Starting or Avoiding a Depression?

Our economy is in shambles but it is not as bad as it was in the Great Depression, yet. But if government makes the wrong moves, a depression like the 20's and 30's is still possible as this article from Kairos Journal makes clear.

The Great Depression of the 1930s—A Lesson in What Not to Do

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a nightmare:

Some 13 million Americans were unemployed, “not wanted” in the production process. One worker out of every four was walking the streets in want and despair. Thousands of banks, . . . thousands of businesses, and millions of farmers fell into bankruptcy or ceased operations entirely. Nearly everyone suffered painful losses of wealth and income.¹

And as the American economy spiralled downwards, it took the countries of the developed or semi-developed world down too—from Latin America, to Europe, to Australia and India.²

Many declare this economic collapse a failure of capitalism, but the claim will not hold water.³ As the “Austrian School” of economists have taught, it is only if governments interfere with or obstruct the self-regulating mechanisms of free and open markets that the conditions obtain for severe economic depressions. The economic history of the 1920s and ’30s provides a textbook example of the truth.⁴ Whilst the causes of the Great Depression are complex and many-sided,⁵ two culprits stand out: (1) government mismanagement of the monetary system; (2) government-imposed tariffs, taxes, price controls, and other regulations and restrictions, with their destructive impact on domestic and international trade.⁶

The “rot” began in the 1920s when, in an attempt to overcome a business downturn,⁷ the Coolidge administration recklessly expanded credit, rapidly increasing the money supply and slashing interest rates. At first, the effect seemed only positive—a burst of prosperity known as “the Roaring 20s.” But the consequences for the American economy were dire. The artificially low cost of loans led to a huge increase in farm and urban mortgages (and hence rising real estate prices); encouraged over-investment in capital goods (such as new factories), which inevitably distorted the production structure of American industry; and fuelled a stock-market boom.

The Federal Reserve moved to rein in the inflation it had caused, but when they cut the money supply and raised interest rates at the beginning of 1929, the stack of cards came tumbling down—business activity receded, bankruptcies and unemployment within the over-expanded capital goods industries began to soar, stock prices began to fall; then, in a final burst of panic selling, Wall Street crashed in October 1929.⁸

This slump, although bad, might have soon been corrected if prices had been allowed to adjust naturally downward. The real tragedy of the 1930s, however, lies in what followed—a catalogue of government disasters. The 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which practically closed American borders to foreign goods, was arguably the crowning folly. It generated unemployment in the export industries of all America’s trading partners; tit-for-tat protectionism ran wild all over the world; world trade contracted sharply;⁹ commodity prices (including those in agriculture) plummeted.¹⁰ As debt-laden American farmers ran into trouble in late 1931 and early 1932, they pulled down 2000 rural banks, wiping out the savings of other bank customers, causing more businesses to collapse. And at this point the Hoover administration chose to double income tax! Small wonder that unemployment rose inexorably throughout the 1930s.

The Great Depression, then, was not so much a failure of capitalism as a failure of government. Many have found it convenient to blame “big business,” but convenience has never been a trustworthy path to truth.

Footnotes:

1	Hans Sennholz, “The Great Depression: State-Caused Chaos,” The Freeman, April 1975, 204.
2	For a good description of the Depression throughout the world see W. Arthur Lewis, Economic Survey 1919-1939 (London: Unwin University Books, 1949).
3	“The causes of the present world depression lie deep down in the capitalist system.” These words were written by two famous British socialists, Ernest Bevin and G. D. H. Cole, in 1931, in their book, The Crisis, (London: The New Statesman and Nation, 1931), 43.
4	See also Kairos Journal articles, "What Causes Economic Depressions?" & "The Forgotten Forgotten Man."
5	Including, for example, severe drought in the American “Dust Bowl.”
6	For a detailed history of the political and economic causes of the Great Depression, see the relevant chapters in: Benjamin McAlester Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1965). See also Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 3rd ed.(Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1975), and Clarence B. Carson, “The Welfare State 1929-1985,” in A Basic History of the United States, vol. 5 (Wadley, AL: American Textbook Committee, 1986), chapters 1-4.
7	Which had itself largely been caused by protectionist trade policies—the 1921 Emergency Tariff Act imposed high import duties on a large variety of agricultural products, and the 1922 Fordeny-McCumber Tariff Act raised the import rates on many manufactured goods 100% or more. This meant America’s trading partners lacked the financial ability to buy American exports. See Hans Sennholz, The Great Depression: Will We Repeat It? (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1993).
8	The Austrian economist, Professor von Mises, has summarised this process as follows: “The attempts to lower interest rates by credit expansion generate, it is true, a period of booming business. But the prosperity thus created is only an artificial hot-house product and must inexorably lead to the slump and to the depression.” Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1974), 27.
9	Even if countries did not take retaliatory action against America, without being able to sell their exports they were unable to afford American goods. American exports hence fell from $5.5 billion in 1929 to $1.7 billion in 1932. Sennholz (1975), 208.
10	They had been well above the 1926 base (100) before the crisis, but fell to a low of 47 in summer 1932. Ibid.

