Anne Bradley [00:00:00]:

Acts two to five articulate a vision for kind of forced sharing, right, that that we might expect to happen within a covenant community. And then there's there's people who have taken that on and say, this is actually not what you find in the text. So and and I think this is really important to look at the language, especially in the original text, in these chapters, which is people decided to voluntarily combine what they had and share with their community for a specific season. That that is not prescriptive, that you can't get ought out of is. So that someone decided to do this as a matter of Christian charity is very important. And I think as Christians, we're called to do that. Translating that into now I'm gonna ask the government to do that for me, actually entirely undermines Christian charity and the role of the church, in my opinion.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:03]:

Welcome to the Kalos Center podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Kalos Center podcast. Our guest today is doctor Anne Rathbone Bradley. Doctor. Bradley is the george and sally mayor fellow for economic education And vice president of academic affairs at the fund for american studies She's also a visiting professor at george mason university and a professor of economics at the Institute for World Politics and is also an Acton affiliate scholar and has served as the vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith Work, and Economics. In these various roles and has worked and continues to work to educate people about economics and specifically to develop a systematic biblical theology of economic freedom. In addition to teaching classes and overseeing curriculum development, she gives lectures around the country, and her talks can be found on YouTube. As for her publications, doctor Bradley is the author of, among other works, be fruitful and multiply why economics is necessary for making God pleasing decisions and co editor and contributor to counting the cost Christian perspectives on capitalism.

Jim Spiegel [00:02:33]:

And it's the key ideas and these works which will be the focus of our conversation today. So, Anne Bradley, welcome to the Kalos Center podcast.

Anne Bradley [00:02:42]:

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Jim Spiegel [00:02:44]:

Alright. So you do a lot of work on providing the rationale or an argument for the reasonableness of free market enterprise. And as you're well aware, one of the the growing criticisms or increasingly popular criticisms of free market capitalism is that it naturally results in income disparities where you have the mega rich, billionaires like George Soros and Elon Musk, as well as millions of poor people who struggle just to make ends meet. And for many critics, that's unacceptable and it warrants wealth redistribution. How do you respond to that?

Anne Bradley [00:03:25]:

It's such an important question and one worth discussing. So, you know, I think it it and it really takes the economic way of thinking. That's what I talk about a lot. That's what we talk about in the classroom to kind of try to parse through this issue, which seems to us on its face as injust, unfair. You, you may recall that Amazon, was searching for a new headquarters in the past couple of years, and they landed that new headquarters, not too far from my home, about 25 miles away. And it's hard to imagine that in the building you could have at one time at the same time, the richest person, one of the richest people I should say in the world, along with somebody who cleans the bathrooms, the janitor, And there's a lot of wealth disparity just in the headquarters of Amazon in any given day, and we can look at hedge fund managers and all this type of stuff. And you see this in the culture. We we've really started talking about income inequality.

Anne Bradley [00:04:22]:

I think it got a resurgence at the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, really, it's been going on for hundreds and thousands of years, kind of how to think about the rich against the poor. And it is true that for most of human history, it has been a struggle to survive for everyone. So if you were the richest person a thousand years ago, you had really nothing compared to what a middle income person in a rich country has today. There were no cell phones, no GPS, no computers, no indoor plumbing and heating, none of that stuff. And so I think the abundance that we have in a country like The United States makes us a little bit, we kinda forget how good we have it. And so we start focusing on a lot of inequality. Now I think as an economist and as a Christian, we have to parse out good inequality, bad inequality. And I think there's both.

Anne Bradley [00:05:16]:

Good inequality is this. Somebody comes up with an innovation or an invention. They put their smarts on the line. They put their money on the line. They borrow money from a bank or from their parents, and they risk it all to give consumers what consumers say they want. And if they do that well, they are rewarded with very high incomes. And and I think most people wanna live in that world. I mean, think about Amazon to continue with that example.

Anne Bradley [00:05:45]:

If you need something delivered to your home, you can have an Amazon Prime account and you need to have an income, of course, and you can have those things delivered to your doorstep in two days. That is remarkable. And you don't have to be rich in The United States to have that. That's a luxury that's been made ordinary, expected Normal to all of us. So I think that that's the good inequality because it's not just the Bezos is getting richer. It's that we're getting richer. I'm richer because Amazon gives me what I need quickly with great customer service and at prices that I can afford. That's that's the good inequality.

Anne Bradley [00:06:23]:

Right? So yes, those kinds of entrepreneurs are going to be rewarded very, very handsomely by the market. But you have to remember it's the customers that are making Amazon rich. There's bad inequality too, though. And I think we need to talk about it and it's the inequality that's born out of political privilege. So when we look at, we can use million dollar trillion dollar companies, but there's lots of different types of manifestations of this in which you see corporations using their influence to get and secure political privileges that change the rules of the game. Right? So like, think about a football team going out to play a game. They play the game based on the expected rules. If you change the rules five minutes before the game, they're not gonna play well unless they were kind of you know, one team had an insight insight into how those rules were gonna be different and they could adapt.

