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Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute

Volume 8, Number 2 March 2016

CHALLENGING THE MYTHS

OF PROGRESSIVISM
by Lawrence Reed

Publisher, William L. Armstrong

Editor, Jeff Hunt

What about the reference, in the Book of Acts, to the

early Christians selling their worldly goods and sharing
communally in the proceeds? Art Lindsley of the Institute
for Faith, Work and Economics writes, In this passage
from Acts, there is no mention of the state at all. These
early believers contributed their goods freely, without
coercion, voluntarily. There is plenty of indication that
private property rights were still in effect.
It may disappoint progressives to learn that Christs words
and deeds repeatedly upheld such critically-important,
capitalist virtues as contract, profit, and private property.
For example, consider His Parable of the Talents. Of
several men in the story, the one who takes his money and
buries it is reprimanded while the one who invests and
generates the largest return is applauded and rewarded.

Lawrence Reed, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, spoke at Centennial
Institutes Issue Monday in February. Below are excerpts from his speech and his new book,
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism.

Myth 1: Jesus Was A Socialist

Nowhere does Christ even remotely suggest that we should

dislike a neighbor because of wealth or seek to take that
wealth from him. Using the power of government to grab
another persons property isnt exactly altruistic. Christ
never even implied that accumulating wealth through
peaceful commerce was in any way wrong; He implored
people to not allow wealth to rule them or corrupt their
character.

In Matthew 19:23, Christ says, Truly I tell you, it will be

hard for a rich person to get into the kingdom of Heaven.
A progressive might say, Eureka! Christ doesnt like rich
people and then stretch the remark beyond recognition to
justify any rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme that
comes down the pike. But this admonition is
Shall
entirely consistent with everything else Christ
says. Its not a call to envy the rich, to take from
Steal
the rich, or to give free cell phones to the
poor. Its a call to character. Its an observation
that some people let their wealth rule them, rather than the
One can scour the Scriptures and find nary a word from
other way around. Its a warning about temptations.
Christ that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth
In Christs teachings and in many other parts of the New
by political authorities. None, period.
I first heard something similar to this clich some 40 years
ago. As a Christian, I was puzzled. I had always understood
Christs message to be that the most important decision a
person would make in his earthly lifetime was to
accept or reject Him as a savior. Christ stressed
inner, spiritual renewal as far more critical to
You
well-being than material things. I wondered,
Not
How could the same Christ advocate the use
of force to take stuff from some and give it to
others?

Consider the Eighth of the Ten Commandments: You

shall not steal. Note the period after the word steal. The
admonition does not read, You shall not steal unless the
other guy has more than you do or You shall not steal
unless youre absolutely positive you can spend it better
than the guy who earned it. Nor does it say, You shall not
steal but its OK to hire someone else, like a politician, to
do it for you.

Lawrence Reed became president of the Foundation for Economic Education in

2008. Previously, he served as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in
Midland, Michigan. He gave this talk at the Centennial Institute on February 8, 2016.
Centennial Institute sponsors research, events, and publications to enhance
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By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith, family, and freedom,
teach citizenship, and renew the spirit of 1776.

especially for small and start-up businesses, reduces the

demand for labor (as with anything else.) But progressives
routinely call for increases in the minimum wage. Its a
progressive myth that government can simply decree a
minimum wage law and all kinds of wonderful things will
happen.

Lawrence Reed speaking at Colorado Christian University.

Testament, Christiansindeed all peopleare advised to

be of generous spirit, to care for ones family, to help the
poor, to assist widows and orphans, to exhibit kindness
and to maintain the highest character. How all that gets
translated into the dirty business of coercive, vote-buying,
politically-driven redistribution schemes are a problem for
prevaricators with agendas. Its not a problem for scholars
of what the Bible actually says and doesnt say.
Search your conscience. Consider the evidence. Be mindful
of the facts. And ask yourself: When it comes to helping
the poor, would Christ prefer that you give your money
freely to the Salvation Army or at gunpoint to the welfare
department?