Changing a City's Culture from Violence to Peace

Whether it is listening to the testimonies of people who have come to faith before a baptism service or reading the biographies of people, it is thrilling to hear the stories of changed lives leading to changed families, work spaces and culture. Here's another one of those kind of stories. the source is Kairos Journal.

Misery to Hope; Through the Church!—Rodney Stark (1934 – )

Leading sociologist of religion and professor at both the University of Washington and Baylor University, Rodney Stark, has written a number of important books on Christianity and culture. In The Rise of Christianity (1997), Stark describes how, in the first few centuries A.D., Christianity grew from being an obscure Jewish sect, to becoming the dominant ideology in the West. One major reason was the impact of the church’s life. Amid the chaos of cities like Antioch, in what is now Turkey, the Church was a glorious force for urban renewal. Acts 11:26 reports that it was at Antioch that believers were first called Christians, which literally means “little Christs.” Stark’s research shows that long after that first designation the Christians continued to live up to their name by letting their good works speak for themselves.

[Antioch was] a city filled with misery, danger, fear, despair, and hatred. A city where the average family lived a squalid life in filthy and cramped quarters, where at least half of the children died at birth or during infancy, and where most of the children who lived lost at least one parent before reaching maturity. A city filled with hatred and fear rooted in intense ethnic antagonisms and exacerbated by a constant stream of strangers. A city so lacking in stable networks of attachments that petty incidents could prompt mob violence. A city where crime flourished and the streets were dangerous at night. And, perhaps above all, a city repeatedly smashed by cataclysmic catastrophes: where a resident could literally expect to be homeless from time to time, providing that he or she was among the survivors . . .

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationship able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.1

^{1. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 160-161.}

The Deindustrialization of America and Its Threat

Here's a link to a new article on what is happening to our economy. it is called "19 Facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind. Read it. Pray for the nation and think about how you can raise children to make a difference.

"19 Facts about the Deindustrialization of America that Will Blow Your Mind"

How Did First Century Jews View Abortion?

Another election is approaching. Another year rolls away from 1973 when we as a nation began the wholesale devaluation of life created in the image and likeness of God. And as another year and election comes, we have the opportunity to repent of our wickedness and turn to a God who will forgive. Abortion is collecting weight on our entire culture for the judgment of God if we do not repent and end this practice. Here's more to fuel you preaching and thinking.

Pastors, begin to pray and think now about how you will preach on Right to Life Sunday in January. Readers, begin to pray now and repent now for your inactivity and apathy toward the greatest moral issue of our age in the country you call your own. Source: Kairos Journal

Abortion and the Early Jewish World¹ (50 B.C. – c. 100 A.D)

Steeped in the Noahic covenant and the Sinaitic law, early Jewish communities viewed abortion as evil. The former text warned, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6 ESV). The latter insisted, “You shall not murder” (Exod. 20:13 ESV). And though contemporary abortion enthusiasts try to appropriate Exodus 21:22-25 to excuse their killing, Moses’ hearers and early interpreters would have found such reading absurd. Indeed, abortion on demand was “very likely not even contemplated in the Mishnaic law,”² much less approved.

