LUR - 9-5-26 - April EP8

0:00Welcome to Let Us Reason, a Christian Muslim dialogue with host, Al Fati. Let us Reason is a unique show utilizing theology, apologetics and evangelism to reach Muslims for Christ by comparing and contrasting Christian and Muslim doctrines. And now your host, Al Fati. Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to a continuation of this fascinating video series on the issues of cultural apologetics. Last time we talked about a very timely topic that has been around in the news for a while now and it seemed like it's gaining traction and gaining support, specifically from younger generations who are being misled by TikTokers, YouTubers and many others who make it sound like socialism

1:05is the way to go and that capitalism is evil. That way the United States economic system is designed somehow that it is untie loving others and caring for others. But of course, last time, Sister Laura with us here who will be unpacking all of these arguments from a biblical standpoint with us demonstrated to us that the Bible never once basically disagreed with the private ownership or had commands against that. And Jesus in particular, because the topic we focused on is this question was Jesus as socialist and I think we demonstrated so far that none of Jesus' teachings were a single command that could be perceived to be a socialist command. Nor that Jesus actually was against the idea of people owning a property or having wealth. The main theme that we can get from the Bible is that things are voluntary.

2:06People come voluntarily, give away things and donate things and help others and even try to share some of their property with others, but never that it was commanded to all of the community to do so, nor that a government was appointed to do such thing. So let's bring back Sister Laura here with us. Sister Laura, thank you so much again for part one of this series and thank you for taking time to be with us again to continue along these lines. Thanks for having me. I'm enjoying it. So what else do we need to talk about when it comes to biblical principles concerning either socialism in general or at least wealth and property and the teaching of Christ? Well you mentioned the moral ethic of socialism versus a free market economy and a book that I recommend to people actually is called the Poverty of Nations by Wayne Grudom and

3:09Barry Asmus and they have an entire chapter in their book about why actually capitalism is a more moral and ethically superior system of government and politics than socialism is. Part of it is that in that free market economy it accounts for the sinfulness of humanity and yet it incentivizes even sinful humans to do their best to treat their customers well because of competition they want to win back their customers to innovate, to make processes more efficient, to be honest, to their clients, to have a clean shop or whatever it is they

4:11may run to actually be helpful. These things are not, they tend not to be present in socialist systems because there's no incentive for it whereas in capitalism there is a, there's, the whole thing is incentive to win back your customers when there are other options out there and competition drives down the prices and drives up the quality of the service and so for that as well as other reasons and of course as image bearers we are called to use our creativity, our mind or rationality, our ingenuity which are all aspects of our Imago Day, the image of God in us, for the benefit of others to love others well and to provide them with excellent service capitalism incentivizes all of that. So there's also the issue of envy that I mentioned briefly in the first segment Jesus

5:18this reminds me of an encounter that we read about in Luke actually. It's only a, maybe a couple of sentences long and so I had missed it until I started studying socialism but Jesus is walking from one significant event to another one and a man says, hey Jesus make my brother give me half of the inheritance and this would have been the ideal moment for Jesus to teach equal outcomes and to say oh heck yeah you're, you don't have an equal amount as your brother let's take care of that right now he doesn't say that at all instead Jesus refuses and he warns this man about covetousness about envy and he basically the the lesson of all of this is and of Jesus's

6:20his story that follows is that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions and get that that's that's not the point you're missing the old point that doesn't matter Jesus was not concerned about exactly you know what you own and making sure it's the same as what you own and what you own so we do see we see Jesus more concerned with our heart or that we're not envious that we're that and with our actions as well that we're not stealing from others again I mentioned in the first segment that the prohibition against theft is completely meaningless if everybody owns everything as as utopian socialists seem to think is possible so yeah so those are those are a couple points yeah and and you know of course I want to be fair on the service socialism come across specialty and generation as a compassionate system because the propaganda is that you know if

