Hosts of Right Response Ministries dismantle modern usury, contrasting 28% credit card rates with ancient prohibitions in Israel and Rome. They condemn predatory universities for worthless degrees like "underwater basket weaving" while advocating Christian government intervention to break monopolies in healthcare and social media. Rejecting libertarianism as insufficient against societal degeneracy, they argue welfare systems incentivize theft yet acknowledge temporary state expansion is necessary before cultural maturity reduces the need. Ultimately, the discussion champions Christian financial stewardship over exploitative debt, urging believers to invest in generational assets like real estate or Bitcoin rather than relying on failing ideological advice. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Citizens Paying the Skin Game00:15:31
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We as Americans take debt and its accompanying exorbitant interest for granted.
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Old Testament Israel, the ancient philosophers, the early church, medieval societies, and the reformers all enforced strict prohibitions on any usury.
Or, at the very least, They capped interest rates and prohibited their use to exploit the poor.
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Oh, my word.
We're going to be talking about usury and interest.
And so, to be honest, for most of my adult life, I just thought this was always how things are.
We're going to talk about 20, 30, 40% charges just to finance, just to borrow money.
And I think for a lot of us, probably most of our adult life, we thought that's just how things are.
I remember in the military, a buddy of mine, he got landed at his base and he went out and bought a car.
And I think his interest rate was 28%.
And in my mind, it wasn't like.
Man, he got taken advantage of.
What a loan shark, this, that, or the other.
Like, oh, he just, you know, like he was dumb.
He didn't know any better.
Nowhere in there was I thinking, like, hey, maybe a 19 year old kid who has a steady paycheck so he can get approved for whatever shouldn't be allowed to actually be charged that much.
In this case, it was a salvage title, infinity.
Like you could see the one side of it was like sagging.
It was like a terrible decision on his part.
But to be fair, that was also an exploitative salesman.
This usury, interest rates like that, they have not been the norm.
Historically, we're going to talk about can Christians utilize it at all?
Is it a sin?
What situations would it be?
But our current context, what you have to understand is it's very novel that we do things the way we do.
Even in Europe, we have friends that have immigrated.
They've said credit cards aren't as big a thing there.
It is a specifically American infatuation with stuff and with consumerism and with the debt that then gets us into those houses, into those cars.
And the point is, if it's novel, you can actually go back.
It was funny.
Bernie Sanders, of all people, I mean, the most busted of clocks in multiple pieces all over the beach.
But that clock was right in that he said, hey, President Donald Trump, it's time to do something about student loans, car loans, credit cards, and the ridiculous amounts of interest that are being charged.
And that doesn't mean forgiving those student loans.
What needs to be done, in my opinion, is the universities need to fit the bill.
They've been passing out underwater basket weaving and gender studies degrees that employ no one and doing it at exorbitant cost.
And they defrauded people.
They defrauded people.
And those people.
Need to be paid back.
There needs to be some responsibility to the students who chose to take on these loans.
But if you want to forgive the loans, you don't punish the taxpayer.
Because when the government does it, what that actually means is the government produces nothing.
The government doesn't have money.
Everybody needs a basic understanding you have about the civil government.
The government produces nothing that has no money.
It can't have money because it produces nothing.
So anytime the government pays for something, that means the citizens are paying for something, one way or the other, either by raised taxes.
Or the government turns on the printers and then the citizens pay through it through another form of tax, which is inflation.
But one way or another, the citizens are paying for it.
Or, ironically, by taking out a loan.
Right.
That's true.
And that just means citizens also pay for it.
It's our grandchildren.
It's future citizens that pay for it.
So the citizens always pay for it.
If the government pays for it, that means you pay for it, either you or your children or your grandchildren, but it's the citizens.
The government can't pay because the government doesn't make money.
It doesn't do anything.
If you want a job done poorly, Then you know, then get the government to do it.
So, all that being said, um, it's not fair to take a guy who never went to college, uh, because his parents gave him good advice and said, Hey, we don't have the money for it, and you shouldn't take out, you know, 120 grand of loans.
Um, but I'm a plumber, I'm going to teach you, son, to be a plumber and hand you the family business.
And he works hard and does all that.
And now, because all the student loans are being forgiven by the government, that means that Joe Blow, the plumber, Who worked hard and never even went to school?
He's now having to pay for college.
College he never went to.
Somebody else's college, so that they could get their underwater basket weaving and gender studies degree and ultimately work at McDonald's.
So, the people who've taken these loans, I would say they bear some responsibility.
However, so we're not saying that they're absolved totally.
However, in the world, talking about categories and these kinds of things, there are predators and there is prey, right?
So, you look at the Proverbs and all these warnings to my son, my son, about the wayward woman, right?
That there is such a thing in biblical terms.
Look at the book of Proverbs.
She's a man eater, right?
Like her house, it's the ground outside, it's buried bones.
I mean, she eats men alive.
So that woman, she's a man eater.
So that woman bears a great deal of moral responsibility because she's a predator.
But that son, if he disregards his father's counsel, he's still got to stand before God and he can't just say, Well, the woman you gave me, right?
That's been tried before.
Adam tried that one.
It doesn't work.
He's still going to be morally guilty.
And apart from faith in Jesus Christ and the blood of Christ that covers sin, then he's going to go to hell.
But there are degrees of guilt.
And so I think that those who have taken these loans, they've got to have some skin in the game.
That's my opinion.
However, the predator also should have an exponentially greater degree of skin in the game.
And then the people who didn't take the loans, And we're not the predators preying on those who took the loans, shouldn't have any skin in the game, which means the citizens, taxpayers, the government can't pay for it because that would make the taxpayers, those who are actually innocent.
So, biblical justice, they can't pay for it.
But those who took the loan should pay something because they did commit a sin, even if in ignorance, a sin of allowing themselves to be deceived.
And there's some degree of moral culpability for that.
But the predator in this whole equation is the universities, in my opinion.
There are entire universities that should be shut down because they have been selling degrees at exorbitant amounts, ridiculous amounts that are absolutely worthless degrees that don't actually help anyone, not only just for employment, because that's not the only purpose of college.
The first purpose is simply to be educated, but they don't do that either.
You come out and you're unemployable and more stupid than you were when you went in.
So, any university, aka 95% of the universities currently in our country that fit that bill, I think they should be paying 90% of all the student loan debt.
Citizens, aka the government, taxpayers who fund the government, should be paying zero.
And then those who took the loans, they should be having some skin in the game.
And that's the university equation.
And in that sense, Bernie Sanders is right.
I don't know what his solution is, but he's right about the problem.
And everything that I just said for universities, go ahead and exponentially multiply that by 10 or even 100.
And now we can talk about credit card companies.
Yeah, yeah, so uh, I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna go through a survey just kind of the ancient world, old testament history, medieval societies, how they thought about it.
First, though, let me go ahead and define the term.
So, usury and interest they're not quite interchangeable, we shouldn't be quite kind of using one or the other in between.
So, the definition here you'll see it on your screen, but I'll read it out.
So, definitionally, there's different ways to define this, but this is the most helpful that I've found usury excessive or unfair lending rates, I think 20, 30, 40 percent, interest.
Commensurate compensation for lending money.
So, this is more closely tied.
I lend you $5,000.
Hey, can you throw in $50 on top of it just for the five grand I didn't have over the weekend?
So, interest, it's a little bit more reasonable, but then usury, you're always talking exorbitant, exploitive.
