#BTColumn – Our false economies (Part 2)

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by Adrian Sobers

“Tyranny is a poor provider. It knows neither how to accumulate, nor how to extract.” – (Edmund Burke, Speech on American Taxation, 1774) Amy Orr-Ewing opens A Theology of Reality, “We are in a cultural moment of what the New York Times calls languishing – a deep malaise that saps our energy and gives us an underlying feeling that all is not well.

“I think we are also perhaps facing a cultural time of reckoning – when things are being shaken economically, environmentally, perhaps personally.”

Orr-Ewing draws on lessons from the early church that perfectly describe our current economic moment. There was a: denial (of reality), a betrayal (of God), and a deception involving money and power. She is right about the cultural reckoning, to which I would add, the coming economic reckoning (inflation bubble), that is also characterized by denial, betrayal, and deception.

The world’s central banks are behind the current inflation bubble but you would not guess that from listening to officialdom.

In Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy, Gregory Collins discusses Burke’s An Account of the European Settlements in America which is relevant to our discussion. Burke highlights a delicious irony, “No country in Europe receives such vast treasures as Spain. In no country in Europe is seen so little money.”

Collins traces this illusion to the fact that “Spain was not affluent by virtue of its collection of gold and silver as a result of military conflict. The false splendor of metals masked the true poverty of nations.”

Similarly, the true poverty of economies across the world is being masked by an inflated money supply (GDP numbers in economic reports), and press conferences.

Even the Fed is starting to change its tune, admitting that the higher prices are indeed permanent, but the rate of inflation is “transitory”. (It’s hard to keep up with their delusions.) In Thoughts on the Present

Discontents, Burke writes, “It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of Government.

It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect.” So, to be clear, the government does have a role to play; but our best bet is in sound markets and morality.

Unless our philosophers in action recognise and address these two fundamental problems, the economic and related social fallout will continue unabated:

(1) elected officials (that would be you) passing the buck to unelected officials in central banks, other institutions (daresay countries);

(2) leaning too heavily on a discipline that is disconnected from reality due to its glaring epistemological problem. If you (still) think these are abstract problems, take a look at your food and gas bill.

Which brings us to the implications of Burke’s economic thought for today. Collins writes, “Market liberty is integral for material affluence and commercial virtue, but religion and morality are even more indispensable for civil order and social progress.” He quotes Burke’s Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace (which applies to Bim): “Better this Island should be sunk to the bottom of the sea, than that it should not be a country of Religion and Morals.”

Markets divorced from morality will quickly descend into mayhem and morass. Although Burke praised the spirit of commercial enterprise, he also acknowledged its limits. Burke’s primary lessons for modernity, Collins concludes, is this: “We should make sure that the temptation for gain in the commercial economy does not overwhelm our deeper social obligations to our fellow neighbour.”

So that while Burke passionately defended the laws of supply and demand he had no problem violating them “by offering high-quality bread to the poor in his neighbourhood below the going rate, thereby making markets obedient to charity, and calculation to grace.”

Free enterprise must not be unchecked and cannot be divorced from, to borrow a phrase from O. Carter Snead (What It Means to Be Human), “the network of giving and receiving on which the vulnerable depend.”

Two of the most important chapters in James Otteson’s Seven Deadly Economic Sins are, “Wealth Is Positive Sum” and “Markets Are Not Perfect”. Concerning the latter Otteson writes, “They do not meet every need or desire, they do not have only good effects, they do not solve all problems, and their features of private property rights, negotiation, echange, cost–benefit analysis, and voluntary consent are not appropriate in all areas of human life.”

However, we should not let their imperfections detract us from the disastrous attempts to build Communist and Socialist Utopias on earth. As Walter E. Williams reminded us in, Are Academic Elites Communists?: “The very attempt to achieve the utopian goals of communism requires the ruthless suppression of the individual and an attack on any institution that might compromise the loyalty of the individual to the state.” He ends, “That’s why one of the first orders of business for communism, and those who support its ideas, is the attack on religion and the family.”

We also do well to remember what Mr. Williams said elsewhere, “Liberty and democracy are not synonymous and could actually be opposites.” This also, daresay especially, applies in the economic sphere.

Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on social issues. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.