7:22you're a capitalist or a rich person somehow you have no compassion towards those who are needy but when you look at Jesus' teaching of course Jesus was compassionate but here's what he did he took two fish and five loaves of bread and multiplied him to feed 5000 plus if that's not a definition of investment and capitalism I don't know what you would call this but yet he combined compassion with that action exactly well and one of the one of the the false assumptions of socialism is that the amount of wealth that exists in the world is a fixed amount it's a fixed pie and that in order for one person to get more get a bigger piece of pie you're going to have another person's going to have to get a smaller piece of pie and so so if one person has a huge piece of pie then obviously they're being incredibly unfair to someone else but that is actually not how

8:27that's how maybe pie pie pie might work I don't know but that is not how I'm going to be working I'm game if it has been out of pie yes I'm a fan of apple pie but that's not how well wealth actually works if we were to take the amount of wealth that existed in the world the whole world 200 years ago and just divided it up and gave you everybody an equal share we would all be poor today the reason we're not all poor today is because people have created new wealth they have innovated they have taken risks and in order for humans to do that they need to have some sort of incentive if they're not going to get anything out of it personally at all why are they going to give up maybe time with their family or something more secure or something easier why are they going to you know take a risk and see if you know if if some new kind of

9:30gizmo like a computer or a smartphone works if there's nothing to be gained from it and and so what capitalism does is it incentivizes that innovation and it has resulted in the extreme poverty in the world dropping by 80 percent since about 1970 the 1970s 80 percent of extreme poverty defined as living off of less than a dollar a day has been eradicated because of capitalism not because of government handouts not because of giving up the pie as it existed but by innovation and I get that that quote from Arthur Brooks and so he the American Enterprise Association I believe is what he was president of and so when he made that comment so this and while we're while we're

10:30talking about outcomes because I do think this is really important because we humans are image and God cares about his image bears he cares very much about us and and all indications are he values human flourishing and has given us a the the means to to flourish in life by living according to his will and such there's don't want to get into kind of prosperity gospel teachings there is a distinction there there's no guarantee there's no promise but when societies follow the teachings of Christ the societies generally tend to flourish when societies reject the teachings of Christ they tend to suffer and to some degree that happens on an individual basis as well but we do still live in a fallen world but to the point of socialism what has happened is that capitalism has repeatedly

11:33led to greater and greater human flourishing whereas socialism has historically consistently harmed both life and and flourishing and so in what we have is in the 20th century alone over 100 million image bearers were killed lost their lives as a result of socialism in things like the Bolshevik revolution and gulags in the in the former USSR the as well as in neighboring Ukraine the so-called great leap forward in China tens of millions starved to death in Cambodia more than a million lost their lives there in Cuba casters Cuba were land and businesses were expropriated and and and people were exiled and government took over there what they had built personally and

12:37didn't you know not governments not the best at making individual decisions for every individual in their nation and so people starved in North Korea they have all the resources of South Korea at least they did it one time but starvation and ongoing destitution is what we find there because of socialism Venezuela was once one of the most prosperous nations on earth they have incredible natural resources hardworking people all of that as soon as it became socialist it became a failed state with extreme inflation and people eating the zoo animals their own pets first and then the zoo animals just to try to stay alive trying to and the government having to block off the borders because everyone wanted to leave when it became a socialist state so I mean these these need to be a warning to us and so many young people tell me oh but they

13:39didn't do it right we would do it better that kind of arrogance needs to be cautioned against because I think it's about two-thirds of the of the countries in the world in the 20th century tried socialism in a variety of different ways and it always led to to destruction and death and devastation to think that that somehow we can do it better I need to know how right we need to know exactly how it would not with some utopian idea of well it'll it'll work out it's just it's giving well we need to study economics and and understand why is it that for example minimum wage laws would sound so compassionate repeatedly cause everything to become more expensive and the the youngest and the the least skilled to be put out of work and poverty to increase why is it that when the government puts price controls on housing that the housing becomes run down and the the privately owned

14:45homes become more expensive and that and poor people are put out onto the streets why does that happen we need to understand that before we can say yeah socialism is it's going to it's going to work it doesn't work it never works for the government to to take over the housing market or the food market or the healthcare system which we can look at Canada for the Canadians have loved in the past to boast about their their healthcare system it does take a little bit of time for reality to catch up with you but over the last 20 years or so what they have seen in Canada as the quality of service has gone down I talked about why that would be in the first episode or earlier in this episode with lack of competition the prices have gone up so that now their free healthcare costs about 19 or 20 thousand dollars per family of four for so-called free healthcare and their waiting times are