Accordingly, Jewish scholars in ancient and classic times were adamantly opposed to abortion. Though influenced by Greek philosophy, Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C. - 41 A.D.) held the following:

If a man comes to blows with a pregnant woman and strikes her on the belly and she miscarries, then, if the result of the miscarriage is unshaped and undeveloped, he must be fined both for the outrage and for obstructing the artist Nature in her creative work of bringing into life the fairest of living creatures, man. But, if the offspring is already shaped and all the limbs have their proper qualities and places in the system, he must die, for that which answers to this description is a human being, which he has destroyed in the laboratory of Nature who judges that the hour has not yet come for bringing it out into the light, like a statue lying in a studio requiring nothing more than to be conveyed outside and released from confinement (Special Laws 3).³

Also influential among Jews in Alexandria was the Sentences of Psuedo-Phocylides, a collection of ethical injunctions for daily life written sometime between 50 B.C. and 50 A.D.:

A woman should not destroy the unborn babe in her belly, nor after birth throw it before the dogs and vultures as a prey.⁴

Similarly, the apocalyptic Sibylline Oracles (first century B.C.), included among those who would suffer God’s wrath (with sorcerers, adulterers, and thieves) women of this description:

Having burdens in the womb [they] produce abortions; and their offspring [are] cast unlawfully away.⁵

Palestinian Jews had even stricter guides. In his apology for Judaism, Against Apion, historian Josephus (c. 37 – c. 100 A.D.) said:

The Law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the foetus; a woman convicted of this is regarded as an infanticide, because she destroys a soul and diminishes the race (Apion 2.202).⁶

With this cultural backdrop, it is easy to see why the New Testament made no mention of abortion; its sinfulness was obvious to followers of Jesus.

Footnotes

1. The following quotes are gleaned from Michael J. Gorman, Abortion & the Early Church: Christian, Jewish, and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982).

2. David Feldman, Birth Control in Jewish Law (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998), 284.

3. Gorman, 36.

4. Ibid., 37.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 43

Is the ADHD "epidemic" a Myth?

I would love to hear from teachers on what they think about this video. I saw it about a year ago and recently it was sent to me by a friend. What do teachers think about this perspective?

The Absurdity of President Obama's Jobs Plan

"Mr. President, your jobs bill doesn't make sense."

This is simple math. You don't have to be Republican (I'm not), Democrat (I'm not), a Tea Partier, a Green, or a Marxist (I'm none of those either). Just divide the number of jobs the new taxes are supposedly going to produce into the cost.

Last Thursday night, the President said that his so-called American Jobs Act would cost $447 billion dollars and would create 1.9 million American jobs. When you do the math it works out to $235,263 per job!

If this would work, why wouldn't we create four times as many jobs and pay people $50,000 per job directly? Do they think that American education is that bad that we can't do the math?

Cold Hard Reality to Cut Through the Media and Political Doublespeak

Vote for whoever you want. All of the candidates are flawed and have had their share of gaffs. But the Governor from Texas, this Rick Perry fellow, was absolutely right in calling the present social security system a Ponzi scheme.

"When Social Security began making monthly distributions in 1940, there were 160 workers for every senior receiving benefits. In 1950, there were 16.5; today, three; in 20 years, there will be but two." ---Charles Krauthammer

Again:

• 1940 = 160 workers for every senior receiving benefits
• 1950 = 16.5 workers for every senior receiving benefits
• 2011 = 3 workers for every senior receiving benefits
• 2031 = 2 workers for every senior receiving benefits

How is this not a Ponzi scheme? See Krauthammer's article here.

Marching Toward the Oblivion of the West

Here's a controversial post that shouldn't be. It will be controversial because it goes against the media literati and the liberal politics of our educational institutions. And while some might quibble about some of the particulars, the overall picture seems to be accurate. Source: Kairos Journal.

The Long March

Smoke was still rising from the ruins of the Twin Towers when liberal icon and prolific writer Susan Sontag wrote, “Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack . . . undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” These words soon appeared in print,¹ prompting columnist Andrew Sullivan to create the Sontag Award for outstanding examples of “[g]lib moral equivalence in the war on terror.”²

Sontag and her cronies had been at it a long time, draining the spiritual and moral capital of America. Roger Kimball, New Criterion editor and London Spectator art critic, compared Sontag’s America to Phineas P. Gage, whose brain was damaged in a drilling accident in 1848.³