Anne Bradley [00:07:17]:

And that's that's what how I want us to think about cronyism is this kind of word we're using today. I think cronyism, political privilege leads to the worst forms of income inequality, And it's not just for corporations. You can look at senators and congressmen and presidents, and you could track their incomes over time. And it's remarkable to see that somebody can, go into an office worth, you know, kind of as a middle class or upper middle class person, serve for three decades and come out a multimillionaire. And you ask, why is a public servant able to do that? Right? So that's where we need to really pay a lot of attention to the rules because people respond to incentives. As such the rules matter a great deal. We don't want politics to be about favors and privileges. Then we really have to, sanction rules that cannot easily be broken.

Anne Bradley [00:08:11]:

And I think if you look at the founders, if you read the Federalist Papers, of course, they were very worried about tyranny. They were very worried about the corruption of democratic institutions. And I I think that's the bad type of inequality. The United States has both. We have good inequality, which makes us all richer. We have bad inequality that makes some richer at the expense of others. And so I think we need to focus on how do you undo some of those political privileges.

Jim Spiegel [00:08:36]:

Okay. I think most people could get on board with, your critiques of crony capitalism. But what about businesses that not only don't meet needs, but are actually rewarded for encouraging vice like the pornography industry? I think Christians would be especially sensitive to this. Shouldn't Christians favor government intrusions to discourage those sorts of industries? And can't the same be said regarding maybe even tobacco and and gambling industries, if perhaps to a lesser degree?

Anne Bradley [00:09:11]:

This is very important as well. And I think this is a tricky one because I agree with you. And I think most of us as Christians, right, we want a culture that supports people's freedom that supports people's dignity. We want a culture and an economy that supports high standards of living economic growth. I think most people can agree on those things. I think where the disagreement is, is how are we going to use policy to mitigate the consumption of vices or things that are sinful? As you mentioned, pornography, it could be alcohol. It could be smoking. It could be vaping, could be a lot of things, frankly.

Anne Bradley [00:09:53]:

I mean, you know, and I think that's one of the problems is where do you draw the line? So if we're going to ask the government to get involved in prohibiting the sale of things, then we are opening ourselves up to, really important economic questions, which is how are they going to do that? And then the second economic question is at what cost? Because we might say on paper, it's a great idea. We're just going to ban pornography. You may, you know, there's many, many economic discussions about prohibition. Prohibition was, won by people of many of whom were religious who wanted to curb drinking and overconsumption of alcohol. But this actually ended up being an unmitigated disaster. Right? And it and what it didn't do is stop the demand. So if you think about economics, we think about the supply of goods and the demand for goods. And whenever you have a, demander met by a willing supplier, you're gonna have a market.

Anne Bradley [00:10:48]:

You're gonna have people engage in those exchanges. And so what we saw during prohibition was simply that the exchanges went kind of underground. And so now you have this kind of underground economy where you have these bootleggers who are making grain alcohol, which is very highly toxic, not regulated at all because people are making it, you know, in the forest, in the back of their pickup trucks. And, and this is not what we want either. So it didn't solve the problem. I think the war on drugs is another important example is at the end of the day, the reason those policies tend to not work is because they don't deal with the most important element of economics, which is people demanding it. Right? If people wanna drink, they're gonna find a way. If people wanna do drugs, they're gonna find a way.

Anne Bradley [00:11:31]:

If people want pornography, they're gonna find a way. Now I don't think that means do nothing. I don't think that as a as a believer, that means we just, you know, kind of withdraw from the culture and say, you know, it's all gonna blow up anyway. I think that's the wrong view of theology, the wrong view of of work and everything like that. But I think what we can do is say this is where the church needs to reclaim its authority in the culture. I think, the church can do a lot in in these areas. One is just to talk about talk about these sins, talk about it, you know, kind of with parishioners on Sunday morning, but also I think, and many, many churches do this, but have support groups or kind of what Tocqueville talked about these mediating institutions, where we actually go into the community and help people that face these institutions where we actually go into the community and help people that face these addictions. Because if you have a pornography addiction, me making it illegal via some policy is not gonna stop you from wanting it.

Anne Bradley [00:12:27]:

And so you're just gonna find a way. Right? So how do we help people that have these addictions work out of those addictions? That's actually very hard work. I think it's outside the scope of policy. I think it belongs in the, in the space of culture, the church, nonprofit organizations. And so I think Christians have a really important role here to play, but I often think that we kind of Christians in society default to, I'm just gonna let the government do it because they have the monopoly of force. Right? So the thing is it is true that if the government bans pornography tomorrow, it will in fact be banned. Right? So you can create that policy, but I think at the end of the day, if we tracked that policy over five, ten, fifteen years, which we will say is people are doing it, they're just getting it another way. And so you have not solved the problem, and you also can create all these unintended consequences.

