Lux Lucet

Elisha Prophesies the End of Samaria’s Siege by Nicolas Fontaine, 1625-1709.

In the first installment in this series, we looked at some of the economic concepts taught in the Bible’s account of the siege of Samaria recorded for us in 2 Kings 6:24-7:20. In particular we looked at 2 Kings 6:25 and found that quite a bit of economics is packed in just that one verse. Today, we’ll continue the discussion of economic implications of Syria’s attack on the capital of the Northern Kingdom.

Politics, Economics and the Blame Game

As a kid, one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons was Scooby Doo. The episodes were pretty formulaic, especially the ending where, as the bad guys were being hauled off to the paddy wagon, they inevitably would blurt out, “And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” They never blamed their downfall on their own criminality. It was all the fault of the interlopers.

Well, politicians are a lot like this. While being separate disciplines, politics and economics are closely related such that to talk about one often means brining up the other. This is especially common when a nation is struggling with economic difficulties.

And when economic troubles begin, so too does the blame game shuffle. Suppose the citizens experience a sharp upward spike in the cost of living, or wages stagnate or wave after wave of layoffs take place. Do the powers-that-be blame themselves? Of course not! Economic difficulty is NEVER related to the policies of the current president or Congress. No, not one bit.

The political class, and the academics whose ideas the politicians implement make it all very clear that they had nothing to do with the mess. We’re made to understand that our economic pain is always the fault of the intransigence of opposing party, or greedy market speculators, or bond vigilantes, or budget cuts, or lack of sufficient federal regulatory oversight, or not enough government spending, or cheap imports from China.

This blame game, this shifting of responsibility, is nothing new. In fact, we can say with confidence that it started six thousand years ago with Adam himself. As he put it in his own words, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). “It’s your fault, not mine!” That’s the gist of Adam’s argument to God.

And just as both Adam and politicians in our own time love to shift blame, so too did Jehoram king of Israel. Jehoram was the son of Ahab and the sitting king at the time Syria besieged Samaria. One significant difference between Jehoram and many current day heads of state is that the actually had to suffer the consequences of his bad policies along with his people.

He didn’t have some luxurious führerbunker to hide out in. He was shut up in the city the same as everyone else and both saw and heard the suffering of the people and suffered along with them.

From our study last week, we already know that the people were so desperate that they were paying a fortune for some of the worst food imaginable, with a donkey’s head going for eighty shekels of silver and a quart of bird droppings for five shekels. A shekel was a weight of silver equal to about .4 oz. or 11.34 grams.

Using the current spot price of silver of $17.33, we can estimate the costs of these items in current dollars. The Samaritans were paying the equivalent of $554.56 for a nasty donkey’s head while a pint of bird droppings set them back around $34.66. Tough times those.

And this wasn’t the worst of it. So desperate was the situation in Samaria that some people were driven to cannibalism. 2 Kings 6:26-29 gives tells about a woman who petitioned Jehoram, complaining that she had boiled her son and shared him with her neighbor, but that the neighbor refused to return the favor.

Upon hearing this grisly complaint, Jehoram tore his cloths and said, “God do so to me and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today!” (2 Kings 6:31). As did Adam, the king shifted blame for his troubles to another. It wasn’t his fault that the people were starving. It was that no-good son of Shaphat!

But a quick glance at Scripture reveals that the problems of Israel very much were the fault of Jehoram and his evil policies. 2 Kings 3:1-3 provides a brief summary of Jehoram’s reign. It reads, “Now Jehoram the son of Ahab became king over Israel at Samaria in the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned twelve years. And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, but not like his father and mother: for he put away the sacred pillar of Baal that his father had made. Nevertheless he persisted in the sin of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin; he did not depart from them.”

