Who Is Amputating Love?

No.254: April 11, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, but today’s is a free edition. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

“Liberation” has been postponed for the time being.

In the midst of continued capital market meltdown President Trump “paused” his draconian tariff plan for 90 days on every country except China (whose domestic American importers and customers now face a whopping 125% tariff), and has left in place across-the-board 10% tariffs on all others. The spinning Wheel of Explanatory Fortune has finally stopped and landed on, “Now all these countries are willing to negotiate with us!” So, congratulations to all. We could’ve just asked them in the first place.

This means, inconveniently for those who’ve been carrying metric tons of water, we are not “bringing back” all that manufacturing. We are not going to “make billions” from tariffs to replace all our income tax revenue. We are not “restructuring” the global economy. All of the “tariffs are good, actually” arguments peddled by the administration and its surrogates can now be tossed into the trash can. Never mind. Just kidding! All the pundits who pivoted the last few days into telling us that markets don’t really matter, that enduring economic pain is downright patriotic, worrying about markets makes one a “Panican,” that it’s high time “Wall Street” gave way to “Main Street”—they are all now instantly cheering a stock market rally happening because the President reversed the very plans they’ve been so busy trying to sell. Court jesters who ought to be given zero credibility. They can now try to convince everybody that everything went according to “plan,” and they will succeed in convincing the already TrueBelievers™.

For three decades now I have lampooned the non-falsifiable premises of “climate change,” and conservatives of all stripes joined in on the fun. The term itself was designed to serve the function of non-falsifiability. When you prophesy “global warming,” you see, you run the risk of having things cool off. But if you say “climate change,” then suddenly any and every weather event under the sun is a fulfillment of your prophecy. MAGA world has perfected this gambit: no matter what happens—market up, market down, countries retaliating, countries groveling, on-shoring manufacturing, never mind about that, huge revenues, none at all—it is proof of Donald Trump’s political genius.

On the contrary, Donald Trump was never going to suspend the economic laws of gravity and it is sad that our country and the rest of the world—not to mention your 401(k)—has to endure this kind of chaos so that he can have a personal educational growth experience.

Markets loved the “pause” on Wednesday. Then they seemed to have second thoughts on Thursday. You know what they’d really like? Congress doing its job by reasserting its Constitutional taxing authority for good. Oh, and a cancelation instead of a “pause” and a removal of the remaining across-the-board 10% tariffs.

As ever, if you are interested in serious analysis of what’s going on with trade and tariff policy, you can do no better than to read Scott Lincicome, who was born for this moment.

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Some people really do not like it when I write about this stuff. Why don’t you just stick to theology, Brian?

The answer is that I am sticking to theology. This newsletter is called The Square Inch precisely because I refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of this artificial and arbitrary dichotomy between “theology” and other sciences like economics. There isn’t a square inch of God’s creation that is “siloed” off in its own little world, disconnected from theological and moral considerations. The Bible has a great deal to say about money, finance, property, and its abuses, and it so happens that private property and wealth and prosperity is under serious and almost unprecedented attack (for the American context) at this very moment. Alarmingly, this attack is coming from the political right.

You could convince me that there are times for the theologian to pick a different lane, pack up his books and head off to another needed outpost on the front. I understand that sometimes the work is done, like, for instance, when you spend a couple of years demolishing a cadre of nascent white supremacists hijacking Christian terms in service of an age-old godless revolution, and their momentum slows to making podcasts and celebratory Nazi videos in their garage studios and then turning their rhetorical guns on each other to prove who is the most ideologically pure. Yes, I can certainly give that a rest.

You won’t convince me to leave the flank currently under real and substantive attack, however. Certainly not if you’re one of the people assuring me that self-inflicted poverty in service of some glorious utopia just around the corner is my patriotic duty.

