The Seductive Simplicity of a Silver Bullet 💰
“Fix the money, fix the world.”
If you’ve spent any time in Austrian economics or Bitcoin circles, you’ve heard this phrase. It’s a powerful, elegant slogan that promises a single solution to a world of complex problems. And for a long time, I was completely captivated by it.
The logic seems irrefutable. Sound money—money that cannot be endlessly printed and devalued by central authorities—imposes discipline. It restrains reckless governments from funding endless wars and welfare states through the hidden tax of inflation. It discourages the mountains of debt that enslave future generations. It forces society to adopt a low time preference, encouraging long-term thinking, saving, and investment over short-term political gratification. I was strongly drawn to these ideas. Austrian economics provides a framework for understanding market coordination that is more robust and insightful than any other system I’ve studied. Bitcoin, in its brilliant design, serves as a living, breathing exposé of the deep, systemic flaws of modern fiat money.
But a nagging feeling persisted. Something felt incomplete. The deeper I pondered the elegant equation, the more a crucial variable seemed to be missing. It became increasingly obvious that the slogan, as compelling as it is, is a dangerous half-truth. Fixing the money doesn’t fix the world. And the reason is disarmingly simple: Men are sinners by nature.
💡 The Assumption I Didn’t Realize I Was Making
For years, my advocacy for free markets, Austrian economics, and sound money rested on a set of assumptions quietly humming in the background—a foundation I took for granted. I was assuming a moral and legal order already existed, one in which:
- Property rights are fundamentally respected.
- Contracts are entered into in good faith and honored.
- The law serves to restrain injustice, not facilitate it.
- Communities broadly value honesty and integrity.
- Society shares a common moral framework for defining right and wrong.
Having grown up in the Old Order Mennonite community, this framework was the water I swam in. But as I engaged more with the modern West, I saw that these assumptions were no longer shared. We have spent generations systematically dismantling the very moral and philosophical foundations that made free and prosperous societies possible in the first place.
What Austrian Economics Explains — and What It Doesn’t ⚖️
Austrian economics is an incredibly powerful analytical tool. It brilliantly explains the mechanics of human action and a functioning economy. It illuminates:
- 📈 Price Discovery: How markets aggregate vast, dispersed knowledge into a single, actionable signal.
- 💡 Entrepreneurship: The vital role of alertness and risk-taking in driving progress.
- 🤝 Voluntary Exchange: How cooperation creates mutual benefit and wealth.
- 🏗️ Capital Formation: The necessity of saving and investment for long-term prosperity.
- 💸 The Distortions of Bad Money: How central banking creates the boom-bust cycle.
But its power is in explaining the *mechanics* of a system. It is not a system for creating the foundational virtues a market needs to function. It largely assumes the existence of things it cannot produce:
- ) no-repeat left center;">🏛️ Law and Order: A just legal framework that protects person and property.
- 🙏 Moral Order: A shared understanding of right and wrong, of duty and obligation.
- 🔗 Social Trust: The baseline confidence that others won't cheat you.
- 👪 Productive Culture: A society that values hard work, family, and future-orientation.
- 🏦 Stable Institutions: The predictable structures that allow for long-term planning.
Without these prerequisites, markets don’t create freedom. They create cartels and corruption. They devolve into rampant speculation and cronyism. They enable predatory behavior where the powerful exploit the weak. A market is a tool, like a powerful engine. Placed in the chassis of a well-designed car on a solid road, it can take you amazing places. Placed on a rotting raft in the middle of a hurricane, it will only sink you faster. Markets require a moral framework outside of themselves to function properly.
The Deeper Problem: A Tale of Two Thinkers 🌍
This realization crystallized for me while listening to a fascinating disagreement between #Bitcoin economist Saifedean Ammous and Allan Savory, the founder of Holistic Management. Ammous, a brilliant advocate for sound money, argued passionately that fixing the money would be the catalyst for fixing a cascade of societal problems, from our diets to our architecture.
Savory pushed back, not by disagreeing with the economic points, but by going deeper. He argued that civilizations don't primarily collapse because of their monetary policy or agricultural techniques. They collapse because of how people treat one another and how their communities are structured. He was getting at a profound truth:
Economic systems cannot produce moral people. And without moral people, no economic system—capitalist, socialist, or otherwise—works as intended.
