N.T. Wright is Wrong About Free Markets

The thesis of my forthcoming book Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation is quite simple: the New Testament does not endorse modern authoritarian socialism. For libertarians, this should come as no surprise; authoritarianism and socialism both require, by definition, the arbitrary initiation of violence against peaceful people for the achievement of the subjective social preferences of those who hold power. Jesus blesses the peacemakers, authoritarian socialists bless the warmongers. Socialists, of course, don’t see it that way, and a large part of the problem is a lack of definitional and categorical precision. Most Westerns, including (perhaps especially including) professional academics, rarely seek to define these terms in a coherent manner and either openly or implicitly acquiesce to the ubiquitous political and economic authoritarianism of our times. Biblical scholarship is no less immune to this criticism, and, as I argue at length in the book, has actually internalized modern authoritarian socialism and made it an interpretive assumption, distorting both historical exegesis and the modern conclusions which exegetes draw from their interpretation.

While I provide several examples of New Testament scholars who have fallen into this trap in my book, I want to highlight one prominent figure: N.T. Wright. Perhaps the world’s most popular and influential modern scholar, Wright has had a profound impact on the way millions of Christians read their Bibles. While there are many aspects of Wright’s work which I admire, he is, to put it bluntly, quite wrong about political and economic concepts. In my book Wright is the first scholar who receives a lengthy critique and serves as an example par excellence of a phenomenon I address in the book: biblical scholarship consistently falling prey to political and economic incoherence. The following is a truncated critique of Wright’s assumptions which serves as an introduction to the larger problem plaguing the field, and I hope this helps you see why the need to reframe our understanding of political and economic concepts in biblical interpretation is so significant. Enjoy!

Biblical Scholarship and Unclear Political and Economic Reasoning

A perfect example of unclear political and economic reasoning is found in Wright’s 2019 book History and Eschatology. Included in a section where Wright explains the impact of Enlightenment thought, he describes the reception of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and explains how it led to the acceptance by many in the Western world of a “full-on laissez-faire view of economics”, generating the widely held perspective that the economy would simply “work by itself”. He continues: “this has become highly influential in subsequent economics, being used to justify unfettered industrial expansion within the spreading imperial worlds and ending up with the greed-is-good philosophy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. No care for the poor, let alone the remission of large debts”. While Wright doesn’t explicitly use the term ‘capitalism’, it is obviously the conceptual referent of his critique. One of his progressive conversation partners, Richard Horsley, has no problem drawing the connection between Ronald Reagan and capitalism, thus the justification for reading this passage as a critique of capitalism popularly conceived. Wright has provided us with a classic example of how biblical scholars use economic concepts in an unsystematic manner.

Wright’s claim that laissez-faire means the economy somehow ‘works on its own’ is patently false. As the Misesian articulation of praxeology makes abundantly clear, the ‘economy’ is simply a description of the totality of individual human actions; there are no metahistorical forces driving economic activity, only the actions of individuals and the consequences which result from them. Subscribing to capitalism simply means recognizing that people should be free to produce, consume, and exchange property without the arbitrary intervention of outside forces. The notion that the economy ‘works on its own’ is simply the recognition, as we will see when we outline political categories below, that there doesn’t need to be a central planning committee in order to produce economic growth. The idea that the economy must at least in some manner be centrally directed, as Wright implicitly suggests, is a product of nineteenth-century thought which relies on a theory that history itself ‘works on its own’, one which has held a powerful influence over Western epistemology ever since. Wright has simply confused categories.

