Christian Principles and Public Policy; E. Coleson

and embarrassed." But is there any more cause for embarrassment over this needless blunder than for what many so-called social scientists of both East and West have been doing and writing for a long, long time? Perhaps Bertram D. Wolfe sum med up the Lysenko delusion best in this brief statement: ~~Laws of hered ity were passed by the Politburo." While we would reject with scorn any attempts to legislate the basic principles of genetics, we have left the door wide open to the same type of thinking by social engineers in charge of a multitude of experi ments in every aspect of our na tional life. If we can't abolish the laws of Nature in the physical sci ences and biology, can we do so in the social, political and economic reaim? Yet we try to every day. Perhaps one of the best examples of an attempt to beat what has long been considered a basic principle of politie.s and economics was the81 82 THE FREEMAN February change from silver to base-metal coinage a dozen years ago. As silver change was rapidly disappearing, there were those who reminded us that Gresham's Law2 was operating once more. This was stoutly denied by prominent people in the national government, but were they right?

Bad Money in History What is Gresham's Law and by what authority did he proclaim it? It seems that early in the reign of ((Good Queen Bess" England was much plagued with monetary prob lems. When Elizabeth mentioned her perplexity in the presence of her councilors, Sir Thomas Gresham ex pressed amazement that Her Majesty was unaware that HBad money drives out good." This was back in 1558, but Gresham claimed no credit for discovering what he regarded as a truism. Some forty years earlier Copernicus, 3 the Polish astronomer, wrote a little essay on money which shows he was also aware of the principle. Others knew about it at least as far back as the Golden Age of Greece nearly twenty five hundred years ago. Aris tophanes mentioned in his cele brated comedy, Frogs, ((bad citizens are preferred to good, just as bad money circulates while good money disappears."4 Apparently, he as sumed that this was common knowledge in his time too.

One might add as a corollary to Gresham's Law in this age of infla tion that a money tends to fall in value to the worth of the material of which it is made: if money is paper, it eventually sinks to the value of last week's daily papers. Monetary practices of the nations of the world, including our own, are daily making that truth self-evident. But how long will it be before ordinary com mon sense becomes the basis for national policy and we return to sound money? Much confusion grows out of the failure to understand how the opera tion of some principle, like Gresham's Law, differs from the working of gravity or inertia. When silver change was disappearing a dozen years ago, some people saw no practical difference between the old coins and the new. To them it was all just money. Does this mean that Gresham was wrong? Not really, but it does illustrate the fact that, since economic laws depend on human behavior, they may seem not to op erate in a given situation or seem even to work in reverse in the short run.

According to the Law of Supply and Demand, customers are sup posed to buy less at high prices and more at low prices. Henry Ford 5 be lieved this, so he reduced the price of his Model T from $950 in 1909 to $290 in 1926, and sold fifteen mil lion of his cars in the process. This should be adequate proof of the prin1979 CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND PUBLIC POLICY 83 ciple. However, he was then forced by declining sales to go to more expensive models, because other fac tors were becoming more important than the price. Gravity doesn't work so haphazardly, but is utterly mechan ical in its operation. Yet, there are economic laws at work which must ultimately be reckoned with by communists, socialists, capitalists and even primitive men. And this has always been so, as an English wri ter so well expressed it more than a half century ago: ((Guilds, Governments and Soviets may come and go. But under them all, and, if need be, in spite of them all, the profound adjustments of supply and demand will work themselves out and work themselves out again for so long as the lot of man is darkened by the curse of Adam."6 God Gave Us Guidelines and Options of Error The Creator did not simply make us creatures of instinct, although that would have been an easy way of ((uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap," as Dos toyevsk y7 pointed out, but He left us the options of error and disobedi ence. Since man's behavior is not programmed, God gave us guidelines, if we would just follow them. But we don't break God's Law in any sphere; we only shipwreck ourselves on the rocks which we could have avoided, if we had steered our course aright.

