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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded Opinion" pages. We invite you to browse our index of outstanding gold-based commentary. Each article or essay is selected on the basis of its long-term relevance for understanding the role gold plays in the individual's portfolio, the overall political economy, or both.

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Christianity and Capitalism in History

by Otto Scott

Editor's Note: A good many of our clientele are practicing Christians and it is with great pleasure that The Gilded Opinion presents the following important essay. Though many or our clientele are practicing Christians, only a handful have been introduced to the philosophical connections between their religious philosophy and its application in the economic sphere. This essay provides the first chapters of that historical background.

Otto Scott, now eighty-three years old, has been a superlative commentator on the American scene for decades. In the process, he has garnered a large and thoughtful audience throughout the world. He is an Associate Scholar for the American Council on Economics and Society, and a member of the Council on National Policy, Philadelphia Society, Committee for Monetary Research and Education, the Author's Guild, and the Overseas Press Club. He is the recipient of the George Washington Medal from the Freedom Foundation (1976) and the John Newman Edwards Media Award (1994).

Long before the mainstream press, even in its highest intellectual echelons, had embraced the importance of Woodrow Wilson's administration with respect to the modern geopolitics, Mr. Scott had published from his unique perspective a lengthy, and less than flattering, portrayal of Wilson's presidency and enlightened us all as to the man and his politics and the thinking which now underlies the modern state and international economic integration. Now Mr. Scott has switched his focus to the connectivity of Christian philosophy -- as it has evolved over the centuries -- and capitalism, and how the two have squared off against secular humanism and the rise of socialism. What you are about to read is the first installment in what I am sure will be an important and interesting series of essays.

Says Scott: "In reviewing Christian civilization, it becomes clear that only Christianity fosters individual freedom and limited government. From the Renaissance until today the secular humanist intellectuals have campaigned against Christianity and against any limits upon governmental power. That campaign has taken a variety of forms. In our time it argues from economic premises, and claims to be animated by a belief in equality of condition for all. Yet in the lands where humanistic socialism (under many names) has triumphed, there is not only no equality, but greater inequalities than ever before. Human rights do not exist, and are not recognized in the People's Republic of China, in Communist-dominated Cambodia, Cuba, and the Marxist states of Africa. [That] the Christian religion is held to be dangerous in all these nations' power over others emerges with dreadful clarity."

As stated in his biographical sketch, "Otto Scott is one of a great many Americans who are well-known to a special audience, but unknown to the nation at large. He is, in this respect, not unusual, though he writes and says much that is quite unusual. This has earned him a reputation and respect as an original thinker -- a pioneer of ideas and concepts."

I have read Otto Scott's "The Compass" newsletter for a good many years and look forward to it each month. He has helped shape my thinking on a wide range of issues and problems on the American scene. I particularly appreciate the way he brings out the human aspect in his historical analysis. He is a long-standing advocate of gold ownership. I strongly recommend a subscription. He truly is as his biography states "an escape from the trivial." --Michael Kosares

Christianity and Capitalism in History

In a struggle, which is the oldest in human history, the humanists have had what appears to have been the longest period of triumph. This period, as traced by Karl A. Wittfogel1 and Igor Shafarevich,2 began with and encompassed the ancient world.

That world, whose origins are described by historians as "prehistory," was marked by centuries of arbitrary power in which the state (or government), assumed the power of God over human beings. This despotic arrogance marked the civilization of China, Babylon and its predecessors, ancient Egypt, and the civilizations of the Yucatan and Peru.

The great exception to those bloody regimes, which conscripted the labor of millions in order to erect such monumental works as the Pyramids and huge temples (where the ruler's image sat among the gods), was ancient Israel -- a small nation surrounded by larger powers. It was Israel's remarkable destiny to be chosen by God. The Bible tells us how the Israelites received the Revelations of God through His Prophets, and how their behavior was held to a standard far different from that which prevailed in the rest of the ancient world.

