Are we using language to confuse ourselves?

Too often in our time, the terms we use to organize our thinking are created by statist agencies and serve to mislead us. One such set of terms created by the IRS is "profit versus the non-profit." Profit-making activities are taxed. Non-profit enterprises and agencies are not. People come to classify activities in terms of these two terms. And so they describe reality instead of a statist-taxing category. Would it be not much more realistic if we classify things without reference to the IRS? If the IRS were to disappear in the next decade, how useful will these terms be? After all, they have referenced only to taxing. I submit that the terms "productive versus non-productive" are much more useful. Churches, schools and libraries are non-profit, but they are at the same time the most productive agencies civilization has ever known. To eliminate them would be to eliminate civilization.

Civil government is emphatically non-profit. Often it is not productive and . . . . But once kept within its limits can be productive of social order. The family is a non-profit community, but it is most emphatically a productive agency, and its decay is the decay of society and civilization. Because we have emphasized the profit versus the non-profit perspective, we have tended to falsify our view of life in every area: intellectual, industrial, and personal. We have downgraded the productive man in favor of the profiting man. Production has thus been displaced by an administration by the visible symbols of profitable power of church, universities, state and business, which have gained ascendancy over the productive mind and hand.

Religiously speaking, this means that form has been more important than substance. Pragmatism has replaced theology. When we look to the world through categories governed by the IRS, we have beggared ourselves intellectually and we have allowed the taxmen rather than the Lord our God to form our thinking. We need to remind ourselves of Saint Paul's words, "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."

Note: This article is transcribed from RushdoonyTV

Business Capital and Debt

Reading Rothbard’s The Formation of Capital (Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, 2004, Chapter 1 Section 9), I observe that debt is not included in his explanation. The four major themes that he discussed include labor, saving, investment, and human decision. I personally find this strange particularly when I compare my reading on Rothbard with my previous reading on financial education.

I find that debt is a central idea in raising business capital in financial education. This is true at least in Robert Kiyosaki’s books. You will repeatedly find the importance of leverage or other people’s money (OPM) in raising business capital (Perhaps I am missing something here, a gap between the two concepts of capital. I am not sure about this).

For Kiyosaki, not all debts are bad; it depends on where and how you will use it. If you will spend it on liabilities, it is a bad debt; but if you will use it on building assets, it is a good debt.

At first, such distinction between debts confused me for as a result of my plain reading of the Bible it appears that debts are discouraged especially for the followers of God.  But as I read more of Kiyosaki’s books, his distinction started to make sense to me. I understand that Robert Kiyosaki is using his “Austrian insights” on the existing monetary system for his own economic advantage. And this is most evident in his advice on OPM.

As I turn to Rousas John Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law, he teaches that there is a legitimate place for debt in the Bible, but only on short-term basis. No man has the right to mortgage his future by enslaving himself in debt in view of the fact that God is the Ultimate Owner of all things including every man.

However, with the monetary system based on debt that we have right now, as lovers of liberty how should we respond? Can we blame financial advisers like Robert Kiyosaki taking advantage of the system? Or should we follow the Austrian school in campaigning for the end of a monetary system based on debt? What is the right thing to do? Is the question of morality and ethics still applicable to contemporary financial system? Does the Bible provide a clear teaching on this critical issue? If the Bible is really relevant to present economic issue, how theologians, preachers, and Christian educators ought to respond?