Miraculously, his “intellectual powers were unimpaired; but . . . his ‘moral center’ had been destroyed. Before the accident, Gage ‘had been an intelligent, socially responsible, hard-working fellow . . . But in the weeks after the tamping rod pierced his brain, he began using profane language, lied to his friends and could not be trusted to honor his commitments.”⁴

By Kimball’s account, a moral meltdown in the West began in the 1960s. Though student radicals of that day dreamed of immediate revolution, they had to settle for the “long march through the institutions,”⁵ which Herbert Marcuse characterized as “working against the established institutions while working in them.”⁶ They would use “insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation. . .”⁷ To see that they have succeeded,

[Y]ou need look no further than the curriculum of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest museum or so-called “public” radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the counterculture.⁸

Kimball traced the roots of this “antinomian hedonism” from Rousseau through the Beat Generation to Manhattan literati and the Ivy League. Among those earning special credit were:

1. Allen Ginsberg, whose poem “Howl” glorified drugs, madness, and promiscuous sex.⁹
2. Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road presented mindless writing as “spontaneous prose.”¹⁰
3. William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), who proclaimed, “I’m violently anti-Christian.”¹¹
4. Norman Mailer, whose “macho, adolescent radicalism” promoted “moral nihilism.”¹²
5. Susan Sontag, who praised the “transcendence” of “the pornographic imagination.”¹³
6. James Perkins, who as president of Cornell, pandered and capitulated to campus radicals.¹⁴
7. Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who lent “the appearance of ecclesiastical gravitas to the Movement.”¹⁵
8. Psychiatrist Willhelm Reich, who preached unbridled sex as the answer to most every problem.¹⁶
9. Paul Goodman, who mocked conventional morality in Growing Up Absurd.¹⁷
10. Norman O. Brown, who fought sexual “repression” in Love’s Body.¹⁸
11. Herbert Marcuse, who yearned for “the fall of the capitalist superpower.”¹⁹
12. Charles Reich, whose The Greening of America was an assault on rationality.²⁰
13. Harvard’s Timothy Leary, who infamously counseled, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”²¹
14. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice), who called rape an “insurrectionary act.”²²

Ancient history? No, required reading and received wisdom in the minds of Western cultural elites. The long march is well under way, and unless the Church is willing to engage in extended cultural combat, the enemy will reign unopposed.

Footnotes:

1	Susan Sontag, “Talk About Town,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 32.
2	Andrew Sullivan, “The Sontag Award,” www.andrewsullivan.com Website, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/info.php?artnum=00awards.
3	Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 3-4.
4	Sandra Blakeslee, “Old Accident Points to Brain’s Moral Center,” The New York Times, May 24, 1994, C1, C14, cited in Ibid., 4.
5	The expression, drawn from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and Mao Tse Tung was popularized by German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke. See Ibid., 14-15.
6	Ibid., 15.
7	Ibid.
8	Ibid.
9	Ibid., 51.
10	Ibid., 49. Kerouac’s literary manifesto is found in “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1953), which counsels, “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup till satisfaction is gained . . .”
11	Ibid., 56.
12	Ibid., 62, 77.
13	Ibid., 89-91.
14	Ibid., 112-118.
15	Ibid., 133.
16	Ibid., 152-157.
17	Ibid., 157-161.
18	Ibid., 162-166.
19	Ibid., 166-172.
20	Ibid., 176-191.
21	Ibid, 197-204.
22	Ibid., 218-219.

US Courts Have "No Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction"

Increasingly, our public life is becoming more and more hostile toward Christians and Christian engagement in the public sphere. But such hostility toward the church and juridical interference with church polity and practice has never been the norm in the USA. The following quotes from earlier courts makes this clear. Pray that such understandings would not become a thing of the past. Source: Kairos Journal

“No Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction”—The U.S. Courts on Church Discipline

A number of churches have recently found themselves on trial for the practice of biblical church discipline, which some courts in the last few years have found is a violation of the rights of the person disciplined. If that is the direction American jurisprudence takes, it will be a new one. Throughout the history of the American republic, civil courts have denied that they have any jurisdiction over ecclesial decisions of local churches. Here is a small collection of opinions on the matter handed down by America’s judges over the past 150 years.

This Court, having no ecclesiastical jurisdiction, cannot revise or question ordinary acts of church discipline or excision . . . We cannot decide who ought to be members of the church, nor whether the excommunicated have been justly or unjustly, regularly or irregularly cut off from the body of the church.