Religious status.
So, thinking more about this from different religions, different perspectives, usury has been forbidden in many traditions Christianity, Islam, Judaism.
We'll talk a little bit about that historically.
Now, interest has been forbidden in Judaism?
So, Jew to Jew, and I'll get this in yes.
Right.
But then, what the medieval ages, the kind of beneficial arrangement was Jews were permitted to lend to Christians.
And Christians kind of liked the loans.
They weren't allowed because they were Christians to charge each other usury or charge each other excessive interest.
But they kind of liked, like, well, I can borrow from the Jews.
And the Jews were like, well, I can then give to them.
They can borrow.
But extort.
Typically it was.
And then what happened was they kind of were like, well, we could take this community of people.
If we just exile them, we've canceled all the debt.
So in this case, if you take all the universities and you exile them.
And so that's actually why they get kicked out of a lot of different places in Europe.
That's not the only reason, but that was kind of the incentive people get worked up about the Jews because they held all the debt because Christians took loaners out from them because they couldn't take it from other Christians.
And they were like, wait, we could just exile these people and our debt problem solved.
I see.
We took American Express and just bulldozed it off the edge of California.
And so then, legally, interest is something that's just historically more common.
I'm not going to say it's ubiquitous.
I'm not going to say everyone's completely fine with it.
But interest is one of those things that was more allowed and more typically accepted.
So you see that now, for example, that interest is just commonplace here in the United States.
So going all the way back, the Greeks and the Romans, the Romans capped interest at 10%.
So they had the 12%.
Tables they were called.
They were kind of the rules that were laid out for Roman citizens.
And it was capped at 10% for a while.
And then eventually they abolished it altogether.
So that was Roman society.
It's individual citizens.
Individual citizens.
And even like business and everything.
Like there was no existence of 30% payday loans.
The Greeks, same thing.
What you'll see across all of these that I'm describing is they look down on it, especially as a profession.
You'll see Calvin will say that and others.
As a profession, the usurer, he's not giving anything to society.
So someone that just makes payday loans or a loan shark or auto loans, he doesn't create anything.
He doesn't create anything.
He's shuffling things around.
He's getting a little bit of return on top of it.
And so, ubiquitously, I can say this certainly across the history that I've surveyed, usury as a profession is looked down on extremely.
Charging some interest, personal loans.
There's a little bit more leeway there.
But even still, even still, let's put that cap on that.
I don't really like it.
We'll get into some of what Calvin says.
So, that's Greece.
That's Rome, the Athenian city state.
Same thing.
Pretty leery of it.
How did they feel about real estate agents?
I've always thought about it.
I have a lot of friends that are in real estate.
That's a great question.
But I always think, like, you didn't build the house.
You don't own it.
You didn't buy it.
Like, I'm buying the house.
I'm also paying.
I always think, like, why can't the owner of the house and the buyer just talk?
You know, like, why does this other person.
To me, that's because the government is so involved that all these T's have to be dotted and I's have to be dotted.
Right.
Someone has to look over all of that.
It's kind of the real estate.
It's almost like a lawyer.
They're coming in.
Because they actually have the know-withal to do all the paperwork.
And the paperwork is unnecessarily complicated for a private purchase.
Yep.
Okay, go ahead.
All right.
So, getting to Old Testament Israel, and this is really important because this is what the Bible says about it.
So, while Israelites could charge interest to foreigners, and this was likely less common, like it probably wasn't very common that you were going across the border back and forth to wherever it would be to give out loans, usury for fellow countrymen and the poor was strictly.
Exodus 22 25.
If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be unto him as a usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.
Deuteronomy 23 20.
Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land, whether thou goest to possess it.
Literally one of the blessings.
So you're going into the land, and I'm going to condition that blessing on not exploiting your fellow countrymen.
So if you restrain from that, trying to make a quick buck, setting up these different means and schemes to try to get your money to increase, I'm going to bless you.
But if you exploit him, And you take the poor and, like, you got to make rent.
You got to give me a hundred bucks on top of that.
That's tied to curse.
I'm not going to bless that if you come into the land and do that.
And you dispute out of the land.
Exactly.
Quick question here, Wes Does the fact that the Lord was commanding them, did you find in your research, was this a common practice in pagan nations?
Do you know?
Probably to the same degree it was, like with the Athenian city states and in Rome.
But it was definitely one of the things the Israelites were prone to.
You see this in the Psalms.
So going into the early church, Nicaea actually.
It forbid clerics, if any cleric charged interest, charged usury, they were defrocked.
So early on in the early church, after you kind of have Christendom come in, very quickly, usury fell completely out of favor.
It was not like, well, 5% or 7%.
It was out of favor.
St. Augustine says this Lend not money at interest.
Thou accusest the scripture which saith, this is from the Psalms, he that hath not given his money upon usury.
I, that is Augustine saying, I wrote not this.
It went not forth first from my mouth and here God.
Then Thomas Aquinas, as he quotes Aristotle, this is dangerous stuff.
He says, Now, money, according to the philosopher Aristotle, was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange, and consequently, the proper and its principal use of money in consumption or alienation, whereby it is sunk in exchange.
The Sin of Usury and Interest00:13:42
Essentially, he's saying, Money's purpose is not for it to grow.
So, Aristotle makes the argument it's not organic, like a plant or a baby or something like that, that's intended to grow.
It's to exchange, it's a medium of value.
I have boots, you have food, you want the boots, the food.
What's commensurate?
Well, we exchange money instead of having to make something that the other person wants.
So, exchange and consumption, Aristotle, Aquinas, pretty smart guys in my estimation, they said that's its proper use.
And so, trying to take it, get 5% or 7%, or give it out to someone and hoping that'll give it back to you more, is an unnatural use of it.
And so, Aquinas goes on to say, hence, it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent.
And it goes on a little bit in the quote there.
I mentioned the Jews a little bit.
After Christendom comes in, the Jews, because they maintained their own language, Yiddish, and then some Spanish variants, and they had their own insular communities and intermarried.
And the distinction, for the record, like it wasn't race.
So there was no 23 in me, you know, and like the early Christendom, and like, ah, 2% Ashkenazi, you're out.
These were people that that was their religion.
So when we say Jewish, we're not just talking about people with a genetic lineage, but literal communities of Jews.
And for, I don't know, killing the Messiah, they typically began to be, they were forbidden in some places from owning land, other places from working.
And so they really struggled to find a vocation where they could actually do.
So sometimes they'd be kicked out for one reason or another.
And so the only occupation in industry that they're really able to do was money lending.
And again, that's because Christians were forbidden to charge usury to Christians and Jews were forbidden to charge usury to Jews.
But a very convenient arrangement worked out where Christians could get the loans from the Jewish benefactors and the Jewish benefactors could get it from them.
They would get a little bit of money in the kickbacks.
And Christians, they were using these loans, to be fair, loans drive business.
Debt drives expansion and innovation.
Well, it's a catalyst that speeds it up.
It allows, it's like I can eventually, you know, I can make a million widgets over the course of 20 years.
But by being able to take loans, I can make a million widgets in the course of five years.
And so that's what it does it's just a catalyst that speeds things much more rapidly.
Yep.
Getting into the Reformation, the reformers did become more lax on usury.
So Luther, he's very against it early on, but later on he allows up to 10%.
And Calvin wrote a small treatise, and it was really helpful because he says look, take, for example, homosexuality.
There's a blanket ban on that.