Another" distinction we need to make is between sin and human error. Let us consider the case of a doctor who was busy spreading the Gospel and infection in an army hospital during the Civil War. Was he a saint or a murderer? Since medical science had not yet discov ered the germ theory of disease, there were many fine Christian doc tors who were spreading death through the wards even more effec tively than they were spreading the Word of Life. They did not realize that they were actually engaged in bacterial warfare against their own soldiers. One is reminded of a wise saying by the German poet Goethe: ((Noth ing is more frightful than ignorance in action." The doctors' motives may have been pure, but their hands, instruments and bandages were not. Yet the error of their ways would soon be common knowledge, since the first antiseptic operation was per formed in Scotland by Joseph Lister in August of 1865, less than six months after the close of the CiviI War in America. While Lister's new technique did not catch on im mediately, the spread of this revolu tionary scientific innovation was rapid once the word began to get around.

The appalling sanitary situation in the middle of the last century, 84 THE FREEMAN February even in peace time, may be judged from the comment of a British doctor of the time: ((A man laid on the opera ting table in one of our surgi cal hospitals is exposed to more chances of death than the English soldier on the field of Waterloo." The great hazard was infection, of course, and had been over the ages, but a simple principle went far in correcting the situation both in surgery and in public health. The relationship of vast detail to a basic principle may be noted from this comment on Lister's work: HJoseph Lister's manifold labors may be read in the volumes of his Collected Papers (1909), but his life work is summed up in a phrase: he made surgery clean."8 Would that other human problems could be as easily solved. Here, knowing what to do went far in providing a rem edy. Unfortunately, the solution isn't usually that simple. Men often cling to their errors as they do to their sins.

Slavery and Tariffs The Civil War also well illustrates man's unwillingness to change and his persistence in doing wrong, even when it would seem that he ought to know better. In 1850, a little more than a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, a popular French political pamphleteer, Frederic Bas tiat, wrote an essay called The Law. 9 He commented most favorably on the political institutions of the United States, but thought that even here there were two violations of public morality which presented a grave danger to the nation: ((The question of slavery and that of tariffs .... " Since the English, whom Bastiat knew well, had recently finished a successful campaign to rid themsel ves of these two evils and since the conflict over slavery and tariffs in America would soon ((lead to the dissolution of the Union," as he foresaw, his observations were both timely and prophetic. The contrast between the British and the American experience in dealing with these two problems is fascinating 'and instructive. The English freed the slaves in England in 1772, forbade the transportation of slaves in British ships after 1807, and emancipated the slaves on the plantations in the colonies, particu larly the sugar islands of the Carib bean, in 1834.10 In the next decade they began the abolition of their tariffs and had soon accomplished this also. In both cases Christian statesmen led the way and the Christian community provided much of the political support. They also brought this to pass without war or other major upheaval.

We freed our slaves belatedly by a long and tragic ((War between the States" and have not yet faced up to the protective tariff problem, which has plagued us throughout our his1979 CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND PUBLIC POLICY 85 tory. Since the resentment of the South against Northern tariffs was as much a cause of the Civil War as Northern objection to slavery, and even nearly started war a genera tion before it did happen, Bastiat's concern was not unfounded. Let us try to understand why we were less successful than our British brethren. Since slavery is the more obvious of the two evils, let us first compare English and American abolition ef forts. To begin with, it may be acknowledged that slavery was more deeply embedded in American life and politics than it was in England. Sad to say also, the Southern obses sion with slavery increased as we move from 1776 with its Declaration of Independence and 1787 with its Constitutional Convention on into the early decades of the nineteenth century. The usual explanation is the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by a Yankee schoolteacher, Eli Whitney. Arnold Toynbee ll regrets that slavery was not abolished be fore the Industrial Revolution made the textile industry big business and Whitney's invention had made cotton ~~King" in the South.

Concerned Statesmen It is interesting to note that Jef ferson and other Virginia statesmen who were also slaveholders were apologetic for their ~~peculiar in stitution" and wished it would go away. The English even thought that the Declaration of Indepen dence 12 would free everyone over here, although we were not quite that consistent. Still the national conscience was troubled, as is evi dent from the following remarks of a Virginia planter, Colonel George Mason, as the issue was being de bated at the Constitutional Conven tion: The western people are already calling out for slaves for their new land. Slavery discourages arts and manufacture. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this.