While in Israel religion was lifted from barbarism, the Greeks introduced the class system by which despotism from the top was tempered and limited by the rise of group and individual authority. The Greek political experiments, however, eventually declined into tyrannies. Their society, based upon slavery and conquest, fell through internal corruption and syncretism.

The Greek sequence was followed by the Romans, whose final centuries were marked by a vicious decadence.

It was Christianity which saved the advances and knowledge of the ancient world from complete oblivion. And it was Christianity which introduced a saving compassion and a belief in liberty for all humanity, which resulted in the rise of a new civilization to which we are today the heirs.

Within a relatively short time (as history is judged) members of the new Christian civilization cleared the forests of Europe, subjugated its wild animals, created first trading centers and then towns and cities, and erected a variegated tapestry of different cultures from the teeming hordes of pagan tribes. The Middle Ages saw the peoples of Europe progress -- in terms of rights, individual pursuits, and prosperity -- far beyond anything that the citizens of the Roman or previous empires ever knew. By the period A.D. 1000 to 1200, the landscapes of Europe were dotted with cathedrals, churches, monasteries, convents, palaces and cities, professions and trades, and local governments that created unprecedented wealth and variety.

During this period, known to traditional historians as the Ages of Faith, international Christianity was linked by the Latin language, the use of the bezant of Byzantium (a gold coin of uniform weight and excellence), the supranational rule of the Church, and a common faith. During these long centuries the majority of intellectuals were clerics. And although they centered the attention of the church upon the condition of the poor and the unfortunate, "and performed all the functions which have now devolved on the welfare state: feeding the destitute, healing the sick, educating the people,"3 they could provide these free services only because of gifts and benefices, "vigorously pressed for."

Commerce, however, slowly spread across the face of Europe, and great international merchant ventures were launched, stretching from the Hanseatic to the Mediterranean. And although mediaeval wealth came largely from the land, and was held by family dynasties that did not search to make productive investments, "it is worthy of notice that the modern use of profit, expansion from retained earnings, arose and was systematized in the monasteries; the saintly men who ran them saw nothing wrong in extending their holdings and putting new lands under cultivation, in erecting better buildings, and in employing an everincreasing number of people. They are the true original of the nonconsuming, ascetic type of capitalist."4 Berdyaev observed that "asceticism played a capital part in the development of capitalism; it is a condition of reinvestment."5

As Europe grew more prosperous and the church richer, however, what Jouvenal termed "the secular intellectual" and we today term the "secular humanist," began to appear. Starting first as king's lawyers, then as clerks and entertainers (which included the nonreligious literati, balladeers, troubadours, poets, and traveling scholars), they gradually rose to positions of influence near the prince (a term then meaning "ruler"). "Servants of the temporal power," said Jouvenal in his remarkable essay, "started from the simple fact that the wealth of the church was least amenable to tax; they moved by degrees to the idea that property was more productive in private hands. . . ."

These secular humanist intellectuals, unlike the friars who lived like the poor, were friends of the rich and the mighty. In many areas they were indifferent to the poor (though not to the merchant). In Italy they encouraged the prince to believe that he -- instead of the church -- should be responsible for the poor, the sick, and the society in general. This led to the rise of the Renaissance despots, who gathered the reins of all power in their hands -- including appointments in the church.

In the Renaissance (a period greatly admired by modern secular humanists), some merchants rose to become princes. Among these the most spectacular were the de Medicis, who started as pawnbrokers (the three-ball sign of that trade is their bequest), some of whom became rulers and even popes.

In this period, ancient hard-won rights, based upon the Christian belief that all men are limited and that none should have sovereign power over others, faded from remembrance except for those who remained in the spiritual life, and those whose faith was unshakable. Inspired by Luther first and then Calvin, these Reformers altered the idea of work from punishment to a form of worship: from labor to dedication. This was the monastic approach, but the Reformers opened the walls of the monasteries and expanded monastic ideals to include everyone in society, on all levels.

