Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is the program bringing you
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news, views,
analysis, and insight
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on the religious
liberty situation in the US
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and around the
world today, yesterday,
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and perhaps even tomorrow.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And my guest on this
program is Elijah Mvundura,
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an old hand at
this program by now.
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We filmed a few
previous programs.
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You're also a
well-established author
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and in particular for
Liberty Magazine articles.
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And I've learned that
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you're very
perceptive on many levels
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and...
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Thank you for that.
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Not just on religious liberty,
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you've got a pretty
good hold on economics.
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But, of course,
money based on many things
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including civil
liberties, money matters.
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The world is in a
pretty bad pass today,
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even though a lot of
it passes for normalcy
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because I don't think
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things have been
fixed up since 2008,
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which was shaping up to
be another Great Depression.
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How is that working out?
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And how that might...
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What's happened since
then be relating to civil
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and religious
liberties in your mind?
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Yes.
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In our past segments,
we've spoken of how God
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used to be the
foundation of liberal society.
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But the actual fact is
that since the 19th century,
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the foundation actually
became economic prosperity.
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Basically, since World War II,
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our freedom has really
been based on Pax Americana,
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the economic expansion
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that occurred
during World War II.
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The European
economies had failed,
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and America basically...
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I think we're aware
of the Marshall Plan
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and all that.
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So that most of the freedoms
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that we have
enjoyed is not so much
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that people actually understand
the concept of freedom,
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but it's because of
the material prosperity
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that did not make them...
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It's a low stress situation.
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Yes, yes.
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And there's no need to
challenge the people's...
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The system because
it was working well.
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Freedom of religion,
freedom of movement, and so on.
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Yes.
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So we're able to
flourish in these religions
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because the
economy was going well.
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And now that the
economy has been failing,
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suddenly all these demons
are coming out of the closets.
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Yeah.
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And we must not forget
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that it was the
collapse of German economy
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that actually gave
the rise to Hitler.
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Hitler did not
just come from Norway,
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it was when the
Germans had lost all hope,
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and they wanted a savior,
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and Hitler appeared as a savior
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who would not only be
able to resurrect the economy,
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I know that a lot...
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We could go further
back, it was the massive debt
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that led to the
collapse of the economy.
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Yes.
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Which led to Hitler. Yes.
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And I know, of
course, no wonder why,
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that's why because of
that economic context,
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that's why a lot of
people have been speaking
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about the rise of
fascism in America
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and then the other
people have been comparing
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Trump to Hitler.
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And I think...
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You know, on the face of
that, it's a foolish comparison.
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But some of the dynamics
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in both cases
are eerily similar,
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and that's why the discussion.
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Yeah, the dynamics are similar,
but we need to be able...
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Anyway, let me go
back again to the...
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I want to go back a little
bit on the economic crisis
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that one of the reasons
again we have the problem
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beside the fiscal policies,
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the past monetary
policies and the like,
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one would almost say to
the exhaustion of ideologies.
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Let me say that most of
our modern institutions,
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whether it is our
modern democracy and the like,
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most of the foundations
were build in the 19th century,
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neoclassical economics
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was ironed out
in the 19th century,
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but neoclassical
economics is what got us
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into the Great Depression,
that will cause the market...
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It's self-regulating,
you don't have to control it,
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you've got to cut
business and the like.
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Well, something that...
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Since you're talk of
economic theory and that,
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it seems to me, you know,
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money's been around forever
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and the barter system first,
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then Roman
coins, and Greek coins,
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and all of that.
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But the economy
as we know it today
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doesn't go any further
back than the mid 1700s.
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The stocks, and bonds,
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and the
investments, and all of that.
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Yes, yes.
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That's not an old thing at all,
and it started very rockily,
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the South Sea's
bubble and a few other things
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where fortunes were made
and then lost in an instant.
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And we've had
several cycles like that
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since people don't realize
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that in many ways,
well, money seems real.
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And, of course, the
dollar is only paper now,
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it's not gold or a standing.
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The whole system is a construct.
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Yes, it's a construct.
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It's as much philosophical
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as the philosophy
that we talk about.
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Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
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But the institutionalization
of all those things
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that you're talking about,
economics as a discipline,
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it images actually
in the 19th century.
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Yes, yes.
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The science of economics.
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Yes, it is science of economics,
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even the science of sociology,
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but the whole idea was that
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the market is self-regulating.
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And that gets us to
the Great Depression.
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The Great Depression proved
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that the market is
not self-regulating.
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I won't to go into
some of the theories
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that preceded
this whole idea of...
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But it seems me, and I will
get into a little bit of theory.
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Things like buying
futures or derivatives
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which can magnify
the gain or the risk
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are like nuclear
bombs aimed at the system.
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Yes.
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Where in the old days,
you know, in prehistory,
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you know, the
trading ship goes down,
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and the merchants ruined,
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and the town might suffer a bit.
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Now not only is there
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that immediate loss like if IIG,
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whatever it is,
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the insurance company
that was going down in 2008.
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The whole deck of
cards not only collapses,
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it just blows up
and like the shockwaves
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from an atomic
weapon everything goes.