You can have the hardest money in the world, but if people are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it, you don't have a prosperous society. You have a Mad Max dystopia with a stable unit of account.
The Civilization Stack Most People Ignore 🏛️
Think of civilization as a stack of layers, with each one depending on the one below it. Modern libertarians and economists often spend all their time analyzing and debating the top layer, forgetting the immense structure underneath.
- 5 Markets & Money: The mechanisms of exchange and calculation.
- 4 Productive Economy: The creation of goods and services.
- 3 Civil Law & Institutions: The formal rules of society.
- 2 Moral Law: The shared, unwritten rules of conduct.
- 1 Theology & Worldview: The ultimate beliefs about God, man, and reality.
If layers one through three collapse, no amount of tinkering with layer five can hold the structure together. Sound money cannot create virtue. You can fix the currency and still have epidemic family breakdown, rampant corruption, lawlessness in the streets, and deep social decay.
✝️ Why Christianity is the Foundation of Free Societies
Historically and philosophically, the freest and most prosperous societies in the West emerged from a civilization steeped in a biblical worldview. #Christianity provided the indispensable moral capital that markets depend upon but cannot create. It taught:
- Honesty in Trade: The concept of just weights and measures.
- Respect for Property: The Eighth Commandment, “You shall not steal,” is the bedrock of all property rights.
- Keeping One's Word: The Ninth Commandment, against bearing false witness, is the foundation of contracts and courts.
- Limits on Rulers: The understanding that all authority, including the king, is under God's higher law.
- Equal Justice: The principle of one law for the native and the foreigner, rich and poor.
- The Dignity of Labor: The idea that all honest work is a calling from God.
Without that widely-held moral framework shaping the hearts and minds of its people, liberty cannot survive.
The Real Relationship Between Christianity and #FreeMarkets
This is where I believe many libertarians get the relationship backwards. A free society does not produce Christianity. Rather, a Christian civilization produces the moral, cultural, and institutional conditions necessary for freedom to flourish. Free markets, sound money, and limited government are not the foundation of civilization. They are the fruit of a deeper moral order. They are magnificent tools that work best inside a culture that values responsibility, integrity, and justice, shaped by a biblical understanding of law and human nature.
Where I Landed
Today, I still believe strongly in the power and importance of free markets, the insights of Austrian economics, the necessity of sound money, and strict limits on government power. But I see them differently now. They are not a complete civilizational framework; they are a subset of one. A healthy constitutional republic requires a deeper foundation:
- A transcendent moral law.
- Stable families.
- Self-governing communities.
- Rulers who see themselves as under, not above, the law.
- A shared public understanding of justice.
In other words, it requires a Christian moral framework to provide the soil in which the seeds of liberty can grow.
The Foundation Beneath It All 🙏
But even that is not the deepest layer. The Bible does not merely give us a moral instruction manual that, in our sinful nature, we cannot ultimately keep before a perfectly holy God. Its central message is not what we must do, but what God Himself has done for sinners.
God did not leave humanity to repair itself through better systems, better incentives, or better institutions. He sent His Son. Jesus Christ lived the perfectly righteous life that God’s law requires. He died on the cross for sinners, bearing the judgment that we deserve. He rose from the dead, conquering sin and death, and now reigns as Lord of heaven and earth.
God now commands all people everywhere to repent and believe this gospel. Repentance is a change of mind—a turning from trusting in ourselves, our systems, our righteousness, and our wisdom, and instead trusting wholly in Christ alone for salvation. The promise is clear and absolute: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.”
The law of God exposes the corruption of the human heart. The gospel of Jesus Christ reveals what God has done to save and change the human heart.
Civilizations flourish where Christ is honored and His law is taken seriously. Not because men become perfect, but because God, by His grace, changes hearts and brings people from death to life. Fixing the money might improve incentives on the margins. But the true, unshakable foundation of justice, liberty, and order is not found in any economic theory. It is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and the salvation He accomplished for sinners at the cross.