David Bahnsen: Marxist Economic Philosophy ‘Deteriorates Freedom’
David Bahnsen, chief investment officer at The Bahnsen Group, spoke with Breitbart News about how the Marxist economic worldview that is prevalent across American financial institutions today “deteriorates freedom.” LISTEN: Bahnsen opened the interview by talking about the free economics course he recently launched on his website. Bahnsen told Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle the inspiration behind his course was to provide those on the political right with “a cohesive economic philosophy.” Although people on the right intuitively recognize the “superiority of a free enterprise system, they don’t have a solid underlying economic philosophy,” Bahnsen noted. He said: It always lacks a kind of cohesive foundation of what we believe and why we believe it. I wanted to put some material together that I thought would give people the opportunity to learn economics the way they can’t learn it at a public school where they don’t teach it or at a public university, where, heaven help us, they do try to teach it. And they teach it wrong.
They teach it with a humanistic, Keynesian messianic view of the government. And I believe that with the right basic foundation and economics, we can change and reprogram the way, so many people understand the way the world works. Boyle mentioned Bahnsen’s recent Real Clear Markets article titled “A Solution To Our Woes — That No One Is Discussing,” and asked him to elaborate on how to address our economy’s problems. Bahnsen said that our society has “abandoned the lessons of economics to go with what is politically expedient.” “Right now we talked about this isolation, this alienation, people who are personally plagued by a lack of purpose or lack of identity, and I believe that we were made to work. I believe we were made to be productive,” Bahnsen said. “But a Keynesian economics world has taught us that we were made to consume that we were made to go by things shop, social media plays into it, modern technology plays into it.” “Economically, I want to refocus people on what man was created to do, which is produce. To be a productive member of society. And this is the most anti materialistic economics, what’s materialistic is telling people, we can make them happy by giving them things,” he added. Bahnsen criticized those who focus on “inequality” because he believes it is a natural outcome of individuals having different tastes and abilities. “When we understand economically, that we’re all here to produce and the different appetites, different tastes, different abilities are going to result in inequality,” he said. “if I divided up all the money in the world today. Equally, it would take two seconds for there to be inequality, people would spend differently, give differently, think differently, valued certain things.” “But when all of us are producing what all of us are growing, when all of us are working, I don’t care if someone else is earning more money than me, I’m deriving my own internal satisfaction from my contribution to society,” Bahnsen said. “This is a fundamental economic point that has to be rediscovered.” Boyle noted that our current American education system focuses less on students’ different strengths and more on woke social topics and asked Bahnsen how we as a society should face this issue. “Well, let me let me add to the point you’re making,” Bahnsen said. “Not only do people have different interests and make different choices, but we also have different tastes and appetites and this is an important, this is one of the reasons why I think this requires some economic education.” Bahnsen went on to criticize Marxism for defining the worth of items based on the labor put into it. “Why is Marxism wrong and free enterprise right? When it comes to how we value things? Well, Marxism teaches that the value of something is defined by the labor that was put into it, where we know from classical economics and Austrian School and again other kind of more thoughtful understandings, we know that value is subjective to the human person,” Bahnsen said. “Right? you may believe a certain piece of furniture is worth ‘X’ to you, and I may think is worth more than ‘X’ to me.” Once society values things based on their “environmental value,” “woke value,” or “some racial justice,” freedom deteriorates, Bahnsen explained. He added: We make choices and what we want to do with our lives, what we want to do professionally, and we make choices and how we value things. That’s how prices get set in an economy and when the state decides, “no we’re gonna make a price set around it. Its environmental value or its woke value or or some racial justice,” when they start impugning economically, look, I believe in value systems, and we can debate what the right social value In moral values of a society, you want to have our, but to try to intervene into the economy with things that are outside of how humans act, and how we subjectively value. It deteriorates freedom, it distorts prices, and then ultimately distorts inequality. Bahnsen then said that the current economy is getting out of control because there is a focus on inequalities, social justice, and environmentalism as opposed to economic growth. “Fundamentally, the basic thing people can constantly come down to is what they want to critique in the economy, is a lost care for growth,” Bahnsen said. “They don’t care about growth, they get sidetracked by income inequality, they get sidetracked by social justice agenda by a radical Green environmental agenda.” “With a government that is going to spend the way our government spends, well, they sure as hell better get enough economic growth to pay for it,” he added. “And our issue is that we’re sitting here debating how we can soak the rich more as opposed to figure out how we can get better economic growth.” “Our need is not soaking any class of people. Our need is promoting economic growth,” Bahnsen continued. “How do you promote that by not sustaining an economy that says 50 percent of people should be working and 50 percent should not? It’s dehumanizing. It strips people away from their dignity that God made them with there are not people on earth that are that are not worthy of contributing to the economy.” Bahnsen told Breitbart News Saturday listeners to “take responsibility for our own affairs” when Boyle asked him to give advice on how individuals can improve their financial situation. “Fundamentally, the number one thing we can all do to improve our lot in life is agency take responsibility for our own affairs, not be held captive by our woke employer not be held captive by what either good policy or bad policy, the politicos may do,” he said. “Have a view of life a worldview, that each day one is going to take responsibility for their own affairs, and is going to take steward their affairs in such a way that they’ll take care of their own needs, their family’s needs, that they will generate the not only the resources, they need to live a productive life, but out of that will generate the happiness that comes with being self sufficient,” he concluded. Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter. .
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