Ask Rush Limbaugh. If he never actually accuses God of being the Big Guy Capitalist directly, certainly Limbaugh declares clearly that his brilliance on the subject of capitalism is "talent on loan from God"—which gets God smack into the middle of the capitalist mix as the cause of it all as filtered through Limbaugh.

Laugh if you will; in fact, Limbaugh seems really to believe it; as do others, Christian conservatives especially.

This is not to disparage Rush Limbaugh; I own that I listen in from time to time and find he makes some sense. But then—well, he misses a great big point. Man, not God, invented capitalism; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not a revised edition of the King James Bible nor was Smith a prophet of God; he was a Deist at best, an atheist perhaps, and his positing "self-interest" as the basis for a moral philosophy of economics, society, and government is clearly anti-Christian (Smith argued that state and personal efforts to promote social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces.).

Limbaugh appears to some to be in the process of revising Smith’s reputation for all conservatives who like their economics dished up with God. Limbaugh speaks with the finality of God; many people believe exactly what he says as well as what they read between the lines and thinks he says.

For example, you come away thinking that

• God is a Republican, way over on the religious right;
• God is for sure a capitalist, hates big government, despises all regulation of the markets, and expects all of us to suck it up and just take it in stride when really big capitalists with lots of greed and gall turn Wall Street into their own private casino.

Of course, if the above is so, it follows that true believers should accept the ruin of retirement portfolios like a man with big brass ones. On the pure capitalist position, the market will correct itself even if you have to move in with relatives and die before it does.

What a God, this Capitalist Theocrat! Adam Smith apparently knew him well…

But where is God in all of this, really?

Well, "In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.’"

As a result, "Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid…Rise and thresh, O Daughter of Zion…you will break to pieces many nations. You will devote their ill-gotten gains to the LORD, their wealth to the Lord of all the earth." (Micah 4:1,4,13).

I leave the timing of the fulfillment of the foregoing Bible prophecy to you; what matters here is what it reveals about how God views micro and macro economics. When "many nations…walk in his paths," the result is "every man…under his own vine…and fig tree" with the Daughter of Zion—whoever she may be; it matters not here—taking "ill-gotten gains" of the nations, "their wealth" to devote all to the Lord.

So much for Smith’s wealth of nations accumulated by the invisible hand of self-interest. It ends up in God’s pocket, confiscated like ill-gotten proceeds from a busted drug cartel!

With only minimal theological application you see God’s pleasure with micro-self sufficiency: every man under his own vine and fig tree, living in peace and relative prosperity, the vine and fig being primary wealth producers for ancient Israel. In contrast, you see "the nations" symbolized in ancient Babylon (Micah 4:10) with "ill-gotten gains…their wealth" accumulated historically through greed, lots of gall—gigantic egos—and as corollaries, deceit, oppression, and, yes, market manipulation on a macro scale. The strategy of ancient conquest was simply to corner the market on everything, every true capitalist’s dream, and the result was certainly wealth, but judged by God as ill-gotten gain.

The problem with the unbridled forces of macro-capitalism, then, is greed and gall and its attendant inability to account for micro-enterprise solutions except as a very minor trickle-down effect left over from stuffing the pockets of the super-wealthy with more cash. This is not anything close to the economics prophesied by Micah and approved by God.

At the same time we note carefully that communism, while not in view by Micah, is inherent in the concept of ill-gotten gains. It, too, when examined in the light of history is based on greed and gall. The difference is that capitalism competes to see who has the biggest set of greed and gall. Communism kills the competition, it being assumed the last man standing has the biggest. In either scenario greed and gall are the driving force. In either scenario the end is oppression of the weaker by the more powerful, and the death of Micah’s micro-enterprise solutions.

The point we make here is that the God of the Daughter of Zion delights in the wealth of micro enterprise and intends that the ill-gotten gains and the wealth of nations be devoted to him.

Micah said that not me.

Whatever spin you put upon this requires that you, like me, reassess capitalism not in terms of an alternative system as if there were one; there isn’t. The issue is not capitalism versus socialism or communism; these are straw men made into boogey men by ideologues to preserve their capitalist corner on things. Human nature, driving all human systems, is the same in capitalism or communism: whether capitalist or communist we remain greed and gall to the core(apart from true conversion); it’s just that some have more than others and take advantage of those with less in both systems.

