Insight from Nehemiah on Property for Today – with Rabbi Lapin: There is a growing difficulty for the individual to own property, in our country. To better understand what is going on, we bring in Rabbi Daniel Lapin for some insights from Nehemiah on property ownership. Should land be available to everyone? What does land ownership mean? What can we learn from Nehemiah on the state of property ownership, today? How is it that government is making it all so disproportionate? We will address all of these questions and more.

Air Date: 3/22/2023

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Tim Barton and Rick Green

Guest: Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s Website

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Transcription:

Rick Green
Welcome the intersection of faith and the culture is WallBuilders. We’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And we’re taking your questions on Thursdays normally, but we are going to read one of your questions today. But you can send those into [email protected] . I’m Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. And guys, we got a lot of stuff coming up this summer. So before we get to our special guests for the day, Rabbi Daniel Lapin will be with us a little later. Some cool stuff happening this summer. And one of the groups we don’t typically talk about, we talk about pastors, young people, legislators, but teachers also got a special program and a training you guys are doing this summer. You’ve been doing it several years, lots of great teachers have come through that training and talked very highly about it. But we hadn’t talked much about it on the program. So tell us what’s going on. When is it the summer? Where will it be?

Tim Barton
Yeah, mostly we want to make sure that we keep people apprised the opportunities they have this summer, depending on kind of maybe different dynamics of where they might fit. But certainly, teachers, we want to make sure that we let people out there and know who are teachers. And we talked so often about the benefits of homeschooling, we certainly encourage homeschooling. We recognize, the majority of the nation is still in public schools. And there are some really great teachers in public schools. Even though we recognize the fundamental flaws of the system, we recognize there’s so many good people that are teachers there, and as well as universities or private schools, or Christian schools, parochial schools, and then of course, homeschool parents and Co Ops, there’s an opportunity that we do every summer for educators to come and have more or less two and a half days in our facility, our museum, we go over to the American Journey Experience in Dallas. And for two and a half days, we do a deep dive into American history. And by deep dive, it’s really a 30,000 foot view. But as with artifacts, the deep dive is just in the sheer volume. It’s not necessarily in the depth of a specific topic, we do an overview, but we look at things from an educational perspective, we see where education changed along the way, we will cover the way education was in early America and the philosophy of education, and why when things were set up in different states, different states passed different laws. Why did they pass a law? What did it produce in that state? So we we do give a pretty in depth perspective. But then we show where you add a philosophical and fundamental change in education in America with progressive taking over, when you add individuals even like Rockefeller pouring millions upon millions of dollars in education saying we don’t need better thinkers, we need better workers, we need better people that can take orders just to go do their job. And so there was a shift in what we did in education where we stopped promoting some of the depth of critical thinking and problem solving and even getting away from some of the levels of not just a logic, but the rhetoric aspects the mathematics. And you see that shift, and then we’ll even encourage teachers with some of the opportunities that they now have in their classroom that because of Supreme Court decisions over the last couple years, especially last year with the Coach Kennedy decision, the overturning of the Kurzman V Lemon decision. There are so many things they can do in the classroom in a public school setting that up to this point had been not legally recognized protected freedoms. Those are now protected. So these are the things we want to make sure teachers know about. If you are a teacher, or if you know a teacher, maybe you even want to help sponsor a teacher because teachers don’t make the best salaries. It can be a challenge for them to come. We want them to be able to come be a part of what we do in the summer programs. If they go to WallBuilders.com they can look for the teachers conference. There’s two programs we do. One… it’s one week at the summer, we have so many programs. Nearly every week at the summer, we’re doing different programs. But for this one week, a Monday through a Wednesday or a Thursday through a Saturday, they can come be a part of this program. And as I mentioned, we’re doing things all throughout the summer we do our Summer Institute as well, which is for 18 to 25 year old students, they can come be a part of a week long program where we will do a deep dive in American history. But it starts with a apologetics, a biblical worldview to lay a foundation of truth. Truth does exist. The founding fathers knew this. We go to the Founding Fathers writings where they lay that foundation of biblical truth and morality. We go through original documents, we address things from the Constitution, from the Bill of Rights, we’ll get into the Founding Fathers, we’ll address things like the 1619 project or critical race theory. We’ll go through guys like Christopher Columbus, people that are villainized today, or lies that are being told Today, we want young people to know what is the truth of that? What can they do? And then of course, every summer WallBuilders partners with Patriot Academy and Rick, Patriot Academy is happening all summer long, all over the nation. And PatriotAcademy.com is the best place for people to go to find out more and actually, it’s a new name has been embraced. I keep calling it Patriot Academy, really in the summer. It’s a leadership Congress, now. So Rick, I apologize. I have called that for so many years.