As the late economist Henry Hazlitt said, You cannot

make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal
for anyone to offer him anything less. Lets say Congress
passes a law that requires the minimum wage to be $15/
hour. If that is the case, is there no such thing as a job,
by its nature or conditions of the market, that is worth
$10/hour? Is every job, no matter what it is, now worth
what Congress decrees? Of course there are $10/hour jobs.
What happens to these people when the minimum wage
is raised to $15/hour? Thats like saying to workers that if
you cannot find a job for $15/hour, you are not allowed to
work. The decree from Congress to force a wage to $15/
hour is equally a ban on all work that is less than $15/hour.
If your skills, education, or place in life require you to work
at $10/hour, Congress is banning you from doing so.
You cant expect employers to pay workers more than their
productivity is worth just because Congress demands it.
At higher prices (or wages), less is purchased. Thats a law
of economics more powerful than a minimum
wage law from Congress.

Christ was no dummy. He was not interested

Why Not
in the public professions of charitableness in
Millions of people, who are utterly unaffected
which the legalist and hypocritical Pharisees
by the minimum wage because they are already
Decree
were fond of engaging. He dismissed their
earning something higher to begin with, see
self-serving, cheap talk. He knew it was
$50/hour?
their wages rise almost every yearsome even
often insincere, rarely indicative of how they
during recessions. Its not a decree of Congress
conducted their personal affairs. It would
that does this; its factors such as productivity,
hardly make sense for him to champion the poor by
capital investment and competition in the labor market.
supporting policies that undermined the process of wealth
If raising the minimum wage to $15/hour makes sense,
creation necessary to help them. In the final analysis, He
why stop there? Why not declare that everyone must be
would never endorse a scheme that doesnt work and is
paid $50/hour? If Congress can degree the value of a job at
rooted in envy or theft.
one level, why not others? If you believe that $50/hour is
Christ endorsed things like freedom, charity, generosity,
too much, perhaps there is hope. It sounds like you think
kindness, personal responsibility, and voluntary
the cost of labor might indeed affect the demand for it.
associationthings that are irreconcilable with coercivelyMyth 3: College Should Be Free
financed redistribution schemes.
Candidates like Bernie Sanders may call for college to be
Myth 2: The Minimum Wage Helps The Poor
free, but its not really free, of course. In the government
Economists have long argued that raising the cost of labor,
context, free means that everyone pays whether he wants
CENTENNIAL REVIEW is published monthly by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. The authors views are not necessarily
those of CCU. Designer, Justin Jones. Illustrator, Benjamin Hummel. Subscriptions free upon request. Write to: Centennial Institute, 8787 W.
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Centennial Review March 2016 2

the service or not. Bernie Sanders never asks the moral

questions of whether we should take money from people
to pay for free college or whether its acceptable to make
people dependent upon government for their education.
Rather than looking at a new government program as the
solution, shouldnt we ask ourselves if government has
been part of the problem? Throwing big bucks at college
education has allowed college tuition to go through the
roof and insulated college administration and faculty from
the winds of the marketplace. Colleges will keep raising the
prices if they keep getting money from the government.
This is a problem of existing
government programs.

Free
Means That
Everyone
Pays

The free market would

provide even more education
than it does now but for the
unfair competition from
government. Since government
has a resource that private
organizations lackthe tax payersit is able to offer
its services for free. As long as government can tax its
citizens and then provide educational services to them at a
marginal price of zero, much private education will never
come into being. How ironic that government vigilantly
looks for predatory pricing in the private sector when
government itself is the major offender.
Government domination of education assures that
the entrepreneurial innovation and creativity we are
accustomed to in, say, the computer industry will be
missing from education.
Myth 4: Upton Sinclairs The Jungle Proved
Regulation Was Required
Upton Sinclairs novel, The Jungle, is treated by
progressives as though it were a documentary, but
it was nothing of the kind. It was a work of fiction,
full of fabrications. Even Teddy Roosevelt said the
author was hysterical and untruthful. Sinclair
was hired to write it for the purpose of advancing
socialism in America.
Government meat inspections existed before
Sinclairs book was ever written. If even a portion of
what he wrote really described what was happening
routinely in meatpacking plants, either the
government inspectors were complicit or else they
were inexcusably ignorantneither of which makes
for a strong case for new regulation.
In the end, the meat packers actually supported the
Meat Inspection Act because it put the government
seal of approval on their product and got the
taxpayers to pay for it.

