This is the second of four episodes building economics from the ground up, and it is the one about systems. Capitalism against socialism, not as slogans but as a record: which one rebuilt a flattened Germany, which one turned a rock in the South China Sea into the richest enclave on earth, and which one has never once rescued a country that the other ruined. Then the conversation turns to the argument being made from pulpits and campaign stages right now, that Jesus taught something close to socialism, and Lawrence Reed takes it apart parable by parable.
Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, joins Jenny Beth Martin. He is the author of nine books, including Was Jesus a Socialist?, and he has traveled to ninety six countries.
Today's topics:
What a system of economic organization actually is, and why Reed calls capitalism what happens when you leave peaceful people alone
Karl Marx coined the word capitalism and was one of its fiercest critics
The hockey stick: living standards barely moved for centuries, then productivity per worker exploded after about 1750
Post-war West Germany, Ludwig Erhard, and the night he went on the radio to end price controls and rationing
East Germany next door as the control group in a real world laboratory
Hong Kong under John James Cowperthwaite: no tariffs, no minimum wage, and the freest economy in the world
Why there are no examples running the other direction, where private enterprise ruined a country and socialism rescued it
The three forms of socialism: redistribution of income, central planning, and government ownership of the means of production
Government run grocery stores in New York as the third form, arriving in America
Why America is best described as a mixed economy rather than a capitalist one
The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony in the sixteen twenties, the common storehouse, and why Governor Bradford abandoned it
About 150 utopian socialist communes in nineteenth century America, all of them failed, none lasting five years
The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and roughly ten million people leaving a country that was one of the richest in Latin America
Why the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in
China after Mao: forty years of stagnation, then Deng Xiaoping and the capitalism that is carrying the socialist side of the ledger
Was Jesus a Socialist? The redistribution request in Luke twelve and the answer, who made me a judge or divider over you
The parable of the talents, the good Samaritan, the workers in the vineyard, and the money changers driven from the temple rather than the marketplace
The eighth and tenth commandments, and Reed on the period after the word steal
The love of money, render unto Caesar, the camel and the eye of the needle, and the communal arrangement in the book of Acts
Romans 13 in context, and why unqualified obedience to any government authority is not a Christian teaching
The seven principles of sound policy, from free people are not equal to character makes all the difference in the world
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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