Rick Green
I’m the same way, man. I’m the same way. I keep calling, I mean it it’s the flagship program, but we have so many different programs, now. We had to come up with a name just for, well, our capital program and that’s called Leadership Congress. And you’re right man, they’re all summer I feel like the summer is is wiped out when I looked at the calendar right now, but I did have a question on the teachers conference real quick. Is that um… Do you have to be a particular kind of teacher… Do you got to be a history teacher? Or can any teacher come? And is it also for, you know, private school public school? What are kind of the parameters there?

Tim Barton
That’s a great question. So we do have a limited space. And because of that we do prioritize people generally that we feel like have some of the bigger reach and so, or maybe have more influence. So we’ve had people that were public school superintendents, high school superintendents that came, we’ve had principals that have come we’ve had college professors that have come in every summer, we have people like this, we have Christian school principals and administrators, that every summer we will have a part of these programs. But we definitely at times will have a homeschool Co Op parent who’s there and different people. So it’s something that we don’t try to limit who can hear this information. But because we have a limited capacity, we do try to pick the people that we feel like will have the most influence. And then for everybody that doesn’t make the list, we let them know about other programs we do throughout the year like family seminars, where it’s very similar content. It’s just geared more toward families and parents, not toward teachers, but it’s things that absolutely can be utilized by teachers in the classrooms. There’s other opportunities for people if our summer programs are already full, and I don’t actually even know what the list looks like. I’m… we have staff that goes over that list that does the interview process. My dad and I, we just show up, we talk. So I don’t even know where that list is what that number is right now. But I do know that we try to prioritize. So there will be the greatest number of reach, since we have a limited capacity in the room and in the space. But we definitely encourage anybody who’s involved in education, whether it be a… I mean, really, I mean, even you can be a Sunday school teacher. We… I don’t care if you sign up, if there’s room, if there’s spots available, we’re going to fill every single spot. It will be prioritized by the people, maybe that have kind of that genre field. And so if there’s a high school history teacher, if there’s a high school government teacher, they’re probably going to have a priority as opposed to a kindergarten teacher, not that we don’t love kindergarten teachers, they’re amazing, they’re important, but we’re just going to prioritize the things that will make the most sense and be the most help. We’ve had literature teachers come before, because certainly, there’s a lot of opportunity for literature teachers to be able to even go back to those original documents and utilize those. Nonetheless, anybody can sign up, if you’re involved in education. And if you don’t make the list, there are other opportunities. And really, you can even apply again next summer, maybe even apply earlier. But WallBuilders.com is the best place to go and find out more information.

Rick Green
WallBuilders.com If you want to to the Teachers Conference, all kinds of other opportunities there as well, this summer, and then PatriotAcademy.com if you want to do one of the capital, Leadership Congresses. Alright, guys we had a question from David in Temple, Texas. And it’s a fairly involved question. And so that means it got a little too deep for the three of us. So we’re bringing in Rabbi Daniel Lapin later. But here’s the question first, we’ll bat it around a little bit. He said he was listening to the podcast. Or has been listening to the podcast for a couple of years, he was reading in Nehemiah in chapter 4, verses 3-5, where it appears to be describing a situation in which the common people are unable to hold on to their land. The land was accumulating in the hands of a few wealthy or influential people. And that the reason given he said in verse 7, and 8 appears to be exorbitant taxes. He said, I would love to here a more detailed explanation of how this land transfer took place. Today, I hear about land being bought up by Bill Gates by Chinese people and corporations and probably others. Here’s the question, Is today’s situation similar to that in Nehemiah time? Is today’s land transfer a voluntary willing process? Or are people losing their lands because of taxes, estate taxes, that sort of thing? Or burdensome regulations, inability to compete with the big guys? What reforms, he asks would need to take place to protect property ownership, which I understand is one of the three pillars of capitalism. I’ve heard you talk about property taxes, which I increasingly think of as immoral. should those be phased out? And what else? So David, great, great question! And I love the fact, guys, that as he’s reading through Nehemiah, he’s thinking about these things. So it’s what we encourage everybody to, do get saturated in God’s word, be in God’s word, and then think about how to apply it to the stuff going on in our neighborhoods and in our country. Alright, David, I remember you telling me one time that when you started WallBuilders, or before you started WallBuilders, you just dove into Nehemiah. God said go read Nehemiah, and I think you said you read it, like the whole book every day for something like 30 days. And you found so much great information in there about how to handle politics and media and all those things. So I love getting this question about Nehemiah and tossing it to you.

