23 Her husband is known in the gates
when he sits among the elders of the land.
24 She makes linen garments and sells them;
she delivers sashes to the merchant.
25 Strength and dignity are her clothing,
and she laughs at the time to come.
26 She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
27 She looks well to the ways of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
28 Her children rise up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
29 “Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.”
30 Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,
but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the gates.
But Solomon also got a lot of his wealth from very heavy taxes. They burdened the people so much that they caused a revolt that split the nation in two and resulted in centuries of civil war.
The nation’s fiscal situation continued to worsen with each king. Isaiah told the people “Your silver has become dross, your drink diluted with water.” (Isaiah 1:22) This could mean several things, but we know it did not mean that silver had literally become dross because silver does not do that. It could mean that production had fallen and as a result prices had risen so much that silver had become as worthless as the slag left over from the refining process. But why had production fallen and created such scarcity. The previous and following verses explain: “How the faithful city has become a harlot, she who was full of justice! Righteousness once lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your drink diluted with water. Your rulers are rebels and companions of thieves; everyone loves a bribe and chases after rewards. They do not defend the orphan, nor does the widow's plea come before them.…”
Corruption had destroyed the incentives to work and produce. As we have seen throughout history, especially in communist nations, people will not work when they are certain that the production from that labor will be taken from them by corrupt officials without compensation. The princes were so greedy that they would not judge cases brought by poor orphans and widows because the poor had nothing of value with which to bribe the judge and the princes who acted as judges wanted bribes. Evil people used the court system to steal from the poor by bribing judges for a decision in their favor.
The mention of wine meant that it was either scarce and Israelis watered it down to make it last longer, or they were cheating people by watering down good wine. Either way, the watered down wine indicates an economy experiencing very high inflation rates and causing enormous suffering. A major reason for the failure of Israel’s armies in battle leading up to the exile was the poverty of the kings. They could not buy the weapons and supply the armies as they needed.
In Ezekiel 45:9-12, God indicts merchants for using false weights and calls for the removal of “violence and spoil” and the administration of civil justice. When the Old Testament condemns Israel for violence, it is often because of the adoption of human sacrifices. Then He establishes the exact ratio of the shekel to its lesser and greater weights, as well as dealing with balances and measures of capacity. Abandoning the worship of God for idols led the nation into human sacrifice, violence, and corruption. Agriculture and industry die in such an environment and leave the nation much poorer.
Which economic system?
Combining sound hermeneutic principles in interpreting the Torah with knowledge of economic history creates an image of ancient Israel under the judges that is very different from the one often preached. The golden age of Israel would have taken place under the judges, not under the kings. Israelis would have enjoyed a much higher standard of living and freedom under the judges. Under the kings, Israeli life would have differed from the oppression of Egypt in only minor ways. Kings and princes would have grown wealthier and more powerful at the expense of the people. Faithfulness to God may have been slightly greater under the judges than under the kings because the book of Judges mentions no incidents of child sacrifice, which appears to have been common under the kings.
Preachers may extol the period under the kings because the Bible contains so much more material about them, even though the two periods lasted roughly the same amount of chronological time, about 480 years each. The period of the judges takes up one book. The period of the kings occupies six history books, the Samuels, Kings and Chronicles, which detail the sins of the long series of evil and oppressive kings. Most of the prophetic books also condemn the evil of the kings, nobility and common people.
But consider why so much of the Old Testament is devoted to the period of the kings. Most of the writing about the kings comes from the prophets, but God called prophets in Israel only because the people and the priests had become wicked and idolatrous. No news from God was good news in the case of prophets. When the priesthood had become corrupted, as it had under Eli in the book of first Samuel, so that no one was teaching the people the word of God, God would bypass the system and anoint prophets to warn of impending judgment. The volume of writing by the prophets and the apocalyptic judgments coincided with the period of the kings, which should signal to preachers that Israel under the kings was far more wicked and rebellious than Israel under the judges.
Theologians who claim the Bible does not endorse an economic system have not understood the Torah, or what Christians call the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Neither Moses nor the elite of Israel wrote the laws that created the economic system. God personally wrote them. And God created a government and economic system verging on what people today call anarchy. The government regulated no part of the economy. It did not set prices, tax land or income, or redistribute wealth. Even if Israelis had wanted to regulate the economy, God provided no state to carry it out. There was no president, prime minister, executive branch, parliament or congress; no department of commerce, securities and exchange commission, federal reserve bank, treasury, federal trade commission or FDIC. No one told Israeli farmers or manufacturers what to produce, when to produce it, how to produce it or how much they could charge.
