What is an Economy?

Capitalists and Communists have more in common than you think

The Greek language tells us that the word “economy” means household management; oikos, which is usually translated as “household”; and nemein, which is best translated as “management and dispensation.”

My first thought when digging around in the Greek was, “Wait, the economy isn’t a massive newsmaking monster with sticky tentacles that reach into every aspect of life and drive me forward toward loans and workplace raises and efficiency and CNBC and all the things that are necessary to be a successful person who can hold his head high in polite society?”

That was my first reaction.

Oh, and also the word “bank” kept coming to mind. I thought the economy was surely about the place that holds your money. But if we take the Old World perspective seriously, the economy is about managing my living room.

Surprisingly, the American Economic Association and their publication The Journal of Economic Perspectives agrees. In one of their articles, Dotan Leshem (he’s been published by Cambridge, Columbia and The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, among others) writes that in contemporary economic theory, oikonomia is simply “how human beings manage a relationship between ends and means.” He then proceeds like this: “In ancient economic theory, an action is considered economically rational only when taken towards a praiseworthy end.”

Whoa.

According to the vaunted Light Person economist Dotam Leshem, things that are economically rational are things that aim to do good. But this then begs a very important question: Is making money for the sake of more money a praiseworthy end? Is it good to acquire capital in and of itself? And if not, is making more money for the sake of money even a part of the economy?

Spoiler alert: No, is the answer.

The economy, it turns out, is the exact same thing as an opera, or a road, or a wife or a knife: The economy is simply a means by which to do good. Nothing more, nothing less. And that good is about the home, the place where you live and come to know who you are.

Mr. Leshem, at least in sticking to the Old World way of being, has simply identified what all “religions” have ever identified. Everything around us, everything given to us, exists in order to make people into something more than their junk, something more than their brainwaves, something more than their stuff. It turns out that if we take the Old World seriously, we see that all things are meant to work together (let’s call this togetherness a system) to reveal an untouchable, unsmellable, un-tasteable, and immaterial good. St. Paul talks about the fruit of the spirit, and in so doing implies that the spirit that produces the fruit, the dough, needs to have the disposition of one aiming for goodness. St. Paul is saying that not all dough is made equally.

You know, like the spirit of “goodness” that produces the dough that dominates Wall Street, or the system that manages your 401k, or the housing market, or any bank anywhere in the world in 2025. This dough, these fruits, have a discomforting metallic smell to them. They feel decidedly inhospitable and plastic, institutional and cold. This dough, these fruits, don’t inspire one to think of the hearth, the neighborhood, the place we call home. They inspire thoughts of a hoarder house. I mean, can any human on earth, with a straight face, argue that our modern financial systems are designed to help us manage our homes? That they’re designed to do good?

But look! It’s so organized.

Go ahead. Try it. Wall Street exists to do good. Say it out loud right now. I dare you. Or try this one: “Our financial markets are all about creating good and beautiful things.”

Did you say it out loud? It’s not easy. It makes you feel like a liar.

No one will argue that our modern economy is about doing good. Ever. Now, someone reading this today will have the thought that I often entertained as a younger man: “No, wait, those economy men do so many good things by creating capital! They allow people to build things like hospitals and schools…” and yada yada.

If the person I’m describing above is you, please stop being that person. You are missing the point (just as I was), and you are wrong, and you are these things in a very destructive way. You see, today in 2025, the point of our economic industry, a system built on finance and usury, is to create more. Period. The economy, or at least the thing we’ve come to know as “economic”, is entirely and only understood as that thing from which you get more chits than you started with. But there’s a problem: More does not equal a praiseworthy end.

And that means that the next thing must be said. Sorry. Capital is not “good.” A belief in capital, also known as capitalism, is not good. The system we love that is meant to create more, is not good by definition. The overflow, the capital, the delicious looking foam that runs down the side of your beer glass, is not good by nature. It might give you a twinge in your underpants and get you jazzed-up about the things that dreams are made of, but sorry, the overflow, the capital, is not good. The foam is not supposed to be the reason you pour your friend a beer.

We are made for one another, not the overflow.

Allow me to illustrate by telling you a quick story from my life.

I served in the Peace Corps in the 1990s. In the Malian village I called home, a place named Sindala, people owned property. In that village, people produced products. In that village, people bought and sold in free markets, some of the freest markets I’ve ever seen. Thursday was market day, and the whole town filled up with people from all over the region setting up shop and selling any and all goods. Not a tax man in sight. What I am trying to say is that people did economic things we westerners recognize as modern and capitalistic, but they did it all within about a 40-kilometer range of one another.

Except, not everyone.

It turns out that the village I lived in wanted me to help them with a bridge project. In that part of Mali, the water and the soil, the heat and the humidity, all of it collided to make delicious mangos. The problem was, the mangos were on the other side of a small river. Trucks couldn’t pass in the rainy season. Horses couldn’t pass. People couldn’t pass. So together, we built a bridge, creating a pathway for this village without electricity and without running water to move mangos over the river to the capitol and then all the way to Paris. Voilà!