Anne Bradley [00:13:17]:

Right? And so we see that's very true with smoking, excuse me, with drugs and alcohol prohibition is that you create a lot of toxicity, a lot of violence, ghettos slums. We don't want to do more of that. We want less of that. So I think we need to win hearts and minds. I think this has been very important in, in other arenas. So I think the church just needs to absolutely and unapologetically lead the way in speaking into these problems because it doesn't just affect on Christians. Right? There are people in our churches that suffer from these addictions, and we need to lovingly kind of help them out of those addictions. But that takes relationship, and it takes time.

Jim Spiegel [00:13:56]:

Okay. Let's, back up here and dig in a little bit, into the foundations. You you talk a lot about God's design for economics. Now Christians are accustomed to thinking in terms of divine purpose when it comes to a lot of things like our bodies, family, history, the plan of salvation, but not so much when it comes to economics. Why do you think that is?

Anne Bradley [00:14:20]:

I think it's because we don't, we meaning in the culture. When we think about economics, we think about something that's very abstract, very boring. Right? So my joke is always if you're at a cocktail party and you kind of wanna get out of a conversation, start droning on about GDP because no one cares. It's boring. Doesn't seem relevant to you, and they don't know. You know, they don't nobody knows what to talk about. So I think that's how we view economics. And, of course, right now in the policy space, there's lots of economics to talk about.

Anne Bradley [00:14:50]:

But, again, I think for a lot of people, like, thinking about the trade deficit, thinking about the budget deficit, thinking about all these things is just removed from their daily lives. But the problem is we've truncated that to be that's economics. And it is a part of economics, but at its core, economics is about human beings. That is the subject matter of our study. Right. That makes us different than chemists, physicists, biologists. We study how human beings make decisions under conditions of scarcity and radical uncertainty. And what I mean by that is that we don't know what the right thing to do is.

Anne Bradley [00:15:29]:

Right. We don't, we don't, we have so much uncertainty. We have to gather a lot of information and we're all profit maximizers. What do I mean by that? We're all trying to maximize the benefit to ourselves and our families and minimize the cost. So I always tell my students, if your goal is to get an a, you should get a great a. And what I mean by that is you should study the exact right amount of hours. You shouldn't over study because it's wasting your time. The problem is, for most of us, we don't know what the right amount of hours is.

Anne Bradley [00:15:58]:

Right? So we have to be very judicious in how we allocate our very precious time, which is kind of the cornerstone of the scarcity we face. And this makes back to the income inequality conversation, right? This is kind of time is the great equalizer. Elon Musk, the richest person alive. He only has twenty four hours in a day. So he's just like you and I, and he has to use that time as effectively as he can. Now, the more income you have, the more you can kind of make better trade offs. Right? You can economize on things. So I think that's why economists focus a lot on income growth because it allows us to be better stewards.

Anne Bradley [00:16:33]:

Now how many economics classes start with that? Right? Economics is about you. It's about the decisions you and your family make every single day. And it's about kind of understanding the framework of that analysis so that we can get a better world. What is a better world? We want greater levels of human flourishing. If we can reframe economics about which, you know, in in that context, which I think is accurate and true, and as believers, we don't have a choice. We have to focus on this. Then it's exciting. It's exciting, right? Because it means your gifts, your talents, your abilities have been endowed to you by God who cares about how you use them.

Anne Bradley [00:17:12]:

And in a market economy, you're empowered to serve people. You don't know, which is amazing back to the Amazon example. There's faceless people behind that screen that are millions of them right around the world. And they are working hard every day to make sure I get those deliveries. And those deliveries help me. They help my family. And so that, I think, is what economics is about. And if we can get ex I mean, how can you not get excited about that is is my question.

Anne Bradley [00:17:42]:

But I just think that that's not how it's presented in certainly in a micro class. We go right into supply and demand curves. Again, those are very, very useful tools, but they're abstract. You don't feel like you're part of the demand curve. You don't feel like you're part of the supply curve. So one of the things I talk about with my students is that it's, it's entirely personal. All this stuff is very personal because it's about the world you're contributing to. And in the long run, you know, how that world changes for your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, you know, some of whom you'll never meet.

Anne Bradley [00:18:14]:

And so I think if we can think about it that way, it's very easy to get excited about economics.

Jim Spiegel [00:18:18]:

Yeah. That's good. And since it really boils down to or it's rooted in a theology of human nature, and since human beings are made in God's image, that ultimately takes you to the divine nature. Can you talk about that connection?

