Capitalism based on selfishness?!

There is a lot of talk about capitalism (what our country was founded on) and socialism (what it feels like we are being led into). I read this article today from Glenn Beck and felt like, yeah!

You can either click on the link or you can just read below as I have copied and pasted the article below. Oh and be sure to tell me what you think!


GLENN: From Radio City in Midtown Manhattan, hello, you sick twisted freak. Welcome to the program. I'm glad you're here. Ashley is with us from Oklahoma and KTOK. Hello, Ashley.

CALLER: Hi.

GLENN: What is ‑‑ where do you go to school, Ashley?

CALLER: It's a very conservative Christian university in Oklahoma.

GLENN: A very ‑‑ is it the one with the big praying hands?

CALLER: No.

GLENN: You don't want to say? Okay. It's a very conservative Christian school in Oklahoma.

CALLER: Yes. It's a Baptist College.

GLENN: Got it, okay. So what happened with you and your professor?

CALLER: Well, I'm in an ethics course, a biblical ethics course, and he put up a quote on the board about capitalism like having this derogatory meaning with it, and I said, well, what's wrong with capitalism? And he said, capitalism's based on selfishness. It's about getting as much as you can for yourself. And I said, no ‑‑

GLENN: That's his perversion of it. But go ahead.

CALLER: Yeah. And I said, well, capitalism's based on hard work. It's about getting reward for hard work. And well, he told me, no, it's about making money off of other people; it's not about hard work. It's about ‑‑

GLENN: So what is his, what is his replacement for capitalism?

CALLER: Socialism.

GLENN: Socialism?

CALLER: Yeah, he says that the Bible ‑‑

GLENN: This is a Christian ‑‑ hang on. This is a Christian ethics teacher?

CALLER: Yes.

GLENN: Okay. And he said what? The Bible says what?

CALLER: He said the Bible supports socialism.

GLENN: Where?

CALLER: Well, there's this scripture in Acts about ‑‑ that's always used about the early church sharing their possessions.

GLENN: Yes.

CALLER: So I ‑‑

GLENN: The church did.

CALLER: ‑‑ wrote a paper on capitalism as a biblical basis. So I turned that in. I don't know if he will like it or not.

GLENN: Look, here's the thing. Tithing and the 10%, Moses, tithe 10%, right? What did they try to do before tithing? What did Moses actually come out with? Do you know? What was tithing? Before it was 10%, what was it before that? The law of?

CALLER: I'm not sure.

GLENN: The law of?

CALLER: Oh, yeah, okay.

GLENN: The law of consecration, which means you take all of your money and you give it to Moses. You give all of your money to your church, 100% and then you take only that that you need, okay? Moses couldn't make that work and so the law of consecration was too difficult for the people with the guy who parted the Red Sea and so they went down to a 10% tithing rule: Give 10%, okay? When Jesus was talking about ‑‑ when the apostles were talking about the early church where they shared everything, that's the law of consecration, and people have led lives of the law of consecration before and since. People have lived it many times. However, the secret is nowhere in the Bible does the ‑‑ do any of the apostles or Jesus say give all of your money to the government. They gave it to their church, and the church, nowhere did the apostles say we're going to take it from members of the church. They, keyword, shared everything they had.

Now, your professor can talk all he wants about how evil capitalism is, but ask your professor why Adam and Eve came down. Why, what was the whole thing about with the snake and the apple? What was that all about?

CALLER: Because they disobeyed God.

GLENN: Yeah, but what did that do? If Adam and Eve could ‑‑ if Adam and Eve didn't have the apple, they wouldn't have been fruitful and multiplied. Man would not be if it wasn't for that, okay? So what did they do? They ate the apple. Their eyes were opened. They saw the difference between good and evil, and the Lord drove them out of paradise and let them live this life where you've got to make choices and there's bad and there's good. We are here to make choices. You ask your professor, how am I supposed to be a good Christian, how am I supposed to better myself if all of my decisions are made for me by the state. If I can only eat these things, if I can only do these things, if I can only have this much money, if I'm forced to share, how does anyone grow spiritually? How do you become Gandhi if everything is decided for you? If this was the plan of salvation, if this is the plan of heaven, if this is God's plan, why didn't he just go with Lucifer's plan of just, I'll bring every soul back to you, God; you give the glory to me. I'll make sure. I'm not going to give them any choice. I'll bring everyone back. Jesus said, no, no, no, no; go down, let them have free will, let them have choice. But they are going to make so many mistakes, they are going to need a savior to come down and wash them clean. Now, if God didn't care about choice, if God was just like, you know what, just force them to do these things, it seems to me he would have gone with Lucifer's plan and not the other plan. Does that make sense to you?