There's no like, well, you can do it to a foreigner.
He says, usury, there is some occasion for it.
It should be leveraged to the common good.
But he's very critical of people that had it as a profession.
And he says this What am I to say except that usury almost always travels with two inseparable companions tyrannical cruelty and the art of deception?
This is why the Holy Spirit elsewhere advises all holy men who praise and fear God to abstain from usury so much so that it is rare to find a good man who also practices usury.
The Westminster Divine, same thing 10% was kind of their cap.
You get then into our current status.
So essentially, the rates kept raising.
That's the tough part you have usury and it's exorbitant.
You say, well, we don't want to go to 25%.
But 5%, I mean, like we can still borrow, we can still make a little bit of money on the side.
But again and again, as I studied this, what it's led to, what we have right now, once you let the cat out of the bag, once the glue is out of the bottle, it's a really tough, you could almost call it a drug to get people back from.
People love money.
Money makes the world go round, right?
The love of money.
It says the root of all kinds of evil.
People love money.
They love the idea of making, for one, a quick buck, making money without working hard for it.
That's especially tantalizing.
And what that's driven, what that led to, was eventually a type of credit system, it was about 1975 here in the United States.
And that's essentially now where you end up today.
You had a ban on it through most of church history, and then some loosening, and then a little more, and then global commerce.
And now most Christians don't even have a category of like, Oh, could a payday shark job be wrong?
I'm not inherently immoral.
If you have to do that, you have to do that.
We just don't even think anymore.
Maybe that's not the most moral thing.
Maybe I'm not contributing to society.
Maybe the job I'm doing isn't anything valuable.
Right.
Well said.
Well, let's go to our first commercial break and we'll come right back.
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So that takes us to Americans today.
The average credit card rate is 28%.
28%.
We mentioned it earlier.
Credit card use is not as common in the rest of the world.
It's Americans that use their credit cards and they use them a lot.
U.S. credit card consumer interest, I think this is in 2023, was as high as $1 trillion.
That's the interest?
No, that's the debt.
The debt.
So they're having this debt.
That's not, you know, like, I put some money in the card, I paid it off at the end of the month.
Right.
Which, for the record, I'm not.
Personally, I'm not Dave Ramsey.
I didn't cut up my cards, but they're all paid off.
I have a revolving balance that's accruing 17% interest every month.
And so you have Americans, we are addicted to stuff.
To, in many cases, like Christmas just happened.
How many of you got toys for your kids or someone else bought them, grandparents in this case, and they're cheap and they're plastic and they've already broken by this point?
How many of them are going to make it to just next Christmas?
How many of them are going to be passed down?
Well, why do these toys not last?
Is it the material?
Oh, well, we get them from China because it's cheaper and people can buy more of them.
And then it's easier for them to buy them because they can do so with a credit card.
And it becomes this revolving system.
I want, I want, I want.
James talks about this.
You want, but you do not have.
We want, and a credit system enables people to have it now.
I just don't think that's a responsibility just about anyone is capable of telling young men, you can have a brand new sports car.
Like legitimately, you can come in, you can put your name on a piece of paper, it doesn't feel very real.
You can walk off with the keys today.
That's an exploitation of, I would say, human psychology.
It's an exploitation of the way things work.
Because the way things typically work is you work hard and the reward is at the end.
You're laboring, you're striving, you're producing, you're doing all of these things.
And at the very end of it, you receive the reward which you labored towards.
Credit and interest that comes along with credit says you can have it now.
And the hard work, well, at the end of the day, if you really stack it up and you can't pay it, Bankruptcy.
That's the negative side.
I have some of the caveats for Christians that would engage in it, businesses, investments, all of that.
I wanted to open up to any additional thoughts.
I think it's interesting that you guys don't know this, but surely out of college, for about a year and a half, I worked at an agency that worked to help people reduce their credit card debt, did credit consolidation.
And what always surprised me, well, it stopped surprising me pretty quickly, was just how seldom people really understood.
Like what it was to have credit card debt right.
For a lot of people it was just like, oh well, now my monthly bills have to include my credit card payment right, and it's not like i'm ever even aspiring to get rid of the credit card debt.
It's just like oh, now I have an extra 300 a month that I have to account for my budget.
That is just the credit card payment.
That never goes away for them.
The other thing that was interesting to me and is interesting to me now is um credit.
Having good credit, which will open up, you know, financial doors for you, has become a replacement for having a good name.
The biblical value is to have a good name, to be a man of good repute, to be a man who's reliable, faithful, hardworking, a good businessman who treats people well and fairly.
But now you've got people with good credit, but that says nothing about whether they're good people necessarily.
All it says is I'm able to mail in certain payments on certain times and not fall behind.
They might not actually be financially solvent either.
You can have quote unquote good credit and not be really financially solvent.
You shouldn't have late payments, things like that.
And so this idea of credit.
has replaced, has become like if you say my credit score is 730 or something like that, people say, oh, you must be responsible, you must be wise, you must be a man of repute.
Well, it doesn't necessarily mean that.
It is a cheap or lesser substitution for what used to be the biblical priority, being a man of honor, having a good reputation, which is more valuable than gold.
And I think a lot of Christians have replaced, I have good credit, with a name that's, you know, something that's more valuable even than gold.
That's a symptom of globalism, too, because the good name, people have to know who you are.
Yes.
So if you stay somewhere and there's three generations and you carry the family name, like for one, it disincentivizes you from bad behavior.
I wouldn't want to heap dishonor upon my family's name, having a child out of wedlock.
Not paying back my loans.
But then people move around and they go to college and they travel abroad in Europe and they do this and that.
And so, how do you trace them?
How do credit companies know?
Because, I mean, they want to give cards out, but they want to do it to the most responsible.
And so, you need some type of credit score.
But the credit score, of course, can't account for generations of faithfulness, can't account for family, can't account for all of these things.
So, we'll take people, we'll boil them down to the economic widget, the number on a screen, and say, oh, I mean, this is literally 2008, the financial crisis.
This is what they did.
They took a bunch of good FICO numbers, bundled them up because they could make 3% on the dollar or this much, bundled it together and crashed the economy, destroyed lives.
Now, there's questions to be had about how that bubble got the way it did in the first place, but I mean, that's what it was.
We're going to bundle these together prime scores, subprime scores, make them into these little securities that we then sell and people pay us a fee and then they get it.
And if everyone pays it off, it goes well.
Somebody watched the big short.
Somebody watched it multiple times.
That's a great movie.
But it's fascinating.
And think about how much it impacted lives though.
A decade of an American recession, a depression in home prices, people that were planning to retire, that had worked hard and their savings were in the stock market and they lost much of it, probably not all of it if they held through and everything like that, but sent back a decade.
And so you could have had a decade ahead of time with grandchildren that you'd worked hard and saved from.
And what I want to see is that type of just profit at any cost, making a return, making money back.
What's my 5%?
What'll get me 6%?
That type of thinking is supremely destructive in the West.
And Christians, we have to be in the system.
And I have some thoughts on that.
Like, you have to own a home, and you are probably, unless you own a trust fund, you're going to have to get a mortgage and you're going to have to pay an interest rate.
You probably, with how expensive cars are, you're probably going to have to do the same.
Financing a Gucci handbag, well, that is not the same category as a house and car.
So, Christians have to live in the system, and we should live wisely.
But you can say, I'm doing this because I have to, and I need a house, and I think it's a good investment, and a car, and all of these things.