Anne Bradley [00:18:32]:

That's exactly right. You know, I think I learned this from Hugh Welshall who, passed away recently, but he was the, entrepreneur who started the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics where I worked for some time. And, you know, he talked all the time about how in the evangelical church, especially, but maybe perhaps other Christian churches in the last hundred years, we've kind of segregated the sacred and the secular. And that that's wrong, that, you know, Christians kind of have this false belief that there's this dichotomy and that God really cares about the sacred, which is going to church and tithing and volunteering for the church and all these types of things that you do your prayer life, discipleship, those things certainly matter. But that that we kind of categorize that over here. That's sacred. God cares about that, but God care doesn't care where I work. He doesn't care about what I do, those emails that I send or the meetings that I participate in.

Anne Bradley [00:19:33]:

And because that's just secular, and then that's gonna just kinda blow up. And I think that's just a misunderstanding of scripture. And so he's a theologian that I worked under for many years, and I, I they taught me really to think about this so deeply connected. And if you go back to Genesis one, we're created in the image and likeness of God, which means we have dignity, but it also means we're creators. We can't create something out of nothing like he did, but we are commanded to create something out of something. And how do we do that? Through our work. Now that doesn't mean just work in the labor market, which is what economists mostly focus on. Right? You can work in your home.

Anne Bradley [00:20:10]:

You can work in your neighborhood, in your church, in nonprofits, but you also work. Many people do in the paid labor market. And I don't think as Christians, we think about when I go to work every day, God is using this arena to allow me to serve strangers I will never meet and to, in that glorify him and build up his kingdom. That's amazing. Right? That means all those emails matter as a student. It means every test you study for matters because it has eternal significance. And I think we don't know. The manifestation of that eternal significance until we're reunited with Christ, but we know that it's true.

Anne Bradley [00:20:50]:

And so I think that breaks down those silos between the sacred and the secular. And again, that means I'm a steward. So, you know, Oi con amia, the Greek word for stewardship is the basis of the modern word. Economics. Economics is about stewarding, managing what God has gifted us. And in Genesis one, you know, 26 through 28, we learn we're we're to be fruitful and multiply. So it's not even just about preserving what God gave us. It is about that, but it's not only about that.

Anne Bradley [00:21:22]:

It's then about growing it. Innovate, be entrepreneurs, use it for his glory, use it to create human flourishing. And so that's a very powerful and I think optimistic message. I think it's a hopeful message, and we need that now more than ever. So if the church retreats into cultural pessimism, what what is the church gonna be able to do? You know, we have to get this right.

Jim Spiegel [00:21:46]:

That's so good. It's such a, it it's a more expansive view of stewardship, isn't it? And, rooting it in the our, you know, divine creator and god's just effusive creativity, I think is profound as well. And it it it really makes sense of the the fact that human beings are also irrepressively creative. I mean, it's amazing that the things that human beings have made and continue to create the advance of, technology and art and music and everything else. We can't help ourselves. You know? Even the most atheistic people are still just irrepressively, creative. And I think your work really highlights that point. And it just, confirms that, you know, we we must have, a profoundly creative and innovative creator.

Jim Spiegel [00:22:42]:

In several places, you talk about the parable of of the talents in in Matthew 25, and it's obviously relevant to your work. What what would you glean from that passage that might be missed by contemporary American Christians?

Anne Bradley [00:22:58]:

I think that what's really important about this parable and I also wanna say that the Bible does not shy away from talking about stewardship, money. And I think we tend to we tend to focus on the love of money as the root of all evil. Right? That's kind of where we go. Sometimes it's kind of the Bible verse everybody knows. But I think if we take a more holistic view of scripture, reading the it in its entirety and kind of gleaning these messages, Matthew 25 and the parable of the talents being one, is that I think it gets us back to stewardship and God's expectations for us in this in in the temporal world. So, again, I think one of the dangers of modern kind of evangelical thinking is that none of what we do today matters. I'm not saying everybody believes that, but you do see some of those trends, which is just focus on your own personal spiritual life, focus on, you know, kind of evangelizing to others, and then just kinda wait to get to heaven, because none of this none of this matters. And and I I think that to believe that, then you have to believe that Genesis one and two aren't true, which is before the fall.

Anne Bradley [00:24:07]:

Right? So before the fall, we see abundance. We see more than two people who were told to fill the earth could ever use. Right? So it's it's it's language of abundance that gets destroyed in some ways by sin. Right? Because everything is more difficult, more challenging. We're unhappy. We're unfulfilled. There's there's all these things going on. And I think Matthew 25 really helps us with the equality point and the kind of stewardship point, because what it shows us is that the different, the master left and he left these individuals in charge of something that was his, the metaphor there, right? God, we are the crowning jewel of God, create of God's creation as human beings.

Anne Bradley [00:24:51]:

And he's gifted us this world and everything in it. And it is we are to use it to glorify him when we use it well, but also to create more than what was already there. So that's a really kind of profound thought to me. It means that my job in the world is to try to make things better than where I started from. Right? That includes inside my family, but as in my work, in the church and the community, all those things, it's a big responsibility. But given they had different amounts that they were left, right. Different amounts of talents and they invest the two who invested the talents wisely and prudently earned double. Right.