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Yes, yes.
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Let me give a context to that
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because as I was
saying neoclassical economics
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gets us to the Great Depression.
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And after the Great Depression,
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the person who
was able to analyze
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the causes of
the Great Depression
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and trying to offer
a solution was Keynes.
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So we have this whole Keynesian
economics after World War II.
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And, of course, Keynes one of...
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To put it in simple terms,
Keynes said, "You know what,
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you need to
balance demand and supply,
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when there is a lack of demand,
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the government is
supposed to borrow.
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And even if it means
that there is debt, at least,
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you know, finance, put
money back into the economy,
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stimulate the economy
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even if people have
got to dig useless things,
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let them dig it so that
you can stimulate the economy."
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But by the early '70s,
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this whole thing
of debt, financing,
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and the like had
caused high inflation.
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And, of course, it
was also affecting the...
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That's why you have
neo-monetarist theory.
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The whole idea that, you
know, I think it is Milton...
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Is it Thomas Friedman?
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Thomas Friedman, yes.
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I thought it was Milton.
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Yeah, it was Friedman.
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Yes, Friedman. Yes.
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And he came up with
the monetarist theory
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that actually you need
to control the money supply.
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If you control the money supply,
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then everything
else solves itself.
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It, of course, deregulates
the economy, and true enough,
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a lot of regulation had actually
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stifled employment and the like.
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And they could say
that after cutting through,
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at least, from
the gold standard,
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money and how much you print.
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Yes.
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So with Reagan and Thatcher,
their economic theories...
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their economic
theories were actually inspired
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by Milton Friedman,
the monetarist theories,
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the supply side
economics, and all that.
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And, of course,
that deregulation,
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the supply side
economics is what got us,
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one could say, to
the 2008 collapse,
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and what was very interesting
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after the 2008 financial crisis
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is that most of the Keynesians
were coming out of the closet.
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And that was I think Krugman,
Paul Krugman in New York Times,
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they're all speaking
about stimulating the economy.
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And that was the whole idea
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behind Obama
stimulating the economy.
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But what I want to
get here is that economics
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has come actually full circle.
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Yeah.
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We started with
neoclassical economics,
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and that's exactly
Friedman was simply actually
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recycling the principles
of neoclassical economics.
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And now with this,
during Obama's time,
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they were back to
Keynesian economics.
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And so some of the problems
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that we're having
in the economic arena
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is that the
economists themselves
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have run out of solution.
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And one of the problems
is that economics has become
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more mathematical
and there's econometrics
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with all these
quantitative methods.
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And they've lost
the human dimension
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to these economic problems,
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you know, people
can do their quantities
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and all the like.
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And that's why even the
people who have been winning
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the Nobel Prize in economics,
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it has been in the behaviorist
economics and the like,
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who are trying to
capture the human dimension
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on economic ideas.
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And I think that, to me, we
have a crisis on all levels,
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that our science
have displaced the human,
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we displaced God,
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but there is one philosopher,
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German
philosopher who says actually,
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the medal of God...
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God cannot be medaled,
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the medal of God actually
leads to the medal of men.
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So much that the
things that we mourn
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about the
alienation and the like.
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If we don't have a sense of God
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who gives us the dignity to men,
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even our
policies become inhuman,
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and I think that
the economic policies
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that do not take
into consideration,
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the human dimensions.
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That people are revolting
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and looking to Trump to solve
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is because the human
dimension has been lost.
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Well, also, the
economic policies
00:10:05.47\00:10:08.57
are more and more reverting
to the Robert Barron era where,
00:10:08.60\00:10:13.98
under the guise
of monitoring it,
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it's being constantly
harvested for a certain class.
00:10:16.34\00:10:20.15
And even the bailout in 2008
00:10:20.18\00:10:25.69
benefited certain
businesses unto this day,
00:10:25.72\00:10:28.02
quantitative easing,
trillions of dollars,
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invisible dollars with no laying
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or guarantee behind them,
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just numbers placed
in the bank's vaults.
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That's not
egalitarian or necessarily
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purely any policy.
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That's policy run amok to serve
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the interests of
a certain faction.
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The connection that I
tried to make years ago
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in an article that I
wrote was in Revelation
00:10:46.88\00:10:49.34
where it talks about,
00:10:49.38\00:10:51.01
you know, you can argue
the particulars of the system,
00:10:51.05\00:10:53.58
but it's a great
mercantile system
00:10:53.62\00:10:57.35
of the whole world is meshed in,
00:10:57.39\00:11:00.06
and then it says in one hour
all of this wealth disappears,
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and the
merchants still are minting
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that their wealth
disappeared in one hour.
00:11:05.59\00:11:07.50
And especially, if
you take it prophetically,
00:11:07.53\00:11:10.20
you know, that's a very
short but quantifiable period,
00:11:10.23\00:11:13.54
a few days.
00:11:13.57\00:11:15.10
And I can remember
as the stock market,
00:11:15.14\00:11:16.84
you know,
collapsed 1,000 this day
00:11:16.87\00:11:18.47
and 500 the next day, and...