15:49up to 60 weeks in some parts of Canada the average is about 30 weeks of waiting time 30 weeks and so Canadians are coming into America they're flying to Europe they're going to other places to get treated because they have to wait 30 to 60 weeks to see a doctor who who can treat them for for what they need and so these these types of of policies lead to the diminishing of human dignity and value and and thriving so we need to keep that in mind absolutely and you know I want to visit the parable of the talents one more time here but I'm going to read just maybe two versus or three versus here it says of course we're looking at Matthew 25 verses 14 to 30 incidentally studying in 31 Jesus talks about the sign of his end time and coming of the kingdom and rebuke in those that did not voluntarily give towards others but here it says for it will be

16:56like a man going on a journey who called his servants and entrusted them to them his property notice it's his property and then you would think socialism meant that he would give people equal things but it says no to one he gave five talents and to another give two and to another gave one and then he actually when he came back after a while he was upset with the one who did not take the risk to invest he wasn't upset with the others is saying oh my gosh you made all of this money and you did not give to to this poor guy no he was upset with the one who did not take the risk and so the idea that Jesus was a socialist is is just a huge misconception and use basically lie if you wish so what do you think you know Laura the young generation is getting these lies from I mean they

17:56have access to the same Bible we have they have access to many things that can help them decipher these things why do they only search one side and ignore the other why not search both arguments well what I find in a lot of cases is that they have heard these arguments in school from the time they were very very young they have not spent a lot of time in the real world starting trying to start a business and seeing how government intervention harms that greatly with all with all their regulations and and whatnot they have not seen what happens are you talking mom Donnie right now or you're talking about just anybody because you just described mom Donnie I was not thinking of him I was thinking of several other people I've had conversations with but you're right yeah you're right exactly he has no real world experience he was apparently a rapper you know who who's got very wealthy privileged parents and has has has incredible connections

19:04but yeah that guy does not know what he's doing and I'm afraid New York City is and New Yorkers are gonna feel some repercussions of that but you know within academia I have great respect for teachers I'm teaching is basically what I do but but being an academia allows you to in a lot of ways escape the the real consequences of of your ideas because you can you can teach any sort of ideas you want but you don't actually have to start a business and see what makes it work or not work you don't actually have to be able to program a computer and and see if you know programming it according to your feelings or some utopian kind of idea based on a drawing you saw one time

20:06works or doesn't work you don't you know the the government keeps paying you to teach little children who don't know how to push back you don't know haven't heard anything else and so we have and frankly our public school system was heavily heavily influenced from the beginning by a socialist and so people can read about the the origins of the US public school system and so socialism is very much entrenched in the American school system so I caution parents that they need to know they I'm a huge advocate of homeschooling and there's so many resources available today but parents need to know what their children are being taught in school because from a very very young age they are being taught today that that socialism is compassionate and that anybody who disagrees with it is just evil and selfish and cold-hearted and things like that whereas you know my my arguments are

21:13no we need to give generously and we need to be free to do so and we cannot obey the commands of of Jesus to give generously and and and joyfully if we don't have access to the wealth that we earn and so I think that's that's a big a big part of it is the the school system I think the media as well now is kind of it's you know that's mostly socialist who have been educated in the in the school the public schools and and and I'll and you know I think families as well if you have lots and lots of money and and you were able to make it in America when you vote for things like minimum wages and price controls and government to become more and more involved and the and prices go up and people the the lower skilled people lose their jobs and such you don't

22:15necessarily feel that if you're really wealthy and so so for the really wealthy who are not all that affected by price increases and job losses and things like that reality tends to not hit them in the face either for the very poor who receive government handouts you know it's the government keeps trying to buy their votes more and more they don't really have a whole lot of reason to question it so but Christians need to question it we need to know how best to love our neighbors and how what will allow us to give generously and with regard to Jesus I want to make one more point um let's see if I I don't know if I'm going to be able to remember the name of the book right now but we can put it in the show notes later um but um there's there's at least one outstanding book on how Jesus if you pay attention to where Jesus was when he gave warnings about wealth um he was in