Anne Bradley [00:25:37]:

So the reward was equal, even though the amounts were different. So that kind of gets us to the income inequality point. Doesn't it? But the person who said, I'm going to hoard this, I'm going to bury it. I'm not going to listen to the instructions was cast out because it's the opposite of what we should do. Right? It's the opposite, of how we should steward our gifts. It's not just hold on to what you have. I kind of think of, you know, Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Right? What is Ebenezer Scrooge? He has this if you've watched any one of the million movies from this book, right, or read the book itself, he has this big mansion.

Anne Bradley [00:26:15]:

It's totally dark. One little candle. He has the money to light it up, but he doesn't. He eats this tiny little sad cup of porridge. He has the money to buy the best Christmas duck on Christmas morning, but he's hoarding it. The hoarding is is about a lack of optimism, a lack of hope, and a a misunderstanding of what God has asked you to do with the resources. Dickens as an, as a modern example, but right. That's not what we're asked to do.

Anne Bradley [00:26:41]:

We're given these talents and gifts and the most important is not the money in your bank account. It's the brain in your head. Human capital is the most important kind. And you mentioned earlier how innovative human beings are at, because that's how we're created. We're made in the image and likeness of God. We are creators. As you said, I love what you said. We can't help ourselves.

Anne Bradley [00:27:02]:

It's our it's. We have this momentum to do that. And that's because. That's how we create human flourishing. Right. But we need to do that in cooperation with other people. And so, you know, we need a market economy to do that. We need a certain type of government.

Anne Bradley [00:27:17]:

We need a certain type of legal system. We need religious freedom. We need freedom of expression. Without those types of freedoms, we can't do what we're asked to do very well.

Jim Spiegel [00:27:26]:

Now despite all of this and the track record of free market capitalism, sympathies with socialism seem to be on the rise in this country, especially among the younger generation. Why do you think that is, and what can be done to counteract it?

Anne Bradley [00:27:42]:

So important. It makes me nervous. I'm in the classroom. And you know what's a funny thing about teaching is that you get older and they stay the same age. Right? So I always have to remind myself, you know, are my jokes funny to them, or am I referencing something that's ten years out of date? But I what the reason I bring that up is because I was raised in a household that was worried about communism. Right? I was just raised in a different time. We were my parents were worried about it. Movies, you know, all these kind of eighties movies, it just you see this.

Anne Bradley [00:28:17]:

Right? Like Rocky four. Right? You you're gonna beat up the Russian and The United States. There's so many metaphors in those types of movies, and so it was just in our culture. We were worried about it. And my students didn't didn't see that. They weren't worried about nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. And so there's different types of threats. I think this generation, you know, is worried about some things that are important.

Anne Bradley [00:28:42]:

But I think this idea that you can have kind of soft socialism, right, comes from not experiencing hard socialism. You know, I although we see it in Venezuela. And I I think the difference is we were afraid of the Soviet Union in a way that we're not afraid of Venezuela. Right? We see it as a kind of an internal collapse of an economy, not something where they're gonna come over and, you know, kind of destroy the American way of life. And and so I think people view it as, well, the government has we can get the best people in government. We can make really good rules so they can't engage in cronyism and corruption, And we'll just have the give the government more power to plan the economy. So when we talk about this, we have to kinda give these terms we use some life and some meaning. Socialism means that we collectively write own resources.

Anne Bradley [00:29:33]:

So it, it, it involves the, the abolition of private property. And so, you know, the track record is just crystal clear on what, where that gets you. Look at China, look at the Soviet Union, look at Sweden's experiment with socialism. They went away from it because they saw how destructive it was. And so I think if you haven't lived through that, maybe you believe that we can engineer things in a better way. And I I actually think that's the biggest danger. So when FA Hayek was fighting the intellectual socialist through the twentieth century, this was his contribution, was that nobody, no matter how smart you are, no matter how many, you know, kind of how much AI you have, no matter none of that stuff matters. We can't plan the economy.

Anne Bradley [00:30:18]:

Technocratic economic planning always leads to economic immiseration. And, of course, the people at the bottom of the income distribution suffer the most and the earliest. And so I think that is the worry. But how do we get people out of that? We gotta cut through this idea of fairness. What does it mean to be fair? Right? Because I think their concern is what we started this podcast talking about. How do you deal with Bezos and Gates and Musk having so, so much money? And then you see some Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That is a hard pill to swallow. And I agree.

Anne Bradley [00:30:54]:

I don't have a problem at all with Elon Musk's wealth if it's earned legitimately, if it's earned outside of political privilege. I think the solution to this is, is the opposite of socialism though. It's more economic freedom. Because when we see economic freedom being applied across countries, ordinary people have a better have better control over their lives. They have better ability to get a good education, to get a good job, to move where they want, to adapt to different jobs as they see fit. And I think we've regulated some of that out of existence and just made it so extraordinarily expensive that Americans are suffering under that. So I think we need to really talk about this because it's a dangerous flirtation of an idea that is a complete mythology. There's no such thing as democratic socialism.

