With the return of self-described socialists to the American political scene, some have taken to reaching for Scripture to justify their political preferences. Scott Shay, while rejecting their readings of the Bible, explains that its prescriptions can’t easily be pigeonholed into modern categories:

The Bible . . . favors partial economic redistribution and legal regulations on the economy. . . . Unlike any other sacred text of its time, the Bible commands Israelites, who were overwhelmingly farmers, to set aside part of their harvest to be gathered by the poor, and to pay compulsory taxes, which were then redistributed to support the less fortunate. If a farmer did not follow these biblical laws, his crops were not kosher for buying or eating.

Further, the Bible required that farmers leave their land fallow every seventh year and allow anyone to harvest from it. [It also] required the release in the sabbatical year of Jews who had sold themselves into slavery to pay debts. But in a most astonishing directive to prohibit income inequality, the Bible instituted the return of all purchased properties to their original families every 50th year (the jubilee), so that everyone would have a more or less equal share. This provision applied to the king as well.

However, . . . the Bible [simultaneously] advocates a free market. The jubilee was not only a law of economic redistribution. It is more fundamentally a law against monopoly. Indeed, the jubilee ensured that Israelites would remain independent farmers, privately owning the means of production. Within this framework, farmers, like the patriarchs [of Genesis], took business initiatives, entered into contracts, and had no qualms about making money. In some cases, for example, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and some talmudic rabbis accumulated [considerable] wealth.

Perhaps most importantly, writes Shay, the Bible cautions that government leaders

are always susceptible of corruption, as recent socialist economies, such as Venezuela’s, have tragically shown. Even the wise King Solomon became corrupted by too much wealth and power. And sadly, today’s leaders are no King Solomons.

To Peter Berkowitz, the rot in American institutions of higher learning exposed by Tuesday’s hearings resembles a disease that in its early stages was easy to cure but difficult to diagnose, and now is so advanced that it is easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. Recent analyses of these problems have now at last made it to the pages of the New York Times but are, he writes, “tardy by several decades,” and their suggested remedies woefully inadequate:

They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs. And they overlook the mainstream media’s complicity in largely ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing repeated warnings extending back a quarter century and more—largely, but not exclusively, from conservatives—that our universities undermine the public interest by attacking free speech, eviscerating due process, and hollowing out and politicizing the curriculum.

The remedy, Berkowitz argues, would be turning universities into places that cultivate, encourage, and teach freedom of thought and speech. But doing so seems unlikely:

Having undermined respect for others and the art of listening by presiding over—or silently acquiescing in—the curtailment of dissenting speech for more than a generation, the current crop of administrators and professors seems ill-suited to fashion and implement free-speech training. Moreover, free speech is best learned not by didactic lectures and seminars but by practicing it in the reasoned consideration of competing ideas with those capable of challenging one’s assumptions and arguments. But where are the professors who can lead such conversations? Which faculty members remain capable of understanding their side of the argument because they understand the other side?