In other words, Christian intellectuals appeared to form teams with Christian merchants. Together they created modern capitalism. This thesis, first propounded by German sociologist Max Weber, has been repeatedly and savagely attacked by anti-Christians ever since it first appeared, early in this century. But it is now generally accepted, by even the most biased, that religion is "creative in forms of social life and organization."6

Calvinism which "was like a baptism of the secular world," as Chadwick put it, "turned Christian energy . . . away from the still and contemplative towards action. . . . Religion centered upon ritual veered towards religion centered upon ethic."7

Despite its revival of the Christian spirit, the Reformation did not succeed in reforming all Europe. The new Protestant nations of the north, including Scotland, Holland, and England, prospered but were opposed by great, ancient Catholic powers that retained the old structures and attitudes. These were led in the West by Spain, whose New World wealth covered its domestic economic disabilities. Spain's power was buttressed by the riches of the Vatican, which excoriated the pursuit of wealth, as of old, while extracting huge sums from the wealthy.

Overall, moreover, secular humanist intellectuals continued to play an important role in all Western societies. In the period from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century the wealth of the traditional church was largely transferred to private and governmental hands through far-reaching confiscations -- a process in which the secular humanist intellectuals played a leading role. "Until the late eighteenth century," said Jouvenal, "the secular intelligentsia was not numerous; its average intellectual level was . . . high . . . its members were educated in ecclesiastical schools."8

Their attitude toward the poor, through the eighteenth century, was one of indifference. Unlike their clerical predecessors in the Middle Ages, they believed that beggars should be rounded up and forced to work. Like their predecessors in the Renaissance, they admired wealth and power, and sought the favors of their possessors. This was true even in Revolutionary France, where bankers like Necker in the 1780s and Lafitte in 1830 had friends among the intelligentsia.

After the Napoleonic wars, however, Europe became aware that England was pioneering a new and spectacular advance. This had started generations earlier in large part because of the revitalizing impact of the Reformation. The pace of these improvements was intermittently interrupted by political and other crises, but was sufficiently advanced to evoke the observations of Adam Smith by the 1780s at the same time that France was destroying its substance in search of abstractions.

One result was a dramatic increase in the English population, due not so much to longer lives as to lesser deaths. A corresponding increase in schools, in business ventures, and in the numbers of those with special skills was a concomitant phenomenon. What the world somewhat misleadingly calls the Industrial Revolution (a phrase coined by French writers of the late eighteenth century) was underway -- and proceeded a considerable distance before it was noticed.

The changes it introduced did not meet with universal approval, especially in the landowning upper and middle classes. They deplored the smoking factories, the crowds that flocked to towns to take factory and mill positions, the rise of rich entrepreneurs from lower levels who had no claims to noble birth or connections -- and the general disruption of entrenched privilege. Secular humanist intellectuals were conspicuous among those who objected to these changes, although their own ranks had been greatly increased by the increase in population and services.

One result of their dislike of industry was a spate of reports by various intellectual and political allies of the Tory landowners to the effect that the new factories were injurious rather than helpful to the poor, the dispossessed, and the unskilled. It was charged that women and children were especially ill-treated by mill-owners and the plight of the handloom operators, whose skills were made obsolete by the introduction of machinery, was widely and loudly deplored. In the process a new, modern myth was developed -- still carried in many modern textbooks and histories -- about the presumed suffering that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.

The historical facts are far different. The Whig historians of Britain, whose ranks included Macaulay, Hallam, Grote, Lord Acton, and others, believed that industrialization marked a great advance in the human condition by introducing regular, year-round wages, workers' housing, regular conditions, a flood of new, inexpensive products within the reach of all but absolute paupers, and a general amelioration of hardships. These scholars, aware that endemic and incurable poverty had been the ordinary lot for uncounted centuries, and equally aware of England's progress between 1730 and 1830, described the new era with optimism and pride.