It is my belief that evaporating huge portions of the invested life-savings of hard-working Americans and drastically raising their costs of living and reducing their employment prospects with the stroke of an executive pen is immoral (“taxation without representation,” anyone? Ring a bell?). It is an act of vandalism. Arson. Theft. Breaking the 8th Commandment. I think doing so for completely irrational reasons (e.g., “trade deficits” mean someone is inherently “ripping someone off”), false pretenses (an “emergency” measure), refusing to learn basic economic principles or listen to sound economic counsel, and ignoring the unambiguous lessons of history, compounds the iniquity.

But that might just be me. Other theologians take a different view. New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon thinks that tariffs and the stock market are of lesser importance than his particular passion—trans activism. I, for one, am glad that Dr. Gagnon is manning that particular wall. In the past he’s done lasting and important work on the subject. But this framing, posted on Facebook highlighting a piece of “trans” legislation being considered in the state of Colorado, is sorely mistaken:

This is the most important political stuff. Not the tariffs or stock market. Not Trump's salty language. Too many Evangelicals virtue-signaling to the Left major in minors. Trump is vigorously fighting the evil of Trans Tyranny or Trans Insanity. All Evangelicals and conservative Catholics should be regularly posting in support of his efforts and against Democratic promotion of this evil, even if it offends their own, and their friends', TDS. Get over it.

“Major in minors,” you say? Is it really his view that the 8th Commandment (“You shall not steal”) is a “minor” one compared to the 7th (“You shall not commit adultery”)? We could do a little Bible study and compare the amount and frequency of its treatment of economic sins versus sexual sins, but I will spare you. Believe it or not, the Bible says quite a bit more about treatment of the poor—widows and orphans, etc.—than it does about sexual immorality. That doesn’t make it more or less important or more or less serious—but I am not the one saying that. He is saying that. He is baldly maintaining that the issue that gets more treatment in the Bible is actually less important—a mere sideshow—and if you’re worried about it you are “virtue signaling to the Left.” Now, why would Gagnon want to minimize Trump’s economic sins? I think it is because he has been in the business of reflexively minimizing Donald Trump’s sins for about a decade, and he has perfected the art of doing so by pointing to good things Trump does.

I prefer the skill (and virtue) of walking and chewing gum at the same time and applying—to use the Bible’s own economic terms—just “weights and measures.” Faithfulness regarding the 7th Commandment (if that can even be fairly said of Donald Trump) does not balance out or excuse wanton violations of the 8th.

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Some of you may now understandably be confused. It is usually the case when a theologian starts talking about how the Bible says more about treatment of the poor than it does sexual ethics, what you are about to hear is one of two things, or—more regularly—both together: 1) A sidelining of classic biblical texts on sexuality, along with an embrace of sexual perversion. 2) An essay urging government intervention into the economy on behalf of the poor, to redistribute resources from the “haves” to the “have nots.”

I am happy to break the mould. I stand in full support of both the 7th and 8th Commandments. I refuse to pit the one against the other or to prioritize one over the other. Sexual immorality remains immorality, and stealing (or destroying) private property remains stealing. This isn’t that hard, one shouldn’t think.

Regrettably, it seems pretty difficult for some. Here’s a timely and somewhat lamentable example. Just two days after “Liberation Day,” Peter Leithart published an essay in First Things entitled, “What’s Love Got To Do With Economics?” If you are new around here, I should tell you right up front that Peter Leithart happens to be one of my favorite and most admired living theologians. I cannot begin to tell the ways in which his insight has benefitted me. But over the years he and his study center, Theopolis Institute, have become increasingly cozy with post-liberal ideas about economics—particularly, ideas represented by First Things under the editorial leadership of Rusty Reno. Post-liberalism has essentially given up on free markets, alleging that “capitalism” is responsible for the hollowing out of American civil society, the destruction of the family, the crisis of alienation and mental health problems, opioid addiction, and all the other Bad Things. Everything Marx alleged, basically.

The proposed answer of post-liberal economics is the Statist one: more and more active State intervention in the market economy to produce the social and cultural outcomes desired by the powers-that-be. A little coercive nudge here, a pull there, a little more taxation here, a little subsidy there, and the central planners will bring about the “common good” for all. And, to remind you of something I once wrote:

Rusty Reno is […] on the bandwagon, too. In a debate with Father Robert Sirico, held at King’s College, New York City, he also advocated for a more robust government willing to, say, crack down on Big Tech and multinational corporations, to police various kinds of speech, and to ‘re-orient’ society toward the ‘common good.’

