The Real Questions You Should Ask Your Economics Professor

“Students are commonly told that Jesus was amenable to socialism because he favored the sharing of wealth. But in fact, he taught personal responsibility, voluntary charity, and doing good from the heart, not from someone else’s wallet.”

“The only thing new in the world,” President Harry Truman famously said, “is the history you do not know.” While there’s a bit of hyperbole in Truman’s words, the truth in them is also disturbingly common these days.

In my four decades of teaching and interacting with students on matters of economics and history, I’ve been routinely amazed by both how much they know and how little they know about the very same subjects. Allow me to choose four important topics to illuminate my point: child labor during the British Industrial Revolution, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the teachings of Jesus as they pertain to economics.

These topics routinely elicit from students the firmest of conclusions. They absolutely “know” that the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain, introduced widespread, horrible working conditions for children. They “know” that Upton Sinclair’s famous book, The Jungle, proved that Chicago meatpackers were deliberately harming their workers and poisoning their customers. They “know” that unfettered capitalism caused the Great Depression. And they are just as convinced that Jesus advocated socialism because he wanted to help the poor in their struggle against the greedy rich.

On each matter, they “know” that the perceived problem had one best fix, namely, corrective intervention by caring government authorities. No need to question those authorities, their methods or outcomes, because those authorities are both compassionate and right.