Rieger Without Romance - Reflections on the 2011 Willson Lectures

By Matt Hisrich
I would like to extend my appreciation to ESR for hosting the Willson Lectures, to David Johns for arranging Joerg Rieger’s visit, to Rieger himself for coming all the way to Richmond and presenting, and to Mandy Ford for working to make the lectures available for viewing online. I believe that Rieger’s goals are noble, and his analysis prompted me to give more significant thought to important questions than I would have otherwise. That’s a good outcome for the Willson Lectures, and I am confident that my experience is not unique.
Overall, my main response to Rieger’s lectures was of wanting more – a more robust critique of empire and economics, and more clear paths forward. After reading his book No Rising Tide in preparation for his visit, I couldn’t help but feel that the lack of clarity regarding the clear distinction between free markets and the interventionist chaos we are faced with today undermined both his analysis of economics as well as the validity of the conclusions he reached.  My hope as I arrived to listen to Rieger in person was that he would move beyond the limitations of that text.
Unfortunately, this hope was left unfulfilled. From the economic side, I stand by my initial critique of Rieger’s No Rising Tide as he offered little during the lectures to indicate that he does not in fact conflate free markets with a mercantilist system whereby “groups with political power use that power to secure government intervention to protect their interests while claiming to seek benefits for the nation as a whole.” This creates a significant problem in the solutions he presented at the Willson lectures – the political side of his analysis – grow out of this conflation.
As I read No Rising Tide, I was struck repeatedly both by the lack of clear steps toward the new reality Rieger envisions and by an all too uncritical approach toward public policy. He notes that “politicians are democratically elected by the people, while business leaders are not,” as if this puts an end to the discussion about corruption in government, and asks with genuine astonishment, “why would ‘government’ want to take just anything from its citizens, and who is ‘government’ in a democracy if not the citizens?”
These themes were again evident again in the lectures. Few concrete solutions were presented, and those that were raise more questions than real answers. He spoke several times about the importance of community gardens and labor unions, for instance, but it is difficult to see how these alone will begin to transform an empire and economic system that is so pervasive and domineering. His very limited comments on war and their connection to empire and economics should disturb any Friend. His assertion that when Jesus tells his disciples to tell John that the sick are healed and the blind can see is an affirmation of nationalized health care is an impressive leap. At one point during the Q&A period, he was asked how high unemployment should be addressed, and he suggested significant expansion of public sector jobs.
One must ask at this point why someone who speaks to “bottom up” power employs such “top-down” solutions through the state. The essential narrative that Rieger appears to operate out of is one in which the state is there to protect us from corporations. But while I would agree that the empire and economics as they exist today are pervasive and domineering forces in our lives, I wish that Rieger would expand the scope of his definition of empire to include democratic states that collude with business interests. 
His appreciation of democracy coupled with his disdain for corporations seems to prevent him from correctly identifying the crony capitalist nature of our economic system. This in turn prevents him from offering a response to empire-as-state that recognizes the incentives within the empire to expand the scope of its power whether employing the language or free markets or that of progressivism.  Sadly, therefore, the very remedies he suggests only serve to feed empire further.
In 1978, economist James Buchanan coined the phrase “politics without romance” to describe what he was trying to develop at the time – public choice theory. As Buchanan further elaborates, “Armed with nothing more than the rudimentary insights from public choice, persons could understand why, once established, bureaucracies tend to grow apparently without limit and without connection to initially promised functions. They could understand why pork-barrel politics dominated the attention of legislators; why there seems to be a direct relationship between the overall size of government and the investment in efforts to secure special concessions from government (rent seeking); why the tax system is described by the increasing number of special credits, exemptions, and loopholes; why balanced budgets are so hard to secure; and why strategically placed industries secure tariff protection.”
In order to build upon the work he has already undertaken, deepen his critique, and point readers toward solutions that begin to sever the ties between empire and economic interests, I would encourage Rieger to further explore public choice theory. As Buchanan argues, “Regardless of any ideological bias, exposure to public choice analysis necessarily brings a more critical attitude toward politicised nostrums to alleged socioeconomic problems.” If Rieger or others seek to strengthen their understanding of the connections between empire and economics, I would suggest Anthony de Jasay’s The State and Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan.
One of the definitions of theology is “faith seeking understanding.” During his lectures, Rieger issued a call for truly understanding the nature of the world around us so that we can be effective agents of change. Here’s where I would agree with him wholeheartedly. If at least part of our faith involves helping to bring about a more just and humane world, then there is no time to waste.
Matt Hisrich is the Ministerial Advocate for Indiana Yearly Meeting. He lives in Richmond, Indiana, with his wife and two daughters, and is a member of First Friends Meeting there. Matt is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan and ESR, where he received his MDiv in teaching and theology. Prior to enrolling in seminary, he worked with non-profit public policy organizations in Indiana, Kansas, and Ohio.