Jehoram, it turns out, was a promoter of idol worship, and almost certainly guilty of this sin himself. The specific idolatry in view here is, “the sin of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.” Jeroboam, Scripture tells us, was the first king of Israel. And fearing that people would kill him and return to the king of Judah if they continued to go to Jerusalem for the annual feasts, he decided to set up two gold calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan, and commanded the people to worship there instead of in the prescribed manner at Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 12:25-31). In disobedience to Moses, he also made priests of every class of people regardless of whether they were of the tribe of Levi.

As if these sins weren’t enough. Jehoram also left the temple of Baal standing in Samaria. This temple had been built by his father Ahab (1 Kings 16:32), and would later be destroyed by Jehu (2 Kings 10:27). But during the entire time of the siege, there stood this monument to Baal in nation’s capital city.

Although the text does not specifically call out Jehoram’s promotion of idolatry as the reason for the siege of Samaria, given the context of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles, it is reasonable to assume that the rampant idolatry promoted by Jehoram’s administration was at least part of the reason God visited Samaria with the Syrian siege.

But notice, Jehoram never once considers that 1) persisting in the obvious sin of Baal worship, a violation of the first commandment, and 2) violating the second commandment by allowing the gold calves to stand may in some way be related to the awful conditions that obtained in Samaria. “Elisha’s behind this,” seems to be Jehoram’s only thought. Therefore, “Off with his head!”

Blaming God

Jehoram didn’t stop his blame shifting with Elisha either. But just like Adam, ultimately his blame for the economic misery of Samaria was directed to God, whose representative Elisha was.

After dispatching his messenger to execute the prophet, Jehoram, perhaps having second thoughts, followed after him and said, “Surely this calamity is from the LORD, why should I wait for the LORD any longer?”

Apparently, the king had all but given up on any hope of deliverance. And humanly speaking, he likely was right.

Contemporary Parallels

Just as Jehoram never stopped to consider that his government’s policies just might have something to do with the suffering of Samaria, so to modern day policy makers refuse to admit that the ongoing economic breakdown of the West is the result of their own foolish and destructive programs. Instead they shift the blame, usually settling on the free market as the scapegoat of choice.

But it doesn’t stop with their rejecting private property, the free market and limited government. Because these concepts are all taught in Scripture, to reject them is also to reject God himself.

The Crash of 1929

Take, for example, the stock market crash of 1929. Why that was the fault of greedy speculators and unscrupulous, unregulated stock brokers. Bring on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)!

And thank goodness we have it. Why, if there weren’t for the SEC, we’d have ponzi schemers like Bernie Madoff running around ripping off widows and orphans….Oh wait, you mean he managed to do all that right under the noses of government regulators? Never mind…

The reality is quite different. Far from being the fault of freewheeling capitalist speculators, the 1929 stock market crash was principally the fault of the money printers at the Federal Reserve (the Fed).

During the 1920s, the Fed increased the money supply to devalue the dollar against the British pound. This caused financial bubbles in both the stock market and in Florida real estate.

Why did the Fed go on its printing spree? The purpose was to aid Great Britain’s return to the gold standard. (see Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 133).

Now the gold standard can be a good thing when executed properly. But there were serious problems with the way Great Britain went about setting it up. And in order to make the scheme work, the US had to debase its currency, which it began doing in 1924.

This raises another issue. One could fairly ask the question, on what ground the Fed had any moral authority to devalue the dollar, thus hurting Americans who used the currency, in order to help out a foreign government? The Bible and the Constitution nowhere allow the federal government, or in this case and agency of the federal government, the authority to take money from the American people and give it to foreign governments.

The actions of the Fed can fairly be described as theft. Through money printing and the resulting devaluation of the dollar, US central bankers stole the savings of the American people and, in effect, transferred the proceeds to the Bank of England.

By 1928, the Fed had stopped inflating the money supply (printing dollars). And when the inflation stopped and there was no more air going into the stock market and Florida land bubbles, the stage was set for a deflationary collapse, which famously happened in October of 1929.

Of course, you’ll rarely hear an accurate account of the role the Fed played in the collapse of the stock market. And to the degree the Fed is blamed, they usually are censured for not printing enough money, when the real problem is the existence of the Fed in the first place.