But I also recognize my life is not about.
The bottom dollar percent return in the stock market and like H1B visas, same thing.
Tech companies want cheaper labor, they can make more money and get a bigger return.
Christians have to say, not worth it.
We'll pay our own workers more.
Maybe this app, you know, isn't as good or isn't as profitable.
That's okay because we don't exist to just literally make a bottom line for shareholders, we exist for our laborers, we exist for, I mean, like manufacturing and farms.
They existed for the people around them.
Shareholders Over Consumers00:06:53
Well, every time a company goes public, like there's a lot of studies that have been done about this, that it's not just existing for the laborers.
There's plenty that could be said about that and practicing integrity in your business practices towards your workers.
But it's also fundamentally, a company exists for its consumers, its clientele, its customers, right?
The customer is always right.
Well, every time a company goes public, IPO, in a sense, the shareholder is always right.
They actually become more beholden.
To the shareholder than they actually do the consumer.
And so they can start doing things that actually the consumer doesn't even like, you know, simply because it makes the stock go up.
The shareholder is happy.
So I'm going to give one more example of this and we'll get into like Christians just practically.
How do you live in this type of system?
So you're going to see a picture on the screen and I'll describe it for anyone that's listening of two bowls of cereal.
And you're like, that's a silly illustration.
Well, the one on the left is the American version of Froot Loops, and the one on the right is the European version.
The one on the left, if you're listening, is brighter.
The color is just straight up.
Like there's more colors, they're brighter, they're more engaging.
The one on the right just looks a little bit more bland.
I don't know about the taste because I don't eat cheap, junky cereal.
The reason the American version looks how it does is because it has red 40, yellow 5, yellow 1, and blue 6.
These are food dyes that are incredibly toxic and they're terrible for children.
And that's just not like a fringe.
I read one paper.
RFK and the FDA are set to ban them.
The evidence is overwhelmingly clear.
Canada's banned them, Europe has banned them.
These dyes.
They're toxic to your children, to your health.
You should not be consuming them.
So, now why does Kellogg's put this dye in this cereal?
Because they think it's healthy for your kids.
Well, they don't think that.
They know it's not.
The reason it is in there is so that your children, it's brighter, more stimulating, and engaging.
It's, of course, packed full of cereal.
So, when they taste it, they get a similar euphoric feeling.
So, they buy more.
Most of the boxes have cartoon characters on them.
It's got Simba from Lion King.
Why is that?
Because adults love Simba and Luke Skywalker.
No, so at the grocery store, when you're walking down the aisle, your kid sees it and they become the weapon to get you to buy Froot Loops.
Like it makes me angry.
Your health for your children, and this is just one of hundreds of examples, these corporations, what I would describe what we have now as a type of corporate capitalism.
They don't care.
Well, they do care, I'm sorry.
But one thing, and that's money.
Right.
Money, money, money.
I will pack this full of dyes.
I will pack this full of sugar.
I will make clothes out of polyester.
I will do X, Y, and Z.
And all that matters to me, can I make it cheap?
Can I mass produce it?
And will people buy it?
And they have destroyed the health of your children, the health of adults, the quality of our goods.
How much stuff have you bought recently?
And it's just junk.
It's manufactured terribly.
It's not put together well.
It doesn't last very long.
Like that is what's happening when the pursuit, above all, these big global international corporations is we want money.
We want a return as much as we can, as fast as we can.
And there's no cost we will not pay.
Of course, we don't want negative consumer perception, anything like that.
We'll avoid that.
As long as people don't catch on to the Red 40 and the Yellow 6 and all of that, we're happy to do it.
And so Christians have to think of that system and say, wait a second, that is not loving to our neighbor.
That is not what God intended.
I would say I'm a big fan of the free market a free man owning his own trade, making a good product, and competing with others to sell it.
So when I critique a type of corporate capitalism like that, that's not a critique of free trade as a whole, but free trade and that is very different from an environment.
OnlyFans is another example of success of capitalism.
A man went ahead and built a website, a Jew, Leonard Kraninsky, and for women and men.
He connects them both.
It's one of the most profitable tech companies because it takes like 30 employees to run.
Wow.
They make like $31 million per employee.
Great success story, right?
He's an entrepreneur.
He got out there, not quite so much.
And so that drive for money, that pursuit of money, and it comes back to usury, interest, all of these things.
Thinking of money as how can I grow it?
How can I grow it the fastest?
How do I pursue it?
How do I get more of it?
How do I line my pockets?
And that's essentially where we are as Americans and as Christians.
Yep.
Well said.
You use the dyes with the cereal.
The whole time you're talking, I was just thinking you could use as an example.
You could have put two bowls of cereal like you did with the bright colored Froot Loops with the dyes that are terrible for your health and then the bland ones.
But you could have also just put a bowl of cereal and then steak and eggs or eggs and bacon or something.
Like cereal in general, just all together, is kind of an example of why.
Why does cereal even become a thing?
You know, well, the food pyramid, which is one of the biggest psyops that there's been, certainly in the health industries, it's literally like it is almost to the T upside down in terms of like what's actually healthy for you.
So it's like, well, you need all these grains.
Like, well, no, you actually don't.
Well, do you know why those are on the base?
You might be getting to it because they're cheap.
Because food groups made up of these corporations lobbied the FDA to get stickers like heart healthy and to put their products at the base of it.
So they wanted money and so they lobbied the FDA through these different avenues to say, Please make our product the base of the pyramid.
Right.
Again, money, money.
Yep.
Have you guys seen that South Park clip that's floating around right now where the president in the show is unhealthy and he's like exponentially getting unhealthy, more and more unhealthy.
And they're trying to figure out what's wrong.
And all these people around him are unhealthy.
And the kid from South Park, I don't even know the characters, but he calls in and he goes, It's the pyramid.
And they're like, No, no, no, it's not the pyramid.
And he goes, No, it is.
It's upside down.
And they take the food pyramid and it spins over on the screen.
And so the bottom is now like the fats and the oils and the meats.
And then there's hardly any carbs and grains and things like that.
And like they give the president the food pyramid and he just like immediately starts to improve.
And it's like South Park has called everything.
Right.
That's great.
Yeah.
Another thing I was going to say in terms of the free market and thinking about just like forms of government and stuff, you know, back to, you know, a common theme that we've been talking about, you know, this week with, you know, Categories and things like that.
And on the flip side, ideology, where you're ideological, you take one thing, you try to make it the master key, one size fits all.
It's a lazy approach to worldview thinking.
Libertarianism as a Lazy Worldview00:04:02
And one of the things that I think Christians have done this when it comes to politics and when it comes to government is libertarianism.
I think every young man goes through a libertarian phase for a while where he thinks, This is it, I finally.
I finally figured it out.
And what happens is it's overly simplistic.
It's myoptic.
It's a conflation of, well, governments should be Christian.
They should be, because they should be moral and the Christian worldview is the true worldview.
And so government should be Christian.
But then what happens is that Christian becomes just a placeholder for small.
And so then you begin to think that intrinsically that small equates to righteous.
But you can have a small, wicked government.
And you can actually have a large righteous government.
And my point in that is, I understand jurisdictions.
I'm well aware of sphere sovereignty or whatever you want to call it, or classical two kingdom theology, whatever side of the fence you're on.
I understand there are jurisdictions.
There are certain things, certain duties and roles that have not been given to the civil magistrate, but rather been given to households, the family, the home.
