A reader asks:

I’m used to hearing leftists say that capitalism (free markets) are driven by greed, and therefore bad. Now, since I know where their end game leads (mass graves), I don’t feel any serious need to rebut their claims. I’ve recently heard some sincere Christians, non-leftists, say something much similar, and I honestly didn’t know how to respond.

What would you say in response to this charge?

My response: What I would say depend on whether I am answering a Christian or a Leftist, because the same words, in their two different mouths, come from two different backgrounds, hence mean two different things.

If your Christian friends mean to say that anything, no matter how good, becomes an idol when elevated above God, then it becomes corrupt and evil, then I say “Amen.” They are exactly right.

The free market is a good thing the way marriage is a good thing. It is an institution calculated to channel otherwise harmful passions into productive uses: a way to harness the dragon to a chariot, so to speak. But keeping a harem is overdoing it. The bridegroom makes marriage an idol, a source of pain and woe, if he starts gathering wives and concubines like Solomon.

Likewise, my libertarian friends are mesmerized by the beauties of the free market to the point where they forget that some things, like drug addiction and prostitution, are bad. The wish to maximize human liberty becomes counterproductive once we liberate from all restraint certain passions and addictions that discourage the virtues without which liberty cannot be exercised.

Like fire, liberty is a good servant but a bad master. Freedom is a great watchdog when kept leashed, and the government cannot be trusted to hold the leash, only the culture, the cult, the consensus. Us. Only a moral and upright people can be trusted with freedom or with a free market.

Whether or not any non-Christian nation could long exist in freedom without collapsing into collectivism remains to be seen: the witness of history so far says not.

In the mouth of the Christian, who says the free market is based on greed, and is therefore bad, the sentiment is true. Greed is part and parcel of the evil that afflicts all sons of Adam.

No Christian who reads even a summary of his Bible thinks men are sinless and heaven on earth is reasonable, so no Christian, when he says “that is evil” is saying “abolish it and replace it with Utopia.” He is saying, “Be watchful. Watch and pray. Be vigilant against the evils and temptations luxury brings.”

All good things to say.

In the mouth the Left, on the other hand, “the free market us driven by greed and therefore is bad” is not an argument, but an assertion, akin to saying that marriage is driven by lust and it therefore bad.

In fact, marriage is an institution that harnesses the lust of young men so that they can only slake it by becoming husbands, fathers, and productive members of the community.

The other option to marriage, anarchy aka free love, does not deter lust but encourages it, and directs it into destructive channels. See the modern hook-up culture and the concomitant suicide rate, for example.

I am also unclear on the cause and effect. If my motives are impure, the end result is undesirable?

If I save a little girl hoping for a reward from grateful parents, my motives may be indeed up for review by Christ at Doomsday, but meanwhile the little girl lives. If I suffer a qualm, and realize my motives are bad, and I let the girl drown, is that better? The badness of base motives is a different thing than the badness of bad results.

The badness of base motives is a matter the Church was created to handle. Go to confession, if greed is your sin. Do penance. Give alms. Mortify the flesh. (Joining a Marxist bandwagon is none of these things, despite what those who climb on the bandwagon pretend.)

How to turn poverty into wealth is a matter political economics was created to handle. Blaming the political economics for not being a Church is a typical scurrilous trick of those who do not seek salvation from Christ, but from Caesar. To them, political economics is their religion.

In any case, the “free markets are driven by greed” is not an argument as much as it is a lie by omission.

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