We must take the fact of expulsion as conclusive proof that the persons expelled are not now members of the repudiating church; for, whether right or wrong, the act of excommunication must, as to the fact of membership, be law to this Court.¹

— Chief Justice George Robertson, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 1842

The right to organize voluntary religious associations . . . and to create tribunals for the decision of controverted questions of faith within the association . . . is unquestioned. All who unite themselves to such a body do so with an implied consent to this government, and are bound to submit to it. But it would be a vain consent and would lead to the total subversion of such religious bodies, if any one aggrieved by one of their decisions could appeal to the secular courts and have them reversed . . .

The judicial eye cannot penetrate the veil of the church for the forbidden purpose of vindicating the alleged wrongs of excised members; when they became members they did so upon the condition of continuing or not as they and their churches might determine, and they thereby submit to the ecclesiastical power and cannot now invoke the supervisory power of the civil tribunals.²

— Justice Samuel Miller, Supreme Court of the United States, 1871

Civil Courts deal only with civil and property rights. They have in this country no ecclesiastical jurisdiction . . . [H]ere we have a fact to be dealt with—the fact that this church, sitting as a court, has determined for itself that it had the power and the right to exclude these complainants. They have, as a judicature, adjudged that they had the jurisdiction, and that the usage and law of the church did not demand other trial or notice than such as attended the public action of the church. The law of the church provides for no appeal to a higher tribunal. They may have erred in their procedure. It is not for a civil Court to revise their action in a matter so vital to their freedom as a church.³

— Justice Horace Lurton, Supreme Court of Tennessee, 1891

It seems to be settled law in this land of religious liberty that the civil courts have no power or jurisdiction to determine the regularity or validity of the judgment of a church tribunal expelling a member from further communion and fellowship in the church.⁴

— Judge C. J. Pleasants, Court of Appeals of Texas, 1927

Ecclesiastical immunity would be an empty protection if a disgruntled member, denied the chance to sue the religious body [because of the First Amendment], sued instead the members of the religious body who disciplined him. If disciplined members were able to sue the members of the church, as opposed to the church itself, there would be an inappropriate chilling effect on the ability of churches to discipline their members.⁵

— Justice Joe L. Draughn, Court of Appeals of Texas, Fourteenth District, 2000

The principal question in this appeal is whether we have subject matter jurisdiction to decide an ecclesiastical dispute. We find we do not.⁶

— Justice Joe L. Draughn, Court of Appeals of Texas, Fourteenth District, 2000

Footnotes:

1	Shannon v. Frost, 42 Ky. 253 (1842)
2	Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 679, 728-29 (1871)
3	Nance v. Busby, 91 Tenn. 303; 18 S.W. 874 (1891)
4	Minton v. Leavell, 297 S.W. 615 (1927)
5	Williams v. Gleason, 26 S.W.3d 54 (2000)
6	Ibid.

Ammunition for Defending the Sanctity of Life

Source: Kairos Journal

The defense of the sanctity of human life is an issue we simply can't let become a "back-burner" issue. Every quality of a civilized society is at risk on the fringes of this issue. With that in mind, here is more ammunition for your defense of human dignity and life.

Protecting the “weakest and most vulnerable of human beings”—Gilbert Meilaender (1946 – )

Gilbert Meilaender¹ is professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso University, Indiana, and was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. In a personal statement appended to the July 2002 report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry,² Professor Meilaender raises the important issue of protecting human life in its most vulnerable stage:

A number of Council Members, of whom I am one, hold that the human embryo is fully deserving of our moral respect and that such respect is incompatible with its deliberate destruction in research . . . We have taken seriously what the science of embryology teaches us. We have taken seriously what careful philosophical reasoning about the meaning of “potentiality” teaches us. We have taken seriously the lessons of human history in which the limits of our sympathy for fellow human beings who seem “different” from us have more than once had to be overcome in order to learn a more inclusive and egalitarian respect for human life. This does not mean, for me at least, that religious belief should play no role here. On the contrary, Jews worship a Lord who favors the widow and the orphan, who teaches us to speak on behalf of those no one else defends. And Christians worship a crucified God who has himself accepted vulnerability. Instructed by our religious traditions, we may see in the weakest and most vulnerable of human beings—those unable to speak in their own behalf—special objects of our care. Such care for the vulnerable seems to me incompatible with an industry of routine manufacture, use, and destruction of cloned embryos—even if the goal is to help others who are also vulnerable.³