The Great Depression

What about the Great Depression of the 1930s? The official statist mythology would have us believe that the difficulties of that period were the result of inherent flaws in capitalism, which was saved only by the heroic interventions of the federal government. In truth, left to its own the economy would have righted itself much sooner, and done so without the additional deadweight of all the new federal agencies and laws.

If you doubt this, consider the case of the crash of 1921. What’s that, you say? You’ve never heard of the crash of 1921? Well, there was serious economic downturn that occurred that year, but you’ve never heard of it, because it was over and done with faster than you can say Keynesian economics. Why? The government minded its own business and let the economy self-correct. Noted financial expert James Grant has written a book about it called The Forgotten Depression.

But in the 1930s, the interventionists ruled the roost, and they just couldn’t stop themselves from “helping” the economy recover. Scorning Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s calls to let the economy work things out on its own – then president Hoover called Mellon and his supporters “the leave-it-alone- liquidationists – the president embarked on a series of unprecedented interventions in the free market, especially concerning wages.

Hoover acted quickly and decisively. His most important actwas to call a series of White House conferences with the leading financiers and industrialists of the country, to induce them to maintain wage rates and expand their investments (Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 187).

Of course, this was not the last intervention either by Hoover or by his successor Franklin Roosevelt. I can be fairly said that the actions of these men turned what would have been a temporary setback into a more than decade-long marathon of misery. Their policies were the problem, not the cure.

Contemporary Wealth Disparity

In our own time, we’re constantly harangued about the 1% vs. the 99%, by which is meant the very elite in society get richer while everyone else sees their economic opportunities shrink. Bernie Sanders’ entire campaign was built around this blame capitalism message.

Now I’m willing to grant Sanders the point that there is a problem with wealth distribution in our economy. It is true that the earnings of the super rich have been super charged in recent decades while at the same time ordinary workers earnings, after inflation adjustments, are about the same as they were in the early 70s.

But while socialists are right in pointing out the ongoing re-enserfment of the middle class, they are wrong about its source. Capitalism and free markets, what John Robbins called constitutional capitalism, are, economically speaking, the best friend the working man ever had. The current system, what Sanders thinks is capitalism, is really corporatism, which is simply a polite way of saying fascism. And the Fed is at the very heart of this corrupt system that rewards the rich and well-connected by stealing from ordinary Americans.

Andrew Huszar, the man who in his own words “quarterbacked” the Fed’s latest foray into money printing, what is known as Quantitative Easing (QE), said as much in a Wall Street Journal article,

I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time…

Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program [QE] wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American…Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash…

In the past, Fed leaders – even if they ultimately erred – would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street’s leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer…

The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank’s bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street…Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009 (Andrew Huszar, “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/7/2013).

Without question, QE is one of the biggest financial frauds in the history of financial frauds. And it will end, as do all money printing schemes, in collapse. The only question is when. And from what many top people in the field of finance are saying, the day of financial reckoning may not be far off.

For the folks in Venezuela, that day has already arrived.

Conclusion

The problems of the Israel of King Jehoram and those of the contemporary West are very much alike. On one level there are serious economic problems. But the economic problems are really symptomatic of a deeper, spiritual bankruptcy.

For just as Jehoram failed see that the suffering of Samaria was the result of his own ungodly policies, preferring instead to shift the blame to Elisha and to God himself, so too do we in the West fail to understand that our present discontent and poor future prospects cannot be blamed on the failure of freedom and capitalism, for constitutional capitalism is the political and economic system of the Bible, but rather are the result of our substituting the wisdom of this world for true wisdom that comes from God alone.

It is critical that Christian understand this point. Because when the next crisis hits, and it really is just a matter of when, not if, we can be sure the statists once again will drag out their tired playbook, blaming the crisis on free markets and flacking for more statist policies. It’s way past time for Christians to put the onus for our deteriorating economy where it belongs, on the backs of the ungodly statist destroyers of liberty.

To be continued…