Puritan Economic Experiments

Good intentions . . . the road to hell is paved with them.

The vision of the Puritans who settled seventeenth-century America was to establish “a city on a hill,” a “light to the world.” But less than two generations after the earliest pioneering settlements were established, they seemed to have lost their way. Even Cotton Mather despaired of the future lamenting, “Religion hath brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother — there is a danger, lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.”

In this brilliant little book, Dr. Gary North shows why. The Puritans failed to rethink economics in terms of the Bible; instead, they simply imported medieval scholastic economic categories into their regulations, markets, and prices. They attempted to limit private property acquisition. They imposed wage and price controls. And they restricted consumer choices through sumptuary legislation. They were enamored with the ideologies of Scholasticism, Socialism, and Utopianism. The result was predictably disastrous. And the lessons for us today could not be more obvious.

67 pages with Scripture index, paperback.