No nation in history has enjoyed such freedom from state control. Even the system of natural freedom proposed by Adam Smith in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations never came close to imagining the level of freedom that Israelis enjoyed under the judges. Yet anarchy did not prevail in ancient Israel because the people had the law of God. The courts adjudicated disputes in the light of that law and the people enforced court decisions. As a result, theft, fraud, murder, and other crimes were kept to a minimum.
The Torah makes it clear that God would never have endorsed socialism in any of its forms, whether communism, fascism, democratic or Fabian. The Torah government embodied all of the elements of capitalism described in chapters 1 and 2. Those included respect for property, the rule of law, limited government, relatively honest courts, free markets, veneration of business, the bourgeois virtues and individualism.
Chapter 4 – The dark ages
The monarchy’s legacy
Israel seemed to prosper under kings David and Solomon, but in reality the nation was coasting on investments made during the reigns of the judges. David wasted the nation’s wealth and youth on continual warfare. In spite of his wisdom, Solomon ruled like a pharaoh. He increased his personal wealth through international trade and heavy taxation. He describes his luxurious lifestyle and massive building programs in his Book of Ecclesiastes: “I also tried to find meaning by building huge homes for myself and by planting beautiful vineyards. I made gardens and parks, filling them with all kinds of fruit trees. I built reservoirs to collect the water to irrigate my many flourishing groves” (Ecclesiastes 2:4-6).
In the book of I Kings chapters 5-7, the court historian recorded that Solomon
spent seven years building the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was one hundred feet long and made of stone overlaid with imported wood, gold and silver. But he devoted thirteen years to constructing a palace for himself that was larger and far more expensive than the temple of God. Then he built reservoirs to hold water for irrigating his groves and vineyards and supply water to Jerusalem. Groves were often places for worshipping idols. Solomon’s conspicuous consumption during his reign lit the fuse that set off an explosion ripping the nation apart and reverberating through centuries of civil war and national decline.
After Solomon’s death, the elders of Israel asked his son and heir to the throne, Rehoboam, to reduce the crushing tax burden. A delegation told him, “Your father made our yoke heavy; now therefore, lighten the burdensome service of your father, and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you.” (I Kings 12:1-5) Rehoboam consulted his father’s advisors who counseled him to comply with the demands of the people, but the son had inherited none of his father’s wisdom and instead increased the tax burden. As a result, Israel ruptured into the northern and southern kingdoms. Both chased idols and generally grew poorer over time.
The rebellion of Israel against God in their choosing a king snuffed out the light of freedom and prosperity for millennia. As a result, “In the ancient Middle East (Mesopotamia and pharaonic Egypt), the prevalent form of government was the ‘patrimonial’ regime, under which the monarch owned as well as ruled the land and its inhabitants, treating his realm as a gigantic royal estate,” according to prominent historian Richard Pipes. Pipes concluded that “private property in land in the modern sense of the word was not known in any of the ancient societies, whether in Europe or Asia, at least up to the latest period of antiquity.”
As the hockey stick graph of per capita G.D.P. in chapter 1 demonstrates, nothing much happened economically for 2,500 years after Israel chose a king to replace God. That statement will throw academics to the floor in convulsions. They will immediately point to their research showing the changing fortunes of each empire. Yes, wealth waxed and waned, but around a very low level. Compared to wealth today, the variance in wealth over the previous two millennia is insignificant.
Empires rose and fell. When they rose, they grew rich through military conquest and plundering the wealth of the vanquished. But when the conquered grew strong enough to resist, the wealth and power of the former victor evaporated. The world’s wealth did not grow; it merely sloshed around and pooled in the capital city of conquering armies for a brief time. Standards of living in 1800 AD looked pretty much as they had in 5000 BC. The team of oxen was still cutting edge farming technology and that limited food production, which kept the stream of urban population within narrow banks. Three things kept people poor: government, attitudes toward commerce, and envy permeating and uniting the first two.
As they had wished, the Israeli government and economy became like that of the surrounding nations and that form of government has proven to be the most robust in human history. Society was divided between a small group of elites and the masses. The leader of the elite group, the pharaoh, king, emperor, Caesar, dictator or whatever, gave the elite permission to rape and pillage the masses in exchange for their loyalty. The masses put up with the plunder because they envied their neighbors and wanted a greater power that could use force to prevent any neighbor from succeeding more than others. The masses did not envy the elite, because they saw no possibility of joining their ranks. They avoided innovations that might bring success because they did not want to inflame envy in others.
The masses, mostly farmers, hated businessmen because businessmen refused to accept their status as part of the poor and dared to accumulate wealth. In their minds, the nobility had the right to be wealthy because of their status in society. Merchants were consigned to the lowest status and therefore enjoyed no right to be wealthy. In addition, everyone knew that no man could grow richer except at the expense of another so as merchants grew wealthy people assumed that the merchants had taken wealth that belonged to them. But the merchant’s chief sin was rising above his neighbors in material success through good business practices and thereby inflaming their envy.