Anne Bradley [00:31:43]:

Socialism is always authoritarian.

Jim Spiegel [00:31:45]:

So I think you make some great points there and particularly what you were, what you started with there just in terms of, an older generation living under the specter of potential, nuclear conflict with Soviet, Russia and and the two very different economic systems. And there's a kind of historical myopia but also cultural. Today, you know, there are plenty of examples. You mentioned Venezuela, North Korea, where you see, the devastating effects of this. So it's like a contemporary cultural myopia as well. There's a story that really struck me that you cite in one of your works, I think, told via Thomas Sowell, the great economist, about Boris Yeltsin and, when he visited America. Can you relate that story?

Anne Bradley [00:32:45]:

I love this story. I mean, I'm happy that you asked me to tell this story because if my coworkers kind of think I talk about the grocery store way too much. But it's just a very powerful story, and I encourage all the listeners to go Google this story, Boris Yeltsin goes grocery shopping. It's a fantastic story about the marvel of the ordinary, which to some is extraordinary. So you mentioned, right, North Korea, Venezuela. Imagine going grocery shopping in one of those countries today versus walking into your local grocery store in in The United States, no matter what state you live in, no matter what ZIP code, full of things waiting for you. Right? The shelves are full. They wait for the people.

Anne Bradley [00:33:25]:

So Boris Yeltsin, comes to visit The United States. I believe it's the year's 1990. He takes over after Mikhail Gorbachev and the failure of perestroika. Boris Yeltsin is a establishment Marxist. Okay? This is not some guy running around like I heart free markets on his bumper sticker on his car. No nothing like that. Right? He's establishment as they come inside the the communist party, Soviet communist party his whole life, a believer. But of course the Soviet Union has failed.

Anne Bradley [00:34:00]:

Right. So he sees some of the writing on the wall has to comes to United States. They visit the Johnson space center, in Clearwater, Texas. And, you know, I think that's all fine and good to him, but, he wants to see a grocery store. And so he asks, and I have, you know, the secret service had to handle this somehow, but they did. And they made an unscheduled trip to Randall's grocery store, which is still an active grocery store chain in Texas. And the this the pictures, which I, again, encourage everyone to look at this online because the pictures are so great. Because in 1990, a grocery store looks very different than it does today.

Anne Bradley [00:34:39]:

Right? Today, they have, like, the lights that turn off and on, and, they're just so fancy. And this grocery store is in the my favorite picture is in the popsicle aisle. And it's just like a big deep freezer bin. It doesn't even have a cover on it. And he's touring the store with his wife, and he writes about this experience in his autobiography and says it is what turned him into a reformer to see an American grocery store full of stuff. And I think what's remarkable about the story is that he says it was both overwhelming and depressing overwhelming in the abundance, but depressing because a couple of reasons. One is the Americans that are walking around the grocery store aren't even excited. I mean, how excited are you when you go to the grocery store? You're not.

Anne Bradley [00:35:28]:

You're like, I have to check this off my list. I need to get these things. Let me get out of here so I can get home. And this guy wants to spend all days interviewing managers. He's talking to people who stock the shelves and in a very Marxist way says to the manager, do you have to have a special education to run a grocery store? Because the Soviet model, and this is Thomas Sowell's point, the Soviet model is that the way that we get economic growth in a country is to take smart people, put them in charge of things and move the chess pieces around on the chessboard. And again, I mentioned FA Hayek, Nobel prize winning economist said, no, no, we can't do that because we don't have the knowledge. We don't have the know how no one person has that knowledge. So prices are a very effective tool to allocate scarce resources according to what people want most right now.

Anne Bradley [00:36:18]:

And I think Boris Yeltsin had to see it to believe it. And and a funny part of the story is that he loved Jell O Pudding Pops. So if you're a kid from the eighties like me, you know what those are. It's like basically a fudgesicle kind of on a stick. Right? He loved them. So he had them shipped over to the Kremlin. So this is like diplomacy of markets. Right? It's like, I can't get this.

Anne Bradley [00:36:38]:

I'm the leader of one of the largest countries in the world. I have minions. I have wealth. I have power and I can't make a grocery store be full of stuff for people. So it's his like moment. And I think we can learn a lot from that story. Here's why as Americans, again, my, you know, even in my own lifetime, have grocery stores changed. Yes.

Anne Bradley [00:37:03]:

But not in the way Yeltsin sees it. Right. My grocery stores didn't go from like nothing to everything. They've just gotten marginally better over time. They have a lot more products. They're great. But for Yeltsin, it's going from even I can't eat this well. And this, like, housewife is pushing the cart around on a Tuesday afternoon, and she just thinks it's normal.