These assessments were soon inundated, however, by such efforts as the evidence gathered by "Sadler's Committee," in 1832. "The report of this committee, which gives us a dreary picture of cruelty, misery, disease and deformity among the factory children," is still used by liberal and Marxist historians. In reality, it was the result of an investigation headed by Sadler, who wanted to get a Ten Hours Bill passed. It was agreed he could call his favored witnesses first, and the opponents later. Instead he prematurely published the evidence he preferred, based upon testimony of witnesses who refused to take the oath (at a time when such oaths were regarded with great seriousness), and heavy with perjury and imaginary events. Sadler also used descriptions of abuses that had occurred in earlier periods in such a manner as to imply they were current, and still virulent.9

Other reports, gathered by royal commissions and committees of inquiry launched in the eighteenth century but reaching full steam in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, dealt entirely with social grievances. Such studies did not focus upon or contrast crowded factory towns with other regions untouched by industrialization, which also received massive influx, "with the resultant squalor and pauperism," occurring in countries untouched by the Industrial Revolution.10 There, waves of beggars were produced, said Jouvenal, instead of underpaid workers. He then contrasted such areas with contemporary Third World countries, leaving open the question of whether their inhabitants are better off as peasants.

By the 1840s the liberal Whig historical school was overtaken by the members of the German Historical School, who, according to F. A. Hayek, "prided themselves on the name of the 'socialist in the chair.'"11 This school, dominant in the sixty years preceding World War I, was determinedly and openly anti-capitalist. So much so, according to Hayek, that "no reproach was more feared or more fatal to academic prospects than that of being an 'apologist' of the capitalist system."

This school spawned the historical writing that was based, according to Hayek, on theories rather than observation. "Common sense," he said, "is a treacherous guide in this field, and what seems obvious explanations are often no more than commonly accepted superstitions. It may seem obvious that the introduction of machinery will produce a general reduction of the demand for labor. But persistent effort . . . shows that this belief is the result of a logical fallacy of stressing one effect of the assumed change and leaving out others."12

Nevertheless, the impact of the socialist school was heavy. Friedrich Engels, a socialistcapitalist whose own life contradicted his expressed theories, launched his The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 by saying the history of the English proletariat began with the steam engine and machinery for working cotton (!) and then described, prior to the introduction of these presumed horrors, an idyllic period when "workers vegetated through a passably comfortable existence, leading a peaceful and righteous life in all piety and probity. . . . [T]hey did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed . . . their children grew up in fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally. . . ."13

These distortions of historical fact have become imbedded in popular mythology. "The remarkable thing about this socialist interpretation of history," said F. A. Hayek, the Nobel laureate in economics, "is that most of the assertions to which it has given the status of 'facts which everybody knows' have long been proved not to have been facts at all; yet they still continue, outside the ranks of professional economic historians, to be almost universally accepted as the basis for the estimate of the existing economic order." (Emphasis added)

L. M. Hacker, however, said that "Marx is not only wrong, but has brought incalculable suffering to the world." In Marx's theory all challenges were related to the forces of production. Everything else -- morality, law, art, social relations -- was "superstructure." Therefore, control of the tools of production was all that was important: everything else in civilization could be swept aside.

The early socialists followed this line of reasoning to the letter. Being mostly secular humanist intellectuals, they sought to reduce the rise of entrepreneurs by regulation, and credited regulations with the improvements introduced by industrialization. Changes in hours and conditions, mandated by government at the urgings of socialists, have been entered into our histories as the real engines of progress.

What was accepted in English intellectual circles became accepted (with local modifications) in the United States. The New England Transcendentalists hated the mills of New England and those who grew rich from such operations. At a time when foreign visitors marveled at the cleanliness of New England textile factories and the intelligence and cheerfulness of the girls and men who worked in them, Emerson & Co. deplored the passing of traditional ways.

Even the great upheaval of the Civil War remains largely unexplained in the average texts of the period, in an economic sense. From the 1830s to 1860, agrarian slave-capitalists of the South were the dominant economic group in the nation. They believed in free trade, cheap transportation, low taxes and no central bank. The Republicans, once in power during the war years, wrote nearly all these measures into law. The resemblance between the Southern and the Northern groups and the struggle between the rising industrialists and Tories of England is acute.

