Trump family wants to upgrade the U.S. dollar with their own crypto dollar.

Mammon and the Market

The famous exchange in the Gospels where Jesus is asked about paying taxes to Caesar is usually read as a clever evasion — a way of sidestepping a political trap. But there's a more subversive reading available. When Jesus says "give to Caesar what is Caesar's," he isn't elevating the coin or acknowledging some deep authority in Roman economic power. He's deflating it. The coin bears Caesar's image because it's Caesar's administrative instrument, a token in a particular social system. It has no transcendent claim on you. It's just a tool, not a rival deity.

This is almost the exact opposite of how modern libertarian economic ideology treats money. The libertarian wants us to understand market logic as a brute fact about reality, as neutral and unchallengeable as gravity. Prices, they insist, reveal truth. Market valuation discovers the real worth of things. Exchange is the fundamental human activity from which all social life derives. But this isn't hardheaded realism — it's a theology, and a remarkably credulous one. It takes a set of humanly constructed rules, enforced by courts and police and the entire apparatus of the state, and treats them as if they existed prior to and independent of human choice. The "free market" is already a political achievement before a single transaction occurs.

The biblical concept of Mammon illuminates what's actually happening here. Mammon in its Aramaic context doesn't simply mean money — it means misplaced trust, wealth treated as a source of ultimate security and meaning rather than a practical instrument within a larger moral order. Jesus identifies Mammon as a rival to God not because money is inherently evil but because it tends toward idolatry — toward becoming an unchallengeable arbiter of value that stands above moral accountability. You cannot serve both God and Mammon precisely because they represent incompatible frameworks for evaluating what matters and what doesn't.

Modern libertarianism has accomplished exactly this re-enchantment of money that Jesus was warning against. By insisting that market logic is simply how reality works, it removes economic arrangements from the domain of moral evaluation. The prophetic tradition consistently refused this move. Amos wasn't raging against markets as such — he was insisting that markets exist within covenant relationship and are therefore always subject to the question of whether they serve human flourishing or undermine it. The merchant manipulating weights and measures isn't just breaking a rule; he's betraying a fundamental social bond, treating his neighbor as a resource to extract rather than a person to whom he is obligated.

The democratic framing of Modern Monetary Theory actually recovers something of this prophetic intuition. If money is sovereign currency, and in a democracy the people are sovereign, then money is a collective instrument of social credit — the community's shared capacity to organize labor and distribute goods in service of common life. Privatizing that through crypto stable coins, as the Trump family is currently attempting, isn't liberating anyone from government control. It's enclosing a commons, replacing democratic accountability with the unaccountable power of whoever controls the ledger. It's Mammon with a whitepaper.

Jesus' deflation of the coin turns out to be the more realistic position. Money is a human construct embedded in social obligation, which means it's always a moral question, never just a technical one. The libertarian who insists otherwise isn't being more rational than the rest of us. He's just worshipping without knowing it.

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• Tether (USDT): The largest stablecoin by market capitalization, backed by a diversified mix of assets including fiat, gold, and corporate bonds.
• USD Coin (USDC): Managed by Circle, this is considered a more conservative, fully reserved stablecoin backed by cash and U.S. Treasurys.
• PayPal USD (PYUSD): Issued by Paxos Trust Company for PayPal, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar.
• TrueUSD (TUSD): A fiat-collateralized stablecoin focused on transparency and regulatory compliance.
• Dai (DAI): While partially decentralized, it is heavily collateralized to track the U.S. dollar price.
• Binance USD (BUSD): A regulated stablecoin issued in partnership with Paxos, though its issuance has been restricted.
• Gemini Dollar (GUSD): A regulated stablecoin issued by the Gemini exchange.

Richard T said:

You give me pause with libertarian thought as I have never heard it framed that way. I have however been an advocate that we are nearing the end of the age of acquisition, where the love of money is going to be dealt with. I always figured it would be a democrat, but God wants to align his church so no one seems better than Trump to stage a reversal of fortune moment. I always questioned how a nation can get turned around when there is so little humility. The coming collapse will bring that.
I sometimes say the dollar has "in God we trust" but that trust is not known for sure until you have no dollars.
Thanks for the teaching though you are quite articulate. I think we arrive at the same conclusion though in different ways.

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