Footnotes:

1	Readers should be aware that Professor Meilaender does not hold that embryos earlier than 14 days post-conception qualify as “early human life.” See Gilbert Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 30-31. This does not represent the KJ position, but we offer the above quotation because of its perceptiveness.
2	The President's Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry,Washington D.C., July 2002, http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/cloningreport/index.html (accessed April 04, 2004).
3	Gilbert Meilaender, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry; Appendix: Gilbert Meilaender, Washington D.C., July 2002, http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/cloningreport/appendix.html#george (accessed April 04, 2004).

A Nazi Fighter Paves a Path for Our Budget Crisis

Economic ideas are in the news; they are hot topic issues. With the budget crisis, a volitile stock market, continuing unemployment of millions of able bodied men and women willing to work, and a growing national debt, sometimes it is hard to sort it all out. It is good in these times to look at history and learn. Here's one of those looks back that can illumine our present path. The source is Kairos Journal.

Wilhelm Röpke: An Economist against the Tide (1899 – 1966)

Scholars are eager to burnish their resumes with the names of learned societies, but Wilhelm Röpke placed little value on peer approval. So when the International Political Science Association invited him to join their ranks, he declined, refusing to connect his name with a body which accepted academic “stooges” from Communist countries. He explained:

For more than a quarter of a century I have devoted all my strength to the struggle against the plague of our time which is totalitarianism in all its forms and colours, brown or red, and you know that in this struggle I have not hesitated to expose myself to the greatest dangers and to prefer exile and the abandonment of my career to submission.¹

At age 24, Röpke was appointed the youngest university professor in the German-speaking world. He became an economic advisor to the Weimar Republic during the 1920s and early ’30s and was also a well-known and prolific writer and lecturer. With his Nordic good looks, Röpke could have exploited the opportunities afforded by the rise of Nazism, but he chose, instead, the path of opposition and resistance, denouncing the totalitarian currents of his age and affirming the need to rediscover the vanishing liberal heritage of Western civilization.

After publicly attacking the Nazi regime in a lecture at Frankfurt in 1933, Röpke became the first academic to leave Germany in protest against Hitler. Subsequently, at the invitation of Kemal Ataturk, the ruler of Turkey, he became an economics professor at the University of Istanbul until 1937, after which he joined the distinguished Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he continued to teach until his early death in 1966.

Röpke’s outspoken and courageous opposition to all forms of collectivism was honoured (in their own way) by his foes as well as his friends. The Nazis put him on their blacklist and banned his book, The Social Crisis of Our Time² but not, fortunately, before several hundred copies had been distributed in Germany. To the Communists, Röpke was an equally dangerous enemy. An East German encyclopaedia described him as “an especially shrewd and therefore especially dangerous representative of the modern bourgeois point of view.”³

As well as being an enemy of totalitarian socialism, Röpke was also a trenchant critic of the New Deal and the welfare-state planned economy championed by John Maynard Keynes and other contemporary British and American economists. His unfashionable belief that post-war economic recovery required personal independence, deregulation, greater reliance on markets and free enterprise, and a non-inflationary monetary policy, was triumphantly vindicated in West Germany by the successful adoption of his policies by his friend, Ludwig Erhard, economics minister under Chancellor Adenauer. As Erhard put it, he devoured Röpke’s books “like the desert the life-giving water,”⁴ a tribute echoed by other leading post-war European public figures.

What can 21st century Christians learn from Röpke’s life and work? The answer is encapsulated in his last and greatest book, A Humane Economy.⁵ It not only reveals a life passionately dedicated to the pursuit of truth; it also sets out a comprehensive social philosophy which insists on the need to resist materialism and cultural degradation by anchoring freedom in the pursuit of goodness and excellence, without which freedom has no value or purpose.

Footnotes:

1	Wilhelm Röpke, Against the Tide (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969), xi.
2	Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
3	Röpke, Against the Tide, xi.
4	Ibid., ix.
5	A Humane Economy (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960).