As far as I was concerned, the debate was over when Father Sirico interjected: ‘Rusty, you are not going to be on those committees.’

That’s always the Achilles’ heel with revolutionaries. In their vanity they imagine that it is they themselves who will occupy the chairs in the new politburo.

Back to Leithart’s essay. He begins with a familiar passage from famed economist Ludwig von Mises:

Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

Its self-interested amorality is pretty bracing. But even Leithart admits, given that economists have a “narrow focus” of concern, the sentiment is in fact true. He writes:

Why does the shoemaker sell me shoes? Because he doesn’t want me to go unshod? Maybe, but neither he nor I need his empathy. He sells because I pay, and he can use that money to pay for things he needs. Why do I pay him? Because I want him to have enough money to feed his family? Perhaps, but, once again, fellow-feeling is unnecessary. I pay because I don’t want to suffer the pain and shame of walking barefoot. Love’s got nothing to do with it.

“Still,” he says, “it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.” For,

[i]t implies that what we count as the deepest and most noble human emotion has no place in the acts of production, distribution, and consumption that occupy the bulk of our waking lives.

He goes on to suggest that this amoral, self-interested, nickel-and-dime economics can take on the character of a monocausal explanation of the human person and society—an “imperial” economic theory in which

economists never have to yield terrain to psychologists or anthropologists or other -ists, since ‘differences in prices or incomes [can] explain any differences or changes in behavior’ (my emphasis). Elsewhere, Becker writes, ‘the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior.’ Becker is relentless, applying the logic of prices and income to marriage, child-bearing, and, well, everything. Love, it seems, has nothing to do with anything.

There is a great irony here. It is Marx, the great anti-capitalist and implacable foe of economic liberty, who insisted that man is homo economicus. And here it is free market capitalists being accused of this most Marxian of principles. I don’t deny that very often opposite extremes mimic each other; I’d be quite congenial to the argument that the radical individualism and self-absorption of Ayn Rand-style libertarianism shares more than a few Marxist presuppositions about the nature of man.

Leithart now ably, in the space of a couple of paragraphs and thought experiments, puts the lie to it all. Love has everything to with it.

We need to push the question, ‘Why does the shoemaker make and sell shoes?’ from the realm of means to that of ends. Gathering money from shoe sales isn’t, after all, the shoemaker’s ultimate goal. He doesn’t sell shoes to fill his mattress with cash, but to pay for food, clothes, shelter, and other goods for himself, likely also for others—his wife, children, guests in his home, perhaps the church food bank. And how does he decide how much to distribute to each? Can we answer that question without introducing love? Can we answer without the category of ‘gift’?

No, we cannot. Every single economic decision is about ends as well as means. And the ends determine the means. And the end is always love—something or someone prioritized above all else. Referring to John D. Mueller’s book, Redeeming Economics, Leithart concludes:

In Mueller’s Augustinian formulation, ‘all human action is ultimately motivated not by utility but by love for some person or persons.’ This, Mueller argues, was the holistic vision of Scholastic economics, which asked not only how humans determine the value of scarce resources, not only how goods are produced, not only how they’re fairly exchanged, but also how humans make decisions about distributing gifts and goods.

These truths are impossible to deny for anyone holding to anything like a biblical anthropology. So what is the problem? Where does it go wrong? Leithart’s final paragraph:

For several centuries, ‘final distribution’ has been amputated from economic theory and, with it, love. For several centuries, economics has suffered from the amputation. Love’s got everything to do with it. Final ends never appear late in the game. The final cause is the first cause: We determine the aims of our actions (whipping up dessert), and then work out means to achieve them (purchasing a quart of milk). And the final end is a person, myself or a beloved other. By deleting love from the calculus, economists give us a theory, and eventually a practice, of aimless production, exchange, and consumption—literally, purposeless abundance. Theories such as Mises’s run aground both normatively and descriptively. They describe a loveless society few wish to inhabit, but, fortunately for us, the dismal world they describe isn’t the real world.