Anne Bradley [00:37:27]:

So he's really puzzled by that. Right? And I think he had to see it to believe it. So I think this is a story that illuminates the the, GK Chesterton quote. We are perishing not from want of wonders, but from want of wonder. And that's exactly right. We have so much abundance that we take it for granted. And then I think when we take it for granted and we pursue back to the conversation we're having a moment ago, we start to pursue agendas or policies like democratic socialism, then we're gonna see very quickly that we don't have that abundance anymore. So ideas and policies and actions have consequences.

Anne Bradley [00:38:04]:

So I I would just like us, and I try to get this my students to think about this. What are the wonders that you think are ordinary? And take a minute to think about how did that happen. Like, when you're sick and you have strep throat, you go to the doctor, and in four hours, you can go to the doctor and have penicillin prescribed to you and be on your way to not to feeling better than to not having strep throat anymore. But that's because of this huge system behind you of capitalism and decentralized exchange, the rule of law, democracy, all those things that give us that. And but, again, I think if we start to take it for granted, then we'll try to we'll believe falsely that we can manipulate it for our own ends. And I and I think that is where I'm what I'm worried about. Not just with kind of younger generations, but also what I see in policy right now is, you know, we're we should be worried about what we think we can control because we can control a lot less than we believe we can. And that's a lesson of economics.

Jim Spiegel [00:39:06]:

Yeah. Good. Yeah. It seems like we're spoiled by our abundance. Right? A lot of us complain that you go to the grocery store and we complain about having too many choices. Right? You you go in and you got all these different brands of toothpaste and cereal and says too much. You know, I mean, that's our complaint. What a contrast with most of the world.

Jim Spiegel [00:39:31]:

Right?

Anne Bradley [00:39:32]:

Absolutely.

Jim Spiegel [00:39:33]:

Okay. Another argument that if not pure socialist, but at least those sympathetic with more government controls will make well, from a Christian perspective, will appeal to, the early church in acts two and four where the early church shared possessions. Some will argue on the basis of that that actually that that something more socialistic is a biblically ideal economic system. What do you say to that?

Anne Bradley [00:40:02]:

Also extremely important. And I think this is, this has been well documented in the literature on both sides. Right? So there's the argument that you made that some make, which is that acts two to five articulate a vision for kind of forced sharing. Right? That that we might expect to happen within a covenant community. And then there's there's people who have taken that on and say, this is actually not what you find in the text. So in an edited volume, I I, I was co editor with Arthur Lindsley, who is a theologian. He has a great chapter in counting the cost on this exact issue. So I I would point that to to people.

Anne Bradley [00:40:42]:

But but he says a couple of things. And and I think this is really important to look at the language, especially in the original text, in these chapters, which is people decided to voluntarily combine what they had and share with their community for a specific season. That is he argues that that is not prescriptive, that you can't get ought out of is. So that that someone decided to do this as a matter of Christian charity is very important, and I think as Christians, we're called to do that. Translating that into, now I'm gonna ask the government to do that for me, actually entirely undermines Christian charity and the role of the church, in my opinion. I'm not saying maybe we shouldn't have any government welfare, but I think that most government welfare falls into this problem. So if I was, you know, if I, if somebody said like, what kind of government welfare would you support as local as possible, as relational as possible, and for as short of a time as necessary? Because I think the problem is that just persistent intergenerational welfare has created persistent intergenerational poverty and and inter and and, excuse me, dependency. So we're we're actually encouraging people to become dependent, to have children out of wedlock.

Anne Bradley [00:42:05]:

I mean, there's just so much literature on this that's very clear that our welfare, state level welfare, federal level welfare just doesn't solve the problem. And so I think that kind of taking acts two to five and reading it as rather than an act of grace that people choose to do to fulfill their faith, we're gonna say, we're gonna take the government at the at the end of a barrel of a gun and make you do the thing that you were asked to do voluntarily out of your heart. And I think what makes the first, you know, kind of doing this as a matter of grace difficult is that we have to decide how long are we gonna help people, under what circumstances, would we cut them off from aid, what would that look like. Right? I mean, those are hard questions that I think the church has to deal with in their local communities, but just surrendering it to the state is anonymizing it. It's bureaucratizing it. And I think it largely makes it inhumane. And so I think, you know, the church has been crowded out by a very large government kind of social safety net. And, you know, I don't have all the answers for how we get that back, but I think the church has the power of relationship.

Anne Bradley [00:43:18]:

That again, you know, it it might be the case that we need to give to someone financially for many years to help them. But it also is the case that writing a check and walking away probably doesn't help anyone. Right? In the long run, like, they need relational help. What is causing them to be homeless? Or what are their family issues that have led them to this place? That takes relationship. The government welfare check cannot possibly do that, and I don't think we want it to. I think that's the proper role of the church.