By an inevitable chain of cause and ef fect Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. 13 In addition to discovering another principle-God ~~punishes national sins by national calamities," if the Colonel is right-it is interesting to compare his condemnation of slav ery with the Biblical defense of the evil in the years before the Civil War. It is also fascinating to com pare English abolitionists with our own: William Wilberforce, for in stance, was a patient Christian statesman who knew how to hate the sin without hating the sinner, while John Brown of Harpers Ferry was a fanatic. Therefore, Parlia86 THE FREEMAN February ment was able to make emancipa tion at least palatable to the sugar planters in the Caribbean in 1834: the English government paid the masters twenty million pounds for their slaves. While there were reasonable Americans, reason failed us; but we did pay for our animosity. It is in teresting to note that an official of the U.S. Treasury estimated in 1869 that the cost of the Civil War was (t. .. three times as much as the slave property of the country was ever worth."14 This figure, of course, does not count the ((blood, sweat and tears." Now it should be obvious that a more reasoned and Christian approach to American slavery would have been most appropriate, but this hides a deeper issue which will come up in the discussion of their economic problem-a problem which is still with us.

While Northern propagandists tried to picture the Civil War as a holy crusade for freedom, Southern ers felt otherwise and with some reason. When the triumph of the new Republican party in November of 1860 made higher tariffs certain, Jefferson Davis insisted that the at tempt to limit the extension of slav ery was not from humanitarian mo tives, but to insure that the North would dominate the nation for self ish reasons: It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim .... 15 Davis, of course, was protesting against high import duties on goods bought from England in exchange for Southern cotton. He felt, as Southerners did, that they could never prosper as long as they paid high taxes to promote Northern prosperity. The larger question is whether the government should be busy granting favors to any section, party or interest, or should it simply be concerned with administering justice for all.

In his study, The Evolution of Political Thought, Parkinson 16 notes the observation by the ancient Greeks that when their city states became democracies the people would promptly bankrupt their gov ernments by demands for special favors. This collapse then led to a dictator (a tyrant, to use the Greek). Parkinson says the Greeks regarded this shift from democracy through bankrupt socialism to dictatorship as ((almost a law of nature." Perhaps we have another principle here, a ((law of nature" which makes democ racy impossible except as a short run expedient. Since other forms of government are not very attractive either, this is a serious matter.

1979 CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND PUBLIC POLICY 87 THE LAW sometimes places this whole apparatus of courts, police, constabularies, and prisons at the service of the plunderer, and puts the plundered person, when he defends himself, in the prisoners' dock. In a word, there is legal plunder . ... How is it to be recogn ized? Very simply. All we have to do is see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong. We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime. FREDERIC BASTIAT, The Law In The Law 17 Bastiat said that in an oligarchy the few plunder the many and in a democracy ttuniversal plunder" becomes the rule (to him, ttThe state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else"). He says that the ttAbsence of plunder is the principle of justice, of peace, of or der, of stabili ty, of harmony, of good sense." This would mean a govern ment which confined itself narrowly to the task ofadministering justice within the nation and defending the frontiers, as Adam Smith 18 urged in The Wealth ofNations, published in 1776.

The Victorian system was, of course, the application of the ideas of Adam Smith to the economic and political life of Great Britain. Victo rians believed that a few basic prin ciples should serve as guidelines in the decisions for the running of the nation and of the world, and that these ttLaws of Nature" were built into the constitution of the universe by the Creator Himself. The Judge of all the earth becomes the court of last resort. Were they right, or should the government dominate every aspect of life, as it is doing more and more? American conservatives have long been frustrated because the general public does not ttbuy" their argu ments for limited government, a re vival of the ttwork ethic," and other sound policies. The appeal is usually made in the name of efficiency, greater productivity, and maximiz ing profits. Unfortunately, that ap proach often misses the mark-life doesn't seem to work out that way. I knew a few poor farm laborers dur ing the Great Depression who stayed off W.P.A. because they had tender consciences. They could have 88 THE FREEMAN February gotten twice as much money for doing half as much work, but they would have had to lie to do it (they would have had to swear on their applications for government jobs that they couldn't find work, when they knew very well that farmers couldn't get help).