David Barton
Well, actually, it was more than 30 days. It turned out to be six months. I felt like God said every day for six. And after about six weeks I was going, come on God I read it yesterday and the day before and the three weeks before that and the five weeks. But after about six weeks, I started seeing things I had never seen in Nehemiah, things started coming together. You started seeing why they did certain things motivations behind it. And it was a real book that told you the story of how to restore and rebuild a nation that’s been torn down. And so there’s great guidance in there, and the private property aspect is one of the really important aspects. I mean that was one of the inalienable right things the Founding Fathers built American government on. And when you start losing the ability to have private property, including your own home and your own land, and etc. When government can take that from you, it’s no longer an inalienable right. And so literally, Nehemiah deals with so much of what we have in America, certainly different time different setting, but people don’t change over time, necessarily. The same motivations are there that the same good, the bad, the ugly is still there. So it’s a great book for seeing a perspective. But it’s also a great book to be able to get ancient Jewish wisdom on is Rabbi Lapin likes to call it. I mean we would go back and see why the Jews did what they were doing. So I can look at Nehemiah and say, yeah, here’s the problems. And here’s what was going on. So Rabbi Lapin can also say, well, here’s why they were doing that. Here’s why it’s a big deal because the 4,000 years of Jewish history before that. And so that’s a great perspective to have. And so that’s why we feel like Rabbi Lapin is so important on this.

Rick Green
Stay with us, folks, Rabbi Daniel Lapin our special guest. We’ll be right back on WallBuilders.

Tim Barton
Hey, this is Tim Barton with WallBuilders. And as you’ve had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you’ve probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, about all the things that makes America exceptional. And you might be thinking as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area and share with my group, whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school or public school or some political event or activity. If you’re interested in having a WallBuilders speaker come to your area, you can get on our website at www.wallbuilders.com and there’s a tab for scheduling. And if you’ll click on that tab you’ll notice there’s a list of information from speakers’ bios to events that are already going on, and there’s a section where you can request an event to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green
Welcome back to WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Always great to have Rabbi Daniel Lapin with us. Great to have you back, sir. Appreciate the time today.

Daniel Lapin
Yeah, it’s a great pleasure to be with you, as you know. Whenever I have the chance, I’m happy.

Rick Green
Well, whenever we get tough questions, we call you. So if it’s… and it doesn’t take… it doesn’t have to be that tough for it to be over my head. So anyway, this is a really good one about reading in Nehemiah just how property was, you know, ended up in the hands of a handful of people and kind of looking at where we are culturally right now with all the buying up of land. And David said, man, we got to get the rabbi on for this one. So Rabbi Lapin, what do you think? What was going on in Nehemiah here in chapter 4?

Daniel Lapin
Well, you know, it’s not that different from what we see happening in the United States and in other parts of the world at the present time. Were very large tracts of land, are being purchased by people who you wouldn’t think have any need or any business. I mean, you know, what is a software Titan need with 100,000 acres in Montana? But a lot of that is happening. And, and yes, it’s basically scripture is telling us something here, which is that when society has too many people, with nothing to lose, too many people with no long term stake, that is a harbinger of serious problems. You know, many years ago in the 60s, I think there was a famous blues song Me and Bobby McGee. And one of the famous lines in that was, Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Rick Green
And that’s where we are.

Daniel Lapin
And the truth is that you really do not want to be in a group of people with nothing to lose, because there is no limit to what they will do. I want to live among people who are married and have families and have children who own real estate, and therefore have a long term interest in the future. That’s why it used to be not just in the United States in the early days, but in a number of countries that you couldn’t vote if you didn’t own land. And the idea was they wanted to make sure decisions are being made by people who had a long term stake. And the goal was to have as many people as possible. As matter of fact, America used to lead the way in people living in homes they owned. That didn’t always used to be the case. In the United Kingdom up until the middle of the 20th century fewer than 20% of people lived in houses they owned. And in America during the 20th century, it climbed up to over 60%. Because there was an understanding in this country of that very section in Nehemiah, that yes, we do want to make sure that all of us ordinary folks do own our real estate, even if it’s not a lot. But we owned our… we got a place of land, that’s ours. And that makes us worry about the long term in a totally different way. Because yes, we do have something to lose.