Meanwhile, German theories -- from Hegel, Marx, List, Sombart, and Mannheim -- began to gain ascendancy over English ideas. It was in Germany that the idea of "organization" as the most effective approach to social problems and situations culminated in socialism. A large Socialist party rose in the German parliament; German universities achieved a high international reputation, and the rapid progress of German industry and products spread its influence around the world. This development was accompanied by a growing German contempt for liberal democracy, love of peace, and internationalism. German secular humanist intellectuals, whose ranks experienced secularization earlier than did the English and the Americans, believed that English and American ideals were outmoded and inferior.

From the 1890s to 1913 both American and English secular humanist circles were swept by socialist ideas less rigid and "organized" than the German, but similar in essence. These resulted in a spate of socialist propaganda against capitalists and large enterprises, couched in the form of "antitrust." Since the capitalist system by definition does not allow individual components to control the whole, the very concept of a trust was a socialist myth. Antitrust regulations by courts and the executive branch of Government were, therefore, enactments based on socialist assumptions. Their appearance marked the decline of capitalism as a theory among American intellectuals and an increase in their admiration for socialism.

Socialism, born in authoritarianism, actually arose first in reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. One such "planner," Saint-Simon, proposed that those who did not accept his "planning boards" be "treated as cattle." In later years socialists began to link their theories to what they termed "economic freedom." Unlike old freedoms, which meant to be released from orders and coercion, the new freedom promised release from necessity, to which Man has been historically bound. In this new promise, the individual was to be released from "the despotism of physical want," and all his needs would be supplied -- by the Government.

Inherent in this promise was the argument that those who attained wealth had, somehow, robbed the poor. This rationale for failure served as a license for envy and resentment. Social disorders, therefore, naturally followed upon socialist expansion.

Although such disorders disfigured much of France, Italy, Britain, and the United States, they were defused in Germany by a vast bureaucratic welfare system.

While Germany applied socialism, both English and American secular humanist intellectuals energetically propagated socialist ideas in their respective nations from the 1880s to 1913. These theories were authoritarian from the start, but the nineteenth century socialists soon learned to cloak that authoritarianism in humanitarian rhetoric. Marx, for instance, laced his perorations with lengthy, loftily sentimental effusions about the presumed abuse of those whom he termed proletarians (a term that, in the original Greek, means those whose only life function is to breed). Later socialist rhetoricians disarmed suspicion by orating about "freedom" -- a term they subjected to a new definition.

Freedom originally meant release from the orders and coercions of others. In socialist hands freedom was held to mean "economic freedom" -- which was translated to mean a release from physical want (to which man has been bound since the Fall). In order to achieve that socialist freedom, the "restraints of the economic system" had to be relaxed.14

This goal was accompanied by arguments based on the proposition that private wealth was obtained by thefts from the poor. This charge was accompanied by a rain of criticism of traditional societal customs and classes, which were held to be tilted against virtue and justice. Such arguments provided a nearly irresistible rationale to all who felt unable to achieve success in the degree or to the extent they desired. They were able to console themselves that it was not any deficiency of their own that was responsible for their disappointments in life, but that these were the results of an unjust system, deliberately slanted against them.

That rationale prepared the way for arguments that a better world could be created along socialist lines. This was popularized in the United States in the 1880s by the works of Edward Bellamy,15 which influenced (among others) Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, and Colonel House.

Among other consequences of the rise of socialism in pre-World War I America was the appearance of the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies), such popular political movements as the Populists, and an outbreak of disorders by anarchists, trade unionists, and the perpetually discontented.

With groups on the top, middle, and bottom levels of American society intent upon making basic changes in the economic and political systems, such changes soon came to appear inevitable. Theodore Roosevelt's political career was enhanced by his reputation as a "trust-buster," and he led a popular movement to curb business freedom.