While it is true that the nation would be better off over the long run if people in general did what was right, the connection between virtue and reward for the individuai may be so remote, and even uncertain, that it is almost silly to suggest it. Try in this age to convince a bureau crat, one who is doing less than nothing, that he should resign to reduce the national budget. True, perhaps, but who listens? The worth less government employee is just trying to minimize his efforts and maximize his income. That sounds like good economics, doesn't it? It would be better to appeal to his conscience--if he has one. Men of Conscience We forget that the men who made that remarkable era of freedom in England back in the last century were men of conscience. Is sound social, political and economic theory simple Christian ethics? Reformers in England once believed this and their considerable success suggests that their ideas and actions might well serve as examples for us in this time of national and global crisis. It should be noted also that they se cured someone else's freedom before they got around to care for their own self-interest: the abolition of slavery in British territory was ac complished before the free trade movement was started. The think ing was the same in both cases, as they themselves insisted.

As the slavery issue was being debated in Parliament in the early years of the last century, practical politicians who were making money from slavery objected that the abolitionists were arguing the case on Uabstract principles of right," and were ignoring the heavy losses to business that would come with the triumph of their cause. Wilber force 19 replied that a HChristian country should be glad to give up profits which are made out of human shame and misery." He assured them that the laws of the nation should be founded Uon the great and immutable principles of truth, jus tice and humanity." This same view point dominated the campaign for free trade a little later, during the early years of Victoria's reign, when statesmen such as Richard Cobden and John Bright consulted the Bible as they did business statistics. In the early decades of the last century it was a common saying in England that ((the school master now walks abroad in English politics,"20 since the appeal to truth requires thought and study, while the 1979 CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND PUBLIC POLICY 89 pragmatist makes up his rules as he goes along. According to Jacques Barzun,21 this era tthas rightly been called the Golden Age of Intellect."

Barzun notes correctly that the rela tionship today between a labor leader and his Ph.D. consultant in economics is not between their intel lects; the Ph.D. is a flunky helping his pragmatic boss do what he would do anyway without his assistance. He is in much the same position as a soothsayer prostrated before the throne of an Oriental despot: he says what he is expected to say. When principles are ignored and truth is forgotten, learning loses its reason for being; the tttruth" simply be comes the lie that Big Brother finds most convenient at the moment. Freedom disappears,· for liberty and truth are inseparable. ttAnd ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). (I -FOOTNOTESlEugene Lyons, Workers' Paradise Lost (New York: Twin Circle Publishers, 1967), pp. 321-325. 2William F. Rickenbacker, Wooden Nickels (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1966), pp.57-96.

3Angus Armitage, The World of Copernicus (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1947), pp. 85-87. 4Elgin Groseclose, Money and Man (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., second edition, 1967), p. 26. SRoger Burlingame, Henry Ford (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1954), p. 59 and pp. 86-87. 6Hubert D. Henderson, Supply and Demand (London: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1921), p. 17. 7Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: New American Li brary, translation by Manuel Komroff, 1957), p.237. 8Victor Robinson, M.D., The Story of Medicine (New York: The New Home Library, 1943), p. 423. 9Frederic Bastiat, Selected Essays on Politi cal Economy (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nos trand Co., translation by Seymour Cain, 1964), pp.59-60. 10J. C. Furnas, The Road to Harpers Ferry (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1959), pp. 245-285. llArnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford U. Press, 1939), Vol. 4, pp.

137-141. 12Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 25. 13Garet Garrett, The American Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955), p. 87. 14H. U. Faulkner, American Economic His tory (New York: Harper and Brothers Pub lishers, seventh edition, 1954), p. 508. lsIbid., p. 308. 16C. Northcote Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1958), p. 241. 17Bastiat, op. cit., pp. 62-64. 18AdamSmith, The Wealth ofNations (New York: The Modern Library), p. 651. 19W. E. F. Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1969), p. 19. 20Asa Briggs, Victorian People (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), p. 209. 21Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 10-11.