Yeah, it’s almost hard for me to comprehend this trend towards not wanting to own your own piece of land, your own, like you said something to lose something that you can pass on to your kids, something that somewhere that you can truly call your castle, you know, and…

Very much so and, and the tragedy is that once government surrenders to the unholy impulse of adulterating the money with inflation, that basically signals people who have a lot of money to keep that money in lands, not in the banks, because one of the results of inflation is it does help to make banks fault, as we can tell, at the present time in the United States. And so the tendency of super wealthy people to buy up a whole lot of land, more than they can ever use, is contributed to by government immorality, because inflation, regardless of anything means only one thing and that is government has been immoral, because it is fun spending other people’s money. And if you can only get that money by raising taxes, and maybe finding that voters at the next election punish you for raising taxes, that’s not so much fun. So rather print money and that way, it’s an invisible tax on everybody, but you get to spend money. That’s one of the things that politicians just do. So when that happens, one of the side effects is that it becomes harder for ordinary folks to own land.

Rick Green
You said something there that I got to go back to that inflation is happening because government is being immoral. It’s doing things it shouldn’t be doing. Zero in on that for me.

Daniel Lapin
Sure. Look at Milton Friedman used to say it very, very clearly. But it’s always been understood since Adam Smith’s monumental work on economics, that is exactly as old as the United States, published in 1776, called The Wealth of Nations. It’s always been understood that inflation is not caused by Putin invading Ukraine, it’s not caused by climate change. It’s not caused by a mistaken figure for the M2 Federal Reserve figurs. No! Inflation is when government prints money that has not been backed either by gold, or since 1971, when Richard Nixon got rid of the gold standard, it has to be backed by wealth creation, by people actually doing things. And for the best part of a century in Victorian England, the price of a pound of wheat or a ton of coal never varied, because there was no inflation. Because the British Empire took the responsibility extremely seriously of looking after the money. But whenever there’s been a United States government, or they’ve been since that time, British governments that are more interested in spending money they don’t have, because that’s one of the ways you win elections is you give people money, but you don’t want to tax them. So you do it by invisibly, taxing them. And that’s what happens. Look, you want me to give you an example that everyone will see right away?

Rick Green
Go for it.

Daniel Lapin
Wake up tomorrow morning and find a duffel bag outside your door. You open it, a million dollars inside. Rick, you’re so excited about that. The first thing you do is you call David Barton and you say, David, you won’t believe… and he says, hey, Rick, before you even tell me I got to tell you something. I just found a million dollars outside! You say, you as well? And then you realize everybody got it. Well, anyway, you know, you really want to buy that BMW Series five. So you run over to the BMW dealership. And to your shock, there’s a long line stretching down the block like 200 people there. And there’s a girl coming down the line with a clipboard. She says what car do you want? You say I want a BMW Series five. She says that will be $250,000. You say, what! It’s a $70,000 car. I want to buy… She says 70,000 yesterday, but right now, there’s 100 People in this line that want that car and they’re willing to pay a whole lot more. We’ve only got six of them on the lot. We got to auction them. That’s all we have to do. So if you’re not willing to pay a quarter [of] a million, even though yesterday it was $70,000 then you’re not even in the run. This is a little mini picture of how prices go up when the government gives out money. It’s as simple as that.

Rick Green
And that’s exactly what happened over the last couple of years. We dumped trillions of dollars on the market and we continue to do it and it’s a absolutely going to continue to cut… but I had not connected the inflation that was created by that with the fact that this plays into the whole idea of people not owning their own property and owning their own land. Because with inflation, interest rates go up, it makes it harder for people to buy property…

Daniel Lapin
Yes, much harder to get land. That’s exactly what’s happened. That’s precisely right. And people who are super wealthy, go ahead and buy land anyway, because it’s a much safer place to put their large sums of money than in banks.

Rick Green
Yeah, wow! Wow. what a danger. What a danger.

Daniel Lapin
Now, it’s not a good thing. Not a good thing.

Rick Green
No, it’s not a good thing. And what would be the biblical answer to this, in terms of how you prevent it, and how we reverse course?

Daniel Lapin
First of all, honest currency.

Rick Green
Yes.

Daniel Lapin
If a government is meticulous about protecting the currency used by people in its administration, then for them, the natural market forces take place and people… You know, which, by the way, happened during the 1950s and 60s, when the number of Americans that own their own houses just skyrocketed, but…

Rick Green
Honest Weights and Measures.

Daniel Lapin
Yeah, no, absolutely. And governments that understand their responsibility, and are made up of people with real honor. So that’s the main part of it and obviously, in the land of Israel, there was the Jubilee every 50 years and the return of land, but you don’t even need that. That was, you know, that was in the land of Israel, but people live all around the world. And that’s fine. The land is always within the market range, provided the money is protected.