These trends reached a peak in 1913: a year which witnessed the passage of a progressive income tax (through a constitutional amendment, since the Constitution forbade the unequal treatment of citizens), a central bank (called the Federal Reserve), and the direct election of U.S. Senators (which reduced the power of the states).

These measures, when combined with new antitrust laws and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (one of the first quasi-independent agencies created) had a deep impact upon the American economic system and the American people. In effect, their freedoms were narrowed.

This process advanced during the administration of Woodrow Wilson in World War I, when many constitutional freedoms were suspended under the rubric of the national emergency. Wages, prices, raw material priorities, factory operations, industrial operations, and other economic aspects of national life came under direct governmental control. Other Constitutional rights, including a free press and free speech, were curtailed or, for all practical purposes, suspended. Many of those who argued against such measures were tried under wartime regulations, convicted, and sent to prison during the period 1917­1918.

Most of these wartime controls were scrapped after the First World War ended. But many of the officials of the Wilson Administration could not easily forget their heady use of authority at a time when Americans had passively accepted the loss of their liberties. Many such persons longed for a return of that authority in later years.

Meanwhile, in 1917, in the other side of the world, the democratic Kerensky government that succeeded the Czar in Russia was overthrown by a coup d'état engineered by the Bolshevik Party, using funds provided by the German General Staff (itself a wartime dictatorial body). Under Lenin, Trotsky and others, the Bolsheviks proceeded to turn the clock of history back to pagan times.

Force and fear were established as the pillars of Government. Lenin, Trotsky, and their colleagues recognized no God, no rights of religion, no rights of the people, and no rights to freedoms of any sort, including economic. The region encompassing Russia and its Asian neighbors was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in a distorted imitation of American federalism.

This was hailed by socialists around the world as a triumph of their ideas. The USSR was considered the first effort at a completely "planned" economy and political system. Not many seemed to realize that although regulations may be legal in a planned society, they do not express the Rule of Law.

The distinction lies in the fact that in a planned economy, the government is authorized to direct economic life and to make decisions in unforeseen (and unforeseeable) circumstances which cannot be generically stated.16 One consequence is that as planning expands legislative powers are delegated to an increasing number of boards, agencies, and authorities. This is in direct contrast to the Rule of Law, which limits the scope of legislation and excludes legislation aimed at particular people, or enabling anybody to use the coercive power of the state to achieve such discrimination.

Those who have difficulty in understanding this in the abstract have no difficulty in understanding it in the concrete. Thus, the peoples of the USSR soon learned that their new, self-appointed rulers were their masters in every particular. In order to plan production, the Soviet government seized land, allocated materials, assigned architects and builders to create factories, then ordered raw materials, then appointed managers and workers to operate the plant, arranged for the transportation of the finished products, their distribution in the marketplace, and -- in the process -- set the prices of the raw materials, the workers, and the customers. Soviet citizens found they had no choice over who was to rule over them, no right to leave jobs assigned to them by the government, no right to leave their country, no right to choose where they wanted to live, no right to set their own price on their labor, no right to set their own working hours, no right to choose their own occupations, no right to establish a private enterprise, hire others or sell property, choose their own doctor or lawyer, and no right even to provide charity (that, too, being considered a monopoly of the government).

It took time, of course, for this enormous network to be completed. Stalin, who used the unlimited powers of the Soviet government, did not fully consolidate his authority until the early 1930s.

The Soviet regime was initially hailed by socialists around the world. To this day those to whom socialism is a religious substitute continue to look with favor upon the now-collapsed USSR, though their once-vaunted self-description of "communism" is now most often termed "Marxism." During the 1920s, these enthusiasts continued their efforts and carried them to a peak in Germany, a land where socialist ideas had long been influential. "By 1928 central and local authorities directly controlled the use of more than half the official income" of Germany,17 and indirectly controlled the whole of the nation's economic life.