This form of government, called a closed or extractive society by the New Institutional School of economics is the traditional and most robust form of government in history. It never abolished the notion of private property. Going back even to ancient Egypt, philosophers (except for Plato and the later Stoics), theologians and politicians endorsed private property as either a natural right or a necessary evil to keep the peace. Plato and the Stoics thought that common property would end envy and greed, but twentieth century experiments in the USSR, China and the Kibbutzim of Israel proved them wrong. As Schoeck wrote, equality enrages envy against the most trivial differences.
Roman law provided for strong property rights, as Richard Pipes wrote, “Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium and applied to real estate and slaves...The rights implicit in dominium were so absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain.” Why, then, did not capitalism spring up in the rocky Italian soil? Why did it have to wait until the sixteenth century? The answer lies in the difference between principles and practice.
While almost all nations endorsed private property and punished theft severely, that principle applied only to the masses. Among themselves, the masses could not steal each other’s property or the property of the ruling class, but everyone understood the law did not apply to the elite or the state. In most empires, the ruler was the image of a god and owned everything. He allowed people to use his property as if it was their own and they could not steal from each other, but as the ultimate owner the king could dispose of anyone’s property as he wished. In other words, the poor could not steal, but the ruling class could steal all they wanted from the masses. Private property was superficial.
Empires with such a system followed empire. Syria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and carried off the wealth to Damascus then Nebuchadnezzar overran Judah in the south and took all of the wealth of the temple to Babylon. The Medes and Persians in turn overthrew the Babylonians and stole the wealth of that empire. No one created any wealth; they just stole what others had piled up. Then along came Greece.
Greece
After the failure of Israel, ancient Greece resurrected the institution of private property for a brief time and for a few people. By the end of the sixth century B.C., independent yeoman farmers made up the bulk of Greek citizens. Most owned less than ten acres on which they grew grapes, olives, figs and grains. Ownership of land included the rights of citizenship and participation in government. These farmers were freeman, which meant they were exempt from taxes and providing services to the aristocrats. They labored for themselves and enjoyed the fruits of their labor, much as the ancient Israelis had. In battle they formed the columns of armored infantrymen who fought to defend their cities and farms. The historian of antiquity Sir Moses Finley, quoted in Pipes’ Property and Freedom, wrote:
In the Homeric poems, the property regime, in particular, was already fully established...The regime that we see in the poems was, above all, one of private ownership...[T]here was free untrammeled right to dispose of all movable wealth...[T]he transmission of a man’s estate by inheritance, the movables and immovable together, was taken for granted as the normal procedure upon his death.
Noncitizens could pursue finance and commerce or lease land and mines, but they could not own land or become citizens. Plato and Aristotle devoted attention to the subject of private property because it was prevalent, and their love of farming may account for the low esteem in which they held finance and commerce. Artisans in Greece were self-employed, unlike their counterparts in the Middle East who worked for the king.
By contrast, Sparta enrolled all adult males in the military and allotted uniform plots of land cultivated by bondsmen but retained only on the condition that they use
d it well. The state could take the property away and give it to another soldier at any time. The law prevented its citizen-soldiers from engaging in commerce or manufacturing because of the low esteem in which society held those professions. Men shared their wives with other men and turned their children over to the state at the age of seven to begin military training. In exchange for iron coins, the state confiscated all gold and silver. As a result, Pipes reports that the historian Plutarch claimed, “luxury, theft, bribery, and lawsuits disappeared.” Of course, if the state allows the people no property, then such problems disappear automatically. However, Schoeck’s work on envy proves that the Spartans would have suffered from envy as much as anyone, if not more, over the small remaining differences between people, such as talent.
Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian war and that event may have inspired Plato’s depiction of a similar society as the ideal in his Republic. Plato saw property as incompatible with virtue and allowed the rulers of his idyllic republic to have none, neither houses nor land, lest they “tear the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine,’” according to Pipes. In Plato’s mind, virtue diminished in proportion to the property one owned. The rulers, whom Plato gave the harmless sounding title of “guardians,” shared wives and held children in common. In his next work, the Laws, Plato tried to be more realistic by tempering his idealism and allowing the rulers to have families, but insisted that the state have to power to prevent extremes of wealth and poverty. Still, he clung to his utopian dream of a propertyless society as the following excerpt from The Dialogues of Plato quoted in Pipes’ Property and Freedom demonstrate:
The first and highest form of the State and of the government and of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that “Friends have all things in common.” Whether there is anywhere now, or will ever be, this communion of women and children and of property, in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost – whether this is possible or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a state which will be truer or better or more exalted in virtue.
God is a Capitalist Page 17