Rather than pursuing an alternative system, then, we need to assess greed and gall on God’s terms and put a restraint on both.

How? In the community of the converted by grace, faith, and God’s word through an ongoing encounter with God and one another, and we still get it wrong; beyond this, say, like on Wall Street, like it or not government plays a critical role designed by God.

"Governing authorities," Paul writes, "have been established by God [as] God’s servant to do you good. But…an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (see Romans 13:1-7). God intends government to place a restraint on greed and gall.

Now this is far different than saying God intends government to redistribute wealth. He does not, and for good reason but that is another story. The point here is Wall Street excesses cry out for some kind of restraint; too big to fail is just another way of saying too much greed and gall, which at its core is the automakers’ failure, too, in its own way.

Perhaps the biggest run up of greed and gall in world economic history began with the introduction of Reagan’s supply-side economics in the 1980s, exacerbated by Clinton’s aggressive deregulation of the financial sector in the 1990s.

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the go-to guy who built AIG into a global powerhouse, established AIG FP, the division that essentially brought AIG to its knees, way back in 1987. On his decades-long watch AIG was "…driven by a thirst for greater profits." As a result, AIG FP "racked up guarantees on CDS worth a total of about $450 billion."

The source above notes, "AIG jumped into the high-beta world of credit default swaps when there was a low default environment…But when the market goes bad it all goes bad, and with the kind of exposure that AIG wrote, it is just rancid."

But AIG—with many others— had caught the fever, being spread hither and yon by greed and gall. Suddenly the American ideal of micro-enterprise—family farms, home ownership, small businesses, intellectual property, and so on—as the generators of wealth for the nation morphed into blips on a computer screen reflecting a world where one could be rich overnight on a bet—Wall Street ceased to be a somewhat honest reflection of the valuation of wealth inherent in America’s business, micro-enterprises and big business, too, and became instead a roll of the dice on imaginary financial instruments with little relation to the real world. It is telling that the Barry Madoff scam, like AIG’s venture into credit default swaps, began in the 1980s, took off in the 1990s, and crashed only when the whole imaginary world of money—a literal house of cards—of which it was a part came tumbling down.

In all of this—and this is the point—size of government grew, under both Republican and Democratic administrations; but quality of government diminished horribly. Government failed miserably to do its job.

So what does God think of this?

If we believe what he says, he calls governments to account.

How ironic that the Iraq war did not bring the Republican house tumbling down in 2008, but the lack of stewardship of the micro-enterprise economy did. Failure to rein in the excesses of Wall Street allowed short sellers to line their pockets with cash by betting against the small business sector, driving down the value of small businesses while enriching themselves. (The concept of shorting involves not just betting against a stock, but betting that short sellers can get the investors who initially bet that the stock would increase to change their position. This negative volume creates an imbalance in the market and forces the price of the stock down.) All the while AIG was taking bets from short sellers who were betting against the housing market that had been pumped up by speculators who were betting against the people living in the houses. They turned a man’s home from a castle into a commodity to be swapped like pork bellies or pecans, creating the illusion that houses magically increased in value forever. Between AIG betting for the illusion and short sellers betting against it, anyone in charge with half a brain should have seen the thing for what it was, a shell game for sure, not even a good dog and pony show, which at least delivers entertainment. Blind to the state of the vine and the fig tree the Bush administration watched over the run up of ill-gotten gains as never before seen in human history. The nation was defrauded not only by AIG, but by a government blinded by the ideology of blind faith in the markets as if greed and gall were going to govern greed and gall; they do not; they only show in the end who has the most greed and gall: in this case, the short sellers in gigantic hedge funds who needed the whole thing to come tumbling down in order to collect on their bets. So you can bet the Republicans were turned out of office in 2008 because they deserved to be. They simply were called to account and came up short. The irony is that the guys who invented the deregulation game back in the 1980s were again in charge when the game went south. Coincidence? You tell me.

Next post: where do we go from here?