And then, of course, certain things given to the church.
And I think that gives you a pretty good general sense of the lay of the land.
But That doesn't completely settle the equation.
There was a time where I thought it did.
But the reality, you know, so you think of when it comes to commerce and markets and trade, well, this belongs to it's not the church, but it's also not the state, it's the household.
But this is where, like some guys, you know, especially bright guys who do the reading, this is part of what got guys fascinated with things like socialism or communism or, you know, Marxism, because they would just naturally begin to think, well, wait a second, what if a guy, you know, he's done nothing?
In his entire life, but you know, his great great great grandfather, uh, just happened to be it's not like this guy was hard working and this other guy was lazy, it's just time and place.
It's just you know, his great great great grandfather happened to you know settle out west and he bought land at the head of a river.
Um, and then all these other people they bought land based off of a certain price because it had water access and water rights, um, you know, further down river.
Well, this guy, it's his lamb, you know, and it's it's free trade, it's you know, he's a private citizen.
He can do whatever he wants.
Well, what if he dams up the river?
And then everybody south of him, downstream, no longer has water rights.
And then they can't even just sell the property because now it's worth a fraction of what it was worth when they bought it.
And then you apply that concept to patents, things like that.
It's like, well, in some cases, somebody shows real ingenuity and innovation and works really, really hard and has a brilliant mind.
And then there's other cases where it's like, no, somebody just.
It's again a product of place and time.
Like somebody was just there first.
But now, for all of time, they, you know, so you think of like monopolies.
Like, should governments, our government already does this, like, okay, free trade, yes, but there are stipulations, I guess is what I'm getting at.
Like, should there be monopolies just across the board?
And then think about that as it plays in not just to your health, you know, with major food companies, big meat, you know, where every mom and pop farmer, you know, in the country is just driven out of business because they, they, They cannot produce, they don't have the money or the resources to produce at that level of quantity in order to get the prices that low.
And so they can't compete.
Their meat's never going to be purchased.
And so then all of a sudden, the big food companies have a monopoly on beef, but then they want to drive the bottom line even lower and make profits go even higher.
And so now everything is grain finished.
Facts Don't Care About Feelings00:03:41
And then it starts to be steroids and injections.
And now there's mRNA.
Vaccines with cattle and all this kind of stuff.
And you're eating these things.
Even if you said, I don't want to take the vaccine, well, you're probably still getting some of it in you simply because you can't afford $30 a pound for ground beef or whatever.
And so all these things happen.
That's just as it pertains to health.
Okay, here would be another example.
What about the moral implications of speech?
Well, freedom of speech.
We believe in free speech.
But what if somebody beats you to the punch when it comes to new platforms for free speech?
You think of the early days of social media with Facebook and all these different things.
And then somebody inevitably emerges the victor, and then they entrench the victory, and no competitor can take them out.
And then all of a sudden, you get four years of Joe Biden because Hunter's laptop was suppressed, and this is suppressed, and that is suppressed.
And it's literally being.
Surely none of that stuff was suppressed.
Yeah, this is just hypothetical.
No, it's not.
But they're literally admitting it now, like straight up Mark Zuckerberg.
And just for the record, here's how you have to think about politics Mark Zuckerberg.
It is doubtful, highly doubtful that he has had a genuine change of heart.
So, what happened?
Well, the world has changed one heart at a time, one heart, one mind, as facts don't care about your feelings.
And you just make the arguments and seek to be persuasive and do the reading and present the facts.
And eventually, through persuasion, you convince enough people, 50% of the population plus one, and then things start to change.
Nope, that's not how it works.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
That's correct.
You know what else is correct?
Here's a fact feelings don't care about your facts.
That blue haired feminist, you can do a 90 minute presentation with charts and statistics and quotes and all the.
She doesn't care because my feels, you know, she doesn't care.
Your facts don't care about her feelings.
Her feelings don't care about your facts.
Mark Zuckerberg, even, I'm talking about even in the case of powerful people, not just the general populace, but even in the case of extremely wealthy people or in the case of extremely smart people, what you need to realize is society is ultimately shaped by a fraction of the population.
Part of it has to do with intelligence, part of it has to do with virtue.
I think that's the biggest part.
But But my point is that it's not about convincing everyone.
It's about winning.
And when you win, magically, overnight, all of a sudden, everyone happens to be convinced.
Zuckerberg would not be doing what he's doing.
He's now adopting Elon's model of, oh, we're going to get rid of the fact checkers.
He's known that the fact checkers were full of bull crap.
He's known that for a decade.
He didn't come into new information, his feelings didn't just subjugate themselves.
To facts that he came into contact with for the first time.
That's not what happened.
What happened?
Well, two things Trump won and Elon.
That's what happened.
X is the biggest social media now in the world.
Elon beat Zuckerberg and uses community notes instead of fact checkers.
So Zuckerberg will too.
And lo and behold, all the other social media platforms, you'll find that they've all magically had a change of heart.
But here's the point.
Or McIntyre, you would say, in this house, we believe in elite theory.
And that's just the reality.
That is the reality.
But my point is there was a time, every young man goes through his Ron Swanson libertarian phase.
Elite Theory and Social Media00:07:14
And that's all good and well.
You can go through that phase, but make sure it's a phase and that you go through it and you don't stop.
A couple of days is a good amount of time for that phase.
I had about a six month phase of libertarianism.
But here's the deal.
My point is, small is not synonymous with righteous.
Governments should be righteous.
But you can have a big government that's actually more righteous than a small government.
You can have a small government that's 100% wicked and a big government that's 80% righteous.
And when you think of trade just as one realm, yes, in a theological general sense, it belongs to households.
Governments produce nothing.
That's true.
But should the government, not just should, but does the government have a moral obligation under God?
To break up certain monopolies in the free trade realm, when it comes to things that can literally shave off 15 years of the citizen's lifespan, or where in the realm of free speech, where an entire portion, half the country, no longer has a voice and can't be heard.
Like, then, yeah, I do think that, and you can say, well, that's not theocratic libertarianism.
Well, then I don't care.
I don't know what to tell you, but a Christian government should have the power in order to meet the duty and obligation that if Zuckerberg has a monopoly, an iron fist clenched on all the free speech, and he's preferring one in a partisan fashion, one party to the other, and that party also happens to be wicked and lying, then yes, the government,
the sword is to punish evildoers.
That's evil.
So that's the question is like, well, the government just exists to punish evildoers.
It doesn't exist with capitalism and when it comes to free trade.
Well, can you do evil in trade?
Can you do evil in the medical industry?
Can doctors practice evil?
Can they produce fraudulent, evil studies about a disease and blur the statistics?
Can Speech, free speech platforms and social media platforms, can they do things that are evil?
Well, the government has been given the sword, the civil magistrate has been given the sword to punish the evildoer.
And as far as you find evil, then that's as far as the reach of the sword.
I've said to friends, they've asked, like, it sounds like everything we're talking about kind of sounds like more government.
And I feel like the last thing we need right now is more government.
But I would say, here's this this is what I said short term more, long term less.
Because the ideal, I mean, just like our constitution, It's fit for moral people.
The ideal is not the FDA testing cereals to make sure you didn't pack them with dyes.
The ideal is that people are so moral and they care about their neighbor that they just don't do it.
The ideal is not that you have to have these strict laws in the books and you're hunting down.
And you eventually have a society where even if somebody tried to do it, they would be pushed out of town.
