#189 Karl Marx and Hamas

The Christian Economist | Dave Arnott

The powerful religion of Karl Marx and of Islam leads to the powerful political system of totalitarianism, which leads to the powerful economic system of Marxism, which impoverishes its people. How we see God has a lot to do with how we see our fellow man. Belief – Politics - Economics When I wrote the curriculum for International Economics at Dallas Baptist University, I used this simple diagram to begin each session. Belief systems produce political systems, which produce economic systems. I know, there is a lot of interplay and it goes back and forth. But the diagram is mostly correct. That’s why we should not be surprised that the Muslim Palestinians of Hamas have a totalitarian political system and a socialist economic system. Power begets power. All three of those systems are based on power structures. If Israel didn't exist, the Palestinians would still live in abject poverty. That is not Israel's fault. It's a cultural thing. In most cases, the powerful top-down religion of Islam does not produce a bottom-up political system like democracy, nor an economic system like free market capitalism that enriches the poor. What we study in social science is differences. That’s it. We want to know why there are differences in the world. Economics is a social science. So, we want to know why the Israelis make $55,000, their neighbors, the Jordanians and Lebanese make less than $13,000, and the Palestinians make under $7,000. Israelis make eight times more than their Palestinian neighbors. Why? Top-down religions like Islam identify more easily with top-down political ideas like totalitarianism, and top-down economics like Marxism. Karl Marx and the Devil That happens to be the title of my podcast #106. That one is based on some comments by Dr. David Jeremiah. I am struggling through a book right now titled The Devil and Karl Marx by Paul Kengor. The subtitle is “Communism’s long march of death, deception, and infiltration.” That sounds like the recent Hamas attack on Israel, doesn’t it? The book I’m currently reading is hard to read because Karl Marx was such an evil person. If you are sickened by the atrocities performed by Hamas against Israelis recently, then you won’t want to read the book. Karl Marx exercised power whenever he could. He impregnated his housemaid, who was about as close to an owned servant as you can get. Two of his daughters committed suicide. His personal life is as disordered and calamitous as the economic system he designed. He bullied people on many occasions, and very rarely worked. He lived off his partner, Friedrich Engels. Maybe I’ll explain more about his disastrous and immoral life in another podcast someday. For now, just be assured, that in his personal life and in Marxism, it’s all based on power. At the heart of Marxism is the idea of the oppressors and the oppressed. It’s such a lousy economic system because it fails to recognize that both parties in a transaction can benefit at the same time. Milton Friedman famously said, “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” Well, Marxism is one of those economic fallacies. The left thinks Israel’s prosperity was caused by the Jews stealing wealth from the Palestinians. That’s not how it works. About those oppressed and oppressors. There are about 475 million Arabs in the countries that surround Israel. Their population increased by 8.2 million last year alone. There are…. are you ready for it……just over 7 million Jews in Israel. Get it? The Arab population increase in ONE YEAR was greater than the entire Jewish population. But we’re being told that 7 million people oppress 475 million? You see, some of this misaligned sympathy for the Palestinians is because they are portrayed as the oppressed. That’s just nonsense. They are poor because their religion produces totalitarian polit...