This trend was extended in the early 1930s, when the Nazis succeeded the Social Democrats as the rulers of Germany. Peter Drucker, a German citizen during the 1920s, later a well-known American commentator, said of the USSR and Germany (in 1939): "The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality that Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has been proved an illusion, and it has proved as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."18 (Emphasis added)

The same tides that swept through Central Europe and the USSR influenced the United States in the 1930s. The American communist movement achieved a considerable intellectual presence, assisted by false dispatches from the USSR by Moscow-based American correspondents such as Walter Duranty, W. H. Chamberlin, and Eugene Lyons. All three later recanted and admitted they had falsified their dispatches in order to keep their jobs and perquisites, but by that time all three had done a great deal of damage to the historical record and helped to misdirect their countrymen.

The 1930s Depression in the United States, meanwhile, led to organized "planning" and a flood of regulations that enacted, while semantically denying, socialist assumptions. Labor unions were provided special privileges by the government and allowed to commit a variety of public disorders; a de facto one-party Congress shouted through sweeping measures that fundamentally altered the traditional American governmental process, and a personality cult centering upon President Roosevelt provided the White House with unprecedented powers for an unprecedented period of three full terms and election to a fourth.

Assisted by a small but significant number of refugee secular humanist intellectuals from Germany and Central European countries, the Roosevelt Administration created a large number of regulatory agencies empowered to issue rules, administer their obedience, and adjudicate over their application. This fourth branch of government further unbalanced the original trinity of powers devised by the Founders and authors of the Constitution.

Because appeals from agency regulations can be heard by the courts, it has been argued that the "due process of law" was retained and there has been no loss of liberty involved in these governmental innovations. A secondary argument is that so long as regulations are legal actions of a government, they are lawful.

It has, however, already been pointed out that the Rule of Law, established during a liberal period, was designed to be a legal embodiment of freedom. Christianity has long believed that man is free if he needs to obey no person, but the laws. The idea that there is no limit to the powers of the legislator is a delusion of ancient democracies, and led to their descent into tyrannies. The Founders, not so deluded, limited the powers of the U.S. Congress to specific, written sectors -- and reserved all those powers not listed to the States and the people. These restrictions were successively removed by congressional expansions and court rulings -- and finally by the creation of agencies authorized to employ the powers of all three branches.

These expansions were extended during World War II, when virtually all American society was regulated by the Government. Wages and prices were mandated, private material resources made subject to governmental requisition, and economic activity circumscribed. In contrast to the aftermath of the First World War, these powers have never been relinquished by the U.S. Government, although some (like wage and price controls and the draft) have been intermittently relaxed.

The consequence of these expansions of governmental authority has been that in Great Britain, France, the United States, and most other Western nations are now officially "Welfare States" -- which is to say, socialist.

In a manner that echoes previous expansions of autocratic power, these governments keep moving steadily beyond previous limits, in the name of the general welfare. The secular humanist intellectuals who now comprise the bureaucracy, and who direct the policies of the politicians, are clearly embarked upon a course that will, if continued, eventually eliminate any area of spontaneous action not subject to regulation in the West, as in the former USSR and other totalitarian lands.

Cultural differences between the USSR and the West masked, for a considerable period, this similarity of direction from general view. Many believed that regimes fastened upon the peoples of Eastern Europe could not -- and would not -- be accepted by people in the West. But when the Soviet methods were exported to Cuba, they proved as able to repress a volatile and independent people as they did Africans accustomed to autocracy.

In recent years the secular humanist intellectuals of Poland, France, and the United States have begun to aim the sweeping economic powers of their governments against religion, and specifically against the Christian churches. As in previous eras of religious assault, the first steps in the United States have been through the use of taxes. These have now expanded to include taxation of all religious activities beyond the pulpit in many states. Christian schools have also been subjected to prosecution in the courts because the states claim that regulations mandated by school boards and departments of education have the force of law. In the United States and western Europe, Christianity has been targeted for the same eventual treatment it earlier received at the hands of socialists, Nazis, Fascists, and Communists in large parts of the globe. That is to say, western governments now believe that religion should be placed under governmental controls.