00:11:18.51\00:11:21.01
it's you're off the cliff.
00:11:21.04\00:11:22.38
Yes.
00:11:22.41\00:11:23.75
And I think we got a foretaste
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of what clearly will
happen at some future point,
00:11:26.58\00:11:31.12
probably sooner
rather than later
00:11:31.15\00:11:32.82
because they
haven't fixed anything
00:11:32.85\00:11:34.59
of any substance since 2008.
00:11:34.62\00:11:36.83
No, no, no, no, no.
00:11:36.86\00:11:38.26
And among other things,
00:11:38.29\00:11:39.63
and while we're
talking about it here,
00:11:39.66\00:11:41.00
will precipitate
great stresses in society,
00:11:41.03\00:11:44.37
civil liberties already
are at stress because of it,
00:11:44.40\00:11:47.54
and religious liberty,
00:11:47.57\00:11:49.50
and self-determinism is
going to be a great threat.
00:11:49.54\00:11:52.64
You're very, very right
because when people are hungry,
00:11:52.67\00:11:55.84
they go to the extremes
and they look for a savior,
00:11:55.88\00:11:59.41
and this is I
think where we need
00:11:59.45\00:12:00.92
to be able to
look at these things
00:12:00.95\00:12:02.28
from an apocalyptic perspective.
00:12:02.32\00:12:04.25
Yeah.
00:12:04.29\00:12:05.62
If the material foundations
of society undermine...
00:12:05.65\00:12:07.59
Marx was indeed into something.
00:12:07.62\00:12:09.92
The material
foundations of the economy
00:12:09.96\00:12:11.86
actually supports these
all other superstructures.
00:12:11.89\00:12:14.96
If people...
00:12:15.00\00:12:16.33
I've seen it in Zimbabwe.
00:12:16.36\00:12:17.70
Yeah, you know,
00:12:17.73\00:12:19.07
what was the maximum inflation
that Zimbabwe experienced?
00:12:19.10\00:12:20.44
Ooh!
00:12:20.47\00:12:21.80
It was in trillions of
dollars. The percent inflation.
00:12:21.84\00:12:24.47
Yes, there were
million dollar bills.
00:12:24.51\00:12:26.37
I remember...
00:12:26.41\00:12:27.74
Yes, someone told me that I
was talking to a Zimbabwean.
00:12:27.78\00:12:30.15
If I had remembered, I
would have come up with
00:12:30.18\00:12:32.31
one of the bills it was...
00:12:32.35\00:12:33.68
Yeah, they said
you would get your pay
00:12:33.72\00:12:35.05
and you would
literally run down the street
00:12:35.08\00:12:37.09
to spend it as you
ran, it was disappeared.
00:12:37.12\00:12:40.52
You know, my father
was a building contractor,
00:12:40.56\00:12:43.12
and he had investments,
00:12:43.16\00:12:44.83
when that Zimbabwean
dollar collapsed, something...
00:12:44.86\00:12:47.80
his investments that were worth
00:12:47.83\00:12:50.50
more than a quarter
of a million dollars,
00:12:50.53\00:12:52.47
they actually became useless,
00:12:52.50\00:12:54.24
completely useless.
00:12:54.27\00:12:56.47
Insurance at the things.
00:12:56.50\00:12:58.14
And this is exactly
what gave rise to Hitler
00:12:58.17\00:13:00.41
because the middleclass,
00:13:00.44\00:13:01.78
when it was gutted out
by the Great Depression,
00:13:01.81\00:13:04.75
they wanted
somebody to serve them.
00:13:04.78\00:13:07.22
And so it is very, very
scary, so people need something.
00:13:07.25\00:13:11.29
But this is why belief in
God is very, very important.
00:13:11.32\00:13:16.12
I remember the Psalmist,
I think is that 49 or so,
00:13:16.16\00:13:20.10
the Lord is our refuge,
00:13:20.13\00:13:21.46
we'll not be scared
even if the mountains
00:13:21.50\00:13:23.87
is the present
help in time of trouble,
00:13:23.90\00:13:25.87
even if the mountains
sink into the heart of the sea,
00:13:25.90\00:13:29.94
we will not be afraid.
00:13:29.97\00:13:31.41
And I think this is why
00:13:31.44\00:13:32.77
the reading of
Book of Revelation
00:13:32.81\00:13:34.38
is very, very
important because it says,
00:13:34.41\00:13:36.61
"Even if the world
around you collapses,
00:13:36.64\00:13:39.31
you can still
have faith in God."
00:13:39.35\00:13:41.18
Absolutely, and
that's a wonderful assurance.
00:13:41.22\00:13:43.39
We all need
faith for the future.
00:13:43.42\00:13:45.05
And the future for us
is a few moments away,
00:13:45.09\00:13:48.02
but we're going to
take a break, come back,
00:13:48.06\00:13:50.49
and we'll continue this
discussion of the economy
00:13:50.53\00:13:54.20
and the ramifications
for religious freedom.
00:13:54.23\00:13:56.60
Yes.
00:13:56.63\00:13:57.97