CALLER: Yeah. And I ‑‑ one of the things I told him is that when Jesus commands us to give, I think that in a socialist society when our money's taken away from us by taxes, that's not really Jesus' definition of giving.

GLENN: No, did he say ‑‑ go quote the scripture to your professor. Ask him, did Jesus say when a man asks for your shirt, you give the government your coat, also, and have the government give that coat to the man? No. The government is a middleman. The government is acting in the role of Lucifer. They are taking stuff from you. They are forcing you ‑‑ yes, I did, I did just say, yes, the government is the devil. They are taking your choices from you. There is ‑‑ you ask your professor this. I hope you're writing this stuff down and I want to hear the answers from this nut job of a professor. You ask this ‑‑ you ask your professor this: At what point ‑‑ now, jeez, I just lost it. What were we talking about before that? The government is the devil, I remember that.

CALLER: The government is Satan.

GLENN: I remember that one clearly. I can't remember the last one. Yeah, you just, you just ask your professor where in the scriptures does it teach about a middleman. It teaches you to go right directly to the source. Where ‑‑ you ask your professor this: On April 15th does he feel charitable.

CALLER: Right.

GLENN: As charitable on April 15th as he does when he goes and visits a soup kitchen and works there, when he goes and visits sick people in the hospital, when he stops off the side of the highway to help somebody whose car is broken down? Does he have that same warm confirming spirit with him on April 15th? The answer is no. Because the spirit wouldn't confirm April 15th. It's taken from you. Giving is about your heart. Taxes don't engage your heart. They engage another part that is down, usually kept in the wallet region. Ashley, you ask him those questions. You call us back, all right?

CALLER: Okay. Thank you.

GLENN: All right. Thank you. Jeez. I mean, from a Christian: Capitalism is evil. Capitalism is freedom. What we do with capitalism is evil sometimes. Capitalism, capitalism is evil. Really? Tell that to Bill Gates, who has taken, what is it, a billion dollars and given it to cure malaria, given it to help people all over the world. You tell Wal‑Mart that capitalism is evil as they are writing out the largest check of any corporation for charity on planet Earth, every year. You tell them that capitalism is evil. You tell they happen that capitalism is evil when you look at the Jon Huntsman cancer center. Written by a capitalist. The check written by a capitalist. The funds taken from capitalism. You do that. You tell him that. Capitalism is evil? You tell me that capitalism is evil when you look at what Washington has built on the backs of capitalists. If capitalism was evil, if capitalism didn't exist, we wouldn't have this country. We wouldn't have what the government has because the government didn't create anything; it took it from us! Show me the dollars that they have made themselves, except for recently because they're printing those off right now show me the things the government has built on its own, except for a war machine. They haven't invented or built one thing. They went to capitalists and entrepreneurs and said we need something that does this, and they built it. Don't tell me that capitalism is evil. Your choices can be evil or your choices can be good. But in this country the individual choice is what mattered. But we have so perverted God's will, God's law, we have so perverted what our founding fathers ‑‑ so let me ask you this, Mr. Professor: Do you believe this country was founded on divine providence? Do you believe that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Madison, Adams, do you believe those men were enlightened men? I do. Well, their crazy idea was to allow men to be free and free in their own business to allow them to be able to engage in capitalism. I didn't think a bad tree could bear good fruit. I didn't know a good tree could bear bad fruit or bad trees bear good fruit. I didn't think that was possible. I've read that some place in some big thick book. You'd know better than I do because you're a professor, and the elite professors always have the right answer.