Such controls in totalitarian countries have accompanied the restoration of paganism in those lands. Similar controls in the West would bring to an end the long struggle of Christians to maintain their civilization against a centuries-old series of attacks.

In reviewing Christian civilization, it becomes clear that only Christianity fosters individual freedom and limited government. From the Renaissance till today the secular humanist intellectuals have campaigned against Christianity and against any limits upon governmental power. That campaign has taken a variety of forms. In our time it argues from economic premises, and claims to be animated by a belief in equality of condition for all.

Yet in the lands where humanistic socialism (under many names) has triumphed, there is not only no equality, but greater inequalities than ever before. Human rights do not exist, and are not recognized in the People's Republic of China, in Communist-dominated Cambodia, Cuba, and the Marxist states of Africa. The Christian religion is held to be dangerous in all these nations and its exercise is persecuted; its congregations are pursued with a cruelty the world has not seen since the days of the Caesars. As in those days, the contest is between those who would usurp the Sovereign powers of God, and those who acknowledge God as Lord of the universe, and seek to know His Will and Purpose.

The language of that struggle changes as do the costumes and surroundings of the protagonists, but the essence is always the same. The idolaters of unlimited worldly power today use the language of politics and economics, where yesterday they used the language of philosophy and theology.

Those who seek to promote their belief in unlimited power for man have, by expressing their belief in bristling economic terms, confused and deceived many in the West. This writing, therefore, is designed to strip their deceptions away and to express the Christian faith in economic terms. Only Christianity evolved capitalism, and only Christian-based capitalism provided man with the freedom to work at occupations of his own choice, in peaceful efforts of his planning, free from coercion and tyranny.

The historical record of this achievement is quite clear. The manner in which the Renaissance despots arose and took away Christian based freedoms is easily proven from that record. The way the Enlightenment destroyed the ancient freedoms of France on the guillotine of Paris is also well known. The way that modern socialism has re-introduced ancient slavery in over half the globe is now clear for all to see.

It is true, however, that since the Reformation, the Christian community has been remarkably slow to perceive its peril, remarkably silent about the persecution of its fellow Christians in totalitarian regions, and remarkably reluctant to examine the economic arguments that have deceived so many, for so long.

This neglect of growing danger is, however, now coming to an end. The Christian community in recent years has slowly come to realize that the forces that enslaved over half the world are active in our midst and in high places in the governments of the West. They use the language of freedom and opportunity, but have twisted the definitions. They claim concern for the poor, and promise equality, while erecting new barriers against the individual and his rights. They have used the language of politics to end elections and the language of economics to close the doors of opportunity.

In all these activities the secular humanist intellectual thirst for power over others emerges with dreadful clarity. Therefore, COMPASS intends to publish more on this subject to analyze the deceptions that have led millions to death and slavery, in the hope that these essays will serve as useful tools in the defense of our Western capitalist culture.

NOTES
1. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957).
2. Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
3. Bertrand de Jouvenal, "Treatment of Capitalism by Intellectuals," in Capitalism and the Historians, ed. F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963, paper), p. 104.
4. Ibid., p. 105.
5. Ibid.
6. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, paper), p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Jouvenal, op. cit., p. 108.
9. W. H. Hutt, "The Factory System of Early Nineteenth Century England," in Capitalism and the Historians, op. cit., pp. 158­160.
10. Jouvenal, op. cit., p. 99.
11. F. A. Hayek, "History and Politics," in Capitalism and the Historians, op. cit., p. 23.
12. Ibid., p. 24.
13. T. S. Ashton, "Treatment of Capitalism by Historians," in Capitalism and the Historians, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
14. Hayek, "History and Politics," op. cit., pp. 25-26.
15. Cf. Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
16. Hayek, "History and Politics," op. cit., p. 83.
17. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, paper), p. 174.
18. Hayek, "History and Politics," op. cit., p. 29.

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