Jim Spiegel [00:43:44]:

That's good. Let me conclude with a couple of perks more personal questions. The first one being this. Who would you say are your biggest heroes, whether historical or contemporary when it comes to working out a Christian view of economics?

Anne Bradley [00:43:57]:

Well, I think that there's several. I I have mentioned some already, but, I worked with Hugh Welshall, and he was just extraordinary. He graduated from reformed theological seminary. He taught there, he helped start the Institute of faith work and economics. And, he really, really brought to life for me. Something that as a Christian, I had thought about some of these things, but I had never really married them, in a, in a, an intentional way with, with my economics. And so I love that was just a great time in my life because I was working with, you know, as the economist, working with the theologians, they were working with me. I think we've all learned from each other, but he was just a huge inspiration, really redefining work for me, thinking about the theology of work.

Anne Bradley [00:44:44]:

And as I also mentioned, Art Lindsley has been very important in my life. I I also think father Sirico, who is the, founder of the Acton Institute. I mean, that is their entire their entire organization is dedicated to thinking about the a free and virtuous society. It's not just about how many Teslas can you have in your driveway because you're really rich. Right? Like, we all go to the grave with no material goods. And so how do we think about human flourishing that's buttressed by virtue? And I think that father Sirico has just, done amazing work in this space. I would also, I also think Michael Novak, very famous. You know, he was a socialist, actually.

Anne Bradley [00:45:30]:

And he wrote the spirit of democratic capitalism. Capitalism, and I think sometimes people who were on the other side of this issue, that then become kind of, defenders of freedom and virtue and free markets are very powerful voices. So, he's he's been very important to me. And then another contemporary is I would say Sam Greg. He works at the American Institute of economic research. He's their president right now. I worked with him for many years at Acton and he, he has done a lot of work, in this space too. So these are some of these people I I like to work with, and I write with some are more, kind of more historical examples of people who have motivated me and changed my ideas.

Anne Bradley [00:46:10]:

There's, of course, other economists who aren't Christians, but you asked me specifically about people who represent, both of those. And and I I I'd say that's that's at least a starting list for me.

Jim Spiegel [00:46:20]:

Yeah. Very good. And now here's the question with which I conclude all of our conversations. What is your view of the meaning of life, and how does your professional work aim to work out that conviction in practice?

Anne Bradley [00:46:35]:

That's a great question. I think the meaning of life, to put it simply, although living this out, I think, is, of course, very challenging, every day, is to figure out who God created me to be and to do that with excellence every single day. And I think that's what each of us have to do. That's what we're asked to do. It means we're going to do hard things, risky risky things, things that make us feel uncomfortable. And and that is exactly what we're asked to do. So that's that's how I view my role in my home, in my job, in my church, in my school, in my community, all of those things. How do I live that out in my life? For me, as I said, it's been a bit of a journey.

Anne Bradley [00:47:16]:

I was raised by f by two parents and my mom was a nurse, so she worked a lot in the evenings. So my dad would cart me and my brothers around, you know, and he always had talk radio on in the background. And as kids, we hated it. And, I have come to realize how much meaning that that that had for me later in life. But he used to listen, when Walter Williams filled in for Rush Limbaugh, when Rush Limbaugh would go on vacation. And he was like, I love Walter. I love this guy, Walter Williams. Well, when I decided to get my PhD in economics, I only applied to one school, which is George Mason University.

Anne Bradley [00:47:51]:

Walter Williams was the department chair. I think that was one of my dad's proudest days. Like, you're gonna go study with Walter Williams. You know? I also, I've talked about this before in the past too. When I was, a high school student, I had the chance to go on a trip with a bunch of other high school students from the area, and one of the countries we went to was Russia. And I don't think it was until years later that I realized the impact that had on me, that I wanted to defend freedom, and economics was a way to do that. I don't, I didn't know that when I was 15 and I went there. Right.

Anne Bradley [00:48:28]:

I had no idea. It had, it took me years to kind of put that together. And so, you know, we're each I'm an economist. There's many economists in the world. And I think each of us in in whatever your job is, whatever your role is, has to figure out what unique skills as an economist do I have. And how can I use those skills, both in the paid and unpaid mark labor markets to help other people? Because that's how I glorify God and that's how I contribute to human flourishing. And so I think that keeps us really humble too. Right? Am I doing it right? Should I do something else? When is it time to change course and we will all have to deal with those questions? But that's how I view I think that's my answer to your question.

Anne Bradley [00:49:10]:

I I think that's true as a wife, as a mother, in all areas of life.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:13]:

That's very good. Well, thank you so much, Anne, for this time. I've enjoyed our conversation. Appreciate it.

Anne Bradley [00:49:20]:

Thanks for having me.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:22]:

Thank you for listening to the Kalos Center podcast. We gave you our thoughts. Now let us know what you think. Email us at podcast@Kalos.center.