If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out this Patrick Coffin podcast on Capitalism: Usury Vs. Labor, where he interviews the retrograde Catholic scholar, E. Michael Jones. In its entirety, there’s more good than bad, so I’ll start by praising the high points before critiquing the mistakes.
Both men are solid traditional Catholics, suspicious of the Novus Ordo Seculorum, and eminently well-read. I agree with them often. This podcast tackles several issues of global economics and politics. In it, they discuss topics like gold, money, usury, Catholic economic scholarship, Talmudic Jewish greed, and so forth.
These trends and topics are incredibly pertinent to the ongoing cataclysmic meltdown around the world. Let’s see what Coffin/Jones get right and wrong.
What They Get Right
- Jones gives extensive background into wicked usury, condemned in Holy Scripture, and distinguishes it from user fees. He makes convincing points about how the Catholic hierarchy got into trouble mingling with usurious banker Jews. Without this problem, nobody would’ve cared about the sale of indulgences.
- He makes exactly the same comparison of Bitcoin to “Tulip Bulb Mania” that folks like Peter Schiff use to illustrate cryptocurrency flaws.
- Coffin and Jones both identify an intellectual apathy among Catholics, including traditional Catholics, with regards to our legacy of economic scholarship. Of course, we need to know what that is (free market economics) before having any chance at regaining our academic heritage.
- Their recognition and explanation of the crooked central bankers from the Creature of Jekyll Island also deserves commendation.
- Jones is one of the very few scholars to acknowledge what he calls the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. For his efforts, he experiences a very legitimate white martyrdom. This shows he has guts, follows Our Lord’s approach to contradicting the world with truth, and demonstrates how you cannot criticize those who really run the world.
What They Get Wrong
- They speak of libertarianism and capitalism extensively without defining either term.
- They never mention the intellectual cornerstone of libertarianism, the Non-Agression Principle (NAP). You cannot be taken seriously as an analyst of libertarian thought without mentioning this concept. Libertarianism is way deeper than merely gurgling together a few utterances about rights and freedom.
- Like many other critics, they devote lots of time to the straw-man problem of libertinism, but without using that distinction. This occurs during their discussion about hedonism in San Francisco with alleged libertarians like Michel Foucault and Fr. Robert Sirico. Foucault, especially, was an on-again/off-again Marxist pedophile. He was as much a libertarian as Jeffrey Epstein, viz. he wasn’t.
- Jones mischaracterizes Hans Herman-Hoppe’s advocacy of a stateless society as domination by “insurance companies.” I can’t find anything that suggests this is Hoppe’s strategy for anarcho-capitalism, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Does Jones have a source for this? His research on many other topics is stellar, but this appears to be the occasional academic fart on his part. Alas, nobody’s perfect.
- The other points about Murray Rothbard and gold are overly simplistic as well. As a Catholic, I know to store my true treasures in heaven. Without making this article excessively long, I’ll just mention that the finite amount of gold in the world, does not negate its potential as currency. This is particularly true when society employs a bi-metal approach. I don’t recall them saying much about silver.
- He considers the Austrian School of Economics to be an intellectual justification for capitalism (which he views negatively) and a stepping stone toward communism. This is actually pretty close to dialectical materialism (Marx’s view of economic evolution). I contend, however, that the Austrian school is really the continuation of the Catholic patrimony of economic thought. When virtually every academic community in the world was going full commie and Keynesian, Austrian scholars stuck with common sense economic theory. In a similar vein, Austria was the last Catholic monarchy through the reign of Blessed Karl. This made them the last traditional monarchy to hold the line amid a world converted to secular monarchialism. In other words, that country generally bucked modernist trends occurring elsewhere.
Why Catholic Libertarianism Matters
So, to summarize, Coffin and Jones are mostly dismissive and critical of libertarianism. They conflate it with young men struggling to find agency in life through entrepreneurialism rather than faith in God. This is an obvious mischaracterization.
All Catholics should at least comprehend libertarianism because it’s essentially the social-political exemplification of God’s 5th and 7th Commandments. Thou shalt not kill, and thou shalt not steal. Libertarians appear to be the only ones who still take these Commandments seriously, while the rest of the world embraces moral, economic, and political relativism.
As I demonstrate in Caesar Vacantism, the state is the world’s turbocharged engine for brutalizing these two Commandments. They also rip to shreds the 8th Commandment: thou shalt not LIE!
We might ask whether our fellow Catholics still believe, as the Church teaches, that we should abide by these divine mandates?
If we support the existence of a state, one that coerces and taxes, as they all do, then there’s something we need to know: How much is the state allowed to violate the 5th and 7th Commandments? Does God actively desire that somehow?
I know that many traditional Catholics will balk at my insistence that the state is a curse heaped upon humanity. I remind them of two things:
1) It’s precisely a curse, because God made it such when the Hebrews begged for a king in 1 Kings Chapter 8 (1st Samuel Chapter 8, in new versions).
2) The culture of death, which Catholics rightfully oppose, emanates from and flows through the state. You would not have this ubiquitous contraception/abortion problem if central banking and taxes (core planks of Marxism) hadn’t ruined our money and rendered our children as liabilities.
I would go as far as to say abortion would not be 10% of what it is now if it weren’t for central planning and crooked courts. Libertarianism easily eliminates these dastardly forms of aggression.
I’d like to make one final point regarding the demons we face, ones that harness the very worst faculties of the state. The exorcist priest, Fr. Chad Ripperger, regards greed and fraud as the two patron demons of the U.S. (a dying world hegemon). This is especially significant and it explains everything you need to know about the Creature of Jekyll Island (which even sounds like a demon moniker).
Today’s ubiquitous evil doesn’t come from “unbridled capitalism” or anything of the sort. It comes from preternatural forces, demons from Hell, that latch onto the most perfidious mechanism for greed, corruption, death, and misery: the state!
So, as always, ditch the state, resist greed and fraud, define all your terms precisely, and pray for an end to all state-driven scourges.
Deus Vult!
Catholics Aren't Zombies! 