Theologians who claim the Bible does not endorse an economic system have not understood the Torah, or what Christians call the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Neither Moses nor the elite of Israel wrote the laws that created the economic system. God personally wrote them. And God created a government and economic system verging on what people today call anarchy. The government regulated no part of the economy. It did not set prices, tax land or income, or redistribute wealth… There was no president, prime minister, executive branch, parliament or congress… No one told Israeli farmers or manufacturers what to produce, when to produce it, how to produce it or how much they could charge.

No nation in history has enjoyed such freedom from state control. Even the system of natural freedom proposed by Adam Smith in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations never came close to imagining the level of freedom that Israelis enjoyed under the judges. Yet anarchy did not prevail in ancient Israel because the people had the law of God. The courts adjudicated disputes in the light of that law and the people enforced court decisions. As a result, theft, fraud, murder, and other crimes were kept to a minimum.

The Torah makes it clear that God would never have endorsed socialism in any of its forms, whether communism, fascism, democratic or Fabian.

The Torah government embodied all of the elements of capitalism … those included respect for property, the rule of law, limited government, relatively honest courts, free markets, veneration of business, the bourgeois virtues and individualism.

Roger McKinney