise practically everybody else who ever championed the Worker as an intellectual hero. None of them ever produced anything but misery.
Libertarians today, who think they are the ultimate anti-Communists, continue this tradition of making economics into a theology. The one thing they insist on is free markets, with the same religious intensity Communists and socialists devoted to their recipes.
Libertarians say the free market is the solution for everything.
Including border problems. Since differences among peoples mean nothing, and the free market will take care of them, libertarians insist that the Third World population should pour into America and Western Europe.
Just crossing that border, say the libertarians, will make billions of third worlders prosperous First World Citizens in no time.
The Wall Street journal demands a constitutional amendment that says: "There shall be no borders."
In other words, their economic theology will take care of everything.
I think we've had enough of that nonsense.