“Final distribution”—that is, the question of not just motives and means, but the “telos” and “end” of how and why and where scarce resources get deployed the way they do, and the role that love plays in it—has been “amputated from economic theory.” The result is a theory, then a practice, of “aimless production, exchange, and consumption—literally, purposeless abundance.”

I don’t think I could possibly—with apologies to Demi Moore’s character in A Few Good Men—object more strenuously.

“Final distribution” has not been amputated; it has finally, at long last, at this late historical hour, been liberated to find its true and lasting home. For the past several centuries, in many ways thanks to the Protestant Reformation, it has been properly relocated to the realm in which it belongs.

Read his final paragraph again and ask yourself: who is this “we” who “determine the aims of our actions (whipping up dessert) and then work out means to achieve them (purchasing a quart of milk)”? I am not asking a rhetorical question. Who is “we”? Who decides how one’s resources get deployed and allocated? Who supplies the aims for production? For exchange? For consumption? Who determines the purpose for abundance? For most of history the answer to those questions has not been the individual human person, the moral actor. It has been some external authority—Plato’s Philosopher-King or committee of “Guardians” or guild elites or feudal lords who decide what the “aim” or “telos” or “common good” is, toward which every individual is expected to bend. Usually they bend under a lack of economic agency and autonomy, along with the weight of crushing taxation.

The revolution of “modern economics” (the one that gave us prosperity undreamt of in all of human history) is that basically for the first time the shoemaker (and mother and dessert-maker) determines what love requires of him or her. No outsourcing morality to the State; no phoning in one’s responsibility to the letter of a law; no paying taxes as a substitute for charity. Love is now freely carried out by a lover as it was meant to be, and as it cannot be carried out by any other. Certainly not by a third-party paper-pusher in a government bureaucracy. Is that scary radical “individualism”? Hardly. It is a shoemaker and a mother and a pastry chef and thousand other things besides, terms which signal a person richly embedded in community with all that entails—norms, expectations, responsibility, privileges, et cetera.

You see, this isn’t a question about the presence or absence of love or “telos.” It’s not about that at all; it is a jurisdictional dispute. Who decides what love requires of a given person in a given circumstance in a given moment of deploying economic resources? Not the State, not economic theorists, not an army of bean-counters, has been classical liberalism’s answer. If one wants to call that an “amputation of love” resulting in “aimless or purposeless abundance,” then one has already granted the great Statist assumption (and lie): it, and it alone, is the meaning-maker. One could scarcely conceive a more abstract, artificial, cold, contra-creational, untrue-to-life, loveless world than that. It’s the stuff of every dystopian fantasy novel and film: the “committee” is your real source of love. Downright chilling. And the greatest irony of all is that if the human economic actor is hindered from acting out of his or her own loves, but is rather told by a coercive busybody to deploy resources as it wishes “or else,” one has in fact fostered the very “loveless society” here decried. Coercion breeds hatred.

No one wants to live in such a “loveless society,” no lover of liberty is advocating for such a thing, and no such thing has yet emerged in modern free economies, despite endless and lazy accusations to the contrary. Leithart himself even grants that such a dismal world doesn’t really describe the reality in which we live. But history does teach us that such societies can and do exist. They are Statist ones where love and agency is, well, amputated from human persons, imago Dei, and outsourced to their “betters.” The result is usually mass starvation and human misery.

Sometimes, less drastically, it means decimated 401(k)s because people and businesses and firms cannot be trusted to freely trade in their economic self-interest.

Leithart and I are in agreement. Love has everything to do with it. But I fear he’s getting it exactly backward; it isn’t individual freedom that “amputates” love from economics, resulting in “aimless production” and “purposeless abundance.” Only an overbearing government with little regard for the 8th Commandment could do that. And they do, all the time. Do you need me to tell you about government waste and worthless boondoggle projects? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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Thanks for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Have a wonderful weekend deploying your resources as you see fit for the people you love without asking for a permit.