Some Thoughts on Rieger and the Austrians

A partial review of Joerg Rieger's No Rising Tide

By Matt Hisrich

In preparation for the 2011 Willson Lectures at ESR I tracked down and have been reading a copy of Joerg Rieger’s book No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future. I have been interested in the ideas of liberation theology since my days at ESR, where I wrestled with the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez. Whereas Gutiérrez and others such as Leonardo Boff represent what could be deemed the “first generation” of liberation theologians, Rieger and Jung Mo Sung are examples of a resurgence of activity around the core ideas of liberation theology – an intriguing development all on its own.

Aside from a general interest in matters of theology, part of my interest in liberation theology generally has to do with its explicit effort to connect economic concepts to faith. Having a background in economics and public policy before coming to ESR and continuing to seek out and address the intersections of these disciplines during and since I cannot help but be drawn to the work of Rieger and others engaged in similar work. What is of particular interest to me in the work of both Rieger and Sung, however, are their comments regarding the Austrian School of Economics. I first became acquainted with the ideas of the Austrian School in high school and it was these ideas that led me to study economics in undergrad and explore the overlaps with theology in seminary.

Now, I should preface all of the thoughts I am about to share with a number of caveats:

1) While I have come across Rieger’s work in several different contexts I have not completed a thorough analysis of his whole body of research and therefore these comments are limited to the contents of No Rising Tide alone;

2) I think both the general principles of liberation theology and how those are employed within the work of specific theologians and in specific texts such as No Rising Tide merit a much broader consideration but I will attempt to limit my comments here to Rieger’s discussion of the Austrian School only;

3) I am sympathetic to his critique of empire and have benefitted from spending time with his book; but

4) Just as I have found a theological home in Quakerism, I have found an economic home in the Austrian School, and these positions necessarily inform my understanding and color my analysis; and, finally

5) I am neither a professional economist nor a professional theologian and so I enter into this discussion knowing that I may well be in over my head.

So, what can be said about Rieger’s discussion of the Austrian School in No Rising Tide? In short, while his presentation of the Austrian School is important to the overall structure of his argument (as with Sung’s in Desire, Market and Religion), it nonetheless requires a fundamental distortion of the ideas of the Austrian School that unfortunately weakens his argument and reveals a lack of familiarity with important concepts in economic thought that are essential to Rieger’s project of critiquingfree-market economics.

Here is why:

- Rieger sets up an “us v. them” dynamic in attacking what he defines as mainstream economics and praising what he defines as heterodox economics – from institutionalism to Marxism. According to his interpretation, every school that he sees as questioning markets is heterodox and therefore offers something positive while any school that he sees as generally supporting markets – from Austrian to Chicago – is mainstream and therefore problematic. This creates two problems for Rieger. First, it puts him in an awkward position with regard to Keynesian economics (which I would argue holds far more sway in contemporary economic thought and public policy than he seems to feel it does). This is because Keynesians essentially seek to use the tools of state intervention to save capitalism from itself because left to its own devices it will destroy itself, and Keynesian economics and neoclassical economics have in many regards merged. Is such a position one that supports or questions markets? The ambiguity is clear in Rieger’s comments. Second, it forces him to conflate schools of thought that are not nearly as compatible as he would seem to suggest – namely the neoclassical and Austrian Schools, the latter of which is generally considered a heterodox school outside of Rieger’s analysis.

- At this point, it would be fair to ask why Rieger (and Sung) include a discussion of the relatively small Austrian School at all. This is an important point. Much of what Rieger criticizes with regard to empire and market has a lot more to do with a mercantilist hybrid of state and business interests, not with truly free markets (the same could also be said of more popular theologians such as John Dominic Crossan).  But whether Rieger fails to understand this distinction or chooses to ignore it for the sake of his argument, what he appears to want to critique in the book is free markets and not mercantilism. Unfortunately, schools of economic thought that advocate for genuinely free-market positions are few and far between. To accomplish this goal he must employ the Austrians for the sake of rhetorical power alone, using their words as a stand-in for what he wishes genuinely mainstream neoclassical economists would actually have said.