Rick Green
Yeah, yeah. Well, we’ve got to get educated on these things. The biblical economics…

Daniel Lapin
And the way, that’s something we really need to do in churches and synagogues, because you cannot rely on public schools to teach children about money. They won’t.

Rick Green
Yeah. Amen. Amen. What… you put out so many good things over the years, which study that you have, would directly go to this economic issue of inflation? And…

Daniel Lapin
I think, you know, most likely, I think the most important one is an online course I make available called the Prosperity Collection, and Financial Prosperity Collection, and that’s at my website, RabbiDanielLapin.com .

Rick Green
All right, we’re going to have links to that today, folks. Get educated, get equipped. Don’t, just as the rabbi said, don’t don’t expect the public schools to do this, or the government to do this. This is our responsibility. Let’s go get educated on this and teach it to our kids. Rabbi, thank you. God bless you. Thank you for coming on today!

Daniel Lapin
Thank you so much. Good to be with you.

Rick Green
All right, we’re back with David and Tim Barton. Always good to have Rabbi Lapin on with us. And speaking of those, well not the summer programs, but our legislators conference, Rabbi Lapin often comes and teaches at that particular WallBuilders program, but good to have him on the program. All right, guys, what… You know, is this something that can be remedied in the American system right now? And what would be the big steps, like what the rabbi is talking about here?

David Barton
You know, he has some really important things. Honest currency is a lot of the problem here. Also the stakeholder aspect of it, there’s a lot of people who no longer have any stake in being interested in government. And so as you look at the loss of the family, the loss of the home, the loss of property, you have the complete transition to government. I love the fact that he pointed out that this is the result of inflation. When you have inflation, you can no longer have the same kind of property. You’re not able to have property as you had before. And so he just looked back to… and I love this, about Lapin. You know, you ask him a specific question, waiting for a specific answer. And he answers a question you didn’t ask. But it’s a question you should have asked if you’d understood what it’s about. So, you know, we were asking him real simple about Nehemiah. And he says, well, Bill Gates, this and 100,000 In Montana, and he instantly went into the exact parallel that’s happening in America today with what was happening back then. And he put his finger on it. And its economic policy, its inflation, and inflation happening. And he just hit so many things that are part of it. So it goes back to people really do need to work to have private property. They really need to work to own their own homes. He pointed out Great Britain, 20%. America, 60%-70%. They need to have a family, they need to have children, they need to be stakeholders and have something at stake. And this goes back to the American founding. He was right, the American founders back at the time, you had to be a property owner to be able to vote. Because if you don’t own property, you can tell everybody else what to do with their property. But if you own property, you have a different view of how to protect it and save and guard it. If you don’t have property, you’re socialists and say I want your property. I’ll use it for what I want. So people have criticized that saying, well, that was elitism. No, it wasn’t, when you go back to states like Pennsylvania, colonies like Pennsylvania, they made it easy to own land. You could own land for a penny an acre. They wanted you to be a land holder, that… it wasn’t elite exclusive stuff. They wanted you to be a stakeholder in government.

Tim Barton
Well, and maybe just to clarify, there might have been some places where it was elitism and they didn’t want everybody to, but this is where we so often talk about there’s an overgeneralization when it comes to America. That we say well, nobody in America could own land if you weren’t a white male. Well That’s not true. There were definitely places in America that you could own land and not be a white male. You could be a woman and own land. You could be a black person and own land. But there definitely were places where there was elitism. There was places there was racism. But that wasn’t all of America, Dad, to your point, where there’s so many examples we can point to, that are contrary to the modern narrative, which is kind of the point.

David Barton
And, you know, as he was closing out, he said, look, it’s all about honest currency. And just a little heads up on stuff right now. In 23 states, they are moving through what’s called UCC, Uniform Commercial Code. A lot of this is spun out from an executive order that Biden did a while back, this moving us into digital currency. Digital currency is not honest currency. People think that’s convenient. No, that’s the government being able even to program currency, they move from digital currency to programmable currency. And the government then tells you what you can buy and when, because your currency won’t work except on certain days for certain items. So a lot of the states have already passed this just thinking this like a building code, we just need to get this to get all the state standard. Now this introduces something that has not even been introduced in the nation yet, and that’s digital currency. This is laying the groundwork for it. Honest currency is super important. And let me just tell you right now, find out in your state and you can go to ProFamily.com , you can find information on this. If this is going in your state, you need to step out against it, now. This is a huge threat to your private property. But man, thanks for the question. And thanks for the answer from Rabbi Lapin.

Rick Green
And thanks to you for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders.