New LDS Book Just In: Socialism versus A Christian Economic Miracle — Phillip J. Bryson — Softbound

Publisher: Eborn Books

Author: Phillip J. Bryson

Date: 2022

Pages: 324

Description: Softbound, Indexed.

This book tells the fascinating story of the historical development among Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) of a welfare program that has accomplished marvelous things in caring for the poor and those who suffer from natural and personal disasters. That welfare program was constructed according to the model of Christianity implemented by the Savior himself and appearing in the New Testament. It was restored to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through Joseph Smith Jr. To see what has been accomplished in that history is to observe a paradigm of organizing a people economically in what the author calls a “Christian market system” and of caring for the poor and needy in a remarkable way.

The brief telling of this story will help to clarify some basic economic ideas as to how societies can be organized to accomplish some of their most important goals. For socialists, those goals are expressed, of course, in lofty ideals; unfortunately, those ideals have failed to be realized in all previous dictatorial and democratic socialist experiments.

This book will show why the socialist economic system cannot succeed. It will become apparent why the values and principles of Christianity permit a much more gentle and successful path to achieve the American dream.

About the Author:

Phillip J. Bryson was in Berlin in August of 1961 when the Berlin Wall was built by the German Democratic Republic. He talked with people who had escaped from East Berlin in spite of the wall. He read the newspaper reports of those who gave their lives in the attempt to reach West Berlin and liberty. Bryson returned home wondering what made it necessary for a nation to fence their people in and deny them the freedoms people cherish. The quest to find answers about Marxian socialism and its planned economy ultimately turned into a career and a lifelong study of socialist economic systems.

Bryson was interested in the national institutions and practices of socialist countries and pursued a PhD in economics at The Ohio State University. He began his teaching career as an instructor at Ohio State in 1965 and became an assistant professor at the University of Arizona in 1967. In 1988, he left Arizona to join the Marriott School Faculty of Brigham Young University. He researched and taught comparative economic systems, international economics, and the history of economic analysis. His research on socialist economies took him on several occasions to West Berlin and East Berlin (Karlshorst), Munich, Marburg, Duisburg, Vienna, London, and Moscow. As a Fulbright Fellow he did research and taught at Marburg University in the Federal Republic of Germany. As noted above, he was living in Berlin when the wall was erected and he was also attending a conference in the Reichstag in West Berlin when the wall was declared open in November of 1989. So he had the amazing personal experience of the appearance and later disappearance of the Berlin Wall.

Bryson became professor emeritus of economics in the Marriott School of Brigham Young University in 2010. In retirement, after having written seven academic books and many journal articles, Professor Bryson decided to write for the general public about the economic system of socialism, a topic to which he had devoted his entire career. He was concerned about the fiscal, social, and political implications of the socialist policy initiatives of the Obama administration.