- It is possible that Rieger’s understanding of the Austrian School lacks sufficient depth to fully comprehend the distinction, for it is clear that he draws from only one economist from the school (Friedrich Hayek) to represent the whole, and he even goes so far as to use Capitalism for Beginners as a source for one of his Hayek quotes. Setting aside developments in the school since the era of Hayek, that one can bring in a discussion of the Austrian School without even mentioning its central figure, Ludwig von Mises, is telling. Just to provide one example of how Mises might have informed Rieger’s analysis, here is a quote from No Rising Tide: “A deregulated economy has been allowed to produce an imperial bubble where the stock market, the housing market, and the lending sector built forms of power that were more and more disconnected from real values and real life;” and one from Mises’s Human Action, “Nothing harmed the cause of liberalism more than the almost regular return of feverish booms and of the dramatic breakdown of bull markets followed by lingering slumps. Public opinion has become convinced that such happenings are inevitable in the unhampered market economy. People did not conceive that what they lamented was the necessary outcome of policies directed toward a lowering of the rate of interest by means of credit expansion. They stubbornly kept to these policies and tried in vain to fight their undesired consequences by more and more government interference.” Nonetheless, even working with Hayek alone it should become clear that the system Rieger seeks to attack as a tragically deregulated market bears little resemblance to what Hayek understands as a market free from state intervention. As Hayek commented in 1935, “[I]t is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists today is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos."

To close, I do think that liberation theology adds to the richness of the theological landscape and should not be ignored as such. Nonetheless, as a proponent of this view Rieger would be more convincing if he displayed a greater depth of economic knowledge. In particular, if he chooses to single out particular schools for criticism, it would behoove him to devote significant attention to the origins and contributions of those schools if he seeks to level effective critiques. Austrian economists have contributed much to the study of how war, oppression, and poverty are connected to naïve or intentional use of state power for supposedly positive ends. That Rieger finds it necessary to ignore these contributions in order to advance his thesis ought to be of concern to anyone seeking to think through how economies can or should function in light of ethical standards and Christian faith. If readers are interested in a critique of Austrian economics from a faith perspective, I would recommend Charles McDaniel’s God & Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism. While I don’t agree with his conclusions, it is clear the McDaniel spent considerable time trying to understand and confront the core ideas of the school.

Having spent some time with Rieger’s written work, I am looking forward to the chance to hear him in person at ESR this April. I have no doubt it will be an interesting discussion!

Matt Hisrich is the Ministerial Advocate for Indiana Yearly Meeting. He lives in Richmond, Indiana, with his wife and two daughters, and is a member of First Friends Meeting there. Matt is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan and ESR, where he received his MDiv in teaching and theology. Prior to enrolling in seminary, he worked with non-profit public policy organizations in Indiana, Kansas, and Ohio.

Quaker Authority: Jefferson or Hamilton?

Part of my role as Ministerial Advocate for Indiana Yearly Meeting is to put thought into how to foster renewal within our monthly meetings and the yearly meeting as a whole. I think authority plays at least a part in this discussion, and I wrote a piece touching on this for Quaker Life a few months ago.

It’s no surprise then that I was pleased to see Quaker Life addressing this topic head on in the first issue of 2011. Is a lack of sufficient authority at the yearly meeting level the main obstacle – or even a significant impediment – to meeting health and vitality? That’s certainly the position Iowa Yearly Meeting superintendent Ron Bryan takes in his contribution, “The Need for a Clearly Defined Authority of the Yearly Meeting.” Bryan even goes so far as to say that yearly meetings need hiring and firing authority at the monthly meeting level.

As I reflect on the question of authority within yearly meetings, I am reminded of a recent book I came across called Hamilton’s Curse. The basic premise of author Thomas J. DiLorenzo is that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had diametrically opposed ideas regarding the structure of American government – Hamilton favoring a strong, centralized version and Jefferson preferring a decentralized model that emphasized states’ rights. As something of a political junkie, I certainly find this interesting from an American history/political science perspective, but also potentially instructive in terms of yearly meetings.

In one section where the author discusses how different sections of the U.S. had different characters and economic interests, and I found the following quote particularly relevant: “With a truly consolidated or monopoly government, only one of those interests could prevail at any one time….This is precisely why the founders created a system of federalism, or decentralized government.” The author concludes that the move to a more centralized government sowed the seeds of the civil war - a sobering thought for any yearly meeting faced with current or potential conflict.

Do different yearly meetings lean in different directions when it comes to centralized or decentralized authority, and is there a connection between the structure of authority and yearly and monthly meeting health?

Matt Hisrich is the Ministerial Advocate for Indiana Yearly Meeting. He lives in Richmond, Indiana, with his wife and two daughters, and is a member of First Friends Meeting there. Matt is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan and ESR, where he received his MDiv in teaching and theology. Prior to enrolling in seminary, he worked with non-profit public policy organizations in Indiana, Kansas, and Ohio.