This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Capitalism means unleashing our most uncharitable motivations, leading us to cruelly take wealth from others and hoard it.

That line of thinking and others like it leads many Christians to oppose capitalism.

The incompatibility of Christianity and capitalism is a fiction according to

Jay Richards author of the new book Money, Greed and God by capitalism is the

solution and not the problem he spoke at the Cato Institute November 4th.

I would maintain that most of the spoke at the Cato Institute, November 4th.

I would maintain that most of the stuff that a person needs to be an educated citizen,

to be able to evaluate public policy in economics, doesn't require that you have an advanced degree or even that you've had a

course in macroeconomics. It just requires that you think carefully through various issues.

And in fact, I think almost every intellectual mistake that Christians and frankly others make

about economics can be boiled down into one of these eight myths that I talk about in the book.

I'm not going to obviously talk about all eight myths here today. I want to just briefly touch on three so that you can kind of get an idea of what I'm trying to do.

First, you want to call the piety myth, and most of you are probably familiar with the so-called law of unintended consequences.

The intentions for a policy of course don't bear any relation to the actual effects of the policy.

City Council's intentions on a rent control policy might be to help

the poor have affordable housing. The effect nevertheless is going to be to create a

shortage of affordable housing as we all know from experience.

The piety myth though I think is especially acute problem for religious people and Christians

in particular.

And the reason is this, if you're a Christian or you're just a theist in general, then you think that why you do things is morally relevant.

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