Myth 5: The Rich Are

Getting Richer And The
Poor Are Getting Poorer
Progressives try to argue
that the poorest have a
small percentage of the
overall wealth pie. And that
might be true, but the pie is
much, much bigger. Would
you rather have 50 percent
of a million or 20 percent
of a billion? Another way
of putting this: Would you
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the
rather be better off, even if
Myths of Progressivism by Lawrence
Reed. Available now on Amazon.com
that means certain people
at www.amzn.com/1621574652
were super well off? Or
would you rather everyone
were worse off, as long as everyone were relatively equal?
That the poorest among us are still, on balance, doing
better today than they were 50 years ago is a remarkable
testimony to what relatively free people and markets can
do, even as governments put up roadblocks. So if the poor
arent getting poorer, why do people say they are?
One reason this particular clich manages to hang around
is that people generally take a static view of the economy.
The idea is that wealth is like a giant pie, which neither
grows nor shrinks, but gets carved up and distributed in
certain ways. So, some people end up with the false idea
that the only way the rich can be richer is if part of the
wealth pie is taken from the poor. From this they conclude
justice demands a different distribution of the pie.
Wealth can be better imagined as a growing pie, or better,
a growing ecosystem. Merit and hard work tend to be
rewarded in this growing pie, but rewards more generally
accrue to those who create value for others.
Advocates of so-called social justice want the wealth pie
to be divided according to an arbitrary and subjective
abstraction like fairness or equal outcomes. But carving
up wealth according to some nebulous concept of justice
ignores the actual ecosystem in which people operate.
By distributing from rich to poor, you end up paying
poorer people to be less productive, while punishing more
productive people. If taxation and redistribution for the
sake of equal outcomes makes us all worse off than we
would otherwise have been, how is this social justice?
In the past 30 years, all quintiles of American society
have become wealthier. Its also true that there are fewer
desperately poor people around the world. In only 20
years, extreme global poverty has been cut in half. That
*Article includes aspects by Sheldon Richman in The Free Market Cannot
Provide Public Education.
Centennial Review March 2016 3

CHALLENGING
THE MYTHS OF
PROGRESSIVISM
by Lawrence Reed
Lawrence Reed,
President of the
Foundation for
Economic Education,
challenges common
myths of progressivism
in this months
Centennial Review,
including:

Centennial Institute
Colorado Christian University
8787 W. Alameda Ave.
Lakewood, CO 80226
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1. Jesus Was A Socialist

2. The Minimum Wage Helps The Poor
3. College Should Be Free
4. Upton Sinclairs The Jungle Proved Regulation Was
Required
5. The Rich Are Getting Richer And The Poor Are
Getting Poorer
is a remarkable achievementone that is attributable to
Just think how much more capitalism could do to alleviate
policies of liberalization (freer markets) around the world,
the poverty that still exists if only government were to get
which progressive activists and egalitarians
out of its way. n
decry. In other words, those who say the poor
are getting poorer are simply wrong.
Capitalism
*Article includes aspects by Max Borders in The Rich are

Getting Richer and The Poor are Getting Poorer.

More than a century and a half ago, Karl
Makes
Marx and his early followers claimed the rich
Everyone
were getting richer and the poor were getting
If you enjoyed these 5 myths, Lawrence Reed
poorer. They argued this would continue and
explores a total of 52 myths of progressivism
Richer
worsen. No one in his right mind can look
in his latest book: Excuse Me Professor,
back on the intervening years and believe
Challenging the Myths of Progressivism.
the poor were better off in 1850 than they are in 2015.
Order your copy here: http://amzn.com/1621574652

Centennial Review March 2016 4