And that felt very much like doing something important, it felt like we were doing business, being capitalists, making dough! Our mangoes were on their way out of the simple economy of Sindala and into a system filled with multinational financial wizards, princes of usury, masters of lawfare and scary tariff tyrants. Our mangoes were on a world tour with a mic in the hand, and none of it had much to do with household management and praiseworthy ends. But the profits were great, and very quickly I began to see that not unlike a Hindu sharing Hinduism, or an individual sharing individualism, or even a communist sharing communism; I was evangelizing my pals to believe that capital is good.

Yes. Capitalism and communism are both just New World belief systems, born of the Enlightenment, and entering the world in the fashion of a religion. (I call such belief systems ligs in this substack, from the root for religion, and relating to a ligament that binds together a worldview). Neither C-world lig is particularly interested in your well being, and neither is in any way concerned about your oikonomia.

Capitalism and communism are materialistic isms practiced by humans to create the greatest material satisfaction for the greatest number of people. These systems are created by positivists to serve positivists. And if you’ve ever found yourself arguing heatedly for capitalism over communism (or vice-versa), then it’s very likely that you are a positivist.

Positivism is the modern philosophical idea that all genuine knowledge is exclusively derived from the experience of natural phenomena. From stuff. Positivism is often paired with utopian anthropologies that portray humans as reasonable and objective creatures capable of maneuvering stuff in such a way as to make us happy. Think The Donald’s new Stargate project, or the transhumanism of the anti-humans at Davos, and think that Lord Sauron guy who needed one ring to rule the world.

Ruling the world, the stuff; true-believing positivists always end up scheming up the best way to make and deliver things for more and more fleshy things called humans.

So, what am I getting at already?

Americans, and westerners in general, have mistaken a way of believing for the oikonomia. Communism and capitalism are atheistic materialistic philosophies supposing that material prosperity is the most essential variable for measuring human flourishing.

Old World people don’t think like this.

In the Old World, especially the old Christian world, more stuff was never the goal of the oikonomia. This meant there was a kind of baked-in poverty to pre-Enlightenment cultures. We don’t see Old World cultures touting a “robust middle class”, but we do see lots of people burning manure for fuel and wearing itchy wool in the summertime. For these folks, the economy was about dying having been good, not about dying having done Disney.

The great minds of the Enlightenment studied this. David Hume and Adam Smith taught that the way to health was a sober understanding of the material world. They valued pragmatism and material realism as a way to measure human happiness. Health and wealth became linked together, and for Smith, wealth was best created in something like a free market. That market should include freedom of trade between nations, and as my Malian friends would find out, the way to trade demands monetization. My friends couldn’t trade their mangos to the French for cows. They needed money to go big, and big money meant big banks to handle their newly minted big wallets. With these things, of course, comes the need to lend money at interest (usury) and a whole new type of money management called finance.

And with all of this you see the rise of giant centralized governments (think British, French and the burgeoning American empires) and the giant centralized banks they needed in order to manifest big, fat material destinies.

And that brings us to Marx. You see, Karl, like Francis Bacon and Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson (Mr. Manifest Destiny himself), Adam Smith and the French satirist Monsieur Voltaire, was a utopian thinker. He believed in stuff and not in the soul, and he believed the best way to happiness was to properly deliver stuff in just the right proportions to just the right people. Like the capitalist utopians, he believed that stuff would make people happy. And though you might not believe me, Marx praised capitalism. He did. Go read the manifesto.

Marx, it turns out, wanted to eliminate private property, but capitalism was the necessary enzyme to do this. Marx needed capitalism to get rid of private property. Marx believed that capitalism was necessary because it concentrated property, it lumped up assets and coagulated cash, and in turn, it accentuated disparity. Without this “ism”, this capital way of thinking, Marx knew there could never be an underclass large enough and willing enough to risk death in favor of revolution. Fewer and fewer people with everything, make for more and more people with nothing (despite what the other C-word people tell you about an ever growing pie). The nothing people have every reason to destroy the something people. They’ve got nothing to lose. For Marx, capitalism is the materialist yin to the Communist yang.

But don’t get all hyped up. I’m not arguing for communism. Not even close. I’m trying to make one simple point; capitalism and communism are ligs around which human beings gather for worship.

Capitalism and Marxism are two sides of the same materialistic coin. And people who call themselves such, aren’t interested in your oikonomia. At all. Lovers of the big C-words are not concerned with praiseworthy ends, with non-material realities like redemption and hope. They are concerned with moving money around, with stuff, with sharing their religion so that you might become a believer in matter.

And here’s the weird thing. People are starting to leave the religion of the big C’s and their grand towers of power. You can feel it if you pay attention. Little by little, fleshy humans are starting to realize they are more than their jeans. Western flesh is starting to search again for a system that promises a unity of flesh and spirit.

If I am right, this could be the beginning of a mass movement toward the thing this article began with: True economy. Let’s see if our leaders have the ears to hear the gathering sounds of oikonomia.

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