Exactly.
Like nobody would buy it.
Good neighbors would warn their fellow neighbors and say, no, don't do that.
This guy is selling snake oil.
Yep.
Perversion laws and everything.
We didn't have a big deal with them because nobody, for Close to probably about the first 150 to 200 years of our nation, thought, oh, I should market and sell smut.
They didn't do that.
Because laws are not the only form of power.
There's legal power, but there's also cultural power.
Cultural pressures, cultural norms is powerful.
That's why we want Christian culture.
That's right.
We want Christian culture because we don't actually want to have a law about everything.
But here's the deal the law is a tutor, and we currently have a society of a bunch of degenerates that need a lot of tutoring.
So if your country is filled with metaphorical toddlers, Then you're going to have to have a stronger hand and a sharper sword.
You might even have to dual wield a little bit.
You got two swords going on.
And that's currently where we are.
But that's not where we always have to be.
It's not always where we were.
We had a smaller government in the past.
And part of it is because, well, you had a much smaller population.
Yeah, part of it is people.
That's true.
If you have more people, you're going to have to have more administration to some level, not to a managerial class, but to some level.
But it wasn't just that the population grew.
It's also that the population became less trustworthy.
We don't have a high trust society anymore.
And with less trust, you have to have more management and more laws and more infractions and more all these different things supervising what's actually going on because everybody's trying to defraud everybody.
And so, yes, in the short run, I think you need more government.
And then also that gets into jurisdictions.
In certain jurisdictions, you would have, even on the short end, you'd have more government and then less.
But even in the short timeframe, you would have less government immediately in whole swaths of realms or areas.
So think welfare.
Well, welfare in itself is evil.
It's doing evil.
It is theft.
It's fraud.
It is taking from someone who worked for it and giving to someone who didn't.
It's also incentivizing the breakdown of the family.
It's saying, hey, you know what?
You can be a deadbeat dad.
And it's okay because Uncle Sam will be Daddy Sam.
You actually don't have any moral obligation to your children.
In fact, if you stay, we'll penalize your children.
You actually get less financial incentives.
For keeping your marriage vows and being a present father in the home, your children will get more money if you go out and commit crime and go to jail, and will also just jail in itself.
The taxpayer will pay for your room and board, three meals a day, a little bit of exercise time, a bed, and all these kinds of things, and a working toilet.
So we will actually pay for you while you produce nothing, and pay for your wife and kids that you produce nothing for, and we'll do a better job at it than you will.
And so, something like that, that would be a whole arena of government, namely the welfare system.
That immediately, well, we would have to, a ton of people would die.
We would probably have to wean them off, but it would quickly, if we were being righteous, quickly fade away.
Other sections, though, would actually be larger.
My point is to say it simply.
If we do Christian nationalism, under Christian nationalism, X, Y, and Z, well, under Christian nationalism, it is not as simplistic as just saying, under Christian nationalism, you'd have a Christian government, and a Christian government would be a smaller government.
It would be smaller in some ways, and it would actually be exponentially larger than others.
And that radically offends libertarians.
But libertarianism is honestly like, it's like, we'll go and live in Never Everland, you know, like with the Lost Boys and Peter Pan.
But eventually you have to grow up.
Libertarianism is a wonderful stage of life for a 17 year old man.
That's even a little old.
That's a little old.
Growing Wealth for God's Good00:08:02
All right.
Let's go to our second commercial break.
The last, we'll just touch on some thoughts on Christians who want to not commit the sin of usury.
There is a sin, but also want to be wise with their finances.
Great.
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All right.
Well, welcome back.
In this last section, so some of the questions I mean, we have sponsors that are investment funds.
I think of New Founding.
They're on the front page of Forbes Finance or New Venture Capital.
Those are institutions that are designed to have individuals invest and to get a return and to build different things.
I think we'd like to say here for the record that's awesome.
Would that exist for all time in every system, every Christian system?
I don't know.
Who knows?
But the point is here and now, There's a huge difference.
We talked about usury and charging and exploiting your brother.
There's a huge difference if Michael couldn't make rent.
He's never done this, but like, you couldn't make rent.
And I said, sure, I'll loan you $2,000 and you need to give me back $3,000.
There's a huge difference between that and then me taking my own money voluntarily, not under compulsion, saying, hey, I have some money.
I want it to be used to help build Christian companies.
And so I'm going to invest in Reese Fund, Newfounding.
Notice the compulsion, the need, The motive for it, me, if I was to charge Michael an extra $1,000, what's the motive?
Line my pocket.
If I'm investing in these companies, what's the motive?
To grow, to be a good steward, and to provide for better things down the road.
And so, right here, right now, the system we're in, I don't think you'd be able to swear off all loans.
You could cut up your credit cards.
And if you have problems with debt, you probably need to do that.
But owning a house, I don't think any Christian sins in and of itself by just buying a house.
Now, you can buy too big a house because you're greedy.
You can buy too nice a car because you're greedy.
But I don't think those things are wrong because the Bible typically forgoes universals in favor of particulars.
It doesn't give us a list of words we can't say and say you can say everything else.
So, same thing with usury, as Calvin points out.
There are times and positions, there's some use for it.
Calvin says, for the common good.
But to exploit, to leverage against your brother, to make a quick buck, to make a profession of it.
If you are, I can't imagine our payday loan salesman listening base is that high.
If you literally make a living off payday loans and bail bonds, by God's grace, find another job, brother.
But short of that, so don't do it as a profession, don't exploit your fellow brother.
But at the same time, grow your wealth for your family's good, for God's good.
There's no church, political, family situation that's made better by you having less money.
Nothing is made better.
I'm just so much better placed because I have so much debt.
Like, no, actually, now you're stuck here because you can't move from your house because it dropped in value and you have this.
The whole concept of that is like mitigating the blessings of God.
Like, God, I would appreciate less of your blessings.
Like, no, I want whatever blessing God will give me.
And God, you know, who does all things well, if you're faithful with little, will give you much.
God will give you blessing in accordance with, you know, at least for His own, for His own children.
Sometimes He'll give an abundance of temporal blessing to the wicked in order to further indict them for their detriment.
And to further justify himself on that final day when they stand accused before him.
But in the case of the righteous, as God, children of God, yeah, God is a good father.
He gives us blessings that we can handle as he's maturing us.
And so we don't, I don't want to mitigate blessing.
If God would say, you know, Joel, you've been faithful with little, and I want to give you more, I want to actually give you more financial wealth for you to steward faithfully for my glory and the good of my people.
Great.
And in the same way, I think that that principle, not a hard and fast rule, I would, you know, there would be some nuancing and disclaimers here, but the same with children are a blessing, a heritage from the Lord.
We don't, you know, very few of us would mitigate.
You know, like if we went, our employer, you know, pulled us in Monday morning and said, Listen, you've been doing excellent work and I want to give you a raise.
I'd like to double your salary.
Very few of us would say, 25% is fine.
Yeah, 25% is fine.
Don't do that.
Seems like too much.
I don't know if I'll be able to properly steward it all.
You know, this is just beyond, it's above my pay grade.
But we do do that with children, even though the Bible uses the same word wealth, blessing from the Lord, heritage.
With children, we'll look to God as our ultimate employer and Uh, God, in very many cases, not every case, there's infertility and all these different things.
Uh, but in many cases, God is abundantly generous and kind, and He has given the capacity for a raise of five children.
