Morally, our freedom has consequences for us. Economically, too.
March 7, 2026
In his lecture " God and Anarchocapitalism" (which slightly narrows his earlier lecture " God Is a Libertarian"), Jesús Huerta de Soto gives examples of how God has steadfastly granted us freedom.
God, through His law, initially set up a high-freedom state of semi-anarchy, in which the only human government was a series of judges to settle disagreements (and, when needed, to lead the people in mutual self-defense). Later, God let the people reject Him as their leader to instead follow a king.
After Jesus fed 5,000 men, they wanted to make Him king, but He instead withdrew by Himself. Jesus didn't give James and John permission to call down fire from heaven. God rarely even simply offered undeniable signs; Jesus, for example, didn't free Himself from the cross.
Morally, our freedom has consequences for us. Economically, our freedom has consequences for us, too; and these turn out to be wonderful.
Based on hands-on experience and extensive further observation, Andrew Hargadon explains that existing practical components are the best starting point for combining suitable components to develop innovations.
In Explaining Technology, Roger Koppl and his coauthors build further on observations like Hargadon's. They propose that these observations might be explained by a universal rule, and they take this rule to the limit.
They suppose that the more distinct products existed at any given time, the more new distinct products people would have developed at that time. They further reduce this to practice by supposing that there are fixed proportions of existing components that people could plausibly combine to add value, and there are is a fixed probability that the few new combinations that people end up trying out end up adding value.
Next, Koppl and his coauthors describe qualitatively how this simple model could have been operating for at least the last 3.3 million years. Then they consider how this model's predictions would compare with increasingly accurate estimates of world GDP per capita since 0 B.C. They find that this model would predict the initial glacial growth that was seen, followed by the sudden takeoff around 1800 B.C. that was also seen.
If growth would always fit this elegant, simple model, then growth would eventually become infinite. In the real world, a regime change would have to happen instead, at which point a modified model or new model would be needed to describe what happens next.
Overall, then, evidence such as that discussed by Jesús Huerta de Soto, Andrew Hargadon, and Roger Koppl and his coauthors indicates that God protects our freedom, and our freedom then brings variation that brings us abundance. In this way, God does everything He can do, short of doing everything for us, to provide us abundance.
In providing for our material needs and wants in this substantial, sublime way, as in all of His ways, God is good and loving, all the time.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.