He also attributes to laissez-faire ‘greed’ and a disregard for the poor. As in Ludwig von Mises’ description of ‘the anti-capitalist mentality’, Wright is clearly using the language of free markets to decry any activity he finds morally deficient. ‘Greed’ and a disregard for the poor are not intrinsic to the private ownership of capital, private property, or free exchange. Wright’s inability to comprehend a social order free from state economic intervention does not constitute a failure of the free market but rather an oversight of his own imagination. Wright also dubiously claims that ‘imperialism’ is a result of laissez-faire free markets. Capitalism as defined by the Austrian school precludes the idea of imperialism and any politically-driven ‘public policy’. Capitalism respects the private property rights of all human beings and outright rejects any intervention in the free exchange of goods and services between individuals and groups. Imperialism by definition is a project of the state; this point is so glaringly obvious it amazes me how so many professional intellectuals miss it entirely. The idea that governments waging war (often involving conscripted soldiers, fiat currencies, and heavy taxes) in far-away places to control resources which weren’t acquired contractually is somehow a manifestation of the respect for private property and free exchange would be comical if it wasn’t a generally accepted view among academics. The arbitrary intervention of the state into economic activity, the very definition of socialism, is what actually drives state-sponsored imperialism. Capitalism is antithetical to imperialism because imperialism is an abandonment of the fundamental presuppositions of capitalism. Wright reveals why defining these terms in a clear, consistent manner is so important; it helps us analyze and assess events as they occur in the real world without unnecessary intellectual baggage.

This leads us to Wright’s commentary on the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Observant readers will already anticipate my response: any so-called ‘public policy’ where the political class makes decisions about property, resources, or economic activity is by definition not a form of capitalism. We must seriously reevaluate the capitalistic credentials of Reagan’s supposed free-market revolution. In shallow historical evaluations of 1980s American politics Reagan is either the hero of free-market capitalism (for conservatives) or the villain of deregulated imperialism (for progressives). Both narratives are false because they assume the Reagan administration actually pursued a policy of economic freedom. N.T. Wright uncritically accepts this popular understanding of Ronald Reagan, making his Reaganite critique of free markets historically false.

David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration from 1981-1985, resigned from his position after elected Republicans failed to decrease government spending. In his book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America Stockman explains how Reagan and congressional Republicans weren’t at all the defenders of free-market capitalism political commentators chalked them up to be. After slashing taxes in 1981, mostly benefiting politically-connected corporations and their sleazy D.C. lobbyists, the Reagan administration failed to cut government spending, predictably resulting in massive budget deficits. The economic logic is elementary. In order to reduce income, the government must reduce consumption. In the following years Reagan signed several tax increase measures into laws, thereby reigning in the deficit. While observers like Wright and Horsley, analysing history with an imprecise definition of basic economic concepts, frame this as a breakdown of the free markets, it was unmistakably the consequence of government policy. A group of politicians make economic decisions which benefit one group of people at the expense of another, it backfires, and so they raise taxes without cutting spending. Had Wright consulted the Austrians, he wouldn’t have been so off-base. In the purest sense of the term the Reagan administration was implementing socialist policies.

Another nasty and inconvenient fact is often left out of the conversation about concrete economic policies, one with relevance to Wright’s assertion regarding the relationship between markets and imperialism. Reagan dramatically expanded the military-industrial complex. Stockman explains how “a riotous expansion of the warfare state was foremost among the policy errors of the Reagan Revolution…the White House made a historically devastating mistake by signing over to the Pentagon a blank check known as the ‘7 percent real growth top line’. This…nearly tripled the annual defense budget from $140 billion to $370 billion…it fueled expansionist impulses through the military-industrial complex at exactly the wrong time in history”. Increasing government expenditures for the warfare state, often to the benefit of politically-connected corporations and further expanding the imperialist ambitions of America’s federal government, is the opposite of free-market, laissez-faire capitalism. Resources are being taken by force from private citizens and decisions about the utilization of those resources are made by politicians and bureaucrats. What Stockman is describing can only be described as socialism. The expansion of military power is in violation of economic freedom, private property, and voluntary exchange. That ain’t capitalism, friends. Wright has correctly identified an important problem but because of his lack of linguistic and categorical precision he provides an incorrect analysis and proposed solution. Every single scholar quoted in the opening to this chapter has fallen into the same rhetorical trap; unable to provide a clear, irreducible, and universally applicable definition of basic economic categories has distorted economic discourse in biblical scholarship.

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