And yet, we go to our employer, God, and we say, Five children, that's too much blessing.
We'll take three.
Um, and you know, and so, um, you know, again, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not going to the Monty Python skit, you know, every sperm is sacred, you know, that with the Catholics, and like, so you know, 12 children, or you're in sin.
Um, obviously, there's prudence and wisdom and thought and all those things, but.
But my point is, we shouldn't mitigate blessing.
We do often.
We do it with children all the time with our 1.2 kids, you know, and white picket fence.
And then, you know, but with money, very few of us are mitigating blessing.
We want to be blessed, we want to use it to the glory of God, but it needs to be used wisely.
So, what do you say?
I was going to just restate what Wes said in a slightly better way.
No, no.
Just for those of you who are.
Because I know, in spite of our audience being extremely based, right?
Predominantly, the conversation in Christian circles is the conversation about money is why money is so bad.
Right.
Turning Mortgages into Investments00:15:29
And so, Wes, when you talked about just kind of the system that we live in, one of the things that I think would be helpful for people to think about as they're seeking to grow their wealth is maybe a principle for you is growing money and wealth used to produce.
And to grow.
So, in the sense of like, maybe you've got some money, what you want to do is you want to help a brother start up a business.
He's working nine to five, but he's a skilled mechanic, right?
He doesn't have the capital to start a shop, but you've been blessed.
And so, you lend him some money with a small interest rate or maybe a stake in the company or something like that.
That's a different purpose.
That is growth and even flourishing, to use a social justice word, productivity.
That's actually what we're supposed to be doing as humans, right?
But where it's taking advantage of, if that's a helpful way to think about how you use your money or even what kind of loans you enter into, loans for the purpose of productivity and increase versus loans for the purpose of taking advantage and pulling the wool over someone's eyes.
That maybe for listeners is a helpful way to think about, I think, exactly what Wes is saying.
Yeah, that's a good way.
Also, in terms of loans that.
For the sake of an asset versus, like, you know, college loans.
Part of what makes it so bad is that it's like, well, I got an education.
Well, first, that's debatable.
Second, even if you did, that is an improvement, but it's not a tangible asset.
When somebody takes out a loan to buy a house, I mean, yeah, there can be a housing market crash and you can be underwater on your mortgage, and those things are possible.
But at the end of the day, you still have a tangible asset that you can sell.
So it's like I took out a loan for a house.
That house typically over the long haul, Usually seven to 10 years, and pretty much every seven to 10 year period, if you're willing to wait at least that long, right?
So, you know, you buy a house and the very next year you turn around, maybe you have a profit, maybe you don't.
But if you're willing to wait seven to 10 years from the time of buying a house, then you're pretty much always in the black.
And so, in that case, you're taking a loan for one, a basic need, shelter.
Two, you actually have a tangible physical asset that appreciates in value, which is very different than a loan shark selling loans, typically not to somebody who's paying a mortgage for a For a physical asset that they own, but to pay rent to someone else who owns that asset.
Meaning that if they ever get behind, the money's gone.
There's nothing that that money went towards that they physically own that represents that they can sell in order to get out of bankruptcy is the only option.
They have no safety line.
And so that's another thing to consider what am I taking a loan for?
Am I taking a loan for just material stuff, the Louis Vuitton handbag?
Or am I taking a loan for a need and a need that also happens to be an asset?
Yep.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad, great book.
And he just simply says the rich acquire assets, things that make the money, and the poor acquire liabilities.
Like I have, I've said it before, like two homes and one's a rental.
It's a lot of debt.
It's closer to a billion than not, but it's an asset.
Closer to a million, you said?
Closer to a million in total debt.
That sounded like you said a billion for his asset.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was like, real estate empire.
Billions.
But that debt is not just debt for the purpose of paying debt.
It's an asset that's bringing in money.
And so, as a Christian and all of those things, I can say, yeah, I think this is a wise choice to acquire this asset that will take a loan, but I'm acquiring it.
I'm giving someone a home to live in.
I hope in time, a Christian from our church that isn't at the point to buy, that they would rent it.
So, I'm providing a real, tangible service.
Again, not software or something like that, real service.
And it's bringing in money instead of taking money out of my wallet every month.
That is so different than a consumeristic minded.
Going into debt for a Peloton or something like that.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And this is just, I'll end it with this.
This is another one of those topics where ideology, again, is proves to be incredibly unhelpful because the ideological answer, which is appealing to someone who's desperate, and also, you know, if you're particularly uneducated in the realm of finance and tempted to be lazy, ideology is always.
Appealing to those who are lazy because it's a one size fits all master key.
Instead of having to learn many topics and an exhaustive education, I can just learn one secret thing that's, you know, it's the gnosis, it's the secret knowledge that enlightens me that now I can unlock every door.
So, an example of ideology on this topic would be, in my opinion, and some people won't like this, Dave Ramsey.
I think that that is not an exhaustive understanding of wealth and finances.
I think it's ideological.
Debt, bad, period.
In a discussion.
No disclaimers, no just.
He says 15 year mortgage for your house is about the only debt you should have.
The only one.
I will say, in his favor, he's speaking to people who are never going to do the reading.
That's true.
Right?
So it probably is better for them, for those people to follow that advice than not.
For some people.
But I know other people, and I pastorally dealt with this, where there are people in their 40s, 40 years old, who have been taking the damn Dave Ramsey.
I was connecting the two names there.
I wasn't trying to curse, but the Dave Ramsey approach.
And it's like, and they're thinking, I'm going to accrue wealth, you know, by accruing real estate.
It's like, well, how many houses do you own?
You know, one, you know, and how close are you to accruing the second one?
Nowhere even close.
But I'm going to do real estate and the SP 500, you know, and which is, I think the SP 500 is relatively good and this and that and the other and paying off all of our debt.
And like, and I know a lot of people have been hurt by that.
Like people, you know, in, in, You know, pastorally, parishioners who they're like, you know, I worked really hard in 2019 to, you know, my wife and I to pay off all of our student loans because we believed it was morally right.
And that's the financial morality, you know, ideological financial morality, you know, education that we had received.
And so we did it because we thought it was right.
And then 2020 happens and 2021 and 2022.
And what inflation does is that it actually shrinks with inflation.
It's a bad system because it also because money across the board shrinks.
What that means is if money is shrinking across the board, it means that the $50,000 that you owed in 2019, well, by 2022 standards, it's more like equivalent of like $38,000 that you owe.
Likewise, the money that you save shrinks.
So, everybody in 2020 and 2021, if you had $50,000 in debt and somebody else worked really hard to pay off all their debt and had $50,000 in savings, the guy with $50,000 in savings, Now has the buying power of $38,000 in savings.
And the guy with 50 grand in debt now has the debt, actual equivalency of $38,000 in debt.
So the guy who made poor choices, what he owes actually lessens.
And the guy who made wise choices, what he owns also lessens.
And so my point is it's not that simple.
There are times, and maybe not with student loans, but the principle still remains.
There are times where, But, Wes, your mindset was not just I should take my 30 year mortgage on the one house that I own that I have to have to meet a base need of shelter, and I should turn that into a 10 year mortgage and get a lower interest rate because interest is money lost.
And so I've got, let's say I've got a 3.5 interest rate because I bought in 2021 or whatever on the one house that I actually need.
And I'm going to take that 30 year mortgage and make it a 10 year mortgage and get it all the way down to like a 1.9 or a 2.6% interest rate and pay it off in 10 years.