23:20areas where wealth was typically obtained through extraction um whether it was the religious leaders who were abusing people who came to the temple and had to buy the you know the right animals in order to be able to make religious sacrifices and we're taking advantage of them whether it was political leaders people with with tight connections with political leaders those are the people he warned about uh about wealth and cautioned them not to love their wealth too much he didn't condemn having wealth but he warned people about you know the about it and he challenged people to again to give to give a lot of wealth away um he did not condemn the the bankers in the area of Sephiris or the the fishing merchants in Magdala or the Galilee and

24:22Artisans who were tied to large building projects those people were working hard they were innovating they were providing uh uh goods and services to others and we see them just um kind of passing through those areas with nothing no warnings at all about wealth we see them start to warn people when he's in Judea which is was a a high tax exploitative uh political and religious center we see him uh uh seeming to show some preference toward the poor when he's in tire and siden or speaking to people from there when he's nearby there um like and we see in Luke's verse Luke's um it's not at says that sometimes it's called Luke's uh parallel like sermon on the mount but it's not i think it was uh i'm convinced that that was a different um a different event occasion Jesus had you know he didn't he went to a lot of places and shared a

25:23lot of the same information in a lot of different places and so um uh and we see that that people from tire and siden were there and um he's you know he's he's concerned about the poor and he's kind of warning the elite was not not because he he was concerned with them making money through their hard work and that was where i mean tire and siden um uh and and and the the regions of Judea and the closer you got to he got to Jerusalem those were places where um uh people largely became wealthy by taking from others and um and and it and it's where there were elite trade and uh slave markets operating there as well so uh so what we see is Jesus uh mourning people in places where uh they were earning money the way that socialism tends to work uh not the way people gain wealth through free markets he was not warning people about their who were gaining

26:26money through labor and commerce and investment he um so so that's something to be aware of as well pay attention and ask the question where was Jesus who is he talking to how did people largely get wealthy there um and um uh and keep in mind that in first century uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh israel they did they didn't really have um a free market economy akin to what we have in the west today or in the united states i'll say because um european nations have gone far more than just and oh well i think it's important state that there's a continuum uh uh uh there's no country on earth that is 100% free market with a no government involvement at all whatsoever and um the and uh it's it's rare to find a country that is 100% socialist but um what we see is a continuum and as european countries have gone towards socialism they have um had bigger and bigger

27:32problems greater expense less access to energy um that's affordable um uh more poverty more homelessness etc california has seen that as well new york city has seen that as well uh whereas when uh countries go more toward a capitalist uh paradigm we see greater and greater uh wealth for everybody opportunities uh giving as well by the way uh free market uh economies also tend to have uh the highest levels of giving and generosity uh socialist countries tend to have um tend to not play well with christianity and tend to persecute christians in addition to taking their money and deciding where the money will go they also tend to decide where they're allowed to uh you know what churches are allowed to exist and not exist and what teachings are allowed to be taught there and not be taught

28:32even in a country i don't know how much people follow canada but even in canada over the last few years as they've become more and more towards socialism uh pastors have been imprisoned for teaching the scriptures um and and certain aspects of the scriptures specifically that the government doesn't like uh and uh how housing is unaffordable um uh like i mentioned wait times for for medical care and sane um so it's uh if you want to love your neighbor well uh have incentives to to do so through your god-given talents and and abilities uh free market economics is what you want if you care about the poor free market economics capitalism is what you want um if you're most concerned with everyone having exactly an equal amount of everything and you're willing to be equally poor with everybody else with the poorest people in a country um you know then maybe maybe socialism is for you after all yeah well thank you so much uh Laura uh i don't want to

29:38go over our limit here but uh we we'll be back again of course another topic uh hopefully and we'll continue this video series and everyone thank you so much of course please make sure you send your comments and your questions and uh hopefully we will be able to interact with you uh over the course of uh these uh videos uh when they have released uh thank you sister Laura thank you everyone for watching this about body helpless