From Paris to Africa: Liberty Struggles to Survive

In January 2015, armed Muslims entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine, and began shooting. They killed eleven people, because they objected to a cartoon which the magazine had published.

As part of this same action, Islam had organized violence thousands of miles away, in Africa. News media carried reports like this:

More than 70 churches were destroyed and 10 people killed after a cartoon agitated Niger’s two largest cities. One week after Islamic terrorists killed 11 staff members of the French publication Charlie Hebdo, the magazine published a “survivor’s issue.”

While the magazine is not a particularly religious one - it is, in fact, probably somewhat anti-religious - it nonetheless stands for religious freedom, and thus makes, to a limited extent, common cause with Jesus followers around the globe.

Its cover featured a cartoon of Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”) sign. While the cartoon sparked protests across Africa and the Middle East, the deadliest were in Niger, which ranked worst in a Pew Forum poll of sub-Saharan African Muslims’ support for religious freedom for non-Muslims.

Only a few months later, Paris was again the location of Islamic hostility, as Muslims used bombs and rifles to kill over 100 people. These attacks, on Friday, November 13, 2015, revealed that Islam has no intentions of relaxing its efforts to execute those whom it considers to be ‘infidels.’

As Islamic aggression continues to expand globally, societies based on freedom will be tested, to see if they are willing and able to resist such attacks.

Religious Freedom: a Global Concern

The sincerity of any claim of support for religious liberty is seen in one’s effort to support the freedom to practice a religion which is not one’s own.

In 1998, the United States Congress created an “Office of International Religious Freedom” and a “Commission on International Religious Freedom” not to address the concerns of comfortable majority religions, but to speak on behalf of persecuted minority faiths.

In keeping with the principle of protecting minority interests, an important post has been filled by a representative of Judaism. Estimates calculate that, at most, 1.4% of the U.S. population is Jewish, making it one of the smallest groups in the nation. In March 2015, news media carried reports like this:

For the first time, a non-Christian became America’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Rabbi David Saperstein, confirmed in December, fills a position left vacant since October 2013.

The ambassador’s minority status carries both a practical and a symbolic value. Practically, he has experience as a member of a possibly marginalized non-majority group. Symbolically, he represents American habits of protecting minority groups.

Members of small and possibly endangered groups have, over many years, seen the United States as a place of safety for them.

His nomination was widely lauded by Christian advocates, including Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement, and US Rep. Frank Wolf. Wolf authored the International Religious Freedom Act that created the post.

The question of safety for religious minorities has gained attention in recent decades, as Islam has organized the persecution of Jesus followers in countries from Niger to Pakistan.

Because of this trend, religious liberty as a movement has gained attention in the last few years. Worldwide, more people have been killed for speaking about Jesus or for owning a copy of the New Testament than in previous decades.

After 34 years as one of Congress’s leading advocates for international religious freedom and human rights, Wolf retired in January. But he is hardly finished advocating, becoming the first to fill a newly endowed chair in religious freedom at Baylor University.

Whoever occupies the position “ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom,” she or he will have much work to do, as Islamic aggression continues to spread.

A Higher Level of Economic Science

The principles of economics were articulated primarily by Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Ricardo. They formulated the familiar statements about supply, demand, and price levels.

According to this type of ‘classical’ economics, prices rise when demand increases and supply remains steady, or when demand holds steady and supply decreases. Prices drop when supply increases against a steady demand, or when demand decreases against a constant supply.

These familiar axioms are intuitive, and they correspond to actual experience and data. This classical understanding is now the core of economic thought.

But there are some questions for which classical economic reasoning has no good answers.

One question is about the concept of value: food, which is necessary for life, and which everyone desires, often costs little; sapphires and pearls, which serve no practical purpose and meet no need, often cost much. Why?

The demand for food is large, universal, and steady; the demand for jewels is small, limited to a segment of the population, and can soften when competing demands expand. Yet the gems find a higher price than food. Why?

Classical economic understandings were correct as far as they went, but they did not go far enough to answer such questions. The science of economics would have to advance to a new level.

Carl Menger would discover the principles which allowed for new understandings of economic phenomena.

Born in 1840, Menger would do most of his work at the Universität Wien. He died in 1921.

Menger noticed that classical economic thought treated supply and demand as monolithic and irreducible forces, like magnetism or gravity. The original founders of classical economics - Smith, Hume, Ricardo - may have attempted to follow the paradigm of Newtonian physics or Cartesian philosophy, and tried to find a systematic solution based on a few axiomatic concepts.

Instead, Menger analyzed economic demand as being composed of many individual decisions. Different individuals will be purchasing the same product at the same time - but their choices are different.

Consumers may buy the same product, but for different reasons. The value which they place on the product will vary. ‘Value’ is a measure of the strength or intensity of demand - in common language, “how much” and “how bad” the customer wants the product.

Classical economics could not answer these questions: How does a person assign a value to an object? A person decides to pay a certain amount for the object, presumably because the object will fill, or help to fill, certain desires; how does a person make that decision? Why does a person decide to pay some specific amount? Joseph Salerno writes:

Menger brilliantly answered the question by restating it: “Which satisfaction would not be attained if the economizing individual did not have the given unit at his disposal - that is, if he were to have command of a total amount smaller by that one unit?” In light of Menger’s discussion of economizing, the obviously correct answer to this question is “only the least of all the satisfactions assured by the whole available quantity.” In other words, regardless of which particular physical unit of his supply was subtracted, the actor would economize by choosing to reallocate the remaining units so as to continue to satisfy his most important wants and to forego the satisfaction of only the least important want of those previously satisfied by the larger supply. It is, thus, always the least important satisfaction that is dependent on a unit of the actor's supply of a good and, that, therefore, determines the value of each and every unit of the supply. This value-determining satisfaction soon came to be known as the “marginal utility.”

Menger’s discovery was this: goods have values because they serve various purposes, and the importance of these various purposes differ. This is step toward answering the question about why gems are more expensive than food.

Menger argued that it is not the case that the value of goods derives from the value of the labor used to produce them. On the contrary: the value of labor derives from the value of the goods it produces.

Against the idea that financial transactions are always an exchange of equal values - like an algebra equation or a chemical equation - , Menger pointed out that people will give up what they value less in order to gain what they value more. It is this asymmetry which produces wealth: both sides gain from the transaction.

One sees here again the fascination which the founders of classical economics had with the advancements in natural science made by people like Newton and Boyle.

Carl Menger launched a new area of economic investigation, which kept many of the discoveries of ‘classical economics,’ but which also created possibilities for more advanced analyses.