That's what Dave Ramsey would say.
Wes will actually be in a much better financial position by not doing that and saying, look, the first loan I got because of this reason, because of that reason, military and all this, I got at very low interest or zero interest.
And instead of paying this off faster, I'm actually going to sit on that debt for a while and go ahead and actually take out more for a second mortgage in order to have a rental property that now I have an appreciating asset that also pays dividends, monthly dividends.
And I'm going to leverage that to pay off the first home, and then I'm going to own it in the final announcement.
That would actually make more money.
And I think that some of the financial advice that's ideological and too simplistic, one size fits all, part of the reason it's bad is because it's financial advice that worked in a different time in a different world.
That's another thing that people don't realize you're getting financial advice from Dave Ramsey, or to stop picking on him, from David Bonson.
I would categorize him a little bit different, but I think somewhat similar.
These are guys who made a lot of money in the 80s.
Right.
The 80s are not 2025.
The world has changed.
The way money works has changed.
Central banking, the core problem of all of this has stayed the same.
You are correct that other things, the way it operates, is almost more clear now.
Like this inflation problem.
That is when you have a central bank and a centralized currency, that is what it will always tend towards the printing of more money, the inflation away of debt, which then incentivizes more debt taking, but then also your savings, you have to be putting them in assets that return because if they just sat there, they'd be worth less.
And that's the core problem underneath this, but you and I can't change central banking tomorrow.
Right.
But that was like, I'll just leave here just to be helpful, a real practical, tangible lesson.
One little lesson that I learned through 2020 and 2021 was, and I never thought about it like this, I never heard anybody explain it this simply, this clearly.
But one thing that I learned is I thought in terms of there are investments, whether it's real estate or stocks or whatever, there are investments, bonds, and then there's money.
And it clicked for me one day in either 2020 or 2021, where I realized that money is actually just another alternative investment.
The better way to think of it is not there's money and then there's investments, multiple put my money into.
But there's, right, that I put my money into.
But there's actually wealth.
And then with investments, money is actually one of those investments.
What investment is it?
Well, it's currency, it's the US dollar in my case.
I am constantly, and that's what made me realize is that there is actually no scenario, there's no option of opting out of any and all investments.
Your wealth will be in some investment.
It's not whether, but which.
It's either a bad investment or a good investment.
If you're keeping your money in cash, well, that is an investment, an investment in the US dollar.
And then you have to ask the question is the US dollar a good investment?
There's a bear, like, I don't know.
Like, no, it's not.
Uh, that's a rhetorical question.
Um, but that's not to say it's the worst investment, right?
Because an investment with a Nigerian prince, you know, believe it or not, the US dollar will probably beat that investment.
You know, US dollars not beating much, but it probably will beat that.
So, cash is actually an investment.
Um, it's the and and and stocks are an investment, and and real estate is an investment.
Bitcoin, bitcoin, crypto is an investment.
So, there are good investments, there are okay investments, there are very poor.
Investments, but all wealth is invested, it's in something.
So, then the question is all investments are susceptible.
I just preached to this what you know, like store up treasure in heaven.
We're going through Matthew, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where a thief does not break in and steal.
And those are two categories right there there's external dangers towards investments, thief breaking in, and there's also internal decay, right?
And so, cash is subject to thieves breaking in and stealing.
But also in itself, in an internal mechanism of inflation and slowly decaying and those kinds of things.
Even something like Bitcoin, with you know, you think of quantum computing, right?
Right now seems like a distant dream, but really, the little bit that I've looked into quantum computing, right?
Here's an investment.
One of the guys in our church, I got to give him props.
I won't name him because it might get him in trouble with his job, but he recommended there's a particular kind of refrigeration required for quantum computing.
And there's tiny little companies that are making the refrigeration necessary for that.
And those are currently penny stocks that could be massive if quantum computing actually takes off.
That could be a really good investment.
But the point is, Quantum computing that seems like a futuristic dream right now is actually much closer than we think by all metrics.
And it is possible, it's possible, Wes.
I know you love Bitcoin, I love Bitcoin.
But what if quantum computing allows for the hacking of Bitcoin eventually one day?
Essentially, the encryption would fail to the repeat, the quantum computing could attempt so many tries at the encryption that it would be solvable.
Exactly.
Great great grandma saying, No, okay, yeah, but what I'm saying is it's the sequence.
That's the Bitcoin, it's like, well, you know, what backs Bitcoin?
Well, that's the wrong way.
Bitcoin is what backs everything.
That's the concept.
That's what you're going for.
So, Bitcoin isn't even really to be viewed as an investment, but actually as a currency and what backs all other investments.
And I understand all that.
I get the concept.
And it's, you know, it's away from fiat currency and it's, you know, it's decentralized and it's also finite, right?
So, it's not just expanding forever.
So, it's inflation proof, but it is part of what Bitcoin is.
It's a fail safe.
It's security.
It's a code that's locked.
But if you have something like quantum computing and it gets to the point where it's capable of putting out a million different equations all in a nanosecond, then because people say, well, it would take you this many million years to crack Bitcoin, unless through technology and all these kind of things.
Eternal Treasure in Bitcoin00:02:32
So my point is, everything store up your treasure in heaven.
There's your point store up your treasure in heaven.
Where moth and rust don't destroy, and thief can't ever break in and steal, even a quantum computing thief.
But the point is, all that being said, everything is subject to decay.
And that's why we want to be good stewards of our wealth.
We want to multiply our wealth, but we want our true eternal wealth to be in heaven, prioritizing the soul and eternal things, the higher things.
Everything lower is in service of the higher.
That said, though, in the temporal plane, there are some investments that moth and rust will destroy much faster, and some investments that thieves can break in much more easily.
And so I'm just saying Bitcoin technically still, because people say, well, not Bitcoin.
There's treasure in heaven and Bitcoin.
And those are equal alternatives.
No, even if it's a blockchain.
That's why I said the whole quantum computing.
It's just to say that even that is possible.
But here's the deal it's less possible.
It's less possible.
And so when you're looking at investments, remember cash, it's not which investment do I put my cash in.
Cash is just one of many investments.
It is an investment, it's the US dollar.
It's a bet.
And I think it's a poor bet.
And I think you can beat the US dollar in better.
Investments.
And so looking at it like that and thinking, I've got to put my wealth in something.
I've got to put my wealth in something.
And that's not a Dave Ramsey tip that you're going to get.
My wealth is always in something.
Savings is an investment in the US dollar.
It's always in something.
What's something where there's going to be the least moth and the least rust and the least thieves breaking in and stealing and destroying all these kinds of things?
And the reality is that in our world, the way that it currently works, we want to be wise.
We want to be moral.
So we don't want to compromise things that are inherently moral.
There are certain things that you can't do.
Like, yeah, you can make money, but it's immoral.
But then there are some things that are not inherently immoral and they fall into a category of Christian shrewdness.
And right now, I think in the year of our Lord 2025, that there are ways of being shrewd, exercising Christian shrewdness that actually are more profitable and can accrue generational wealth that don't merely involve paying off all your debt as fast as possible.
And that's what you're doing.
What you're doing, Dave Ramsey would say, don't do.
And he's wrong.
And he's wrong.
At least to this point so far.
Lord willing.
He's wrong.
Fingers crossed.
He's wrong.
All right.
Thank you guys for tuning in, and we hope to see you next time.